It’s been a busy week of news. Here are four items that stood out.
A group of Democratic members of Congress released a short video addressed to the U.S. military, reminding service members that they may refuse unlawful orders. President Trump denounced the video as “seditious behavior” and said such behavior was “punishable by death,” even resharing posts calling for the lawmakers to be hanged. The Democratic message itself was partisan and thin on specifics, but Trump’s response was far more troubling. U.S. troops already know they can and should refuse unlawful orders—though determining what is lawful in practice is rarely simple. What struck me most was the timing: Democrats issued this warning to the troops in response to Trump, but I don’t recall a similar concern when President Biden continued military support to Israel amid mounting accusations from human-rights bodies of grave—indeed, genocidal—violations in Gaza.
In sum, Congress should confront questionable executive actions directly rather than shifting responsibility to Lieutenant Smith or Corporal Jones.
The Trump administration has floated a 28-point plan to end the Russia-Ukraine War. Reports indicate the plan involved Russian input but did not include Ukraine or key European partners. Unsurprisingly, many provisions cross Ukraine’s stated red lines. Diplomacy is still preferable to endless war—jaw-jaw over war-war is a sound motto—but it’s hard to see this plan gaining real traction, especially when it seems designed more to satisfy Washington and Moscow than Kyiv.
One thing is certain: Ukraine is learning that when you dance with elephants, you’re likely to get trampled.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has announced her resignation from Congress, effective January 5, 2026. This surprised me. I read her resignation letter and, despite disagreeing with much of her politics, I respected her consistent opposition to regime-change wars and her outspoken criticism of Israel’s genocidal effort in Gaza and of the undue influence of AIPAC and similar lobbies. She is also right to highlight how far our government has drifted from serving America’s working and middle classes.
MTG, as unlikely as it sounds, is a viable candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 2028, assuming Trump obeys the Constitution and steps aside.
The UN Security Council has approved a U.S.-sponsored Gaza resolution, with Russia and China abstaining. Their decision not to veto suggests a calculation: let Washington bear responsibility for the consequences of its own neocolonial proposal. The plan itself looks like a thinly veiled endorsement of a murderous status quo—one that provides political cover as Gaza remains strangled and devastated. If the United States is now the guarantor of this “peace,” then it also owns the moral and political fallout. If anything, this “peace” plan will only provide cover for Israel’s ongoing genocide in slow motion.
Which brings me back to unlawful orders. Any U.S. service member asked to support actions that clearly violate international law has a duty to refuse. Yet the Democrats who admonished troops about unlawful orders seemed focused only on hypothetical abuses under Trump, not on real-world concerns about U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal operations in Gaza. For too many in Washington, unwavering support for Israel overrides legal, moral, and humanitarian considerations.
Readers, what did you make of this week’s events? One thing seems certain: we continue to live in “interesting times.”
I’ve taught military history “from Plato to Nato,” as we used to joke, but my expertise focused on technology and warfare. Along with “revolutions” and “transformations” in weaponry, I probably spent too much time focusing on “decisive battles” and “great captains” in history. When you look at the course of military history, most deaths from war didn’t come in battle. They came from hunger and disease, from famine and pestilence. Sometimes, mass starvation and pandemics were unintentional byproducts of chaos and societal disruption caused by war, and sometimes starvation and disease were intentional weapons and products of war.
And behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death
You might call this apocalyptic war, from the Bible and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which included famine and pestilence among the death riders.
An apocalyptic fate seemingly awaits Palestinians in Gaza. I’ve written about Gaza as a genocide, the mass bombing by Israel, the mass killing, with the apparent goal of forcing Palestinians out of Gaza, but I haven’t given enough thought to the use of mass starvation and diseases as weapons in this genocide.
A reader, Dan White, brought this lesson home to me, and I’d like to quote his message to me at length:
I can’t think of a better word than the etiology of starvation. It hasn’t been adequately addressed by the snoozemedia. Starvation death rates have a funny shaped curve. During the first stages of starvation–can’t give any figures on a time period for this or any other part of the process/curve, due to there being varying levels of food deprivation–there are few deaths, generally (but not always) those persons with compromised health/preexisting health problems that make them more susceptible to death than others in the population. After some (varying length) period of starvation, people start to die in larger numbers, and then all of a sudden, everyone is dying, and then everyone is dead. This period of death is fairly short compared to the period of starvation. Again, due to varying levels of starvation and varying levels of preexisting health and varying levels of surplus consumable body tissue in the starved group, this period has no fixed length, but it happens all of a sudden, and it doesn’t take long for everyone to die once it starts–couple of weeks seems common.
