Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim are joined by Jeffrey Sachs to discuss Israel and Gaza.
Krystal Ball et Ryan Grim sont rejoints par Jeffrey Sachs pour discuter d'Israël et de Gaza [et de l'Europe et de l'Ukraine].
TRANSCRIPTION (Les liens et les crochets sont de mon cru) :
Krystal Ball : To talk about the very latest with regard to Israel and Gaza, we are very fortunate to be joined this morning by economist and professor at Columbia University, Jeffrey Sachs.
Great to have you again, sir.
Jeffrey Sachs : Thank you. Wonderful to be with you.
Krystal Ball : Of course. So, let's go ahead, guys, and put this first element up on the screen.
[AXIOS - Scoop: Tony Blair and Jared Kushner brief Trump on Gaza post-war plans]
Axios got this scoop that apparently now we've got Tony Blair and Jared Kushner involved in some sort of Trump Gaza quote unquote ‘post-war plans’.
There is a meeting which is set to occur with regard to this as well. What did you make of this?
Jeffrey Sachs (0:35) : Well, who knows what to make of anything when Blair, Kushner and Trump get together? That is really…
Krystal Ball : …make nothing good of it, I guess we can say, hahaha!
Jeffrey Sachs : …an unholy alliance. But this is not the way to any solution right now.
The way to a solution lies in immediately ending the genocide that's underway [cf. IAGS Resolution on the Situation in Gaza], the mass starvation that's underway, which the US again denied yesterday in the UN Security Council, which Israel has denied, but which the whole world sees before our eyes, that at least half a million people are being starved to death right now before our eyes.
And so, this has nothing to do with Kushner and Blair.
This has to do with ending a genocide. It has to do with creating a state of Palestineimmediately [One democratic State campaign]. And it has to do with this absolutely fascist government in Israel being stopped by the United Nations.
Ryan Grim : As somebody who follows global south politics pretty closely, including Russia and China, India as well —India is a separate case here—, when is the world going to do anything about what's happening in Gaza? I think the UN obviously has the United States sitting on the Security Council and will veto it, but it feels like there's very little pressure brought to bear from the global south, and South Africa obviously took Israel to the ICC and was joined… at some significant risk by a number of other countries from the global south, but that's about it, like… is there no countervailing force that exists on a kind of just moral and ethical level willing to push back against this genocide? In other words, if the Chinese and the Russians don't see it in their specific national interest, are they okay to just set sit back and allow a genocide to unfold? Is that the realist politics that we live in? Am I too naive to expect that? I'm like… there's got to be somebody that's going to do something about this, but there isn't. Like what have you seen from…?
Jeffrey Sachs : …I think that there are probably three arenas that we should consider.
1) First is the battlefield itself, where Israel is mass murdering the Palestinian people. I don't expect any of the regional powers to land troops or to be in a direct war over this issue.
So, I don't expect Russia or China, or any of the Arab countries to land troops and open a war with Israel.
2) The second area is on the diplomatic front.
Every single day there is a worldwide condemnation of Israel, some of which gets reported in the US, most of which does not.
The Security Council meeting yesterday was an overwhelming condemnation of Israel's genocide and starvation, but it doesn't get even mentioned. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation had a meeting in Jeddah on August 25th condemning this. That's 57 Muslim majority countries.
The BRICS condemn this routinely. China, Russia, Brazil, India condemn this routinely. It doesn't get picked up.
So, they don't intervene on the battlefield, but they are not sitting back or complacent or winking at Israel, but they don't do more let's say than condemnation.
3) The third would be an increasing set of measures that I think should be taken. I think Israel is courting suspension from the UN General Assembly. I would recommend it, because I believe that this is a completely lawless, murderous, genocidal regime. I don't think there's any other country in the world remotely doing what Israel is doing in terms of the violence and the mass murder and the mass starvation.
So, there could be Israel's suspension from the UN.
This was at least raised at the OIC [Organisation de Coopération Islamique] meeting.
There could be a break of diplomatic relations, which I think should be in the cards. There could be a suspension or end of the so-called Abraham Accords.
Remember, of course, I think everyone knows the US military is all over the Middle East. In a way, the Middle Eastern countries often feel more like occupied countries than they do with sovereigns. They worry that if they are too vocal, the United States will do something, overthrow their regimes, ferment unrest, do the things that the United States covert operations do for a living.
