Sue Coe, Vermin, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Art by Sue Coe. Text by Stephen F. Eisenman

Trump and Hitler

Over Thanksgiving dinner, my sister and I argued about which of us first called Donald Trump “Hitler.” I finally conceded she did (way back in 2016) but that I deserved credit for making the point in a little book featuring art by Sue Coe.* I wrote there that Trump, like Hitler endorsed “palingenetic nationalism,” the idea that the nation is suffering from racial and political degeneracy and needed a man of iron will to effect a rebirth. Trump claimed, like Hitler, to be that man. He would: “Make America great again.”

Recently, the former president and attested sex abuser announced his plans if he is elected; they are brazen. He would undermine the impartiality of the Justice Department and destroy the independence of the civil service (the “deep state”). He’d make all education patriotic education; restrict abortion; police gender identity; and challenge the rules of post-election succession. We can expect Trump to continue to embrace a Republican culture of death: He consistently denies the facts of climate change (pledging to increase U.S. production of fossil fuels) and opposes any kind of gun control. He would invade or bomb Mexico to stop drug trafficking.

Trump recently announced his intention to use the Justice Department to indict political opponents. He also discussed plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on the first day of his term to enable him to round up thousands of undocumented immigrants and bar public protest. To help him accomplish this, he would appoint a team of lawyers whose allegiance was to him alone. No more of those old-fashioned pledges to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States”!

Using the German, World War II term for a lightning-fast military strike, Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief advisor on immigration, told The New York Times that the president’s attack on migrants would constitute a “blitz”. He added “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.”

Trump’s post-election plans – broadly endorsed by Ron DeSantis and other Republican presidential candidates– can be summarized with a second German term: gleichschaltung. The word was coined by Nazi party officials and is translated as “bringing into line.” The Nazis devised a program to control both government and non-government organizations and eliminate all political opposition. The German artist George Grosz illustrated the concept in 1935 with a drawing that showed stormtroopers brutally rousting and corralling a pair of men. Coordination would occur at every level, from the heights of industry to quotidian life. (Even as he was attacking Nazism, Grosz relied upon caricature to represent a Jew in his drawing; that’s how far antisemitic ideology had penetrated national consciousness.)

George Grosz, “Bringing into Conformity,” Thirty Drawings and Watercolors, New York: Paul L. Baruch, 1948.

“Das Ungeziefer” (vermin)

Until recently, one thing was conspicuously absent from Trump’s plans: details about how he would implement gleichschaltung. Now we have a better idea what he has in mind, and it’s positively Hitlerian: The establishment of vast concentration camps, as Miller proposes, for migrants and undocumented workers who have lived in the U.S. for years, even decades; exclusion or deportation of non-citizens with undesirable political beliefs; and “retribution” against political enemies, meaning prosecution and imprisonment. At a Veterans Day rally in New Hampshire, Trump vowed to “root out…the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

The word “vermin” – in German “das Ungeziefer” – was frequently used by Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and other Nazis to refer to Jews, Roma, queers, communists, socialists, and others considered undesirable. They picked up the term from, among others, the late 19^th C. Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, and the German/Hungarian physician Max Nordau who used it to describe the scourge of delinquency and the supposed degeneracy of contemporary literature and art. From them, and from the writings of Frederick Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, the Nazis developed the idea that Jews, socialists and other proscribed persons were parasites, vampires, and vermin. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “[The Jew] remains the eternal parasite, a sponger who, like a terrible bacillus, spreads out more and more as soon as a favorable medium invites him to do so.”

When questioned about the Nazi resonance of “vermin”, Trump’s spokesman Steven Cheung both denied it and doubled down: “[T]hose who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” Realizing that the phrase “entire existence will be crushed” sounded Nazi, Cheung amended his statement. He was only referencing his opponents’ “sad, miserable existence” he said, not their “entire existence.”

Here’s a longer excerpt from Trump’s now infamous “vermin speech,” posted by the ex-president on his Truth Social site:

In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Compare Hitler in Mein Kampf, also commemorating fallen soldiers and demanding the expulsion from Germany of foreign elements, especially Jews and socialists:

[Following World War I] it ought to have been the duty of any Government which had the care of the people in its keeping, to take this opportunity of mercilessly rooting out everything that was opposed to the national spirit.

While the flower of the nation’s manhood was dying at the front, there was time enough at home at least to exterminate this vermin. But, instead of doing so, His Majesty the Kaiser held out his hand to these hoary criminals, thus assuring them his protection and allowing them to regain their mental composure. And so the viper could begin his work again.

Fifteen years later, at the Berlin Sportspalast on January 30, 1941, Hitler said: “Those nations who are still opposed to us will someday recognize the greater enemy within.” Extirpating this threat was the job of SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Addressing the mobile killing squads, euphemistically called einsatzgruppen — the “task force” tasked with killing the Jews of Eastern Europe–Himmler said:

You men of the einsatzgruppen are called upon to fulfil a repulsive duty. But you are soldiers who have to carry out every order unconditionally. You have a responsibility before God and Hitler for everything that is happening. I myself hate this bloody business and I have been moved to the depths of my soul. But I am obeying the highest law by doing my duty. Man must defend himself against bedbugs and rats, against vermin.

At the end of the war, Hitler looked back over the previous decades and summarized his aims: “To exterminate the vermin throughout Europe”, by which he principally meant Jews.

Artist unknown, “Vermin,” Der Stürmer, September 28, 1944.

An illustration on the front page of the Nazi weekly, Der Stürmer, published in the last months of the war, shows a giant centipede with bulbous nose, grasping hands, and eyes highlighted with a dollar sign (the capitalist) and hammer and sickle (the Bolshevik), the Jew’s two (contradictory) identities according to Nazi ideologists. “Jews are the source of our misfortune” says the text at the bottom of the page.

The unknown Nazi artist drew upon a long, visual tradition of human/animal hybrids. But whereas, the French Symbolist Odilon Redon’s Crying Spider looks at us imploringly – asking for kindness — the Nazi artist’s creature is both pathetic and pathogenic. He excites revulsion, not sympathy. Redon’s Symbolist art was specifically the type reviled by Nordau and later on the Nazis as “degenerate.”

Odilon Redon, Crying Spider, 1881, private collection (public domain).

When somebody – a Nazi or Donald Trump – calls Jews, Muslims, immigrants, Democrats, queers, Marxists or others, “vermin”, “parasites” or “vampires”, it means they consider them sub-human, diseased, and undeserving of life. In an October interview with The National Pulse, a far-right website, Trump might have been quoting Hitler verbatim: “Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now, it is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country, it’s so bad and people are coming in with disease, people are coming in with every possible thing that you can have.” No Nazi ever spoke the blood libel more clearly.

No animals are vermin

To call someone or some group vermin, is also to malign animals considered vermin. In fact, just as no people are vermin, no animals are vermin. All animals are evolved to fit a given ecological niche; all are sentient (they avoid pain and seek pleasure); and many are both intelligent and empathetic, including rats, generally considered the ur-vermin. Recent research has shown rats’ capacity for “shared affective states” and concern for “the emotional condition of others.” If one rat sees another in distress, it will suppress its own upset to help the latter. Pigeons, chickens and other birds have the same capacities. It has recently been shown that roosters like dolphins, elephants, and chimpanzees, pass the “mirror test”, meaning they can distinguish between self and other, and are self-conscious beings.

The ascription “vermin” is solely based upon an animal’s impact on humans; Rats for example, can reduce or contaminate food stocks, if no precautions are taken. They can damage infrastructure by chewing holes in walls and floorboards or through the insulation of electrical wires. Rats may be disease vectors, most famously for bubonic plague, though in that case, it was the fleas transported by the rats that carried the disease.

But since bubonic plague is no longer a significant source of global disease and death, and since food stores and even most homes are easily secured against rats, why are they still the focus of so much obloquy? The reason is historical prejudice — and because rats are useful for racists and fascists to think with. Whenever they wants to stir hatred or deny moral consideration to a minority or migrant community, they invoke the bogey of rats as vectors of disease. That’s what the Nazis did in cartoons like the one above showing Germany sweeping itself clean of rats (with caricatural Jewish noses) while so-called “democratic countries” deny them entry. It’s what anti-migrant journalists and cartoonists in Europe and the UK still do, and what Trump and his Republican followers promote. In a grotesque inversion, the terms “vermin,” “animals” and “beasts” are now being deployed by some Israeli Jews against Palestinians. For them to speak like Nazis while deploring Hamas violence, undercuts their legitimacy.

Artist unknown, “Germany for the Germans,” Das Kleine Blatt, Vienna, Feb. 2, 1939.

Sue Coe’s drawing, published here for the first time, exposes the internal contradictions of the word “vermin” as applied to either humans or animals. It shows the former president squatting on a toadstool, throwing a tantrum, observed by thoughtful and sensitive animals (so-called vermin!) in a forest clearing. The rats, mice, rabbit, snail, and moth (holding a lantern) watch the performance with a combination of amusement and alarm. They know that the only creature acting like a beast – like vermin — is the bawling human. The phantom above who sternly presides over the scene is Hitler.

* American Fascism Still (Detroit: Rotland Press), 2022, p. 12. Also see American Fascism Now (Detroit: Rotland Press, 2020); and forthcoming: The Curious Child’s Guide to American Fascism, (New York: OR Books), 2024.

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Photo by Tech Nick

Oxford Languages defines the word “evil” as “profound immorality and wickedness, especially when regarded as a supernatural force.” The definition suggests that some behaviors are not of this world; they are so much worse than what we regularly read about that they stand outside the margins of our understanding. We are familiar with this idea of evil from childhood: Dracula and wicked witches are malignant creatures animated by dark forces that infect them with such corruption that they are insensible to reason or pity.

Flesh and blood people are also called evil. Serial killers and genocidal dictators come to mind. They are unmoved by the pain and terror they inflict on their victims. Whether products of our societies or monsters from films and fairy tales, evil characters have much in common. They effortlessly persuade others to do terrible things. Dracula enlists Renfield to be his helper. Charles Manson persuaded his followers to kill innocents. Like predatory animals, they strike without warning, but while predators are driven by survival, evil people are simply insane.

Evil is used to explain terrible acts, but the problem is that it explains nothing. In fact, it does the opposite. Evil decontextualizes and mystifies. Using the word “evil” is a feigned or honest admission of ignorance. It also erodes responsibility.

A concrete example will illustrate. Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s architect and later his Minister for Armaments and War Production, was wracked with guilt over the Nazi regime’s crimes. He had loved and admired Hitler. It was only later, toward World War II’s end, that he understood the degree of Hitler’s megalomania. He said that before his moment of clarity, he had been deceived and insisted he did not know about the mass murder of Jews. He lied about that. Speer claimed that Hitler’s special charisma had a hypnotic effect. He once told an interviewer that “One does not recognize the devil when he has his hand on your shoulder.” He meant that Hitler was an illustration of a general principle: cosmic evil can manifest itself in our midst and charm ordinary mortals into stepping over moral boundaries.

Some Germans—including Speer—would struggle with this explanation in the post-war years. They said that characterizing Hitler as evil abdicated him of responsibility. If he were so insane, then he could not have understood right from wrong. Like Dracula, he would have hated the light since it was in his nature to despise it, and consigning the horrors of that time to an unearthly cause was too easy an answer.

They were right. Calling people evil turns them into nightmarish, mythical creatures. By calling them evil, we confer far more power on them than they really have because we surrender the collective power and responsibility we already have. Yet, many tell themselves that if evil people have dark powers, then we can do little to stop them. It seems that we are also off the hook.

Apparently, those like Speer who claimed they never saw troubling signs of what the Nazi regime was capable of were blinded to the awful treatment of Germany’s Jewish population, which was accompanied by vicious and very public anti-Semitic rhetoric for many years. Yet, the logic of evil tells us that eventual mass murder was practically inevitable, and no one was directly responsible. Evil is a consoling myth. It’s little wonder that Albert Speer and so many others clung to it.

Evil-as-explanation is back in the news. Its ability to mystify, conceal, and console is again on display but in a different context. After Hamas’s horrific attack that killed an estimated 1,300 Israelis on October 7, President Joe Biden said that the group had “unleashed pure, unadulterated evil in the world.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas “the new Nazis.”

Like the Nazis, Hamas’s powers to corrupt ordinary people must have been formidable. As the Israeli army began indiscriminately pummeling Gaza with rockets, President Isaac Herzog angrily dismissed the very idea of a Palestinian non-combatant. He said, “It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. They could have fought against that evil regime.”  He claimed that instead of resisting evil, Gazans were firing rockets at Israelis out of their kitchen windows.  According to Herzog, millions of Gazans were complicit on October 7, seduced by Hamas’s malevolent charisma. One assumes this includes over 14,000 dead, including 5,800 children.

Many news outlets called Hamas’s assault a “surprise attack.” After all, evil strikes without warning; it has no human context since it is unearthly. However, as the Associated Press reported, less than a week before the October 7 assault, Egyptian intelligence “warned them [the Israeli government] an explosion of the situation [was] coming, and very soon, and it would be big.” Netanyahu denies he received reports about an impending attack, but sound counsel about the real possibility of violence had been publicly available for a long time. Former Israeli security and military officials have published analyses and done many interviews on the topic. Perhaps the forces of evil impaired Israeli politicians’ reading and listening skills.

The notion of evil extracts atrocities from real-life conditions, which makes another awful October 7 and the horrors that have followed in its wake more likely. We have a unique opportunity to press for humane solutions that are already at our disposal. Dispensing with the obfuscation of evil would be a productive start.

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Jimmy Carter working at his desk – Public Domain

“In 1978, a Washington Post editorial described what many of President Jimmy Carter’s critics felt was missing from Mr. Carter’s foreign policy: “the sense of design, of architecture of knowing what he was doing, that Henry Kissinger conveyed widely, even to detractors.”  (Washington Post editorial, December 1, 2023)

The mainstream media, including the Washington Post and the New York Times are gradually getting out of the editorial business.  Whereas there were several editorials each day in the Post and the Times, now there is typically only one.  Many readers, myself included, have stopped reading these editorials because they tend to be group-think exercises on weighty public issues that have no bite or original point of view.  There is a similar problem at the Central Intelligence Agency, where National Intelligence Estimates are group-think exercises that represent the entire intelligence community.  As a result, like editorials, intelligence estimates are lowest common denominator documents that eliminate sharp opinions and original ideas.  I should add that the late Henry A. Kissinger felt the same way about CIA estimates and, as a result, didn’t read them.

Last week, the Post published a bizarre and outrageous editorial on Kissinger’s legacy that weakly concluded that his legacy “was still up for debate.”  But planted in the middle of the mealy editorial was an unusual criticism of the foreign policy of President Carter, which was gratuitous and wrong-headed.

Carter’s accomplishments in foreign policy rivaled those of any of the post-World War II presidents.  He ignored advice from the Department of State not to engage in a Panama Canal treaty, which was a major political and policy achievement.  He outmaneuvered conservative opposition to his diplomacy and ignored public opinion polling that showed three-quarters of the American people were opposed to the treaty.

President Richard Nixon conducted the opening to China in 1972, and Carter finished the job with the exchange of diplomatic relations with China in 1979.  Once again, Carter had to deal with conservative opposition to severing diplomatic ties with Taiwan and revoking the Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan.  Carter’s treaty abrogation was challenged in the Federal district court, where he lost, but he ultimately won in the Appeals Court.  Carter also negotiated mutually beneficial trade agreements with China, which our most recent presidents have been unable to do.

Kissinger received plaudits from the Post for his shuttle diplomacy with Egypt and Syria, but Carter’s Camp David process brought Israelis and Egyptians together in a way that ensured there could not be another Arab-Israeli war.  Without Egypt in the Arab coalition against Israel, the Arab states could no longer gang up on Israel.  It was Carter who shepherded Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat through two weeks of very tough negotiations.  Carter should have won a Nobel Peace Prize because, not since President Theodore Roosevelt’s role in ending the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, had a U.S. president so effectively mediated a dispute between two nations.  The Post credits Kissinger with orchestrating the “deep entanglement of the United States in the Middle East,” but it’s becoming more apparent that the Middle East is the United States’ briar patch and we have no way of getting out.

