Still from Where the Buffalo Roam.

Even though I’ve been making these annual appeals for several decades now, I’m a terrible fundraiser. I was even let go as a canvasser right out of college for a Nader-raider environmental outfit working to save the Chesapeake Bay from being poisoned. I spent too long at the door proselytizing about the issue and not enough time hitting people up for cash and checks. I missed my quotas night after night.

Writing these letters should come easier. But it doesn’t. Here I go again, talking when I should be selling. I’m never quite sure the buttons to push, the heartstrings to pull, and financial alarums to broadcast.

I’ve been around some really talented fundraisers. I’ve seen it done smoothly and efficiently. Few people could refuse a call from Alexander Cockburn asking for an emergency infusion of cash. My old friend James Monteith saved the Oregon Natural Resources Council, one of the most potent grassroots groups of the 1980s and 90s, from financial ruin once every couple of years.

But by far the most gifted fundraiser I knew was the arch-druid himself, David Brower, who used his unexcelled persuasive powers to transform the Sierra Club from a mountaineering clique of Bay Area elites into the world’s most powerful environmental group. Cockburn, Monteith and Brower all had charm and charisma, which they ruthlessly exploited. I lack both. I’m not timid about asking for money, just inept at the craft.

Brower once told me that the secret was “letting the work speak for itself and not to fear the consequences.” Do the work without fear of reprisal and the people will support you when you need them.

Brower knew what political retribution felt like. In 1966, the Johnson Administration suspended and then revoked the non-profit status of the Sierra Club, citing its aggressive advertising campaign against a bill that would have authorized canyon-flooding dams on some of the West’s wildest rivers. One of the most impactful of the ads read: Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?”

The ad proved a dam killer and so infuriated the federal government that the letter informing the Club that their non-profit status had been suspended was hand-delivered by a federal marshal. “For dramatic effect, I suppose,” Brower later quipped.

This is, of course, the precise strategy Trump is apparently pursuing as part of his campaign to shut down non-profit groups he perceives as enemies of his administration. Some pundits have said he got the idea from Viktor Orban’s suppression of civic groups in Hungary, but the domestic precedent had been set 50 years earlier that bastion of napalming liberals, the Johnson Administration.

The Club lost its tax status, but saved the Grand Canyon and emerged from the battle an even stronger and more politically potent organization.

Lesson learned. Let the work speak for itself. Don’t fear the consequences.

With all respect to you Søren K., we’re not afraid, we’re not trembling and our objective as journalists remains the same as it was in the 1990s when the first CounterPunch newsletter went to press: to question the received wisdom, call out political cant and cliches, expose injustices and follow the money wherever it leads and into whoever’s pockets it stuffs. As CounterPunch founder Ken Silverstein, still one of the best investigative journalists around, said: “We’re journalists, not ideologues. Everyone is fair game.”

And that’s the way we’ve conducted our work for more than three decades. We haven’t shied away from putting liberal and progressive icons (including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Paul Wellstone, Obama and Bernie Sanders) to the same scrutiny we imposed on the right. This has sometimes engendered fierce blowback from our readers. My reporting on Sanders during the 2016 campaign so irritated a few of the more excitable Bernie Bros that I began receiving hyperbolic threats to do gruesome bodily harm not only against my own delicate person, but more outrageously, our family. So it goes in big-time journalism. My critique of Bernie rang true. Still does.

I got a note from Danny Warner from somewhere in the Swiss Alps with his Friday column saying that he’d attacked the same subject as Dean Baker did earlier in the week, but from a different approach. The more angles the better, as far as I’m concerned. I like the idea of CounterPunch writers playing off each other, even refuting each other, in a kind of polemical dialectic that will move us forward, or keep us moving at any rate, and not mired in an intellectual stasis. No one, I presume, wants to hear the same take day after day until the “last syllable of recorded time”. Or bankruptcy.

Becky’s set forth our tenuous financial situation. I encourage you to look it over. It’s dire, but salvageable, if only a small percentage of daily readers of CounterPunch pitch in $25 or $50. Joshua has laid out what’s at stake in the world we’re reporting on. It’s equally dire. A true existential crisis and by existential, I mean a matter of life and death. And not just for humanity.

We’re not so grandiose as to claim that we’re going to save the planet from climate change or stop a genocide. We don’t have the guts of the Palestinian reporters in Gaza. We’re not putting our lives on the line, except in the minds of some cyberbully couch potatoes who haven’t seen sunlight since Ye called himself Kanye.

But we’re not going to lie to you either. We’re not going to sugarcoat reality or feed you false hope. We’re not going to play political favorites. We’re going to call it like we see it, unbound by the dictates of foundations, advertisers, political parties, or big donors with an agenda to push.

In the early years of CounterPunch, we alternated between two mottos on our masthead: “Power and Evil in Washington” and “Tells the Facts, Names the Names.” We’re still telling facts in an age when facts are being adulterated, perverted and fabricated.

We’re still naming names in an age when thin-skinned billionaires finance site-killing libel suits capable of sinking you financially before you even get to depositions.

We’re still trying to be journalists at a time when journalists are an endangered species, targeted for extinction not only by the nabobs of MAGA but their own bosses, many of them Private Equity pirates, who want to replace reporters with AI scribes (See Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Newsweek or the article “summaries” in the Associated Press, the New York Times and CNN) or have them micromanaged and disciplined by the likes of Bari Weiss, the ultra-Zionist editorial dominatrix now running the once venerable CBS News for Trump’s billionaire pals the Ellisons.

How does CounterPunch fit into this strange new media ecosystem? Well, by continuing to expose “power and evil”, even when the powerful and evil are publicly exposing themselves daily like school-yard flashers and daring you to do something about it.

Our job as I see it is to present American history clearly and to highlight the continuities of power that have sustained forever wars, racial oppression, environmental destruction and gaping economic inequality across political affiliations.

You don’t have to swallow all of Michel Foucault’s philosophy to understand that a critique of power–who wields it, how it’s leveraged, who it harms and who profits from the damage done–is vital to understanding how we got to where we are.

Where we are? We’ve entered a time of shattered illusions: The illusion that there ever was such a thing as “political norms.” The illusion that the West ever operated under a “rules-based order.” The illusion that the power of our government is limited by checks and balances and the of separation of powers. The illusion that the US is a nation of laws enforced by an independent judiciary. The illusion that the Bill of Rights applies to all. The illusion that we’d entered a post-racial society. The illusion that we’d intervene to stop, not help commit a genocide.

I’ve been writing about Gaza every week for the past two years, including more than 100 entries in my Gaza diary. It’s a horror story that should frighten every American, a story of mass slaughter, child murders and starvation–a genocide that our government has armed, abetted, condoned and shielded over mounting disgust of most Americans, left and right. This is another lesson in power. Trump has proved who holds the dominant hand in the US/Israel relationship and he has used it to constrain Netanyahu more than once, if only for his own self-interest and glorification. Biden could have done the same at any point in his presidency. But never did. Not because Netanyahu bullied Biden, but because Biden supported Israel to the hilt and backed its policy of destroying Gaza as a livable environment and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Strip. There are vast differences between Trump and Biden, but the continuities are even greater. Both have used power in the service of evil. And it’s our job to probe and expose both.

So my appeal to you in these desperate hours for the Republic is an appeal to reason, an appeal to the importance of facts, an appeal to political independence and free thought, an appeal for the value of doing the work without fear of retribution, even though it may be coming.

If this is important to you, if independent journalism still means something to you, then now’s your chance to help sustain it, to keep it alive with a darkness descending.

A beneficent donor, who has supported CounterPunch for many years without asking anything in return except for us to continue what we’re doing, has promised to match every donation of $50 or more through the next week. That means if you contribute $50, it will become through the magic of mathematics: $100.

We’ll be here until they turn the lights out.

The post Let the Work Speak for Itself appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Still from David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997).

So, here we are on the precipice. Not just CounterPunch, but the country, even the 30% who refuse to believe it. Indeed, we may well be off the precipice, suspended in air above the chasm, like Wile E. Coyote, as the icy grip of gravity takes hold, pulling us down into political darkness. 

Is that dark pit we’re being dragged into “fascism”? I’m reluctant to use that word to describe the retrograde policies and savage tactics of the Trump regime. There’s no reason to import a European ideology from the last century to explain a domestic political pathology that can be traced back to the origins of the Republic. 

In fact, what if we’re entering a dispensation that’s even worse than “fascism”?  Worse, you say? What could be worse than fascism? 

How about a face-to-face confrontation with America’s own history, come alive on the streets of our largest cities, like armed zombies emerged from musty graves thought long buried.

Trump’s malignant genius is that while he’s furiously trying to whitewash American history at the Smithsonian, Gettysburg and Stonewall, he’s forcing Americans into a live-fire reenactment of some of its most nightmarish episodes.

The political antecedents of Donald Trump aren’t to be found in Weimar, Germany or the nationalist movements of post-WW I Italy, but in the authors of the Constitution, a document that not only condoned the ownership of human beings, but, through the 3/5s clause, gave a political advantage to the states whose economies were driven by slave labor.  A constitution that doubled down on this ignominy in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, requiring the return of escaped enslaved people to their enslavers, even from states that had outlawed slavery. It’s hard to hide that from the kiddies. But the Constitution just set the stage for what followed…

+ The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in the Republic’s infancy (1798), outlawing “malicious speech” against the government and targeting immigrants as “enemy aliens.” (Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act as part of his program against immigrants.)  

+ Thomas Jefferson signed the Insurrection Act into law in 1808. It’s been invoked by 15 presidents and General Douglas MacArthur, who thought he outranked the president, to suppress domestic dissent. 

+ In 1831, Trump’s hero Andy Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act and began the forced relocation of 60,000 people from the so-called “civilized” tribes of the southeast, a death march that went on for 19 years known as the Trail of Tears. 

+ In the Dred Scott decision (1857), the Supreme Court not only upheld the Fugitive Slave laws but also effectively ruled that blacks were subhuman and not entitled to any rights under the Constitution. 

+ In the 1850s and a group known as the Secret Order of the Stars Spangled Banner (later known colloquially as the Know-Nothings) rose to political prominence through immigrant bashing, mainly of Irish Catholics, in the East who they slandered as corrupting the US political system. 

+ During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and oversaw the largest mass execution in US history, hanging 33 Lakota men for defending their homeland from white land thieves. 

+ Former Confederate officers, such as KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, waged a war of terror against blacks and Radical Republicans across the South for 12 years until Reconstruction was abolished and Jim Crow established, effectively eviscerating the “rights” of southern blacks that had been won under the 13th and 14th Amendments. 

+ In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting Chinese workers from entering the US and preventing Chinese residents of the US from becoming citizens. The law wasn’t repealed until 1943. 

+ In 1890, yes 1890!, the US Cavalry massacred nearly 300 wearing and near-starving Lakota people, including dozens of women and children, at Wounded Knee. Thirty-one of the murderers were awarded Medals of Honor for the slaughter, tributes recently reaffirmed by Pete Hegseth, who called the killers “brave soldiers” who “deserved their medals.”

+ The eugenics movement (backed by some of the nation’s leading corporations and tycoons) originated in the US in the late 1890s, first with laws prohibiting marriage by people the state considered “epileptic, imbeciles or the feeble-minded.” Then, in 1908, Indiana (then considered a progressive state) enacted the first forced sterilization laws for those the state deemed “mentally ill or retarded.” These laws became the template for the eugenics programs of the Nazis, as Hitler himself admitted, not the other way round.

In 1917, Mexican immigrants crossing the border at El Paso, Texas, were doused with the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon-B, more than two decades before the Nazis used it on Jews and other “undesirables” in the death camps of Eastern Europe.

+ In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson unleashed the Palmer Raids, targeting suspected pacifists, black radicals, socialists, communists, anarchists and basically anyone who might’ve objected to Wilson screening Birth of a Nation in the White House for mass arrest and deportation. The raids launched the career of J. Edgar Hoover.

+ All of these grim chapters of homegrown authoritarianism unfolded long before Mussolini ever dreamed of bundling his fasces into a political cudgel and calling himself Il Duce.

But the beat went on…

+ In 1939, at a time when Trump’s father was attending pro-Nazi rallies in the US, the MS St. Louis, an ocean liner of the Hamburg America Line, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Europe attempting to escape being rounded up by the Gestapo, was denied entry into the US by the Roosevelt Administration. The Coast Guard shadowed the ship to prevent the Captain from intentionally running it aground on the US coast. Ultimately, the MS St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, where an estimated 254 of its passengers were murdered in the Holocaust. 

+ FDR imprisoned 100,000 Japanese-Americans in 10 concentration camps, nearly all of them without warrants or any indication of subversive intent. The Supreme Court sanctified this massive violation of civil liberties and constitutional rights in the Korematsu decision. 

+ Truman nuked two civilian cities in Japan as the war in the Pacific was nearing its inevitable end, primarily to intimidate the Soviets, who responded by building their own arsenal of atomic weapons, thus putting the planet at risk of nuclear annihilation, which now, eight decades later, seems closer than ever.

+ The bipartisan Red Scare of the late 40s and 50s saw the government ignite (one of the chief arsonists being Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn) a nationwide hysteria over alleged communist infiltration that led to purges of government workers (many of them at the State Department), academics, and Hollywood.

+ COINTELPRO was established in 1955 to spy on, harass, infiltrate, smear and even assassinate leaders of leftwing movements in the US, unfettered by any Constitutional restraints. The plug wasn’t pulled on COINTELPRO until 1971…so they claim.

+ JFK, RFK, LBJ, and J. Edgar spied on the leaders of the civil rights movement, smeared many as communists, and even blackmailed and tried to encourage MLK, Jr. to commit suicide. When he didn’t, did they have him killed? There’s a case to be made. A strong one.

+ Nixon illegally bombed Laos and Cambodia and manufactured a repressive drug war that one of his chief henchmen, John Ehrlichman, later admitted was “all about the blacks.”

+ Carter secretly started the largest CIA-run war in US history in Afghanistan, a war that gave the young Osama Bin Laden the training and weapons he would turn two decades later against his infidel benefactors.  

+ Clinton declared the era of big government over, destroyed welfare, bombed Afghanistan to divert attention from sexual trysts, instituted the most punitive and racist crime laws (written by Joe Biden’s staff) in US history and blamed black popular music for America’s cultural decline.

+ Bush the Lesser stole an election and then lied the US into a still-reverberating war that Biden and HRC both backed.

+ John Kerry lost an election, which his backers claimed was stolen by Bush-friendly Diebold voting machines in Ohio. 

+ Obama, the OG Deporter-in-Chief,  bailed out Wall Street, executed a coup in Honduras, a regime change in Libya and droned American citizens, including at least two children, without any legal justification. 

+ Biden armed, justified, and prolonged a genocide in Gaza that Trump extended and is now poised to capitalize on. Biden’s auto-penned pardons of his own family and inner-circle have enabled Trump to use the White House as a billion-dollar giftshop to enrich himself, his family and his cronies. 

+ And, of course, this grisly history also includes, yes, an apparently undying obsession, one might even say fetishization, of the Nazis, from Sieg Heiling industrials like Henry Ford and Elon Musk to the smack-chatting leaders of the Republican Youth movement to the progressive Democratic from Maine, Graham Plotter, who even now is having Nazi tattoos lasered from his flesh.

Trump isn’t trying anything new. He’s not an original thinker, even in a Machiavellian sense. Instead, he’s sampling the most authoritarian measures from the American past and trying them out on everything, everywhere, all at once.

Excuse me for a second. I’ve just been reminded by Becky Grant that this is supposed to be a fall fund drive appeal and not another Friday morning, stream-of-consciousness rant. Right, sorry.

Even though I’ve been making these annual appeals for several decades now, I’m a terrible fundraiser. I was even let go as a canvasser right out of college for a Nader-raider environmental outfit working to save the Chesapeake Bay from being poisoned. I spent too long at the door proselytizing about the issue and not enough time hitting people up for cash and checks. I missed my quotas night after night.

Writing these letters should come easier. But it doesn’t. Here I go again, talking when I should be selling. I’m never quite sure the buttons to push, the heartstrings to pull, and financial alarums to broadcast.

I’ve been around some really talented fundraisers. I’ve seen it done smoothly and efficiently. Few people could refuse a call from Alexander Cockburn asking for an emergency infusion of cash. My old friend James Monteith saved the Oregon Natural Resources Council, one of the most potent grassroots groups of the 1980s and 90s, from financial ruin once every couple of years. 

But by far the most gifted fundraiser I knew was the arch-druid himself, David Brower, who used his unexcelled persuasive powers to transform the Sierra Club from a mountaineering clique of Bay Area elites into the world’s most powerful environmental group. Cockburn, Monteith and Brower all had charm and charisma, which they ruthlessly exploited. I lack both. I’m not timid about asking for money, just inept at the craft.

Brower once told me that the secret was “letting the work speak for itself and not to fear the consequences.” Do the work without fear of reprisal and the people will support you when you need them. 

Brower knew what political retribution felt like. In 1966, the Johnson Administration suspended and then revoked the non-profit status of the Sierra Club, citing its aggressive advertising campaign against a bill that would have authorized canyon-flooding dams on some of the West’s wildest rivers. One of the most impactful of the ads read: Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?”

The ad proved a dam killer and so infuriated the federal government that the letter informing the Club that their non-profit status had been suspended was hand-delivered by a federal marshal. “For dramatic effect, I suppose,” Brower later quipped.

This is, of course, the precise strategy Trump is apparently pursuing as part of his campaign to shut down non-profit groups he perceives as enemies of his administration. Some pundits have said he got the idea from Viktor Orban’s suppression of civic groups in Hungary, but the domestic precedent had been set 50 years earlier that bastion of napalming liberals, the Johnson Administration.

The Club lost its tax status, but saved the Grand Canyon and emerged from the battle an even stronger and more politically potent organization. 

Lesson learned. Let the work speak for itself. Don’t fear the consequences.

With all respect to you Søren K., we’re not afraid, we’re not trembling and our objective as journalists remains the same as it was in the 1990s when the first CounterPunch newsletter went to press: to question the received wisdom, call out political cant and cliches, expose injustices and follow the money wherever it leads and into whoever’s pockets it stuffs. As CounterPunch founder Ken Silverstein, still one of the best investigative journalists around, said: “We’re journalists, not ideologues. Everyone is fair game.”

And that’s the way we’ve conducted our work for more than three decades. We haven’t shied away from putting liberal and progressive icons (including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Paul Wellstone, Obama and Bernie Sanders) to the same scrutiny we imposed on the right. This has sometimes engendered fierce blowback from our readers. My reporting on Sanders during the 2016 campaign so irritated a few of the more excitable Bernie Bros that I began receiving hyperbolic threats to do gruesome bodily harm not only against my own delicate person, but more outrageously, our family. So it goes in big-time journalism. My critique of Bernie rang true. Still does.

I got a note from Danny Warner from somewhere in the Swiss Alps with his Friday column saying that he’d attacked the same subject as Dean Baker did earlier in the week, but from a different approach. The more angles the better, as far as I’m concerned. I like the idea of CounterPunch writers playing off each other, even refuting each other, in a kind of polemical dialectic that will move us forward, or keep us moving at any rate, and not mired in an intellectual stasis. No one, I presume, wants to hear the same take day after day until the “last syllable of recorded time”. Or bankruptcy.

Becky’s set forth our tenuous financial situation. I encourage you to look it over. It’s dire, but salvageable, if only a small percentage of daily readers of CounterPunch pitch in $25 or $50. Joshua has laid out what’s at stake in the world we’re reporting on. It’s equally dire. A true existential crisis and by existential, I mean a matter of life and death. And not just for humanity. 

We’re not so grandiose as to claim that we’re going to save the planet from climate change or stop a genocide. We don’t have the guts of the Palestinian reporters in Gaza. We’re not putting our lives on the line, except in the minds of some cyberbully couch potatoes who haven’t seen sunlight since Ye called himself Kanye. 

But we’re not going to lie to you either. We’re not going to sugarcoat reality or feed you false hope. We’re not going to play political favorites. We’re going to call it like we see it, unbound by the dictates of foundations, advertisers, political parties, or big donors with an agenda to push. 

In the early years of CounterPunch, we alternated between two mottos on our masthead: “Power and Evil in Washington” and “Tells the Facts, Names the Names.” We’re still telling facts in an age when facts are being adulterated, perverted and fabricated. 

We’re still naming names in an age when thin-skinned billionaires finance site-killing libel suits capable of sinking you financially before you even get to depositions. 

We’re still trying to be journalists at a time when journalists are an endangered species, targeted for extinction not only by the nabobs of MAGA but their own bosses, many of them Private Equity pirates, who want to replace reporters with AI scribes (See Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Newsweek or the article “summaries” in the Associated Press, the New York Times and CNN) or have them micromanaged and disciplined by the likes of Bari Weiss, the ultra-Zionist editorial dominatrix now running the once venerable CBS News for Trump’s billionaire pals the Ellisons.

How does CounterPunch fit into this strange new media ecosystem? Well, by continuing to expose “power and evil”, even when the powerful and evil are publicly exposing themselves daily like school-yard flashers and daring you to do something about it.

Our job as I see it is to present American history clearly and to highlight the continuities of power that have sustained forever wars, racial oppression, environmental destruction and gaping economic inequality across political affiliations. 

You don’t have to swallow all of Michel Foucault’s philosophy to understand that a critique of power–who wields it, how it’s leveraged, who it harms and who profits from the damage done–is vital to understanding how we got to where we are. 

Where we are? We’ve entered a time of shattered illusions: The illusion that there ever was such a thing as “political norms.” The illusion that the West ever operated under a “rules-based order.” The illusion that the power of our government is limited by checks and balances and the of separation of powers. The illusion that the US is a nation of laws enforced by an independent judiciary. The illusion that the Bill of Rights applies to all. The illusion that we’d entered a post-racial society. The illusion that we’d intervene to stop, not help commit a genocide.

I’ve been writing about Gaza every week for the past two years, including more than 100 entries in my Gaza diary. It’s a horror story that should frighten every American, a story of mass slaughter, child murders and starvation–a genocide that our government has armed, abetted, condoned and shielded over mounting disgust of most Americans, left and right. This is another lesson in power. Trump has proved who holds the dominant hand in the US/Israel relationship and he has used it to constrain Netanyahu more than once, if only for his own self-interest and glorification. Biden could have done the same at any point in his presidency. But never did. Not because Netanyahu bullied Biden, but because Biden supported Israel to the hilt and backed its policy of destroying Gaza as a livable environment and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Strip. There are vast differences between Trump and Biden, but the continuities are even greater. Both have used power in the service of evil. And it’s our job to probe and expose both.

So my appeal to you in these desperate hours for the Republic is an appeal to reason, an appeal to the importance of facts, an appeal to political independence and free thought, an appeal for the value of doing the work without fear of retribution, even though it may be coming. 

If this is important to you, if independent journalism still means something to you, then now’s your chance to help sustain it, to keep it alive with a darkness descending. 

A beneficent donor, who has supported CounterPunch for many years without asking anything in return except for us to continue what we’re doing, has promised to match every donation of $50 or more through the next week. That means if you contribute $50, it will become through the magic of mathematics: $100.

We’ll be here until they turn the lights out.

The post Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: an Appeal in a Time of Darkness appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Still from David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997).

So, here we are on the precipice. Not just CounterPunch, but the country, even the 30% who refuse to believe it. Indeed, we may well be off the precipice, suspended in air above the chasm, like Wile E. Coyote, as the icy grip of gravity takes hold, pulling us down into political darkness. 

Is that dark pit we’re being dragged into “fascism”? I’m reluctant to use that word to describe the retrograde policies and savage tactics of the Trump regime. There’s no reason to import a European ideology from the last century to explain a domestic political pathology that can be traced back to the origins of the Republic. 

In fact, what if we’re entering a dispensation that’s even worse than “fascism”?  Worse, you say? What could be worse than fascism? 

How about a face-to-face confrontation with America’s own history, come alive on the streets of our largest cities, like armed zombies emerged from musty graves thought long buried.

Trump’s malignant genius is that while he’s furiously trying to whitewash American history at the Smithsonian, Gettysburg and Stonewall, he’s forcing Americans into a live-fire reenactment of some of its most nightmarish episodes.