So, I think that there is some trepidation there. But the fact of the matter is both the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and most other groups in the world, and I would say the UN General Assembly more than 180 of the 193 countries are openly aghast.
But I think stronger measures are needed right now. And these are measures that might be blocked if it's through the UN, but could be taken by dozens or well over 100 countries on their own, breaking diplomatic relations, putting on boycotts and sanctions.
Israel is completely out of control. Mass starvation is not an acceptable policy for the world. It should not be tolerated one moment longer.
Krystal Ball : And what do you make of the American politics? There's just a poll that came out yesterday. I don't have an element for it, but I don't know and I don't know if you saw it or not, but 77% of Democratic voters say this is a genocide. You know, I mean, it's an overwhelming consensus among the Democratic base. And yet, you only have a handful of Democrats who are willing to say it. The leadership of the Democratic party, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and the like, are still very much, you know, anything for Israel and whatever AIPAC wants us to do. And look, I don't expect these people to be moral actors, but you would think at some point there would be a political calculation, like a cynical political calculation that occurs? And it's genuinely perplexing to me at this point that that hasn't happened. Obviously, I understand, you know, the money of AIPAC and their affiliates, Democratic Majority for Israel, etc. But it still doesn't seem like that would be sufficient to keep them from seizing what is a genuine wide-open obvious political imperative and political opening in the landscape. What is your assessment of what keeps these politicians so tied to the status quo with regard to Israel and their commitment to allowing Israel and facilitating Israel's commitment to this genocide?
Jeffrey Sachs (8:21) : This is an excellent and very important question. And it starts with the fact that, in foreign policy, public opinion plays almost no role in the United States in general. That's true across wars. That's true across almost all of the issues that we have foreign policy. This is an executive branch, largely covert.
It's very heavily CIA and national security driven rather than any publicly driven decision-making.
Congress is pretty much useless across the board in foreign policy and has been for a long time. Of course, the Congress is suborned by the military-industrial complex to begin with, by the military contractors.
And then, there are the specific issues of Israel.
So, you mentioned of course the biggest one, which is the Zionist lobby, the AIPAC and others.
There's just a tremendous amount of buying of votes and corruption and threats against individual congressmen.
I'm sure that the Epstein files play some role in this. Epstein was a Mossad agent and there's no doubt that there's blackmail involved in this in some way or another that we don't fully know.
The CIA-Mossad relationship dates back many many decades. Mossad does murders on behalf of the CIA. They deeply share intelligence.
The CIA is the single most powerful agent of our foreign policy.
So, this is not only the Israel lobby because after all, by the way, the Jewish community is profoundly unhappy with what's happening.
Of course, there are Jews that support Israel, but there's a vast community of Jews that is completely aghast and disgusted and also reviled at what Israel is doing, because it… Israel claims to do it in the name of world jewelry. That is an obscenity. I would say Israel is doing it in the face of opposition of world jewelry.
So, this is another element the CIA-Mossad linkage that go quite strongly.
They are very powerful in Silicon Valley right now.
Palantir is the AI murder inc. company of the world. It does the targeting.
We know that Microsoft and many other companies are deeply involved with Israel.
There's a lot of money in all of this.
The Israeli stock market has been up during this war.
So, there's a lot of corruption, blackmail, campaign finance, deep state, CIA-Mossad relations.
But I have to tell you, saying all of that, it's still shocking.
It's still shocking because we don't have genocides before our eyes this way. All recorded day by day. All with the thank you of the Israeli ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir every day explaining that it's a genocide making no bones about it, being very explicit about it.
So, your question hangs there even after all of the explanations. It is a puzzle.
How corrupt can America be? We're plumbing new depths basically.
Krystal Ball : Truly.
Ryan Grim : And while we have you, I wanted to ask you about the newest piece from you that I read, that may not be the most recent piece that you wrote, but called A New Foreign Policy for Europe, in Horizons magazine, taking a look at the historical relationship between Europe and Russia, and envisioning a new kind of path out that doesn't involve Europe constantly invading Russia and then, at the same time, having this fear that Russia is going to invade them.
Can you talk a little bit about what can you lay out this vision that you presented here and what's been the reaction to it?
Jeffrey Sachs : Basically Russia, for more than 200 years, going back to Napoleon, certainly including Hitler, including the remilitarization of Germany by the United States after World War II, in the years immediately following Nazism and, by the way, bringing a lot of Nazis to leadership of West Germany, including the new intelligence agencies led by the chief Nazi intelligence official for Hitler, for Eastern Europe, [Reinhard] Gehlen*; the Russians said, "What are you doing?" You know, again, “we just lost 27 million people”.
