Image by Jakayla Toney.

A UN Special Committee has characterized Israel’s war in Gaza as genocide, while Western “free” media has abandoned its ethical responsibility to cover and or report objectively on the conduct of Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Western corporate media outlets, without exception, acquiesced to Israeli directives barring reporters from entering Gaza. Journalists embedded with the Israeli army report only what Israel permits them to observe, creating a one-sided, heavily filtered narrative.

The programmed absence has deprived Western public of critical information to show what UNICEF describes as the most dangerous place in the world for children. Disregarding these realities, corporate Western media outlets often dehumanize Palestinians, dismissing their grievance while overtly empathizing with the Israelis. Case in point, they extensively cover the relocation of hundreds of Israeli families, while offering little to no coverage on the Scholasticide of the 625,000 Palestinian children who are unable to attend school for a second year because Israel has damaged or destroyed 85% of Gaza’s schools. Similarly, they disregard U.N. documented Israel’s use of “starvation as a weapon of war . . . destroying vital water, sanitation and food systems,” and neglect the plight of 90% of Gaza’s internally displaced population, many of whom have been forced to relocate nine or ten times. In addition, the media’s intentional omission of the destruction of the entire higher education system, with 100% of Gaza’s 12 universities demolished, leaving 88,000 students unable to continue their studies.

Just as with the systematic destruction of Gaza’s educational system, the “free” media has failed to critically report on Israel’s deliberate strategy to dismantle Gaza’s healthcare system. According to former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, this strategy involved “relentless and intentional attacks on medical personnel and facilities,” including the killing, detention, and torture of medical staff as part of a “concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system.” By the end of July 2024, the World Health Organization reported that Israel had conducted 498 raids on healthcare facilities. Out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, less than 16 are partially operational, leading to the near-total collapse of the healthcare system.

The managed “free” media deploys countless reporters in Tel Aviv to cover the effectiveness of Israel’s Iron Dome missile system, yet no one on the ground investigates the starvation in North Gaza or even show the face of one of the approximately 16,800 murdered children or the anguish of over 17,000 children who have lost one or both parents. At the same time, the programmed media floods screens with images of a broken glass window in a “Jewish only” colony, but no cameras are allowed to capture the devastated 163,778, plus residential units in Gaza.

The so-called “free” Western media does not question or fact-check Israeli disinformation, hasbara, when American made jets target schools or demolish residential towers under the pretext of “command centers” inside these facilities. Worse yet, the media propagates a false narrative, portraying Israel’s malevolent policies as acts of benevolence because they issue a warning ahead of bombing homes to smithereens, and then murder civilians as they evacuate under the same orders. Journalists ignore Palestinian voices pointing out that the wide scale destruction of homes, “safe shelters,” and critical infrastructure is part of a calculated Israeli strategy to render Gaza uninhabitable and forcibly displace its residents. Their reporting from afar, normalize Israeli violence and ethnic cleansing as they parrot Israeli Newspeak without scrutiny.

A glaring example of the media abdicating its objectivity is the case of Al-Shifa Hospital, where Israeli military officials showcased an elaborate 3D model purportedly depicting a command center beneath the hospital. The Israeli disinformation was echoed by U.S. President Joe Biden and the White House, further amplifying the false Israeli narratives to an unsuspected public.

In November 2023, Al-Shifa Hospital was occupied by the Israeli army. Doctors were arrested, several tortured to death in Israeli custody, and the hospital was forced out of service. Western journalists, embedded with the Israeli military, joined the Israeli army to show the world what was claimed to be a military command center beneath the hospital. However, to uncover that the only underground edifices in the hospital’s vast complex were originally designed by Israeli architects Gershon Zippor and Benjamin Idelson, and commissioned by the occupying Israeli Public Works Department in 1983.

The embedded Israeli propaganda tool, aka Western media, accompanied Israel’s chief disinformation officer on a tour of Al-Shifa Hospital but left empty-handed, unable to find the flaunted “command control center” or any military facilities under the hospital. Human Rights Watch later concluded that the military raid at the hospital constituted a war crime after failing to provide evidence “to justify revoking the hospital’s status as protected by the laws of war.”

Rather than holding Israel accountable for destroying a major health facility, the embedded media continued to market Israeli lies to excuse violations of international law. The lack of critical reporting and fact-checking is a betrayal of the journalistic responsibilities, effectively serving as implicit approval or, at the very least, normalization of the Israeli war crimes.

Another case on how the media facilitates violence and aggression is the adoption of Israeli-nuanced jargons that desensitizes readers, and redirects focus. For instance, by framing Israel’s wars against Palestinians in Gaza and the people of Lebanon as a war against “Hamas” or “Hezbollah,” the media employs euphemisms that deflect Israeli responsibility for the broader impact of the war on innocent civilians. This framing whitewashes Israeli culpability for the destruction of 80% of homes, 60% of the hospitals, 85% of the schools, 100% of the universities, the displacement of 90% of the population, the razing of villages, and the starvation of children, portraying these atrocities as mere “collateral damage,” or unintended victims in a crossfire.

Furthermore, Western media’s dereliction in contextualizing Israeli violations of the international humanitarian law, the findings of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court, leaves readers unaware of the legal ramifications and obscures accountability. In doing so, Western media becomes, wittingly or unwittingly, a complicit platform in Israeli hasbara.

Western media has even abandoned fellow local journalists who remained in Gaza and were purposely targeted by the Israeli army. Israel’s assault on the truth, including attacks on journalists and their families, is unprecedented in war zones. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Israel has murdered 137 journalists and media workers, making it the deadliest since CPJ began collecting data in 1992.

Zionist hasbara, bolstered by a powerful media plutocracy and influential special interest groups in the West, has normalized Israeli lies and bias against Palestinians for over 76 years. This media-constructed narratives distorts public understanding, manipulates public discourse and shape policy debates. Inevitably, the systematic dissemination of misinformation shapes a one-dimensional view of the conflict, suppresses dissent, and position Western media as a key instrument in manufacturing consent for Israel’s wars of genocide.

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Industrial plant, Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

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Soweto housing (c. 2009). Photograph Source: Kevin Gabbert – Public Domain

In 2002, the state of Gujarat in India erupted in horrific violence that would shape and define Narendra Modi’s political career. The pogrom, which left thousands of Muslims dead and displaced tens of thousands more, demonstrated the ease with which fear and hatred can be weaponised in pursuit of political power. Modi’s right-wing populism, rooted in Hindu fascism, enabled and cemented his rise to national prominence. Today, South Africa risks following a similarly destructive trajectory as political elites increasingly try to incite xenophobia against African and Asian migrants to redirect anger over a devastating economic and social crisis onto vulnerable scapegoats.

The 2008 pogroms in South Africa, when over 60 migrants and people from ethnic minorities were killed and many thousands displaced, marked the first dark moment in the country’s post-apartheid history. Alliances between local politicians and thugs scapegoated migrants for the country’s deep-rooted economic inequalities, even though they were often victims of the same systemic neglect. Now, fifteen years later, the same dynamics persist, but the scale and intensity of xenophobia have evolved, with new flashpoints and actors emerging.

One of the most alarming developments in recent years has been the rise of Operation Dudula, a vigilante movement targeting migrants. On 16 June 2021, a day of deep historical significance as South Africa commemorates the Soweto Uprising of 1976, Dudula held its first march in Soweto. Operation Dudula, like other xenophobic outfits, actively tried to present itself as a continuation of the struggle for national liberation, this time with people like impoverished Zimbabweans working in the informal economy and small-time Pakistani shopkeepers being cast as the enemies of the people.

Dudula, adopting a militaristic posture, went on to organise ‘raids’ on migrant-owned businesses, forcibly evict migrant families from their homes, and patrol communities to identify and expel migrants. In several townships, Dudula’s actions created a climate of fear not only for migrants but also for South African-born residents who refused to participate in these raids.

Despite the group’s openly violent and unlawful actions, the state’s response was tepid. The police allowed them to act with impunity and some political leaders tacitly endorsed Dudula’s activities, viewing the movement as a means to channel public frustration without addressing systemic failures. This lack of accountability emboldened Dudula, but the organisation never achieved any sort of mass support. Although it received huge media coverage, it was never able to evolve beyond being small groups of thugs with a media-savvy privately educated leader.

Political and other elites justify their xenophobia in the name of the poor but, strikingly, the mass-based organisations of the poor and the working class are mostly not xenophobic. During the 2008 pogrom, Abahlali baseMjondolo, the radical movement of the urban poor with over 150,000 paid-up members and many more supporters, bravely contested the xenophobic attacks and has remained resolutely opposed to xenophobia. It includes migrants among its leaders and on the platforms at its big public events and worked with Congolese migrants to found the radical Lumumbist Congolese Solidarity Campaign, with which it has a close relationship.

The trade union movement has a long history of opposing xenophobia and including migrants in leadership positions. This remains true of many unions, including the metalworkers’ union, Numsa, the largest union in Africa. But in 2019, Zwelinzima Vavi, then General Secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), broke from this consensus, tweeting a photograph of Muslim migrant shopkeepers walking to a mosque with the caption: “These are new shop owners going for midday prayers. Too many things going wrong?”

In the national election in May this year, a number of contenders placed xenophobia at the centre of their platforms. Herman Mashaba and Gayton McKenzie, both Trumpian figures, were among the worst, but most voters didn’t buy it. Well less than 40% of eligible voters bothered to participate in the election, and Mashaba’s party won 1.2% of the vote while McKenzie’s party won 2.1%. But despite their failure at the polls, Mashaba and McKenzie both get regular and, in the case of McKenzie, fawning media coverage, creating the impression that migration is a hot-button issue for voters.

In recent days and weeks, xenophobic rhetoric has dangerously escalated, with the media and politicians taking the leading role. Claims that migrant-owned stores are “poisoning children” with expired or tainted goods have circulated widely. One video circulating on WhatsApp goes a step further and claims that Pakistani shopkeepers are poisoning the water supply. McKenzie declared: “We need to close all these shops. We can’t be debating this matter. The shops should be closed and owners arrested to be deported. What more do we want to see, more children dying?”

There is a genuine issue in South Africa with a long list of pesticides that have been banned in most other countries but continue to circulate freely. With the state not providing refuse removal to informal settlements, people often buy dangerous pesticides to deal with rat infestations. There have been occasions where, tragically, children have died. But this is a result of the failure of the state to remove refuse and to regulate dangerous toxins, not a conspiracy by migrant shopkeepers to poison South African children.

In response to the tragic deaths of six children in Naledi, Soweto, due to terbufos poisoning a coalition of civil society organisations and trade unions issued a report highlighting systemic regulatory failures. The coalition, operating under the South African People’s Tribunal on AgroToxins, emphasized that these fatalities are a direct consequence of inadequate regulation and enforcement concerning hazardous pesticides.

The report focuses particularly on terbufos, an organophosphate pesticide banned in the European Union since 2009 due to its high toxicity but still in use in South Africa. The coalition criticizes the continued manufacture and export of such chemicals from Europe to developing countries, labelling it a “racist double standard in the pesticides trade.”

Despite all this, many politicians and much of the media continue to speak as if migrant shopkeepers are part of a sinister conspiracy to murder South African children. At the same time, another folk devil is being carefully fabricated as the state presents all informal miners working shafts abandoned by mining companies as both “illegal foreigners” and “dangerous criminals.”

Informal miners, known as ‘zama zamas’, are poor men from across Southern Africa, many from South Africa, taking on dangerous and difficult work to survive an economic crisis. Some work under criminal gangs, but many are just ordinary men trying to survive.

In recent days, a crisis has unfolded in Stilfontein, in the North West Province, where zama zama miners have been trapped underground by the police who have blocked supplies of food and water in an attempt to force the miners to surface. Families have gathered at the site, anxiously awaiting news of their loved ones.

Instead of treating this as a humanitarian crisis, the state has responded with hostility. Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said: “We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out. They will come out. Criminals are not to be helped; criminals are to be prosecuted. We didn’t send them there.” There are real fears that men may die, or may have already died, in the mines.

The active attempts by political elites, in and out of the ANC, to incite xenophobic hatreds and scapegoat migrants cannot be separated from the broader economic and social crises. Official unemployment rates exceed 30%, with youth unemployment surpassing 60%. Hunger is widespread, and 27% of children under five years old are affected by stunting, a condition resulting from chronic undernutrition that impairs growth and development.

The recent termination of the COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant, coupled with harsh austerity measures in the mid-term budget, has exacerbated the crisis.  At the same time systemic corruption and mismanagement have further eroded public trust. In this climate of desperation, migrants have become convenient scapegoats for the political class.

The 2008 anti-migrant pogrom should serve as a warning for politicians like Ntshavheni, Mashaba, and McKenzie who, with Trumpian recklessness, try to ignite the fires of xenophobia. Modi’s success in building an effective hard right project on the back of a pogrom should serve a warning to all who aspire to a democratic future for South Africa.

South Africa must confront its systemic inequalities head-on and reject the politics of scapegoating. A broad based united left front, rooted in the mass organisations rather than NGOs and tiny sectarian organisations, is urgently needed.

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Photograph Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain

The results are in and the clear winner of the 2024 U.S. presidential election is undeniably Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  Netanyahu is now freer than ever to pursue his genocidal campaign against Palestinians; demolish Lebanon; create more illegal settlements on the West Bank; and even annex the West Bank itself if he chooses to do so.

There is no better indication of the close relations between Donald Trump and Netanyahu than the recent announcement of the exchange of ambassadors to their two capitals.  Netanyahu has named Yechiel Leiter, a settler activist and a former aide who was Netanyahu’s chief of staff when the prime minister served as finance minister years ago.  They are very close.  Leiter was also an aide to the late war hawk Ariel Sharon, when Prime Minister Sharon served in the Knesset.

As a young man, Leiter was a member of the Jewish Defense League, which was formed by right-wing rabbi, Meir Kahane.  The group was designated a terrorist organization following the discovery of its plan to bomb a mosque in Los Angeles.  Leiter himself founded a U.S.-based fund (the One Israel Fund) that supplies security equipment and financial assistance to the illegal settlements on the West Bank.  Leiter is doing his best to expand the West Bank settlements, and he and his family currently live in one of them.  At a funeral for one of his sons, Leiter crudely denounced President Joe Biden for pursuing a cease-fire.

Following the Leiter appointment, Trump announced that former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee, would be his ambassador to Israel.  Huckabee opposes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and claims that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”  Like Leiter, he favors permanent Israeli control over the West Bank, a term he will not use, preferring the Israeli terms “Judea” and “Samaria.”

During a visit to Israel, Huckabee said that “there is no such thing as a West Bank.”  As for the illegal settlements, Huckabee similarly says that “there is no such thing as a settlement.”  He calls them “communities…cities…neighborhoods.”  To cap it all off, Huckabee emphasizes “there’s no such thing as an occupation.”  Huckabee, moreover, is a Christian evangelical, and Trump is a hero to conservative Christians for ending Roe vs. Wade.  Trump often referred to “my beautiful Christians” at campaign rallies.

In his first term, Trump’s ambassador to Israel was David Friedman, who infamously referred to a liberal Jewish organization as “worse than kapos,” meaning Nazi collaborators.  Like Leiter, Friedman wanted Israel to annex the West Bank.  In his second term, Trump will have real estate developer Steven Witkoff as a special envoy to the Middle East.  Witkoff was a key fund raiser for the Trump campaign, raising “six-figure and seven-figure donations” from Jewish donors.

With Trump in the White House, Netanyahu will no longer have to worry about U.S. efforts to get more humanitarian aid into Gaza.  The Biden administration sent a warning letter to Israel in October to ensure the opening of more aid channels into Gaza, but the thirty-day deadline was ignored, and humanitarian aid is at its lowest levels since the start of the war.  At the same time, the bombing of civilian communities and civilian shelters has gotten worse.  Israel has simply refused to comply with the requests that were contained in the letter signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

In addition to ignoring the U.S. demarche, the Netanyahu government went out of its way to embarrass the Biden administration once again.  Netanyahu sent a special envoy, Ron Dermer, to the United States with a plan for a ceasefire in Lebanon.  Before going to Washington, however, Dermer flew to Mar-a-Lago to brief Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, on the details of the plan.  Netanyahu has described the plan as a “gift” to Donald Trump.  Trump, for his part, has already told Netanyahu that he can “do what you have to do” against Hezbollah and Hamas.

The discussions in Mar-a-Lago appear to be a violation of the 1799 Logan Act, which criminalizes negotiations between the United States and a foreign government by an unauthorized American citizen.  But no one seems to care about the law these days.  Dermer, who like Leiter was born in the United States, has a very close relationship with Kushner.  Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Forces appear to be making plans to ramp up ground operations in Lebanon.

The White House and the Congress over the years have played to the worse sides of  Israeli prime ministers, but Netanyahu has always gotten the best treatment that Washington has to offer.  The catering to his militarism must stop, but there is simply no chance of this as long as Trump and his acolytes form the national security team in the White House.

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Image by Greg Bulla.

Immigration to the U.S. southern border has long been subject to cold-hearted racial demagoguery. The Statue of Liberty may have welcomed some of the “huddled masses” from Europe at different times, but no such welcome was ever given to people from south of the border. There, a different attitude has prevailed.

Donald Trump’s MAGA hate speech includes such descriptions of non-European immigrants as “stone cold killers,” “immigrant criminals from the dungeons of the world,” “rapist,” “pet eaters” — or “invaders” from across the southern border. Some may find Trump’s words pleasing and others dreadful, but he is far from original.

The story begins in 1846 when U.S. President Polk— encouraged by the slavocracy eager for more land to expand their operations and by the merchant capitalists looking for a gateway to the Pacific — set about to rip off the northern half of Mexico from the rest of that country. Among the European Americans who followed their “Manifest Destiny” west to newly conquered lands after the war in 1848, there was debate about whether the new U.S. territories would be “slave” or “free.” But there was neither debate nor doubt about how to receive the non-white immigrants who made it to those promising lands.

In a Congressional hearing in the 1880s a member of the House committee on immigration questioned a representative from California: “Two years ago California came before this committee and stated herself in opposition to the Chinese and Japanese immigrant and in favor of Chinese and Japanese exclusion, stating that they wanted to develop a great big white State in California, a white man’s country; and now you come before us and want unlimited Mexican immigration . . . I cannot see the consistency.”¹

But there was consistency. Chinese and Japanese workers were among the first waves of non-whites whose labor would lay the groundwork for large scale agriculture and the California dream that would not be theirs. But as important as their labor was it came with a defect making them far from the ideal workers white employers desired: They were difficult to remove thus posing an unacceptable threat to white demographic dominance.2 Mexican labor, however, was close at hand and easily deportable, a quality that made it, by the early 1920s, the immigrant labor of choice.

The southern border became, not the firm line of defense of national sovereignty as our contemporary demagogues would have us see it, but the portal for the low wage laborers on whose backs an empire was being built. But the door was meant to be a revolving one and herein lay the conflict.

Through the years the southern border has been the scene of a schizoid dance of immigration. There were times when employers on U.S. farms, factories, and railroads, couldn’t get enough of those “hard working,” “uncomplaining” Mexican (or Central American) workers—think of the Bracero program during the World War II years.³ Then there were other times marked by furious nativist-driven campaigns to stop the flow and rid the land of “criminals,” “disease ridden delinquents,” “drug runners,” “ants,” “communists” or “terrorists”— depending on the era. Notable in this are the years 1930, 1954, and 1994.

In the early 1930s hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were deported or otherwise forced out of the U.S. having been made convenient scapegoats for a brutal Depression economy. The deportations were massive and indiscriminate and accompanied by a ferocious campaign of racial intimidation and threats so intense that many of those who left the U.S., did so on their own out of fear of violence. Forty to sixty percent of those deported or repatriated were U.S. citizens, and many were children.

1954 was the year of Operation Wetback, a militarized campaign of terror and mass deportation that resulted in the suffering and death of many immigrants. Operation Wetback was principally an ethnic cleansing campaign. Its goal was to reverse the “troubling” growth of Mexican and Mexican American communities in California and the Southwest. But the deportation campaign ultimately failed, not because it wasn’t well planned or brutally executed, but because the immigrant communities had become interwoven in the economic and social fabric of border states. After a military style mass deportation of more than a million immigrants which caused terrible suffering, American authorities appealed to Mexicans to return to the U.S.! The California and southwest economy could not function without them. ⁴

In the intervening years since Operation Wetback the structural dependence of U.S. capitalism on cheap, vulnerable labor has increased. At the same time, one of the foundations of white supremacist control and identity, the demographic dominance of white people, is more challenged than ever. What began as a labor system largely restricted to California and the southwest has now become a key part of the labor structure for the entire country. In places throughout the U.S., and especially in the cities, essential jobs from service to construction to meat packing, child care and elder care, are dependent on immigrant workers. And the countryside? Today nearly 90% of U.S. farm and dairy workers are immigrants, roughly half undocumented.

