Photograph Source: Christopher Michel – CC BY 2.0

“There is no nation that feeds its enemies.  The British didn’t feed the Nazis nor did the Americans feed the Japanese, nor do the Russians feed the Ukrainians now.” 

– Amichay Eliyahu, Israel’s Heritage Ministry, July 24, 2025

“How many times can a man turn his head/and pretend that he just doesn’t see.”
– Bob Dylan, “Blowing in the Wind,” 1962

“Israel is prolonging the war, even though we do not see where further progress cans be made.”

–Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy, 2025

Last week, Bret Stephens, the New York Times’ leading warmonger and apologist for Israel, penned a lead editorial that denied Israel was committing genocide in Israel.  The editorials and articles in the NYT’s have always favored Israel, but no NYT’s columnist compares to Stephens, whose writings are chauvinistic and bellicose.  Stephens, a former editor of the Jerusalem Post and a supporter of all Israeli policies, left the Wall Street Journal to join the Times in 2017 because he believed Israel was not getting a fair hearing in the mainstream media.  In doing so, he joined other Jewish columnists at the Times (Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and Roger Cohen).  However, while these men bring some objectivity to the problem of Israel, Stephens has no limits in his support of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Stephens limits his definition of genocide to assault against innocent civilians, which allows him to ignore the international definition developed during World War II that includes cultural genocide.  Even with his definition, Israel is committing genocide on the basis of the brutal starvation of the Palestinian population, which is an assault on the physical survival of Gaza’s population. 

Israel is clearly committing cultural genocide to ensure that its militarism stops Palestinians in Gaza from ever constituting itself as a political, social, or cultural entity.  The convention against genocide mandates that signatory states must prevent genocide and that war criminals who carried out genocide must be punished.  The International Court of Justice stipulates that severe sanctions can be imposed on nations that conduct genocide.

The targeting procedures of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are consistent with the objectives of cultural genocide.  The IDF has made Gaza uninhabitable and, in the process, has systematically destroyed or damaged virtually the entire civilian infrastructure.  This military campaign has targeted every government building, hospital, medical clinic, school, university, mosque, library, and archive.  Israel had turned Gaza into an outdoor prison before the war, and there is no chance that Gaza can now be revived for civilian life.  As Netanyahu said in May, “We are destroying more and more homes.  They have nowhere to return to.”  Certainly, this is genocidal.

The relentless and repetitively compulsive Israeli attacks over the past two decades indicates that Israelis are making innocent Palestinians pay for the savagery of the Germans 85 years ago.  The current massacre, such as the one in Sedalia, with Palestinian children carrying white flags and running for their lives from Israeli tanks and artillery, is reminiscent of the massacre of the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of all Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.  We know so little of Israel savagery because the Israelis have kept journalists out of Gaza.  There is also terrible savagery in the West Bank, but Western journalists have displayed little interest in covering the terror imposed by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. The mainstream media is finally getting around to covering the starvation in Gaza after the evidence mounted in a year and a half of savage bombing with U.S.-supplied weaponry..

Now, we are seeing the IDF target women and children who are trying to get food and medicine from a very limited assistance effort that Israel is permitting.  According to Omer Bartov, a Professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, “Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world.” Chronically ill Palestinians have very little access to hospital care.  The fact that Palestinians must risk their lives to acquire a bag of flour is absolutely repulsive.

Stephens justifies Israeli savagery as necessary against Hamas, but there is little left of Hamas to target.  Instead, the IDF is preoccupied with moving Palestinian civilians from one part of Gaza to another, while its bombardment continues everywhere in the Strip.   The IDF fight against Hamas was essentially over more than a year ago, and the weakened group that still emerges from their tunnels to contest the IDF is extremely limited. Stephens explains that Israel could kill many more Palestinians if it was truly pursuing genocide.  What a pathetic statement.  Israeli intent is obvious.

Israeli acts of violence against innocent Palestinians have been taking place for over 75 years, beginning with the terrorism and ethnic cleansing that took place in the 1948 war…the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic.  The forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians from their homes that began in 1948 is still taking place in the West Bank, in addition to Gaza.  The Nakba in 1948 involved the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from what became the Jewish state.  Palestinians are the only refugees in the world that have hereditary refugee status among international relief agencies..

There are several certainties in this narrative.  First, the New York Times will always give Israel the benefit of the doubt, and Bret Stephens will excuse any barbarity that Israel imposes on the Palestinian people.  The NYT’s Walter Duranty, ironically, was the leading apologist for Stalin’s genocide in the 1930s.  Second, when scholars and academics study genocide in the future, they will frame their writings and research around Joseph Stalin and Ukraine (the Holodomor); Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust; and Benjamin Netanyahu and the latest Nakba.  Third, the United States—particularly Biden and Trump—will be guilty of complicity for the barbarity that Israel is imposing on innocent Palestinians.

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Mountain pass, California rare earth mineral ining and processing facility. Photo courtesy of Tmy 350 and Creative commons Attribution Share alike 4.0 .

Montanans are well aware of the asbestos disaster caused by the vermiculite mine in Libby that turned the town into a Superfund site. Libby’s tremolite asbestos lurked in the shadows for decades until determined citizens brought the hidden killer to light. But too late for more than 400 people who died and many more left sickened with asbestosis, dying slowly and painfully from asbestos fibers lodged in their lungs. 

A similar disaster was narrowly avoided when actinolite, a mineral that belongs to the amphibole family became a topic of concern about the proposed Skalkaho vermiculite mine near Hamilton in 1999. The question of asbestos was not addressed by officials until the mine was almost permitted. Only after the Bitterroot National Forest had issued its Final Environmental Impact Statement did the agency decide to evaluate the potential for asbestos exposure. The mining company folded before testing. 

As “Roadside Geology of Montana” notes: “Several early attempts to mine vermiculite in the Skalkaho intrusion went poorly. While at one time that seemed unfortunate, now it’s clear that we narrowly escaped having another major environmental disaster.”

Yet, Montanans are facing this situation once again with the US Critical Materials Sheep Creek mine project at the headwaters of the West Fork of the Bitterroot River. There could hardly be in a riskier place to mine given the location, the surrounding wilderness lands, and the threat of river contamination throughout the Bitterroot Valley. 

The company did not pick that spot for a rare earth elements deposit nor choose other minerals associated with the rare earth elements in the ore veins. But one of those minerals is actinolite, a close relative of Libby’s deadly tremolite — and both are asbestos in their fibrous form. 

As a recent study on the dangers of actinolite concluded: “The lack of widespread awareness regarding actinolite complicates efforts to mitigate its health risks. Unlike more commonly known asbestos types…actinolite often remains underestimated. Actinolite occurs in both fibrous and non-fibrous forms, but the fibrous type has garnered a reputation due to its links with asbestos. The health risks associated with this mineral cannot be overstated: Exposure to actinolite, particularly in environments where it is disturbed, poses significant respiratory health risks. The potential for mesothelioma, lung cancer, and other diseases expands with prolonged exposure.”

To be clear, nobody knows if there is asbestos at Sheep Creek. But there is good reason to suspect asbestos may be there. Geologists at Montana Tech report that actinolite is one of the most common minerals in the host rock and the veinlets containing ore are “actinolite-rich.” The Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology Crowley Bulletin reports actinolite at Sheep Creek “forms masses of radiating fibers surrounding other crystals.” The American Mineralogist, a prestigious industry journal, confirms: “actinolite forms clusters of fibers, usually in radiating groups.” 

There’s no question the actinolite is there. But although US Critical Materials has sampled ore for several years and tested for a long list of analytes, I can find no mention of possible asbestos on US Critical Materials’ website. 

Asbestos exposure happens by breathing contaminated dust, which is very hard to contain and clean up. Mining is dusty business. Workers at Sheep creek are already breathing dust. So why not test for asbestos to inform both the public and agency management? We’ve been down this lethal road before. Public health concerns are clear: test soon to avoid spreading asbestos around if it’s there.

Contact Bitterroot NF Supervisor Matt Anderson matthew.anderson3@usda.gov and Ranger Dan Pliley Plileydaniel.pliley@usda.gov about possible asbestos at Sheep Creek.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

If ever there was a sign that democracy in the United States is in dire straits, it was Congress’s rescission of $9 billion in funding for public media, achieved via a party-line vote of 216 to 213 on July 18, 2025. The vote took place despite the fact that millions of people wrote to their elected representatives urging them not to cut funds and that a majority of Americans, including Republicans, support federal funding of public media.

Public funding of media is not the problem that President Donald Trump and his puppet masters at the Heritage Foundation claim it is. Not enough public funding for it is the real problem. According to public media experts Victor Pickard and Timothy Neff, “the U.S. government is notable among democratic nations for how little it funds its public media.”

Compare the public media funding cuts to the $28 billion in tax dollars that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency will receive thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill—a subsidy that goes against public opinion.

A well-resourced media ecosphere is essential to democracy—an informed electorate is far more capable of keeping its representatives accountable than an ignorant one. Fascism thrives on ignorance, and that is precisely what the defunding of public media symbolizes within the context of excessive funding of armed enforcement agents.

Since 1967, congressionally appropriated funds have been distributed to thousands of small broadcast media outlets via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a private nonprofit organization. But CPB funding represents only about 0.01 percent of the federal budget. American media were never very well-resourced—and that was always the problem. For a nation of nearly 350 million people, a few billion dollars of taxpayer funding for public media is akin to crumbs from a heavily laden table.

And still, using those crumbs, small radio stations managed to operate in all corners of the nation, never fully thriving, and constantly relying on pledge drives and corporate sponsorship to fill budgetary gaps.

That sliver of the federal budget just barely enabled the maintenance of an essential public service. “Although mainstream news media face historically low levels of trust, public broadcasting enjoys relatively high levels, even among Trump supporters,” wrote Pickard and Neff in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2021.

CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison concurred, saying that “public media has served families in every corner of America, especially rural and tribal communities, providing extraordinary vital content and services free of charge.”

Moreover, according to Harrison, “Cutting federal funding could also put Americans at risk of losing national and local emergency alerts that serve as a lifeline to many Americans in times of severe need.” Given the unprecedented flooding that states like Texas and North Carolina faced in July 2025 due to unchecked global warming, local emergency alerts are more necessary than ever.

For nearly two decades, I worked at KPFK, Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, a station that once relied on CPB funding. At regular intervals, KPFK would test—as required by virtue of being a public radio station—its emergency alert system over the airwaves. The loss of public funding is likely to lead to the closure of many such public radio stations, and therefore emergency alerts, across the nation.

We knew this was coming, and indeed, Americans voted for it. The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, also known as Project 2025, made defunding public media a major goal, claiming that “To stop public funding [of media] is good policy and good politics.” Advising a future Republican president, the document’s authors quoted the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as saying, “conservatives were being ‘confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences—that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.’”

Project 2025 specifically named those media outlets deemed the greatest threats to conservative ideology, saying, “Stripping public funding would, of course, mean that NPR, PBS, Pacifica Radio, and the other leftist broadcasters would be shorn of the presumption that they act in the public interest and receive the privileges that often accompany so acting.” And yet, NPR and PBS in particular have often appeased the right, as per years of analysis by the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

Interestingly, Project 2025’s authors understood that stripping public funds for media would not impact big media outlets such as NPR and PBS, saying, “Defunding CPB would by no means cause NPR or PBS… to file for bankruptcy,” and that “NPR and PBS stations are in reality no longer noncommercial, as they run ads in everything but name for their sponsors.”

Indeed, one can argue there is a correlation between private funding and bias, and not public funding and bias. The more a news outlet relies on private sources of funding, the more likely it is to play it safe to avoid upsetting its sponsors.

U.S. media has been so tilted toward the right that we have a culture that is now dominated by conservatism. If media outlets operated according to the highest standards of journalism, they would indeed be biased against the doctrine favored by billionaires and bigots—injustice, greed, domination, and authoritarianism—values that thrive in a web of lies and wither when exposed by facts. Not being tough enough on right-wing ideas and policies has, in part, paved the path to defunding the media.

To summarize, conservative forces have claimed (wrongly) that NPR and PBS are biased against them, admitted that those outlets aren’t as reliant on public funding as smaller media outlets, and voted to defund public media anyway; they are hurting the constellation of small media outlets relying on taxpayer funds. The long-term conservative goal is to fuel public ignorance and the subsequent embrace of the morally bankrupt ideology of the right.

The coming mass shuttering of small publicly funded media outlets will happen within the context of already expanding news deserts. The U.S. has, for generations, suffered from unsustainable models of media funding. Without public funding, news outlets have few options: they can rely on corporate advertisements and sponsorships, appeal to foundations for private support, or cultivate subscriptions and donations from individuals.

Corporate advertising and private philanthropic support are most problematic and can result in subtle pressures on editorial coverage to appease funders. Meanwhile, subscriptions and donations are extremely challenging, especially for smaller media outlets, and rely on a populace weary of rising costs and stagnant wages.

Public funding of the media is an antidote to bias, not the driver of it. Just as public funding offers solutions to the crises of health care, child care, banking, and education, it is an obvious solution to the crisis of unsustainable journalism.

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

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Photograph Source: Ashraf Amra – CC BY-SA 4.0

The bronze sculpture by Marie Uchytilová, Memorial to the Children Victims of the War, depicting the 82 children of Lidice murdered at Chełmno in 1942, serves as a haunting reminder of the barbarity that defined the Nazi-led Lidice massacre. In reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazis razed the village of Lidice, executed its men, and deported its women and children to death camps.

The murder of these innocent children, whose faces are forever memorialized in Uchytilová’s sculpture, resonates deeply today, as we witness the suffering of children in Gaza, where the cycle of violence continues unabated. The massacres of these children, then and now, serve as stark symbols of the ongoing tragedy of war and genocide, linking past and present in an unbroken chain of human suffering.

In Gaza, the atrocities visited upon children are unspeakable, a violence that staggers the imagination. Omer Bartov, a distinguished scholar of Holocaust and Genocide studies, reports in The New York Times that more than 17,000 children have been slaughtered in Gaza, 870 of them infants, not yet one year old. He further reveals that Gaza now has the highest rate of child amputations per capita in the world. These chilling figures unravel the brutal truths of modern warfare, a sickening continuation of the horrors we dared to believe had been consigned to history’s darkest pages, alongside Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

But the genocide in Gaza, like the slaughter at Lidice, cannot be hidden. It stands as an undeniable, grotesque monument to the unchecked power of the state and the monstrous machinery of war. This tragedy is different from past atrocities in one disturbing respect: the suffering of Gaza’s women and children, the use of starvation as a weapon, the unrelenting bombardment, and the spectacle of mass murder are laid bare for all to see. The grotesque violence is not concealed, it is flaunted, glorified in the guttering language of demagogues and amplified by the shameful silence of the mainstream media. In addition, as a testament to the grotesque violence of gangster capitalism, entire villages are being bulldozed in the interest of appealing to private investors who can turn Gaza, in the words of President Trump, into a “riviera of the Middle East.”

