BY KATHLEEN WALLACE
April 5, 2024

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Those who knew the history in terms of the plight of the Palestinians and the details for the creation of the modern Israeli state knew what was going on and what was about to happen late last year. We watched in horror as our news media reported in their always slanted manner, calling murdered children minors, using that vile passive voice in every instance of outright murder. We watched fellow Americans taken in by the very well-documented practice of hasbara and largely shook our fists at the sky while our nation funded the ongoing atrocity.

The clarity in terms of a politician’s zealousness in defense of Israeli genocidal practice lines up very well on a graph compared to his or her AIPAC donations (I’m looking at you, you Fetterman, you absolute lumbering, lurching ghoul). This has always been clear to anyone paying attention. The slinging of the ever-loved “antisemitism” branding has been launched towards anyone, even with temerity, voicing “Maybe it’s not okay to level hospitals and murder kids”. Idiotically, this antisemitism branding has even been used against Jewish individuals speaking out against the ongoing atrocity. They’ve been brutalized and beaten for voicing this humanity in the streets of Israel. But it’s only antisemitism if it’s against Zionism by these ridiculous rules. It’s a very bizarre state of affairs well beyond the average American’s ability to parse out. It’s definitely a level of the surreal that is difficult to comprehend.

Those in power offering platitudes for Israeli state actions know in their hearts why they are doing it, and I can’t imagine it sits well if a person has even 1% of functioning humanity within. It’s most certainly spurred by motivations of self-interest, not because they truly support ongoing genocide. The leaders never were the best of us, and it probably isn’t all that difficult for them to compartmentalize. But they should be aware that in the eye of history, they will most certainly be looked at and paired with the most barbaric, their names mingling with the Himmlers and Goebbels for future descendants. Their children’s children will want to change their surnames; it will carry such shame that they came from such utterly depraved ancestors.

The proof of this genocide is already there for anyone looking. Every phone that has captured the sniping of children, of doctors—the bulldozing effects on bodies….it’s all there, in unthinkable detail. It is certainly not secret or hidden; there are even Telegraph accounts showing these atrocities with accompanying “likes” and jokes in Israel. They truly have succeeded at dehumanizing those just miles away from them.

The PR has been fantastic in other nations, nothing so brazen as “likes” with Palestinian snuff films, but more the weaponizing of guilt that decent individuals feel. It’s the rightful shame of humanity due to what was done to the Jewish populations during the Nazi period. The hasbara PR has performed well– purposeful mucking up of the water. It has led those who wish to never again see such inhumanity to blindly support another genocide—it is stolen valor from holocaust victims and it is being used to victimize a whole new group of individuals.

The average American has been either feeling that support for Israel is mandatory because of the holocaust or is merely hiding behind an ignorance of current events. Life is hard here so they really aren’t paying attention to what happens elsewhere. The irony is that part of why life is hard here is because the resources of the state are being shuffled elsewhere, and the safety net here has been shredded worse than old fishnet stockings. 2,000-pound bombs would fund a lot of healthcare.

CNN continues to frame this as the “Israel-Hamas War” and pre-existing anti-Arab racism has conveniently been there to weaponize with some of the population as well. Xenophobic Americans say things like “they are just a bunch of religious nuts” in terms of any group who is primarily Muslim, but ignore that a murderous theocracy is the one doing the theft of land and murder. Palestinians in many instances opened their homes to refugees in the past only to face betrayal–definitely a situation along the lines of what indigenous peoples faced in the Americas. They helped refugees and settlers, then had their land stolen and their loved ones murdered. When they fought back, they were branded “savages”. It is not even a new story that Israel is peddling. So no, this isn’t the “Israel-Hamas War”. This is more along the lines of ….say, a coveted Southern California climate region with great canal potential (and can serve as an outpost of continued Western hegemony) Murder-Theft situation. A home invasion.

The truth is trickling out now in America, though–one would have to be completely blind or unfathomably evil to continue to support what is going on in Gaza. The beyond tone-deaf manner of the Biden administration hosting an iftar dinner (breaking the fast of the recent Muslim holiday) when a full-scale starvation situation is being created is difficult to fathom. Gaslighting is the fuel they are using to cook the food for that celebration, I would say.

So of course the munitions, the backing needed to complete this genocide—it’s all being supplied by the United States. You don’t get to supply all the needed equipment to murderers and then come to the funeral and pretend to care. That’s definitely serial killer actions, Joe Biden. Perhaps that’s the best analogy for the behavior of the United States government right now. Ted Bundy hugging the murdered girl’s mom by the casket kind of actions. I’d even go so far as to say it’s perhaps worse than a run-of-the-mill unhinged serial killer. I say this because in many ways it is a measured and rationalized support to advance the aims of the military-industrial complex. You know, the great evil warned about by Eisenhower. These people know full well that to advance this, it will be required to clear out an entire group of souls who already live there. This is an evil form of deranged pragmatism that is so skewed that in the end it won’t allow the perpetrators to have anything but continued strife abroad and internal strife as well, since even the most callous and uninvolved Americans are getting pissed about the sheer amount of money being spent on anything and everything but the well being of Americans.

Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American physician, walked out of a White House meeting as a form of protest due to the atrocities he has seen– after handing Biden a letter from a Palestinian orphan begging for it to stop. At least this has made the national news. One hopes that even the more slow-witted begin to question their nation’s unwavering support for murder, maiming and starvation. The knee-jerk “well they have hostages” makes little sense when the number of Palestinian hostages held in Israel is taken into account as well. Desperate people try desperate measures, and people will fight back to free their own people. Not to mention that collective punishment is a war crime. Insane Republican politicians in the US are even saying things like “Palestinian babies may not be innocent’. It’s disgusting, and the immediate, visceral response to that is the correct one. You can’t cage people in an apartheid situation intermittently mixed with ethnic cleansing. It is amazing that our level of humanity (in terms of governmental actions) hasn’t progressed beyond this behavior that would have been at home during the Roman Empire.

The absolute audacity of the World Central Kitchen aid worker murders should clarify even further who the villain is in this story. They don’t want people to be fed. Starvation is the goal. Of course, targeted attacks on intellectuals, healthcare workers, reporters…it’s all been happening with great regularity, but this one is getting a bit more traction in the news cycle. Sadly, it’s probably because some white aid workers got killed. But Israel got its way; the agency has ceased activity in terms of feeding the starving.

The fact that we are facing an unprecedented number of pediatric amputees in this world right now says it all. Every single time you see one of these monstrous political class talking heads making excuses, think what your response would be to sending a bomb down that kills or maims kids– and if that kid lives, keeping food from reaching them until they starve. There is no reality or plane of existence where this is acceptable to perpetrate or abet. Yes, I think we’ve hit a tipping point where even the masterful obfuscation will no longer work. There are more of us who believe this is depravity and those in power need to realize that their serial killer hold on all of us is vanishing.

Kathleen Wallace writes out of the US Midwest. Her writing is collected on her Substack page.

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First published on CounterPunch.

Shared via Creative Commons.

What War Does to the Nations That Fight It

ANDREA MAZZARINO
11/01/2023

Reacting to the terrorist attacks by the Palestinian militant group Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israelis, Americans have been remarkably focused on whether we should support Israel or the residents of Gaza. In either case, we act as if Israel’s only possible decision was whether or not to launch a war against Gaza. In the country that waged a disastrous 20-year “global war on terror” in response to the 9/11 attacks, it seems strange that there’s been so little discussion about what such a decision might mean in the long term. Going to war is just that — one decision among many possibilities, including taking steps to strengthen and democratize the states where such armed militias may otherwise flourish.

As a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, it’s become a focus of mine to show just what’s happened to us because our government, more than two decades after the 9/11 attacks, continues to fight a “war on terror” (whatever that may mean) in some 85 countries. Yes, that’s right: 85 countries! We’ve armed foreign militaries, flown our drones in a devastating fashion, run prisons (often in places with far laxer human-rights standards than ours), trained foreign militaries, and sometimes fought directly alongside them.

Over the years, the 2,977 American lives taken by Osama bin Laden and his followers on September 11, 2001, have exploded into nearly one million lives lost globally thanks to our government’s decision to go to war. Framed by the sheer scale of death and destruction wrought by this country’s forever wars, our hasty retreat from Afghanistan in 2021, long seen as a shamefully botched mission unaccomplished, should instead have been viewed as a genuinely courageous act, even if it was just one of dozens of countries where the U.S. hemorrhaged lives and dollars galore.

Imagine the “footprint” our post-9/11 wars created. For one thing, we’ve spent more than $8 trillion dollars (and counting) in that fight, money that could have funded the creation of millions of jobs here at home, provided affordable preschool in all 50 states, and jump-started the transition to clean energy. And now, we’ll probably be sending more than $75 billion in aid, most of it military rather than humanitarian, to Ukraine and Israel in the coming months. Regardless of what you think Israel’s response should be, the fact remains that we could do a lot with that money here at home.

And worse yet, those funds devoted to war were largely wasted. Since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, terrorist groups have only proliferated in number and strength globally. A case in point, in fact, was that very Hamas campaign. Remember that Israel always has been a vital U.S. military and intelligence partner and those October 7th surprise attacks represented a staggering intelligence failure of both governments. And mind you, over the years Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made no secret of his opposition to allowing a stronger Palestinian Authority to develop in Gaza.