The starving residents of Gaza haven’t reached the mass-death stage of starvation, but it could well start happening tomorrow. I can’t say because I don’t know the food reserves preexisting, the food delivery figures since the ‘war’ started, and nobody in the news biz has bothered to look for them, either. There really should have been some government or multistate agency who has looked for them and published them, but nobody has.
When the mass-death stage hits, people in Gaza will be dying by the tens of thousands a week. Stopping the mass-death by all of a sudden providing food isn’t going to work very well, on account of logistical delivery problems and the medical problems of alleviating starvation at this advanced stage–folks’ digestive tracts may well not work well enough even if they get food. That will be the real genocide, and I’d bet money it happens, and bet more money that this is the real objective of Israel’s ‘war’ in Gaza. The notion of Israel’s war objective is displacement of Gazans is an absurdity–you want someone to leave, well they have to be able to walk, right? And they have to have a place to go. Israel is counting on the rest of the world to all of a sudden do a mass-evacuation of Gazans combined with a mass feeding and mass medical intervention all at the same time in order to prevent this mass death of Gazans from occurring? NFW–Israel’s leaders have accepted mass killing as an official state policy, and have commenced doing it, and do it as we speak. And Israeli hasbara [propaganda] will blame us for it, and a whole lot of whored-out American and European politicians, as well as Israel-worshipping American Jews, will go along with it.
What Dan White posits here is horrifying—and increasingly likely. Of course, as people are weakened through starvation, they become more susceptible to various diseases associated with famine and unsanitary conditions.
These “old” weapons of war—starvation and disease—will serve as the grimmest of reapers among the Palestinians in Gaza.
The “mass-death stage” of starvation is nearing, unless the U.S. and other countries intervene to force Israel to allow adequate food and medical supplies into Gaza. A failure to act will only spur the pale horse on whose back Death sits.
The LA Holocaust Museum recently suggested that “Never Again” is a fundamental lesson of the Holocaust. Then they took it back. Here’s the (almost) inconceivable story from Caitlin Johnstone:
Israel supporters are so crazy and evil that the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum recently retracted a statement saying “Never again can’t only mean never again for Jews” after objections from Zionists.
The museum issued a statement saying, “We recently posted an item on social media that was part of a pre-planned social media campaign intended to promote inclusivity and community that was easily open to misinterpretation by some to be a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East. That was not our intent. It has been removed to avoid any further confusion.”
Think about how gross your position has to be for you to be all hey, let’s say no genocide for ANYBODY, and then immediately have to come back and clarify that you definitely weren’t saying no genocide for the Palestinians.
I’m glad that’s clear! Talk about a profile in cowardice.
Then there are those who get testy about applying the word “genocide” to events in Gaza. Their distorted mouth noises sound something like this: Israel is at war with terrorists (Hamas) and *only* 70,000 or so Palestinians are dead so it’s not really a genocide, is it? Plus it’s all their fault because of October 7th, end of story.
For what it’s worth, I taught the Holocaust as a professor of history after attending a seminar at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Also, if it means anything, I’m Catholic, retired military, with no particular axe to grind.
Yes, it’s a genocide in Gaza. A holocaust in slow motion. Heck, Israeli leaders have freely confessed their goal is a final solution to the Gaza question, mainly by killing many Palestinians while forcing the rest to leave. (Whether they’ll have any place to go remains to be seen.)
There is no one model of genocide, and definitions also vary. But if what’s happening in Gaza isn’t a genocide, I don’t know what other word applies. Mass murder, perhaps? Extermination, but slowly? Ethnic cleansing and mass death followed by mass expulsion? That is genocide, plain and simple.
Welcome back, everyone. I hope you enjoyed Labor Day Weekend.
It’s grim times in America. Perhaps grimmest of all is the U.S. government’s support of genocide through mass killing and starvation in Gaza. “Never again” was the message of the Holocaust, not “Yes, again” if it benefits Zionists in Israel.
Americans, in the main, are against mass killing (at least, I hope we are), but what does it matter when all 100 senators take money from AIPAC and the Trump administration is rabidly pro-Israel? “Our” government isn’t ours; the man who gets what he wants with the loudest applause is Bibi Netanyahu. Talk about foreign interference in America’s elections and governance!
Courtesy of Lisa Savage at her Substack site
Why is it so hard for Americans to come together in sensible ways? A decade ago, I wrote about how we’re kept divided, distracted, and downtrodden. The letter D truly is for defective and deficient—disastrous as well—but permit me a little exercise in alliteration as I expand my D list to seven, as in the 7 habits of a highly defective country.
1. Divided: Are you Republican or Democrat? Red or Blue? MAGA or “libtard”? Woke or Anti-woke? Cis white male or BIPOC? Pro-life or Pro-choice? There are far too many labels and efforts that end in division. And we know how rulers use division to conquer.
