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This is what politics looks like today: a president-elect in Mexico pushes big minimum wage hikes amid unsettled financial markets. In Budapest people queue to vote in local and European elections not for liberals to oppose Orban’s nationalist FIDESZ party, but for an alternative conservative party to it. In Germany the rightwing AfD swept elections along political geographic lines almost questioning whether Germany ever fully re-united in 1989. Meanwhile, the centrist faction of Labour sent Tories packing while simultaneously seeing the return to Parliament of Jeremy Corbyn and Nicholas Farage.

Then there is France where big gains by the rightwing National Rally led Macron to make the riverboat gambler’s move to call snap parliamentary elections only to see Le Pen’s Rassemblement National’s hopes dashed this weekend when France’s Left prevailed on July 7^th as Macron’s forces vacated spots for them to keep Le Pen down. And in the United States, the Democratic Party continues agonizing over whether to replace President Joe Biden, as by each day he comes to resemble the 1980s feeble gerontocracy of the Soviet Union.

It was not supposed to be this way, according to the neoliberals. Four decades ago Francis Fukuyama forecast a future absent doubts about market economies and political liberalism. The future was to be one of convergence, where central bankers were to operate independent of politics, and technocrats in International Financial Institutions would make adjustments to maximize equilibrium in order to keep the perpetual neoliberal motion machine humming along. New political ideas were thought unnecessary. Politics was out and the “Washington Consensus” was in. Few seemed to recognize or tolerate concerns that economies and societies are dynamic where contradictions can build up over time leading to calls for change.

But politics are back. The 2008 financial crisis proved to be a departure point from what John F. Kennedy’s advisor, Arthur Schlessinger Jr., referenced in the mid 1960s as the “Vital Center.” That center shifted from the social democratic New Deal order of the 1960s to neoliberalism with pretenses of still-existing social protections by the 1990s. In the 21^stcentury, political alignments dissolved as electorate shifted “vote shopped,” often changing parties as each election left them ever more disappointed. One side would be elected only to be tossed out in the next election. Then came more anti-systemic challenges. Syriza in Greece rapidly rose to power in 2014 by opposing neoliberal austerity. In the spring of 2015 their finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, positioned Greece to exercise the nuclear option and exit Greece from the euro. This was real change, but the risks were massive, and their prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, facing the threats from the European Central Bank to annihilate Greece’s economy, surrendered, thus leaving Europe’s left dispirited as Syriza was no longer representing real politics, but more akin to Barack Obama’s Democrats that were long on “hope” and short on “change.”

Meanwhile, in the US frustration with Barack Obama’s perceived do-nothing presidency and prospects for more of the same with the 2016 election running legacy candidates in the primaries (Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush) resulted in powerful upwellings from below propelling forward Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the populist right. Democrats cauterized and contained the Sanders challenge, but just barely. Trump hijacked the Wisconsin-based Republican party national in an ongoing battle for leadership of the GOP and now has near complete control over it.

Tectonic economic forces continued generating faults since, but increasingly with Europe’s right now proposing real policy change. A year after Eurocrats curbed Syriza in Greece, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party organized neoliberals’ losers, e.g., the middle-class from the UK’s formerly industrialized Midlands, etc., and mobilized them to success in their referendum taking Britain out of the EU. Promised benefits failed to ensue, thus the “victory” was more a cultural protest, even though economic arguments were made advancing it. Meanwhile, Marie Le Pen’s political fortunes rose. And Fidesz in Hungary, to Law & Justice in Poland, to Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy political party, to the AfD in Germany (almost exclusively in the former GDR) and many others protest see the right on the march. By promising actual change on cultural issues and economic ones too, even if largely ineffectual, rejection of the “Vital Center” has grown more powerful.

In Mexico in this June 2nd’s election, Claudia Sheinbaum powered to a 61% victory as President on a left agenda of double-digit increases to the minimum wage and continuing her predecessor Andres Obrador’s plan to throw out Mexico’s 1600 federal appointed judges to be replaced by ones elected. Meanwhile, Mexico’s PRI which ruled the country for 79 years straight from 1929 to 2000 netted less than 10% of the vote. Alternately, a half year earlier, Argentinians embittered by decades of facing economic headwinds elected libertarian Javier Milei. In short, frustrated voters reject Margaret Thatcher’s old maxim of “There Is No Alternative” and increasingly reward candidates advancing cultural and/or policy change, regardless of effectiveness. Our still globalized (yet diminishing) world economy impedes agency at national levels. Thus, the political left (Mexico) and right (nearly everywhere else) has gained more traction with proposals for cultural change, especially on immigration, although there too demographic realities (e.g., need for labor) deliver constraints. That said, anger resulting from economic instability continues fueling discontent.

In short, the collapse of the once social democratic Vital Center has created a “Polanyi moment.” Jaques Delors’ “Social Europe” call in 1986 to square competitiveness in Europe with its Social Model, in practice led to ever-increasing economic liberalization marginalizing ever more of West Europe’s working classes. Bill Clinton and “reform” Democrats moved in tandem with this program. In East Europe, integration and migration threatened the national aspirations of its populations previously shackled under neo-Stalinist regimes. Absent fixes that deliver prosperity and stability to most people’s lives in West Europe, while permitting East Europeans national autonomy within democratic structures, we can expect greater volatility ahead in the EU. Meanwhile, in the Americas the political right has benefited in countries such as El Salvador and Argentina. The left commands attention in Mexico, while Trump and J.D. Vance look to represent the disaffected in the United States given no left alternative absent Bernie Sanders.

Politics returns with its next installment on July 15th. Contra Gil Scott-Heron’s assertion that the “revolution will not be televised,” one can tune into the Republican Party’s National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin held from July 15-18^th. The GOP will offer its mix of nationalism to the disaffected, yet simultaneously removing the last protections for working people with Project 2025’s program for privatizing Social Security and other services, while cutting taxes. Tune in for this preview of their revolution from the right coming for you.

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“Now is the time of monsters.”

– Antonio Gramsci

Two recent events have shattered complacency about the specter of a fascist takeover globally that a number of us have been warning about for some time now. In Europe, far-right parties scored impressive gains in the elections to the European Parliament in June.  In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and other like-minded parties got 15.9  percent of the vote, forcing the long-time second-placer Socialist Party to third place. In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance gathered just 14.6% of the vote while Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National) took in 31.3% of the vote. The results prompted Macron to an ill-advised decision to immediately dissolve the French Parliament and call a snap election, which resulted in a devastating first round victory for Le Pen’s party.

In the United States, President Joe Biden made a second Trump presidency come immeasurably closer with a horrible performance in a debate with Trump on June 27 that simply confirmed what most voters have discerned for some time now: that Biden is simply too old to function effectively in what is arguably the most powerful job in the world.

This has made many progressives and liberals fear that the enemy is at the gates. They are right. Gramsci depicted his times, the early decades of the 20th century as a time when “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” That line might well describe where our world is at today.

How I Got Interested in Fascism

My interest in fascism started when I went to Chile in 1972 to do field research during the presidency of Salvador Allende, which was cut short by a military coup on Sept 11, 1973. I arrived in the capital, Santiago, in the midst of the Chilean winter, greeted by tear gas and skirmishes of opposing political groups in the aftermath of a demonstration. Hauling two suitcases, I made it with great difficulty from the bus depot to the historic Hotel Claridge.

I had gone to Chile to study how the left was organizing people in the shantytowns or callampas  for the socialist revolution that the Popular Unity government had initiated. A few weeks in Santiago disabused me of the impression of a revolutionary momentum that I had gathered reading about events in Chile in left-wing publications in the United States. People on the left were constantly being mobilized for marches and rallies in the center of Santiago, and increasingly, the reason for this was to counter the demonstrations mounted by the right. My friends brought me to these events, where there were an increasing number of skirmishes with right-wing thugs.

I noticed a certain defensiveness among participants in these mobilizations and a reluctance to be caught alone when leaving them, for fear of being harassed or worse by roaming bands of rightists. The revolution, it dawned on me, was on the defensive, and the right was beginning to take command of the streets. Twice I was nearly beaten up because I made the stupid mistake of observing right-wing demonstrations with El Siglo, the Communist Party newspaper, tucked prominently under my arm. Stopped by some Christian Democratic youth partisans, I said I was a Princeton University graduate student doing research on Chilean politics. They sneered and told me I was one of Allende’s “thugs” imported from Cuba. I could understand if they thought I was being provocative, with El Siglo tucked under my arm. Thankfully, the sudden arrival of a Mexican friend saved me from a beating. On the other occasion, my fleet feet did the job.

When I looked at the faces of the predominantly white right-wing crowds, many of them blond-haired, I imagined the same enraged faces at the fascist and Nazi demonstrations that took control of the streets in Italy and Germany. These were people who looked with disdain at what they called the rotos, or “broken ones,” that filled the left-wing demonstrations, people who were darker, many of them clearly of indigenous extraction.

My experience in Chile did two things to me. One, it gave me an abiding academic fascination with counterrevolutionary movements. Two, it turned me into a life-long activist with a deep loathing for the far right and instilled a commitment to fight authoritarianism and the far right. In many ways, these contradictory drives have determined my personal, political, and academic  trajectories.

Is It Fascism?

Fast forward to the present. When far-right personalities and movements started popping up during the last two decades, there was, in some quarters, strong hesitation to use the “f” word to describe them. With my experience in Chile, the Philippines, and other countries behind me, I had no such qualms. This apparently was the reason I was invited by the famous Cambridge Union for a debate on the topic “This House Believes That We Are Witnessing a Global Fascist Resurgence” on April 29, 2021, where I would speak for the affirmative. Of course, a great incentive for agreeing to participate was that one of my intellectual heroes, John Maynard Keynes, had been involved in a famous Cambridge Union debate. Joining me in the debate by Zoom that evening were New York University Professor Ruth Ben Ghiat, Russian journalist Masha Gessen, staff writer for the New Yorker, the prominent historian of the Second World War Sir Richard Evans, and Isabel Hernandez and Sam Rubinstein, two Cambridge University students.

In that debate, I said that a movement or person must be regarded as fascist when they fuse the following five features: 1) they show a disdain or hatred for democratic and progressive principles and procedures; 2) they tolerate or promote violence; 3) they have a heated mass base that supports their anti-democratic thinking and behavior; 4) they scapegoat and support the persecution of certain social groups; and 5) they are led by a charismatic individual who exhibits and normalizes all of the above. It is how they fuse these five features together that accounts for the uniqueness of particular fascist leaders and movements.

Not surprisingly, Donald Trump figured prominently in that debate. And one of my main arguments was that Donald Trump and the Jan 6, 2021, insurrection showed that the distinction between “far right” and “fascist” is academic. Or one can say that a “far-rightist” is a fascist who has not yet seized power, for it is only once they are in power that fascists fully reveal their political propensities, that is, they display all of the five features mentioned above. By the way, the Cambridge audience agreed with me. The Cambridge Independent carried the news the next day that “the motion was carried with 38 votes in favour, 28 against, and 2 abstentions.” Thank god, I didn’t let Keynes down.

Fascists and Counterrevolutionaries

In my work on the right, I have used the word “counterrevolutionary” interchangeably with the word “fascist.” Here I have been greatly indebted to the great historian of counterrevolution, Arno Mayer, who distinguished between the three actors in what he called the “counterrevolutionary coalition:” reactionaries, conservatives, and counterrevolutionaries.  “Reactionaries,” said Mayer, “are daunted by change and long for a return to a world of a mythical and romanticized past.” Conservatives do not make a fetish of the past, and whatever the makeup of civil and political society, their “core value is the preservation of the established order.”

Counterrevolutionaries are more interesting theoretically and more dangerous politically. They may have, like the reactionaries, illusions about a past golden age, and they share the reactonaries’ and conservatives’ “appreciation, not to say celebration, of order, tradition, hierarchy, authority, discipline, and loyalty.”  But in a world of rapid flux, where the old order has become unhinged by the emergence of new political actors, “counterrevolutionaries embrace mass politics to promote their objectives, appealing to the lower orders of city and country, inflaming and manipulating their resentment of those above them, their fear of those below them, and their estrangement from the real world about them.” Counterrevolutionaries or fascists, to borrow from another great historian, Barrington Moore, seek to “make reaction popular.”

Fascism as a Global Phenomenon

The rise of fascism is a global phenomenon, one that cuts through the North-South divide.

Narendra Modi has made the secular and diverse India of Gandhi and Nehru a thing of the past with his Hindu nationalist project, which relegates the country’s large Muslim minority to second-class citizens. The parliamentary elections earlier this year returned his BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) to power, though it lost its absolute majority in the lower house. Nevertheless, there is no indication that Modi will relent in his fascist project. Currently, he is carrying out the most sustained attack on the freedom of the press since the Emergency in 1976 by putting progressive journalists in jail and bringing charges against noted writers like Arundhati Roy.

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro lost the 2022 presidential elections to Lula da Silva by a slight margin, but his followers refused to accept the verdict, and thousands of people from the right invaded the capital Brasilia on January 8, 2023, in an attempt to overthrow the new government, in a remarkable replication of the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington.

In Hungary, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party have almost completed their neutering of democracy. Indeed, Europe is the region where fascist or radical right parties have made the most inroads. From having no radical right-wing regime in the 2000s, except occasionally and briefly as junior partners in unstable governing coalitions as in Austria, the region now has two in power—one in Hungary and the government of Giorgia Meloni in Italy. The far right is part of ruling coalitions in Sweden and Finland. The region has four more countries where a party of the far right is the main opposition party. And it has seven where the far right has become a major presence both in parliament and in the streets.

In the Philippines, I wrote two months into Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency in 2016 that he was a “fascist original.” I was criticized by many opinion-makers, academics, and even progressives for using the “f” word. Over seven years and 27,000 extra-judicial executions of alleged drug users later, the “f” word is one of the milder terms used for Rodrigo Duterte, with many preferring “mass murderer” or “serial killer.”

Duterte nevertheless ended his presidency in 2022 with a 75 percent approval rating, and he is now leading the opposition to the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., apparently confident he can topple it.

Fascist Charisma and Discourse(s)

Let me spend some time on Duterte since he is the fascist figure I am most familiar with. Like Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Orban, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and now Javier Milei in Argentina, Duterte is a charismatic figure. Charisma, that quality in a leader that creates a special bond with his or her followers, is not just of one variety. Modi’s charisma is different from that of Duterte. Although Modi’s charisma is more of the familiar inspirational type, Duterte has what I called “gangster charm.” In the way he connects with the masses, in his discourse, Duterte has similarities to Donald Trump, with his penchant for saying the outrageous and delivering it in an unorthodox fashion—precisely what drives their supporters wild.

On Duterte’s discourse while he was president, I would like to share three observations. First, from a progressive and liberal point of view, his discourse was politically incorrect, but that was its very strength. It came across as liberating to its middle-class and lower-class audience. Duterte was seen as telling it as it was, as deliberately mocking the dominant discourse of human rights, democratic rights, and social justice that had been ritually invoked but was increasingly regarded as a cynical coverup for the failure of the post-Marcos liberal democratic regime to deliver on its promise bringing about genuine democratic political and economic reform.

Second, Duterte’s discourse involved a unique application of what Bourdieu calls the strategy of condescension. His coarse discourse, delivered conversationally and with frequent shifts from Tagalog, a Filipino language, to another, Bisaya, to English, made people identify with him, eliciting laughter with his portrayal of himself as someone who bumbled along like the rest of the crowd or had the same illicit desires, at the same time that it also reminded the audience that he was someone different from and above them, as someone with power. This was especially evident when he paused and uttered his signature, “Papatayin kita,” or “I will kill you,” as in “If you destroy the youth of my country by giving them drugs, I will kill you.”

Third, Duterte’s speechmaking did not follow a conceptual or rhetorical logic, and this was another reason he could connect with the masses. The formal conceptual message written by speechwriters was deliberately overridden by a series of long digressions where he told tales in which he was invariably at the center of things that he knew would hold the audience’s attention, even when they had heard it several times. Let me confess here that when I listened to Duterte’s digressions, peppered as they were with outrageous comments, like telling an audience he would pardon policemen convicted of extra-judicial executions so they could go after the people who brought them to court, my mind had to restrain my body from joining the chorus of laughter at the sheer comic effrontery of his words. With Duterte, the digression was the message.

Duterte, of course, is not unique among far-right leaders In his ability to connect to his base by trampling on accepted conversational conventions and admitting to illicit desires. One of the sources of Donald Trump’s appeal is that he, like Duterte, connects, without subterfuge or euphemism, with his white male base’s’ “deeply missed privilege of being able to publicly and unabashedly act on whatever savagery or even mundane racism they wished to,” as Patricia Ventura and Edward Chan put it. To many aggrieved white American males he came across as refreshingly candid in publicly calling Mexicans rapists, Muslims terrorists, colored immigrants as coming from “shithole countries” instead of pristine, white Norway, and boasting that, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Economics and Fascism

Leaders are critical in fascist movements, but social conditions create the opportunities for the ascent of those leaders. Here one cannot overemphasize the role that neoliberalism and globalization have played in spawning movements of the radical right. The worsening living standards and great inequalities spawned by neoliberal policies created disillusionment among people who felt that liberal democracy had been captured by the rich and distrust in center-right and center-left parties that promoted those policies.

Perhaps, there is no better testimony to the role of neoliberal policies than that of former President Barack Obama, who represents the dominant, neoliberal, “Third Way” wing of the Democratic Party, along with the Clintons. In a speech in Johannesburg in July 2017, Obama remarked that the “politics of fear and resentment” stemmed from a process of globalization that “upended the agricultural and manufacturing sectors in many countries…greatly reduced the demand for certain workers…helped weaken unions and labor’s bargaining power…[and] made is easier for capital to avoid tax laws and the regulations of nation states.” He further noted that “challenges to globalization first came from the left but then came more forcefully from the right, as you started seeing populist movements …[that] tapped the unease that was felt by many people that lived outside the urban cores; fears that economic security was slipping away, that their social status and privileges were eroding; that their cultural identities were being threatened by outsiders, somebody that didn’t look like them or sound like them or pray as they did.” These resentful, discontented masses are the base of fascist parties.

Disenchanted with the Democratic Party’s embrace of job-killing neoliberal policies, the white working class vote put Republican Trump over the top in the traditionally Democratic swing states in the Midwest during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. But it is not only neoliberal policies that white workers are protesting by walking out of the Democratic Party and walking into the Trump tent; they also feel that professional and intellectual elites have captured their old party, along with Blacks and other minorities.