The political antecedents of Donald Trump aren’t to be found in Weimar, Germany or the nationalist movements of post-WW I Italy, but in the authors of the Constitution, a document that not only condoned the ownership of human beings, but, through the 3/5s clause, gave a political advantage to the states whose economies were driven by slave labor.  A constitution that doubled down on this ignominy in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, requiring the return of escaped enslaved people to their enslavers, even from states that had outlawed slavery. It’s hard to hide that from the kiddies. But the Constitution just set the stage for what followed…

+ The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in the Republic’s infancy (1798), outlawing “malicious speech” against the government and targeting immigrants as “enemy aliens.” (Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act as part of his program against immigrants.)  

+ Thomas Jefferson signed the Insurrection Act into law in 1808. It’s been invoked by 15 presidents and General Douglas MacArthur, who thought he outranked the president, to suppress domestic dissent. 

+ In 1831, Trump’s hero Andy Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act and began the forced relocation of 60,000 people from the so-called “civilized” tribes of the southeast, a death march that went on for 19 years known as the Trail of Tears. 

+ In the Dred Scott decision (1857), the Supreme Court not only upheld the Fugitive Slave laws but also effectively ruled that blacks were subhuman and not entitled to any rights under the Constitution. 

+ In the 1850s and a group known as the Secret Order of the Stars Spangled Banner (later known colloquially as the Know-Nothings) rose to political prominence through immigrant bashing, mainly of Irish Catholics, in the East who they slandered as corrupting the US political system. 

+ During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and oversaw the largest mass execution in US history, hanging 33 Lakota men for defending their homeland from white land thieves. 

+ Former Confederate officers, such as KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, waged a war of terror against blacks and Radical Republicans across the South for 12 years until Reconstruction was abolished and Jim Crow established, effectively eviscerating the “rights” of southern blacks that had been won under the 13th and 14th Amendments. 

+ In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting Chinese workers from entering the US and preventing Chinese residents of the US from becoming citizens. The law wasn’t repealed until 1943. 

+ In 1890, yes 1890!, the US Cavalry massacred nearly 300 wearing and near-starving Lakota people, including dozens of women and children, at Wounded Knee. Thirty-one of the murderers were awarded Medals of Honor for the slaughter, tributes recently reaffirmed by Pete Hegseth, who called the killers “brave soldiers” who “deserved their medals.”

+ The eugenics movement (backed by some of the nation’s leading corporations and tycoons) originated in the US in the late 1890s, first with laws prohibiting marriage by people the state considered “epileptic, imbeciles or the feeble-minded.” Then, in 1908, Indiana (then considered a progressive state) enacted the first forced sterilization laws for those the state deemed “mentally ill or retarded.” These laws became the template for the eugenics programs of the Nazis, as Hitler himself admitted, not the other way round.

In 1917, Mexican immigrants crossing the border at El Paso, Texas, were doused with the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon-B, more than two decades before the Nazis used it on Jews and other “undesirables” in the death camps of Eastern Europe.

+ In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson unleashed the Palmer Raids, targeting suspected pacifists, black radicals, socialists, communists, anarchists and basically anyone who might’ve objected to Wilson screening Birth of a Nation in the White House for mass arrest and deportation. The raids launched the career of J. Edgar Hoover.

+ All of these grim chapters of homegrown authoritarianism unfolded long before Mussolini ever dreamed of bundling his fasces into a political cudgel and calling himself Il Duce.

But the beat went on…

+ In 1939, at a time when Trump’s father was attending pro-Nazi rallies in the US, the MS St. Louis, an ocean liner of the Hamburg America Line, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Europe attempting to escape being rounded up by the Gestapo, was denied entry into the US by the Roosevelt Administration. The Coast Guard shadowed the ship to prevent the Captain from intentionally running it aground on the US coast. Ultimately, the MS St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, where an estimated 254 of its passengers were murdered in the Holocaust. 

+ FDR imprisoned 100,000 Japanese-Americans in 10 concentration camps, nearly all of them without warrants or any indication of subversive intent. The Supreme Court sanctified this massive violation of civil liberties and constitutional rights in the Korematsu decision. 

+ Truman nuked two civilian cities in Japan as the war in the Pacific was nearing its inevitable end, primarily to intimidate the Soviets, who responded by building their own arsenal of atomic weapons, thus putting the planet at risk of nuclear annihilation, which now, eight decades later, seems closer than ever.

+ The bipartisan Red Scare of the late 40s and 50s saw the government ignite (one of the chief arsonists being Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn) a nationwide hysteria over alleged communist infiltration that led to purges of government workers (many of them at the State Department), academics, and Hollywood.

+ COINTELPRO was established in 1955 to spy on, harass, infiltrate, smear and even assassinate leaders of leftwing movements in the US, unfettered by any Constitutional restraints. The plug wasn’t pulled on COINTELPRO until 1971…so they claim.

+ JFK, RFK, LBJ, and J. Edgar spied on the leaders of the civil rights movement, smeared many as communists, and even blackmailed and tried to encourage MLK, Jr. to commit suicide. When he didn’t, did they have him killed? There’s a case to be made. A strong one.

+ Nixon illegally bombed Laos and Cambodia and manufactured a repressive drug war that one of his chief henchmen, John Ehrlichman, later admitted was “all about the blacks.”

+ Carter secretly started the largest CIA-run war in US history in Afghanistan, a war that gave the young Osama Bin Laden the training and weapons he would turn two decades later against his infidel benefactors.  

+ Clinton declared the era of big government over, destroyed welfare, bombed Afghanistan to divert attention from sexual trysts, instituted the most punitive and racist crime laws (written by Joe Biden’s staff) in US history and blamed black popular music for America’s cultural decline.

+ Bush the Lesser stole an election and then lied the US into a still-reverberating war that Biden and HRC both backed.

+ John Kerry lost an election, which his backers claimed was stolen by Bush-friendly Diebold voting machines in Ohio. 

+ Obama, the OG Deporter-in-Chief,  bailed out Wall Street, executed a coup in Honduras, a regime change in Libya and droned American citizens, including at least two children, without any legal justification. 

+ Biden armed, justified, and prolonged a genocide in Gaza that Trump extended and is now poised to capitalize on. Biden’s auto-penned pardons of his own family and inner-circle have enabled Trump to use the White House as a billion-dollar giftshop to enrich himself, his family and his cronies. 

+ And, of course, this grisly history also includes, yes, an apparently undying obsession, one might even say fetishization, of the Nazis, from Sieg Heiling industrials like Henry Ford and Elon Musk to the smack-chatting leaders of the Republican Youth movement to the progressive Democratic from Maine, Graham Plotter, who even now is having Nazi tattoos lasered from his flesh.

Trump isn’t trying anything new. He’s not an original thinker, even in a Machiavellian sense. Instead, he’s sampling the most authoritarian measures from the American past and trying them out on everything, everywhere, all at once.

Excuse me for a second. I’ve just been reminded by Becky Grant that this is supposed to be a fall fund drive appeal and not another Friday morning, stream-of-consciousness rant. Right, sorry.

Even though I’ve been making these annual appeals for several decades now, I’m a terrible fundraiser. I was even let go as a canvasser right out of college for a Nader-raider environmental outfit working to save the Chesapeake Bay from being poisoned. I spent too long at the door proselytizing about the issue and not enough time hitting people up for cash and checks. I missed my quotas night after night.

Writing these letters should come easier. But it doesn’t. Here I go again, talking when I should be selling. I’m never quite sure the buttons to push, the heartstrings to pull, and financial alarums to broadcast.

I’ve been around some really talented fundraisers. I’ve seen it done smoothly and efficiently. Few people could refuse a call from Alexander Cockburn asking for an emergency infusion of cash. My old friend James Monteith saved the Oregon Natural Resources Council, one of the most potent grassroots groups of the 1980s and 90s, from financial ruin once every couple of years. 

But by far the most gifted fundraiser I knew was the arch-druid himself, David Brower, who used his unexcelled persuasive powers to transform the Sierra Club from a mountaineering clique of Bay Area elites into the world’s most powerful environmental group. Cockburn, Monteith and Brower all had charm and charisma, which they ruthlessly exploited. I lack both. I’m not timid about asking for money, just inept at the craft.

Brower once told me that the secret was “letting the work speak for itself and not to fear the consequences.” Do the work without fear of reprisal and the people will support you when you need them. 

Brower knew what political retribution felt like. In 1966, the Johnson Administration suspended and then revoked the non-profit status of the Sierra Club, citing its aggressive advertising campaign against a bill that would have authorized canyon-flooding dams on some of the West’s wildest rivers. One of the most impactful of the ads read: Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?”

The ad proved a dam killer and so infuriated the federal government that the letter informing the Club that their non-profit status had been suspended was hand-delivered by a federal marshal. “For dramatic effect, I suppose,” Brower later quipped.

This is, of course, the precise strategy Trump is apparently pursuing as part of his campaign to shut down non-profit groups he perceives as enemies of his administration. Some pundits have said he got the idea from Viktor Orban’s suppression of civic groups in Hungary, but the domestic precedent had been set 50 years earlier that bastion of napalming liberals, the Johnson Administration.

The Club lost its tax status, but saved the Grand Canyon and emerged from the battle an even stronger and more politically potent organization. 

Lesson learned. Let the work speak for itself. Don’t fear the consequences.

With all respect to you Søren K., we’re not afraid, we’re not trembling and our objective as journalists remains the same as it was in the 1990s when the first CounterPunch newsletter went to press: to question the received wisdom, call out political cant and cliches, expose injustices and follow the money wherever it leads and into whoever’s pockets it stuffs. As CounterPunch founder Ken Silverstein, still one of the best investigative journalists around, said: “We’re journalists, not ideologues. Everyone is fair game.”

And that’s the way we’ve conducted our work for more than three decades. We haven’t shied away from putting liberal and progressive icons (including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Paul Wellstone, Obama and Bernie Sanders) to the same scrutiny we imposed on the right. This has sometimes engendered fierce blowback from our readers. My reporting on Sanders during the 2016 campaign so irritated a few of the more excitable Bernie Bros that I began receiving hyperbolic threats to do gruesome bodily harm not only against my own delicate person, but more outrageously, our family. So it goes in big-time journalism. My critique of Bernie rang true. Still does.

I got a note from Danny Warner from somewhere in the Swiss Alps with his Friday column saying that he’d attacked the same subject as Dean Baker did earlier in the week, but from a different approach. The more angles the better, as far as I’m concerned. I like the idea of CounterPunch writers playing off each other, even refuting each other, in a kind of polemical dialectic that will move us forward, or keep us moving at any rate, and not mired in an intellectual stasis. No one, I presume, wants to hear the same take day after day until the “last syllable of recorded time”. Or bankruptcy.

Becky’s set forth our tenuous financial situation. I encourage you to look it over. It’s dire, but salvageable, if only a small percentage of daily readers of CounterPunch pitch in $25 or $50. Joshua has laid out what’s at stake in the world we’re reporting on. It’s equally dire. A true existential crisis and by existential, I mean a matter of life and death. And not just for humanity. 

We’re not so grandiose as to claim that we’re going to save the planet from climate change or stop a genocide. We don’t have the guts of the Palestinian reporters in Gaza. We’re not putting our lives on the line, except in the minds of some cyberbully couch potatoes who haven’t seen sunlight since Ye called himself Kanye. 

But we’re not going to lie to you either. We’re not going to sugarcoat reality or feed you false hope. We’re not going to play political favorites. We’re going to call it like we see it, unbound by the dictates of foundations, advertisers, political parties, or big donors with an agenda to push. 

In the early years of CounterPunch, we alternated between two mottos on our masthead: “Power and Evil in Washington” and “Tells the Facts, Names the Names.” We’re still telling facts in an age when facts are being adulterated, perverted and fabricated. 

We’re still naming names in an age when thin-skinned billionaires finance site-killing libel suits capable of sinking you financially before you even get to depositions. 

We’re still trying to be journalists at a time when journalists are an endangered species, targeted for extinction not only by the nabobs of MAGA but their own bosses, many of them Private Equity pirates, who want to replace reporters with AI scribes (See Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Newsweek or the article “summaries” in the Associated Press, the New York Times and CNN) or have them micromanaged and disciplined by the likes of Bari Weiss, the ultra-Zionist editorial dominatrix now running the once venerable CBS News for Trump’s billionaire pals the Ellisons.

How does CounterPunch fit into this strange new media ecosystem? Well, by continuing to expose “power and evil”, even when the powerful and evil are publicly exposing themselves daily like school-yard flashers and daring you to do something about it.

Our job as I see it is to present American history clearly and to highlight the continuities of power that have sustained forever wars, racial oppression, environmental destruction and gaping economic inequality across political affiliations. 

You don’t have to swallow all of Michel Foucault’s philosophy to understand that a critique of power–who wields it, how it’s leveraged, who it harms and who profits from the damage done–is vital to understanding how we got to where we are. 

Where we are? We’ve entered a time of shattered illusions: The illusion that there ever was such a thing as “political norms.” The illusion that the West ever operated under a “rules-based order.” The illusion that the power of our government is limited by checks and balances and the of separation of powers. The illusion that the US is a nation of laws enforced by an independent judiciary. The illusion that the Bill of Rights applies to all. The illusion that we’d entered a post-racial society. The illusion that we’d intervene to stop, not help commit a genocide.

I’ve been writing about Gaza every week for the past two years, including more than 100 entries in my Gaza diary. It’s a horror story that should frighten every American, a story of mass slaughter, child murders and starvation–a genocide that our government has armed, abetted, condoned and shielded over mounting disgust of most Americans, left and right. This is another lesson in power. Trump has proved who holds the dominant hand in the US/Israel relationship and he has used it to constrain Netanyahu more than once, if only for his own self-interest and glorification. Biden could have done the same at any point in his presidency. But never did. Not because Netanyahu bullied Biden, but because Biden supported Israel to the hilt and backed its policy of destroying Gaza as a livable environment and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Strip. There are vast differences between Trump and Biden, but the continuities are even greater. Both have used power in the service of evil. And it’s our job to probe and expose both.

So my appeal to you in these desperate hours for the Republic is an appeal to reason, an appeal to the importance of facts, an appeal to political independence and free thought, an appeal for the value of doing the work without fear of retribution, even though it may be coming. 

If this is important to you, if independent journalism still means something to you, then now’s your chance to help sustain it, to keep it alive with a darkness descending. 

A beneficent donor, who has supported CounterPunch for many years without asking anything in return except for us to continue what we’re doing, has promised to match every donation of $50 or more through the next week. That means if you contribute $50, it will become through the magic of mathematics: $100.

We’ll be here until they turn the lights out.

The post Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: an Appeal in a Time of Darkness appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Mathias Reding

The United Nations has recently come under attack from the Trump Administration and, much as it goes against the grain, it’s difficult to argue with real-estate-developer-cum-ambassador-Representative for U.N. Management and Reform [sic], Jeff Bartos:

Over 80 years, the UN has grown bloated, unfocused, too often ineffective, and sometimes even part of the problem. The UN’s failure to deliver on its core mandates is alarming and undeniable.

Yet the problem isn’t really the UN. One notable symptom of its malaise is the Security Council and its five veto-playing permanent members—the US, UK, France, China and Russia—countries representing the world system that assist and cover up for their allies who commit human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide, and that also outsource such crimes. But lèse-humanité is the crime par excellence of the international system. It’s a basic principle of colonial “development”. So what follows isn’t about kicking the UN when it’s down, but about how the rulers of this system use any institution, democratic or otherwise, to achieve their own diabolical and white supremacist ends.

I’m sorry—in more ways than one—that this article is long.

It’s long because the list of UN (when I refer to the UN, I’m basically referring to the world system) offences against the people of West Papua is hideously long. Sadly, my list is by no means complete because there’s lots of “Classified” I don’t know about and many, many secrets, but I hope it gives a glimpse of how the international system works when it wants to get whole encumbering peoples out of its way.

I’m taking it as given that Indonesia is committing genocide in West Papua. It’s done stealthily but there’s plenty of evidence (for example, see here, here, and here) for it. However, the facts show that, in this six-decade-plus crime against humanity, Indonesia has been the tool of other interests, that the role of the United Nations (by which I mean some of its dominant powers and personalities) has been particularly egregious, and this is surely one of the reasons why the West Papua genocide has continued sub rosa, deliberately silenced, for more than sixty years. There are many aspects of the UN betrayal because they belong to big-power politics, and they’re convoluted because of the secrecy that surrounds them. 

This isn’t about an isolated instance of genocidal violence. It fits into a world system where white supremacist brutality, going back at least to the period of early modern European overseas expansion from the 15^th century, the so-called Age of Discovery (a quintessentially Eurocentric concept), turned into a “scientifically-based” system with the Enlightenment and didn’t end with decolonisation. I’d suggest, after reading documents from the time when West Papua was gifted to Indonesia, that the latter was less the West’s darling than a mere instrument unscrupulously used to favour the economic and geopolitical interests of white supremacy and its destructive notions of “progress and development”. It’s not only the various Indonesian regimes that are responsible for mass murder in West Papua, but also and especially their enablers in the international political system represented by the UN and the big powers.

I can only partially list the crimes committed against West Papua (and, here, I’m indebted to painstaking research by Julian McKinlay King, John Saltford, Greg Poulgrain, and others). But even an incomplete list gives an idea of the magnitude of this lèse-humanité, this core crime of international law. I’m not interested in “speaking truth to power” because I agree with Pankaj Mishra that this is a naïve exercise. Those in power know and control the truth. I studied Politics and am not an expert in international law so I hope I don’t misinterpret some aspects of it. In any case, the hard facts are enraging for any decent human being. Experts in international law are often too invested in, or too occupied with other aspects of the corrupt system to inquire into the evidence of Indonesia’s daily genocidal actions in West Papua, and too demoralised to try to stop them through the shoddy institutions at their disposal. Yet any non-expert person who cares to look at the documents can see quite plainly that, in the last almost 65 years of West Papua’s history, the UN has played a shameful role, not only allowing this to happen but deliberately colluding with it. The very forum that has the power to stop the genocide is complicit in it. 

It was only recently that the UN finally acknowledged that Israel is committing genocide in Palestine, and I can’t help wondering whether all this fudging about the word is somehow related with fear of disclosure of the UN’s active role in abetting and silencing the West Papua genocide. I list forty-three aspects of this below.

+++

1. RESOURCES: The scene was set by big power politics in the early 1900s. After the Dutch East Indies gained independence in 1949, Dutch New Guinea remained under Holland’s control until 1962. Greg Poulgrain details how Allen Dulles, CIA director from 1953-1961, aware of West Papua’s immense oil and mineral wealth before the Second World War, decided to bring the colony under Indonesian control, as part of a wider plan of directing Indonesian politics as well. From the early twentieth century, the U.S. Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil had been trying to take over Dutch oil interests in the Indies. After the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company was formed in 1935, Dulles, as official representative of Standard Oil group, was able to use alarmism about Japanese intentions to obtain a 60% US controlling interest in the company. US geologists remained in West Papua for another decade after the Second World War but their findings of vast mineral and oil resources were kept secret by Dutch Foreign Minister Luns and Dulles, so neither Sukarno, nor Kennedy, nor the second UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld (1953-1961) were informed. The chief concern of Dulles and the Dutch colonial authorities was to wrest control of the gold, copper and oil in the colony they said had no natural resources. In 1961, a Freeport director, Robert Lovett (“architect of the Cold War” and director of Freeport McMoran, which holds 48.8% of the shares in the world’s largest gold mine and one of its largest copper mines in Grasberg, West Papua), got his friend McGeorge Bundy appointed as national security advisor in Washington DC where he could influence US foreign policy, which included playing a significant role in transferring control of West Papua to Indonesia. After Hammarskjöld was murdered (see point 2), McGeorge Bundy and Co. persuaded Kennedy that the handover of West Papua was a necessary measure to save the world from communism. Ideological gloss covered up real motives.

2. MURDER: There’s more to the story than oil and mineral greed. Naturally, it’s also about big power politics. An important factor is the death in a suspicious plane crash in Ndola (then northern Rhodesia, now Zambia) of Hammarskjöld and fifteen other people, eleven of them UN employees, and its subsequent coverup. In those Cold War years, Hammarskjöld was trying to democratise UN workings and was, in Poulgrain’s words, “an outspoken advocate for the economic development of poorer countries”. His plan, which included a Special Fund for these countries, greatly irked leading players on both sides of the Cold War, including Dulles and Nikita Khrushchev, especially when it seemed that President Kennedy supported Hammarskjöld’s approach to decolonisation. This project of “speedy and unconditional granting to all colonial peoples of the right of self-determination” meant that, with the addition of 88 newly independent territories, he would create in the UN a counterweight to the neocolonially ambitious Cold War powers.

3. COVERUP: All this directly pertains to West Papua. Greg Poulgrain reports Hammarskjöld was committed to intervening in the dispute between Indonesia and the Netherlands over sovereignty of West Papua, and planned to declare Dutch and Indonesian claims to the territory invalid at the UN General Assembly in October or November 1961. Kennedy supported him because this saved him from having to decide whether to hand the disputed territory of West Papua to Indonesia or, in these times of decolonisation, to the colonial power, NATO ally the Netherlands, in a thorny situation where the Soviet Union and China supported the Indonesian claim. There seems little doubt that Hammarskjöld and the fifteen other passengers in the plane were murdered. On 20 September 1961, two days after the crash former US president, Harry S. Truman, was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “Mr. Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him’.” The UN huggermuggery about the deaths of its Secretary-General and eleven other staff members in Ndola is suspicious to say the least. West Papua is almost certainly enshrouded in all that secrecy.

4. DUBIOUS CLAIMANTS: Indonesia’s right to negotiate West Papua’s future was questionable. When it was admitted as a sovereign nation to the UN, General Assembly Resolution 448 (V) stated, “Noting the communication dated 29 June 1950 from the Government of the Netherlands will no longer present a report pursuant to Article 73 e on Indonesia with the exception of West New Guinea [my emphasis]”. The UN didn’t recognise West New Guinea as part of Indonesia. Before officially joining the UN in September 1950 but having sworn to respect its principles, and ignoring the fact that West Papua was to be decolonised under the name “Netherlands New Guinea”, Indonesia’s President Sukarno, in his speech of 17 August on the fifth anniversary of Indonesia’s independence, was agitating for “national” unity with the slogan “From Sabang to Merauke” (from the northwesternmost tip of the country, an island off Sumatra, to the eastern town in West Papua). Indonesia’s designs on West Papua were clear from the very start.

5. DEFILING “SACRED TRUST”: As a UN member, Indonesia was obliged to respect the UN Charter and the basic principles expressed therein. Article 73 e, states, “Members of the United Nations which have or assume responsibilities for the administration of territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government recognize the principle that the interests of the inhabitants of these territories are paramount, and accept as a sacred trust the obligation to promote to the utmost, within the system of international peace and security established by the present Charter, the well-being of the inhabitants of these territories”. The interests of the West Papuans were clearly not remotely paramount and, indeed, when Indonesia dishonestly, and evidently dishonestly, agreed to these obligations, the stage was set for an internationally orchestrated coverup of its subsequent serious human right abuses, and even genocide in West Papua, because the UN’s complicity also had to be covered up.

6. WEST PAPUANS EXPUNGED: The New York Agreement between the Republic of Indonesia and the Kingdom of the Netherlands Concerning West New Guinea (West Irian) was signed at the New York headquarters of the UN on 15 August 1962. No representative from West Papua was present. Article I stipulates that “both Contracting Parties, Indonesia and the Netherlands will jointly sponsor a draft resolution in the United Nations under the terms of which the General Assembly of the United Nations takes note of [not “ratifies”] the present Agreement, acknowledges the role conferred upon the Secretary-General of the United Nations therein, and authorizes him to carry out the tasks entrusted to him therein.” Article II says, “the Netherlands will transfer administration of the territory to a United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) established by and under the jurisdiction of the Secretary-General upon the arrival of the United Nations Administrator appointed in accordance with article IV. The UNTEA will in turn transfer the administration to Indonesia in accordance with article XII.” The Agreement came into force on 21 September 1962 when it was acknowledged by General Assembly Resolution 1752 (XVII), which authorized the UN to oversee the transfer, as the basis for its implementation.

7. NAME SCAM: The title of the UN General Assembly Resolution 1752 (XVII – Agreement between the Republic of Indonesia and the Kingdom of Netherlands Concerning West New Guinea (West Irian)) of 18 September 1962 lets slip what was, in fact, a foregone conclusion. The word “Irian” in the name Indonesia gave in 1949 to its future colony (Irian Barat) comes from the acronym Ikut Republik Indonesia Anti-Nederland (To Join the Anti-Netherlands Republic of Indonesia). 