Unlike Kissinger, who had no regard for democratic values in the making of national security policy, Carter’s “design” for foreign policy stressed the importance of the rule of law, universal human rights, self-determination, and the avoidance of military intervention.  Whereas  Kissinger orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, Carter suspended military and economic aid to the authoritarian government of Augusto Pinochet.  Kissinger supported right-wing governments in Nicaragua and El Salvador that terrorized their own people; Carter suspended aid to these Central American governments.

The Post credits Kissinger with the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, but more than a third of U.S. military fatalities in Vietnam occurred during the Nixon presidency. There were no combat deaths during the Carter presidency.   There was never a chance that a Carter administration would conduct the kind of secret bombing that Kissinger conducted in Cambodia that led to the emergence of the Khmer Rouge and the deaths of more than 150,000 civilians.

Not every Carter decision was a good one.  Like Kissinger, Carter negotiated a strategic arms agreement with the Soviet Union, SALT II, but the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 ensured that the Senate would never ratify the treaty.  Carter made a big mistake in naming Zbigniew Brzezinski as his national security advisor.  Kissinger and Brzezinski were academic rivals at Harvard University in the 1950s, and Brzezinski would never continue the kind of diplomacy that had Kissinger’s name all over it.  Carter also had difficulty negotiating between his right-of-center national security adviser, Brzezinski, and his left-of-center secretary of state, Cyrus Vance.

The most bizarre aspect of the Post editorial praising Kissinger’s legacy was crediting him with “setting the stage for some of the most momentous developments of the late 20th century,” such as the collapse of the Soviet Union.  You could make a far stronger argument that the weapons systems that were introduced during the Carter administration, which included the deployment of intermediate-range missiles and cruise missiles in Europe led to Moscow’s willingness to engage in serious disarmament talks with the United States and the beginning of Moscow’s geopolitical and economic decline.

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Palestinians inspect the ruins of Aklouk Tower destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City on October 8, 2023. The death toll from the devastating Israeli war on the Gaza Strip has risen to 313 since early yesterday morning, with more than 1,990 others injured, according to medical sources. Photo by Naaman Omar APA images.

World Health Organization now says disease could be even deadlier than airstrikes in Gaza.

Speaking from a hospital ward about 50 meters from where a bomb had just exploded, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder raised his voice over sounds of children screaming. In a video posted on Twitter/X he emphasized that Gaza’s health care system is overwhelmed. Pointing at children packed into the ward of a hospital he said was operating at 200 per cent capacity, Elder insisted the hospital “cannot take more children with the wounds of war…with the burns, with the shrapnel littering their bodies, with the broken bones.”

Calling it a war on children, Elder warned that “inaction by those with influence is allowing the killing.”

We, the citizens of the world, are those with influence as well as our elected officials. It is the citizens of the world who came out by the hundreds of thousands in recent weeks that caused the woefully inadequate gesture of a seven-day truce. Now we must urgently pay heed to another persecution of Gaza’s children and families, waged by one of war’s more silent partners, disease.

Those with influence among authorities in Israel and the United States must reckon not only with the reckless carnage they are inflicting on children. They must also grasp the likelihood of an exponentially increased death toll from battlefield illnesses afflicting children. Surviving Gazans live amid ominous pre-conditions for outbreaks of water-borne diseases especially deadly to children: a mounting number of unburied corpses, unsafe drinking water, overcrowding in impromptu mass shelters where sick people are  denied any access to health care, as well as a breakdown of basic sewage and sanitation systems.

The World Health Organization warns that Gaza is “on the precipice of major disease outbreaks.”

On November 15, 2023, the World Health Organization reported more than 44,000 cases of diarrhea had been documented in Gaza since mid-October — already a dramatic increase compared to previous years and after only two months of the bombardment.

“Eventually we will see more people dying from disease than from bombardment if we are not able to put back together this health system,” said Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the WHO.

Yet. without electricity and fuel, it’s impossible to repair Gaza’s collapsed healthcare system. Israeli authorities cut off Gaza’s electricity supply after October 11, according to UNOCHA, and fuel reserves for Gaza’s sole power plant have been dangerously depleted.

History repeatedly shows that children in war zones bear the brunt of punishment as bombing wars give way to even more lethal economic war, and what ought to be regarded as biological warfare against children. (It’s noteworthy that Israel is one of only eight world nations not to have signed the Biological Weapons Convention.)

The suffering inflicted on Iraqi children following the 1991 war and ensuing years of merciless economic sanctions is well known to U.S. and Israeli authorities.

When the U.S. Desert Storm bombing war against Iraq ended, on Feb 28, 1991, a new kind of warfare proved far more devastating than even the worst of the bombing. By 1995, UN workers recognized that children were dying, first by the hundreds, then by the thousands, and eventually by the hundreds of thousands because economic sanctions prevented necessary access to medicines, clean water, and adequate food.

The U.S. military itself predicted epidemic levels of waterborne diseases would break out, in Iraq, because the U.S. bombing had so badly damaged the country’s underground water pipelines, causing cracks allowing sewage to seep into water used by civilians. Thirteen years of punitive economic sanctions cost the lives of countless Iraqis who couldn’t possibly have been held accountable for the actions of their government, – elderly people, sick people, toddlers and infants.

A similar pattern emerges if we turn our gaze toward the Saudi aerial bombing of Yemen from 2015 to 2018. The Saudi attacks against vital sewage and sanitation facilities, and against the electrical plants which powered them, contributed to severe shortages of potable water. The Saudis were also known to bomb sites where Yemenis were digging their own wells.

A report from Save the Children, issued in November 2018, estimated  at least 85,000 children died from extreme hunger since the war began in 2015. The worst cholera outbreak ever recorded infected 2.26 million and cost nearly 4,000 lives. Attacks on hospitals and clinics led to closure of more than half of Yemen’s prewar facilities. Besieged on all sides, 3.65 million Yemenis were internally displaced. An entire generation of Yemeni children will suffer the trauma and disease caused by Saudi bombings using weapons supplied by U.S. and other western manufacturers.

Dr. Yara Asi, a professor of global health management, points out that “the Gaza Strip had fragile health and water, sanitation and hygiene sectors long before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and prompted the retaliatory airstrikes. The health system of Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world, has long been plagued by  underfunding and the effects of the blockade imposed by Israel in 2007.”

In early 2023, an estimated 97% of water in the enclave was unfit to drink, and more than 12% of child mortality cases were caused by waterborne ailments. Diseases including typhoid fever, cholera and hepatitis A are very rare in areas with functional and adequate water systems.

Now, OCHA reports over 1.8 million people in Gaza, or nearly 80 per cent of the population, are internally displaced. Overcrowding at makeshift UNRWA shelters significantly increased cases of diarrhea, acute respiratory infection, skin infection, and lice. Without wells and water desalination, dehydration and waterborne diseases are mounting threats.

We can’t help but ask whether Israeli officials, intent on continuing the war for possibly as long as a year, see the potential for widespread disease as motivation for families to leave Gaza, accepting massive ethnic cleansing that would displace them beyond Gaza’s borders.

In a recently published investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call, an Israeli intelligence veteran notes Israel’s detailed information on where Gazan civilians are located: “Nothing happens by accident … When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed – that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home. “

Rather than wait for Gazan parents to dig graves for the children sickened by lethal water-borne diseases, we must clamor for a permanent cease fire, reparations, and an end to Israel’s apartheid regime. In the United States, we must truthfully diagnose our diseased foreign policy, sickened for many decades by greed, fear and an addiction to war.

Worldwide, people are demonstrating their commitment to care about the Gazan children who survive this hideous war. The call for a permanent ceasefire includes the utter rejection of weaponizing disease to collectively punish children.

This article first appeared in The Progressive  https://progressive.org/

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Photograph of Henry A. Kissinger Dressing for a State Dinner – Public Domain

On the occasion of his death at 100, praises and denunciations of Henry Kissinger are being sung and spewed out in record numbers. Let me add to the “praises.” More than anyone else, Henry, along with his boss, Richard Nixon, was responsible for my transformation into an activist.

This transition from being a free-floating intellectual into an activist took place unexpectedly. It happened sometime in April 1970, when Kissinger and Nixon said they were going to end the war in Vietnam by expanding it to Cambodia. I was rushing along Prospect Road—where Princeton’s “eating clubs” or fraternities were located—to attend class when I was attracted to a commotion at a building housing the Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA). A crowd of about 100 surrounded some 15 people who had sat down and linked arms to block the entrance to the Institute, which was known to be doing contract work for the Pentagon. I crossed the street to see things, more out of curiosity than anything else. Then a phalanx of policemen arrived and shoved people aside in order to clear a path to arrest those who were seated on the ground with arms linked.

When the police started to brutally cut the human chain and pull people into the paddy wagon, something in me snapped and I leaped into the empty space opened up by an arrest and found myself linking up with two people that I later learned were Arno Mayer, a distinguished professor of diplomatic history, and Stanley Stein, an equally prominent professor of Latin American history. All I was conscious of as I joined them was: there goes my PhD. At that time, foreign students who were arrested in political events could expect deportation according to Immigration and Naturalization Service rules. In a split second, I had given up my future as a sociologist.

As we were processed after arrest at the Princeton police headquarters, I called Madge, my wife, and told her what had happened but left unmentioned the likelihood that we would be deported. I had made the leap, and, surprisingly, I had no regrets since I felt I had found my place in life: being an activist, an organizer for social change. Like the other participants in the IDA rally, I was judged guilty of trespassing and resisting arrest and given a punishment of community service, that is, cleaning the streets of Princeton on weekends for a whole month.

I waited for the deportation order. And waited. After a month of waiting, I began to realize what was happening. The local government in Princeton was not coordinating its work with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as I had been led to expect. That would not happen until after 9/11, under the aegis of the newly established Department of Homeland Security, over 30 years later.

My profession as a sociologist, for which I was being trained at Princeton, was given a new lease on life. But I was no longer the same. The arrest had transformed me.

At that point, my priority during my stay at Princeton became stopping the war in Vietnam, and when I was not deep into reading Marx and Marxists and post-Marxists, much of my work was leading or participating in discussion groups on how to organize more and more students into a critical mass on campus against the war.

By the time that Kissinger and Nixon invaded Laos early in 1971 to destroy the traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, I had become part of the informal leadership of the anti-war movement on campus. We called for a boycott of classes, but the coup de main was the takeover and shutting down of what was then called the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton’s school of public administration that served as a recruiting ground for the Central Intelligence Agency and the trained bureaucrats of foreign governments allied with the United States. I led the successful occupation of the School by hundreds of students, but at the price of my incurring the perpetual enmity of one of its professors. The prominent sociologist of modernization Marion Levy tried his best in the next few years to worm his way onto my dissertation panel with the sole aim of torpedoing the person he regarded as sullying his beloved Woodrow Wilson School.

I went on to do my dissertation, a study of the counterrevolution in Salvador Allende’s Chile from a Marxist perspective, and this was approved in 1975, thanks partly to the successful effort of the department chairman, Marvin Bressler, to keep the vengeful Marion Levy from getting onto my committee.

I went on to do full-time underground work as a cadre of the Communist Party of the Philippines for the next 15 years, incurring more arrests and jailing for civil disobedience in protests in the United States against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Later, as an international activist during the George W. Bush era, I again gave full play to my anti-war addiction, participating in mobilizations across the globe, from Baghdad to London to Beirut.

So, here’s to you, you old devil, Henry, for saving me from what would surely have been an unexciting academic life specializing in some godawful field such as Marion Levy’s “modernization theory.”

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Photograph Source: Raph_PH – CC BY 2.0

Jonathan Freedland is a senior columnist for the Guardian, and its point-person in providing commentary and reporting on the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Freedland gives every impression of being fair-minded and “objective” in this commentary, unlike the less-knowledgeable and far-from-impartial US commentator Thomas Friedman, who is little more than a fan-boy of Likud and its political allies (aside from the occasional muted demurral when Israel turns its overwhelming military might on hapless Palestinians, though in the end Friedman always finds ways to exculpate Israel).

Freedland went to Israel to cover its current conflict with Gaza. In a Guardian piece from there he enjoined his readers to “listen to the phone call made by one of the Hamas murderers of 7 October to his parents back in Gaza. Hear his pride, his ecstatic joy as he tells them he has “killed Jews” with his own hands, including a husband and wife and eight others. “Dad, 10 with my own hands!”.

The Guardian invited readers of this article to submit a response to what Freedland’s wrote. Here is what I sent in (it did not get published):

“This unspeakable bloodlust [referred to by Freedland] called to mind a parallel episode during Israel’s assault on the Jenin refugee camp two decades ago:

Moshe Nissim, IDF Bulldozer Operator in Jenin: “Before we went in [to Jenin] I asked some guys to teach me [how to operate a Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer]. They taught me how to drive forward and make a flat surface… For three days I just erased and erased… I kept drinking whisky to fight off fatigue. I made them a stadium in the middle of the camp! I didn’t see dead bodies under the blade of the D-9… But if there were any I don’t care”. Originally published in a report by Tsadok Yeheskeli, Yediot Aharonot, May 31 2002.

Unlike Mr Freedland I’m not sure what lessons are precisely to be drawn from such cases of untramelled bloodlust”.

International law requires these war-criminal berserkers (on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides) to be brought to account, and it is not unreasonable to expect fair-minded journalists to acknowledge both such situations accordingly.

In a later article from Israel Freedland says:

“There is, in fact, a terrible price to pay as long as Israel keeps fighting in Gaza, in the form of the deaths of thousands of innocents. And there is a terrible price to pay if Israel stops fighting in Gaza, leaving intact a murderous, eliminationist threat. Neither option is bearable. It is a tragic choice. We cannot do much for the two peoples trapped by that choice, but we can at least admit that we see it”.

But: is Israel not also “a murderous, eliminationist threat” for Gazans since it imposed its draconian siege on that territory in 2007? So why not point this out, instead of pointing this accusatory finger solely at one of the parties involved? And why can’t we “do much for the two peoples trapped by that choice”? There is a clear way out of this supposed tragedy. But first another contention in this article requires attention.

Freedland says “responsibility for a death toll estimated to be in excess of 15,000 – in less than two months – rests squarely with a Hamas enemy that deliberately embeds itself in population centres, including in schools and hospitals”.

Freedland is right to say that Hamas blurs the line between its combatants and non-combatant Gazan civilians—this of course is a prima facie violation of international law, though the application of this law in asymmetrical warfare lacks the clear-cut applicability present in wars of a more regular and standard character.

Freedland’s claim however occludes the fact that Israel also blurs the line between its active-duty combatants and those of its civilians who are designated as “reservists”.

In Israel, military service is compulsory for most citizens, with men serving for two and a half years and women for two years, starting at the age of 18. After completing their required service, these men and women typically become part of the Israeli Defence Force’s (sic) Reserves. That is to say, these individuals, usually up to the age of 40 (50 in certain specialist fields), can be summoned back to active duty at the behest of their government.

So is an Israeli aged 18-40 in civvies really and routinely to be regarded as a non-combatant civilian? After all, reservists are allowed to take their weapons home with them when they finish their service in the regular military, and the media is replete with images of Israelis in civvies shouldering guns in the middle of towns and cities.

Soon after the October 7 attack by Hamas, Israel expanded its mobilization of reservists to 360,000.

Any Jewish person anywhere in the world is a citizen of Israel by virtue of this fact, regardless of their place of birth. As a result, many “Israelis” possess dual-nationality, and can be called-up to serve in Israel’s military while living abroad. According to the Washington Post,  about 10,000 people living in the United States alone have reported for Israeli military duty after receiving draft notices that were part of the mass mobilization after Hamas’s attack in October (incidentally, this includes someone who lives and works as a financier in Los Angeles— hence a likely case of making money in one country and killing Palestinians in another).

Israeli airlines El Al, Israir and Arkia added more flights to bring “home” these reservists, according to their websites and Israel’s airports authority.

The demarcation between combatants and noncombatant civilians is thus blurred indisputably by both sides in this conflict.