It is not only the white working class that now forms the base of the Republican Party. Large parts of rural America have long been marked by economic depression, creating ideal ground for the politics of resentment and the incubation of far right militias, who made their intimidating presence felt in the cities where protests against police brutality spread after the killling of George Floyd.

In France, the Socialist Party collapsed, with a significant part of its former working class adherents going to Marine Le Pen and her National Front (now National Rally). Their sentiments were probably best expressed by a Socialist senator who said, “Left-wing voters are crossing the red line because they think that salvation from their plight us embodied by Madame Le Pen…They say ‘no’ to a world that seems hard, globalized, implacable. These are working-class people, pensioners, office workers who say: ‘We don’t want this capitalism and competition in a world where Europe is losing its leadership.’”

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Nigel Farage has always been a bigoted posh boy with the gift of the gab. Raised in the rolling hills of Downe on the outskirts of London — a village most famous for its association with Charles Darwin — Farage attended Eden Park Preparatory School in the 1970s. His wealthy parents then paid for his attendance at one of South London’s most prestigious old boys’ clubs, Dulwich College. Farage’s germinal racism was public even at this early age, and in 1981, his fascist mannerisms were played down as ordinary “naughtiness” by his college’s “Master” when he chose to make him a prefect – a position Farage attained not because of his open racism but probably because of his sporting skills. (Farage happened to be part of the “three-man Dulwich team who in 1981 reached the finals of the national Schools Golf Championship in Surrey.”)

Among his many unusual schoolboy pranks, Farage took to signing his initials in the style of the neo-Nazi NF, seemingly reveling in the violence that the National Front had unleashed upon local ethnic minorities in neighboring Brixton in the wake of Enoch Powell’s “river of blood speech”. It is fitting that during his final weeks of sixth form (in 1982), Farage gained a new hero in the form of Enoch Powell, who had been invited to address Dulwich’s posh boys with his cultured racism. Farage would later recall that Powell’s visit had “dazzled me for once into awestruck silence”.

Schoolboy Farage was not isolated at the time, especially at Dulwich College. Throughout the 1970s London’s institutionally racist police force was relentlessly attacking black communities, famously leading up to the Brixton riots of April 1981. During these riots the local police had been granted permission to use the ample green spaces of Dulwich College’s grounds for one of their operational bases.

We should also remember that the main reason why the National Front grew in the first place was because the two leading parliamentary parties were themselves full of bigots. Both parties’ overriding concern (then as now) was quelling working class resistance to capitalist exploitation, not opposing oppression. The far right of the Tories leadership were busy organizing themselves within the Conservative Monday Club and willingly threw their political and financial muscle behind efforts to repatriate immigrants, while the Labour Party as ever, proved themselves more concerned with purging socialists from their ranks than in opposing the divisive lies of the Right.

But back then, ordinary members of the Labour Party were able to exert a moderating influence over the worst excesses of their Party’s pro-capitalist and racist leadership. One example of this can be seen by the party’s position on European integration. When Labour found themselves out of government (in the late 1970s and 1980s), its party leaders were forced to publicly oppose entry into the undemocratic bosses’ club that was the European Union. Given the dominance of right-wing Euroscepticism today, it needs to be understood that integration into the European Economic Community was fiercely opposed by the workers’ movement at the time, not on provincial grounds, but because of the disastrous role the EEC played in fostering a race to the bottom mindset on pay and conditions for working people. This socialist-inspired opposition to membership in the EEC even led Enoch Powell to endorse Labour’s manifesto commitments in a speech he delivered in Westminster in February 1982. However, Labour’s class-based position on the European project would soon be reversed under the leadership of Neil Kinnock, a disastrous u-turn which would help pave the way for the populists like Farage to seize the Eurosceptic terrain from the workers’ movement.

Trading in King and Country

When Farage left school in 1982, most of his chums progressed to graduate studies at either Oxford or Cambridge University. However, Farage took a different path. His desire to make it rich in Margaret Thatcher’s brave new world of deregulation and privatisation, Farage donned a pinstriped jacket and followed in his father’s footsteps became in becoming a commodities trader who made his living by swindling others. As luck would have it, a connection from the golfing world provided Farage with his first job opportunity and he landed on his feet when he joined Maclaine Watson, a traditional English commodities brokerage owned by the Wall Street giant Drexel Burnham Lambert. Later in the 80s, he moved on to R J Rouse & Co, which was acquired by the French bank Crédit Lyonnais. Farage was eventually sacked from this trader after “taking a drunken friend on to the floor” of the London Metal Exchange. After this inopportune event, Farage sought true independence and in 1994 he formed his own business, Farage Futures.

By the late 80s Farage had two children with his first wife, and ever the patriotic historian and political drinker, he also formed a social group called Farage’s Foragers which involved his organising alcohol fuelled trips with his macho friends to First World War battlefields in France and Flanders. One of his chums partaking in such boozy jaunts included Godfrey Bloom who would go on to win a seat for UKIP in 2004 in the European elections. Bloom’s causal sexism and bigotry eventually saw UKIP remove the whip from him in late 2013 (but not Bloom’s membership) partly as he was prone to speak his mind. Bloom famous referred to foreign countries in receipt of British aid as “Bongo Bongo Land” and demanded that the unemployed and public sector workers should not have the right to vote. Farage was quick to Bloom’s defence, saying that “he is not a racist, he’s not an extremist or any of those things and he’s not even anti-women, but he has a sort-of-rather old-fashioned territorial army sense of humour which does not translate very well in modern Britain.” Supporting the reasoning behind this line of defence, the Eurosceptic journalist Richard North has asserted that Farage himself, with whom he had worked closely within UKIP, “was racist in a Churchillian sense” as he “believed in the superiority of the white Englishman” – as North put it, Farage was “a white supremacist on a King and Country basis, rather than overt hatred of coloured people.”

But old-fashioned racism was always central to Farage’s life. In 1989 the city trader founded another social grouping called the Column Club which met monthly to drink and discuss Eurosceptic politics. And rather unsurprisingly “some members of Farage’s Column Club were on the extreme right of politics, sympathisers with or members of the British National Party.”

A Superstate Looms Large and an Independence Party is Born

Around roughly the same time that Farage’s unsavory Column Club were colluding, and his Forager’s were holidaying and slurping fine liquor, all hell broke loose politically speaking on a national and international plane. In November 1990 Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign as the Conservative’s leader because a mass movement of ordinary people — led by the Militant Tendency, a predecessor organisation of Socialist Alternative – had mounted a popular revolt against her hated poll tax. The following month the Berlin Wall was torn down, while soon after the USSR collapsed. With their old class enemies much diminished in strength and the Soviet bogey man now vanquished, conservatives of all stripes quickly had to recalibrate their propaganda to focus on a new external enemy. One new enemy thus came in the form of the European project. And as this political project was now fully embraced by the Labour Party, it served as a handy target for populist ire, alongside the Tories staple preference for immigration fearmongering.

One significant precursor for the building of this germinal movement against the EEC was the founding of the Bruges Group. The Bruges Club was a right wing thinktank launched in February 1989 by Lord Harris of High Cross (who at the time was a board member of Rupert Murdoch’s Times company) and Oxford University student Patrick Robertson, a former boarder at Dulwich College. The ignominious members of this group rapidly attracted more than a hundred backbench MPs and were soon joined by Margaret Thatcher herself, who became their honorary president just months after resigning as Prime Minister. Another intellectual godfather of the Bruges Group was Professor Norman Stone, a right wing stalwart at Oxford who had actively mentored Robertson and other Tories in their Euroscepticism. Much needed financial backing for this new think tank arrived courtesy of the billionaire Sir James Goldsmith. Robertson soon persuaded their new financier, who had always maintained a propensity for supporting far right intrigues, to launch his short-lived but highly effective Referendum Party in 1994.

However, the first political party to be formed in opposition to the EEC was Professor Alan Sked’s Anti-Federalist League (AFL) in 1991, which was shortly followed by the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in 1993. The AFL had stood in their first general election in 1992. Shortly after, Sked became enthralled by Farage at a meeting of the Bruges Group. Things moved quite slowly to start with, but when Sked stood in a by-election in May 1993, Farage was recruited to the canvassing team and was tasked with driving his hero Enoch Powell to a public meeting.

Powell’s connection to the AFL was temporary, and Sked sought other ways to popularise his new party, one of which was to adopt a catchier name, hence the party’s rebirth as UKIP. Farage quickly became the power behind the throne of this then generally poorly funded party, and in the wake of the 1994 European elections, UKIP faced fierce opposition when Sir James Goldsmith announced that he would be stumping up tens of millions of pounds to establish the Referendum Party, which as its name suggested called for a referendum on whether the UK would remain in the now named European Union (EU). Notably, by this time Goldsmith had already been elected to the European Parliament in France on a right wing ticket. The French right, then as today, always seemed one step ahead when it came to bashing immigrants and growing their forces.

Goldsmith’s Referendum Party, like UKIP, succeeded in many ways, but most of all it succeeded in attracting reactionaries and racists into its leadership. This was in keeping with the ultra-conservativism of its founder who had naturally employed many of his friends and employees in his undemocratic organisation. Thus the job of “field organiser” for the Referendum Party was delivered to Marc Gordon whose prior experience had consisted of acting as the Director of the London office of the International Freedom Foundation — a think-tank which served as a South African military intelligence front to shore up support for the apartheid regime. Bearing this in mind, socialist commentator Derek Wall made a valid point when he compares Goldsmith’s political activism to that of George Soros. Both appeared to follow a strategy which was to…

“…make mega-billions as a completely unproductive finance capitalist and then challenge capitalism. Like Soros, the Goldsmiths [Sir James and his brother Teddy] have done the work when it comes to ideas and politics: from the unsustainability of ever-increasing economic growth to the dangers of nuclear power, they have laid the intellectual groundwork for environmental campaigners, funded action and organised politically.

“Their politics, although a radical challenge to the conventional wisdom, have never been of the left. They are rightwing anti-capitalists in a far-from-self-interested way. Capitalism is hostile to the conservatism and functionalism they espouse.”

A Leadership of Cranks… Racist Cranks

Primarily by virtue of big money, the Referendum Party was able to dominate UKIP in the 1997 general election, obtaining 812,000 votes to UKIP’s 106,000. But when Goldsmith died of cancer in the same year, UKIP found greater possibilities for growth. This was especially so in the wake of New Labour’s 1999 introduction of proportional representation in European elections.

UKIP now set about popularising their anti-EU messaging in a way that differentiated themselves from their extreme right rivals, the British National Party (BNP), winning three MEP seats in the 1999 elections. This attempt at political segregation however never proved a particularly easy task to achieve in practice. A good example was provided in 1995 when Professor Sked recruited a student activist named Mark Deavin onto UKIP’s National Executive Committee. The naïve Professor had been wowed by the university student’s research skills, and Deavin had apparently never let on to his new friends that he was a BNP member. Thus Deavin was able to serve on UKIP’s leading body for two years before being kicked out, with his expulsion only arising when The Cook Report exposed his sinister secret in a documentary that aired on ITV shortly after the European elections.

In the coming years UKIP would have many electoral successes, but perhaps their greatest achievement lay in the fact that their mainstream political opponents chose to respond to their propaganda by largely accommodating themselves to UKIP’s populist priorities. Thus, particularly with the open embrace of neoliberal politics by so-called Social Democratic parties across the world, along with their active denigration of socialist ideas, far right talking points have now come to dominate the policies of most political parties. While political debate has certainly shifted to the right, these ideas have been actively resisted by masses of the population, even if not by the majority of parliamentarians. This can be seen by the immense popularity of the socialist policies that were promoted by even a moderate Social Democratic leader like Jeremy Corbyn, and in the reverse, by the immense hatred that was directed against Corbyn by all parts of the capitalist establishment.

In the case of the UK, the Labour Party’s ditching of the traditional politics of class struggle (most clearly seen in their failure to back the miners’ strike in the 80s) acted to create a political void that far right populists have now been able to fill. Therefore, unlike in the distant past (when the far right came to dominate Nazi Germany), UKIP’s primary concern has not been with crushing the workers movement, but instead with presenting themselves as an ordinary party that would be willing to fight to help ordinary people — as a respectable party quite unlike that of the Nazi-infected BNP. But for all their huffing and puffing about unwanted fascist infiltrators, UKIP’s pipedream of ideological purity was never going to be fulfilled, especially given that their political priorities have always meshed with those of so many reactionaries. This overlap was made harder to ignore by UKIP’s seeming perpetual love affair and willing embrace of former members of the far right, which involved their recruiting one-time leaders of the New Britain Party into their governing structures — an odious group which advocated the voluntary repatriation of immigrants.

Notable far right activists who were recruited into UKIP’s upper echelons included Michael Nattrass and Bryan Smalley, former NEC members of the New Britain Party who went on to serve respectively as UKIP’s national chair between 2000 and 2002 and as UKIP’s Secretary in 2000. Another important joiner around this time was Jeffrey Titford who spent a short time with the New Britain Party when the Referendum Party had folded, before going on to join UKIP, a party which Titford led from 2000 to 2002. Likewise, the example of Martyn Heale provides another revealing case. In the late 1970s Heale had served as a London branch organiser for the National Front, later becoming the chair of the West London branch of the New Britain Party. In 2003 Heale then became the chair of UKIP’s Thanet South branch. In fact, in 2015 when Farage stood in this parliamentary seat, Heale was still serving as the Thanet South branch chair!

A further illustrative demonstration of UKIP’s unprincipled relationship to the BNP milieu can be seen by the party’s flagrant mismanagement of their relations with one of their rank-and-file members, an activist named Trevor Agnew. In 1999, Agnew had been expelled from UKIP while standing in a local election because it was found out that he had ties to the BNP. But for reasons unknown he was subsequently allowed to rejoinUKIP. Then in 2003 he was expelled (again) for campaigning in support of both the BNP and UKIP – with the latter being the party he was standing for. Further internal investigations (undertaken in 2003) led UKIP’s bosses to conclude that a leading UKIP activist in the same region, a man named Peter Troy, was the underlying cause of the problem as he had been deliberately actively recruiting BNP supporters into UKIP and even paying their membership fees for them. Yet despite this finding, the following year during the 2004 European elections Troy was selected to stand at the top of UKIP’s list in Scotland.

As if that was not enough, UKIP has even more controversial cases on their books. A prime example here is provided by Alastair Harper, whose long and highly visible career had been committed to spreading neo-Nazi hate. For example, Harper had not only cofounded the fascist Northern League in 1957, but in 1990 had been spotted attending a secretive fascist conference in London which was attended by the likes of Robert Steukers, a leading figure of the Belgian extreme right. Harper was then somehow allowed to join UKIP and stand as their candidate in Dunfermline West, after which, in a fairly natural progression, he went on to become the BNP’s assistant organiser in Fife.

Another related case is Alistair McConnachie, who had been UKIP’s organiser in Scotland at the same time as Harper. McConnachie’s was famously “suspended from [UKIP’s] National Executive Committee for a year in February 2001 after he questioned the extent of the Holocaust.” As McConnachie wrote at the time: “I don’t accept that gas chambers were used to execute Jews for the simple fact there is no direct physical evidence to show that such gas chambers ever existed.” And to top off all these troubling tales of extremism, one of the coauthors of UKIP’s 2001 manifesto, a man named Dr Aidan Rankin, was part of a far-right group called Third Way – itself a spinoff from the National Front.

A Fleeting Racist TV Star

Evidently UKIP has never been too picky about weeding out reactionaries when it comes to political representatives. Quite the opposite. In 2004, the controversial day-time television presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk was headhunted to join UKIP’s ranks, shortly that is after he had been sacked from the BBC for promoting racism in his newspaper column. But the BBC had hardly been principled in dispensing of their famed host, as Kilroy-Silk had proudly exhibited his journalistic bigotry for years. For example, in 1991 he wrote in the Daily Express that: “They [Muslims] are backward and evil and if it is racist to say so… then racist I must be – and happy and proud, to be so”. In 2002, writing in the Sunday Express he said: “The indigenous population is not responsible. The diseases [like HIV] are being brought here by refugees, immigrants and tourists… It is the foreigners that we have to focus on.”

Another horrific gem (and there are too many to discuss) was penned by Kilroy-Silk in 2002, when, again in the pages of the Daily Express, he told his readers how he would solve unwanted immigration. “We station paratroopers a mile from the British end of the [Channel] Tunnel… The paras herd the immigrants together and cart them off to Dover where they are dumped on a secure slow boat to – wherever.” In the end, the newspaper article that led to his sacking was no worse than any of his normal fare – the only difference being that the BBC felt compelled to enforce a new rule that they had introduced which banned their employees from publishing racist diatribes in freelance columns.

The BBC’s loss became UKIP’s gain, and Farage and friends seized upon the chance to stand a well-known and outspoken racist as their headlining candidate in the 2004 European elections – which coincidentally happened to be the first election in which curbing immigration was foregrounded in UKIP’s campaigning literature. With UKIP’s populist profile on the rise, Kilroy-Silk was duly elected (along with 11 other MEPs), but when the television star realised that he couldn’t wrest complete control of UKIP from Farage and company, the celebrity bigot stormed off to form his own short-lived political party.

Preparing the Streets for Rivers of Blood

After the 2004 European elections Farage’s ties to the Europe’s ever growing far right became more openly pronounced, especially when he became the joint president of the new Independence/Democracy group of populists. UKIP profited enormously from the EU bureaucracy, mainly by forming a group with some of Europe’s leading anti-Semites. At the same time, and much closer to home, fresh controversies of racism soon made the press. David Abbott who had joined UKIP’s NEC in 2006 featured in a Daily Telegraph reportthat pointed out that he had given donations to the American Friends of BNP and had met with the BNP leader Nick Griffin at a meeting organised by the white supremacist group American Renaissance. As it turned out UKIP already knew about these issues, as they had first been raised in the British press in 2004 when Abbott had stood as one of their parliamentary candidates. But despite this seeming problem, UKIP had ignored his indiscretions and brought him on to their NEC.

