Where Despair Ends and Tactics Begin: The Invigorating Case of Luigi Mangione

[Pictured: Luigi Mangione is escorted into Manhattan Criminal court for his arraignment on state murder and terror charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Monday, Dec. 23, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)]

By Thomas King

What’s at stake in the Luigi Mangione case is where despair ends and tactics begin. On December 4th, an unidentified shooter (now suspected to be Mangione) exposed the alibis through which social power avoids being put right on the spot— as Raoul Vaneigem once wrote. We must resist any misattribution or denial of what this moment reveals; to do otherwise is to conceal how systematic terror breeds desperate acts of political violence in America. This demands that we reject the shoehorning of the alleged gunman’s inconsistent politics into a neat ideological framework, or the digging into his past as doing the state’s work. The truth behind the shooter’s actions lies in the parasitic design of a healthcare system that sacrifices lives to fuel its machinery. After an election where healthcare barely registered for either party, the desubjectivated entity took with him a gun, his despair, and, unsurprisingly, struck a chord with the public consciousness. The praxis was simple. Pain can radicalise anyone. ‘What do you do?’ he wrote.

Let’s not be deterred. Private health coverage spending will exceed $1.5 trillion this year as life expectancy declines. Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, a measure the Democratic Party (aside from Bernie Sanders) has only sought to protect, UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, increased its annual share buyback program by 217%, funnelling $54 billion into stock repurchases. In 2023 alone, it pocketed $22 billion in profits on $371 billion in revenue—equating to $25 per share—and paid out $7.29 per share in dividends to investors. UHC had the highest denial rate of any U.S. insurance company, at 32 percent. Personal testimonies describe instances where the company denied coverage for essential treatments, including medications and hospital stays, despite their critical necessity for recovery. UHC was accused of using rigid algorithms to cut off payments despite ongoing care needs and was sued for a bot with a claimed 90 percent error rate. Meanwhile, a U.S. Senate committee found that UHC and other insurers intentionally denied critical nursing care to stroke patients, prioritising profit over survival. We lay bare the shooter’s motive when we recognise the healthcare system as a productive force of socialised violence. We must also recognise this violence as producing sad passions: fear, depression, and the suicidal urge. Franco Berardi reminds us, “Only by calibrating the abyss of the American unconscious can we decipher the roots of the social ferocity that is now in full manifestation.” From this point, we might decide where and to whom we must turn.

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

The so-called ‘dark corners of the internet’ are, in fact, very bright. Talking heads decry the blurring of celebrity and criminality in the lionisation of Mangione, as if it's a new phenomenon, as if it marks a troubling new phase in the normalisation of violence in America. If violence is indeed normalised in America, it is because U.S.-supplied weapons kill civilians and fuel genocide. It is because both political parties have spent decades eroding public trust in the rule of law. It is because so-called ‘liberal democracy’ is on shaky ground. It is because neoliberal governance thrives on the precarity and commodification of relations. It is because, while Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro claims there is no place for violence, he signs his name on missiles. It is because Zoe Strimpel fears for the future because of ‘Gen-Z’ support for Mangione yet writes that ‘the Israel Defence Forces are the most moral soldiers in the world’. Why is violence only acceptable when carried out—or backed—by elites against the working class and marginalised? Why does a U.S. Congress report deem it necessary to issue a “call to arms” for bipartisan public support to reclaim the United States’ crumbling global hegemony? If we are witnessing the normalisation of political violence through chaotic revenge, it is because the reasons for revolution are staring us in the face. It is because pain and sad passions ignite the active forces within them.

We are fighting a war of information where major media outlets have become arms of the national security state. Mangione’s alleged manifesto remained hidden until Ken Klippenstein published it, despite being in the possession of major media companies, just like his notebook is now. Days later, the New York Times refused to publish Mangione’s image, citing fears of "amplifying the crime and inspiring others," according to Andy Newman. Meanwhile, other media outlets scramble to frame Mangione's alleged actions as 'bizarre' and 'brazen'— desperate to portray him as terrifying and erratic, because acknowledging the truth of the event would force them to recognise that he is, in fact, no different from the average American voter. Even those who appear to empathise with the cause often revert to reductive moralising.

A quick search of Luigi Mangione's name floods the screen with headlines like ‘Who is Luigi Mangione?’, ‘What we know about the New York killer,’ or ‘Tracing the privileged family of Luigi Mangione.’ This is journalism at its most insidious. Had Mangione not been arrested, the shooter may have become a stronger symbol of class antagonism—his image untainted by the specifics of his story. It is why we must resist such attempts to dilute his image. That said, as Will Conway, co-host of the Acid Horizon podcast, pointed out, the flood of comical or provocative edits and politicised videos surrounding the shooter’s assassination reveals how the truth of a politicising event disrupts the biopolitical fabric, where anyone can shape the mythology surrounding the propaganda of the deed. These posts fight back against those who seek to control the narrative, which is why the Times attempted to disarm the public in the name of national security, but it was already too late.

Americans are conditioned to love men who look like Mangione, which is why they dominate narratives in media and culture. If Mangione weren’t white, the universal support he now receives would undoubtedly shape a very different narrative. So, resisting the dilution of the motive also requires, as we should independently of this case, resisting the embedded racism that makes his attractiveness conventional. An obsolete romanticism—seemingly innocent, though it isn’t—will only help sustain the forces that shape who becomes a symbol of resistance and who doesn’t. We must remember the work remains unfinished, and the revolution will have no face. Destituting the political apparatus doesn’t rest on the murder of Brian Thompson— the world is full of Thompsons. With that said, this incident might have done the world a huge favour. It has given a nation, relentlessly beaten down by a for-profit healthcare system, a renewed sense of unity and a reinvigorated cause. What matters now is what we do next.

Vaneigem wrote,

“My sympathy for the solitary killer ends where tactics begin; but perhaps tactics need scouts driven by individual despair. However that may be, the new revolutionary tactics — which will be based indissolubly on the historical tradition and on the practice, so widespread and so disregarded, of individual realisation — will have no place for people who only want to mimic the gestures of Ravachol or Bonnot. But on the other hand these tactics will be condemned to theoretical hibernation if they cannot, by other means, attract collectively the individuals whom isolation and hatred for the collective lie have already won over to the rational decision to kill or to kill themselves. No murderers — and no humanists either! The first accept death, the second impose it. Let ten men meet who are resolved on the lightning of violence rather than the long agony of survival; from this moment, despair ends and tactics begin. Despair is the infantile disorder of the revolutionaries of everyday life.”

References

UHC Stats. Health Insurance, UnitedHealth, Shareholders, and Buybacks. Jacobin, December 2024. https://jacobin.com/2024/12/health-insuranceunitedhealth-shareholders-buybacks.

Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life.

Berardi, Franco. The American Unconscious and the Disintegration of the West. Substack. https://francoberardi.substack.com/p/el-inconsciente-americano-y-ladesintegracion.

Strimpel, Zoe. The Israel Defence Forces Are the Most Moral Soldiers in the World. The Telegraph, April 27, 2024. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/27/israel-defence-forces-mostmoral-soldiers-in-the-world/.

Grounding with Koreans in the Belly of Another Beast

[Pictured: The western-induced border, commonly referred to as the DMZ (demilitarized zone), that separates the Korean people.]

By D. Musa Springer

Republished from Hood Communist.

In the short time between sunrise and boarding the 15 hour flight to Tokyo, all of my travel anxiety turned to excitement. In November 2023, I was invited to join the 2nd annual U.S. Peace Delegation to Chongryon (The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan), in a variety group of U.S. academics, journalists, high school youth, and organizers. The delegation was organized by Korean Reunification activists Dr. Kiyul Chung, a Visiting Professor at Tokyo’s Korea University and Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung University, and Derek R. Ford, a US-based activist and visiting lecturer at Korea University. The opportunity to join this exchange felt like a unique chance to build fundamentally anti-imperialist paths to solidarity, and proved itself to be. 

As an International Youth Representative for the Cuba-based Red Barrial Afrodescendiente, I’m familiar with organizing delegations for Africans struggling in the U.S. to ground with Africans struggling against the blockade in Cuba. Aside from it being the longest flight I’ve ever taken, this trip to ground with Koreans in Japan was my first time on the ‘attending’ end of a delegation, putting anti-imperialist politics into practice from that perspective. My time at Korea University, as well as touring the impressive Chongryon Korean National Schools, reaffirmed my commitment to the examples of Cuba’s internationalist politics, and presented much educational dialogue, valuable exchanges, and material pathways for further solidarity. 

I would especially like to thank Dr. Kiyul Chung, the only Korean born in the Southern portion of the Korean peninsula to ever teach at a Northern Korea university! The wonderful Korean comrade and longtime anti-imperialist organizer shepherded us throughout the entire delegation, losing his own sleep for the sake of ours. At 71 years old, Dr. Kiyul has more energy than the entire delegation combined, with his passion for his people and the Reunification of Korea beaming at all times. This experience provided me with further insights into the historical struggles of the Korean people under Japanese imperialism — both as an unrecognized, oppressed colonial diaspora within Japan, and in their Motherland as the target of limitless Western imperialist aggression.

I believe that traveling on delegations is a task that organizers in the U.S. should engage in, within an organized fashion, including domestic trips to share notes with organizers across the country. Our organizations must collaborate and strategize on how they, and in turn us, can do better in supporting a broad and fresh base of members within our ranks to experience the political transformations, solidarity, and exchanges that often come from delegations. In this context my reflection on my time grounding with Koreans, like my reflection on African power and politics in La Marina, is an attempt to offer some perspective on the broad map of global resistance to imperialism, the process of building ties to learn from our Global South siblings in struggle, and to share insights to both the experience itself and what I learned from it.

Koreans In Japan

One of the most staggering revelations of this trip was learning firsthand about the sheer scale of Korean suffering under Japanese imperialism. While the image constructed of Japan in the West is closely related to the island’s cultural exports — popular art, food, entertainment and fashion often associate the island and its history with all things fun and whimsical — the reality of its colonial violence is much less spoken. As Derek Ford details, the origins of Koreans in Japan is fraught with ‘profound violence’:

“From their founding after World War II, Koreans in Japan—who are sometimes called “Zainichi Koreans”, meaning “foreign Koreans”—have always had to struggle to create and maintain educational spaces and systems where they can teach and learn about their own history, culture, traditions, and languages, in addition to other essential disciplines and languages. This was a basic human right as well as a political struggle, as Japan’s colonization of Korea, which officially started in 1910 but began about 5 years earlier, forced over 2 million Koreans—about 90 percent of whom came from the southern part of the peninsula—to move to Japan through either physical violence, coercion, and deceit. The story of the formation of a Korean population in Japan in the 1900s is one of profound violence.

Some were “recruited” by Japanese companies after colonial forces stole their lands and gave them to landlords, promised great jobs and good pay but receiving the opposite. Many Korean women, hundreds of thousands, were kidnapped into Japan’s military sexual slavery network, which the U.S. [military] inherited after it replaced Japan as the occupying force in the south [in 1945]. In 1938, Japan forcibly conscripted and kidnapped workers from Korea and brought them to Japan as slave laborers, where they were forced to build the military, munitions buildings and construct secret underground bases and bunkers for the air force. In the latter instance, children were particularly valuable, as their small bodies and hands were essential for creating the tunnels with pickaxes.”

Koreans estimate upwards of 7-8 million were conscripted to Japanese colonial forced labor during the World War period, with at least 800,000 taken to mainland Japan as forced labor. Approximately 300,000 Korean women were kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, again, an operation later taken over by the U.S. military occupation. In their explanations of this history on our trip, the Koreans consistently made comparisons to the colonization of Indigenous people and chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas, and the plight of these individuals is a haunting testament to the universal brutality of colonialism. Similar to how African historians intentionally highlight and celebrate our resistance to colonialism and slavery, all of the Koreans made sure to remind us that they revolted consistently. One historian said that an estimated third of all Korean forced laborers actively resisted through guerrilla warfare, organized escape, and marronage, embodying a common anti-colonial spirit of resilience and defiance.

It’s worth noting the population dynamics among Koreans in Japan, because the Korean community in Japan has a complex and significant history, a main theme throughout the delegation. Japan’s policy towards ethnic Koreans living within its borders, particularly those who do not hold citizenship of either Japan or South Korea, reflects Japan’s enduring colonial policies and the greater geopolitical forces of the region. Japan only recognizes the Republic of Korea (‘South Korea’) as the ‘legitimate’ government of the Korean Peninsula. Consequently, Japan does not consider passports or citizenship issued by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or ‘North Korea’) as valid. This stance is rooted in Japan’s imperial legacy, subservient diplomatic relations with the U.S. who wages continual war against the DPRK, and its own colonial recognition policies. As one can imagine, immense issues related to things like traveling, housing, and education arise from not having your citizenship formally recognized.

Of roughly 1 million Koreans in Japan, thousands of them do not possess Japanese nor South Korean citizenship; the term “Choson” is used for them. This term is a reference to the Korean peninsula under the Choson Dynasty (1392–1897), before its division into North and South; from 1910 to 1945 the peninsula was ruled by the Empire of Japan under the name Choson. “Choson” is how the Japanese government categorizes these Koreans in legal, political, and administrative limbo, and it’s important to remember that many are descendants of Koreans brought to Japan during the colonial period who either only have DPRK citizenship, some combination of Japanese and Korean citizenship, or who have chosen not to obtain Japanese citizenship in place of citizenship to their Motherland, the DPRK. ​​In 1947, Japan enacted the ‘Alien Registration Law’, which relegated ethnic Koreans to the status of foreigners within Japan. Following this, the Nationality Law of 1950 removed Japanese citizenship from Korean offspring born to Japanese mothers, while Korean children fathered by Japanese men could retain their Japanese citizenship.

Learning of these dynamics forced me to reflect on the colonial obsession with regulating national identity, citizenship, and ethnic classification; from the centuries-old ‘One-Drop Rule’ that continues to dictate the racial class system of the U.S., to the apartheid segregation system imposed onto the Palestinians by the Zionists, to the dangerous blood-quantum eugenics preoccupation of Nazi Germany. Whether implicitly implied through legal and cultural means, as is the case with Koreans in Japan, or through explicit and violent exclusion, colonizers are always necessarily obsessed with sternly dictating national and ethnic identity, marriage, citizenship, population diversification, and racial classification.     

While some progress has been made, one can imagine the serious implications that these classifications have had for the identity, legal status, and discrimination of the Korean community in Japan for several generations. Those designated as Choson usually face challenges related to their imposed-statelessness, such as limitations on travel, difficulties in accessing most social services, ethnicity-based discrimination in housing and labor, and broader issues of societal oppression. 

One example that we learned from students at Korea University was during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Japanese government created a special program to support students struggling financially. Japan allowed for students across the entire country of all nationalities, including students at international schools in Japan, to request and receive state funds to help needy students afford a laptop to do remote schoolwork during quarantine, access protective gear like masks and sanitizer, and even help paying university tuition. All students, that is, except for students at Korea University. 

These students already faced a number of compounding financial and discriminatory issues long before the pandemic; students informed me that by simply attending Korea University, they have already curtailed the vast majority of their job prospects within Japan. Korea University was the only university where students were not allowed access to this COVID support, and Korean students launched a grassroots campaign in response to protest and calling out the Japanese government. 

Other examples are much more dramatic, but equally illustrative of the oppressive nature of life in Japan for the Koreans. As Ford notes:

“In 2018, a Japanese man attacked a young Korean man with a knife, and he admitted to police he did so “because he had ‘looked down’ on him.” That same year, two men shot up Chongryon’s headquarters in downtown Tokyo.”

During our visit, the mixture of this painful past with the tenuous present was palpable. 