Walk the streets of major cities, go to the school rooms and work places and the demographic future greets you in all its multiplicity. This is what lies at the heart of the MAGA-fascist immigrant frenzy— a clash of demographics.

For the nativist who has bought into the notion that the U.S. is a “white man’s land” and must always remain so — this is the metastasizing of a nightmare. For those who view humanity through a broader lens, it is a twist of historical irony and the harbinger of a potentially better world.

The Crazy Dance

In the 1980s President Reagan tried to alter the crazy dance of immigration with an amnesty for what were then three million immigrants deprived of documents.⁵ Today, 38 years on, there are at least 11 to 12 million people with this status. Thirty-eight years have passed since there has been any viable path to the most basic “legal residency” for those millions. And the reason for this is no great mystery: No matter how much verbal fog obscures it, the U.S. economy depends on their labor, their cheap labor.

U.S. capitalism admits to no apartheid nor racial caste system, and yet it can’t function – and compete — without workers deprived of basic rights. The endless discussions and promises over the last decades about “comprehensive immigration reform,” have been so entangled in their own contradictions that one residing in Alice’s Wonderland would find it beyond the pale . . . with no end in sight.

Beginning in the 1990s we witnessed with Clinton, Bush and Obama, the border wall constructed, laws criminalizing immigrants enacted, a spectacularly cold blooded decision to drive refugees from NAFTA⁶ into the desert where many died, and an endless raging frenzy over “border security.” Meanwhile, beginning especially under Obama, immigrant detention centers sprouted like diseased deformities on the landscape. In the mid 1990s California’s conservative governor Pete Wilson tried to solve the state’s “demographic problem.” It was called Proposition 187, a draconian plan of ethnic removal that sought to enlist teachers and healthcare workers to its cause. The ballot measure passed easily but the plan failed. Massive resistance by teachers, medical workers, and youth from the immigrant communities, played an important role. The fight to defeat Proposition 187 was a watershed for California. It actually secured greater respect and rights for immigrants, much to the chagrin of the nativists and white supremacists. And they have not forgotten that defeat!

When campaigning for office the first time in 2016, Trump cited and praised Operation Wetback. He even mimicked Herbert Brownell, the Secretary of State in 1954 who, at the height of that Operation, threatened to shoot immigrants to discourage them from coming. Trump, not to be outdone in the verbal thuggery department, said at the time he would machine gun them. And we saw how those words aroused people to horrible actions in 2019 in places like the garlic festival in Gilroy, California and a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.⁷

And now in the Trump2 era, a more rabid fascist nationalism targets the broader non-white community, and non-white immigrants in particular, not only as inferiors, but overtly as racial enemies, and poisoners of blood!

Trump2 is better organized, with a more indoctrinated base, possessed with a histrionic passion for preserving white dominance, or white supremacy, and with the added zeal of racial animus and Christian fundamentalism. It is also linked to the more desperate moment as the U.S. empire confronts greater challenges to its global dominance. The MAGA fascists look to rouse the populace with a racial zeal for the imperial tests ahead.

The depth of Trumpite insanity was spoken to by the MAGA groupie Elon Musk in a conversation with Joe Rogan on November 4 when he referred to then upcoming election as an “existential” moment: “If the Democrats win the election they will legalize enough illegals to turn the swing states. And [then] everywhere will be like California. There will be no escape” (my emphasis)–“Everywhere will be like California.” Such is the vision of hell for the MAGA racial fanatics.

To be sure Trump’s MAGA fascism is more than an immigration and demographics project. It is the fervent vision of a U.S. returning to the unassailable heights of global domination. The glue that holds this MAGA project together bears a striking resemblance to its German counterpart in the 1930s. Racial demagogy, white (instead of Aryan) supremacy, (and misogyny) at its core. While not new, in the world of today, it’s a lunatic vision and its lust for a racial reckoning is more dangerous than it’s ever been.

Postscript:

The opposite of this MAGA vision sees defense of humanity as a whole as our sacred responsibility. And that includes the defense and preservation of this little, abused planet of ours. The MAGAites are going to have to be defeated if we are to succeed in uplifting our humanity. Along with that, the system out of which this MAGA nightmare has arisen will also have to go. Will the coming assaults on immigrants be a spark for a broader, more radical social movement?

¹ Stoll, Steven, The Fruits of Natural Advantage, UC Press, 1998 p.152

² Throughout the 1800s western nativists waged war on Asian immigrants. This included racist pogroms that literally burned down Chinese communities on the west coast. In 1882 the nativists succeeded in passing the Chinese Exclusion Act.

³ The Bracero program was a wartime measure begun in 1942 that brought millions of Mexican workers under contract to work in California and other states. Their contract stipulated that they had to return to Mexico after their period of contractual labor ended. The Bracero program ended in 1964 but the need for Mexican labor did not.

⁴ Operation Wetback was a militarized operation led by a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General. At least one million workers and their families were deported, sometimes deep into Mexico far from their homes. Some deportees were dumped inside the Mexican border without food or water. Hundreds of deaths resulted.

⁵ In 1986 Congress passed the Simpson/Mazzoli Act (Immigration Reform and Control Act or IRCA) that provided for an amnesty for 3 million undocumented workers to legalize their status. In addition a program for growers allowed for many additional legalizations. One of the aims of this amnesty was to assure employers of a more stable workforce. Simpson/ Mazzoli provided for sanctions for employers who continued to hire undocumented workers. This was meant to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants. But this provision was not enforced and following Simpson /Mazzoli the flow of undocumented immigrants into the labor force continued and increased.

⁶ The North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994. Among its effects were lowering tariffs on U.S. produced corn. The subsequent flooding of the Mexican market with cheap U.S. corporate grown corn caused corn prices to fall and hundreds of thousands of small Mexican farmers were ruined, a fact that the mainstream media has largely ignored. Many displaced farmers and rural workers, to survive, went north. But just at that time a border wall was constructed in such a way as to force them to make their way north through dangerous mountainous and desert terrains leading to hundreds and then thousands of deaths. According to one estimate at least 8,000 immigrants have died crossing the Mexico – U.S. border since the latter 1990s.

⁷ In August 2019 a mass shooter killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in one of the deadliest attacks targeting Latinos in modern U.S. history. This followed a shooting in Gilroy the previous month where three people were killed and eleven wounded. The shooters in both cases were white, those injured and killed, mainly Latinos.

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Hæn-fugul (hen), Book of Hours; England, c. 1300; Walters Art Museum, MS W.102, f. 77v.

People think they know lots about chickens, and you’d think they would: There are four living chickens for every living person in the world—and since chickens are domestic fowl (a separate subspecies from their wild ancestor, the red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia), all of them live among humans.

Still, chickens are rarely celebrated in our culture and seldom given the respect they deserve. I once sat next to a man on an airplane who detailed for me at length the attributes of the species: they are stupid, disgusting, filthy, cowardly, occasionally cannibalistic automatons, he said.

How had he acquired this opinion? It turned out he had worked at a factory farmwhere most chickens are raised for food in the United States in a dirty, overcrowded warehouse resembling a prison camp.

This is not the best place to get to know someone. Nor is a dinner plate. Yet, for most of us, our relationship with chickens is generally of a culinary nature. In fact, the first definition of the word “chicken” I encountered on the internet doesn’t even mention that it’s a bird. It’s “the flesh of a chicken used for food.”

According to the National Chicken Council, the average American eats more than one hundred pounds of chicken every year, making it the most popular meat consumed in the United States. Worldwide, some 70 billion birds yearly are roasted, boiled, Kentucky Fried, and turned into everything from McNuggets to the famous “Jewish penicillin,” chicken soup.

Over the decades of sharing my life with successive flocks of these affectionate, industrious, and resourceful birds, I’ve learned that almost everything people “know” about chickens is wrong.

At the Agway feed store, my friend Gretchen ordered 12 chicks of the same breed she’d first owned—Black Sex-Links—for my husband Howard and me. They are so named because the females can be identified upon hatching by their all-black color, averting the problem of raising a coop full of jealous roosters. She hand-raised them in a heated trailer on the farm.

Howard and I often visited them there, holding one or two peeping chicks in our hands, on our laps, or tucked into our sweaters, speaking softly to each so she would know us. When they were old enough—no longer balls of fluff but sleek, slim black miniatures of their eventual adult selves—they moved into our barn. Our travels in the Chicken Universe had begun.

At first, I was afraid they’d run away or become lost. We prepared a cozy, secure home for them on the bottom floor of our barn, with wood shavings scattered over the dirt floor, a dispenser for fresh water, a trough for chick feed, some low perches made from dowels, and a hay-lined nest box made from an old rabbit hutch left over from one of the barn’s previous denizens, in which they could, in the future, lay eggs.

Chickens need to be safely closed in at night to protect them from predators, but by day, we didn’t want to confine them; we wanted to give them free run of the yard. But how could they possibly understand that they lived here now?

Once we let them out, would they even recognize their space in the barn and go back in it? When I was in seventh grade, my family moved to a new house; on my first afternoon there, I literally got lost in my own backyard. Could these six-week-old chicks be expected to know better?

Gretchen assured me there would be no problem.

“Leave them in the pen for 24 hours,” she told me. “Then you can let them out, and they’ll stick around.

They’ll go back in again when it starts to get dark.”

“But how do they know?” I asked.

“They just do,” she said. “Chickens just know these things.”

When I found them all perched calmly back in their coop before dusk, I saw that Gretchen was right.

In fact, chickens know many things, some from the moment they are born. Like all members of the order in which they are classified, the Galliformes, or game birds, just-hatched baby chickens are astonishingly mature and mobile, able to walk, peck, and run only hours after leaving the egg.

This developmental strategy is called precocial. Like its opposite, the altricial strategy (employed by creatures such as humans and songbirds, who are born naked and helpless), the precocial strategy was sculpted by eons of adaptation to food and predators. If your nest is on the ground, as most game birds’ are, it’s a good idea to get your babies out of there as quickly as possible before someone comes to eat them. So newborn game birds hatch covered in down, eyes open, and leave the nest within 24 hours.

They followed me everywhere, first cheeping like the tinkling of little bells, then clucking in animated adult discussion. If I were hanging out the laundry, they would check what was in the laundry basket. If I were weeding a flower bed, they would join me, raking the soil with their strong, scaly feet, then stepping backward to see what was revealed. (Whenever I worked with soil, I suspect they assumed I was digging for worms.)

When Howard and I would eat at the picnic table under the big silver maple, the Ladies would accompany us. When my father-in-law came to help my husband build a pen for Christopher Hogwood, who was still a piglet, the Ladies milled underfoot to supervise every move. The hens were clearly interested in the project, pecking at the shiny nails, standing tall to better observe the use of tools, and clucking a running commentary all the while.

Before this experience, Howard’s dad would have been the first to say that he didn’t think chickens were that smart. But they changed his mind. After a few hours, I noticed he had begun addressing them. Picking up a hammer they were examining, he might say, directly and respectfully, “Pardon me, Ladies”—as if he were speaking to my mother-in-law and me when we got in the way. But when their human friends are inside, and this is much of the time, the Ladies explore on their own.

A chicken can move as fast as nine miles an hour, which can take you pretty far, and ours have always been free to go anywhere they like. But ours have intuited our property lines and confine their travels to its boundaries. They have never crossed the street. For years, they never hopped across the low stone wall separating our land from our closest neighbors. That came later—and it was not the result of any physical change in the landscape but the outcome of a change in social relationships among their human friends.

My travels in the Chicken Universe have been a portal to an unknown kingdom. We all see birds daily, and chickens are among the most familiar birds. Yet again and again, as I watch the hens and roosters in my life, I am reminded how movingly like us birds can be—and how thrillingly different.

This adapted excerpt is from What the Chicken Knows by Sy Montgomery (Atria Books, 2024) and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with permission from Atria Books. It was adapted and produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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In 2016 Steve Bannon told Donald Trump that if he played his cards right, he could become
“the Roosevelt of the Right.”  That is, he could create a coalition of ultra-wealthy capitalists, small entrepreneurs, and discontented workers and bind them together under the flag of cultural nationalism.  The key to doing this was to campaign against “the System” – not the system of capitalist oligarchy, of course, but the structures of administrative regulation, relatively free trade, and military commitments abroad that defined what Trump and Bannon called the “Deep State.”  The key to their electoral success was to cast MAGA as the movement of systemic change and the Democrats as the party of the status quo – a trap into which the supporters of Biden and Harris blindly fell.  If Trump took steps toward becoming the Roosevelt of the Right, the Democrats looked more and more like Herbert Hoovers of the Left.

The pain and suffering inflicted in defeated Democrats and independent liberals by the train wreck of November 5^th is real and understandable.  That many of them have learned very little from this experience is revealed each night on CNN and MSNBC, whose anchors and guests can’t stop complaining about Trump’s rude attacks on established bureaucratic practices and foreign policy norms.  For example, they repeatedly call him a “felon,” unwilling to admit that trying to use the judicial system to discredit him was not only a failure but a serious political mistake and a diversion.  Liberals turn to the courts when they are losing the battle for hearts and minds in the streets, workplaces, and legislatures. Unfortunately, Stormy Daniels did not supply them with a program to win back the alienated working class.

What did the voters want?

Exit interviews and other analyses reveal that those who voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all were reacting to two major problem-sets, one socioeconomic, the other ethnocultural.  The socioeconomic issues included high prices and stagnant wages, growing personal debt, lack of opportunities to get ahead, the impact of deindustrialization and automation, skyrocketing inequality, and feelings of being abandoned and disrespected by the “elites”.  The ethnocultural problems involved perceived threats to people’s identities as Americans, males, whites, Christians, non-college educated workers, Arab-Americans, country people, or members of other groups sensing a decline in their status and opportunities relative to those of more favored groups.

What would it take to solve problems like these?  Clearly —  or so it seems to me – these are structural problems requiring changes  in existing socioeconomic and ethnocultural systems.  But the Democrats licking their wounds would rather debate whether Kamala Harris lost because she was too progressive, as conservatives or centrists say, or because she wasn’t progressive enough, as Bernie Sanders and others on the Left believe.

The answer, I’m sorry to say, is “both.”

With respect to socioeconomic issues, Harris was not progressive enough.  She pointed to reforms adopted by the Biden Administration that were helpful to working people but not remotely adequate to solve the underlying problems causing mass insecurity and suffering.  Harris would not even commit to increasing taxes on the super-rich – but, if she had, she would still have had a credibility deficit.  This is because the measures advocated by progressives like Sanders – reforms such as taxing the rich and raising the minimum wage – do not have the power to correct major structural malfunctions related to deindustrialization, automation, or even the challenge of low-wage immigration.  More radical change is needed.

What sort of change?  Consider the undocumented worker issue, so potent in influencing even the votes of Hispanic Americans.  The economists agree that the U.S. has a serious labor shortage – but low-wage immigration clearly undermines the income levels of low-wage workers living in the same region. This problem could be mitigated, even eliminated, by adopting the sort of economic planning, with input from local communities, that would permit the government to guarantee high-wage jobs and public welfare subsidies in areas of high immigration.  But so long as progressivism as defined by Democratic neoliberals excludes the possibility of serious economic planning and collective action, the Dems will be incapable of offering credible solutions to the real problems of our market-driven system.

What about the ethnocultural problems – the identity-based insecurities and ambitions mentioned earlier? Some say that, with regard to these issues, the Harris campaign was too progressive, in the sense that, in addition to economic reforms, it advocated women’s reproductive and workplace rights, racial equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and protection of the interests of other marginalized groups such as undocumented workers and prisoners.  But the problem is not that liberals fight for the rights and interests of historically oppressed groups.  It is that, by accepting the zero-sum rules of the existing oligarchical system, they declare less oppressed groups to be “privileged” and lump them in with elite oppressors.  Not surprisingly, this threatens and alienates groups that are only relatively privileged, and who are actually potential allies against the oligarchy and its political camp followers.

Let’s be clear about this.  The historic oppression of some groups, continuing into the present, is a fact.  It is also a fact that systemic oppression to some extent benefits everyone who is not a member of the most oppressed group.  For example, the cheap cotton produced by slaves provided jobs for white workers in the clothing industry as well as consumer goods for everyone who could afford them.  But to be white rather than Black, male rather than female, straight rather than gay, gives straight white males only relative advantages over the members of more oppressed groups.  It clearly does not relieve them of oppression by far more powerful elites.  In fact, their relative superiority over other groups is part of a sleazy divide-and-conquer game used by those with oligarchical power to keep them in line.

People do not live “by bread alone”; even if relatively comfortable, they will fight to defend the existence and interests of the groups they strongly identify with.  Even so, it seems undeniable that socioeconomic struggles and precarity incline many of those suffering either to challenge more powerful groups or to seek scapegoats among groups considered their social inferiors or pariahs.  MAGA’s identification of immigrants as rapists and criminals was a classic exercise in such scapegoating.

Cui bono?  Who benefits from such a conflation of economic and moral threats?  Of course, those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder would much rather have troubled workers and insecure middleclass folks punching down than punching up!  The MAGA movement thrives on this dynamic, and the Democrats do not yet seem to understand that the way to challenge it is not just to defend the interests of the most downtrodden groups but to relieve their suffering – and that of the slightly less downtrodden – by punching up!

The enemy is the oligarchy

How to punch up?  Consider that our political system offers voters a choice between two parties, one more “liberal” and the other more “conservative,” both of which claim to represent all classes of Americans, from workers and small entrepreneurs to the great capitalists who control our key financial, manufacturing, communications, and service companies.  The roughneck working on an oil rig and Elon Musk in his Austin, Texas compound are both Republicans. The scholarship student at a march against genocide and the CEO of Lockheed Martin are both Democrats.  Some bargaining between the elements of each party coalition is permitted, but the masters of the economy maintain and modify the basic rules of the game.  So, whichever party citizens vote for, the wealthiest, most powerful groups in our society remain in the driver’s seat.  Whichever party is elected, the solutions to certain problems that might alter the system to the elites’ disadvantage are automatically placed out of bounds, and thinking seriously about them becomes taboo.

Consider the weapons industry, for example.  Producing weapons and weapons delivery systems is the healthiest, most profitable sector of the U.S. manufacturing economy.  The military-industrial complex is an oligarchical industry, with profits guaranteed by the government, that kills millions of people and destroys property around the globe.  Suppose that you don’t like this situation and want to slash the military budgets and redirect this production to peacetime uses.  Forget it!  You will be called irresponsible, pro-Russian, pro-Chinese, AND anti-worker, since you will be threatening jobs as well as investments.  The Democrats will be as opposed to your proposal as the Republicans – if not more so.  This is because the same oligarchs owning the same or related companies, and financing the careers of the same or related politicians, set the rules and define the limits of permissible discussion in both political parties.

What is vicious about this is not merely that elite power makes a farce of democracy, but also that it continually generates solution-less problems.  Thus, we export weapons of destruction as if there were no possibility of converting military production into a program to produce goods and services to satisfy basic human needs.  We fight over immigration as if there were no such thing as a planned economy capable of remedying our labor shortage without lowering wage rates and bankrupting social services.  And we choose sides in disputes between relatively oppressed and less oppressed identity groups as if there were no way to reduce competition between them for unnecessarily scarce resources and economic opportunities.

What James Carville might say, if he understood the situation better, is “It’s the system, stupid!”  If we do not recognize that it is the system of capitalist oligarchy and its political servants that limit the possibilities of conflict resolution and generate most of this discontent, we will keep fighting unnecessary battles that Democrats are unlikely to win against a movement that claims (however falsely) to be anti-system.

In a nutshell: the Republican victory of November 5 was not a rejection of the Left – it was the result of a vacuum on the Left.  The MAGA Republicans allowed themselves to consider forms of change that many consider taboo, for example, making radical cuts in federal regulatory agencies.  These changes will make the plight of working people worse, not better, but they point in an instructive direction.  Those on the Left must also permit themselves to consider forms of system change that are now taboo.