But the western idea, going back absolutely to Napoleon in his invasion in 1812; going to Palmerston and Napoleon III in their invasion of Russia in 1853; going to Germany's attack and war on Russia in August 1914; going to Hitler's invasion in 1941; and then, going to the creation of this military machine of Germany after World War II —there's never been an honest moment of discussion about what a real security arrangement in Europe would be that respects Russia's security as well as Europe’s… Western Europe's security. Russia is, to an important extent, Europe, but I'm talking about the non-Russian Western part of Europe.
And that's what has been needed all along. But the United States has refused.
The British, which ran the world up until basically World War II, were completely russophobic from the 1840s onward.
And then, the United States took over in 1945. And our goal from 1945 onward was first, to defeat the Soviet Union and then —I watched with my own eyes, in shock, by the way— after 1991 that our goal continued to be, even after the Soviet Union was over, communism was over and so forth, our goal continued to be: now, we defeat and divide Russia.
Well, eventually, after so much provocation, with the US being the major impetus to a coup in Ukraine in 2014, expanding NATO, dissing a peace agreement called the Minsk 2 agreement in 2015 and so forth…,
[Angela Merkel et François Hollande se lâchèrent en décembre 2022 : „Das Minsker Abkommen war der Versuch, der Ukraine Zeit zu geben. Sie hat diese Zeit auch genutzt, wie man heute sieht“ / « Les accords de Minsk visaient à donner du temps à l'Ukraine. Ils ont d'ailleurs profité de ce temps, comme nous le voyons aujourd'hui » (Angela Merkel dans une interview à « Die Zeit », 7.12.2022). « Angela Merkel a raison sur ce point », déclara Hollande plus tard au « Kyiv Independent » : « Les accords de Minsk ont stoppé l'offensive russe pendant un certain temps. »]
...eventually, it came to full-scale war. And then, when it did, in February 22, after maybe you could say 180 years of provocation, or maybe you could just say 30 years of provocation, or maybe you could say 8 years of provocation, from the Maidan coup, then we said “You see? Russia! Unprovoked expansionism!”
It's un-be-lie-vable how primitive this discussion is.
I once counted in… between February 2022 and February 2023, I had an assistant count the number of times that the New York Times used the word ‘unprovoked’ to characterize the Ukraine war, and it was 26 times that we were able to count that, in the opinion pages of the New York Times.
So, basically there's a propaganda war.
Now, Europe is so devoid of sense and diplomacy. Trump… this is not exactly Mr. Diplomat.
There's just confusion, and the war will continue until the confusion is sorted out.
So, what I've been saying to the Europeans, who don't like my saying it, but I'm going to keep saying it, is they need diplomacy with Russia, not through the White House.
They don't have to meet Zelenskyy, who rules by martial law in a complete contradiction to the real interests of Ukraine and to the public opinion in Ukraine, which wants this war to end, because they're suffering in Ukraine.
The Europeans meet with Zelenskyy a thousand times, but they don't meet with Putin once, and this is what passes in this pathetic way for foreign policy right now.
So, my article is: do something different, talk directly with your counterparts, understand that there are real security issues that need to be solved.
One other thing I might add, which is almost never mentioned, but absolutely at the top of mind for Russia for more than 20 years, is that, in 2002, the United States unilaterally abandoned the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
From Russia's point of view, that was a threat of a decapitation strike by the United States, because the idea of the anti-ballistic missile treaty was to prevent a decapitation strike by making it plain that there would be a credible deterrent, a second strike. But with the anti-ballistic missiles, a decapitation strike becomes a possibility. So, the Russians said after 2002 you have completely destabilized the nuclear arms control framework.
It's in that context that the United States was pushing missile systems in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
These Aegis anti-ballistic missile systems overthrew the government in Ukraine, built a 1 million-person or men army in Ukraine —under Trump, by the way, who calls himself the man of peace: he armed Ukraine in the first term to a million-man army, the biggest army in Europe. And then, in 2019 [2.08.2019], Trump walked out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty, basically destroying the nuclear arms control framework while also pushing missile systems and US military bases up to Russia's nose.
This is why we're in such a dangerous, unstable mode. And there's such lack of clarity and honesty for one moment in any of this.