2. Distracted: Wherever you look, Americans are bombarded with distractions, starting with the screens we carry everywhere with us. The Romans had bread and circuses; we have junk food, NASCAR, and the NFL. Curl up before that 75-inch TV and chow down.
3. Downtrodden: When you’re working 50+ hours a week, straining to make ends meet, suffering from high health care costs, student loan debt, and so on, it’s hard to pay attention to what’s going on in Washington—and even harder to act against it.
4. Discontented: Paradoxically, the discontentment so many of us feel is not resulting in significant political action. Instead, it’s being channeled in counterproductive ways. Consumer goods and drugs from big pharmaceutical companies are offered as palliatives to “cure” our discontentment. We buy more, or pop more pills, but contentment remains elusive.
5. Duopoly: Sure, Democrats and Republicans aren’t exactly the same. But when it comes to war, foreign policy, weapons sales, serving Israel, favoring billionaires, kowtowing to the big banks and Wall Street, and genuflecting to corporations, both parties are virtually indistinguishable. Both also work together to quash third parties. Small wonder that the largest voting bloc in America is Independent/Non-aligned.
6. Discouragement: Faced with that grim fact—a government completely unresponsive to ordinary people—Americans are discouraged from acting in dynamic and outspoken ways. Also serving to discourage political action is America’s increasingly militarized streets, now occupied with agents from Homeland Security and even armed members of the National Guard.
7. Despair: Remember “hope and change” Barack Obama and the surging idealism of 2008? Those were the days. Now it seems the mantra is “no hope” and change that only makes matters worse. This contributes to despair, our sense of hopelessness and helplessness before impersonal government forces—and this is deliberate. A weaponizing of despair.
So, what is to be done? On the small scale, get involved. Get educated. Follow protesters like Lisa Savage and Clif Brown. Small acts of protest can be contagious.
Clif Brown, taking a stand and sending a message
I do my thing here on Substack and belong to organizations like the Eisenhower Media Network and Space4Peace (The Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space). Since 2007, I’ve written against militarism and war at TomDispatch.com and similar alternative sites. Do what you can, what matches your talents, even if it’s just talking to your family, your friends, your neighbors about your concerns. (Believe me, that isn’t always easy!)
Maybe it’s easier to say where the answer isn’t coming from. It’s not coming from Democrats or Republicans. It’s not coming from Congress. It’s not coming from the richest among us, nor from corporate and financial elites.
Fundamentally, the first big step we need to take as a country is publicly funded elections. No more lobbyists. No more “legal” bribes. That requires a reversal of the SCOTUS Citizens United Decision. It requires legislation or a Constitutional amendment.
How to force that when war and weapons are bipartisan? When the powers that be are more than happy with the status quo? Probably only through mass organizations and protest. Or perhaps the creation of a viable third party–but that will be staunchly resisted by the duopoly (the Dems and Repubs).
The short answer is we need a lot more profiles in courage to counter the profiles in pusillanimity produced and elevated within a corrupt system.
The system as it exists today seems unreformable and unstoppable, but history teaches us that sometimes a crack can widen to a fault that leads to an earthquake quickly and unpredictably. So the only recourse is to keep fighting, to keep the pressure on, hoping those cracks will indeed lead to something greater.
Apathy and surrender are not options. Discouragement and despair mustn’t be our end state. Take inspiration from people like Lisa and Clif, the writing of people like Chris Hedges, and sites like Antiwar.com.
Hello Everyone: Here’s my latest article at TomDispatch.com. Whereas my articles for BV are usually 400-600 words, my articles for TomDispatch are usually just over 2000 words, which allows me to develop my points further, supported by plenty of links. Oh, and my wife and I really do use the expression, “But Bibi needs bombs,” whenever the government says it can’t fund something for the American people. It’s funny but I’ve never heard anyone in Congress ask: Bombs for Bibi—how are you going to pay for that? America’s bipartisan warmongers always find plenty of money for weapons and war, even as money for health care and other needs evaporates. It’s almost as if America has a powerful military-industrial complex combined with pushy lobbying groups like AIPAC.
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As a retired U.S. Air Force officer, I firmly believe in civilian control of our military. This country should be a nation of laws — not of special interests, oligarchs, or kings. Before committing our forces to battle, Congress should always declare war in the name of the people. Our military should indeed be a citizen-soldier force, not an isolated caste driven by a warrior ethos. And above all, the United States should be a republic ruled by law and shaped by sound moral values, not a greed-driven empire fueled by militarism.
Yet when I express such views, I feel like I’m clinging to a belief in the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. It feels idealistic, naïve, even painful to think that way. Yes, I served this country in uniform for 20 years, and now, in the age of Donald Trump, it has, as far as I can tell, thoroughly lost its way. The unraveling began so long ago — most obviously with the disastrous Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, though in truth this country’s imperial desires predated even the Spanish-American War of 1898, stretching back to the wanton suppression of indigenous peoples as part of its founding and expansion.