Critics may brand proposals to reconstruct a destructive neoliberal system “socialist,” “communist,” “anarchist,” or what have you, but if they point the way to shifting power from the oligarchs to the people, working people will respond positively.  They are already anti-system.  The challenge now is to make it clear to everyone that Trumpism is nothing more than a disguise for oligarchical tyranny, and that we can only control the economy by owning it and operating it collectively.

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Image by Getty and Unsplash+

Arab and Muslim American voters did not remove Democrats from office, nor did they cost Kamala Harris the Oval Office. They merely sent a strong message that Palestine matters, not only to Arabs and Muslims but to many Americans as well.

The ones who cost the Democrats the elections are the Democrats themselves. Their humiliating defeat on November 5 was due largely to their undeniable role in the Israeli war and genocide in Gaza.

Peter Beinart put it best in his November 7 op-ed in the New York Times, entitled “Democrats Ignored Gaza and Brought Down Their Party.”

“Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media,” according to Beinart, has “triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation”. The writer correctly indicates that the core of this activism was “Black Americans and the young”.

Undeniably, for the first time in US election history, Palestine has become a domestic American political issue – a nightmare realization for those who labored to maintain US foreign policy in the Middle East as an exclusive Israeli domain.

Aside from Arab voters, black voters and voters from other minority groups who prioritized Palestine, many white Americans felt the same way. This claim is particularly important as it suggests that American voters are challenging the identity politics paradigm, and are now thinking around common struggles, values and morality.

“Democrats may no longer be able to rely on young voters to boost numbers, as Harris appears on track to have the lowest support among voters aged 18-29 in this century,” a report in the British Independent newspaper noted. Knowing the relatively strong support for Palestine among young Americans, US politicians have much to worry about in coming elections.

We already know that support for Palestine is overwhelmingly strong among young Democrats. A poll conducted by Gallup in March 2023 indicated that, for the first time, Democrats’ “sympathies .. now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49% versus 38%.”

Even more astonishing, the overall US Democratic constituency is more pro-Palestine than Israel. According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last April, the overall young American population “are more likely to sympathize with the Palestinian people than the Israeli people.” While a third of adults under 30 sympathized “entirely or mostly” with Palestinians, only 14% sympathized with the Israelis.

These numbers did not seem to matter to the Democrats who continued to take for granted the votes of youth and other minority groups. They made a grave mistake.

The Biden Administration has played a central role in funding and sustaining the Israeli war machine, thus facilitating the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Millions of Americans took notice and acted upon their sense of collective rage to punish the Democrats for what they had done to the Palestinian people.

According to a report prepared for Brown University’s Costs of War project, the Biden Administration has granted Israel a record of at least $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel in the first year of the war. Additionally, according to a report published on October 4 by the non-profit investigative newspaper ProPublica, “the US has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry” to Israel since October 7, 2023.

Merely hours after the US presidential election results were announced, the Israeli Ministry of Defense signed a deal “to acquire 25 F-15IA combat jets from U.S. manufacturer Boeing for $5.2 billion, with an option to get 25 more,” according to Defense News. In other words, Biden remains unrepentant.

Biden, Harris and others may twist the logic to justify their support for Israel in any way they wish. However, there can be no denying that their administration has played a leading role in the Israeli genocide in Gaza. For this, they were duly and deservedly penalized by American voters.

The understandable euphoria among many of Palestine’s supporters in the US notwithstanding, we must not harbor any illusions. Neither President-elect Donald Trump nor his entourage of right-wing politicians will be the saviors of Palestine.

We must recall that it was Trump’s first term in office that paved the road to the complete marginalization of the Palestinians. He did so by granting Israel sovereignty over occupied East Jerusalem, recognizing the illegal settlements as legitimate, waging financial warfare against Palestinians, and attempting to destroy the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, among other actions.

If Trump returns to his old destructive policies in Palestine, another war will certainly start.

This means that the pro-Palestine camp, which has managed to convert solidarity into decisive political action, must not wait for the new US administration to adopt a more sensible political line on Palestine. Judging by the history of Republican support for Israel, no such sensibility should be expected.

Thus, it is time to build on the existing solidarity among all American groups that voted against genocide in the latest elections. This is the perfect opportunity to translate votes into sustained action and pressure so that all aspects of the US government may hear and heed the deafening chants of ‘ceasefire now’, and ‘free, free Palestine.’

This time around, however, these chants are backed by solid evidence that American voters are capable of destabilizing the entire political paradigm, as they did on November 5, 2024.

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Hyper-capitalism is the death knell of democracy. It reduces everything to a commodity, monetizing and pathologizing every aspect of life. The blind faith in markets and unfettered individualism has dismantled the social state, ravaged the environment, and fueled staggering inequality. By divorcing economic activity from its social costs, liberals have obliterated civic culture, creating a vacuum filled by despair and alienation. Into that vacuum emerged a band of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, radical Christian nationalists, and a cruel band of misogynists and neoliberal fascists.

Let’s be clear: liberals have never escaped the shadow of Reagan, whose anti-government rhetoric and racist spectacles reshaped the political landscape, nor that of Milton Friedman, whose dogmatic worship of capitalism and contempt for social responsibility set the stage for decades of exploitation.[1] Liberals have not only failed to dismantle these legacies—they’ve deepened them. They accelerated the war on Black women, expanded the carceral state, gutted the working class with NAFTA, and under Obama, cozied up to bankers while millions of Americans lost their homes and livelihoods in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.[2]

 Instead, liberals clung to the isolating ethos of individualism and a myopic fixation on electoral wins at all costs, turning a blind eye to the loneliness and despair consuming millions of working-class people yearning for community and solidarity. In their neglect, they left an open wound, one that Trump exploited with his grotesque theater of hate. His fraudulent promises of “making America great again” cloaked a cynical swindle in the language of bigotry, lies, and the comforting rituals of spectacle, offering a hollow illusion of unity while solidifying a totalitarian nightmare rooted in the very structures of domination liberals refused to confront.[3]

Liberals bear significant responsibility for the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement. Their complicity lies in more than their failure to challenge the “manufactured ignorance” churned out by today’s totalitarian digital disimagination machines.[4] It is also rooted in their refusal to engage with how youth, people of color, and the displaced experience their suffering and name their realities.

For too long, liberals have failed to recognize education for what it truly is: not merely a service or a tool for economic adaptation, but the very foundation of democratic life. By reducing education to a set of instrumental skills needed to “compete in the global economy” and privileging standardized tests over critical thinking, they have stripped away the radical potential of learning while sabotaging any viable notion of critical pedagogy.[5] Education is not simply about preparing individuals for work; it is about preparing them for the struggle to shape the world. When we turn education into a factory for producing compliant workers rather than active, informed citizens, we sabotage the very principles of democracy.

In their haste to placate the demands of neoliberalism, liberals abandoned the transformative power of education as a vehicle for collective consciousness. They relinquished any serious commitment to the idea that education could—and should—be a force that fosters social awareness, critical inquiry, and solidarity. Instead, they celebrated the hollow rhetoric of “school-to-work” and embraced policies that treated students as nothing more than cogs in a corporate machine.

Too many liberals remained silent as the media—a crucial pillar of democratic society—was surrendered to a far-right agenda and a corrupt corporate elite. In the process, the media has become a tool of misinformation, distorting reality to serve the interests of the powerful. Right-wing media has not just fostered ignorance; it has crafted a society incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction, truth from lies, democracy from authoritarianism.

This is the legacy of liberalism’s failure to defend education as a critical practice for political engagement. By abandoning the radical potential of the classroom and turning a blind eye to the growing monopoly over information, they have paved the way for the erosion of democratic values and social relations. In an age marked by the resurgence of fascism, especially with the election of Trump, Americans find themselves in a world where ignorance is weaponized, and truth is under siege. Lost in the veil of spectacularized stupidity and lies promoted by the likes of Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, and Elon Musk’s X, it is almost impossible to image education as both a defense and enabler of democracy.[6]

Meanwhile young people act not only as cultural critics but also as cultural producers across a variety of platforms—from social media and podcasts to online documentaries, blogs, and art installations—creating new pedagogical spaces to educate and mobilize the public. These spaces are crucial in both raising awareness of the growing threat of fascism and advocating for the dismantling of entrenched systems—such as the influence of money, the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and other elements of a corrosive capitalism—that distort the promise of a radical democracy.

What is unforgivable is the liberal retreat into the mythic fantasy of an America that never existed. Historical amnesia has become a mass pedagogical weapon of depoliticization. This denial left the path wide open for a regime that embodies the darkest truths about the nation’s past and present. Now, we are left with a pedagogy of terror and ignorance—a cultural framework that normalizes violence and enshrines cruelty, allows the planet to destruct, accelerates the war on people of color and women’s reproductive rights. This is the “Third Reich of Dreams” Charlotte Beradt warned about, where the nightmare is both lived and embraced.[7]

Carlos Lozada, writing in The New York Times, captures a stark truth when he declares that neither Trump nor Trumpism are passing fads.[8] Trump and his MAGA movement are not outliers on the fringe of American identity—they are a reflection of what America has become. As Lozada insightfully observes, “Trump has changed us by revealing how normal, how truly American, he is.”[9] He adds that for far too long, the political establishment has clung to the comforting illusion that Trump’s behavior is abnormal, a deviation from the national norm. This belief is reflex, “a defense mechanism, as though accepting his ordinariness is too much to bear.”[10] It is a psychological mechanism meant to shield us from the uncomfortable reality that if Trump is ‘normal,’ then America must be, too. And who among us wants to be roused from the comforting fantasy of American exceptionalism? “It’s more comforting to think of Trumpism as a temporary ailment than a pre-existing condition.”[11]

Trump’s fascist dreamscape is on full display in his administration’s appalling plan to deport between 15 and 20 million undocumented immigrants from the United States. This policy is not just about immigration—it is an act of racial and class warfare, targeting people of color, the poor, and millions fleeing poverty and violence in Latin America. There is more at work here than the long tradition of xenophobia in the United States.[12] There is also the affirmation of the carceral state, which intensifies the criminalization of vulnerable populations, carried out by a state machinery designed to dehumanize and eradicate those deemed unworthy of citizenship.[13] This a form of domestic terrorism writ large as a white nationalist fantasy of exclusion and elimination. As Greg Grandin states Trump’s deportation policy amount to a “nationalization of border brutalism” that have the potential to become a murderous policy of  “extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring.”[14]

Leading this heinous project are Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, and Kristi Noem—hard-right ideologues determined to weaponize the power of the state against entire communities. For instance, Stephen Miller embodies the ideological extremism driving this policy. His declaration that “America is for Americans” chillingly echoes Adolf Hitler’s assertion that “Germany is for Germans.” This is not immigration reform—it is racial cleansing. It is a deliberate strategy of disposability, rooted in white supremacy, and executed through the machinery of the carceral state and the criminalization of everything considered other and disposable.

This policy envisions a dystopian reality: families torn apart, children ripped from their parents, and communities shattered. Immigrants are reduced to mere bodies—loaded into boxcars, shipped to prisons, or expelled from the country altogether. The parallels to Nazi Germany’s genocidal regime are undeniable. The projected image of trains deporting people to prisons and detention camps is a harrowing reminder of where such dehumanization and racial politics inevitably lead. This is not hyperbole; it is history repeating itself.

Trump’s immigration policy is the embodiment of anti-democratic values, a dystopian fascist nightmare that weaponizes fear, hatred, and dehumanization. It strips away any facade of justice or humanity, laying bare the raw brutality of racial exclusion and state violence. This is not policy—it is vigilante terror—crafted to solidify a fascist vision of America built on the ruins of dignity, compassion, and freedom.

At its core, this policy targets the most vulnerable people defined by Trump and his allies as vermin, criminals, and rapists, threatening an imagined America that is white, Christian, and ultranationalist.[15] It feeds off a volatile mixture of racial anxiety and hatred, bolstered by the rhetoric of superiority and power. This is a politics that normalizes cleansing, expelling, imprisoning, and ultimately erasing entire populations, all with chilling efficiency.

This fascist dreamscape echoes the darkest chapters of history. We have seen this before: the language of dehumanization, the machinery of disposability, and the moral collapse, silence and complicity that permits such atrocities. It is a story that must rouse every ounce of outrage and resistance within us. The stakes could not be higher. We must confront this assault on humanity with unrelenting urgency—before it is too late.

Hope may be under siege, but it is not lost. No nightmare of oppression endures unchallenged. The weight of tyranny always carries within it the seeds of resistance. Frederick Douglass’s timeless truth echoes powerfully today: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”[16]  Resistance today is more complex, demanding, and urgent, but I believe this generation of young people will find a way forward. Young people in social movements extending from Black Lives Matter Fridays for Future to March for Our Lives and Extinction Rebellion are already forging a new language of resistance—one that speaks of solidarity, hope, and transformation. Their voices and actions signal a reckoning on the horizon, one we cannot afford to delay.[17] The clock is ticking, but the possibilities for liberation and justice remain alive. Time is short, but the possibilities remain alive. Once again, the promise of a real democracy and forceful resistance may be injured, tattered, and apparently shredded  but it is not lost.

This generation of youth recognizes that education and culture are vital battlegrounds where fascist ideologies wage war through manufactured ignorance, systemic racism, and the deliberate erosion of imagination. They understand that culture and power are not abstract notions but concrete forces that shape agency, politics, and the possibilities for liberation. For these young activists, the relevance of education goes far beyond academic settings—they see it as central to shaping the broader political landscape.

They are acutely aware of what pedagogical terrorism looks like: the suppression of critical thinking, the distortion of history, and the imposition of ideologies designed to stifle dissent and dehumanize the oppressed. At the same time, they understand the transformative potential of an emancipatory pedagogy, one that challenges authoritarianism, fosters critical consciousness, and empowers communities to reclaim their voices and futures. Education, in their eyes, is a democratic space where the fight for justice and freedom begins.

Youth resistance has become a powerful force for the revitalization of cultural politics and the role of free speech and the building of social movements, while stressing the importance of education as a democratizing force. The current wave of protests across the country, particularly in support of Palestinian rights and sovereignty, illustrates this growing momentum. Young people are crafting a critical pedagogy that not only resists the encroachments of authoritarianism but also actively promotes civic engagement and reclaims culture as a site of power, resistance, and empowerment.

In this struggle, they have become “border crossers,” bridging divides between academia and society, theory and practice, education and action. Their work is transformative, mobilizing social movements and redefining education as a tool for resistance and liberation. They remind us that the classroom is not a retreat from politics but a crucible for imagining and building a more just and democratic world.

Unlike liberals, they are keenly aware of how neoliberalism has transformed universities into market-driven institutions that prioritize profit over democratic values, civic responsibility, and critical thought. They have voiced concerns about the rise of “neoliberal fascism,” a fusion of corporate power and authoritarianism, which erodes academic freedom and marginalizes public intellectuals. Given their critiques the corporatization of universities, which reduces education to careerism and consumerism, while silencing dissent, they have not only criticized higher education for investing in the war machine and Israel’s genocidal war, but they have also called  for universities to reclaim their democratic mission by fostering critical thinking, resisting authoritarianism, and addressing social and environmental injustices.

Against the rising tide of fascism in the United States and across the globe, young people have bravely asserted their voices, pushed up against the forces and pedagogical instruments of domination, and crossed boundaries to share their hope and the possibilities for a new world. In doing so, they offer not just hope but a defiant call to dismantle the vast machinery of pedagogical terrorism wielded by the financial elite—figures like Elon Musk. They have not merely critiqued the disimagination machines and cultural apparatuses that churn out lies, conspiracy theories, and assaults on critical agency and resistance. They have envisioned something greater: the reinvention of democratic practices and collective struggle, emphasizing cultural transformation as indispensable in the battle against fascist ideologies.

Their call for an unflinching critique of neoliberalism and its entanglement with fascist politics is a clarion demand for a new language of resistance—one that recognizes culture and education as pivotal battlegrounds in the fight against Trump’s ominous vision of a “unified Reich.” This moment calls for more than critique; it demands a revolutionary imagination capable of forging a massive social movement that reclaims democracy as a radical, participatory project.

We must respond to their urgency with a collective determination to reshape mass consciousness through critical pedagogy, cultural politics, and bold, decisive action. Now is the time to disrupt this totalitarian machinery of misery, destruction, and death—to build a future where democratic practices thrive, and the specter of authoritarianism is irrevocably defeated.

Notes.

[1] Rick Perlstein, Reagan Land (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020).

[2] Thom Hartmann, “Left Behind: How Neoliberalism’s Legacy Cost Democrats the 2024 Election,” The Hartmann Report (November 8, 2024). Online: https://hartmannreport.com/p/left-behind-how-neoliberalisms-legacy-5f0

[3] Daniel Dale, “Analysis: Donald Trump’s campaign of relentless lying,” (November 1, 2024). Online: https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/01/politics/analysis-donald-trumps-campaign-of-relentless-lying/index.html.

[4] Henry A. Giroux, Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

[5] Kenneth J. Saltman, The Corporatization of Education (New York: Routledge, 2024); Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019).

[6] Michael Tomasky, “The Right-Wing Media Takeover Is Destroying America,” The New Republic (January 19, 2024). Online: https://newrepublic.com/post/178256/baltimore-sun-liberal-billionaires-media-failure

[7] Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2025).

[8] Carlos Lozada, “Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are”  New York Times [November 6, 2024]. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/opinion/trump-wins-harris-loses.html

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2021).

[13] Tony Hester, “Deportability and the Carceral State,” Journal of American History, 102:1,(June 2015), pp 141–151.

[14] Greg Grandin, The End of Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020), p. 13.

[15] Maggie Astor, “‘Poisoning’ the Country,” New York Times (March 17, 2024).  Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/us/politics/trump-fox-interview-migrants.html

[16] Frederick Douglass, “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress” (1857) Black Past (January 25, 2007). Online: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-frederick-douglass-if-there-no-struggle-there-no-progress/

[17] Mark Edelman Boren, Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos: Book 2, 2010 – 2021 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2021).

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On May 10, 2024, the UN General Assembly passed overwhelmingly, with only nine negative votes (Argentina, Czechia, Hungary, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and the United States) a resolution (https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/ltd/n24/129/97/pdf/n2412997.pdf) which “Determinesthat the State of Palestine is qualified for membership in the United Nations and should therefore be admitted to membership in the United Nations” and “Accordingly recommends that the Security Council reconsider the matter favorably.”

Early foreign policy appointments, both formally announced and authoritatively rumored, by President-elect Donald Trump make clear that there is absolutely no chance that his incoming administration would permit the Security Council to approve an upgrade in the status of the State of Palestine from observer state to full member state.

In addition, prominent members of the Israeli government, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, are expressing the expectation (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/11/far-right-israeli-minister-orders-preparations-for-west-bank-annexation) that, in 2025, the second Trump administration will bless and recognize Israel’s formal annexation of the West Bank, as the first Trump administration recognized Israel’s formal annexation of occupied East Jerusalem and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, thereby definitively destroying any possibility of Palestinian self-determination and freedom, and Trump has named a public supporter of Israeli annexation of the West Bank as his ambassador to Israel (https://news.antiwar.com/2024/11/12/trump-picks-mike-huckabee-supporter-of-israeli-annexation-as-ambassador-to-israel).

There is, however, one tiny glimmer of hope in this darkness.

On December 23, 2016, after Trump’s first election but before he took office, President Barack Obama instructed his UN ambassador to abstain, and thereby to permit the adoption by a 14-0 vote, in the vote on UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (https://press.un.org/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm), which reaffirmed that Israel’s establishment of settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, had no legal validity, constituting a flagrant violation of international law, and which reiterated the Security Council’s demand that Israel immediately cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.

Obama’s abstention decision constituted an act of insubordination and disobedience which shocked the Israeli government, and it would have been inconceivable at any previous time during his presidency or if Hillary Clinton had been elected to succeed him. One may assume that Obama did not wish virtually has last act as president to be a final demonstration of his contempt for international law and the views and values of the vast majority of mankind.

While Israel could and, unsurprisingly, has ignored UN Security Council Resolution 2334, a UN Security Council resolution approving full UN member state status for the State of Palestine would create a fact that no country could ignore. The occupation of the entire territory of a UN member state by another UN member state, which, in the case of Palestine, the International Court of Justice has recently confirmed (https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176) is unlawful and must rapidly end, could not be permitted to stand indefinitely or without prompt and significant consequences.

Might Biden, who has been repeatedly humiliated and treated with contempt by Netanyahu notwithstanding his having given Israel everything it has sought, militarily, financially and diplomatically, as it has pursued its genocidal assault against the Palestinian people, follow the Obama precedent and finally assert his personal freedom and independence by instructing his UN ambassador to abstain from a Security Council vote on a new application by the State of Palestine for full UN member state status?

