If hallmarks of economic decline are everywhere apparent, it is Washington’s shameless participation in human genocide that has awakened many an American from their dogmatic slumbers. The United States has been a partner in human slaughter in Gaza, arming and funding, providing intelligence to and political cover for Zionist forces in Israel in their fanatical quest to establish a Greater Israel.

This blatant moral failing is the surest sign yet that the liberal West has failed. Liberalism was once a symbol of progress, bourgeoisie and workers and rural peasants banding together to overthrow feudalism and the divine right of kings.

Now it lists in the winds of modernity, an ethical cipher that maintains—like the artificial distortions of Mannerist art—a rhetorical posture of piety. Conservatives declare themselves part of an unfathomable messianic mission to establish mythical free markets and Christian rule, while liberal politicians repeat their multicultural platitudes in data-poor and poorly constructed sophistry that nobody believes.

Both—through their Republican and Democrat political wings—refuse to acknowledge their culpability, reflecting the absolute arrogance that accrues to those too long in power.

We Knew All Along

As the world comes awake to the sickening tango of death being tapped out on the rooftops of Gaza, statements like the following float through the media sphere, unaddressed and unpunished by the world’s leading states:

• Evidently calling for collective punishment outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said, “It’s an entire nation that is out there that is responsible.”

• Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi said Israel needs to “erase Gaza”

• Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich transparently disguising ethnic cleansing as “the right humanitarian option”

• Revital Gottlieb of the Israeli Knesset said, “All of Gaza’s infrastructures must be flattened…We need to stop talking about ‘humanitarian aid’.”

• Another member of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, added, “Burn Gaza now. No more excuses.”

• The New York Times reported that American leaders understood that mass civilian casualties were acceptable to Israeli leadership

• Israeli lawmaker Moshe Saada justified widespread calls to “destroy Gaza”

Western corporate media has provided extensive cover for Israel’s criminal campaign, often by insisting everyone on air first answer the slighting question, “Do you condemn Hamas?”, as if this is the moral bedrock on which any opinion on Gaza must establish itself. Yet the corporate media deliberately hides the fact that under the Geneva Conventions, an occupied people have every right to resist, including employing violent means. None of the international rulings from 1967 onward are included in discussions that are ahistorical at best, farcical at worst. Gore Vidal was prescient when he called America the United States of Amnesia.

The feigned outrage and disgust by American pundits over the initial Hamas attack, liberal and conservative alike, only illustrates by contrast the utter callousness and emptiness of the public discourse. Seventy five years of oppression, racism, and bloodshed against Palestinians produced no such horror among the corporate intelligentsia.

And as author Chris Hedges rightly pointed out, “How can you trap 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are unemployed, in one of the most densely populated spots on the planet for 16 years, reduce the lives of its residents, half of whom are children, to a subsistence level, deprive them of basic medical supplies, food, water and electricity, use attack aircraft, artillery, mechanized units, missiles, naval guns and infantry units to randomly slaughter unarmed civilians and not expect a violent response?”

Trump’s Vulgar Sycophancy

Though not the first to support the present ethnic cleansing, President Trump has embraced the Israeli mission with an enthusiasm that betrays his utter subjugation to those that would keep him in power, notably AIPAC. His love for Israel seems to be the means by which he has made a measure of peace with the National Security State, which wanted him imprisoned in his first term for his friendliness with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.

Now his administration has ratcheted up the vulgarity of American complicity in the Gaza genocide. For instance, he has:

• Tied state aid to each state’s stance on Israel. This is a despicable policy that hitches domestic support to support for a foreign power, which no American citizen should be compelled to provide

• Lifted a pause on 2,000-lb bombs, and a couple of ‘human rights’-linked oversight procedures, that had been put in place by the Biden administration as part of its feckless PR campaign to pretend to oppose the slaughter

• Approved $7B in munitions and $3B in “emergency” bombs in February 2025 alone

• Continues the Memorandum of Understanding from the Obama era under which the United States finances weapons procurement by Israel from U.S. defense firms

• Congressional Reporting Service (CRS) notes enhanced military intelligence cooperation with Israel

• Vetoed another UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate unconditional ceasefire

• Conducted “limited” strikes on Yemen Houthis, which are pro-Palestinian allies of Iran

• Has floated various real-estate fantasies about turning Gaza into another riviera once all the unwanted Arabs are removed, while children are trampled by tanks, in a kind of breathtaking display of utter callousness

• And much else, though he’s only been in office 8 months

Biden’s Liberal Narcissism

Setting aside the current administration, lest we slip into the fanaticism of the liberal, the more important point to remember is that Democrats are also morally bankrupt, if not as crass, and if marginally better in social uplift statistics. Because if we do not recognize this, the electoral pendulum that swings between corrupt neoliberal capitalist Democrat and corrupt neoliberal capitalist Republican will continue, while the majority suffer economic debasement at home and slaughter abroad.