As mentioned above, Freedland contends we can’t “do much for the two peoples trapped” in what he regards as an inexorable tragedy. But of course we can! Freedland scarcely mentions Israel’s countless illegalities in its dealings with the Palestinian people. A start can be made by addressing some of these.

Every international legal body regards the siege/blockade of Gaza as contravening the law prohibiting the use of collective punishments against civilians. International law permits an occupied people to engage in armed resistance against the occupier. As long as Israel maintains its illegal siege, there will be justified resistance against the blockader/illegal occupier (with the caveat that noncombatant civilians are not to be targetted). Israel– so far shielded and abetted by its US paymaster– has to be brought to an acknowledgement of this situation.

At the same time, Freedland and others maintain that this step will not be a practical proposition for Israel as long as Hamas maintains its “eliminationist” stance towards Israel.

While Hamas pledged to “eliminate the Zionist entity” in its 1988 founding charter, which called for the creation of an Islamic state over the entirety of the land of historic Palestine, its May 2017 “Document of general principles and policies” abandoned eliminationism in favour of a long-term truce in which Israel exists within its 1967 borders as a condition of further negotiations leading to the creation of a Palestinian state.

Neither the exact nature of this putative Palestinian state nor that of a future Israel was specified in the May 2017 document, leading Hamas doubters to maintain that this was merely a playing-for-time diplomatic smokescreen employed by Hamas while it pursued its longer-term eliminationist goals. But in any event, contra Freedland and others, Hamas has not been committed publicly to the elimination of Israel since 2017.

Zionists such as Freedland have of course a visceral distrust of Hamas.

Hamas is however in no position to destroy Israel militarily, so why not create an internationally supervised framework, in the context of a long-term ceasefire or truce, in which Hamas is held accountable for each and every one of its policy declarations and subsequent actions? The same of course would apply to Israel.

Will anyone take bets that a principled procedure of this kind is unacceptable to Israel and its supporters in the western media?

Meanwhile, in Gaza Hamas will doubtless be crippled by Israel’s brutal techno-militarism, but in the longer-term Hamas or one of its approximations or proxies will almost certainly find ways to continue the resistance.

An American state, New Hampshire, uses “Live free or die” as its official motto.

What if the long-suffering Palestinian people insist on joining New Hampshire in adhering to this simple motto? Saying this in the knowledge that 75% of Gazans are now internally displaced,  and 400,000 have lost their jobs since Israel began its retaliation after October 7.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

As we count down toward the 2024 general election, we should expect to hear from media pundits about candidates and their viability, swing states and the electoral college, likely voters and poll results, and much more. Occasionally we may hear about some issues of importance. Most likely, we will hear little about the urgent need for wealth redistribution in the United States. Extreme inequality remains an invisible scourge underlying so much of what ails society and, even when discussed, is touted as an unavoidable and inevitable outcome of our economy.

However, there is abundant evidence that wealth inequality is the product of intentional design and the idea that what is good for billionaires is good for society. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Switzerland-based global bank UBS just released its 2023 Billionaire Ambitions report and concluded, “For the first time in nine editions of the report, billionaires have accumulated more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship.” Benjamin Cavalli, Head of Strategic Clients at UBS Global Wealth Management said, “This is a theme we expect to see more of over the next 20 years, as more than 1,000 billionaires pass an estimated [$5.2 trillion] to their children.”

That’s more than the economy of the entire United Kingdom. It’s more than the economies of Canada and Mexico combined.

The UBS report was not a critical one and hardly blinked an eye about the obscenity of wealth being hoarded in dynasties. About half of all billionaires around the world use UBS’s banking services, so the bank merely analyzed the investment habits of its most important clients. It did so candidly, referring to “the great wealth transfer” from one generation to the next, avoiding mention of the wealth transfer from the majority of the public to an elite minority.

The report also declared with pride that intent on “continuing the current family legacy, 60% of heirs want to enable future generations to benefit from their wealth.” Of course, they meant future generations of their own families, not in general.

But this wealth transfer is directly the result of tax codes written to benefit the uber-rich. ProPublica’s 2021 analysis of the tax returns of the richest Americans found that they paid an average of 3.4% in taxes, employing armies of lawyers to exploit every loophole carved out to offer special advantages to wealthy elites. Meanwhile, middle-class and working-class Americans pay double-digit tax rates. What this amounts to is collective theft from government revenues.

It’s time to reverse this trend by resorting to a concerted project of wealth redistribution. It’s time to wrest billions, if not trillions, out of the hands of billionaires and their heirs and pour it back where it belongs: to the rest of us.

Call it socialism—which is what the pro-rich rightwing GOP does—or call it progressive taxation, or economic justice. It doesn’t matter; the nation’s fiscal conservatives will demonize any ideas of wealth redistribution and will attempt to instill baseless fears of creeping communism, no matter what specific language we use around fairness. So, we might as well start spelling it out instead of trying to appease the right. After all, there’s a reason why conservatives and wealthy elites want the public to be afraid of socialism: they’re terrified that Americans might be thrilled to embrace policies such as wealth redistribution through taxation.

And if we need any more reasons to put a bullseye on billionaire wealth, it turns out they are vicious, dangerous fascists, whose children are an even more callous lot than their parents.

Billionaires don’t need the protections that democracy offers: earned benefits like Social Security or Medicare, access to free or affordable health care including abortion, labor and wage protections, and due process (they can buy the best legal help when they get in trouble).

In fact, democracy is a threat to their wealth hoarding, which is why they are backing the most dangerous demagogue to have ever occupied the White House: Donald Trump. Economic analyst and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich lists the numerous billionaires backing Trump for a second term and cites Trump’s promise to wealthy elites, that he plans to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Wealthy elites helped bring us Trump’s first term, and they’re itching for a second.

Why wouldn’t billionaires back fascism? It benefits them in ways democracy doesn’t. Indeed, billionaires exist as a design flaw in democracy. The greater the number of billionaires and the greater the wealth they hoard, the weaker the democracy that binds them.

Legislation like Senator Ron Wyden’s Billionaire Income Tax is what they fear if democracy trumps fascism. Wyden’s bill is so modest that it doesn’t target wealth, only income, and would affect fewer than 1,000 Americans, trimming off tiny slivers of their unprecedented hoardings, leaving them as fabulously wealthy as before. After all, is there a real difference between being worth $10 billion versus $9.9 billion?

As to the children of billionaires being worse than their parents, there is a small mention in the UBS report of how heirs of billionaires are far less philanthropic than first-generation billionaires: “while more than [two-thirds] (68%) of first-generation billionaires stated that following their philanthropic goals and making an impact on the world was a main objective of their legacy, less than a third (32%) of the inheriting generations did so.” One could conclude that empathy among children of the ultra-wealthy drops by half each generation. This could be a generation even more determined to fund and fuel fascism in order to protect their riches compared to their parents.

The wealthy are so secure in the protections they have from democratic curbs on their financial power that their biggest worries, as per the UBS report, include “geopolitical tensions,” inflation, recession, and higher interest rates. Fears around a “tight jobs market” and “stricter sustainability rules,” fall low on their list. In other words, they feel secure against threats of wage rebellions and government regulations.

And so, as we hurtle toward authoritarian aristocracy, we must normalize the idea of wealth redistribution. There is no good reason against it, not a single one. We can have either billionaires or democracy, not both.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Photograph Source: Gerald R. Ford Library – Public Domain

International relations scholar Richard Falk once summarized Christopher Hitchen’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001). Falk reminded readers that Hitchens listed six major crimes carried out by Kissinger: 1) The deliberate mass killing of the civilian population in Indochina. 2) Deliberate collusion in mass murder, and later in assassination in Bangladesh. 3) The personal suborning and planning of murder, of a senior constitutional officer in a democratic nation—Chile—with which the United States was not at war. 4) Personal involvement in a plan to murder the head of state in the democratic nation of Cyprus. 5) The incitement and enabling of genocide in East Timor. 6) Personal involvement in a plan to kidnap and murder a journalist living in Washington, DC.

In this exclusive interview for Counterpunch, Richard Falk describes the life of Henry Kissinger including his early work involving atrocities such as Operation Menu, nuclear proliferation, and his war crimes in Indochina and Chile. Falk argues that four main character traits defined Kissinger: greed, careerism, impatience, and skepticism. Falk maintains that Kissinger undoubtedly understood, that in capitalist America, partisan and economic power merged despite the pretenses of being the protectors of the free world.

Daniel Falcone: Can you comment on the life of Henry Kissinger? How will history remember him in your estimation? How should he be remembered historically?

Richard Falk: Kissinger will be long remembered by foreign policy elites as the supreme realist of the Cold War Era and an influential advocate of a nationalist, flexible inflection given to geopolitical priorities and ideological tensions. His influence can be traced back to a book formulating the case for ‘limited nuclear war’ as threat and potential operational policy if Europe were ever confronted by the supposedly superior conventional forces of the presumed Soviet adversary. This book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (Council on Foreign Relations, 1957) did more than any other writing at the time to affirm a war-fighting role for nuclear weapons as an addon to deterrence. It also provided an intellectual infrastructure for the continuous development, deployment, and evolving strategic doctrine articulating the relevance of this infernal weaponry of mass destruction.

Militarist realism, with such a nuclear twist was also valuable for furthering hegemonic ambitions of the American deep state that exposed the undisclosed motivations for so strongly supporting the nonproliferation treaty and implementation regime of selective enforcement. Israel’s acquisition of the weaponry was facilitated while countries in the Arab world, notably Iraq, Syria, and most of all Iran, supplied pretexts for coercive threats and instances of military interdiction if their nuclear energy programs crossed the nuclear threshold or propagandized as such.

Kissinger’s critics will revile him as a war criminal who facilitated the worst imperial tendencies in American foreign policy. In some ways, Kissinger is the exemplar of an establishment public intellectual who was a faithful servant of ruling-class America throughout the Cold War and rewarded by appointments as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. Among his criminal activities were his support for a punitive extension of the Vietnam War to Cambodia and Laos, not with any prospect of succeeding in the lawless war, but to induce Hanoi to accept a negotiated outcome that could be viewed as ‘peace with honor.’ In a bizarre turn, this highly destructive extensive of the combat zone led the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Norway to give the award in 1973 to him jointly — with his Vietnamese counterpart, Lu Duc Tho, who took the unprecedented step of declining the coveted prize rather than share the occasion with Kissinger.

Another notorious Kissinger initiative involved the regime-changing complicity in the 1973 Pinochet coup that took over the government of Chile from its left-leaning elected leader, Salvador Allende. Pinochet presided over a dictatorial, market-oriented government under the influence of conservative economists familiarly known as ‘the Chicago boys,’ basically an acceptance of the world according to Milton Friedman.

In surveying Kissinger’s long life, four separate character traits stand out:

1) A greed for and subservience to power as exhibited in foreign policy domains of superpower; Kissinger was associated with the sexist ethos of a patriarchal mentality: ‘the greatest aphrodisiac is power.’ It was attributed to Kissinger but whether he originated the adage or not it exhibited his dismissive attitude toward women, in my view.

2) A careerist outlook with respect to the substantive range of orientations acceptable to the defense and ideological elites, but with a right-leaning sense of world history; his opportunism was illustrated by a political comfort zone large enough to encompass both a Republican moderate such as Nelson Rockefeller and an unscrupulous reactionary such as Richard Nixon; he was also on call to such Democratic Party militarists who sought him out for his worldly ‘wisdom,’ and to gain credibility with militarists in and out of government. It is doubtful that he would have responded to phone calls from Bernie Sanders or AOC, although maybe he would be responsive to Donald Rumsfeld or Donald Trump.

From the beginning of his long post-academic career, Kissinger’s chosen path to high status and great influence passed through the sedate meeting rooms of the Council of Foreign Relations and the conference halls of the World Economic Forum. He accessed the inner sanctums to the White House where he was notable as an advisor to Democrats as well as Republicans naming him as the exalted ‘super-K’, even in his waning years.

3) As he makes clear in his self-serving memoir, Diplomacy, Kissinger was impatient with his staff if they called his attention to inconsistencies between his foreign policy views and the relevant norms of international law or of proclaimed as American values. To the extent that he professed positive goals, they were best identified with words like ‘balance’ and ‘stability,’ and the phrase ‘balance of power,’ although in practice he seemed mainly an advocate of ‘a preponderance of power’ at least for the United States.

4) Kissinger’s world view was skeptical to the point of derision with respect to the UN or international law; perhaps, his childhood escape from Nazi Germany explains his fatalistic outlook, which made it naïve to seek peace, much less justice, and highly dangerous as exposing his country and civilization of choice to danger; the best we can hope for is to live in a world of states, with the geopolitical actors sensitive to the limits of their power and the retaliatory intentions and capabilities of their adversaries. For Kissinger, the Thucydides Melian Dialogue is not an intriguing historical incident in the history of ancient Athens, but an eternal insight to the human condition concisely expressed: “The strong do what they will, the weak do what they must.”

Daniel Falcone: In recent years, the progressive left anxiously waited for Kissinger to expire as it generated a host of memes in anticipation of his passing, usually expressing disappointment when someone else had died other than him. He’s largely considered a war criminal. Can you comment on the far-reaching impacts of his policies, human rights abuses, and criminality?

Richard Falk: Kissinger’s behavior needs to be interpreted from the perspective of opportunism, careerism, and pervasive amorality. For elites, and not only in the US, Kissinger was regarded as the most influential and effective diplomat of modern times, partly because he was seen as so successful in protecting the national interests of the US as understood in the Cold War Era. Kissinger was also admired because he projected a deep understanding of how the world works, stripped of all the sentimentality embedded in the ‘American Exceptionalism’ branding that claims special virtue and innocence. For Kissinger the US was a country with the power and responsibility to shape history to its liking, but only if it remains prepared to sustain its role as global hegemon, which means a criminal disrespect for the sovereignty of states that succumb to hostile forces within their borders (Chile under Allende) or impede a major undertaking in American foreign policy (Cambodia during the Vietnam War).

The opposition to Kissinger and Kissingerism came, as your question suggests, from progressive sectors of public opinion that cared about the well-being of people more than the power-seeking and wealth-aspiring agendas of geopolitical actors and transnational corporations. It should not be overlooked that Kissinger was a coveted star performer at Davos where the rich and powerful gathered every year at the World Economic Forum. He clearly understood, that in capitalist America, political and economic power were fused despite the pretensions of being the defenders of ‘the free world.’

Among Kissinger’s most distasteful behaviors were those associated with a few salient events that expressed his geopolitical orientation relating to statecraft—whatever benefits the ruling elites in the US is permissible, regardless of what the lawyers or moralists have to say, although it should be done discreetly to avoid a backlash from public opinion at home and abroad and from foreign political forces that were casualties of intervention, whether covert or overt.

Ending the Vietnam War was viewed by Kissinger as a lost cause in terms of its objectives of denying control of the country to Vietnamese nationalism dominated by Communist forces of the National Liberation Forces (NLF) led by Ho Chi Minh. Kissinger’s objective was to end the war in a way that created ‘a decent interval’ between an American withdrawal and the NLF takeover in a unified Vietnam so that it could be claimed to be a diplomacy based on ‘peace with honor’.

To promote such an outcome the Nixon/Kissinger team wanted to increase pressure on Hanoi to negotiate with deference to these face-saving US objectives. In furtherance of such a course of action, Kissinger masterminded ‘the secret bombing’ of Cambodia, which led to a pro-American coup, followed by an extremist takeover of the country by the Khmer Rouge, which resulted in the blood-stained ‘killing fields’ as well as ‘the Christmas bombing’ of North Vietnam, as diplomatic chess moves were designed to obscure a lost end game.

The anti-Allende intervention of 1973, preceded by the 1970 elections by Kissinger’s alarmist reminder to Nixon that the success of a Marxist government in Chile would negatively impact American economic and political interests throughout the Western Hemisphere. Kissinger reportedly urged economic policies after Allende’s victory in 1970 that would make the Chilean economy ‘scream’ for help, setting the stage for the Pinochet coup. When subsequently informed of the dictator’s policies of torture and ‘disappearance’ of opposition figures, Kissinger apparently shrugged his shoulders to indicate an awareness of the wrongdoing, but continued to rely on his policy leverage to make sure that American foreign policy would not weaken its support for Pinochet, using words to the effect, ‘whatever we may think of Pinochet he is better for America than Allende’. Even more pointedly was Kissinger’s incredibly brazen pre-coup remark: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

As previously discussed, Kissinger’s advocacy of nuclear weapons as weapons of war in the context of Europe, coupled with his disregard for the limitations of the use of force derived from international law, the authority of the UN, and a consensus among international law experts. The fact that there was so little pushback to these views in elite circles suggests the American foreign policy establishment shared, and even welcomed, Kissinger’s views unconstrained by law and morality.

