A “Loyal Little Ulster”: Why and How the UK and US Shaped Israel to Create Endless Conflict

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“Even though the land could not yet absorb sixteen million, nor even eight, enough could return… to prove that the enterprise was one that blessed him that gave as well as him that took by forming for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.” Ronald Storrs, Military Governor of Jerusalem 1917-20, commenting in 1937 on the rationale of the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

“Zionism is the continual attempt to fit a square into a circle.” Lowkey, interviewed by Danny Haiphong 25 March 2024.

“But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.” James Baldwin, 1979.

Israel was always meant to be a bleeding sore, an unending source of conflict and hence an unending source of suffering. In creating Israel the British were following a policy of divide-and-rule to create an outpost as a way of projecting power into the Arab world and its oilfields. In practical terms British power could only be projected through the maintenance of immanent or actual armed hostility. The success of this strategy, as the baton was passed to the US empire, has caused the region to suffer 100 years of instability and strife while the Palestinians have suffered a long slow genocide of everyday brutality punctuated by massacres and outbreaks of resistance.

The British Empire did not create Israel in gratitude for Chaim Weizmann’s invention and development of synthetic acetone (a component of cordite) during World War I. The British Empire did not create Israel in gratitude for the financial assistance provided by the British branch of the Rothschild clan. I could go into detail on each case but it is unnecessary. We only need to remember one thing: the British Empire would never do anything out of gratitude. Nor, as I will illustrate in the course of this article, did it deign to honour promises it made in order to achieve its own gains. There are romantic notions of a British sense of honour in the official sphere but these are false – products of a robust cultural hegemony and propaganda system. The historical record instead shows that British foreign policy, and before that English foreign policy, has been unusually ruthless, callous, and dishonest.

In respectable discourse it is only possible to refer to British perfidy and US aggression when talking in the abstract or about matters of the distant past, but when talking of current events one must always assume a foundation of benevolence and criticise these countries for straying or being diverted from their true nature. As a rule all aspects of British and US imperialism are treated as if they exist in an historical vacuum. Comparing British and US interventions with empires of the past is not the done thing. Comparing British and US interventions to their own past interventions is not the done thing. In the case of Palestine even comparing British actions to their own simultaneous actions in other parts of the Middle East is not the done thing. This is exponential exceptionalism. Just because we are doing this thing it doesn’t mean that we do this sort of thing, and please don’t look at all the other times we have done this thing because it is just not who we are. Luckily it is acceptable at all times to claim that the tail wags the dog of empire, whatever that tail might be. In the case of Israel existing anti-Semitic tropes about the influence of The Jews makes this all the easier.

Normally instead of entertaining the possibility that the British and US empires have deliberately created and sustained a situation of endless conflict because it serves an obvious purpose, people are more inclined to blame the Israel Lobby in ways that seem to reflect an intellectual descent from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The power of the Israel lobby is real, but it exists at the sufferance of the Empire Complex. It is a tool for imperial elites to exert control over political representatives and civil society in order to constrain “democratic distemper”, that is why it came to exist (not because of the mysterious control Jews are imagined to exert over the noble but hapless Anglo-Saxons who have traditionally run the world).

Even when people seek to avoid this anti-Semitism they find other ways to avoid suggesting that any Western wrongdoing is intentional. An interesting example is “Balfour: The Seeds of Discord” (the latest in the seemingly infinite series of Al Jazeera English documentaries about the Balfour Declaration). Avoiding the traditional discourse which suggests that Jews exert a seemingly mystical power that allows them to dictate to Great Powers, the documentary employs a more fashionable way of preserving exactly the same explanation of motive. Instead of Magical Jew Power being at fault, it all happened because people like Balfour and British PM David Lloyd George believed in Magical Jew Power (MJP) due to their yucky anti-Semitism. This is very convenient because you can keep the exact same explanation for the creation of Israel while not having to rely directly on anti-Semitic tropes.

Lloyd George, Balfour and others are said to have thought that the promise of a homeland would unite all Jews to unleash their MJP in aid of the Entente in the Great War. How do we know? Because they said so, and people like that don’t lie, do they? There is a bit of a problem though in that World War I was over before the British could do anything towards creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. According to this reasoning, then, the British incorporated the Balfour Declaration into the Mandate for Palestine because they had an irrational belief in monolithic Jewish power and conveniently ignored the fact that most Jews were not Zionists and many found the idea abhorrent and dangerous. At the same time it seems to have slipped their minds that they had already won the War that this was meant to help them win.

I will have more to say about the Mandate later, but it is worth noting that a prominent expert on “Balfour: The Seeds of Discord” claims that the British were committed to Zionism because it was central to the legitimacy of the Palestine Mandate. This is wrong because the Mandate does not and cannot dispense with the rights of the Palestinian people, even though it is written tendentiously in order to give that impression. Moreover it seems a little strange to choose a specific exceptional legitimating purpose for the Palestine Mandate when the British operated Mandates in Jordan and Iraq with no need for any such rationale. Yemenis might also raise an eyebrow at the suggestion that the British cared about such niceties given that South Yemen did not gain independence until 1967.

“Balfour: The Seeds of Discord” mostly suggests that the British do not act, but only react. As is so often true the British Empire, like the US Empire, is portrayed as unwitting. The moral failures are always those of ignorance and arrogance but never those of immoral intent. In 1883 John Seeley wrote, “we seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” Outside interests are used as pretexts by the imperialist parts of the establishment, led by the intelligence and military inside government in close intermingled accord with the arms, finance, and extractive industries. In this sense Zionists like Chaim Weizmann and the Rothschild’s served the same purpose as US puppets during the Cold War who somehow caused the US to act in ways it did not want to. People such as Syngman Rhee, Ngo Dinh Diem, Jose Napoleon Duarte, Shah Reza Pahlavi, Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, and many more have been cited as forcing or constraining US DoD or State Department actions, notwithstanding that they were dependent on the US and in many cases owed their power entirely to US intervention. The utility of the tactic is self-evident, even when it becomes ridiculous. Ahmed Chalabi, whose power and legitimacy were never more than a US fiction, had his supposed desires used as justifications for US policy. This was an effective distraction because it provided a focus of contention. Journalists and academics lap that stuff up and seem somehow incapable of looking beyond it at possible real causes for an empire’s behaviour, such as… I don’t know, say, the desire to control the most important strategic asset in human history (oil).

In a sane world it would be considered ridiculous to discuss 20th Century Middle Eastern history without reference to petroleum. In our world the near inverse is true. Right-wing people can make pithy aphorisms about oil to show their tough realism, but to actually connect that to an analysis of decision-making is considered heretical. Thus, for example, Paul Wolfowitz can explain the need for the Iraq invasion using the phrase “the country swims on a sea of oil”, but one cannot suggest that decisions were made on that basis. Almost everything else is on the table: humanitarianism, greed, stupidity, security concerns, racism, anti-racism, and, of course, the MJP of the Israel Lobby. One can say that things occurred because George W. Bush was a venal idiot, but it is unacceptable to base a detailed analysis on the notion that this lifelong oil man invaded and occupied Iraq to maintain US control of the global oil trade. Dubya Bush was the 4th generation product of a politically engaged dynasty of energy and finance aristocrats, his cabinet was also full of oil executives, and his own father had begun a genocidal assault and siege on Iraq. Despite these facts in orthodox analysis he cannot be said to have been rationally and intelligently motivated in his actions. This would lead one to conclude that he successfully carried out an intentionally genocidal strategy that increased US power in the world, and that is not allowed.

Petroleum is equally central in relation to the birth of Israel – and equally unspeakable. To understand why the British wanted to create a permanent open wound of violence in the midst of the Arab world it is necessary to go back to 1895. John Fisher (who would go on to become an admiral, a peer of the realm, and the first person on record to use the abbreviation OMG) became convinced that the Royal Navy must transition its fleet away from coal and into petroleum as a fuel. This was a very hard sell as Britain had ready sources of coal but no oil. It took Fisher 10 years to make his case, but once he did the British were uniquely well positioned to lay claim to the oil they knew rightfully belonged to them (but which non-British people had the temerity to live on top of). At the time, you see, there were no known sources of oil on the extensive soil of the Empire. No problem, though – the British “sphere of influence” was as large as its acknowledged empire, and it turned its baleful eye upon Persia.

The British knew a thing or two about exerting extra-territorial control over other people’s countries. They also knew a thing or two about strategic resources. Their naval power had been built on spreading coaling stations that facilitated its own movement and gave it a way of controlling or denying the same ease of movement for others. The art of strategic denial, which would become crucial to the bloody history of the Middle East, was also honed on its dominance of major sources of gold in South Africa.

(Always bear in mind that these territories, these resources and even this “influence” were acquired with mass violence and retained with mass violence. The British Empire killed people for this. They tortured for this. They beat and robbed for this. All of it.)

Desiring the oil of Persia they set about acquiring it in a quintessentially imperialist style. They did not seek to create stable access to the oil by creating a sustainable transaction of mutual benefit. In zero sum imperialist thinking that would be disastrous. If, for example, they wanted to send gunboats to shell the ports and workers of another country that was not being obedient they would have to ensure that Persia did not object enough to break the deal. That would be an intolerable imposition on the sovereign right of the British to protect its own “interests”. Instead they cut the sort of deal that you would expect from a violent crew of mobsters. Their method of ensuring stability relies on ensuring that the lesser, weaker party does not profit enough that they become less weak and might therefore be in a position to ask for a better deal.

For an empire the ideal relations of informal imperialism separate the interests of a small ruling group from the masses and from the national entity itself. As a good imperialist, you structure deals so that any profit tends to accrue to that small group, creating a beneficial enmity between these rulers and their own subjects who remain impoverished and are displaced, poisoned and often worked to death in the production or extraction of the desired resource. You ensure that much of the money that you do pay is returned immediately to buy arms from your own arms industry for use against the unhappy people. You make the rulers as hated as possible in their own countries, apart from a narrow client base and/or a minority ethnic or religious group. This is highly unstable and a source of continual violence and oppression, but the rulers become dependent on you and they are forced to keep the desired outpouring of national riches flowing. Should the local oppression fail for any reason, such as a popular revolution, you can declare a “national interest” and send in the marines, the gunboats, the spooks, or any combination thereof. The nature of the deal itself is such that it has created military dependency and underdevelopment that ensures that the people of the country have the minimum possible ability to resist your own use of force.

That model is sustained on blood and oppression, and we charmingly name it the “resource curse”. The received wisdom in Western boardrooms, lecture halls, and think-tanks is that somehow the possession of natural wealth creates bad governance. In most cases this is simply a poor cover for foetid racism. For believers in Western values it is considered common sense that the peoples of the developing world are morally and intellectually inferior to Westerners and this known fact is only suppressed due to wokeness. The agency of Western imperialist power is effaced: deleted from history and deleted from current affairs.

The massive military expenditures of the US and its constant covert and overt interventions; its bombings; its wars; its threats; its overt and covert control, co-optation and subversion of international institutions is well documented and indisputable. What you are not allowed to say is that they are doing all of this for any cogent purpose. The continual flow of wealth and resources from the developing world to the developed world is meant to be viewed as a simple product of the natural order of things that is totally unrelated to massive arms expenditures, invasions, coups, espionage, economic warfare and so forth. To suggest otherwise is a conspiracy theory or some form of cultish dogmatic Marxism.

I am using contemporary US examples a little ahead of time here, but the British Empire provided the precursors to these structures of power and extraction. The British never had the level of military hegemony that the US possesses therefore they became extremely expert at exercising asymmetric power over vast populations using any and every tool available.

Once the British establishment had come to accept the inevitability of the need for the Royal Navy to make the change from coal to petroleum, they sought to intervene in a deal cut between mineral prospector William D’Arcy and the Shah of Persia (now Iran). By some accounts they even sent Sidney Reilly the “Ace of Spies” to deal with what was known as the “D’Arcy Affair” in 1905. This led to the establishment in 1909 of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and later British Petroleum, or BP. In 1913 the APOC negotiated a sale of shares to the British Government. The Crown wanted a government-controlled source of oil. The man in charge of the negotiations was one Winston Churchill. Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty and was engaged in continuing the modernising work of John Fisher by switching the fleet wholly from coal to oil as fuel.

It would be in a letter to Churchill that Fisher first used the fateful letters OMG. More consequentially, though, Fisher would resign as First Sea Lord in 1915 in disgust over Churchill’s disastrous Dardanelles (Gallipoli) campaign, famous for its horrific and pointless loss of life. This precipitated Churchill’s own resignation. He was replaced by Arthur Balfour – yes that Arthur Balfour.

Balfour and Churchill had five things in common: They believed in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, they were ardent imperialists, they were scions of families elevated to elite status through imperialist exploitation, they were enthusiastic Zionists, and they were anti-Semitic. I have to acknowledge that it is “controversial” to call Churchill an anti-Semite despite the fact that he often wrote and said anti-Semitic things that he never retracted. To be fair Churchill was by no means outstandingly anti-Semitic by the standards of the time and would in later life express an opposition to anti-Semitism, but that does not change the bald facts. His official biographer Martin Gilbert, a Jewish Zionist, counters claims of his anti-Semitism in part by saying that he was an ardent Zionist. This is a laughable claim because non-Jewish Zionists – from Balfour through to today’s Christian Zionists – are frequently explicitly anti-Semitic. Moreover the link between their anti-Semitism and their Zionism is not hard to explain – whether through racial animus or through religious zeal they want all the Jews to migrate to Palestine. To put it mildly, being a Zionist is by no means proof that one is not an anti-Semite.

Arthur Balfour was the Prime Minister of Britain who supported and approved Fisher’s naval modernisation programme. He was also politically associated with Winston Churchill and Churchill’s father before him. Both were also linked to imperialists like Cecil Rhodes, Lord Rothschild, Lord Esher and Lord Milner. This group were racists who believed in Anglo-Saxon superiority. It is common to suggest that they were “cultural racists” rather than outright racists, but I have seen no compelling reason to believe that this is a lesser form of racism. To illustrate: in Aotearoa some British “cultural racists” told 19th century Māori that they could become British, but those Māori that chose to do so soon discovered that a racial hierarchy based on skin colour was part of being British. This proves rather neatly that Anglo-Saxon “cultural racism” is the embrace of a culture of biological racism. Moreover this “cultural racism” leads to the same horrific conclusions as direct biological racism. Churchill, for example, said “I do not admit… that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.” These people believed in an Anglo-Saxon racial empire and believed in using violence and subjugation to create that empire.

The Anglo-Saxon empire envisioned was to be a transatlantic one. Fittingly it would later be the alignment of British, US and Dutch oil interests between 1928 and 1954 that would provide the strategic underpinnings of such an empire, but Britain would be a decidedly junior partner by 1954.

There is some controversy over whether the British may have deliberately pushed the Ottoman Empire into joining World War I on the side of the Central Powers. On one hand, Germany was clearly the best European friend that the Ottomans had, probably because they wanted to secure access to oil. Germany was constructing the Berlin to Baghdad railway, aiming at further establishing a port in the Persian Gulf and they had invested much into modernising the Ottoman military. On the other hand, the Ottomans could see a greater potential for security in aligning with the Triple Entente (Britain, France, Russia) so their choice of sides in WWI was by no means set in stone. Supposedly the British were meant to be courting the Ottomans, but they made the interesting decision to confiscate a newly constructed dreadnought battleship along with an unfinished dreadnought, two cruisers, and four destroyers. This made the Ottoman choice to go to war inevitable. It was Winston Churchill who ordered British crews to take the dreadnoughts, an unambiguously illegal act. Given subsequent events it is hard to believe that Churchill was not either intentionally pushing the Ottomans into the arms of the Central Powers or had convinced himself that the matter was already decided.

Churchill then launched the first oil war in the Middle East. This war was enormous by any standards other than that of the slaughter occurring simultaneously in Europe. It started with the Dardanelles campaign. This was ostensibly to draw Ottoman forces away from the distant Caucasus where they were fighting the Russians. It is unlikely to have achieved much towards that end. Instead after the first couple of weeks it was quite evident that British, French and ANZAC forces were trapped on the rugged shoreline. Despite this they stayed for eight months of futile slaughter. The campaign cost the Ottomans in blood and materiel, but it was more of a setback for the British, and more still of a human tragedy where lives were spent for no real gain.

Having failed to penetrate the Dardanelles the British kept fighting a war in the Middle East, notably in Iraq and Palestine. They committed over 1.4 million troops to this theatre when the situation in Europe was clearly desperate. The French made their alarm about this known. Given that the later German effort to “bleed France white” led to serious mutinies and came close to forcing France out of the war, it can be said that the British were truly risking a defeat in the Great War itself by pouring so much into their sideshow oil war.

Along the way the British displayed the perfidy for which they have such renown. First they betrayed their Arab allies by signing the Sykes-Picot Agreement under which Britain and France would carve up the Middle East. Then they signed an armistice with Turkey (formerly Ottomans) which they immediately broke in order to invade and conquer Mosul. In doing so they also betrayed the French who had been given the area under Sykes-Picot. At the end of the war the British had occupied everywhere in the Middle East known to have oil apart from the Persian oil fields that it already controlled. After the war nearly a million imperial military personnel remained to occupy and pacify the region.

Given the cavalier approach that the British had to the agreements it made to induce others to serve its ends, it is striking that the vague Balfour Declaration is still talked about at all, let alone held up as some form of legitimation of the Zionist project. In contrast to promising to “look with favour upon the creation of a Jewish state” the British had explicitly promised the Sharif of Mecca, Hussain bin Ali, an independent Arab state that stretched from the Mediterranean and Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, from the Indian Ocean to the border of Turkey. (The only exception was a small strip roughly corresponding to Syria’s current coastal area.)

I won’t dwell long on the partition and distribution of Arab lands that occurred. The British attempted to install puppet monarchies, but this provoked resistance. In particular Iraq was combative. Formed from the “3 Provinces” of “al-Iraq” in the Ottoman Empire, Iraq had been the greatest source of fighters in the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule. Though divided ethnically and by sect, the population of Iraq soon found themselves united by the common hatred of the British presence, British exactions and British violence. Intended puppet leaders have been hard to control in Iraq because of its natural wealth and because its surface divisions are outweighed by a long sense of shared identity and history. It is the Cradle of Civilisation and its peoples have a far longer record of working together as one polity than do, for example, the peoples of Wales, England, Scotland and the northern bit of Ireland.

Winston Churchill directed the repression of the Iraqi Revolt in 1920, going so far as to advocate using mustard gas against villages. Aeroplanes dropped bombs on villages many years before the German bombing of Guernica would spark international outrage. Arthur “Bomber” Harris (who would later work closely with Churchill to conduct the deadly and controversial British “strategic bombing” during WWII) said that Arabs and Kurd “now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within forty-five minutes a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” After Iraq was granted “independence” British forces stayed and some sense of how independent Iraq truly was could be measured by the fact that the ostensible monarch of the country, King Ghazi, installed a radio station in his palace to broadcast anti-British political material. He soon died in a car crash that is often attributed to the British or to the pro-British politician Nuri al-Said.

It was in this context that the decisions over the fate of Palestine were taking place: the British needing Middle Eastern oil and finding it difficult to ensure that the Arabs, Kurds, Persians and others living atop the oil would remain compliant. The process of deciding the fate of mandatory Palestine was clearly contested within the British establishment. It may seem like a “conspiracy theory” to state that a clique of oil-loving imperialist Zionists fought for and achieved the establishment of the state of Israel, but that is what the evidence lends itself to. Further, to suggest otherwise is to state that the British state is a monolith where foreign policy is not open to such contestation. The record of disagreements is clear and we can choose to believe that those promoting the establishment of a Jewish homeland were irrational weirdos who had no cogent reason for clinging on to their stance in the face of clear irresolvable difficulties, or we can believe that they kept their own counsel about their motives. They chose to present a face of a sentimental but unreasonable attachment to Zionism because they knew the world at large would not agree that their aims served the greater good. What they intended was unethical and immoral, and its execution would be necessarily criminal, but it was anything but irrational.

The period from 1919 to 1947 was absolutely crucial. The institutional processes show a struggle between different forces pulling in what amounted to opposite directions. Through multiple commissions, enquiries, and three white papers the British foreign affairs establishment repeatedly returned to the conclusion that no Jewish state could be established without clear violations of the rights of Palestinians and a violation of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. There was simply no legitimate way to honour the vague promise of the Balfour declaration which, after all, included the phrase “…nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Rashid Khalidi thinks that there is a trick in the Balfour Declaration in that it mentions a national identity for Jewish people but not for Palestinians. I think that is according too much credence to the document. Similarly one of the experts on “Balfour: Seeds of Discord” states that the declaration accorded “civil” but not “political” rights but this is not a real division. It is a convention to divide political from civil rights, but the principle of equality before the law inevitably leads to equal political rights. In normal usage the term “civil” refers to political participation. Voting rights, for example, were intrinsic to civil rights struggles in the USA and Northern Ireland.

Even in discussing semantics we are missing the point. The fact that such microscopic focus is given to the 67 words of the Balfour Declaration is a testament to the pressure to find non-realist explanations for British behaviour. In reality the Balfour Declaration is a meaningless piece of paper and, as I will discuss, Israel could never have been established as a Jewish state in anything like the form that exists today if it did not ethnically cleanse the non-Jewish community and steal their property. To say that this prejudiced “the civil rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine” is a massive understatement.

Ignoring the pointless Balfour Declaration (as we all should) the recognised power that the British had over the land of Palestine came from a League of Nations Mandate. The League’s charter provides for Mandates for League members to exercise power over nations that were no longer under the sovereignty of the defeated empires of Germany, Turkey and Austria-Hungary but were deemed unready for self-rule. The pertinent section for Palestine states: “Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone.” Note the use of the term “independent nations”.

The Balfour Declaration was incorporated in the Mandate, but I must restate here that Zionists were never intending to create a “Jewish Homeland” that could be created without massively violating the civil rights of non-Jewish Palestinians. The Balfour Declaration was not just a dead letter, it was a stillborn letter that never drew a single metaphorical breath.

The Mandate mentions Jews many times but doggedly refuses to accord any character to any other inhabitant of Palestine. This is quite striking given that nearly 90% of the population were non-Jewish Palestinians and that the League charter states that the Mandate is based on there being a provisionally recognised independent nation. Striking or not, though, it is an exercise in propaganda rather than legally significant. As absent as the Muslims, Christians, Druze and other non-Jewish people’s may be from the text in specificity, they are still there in every legal sense. Universal and general terms (such as the oft-appearing word “communities”) clearly cannot exclude non-Jewish peoples. The imperialists might have wished to create an openly discriminatory Mandate but were forced to affirm that no “discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants of Palestine on the ground of race, religion or language.”

An honest process would have recognised the intractability of the problem as soon as it was identified. An honest process would have acknowledged that the rights accorded to the Palestinian people in the League of Nations Charter, which is where the Mandate derives its claims to legitimacy, and in the Mandate itself make the creation of a Jewish state as such impossible. The conclusions reached by the 1939 White Paper should have been reached far earlier and should have been accepted and implemented. The 1939 White Paper rejected partition and proposed limiting Jewish immigration while transitioning to a sovereign state of Palestine that would be binational in nature. The problem was that, over the years, the abrogation of the rights of Palestinians in order to establish a Jewish state had been rejected many times and no case had been made, nor could be, that provided a path that would in any way satisfy Zionist desires while honouring the rights of the “non-Jewish communities”. With each such finding, though, the British would pointedly revert to the promise of a Jewish homeland in the mandate in order to reject these findings. These are repeated arguments from consequence, which is to say that they are fallacious. They do not deal with presented evidence and reasoning but instead attack the conclusions. It is a legalistic rhetorical trick undertaken in bad faith, and it happened repeatedly.

And what, we might ask, was the pressing need to keep perverting the course of the bureaucracy like that? Once again the conventional historiography would have us believe that it is the work of MJP. Worse still, given that most Jews were not Zionists it seems that the Magic Jew Power was controlled by a Zionist conspiracy. That would be industrial-grade anti-Semitism, and while it is tempting to believe Balfour et al. capable of such twisted thinking, it is not believable. One of their own colleagues, Edwin Montagu who was Secretary of State for India at the time, was an anti-Zionist Jew who made it amply clear that he thought the project anti-Semitic and a source of danger for Jewish people.

We are left with no declared motive on the part of British imperialists that holds up to scrutiny. Therefore we must search for an undeclared motive among at least some of the decision-makers. We might not be able to draw the straight line of an overt declaration that shows a concern for oil directly. As far as I know there is no document to that effect that would satisfy the vulgar empiricists that shamble through the history departments of the world seeking archival proof in the manner of zombies seeking brains. The straight line does not exist, but there are three dots labelled “1”, “2”, and “3” that just happen to lie in a straight line for anyone to join with minimal effort.

The final acts leading to the Nakba also fit the picture of a divided British establishment with some doing everything possible to establish a Jewish state and refusing to accept defeat simply because it could not be done in a legally or morally acceptable manner. The horrors of the Shoah had created a sense of urgency and exception in sentiment, but when the details were taken into account it is very clear that establishing a Jewish state would require a large scale genocide by historical standards. I will explain why this was necessary shortly, but I do want to acknowledge that this large-scale genocide was dwarfed in people’s minds by the scale of death during the recent War and that this will have blunted sensibilities. That said, more sensitive and engaged individuals like Folke Bernadotte, were not inclined to ignore some people’s rights because others had suffered such extremities. Bernadotte, famous for having rescued many Jews and others from Nazi camps, was supportive of “the aspirations of the Jews” but was even-handed enough that members of Lehi, a Zionist paramilitary group often known as the Stern Gang, assassinated him. (One of the three planners of the murder, Yitzhak Shamir, would become the Prime Minister of Israel in 1983). It is reasonable to think that Bernadotte was genuinely sympathetic to Zionism in the abstract but Lehi, like Ze’ev Jabotinski before them, knew that an Israeli state could not be created without genocidal violence. Bernadotte’s condemnation of violence against Palestinians, given his stature, could have harmed the Zionist cause greatly.

I won’t repeat here what I have already written elsewhere on the subject of the genocidal nature of the occupation of Palestine, but a recounting of events with a focus on the practical needs of a “Jewish state” will show anew that genocide was always a pre-requisite even if the word itself was unspeakable.

The British were never able to square the circle of allowing the creation of a Jewish state without clearly violating the rights of the indigenous inhabitants, moreover the gap was far greater than we might suspect now that the establishment of Israel is a fait accompli. Having first rejected its own 1937 partition plan and then rejected its own rejection, the British took to playing the victim. They fobbed the problem off on the UN. Eventually this led in late 1947 to UNGA Resolution 181 laying out a partition plan. The UK abstained from the vote, but we now know that they lobbied vigorously for others to vote in favour of partition.

Two things are worth noting about UNGAR 181. The first is that General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding. Israel, a country that is second only to the USA in violating General Assembly resolutions, should be the first to admit that. The second is that if everyone had agreed to abide by the provisions of UNGAR 181 and there had been a peaceful implementation of the partition plan it would have simply resulted in a temporary and unsustainable partition of a single Palestinian state. Without genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing there could never have been a “Jewish state”. Perhaps even more crucially a Jewish state could not exist without mass theft of Palestinian property.

As things stood the Jewish partition designated in UNGAR 181 would not even have had a Jewish majority without ethnic cleansing. Moreover, Jews owned only about 20% of the land in the partition and something like 10% of the commercial property and small enterprises. Even if they had not instituted a democracy in which they were outnumbered from the outset, respect of the civil rights of Palestinians would have left them totally economically dependent on Palestinians and without the resources they needed to allow the mass Jewish migration that later occurred. The property of refugees was taken and nationalised under the rationale that the owners had chosen to abandon it and were designated “absentees” while being denied the right to return. This created a massive national estate. Much of this was administered by the Jewish National Fund which by its own constitution served only Jews.

After the Nakba Israel established itself on 72% of the land of Mandatory Palestine which in 1945 was only 30% Jewish by population. Despite this the ethnic cleansing they had carried out created a territory with a clear Jewish majority. Israel passed a law of “Return” which referred not to the expelled indigenous inhabitants but to all Jews who were given the right to “return” to Israel from wherever in the world they happened to be. When they got there it was absolutely necessary that they be leased residential, horticultural, agricultural and commercial property or land on which to develop these things. Due to the role of the Jewish National Fund these instant citizens immediately had greater access to these resources than the remnant Palestinians who had gained Israeli citizenship.

It is not hard to imagine what would have happened if the Partition Plan had been implemented. The “Jewish State” could not have survived. There could be no “democratic” elections. Palestinian property ownership and tenure would have needed to be violated or property owning Palestinians would have become increasingly wealthy and empowered by the influx of Jewish immigrants which would have made it difficult to suppress their political participation. The Jewish state needed the violent dispossession of Palestinians in order to be born, but without the credible excuse of conflict it could not have done so and then claimed to be lawful and democratic. The 1947-48 War was crucial to them.

Let me be clear here, I am not saying that Palestinians and the Arab countries should have embraced the Partition Plan. They had no reason to and it would not have stopped the war anyway. UNGAR 181, like the Balfour Declaration, did not show a path towards the legitimate establishment of a Jewish state. It was a piece of theatre. It was an act of public diplomacy designed to give a pretext of legitimacy to an enterprise that simply could not be justified on closer examination.

Genocide is almost invariably carried out under the cover of military conflict. It was true in 1947 and it is true today. Revisionist Zionists knew from the outset that acts of mass violence against the Palestinian people were necessary in order to establish a state of Israel. The first violence that occurred after the Partition Plan was an attack on a Jewish bus, but the perpetrators of these murders were retaliating for murders carried out 10 days before by Lehi. After UNGAR 181 violence escalated and the British largely allowed it to happen. Bearing in mind that UNGAR 181 was not legally binding it did not absolve the British of any responsibilities at all.

The British Government rejected the Partition Plan (even though their officials had lobbied other countries to pass it) which shouldn’t surprise anyone because it would have violated their Mandate and if they could have justified it they would have done it themselves much earlier. They decided to end their mandate in May 1948, but instead of doing what they were clearly obliged to do – create an orderly transition to a sovereign state for the people of Palestine – they allowed violence to spiral out of control. They refused to cooperate with the UN, the non-Jewish Palestinians, or the Jews to work towards a transition. Then in February of 1948, once facts on the ground had made their responsibilities seem impossible to fulfil, they switched to supporting partition and the annexation of non-Jewish parts of Palestine to Transjordan (today’s Jordan). In March Zionist forces began executing the infamous Plan Dalet.

Some Zionist historians claim that Plan Dalet was defensive. It sought to clear threats from around pockets of Jewish population including those that lay outside of the area designated for Jews in the Partition Plan. According to this reasoning the ethnic cleansing was a by-product of a legitimate military exercise. The context to that claim was that, as I have already stated, there could never have been a Jewish state if they had not ethnically cleansed that part of Palestine. Furthermore, they did not give back the land beyond that delineated in the UN Partition Plan. Also, they did not allow these supposedly accidental refugees to return, instead they passed a law to prevent their re-entry, confiscate their property and to strip citizenship from any Palestinian citizen of Israel who married one of them. Moreover, they systematically lied for 40 years about why Palestinians fled and if anyone challenged these lies that accused them of being anti-Semitic.

Given the foregoing, my contention is that British imperialists knew that establishing a Jewish state as such was never going to be possible without the violent dispossession of the existing Palestinian people. They could have insisted to Zionists from the outset that a Jewish state was not on the table and worked towards the peaceful establishment of a “Jewish homeland” in a sovereign Palestine that would accord guarantees of freedom from persecution underwritten by the international community. The Palestinian government would control immigration but would be encouraged to accept Jewish immigrants who would bring funding raised overseas into the country to help development. The British had 30 years to do this yet they chose to keep the dream of a Jewish state alive for their own purposes.