Trump, by the way, one of his many, many weaknesses, but one of his great weaknesses, is the confusion of speaking truthfully to the American people in a speech, for example, which he never gives, versus a truth social post with eight exclamation points and capital letters, which is not the same thing as trying to explain what is happening and how we get out of this. He probably doesn't have the capacity to do what needs to be done at just… at an individual level. But we lack any clear understanding and that's why there is so much instability and Washington is… !!! completely incoherent, because there is no clarity of policy from one moment to the next.
Krystal Ball (20:51) : Professor, last question for me. Let's say… going back to Israel and Gaza, let's say the world does nothing and this final solution is allowed to just unfold. What does that mean for the future of the world?
Jeffrey Sachs : The world is in the most dangerous state since the end of World War II. And The Doomsday Clock, which portrays how close we are to Armageddon, puts the clock at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest that it's been since the clock was unveiled in 1947.
We have no rules of the road right now. We have no clarity. We have no consistency of policy, and Western values has been exposed to mean open genocide.
So, I would say that we're in an extraordinarily dangerous world, and Trump, who in his delusion, calls himself a president of peace, is complicit in an open genocide that the world sees.
And I travel all over the world, all the time. Everybody knows what's happening right now, and this is a tremendous risk to global security and to any place of the United States in the international system, which is being squandered.
I think it's also a fundamental risk to Israel's survival.
Israel banks entirely on the United States for its survival, because virtually every other country in the world is aghast at the crimes that Israel is committing. And because, as you pointed out, the American people are also aghast. It's a pretty… pretty… slender and fragile thing to depend on the United States when public opinion is against you as your sole source for survival. So, I think Israel has put itself at absolutely mortal risk. Of course, it's mass murdering the Palestinians. So, I'm not expressing that in sympathy. I'm just stating a fact that this is wildly against Israel's security interests.
*German military and intelligence officer, later dubbed "Hitler's Super Spy," who served the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and West Germany, and also worked for the United States during the early years of the Cold War. He led the Gehlen Organization, which worked with the CIA from its founding, employing former SS and Wehrmacht officers, and later became the first head of West Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND). In years prior, he was in charge of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front during World War II and later became one of the founders of the West German armed forces, the Bundeswehr.
Officier de l'armée et du renseignement allemand, surnommé plus tard « le super espion d'Hitler », il servit sous la République de Weimar, l'Allemagne nazie et l'Allemagne de l'Ouest, et travailla également pour les États-Unis au début de la Guerre froide. Il dirigea l'organisation Gehlen, qui collaborait avec la CIA dès sa fondation, employant d'anciens officiers SS et de la Wehrmacht, et devint plus tard le premier chef du Service fédéral de renseignement ouest-allemand (BND). Auparavant, il avait été responsable du renseignement militaire allemand sur le front de l'Est pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale et devint l'un des fondateurs de la Bundeswehr, l'armée ouest-allemande.
Holocaust Survivor's Final WARNING to Israel. Dernier avertissement d'un survivant de l'Holocauste à Israël.
Il s'agit de l'admirable Stephen Kapos, juif hongrois naturalisé britannique, enfant survivant de l'Holocauste, du génocide nazi. Un esprit humain et tempéré que nous avons déjà cité sur ce blog.
La dernière fois, il faisait partie des intervenants au Premier Congrès juif antisioniste, tenu à Vienne du 13 au juin 2025. Sous la modération de Stefan Kraft, il participait avec Tony Greenstein, Wieland Hoban et Wilhelm Langthaler sous la rubrique : Réaffirmer l'antifascisme et lutter contre l'instrumentalisation de l'antisémitisme. Réaffirmer les traditions antifascistes tout en s'attaquant aux accusations mensongères et manipulatrices d'antisémitisme visant à museler la dissidence.
[Justement, faisons acte de la parution d'un insigne ouvrage collectif en français en la matière : Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Maxime Benatouil, Houria Bouteldja, Sebastian Budgen, Judith Butler, Leandros Fischer, Naomi Klein, Frédéric Lordon, Françoise Vergès : Contre l'antisémitisme et ses instrumentalisations, La Fabrique, 18.10.2024.
La lutte contre l’antisémitisme serait le parent pauvre de la gauche. Reprise comme une évidence, cette affirmation est pourtant rarement étayée ni accompagnée d’une tentative d’explication sérieuse. Plus grave, elle est aujourd’hui devenue l’étendard d’une offensive réactionnaire qui instrumentalise l’antisémitisme contre les forces politiques anticapitalistes et anti-impérialistes en se faisant passer pour progressiste. Dans la séquence dramatique qui s’est ouverte le 7 octobre, toute expression de solidarité avec le peuple palestinien a été ainsi ciblée et criminalisée.