The collapse of conscience is not a distant abstraction but a visceral reality, carved into the bloodstained bodies of women and children, their lives and futures obliterated by the ruthless forces of war. It is etched into the hands of those who perpetuate this unbearable violence against a defenseless yet resilient people. This erosion of humanity is also made explicit in the chilling words of Israeli politicians. Take, for instance, former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin, who pushed this rhetoric to unspeakable extremes in a 2025 interview on Israeli Channel 14. He declared, “Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy. The enemy is not Hamas, nor is it the military wing of Hamas … We need to conquer Gaza and colonize it and not leave a single Gazan child there. There is no other victory.” Feigin’s words lay bare a harrowing truth: this is no longer a war, but a calculated and dehumanizing military campaign, a ruthless genocidal war,  aimed at erasing not only the most vulnerable—Palestinian children—but an entire people from existence.”

Nowhere is the heartlessness of the Netanyahu government and the Israeli state, and the shameless indifference of most of the world. more evident than in the deliberate starvation of an entire people. Because of the enforced blockade of aid to Gaza, 81 people have died from starvation, while Gaza’s health ministry reports over 28,000 cases of malnutrition, including more than 5,000 children. “According to U.N. spokesperson, Thameen Al-Kheetan, “as of July 21st, 1,054 people have been killed while simply trying to obtain food.” This is not merely a humanitarian catastrophe—it is an act of collective punishment, a slow, grinding extermination. Infants wither in their mothers’ arms, their tiny bodies hollowed by hunger. Mothers, themselves starving, have no milk to give. Children gaze with sunken eyes and swollen bellies, their cries of hunger echoing into a silence broken only by the roar of bombs. The smell of death is everywhere-with no shame, only the hunger of extermination. The deliberate starvation and murder of those seeking bread, the withering of children before the eyes of the world, is more than a moral stain or a violation of international law—it is the mark of a state descending into the savagery and cruelty of genocidal authoritarianism. And yet, the silence of much of the world remains deafening.

The atrocities occurring in Gaza are not merely a crisis–they are a profound moral catastrophe, one that forces us to confront the global collapse of conscience. As we bear witness to the brutal, real-time images of children being torn apart by bombs, snipers, and the Israeli Defense Forces, we are confronted with a global moral collapse. The major powers continue to arm Israel, while academic institutions remain silent and corporate-controlled media either ignore or vilify those who dare to speak out against the Israeli government’s actions. We are witnessing what could be described as the Hiroshima of our time, an event that signifies not only the destruction of lives but the erosion of our collective conscience.

The parallels between the children of Lidice and the children of Gaza are undeniable. Both are casualties of power, victims of regimes that see them as expendable. Yet, in the erasure of history, in the paralyzing censorship that pervades many parts of the world, we risk forgetting the lessons of the past. The ghosts of genocidal violence are not distant echoes, lingering only in the forgotten corners of history, they are present, shaping the policies that continue to devastate innocent lives. To ignore these lessons is to abandon our moral compass, to deny our shared humanity, and to let history repeat itself.

We stand at a crossroads. The violence and brutality we are witnessing today demand more than passive observation; they demand collective moral action. The tragedy unfolding in Gaza is not an isolated incident; it is part of a broader pattern of state violence and genocide. It is a global issue, one that transcends borders and affects us all. It is time to acknowledge the atrocities being committed and to act with the urgency that the situation demands. The children of Gaza are not just casualties of a distant conflict; they are the children of humanity, and it is our collective responsibility to ensure their suffering does not continue unchecked. The time to dismantle the machinery of death and state terrorism is now.

Our collective responsibility is no longer a choice, it is an imperative. Every child is our child. This is not a hollow slogan but a profound truth, a declaration of our boundless commitment, our unwavering love, and our shared hope for all children, for whom we bear an irreplaceable responsibility. It is a call to action, an urgent demand for justice that transcends mere words, and a vision of hope as a fierce, militant force resisting the childcide that stains our world. It is a rallying cry against the gangster militarism and ruthless authoritarianism that enable such horrors, a reminder that our fight for the future is inextricably bound to the lives of the youngest among us.

Note from the publisher:  You can call your representatives via Code Pink’s Congress Action page. They provide a script that urges congress to:

Support a ceasefire and open humanitarian corridors
Vote NO on future weapons shipments to Israel
Demand aid for Gaza, not bombs
Dial (202) 224‑3121 as your voice from your ZIP code.
Find the contact link here.

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Photograph Source: Ashraf Amra – CC BY-SA 4.0

“I have a cold. And in one hour, I’ll have finished a twenty-four-hour shift, heartbroken again. I lost a cardiac patient because we had no medication. Another patient shot in the head, was left to die slowly because we had no ventilator. A child with a shattered skull and exposed brain matter just died in front of me. I also just found a kidney patient collapsed on the bedroom floor. He had a seizure due to brain damage because he has not had dialysis in three months. A diabetic man hadn’t eaten in four days. He cried when I asked why. I gave him fluids and some money to buy flour. I’m so sorry for the starving, for the children we couldn’t save, for the mothers, for the elderly, for the vulnerable. Not a single shift has passed without having me shattered.”

This is the reality in Gaza right now for the medical profession struggling to save an overwhelming amount of patients, not only from the bombings and gunshot wounds but now also from starvation. And the starvation has reached everyone, including the doctors themselves, some of whom have passed out on the floors of what remains of Gaza’s hospitals, then picked themselves up and gone back to work.

Those opening words belonged to Dr. Ali Tahrawi, an emergency room doctor at Alqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza.They were read aloud at a recent Washington, DC press conference by Dr. Ashraf Abou El-Ezz, a physician from Indiana who knows he has all the resources he needs.

But somehow, the words are never loud enough and even though they were spoken in the shadow of the US Capitol building, those inside had already left for the summer recess. And in any case, most of them are not listening. Only US Representative Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan Democrat and the sole Palestinian American in Congress, remained behind to host the press conference.

“I dread the moment Hanan and Misk will ask me about their legs,” continued medical student Sharad Wertheimer, a member, like the others, of the US-based global network, Doctors Against Genocide (DAG), reading the words of Hala Sha’sha’aj, a 40-year old mother of five from Gaza city.

“What will I tell them? When I go to buy shoes for my children, what will I do when Hanan and Misk ask why I don’t buy them any? If they say, ‘I want to play’, ‘I want to dance’, ‘I want to ride a bike,’ what will I say to them? They lost their father, the love, compassion and security he gave them, and they also lost their legs, the ability to move and play. Everything beautiful in their lives is gone. Their childhood was stolen. What did they do to deserve such devastation?”

One after another, the doctors in their white coats and scrubs stepped forward to read the words of their colleagues, friends, relatives and people they don’t know at all, just human beings who matter and who are trapped in the concentration camps and free fire zones that Gaza has now become under the Israeli bombardment and forced starvation.

The doctors have heard these stories over and over for 22 months, during which time the situation has continued to get worse and the inaction by the US and other governments more criminal. But now, in the heat of late July, having lobbied members of Congress, protested, disrupted meetings and been arrested, they are running out of patience.

“We will not be polite”, warned John Reuwer, a retired ER doctor and member of DAG, who said he had been to five war zones but had never seen anything as bad as the current situation in Gaza. “We are here to say ‘no more’”, he said. “We will not stop. And we will not forget.”

And so the doctors continued to bear witness on behalf of the besieged and desperate Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

“On the 28th of March, the soldiers called me and two other civilian prisoners, aged around 16 and 17, by name,” came the words of Dr. Khalid Alseer, read by Dr. Qurat-ul-ain Syedain. “It was night. They tied us very tightly at our wrists and ankles and put us in a military car. No one told us anything. We drove for around two hours into the hills. All the while they beat us, kicking us and humiliating us. They were laughing. I was trying to explain in English that the ties on my wrist were too tight, but they just said I was a doctor so I would be okay.

“At around 4 am I heard one say in Arabic, ‘these three are to be hanged.’ I thought it was the end. I was in pain. They had broken my ribs. Even when they said I was going to be hanged, I didn’t care. I just wanted it to end.” Dr. Alseer was eventually released in late September, reunited with his parents for whom he is the sole provider.

“In mid-April 2024, Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison,” read Dr. Roxana Samimi from an eyewitness account by a captive at the notorious detention center in the occupied West Bank and as told to Sky News. “The prison guards brought Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body. The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up. One of the prisoners helped him and accompanied him to one of the rooms. A few minutes later, prisoners were heard screaming from the room they went into, declaring Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was dead.”

How many more such testimonies need to be heard, the doctors wondered? What has happened to our humanity if we can live in a country that allows such a genocide to continue and our tax dollars to support it? Included in that so-called support is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israel-US front that distributes aid as a form of Russian roulette, where young children are picked off by snipers, running barefoot to faster escape the bullets while trying to get food to feed their families.

“This is not a war, this is an extermination campaign,” said Dr. Nidal Jboor, a Michigan internal medicine specialist and a co-founder of DAG. “From the concentration camps of the Holocaust, to the killing fields of Cambodia, to the concentration zones Israel is building across Gaza, and now the American-backed death distribution centers, the genocide is the same.”

“This institution is not moving with the majority of their constituencies,” said Tlaib, pointing to the Capitol dome behind her. “And it’s shameful because if they polled their constituents to ask if they wanted another dime spent on continuing to support another war crime in Gaza, they would tell you ‘hell no’,” she said. “We say enough is enough.”

The post “Everything Beautiful in Their Lives is Gone:” US Physicians Read Aloud the Searing Testimony of Desperate Doctors and Patients in Gaza    appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Afghan evacuees boarding American aircraft during Operation Allies Refuge in 2021.

In February 2022, a British Royal Marine officer—often among the brightest—made a mistake while seconded to a UK Special Forces base at Regent’s Park barracks in London. He was trying to sift through thousands of false claimants. His task: reduce the number of bogus and potentially dangerous applicants. He believed he was protecting his country.

He emailed a spreadsheet to the wrong people. On it were names of Afghan men and women who had helped the UK. Some had fought. Some interpreted. Some did quieter work. It listed where they lived—and with whom. It also included over a hundred UK special forces and intelligence personnel, plus other government staff.

It was, in effect, a kill list. Handed out by accident.

To keep the Taliban from seeing it—without knowing if they already had—the UK government asked the courts for silence. Also, what if those UK names were passed on to Russia, China or Iran? They got it: an injunction. No one could speak. The truth was buried—not like a hatchet, more like an Afghan peshkabz—so people could be rescued. I repeat: so people could be rescued.

Not all were.

They said 100,000 were at risk. About 18,500 got out. Secret routes. Back channels. The cost? Nearly a billion pounds. The total Afghan resettlement bill? Six billion? Numbers should be easy to count. People are not. Alarmingly, defence sources now said only one in sixteen people in the breach might be genuine—might. The rest with no link to the Armed Forces. There were even whispers of attempted blackmail by one Afghan. Whispers can be pernicious, even if true. Understandably, the real claimants still stranded in Afghanistan were no friends of those exploiting the leak.

The secrecy broke only last week when the courts lifted the injunction—by then a super-injunction, meaning even its existence could not be reported.

For some Afghans, it wasn’t until the morning of 15 July that they received news of it—through emails sent by the UK government in English, Pashto, and Dari. Lawsuits began. At last count, over 600 people were seeking damages. Manchester-based Barings Law is handling many. They take a maximum of 25 percent, so may make over £100 million in fees—though they say they’re giving voice to people who lost homes, livelihoods, and liberty.

It’s such a mess that most Brits who were once there themselves feel sick to their stomachs. Remember, Brits had no warning of Biden’s sudden decision in August 2021 to abandon the Afghans. No time to look after the Triples or interpreters. Most Afghans who escaped did so after 2021. Around 36,000 through official routes. Another 4,500 came after the leak. Nearly 7,000 more are on the way.

Passage wasn’t guaranteed. Vetting takes time. Some still wait. A UK broadsheet published just under 130 photos of Afghans from the list reportedly killed by the Taliban.

I remember seeing many Afghans in Kabul and Helmand working with the UK—men and women genuinely believing they were building a peaceful, post-war Afghanistan, even as some of their politicians fled to the Gulf with some of the cash.

The doors closed on 1 July. No fresh applications. The system is full. Or tired. Or both.

In Parliament, John Healey, the Defence Secretary, rose in a navy suit. His red-and-white tie matched the earlier ministerial red box. One report said the tie was askew. It wasn’t. It was straight as a blade. He said 900 primary applicants, plus 3,600 family members, had been relocated. Cost: £400 million. They’re reviewing policy. The Triples will be reconsidered. Vetting is strong, he said. He said many things. Notably, he didn’t seek political capital from the fact it happened on a Tory watch.

It was said Tory leader Kemi Badenoch had only just learned about the leak—having declined a security briefing months ago. Interestingly, former Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak called a General Election the day after a judge declared the super-injunction should be lifted.

Outside Westminster, people got on with it.

In London, Nooralhaq Nasimi built something. A refugee turned citizen, he founded the Afghanistan & Central Asian Association. They taught English, helped women, showed people how to live here without losing themselves. His daughters, Rabia and Shabnam, joined him—sharp, certain voices for the new Afghans.

Then there’s Dr. Waheed Arian. He came from war. Became a doctor. Now he heals by phone—telemedicine calls to Helmand. His way of fighting back.

But last week, the headlines were never about them. Nor were they just about false claimants. They were also about the Triples.

CF333 and ATF444. Afghan special forces. Trained by the UK. Fought beside them. Killed for them. Left behind by them. I remember such men at such bases as Camp Bastion and Lashkar Gar.

Often small, they moved like hawks. Five thousand served alongside UK Special Forces. Trained, equipped, paid by the UK. That’s not anecdotal—it’s in court filings and official assessments. What’s under scrutiny now isn’t their service, but how they were treated after 2021. But the figure—5,000—is solid.