The British wanted a “loyal little Ulster” but they needed it to be in actual or immanent conflict with the Arab world for it to be of use. When the US replaced the UK in the patron role they referred to Israel as one of their “cops on the beat”. This was the term used by Nixon’s Defense Secretary Melvin Laird to refer to Iran, Turkey and Israel. These three non-Arab countries form a triangle around the richest oil fields in the world and it is pretty striking that they would be considered as policing the region when most of the Arab regimes in the area were also US clients at the time. The threat of Arab and pan-Arab nationalism to the ability to control global energy supplies was intense and it is still significant today. This is only aggravated by Islamic solidarity.

Of course the British had no crystal ball to see the future, but it is worth thinking about the nature of the state of Israel now. Both in actions during the mandate period and actions afterwards the US and UK have created a state that can never know peace. The US in particular has exercised its international power, most notably in UN Security Council vetoes, to create an impunity that fuels Israeli delusions of peace through total victory. Israel is still seeking to square the circle that the British could never square.

George Orwell wrote that those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future. He meant that those who shape our understanding of history also shape our beliefs about the present and our reactions to events. The proof of his insight is all around us, but as with all such concepts there are limitations, and those can be very important. There are gross facts that cannot be twisted or suppressed by shared indoctrination. The Nazis, for example, despite having a very strong grip on the communications and ideology of the German people, could not have declared that they had achieved victory in the siege of Stalingrad (though I suspect in early 1943 they would have loved to do so). Some things are resistant to distortion. Words are not simply arbitrary signifiers, they exist within webs of meaning. Israel has laboured tirelessly in arguing that Palestinians have no human rights on the grounds that they are stateless and that there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Rhetorical racism aside, though, they cannot claim that Palestinians are not human beings.

Zionists cannot simply declare Palestinians to be non-humans, though many can be brainwashed into an emotional state in which Palestinians are inhuman or far less human than Israelis. The Orwellianism succeeds in that many people in the world have accepted Israel’s right to defend itself by killing Palestinians without thinking for a second that the Palestinians have the same right only more so because they are by far the greater victims of violence. The problem for Israel is that in formal and juridical contexts it is impossible to dehumanise people in that way.

If the Nakba had happened in 1910 Israel might have been able to establish a Jewish-state-accompli, but after World War II people were writing a new rulebook of international law and human rights. Obviously we have not reached a point where those rules stop powerful state actors from committing crimes, but they do create an historical record in which those crimes are illegitimate. As long as they still stand and hold sway over officialdom, they limit the rewriting of history.

The key problem that Israel has is that it cannot undo the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendents to return. Due to timing Palestinian refugees come under the mandate of UNRWA instead of the UN High Commission for Refugees, and UNRWA doesn’t have the same mandate to seek durable resolution through voluntary repatriation, but that does not mean that Palestinians don’t have the right to return. Rather like the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, the failure to name a specific right for Palestinians does not mean that it does not exist. The right of displaced persons to return to their homeland is a human right derived from Articles 13-15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Palestinians are humans, ergo they have that right.

Israel’s admittance to the United Nations was conditioned on its compliance with UNGAR 194 which, among other things, “Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” Most Palestinians are refugees, including half of those in the occupied territories. Clearly Israel did not comply with that resolution. Clearly UN members did not expect it to, but they could not simply pretend that Palestinian refugees did not exist. Their humanity was, and is, a gross fact that cannot simply be ignored for political expediency.

Though under immense pressure Yasser Arafat and the PLO did not renounce the Palestinian right of return in 2000, but if they had it would not have extinguished that right. It is typical of the delusory thinking that Israel is falling into that the leadership thought that Arafat had some magic power to abrogate the rights of Palestinians on the basis that he is a Leader. The whole point of human rights is that political leaders cannot arbitrarily cancel them. They wouldn’t be much use otherwise would they?

I am sure that there have been times in its history when Israel might have found a way to resolve issues peacefully in a way that had enough legitimacy to be lasting. It would have been painful and imperfect and it would have left some injustices unredeemed, but it could have ended the violence and unremitting oppression and crushing injustice that Palestinians have endured for generations. Instead the US gave Israel unconditional aid and assistance that was a poison. They have controlled the occupied territories for 67 years, meaning that they have made subjects of half of the world’s Palestinians without granting them rights while grotesquely claiming to be the “only democracy in the Middle East”. Drunk on the impunity gifted by the Western world and Israel’s own immense military power, they refuse to even say where their borders are, sponsoring a colonisation and ethnic cleansing programme in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Our political leaders, in obedience to Orwellian principles of power, act as if this is not happening. It is happening, though, and the gross fact is that its victims are human beings.

Palestinians are not transitory phenomena. They are not simply a colour on a demographic map that can be changed with a paintbrush. They are human and their lives, their existences, their very breaths are gross facts that doom the state of Israel to fall. In its mania for a “final status” and in its awareness of the “demographic threat” Israel becomes ever more overtly genocidal. They act as if they can win by inflicting enough pain that the enemy will bend to their will, but they can only get what they seek by the non-existence of all Palestinians. It will not happen and the further they go down that path the worse it will be for both peoples. They cannot kill all Palestinians and the more they do kill the more they are repudiated internationally. The death they have unleashed on Gaza, which sadly will continue to rise even after the direct violence has ended, will never be forgotten, and what can they achieve from it? Seizing the northern third of the strip? It gets them no closer to their goal. Their goal recedes with every step they take towards it.

In the end, whose purposes does this serve? It serves an Empire Complex with military, intelligence, arms, financial, and energy interests at the core, but Israelis only have a fool’s paradise. Zionists could only ever have achieved their desires by making immense compromises in order that they could have a place of Jewish belonging and safety. Perhaps that was never possible, but if it was it could never be made as an exclusive Jewish ethno-state. Fed on the narcotic of impunity and the hallucinogen of exceptionalism they have for generations made it seem natural that the plucky Jewish state should continue – an oasis of [insert Western value here] in a desert of barbarism:

Enlightenment? Of course.

Modernism? Naturally.

Socialism? Absolutely.

Not too much socialism? Heaven forfend!

Secularism? Well we are a Jewish state, so… just kidding of course we are secular.

Whatever you want, that is what we are. We are the Athenian Sparta. We shoot. We cry. We write the history and law textbooks to teach everyone that we had no choice.

It all seemed so real, but it was never real because Palestinians exist. Palestine exists.

The loyal little Ulster has served its purpose well, but its time is coming to an end. The UK and US will jettison Israel when it suits them. Israel has been a tool of empire but it never suited the empire to create a stable peaceful Jewish state or homeland. Israelis will someday have to choose to live in a democratic state of Palestine, or to emigrate. There is no point in continuing to kill to chase a dream that can never be.

Support: http://ko-fi.com/krkelly

I Changed My Mind, I Hope Trump Wins

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cunvlmqukaaxes

New rant by me at a-Infos radio. Only 36 mins long as I was feeling merciful:
http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/88784

The Empire Paradox: More Power is More Weakness

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neolibs

In response to my recent article on US imperial wars some people objected to my characterisation of the US empire. I wrote: “In global terms the US has never been more powerful” and some were quick to point out that the US empire is very weak. To those people I want to say that we are both right, but the weaknesses of the US empire do not generally affect its functioning. One day these weakness will become very, very important, but we cannot predict when that will be. In the meantime, critics of US empire undermine themselves by their focus on weakness, which often leads to millenarian predictions of immanent collapse.

To explain, I will begin by giving shape to the empire’s dynamic of power and weakness. There is nothing new in suggesting that empires can become victims of their own success. “Imperial overreach” is a common enough term and it is clearly worrying at least one imperialist (Zbigniew Brzezinski, whom I will discuss further at a later point). However, while the established language of “stretch”, “overextension” and “centrifugal forces” evoke 2 dimensions, I want to suggest that we visualise the empire in 3 dimensions.

2-dimensional metaphors of imperium are cartographic in origin. They reflect the logistical, strategic and tactical concerns of an empire of military, bureaucratic and economic control. The irony is that the imperial quest to conquer and tame geography is also a process of transcending geography with institutions and communications which erase differences and distances. Geography is still important in many respects, but I think we need to visualise the totality of empire in an abstract way, because in some important ways it has become a post-geographic empire wherein many important connections exist without physical proximity. This changes some facts of empire, even if others remain the same.

For example, the British had to worry about the “agency problem” in India which could be epitomised by, say, an East Indian company employee marrying a local woman and setting up in business with his new in-laws. This was very common, and the response from the Empire was to create a segregationist and anti-miscegenation racial discourse (and to ship young British women to India in bulk consignments). In contrast, the US can send agents to any country without such worry due to transnationalisation and global mobility. Though there is still a bias towards people of European descent, diplomats, spies, contractors, investors, missionaries, and garrisoning troops are ever more likely to be people of colour. Far from needing to keep its people separate, the US empire is benefiting from its ability to send agents who have ethnic origins and family ties to the neocolony in question. Meanwhile comprador oligarchs (especially in the Western hemisphere) are educated in the US and may have residences and business concerns in the US. The nationality on your birth certificate might limit your power at the highest levels (unless Trump and the “birthers” are correct), but there is still an international imperial elite including many non-US nationals who wield great power.

My proposal for an abstract 3-dimensional model of imperial power is a foam of conjoined bubbles. Each bubble represents a discrete institution of imperial power relations has the properties which we associate with metaphorical bubble such as a price bubble.

Imperial power relations are bubbles because the empire is a structure which puts power into the hands of the few. As Antonio Gramsci famously observed there must be “Consent” to domination, and as Gandhi noted: “We in India may in moment realize that one hundred thousand Englishmen need not frighten three hundred million human beings.” This sets up a dynamic that necessarily inclines towards an increasing but individually unsustainable concentration of power with the necessary increase of coercive power being a threat to the “hegemony” that maintains the consent of the governed.

Not every aspect of imperial power replicates the dynamics of an economic bubble, but I think that enough do to make the generalisation valid. In the resulting imperial spume each bubble; such as petrochemical hegemony, financial hegemony, or entertainment media hegemony, must individually expand or die, but the conjoined bubbles can artificially prevent a bubble burst, or may at other times simply fill the space so that the imperial mass continues with little diminishment. But as the bubbles continue a general trend of expansion there will be an increasing number of bubbles large enough that the bursting will set off a chain reaction. Theoretically there will come a point where the increasingly dominant and powerful empire will be susceptible to complete collapse from the tiniest pin-prick.

The problem is that the system is too complex for us to predict. We don’t know where we are at. The empire has responsive institutions, so vulnerabilities that are predictable are compensated for. This itself feeds the processes of inflation. To use another analogy, perhaps the future will bring a giant iceberg of imperial weakness which is foreseen, but cannot be avoided. It is possible, but the empire is constantly steering among icebergs. I think it is more likely that one day an unforeseen fault will cause a cascade failure, destroying the ability to steer. After that we can spend all the time we want arguing whether it was the unforeseen fault or the giant and obvious iceberg which is to blame (or praise) for the empire’s collapse.

Because of this unpredictability, the weaknesses of the US empire are significant potentialities, but they have little relevance in actuality. For those who oppose empire there is little to be gained fro focussing on imperial weakness.

I count myself among those who has a bias towards perceiving the inherent weakness, contradiction and self-defeat built into imperial expansion. We do not want to think of the empire as a “success” in any terms. We do not want to think that the mass-murderers of Washington DC might go to their graves believing that they have been on the side of the angels. We do not even really want to admit war and genocide can be used successfully to advance the interests of US empire. We want people to understand that nobody truly benefits from the cruel crimes of empire.

I do not want to believe that the US empire “wins” all the time, but I know that that is the real nature of empire. With very few exceptions it will always leverage from its superior power and will win every conflict eventually. Every time the US empire seems to be handed a defeat, it is only a matter of time before it becomes a US victory. In 1950 the US was worried about an independent Viet Nam becoming an industrialised socialist regional hegemon. Now Viet Nam is a poor neoliberal source of cheap labour that has signed the TPP and lets US warships use Cam Ranh bay and Haiphong harbour. The Phillippines evicted the US military in 1992, to much acclaim, but they were back a decade later and have been increasing their presence ever since (including announcing of 5 new bases in recent months).

They are also hard to stop when they decide to go to war. 3 years ago, after protest had prevented US bombing of Syria, I wrote “Though apparently thwarted in its efforts to justify action against Syria, the US is likely to continue looking for cracks in the wall of opposition and will exploit any opportunity to act, relying on its well established impunity.” Sure enough, in time the US began bombing Syria, having found a completely different rationale that coincidently meant they needed to bomb the country they had wanted to bomb for unrelated reasons just months before.

In Latin America, just a few years ago it seemed that the tide had turned decisively and enduringly against Usanian dominance, but now: Dilma Rouseff has been ousted; Venezuela is nearing collapse under the strain of US economic warfare and sabotage; Mauricio Macri plunged Argentina back into the deepest depths of neoliberalism; post-coup Honduras is rife with right-wing death squads; Rafael Correa will not be standing in the upcoming Ecuadoran election; and the historic peace-deal in Colombia has actually given a platform and relevance to mass-murderer Alvaro “I did it because it was a necessity” Uribe who is leading the right-wing campaign against peace (50 years of killing is apparently not enough).

In Europe, NATO has expanded to Russia’s borders in numerous places. India is now clearly in the US camp, a factor that should not be underestimated. Under AFRICOM (established 2002) the US military is now deeply entrenched and highly active throughout most of Africa. US military capabilities on the borders of rivals and enemies become ever more menacing with deployments such as the THAAD missiles in ROK, and ABM missiles in Romania and Poland.

The US remains the largest arms exporter and provider of military “aid”, but there has been a qualitative shift that increases the dependency of its clients. US weapons systems, and the insistence on “interoperability” amongst allies and clients, are now such that many military activities require US contractor or military personnel for maintenance. This gives the an unprecedented lever of control that supplements the military aid and training programmes that ensure that officers in the neocolonies are loyal to the empire. In direct terms the US can also, under circumstances decided by itself, take control of the massive and well armed forces of the Republic of Korea (ROK). Moreover, though its sidekick the UK has dropped from 2^nd to 5^th in military spending, it is now the second biggest arms dealer in the world.

The US has been proliferating missile defence systems which are designed to prevent retaliation from Russia after a massive US nuclear attack. This alone is causing dangerous instability, but the US is also trying to blur the lines between nuclear and conventional weapons to make them more “thinkable. Complementing this is a very expensive nuclear modernisation programme that includes many smaller “tactical” munitions.

In conventional terms the US also has excessive and peerless firepower. The US has 10 massive “supercarriers” currently in service. There total displacement is close enough to be called a megaton (1,000,000 tons). In contrast, adding all other countries aircraft carriers together you get under 200,000 tons of displacement (one fifth of the US strength). Total US naval size is 4 times that of its nearest rival (Russia): quote “the U.S. war fleet displaces nearly as much as all other warships in the world’s navies, combined.” Given that is also has the highest nuclear and conventional payloads, and the greatest technological sophistication, it is fair to say that the US Navy is considerably more powerful than all other navies combined.

In military terms the US is unquestionably a greater power now that it was in the past, and it is the greatest military power in world history.

The US has also gone from strength to strength in being able to impose economic control and in coercing and bribing governments into signing over economic sovereignty to the empire’s corporate arm. Once again it seems that the US empire never has to concede defeat, it merely bides its time and finds a new way forward when checked. The anti-globalisation movement in the late 1990s seemed spell the end of the march of neoliberalism. Indeed the Doha round of WTO negotiations, which started in 2002 and still continue, were hijacked by notions of development and welfare. Undeterred, the US has turned to bilateral and regional multilateral deals which further US hegemony and neoliberal governance. Now it gets to exploit the synergies that result from having its fingers in so many pies. The TPPA and TTIP, for example, also function to isolate China and Russia. We may still be holding a good fight against the TPPA, but the fact that the US could muscle in on someone else’s trade deal and then pervert in entirely to their own cause and then get the government’s concerned to sign the deal. Now many believe that TTIP is dead in the water. I would caution that there was a period when the TPPA also seemed dead (some say it is now), but stalled is not the same as dead.

The forces wanting these agreements are not going anywhere and no one is actually dismantling the process to this point. With the TPPA in particular, even if ratification becomes indefinitely delayed popular outrage, we don’t have a realistic way of getting the deal off the table altogether. This is a ratchet system, it can only go one way and it moves that way every time public pressure is relaxed or confounded.

Even if we defeat TPPA and TTIP, then there is already the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) which “imposes unprecedented restrictions on SOEs and will force majority owned SOEs to operate like private sector businesses.” As George Monbiot writes: “TTIP has been booed off the stage but another treaty, whose probable impacts are almost identical, is waiting in the wings. And this one is more advanced, wanting only final approval. If this happens before Britain leaves the EU, we are likely to be stuck with it for 20 years.”

We seem to have no means of reversing the progressive loss of economic sovereignty. Each individual country knows that they will be hammered if they take the first step. Thus in those periods where a country might be lucky enough to have a government that has a level of benevolent intent, they are constrained to trying to beautify our prison cells with some flowers and maybe (if we are really lucky) a comfortable vermin-free mattress. They provide insufficient and, above all, precarious well-being in a world where inequality has become a rampant cancer, as dangerous as it is obscene and surreal. Billionaires now own over $US7 trillion in wealth.

The empire can think up new ways of robbing and enslaving the people of the world because it owns our governments, it owns our bureaucrats, it owns our spooks, it owns our generals. As for multinational corporate interests (and their legions of lawyers and lobbyists and PR hacks), well the empire owns them and they own the empire (or is that the other way around?)

At the launch of a left-wing think tank author and academic Nick Srnicek said: “Neoliberalism is dead, and we have an opening to produce something new.” He is right, but wrong. His diagnosis is no different from what was said by people like him after the Asian Financial crisis 20 years ago. We must build intellectually robust counterarguments to neoliberalism, but we should realise it does not actually need to be intellectually valid to continue. You cannot kill that which does not live. Likewise, it is wrong to think that the rise of right-wing populism means an end to neoliberalism. It is a scam, and you don’t have to believe in the lies to perpetuate them or use them. Srnicek thinks that Trump is anti-neoliberal, which is what a lot of Argentinians thought about Mauricio Macri. Macri (who laid off 100,000 public sector workers in his first 3 months and deregulated labour laws for the benefit of employers) has just announced an end to energy subsidies which will cause a 400% rise in gas prices. Combined with Macri’s earlier move to raise wholesale electricity prices this will mean increases in power bills of up to 700%.

I think it is great, wonderful and necessary that we use the term “neoliberalism” as a catch-all term. It helps us draw links between the policies of our own governments and the international trends, and now people are grasping the fact that it has an authoritarian side. But I would caution against treating it as deriving its coherence from an ideology. As David Harvey pointed out in A Brief History of Neoliberalism neoliberals do not play by the rules they espouse.

Neoliberalism isn’t really particularly neo, it is just a new bottle for the old sour wine of market fundamentalism (as Fred Block explains in this interview). In practical terms, for example, Herbert Hoover was indistinguishable from a neoliberal except that he was less slick. In reality, the final nail in the intellectual coffin of market fundamentalism came before neoliberialism even existed. It was the work of economic historian Karl Polanyi whose unrefuted 1944 book The Great Transformation showed that market fundamentalism always was a bunch of crap going right back to its first policy applications in the 19^th century. Polanyi also found exactly the same double standards in 19^th century British laissez-faire that Harvey found in its modern incarnation, quoting a US Treasury Secretary who complained that the British Empire’s policy was “do as we say, don’t do as we do”.

Thus, neoliberalism always was an undead ideology of Zombie Economics. Personally I find it hard to believe that people take something like Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom seriously but clearly, like Ayn Rand, he is tapping into the hidden desire for absolution that obviously afflicts the wealthy and the bourgeois. It must be something like that, because it is a really pathetic book. First Churchill and then Thatcher had tens of thousands of copies distributed free to the Conservative Party faithful like it was the Tory Bible, or Little Red Book.

The thing about zombies is that, however shambling, they are hard to stop. There have been few sour notes in the orchestrated global advance of neoliberal imperialism. There have been thorns in the sides of the US – nation-states that just won’t play ball – but the empire has the time and expanse to quarantine such naughty countries until such time as they can crushed. People call the US weak, but they are destroying Syria now at no real cost to themselves. Syria was on a list, as was Libya. People point to Libya and call the intervention a failure, but Libya is fucked and it hasn’t hurt the empire in any way. Mission accomplished, surely? And then there is Iraq. Iraq, which would be an incredibly rich nation without intervention, is barely holding together. It is so divided that any powerful outsider (not just the US) can destabilise it. This is a clear win for the US, and they used the Iraq invasion to give $US19 billion of Iraq’s money to US contractors like Halliburton. Iraq now spends billions in oil money each year to buy US weapons and is completely dependent on US support to keep its government in one piece.

neoliberal-power-supply

Picture: power supply in Iraq embodying the “logic” of neoliberalism

After what the US has done to Iraq, no one should think that Iraqis want the US there, but people still call the 20-year genocide a “failure” and a “tragic error”. It is an evil master-stroke, not a mistake. The empire is only threatened by such action in that eventually it may over-reach, so each success carries the germ of potential disaster. As I mentioned at the beginning though increased power and increased fragility go hand in hand. Maybe a collapse of the empire will come, but until that time the empire’s power is an actuality, but its weakness is only a potential.

People who develop the habit of announcing the immanent demise, or even just the weakness of the US will eventually find themselves in the same position as those cultists who have to sheepishly keep pushing back the date of the apocalypse as each predicted end-time passes without the end actually happening. Historians Joyce and Gabriel Kolko spent decades emphasising US weakness in foreign policy, beginning during the US war in Indochina. At each point, over the decades of writing, it seemed valid to highlight this supposed weakness, but if you trace their work through time that aspect of the work becomes ridiculous, which in turn brings into question their very understanding of the empire. Sun Tzu advised: “When you are strong, appear weak”, and US officials love nothing more than whingeing about their vulnerability and impotence. The Kolkos let themselves be misdirected. They let their desire for a more just world lead them astray.

The empire’s weaknesses are its contradictions, which is another way of saying what I wrote in the title: more power is more weakness. But the potential weakness only affects the empire in the here-and-now inasmuch as it causes imperialists to become circumspect and modest. That is not happening. We know it is not because there is an exception to the rule, and that is Zbigniew Brzezinski. He wrote an article this year calling for caution and realignment. However, he is claiming that the US empire is already dead (which could be seen as disingenuous) and that a global realignment has to occur in which Russia and/or China are incorporated. He is basically advocating a global carve-up of the world and his can even be read as an appeal to take substantive control of China and Russia in order to dominate parts of the globe through them (in the same manner that occupied post-WWII Japan was used as a sub-hegemon in East Asia).

Brzezinski is clearly not being 100% honest either. He makes a transparently fake denunciation of “the current inclination of the Saudi government still to foster Wahhabi fanaticism”. Once the obvious lie is removed he is clearly saying that SA (which used to just buy US weapons and not use them) should continue in its new-found warmongering role.

Perhaps Brzezinski is genuinely worried about continued unipolar expansion, and that is what makes him an exception, but his answer is to a problem of empire is more imperialism: a controlled US dominated delegation of power to subordinates: “the United States must take the lead in realigning the global power architecture”. Nevertheless Mike Whitney seized on Brzezinski’s article with glee at the arch-imperialist giving up on empire, and I think he represents a broader tendency to want to see the empire as crumbling. But even if one imperialist did give up on empire, it isn’t much to get excited about it. Moreover, if “giving up on empire” comes in the form of saying that the US should create an new New-World-Order, then I would hate to see what expansionism looks like.

Besides all of that, none of this is new for Brzezinski, and a veteran like Mike Whitney should have remembered that this echoes Brzezinski’s stance from 2006, especially since Whitney quoted him in 2007: “American power may be greater in 2006 than in 1991, (but) the country’s capacity to mobilize, inspire, point in a shared direction and thus shape global realities has significantly declined. Fifteen years after its coronation as global leader, America is becoming a fearful and lonely democracy in a politically antagonistic world.” In fact Brzezinski had much the same stance in 2000 when he published The Geostrategic Triad advocating “The progressive inclusion of Russia in the expanding Transatlantic”. He wanted the US to rule in conjunction with partners dominated by it. The details in his latest article are different (China promoted, Europe demoted, Russia matured), but the essence is the same, a unilateral imperialism that calls itself multilateral and pretends to be pragmatic by being thoroughly overtly repugnant in the name of realism.Having seen many excited tweets about Brzezinski’s putative turn against empire, I think it is a good case study on which to end. It shows how we fool ourselves, seeking the easiest signs of hope and progress when the outlook is actually daunting and scary. We cannot see what lies ahead. We could be on the cusp of something great or something horrific or a long hard slow battle which we might not win. At the moment we have little control over such things. Any attempt to take a shortcut because of some will-o-the-wisp is counterproductive. We have been dealt a crappy hand, but that is what we have to live with because the masses are unreachable and will remain so until dissidents can offer a coherent comprehensive alternative to empire. That is why Srnicek was correct in his prescription, even if his diagnosis was a bit off.

To paraphrase Gramsci, what we need is accuracy of the intellect and sufficiency of the will, in that order.

US Wars are for Empire, Not for Profit

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Yemen is being destroyed. A US-backed “Saudi Coalition” has been bombing and shelling Yemen for 16 months. The UN puts the civilian death toll at 3700, but (aside from the question of why combatants’ lives apparently only count if they are Western soldiers) this probably vastly under-represents the death toll by both direct violence and by the indirect effects of the war. Most of the country has no reliable access to clean water and people, particularly young children, are dying of disease and deprivation.

On August the 22^nd, two eminent commentators gave interviews on Yemen. Harper’s magazine editor Andrew Cockburn (author of a book on drone assassinations called Kill Chain) was interviewed on Democracy Now! Later in the day Medea Benjamin (prominent activist co-founder of Code Pink and also author of a book on Drone Warfare) was interviewed on KPFA’s Flashpoints.

Cockburn and Benjamin were in complete agreement about two very important facts. This first is that this is a US war. As Cockburn wrote in a Harper’s piece:

Thousands of civilians – no one knows how many – have been killed or wounded. Along with the bombing, the Saudis have enforced a blockade, cutting off supplies of food, fuel, and medicine. A year and a half into the war, the health system has largely broken down, and much of the country is on the brink of starvation.

This rain of destruction was made possible by the material and moral support of the United States, which supplied most of the bombers, bombs, and missiles required for the aerial onslaught. (Admittedly, the United Kingdom, France, and other NATO arms exporters eagerly did their bit.)

The second important fact is that Saudi violence is is targeted against civilians and civilian infrastructure. To quote Cockburn again: “They’ve destroyed most of the health system. They destroyed schools. Human Rights Watch did an excellent report pointing out that they’ve attacked—consistently attacked economic targets having nothing to do with any kind of war effort, but like potato chip factories, water bottling factories, power plants. It’s an effort to destroy Yemen. And … we are part of that. This is our war, and it’s shameful.”

The type of warfare Cockburn is describing, systematic violence against a national group and systematic destruction of a nation-state, is exactly what was meant by Raphael Lemkin when he coined the term “genocide” (as you can read for yourself here) and it is clearly covered by the UN Convention against genocide which prohibits any intentional destruction “in whole or in part” of a national group by:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

I will return to the significance of the concept of genocide in due course, but there is a third very significant thing on which Benjamin and Cockburn agree, and that is that the US motive in participating is to make money. In response to Kevin Pina’s opening question as to why the US is involved, Benjamin answered: “That’s a pretty simple one: money; greed; US weapons industries. The Saudis have become the number 1 purchaser of US weapons.” In this case, however, I must vehemently disagree with Benjamin and Cockburn (and on this subject it often feels like I’m disagreeing with the entire Western world). Blaming greed, or the power of profit, is a dangerous delusion. If opposition to permanent warfare continues to be dominated by this trope then we will never be able to end these ongoing massacres. Nor, for that matter, will we be able to halt the war on the domestic front – the intrinsically linked increase in militarisation, surveillance, and state violence (actual and potential) that is the other side of the permanent warfare coin.

There are many things that make me angry about the wide-held belief that US foreign policy is shaped by the profit motive. It is facile; it is intellectually cowardly; it is self-defeating; it is chauvinistic (or more specifically Usacentric) and thus unavoidably racist; and it is embarrassingly credulous. Nicholas J S Davies recently published an excellent article on the “normalisation of deviance” which causes US foreign policy elites to embrace a worldview of vast cognitive dissonances, in which realities of illegal and inhumane US practices are subsumed (and thus made possible) in the oceanic assumption of fundamental existential US benevolence, benevolence of US purposes, and benevolence of US intents. My contention is that Benjamin, Cockburn, and others I shall name are part of a constrained and disciplined dialectic of opposition that condemns the individual dissonant actions but actually accommodates and reinforces the US exceptionalist worldview that creates the “normalisation of deviance”.

There are two things that are very crucial to understand. One is that the US exceptionalist worldview is hegemonic throughout the West and, to a lesser extent, globally. What this means is that when judging the actions of the US government we project our own self-image onto imagined or real agents (such as the US President). We assume that the motives behind their actions are sane and rational and not malevolent in intent (unlike those of demonised enemy leaders who are often assumed to be acting out of irrational or diabolical intent). That is not to say that the claim is that US foreign policy is rational, but rather that irrationality is created by the system, while US leaders are personalised as rational beings who mean well in exactly the way that enemies of the West are personalised as irrational and/or malevolent in intent.

The second thing to understand is that without the widespread “normalisation of deviance” US military interventions would be impossible. Many US personnel would not follow the flagrantly illegal orders which they currently enact without a second thought. Other countries would not continue to cooperate with the US except when necessary and they would make war crimes prosecutions an unsurpassed priority of public and private diplomacy.

The idea that “war is a racket” and that wars are fought to line the pockets of profiteers is part of a tradition that comes out of an ideological consensus that is so widespread as to be nearly invisible. This is a materialist consensus between Marxists, liberals, conservatives, and others which embraces economic determinism (meaning roughly that economics shape society rather than society shapes economics). Note that Marxists often reject economic determinism as merely “vulgar Marxism”, but the fact remains that the very terminology of Marxism, much of which is used by non-Marxists, ensures that they remain shackled to that basic position. Free-market liberals, conservatives, neoliberals, and libertarians are ultimately just as tied to economic determinism, not least because they embrace the notion of capitalism which (as we tend to forget) comes from Marx. The point about this materialist consensus is that creates a common language in which people can intelligibly argue about the fine details of a fundamentally nonsensical construct. Disputants on both sides find that the path of least resistance lies in affirming the underlying orthodoxy and working with that, and the prefabricated arguments that come with it. The fatal flaw is that dissent becomes limited and impotent to affect change.

People who cite the military-industrial complex and profiteering as being a cause of US foreign policy often seem to be rather smug with what seem to me to be an unjustified sense of bravery and insight. I think people find it satisfying because they have the sensation of having pierced a veil, or having clambered over the thorny hedge that surrounds the a meadow of classroom platitudes. Such people, presumably, feel good about themselves for being clever. They will generally only be challenged by people who still cling to an even less tenable analysis so they need never interrogate these beliefs.

There is also a certain calculus of dissent. If you reject the mainstream view in the most obvious and easy fashion, you can be sure that you will have a cohort of like-minded semi-dissidents. However, if you then question and reject the easy critique, you will most likely find yourself isolated and deprived of the common language and shortcuts shared between the mainstream and semi-dissenting viewpoint. Usually someone will be quite young when they reject idealistic notions of politics and embrace a sense of amoral economic determinism and human greed or self-interest as driving forces behind the exercise of power. Once they have that conviction it will be a foundation on which rests all of their political analysis that they develop through life and thus it becomes an ingrained unexamined habit of thought.

However, when it comes to war, the centrality of profit/profiteering becomes a big problem. There are some exceptional circumstances, such as the interests of US financiers in World War I, in which powerful individuals may have a strong profit-motive that leads them to agitate for war. On the whole, however, wars do not create wealth, they destroy wealth. Some interests may profit, but fighting wars will reduce overall profits (except in as much as they may allow an upward redistribution of wealth through the disbursement of tax money and government bond money (which is the tax money of future generations)).