All this was happening with New Labour in power, at a time when Tony Blair was doing his damnedest to misdirect working class anger away from the ruling class. Throwing fuel on UKIP’s fearmongering, a then so-called moderate set about promoting the idea that Britain faced a crisis in multiculturalism. This individual was Trevor Phillips, who in 2005, while serving as the chairman of the Commission for Equalities and Human Rights, channelled Enoch Powell when he warned of an “increasing ‘race segregation’ which would bring ‘civil strife’ and ‘fire’ to the streets of British society.” Contributing towards a developing climate of racism, things only got worse in 2008 when the BBC broadcast a television series entitled ‘White Season’ which focused on the marginalisation of the white working class. The “Rivers of Blood” episode in particular was well received by the BNP leader Nick Griffin who said if he had the chance to make a documentary on Powell “it wouldn’t have differed too much from this”.

With the political mainstream moving ever rightwards, UKIP were further emboldened to intensify their hate. Farage was working hard to court far right audiences; in December 2009, he gave his first interview to America’s leading libertarian conspiracist, Alex Jones. As was his wont, Farage used this interview to rail the formation of a one world government and against what he said was a “very, very questionable concept of global warming caused by C02 emissions.”

Ever the reactionary networker, in 2012 Farage developed a friendship with the dark darling of the American far right, Steve Bannon – a former banker with Goldman Sachs who cofounded Breitbart News in 2007. A few years after their first meeting, Bannon launched a London base for Breitbart, which was established (in 2014) by James Delingpole and Raheem Kassam. The latter individual remains the most relevant to Farage’s story, as in the same year that Kassam started working with Breitbart he was appointed as Farage’s “chief of staff” – a position he held until late 2015. With strong ambitions for assuming UKIP’s reins of power, Kassam, while remaining close to Farage, continued working for Bannon, who at the time was in the process of overseeing Donald Trump’s Presidential victory. The far right was now really in business, and shortly after Trump’s victory, Farage accompanied by Kassam, had flown to America to further consolidate Farage’s special relationship with the new orange leader of the free world.

Kassam would famously feature in The Brink, a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Bannon’s attempts (with the aid of Kassam and Farage) to build a far-right group called “The Movement.” In the documentary we see the exact moment (in October 2017) when Bannon, sitting across a table from Farage, said he wanted to work together with him to “knit together the populist nationalist movement throughout the world,” with the ideal of it becoming a “convening authority” for the far right. Farage eagerly agreed with Bannon’s proposal, even if he expressed concerns that he was already pressed for time.

Here it seems that one reason why Farage was already very busy was because UKIP’s leadership was in turmoil, with many of the party’s top dogs believing that their party should take an even harder line on Muslims. One example of this was a proposal that UKIP could achieve this aim by working more closely with Tommy Robinson, the high-profile former leader of the street-fighting English Defence League. Indeed, in June 2018 Kassam had even managed to position himself at the forefront of a 10,000-people strong “Free Tommy” demonstration in London. At this time Kassam then used his authority to promote “The Movement,” saying it had the potential to include UKIP in efforts to “unite what we think of as patriotic, populist nationalist parties across the continent”. But by this stage it seems that Farage was not happy about UKIP’s slightly altered political trajectory under Gerald Batten’s new leadership. Apparently, Farage thought UKIP was putting too much emphasis on fighting the so-called evil of Islam rather than concentrating on the bread-and-butter issue of getting Brexit done — a priority that was seemingly consolidated in Farage’s eyes when Batten had appointed Robinson as his personal adviser on “rape gangs and prison conditions and prison reform.” It is, on the other hand, also possible that Farage was annoyed that his own media profile might get sidelined as new political developments strayed beyond his immediate control. Either way, another leading UKIPPer who disagreed with Batten was Catherine Blaiklock, the party’s new spokesperson on economics. This led Farage to work closely with her to secretly plan the formation of a new political party, The Brexit Party — a party which was officially launched by Farage to everyone’s surprise (including that of Blaiklock) in January 2019.

Taking Back Control, and the ‘Marxist’ Enemy Within 

Fed up with a nominally democratic membership, which had the potential to shape UKIP as an organisation, The Brexit Party was created as a new beast. Farage had seemingly taken inspiration from the lack of democratic structures exhibited by the Referendum Party and ensured that his new party would remain fully in his personal control. Instead of members The Brexit Party would have registered supporters. But even with such safeguards in place, no sooner had his party been launched then it became clear that the Party’s other cofounders had to be dismissed to save the party. The first to go was the main organiser behind The Brexit Party, Blaiklock, who despite howling that she had previously been married to a Nepalese gentleman and was then happily married to a Jamaican, was correctly exposed in the media as being a racist.

Indicative of Blaiklock’s reactionary views, the Brexit Party’s cofounder had retweeted a number of posts made by Tommy Robinson, but more damming were the forty-five messages she had retweeted from the former BNP activist, Mark Collett (now the leader of the ethnonationalist Patriotic Alternative). One of these retweets from 2018 showed a picture of a multiracial primary school class with the caption: “This is a British school. This is white genocide.” (These retweets had evidently been made from Blaiklock’s old twitter account — an account that had been recently deleted to help hide her racist views from the world.)

Then, just weeks after Blaiklock’s dismissal, Farage’s friend, Michael McGough, who had been anointed treasurer of The Brexit Party, was ditched for similar reasons. Apparently, McGough was of the old school type that Farage tended to be acquainted with, the type that talked about “bingo bongo land”, and thought it was fair game to promote anti-Semitism. In referring to the Labour Party’s Miliband brothers, who are Jewish, McGough had stated that they had “shallow UK roots”. He then made similar comments about Peter Mandelson – whose father was Jewish – saying that he was likewise “devoid of UK roots”.

Of course, these high-profile dismissals did nothing to combat racist attitudes within Farage’s new party. The firings simply helped Farage pretend to the public that he wasn’t really a creature of the far right, which he most certainly was. I make this point here because Farage was promoting the same types of toxic conspiratorial nonsense as his disgraced cofounders, and doing so in media outlets that were far more visible. In an May 2018 interview conducted by Tucker Carlson that aired on Fox News – Carlson himself being a leading booster of the Great Replacement conspiracy, the racist fiction that non-white people are being brought into countries to replace white indigenous voters – Farage promoted his dog whistle politics stating:

“George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, which he has of course poured billions of dollars into, I mean this is the biggest political campaigning organisation in the world. He wants to break down the fundamental values of our society and, in the case of Europe, he doesn’t want Europe to be based on Christianity.”

The following month Farage was once again interviewed on Fox News, but in a discussion that centred upon Hungary’s “STOP Soros package of bills,” which in the words of Victor Orban’s far right government were being introduced “to stop Hungary becoming a country of immigrants.” Farage knew full well that Orban was mounting an anti-Semitic campaign that centred on Soros himself, but Farage still chose to respond to his interviewer like this.

“What Soros has done is that he is actually encouraging people to come across the Mediterranean, to flood Europe… This is an organised attempt, on a huge scale, to undermine nation states, to undermine democracy, and to fundamentally change the makeup, demographically, of the whole of the European continent, and thank goodness that Viktor Orban and Hungary has got the courage to stand up against him. But I tell you something, if you criticise Soros, his media friends accuse you of being an anti-Semite. It is quite extraordinary, and I really feel that Soros in many ways is the biggest danger to the entire Western world.”

Leaving aside Farage’s hypocrisy, there can be no doubting that his scapegoating rhetoric, in lieu of their being any other sensible socialist alternative being promoted in the mainstream, was going down well with the public. This became more evident in May 2019 when The Brexit Party took a massive 29 of the possible 73 seats up for grabs in the European elections, obtaining 30.5 per cent of the total votes cast. Keen to make the most of this success, Farage then tried to persuade his new batch of MEPs to join the freshly launched Identity and Democracy grouping – a group which included both Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally) and Germany’s far right counterpart Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Yet despite his best efforts, Farage remained unable to bully his parliamentarians into his attempt to jump into bed with two of Europe’s most notorious far right parties.

In January 2020 Brexit was completed and the UK was formerly separated from the European Union. The following January, Farage’s party was renamed Reform UK. Within a few months Farage handed over formal leadership of the party to Richard Tice, and Farage became Reform’s honorary president, which meant he could devote his time to building the so-called popular revolt and propagandising against the pandemic lockdowns. His role as a mouthpiece for the far right had been aided by his hosting a talk radio show on LBC from 2017 through to June 2020. But in mid-2021 Farage was then able to intensify his propaganda war as the host of a new Sunday morning show on GB News (UK’s new equivalent to Fox News).

Full of bilious hot air as ever, in August 2020 Farage made his regular pilgrimage to the Conservative Political Action Conference – a political gathering of the international far right – where once again he upped his fearmongering game. During the speech Farage delivered we see the real Farage when he warned:

“We are under attack as never before, and that threat is not external… The biggest threat we face is from within. The biggest threat we face is the fifth column inside all of our countries which is attempting to destroy the family unit, attempting to destroy our Judeo-Christian culture, attempting to destroy our Constitution, attempting to destroy our history, our pride in who we are and what we are, and the way they are doing it, the waying they’re doing it is predominantly through the educational institutions… Our children are being indoctrinated. Our universities have become madrassas of Marxism and it’s got to change… and the same goes for the media… This is not accidental. What is going on, and it is happening in the US, it is happening in Canada, it’s happening in the UK, and it’s happening in Australia, it is happening in New Zealand. It is the English-speaking countries that have got this terrible virus worse than anywhere else in the world. This is a Marxist attempt to break Western civilisation. A Marxist attempt to destroy everything that we are, and we are going to fight back hard against it.”

This is far right conspiracy mongering to the core, a line of attack which frames “cultural Marxism” as an evil plot to disenfranchise ordinary people, with this fictious Marxist takeover being portrayed as a dastardly virus, which as Farage stated, was not even being opposed by conservatives. This is why he ended his speech with a rallying cry for the far right “foot soldiers” of the world “to stand up against the establishment, to stand up against the deep state, and to stand up against all these things the globalists try to impose upon us.”

2024 and the Rise of Reform

In late May when the UK’s weak and faltering Conservative government presented the public with an early general election to be held on July 4, initially it wasn’t clear what role Farage would play. All we did know is that his input to the election would be divisive. This was more than evident when Farage lined up an interview on Sky New’s with Trevor Phillips (on May 26), where he made it absolutely clear that a political priority for Reform UK would involve a vicious scapegoating of Muslims. Shortly after this, on June 3, Farage then announced he was now Reform’s leader, surprising many when he stated that he was planning to stand in the parliamentary seat of Clacton.

But before Farage’s surprise announcement, Reform already had a parliamentary candidate for Clacton, a man named Tony Mack, whom was unceremoniously and undemocratically swept aside. This caused much annoyance to Mack, who then ditched Reform so he could stand against Farage as an independent. Mack was no angel. Much like Farage himself, Mack is a racist who vehemently denies being a racist, with most of his misinformed hate directed against Muslims. For example, on March 6 Mack tweeted that Islam is “basically an evil mysoginistic oppressive [sic] ideology opposed to everything I hold dear” while shortly after being replaced by Farage he made it a political priority to retweet a post made by Tommy Robinson (also someone who is apparently not a racist).

During Farage’s grandstanding electioneering in Clacton, Reform attracted unwanted attention when a Channel 4 reporter made an undercover film which exposed extremely racist remarks made by Reform campaigners. Most of the subsequent coverage of this matter then focused on the bigoted comments made by a single campaign volunteer (Andrew Parker), which were disregarded by Farage who alleged (with little pushback) that the individual had been an actor and so the damming footage must have been manufactured as some form of elaborate psi-op (as Farage put it, “a total and utter set-up”). Yet the subsequent focus on this volunteer missed the point completely, as another more significant person who featured in the footage was George Jones, who was introduced as being “a veteran” of UKIP and The Brexit Party who was “running events for Farage.”

Although Jones is no longer working for Reform, in the covertly recorded footage he asserted that Farage had chosen Clacton to stand because it “was proper England… proper English… not like in London when you’re a foreigner in your own country.” And later, while drinking outside a pub, Jones identifies a Pride flag on a passing police car and comments: “You see that fucking degenerate flag on the front bonnet? What are the old bill doing promoting that crap? They should be out catching nonces not promoting the fuckers.” Jones is then captured boasting that under Reform’s leadership “our police officers will be paramilitaries, they won’t be police” before ominously adding that “we’re going to bring back the noose”.

The plain bigotry of those involved with Reform, as illustrated by the reactionary views presented by Tony Mack, Andrew Parker, and George Jones, remain typical for many of the leading members of Farage’s party. Indeed, we could look at just a few of Reform’s parliamentary candidates who were subsequently dropped when their toxic political views were exposed to public scrutiny. (They were however ditched too late for their names to be removed from the ballot papers as Reform candidates.) Such individuals include former BNP member Raymond Saint, who was chosen to be Reform’s candidate in Basingstoke; Grant StClair-Armstrong, their candidate in North West Essex, who had previously written a blog post calling for people to “vote BNP”; and Leslie Lilley, Reform’s candidate for Southend East and Rochford. The latter candidate penned a social media post in response to the news of a small boat arriving in Dover which said: “I hope I’m near one of the scumbags one day I won’t run away I’ll slaughter them then have their family taken out”.

Another Reform candidate who was dropped because of his extreme views was an elderly bigot named Hugo Miller. Yet not only was Miller selected to be Reform’s parliamentary candidate for Horsham – but he had longstanding ties to Farage’s crew, as he had stood as UKIP’s parliamentary candidate in the same seat in 1997, 2001 and 2005. Just one example of Miller’s troubling views was illustrated by a Facebook post he wrote in 2020 which highlighted his thoughts on the history of racism in America. Miller observed: “As slaves, they [African Americans] fitted in well, but as equals – well, that was asking too much.” In the same post he added: “I believe that the Negroes in America are very fortunate indeed, in that the White population has (eventually) allowed them to fully integrate into society…”

Farage’s Victory: Before the Storm

Independence Day has come and gone, and with the July 4^th election now over, Labour has won by a landslide. This hollow victory however has nothing to do with Labour’s popularity, but the total collapse of support for the Conservative Party, who obtained their “worst-ever result” with 7 million votes, while Labour, even with their landslide, failed to breach the 10 million mark. It was therefore not Labour but Reform who were the main beneficiaries of the Conservative’s implosion. Reform totted up a massive 4 million votes, which represents Farage’s highest ever electoral vote – a huge vote, which is not reflected in parliamentary positions owing to the undemocratic nature of the first past-the-post electoral system. Hence despite this success Reform only secured five parliamentary seats. But bums in parliament is not all that matters in politics, as one of the main achievements of Farage’s decades of electioneering has been his ability to drag the political priorities of all the mainstream parties to the far right.

We should also remember that UKIP had previously gained a similar sized vote in 2015, when they received just short of 4 million votes. But by 2019, with Brexit largely done, and with the Tories lurching ever further to the right, the vote for Farage’s newly christened electoral vehicle (The Brexit Party) plummeted to twenty-odd thousand votes. This makes Reform’s current results all the more remarkable.

Also significant is that Labour won this year’s general election with a vote count that was 3 million short of the 13 million votes obtained under Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist leadership in 2017. Moreover, even in 2019, Corbyn’s Labour still gained more votes than Starmer! Again this was a remarkable achievement on Corbyn’s part given that the then right wing dominated parliamentary Labour Party (with Sir Keir Starmer to the fore) were doing everything in their power to stop their own party winning. But if we were to believe Starmer and his capitalist cronies, they had to drop all of Corbyn’s socialist policy commitments because they were so unpopular with the public. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is reflected by the fact that Corbyn was forced to stand as an “independent” and still beat Labour; it was also evident by the declining support for Starmer himself who saw his personal vote drop from 36,641 in 2019 to 18,884 this year.

The danger that lies ahead is that with the ongoing decline of the Conservative Party (a potentially terminal process), and if Labour fails to take immediate measures to better the lot of the electorate, it is Reform that is best positioned to mount a serious challenge for political power. Judging by the Tory-lite content of Labour’s election manifesto, Starmer’s Labour are not going to suddenly start promoting the sort of the socialist changes that are needed to address the multiple crises facing the working class. There was a good reason why one of the Labour Party’s main funders, Unite the union, refused to endorse Labour’s election manifesto. It is also why in the weeks before the election the same union argued:

“Labour need to make government count. They can and need to make real change. The rise of the far right throughout the west should send alarm bells ringing in Westminster. People want to see tangible results and politicians must listen to workers and communities.”

Yes, alarm bells should have been ringing loudly, but unfortunately they have not been. This is because the few bell ringers who might have existed before the election have now been silenced: Labour’s purge of even moderate socialists (like Corbyn) is now largely completed, their overwhelming priority seems to be assuringthe leaders of the billionaire-class that they will be prioritising them over the needs of voters.

Ironically, Labour could learn a thing or two (but won’t) from Douglas Carswell, the former Conservative Party MP for Clacton who defected to UKIP in August 2014, then becoming UKIP’s first elected MP when he triggered a by-election later that year. Carswell subsequently ditched UKIP in 2017 and later resigned from parliamentary politics to pursue more intellectual pursuits. So, in the first instance, just a few weeks after quitting UKIP he published a book entitled Rebel: How to Overthrow an Emerging Oligarchy. And while Carswell’s hard right politics dictate that his preferred rebellion is very different to what might be proposed by a socialist, his book still makes a few interesting, if perhaps obvious, observations. “A mood of populist revolt is taking hold. Across Britain, the United States and much of Europe, a new radicalism is on the rise,” he explains. There is “an intense, simmering feeling of frustration” amongst voters — an “insurgent anger” being “aimed at what they perceive to be the political clique – that cosy knot of professional politicians and pundits who get to decide where the boundaries of the politically possible lie.” He goes on:

“So, they cheer when candidates like Trump or Farage come along and say things beyond those boundaries. They do so, not necessarily because they want to shift the boundaries, or, indeed, because they agree with what is being said, but because they so deeply resent the way that the political cliques – elites – have patronized them and treated them with such disdain.”

This is true. But like other libertarian commentators, Carswell’s ultimate solution is to dream of creating a purer form of capitalism, one unencumbered by government regulation. So when it comes to dealing with growing inequality, he understands that it is increasing but believes that it is wrong to assert that the growing gap between ordinary people and “the emergence of a class of super-remunerated corporate ‘fat cats’… is a natural consequence of capitalism.” Instead, he insists capitalism has just “been corrupted”. “What we need to do,” he proposes, “is not further restrict the free market, but sweep away the corporatist constraints that vested interests have imposed upon it.” This however is just another delusional libertarian dream.