8. “STONE-AGE” STIGMA: The formula both Contracting parties is further evidence of how the West Papuan people were excluded from deciding their own fate. They were depicted as “stone-age” people when, in fact, they had already opted for and were ready for independence, with electoral rolls, and the establishment of the New Guinea Council in April 1961, complete with a national manifesto and the Morning Star flag. The Council’s work was callously cut short by the exclusively external, colonial and neocolonial New York Agreement. 

9. COMMUNIST FEARMONGERING: The crushing influence of big power considerations is clear in a 1962 U.S. State Department note, which makes no bones about the fact that, “The underlying reason that the Kennedy administration pressed the Netherlands to accept this agreement was that it believed that Cold War considerations of preventing Indonesia from going Communist overrode the Dutch case”. The fact that, from 1957 to 1962, the USSR had committed $900 million in military aid to Indonesia, reinforced the arguments. But the ideological considerations, as they so often do, covered up the other plan to exploit West Papua’s natural resources, of which Kennedy was unaware.

10. SECRET CRONY PROMISES: Only days after the inauguration of President Kennedy, U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, Howard P. Jones, submitted a seven-point plan to prevent Indonesia from “falling under Communist control”. Key points were the resolution of the West New Guinea question, the promise to Sukarno that the territory would be reunited with Indonesia and “the creation of a personal relationship between Presidents Kennedy and Sukarno”. 

11. INSTRUMENTALISATION: For Sukarno, the UN was a mere instrument. When Kennedy raised the issue of the trusteeship, he replied, “we would be willing to borrow the hand of the United Nations [my emphasis] to transfer the territory to Indonesia.” The Department of State and the White House also sought to use the UN as a rubber stamp for their plans because, in fact, Sukarno was their instrument. The matter would really be decided outside the UN. In this process, the Department encouraged the Netherlands and Indonesia to hold secret bilateral negotiations.

12. REMOVING THE NETHERLANDS: Even before Hammarskjöld was murdered, White House and National Security Council staffer Robert Komer was pushing to “spell out for the President that trusteeship was not just a ‘graceful out for the Netherlands,’ but also ‘a cover for eventually giving WNG to Indonesia’”. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, Walt Rostow, pressed him to “insist that the only resolution of the issue was one that ‘looks to Indonesian control’”, adding that “meaningful self-determination for ‘stone-age Papuans’ would take too long.”

13. FREEPORT DIPLOMACY: Freeport director Robert Lovett’s friend, McGeorge Bundy, “Freeport’s national security pick” and now Kennedy’s National Security Adviser, gave his support to Indonesia, emphasising that “no one in this town does not believe that, sooner or later, the Indonesia will get West Irian”, so the United States had to “work with this trend and not allow the Soviet bloc to exploit the issue”. Kennedy was persuaded and opted for active support of Indonesia. 

14. ANTICOMMUNIST PROMISES: In a secret letter to Dr. J. E. de Quay, Prime Minister of the Netherlands, dated 2 April 1962, Kennedy wrote, “If the Indonesian Army were committed to all out war against The Netherlands, the moderate elements within the Army and the country would be quickly eliminated, leaving a clear field for communist intervention. If Indonesia were to succumb to communism in these circumstances, the whole non-communist position in Viet-Nam, Thailand, and Malaya would be in grave peril, and as you know these are areas in which we in the United States have heavy commitments and burdens.” Persuasion of the Dutch “to turn over administrative control of the territory to a UN administrator” came with a promise that Kennedy’s key advisors knew would not be honoured: “The UN, in turn, would relinquish control to the Indonesians within a specified period. These arrangements would include provisions whereby the Papuan people would, within a certain period, be granted the right of self-determination. The UN would be involved in the preparations for the exercise of self-determination.”

15. THE CHIEF LEGAL ADVISOR’S “LIKELY OUTCOME”: Kennedy sent his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to Indonesia and the Netherlands for UN-supervised bilateral negotiations. Although the Law Boss “could give no assurances to the Indonesians that the Netherlands would agree to transfer WNG to Indonesia, he could say that the United States believed this was the likely outcome …” 

16. RACISM: Racism was a potent bargaining point. After Robert Kennedy’s visit, eight members of the New Guinea Council, wired the president: “We protest strongly Robert Kennedy’s humiliating statements on television concerning backwardness Papuan people and lack university trained workers, seemingly indicating advise [sic] to Indonesia to eradicate Papuan people … Independence and democracy can be understood and practiced by common people even if they have not seen Harvard and we have an unalienable right to such practicing …”. The message went unanswered. The State Department considered that “there is no advantage to be gained by replying to these persons”.

17. “CANNIBAL LAND”: In the name of “cold realpolitik” Robert Komer spoke of sacrificing “a few thousand square miles of cannibal land.” In one message dated 15 January 1962 and copied to Bundy, he referred to “that bit of colonial debris called West New Guinea”. His colleague Robert Johnson “considered self-determination [a] meaningless facade when applied to stone-age people almost totally lacking in contact with the modern world.” Robert Amory of the CIA said a plebiscite was “farcical … considering the stone-age level of the West New Guineans”. Press accounts shaped popular culture with lurid accounts of naked cannibals. The legacy endured. In 2014, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, by Carl Hoffman, purporting to prove that Michael Rockefeller, son of New York Governor, Nelson Rockefeller (with Standard Oil connections of course), who disappeared in West Papua, was killed and eaten by cannibals, has the magic words Savage, Cannibals, and Primitive, while Quest covers what was really misappropriation of sacred works of art. Rockefeller’s father donated the products of this “Quest” to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which later had a Michael C. Rockefeller Wing where it is truly heartbreaking to see them displayed as mere collectors’ objects, so sterilely, so far from home.

18. “ONLY SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND”: For all his fine words immediately after Hammarskjöld’s murder (“That continuing tide of selfdetermination, which runs so strong, has our sympathy and our support”), President Kennedy, now wholly under the influence of his take-the-gloves-off national security advisors, still ignorant of West Papua’s oil and mineral wealth, unable to understand why the Dutch wanted to keep that “bit of colonial debris”, and swayed by the anti-communist argument, expressed a callous lack of concern about “those Papuans” a few months later. When the Dutch ambassador J. H. van Roijen, compared Papua to Berlin, Kennedy answered, “Oh, that is entirely different because there are something like two and a quarter million West Berliners where there are only seven hundred thousand of those Papuans. Moreover, the West Berliners are highly civilised and highly cultured, whereas those inhabitants of West New Guinea are living, as it were, in the Stone Age.”

19. MILITARY REALITY: On 11 March 1962, on US instructions, UN Acting Secretary General U Thant appointed businessman, diplomat, and hawk, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker as mediator for forthcoming Dutch/Indonesian talks. This was in violation of Article 100 of the UN Charter, In these talks (by which time Indonesia had already launched a small-scale invasion of West Papua shortly after Dag Hammarskjöld was killed), Bunker proposed that Indonesia should be given administration of West Papua and that the United Nations should be involved in the process of “self-determination” for its people. The transfer would take two years, with Indonesians replacing U.N. administrators in the second year. The United Nations would oversee a subsequent arrangement whereby West Papuans could exercise expression of free choice. However, “Indonesia wanted to minimize the role of the United Nations”, as well as recognition of “special status for their paratrooper forces which had infiltrated into WNG”. These forces were under the command of Major-General Suharto (soon to be President of Indonesia after one of history’s worst crimes against humanity, a U.S.-orchestrated military coup, in which between 500,000 and a million people were murdered and 1.7 million imprisoned for years without trial). Obviously this man, the US’s man in Indonesia, wouldn’t be permitting a free, democratic Act of Free Choice four years later.

20. BROKEN DUTCH PROMISES TO “CANNIBALS”: In 1961, after months of talks with American officials, the Dutch Foreign Minister Joseph Luns, who once facetiously remarked in an official conversation when asked how West Papuans responded to Indonesian infiltrators that “the natives either apprehended and reported these agitators to the local administration or they ate the agitators” although “there was only one variation to this latter practice and that existed among the more Christianized natives who would only eat fishermen on Fridays”, proposed a UN trusteeship for West Papua to the General Assembly. It went to the vote a few days after Hammarskjöld’s death but was rejected in the UN. Nevertheless, Dutch officials promised that, whatever happened, they would honour their promise to ensure that West Papua achieved independence in ten years, Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans, who had briefed President Kennedy’s national security staff in 1961, differed. The dispute was about “who will train the Papuans to eat with knife and fork”. In a confidential briefing of April 1961 to former US secretary of state Dean Acheson (Kennedy’s envoy), Dirk Stikker, Secretary-General of NATO, opined that “Dutch politicians and people… would be extremely grateful if the US will take leadership in pushing through an international trusteeship arrangement for NNG [Netherlands New Guinea]” and, more than once, Prince Bernhard also informed Kennedy via his foreign policy advisor Dean Acheson that the Dutch would accept the handover to Indonesia of West Papua.

21. “POLITICAL CAPITAL” OF INDONESIAN “INTEGRITY”: The UN debate on the future of West Papua at the 16^th General Assembly was slotted into wider discussion on granting independence to former colonial peoples in which Indonesia led a 38-country resolution that they should all be granted independence, that a Special Committee on Decolonisation should be formed, and that attention should be given to the fact that the integrity of some states, including Indonesia (with its claim to West Papua), Iraq and Kuwait, was being damaged by decolonisation, as if Melanesian West Papua was ever an integral part of Asian Indonesia. After consultation with West Papuan leaders, the Brazzaville group (Cameroun, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Dahomey, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Togo, and Upper Volta) drew attention to West Papua’s specific case as a country where decolonisation hadn’t yet occurred, calling for a UN Commission on West Papua, rejecting Indonesian claims to it, and emphasising the rights of its people. The resolution was supported by some western countries but Indonesia objected to its emphasis on self-determination, insisting that it wasn’t an issue because “Indonesia” (including West Papua, of course) had been independent since 1945. Threatening in at least one case to break diplomatic relations, Indonesia forced the vote against the resolution, which failed to reach the required two-thirds majority. Although it was clear that, against all odds, West Papua had significant support in the UN, the Brazzaville Initiative was completely ignored by the White House and, in the general plan of things, consigned to the dustbin of history. Kennedy’s national security staff now showed their true colours. Writing to Rostow, Robert Komer recommended “the time has come to take the gloves off, and adopt a frankly pro-Indonesian stance while there’s still time to get some political capital out of it.”

22. NO DEBATE: The Agreement, signed on 15 August 1962 was bulldozed through. A draft text for General Assembly consideration was presented to UN members a month later, the day before they had to vote and without debate. The government of Benin (Dahomey) objected that West Papuans hadn’t been consulted, Togo criticised the haste and, for the same reason, Senegal changed its vote three days later from affirmative to negative. They were ignored, and the vote was passed 89-0 with 14 abstentions (General Assembly Official Records, A/PV.1127, A/PV.1150). It’s also worth noting that, earlier that year, the United States had tried to prevent a visit to West Papua by the UN ambassadors of Dahomey and Upper Volta. 

23. BROKEN TRUST IN A “TRUST” TERRITORY: Ten days later, on 1 October, as administrator of West Papua, the UN (UNTEA) became responsible for the “interests and welfare of the people of the territory of West New Guinea (West Irian)”. Theoretically, with the New York Agreement, West Papua became a UN trust territory or colony for which the UN accepted legal responsibility, in accordance with Chapter 12 of the UN Charter, in which Article 77, part 1 (c) made it a territory “voluntarily placed under the [UN] system by states responsible for their administration” until the people of the territory are allowed to express self-determination by public vote. In practice, West Papua formally became a UN trust territory when, by means of General Assembly resolution 1752 (XVII), the UN authorised the deployment of UN troops from Pakistan to occupy the colony of West Papua when an “Act of Free Choice” took place. A further requirement is that the Agreement must be approved by the General Assembly. The conditions for these two requirements were not respected. The choice of 1,000 troops from Pakistan as the sole country represented in the UN Security Force, at the behest of U Thant himself, is significant because Pakistan had always voted in favour of Indonesian plans for West Papua.

24. MEANING OF “ANALAGOUS”: The document titled Summary of AG-059 United Nations Temporary Executive Authority in West Irian (UNTEA) (1962–1963)—written after 1973 and now on the UN website as “page not found”—gives another slant on the view of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning West Papua’s legal status, suggesting that the Secretariat understands that West Papua is “administered” by Indonesia and not a “sovereign part” of it. However, before administrative functions were irregularly transferred to Indonesia, it was recognised by Article 81 of the Charter that, “Such authority, hereinafter called the administering authority, may be one or more states or the Organization itself.” In this case, with “the agreement of the two parties the functions envisaged would come within the competence of the United Nations”. Now-declassified documents show that U Thant’s legal advisors told him in 1962 that the proposed role of the United Nations was ‘analogous’ to Article 81 of Chapter XII governing the International Trusteeship System. If this is not an outright case of trusteeship, it is analogous. McKinlay King points out, however, that there is, “no other article within international law governed by the Charter that allows the ‘Organisation itself’ to take over a Non-Self-Governing Territory. Thus, Chapter XII governing the International Trusteeship System must apply.” 

25. U THANT’S DRAGOONED TRANSFER: Document 6312. Understandings between The United Nations and Indonesia and The Netherlands Relating to the Agreement of 15 August 1962 between the Republic of Indonesia and the Kingdom of the Netherlands Concerning West New Guinea (West Irian), states, “The transfer of authority to Indonesia will be effected as soon as possible [my emphasis] after 1 May 1963.” This contravenes the Agreement put to the General Assembly, which stipulates in Article XII only that, “The United Nations Administrator will have discretion to transfer all or part of the administration to Indonesia.” U Thant’s instruction of 15 August was never presented to the General Assembly for debate, so it never voted on this instruction affecting the fate of a Non-Self-Governing Territory. The Agreement was also clear that a second phase of an indeterminate period would begin after UNTEA Phase One ended on 1 May and, moreover, that the “freely expressed will of the population” had to be ascertained before 1969. In fact, UNTEA should have remained until this had taken place, especially because, since December 1961, “A strong Indonesian military presence has been a permanent fixture in Papua”. In fact, Indonesia was doing everything it possibly could to undermine the UNTEA mission.

26. UN LEAVES THE SCENE OF THE CRIME: The very night that administration of West Papua was transferred to Indonesia, all UN officers left the country. This breached Article XVI of the Agreement: “At the time of the transfer of full administrative responsibility to Indonesia a number of United Nations experts, as deemed adequate by the Secretary General after consultation with Indonesia, will be designated to remain wherever their duties require their presence…”

27. U THANT’S PERFIDY: This is clear in several instances. For example, a declassified “TOP SECRET” CIA document informs that, thanks to a letter from U Thant to President Sukarno of 28^th June 1962, Indonesia was ready to continue interrupted secret talks with the Dutch about the future of West Papua. The letter assured Sukarno that the Netherlands was willing to postpone a plebiscite until after administrative powers were transferred to Indonesia. U Thant was informed by Constantin Stavropoulos, the UN legal counsel, on 29 June that, according to the wishes of the people, “there appears to emerge a strong presumption in favour of self-determination … irrespective of the legal stands or interests of other parties to the question”. He ignored the message. These covert steps made him a priori complicit in the fake “Act of Free Choice” of 1969.

28. NO REPORTS: Declassified U.S. documents reveal that the Komer national security group planned illegal manipulation of the UN Trusteeship System, and thereby to invite Indonesia to assume control of West Papua. As administrator, the UNTEA was obliged to report to the Trusteeship Council on the welfare of the West Papuan people, and progress towards independence. Article VIII of the Agreement gets around this by stating that, “The United Nations Administrator will send periodic reports to the Secretary-General on the principal aspects of the implementation of the present Agreement. The Secretary-General will submit full reports to Indonesia and the Netherlands and may submit, at his discretion, reports to the General Assembly or to all United Nations Members.” At the “discretion” of the Secretary-General, reports, when supplied, were not made available to UN members. However, Article 103 of the UN Charter—“In the event of a conflict between the obligations of the Members of the United Nations under the present Charter and their obligations under any other international agreement, their obligations under the present Charter shall prevail”—obligations under the Charter can’t be waived by any undisclosed agreement. Article 85 of the UN Charter assigns responsibility for supervising all non-strategic trust territories to the General Assembly, and not to the singular fiat of the Secretary-General. What “Secretary-General” really meant was clear enough in the secret meetings between Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the UN in Huntlands, Virginia in March 1962, where Ellsworth Bunker, representing the US government, was allegedly acting for UN Secretary General U Thant.

29. BILATERAL AGREEMENT MEANS NO VALID REFERENDUM: Denying that the West Papuans had any right to self-determination, Indonesia understood the deal at Huntlands simply as a bilateral agreement with the Netherlands, and nothing to do with any UN trusteeship. Buckling under this pressure, the UN, against its own Charter and agreements, handed it West Papua, and denied that it had any obligation to organise a plebiscite in West Papua, except—secretly—as a face-saving device for all concerned, including the United Nations. Evidently there would be no valid referendum.

30. IGNORING DAHOMEY: Julian McKinlay King provides a lot of evidence of the manipulation, which wasn’t overlooked by all member states. Dahomey’s representative denounced the fact that, “[A] people of 700,000 is transferred from one Power to another … without previous consultation with the party chiefly concerned, the Papuan people … Not once—I repeat, not once—do we find in the text any mention of a “referendum” … and … the actual public expression of opinion will be organised entirely by the party which has the greatest interest in the yielding of results that are favourable to it.” The UN didn’t see fit to investigate these serious accusations by one of its members.

31. INSTRUCTIONS TO BLOCK DEBATE: McKinlay King also names the General Assembly president Muhammad Zafrulla Khan of Pakistan (which had consistently voted in Indonesia’s favour) as being responsible for “denying time for Members to review the draft, debate, and no doubt amend before proceeding to the vote”. He had thus blocked any debate before the vote, was literally “using his position to deny the West Papuan people’s right to self-determination, and was instead supporting Indonesia’s illegal claim to the Territory”. He was not censured for this. Moreover, U Thant, a personal friend of Indonesia’s President Sukarno, had waited five weeks before providing copies of the draft Agreement to UN Member states. His actions are arguably in violation of Article 100 of the UN Charter which states that: “1. In the performance of their duties the Secretary-General and the staff shall not seek or receive instructions from any government or from any other authority external to the Organization [my emphasis]. They shall refrain from any action which might reflect on their position as international officials responsible only to the Organization [my emphasis].

2. Each Member of the United Nations undertakes to respect the exclusively international character of the responsibilities of the Secretary-General and the staff and not to seek to influence them in the discharge of their responsibilities.”

32. NO QUESTIONS, NO ANSWERS: Article 88 of the UN Charter states, “The Trusteeship Council shall formulate a questionnaire on the political, economic, social, and educational advancement of the inhabitants of each trust territory, and the administering authority for each trust territory within the competence of the General Assembly shall make an annual report to the General Assembly upon the basis of such questionnaire.” This didn’t happen.

33. “TAKING NOTE OR TURNING A BLIND EYE TO EVERYTHING: Document 1752 XVII of 21 September 1962 between the Republic of Indonesia and the Kingdom of the Netherlands concerning West New Guinea (West Irian), simply “takes note” of the Agreement and “Authorizes the Secretary-General to carry out the tasks entrusted to him in the Agreement”. Only a year after Hammarskjold’s death, the attempt to install a trusteeship that should have reported to the Trusteeship Council failed. Taking note is not endorsing or ratifying, and bypassing the Trusteeship Council violated the terms of the UN’s own Charter.

34. THE UN MISLEADS ITSELF: As foreordained, the so-called Act of Free Choice, was a crude mockery of all the principles the UN purported to uphold. A meticulous account of UN chicanery in the lethal farce is given by John Saltford in The United Nations and the Indonesian Takeover of West Papua, 1962-1969: The Anatomy of Betrayal (2003). For example of (pp. 131-132) UN Secretary-General U Thant’s Representative for West Irian (UNRWI), Fernando Ortiz-Sanz, well aware of Indonesian crimes of murder, torture, and other forms of violence against West Papuans who called for an authentic referendum, spoke in his report to U Thant of “the possibility of peaceful democratic demonstrations by the population and evident good-will on the part of high ranking Indonesian military commanders”. Saltford’s well-founded conclusion is, “either Ortiz Sanz himself chose deliberately to mislead the UNGA or he was directed to do so his superiors in New York. Whoever was responsible, it is a clear illustration of the UN leadership’s collaboration with Indonesia to legitimise the latter’s takeover of West Irian.”

35. SEE NO EVIL: By the time the meagre UN team of just 16 people arrived in 1968 to assist in preparations for the Act of Free Choice the following year, West Papua had been under Indonesian rule for five years. Thomas Reynders, a US consular official who visited in March 1968 reported that, “The Indonesian government’s presence in West Irian is expressed primarily in the form of the Army” and (like almost all western observers, he notes) that, “Indonesia will not accept Independence for West Irian and will not permit a plebiscite that would reach such an outcome”. He also mentions the “antipathy or outright hatred believed to be harbored toward Indonesia and Indonesians by West Irians in the relatively developed and sophisticated areas”. Saltford (p. 92) adds that Reynders also reported that the Indonesians had “tried everything from bombing to shelling and mortaring, but a continuous state of semi-rebellion persists”. A consular official observes all this in a brief visit. But UN officials on the ground, we are supposed to believe, didn’t see any Indonesian repression. Meanwhile, the US Ambassador to Indonesia, Frank Galbraith, secretly reported in a telegram of 9 July 1969 that, “Military repression has stimulated fears and rumors of intended genocide among the Irianese”. Like the “referendum” results, genocide was also a foregone conclusion. 

36. THE UN OVERSEES INTIMIDATION OF HANDPICKED VOTERS: Declaring that the West Papuan people were too primitive to decide their own future, the Suharto military regime imposed, instead of the one man one vote system, the Indonesian decision-making process musyawarah to determine the votes. This was certainly not stipulated in the agreement. And it certainly wasn’t real musyawarah which means consensus decision-making. The 1,022 so-called “representatives” were selected, coerced, and terrified. Saltford, cites journalist Hugh Lunn, who witnessed the selection process in Biak: “…plain clothed Indonesian soldiers simply selected the representatives themselves from the small assembled crowd. They then arrested three peaceful demonstrators who had sat down at the front displaying placards calling for a direct free vote. Disturbingly, this was done even while UN officials, including Ortiz Sanz himself, looked on. A colleague of Lunn’s allegedly pleaded with Ortiz Sanz to intervene but he refused saying simply that the UN was just there to observe.” A Dutch journalist, Otto Kuyk, also reported on this experience. “In the next three days, all three UN observers under Ortiz Sanz came to me individually, distraught. They said there would be no free choice. They’d received a constant stream of pleading letters.” UN representatives witnessed the selection of only 195 of the 1,022 representatives and did not report on the brutal methods employed.

37. U THANT’S VERBAL SLEIGHT OF HAND: On the issue of musyawarah, the Secretary General’s official report to the UN General Assembly in 1969 tampered with the Agreement when it replaced, without comment, the phrase “international practice” with “Indonesian practice.” His report also infracted UN General Assembly Resolution 1541, December 1960, requiring that, “The peoples of both territories should have equal status and rights of citizenship and equal guarantees of fundamental rights and freedoms without any distinction or discrimination; both should have equal rights and opportunities for representation and effective participation at all levels in the executive, legislative and judicial organs of government”, and that, “The integration should be the result of the freely expressed wishes of the territory’s peoples acting with full knowledge of the change in their status, their wishes having been expressed through informed and democratic processes, impartially conducted and based on universal adult suffrage”.

38. EXTIRPATING A CANCEROUS GROWTH, UN-STYLE: In fact, the result of this supposedly consultative musyawarah had been decided well in advance. Everyone knew the West Papuans didn’t accept Indonesian rule. Saltford is clear on this point: “[As] early as 1963, the UN and the Dutch had privately advised Indonesia that they would accept an act of self-determination involving as little as 800 representatives and no direct voting by the general population. Both Ortiz Sanz and the Secretary-General also confidentially urged Indonesia to lobby other states to remain silent on the issue at the UN General Assembly. Specifically, Ortiz Sanz wrote to his superiors in the UN Secretariat informing them that he had urged Jakarta to privately seek assurances from The Hague that they “would not cast any doubt on, or challenge, the Act of Free Choice. This would prevent a heated debate in the General Assembly”. The UN was complicit. “As one British diplomat remarked at the time, UN member states wanted the issue: ‘cleared out of the way with the minimum of fuss. The UN Secretariat, he added; “‘is only too anxious to get shot of the problem as quickly as possible’.” The choicest quote of all comes from Ortiz-Sanz himself. He told journalist Hugh Lunn, “‘West [Papua] is like a cancerous growth on the side of the UN and my job is to surgically remove it’.”