When they tried to come here, they were turned away. The Ministry said they didn’t serve ‘closely enough.’ Meanwhile, dozens were caught and killed as referenced above. Others tortured. Some ran.

One, a former CF333 sniper—they call him Habibullah—lives in a shared hotel room in Worcester. Supported on about £9 a week. Eighteen months waiting for asylum. Perhaps even greeted by anti-migrant protesters who have no idea what he did for UK forces. Also unaware that only 4% of migrants are asylum seekers. He went on raids. He hid. He fled. He made it here—as I say, perhaps now only hearing people shout him down.

Another flew intelligence drones. Denied entry twice. Still in hiding. Maybe in a basement. Maybe listening for knocks. Maybe hasn’t seen daylight in days.

Johnny Mercer, former Veterans Minister, called the programme hapless. I met Mercer in Kabul in 2008 when he still wore the uniform. T-shirted, sometimes. Boots dusty. He had that look soldiers get—somewhere between angry and exhausted. Never lost his manners, though.

Now they’re reviewing it all. The Triples. The rejections. The silence. Some 2,500 cases are under new scrutiny. Mercer strongly believes that Afghan special forces who worked with British personnel—the Triples—should be here, for their own safety. ‘An uneasy but necessary rescue job,’ someone called it.

The leak, the injunction, the flights—all of it converges. Lawsuits mount. Politicians talk. It’s a numbers game now. Many made it. Many did not. Some wait. Some remember the promises. Some, not a small number, may well be bogus.

That’s the story. Brutal. Simple. Sad. The way most stories end when a state picks up a weapon for someone else, before being obliged by said masters to scarper.

I mean—what were we even doing in Afghanistan? It’s not like we gained any credit from the aggressive likes of JD Vance, who calls the UK ‘a random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.’ (All the more extraordinary that he chooses the Cotswolds for the family summer holiday this year.) And we all know ‘no new wars’ Trump has already overseen almost as many air strikes in five months as Biden in his whole presidency.

But I keep going back to the Royal Marine.

He sent the wrong file.

It was as simple—and as disastrous—as that.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Egyptian-born Omar El Akkad had studied in the United States and been 10 years a journalist when, in the summer of 2021, he became an American citizen. Covering the War on Terror in Afghanistan and at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay exposed him to the “deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing they called “the free world.” Yet he believed the cracks could be repaired – “Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”

The slaughter was Israel’s razing of Gaza following Hamas’s rampage into Israel on October 7, 2023. The Israeli assault escalated to include massive bombardment, enforced hunger, destruction of hospitals and schools, bulldozing of dwellings deprivation of medical care, torture and the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children. The onslaught caused Akkad to despair for Gaza’s Palestinians and for his adopted country, whose financing and weapons enabled it. He channelled that despair into the rage that inspired this excellent and troubling book.

One Day, Everyone Will Always Be Against This is neither polemic nor memoir, although it contains elements of both. Akkad’s prose is an appeal to readers not to wait for “one day” in the distant future to resist injustice not only in Gaza, but in the wider world: “In the coming years there will be much written about what took place in Gaza, the horrors that have been meticulously documented by Palestinians as they happened and meticulously brushed aside by the major media apparatus of the western world.” When the killing ceases, as with genocides of native Americans, Tasmanians, Namibia’s Hereros and Namas, Armenians, Jews and Tutsis, it will be too late.

Akkad’s condemnation of U.S. policy in the formerly-colonized world sits uneasily beside his choice to live and raise his children in the land that torments people who, like him, are brown or Muslim or doomed to live under American-supported Arab dictators or Israeli occupation. His rationale is as simple as it is understandable: “I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.”

He is unafraid to speak against the Biden administration’s veto of United Nations resolutions calling for ceasefires in Gaza (“untroubled when they say a ceasefire resolution represents a greater threat to lasting peace than the ongoing obliteration of an entire people”) and its termination of funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that was the primary supplier of food, medical care and education to Palestinian refugees. Yet speaking out seems futile. As the author of the award-winning novel American War and sometime columnist, he does not spare himself and other writers for political impotence: “What is this work we do? What are we good for?” He quotes Egyptian-American poet Marwa Helal:

this is where the
poets will say: show, don’t tell
but that
assumes most people
can see.

Too many seek refuge in propaganda that what is being done to Palestinians is necessary. Akkad quotes an Israeli newspaper post’s headline from seven months prior to October 7: “When Genocide is Permissible.” Palestinians are killed every day in Gaza, “but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that’s what those people do, they die.”

This book is not devoid of hope, which he finds in resistance that can be positive (“showing up to protests and speaking out”) and negative (“refusing to participate”). He praises students “risking expulsion and defamation, risking their livelihoods, their entire careers” and Jewish protestors “being arrested on the streets of Frankfurt, blocking Grand Central Station in New York, fighting for peace.” Their efforts, however ineffective, absolve them of the culpability of waiting for everyone else to be “against this.”

Charles Glass is a writer, journalist and broadcaster, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past 50 years. He was ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent from 1983 to 1993 and has covered wars in Lebanon, Syria, Eritrea, Rhodesia, Somalia, Iraq, East Timor and Bosnia-Herzegovina. His many books have dealt with the First and Second World Wars as well as contemporary Middle East history.

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Photograph Source: Wikideas1 – CC0

The United States is responsible for half of global spending on defense.  The Trump administration is committed to spending more than $1 trillion dollars on defense, and this figure doesn’t include the hundreds of billions devoted to the intelligence community, the Department of Energy, the Veterans’ Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security.  There is huge waste in the defense budget, and the major culprits in this department are the unneeded modernization of U.S. strategic weaponry and the so-called Golden Dome national missile defense.  The enormous cost and technological deficiencies of the U.S.-supplied, European-based missile defense system adds to the huge bloat in U.S. defense spending.

The Golden Dome missile defense system, as proposed by President Trump, is estimated to cost $175 billion. This cost is just for the initial three-year build, with ongoing operational and sustainment costs potentially pushing the total figure much higher. Some estimates from organizations like the Congressional Budget Office suggest a total cost between $161 and $542 billion over two decades. Since programs were first launched in the 1950s to build systems capable of intercepting incoming nuclear or conventional weapons, the United States has spent more than $400 billion on various missile defense programs.

Over the years, NMD has been a technical flop, having failed most of its tests.  The NMD system has flaws such as an adversary’s ability to use shorter range ballistic and cruise missiles that could “underfly” NMD.  The U.S. system could be defeated by numerous unsophisticated countermeasures and decoys that would overload the NMD system and create confusion.  Moreover, the U.S. system will never be tested in a realistic battle environment, and there is no assurance that a U.S. system could be effective against all of the many varieties of countermeasures.

Even a flawed NMD system will create instability in the nuclear community.  Russia would fear that the United States would feel protected by the so-called shield, and China would fear that its smaller nuclear arsenal would be compromised.  The level of instability could lead such non-nuclear states as Japan and South Korea to pursue nuclear weapons and thus weaken the Non-Proliferation Treaty that has kept the number of nuclear states to nine.  If unchecked, proliferation would have no logical stopping point.

Laser-driven systems, launched in the atmosphere or in outer space, have still not resolved their problems, despite billions of research dollars by various administrations over the past four decades.  Testing of these systems has failed to produce credibility, and some of the tests have created a false reality by programming the flight characteristics of the targeted missiles and artificially identifying the test missile from the decoy.

Finally, there are alternatives to national missile defense, particularly the pursuit of arms control and disarmament.  The United States missed a major opportunity in the 1990s and 2000s, when Russia was weak and open to a strategic dialogue and China was still committed to minimal strategic deterrence,  Moreover, the last arms control agreement between the United States and Russia—the New Start Treaty—is scheduled to expire in January 2026.

The U.S. retreat from arms control and renewed commitment to NMD will only worsen the problem of nuclear proliferation as nuclear nations will pursue greater deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles and non-nuclear states, such as Japan and South Korea, could consider the deployment of nuclear weaponry.  The absence of any nuclear dialogue at present and the strained relations between the United States and both China and Russia are major contributors to the current state of international instability.  The Trump administration’s cut backs at the Department of State and the National Security Council as well as the politicization of the intelligence community will make it more difficult for the United States to enter a serious and substantive dialogue on any aspect of arms control.

Our European allies are opposed to a U.S. missile defense system because of the unilateral abilities it will provide for U.S. security and the risk of greater proliferation,  President George W. Bush’s abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty marked a major setback to nuclear stability because it created an incentive to produce additional offensive weaponry.    Overall, there is no reason to invest in a national missile defense system, and no reason to believe that, if we do, U.S. strategic security will be enhanced.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Donald Trump is putting in place the largest tax increase in the country’s history with his big import taxes (tariffs). We won’t know the full size of Trump’s taxes until after Liberation Day III (August 1), and probably not even then, but we already know that they are huge.

This is evident from the tariff revenue the government is collecting. In June the government collected $26.6 billion in tariff revenue. That is up from around $6 billion a month in 2024 before Trump’s tax hikes. The difference of $20 billion comes to $240 billion on an annual basis. Summed over a decade, as we do with other measures, this comes to $2.4 trillion.

This would be a substantial tax hike in itself, roughly $1,900 per household, but we know that the figure is almost certain to go much higher. Trump is threatening taxes of an additional 10 to 30 percent on imports from our major trading partners, such as Mexico, Canada, the European Union, and Japan. The tax take could easily end up being twice its current level, making Trump’s tariff frenzy by far the largest tax increase in US history.

While we have a great deal of evidence showing that US consumers will end up paying the bulk of these taxes, the Trump administration is in full denial mold. The first clear evidence of the tariffs’ impacts on consumer prices came with the release of June Consumer Price Index (CPI).

There were sharp price increases in some of the items subject to large tariffs. For example, apparel prices rose 0.4 percent, appliance prices rose 1.9 percent, and the price of visual and audio products increased by 1.1 percent.

The overall price index outpaced wage growth, pushing real wages down 0.1 percent for the month. While wage growth data are erratic, as is the CPI, wage growth has been slowing in recent months. A slower pace of wage growth, coupled with more rapid inflation, will mean a reduction in real wages and living standards, after healthy growth over the Biden years taken as a whole.

Many commentators (including me) have been surprised that we have not seen larger increases in prices from the tariffs. There are two factors that likely explain why the impact has not been larger so far.

First, there was a massive accumulation of inventories in the first quarter as businesses rushed to stockpile imports before the tariffs hit. We had been accumulating inventories at an annual rate of just over $50 billion in 2024. In the first quarter, we accumulated inventories at a $207 billion annual rate. Businesses are now selling from this stockpile, on which they did not pay the Trump tariffs.

The other main reason is that businesses do not know the tariffs will stick. Trump seems determined to do his reality TV show routine where we all find out the tariffs after the next commercial break. This uncertainty is likely discouraging businesses from jacking up prices as much as they might otherwise.

That reluctance can be seen clearly in the auto sector. Car prices actually fell by 0.3 percent in June. It is likely that many manufacturers are reluctant to raise prices based on tariffs that may not stick. They are prepared to take smaller margins, at least in the short term, rather than risk pricing themselves out of the market. Over the long term, if the tariffs remain in place, they will almost certainly raise their prices to pass on much, if not all, of the cost.

One issue that Trump has repeatedly raised is the possibility that exporters will absorb much of the tariff. Past experience shows this is generally not the case. We have limited data to date, but thus far it does not appear that exporters are absorbing the Trump tariffs.

Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers put out a study last week that tried to make the case that import prices were falling relative to domestic prices, and thereby claimed this meant importers were absorbing the cost of the tariffs in lower prices. This is not a serious way to measure the effect of tariffs for the simple reason that we expect tariffs to raise the price of domestically-produced goods as well.

One of the points of a tariff, and certainly one claimed by Trump, is that it will promote domestic industry. Part of that story is that by raising the price of imports, it will make it possible for domestic competitors to also increase their prices, thereby getting larger profit margins. The larger profit margins are supposed to lead to more investment and output growth.

Since the price of domestically produced goods are expected to rise in response to tariffs, showing the relative movement of the price of imported goods and domestic goods tells us nothing. Rather, we would be interested in how the price trends of imported goods and domestic goods changed following the tariffs. Here’s that picture.

As can be seen, the price of core (non-fuel, non-agricultural) imports had been rising gradually in the year prior to Trump’s election, when people first began to expect tariffs. It has continued to rise modestly in the eight months since the election. If there has been any slowing of this increase it has been very small.

On the other hand, there has been a clear reversal of course for core goods in the CPI. The price of these goods had been falling at roughly a 1.5 percent annual rate from March of 2023 to August 2024. Since August the price of core goods have risen at roughly a 1.0 percent annual rate. If the trend of falling prices from last August had continued, goods prices would be roughly 2.0 percent lower today. Since we spend over $6 trillion a year on goods consumption, this 2.0 percent difference would translate into $120 billion in annual savings, roughly half the size of the tariff revenue we were collecting in June.

These calculations are obviously crude, but they should give us a rough idea of magnitudes. What it looks like to date is that we are seeing a substantial impact of tariffs on consumer prices. We will almost certainly see more impact over time from the tariffs already imposed, if they remain in effect, and we will see a much larger impact if Trump goes through with the new round of taxes promised for Liberation Day III.

In short, we are in fact seeing the largest tax hike in the history of the country.

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

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As Trinidad and Tobago prepared for national elections in April 2025, politicians, economists, and analysts eyed the fate of a dragon that slept just off the country’s shores, in Venezuelan waters. The future of the massive gas field, known as “Dragon Gas,” had recently been dealt a heavy blow. As collaboration between Trinidad’s National Gas Company and Venezuela’s national oil company (PDVSA) had only been made possible due to Biden-era sanctions waivers for the latter, the election of Donald Trump cast doubt on the viability of the project.

The Trinbagonian government had made Dragon Gas the center of its promises to revitalize the country’s declining oil and gas industry and end the nation’s economic malaise. However, the Trump administration’s vow in late February to cancel all Biden-era sanctions waivers for Venezuelan fossil fuel projects made the government’s promises of future prosperity increasingly dubious. As Dragon Gas was effectively declared dead in the weeks leading up to the Trinbagonian elections, so too were the governing party’s chances at re-election. They were swept out of power in a landslide opposition victory.