But what we do know is that at the time of publishing Rebel, Carswell had clearly become frustrated with his fellow patriots on the right, noting that many of their movements were little more than “personality cults” “led by charlatans.” He railed against the “pound-shop populism of Nigel Farage or Donald Trump” and argued that such leaders should engage in less fearmongering and instead take his advice and adopt a more positive program that would allow capitalism to work its magic.

Rebuilding the Left. We Need a Party of Struggle

Carswell, Farage and Trump all understand what Starmer does not: “From the US Democrats, to UK’s Labour, to the French Socialists, everywhere the left seems to be in trouble as their vote slips away from them,” as Carswell puts it. This can be seen with the almost certain return to power of Trump, and the huge gains that have been made by the far right in France. In the UK, Labour may have won, but it was a victory based on a dwindling vote. Carswell like other right populists fails to recognise the most basic fact explaining why so-called ‘Left’ politicians are seeing their votes slip away, which is that their policies no longer even pretend to prioritise the welfare of the majority of their electorate.

It is not just that the so-called ‘Left’ politicians are elitist and patronising, it is that they have totally ditched any semblance of socialism. In the US this has never been different, as there has never been a party that represents the working class. And while in the UK the Labour Party has always supported capitalism to some extent, the difference was that until the 1980s, it was still a party that was forced to listen and respond to the political views of its working class members. This limited form of interaction ended with Neil Kinnock’s leadership, but then had a partial but insufficient reversal when Jeremy Corbyn led the party.

In his 2017 book, Rebel, Carswell makes one other straightforward point when he states: “Perhaps the most important reform we could introduce to break the stranglehold of the parties on politics is a proper right of recall.” And yes, socialist agree that the public should have the right to recall their elected representatives, as it is a critical means of holding them democratically accountable. But Carswell, as the quote makes clear, isn’t too keen on political party’s full stop. In keeping with his libertarianism, he believes the problems facing politics cannot be solved by creating a new party, but “It’s to do politics without one.” Socialists disagree, and we believe it is essential that our class has politicians who represent their interests on the streets and in parliament.

This means the task at hand will involve us creating political parties afresh, all over the world – creating parties that are democratic, and that promote the type of transformative politics that can realistically meet the living needs of ordinary working-class people. Such parties will need to be living breathing organisations of struggle, that work alongside militant trade unions and their members to engage in a bold socialist fight to take the wealth and big companies out of the hands of the billionaires.

These parties must be committed to creating secure jobs that pay a real living wage, they must be committed to launching a mass council house building program to provide high quality affordable housing for all, and committed to building the types of mass movements that can shut down the capitalist war machine. There are many more far-reaching and inspiring policies that we need to fight for, but another significant socialist one is to fight to nationalise the banks and the big corporate monopolies so that they are brought under democratic workers’ control and management. Only if we take such bold approach to fighting capitalist exploitation the world over will we, the global working class, be able to undercut the support of scapegoating far right populist elites, whether they be Reform UK in the UK or the National Rally in France.

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Given the recent pro-Palestinian protests around the world and on many university campuses, it seems strange if not surprising that neither genocide nor the continuing flow of U.S. weapons to Israel were mentioned during the first (and maybe only) 2024 presidential debate. Nor did the New York Times Editorial Board see fit to cite complicity in genocide while calling for Biden to step down after his poor debate performance. Instead, it declared that Biden has been “an admirable president.”

Clearly, the major media and the American public are discounting the possibility that Joe Biden and his White House enablers could ever be prosecuted for complicity in genocide. They should think again.

The United States is a member of the Genocide Convention of 1948. Article III includes among punishable acts, “Complicity in Genocide.” Article IV makes clear that persons punished for genocide shall include “responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”  Article V requires the contracting parties to enact legislation that provides “effective penalties for persons “guilty of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.” Accordingly, 18 U.S. Code 1091 mirrors the Convention’s definition of genocide and provides that “any person who attempts or conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be punished in the same manner as the person who completes the offense.”

Whether or not charges of genocide complicity are ever brought against American individuals, it is important to identify those officials and non-officials who fall into the category of complicit in genocide. They should be called out for their role in the deaths of almost 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza.

Here are the major offenders:

White House.  In the wake of Hamas’ brutal massacre on October 7, President Joe Biden embraced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and promised to supply him with unlimited arms.  Despite ignored and never-enforced Biden “redlines” and pleas for Israel to limit its attacks on civilians, U.S.-provided bombs have continued to fall on civilian centers while the use of starvation as a war tactic has brought famine to the suffering Gazans.  In a rare show of restraint following major IDF raids on hospitals and refugee centers, Biden announced a one-time pause in the delivery of 2,000 pounds.  When Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant raced off to Washington to complain, American officials took pains to rebut Netanyahu’s claims that the Biden administration was delaying military assistance. They showed Gallant records of hundreds of weapons shipments to Israel for its Gaza campaign.  By doing so, they also acknowledged U.S. complicity in Israel’s continuing genocide.  Biden and aides who assisted in the arms transfers are all subject to charges of complicity.

State Department. In its much-delayed May report on the war, the State Department denied that war crimes were being committed. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the face of American diplomacy, gave only lip service to its calls for military restraint.  From the beginning Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called for a two-state solution while conveying strong support for an Israeli war cabinet that firmly rejected two- states. Meanwhile, Israel expanded its war campaign to Rafah and refused calls for a ceasefire. Fully committed to Biden’s pro-Israel war policy, both Blinken and Sullivan are now vulnerable to complicity charges.

Defense Department.  The Defense Department has provided important intelligence, strategic advice, and aerial reconnaissance to the IDF.  It has delivered an estimated $6.5 billion worth of  U.S.-made bombs and missiles that have destroyed so much of the Gaza Strip and killed or wounded so many of its citizens.  From what we see in the media, Austin is a close advisor to Gallant. Moreover, the Defense Department has been responsible for the regular hands-on transfer of weapons from U.S. stockpiles to Israel for its war on Gaza. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and his aides have made themselves subject to charges of complicity of genocide.

Military Suppliers and Contractors. Boeing has been a major arms supplier to Israel both before and during the Gaza war.  According to Amnesty International, Israel used Boeing supplied bombs in at least five strikes on Gaza in 2023, causing the deaths of over 100 civilians. Other reported U.S. suppliers of lethal weapons to the IDF in its Gaza campaign include General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin,  Agilite and BAE Systems, among several others.  Under the Genocide Convention, such companies are subject to complicity charges. The ICJ in April denied Nicaragua’s request for provisional measures against Germany to stop its arms shipments to Israel. Noting that Germany substantially reduced the value of weapons for which licenses were granted for export to Israel, the Court declined the Nicaraguan request.  However, the Court reminded all States of their international obligations to avoid the risk that arms transfers “might be used to violate” the Genocide Convention.

Whether or not any U.S. entities and individuals are ever held criminally accountable for complicity in genocide, the visible evidence of United States complicity has been amply displayed on television, in the press and in the social media for the whole world to see.

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Few would have staked their political fortune, let alone any other sort of reward, on a return of the British Conservatives on July 4.  The polls often lie, but none suggested that outcome.  The only question was the extent British voters would lacerate the Tories who have been in office for fourteen years, presiding over a country in divisive decline, aided by policies of austerity, the galloping cost of living and the lunatic tenures of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.  Predicted numbers varied from a return of 53 seats to what was forecast in the more accurate Ipsos exit poll of 131 seats.

As the night wore on, the laceration became a ballot massacre.  It was clear that most voters were less keen on Sir Keir Starmer’s dour Labour team, supposedly reformed and devoid of dangerous daring, as they were of voting against the Tories.  Any other option would do.

A whole brigade of senior Conservatives suffered a rout.  Commons leader Penny Mordaunt lost her seat, as did defence secretary Grant Shapps.  That manorial relic of Tory tradition and privilege, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, was also ousted from his seat.  The Liberal Democrats made huge inroads into traditional Conservative territory, winning seats held by two former prime ministers – David Cameron and Theresa May.

Recriminations, long readied in reserve, came out.  Former party chair, Sir Brandon Lewis, pointed the finger to his leader, Rishi Sunak, whose decision to call the election was considered monumentally ill-judged.  “I suspect right now that’s weighing on him very, very strongly … He will go down as the Conservative prime minister and leader who had the worst election result in over a century.”

Other Tories thought Sunak’s efforts to push the Conservatives further to the right to stem the leaching of votes to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK a serious error of judgment.  Former Tory universities minister Lord Jo Johnson, also famed for being the sibling of that buffoonish wrecker-in-chief Boris, called efforts to make the Conservatives “a Reform-lite kind of party” a “big mistake”.  Only a return to the “centre-ground of British politics” would spare them a lengthy spell in the wilderness.

The strafing of the more liberal Tory members does, however, place them in an unenviable position.   Are they to, as Lord Johnson suggests, alter course to “appeal to metropolitan, open-minded, liberal voters”?  Or should they, as Rees-Mogg insists, dig deeper into the soil of Conservative values, what he calls “core principles” that had been essentially pinched by Reform UK?  Amidst the debate, former lord chancellor Robert Buckland could not resist quipping that this Conservative “Armageddon” was “going to be like a group of bald men fighting over a comb.”

The most staggering feature of these elections, leaving aside the ritualistic savaging of the Tories, was the wholly lopsided nature of the share of votes relative to the winning of seats.  “This election,” the Electoral Reform Society solemnly declared, “saw Labour and the Conservatives receive their joint lowest vote share on record, with a combined 57.4%.”

That did not prevent the two major parties from snaring the lion’s share.  Labour received 33.7% of the vote yet obtained 63.2% (411 seats) of the 650 on offer, making it the most disproportionate on record.  The Tories, despite the bloodbath, could still count on 121 MPs with 23.7% of votes winning 18.6% of seats in the House of Commons.

The Lib Dems burgeoned in terms of representatives, gaining a record number of MPs (they now stand at 72), despite only having a vote share of 12.2%. It was a modest percentage hardly different from the 2019 election.

Reform UK, Farage’s rebranded party of Brexiteers, had every right to feel characteristically foiled by the first past the post system that is always defended by the party that wins majority, leaving smaller contenders to chew over its stunningly unrepresentative rationale.  Having netted a higher percentage than the Lib Dems at 14.3% (over 4 million votes), they had only five MPs to show for it.  “That is blatantly not a properly functioning democratic system – that is a flawed system,” a resentful Richard Tice of Reform remarked on BBC 4 Radio’s Today program.  “The demands for change will grow and grow.”

The Greens, similarly, received 6.7% of the vote (just under 2 million), but returned a mere four MPs to Westminster. Despite this, the strategists will be seeing these wins, the most successful in their party’s history, as stunning, bettering the heroic if lonely exploits of Caroline Lucas.  Tellingly, the party pinched two seats off Labour, and one from the Conservative stable.

Given that Labour proved the largest beneficiary of a voting system that should only ever apply in a two-way contest and given the prospect of Reform and the Greens posing ever greater threats from either wing of politics, appetite for electoral reform is likely to be suppressed.

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Last week’s Biden-Trump debate harmed U.S. foreign policy, and the international community was left to debate what was said and what was left unsaid.  In view of the harmful potential for wider wars in East Europe and the Middle East in addition to the potential for China’s increased military pressure on Taiwan, it is shocking that only ten minutes of the 90-minute debate was devoted to national security policy.  The inept CNN moderators—Jake Tapper and Dana Bash—were partly responsible because of the dearth of questions on foreign policy.  Nevertheless, the answers provided by President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump were shocking for their misinformation and their polemics.  

The debate was incoherent for the most part due to Biden’s lack of sharpness as well as Trump’s ignorance and boorish manner.  There was no reason to expect a substantive exchange or even some enlightenment on the wars between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas.  But the incoherence of both men certainly signaled to President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that they have a free hand in their respective confrontations and that the United States has no leverage, let alone policy, for ending two terrible and costly wars that could be expanded in the coming months.  The debate did immeasurable harm to U.S. interests.

The moderators were TV anchors accustomed to reading teleprompters rather than offering insight into specific policy matters.  Previous debates engendered more serious discussion when print journalists, such as Max Frankel of the New York Times or Marvin Kalb, performed as moderators and could handle a discussion on national security.  CNN’s anchors, Tapper and Bash, asked nothing about defense policy and defense spending, although the Pentagon’s budget is soon to reach the level of $1 trillion.  U.S. power projection capabilities were not addressed, and the modernization of our strategic capability, which already exists at overkill levels, was not introduced.

Tapper and Bash provided no opening for discussion of relations with China—the most important bilateral relationship on the U.S. agenda—or with Russia.  This oversight was particularly troubling in view of the close relations that now exist between Moscow and Beijing, and the fact that preventing such rapprochement was once upon a time the sine qua non of U.S. national security policy.  The template for dealing with the triangular relationship was provided by President Richard Nixon and national security adviser Henry Kissinger, but their effective policy has been lost to the ages.

Biden’s administration has provided arms to Ukraine on a regular basis, but has never developed a policy regarding the war and how to end it.  When this subject was raised, all Biden could do was to state tired shibboleths about Putin seeking to restore the “Soviet Empire” and considering the use of force against Poland or the Baltic states. Biden incorrectly referred to Belarus as a NATO country, and said that Belarus would be at risk if Putin were allowed to “take Ukraine.”  Putin is in fact tied down in a war of attrition, and his inability to deal with Ukraine in a conventional confrontation does not bode well for taking on any country that is part of a NATO alliance that circumscribes his western border.  

Trump’s predictable response was that, if he were in the White House, the Russians would never have invaded Ukraine in the first place.  When Trump was pressed, his blusterous response turned on the ridiculous charge regarding Biden that the military “can’t stand him” and “they like me more than just about any of them, and that’s based on every single bit of 

information.”  Trump reached a new low when he charged that Biden “encouraged Russia going in (sic).”  Putin has settled into a war of attrition, and the debate must tell him that neither Biden nor Trump has any ideas regarding dialogue, let alone negotiation.  “Before I take office on January 20,” Trump harrumphed, “I’ll have that war settled.”

The discussion regarding Israel and Gaza was even worse.  The essential fact is that Biden was wrong about Netanyahu from the start, and his talk of “red lines,” two-state solutions, and cease-fires was just that—talk!  Biden believed that if he assured Netanyahu that Israel would get all the weaponry he desired, then Biden would have some influence over the Israeli leader.  In doing so, Biden ignored that past 25 years of bilateral relations with Israel that demonstrated Netanyahu’s belief that he could manage any U.S. administration and never have to pay a price.  

Trump’s response was similar to the issue regarding Ukraine.  If he had been in the White House, according to Trump, Putin “never would have invaded Ukraine, never, just like Israel would have never been invaded in a million years by Hamas.”  Trump went further in arguing that there was “no terror at all during my administration,” whereas the “whole world is blowing up under him (Biden).”  Trump charged that Biden had “become like a Palestinian, but they don’t like him because he’s a very bad Palestinian.”  And this man could be returned to the White House?

During his four-year term, Trump gave Israelis everything they sought, including an embassy in Jerusalem; end to financial support for the Palestinians; approval for West Bank settlements; and recognition of the Golan Heights as part of Israel. Trump abrogated the Iran nuclear accord, just like Netanyahu wanted him to do.  Like Putin, Netanyahu must believe he is home free if he had to deal with either Biden or Trump in the coming years.

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—So that means he [Biden] can take the life of the baby in the ninth month and even after birth, because some states, Democrat-run, take it after birth.

—We have a border that’s the most dangerous place anywhere in the world. Consider the most dangerous place anywhere in the world, and he opened it up and these killers are coming into our country and they are raping and killing women, and it’s a terrible thing.

—All he [Biden] had to do was leave it, all he had to do was leave it. He decided to open up our border, open up our country to people that are from prisons, people that are from mental institutions, insane asylum, terrorists. We have the largest number of terrorists coming into our country right now. All terrorists, all over the world. Not just in South America, all over the world, they come from the Middle East, everywhere.

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The Dutch colonisers of West Papua thought the island of New Guinea looked like a bird, so called its northwestern tip Vogelkop (Bird’s Head). In what is now Indonesian-occupied West Papua, Paniai, an area of 6,525.25 km² with a population of about 220,410, is nestled with its lakes in the middle of the “bird’s” shoulder girdle. It’s not a place that hits headlines although it ranks high in the annals of human tragedy. In a recent Indonesian military raid on Paniai, over 5000 Papuans fled their homes. Fifteen villages are now uninhabited. These 5,000 people swell the numbers of more than 100,000 West Papuans displaced since 2018.

According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, there are 75.9 million internally displaced people in the world, a figure that has soared by 50% in the last five years. Of the total, 68.3 million were displaced by conflict and violence, and 7.7 million by disasters. The numbers signal a grave human rights crisis but, focusing on humans alone, they perhaps hide the even graver crime of ecocide, against all lifeforms in different habitats. This happens when humans are massively displaced—often a crime against humanity (“committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack”)—as an even worse crime usually caused by war, pollution, ravaging of natural resources, and industrial disasters (like Bhopal). Ecocide, which keeps increasing the numbers of displaced people, is happening in Ukraine (17 million displaced), in Palestine (5.138 million displaced, out of a population of 5.493 million), and in Congo (7.1 million displaced), to give three examples.

A chart of the UN World Migration Report lists the twenty countries with the largest displaced populations at the end of 2022 (so Israel’s displacement of 85% of Palestine’s population doesn’t appear): Syrian Arab Republic, Ukraine, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Columbia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, South Sudan, Iraq, Türkiye, Mozambique, Cameroon, Azerbaijan, India, and Central African Republic.

The striking omission is West Papua. True, Indonesian statistics aren’t accurate, partly because of the rugged terrain (in which the people speak some 250 languages), and partly because slapdash statistics are one way to cover up genocide. Even so, it’s estimated that about 100,000 West Papuans (5%) have been displaced since 2018. West Papua should be among the countries on the UN chart. But it’s not. Why? Maybe because, first, Indonesia doesn’t allow international scrutiny of what it’s doing in West Papua (indirect confession of serious crimes) and, second, the UN itself is largely responsible for these crimes because, with its false “referendum” in 1969, it denied independence to West Papua’s Melanesian people and gifted the former Dutch colonial territory to Indonesia, a country of a totally different culture and peoples, basically so the US could exploit its natural resources. And perhaps the displaced West Papuans have been “disappeared” by numerically subsuming them into the Asian population of the occupying power of Indonesia (about 280 million) so, voilà, they become a tiny percentage.