Kissinger’s diplomatic successes resulted from applying the 19th century worldview of Bismarck, which stressed the importance of stability and balance, both illustrated by détente arms control agreements with the Soviet Union and normalization with China based on the compromise on Taiwan forming the basis of the Shanghai Communique. The best exposition of Kissinger’s view of superior statecraft was a book adapted from his Harvard thesis, A World Restored: Bismarck, Metternich, and Castlereagh (Houghton-Mifflin,1957).

Daniel Falcone: Author of Killing Hope, the late William Blum once lamented on how Kissinger’s exploits in Angola (Great Powers Poker Game) were seldom reviewed. Can you discuss the Kissinger record as it relates to your own work?

Richard Falk: Although I am not as familiar with Kissinger’s role in relation to the right-wing coups in Angola and Mozambique, I can comment on the general and latter question. (Much of Falk’s work focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where he studied Kissinger’s role, a legacy reflected in the war in Gaza).

From an early stage of his career, Kissinger represented for me a negative archetype of global policy advocacy, and I was appalled by the media enthusiasm for his foreign policy influence during the Ford and Nixon presidencies when he held the top positions in the State Department. In retrospect, this enthusiasm arose because Kissinger did have the ability to explain the Cold War consensus in a clear and coherent manner that seemed to add elements of gravitas with the help of his German accent and supposed deep knowledge of balance of power geopolitics. In a sense, Kissinger’s success arose from his limitations—he was thought at Harvard to be neither learned nor smart enough to succeed in academia but more intelligent and literate than the typical journalist or policy wonk. It is little known that Kissinger after completing his graduate studies at Harvard had what must have been the disappointing fate of reportedly not receiving a single offer to join a university faculty.

I often thought of Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, whom I knew quite well, as ideological siblings, with Kissinger taken with bigger ideas of world order as historically construed from a European historical viewpoint that was passionately anti-revolutionary. Brzezinski was more tactical and pragmatic, although also a brilliant opportunist, a willing, rarely critical executor of US imperial power, perhaps most dogmatic in his anti-Soviet and pro-Shah geopolitics. Brzezinski came across as self-satisfied and arrogant, while Kissinger cultivated a façade of European erudition tempered by a sardonic, and sometime self-deprecating wit, which endeared him to the media. Both were treated as prodigies of and championed by the Council of Foreign Relations, which served as a filter for top echelon foreign policy jobs in Washington.

My own work was less colored by cynicism, careerism, or ambition. I was thrilled to be offered a faculty position at Ohio State University’s College of Law upon my graduation from law school, which at the time more than satisfied by my professional and lifestyle expectations. I became intrigued by how international law might become a policy tool that would bring together a prudent approach to national interests in the nuclear age with a foreign policy respectful of self-restraint, the authority of the UN, and grounding of international law in what was best for the peoples of the world. I attribute my seeming inherent empathy for the vulnerable and marginal, to my exposure to Buddhism and other religions during my undergraduate studies. My transformative political experience was associated with a wartime visit to North Vietnam in June 1968, toward the end of the Vietnam War, which deepened my growing tendency to identify with victimized others, whether domestically or globally, whether for reasons of race, religion, class, or sexual or gender orientation.

Kissinger was increasingly celebrated for his professional trajectory while I was gradually marginalized, with turndowns from mainstream media and end of invitations from prestigious venues, including in the academic world, which became almost systemic when I crossed the red line by voicing criticisms of Israel’s designs and treatment of Palestinians. I never second-guessed my preferential trajectory, nor envied Kissinger’s ascent to the pinnacles of state power and societal prestige. I can look back from the age of 93 with no sense of shame about past action, Faustian Bargains, and compromises. I have been the beneficiary of many blessings from friends and those I had the pleasure and honor of working with over the years, including some wonderful former students. Of course, there were disappointments along the way, but overall, my career choice of teaching/scholarly writing/citizenship engagement has brought me a sense of profession fulfillment that I couldn’t have imagined 65 years ago.

Daniel Falcone: Noam Chomsky in conversation with David Barsamian once said,

“On May 27, the New York Times published one of the most incredible sentences I’ve ever seen. They ran an article about the Nixon-Kissinger interchanges. Kissinger fought very hard through the courts to try to prevent it, but the courts permitted it. You read through it, and you see the following statement embedded in it. Nixon at one point informs Kissinger, his right-hand Eichmann, that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out ‘a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.’ That is the most explicit call for what we call genocide when other people do it that I’ve ever seen in the historical record.”

What are your reactions to this vignette? 

Richard Falk: There are now official documents released on the details of Kissinger’s role, and they show his distasteful side more vividly than even critics imagine. He was the author of the plan Chomsky describes as genocidal. The plan was named ‘the menu,’ with meals specified to correspond with the phases of the plan, starting with ‘breakfast,’ which was the secret part. Revealingly, it was a secret to be kept from Congress and the American people, and neither the Cambodians nor Laotians. Kissinger was deputized to command other relevant cabinet members to proceed with this a genocidal campaign, as the Chomsky quote suggests, and take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that the secret is kept at least until the vaguely cannibalistic ‘breakfast’ is over. This anecdote, which became the reality of ‘the killing fields’ in Cambodia remove all doubt that Kissinger lived and died as a war criminal.

Daniel Falcone: Could you discuss the ways in which Kissinger saw the world in racial and class terms and how his geopolitical theory could possibly translate into a Nobel Peace Prize? 

Richard Falk: Fredrik Heffermehl, a Norwegian author, who has just published a book devoted to an extended criticism of how the Norwegian NPP Committee has abandoned the vision of the donor to give the coveted prize to those who work against war and militarism. As alluded to earlier, Kissinger is the poster child of such a critique. I should admit that I have ‘a dog in the fight,’ or at least a puppy. I am mentioned as one of more than a hundred who Heffermehl believes deserved the prize, which is a compliment I don’t deserve but maybe because of this, enjoy receiving!

My sense is that the NPP Committee has been in recent years stung by such criticisms of bias, which in my view was less shaped by race and class factors since at least the end of the Cold War than earlier. Yet it is now no more responsive to Nobel’s vision, than it was earlier to media salience of the media and possibly geopolitical priorities of the Global West, which upon scrutiny reflect class/race factors. Of course, choosing a war criminal and militarist like Kissinger as a NPP winner was a repudiation of everything that Alfred Nobel hoped the prize would encourage. It seemed a hijacking of the NPP, at least temporarily.

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New wall construction near Sasabe. Photo by Todd Miller.

Off the side of the border road, there was a young woman cradling what turned out to be her sick one-year-old. Slowing down, we turned the corner and saw that she was part of a larger group, who were sitting on blankets placed on the dirt road against the towering 30-foot rust-colored border wall. We were to the east of Fresnal Peak (Cerro de Fresnal), about 10 miles from Sasabe, Arizona. The group had tied several ground cloths and blankets, including a white one from the Red Cross, to the bollards of the wall to tame the wind. The nights had been cold. They tied the last metallic-colored blanket to a white sign nailed to the wall that said, ironically, No Trespassing. To the east, the wall continued snaking up and down through the hills and mountains. This was the last part of wall that the Trump administration constructed during his waning presidency at the end of 2020. And this was the wall that the Biden administration was now finishing up.

This group of 12 people from Veracruz and Guanajuato, Mexico, had a bunch of kids. The one-year-old was sick, but then it turned out that the three-year-old was also sick. And so were the four- and five-year-olds, the latter’s small body a lump under a blanket up against the wall. The children’s eyes were glazed and gaunt, signs of sickness, signs of three very cold nights. Respite seemed a million miles away. Usually that would be Sasabe, Sonora, but warring factions of organized crime had made the town unsafe. On top of that, according to a security guy I had talked to earlier, the U.S.-based militia Veterans on Patrol was going to be “in the area” later that day. As the evening approached, the prospects of another night with sick kids at the wall seemed likely. As we stood there assessing the situation, the silver trucks of Spencer Construction—a company that had just received more than $600 million for “border infrastructure,” including wall construction—rumbled by. That was the biggest contract that Spencer, which was first contracted by Trump in 2020, had ever received from Customs and Border Protection. Spencer was also the company that San Diego activists blockaded from doing wall construction in September.

As The Border Chronicle has reported, when Joe Biden took office, he promised that he would build no more wall. This border infrastructure contract issued in July, however, says otherwise. Besides Spencer, the companies Sisco and Fischer Sand & Gravel also received hefty contracts. In total, the contracts were worth $1.4 billion, with a $4 billion ceiling. And now, as we stood with the group, there was the surreal imagery of the contractors’ seemingly new trucks juxtaposed with people, like this group, camped along the border wall, sick and seeking asylum. The children’s gaunt eyes and faces were flush with misery, and the adults told us that they had just called 911. For the children, a man from Veracruz told me. The situation, he told me, has become desperate. Gail Kocourek of the humanitarian aid group Samaritans and cofounder of the Sasabe, Sonora–based Casa de la Esperanza offered the group water, food, and blankets.

The term the Democrats have used for continuing to build onto Trump’s wall has been “filling gaps,” as if the border wall were missing part of a tooth and now needed a crown. One of the recently filled “gaps” was much closer to Sasabe, and was precisely the place where asylum seekers had been arriving. But after the new wall, this was no longer possible. The new portions were colored gray—not rust—and the bollards had a time stamp on them that said 09/26/23. Spencer Construction had barely built it. While Biden didn’t put up a commemorative plaque as Trump had, this was his border wall. As Gail told me, that additional wall construction forced people farther out into the desert, into more isolated regions like the one where we found that group with the sick kids.

And there were more people coming. In the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, encounters with people had increased from 27,318 people in June to 59,421 people in October (along the entire border, however, encounters slightly decreased). Although there was new context, people forced into the dangers of desolate locations was a story we’ve been hearing on the border for 30 years, resulting in at least 10,000 deaths.

Have you been cold at night? I asked. Yes. Very cold. Maybe that’s why the kids are sick. The Border Patrol, they told us, had passed by many times. They had not stopped. Could we, they asked, call 911 for them? As we talked, another Spencer truck came. The trucks were rumbling by what turned out to be many people—many more groups besides this group—along this stretch of border, many with smoldering campfires to keep warm. One such fire was from a group of Guatemalans whom we met 15 minutes later along the border wall. The fire, they told me, was for our two-month-old, who was also sick. I looked across the fire to where a young woman was placing a blanket over the two-month-old’s body, the child’s tender face looking out from the covers, up into the dimming blue sky in the lowering sun, with the omnipresent border wall undoubtedly in her view. They told us that they too were cold at night. The same for another group from Chiapas, Mexico, near Tapachula, whose kids were also sick. Every single kid by the border wall was sick. There was not one child who was not sick.

After driving around and talking to several such groups, we went to the top of the hill, the only place where we could get a cell signal. Gail called 911. From where we stood, looking out at Fresnal Peak, which Trump blew to smithereens for wall construction, was (besides that unfortunate fact) a view of one of the most beautiful places in the world. Mountain ranges surrounded us in all directions like waves in an ocean—in Sonora, in Arizona—crisscrossing and in constant disrespect of the human-made border. In the distance we could see the sacred Baboquivari Peak of the Tohono O’odham. You could also see a scope truck operated, according to Gail, by the National Guard, and an Integrated Fixed Tower—one of 50 or so in Arizona constructed by the Israeli company Elbit Systems—staring toward Mexico.

The 911 operator transferred Gail to a Border Patrol dispatcher. While she was talking, I thought of one of the sick children, the five-year-old girl who was but a motionless lump under her blanket. The group lifted the blanket so we could see how sick she was. Her eyes were open but glassy and gaunt like the other kids’. She didn’t look at us but stared off into the distance, along the bottom of the border wall, a nightmarish symbol that would probably forever be branded in her mind. Maybe I thought of her in that moment because I have a daughter who is also five. I imagined my daughter on the ground, sick, drained of hope, like her, looking at the world she had inherited from the generations before her and their political systems.

Now talking to the Border Patrol, Gail told them there were groups out here and that they had been there for three days. Gail told them—her voice forceful—that there were sick children, lots of sick children. She told them that the groups had told them that Border Patrol had passed them and not stopped. Why hadn’t they stopped? Gail asked. Can you send someone out here? Meanwhile, the sun continued to go down, shifting the colors to rich browns and glowing yellows and earthly greens throughout this high-elevation desert near the Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge. The final trucks from Spencer were leaving, done for the day, Gail would tell me. The last one was doing a security sweep. It was a border civilization, the rhyme and reason of profit and suffering and border policy and strategy all surrounding us; while at the same time, there was this sweeping view of the world, as if somewhere in there was the potential that things could be different, better, much more beautiful.

Night was on its way, and I was pessimistic about the Border Patrol coming. I knew that their record with 911 calls was less than desirable, as the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths has documented now for years. But I was wrong. The Border Patrol came rumbling over the hills, going at high speeds, as they do so often. They picked up the group of 12. Later, one of the agents pulled beside Gail to tell her that they were picking up as many people as they could who were at the wall. As the Border Patrol truck passed us, I saw some of the kids, the same sick ones, in the back caged area of the truck, their small hands clenching the bars on the window as the agent drove them to the Border Patrol substation in Sasabe, Arizona.

This was originally published by The Border Chronicle.

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Photograph Source: Dharbigt – CC BY-SA 4.0

Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), thrown in jail by Grover Cleveland for leading the Pullman Strike in 1894, would become the Socialist candidate for U.S. president five times, receiving 6% of the vote in 1912, and running his final campaign in 1920 from a federal prison cell, incarcerated by Woodrow Wilson for speaking out against World War I. A little more than a century ago, Debs—along with enough other Americans to scare the hell out of the U.S. ruling class—believed that with the defeat of chattel slavery, the next great victory would certainly be the defeat of wage slavery.

Gene Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, lived there throughout his life, and today the former home of Gene and his wife Kate is the home of the Eugene V. Debs Museum, located on the grounds of Indiana State University.

During a recent visit to the Debs Museum, I could feel how, a little more than a century ago, it seemed not only right but doable for the working class to wrest the means of production away from the ruling class. And here I could feel some of the sadness that Gene must have felt when he saw the lengths of violence that the U.S. ruling class—and their puppets in the U.S. government—would take to crush the working class so as to maintain control.

When I’ve read about Debs, what sticks out is his integrity, intelligence, generosity, tenacity, and courage, but hanging out in his former home for a few hours offered something more. It brought to life how Gene’s combination of personal traits was so formidable that he could create receptivity, at least in open-minded Americans, for an antidote to capitalism and its adverse effects of insecurity, self-absorption, anxiety, and depression—“symptoms” of an “economic injustice disorder” that plagued millions of Americans in his day and continues to do so today.

More later on Gene and my experience of the Debs Museum, but first: What the hell do Bill Walton and Larry Bird have to do with Gene and the museum?

The Debs Museum director Allison Duerk is full of fun facts, and during my visit, she mentioned that Bill Walton got Larry Bird to accompany him on a tour of the museum. Walton, as a UCLA student-athlete, was arrested in 1972 for protesting the Vietnam War, and in the mid-1980s he was a Boston Celtic teammate of Larry Bird. “Larry the Legend”—also known as “the Hick from French Lick”—grew up in French Lick, Indiana, and then became the greatest basketball player, by far, in the history of Terre Haute’s Indiana State University.