A deeper look at this moment of intense contestation over subsoil extraction between petro-states can help shed new light on some crucial, less-understood aspects of fossil politics in an era of climate crisis. The fate of Dragon Gas reveals how economic sanctions, conventionally understood as targeted measures, actually cause powerful regional effects on unsanctioned countries. The death of Dragon Gas also foregrounds the severe limits of global south countries’ control over resources they ostensibly own, affecting their pursuit of alternatives to extractivism. The consequences of this failed project reveal one last thing: the political fall-out of fossil-fuel dependence gone awry, a type of “late petro-state politics” that calls into question our understanding of the United States itself.

The Latest Developments in the Oldest Petro-State

Trinidad is arguably the world’s oldest petro-economy. It was home to a well by 1857, two years before the drilling of the Pennsylvania well that is often treated as the birth of the modern oil industry. By World War I, the British colony of Trinidad was a primary supplier of oil to the British Empire, the world’s largest consumer of petroleum at the time.

Oil extraction in Trinidad began under colonial conditions. While Trinidad gained independence in 1962 and partially nationalized the oil industry during the 1970s, in practice the country does not entirely control the exploitation of its subsoil resources today. As the saga of Dragon Gas reveals, the country remains bound to the vagaries of the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil and gas, the United States.

The Dragon Gas Field, which would only require a short pipeline to pump gas into Trinidad’s robust natural gas-processing infrastructure due to its proximity, is an unprecedented project. It would enable Venezuela, for the very first time, to export its natural gas, which unlike oil, has to be processed to become a monetized commodity. It would also bolster Trinidad’s natural gas exports at a critical juncture. While it is among the world’s largest exporters of ammonia and liquefied natural gas (LNG), the country’s processing plants have been operating below capacity over the past decade, due in part to the United States’ commitment to fracking, which has converted the U.S. to a globally-dominant producer of natural gas. Though the project would radically restructure the power dynamics between the region’s oil producers, its fate has been ensnared in a web of sanctions: the project requires a permit from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)—the international punitive wing of the US Treasury.

Rather than seriously exploring alternatives to tenuous petro-development, the outgoing government had been focused on wooing the United States to secure sanctions waivers. Though the opposition party (UNC) has accepted the demise of the Dragon Gas project, they remain firmly committed to extractivism, promising to obtain natural gas from Guyana. Yet, as Guyanese officials have made clear to Trinidad’s new government, they also do not effectively control the fate of their natural gas. Guyanese officials have stressed that the decision regarding a potential gas pipeline to Trinidad is ultimately in the hands of US corporation Exxon-Mobil, which has expressed resistance to such a project, given that the much longer pipeline would still have to pass through Venezuelan waters.

The Trinidadian government has proceeded as if they can control the gas-flows into Trinidad by finding an unsanctioned supplier. Nevertheless, US sanctions, though framed as targeted punitive measures, produce wide-ranging regional effects. Even more to the point, however, the final decision on resource extraction often lies not with the governments of Caribbean countries that ostensibly “own” these resources, but with the private corporations that fund and execute their extraction.

A Petro-State Crisis Foretold

Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil famously asserted that the petro-state performs the “magic” of turning hydrocarbons into money, which is supposed to be spectacularly redistributed to the population. Ultimately, as Coronil himself was aware, this is not exactly the case.

Over a hundred years ago, private capital structured oil industries in Trinidad and Venezuela to reproduce dependency on export of a raw material. In Venezuela, Dutch and US companies offshored refining capacity to Curaçao and Aruba in the early 20^th century to ensure a separation between the labor of refinement and sites of extraction. Like Trinidad, Venezuela formed a national oil company during the oil boom of the 1970s, but it continued to be dependent on crude export and foreign capital. In addition, even at its peak, only a small percentage of the population was employed the oil and gas industries in Trinidad and Venezuela, though an upper-middle-class minority did benefit from professional employment.

The 2002-2003 Oil Strike of the early Chávez years further exacerbated Venezuela’s reliance on a very crude (pun intended) form of extractivism, leading to the flight of the upper-middle-class professionals who had provided the industry’s technical expertise. The fact that the country with the world’s largest reserves of oil experiences gasoline shortages and has to import refined oil has many causes, including current government mismanagement and US sanctions. Many of the roots of the current crisis, however, predate the Bolivarian revolution by decades.

Trinidad does not face an economic crisis of Venezuela’s magnitude. Nor is it as dependent on crude oil export: windfall profits from the Oil Boom were used to construct value-added processing infrastructure for natural gas. Even still, Trinidad’s declining production and economic downturn are conditioned by its geopolitical context. Trinidad sits next to Venezuela and Guyana, the former a heavily sanctioned petro-state and the latter a new petro-state that charges extremely low royalties on foreign companies. Meanwhile, the rise of the United States to the position of the world’s largest producer of oil and gas since 2014 has weakened the bargaining power of established petro-states in the Global South and diminished U.S. reliance on imported oil and gas.

The Rise of “Late Petro-State Politics”

“Petro-states” are often defined as countries whose economies are highly dependent on the extraction or export of oil. The term usually carries the connotation of governmental “corruption” that allegedly accompanies the “resource curse” of petroleum. As such, the label is often only applied to states in the Global South, thus reproducing a (neo)colonial discourse that sees non-Western states as deviating from liberal democratic models of good governance.

The United States has historically been exempted from the label, both because it has touted itself as a liberal democratic Western nation and because its consumption of oil from around 1950 to 2011 outstripped domestic production. This has obscured the longer role of U.S. companies in profiting off of foreign fossil fuels, as well as the role of U.S. consumer demand in sustaining systems of extractivism. Over the last decade, however, the United States has been the world’s largest domestic consumer and producer of oil and gas by large margins. If the petro-state, as scholar Michael Watts has suggested, is defined by “addiction” to oil, then the United States is a petro-state that is now doubly addicted.

Framing the United States as a “petro-state” casts the country’s current political crisis within a shared regional context of climate crisis. Old petro-states in the region are experiencing what I call “late petro-state politics.” As the ability to turn fossil fuels into money faces a present of climate crisis, but petro-states remain addicted to oil and gas, politics themselves become fossilized. In this temporality, the United States, buffered by its capital and imperial power, is living in what should be a distant past of “drill, baby, drill.” Venezuela, facing an accelerated crisis, is living in the future of declining production and economic downturn. To very different degrees, an increasingly authoritarian populism replaces redistributive petro-populism as the basis of the social contract in these countries, even as these countries currently face very different fortunes.

This is the case in Venezuela today, where the vast social welfare infrastructure of the Chávez years has rapidly collapsed since 2014, not coincidentally the year that the United States cemented its global dominance in oil and gas production. Authoritarian politics and transactional loyalties hold an eviscerated social contact tenuously in place. For politicians, nationalism beckons as a distraction for a disgruntled populace, as the country’s recently-intensified border dispute with Guyana makes clear.

While avoiding political crises as intense as those of its neighbor, since 2014, politics in Trinidad has increasingly depended on promises of spectacular fossil fuel wealth to sugar-coat the reality of a declining petro-economy. The former government simultaneously preached contradictory discourses of austerity and impending prosperity linked to Dragon Gas. After the project’s demise, nationalist populism beckoned. Kamla Persad-Bissessar, who was elected as Prime Minister in 2025 by promising renewed working-class prosperity, has blamed Trinidad’s economic and security crises on Venezuelan migrants and praised Trump’s policies.

While the United States has faced no comparable economic crisis, its current political leaders hype bellicose nationalism and anti-immigrant border security while making empty promises of imminent prosperity and greatness. In Trump’s 2025 inauguration speech, the president promised to “drill, baby, drill,” rooting this mirage of greatness in the “liquid gold beneath our feet” that would make the US “a rich nation again.” After bombing Iran, Trump’s only immediate solution to political and military quagmire was to repeat his command to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL,” this time in capital letters. Yet, this assertion of unparalleled petro-prosperity and extraction was late: the US is already the largest global producer of oil and gas. More importantly, this rise to petro-dominance has coincided with the unprecedented acceleration of a climate crisis that demands transition away from fossil fuels.

As the United States continues contributing to global climate crisis at accelerating levels, one can hardly expect Global South petro-states facing dire economic situations to abandon oil and gas extraction. However, petro-states the world over must now enact a profound transformation away from fossil fuel economies in an accelerating climate crisis. In the meantime, the fossilization of politics will only grow more acute.

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Photograph Source: Bingjiefu He – CC BY 4.0

The deafening racket we’re getting here in Spain from US politics or, more like it, from Donald Trump’s chaotic and volatile presidency, tends to drown out other signals we’re getting. In this situation of the Trump administration’s blind developmentalism and explicit refusal to accept any limits or to engage in mature consideration of the policies it’s pushing, Zohran Mamdani’s victory as Democratic nominee for New York City mayor is a breath of fresh air. And for more than one reason. A Muslim, born in Kampala, Uganda, of Indian parents, his personal background and practised values thoroughly contradict everything that Trumpism and the far right are preaching and imposing around the world. It’s also a relief that someone who seeks to be mayor of a city that unquestionably symbolises urban modernity should campaign with the slogan “the affordable city”.

With Spain’s local elections less than two years away, many cities are showing clear signs that their traditional development models are foundering. The impact of the 2008 financial and real-estate crisis, combined with the far-reaching effects of digital platforms offering tourist accommodation and the historical failure in terms of a good public housing policy are driving many people out of cities. Yet the city is still a key place for opportunities, exchanges, and transactions leading to all kinds of groupings with evident environmental and mobility effects that are visible in large Spanish cities, all of which don’t have enough childcare services for the under-threes, and neither do they have plans in place for dealing with lengthening lifespan and its implications for the care system. Cities and their future models are still under the thrall of the expansionist approach of the beginning of the century, so the talk is only about growth, development, and doing more and more.

Mamdani’s message is different. If we understand the city as a community of people of all ages and origins, with a wide variety of lifestyles and forms of cohabitation, but also coexisting and sharing streets and squares, then what can we all afford? What is it that brings us closer to ways of being together and forms of recognition and respect? What might allow us to look to the future without turning our homes into fortresses, without being always on guard, and distrustful of everyone around us?

In electoral campaigns, the main parties are still clinging to a notion of local development closely linked with expansion of capital, real estate, and finance. It’s the message sent out by the technocrats and it’s still alive and well among the power elites. But there is room for another kind of development, the one that holds that true development, rather than focusing on economic indicators, enhances people’s freedoms and includes education, health, participation and, in brief, fosters each person’s dignity. In these times of crude neoliberalism in which social justice is shunned as a device that is said to take from the rich part of what they have achieved “by their own merits” to reward others who have failed “because of their demerits” and haven’t achieved their goals, these two ways of understanding development (accumulation of capital versus expanded rights and freedoms) will define in each election what democracy and rule of law mean for each voter.

The night Zohran Mamdani defeated former Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, and was declared the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York he said, “We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford. A city where … hard work is repaid with a stable life. Where eight hours on the factory floor or behind the wheel of a cab is enough to pay the mortgage. It is enough to keep the lights on. It is enough to send your kid to school. Where rent-stabilized apartments are actually stabilized. Where buses are fast and free. Where childcare doesn’t cost more than CUNY. And where public safety keeps us truly safe.” And he added, “And it’s where the mayor will use their power to reject Donald Trump’s fascism. To stop ICE agents from deporting our neighbors. And to govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party. A party where we fight for working people with no apology.”

It’s high time that cities and citizens started thinking about what we can afford. There is much at stake. It is only from proximity that we can work in a more integral, direct, and shared way to tackle the problems of individuals, families, and communities. It begins from the premise that a fulfilled life shouldn’t be a privilege reserved for a fortunate few but that it must be something that the city administration should strive to guarantee for everyone. The dignity of people is everybody’s business.

This column was originally published in Spanish at El Diario and was translated into English by Julie Wark. 

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Sudanese refugee camp in Chad. Photo: Henry Wilkins, VOA. Public Domain.

I met up with two Sudan experts last week. Over a year ago I was lucky enough to travel with one of them to the region, meeting over two dozen key Sudanese civilians. Last week the other expert introduced me to the head of a humanitarian group still working out of Sudan, a man not only deflated like everyone else by the continuing conflict, but also by sudden, savage US aid cuts. (‘I’m scared,’ he admitted.) Since the latest fighting began in 2023, the US has slashed over 83% of its USAID programmes. Clinics have shut. Soup kitchens have vanished. Preventable deaths have soared. And yet, Sudanese health workers carry on—without supplies, without pay.

Even if people really don’t believe the US should be bailing out non-Americans anymore, no time was allowed by the Americans for an alternative rescue plan.

Reacquainting myself with all this was dispiriting. Here however is an update of a conflict so seldom reported. In early July this year, Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) intensified attacks on El-Obeid, a key supply city briefly reclaimed by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in February. Artillery strikes on July 10–11 killed at least four civilians and displaced 700 households. Densely populated civilian areas—especially where internally displaced people (IDPs) shelter—are being hit hardest.

On July 11, the US-derided International Criminal Court (ICC) told the UN Security Council that war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed in Darfur. This includes systematic rape, bombings, kidnappings, ethnic cleansing, and starvation. Most atrocities are attributed to the RSF targeting non-Arab communities, though SAF has also carried out indiscriminate aerial bombardments of civilian areas.

In late June, a strike on Al-Mujlad hospital killed over 40 people, including children and medical staff. Both sides denied responsibility, but officials from WHO—also US-derided—confirmed the attack. Survivors reported ‘aerial weapon signatures’ consistent with SAF tactics.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says over 70% of Sudan’s health facilities are destroyed or barely functioning. Repeated attacks—many by SAF drones—have gutted emergency care. Cholera and other outbreaks are escalating, with hospital-related deaths now 60 times higher than in 2024. These are shocking facts.

Famine stalks Darfur. In Zamzam camp, at least one child dies every two hours. MSF reports a 46% rise in acute child malnutrition. Emergency food centres have shut as convoys are blocked or looted—often by both RSF and SAF-aligned militias. The person I met last week for the first time works tirelessly to keep food flowing through, even growing some of it there.

Since April 2023, 13 million Sudanese have been displaced: 8.8 million internally, 3.5 million abroad. Chad alone has absorbed 1.2 million, with camps like Adré and Tiné overwhelmed and underfunded—only 13% of required aid has arrived. Western politicians sometimes visit these camps—one former UK Africa minister shed a possibly well-timed tear on camera there. The truth is, since Brexit the UK is increasingly sidelined by the rest of Europe, often not in meetings at all, as well as ignored by an increasingly go-it-alone US. Meanwhile, on the ground, SAF checkpoints detain civilians, and RSF loots convoys and forcibly conscripts men in Darfur. Neither Europe nor the US appear either able or interested in doing something about this.