The conservative critique that liberals prefer virtue signaling to principle is correct. It has been ever since Bill Clinton demonstrated that the New Democrats could win corporate money, co-opt business-friendly Republican policies, and sell them with the rhetoric of social empathy with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Coupled with a vigorous identity politics and companion campaign of discrimination against privileged and majority ethnic groups, it was a winning electoral strategy.

Clinton’s triangulation model proved an irresistible rationale for members of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), who claimed to hope to ‘do well by doing good.’ In the end, doing well meant maintaining their class privileges and material advantages while looking askance as their party practiced counterrevolutionary imperialism abroad, and instead hyping token reform at home.

Where has this left the liberal class? With the following:

The Biden administration was Israel’s most important military, financial, and political backer from the beginning of the genocide to the end of his term in office. We should set aside anonymously-sourced reports of Biden’s anger with Bibi and attend to the facts.

Aside from $3.8B in annual military aid, the Democrats sent emergency arms shipments, and provided additional financial and political support, including:

Military Supplies:

• 14,000 tank shells in an October 2023 shipment

• More than 2,000 2,000-pound bombs, great for mass casualty attacks

• 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells in a December 2023 shipment, including bunker busters

• F-35 fighter jet parts and $1B in new arms shipments approval in March 2024, the second time Biden used the Arms Export Control Act to bypass pesky Congress to arm the genocidaires

• Ongoing intelligence sharing, including satellite imagery and location tracking

• Military advisors dispatched by the Pentagon to assist in Israeli attacks

• Deployed U.S. warships to block regional intervention

• Launched Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect Israeli shipping

• The Costs of War Project at Brown University, the United States spent nearly $18B in military aid to Israel in a single year

• In August 2024, Biden approved a $20B arms shipment to Israel

Political Cover:

• Vetoed three UN Security Council Resolutions calling for a ceasefire, and abstained from a fourth despite a death toll of some 30,000

• Attacked the ICJ finding on Gaza as meritless and threatened sanctions on ICC officials

Financial Support:

• Continued ongoing $3.8B annual military support deal, inked by the Obama administration, with no stoppage or even threat of stoppage

• Added $14.5B in a Supplemental Aid Package in April 2024

• Cut funding to UNRWA over unproven Israeli claims, devastating aid delivery. This means that the administration was blocking aid to Gaza while arming Israel

All of this despite a death toll exceeding 30,000 people (likely far higher), the vast majority of which were women and children. And despite famine. And despite hundreds of reported potential violations of international law (rendering bootless the token human-rights verifications attached to some aid).

And despite two leading Israeli rights organizations—B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel—both released reports declaring Israel’s conduct in the war on Palestinians constitutes genocide.

(Even Grok wasn’t having it: “Israel’s actions in Gaza align with genocide indicators per ICJ’s plausible ruling, the UN’s “Anatomy of a Genocide” report, and Amnesty’s findings on intentional mass killings. US funding enables this horror—stop the slaughter.”)

Coda to a Catastrophe

Whatever the particular violent exploitation, there is bipartisan consensus. Whether participating in genocide in Gaza; sparking a bloody proxy war against nuclear-powered Russia in Ukraine; facilitating the wholesale destruction of Syria and whitewashing its terrorist leaders; aggressively working to disarm Iran while arming Israel; encircling China with military force; sanctioning every country that pursues a different model of economic development than Washington’s hegemonic system; or strip-mining Argentina through the IMF with the help of comprador elite. In any and every case, liberals and conservatives will always side with violent fascist imperialism over peaceful socialist mutualism because fascism doesn’t threaten capitalist profits. Rather it reinforces and amplifies them. Historical examples abound.

Is there a difference, then, between the two electoral fronts for corporate power? Let’s ask Hedges, “Of course, there’s a difference. It’s how you want corporate fascism delivered to you. Do you want it delivered by a Princeton educated, Goldman Sachs criminal or do you want it delivered by racist, nativist, Christian fascist?”

A quote from Noam Chomsky should suffice to close this chat: “I don’t know what word in the English language—I can’t find one—applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life so they can put a few more dollars into highly stuffed pockets. The word ‘evil’ doesn’t even begin to approach it.”

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.