The Bird-Walton visit to the Debs Museum in Terre Haute occurred in 2013, following the dedication of a Larry Bird statue (close to the Debs museum) that was attended by Walton. This visit “was not a step in, step out visit,” according to Terre Haute’s Tribune-Star (“Bill Walton, Larry Bird Visit Eugene V. Debs Museum”), in which Gary Daily reported they spent a full hour and a half visiting the museum. Daily noted, “Walton spent some time looking over the list of distinguished recipients of the Debs Award, an honor bestowed on a person whose life work has been in concert with the ideals of Eugene V. Debs,” as Bill pointed out the names of Debs Award winners Pete Seeger, Coretta Scott King, and Howard Zinn.

Walton and Bird noticed that the first Debs Award recipient in 1965 was John L. Lewis, leader of the United Mine Workers from 1920 to 1960, and Larry asked Bill, “Wasn’t Havlicek’s father a coal miner?” John Havlicek, a great Boston Celtic who had played in an era previous to Larry and Bill’s Celtic team, did have a grandfather and uncles who worked in the mines, as his parents’ owned a grocery store in a coal-and-steel town in eastern Ohio. Daily also recalled Bird asking something like, “How did Debs get around back then? How many miles did he travel on political and union organizing campaigns?” Daily concluded, “Bill Walton and Larry Bird found much in the Debs Home Museum that spoke to them.”

What spoke to me on my visit to the Debs Museum? Although I have long known many of the facts of Debs’s life, including the violence directed at him by the U.S. ruling class and its lackeys in the U.S. government, hanging out in Deb’s former home provoked a more visceral experience of just how ugly the ruling-class bastards can be when they are threatened, and how effective their violence has been.

Many Counterpunch readers are well acquainted with what is now called the “First Red Scare”—how Woodrow Wilson reversed himself from his 1916 campaign slogan “He Kept Us Out of War” and pushed for the U.S. entry into World War I, then orchestrated a massive pro-war propaganda campaign, along with pushing for the passage of the Espionage Act in 1917, the Sedition Act in 1918, and the Immigration Act in 1918 (also known as the Anarchist Exclusion Act). This First Red Scare was used to crush the U.S. working class, and hanging out in the Debs Museum makes this catastrophic defeat painfully gut-wrenching. I could feel just how large and powerful socialist and libertarian-socialist (anarchist) organizations were, so much so that they terrified the U.S. ruling class. Leafing through the two large bound volumes of the Appeal to Reason that sit on a table in the Debs Museum was especially heartbreaking.

The Appeal to Reason (1895-1922), a hugely popular Left weekly periodical and supporter of the Socialist Party was denounced by Theodore Roosevelt as a “vituperative organ of propaganda, anarchy and bloodshed.” Its writers included Debs, Jack London, Mary “Mother” Jones, and Upton Sinclair (whose The Jungle was first serially published in this periodical). The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains reports that the peak circulation of the Appeal to Reason was 760,000 in 1913. When one considers that the U.S. 1910 census shows a U.S. population of 92 million (approximately 27% of the current 340 million population), one feels just how large a threat in the early twentieth century a critically-thinking working class posed to the ruling class.

What happened to the Appeal to Reason? Through the Wilson government’s punishment of well-known firebrands—such as the imprisonment of Debs and deportation of Emma Goldman—and through other means, many anti-war Leftists were intimidated. In the case of the Appeal to Reason, this once anti-militaristic periodical became so intimidated by the fear of being seen as “unpatriotic,” it supported Wilson’s entry into World War I. And not long after this U-turn, the Appeal to Reason was abandoned by much of its disheartened readership and discontinued in 1922. In leafing through the pages of the Appeal to Reason at the Debs Museum, I could only feel sadness about its demise.

In the Debs house, there is a guest room, and Allison noted that among those who stayed there were Mother Jones and Upton Sinclair, and here I felt some sadness about Sinclair’s path. Debs and most socialists believed that the root cause of World War I was rival capitalist imperialist nations’ hunt for new markets, and that the result of this war would be a slaughter of the working class from all these nations; and so in the spring of 1917, there was a Socialist party referendum on entry into the war, with the rank-and-file overwhelmingly endorsing a militant anti-war position. However, Gene’s good friend Upton Sinclair rejected this anti-war position and supported U.S. entry into World War I.

The bighearted Debs maintained his friendship with Sinclair, even heaping praise on Sinclairs’s 1919 muckraking exposé of American journalism, The Brass Check. However, I imagine that when Gene discovered that his good friend had broken with the Socialist rank and file to support World War I, he must have felt worse that many Sandernistas felt when Bernie Sanders (who had previously pledged to support the winner of Democratic Party nomination) endorsed the pro-militarist neoliberal Hillary Clinton.

Bernie Sanders, who made a documentary about his hero Debs in 1979, is today the most famous self-identified American “democratic socialist.” Sanders may one day win a Debs Award, as he certainly has made the word socialismpopular again for many young people, but the word’s regained popularity has come at the expense of de-radicalizing its meaning. While young Bernie’s documentary celebrated Gene’s anti-capitalism, the older Bernie’s presidential campaigns were not campaigns that Gene would recognize as socialism. Here’s a couple of excerpts from a Gene Debs’s 1902 speech about The Mission of the Socialist Party:

“The only vital function of the present government is to keep the exploited class in subjection by their exploiters. Congress, state legislatures, and municipal councils as a rule legislate wholly in the interest of the ruling capitalist class.”

“Economic freedom can result only from collective ownership, and upon this vital principle the Socialist Party differs diametrically from every other party. Between private ownership and collective ownership there can be no compromise. . . . One gives us palaces and hovels, robes and rags, the other will secure to every man and woman their full product of his or her toil, abolish class rule, wipe out class distinction, secure the peace of society . . . .”

To be clear, Bernie’s policies are certainly more progressive than the mainstream Democratic Party, but to view them as socialist means we have to create another word for what Debs and his comrades stood for—an ideology that was so attractive and intoxicating for the working class that its truly revolutionary nature scared the hell out of some in the ruling class in 1912 to dangle some non-radical reforms (Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party 1912 platform included an eight-hour workday, women’s suffrage, campaign finance contribution restrictions, and the establishment of some type of social insurance system).

One final piece of sadness. Prior to my visit to the Debs Museum, I had known that following Gene’s release from prison in 1921, estimates of the crowd that welcomed his return to Terre Haute ranged from 25,000 to 50,000. A sad irony that I hadn’t known but learned from Allison was that in Terre Haute, the Woodrow Wilson Junior High School (now called Woodrow Wilson Middle School) was completed in 1927, a year after the death of Gene Debs, whose faltering health in his mid-sixties was further harmed by prison, courtesy of Woodrow Wilson.

My visit to the Debs Museum did have some playful moments. After Allison mentioned that Bill Walton got Larry Bird to accompany him on a tour of the Debs Museum, I joked with her about whether Bill Walton—famously a Deadhead—would have a more difficult time getting Larry to a Grateful Dead concert than to the Debs Museum. To this, Allsion informed me that while some Debs enthusiasts call themselves Debsians, a few call themselves Debsheads.

If you can’t get to Terre Haute and want to get a sense of Eugene V. Debs, his home, Allison Duerk, and other Debsheads, you can view online the documentary The Revolutionist: Eugene V. Debs, narrated by Danny Glover (the 2011 Debs Award winner), or check out Allison’s mini-museum tour.

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Henry Kissinger, who died on Nov. 29, 2023 at the age of 100, stood as a colossus of U.S. foreign policy. His influence on American politics lasted long beyond his eight-year stint guiding the Nixon and Ford administrations as national security adviser and secretary of state, with successive presidents, presidential candidates and top diplomats seeking his advice and approval ever since.

But his mark extends beyond the United States. Kissinger’s policies in the 1970s had immediate impact on countries, governments and people across South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Sometimes the fallout – and it was that – lasted decades; in some places it continues to be felt today. Nowhere is that more true than Cambodia.

I’m a scholar of the political economy of Cambodia who, as a child, escaped the brutal Khmer Rouge regime with four siblings, thanks in large part to the cunning and determination of my mother. In both a professional and personal sense, I am aware of the near 50-year impact Kissinger’s policies during the Vietnam War have had on the country of my birth.

The rise of the murderous regime that forced my family to leave was, in part, encouraged by Kissinger’s policies. The cluster bombs dropped on Cambodia under Kissinger’s watch continue to destroy the lives of any man, woman or child who happens across them. Indeed, when the current U.S. administration announced its intention in 2023 to provide cluster bombs to Ukraine, the prime minister of Cambodia was quick to call out the lingering damage the munition causes.

‘Island of peace’

Counterfactuals are not the best tool of the historian; no one can say how Cambodia would have developed were it not for the Vietnam War and U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia.

But prior to the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, the country was touted as an “Island of Peace” by then-leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk, with a developing economy and relative stability.

After Cambodia gained independence from its French colonial masters in 1953, Sihanouk presided over what was seen as a golden age for Cambodia. Even Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern-day Singapore, visited Cambodia to learn lessons on nation-building.

The country’s independence from France did not require any hard fight. Neighboring Vietnam, meanwhile, gained independence only after the bitter anti-colonial First Indochina War, which concluded with a rout of French troops at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954.

However, Cambodia’s location drew it into the subsequent war between the newly independent communist North Vietnam and U.S.-backed South Vietnam.

Cambodia wasn’t officially a party in the Vietnam War, with Sihanouk declaring the country neutral. But Washington looked for ways to disrupt communist North Vietnamese operations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail – which cut across Cambodia’s east, with Sihanouk’s blessing, and allowed the resupply of North Vietnamese troops on Cambodian soil.

Kissinger’s ‘menu’

Kissinger was the chief architect of the plan to disrupt that supply line, and what he came up with was “Operation Menu.” The secret carpet-bombing campaign – with breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, dessert and supper representing different targets and missions within Cambodia – was confirmed at a meeting in the Oval Office on March 17, 1969. The diary entry of Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, reads: “ … Historic day. K[issinger]‘s ‘Operation Breakfast’ finally came off at 2:00 pm our time. K really excited, as is P[resident].”

The following day, Haldeman wrote: “K’s ‘Operation Breakfast’ a great success. He came beaming in with the report, very productive.”

And so began four years of Kissinger’s legally dubious campaign in Cambodia.

To Kissinger, Cambodia was a “sideshow,” to use the title of William Shawcross’ damning book exposing the story of America’s secret war with Cambodia from 1969 to 1973.

During that period, the U.S. bombing of neutral Cambodia saw an estimated 2,756,941 tons  of ordnance dropped on 113,716 targets in the country.

Secret and illegal war?

Kissinger and others in the White House tried to keep the campaign from the public for as long as they could, for good reason. It came as public opinion in the U.S. was turning against American involvement. The bombing campaign is also considered illegal under international law by many experts.

But to Kissinger, the ends – containing communism – seemingly justified the means, no matter the cost. And the cost to Cambodians was huge.

It resulted in the direct deaths of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. With the U.S. government keeping the bombings secret at the time, comprehensive data and documentation are limited. But estimates on the number of deaths range from as few as 24,000 to as many as a million. Most estimates put the death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

Kissinger’s campaign also destabilized Cambodia, leaving it vulnerable for the horrors to come. The capital, Phnom Penh, ballooned in population because of the displacement of more than a million rural citizens fleeing U.S. bombs.

Meanwhile, the bombing of Cambodian citizens contributed to an erosion of trust in Camodia’s leadership and put at question Sihanouk’s policy of allowing the North Vietnamese access through the country’s east. On March 18, 1970, Sihanouk was ousted in a coup d’etat and replaced by the U.S.-friendly Lon Nol. Direct U.S. involvement in the coup has never been proven, but certainly opponents to Lon Nol saw the hand of the CIA in events.

The ousted Sihanouk called on the country’s rural masses to support his coalition government in exile, which included the Khmer Rouge. Until then, the Khmer Rouge had been a ragtag army with only revolutionary fantasies. But with Sihanouk’s backing, they grew. As journalist Philip Gourevitch noted: “His name became the Khmer Rouge’s greatest recruitment tool.”

But Kissinger’s bombs also served as a recruitment tool. The Khmer Rouge were able to capitalize on the anger and resentment of Cambodians in the areas being shelled. Rebel leaders portrayed themselves as a force to protect Cambodia from foreign aggression and restore order and justice, in contrast to the ruling government’s massive corruption and pro-American leanings.

Kissinger’s bombing campaign was certainly not the only reason for the Khmer Rouge’s rise, but it contributed to the overall destabilization of Cambodia and a political vacuum that the Khmer Rouge was able to exploit and eventually seize power – which it did in 1975, overthrowing the government.

Led by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge inflicted unimaginable atrocities upon the Cambodian people. Its genocidal campaign against political opponents, Cambodian minorities and those deemed counterrevolutionaries saw between 1.6 and 3 million people killed through executions, forced labor and starvation – a quarter of the country’s then population.

The scars from that period are still felt in Cambodia today. Recent research even points to the economic impact Kissinger’s bombs continue to have on farmers, who avoid richer, darker soil over fears that it hides unexploded ordnance.

Anti-Americanism is no longer prevalent at the everyday level in Cambodia; indeed, the opposite is increasingly becoming true as China’s financial and political embrace becomes suffocating. But anti-Americanism is frequently used in rhetoric by leading politicians in the country.

I don’t agree with some other scholars that Kissinger’s bombing campaign can be definitively proven to have resulted in Khmer Rouge rule. But in my view, it no doubt contributed. Hun Sen, Cambodia’s autocratic leader who ruled for 38 years before passing the prime minister baton to his son in August 2023, has cited the U.S. bombing of his birthplace as the reason he joined the Khmer Rouge. Many others joined for similar reasons.

As such, the devastating impact of Kissinger’s policies in Cambodia cannot be overstated – they contributed to the unraveling of the country’s social fabric and the suffering of its people, leaving behind a legacy of trauma.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Kissinger in the West Wing as National Security Adviser in April 1975. Photo: White House.

For U.S. mass media, Henry Kissinger’s quip that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” rang true. Influential reporters and pundits often expressed their love for him. The media establishment kept swooning over one of the worst war criminals in modern history.

After news of his death broke on Wednesday night, prominent coverage echoed the kind that had followed him ever since his years with President Richard Nixon, while they teamed up to oversee vast carnage in Southeast Asia.

The headline over a Washington Post news bulletin summed up: “Henry Kissinger Dies at 100. The Noted Statesman and Scholar Had Unparalleled Power Over Foreign Policy.”

But can a war criminal really be a “noted statesman”?

The New York Times top story began by describing Kissinger as a “scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States’ opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the time of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so.”

And so, the Times spotlighted Kissinger’s role in the U.S. “exit from Vietnam” in 1973 — but not his role during the previous four years, overseeing merciless slaughter in a war that took several million lives.

“Leaving aside those who perished from disease, hunger, or lack of medical care, at least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths according to researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington,” historian and journalist Nick Turse has noted. He added: “The best estimate we have is that 2 million of them were civilians. Using a very conservative extrapolation, this suggests that 5.3 million civilians were wounded during the war, for a total of 7.3 million Vietnamese civilian casualties overall. To such figures might be added an estimated 11.7 million Vietnamese forced from their homes and turned into refugees, up to 4.8 million sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange, an estimated 800,000 to 1.3 million war orphans, and 1 million war widows.”

All told, during his stint in government, Kissinger supervised policies that took the lives of at least 3 million people.

Henry Kissinger was the crucial U.S. official who supported the September 11, 1973 coup that brought down the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile — initiating 17 years of dictatorship, with systematic murder and torture (“trampling on democratic values” in Times-speak).

Kissinger remained as secretary of state during the presidency of Gerald Ford. Lethal machinations continued in many places, including East Timor in the Indonesian archipelago. “Under Kissinger’s direction, the U.S. gave a green light to the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor (now Timor-Leste), which ushered in a 24-year brutal occupation by the Suharto dictatorship,” the human rights organization ETAN reported. “The Indonesian occupation of East Timor and West Papua was enabled by U.S. weapons and training. This illegal flow of weapons contravened congressional intent, yet Kissinger bragged about his ability to continue arms shipments to Suharto.

“These weapons were essential to the Indonesian dictator’s consolidation of military control in both East Timor and West Papua, and these occupations cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Timorese and Papuan civilians. Kissinger’s policy toward West Papua allowed for the U.S.-based multinational corporation Freeport McMoRan to pursue its mining interests in the region, which has resulted in terrible human rights and environmental abuses; Kissinger was rewarded with a seat on the Board of Directors from 1995-2001.”