The period between today and January 20 offers the best opportunity for full UN membership which the State of Palestine has ever had, and it may be the last opportunity.

The State of Palestine and its friends throughout the world should try.

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Indigenous leader Lidia Thorpe confronts King Charles III during his visit to Australia. (Screengrab from X.)

If you go to the bluff at Kings Park in Perth, Australia, you can overlook the Swan River and enjoy a remarkable view. Across the bay, there is a phalanx of steel and glass buildings that rise to the skies. Each of these buildings carries a sign that glistens in the sharp sun: BHP, Rio Tinto, Chevron, Deloitte, and others. Kings Park no longer survives merely with the patronage of the British King, who continues to claim sovereignty over Australia. Part of it is now named Rio Tinto Kings Park, needing the corporate profits from this enormous mining company to sustain its charms. Down one of the avenues of the park there are trees set apart by a few meters, and at the base of these trees are small markers for dead soldiers from past wars; these are not graves but remembrances that are crowned by Australian flags. The park brings together the three crucial pieces of Western Australia, this province of which Perth is the capital which is the size of Western Europe: the British monarchy, the mining companies and its affiliates, and the role of the military.

Of Kings

A few days before I arrived in Canberra, an aboriginal senator, Lidia Thorpe, interrupted the celebration of King Charles III to say, “You are not my king. This is not your land.” It was a powerful demonstration against the treatment of Australia ever since the arrival of English ships to the country’s east in January 1788. In fact, the British crown does claim title to the entirety of the Australian landmass. King Charles III is head of the 56-country Commonwealth and the total land area of the Commonwealth takes up 21 percent of the world’s total land. It is quite remarkable to realize that King Charles III is nominally in charge of merely 22 percent less than Queen Victoria (1819-1901).

The day after Senator Thorpe’s statement, a group of aboriginal leaders met with King Charles III to discuss the theme of “sovereignty.” In Sydney, Elder Allan Murray of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council welcomed the King to Gadigal land and said, “We’ve got stories to tell, and I think you witnessed that story yesterday in Canberra. But the story is unwavering, and we’ve got a long way to achieve what we want to achieve and that’s our own sovereignty.” When Captain James Cook (1770) and Captain Arthur Phillip (1788) arrived on this Gadigal land, they were met by people who had lived in the area for tens of thousands of years. In 1789, a smallpox epidemic brought by the British killed 53 percent of the Gadigal, and eventually—through violence—they reduced the population to three in 1791. It is accurate, then, for Elder Murray to have said to the press after King Charles III left that “The Union Jack was put on our land without our consent. We’ve been ignored.” What remained were barrangal dyara (skin and bones, as the Gadigal would have said). Given the value of the land in Sydney, the Gadigal clan would today be one of the richest groups in the world. But apart from a few descendants who do not have title to the land, the ghosts of the ancestors walk these streets.

Of Minerals

Australia is one of the widest countries in the world, with a large desert in its middle section. Underneath its soil, which has been walked on by a range of Aboriginal communities for tens of thousands of years, is wealth that is estimated to be $19.9 trillion. This estimate includes the country’s holdings of coal, copper, iron ore, gold, uranium, and rare earth elements. In 2022, Australia’s mining companies—which are also some of the largest in the world—extracted at least 27 minerals from the subsoil, including lithium (Australia is the world’s largest producer of lithium, annually providing 52 percent of the global market’s lithium).

On May 24, 2020, Rio Tinto’s engineers and workers blew up a cave in the Pilbara area of Western Australia to expand their Brockman 4 iron ore mine. The cave in the Juukan Gorge had been used by the Puutu Kunti Kurrama people for 46,000 years and had been kept by them as a community treasure. In 2013, Rio Tinto approached the Western Australian government to seek an exemption to destroy the cave and to extend the mine. They received this exemption based on a law called the Aboriginal Heritage Act of 1972, which had been drafted to favor mining companies. Rio Tinto, with substantial operations in Western Australia and around the world, has a market capitalization of $105.7 billion, making it—after BHP (market cap of $135.5)—the second largest minerals company in the world (both Rio Tinto and BHP are headquartered in Melbourne). Hastily, BHP began to reconsider its permission to destroy 40 cultural sites for its South Flank iron mine extension in the Pilbara region (and after its investigation and conversation with the Banjima community) decided to save 10 sites.

Craig and Monique Oobagooma live in the northernmost homestead in Australia near the Robinson River. They are part of the Wanjina Wunggurr, whose lands are now used for the extraction of uranium and other metals and minerals. The uranium mines in the north are owned and operated by Paladin Energy, another Perth-based mining company that also owns mines in Malawi and Namibia. There is also a large military base in nearby Yampi. Craig told me that when he walks his land, he can dig beneath the soil and find pink diamonds. But, he says, he puts them back. “They are sacred stones,” he says. Some parts of the land can be used for the betterment of his family, but not all of it. Not the sacred stones. And not the ancestral sites, of which there are only a few that remain.

Of Militaries

In 2023, the governments of Australia and the United Kingdom signed an agreement to preserve “critical minerals” for their own development and security. Such an agreement is part of the New Cold War against China, to ensure that it does not directly own the “critical minerals.” Between 2022 and 2023, Chinese investment in mining decreased from AU$1809 million to AU$34 million. Meanwhile, Australian investment in building military infrastructure for the United States has increased dramatically, with the Australian government expanding the Tindal air base in Darwin (Northern Territory) to hold U.S. B-1 and B-52 nuclear bombers, expanding the submarine docking stations along the coastline of Western Australia, and expanding the Exmouth submarine and deep space communications facility. All of this is part of Australia’s historically high defense budget of $37 billion.

In Sydney, near the Central Train station, I met Euranga, who lived in a tunnel which he had painted with the history of the Aboriginal peoples of Eora (Sydney). He had been part of the Stolen Generation, one in three Aboriginal children stolen from their families and raised in boarding schools. The school hurt his spirit, he told me. “This is our land, but it is also not our land,” he said. Beneath the land is wealth, but it is being drained away by private mining companies and for the purposes of military force. The old train station nearby looks forlorn. There is no high-speed rail in vast Australia. Such a better way to spend its precious resources, as Euranga indicated in his paintings: embrace the worlds of the Aboriginal communities who have been so harshly displaced and build infrastructure for people rather than for wars.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Image: Fires in Israel and the Gaza strip – 7 October 2023 Image is about 48 kilometers wide. – CC BY 2.0

Last November, on the one-month anniversary of the October 7th assault, President Isaac Herzog of Israel wrote a letter to university and college presidents in the United States, seeking to prevail on them to “condemn the barbarous acts.” Herzog wrote admiringly of the “critical thinking skills” he himself gained during his education at American universities, while aiming to quell debate on campus for fear that an abundance of critical thinking was leading students to criticize Israel for bringing on the anti-colonial violence, instead of accepting it as pure, unadulterated evil that came out of nowhere.

“We are all students of history,” Herzog declared, before indicting the “foul ideologies targeting Jews” that he viewed as the driving force behind the devastating attacks of the month before and now polluting the minds of the US college students he was seeking to silence. Invoking the Holocaust by name, Herzog drew a straight line from the antisemitism of the Nazis to the present, thereby erasing the contingent nature of the history of what Edward Said once described as “two peoples locked in a terrible struggle over the same territory, in which one, bent beneath a horrific past of systematic persecution and extermination, was in the position of an oppressor towards the other people.”

It was interesting to see Herzog recruit history, which he understands as a topic, not a method, to his cause because shortly before he wrote, his own government had slammed secretary-general of the UN, António Guterres for declaring that while nothing could justify the killing and maiming of civilians, it was also important to understand that the assault “did not happen in a vacuum.” In other words, Guterres thought it necessary to specify the historical forces at work and instead chose, not the Nazi Holocaust, but 1967 as the relevant context, noting that Palestinians “have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” Israeli officials fulminated over Guterres’ remark, while Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan claimed that he had spouted a “justifying context” and thus “failed the test” for purportedly not condemning the perpetrators as evil in no uncertain terms.

The Israeli government’s attack on Guterres caused historian Ilan Pappé to weigh in. What Pappé feared the most about Israel’s harsh reaction to Guterres was the prospect that something as fundamental to the search for truth as basic historical practice might now be deemed antisemitic, as the state of Israel and its supporters expanded even further the now already expanded definition of antisemitism far beyond the hatred of Jews as Jews. The brutality of the October 7th attack, Pappé pointed out, “cannot be justified in any way, but that does not mean it cannot be explained and contextualized.”

Pappé then sketched out, in a disciplined fashion, a four-part historical framework applicable to October 7th. He began with the Christian theological roots of Zionism in the nineteenth century organized around the millennial wish for a Jewish return to the Holy Land. Theology evolved into public policy toward the end of the century, as political Zionism emerged to address the European problem of antisemitism by focusing on Palestine, where Jews would assert a superior historical claim over the indigenous residents, a development that eventually gave rise to a settler-colonial project. Context two began in 1948, as the Zionists terrorized, murdered, and expelled the Palestinians based on a systematic plan of ethnic cleansing drawn up prior tothe founding of the state of Israel. Context three referenced the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967. And context four involved the siege in Gaza. The prehistory of the blockade began after Oslo when Israel, in 1996, finished constructing barbed wire, sensor-equipped fencing around the strip. Completion of the siege occurred shortly after Palestinians voted Hamas into office in a fair election. Beginning in 2007, as Pappé explains, Israel “controlled the exit and entry points to the Gaza ghetto, monitoring even the kind of food that entered—at times limiting it to a certain calorie count.”

A subsequent effort to historicize October 7th, now making the rounds on US college campuses, is being put forth by historian David N. Myers of UCLA, and Hussein Ibish, a scholar of comparative literature, who once collaborated with co-founder of The Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah, but who has since taken a right turn. In a series of four lectures at Fordham University, Myers and Ibish have turned around Edward Said—who advocated for the Palestinian people with empathy for the genocide suffered by Jews—to acknowledge the trauma experienced by the Palestinians.

Their goal, it would seem, is to replace political scientist Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” model, which Said demolished as abstract, reductive, and ignorant of “complex histories,” with a new framework: call it a clash of traumas. They see trauma, especially as it related to the Jews’ experience of the Holocaust and the Palestinians’ experience of the Nakba, as the essence of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Myers put it, “these two traumas have intersected or clashed with one another to create sparks of conflict, perhaps no more profoundly so than in the wake of October 7th where the trauma of the Holocaust is retriggered for Jews and the trauma of the Nakba is retriggered for Palestinians, especially when we think about the fact that two million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced.” Calling attention to the collective traumas of Jews and Palestinians is meant to aid us in adopting a more empathic understanding of the “conflict,” a word they employ despite acknowledging its asymmetric nature.

Myers and Ibish divide up the history into three main periods: 1882 to 1948; 1948 to 1967; and 1967 to 2023, which provide the contexts for “October 7th and Its Aftermath,” their crowning fourth lecture, in which they argue that the Abraham Accords, which ignored the Palestinian question, combined with the protests over Benjamin Netanyahu’s gravitation toward illiberalism as expressed in judicial reform (meant to more efficiently ethnically cleanse the Palestinians), and Hamas’ presumed anger at these developments, especially the former, to bring on the attack.

Comparing this periodization with Pappé’s rendering reveals significant overlap. Both historical interpretations agree on the importance of Zionism, which is why Myers and Ibish begin their story in 1882 when the first wave of Jews migrated from Russia to Palestine. And both acknowledge the importance of 1948 and 1967. The main difference is that Pappé emphasizes the siege of Gaza since 2007 and places it on an equal level with these earlier turning points.

No mention is made by Myers and Ibish in their five and a half hours of lectures of the more than 4,000 people killed by Israeli forces in the six assaults on Gaza between 2006 and 2022, which Ibish refers to as “these little wars.” It is not that they ignore the siege completely. Ibish acknowledges that after Israel removed its settlers from Gaza in 2005 it still “retained control over all means of ingress and egress” though this “different kind of occupation,” as he put it, goes by in the blink of an eye, hiding from view the mass murder and abject sadism that have taken place in the years leading up to October 7th.

Nor do Myers and Ibish mention the 2018–2019 Great March of Return, a year-and-a-half long almost completely peaceful popular protest, dreamt up by people outside of Hamas but ultimately embraced by the group, in which Palestinians marched to the fence separating Gaza and Israel to contest the siege. According to a 2020 UN report, the demonstrations led to the killing of one Israeli and the injury of seven others, and the deaths of 214 Palestinians, mostly unarmed, including 46 children. The number of injured Palestinians is jaw-dropping: more than 36,100. Some 4,903 of those injured, a report by the UN Human Rights Council reveals, suffered life-changing injuries to their lower bodies as the Israeli authorities cleared the way for snipers to aim low to deal with the “key inciters.” “Journalists and health workers who were clearly marked as such were shot,” the Human Rights Council concluded about Israel’s intentional infliction of harm, “as were children, women, and persons with disabilities.”

Selection of evidence is a normal part of historical study. But one wonders how we are supposed to empathize with the Palestinians, much less understand the historical forces that gave rise to the attack on October 7th, if the siege of Gaza and the resistance to it, especially the overwhelmingly nonviolent march to break the chains of colonialism, is swept under the rug.

Moreover, Hamas comes off in their analysis almost as a puppet whose strings are pulled by Israel which, as Ibish notes, funded and supported it to keep Gaza and the West Bank split, thereby preventing a Palestinian state, a plan that “worked beautifully, but it led inevitably to October 7th.” A more plausible theory of Hamas’ actions is put forward by Jeroen Gunning, a scholar of Middle Eastern politics who is the author of Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence (2008). Gunning has pointed out in a recent interview that Hamas had previously turned to wars, political overtures, and “then there’s this march, which is a nonviolent expression of anti-colonial struggle, and none of that leads to anything.” With its tactical arsenal nearing exhaustion, Gunning continues, the groundwork was laid “for the hardliners to come back in and say we have to prepare for a dramatic, violent explosion.”

Equally problematic is how Myers and Ibish handle the development of Zionism, in which they acknowledge the partial legitimacy of the settler-colonial framework while pointing out that “the reduction of Zionism to an ideology of either elimination or control of the land ignores the fact that Zionism was also really an ideology of survival, an ideology of escape.” Their logic is as follows. No matter how brutal and predatory the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians might be, there is a good justification: Zionism was developed to rescue Jews from the vicious antisemitism they experienced in Europe.

It is hard to square this seemingly rational desire for survival with the fact that the Zionists replicated the reasoning of none other than antisemitism itself, justifying the need for a Jewish homeland by arguing that Jews could never be assimilated in Europe and must exit the European stage to found a nation of their own. Not only did the Zionists adopt the logic of antisemitism, they crawled into bed with antisemites who welcomed their Zionism with open arms, including the Nazis, when it suited their colonial ambitions, which were predicated, above all, on the demographic premise of a Jewish majority in Palestine. The fears of dissident Zionists that the concept of a Jewish majority would lay the groundwork for Jews to claim a superior right at the expense of non-Jews in Palestine came true. Zionism has thus been characterized by political scientist Norman Finkelstein as a “radically exclusivist ideology” or, alternatively, in the words of intellectual historian Joseph Massad, as “a religio-racial epistemology of supremacy over the Palestinian Arabs, not unlike that used by European colonialism with its ideology of white supremacy over the natives.”

Another significant problem with how Myers and Ibish handle their discussion of Zionism emerges when they describe its imposition in Palestine without the proper contextualization. They tell us almost nothing about the non-Europeans Jews living in Palestine except that this Jewish community, as Ibish points out, was “not very big.” Yet somehow it seemed to be surviving in the Arab world before the arrival of the Zionists.

As Ussama Makdisi has explained in his Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (2019), by the latter part of the nineteenth century, Ottoman reformers in the Arab eastern part of the empire had constructed a political framework founded on a secular understanding of equality that sought to incorporate as citizens both Muslims and non-Muslims. This ecumenical frame persisted and is evidenced in a British report on a struggle between Arabs and Jews, which flared up in Jerusalem in 1920. “Up to a very recent date the three sects, Moslem, Christians and Jews,” the report stated, “lived together in a state of complete amity.”

While avoiding any romanticization, Makdisi explains that the ecumenical frame, which “valorized religion and coexistence, and demonized sectarianism,” existed until Zionism led to its destruction by “inserting religion into nationalism in a part of the world already rife with politicized religious difference.” Myers and Ibish, by contrast, paint a picture of clashing traumas—Palestinian and Jewish—that seem inescapable when, in fact, even as late as the 1940s, liberals such as Albert Hourani, rejected the partition of Palestine, and put forward a plan for an Arab state in which, as Makdisi notes, “Jews could very plausibly be incorporated into an ecumenical nationalist Arab polity.”

Given the enormity of the horrors that have unfolded in Israel and Palestine over the last year and the resulting Mississippi River of blood, disciplined thinking about the historical forces that explain why this violence has taken the form that it has is needed now more than ever. Methodical historical thought can liberate us from the debilitating inevitabilities of a clashing traumas chronology, which makes it seem as if sectarianism is human nature. And trauma an inexorable part of the human condition. It can also make it easier to imagine alternatives and possibilities and, above all, can help produce a fuller understanding of why historical actors have done what they have done.

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“…the United States and Israel are making significant progress toward stabilizing three dangerous wars: Israel’s tit-for-tat conflict with Iran, the devastating assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the brutal year-long war against Hamas in Gaza.”

– David Ignatius, Washington Post, November 6, 2024

“Settling Israel’s wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran will be far simpler.  Netanyahu has largely achieved his goals: Hamas is devastated militarily.  Hezbollah has been decapitated and is ready to withdraw from southern Lebanon.  And Iran has been unable to retaliate successfully, thanks in part to U.S. military might.”

– David Ignatius, Washington Post, November 8, 2024.

For the past year, the Washington Post’s senior diplomatic columnist, David Ignatius, has been loyal to the U.S. and Israeli national security teams, playing the role of stenographer in sharing and repeating their optimism about peace in the Middle East.  He has reported one hopeful scenario after another, and avoids criticizing the self-serving comments from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the past year regarding the outlook for peace.

Not even Netanyahu’s firing of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who favors a cease-fire, has dampened Ignatius’ optimism regarding a “safe landing” for the three dangerous wars involving Israel.  Neither is Ignatius’ optimism weakened by the election of Donald Trump, which will give Netanyahu greater opportunities to continue his militarism.

In seeing “so many opportunities to end the nightmare of war in the Middle East,” Ignatius ignores or simply doesn’t recognize the painful history of Israel and its neighbors.  It requires a belief that the Lebanese Armed Forces could be deployed to South Lebanon where it could disarm Hezbollah.  Such a belief requires that an empowered Lebanese Armed Forces  stand up to Hezbollah, a well-trained and well-disciplined force with significant combat experience on the border with Israel and in Syria.  This belief also requires that the politics of Beirut can be reshaped, but Lebanon is a failed state that has had no president for the past three years.  Nevertheless, Ignatius agrees with sources who tell him that a Lebanese agreement could be completed “in the next few weeks.”

Ignatius even sees opportunities for the deployment of a peacekeeping force in Gaza that would consist of military forces from European and moderate Arab countries to begin “stabilization operations” in Gaza.  This would require that the United States provide a military command-and-control center based in Egypt near the Gaza border.  It is very difficult to imagine the Israeli government agreeing to such a force, particularly in view of its hardline demands regarding the Philadelphi Corridor, the land border between Gaza and Egypt.  Israeli forces discovered numerous tunnels in this region used for smuggling weapons into Gaza.

Ignatius concludes that Gaza might be the hardest “post-conflict landing zone” to establish.  This ignores the potential for and implications of a wider Iranian-Israeli confrontation.  Trump could make a difference in the latter scenario because his “blank check” policy toward Netanyahu could lead to an all-our war between the two countries that would certainly involve the United States.

There is a fourth battleground that Ignatius doesn’t mention: the West Bank.  Ignatius refers to promises that Israel made last year to refuse to discuss any new West settlement for four months, to refuse to authorize outposts for six months, and to take steps to curb violence.  The communique was signed by Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and the United States.  He fails to mention Israel’s increased violence in the West Bank, which includes possible war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.  Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its civilian population into occupied territory, which Israel has been doing for the past six decades.