A glance at U.S. history reveals major atrocities: the displacement and murder of Native Americans, slavery, and all too many imperial misadventures abroad. I knew of such realities when I joined the military in 1985, near the end of the Cold War. Despite its flaws, I believed then that this country was more committed to freedom than the Soviet Union. We could still claim some moral authority as the leader of what we then referred to as “the free world,” however compromised or imperfect our actions were.
That moral authority, however, is now gone. U.S. leaders fully support and unapologetically serve an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. They sell weapons to nearly every regime imaginable, irrespective of human rights violations. They wage war without Congressional approval — the recent 12-day assault on Iran being just the latest example. (The second Trump administration has, in fact, launched almost as many air strikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, in its first five months as the Biden administration did in four years.) Those same leaders have been doing a bang-up job dismantling the America I thought I was serving when I took that oath and put on second lieutenant’s bars four decades ago. That America — assuming it ever existed — may now be gone forever.
FUBAR: A Republic in Ruins
My fellow citizens, America is FUBAR (a term that dates from World War II). We are not faintly who we claim to be. Rather than a functioning republic, we are an ailing, flailing, perhaps even failing empire. We embrace war, glorify warriors, and profit mightily from the global arms trade, no matter the civilian toll, including tens of thousands of dead and wounded children in Gaza, among the latest victims of U.S.-made bombs, bullets, and missiles.
Signs of moral rot are everywhere. Our president, who would like to be known for his budget cuts, nonetheless giddily celebrates a record trillion-dollar war budget. Our secretary of defense gleefully promotes a warrior ethos. Congress almost unanimously supports or acquiesces in the destruction of Gaza. Images from the region resemble bombed-out Stalingrad in 1942 or Berlin in 1945. Meanwhile, for more than two decades now, America’s leaders have claimed to be waging a successful global “war on terror” even as they fuel terror across the globe. What do they think all those U.S. weapons are for — spreading peace?
My wife and I cope through dark humor. We see news on cuts to Medicaid, the mentally ill in the streets, and crumbling infrastructure, and quip: “But Bibi [Netanyahu] needs bombs. Or Ukraine does. Or the Pentagon needs more nukes.” That’s why Americans can’t have nice things like health care. That’s why all too many of us are unhoused, in debt, out of work, and desperate. In 1967 — yes, that’s almost 60 years ago! — Martin Luther King warned of exactly this: America’s approaching spiritual death through militarism (aggravated by extreme materialism and racism). That death is visibly here, now.
Washington is not even faintly committed to “peace through strength,” a vapid slogan touted by the Trump administration, and an unintentional echo of George Orwell’s dystopian “war is peace.” It is committed instead to what passes for dominance through colossal military spending and persistent war. And let’s face it, that warpath may well end in the death of the American experiment.
The Mediocrity of Our Generals
In this era of creeping authoritarianism and mass surveillance, perhaps the U.S. is lucky that its generals are, by and large, so utterly uninspired. Today’s American military isn’t open to the mercurial and meteoric talents of a Napoleon or a Caesar. Not in its upper ranks, at least.
One struggles to name a truly great American general or admiral since World War II. That war produced household names like George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Chester W. Nimitz. In contrast, America’s recent generals — Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell of Desert Storm fame, Tommy Franks in Iraq in 2003, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal of the “fragile” and “reversible” Iraq and Afghan “surges” — have left anything but a legacy of excellence or moral leadership, not to speak of decisive victory. At best, they were narrowly competent; at worst, morally compromised and dangerously deluded.
Mind you, this isn’t a criticism of this country’s rank-and-file troops. The young Americans I served with showed no lack of courage. It wasn’t their fault that the wars they found themselves in were misbegotten and mismanaged. Twenty years have passed since I served alongside those young troops, glowing with pride and purpose in their dedication, their idealism, their commitment to their oath of service. Many paid a high price in limbs, minds, or lives. Too often, they were lions led by donkeys, to borrow a phrase once used to describe the inept and callous British leadership during World War I at bloody battles like the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917).
Today, I fear that America’s lions may, sooner or later, be led into even deeper catastrophe — this time possibly a war with China. Any conflict with China would likely rival, if not surpass, the disasters produced by World War I. The world’s best military, which U.S. presidents have been telling us we have since the 9/11 attacks of September 2001, stands all too close to being committed to just such a war in Asia by donkeys like Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
And for what? The island of Taiwan is often mentioned, but the actual reason would undoubtedly be to preserve imperial hegemony in the service of corporate interests. War, as General Smedley Butler wrote in 1935 after he retired from the military, is indeed a racket, one from which the rich exempt themselves (except when it comes to taking profits from the same).