“Just before the beginning of the COVID pandemic we had to crawl through a torn chainlink fence,” participants of the delegation from prior years told me, as we accessed the underground tunnels where thousands of Koreans perished as forced laborers. By November 2023 during my trip, the Japanese government had installed sparse lighting inside the opening of the tunnel, and had a small multilingual plaque acknowledging the historic nature of the site. Having legal access to these tunnels and the small commemorative plaque is itself the result of struggle by local Korean organizers and a small handful of Japanese historians, and remains a point of contention: the plaque doesn’t accurately describe the site, almost reading as a celebration of the horrors endured by Koreans in these tunnels, with absolutely no mention of forced labor. Of the roughly  1200 forced labor tunnels across the island, only less than a dozen are accessible by Japanese historians, who must receive tight-gripped government approval to enter.

These underground cave-tunnels were utilized by the Japanese imperial army, who moved most of their military operations underground to escape bombardments and military action during the World Wars. Once I ducked my way into the dark, humid tunnel, I quickly realized the space was filled with an ominous, heavy, and familiar feeling. We observed the physical marks on the walls of these underground tunnels painstakingly chiseled by the hands of Korean laborers, many just teenagers as young as 12, under the duress of Imperial Japanese guns. These marks are not just scars on stone; they are indelible imprints of a dark history, a somber reminder of the exploitation and suffering endured. 

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Exploring the legacies of chattel slavery causes a similarly chilling feeling for Africans in the Americas. At the Castillo de San Severino in Matanzas, Cuba, for example, historians point out where you can still see the bullet holes in the stone walls, where Africans who attempted to escape or revolt were punished by gunfire. There’s a level of reality that is communicated by experiencing the physical remnants of this deep oppression.

Dr. Chung and professor Curry Malott, another participant on the delegation, described that when there were no lights inside these colonial tunnels, only the guide’s flashlight, they were immersed in shadows and the echoes of brutal horror. To honor this, we turned off all the lights to experience just a few seconds of the darkness that plagued Koreans for decades. 

Interestingly, the Japanese public’s awareness of their nation’s colonial history is markedly absent, intentionally hidden and disallowed from public memory in any capacity. The nation’s imperial history is not taught in their schools, nor part of public discussion in any meaningful capacity. The lack of historical consciousness among the Japanese populace about their own country’s role in colonizing Korea is concerning, but not dissimilar to the absolute and proud lack of public knowledge in the U.S. of the atrocities their European ancestors carried out against many colonized and enslaved populations. It points to a broader issue of historical amnesia as a tool of the maintenance empire, the nearly inescapable dominating power of U.S. imperialism, and the importance of truthful historical education in acknowledging and learning from the past. 

Since at least 1948 the Koreans have engaged in organized resistance in the form of grassroots organization and DPRK-supported popular education. In 1955, this grassroots organizations would become Chongryon, a network of Korean schools that they began to build immediately following liberation. Chongryon now exists as a network of hundreds of Korean schools across the islands, cultural centers and businesses, and a humbly stunning university in Tokyo — all leading the struggle against the violent erasure of Korean people’s history, culture, and presence. And, as one professor made sure I understood clearly, all of this is achieved through belief in the values and principles of socialism.  

Microcosm of Regional Imperialist Aggression

The complexities of this situation reflect the ongoing tensions in the East Asian region — due primarily to the presence of U.S. imperialist forces that occupy all of Japan and the Southern Korean Peninsula — and the wider Pacific region through United States Pacific Command (USPACOM). 

In my short time in Japan, I was repeatedly stunned at the extremely visible and influential presence of U.S. military forces on the small island. Signs in some places read “U.S. Military Housing”, while others advertise “Best Car Rentals For U.S. Military Men.” When I ventured into the fashion district in my free time, massive and popular second-hand clothing markets were on most corners filled with used military paraphernalia, proudly sitting across from the McDonald’s on every block. In true ‘traveling while Black’ fashion, I sought out other Black people whenever possible; in Tachikawa, nearly every Black person I saw, including those who messaged me on social apps, were U.S. soldiers and their families. In some regards, what I observed and experienced of the U.S. Military presence in Japan was more visible and aggressive than their presence domestically in many places. The juxtaposition of Japanese culture and context with the U.S. military presence gave the same feeling as the police who occupy U.S. cities, who stick out within a society designed to cater to them. 

The U.S. has not only occupied and wedged its way into virtually every aspect of Japanese life and economy, it has also stunted and outright stopped virtually all attempts at Korean reunification, regional peace and stability, and sustainable diplomatic ties between the DPRK, its citizens, and Japan. 

One afternoon on the trip we drove up a winding, narrow road to park our van at a stunning mountaintop park, surrounded by cherry blossoms and lush greens. The beauty felt like a scene from a movie.

“Right there, you see it,” Said Dr. Kiyul, one hand on my shoulder and the other pointing at the various cargo and military ships in the ocean. “See that big U.S. ship right there? That’s where the nukes are!” 

The ship he was referring to was the unavoidable USS Ronald Reagan, a massive nuclear-powered aircraft ‘supercarrier’ sitting off the shore of Yokosuka. 

“That ship is readied with nuclear weapons and other devastating heavy artillery, aimed at the DPRK at all times. One may think that the Japanese, being the victims of the world’s most tragic and infamous nuclear attack by the U.S., wouldn’t cooperate with this nuclear chauvinism,” said Dr. Kiyul. 

Unfortunately, the U.S. uses the nonsensical guise of “deterrent diplomacy” and maintains a subservient Japanese government to assert that they are keeping Japan ‘safe’ from the DPRK and others, even if the opposite remains true. Most Japanese people I spoke with in my free time felt, for lack of a better term, deeply indifferent to the U.S. military occupation across their island, though some have said that the events in Palestine since October 7 have changed that. 

It’s important to underscore how deeply ingrained the U.S. military presence and militarization is in the Pacific region is. Similar to how U.S. AFRICOM has turned the entirety of the African continent to a subservient militarized zone, or how the U.S.  SOUTHCOM has designated Latin America as its “yard” to dominate, so too has the U.S. PACOM (Indo-Pacific Command) carved the entire Pacific region into its playground. U.S. military bases, naval carriers, occupation installments, and joint-training endeavors completely surround the DPRK and China, utilizing Japan, Southern Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Guam, and surrounding areas in the region to encircle those the U.S. deem as enemies.    

This all-encompassing military presence aligns with the U.S. strategy of “full spectrum dominance” to control all land, sea, air and space possible. Across the continent of Africa the presence of the U.S. AFRICOM resulted in a 100,000% increase in terrorism across the continent, deteriorated the already shaky regional stability, and left neo-colonial forces with new caches of U.S. weapons. In a similar manner, the U.S. presence in the Pacific has caused a breakdown of negotiations between the DPRK and neighborhooding countries like Japan, as well as the Southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. Each time the North and South Korean governments have attempted peace talks, let alone discussions of any potential reunification, the U.S. has swiftly halted such talks; the easing of Japanese hostility against the DPRK was also stunted by the U.S., who deemed the DPRK a grave safety and forbade the Japanese government from seeking peaceful solutions. The U.S. has consistently denied DPRK-initiated proposals to discuss a peace treaty to formally end the Korean war, for example, the longest war in U.S. history.  

What’s clear is that the U.S. prefers to continue an aggressive and antagonistic policy towards the DPRK, using its subservient “allies” in the region as mere launching pads from which they can target their regional enemies. Despite the DPRK remaining politically consistent on the question of peace talks, consistent on the common sense policy not relinquishing nuclear weapons (for fear of suffering the same fate of Libya’s Qaddafi), consistent on their expressed desire for reunification of Korea, the U.S. has been equally consistent in denying the region stability and demilitarized peace. The largest military occupation is in Luchu (Okinawa), which doubles as a U.S. and Japanese colonial occupation of these Indigenous islands. 

For Koreans in Japan, I was told by students, Japanese aggression and discrimination against internal Koreans tends to match the larger geopolitical situations they face. As the geopolitical sphere becomes more complex and contentious, local Koreans face knife attacks, are scared to wear their traditional clothing outside of their schools, are made into the society’s punching bags, and experience a microcosm of the larger regional warcraft by the U.S.

68 years of Internationalism, Popular Education In Practice 

The delegation took place just one month following the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation in Occupied Palestine on October 7, and therefore the consistent backdrop of most conversations on the trip was Palestine, the resistance struggle being waged there, and how it is related to the burgeoning potential of a multipolar world. The DPRK has long supported the struggles of the Palestinian Resistance both materially and politically, as they have to a lesser known extent African liberation struggles, including training various militant Black Panthers and supporting some seeking asylum. In fact the DPRK has never recognized the Zionist state, consistently calling for the liberation of Palestine. 

In the Korean elementary and middle schools, I flipped through pages in their history books and saw images of Martin Luther King Jr., Muamar Qadaffi, the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, Ahmed Ben Bella, and other revolutionary figures in African history, which was particularly warming. While in in the U.S. the DPRK is extremely and harshly vilified, the Global South still largely recognizes the DPRK for having never surrendered to imperialism, and as an “unwavering ally of the South and the resolute torchbearer of anti-imperialism”, as the Communist Party of Kenya put it in their December issue of Itikadi. Reverence for the DPRK exists across Africa, with organizations like the Nigerian-DPRK Friendship Association highlighting the role that the DPRK played in supporting African liberation movements of the 60s and the 70s, and African development beyond that. This support includes providing tractors and agricultural supplies, helping to develop local infrastructure like roads and hospitals, exchange of academic training, import-export exchange, and technological cooperation.  

Inside each room of the Korean high schools and the Korean University, images of their anti-colonial heroes Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il hang proudly, similar to the endless images of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Jose Martí plastered across Cuban walls. The Koreans recognize their struggle as primarily a struggle against the contradictions of imperialism and colonialism, with the Korean Juche ideology guiding them, and sew this recognition into the fabric of their work inside Japan. 

In the middle school classes, a young Korean girl was asked to practice her English in front of the class by speaking to us; the students all turned their chairs around and sat quietly, attentively to show her respect. To our surprise, she didn’t simply introduce herself, but rather introduced her entire class, speaking almost exclusively in the collective “we” — telling us what ‘we’ as a class like to do, why they are excited to meet us, and so forth. We all noted the collective, communal nature of the Chongryan system, and the beautiful display of this collectivism in the student’s persistent use of “we.” 

Toward the latter half of our trip, I was able to guest lecture alongside other delegation participants for two different classes at Korea University. The topic of the class that I joined is itself a testament to the advanced nature of their revolutionary education: “End of the Unipolar World, Creation of Multipolar World: Histories of Korea-U.S., Russia-U.S., and China-U.S. Confrontation” taught by professor Kiyul Chung. We discussed the globalization of anti-imperialist principles of self-determination, the role of the DPRK in supporting a burgeoning multipolar world, and the active application of DPRK principles of self-reliance and self-defense. 

When it was my turn to speak, I put into context the struggles of Africans within the U.S. as an internal colony, highlighted several moments of joint history between DPRK and African liberation struggles, and discussed the strong commonalities between Pan-Africanism and Korean Reunification as strategies and political ideologies. The commonalities in these two ideological northstars needs to be further explored. The same way that Korean Reunification wishes to see the U.S., Japanese, and Western imperialist grip on Korea fall, we too wish to see this imperialist grip on Africa fall. The same way that they desire the reunification of the Korean Peninsula under scientific socialism, so too do we wish to see the unification of Africa under scientific socialism. In the same way that they envision safety and security for the Korean diaspora as being existentially linked to the reunification of Korea, we also understand the safety and security of Africans in our diaspora from imperialist racism as only being achievable through Africa’s unification.  

And as they wish to see the fall of the neo-colonial puppet governments of Japan and South Korea — who take their orders directly from the U.S. — we, too, wish to see the fall of the neo-colonial comprador class, who exploit Africa and Africans at the command of Western imperialists. 

The discussions highlighted the irony of certain academic narratives that focus exclusively on single-issue oppression with a U.S.-centric lens, while ignoring the broader history and experience of imperialism globally. While discourse of ‘global anti-blackness’ has gone viral in recent years, rarely have I seen this perspective properly contrasted with the experiences of Koreans under Japanese imperialism, including the mass rape and enslavement of Korean women, or other colonized populations. It underscored the importance of recognizing and respecting the diverse histories of both suffering and resistance across the world, rather than subsuming them under singular narratives of blanket oppression hierarchies.

This trip helped me to think deeper on the often cited concept of ‘the world being built on antiblackness’, critically examined in the light of the Pacific region’s experiences, the Arab (West Asia) region’s experiences, and so forth. The sufferings of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran, in Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii, and in other regions includes levels of dehumanization, mass murder, sanctions, exploitation, and slavery by Western powers that challenge the narrative that centers solely on anti-Blackness as the foundational for global oppression. This view feels reductive in light of serious engagement with the world history of imperialism, as it overlooks the multifaceted nature of imperialist violence and the diverse experiences of those suffering under it, in favor of grand narratives.

While I do not claim to be an expert on such subjects nor want this occasionally controversial topic to overshadow the overall reflections in this piece, I do hope that we can broaden our understanding of our own oppression in light of global struggles. Conditions of enslavement, colonization, vicious racism and discrimination emanate from a system of imperialism that dictates super-exploitation at all costs, that simply reappears in various forms and locations. We must resist the urge to claim a form of chauvinism which asserts a global preoccupation, consciously or subconsciously, with our oppression as the ‘psychic’ lifeblood of the modern world. In reality, imperialism is the lifeblood of the modern world-building project, with the U.S.-EU-NATO bloc dictating the terms of exploitation to the world. 

This, perhaps, is why the Chongryon school network is primarily based on Korean culture as their basis of community and education. “Korean culture is thousands of years old, and our oppression is not,” one student at Korea University told me. “That is why we focus on learning our Korean language, our mythology, our history. if we do not preserve it, Japan will squash it out of us.”

In Cuba, a similar phenomenon exists. The depth of African culture, from language and dance, to fashion and spiritual practice, help to unify and sustain the Revolution, by creating a common African identity that Afro-Cubans unif around. For the Koreans in Japan, their culture is not just an act of resistance against Japanese erasure, it is also a source of unity and great ethnic, national pride. For African organizers in the West, we have to remember that our culture is a powerful tool for unification and pride, taking the lessons from other colonized individuals who have proven as much. 

Under the guise of building a ‘battery factory’ and with firm belief in the power of their culture, Koreans in Japan secretly built Korea University without the knowledge of the Japanese government, which opened in 1956. On the basis of culture and popular education, they have turned this act of defiance into a network of contested spaces, where they are able to exercise their autonomy. Language, song, dance, history, traditions, clothing, all are celebrated as a basis for the socialist experiment in self-determination that is Chongryon. I couldn’t help but wonder, what it would mean for us to return to and celebrate our African culture in a similar and serious manner.

As we move forward, it is crucial to carry these lessons with us, fostering an empathetic and decisive discourse on resistance and liberation. Delegations are not simply to perform a more ethical form of tourism, but rather are crucial moments to witness and learn the opportunities that exist for colonized peoples who are organized and dedicated. After my trip to Chongryon to ground with Koreans in the belly of another beast, I am reaffirmed that our struggle as Africans must be decisively socialist and anti-imperialist, firmly rooted in notions of cultural power, and remain consistent in our solidarity with the Korean struggle. We have to join them in calling for the reunification of Korea and supporting the U.S. Out Of Korea movement, because the intertwined nature of our struggles are profound.

Groveling at the Feet of Greed: How U.S. Politicians Sacrifice Lives for Profit and Power

By Peter S. Baron

U.S. foreign policy has consistently exposed the cowardly and self-serving opportunism of our political leaders, who are driven by the interests of their corporate elite overlords. From the earliest days of the Republic, American interventions abroad have prioritized the elite class’s accumulation and consolidation of profit and power over human rights and international stability. Politicians, ever ready to serve corporate interests, have implemented policies designed to expand market access, control vital resources, and maintain global dominance, all while cloaking their actions in the rhetoric of democracy and security.