39. TEARING OUT TONGUES: General Ali Murtopo, head of OPSUS, the Special Operations [Intelligence] Service used by Suharto for delicate foreign assignments but by no means a delicate operator, orchestrated the final act of the farce, consisting of eight assembly meetings “where the representatives would be required to publicly [my emphasis] make their choice. Several of them have since claimed that the authorities isolated them from their friends and families for several weeks before the vote and subjected them to a series of threats, insults and bribes. Some were then selected to speak at the assemblies and given instructions on what to say before being made to rehearse their lines in front of Indonesian officials. The man in charge of this was General Ali Murtopo who reportedly warned anyone thinking of voting for independence that they would have their “accursed tongues” torn out. At least one “representative” is alleged to have been taken away and killed for refusing to comply.” 

40. 100% WANTED TO BE INDONESIAN: The preposterous result was a unanimous vote in favour of becoming part of Indonesia, although the United Nations seemed to find nothing untoward about it. Rather, it more or less followed suit. Three months later, the Dutch, British and eighty-two other states voted in the UN General Assembly to “take note” of the result, acknowledging the fulfilment by the UN of its responsibilities under the Agreement, and congratulating U Thant for “his good work in fulfilling his responsibilities”. There were thirty abstentions, but no votes against.

41. “GREEK TRAGEDY”: Although some African countries led by Ghana protested, the international community wanted to “get shot of” the West Papuans (or, more like it, get them shot). It had all unfolded “like a Greek tragedy” as a US Embassy telegram of 9 June 1969 described it. A list of relevant US documents is available here. The prevailing cynicism is well summed up in a British Foreign Office briefing paper: “Privately, however, we recognize that the people of West [Papua] have no desire to be ruled by the Indonesians who are of an alien (Javanese) race, and that the process of consultation did not allow a genuinely free choice to be made.”

42. INTEGRATION WAS NEVER APPROVED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY: The Dutch, British and eighty-two other states voted to adopt the resolution “taking note of” the Act’s result and acknowledging the fulfilment by the UN of its responsibilities under the Agreement. Although Resolution 2504 claimed that the Secretary-General had duly completed his task, he hadn’t because Article XXI of Agreement (with annex) concerning West New Guinea (West Irian) of 15 August 1962 states, “After the exercise of the right of self-determination, Indonesia and the United Nations Representative will submit final reports to the Secretary-General who will report to the General Assembly on the conduct of the act of self-determination and the results thereof”. The Secretary-General did not report on an act of self-determination. Nowhere does the resolution say that General Assembly approves the integration of West Papua into the Republic of Indonesia. It only “took note”.

43. NO PETITIONS ALLOWED: Article 87 of the UN Charter states that the Trusteeship Council may “… accept petitions and examine them in consultation with the administering authority; provide for periodic visits to the respective trust territories at times agreed upon with the administering authority; and take these and other actions in conformity with the terms of the trusteeship agreements.” Since the Trusteeship Council was bypassed by the person of U Thant, in 2017, the United Nations continued with his deceit and refused to accept the real West Papuan plebiscite, a petition signed by 1.8 million people, an extraordinary achievement in a country where genocide is occurring. The petition asked for a UN special representative to investigate human rights abuses and to “put West Papua back on the decolonisation committee agenda and ensure their right to self‐determination … is respected by holding an internationally supervised vote”. The chair of the decolonisation committee, Rafael Ramírez, stated that he supports Indonesia’s claim that West Papua is an integral part of its territory. Indonesia’s representative to the UN, Dian Triansyah Djani, is a vice-chair of the Decolonisation Committee. And in October 2023, Indonesia was elected to the UN Human Rights Council for the sixth time.

+++

Yes, the UN has done a great job, not by its own lights but as a faithful servant of a world system that stoops to the most ignoble and malevolent skulduggery to achieve its own destructive ends, which are now visible on a planetary scale. The UN’s role in the awful fate of West Papua now raises the question: what do such crimes of lèse-humanité, committed by the system that supposedly protects humankind against them mean for all of humanity now, when genocide has also become ecocide?

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Two Left Hands, Clackamas Community College, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

There are enough problems in the world without getting into an intergenerational American dust-up. But if journalists like Emily Holzknecht and Binyamin Appelbaum and their recorded speakers want to go after their elders, this Baby Boomer from the Bronx is ready to tussle. If the New York Times columnists and interviewees want to pin the world’s problems on Baby Boomers like me in “Thanks a lot, Boomers,” they’d better be ready for some pushback. As Aretha Franklin sang: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me.” I’ll tell you exactly what it means to me.  

Dean Baker gave an economic explanation of why the article/video was wrong in CounterPunch, (Blame the Rich, Not the Boomers for Economic Inequality – CounterPunch.org); this response is personal.

In their Times’ three-minute, thirty-six-second Opinion video, “younger Americans from the New York region spell out the frustrations of the generations that followed the baby boomers.” (Already there’s a lack of respect in not capitalizing Baby Boomers.)

What do they want? “We’ve noticed that many of you are pretty upset about the state of the nation. And we get it. We really do. But do you ever stop and ask yourselves how we got here?” they challenge. “We have one simple request: How about an apology?” Apologize! And then they tell us to “Protest yourself.” 

“You were handed the world on a silver platter,” one speaker declares. “For the last several decades,” another says, “Boomer presidents” – from Bill Clinton to DJT – are to blame for the dire state of the world. “What is your legacy?” another demands.

An apology! Protest yourself? Legacy? Listen Gen X,Y,Z, and Millennials. (Notice the respect with the capitals.) First, lumping a whole generation together is a risky business. Tom Brokaw praised The Greatest Generation, those who survived the Depression and fought in World War II. Was he right to put so many people together? Brokaw lauded George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole. What about Norman Thomas? The pacifist, democratic socialist ran six consecutive times for president between 1928 and 1948. Although he never won, many of his ideas were incorporated in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Baby Boomers are the generation born between 1946 and 1964. Being “born with a silver spoon in their mouths,” as one speaker said, is an exaggeration. Those who grew up during that period will never forget Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), the Cuban Missile Crisis, Sputnik, or the other horrors of the Cold War. (For Gen X.Y,Z, and Millennials: The Cold War was not a weather pattern before global warming.) Watch Dr. Strangelove, read Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War or Henry Kissinger’s 1957 strategic best-seller Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. We Boomers lived in fear that our silver spoons could become radioactive at any moment, and those childhood memories remain. 

As long as we’re doing generational history: What about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, all within a four-year period when we were at the height of our political/civic development and the country seemed close to chaos? Only sixty-two days elapsed between the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Our silver spoons risked more than just radioactivity.  

And what about war? You never experienced the intense anxiety of the Vietnam draft lottery. If your birth date was selected, you could find yourself in full combat after only six weeks of basic training. According to Defense Department records and birth-year distributions, roughly 70-75% of the Americans who died in Vietnam were Baby Boomers, about 40-44,000 people.

More generally, Holzknecht and Appelbaum raise the difficult question of collective responsibility. As indicated, the speakers in the editorial blame an entire generation – a collective responsibility that assumes all members of the Boomer generation had more in common than just their birth dates. Imputing blame to such a large group denies individual action; it is too broad, too general.

Personal examples of such generalization: In 1968, simply because of my American accent, I was spat on in Paris for “causing the war in Vietnam” even though I had never served in the military and had completed a four-year form of alternate service. At the other extreme, some years later, I was treated to champagne by an elderly gentleman at a restaurant on the beaches in Normandy because, as an American, I had “saved France and the world from the Nazis.” In fact, D-Day happened before I was born. Neither the insult nor the compliment reflected anything I had done.

Generational blame requires a moral community. Tribal responsibilities, perhaps, may apply if there is genuine collectivist thinking and feeling. But collective responsibility follows only from the existence of a true collective. Mere birth dates are not sufficient grounds for imputed blame. Baby Boomers are very diverse; they have little in common except shared birth dates and shared history. 

Blaming an entire generation separates actions from individuals. If the interviewees blame Baby Boomers, they should be prepared to be blamed as well – something I hinted at in CounterPunch. (“Mary Robinson and Elders: Where Are the Young Leaders in Today’s Progressive Movement?” – CounterPunch.org).

To return to my experiences as someone with an American accent: Although I have lived outside the United States for over fifty years, can I be held responsible for what the current government is doing? By blaming Baby Boomers for many of the world’s problems, the interviewees have reduced individual responsibility to a simplistic generational level. As Eugenia Cheng shows in Unequal: The Math of When Things Do and Don’t Add Up, generalizations in Math and life blur individual specifics.

I am fully aware of Mitch McConnell’s latest fall and Joe Biden’s debate performance. I am also aware of 83-year-old Bernie Sanders lighting it up with his Fighting Oligarchy tour, and of Mick Jagger still going strong looking for “Satisfaction.” This Baby Boomer accepts his age but challenges attacks on his moral responsibility. 

In the end, every generation inherits both the achievements and the failures of those who came before. We Baby Boomers have lived through wars, assassinations, and nuclear fears, but we have also fought for civil rights and created new forms of culture and technology. History will judge us not by our birth dates, but by our individual actions. Respect, as Aretha sang, runs both ways.

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“Columbia’s Easter Bonnet,” Puck. (1901). Library of Congress.

The US has been transformed into a mirror world, the mirror world of a pathological narcissist, a world of reverse images where victims are flipped into perpetrators, the poor portrayed as exploiters of the super-rich, the weak as persecutors of the strong and where the law is used to perpetuate lawlessness. The police conceal their faces behind the masks of thieves, while thieves loot the public estate unmolested. Public corruption has been legalized and exposing graft made a crime. 

The right of free speech has been rendered into an obligation to be obsequious in the face of power. The history of the country is being erased and rewritten to honor some of its most infamous villains and traitors and airbrush out defenders of liberty, diversity and equality. The sins of the past are promoted as virtues.  People are judged based on the color of their skin and the size of their portfolios. Domestic tranquillity has been supplanted by an atmosphere of fear and manufactured dread, where everything and everyone is suspect and no one is even sure what a citizen is or whether they are one. Not even the weather is to be believed. 

This mirror world’s aesthetic is the grotesque, the bloated, the cannabilistic and the country feeding upon itself is presented as a kind of cage match for the entertainment of the elite. Even the people’s house, built, maintained and served by the enslaved, has been  retrofitted into a gilt-fringed Versailles on the Potomac. 

This is, of course, the mirror world’s fatal weakness: a hollow hubris. Deep down a secret voice whispers to the narcissist that he’s not worthy of the power he holds. His crippling anxiety is that the people he despises the most will see through him to the fraud within, that his grip on power is maintained by an illusion of force–not real authority–and that once exposed, the mirror will crack and he will crumble by his own accord at the feet of those he tormented.

A shorter version of this piece was written for the fall issue of Ishmael Reed’s new magazine, Tar Baby, published by the Toni Morrison Foundation.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

A recurring theme in policy circles over the last three decades has been that young people should blame their economic problems on older people. The idea is that rather than being concerned about the massive upward redistribution of income, which has made people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg ridiculously rich, young people should blame their parents and grandparents.

The New York Times gave us the latest version of this story last week in a video segment titled “Thanks a lot boomers.” The write-up (sorry, I don’t have time to view the video) tells us:

Hey, boomers! Younger Americans would like a word.

We’ve noticed that many of you are pretty upset about the state of the nation. And we get it. We really do. But do you ever stop and ask yourselves how we got here?

In the Opinion video above, younger Americans from the New York region spell out the frustrations of the generations that followed the baby boomers. Like so many of us, they’re struggling with the high cost of education, a scarcity of affordable housing and a diminished American dream.

We live in communities that are still divided by race, in a nation burdened by debt, on a planet that keeps getting hotter.

We have one simple request: How about an apology?

Okay, let’s bring a little reality to the New York Times. First, the idea that the boomers lived through wonderful times is demented nonsense, not anything that corresponds to the real world.

There was, in fact, a golden age, but it predated the entry of most boomers into the labor market. The economy experienced a period of low unemployment and rapid real wage growth, which was widely shared, from 1947 to 1973. At the endpoint of this boom period, the oldest boomers were 27, and the youngest were 9.

After 1973, the economy took a sharp turn for the worst. The most immediate cause was the Arab oil embargo, which sent oil prices soaring. The economy at that time was far more dependent on oil than is the case today. Soaring oil prices sent inflation higher, which prompted the Fed to bring on severe recessions, first in 74-75 and then again in 1980-82.

The full story is more complicated and highly contested, but what happened to the economy is not. We had a period of far higher unemployment and stagnant real wage growth that lasted until the mid-1990s. The median real wage in 1996 was actually 4.4 percent lower than it had been in 1973.

The average unemployment rate for people between the ages of 20-24 over the years 1973 to 1988 (when the last boomer hit 24) was 11.3 percent. By comparison, it averaged 7.2 percent over the last decade, although it has been rising rapidly in 2025.

Real wages are substantially higher now than they were in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. The real median wage in 2024 was 30 percent higher than it had been in 1980.

Source: Economic Policy Institute. 

The increase should have been more. If the median wage had kept pace with productivity growth, as it had from 1947 to 1973, it would be more than 100 percent higher today than in 1980. The problem is that a larger share of income was diverted to high-end wages: CEOs, Wall Street types, successful STEM workers, and high-end professionals, like doctors, as well as an increased profit share since 2000, but 30 percent wage growth is not zero.

Anyhow, younger people should definitely have things better today than they do. But it is dishonest to say us old-timers are the problem, rather than the rich.

To start with, health care costs way too much. Suppose we got rid of patent and copyright monopolies, which redistribute over $1 trillion a year ($8,000 per household) from the masses to drug companies, medical equipment suppliers, software companies, and the rest. We can finance the development of drugs and medical equipment through upfront funding, like we do with the $50 billion a year we distribute through the National Institutes of Health. Then drugs and medical supplies are cheap, and healthcare costs far less.

We could also have universal Medicare, which would save us hundreds of billions of dollars a year on the administrative costs and profits of insurers. And, we could have free trade for physicians’ services, bringing their salaries in line with doctors in Germany, France, and other wealthy countries, saving us another $100 billion a year.

Boomers are not the reason we don’t have universal Medicare and free trade in prescription drugs and doctors. The lobbying groups for drug companies, insurers, and doctors are the reason healthcare is ridiculously expensive in the United States.

We also have the story of housing being extremely expensive, but here too we need to move beyond the lies. Housing costs had moved roughly in step with the overall inflation rate until the mid-1990s. Then we saw the take-off of a bubble, coinciding with the stock bubble, with house prices hugely diverging from rents and overall inflation.

While we built a huge amount of housing in the decade from 1996 to 2006, after the bubble burst and prices crashed, housing construction fell from a peak annual rate of almost 2.3 million to an annual rate of less than 500,000 at its low in 2009. Construction eventually picked up so that by the eve of the pandemic housing starts were running at 1.5 million annual rate, which was likely enough to meet new demand, but far below what was needed to make up a shortfall where we had seriously underbuilt housing for more than a decade.

NIMBYism surely slowed construction, but that could not have been the primary factor in the shortfall, since NIMBYism didn’t start in 2008. The main problem was the overreaction to the collapse of the bubble, with builders hesitant about new construction. This overreaction was what caused both rents and house sale prices to substantially outpace both inflation and wage growth. That is very clear in the data, but it is more popular in elite circles to blame boomers.

The best policy would have been to prevent the bubble in the first place. But the rich people who controlled news outlets were not anxious to say things about the housing bubble, even long after it should have been evident, because the financial industry was making money hand over fist pushing out bad mortgages. And when the mortgages went bad and the banks faced bankruptcy, they got the government to bail them out.

If younger people want someone to blame for high house prices, they should look to the financial industry and the failed regulators of the bubble era, most notably Alan Greenspan, but also Ben Bernanke, and Larry Summers. If they had taken steps to rein in the bubble, it likely never would have grown so large and led to such a disastrous fall in construction when it finally burst.

There is a similar story on climate. While many people, including boomers, can be blamed for driving gas guzzling cars and contributing to climate change in other ways, a big chunk of the blame surely must go to the executives of the fossil fuel companies. They deliberately misled the public about the dangers from climate change, pushing out false stories to hide the harm they knew they were causing. If the media, which is controlled by rich people, had been more effective in calling attention to these lies, perhaps there would have been more public support for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The story goes on, but the point is that it is dishonest to blame a generational grouping for the problems facing younger people today. The whole generation of baby boomers did not have equal power to influence public policy. A tiny elite had a hugely disproportionate ability to determine public policy and control the course of debate.

It is long past time to recognize this obvious fact. As long as we fail to do so, we will never be able to address the problem. I would also propose, as does the NYT boomer blaming piece, an apology from the rich. But as the old saying goes, being rich means never having to say you’re sorry.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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The Gaza, the one that existed on the morning of October 7 is gone, decimated by months of saturation bombing, shelling, bulldozing and controlled demolitions. All that was familiar when I worked in Gaza has vanished, transformed into an apocalyptic landscape of shattered concrete and rubble. My New York Times office in the center of Gaza City. The Marna boarding house on Ahmed Abd el-Aziz Street, where after a day’s work I would drink tea with Margaret Nassar, the elderly woman who owned it, a refugee from Safad in northern Galilee. On my last visit to Marna House, I forgot to return the room key. Number 12. It was attached to a large plastic oval with the words “Marna House Gaza” on it. The key sits on my desk.

Friends and colleagues, with few exceptions, are in exile, dead or, in most cases, have disappeared, no doubt buried under mountains of debris.

The daily rituals of life in Gaza are no longer possible. I used to leave my shoes on a rack by the front door of the Great Omari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in Gaza, in the Daraj Quarter of the Old City. The white stone walls had pointed arches and a tall octagonal minaret encircled by a carved wooden balcony that was crowned with a crescent. The mosque was built on the foundations of ancient temples to Philistine and Roman deities as well as a Byzantine church. I washed my hands, face and feet at the common water taps, carrying out the ritual purification before prayer, known as wudhu. Inside the hushed interior with its blue-carpeted floor, the cacophony, noise, dust, fumes and frenetic pace of Gaza melted away.

The mosque was destroyed on December 8, 2023, by an Israeli airstrike.

The razing of Gaza is not only a crime against the Palestinian people. It is a crime against our cultural and historical heritage — an assault on memory. We cannot understand the present, especially when reporting on Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not understand the past.

There is no shortage of failed peace plans in occupied Palestine, all of them incorporating detailed phases and timelines, going back to the presidency of Jimmy Carter. They end the same way. Israel gets what it wants initially — in the latest case the release of the remaining Israeli hostages — while it ignores and violates every other phase until it resumes its attacks on the Palestinian people.

It is a sadistic game. A merry-go-round of death. This ceasefire, like those of the past, is a commercial break. A moment when the condemned man is allowed to smoke a cigarette before being gunned down in a fusillade of bullets.

Once Israeli hostages are released, the genocide will continue. I do not know how soon. Let’s hope the mass slaughter is delayed for at least a few weeks. But a pause in the genocide is the best we can anticipate. Israel is on the cusp of emptying Gaza, which has been all but obliterated under two years of relentless bombing. It is not about to be stopped. This is the culmination of the Zionist dream. The United States, which has given Israel a staggering $22 billion in military aid since Oct, 7, 2023, will not shut down its pipeline, the only tool that might halt the genocide.

Israel, as it always does, will blame Hamas and the Palestinians for failing to abide by the agreement, most probably a refusal — true or not — to disarm, as the proposal demands. Washington, condemning Hamas’s supposed violation, will give Israel the green light to continue its genocide to create Trump’s fantasy of a Gaza Riviera and “special economic zone” with its “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians in exchange for digital tokens.

Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, the current one is the least serious. Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire begins, it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement, which Israel did almost immediately by refusing to open the border crossing at Rafah, killing a half dozen Palestinians and cutting in half the agreed upon aid trucks to 300 a day because the bodies of the remaining hostages have yet to be returned. And that is the point. It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand. Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only “rhetoric.”

Israel, in one example from the proposal, will “not return to areas that have been withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”

Who decides if Hamas has “fully implemented” the agreement? Israel. Does anyone believe in Israel’s good faith? Can Israel be trusted as an objective arbitrator of the agreement? If Hamas — demonized as a terrorist group — objects, will anyone listen?

How is it possible that a peace proposal ignores the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which reiterated that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end?

How can it fail to mention the Palestinian’s right to self-determination?

Why are Palestinians, who have a right under international law to armed struggle against an occupying power, expected to disarm while Israel, the illegally occupying force, is not?

By what authority can the U.S. establish “temporary transitional government,” — Trump’s and Tony Blair’s so-called “Board of Peace” — sidelining the Palestinian right to self-determination?

Who gave the U.S. the authority to send to Gaza an “International Stabilization Force,” a thinly veiled term for foreign occupation?

How are Palestinians supposed to reconcile themselves to the acceptance of an Israeli “security barrier” on Gaza’s borders, confirmation that the occupation will continue?

How can any proposal ignore the slow-motion genocide and annexation of the West Bank?

Why is Israel, which has destroyed Gaza, not required to pay reparations?

What are Palestinians supposed to make of the demand in the proposal for a “deradicalized” Gazan population? How is this expected to be accomplished? Re-education camps? Wholesale censorship? The rewriting of the school curriculum? Arresting offending Imams in mosques?

And what about addressing the incendiary rhetoric routinely employed by Israeli leaders who describe Palestinians as “human animals” and their children as “little snakes”?

“All of Gaza and every child in Gaza, should starve to death,” Rabbi Ronen Shaulov, Israel’s version of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, bellowed. “I don’t have mercy for those who, in a few years, will grow up and won’t have mercy for us. Only a stupid fifth column, a hater of Israel has mercy for future terrorists, even though today they are still young and hungry. I hope, may they starve to death, and if anyone has a problem with what I’ve said, that’s their problem.”

Israeli violations of peace agreements have historical precedents.

The Camp David Accords, signed in 1978 by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin — without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — led to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt.

Subsequent phases of the Camp David Accords, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never implemented.

The 1993 Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, saw the PLO recognize Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. Yet, what ensued was the disempowerment of the PLO and its transformation into a colonial police force. Oslo II, signed in 1995, detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state. But it too was stillborn. It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” were to be delayed until “final” status talks. By then, Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were scheduled to have been completed. Governing authority was poised to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. Instead, the West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority had limited authority in Areas A and B while Israel controlled all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.

The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands that Jewish colonists seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law — was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. This instantly alienated many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees. As a consequence, many Palestinians abandoned the PLO in favor of Hamas. Edward Said called the Oslo Accords “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians.”

The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank when the Oslo agreement was signed. Their numbers today have increased to 700,000.

The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo “a sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”

Israel unilaterally broke the last two-month-long ceasefire on March 18 of this year when it launched surprise airstrikes on Gaza. Netanyahu’s office claimed that the resumption of the military campaign was in response to Hamas’s refusal to release hostages, its rejection of proposals to extend the cease-fire and its efforts to rearm. Israel killed more than 400 people in the initial overnight assault and injured over 500, slaughtering and wounding people, including children, as they slept. The attack scuttled the second stage of the agreement, which would have seen Hamas release the remaining living male hostages, both civilians and soldiers, for an exchange of Palestinian prisoners and the establishment of a permanent ceasefire along with the eventual lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Israel has carried out murderous assaults on Gaza for decades, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn.” No peace accord or ceasefire agreement has ever gotten in the way. This one will be no exception.

This bloody saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged: the dispossession and erasure of Palestinians from their land.

The only peace Israel intends to offer the Palestinians is the peace of the grave.

History is a mortal threat to the Zionist project. It exposes the violent imposition of a European colony in the Arab world. It reveals the ruthless campaign to de-Arabize an Arab country. It underscores the inherent racism towards Arabs, their culture and their traditions. It challenges the myth that, as former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak said, Zionists created, “a villa in the middle of a jungle.” It mocks the lie that Palestine is exclusively a Jewish homeland. It recalls centuries of Palestinian presence. And it highlights the alien culture of Zionism, implanted on stolen land.

When I covered the genocide in Bosnia, the Serbs blew up mosques, carted away the remains and forbade anyone to speak of the structures they had razed. The goal in Gaza is the same, to wipe out the past and replace it with myth, to mask Israeli crimes, including genocide.

The campaign of erasure allows Israelis to pretend the inherent violence that lies at the heart of the Zionist project, going back to the dispossession of Palestinian land in the 1920s and the larger campaigns of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, does not exist.