America’s Terrorism Problem

Meanwhile, our government’s forever wars have helped stoke terror here at home. Republican politicians and conservative journalists have used a combination of angry language and racist rhetoric and policies to ratchet up anxiety about people of color. As America’s forever wars entered their second decade and then their third, the notion of brown and black people as threats to our national identity came to be baked into policies and laws and into the popular imagination.

Forced registration requirements for young Muslim men placed tens of thousands of them on the government’s radar screen, while sting operations were carried out in Muslim-American communities. Meanwhile, several generations of young Americans were sent to fight disastrous counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond, returning to a war-starved healthcare system that couldn’t deal effectively with their multiple traumas. All of that contributed to a beleaguered national culture in which the dangerous Other looked like a young Muslim man, at least to deranged white people, as evidenced by the recent fatal stabbing of a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy by his 71-year-old landlord.

Through these trends and others, our war-on-terror culture also set in place government infrastructure aimed at the surveillance of our citizenry and expanded our sense of what our government can possibly do to us. That became all too clear when Department of Homeland Security officials began abducting peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters off the streets of Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 2020, and Trump administration officials tried to intimidate Black Lives Matter activists. Who knows where the fear institutionalized after the 9/11 attacks may be directed, depending on who becomes our next terrorizer-in-chief?

An Uncomfortable Parallel

Donald Trump has already given us a sense of some of his targets, were he to be re-elected in 2024, most recently in his threats against federal prosecutors and his urge to execute his own former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley. Of course, there was nothing new in that. In 2017, as president, he infamously labeled the news media an “enemy of the people” — a term used by one of the deadliest dictators in modern history, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, to single out millions of citizens for extrajudicial execution based on perceived disloyalty.

And by the way, my mentioning that Russian dictator was anything but unintentional. As someone who has, for more than 20 years, traveled to Russia, studied its history, and worked on human-rights issues there, while watching Russian President Vladimir Putin consolidate power, I have a sense of how historical trauma wrought by terror in your own homeland can impact the way you think, what you’re willing to tolerate, and what you might choose not to see.

During World War II (or to Russians, “The Great Patriotic War”), the collection of nation-states then known as the Soviet Union lost tens of millions of citizens or more than 10% of its population fighting off Adolf Hitler’s invading army. Most of the Russians I’ve gotten to know or interviewed in my years there had at least one parent, grandparent, or sibling whose life was either lost in or forever altered by that war. So I’ve been less than surprised by the way Russian President Vladimir Putin has all too successfully tapped into that shared trauma to reincarnate the figure of Stalin.

More than a decade ago, I first noticed banners featuring his face in the May 9th “Victory Day” celebratory parades in Moscow and St. Petersburg that marked the defeat of the Germans in World War II. Such images were often featured alongside aging war veterans who recounted their memories of ancient battles, as people wept. (Note that veterans of Russia’s more recent counterinsurgency wars in Chechnya, to the south, featured far less prominently, perhaps because the country never did quite “win” that war and still continues to face threats of armed violence there.)

Elevating Stalin has become a vital part of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to justify his unprovoked war on Ukraine. In fact, following his decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin ordered all school textbooks revised to downplay the violence Stalin wrought, while elevating him as a leader who — future shades of Putin and Russia —  “clearly defended the Soviet Union’s foreign policy interests.”

In reality, when it came to Ukraine, Stalin’s decision in the 1930s, amid a devastating man-made famine, to collectivize farming and forcibly relocate staggering numbers of Ukrainians resulted in millions starving to death [Holodomor], followed by the devastation of the Nazi invasion. So, consider it an irony indeed that Putin continues to use the term “Nazi” to describe the present Ukrainian government and its forces, even though a Jewish president leads them. In a recent Victory Day speech, he insisted that Russian soldiers in Ukraine are “fighting for the same thing their fathers and grandfathers did.”

Creating Dangers Within

Long before invading Ukraine, Putin and his state-supported media normalized violence against Russians deemed foreign or different — especially those seen as being influenced by the West — to deflect attention from the country’s real problems, including burgeoning inequality and a remarkably low life expectancy. A series of laws targeting “gay propaganda” formalized long-standing homophobia, while imposing hefty sanctions on media outlets, nonprofit agencies, and schools that depicted anything remotely considered gay or transgender in nature.

At the same time, state-sponsored white supremacist groups encouraged hatredtowards migrants from majority-Muslim regions of Russia and nearby Central Asian countries. The police increasingly conducted raids on majority-Muslim neighborhoods and mosques in Russian cities and acts of violence against such groups were generally overlooked by the authorities. In addition, they stepped up raids on migrant communities, expressly to forcibly enlist men to fight in Ukraine. At the same time, the Kremlin and its political allies launched assassination campaigns against journalists and activists who sought to document human rights abuses, especially by the country’s military.