American politicians, as executors of this foreign policy, perpetuate wars, coups, and economic sanctions, ensuring a steady stream of blood money to their elite patrons. They manipulate public sentiment and suppress dissent to create a facade of national interest that conceals the true beneficiaries of these policies. The cumulative devastation from the African Slave Trade to the genocide in Gaza exposes the moral bankruptcy of a foreign policy rooted in murder and torture for profit and power. This grotesque complicity demands a radical rethinking of America's role in the world, prioritizing human dignity over corporate greed.

A History of Exploitation: From Slavery to Modern Conflicts

The pattern of exploitation, intrinsic to American capitalism and imperialism, traces back to our earliest days as a new nation. Understanding this continuum helps explain ongoing atrocities in places like Gaza, where marginalized lives remain collateral damage in the pursuit of profit and power.

The African Slave Trade, beginning in the 16th century, was an era of unparalleled brutality that resulted in the deaths of approximately 1.5 to 3 million African people. This brutal chapter in history was propelled by European powers and elite colonists, whose capitalist ambitions demanded a massive labor force to produce surpluses of profitable crops like sugar, cotton, and tobacco. Africans were enslaved and forcibly torn from their homes, families, and cultures, then transported across the Atlantic under the most inhumane conditions imaginable. Packed like cargo in the filthy holds of ships, many died from disease, malnutrition, and abuse. Those who survived the harrowing journey were sold like cattle, treated as mere property, stripped of their humanity, and forced to toil under relentless, brutal conditions.

The dehumanization and commodification of millions of men, women, and children generated immense wealth for European and American economies, laying the very foundation for modern capitalism.

In what is now the contiguous United States, the Indigenous population was decimated from over 5 million before European contact to fewer than 238,000 by the late 19th century, a near-total annihilation that subjected indigenous communities to unimaginable horrors—relentless warfare, violent displacement, and the deliberate introduction of diseases to which they had no immunity. The forced removal and extermination of Indigenous peoples was justified by U.S. expansionist policies under the guise of "Manifest Destiny." Americans were supposedly destined to occupy and control the land across the American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Driven by a relentless capitalist hunger for land and resources, the U.S. government and settlers aggressively seized vast territories for agriculture, mining, and real estate ventures in a calculated effort to pave the way for capitalist development.

The American Revolutionary War resulted in approximately 25,000 American deaths, around 24,000 British deaths, and about 7,500 Hessian (German) mercenary deaths, totaling approximately 56,500 fatalities. British trade policies were designed to keep the colonies economically dependent on Britain, restricting their ability to trade freely and forcing them to benefit the British economy. These policies included excessive taxation, which disproportionately burdened the lower classes in the colonies, fueling their anger towards both the elite in the UK and their colonial counterparts.

However, as the revolution progressed, the colonial elite seized control of the revolutionary committees and assemblies. This allowed them to hijack the grassroots demands for liberty and self-determination, twisting the revolutionary fervor to serve their own selfish economic interests. The common colonists were thrust into a violent and bloody struggle, duped into believing they were fighting for genuine freedom. However, the revolution ultimately served only to enrich and empower the wealthy American elite, betraying the common people and stripping them of the promised economic and social gains.

Elite leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison ensured the founding documents would usher in a political structure that safeguarded the interests of property owners and the wealthy. The original Constitution included mechanisms like the Electoral College and the Senate, which diluted the direct influence of the popular vote and ensured that power remained concentrated among the elite.

In essence, the rich leaders of the revolution, like George Washington who was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies, sought to dismantle British control to establish a capitalist economy where private property and free enterprise reigned supreme. Washington, often lauded for his prudence in declining to rule as King, certainly did not forgo the opportunity to live like one. He paid himself a Presidential salary that amounted to 2% of the total budget of the newly established American nation.

The US Civil War, which claimed between 620,000 and 850,000 lives, was fundamentally a battle between the Southern elites' agrarian economy based on slavery and the Northern elites' industrial economy based on wage labor. Southern landowners accumulated wealth through the brutal exploitation of enslaved people on plantations that produced cash crops like cotton and tobacco. The relentless drive for profit under capitalism pushed these enslavers to seek expansion into new American territories, a practice that Abraham Lincoln aimed to halt.

Northern elites, driven by the same capitalist commitment, were invested in expanding industrial capitalism, which relied on wage labor. They saw slavery as an economic hindrance to their vision of a more profitable and adaptable workforce. Wage labor allowed Northern industrialists to exploit workers without the legal and logistical constraints of slavery, offering a more scalable and flexible labor force for factories and industries. Workers could be hired and fired based on demand, paid only when needed, and subjected to poor working conditions without the need for lifelong ownership.

The North's victory dismantled the Southern slave-based economy, ending the agrarian capitalist model and paving the way for industrial capitalism to dominate. This shift facilitated rapid industrial growth and infrastructure development, promoting a capitalist economy based on wage labor. After approximately a decade of Reconstruction efforts, Northern industrial powers strengthened their influence over key economic sectors such as manufacturing, railroads, and finance. Subsequently, they withdrew their support for Reconstruction, allowing the South to effectively reinstitute slavery through the systems of sharecropping and convict leasing.

The Spanish-American War of 1898, which led to approximately 60,000 Spanish deaths and 3,200 American deaths, was driven by the U.S. desire to expand its influence and open new markets for American goods. The war was partly fueled by the sensationalist journalism of the time, which drummed up public support for intervention in Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain. However, underlying this public sentiment were strong economic motivations. The U.S. sought to protect its investments in Cuba and to gain control of other Spanish colonies like Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The acquisition of these territories allowed the U.S. to expand its reach into new markets, securing strategic locations for military and trade purposes, thereby furthering American capitalists’ economic and strategic interests.

The US-Philippine War, which occurred from 1899 to 1902, caused around 220,000 Filipino deaths. This war was driven by the U.S.'s desire to establish a foothold in Asia, opening up new markets and resources for American businesses under the guise of "civilizing" and democratizing the region. Following the Spanish-American War, the U.S. took control of the Philippines, facing resistance from Filipino nationalists who sought independence. The brutal suppression of the Filipino independence movement demonstrated the lengths to which the U.S. would go to maintain its new colonial possessions.

During World War I, the federal government registered about half a million "enemy alien" civilians, monitored many of them, and sent around 6,000 German Nationals and German-American men and a few women to internment camps. The camps were harsh and inhumane, with poor living conditions, inadequate food, and rampant disease. Internees were subjected to forced labor and constant surveillance, stripped of their freedoms under the guise of protecting the nation. Perhaps, more strikingly, the government seized vast amounts of private property, often with dubious connections to the war effort, amassing assets worth over half a billion dollars—nearly the entire federal budget before the war.

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

By seizing the businesses and properties of German Americans, the American elite removed economic competition and consolidated control. Xenophobia was used as a tactic to create an ideological construct where the German American community was scapegoated, symbolizing both external and internal threats. This strategy reinforced national cohesion by projecting fears onto a racialized other, uniting the nation against a common enemy.

Following the Pearl Harbor attack, American elites and their obedient politicians deflected public anger away from their own profit-driven actions that had escalated tensions with Japan. The greedy capitalist elite, desperate to control vital resources like oil and rubber from Southeast Asia, had imposed crippling economic sanctions on Japan. A State Department memorandum a year before Pearl Harbor laid bare their true motives: fear of losing access to lucrative markets and essential materials in Asia. These ruthless measures posed a clear and potent threat to Japan's very existence, intentionally provoking them into war. Instead of holding these capitalist vultures accountable, the government cowardly redirected blame onto Japanese Americans, shielding the true culprits behind this manufactured conflict.

Thus, echoing the strategic motivations behind the internment of German Americans during World War I, the U.S. government initiated the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. These camps were dehumanizing, with families torn from their homes and businesses, stripped of their rights, and confined in remote, desolate locations. The deplorable conditions lacked adequate shelter, food, and medical care. People lived in overcrowded barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, enduring extreme weather and a constant sense of fear and uncertainty.

The Korean War, which raged from 1950 to 1953, was a horrific conflict that resulted in approximately 2.5 million deaths, leaving the Korean peninsula in ruins and its people devastated. This war, driven by the U.S. aim to contain Soviet influence and protect global capitalist interests, reveals that the Cold War was essentially a series of hot wars, with Soviet and American elites fighting proxy battles around the world. After World War II, Korea was divided into two zones, with the North under Soviet influence and the South under American control. The American aim was to establish a capitalist South Korea that could serve as a bulwark against Soviet influence, ensuring a market-friendly environment beneficial to American economic interests. The war saw relentless bombings, mass executions, and widespread atrocities. Entire cities were leveled, and countless civilians were caught in the crossfire, subjected to unimaginable suffering.

In Guatemala in 1954, the U.S.-backed coup of Jacobo Árbenz set the stage for decades of brutal conflict and repression, including the Guatemalan Civil War, that led to the deaths of between 140,000 and 200,000 people. The overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz was a direct response to his land reform policies that aimed to redistribute land to impoverished peasants, which threatened American corporate interests, particularly those of the United Fruit Company.

The US-backed Indonesian genocide from 1965 to 1966 resulted in the deaths of between 500,000 and 1 million people. The U.S. supported General Suharto's rise to power as part of a broader strategy to eliminate communist influences in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority country and a region of significant geopolitical importance. Suharto's regime, with U.S. backing, targeted members of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and suspected leftists, resulting in mass killings and widespread atrocities. The elimination of communist influences in Indonesia helped to secure a stable and capitalist-friendly regime that ensured a favorable environment for American economic interests and multinational corporations in Southeast Asia.

The Vietnam War, from 1955 to 1975, resulted in approximately 2 million deaths. The U.S. intervened to prevent the spread of communist influence in Southeast Asia, crucial for protecting global capitalist interests. The Domino Theory suggested that if one country fell to communism, others in the region would follow, threatening capitalist markets and investments.

The war was characterized by extensive bombing, chemical warfare, and brutal ground battles, leading to immense destruction and loss of life. The U.S. aimed to support a non-communist government in South Vietnam to maintain a strategic and economic foothold. Th U.S. government installed Ngo Dinh Diem as the leader of South Vietnam in 1954, a man who aided the French colonizers in rounding up independence fighters during Vietnam’s revolution and who was living in Lakewood, New Jersey prior to being installed as President of South Vietnam. Villages were razed, civilians massacred, and entire regions devastated by napalm and Agent Orange.

As part of the Vietnam War, the U.S. bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos from 1969 to 1973 resulted in 500,000 deaths. These, known as Operation Menu and Operation Freedom Deal, were aimed at destroying North Vietnamese supply routes, particularly the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran through these countries. The campaigns involved extensive use of carpet bombing and chemical defoliants, causing widespread civilian casualties and long-term environmental harm. In total, U.S. dropped 2,756,941 tons of bombs, more than all of the bombs dropped by the Allies in World War II.

The Bangladesh famine of 1974, which claimed up to 1.5 million lives, was tragically induced by U.S. policies that prioritized geopolitical interests over human suffering. During the Bangladesh Liberation War, the U.S., driven to uphold global capitalism through their Cold War alliances, supported the Pakistani government with aid and arms, enabling Pakistan to brutally suppress the independence movement in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

The conflict ravaged the region, leading to widespread devastation and economic collapse. When Bangladesh finally achieved independence, it was left in ruins, its infrastructure destroyed, and its economy in shambles. The newly formed government struggled desperately to address the famine that followed. Fields lay barren, markets were empty, and the people starved. During the height of the famine, the U.S. withheld 2.2 million tons of food aid as a means to pressure the Bangladeshi government into aligning with American political and economic interests.

The haunting images of skeletal children did nothing to stir the cold, calculating hearts of American politicians, who shamelessly grovel at the feet of greed. As expected, their consciences, deeply buried beneath their unwavering service to those who relentlessly pursue profit, remained impervious to the suffering they inflicted. The elite relied on their unwavering commitment to corporate profit and control over the global order, and these politicians met those expectations without hesitation.

The $8 trillion U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, part of the broader War on Terrorism, has resulted in over 900,000 deaths over the ensuing years. Initially justified as a response to the September 11 attacks, aimed at dismantling Al-Qaeda and toppling the Taliban, this intervention was heavily influenced by imperialist strategic interests. Afghanistan's critical location in Central Asia made it a prime target for projecting U.S. power and influence, surrounded by key nations like Iran, Pakistan, China, and the Central Asian republics. Establishing a foothold in Afghanistan provided the U.S. a strategic base to manipulate regional dynamics and counterbalance rivals such as Iran and China. Additionally, the prolonged military occupation and reconstruction efforts were a boon for American corporations involved in defense, security, and infrastructure, including then Vice President Dick Cheney's Halliburton.

The U.S. interventions in Iraq, including the Gulf War in 1991 and the Iraq War in 2003, resulted in catastrophic human losses, with approximately 100,000 deaths the Gulf War and 600,000 deaths from the Iraq War. These interventions were driven by strategic interests in Iraq's vast oil resources, with the U.S. aiming to control and secure these assets for capitalist benefits. The Gulf War was initiated to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, a key oil-producing country, thereby protecting U.S. allies and ensuring the stability of global oil supplies. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, under the pretext of eliminating weapons of mass destruction, was similarly motivated by the desire to gain control over Iraq's oil fields and to establish a compliant government that would favor U.S. economic interests. Here too, the Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, made a staggering $39.5 billion from contracts related to the Iraq War, many of which were awarded without competitive bidding.

The devastation caused by these wars was immense: infrastructure was obliterated, cities were reduced to rubble, and millions of civilians were caught in the crossfire or suffered from the resulting chaos and instability, with 5 million displaced. The prolonged occupation and the dismantling of its military and governmental structures created a power vacuum and widespread chaos. This environment facilitated the rise of extremist groups, with ISIS eventually forming from the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq and other militant factions.

The NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, which led to approximately 22,000 deaths, was officially framed as a humanitarian effort to protect civilians during the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi's regime. However, beneath this veneer of humanitarianism lay significant strategic and economic interests, particularly related to Libya's vast oil reserves. Libya, boasting the largest proven oil reserves in Africa, was a crucial supplier of oil to Europe. The NATO-led intervention resulted in the overthrow of Gaddafi but also plunged the country into chaos, leading to prolonged instability and conflict. This destabilization allowed multinational corporations easier access to invest in and exploit Libya's oil resources. Moreover, the intervention had dire consequences for the social fabric of Libya. The power vacuum and ensuing chaos led to the re-emergence of open-air slave markets, where human beings are being bought and sold like commodities for as little as $400.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza is simply another manifestation of the capitalist ethos that permeated the violence described above. The U.S. government's complicity in perpetuating violence and destruction is driven by economic and geopolitical imperatives just like those we have discussed above. American taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel supports a relentless campaign against Palestinians, masked as a security measure but fundamentally rooted in capitalist and strategic interests. This alliance between American and Israeli elites consolidates control over critical resources and trade routes, enriching defense contractors and entrenching regional dominance. Innocent civilians bear the true cost: tens of thousands killed, homes and infrastructure decimated, and entire communities obliterated.

Collective Disengagement: Standing Up to Oppression and Building a New Future

The elite sustain this centuries long pattern of calculated violence by manipulating our collective psychology. They justify their acts of violence and war, while those who denounce such atrocities and propose new ways of organizing society are marginalized and discredited. Public sentiment is meticulously crafted through propaganda that narrows the range of acceptable discourse and paints revolutionary voices as unrealistic, insane, or dangerous.