Ignatius’ most recent column appeared several days after last week’s election, but there is no speculation regarding the difference Trump’s return to the White House would make.  Trump’s first term featured his support for numerous Israeli positions, including moving the capital to Jerusalem, recognition of the Golan Heights as part of Israeli sovereignty, and encouraging additional (illegal) settlements on the West Bank.  Trump’s second term will be preoccupied with a worsening Israeli-Palestinian situation as well as the possibility of a wider conflict between Israel and Iran.  Trump’s shares Netanyahu’s concerns about Iran getting a nuclear weapon.  The region (and the world) is far more chaotic than in 2017, when Trump’s first term began; his capricious decision making could worsen the situation in the region.

Ignatius (and the mainstream media in general) makes no mention of a law passed last week that would allow Israel to deport family members of Palestinian attackers, including Israeli citizens.  Netanyahu and his Likud Party championed the bill that was passed 61-41.  The law would apply to Palestinian Israelis and residents of East Jerusalem, who could be departed either to Gaza or “another location, for a period of seven to 20 years.”  This doesn’t augur well for Netanyahu’s policies toward the West Bank and Gaza in the near term.

The mainstream media is doing an inadequate job identifying the need for changing the dynamics of U.S. bilateral relations and contextualizing the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian problem.  Regarding diplomatic dynamics, the Trump administration must seek bilateral dialogues with Russia and China, and restore diplomatic relations with Iran and North Korea.  Regarding Israel and Palestine, the Trump administration must not act on the basis of a crisis that began on October 7, 2023, but address the root causes of a conflict that began 76 years ago.  Future articles will discuss the importance of “new thinking,” and will echo William Faulkner’s warning that the “past is never dead; it’s not even past.”

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Photo by Jon Tyson

The election of Trump is more than a political event; it is an attempt to legitimize a brutal evolution of fascism in America. His rise is not accidental but symptomatic, emerging from the depths of collective fear, dread, and anxiety stoked by a savage form of gangster capitalism—neoliberalism—that thrives on division and despair. This climate, steeped in a culture of hate, misogyny, and racism, has given life to Trump’s authoritarian appeal, drowning out the warning signs of past and present tyranny.

While it’s clear that American society changed dramatically with Reagan’s election and the corrupt rise of the billionaire elite, we must also recognize how liberals and the Democratic Party, instead of resisting, aligned with Wall Street power brokers like Goldman Sachs. In doing so, they adopted elements of neoliberalism that crushed the working class, intensified the class and racial divide, accelerated staggering levels of inequality, and intensified the long lacy of nativism,  all of which fed into the conditions for Trump’s appeal. Clinton’s racially charged criminalizing policies, Obama’s centrist neoliberalism and unyielding support for the financial elite, and Biden’s death-driven support for genocide in Gaza have contributed to a culture ripe for authoritarianism. In short, this groundwork didn’t just make Trump possible; it made him inevitable.

But perhaps one of the most overlooked failures of liberalism and Third Way democrats, and even parts of the left, was the neglect of education as a form of critical and civic literacy and the role it plays in raising mass consciousness and fostering an energized collective movement. This failure wasn’t just about policy but, as Pierre Bourdieu observed, about forgetting that domination operates not only through economic structures but also through beliefs and cultural persuasion. Trump and his engineers of hate and revenge have not only rewritten history but obliterated historical consciousness as fundamental element of civic education. Historical amnesia has always provided a cover for America’s long-standing racism, nativism, disavowal of women’s right. Capitalizing on far right propaganda machines, Trump managed, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, to convince millions of Americans that they “simply could not accept the idea of a non-White and female president.” Nor could they insert themselves in a history of collective struggle, resistance, and the fight for a better world. He also convinced the majority of Americans that it is okay elect a white supremacist to be the President of the University.

Bernie Sanders rightly observes on X that “It comes as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Of course, the Democratic Party shares with mainstream media stenographers the fact that they have refused to forcefully acknowledge, as Sherrilyn Ifill points out, that not only the MAGA crowd but also “a majority of white Americans in fact have chosen to embrace white supremacy rather than the promise of a multi-racial democracy.”   Sanders’ comments only scratch the surface. The issue of abandonment and moral collapse also extends to the pedagogical realm: for decades, the right has wielded the educational force of culture to persuade white, Latino, and Black workers to turn their backs on their own interests, binding them to an authoritarian cult and white supremacist ideology that exploits their alienation and sabotages any sense of critical agency. Since the 1970s, galvanized by the Powell Memo, reactionary conservatives have grasped, far more than the left, the transformative power of ideas. They have weaponized culture to dismantle institutions that once nurtured critical thought, education, and resistance. Recognizing that reshaping public consciousness was essential to their agenda, they systematically eroded critical literacy, attacked public spaces, and transformed public and higher education from forces of liberation —turning them into either sites of repression and training or more disdainfully, full scale sites of indoctrination. This was no accident; it was a core part of their long-term strategy—to strip society of its capacity for dissent, molding a populace more easily controlled, more willingly complicit in its own subjugation.

Trump is the grim culmination of this cultural war against reason, truth, and critical thinking. Mass ignorance and civic illiteracy have become not mere byproducts but the very engines of a strategy to blind working people and those considered expendable to the economic injustices ravaging their lives. Rather than addressing these economic onslaughts, they are instead lured into a communal theater of hate and bigotry. This spectacle of manufactured ignorance and call for cult-like loyalty does more than cloud the mind; it becomes a political weapon, rendering the dispossessed both docile and divided. Neoliberal ideology intensifies this dynamic, imprisoning people in suffocating bubbles of self-interest and hyper-individualism. It wages a calculated assault on collective solidarity, designed to transform the public into isolated consumers, unable to envision a politics beyond their private lives or recognize that their true power lies in unity and critical consciousness. At the same time, it takes advantage of the anxiety and loneliness experience by the disposed to lure them into a false community of hatred and lawlessness. The need for solidary falls prey under Trump into the lure of what Ernst Bloch in The Principle of Hope called the swindle of fulfillment.

With no viable movement for meaningful social change in sight, Trump and his modern-day Brownshirts exploited the void left by a crisis of consciousness. Into this gap, they injected a corporate-controlled culture that shaped daily life with a culture steeped in hatred, fear, anxiety, and the force of endless fascist like spectacles. It is worth noting that such spectacles are chillingly reminiscent of Nuremberg in the 1930s, designed to stoke division and obedience, distracting the public from any path toward collective resistance or liberation. This carnival of divisiveness and dehumanizing rhetoric did more than destroy the nation’s civic and educational fabric, it produced a poisonous populist culture that changed the way most Americans view the past, present, and future.

If we are to confront this fascistic momentum, we must urgently return to the tools necessary to rebuild a mass consciousness as a precondition for a mass movement–one that can use the mobilization of mass consciousness, strikes and other forms of direct action to prevent this new fascist regime from governing. We need to stop this machinery of death from enacting the enormous suffering, misery,  violence, and power that gives it both a sense of pleasure and reason for enduring.

With Trump’s rise to power, American citizens have empowered a fascist agenda—one bent on enriching the ultra-wealthy, gutting the welfare state, deporting millions, and dismantling the very institutions that uphold accountability, critical thought, and democracy itself. These structures are not just formalities; they are the lifeblood of a radical, inclusive democracy and the safeguard for an informed citizenry. In this perilous moment, Seyla Benhabib, drawing on Adorno and Arendt, confronts us with a question of profound urgency: “What does it mean to go on thinking?” Her call to “learn to think anew” resounds with particular force as we grapple with the stark reality of Trump’s election.

We are now compelled to rethink the very foundations of culture, politics, power, struggle, and education. The stakes are clear. In mere weeks, as Will Bunch notes, a man who attempted to overturn an election—who espouses overt racism, embraces white supremacy, and boasts about his rancid misogyny, has pledged mass deportations, and threatens military force against political opponents—will once again assume power. This is a historical crossroads that demands a radical reevaluation of our democratic commitments and strategies for real social and economic change.

Chris Hedges aptly warns that “the American dream has become an American nightmare [and that] Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay.” Trump embodies the cumulative effects of decades of moral and social corrosion. His presidency signals not a departure but an intensification of a deep-seated national crisis.

In this historical moment, we face an urgent challenge to confront and dismantle the forces entrenching fascist politics and authoritarian governance. Now is the moment to radically transform our approach to theory, education, and the liberatory power of learning—tools we must wield to build a robust, multi-racial working-class movement that is unapologetically anti-capitalist and unwaveringly democratic. We must relinquish the myth of American  exceptionalism and the dangerous illusion that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. The cost of inaction is dire: a future where democracy is not merely eroded but supplanted by a violent police state,—a betrayal soaked in blood, extinguishing the dream of a society committed to the promise and ideals of justice and equality.

The stakes could not be higher. We must confront this moment with uncompromising purpose, a blueprint for bold action, and an unyielding commitment to a radical democracy that defies fascist cruelty, bigotry, and the stranglehold of the financial elite at every step. Our future demands it, as does the vision of a society where justice, solidarity, and human dignity are not just ideals but realities—part of a future that defies the rising shadow of fascism threatening to consume us. We either fight to reclaim this promise, or we surrender to a darkness from which there is no return.

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Papier-mâché sculptures of faces hang in front of the Nogales border wall. Photo:Todd Miller.

The man was sitting on a bench in front of the 20-foot rust-colored border wall near where the public buses passed. He was jotting in a small notebook in the bustling center of Nogales, Sonora. It was Tuesday, Election Day in the U.S. I approached him and told him I was a journalist and was interested in what he thought about the election in the United States, especially since the border—which I pointed to right before us—was one of the election’s biggest issues.

His answer was terse: “It’s another country.”

The man told me he coordinated the buses and spent a lot of time on that bench. He preferred not to use his name. It was midday, and the sun was rising to the top of a clear, blue sky, and I had just crossed the border. The tension was already heated in the United States, and it was a relief to be in Mexico.

At first I thought the bus coordinator was being dismissive, and I was going to move on. But then he asked, “Who do you think is going to win? Trump?” I told him that according to the polls it was 50/50. This was before we knew what we do now: that Donald Trump was about to win the election decisively.

The bus coordinator said, “I hope Harris wins.” He paused. “Because she’s a woman. Would this be the first woman president in the United States?” I nodded. “We also have our first woman president in Mexico,” he said, referring to Claudia Sheinbaum, who was inaugurated on October 1.

My plan was to walk along the wall and perceive the U.S. elections from the Mexican side. Even though our conversation was brief, the bus coordinator was exactly the person I hoped to talk to. Here was a place where U.S. elections would affect people blatantly, viscerally, and palpably—as border policies have for decades—yet they had no say in the choice at all. I wanted to capture people’s sentiments.

I also wanted to converse with the wall itself. Let me explain: There is a stark difference between the wall on the Mexican side and the wall on the U.S. side. The U.S. side is dominated by the enforcement apparatus, which has become the source and the logic of the presidential campaigns, from both parties. In U.S. campaign and national narratives, it was difficult to hear the border characterized in any other way. On the Mexican side, however, the offering was a more complex and alternative story, whether it be the graffiti and art on the wall, or simply the words of people like the bus coordinator, people who worked, lived, went to school, and walked around the wall.

Right before I crossed the border I talked to Gustavo Lozano of the Border Beatz Music Collective in Nogales, Arizona. He told me, “None of the politicians, not Trump not Harris, no representatives of their cabinets—Republicans and Democrats—the very people that have influence in where we are going as a country, none of them know what the borderlands actually are, that the borderlands are a deep source of riqueza, wealth.” Here, he told me, there is an interchange of culture, a sharing of culture, knowledge, and skills. Lozano talked about revitalization projects in Nogales. He talked about creating an arts corridor. He talked about the galleries with challenging, provocative art, art that created conversations about the border, that transcended the border, that subverted the border. I didn’t realize this at first, but as I walked along the borderline, it was this type of inspiration that I sought, the omitted or unheard stories.

As the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote, “Walls are the publishers of the poor,” and the Nogales border wall was no exception. Written on the bollards—the thick steel bars—in one section was the message: “Nuestros sueños de justicia no los detenienen ningún muro,” No wall can stop our dreams of justice. In another place the prose expressed that “América es una sola casa,” “America”—in the Latin American sense of the word, that is, the combined North and South American continents, “is a single house.” Later I stood mesmerized before a rendition of the U.S. flag made on the border wall made of clothes, T-shirts, children’s clothes, undergarments, the same clothes that tear on the razor wire, or are sometimes found discarded in the desert. And farther down the wall are the papier-mâché sculpted faces near where three dogs napped in the shade.

America is a single house. Photo by Todd Miller.

I interviewed another man who was waiting for a bus in another area named Manuel. He told me he wasn’t from here but from Ciudad Obregón, about five hours to the south. He told me he didn’t understand the U.S. electoral process. He said, “Why Tuesday?” In Mexico elections happened on Sunday. I agreed it doesn’t make sense to have elections on a workday. But I told him in many places people can vote early. He said, “Doesn’t that create more possibilities that the vote can be manipulated?” I told him that I appreciated his skepticism. Like the bus coordinator, Manuel treaded the election question carefully. He said he “didn’t dislike” Trump. I told him that he could dislike him, I wouldn’t mind. He asked me, “What is this threat of mass deportation?” This threat would be repeated by Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt on November 5 (the next day) after his victory was announced. She reiterated Trump’s promise to undertake the “largest deportation in the history of the country” and said this operation would begin on day one. There was an immediate spike in the stock price for the private prison company Geo Group, a company that had also been doing well under the Biden administration. Manuel thought the mass deportation would be “mutually damaging,” especially since Mexico, he understood, would be corralled into helping with the expulsions. He said this would create a ripple effect of suffering.

I wandered up a block from the border to where two women were selling secondhand clothes, in front of the apartment they rented together. As I approached, I noticed one of the T-shirts they were selling; it was black with white letters: “I don’t give a fuck what you think.”

I asked the women about the election and the border. Like other people, they eyed me cautiously and asked me who I wanted to win. I gave them my thoughts, which seemed to put them more at ease. Their names were Bertha and Mariana. Bertha told me she had two kids in the United States and that they were voting for Trump. “Do you know why?” I asked. She shrugged. Then she told me she wanted Harris to win. The women told me—like the bus coordinator—that Mexico has its first woman president, whom they liked. They told me her government was going to help them. They’re going to help especially, Mariana said, “madres solteras,” single mothers, like they were. There were “ayudas” for housing, for education, for health. We need all of that. “Would that be the same with Harris?” they asked. I wasn’t sure.

“Would the wall come down?” one of them asked. I said I’m not so sure about that either. In fact, I admitted, Harris had said that she would build it more. “Es muy triste,” Mariana said, “para el mexicano” (That is very sad for the Mexican people). I wondered, again, why the Democrats chose the hardline campaign stance on the border. I had heard from people who justified this campaign strategy as practical, inevitable, that they had to do it. I found this perplexing, especially since in 2020, the Democrats ran a campaign on a more humane border, and they won.

Later, I discussed this with longtime Nogales organizer Marycruz Sandoval Pérez, from the Colonia Flores Magón. “They [by they, all politicians of all parties] always put us down as an excuse when there are elections,” she said. “But they know perfectly well that we are a ‘bad necessity’ in the United States.” Because, she asked, who else would pick the food, wash the dishes, clean the hotel rooms? It was precisely this constrained perspective that Sandoval Pérez described, the constant commodification of people, that I wished to break free of on my walk.

A sculpture from an exposition called Paseo de la Humanidad in Nogales, Sonora. Photo: Todd Miller.

But now I was headed back. Near the DeConcini port of entry, I passed a man who strummed a mandolin and sang “La Llorona” with the voice of an opera singer. The song stopped me in my tracks, and I listened with complete attention. Then I began to jot down inspired notes about how hope doesn’t lie with the politicians from the upper echelons but rather from below, in art, in conversation, in song, in graffiti, in normal everyday people. I have heard “La Llorona” hundreds of times before, but this rendition soared, and I realized I was seeking something much more than an election assessment. I was searching for the source of change, how things really move, how they transform. It usually does not come from above, but from below, like a passionate song.

I realized that what I was craving was the inspiration that comes from the borderlands, not as a place of chaos and violence—as Trump will now loudly and endlessly portray it—but precisely the opposite: a place of creativity, a fertile ground where solutions are found. Bertha and Mariana have them. Gustavo Lozano has them. Marycruz Sandoval Pérez has them. Now, as the Trump administration barks out its plans, it is more important than ever to listen.

This was first published on The Border Chronicle.

The post Walking Along the Border on Election Day appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Taos Pueblo, northern New Mexico. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

On Friday, October 24, 2024, President Joe Biden formally apologized to the indigenous peoples of North America for the abuses committed against thousands of indigenous children in so-called “residential schools,” which were intended to “kill the Indian in the child.” The apology was tardy, considering that over a period of 150 years, US-government-funded boarding schools had forcibly taken indigenous children away from their families in an effort to “Americanize” them, suppress their cultural identity, and ultimately assimilate them into the American social fabric.

Biden described the residential schools as “one of the most horrific chapters in American history.” He called for a moment of silence to “remember those lost and the generations living with that trauma.” It is estimated that at least 18,000 children were taken from their families and forced to attend some 408 boarding schools across 37 states and U.S. territories between 1819 and 1969. Three years ago, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, commissioned the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to review the schools’ impacts on Native Americans. Their final report was issued in the summer of 2024, finding that at least 973 Native American children had died while attending these federal institutions. Biden commented that it remains important “that we do know there were generations of Native children stolen, taken away to places they didn’t know, with people they never met, who spoke a language they had never heard.”

Biden’s remarks were made at the Gila Crossing Community School outside of Phoenix, Arizona, where he was traveling in connection with the Harris presidential campaign. This was the first time Biden had visited Indigenous communities as president and the first time in 10 years that a sitting president visited tribal lands. Back in 2014, then-President Barack Obama paid a visit to the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation on the border of North and South Dakota, and in December 2009, Obama actually issued an apology that was incorporated into a Congressional Resolution[3].  I remember the reaction of Indigenous groups to Obama’s 2009 Apology, namely indifference, as was said to me by a tribal leader: “A tree fell in the forest, and nobody saw it.” Indeed, there was no follow-up and no benefit flowed to the American indigenous communities at the time.

The bottom line could be summed up as follows: “Sorry we massacred you, sorry we stole your lands, sorry we destroyed your livelihood. Now, shape up, turn the page, and let’s move together into the future.” Archetypically, the key sentence in the resolution was the disclaimer at the end, according to which: “Nothing in this Joint Resolution—(1) authorizes or supports any claim against the United States; or (2) serves as a settlement of any claim against the United States.”

Public Reaction to the Apologies

In the press, one reads that “For many Native Americans, the long-awaited apology was a welcome acknowledgment of the government’s longstanding culpability. Now, they say, words must be followed up by action. Bill Hall, 71, of Seattle, was 9 when he was taken from his Tlingit community in Alaska and forced to attend a boarding school, where he endured years of physical and sexual abuse that led to many more years of shame. When he first heard that Biden was going to apologize, he wasn’t sure he would be able to accept it. ‘But as I was watching, tears began to flow from my eyes,’ Hall said. ‘Yes, I accept his apology. Now, what can we do next?’ Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier, a 79-year-old citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, said she felt “a tingle in my heart” and was glad the historical wrong was being acknowledged. Still, she remains saddened by the irreversible harms done to her people. Whirlwind Soldier suffered severe mistreatment at a school in South Dakota that left her with a lifelong, painful limp. The Catholic-run, government-subsidized facility took away her faith and tried to stamp out her Lakota identity by cutting off her long braids, she said. “Sorry is not enough. Nothing is enough when you damage a human being… A whole generation of people and our future was destroyed for us.”

There was also President Bill Clinton’s apology to the Hawaiian peoples, Public Law 103-150, a joint resolution of the U.S. Congress adopted in 1993 that “acknowledges that the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii occurred with the active participation of agents and citizens of the U.S.” and confirmed that the Native Hawaiian people never relinquished to the U.S. their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands. Predictably, the resolution was little more than a public relations show because the U.S. never envisaged the reestablishment of the Hawaiian Kingdom (I personally know the heir to the Hawaiian throne), nor intended to make the least reparation, individually or collectively, to the Hawaiians whose lives were disrupted, whose properties were confiscated, whose lands were polluted. This is the kind of hypocrisy that U.S. presidents and the U.S. Congress engage in on a regular basis.

By comparison, in 2007, the then-Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, issued an apology to the native Aborigenes[6]. The Australian Resolution did have some beneficial effects, as many Aborigenes recovered lands[7] and enjoyed a degree of compensation.