In the US context people may mistakenly believe that they have a more robust analysis than “war is a racket” because they can cite the existence of the military-industrial complex. The problem with that is that is presumes that the military-industrial complex just created itself. On Waatea 5^th Estate, for example, Henry Rollins opened an interview by explaining the whole thrust of US politics since Reagan as being caused by the needs of the military-industrial-complex and the prison-industrial-complex. In fairness, he did go on to show that he understood the prison-industrial-complex to be a dynamic mechanism (situated in history) for reproducing the racialised “caste” system that subjugates African Americans. However, he shows no such insight into the military-industrial complex, though its historical roots are, if anything, more strikingly functional than those of the prison-industrial complex. The prison-industrial complex exists to maintain a domestic social order through violent subjugation and the military-industrial complex exists to maintain imperial hegemony and an international social order through even greater violence and subjugation.

The term “military-industrial complex” was coined by Dwight Eisenhower at the end of 8 years in the White House. The forerunners of the complex can be seen in the British Empire. Thus, in trying to diagnose the British Empire at the end of the 19^th century, John A. Hobson noted that the Empire was an economic drain, but that it benefited “certain sectional interests”. He specified that these interests were the finance sector plus “the shipbuilding, boiler-making, and gun and ammunition making trades”. In those days of British naval supremacy shipbuilding and boiler-making were the equivalent of the aerospace industry in the US today. Hobson, like today’s aficionados of the military-industrial complex, treated the whole thing as if it were some sort of scam – an unfair and vastly disproportionate way of fleecing the British people and the colonies. But the disproportionality itself showed that profit could not be a driving factor. Why, after all, would wealthy landowners and traders sacrifice their own wealth, as Hobson claimed, for sectional interests? If those interests had taken control of policy, why and how?

The key to understanding this “empire complex”, as I will call it, is that these “certain sectional interests” were, alongside the military and some other parts of the British state structure, the governing structures of the Empire (and the informal empire). This rose from a deliberate blurring of the lines between state and private power. For example, in Century of War F. William Engdahl writes of 3 “pillars of the British Empire” (finance, shipping and control of natural resources) and gives this example of interpenetration between private interests, government and British intelligence:

Britain modelled its post-Waterloo empire on an extremely sophisticated marriage between top bankers and financiers of the City of London, Government cabinet ministers, heads of key industrial companies deemed strategic to the national interest, and the heads of the espionage services.

Representative of this arrangement was City of London merchant banking scion, Sir Charles Jocelyn Hambro, who sat as a director of the Bank of England from 1928 until his death in 1963. During the Second World War, Hambro was Executive Chief of British secret intelligence’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the Government’s Ministry of Economic Warfare, which ran war-time economic warfare against Germany, and trained the entire leadership of what was to become the postwar American Central Intelligence Agency and intelligence elite, including William Casey, Charles Kindelberger, Walt Rostow and Robert Roosa, later Kennedy Treasury Deputy Secretary and partner of Wall Street’s elite Brown Brothers, Harriman.

The US military-industrial complex took things further than its British forerunner. When Eisenhower gave his famous warning about the “military-industrial complex” he was referring to something with long historical roots and antecedents, but nevertheless he was referring to something new; something only a decade old. In earlier drafts of Eisenhower’s farewell address it was referred to as the “military-industrial-Congressional complex”. In retrospect it was unfortunate that the word “Congressional” was omitted, because he nature of Congressional involvement shows a level of premeditated planning. Military contracts were distributed to every possible Congressional district so that every representative would be vulnerable to losses of jobs and income in their district. Politicians were being deliberately tied to the complex, so that it would be possible to either direct or replace any who spoke out against the interests of the complex. This was all happening at the time when NSC-68 became policy, creating what we know as the Cold War.

NSC-68 was a policy document signed by President Truman in 1950. It halted the post-WWII demobilisation of the USA and put the country on a permanent wartime footing. Though top secret, the 58 page document is stuffed full of propaganda that painted a fictitious picture of the USSR as a military threat to the USA. It states: “The Kremlin regards the United States as the only major threat to the conflict between idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin … and the exclusive possession of atomic weapons by the two protagonists. The idea of freedom, moreover, is peculiarly and intolerably subversive of the idea of slavery. But the converse is not true. The implacable purpose of the slave state to eliminate the challenge of freedom has placed the two great powers at opposite poles. It is this fact which gives the present polarization of power the quality of crisis.” NSC-68 is full of fake figures and outright lies about Soviet capabilities. The document was probably not intended to persuade lawmakers and administrators as much as it was to give them a Party-line and talking points. These were words, phrases and arguments that could sell a new brand of USA to the people living in the USA itself and the strongest dissenting voices were soon silenced by McCarthyism.

Military spending tripled in the three years after NSC-68. An armistice was signed in Korea in 1953, but the military spending remained at wartime levels, and has never significantly decreased since.

The military-industrial complex was purposefully given a lever to control Congress and this tells us something about the intentionality of its creation, but I must point out that the complex has other levers to pull. Like other big industries which rely on government contracts and/or a lucrative legislative and policy environment, the private interests in the complex spend vast amounts on lobbying and campaign donations. This alone gives them “unwarranted influence” far in excess of what Eisenhower might have envisaged (at least in the fact that that influence is ineradicable by any means short of revolution). It gets even worse, however, because elected officials in the US are heavy investors in weapons and aerospace, and House and Senate members are not prohibited from insider trading. Between 2004 and 2009 19 of 28 members of the Senate Armed Services committee held stock in companies to which they could award contracts. They are only: “precluded … from taking official actions that could boost their personal wealth if they are the sole beneficiaries.”

The circle of venality tying politicians to the military-industrial complex works through bonds of greed and self-interest, but it has nothing to do with the profit mechanisms of “capitalism” as it is usually conceived. The complex was partly the product of historical processes shaped by power relations, but more importantly it was a conscious artifice. At the same time that food companies were developing the “TV Dinner”, US political elites created a TV Dinner military hegemony which went with a new TV Dinner empire. They pulled back the foil on their instant empire by announcing the doctrine of Cold War “containment”. Modelled on the 19^th century “Monroe Doctrine”, by which the US gave itself the right to intervene in any Western hemisphere country, “containment” meant that any time the US had the power and desire to intervene they would simply claim that there was a Communist threat.

The military-industrial complex was created to tie government to the project of empire, however it did not remain static once created. Because this is an empire, success within the system is not determined by market forces, as much as market forces are twisted, wrangled and beaten into a shape that feeds the semi-private arms of imperial power. They are profitable, but that is incidental.

Both the military-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex are subsumed within a greater empire complex. This model of government corruption (campaign financing, lobbying, revolving door appointments, intellectual property legislation, no-bid contracts, cost-plus contracts, bail-outs, etc.) creates a whole class of industries that are co-dependent with government. These are not random concerns, they are tied together by a shared characteristic. Such industries include arms; aerospace; finance; agribusiness; pharmaceuticals; health; oil and energy; infrastructure; media and communications; and security/policing/prisons/mercenaries. What ties them together is that whoever controls these things controls nations and peoples.

The imperial complex creates a situation where it becomes inevitable that the business of empire is empire, and nothing else unless it is in the service of empire. The government of the USA is so integral to the empire complex that, in foreign policy, it is purely devoted to the extension and maintenance of imperial power. In fact, the model of governance imposed on the empire by the public-private branches of the empire complex, widely known as “neoliberal”, increasingly provides the model of domestic governance. The US is colonising itself. The empire complex has evolved to control, not to build, nurture or protect. Like empires of the past, it has become the tool of a narrow elite whose interests are not truly tied to the motherland any more tightly than they are to the colonies.

This brings me back to the claim that the US is behind the bombing in Yemen because it feed the profits of the military-industrial complex. The claim is 100% wrong. None of this is for profit. It was a system intentionally constructed to maintain and extend imperial hegemony. It’s subsequent evolution has not in any way made it capitalistic, but has alarmingly broadened and deepened the governance structures.

There is an underlying assumption by Cockburn, Benjamin and other such critics of US foreign policy that the money factor has perverted foreign policy from its true course. This implies that uncorrupted by money (and nefarious foreigners) US foreign policy would revert to being a largely benevolent practice directed by concern with national security, the national interest, and the prosperity of the homeland. The frustrating thing about this is that it is a complete refusal to simply attempt to analyse an empire (which many critics US foreign policy gladly admit that it is) as an empire. It is sad that trenchant critics of wars (and the bloodthirsty elites who wage them) are stuck with such a childish mentality. They evince a faith that the proper purpose of the system itself is akin to that of a parent (whether loving or stern) and that Dad just needs to sober up from the intoxication of money.

Most critics of US foreign policy assume that it is a dysfunctional branch of nation-state politics, rather than even entertaining the idea that it might be a very rational and functional arm of imperial politics. For example, they assume that provoking terrorism against US interests and people is a failure of policy, but there are no concrete reasons for believing this. In contrast, one can argue that the US provokes terrorism on purpose in order to justify foreign interventions and erosions of civil liberties. That is a reasoned position that explains US actions with a clear motive. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with it, but let us consider conventional assumption that provoking terrorism is a mistake. In that case the contention is that an observed repeated pattern of behaviour (the various violent provocations such as invasions, bombings, torture, kidnappings) is a continual series of errors due to systemic dysfunction. To support this you must create a complex analytical apparatus showing that some essentialist cultural characteristics (a blend of ignorance, arrogance, and the desire to do good) cause US officials and personnel to keep repeating the same mistakes and never learn their lesson. All of this, a massive offence against the principle of parsimony, rests on the assumption that there can be no intent to foment terrorism because those same officials and personnel are collectively inclined to protect Usanians and US interests. This all falls down though, in the very obvious fact that the US government only protects US citizens when forced to. In the policies environment, public health, health, economy, trade, infrastructure, civil defence and (let us not forget) foreign intervention the US government shows that it will happily sacrifice the lives of its citizens. Terrorism deaths are a drop in the bucket compared to those caused by the insufficient healthcare in the US. Moreover, if you pre-ordain that non-interventionism and demilitarisation are not allowable foreign policy options, then you will not allow a policy that keeps people safe from terrorism. In practical terms that is a conspiracy to foment and harness terrorism for foreign interventions because the results are foreseeable and unavoidable.

Accompanying the infuriating belief that the natural state of Western governance is enlightened self-interest is the more repugnant and hypocritical belief that non-Western foreigners act in ways that need no explanation other than their hatred, brutality, and irrational violence. We endless ask ourselves where the US went “wrong” over various acts of mass violence, but no one feels the need to agonise about what part of the Qatari national character causes them to keep making the “mistake” of thinking they can bomb terrorism out of existence. The only analysis you need put forward is that they hate Iran, or hate Shi’a or (if you are really sophisticated) hate republicanism, then there is not need to explain why this translates into bombing or invasions or torture or any form of violence. When non-Westerners commit such acts it is treated as no more remarkable than the sun rising.

When Saudi Arabia bombs Yemen with US weapons, few entertain the notion that the Saudi Arabia might be acting as a US proxy, even though the US must approve enough to keep supplying the bombs. Instead we have a frankly racist discourse that suggests that Saudi Arabia is by some means dragging the US into a conflict in contravention of US interests. This whole “tail-wags-dog” trope really pisses me off. The US has been using the supposed rebelliousness and truculence of its puppets as an excuse for its actions going at least as far back as Syngman Rhee, the dictator they installed in South Korea after WWII. Everywhere that they possibly can, the US installs leaders who are unpopular enough with their own people that they are dependent on the US military to stay in power. That is how you run an empire. Sometimes it is in the US interest that such people make a show of anti-imperialist defiance, but when they really are defiant they tend to find themselves exiled, dead or imprisoned in fairly short order.

In the case of Saudi Arabia, an oligarchy of royals rules in defiance of the public will and the public interest. That is the classic recipe for a client regime, and probably differs little from a standard Roman client regime 2000 years ago. Iraqi-American analyst BJ Sabri has been posting a multi-part analysis of Saudi subjugation for over some months and argues that Saudi dependency is very deep, perhaps unusually so. In Part 2 of the series Sabri wrote:

On one side, we have the Saudi deference to the United States. I view this deference as follows: (1) confluence and reciprocal opportunism of two different but oppressive ideologies —Wahhabism and imperialism; (2) oil and petrodollars, and (3) a long history of secret deals—since the day Franklin D. Roosevelt met Abdul Aziz Al Saud in 1945. On the other, we have a supremacist superpower that views Al Saud as no more than a backward tribal bunch whose primary function is providing special services to the United States. These include cheap oil, buying US weapons, investing oil money in the US capitalistic system, supporting US hegemonic quest, buying US national debt, and bankrolling its covert operations and wars.

To drive the point, I argue that the combination between lack of means, lack of resistance, and other forms of dependence (US political and public relations support, for example) has created a situation of dependency. It incrementally forced the Saudi regime into a mental subordination to the United States similar to an occupied mentality.

Of course, others will tell you that the US must be acting at the behest of Saudi Arabia because they have no motive of their own. As Cockburn reports, “no one that I talked to in Washington suggested that the war was in any way necessary to our national security. The best answer I got came from Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman from California who has been one of the few public officials to speak out about the devastation we were enabling far away. ‘Honestly,’ he told me, ‘I think it’s because Saudi Arabia asked.’”

When people like Cockburn make reference to “our national security” as if it were a factor in US military interventions I have to check that I haven’t been whisked to a parallel dimension. When has US national security ever been a consideration in a US decision to attack another country? This is the most interventionist state in the history of humanity and from an historical perspective the only differentiation in terms of national security is whether the US government puts a lot of effort into lying about having a national security interest (e.g. Viet Nam, Cambodia, Korea, Iraq); puts on a minimal or pathetic show (e.g. Grenada, Laos, Syria, Libya); or doesn’t really bother with the pretence at all (e.g. Haiti, Somalia, Panama).

Implying that a given US military intervention is aberrant because not does not serve national security is gross intellectual cowardice. It is a way of critiquing US policy without ever suggesting that the US might itself be worthy of criticism. Notions of exceptionalism are not challenged but rather are enforced by the implication that each act of mass violence is a departure from an unspoken norm. These are criticisms that sanitise and conceal US agency and intentionality by using the equivalent of the passive voice.

Gareth Porter is a fine critic of US policy when it comes to challenging the lies of officials who are gunning for war. He has written extensively to debunk the nuclear scare tactics used by US officials to threaten war against Iran and to impose cruel sanctions. But Porter is also an exponent of this passive voice historiography. His 2005 book Perils of Dominance documented the fact that the US had an unassailable strategic hegemony and lied to create the impression that the USSR was a threat to national security. It is a very useful book (although I would dispute his exculpation of Lyndon Johnson), but the way Porter frames facts, indeed the central “thesis” of the book, is that not having any genuinely security fears caused the US to invade Viet Nam. It is rather like framing a story of spousal abuse by focussing on the fact that the perpetrator was induced to beat the victim because of a large difference in size and strength.

The reason I bring Porter up is because in a recent interview with Lee Camp he said we need to go beyond the military-industrial complex and look at the “national-security complex” and the “permanent war state”. At first glance you might think that he and I were on the same wavelength, but despite admitting to long years of “committing the liberal error of opposing the war, but not the system”, he refuses to relinquish his central delusion. He reprises the same analytical framework that was very common after the US withdrew from Viet Nam under titles like Quagmire Theory or Stalemate Theory. The idea is that bureaucratic systems running on their own logic become the determinants of foreign policy. This allows people like Arthur Schlesinger (himself an official under Kennedy) to state that the war in Indochina was “a tragedy without victims” and talk of “the politics of inadvertence”. This apologism can be seen in book titles on US war that emphasise benign intent or lack of agency such as Nobody Wanted War, or the book by one of the US officials who help destroy Iraq whose lame excuse is We Meant Well.

Discussing Syria (though it could just as well be Yemen) Porter says US actions point to “the total inanity and irrationality of US policy”. This is the critique of someone who wants to go on record as opposing US warmongering but wants the least possible challenges and repercussions for doing so. It resonates easily with people, but it simply does not hold up to any intellectual examination. US aggressions, as Porter admits, fit a pattern of behaviour, so are they irrational? Irrational would imply self-defeating, but the US has been destroying countries, Balkanising them, destabilising them, killing and impoverishing in many places. They have created an ever-lengthening string of failed or near-failed states in actions so momentous that they have created the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. Why would irrationality be so consistent and have such a strong impact?

I do not have the time and space here to detail the intrinsic links between genocide and imperialism here, but let us not be unnecessarily stupid and deny that empires profit from Balkanising, partitioning and destroying countries that are strategically inconvenient. That is well established as part of history, and there is no reason at all to think that the US should be any different. The US empire, despite its internally generated weakness and contradictions, goes from strength to strength in foreign policy. The USSR is gone and NATO is on Russia’s border. China is besieged by the “Pacific pivot” and the TPP. Independent nationalist regimes that reject the neoliberal “Washington Consensus” (which is the surrender of economic sovereignty to the US empire) have been picked off one by one. In global terms the US has never been more powerful.

How many times do we need to see the same intentional destruction of a country and its people by the US before we call it what it is – genocide. This is intentional destruction of “nations and peoples” and it is exactly what the term genocide was coined to describe.

The US empire is hollowing itself out. As it fails internally it will be ever more driven to impose control globally. As the 2016 Presidential campaign enters its crucial stage, we are entering the most dangerous period of history since the Cold War. We cannot afford to cling to delusions. We need to oppose US wars; evict US military bases; end mass surveillance and intelligence co-operation; reject neoliberalism and pro-corporate trade deals; and we need to reject the propaganda and discourse of US exceptionalism and apologism. When I say “we”, I mean every single person on the planet (including people in the US itself). The empire has to be beaten back on all fronts, because otherwise there are two horrific options: either it collapses, or worse still it doesn’t.

It is not “Ridiculous” to Reject Hillary, Part 2: Bride of the Monster

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In Part 1 of this article I argued that the 2016 US presidential race is the Alien vs. Predator election. The joke, which is at the expense of everyone on this planet, is that they are both aliens and both predators. Many ordinary people understand the situation perfectly well. A South Carolina real estate billboard shows Trump and Clinton and reads: “Moving to Canada? We can sell your home.” Even a month ago you could read this Onionesque headline at The Hill: “Poll: 13 percent prefer meteor hitting earth over Clinton, Trump”. It is even heard “out of the mouths of babes”. My 11 year-old daughter and her friend just told me a joke they heard in school:

Q: Clinton and Trump are together in a plane crash, who survives?

A: America.

Many ordinary US folks get it. They understand. Some may grit their teeth and vote for Clinton, but most people do not have positive feelings about her. A small number of others feel the same about Trump and argue that he is actually the lesser evil. I will return to that subject later.

Clinton and Trump are much more similar to each other than they are to any ordinary mortals. The Clintons are estimated to be worth $110 million in wealth. Trump is clearly also obscenely rich (even if it is partly delusional). It is widely known that Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton are friends, but Bill and Donald are much closer than people think. In 2012 Clinton said of Trump: “I like him. And I love playing golf with him,” and Trump called Clinton “a really good guy”.

The other link between Bill and Donald is their mutual friend, the paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. It is very important, if indirect, evidence that Clinton and Trump inhabit an elite sociopathic world where ordinary people’s lives are insignificant and expendable. People might think I am making the following stuff up, so I will simply quote from named news sources:

Daily Wire: “Both presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton have ties to convicted pedophile and Democratic donor, billionaire Jeffery Epstein and ‘Sex Slave Island.’”

Fox: “Former President Bill Clinton was a much more frequent flyer on a registered sex offender’s infamous jet than previously reported, with flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the “Lolita Express” — even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail for at least five of the flights, according to records obtained by FoxNews.com.

…The tricked-out jet earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls…”

New York magazine: “’I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,’ Trump booms from a speakerphone. ‘He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.’” [This is from 2002. The investigation leading to Epstein’s conviction for child-sex offences began 3 years later.]

V ICE: “In 2010, Epstein pled the Fifth when asked by a lawyer representing one of Epstein’s victims about his relationship with Trump: ….
Q. Have you ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18?
A: Though I’d like to answer that question, at least today I’m going to have to assert my Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendment rights, sir.”

Epstein was also allegedly involved as the procurer of the 13 year-old who was allegedly raped by Trump in Epstein’s apartment. As both Lisa Bloom and Drew Salisbury point out, these are not accusations that can be dismissed out of hand.

Hillary Clinton cannot wash her hands of Bill’s record of sexual violence, in part because her denials have helped him escape the consequences. Particularly damaging is Juanita Broaddrick’s belief that Hillary tried to ensure her silence after Bill almost certainly raped Broaddrick in 1978. The National Review reports: “Juanita Broaddrick’s claim was supported by not one but five witnesses and a host of circumstantial (though no physical) evidence.” The allegation seems difficult to deny because Broaddrick never voluntarily came forward. Rather, she was served with a subpoena and then taped without her knowledge after years of rumours. Hillary’s approach to this has been to brazen it out in a frankly Trumpian show of denial: “On December 3, a couple of weeks after Clinton tweeted, ‘Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported, ‘a woman at an event in Hooksett, New Hampshire, asked, ‘Secretary Clinton, you recently came out to say that all rape victims should be believed. But would you say that Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones be believed as well?’ Clinton replied, ‘Well, I would say that everyone should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence.’ The audience applauded.”

These rape allegations are symptomatic of an aristocratic system in which Marie Antoinette would feel at home. Epstein, for example, received a secret “sweetheart” non-prosecution deal from the FBI and only served 13 months. There is no equality under the law and many ordinary people are becoming acutely conscious of the divide between Us and Them.

A good argument can be made that voting for Trump or Clinton is essentially exactly the same thing. They are friends, peers, comrades and co-conspirators. Trump puts on a good show of dirty negative campaigning, but remember that this guy really does come from the entertainment world and even from pro-wrestling. His CV includes “body-slamming, beating and shaving” WWE owner Vince McMahon, and anyone who doesn’t at least entertain some doubts about the sincerity of his campaigning trash-talk is simply refusing to see what is in front of them. It is possible that this invective is just his natural way of being, but if that is true then he isn’t actually sincere in anything he does. The only question is whether he remains friends with the Clintons after this campaign.

We have now reached a point where both of these super-rich aristos are campaigning for the votes of the working class. Trump knows that he gets far more votes campaigning against trade liberalisation than he does by pushing xenophobia, and it was a key component of his recent speech in Detroit (though he did promise jobs to “titties like… Detroit” instead of “cities”). But he mixed “fiscal conservative” tax-cut rhetoric with anti-trade-deal rhetoric in a way that was unconvincing. Trump runs as an outsider and a maverick, but so has every Republican candidate since 1996. He decries Clinton as a creature of Wall St., but his own economic team includes several billionaires including financier John Paulson.

In essence Trump and Clinton also have identical stances on the TPP, a point that should give as much pause to Clinton supporters as to Trump supporters. Tim Kaine, who went against most Senate Democrats in support of TPP “fast-track” authority and defended the decision hours before being nominated as VP candidate, stands out because his flip-flop objections to the TPP (a transparent ploy to dilute the left-wing anger against his nomination) differ sharply from Trump and Clinton in that they reference unfairness in practical, ethical, and moral terms. Clinton’s TPP stance agrees with Trump’s and his implication that the problem with the TPP is that US negotiators were outsmarted and outmanoeuvred by us cunning foreigners with our underhanded slyness. Indeed, while some of us here in Aotearoa are wondering why our government is signing us up to a pact which will hurt and alienate our biggest trading partner (China), Trump is saying that the TPP “was designed for China to come in, as they always do, through the back door and totally take advantage of everyone.” The media don’t particularly care to highlight the fact, but Clinton has stuck to the same risible line: “We can not let rules of origin allow China — or anyone else, but principally China — to go around trade agreements. It’s one of the reasons why I oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership because when I saw what was in it, it was clear to me there were too many loopholes, too many opportunities for folks to be taken advantage of.”

Understanding the dynamics of these elections, and the ramifications of taking one stance or another, cannot be reduced to “candidate X says they support A and I support A, therefore I support X”, but our journalists and pundits are simply not capable of dealing with the reality of the politics we have to live with.

Broadcaster Paul Jay (who would much prefer Clinton as POTUS than Trump) put his finger on something when he observed that people should choose the lesser evil but “the problem is… they don’t call them the ‘lesser evil’; they start saying good things about them.”

Trump and Clinton are both vicious parasitic lifeforms too loathsome for people to bear in ordinary circumstances, but the people’s instincts are blunted and confuted by a journalistic and academic culture that gets stuck in half-think. Half-think, I should explain, is the process by which some people take the surface appearance of things and then apply fatuous received wisdom. Half-thinkers apply pre-fabricated generalities to any situation in order to make all things conform to an established ideology of complacent authoritarianism. Thus, when the common plebeians of Pompeii became alarmed by a smoking mountain and shaking ground they were probably reassured by one of their social betters: “Well actually, according the Greek authorities on such phenomena, belching is a healthy response for the human body and if the earth itself should belch it is surely a good omen. Quod erat demonstrandaaaaaaaah!”

Those who use half-think gain a sense of superior education and intellect, having gone past the mere vulgar issues of “plain fact” and “common sense”. However, this is no process of interrogation in which the half-thinker delves beneath the surface. It is an unthinking response that can be arrived at instantaneously, or sheltered behind over a long period. The half-thinker simply grabs onto any generality which they can pass off as being an educated insight in order to defend the status quo. That is to say that half-think is used to defend racism, inequality, war, state violence and so forth. It is fundamentally conservative in nature and often revolves around defending the indefensible because it is natural, unavoidable, part of human nature, or what anyone would expect of any “red-blooded male”.

I mention all of this because in times of political and social decadence and dysfunction, half-thinkers will always do their best to convince people that there is “nothing to see here”. Chris Trotter, who readers may remember from Part 1, has been employing the phrase politics is the “art of the possible” as a kind of snobby way of blocking his ears and going “lalalalala I’m not listening, I’m not listening lalalalala”. On one hand he is using a commonplace generality to assert something that he could never safely assert in specific reference to Clinton herself, and on the other hand, in doing so, he is performing the standard half-think trick of making remarkable things unremarkable.

I do agree with the half-thinkers on one thing, because they believe that there is nothing new under the sun. Where I differ from the half-thinkers is that for them this means: Western liberalism is the acme of civilisation; the people in charge are there for a reason; the police are doing their best in a difficult situation; North Korea is a rogue nation; ordinary people are dangerously stupid; Putin is a villain; our politicians mean well; you have to have a seat at the table to enact real change.

Half-thinkers like Trotter never examine their assumptions, they just use safety in numbers to avoid being challenged. They use their compatibility with power to keep real intellectuals at the margins.

In contrast to Trotter, Luciana Bohne, compares Clinton to Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Agatha: “the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth.” She casts Trump as Charybdis, “a huge bladder of a creature whose face was all mouth and whose arms and legs were flippers”, and Clinton as the Basilisk. “I’m raving, you say? This is the Age of Empire, and empire breeds monsters.”

Bohne’s imagery is extravagant because her eyes are open and the times demand it. Man-eating giants are striding the land stuffing screaming peasants in their maw by the handful, like so many jelly-babies, and people like Trotter are saying: “What giants? I can only see windmills and people have always been crunched up in windmill accidents. It is nothing new. Yelling about it will only cause more windmill deaths.”

Trotter wants us to be practical, but is his business-as-usual, vote-for-the-lesser-evil-then-appeal-to-her-progressive-principles actually practical? Or is it based on Panzaist delusions that turn a bloodthirsty mass-muderer into a well-meaning advocate of the rights of children? To counter cliché with cliché, is supporting Clinton the “art of the possible” or is it sticking your head in the sand?

Trotter doesn’t simply rely on the threat of Trump to argue that the US electorate should settle for Hillary, he also claims “This was the battle that Bernie won. As he told the Convention: ‘This is the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party!’ Yes, he endorsed Hillary, but in doing so he took care to bind her to that progressive platform with chains of rhetorical steel.”

In reality the platform is fatally flawed. Cornel West abstained from passing the platform because it did not oppose the TPP, acknowledge the occupation of Palestine as an occupation, or call for universal healthcare: “I have no other moral option”, he explained. Worse still, by stating “we will not hesitate to take military action if Iran violates the agreement”, the platform is advocating illegal aggression. The US has no right to take military action if Iran breaks its nuclear deal. Moreover the threat of a war with Iran horrifies most of the US public, particularly Democrats, so slipping a phrase like that in without mass protest shows how US exceptionalism and these “lesser evil” oligarchic politics create a massive and dangerous cognitive dissonance.

Even if the platform did have stronger and less ambiguous commitments, it is still nothing more than rhetoric. In the US system, there is no comeback for an administration or a caucus that does not abide by a platform. The platform means nothing. Obama entered his first term with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress so the 2008 Democratic platform should have been more binding than ever, right? Here are some of my favourite excerpts from that 2008 platform so you can judge for yourself:

* “We believe that the people of Puerto Rico have the right to the political status of their choice, obtained through a fair, neutral, and democratic process of self-determination. The White House and Congress will work with all groups in Puerto Rico to enable the question of Puerto Rico’s status to be resolved during the next four years.” [Under the Obama administration Puerto Rico has just been stripped even further of self-determination and been placed under similar governance to that which worked so well for Flint, Mi.]

* “We support equal rights to democratic self-government and congressional representation for the citizens of our nation’s capital.” [For the actual situation here is John Oliver’s rant]

* “We will close the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay,….” [No comment]

* “We support constitutional protections and judicial oversight on any surveillance program involving Americans.” [LOL]

* “Working together, we can cut poverty in half within ten years. We will provide all our children a world-class education, from early childhood through college.” [Data from Feb. 2015: “The official poverty rate is 14.5%, meaning 45.3 million people in the US live in poverty, up by over 8 million since 2008. An additional 97.3 million (33%) of people living in the United States are low-income, defined as incomes below twice the federal poverty line, or $47,700 for a family of four. Taken together, this means that 48% of the US population is poor or low income, 1 in every 2 people. More than 1 in 5 children in America (21.8%) are living under the official poverty line. Half of all children will be on food stamps before they turn 20, including 9 out of 10 African American children. ]

* “To renew American leadership in the world, we must first bring the Iraq war to a responsible end. … At the same time, we will provide generous assistance to Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons. We will launch a comprehensive regional and international diplomatic surge to help broker a lasting political settlement in Iraq, which is the only path to a sustainable peace. We will make clear that we seek no permanent bases in Iraq. We will encourage Iraq’s government to devote its oil revenues and budget surplus to reconstruction and development.” [The US just announced 400 more troops deploying to Iraq: “Last month, President Obama raised the “cap” on the number of ground troops in Iraq to 4,647. This cap has become something of a running joke, as the Pentagon has repeatedly admitted to having well more troops than that. Most recent estimates have over 6,000 US ground troops in Iraq already, before this new deployment.”]

The 2008 Democratic Party platform also promised to end nuclear weapons, whereas Obama has launched the biggest nuclear weapons programme since the Cold War. They promised to institute transparent government, but “transparency” and the FOIA system has become even more of a farce than under Bush II. Redactions are so commonplace and arbitrary that they release whole redacted pages that now have “redactions within redactions”, as if redacting something once is not enough any more.

So much for this year’s allegedly “progressive” platform, but we are still left with the major practical argument that supporting Clinton is necessary to stop Trump, even if she is not a desirable leader in her own accord. There are several important assumptions behind that which should be interrogated. One: can Trump win, and under what circumstances? Two: does supporting Clinton actually help stop Trump? Three: is Trump actually worse than Clinton? Four: balancing all these factors and more, what are the practical repercussions of supporting Clinton?

Like most people, I am frightened of what Trump might unleash on the world, but I have become much more relaxed on the specific subject of him winning the Presidency. All things being equal, Trump really doesn’t have a chance simply because this is a negative election (where the vote is decided on whom you most hate) and Trump alienates more people in swing states, while Clinton alienates people in populous safe Democrat states. In practical terms, as Rik Andino has pointed out, it is hard, if not impossible, to see a scenario in which Trump wins 50% of electoral college votes.