Their fearmongering is particularly effective because it exploits our vulnerable position in a systemically competitive society. Those who have the least are warned they can't afford to join the courageous revolutionaries and risk losing what little they have, even though they stand to gain the most. Meanwhile, those with some financial security are told that embracing revolutionary ideals would plunge them into the struggles faced by those below them. The truth is, these revolutionary ideals would remove us from the cutthroat competition that characterizes the current world order. Such actionable ideals promise a world where no one has to live in insecurity or fear of losing everything. By fostering cooperation instead, we can create a society where everyone's needs are met, and the constant anxiety of survival is abolished.

The elite's hostility towards so-called 'radical' ideas is not simply a matter of ideological disagreement. They are acutely aware of the power, practicality, and rapid spread of these revolutionary concepts, and they fear how quickly they can be implemented. Thus, they ensure such dissent is systematically suppressed through state-sanctioned violence, creating a climate of acquiescence. This dual approach of bounded discourse and suppressed dissent ensures that transformational ideas are marginalized and genuine social change is hindered. Through this method, the ruling class engineers a grotesque charade where the only permissible political stances are those fundamentally devoted to perpetuating corporate dominance and expanding capitalism.

But their manipulation runs deeper—they sell us these contrived choices! They cleverly associate being a Democrat with specific cultural values and being a Republican with others. Glossy advertisements and sleek marketing campaigns flaunt both celebrities and everyday people who embody these fabricated values, pushing products that supposedly define liberal or conservative lifestyles, along with their various subcultures.

Every purchase we make, whether it's a hybrid car adorned with progressive bumper stickers or a pickup truck flaunting patriotic decals, feeds into this fabricated dichotomy. We're not just voting with our wallets; we're being coerced into aligning our self-worth and identity with these consumer choices. It's a grand illusion where both sides, despite their apparent differences, funnel us into the same exploitative system.

We’re bombarded with slogans and images that blend politics with consumerism. "Vote blue, buy green." "Real Americans wear red." It's a relentless cycle where we are implored to buy products that signify our 'values'—values crafted in boardrooms to serve corporate interests.

Every vote, every purchase, every piece of cultural paraphernalia we adorn ourselves with is a cog in their profit machine. The elites sit back, watching us dance to their tune, our dissent muted, our choices orchestrated, our lives commodified. This is a profound violation of our autonomy and dignity, a testament to the insidious power of corporate hegemony.

It’s time we reject the individuals who are “leading” our country, recognizing them as the spineless and avaricious opportunists they repeatedly prove themselves to be. They do not look out for “American interests.” They look out for elite interests. The elite are fully aware of the destruction and death they cause. They wield force not just because it’s effective but because it sends a chilling message to those of us who see through their charades. They know that some of us can see their justifications for war—drenched in pompous, misleading rhetoric of spreading democracy or protecting American interests—for the sham that it is. They want us to understand that if we challenge them, they can and will bring hell upon earth. They will kill without hesitation.

Yet, they have a vulnerability. To oppress and kill, they need us to do their bidding. They need us to ship the bombs, to provide political support, to play their rigged game. They require vast numbers of soldiers to sign up, commit these atrocities, suffer from PTSD, and then be discarded when they return and seek help. It's time we stand together and refuse to be pawns in their murderous schemes. We must take this stand for ourselves and for humanity. By building networks of mutual aid and supporting each other, we can create the solidarity needed to resist their exploitation and implement new, just ways of organizing society.

Our collective power lies in our ability to say no. By refusing to participate in their wars, by resisting their propaganda, we can dismantle their power. The elites rely on our complicity, our labor, and our silence to maintain their dominion.

Imagine we chose to serve each other instead! Picture the strength of a unified populace, rejecting the exploitation and brutality inflicted in our name. We must rise together, in defiance of the so-called leaders who have sacrificed their integrity on the altar of capitalism. For every life shattered by their betrayal, for every dream crushed under the weight of their gluttony, we must unite. It is our duty to reclaim the values they have perverted, the future they threaten, and the planet they are setting aflame with their endless pursuit of profit. We owe it to ourselves and to the world to disrupt this cycle of violence and build a new social order that values human dignity over capital. Now is the time to come together and take action.

Peter S. Baron is the author of “If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society” (https://www.ifonlyweknewbook.com) and is currently pursuing a J.D. and M.A. in Philosophy at Georgetown University.

Debunking Myths About Venezuela: What's Really Going On?

[Photo Credit: MIGUEL GUTIERREZ/EPA/Shutterstock]

By Eli Morey

Republished from Liberation Center.

Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela’s socialist movement, won the July 28 Venezuela presidential election by a wide margin. In a near-repeat of 2019,  the Biden administration  immediately declared the election illegitimate and recognized their preferred—but badly defeated–candidate as the winner, Edmundo González as the winner, just as they supported Juan Guaido’s pitiful attempt to take power in 2019-2020. Similarly, the U.S. is fully supporting current right-wing violence in Venezuela to set the stage for another coup against the legitimate and widely popular government.

None of this appears in the corporate media, of course. Instead, we only encounter accusations of “corruption” and “illegitimate” elections.

What about the polls that showed Maduro losing?

Headlines in the U.S. cite polls as evidence of fraud in the 2024 elections. According to some polls, Maduro trailed the opposition by a wide margin in the lead-up to election day. A closer look reveals that these polls are not a reliable source of information about Venezuelan voter preferences. 

In fact, each of the four polls cited by Western media were run by organizations with a clear conflict of interest:

1. The Encuestadora Meganálisis poll is openly affiliated with the opposition, as their Facebook page filled with videos denouncing Madruo and the Bolivarian Revolution.

2. The Caracas-based Delphos poll is directed by Felix Seijas Rodriguez, an outspoken member of the Venezuelan opposition who has authored numerous articles attacking Maduro and even discussing U.S. military intervention against Venezuela.

3. OCR Consultores is a “consultancy” group whose Director, Oswaldo Ramirez Colina, lives in Miami, where the group is headquartered. Colina studied “Terrorism and Counterterrorism” at Georgetown University, which is notoriously cozy with the CIA. He has appeared on news segments and podcast episodes criticizing Maduro and questioning the legitimacy of Venezuela’s electoral processes.

4. Edison Research, whose exit poll claimed Maduro’s loss, has “top clients [that] include CIA-linked US government propaganda outlets Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, all of which are operated by the US Agency for Global Media, a Washington-based organ that is used to spread disinformation against US adversaries.”

Are elections in Venezuela free and fair?

While western media consistently accuses Maduro of rigging elections, there is zero evidence to support this claim. In both the 2018 and 2024 elections, thousands of international observers were present at polling stations across Venezuela. 

In fact, even mainstream liberal organizations like the Carter foundation have praised Venezuela’s electoral system. In 2012, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter said that “as a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.”

Who are the leaders of the opposition?

Maduro’s primary opponent in the elections, Edmundo Gonzalez Urritia, was not a big figure in Venezuelan politics until this most recent election cycle. He is primarily serving as a stand-in for Maria Corina Machado, who is the true face of Venezuela’s opposition. 

Machado is on the far right. Her policies would undermine Venezuela’s sovereignty by privatizing national assets and selling off Venezuela’s oil reserves to western corporations. 

She is also a proud and open Zionist. In fact, in 2018 she wrote a letter directly to Benjamin Netanyahu asking Israel to intervene militarily in Venezuela to conduct a “regime change” operation in order to overthrow its democratically elected government. In 2020, she signed a cooperation agreement with Netanyahu’s Likud party stating that they were in agreement on “political, ideological, and social issues” and “issues related to strategy, geopolitics and security.”

The right-wing’s violence is particularly directed against Afro-Venezuelans and the indigenous populations because the Revolution has greatly benefitted the sectors of society who have historically been excluded and oppressed. In 2014, a right-wing group beat a law student named William Muñoz, and doused him in gasoline. Fortunately, an ambulance rescued Muñoz before the mob could ignite the gasoline. In 2017, the right-wing went on a rampage targeting darker-skinned Venezuelans, setting them on fire and even lynching them.

Why and how does the U.S. try to overthrow the Venezuelan government?

It is not only the domestic reactionaries that constantly threaten the Revolution. Particularly since 2005, the U.S. has deployed numerous strategies to reverse the revolutionary gains of Venezuela.

A few years after the presidential election of Hugo Chávez, representing the Fifth Republic Movement, the U.S. ruling class started openly working to destroy Venezuela’’s socialist government since the Bolivarian Revolution began with the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez, who ran as the Fifth Republic Movement’s candidate.’s government. Under Chávez’s leadership, Venezuela’s democratic processes expanded quickly and rapidly. In 1999, Venezuela adopted a new constitution that created a constituent assembly, bringing the people into positions of power to pass laws in their interests. Land was redistributed and social goods like housing and education were prioritized thanks to the massive oil reserves of the country.

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

What became known as the Bolivarian Revolution, led by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV)—which formed in 2007—was a spark that set off a “pink tide” throughout Latin America. Progressive governments came to power in Brazil and Bolivia, and people’s movements surged across the continent. With state power, progressives and socialists formed new alliances to challenge U.S. domination and imperialism, including notably ALBA, or the Alliance for the People’s of Our America. Founded in 2004, ALBA enables Latin American and other countries to engage in non-exploitative trade and other inter-state projects and agreements.

Sanctions were the first tactic the U.S. deployed against the Revolution. By depriving the government of the ability to fund social programs, the intent was and is to create widespread poverty and misery to foment dissent and blaming the results of the sanctions on the policies of the Venezuelan government.

If Venezuela’s socialist government was allowed to engaged in “free trade,” they could make even more impressive advances for their people and inspire other countries to follow in their path. As a result, Venezuela is one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world, with over 900 unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States alone. The U.S. has actively worked for over a decade to destabilize the Venezuelan economy specifically by targeting its oil industry and its financial sector.

However, undermining the Venezuelan economy is just one element of the U.S. hybrid war on Venezuela. There have also been multiple coup attempts with links to the U.S. Here are a few:

• 2002: Socialist president Hugo Chavez was kidnapped and removed from power by military coup plotters connected to Venezuelan big business. After two days, huge protests in support of Chavez forced the coup government out of power and restored the constitutional order. Chavez was freed and returned to the presidency.

• 2019: In 2018 the opposition boycotted the elections, and as a result their candidates lost by a huge margin. In spite of this, they then declared opposition figurehead Juan Guaidó—who had not even run in the elections and won 0 votes—the new interim president of Venezuela. The United States immediately recognized Guaidó as the president of Venezuela. The following year Guaidó led a failed coup attempt against Maduro. 

• 2020: “Operation Gideon,” an armed invasion of Venezuela led by a former member of the U.S. Army special forces, was defeated by the Venezuelan military.

Why are so many immigrants leaving Venezuela?

Millions of people have left Venezuela in the last 10 years. While the U.S. media often portrays these people as political refugees fleeing a dictatorship, the reality is quite different. 

Global oil prices dropped drastically in the mid 2010s. Oil is a key component of Venezuela’s economy. This would not have been a problem if Venezuela was able to take out loans to cover shortfalls until the price of oil rebounded. Oil-dependent countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE are able to get cheap loans when oil prices decline because they are allies of the U.S. and EU. In Venezuela’s case, the U.S. did everything it could to undermine the Venezuelan economy in a moment of crisis, and prevent its economy from rebuilding in the wake of disaster. 

Most of Venezuela’s immigrants are in fact victims of the U.S’s harsh sanctions regime, which has damaged Venezuela’s economy and prevented it from accessing key goods including food and medicine. 

Why do I see posts on social media calling Maduro a dictator?

After every election there are outspoken people who are upset about the outcome. If you were to look on social media or talk to random people on the street after the 2016 or 2020 elections in the U.S, you would certainly find people angry or confused about the results. You would probably also encounter people claiming that the election was rigged. This does not amount to evidence of election fraud. 

In the U.S. and on western social media platforms, the anti-Maduro position is over-represented because of the number of expats living in the United States. Venezuelans living here have, for the most part, left Venezuela either because they had the money to leave when the economy took a downturn, or they left out of desperation when the economy was at its lowest point. These are the segments of the population most likely to be critical of Maduro, most likely to speak English, and most likely to be on American social media pages and platforms.

Alternatively, the social base of the Bolivarian revolution is in the working class, poor, and indigenous people living in the barrios and rural villages of Venezuela. These people are significantly less likely to speak English, have smartphones, or be active on social media platforms like Instagram. Their voices are never centered in conventional media like TV and radio in the United States, which is largely run by corporations with a vested interest in demonizing socialism.

What is the Bolivarian Revolution and why do the masses support it?

Under the leadership of Chavez and later Maduro, notable achievements were made in spite of ongoing attempts by the U.S. to sabotage Venezuela’s socialist project. The main vehicles for these achievements has been the mobilization of the working class and the misiones, or “missions,” which are long-term economic and social development programs. The Bolivarian government has built over 4 million new homes for poor people living in substandard housing as part of the Misión Habitat. Over 10 million poor Venezuelans have benefited from subsidized food under a program called Misión Mercal. Another program known as Mision Barrio Adentro built thousands of clinics and community centers in an effort to provide free healthcare and dental care to Venezuela’s poorest people.

A massive literacy campaign in the 2000s helped over a million people to read and write. In spite of economic hardships due to the oil crisis and U.S. sanctions, millions of Venezuelans continue to support the Maduro government because of the tangible benefits it provides in their day-to-day lives. This is even more understandable given the ruthless nature of the racist right-wing opposition.

How the U.S. Helped Israel Promote the 'Hamas Mass Rape' Lie to Justify Mass Murder in Gaza

[Pictured: Joe Biden cited the since-debunked Hamas mass rape accusation on multiple occasions. Photo by Miriam Alster/Flash90]

By Joyce Chediac

Republished from Liberation.

Rape is a terrible crime. It can never be justified or defended. The natural inclination is to abhor rape and those who commit it.  However, because it is such a charged issue, false rape accusations, while in general rare, have been used time and again to whip up hatred against oppressed people. This has been seen in the United States with the myth of the “Black rapist” which launched countless lynch mobs.  

Today, the claim: “Hamas committed mass rape of Israeli women on Oct. 7 as a weapon of war” is another example. This claim has been shown to have no basis in fact; instead it’s an Israeli government propaganda campaign meant to manipulate public opinion in the west to justify genocide in Gaza.

To this day no rape victims from Oct. 7 have stepped forth. There is no forensic evidence. The sensationalized “eyewitness accounts” of “horrific sexual assaults” have been thoroughly debunked and discredited by independent news outlets. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even openly said the rape stories  help legitimize and extend Israel’s mass murder in Gaza.

Yet to this day, U.S. politicians and the corporate media regularly preface Gaza reports by mentioning “horrific atrocities” allegedly committed by Hamas.

U.S. promoted ‘mass rape’ fraud

This is because U.S. politicians and the establishment media are an integral part of this deception. The Biden administration, members of Congress and the mainstream media repeat the mass rape lie at every turn. A U.S. newspaper and a UN official have used their prestige to keep the rape story going after it had fallen apart by repackaging the debunked Israeli atrocity stories and claiming ‘independent investigations” found “new evidence.” 

This shameful exploitation of people’s horror at this crime that is committed mostly against women is meant to cover up the horror of genocide, where Palestinian women and children are the main victims. Some 70% of those killed are women and children. Women and children have been arbitrarily executed. With starvation used as a weapon of war, women are the last to eat and children the first to die. A Palestinian child is killed in Gaza every 10 minutes. Two mothers are killed every hour. Of the 1.9 million displaced, close to 1 million are women and girls.

Hamas and other groups in the Palestinian armed resistance have roundly denounced as “slander” the charge that they ordered fighters to rape women. They also point out that individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred, as others came through the fence later on Oct. 7 who were not under their discipline

Rape lie used to justify destruction of Libya

In November of 2023  many Palestinian women’s groups within historic Palestine and in exile came together and declared ending the Gaza genocide a feminist issue. They made an urgent call to all those truly interested in women’s rights to join feminists worldwide and others fighting for a ceasefire, to end the blockade and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza unimpeded.