Sequels of settler colonialism and forced assimilation

Medical and sociological studies document the physical and psychological sequelae suffered by indigenous children who endured abuse, separation from their families, and being cut off from their roots, language, and traditions, while being subjected to forced indoctrination aimed at imposing an alien Western-compatible identity[8]. The rate of suicide among these unfortunate individuals is reported to be higher than that of the rest of the population[9]. Doubtless, these Native American boarding schools were incompatible with Christian values and the fundamentals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As so often happens, apologetics and propaganda have made it appear as if these federal institutions were intended to “help” the hapless children and prepare them for a good life in free Western societies.  As psychiatrists have observed in other cases, including those concerning survivors of the Holocaust[10] and survivors of the expulsion of 14 million Germans (with 2 million deaths) from their homelands at the end of World War II[11], the trauma continues with the children and even grandchildren of the direct victims.

Tamara Starblanket published a brilliant dissertation in 2020 on the Canadian “residential schools” and the racist ideologies that led to their establishment and the effort to “kill the Indian within them.” As Noam Chomsky wrote in a blurb: “Settler-colonialism reveals the brutal face of imperialism in some of its most vicious forms. This carefully researched and penetrating study focuses on one of its ugliest manifestations, the forcible transfer of indigenous children, and makes a strong case for Canadian complicity in a form of ‘cultural genocide’ – with implications that reach to the Anglosphere generally, and to some of the worst crimes of the ‘civilized world’ in the modern era.”

In recent decades a number of researchers and organizations in the US and Canada have shed light on the cultural genocide committed on Indigenous populations in the Americas and elsewhere.  In the United States a PBS documentary opened the eyes of millions of Americans about our legacy of cultural genocide[14].  In Canada, we can refer to “Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust – The Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples by Church and State in Canada – A Summary of an Ongoing, Independent Inquiry into Canadian Native ‘Residential Schools’ and their Legacy”, is a study by Rev. Kevin D. Annett, MA, MDiv. The report is published by The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada, a public investigative body continuing the work of previous Tribunals into native residential schools: The Justice in the Valley Coalition’s Inquiry into Crimes Against Aboriginal People, convened in Port Alberni, British Columbia, on December 9, 1994, and The International Human Rights Association of American Minorities Tribunal into Canadian Residential Schools was held in Vancouver, BC, from June 12-14, 1998.

Identity is a Human Right

As I elaborate in my “new functional paradigm of human rights”[15], the right to identity is crucial for the well-being of each individual, for the development of the individual personality, in short, for the “pursuit of happiness”. Identity means the right to be you, the right to be me, without being forced by the government or society to relinquish our authentic traditions, convictions, and aspirations.  Cultural identity is necessary for a sense of orientation, a pre-condition for the ability to integrate into a collectively, for the exercise of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. A human being needs to know his/her origins, culture, history, traditions. A person deprived of historical memory is more often than not lost in the world and deprived of the capacity to interrelate with the environment and with others.  One must know who one is.

The 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples[16] reaffirms both individual and collective rights, in particular, the right of self-determination and sovereignty over natural resources, the right to say “no” to private or government prospecting in and exploitation of indigenous lands, the right to identity and language, to education, health, employment, language. It outlaws discrimination against indigenous peoples and promotes their full and effective participation in all matters that concern them. It also ensures their right to remain distinct and to pursue their own priorities in economic, social and cultural development. Of course, the “Declaration” is only a pious expression of “soft law”, not a “hard law” treaty, and countries largely ignore it.

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

There are numerous organizations, groups, and civil society leaders currently advocating for the recognition of Indigenous rights in the US and Canada, for “affirmative action” to save what may still be saved of the culture of these communities that flourished in North America before the arrival on their continent of millions of “migrant” Anglo-Saxons, Scots, Irish, French, Germans, Italians, Poles and Ukrainians. There is a movement in Canada called “idle no more”[17], there are numerous non-governmental organizations, including the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities[18], the Koani Foundation[19], the Indigenous Peoples and Nations Coalition[20], the Indigenous Foundation[21], the American Indian Council[22], etc., all of whom have consultative status with the United Nations.  I have heard their statements at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Under Canadian Law, there is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission[23], which has shed light on the abuses committed in the residential schools for Indigenous children.  There is also a private organization of the survivors of Residential Schools in Canada[24].  As yet, there is no similar institution in the United States[25], and Human Rights Watch has been pushing for the establishment of just such a Truth and Healing Commission on Indigenous Boarding Schools[26] in the United States.  Recently, Native advocates, survivors, and members of the US Congress have introduced a federal bill that would establish a Truth and Healing Commission to examine the full range of harms from the boarding school system.

No Plan of Action

Thus far there is no concrete plan of action to help the victims of the residential schools or their relatives.  Alas, the legacy of the indignities committed against Indigenous continues unabated.  Biden acknowledged that “no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” although “we’re finally moving forward into the light.”  Will there be a coherent program of action to help Indigenous communities throughout the US and Canada cope with their considerable problems, including extreme poverty and unemployment?  Alex White Plume, 73, a former president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who attended two boarding schools on reservations in South Dakota, told NBC News he would not accept the apology from president Biden: “I don’t really see any way where we could accept it, because it doesn’t change anything… We need to survive, and in order to survive we need our territories back so we could bring back our language and perform the ceremonies that are specific to places in our territory …So I don’t want to accept an apology. I want them to be meaningful. And if it’s a meaningful apology, he would say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna investigate the genocide, and we’ll establish a process to create protocols on how to go about it.’ I think something like that would have been more meaningful.”[27]

Remedies

Victims of injustice want action, not rhetoric. Indigenous victims and their representatives can address complaints and petitions to the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples[28], to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues[29], which will hold its 24th session in April 2025[30], and to the Expert Mechanism on Indigenous Peoples[31]. With respect to Canada, the Indigenous can submit cases to the UN Human Rights Committee pursuant to the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights[32] with a view to obtaining a ruling from the Committee and a recommendation to provide an “adequate remedy,” as is the Committee’s jargon. This is not yet possible with respect to American Indigenous tribes because the United States has thus far refused to ratify the Optional Protocol to ICCPR.

The harm caused to indigenous communities in North America, in the United States, Alaska and Canada is incalculable.  Personally, I do not see how it could ever be repaired.  The Indigenous of North America has a truncated history and a broken identity.  This is the result of deliberate cultural genocide.  The US and Canada cannot reverse the fact that when the Anglo-Saxons and French came to North America, there were some ten million Algonquins, Crees, Cherokees, Dakotas, Hopi, Iroquois, Lakotas, Mohawks, Pequots, Seminoles, Sioux, Squamish, Tlingits in the continent.  At the end of the 19^th century, there were barely 300,000.  In this sense, the genocide was successful[33].

As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1964 in his book Why We Can’t Wait, “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation that tried, as a matter of national policy, to wipe out its Indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today, we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.”[34]

Unfortunately, sixty years after Dr. King wrote those words, racism against Indigenous Americans persists, and many do not forget the signs that used to hang in South Dakota stores – in Arizona near the Navajo “Reservation” and in so many other places in the American West:  “No dogs or Indians allowed.”[35]  This kind of humiliation is difficult to forget. By comparison, the new awareness of the injustices committed in the residential schools pale in the genocidal landscape.  These victims are but the last vestiges of the annihilation process.

The mindset that led to cultural genocide

U.S. Army Captain Richard Henry Pratt is notorious for a speech in which he demanded assimilation of the indigenous peoples of America: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”[36] The speech was delivered in 1892 during the National Conference of Charities and Correction, held in Denver. Colorado. The full-text copy of his speech, as printed in the published proceedings of the conference, was drawn from the HathiTrust Digital Library. The ideas expressed in Pratt’s speech are central to the development of the Carlisle Indian School (founded 1879) and other boarding schools across the US, which aimed to “civilize” the “Indian”. Indeed, the intent to destroy the indigenous mentality affected not only the direct victims but also their families and, more broadly, the societies where they lived and still live.

The Canadian panorama is not unlike the American.  At the height of the Canadian effort to “assimilate” the “Indians” we recognize a militant racist, Duncan Campbell Scott, a civil servant in the Canadian “Department of Indian Affairs,” perhaps the most ardent supporter of the residential schools and the policies that accompanied them: the removal by consent or by force of tens of thousands of Indigenous children from their homes, some as young as two or four years of age; the attempts to deprive these children of any connections with their parents; the institution of an underfunded system where thousands of students perished from malnutrition, poor medical care, and disease; the creation of an education system where child labor was a norm and where academic achievements were severely compromised. In 1920, Scott also promoted an amendment to the Indian Act, making school attendance compulsory for all First Nations children under 15 years of age.  When he ordered compulsory school attendance in 1920, he stated: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone . . . Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question.”

After-thought:  Indigenous in Central and South America

By comparison, it is worth noting that although the indigenous population of Central and South America endured the criminal onslaught of the Spanish conquistadores[37], the Spanish model of “colonization” did not implement the same kind of cultural genocide as in North America.  Indeed, whoever travels to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, etc. soon discovers that indigenous cultures in Central and South America are very much alive, numbering in the tens of millions of human beings, speaking their own indigenous languages, Quechua, Aymara, Mapuche, Uru-Chipaya,  that they continue to practice their old traditions, in short, that they manage to preserve their identities.  They were never subjected to the level of humiliation and cultural genocide that characterized the Anglo-Saxon and French settlement of North America.  Still, there is a long way to go to their rehabilitation, since racial discrimination persists in South America and large indigenous groups like the Mapuche in Chile are denied their inalienable right of self-determination.

It occurs to me that the “elites” of North and South America could learn a few things from the indigenous[38].  As the Indigenous former President of Bolivia, Evo Morales is reported to have said: “Sooner or later we will have to recognize that the Earth has rights too, to live without pollution. What mankind must know is that human beings cannot live without Mother Earth, but the planet can live without humans.”

Let us hope that the “elites” in all countries listen, recognize the immensity of the crime against the indigenous peoples, and make an effort to rehabilitate the survivors, giving them, at the very least, the rights enunciated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Notes.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/25/politics/biden-apologizes-native-americans-abusive-boarding-schools/index.html

https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/28/biden_residential_schools

[2] https://www.npr.org/2024/07/30/nx-s1-5051912/interior-dept-report-indian-boarding-schools

[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/14/text

[4] https://www.mlive.com/native-american-news/2024/11/native-americans-laud-biden-for-historic-apology-over-boarding-schools-they-want-action-to-follow.html

[5] https://hawaii-nation.org/publawsum.html

[6] https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/national-apology

[7] https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/mabo-decision

[8] https://www.acf.hhs.gov/blog/2021/11/healing-trauma-federal-residential-indian-boarding-schools https://www.pbs.org/native-america/blog/legacy-of-trauma-the-impact-of-american-indian-boarding-schools-across-generations

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/a-century-of-trauma-at-boarding-schools-for-native-american-children-in-the-united-states

[9] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/residential-schools-intergenerational-trauma-kamloops-1.6052240

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5809999/

[10] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-and-the-pursuit-of-leadership/202301/how-do-holocaust-survivors-cope-with-extreme

[11] Alfred de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, Routledge, London and Boston.

[12] Tamara Starblanket, Suffer the Little Children, Genocide, Indigenous Nations and the Canadian State. Clarity Press, Atlanta. 2020. https://www.claritypress.com/product/suffer-the-little-children-genocide-indigenous-nations-and-the-canadian-state/

[13] https://www.facinghistory.org/en-ca/resource-library/killing-indian-child

[14] https://www.pbs.org/native-america/blog/legacy-of-trauma-the-impact-of-american-indian-boarding-schools-across-generations

[15] Alfred de Zayas, Building a Just World Order, Clarity Press, Atlanta, 2021.

A New Functional Paradigm of Human Rights

[16] https://www.ohchr.org/en/indigenous-peoples/un-declaration-rights-indigenous-peoples. Adopted by a vote of 143 in favour to 4 against (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States).

[17] https://idlenomore.ca/

[18] https://ihraam.org/

[19] http://www.koanifoundation.org/Mission_%26_Purpose.html

[20] https://cendoc.docip.org/collect/cendocdo/index/assoc/HASH01fb/0a6e3dbd.dir/JS46_UPR22_USA.pdf

[21] https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/us-residential-schools

[22] https://indiancouncil.net/

[23] https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060525

[24] https://www.irsss.ca/

[25] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/08/16/does-america-need-a-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-395332

[26] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/18/us-truth-and-healing-commission-indigenous-boarding-schools-long-overdue

[27] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/biden-apologizes-forced-native-american-boarding-school-policy-caused-rcna177242

[28] https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-indigenous-peoples

[29] https://social.desa.un.org/issues/indigenous-peoples/unpfii

[30] https://social.desa.un.org/issues/indigenous-peoples/unpfii/unpfii-twenty-fourth-session-21-april-2-may-2025

[31] https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrc-subsidiaries/expert-mechanism-on-indigenous-peoples

[32] Jakob Möller/Alfred de Zayas, United Nations Human Rights Committee Case Law, N.P.Engel, Strasbourg 2009.

[33] David Stannard, American Holocaust, Oxford University Press, 1992.  Richard Drinnon, Facing West, University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Alfred de Zayas, Countering Mainstream Narratives, Clarity Press, 2022, Chapter 17 on the “Unsung Victims.”

[34] Why we can’t wait, p. 141, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/dr-king-spoke-out-against-the-genocide-of-native-americans/

[35] https://www.hcn.org/issues/49.17/opinion-racism-against-native-americans-persists.  https://www.columbiagorgenews.com/archive/the-story-has-another-chapter-first-indigenous-peoples-day-observed/article_ef115dbe-b3b4-596e-9e35-7b9b95f5f112.html

https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2020/06/22/in-gallup-surrounded-by-the-navajo-nation-a-pandemic-crosses-paths-with-homelessness-hate-and-healers/

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-nov-02-na-trailmix2-story.html

[36] https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/teach/kill-indian-him-and-save-man-r-h-pratt-education-native-americans

[37] Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, https://web.as.uky.edu/history/faculty/myrup/his208/Casas,%20Bartolome%20de%20las%20-%20Short%20Account%20(1992,%20excerpts).pdf

[38] https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/08/1097382

https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/04/1135732

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Photo by Jakub Kapusnak

It takes some skill to make Donald J. Trump look good.  Two Democrats have succeeded in doing so: Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024.  The conceit of both presidential campaigns, and the belief that attacking a staggeringly grotesque moral character for being such, was laughable. (When a Clinton mocks groping philanderers and creepy molesters, one must reach for, well, the Starr Report?)  In certain countries, abominating and execrating your political adversary for being a moral defective might work.  In the United States, such figures can draw benefit from being outside the constraints of law-abiding society.  They are quite literally outlaw spirits that still speak of that nebulous notion called the American Dream while encouraging everyone else to come for the ride. Realising it involves treading on toes and breaking a few skulls on the way, but that’s the expectation.

From the start, the Democrats had tied themselves in knots by convincing President Joe Biden that he could not only last the tenure of his office but run against Trump.  Doing so, and deriding those wishing to see a change in the guard, created a needless handicap.  Throughout late 2023 and early 2024, it became clear that the party worthies were doing their best to shield Biden’s cognitive decline.  The sham was cruelly exposed in the June 27 debate with Trump.

Panic struck the ranks. With little time to regroup, Vice President Harris was close at hand, selected by Biden as the appropriate choice.  But Harris landed with a punctured parachute weighed down by the crown of presumptive nomination.  There were to be no opponents (the 2016 challenge of Bernie Sanders against Hillary Clinton which annoyed the party mandarins would not be repeated), no primaries, no effective airing of any challenge. It was easy to forget – at least for many Democrats – that Harris’s 2019 bid for the nomination had been spectacularly poor and costly.  An ailing president would also keep his occupancy in the White House, rather than resigning and giving Harris some seat warming preparation.

While the change caused the inevitable rush of optimism, it soon became clear that the ghost of Hillary’s past had been working its demonic magic.  The Harris campaign was unadventurous and safe.  All too often, the vice president hoped that messages would reach the outer reaches of the electorate from cocooned comfort, helped by a war chest of fundraising that broke records ($1 billion in less than three months), and a battalion of cheerleading celebrities that suggested electoral estrangement rather than connection.

Then there was the problem as to what those messages were.  These, in the end, did not veer much beyond attacking Trump as a threat to democracy, women’s rights and reproductive freedoms.  They tended to remain unclear on the issue of economics.  From foreign to domestic policy, Harris failed to distinguish herself as one able to depart from the Biden program in her own right.  Instead, it was hoped that some organic coalition of anti-Trump Republicans, independents, Black voters, women and American youth would somehow materialise at the ballot box.

In a September 16 meeting with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, longtime allies of the Democratic Party, Harris failed to convince its leaders that she would protect the livelihood and jobs of workers better than Trump. Within a matter of days, the union publicly revealed that it would not be endorsing Harris as Democratic presidential candidate, the first since 1996.

Her interviews were minimal, her exposure to the outside treated with utmost delicacy. The Republicans, on the other hand, were willing to get their hands dirty with an extensive ground campaign that yielded electoral rewards in such battleground states as Pennsylvania.  The Early Vote Action effort of conservative activist Scott Presler proved impressive in encouraging voter registration and increasing absentee and early vote counts. His efforts in securing votes for Trump from Pennsylvania’s Amish community were strikingly successful.

Trump, in sharp contrast to his opponent, was so exposed to the point of being a potential assassination target on two occasions.  He showed the electorate he was worth the tag.  He personalised with moronic panache.  He babbled and raged, and made sure he, as he always does, dominated the narrative.  Alternative media outlets were courted.  Most of all, he focused on the breadbasket issues: the cost of groceries, housing and fuel; the perceived terrors of having a lax border policy.  He also appealed to voters content with reining in the war making instincts so natural to Harris and neoconservatives on both sides of the aisle.

Fundamentally, the Democrats fell for the old trick of attacking Trump’s demagogy rather than teasing out their own policies.  The Fascist cometh.  The inner Nazi rises.  Misogyny rampant.  Racism throbbing.  This came with the inevitable belittling of voters.  You cast your ballot for him, you are either an idiot, a fascist, or both.  Oh, and he was just weird, said the unknown and already forgotten ear-scratching Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, whatever that means in a land where weird is so frequent as to make it its most endearing quality.

It is remarkable that Trump, a convicted felon, twice impeached in office, a person so detached from the empirical, the logical, and the half-decent, would be electable in the first place.  Even more remarkable is that such a figure has won both the Electoral College and the popular vote.  The glorious Republic likes its show and treats elections like marketing exercises.  Its defenders often pretend that those reaching its highest office are not mirrors but transcendent figures to emulate.  Trump – in all his cocksure hustling and slipshod approach to regulation and convention – shows many in the electorate that the defect and the defective can go far.

A few final lessons.  The Democrats would do best to listen to those who would otherwise vote for them.  Focus on the economy.  Talk about the price of eggs and milk.  Ditch the lexicon on ill-defined terms of supposedly useful criticism such as fascism, a word the users almost always misunderstand. And always be careful about pundits and pollsters who predict razor small margins in elections.  Polls, and people, lie.

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Photo by Sara Groblechner

“There is little doubt that Israel is in a better strategic position today than it was before the Oct. 7 attacks.”

– Amanda Taub, “The Interpreter,” New York Times, November 4, 2024, “Can Israel and Iran Find a New Balance of Power to Stabilize the Mideast.”

 In a 7,000-word essay in Foreign Affairs that was published on the eve of the Hamas invasion of Israel in October 2023, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan wrote that the Middle East is “quieter than it has been for decades.”  Sullivan based his dubious case on a “lengthy truce in Yemen,” and a “cessation of attacks on U.S. troops by Iran-backed militias.”

Sullivan could not have anticipated the Hamas invasion, but he must be faulted for failing to understand the explosive situation that existed in the Middle East.  He also can be faulted for asserting that the Biden administration had “deescalated” crises in Gaza.  Sullivan received a great deal of criticism last year from the New York Times for his premature victory lap in the Middle East.

Now it is the New York Times’ turn to misread the unpredictable turmoil in the Middle East.  In its description of Israel’s “strategic position,” the Times has forgotten that prior to October 7, Israel’s borders were quiet, particularly the northern border with Lebanon.  Israel had domestic concerns due to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken the Israeli Supreme Court and his formation of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history.  But Israel’s economy was strong, and its economic dealings with various Arab countries due to the Abraham Accords was offering a measure of stability to the region.  There was even discussion of an Israeli-Saudi Arabian accord that would include a U.S. defense agreement with Saudi Arabia.  Such an accord would have strengthened Israel’s diplomatic position throughout the region, and weakened Iran’s standing in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.  A possible accord is very unlikely at this juncture, and several Persian Gulf countries are trying to improve relations with Iran, which will make Israel’s (and America’s) strategic position more difficult.