In the age of algorithms, numbers are treated as if they explain everything. As a sole indicator they can be dehumanising because they give no insight into what actually happens, how, who’s responsible, why, and consequences. 5,000 here, 7,000,000 there (Syrian Arab Republic), nearly 5,000,000 there (Yemen) or there (Afghanistan): the numbers are numbing. They’re all displaced people but some are given more importance than others. But hath they not “hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions …?” Aren’t they victims of the same crimes, human beings like everyone else? Imagine, us being exposed to high mortality rates, helplessly watching our babies and loved ones die, at risk of sexual assault and abduction, held hostage, denied shelter, food, and healthcare in extreme conditions, trapped in conflict zones, caught in crossfire, targets and human shields. All this happens to displaced people, more than half of whom are woman and girls. If you see a picture of a starving baby and feel grief, that grief should be multiplied by about 76 million. Without seeing numbers through the micro-prisms of all these stories, the macro-picture they hold out is mere, mostly meaningless statistics.

Paniai may be a small story by comparison with Palestine but it speaks volumes about the big picture. At 8 a.m. on 14 June this year, Indonesian “security” forces in ten trucks accompanied by four helicopters attacked villages of the Moni and Mee tribes. Thousands of people fled, from Bibida (443, 100%), Dama-Dama (482, 100%), Kolaitaka (486, 100%), Kugaisiga (453, 100%), Odiyai (416, 100%), Tuwakotu (394, 100%), Ugidimi (597, 100%), Amougi (289, 100%), Timida (318, 100%), Kopo (555, 100%), Wouye Butu (368, 100%), Uwibutu (47, 30%), Madi (26, 20%), Ipakiye (35, 20%), and Pugotadi (125, 40%). It’s no accident that the whole area had been closed by military and police checkpoints two days earlier.

Paniai represents what’s happening all over West Papua but also speaks of international politics. In the words of Benny Wenda, Interim President of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) Provisional Government, “The displacement crisis in West Papua has reached every corner of our country, from the highlands, to the coasts, to small and isolated islands. Every week brings news of another mass evacuation, as terrified Papuans flee Indonesian military violence. Yet Indonesia condemns Israeli displacement in Gaza.” This criticism of Israel is clearly more about Islamic politics than human rights. But the displacement in West Papua is so little known, let alone denounced, that the barefaced cynicism of Indonesia’s criticism of Israel’s displacement of Palestinians goes uncommented in the media, as does Indonesia’s recent re-election to the UN Human Rights Council (186 to 192 votes) when it is actually committing crimes against humanity and genocide. How can anyone believe the UN is serious about protecting human rights?

As in Palestine, much of the displacement in West Papua is caused by settlers, but this time funded by the World Bank. Respectably called “transmigration” and officially lasting until 2015, this policy affects Kalimantan, Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Maluku but, above all, West Papua because the transmigrants aren’t Melanesian, so the possibility of ethnic and religious strife is high. Touted as solving problems of overpopulation and poverty in Java, giving poor people a chance to prosper, it also provides a handy workforce for cheaper exploitation of natural resources, and strategic reinforcement in “buffer” zones, like the Papua New Guinea border zone and where big economic interests seem threatened. The result? Two notable effects are destruction of huge tracts of rainforest and Islamisation by numerical overwhelming of a nominally Christian country that retains its age-old beliefs and traditional rites.

Indigenous peoples have been displaced from more than a million hectares of cleared rainforest to make way for transmigrants. Forest dwellers have been expelled to malaria-infested lower altitudes. Their rights are annulled by law. Indonesia’s Basic Forestry Act (1967), enacted almost immediately after Suharto’s military coup, stipulates: “The rights of traditional law communities may not be allowed to stand in the way of transmigration sites”. Martono, the Minister for Transmigration, made the underlying aim clear in 1985: “the different ethnic groups will in the long run disappear because of integration … and there will be one kind of man”. Well, that’s one way of putting it. Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong come much closer to the truth in West Papua: The Obliteration of a People. Thanks to wheeler-dealing between the United States, Holland, and Indonesia in 1962, West Papuans are “confronted with the dispossession of their homeland. The result has been nothing less than a death warrant for Melanesian culture west of the 141 meridian.”

The statistics are telling. The 1971 census, two years after the UN handed West Papua to Indonesia with its callous “Act of Free Choice” (Act Free of Choice), recorded a population of 923,000 and 96% Melanesian. In 2022, the total population was 4.378 million (more than 50% transmigrants). West Papuans were dispersed and turned into minority groups. In the transmigration compounds, the rule was nine Javanese families for one Papuan family. The settlers brought diseases or contributed to them because of the deteriorated living conditions of the West Papuans. Yaws, measles, and whooping cough were epidemic and, in the Baliem Valley, a key transmigration zone, an outbreak of sexually transmitted diseases impaired the fertility of the Dani people. Infant mortality here was said to be above 60%, and average life expectancy about 31 years. In 2024, 11.5 % of highlands children die before the age of five.

As the commercial sex industry grew around logging and mining sites, either controlled or (very lucratively) protected by the Indonesian military for foreign companies, HIV infection rates had rocketed by the late 1990s. A 2001 study found that a quarter of the prostitutes were infected. Men working in these exploited zones take the virus back to villages where there is no healthcare. West Papua, representing much less than 1% of Indonesia’s population, has about 40% of its HIV/AIDS cases. In 2008, with 3% of the population infected, West Papua had the highest HIV/AIDS infection rate outside Africa.

Many West Papuans believe they’re being deliberately infected. One doctor said that the real figures (in 2011) are much higher than those usually cited because, “many Papuans don’t go to the few clinics available as there is limited medication on offer, and others don’t trust local health officials”. She adds, “There’s a lot of deliberate infection of HIV by Indonesian medical services…” An Indigenous leader, Jakobus Yufu, says, “the military controls the sex industry in Papua and deliberately brings in infected sex workers to contaminate the indigenous population”. Of course, deliberate infection is difficult to prove, especially in such a closed country, but the (at least plausible) accusation should be properly investigated given the context. West Papua isn’t an example of peaceable coexistence. The accused institution, the Indonesian regime, has killed some 500,000 people in the sixty years it has occupied West Papua. So, why would it shrink from using a few Javanese prostitutes to infect many West Papuans with HIV/Aids?

The threat of expanded militia operations has grown greatly with the recent election of 4-star general Prabowo Subianto as president of Indonesia. This man is notorious, inter alia, for his ruthless use of militia groups in what was then East Timor. Militia groups in West Papua are documented by the Pro-Government Militias Guidebook. It cites an East Timor-style group called the “West Papuan Army”, many of whose members came from the Suharto regime’s Pemuda Pancasila movement, known for “semi-licensed thuggery” and savagery in East Timor. It was operating in West Papua in 2000 and again in 2006-2009, working with the Indonesian army and Kopassus special forces, of which Prabowo was once commander. Armed with M16s, SS1s and AK47s, it has burned down villages and displaced many people. Another group, the Laskar Merah Putih (Red and White Warriors) was active until 2006 under the brutal East Timorese militia leader, Eurico Guterres. This group, or a copycat “red and white” (colours of the Indonesian flag) gang was seen again in 2022 in several parts of the country, under the orders of Indonesian security forces, although nominally independent.

The West Papuans have always fought back. The OPM (Free Papua Movement), then mostly armed with bows and arrows, began guerrilla attacks against the Indonesian army and installations of international enterprises in the 1970s. The present armed wing of the OPM, the West Papua Liberation Army (TPNPB)—which has recently been in the news since it abducted a New Zealand pilot in February 2023 (one abducted New Zealand pilot is news, but 500,000 murdered West Papuans don’t cut it)—is now experienced, better equipped, and able to use social media to counter official narratives. In 2021, the Indonesian government raised the stakes and declared that all “armed criminal groups” (i.e. TPNBP and OPM) are “terrorists”, under Law 5 of 2018 on Counterterrorism, thus delegitimising all resistance to the violent occupation but also preparing the ground for Prabowo’s very own “unconventional” warfare that served him so well in East Timor. Indonesia, recognising that its forces can’t crush West Papuan resistance, has deployed more than 25,000 troops to West Papua since 2019, as well as planning, in 2022, to recruit 3,000 Papuan youths to serve in (or as militias for?) the police and army. In any case, intense resort to militia groups is all but inevitable.

An “early warning” report (2022) by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum foresees as a likely outcome that, “atrocities would be committed by militia, with tacit support or acquiescence from Indonesian security forces, in response to increasing protests and/or rebel attacks by Indigenous Papuans demanding independence from Indonesia”. This could mean large-scale killing of civilians with atrocities by imported and pro-Indonesian West Papuan militia backed by the military and police, or by organised transmigrant groups, also protected by “security” forces. As part of an official 2015 defence plan to amass 100 million militias by 2025, militia groups are being organised as a “total people’s defence” with “complete integration” of military and civil components under military command. In West Papua, military and police would claim to be confronting pro-independence “terrorists” but militias would indiscriminately target all West Papuans, as happened in East Timor. This would bring more displacement, more suffering, and more death.

This month has seen the launch of the West Papuan Peoples Liberation Front (GR-PWP), a new initiative in the struggle for West Papuan independence. Non-factional and uniting activists, students, religious organisations, Indonesian solidarity groups, the Alliance of Papuan Students, and the KPNPB, the GR-PWP will fortify “the ULMWP’s presence on the ground, supporting the cabinet, constitution, governing structure, and Green State Vision”. Since its aims include a monitoring visit to West Papua by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the ULMWP’s full membership in the Melanesian Spearhead Group, and an internationally-supervised self-determination referendum, this skilled, principled statecraft of West Papuan leaders is, for UN-human-rights-champion Indonesia, “terrorism”.

 The displaced people of Paniai tell us much about leaders of a global regime teetering on foundations of greed, violence, destruction, cruelty, and lies. But they also point to other, little known leaders like those of the ULMWP, with ethical, socially and environmentally responsible values like those expressed in its Green State Vision. Announcing the GR-PWP, Interim President Benny Wenda, invites “solidarity groups and supporters around the world to unite behind this new organisation”. It’s an organisation that’s attempting to respond to challenging questions raised by the overlooked displaced people of Paniai: do we want to profess, respect, and enjoy human rights? Or do we prefer a world where human rights defenders are “terrorists”? They’re questions about the future of humanity.

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This past June 23, I awoke with a thought I often have on this date. This was the day in 1988 that Jim Hansen went up to Capitol Hill to announce that human-caused global warming had arrived.

“The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now,” the then director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies told the U.S. Senate Energy  Committee. It made national headlines, only to be met with a deluge of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry, whose scientists decades before accurately projected the global temperature increase from burning fossil fuels, and which was funding climate change research as early as 1954. Thirty-six years after Hansen made that statement, the world seems little closer to getting it, thanks in huge part to that fossil industry campaign, by far the greatest corporate crime in history.

The June 23rd anniversary coincided with a heat wave that over the days from June 16-24 roasted 5 billion people in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe. Much of the U.S. was sweltering under heat advisories. Climate Central reported that the global heatwave was on average 3 times more likely to happen because of climate change, and across wide regions up to 5 times more likely. In Mexico and the Southwest U.S., a heatwave that happened in prior weeks was 35 times more likely to happen due to global heating, World Weather Attribution reported. On June 21 Mexico tied its hottest day on record at 125.6°F, while over the course of this year 70% of days in that nation have been extraordinarily hot. Saudi Arabia reported 1,300 heat deaths during this years Hajj pilgrimage, it was reported June 23.

Meanwhile the unusually hot waters of the Atlantic have spurred Beryl, the first hurricane of the year and projected to be the third earliest major hurricane on the books. It is the furthest east any hurricane has formed in June, fueled by the warmest June waters in that region. This animation tells the story. Beryl could be a precursor for what is likely to be a vicious tropical storm season.

‘Someone needs to remind me what part of the hurricane season we are in as this is very unusual,” tweeted Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel. “I guess these historic warm ocean temperatures are changing the game.”

Heating wasn’t the only extreme in recent days. Across the world drenching rainfalls were producing inundations from Switzerland and Italy to South China and the Indian subcontinent. In the U.S. upper Midwest floods drowned lands and communities in states including Iowa, South Dakota and Minnesota. Nearly half of that state was affected, while waters eroded the banks and flowed around the Rapidan Dam, threatening to take it out.  Southern Brazil was still recovering from record May flooding and slowly receding waters. Of the half million driven from their homes, 389,000 were still displaced.

“It’s a warning signal, but we’ve been seeing warning signals now for five, 10 years,” said Andrew Harper, a U.N. Refugee Agency climate advisor who visited the area. “At what point do you basically have to slap somebody in the face and say: Wake up…(?)”

While world rolls to 1.5° fossil fuels hit record

Harper’s question is one for the world, where fossil fuel use hit record levels in 2023, growing 1.5% over the previous year to release 40 billion tonnes of CO2 for the first time. The share of global primary energy coming from coal, oil and gas was 81.5% barely budging from 2022’s 82%, despite 13% growth in wind and solar energy. That is the story. Certainly wind and solar have been expanding at rapid rates, but are still only a sliver of world primary energy usage, and not enough to keep up with overall growth in world energy demand, particularly in India and China.

Even as fossil fuel use set a record, so did the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, rising at a record rate of 4.7 parts per million from March 2023 to March 2024. The heat-trapping gas does increase faster during an El Niño ocean warming event such as has occurred over the past year. But even as El Niño fades the rate of increase remains high.

“This recent surge shows how far we still need to go to stabilize the climate system,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “Stabilization will require that CO2 levels start to fall. Instead, CO2 is rising faster than ever.”

Yet a third disturbing record was set in 2023. Global temperatures increased to 1.35°C over the preindustrial baseline of 1850-1900, and by a record margin of 0.27°C. That continued a string of the world’s hottest years on record, 10 in the last 10 years.

“After seeing the 2023 climate analysis, I have to pause and say that the findings are astounding,” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Chief Scientist Dr. Sarah Kapnick. “Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA’s 174-year climate record — it was the warmest by far . . . We will continue to see records broken and extreme events grow until emissions go to zero”

The world is rapidly rolling toward the 1.5°C temperature increase threshold set by the 2015 Paris Climate Summit as the limit to avert the worst climate disruptions. Hansen nowadays is saying we have already effectively breached it, and are seeing an acceleration of global heating. You can read his work here. Those assertions have stirred debate in the climate science community. But we are already moving perilously close. As a February the world had already breached the 1.5°C mark 12 months in a row for the first time on record. Recent months have seen a continuation of record temperatures. Heating has been driven by the El Niño, and some cooling is expected.

In any event, sometime in the coming decade, the world is expected to plow through the 1.5°C barrier and stay there. Carbon Brief projects that likely occurring by 2030, and as soon as 2028, with a 95% chance by 2036. So it is probably time to ditch language such as “so many years to avert catastrophe,” and realize that as a world we are going to cross lines. Instead we need to understand this as a continuum, that each tenth of a degree we avoid is human lives saved and species spared from extinction.

When will an addicted world swear off?

The world sometimes seems like an alcoholic or drug addict. We know our problem. We know it’s going to take us down. Already it is eroding our basic health. We make endless promises to swear off, get off our addictions. But we never really do, and the problem just gets worse. Will we have to hit bottom before we get it? To be forced to do what we should have done years ago? And then how far gone will we be? Will we have triggered climate tipping points that swamp all efforts to deal with the problem?

We don’t know. But it is clear there is only one way to begin stabilizing the climate, massive and rapid reductions in fossil fuel use. Of course, an end to deforestation and a reform of agriculture are also necessary. Yet without significant cuts in burning coal, oil and gas, climate extremes will only intensify. It is also clear that human society is far from making this change. It would involve major restructurings of industry and transportation, and a change in assumptions about consumption and lifestyles. The level of economic disruption that it would cause would necessitate something like a guaranteed basic income. That would involve enormous redistribution of the wealth that has accumulated at the top via a just taxation system.

At the same time, the Global North that is still the historic source of most climate-altering pollution would have to support development in the Global South based on nonpolluting energy sources. Overall, a change to different economic criteria of progress not based on gross economic throughput, but instead on meeting the needs of people and nature, would have to be instituted.

It’s a tall order, and we are nowhere close. What will get us there short of economic, social and environmental collapse? Will it be a series of catalyzing events? Storms ravaging major coastal cities? The deaths of tens of thousands in heatwaves associated with power blackouts? Multiple breadbasket failures that cause famines and radical food price increases? What will set off the alarm that tells our addicted world we need to change our ways fast or suffer deadly consequences? How close to the bottom do we need to get?

Constructing a better story

I honestly don’t know. But I would like to construct a story in which we do get it. In which the weight of increasing climate extremes finally causes a shift in public awareness that penetrates the smog of disinformation, and scares people at all levels reaching to the pinnacles of media, business and politics. In which climate has finally become an issue that drives millions into the streets. Where direct action not just shuts down corporate offices, but whole downtowns. Where climate chaos has become so searing that leadership groups realize their own credibility is draining to zero, that people simply no longer believe in a system careening toward catastrophe.

I think in the end, when and if the break comes, it will be about belief and credibility. When people can no longer see anything coming but disaster upon disaster in a way they understand affects their own lives, from the heat and storms they must endure to the cost and scarcity of food at the grocery store. When we realize en masse it’s not going to be okay, and we damned well better do something about it. I see this coming in the context of a generational shift, when younger generations far more concerned about climate and their future than older generations become a greater portion of voters and begin to move into leadership roles. When the relatively small disruptions staged by younger groups such as Climate Defiance and Stop the Money Pipeline, joined by conscious elders such as those organizing in Third Act, grow to mass proportions. It is going to take disruptive action, and nothing less.

Then we will move to implement the many plans and ideas developed over the years by groups such as Project Drawdown or experts who developed the Exponential Climate Action Roadmap. We have the solutions along with detailed analysis of how to achieve them and how much climate pollution each will reduce. In almost every way, they would produce a better world with healthier people and communities even if climate were not a crisis. Overall, solving the climate crisis will drive us to learn the most important lesson, with ramifications across the board. That is, how to cooperate and build community with each other as people and as nations. It will require a kind of global awakening. Imagining the better world that is possible can pull us much as the seriousness of the crisis pushes us.

In the U.S., we will declare a climate emergency and stage a mobilization for rapid climate pollution cuts based on a National Climate Action Plan, to which John J. Berger summons us in an article published during the overheated month of June.