Between April and May 2025, RSF forces bombarded the Zamzam and Abu Shouk IDP camps near El-Fashir. Hundreds were killed, including over 20 children and nine aid workers. RSF then converted the sites into military staging zones and abducted scores of civilians and aid staff.

In Khartoum, RSF-run detention centres have been exposed as torture chambers. Survivors report starvation, beatings, rape, and executions. Over 500 disappearances have been logged in Omdurman alone. I’ve heard firsthand accounts from the Sudanese diaspora in northern England of relatives missing, arrested, or buried in unmarked graves.

On January 24, 2025, an RSF drone strike hit El-Fashir’s last functioning hospital, killing around 70 patients and staff. It marked the collapse of medical care in the region.

SAF abuses are well documented too. In SAF-held zones, detainees face arbitrary arrests, forced confessions, and torture. Aerial bombing campaigns have levelled entire neighbourhoods in Darfur and Kordofan. Human Rights Watch has called SAF tactics ‘blind’ and ‘collectively punitive.’

In April, the RSF declared a ‘Government of Peace and Unity,’ claiming control over RSF-held areas. RSF is led by Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti). His self-declared government now runs in parallel to the army’s Transitional Sovereignty Council. One rumour places him living outside Sudan. SAF leader and de facto leader of Sudan is Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Hemedti’s nemesis.
Frontlines meanwhile shift weekly. In June, RSF seized trade routes near Libya and Egypt. SAF retook roads between Dalang and Kadugli. On July 7, SAF claimed to have captured Kazgeil in North Kordofan.

Despite those trying so hard to help, the humanitarian response is largely failing. Only 14% of Sudan’s 2025 needs are funded. UN Special Rapporteur Michael Fakhri has warned of ‘dystopia’ unless peacekeepers protect aid. With over 360 aid workers killed in 2024—many in Sudan—humanitarian missions are now high-risk. Both SAF and RSF have blocked convoys, looted warehouses, and harassed staff.

To summarise: civilians are under siege. Heavy artillery, airstrikes, hospital bombings, and mass killings are escalating across Kordofan, Darfur, and Khartoum. Health systems are collapsing. Famine is rising. Displacement is historic—13 million people uprooted. Accountability is absent. ICC and UN investigators cite war crimes—especially by RSF—but no ceasefire or prosecution has stuck. Governance is splintering. The rise of a rival RSF government shows Sudan’s fracture, with frontlines replacing any unified rule. The aid model itself is under scrutiny, as air drops and calls for armed humanitarian protection reflect a crisis of trust in traditional logistics.

What’s urgently needed are ceasefires and protected corridors. Civilians and aid must be shielded under international supervision. Humanitarian missions need protection. Assaults on aid convoys should be treated as war crimes. Most crucially, international donors must scale up fast. Just 14% of needs met is unacceptable. And ICC investigations—without constant US sniping—must nonetheless swiftly translate into enforcement against perpetrators on all sides.

This isn’t a ‘romantic tragedy’ of collapse. It’s deliberate, preventable cruelty. And it’s unfolding now. The world has tools—ceasefire enforcement, aid corridors, legal action—but without decisive intervention, Sudan’s collapse will deepen, destabilising the wider region.

I gather most of the exiled civilian politicians I met are as determined as ever to return there, but there appears no sign of this happening any time soon. Former prime minister Dr Abdallah Hamdok once explained to me why a civilian government can be restored: ‘The seeds of democracy planted after 30 years of dictatorship are robust,’ he said. But what no one still knows is when and where it will be safe enough to plant the damned things.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Across the globe, we are living in a moment of profound crisis where the very essence of education as a democratic institution is under attack. In the United States, the assault on higher education is part of a broader war waged by authoritarian forces aiming to dismantle the pillars of not only academic freedom, dissent, and human rights, but also the essential foundations of democracy itself. Universities are no longer seen as spaces of intellectual freedom and critical inquiry but as battlegrounds for ideological control. Campus protests are met with police brutality; students are abducted for their political views, and those who dare to speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy face expulsion, censorship, and criminalization. Trump’s administration has fueled this campaign, not only targeting academic freedom but also pushing policies that criminalize dissent, especially when it comes to movements like those advocating for Palestinian liberation. The erosion of civil liberties extends to international students protesting in solidarity with Gaza, with threats of deportation looming over them. The chilling message is clear: higher education is no longer a sanctuary for free thought; it is a field of repression where the rule of authoritarianism dominates.

– Henry Giroux, CounterPunch

The quote from Henry Giroux points to the corporatization of the university, where in the last 50 years, a professionalized administration has been growing while faculties have been shrinking or remaining stagnant. At the same time, tenured positions have been declining so that as of 2023 only 23% of all faculty jobs are tenured with 9% tenure-track. Unsurprisingly, this decline has resulted in a sharp decline of faculty governance (virtually an erasure) with the tenure-track number pointing toward the eventual demise of a tenured and thus protected faculty, unless unions are legalized at private universities, and at both private and public universities, where unions are legal, collective bargaining replaces the tenure void. Without effective collective bargaining, however, teaching will become a kind of piece work, which it is today for the large majority who do not have tenure or the chance of tenure on tenure-track.

While the national tenure statistics are dismal, a brief survey on ChatGPT suggests that first-tier research institutions still have a majority or significant minority of tenured faculty. This points to a two-tiered higher educational system, the upper tier of which (The Ivy League and its peers, such as Stanford, Duke, and UC Berkeley) produces the professional elites who ascend to political, social, and economic positions that form the nexus of national power. In spite of the significant numbers of tenured faculty at these institutions, their top-down corporate structure, their allegiance to donors and trustees, that is to money, rather than to faculty, students, and staff is dominant. Lacking ethical cores, corporate universities are chameleons: they take the color of the system in which they are embedded and that system has mandated, not without ongoing resistance, that the order of the day is the erasure of Palestine and with it the erasure of traditional Judaism for Zionism because the values of traditional Judaism support social justice and human rights and the welcoming of the stranger,—”You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Lev 19:34). 

In 1918, the economist Thorstein Veblen gave us the blueprint for the corporate university in his book The Higher Learning in America. In the corporate view, “the university is conceived as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means at hand to account in the largest feasible output. It is a corporation with large funds, and for men biased by their workday training in business affairs, it comes as a matter of course to rate the university in terms of investment and turnover” (62). Within this system, administrators are the bosses, knowledge is a commodity, students are clients, and most scholar-teachers are bureaucrats who work within narrow niches of marketable information. Within this system the humanities and qualitative social sciences are marginalized because the knowledge these disciplines produce resists commodification and thus threatens the workings of the knowledge factory.

Through a system of rewards and punishments, the hierarchical corporate structure is built to resist solidarity, the kinship of its workers (faculty, students, and staff). The faculty are isolated one from another through the hierarchy of rank and through the relative isolation of disciplines in departmental structures. There is, of course, interdisciplinary work, but that work goes on primarily between individuals and never threatens to become communal, that is, to override departmental borders and disciplinary distinctions. Faculty focus is intensely individual and thus alienating. If one is on tenure-track, then for six years one is focused on achieving the reward of tenure and avoiding the punishment of dismissal, which will come, in the first place, if one does not meet specific publication standards in terms of quantity and quality: quality, to be determined by a jury of one’s peers both inside and outside of the institution, depends not only on the approved content of what one writes but on the prestige of where one publishes a book or articles. Experimental work is implicitly discouraged: for example, a communal project that is documented but not publishable in a print format. Such projects are at the heart of Indigenous research (see Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies). At first-tier universities, such as Cornell, where I teach, teaching comes second in the tenure track hierarchy: teaching evaluations from students are reviewed by the departmental faculty but unless there is a decided negative trend will not influence a strong publication record. Service to the department and the university is noted but negligible. After tenure, if one achieves it, one must focus on climbing the promotional ladder to associate and then full professor. This kind of career focus tends to blur one’s peripheral vision or, put another way, to stimulate one’s tunnel vision.

If one is not in a tenure-track or tenured job, that is, if one is a contingent faculty member, then one is simply focused on keeping one’s job without the scholarly benefits—primarily leaves and research support—that tenured and tenure-track faculty receive. Contingent faculty typically teach more than those tenured or on tenure-track because the research they do, if they have time to do it, cannot bring them the rewards of merit pay. Simply put, contingent faculty are the mirror image of tenured and tenure-track faculty. Though they typically have the same credentials (a Ph.D), they are paid to teach and not to do research, and they are paid substantially less than those increasingly few privileged to rise in the ranks. The status of contingent faculty implicitly alienates them from the tenured and tenure-track faculty, who have relatively secure positions, and makes the contingent vulnerable to arbitrary firing, particularly in this era if they support Palestinian rights.

For undergraduate students the road to the reward of a bachelor’s degree is equally isolating through a system of carrots and sticks that echoes the faculty path to tenure. The foundation of the system is grades reflected in the grade point average, which focuses students on quantitative rather than qualitative achievement, and the future (jobs, graduate school) rather than the present. The system of the major, coupled with the emphasis on grades, limits students’ ability to take a range of courses outside their discipline, that is, to learn in the broadest and deepest sense of the word. This is particularly true in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering , and Math), where major requirements strictly limit the number of courses outside the major that one can take. This structure, given the financial pressures (even for students with grants) instrumentalizes education. The question becomes, then, not what are we learning about ourselves in the world around us in order to change this world to provide a decent life for everyone. That is, we are not receiving an education in social justice. We are instead learning how to position ourselves, as competitive individuals, to make the best possible living, to get a return commensurate with our investment. In this corporate environment, the question of social justice is marginalized in very few courses, under fire now in the era of anti-DEI.

For graduate students, the job statistics previously cited tell the story: the end of academia. These students, being trained as scholar-teachers, typically within very narrow disciplinary limits,  when the job market has collapsed, are not being prepared for the market beyond academia, unless they are working in STEM fields where their studies may have practical applications.

Staff from middle managers (academic advisors,and administrative assistants) to service workers keep the university running, but are at the same time the most expendable employees, whose crucial importance to faculty and upper-tier administrators is virtually invisible. 

It is this corporate system, based on the alienation of all its constituencies from one another and the constituents of each constituency from each other, that explains why the universities capitulated so quickly to the weaponization of antisemitism and the attack on affirmative action (DEI). In this system, the constituents reflexively concede power to the top of the hierarchy, the upper administration, who answer to the trustees, who answer to the donors. At best, this leaves isolated pockets of resistance, which we have witnessed in sporadic student and faculty protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, typically met with violent suppression by university administrators, while an atomized faculty, students, and staff remain largely quiescent, locked in disconnected niches as the administration goes about its business of repression in order to keep trustees and donors content.

Within this structure, without broad faculty support, resistance can only function as a voice in the academic wilderness. Here, as a traditional Jew, and a critic of Zionism in my scholarship and teaching, I remember that the radical Jewish rabbi and Palestinian, Jesus of Nazareth, removed to the wilderness for 40 days and nights in order to prepare himself to organize the people for a ministry of resistance dedicated to social justice. So, I am reminded that keeping voices of resistance alive is crucial in a corporate structure that demands silence except when the managers speak. As one of the voices of resistance at a rally on May 9, 2025, sponsored by Cornell Grads for Palestine in memory of the 13,000 children murdered by Israel in Gaza (no doubt a conservative number),  I said the following,  which stands as an epilogue to the course, “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” I taught in the spring of 2025, a course certified by the appropriate faculty committee but condemned publicly by the Cornell president:

Gaza brings home to us, if we needed it to be brought home, that for those in power in government and civil institutions, such as universities, much to their shame, human life, no matter how innocent, is infinitely expendable in order to keep that power. 

It is at this juncture that the words of the Jewish prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, reverberate for me, a Jew who has a child and grandchildren who are citizens of Israel. These words stand against the capitalist imperialism that drives the genocide in Gaza: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

The resistance against this imperialism is at bottom the struggle for one’s soul, the soul necessary to ground a revolution that will build a world in which children are no longer sacrificed for profit.

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Photo by Egor Filin

It’s often stated that useful collaboration with Russia is not possible.  Is this true?  Not really.  There are some areas where useful collaboration would be difficult due to Russian ideological commitments.  But there are areas where dialogue and diplomacy could be rewarding—such as arms control and disarmament—despite misunderstandings and disagreements that may occur along the way.  Soviet-American arms control talks over 20 years were protracted but ultimately successful.  Moscow was supportive of the negotiations for the Iran nuclear accord in 2015 as well as the removal of chemical weapons from Iraq in 2011.

Unfortunately, U.S. politicians, policy makers, and their media mainstream echo chamber are making it difficult to engage Russia because they exaggerate and worst-case both the scale of Russian weaponry and the menace of Russian expansionism and adventurism.  The fact that the Russian military has performed so poorly against a much weaker state on its borders is rarely taken into account.  The fact that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has strengthened the European alliance and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is typically ignored.

The lack of international experience of key personnel throughout the Trump administration complicates the picture. There is no Russian specialist in the administration, for example.  The fact that the United States and Russia are so different in terms of geography and history should lead us to review some fundamental truths of Russian foreign policy and national security policy in order to understand the possibility of a path forward.  This is particularly important at this juncture because the war in Ukraine has brought the United States and Russia into direct competition on a sensitive geopolitical front in Central Europe.. 

I’m putting forward these talking points in order to help understand factors that play a major role in formulating Russian behavior.  Today’s Russia bears the heavy burden of its historical baggage.  The authoritarian nature of the Russian state and the powerful role of the Russian government are unlikely to change.  State power will always dominate individual Russian rights; subjugation to the state will be seen as essential to national survival.  Mikhail Gorbachev is still viewed as a subject of scorn because his reforms suggested possible concessions to constitutionalism or individual rights, which would threaten Russian “greatness.”

Submission to the state is accepted, part of a blind faith that goes beyond patriotism.  Russians support strong, central authority that is all-powerful.  There is great support for Vladimir Putin despite his costly war, and even signs of nostalgia for Joseph Stalin and his iron rule.  Putin has successfully convinced the population that the current war is being waged against the United States and the West, not merely Ukraine.  The expansion of Western military power throughout East Europe will ultimately have to be addressed.

Russia’s technological and economic backwardness has always set it apart from the West.  Russia is the only European country that owes little to the common cultural and spiritual heritage of the West.  Russian exceptionalism is manifested in the idea of Russian moral superiority and the “idea” that Russians are able to suffer more than their Western counterparts.  The “idea” of Western freedom is viewed as an example of disorder and discontinuity.