Now a war with Hamas that was supposed to last several months, if not several weeks, is headed into its 14th month, and what had been a localized conflict on Israel’s southern border finds the Jewish nation fighting a regional war on several fronts.  There is no end in sight in the war with Gaza, with Hezbollah in Lebanon, or with the Houthis in Yemen.  Israel and Iran have exchanged serious military attacks, and there is terrible anticipation in Israel regarding Iran’s next move.  There is no reason to believe that the tit-for-tat military exchanges of the past several months between Israel and Iran have ended.  Like the aftermath of the October War in 1973, Israel’s psyche has been badly scarred.

In addition to the unpredictable scenarios that Israel is facing on all of its borders, the country has become an international pariah as a result of its genocidal campaign in Gaza.  Only the United States fully supports Israeli policy, and there are signs that the United States is prepared to reconsider its full-scale military support for Israel.  There are serious critics of that open-ended military support for in the Senate as well as in the House of Representatives.  Civil servants at key agencies, including the Department of State and the Agency for International Development have signed statements endorsing reduced military assistance for Israel, and Congressional staffers have put pressure on senators and representatives to become more even-handed when discussing the Middle East.  If Vice President Kamala Harris is elected president, there is some reason to believe that Harris will reopen the question of U.S. military support for Israel.  Conversely, if she loses the election, it will be due in part to the Biden administration’s support for Israel.

Netanyahu will ultimately be held accountable for the policy and intelligence failures associated with October 7, and probably won’t survive politically in the wake of a cease-fire with Gaza and Hezbollah, let alone an actual armistice or peace treaty.  Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe a successor to Netanyahu will be more moderate or conciliatory.  In fact, Israel’s politics and politicians have moved to the right on all issues involving the Arabs and the Palestinians.  Israeli efforts to displace Palestinians on the West Bank and to make Gaza uninhabitable will only worsen the regional and domestic environments, and contribute to Israel’s isolation.

Israel had dominant military power in the region before October 7th, and it continues to have dominant military power  Once again, we have a demonstration of the fact that military power alone does not determine strategic power or influence.  The United States should have learned these lessons in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  Israel should have learned these lessons in Lebanon in the 1980s and in 2006 as well as the Intifada’s with the Palestinians over the years.

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Rocky Mountain Wolf. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

CounterPunch went online 30 years ago, just in time for Clinton’s war on Serbia. Clinton’s war was premeditated, our transit to the World Wide Web was reluctant, at best. Alexander Cockburn’s relationship with computers was hostile. Mine was indifferent. I surfed the web, like anyone else, but had no idea how it would be useful for us. At the time, CounterPunch was a 6-page newsletter that we published fortnightly. We called it “fortnightly” because the word had a nice ring to it and no one was precisely sure how many days or even weeks a fortnight encompassed. But if we ran pieces online, who would pay to receive our newsletter? We remained stubbornly committed to print and our 5,000 or so subscribers. Where will the web be when the electromagnetic pulse wipes the slate clean?

The fact that we even had a domain name we owed entirely to the foresight of one of our tech-savvy donors, who told me that even though we were both too dumb to realize it now, we’d thank him for it one day. He reserved the CounterPunch domain in 1997. We didn’t start using it for another year when the cruise missiles started shattering the night in Belgrade. The war went on for 78 days and nights, roughly four fortnights. The web allowed us to cover Clinton’s war in real time. Cockburn said he was willing to try it as an “experiment,” fully expecting it to fail. He had just one condition: that he never had to learn how to post a piece. Thus management of the CounterPunch website fell into my hands by default. I used a primitive software program called Pagemill for the first few years and it looked primitive, like scribblings by Cy Twombley. There was no time to take any classes or seminars. “Just get it up as fast as you can, Jeffrey,” Cockburn said. “And no complaints.” I knew nothing then about HTML, hyperlinks, analytics or even how to load a photo. I still don’t know much. I’d loved my archaic Pagemill program. It was web design for simpletons. I threw a tantrum the day I was forced to give it up for the damnable Dreamweaver, which was far too complex for my sophomoric skill set.

Nevertheless, people came. Came by the thousands and then the 10s of thousands. They came from all over the world: Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, Iceland, South Korea, India. By the 2000 presidential elections, CounterPunch had gone global. Even so, we had no idea how to make the website pay for itself or to help support CounterPunch. For years, we didn’t have a shopping cart or any way to take credit card orders or sell subscriptions online. We simply asked people to mail in a check to the office in Petrolia. In a couple of years, our readership had grown from 5,000 print subscribers to 150,000 viewers a day on the website.

But the funding base had remained pretty much the same. We were supported by our subscribers and by the extra money we raised from hitting them up once a year through a direct mail letter usually sent in November. Alex enjoyed writing the letters.

Cockburn, St. Clair and the Great Bear of the Mattole.

Cockburn told me once, he thought he could have enjoyed a great career in advertising or public relations, a fantasy fed by our friend and counselor Ben Sonnenberg, the longtime editor of Grand Street, whose father nearly invented the seductive art of public relations. And they were successful. Or successful enough to keep us afloat, though the coffers had usually been drained to a shallow tidepool by the time October rolled around.

Alex told me once that he was good at raising money because he’d spent so much time avoiding debt collectors. He said he learned the finer points of this art from his father, Claud, who like most writers of radical journalism lived close to the margin most of his life. It was from Claud that Alex inherited some of his favorite phrases: “the wolf at the door,” “pony up,” “begging bowl.” (Of course, Alex loved all canids, wild and domestic, and would have gladly left out a shank from one of his pal Greg Smith’s lambs for any wolf on the prowl.) We used to joke about Alex’s six phone lines, one for each creditor. He also had a different accent for each creditor, once pretending to be his brother Patrick, who was reporting on the siege of Mosul at the time. Listening to these calls was hearing a master at work, like a character from one of his favorite novels, The Charmer by Patrick Hamilton.

In those days, the CounterPunch staff was so small we could all squeeze into Alex’s Valiant, when it would start. After Ken Silverstein left for greener pastures, it was largely down to Alex, Becky Grant and me. We worked 11 months out of the year, taking August off, and a weeklong holiday during Christmas usually highlighted by a New Year’s Eve party at Alex’s house along the Mattole River. Those years can seem idyllic in hindsight. We worked hard and drank harder, often hard cider brewed by Alex and CounterPunch’s board chair Joe Paff. Still, we were fairly productive by almost any standard. We wrote three books together in four years, two of them (Whiteout and our scathing biography of Al Gore) were substantial works requiring months of research. We both wrote a column a week separately and one together (Nature and Politics). We wrote most of the copy for CounterPunch, 10 to 12 stories a month. We both had weekly radio shows, Alex in South Africa and mine on KBOO in Portland. We both wrote for the Anderson Valley Advertiser and occasional pieces for New Left Review, The Progressive, the New Statesman, and City Pages. I wrote for the Village Voice and In These Times and Alex had a bi-monthly column in The Nation. But CounterPunch was home base. It’s the journal that we felt the closest to and saved our best writing for.

Cockburn “dialing for dollars” in my office/garage in 1998.

Sometimes the bank accounts would evaporate even earlier. On September 11, 2001, for example. I was jolted from bed by an early morning wake-up call from Cockburn. “Jeffrey, turn on your TV and describe what you see.” He hadn’t paid his cable bill and they’d shut off his service. I spent the next several hours narrating the fall of the Twin Towers, the crash at the Pentagon, the panicky peregrinations of George W. Bush and Cheney’s tightening grip on the throat of the Republic. Our lives as journalists changed profoundly that day as well. From September 11 onward, we published nearly every day of the week, week after week, month after month, year after year. At first, we ran only two or three stories a day. (And to fill in those blank hours on the clock, we insanely decided to start a book publishing venture!) Now we publish 12 to 14 each day and 40 to 45 every Friday for our Weekend Edition. We were online for good, like it or not. No vacations, no holidays, no sick days. The web, we soon found out, waits for no one.

We were online, but we still had no idea how to make our web-based journalism pay for itself. We tried running Google Ads for a few months, but got banned for what Google imperiously declared was “clicker fraud,” even though we hadn’t been the culprits. Apparently, some over-enthusiastic CounterPuncher had repeatedly clicked on Google text links, for which we received a return of a nickel a click. We think it was a CounterPuncher. Of course, it might have been Alex’s cockatiel, Percy, who in addition to whistling the Internationale, took a fancy to Cockburn’s keyboard, battering it with his beak four or five times a day. At the time, a close friend of ours was dating a top Google lawyer, who to prove his devotion to her swore that he would have the ban reversed. He failed. She dumped him. But the verdict of the corporate algorithm is absolute. It tolerates no appeals.

Alex, a Luddite to the core, believed that every new feature of the cyber world was an evil manifestation to be shunned, shamed and exorcized. Thus he continued to refer to CounterPunch as a “Twitter-free Zone” for nearly a year after Nathaniel had set up the CounterPunch Twitter account, which now has more than 65,000 followers. No one had the heart to tell him the news.

Early on we tried writing a few grant proposals, but never got one we actually applied for-our position on Israel proving fatal to our aspirations for funding. It’s just as well. We weren’t going to dance to any master’s tune or be constrained by anyone else’s ideological strings. We weren’t going to saddle ourselves with ads, either. Partly this was owing to my own incompetence. I had no idea how to use Flash or any of the other plug-ins that ad companies demanded we deploy. But we also both deplored the way online ads intruded on our own reading experiences and didn’t want to inflict that on our readers, if we could help it. And so far, so good.

In the end, we’ve largely depended on the kindness of our readers to survive. And, though there have been some close calls, this simple and direct approach of appealing to those who know us best hasn’t failed in 30 years. Not yet, anyway. After Alex died, a woman approached me at the funeral and said rather smugly, “Well, I guess this is the end of CounterPunch.” I was angered at her remark and Alex would have been, too. This woman was part of the Nation magazine’s delegation to the funeral. My irritation with her was only partly about how dismissive she was concerning my own contribution to CounterPunch, which had been substantial even before Ken’s departure.

It stemmed more from the flippant disregard for our writers and tens of thousands of readers. CounterPunch was no longer merely a platform for our voices. It was now the home base for hundreds of different writers from across the country and around the globe. I checked this morning. Since going online, we’ve published more than 6,000 different writers. CounterPunch belongs to them, as much as it does to us. Still, Mrs. MoneyBags was right about one thing. We were more broke than we’d ever been the week that Alex died. But we published the day Alex died, the day he was buried and every day since. The readers came through, again and again and again.

We’ve grown in the 11 years since Alex passed. The online readership is probably twice what it was in August 2012. We’re publishing more pieces each week and adding new writers every day. The website has been completely revamped by Andrew Nofsinger into a more efficient and flexible WordPress design that even a Luddite like me can’t screw up too badly. It even works on smartphones, where the analytics say nearly half of the site’s visitors read CounterPunch. To keep up, our staff (still tiny by most standards) has doubled in size, from three to seven: Becky, Deva and Nichole in the business office, me, Josh and Nathaniel on the editorial side, and Andrew helming the website.

That means our costs have more than doubled. What didn’t double, however, were the number of print magazine subscribers who used to be the primary funders of CounterPunch. Everywhere, print was in decline, even here at CounterPunch. Then COVID hit, the printers shut down, Louis DeJoy took over the Post Office so magazines sent by mail were arriving later than ever, if they arrived at all. So we made the cruel decision to kill the magazine and now we’re dependent solely on the community of online readers who utilize CounterPunch for free: no clickbait, no ads, no paywalls.

I remember a conversation Alex and I had on the night before the last fundraiser we did together in October 2011. He was sick then, sicker than any of us knew, but not showing it. He was impish, excited and anxious, as he always was this time of year.

“Are you ready for another shot in the dark, Jeffrey?” he asked.

“What if we fail this time?”

“Well, we can always do something else.”

“Do we know how to do anything else?”

“Of course, we do. We know how to make cider, go trout-fishing and listen to Chuck Berry. What more do we need?”

And now another Fall Fund Drive has rolled around and the old wolf, perhaps loping past the spirit of Cockburn in the pepperwood grove in the Mattole Valley, is back at our door. We humbly put forth our begging bowl, confident that CounterPunchers will once again pony up…

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The seal of the International Court of Justice.

The timing, as with so much in the ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon, was most appropriate. The Israeli Knesset had signalled its intent on crippling and banishing the sole agency of humanitarian worth for Palestinian welfare by passing laws criminalising its operations by 92 to 10 on October 28.

The attack on UNRWA also came with a contemporaneous legal effort, this time from South Africa.  Pretoria had already made its wishes clear on December 28, 2023 in filing an application in the International Court of Justice alleging “violations by Israel regarding the [United Nations] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide […] in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”  Acts and omissions by Israel, argued the South African government, were alleged to be of a “genocidal” nature, “committed with the requisite specific intent … to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group”.

By May 10, South Africa had filed four requests seeking additional provisional measures with modifications to the original provisional measures laid down by the ICJ.  The momentum, and frequency of the actions, even gave certain commentators room to wonder: Was Israel’s own due process rights regarding judicial equality and the right to be heard compromised?  Israel had promised to submit written observations by May 15 to the ICJ when faced with the sudden announcement on May 12 that the court would be holding an oral hearing instead.

These debates have been taking place before the concerted, dedicated, enthusiastic pulverisation of Gaza, and the ongoing killing, terrorisation and displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank.  In these cases, due process remains fantasy and distant speculation, especially concerning civilians.  With increasing regularity, there is chilling evidence that Israeli units have a programmatic approach to destroying a viable infrastructure and means of living on the strip.

On October 22, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem expressed horror at the sheer scale “of the crimes Israel is currently committing in the northern Gaza Strip in its campaign to empty it of however many residents are left […] impossible to describe, not just because hundreds of thousands of people enduring starvation, disease without access to medical care and incessant bombardments and gunfire defies comprehension, but because Israel has cut them off from the world.”

In a chilling overview of the exploits of the IDF’s 749 Combat Engineering Battalion written by Younis Tirawi and Sami Vanderlip for Drop Site News, a record of systematic elimination of cultural, structural and intellectual life in the Gaza Strip is evident.  As members of the battalion’s official D9 company stated: “Our job is to flatten Gaza.”  In an operation that saw the destruction of the Al-Azhar University, First Sergeant David Zoldan, operational officer of Company A of the battalion, delights with fellow soldiers on seeing the explosion: “Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, did you see?!”

Statements of this sort are frequent and easily found up the chain of command.  They are also uttered with ease at the highest levels of government.  On October 21, Israeli Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir had told a “settlement” conference held in a restricted military zone that Gaza’s inhabitants would be given the chance to “leave from here to other countries”.  His reasoning for this ethnic cleansing has remained biblically consistent: “The Land of Israel is ours.”

In a media statement from its Department of International Relations and Cooperation dated October 28, the South African government announced its filing of a Memorial to the ICJ pertaining to its ongoing case against Israel.  The Memorial itself runs into 750 pages, with 4000 pages of supporting exhibits and annexes.  (Its December 2023 application had run into 84 pages.)  “The problem we have is that we have too much evidence,” remarked South Africa’s representative to The Hague, Ambassador Vusimuzi Madonsela to Al Jazeera.

Zane Dangor, director- general of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, was more practical.  Israel might well inflate its dossier of bloody misdeeds, but some line had to be drawn in the submissions.  “The legal team will always say we need more time, there’s more facts coming.  But we have to say you have to stop now.  You [have] got to focus on what you have.”

While the formal contents of the Memorial remain confidential, the clues are thickly obvious.  It contains, for instance, evidence that Israel “has violated the genocide convention by promoting the destruction of Palestinians living in Gaza, physically killing them with an assortment of destructive weapons, depriving them access to humanitarian assistance, causing conditions of life which are aimed at their physical destruction and ignoring and defying several provisional measures of the International Court of Justice, and using starvation as a weapon of war to further Israel’s aims to depopulate Gaza through mass death and forced displacement of Palestinians.”

Despite that comprehensive assortment of alleged crimes, the legal commentariat wonder how far this latest effort will necessarily go in linking the decisions of Israeli officialdom with genocidal intent.  That Israel is committing war crimes and violating humanitarian law is nigh impossible dispute.  The threshold in proving genocide, as international jurisprudence has repeatedly shown over the years, is a high one indeed.  The dolus specialis – that specific intent to destroy in whole or in part the protected group – is essential to prove.

Cathleen Powell of University of Cape Town, for instance, has her reservations.  “If they can find genocidal statements from state officials and show that that directly led to a particular programme that led to the destruction on the ground, then that’s probably a very strong case,”.  But making that link would be “very difficult”.

Dangor has no doubts.  “Genocidal acts without intent can be crimes against humanity.  But here, the intent is just front and centre.”  Suffice to say that Israeli lawmakers and officials, aided by the exploits of the IDF, are making proving such intent an easier prospect with each passing day.

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Photo by Nathan Dumlao

Education is not the filling of a vessel, but the lighting of a fire.

– bell hooks

In an era marked by unprecedented threats to democracy from rising authoritarian forces, universities—once celebrated citadels of democratic learning and public service—now find themselves caught in a profound political and ideological siege. Rather than championing social justice or fostering spaces for rigorous intellectual exchange, many institutions have shifted their priorities to profit, silencing dissent and embracing market-driven models that serve a predatory capitalism, thus betraying their democratic mission. This crisis has deep roots, but the recent onslaught by far-right politicians and a reactionary billionaire elite is without precedent in its intensity and scale. This trend weakens the humanities and liberal arts, stripping higher education of its capacity to serve as a democratic public sphere and robbing it of the potential to cultivate socially aware students who challenge injustices and hold power to account. Increasingly, higher education runs the risk of becoming either right wing indoctrination centers or dead zones of the imagination.

Neoliberal ideology, marked by the irrational belief in the ability of markets to solve all problems, has deeply infiltrated public life, depoliticized critical issues and shifted education’s focus to workforce training. As education becomes increasingly privatized and subordinated to right-wing agendas, students are steered away from engaging with collective issues, ethics, or democratic participation. In the neoliberal university, students are encouraged to abandon any commitment beyond personal gain. Education is stripped of its civic purpose, no longer a path to responsible citizenship but a high-stakes financial transaction—a competition for entry into the lucrative world of hedge funds and exploitative financial ventures. This transformation reduces learning to mere careerism, undermining the university’s potential to cultivate engaged, socially conscious citizens.

In doing so, it fosters a dangerous form of historical and political amnesia, obscuring the reality that neoliberalism, which facing a crisis of legitimacy has aligned itself with a fascist politics steeped in white nationalism, white supremacy, and the politics of disposability. This alignment signals the rise of what I have called neoliberal fascism, a fusion of market-driven policies and authoritarian ideologies. Moreover, right-wing billionaires such as Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund CEO, are putting enormous pressure on universities to suppress dissent, particularly among critics of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and Lebonon and impose a curriculum that weakens the power and autonomy of faculty and students while turning colleges such as New College in Sarasota, Florida into citadels of indoctrination—a MAGA model for all of higher education.

This market-driven transformation has reshaped universities, reorienting them toward profitability and marginalizing disciplines that foster critical thinking, social responsibility, and collective imagination. The resulting commodification of education deprives students of the tools to challenge injustice or envision a more equitable society. Under such circumstances, the language of the market replaces civic language with personal, consumer-oriented perspectives, isolating individuals and obstructing a shared understanding of public concerns. In short, the critical function of higher education is under siege. Under such circumstances, higher education increasingly resembles disimagination machines.

The shift has also marginalized public intellectuals—scholars who contribute to society’s understanding of critical issues by connecting academic work to larger social problems. Instead, universities increasingly favor faculty who align with corporate values, reinforcing depoliticized, market-oriented approaches to education. This trend has led to the rise of  what George Scialabba calls the “anti-public intellectual,” figures who endorse market policies without addressing issues of justice and democracy. Or as in the case of  anti- public intellectuals such as Niall Ferguson whose writing legitimizes an outright fascist such as Trump. These corporate-aligned “anti-public intellectuals,” supported by neoliberal foundations like the Heritage Foundation, champion policies that erode public resources and democratic institutions. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto, for instance, aims to dismantle the welfare state and punish dissenters—a blueprint for an authoritarian reordering of American society under a potential second Trump administration.