Berger writes, “Fortunately, there is a historical precedent for just such a comprehensive mobilization of government and citizenry in dire circumstances: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and the World War II years provide examples of the scale and intensity of the response needed today to reverse climate change. However, instead of gearing up to produce jobs for the unemployed or planes and tanks for a war, a concerted nationwide industrial effort is needed now to upgrade our electrical grid and produce millions of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, carbon-capture machines, and zero-emission vehicles. All too sadly, this country and the world are now in a situation even more perilous than either the Great Depression or World War II.”

Berger lines out the path. “To create a common consensual vision around which the national climate movement could mobilize, a broad civil society gathering should be convened to attract the leadership of all environmental and climate action groups and set the stage for the National Climate Action Plan. That gathering would, of course, focus on the roadblocks to implementing such a plan and to a swift, national clean-energy transition — and how those roadblocks could be dismantled”

I have to confess that as I read Berger’s article I felt a bit of frustration. For many years many of us have been calling for this scale of mobilization. It has long been the obvious answer to a climate crisis gone beyond the possibility of incremental solutions. We are already late in the game. I believe facts and circumstances will eventually drive us to a major mobilization far exceeding the scale of current efforts. My gut sense tells me it will come over the next 10 years. I hope it is before the 2030s. Will it be, creator forbid, out of the backlash from a disastrous second Trump presidency? I hope not, but these are terms in which we must now think.

Will any of this in the end be enough? We have no way of knowing. What we do know is that the world will not continue as it is. A certain amount of hell is coming upon us, and we must use it to illuminate the situation in a way that drives mass awareness and response. Awareness is the fundamental necessity. We must do everything we can to build a common understanding of the unprecedented crisis we face, in every venue available to us. If we do not make the most monumental of efforts in political organizing and eventual mobilization for solutions, we face climate disruption that will kill tens of millions, perhaps more, and potentially crash civilization. We must work for solutions at all levels, beginning in the communities where we live.

If we feel despair, the antidote is action. If we understand the world is ill, we can see ourselves as the antibodies. If we know our world is wounded, we can envision how we might heal it and create a better future for all.

It is not the time for doomsaying and retreat from action, but for the greatest thrust of climate organizing we ever have seen. It’s up to us who already get the scale and scope of the climate crisis to make sure the world as a whole gets it. And, as is screamingly obvious, the sooner the better.

This first appeared in The Raven.

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For at least some of us watching the Biden-Trump debate last week it was the lucid Biden who was scariest. (Of course, Trump is scary too, but for different reasons and in different ways.)

+ Ukraine.  Trump wants the Russians and Ukrainians to negotiate an end to their war.  Biden opposes that.   If Ukraine agrees to negotiate peace, Biden says, Russia will then attack Poland and Belarus too    This is, of course, the domino theory that kept the Vietnam war going for 20 years.  Trump then argued that financing and feeding the war would lead to WW3, but Biden isn’t worried.  NATO will deter Russia, he explained, as if Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine despite Biden’s threats and because of NATO, has not already happened.

+ Israel.  Biden devoted his time to highlight his unconditional support of Israel, laying all of the blame on the continued butchering of the Palestinian people and the destruction of Gaza on Hamas.   This makes us a partner to genocide.

Biden has turned out to be a war president, and the Democratic party is now the party of war.  And they scare me.

+ Inflation.  Regardless of its cause, inflation has an instant remedy:  A higher minimum wage and a law that grants workers of large employers wage adjustments that are tied to their employer’s profits.   Between January 2020, the start of the pandemic, and January 2024, the average wage of non-supervisory employees increased by 24%, a figure that appears to be high and that the Fed uses to justify raising the interest rate; but over this period prices increased by 20%, leaving workers with a 3.6% real increase in wages or less than 1% a year.  Corporate profits, on the other hand, increased by 57% over the same period, 32% in real dollars–an increase that is due, at least in part, to the low wages they pay their workers.

There is no doubt that Biden is a pro-labor president.  He wants to raise the minimum wage and he is pro-union.  But now, at a time when all eyes are on inflation, the president needs to refocus the discussion on the real issue:  wages that compensate workers for inflation and that reflect their contributions to the profits of their employers.  The Fed wants to tame inflation by lowering wages, but the real task is to tame corporations and raise wages.

+ Immigration.   Trump’s wildest and most dangerous lie is that illegal immigrants are criminals.  The fact is that the rate of crime committed by illegal immigrants is lower than the rate of crime committed by legal residents (the US born and legal immigrants).  This means that for every crime committed by an illegal immigrant against a legal resident there are more crimes committed by legal residents against illegal immigrants.  In other words, illegal immigrants take blows that had they not been here, would have fallen on legal residents instead.  Trump can utter his vitriol because unlike crimes by illegal immigrants against legal residents, crimes in the opposite direction do not make the headlines.

Trump also claims that immigrants steal “black jobs.”   But black unemployment and total unemployment have been at historically low levels under both the Trump and the Biden administrations, and it is clear that the focus on immigration is just a diversion from the real problem of low wages.

But immigration is the result of dire economic conditions in the immigrants’ home countries, and both presidential candidates should have addressed this issue, because to some degree these economic conditions are the result of US foreign policy.  Venezuelans make a very large fraction of the immigrants trying to get in.   The US has imposed sanctions on Venezuela, and technically these sanctions have been successful:   the Government Accountability Office found that they have worsened the economic conditions there.  But this has not moved Venezuela toward democracy; all it has done is to force workers to leave their country.   Economic sanctions should be stopped.

Another debate is coming.  Will Biden be able to say what he intends to say this time?  As we saw in the first debate, his actual intentions are even more problematic than his inability to express them.

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July 4, 2026 will mark the 250^th anniversary of the revolt against British rule by some of the settlers situated in the thirteen colonies clustered along the Atlantic Ocean.  It’s not a minute too soon to start preparing for the orgy of self-congratulation and remythologizing that is about to befall us.  Replete of course with gallons of there-is-still-a-lot-of-work-to-be-doneism.

Better still, as the rate of decline into chaos and confusion accelerates, it’s a perfect time to consider what can get us out of this mess.  By mess I mean what 1776 hath wrought.

A good place to begin that appraisal is with the document the Founders created to justify the project in the first place.  The Declaration of Independence has been misconstrued for a very long time. It’s taken me decades to penetrate the fog and I still have lots to learn.

The Declaration is a manifesto. Its purpose was to explain and justify violent opposition to British “occupation.”  By 1776 gendered and racialized violence was already deeply ingrained within the white settlers.  It was the product of what it took from 1619/20 forward to seize and hold territory, to enslave and keep enslaved at least 500,000 Black people and to control deviant white settlers. (For context as to the latter, the Salem Witch trials were in 1692/93.)

Accordingly, picking a fight with the British Army did not require creating a violent or militarized culture from scratch.  For that matter, since at least the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, violent conflict with British troops was already well underway.

In the first paragraph of this essay, I used the word project. I find it a useful lens or frame to view the arc of U.S. history.  By way of illustration, I thought the movie Oppenheimer did an excellent job at depicting the creation, testing, deployment and afterlife of the atomic bomb as a big project.  Putting a man on the moon was another big, fast USA national undertaking.

The 1960s partial dismantling of the Jim Crow system in the South can also be viewed as a project—an especially important and difficult one.  There are plenty of other examples, but within the U.S. all are subprojects of the gigantic, relentlessly violent work of creating and maintaining the modern nation state known as the United States of America.

Territorial conquest for natural resources and/or land for settlement is at the core of colonialism and thus also at the core of the very being of the USA.  What makes understanding the Declaration so useful is what it reveals about why some of the settlers took matters into their own hands.

That it was only some of the settlers is relevant because had there been a referendum on the matter, most would have voted to remain a British colony.  (Similarly, there was never a majority for ending slavery either.)  Those who had a different idea were a quite small group of white, male property owners with a vision.  And how comfortable they were using violence to achieve it.

For a long time, I accepted the canard that we are a nation of laws.  We aren’t.  Since Day One we have remained first and foremost a nation characterized and defined by violence.  The veneer of law comes separately.  Usually after the fact but sometimes before or concurrently.  The Declaration is itself a good example.  THE BLOODSHED WAS ALREADY UNDEDRWAY when it was adopted.

As a sidenote, most accept the myth that the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution ended racialized chattel slavery.  No.  Seven hundred thousand people killing each other came first.  Or to put it another way, had the laws been capable of resolving the conflict over slavery there wouldn’t have been a Civil War in the first place.

Where does the Declaration fit in the organic evolution of the whole arrangement?  Even though newspapers have run July 4 full page ads of the whole dang thing for years, going as far back when people still read newspapers, most U.S. Americans think the Preamble is the Declaration in its entirety.  It’s where the frequently quoted “…all men are created equal” occur.  Those words, however, are also profoundly misunderstood.

Ex post facto they are invoked to imply an aspiration among the Founders to equality among all humans or at least male humans. Strategically understandable perhaps.  It’s as though we want to believe the Drafters and Signers were just hypocrites.  They weren’t.  They genuinely did not consider Indians or Black people to be human.

When they said all men were created equal, they meant themselves, the British and other Europeans. Or, to put it another way, they were asserting that they were equal to their colonial masters.  White supremacy was already deeply implanted in their worldview. (Doesn’t matter, some may say, they let the “created equal” genie out of the bottle even if they did so by accident.  We’ll come back to that later.)

Transactional Democracy

Most of the Declaration isn’t the preamble. It’s a long list of grievances.  There are 27 in all.  Taken together they present a recipe for what I would call transactional democracy.  Meaning that the British were making decisions contrary to the wishes of the Founders.  It wasn’t that the British were making the decisions per se.  Rather it was that British decisions were at odds with what the white, property-owning men wanted to do.

This idea is so far from the idealized myth we have been taught it’s not easy to grasp.  So, I’ll say it again another way.  The Independence being sought was NOT for the purpose or reason of overcoming opposition to visionary and previously unimagined ideas of freedom and democracy.

Here’s how Britannica addresses this in their backgrounder on the Declaration.  “It can be said, as Adams did, that the declaration contained nothing really novel in its political philosophy, which was derived from John Locke, Algernon Sidney, and other English theorists.”  So, some old governing ideas were put into new bottles partly to seek support from a population mostly inclined to go along with British rule, not overthrow it.

What did the white, property-owning men really, really want to do? Several things one of which was territorial expansion on their terms.  It’s as though the Declaration is its own Doctrine of Discovery, its own license to kill, conquer and steal.  Its essence was to justify replacing British colonialism with U.S. based settler colonialism.

Two clauses from the Declaration:

He [referring to the King] has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

Sure enough, the very first legislation passed after the revolution succeeded was the Northwest Ordinance.  (Thanks to Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s essential AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, for first making me aware of this timeline.)

Following the principles outlined by Thomas Jefferson in the Ordinance of 1784, the authors of the Northwest Ordinance (probably Nathan Dane and Rufus King) spelled out a plan that was subsequently used as the country expanded to the Pacific. (Northwest Ordinance of 1787 at archives.gov)

Here’s Smithsonian Magazine in its July/August 2024 edition.

Decades earlier, Thomas Jefferson had formed a vision for new territory west of the Appalachian Mountains: It would fuel the creation of an “empire for liberty.” He first used a version of this phrase during the Revolutionary War, in a 1780 letter that urged George Rogers Clark, a surveyor turned soldier, to head north to wrest more land from the British. The frontiersman proved unable to muster sufficient recruits for an expedition, but Jefferson never dropped the idea.

After the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, Britain ceded more territory that doubled the size of the U.S. Along with the original 13 colonies, the new country now included territory that stretched all the way to the Mississippi River, to the western edges of what would become Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and the northern part of Mississippi.

Anticolonial?  Not in the least.

Since 1776 has the allegedly “anticolonial” USA ever supported the struggle of any other nation or peoples against colonial power?  No. Never.

One of the more dramatic examples was the response to a plea from Ho Chi Minh in 1948.  (The same year Israel became a nation-state.) As Viet Nam sought independence from decades of French colonial rule, Ho Chi Minh appealed to then President Truman for support.  It wasn’t as unreasonable as might appear given the U.S. and Viet Nam had worked closely together against the Japanese in WWII.  Truman never responded. And as we know the U.S. went on to support French efforts to retain control, even to the point of offering them nuclear weapons to use against Viet Nam.

Fast forward to the present.  Further evidence that the transactional purpose of the rebellion against the King of England was to change the form of colonialism, not the content is on full display right this minute.  That would be demonstrated by the U.S. backing of the settler colony Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.  [Note: A photo of Nicki Haley autographing U.S. made bombs to be dropped on Gaza could go here.]

Does the Declaration mention slavery? 

Never.  However, just because it references “Indian Savages,” and not Blacks doesn’t mean slavery and anti-Black racial caste aren’t in there.  The absence of any such language speaks volumes.

The great Gerald Horne, Nicole Hannah Jones and others have done excellent work in exposing how the fear that British colonial masters would abolish slavery was a powerful motivator of the drive for independence.  (A good place to learn more is with Professor Horne’s THE COUNTEREVOLUTION OF 1776.)

Deep differences among the Founders over how best to manage slavery prevented explicit discussion on the topic in the final version of the Declaration.  Among other things, some slave-owners wanted to favor the domestic slave trade by restricting the Atlantic slave trade. Others didn’t.  Which doesn’t change the fact that racialized enslavement was fundamental to what Professor Horne has correctly identified as the world’s first-ever apartheid Nation-State.

How this is who we were then and who we still are. 

The assumptions made in the Declaration in 1776 are now even more deeply embedded.  Not only have they been passed from one generation to the next. They have become baked into the structure of well, everything.  How that happened is relatively simple.  Lots of practice.

Of all the things I’ve ever written, a line published for the first time in 1969 is the most frequently quoted to this day, “The reason the U.S. is in Viet Nam is because the U.S. is in California.”  Meaning that territorial expansion and control is the US. way of life.

In expanding from sea to shining sea and beyond, that project has created many intersecting subsystems.  Those systems include the lens through which we are all taught to view the world and the place of the U.S. in that world. The colonialization of our minds as Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin and others have described it.  I call it the white way of thinking.

For our purposes here, three examples are illustrative. Militarism, immigration and the never-ending thirst for racialized control of who can do what where.

Militarism

As to militarism, I have written here about the Culture of Violence in which we swim.  It’s impossible to overstate how much the military is embedded in our economy, politics and culture.  So, I won’t. I’ll just ask that instead of ignoring it please be on the lookout for how it shows up.

Where to start? Here are a few prompts.  Sporting events, advertising, the resumes of political candidates, most of the national holidays, parking and other special privileges for veterans, the military budget, parades of all kinds, obituaries…pretty much everywhere.  Other societies are not like this.

“Immigration”

In 2016 Trump came down the escalator to talk about immigration. Not just any immigration.  A surge from the South.  He did not propose building a wall at the Canadian border.

In Mexico, there is a joke that Mexico will willingly build a border wall AND pay for it.  Under one condition.  That it’s built at the border in place prior to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe.  Which would necessitate the return of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming to Mexican sovereignty.

Taking land and people away from Mexico by force was considered a great national achievement.  An essential building block in the sea-to-shining-sea project.  But when refugees from Mexico or other Southern hemisphere nations enter the U.S. in large numbers of their own volition?  That’s a crisis.

Why? Because it’s one of several factors contributing to white people having a panic over the loss of white people’s habitat.  That’s a topic for discussion in its own right.  For now, suffice to say Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World by Todd Miller and NOT A Nation of Immigrants by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz are indispensable reading.

The Sundown Town way of thinking

I live in a Sundown Town.  It’s an overwhelmingly white suburb of Detroit.  In truth, most white people live in Sundown Towns, whether it was ever formalized as such or not.  For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to cities that by legislation and/or practice limit the movement of people of color, most often Black people after 6PM.

At its core white hierarchy is about control over space and place.  You can go to this school, not that one. Or no school at all.  It’s up to us not you.

You can sit in the back of the bus, not the front.   You can walk or drive or jog on this street if we say so.  If we say no, your life and liberty are at risk.  You can hold this position in our company but not a higher one.  You can buy a house in this city but not these suburbs.  You could get a mortgage if you live in this zip code but alas, not the one you actually live in.

If the Declaration of Independence wasn’t about the control of space and place, then just what was it about?  Read it. Not just the preamble, the whole thing.  I think you’ll see what I’m talking about.

OK, so this is who are.  Is it who we must be forever?

Of those readers who have made it this far, many are probably thinking, but you left out all the good things.  This isn’t who we are—or not all of it anyway.  What about all the progress?  Women can vote now.  Barack Obama was President for two terms.  Millions have enjoyed good incomes, homeownership, college for their children, vacations and other nice things.  Our diversity has given us food options better than any other nation on earth.  We have lots of sports teams and other forms of entertainment. Surely the glass is more than half full.

Oh, and what about all the other nation states that are worse than the U.S. you ask.  Shouldn’t we take comfort in that?  (What those might be is its own conversation.)

Further there is no denying that support for various versions of the status quo is deep and broad. Also strong is the belief that Another World is definitely NOT possible.  Most U.S. Americans believe that There Is No Alternative. I get it.

Part Two will examine whether and how to get past all of that. 

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Zionism as Ethnic Chauvinism 

Something has happened in connection with Israel’s savage war in Gaza that no one expected and that few even now want to discuss. It cannot be summarized numerically – not even when the number of dead and missing Palestinians now exceeds 38,000 and when the total number of casualties is well over 120,000 – the equivalent, in population terms, of 14 million Americans. Nor can it be expressed by describing the effects of starvation, disease, and psychological damage on the surviving two million-plus Gazans, 85% of whom have been displaced from their homes, and who now face continued air and ground strikes aimed at the remaining forces of Hamas.

The Israelis have also suffered greatly, beginning with their loss of 1200 soldiers and civilians to Hamas attackers on October 7, 2023. One effect of this brutal assault was to reopen the wounds of the Holocaust, re-traumatizing a people already conscious of their historic vulnerability.  But the result of their government’s bloody response to that violence, deemed plausibly genocidal by the International Court, combined with its failure to recognize the systemic sources of Palestinian misery and rage, have broken the ties connecting them to sympathetic allies and friendly critics around the globe.