Israel’s answer was a PR event at the UN on Dec. 4, 2023, that excoriated women’s and feminist groups that backed a ceasefire, claiming they were indifferent to the suffering of Israeli women because they did not condemn “Hamas rapes.” Among the speakers was Hillary Clinton.

Clinton has been especially helpful in propagating the “mass rape” falsehood under the guise of supporting “women’s rights.” She knows the drill. When she was Secretary of State her department fabricated a later-debunked story that Libyan leader Qaddafi gave his troops Viagra to rape rebels. This racist falsehood was used to justify NATO’s carpet bombing and total destruction of Libya.

No #MeToo for Palestinian women

“Believe women” these pro-Israeli propagandists said, hijacking for settler colonialism the words of the #MeToo movement.  Only there were no women to believe. To this day no Israeli women have stepped forth to say they were raped by a Palestinian fighter on Oct. 7. And contrary to the U.S. Congressional resolution saying there were thousands of women raped, not one “eyewitness testimony” has withstood scrutiny.

Meanwhile, the women who should be believed are instead ignored by the media and by politicians who do not speak out on their behalf. They are the many Palestinian women who have come forward, with credible witnesses,  to testify to rape and sexual assault at the hands of Israeli soldiers in Gaza and in Israeli detention.   

For example, to this date Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has ignored for months recommendations from his own staff to suspend aid to Israeli military and police units accused of abusing Palestinians, including interrogators accused of raping and torturing a teenager.

While ignoring the plight of Palestinian women, U.S. politicians loudly and often repeat debunked stories that resistance fighters committed mass rape. For example, in his March 7 State of the Union speech Pres. Joe Biden accused Hamas of “massacre” and “sexual violence” against 200 “women and girls, men and boys.” The House of Representatives passed a resolution in February falsely claiming there were “thousands of testimonies from eyewitness” of “countless instances of rape, gang rape, sexual violence” by Hamas.

Israel directs media to unreliable sources

The most horrific descriptions of mass rape and other alleged atrocities against Israeli women and children on Oct. 7 come  from ZAKA. This ultra-right religious group collects bodies and body parts from sites of “unnatural” deaths and transports them to morgues. Its founder, Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, attempted suicide after he was implicated in  dozens of rapes and sexual assaults of teens, women and children.  

ZAKA’s members have no professional training and are not qualified to make assessments about rape on the bodies they collected. Their testimonies have no details: no age, no location, and no time. There are no pictures or videos to back up their claims. The bodies they describe were buried quickly without examination for forensic evidence. All one has is their word.

ZAKA atrocity stories have even been debunked in the Israeli press. The source for the widely publicized beheaded babies, children tied together and burned, a child ripped from its mother’s womb and other debunked  atrocity stories, is one ZAKA official, Yossi Landau. Recently Landau admitted that his claim of “executed children” were a lie.

ZAKA volunteers are not credible. Yet when the international media wants to know what happened on Oct. 7 the Israeli Government Press Office sets up an interview with ZAKA.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

ZAKA testimony praised for giving Israel ‘maneuvering room’

The director of the Israeli Press Office, Nitzan Hein, called ZAKA “remarkable, valuable, and effective,” and “extremely important in hasbara.” Hasbara is the Israeli word for propaganda that justifies government actions, often portraying Israel as the victim.

Netanyahu praised them  for helping to legitimize and extend Israel’s war on Gaza.   He told ZAKA, “We need to buy time … by turning to world leaders and to public opinion. You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders. We are in a war; it will continue. The war is not only to take care of the 1,400 people…but also to give us the maneuvering room.”

Relative says NY Times’ invented’ the rape of a victim

Independent media, including The Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss, along with the Intercept, have written many articles thoroughly exposing the alleged “eye witnesses to rape” on Oct. 7 as unreliable, debunking their atrocity stories, and revealing their links to the Israeli government. This information has been widely circulated on social media. However, CNN, the BBC, the New York Times and other major media have ignored these exposes, choosing to report as fact whatever the Israeli government presents.  

No U.S. media outlet has come to Israel’s rescue more than the New York Times. On Dec. 28 it showcased an article headlined, “‘’Screams Without Words’: How Hamas  Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”  Claiming to have done its own investigation, the Times found “new details” that Hamas “weaponized rape and sexual violence against Israeli women on Oct. 7.”

The Times Is a major influencer of the 24-hour news cycle, often determining what and how issues are covered by other major news outlets like BBC, The Washington Post and CNN.

But the article began to unravel the very next day when the family of an alleged rape victim said the Times interviewed them under false pretenses.

About a third of the Times article covers the alleged rape of Gal Abdush, who the Times called “The Woman in the Black Dress.”  On Dec. 29, Etti Brakha, Abdush’s mother, said that the family knew nothing about the sexual assault issue until the piece was published. Nissim Abdush, Gal’s brother-in law, said his brother’s wife was not raped and that “the media invented it.” Abdush’s sister, Miral Alter, said  the Times reporters “mentioned they want to write a report in memory of Gal, that’s it. If we knew that the title would be about rape and butchery, we’d never accept that.”

Two teen sisters the Times also said were raped and murdered in their bedroom in Kibbutz Be’eri, were not raped either. Be’eri spokesperson Michal Paikin said: “They were shot and were not subjected to sexual abuse.”

Experts call the Times investigation ‘disgraceful’

None of the media repeating ZAKA atrocity stories has bothered to call in independent experts to examine these stories for veracity. MENA Rights Group, a legal advocacy NGO representing Middle East and North African victims of human rights violations, stepped forward to do just this after the Times article was published  MENA calls the Times investigation “disgraceful” in a statement signed by 16 organizations and 1,000 individuals from 50 countries. The statement cites lack of forensic evidence,  no victim involvement or testimonies  and sensational testimonies that were not fact checked.

MENA denounced the Times for “its exploitation of women’s bodies and struggles as a means to fabricate assault incidents and push propaganda for an unlawful occupation, thereby abetting the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.” 

No major media has covered the MENA statement.

Writer could find no rape victims

There is a backstory to this article. Anat Schwartz, who the Times hired to do most of the on-the-ground investigation, is an inexperienced writer with a pro-Israeli bias. She had served in Israeli Air Force intelligence, and on social media she liked a tweet saying Israel needed to turn Gaza into a “slaughterhouse.”

In a Jan. 20 interview with Israel’s Channel 12 ,she explained that she tried to find rape victims by calling the 11 Israeli hospitals that examine and treat potential victims of sexual violence. “They told me, ‘No, no complaint of sexual assault was received,’” she said.  The manager of the sexual assault hotline in south Israel’s told her they had no reports of sexual violence either. She found no corroborating evidence at alleged places of sexual attack. Schwartz said she then turned to Israeli officials, police, soldiers and witnesses being managed by the Israeli government to write the article.   

Media interviews with the unnamed paramedic who falsely said he saw “evidence” that two teenage girls had been raped at Kibbutz Be’eri, were being handled by a spokesperson for the Israeli government, Eylon Levy,.

Schwartz spoke extensively with ZAKA members. Yossi Landau, originator of the debunked “40 beheaded babies” and “pregnant women shot and stabbed with her stomach ripped open” fabrications, is featured in the Times article.

UN report recycles debunked stories

When the Times article lost credibility a new source brought the “mass rape” falsehood back to life.  A March 5 report by Pramila Patten, UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, claimed that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas had committed rapes on Oct. 7. The media spun the report as if it backed Israel’s claims.

But the report didn’t support Israeli claims. Her report says it couldn’t find one direct testimony of sexual assault on Oct. 7. It found “no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence.” It was “unable to establish the prevalence of sexual violence.” It says a “full-fledged investigation is needed,” and notes that Israel won’t permit UN agencies with an investigative mandate to make independent assessments.

The report based its dubious conclusion of “reasonable grounds” for Hamas rapes not on evidence but on information “sourced from Israeli national institutions” — the Israeli military, the internal intelligence agency Shin Bet and the Israeli national police, the same forces committing genocide in Gaza. In Be’rre, Patten was accompanied by Yossi Landau of ZAKA.

There is a backstory here as well. Far from being neutral, in each meeting that she attended in the settlements near Gaza, “Patten consistently expressed her solidarity, empathy and sympathy towards Israel,” the Israeli newspaper YediothAhronoth reported.

Patten’s position, UN Envoy on Sexual Violence in Conflict, is an advisory, not investigative, position that was created by Hillary Clinton in 2009. Patten has used this position to advance a pro-western agenda before. In October 2022 she claimed that Russian soldiers were being supplied with Viagra to rape Ukrainian women. A month later she admitted this was a fabrication. 

While Patten could not find one victim to interview, one Israeli former hostage has recently come forward to say she was sexually abused while she was held in Gaza.  She is Amit Soussana, who was released from Gaza in a prisoner exchange on Nov 30 after being held for 55 days. She said on March 26, in another detailed Times article, that she was made to perform a sexual act at gunpoint while captive. 

Hamas, while skeptical, has offered to investigate the allegations, but said an inquiry was not possible in the current circumstances. Surely a ceasefire and an alleviation of the suffering Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza and the reestablishment of government institutions there to conduct an inquiry would be a minimum prerequisite to any meaningful investigation of Soussana’s claims.

But Israel will not allow this and is, in fact, spinning hostage rape allegations to justify the continuation of the genocidal war that makes a meaningful investigation impossible.  

Politicians and media have discredited themselves

The Biden administration, elected officials and the media have worked overtime to create and keep alive this racist trope. Certainly it has had an effect, but at the same time, in the eyes of many, the media and the politicians that go along with and promote this false narrative  have only discredited themselves.

From college campuses to work places, to churches to trade union halls, hundreds of groups and hundreds of thousands of individuals are taking to the streets to demand a ceasefire, many also demanding a free Palestine. Hundreds of thousands have voted “uncommitted’ in state Democratic primaries rather than endorse the U.S. president, dubbed “Genocide Joe.” Activists are confronting politicians everywhere.

These activists see fraudulent claims of ‘mass rape” as a  loathsome U.S.-Israeli manufactured atrocity meant to detract from the real atrocities being committed against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. They detest this exploitation of women’s oppression for imperialist ends. They are revolted at the phony feminism of the Hillary Clintons, and sickened by blatant misuse of feminism by the Israeli and U.S. governments as a tool to silence those who would speak out against the genocide in Gaza

These protesters are listening to the voice completely left out of the corporate media and ignored by the politicians — the Palestinian voice. They are inspired by the resilience of the Palestinian people even when subjected to unspeakable atrocities. They note the overwhelming Palestinian support for their armed fighters as a legitimate and necessary part of their struggle against oppression and for national liberation.

The feminists they believe are Palestinian

To this movement, “believe women” means believing the women of Palestine. The Palestinian Feminist Collective explains that a key component of Zionist settler-colonialism is gendered/sexual violence and oppression. The PFC has asked all women’s and feminist organizations to support Palestine liberation and to back it as a feminist issue because there is no real feminism for anyone without anti-imperialism.

Nazis! The Fraught Politics of a Word and a People Besieged

[Pictured: Palestinian women cross an Israeli checkpoint, outside of the West Bank city of Ramallah, on April 15, 2022. (Flash90)]

By Gary Fields

Republished from Jadaliyya.

Like many highly-educated individuals in Palestine today, Mohammed Q. cannot find work in his field of computer engineering, despite a master’s degree in computer science from Birzeit University, and as a result, he relies on the tourist industry to earn a living, drawing on his fluent English and knowledge of the fraught politics of the region.  In the aftermath of October 7th he was working in Ramallah at the same hotel where, by fate, I found myself as the only guest on a sabbatical that began October 6th.  Over coffee, he recounted to me an experience leading a group of German tourists to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.  As a West Bank Palestinian, Mohammed would normally be barred from entry to the Israeli capital, but because of his role on this occasion in shepherding a German tour group through the Holy Land, he was able to obtain the mandatory permit from Israeli authorities to enter the Holy City.  While at Yad Vashem, the group had a tour from one of the Museum docents who explained in detail the suffering endured by Jews at the hands of the Nazis 

As Mohammed recalls the episode, the guide described how the Nazi regime forced Jews to wear a yellow badge as a mark of identification that enabled Nazi authorities not only to stigmatize them, but to monitor and control their movements.  Alongside this measure, Nazis eliminated the rights of Jews to German citizenship, insisting that only those with “pure” Aryan blood could be Germans.  Bolstered by mobs of fascist-supporting vigilantes, Nazi authorities orchestrated modern-day pogroms against Jews including the ransacking of Jewish businesses and the theft of Jewish property designed to force Jews out of Germany.  Those Jews who tried to remain, the guide explained, fell victim to the night raids of the Nazi SS in arresting Jews and sending them to concentration camps.  In areas outside Germany under Nazi rule, Nazi policy ghettoized Jews as a prelude to a genocidal campaign of eliminating them as a people, and the guide spoke admiringly of the heroism of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto who resisted these measures.  “I did not know about all of this suffering,” Mohammed admitted to me, “and I felt sorry for these Jewish victims of Nazism.” At the same time, he could not help but reflect on the parallels with his own experience as a West Bank Palestinian living under Israeli military rule. 

Mohammed thanked the guide and admitted that he had not been fully aware of the suffering of Jews at the hands of the Nazis.  He then commented to the docent that many details in his story of the Jews resonated for him as a Palestinian living in the West Bank.  After Mohammed made this admission, however, the guide became angry and demanded to know how he was able to come to Jerusalem and gain entry to the Museum.  Mohammed explained that he had received the necessary permit from Israeli authorities to chaperone the German tour group at which point the guide became extremely irate and called Museum security.  “Security personnel from the Museum came,” he explains, “and took me to the exit of the Museum where they ousted me from the building.”  In this way, Yad Vashem evicted a Palestinian from its premises for sympathizing with Nazism’s Jewish victims while explaining how, in his own experience, Israeli rule over Palestinians resembled some of the same practices attributed by the Museum to those used by the Third Reich on European Jews.  Replete with irony, Mohammed’s eviction from Yad Vashem, in the context of the forced displacements and carnage unfolding in Gaza, recalls a traceable historical arc.

Nazis Among Us?

On December 4, 1948, the New York Times published an open letter penned by a group of Jewish luminaries including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein who were protesting a visit to the U.S. by Menachem Begin, founder of the Herut (Freedom) Party of Israel.  Herut would later emerge as the foundation of the ultra-nationalist Likud Party of current Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.  Authors of the letter made note of “Fascist elements in Israel” and objected to Begin’s visit because, according to them, Herut was “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”  

In support of its claim, the letter referenced the massacre in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin committed earlier in 1948 by the paramilitary predecessor to Herut, the Zionist Irgun, labeled even by many Zionists of the time a terrorist militia.  The Irgun had come into the village, which had harbored no animus toward its Jewish neighbors, and “killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem,” revealing a practice of cruelty toward Palestinians eerily similar to what Nazis did to the Jews.  Arendt was already on record as warily critical of exclusionary tendencies in the Zionist project, writing in “Zionism Reconsidered” (1943) how the Zionist movement stood for a kind of ethno-state in which Palestinians would have only “the choice of voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship.” In the end, Arendt, Einstein and co-signers of the 1948 open letter proffered a warning about Herut and its Fascist roots: “from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.”

Apart from the reference to Deir Yassin, the letter did not specify what this kinship might portend but Fascism’s past practices highlight three themes.  First, Fascism is a mass movement animated by an extreme nationalist ethos whose adherents share a sense of collective victimhood caused by “outsiders” who are considered to have illegitimate claims of belonging to the nation and who emerge as the cause of collective national suffering. Second, Fascism channels this shared outlook of victimhood into collective hostility toward these outsiders whom Fascists consider as enemies seeking the nation’s demise.  Finally, Fascism enlists its backers to support liquidation of these enemies which drives it to untold levels of brutality and toward territorial expansion to ensure the completeness of the liquidation process, while keeping outsiders safely distant from the bounded space of the nation and those who belong to it. 