Now that’s the work of a noted statesman.

The professional love affairs between Kissinger and many American journalists endured from the time that he got a grip on the steering wheel of U.S. foreign policy when Nixon became president in early 1969. In Southeast Asia, the agenda went far beyond Vietnam.

Nixon and Kissinger routinely massacred civilians in Laos, as Fred Branfman documented in the 1972 book “Voices From the Plain of Jars.” He told me decades later: “I was shocked to the core of my being as I found myself interviewing Laotian peasants, among the most decent, human and kind people on Earth, who described living underground for years on end, while they saw countless fellow villagers and family members burned alive by napalm, suffocated by 500-pound bombs, and shredded by antipersonnel bombs dropped by my country, the United States.”

Branfman’s discoveries caused him to scrutinize U.S. policy: “I soon learned that a tiny handful of American leaders, a U.S. executive branch led by Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger, had taken it upon themselves — without even informing let alone consulting the U.S. Congress or public — to massively bomb Laos and murder tens of thousands of subsistence-level, innocent Laotian civilians who did not even know where America was, let alone commit an offense against it. The targets of U.S. bombing were almost entirely civilian villages inhabited by peasants, mainly old people and children who could not survive in the forest. The other side’s soldiers moved through the heavily forested regions in Laos and were mostly untouched by the bombing.”

The U.S. warfare in Southeast Asia was also devastating to Cambodia. Consider some words from the late Anthony Bourdain, who illuminated much about the world’s foods and cultures. As this century got underway, Bourdain wrote: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to [Slobodan] Milošević.”

Bourdain added that while Kissinger continued to hobnob at A-list parties, “Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.”

But back in the corridors of U.S. media power, Henry Kissinger never lost the sheen of brilliance.

Among the swooning journalists was ABC’s Ted Koppel, who informed viewers of the Nightline program in 1992: “If you want a clear foreign-policy vision, someone who will take you beyond the conventional wisdom of the moment, it’s hard to do any better than Henry Kissinger.” As one of the most influential broadcast journalists of the era, Koppel was not content to only declare himself “proud to be a friend of Henry Kissinger.” The renowned newsman lauded his pal as “certainly one of the two or three great secretaries of state of our century.”

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Stuart Seldowitz, a former deputy director in the US State Department, was caught on video harassing a New York Street food vendor. On November 22, he was charged by the New York State attorney office with several counts of hate crime/stalking and aggravated harassment. Gotham Government Relations, a Manhattan-based lobbying firm, touted Seldowitz’s “expert” résumé, which includes “former Director of the National Security Council under President Obama and former diplomat for the US State Department … during five presidencies.” From 1999 to 2003, Seldowitz was the deputy director of the US State Department’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs under former President George W. Bush. According to Gotham, in the early 2000s, he worked as Acting Director for the National Security Council South Asia Directorate under the order of the Executive Office of the President.

While anti-Islam manifestations have exponentially increased after the Israeli onslaught on the Palestinians in Gaza, the case of Seldowtiz is different for many reasons. Seldowitz had a high-ranking position in the State Department at a time when the US was outsourcing torture to countries like Egypt and Syria. According to justiceinitiative.org, “At least 136 individuals were reportedly extraordinarily rendered or secretly detained by the CIA and at least 54 governments reportedly participated in the CIA’s secret detention and extraordinary rendition program; classified government documents may reveal many more.”

It was during those years that the US detained Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, while returning from a visit to Tunisia and then sent him to Syria (through Jordan) to be tortured for one year.

The Seldowitz incident brings back memories of that horrific US government policy when the CIA was given the freedom to kidnap whomever it wished and send them to be brutalized and tortured in countries historically known for sadistic torture practices, or to be tortured by CIA contractors in hidden places around the globe. In his vile rants against the helpless 24-year-old Egyptian food vendor, Seldowitz invoked the mukhabarat of Egypt (intelligence agency of the Egyptian government) and their practice of plucking nails. He said to the vendor: “Mukhabarat in Egypt will get your parents…Does your father like his fingernails? They’ll take them out one by one.” It is completely extraordinary for someone to invoke such horrific torture practice unless, and most likely, Seldowitz was part of the decision-making process to send kidnaped persons to the Mukhabarat of Egypt during his tenure in the US State Department. If he wasn’t, then most likely he was fully aware of the Egyptian Mukhabarat’s torture practice of plucking nails. The program of Extraordinary Rendition could not have been intended to send people for a fully paid vacation to Egypt, Macedonia, Syria, or other exotic places around the globe.

In another very telling rant, Seldowitz said “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, it wasn’t enough…”  Notice the “we” in Seldowitz’s vile rant, which reaffirms that the genocide on the Palestinians of Gaza, which thus far killed close to 20000 people, including over 5000 children, was a US-Israeli effort. This conclusion is a no-brainer since whoever supplies the bullet for murder and encourages the murder, that person is both an accomplice and accessory to the murder. These words coming from a former director of the National Security Council could not have come from thin air.  Nor did those words come from a deranged lunatic, but rather a sought-after consultant on government affairs as the Gotham website indicated.

Seldowitz’s anti-Islam vile rant was extraordinary. The videos captured him saying to the vendor: “Did you rape your daughter like Muhammad did?” And, “What do you think of that – people who use the Quran as a toilet?” In an interview after the airing of the video, Seldowitz only regretted the “religious aspect” of his rant as he stated, “If I had to do it all over again, I would not have raised the religious aspect.” In other words, the Mukhabarat and the nail-plucking aspects of his rant were fully acceptable and legitimate speech according to Seldowitz.

The level of anger and frustration exhibited by so many in the US against Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians lately has to be contrasted with what happened after previous Israeli onslaughts on Gaza that netted the lives of thousands of Palestinians. Back then, especially in 2009 and 2014, when Israel’s forces killed thousands of Palestinians and maimed many others, the Palestinian resistance including Hamas, was very weak. Now, things have changed dramatically to the point that sympathizers with Israel are not keeping low key as they did in previous Israeli attacks on Gaza, but expressing and venting their anger using extreme methods that range from anti-Muslim and hateful rants, as in the case of Seldowitz, all the way to outright murder, as in the case of Wadea Al Fayoume on the 15^th of October and the attempted murder of Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ahmed, on the 26^th of November. Such magnitude of anti-Islam, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian hatred eclipsed what has happened after 911.  The only visible change between then and now is the strength of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza.

Seldowitz’s vile anti-Islam and racist statements were very expressive and made the social media rounds extensively to the point that major media organizations could not ignore them. Most likely, had his statements not been caught on camera, nothing would have happened. In fact, the NY police did not react to Seldowitz racist and hate speech despite several complaints until and after the videos started circulating, kicking in damage control mechanisms that were intended to sanitize the image of New York City for no other purpose but to avoid hurting the tourism industry which carefully manages the image of NY city as inclusive, welcoming, friendly, and tolerant.  What makes me believe that this to be true is the case of Michelle Salzman.

On November 9, Florida State Representative Angie Nixon was speaking on the floor of the Florida legislature in support of a resolution calling for a ceasefire to end the killing of Palestinians in Gaza. During the debate, Nixon asked her colleagues “We are at 10,000 dead Palestinians. How many will be enough?” Republican Representative Michelle Salzman replied, instantly: “All of them.”

The call for genocide by Salzman, a Florida State legislator, was never condemned by any US-based organization, nor was it condemned by anyone in State or Federal governments. In fact, the call for genocide, which far exceeds the racist and anti-Muslim rants that Seldowtiz spewed, this time came from an active lawmaker. Salzman tried to deny her call for genocide, but when it became impossible to deny, she claimed that it was the Hamas regime that she was against not the Palestinians of Gaza. This extraordinary level of hate and racism and enticement for genocide, coming from a Florida state legislator was not worth mentioning on CNN, ABC, FOX, MSNBC or any of the other major news outlets in the US, except for Newsweek, which sanitized the incident by covering the news as an encounter between Nixon and Salzman. The NY Times did not find Salzman’s call for genocide “News That’s Fit to Print.”

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Photograph Source: Daniel Capilla – CC BY-SA 4.0

Israel’s seven-week campaign of retribution for the October 7 massacre has killed untold thousands of Palestinian women and children in Gaza. It has also diverted world attention from Ukraine, where the 22-month trench war drags on into stalemate with no end in sight. The common denominator between the two wars is President Joe Biden, who stokes both conflicts with taxpayer-funded offensive weapons.

Now that Israel’s war presents a competing claim for U.S. military support, will America be able to sustain arms shipments to Ukraine for the promised “as long as it takes?” How can Biden satisfy both Zelensky and Netanyahu when both conflicts could last many more months, if not years? The rising number of casualties in both conflicts calls out for ceasefire, in both Israel and Ukraine. .

When Putin sent his tanks toward Kiev in February 2022, Ukraine faced an existential threat. U.S./NATO arms aid for Ukraine supported justifiable self-defense to prevent a Russian government take-over. That defense succeeded.

When Russia shifted the battleground to Ukraine’s southern and eastern border regions, the conflict changed from a war of national survival to an ongoing battle for long-disputed territory. In the contested regions, languages and national allegiances are mixed. This “second war” has brought the number of Ukrainian war dead to over 70,000 (as of August 31). A recent New York Times article cited increasing Ukrainian losses. Is it morally just for the U.S. to keep fighting a proxy war with Putin’s Russia when it’s the Ukrainian soldiers who are dying?

Only President Zelensky will decide when to accept mediation of a ceasefire, a first step toward the negotiation of a long-term peace agreement. To date however, he seems unwilling to modify his top war goals of expelling Russian troops from disputed territory and recovering Crimea. An end to the flow of weapons and ammunition might prompt the Ukraine leader to accept that a David and Goliath battle is unwinnable over time.

Zelensky is unlikely (and may be politically unable) to stop the fighting as long as the U.S. and others continue to supply him with the guns and bullets his troops desperately need. Continuing reliance on long-range artillery and the rapid depletion of missile stock, have forced him to fundraise Western leaders repeatedly for more (and more sophisticated) weaponry. How long will Ukraine’s friends keep supplying arms?

An international peace coalition (300 people from 32 countries) met in Vienna last June. It called for a ceasefire, negotiations, and days of international actions. As the global peace movement gains support it will be harder for Western leaders to maintain the public support necessary for the funding of Ukraine weapons.

It’s time to question the conventional wisdom of our weapons supply policy. Democracy may be under threat in Ukraine, but not more so than in today’s America and other places (including Israel). So far, the only winner in the Ukraine war is the military-industrial complex, now reaping billions from defense contracts.

CIA Director William Burns and other experts on Russia have warned that Putin may resort to the deployment of nuclear missiles should he begin to feel threatened, especially in Crimea. Recalling Germany’s treaty humiliation in 1919, it seems unwise to demonize a whole nation for the evil acts of its leader.

With both Russia and Ukraine running short of weapons, Biden could already claim some success in degrading the Russian military. Now could be an opportune time for him to launch a global diplomatic effort to end the war. Russia has reportedly signaled an interest in a mediated ceasefire as a prelude to long-term peace talks. Turkey and the U.N. managed to negotiate grain deals with Russia during the war. Now China and other BRIC countries have the leverage to pressure Russia to remove its troops from at least some of the areas it holds.

As a major investor in the Ukraine war, the U.S. should encourage Zelensky to relent from his maximalist war goals. Neither Ukraine nor Russia has much to gain from territorial victories since most of the lands in conflict will be uninhabitable for generations due to the omnipresence of land mines and cluster bombs.

America should stop funding Ukraine’s war. Rather, it should help its suffering people with more humanitarian and economic assistance. It should call for international mediation to achieve a ceasefire and peace talks. For only diplomacy, not more war, will bring peace to Ukraine. The same could be true for Israel in its ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.

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Photograph Source: Fronteira – CC BY-SA 4.0

No one does a stadium show like Roger Waters. The music, of course, is resplendent, but so too are the soundscape, the images, the giant sheep and pig, the lasers, the films, the energy of the fans who—despite the language differences—sing along… “Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?” It is a riot of emotions. The quiet calm of Santiago is broken by familiar sounds and necessary feelings: yes, we are here; yes, we exist; yes, we must resist.

Santiago is a city blistered by social inequality. For two nights, Roger Waters played at the Estadio Monumental in Macul, a commune of Santiago that is more middle-class than the rest of the city although still not immune from the sharp divides that produced the massive social unrest of 2019. Then Roger sang a version of Víctor Jara’s El derecho de vivir en paz, with new lyrics for the new moment:

I can hear the Cacerolazo
I can smell you, Piñera
All fucking rats smell the same.

The Cacerolazo is the banging of pots, a social protest that resounded from Buenos Aires (2001) to Santiago (2011 and then again from 2019 to 2022). There is a good reason to walk on the streets and bang pots every day given the permanent condition of austerity reproduced by people like Chile’s former president Sebastían Piñera, one more of the “fucking rats” that make life hell. There is the austerity, the demise of social welfare and decent work, and the rise of poverty and social despair. Then there are the sharpened contradictions, the anger that sometimes gives rise to hope in madmen (Argentina’s incoming president Javier Milei is one of them) and at other moments, it gives rise to disorganized and organized forms of dissent.

A sheep flies over the tens of thousands of people in the stadium. It is the physical cognate of the song that flies off the stage, a paean to the atomization of people in society by this State of Permanent Austerity and of the necessity of resistance.

Through quiet reflection, and great dedication
Master the art of karate
Lo, we shall rise up,
And then we’ll make the bugger’s eyes water

Why not? Why not rise up? Sure, run like hell, run as fast as you can from the forces of repression that want to manage the contradictions of austerity. But then—as Roger does, as that sound of the hammer battering down your door quietens—take off the shirt that says, “run like hell” and put on one that says, “Resist.” The guitars tear through the night, the lasers flash to infinity, and the desire increases to rip off one’s fear of the State of Permanent Austerity and to rush into protest. But the images are chosen carefully. This is not a call for action without strategy. “Master the art of karate,” sings Roger. Like the karateka, dedicated study is needed, and the battlefield must certainly be approached with care to “make the bugger’s eyes water” and to do that with careful strategy.

The hammer’s sound is both that of the march of the police—in Chile the hated Carabineros—and the banging of the tools of the people, including the pots and pans. The stadium is engulfed by the madness of the electric guitar (particularly when Dave Kilminster has his eyes closed and his fingers aflame), heartbeats symphonized drawing people into Roger’s bar, a bottle of mezcal on the piano, Roger with his arms in the air, the night sky clear and hopeful because not far away is the dawn.

Universal Human Rights

About five kilometers from the Estadio Monumental is the Estadio Nacional, where Víctor Jara was assassinated by the coup regime of Augusto Pinochet 50 years ago. A few days before Roger’s show in Santiago, Victor’s wife, Joan Jara died, but their daughter Amanda was there to listen to Roger recognize the assassination of Víctor Jara and to Inti-Illimani open the show with a tribute to Víctor, including singing a full-throated version of El derecho, itself a tribute to Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese fighters.

Donde revientan la flor
Con genocidio y napalm
(Where they burst the flower
With genocide and napalm)

Jorge Coulón from Inti-Illimani belted out those lines with a kufiyah around his neck. Roger, with his acoustic guitar and kufiyah and with the haunting voice of Shanay Johnson alongside him, sings, lay down Jerusalem, lay your burden down.

If I had been god
I would not have chosen anyone
I would have laid an even hand
On all my children everyone
Would have been content
To forgo Ramadan and Lent
Time better spent
In the company of friends
Breaking bread and mending nets.

“Stop the Genocide” in white letters against a red background appears on the screens above the band’s head.

Roger was born in England in 1943 to a communist mother, Mary Duncan Whyte (1913-2009). His father—Second Lieutenant Eric Fletcher Waters, also a communist—was killed in Italy in 1944 (immortalized in my favorite song, The Gunner’s Dream from Final Cut, 1983). Five years later, the United Nations crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That text is the foundation of Roger’s beliefs (“I don’t know when I first read it,” Roger tells me after the show, but he refers to it often, including in his shows). The fierce defense of human rights governs Roger, his anti-war sentiment shaped by the loss of his father. It is this universal faith that drives Roger’s politics.