Since Clinton’s nomination, Trump is looking even less viable. In fact, with Clinton’s nomination it was as if a switch was thrown and suddenly the media that had previously made it seem that Trump could get away with murder, found his standard daily outrages now damaging and intolerable. Tellingly, it all began with him saying of Gazala Khan: “Maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me, but plenty of people have written that.” Suddenly this typical Trump comment was unacceptable, with news reports switching from telling people that Trump can say these things with impunity to running pompous features like this Guardian piece about how the dead “hero” Humayun Khan “could derail his campaign”.

Meanwhile, Trump has plummeted in the polls. Even previously safe Republican states , like Georgia, seem to be leaning towards Clinton. In Republican Arizona Clinton now leads in the polls. On the one hand this might seem to be expected in a state that is nearly 30% Hispanic, but on the other, Arizona has a history of supporting some extremely Trumpish policies including the notorious SB 1070 “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act”. This is widely felt to have encouraged racial profiling and was formally opposed by 11 other states, Mexico, large numbers of Obama administration officials and Obama himself, law enforcement heads, 68 national members of Congress, and dozens of human rights and civil liberties organisations. The state also banned successful Mexican-American studies programmes after Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal had been horrified to find that “they were portraying Ben Franklin as a racist”, and “they got a poster of Che Guevara.” Many books were banned from schools including important texts from James Baldwin, Isabelle Allende, and Howard Zinn along with Chicano writers that include some of the most important literary and scholarly figures in Arizona itself. They banned Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, and the novelist and professor Manuel Muñoz is banned in the school just across the street from where he lectures.

In Maricopa County, which is home to 4.2 million of Arizona’s 6.8 million population, SB 1070 was welcomed by 4 term “toughest Sheriff in America” Joe Arpaio. To call Arpaio controversial simply cannot do justice to his proven hatefulness, dishonesty, sadism, xenophobia (or crypto-racism), corruption and abuse of power. Arpaio is a Trump supporter who makes Trump himself seem like Mahatma Gandhi. I cannot detail his impressive record of lunacy, so I will take the unusual step of recommending this section of his Wikipedia page.

Arizonan’s have stuck with Arpaio through thick and thicker. They voted for a State Congress that banned hundreds of books from schools and a Senate that passed SB 1070. Yet they are turning away from Trump (perhaps they are also belatedly having qualms about their “tough” sheriff). It really doesn’t bode well for Trump’s bid for the White House.

There is also the question of how serious Trump is in his Presidential bid. From the beginning, on an escalator, his campaign has played out like a prolonged amateurish publicity stunt. A tax specialist who examined the possible reasons that Trump would continue to refuse to release his tax returns could only conclude: “Donald Trump will not publish his tax returns because he does not expect to be President, or at best has not internalized what becoming President actually entails. Trump’s tax return strategy is directed at a future in which he is not President, but is an even richer self-promoter.” More recently still, Representative André Carson (D-Ind.) claimed that Trump is “trying to sabotage himself to clear the way for President Clinton”: “It appears as if he knows he will not be the next President of the United States, so he’s trying to sabotage this thing because he’s not used to losing.”

Perhaps it is irrelevant whether Trump really wants to win or not. Trump is a threat and he has the potential to unleash violence upon the world, but it does not follow that supporting Clinton lessens that threat. As Kshama Sawant (a socialist city councillor from Seattle) suggested on Democracy Now!, if people to the left of Clinton give her their support out of fear, then they will drive masses of ordinary people into Trump’s camp. It is actually the politics of the lesser evil that have given us Trump. What is more Trump is not necessarily going anywhere.

If Trump is just playing a game, using extremist rhetoric to stampede people into the Clinton camp (like a sheepdog, but with rabies) then an electoral loss may or may not mean the end of Trump’s political career. If Trump is earnest, however, then everything we know about him suggests that he will not accept defeat in the way we have come to expect. Defeated major party Presidential candidates have a tendency to recede like clumps of rotting matter back into the roiling mire of party politics, thereafter surfacing occasionally or not at all. But Trump, if he is what he appears to be, will not accept defeat. He has repeatedly claimed in advance that the election will be rigged and one of his Republican Party supporters warned that there will be a “bloodbath” if he loses in November.

People are understandably concerned that Trump’s loaded language, such as his recent hint about “2nd amendment people” taking action, will inspire political violence, but let’s keep this in perspective: Trump may inspire some lone nutcases, but whoever is next President will be killing thousands of people with the US military.

The most tangible and certain fact about the Trump campaign is that his campaign is shifting the discourse of politics altogether. From that perspective it fits a long tradition of pushing rightwards, of increasing oversimplification, of increasing extremism, of increasing self-righteous chauvinism, and of decreasing empathy. It is a slow drift into what can best be described as a type of fascism. It is a one-way street, a ratchet system that can only go towards fascism and never away from it (though it may feature socially liberally aspects which are very different from historical fascism). The thing that makes this drift so certain and unremitting is the politics of the lesser evil. Democrat and Republican leaders have been playing Good Cop/Bad Cop since the Reagan years. The very logic of the lesser evil ensures that each new election cycle will see both greater and lesser evils being more evil than the last time around. We might worry about what Trump might hypothetically do if he takes office, but this is an effect that we know he is having. It is happening now and supporting Clinton only strengthens the shift towards a more encompassing and total fascism.

Not only does supporting Clinton empower Trump’s transformation of politics (bearing in mind that Trump and Clinton are merely the latest in a line of electoral double-acts), but some people see Trump as the lesser evil. Anthony Monteiro, for example, is an activist and African-American studies scholar linked to Black Agenda Report and Counterpunch: “His positions come as close to the working class as you’re going to get.” Talking to Don Debar and Glen Ford he says “he is to the left of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama….” He and others like him point out that Clinton is supported by the neoconservatives, Wall St., the military-industrial-complex, and appears much closer to overt plutocrats like the Koch brothers than Trump.

Those who see Trump as the lesser evil point out that Hillary Clinton is an undeniable war hawk, whilst Trump is an advocate of détente. Clinton has a p ublic and undenianble track record of advocating, supporting, and committing war crimes that is far more significant from any perspective (including a feminist perspective) than Trump’s overt misogyny and probable history as a rapist. But then again, Trump is a monster, so treating him as the lesser evil is no more sensible than treating Clinton as the lesser evil.

Listening to Anthony Monteiro talk about Trump is exactly like listening to apologists for Clinton. The polemic follows exactly the same formula for either: Find the positive things and avoid testing them to see of they actually make sense; point out how scary the opponent is; state that there really are good reasons to treat the nicer rhetoric as substantive (like “chains of rhetorical steel”); find some reason to say that unlike the opponent this particular very rich powerful establishment figure is actually on the side of the common people; don’t mention the long public record that shows your candidate is against the common people (but do mention the corresponding record of the opposing candidate); et cetera.

In the end it is impossible to support Clinton or Trump in good conscience and that in itself is a practical consideration. Trump supporters should be aware of his extensive record of scams, lies and ties to organised crime. David Cay Johnston, for example, has been reporting on Trump for 27 years: he is not some stooge for the Clinton campaign; he isn’t protecting Wall St. from the new champion of Joe Lunchbox (quite the opposite really); he just reports that Trump has a long ongoing close working relationship with organised crime and reaches the conclusion (which is amply supported by evidence) that Trump is a dangerous “world-class narcissist”.

I am personally less interested in the individual character of a candidate than in the political dynamic that they create and that would result form their taking office. From that perspective Trump is terrifying. Almost everything that Trump says stokes anger. He is not only inflaming aggrieved white male entitlement syndrome, he is appealing to all who believe in US exceptionalism. He paints a picture of a noble and strong USA belittled and persecuted by inferior foreigners. This trope has historical roots from 19^th century nationalism that continue through Fascism and Nazism. In the US context the conceit was a staple of the most violent hard-line Cold Warriors, but went mainstream under Ronald Reagan. Most relevant to Trump, however, was when it was used to justify one of the greatest war crimes of the 20^th century by Richard Nixon – the invasion of Cambodia, which was followed by bombing that killed hundreds of thousands and is significantly responsible for the Khmer Rouge takeover and subsequent autogenocide. Nixon justified his act of aggression by saying that if the US “acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”

Trump is openly Nixonian, which again suggests that he is not very serious about winning the Presidency. Aides avowed that Trump’s nomination acceptance speech was modelled on Nixon’s 1968 acceptance speech. There are many similar themes, but in fact Trump’s speech was far more alarmist and negative, and thus more inflammatory. The scariest thing for me is that Nixon’s speech was a launching pad for a campaign of right-wing authoritarian law-and-order at home combined with a crucial promise of “peace with honor” abroad. Trump 2016 and Nixon 1968 are part of a US tradition of loudly avowing peace in an election campaign when you are set on war. Other examples include Wilson’s 1916 slogan “He Kept US Out of the War” and Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 declaration “we are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves”. Nison’s “Peace with honor” meant 7 more years of war, in which millions died. Incidentally Nixon had recruited the Democrat and liberal Henry Kissinger (who was on LBJ’s staff at the time) to sabotage the 1968 Paris peace talks thus guranteeing more war.

Another war hawk who donned the election-year dove suit was George W. Bush. He opposed military over-commitment and nation building. He said, “I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into another country and say: ‘We do it this way, so should you!’” Trump has reprised Bush’s semi-isolationist pragmatic deal-maker rhetoric in its entirety. People seem to have forgotten that this was the platform on which Bush campaigned because he did exactly the opposite when he was in office but that should be a lesson about how we really need to view political rhetoric. Rhetoric has meaning, but it is not as simple as equating an expressed wish with an actual desiure or inclination. Sometimes it means exactly the opposite. In taking the same pragmatic dove stance (which does not reject chauvinist patriotism or exceptionalism) Trump is positioning himself exactly as Bush, Johnson, Wilson and Nixon did. He is stating a desire for peace in order to create political space to wage war.

Choosing between Trump and Clinton is a lot like choosing between Nixon and Kissinger. Clinton is unashamedly close to Kissinger and is rumoured to be seeking his endorsement. Clinton and Trump, by their positive referrals to the widely loathed Nixon and Kissinger, are showing how contemptuous they both are of ordinary people.

I tend to see Trump as more dangerous, but someone responded to my stance by pointing out that Clinton is more dangerous because she would have bipartisan support for waging war. In parliamentary terms (not in terms of public opinion) this is certainly true and may or may not become crucial to the future of the world. GOP senators and congressional representatives will support every military adventure, every increase in surveillance and secrecy, every assassination, every arms deal, and so forth. Like Tony Blair in the UK, the only legislative opposition that Clinton will face will come from a weak sub-group of her own party. So as well as being like the choice between Nixon and Kissinger, this election presents a choice akin to voting either for Tony Blair or George W. Bush: one is unstoppable because she has captured and controls the one party that might oppose her warmongering, the other is unstoppable because he has created the space to govern as a partisan rogue who is not subject to congressional restraint or restraint by public opinion.

In the final analysis, any acquiescence to Trump or Clinton is a grovelling surrender to a sick slave-master who is demanding that we eat a pile of steaming dog turds. People like Chris Trotter lick their lips at the prospect and expect us to do the same, but how can supporting for Clinton not be an act of self-debasement? The FBI, predictably, decided not to prosecute her even though it is clear from their account that they believe that she committed a serious crime, but their account contradicts what Clinton said on three occasions under oath. As Clinton will be aware, that perjury makes her eminently impeachable, which really should have ended her presidential run then and there. How can people be expected to vote for someone who could be impeached on the moment she takes office? Now she is involved in a “pay-to-play” scandal from her time in the State Department that, among other things, is the perfect example of why her attempt to keep her emails private was a serious crime. Clinton will enter office with a number of unresolved scandals that should disqualify her. The worst thing is that she will probably do so with impunity, revealing that she is above the law and that people like her can openly mock the law. To support Clinton is to support demockracy [sic] – the farce of elections that are used to legitimate an actual kakistocracy.

Chris Trotter recently compared Clinton to F. D. Roosevelt and claimed that the US role in Libya was just lending “support to British and French efforts in the UN Security Council to provide air support to Libyan rebels fighting Muamma Gaddafi.” He is coming very close to simple outright lying and seems completely unfazed by the masses of negative comments he receives and equally disinclined to answer any of the arguments and evidence presented within them.

I agree with Paul Jay that our best hope for the future is that Clinton becomes President, but then becomes the immediate focus for discontent and agitation. If we support Clinton (by “we” I mean those of us who know more than what is fed to us by a mendacious system of mass media) we will undermine our own future. Mumia Abu Jamal said “If Trump is the price we have to pay to defeat Clintonian neoliberalism – so be it.” I want to suggest that Trump is not likely to become POTUS and the we already pay the price of having Trump in our world. The real issue whether we are willing to risk an outside chance of a Trump presidency, or whether we will be self-defeating losers who let ourselves be spooked by the scary clown. People in the US and outside need to gear up to oppose the next President, whoever she may be.

Many Trump supporters are like Brexit supporters who, as Jonathan Pie pointed out, made an almost rationally irrational decision to choose a self-destructive hopeless gamble over the certainty of slow neoliberal degradation. They weren’t really being offered a choice, because the entire referendum was framed so that voting stay would be taken as an endorsement of the wider status quo. US voters are faced with a similar non-choice. Clinton’s election will be taken as a mandate for war, empire and neoliberalism. Moreover, if people do not make a show of rejecting both Trump and Clinton it will validate and consolidate the demockracy. It will be a watershed in the slow murder of democracy, perhaps not as irremediable as the 1932 Nazi electoral victory, but a definite goose-step in the same direction.

As a long-standing student of US history and wars, this election reeks to me of the election before a major war. I suspect that we will be tested by the next administration and our responses will write the future for us and our children. The distinction between war abroad and war at home has always been blurry and it looks like becoming much more so. The US is heading back into the Middle East at a time when conflict in the Middle East and North Africa is metastasising and consolidating into a single historic bloodletting.

It is time to ask the question, which side are you on? Supporting Trump could be hateful or delusional or simply the product of desperation, but supporting Clinton (even out of fear) is a clear endorsement of neoliberalism, neoconservatism and empire. Do you think that your hatred of Trump can justify supporting the killing of tens of thousands in the Middle East? the suffering of tens of millions as whole countries are slowly ground up and turned into failed states to maintain US hegemony? the immiseration of hundreds of millions as neoliberalism continues its march towards a nightmare future? If you choose Clinton, whether you are witting or only half-witting, you are the enemy of humanity.

It is Not “Ridiculous” to Reject Hillary; It is Not Undemocratic to Disrupt the DNC

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Image source: dragoart.com

In a post on Aotearoa’s The Daily Blog, a supposedly “leftist” blogger, Chris Trotter, took “Bernie’s die-hard supporters” to task for being “ridiculous”. He was endorsing Sarah Silverman’s words, but after some inconsequential waffle, he took it a bit further: “That makes the ‘Bernie or Bust’ crowd something much more than ridiculous, Sarah, it makes them dangerous.”

Trotter is not alone in this sentiment, but it is highly arrogant to presume to criticise without showing any insight or seeming to know much about the subject at all. Not only is the disruption and protest valid, the circumstances that lead them to it have a significance even broader than this US general election. Trump v. Clinton is the Alien vs. Predator election. Those who refuse to reject the two-party system agree that they prefer Predator, but they disagree about which candidate that is. Meanwhile a growing number of people, with varying levels of politeness, are trying to get them to realise that Alien and Predator are both aliens and both predators. But this predicament facing US voters is to some extent faced everywhere that neoliberalism holds sway, it is just more scary and funny when you put it in the deranged context of US electoral politics.

In my country, as fellow Kiwi Patrick Gower explained to Democracy Now!, we have a “morbid fascination” with the political rise of Donald Trump, but our media have been much kinder to Hillary Clinton. I can only liken the phenomenon to US news media reporting on Israel which is far more obsequious and uncritical than Israel’s own media. I don’t know why our media gloss over the faults, weaknesses, scandals and crimes of Clinton, but they do. They also followed a script in which Bernie Sanders was a wannabe spoiler, threatening to hand the USA over to Trump by prolonging his primary campaign and splitting the Democrats (a narrative similar to that in which Nader is blamed for giving the 2000 election to Bush).

In reality, if you look for them even from half a world away, there are clear reasons why Clinton is so unpopular with the people of the USA. In fact, she and Trump currently have equal pegging in dislike with both having “unfavourable” responses of 58% according to Gallup. No past Democrat or Republican candidate “comes close to Clinton, and especially Trump, in terms of engendering strong dislike.” In ordinary circumstances neither Clinton nor Trump would be electable with that level of public disdain. The very fact that either could become POTUS is purely because they face each other.

These are strange times. We should reflect on the fact that each party can afford to put forward such a loser of a candidate only because both parties are doing so at the same time. Polls clearly showed that Bernie Sanders would have been able to beat Trump overwhelmingly in the popular vote (despite the vagaries of the electoral college system, this is historically reliable as an indicator of who will win ). Even though they come many months before the election these polls are not just an irrelevance and they probably even understate the advantage Sanders would have had over Trump. Like Clinton, and unlike Sanders, Trump is embroiled in ongoing scandals (over taxes, business practices and child rape allegations) that would in ordinary circumstances have made a presidential campaign highly problematic. Moreover, his campaigning style is key to his base of supporters, but the same theatrics and incendiary rhetoric inevitably make most people dislike him all the more. The only thing that keeps Trump in the race is Clinton, and vice versa.

Instead of feeling entitled to lecture and scold from afar, Chris Trotter should have taken the time to engage with the substance behind the discontent of Sanders delegates (not to mention the masses of protesters on the streets of Philadelphia, far greater in number than those protesting the RNC in Cleveland). To be “ridiculous” or even “dangerous”, as Trotter claims, the dissident Democrats would have to have no grounds to contest the legitimacy of Clinton’s selection as Democratic presidential candidate, no grounds to contest the legitimacy of the dominance of the two main parties in the electoral process, and no grounds to reject Clinton as morally unacceptable and insupportable as an elected representative. On all three counts those who refuse to accept Clinton have very safe and justifiable grounds.

Clinton’s selection as candidate has been far from democratic. She did not, as Trotter claims, win “fair and square”. There is evidence of systematic fraud in the Democratic primaries (the source is not a peer-reviewed paper, but this Snopes article confirms that there is substance to the claims). Similar findings come from a more recent non-partisan report (written in collaboration with Fritz Scheuren, former President of the American Statistical Association). In addition there has been voter suppression, most significantly in the psychologically and politically important states of California and New York. Then there is the media bias against Sanders (not to mention CNN dramatically biasing the electorate on the eve of the California primary).

Moreover leaked DNC emails clearly show that the primary process was unfair. DNC officials on DNC time were conspiring against a candidate and, by extension, the democratic process itself. How could anyone in good conscience simply brush this off as unworthy of examination? How much these DNC officials biased the process may be up for debate, but the fact that they did cannot be questioned. They were acting in bad faith all along, and decisions such as when and where to debate seemed to favour the Clinton campaign throughout. Politifact fatuously claims that there is no evidence in the DNC emails that they set out to rig the debates, but it is clear that important DNC staffers were willing and able to work to get Clinton the nomination, and her weakness as an orator is well recognised. To ignore these impacts also reeks of bad faith.

Perhaps we should also consider the fact that one of the leaks from Guccifer 2.0 showed that DNC staffers were planning Clinton’s strategy against the GOP “field” of candidates in May of 2015. This means that as far as they were concerned Clinton was already the anointed presidential candidate of their party. They were right: even though Clinton is highly unpopular; had to fight off a Sanders insurgency; and has been plagued by scandals about DNC emails, her own emails, and an FBI investigation, they were right to presume that she would get the nomination. The implications of this are that democracy is not really a factor in Democratic primaries and that insiders do not expect it to be.

And then there is the role of money in US politics. In simple terms, Clinton was given a lot more money than Sanders. According to the BBC in March, Sanders had received large numbers of small donations, but Clinton’s money was mostly from large donations with the finance industry being a crucial source. I would call that undemocratic whichever way you cut it, and while money is so crucial to the US electoral process, it can never ever be called “fair and square”.

Even if the #NeverHillary people did not have every right to reject the Democratic primary process in itself, they would still have grounds to reject it as part of a greater undemocratic system that maintains a duopoly of political power. Third parties are systematically excluded from publicly visible politics by the corporate news media. Social media has allowed third parties make a small amount of headway, just as soapboxes and pamphlets once did for Populists and Socialists, but now, as then, it is far from a level playing field. There is a media “blackout” of third parties. This became an issue in 2012, and it will be an even bigger issue this time. Not only are they quantitatively biased, but there is a qualitative bias in the news media with mentions of third parties being dismissive, mocking or negative. If Trump wins, for example, you can be certain that they will use the spoiler argument about Jill Stein, even though the most clear and direct cause will be the alienation of voters by the DNC’s decision to put forward a right-wing corporate-linked hawkish Clinton-Kaine ticket. And then there is the money thing, because the big corporate interests and billionaire donors have a huge sway in US elections (because of “Citizens United”) and they don’t like independent parties.

Yet the two-party system has never looked more undemocratic, more ridiculous, nor more fragile. The Republican primaries have become some sort of freak show and the party itself seems to teeter on the edge of a descent into a comical mash-up where crass aspirational consumer capitalism collides with Fascism and Torquemada’s Spanish Inquisition. The Democrats, meanwhile, continue a process that dates back to 1968 (though it has changed somewhat) of carefully canvassing their support base to find who would best represent everything that epitomises Democrat ideals, and then trying their best to paint their pro-corporate elitist neoliberal candidate as being something like that person.

The chaos in both parties shows that the chronic malaise of democratic deficit that has been eating away at the US for decades, has entered a terminal phase. Chris Hedges, prophet of doom and hope par excellence, has changed his metaphorical placardbycrossing out “The End is Nigh!” and replacing it with “Told You So!”.

People have every right to reject Clinton’s selection and to disrupt this burlesque parody of a democratic process because it is demonstrably undemocratic and because their rights are being violated, but they also have a clear moral claim to reject and disrupt as a matter of conscience. Make no mistake that among other things Clinton is a grade A war criminal with the blood of thousands on her hands. Even as First Lady she took a key role in Operation Desert Fox (an air war, justified with blatant lies, which killed thousands of Iraqis). She was a key exponent of the Libya intervention which, after securing UNSC approval, immediately (and with clear premeditation) exceeded its legal mandate and became a regime change operation. That is the crime of waging aggressive war, the greatest war crime that there is. Libya has been turned into a nightmare that quite literally makes Ghadafi’s period of rule seem like a Golden Age of freedom and prosperity. As Eric Draitser reports, we can now confirm that accusations of atrocities against the Ghadafi regime were lies; that the US intent was always regime change; and that Libya is now a festering sore of instability, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, militia violence, political repression and economic disintegration.

Libya has also been used to ship arms and fighters to Syria, fuelling a civil war which has caused 250,000 deaths. Not only do these arms go to some very brutal people in their own right (from the FSA leader who bit into a dead enemy’s heart or lung in 2013 to the US-backed Islamists who posted video of themselves beheading a 12 year-old boy last week) but, predictably, they have also been a major source of arms for the self-proclaimed “Islamic State”. As for Clinton’s part, Jeffrey Sachs writes that “In 2012, Clinton was the obstacle, not the solution, to a ceasefire being negotiated by UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan. It was US intransigence – Clinton’s intransigence – that led to the failure of Annan’s peace efforts in the spring of 2012….” She supports current US airstrikes in Syria, such as that killed at least 28 civilians just this Thursday (only a week after a nearby strike killed at least 74 civilians). Because the Syrian government has not given permission, these airstrikes are themselves war crimes. Not only are acts such as this crimes, threatening such acts is itself a war crime. Therefore Clinton, who advocates imposing a no-fly zone on Syria, is both advocating and arguably committing a war crime as a central plank of her campaign. Given that military and diplomatic officials reject the plan as unworkable and irrational this is Clinton’s equivalent of Trumps’ wall except that it is also a war crime. She even has a bizarre “Mexico will pay” twist in that she has proposed “sharing” the no-fly zone with Russia. She should be pilloried, but she gets a free pass because people don’t understand what a no-fly zone is. This, in turn, is because they have intentionally been left in the dark in order that they think of a no-fly zone as a passive act, rather than what it is: a violent form of aggressive warfare that requires the destruction of all air defences on the ground as well as the destruction of aircraft.

Another country that owes much suffering and loss of life to Clinton is Honduras. After a coup there, as Adam Johnson of FAIR writes: “Fifteen House Democrats joined in, sending a letter to the Obama White House insisting that the State Department ‘fully acknowledge that a military coup has taken place and…follow through with the total suspension of non-humanitarian aid, as required by law.’ But Clinton’s State Department staunchly refused to do so, bucking the international community and implicitly recognizing the military takeover. Emails revealed last year by the State Department show that Clinton knew very well there was a military coup, but rejected cries by the international community to condemn it.”

Post-coup Honduras has seen the return of right-wing death squads and political murders such as that of Berta Caceres, an activist who, before her death, had herself singled out Clinton as responsible for the coup. Ironically, Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine frequently refers to his time in Honduras in 1980, decrying the dictatorship without ever acknowledging that it was installed and supported by the US, and showing no shame over sharing a podium with someone who helped destroy democracy and unleash violence there 3 decades later.

But if there is a people that has suffered most at the hands of Hillary Rodham Clinton, it may actually be the people of Haiti. In January of 2011 Hillary Clinton flew into Port-au-Prince to resolve an electoral dispute in this manner: the person who came third in the first round of Presidential elections should be bumped up to 2^nd place because the US thinks he should and he should then compete in the run-off election. That is how Michel Martelly came to be President of Haiti. After 3 years the terms of the parliament’s deputies all ended, with Martelly refusing to hold elections. He ruled for a year by decree (without the international news media seeming to care in the slightest) before holding elections that were so fraudulent that they were scrapped after 8 months (in June). New elections are set for October of this year.

All of this was happening in a country tortured by an earthquake in 2010 that killed 220,000; a UN “stabilisation” mission, MINUSTAH, that acts more like a hostile violent occupying force; a cholera epidemic brought by MINUSTAH that has killed thousands; rampant corruption; and brutal political violence against the poor and the left. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was put in charge of a much of the overseas construction funds and Hillary announced that they would test “new approaches to development that could be applied more broadly around the world.”

Instead of rebuilding Haiti it was decided to “rebrand” Haiti. After 5 years $13.5 billion of aid had been spent with little or no assistance being given to those affected. The money is systematically disbursed in ways that make the poor poorer and the rich richer. It goes to line the pockets of US contractors. It maintains a privileged class of NGO executives who wield regnal rights (those usually reserved for the sovereign) as if they were feudal lords. It goes on constructing enterprises that destroy farms and small enterprises to return only a pittance in slave wages (incidentally, during Clinton’s time heading the State Department, US embassy staff opposed a minimum wage rise and cables released by Wikileaks in 2011 s howthat they helped block a law passed unanimously in Haiti’s parliament raising minimum wage from $US0.24 to $US0.61).

“Reconstruction” money also gets spent on luxury facilitie s for the rich on the theory (or rather the pretext) that poor homeless people will be able to get jobs. The US Red Cross raised $500 million for Haiti and only built 6 permanent houses, (note: this is not the International Red Cross, but rather the US organisation which also gained notoriety and condemnation for their response to Hurricane Sandy).

Meanwhile connected people from the US have found that Haiti is “open for business” (the actual slogan promoted by Clinton), with natural wealth to plunder and cheap labour to exploit. Among them is Hillary Clinton’s brother Tony Rodham, whose company scored a “sweetheart” concession to mine gold that had not been given for 50 years. The mining threatens to inflict severe environmental and humanitarian consequences. So when Clinton castigates Trump for ripping-off small businesses and workers, as she did in her acceptance speech, just bear in mind that her corruption hits people who are even more vulnerable. Like the no-fly zone issue she gets away with it because nobody knows about Haiti.

These are just some of the moral grounds on which people can legitimately refuse to support Hillary Clinton. Others have been highlighted by Black Lives Matter, often dating back to Bill Clinton’s terms as President. She was supportive of welfare reform, the drug war, and justice reform which all led to the current neoliberal security state. Complementing this are her ties to Wall Street, her immense wealth, her obscene speaking fees, and her clear political expediency and flexibility on issues that should be matters of conscience. Any real leftist should loathe Clinton in the same way that they would loathe Tony Blair and George Bush. They are a new aristocracy that have proven that they will steal and kill. These are all warmongering neoliberal neoconservative neofeudalist neofascists and it is time we finally understood that none of those labels is in conflict with any other of those labels. People like Trotter have an authoritarian streak that makes him far more offended by those who try to make themselves heard by disruption from below, then he does by a stinkingly corrupt decadent system that is far more offensive. His tone suggests that he views himself as being well above the ill-behaved rabble as if, despite his evidently ignorant and vulgar apprehension of the issues, he has some paternal wisdom. It is not a good look, but he is hardly the only example of his species abroad. He also has prior form: in 2007 when armed police terrorised an entire rural community with “anti-terror” raids on Māori and anarchist activists, he wrote “it wasn’t the actions of the police that provoked my fury, but of those who’d forced their hand.”

And yet, Hillary Clinton and the undemocratic behaviour of the “Democratic” party are not the only things that make disobedience and disruption a legitimate response. The Democratic National Convention showed extremely disturbing signs of militarist nationalism and fanatical fervour. Eddie Glaude described it as “retooling Ronald Reagan’s morning in America, the shining city on the hill”. That day a 4-star General marched out to a military drum-roll proclaiming Clinton’s credentials as a war leader. He scowled and yelled, probably trying to look like Churchill, but actually ending up looking more authentically Mussoliniesque than Trump: “To our enemies; we will pursue you as only America can. You will fear us!”.

And then there was the unforgettable end of Joe Biden’s speech. Long considered a non-entity only distinguished by his blinding teeth, Biden became a man possessed: a fist-pumping spittle-flecked vessel for the spirit of GI Joe and John Wayne: “We are America! Second to none. And we own the finish line. Don’t forget it! God bless you all, and may god protect our troops. Come on. We’re America! Thank you.”

Most significant of allwasthe moment that many considered the highlight of the entire conference. The crowd erupted when Khizr Khan,the father of a GI who died in the illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq, rhetorically asked Trump: “Have you even read the US constitution?” And then proffered his own copy from the left-hand shirt pocket (next to the heart).

Judging from the response on twitter Khan’s act was adored by nearly everyone, and that itself should be frightening because the moment carried many implications, and not one of them is good. Firstly we need to recognise that this is a ritual gesture popularised by the nationalistic right-wing Tea Party movement and linked in the public mind to that ideology. Secondly, as the US-Iraqi activist and writer Dahlia Wasfi commented: “the message that a ‘good Muslim’ is one who kills for US empire, oil, and Israel is no less offensive to me than whatever Trump has to say about Muslims or Islam.” Thirdly this is a type of disingenuous appropriation of Islam equivalent to greenwashing, pinkwashing or femiwashing. Even Piers Morgan tweeted: “Something very distasteful about Hillary using Khans as political pawns vs Trump given she’s partly responsible for their son’s death”. Fourthly it signifies that in the space of just 8 years, the Democratic Party has gone from viewing the Iraq War as a “war of choice” (which has connotations, if noticeably inexplicit ones, of immorality and illegality) to viewing the Iraq War as a fight to protect US freedoms.

The entire DNC was so nationalistic and militaristic that the actor and activist Margot Kidder was evidently driven to publish a cri de coeur in Counterpunch: she begins “the words are gagging my throat and my stomach is twisted and sick and I have to vomit this out”, and ends: “And there you all are tonight, glued to your TVs and your computers, your hearts swelled with pride because you belong to the strongest country on Earth, cheering on your Murderer President. Ignorant of the entire world’s repulsion. You kill and you kill and you kill, and still you remain proud.” My question is this: if Margot Kidder can see this clearly from within the belly of the beast (well, Montana), how can Chris Trotter, an Aotearoan and putative leftist, be such a blithe apologist for a mass-murderer like Hillary Clinton.