With the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s efforts to suppress dissent only intensified. The country’s last independent media outlets were forced to close, due to laws forbidding public dissemination of “deliberate false information” about the country’s armed forces. Antiwar demonstrations and opinion have been similarly suppressed. Recently, the leader of a prominent human rights organization documenting Stalin’s purges and more recent atrocities in Ukraine was detained on charges of supposedly “rehabilitating Naziism,” which could result in up to 15 years’ imprisonment.

Russia as a Warning

Compared to our still reasonably healthy civil society, such actions may appear beyond the pale, but they still strike me as a stark warning about the dangers of, among other things, putting a country’s military on a pedestal in the wake of national trauma. That’s certainly something we in the United States have also tended to do, as ever more issues divide us. Admittedly, most Americans have by now largely forgotten that we are, in some sense, still at war.

That’s obviously harder to do in Russia, though better-off Russians in relatively wealthy cities have similarly been largely shielded from the direct effects of the war in Ukraine that has already taken a staggering human toll, at least tens of thousands of Russian deaths. The reason? Because the bulk of those casualties have been sustained by poor, rural communities. Yet even ordinary citizens are increasingly finding their lives altered by that devastating war and the repressive environment that now surrounds it. I shuddered recently upon learning of a Russian father who was sentenced to prison after his teenage daughter drew a picture in school expressing opposition to the war.

Here in America, I’m ashamed to say that I barely blink anymore when I hear about people facing threats or even actual attacks because of their racial or ethnic identity, or their political views. For me, this started in 2011 when we launched the Costs of War Project and I began to bone up on America’s foreign wars. Images of bloodied Iraqi children being carried away from sites U.S. planes had bombed and of our troops returning from our spreading war zones with dazed looks and missing limbs were just the beginning. My own desensitization continued during the Trump era when police attacks on unarmed Black men like George Floyd became more common, those January 6th rioters erected a noose in front of the capitol intended for Vice President Mike Pence, and I found myself repeatedly answering the incredulous questions of my young children about such incidents and my work.

All too sadly, the transition from a vibrant civil society to some version of authoritarianism tends to be gradual. (Think, for instance, about the possibility of Trump 2025 and how slowly it might creep up on us.)

I remember one weeknight in 2008 sitting at a table in a café in the Russian city of St. Petersburg. I was working on my (sadly all too topical) doctoral dissertation involving Vladimir Putin’s suppression of political activism. All of a sudden, I heard a rumbling sound on the main thoroughfare outside. When I looked out the window, a line of tanks had appeared on the main street. This was no national holiday with a military parade, but the government had evidently decided to run a training exercise through the city to place part of its shiny arsenal on display. Many of those around me didn’t even give the tanks a passing glance, nor admittedly was I that surprised.

Still, that random and ominous display of military might would not have been possible at the start of Putin’s reign. Russian streets were then still a chaotic, colorful mix of market stalls, migrants speaking a cacophony of different languages, and vendors selling newspapers and magazines on almost any topic imaginable. By 2008, however, those streets had been cleared and many vendors were afraid to set up shop lest their activities be deemed offensive.

I told a Russian friend of mine whose academic research focused specifically on casualties within the armed forces during the Chechen wars about those tanks. She had already begun to face harassment and anonymous threats of violence from those who found her work “insulting to the armed forces of Russia.”

“Here in Russia,” she warned me, “we are like slowly boiling frogs.”

Just as “Nazi” has come to represent anything that offends the personal wishes of Russian elites or gets in the way of their political and imperial desires, so has “terrorism” come to stand in for so much here in America. Despite the vast differences between us and our political foe, leaders on both sides focus on funding armed conflicts even as deficits wrought by prolonged war have deprived and angered ordinary citizens.

Russia is a warning of what we might someday face as a nation if we become inured to violence at home and abroad. It’s not just Israel’s response that’s at issue now, though there’s ample evidence to suggest that a brutal counterinsurgency war in Gaza will only weaken an already divided, anti-democratic government. The U.S. decision to continue to fund and fight our war on terror, not to speak of wars and cold wars of various kinds globally, will determine the environment in which we and our children live going forward. All too sadly, war, when we are the ones fighting it, has been largely missing in action in our own media sphere and that, believe me, is anything but healthy.

Copyright 2023 Andrea Mazzarino

Featured image: War by Kevin Dooley is licensed under CC BY 2.0 / Flickr

First Published on TomDispatch.com.

Shared via Creative Commons.