“Are there paranoids in the stadium?” Roger asks. We are paranoid not because we are clinically ill, but because there is an enormous gulf between what we know to be true and what the powers that be tell us is supposed to be true. Roger Waters stands for human rights, including the rights of the Palestinians. We know that to be true because that is what he says, and he acts according to that belief. But the powers that be say that what Roger says is not true and that in fact, he is antisemitic. A consequence of the powers that be is that they tried to cancel his show in Frankfurt and—weirdly—all the hotel owners in Argentina refused to allow him—but not his band—a room in their establishments (he had to stay at a friend’s house in Uruguay). When Katie Halper and I asked him about this attack on him, Roger responded:

My platform is simple: it is [the] implementation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights for all our brothers and sisters in the world including those between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. My support of universal human rights is universal. It is not antisemitism, which is odious and racist and which, like all forms of racism, I condemn unreservedly.

Roger says this over and over again, and yet, over and over again the powers that be malign Roger. “I will not be canceled,” Roger said in Birmingham at a concert. And why should he be? The attempt to cancel critics of Israel had some impact in recent years, but no longer carries weight: the atrocities of Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza have produced new generations of people who see the hideousness of the Occupation and refuse to bow down before the powers that be. “We need more than a pause” in the bombing of Gaza, Roger said from the stage in Santiago, “but a ceasefire that lasts forever,” the soundtrack to that sentiment produced by the saxophone of Seamus Blake and the lap steel of Jon Carin.

The show opens with Pink—the lead figure from The Wall (1982)—in a wheelchair, comfortably numb. In the second half, Roger is in the wheelchair in a straitjacket, thrown in there by orderlies of the powers that be. Is this the life we really want? It better not be. I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

Roger Waters’s This is Not a Drill tour moves on to Lima, Peru (November 29), San José, Costa Rica (December 2), Bogotá, Colombia (December 5), and ends in Quito, Ecuador (December 9).

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Image by Mike Erskine.

Liberals want us to believe something that is simply false: that there are meaningful solutions to the leading existential problem of our time under the reigning capitalist-imperialist order.

Recall how they responded to Joe Biden’s 2022 corporate climate bill – the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. The legislation was hailed by Democrats and the establishment “green” movement as a “historic” move off fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal) and to an ecologically sustainable energy economy. Never mind that, as the Revolutionary Communist writer Raymond Lotta pointed out:

“There is no explicit charge or comprehensive plan of action in this bill to move quickly to eliminate fossil fuel as the energy foundation of America’s economy. There is nothing in this bill that questions or challenges the U.S. as the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. Nowhere does this climate bill mandate (set enforceable targets for) fossil-fuel emissions cuts: whether in the extraction of fossil fuels, the industrial use of fossil fuels, the utility-scale generation of electricity, or from transport and agriculture…But the bill contains several key provisions that allow for and facilitate expanded fossil-fuel production, exactly the opposite of what is needed… this legislation falls massively and obscenely short of what is needed. Worse, t…[it] prolongs the dependency of the U.S. economy on fossil fuels…this bill is part of the problem of global warming, not the solution.”

The bill “revive[d] offshore oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska” and “weaken[ed] bedrock environmental laws to give faster fossil fuel project approvals and expedite the fracked gas Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia,” as the Center for Biological Diversity warned.

Blowing Past the Goldilocks Zone

And look now at a recent New York Times Op-Ed by the liberal climate scientist Kate Marvel, who titles her commentary “I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore.” Dr. Marvel, a researcher at the nonprofit Project Drawdown and a lead author of the Biden Administration’s Fifth National Climate Assessment (FNCA), thinks we should chill out a bit about how capitalism is turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber. She purports to believe that the magic of the marketplace is putting us on the right path to environmental healing.

Yes, Dr. Marvel acknowledges, humanity (try capitalism) “has put about 1.6 trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution — more than the weight of every living thing on Earth combined.” Further:

“Scientists have raised the alarm over and over again, and still the temperature rises. Extreme events like heat waves, floods and droughts are becoming more severe and frequent, exactly as we predicted they would. ..We showed what the United States would look like if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius. It wasn’t a pretty picture: more heat waves, more uncomfortably hot nights, more downpours, more droughts… climate science tell us how the feedback loops in the world climate system will make global warming worse. We can also now more confidently forecast catastrophic outcomes if global emissions continue on their current trajectory…the fossil fuel industry is still ignoring the science. Oil, gas and coal companies have already made plans for infrastructure that, if used as intended, would cause the world to blow past the Paris agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius in the next few decades.”

Dr. Marvel knows things aren’t looking good (to say the least) “on the current trajectory.” Her own report, the FNCA, spotlights dire perils to civilization: “accelerating sea level rise, intensifying extreme weather” and “reductions in biodiversity.”

It’s worse than she says. The standard and modest establishment climate goal is to cap the rise in average global temperature (AGT) below 2°C (3.6°F), and preferably at 1.5°C (2.7°F). Meeting that target requires bringing global CO2 emissions down to net zero by 2050. But the current trajectory is for AGT to go beyond 2 degrees Celsius in the 2030s, hit 3 degrees Celsius in the 2040s, and 4 degrees Celsius in the 2060s. This takes humanity well beyond what some climate scientists call humanity’s thermal “Goldilocks Zone” – the temperature spectrum within which decent human life and civilization can exit.

“Some Politicians Now Actually Campaign on Climate Change”

Still, Dr. Marvel is now feeling climate Hopey-Changey. She tells us to breathe a sigh of relief. Capitalist market forces and government agencies are now supposedly changing the trajectory by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy in electricity production. She waxes optimistic:

“State, local and tribal governments all around the country have begun to take action. Some politicians now actually campaign on climate change, instead of ignoring or lying about it. Congress passed federal climate legislation [the weak Biden bill critiqued above – PS] — something I’d long regarded as impossible — in 2022. We can do this. We now know how to make the dramatic emissions cuts we’d need to limit warming, and it’s very possible to do this in a way that’s sustainable, healthy and fair. The conversation has moved on, and the role of scientists has changed. We’re not just warning of danger anymore. We’re showing the way to safety.”

Yes, Dr. Marvel actually wanted us to marvel that “some politicians now actually campaign on climate change…” Surely she is aware that many politicians still actually campaign against climate science and denounce any efforts to reduce fossil fuel extraction and burning as nefarious “radical Left” plans meant to destroy great nations.

The politicians who still ignore and lie about climate change are significantly overrepresented in the US Minority Rule political system. One of those politicians is Donald Trump, the leader of an eco-fascistic party that holds down the Supreme Court of the world’s leading climate polluter nation. That party is well positioned to win back the presidency and US Senate next year. It holds down half of the nation’s powerful state governments. (In other countries, too, science-hating planet-cooking politicians hold great power. In Argentina, a major source of methane-producing animal agriculture, for example, the presidency has just taken by a far-right maniac who attacks climate science and environmental regulation.)

Climate Science vs. Capitalism

But I digress. What specifically does the FNCA that Dr. Marvel and her colleagues wrote for Biden offer to support her purported newfound optimism? “Mitigation and adaptation activities,” the report says, “are advancing from planning stages to deployment in many areas, including improved grid design and workforce training for electrification, building upgrades, and land-use choices…adaptation planning and implementation has advanced in the US [but…] most adaptation actions to date have been incremental and small in scale…Efforts to adapt to climate change and reduce net greenhouse gas emissions are underway in every US region and have expanded since 2018.”

Sorry, but this is small potatoes in relation to the ever-escalating climate catastrophe, the biggest issue of our or any time. Bear in mind that the Biden administration, which has broken yet another campaign promise by approving a Conoco-Phillps drilling operation in a formerly pristine part of the Arctic (the horrific Willow Project). Biden’s much ballyhooed “green” infrastructure bill does nothing to advance environmentally required green mass transit.

Is it possible to massively roll back the deadly Greenhouse Gassing of the planet? Of course it is. Yes, humanity can do that – and later on figure out how to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Scientists, engineers, policy planners and others have for decades known ways and proposed plans to restructure energy, transportation, agriculture, and agriculture to drastically reduce CO2 emissions. Remarkable technologies have emerged to enable these plans and methods: renewable energy systems, atmospheric carbon capture and more. “In a rational world,” the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) points out, “such plans would have been implemented when the first warnings of the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions were raised” (four-plus decades ago).

But here’s the thing: homo sapiens can’t and won’t do what is now existentially required under capitalism-imperialism. As the WSWS notes, the giant disparity between the threat and the remedies in place and proposed by US authorities “underscores the impossibility of combining a scientific approach to resolving climate change with the ongoing existence of capitalism and the dominance of the world economy by the drive for private profits and the division of the world into rival nation-states” (emphasis added).

If you want to fix a problem you have to go to its taproot. The taproot of the greatest crime in history – turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber – is capitalism, the class rule system of inter-firm and inter-imperial competition that is hopelessly addicted to and invested in fossil fuels to power its need for constant expansion and its imperial militaries and wars. It’s a disorderly global economic and state system devoid of any real capacity to sustainably re-orient and de-toxify human relations with the natural environment.

As the Marxist ecologist Jason W. Moore points out, it’s not really (or if you prefer merely) anthropogenic climate change we face today, it’s capitalogenic climate change.  Humanity per se didn’t set up the modern coal, gas, oil, livestock, automotive and airline industries or the giant global militaries (with the US far in the lead) and war industries that rely heavily on fossil fuels.  Capitalists and imperialists did that while most of humanity struggled to keep its head above water and eke out a “living” in the world capitalist rat race.

An ever more poisoned planet dominated by capitalist imperialists and broken up into dozens and dozens of competing nation states is not a rational or sane world. It is anarchic and exterminist, tied to an underlying mode of production that cancerously requires endless growth. It is too invested in fossil fuels to stop extracting and using them on a mass scale before the emissions resulting from the burning of coal, oil, and gas push the planet past irreversible tipping points of runaway warming. Capitalism is a fundamentally socio-pathological system that sees the ecological destruction it generates as a source of new profit opportunities – new shipping lanes available in Arctic regions formerly covered by ice, for example.

What’s required is a people’s socialist revolution that radically eliminates private ownership and profit at the commanding heights of human economic life. We must re-constitute production and consumption around an entirely new and different way of managing humanity’s interchange with nature – a mode of life that privileges the common good and life itself over private accumulation, wealth, and class rule.

Something Even Crazier Than Calling for Revolution

A gloomy aphorism common among certain left intellectuals says that “people can more readily imagine the end of life itself than they can imagine the end of capitalism.” If true, that tragic dichotomy must be forthrightly challenged, not merely bemoaned. It’s long past time to break through such suicidal thinking and struggle with folks to understand the scientific, historical-material reality. To continue down the capitalist road is to consign our own and other species to incredible suffering and extinction.

I understand that it sounds “crazy” and “extreme” – “screaming into the void,” to use Dr. Marvel’s words – for many to hear someone call for socialist revolution. Here’s something crazier: continuing to live under an eco-exterminist system that science (both natural and social/historical) knows to be cancelling – voiding – prospects for a decent human future. Time’s up for solutions under and through capitalism: under and through the problem. Dreaming of meaningful environmental correction under and even through that system is madness. We must imagine and then undertake the radical replacement of capitalism by revolutionary green and red socialism. Marx and Engels were right in 1848: it’s either “the revolutionary re-constitution of society at large” or “the common ruin” of all.

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Photograph Source: Wafa (Q2915969) in contract with a local company (APAimages) – CC BY-SA 3.0

The humanitarian disaster of the war in Gaza shows in both the wreckage of hospitals and the dying in and around hospitals. The need, said Dr. Hammam Alloh, an internist, is “First, we need this war to end, because we are real humans … We have the right to live freely.”

Healthcare workers at Al-Shifa Hospital buried over 180 dead patients. Norwegian physician Mads Gilbert reported that, “Twenty out of the 23 ICU patients had died. Seventeen other patients died because of a lack of supplies, oxygen and water. And three, if not five, of the 38 premature newborns have died because of this slow suffocation.”

Asked why he remains at Al-Shifa Hospital, despite the invaders’ orders to leave, Dr. Alloh explained that he didn’t choose to be a physician “to think only about my life and not my patients.” And, “who treats my patients? We are not animals. We have the right to receive proper healthcare.”  Alloh subsequently died from a bomb attack on his living quarters.

Expressions of outrage have circulated widely in the independent media. World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the UN General Assembly that, “You must act and you must act now … there are no words to describe the horror.”

The plight of Dr. Shadi Issam Radi is appalling. He is standing in a corridor of the hospital during his interview. Two little children are at his side. “I have worked in the intensive care department for seven years,” he says. “My wife was killed while I was working. I am obliged to bring the children with me. I am still working. Thank God for everything.”

Condemnations and revulsion are not enough. Fixation on the dire situation of the Gaza doctors contributes little to ending the war, just as treating the symptoms of sick people doesn’t cure them.  But knowing about the cause helps to achieve peace and to find curative treatments.

The plan here is to go scientific, to investigate a historical reality that, having fostered relations mired in lethal conflict, may someday usher in more promising realities.

The Palestinian people’s circumstances for living and for communal existence have long been unsustainable. Political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal recently explained why that is so:

“[W]ar between Palestine and Israel … is not a war around religion or between faiths or gods. It’s a war for that which is no longer being produced — land … The Palestinians are the Indigenous people of the region. They are thus equivalent to the Navajo, Apache and Seminoles of the West.”

Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan in 1956 spoke about land and the fight for land:

“What can we say against [the Palestinians’] terrible hatred of us? For eight years now, they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their land and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home … Without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home.”

Immigrants who were part of the Zionist movement, whose mission was to form a Jewish state, began to arrive in Palestine in the earliest years of the 20^th century, mostly from Europe. A burgeoning population needed land for sustenance, land with its topsoil, vegetation, crops, trees, space for living, and access to water in rivers, springs, and aquifers.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappe estimates that during the 400-year period of Ottoman rule, from 1517 on, Jewish people made up only two to five percent of the region’s population. A census in 1878 showed that 87% of inhabitants were Muslim, 10% Christian, and 3% Jewish.

Zionist publicists have portrayed pre-immigration Palestine as a “desert,” empty of people. However, Pappe indicates that in the 18^th century, “[T]he coastal network of ports and towns boomed through its trade connections with Europe, while the inner plains traded inland with nearby regions.”  Palestine “was part of a rich and fertile eastern Mediterranean world that in the 19th century underwent processes of modernization and nationalization.  It … was a pastoral country on the verge of entering the 20th century as a modern society.”

He adds that, “By 1945, Zionism had attracted more than half a million settlers to a country whose population was about 2 million …The settlers’ only way of expanding their hold on the land…and of ensuring an exclusive demographic majority was to remove the natives from their homeland.”

Antisemitism in Europe and elsewhere stimulated emigration to Palestine, more so after the Holocaust and Israel’s formation. That government in 1950 instituted its Law of Return which grants “every Jew in the world” the right to settle in Israel.

British rule over Palestine from 1920 to 1948, under a League of Nations “Mandate,” fit with imperialist ambitions, according to Pappe. The United States and France would be joining Britain in a joint venture with the new Israeli state to control the region and assure access to oil and gas. Likely expectations were that Israel would become powerful and its population would grow. Absorption of Palestinian land was part of the package.

In 1945, 84.7% of cultivatable land in Palestine was “Arab-owned.” The “newly established Israeli [military] forces in 1948 launched a major offensive” after Israel declared its independent statehood and after the surrounding Arab nations attacked. This was the setting for the “Nakba” (catastrophe); hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced from homes and land.

According to one report (Journal of Palestine Studies,1979), “Israel thus began its life with a vast stock of abandoned farmland and in the early years of statehood, when immigrants were pouring in, this land was ‘reclaimed’ for agriculture at an impressive rate. In the four-year period from 1948-49 to 1952-53, the physical area under cultivation in Israel almost doubled.”

Moreover, “About 80 percent, and probably more, of the 2,185,000 dunums (539,925 acres) brought into cultivation since 1948 thus constitutes farmland belonging to the Palestinian refugees.”