Submission to the state is the accepted norm, and any weakness in central authority is seen as creating the possibility of disorder and discontinuity.  Freedom of the press, so essential to U.S. national security, is anathema to Russia. The Russian folk saying “Don’t carry garbage outside the hut” refers to the vulnerability associated with allowing adversaries to gain access to Russia weakness.

For these reasons, it is impossible to imagine Putin making major concessions to end the war with Ukraine, let alone to accept defeat.  Putin will not lose this war, and it hard to imagine Ukraine winning it.  Much has gone wrong for Russia’s military forces, including Ukraine’s ability to repel the initial Russian advance, Western unity to address the Russian challenge, and the strengthening of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  The added membership to NATO (Sweden and Finland) adds an additional 830-mile border between Russia and NATO, and nearly every NATO member is increasing defense spending.  Even if Russia maintains control of most of that part of Ukraine it currently occupies, a smaller Ukraine will be a battle-tested military with a special relationship with the West.

The Russian-Ukrainian war can only be settled with dialogue and diplomacy, which could also be said for the current U.S. struggle with Iran regarding Tehran’s nuclear program as well as the Israeli-Palestinian struggle to provide a two-state solution in the Middle East.  Simply providing more weaponry to Ukraine and to Israel won’t lead to geopolitical success, and the continued use of military force against Iran won’t end the threat of Iran as a future nuclear weapons state.  In all of these scenarios, continued fighting will simply produce more death and destruction, and will make the international situation more unstable and unpredictable.  If Iran becomes a nuclear weapons state, there is the risk of greater proliferation of such states.

Sadly, there is no statesman in the global picture with the credibility and the standing to move these scenarios in a more peaceful direction.  We are in the hands of a diabolical triumvirate (Putin, Netanyahu, Trump) who lack the skills and the experiences to move the international situation in a more benign direction.  The absence of skilled U.S. diplomats at this particular juncture as well as the severe cuts at the Department of State and the National Security Council are particularly appalling and threatening.  The notion that Marco Rubio can serve as both Secretary of State and acting national security adviser is laughable.  The politicization of the intelligence community is another hindrance.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Before a multi-course dinner at the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented President Donald Trump with a copy of a letter nominating him for a Nobel Peace Prize. “He is forging peace as we speak,” Netanyahu remarked to the TV cameras.

Earlier this year, Trump likewise praised Netanyahu “for pursuing the peace process.” He did not endorse him for an award, but he often compliments his “good friend” on his efforts to create a better world.

The affection both men apparently have for each other is rivaled only by the love Netanyahu demonstrated to former President Joe Biden during an address to a joint session of the US Congress “for his efforts” to broker a hostage deal. After nearly two years, hostages are still languishing in captivity.

Biden reportedly gave Netanyahu a signed photograph of himself. The inscription on it is said to have read “I love you, Bibi, even though I don’t agree with a damn thing you’ve said.”

As touching as this festival of manly mutual admiration appears to be, it is cynical and grotesque political theater. Behind the Trump and Biden playacting is a long bipartisan practice of frequently underwriting allies’ violent crimes against defenseless populations, all in violation of international humanitarian law. Providing diplomatic cover has been a common service for favorites ranging from the Somoza family in Nicaragua to the Shah of Iran.

The proxies’ religious affiliation is immaterial. For Washington DC, the issuing of blank checks to those whose interests align with those of the United States is simply policy. There is no limit to the number of corpses that could ever trigger those checks to stop coming unless the clients become inconvenient or display disobedience.

It is important to note that in his inscription, Biden only disagreed with what Netanyahu said, not the acts that his government has authored. The doddering Biden, like the execrable Trump, prefers that we live in an upside-down world where hideous crimes are not named at all. They should instead be described as occasionally friendly disagreements in the tireless pursuit of peace. George Orwell and Franz Kafka could scarcely have imagined it.

Gaza now has the largest population of child amputees in the world. As of January, there were 4,000 of them, but that was seven months ago. Many have since died excruciating deaths. Others have more recently become amputees. Many of them will also die soon for lack of food, water, and medicine, which have been severely restricted by something like an imperial decree.

Over 5,000 Gazan children were diagnosed with malnutrition in May, and more than 600 suffered from severe acute malnutrition that month. That is the stage of hunger right before death, and many have already perished from starvation. If they had living parents, mothers and fathers witnessed their wasting.

As I mentioned, this is all unambiguously illegal. The Geneva Conventions, a set of international laws that govern nations’ actions in time of conflict, state that “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited.” It also forbids “attack[ing], destroy[ing], remov[ing] or render[ing] useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, … crops, livestock, [and] drinking water installations.”

Punishing the civilian population was announced from the start and has been done explicitly for almost two years to people who were not a party to any crimes against Israelis on October 7. It is difficult to imagine what terrorist acts thousands of men, women, and children who have nothing to do with Hamas may have committed, but they are nevertheless punished in ways that defy imagination.

Collective punishment and forced population transfers are also grave crimes under international law, yet both are enthusiastically championed from the White House, where, during that dinner, Netanyahu complimented Trump on his “vision” to forcibly remove two million starving, suffering people to an undetermined location. Perhaps they can live in a refugee camp on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. Netanyahu called it a “free choice.” Incarceration in squalid detention or a slow death from starvation is, he would have us believe, a form of freedom. Again, this is language worthy of Orwell’s accounts of a dystopian society.

After a brief ceasefire ended last March, the Israeli Defense Forces have continued to bomb and shoot civilians. The United Nations reports that 50,000 children have been killed or injured since the beginning of hostilities, and over 100 are admitted for treatment due to malnutrition every day. Aid distribution sites have become killing fields. Despite the congratulatory rhetoric at the White House, peace is nowhere in sight.

Describing violations of law as debatable or antisemitic is absurd and testimony to an effective doctrinal system that both US political parties unceasingly maintain. Their collective and often contrived anger directed at those who describe facts on the ground in Gaza should tell us what they think about a humane foreign policy, a topic about which they spare no effort to lecture others.

With US support from both sides of the aisle, like Democrat Cory Booker, who sometimes raises feeble objections and often does not even do that, to Republican Lindsey Graham, who openly called for the evisceration of Gaza, as well as their respectively moribund political leadership, the dismemberment and starvation of innocent people continue unimpeded.

The contrast is striking. As two well-fed, corrupt old men dined at the White House and congratulated each other on their virtues, children starved to death in front of their parents.

History will not be kind to either US political party, whose major areas of agreement often deepen the suffering of vilified people.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Introduction: Language in the Age of Fascist Politics

In the age of expanding fascism, the power of language is not only fragile but increasingly threatened. As Toni Morrison has noted, “language is not only an instrument through which power is exercised,” it also shapes agency and functions as an act with consequences. These consequences ripple through the very fabric of our existence. For in the words we speak, meaning, truth, and our collective future are at risk. Each syllable, phrase, and sentence becomes a battleground where truth and power collide, where silence breeds complicity, and where justice hangs in the balance.

In response, we find ourselves in desperate need of a new vocabulary, one capable of naming the fascist tide and militarized language now engulfing the United States. This is not a matter of style or rhetorical flourish; it is a matter of survival. The language required to confront and resist this unfolding catastrophe will not come from the legacy press, which remains tethered to the very institutions it ought to expose. Nor can we turn to the right-wing media machines, led by Fox News, where fascist ideals are not just defended but paraded as patriotism. In the face of this crisis, Toni Morrison’s insight drawn from her Nobel Lecture becomes all the more urgent and makes clear that the language of tyrants, embodied in the rhetoric, images, and modes of communication characteristic of the Trump regime, is a dead language.

For her “a dead language is not simply one that is no longer spoken or written,” it is unyielding language “content to admire its own paralysis.” It is repressive language infused with power,  censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties and dehumanizing language, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. “Though moribund, it is not without effect” for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, and “suppresses human potential.” Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, or fill baffling silences. This is the language of official power whose purpose is to sanction ignorance and preserve it. Beneath its glittering spectacle and vulgar performance, lies a language that is “dumb, predatory, sentimental.” It offers mass spectacles, a moral sleepwalking state of mind, and a psychotic infatuation for those who seek refuge in unchecked power. It forges a community built on greed, corruption, and hate, steeped in a scandal of hollow fulfillment. It is a language unadorned in its cruelty and addiction to creating an architecture of violence. It is evident in Trump’s discourse of occupation, his militarizing of American politics, and in his use of an army of trolls to turn hatred into a social media spectacle of swagger and cruelty.

 Despite differing tones and political effects, the discourses of the far right and the liberal mainstream converge in their complicity: both traffic in mindless spectacle, absorb lies as currency, and elevate illusion over insight. The liberal mainstream drapes the machinery of cruelty in the language of civility, masking the brutality of the Trump regime and the predatory logic of gangster capitalism, while the far right revels in it, parading its violence as virtue and its hatred as patriotism. Language, once a powerful instrument against enforced silence and institutional cruelty, now too often serves power, undermining reason, normalizing violence, and replacing justice with vengeance. In Trump’s oligarchic culture of authoritarianism, language becomes a spectacle of power, a theater of fear crafted, televised, and performed as a civic lesson in mass indoctrination. If language is the vessel of consciousness, then we must forge a new one– fierce, unflinching, and unafraid to rupture the fabric of falsehood that sustains domination, disposability, and terror. The late famed novelist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, was right in stating that “language was a site of colonial control,” inducting people into what he called “colonies of the mind.”

The utopian visions that support the promise of a radical democracy and prevent the dystopian nightmare of a fascist politics are under siege in the United States. Increasingly produced, amplified and legitimated in a toxic language of hate, exclusion, and punishment, all aspects of the social and the democratic values central to a politics of solidarity are being targeted by right-wing extremists. In addition, the institutions that produce the formative cultures that nourishes the social imagination and democracy itself are now under attack. The signposts are on full display in a politics of racial and social cleansing that is being fed by a white nationalist and white supremacist ideology that is at the centre of power in the US, marked by fantasies of exclusion and accompanied by a full-scale attack on morality, reason, and collective resistance rooted in democratic struggle. As more people revolt against this dystopian project, neoliberal ideology and elements of a fascist politics merge to contain, distract and misdirect the anger that has materialised out of legitimate grievances against the government, controlling privileged elites and the hardships caused by neoliberal capitalism. The current crisis of agency, representation, values and  language demands a discursive shift that can call into question and defeat the formative culture and ideological scaffolding through which a savage neoliberal capitalism reproduces itself. This warped use of language directly feeds into the policies of disposability that define Trump’s regime.

State Terror and Trump’s Politics of Disposability

As Trump’s regime concentrates power, he invokes a chilling convergence of law, order, and violence, a cornerstone of his politics of disposability. His acts of cruelty and lawlessness, abducting and deporting innocent people, branding immigrants as “vermin,” claiming they are “poisoning the blood” of Americans, and even proposing the legalization of murder for twelve hours, make clear that his violent metaphors are not just rhetorical flourishes. They are policy blueprints. In Trump’s hands, rhetoric becomes a weaponized prelude to atrocity, a tool of statecraft. Threats, hatred, and cruelty are transformed into instruments of governance. 

This is not careless talk, it is a brutal and calculated expression of power. Trump’s threats to arrest and deport critics such as Zohran Mamdani reveal his willingness to use the machinery of the state for political extermination. His targets are predictable: immigrants, Black people, educators, journalists, LGBTQ+ individuals, and anyone who dares to challenge his white Christian nationalist, neoliberal, and white supremacist vision. His language does not merely offend, it incites harm, enacts repression, and opens the gates to state-sanctioned violence. It extends the reign of terror across the United States by labeling protesters as terrorists and deploying the military to American cities, treating them as if they were “occupied territories.”

We now live in a country where class and racial warfare both at home and abroad is on steroids, exposing the killing machine of gangster capitalism in its rawest, most punitive form. Trump supports the genocidal war waged by a state led by a war criminal. Children are being slaughtered in Gaza. Millions of Americans, including poor children, teeter on the edge of losing their healthcare. Funds for feeding hungry children are being slashed, sacrificed to feed the pockets of the ultra-rich. Thousands will die, not by accident, but by design. Terror, fear, and punishment have replaced the ideals of equality, freedom, and justice. Childcide is now normalized as the law of the land.  The lights are dimming in America, and all that remains are the smug, ignorant smirks of fascist incompetence and bodies drained of empathy and solidarity.

Gangster Capitalism and the Death of Empathy

Gangster capitalism lays the foundation for Trump’s racist and fascist politics. As I have noted elsewhere, the United States has descended into a state of political, economic, cultural, and social psychosis, where cruel, neoliberal, democracy-hating policies have prevailed since the 1970s. At the core of this authoritarian shift lies a systemic war on workers, youth, Blacks, and immigrants, increasingly marked by mass violence and a punishing state both domestically and internationally. The U.S. has transformed into an empire dominated by a callous, greedy billionaire class that has dismantled any remnants of democracy, while embracing the fascistic ideology of white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. Fascism now parades not only beneath the flag but also under the Christian cross. America has shifted from celebrating unchecked individualism, as depicted in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, to the glorification of greed championed by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, and the psychotic avarice of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. This descent into barbarity and psychotic infatuation with violence is further demonstrated by Justin Zhong, a right-wing preacher at Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Indianapolis, who called for the deaths of LGBTQ+ individuals during a sermon. Zhong defended his comments by citing biblical justifications and labeling LGBTQ+ people as “domestic terrorists.” It gets worse. During a Men’s Preaching Night at Sure Foundation Baptist Church, Zhong’s associate, Stephen Falco, suggested that LGBTQ+ people should “blow yourself in the back of the head,” and that Christians should “pray for their deaths.” Another member, Wade Rawley, advocated for violence, stating LGBTQ+ individuals should be “beaten and stomped in the mud” before being shot in the head. Fascism in America, nourished by the toxic roots of homophobia, now cloaks itself not just in the poisonous banner of the Confederate flag, but also in the sacred guise of the Christian cross.