In all I have written I have focussed on morals and reasons of principle. They alone should make it clear that only thing that is “ridiculous” is the conceit of loftily condemning those who refuse to be drawn by fear into supporting the insupportable. I am aware, however, that there are many practical issues I have not dealt with. I am aware that some people will think that US voters, facing the possibility of Trump, do not have the luxury of rejecting Clinton. These are very important issues, because time and again even those who refuse to be chained to the “lesser-of-two-evils” cede the realist high-ground to intellectually and morally compromised dullards; dullards who insist, like broken records stuck in the era of vinyl, that we must play the game and change it from the inside. I do not intend to leave such claims unchallenged, so check back here for Part 2 of this article in which, amongst other things, I will test how strong “chains of rhetorical steel” are (hint: about as strong as chains of rhetorical butter).

My Conspiracy Against the UK Government

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I started a conspiracy to harm Her Majesty’s Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (HMGUKGB&NI). I wanted to deal as much damage to them as possible so I conspired with a poet to plant an explosive and incendiary petition right in the heart of their own website. It was a petition to make the UK Government respond or debate the question of appearing before the International Court of Justice and allowing it to rule on the case of the Chagos Archipelago.

At issue is the terrible injustice to the Chagossians and their descendants who were arbitrarily evicted from their homeland with trickery or brutality. It was the US that decided the negative repercussions of this crime were a reasonable price to pay for a completely depopulated archipelago in which to put a naval and air base. The US gave the order to their British subordinates in a now notorious 3 word telegram: “ABSOLUTELY MUST GO”.

At issue also are the rights of Mauritius. The UK broke international law by detaching Chagos in the lead-up to decolonisation but refuses to have the question adjudicated. Her Majesty’s Government takes the position that Chagos will be returned to Mauritius once the islands are no longer required for “defence” purposes. So far they have “needed” Chagos for 50 years and there is absolutely no reason to believe that they will not “need” the military base on the island of Diego Garcia for another 50 years.

The plight of the islanders, who continue to live in deprivation, is a worthy cause, but we allow it to distract us from what is most important. Our natural sympathies and our psychology as activists is used to make the issue into a lightning rod. We pour our energy into that, and the UK Government directs it safely away from its edifice of imperial violence. Ultimately this is not only turning our backs on the victims of US military violence, it is also useless to the Chagossians. The fact is that no one can argue against the proposition that an injustice was perpetrated against the Chagossians, but they and their supporters are forced to fight the same battle over and over again, and each time they win it gains them nothing. To understand why we need to understand that human rights discourse is dominated by establishment voices who are unquestioningly subservient to power.

Take the example of this educator and human rights professional. She writes:

Considering the crucial importance of the military base for the USA and having in mind all the conflicts that are currently taking place in the Middle East and Asia and those that might be coming soon, it is difficult to believe that even if the Chagossians win again, they would be allowed for real to resettle the islands again.

The case of the Chagossians is interesting precisely because of its complexity and the many factors that have to be taken into consideration when examining it: the interests of both American and British governments, international politics, diplomacy and security, are most certainly factors that could not just be disregarded. So how do human rights enter the picture? Are they taken into consideration when they are opposed to international security? Could they change the course of events? They should definitely influence it. And here comes the question – is something as important as international security worth risking, so that human rights are not violated?

This creates a false dichotomy between human rights and “international security”. The author clearly cedes precedence to security as the superior concern, but without devoting even a single atom of examination to what it might mean. The embedded presumption is that the US and UK can unilaterally decide what constitutes “security” and that their actions are necessarily in favour of “international security”. On a very basic level this violates logic by suggesting that killing people and wreaking destruction in a region geographically distant from both countries is somehow in the service of “security” when there can be no immediate threat from the victims of that violence and destruction. If that basic flaw is unconvincing then there is the fact that US/UK interventions in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia seem to have spawned incredible amounts of insecurity. If “security” is defined as being the physical security of human beings, or even UK citizens, it seems quite a stretch in these times of instability and crisis to say that US/UK military actions have been in the service of security, but to simply stipulate that this is the case without even giving some form of argumentation is ludicrous and unforgivable nonsense.

The political discourse of UK foreign affairs relies on unchallenged assumptions and areas of inquiry where silence is enforced. Like their US counterparts the UK establishment cultivates and inhabits a world of parochial narrow-mindedness and mirror-blindness where they never need to ask themselves why they consider it their right to take lands and resources from others by force. The assumptions are based on exceptionalist notions that presume a fundamental benevolence of nature and benevolence of purpose as the foundations of Western civilisation. These assumptions take on the character of articles of faith and challenges to those articles are greeted with hostility as being heresy. For those that would oppose unjust actions by HMGUKGB&NI it is made much easier to challenge on narrow grounds by suggesting that a particular crime is an exception, while they affirm the rule. That is why it is acceptable to criticise the UK for injustices perpetrated on the Chagosians or even on Mauritius, but it is not permissible to state that their purposes in doing so are themselves criminal, arrogant, imperialistic, militaristic, illegitimate and morally repugnant. In fact even bringing up the subject is offensive, because the facts are so clear. The UK has no right to be in the Indian Ocean and no right to use territory there in support of killing people in the Middle East and Africa.

It is easy to see, therefore, why well-meaning people are attracted to the easy option of treating the issue of the Chagos Islands as separate from the acts of mass violence that are facilitated by the base at Diego Garcia, but it becomes a trap, The callousness of the treatment of those deprived of a homeland is infuriating and exasperating by design. Both openly and behind closed doors officials will fight every step of the way to avoid any admission of wrongdoing. They will make challengers fight and fight for every little admission and then finally, when the time is right and the fullness of consciousness is invested in the blatant injustice, they will admit regret and cite “strategic necessity” for “defence purposes”. In practical terms neither an individual nor a movement can change track at that point. Leaders of the cause, such as crusading parliamentarians, will effectively be subverted or left in a halfway position of campaigning to moderate rather than end overt wrongdoing.

At the same time the voices of the dead of 50 years of mass killing cry out. Diego Garcia is a base for long-range cruise missiles and bomber aircraft as well as communications and logistical support. Even leaving aside the questions of its naval and nuclear role, it is the source of incalculable death, destruction and suffering. This is not potential or theoretical. Another 50 years of “defence purposes” will mean hundreds of thousands killed. The very nature of the weapons systems is such that “defence purposes” can only mean imperial aggression. These are true weapons of mass destruction. Despite pretences, they are not and cannot be used in a pure military sense against a chosen Hitler-of-the-month dictator and their armies, they are weapons that attacks “peoples and nations” – which is the original defining trait of genocide.

Since the end of World War 2 the most indiscriminate and obscene weapon of war to be used has been the B-52 bomber. After smaller aircraft and ground artillery had had created a 20 km traffic jam on the Mutla Ridge early in 1991, it was B-52s which carpet bombed those trapped there, massacring them in a period of hours. This became known as the “Highway of Death” and the B-52s which were responsible for the slaughter flew from Diego Garcia.

Most B-52s that flew in the 1990-1 “Gulf War” were based in Diego Garcia. The near obsolete bombers dropped one third of the aerial tonnage and every time they dropped ordnance it was, by the very nature of the weaponry, a war crime of disproportionate and/or indiscriminate killing.

Paul Walker wrote:

B-52s were used from the first night of the war to the last. Flying at 40,000 feet and releasing 40 – 60 bombs of 500 or 750 pounds each, their only function is to carpet bomb entire areas. … B-52s were used against chemical and industrial storage areas, air fields, troop encampments, storage sites, and they were apparently used against large populated areas in Basra.

Language used by military spokesman General Richard Neal during the war made it sound as if Basra had been declared a “free fire zone”…. On February 11, 1991, Neal told members of the press that “Basra is a military town in the true sense…. The infrastructure, military infrastructure, is closely interwoven within the city of Basra itself” He went on to say that there were no civilians left in Basra, only military targets. … Eyewitness accounts Suggest that there was no pretense at a surgical war in this city. On February 5, 1991, the Los Angeles Times reported that the air war had brought “a hellish nightime of fires and smoke so dense that witnesses say the sun hasn’t been clearly visible for several days at a time . . . [that the bombing is] leveling some entire city blocks . . . [and that there are] bomb craters the size of football fields and an untold number of casualties.”

This was the opening of a period of genocide against Iraq. In 1998, during the sanctions period which was estimated in 1996 to have cost 500,000 children’s deaths, B-52’s from Diego Garcia launched 100 aerial cruise missiles as a major part of Operation Desert Fox. While officials, wonks and security studies hacks are triumphal about the efficacy of strikes against “regime” targets this comes from the long-standing habit of conflating civilian and military targets.

The patently false stated aim of Operation Desert Fox was to “degrade” the mythical WMD programme. The targeting of “command and control”, WMD industrial and “concealment” sites, and the Basra oil refinery were all deleterious to the people of the stricken country. Only retrospectively did the think-tank pundits decide that the real aim must have been regime destabilisation not WMD, but as with the sanctions inflicting misery and hardship on Iraqis only strengthened the governing regime. From 600-2000 civilians died along with an unknown number of military personnel who were attacking no one and had no chance to defend themselves or fight back.

In 2001, Diego Garcia was the most important base in launching attacks on Afghanistan. This was a high-altitude no boots-on-the-ground approach by the US which led predictably to a power vacuum, rampaging warlords, insoluble instability, refugee crisis, food insecurity and everything else we have since seen unfold. Like Iraq, the country is being slowly tortured to death. In 2003, Diego Garcia was once again central to US efforts against Iraq. Readers are probably somewhat familiar with what has happened in the area since.

Diego Garcia has never had legitimate “defence purposes”. It is a strategic asset of empire and it is used to maintain control over the Middle East, South Asia and parts of Africa. The base is there primarily for the purpose of killing large numbers of people at once when other means of exerting power are unsuitable, undesirable or unavailable. Its role is distinctly and inescapably genocidal.

Here’s the thing: it is difficult for activists to recruit people by accusing the government of war crimes, let alone mass-murder and genocide. A web search will show that even antiwar websites and writers tend mention Diego Garcia’s role in bombing only in passing while focussing either on its role in torture and “extraordinary renditions”, or on the injustice perpetrated against the islanders.

It is easy to see why the plight of the Chagossians appeals in the same way that seeing rabbits tortured in testing cosmetics was so rousing in the 1980s. The moral dimensions of the issue are readily apparent and very few people need to re-examine their ideology, challenge their beliefs, or question their loyalties. The Chagossian cause is just, but it is not right to ignore other crimes which are even more monstrous. It is not right, and it is not wise. Without undermining the “strategic necessity” argument then there can never be a victory. The Chagossians have already won in court – several times – but they remain in exile. Why? Because “defence purposes”.

People may not want to hear the truth about imperial aggression and the suffering inflicted in their names, but they can at least understand that giving the US a base in the Indian Ocean from which to bomb people has not made the United Kingdom in any respect safer. No one can suggest that carpet bombing Iraq reduced the threat of terrorism or Saddam’s WMD. If we do not accept that there are valid “defence purposes” then there are no legally or morally valid “strategic” reasons for keeping the Chagos Archipelago. That is something that we must always bear in mind when working in this cause – there is no strategic justification and the UK has no right to be there at all.

The cause of Mauritius is also just. They are the rightfully sovereign country deprived due to “strategic” decisions taken in 1964-5 which were no more defensible than the depopulation decisions of 1970-1. Mauritius recently won a case against the UK in the Permanent Court of Arbitration, but the UK denies the jurisdiction of the court and the court cannot rule on the issue of sovereignty. Mauritius is taking the case to the International Court of Justice for an “advisory” ruling, but that is only as good as the publicity it generates. They need allies, especially among UK activists who can keep the issue on the agenda at home.

For this reason I contacted Mhara Costello, an activist and poet who uses the pen name Tamerishe. Along with her poem “Once Upon a Palestine” she also wrote “Just a Word” which deals with the abuse of the term “terrorist”. It seemed an appropriate qualification. We formulated a petition that would incorporate a direct challenge to the narrative frame which ensures that critiques always remain atomised, specific and isolated – hermetically and prophylactically sealed away from infecting the self-righteous self-love of civilised Britons.

The characters allowed for e-petitions to HMGUKGB&NI are predetermined and restrictive, and this is what Mhara posted:

HMG should agree with Mauritius to an ICJ case regarding the Chagos Islands.

The Republic of Mauritius claims sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago, but that claim is disputed by the UK. If the UK government agrees the International Court of Justice can hear and judge the issues as a “Contentious Case” in accordance with international law.

At issue is more than sovereignty. The UK forcefully removed the inhabitants of the islands and leased Diego Garcia as a US military base. The treatment of the islanders is cruel and unjust, and has been ruled unlawful. The US military base sends bombing sorties which cause countless deaths and may constitute crimes of aggression or terrorism. The base is also implicated in torture, illegal rendition, and concealment of illegal munitions. More at: http://johnpilger.com/videos/stealing-a-nation.

The first response was silence. The after prodding the following belated reply:

Dear Mhara,

Thank you for your email. I apologise for the length of time it has taken to process your petition. We can accept the central request of your petition, but we cannot publish the second paragraph because it does not comply with our rules. This means that your petition would read:

HMG should agree with Mauritius to an ICJ case regarding the Chagos Islands.

The Republic of Mauritius claims sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago, but that claim is disputed by the UK. If the UK government agrees the International Court of Justice can hear and judge the issues as a “Contentious Case” in accordance with international law.

If you could let me know that you are happy with this, we could publish your request immediately.

To which Mhara responded:

No, I am not happy removing the second paragraph. I would be willing to amend it. Can you be more specific please, regarding your objections? In what way does the petition not comply with the rules? Please cite which rules have been breached? I am unable to identify any (inadvertently) I may have overlooked.

She then sent a second reminder and eventually received a longer email including the following:

We cannot publish the second paragraph of your petition, because we have not been able to establish that the very serious allegations you make are true. I hope you will understand that we cannot publish allegations of unlawful conduct. We would be happy to look at alternative wording for this paragraph, if you would like to propose some. It would need to be worded moderately and fall within our rules. You might reasonably say, for example, that many people believe that the former inhabitants of the Chagos Islands have been very badly treated by the Governments of the UK and the USA, and that this ought therefore to be examined by the ICJ.

They are saying that you can’t detail allegations that you want addressed in court, because you have to prove the truth of the allegations before petitioning to have the matter adjudicated. This response is a bureaucratic Catch-22 piece of nonsense. It must be assumed that, as intended, the petition itself is troubling. The offending paragraph deliberately broadens the issue as much as possible within the character limit. One petition is unlikely to really shake the UK establishment, but it may yet frighten them because it takes matters into a realm which they cannot control. What is more, there is a hook in it.

When they commit crimes or act unjustly the greatest vulnerability of the authorities is their perceived legitimacy. When they are forced to overtly display illegitimacy it breaks their support structure. Even in the face of mass popular condemnation, a government can act with blatant injustice as long as they have a cover story – a lie which, however unconvincing, allows those who really want to give them unconditional support to believe in benign intent or even the ineffable divine schemes of “security”, which lie beyond mortal ken. In this case the UK might be in an awkward position if the question were debated because it does not want to negotiate directly with Mauritius. To explain why they do not wish the matter adjudicated by the ICJ the UK government might either have to say it prefers bilateral talks or it would have to say that it does not think its actions should be subject to adjudication under international law because “defence purposes”. That would bring the spotlight back onto the criminal uses of the criminally acquired Chagos Archipelago.

Right at the moment the “perceived legitimacy” of the UK government may already be close to breaking. Foreign entanglements must surely seem even less attractive to the UK public than February 2003, when a million marched in London to protest the looming invasion of Iraq. The sordid aftermath of shame from that act continues while the ongoing Balkanisation of the oil rich Arab world is surely one of the most inglorious blood-lettings in the unpleasant history of conflict. Even for those who do not understand that US/UK intervention created the fractures and fervour that wrack the region, it is hard to see any nobility in backing the Saudis, the Israelis and the “moderate” forces that fight alongside al-Nusra.

Meanwhile, the establishment seems to have to put the UK public in its rightful place of silent subjugation more often than it would normally need to. It seems that every time that there is a popular consensus in the general population or some significant segment of it, they need to be reminded that their democratic voice must be conveyed through a mediating wah-wah pedal that is under the foot of their social superiors. Whether it is giving Thatcher an appropriate send-off, or naming a sea-vessel, or when Labour Party members mistakenly choose a leader whose views coincide with those of ordinary people. Much more of this and people will start demanding that the hollow sham of modern democracy have some populist stuffing shoved back in it, and once government’s start giving in to popular demands it just encourages more; things could spiral out of control and before you know it you are dealing with a sovereign self-emancipated people who do not want a society run by and for a controlling greedy and/or power-obsessed few.

That is why even an e-petition can frighten Her Britannic Majesty’s mighty Royal Government. They need people to continue to be their own worst enemies. They need people to sabotage their own efforts. They need people to think that those within the establishment have a greater understanding of issues and how to tackle them. They need them to make their own protests against specific injustice into an embrace and an endorsement of the system itself.

Let’s show them that we won’t play that stupid game any more.

The Shame of Anzac Day

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In Aotearoa (New Zealand) and in Australia we observe Anzac day, commemorating the first landings at Gallipoli in 1915 on April 25. The Dardanelles campaign that followed this landing was 8 months of futile slaughter that ended in complete withdrawal. In the century since the sense of loss and the rightful condemnation of the vicious military folly were always muted and buried under tales of honour and national pride, but now we are forgetting altogether. In our fatuous nationalistic self-love we are telling our children that the war was a noble endeavour. History is being rewritten in the most offensive and disgusting manner and we need to finally confront the fact that Anzac Day should be a day of shame, not of pride.

After the Armistice in 1918 people began in many ways to commemorate the war. The event and monuments are solemn. Tombs or tomb-like memorials and plaques listing the fallen became commonplace. Events were also solemn. The Anzac Day service that we observe here in Aotearoa is based on funeral rites. Much of the memorialisation implicitly or explicitly promised to struggle against further war and bloodshed. For many this had been the war to end war, and that was the only meaning and consolation they could find in the futility of the carnage that had occurred. At the same time nationalism and the need to find positive meaning to soften grief shifted people from mourning the loss of lives to honouring the sacrifice of lives. But sacrifice implies that something was gained. Increasingly our commemoration of events that should fill us with deep shame has become an occasion for mistaken pride. We have forgotten the ugly truths of the Great War. Even though wars are happening now in which we have moral, if not material entanglement, we are as foolish as the people of 1914 who thought the War was a romantic adventure and would be “over by Christmas”.

We need to remember the forgotten truths, some of which were buried right from the start. To begin with, there is the fact that large numbers of British people actually opposed the war. On August the 2^nd 1914 there was a massive antiwar rally in Trafalgar Square, London. The Manchester Guardian reported that it was “far larger, for example, than the most important of the suffragist rallies”. On that very day the British government decided to go to war. 4 cabinet ministers and one junior minister resigned and the government seemed in danger of falling, but on the 4^th of August Germany invaded Belgium and Britain officially declared war. They now had the pretext of protecting Belgian neutrality, though they later violated Greek neutrality in the same manner. In truth, for Britain and for us, this was a war for Empire.

Less than 4 hours after Britain declared war Lord Liverpool, the Governor General of New Zealand, stood on Parliament steps in Wellington are read a proclamation from the Emperor King George. We were ordered to war. Many New Zealanders were wildly enthusiastic but the voices of those opposed to war were never heard. There was no debate and, as a country, we had no voice in this matter.

Young men who had no idea what they would face clamoured to volunteer. 2 years later conscription was introduced and about one third of the men sent overseas from Aotearoa were conscripts. Whether conscript or volunteer, though, the lives of military personnel during wartime are a form of regulated slavery. When ordered to die, they must die. New Zealanders died in numbers that can be hard for us to grasp. It was not lawful to act in the interests of self-preservation regardless of what you thought of the futile slaughter and stalemate that lasted for years on the Western Front. 23 New Zealanders were killed by firing squad for desertion.

April 25 is Anzac day. For both Australia and Aotearoa the formation of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps was an occasion of national maturation, but we have always been too polite to admit that our national spirit developed in a very ignoble disdain for the weakness of ordinary Britons. For ordinary soldiers the Anzac spirit came from embarking thinking of themselves as somewhat inferior Britons, but on arrival discovering not only a commonality of culture between the two countries, but also a new sense of self for each. Far from being inferior, the Anzac troops soon developed the belief that they were superior to British soldiers and developed a degree of contempt for them and their murderous officers. British soldiers were physically and mentally weak for the simple reason that the British working class was the most malnourished in Europe. 50% of British military aged men were not even considered fit for military service. The Anzacs thought that they lacked strength, endurance, morale and initiative. That contempt for the less fortunate is how they overcame their sense of colonial inferiority.

As a result of the relative individual weakness of the British troops, British commanders used Canadian and Anzac troops as shock troops throughout the war. Because of this personnel from Aotearoa were over 50% more likely to be killed in the war than their British counterparts.

After three years of often horrific fighting – including the Battle of the Somme which left 2111 New Zealanders dead and 5848 wounded – New Zealand’s military effort culminated in the Third Battle of the Ypres, better known to us as Passchendaele. On the 12^th of October 1917 New Zealand forces were ordered to advance in muddy conditions into machine gun fire. On that day alone 800 Kiwis died. Over all, the 3^rd Ypres cost New Zealand 1796 lives. In a letter home Private Leonard Hart wrote:

“Dozens got hung up in the wire and shot down before their surviving comrades’ eyes. It was now broad daylight and what was left of us realised that the day was lost. We accordingly lay down in shell holes or any cover we could get and waited. Any man who showed his head was immediately shot. They were marvellous shots those Huns. We had lost nearly eighty per cent of our strength and gained about 300 yards of ground in the attempt. This 300 yards was useless to us for the Germans still held and dominated the ridge.”

He also wrote about seeing British wounded who were abandoned by their commanders:

“These chaps, wounded in the defence of their country, had been callously left to die the most awful of deaths in the half frozen mud while tens of thousands of able bodied men were camped within five miles of them behind the lines.”

After Passchendaele the New Zealand Division, worn down by horrible misuse and deprivation, was as broken and lacklustre as their British comrades.

Indeed, the conditions faced by all frontline troops of all nations in the War were enough to break any normal human being. On arrival at the front they were confronted with overwhelming noise and disorientation in time and space^. They had to contend with stench, filth, mud, vermin and cold. They were constantly fatigued from hard labour at or behind the front line. They suffered chronic sleep deprivation exacerbated by the reversal of day/night patterns of activity in the front trenches. They were malnourished and extremely prone to physical disease, but were often treated punitively, cruelly or callously on falling ill. They were starved of any, even basic, strategic information and and were frequently blind and helpless as death and danger stalked them or exploded all around them. Their lives were thrown away by others as if they had no value. In these circumstances the front line soldier inevitably came to see some actions of military superiors and politicians (and by association the “home”) as either gratuitously idiotic or insane, or even as intentionally murderous. This was not entirely irrational as many of the commanding officers of Britain and Europe were known to loathe the men they sent into battle. However, along with hatred of those in the rear echelons, frontline soldiers often developed a hatred for women and older men. Some even imagined that women were rejoicing in the slaughter of their own sons.

Deaths in the Great War were often lingering, agonising and horrific. That is the norm for the violence of death in war, yet the technology and the conditions of the fields of battle made this even more so in World War One. Only a lucky few died clean deaths, and many who died slowly would have died unattended, alone with their grief, fear, pain and loneliness. Others might have been dragged away by brave stretcher bearers, only to end up living with horrifying incurable mutilations. These men with lost limbs, crushed joints or incinerated flesh would live in chronic pain, often as beggars.

The sense of helplessness common to soldiers seems to have been a major factor in causing acute psychiatric casualties. Men would break down completely in various ways and there was considerable risk that such people would be tried in a court martial and even shot. Others were sent for treatment and for the first time, but not the last, military psychiatrists struggled with the fact that their job was not to make people better, but to make them effective again and send them back into the situation that was destroying them. We now know that those acute psychiatric cases were the tip of the iceberg. Post-traumatic stress disorder generally develops over many years or even decades. The war created an epidemic of family violence and alcoholism that wreaked havoc on the homefront, but did so behind closed doors.

Some of the men brutalised in the War became violent official or unofficial paramilitary squadrists. The notorious “Black and Tans” sent by Britain to Ireland were largely veterans of the Great War.

Similarly the Fascist and Nazi militias that became active throughout Europe were originally veterans. The violence of fascism was born in the trenches. Like the Spanish Flu that killed up to 50 million people, no mutation of ideology could have been so virulent and so deadly had it not been cultivated in the brutality of the Great War. This is what led to another 60 million dead in the bombed cities, on the battlefields, and in the gas chambers of World War II. As Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer tells us: “The killing, mutilation and gas poisoning of millions of soldiers on both sides had broken taboos and decisively blunted moral sensitivities. Auschwitz cannot be explained without reference to World War I.”

The violence that sprang from the Great War did not end when the next war ended in the nuclear incinerations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The British Empire had devoted fully 25% of its troops to fighting in the Middle East, and in doing so it directly set in motion events that are still causing death and destruction through war as I speak to you now. Men and women are fighting and dying right now, be they volunteers or conscripts. Bombs are dropping on civilians whose homelands may not have known real peace for 2, 3 or even as much as 5 decades.

The British effort in the Middle East was a war for oil. While France pleaded for help and saw one half of her young men die in battle (one half of all French men between the ages of 20 and 32 were killed in the war), but Britain ignored the desperation of her closest ally and invaded first Turkey and then Iraq. They treated their allies very badly. They betrayed their Arab allies by signing the Sykes/Picot agreement that carved up all of the Arab Middle East for Britain and France. They then betrayed the French by redrawing the boundaries of that agreement to put further distance between French territories and the oilfields that were the British goal. Then two days after an armistice that was supposed to end hostilities between Turkey and Britain, a British force invaded Mosul vilayet in what is now northern Iraq. After nearly two weeks of fighting they secured the area and now they had established control over every known source of petroleum in the Middle East. They created the countries of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen and more. In a year or so the British were dropping poison gas on rebellious Iraqi villages.

That is the empire that New Zealand soldiers died for. That is the future that their sacrifice brought us: burning cities, mass graves and wars that now seem destined to simply continue in perpetuity, as if the very idea of peace is lost to us. If we want to honour their memory, we cannot lie to ourselves about the crime perpetrated on them – on all of us. This country sent 10% of its population overseas. We lost less than countries like France, Serbia or Austria (where many civilians starved to death) but look at an atlas. Those countries had little choice. What madness made us do this to our young men? In economic terms alone we crippled ourselves, wasting years of development, not for a worthwhile cause, not even for empty gains, but to help make a world that was much much worse for our efforts and our loss. It is a hard pill to swallow, but it is worse than if they had died for nothing. That is the truth, and if we want to honour their memories we have to work to end the suffering that still follows in the wake of their deaths. Those people who are dying right now in the Middle East are most often dying from arms made by our allies in the US while US and UK based oil companies reap record profits on a new tide of blood. We were craven and wilfully blind to the immorality of the British Empire, but we still provide intelligence, diplomatic and military support to their equally immoral successors. Is that too political? Well war is political and if you don’t talk about politics you cannot talk sensibly about war.

When the Great War was first commemorated it was in the spirit that we must never let this happen again. Antiwar sentiment was the norm, not least in the RSA. In 1922 if you bought one of the first red poppies sold here, you were donating to an organisation that was committed to peace. Now, I fear, we have forgotten the lessons of two world wars and Anzac Day is increasingly nationalistic and militaristic. This is not a day for pride. Pride is the greatest offence against the memories of the fallen.

The Resistible Rise of Global Fascism Part 2: 8 Signs You Are Living Under a Fascist Regime

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In Part 1 I asserted that there is a new globalised Fascist movement that has gradually, in fits and starts, insinuated itself as a new normal in Western regimes and in many “developing” regimes. A central claim of the article is that the differences between old Fascism and new Fascism are almost entirely due to the fact that the original Fascism was a nationalistic creed with imperialist ambitions, while the new Fascism is an imperialist ideology and mode of governance.

I also distinguish between the banal Fascism of governance and the dramatic Fascism of rhetoric. Fascists campaign as radical revolutionaries, but rule in a way that secures and bolsters the existing social order against mass discontent.

There is an inversion of the historic pattern in this new Fascism. This inversion of old Fascism parallels Sheldon Wolin’s conception of “inverted totalitarianism”. Old Fascism harnessed mass political engagement during a time of crisis and channelled it into an ultimately reactionary political project. The new Fascism has harnessed mass disengagement but the crisis it has brought by its own success has led to the same populist right-wing explosion that was the vanguard of the old Fascism. We can now see – particularly in the US – that this is a matter of sequence, not essence. The mass embrace of combative right-wing populism is becoming ever more common, and it completes the circle so that the symmetry with old Fascism is revealed.

A major difference between old and new Fascism is that the biopolitical paradigm of control in the new Fascism is neoliberal and expresses itself the state violence of police, courts and the “corrections” complex and through the discipline imposed on persons as consumers and workers. It lacks the paternalistic aspect of old Fascist corporatism and nationalism. This too is changing. Authoritarian political rhetoric and the actions of police and intelligence agencies have brought the new Fascism into much closer alignment with the old.

In writing this article I have been beset by two serious problems. The first is that each new day brings new revelations. For someone who is as slow in writing as I am, it feels almost farcical because I am constantly being overtaken by events. Internationally the manifestations of overt Fascism (such as the hundreds of neofascists who just marched behind Swastika banners in Helsinki) are dwarfed in significance by mass expressions of Fascistic xenophobic violence, mass support for crypto-fascist “right-wing populism”, yet more militarism, and increasingly remarkable and yet unremarkable government suppression (such as the Republic of Korea’s latest crack down which has seen, among many other things, more than 1000 cops sent to arrest a union leader hiding in a monastery).

The second serious problem is that boiled frogs are notoriously slippery, especially in metaphorical terms. In seeking to shine light on their sad state, I suddenly find them transformed into fish – fish who do not know they are wet. Immersed in a new Fascism, they cannot see the medium in which they swim. It is only by taking them out of the Fascist context that you can show the Fascist wetness of things and people that lie within. For example, the US started putting prisoners into Guantánamo 14 years ago. The institution was deliberately public – a display of power designed to incite fear and hatred, much like a public execution. At the same time, the public and overt nature of the Guantánamo prison complex was designed to establish a new norm. It established a state of exception – a zone where power was exercised without the constraints which are said to legitimise power. 14 years ago this state of exception seemed an exceptional response to exceptional and immediate circumstances. It was a dramatic departure from the norm. Now, 14 years later it is completely normalised. If events occur that provide a pretext to start sending more “terrorists” to Guantánamo we will only be surprised for about 3 seconds, and opposition will be seriously blunted by 14 years of inertia. As things stand, the continued imprisonment of inmates who have no rights at all is still a public statement. It says that power does not need legitimacy because the exercise of power legitimises itself.

Immersed in transparent Fascism, people are curiously incurious, accepting half-baked question-begging snippets of factoid-based analyticule. World-shaking historical events are placed in frames a thousand times too small to contain the full picture. I have previously written that the sheer scale of the refugee crisis is indicative of a subterranean Holocaust. Yet consumers of news media are given misdirection instead of analysis and are made to feel that the entire mass migration of tens of millions is somehow due to ISIS (the equally unexplained Instant State of Insane Salafists). The refugee crisis has been transformed by heightened fear and militarism into an even greater phenomenon, a type of post-simulation, post-Baudrillard mass violence: we may have already slipped into a secret sub rosa subterranean sub-real World War. There will be no precise and knowable beginning to this new World War, but it feels like the imprecise and unknowable beginning has already begun.