A disastrous conflict with China, likely ending in a U.S. defeat (or a planetary one), could very well lead to a repeat of some even more extreme version of Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign, amplified and intensified by humiliation and resentment. From the ashes of that possible defeat, an American Napoleon or Caesar (or at least a wannabe imitator) could very well emerge to administer the coup de grace to what’s left of our democracy and freedom.
Avoiding a Colossal Act of Folly
War with China isn’t, of course, inevitable, but America’s current posture makes it more likely. Trump’s tariffs, his bombastic rhetoric, and this country’s extensive military exercises in the Pacific contribute to rising tensions, not de-escalation and rapprochement.
While this country invests in war and more war, China invests in infrastructure and trade, in the process becoming what the U.S. used to be: the world’s indispensable workhorse. As the 10 BRICS countries, including China, expand and global power becomes more multipolar, this country’s addiction to military dominance may drive it to lash out. With ever more invested in a massive military war hammer, impetuous leaders like Trump and Hegseth may see China as just another nail to be driven down. It would, of course, be a colossal act of folly, though anything but a first in history.
And speaking of folly, the U.S. military as it’s configured today is remarkably similar to the force I joined in 1985. The focus remains on ultra-expensive weapons systems, including the dodgy F-35 jet fighter, the unnecessary B-21 Raider bomber, the escalatory Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, and Trump’s truly fantastical “Golden Dome” missile defense system (a ghostly rehash of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” proposal, vintage 1983). Other militaries, meanwhile, are improvising, notably in low-cost drone technology (also known as UAS, or uncrewed autonomous systems) as seen in the Russia-Ukraine War, a crucial new arena of war-making where the U.S. has fallen significantly behind China.
The Pentagon’s “solution” here is to continue the massive funding of Cold War-era weapons systems while posing as open to innovation, as an embarrassing video of Hegseth walking with drones suggests. America’s military is, in short, well-prepared to fight a major conventional war against an obliging enemy like Iraq in 1991, but such a scenario is unlikely to lie in our future.
With respect to drones or UAS, I can hear the wheels of the military-industrial complex grinding away. A decentralized, low-cost, flexible cottage industry will likely be transformed into a centralized, high-cost, inflexible cash cow for the merchants of death. When the Pentagon faces a perceived crisis or shortfall, the answer is always to throw more money at it. Ka-ching!
Indeed, the recent profit margins of major military contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and RTX (formerly Raytheon) have been astounding. Since 9/11, Boeing’s stock has risen more than 400%. RTX shares are up more than 600%. Lockheed Martin, maker of the faltering F-35, has seen its shares soar by nearly 1,000%. And Northrop Grumman, maker of the B-21 Raider bomber and Sentinel ICBM, two legs of America’s “modernized” nuclear triad, has seen its shares increase by more than 1,400%. Who says that war (even the threat of a global nuclear war) doesn’t pay?
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s war budget, soaring to unprecedented levels, has been virtually immune to DOGE cuts. While Elon Musk and his whiz kids searched for a few billion in savings by gutting education or squelching funding for public media like PBS and NPR, the Pentagon emerged with about $160 billion in new spending authority. As President Biden once reminded us: Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value. Far too often, America’s leaders, whatever they’ve said in their election campaigns, have valued weapons and wars over almost anything else.
What Is To Be Done
I’ve written against warriors, warfighters, and U.S. militarism since 2007. And yes, it often feels futile, but silence means surrender to warmongering fools like Hegseth, Senator Tom Cotton, and the farrago of grifters, clowns, toadies, con men, and zealots who inhabit the Trump administration and much of Congress as well. The fight against them must go on.
All leaders, military and civilian, must remember their oath: loyalty to the Constitution, not to any man. Illegal orders must be resisted. Congress must impeach and remove a president who acts unlawfully. It must also reassert its distinctly lost authority to declare war. And it must stop taking “legal” bribes from the lobbyists/foot soldiers who flood the halls of Congress, peddling influence with campaign “contributions.”
For tyranny to be stopped, for a catastrophic war with China (and who knows what else) to be avoided, America must have profiles in courage, not cowardice. Yet even despair is being weaponized. As a retired colonel and friend of mine wrote to me recently: “I don’t even know where to start anymore, Bill. I have no hope for anything ever improving.”
And don’t think of that despair as incidental or accidental. It’s a distinct feature of the present system of government.
Trump and Hegseth are not faintly what the founders of this country envisioned when they placed the military under civilian control. Yet power ultimately resides in the people (if we remember our duties as citizens). Isn’t it high time that we Americans recover our ideals, as well as our guts?