The ancient Chinese had a doctrine that tried to account for a severed relationship between the emperor and the people. They said that a ruler who had lost “the mandate of heaven” would be seen ever after as illegitimate and not worthy to be obeyed. Judaism and Christianity have their own versions of this doctrine. Both understand that a regime’s legitimacy depends, finally, on its ability and willingness to treat its subjects and neighbors justly. The systematic mistreatment of its internal constituents or other states deprives a government of the right to demand loyalty and respect.

Where Israel is concerned, many observers would agree that Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost any claim to this sort of legitimacy. They understand that his dogged opposition to a Palestinian state, his promotion of massive Jewish settlement in occupied territories, and his past wink-and-a-nod support of Hamas are at least partly responsible for the current slaughter in Gaza. But the problem cannot be defined by pointing fingers at Bibi or his even more ultranationalist ministers. The tie being broken is not just that with Israel’s current government but also with the system that produced that regime.

The system that Netanyahu’s Likud Party inhabits, along with other Israeli parties ranging from fairly far Left to very far Right, is Zionist. That is, it reflects a consensus that the State of Israel’s primary mission is to be a place of refuge and homeland for Jews worldwide and a means of expressing the interests and values of Israeli Jews in national form.  A corollary is that if carrying out this mission seems to be threatened by the actions of other groups – non-Jewish communities within the state or other national regimes – then Jewish Israeli interests must be preferred over all others.  According to Israel’s Basic Law of 2018, “the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People.”  Since a state is a community empowered to enforce its norms violently, this systemic preference for Jewish identity and interests creates a warrant for “structural violence” (for example, the discriminatory regulations that Palestinians call “apartheid”) against non-Jews.

For a long time, most American Jews have understood that there is tension between Zionism and the moral values that Judaism helped the world discover. This tension is not peculiar to Zionism; it exists whenever nationalistic beliefs and practices appear to conflict with more general human interests and needs.  The tension seems particularly acute where nationalism mixes with ethnic or religious identity, since Judaism and other world religions claim to embody and promote universally applicable values, not just the customs of a particular tribe.  One such value is the sanctity of human life. Human life is sacred and inviolable, say the holy ones – except when we Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist nationalists decide that to protect our own group it is expendable.

As a result, when Israeli retaliation against Hamas took the form of a massive continuing assault on the entire population of Gaza, my own reaction, like that of many other Jews, was that regardless of whether the violence amounted to legal genocide, it violated fundamental Judaic principles, beginning with the principle that no life, Jewish or non-Jewish, is more deserving of death or more worthy to be saved than any other life.  One’s sense that a gross violation of Jewish norms was taking place was strengthened, not weakened, when those trying to justify the massacres charged that Hamas fighters were sheltering among civilians and using them as “human shields.”  Are soldiers in a country without natural protection or air cover expected to fight in the open?  In any case, where is it written that the killing of masses of innocent civilians is justified in order to punish wrongdoers hiding among them?

Answer: it is written nowhere. Although one may search the Torah for historical parallels or the Talmud for rabbinic hypotheticals, the principle that rates one of “our” lives as equal to ten or 100 or 1000 of “theirs” is not a tenet of traditional religion; it is a typical dogma of the secular religion known as nationalism. This becomes clear when pro-Israel spokespeople use the mass violence of World War II to justify their own violent excesses. “Did you care how many civilians you killed when you bombed Dresden or Hiroshima?”  The question is revealing.  We are not supposed to care about those massacres (although many of us do), because the nationalist catechism instructs, “When the nation is in danger of defeat, all violence necessary to preserve it is justified.”

The Zionist equivalent is this: “When the security of Israel is threatened, all violence necessary to eliminate that threat is justified.”  Of course, things are not usually expressed in such bald terms.  Where states justify extreme violence in defense of their (alleged) national interests, they usually do so not in their own name alone but in the name of the American (or French, or Russian) people, or, even more gloriously, in the name of the abstract principles said to legitimize their political culture, such as freedom, equality, and democracy.  Similarly, the Israeli government speaks as the voice not only of its own citizens but of “the Jewish people,” who are said to be threatened worldwide by a resurgence of antisemitism, and as an authorized exponent of “Jewish values.”

Which values, in particular? The answer may come dressed in Jewish garb, but it is the same as that offered by all ethnic nationalists:  the supreme value of the group’s survival.  One needs to pay careful attention to the way this argument develops; it’s like watching an expert street hustler play the shell game. First, he focuses your attention entirely on Hamas.  Not only did Hamas conduct the savage attacks of October 7, he declares, that same organization and its supporters also want to destroy Israel and kill the Jews.  All Jews, everywhere.  The same thing is true of Hezbollah and Iran and their supporters.  Therefore, whatever violence is needed to annihilate Hamas and to deter Hezbollah and Iran from attacking Israel is justified to secure the survival of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.  And anyone who questions this conclusion is a knowing or unknowing enemy of the same state and people, i.e., an antisemite.

Which shell on the table hides the coin?  Never mind that this is not what Hamas (or Hezbollah, or Iran) says it wants to do.  Never mind that the October 7 attack, ghastly as it was, did not in the least represent an existential threat either to Israel or the world’s Jews.  Never mind that genocidal violence against the Gazans does more damage to Israel’s international support and long-term security than any antisemite could hope to do.  Focusing on horrors that revive vivid memories and fears of the Holocaust and other traumas, one loses sight of a principle imparted to me years ago by the Israeli scientist and peace activist Israel Shahak: “There is no right of Jewish survival that can justify the oppression of other peoples.” The survival of the group at all costs is a nationalist doctrine, not a Jewish one.

A Holocaust survivor himself and soldier of the IDF in earlier days, Prof. Shahak described modern Zionism as a virulent form of ethnic narcissism.  The underlying assumption of this mode of thinking, he insisted, is always “Our lives are worth more than theirs.” Unsurprisingly, this insight inspired the Anti-Defamation League to brand him an antisemite, but he never tired of explaining that the attempt to fuse nationalism with Judaism had corrupted Jewish ethics and had itself become a generator of antisemitism. In his view, Jews in Israel and around the world could only be truly secure as part of a global movement that worked to establish a human security based on the equality of all peoples.

In advocating this recognition of a common humanity trumping nationalism, the Israeli dissenter joined a list of notable cosmopolitans ranging from contemporary figures like Noam Chomsky to nineteenth-century sages like Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). The author of Huckleberry Finn and The War Prayer well understood the genocidal implications of nationalist passion. Since every act of violent “self-defense” by one nation is interpreted by the target nation as an aggressive act calling for retaliation or revenge, the logic of nationalist conflict is essentially that of the family feud.  In Huckleberry Finn, Huck’s friend Buck Grangerford explains what this means:

Well, says Buck, “a feud is this way: A man has a quarrel with another man and kills him; then that other man’s brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in—and by and by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud.

Twain makes his point, as he often did, with the darkest of dark humor.  But how do we avoid the genocidal consequences of ethnonational loyalty?  Israel Shahak insisted that the antidote to Zionist nationalism was not Palestinian nationalism or any other form of ethnic supremacy rebranded as anticolonial liberation.  He was under no illusions about the provenance of Zionism, which at least since Great Britain’s Balfour Declaration (1917) was part of a colonial project to establish a Jewish homeland as an agency of Western influence in the Middle East.  When the U.S. replaced Britain and France as the region’s imperial master after World War II, the Americans succeeded to British hegemony over Palestine.  But Shahak understood – exactly as Franz Fanon did –   that without radical social and political change, nationalist elites will be incorporated into a global elite, and oppressed nations into an alliance of oppressors.

Thus, when Zionists complain that it is antisemitic to deny Jews the “right of self-determination,” they are right in one sense and horribly confused in another.  In a world of violent, power-addicted nation-states, why should Jews be denied the right to be as violent and power-addicted as Christian, Muslim, or Hindu nationalists? The confusion lies in supposing that building and arming a nation liberates an ethnic or religious group, secures its existence, and permits it to thrive. Centuries ago, nationalism helped free people from domination by feudal lords and traditional religious authorities. Today it functions mainly as way of preventing people from thinking and acting as members of the human family and the global working class.

To prevent genocidal wars like the war in Gaza from recurring, we need to do more than “flip” relations between the oppressors and the oppressed.  We need to move on from the infantile form of political identity called nationalism to global citizenship and moral adulthood.  And this will not happen until we replace a system in which capitalist oligarchs manipulate nation-states to maximize their own profits and power with a system controlled by the working people of all nations.  Referring to the railroad oligarchs of his own time, Henry David Thoreau wrote,

though a crowd rushes to the depot and the conductor shouts “All aboard!”, when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over—and it will be called, and will be, “a melancholy accident.”

When the smoke clears in Gaza, it will be perceived that the only people not “run over” are the owners and managers of the U.S. military-industrial complex and their political enablers.  They will be counting their money, running for reelection, and planning the next war.  And that will be no accident.

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“There was much in the way of stumbling, incoherence, and immaturity – just the sort of thing we need for a White House occupant.  Biden mumbled nonsensically at several points, trawling his shattered memory for some reference to Covid before claiming that, “We finally beat Medicare.”  It soon became routine to expect mangled figures and fantasy mathematics.  (The claim that the Biden administration had created 15,000 jobs, for instance; or the number of trillionaires in the United States.)  At some point, it became clear that the fetishised fact checkers were out of a job, if for no reason that both candidates were proving loose with their figures.”

It was cruel.  Sinister cruel.  While Donald Trump was always going to relish the chance to be not only economical with the truth but simply inventive about it, Joe Biden, current Commander in Chief of the United States, leader of the self-described Free World, seemed a vanishing shadow, longing for soft slippers and the fireplace with cocoa, a case of comfort rather than the battling rage of politics.

It need never have happened, and certainly not so early.  But the earliest-ever US Presidential election debate, held even before both candidates had been formally confirmed at their party conventions, did much to puncture Biden and hold Trump afloat in odd boosts of credibility.  The media were at hand to glory in the matter and taste the morsels of slaughter.  NBC News was aghast at the president, who “seemingly struggled even to talk, mostly summing a weak, raspy voice.  In the opening minutes, he repeatedly tripped over his words, misspoke and lost his train of thought.”

There was much in the way of stumbling, incoherence, and immaturity – just the sort of thing we need for a White House occupant.  Biden mumbled nonsensically at several points, trawling his shattered memory for some reference to Covid before claiming that, “We finally beat Medicare.”  It soon became routine to expect mangled figures and fantasy mathematics.  (The claim that the Biden administration had created 15,000 jobs, for instance; or the number of trillionaires in the United States.)  At some point, it became clear that the fetishised fact checkers were out of a job, if for no reason that both candidates were proving loose with their figures.

At stages, this left Trump, his predatory instinct aroused by a limping animal, able to land a stinging jab or two.  “I don’t know if he knows what he said either.”  At intervals, as Trump spoke, Biden seemed to vanish into a canyon of stricken vacancy, possibly struggling to recall the talking points his aides had stocked him with over the last few days along with the necessary medications to fuel him.  This was elder abuse as a gladiatorial sport, your grandfather abused on live television.

The only time when some balance was restored was the issue of the respective golf handicaps of the debaters. Biden’s claim that he had a handicap of 6 in golf received the predictable sneer from his opponent: “I’ve seen your swing.”  Here, the world’s most prominent superpower could be reduced to two elderly men talking about a sport described as being a good walk spoilt.  Priorities were confirmed.

An army of the delusional and deluded have come out with the “truthful” defence on Biden’s part.  Forget the competence of the leader, focus on the inner gold of a supposedly good character.  Regrettably for those who believe veracity is important in politics, except when it isn’t, this is unlikely to go far.  Debates are shows of tedious pomp, displays, projecting a false sense of hot air authority.  Biden failed on all counts; Trump could at least muster a semblance of it, his lies embroidered by a passable confidence.

This is not to say that the physically and mentally feeble have evaded White House occupancy.  Presidential history is marked by cerebral infirmity and physical enervation.  What matters is election, the great electoral con.  John F. Kennedy, despite being murderously cut down at the age of 46, was ruined in body.  These are the less than flattering words from Christopher Hitchens in a scathing review of Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life in the Times Literary Supplement (Aug 22, 2003): “In addition to being a moral defective and a political disaster, John Kennedy was a physical and probably mental also-ran for most of his presidency.”  He was a walking pharmacopeia in office, mortality always more than a threatening suggestion.

Another disaster is also proof than the infirm can still find their way through campaign, ballot box and office.  Ronald Reagan may have been celebrated as the master communicator during his presidency, saddled with the grave responsibility of bringing the Cold War to its eventual end.  He also tolerated the superstitious interventions of his wafer thin wife on policy, curated through the medium of the astrologer Joan Quigley even as his own mind was taking a lengthy, eventually permanent sabbatical in the realm of dementia.  Biden, to put it simply, may still have some room to survive.  The question is: can he?

Democratic strategists, at least those reeling from the tingling shock of a cold bath, understood the implications.  Others preferred an elaborate ostrich act crowned by sycophantic reassurance.  Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina was admirably spineless in telling Biden to “Stay the course.”  That said, the sages had already given ample warnings before the debate.

The enchantingly shrill James Carville (mad, bad and dangerous to ignore) had warned about the risk posed by Biden’s age to electoral hopes.  Julian Epstein, former Chief Counsel to the US House Judiciary Committee and Staff Director to the House Oversight Committee Democrats, excoriated his party for revealing “their own kind of cowardice in refusing to say that President Biden shouldn’t run for re-election.”  The party faithful and apparatchiks were defiant: such criticism was ageist.  They had their man.

The choice, as things stand, is for a person weak of mind insisting that he is safer for the US and the world while “knowing how to tell the truth” over a man who remains estranged from the truth, guilty of 34 felony counts for falsifying business accounts, and trumpets the winding back of US global commitments.  It left such admirers as Alastair Campbell, former communications chief for British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, mournful: Russia’s Vladimir Putin; China’s Xi Jinping, and the Islamic Republic of Iran would be stifling sobs of joy.

It’s a striking nightmare, throwing the Republic’s politics into sharp relief, taking the shine off a system Americans regard as sacred, exportable and relevant to the globe.  A more sober reading is that political reality has bitten, leaving Hunted Biden to barely escape the slaughter, permitting an alternative to be selected before it’s too late.  The question for the Democrats will involve allowing Biden to gracefully withdraw or take himself and his entire entourage to the electoral grave.

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This was quite a week in the annals of freedom of the press.

Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblower organization Wikileaks, after being hounded by the US with the help of its sycophantic allies in the governments of the UK, Sweden, Ecuador and, most shamefully, his native Australia, for 14 years since his Wikileaks organization obtained and released  documents proving systemic war crimes by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been freed. He spent the last 14 years fighting efforts by the US to lock him up oar execute 9or even to assassinate him ,spending 12 of those years in the hell of confinement in a British maximum security prison and earlier seven years as an asylum seeker trapped in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.

His asylum ended and his imprisonment in Belmarsh began when the leftist president who had granted him asylum from British authorities who wanted to hand him over to the US for prosecution as a spy, lost an election and was replaced by a right-wing president who cancelled his asylum and called in the London Metropolitan Police, who dragged him out of the embassy and into solitary confinement in Belmarsh Prison pending extradition to the US.

Over the seven years he was trapped in the little embassy, or left alone in a tiny cell in hellish Belmarsh, his supporters — initially a handful of journalists and his family — a father, a half-brother and father and attorneys in Britain and the US, and one attorney, Sara Gonzalez Devant, who later bore  him two sons who have never met him except in captivity worked to build a movement to defend and free him.

It was a tough struggle. The US and UK media organizations that benefitted from his Wikileaks organization’s documentation of US war crimes, including the gun-sight video of a US helicopter gunship slaughtering, amidst audible mocking laughter,  11 unarmed Iraqis including two local Reuters journalists, and from other scoops Wikileaks  received from whistleblowers, largely turned on him when he was being pursued by US prosecutors.

Typically these same news organizations, when covering his case, would repeat in their articles about him (almost as if pasting in pre-set macro paragraphs”),  the false accusation that he was wanted by Swedish prosecutors for allegedly “raping” two women in Sweden. They also would routinely include in such stories gratuitous quotes from politicians smearing his character and even from fellow journalists questioning his claim to be one of them, along with grudging acknowledgement that the US charge of espionage against him was a threat to press freedom,

But truth gradually prevailed and pressure kept building: in Britain against his being extradited and against the US obsession with pursuing the case against him, and in Australia for the government in Canberra to end its years of submissive and callous acceptance of the abuse of an Aussie citizen by a US government out for revenge. This international movement to free Assange grew larger and more vocal when a new Labour government replaced the prior conservative one in Australia and Labor PM Anthony Albanese openly called on President Biden to end the case against his countryman Assange.

In the end it was this slowly and painstakingly developed international movement to free Assange that compelled the Biden administration to offer Assange a deal. He and his attorneys were reportedly told that the US would agree to his  freedom if he would plead guilty to one felony count of theft of US military secrets (the evidence of war crimes), and a sentence of five years, which would be satisfied by crediting the over five years he had spent being held in Belmarsh Prison without conviction of anything but denied bail while fighting the US’s extradition effort.

Much is being made now, of course, by US officials of that guilty plea, but it is important that what Assange was facing if he were extradited to a court in Washington DC. With an indictment on 17 felony counts under the 1917 Espionage Act an one felony count of  encouraging hackers and of helping NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to escape to Russia, the total prison term if convicted on all those counts would have run to 175 years’ jail time served consecutively.

The urgency of the US plea deal offer, which apparently came as a something of a surprise to Assange and his defense team, had to do with the reality that the US was facing of his possible escape from their trap:  That became at least a possibility when, after many rejections, two UK High Court Judges last year overruled a 2022 British Supreme Court decision denying Assange the right to challenge his extradition. Unconvinced by US promises that he would receive a fair trial in a US court (promises that were hedged by the US DOJ’s acknowledgement that the US Supreme Court would in fact be the final arbiter of whether, for example, Assange could avail himself of the Constitution’s First Amendment right of Free Speech and a Free Press — a Supreme Court packed with originalist justices who support the national security state. The two High Court judges were preparing to review his arguments against extradition later this month.

There’s no telling how they would have ruled of course, but the Washington nightmare of his walking free in Britain was more than Biden, AG Merrick Garland and the US national security agencies pressing for a lengthy jail sentence in the US, could tolerate. They needed at least the fig leaf of a guilty plea.

To understand why Assange, who is about to turn 53, after being effectively incarcerated for nearly a quarter of his life, simply for doing what investigative journalists do, revealing the truth about government crimes, it’s important to know what he was facing if he didn’t accept the Biden deal and then lost his last appeal of the extradition order that had already been approved in a UK court.