Against this tide, public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Cornel West have long advocated for a different vision of education, one that invites students to question authority, seek justice, and cultivate democracy. Rather than focusing solely on producing economically viable graduates, universities must also strive to cultivate active, engaged citizens who can imagine a future free of climate catastrophe, militarism, systemic racism, and predatory capitalism.

Historically, universities have largely supported resistance and critical engagement, playing pivotal roles in movements for free speech, civil rights, and gender equality. However, this legacy is at risk. Neoliberal ideologies target universities because of their potential to promote democratic values and critical thought. As a result, right-wing movements and corporate interests increasingly attack universities’ public roles and democratic functions.

In response to these threats, a coalition of young people, critical public intellectuals, and progressive social movements has emerged, asserting that universities must be protected as bastions of democracy. As white nationalists, authoritarian billionaires, and neo-fascists wage war on education, it becomes clear that treating education as a public good is essential to sustaining a healthy democracy. Public intellectuals, students, and workers must defend educational institutions as sites of social justice and resistance against corporatization and the authoritarian impulses encroaching on democracy. Universities have a moral responsibility to press for social and economic justice, countering both corporatization and the rise of authoritarian ideologies.

The crisis in higher education is part of a broader neoliberal assault on democracy, which systematically privatizes education, undermines public trust, and weakens collective institutions. This relentless assault corrodes the very foundations of democratic life, replacing the values of cooperation, civic responsibility, and community with self-interest, competition, and social isolation. In this climate, public intellectuals play an essential role as guardians of engaged citizenship and intellectual integrity, equipping students and the public to see that democracy cannot sustain itself passively; it demands an active, vigilant defense. Universities, when aligned with their true purpose, become crucial spaces for cultivating the capacities, solidarity, and critical awareness necessary to confront and resist the encroachments of authoritarianism. What must be stressed here is that habits of power are learned and must in some cases be unlearned. This is an important pedagogical task.

The path forward for universities is clear: they must resist corporatization and recommit to fostering critical thinking, academic freedom, civic engagement, and democratic renewal. If higher education is to fulfill its democratic mission, it must resist the neoliberal plague and foster young people equipped to challenge inequities and envision a just, compassionate society.

In an era of collapsing visions, emotional plagues, manufactured ignorance, staggering inequality, environmental ruin, human misery, and rising authoritarianism, it is vital for academics to affirm higher education’s claim on democracy. Above all, academics need to stand firm in their ethical convictions, engage with the pressing social issues of our time and bridge the gap between learning and everyday life. Evoking the spirit of James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Edward Said, Ellen Willis, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Paulo Freire, our role as educators and citizens demands that we champion public intellectuals who dare to confront power, alleviate human suffering, and combat the moral vacuum of ultra-nationalism, white supremacy, and economic exploitation. Intellectuals, when aligned with these commitments, transcend the constraints of academic disciplines, engaging in society’s most urgent struggles, resisting the commercialization of knowledge, and bringing truth to bear amid a deluge of lies and conspiracy theories. They embody, as Kiese Makeba Laymon notes, “the vital connection between a reflective self-awareness and a commitment to social responsibility. Without an informed public, democracy is imperiled; without a language that interrogates injustice, there can be no path to justice.” At stake here is the recognition that without an informed public, there can be no democracy, and without a language critical of injustice, there can be no path to justice.

 Today, the role of educators as public intellectuals aligned with broader social movements has never been more vital, especially when far-right extremists around the globe seek to turn education into a force for indoctrination. Education has always been political, but in this era of book bans, weakened faculty autonomy, restricted curricula, and whitewashed history, imagining education as a practice of freedom is a radical act. It is not merely a means to transfer knowledge or a method, but a site of struggle over agency, identity, history, and the future. In a time when education can also become a tool of oppression, it is crucial to imagine education as a living pathway toward a strong and vibrant democracy. This suggests that young people and academics engage in a  profound dialogue with history, a commitment to honoring the memories of the forgotten, the silenced, and the oppressed as part of a relentless pursuit to hold power to account. It also suggests taking seriously the idea that pedagogy is a powerful force for shaping identities, agency, and social values. As Homi Bhabha rightly observes, pedagogy demands vigilance “at that very moment when identities are being produced and groups are being constituted.” In such contexts, pedagogy becomes a catalyst for empowering individuals to take responsibility not only for themselves but also for their communities, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to question authority and expose abuses of power. It urges us to learn from history, sharpening our ability to recognize, comprehend, and resist the insidious forces of fascism.

The McCarthyite rhetoric espoused by figures like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump poses a grave threat to the foundations of higher education. Vance has publicly branded  professors as “the enemy,” while Trump has pledged to cleanse universities of so-called ‘leftists,’ whom he denigrates as ‘vermin.’ For Trump, labels like ‘leftists’ and ‘Marxists’ serve as sweeping condemnations for anyone who dares engage in critical thinking or challenges the status quo. These attacks reveal a deep-seated contempt for universities as spaces of intellectual freedom, dialogue, and the pursuit of truth. By framing educators, scholars, and the media as “enemies from within,” these political figures are not merely undermining public trust in academic institutions; they are working to extinguish open inquiry and eradicate the diversity of perspectives essential for a vibrant democratic society. Their ultimate aim is to strip universities of their cultures of criticism, unsettling knowledge, and democratic values—even those values that remain tenuous The consequences of this discourse are severe, and we have seen a similar script played out in Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, and more recently in Orban’s Hungary. To put it bluntly, this rhetoric signals a project of repression that escalates toward expulsions, imprisonments, and, if Trump’s language is any indication, hints ominously at what Fintan O’Toolerefers to as “so many of European history’s lagers and gulags and prisoner-of-war camps.”

Reviving historical consciousness as a pedagogical practice illuminates patterns of repression and opens pathways for resistance. Simultaneously, it offers a vision of leadership that amplifies the power of both individual and collective agency—a fierce, binding force that calls us to the obligations of social responsibility, justice, and freedom. It is a foundation for a democracy that pulsates with the promise of a future where economic, social, and personal rights are not merely ideals but lived realities, untouched by fear, repression, or the shifting, ever-present ghosts of fascism.

Universities now stand at a crossroads: they can either continue down the path of market-driven values, eroding their purpose, or reclaim their democratic mission as spaces of critical inquiry and social responsibility. Since the 1970s, neoliberalism–a predatory form of capitalism–has systematically dismantled the welfare state, public sphere, and commitment to the common good, reshaping universities in its image. This ideology insists that the market should dictate not only the economy but all realms of society, concentrating wealth among a corrupt billionaire financial elite while promoting unchecked individualism, deregulation, and privatization as guiding societal principles. Under neoliberalism, education is commodified, and citizenship is reduced to consumerism. Universities—once spaces for cultivating democratic ideals and intellectual freedom—now risk becoming extensions of this form of gangster capitalism, mirroring the racialized inequalities, militarism, and extreme wealth gaps that define our broader social landscape. To surrender to the commodification, commercialism, and corporatization of education and the fascist currents shaping contemporary politics would be a profound betrayal of higher education’s foundational mission. The stakes could not be higher: without an unrelenting commitment to radical democratic ideals, universities risk not only forfeiting their own relevance but also imperiling the very future of democracy at a moment when the specter of fascism looms with renewed force.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Israel has reached an unimaginable peak of evil. And indeed many people all over the world find it hard to imagine that this is so. …The only possible conclusion must be that Israeli evil has nothing to do with Judaism and that what is manifested in Israeli behavior is not Jewishness. It is pure colonialist, nationalist and chauvinistic racism and should be treated as such.

–Nurit Peled-Elhanan at the Closing Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, March 17, 2013

I recently had a horrific dream that transported me from the safety and peace of Vietnam to the blazing hell on earth that is Gaza. I was holding a sniper rifle and in my sights was an IDF soldier. There’s not a shred of doubt in my mind that I would have pulled the trigger had the dream not ended. While I’m a great supporter of non-violence, I also firmly believe in the right of self-defense, including in Gaza where Israel is the invader and a fanatical agent of genocide.

My nightmare was a visceral manifestation that this Israeli-conceived and -executed genocide weighs heavily on my mind, is embedded in my subconscious, and can even rear its ugly, bloodstained head in my dreams. It embodies the powerlessness I feel but also the anger, frustration, and sadness. I wake up thinking about this moral stain and go to bed doing the same. But, alas, there are also glimmers of hope, a lesson history has taught me.

In her recent PEN Pinter Prize 2024 acceptance speech, “No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound That Is Palestine,” Arundhati Roy stated the obvious for those with eyes to see and ears to hear: “Israel is not fighting a war of self-defense. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.” She forcefully and eloquently dispenses with the perverse notion so many who “stand with Israel” embrace that genocide, torture, and land grabbing are a form of self-defense.

This, of course, is official Israel’s party line. In his October 7, 2024 Address at the State Ceremony to Mark One Year since the October 7 Massacre, Benjamin Netanyahu stated that “We rallied together to defend our country, our homeland. We mustered immense mental strength. We outlined the goals of the war and we are achieving them: toppling the rule of Hamas; bringing all the hostages home, the living and the deceased alike—this is a sacred mission and we will not stop until we complete it; eliminating any future threat from Gaza to Israel; and returning the residents of the south and the north safely to their homes.” Sounding very much like his primary benefactor in Washington, D.C. with its “city upon a hill” sense of cultural superiority and exceptionalism, he referred to Israelis as “the Eternal People. A people that fights to bring light to this world, that aspires to spread good and eradicate evil. ‘A people that rises like a lion, leaps up like a lion’.”

Back to the cold, bloody reality. Amos Goldberg, the Jonah M. Machover Chair in Holocaust Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-editor with Bashir Bashir of The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press 2018), writes that

What is happening in Gaza is a genocide, in my opinion, because the level and pace of indiscriminate killing, destruction, mass expulsion, displacement, deliberate famine, executions, the wiping out of universities, cultural and religious institutions, the crushing of elites (including the killing of journalists), and the sweeping dehumanization of the Palestinians create an overall picture of genocide, of the intentional and conscious shattering of Palestinian existence in Gaza. Palestinian Gaza, as a geographical, political, cultural, and human entity no longer exists. Genocide is the deliberate destruction of a collective or part of it, not of all of its individual members – and that is what is happening in Gaza today.

I Stand With…

During a summer visit to Philadelphia, I regularly walked by a home in my temporary neighborhood that had large posters in its window that screamed, “We Stand With Israel” and “Philly Stands with Israel.” Almost immediately, as if on autopilot my mind began to sketch out an essay in the spirit of writing as therapy, a more productive and therapeutic response than throwing rocks through the window, something my angry alter ago was insisting I do, instant yet counterproductive and illegal gratification.

In a blog post I proclaimed that I stand with “the exploited, weak, oppressed, and victims of state-sponsored violence, including genocide, NOT the oppressors, exploiters, and murderers. It’s really that simple. That black and white. There are no gray areas. There is no moral equivalence here.” It’s a grotesque of the times that this commonsensical and moral position is branded as controversial and to oppose the genocidal actions of Israel is to be antisemitic.

My interior dialogue with a friend who has swallowed the line about “toppling the rule of Hamas; bringing all the hostages home” and “eliminating any future threat from Gaza to Israel,” I continued: “What Hamas did last year was barbaric but the 2.1 million people living in Gaza are not Hamas. The attack merely created an opportunity for Israel and the IDF to shorten the long game, a modern-day version of the desire for Lebensraum.

There’s a lot of talk about taking sides, especially in the US, a country whose citizens and political leaders are indoctrinated to view the world in black and white terms, e.g., us vs. them, good and evil. Tell me who you stand with and I’ll tell you what side of history you’re on.

When you ‘Stand with Israel,’ does that mean you stand for genocide? Does it mean you don’t care about the tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, children who have been displaced, injured physically and psychologically, and slaughtered? Are their lives of less value than those of Israelis? Are they of no value?

The ongoing genocide in Gaza is Israel’s ‘final solution’ in ‘cleansing’ the country of Palestinians. (As a student of German history, I don’t use this term lightly.) The persecuted have come full circle by becoming the persecutors whereby the ends always justify the means. As many have observed, Palestinians have become the Jews of the 21st century.”

State-Sanctioned Murder of Innocents as the Ultimate Human Rights Violation

I had an unpleasant but necessary exchange on LinkedIn, “the world’s largest professional network on the internet,” with J., a colleague with a Ph.D. who is an anthropologist and gender specialist, and highlights human rights in her profile. As part of a discussion about Israel and the U.S., I noted that both countries have much in common.

“They’re both essentially settler colonial states that have inflicted untold suffering and misery on ‘undesirables’ within and beyond their borders. It’s a given that the lives of their citizens are more valuable than those of ‘the other.’ Take the US war in Vietnam, for example. 58,220 US Americans perished while 3.8 million Vietnamese were killed. Yet it’s always been about US(A). This Harold Pinter quote is relevant: ‘The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.’”

I also referred to Israel as “a terrorist state by any reasonable definition of the term” and “a pariah state, an outcast in the global community.”

J.’s ill-informed and off-the-mark response: “I think that this is a very unfair and very uniformed comment. Calling Israel a ‘terrorist’ state is beyond unreasonable. It is the only democratic country in the region that respects women’s and homosexual rights. It allows anyone to have citizenship, regardless of their ethnicity, UNLIKE their neighbors. They are continuously attacked and then blamed when they resound (read response) in defense. What is also continuously ignored is the widespread hate for Jewish people, and non Muslims in general, that runs rife in the region. It is ignored that this is the primary reason for the continued aggression and hostility towards Israel as is the fact that all of the other countries in the region run tyrannical regimes that don’t afford the rights to their citizens that Israel does.”

You’ll notice she trots out the old canard, self-defense, as a justification for Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and now Lebanon and Syria. It’s obvious she’s consumed enormous quantities of the blue and white Kool-Aid served up by Israel’s 24/7 propaganda machine.

But, hey, aside from the rampant racism in Israeli society, which J. either ignores or is blissfully ignorant of, the genocide in Gaza, and the murder of over a thousand civilians in Lebanon with no end in sight, Israel “is the only democratic country in the region that respects women’s and homosexual rights.”

The Complicity of Silence, The Moral Obligation of Resistance

You can be a celebrity or an ordinary person. If you stay SILENT, PASSIVE, INACTIVE while Palestinians trapped in Gaza – humans who breath, feel and dream exactly like you – get slaughtered by an unchecked army, you are no different from those who continued to go by their lives during past genocides who erased from earth millions.

-Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Instagram post, October 15, 2024)

All I can do from Vietnam is speak out in general and to fellow international educators (see International educators need to end their silence on Gaza), especially in my home country, who have remained silent in the face of the monstrous crimes being committed day and night by the Israeli military and that country’s political leadership.

It saddens and infuriates me that US international education leaders such as Dr. Fanta Aw, executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, and Allan Goodman, president and CEO of the Institute of International Education (IIE) among others, are among the silent.

Since I cannot read their hearts and minds, I don’t know if Victor Hugo’s observation that “It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie” applies to these colleagues and others who remain silent. What I do know is that their choice not to speak out against this genocide is a political statement, and a damning one at that. Thích Nhất Hạnh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, and author, echoed this theme in response to a question about genocide posed by a young national security professional: “Even if you don’t do anything, if you allow the people to kill and destroy … that is also violence. Violence can be action or non-action.”

I was part of that quasi-US governmental world for four years of my decades-long career and am therefore familiar with the usual political and economic arguments in favor of silence, e.g., don’t damage important official relationships and “whose bread I eat, his song I sing.” I reject and condemn them, now as I did then. Silence is inexcusable, unconscionable, and unforgivable.

How I wish they would take this Elie Wiesel quote to heart: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Like other Holocaust survivors, I’m certain Wiesel would have taken the side of the Palestinians on the receiving end of Israel’s bullets and bombs.

Nobody But You, a poem by Charles Bukowski, comes to mind:

nobody can save you but
yourself.
you will be put again and again
into nearly impossible
situations.
they will attempt again and again
through subterfuge, guise and
force
to make you submit, quit and /or die quietly
inside.

nobody can save you but
yourself
and it will be easy enough to fail
so very easily
but don’t, don’t, don’t.
just watch them.
listen to them.
do you want to be like that?
a faceless, mindless, heartless
being?
do you want to experience
death before death?

nobody can save you but
yourself
and you’re worth saving.
it’s a war not easily won
but if anything is worth winning then
this is it.

think about it.
think about saving your self.
your spiritual self.
your gut self.
your singing magical self and
your beautiful self.
save it.
don’t join the dead-in-spirit.

maintain your self
with humor and grace
and finally
if necessary
wager your self as you struggle,
damn the odds, damn
the price.

only you can save your
self.

do it! do it!

then you’ll know exactly what
I am talking about.

Don’t be “a “faceless, mindless, heartless being” who experiences “death before death.” Our fellow human beings, men, women, and children are being murdered daily and the survivors are enduring unimaginable suffering. “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Save your spiritual self by speaking out against injustice and cruelty. It’s the least we can do, a meaningful way to live in the brief time we have been granted.

People show their true colors by what they say and do and by their complicity in silence. We and those who come after us will not forget what was said and not said, done and not done in this, the first livestreamed and meticulously documented genocide in human history. I say this not as a threat but as a solemn promise to the victims of this still unfolding early 21st century human catastrophe. Those who are actively involved in this genocide and regional state terrorism have more to fear aside from whatever their consciences may throw up. The official and unofficial days of reckoning can’t come soon enough.

Solutions for Sadness

In T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Merlin proposes a solution for being sad: “The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

This is what I have done, to add to my admittedly scant knowledge about the origins of the founding of the state of Israel, including what Nurit Peled-Elhanan referred to as the “pure colonialist, nationalist and chauvinistic racism” that pervades Israeli society in her speech at the Closing Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in 2013.

Another solution to sadness is to tap into a community of kindred spirits in international education and beyond. I have found my community, my people, online. There is no more important and urgent use of this space right now. Members of my online tribe include anti-Zionist Jews, Holocaust survivors, Muslims, and Palestianians in Gaza and the global diaspora, people from all walks of life. They are sources of real-time information and commiseration, and an endless well of inspiration. They give me hope as do those who have been martyred and their fellow human beings struggling to survive in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. As global citizens who believe in truth and justice, fear no one, and act with compassion and passion in the pursuit of common goals, we are legion.

Or create a video slideshow of injured, dying, displaced, and dead Palestinians set to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings as a way of reflecting on and processing the Israeli-planned and -executed carnage that is occurring in Gaza.

Or create a page on my blog Israel’s Genocide in Gaza – And Other Regional Acts of Israeli State Terrorism that I update regularly.

Finally, there are abundant opportunities for individuals to offer financial support via legitimate international non-governmental organizations that will benefit the people of Gaza.

All I have are my moral compass, my words, and my support. They are small but count for something for I am not alone. I am consoled and encouraged by the realization that millions of others are doing what they can in myriad ways large and small to combat this evil and help the victims now and in the future.

Amina Youssef, a Lebanese Australian lawyer based in Sydney, wrote the following on LinkedIn that applies to all of us but especially those who remain silent:

It’s easy for you to get off social media.

It’s easy for you to unfollow.

It’s easy for you to close your eyes while a genocide occurs in Gaza and our people are killed in Lebanon.

It’s easy for you to say protestors are making you uncomfortable.

You have choices.

They do not.

You have power.

They do not.

What you do today can make an impact on helpless people who cannot do anything at all to help themselves.

Even if nothing comes of it, at least you tried.

What can we as global citzens do to ensure this noble call to action becomes a reality, to honor the memory of the martyred, and assist the survivors? This is one of the burning questions of our time and should be on the mind of everyone with a conscience. We must try “even if nothing comes of it.”

Eye on the Calendar

Arundhati Roy’s conclusion to her PEN Pinter Prize 2024 acceptance speech touched my heart, mind, and soul with its passion and crystal moral clarity. She quoted from Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s book of prison writing You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.

I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.

‘The centre is treason because there’s room in it only for the General…The centre is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they’ve pushed us back into the margins. They don’t realize that we never left it, we just got lost for a brief while. Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams. We never sought the centre because it has no room except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution happened outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.’

As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day—

From the river to the sea
Palestine will be Free.
It will.
Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock.
That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time. 

As a student of history, including settler colonialism, which my country happily co-opted from the homeland of my ancestors and perfected to a tee, I know in my heart that both speak the truth.

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