In the case of the Nazis, some of the signature behaviors that emerged from these contours and resonated so profoundly with Mohammed at Yad Vashem included Nazism’s exclusionary citizenship laws; its pogroms against Jewish businesses and property; night raids by the Nazi SS of Jewish homes along with arrests and deportations of Jews to concentration camps; and the ghettoization of Jews and their liquidation in these confined spaces. Although Mohammed recounts these practices as part of his own experience, it has become anathema, and in some places illegal even to raise the question suggested by his story:  How could heirs of those claiming to be Nazism’s most hapless victims assume the role of those who brutalized them, or in the words of Edward Said, how did Palestinians become “the victims of the victims”? 

It turns out that insight into this vexing puzzle beckons to two contemporaries from the nineteenth century with vastly different political persuasions. In his celebrated work, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856), Alexis de Tocqueville asked how the luminaries of the French Revolution, with their “love of equality and the urge to freedom” ultimately crafted a system of authoritarian rule little different from the absolutism they so passionately set out to overturn.  In seeking to explain this paradox, de Tocqueville signaled a beguiling truth about these revolutionaries who he insists, “were men shaped by the old order.”  These individuals may have wanted to distance themselves from the ancien regime they so fervently wished to destroy, but years of conditioning under French absolutism had influenced their outlook and behavior.  Try as they might, these revolutionaries, “remained essentially the same, and in fact…never changed out of recognition.” Four years before de Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime, Karl Marx famously wrote how human beings make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please. They make it “under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”  In this way, both de Tocqueville and Marx emphasize how human actors emerge from the circumstances around them, and this history conditions and weighs upon them as they seek to remake the world of the present.  What kind of “dead weight” did the Nazi Holocaust cast on Zionism, Jews, and the State of Israel? 

Lords of the Landscape

As early as 1904, Zionists in Palestine associated with the Second Wave of Jewish immigration were already signaling the future character of the State of Israel when they promoted the idea of “Hebrew Land, Hebrew Labor.” Central to this slogan was an effort to build an exclusionary Jewish society by evicting Palestinian tenants from lands they purchased, and preventing Palestinian labor on Jewish-owned land. In this way, early Zionism was seeking to create a landscape of Jewish spaces free of Palestinians. What Zionism ultimately created to fulfill these exclusionary impulses, however, took shape after 1945 in the crucible of the long shadow cast upon world Jewry by the experience of the Holocaust when the State of Israel came into being. Its signature practices with respect to the Palestinians reveal a striking, if unsettling set of parallels with what was done to Jews by the Nazis. Two seminal moments in the evolution of the State of Israel are paramount in marking the development of these exclusionary behaviors.

The initial moment encompasses Israel’s early years, 1947-50 and focuses on three defining practices designed to create Jewish ascendancy on the land and render Palestinians a subjugated people. First, during this period, the “Jewish State”—a moniker that is something of a mischaracterization since that State contains a 20% Palestinian population—evicted 750,000 Palestinians from homes within its boundaries, and in a Cabinet decision of July 1948 declared that it would never allow these evictees to return. Second, was what the Israeli Government did to Bedouins from the Naqab desert who managed to remain in their ancestral homeland following the end of hostilities in 1949. The Israeli military rounded up the 13,000 remaining Bedouin and confined them in a prison-like encampment near Beersheva known as the Siyaj (Enclosure Zone) where they were without basic services, forced to obtain permits to enter and exit the Siyaj, and prevented from building permanent housing for themselves. Finally, in the early 1950s, the Israeli State passed a series of laws on property rights, notably, the Absentee Property Law (1950) that dispossessed refugees of their lands on the grounds that they were “absentees,” no longer living in their domains. This law, however, also confiscated the property of roughly 50% of Palestinians in the new state through a macabre legal designation for Palestinians temporarily displaced from their homes who were classified as “present absentees.” In effect, what the State of Israel did in its infancy in seeking to make the Jewish State free of Palestinians by evicting, dispossessing, and confining them, had an uncomfortable resonance with the aim of the Third Reich in making Germany and the Reich Judenrein, free of Jews.

The second historical moment focuses on the aftermath of the June War in 1967 in which the State of Israel sought to extend its domination over Palestinians into territories conquered in the 1967 campaign by settling those areas with Jewish Israelis – a clear violation of Article 49 of the 1949 Geneva Convention. This practice expanded Jewish presence within the conquered space while shrinking Palestinian presence by confiscating an ever-expanding inventory of Palestinian property for settlement-building and limiting the territorial spaces accessible to Palestinians in the occupied areas. In this way, the Jewish State created a constantly growing Hebrew landscape in the areas under its military control.

Not surprisingly, the State of Israel has taken draconian measures to fortify its project of land confiscation and settlement, and to this end has created a carceral-like regime for control over a population that it perceives as hostile to Jewish supremacy on the land. In pursuit of this aim, the Jewish State has not only intensified a system of actual incarceration in which thousands of Palestinians fill Israeli jails as political detainees. The State of Israel has created a massive prison-like environment on the Palestinian landscape dubbed a “Matrix of Control,” for the subjugation of Palestinians. This “Matrix” consists of an elaborate system of checkpoints, including several large checkpoint terminals, diffused throughout the West Bank to control Palestinian circulation; guard towers situated at major transport junctions to monitor Palestinians and their movements; and a massive Wall built along a 450-kilometer route across the West Bank where Palestinian circulation is pre-empted and the territory partitioned in much the same way that Michel Foucault has described the attributes of modern prisons. These features on the land have imbued the Palestinian landscape with the unenviable moniker of “The Biggest Prison on Earth.” More critically, as Palestinians encounter these elements in queues of regimented bodies under the gaze of armed soldiers, the echoes of Nazi landscapes seem inescapable.

Added to this carceral environment is the effort of the Jewish State to weaken Palestinian presence on the land by destroying one of the primary anchors affixing Palestinians to place, the Palestinian home. At any one moment, a Palestinian home is routinely demolished, usually on the pretext of being built “illegally,” without permission, but the State of Israel also destroys Palestinian homes as retribution against entire families of alleged perpetrators of “terror” against the Jewish State. Complementing this destruction is the longstanding practice of Israeli military “raids” into Palestinian homes, casting a pall of terror over the Palestinian landscape. These raids not only witness the arrests of Palestinians who disappear into Israeli jails as political prisoners, but also the ransacking and vandalism of the Palestinian home. Such destruction of Palestinian homes and property, along with the arrests of Palestinians in these actions find resonance in the way Jews were subjected to raids by the Nazi SS and sent to prison camps while their homes were ransacked and looted in Nazi versions of the pogrom. 

In February of last year, the world witnessed a particularly savage outbreak of this kind of violence in the Palestinian town of Huwara perpetrated by settlers from nearby Israeli settlements who set fire to cars, businesses, and homes of Huwara residents and killed one resident by gunfire as Israeli soldiers looked on and even assisted the perpetrators in this mayhem. So depraved was this rampage that the Israeli military commander in the West Bank, Yehuda Fuchs even used the word, “pogrom,” to label this carnage, a word choice by an Israeli official that was especially poignant. The implication was that the Jews who perpetrated this violence possessed the same kind of racist animus as perpetrators of Christian and Nazi pogroms against Jews, and enlisted similar types of brutality against Palestinian civilians. At the time of events in Huwara, however, the uprooting of Palestinian croplands and the destruction of rural homes, livestock pens, and farm equipment by Jewish settlers in an effort to evict and drive out Palestinians had already become commonplace on the Palestinian landscape—with nary a condemnation by Israeli officials, and virtually no effort by Israeli authorities to prevent and punish this criminality. As it turned out, Huwara was but a prelude to the much more sweeping campaign of carnage visited on Palestinians in the aftermath of October of the same year. 

Final Solution

In a riveting documentary, 1948: Creation and Catastrophe (2016), members of the Zionist Haganah militia interviewed in the film who were active in the military campaign of the period recounted their encounters with Palestinians during that critical time when the Jewish State came in to being. Hava Kellar, a Haganah veteran, spoke glowingly about her role in the expulsion of Palestinians from Bir-es Saba, seemingly oblivious to the expulsions of Jews during the Shoah. “I came to Beersheva, she recalls, and the commander said to me: ‘tomorrow we are going to throw out the Arabs from Beersheva.’ I said ‘wonderful, of course I’m going to help.’ Next day I got a gun, and we prepared 10-12 buses. We called all the Arabs from Beersheva to come to the buses and I was standing guard to make sure they went into the buses to go to Gaza—and they are still in Gaza today.” 

What we are witnessing in Gaza is another instance of, “Once Again,” only this time it is Zionist Jews who are wielding the guns and are the keepers of the camp, while it is Palestinians such as Mohammed who are being locked up, dispossessed, and face death.

Another Haganah veteran, Josef Ben-Eliezer, is even more explicit in admitting to the parallels of what he did as a solider and what he experienced as a boy at the hands of the Nazis. “I saw masses of people going through the checkpoint that we were ordered to oversee,” he says, “and they were searched for valuables. It reminded me of when I was a child. We were doing the same thing that people have done to us as Jews.” 

A common belief among defenders of Israel is that Jews, and all things associated with the Jewish people—including the State of Israel—could not possibly do what Josef Ben-Eliezer described as Jews imitating the Nazis. To even imagine such a possibility is to transgress into forbidden terrain. Nazism is invariably associated with humanity’s worst-ever atrocity—the elimination of the Jews as a people—a crime given the name in 1944 of genocide, and codified in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Among the stated goals of Nazism, for which some of its leaders were prosecuted under this law, was the idea of making Germany and the areas it occupied Judenrein, free of Jews. That Jews could be a party to such an idea is for many, completely blasphemous if not worse. Events after October 7, however, reveal this longstanding Zionist conceit to be problematic.

On October 13 of last year, the Israeli Intelligence Ministry, an opaque governmental body that produces policy research for other Israeli Government agencies, authored a document in which it outlined three options for the Jewish State in response to the breach of the barrier confining the Gazan people, and the killing by Hamas and other allied groups of Israeli military personnel, law enforcement officials and roughly 700 civilians. In this document, the Ministry recommends the third option—transfer of the entire Gaza population to the Egyptian Sinai – which document authors point out is “executable,” and will yield “the most positive long-term benefits” for the Jewish State. These authors understood how transfer of the 2.3 million Gazans into the Egyptian Sinai would entail an untold level of brutality against the people of Gaza triggering violations of the laws of war and even more serious charges, and would likely elicit broad global condemnation if not indictments. Nevertheless, the document urges policymakers in Israel to forge ahead with emptying Gaza, despite these challenges, and count on its alliance with the U.S. for backing while waging the necessary public relations campaign of incessantly portraying the Jewish State as victim. 

If there was any ambiguity about what this campaign of depopulation would entail, such doubts were put to rest almost from the start of the violence by the Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant. On October 9 at a meeting of Israeli military commanders at the IDF Southern Command in Beersheva, Gallant, acknowledged: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” An even more graphic specter of the motivation to eradicate the bare life of the Gazans came from Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu himself at the end of October after the Israeli Military had already killed 8000 Gazans and had evicted 1.2 million Gazans from their homes in the North of the Strip and instructed them to move South. Likening the campaign in Gaza to an ancient Biblical struggle by the Jews in the time of the Exodus to eradicate the Amalakites, Netanyahu exhorts his military and the people of Israel to “Remember what Amalek did to you” and he continues: “Our heroic soldiers have one supreme goal: To destroy the murderous enemy.”

Two days after Netanyahu’s Biblical invocation, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, in a calculated performative spectacle, denounced the United Nations for supposedly failing to condemn Hamas and duly pinned a yellow star to his blazer, reenacting the Nazi practice of stigmatizing Jews with this disparaging emblem so that the Nazi regime could more easily monitor them and ordinary Germans could more easily harass them. But Erdan’s bizarre stunt, assuming the role of a Nazi himself in pinning the Yellow Star to his own clothing, had a more sinister propaganda aim. “Don’t forget, we are the victims”—was his unmistakable subtext. Such a message, however, is difficult to reconcile alongside images of some of the world’s most impoverished human beings, with no military, no planes, no navy, no tanks, no anti-aircraft batteries, being bombarded at will by one of the most powerful military forces in the world while trying to escape the carnage raining down on them in overcrowded wooden carts pulled by donkeys, or for those less fortunate simply walking disconsolately on bombed and destroyed roads in lines resembling Palestinian refugees of 1948. Indeed, the disconnect between what Israeli ambassador Erdan wants the world to believe, and what the world can see with its own eyes is starkly Orwellian.

In 1944, a Polish lawyer, Raphäel Lemkin coined the term, genocide to describe the campaign of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews, but he also intended the concept to be applicable to a range of other crimes against humanity committed prior to the Holocaust. Four years later Lemkin’s idea was codified in what is now known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Despite the European bias of the Convention, however, with its almost singular point of reference being the experience of the Nazis and European Jewry, and the absence in it of specific kinds of acts such as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which adjucates the law with respect to countries, has repeatedly emphasized that the Convention embodies general principles. It is for this reason that the State of Israel, arguably born at least in part as reparations for the Nazi Genocide against European Jews, now finds itself on the opposite end not as victim but indeed as perpetrator. 

In January of this year, South Africa as a signatory to the Genocide Convention to prevent the commission of this crime, duly filed a complaint with the International Court of Justice charging the State of Israel with genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. In broad outline, genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Genocide Convention as “acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” and the Statute goes on to specify five scenarios in which the crime can be identified. Section C of South Africa’s 84-page document describes in detail the various campaigns of the Israel military in Gaza that conform to the definition of destroying in whole or in part Palestinian as a group. Among what is summarized in this section is the forced eviction of close to 2 million of the 2.3 Gazans from their homes; the destruction of 60% of the housing stock in the Gaza Strip; the deliberate and almost complete destruction of the health care sector including most of the hospitals; the destruction of schools and universities; and the targeting of food-producing outlets including farms and bakeries. Part of what has made genocide so difficult to prosecute, especially with respect to sovereign states, is proving intent on the part of alleged state perperators. In its document, the South African legal team has diligently gathered the various statements of the Israeli Defense Minister, Prime Minister, and other high-ranking Israeli Government officials that admit in plain language, to the genocidal intent of the Israeli military campaign. Taken together, the deeds of the Israeli military, and the words of Israeli officials testify to the aim of eliminating the Gazans from Gaza, that is, rendering Gaza free of Palestinians.    

For the past 17 years, Israel has imposed a blockade on Gaza, controlling the movement of people and goods that could enter and exit the territory, imbuing the Gaza Strip with the odious label of “the world’s largest open-air prison." Three years prior to the blockade, however, the State of Israel had sufficiently confined the people of Gaza in a walled and fenced enclosure to the point where former Israeli National Security Council Director, Giora Eiland conceded the territory to be “a huge concentration camp.” The choice of this descriptor by Eiland seems especially appropriate for a population blockaded and unable to circulate beyond the closed confines of the Strip and who are reliant on the whim of Israel for access to virtually all essentials for bare life. International law, however, suggests that a blockade imposed on a territorial space is an act of war. Even former Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban endorsed this view in reference to the June 1967 war. “The blockade is by definition an act of war,” Eban announced at the UN on June 19, 1967 in describing the actions of Egypt that supposedly provoked Israel into its surprise attack.  Israel is thus trying to argue to the world that it is defending itself in a war it did not want. In reality, the war did not begin October 7.  Israel has been waging war against Gaza with its blockade since 2007—not to mention four major military bombardments since 2006 killing thousands of Gazans—and the Jewish State presents itself as victim when the Gazans have attempted to break the siege and fight back. 