After all, the few can do little without the consent of the many. It’s up to the many (that’s us!) to reclaim and restore America.
In an ever-changing world, the one constant in Universe USA is rising Pentagon budgets. For President Trump, a trillion-dollar war budget is something to crow about. Of course, it’s sold as “peace through strength.” For what is more peaceful than more weaponry, especially nuclear-tipped ICBMs and SLBMs?
America is always arming, uparming, rearming for war allegedly to prevent war. The problem is arming for war usually leads to yet more war. You don’t “invest” in weaponry to keep it on a shelf, rusting away in armories.
Excuse my language, but Vietnam vets and war protesters put it well: Fighting (or bombing) for peace is like fucking for virginity.
Vintage 1969. Makes sense, right?
More telling, however, is the constant state of war preparations that infect and influence our minds. Our “leaders” talk about “all options being on the table” when the only option they consider is military force. We are what we “invest” in. And weapons ‘r’ us.
In U.S. politics, strong and wrong is seen as far better than “weak” and right. And just about every politician inside the DC Beltway appeases the military-industrial complex, Israel, or both. That’s how you end up with disastrous wars of choice in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, together with full-throated support for genocide in Gaza.
Who cares about right and wrong when might always makes right?
An anecdote: I have a friend who works in the belly of the beast (the DoD). He told me his job makes him think of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s “1984.” The Pentagon under Pete Hegseth has become an exercise in eliminating DEI bad speak and replacing it with doubleplusgood warrior-ethos speak. Lots of time is wasted sending “bad” terms and names down the memory hole.
Even as the DoD’s language is purged of bad speak about DEI, the Pentagon’s embrace of a permanent war economy is tightened. The very idea of a “peace dividend,” floated by Republican President George H.W. Bush in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, is seemingly ancient history, an idea never to be considered again, not in Trump and Hegseth’s warrior-USA.
Preparing constantly for war is a powerful way to ensure more war. Overspending on esoteric and genocidal weaponry is a powerful way to hollow out one’s country while establishing the conditions for global mass death.
Perhaps our “leaders” need to recall that Orwell’s “1984” was meant to be a warning of what to avoid, not a how-to guide for authoritarian rule and perpetual war.
I sent this somewhat despairing note to a friend this morning:
It remains unclear to me whether the U.S. government kowtows to Israel (for all the reasons we know, like AIPAC), or whether Israel is a sort of cat’s paw for U.S. imperial and corporate interests. Maybe it’s not about nations and borders, as the famous speech from “Network” put it, but rather resources and profit, whether oil, water, weapons, and the like. The people of Gaza are simply in the way and entirely expendable to these larger interests. Naturally, propaganda is skillfully used to portray just about every Palestinian as a Hamas terrorist. Then, as you noted, there’s a media blackout on Gaza in most U.S. mainstream media sources.
Short of revolution, I don’t see any changes coming. The Democrats, of course, are just as happy to serve Israel and corporate interests.
This is the famous scene from “Network” featuring a brilliant performance by Ned Beatty:
If the world is a “college of corporations” (heck, even Harvard is a corporation) and if business and money is the universal lubricant, the Palestinians in Gaza are both good and bad for business. They are “good” in the sense that money can be made from killing them, concentrating them, monitoring them, expelling them, and so on. Speaking and documenting this horrendous truth got Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, sanctioned by the U.S. government, as Lisa Savage noted here.
They are “bad” for business with respect to the gas fields off Gaza. Those marine gas reserves are likely worth $5 billion or more, money that would have done much to alleviate poverty in Gaza. Of course, Israel wasn’t about to allow Palestinians in Gaza to share in this bounty. Getting rid of Palestinians is a means to the end of completely dominating future trade in gas and other commodities in the Levant Basin.
I’ve been wondering why Great Britain is at great pains to help the Netanyahu government—then I noted that British Petroleum is one of the giant corporations that Israel granted a license to for future gas exploration. Coincidence?
Now, unlike Ned Beatty above, I’m not saying everything is explained by money and currency flows as “the primal forces of nature.” But it’s always a good idea to follow the money. It’s a ghastly business indeed when genocide makes money, but there you have it. A large part of the Holocaust in World War II was Germans and their fellow travelers taking everything from the Jews before they killed them. Profit from death factories—a grim truth I care not to contemplate, but it happened. Mass death can be a huge money-maker, and those pulling the strings couldn’t care less about body counts. Quarterly profits—now those they care about.
This suggests a strategy for activism—except efforts at BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) are heavily resisted by the powers that be. Surprise! You can find out more about the BDS movement here.