So bear with me as I list the 8 Signs that You are Living in a Fascist Regime, try to feel the wetness in which you are swimming and pity the fool author who bites off more than he can chew.

1 – Antifascists

In the Spanish Civil War there were International Brigades of volunteers who fought against the Fascist-led right-wing rebel coalition. Around one quarter of those volunteers came from Germany and Italy – countries that were overtly allied with the rebels – despite the fact that this would mark them as traitors. Perhaps more to the point the advent of the Civil War pushed the Spanish Republican side into a revolution. The rise of Fascism made the liberals and social democrats much less relevant and it empowered the innately antifascist Anarchists and Spain’s predominantly anti-Stalinist Communists.

When faced with movements of repressive authoritarianism, close-minded tribalism, moral expediency and vast inequality many people will respond by gravitating to libertarian, pluralistic, principled and inclusive ideals. Fascism changes the calculus so that when once people might have been inclined to think that society could not afford to be idealistic, they come instead to see that society can not afford not to be idealistic. Creeping Fascism has prompted a countervailing creeping antifascism. The upshot of the gradual advent of Fascism is that some people have become antifascists without even knowing it.

Of course, there is also overt self-conscious antifascist activism occurring. Antifascist or “Anti-Fascist” or “Antifa” groups are growing and becoming more active in Germany, the UK, Greece, Australia, Croatia, Portugal, Italy, Russia, France, Spain and Quebec to name a few. These tend to be counter-movements to extremist right-wing activists. Such antifascists have often historically fought street battles of varying intensity, but the frequency and distribution of such activities has slowly crept up. Even Bristol in the south of England has seen street violence between the Bristol Antifascists and the Bristol United Patriots. Such antifascists often greatly outnumber the more publicised growing right-wing formations such as Pegida and the English Defence League. Of late, however, that gap is closing.

The self-avowed antifascists are really only the tip of the iceberg of a broader and more significant generalised antifascist mood across the breadth of left-wing activism. This is an essentially and existentially antifascist movement, but even the activists don’t necessarily think of it in those terms. It started to evolve under an Anarchist renaissance in opposition to “globalisation” in the 90s. The thing about these Anarchists is that, like their Spanish antecedents, they largely rejected all of those organisational and tactical practices which were embraced by their antagonists. That meant a rejection hierarchy and dogma.

Consciously or unconsciously the anarchistic approach has come to permeate political dissent in the Anglosphere. Political scientist James Martel sees anarchist principles as central to the practices of internet freedom activists, antiwar activists, the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, and more. We should bear in mind that during the Cold War era left-wing dissent in the West was decidedly dominated by authoritarianism and dogma. I am not saying that such dissent cannot be antifascist, nor that Stalin wasn’t antifascist because he was authoritarian. What I am suggesting is that when Fascism becomes visible people start to react with a more organic antifascist impulse. This is intrinsically pure antifascism, and it is on the rise.

What differs now from, say, battles between anarchist antifascists and avowed neo-Nazis in the 1980s is that this is all much more directly connected to mainstream politics. The right-wing extremists may still be socially excluded and marginal to public opinion, but they are ideologically aligned with centres of power that use “dogwhistle” tactics to validate fascist politics without openly declaring themselves as Fascists. This is even more striking in countries where avowed antifascists take action against their own governing regimes, policies or parties. Such countries include Switzerland, Ukraine, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Turkey, and India.

Of course, this is only a selection of countries with antifascist activism. One I have not mentioned is the US, where avowed antifascists are rare, though there are some local and national organisations. In a way this can partly be put down to not seeing the forest of Fascism because there are so many trees blocking the view. Right-wing extremism is so pluralistic in the US that it resembles a bizarre menagerie. At the same time the political terminology of “right”, “left”, “conservative”, “liberal”, “socialist” and “libertarian” have all become empty signifiers meaning nothing more that “yay!” or “booo!” depending on the speaker. There is also the confusion that local, state and federal government agents practice and license right-wing extremism on one hand, but ostentatiously oppose it at other times. This is slippery Fascism – hard to oppose because it is so mercurial.

The US provides a lesson for all antifascists to learn – it is counterproductive to distinguish between the violent right-wing authoritarians who have swastika tattoos and the right-wing authoritarians who believe in guns or God or country or the uniform that they wear. What I expect to see, however, is that as the gobbets of Fascism increasingly clump together into a more obviously conjoined mass, those who have knowingly or unknowingly opposed aspects of Fascism during its rise will also consolidate both ideology and networks.

Whichever way you look at it, both activism that overtly opposes Fascism and activism that tacitly but coherently opposes what Fascism stands for is on the rise. It is a sure sign that there is a widespread Fascism which is prompting this phenomenon.

2 The Leader Principle

Like a South Park joke Amy Goodman recently inadvertently referred to the Canadian “presidential race”. It was also a Freudian slip. In the past 30 years it seems that every parliamentary democracy to have moved towards presidential style politics. In many countries the idea that a political party or ideology is tied to the personal qualities of a leader was once viewed with great suspicion. The reason for this is precisely because this style of politics is inescapably demagogic and fascistic.

In parliamentary democracies, strong party leaders have always been an asset, but electoral campaigning has traditionally been about getting a mandate for a party’s political platform and getting a mandate for a given parliamentarian to represent an electorate. That is the entire basis for the democratic pretensions of parliamentary systems – the basis on which the government claims to govern with the consent of the governed. In contrast, electing a single person as a “leader”, whether they be a Prime Minister or a President, is unavoidably undemocratic and presidential systems base their democratic claims on limiting or balancing executive power. More on that later.

To return to the fact that parliamentary systems are adopting a presidential campaigning style; the most striking example must be India. For those unfamiliar with India’s PM, if you do a web search for “Narendra Modi cult of personality” you will probably quite a surprise about the way things are in the “world’s largest democracy”. You will read that he had a TV channel in his name – or rather NaMo – when he was still Chief Minister of Gujarat; that NaMo is now available as an app; that his 2014 campaign created a “Mao-like personality cult” (which I believe may be even more serious even than riding a Mao-style bicycle); and perhaps most disturbing of all, in the style of the late Kim Jong Il, soon after his election he opposed moves to devote a chapter of school history textbooks in Gujarat to his heroism on the grounds that “the life story of living individuals should not be included”. Apparently this “humility” has only served to increase Modi’s popularity. But NaMo need not have worried because the political mass movement from which he sprung, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS, sees “nothing bad” in a personality cult (and if millions of militaristic uniformed ideologues with a history of violence see “nothing bad” it is probably advisable to think carefully before disagreeing aloud.)

Not only have elections become increasingly akin to popularity contests controlled by marketing firms, but numerous countries are moving to consolidate more power in the hands of a single leader. In Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been trying to extend the executive power of the President. Previously executive power was largely vested with the Prime Minister and Cabinet, leaving President as a largely symbolic head of state. Erdoğan’s Islamist AKP was once the electoral alternative to the established fascistic old guard of corporatist militarist US client rulers (who were part of the Third Wave discussed previously). The AKP had planned to extend the powers of the President, but the electorate didn’t want to play along and so the Turks had to have a second election. As Rosa Burç wrote the elections were the “last exit before the bridge” to “an authoritarian presidential system.” The AKP put up barriers to prevent that exit and the bridge was crossed. The AKP regained a parliamentary majority and three days later Erdoğan put forward his plan to rewrite the constitution.

Elevating one leader above the normal party-political processes is not only authoritarian in its essence, it also fits the anti-political pretensions of Fascism. Moreover, along with the trend towards this “presidential” style, there is a widespread tendency to extend greater and greater political control to the executive power. This happened globally in the first few years after 2001, not just in the West but in the developing world, the BRICS countries and East Asia. Now that those changes have been around for a while governments are entrenching them by normalising the use of executive power which was originally implemented as a crisis measure. This follows a model established by Egypt and Israel who both implemented “Emergency Laws” 70 years ago and have not deactivated them since. For all of us now, a state of extraordinary crisis is the new normal. When governments are not yelling and screaming about the current emergency, they are still using the emergency powers. If challenged they will simply start yelling and screaming about the current emergency because, even more than at the height of the Cold War, normality to these people is defined as being a state of extraordinary crisis and immanent existential threat.

The best example of this is the US because on paper the executive should be limited. Naturally, any executive is going to have a lot of power simply from the immediacy of the office and the inevitable leeway that comes from choosing just how to enact the will of the representatives, but in the US case there are many putative “checks and balances”. Individual states have a great deal of sovereignty. At the federal level the most fundamental powers – legislating, taxing, spending, declaring war and signing treaties – are all in the hands of the houses of congress. Implementing policy is dependent on the disbursement of funds and often on the passage of legislation, so any administration is dependent on Congress. Further the executive can be constrained by the courts which have taken on the role of a watchdog ruling on the constitutionality of policies and laws.

There has always been a tension in US politics because various administrations have attempted, with differing degrees of success, to govern in the style of a fixed-term dictatorship. In the 1960s and 1970s Congress started to fight to regain the exercise of power that it is afforded in the US Constitution. Both Houses of Congress, separately and jointly, formed committees such as the “Church Committee” and passed legislation such as the War Powers Act of 1973. This was in response to the seemingly uncontrollable executive power which was then referred to as the “Imperial Presidency”.

According to Digital History the attempts to rein in executive power had mixed results: “The War Powers Act has never been invoked. Campaign financing reform has not curbed the ability of special interests to curry favor with politicians or the capacity of the very rich to outspend opponents.” Well given that Congressional failure to make decisions on war has become a bad joke repeated like an annoying sitcom catchphrase, and given the insanely expensive Pandemonium that is the current 23.8 month-long campaign for the 2016 elections, it is clear that they are vastly understating the failure.

On the other side of the ledger, Digital History claims that “Congress has had somewhat more success in reining in the FBI and the CIA.” Really? There was certainly a period during which these agencies kept a low profile, but if they retain any circumspection in certain areas, they more than compensate by shameless excesses in others. The FBI went from the COINTELPRO-esque “Green Scare” repression to a post-9/11 incarnation where it seems that the main activitity of the Bureau has been to create terror plots in order to foil them and throw their own patsies into supermax prisons for inhuman and cruel confinement for breathtakingly long periods. As for the CIA, a key constraint placed on their activities were the executive orders issued by Ford, Carter and Reagan which prohibited political assassinations. Now, by contrast, the CIA maintains weaponised drones and kills frequently and overtly as a matter of “routine”. Worse still, perhaps, is the fact that the CIA and FBI are only small parts of a gigantic intelligence industry that is beyond oversight. Dana Priest and William Arkin’s landmark investigation “Top Secret America” is a disturbing look at an unstoppable many-headed monster. This is all the more alarming because the 2010 revelations cry out for action, yet no action is forthcoming or even talked about.

After 2001 executive power was extended by legislation such as the Patriot Act. George W. Bush also set a precedent by using “signing statements” as de facto, if limited, rule by decree. This was all magnified by “Unitary Executive theory” which holds that the President is at the apex all Federal executive authority. This is not from the Constitution, rather proponents argue that it is a true because they say so, which is true to the authoritarian spirit of the whole thing anyway. As Garrett Epps wrote: “In any crisis, it allows power to flow to the President; as crisis recedes, future Presidents tend not to give it back.” Obama has done exactly that. By not abdicating any of the powers accumulated by Bush he has entrenched and strengthened the Imperial Presidency to the point where it no longer needs to justify itself and it becomes invisible – especially to younger people.

Theoretically Congress could still exert authority over the President, but we have to look beyond appearances. Congress itself is beholden to other powers and can only act against the President when acting with their assent. There are still institutions that subject the Presidency to checks and balances – Wall St, the military-industrial-media complex, the imperial think-tanks, the NRA and so forth. For more on those institutions see section 8 below.

3 Idiocracy (WARNING: Contains Nuts)

Fascism has always had a strong anti-intellectual strain. A key demagogic tactic is to play on popular prejudice in a way that actively rejects critical engagement. Neocons share with the Nazis and other old-style Fascists an intellectual argument against intellect. Leo Strauss, in particular, devoted much scholarship to the ways in which exposure to complexity might dangerously overheat the brains of plebs. His acolyte Alan Bloom wrote the book The Closing of the American Mind in which he explained that if you don’t restrict, constrain and direct the learning of students to the things that Alan Bloom thinks are worthy, the very openness of the education system itself will cause a feedback loop of bottomless relativism which will actually cause the young to become close-minded.

It is possible that Strauss and Bloom were actually trying to subvert and spoil growing anti-intellectual trends. Strauss, a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, feared the coming of a single world government. He advocated camouflaging meaning within a web of lies, even to the extent of living a life of lies. He advocated moral simplicity and a Manichaean clarity where good-guys wear white hats and bad guys wear black. He knew that this was consonant with Nazi philosophy so he was either being subversive or he wanted to make sure that the next time he was on the side of the persecutors not the persecuted (and if that was the case, why didn’t he just move to Israel). Likewise, Allan Bloom, as a gay Jew, had every reason to subvert the old-fashioned patriarchal Anglo-Saxon protestant dominated canon of “Great Books”.

Regardless of the intents of Straussian neocons, we may judge them on the fruits of their labours – they were fools. But they are just one tributary feeding into a veritable Mississippi of moronic mentality in the US. Other sources include televangelists who want you to send money in exchange for various unlikely miracles such as God paying back the loan with interest; advertisers who want you to send money in exchange for various unlikely miracles such as their product making you wealthy and sexually attractive; and politicians who want you to vote for them (and send money) in exchange for various unlikely miracles such as them not helping to destroy the human species.

The old fashioned Fascists reasoned their way to unreason through a philosophy rejecting materialism. A lot of today’s most influential opinion leaders would consider all philosophy to be derp and don’t believe in thinking anything that takes more than 140 characters (of which up to half may need to be set aside for hashtags). Likewise the neocons believe in keeping things simple for the masses. For them, people must be led by a sophisticated elite, but if intellectualism is suspect why would we want to be led by intellectuals – what we need is government of the idiots, by the idiots, for the idiots. The new Fascism offers that – at least in part.

One could say that the new Fascism Trumps the old Fascism in its capacity for unadulterated anti-intellectualism. Donald Trump doesn’t even bother to try and make sense. He is not necessarily innately stupid, but whatever his intellectual limitations may or may not be, he simply does not try to reason out his stances. He has absolutely no incentive to try to make sense of things, it would only get in the way of his success in making money, in being a celebrity, and in politics. He has no reason to reason.

Trump is also the beneficiary of many years of the boiling frogs mechanism discussed in the first part of this article. George W. Bush was careful to always distinguish between Islamist terrorists and peaceful Muslims, but his actions and his unspoken messages said something else. Under Obama the environment has remained extremely favourable to the growth of Islamophobia such that now Trump can lie through his teeth in saying and reiterating that he saw thousands of Arabs celebrating the attacks of September 11 2001.

Trump’s simplistic and hateful populism has prompted some people to use the f-word (here, here, here, here, here, for examples). Chip Berlet countered that he is not a Fascist, but rather a “nativist right-wing populist”. Without wanting to devote too much time to Berlet’s argument, the first thing that should be noted is that Fascists generally are “nativist right-wing populists” and that Berlet is simply begging the question because he does not define Fascism.

Second to Trump in the polls was Ben Carson. Andy Borowitz has pointed out that he is smashing stereotypes such as the tired old cliché view that neurosurgeons are intelligent. He claims that the pyramids in Egypt were built by Joseph to store grain. Why he advances this 1500 year-old pseudo-biblical hypothesis is anyone’s guess. I assume that he is predisposed to believe any contention that has a biblical reference no matter how unlikely it is and how extraneous to faith. He is also said to be struggling to wrap his head around the most simple facts of foreign policy, which led him to claim on live TV that “the Chinese are there” in Syria.

The fact is that revelations of Ben Carson’s diminished intellectual capacity have come hand-in-hand with his rise in popularity. I think it is fair to say that the US is leading the charge into mass stupidity, but even there they have reached peak Carson. Like Wile E. Coyote he is in temporary defiance of gravity but will soon plummet to the depths of becoming a pop-culture reference – a meme which conveys a certain type of blithe and unselfconscious naïve idiocy.

The most important thing to note about Trump and Carson is that doing, saying and believing stupid things has not in any way prevented them from being successful. On the contrary, it has been the key to their success. It would be hard to demonstrate, but I genuinely believe that Carson needed both his religiosity and his cluelessness to succeed. As a poor black young man scepticism, social consciousness, or even just showing up his academic superiors would have earned ire and exclusion, leaving him as just another angry individual with wasted potential. By destroying or suppressing intellectual potential outside of his chosen field Carson has been made into an intellectual monstrosity – like a jigsaw of a normal mind with 2 thirds or more of the normal pieces taken away. On a purely human level this makes him a bizarre twisted thing, but he is twisted in the right way to allow him to have succeeded.

Trump is the product of a far more widely evidenced type of protective stupidity – that of gangsters, used-car salesmen, politicians and journalists. This is the protective stupidity of someone who does horrible things, often visiting harm to others in a very personal manner. Such people adopt a callous and officious obtuseness which is their armour against any questions of morality and ethics. They internalise these things so that they don’t have to answer their own consciences either. The degree to which such people believe their own lies is moot. The only thing that makes Trump outstanding is not that obtuseness and bullshitting are weapons in his political/commercial/celebrity arsenal, but the fact that they form the foundation of all that he has done.

Once again, the key to understanding outstanding anti-intellectual figures like Trump and Carson is to understand the context of a progressive dumbing down of entire societies. Miseducation is spreading. In 2003 it was found that the more you watched Fox News, the more likely you were to believe falsehoods about Iraq. This was not caused by Fox overtly lying, but rather by their coverage being constructed in a way that would seem to be utterly nonsensical if these lies weren’t true. For example, you would not devote hours and hours of coverage to the links between Saddam and Al Qaeda if they were fictitious. The only way that would makes sense was if you had a deliberate co-ordinated plan to deceive people but did not want to be caught in an outright liAe. Similarly, the vast majority of consumers of Western news media will currently believe that refugees were responsible for the Paris terror attacks that happened recently. The media coverage of political moves to restrict refugee entry in response to Paris makes no sense unless refugees carried out the attacks. Thus it can be concluded that there is a conscious effort to deceive. People did not need to switch to being ignorant Fox viewers, because Fox News came to them.

Trump and Carson have responded to the Paris attacks in a way that prominent US Muslims have described as “beyond terrifying”. They make a connection to Nazism for the simple reason that the analogy is too apt to ignore. It isn’t just Trump and Carson either. Jeb Bush is calling for a “Christianity test” on Syrian refugees. People are still taking them seriously. Trump may never become President of the US, but he is creating a space in the political landscape. Someone slightly less comical but equally antagonistic to evidence-based reason could fill that space in future times, but even in the absence of that new Leader he has added to a vortex of unthought which sucks public discourse into a vapid vacuum.

This entire section has featured the US because it is a large slow-moving target when it comes to accusations of ignorance and stupidity. A town in North Carolina rejected a solar power farm in the belief that it would “suck up all the energy from the sun”. In 2012 I posted a piece entitled “Polls Show: Israelis Racist Hateful Baby Killers, “Americans” Stupider than Frog Spawn”. I wrote, “If a Martian were to make judgements on the peoples of the Earth based on their responses to polled questions, that Martian might possibly conclude that the average US citizen has an intellectual ability somewhat below that of a concussed baboon and that the average Israeli would like to see all Palestinians strangled at birth.” My point was that the average person from these countries was probably not well represented by the extreme results, but that the polls reflected growing trends. Sadly I was right.

But the growing interlinked hate and stupidity is by no means contained in the US and Israel. Writing of the current “Age of Stupidity” Andrew Levine opines: “The U.S. hasn’t gotten smarter, but it is no longer the outlier it used to be.

“Everyone knows that British bombs in Syria will serve no useful military purpose; that their effect is mainly symbolic. And yet they bomb – putting the British people at greater risk.

“This is stupid indeed, but David Cameron is downright sagacious compared to François Hollande. With the National Front breathing down his neck, Hollande has affected a stance as vengeful – and dumb — as Bush and Cheney’s after 9/11.”

Anti-intellectualism is pre-condition of many of the aspects of Fascism that I will continue to enumerate. The violence, the chauvinism and the hypocrisy all require a type of willful stupidity to exist. Sometimes the stupidity is internalised and intrinsic to the individual Fascist, but it is often a deliberate construct. The bizarre claim by Binyamin Netanyahu that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem persuaded Hitler to kill all the Jews is, like the Tory attacks on Corbyn in the UK, calculated to impress a certain section of the Zionists who are impervious to simple logic and common sense. ISIS followers believe that they will fight a battle against the “Romans” in small town in northern Syria as part of the end-of-days showdown against the Antichrist. This is used to recruit people, but it only works because they are willing to accept a particular interpretation of a sentence in the Hadith as being worth killing and dying for. Perhaps that is what makes ISIS most scary – they are idiots like us.

3b More Idiocracy

As amusing and alarming as the foregoing idiocy may be, it may actually be less of a problem than the degradation of those institutions that are meant to reflect the pinnacles of intellect and knowledge.

Tertiary education, for example, has always been dominated by the ruling class and by bourgeois perspectives. If universities are often associated with activism and dissent it is certainly not because rich kids are more idealistic and dedicated than others, it is because the knowledge that is incidentally gleaned in their process of “education” tends to create discontent. The very nature of the universe itself is anti-establishment. To paraphrase Steven Colbert, “truth has a well-known left-wing bias”. Of course, the knowledge aspect of tertiary education is on the decline. For some reason it is universally accepted that the tax payer and the student should pay their own money to become exploitable “human capital” that someone else can profit from. We demand that universities provide what employers want even though the employers aren’t paying for it. Instead of tertiary education, wherein students learn about things, we have a tertiary training model, where students learn to do things.

In addition the university is a strictly hierarchical structure. It is all very open and free until suddenly it isn’t. There is no one who will tell you outright not to say certain things, but wrong thought is treated by double-standards of nit-picking, obtuseness, bullying and petty lies. If you don’t take the hint the system will eventually turn on you and you will suddenly realise that at key points it is purely authoritarian, 100% opaque, completely immune to appeal or interrogation. This is referred to as “traditional independence”. You don’t have to take my embittered and biased word for it because Steven Salaita, who was unfairly fired for his political beliefs, researched the whole subject and wrote this book and gives a one hour talk on his findings here.

Universities are also, and more importantly, dominated by junk merchants (who directly exchange “scholarly” product for money from those who benefit) and fanatics of ideological orthodoxy (who may be difficult to distinguish because their official pieties also serve vested interests). Furthermore there is a great gray area where as prospective employers, as sponsors, as investors, and as “partners” certain industries and interests influence tertiary institutions. Education is further degraded by the clearly deleterious influence of industries such as the pharmaceutical, petrochemical, arms, mining, biotech/agribusiness, PR/marketing, media, and finance along with an equally if not more destructive involvement from the military.

Beyond the university system there are also the “think tanks”, where money talks, power yells and Orwellian ideology screams out of loudspeakers. This is a whole issue in itself, worthy of entire articles like this, or this. Because they provide pundits and commentary for news media, think tanks have effectively become a type of ideological priesthood. Rather than describe them all in general terms I offer this case-study on a very respectable UK Islamophobe think tank excerpted from a blog post by ex-diplomat Craig Murray:

“Donald Trump’s remarks have brought appropriate condemnation, but the Henry Jackson Society got there first. In February 2006 Douglas Murray, Associate Director of the Henry Jackson Society, stated :

‘It is late in the day, but Europe still has time to turn around the demographic time-bomb which will soon see a number of our largest cities fall to Muslim majorities. It has to. All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop. […] Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board: Europe must look like a less attractive proposition.‘

“Douglas Murray also came out with a straight defence of the use of torture by Western intelligence agencies.

…

“The Henry Jackson Society is the go-to organisation for broadcasters looking for comment on Islamic affairs. I was both pleased and surprised to see the Henry Jackson Society named two days ago in a Guardian article on the mainstreaming of Islamophobia. …

… Guess what? The Guardian Editors have now excised all mention of the Henry Jackson Society from the article on the mainstreaming of Islamophobia. Interesting that, isn’t it?

The Henry Jackson Society seconds staff to the Quilliam Foundation. This extraordinary organisation is a career vehicle for “reformed jihadists” to milk huge salaries and luxury lifestyles from government money, in return for fronting an organisation run by the security services. Quilliam specialises in denouncement of Muslim organisations and talking up the Jihadi threat, offering “expert advice” on the government’s anti-free speech strategy. At the same time, it seeks to maximise the income of its directors. One interesting collaboration to make money was its collaboration with the current head of Pergida UK, and former head of the English Defence League, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Alias Tommy Robinson).

“Quilliam have received millions from the taxpayer for their dubious “work”. But their application for Home Office funding to split with Yaxley-Lennon remains an episode beyond belief. Several of Quilliam’s staff are “lent” by the CIA-funded Henry Jackson Society.”

With the idiocy, the spin, the ideological faith-based reasoning, the junk, and the propaganda predominating in the public discourse, where does that leave public intellectuals? There is still room for engaged activist academics to tackles inequality, housing, racism, or neoliberalism in many important ways, but the fundamental areas of international relations, economics, and politics are the realm of the fanatics, the mercenaries and the pseudorealist dullards. More often than not, news media contextualise Western military action by getting comment from a puerile geek who heads a University-based think tank with called the “Center for Strategic Something-or-Other” who thinks the world is a James Bond movie and gets breathless while describing moves “take out” these ISIS forces or those Al Qaeda affiliates.

The most respected intellects in the public realm are now those best at peddling propaganda and blithely trashing intellectual rigour. Niall Ferguson, for example, wrote a 2012 Newsweek cover article that was full of deliberate distortions, that hasn’t lowered his stock. If Noam Chomsky had done something like that we would never hear the end of it, but Niall Ferguson is treated as if he is some form of superior being. His books are also abysmally poor from a scholarly, intellectual and ethical viewpoint except when he is writing about financial history. When writing about finance he is incisive and cynical, but when writing of more general history he simply reproduces old political rhetoric and propaganda. He is like an archeologist who, on excavating a midden, throws away all artifacts and instead collects the ancient, dry, dusty manure into a big heap. Then, for this pile of shit, he is given high accolades, praise, book deals and glowing reviews.

Neocons and other old warmongers like Henry Kissinger are treated increasingly like idols. In France the most notable intellectual of this time is Bernard-Henri Lévy. That alone should be enough to show how low we have sunk. Like Henry Kissinger, “BHL” is widely loathed, but he is accorded the highest status as a public intellectual.

The right-wing fanatics and neoliberal apparatchiks, who promote of greed, selfishness, hate and war, are not balanced by opponents who are given the same stature. Antagonists are effectively crowded out of the mainstream conversation so that the anti-intellectualism of the right-wing pundits spreads discredit over scholarship as a whole. Left-wing public intellectuals thrive amongst the activist minority, but are almost totally excluded from mainstream news media. Instead, news media will not only feature junksters from think-tanks, but will often allow paid PR people and political consultants to act as pundits. It is simply free unregulated political advertising for right-wing and commercial interests.

Meanwhile, a war criminal like Tony Blair can travel to any part of the world and, no matter how much ordinary people hate him, rich people will pay huge sums to hear him speak. They do not line up to pay for ex-leaders who did not wage a war of aggression. They are so enamoured of power that in their magical thinking the very fact that Blair was such a successful mass-murderer imbues his words with mystical sagacity. This reveals much about elite culture and politics that I will return to later.

In the US there is also a rarified zone “inside the beltway”. This Olympus is at the heights of power, but apparently at that altitude something weird happens to your brain and Ronald Reagan looks like a Great Man or even some form of genius. Among the beltway demigods are many neocons like Robert Kagan who are treated as paragons of intellect. Let me be very very clear here: some of these neocons, most likely including Kagan, know exactly what they are doing. Their idiocy is calculated. The past 15 years of ongoing slaughter, destruction and instability in the Middle East, Central Asia and parts of Africa under the rubric of fighting terrorism has seen the US extend its already unparalleled imperial hegemony. Without this death and suffering the US empire, which has voluntarily been constructed out of militarised control of strategic resources and finance, would have shrunk. By their own tacit standards, which are seldom voiced, the neocons have succeeded enormously. But that is not my concern here, because the way they publicly explain themselves is utter nonsense. Their intellectual offerings are much like those of Niall Ferguson, but where his is dusty remnants, theirs is fresh, steaming and pungent.

Accorded the status of intellectual people like BHL, Kagan, or Ferguson can say stunningly stupid things and be praised for their superior minds. However, let us not pretend that this is not pointed. The stupidity must serve the right purpose. It must be pro-war, pro-authoritarian, and pro-neoliberal. Or it could be Islamophobic. Sam Harris, for example, has extremely clever ways of saying extremely stupid things. As Marek Sullivan writes in Counterpunch, Harris uses “‘vaccinated polemicism’—a polemicism that incorporates a moderate dose of self-reflexive critique”. What he does is reject the crude Islamophobic rantings of people like Trump, and having established himself as a creature of reason, he performs a 180-degree turn and affirms them, except now couched in more multisyllabic terms. This “enables him to say one thing while meaning another, to give the impression of reasonableness while endorsing the most noxious ideas of the right.” To extend the metaphor I used for neocons and Ferguson, Sam Harris proves that despite everything they say, you can polish a turd. Many people who don’t like the raw turds offered forth by Trump or Ted Cruz will cheerfully gobble down Harris’ polished turds, which are a much better class of crap.

4 Let Your Fists Do the Talking

The proclivity for using violence is an intrinsic constituent of Fascism. When Fascists eschew violence it is always a tactical decision, because on the whole they are ideologically and psychologically wedded to the idea that if they use violence to advance an agenda it is necessary, natural and morally righteous.

If you have ever found yourself in personal opposition to neonazis or fascistic white supremacists, you will know that they project their own violent tendencies and intentions on those who oppose them ideologically. Fascist ideas are very attractive to people who have what psychologists refer to as “appetitive aggression”. This is fostered by trauma, such as family violence, and in turn prompts not just violent acts but cruelty.

Your average Fascist, however, is not a frontline Brownshirt. They mostly want violence to be inflicted on those they think of as enemies by those who they think of as their protectors. They want the police to be violent to criminals and to those who threaten the social order with activism. They are both thrilled and reassured by displays of military might and by the use of mass armed violence against those who they perceive as potential threats. This, in turn, is part of a tendency that psychologists term “right-wing authoritarianism”.

“Right-wing authoritarians” also believe strongly in following a leader, hence the name. For this reason I want to return to a particularly revealing recent incident described in the headlines of Democracy Now!:

“Trump’s remarks at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama were interrupted by an African-American activist who shouted, “Black lives matter.” Trump shouted, “Get him the hell out of here,” and a group of Trump’s supporters surrounded the activist, Mercutio Southall Jr., kicking and punching him. Trump defended their actions in a Fox News interview Sunday.

Donald Trump: “I don’t know, rough up, he should have been – maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing. … And this was a very obnoxious guy, who was a troublemaker, was looking to make trouble….”

Trump is saying that it is good to beat up people who annoy you and his supporters spontaneously do that to protesters at his rallies. At a more recent rally “supporters yelled ‘Shoot him!‘ ‘Kick his ass!‘ and even ‘Sieg heil‘—a Nazi salute—as one protester was dragged away.” Others yelled “light the motherfucker on fire”. But Trump and his followers are not that far from the mainstream. When protests have occurred at rallies for the Democrats as well as the Republicans for a number of years attendees have spontaneously surrounded the dissidents and chanted “U S A! U S A!” in a manner that should be chilling. It is not that much of a step to go from an aggressive mass chant to the violence of physical force.

[I have just seen an even more striking incident at a Trump rally where the reviled dissidents were themselves rather midlessly partiotic and joined in the USA! chant]

Part of this is the belief that people raising their voice is discordant and a form of transgressive violence. Any perceived insult to the country or to authority prompts great violent anger. For both the leader and the followers anything seen as insubordination is the equivalent of unpredictable dangerous violence. This is shown again and again by US police who can become violent and agitated if people are not deferential.