This denial of historical truth and historical identity also permits Israelis to wallow in eternal victimhood. It sustains a morally blind nostalgia for an invented past. If Israelis confront these lies it threatens an existential crisis. It forces them to rethink who they are. Most prefer the comfort of illusion. The desire to believe is more powerful than the desire to see.

As long as truth is hidden, as long as those who seek truth are silenced, it is impossible for a society to regenerate and reform itself. It becomes calcified. Its lies and dissimulation must be constantly renewed. Truth is dangerous. Once it is established it is indestructible. The Trump administration is in lock step with Israel. It too seeks to prioritize myth over reality. It too silences those who challenge the lies of the past and the lies of the present.

The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of an historical process. It is not an isolated act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonialism. This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures – the killing of civilians, the ethnic cleansing, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.

The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the cover to implement its own version of the final solution. Oct. 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine.

Israel’s weaponization of starvation is how genocides always end. I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs blocked food and aid to Srebrenica and Gorazde.

Starvation was weaponized by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in World War II. German soldiers used food as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in “The Ghetto Fights.” “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.” And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.

This tactic is as old as warfare itself.

Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies. It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of Oct. 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA.

The near total blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, reduced Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they were forced to crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they were stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This was by intent.

The nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 UNRWA aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south. Palestinians were herded like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They received, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food. Most received nothing. And when the crowds became unruly in the chaotic scramble for food the Israelis and the mercenaries gunned them down, killing 1,700 and injuring thousands more.

The genocide marks a break from the past. It marks the exposure of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians, dressed in Israeli army uniforms and with their hands bound, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations buildings or mass casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out sexual assaults of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of ceasefire agreements.

Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed.

The expansion of “Greater Israel” — which includes the seizing of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, southern Lebanon, Gaza and the occupied West Bank, where some 40,000 Palestinians have been driven from their homes and which I expect will soon be annexed by Israel — is being cemented into place.

But the genocide in Gaza is only the start. The world is breaking down under the onslaught of the climate crisis, which is triggering mass migrations, failed states and catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding and droughts. As global stability unravels, industrial violence, which is decimating the Palestinians, will become ubiquitous.

Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, one often violated by the U.S. in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The U.S. and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but obstruct the demand by most nations for an adherence to humanitarian law. They have carried out attacks against the only nation – Yemen – which has tried to halt the genocide.

The message this sends is clear: We have everything. If you try and take it away from us we will kill you.

The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watch towers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheid existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe as they are to the Palestinians.

Israel, which as Ronen Bergman notes his book “Rise and Kill First” in has “assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world,” cynically employs the Nazi Holocaust to sanctify its hereditary victimhood and justify its settler-colonial state, apartheid, campaigns of mass slaughter and Zionist version of Lebensraum.

Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, saw the Shoah, for this reason, as “an inexhaustible source of evil” which “is perpetrated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation.”

Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany or Israel.

Aimé Césaire, in “Discourse on Colonialism,” writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the nègres d’Afrique.”

The near-annihilation of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population, the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrate something fundamental about “western civilization.”

The moral philosophers who make up the western canon – Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, David Hume, John Stuart Mill and John Locke – excluded enslaved and exploited people, indigenous peoples, colonized people, women of all races and the criminalized from their moral calculus. In their eyes European whiteness alone imparted modernity, moral virtue, judgment and freedom. This racist definition of personhood played a central role in justifying colonialism, slavery, the genocide of Native Americans and First Nations people in Australia, our imperial projects and our fetish for white supremacy.

So, when you hear that the western canon is an imperative, as yourself for whom?

“In America,” the poet Langston Hughes said, “Negros do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”

The Nazis, when they formulated the Nuremberg laws, modeled them on American Jim Crow-era segregation and discrimination laws. America’s refusal to grant citizenship to Native Americans and Filipinos, although they lived in the U.S. and U.S. territories, was copied by the German fascists to strip citizenship from Jews. American anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial marriage, was the impetus to outlaw marriages between German Jews and Aryans. American jurisprudence classified anyone with one percent of Black ancestry, the so called “one drop rule,” as Black. The Nazis, ironically showing more flexibility, classified anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as Jewish.

The millions of victims of colonial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, Australia, the Congo and Vietnam, for this reason, are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by their western perpetrators.

The fact is that genocide is coded in the DNA of Western imperialism. Palestine has made this clear. The genocide in Gaza is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state the far-right dreams of creating for themselves, one that rejects political and cultural pluralism, as well as legal, diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is admired by these proto-fascists because it has turned its back on humanitarian law to use indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those condemned as human contaminants. Israel is not an outlier. It expresses our darkest impulses and I fear our future.

I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.

Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.

Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”

There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project, mirroring the strain of fascism in American society. Unfortunately, for us, the Israelis and the Palestinians these fascistic strains are ascendant.

“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far-right Zionists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of the Nazi’s blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compares to the Biblical Amalekites, massacred by the Israelites. Euro-American settlers in the American colonies used the same Biblical passage to justify the genocide against Native Americans. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand.

Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque – the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army – to be demolished. The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will become a Jewish version of Iran.

There are over 65 laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those living in the occupied territories. The campaign of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, many by rogue Jewish militias who have been armed with 10,000 automatic weapons, along with house and school demolitions and the seizure of remaining Palestinian land is exploding.

Israel, at the same time, is turning on “Jewish traitors” – within Israel and abroad — who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the genocide. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be deported.

Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized, on October 8th. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them, killing perhaps hundreds of their own soldiers and civilians.

Israel and its western allies, James Baldwin saw, is headed towards the “terrible probability” that the dominant nations “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”

The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations as it carries out genocide has imploded the post-World War II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilization.

“At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century — just as the First World War was for a generation in the West,” Pankaj Mishra writes.

We must name and face our own darkness. We must repent. Our willful blindness and historical amnesia, our refusal to be accountable to the rule of law, our belief that we have a right to use industrial violence to exert our will marks, I fear, the start, not the end, of campaigns of mass slaughter by industrialized nations against the world’s growing legions of the poor and the vulnerable. It is the curse of Cain. And it is curse we must remove before the genocide in Gaza becomes not an anomaly but the norm.

Edward Said Memorial Lecture
University of South Australia in Adelaide

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Image by Kelly Sikkema.

The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes. But what about the preventable ones? Shouldn’t the United States provide for the basic needs of its people?

Such questions get distinctly short shrift in the dominant political narratives. When someone can’t make ends meet and suffers dire consequences, the mainstream default is to see a failing individual rather than a failing system. Even when elected leaders decry inequity, they typically do more to mystify than clarify what has caused it.

While “income inequality” is now a familiar phrase, media coverage and political rhetoric routinely disconnect victims from their victimizers. Human-interest stories and speechifying might lament or deplore common predicaments, but their storylines rarely connect the destructive effects of economic insecurity with how corporate power plunders social resources and fleeces the working class. Yet the results are extremely far-reaching.

“We have the highest rate of childhood poverty and senior poverty of any major country on earth,” Senator Bernie Sanders has pointed out. “You got half of older workers have nothing in the bank as they face retirement. You got a quarter of our seniors trying to get by on $15,000 a year or less.”

Such hardship exists in tandem with ever-greater opulence for the few, including this country’s 800 billionaires. But standard white noise mostly drowns out how government policies and the overall economic system keep enriching the already rich at the expense of people with scant resources.

This year, while Donald Trump and Republican legislators have been boosting oligarchy and slashing enormous holes in the social safety net, Democratic leaders have seemed remarkably uninterested in breaking away from the policy approaches that ended up losing their party the allegiance of so many working-class voters. Those corporate-friendly approaches set the stage for Trump’s faux “populism” as an imagined solution to the discontent that the corporatism of the Democrats had helped usher in.

While offering a rollback to pre-Trump-2.0 policies, the current Democratic leadership hardly conveys any orientation that could credibly relieve the economic distress of so many Americans. The party remains in a debilitating rut, refusing to truly challenge the runaway power of corporate capitalism that has caused ever-widening income inequality.

“Opportunity” as a Killer Ideology

The Democratic Party establishment now denounces President Trump’s vicious assaults on vital departments and social programs. Unfortunately, three decades ago it cleared a path that led toward the likes of the DOGE wrecking crew. A clarion call in that direction came from President Bill Clinton when, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he exulted that “the era of big government is over.”

Clinton followed those instantly iconic words by adding, “We cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” Like the horse he rode into Washington — the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which he cofounded — Clinton advocated a “third way,” distinct from both liberal Democrats and Republican conservatives. But when his speech called for “self-reliance and teamwork” — and when, on countless occasions throughout the 1990s he invoked the buzzwords “opportunity” and “responsibility” — he was firing from a New Democrat arsenal that all too sadly targeted “handouts” and “special interests” as obsolete relics of the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society.

The seminal Clintonian theme of “opportunity” — with little regard for outcome — aimed at a wide political audience. In the actual United States, however, touting opportunity as central to solving the problems of inequity obscured the huge disparities in real-life options. In theory, everyone was to have a reasonable chance; in practice, opportunity was then (and remains) badly skewed by economic status and race, beginning as early as the womb. In a society so stratified by class, “opportunity” as the holy grail of social policy ultimately leaves outcomes to the untender mercies of the market.

Two weeks before Clinton won the presidency, the newsweekly Time reported that his “economic vision” was “perhaps best described as a call for a We decade; not the old I-am-my-brother’s-keeper brand of traditional Democratic liberalism.” Four weeks later, the magazine showered the president-elect with praise: “Clinton’s willingness to move beyond some of the old-time Democratic religion is auspicious. He has spoken eloquently of the need to redefine liberalism: the language of entitlements and rights and special-interest demands, he says, must give way to talk of responsibilities and duties.”

Clinton and the DLC insisted that government should smooth the way for maximum participation in the business of business. While venerating the market, the New Democrats were openly antagonistic toward labor unions and those they dubbed “special interests,” such as feminists, civil-rights activists, environmentalists, and others who needed to be shunted aside to fulfill the New Democrat agenda, which included innovations like “public-private partnerships,” “empowerment zones,” and charter schools.

Taking the Government to Market

While disparaging advocates for the marginalized as impediments to winning the votes of white “moderates,” the New Democrats tightly embraced corporate America. I still have a page I tore out of Time magazine in December 1996, weeks after Clinton won reelection. The headline said: “Ex-Investment Bankers and Lawyers Form Clinton’s Economic Team. Surprise! It’s Pro-Wall Street.”

That was the year when Clinton and his allies achieved a longtime goal — strict time limits for poor women to receive government assistance. “From welfare to work” became a mantra. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was out and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families was in. As occurred three years earlier when he was able to push NAFTA through Congress only because of overwhelming Republican support, Democratic lawmakers were divided and Clinton came to rely on overwhelming GOP support to make “welfare reform” possible.

The welfare bill that he gleefully signed in August 1996 was the flip side of his elite economic team’s priorities. The victims of “welfare reform” would soon become all too obvious, while their victimizers would remain obscured in the smoke blown by cheerleading government officials, corporate-backed think tanks, and mainstream journalists. When Clinton proclaimed that such landmark legislation marked the end of “welfare as we know it,” he was hailing the triumph of a messaging siege that had raged for decades.

Across much of the country’s media spectrum, prominent pundits had long been hammering away at “entitlements,” indignantly claiming that welfare recipients, disproportionately people of color, were sponging off government largesse. The theme was a specialty of conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer, John Leo, and George Will (who warned in November 1993 that the nation’s “rising illegitimacy rate… may make America unrecognizable”). But some commentators who weren’t right-wing made similar arguments, while ardently defaming the poor.

Newsweek star writer Joe Klein often accused inner-city Black people of such defects as “dependency” and “pathology.” Three months after Clinton became president, Klein wrote that “out-of-wedlock births to teenagers are at the heart of the nexus of pathologies that define the underclass.” The next year, he intensified his barrage. In August 1994, under the headline “The Problem Isn’t the Absence of Jobs, But the Culture of Poverty,” he peppered his piece with phrases like “welfare dependency,” while condemning “irresponsible, antisocial behavior that has its roots in the perverse incentives of the welfare system.”

Such punditry was unconcerned with the reality that, even if they could find and retain employment while struggling to raise families, what awaited the large majority of the women being kicked off welfare were dead-end jobs at very low wages.

A Small Business Shell Game

During the 1990s, Bill and Hillary Clinton fervently mapped out paths for poor women that would ostensibly make private enterprise the central solution to poverty. A favorite theme was the enticing (and facile) notion that people could rise above poverty by becoming entrepreneurs.

Along with many speeches by the Clintons, some federal funds were devoted to programs to help lenders offer microcredit so that low-income people could start small enterprises. Theoretically, the result would be both well-earning livelihoods and self-respect for people who had pulled themselves out of poverty. Of course, some individual success stories became grist for upbeat media features. But as the years went by, the overall picture would distinctly be one of failure.

In 2025, politicians continue to laud small business ventures as if they could somehow remedy economic ills. But such endeavors aren’t likely to bring long-term financial stability, especially for people with little start-up money to begin with. Current figures indicate that one-fifth of all new small businesses fail within the first year and the closure rate only continues to climb after that. Fifty percent of small businesses fail within five years and 65 percent within 10 years.

Promoting the private sector as the solution to social inequities inevitably depletes the public sector and its capacity to effectively serve the public good. Three decades after the Clinton presidency succeeded in blinkering the Democratic vision of what economic justice might look like, the party’s leaders are still restrained by assumptions that guarantee vast economic injustice — to the benefit of those with vast wealth.

“Structural problems require structural solutions,” Bernie Sanders wrote in a 2019 op-ed piece, “and promises of mere ‘access’ have never guaranteed black Americans equality in this country… ‘Access’ to health care is an empty promise when you can’t afford high premiums, co-pays or deductibles. And an ‘opportunity’ for an equal education is an opportunity in name only when you can’t afford to live in a good school district or to pay college tuition. Jobs, health care, criminal justice and education are linked, and progress will not be made unless we address the economic systems that oppress Americans at their root.”

But addressing the root of economic systems that oppress Americans is exactly what the Democratic Party leadership, dependent on big corporate donors, has rigorously refused to do. Looking ahead, unless Democrats can really put up a fight against the pseudo-populism of the rapacious and fascistic Trump regime, they are unlikely to regain the support of the working-class voters who deserted them in last year’s election.

During this month’s federal government shutdown, Republicans were ruthlessly insistent on worsening inequalities in the name of breaking or shaking up the system. Democrats fought tenaciously to defend Obamacare and a health-care status quo that still leaves tens of millions uninsured or underinsured, while medical bills remain a common worry and many people go without the care they need.

“We must start by challenging the faith that public policy, private philanthropy, and the culture at large has placed in the market to accomplish humanitarian goals,” historian Lily Geismer has written in her insightful and deeply researched book Left Behind. “We cannot begin to seek suitable and sustainable alternatives until we understand how deep that belief runs and how detrimental its consequences are.”

The admonitions in Geismer’s book, published three years ago, cogently apply to the present and future. “The best way to solve the vexing problems of poverty, racism, and disinvestment is not by providing market-based microsolutions,” she pointed out. “Macroproblems need macrosolutions. It is time to stop trying to make the market do good. It is time to stop trying to fuse the functions of the federal government with the private sector… It is the government that should be providing well-paying jobs, quality schools, universal childcare and health care, affordable housing, and protections against surveillance and brutality from law enforcement.”

Although such policies now seem a long way off, clearly articulating the goals is a crucial part of the struggle to achieve them. Those who suffer from the economic power structure are victims of a massively cruel system, being made steadily crueler by the presidency of Donald Trump. But progress is possible with clarity about how the system truly works and the victimizers who benefit from it.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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For the first time in decades, the public in the United States and across the West has begun to see Israel’s wars and occupation for what they truly are: acts of systemic injustice driven by malevolence and impunity. Social media has removed the familiar whitewash of mainstream filters, revealing truths long concealed behind carefully managed narratives that presented Israel as a victim and Palestinians as faceless aggressors.

At first, the shift in public opinion was dismissed as a fleeting wave of online teenage outrage. Others within the Zionist establishment ignored it altogether, clinging to an arrogant chutzpah born of decades of unchallenged influence over Western media. Convinced that control over the traditional press and elected officials made public sentiment irrelevant; they believed their “sophisticated” propaganda could always bring people back into their corral. Israel-firsters failed to understand that this time something fundamental had changed: people now had direct access to unfiltered images, eyewitness testimonies, and voices from Gaza that no amount of spin could erase.

Recent polling confirms just how profound this shift has become. Citing new Quinnipiac and New York Times polls, CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten noted that where voters once sided with Israel by +48 points in October 2023, they now favor Palestinians by +1 point. It is, he said, “the first time ever” since polling began in the 1980s that Palestinians hold any advantage in U.S. public sympathy. The shift is most dramatic among Democrats, who moved from supporting Israel by +26 points to favoring Palestinians by +46—a seventy-two–point swing in just two years. Even among Republicans, deep generational divides are emerging, with voters under 50 far less supportive of Israel than their elders.

What the Zionist architects of managed consent failed to understand is that this transformation is not transient. It is generational and moral realignment. Younger Americans are examining Israeli actions with independent eyes, unburdened by the inculcated guilt narratives that shaped post-World War II Western politics. They belong to a global generation raised outside the rituals of the 5 o’clock news and cold war. A generation for whom information is open source, and real-time videos bypassing the curated messaging of traditional media.

By blocking international reporters from entering Gaza, Israel inadvertently fueled the demand for alternative news. Social media became a critical independent source, a great equalizer, exposing atrocities that legacy networks once obfuscated or filtered out. It allowed millions to witness war crimes through the eyes of the victims, not corporations. It shattered the monopoly of manufactured consent that shielded Israel from accountability for seventy-seven years. The raw images of destroyed hospitals, neighborhoods, universities, and starving children reshaped global consciousness. They exposed the real reasons why Israel murdered local journalists and was determined to keep the international press out of Gaza.

This reversal in public opinion helps explain the increasingly aggressive efforts by American Zionists to reassert control over both traditional and social media. As public sympathy for Palestinians grows, Israel and its allies are doubling down on narrative management, enlisting U.S. media insiders to “shift the story” and reestablish their influence within the world’s leading news organizations.

For example, a new journalism fellowship founded in 2025 by Jacki and Jeff Karsh —heirs to a Zionist billionaire and self-described supporters of Israel—openly seeks to “shift the narrative” back in Israel’s favor. Promoted as “the world’s only journalism fellowship solely dedicated to Jewish topics,” it features pro-Israeli mentors from CNN and The New York Times, including Van Jones, Jodi Rudoren, and Sharon Otterman. Behind its claims of “integrity and independence,” the fellowship represents a broader Hasbara campaign to rebrand Israeli propaganda as journalism.

As Gaza’s reality reaches global audiences through unfiltered social media, public opinion is shifting faster than any managed narrative can contain. No amount of media engineering can conceal war crimes. Social media has torn down Israel’s false moral façade. No billionaire’s funding, no standing ovation for Benjamin Netanyahu in Congress, can erase what people have seen, questioned, and now refuse to accept: the lies that sustained occupation and Jewish apartheid for generations.

The political ripple effects of this awakening are beginning to unsettle Washington. What was once an untouchable bipartisan consensus on Israel now shows visible fissures, especially within the Democratic Party. Two years ago, I could not have imagined receiving text messages from candidates pledging to reject AIPAC funding. Even within the halls of Congress, where AIPAC once silenced dissent, a quiet rebellion is taking shape. Lawmakers who once hesitated to utter the word “Palestine” now invoke it as a measure of moral integrity. Questioning AIPAC and Israeli policy has become part of mainstream political discourse.

Ultimately, in this generational divide, the shift reflects the erosion of fear that once intimidated many. The fear of speaking out, of losing funding, or of being labeled antisemitic is fading. In its place rises conviction, where young Americans, armed with truth and moral clarity, are rejecting the long-standing conflation of Israel with Judaism, along with the myths and manufactured guilt that sustained it.

The question is no longer if U.S. policy toward Israel will change, but when Washington’s politics will finally align with the public opinion.

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Counter-attack by Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces supported by T-34 tanks near Playa Giron during the Bay of Pigs invasion, 19 April 1961. Photograph Source: Rumlin – CC BY 3.0

The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy.  Each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength that makes us free, is lessened.

– Senator Frank Church, 1976

The CIA has committed every crime there is except rape.

– General Walter Bedell Smith, former Director of Central Intelligence, 1949

The term “covert action” is a peculiarly American invention; it does not appear in the lexicon of other intelligence services.  Nor does the term appear in the National Security Act of 1947, which created the Central Intelligence Agency.  Covert action refers to secret operations to influence governments, organizations, or persons in support of a foreign policy in a manner that is not attributable to the United States.

Donald Trump has gone a step further than all other presidents by ignoring plausible denial; he announced the “secret” authorization to allow the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela against President Nicolas Maduro.  This represents the latest attempt to apply pressure on Venezuela.  It follows  authorization for the U.S. military to target boats that may or may not be carrying drugs.  Thus far, five boats have been destroyed and 29 Venezuelans (and some Colombians) have been killed.  Venezuela is a target even though it plays no role in the fentanyl trade, and accounts for little of the cocaine that enters the United States.

Trump’s use of the military has been even more threatening.  It involves the deployment of F-35 fighter planes and 10,000 troops in Puerto Rico, eight combatant ships, and an attack submarine.  More recently, elite Special Operations aviation has flown near the Venezuelan coast, and helicopters and even B-52 strategic bombers have been sighted.  Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are presumably hoping that U.S. military pressure will lead the Venezuelan military to overthrow its president.

In the wake of this buildup, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsey, has announced his retirement, an apparent protest of this dangerous activity.  Holsey has privately complained that he wasn’t even consulted about some of the provocative actions that Trump, Rubio, and CIA director John Ratcliffe have engineered. It is highly unusual for a combatant commander to leave his post early.

U.S. covert action, which began under the Eisenhower administration, has been marked by incredible and often predictable failure.  The worst failures were in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the Congo 1959, and Chile (1973), where leftist leaders were overthrown only to be followed by the accession to power of authoritarians and tyrants such as the Shah, Julio Alpirez, Mobutu, and Pinochet, respectively.  These authoritarians introduced brutal regimes and repressive military forces, many of whom received military training from the CIA.  When U.S. ambassadors in Central America protested this activity, they were ordered to stop reporting on such criminal activity, and some were forced out of the Foreign Service.

The CIA also trained and supported abusive internal security organizations throughout Central America, particularly in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.  In Honduras, death squads grew out of collaboration between the CIA and the Honduran military.  The CIA was closely involved in the formation and training of the notorious Battalion 316, and CIA operatives had exclusive access to their secret detention centers.

Revelations of assassination plots in Cuba, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam in the early 1960s—at the direction of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy—finally led to a ban on CIA political assassinations in the mid-1970s.  In 1984, however, the CIA displayed its contempt for the ban on assassination when it produced a manual for the Contras that discussed “neutralizing” officials in Nicaragua.

The nadir of the CIA’s covert action was the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, when U.S. and CIA ignorance of Fidel Castro’s popularity led the CIA to launch an ill-fated paramilitary operation.  Several Cubans, initially trained by the CIA for covert action, were involved in the break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s office in the Watergate complex ten years later.

Despite the failures of clandestine activity and covert action, the CIA has  received increased funding annually from a bipartisan congress.  The failure to address the problems associated with covert action has been compounded by the failure to address the problem of oversight.  Oversight needs to be strengthened and operational failures must be studied.  The Trump presidency ensures that laws will be ignored, congress will not be consulted, the Pentagon and the CIA will have free rein, and President Truman’s original conception of the CIA as an objective interpreter of foreign events will be breached.

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Wikipedia.

If you are reading this, you know we’re all in a heap of trouble if we don’t alter course.

You are here because, like us, you’re unhappy with the direction the political winds are blowing.

You know the system is rigged against the working class.

You are tired of Israeli propaganda and the ongoing suffering of Palestinians.

You are fed up with Trump’s fascist, authoritarian creep and the Democrats’ complicity.

You don’t believe anyone is “illegal” and that ICE is acting as Trump’s Gestapo.

You worry that attacks on free speech will continue to silence dissent and movements for social justice.

You are concerned that the planet’s future is at risk because capitalism’s (and AI’s!) reliance on fossil fuels is causing irreversible damage to the climate.

You recognize that the United States was founded through colonial genocide and built with slave labor, the reverberations of which still shake today.

You know corporate media is compromised and often used as a tool of Empire.

You are here, reading CounterPunch, because few others tell it like it is.