When protests are bad for business, that’s when the powerful pay attention. Powerful people already know the truth—they do everything in their power to determine what is “true”—so they’re not interested in right or wrong. What’s “right” is what makes money and what’s wrong, very wrong, loses money. You can’t appeal to their collective conscience (Good luck with that!), but you can possibly appeal to or cut into their collective profits.
At her Substack, Lisa Savage asks whether the “Gaza Hunger Games” we’re witnessing—the concentration of Palestinians there accompanied by slaughter and mass starvation—was the plan all along for Israel and the United States. It got me to thinking, so I wrote a rather longwinded response to Lisa, which I’d like to share with all of you.
Whether it was the plan all along or whether it’s the result of ad hoc decisions over time, one thing is certain: the holocaust in Gaza must be stopped.
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Lisa, I’ve taught the Holocaust, and your question reminds me of a debate among historians: Did Hitler and the Nazis always plan to kill all the Jews, or was it the result of ad hoc decisions over time? Scholars still debate this.*
Perhaps the debate is somewhat artificial in the sense that Hitler and the Nazis vilified the Jews, demeaning them, attacking them, dehumanizing them, establishing the conditions for genocide, which were linked to the need to win a war (Jews as an existential enemy that had to be destroyed, even Jewish children, i.e. they were all “guilty”).
The “logic” of genocide sees even children as enemies who must be eliminated (Image of the “Warsaw Ghetto Boy” during World War II)
Something similar is happening with Palestinians in Gaza. I don’t think Israel and the U.S. had a plan all along to concentrate them in Gaza and kill them. But all that’s gone before this has created the preconditions for a final solution to the Gaza question.
When you vilify Palestinians, demean them, attack them, incarcerate them, dehumanize them, you establish the conditions for a genocide. Then you use the excuse of a “war” to drive the most radical solution–elimination–just as the Nazis used the excuse of World War II to eliminate the Jews (who, of course, posed no existential threat to Germany).
Within the Nazi government (and now within the Israeli government), extremists always come to the forefront. Many officials in Nazi Germany wanted to relocate the Jews, not kill them all, or they wanted to exploit them as slave labor before killing them. But the extremists–the ones who just wanted to kill them all–tended to win the argument. They were the most committed, most sure of themselves, the most radical.
So, what’s happening in Gaza has been the result of long-term dehumanization and propaganda coupled with ad hoc decisions that have run to extremes, because those who are most radical tend to win these “arguments.”
What is truly unconscionable is the eagerness of the U.S. government to provide Israel with all the weapons and diplomatic cover it needs to implement its final solution in Gaza. Whether the president is Biden or Trump, whether Congress is controlled by the Democratic or Republican parties, the policy and result is the same: a blank check to Israel to kill as many Palestinians as they want, justified falsely in “defending” Israel from Hamas.
The Nazis thought or said the Jews were out to destroy them (obviously the Jews were totally incapable of threatening the German war machine) so they tried to destroy the Jews.
The Israeli government says Hamas is out to destroy them (obviously Hamas is totally incapable of threatening the IDF war machine) so they’re trying to destroy the Palestinians.
Genocide is sold as “defensive” and “necessary.”
The parallels are there, yet few people want to see them.
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*Addendum: Among Holocaust historians it’s known as the “intentionalist” versus “functionalist” debate, i.e. was it always the Nazis’ intent to kill the Jews, or did it emerge slowly as a function of specific events and decisions?
Some might say, who cares? Dead is dead. Stop the killing!
So much of what we’ve been told about Israel and Zionism has been a lie, as this video reveals.
My mother-in-law had a saying: “Have a heart if you’ve got a heart.” So many “leaders” in the U.S. and Israel, including Joe Biden and Donald Trump and of course Bibi Netanyahu, haven’t got hearts, at least when it comes to Palestinians and Gaza.
Israel bombed the home of two married doctors in Gaza on Friday, killing nine of their children and critically injuring their sole surviving son. The father of the children was also severely injured in the attack, while their mother, while still working at the nearby hospital, received the charred bodies of her children. They were too badly burned to be recognized.
This one incident, just by itself, is vastly more newsworthy and deserving of attention than two Israeli embassy staff members being killed in Washington. But news coverage hasn’t reflected this, because Palestinians aren’t regarded as human beings in the mainstream western press.
And another worthy snippet from Caitlin Johnstone:
This is a particularly glaring example of the way the western press have been discussing the Gaza holocaust as some kind of unfortunate tragedy that is just passively happening to the Palestinian people, as though it’s a natural disaster or something. It’s like bombs and siege warfare are just the weather over there. Like “Oh it’s a bit bomby and faminy in Gaza today, and it makes me feel sad!”
This genocide is exposing the mass media like nothing else in my lifetime.
Finally, consider this article by Lisa Savage as she ponders the misuse of Memorial Day as a celebration of militarism in the United States.