The “white male entitlement syndrome” is part of a growing culture of authoritarianism in the US. A key indication was one of those incidents that should have been widely broadcast news, but which the global mainstream media managed to pretend was not newsworthy and that is the “Don’t tase me bro!” incident which became famous through social media. This happened in 2007 when some security guards at the University of Florida decide to detain someone because the did not like the question he posed to John Kerry. He quite rightly resisted being silenced and what followed looked a lot like they deliberately inflicted pain on him for having been defiant. The difference between this and many of the police incidents is that these guards were by no means in a confrontation, they had no possible excuse for being fearful, and they were not forced to exert control over the body of the man. Everything they did was utterly gratuitous. I am not trying to excuse other incidents of police violence, but this is an extremely uncomplicated example of uniformed thuggery by people who seemed to believe that it people who do not show deference to authority should be punished with violent pain. My great fear is that many people cannot really see why this incident is so disturbing and symptomatic.

It is only a short step from a crowd bravely beating a lone protester, to militias attacking peaceful rallies while the police studiously fail to notice. From there violence may easily become deadly. Back to India, Narendra Modi’s ideological wellspring – the RSS – is a militant organisation with many aligned militias. They have a long history of entanglement and involvement in bloody communal violence. This has long been a serious problem, but now violent Hindu nationalism has, to a degree, been endorsed by the state.

The English language Indian website Countercurrents features many stories about Indian fascism. This is a large and complex issue in a large and complex country, however there are two stories that I think will be striking to most readers. One is the fact that Indian tax money is being spent erecting statues to Naturam Godse. Godse was the Hindu nationalist, formerly of the RSS, who killed Mahatma (“Venerable” or “Great Soul”) Mohandis Gandhi. The statues are part of an attempt to rewrite history: to make Gandhi more exclusively Hindu and to elevate Godse. “One BJP MP called him a patriot and other BJP MP said that Godse chose the wrong target, instead of Gandhi; he should have chosen Nehru as his target.”

Alonside Gandhi and his murderer, Modi has also elevated the Sardar (“Chief”) Vallabh Bhai Patel. Patel banned the RSS after Godse killed Gandhi, so it is little wonder that Sandipan Sharma writes: “The utopian dream of the lamb and lion drinking from the same fountain couldn’t have found a more perverse fulfillment.” Combining contradictions within one entity might be fertile for spiritual and philosophical thought, but in politics it always denotes the deliberate confusion of antagonistic values in order to create Orwellian doublethink. War is peace. Modi, like Sam Harris, is polishing turds. He is making violence, hatred and intolerance acceptable to people who want to pretend that they are not complicit in the excesses of the few.

The second striking story of Fascism emanating from India is the natural result of the dogwhistle endorsement of communal violence that is implicit in Modi’s governance. This is the advent of anti-beef militias who attack and sometimes lynch people suspected of eating beef or transporting cattle. These attacks are directed against Muslims in general. Countercurrents details 5 deaths, all of which seem to be prompted by faulty or flimsy information, before adding: “Recently three writers were killed by fascist forces. Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and M.M.Kalburgi were killed in cold blood and none of the culprits were arrested so far.”

Central and Eastern Europe have seen the coinciding phenomena of the rehabilitation of old Nazis with the rise of Fascist violence. In Latvia hundreds of Waffen-SS veterans and supporters marched. Earlier, “the last Estonian SS veteran to have been awarded the Nazis Knight’s Cross, Harald Nugiseks, was buried in Estonia with full military honors on Friday 10 January 2014.” In Croatia nationalists demonstrated against an antifascist ceremony chanting the Ustasha slogan “Za dom spremni” (“Ready for the homeland”). The Ustasha ran a Nazi client regime in World War II. They had their own death camps where an estimated 34,000 Jews, 80,000 Roma and 300,000-600,000 Serbs were killed. In Ukraine, though loathed by many Ukrainians, large numbers of West Ukrainians venerate Stepan Bandera whose Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists had dedicated SS units who are estimated to have massacred a total of 500,000 civilians.

Those who embrace the Fascists of the past as heroes tend to minimise their crimes of violence, but they themselves embrace the use of violence as a valid form of political action. Many readers of this article will no doubt be aware of the Odessa Massacre, but given the mainstream silence on the subject it is worth (re)acquainting yourself with the facts to understand what Fascists will do when they are able.

Behind the thugs who commit acts of cruelty are demagogues who spout what may at first seem to be hyperbole. We know from sources such as the Auschwitz doctors interviewed by Robert Jay Lifton that the over-the-top rhetoric of Nazi leaders, which they had almost disregarded when first hearing it, made it much easier to adjust to the new reality of daily participation in mass-murder. For this reason, like a tongue probing a sore (and cliché) tooth, I must return to the topic of Donald Trump: “’We’re fighting a very politically correct war,’ Trump said during a 2 December interview on Fox and Friends. ‘And the other things with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families! They care about their lives, don’t kid yourselves. They say they don’t care about their lives. But you have to take out their families.’”

Trump, who is ahead in polls by up to 5-27% depending on the poll, defended his openly stated plan to murder innocent people by saying “we have to be much tougher than we’ve been”. But it is the context in which Trump is saying these things that is most disturbing. He fellow candidate (currently second in the polls) Ted Cruz wants to carpet bomb ISIS areas, where millions live, and says “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.” The same debate in which Trump said those things saw the moderator ask Carson: “Could you order airstrikes that would kill innocent children by not the scores, but the hundreds and the thousands? Could you wage war as a commander-in-chief?” So now it is normal and accepted that mass-murder is part of the job description of President of the US.

Being a pediatric neurosurgeon, Carson’s response to being accused of not being willing to slaughter kids was fascinating: “…you should see the eyes of … children when I say to them, ‘We’re going to have to open your head up and take out this tumor.’ They’re not happy about it, believe me. And they don’t like me very much at that point. But later on, they love me. …

HUGH HEWITT: So you are OK with the deaths of thousands of innocent children and civilian. It’s like—

DR. BEN CARSON: You got it. You got it.”

Even for a religious person like Carson it seems a stretch to think that those you have killed will look back and love you for it. Carson is combining two techniques of sanitising violent crimes that, while not exclusive to them, were greatly beloved of the Nazis. One is a specific dehumanisation which strips victims of their capacity for suffering. Usually this is done by saying that “life is cheap” for the enemy, but Carson’s childish fantasy works to the same effect. The other is the use of a medical/surgical metaphor for warfare. This enduring mental framework for the grotesqueries of mass violence adjusts the attitude of those on the home front, those in the rear echelon, and those in the front lines carrying out the butchery. We might like to think that we cannot become the new Nazis, but once you accept the basic proposition that killing human beings is an act of sanitisation, or the excision of a disease, then there is no limit to how far you will take that killing.

This brings me to my final point, Jeb Bush, because of the circumstances, is able to make a completely anodyne and banal call for genocidal mass slaughter: “We need a strategy. We need to get the lawyers off the back of the war fighters. Right now, under President Obama, we’ve created this standard that is so high that it’s impossible to be successful in fighting ISIS…. We need to increase our military spending. We need to deal with a no-fly zone in Syria, a safe zone. We need to focus on building a military that is second to none.”

Bush’s word are the most significant of all because, although he is far too unpopular to become POTUS, he is the genuine voice of power. His words could have been uttered by Hilary Clinton without anyone raising an eyebrow. Her own rhetoric is extremely warlike and she is the easy frontrunner when it comes to campaign contributions from weapons manufacturers. Remember that almost every POTUS of the last half century has become significantly more hawkish after each successful election. In that context, what Bush is saying is ominous in the extreme.

5 Might is Right

Fascists believe that by exercise of power and will people can righteously act outside of the boundaries of law. They loathed “criminals”, but when they used the term they meant poor people, minorities, and race/class traitors. Breaking the law for your political beliefs or for self-advancement is not really criminal. “Moral” crimes and material gain are gray areas because the Fascist ideology is really just a cover for a psychology of us and them. The fear and hate directed at them is rationalised and justified by the fact that they are innately criminal. Those prone to this viewpoint are, on one hand, inclined to project their own sense of self onto others they consider respectable, and on the other hand have so conflated the concept of criminals with their phobic negative feelings about them. On both counts it makes it hard for them to view social peers and social superiors as actual criminals, nor view their illegal and transgressive acts as being actual crimes.

Once again our societies have drifted into a place where the fundamental relations of power that were truly important to Fascism are in effect, but the more visible flashing patent-leather declarations of Fascist ideology.

We are now more accepting of the idea that the rich and the powerful are beyond the law. I could mention here the near impunity enjoyed by perpetrators in finance, in oil and mining, in US law enforcement. There are a few scapegoats, but they are the exception. For example Donald Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, was prosecuted after 29 men were killed in a mining disaster in 2010. In my own country of Aotearoa when 29 mine workers were killed in the same year, CEO Peter Whittall managed to position himself in the news media (which is a willing tool of the PR industry) as something akin to a heroic rescuer. Whittall did face 12 charges, but they were dropped in what appears to be a deal in exchange for a voluntary payment of $3.4 million. His company was convicted and fined and ordered to compensate victims, but it went bankrupt, paid no fine, and gave only $5000 to each grieving family.

We are thoroughly accustomed to the idea that prosecutions against the rich are dropped because they might be expensive and risky, but we seem utterly oblivious to the hugely disproportionate use of national wealth that goes into prosecuting the poor and then locking them up at the taxpayer’s expense. I was nearly selected to sit on the jury for a couple accused of small-time tax fraud. Between investigation and prosecution it was clear that the expense to the taxpayer would have been at least 10 times the amount that they were accused of defrauding. The prosecution were seeking custodial sentences the costs of which would have also exceeded the amount they defrauded. In a bittersweet epilogue, after the conviction the local community has had to use its resources, including time donated by lawyers, to prevent the female convict from being deported away from her citizen children.

The accused in that instance were not exactly poor. They were petit bourgeois facing the same sort of “justice” that a working-class petty criminal would face. To demonstrate the long arm of the law, the state will entirely disregard cost when it comes to punishing the lower orders. The criminal justice system will wreak havoc on families and communities to remind all ordinary people that they are subject to the rule of law. They are sending a message to the poor. They also send a message to the rich, but it is a very different message. The message is that they will be fine unless they are very unlucky, or they steal from rich people, like Bernie Madoff did, or they paint a large bullseye on your chest and wear a cap saying “I’m an ideal scapegoat”, like Martin Shkrelli did.

Having different rules for the rich and for the poor is nothing new, but as our societies become more authoritarian, it becomes more natural. US law enforcement officers, for example, seem to genuinely believe that if they break the law it is not a crime. Equally, the outpourings of public support for George Zimmerman show that for tens of millions of people in the US right and wrong is a literal matter of black and white. The scary thing is that those who don’t believe that George Zimmerman is a murderer are so profoundly racist, in a deep and often quiet way, that they cannot even be reached by reasoning.

Similarly, when an Auckland businessman chased a 15 year-old tagger and stabbed him to death with a knife, there was a great deal of public support for his claim that it was self-defence. The boy, who was Maori, was portrayed in court as a pothead and an alcoholic. The killer was convicted, but the incident showed how even in Aotearoa, the foul slime of respectable and fearful racism is not far from the surface.

These cases show the way different aspects of society blend into a Fascist whole. Hate for the poor, however tinted by race and class notions, is always a product of uneasy consciences as well as being linked to authoritarianism and chauvinism – call it the discreet guilt of the bourgeoisie.

Times of crisis catalyse fearful privilege and create a fertile medium for Fascism to flourish. One of the symptoms that has come to the fore of late is Aggrieved White Male Entitlement Syndrome. This is a violent reaction, much like that which prompted the formation of proto-Fascist Freikorps militias in Germany after World War I. This happens when those who enjoyed status and security within the system lose their privilege due to systemic change or crisis. Out of egocentricity, and because the myths of society put them in an unrealistically central role, they mistake the symptom of breakdown (their loss of privilege) for the cause. They then blame those who campaign for equality for breaking a system in which they dreamed themselves to be the ruling class.

As I have already written about on another occasion, there is also an imperial version of Aggrieved White Male Entitlement Syndrome. You don’t have to be white or male, you just need to think that you are meant to be the part of the greatest and best country in the world, and when that imperial state no longer accords you secure well-being, your reaction is that other peoples should be attacked. In the most tragicomic fashion this is demonstrated by a recent poll in which 30% of US Republicans supported bombing Agrabah – a fictional country from a Disney cartoon.

This brings me to my next point, that governments and powerful political leaders are not expected to always act lawfully. There is now very little expectation that Western governments will give a cogent legal rationale for military action.

Governments and their agencies have always broken laws, but the open defiance of the international law currently displayed by Western governments and some of their client regimes is precisely comparable to the same open defiance of international law displayed by Hitler. In many respects this was Hitler’s most striking trait.

The evolution of this overt and unapologetic illegality is quite and interesting tale. I call it “How to go from Truman to Hitler in 6 easy steps”:

Create client states as in South Korea and South Vietnam so that you can wage aggressive war against enemies under the pretext of “defending” the states you yourself created.
Wage clandestine aggressive warfare using puppet troops or mercenaries under the command of US “advisors” as occurred in Laos.
Wage secret conventional warfare using your own forces, but doing it “off the books” as in the “secret” bombing of Cambodia.
Lie, blackmail, bully and distort UNSC authorisation to use force as in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Note that this involved a greats deal of time and effort and was achieved at considerable diplomatic cost. It prompted mass popular unrest and was generally a risky and costly road to waging a war of aggression.
Get a UNSC authorisation to use limited force for a specific purpose and then simply use that as an excuse to wage a war of aggression. If people object, just thumb your nose at them. UNSC 1973 authorised the use of force to protect civilians, but belligerent Western and Arab regimes simply used as the pretext to wage aggressive war which toppled Libya’s government.
Bomb Syria and get all of your friends to bomb Syria. If people point the finger you can say that everyone else is doing it anyway. Congratulations, you are now officially As Bad As Hitler.

The UK claims that its bombing of Syria is legal as “collective self-defence” of Iraq under Article 51 of the UN Charter bolstered by UNSC 2249. But Article 51 provides that “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.” The intent is that claims to act in collective self-defence cannot simply be used as a pretext for aggression. The UNSC specifically did not authorise military force in UNSC 2249, therefore it must not accept, as a body, that there is a valid case for collective self-defence. It is perfectly legal for the UK to bomb Iraq at Iraq’s behest, but to bomb Syria on that basis cannot stand because the same logic could be used for any act of aggression where you deemed that one state was being attacked from within another. If that were the case any of the 5 permanent members of the UNSC could wage aggressive war anywhere in the world by citing this pretext and there would be no way to overrule them.

Let me reiterate that the transformation is not such much one of increased illegality, it is that we no longer expect of governments to act within the law. Security Council resolutions were a big deal in 2003, an issue in 2011, and a mere curiosity for “policy wonks” in 2015.

By the same token we are readjusting our expectations of democracy. 2003 was a watershed. A NY Times writer wrote that antiwar demonstrations “are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” Now we know that world public opinion has little power to constrain the US, or the EU, or NATO, or China, or Russia. The people of the world are the superpowerless. They are fooled and they are manipulated. When they do not accept lies they are capable of staging massive, elaborate, sustained and magnificent displays of impotence.

A study based on data from 1981 to 2002 confirmed what most people who concern themselves with the issue already knew: the US is not a democracy. The history of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) shows that the US is no exception. Both in polling and through mass action, peoples showed their clear opposition, but the regimes who signed the deal don’t really care. Equally, in this and in so much else, the news media vastly favoured the elite narrative and gave very little time to the popular narrative of opposition.

Not only is the democratic deficit getting worse, but the democratic electoral façade is becoming an ever more bizarre communal ritual that has nothing to do with democracy. To begin with I believe that there is a global pandemic of chronic electoral fraud. This is matched by an elite neoliberal hegemony over political and public opinion polling. We fool ourselves that, like PR companies, polling companies are amoral apolitical mercenaries, but they will not provide loyal service to those on the political left.

If we know that there is no democracy derived from the electoral process, then we are left to wonder what the increasingly elaborate and expensive business of campaigning is all about. The US is subjected to nearly 2 years of Presidential campaigning, but there is clearly no connection between public will and the actual post-election policies of the winner. In part the process is an auction block, with candidates selling policy for contributions. Mostly, though, the US Presidential campaign is an extended orgy of propaganda.

With a cast of thousands, a budget of billions, with focus groups, strategists, spin-mongers and the ever compliant presstitutes, the whole fantasmagoria is a long unrelenting barrage of thought control. It manufactures consent, it manufactures assent, and it manufactures disgusted disaffection and complacency. It gives some the illusion of self-determination, while it drives others away from all political participation. Amongst the array of candidates many will find either someone who they believe in, or someone who they feel must be kept from office, or both. All of the candidates are sheepdogs, herding all the voters together into lines to buy the product, Democracy®. They ride the electoral roller coaster in Democracyland and when it ends they are too dizzy and dazed to know up from down and left from right. Whatever happens after that they are told that they asked for it themselves or, more often, that everyone else voted for it and they must accept the democratic will. You can’t complain if you don’t vote and you can’t complain if you do vote.

To return to the subject of war, we can track the democratic deficit growing alongside the ever more blatant illegality. People hated the Korean War, so they voted for Eisenhower who ended the war. People didn’t want a war in Viet Nam, so they voted for Lyndon Johnson who promised not to send “American boys” but he promptly did exactly what he had promised not to do. Then they voted for Richard Nixon who promised to end the war. That did not work, either. But they had also been taking to the streets and taking direct action. More than 6 years after Nixon had been elected on promising to end the war, Congress finally ended the funding that would have seen the war continue in perpetuity. Now, however, it doesn’t matter if people take to the streets. Congress will never defund a war in the current circumstances. Perpetual war is with us. There are no democratic avenues to constrain the US empire in fomenting one eternal conflict after another.

6 Chauvinism, Extremism and the Death of Empathy

Two important related traits of right-wing authoritarians (or authoritarian “followers”) are aggression and a lack of empathy in general. These traits are greatly intensified by an excessive and exclusive identification with one’s own self-defined collectivities such as ethnicity, race, nation, religion, sect, region, sex, and class. This even extends to rather minor things like school and sporting affiliations, but these may become very serious to the authoritarians.

When you get authoritarian governance mixing with a widespread mass authoritarianism then you will inevitably end up in a Fascistic society. The authoritarian followers do not need to be a majority, they merely need to activated and weaponised by official sanction.

The dog-whistle approach of demagogues has continually fertilised and inflated the extremism of the authoritarian minority and, like the Weimar Germans, we have probably been distracted by the growing pluralist and libertarian tolerance of the majority.

While we are caught up in the good feelings that certain dramatic reforms engender, such as gay marriage, we fail to notice the increase in structural problems, the growing levels of social, political and economic exclusion, the growing corruption of unbridled plutocracy. We fail to notice the anomie, the inequity and the iniquity, but we also fail to notice that large numbers of people don’t share our joy at seeing our fellow human beings gain dignity and freedom. Those people think that gay rights and social disintegration are the same thing. They might or might not think that growing inequality is a threat to society, but they will all screw up their faces at the mere thought of feminists, and they will all be scornfully resentful of “political correctness”.

And now, when crises hit these people and their opinions are no longer quarantined. They live in a world threatened by demons and it shapes their thinking in ways that we might find difficult to grasp and beliefs we might find difficult to take seriously. These beliefs are now supported and promulgated by “mainstream” political leaders, religious leader newspaper editors, and broadcasters.

Carly Fiorina was attacked by some for saying: “Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” But many people are being told, and are receptive to, the message that the fact-checkers are the ones who have it wrong. For example in Breitbart you can read an article entitled “AP Correction Shows Carly Fiorina Is Right About Planned Parenthood and the Media”. If you actually read to the end carefully it does not actually validate Fiorina’s lie, but you actually have to try hard to notice that.

A Time article also seems at first to make Fiorina’s claims seem more credible. Twice they state that the video which she referred to has been released, but further down you can read: “There are no images on the full video of any attempt to harvest the brain of the fetus, and there is no sound.” The man who produced the video, Gregg Cunningham, claims to be “confident” that it is of an abortion, but refuses to name any organisation or clinic. In an online update Time was forced to admit that the footage could depict a miscarriage. As for Cunningham: “He said he worked as an intelligence officer at the Pentagon, where he learned the importance of using graphic images in wartime propaganda to establish popular sympathy for victims and anger at enemies.”

To summarise, mainstream people and outlets are promulgating emotive deceptive propaganda that feed extremism and violent reaction. Those who drink from this wellspring of demonisation divide the world into Us and Them.

They may be evil, subhuman, or merely unreachably alien. In many respects the Them is of lesser importance, a mere symptom of the more fundamental sense of Us. The point is that you only empathise and identify with the exclusive group that you understand as being human. You do not accord full humanity to others. From this perspective your understanding of any given Other may include any or all of the following: they are not capable of reason; they do not love their children; they cannot feel the same level of pain, fear or grief; they are inscrutable; they love destruction suffering and violence; they are evil.

The irony is that those who think they are the Us become the closest approximation to their own vision of the demonic Them – capable not only of committing monstrous acts but coming to revel in the suffering of others.

A recent study in the US has shown that students are significantly less empathic and more narcissistic than those 30 years ago. People are apparently confused as to how this could come to be, and the finger of blame often points to technology, violent games, and various aspects of youth culture. This makes me want to scream in outrage because we have wilfully promoted social relations and an orthodox ideology which makes narcissism and lack of empathy an absolute necessity for survival, let alone success, in contemporary Western societies and this disgusting culture has emanated from the US spreading like gangrene into the Anglosphere and then beyond.

From the Baby Boomer “Me Generation”, through the New Age, right up until now we have had more than half a century of an evolving social structure in which self-promotion has become compulsory in ever more varied spheres of life. The effect has been that of a repackaged and rebranded social Darwinism. Under the guise of individual positivity and self-esteem we have created societies where crushing competition is omnipresent. In this world the meek and the modest are kicked in the face, and feeling empathy for others will cause futile counterproductive angst.

This is the context that produces hipsters. For them social success and social inclusion requires an exquisite degree of self-regard while the space that previous generations might have reserved for political engagement is now filled with political correctness and ethical consumerism. This is also the context which produces trolls – people who derive a pleasurable sense of power and superiority from acts of destructive cruelty.

Other results of this need for narcissism include the reactionary impulse to recreate the nurturing tight-knit communities of an imagined yesteryear. In this imagined past the things that might cause anxiety, such as emancipated women or coloured people who are not servile, are (inaccurately) removed. This can be seen in Mad Men where the past is rewritten to make white male privilege seem less problematic, less contested, more natural and, above all, something that is not a source of guilt. That is not altered by a touch of self-reflexiveness or a morality-play type critique of white privilege because it is reaffirming the mythology of white supremacist nostalgia. Interestingly the critiques of Mad Men have themselves been dismissed as anachronistic, meaning that the ordinary perception of the past is in fact a distorted fantasy of white male empowerment.

The fascist nostalgia fuels nativism, racism, sexism, sectarianism, and religious fervour, but there is also a purely negative reaction that rather than trying to recreate fantasy, tries simply to exclude the contemporary notes of discord. In this nothing quite symbolises turning one’s back on humanity the way a gated community does. Gated communities have flourished in the last 40 years in both the developed and the developing world. The fact that they are often occurring where the risks of violent crime are negligible or not lessened by being in a gated community shows that these are the product of a distorted sense of danger and a fear of the disintegration of a fictional safe social order which never existed outside of the imagination.

The death of empathy can make the hegemonic class, ethnicity, gender, sect and/or religion into potential monsters. There is probably no clearer example of a nation losing the capacity for empathy than Israel. Israel has seen increasing levels of callousness and brutality. The anti-African racism in Israel has prompted both alarming words and shocking deeds. Israelis cheer the killing of Palestinians and desecrate their corpses. Religious scholars encourage the killing of children “if there is a good chance they will grow up to be like their evil parents.” A wedding party of Orthodox Israeli Jews danced and cheered to celebrate the death from fire of an 18 month-old Palestinian, brandishing knives and guns and stabbing a photograph of the murdered baby.

I could probably devote thousands upon thousands of words to describing what trollish hatred and violence that is gripping Israel, but instead I want to show how Fascism in one people can encourage Fascism in their enemies. In this instance I could cite the fact that opposition to Israeli crimes often causes anti-Zionists to cross a line from supporting the legitimacy of groups like Hamas and their right to resist occupation to actually becoming partisan advocates and supporters of this reactionary theocratic political organisation. More interesting than that, though, is the way that the real crimes of Zionism feed old-fashioned anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and white supremacist beliefs. People who believe in the impending “white genocide” (and who would probably cheerfully kill their grandmother if she began an intimate relationship with an Arab) seem genuinely concerned for the suffering of Palestinians. Of course, some are obvious shills for Israel, like this one but I don’t think they all are. The existence of these groups in turn feeds Zionist propaganda. The US-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) decries the scary extremist “White Supremacists”. This is fuel for their long-standing practice of appropriating alarm at the hateful racism of others and using it to delegitimise and attack those who would critique the hateful racism and oppression perpetrated by Israel.

The ADL is increasingly preaching to and collecting from the choir. Since that choir includes numerous billionaires and both the preaching and the singing are in the service of US empire, the ADL doesn’t have to worry too much about their increasingly frayed credibility. It is not easy to practice the legerdemain that equates anti-Zionists like Rania Khalek, Max Blumenthal, Ali Abunimah, or Rania Masri with the Ku Klux Klan or some skinhead thug covered in swastika tattoos, but the Zionists can afford to look foolish.

However, even Israeli elites are starting to see more of an equivalence between their own leaders and the Nazis. The Israeli ambassador to Switzerland responded to new legislation aimed at left-leaning NGO’s in Israel by posting this famous Göring quote to facebook “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are under attack and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.” Meanwhile: “Hebrew University lecturer Dr. Ofer Cassif wrote on Facebook that Justice Minister Shaked is ‘Neo-Nazi scum’ and told Army Radio afterward, ‘I think it’s fair to compare Israel to Germany in the 1930s, and not to the years of genocide.’” Gideon Levy, who is admittedly somewhat of a dissident, wrote a New Year op-ed for Haaretz “2015: The Year of Blatant and Unapologetic Israeli Fascism”.

Israel is not the only Fascist state that feeds off the fascism of others. ISIS was the direct result of the US-led invasion and occupation of of Iraq and it thrives in an ongoing US-led destabilisation/permanent-war/slow-genocide strategy that seems to be aimed at all populous Arab countries. Europeans who join ISIS are motivated by experiencing Western racism and economic exclusion combined with seeing the hypocrisy and cruelty of Western military violence against Islamic peoples.

Former ISIS captive Didier François describes his captors as being far more driven by right-wing ideology and hatred of “democracy” than by religious ideology. “Islamofascism” was originally a purely fictional conceit created by neoconservatives seeking to promote war in the Middle East. [Islamofascism seems to fit a pattern of self-fulfilling prophecies made by US ideological “scholars”. These claims are patently false when made, but become true as the supposedly unintended outcome of US interventions. These notions include the “clash of civilisations”, the “arc of instability” and the “end of Iraq”. All of these conceits claimed that there was endemic conflict in the areas where the world’s most significant oil reserves are found. The claims were full of factual and logical errors when first made, and yet after heavy and violent US intervention they became reflected in actual events. While the “clash of civilisations” thesis is still nonsense, all of these claims are now in some respects reified and played out in violence destruction and misery.]

Predictably “Islamofascism” feeds from Islamophobic fascism. The latest Al Shabaab recruitment video, for example, features Donald Trump. Equally, the response to the existence of this new Islamofascism is an explosion of Christofascism, Amerofascism, Ziofascism, Whiteyfascism, Eurofascism, and Liberofascism. Like the Islamofascists these fascists appeal to an imagined past and seek to “make America/Britain/Eretz Israel/Ukraine/etc. great again”. There is also a utopian “end of history” promise of a future of righteous peace which just needs some military action, some redrawn borders and maybe a little bit of lebensraum.

Even satirical morons Barry Shitpeas and Philomena Cunk remarked that ISIS atrocities functioned to destroy the sense of humanity that was beginning to be extended to the millions of refugees fleeing conflict. Trump and Katie Hopkins thrive on the brutality of ISIS.

ISIS doesn’t just promote fear and loathing, it feeds self-righteous chauvinism. People don’t use the term “master race”, but the savagery of Islamist terrorists along with the facts of poverty, conflict and chaos make people of the US and Europe feel highly superior to the peoples of the former colonies.

Of course, those of you who are reading this article are likely to understand that the conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia are all sparked and fuelled by Western intervention. We know this because if you follow events the evidence cannot be ignored. Many people might not grasp the purpose of these monstrous acts, but Western fingerprints are undeniably all over the masses of murder weapons. As Andre Vltchek wrote of Syria: “The conflict… is so ‘unnecessary’, so bizarre, so obviously triggered by the West and its vile allies and interests.”

Most Westerners, however, do not understand that their own brutal regimes are visiting this suffering on poor nations and peoples. Most Westerners take this as proof of the savagery of those other peoples. Some say it aloud – the Trump followers, the Likudniks, the Daily Mail readers and so forth – and some just think it. The latter, which in the US context would cut right across supposedly vast gulf between “left” and “right”, from those who support John Ellis Bush (“JEB!”), to the Clintonites and the Sandernistas. These folks do not openly proclaim that others are barbarians, they just claim that the USA is the epitome and fount of civilisation, and they feel all the more smug for being too politically correct to say directly what they believe.

Under Hitler, the Germans were also very convinced that they were the embodiment of civilisation. Germans did not look back on their brutal actions in the Herero genocide and think – “we are actually the violent savages, not those we oppress.” Equally, people in the US cannot and do not match the brutal actions of their leaders and soldiers to their notion of who they are. US soldiers raped boys in front of their mothers in Abu Ghraib. It is difficult to think what more it would take to qualify as barbaric. Yet, as Rob Corddry explained on The Daily Show, this does not change the self image of people in the US: “There’s no question that what took place in that prison was horrible, but the Arab world has to realize that the U.S. shouldn’t be judged on the actions of a…well, we shouldn’t be judged on our actions. It’s our principles that matter, our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember: just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.”

7 State Repression

The savage empires with their torture and their massacres often fuel the hypocrisy and the exceptionalism by reference to the “freedoms” that they enjoy in the homeland. This too may often be more myth than reality. There is a confirmation bias which takes any affirmation of “traditional” freedoms and liberties as being fundamental and any curbs on freedom to be exceptional and not representative. The reason that this seems true to people is that state repression is not aimed at people who do not pose a threat to the state. When the state becomes fragile it may begin imprisoning journalists or comedians who speak heresy, but the ideal response to such people is to do nothing and act positively to ensure that that they are overwhelmed by having at least ten times as many column-inches and twenty times as much airtime devoted to more patriotic opinions and more loyalty to the social order.

There is a lot of truth to the sense of freedom in the developed Western world. There is a virtuous circle where a regime allows more freedoms because the people are contented and unthreatening and those increased freedoms increase the level of contentment which in turn allows even greater liberalisation. Existing alongside this, however, is another source of loyalty and contentment, which is delusion brought about by propaganda. The two work very well together because you can create enough freedom and material well-being in the homeland that it seems intuitively correct when you claim to be the standard-bearers of human goodness. Thus when you carry out brutal acts of slaughter against foreign peoples it seems perfectly believable when you blame the victims.

Western ideological governance is not so much carrot-and-stick as carrot-and-stick-and-koolaid.

I will return to the “stick”, later. At this point we should note that the “carrot” helps mask the bitterness of the mind-controlling “koolaid”. The carrot is the Bernie Sanders “bribe” which I referred to in part one of this article. The carrot comes in forms like the US “New Deal” or accommodation reached in Western Europe after 1968 which saved capitalism from itself. The problem with the “carrot” is plutocratic distemper. If elite plutocrats are not actively frightened of the consequences of not providing a carrot they tend to resent giving carrot handouts to the masses. Once the carrot is gone, the “koolaid” of regime loyalty becomes very sickly and increasingly hard to swallow.