Welcome to Trump’s America, where empathy is now viewed as a weakness and the cold rule of the market is the template for judging all social relations. One noted example can be found in the words of Trump’s on-and-off billionaire ally, Elon Musk, who dismisses empathy as a naive and detrimental force that undermines the competitive, individualistic ethos he champions. Speaking to Joe Rogan on his podcast, Musk specifically stated that “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.”  As Julia Carrie Wong observes in The Guardian, the stakes extend far beyond casting empathy as a “parasitic plague.” Empathy’s true danger lies in its role as an enabler—granting permission to dehumanize others and constricting the very “definition of who should be included in a democratic state.” This is a recipe for barbarism, one that allows both states and individuals to turn a blind eye to the genocidal violence unfolding in Gaza and beyond.

Naming the  Deep Roots of the Police State

Ruth Ben-Ghiat has warned that “America has been set on a trajectory to become a police state,” pointing to the passage of the Brutal and Bellicose Bill (BBB), which handed ICE a budget larger than the militaries of Brazil, Israel, and Italy combined. But the roots of this state violence go deeper. The foundation was laid under Bush and Cheney, whose war on terror birthed Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, mass surveillance, and extraordinary rendition. What Trump has done is strip these earlier authoritarian practices of all pretenses, elevating them to the status of governing principles. 

The police state did not begin with Trump; it evolved through him. Now, we see its terrifying maturity: racial cleansing disguised as immigration policy, hatred normalized as political speech, dissent criminalized, birthright citizenship threatened, and everyday life militarized. This is not politics as usual, it is fascism in real time. 

Trump’s fascist politics grows even more dangerous when we recognize that his language of colonization and domination has helped transform American society into what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o chillingly describes as a “war zone.” This war zone now spans the digital terrain—through the internet, podcasts, social media, and educational platforms—becoming a fertile breeding ground for fascist symbols, reactionary values, manufactured identities, and the toxic resurrection of colonial logics. In this battleground of meaning, the language of colonization does more than obscure the truth—it erodes critical thinking, silences historical memory, and disarms the very possibility of empowered agency. What remains in its wake is a nation scarred by suffering, haunted by loneliness, bound by shared fears, and anesthetized by the numbing rituals of a punishing state.

The transformation of America into a war zone finds its most visible expression in the rise of Trump’s omnipresent police state. This authoritarian machinery reveals itself through the mechanisms of state-sponsored terror, a heavily militarized ICE force operating like masked enforcers, and the rapid expansion of detention centers that will increasingly resemble a network of potential forced labor camps. As Fintan O’Toole warns, Trump’s deployment of troops onto the streets of Los Angeles is not merely symbolic—it is “a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation.” In this reorientation, soldiers are no longer defenders of the Constitution but are being retrained as instruments of authoritarian power, bound not by democratic ideals but by obedience to a singular will. 

Nevertheless, we resist or refuse to name the fascist threat and the ideological and economic architecture of its politics. Still, we recoil from calling the Trump regime what it is: a fascist state engaged in domestic terrorism. Still, we remain blind to the fact that economic inequality, global militarism, and the genocidal logics of empire are not peripheral issues, they are the center. Why is it so difficult to admit that we are living in an age of American fascism? Why do the crimes of the powerful, at home and abroad, so often pass without scrutiny, while the victims are blamed or erased? 

The Collapse of Moral Imagination

What we face is not only a political crisis, partly in the collapse of conscience and civic courage– a profound moral collapse. The war being waged at home by the Trump regime is not just against immigrants or the poor, it is a war on critical thought, on historical memory, on the courage to dissent. It is a war on every institution that upholds critical thinking, informed knowledge, and civic literacy. This is a genocidal war against the very possibility of a just future—a war not merely against, but for stupidity, for the death of morality, and for the annihilation of any robust notion of democracy. Viktor Klemperer, in his seminal work The Language of the Third Reich, offers a crucial lesson from history: “With great insistence and a high degree of precision right down to the last detail, Hitler’s Mein Kampf teaches not only that the masses are stupid, but that they need to be kept that way, intimidated into not thinking.” Klemperer’s analysis reveals that Nazi politics did not arise in a vacuum; it was cultivated in a culture where language itself was the breeding ground of cruelty and control.

Trump’s rhetoric of fear, racial hatred does not emerge in a vacuum. It resonates because it taps into a long and violent history, a history soaked in blood, built on genocide, slavery, colonialism, and exclusion. His language recalls the genocidal campaigns against Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Jews, and others deemed disposable by authoritarian regimes. It is a necrotic lexicon, resurrected in service of tyranny. It gives birth to politicians with blood in their mouths, who weaponize nostalgia and bigotry, cloaking brutality in the false promises of patriotism and “law and order.”

Language as War and the Return of Americanized Fascism

This is not merely a rhetoric of cruelty, it is a call to arms. Trump’s words do not simply shelter fascists; they summon them. They silence dissent, normalize torture, and echo the logic of death camps, internment camps, and mass incarceration. His discourse, laden with hatred and lies, is designed to turn neighbors into enemies, civic life into war, and politics into a death cult and zone of terminal exclusion. Undocumented immigrants, or those seeking to register for green cards or citizenship, are torn from their families and children, cast into prisons such as Alligator Alcatraz, a grotesque manifestation of the punishing state. As Melissa Gira Grant writes in The New Republic, it is “an American concentration camp…built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE,” constructed in a chilling display of colonial disregard, and erected on traditional Miccosukee land without so much as consulting the Tribe. 

This is the face of modern cruelty: language wielded as a tool to orchestrate a spectacle of violence, designed to degrade, divide, and erase. Culture is no longer a peripheral force in politics; it has become the central weapon in the rise of state terrorism. The language of war and complicity normalizes America’s transformation into a monstrous carceral state, a symbol of state-sponsored terror where due process is suspended, and suffering is not just an outcome but the point itself. A culture of cruelty now merges with state sponsored racial terror, functioning as a badge of honor. One example is noted in Trump advisor Laura Loomer,  who ominously remarked that “the wild animals surrounding President Donald Trump’s new immigration detention center… will have ‘at least 65 million meals.” Change.org, along with others such as  Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor, noted that her comment “is not only racist, it is a direct emotional attack and veiled threat against Hispanic communities. This kind of speech dehumanizes people of color and normalizes genocidal language.”  Her racist remark not only reveals the profound contempt for human life within Trump’s inner circle but also highlights how cruelty and violence are strategically used as both a policy tool and a public spectacle. Loomer’s remark is not an aberration, it is a symptom of the fascist logic animating this administration, where death itself becomes a political message. Her blood-soaked discourse if symptomatic of the criminogenic politics fundamental to the working of the Trump regime. 

The parallels to history are unmistakable. Loomer’s invocation of death as the outcome of detention recalls the Nazi designation of certain camps as Vernichtungslager, extermination camps, where as Holocaust survivor Primo Levi noted, imprisonment and execution were inseparable. Likewise, the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, though often sanitized in public memory, operated under a similar logic of racial suspicion and collective punishment. The message in each case is clear, as Judith Butler has noted in her writing: some lives are rendered invisible,  deemed unworthy of legal protection, of family, of dignity, of life itself. In fascist regimes, such spaces function not only as instruments of punishment but as symbolic theaters of power, meant to instill terror, enforce obedience, and declare which bodies the state has marked for erasure.

For Trump, J.D. Vance, and their ilk, fascism is not a specter to be feared but a banner to be waved. The spirit of the Confederacy and the corpse-like doctrines of white supremacy, militarism, and neoliberal authoritarianism have returned, this time supercharged by surveillance technologies, financial capital, and social media echo chambers. In the spirit of the Trump regime, the symbols of the Confederacy are normalized. Confederate flags are now waved by neo-Nazis in public squares and parades, while Trump renames US warships and 7 military bases after Confederate officers, reinforcing a dangerous nostalgia for a past rooted in racism and rebellion against the very ideals of unity and equality that this nation claims to uphold.

It should not surprise us that the American public has grown numb with the constant echo chamber of state terrorism playing out in multiple sites of attack. Powerful disimagination machines, mainstream media, right-wing propaganda platforms, tech billionaires, have flooded public consciousness with conspiracy theories, historical amnesia, and spectacularized images of immigrants and others being deported to prisons, foreign Gulags, and moder day black holes. These are not simply entertainment outlets; they are pedagogical weapons of mass distraction, breeding civic illiteracy and moral paralysis. Under their influence, the American people have been placed in a moral and political coma.

White Nationalism and Reproductive Control

Nowhere is this more evident than in the mainstream media’s failure to address the racial and ideological foundations of Trump’s agenda. His attacks on Haitian immigrants, the travel ban on seven African countries, the shutting down of refugee programs, and his open-door policy for white Afrikaners from South Africa are not merely racist; they are explicitly white nationalist. The same ideology drives attacks on women’s reproductive rights, revealing the deep racial and gender anxieties of a movement obsessed with white demographic decline. These are not isolated skirmishes, they are interconnected strategies of domination.

These converging assaults, white nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchal control, and militarized life, manifest most vividly in the war on reproductive freedom. White nationalists encourage white women to reproduce, to hold back demographic change, while punishing women of color, LGBTQ+ people, and the poor. It is a violent calculus, animated by fantasies of purity and control.

The Systemic Assault on Democracy

This is a full-spectrum assault on democracy. Every act of cruelty, every racist law, every violent metaphor chips away at the social contract. A culture of authoritarianism is now used to demean those considered other, both citizens and non-citizens, critics and immigrants, naturalized citizens and those seeking such status. They are labeled as unworthy of citizenship now defined by the Trump regime as a privilege rather than a right. Meanwhile, a media ecosystem built on clickbait and erasure renders both such fascists as legitimate while making invisible the roots of suffering mass suffering and fear, all the while, turning oppression into spectacle and silence into complicity.

In this fog, language itself is emptied of meaning. Truth and falsehood blur. As Paulo Freire warned, the tools of the oppressor are often adopted by the oppressed. We now see that the logic of fascism has seeped into the culture, eroding civic sensibility, destroying moral imagination, and rendering resistance almost unspeakable.

The Normalization of Tyranny

Trump’s authoritarian fantasies do not alienate his base, they galvanize it. What was once unthinkable is now policy. What was once fringe has become mainstream. Cruelty is not something to be deplored and avoided at all costs, it is a central feature of power, wielded with theatrical and spectacularized brutality. Under the current acting ICE Director, Todd Lyons, this punitive logic has intensified: Lyons oversees a $4.4 billion Enforcement and Removal Operations apparatus staffed by over 8,600 agents across 200 domestic locations, using militarized tactics, surprise raids, and aggressive targeting of immigrant communities to sustain a regime of fear. ICE’s presence is at the heart of Trump’s hyper-police state, and its funding has been greatly expanded to $170 billion under Trump’s new budget bill, creating  what journalist Will Bunch calls Trump’s “own gulag archipelago of detention camps across a United States that’s becoming increasingly hard to recognize.” 

Meanwhile, figures like Tom Homan, who led ICE under Trump’s first term, laid the groundwork with Gestapo-style operations, midnight raids, family separations, and public declarations that undocumented immigrants “should be afraid”.  As the “border tzar” under Trump, Homan has initiated deportation policies that are even more aggressively violent and cruel that those that took place in Trump’s first term as president.  As Bunch notes, take the case of “the 64-year-old New Orleans woman, Donna Kashanian, who fled a tumultuous Iran 47 years ago, volunteered to rebuild her battered Louisiana community after Hurricane Katrina, never missed a check-in with U.S. immigration officials ,  and was snatched by ICE agents in unmarked vehicles while she was out working in her garden and sent to a notorious detention center.” These horror stories now take place daily in cities extending from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island. 

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

Far-right white nationalist such as Miller, Tom Homan and Todd Lyons, do not treat cruelty as a regrettable side effect. For them, cruelty is the currency of power. Suffering becomes a spectacle, and violence a ritual of statecraft. Tyranny is not inching forward in silence; it is advancing at full speed, cheered on by those who treat fear as a governing principle and pain as public policy.

This is not a passing storm. It is the death throes of a system that has long glorified violence, commodified everything, and fed on division. Trump’s language is not a performance, it is preparation. His words are laying the foundation for a society without empathy, without justice, without democracy.

Reclaiming the Language of Resistance, Reclaiming Democracy

In a decent society, language is the lifeblood of democracy, a vessel of solidarity, truth, and hope. But in Trump’s America, language has become a weapon, dehumanizing, excluding, and dominating. His vision is not a warning; it is a blueprint. We must resist, or we risk losing everything. The stakes are nothing less than the survival of democracy, the retrieval of truth and the refusal to live in a world where cruelty is policy and silence is complicity. What is needed now is not only a rupture in language but a rupture in consciousness, one that brings together the critical illumination of the present with a premonitory vision of what lies ahead if fascist dynamics remain unchecked. As Walter Benjamin insisted, we must cultivate a form of profane illumination, a language that disrupts the spectacle of lies and names the crisis in all its violent clarity. At the same time, as A.K. Thompson argues, we must grasp the future implicit in the present. His notion of premonitions urges us to read the events unfolding around us as urgent warnings, as signs of the catastrophe that awaits if we do not confront and reverse the political and cultural paths we are on. It demands that we see the connections that bind our suffering, rejecting the fragmented reality that neoliberalism forces upon us. The time for complacency is past. The time for a new and more vibrant language, one of critique, resistance, and militant hope, is now. A language capable not only of indicting the present but of envisioning a future rooted in justice, memory, and collective struggle.

As Antonio Gramsci remarked in his Prison Notebooks, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” What is clear is that these morbid symptoms have arrived. Yet, alongside the despair they breed, they also present new challenges and opportunities for revitalized struggles. This is where the power of language comes into play—this is the challenge and opportunity for those who believe in the transformative power of culture, language, and education to address not just the nature of the crisis but its deeper roots in politics, memory, agency, values, power, and democracy itself.

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Aerial view of the Consumers Power Company of Michigan’s Palisades Plant Unit 1. Photo: Department of Energy.

Not long ago, the U.S. nuclear power industry was in freefall. Only two reactors had been ordered since 1978, meaning the existing reactors were aging. Old mechanical parts require costly maintenance; and rather than pay for these upgrades, nuclear plant owners chose to shut reactors (13 out of 104 in the U.S. closed from 2013-2022). Many more closings seemed imminent, as two-thirds of reactors had operated more than 40 years, the expected lifespan. The dream that nuclear power would dominate the U.S. electrical market with 1,200 reactors was ending.

But just recently, industry and government combined to postpone nuclear power’s sundown. State governments took the first step; legislatures in five states passed laws giving billions of dollars to bail out utilities, and keep old reactors operating. The federal government then passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which included pledges of up to $135 billion for keeping old reactors open, and supporting new ones.