Here’s an excerpt:
The U.S. as a whole seems to be suffering from moral injury as we destroy country after country in our lust for imperial spoils. Watching the U.S.-Israel genocide in Gaza starving thousands to death while bombing them drives me to despair. There are now plans for U.S. soldiers to distribute food aid because Israel won’t allow UNRWA to do it as they have for decades. Food has been weaponized and politicized, and the largest shipments being allowed in at the moment don’t even contain calories or medical supplies. They contain shrouds.
I will hold my kids tonight, and shake with anger. Dr. Alaa Elnajjar left her home this morning in Gaza to save other kids lives. 9 of her 10 kids arrived to her charred in body bags, and her 1 surviving child barely alive. May Gods mercy be upon her and her family, and may His… pic.twitter.com/hqvvSnu4kD
It was quickly obvious to me, as it was to so many people, that Bibi Netanyahu and the Israeli government was engaged in a genocide in slow motion, using the October 7th Hamas attack to justify the most ruthless reprisals against more than two million Palestinians in Gaza.
Caitlin Johnstone’s new piece, “Israeli Officials Explain Balancing Act Between Overt Genocide And Maintaining Western Support,” cites the words of Israel’s own government to prove this. Israeli officials are open about it. They make no apologies. They would like to starve and kill more quickly, but they need to go slow so as to maintain support in the U.S. Senate.
I wrote the article below in early December 2023. It was obvious then, as it is today, what Israel’s goal is. Gaza (and the West Bank) is to be ethnically cleansed. Full stop. The main challenge for Israel is to do it in a way that’s palatable to politicians and supporters in the United States.
A palatable genocide. Just think of that idea for a moment.
Anyhow, here’s my article from December 2023, unchanged.
Biden to Israel: Don’t Ethnically Cleanse Too Fast
Have you ever heard parents tell their unruly children: Don’t run in the store too fast. Don’t slug your friend too hard. Don’t eat all the candy. Instead of telling them to stop running in the store, to stop slugging their friend, to stop hogging all the candy.
I feel like that’s the Biden and Blinken approach to Israel: Don’t ethnically cleanse Gaza too fast. Just slow down a bit. Don’t make it too obvious. Don’t be too ruthless.
Biden and Blinken are those permissive parents who are dominated by an unruly child. Let’s call the child “Bibi.” They don’t dare tell Bibi to stop. They don’t dare punish him. They don’t dare make a scene, because Bibi will throw a tantrum and make their lives hell. So they allow Bibi to do whatever the hell he wants to do, except just a bit quieter, or slower, or less violent. They enable the child, in short, and indeed Biden and Blinken give Bibi more “clubs” (as in 2000-pound bombs and Hellfire missiles) so he can keep slugging other kids with even more relish.
Don’t kill too many children, Bibi. Good boy!
Speaking of enabling, I got my daily report today from the New York Times on what’s happening in the “Israel-Hamas War.” Note the framing here: the idea this is a war between equals, when Israel is an overwhelmingly powerful nation-state and Hamas consists of maybe 20,000 lightly-armed fighters. Anyhow, here’s the summary:
Israel-Hamas War
Israel said it had launched 200 strikes into Gaza since fighting resumed yesterday. Air-raid sirens in Israel warned of possible incoming rockets.
Gazan officials accused Israel of striking southern Gaza, where many displaced Palestinians are sheltering.
Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, blamed Hamas for the cease-fire’s end and said he had seen signs that Israel had begun to take new steps to protect Palestinian civilians.
The resumption of fighting left dozens of hostages still in Gazaand reduced the amount of aid entering the enclave, which had increased during the truce.
Let’s take a look at those bulleted points.
The powerful Israeli military has launched 200 strikes against Gaza, killing hundreds of innocent Palestinians, which goes unmentioned, even as small rockets from Hamas may (or may not) have been launched against Israel.
Gazan officials “accused” Israel of striking southern Gaza: Is there any doubt here? Where “many” displaced Palestinians are sheltering: How many? What type of shelter is available to them? Hasn’t Israeli military action “displaced” more than a million Palestinians, most of whom have no real shelter to speak of?
Blinken blames Hamas: What a surprise! And how is Israel protecting civilians in Gaza when they’re launching 200 “strikes” against them?
Apparently, the only hostages that matter are the ones held in Gaza. Israel’s mass incarceration of Palestinians, including children, goes unmentioned.
Again, Israel is held blameless; Hamas is responsible for everything bad that has happened, is happening, and will happen in Gaza. Because our child Bibi can do no wrong.
Don’t bomb too much, Bibi. Don’t kill too many other children. Don’t ethnically cleanse too fast. There: that’s my good boy. That’s my little angel.
Bracing Views 