Contrary to popular belief, empires do not tend to be very good at doling out carrots. Many people, having taken their patriotic koolaid, think that empires are run for the benefit of the homeland. In fact the very nature of empires is to create a set of imperial interests and power relations which detach an imperial elite from the homeland population. The Roman, the Spanish and the British Empires all developed in such a way that inequality and deprivation gripped both the imperial centre and the conquered periphery. As the homeland population becomes less economically significant, as is happening now with the outsourcing of industrial labour, the imperial elite cheerfully destroys the social structure. This is not just out of unreflexive greed, but also because wealth distribution has a democratising effect and elites do not like democracy. Thus the virtuous circle of carrot-and-koolaid is replaced by a vicious circle of deprivation-and-stick.

I will deal with the increasing levels of inequality and economic injustice in the next section, but it is important to highlight the centrality of class relations. Underneath all of the doling out of carrots regimes are always, at base, structured to favour the interests of a ruling class. There is always discontent and dissent among those who see more clearly or whose place in the social order leaves them out of the carrot party. Because of that there is always the stick. In the best carrot-and-koolaid consuming scenario the stick stays out of sight. It is deniable, but ideally the carrot-and-koolaid munchers sense that it is there. They fear it but cannot confront it. If the stick comes out of hiding it puts them off their carrots, and if they don’t enjoy the carrots they will refuse to swallow the koolaid. For some people the stick is always brandished visibly. They get little carrot and they can’t stomach the koolaid so the stick is used to shut them up. A lot of them will drink the sickening koolaid anyway, just out of despair and because they will probably get even more stick if they don’t.

In these metaphoric terms what we have seen is that Western societies is the withering of the carrots. They are small and rubbery, and some people are getting very few. The koolaid, meanwhile, has doubled in sickly sweet strength – it is more effective to some, but more revolting than ever to others. The stick is brandished and used far more widely.

Civil liberties have been seriously eroded everywhere after 2001. People in the US, for example, might have once expected that at some stage the tide would shift back and liberties would be restored, but instead the very institutions that might provided a countervailing impetus have been eroded or blunted. I don’t feel that I need to go into specific detail on measures such as the UK’s prolific CCTV cameras or the US airport security regime, readers are probably just as familiar with the details as I. The one thing that is universal and unprecedented, though, is electronic surveillance (or data collection if you think there is a meaningful distinction).

We should all understand that our precious Western freedoms have always been contingent. You are most welcome to freely express your opinion in a “free-speech zone” but if you do anything that actually seriously disrupts the ruling class you will be subject to pain of some form. This is generally done in legalistic terms, but false charges are commonplace. Often this is not in pursuit of a criminal conviction but just a way of locking people up, bullying them and hurting them. In the US, for example, when major protests occur police departments regularly have a pre-approved budget of millions to cover settlements from lawsuits stemming from misconduct.

As the carrots dry up, and discontent grows, more and more people will discover what the stick feels like. The importance of the dragnet data collection is that politically active people are more and more likely to face charges relating to conspiracy or intent to commit a crime. Now, when those charges are brought to court the prosecutor will have comparatively easy access to years and decades of texts, comments and phone conversations. The prosecutors will be assisted by excellent speech recognition software and algorithms designed to go through everything you have ever allowed to be digitised, not to mention everything your child has ever told to its favourite talking toy.

Realistically speaking, if warrants are used to make this data presentable to court they will be sought only after intelligence offices, police and/or prosecutors have already had a not-so-legal sneak preview. Because computers have already trawled through everything to find things that fall within predetermined criteria of incriminating material, they will find exactly what they are programmed to find. After that the defence will have to rely on the scepticism, goodwill and propriety of the judge and jury. Scepticism may grow as people become more aware of the problem, but goodwill and propriety are dwindling commodities.

In the developed countries we have become subject to greater surveillance by far than any other population in human history. Thus far this has been of more use in shaping public opinion than in dragging dissidents away in the middle of the night. That should not be much of a comfort. The fine control over “messaging” that the “computational politics” of big data is itself fuelling a type of bland tyranny wherein spin doctors can make the masses accept nearly any outrage – a subject to which I will return in my conclusion.

The degradation of traditional Western liberties does not need to be repeated here in full. In my country, for example, an intelligence agency was caught breaking the law by spying on people so the government just passed a new law to retrospectively make the spying legal. This sort of thing is typical not just in the West, but in all countries where “terrorism” provides plausible cover.

France could perhaps be emblematic of the lunacy of it all because they are clamping down on free speech in order to, supposedly, protect free speech. Whilst the entire world was still rallying for free speech and everyone was declaring “I am Charlie”, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala managed to get himself arrested for posting “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly” to facebook. He was charged with incitement to terrorism because Coulibaly was the surname of one of the Charlie Hebdo shooters. Dieudonné was making a clear point about the hypocrisy, but he did not arrest himself. The French authorities were also making a very clear point – a declaration of what they consider to be protected speech and what they consider to be incitement.

The worst spikes in state repression have been seen in the increase of death sentences and executions in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt. Saudi Arabia just put 47 “terrorists” to death in one day and then hung their bodies from gibbets. In the year since lifting an execution moratorium, Pakistan has killed over 200 men, most of whom were labelled as “terrorists”. In Egypt there have been 3 mass death sentences handed down and confirmed in the last 2 years which have left hundreds condemned to die for participation in political activities. Another mass trial of 494 protesters facing the death penalty has been postponed for the 11^th time in more than two years.

8 Inequality and “Corporatism”

Some people bandy about the term “corporatism” with considerable ignorance. They simply assume that “corporatism” means rule by big business “corporations” in the US sense of the word. Others like to sneer at the ignorance of such people, but in this case the ignorant are more grounded in the real world than the sophomoric geeks (who should probably stick to arguing about Star Trek or what method of suicide Alan Moore will use if they make another film based on one of his stories). As is so often the case, the ignorant mass opinion is wrong in detail, but broadly makes sense, while the educated opinion is correct in a central aspect but completely oblivious to the larger picture. This is why educated people can be much more twisted and Orwellian in their beliefs. But I digress….

Fascist and postcolonial corporatisms espouse various vertically organised “corporations” as a means of organising and representing the entire populace. This is a highly authoritarian ideal, with each corporation structured hierarchically. It means that a top stratum of society runs everything in the name of various subdivided parts of society, but in effect they become their own separate elite interest. In postcolonial corporatism this meant that the politico-military elites controlled large industrial, extractive and agricultural concerns (often alongside former colonial interests). Whether or not they were the formal owners of enterprise, this politico-military-capitalist would be able to expropriate profits and accumulate capital whilst risk was absorbed by the state.

For Hitler and Mussolini, the former combatants, the ideal was to create a giant army-like machine out of the nation-state, to make it a single organism. Corporatism was the ideology put forward, but as the Parenti quote in part one of this article showed, the reality was a close collaboration of government and capital, with government acting as the muscle of capital against labour. This was not even an invention of the Fascist countries. Despite its liberal ideology opposing such things, the British Empire had built a very close-knit revolving-door sort of relationship between government and the industries of arms, finance, shipping, steel, coal, and oil. Germany and the US had followed in Britain’s footsteps and in some respects Hitler’s empowerment of the industrial elites was a restoration of the central role that they had occupied under the Kaiser.

“Corporatism” is therefore quite a good word for the interpenetration of government and capital we now experience. Like their liberal forebears, neoliberal (anti)praxis is a complete contradiction of the espoused ideals of neoliberalism. Neoliberal globalisation and “liberalisation” is, in fact, the spread of corporatist governance. It is the process of concentrating both capital and political power within a shrinking group of inseparably mixed “private” and “public” elites.

There are many reasons why the rich and powerful feel that the rich and powerful should have all of the power and wealth concentrated in their own hands; why they should be the masters of the universe. Even small business employers tend to be paternalistic at best and at worst hateful of their socioeconomic inferiors. Research shows that wealth has a positive correlation with narcissism and aggression and a negative correlation with empathy. I suspect that there is are even stronger equivalent correlations engendered by one’s position in a political power hierarchy.

Wealth and power are increasingly inseparable. Between speaking fees, directorships and consultancies, those who use power in the right way when they hold office are showered with riches thereafter. They become part of a network of institutions of wealth, power and information/ideology. Within this are think tanks and private institutions that shape or even write government policies like the Council on Foreign Relations; institutions that write legislation like the American Legislative Exchange Council; or they could undertake some of the executive functions of government like the US Federal Reserve or the RAND corporation. These are just examples, of course, but there is interpenetration with lobbying organisations and PR firms. Then there are conspiracy forums such as the Bilderberg Group where the most powerful people in the world meet in secret, but if you suggest that they might actually conspire in these secret meetings (as opposed to merely making small talk) you are tarred as some sort of fantasist.

Within this network are also those enterprises whose business model is reliant on policy, legislation and/or government spending for their revenue. This includes armaments, nuclear and finance industries by their very nature. Other industries choose to pursue a similar path either exclusively or partially. These include mining, oil, agribusiness, food, pharmaceuticals, biotech, aerospace, energy and infrastructure. Other business generate revenue by supplying demand with goods and services or by creating previously non-existent demand through marketing and then filling that demand. Because of their intimate involvement in government these private interests inevitably edge closer and closer to taking the shortest route between point A (collecting taxes) and point B (giving that tax money to executives and shareholders). US government contractors are particularly bold with boondoggles like the f-35 jet, and the insanely corrupt no-bid contracts of the Iraq occupation.

Halliburton subsidiary KBR initially made great wealth from contracts in Viet Nam furnished by Lyndon Johnson (to whom they had given sizeable campaign contributions). In Iraq they were given $39.5 billion in contracts. A 2003 CBS story gives the background:

“The system has been awarding billions of dollars in military contracts to private firms. Among these firms is a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, which got the oil fire job, and in 1992, authored a study that concluded it would be good to privatize billions of dollars worth of military work. ‘Of course they said it was a terrific idea,’ says Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, a group that monitors the government for possible corruption. ‘So they helped design the architecture for privatizing a lot of what happens today in the Pentagon when we have military engagements.’

“In 1992, the Department of Defense, under then Secretary of Defense Cheney, commissioned the Halliburton subsidiary to do the study. In 1995, Cheney became the CEO of Halliburton.

“Says Lewis, ‘Why would a defense secretary, former chief of staff to a president and former member of Congress with no business experience become the CEO of a multibillion-dollar oil services company,” asks Lewis. “He was brought in to raise their government contract profile and he did.’

“Halliburton nearly doubled the value of federal contracts it received – from $1.2 to $2.3 billion – during the five years Cheney was its CEO. “I’m not saying it’s illegal,” says Lewis, who points out that many former high-ranking military officers work for firms seeking federal contracts. ‘They set up the system for themselves, and they may be doing it in red, white and blue, but they’re doing quite well.’”

With US interests in particular this is not just an upward redistribution of the wealth of the US masses, it is an appropriation of wealth from everyone on the planet. Almost every nation in the world, including China and Russia, is forced to pay the US some of the money that the US spends on weapons which, in a roundabout fashion, are used to make sure they keep paying. This fiendish system was described in Michael Hudson’s book Super Imperialism. In case you are unable to read the book, Hudson has explained the underlying thesis in 84 seconds here.

Not coincidentally the interests that get to feed at the public trough just so happen to be the means of imperial hegemony. To complete the picture one must also include news and entertainment media, but between arms industry ownership of major media, intelligence agency control of news media, and Hollywood dependence on the Pentagon, that too is well within the same network. I have said it before, and I will say it again, this is an “empire complex” and it is nothing new to this world:

“In 1902 John Hobson noted that the British Empire was a drain on the wealth of the majority of the people of Britain and the majority of the capitalist enterprises of Britain. He wrote: ‘Seeing that the Imperialism of the last three decades is clearly condemned as a business policy, in that at enormous expense it has procured a small, bad, unsafe increase of markets, and has jeopardised the entire wealth of the nation in rousing the strong resentment of other nations, we may ask, ‘How is the British nation induced to embark upon such unsound business‘; The only possible answer is that the business interests of the nation as a whole are subordinated to those of certain sectional interests that usurp control of the national resources and use them for their private gain.‘

“But the nature of these ‘certain sectional interests‘ was far from random: shipping, coal, arms, finance, and military contracting. These were the beneficiaries of empire, but they were also the tools. These are strategic industries. They were the British military-industrial complex – the empire complex if you will. None of these interests were separable from the Crown, nor, more to the point, was the reverse the case.”

Those who use political office to advance the empire complex are richly rewarded. Tony Blair, for example, has a net worth of over £60 million. Bill Clinton is worth about $80 million. Part of this comes in astronomical speaking fees. Blair was once paid £364,000 for two 30 minute talks, and Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees average $230,000. Given that large numbers of people think that Blair should be tried as a war criminal, including his current successor as Labour leader, the high speaking fees and the adulation given to Blair by the rich and the cronies seem to indicate that there is a strong disconnection between the culture and beliefs of ordinary people and those of the elite. In one Marie Antoinette moment, for example, Save the Children had to apologise after having caused outrage by giving Blair a “Global Legacy” award. This was reminiscent of the mass anger, that apparently was unforeseeable in Washington DC, when the Bush administration had the brilliant idea of making Henry Kissinger the head of the 9/11 Commission.

The people at the centre of the empire complex are out of touch and no longer capable of smelling the putrid stench of their own corruption. They do not believe that the law applies to them, and though they might choose to be sentimental about some issues, they clearly do not place any value on the lives of ordinary people in normal circumstances. We have seen an evolution from the banal “Realist” excuses for mass-murder put forward by Henry “One Should Not Mistake Covert Action for Missionary Work” Kissinger; through the naïve attempted sincerity of Madeleine “We Think the Price is Worth It” Albright; to the giggling lunacy of Hilary “We Came. We Saw. He died” Clinton. You may think that it is unfair to compare Clinton’s statement about the death of Gaddafi with Albright’s statement about the deaths of 500,000 children, but Gaddafi was not the only Libyan who died. Clinton’s remarks are by far the scariest because they were premeditated and the sick delight she is taking in the news of Gaddafi’s death is all too evident. Normally even the worst dictators at least put on a front of solemn gravity and Clinton’s twisted pleasure reminds me of nothing so much as the smirk on Saddam Hussein’s face in 1979 as he read a list of “enemies of the state” in a council meeting where many named were present. They were all executed within hours.

French economist Thomas Piketty is right in the basic premise of Capital in the 21^st Century: inequality is feeding itself. For structural and psychological reasons elitist inequality acts to concentrate wealth at the same time as becoming ever more deranged. I have referred to it as plutocratic distemper. It is not just driven by greed and megalomania, but by creating a psychosocial milieu in which elitism is natural, vast wealth is always a just desert, and democracy is only ever demagoguery and is a threat to “liberal” oligarchic liberty.

I will not go into detail on elitist governance, and the lies they tell themselves and others to justify plutocracy. It could take up a great deal of time and space. The point is that, thanks to technological development which has created ever larger and more immediate areas of effect for wealth and power, there is a vicious circle of inequality. Like the British Raj, the mechanisms by which ordinary people constrain their rulers have been destroyed by the imperialistic nature of political and economic governance. In many respects Fascism and Nazism replicated those same effects by destroying unions and other aspects of democratic governance, but the effect was the same.

Conclusion – The Whole Kit and Caboodle

I wrote at the beginning of this part of this article that events would keep overtaking me, and they have. The new Bundy siege is just one example. Speaking of anti-intellectualism in the USA, DC Comics also put out an annual in which an editor’s note describes some text as “translated from Pakistanian”. In France people report electoral disappointment for the Front National, but the right-wing party won a record number of votes despite the mainstream lurch rightwards after the Paris attacks.

In addition I have given very short shrift to Central and Eastern European fascism in its various overt and covert forms. Some writers see Ukraine as one front in an antifascist war while Syria is another. NATO has become a Fascist coalition, and perhaps discreetly it always has been. In that sense one can tie everything I have written about to interventions in Syria, Libya, Iraq and even back to the bombing of Serbia.

I have also left out the historical continuities between the anti-Comintern Axis powers and the Cold War era anti-Communist alliances led by the US. Unreconstructed Fascist and Nazi personnel were recruited not just for building rockets, but also for counterintelligence, propaganda and even torture expertise. Klaus Barbie, for example, was sent through the notorious “ratline” of Operation Paperclip and was then recruited by US counterintelligence and used as a torturer in Bolivia. Other Fascists were recruited into anti-communist “stay behind” armies, which would become notorious for conducting false-flag terror attacks and were linked, along with Italian intelligence, to the Bologna train station bombing that killed 85 people.

Something else that I have left out is the subject of militarism. In some ways it is difficult to assess. A lot of places have long had a very high bar of militarism and any increase is generally slow enough as to be imperceptible. The most obvious exception is Japan, where the renaissance of militarism is as striking as it is alarming. In contrast, countries like Egypt and Indonesia have the military woven into every strand of society, but this is nothing new. Mass conscription states like Israel and the Koreas are also innately militaristic. In Israel this has grown like a cancer due to the advent of paramilitary settlers and the aforementioned increasing embrace of violence.

The Anglosphere is most definitely more militaristic than it was in the 1970s. In the UK, Australia and Aotearoa the fetishistic honour and obeisance paid to former servicemen has become and obscene form of worship. People have forgotten that the original returned servicemen’s organisations were explicitly antiwar and that the original national commemorations, which began after the Great War of 1914-18, were against all war. Now the “fallen” are glorified in order to promote war.

For my money, though, the US may be the most militaristic society ever in human history. Their fervour exceeds countries where the actual military is omnipresent, like Israel. Israelis may have fantasies of being a cross between Sparta and Masada, but the banal reality of khaki-clad teenagers with their horny sexting and typical acne-ridden idiocy does not allow the depth of militarist delusion that is indulged in the US. In the US it seems as if every enlisted dweeb is an action movie hero and every high-ranking officer is a personal development guru with almost mystical insight and intellect. It is the latter part that is most surprising, in a way, but it indicates that the authoritarian worship of success that is endemic to the US is being translated into a military idiom. The logical outcome of this was already predicted in Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 satire Starship Troopers. Critics were confused by Verhoeven’s depiction of Fascist consumerism in 1997, but as Calum Marsh wrote in 2013, “now people are finally getting the joke”.

I have missed out many many significant fascistic aspects of our time, but I have tried to be consistent in suggesting that it is the whole that must be judged, not various events, institutions or people. It is the context that makes the person a Fascist, not merely their individual traits words or actions. If someone holding political office in a Fascist regime is not actively rejecting the fascistic aspects of the regime that that are involved in that office, then they are a Fascist. That is why I draw the distinction between Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.

It is not just political office holders, it is also the academics, journalists, business people and normal workers who embrace fascist ideas. However, ordinary people are far less fascistic than elites, including the content creators of the left and alternative media. For example, Democracy Now! and Brave New Films joined the gushing adulation that is pouring out of “progressives” because Obama cried about the little kiddies when, after 7 years in office, he decided to take executive action to curb the insane gun violence problems in the US. In both cases, however, facebook commenters made it very clear that at least they had not forgotten that this Oscar-worthy performance came from a man who regularly kills children. Are these alternative media people Fascists then? I would say that they have to work much harder to earn the right to categorically deny being Fascists.

Ultimately, though, you may well ask why I choose to make any claim about Fascism at all? It is, after all, only a word. Moreover, most ordinary people will just think that you are a bit unhinged to say that there is a new global Fascism that has slowly taken over the world. Yet we do need a word.

There is a coherent ideological movement rightwards that has spread throughout the globe. It is not entirely new, but it can no longer be labeled as neoliberalism, neocolonialism, Western imperialism, globalisation, or any combination thereof. Nor are variants of “totalitarianism” any good.

Italian Fascism once happily embraced a totalitarian identity. If a regime is helpful enough to enunciate a totalitarian norm, it is very easy to criticise them as being totalitarian. The problem is in deciding whether their practices are actually more totalitarian than those who don’t proudly announce that they are totalitarian. There is no good reason to presuppose that people who overtly embrace totalitarian rhetoric are more totalitarian in practice. That is only the beginning of the problems inherent in using the term “totalitarianism”

For totalitarianism to work as a concept we would have to have a very good idea of what is and isn’t the state and have good reasons for making the distinction. Market fundamentalism, for example, could be described as totalitarian because it imposes a total paradigm of power, but it claims that the market’s power is separate from the state. Should that be accepted, and if so why? Or, to use an example that is only half absurd, should we consider all states with a state run education system to be totalitarian? Almost every citizen of these countries is socialised to think the same way about maths, sciences, art, music, history and language. They are given identical standardised instructions on how to think about civics, politics and their obligations and duties as a citizen. To someone with radically different ideological views, might this not be considered totalitarian?

For these reasons the process of labeling a given regime as “totalitarian” is tautological. Certain aspects of the society are deemed totalitarian because they are products of the totalitarianism of the regime, and the regime is diagnosed as being totalitarian because those same aspects are symptoms of the disease. This was very useful to liberal ideologues and self-loving Western chauvinists like Friedrich Hayek and Isaiah Berlin who were able to use it as a way of equating Nazism and Communism while painting Western liberalism as the best of all possible worlds. Because it is tautological the concept of totalitarianism is analytically sterile and the insights offered by thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin are like diamonds wrapped in used toilet paper – they are not that hard to get at, but you would be advised to wash the stinky Hayek from your hands afterward (do not touch your eyes, nose or mouth with Hayek-stained hands or you may contract brain rot!)

Fascism is a very good word to use because this ideological phenomenon that has taken over much of the world’s power elite is very compatible with the Fascism and Nazism of old. Not only that, but the suit-wearing, anodyne new Fascists are ideologically, politically and militarily aligned with overt neo-Fascist and Neo-Nazi groups and individuals. Furthermore, when the West bombs or sends troops or uses proxies is it as Fascist aggressors. This is something that the regimes in Russia, Syria and Iran are acutely aware of. I am not saying that to excuse their own authoritarian repression, but it is a fact. They know that they are facing an unfolding World War against Fascism, just as Stalin (who was not a nice person) knew that Fascism/Nazism was the greatest threat to the USSR, to Russia, to socialism and to humanity. He wasn’t wrong. He was a horrible person, but he wasn’t wrong.

Finally, I want to trace briefly how we came to this point.

For a long time people kept leaders from going “full Fascist”. This coincided with the period of comparative equality, humanitarian progression and aspects of democratic governance. This was also a time of intellectual ferment and public engagement. In part I think we owe a debt to the people of Spain, because it was their resistance to the Fascists rebels, and the positive aspects of their revolution, that woke and roused the mass hatred of Fascism that was the natural sentiment amongst people in France, the UK and the US. Beyond that, though, we really do have to thank Adolf Hitler for opening people’s eyes to the full putrescence of unleashed Fascism. In fact, a shocking number of military, commercial and political leaders did not actually think that Nazism was bad, especially in the US, but those people had to be very careful about what they said in public. Fascism was not respectable any more.

In a sense the post-WWII world was inoculated against Fascism, but we haven’t had our booster shot. Not that I think people have become much more sympathetic with fascism. That has certainly started to happen now, but the progress of creating the new Fascism began earlier. I have referred several times to what I term “plutocratic distemper”. This can be related to Piketty’s work on inequality, and it basically indicates that the elite ability of concentrate wealth and power in elite hands has created a feedback loop. They are increasing inequality and social exclusion and the result will be the destruction of society. This happened in Rome’s past when the Senatorial class in the republic started using political power to concentrate ownership by seizing lands theoretically due to be given to retired legionaries. From this arose an economic paradigm of large landholdings (latifundia) owned by oligarchs and worked by slaves. Ordinary people became much less important to the economic activity of the republic. The populares were political enemies of the elitist optimates who were appropriating land for the wealthiest. Populares fought for and secured a subsidised grain dole for the underemployed landless people who moved to the city. Later the dole became free. The contest between optimates and populares was a century of street thugs fighting, lynching, political assassination and civil strife that became a series of civil wars. This destroyed the republic. I would have destroyed the entire Roman polity, no doubt, if the civil wars that followed the death of Gaius Julius Caesar had not been won by Octavian – a man who would rule as princeps Augustus Caesar for a very impressive and relatively stable 4 decades.

I think we have reached a similar point in our history for two reasons. The first is that technology has destroyed the wealth distribution that previously occurred through the selling of labour. Out of both necessity and desire the purchasing power of workers is dominated by goods and services that do not provide a large amount of employment. The “invisible hand” can increase mass consumption, but it cannot redistribute wealth under that paradigm. The consumption can be maintained at high levels through falling prices and built-in obsolescence but that will only accelerate the loss of purchasing power in the long term. Like the Romans before them, ordinary people are becoming peripheral to the economic functioning of society. Their jobs may still be absolutely crucial to society, but they cannot retain their market value.

The second reason is because the elites have become too good at wielding power. They are using what has been labeled “computational politics”. Zeynep Tufekci introduced the idea with these words: “Digital technologies have given rise to a new combination of big data and computational practices which allow for massive, latent data collection and sophisticated computational modeling, increasing the capacity of those with resources and access to use these tools to carry out highly effective, opaque and unaccountable campaigns of persuasion and social engineering in political, civic and commercial spheres.”

The upshot of computational politics is a vast amount of turd polishing. Ideas that are against the common interest are constantly tinkered with, rebranded, repackaged, rephrased, re-rebranded and generally fucked with until people lose the ability to oppose them. Some of the most assiduously polished and gleaming turds are politicians. With their consultants, pollsters, and spin merchants, each has acquired a teflon coating. The fact that Australia’s Tony Abbot actually managed to get into trouble and not slime his way out of it immediately is a testament to his near inhuman ability to alienate and disturb ordinary sane people.

The new Australian Prime Minister has evinced admiration for his Aotearoan counterpart, former Merrill-Lynch currency trader John Key. Before even becoming leader of the “centre-right” National Party Key was implicated in illegally using a religious cult to campaign in contravention of electoral law. Key also developed a clear pattern of frequent lying. In mid-2014 this list of his 150 most important lies was collected. His lies are more venal and petty than the whoppers told by Trump, but as with Trump he is never actually concerned with what is true, only what he can say that will give him the greatest gain. He does not ever suffer negative consequences from these lies, and may be personally unable to fully distinguish the difference between truth and lies.

Key’s dishonesty should have killed his political career, but he would literally have to start killing babies on camera to spark any real consequences. He became an object of international ridicule when he repeatedly pulled a waitresses ponytail. It became more sinister when it was revealed that he has a habit of compulsively touching young girls’ ponytails. If you think that this might cause him to keep a low personal profile you would be wrong. He once again became the butt of John Oliver jokes when he went on commercial breakfast radio and revealed, among other things, that he has peed in the shower and does not “trim his downstairs” before he became a little bit evasive in discussing his habits of masturbation. Not content with leaving it there, the Right Honourable John Key would later go on an even more low-brow morning radio show to do a stunt in a cage where he was asked to pick up a bar of soap and chose to play along with the hilarious implied prison rape joke.

Key gets away with this stuff, which is all cleared in advance, because he has constructed an ordinary bloke image. His actions are very political, and very right-wing, but his persona is devoid of all politics. With considerable calculation he acts like he is not even the holder of high office even while he flaunts his high status and power. He depoliticises his politics in a way that old Fascists would have admired, but which is also appealing to a jaded population that is deeply distrustful of political ideologies.

This antipolitical trend is also seen in Guatemala where they elected a comedian to be president. Jimmy Morales describes himself as a “common man”. His politics are right-wing and he is accused by rights groups of being racist, sexist and homophobic, but he acts as if he has no politics. His campaign manifesto was six pages long and he argued that his lack of experience was his greatest asset.

Key and Morales are also like Trump. Their lack of coherence makes them immune to the vestiges of democracy that remain in the electoral systems of their countries. Their opponents are forced into the same position just to compete. Coherent politics has already become a liability. Trump doesn‘t just use a big lie technique, he uses a big joke technique because saying utterly outrageous things and sticking by them is much easier, less risky and less costly than trying to make real observations.

That is how we have reached this point. This plutocratic distemper has created a kakistocracy (rule by the worst) which is a new form of Fascism. The Fascism will destroy itself eventually, but the longer it lasts the more it threatens our civilisation, our species, and even our planet.

The Choice

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You are at the edge of a canyon. Below you is a procession of thousands upon thousands of gagged people marching forward, their hands behind them in steel handcuffs. The sun mercilessly beats down on you and on the marchers causing real pain and distress. From your vantage you can see that they are marching to a cliff and to their certain deaths. You have been yelling and screaming to warn them, but your voice is distant and it is growing hoarse. It is never completely hopeless because occasionally people look up. Sometimes small groups together follow the gaze of someone who has heard you yelling. You wave frantically.

This has gone on for hours that seem like centuries.

When people see you their reactions vary. Some shrug in disbelief or denial. Others panic. Those who panic understand that they face death but instead of giving them salvation, all you have done is add more suffering to their last moments of helpless torment. Some manage to scramble out of the press of bodies to outcrops or scraps of shelter that vary in their levels of discomfort and precariousness. Some of those who stop try to gesture warnings to marchers with head and eyes. Others try to shield themselves from the merciless sun. After a time of watching hundreds marching by, many of those you warned decide that you must be wrong, or at least that all the other people might be right. They rejoin the death march, relieved to once again be going with the flow. The marchers have been promised that shelter and freedom lie ahead of them. They may be sceptical about that, but all you can offer is struggle and suffering.

There seems little hope. Your skin blisters and your voice is nearly gone.

There is a pool of water. Sometimes you leave the cliff edge to quickly drink. If you didn’t your voice would already have given out. There are also materials around to with which you could build a shelter. You would love to just build that shelter. You could even build a shade that kept the sun off the marchers as they pass your section of cliff. One time you splashed water on the marchers and they loved it. It was genuine joy. You could be sheltering yourself, alleviating suffering, and providing genuine happiness instead of giving only the bitter curse of impotent truth. It is the obvious thing to do.

The problem is that the pool of water gives the best view of people dying.

When they reach the cliff people try to scream through their gags. Some marchers turn on others, kicking and butting. Some are simply paralysed with fear. Many, perhaps even most, secretly thought that this might come and they go to their deaths hating themselves for not having fought back. They fooled themselves and now they realise that they should have paid any price to avoid this fate – for them and for their loved ones. No one at the cliff will thank you for having once splashed them with water.

You could build a screen to block the view of voiceless death and suffering, but you couldn’t live with the screen.

If you close your mind, then your acts and the choices you make will be part of the concealment of the truth. If you can’t bear to bring joy or alleviate suffering without denying the truth, then your acts will perpetuate the lie that sends people to their deaths. You will be complicit in mass murder.

The only answer to the cliff, is to keep screaming.

You know that there is just a small chance that enough people will stop marching and will accumulate at the sides of the canyon. Or maybe enough will look up and see you at one time. Enough to make a real difference. Then….

…Things could go very badly. It could create a stampede. The death might be worse than the cliff itself. Maybe that might be worth it if it ended the death march for good, but there is no guarantee that the march won’t just start again after the stampede. Marchers will go right over the bodies of the trampled if they have to. It only makes them more resolute and narrow-minded in going forward.

On the other hand….

…If the marchers can fight fear, if they can hold firm despite the discomforts of the canyon, a ripple of refusal might travel back right through the march. The marchers aren’t stupid. Most harbour serious doubts about the march, but they have no access to other voices. They have no access to each other’s voices – except for incoherent grunts, tweets, status updates, and moans. That is the only thing that gives power to the distant shouts of a lone lunatic.

They don’t like the source, but deep down many marchers feel that the screeching wierdo might be the only one who is being honest with them.

Once they stop the death march, they will realise that they have no choice but to bear the sun while they work together to get rid of the gags and handcuffs and try to find or make ways out of the canyon. Not easy tasks, but better than marching enslaved in the blazing sun to certain death.

It is not much hope, but it is hope. So you can’t quit.

On Genocide

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The Choice