A study appearing in 2000 reports on the shrinking of agricultural acreage due to Israeli occupations: “The loss of large stretches of agricultural land, after 1967, due to land confiscation and closures, and limitations on water supply and product markets, has led to a substantial decline in the production of this sector.”

Ultimately, the reality of reduced access to land has left Palestinians with precarious living conditions and has forced them into a toxic relationship with Israel. An accompanying reality is that the international community’s arrangements for the partition of Palestine in 1947, and for enforcement, were flawed.

Other troublesome real-life phenomena include: competing Palestinian claims to oil and gas deposits off-shore and in the West Bank, and the continuous, death-dealing supply of U.S. weaponry to Israel.

Meanwhile, appeals to international law, moral principles, human rights, and common decency don’t move the mountain. The conflict continues. Personal or collective grief at the suffering and deaths of the Gaza doctors and their patients has little impact.

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Photograph Source: UK Government – CC BY 2.0

A familiar face has returned to Westminster as foreign secretary. It’s not every day that a former prime minister is inserted into high office through the House of Lords. But this is Britain, the land of gentlemen’s agreements.

David Cameron has even taken the title of Baron of Chipping Norton, the market town where the Cameron family has a cottage. The media once joked about the ‘Chipping Norton set’ inclusive of the Camerons and their neighbors, such as Murdoch executive Rebekah Brooks.

Of course, Cameron still has his fans despite the Greensill lobbying scandal. We’re told he brings “gravitas” and “experience” to the role. Gravitas like austerity and experience like bombing Libya into rubble.

This appointment is a sign that the Conservative government is in trouble. Rishi Sunak needed to bring on board a big name. He needed to distract from the fiasco of sacking his Home Secretary Suella Braverman over her inciting an outbreak of far-right protests.

It’s been a success at that level. “Daddy’s home,” tweeted Tory journalist Iain Dale when he heard the news. Forget the essay crisis style of leadership. Forget over 100,000 excess deaths thanks to austerity.

Worse still, Lord Cameron will not face awkward questions from MPs because a peer cannot address the House of Commons. British foreign policy has effectively been moved out of parliamentary scrutiny.

Still, such a farce is not unprecedented. The last member of the House of Lords to serve in one of the great offices of the British state was Lord Carrington, who served as foreign secretary in the first Thatcher government.

What Cameron really brings to the role is reassurance that the status quo is secure. He is a safe pair of hands for certain sections of the political and media establishment. But we can better understand Cameron’s foreign policy via a series of snapshots.

Exhibit A: Brexit

First, we have the obvious fact that David Cameron helped make Brexit happen by holding the referendum in the first place. He did so for purely cynical reasons to try and end the old battle in his own party.

After the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the Cameron government was complacent that it could win over the public with similar campaign tactics. Project Fear was rebooted for the Brexit referendum and all criticism of UK policy was surrendered.

Because the Remain campaign was effectively run by Team Cameron the pro-EU debates lacked any serious criticism of austerity. Most of the Conservative base voted Leave in the end, joined by UKIP and a sizeable minority of Labour voters.

Some people have even claimed he is the worst prime minister in British history. That’s a tough call, especially since he was followed by such luminaries as Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. At least Sunak shares his slick, yet empty PR managerialism.

It’s a sad fact that Cameron now looks like a figure of stability after his successors came bouncing onto the stage. Cameron will go down in history for Brexit, though he should be remembered for much worse things.

Exhibit B: China

UK China policy was more pragmatic under Cameron. Back in 2010, Hu Jintao was still general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping succeeded him just two years later. But it wouldn’t be for several years before Xi removed most limits on his power.

Even though the Obama administration was seeking to pivot US militarism to East Asia, the UK government was still in the ‘end of history’ phase with regard to China policy. Chancellor George Osborne talked up close economic ties to China as de facto support for democracy.

This theory was widely popular in Western liberal circles: China would inevitably move towards multiparty democracy as part of its embrace of capitalism. This was a convenient fantasy when Cameron and Xi were signing off on £30 billion in trade and investment deals.

Now the British right has assumed the same hostility to China as their US counterparts. The China Research Group was founded by Tory MPs in 2020 to forge a more belligerent response to the rise of China (as if they’ve only just noticed).

As a result, the Tory hard right is suspicious of Cameron because of his record in office and after office. He worked for a private Chinese investment fund after leaving Downing Street. Worst still, the fund in question worked on the Belt and Road Initiative.

Exhibit C: Israel and Palestine

Now we come to the biggest foreign policy question today: Israel’s war on the Palestinians. Cameron has been described as the most pro-Israel prime minister the UK has ever had. This requires some unpacking. He came to power just after the horrors of Operation Cast Lead.

Strangely, Cameron was the first British prime minister to refer to Gaza as a prison camp. He did so in a speech in Turkey after the IDF attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in 2010. Cameron called for the end of the blockade of Gaza and criticized the expansion of Israeli settlements.

Two years later, Cameron opposed the recognition of Palestine as a state at the UN. This is despite his claims to support the two-state solution (a prospect blocked by Israeli policy). But the lowest point came in 2014 with Operation Protective Edge.

During the 50-day war, the Cameron government was hesitant to take a strong position against Israeli aggression. Senior Foreign Office minister Sayeeda Warsi resigned from Cameron’s cabinet in protest calling for an arms embargo against Israel.

The Tory Arabism of yesteryear lives on in the form of close relations with the Gulf dictatorships. Cameron walked the line of arming Saudi Arabia and letting Qatar buy up British assets, while supporting Israel’s occupation to the hilt.

This is still the definitive contradiction of UK Middle East policy today. The UK has a £10 billion investment deal with Qatar, as well as a military cooperation agreement (signed by Cameron’s government).

Meanwhile, Qatar has pursued its own agenda. The Gulf kingdom has supported the Muslim Brotherhood, including its Palestinian affiliate Hamas. This feedback loop is rarely touched upon in British media.

Exhibit D: Iran

One of the very few cases where David Cameron helped improve global stability was Iran policy. To his credit, Cameron supported the Iran nuclear deal to lift sanctions in exchange for access to the nuclear facilities and guarantees that the program was for energy purposes.

Cameron met with President Hassan Rouhani in 2013. The reformist Iranian government was open to negotiation and engagement with Western powers. It was an opportunity to reset the West’s relationship with Iran after decades of hostility.

Of course, the UK was not alone in this process. The Iran nuclear deal was supported by the Obama administration, as well as by China, the EU and Russia. It was a great achievement of diplomacy.

The end of sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program allowed a space for dissent in a country blighted by a cruel dictatorship. It was possible to imagine a democratic opening for Iranian dissidents. However, it wasn’t to be thanks to the Trump administration.

All of these hopes were swept away in 2018. Donald Trump tore up US commitments to the nuclear deal and reverted to a tough line on the Islamic Republic. And Iran has since returned to hardline leadership embodied by President Ebrahim Raisi.

Exhibit E: Libya

Arguably, Cameron’s most egregious foreign policy decision was to join the NATO intervention in the Libyan civil war. The Arab Spring had destabilised the balance of forces in the Middle East, taking down dictators in Egypt and Tunisia.

On the back of the UN mandate for a no-fly zone, the UK launched Operation Ellamy as part of its support for the NATO campaign. Of course, the Benghazi rebels had pledged to respect old oil arrangements to win over European support.

Not only did the NATO campaign help destroy the Gaddafi regime, the Western powers did nothing to support a post-war reconstruction effort to create democratic institutions and a functioning civil society. This was neoliberal foreign policy par excellence.

Today, Libya is still a failed state more than a dozen years later. A playground for jihadis, human traffickers and warlords with foreign backers. The hopes of the Arab Spring in Libya have been extinguished by the forces of counter-revolution.

Exhibit F: Syria

Much like the NATO bombing of Libya, Cameron saw another chance for glorious victory in Syria. He was naturally eager to keep on side with the Obama administration and maybe repeat the photo op in Benghazi, but this time maybe in Aleppo.

Not long after the regime change in Libya, the Syrian uprising was turning into an armed conflict with the Assad regime fighting to crush the rebellion. Thousands of foreign fighters were soon rushing into the country to oppose Assad.

A lot of people have forgotten Cameron’s claim that there were ‘70,000 moderate rebels’ in Syria ready to seize power. These rebels just needed an air force to back them up. The truth of the situation was quite different.

Contrary to popular memory, the 2013 vote in Parliament was not about a no-fly zone. It was a vote on punitive bombing. A no-fly zone was never on the table and 2013 would have just been a bombing campaign (as we saw in the years that followed) with no strategy or end goal.

The 2013 vote was ‘lost’ because the government’s motion was rejected, but so was the opposition’s motion. Amazingly, Cameron’s hawkish line on Syria and Labour’s tepid opposition to it canceled each other out. It was a fluke occurrence.

The following year Islamic State seized huge amounts of territory across Iraq and Syria. Suddenly, the calls for ‘humanitarian intervention’ shifted to demands to ‘do something’ about the Islamist threat. Naturally, Cameron expanded the use of drone strikes.

The UK followed the US and France into a bombing campaign against ISIS, which also targeted other Syrian rebel positions in coordination with Russia. This was while NATO member Turkey was quietly enabling ISIS to counter the Kurds.

Exhibit G: Yemen

While the West was bombing Syria, another brutal civil war was just getting started in Yemen. The Cameron government would end up on the side of military intervention, albeit not direct, to destroy the Houthi movement.

Fearing the spread of Iranian influence, Saudi Arabia began bombing Yemen in support of the Hadi regime. The US and the UK supported the Saudi operation to keep status quo forces in power in Yemen.

In this case, British policy was moved by its longstanding relationship with the Saudi regime. So the British government has continued to sell vast quantities of military hardware to Saudi Arabia, even as the Yemen civil war resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe.

Any pretense of humanitarian intervention disappeared in the case of Yemen. The forces of regime change were opposed in favor of a blood-soaked tyranny backed by another blood-soaked tyranny.

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“It should never have happened,” an elderly Holocaust survivor of a Nazi death camp told the New York Times. He was referring to the colossal failure on October 7th, of Israel’s touted high-tech military and intelligence operations that opened the door to Hamas’ attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians. In many parliamentary countries, the government ministers who are responsible for this kind of failure would have immediately been forced to resign. Not so with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ministers.

Instead, Netanyahu’s coalition of extremists, who know that the Israeli people are enraged about their government’s failure to defend the border, has unleashed a “unifying” genocidal war against every child, woman and man that comprise the 2.3 million population of Gaza. “No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water. … We are fighting human animals and will act accordingly” was the opening genocidal war cry from defense minister Yoav Gallant to defend the onslaught that massive military forces are implementing against the long-illegally blockaded Gazan population.

Israeli leaders declare that there are Hamas fighters possibly in and under every building in Gaza. Israel has long made computer models using their unprecedented surveillance technology (see Antony Loewenstein’s interview in the November/December 2023 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). Nothing and no one is off limits for the Israeli bombing.

Keep in mind that Israel is an ultra-modern military superpower, with hundreds of thousands of fighters on land, air and sea, going after the few thousand Hamas fighters who have limited supplies of rifles, grenade launchers and anti-tank weapons. Moreover, all of Israel’s supplies are being replenished daily from the U.S. stockpiles in Israel and new shipments arriving by sea, compliments of President Biden. The invasion is a “piece of cake” an experienced U.S. government official told reporter Sy Hersh.

Contradictions abound. First, Netanyahu has always referred to Hamas as a “terrorist organization.” Yet he told his own Likud party for years that his “strategy” to block a two-state solution was to “support and fund Hamas.” (See, the October 22, 2023 article by prominent journalist Roger Cohen in the New York Times).

If Netanyahu believes dropping over 20,000 bombs and missiles on the civilian infrastructure of this tiny crowded enclave and its people, nearly half of whom are children, is so restrained, why has he kept Western and Israeli journalists out of Gaza, other than a few recently embedded reporters restricted to their seats in Israeli armored vehicles? Why has he ordered four nightmarish total telecommunications and electricity blackouts, with excruciating consequences, over the whole Gaza Strip for as long as 30 hours at a time?

None of this or international laws matter to the prime minister whose top priority is to keep his job, with his coalition parties, as long as the invasion continues. And before an outraged majority in Israel ousts him from power for not defending their country on October 7th from some two thousand urban guerrilla fighters on a homicide/suicide mission.

As the slaughter of defenseless babies, children, mothers, fathers and grandparents in Gaza continues to drive the death, injury and disease toll to higher numbers each day, the observant world wonders what the Israeli government, which regularly blocks humanitarian aid, intends to do with Gaza and its destitute, homeless, starving, wounded, sick, dying and abandoned civilian Palestinians.

After all, Gaza has only so many hospitals, clinics, schools, apartment buildings, homes, water mains, ambulances, bakeries, markets, electricity networks, solar panels, shelters, refugee camps, mosques, churches, and the clearly marked remaining United Nations’ facilities left, to bomb to smithereens. Endless American tax dollars are funding the carnage. Israel has also killed over 50 journalists, including some of their families, in the past seven weeks – a record.

Why will it take months to clear out the tunnels? Not so, say military experts in urban warfare. Flooding the tunnels with water, gas, napalm and robotic explosives are quick and lethal and would be deployed were it not for the Israeli hostages.

In addition to the reality that all Gazans are now hostages, over 7,000 Palestinians are languishing in Israeli jails without charges. Many are youngsters and women who were abducted over the years to extort information and to control their extended families in Gaza and the West Bank. What’s holding up an exchange, as Israel did twice before in 2004 and 2011? Again, the Netanyahu coalition stays in power by postponing the pending official inquiries into their October 7th collapse, that Israelis are awaiting.

Meanwhile, the hapless Joe Biden dittoheaded the previously hapless presidential pleas for a two-state solution. The dominant politicians in Israel have always sought “a Greater Israel” using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” meaning all of Palestine. Year after year Israel has stolen more and more land and water from the twenty-two percent left of original Palestine, inhabited by five million Palestinians under oppressive military occupation.

With Congress overwhelmingly in Israel’s pocket, Israeli politicians laugh at proposals for a two-state solution by U.S. presidents. Recall when Obama was president, Netanyahu went around him and addressed a joint session of Congress whose members exhausted themselves with standing ovations – a brazen insult to a U.S. president, unheard of in U.S. diplomatic history!

Day after day, the surviving Palestinian families are trapped in what is widely called “an open-air prison” being pulverized by Israel and its aggressive co-belligerent, the Biden regime. A regime in Washington that urges Netanyahu to comply with “the laws of war,” while enabling Israel with more weapons and UN vetoes to violate daily “the laws of war” and the Genocide Convention. (See our October 24, 2023 Letter to President Joe Biden and the Declarations from genocide scholars William Schabas and other expert historians).

Consider the plight of these innocent civilians, caught in the deadly crossfire of F-16s, helicopter gunships, and thousands of precision 155mm artillery shells. Whether huddled in their homes and schools or fleeing to nowhere under Israeli orders, the IDF is still bombing them.

Palestinians cannot escape their blockaded prison. They cannot surrender because the Israeli army does not want to be responsible for prisoners of war. They cannot bury their dead, so their families’ corpses pile up, rotting in the sun being eaten by stray dogs.

They cannot even find water to drink, since Israel has destroyed the water infrastructure – another of its many war crimes.

For years under Israel’s occupation law, collection of rainwater with rainwater harvesting cisterns has not been permitted. Rain is considered the property of the Israeli authorities and Palestinians have been forbidden to gather rainwater!

The Israeli armed forces will soon control the entire Gaza Strip. Under international law, Israel would become responsible for the protection of the civilian population as well as the essential conditions for Palestinian safety and survival. Will they at last abide by just one international law? Or will they establish obstructive checkpoints to restrict humanitarian charities trying to save lives while Israel continues to push the Gazans into the desert or neighboring countries?

The Israeli operation precisely fits the Genocide Convention’s definition by “intentionally creating conditions of life calculated to physically destroy a racial, religious, ethnic, or national group in whole or in part.” Netanyahu’s regime further incriminates itself by defining the targets for annihilation as being between 21st-century progress and “the barbaric fanaticism of the Middle Ages” and a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness.”

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