It’s with this that I must inform you about the state of our situation.

First, there has never been a time in our publication’s history when freedom of the press has been more threatened. Trump, with significant Democratic support, is attempting to revoke the non-profit status of organizations like ours.

Second, since we first went online over 30 years ago, we have never faced such a rapid and organized attack from bots. These relentless efforts are sophisticated, targeted and difficult to trace, bearing all the hallmarks of a powerful government operation (here’s looking at you, Israel).

As these various threats to CounterPunch grow, so do our costs.

We really hate this annual fund drive. We aren’t professional fundraisers. We don’t have a grant writer on staff, and we don’t tug at the coattails of billionaires. We are only able to keep publishing stories five days a week because our readers (YOU!) support us.

We want to keep it that way; our independence depends on it.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it. If we don’t reach our modest goal in this fund drive, we must figure out where to make up for the lost resources. We will have to trim the fat and have any fat left to trim. This could mean one or both of the following: first, we might be forced to run ads, which could generate a lot of revenue for us given our traffic, and second, we will have to reduce the number of articles we publish.

We want neither!

Here’s the good news: a generous donor has promised to match every donation of $25 or more for the next two weeks. That means if you contribute $25, it will become $50. It’s a big opportunity, and if you can afford it, hard to pass up.

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Thank you so much if you have already donated, and for reading and sharing CounterPunch with others. We are an eclectic family of sorts. Yes, we argue and disagree, but in the end, we all come together for a common cause: to beat the devil, as Alex Cockburn would say.

Onward,

Joshua Frank

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White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller speaking at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo: Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0

Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff, is a well-documented white nationalist and one of the most influential architects behind Trump’s racist policies. Miller has long aligned himself with far-right media and extremist figures. His outspoken opposition to DACA and his calls to end Temporary Protected Status for predominantly nonwhite populations further expose his deeply entrenched racism. His attacks on international students, higher education, immigrants, and anyone who refuses to conform to his notion of white nationalism and racialized citizenship reveal a politics of vengeance, in which the full force of the federal government is weaponized against difference. His bigotry is so notorious that even his own family members have publicly denounced him. 

A central player in this regime of state terrorism, systemic racism, mass arrests, deportations, and the criminalization of dissent, Miller has been the driving force behind Trump’s most repressive policies. During Trump’s first term, he authored the Muslim ban, the family separation policy, and assaults on birthright citizenship, all rooted in an unapologetic white supremacist and eugenicist worldview. In Trump’s second term, he has emerged as the architect of even more draconian measures, pushing for mass deportations, the abolition of birthright citizenship, and the revocation of naturalized citizenship for those who fall outside his white Christian vision of who deserves to be called American. 

Jonathan Blitzer, writing in The New Yorker, understates the depth of Miller’s white supremacist ideology and his virulent hatred of immigrants when he observes that “Miller’s obsession with restricting immigration and punishing immigrants has become the defining characteristic of the Trump White House.” While Blitzer’s comment was made during Trump’s first presidency, it is now clear that Miller was already the chief architect of an emerging police state, a project that has since come fully into view.

Under his influence, the machinery of ICE became an instrument of fear and racial terror. Immigration agents, emboldened by his rhetoric, harassed, detained, and abducted immigrants, those marked by Black and Brown bodies, whose very presence were treated as crimes in themselves. Policy mutated into performance, and speech was weaponized into ritual. ICE’s so-called “enforcement operations” escalated with chilling precision, raiding restaurants, farms, and workplaces across the country, with arrests at times exceeding two thousand a day. What began as administrative enforcement metastasized into a politics of intimidation and spectacle, a calculated display of power designed to criminalize vulnerability and render compassion suspect. 

Such orchestrated brutality reflected not only Miller’s ideology but also his personality. Even his former colleagues described him as insufferable, “rude, arrogant, and consumed by a sense of his own superiority,” as Yahoo News reported. On Capitol Hill, he was widely despised, his every interaction marked by condescension and spite. The disdain he showed toward others in conversation mirrored the disdain he codified into law. Miller’s character became policy: arrogance translated into authoritarianism, contempt into cruelty, and his appetite for domination into the scaffolding of a police state. 

Miller’s very being evokes the cold mechanization of a machine, a body turned against itself, moving without rhythm, empathy, or grace. His presence feels engineered: cold, scarred, and hollowed out, the body made into an instrument of command. It is as if a war within himself has long since been lost, a war against vulnerability, imagination, and the capacity to feel, and what remains is a man armored against life itself. The renown psychologist Wilhelm Reich would have recognized in Miller the classic symptoms of what he called “character armour,” that psychic carapace formed by repression, manifesting in the body as stiffness, tension, and the death of spontaneity. His movements are tight, his speech metallic, his demeanor drained of warmth or rhythm. These are not mere mannerisms; they are the visible scars of a consciousness sealed off from empathy and petrified by ideology. 

Miller’s authoritarianism is not only intellectual or political, it is somatic, etched into his very posture, a body that has become its own prison, the outer form of an inner desolation. For Reich, the source of this problem “did not lie primarily with individuals but was a manufactured condition inflicted on people through the institutions of capitalism.” What Reich saw as the social manufacture of repression becomes, in Miller, a performance of it. His rigidity is no longer hidden, it’s displayed, dramatized, and weaponized. This fusion of character and power reveals the theatrical core of Miller’s politics, an authoritarian temperament that thrives on performance, on turning brutality into spectacle and governance into a stage for domination.

This politics of performance was not abstract, it was pedagogical, teaching the nation to equate cruelty with strength through the spectacle of raids and expulsions. Yet these raids were more than bureaucratic exercises in control, they were choreographies of terror and domination, staged to instruct the public in the pedagogy of cruelty. Each act of state violence became a form of political theater, designed to transform fear into consent and suffering into proof of power. Miller’s perverse insight lies in recognizing that fascism does not merely enforce obedience; it stages it.

Having perfected the theater of state violence, Miller soon extended his reach into another arena, the realm of language itself. Policy became performance, and speech became a weapon. Through lies, dehumanizing metaphors, and apocalyptic rhetoric, he turned the public sphere into a stage for revenge politics, a spectacle of linguistic violence that normalizes hate, nurtures white supremacy, and renders cruelty not merely permissible but celebrated.

Miller is also a fanatical anti-communist, wielding the word ‘communist’ as a slur against almost any critic, politician, or institution that challenges Trump’s authoritarian policies. This was on full display during a rant at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station on August 20, 2025. Stopping at a Shake Shack with Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth while visiting National Guard troops, Miller lashed out at protesters confronting the trio, declaring: 

They’re the ones who have been advocating for the one percent. They’re criminals, killers, rapists, and drug dealers. And I’m glad they’re here today because me, Pete, and the vice president [are] going to leave here and inspired by them, we’re going to add thousands more resources to this city to get the criminals and the gang members out. We’re going to disable those networks, and we’re going to prove that the city can serve law-abiding citizens. We are not going to let the Communists destroy a great American city, let alone the nation’s capital… So we’re going to ignore these stupid white hippies, who all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old, and get back to protecting the American people and the citizens of Washington, D.C.

Here the slur “Communists” does not name an ideology, it operates as an epithet, a scarlet letter of treason designed to criminalize protest and erase dissent itself. Miller’s resurrection of McCarthyite rhetoric also permeates a great deal of Trump’s attack on his alleged “enemies from within.” Such diatribes illuminate how Miller’s rhetoric merges moral panic with political strategy, turning propaganda into the public face of repression.

Infamous for his rabid attacks on immigrants and more recently, trans people, Miller has long been the ideological architect of Trump’s fascism.  Not only is he an anti-immigration extremist, he is also a white nationalist. Not surprisingly, he strongly supports Trump’s dictatorial power grab and has publicly stated “that only one party should be allowed to exercise power in the US.” He adds: how else to read his claim that “The Democrat party is not a political party; it is a domestic extremist organization.”  

Miller has also institutionalized his reactionary vision through the founding of America First Legal, a right-wing organization he created to weaponize the courts against progressive policies. Through a barrage of lawsuits, it has sought to dismantle civil rights protections, attack diversity and inclusion programs, and roll back hard-won gains for women, LGBTQ+ communities, and people of color. In this way, during the Biden presidency, Miller extended his authoritarianism beyond rhetoric and policy, he gave it legal muscle, transforming bigotry into lawfare and embedding white nationalist ideology within the machinery of the state itself.

Miller’s racism and nativism animate three interlocking pillars of this project. First, he insists that all immigrants are criminals, fit only to be expelled or incarcerated. Second, he casts the assault on immigration as the foundation for erecting a police state, one that erodes justice, truth, morality, and freedom itself. Third, he has become a leading force in the war on public and higher education, branding them “cancerous, communist, woke culture” that is “destroying the country.”  Such language, echoing Trump’s lexicon, is code for dismantling the critical, inclusive, and democratic possibilities of education: the chance for diverse students to learn, to question, and to act as informed agents of a democratic society.

This same logic of purification extended beyond borders and language; it invaded classrooms curricula, and admission boards. For Miller, schools must not cultivate critical consciousness but instead drill children in patriotism, uncritical reverence for America, and hostility toward “communist ideology.” The details of this pedagogical assault are chillingly familiar: banning books, whitewashing history into a racist mythology, abolishing critical pedagogy, and hollowing out the capacity for informed and ethical thinking. What emerges is a pedagogy of repression rooted in cruelty, one that seeks to erase historical memory, extinguish democratic values, and turn education into a factory of indoctrination. 

Miller’s ranting speech on “Children will be taught to love America” could have been lifted whole from the fascist culture of the 1930s. It seethes with ideological fanaticism, dehumanizing rage, ecstatic ignorance, and paranoic rigidity, laced together by a torrent of lies. The feverish spirit of hate, myth, and moral corruption it embodies is not merely reminiscent of fascism, it is its reincarnation. What we are witnessing is not political rhetoric but the language of purification, abduction, disappearance, and contempt that once paved the road to the Nazi state.

What makes Miller’s tirade so terrifying is not only its celebration of political purity on steroids, but its virulent hatred of education itself, of thought, reflection, and moral agency. He despises any institution or idea capable of producing critical consciousness, civic courage, or empathy grounded in responsibility for others. His words reek of fear: fear of knowledge, fear of imagination, fear of justice, fear of democracy. He embodies an unholy fusion of George Wallace’s racial fury and Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda zeal, a figure in whom fanaticism and hatred converge, resurrecting the ghost of white supremacy in its purest, most vindictive form.

This is barbarism made flesh, a grotesque performance of cruelty dressed up as conviction, ignorance weaponized into ideology. And what should alarm us most is how such fascist rhetoric, once unthinkable, now circulates openly, validated, amplified, and echoed at the highest levels of power. In this poisoned atmosphere, silence is no longer neutral; it becomes complicity. The corrosion of democratic culture advances not with the spectacle of coups or decrees, but through something slower and more insidious, the steady normalization of cruelty, the hollowing out of truth, and the death of conscience disguised as patriotism. The terror Miller embodies is not confined to one man or one ideology. It has become the grammar of a political movement, the shared language of authoritarianism in its new American form.

 The implications of Miller’s rhetoric go far beyond his own cruelty; they reveal the cultural machinery that allows such barbarism to appear ordinary. It is crucial to understand that Stephen Miller’s reactionary language and politics cannot be dismissed as a matter of personal pathology or temperament. While his fanaticism, racism, and white nationalism are unmistakable, what demands attention are the historical and political conditions that allowed such a figure to gain power, that gave his vitriol mass appeal, and that normalized his presence, not simply as a political operative, but as a symptom and a symbol of the deeper malaise afflicting the American body politic. Miller is not merely an individual zealot; he is a mirror held up to a nation that has long cultivated the soil in which authoritarianism takes root.

To focus on Miller, then, is to examine one story that reveals a much larger narrative, the slow death of the idea, if not the practice, of American democracy. He is more than a solitary agent in the current counter-revolution; he is more than another extremist trafficking in what might be called apocalyptic delusion. Miller represents the 21st-century incarnation of the fascist subject that has haunted American history from its inception, a figure born of fear, resentment, and the weaponization of ignorance.

He is not simply one MAGA fanatic ushering in Trump’s fantasy of a “unified Reich”;  he is the embodiment of what the nation risks becoming. Miller stands as both symptom and signpost, revealing the moral and political decay at the heart of contemporary American life. He is a reminder that fascism does not descend upon a fully formed society, it grows in the shadows of its forgotten histories, its unacknowledged cruelties, its silence in the face of injustice.

Miller’s presence and voice thus reveal more than the death of conscience; they expose the swindle of a future already in motion, a future that must be named, understood, and resisted before it becomes our collective fate. Miller’s America is not destiny; it is a warning. Whether that warning becomes prophecy fulfilled or memory resisted depends on whether conscience can still find its voice and a mass movement of resistance can restore the power of civic courage in a nation that has forgotten both.

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Federal agents on the roof of the ICE facility in Portland, OR. Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The United States now has an authoritarian government. Period. Full stop. How do we know that?  If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is almost certainly a duck.

Stanford University History Professor Jack Rakove offers a more professional, succinct explanation. In a functioning constitutional republic, the executive (President) lawfully and constitutionally executes the nation’s laws; the parliament (US Congress) passes the laws and provides a check on unlawful or excessive use of executive power; and a constitutional court (Supreme Court) ensures the other two branches of government act lawfully and constitutionally. He observes that none of these things now occur in the United States.

We have a President who, almost daily, violates the nation’s laws, required government procedures, and the US Constitution. He rules by frequently illegal executive orders and flouts the nation’s judicial system. He has demonstrated that he has no respect for the rule of law, foundational in a democracy.

The Republican-controlled US Congress does nothing to check the President’s abuse of power, nor takes any action to prevent the President from usurping its own constitutional authority. This includes Montana’s entire Congressional delegation.

The US Supreme Court, meanwhile, continues to enable the President’s unlawful behavior. Lower courts, consistently and with reasoned opinions, find the President’s actions un-Constitutional, unlawful, or otherwise improper. But the current Supreme Court repeatedly reverses the lower courts or lifts injunctions that bar unlawful Presidential actions, frequently without explanation. Esteemed Constitutional scholar, Harvard professor-emeritus Lawrence Tribe, stated that this is indicative of an authoritarian supreme court.

This is not what our Founding Fathers intended. Instead, they define an authoritarian government. Numerous books by authors like Snyder, Applebaum, Levitsky, Ben-Ghiat, Gessen, and Diamond explain how we got here and what to expect: 

The authoritarian leader first takes control of the nation’s power ministries – Justice, the Secret Police (FBI), the Military, and the Intelligence apparatus. Then he/she, in what is referred to as “authoritarian consolidation,” moves to control the lower courts, the media, other government ministries, the electoral process, government workers, civil society institutions, universities, opposition groups and individuals, and minorities, with frequent reference to “enemies within” as the main danger to the nation.

Watch the evening news. All these things are happening in the United States now.  

At the same time, the Trump government now sponsors things that are unthinkable in a functioning democracy, including hate, racism, discrimination, censorship, limits on freedom of speech, lawlessness, violence against citizens, ideological indoctrination, conspiracy theories, attacks on science and expertise, fear, persecution of political enemies, financial blackmail, perversion of information and truth, and large cuts to programs assisting the nation’s less fortunate citizens. Again, read a newspaper or watch the evening news.

Sponsorship of such things represent the reality of authoritarian governments. They will affect people much more deeply and for much longer than the price of eggs, if they are allowed to continue.

All is not lost, however. Americans disapprove of what Trump is doing by 60-80% depending on the issue. The lower courts continue to uphold the Constitution and enforce the law. Large parts of the media are still factual and responsible. American citizens are taking to the streets and resisting in ever-increasing numbers. Perhaps we will still have a legitimate 2026 election despite Republican efforts to the contrary.

There are few good books or examples to tell us how to get out of this. As Pogo noted, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” We have to figure it out for ourselves. We could start by acknowledging that the fight is against an authoritarian government.

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Image by Jon Tyson.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump threatened to unleash the armed forces on more American cities during a rambling address to top military brass. He told the hundreds of generals and admirals gathered to hear him that some of them would be called upon to take a primary role at a time when his administration has launched occupations of American cities, deployed tens of thousands of troops across the United States, created a framework for targeting domestic enemies, cast his political rivals as subhuman, and asserted his right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists.

Trump used that bizarre speech to take aim at cities he claimed “are run by the radical left Democrats,” including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. “We’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” he said. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” He then added: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

Trump has, of course, already deployed the armed forces inside the United States in an unprecedented fashion during the first year of his second term in office. As September began, a federal judge found that his decision to occupy Los Angeles with members of California’s National Guard — under so-called Title 10 or federalized status — against the wishes of California Governor Gavin Newsom was illegal. But just weeks later, Trump followed up by ordering the military occupation of Portland, Oregon, over Governor Tina Kotek’s objections.

“I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. And he “authoriz[ed] Full Force, if necessary.”

When a different federal judge blocked him from deploying Oregon National Guardsmen to the city, he ordered in Guard members from California and Texas. That judge then promptly blocked his effort to circumvent her order, citing the lack of a legal basis for sending troops into Portland. In response, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act — an 1807 law that grants the president emergency powers to deploy troops on U.S. soil — to “get around” the court rulings blocking his military occupation efforts. “I think that’s all insurrection, really criminal insurrection,” he claimed, in confused remarks from the Oval Office.

Experts say that his increasing use of the armed forces within the United States represents an extraordinary violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. That bedrock nineteenth-century law banning the use of federal troops to execute domestic law enforcement has long been seen as fundamental to America’s democratic tradition. However, the president’s deployments continue to nudge this country ever closer to becoming a genuine police state. They come amid a raft of other Trump administration authoritarian measures designed to undermine the Constitution and weaken democracy. Those include attacks on birthright citizenship and free speech, as well as the exercise of expansive unilateral powers like deporting people without due process and rolling back energy regulations, citing wartime and emergency powers.

A Presidential Police Force

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled last month that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles, which began in June, was illegal and harkened back to Britain’s use of soldiers for law enforcement purposes in colonial America. He warned that Trump clearly intends to transform the National Guard into a presidential police force.

“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law,” Breyer wrote in his 52-page opinion. “Nearly 140 years later, Defendants — President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense — deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced… Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”

The judge ruled that the Pentagon had systematically used armed soldiers to perform police functions in California in violation of Posse Comitatus and planned to do so elsewhere in America. As he put it, “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country… thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”

In the face of that scathing opinion, the president has nonetheless ramped up his urban military occupations, while threatening to launch yet more of them. “Now we’re in Memphis… and we’re going to Chicago,” Trump told a large crowd of sailors in Norfolk, Virginia, during a celebration of the Navy’s 250th anniversary earlier this month. “And so we send in the National Guard, we… send in whatever’s necessary. People don’t care.”

As October began, Trump had already deployed an unprecedented roughly 35,000 federal troops within the United States, according to my reporting at The Intercept. Those forces, drawn from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and National Guard, have been or will soon be deployed under Title 10 authority, or federal control, in at least seven states — Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas — to aid and enforce the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda, while further militarizing America. Other Guardsmen, being sent to cities across the country ranging from Memphis to New Orleans, are serving under Title 32 status, which means they will officially be under state control, a measure Trump uses in states with Republican governors.

National Guard forces deployed to Washington, D.C. as part of Trump’s federal takeover of the district in August are operating under the same Title 32 status. But with no governor to report to, the D.C. National Guard’s chain of command runs from its commanding general directly to the secretary of the Army, then to Pete Hegseth, and finally to Trump himself.

In September, a long-threatened occupation of Chicago began with an ICE operation targeting immigrants in that city, dubbed “Midway Blitz.” A month later, the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago sued Trump, seeking to block the imminent deployment of federalized Illinois and Texas National Guard troops to that city.  A federal  judge in Chicago blocked the deployment of troops in Chicago for at least two weeks. The Justice Department appealed but an appeals court ruled Saturday that while the troops can remain there under federal control, they can’t be deployed.

“They are not conducting missions right now,” a Northern Command spokesperson told TomDispatch on Tuesday, admitting that she didn’t know exactly what the troops were doing.

The president has also threatened to deploy National Guard troops to Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, Saint Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle.

“When military troops police civilians, we have an intolerable threat to individual liberty and the foundational values of this country,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “President Trump may want to normalize armed forces in our cities, but no matter what uniform they wear, federal agents and military troops are bound by the Constitution and have to respect our rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, and due process. State and local leaders must stay strong and take all lawful measures to protect residents against this cruel intimidation tactic.”

“Living in a Dream World”

Trump’s Portland order drew pushback from Oregon’s Democratic lawmakers, local leaders, and outside experts, who said there was no need for federal troops to be deployed to the city. “There is no national security threat in Portland,” Governor Kotek announced on social media. “Our communities are safe and calm.” Independent reporting corroborated her assessment.

After Kotek conveyed that to Trump in a phone call, the president seemed to briefly question whether he had been misled about an antifa “siege” there and the city being “war-ravaged.” As he recounted, “I spoke to the governor, but I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’”

Days later, despite countless reports that there was neither a war nor a siege underway in Portland, Trump posted on social media that Kotek was “living in a ‘Dream World’” and returned to peddling lies about the city. “Portland is a NEVER-ENDING DISASTER. Many people have been badly hurt and even killed. It is run like a Third World Country,” he wrote on TruthSocial. “We’re only going in because, as American Patriots, WE HAVE NO CHOICE. LAW AND ORDER MUST PREVAIL IN OUR CITIES, AND EVERYWHERE ELSE!”

Judge Karin Immergut of the U.S. District Court in Oregon issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump administration from sending 200 Oregonian National Guard troops for a 60-day deployment in Portland. As she concluded in her opinion, she expected a trial court to agree with the state’s contention that the president had exceeded his constitutional authority.

Trump immediately took aim at her — despite the fact that he had appointed her to office during his first term — saying that she “ought to be ashamed of herself.” He then claimed, without any basis, that Portland was “burning to the ground.” Trump then made further hyperbolic claims about the city and threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. “Portland is on fire. Portland’s been on fire for years,” he said, describing the situation as “all insurrection.”

The same Northern Command spokesperson told TomDispatch on Tuesday that the federalized troops in Oregon were also in a holding pattern. “They are on standby,” she said.

The president’s Portland order followed a series of authoritarian actions that have pushed the nation ever closer to becoming a genuine police state. In August, reports emerged that the Pentagon was planning to create a Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force that would include two groups of 300 National Guard troops to be kept on standby at military bases in Alabama and Arizona for rapid deployment across the country. (That proposed force would also reportedly operate under Title 32.)

The Pentagon refused to offer further details about the initiative. “The Department of Defense is a planning organization and routinely reviews how the department would respond to a variety of contingencies across the globe,” said a defense official, speaking at the time on the condition of anonymity. “We will not discuss these plans through leaked documents, pre-decisional or otherwise.”

Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order claiming to designate antifa — a loose-knit anti-fascist movement — as a “domestic terror organization.” He also issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which directs the Justice Department and elements of the Intelligence Community and national security establishment to target “anti-fascism… movements” and “domestic terrorist organizations.” Such enemies, according to the president, not only espouse “anti-Americanism” and “support for the overthrow of the United States Government,” but also are typified by advocacy of opinions protected by the First Amendment, including “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

After referring to the “war from within” during his address to the military’s top officers, he cast his political rivals as subhuman and claimed that they needed to be dealt with. “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats,” he told the sailors during the Navy’s 250th anniversary celebration.

The Trump administration has also admitted that it’s waging a secret war against undisclosed enemies without the consent of Congress. According to a confidential notice from the Department of War sent to lawmakers, the president has unilaterally decided that the United States is engaged in a declared state of “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations” or DTOs. It described three people killed by U.S. commandos on what was claimed to be a boat carrying drugs in the Caribbean last month as “unlawful combatants,” as if they were soldiers on a battlefield. And that was a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement, not the U.S. military, arrests suspected drug dealers rather than summarily executing them.

As Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and a specialist in counterterrorism issues, as well as the laws of war, pointed out, the White House’s claims that Trump has the authority to use lethal force against anyone he decides is a member of a DTO is extraordinarily “dangerous and destabilizing.” As he put it: “Because there’s no articulated limiting principles, the President could simply use this prerogative to kill any people he labels as terrorists, like antifa. He could use it at home in the United States.”

Police State USA

The Trump administration’s military occupations of American cities, its deployment of tens of thousands of troops across the United States, its emerging framework for designating and targeting domestic enemies, its dehumanization of its political foes, and its assertion that the president has the right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists have left this country on the precipice of authoritarian rule.