The mantra of pro-nuclear forces was nuclear power was “green” and “emission-free” – and would address climate change. But that mantra is not based in fact. The processes of developing uranium for reactors (mining, milling, enrichment, fabrication, and purification) consume large amounts of greenhouse gases. And reactors are NOT “emission-free” as they routinely release over 100 highly toxic radioactive chemicals – the same found in atom bomb explosions – into the air and water.

Federal regulators helped keep the nuclear dream alive by rubber-stamping applications to extend licenses beyond the original 40 years. Currently, 12 reactors are approved to operate up to 80 years, and dozens more applications are expected. An 80-year-old reactor means staggering amounts of highly radioactive waste stored at each site, and the growing chance of a catastrophic meltdown.

Preserving antiquated reactors was the original focus of a nuclear revival. A never-attempted strategy to restart closed reactors has also surfaced. Proposed restarts include:

Palisades: Palisades, in western Michigan, closed in 2022 after 51 years; it only supplied 5% of the state’s electricity. But enormous (mostly federal) government pledges of support led Holtec International to apply for restart, which may be granted as soon as late 2025.

Three Mile Island: The largest U.S. reactor meltdown destroyed one of the plant’s reactors in 1979; its other unit closed in 2019 after 45 years. Constellation Energy recently signed an agreement to restart the reactor in 2028, to power Microsoft’s AI operations.

Duane Arnold: Iowa’s only reactor, which generated only 8% of the state’s electricity, closed in 2020 after 46 years. Several months ago, NextEra Energy filed a licensing change request to federal regulators, with a goal of restarting the plant in 2028.

Still another aspect of an envisioned nuclear revival focuses on building Small Modular Reactors. Proponents claim SMRs would be speedier to build, cheaper, more efficient, and cleaner than larger reactors of the past. But these claims are unproven, and proposed SMRs at several sites have thus far been scrapped due to spiraling cost estimates.

Discussion of nuclear power’s future has been mostly about costs. The 1954 prediction by federal official Lewis Strauss that nuclear reactors would produce energy “too cheap to meter” has failed miserably, as nuclear is now much more costly than wind, and solar power. The most crucial reactor issue – health hazards – has been largely ignored by industry and government.

Numerous articles and reports have documented rising rates of cancer near reactors (www.radiation.org). But recent reactor shutdowns and their proposed restart have raised another issue – does shutdown (and the end of routine radioactive exposures) mean improved health?

A 2002 journal article showed local infant deaths fell more sharply than the U.S. decline near eight closed nuclear plants two years after closing (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12071357/). Infants are more susceptible to radiation effects than adults, and any reduction in exposure after shutdown suggests health of infants would be most likely to improve.

A review of CDC data updates this study for recently-closed plants, including some slated for restart. The table below shows the decline in infant death rates (< 1 year) and low-weight births under 3.3 pounds, in the five years before/after shutdown, for the local county(ies) and the U.S.

Near each closed plant, the local reduction was larger than the nation’s for both infant deaths and low-weight births. Some gaps are especially large, amounting to hundreds more healthy infants.

Palisades is the reactor in line to be the first to restart after permanent shutdown. In the last five years of operation (2018-2022), 15 babies of mothers living in Van Buren County MI, where the reactor is located, died. But in the 2½ years after, only four infants died, a decline of almost 50%. 

Restart of closed reactors, or startup of new ones, must address health risks. Evidence of infant health improvements near closed reactors suggests no such actions be taken, and funds to prop up nuclear power instead be allotted for safe, renewable, less costly energy sources such as wind and solar.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Narcissism is a personality trait characterized by an excessive preoccupation with oneself, a sense of entitlement, and a need for admiration.  It involves an inflated sense of self-importance, a lack of empathy for others, and a tendency to exploit others to meet their own needs.  While everyone experiences some degree of self-involvement, narcissism becomes a problem when it significantly impairs social or occupational functions and causes distress.

Two of the world’s leading pathological narcissists—Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu—met at the White House on Monday.  There was little substantive agreement on outstanding issues, but the meeting produced an outstanding highlight when Netanyahu presented Trump with a letter that nominated the president for the Nobel Peace Prize.  “You deserve it,” Netanyahu said.  “Coming from you in particular, this is very meaningful,” Trump replied.

The self-intoxification of these men is startling: Trump is single-handedly compromising the key institutions of our democracy, including elite universities, the mainstream media, and legal and judicial entities.  Netanyahu is pursuing a genocidal war that is making Israel a pariah state, creating generational conflict in the Jewish American community, dividing the Jewish diaspora the world over, and causing a rise in antisemitism.

Trump and Netanyahu operate in different political environments, but each has a wildly exaggerated sense of self-worth that stems from the delusion of having enormous brainpower and the most advanced military technology at their disposal.  The braggadocio associated with Trump’s bombing campaign against Iran and Netanyahu’s claims to be changing the map of the Middle East speaks directly to their arrogance and paranoia.  Netanyahu’s claim that the Israeli Defense Forces are the “most moral army in the world” is self-evident nonsense.  Trump’s inability to admit that he lost the 2020 election speaks to the fragility of his ego.  The mainstream media have largely ignored the mental health of both men.

Netanyahu knows that he holds the upper hand in dealings with Trump.  Several years ago, he told an Israeli audience that “I know what America is.  America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.”  As New Yorker editor, David Remnick, said “There is not an America President—Clinton, Bush Obama, Biden, or Trump—who has dealt with Netanyahu and not, sooner or later, come away with a lingering sense of resentment.” 

Remnick actually understated these situations; these presidents couldn’t stand the guy.  Yet, all of them gave Israeli Defense Forces everything it demanded; as a result, the United States is totally complicit in Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign.  As for Trump: he won’t provide Ukraine the weapons it needs to defend against President Putin’s campaign of terror, but he will give Israel everything it needs to conduct a genocidal campaign from the air against a Palestinian community without means for defense.  And he tolerates Israel’s violent expansion of its footprint on the West Bank.

This is the third meeting between Trump and Netanyahu, and they will certainly take a victory lap over their successful bombing campaign against Iran’s air defenses and its nuclear facilities.  Having convinced Trump of the necessity of targeting Iran’s nuclear sites with the Pentagon’s “bunker-buster” bombs weighing 30,000 pounds, Netanyahu will presumably try to convince Trump to join Israel in conducting a military campaign to achieve regime change in Iran.  Even Trump, with his intellectual limitations, presumably understands the limits of military power to achieve regime change in view of recent U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan where military involvement led to two decades of feckless U.S. fighting in each place.

There is still debate over the damage done to Iran’s nuclear program, but there is one certainty—Trump has made sure that the Middle East will continue to be America’s briar patch.   However, Trump will presumably be seeking a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in order to reduce the chance of continued U.S. military involvement in the Middle East.  Netanyahu will do his best to prevent any resumption of U.S.-Iranian talks on a new nuclear agreement to replace the one that Trump ended in 2018.

In any event, since their last meeting in April, the Israelis have been killing Palestinians in record numbers, and the acute malnutrition numbers in Gaza continue to grow.  The number of displaced Palestinians in Gaza also continues to grow, and there are continued Israeli blockades of humanitarian assistance.  Israel’s deadly siege continues in Gaza and the West Bank, and Trump is making no serious effort to stop it.  Like Putin, Netanyahu certainly appears to be playing Trump in these discussions.

A leading characteristic of narcissists is grandiosity, and this trait makes it difficult to predict the negotiating positions of either Trump or Netanyahu.  Trump’s grandiosity was  exhibited in the order for the  Pentagon’s $45 million parade that coincided with his 79th birthday.  As president, Trump has raised the possibility of invading Panama, annexing Canada and Mexico, and buying Greenland.  His casual references to the possibility of a third term also speak to his grandiosity.   When Trump can’t control the message, he simply shuts down the messenger, such as Voice of America or sues it, such as ABC and CBS.  Both Trump and Netanyahu demonstrate an insatiable quest for power and control; both men claim they have been given the heroic task of rescuing their homelands.

In addition to his emotional and psychological limits, Trump lacks the intellect, the rigor, and the powers of concentration to devote more than 24 hours to any given international task.

He said that he could end the Ukraine-Russia war in 24 hours and, when he couldn’t, he suspended weapons assistance to Ukraine and walked away from the problem.  For 24 hours, he discussed turning Gaza into the “Riviera” of the Middle East and displacing 2 million Palestinians.  When Trump was caricatured for such nonsense, he dropped the matter and it was never heard again.  Trade deals have not materialized and tariff issues have not been resolved.  Trump said this would take 90 days, but we’ve passed the target on that one, and only a trade/tariff deal with Vietnam is seriously in the works.  When he attends international meetings, such as the recent NATO conference, Trump returns home early because he has little to offer in terms of strategic dialogue. Trump took on the Iran assignment because it was seemingly a one and done operation. 

Trump would like to avoid the results of last week’s phone call with Russian President Putin, who rejected Trump’s call for a ceasefire with Ukraine and, 24hours later, launched  the greatest barrage of drones and missiles since the war started nearly three years ago.  Ukraine accepted Trump’s terms for a ceasefire, but was hit with a halt on much needed Patriot air defense systems from the United States.  Trump threatened additional sanctions against Russia for resisting the ceasefire, but has thus far refused to apply them.  In fact, the Trump administration has eased some of the economic restrictions previously placed on Russia. As a result, Putin pays very little attention to Trump’s warnings, totally ignoring Trump’s call for ending the conflict. 

It remains to be seen what the impact of these events will be on Israel’s response to Trump’s call for a 60-day Gazan ceasefire, which Hamas has accepted and Israel has thus far ignored.  Like Putin, Netanyahu has thus far ignored Trump’s various calls for a cease-fire  Meanwhile, the murderous logistics of Israel’s genocidal campaign continues in Gaza.  Only the courageous reporting of Palestinian journalists provides sources of credible information, but these journalists remain high on the Israeli target list.

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Image by Janne Leimola.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza, along with the escalating regional wars it has ignited, has brought two chilling truths into our focus: first, Israel is deliberately and aggressively undermining the security and stability of the entire Middle East and, second, Israel is utterly incapable of surviving on its own.

These two assertions, though seemingly distinct, are inextricably linked. For if those who relentlessly sustain Israel—militarily, politically, and economically—were to finally withdraw their support, the Middle East would not be the powder keg it has been for decades, a situation that has catastrophically worsened since October 7, 2023.

Though no oversimplification is intended, the brutal reality is that all it would take is for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, allowing the devastated, genocide-stricken Strip the faintest chance to heal. Over 56,000 Palestinians, including more than 17,000 children and 28,000 women, have been brutally slaughtered since the commencement of this war, a horrifying tally expected to surge dramatically when comprehensive investigations into the missing are finally conducted.

Only then could the process of returning to some semblance of normalcy begin, where the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people must be fiercely championed within an international system built, at least theoretically, upon unwavering respect for basic human rights and international law.

The abhorrent “might makes right” maxim would have to be utterly expunged from any future political equation. Middle Eastern countries, both Arab and Muslim, must finally rise to the occasion, stepping up decisively to aid their brethren and to ensure that Israel is powerless to divide their ranks.

For Israel, this demand is simply impossible, a non-starter and, understandably so, from its colonial perspective. Why?

“Invasion is a structure, not an event,” the influential scholar Patrick Wolfe has famously asserted. This profound statement unequivocally means that Israel’s wars, commencing with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the Nakba, of 1948, and all subsequent wars and military occupations, were not random historical coincidences, but rather integral components of an enduring structure of power designed to eliminate the Indigenous population.

This renders as simply false the notion that Israel’s behavior after October 7 was solely driven by revenge and devoid of strategy. We are perhaps excused for failing to initially grasp this distinction, given the grisly, unspeakable nature of the Israeli actions in Gaza and the palpable sense of perverse pleasure Israel seems to derive from the daily murder of innocent people.

Yet, the language emanating from Israel was chillingly clear about its true motives. As Benjamin Netanyahu declared on October 7, 2023, “we will turn Gaza into a deserted island”.

That has always been an intrinsic, unchanging part of Israel’s colonial structure, and it will remain so unless it is decisively reined in. But who possesses the will and power to rein in Israel?

Israel operates through a network of enablers, benefactors who have long viewed Israel’s existence as an indispensable colonial fortress serving the interests of Western colonialism.

“The connection between the Israeli people and the American people is bone deep. (…) We’re united in our shared values,” Joe Biden declared with striking conviction in July 2022.

Without even bothering to question those “shared values” that somehow permit Israel to perpetrate a genocide while the US actively sustains it, Biden was undeniably honest in his stark depiction that the relationship between both countries transcends mere politics. Other Western leaders blindly parrot the same perception.

The unfolding genocide, however, has spurred some Western—and a multitude of non-Western—governments to courageously speak out against the Israeli war, Netanyahu, and his extremist ideology in ways unprecedented since Israel’s very establishment. For some of these countries, notably Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia, among others, the proverbial ‘bond’ is demonstrably ‘breakable’ and their support is most certainly not ‘unequivocal’.

There are various theories as to why some Western governments dare to challenge Israel, while others stubbornly refuse. That important discussion aside, shattering the bond between Israel and the West is absolutely critical, not only for a just peace to finally prevail, but for the very survival of the Palestinian people.

The nearly 21 agonizing months of unrelenting Israeli genocide have taught us a brutal lesson: Israel is, after all, a vassal state, utterly unable to fight its own wars, to defend itself or even to sustain its own economy without the direct, massive support of the US and others.

Prior to the war, there were occasional outbursts from Israeli officials proclaiming that Israel is an independent country, not “another star on the US flag”. These voices have since been largely silenced, replaced by a constant stream of begging and pleading for the US to come to Israel’s rescue.

While Palestinians continue to stand with legendary courage to resist the Israeli military occupation and apartheid, those who genuinely care about international law, justice, and peace must take decisive action by directly confronting governments that persist in helping Israel sustain the genocide in Gaza and the destabilization of the Middle East.

Governments like Spain and others are doing what many had not expected only years ago: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is powerfully advocating for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, an extensive trade deal in place since 2000, due to “the catastrophic situation of genocide.”

If more such governments were to adopt a similar, uncompromising stance, Israel would be choked off, at least from acquiring the very murder weapons it uses to carry out its barbaric genocide.

It is our collective responsibility to march in lockstep behind such courageous voices and demand uncompromising accountability, not only from Israel, but from those who are actively sustaining its Israeli settler colonial structure.

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