In December of last year, author Masha Gessen, in a courageous article for The New Yorker provided a different approach to framing the carceral spectacle in Gaza. For Gessen, the metaphor of the open-air prison was incomplete, if not inaccurate. In the context of the unmitigated carnage being visited upon the Gazans by Israeli military, what the Jewish State is undertaking, Gessen argued, is nothing less than a genocidal effort at “liquidating the ghetto” they have created in Gaza—much like the Nazis liquidating the Ghetto they had created in Warsaw. In this way, Gessen signaled an alternative way of seeing not only the savagery being visited on the 2.3 million Gazans, but also what Gaza had become under the Israeli blockade and bombardment—a ghetto that Israel is trying to eradicate as the Nazis did. How else is it possible to interpret a military campaign demanding Gazans evacuate their homes and move South where they have become more concentrated, and where they are still being incessantly bombed and killed?

At the moment of this writing, the Israeli military has delivered what is perhaps a final ultimatum to the Gazans. Concentrated now in the southernmost enclave in the Gaza Strip, the city of Rafah, where they have been ordered to move after a series of orders that has essentially cleared most of Gaza of its inhabitants since October, the Israeli military has now ordered the Gazans to leave—but there is no place left for them to go. Israel, in effect, appears poised on the precipice of implementing the aim of the Intelligence Ministry Report by forcing the Gazans into Egypt, or alternatively if Egypt continues to deny Israel’s request to let the Gazans into the Sinai, Israel will continue liquidating them. This is indeed an effort on the part of Israel to empty the ghetto!

What the world is witnessing in this effort to liquidate the ghetto of Gaza is shocking in the degree of violence that the State of Israel has unleashed on a defenseless group of people, but at the same time, it is explainable. Although the idea of the Jewish State committing genocide is blasphemy to those who hold that it was born as the supposed antithesis of genocide and the Holocaust, both Alexis de Tocqueville and Edward Said remind us that there is at times a cunning aspect in historical outcomes in which the oppressed somehow take on the attributes of their oppressors. In an interview of 2011, the celebrated physicist and Holocaust survivor, Hajo Meyer made this connection between Zionism and Nazism explicit when he said: “I saw in Auschwitz that if a dominant group wants to dehumanize others, as the Nazis wanted to dehumanize me, these dominant groups must first be dehumanized themselves…They [Zionists] have given up everything which has to do with humanity, for one thing: the state, the blood and the soil – just like the Nazis.” To those who naively proclaim the idea of “Never Again,” sadly what is upon us is that Palestinians have become the Jews, along with all of the other groups from the Namibians to the Rohingya that have suffered genocide. In this sense, what we are witnessing in Gaza is another instance of, “Once Again,” only this time it is Zionist Jews who are wielding the guns and are the keepers of the camp, while it is Palestinians such as Mohammed who are being locked up, dispossessed, and face death. 

Moms For Liberty and the Classical School

By Chris Richards

The Nazis want to control American education, and it's scary. What's scarier is that the Nazis don't advertise themselves as Nazis. They advertise themselves as teachers, educators, parents, pastors, and intellectuals striving to connect your kids with the truth and beauty of Western civilization. They give their groups catchy names like "Moms for Liberty." In the end, however, they still want to segregate your kids' schools by race, economics, and religion. They want to promise you that your kids will grow up to be straight Christians and good citizens, not poor gay people in prison. They want you to believe this promise is something real, that they can deliver on, so that you help them spread their message to more communities.

This morning, while surfing some Substack headlines, I noticed the excellent journalists of Popular Information were reporting that a Moms for Liberty chapter in South Carolina has announced that they are opening the "Ashley River Classical School." It was the combination of "Moms for Liberty" and "Classical School" that particularly caught my attention because this reminded me of some research I started because of some OpEds praising Ron DeSantis back in 2023. I started a major project and started sharing what I was learning. Then the project went on hold because I was distracted by other things, but little things keep pulling me back.

The OpEd that got everyone's attention and briefly made cable news before disappearing, was credited to the byline "Cornel West and Jeremy Wayne Tate" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal*. The title of the OpEd, "DeSantis' Revolutionary Defense of the Classics," was very much in line with its content. The Washington Post, MSNBC, and the Guardian all carried commentary or journalism about the OpEd or the DeSantis policy inspiring the OpEd before the end of the year! Dr. West's name on the byline around the same time he was announcing that he was running for President was quite a big deal. The attention that Ron DeSantis's education policy had been getting in the media helped inspire Glenn Youngkin to run for Governor of Virginia in 2021 and fueled DeSantis's own presidential aspirations.

So who is Jeremy Wayne Tate?

Jeremy Wayne Tate is the CEO of Classics Learning Test, a company that publishes an alternative standardized test adopted by the state university system in Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis. The Guardian article references it directly and the company's public facing website includes a lot of information about who the organization is and what they want to achieve. He hosts the "Anchored" podcast, a show about education and culture that is strongly colored by Western chauvinism and conservative educational bias. He speaks at right wing educational conferences where keynote speakers are former Republican presidential candidates and religious zealots. In addition to Dr. West, the board of his organization includes  ultra-Catholic "American Solidarity Party" activist Patrick Deneen and professional queer-basher Christopher Rufo.

Most importantly for the purposes of the Popular Information news story, the board of CLT includes Moms for Liberty activist Erika Donalds. 

Mrs. Donalds is a former school board member from Naples, FL. She is the wife of Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, a vocal MAGA partisan openly aligned with Christian nationalists. She founded an organization for conservative school board members to provide an official sounding counterweight to the Florida School Boards Association. Most importantly, she is the CEO of the Optima Foundation... a non-profit that operates Christian charter schools as a franchise of pro-discrimination Christian institution Hillsdale College. Ron DeSantis appointed her to the board of trustees for Florida Gulf Coast University.

SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

So a prominent school choice activist affiliated with Moms for Liberty already owns a chain of schools in Florida. There are similar schools and organizations in other states. A friendly acquaintance who supported Dr. West when he was the only announced third party progressive in the race told me that I should take a closer look into the organization's president and that I might change my mind about the CLT being a right wing org.

It didn't. In fact, it scared me.

The board president, Dr. Angel Adams Parham, is the co-author of the sneakily titled "The Black American Intellectual Tradition." While the book does not use this language, instead using a lot of liberal language about Western culture and the education of great Black thinkers (who were grounded in "the classics") to essentially advance the argument that the Black American intellectual tradition is an outgrowth of the white American intellectual tradition. I can't accept that Black slaves in America learned the truth and beauty of Western civilization from their owners. While it is true that Black American thinkers were often very well educated in the classics, this was because the classics were the language of the white Academy. It is also true that it was necessary to refute classical arguments in defense of inequity and inequality with classical arguments for equality, equity, and democracy.

Yet I believe that it is wrong to accept the arguments of Dr. Adams Parham and her co-author (Dr. Anika Prather, who runs an online classical school herself) that Black and white intellectual traditions come from a shared culture. Black intellectuals were struggling against white academic culture to create an intellectual culture of their own. Is it accessible and understandable in a common language? Yes. However, the Black intellectual tradition in America is best understood (in my opinion) as an intellectual counter-culture in opposition to the white Academy. What we call "Western culture" was inherited from the Roman Empire by her bastard granddaughter, the Catholic Church, and grandma stole it from the Greeks in the first place. Yet the Greeks borrowed it from ancient Egypt and ancient Persia. So how "Western" is it?

Which brings us back to Erika Donalds. To her, "Western" means "Christian" in the sense of European Christendom. Which means it also means "white" because it is European. This is really just Enlightenment pan-Germanism (remember, the English and French are "German" too) cast in a new frame of reference for the 21st Century. It still leads to the same narrow set of liberal or reactionary conclusions. Unless one is willing to challenge it by studying its critics and rebels, the truth and beauty of Western civilization is where our crushing social and economic inequity come from.

The spirit of "Classical Education" is best exemplified by Plutarch's "Parallel Lives." Plutarch was writing short biographies of the "greatest" Greeks and Romans of history in which he included very pointed moral critiques.  He then had short passages comparing them to one another both morally and by terms of their accomplishments. Yet Plutarch's moral critique is very clearly biased on behalf of aristocratic republics as opposed to democracy, blaming democracy for tyranny and social disorder in an open manner. Plutarch would sympathize with Samuel Huntington's famous paper for the Tri-Lateral Commission, "The Crisis of Democracy," in which Huntington wrote that the Western crisis of democracy was that the West was too democratic to successfully compete with the Soviet "East."

Huntington was also a student of "the classics," after all.

The far right has a clear vision for an educational system they believe will unify us in happy obedience to the truth and beauty of capitalism and white supremacy. Moms for Liberty is selling that vision in a figurative sense, while Jeremy Wayne Tate is literally selling it. The problem is that too many stakeholders in our society are buying.

That's the problem with the marketplace of ideas. The market is regulated by the dictatorship of capital. It is not a "free market," just another liberal market.

* I apologize for the pay-walled link, it's WSJ content and I cannot currently find a free link to the full article. The WaPo op-ed by Karen Attiah is not pay-walled and its description of the article credited to West is accurate.

The History Behind the So-called "Israel-Hamas War"

(Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

By Dylan Jones

Where we start a narrative makes a big difference. If we start the narrative on October 7th, when Palestinian resistance launched rockets into Israel, then it’s easier to justify a military response from Israel. However, is this an honest place to start telling the story from? What different conclusions would we draw if we started the story from 75 years ago? Or thousands of years ago? Starting the narrative in a different place by adding historical context allows us to understand the obstacles to everyone's liberation in this situation.

First, I would like to acknowledge that there is no doubt important Jewish cultural and spiritual ties to Palestine. And indeed, before Israel was founded there were many Jews living peacefully alongside Muslims and Christians in Palestine. Palestinians have lived there since time immemorial, with genetic ties going back to the Canaanites[1]; they have social, cultural, and spiritual ties to the land. In this way, Palestinians are indigenous to the land. This is not to say that non-Palestinian Jews are not also Indigenous to Palestine, a question which I will show has absolutely no bearing on the current situation. An Indigenous person from a given area can also act as a colonizer/settler under the conditions of a settler colonial nation state such as Israel. This becomes clear when we analyze the last 75 years— since Israel’s founding.

The modern state of Israel has its roots in Western colonialism. Theodore Herzl in the 1800s defined the goal of today’s zionism, to create a home for white Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. He decided it could be in Argentina, Uganda, or Palestine. At this time, Britain controlled Palestine as a colony and, under the Balfour Declaration (1917), it promised an area of Palestine to the zionists in order to quell anti-semitism in Europe. Palestinians had no say in this decision. As tensions heightened due to Israeli settlers converging in Palestine and inevitably seizing property from its inhabitants, the U.N. announced a partition plan in 1947 which would designate over half of Palestine to establish the nation state of Israel. When Palestinians rejected the plan, Israel committed genocide to take it by force. In what is called the Nakba, Israeli military forces and vigilante settlers murdered 15,000 Palestinians overnight, displaced 850,000 people, and destroyed 550 villages. After this initial genocidal campaign, Israel took even more land than it was promised in the UN partition plan. To this day, Israel actively prevents those it displaced from returning. Israel meets protests asserting the right to return with violence.

Since the Nakba, over the course of decades, Israel has consistently evicted more Palestinians from their land, forcefully displacing families and entire communities. It arbitrarily imprisons Palestinians, including children. It has developed an apartheid system that denies basic human rights to Palestinians. There are policies of environmental racism such as not allowing Palestinians to drill for well water and spraying herbicide on Palestinian farms to destroy their sources of food and economic livelihood. This is state terrorism. This is a settler colonial state in operation. Israel is displacing, invading, ethnically cleansing Palestinians, and occupying more and more of Palestine in order to replace the existing society with its own.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Israel regularly bombs Palestine, hardly warranting a few articles in mainstream news. But when the rockets launched on October 7th, mainstream news immediately stated condemnation. When a white Israeli citizen dies, it is news. When an Israeli bomb severs a Palestinian child’s head from their body, it is normal; we can immediately jump to justifications. Similar to its response to other Palestinian resistance, Israel is using October 7th to justify a second genocide, a second Nakba. Since October 7th, Israel has murdered more than 15,000 Palestinians, over 6,000 children, and over 4,000 women. They have blocked water and food. They have bombed schools, hospitals, and refugee camps. Israel has hundreds of child hostages but has the power to define them as prisoners. There are around 10,000 Palestinian hostages in Israel. Every hour, Israel drops 42 bombs and half of the population of Gaza is children.

According to Israeli officials themselves, the goal is not to hunt down Hamas but rather to seize this opportunity to murder and displace Palestinians living on the land Israel would like for its own. Netanyahu himself says “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our holy bible, we do remember,” referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites in scripture. This references a call to exterminate the entire population of Amalekites—every man, woman, child, and piece of property.[2] A former Israeli intelligence chief, Rami Igra on CNN said, “the non-combatant population in the Gaza strip is really a nonexistent term. All of Gaza voted for Hamas and as we have seen on the 7th of October most of the population in Gaza strip are Hamas”.[3] Imagine if the same outrageous claim were made about Israelis having voted for Netanyahu. The Israeli Minister of Agriculture, Avi Dichter announces, “we are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” “Gaza Nakba 2023”.[4] In this way, Israeli officials are clear that the intention is not to hunt down Hamas, it is a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Despite how clearly Israeli officials admit genocide and ethnic cleansing, western media still focuses on the “hunt for Hamas” narrative. We must reject this narrative and when we are asked to condemn Hamas, we should say instead…

Israel—as a terrorist, settler colonial nation state—is dependent on violence against Palestinians and it thereby jeopardizes the health and safety of its own inhabitants, rather than protecting them. It supposes that one people’s self-determination, rights, and lives have to come at the expense of others. Among Zionists goals are creating a safe space for Jewish people and creating a relationship with an important spiritual place to Jewish people living around the world. There are peaceful ways to do this that respect the existing Palestinian society. Establishing the theocratic settler colonial ethnostate of Israel erases Palestinian society. Therefore, the dismantling of zionism is the only truly just and safe path for Palestinians and Jews. If the Palestinian resistance stops its resistance, Israel will only continue its occupation, annexing more land, extra-judicially imprisoning Palestinians—including children (read: taking as hostages), and bombing Gaza. This characterizes life under the boot of Israel since it was founded. This does not advocate violent resistance as the only option, but points out that the root of all the violence rests clearly with the settler colonial state of Israel. Free Palestine is not a cry for retribution. It does not advocate violence against Israelis. Free Palestine means dismantling the social and political project of zionism and moving toward liberation for everyone.

I believe most people have wondered what they would have done during the holocaust when Nazi Germany slaughtered millions of Jews, Romanis, Sintis, people with disabilities, and others. I say emphatically you do not have to wonder what you would have done. What you would have done is what you’re doing right now for Palestinians living in Israel’s death camps. Attend and/or uplift: rallies for a permanent ceasefire, vigils, assembly meetings, sit-ins, and shutdowns. Call legislators and demand a ceasefire. Advocate for Palestine among your friends and family. Whether we would like to be activists or not, our tax dollars are funding the bombs eviscerating Palestinian people. At a moral bare minimum, we are called to be activists now. I do not believe I would have come to support Palestine if it were not for the values for love and kindness that my family and friends taught me. Now I call on all my friends and family to live out these values. Long live Palestine! Long live Gaza! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

Notes

[1] https://www.brown.uk.com/teaching/HEST5001/Palestinians.pdf

[2]https://www.npr.org/2023/11/07/1211133201/netanyahus-references-to-violent-biblical-passages-raise-alarm-among-critics

[3]https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/anderson-cooper-360/episodes/d61ee373-605b-4ec4-82dd-b0a9001d97a9

[4]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-nakba-israels-far-right-palestinian-fears-hamas-war-rcna123909

From Genocide Denial to Climate Denial: How Palestine Will Save Us

Pictured: Protestors hold a rally for Palestinian liberation at the Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., on November 4, 2023. [CREDIT: CELAL GUNES / ANADOLU / GETTY IMAGES]

By Sarah Cavarretta

“I have a cause higher and nobler than my own, a cause to which all private interests and concerns must be subordinated.”