Let me explain.

In the self-appointed “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” United States, those of us who as journalists cover legal issues know that American justice is not blind like the statue in many courts of the woman “Justice” blindfolded and holding up a scale in one hand and a sword in the other.. Neither is it fair. Worse yet, it routinely punishes those who demand  their Constitutional right to a jury trial for doing so applying the stiffest of penalties should they end up being convicted.

The safest bet in an American court under such circumstances is to “cop a plea,”  meaning to take the advice of one’s lawyer or  public defender: typically to plead guilty to a lesser charge and accept a lesser penalty. or if that proves unacceptable to the judge and prosecution, agree to plead guilty as charged in return for a lesser penalty. This harsh reality has led to a large number of people in prison for crimes they did not commit, but that they pleaded guilty to out of necessity and lack of funds to hire a lawyer or to appeal a wrongful conviction.

That’s why for instance, of the 71,954 defendants facing criminal federal charges in the US fiscal year 2022, only 1669 opted to go to trial, according to a Pew Research report.  That is  just 2.3% of all those facing felony or serious misdemeanor charges that year. Of those few who boldly requested a trial before a jury or a district court judge, only a handful — 290 or 0.4% of those charged, were acquitted. The other 1379 who had their cases tried were convicted, and because they insisted on a trial they had a right to, likely were slapped with lengthy or maximum sentences. Of the rest of those who didn’t have their cases adjudicated, 89.5% or 64.434 just pleaded guilty hoping for a lighter sentence. Another 8.2%, or 5900 defendants, had their cases tossed out, usually for lack of sufficient evidence.

Given this sorry record, which is depressingly typical of how the federal courts operate year in and year out in the US, it’s understandable why Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who finally escaped over 12 years of terrible torture at the hands of the US government and a supine British government, agreed to cop a plea.

Assange and his British counsellors also probably knew also about an investigative report published last year in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, summarized later in a British publication called The Pen, which located copies of at least some of the long-missing or destroyed emails between Swedish prosecutors and Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service concerning the effort by a politically connected and CIA-linked prosecutor in Stockholm and the CPS, which at the time in 2013 was headed by none other than Barrister Keir Starmer. He’s the man widely expected to become Britain’s new Prime Minister if, as polls suggest, his Labour Party wins an outright majority and a six-year term as Prime Minister in the July 4 Parliamentary elections.

Starmer’s correspondence suggests it was his office that was pressing reluctant Swedish officials to  keep insisting on trying to extradite Assange to Sweden to face questioning there about allegations of sexual abuse accusations by two Swedish women, and who advised them to reject offers by Assange and his attorneys to respond to their questions if they came to London and met with him. There had long been a question of why, Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny, from  2010 to 2016, unable to question Assange in Sweden, refused a standing  offer from his lawyers to travel to the UK and question him where he was holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy.

As the Italian newspaper Il Facto Quotidiano  explains, “No one understood why Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny did not want to travel to London to question Julian Assange and determine whether to charge him or not. It was our FOIA investigation that allowed unearthing the reason: It was the British authorities at the Crown Prosecution Service…who advised the Swedish prosecutors not to question Assange in London.”  The magazine learned that all of the email correspondence by CPS officer Paul Close’s, who did most of the communicating with Ny was mysteriously wiped when he left the agency in 2014.

Starmer, who has been strangely silent about Assange’s plea deal with the US and his escape from British detention, was in charge of the CPS from 2008 through 2013 and during those years when the office was handling communications regarding Assange with the Swedish prosecutor and was Close’s boss, appears to have been a key agent in Assange’s unconscionable torment. That would clearly have made Assange and his defense team keen to get him out of Britain and out of the news cycle before Keir “our national security always comes first” Starmer were to enter 10 Downing Street as the UK’s Prime Minister.

The deal offered by the Biden Administration’s “Justice Department” was tough one. It required that in return for agreeing to plead guilty to one of the 17 felony charges of violating the US Espionage Act and being sentenced to five years in prison, a punishment which would be met by counting the over five years he has spent in solitary confinement in Britain’s dank and oppressive Belmarsh Prison fighting a US extradition petition, Assange would be able to fly home to his native Australia a free man.

Behind the scenes, one can see that the Biden administration, like the Trump and Obama administrations before it, has been vigorously doing the bidding of the US National Security State —the CIA,, the FBI, NSA  and the Pentagon — in pursuing a major espionage case against Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, He and his organization had hugely embarrassed those agencies and the US government agencies over the years with the release of documents proving that the US was guilty of  systemic and massive war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, was spying on the leaders of allies in NATO, and and Assange had also also helped NSA leaker Edward Snowden, another arch enemy of the national security state, to escape to Russia.

The US media happily ran page-one banner-headlined stories and videos of the US war crimes exposed by Assange and his Wikileaks organization. But then, when he was being indicted and hounded by the US government and was fighting his extradition to the US from a jail cell in Britain, those same media organizations just as happily stabbed him in the back, quoting slimy US politicians like former Trump VP Mike Pence claiming that his releases “put US personnel at risk.”  (In fact the US, in its arguments in British courts seeking an extradition order, never could present a single case of a US soldier or CIA agent being put at risk, injured or killed because of a Wikileaks story or purloined document.   Like the Swedish “rape charges,”  all the smearing of Assange was and remains lies.

Establishment journalists too, in Britain and the US, have been guilty of shamelessly piling on in the tarring of Assange even as others of their colleagues, most of them outside of the mainstream news organizations, have heroically worked to debunk the lies.

The bottom line is that Assange in his struggle for freedom, has been heroically defending the freedom of all journalists and publishers around the world to speak truth to power.  The indictment of Assange, a foreigner working outside the US, was nonetheless pursued by three presidents including Obama (whose Justice Department drew up a sealed indictment, but never acted on it),  Trump, whose Justice picked it up and activated it in 2019, and Biden, who pressed forward with the effort to extradite Assange and have him face the Trump Justice Department’s indictment. All three presidents have sought to expand the reach of the already controversial Espionage Act  to include  journalists of any nationality operating anywhere in the world.

From its first use in the days of WWI, when the Espionage Act was passed to enable the government to arrest immigrants (usually anti-war leftists) on supposed spying charges, the act has morphed fairly recently under those three feckless presidents into a tool to go after not just alleged spies, but whistleblowers and the journalists who rely on them.  Going after Assange just expanded its reach globally.

Some desk-bound pundits to whom the notion of challenging state abuse of power would never occur, are claiming that Assange, by copping a guilty plea, sold out his media colleagues.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  First of all, Constitutional scholars say that a plea bargain creates no new legal precedent in the federal or state courts of the US. Only an appellate court ruling of a Supreme Court ruling has such significance on future cases.  (That’s not to say that just seeing what the US government and its willing puppet states in Europe are willing to do to those who do expose its crimes isn’t going to deter many from following in Assange’s footsteps.)

But in any case, no one who has not spent more than twelve years in enforced confinement has any right to criticize Assange for availing himself of the chance to get out of jail, to avoid the horror of a prosecution in the US legal system, and to join his family, including his two children, whom he has never met except in captivity.

As a fellow journalist, I can only congratulate him for his courage, to wish him well as he gets used to freedom again, and to salute all those who have worked for his freedom.

As my friend, colleague and fellow journalist Ron Ridenour, a US journalist/activist who has long ago abandoned his native US to live in Denmark, and who years ago cashed in his retirement savings and sent it all to Assange’s defense fund (he also reports giving $1000 to a Crowdfunder campaign to fund to repay the cost of the private jet Assange had to charter at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to safely fly to his court hearing in Saipan in the Northern Marianas and on to the safety of Australia), says, “ I think Assange’s freedom is a huge victory. We the people all came together — not so much in the US, but in Europe and England and around the world. It shows that when a good number of people are willing to get together in the early morning in a cold rain we can make good things happen!” (In less than a week the fund had collected £441,793, close to the target goal of £520,000, a powerful demonstration of the support for Assange.)

Ridenour adds, “It’s a disappointment that the great journalist John Pilger, who tirelessly fought for Julian’s freedom, and Dan Ellsberg, and Center for Constitutional Rights President Michael Ratner, didn’t live to see this day.”

I think a headline on the BBC the day Assange walked out of a US district court in Saipan with the judge telling him he was “a free man” was on target,  Referring to the years before PM Albanese called for his release, when Australian leader after Australian leader ignored Assange’s plight at the hands of the US, including even Labour PM Julia Gillard, who pointedly refused to lift a finger to help her persecuted countryman it read:

Australia turned its back on Assange, Time made him a martyr.

The only thing wrong with the story topper is it ought to have said:

Australia turned its back on him, Britain tortured him at the request of US prosecutors, and America betrayed its own First and Fifth Amendments. Time made Assange a martyr.

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Cavemen

Despite their reputation, Neanderthals rarely lived in caves. But when they did, they must first have sat down on the ground (no chairs) and debated which cave was best – one was too small, another too damp, a third had a resident bear. Since their language skills were rudimentary, they probably did a lot of repeating, gesturing, and shouting. Nevertheless, the quality of their debates likely surpassed the two I watched this week, one between U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labor Party leader, Keir Starmer, and the other between U.S. President Joe Biden and presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump. After watching the latter, I felt like crawling into a cave.

Great debates

It wasn’t always thus. Renaissance painter Raphael’s fresco, the Disputà, shows a debate between gods, saints, popes and philosophers over the nature of the Sacrament. By its subject and structure, the picture proposes that transubstantiation (the host becoming the body of Christ) is as certain as the ground beneath our feet. Notice that the picture’s vanishing point – the place where perspectival lines on the floor meet — is the monstrance that holds the eucharistic host. Faith and proportion, spiritual and physical, are all one in Christ’s flesh. Millions were convinced, but Martin Luther and John Calvin among others, were not, and they protested. Now that was a debate!

Then there was the “Galileo Affair” (1632-42), when the famous astronomer argued – as Copernicus had — that the earth revolved around the sun, instead of the other way around. Papal officials thought that violated holy scripture, so they challenged Galileo in print and in court, eventually decreeing that he must “abandon completely…the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves.” Upon threat of torture, Galileo recanted, though he is said to have muttered, upon release from confinement by the Inquisition: “e pur si muove” (“nevertheless, it moves”). That was a great debate too!

Last example: In 1925, the state of Tennessee brought charges against John T. Scopes, a high school teacher, for violating the Butler Act which forbade teaching evolution. The resulting “Monkey Trial” pitted Scope’s lawyer, Clarence Darrow against the attorney for the state, former three-time presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan. The contest became a national, public debate about evolution, as well as the value of science versus religion. Though the former lost at jury, it won in the court of public opinion — still another great debate!

The not-so-great British debate

The debate on Wednesday night between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer was handicapped from the start by bad questions from the audience: “I’m a student. How are you going to help me buy a house?” And: “You are both such jerks, why should I vote for either of you”? Those aren’t exact quotes, but close. Starmer’s approximate response was: “After 14 years of Tory government, I’m going to restore the idea of service”, as if he was applying for a job at Harrod’s. Sunak on the other hand, replied to nearly all questions by saying: “If you go with Labor, you will pay higher taxes. I can lower them,” as if he was pitching to clients at H & R Block.

To be sure, taxing and spending are at the heart of what every government does. But neither candidate acknowledged that the two are not always linked. One can tax for other purposes than to spend and spend without necessarily having to tax. Taxation can reduce social inequality, a chronic disease in the U.K. Less than one percent of the Britons own 50% of the land, a pattern that has existed since the 18^th Century, when vast manor houses such as Blenheim and Castle Howard were physical manifestations of the superiority of lord to tenant and laborer. The biggest landowners today are aristocrats such as King Charles and the Duke of Buccleuch, as well as business tycoons, utility companies and commercial hunting estates. In the U.K., the centuries old process of enclosure – the privatization of common lands and resources – is still ongoing. Local councils regularly sell off publicly owned land (“county farms”), to recover income lost from previous Tory (and sometimes Labor) budget-cuts and austerity programs. 90% of British infrastructure and national assets are privately owned.

The richest 50 families in Britain possess more wealth than half the total population. Hugh Grosvenor (b. 1991), the 7^th Duke of Westminster, with a fortune of more than £10 billion, is richer than the poorest 10%. When his father, the 6^th Duke, died in 2016, his heirs paid little if any inheritance tax. Working-class people on the other hand, pay 40% inheritance taxes on estates over 325,000 pounds ($410,000). Considering that the average house in the U.K. costs about that, it’s clear there are few avenues for members of the British working class to amass significant wealth over time or the status that comes with it. They are locked into patterns of social and economic inequality that have existed for centuries. (The British bourgeoisie established an informal entente with the aristocracy in the late 17^th century, as Tom Nairn long ago showed.)

Rishi Sunak promised to further increase social inequality, if not in so many words. To marginally reduce long waiting lists for non-emergency treatment by the National Health Service, Sunak promised to raise funds by skimming deadbeats and malingerers from welfares rolls. As Americans will know from the records of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, the number of such people is negligible – not nearly enough to pay for major investments in the NHS or anything else. What Sunak really promised therefore, was to cut support for people who need it, thereby further impoverishing those already poor, and pushing still others into poverty. 22% of British citizens are currently living in poverty, including 30% of children.

Keir Starmer, according to the polls the most likely next PM, is less Scrooge-like. He didn’t endorse Sunak’s planned cuts to welfare, but neither did he effectively challenge them. He claimed to have a plan to reduce NHS waiting lists to restore people to health and help them “get off welfare” and enjoy “the dignity of work.” (Starmer has a fondness for Victorian bromides.) But he refuses to say how they will be paid for. Since he vows not to raise taxes, we must assume he plans to borrow the money he wants to spend. That’s fine, but he ought at least to say so.

Nations that print their own currency – like the U.S. and U.K. — do not have to raise taxes for every dollar they spend. They can borrow, or simply print more money. They don’t literally have to do so, of course; their central banks just create liabilities — reserve deposits — and use them to pay debt, purchase assets, or make investments. Governments can do this – up to a point – without triggering inflation. The moderately high inflation levels in the U.S. and U.K. following the Covid pandemic were mostly due to supply chain issues, the war in Ukraine, and price gouging, not economic stimulus programs. The U.K. stimulus was less robust than the American, allowing the former to fall into a period of recession in July 2023, followed by slow growth that is still ongoing. (Biden might have mentioned this in his debate last night, but a coherent discussion of that or anything else seemed beyond his capabilities.) And because the U.S. has a higher debt-to-GDP ratio than the U.K. (130% vs 97%) it’s clear that Starmer has some leeway to simply spend without raising taxes. But will he do so? His priggish manner suggests he thinks it profligate to “spend without paying for it”, even though such phrases are meaningless in the domain of macroeconomics. Besides, spending of the sort needed now in the U.K. is the type that should count on the credit rather than debit side of ledger books: It’s for things like health care, education and infrastructure, which make the economy more productive, increasing productivity, economic growth and national income.

So, what will Sunak or Starmer do when one of them becomes PM? We’ll have to wait until after election day (July 4) to find out.

The much worse, truly awful, cringe-worthy American debate

The American debate 24 hours later, which promised to be a cage fight between an octogenarian and a near octogenarian, turned out to be a slaughter: The criminally mendacious Trump, freed from the sanction of fact-checkers, easily beat the hapless president. Indeed, he demonstrated more strategic acumen than he ever did as president, refraining from directly pointing out Biden’s disabling senescence, and allowing the current president words to do it for him.

Despite this relative restraint, Trump did not, however, disappoint his most rabid supporters. He frothed and fumed and all but called Biden a murderer for allowing into the country an alien horde of “illegals”, released according to his telling, “from prisons, mental hospitals and insane asylums” to prey upon innocent, young girls. He described a near-daily massacre in American towns and cities because of the onslaught. Biden should have been able to deflect the blow and make his own counter-attack. It’s a well-established fact that immigrants commit crimes at a far lower rate than native-born Americans (60% lower) – this has been true for generations. But rather than rebut Trump’s slanderous charge, Biden inadvertently supported it himself by referring to a woman killed by an illegal immigrant! Biden also touted – vaguely, confusedly — his own new, “tough on immigrants” policies, and lamented that Congressional Republicans failed to support it.

To be sure, there is an immigrant crisis in the U.S., but not the one agreed by Trump and Biden: There’s not enough of them. Over the next decade, migrants (legal and illegal) are projected to add an additional $7 trillion to the U.S. economy. Without them, productivity and GDP will fall, the pool of Social Security and Medicare funds will shrink, and there will be critical shortages of workers in agriculture and health care. More than half of all U.S. farmworkers are immigrants, and nearly 17% work in the healthcare industry. Key sectors of the latter, like home health and rehabilitation – crucial for an aging population – would be especially badly impacted if immigration were slowed. Far from stealing jobs from Black people and Latinos, as Trump alleged, migrants to the U.S. provide low-cost services that poor and marginalized communities need in abundance.

Based upon their published programs and utterances last night, Trump and Biden largely agree. They aim to send asylum seekers and economic migrants alike to concentration camps in the Southwest, or holding areas in southern Mexico. In the U.K., Sunak wants to ship an annual 50,000 U.K. migrants to Rwanda in contravention of both U.K, and international law. Starmer wants to unleash MI5 on them, and smash “the cartels” that supposedly enable small boats with migrants to cross the channel. I half expected him to announce, a la Churchill, “we shall fight them on the beaches…”

An unfortunate point of U.S. and U.K. convergence

But I may be being too hard on Starmer and Biden. The question of immigration may simply not be debatable in either the U.S. or the U.K. currently. To really do so, would be to challenge sustaining myths – call it a dominant ideology — of national genius and white, racial superiority. Without the bugbear of illegal immigration, U.K. and U.S. citizens would have to face the sober facts of their own national diminishment. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the four “countries” that comprise the United Kingdom, are rump vestiges of a rapacious global empire; they will themselves soon spin off on their own way, creating separate, statelets that will try to rejoin the E.U.

The U.S. in the meanwhile, is one of those “failed states” that its diplomatic corps and military delight in first immiserating and then bombing. It is the world’s leading, per capita consumer of energy and producer of greenhouse gases. It has higher rates of infant mortality and premature death than most other nations in the Northern hemisphere (and some in the global South). It has lost every significant war it has fought for the 75 years, despite a military budget that is higher than that of every other country in the world combined. Whither the U.S. election? “Whither the U.S.?” is the better question.

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