With Trump attempting to fashion a presidential police force of armed soldiers for domestic deployment, while claiming the right to kill anyone he deems a terrorist, the threat to the rule of law in the United States is not just profound but historically unprecedented.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

Recently, I’ve been in the habit of getting together for coffee and conversations with author and activist, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, though I have known about her and have read her impassioned scholarship for years. In person, and at the age of 87, she tends to be soft-spoken, albeit keenly aware of her surroundings, whether on the street, a neighborhood or a cafe. In some ways, Roxanne was an outlier in the Sixties – she wasn’t born to a military clan, or an Old Left family, but she was in the thick of the protests and the anti-war and feminist movements that erupted in the Vietnam era. On her birth certificate, she is ‘Roxy,” though her father insisted he named her “Roxey. She disliked the name, whatever spelling. When she moved to San Francisco, and got to know some of the Beat poets and writers, they called her “Roxanne,” after the Roxanne of Cyrano de Bergerac, and it stuck. The name Dunbar comes from her paternal grandfather; the name Ortiz from her former husband, Simon, an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Acoma. She has a grown daughter with whom she is close.

For much of her life, Roxanne has been a historian and the author of several widely read and influential books about Indians, guns, violence, genocide, resistance and more. They are: Indigenous Peoples’ History of the US; Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment; Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, A History of Erasure and Exclusion. Indigenous Peoples’ History of the US has just been published in a “graphic interpretation,” by Paul Peart-Smith edited by Paul Buhle with Dylan Davis and put in print by Beacon Press, her “go-to publishers.”

Dunbar-Ortiz has written three memoirs that deftly weave together the personal and the political, public and private worlds: Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso and the University of Oklahoma Press); Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–75 (City Lights Books); and Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, (University of Oklahoma Press.) After I read Outlaw Woman, I told Roxanne that she didn’t seem to be a real American outlaw in the mold of Bonnie and Clyde or Pretty Boy Floyd and Annie Oakley. “The title reflects more of what I wanted to be than who I actually was,” she said. Still, one might call her a maverick when it comes to scholarship. She rejects accepted wisdom. Roxanne and I gather for coffee at Caffe Trieste in North Beach or at an unpretentious place on Polk Street near her home on Russian Hill; we’ve eaten together and I’ve learned that she’s a vegetarian. The shelves in her apartment are lined with books. With readers of CounterPunch in mind – Dunbar-Ortiz reads it daily— I emailed her twelve questions. She wrote back her answers; here they are, edited for brevity.

Q: Is this a unique period in American history? Does it have precedents? Does the more things change the more they remain the same?

A: I think it is a unique period in US history, a sort of end time, the US, the wealthiest and most powerful nation state experiencing the fate of dying empires turning inward fomenting civil divisions and disturbances, while the wealth gap has produced a trillionaire cabal. Capitalism unrestrained can and seems to be nurturing a form of nationalism that tends toward fascism that is always a component of capitalism.

The United States was founded on genocide of the Indigenous to take the continent and great wealth achieved by land sales and enslaved labor, creating an order of white supremacy. As freedom struggles have gained some restitution and equality, fortified by post 1950s immigrations of people from all over the world, liberals hailing the idea of “a nation of immigrants,” the white backlash brought us Trump and Trumpism, the systematic unraveling of laws and practices that favor equality, a chilling future.

Q: How does now compare with the Red Scares of the past we’ve had?

A: Well, it’s not come to the point of executions as with the Rosenbergs in the 1950s, but it does feel like a coming civil war. Although adhering to socialism or communism is more tolerated today—they’re sort of used as cuss words—the big scare now on the right is immigration, transphobia, women’s rights, all particularly attacked by right wing Christian Nationalists who have the support of the US President.

Red Scares of the past involved a supposed foreign enemy that was said to have infiltrated the population, as imagined in the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with McCarthyism raising the horror of subversives among us, and paranoia brilliantly exposed by Richard Hofstadter in his 1964 book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

I recall a large map in our rural school in Oklahoma that featured a flood of red, indicating communism, pouring over the North Pole, reaching the northern border of the US. Now, Trumpism is sort of like a cartoon version to scare the population into paranoia, even calling Democrats “communists.” It resonates with some older white people who remember the era as I do, but I don’t think it’s working that well. Still, Christian evangelicals are opportunistically predicting end times, Trump as the savior, and Charlie Kirk as a martyr. White nationalism and White Christian nationalism have replaced the Red Scare.

Q: How does the history of your own family of origin provide you with insights into American culture and society? 

A: I grew up in a small rural county in central Oklahoma, fourth child of a landless farming family who were sharecroppers. My paternal grandfather, Emmett Dunbar, had moved the family from rural Missouri in 1907, the year of Oklahoma statehood, and the year my father was born. My grandfather was a large-animal veterinarian and also owned land that he farmed. He joined the Socialist Party and was elected, on the Socialist Party ticket as County Commissioner of the county.

In that period, Socialists were surging, not only in Chicago and other cities, but also in a number of rural towns and counties in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and Texas. My grandfather named my father Moyer Haywood Scarberry Pettibone Dunbar after the leaders of the Socialist Party who were on trial for sedition. President Woodrow Wilson launched a war against the Socialist Party—William D. Haywood, George A. Pettibone, Charles H. Moyer—including re-organizing the KKK to attack Catholics and Socialists.

My grandfather died before I was born, but my father told me stories about my brave grandfather, although my father became a racist and a conservative in the 1950s, convinced by McCarthyism. Knowing those stories of my valiant socialist grandfather drove me to be a left wing activist who called myself a revolutionary in the 1960s, pretty much estranged from most of my family and community, moving to San Francisco.

At San Francisco State (then college, now university), I felt like an outsider on the white left, that seemed to hate poor white and working class people. When the Black Power movement kicked out the white organizers, telling them to organize white people, they balked. One of my mentors, the late Anne Braden, was concerned about the problem facing white organizers who had worked in the South for the freedom rides and voter registration drives in Black communities. Braden said, “they just don’t like white people. You can’t organize people if you don’t like them.”

Q: Why are you writing now about white nationalism, other than the fact that your editor asked you to do it? What do you hope to accomplish or reveal or show us?

A: I’m writing a book of essays on white nationalism, but also white Christian nationalism, which we saw on display with the funeral service for the white Christian youth evangelist, Charlie Kirk. I grew up religious with a devoted and active Southern Baptist mother, filled with the fiery words of traveling evangelicals and stadium sermons by Billy Graham, and radio evangelists. I’m bringing my own stories into the essays. Most of the people who have backgrounds like mine don’t go to college or become professors as I did. I did go to college and lost my religion there when I took a required course in physical anthropology, where I learned that the Christian Bible was poetry, not history. In my rural school, like others in the US, some even now, especially homeschoolers, are told the Bible is the gospel.

Q: Is the American Civil War, when white men slaughtered other white men, an aberration given that white men have historically slaughtered people of color? 

A: It was an aberration. Why Reconstruction failed, with the former Confederacy implementing Jim Crow totalitarian segregation for nearly another century, is rarely convincingly explained. The elephant in the room of the query is an absence of historical narrative, including that of the great Black writer, W. E. B. Du Bois.

The Army in the decades leading up to the Civil War was divided into seven departments, all engaged in counterinsurgency against indigenous nations and a two-year war against Mexico, seizing the northern half. After the end of the Civil War, the Union Army was repositioned in the Southeast to help implement the political empowerment of the formerly enslaved Black people, now US citizens.

By 1870, six of the seven war departments, comprising 183 companies, had been transferred west of the Mississippi; a colonial army fighting the native nations and seizing their land. That left only one department to occupy the defeated Confederate states and to enforce freedom and equality. In the Spring of 1877, federal troops were withdrawn and sent west, marking the end of Reconstruction and the implementation of forced segregation.

Q: You have actual experience with guns. How has that helped you frame/understand our gun crazy society? 

A: I tried to understand US gun craziness while researching and writing my 2018 book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. I grew up with guns that my father and brothers owned; shotguns and .22 rifles for hunting, but never for protection as most gun hoarders claim they need. I doubt they were even aware of the Second Amendment. It’s a tricky and much debated amendment: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

The National Rifle Association and its constituency argue that the Second Amendment guarantees the right for every individual to bear arms, while gun-control advocates maintain that the Second Amendment is about states continuing to have their own militias. They emphasize the language of “well regulated.” State militias, later called the National Guard, were already provided for in the Constitution.

Capitalism and white racial panic have much to do with the proliferations of guns in the US. Guns, like gold and silver, are shiny objects that give the sense of power especially to men. I had that experience with guns during the late Sixties and early Seventies as we formed liberation groups and thought we needed guns for self-defense. But, guns are not really for self-defense, because you have to shoot first. US people feel vulnerable and powerless and think a firearm can protect them.

Q: What did you mean when you called your book, “Not a Nation of Immigrants?” Was that in response to something, or some idea? After all, people have come to our shores from China, Russia, Peru, Scotland, England, India, Japan, Ghana, Brazil and….

A: Declaring the US a “Nation of Immigrants,” is a liberal dodge to not acknowledge genocidal settler-colonialism and the brutal land theft of indigenous nations that created the richest country in the world.  Immigration laws did not exist until the continent was fully conquered. Only, with the full development of industrial capitalism were workers recruited from Scandinavia and Eastern and Southern Europe and Mexico to work in the factories and fields. Anglos and Scots were early settlers. German immigrants came next and brought socialism.

Q: The term “settler colonialism” seems to be getting traction right now more than ever before. Why is that? 

A: Yes, it’s been an important concept to academics and students to understand power relations in the world, along with whiteness as power. As the late Patrick Wolfe emphasized in his groundbreaking research, settler colonialism is a structure, not an event.

Wolfe was an Australian anthropologist and historian, one of the initial theorists and historians of settler colonialism. He researched, wrote, taught, and lectured internationally on race, colonialism, Indigenous peoples’ and Palestinian histories, imperialism, genocide, and critical history of anthropology. He was also a human rights activist who used his scholarship and voice to support the rights of oppressed peoples.

In the United States, settler colonialism was more than a colonial structure that developed and replicated itself over time in the 170 years of British colonization in North America and preceding the founding of the United States. The founders were not an oppressed, colonized people. They were British citizens being restrained by the monarch from expanding the thirteen colonies to enrich themselves. They were imperialists who visualized the conquest of the continent and gain access to the Pacific and China. Achieving that goal required land, wealth, and settler participation.

Q; You live in and write in San Francisco. How does this place inform and shape the ways you see the world and the USA?

A: I don’t think that living in San Francisco informs me or shapes how I see the world and the USA, but I love San Francisco. It’s a safe haven. I first moved here from Oklahoma when I was 21, but have lived in many different places—Los Angeles, Mexico, Boston, New Orleans, Houston, New Mexico, New York—finally settling in San Francisco in 1977.

I conceive of San Francisco as a city-state, sort of separated from the rest of the country. There are people from all over the world who live here, and I love living near the Chinese community, a people so ostracized and abused, and now thriving.

San Francisco is a kind of world in itself. I would rather live in New York, but I tried that for a year, and it was too fast-paced for me. I like to visit and have many friends there. I feel safe living alone in San Francisco, walking, and riding public transportation. I like the sense of being on the edge of the continent, love the ocean, a kind of freedom that is precious and that I never tire of. It was the first twenty-one years of my life growing up poor in rural Oklahoma that formed the way I see the world and the USA, my identification and support of the poor and working class.

Q:  Are you an ist of some kind, anarchist, internationalist, communist, feminist? Why so? If not, then why not?

A: I was first a child of rural poor white Christian people. I wanted nothing more than to grow up and move to a city, which I did at age 16. It was Red Scare time, but I seemed to attract left-wing mentors when I graduated and enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, which the majority of right-wing Oklahomans called a hotbed of communism.

I met left-wing and foreign students, including a Palestinian who taught me about colonialism, then married into a liberal trade union family. It was the beginning of the era of decolonization, which thrilled me. At eighteen, I began reading James Baldwin and other critics of racism, capitalism and imperialism. Moving to San Francisco, I finished college at San Francisco State during the time of the Du Bois Club, the youth group of the Communist Party, that was active on campuses, many members traveling to the South to support the desegregation movement.

I admired them, but did not get invited to join them. The highlight for me at that time was Malcolm X speaking at San Francisco State, and again at the University of California at Berkeley during my first year of graduate school. I transferred to UCLA and majored in history in the mid-1960s, and became active in the antiwar movement.

I was one of the founders of the surge of the women’s liberation movement, becoming a full-time organizer in the late 1960s and early 70s. Our feminist movement changed the world and I am proud to have contributed to that. I’ve done international human rights work since 1977, mostly meeting at UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. I lived there for a year, and until the pandemic traveled there at least twice a year for meetings and conferences. I guess I would call myself an anti-colonial, anti-racist socialist-feminist.

Q. Are there members of the Sixties generation you regard as heroes and heroic?

A: Of course, we were all flawed, but I greatly admire so many comrades from the Sixties generation, including yourself, some that I knew and worked with, but mostly from afar. Above all, I idolized Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. There was the heroic Palestinian, Leila Khaled, who I actually got to meet when I attended the UN Conference on Women in Copenhagen in 1980. I admired Amilcar Cabral, who founded and led the The African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) that ousted the Portuguese colonizers. Angela Davis was hired to teach at UCLA when I was a graduate student there, the beginning of her persecution and prosecution, activating multi-racial and feminist organizing and protests. She was and is a great hero to me and many around the world.

Q: What about other generations? Do they offer icons of revolt and revolution?

A: Individuals and communities that are oppressed or exploited find ways to resist and often gain power, however harsh the conditions. As a historian, I have focused on oppression and resistance, particularly against European and US colonization and imperialism. Enslaved African resistance in the US is mind-boggling. In such a closed capitalist system, like no other, they resisted, from small gestures, such as wrecking tools and slow downs, to escaping and forming resistant communities: the 1739 Stone rebellion, Gabriel’s Rebellion in 1800, the German Coast Uprising (1811), Denmark Vesey’s Conspiracy (1822), Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831), and above all John Brown’s rebellion. Imagine ”weird”  John Brown leading a rebellion! Novelist Herman Melville called him “The meteor of the war.”

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Image by Andrej Lišakov.

The scene was a courtroom turned gladiator pit, where justice isn’t blind but bloodshot, half-drunk, and swinging for the fences. A black-robed executioner masquerading as a judge hoisted a weapon hacked together from the rubble of flouted law books, his arm cocked like some Farage rally thug meting out pub crawl sentences, not in words but in hammering blows of existential angst. Each strike landed not on parchment or precedent but on the trembling body splayed beneath him—the protestor reduced to meat, a sacrifice on the altar of Capital’s institutional rage. The gavel was gone; in its place, raw violence, and the law, stripped of ceremony, stood revealed as a back-alley beating in wigs and wigs alone. The last absurd ornament on the corpse of justice.

The fact that it was sprayed and splayed in the middle of the night on the façade of the Royal Courts of Justice building in central London made it seem like a window, offering a glimpse into the inner working of a system that criminalized any dissent or protest of the made-for-TV genocide occurring in Gaza with not only the tacit support of the government but fueled by its direct and indirect aid.

This wasn’t just a mural, it was a flayed nerve slapped onto the marble face of the mothballed empire’s cathedral of jurisprudence. Banksy’s image functioned like an X-ray of the British soul: the bones of empire, the cartilage of hypocrisy, the tendons of polite cruelty stretching across centuries. You could almost hear the slap of paint as a primal scream against the soft-focus propaganda that insists genocide can be bureaucratically sanitized by ‘recognizing’ the state of Palestine if delivered with enough PowerPoint slides and Westminster accents.

The fact that the work was scrubbed away in daylight — quietly, clinically, as though wiping a crime scene — only confirmed the accusation it leveled: that dissent is not debated, it is crushed and erased.

But was it?

A cleanup crew was rushed in. PPE-geared migrants power washed the painting into permanence, leaving a ghosted image of the crime that was less explicit, more metaphorical and endlessly open to suggestion. It was the scar of that tattoo that just wouldn’t be removed. It was something that happened, no matter how hard you try to forget it with booze, pills and therapy chatbots.

And in that ghosted afterimage — that spectral watermark bleeding through the courthouse stone — the piece metastasized. It no longer belonged to Banksy, or to the courts, or to the state. It belonged to the city, to the passersby who squinted at the residue and felt the uncanny sting of recognition: something happened here. The erasure failed because erasure is itself a mark, and the stain of what was scrubbed is more indelible than the thing itself. The state wanted order but got a haunted ruin humming with spectral graffiti. In the gallery of public space, this became the uncommissioned masterpiece: half-painting, half-crime scene, part-rumor scrawled on the architecture of empire.

Absence can be louder than presence: art as scar tissue, a kind of civic PTSD etched into the building’s DNA. You don’t stand before it so much as recoil from it — as if the courthouse itself were guilty, caught in the act, trying to scrub the blood off its own hands. Yet the spot remains.

And maybe that’s the real exhibition — not the art itself, but the cleanup. The ritual of erasure. Because from London to Los Angeles, from Gaza’s rubble to Spain’s granite roundabouts; power’s first instinct isn’t to confront its reflection, it’s to sandblast it. Empires launder their conscience like they launder their money: offshore, and out of sight.

Every nation has its own version of this midnight maintenance crew — the ones who sweep away the evidence before anyone is the wiser. The brushstroke becomes the broom. The mural becomes the monument. And what gets washed off the wall one night reappears the next morning on a different continent, under a different flag, carrying the same stain. Because what starts as graffiti removal in London becomes historical revision in Madrid. The same impulse that scrubs a wall in daylight also scrubs a century at dusk.

As countries like Spain mandate their fascist past to be power-scrubbed away — monuments disappeared as though they never existed, while their ideas are openly espoused in parliament — maybe the lesson lies not in erasure but in scars. Because scars testify. They don’t flatter, they don’t soothe, they don’t let you forget. They sit there, raised and jagged, a permanent reminder that the wound happened. A scar tells a truer, more haunting story than any cosmetic surgery ever could. Spain’s historical memory laws may be well-intentioned, after all it’s seemingly inconceivable to still have obscene fascist monuments glorified in central roundabouts in quiet provincial capitals like Caceres, Spain, but simply disappearing them won’t magically make it that it never happened.

Spain only perfected what everyone else has been practicing: denial as national pastime. It is far from alone in its selective sandblasting of memory. The whole planet’s been on a bleach binge. The instinct to “clean up” history — to make it smell like moral disinfectant — runs deep. It’s the same reflex that scrubbed Banksy’s courthouse mural and the same one that sends work crews into cemeteries of conscience with power washers and revisionist press releases.

Across the Atlantic, the United States is painting over its own frescoes of guilt with a bucket of “patriotic education.” The new Il Braghettones wear MAGA caps and talk about “heritage,” chiseling Confederate faces back into public squares under the pretense of preserving history while simultaneously banning books that dare to describe what those men actually did. The monuments stay, the memory goes — that’s the trick. Trump’s promised curriculum of “positive history” is just Il Braghettone with a Sharpie, doodling over the genitalia of truth — unless it’s a birthday card to a pedo. The goal isn’t to protect innocence; it’s to keep innocence ignorant.

And if irony still needed a monument, it got one — a life-sized statue of Trump and Epstein cast in a grotesque parody of triumph, mid-dance at a quinceañera party on the Washington Mall. It appeared overnight like a confession left out in daylight and vanished just as quickly, hauled away by the same city that pretends such partners never waltzed together. The footage of its removal spread faster than the sculpture ever did; the erasure went viral. What might have been a passing stunt became a resurrection — the scandal reborn through its own disappearance. The monument proved itself by being murdered in broad daylight. In the age of censorship, even garbage turns into gospel once you try to bury it.

And then up past the 49^th parallel there’s Canada — the country that likes to call itself polite while it quietly buried generations of Indigenous children beneath the schoolyards of its own virtue. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was supposed to be the confessional, but the government kept half the sins redacted. Files withheld, names protected, the crime scene tidied up for the cameras. It was a half-truth wrapped in an apology, a performance of contrition that never risked fully dismantling the structures and organization that made the horror possible.

The Catholic Church — architect and accomplice of the residential school system — still drags its feet through the evidence, hoarding archives like relics, muttering about “individual failings” as if genocide were a bad apple problem. When Pope Francis came to Canada, his sermon of sorrow stopped just short of naming the institution itself — he wept for the victims, but not for the machinery that created them. The Vatican’s guilt was outsourced to the ghosts of long-dead priests. It was an absolution written in disappearing ink.

But truth isn’t reconciliation if it’s partial, and memory can’t be sacred if it’s managed. The graves keep surfacing. The ground keeps remembering, even when the state and the Church try to forget.

And it’s not just a North American export. In Poland, you can be fined for suggesting Polish complicity in the Holocaust — a national memory Botox injection meant to freeze the face of history in a fixed expression of innocence. In Russia, Stalin is being rehabilitated as a stern-but-effective father figure, his purges rewritten as administrative efficiency. In Turkey, to speak of the Armenian genocide still means risking vanishing yourself. In China, Tiananmen never happened — just a stray glitch in the patriotic software. Every nation has its own delete key, its own army of digital janitors sent to wipe the blood from the marble.

Meanwhile, in places that refuse to forget — like Auschwitz or Birkenau — memory is a living wound that insists on being seen. Those barbed-wire museums don’t glorify atrocity; they fossilize it, keep it under glass like an open sore so no one can pretend it healed by itself. You walk through the gas chamber, and it hums with the absence of air. You come to understand that erasure is the final stage of violence — the silence that completes the scream. That’s why such places must remain visible: not to re-traumatize, but to inoculate.

The same goes for art. Every time a painting, a mural, a photograph is censored, pixelated, or pulled down from a wall because it offends, we amputate another nerve ending from the body of culture. From Michelangelo’s censored nudes to Instagram’s dangerous nipples and deleted war images, we’ve been covering the same naked truth for centuries: that we are terrified of seeing ourselves. The algorithm has replaced the red-robed inquisitor, but the punishment is the same — exile to digital oblivion.

Maybe that’s why Banksy’s ghosted mural feels prophetic. You can wash away the paint, but you can’t clean the wall. The faint residue becomes a relic — a secular Shroud of Turin testifying that something unspeakable happened and that someone tried very hard to make sure you didn’t see it. The more they scrub, the louder it screams. The world has become a gallery of ghosts, each one shouting through layers of civic wallpaper: “Remember me.”

Censorship is not the opposite of chaos; it’s chaos disguised as order. The eraser doesn’t bring peace, it only resets the countdown. Because if we can’t look our sins in the eye, we end up worshipping their shadows. That’s how fascism slips back in wearing cologne and calling itself nostalgia. That’s how young Spaniards end up chanting Cara al Sol like it’s a catchy football anthem, unaware they’re harmonizing with ghosts. That’s how white American teenagers march with tiki torches, convinced they’re the ones being erased.

Every culture has its own Valley of the Fallen — the physical or psychological monument to things too uncomfortable to hold but too heavy to throw away. Tear it down and you risk amnesia; leave it standing and you risk glorification. The only solution is the scar: not the clean excision or the uncritical idol, but the healed, visible wound that says, this happened, and it hurt, and we survived it.

Memory is not nostalgia; it’s justice. It is the ongoing trial of the past, held daily in the court of conscience. To censor art is to tamper with evidence. To erase history is to perjure the record. And the world, like that courthouse wall, is running out of surfaces that haven’t already been scrubbed.

Because what’s left when we bleach everything is not purity — it’s absence. And absence, when multiplied, becomes a void large enough for monsters to crawl back through. They’re here, they’re in power, and they’re frantically hitting the delete button.

So yes, keep the scars. Keep the ghosts. Let the walls speak, even if the language is pain. Especially then. Because when a civilization no longer wants to see its wounds and starts mistaking amnesia for healing, it’s already carving new wounds with the same unwashed knife.

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Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, U.S. president Bill Clinton, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat – Public Domain

The history of the Palestinians is a history of betrayal.  In the wake of World War I, Britain and France redrew the map of the Middle East to suit their own ends.  They created countries with artificial borders, which led to unrest and uprisings.  They had concluded a secret agreement during the war—the Sykes-Picot agreement—that dashed Palestinian hopes of independence.  The following year, the Balfour Declaration called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in what was then Palestine.

Israeli independence in 1948 led to the forced removal of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. Their families had lived in Palestine for hundreds of years. Indeed, Palestinians had lived beside Jews in Palestine since antiquity.

Many of the Palestinians, who were evicted in1948, have lived ever since in refugee camps in Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan.  I visited several of these camps in the 1970s and 1980s; they were horrific in most cases.