- Leila Khaled, October 30th, 2023

On November 8th, the Palestinian Youth Movement, National Students for Social Justice in Palestine, Answer Coalition, and the Peoples Forum NYC organized Shut it down for Palestine, a national strike of students, healthcare workers, trade unions, and youth coalitions. This national strike followed weeks of demonstrations from tens of thousands of protesters in the United States. From youth groups blocking the Tacoma port in order to stall ships carrying weapons destined for Israel, to Jewish Voice for Peace organizers blocking all White house entrances and conducting sit in’s at Grand Central Station. The momentum is undeniable and global. This is the type of dual power, coalition building, and defiance of social participation we must regularly exercise in society.

In the past few months, the world has witnessed mass demonstrations of millions of people occupying public space to express their support for Palestine’s liberation. Indonesia had 2 million people occupy public space in protest of Israeli occupation. And over 1 million people marched in Washington D.C. demanding a cease fire. From Egypt,  Turkey,  The United States, and even Costa Rica, masses of people from all around the world recognize the brutality of this 76 year old occupation.

In less than two weeks, Israel has dropped over 20,000 tons of of explosives, surpassing the explosive force of nuclear weapons used on Hiroshima Japan in 1945. A total of 10,000 bombs dropped on a people without an military, in a swath of land only 6 miles wide and 25 miles long, with a population of 2 million people, half of which are children. Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, has not had access to water, food, or medicine for over a month, with no end in sight. Even with our best attempts to pause and reflect on the experience of 10,000 bombs in the first 12 days alone, the horror is unimaginable.

The sickening reality is there are multiple genocides occurring right now. From the Congo and Sudan to Palestine, the trivialization and misinformation of each of these examples is an extension of the broader denial that we are living through a mass extinction at the behest of private corporations.

Subduing the Masses

“The parallels are undeniable,” 800 scholars and legal experts wrote in an open letter warning that the Israeli bombing of civilian infrastructure like churches, hospitals, schools, and entire neighborhoods, which predominately kill civilians, all constitute acts of genocide. Additionally, shutting off all water access and food supplies is defined as a war crime under “collective punishment.” In fact, in years prior to the Hamas attacks in October, various human rights experts and organizations have all legally defined Israel’s occupation of Palestine as an “apartheid state constituting a crime against humanity.” Yet, the insidious framing of corporate western media continues to trivialize the actual power dynamics of this occupation. With inaccurate headlines like  “Israel’s war on Hamas” or “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” corporate media deliberately side steps the reality that Palestine does not have a military or functioning state. They are a people occupied in what has been described as “an open-air prison” or “large concentration camp” under constant blockades and military checkpoints by Israeli forces that have been committing a gradual genocide for 70 years.

Similarly, in 2020, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued their most urgent report warning the the world that we are approaching a grave threshold of social collapse with global crop failure on the horizon if we do not enact “increased and urgent” policy that reduces global emissions by 2030. Yet media outlets reported on this as another aspirational statement rather than a critical intersection. The first IPCC report was released in 1990 and its findings have been buried, minimized, and mocked for decades.

In July of this year, various scientific reports warned we are witnessing the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, one of the ocean’s most important currents, literally vital for ocean life and our entire existence.

Yet, year after year corporate media has trivialized the catastrophic and harrowing trajectory we are approaching. This pattern operates ad nauseam: Climate scientists and activists are arrested for their public protest and outcry of irrefutable data, inckuding the fact that North America lost 1/3 of all birds within 50 years. Or that the global loss of pollinators is a clear precursor to unfolding food insecurity. Or that the global destruction of coral reefs signals irreversible damage. The media has responded to all this information with apathy because corporate media operates at the behest of advertisers whose interests run contrary to environmental sustainability.

We are living through the 6th mass extinction driven by human activity as the result of capitalist hyper-consumption and over-production that exploits and disregards water, land, and people for profit. It’s not enough to denounce neoliberalism, but rather we must also know the institutions and multinational corporations who profit from our suffering. Most of all, we must have the courage to acknowledge that institutions contingent on the production of human suffering are illegitimate and can not be reformed. They must, instead, be abolished. Whether its genocide denial or climate denial, our institutions deliberately employ nefarious framing to subconsciously subdue our urgency and understanding of clear identifiable catastrophes.

Co-opting the System

Political thinker Mark Fisher deconstructs the patterns and dualities of capitalism in his book Capitalist Realism. Most of the efforts towards resistance or “anti-capitalism” are predictable forms of counter culture, like two sides of a coin. “Anti-capitalism” becomes a dance with the system, but nothing changes.

This is because the actual boundaries of society remain the same. Therefore, the options society produces for “change” or "resistance” are often self-limited to begin with. Change cannot come from within the system, and this framework is imperative to utilize when understanding today’s global failure.

The system simply does not offer effective mechanisms of reform because those who control these systems benefit from these catastrophes. Instead, political systems and governments shaped by capitalism are designed to reproduce appeasement through the hijacking of legitimate movements and well-intended institutions, whether through political campaigns, environmental movements, or International systems.

We need to look no further than the U.N. Climate Change Conference, which is also referred to as the Conference of the Parties (COP). Today, the COP has been completely hijacked by the fossil fuel industry.

Since 2019, Madrid COP25 had more fossil fuel delegates than delegates representing any single country. By 2022, COP26 in Egypt had more fossil fuel delegates than 10 countries most affected by climate combined. This year, COP will be facilitated by a petrostate with more fossil fuel delegates in attendance than ever before.

This pattern of institutional hijacking is the solidified model of U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon’s budget is over 1 trillion dollars every year, primarily awarding defense contractors and weapons manufactures (all private companies) with unchecked multibillion dollar contracts. All of which reinforces the never-ending rotation of former department of defense employees receiving high ranking positions in private companies like Halliburton, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. Additionally, over 80% of military generals end up working for weapons producers.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

Irrefutably, this revolving door corrupts and incentivizes a conflict of interest when former military personal are appointed jobs with the same institutions whom they’ve been giving inconceivable contracts to. Recalling that these private companies are financed primarily by U.S. tax payers, we must acknowledge that this model of wealth distribution for private corporations comes directly at the expense and well being of U.S. citizens, depriving them of everything from health care and education to affordable housing and healthy food.

The cycle of violence abroad is also repeated domestically through unexamined policies that only pursue perpetual warfare. This trajectory is contingent on the continued annihilation of people both abroad and domestically. And these sentiments are not hyperbole, as the majority of U.S. police departments conduct joint training with Israeli Occupational forces. The results are brutal police tactics, refugee children in cages at the border, and mass surveillance, all of which are imports of Israeli violence sponsored by the U.S. Thus, the brutality that the U.S. creates and empowers abroad is simultaneously implemented back home, and vice versa. Because, under capitalism, there is profit to be made from brutality.

Deconstructing Power

The average person might be inclined to think the United Nations (UN) is a toothless institution, but it is not. Rather, it is the largest consolidation of western hegemony ever expressed.

The UN is made up of 190 member countries. Out of 190, only 5 are permanent members that hold veto power. These 5 countries — the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China — also make up the United Nations Security Council, the only UN body that can issue legally-binding resolutions and has the exclusive legal right to possess nuclear arsenals.

To further demonstrate western hegemony, 3/5 security council members (U.S., U.K, and France) are also the world’s largest military coalition responsible for the majority of war crimes in the past 50 years. It’s imperative to identify this reconfiguration of colonial powers to understand the system is working exactly how it was designed: to grant unmitigated power to the western (capitalist) world. This current representation allows the most powerful countries to be judge, jury, and executioner, while also representing the most brutally offensive forces in the world.

Recalling that the United States has over 800 military bases around the world and has not signed or ratified the majority of human rights treaties, its obvious the U.S. and its allies operate with total impunity.

Take for example the case of the International Criminal Court, established post-WW2 as the only permanent court with international jurisdiction. The Rome Statue, the treaty which gives life and authentication to the ICC, explains in Articles (5) that the ICC has jurisdiction in all matters concerning: (a) The crime of genocide; (b) Crimes against humanity; (c) War crimes; and (d) The crime of aggression, and defines each in subsequent articles. Beyond these definitions, there are legal characteristics of crimes against humanity, such as the indiscriminate targeting of civilians and their infrastructure. This is a war crime for the same reasons that chemical and biological weapons are; because they have no singular target and predominately kill innocent civilians.

For the average person, this seems like a reasonable obligation for militaries. However, in 2002, U.S. President George Bush signed the American Service members Protection Act, a law that permits the “use of force” to invade the Hague in the event that a U.S. military member is ever prosecuted for war crimes.

Recalling that the ICC is a criminal court that only investigates the most egregious cases of war crimes, it is revealing that the U.S. already has a contingency law in place that justifies invading the Netherlands in the hypothetical scenario that its military forces are ever tried for war crimes.

In another demonstration of American exceptionalism and the disdain for international order, in 2020, Donald Trump canceled the visas and placed sanctions on ICC court prosecutors, Fatou Bensouda and Phakiso Mochochoko, for simply investigating U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan.

The lesson here is that there is no way to sequester the power of the United Stats within today’s international framework.

building Power

When we identify that international organizations are nothing more than colonial extensions and will play no role in our collective liberation, it is imperative we take creative and brave ownership of the world we want to live in. Just as every generation has done before us. The United Nations, which is unduly controlled by the capitalist/imperialist West, has brought us to our current demise. Its function is contingent on mass suffering and, therefore, it will never be constructed in a way to liberate the masses.

Society is collapsing, but the world is not ending… yet. Every revolution, liberation, and social movement reveal that collective organization and radical disobedience are the only way to dismantle violent institutions. From weapons manufactures and fossil fuels industries to big agriculture and agrochemical industries, each one operates from a profit incentive and are directly responsible for killing our planet and its people.

This language and understanding must be mainstreamed in order to galvanize a conscious awakening of the masses. There is no going back now, as Israel’s brutality and genocide have polarized the global majority against western governments. And the US is eager and waiting to wage full-scale destruction. The world must be prepared to mobilize against this. 

When we recall that the system of chattel slavery existed longer than it has been abolished, we must draw courage to believe that a new world is possible. Every generation is called to take radical ownership over the world they want to live in. It’s a constant fight that requires the participation of everyone, everywhere, all at once. It starts with building power within our communities.

These sentiments can not be platitudes. We must internalize this as we prepare for the horizon. No one is absolved from participating in our collective liberation. Our future depends on it, and it starts with Palestine.

It's Not a Hamas-Israeli Conflict: It's an Israeli War Against Every Palestinian

By Ramzy Baroud

Republished from MintPress News.

At one time, the ‘Arab-Israeli Conflict’ was Arab and Israeli. Over many years, however, it was rebranded. The media is now telling us it is a ‘Hamas-Israeli conflict.’

But what went wrong? Israel simply became too powerful.

The supposedly astounding Israeli victories over the years against Arab armies have emboldened Israel to the extent that it came to view itself not as a regional superpower but as a global power. Israel, per its own definition, became ‘invincible.’

Such terminology was not a mere scare tactic aimed at breaking the spirit of Palestinians and Arabs alike. Israel believed this.

The ‘Israeli miracle victory’ against Arab armies in 1967 was a watershed moment. Then, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, declared in a speech that “from the podium of the UN, I proclaimed the glorious triumph of the IDF and the redemption of Jerusalem.”

In his thinking, this could only mean one thing: “Never before has Israel stood more honored and revered by the nations of the world.”

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY

The sentiment in Eban’s words echoed throughout Israel. Even those who doubted their government’s ability to prevail over the Arabs completely joined the chorus: Israel is unvanquishable.

Little rational discussion took place back then about the actual reasons why Israel had won and if that victory would have been possible without Washington’s complete backing and the West’s willingness to support Israel at any cost.

Israel was never a graceful winner. As the size of territories controlled by the triumphant little state increased three-fold, Israel began entrenching its military occupation over whatever remained of historic Palestine. It even started building settlements in newly occupied Arab territories, in Sinai, the Golan Heights and all the rest.

Fifty years ago, in October 1973, Arab armies attempted to reverse Israel’s massive gains by launching a surprise attack. They initially succeeded, then failed when the US moved quickly to bolster Israeli defenses and intelligence.

It was not a complete victory for the Arabs, nor a total defeat for Israel. The latter was severely bruised, though. But Tel Aviv remained convinced that the fundamental relationship it had established with the Arabs in 1967 had not been altered.

And, with time, the ‘conflict’ became less Arab-Israeli and more Palestinian-Israeli. Other Arab countries, like Lebanon, paid a heavy price for the fragmentation of the Arab front.

This changing reality meant that Israel could invade South Lebanon in March 1978 and then sign the Camp David Peace Accords with Egypt six months later.

While the Israeli occupation of Palestine grew more violent, with an insatiable appetite for more land, the West turned the Palestinian struggle for freedom into a ‘conflict’ to be managed by words, never by deeds.

Many Palestinian intellectuals argue that “this is not a conflict” and that military occupation is not a political dispute but governed by clearly defined international laws and boundaries. And that it must be resolved according to international justice.

That is yet to happen. Neither was justice delivered nor an inch of Palestine retrieved, despite the countless international conferences, resolutions, statements, investigations, recommendations, and special reports. Without actual enforcement, international law is mere ink.

But did the Arab people abandon Palestine? The anger, the anguish, and the passionate chants by endless streams of people who took to the streets throughout the Middle East to protest the annihilation of Gaza by the Israeli army did not seem to think that Palestine is alone–or, at least, should be left fighting on its own.

The isolation of Palestine from its regional context has proven disastrous.

When the ‘conflict’ is only with the Palestinians, Israel determines the context and scope of the so-called conflict, what is allowed at the ‘negotiations table,’ and what is to be excluded. This is how the Oslo Accords squandered Palestinian rights.

The more Israel succeeds in isolating Palestinians from their regional environs, the more it invests in their division.

It is even more dangerous when the conflict becomes between Hamas and Israel. The outcome is a whole different conversation that is superimposed on the truly urgent understanding of what is taking place in Gaza, in the whole of Palestine at the moment.

In Israel’s version of events, the war began on October 7, when Hamas fighters attacked Israeli military bases, settlements, and towns in the south of Israel.

No other date or event before the Hamas attack seems to matter to Israel, the West and corporate media covering the war with so much concern for the plight of Israelis and complete disregard for the Gaza inferno.

No other context is allowed to spoil the perfect Israeli narrative of ISIS-like Palestinians disturbing the peace and tranquility of Israel and its people.

Palestinian voices that insist on discussing the Gaza war within proper historical contexts–the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, the occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the siege on Gaza in 2007, all the bloody wars before and after–are denied platforms.

The pro-Israel media simply does not want to listen. Even if Israel did not make unfounded claims about decapitated babies, the media would have remained committed to the Israeli narrative, anyway.

Yet, suppose Israel continues to define the narratives of war, historical contexts of ‘conflicts,’ and the political discourses that shape the West’s view of Palestine and the Middle East. In that case, it will continue to obtain all the blank checks necessary to remain committed to its military occupation of Palestine.

In turn, this will fuel yet more conflicts, more wars and more deception regarding the roots of the violence.

For this vicious cycle to break, Palestine must, once more, become an issue that concerns all Arabs, the whole region. The Israeli narrative must be countered, western bias confronted, and a new, collective strategy formed.

In other words, Palestine cannot be left alone anymore.