In 1956, Israel secretly joined the British and the French invasion of Egypt for control of the Suez Canal.  This convinced Arab leaders that Israel was part of the European colonial movement to maintain power and influence in the Middle East.

In 1967, Israel acquired all of Jerusalem and the West Bank in the Six-Day War. Israel falsely described its invasion as a preemptive attack, although there was no evidence that the Arab states were on the verge of using force against Israel.  The strongest Arab state at that time was Egypt, which was in no position to attack Israel since its best ground forces were in Yemen where there was a civil war taking place. The fact that Egyptian fighter planes were parked wingtiip-to-wingtip, vulnerable to Israeli attack, was another indicator of Egypt’s lack of readiness for war.

The Oslo Peace Accords of 1993 envisioned a greater role for the Palestinian Authority to govern the occupied territories.  However, Jewish settlers in Gaza and the West Bank moved quickly to create illegal settlements in these territories.  The sad fact is that Israel illegally settled these lands after its military successes. The Israeli government had no plans to allow the creation of a Palestinian state. and tacitly approved and expanded the settlements.  Israeli governments helped the settlers take Palestinian land, and never considered using these territories as leverage to create a genuine peace in the region.

In 2009, the UN released a 575-page analysis of the Gaza conflict that documented the most numerous and most serious violations and war crimes committed in the region were carried out by Israel, and that Israel’s blockade of Gaza amounted to “collective punishment.”  The report called Israel’s actions a “deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed at the civilian population.”  It stated that a competent court would find that the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, had been committed.  Sadly, the United States backed Israel’s rejection of the report as it has backed virtually all Israeli policies of aggression.

And now we have a “peace plan” that is treated by the mainstream media as a “visible path to a generational accomplishment.”  The leader of the Israeli opposition, Yair Lapid, and others even support giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump.  But there is still no peace and there should be no prize.

Once again, the Palestinians have been betrayed.  It is certain that the plan will not lead to a Palestinian state.  Benjamin Netanyahu has made this clear, and the plan itself only refers to Palestinian self-determination as an “aspiration.”  The extent of Israeli occupation of Gaza is uncertain, but the continuing loss of territory on the West Bank is certain,  Reconstruction of Gaza is also uncertain because Israel will continue to control the reconstruction materials that will be allowed into the region.  Who will supply the funds and resources?  Who will take part in the operation that will costs tens of billions of dollars.

Neither Palestinians as a whole nor the Palestine Authority were  consulted on any of the terms of the agreement, and the Arab mediators from Egypt, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates didn’t press for a serious mediation role and didn’t protect the interests of the Palestinians.  The US unwillingness to provide a diplomatic visa to the leader of the Palestine Authority for his annual visit to the United Nations, and its continued denial of funding to the leading Palestinian human rights organizations demonstrates the lack of any objectivity on the part of the Trump administration. As a result, the plan’s reference to “deradicalization” appears to mean nothing more than the continued denial of any real role for the Palestinians in Gaza.  The betrayals continue as does the continued persecution of the Palestinians.

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“Horror” does not have finite limits. Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

Ben Hubbard, the long-time Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, is known for his high standards. So too is Karen DeYoung, the long-time reporter and foreign affairs editor for the Washington Post.

Yet they, and their editors, share a common, recurring failure by misleading their readers about the serious undercount of Palestinian deaths during the Israeli regime’s genocidal destruction of Gaza.

How so? By repeating in article after article the Hamas claim of 67,000 deaths since October 2023. The real death toll estimate is probably around 600,000. Unlike Israeli and American cultures, which do not under-estimate their fatalities in conflicts, Hamas sees the awful death toll as a reflection of their not protecting their people and a measure of Israeli military might against Hamas’ limited small arms and weapons. Both Hubbard and DeYoung, of course, know better. They know the daily bombardment of tiny Gaza, the geographical size of Philadelphia, with 2.3 million humans, is without precedent in Israel’s targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. The blockade of “food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity,” along with the concentrated destruction of health care facilities have been condemned by human rights groups in Israel and International humanitarian organizations.

Reporters and editors are quite aware of more accurate casualty estimates appearing in The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, and estimates provided by other academic and prominent international relief organizations like Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, UN World Food Programme and others experienced in assessing the human toll of military devastations.

Journalists know the estimate last April by Professor Emeritus Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford in the UK, an expert in the power of aerial bombs and missiles, who wrote that the TNT equivalent of six Hiroshima atomic bombs has been delivered to these totally defenseless Palestinians, almost all of whom are without housing or air raid shelters.

Netanyahu’s American-made missiles and bombs continue to produce deadly bloodshed. The waves of death from starvation, untreated, weaponry-caused infectious diseases, the cutoff of medicines treating cancer, respiratory ailments, and diabetes are still mounting.

What readers do not know is how much of the use of Hamas’s undercount is mandated by news editors, and why. Because intense Netanyahu propaganda has declared the estimates of Hamas, based on real names (excluding many thousands under the rubble and the collateral damage to civilians that in such conflicts exceed direct fatalities from the bombing by 3 to 13-fold), are an exaggeration, the mainstream media is wary of being accused of even worse fabrications than those of Hamas.

Speaking to many reporters and editors about this huge undercount phenomenon, not prevalent in other violent arenas of war, they all agree that the real count is much higher, but they do not have a number to use that is deemed credible. But they do have casualty experts who can be interviewed, such as the chair of the Global Health Department at Edinburgh University or a foremost missile technology specialist, MIT Professor Emeritus Theodore Postol, who said on our radio/podcast recently, “I would say that 200, 300, or 400,000 people [Palestinian] are dead easily.”

The least the journalists could do is say “the real count may be much higher.” The other alternative is to do their own investigation, piecing together the empirical and clinical evidence (See, Gaza Healthcare Letter to President Trump, October 1, 2025) and citing prominent Israelis who have said that the IDF has always targeted Palestinian civilians from 1948 on. (See my column March 28, 2025 – The Vast Gaza Death Undercount – Undermines Civic, Diplomatic and Political Pressures.)

The other alternative is to do a “news analysis,” which allows for evaluations, short of editorializing. For instance, a “news analysis” could point out that conveying the impression that the Hamas figures are the true count means that 97 out of 100 Palestinians in Gaza are still living. This is not remotely credible. Yet that is essentially what Ben Hubbard’s October 7th Times article stated, “with more than 67,000 killed, or one in every 34 Gazans, according to local health officials.” It is more like one in every four Gazans killed.

Nor is it true that the “local health officials” are confirming this, because on further inquiry, they admit their definition of the fatality toll excludes those under the rubble and those who die from the massive collateral casualty toll. This reality is well known to scores of American physicians back from Gaza who say that a majority of those killed are children and women and that the survivors are almost all injured, sick, or dying.

There are esteemed reporters like Gideon Levy of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, who claim that the Hamas figures are horrible enough that they meet the test of genocide, implying that a higher count would not make any more of a moral or political difference.

I disagree. “Horror” does not have finite limits. It makes a difference in driving the greater intensity of political, diplomatic, and civic pressures to have a count of 600,000 rather than 67,000 or 200,000 children rather than 20,000 children murdered. Do we need to refer to other genocides in the 20th century to show how much a difference it would have made if the official count were one tenth of the real count?

The editors of the Post, especially, and of the Times are not keeping up with the reporting of DeYoung and Hubbard et al., about the scenes of death, dying, and horrendous agony in Gaza. The editorial management of reporters and the editorials fail to hold Netanyahu and his terroristic mass-slaughtering cabinet accountable. They allow the publication of realistic reports, features, and sometimes even give voice to Palestinians, as the Times did with several pages and pictures recently. But the long-time omnipresent shadow of AIPAC et al. darkens the editorial and opinion pages more than do the illuminations of their own reporters.

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No, the Air Force didn’t illicitly use this land for a bombing range. This is the handiwork of the taxpayer funded Ely BLM treatment-industrial complex, aided, and abetted by TNC’s (The Nature Conservancy) contracted vegetation models and analysis. Photo and caption: Katie Fite.

Some may have noticed (recently, or decades ago) that the U.S. Forest Service-U.S.D.A. (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management-U.S. Department of Interior (BLM) speak in a cryptic language of words with no source, no reference, no definition, and consequently no meaning. 

This is a deliberate blinding process designed to deprive the American public of sight and understanding.  Trickery is used by land managers as a weaponized psychological tool to create mass delusion, dominion and deterrence over vast landscapes and we, the common people. 

In his seminal (1983) book entitled Sterile Forests, Ned Fritz warned of the renewed “onslaught…” inflicted by the “modern clearcutters, by burning, poisoning and other methods preventing the original forest composition from ever returning.”  

Forest genocide is not new. Its cumulative detrimental effects now threaten our terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. A warming planet and extended regional drought drive air and water temperatures higher, simultaneously as baseline and trend. Clearcutting and long-term deforestation are accelerants that must stop. Warming waters explode algal blooms that rob aquatic ecosystems of oxygen. Aquatic insect populations deprived of oxygen no longer persist, breaking the food chain, placing trout survival in serious jeopardy.  

Legislative efforts to reform federal land management agencies and gain control over the commodification and sterilization of public forests have failed miserably.  Indiscriminate clearcutting and bulldozing logging roads into untrammeled forests proceeds unabated. Massive agency-arson programs burn, masticate, and cultivate the fragmented forest creating man-made ‘temporary deserts.’ These programs to grow commercial tree crops and cows allegedly to meet and expand the nation’s demand wood fiber and red meat haven’t changed much since Puritans repaid City of London investors with beaver pelts and timber in the early 1600s. 

Under the direction of seldom identified oligarchs, technocrats, fascist ideologues, and their infantile mannequins of power in Congress, in the Supreme Court and White House, almost all funding for non-commercial activities was eliminated.  Federal forest management programs and projects have reduced 21^st century public forests to a single purpose: ‘meeting demand’ for low value commodities at great expense.  Expenditures almost always exceed net revenues.  

Example #1:  The $1.35 per AUM (Animal Unit Month, i.e., one cow with calf/month) is a federally set grazing lease fee that applies to lands managed by the BLM and USFS.  Fees on private land range between $20 – $30 per AUM.

Example #2:  Timber ‘stumpage’ was recently sold (liquidated) on the Flathead National Forest in northwest Montana, adjacent to Glacier National Park, at $2 per ton. This is not a misprint.  Currently, merchantable (100 years or older) stumpage is subsidized and sold on average between $3 to $10 per ton. You cannot buy a ton of goat manure at those prices.  

“Multiple-Use” is a ruse. As always, America’s working class, what’s left of it, is literally paying for the destruction of sacred forests, water quality and quantity, cold-water fisheries, wildlife and wildlife habitat, contemplative pursuits, and scenic quality.  Wilderness fragments, solitude, and spiritual values that remain on the landscape after centuries of institutional efforts to erase any trace of the divine in Nature are being hunted down and exterminated, with extreme viciousness and prejudice. 

Far-fetched, you say? Even the federal government shutdown won’t slow down the forest-eating machines. Approximately 20,000 of the 32,390 Forest Service employees will continue to work in the following, arbitrarily approved areas of agency (euphemistically, of course) work:  wildfire prevention, expand timber production, arson, and deforestation to clear the way for more cows. Each spring massive numbers of baby birds are incinerated when helicopters and drones drop napalm and drip torch their nests. When desertification intersects with lack of foresight and plain old stupidity, what shall we call this expanding desert, which now extends beyond external territories, encroaching into the landscapes and dreamscapes of human minds and bodies.

Clearcuts and too many roads on public lands eliminate big game hiding cover, driving animals onto private land where hunters must pay to play (kill something).  It gets worse, and more costly, for big game and hunters every year.  

I’m imagining a time not too far away when the U.S. Department of War will commence bombing forests to control insect infestations and conquer ‘encroaching conifers,’ wolves and space aliens.  Who is the enemy?  Wildness, we proles, and Nature herself.

The high-velocity flows of excessive information and word magic manipulate public perception, creating a herd effect. Propaganda spews forth in volumes that would fill a high-pressure fire hose.  In the final analysis, however, if all legal fiction and contorted language were to be destroyed, we must realize that nothing in Nature, nothing in Reality, and therefore no man, woman or child would actually be harmed. The Laws of Nature would be unscathed, for Nature’s true, self-existence requires nothing of mankind; no names (titles), no numbers, and no language arts.

Conifer encroachment. What does this mean? This is a term of art, which implies that natural reproduction of conifers on BLM and USFS land is bad.  Its origin, its definition, and its meaning in the context of the forest planning, management programs and proposed projects, remains cryptic, at best. Conifer encroachment at odds with a future desired condition, a simulation, a copy of a desired synthetic landscape imagined, analyzed, and modeled by computer programs.  These machinations exist as a twin, with no reference to a real landscape, to be copied and reproduced ad nauseam until the common folk accept it as an object (a thing) that can be manipulated, along with the all the people duped into believing in simulacra as if it were real. The objective, I suppose, is to make us all believe that there are still real forests and fenceless prairies out there somewhere.  

Unlike legalese (the ruling class’s language), the common or general language of the common people is violently twisted into a language of fraud and deceit in direct opposition to Life and Mother Nature.  This magical spell (the spelling and construction of words) must first be understood as a simulation, a state of despotic dualism, where we are intentionally misled to a wrongful understanding of meaning.  Hallucination, fantasy and hyperreality collide to create the pure simulacra of man-made law and language that imprisons so many good men and women as one meaningless body politic under false names (nouns). 

The presumption that public forests require ‘help’ from the USFS and BLM continues apace with no discussion and little resistance. These quasi-military institutions can only speak of themselves through denial and by simulating crisis and death, ostensibly to escape their real death throes. So, they stage their own murder by murdering the public domain in a feeble attempt to rekindle a flicker of existence and legitimacy.    

Presumably all this industrial activity is remedy rushing to aid in a simulated ‘forest health crisis.’ Vegetation manipulation (desertification) masquerades behind magical words.  Forest resiliency, enhanced biodiversity, restoration, watershed improvements, reduce wildfire risk, protect the Wildland Urban Interface. All simulacra.

It is certainly debatable whether most forest ecosystems in the Northern Rockies bioregion need any restoration/manipulation. Nearly all higher elevation (mountainous regions) mixed conifer and subalpine forests have historically grown (very slowly) in dense stands that tended to burn at medium to long intervals (often hundreds of years) with large patches of mixed to high mortality – so, they are functioning well within the range of historic conditions.  

The agencies try to regenerate their moribund theories through simulated scandal, self-inflicted crisis, and mass murder. Exaggeration, fabrication of symptoms of a dis-eased forest creates fear and irony.  For over 100 years these “out-of-whack” forests were under federal agency management. In the gangster-like world of timber management, problem-reaction-solution functions as a mechanism for constructing and hyping the “problem” to gaslight the public into accepting death and destruction (desertification, sterilization, and domestication) as the sole remedy.

It’s hard to ignore how this all resembles a scaled-up version of the mental illness Munchausen syndrome by proxy – driven by a psychotic desire for ever bigger budgets and sympathy.  It’s too late.  Caught in a vicious cycle of its violence, irresponsibility and its fundamental irrelevance, no solution or alibi can prevent the system’s ultimate demise.   

It’s time to abandon the failed dogmas of capital and materialist technology and science and stop pretending that we already know all the answers.  Science’s future will be shaped by recognizing that natural, self-organizing systems, including native forest ecosystems, like all lifeforms, are constantly evolving, impermanent processes rather than things, organisms, not machines. Society’s future is interdependent with Nature and man’s unpredictability and impermanence.  The entire universe operates as a developing organism. 

We face unprecedented problems that modern science and technology have helped to create. As the sciences are gradually liberated from this exclusively rationalist, materialist ideology, there is cause for guarded optimism. From an artist’s perspective I imagine the process as a complex, ineffable, work-in-progress functioning beyond our ability to know.

According to Natural Rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence each citizen faces the age-old challenge of despotism.  An appropriate human response is to rebel – as individuals, and in cooperative groups – to end desertification and sterilization of landscapes and mindscapes.  It is time to fight to protect and defend all lifeforms from the multiple global threats initiated and enabled by a small cult of billionaire assassins (oligarchs) who fund and enable global forms of neo-colonialism, genocide, and desertification.

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Image by Ömer Faruk Yıldız.

For decades, the prevailing notion was that the ‘solution’ to the Israeli occupation of Palestine lay in a strictly negotiated process. “Only dialogue can achieve peace” has been the relentlessly peddled mantra in political circles, academic platforms, media forums, and the like.

A colossal industry burgeoned around that idea, expanding dramatically in the lead-up to, and for years after, the signing of the Oslo Accords between Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli government.

The Unmaking of ‘Peace’

The problem was never with the fundamental principle of ‘dialogue,’ ‘peace,’ nor even with that of ‘painful compromises‘ — a notion tirelessly circulated during the ‘peace process’ period between 1993 and the early 2000s.

Instead, the conflict has largely been shaped by how these terms, and an entire scaffolding of similar terminology, were defined and implemented. ‘Peace’ for Israel and the US necessitated a subservient Palestinian leadership, ready to negotiate and operate within confined parameters, and entirely outside the binding parameters of international law.

Similarly, ‘dialogue’ was only permissible if the Palestinian leadership consented to renounce ‘terrorism’ — read: armed resistance — disarm, recognize Israel’s purported right to exist as a Jewish state, and adhere to the prescribed language dictated by Israel and the US.

In fact, only after officially renouncing ‘terrorism’ and accepting a restricted interpretation of specific UN resolutions on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza did Washington agree to ‘dialogue’ with Arafat. Such low-level conversations took place in Tunisia and involved a junior US official — Robert Pelletreau, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.

Not once did Israel consent to ‘dialogue’ with Palestinians without a stringent set of preconditions, driving Arafat to a unilateral series of concessions at the expense of his people. Ultimately, Oslo yielded nothing of intrinsic value for Palestinians, apart from Israel’s mere recognition, not of Palestine or the Palestinian people, but of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which, over time, became a conduit for corruption. The PA’s continued existence is inextricably linked to that of the Israeli occupation itself.

Israel, conversely, operated unchecked, conducting raids on Palestinian towns, executing massacres at will, enforcing a debilitating siege on Gaza, assassinating activists, and imprisoning Palestinians en masse, including women and children. In fact, the post-‘dialogue,’ ‘peace,’ and ‘painful compromises’ era witnessed the largest expansion and effective annexation of Palestinian land since the 1967 Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Gaza as the Anomaly

During this period, there was a widespread consensus that violence, meaning only Palestinian armed resistance in response to unconstrained Israeli violence, was intolerable. The PA’s Mahmoud Abbas dismissed it in 2008 as ‘useless,’ and subsequently, in coordination with the Israeli military, devoted much of the PA’s security apparatus to suppress any form of resistance to Israel, armed or otherwise.

Though Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus, and other regions and refugee camps in the West Bank continued to forge spaces, however constrained, for armed resistance, the concerted efforts of Israel and the PA often crushed or at least substantially reduced these moments.

Gaza, however, consistently stood as the anomaly. The Strip’s armed uprisings have persisted since the early 1950s, with the emergence of the fedayeen movement, followed by a succession of socialist and Islamic resistance groups. The place has always remained unmanageable — by Israel, and later by the PA. When Abbas loyalists were defeated following brief but tragic violent clashes between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza in 2007, the small territory became an undisputed center of armed resistance.

This event occurred two years after the Israeli army’s redeployment out of Palestinian population centers in the Strip (2005), into the so-called military buffer zones, established on areas that were historically part of Gaza’s territory. It was the start of today’s hermetic siege on Gaza.

In 2006, Hamas secured a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council, an unexpected turn of events that infuriated Washington, Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and other Western and Arab allies.

The fear was that without Israel’s PA allies maintaining control over the resistance inside Gaza and the West Bank, the occupied territories would inevitably result in a widespread anti-occupation revolt.

Consequently, Israel intensified its suffocating siege on the Strip, which refused to capitulate despite the horrific humanitarian crisis resulting from the blockade. Thus, starting in 2008, Israel adopted a new strategy: treating the Gaza resistance as an actual military force, thereby launching major wars that resulted in the killing and wounding of tens of thousands of people, predominantly civilians.

These major conflicts included the war of December 2008-January 2009, November 2012, July-August 2014, May 2021, and the latest genocidal war commencing in October 2023.

Despite the immense destruction and the relentless siege, let alone external international and Arab pressures and isolation, the Strip somehow endured and even regenerated itself. Destroyed residences were rebuilt from the salvaged rubble, and resistance weaponry was also replenished, often utilizing unexploded Israeli munitions.

The October 7 Rupture

The October 7 Hamas operation, known as Al-Aqsa Flood, constituted a significant break from the established pattern that had endured for years.

For Palestinians, it represented the ultimate evolution of their armed struggle, a culmination of a process that commenced in the early 1950s and involved diverse groups and political ideologies. It served as a stark notification to Israel that the rules of engagement have irrevocably shifted, and that the besieged Palestinians refuse to submit to their supposed historical role of perpetual victimhood.

For Israel, the event was earth-shattering. It exposed the country’s vaunted military and intelligence as deeply flawed, and revealed that the country’s leadership assessment of Palestinian capabilities was fundamentally erroneous.

This failure followed the brief surge of confidence during the normalization campaign initiated by the US and Israel with pliable Arab and Muslim countries during Trump’s first term in office. At that time, it appeared as though the Palestinians and their cause had been rendered irrelevant in the broader Middle Eastern political landscape. Between a co-opted Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and besieged resistance movements in Gaza, Palestine was no longer a decisive factor in Israel’s pursuit of regional hegemony.

The centerpiece of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy, and his aspiration to conclude his long political career with the ultimate regional triumph, was suddenly obliterated. Enraged, disoriented, but also determined to restore all of Israel’s advantages since Oslo, Netanyahu embarked on a campaign of mass killing that, over the course of two years, culminated in one of the worst genocides in human history.

His methodical extermination of the Palestinians and overt desire to ethnically cleanse the survivors out of Gaza laid bare Israel and its Zionist ideology for their inherently violent character, thus allowing the world, especially Western societies, to fully perceive Israel for what it truly is, and what it has always been.

Resistance, Resilience, and Defeat

But the genuine fear that unified Israel, the US, and several Arab countries is the terrifying prospect that Resistance, particularly armed resistance, could re-emerge in Palestine, and by extension across the Middle East, as a viable force capable of threatening all autocratic and undemocratic regimes. This fear was dramatically amplified by the ascent of other non-state actors, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansarallah in Yemen, who collectively with the Gaza resistance managed to forge a formidable alliance that required direct US involvement in the conflict.

Even then, Israel failed to achieve any of its strategic objectives in Gaza, owing to the legendary resilience of the Palestinian people, but also the prowess of the resistance that managed to destroy over 2,000 Israeli military vehicles, including hundreds of the pride and joy of the Israeli military industry, the Merkava tank.

No Arab army has managed to exact this scale of military, political, and economic cost from Israel throughout the country’s violent existence of nearly eight decades. Though Israel and the US — and others, including some Arab countries and the PA — continue to demand the disarming of the resistance, such a demand is rationally nearly unattainable. Israel has dropped over 200,000 tons of explosives over Gaza over the course of two years to achieve that singular objective, and failed. There is no plausible reason to believe that it can achieve such a goal through political and economic pressures alone.

Not only did Israel fail in Gaza, or, more accurately in the words of many Israeli historians and retired army generals, was decisively defeated in Gaza, but Palestinians have managed to reassert Palestinian agency, including the legitimacy of all forms of resistance, as a winning strategy against Israeli colonialism and US-Western imperialism in the region. This explains the profound fear shared by all parties that Israel’s defeat in Gaza could fundamentally alter the entire regional power dynamics.

Though the US and its Western and Arab allies will persist in negotiating in an attempt to resurrect the almost 90-year-old Palestinian leader Abbas and his Oslo paradigm as the only viable alternatives for Palestinians, the medium and long-term consequences of the war are likely to present a starkly different reality, one where Oslo and its corrupted figures are definitively relegated to the past.

Finally, if we are to speak of a Palestinian victory in Gaza, it is a resounding triumph for the Palestinian people, their indomitable spirit, and their deeply rooted resistance that transcends faction, ideology, and politics.

All of this considered, it must also be clearly stated that the current ceasefire in Gaza cannot be misconstrued as a ‘peace plan’; it is a mere pause from the genocide, as there will certainly be a subsequent round of conflict, the nature of which depends heavily on what unfolds in the West Bank, indeed the entire region, in the coming months and years.

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