Ce livre réunit des voix juives et non juives qui s’alarment du procédé autant que de ses conséquences et produisent une réflexion riche sur les liens entre sionisme, antisémitisme et racisme colonial.]
Sous tel titre, ils dénonçaient ce que notre vénérable Stephen Kapos dénonce fermement aujourd'hui hébergé par Double Down News, une plateforme britannique indépendante d'information :
TRANSCRIPTION [liens et crochets de mon cru] :
What's happening in Gaza is a Holocaust, and what is currently being designed by the Israeli government is the final solution to their Palestinian problem.
And as a Holocaust survivor, my reaction is, not in my name.
Extermination, dehumanization, starvation, blockade, lack of water and medication.
The destruction of the health service, the hunting down of doctors, the hunting down of journalists, safe places which turn out to be not safe at all but traps,
concentration camps, all this together makes a clear Holocaust.
Clearly all these elements are not in any way different from similar actions by the Nazis during the second World War.
Gaza is an open-air concentration camp. In a sense it's an extermination camp, because there is no way out other than dying through bombing or disease or lack of food.
Only alternative is to agree to be replaced somewhere where you don't want to be.
I had not only experience of the Holocaust and the hiding, and the discrimination, et cetera, but the fighting went through our particular area where we were hiding. When we came out, when it was all over, I saw total devastation, just like when you see the pictures of Gaza; destroyed buildings, piles of rubble, dead horses, dead people. I see exactly the same in Gaza.
However, the great difference is that what I witnessed was a byproduct of two armies fighting, and what I see in Gaza is a deliberate destruction, and I think it's a degree evil, greater evil than what I've seen.
The license which has been employed against the Palestinians, it's all based on the Holocaust experience. But rather than making the conclusion that this is something that we have to learn for and make it impossible to be repeated to any other people, they are actually using it as a license to complete lack of accountability towards any other people.
I'm thinking now of when Netanyahu says, "Never again is now." This is a very clear reference to the Holocaust experience, justifying whatever they are doing.
They are permanent victims, no matter how aggressive they are towards others.
And another example, when the Israeli ambassador to United Nations [Gilad Erdan], before making his contribution at the Security Council meeting, very theatrically put on a yellow star.
I found that particularly upsetting and disgusting, because I had to wear the yellow star even at age seven in 1944.
But they continually making this connection and using this cover to acquire impunity, total impunity.
And that is deliberate policy of the Zionists and the Israeli state.
They create an increase of antisemitism the world over because they conflate Judaism with Zionism and their current policies. And as we know, a very large number of Jews who have a sense of justice are against it all, and yet they pretend to be speaking and acting on behalf of all Jews. It's amazingly damaging to Jewish people the world over.
So, not only has it become obvious that the Israeli state and Zionism are producing a genocide in Gaza, but it is actually the very worst thing that could have happened to the Jewish people who are associated with these dreadful acts.
For Jewish people, and particularly anyone who survived the Holocaust or their descendants, to dissociate ourselves from the actions of the Zionist state is extremely important. And how important it is is proven by the reaction we get from the general public, who are grateful for our stand, making it clear that the Jewish people are not a solid block on the side of the apartheid and genocidal Israel.
Because due to the Holocaust, Israel and the Zionists claim total impunity, and we see it in practice that this is accepted all around, they should not be in any way free of being called out as fascists, like we call out fascists elsewhere where we see them.
And sadly, Israeli policies are now driven by clearly fascist characters, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich amongst others.
The comparison between the extreme actions of the Zionists and the Nazi regime has a long history. Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt in their open letter in 1948 in the New York Times, signed by many others as well, had already pointed out that the policies and beliefs of the Zionist organization Herut, which later morphed into the Likud party, had similarities in their ideology to the Nazis ["Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties."].
If a comparison with the Nazi philosophies and practices was acceptable then, so soon after the Holocaust, it surely must be acceptable now and we must protest against the taboo of not making any comparisons between the genocidal actions of Israel and the Nazi regime.
This latest initiative of theirs of setting up a so-called humanitarian camp is just another concentration camp. [Cf. The Guardian : "'Humanitarian city' would be concentration camp for Palestinians, says former Israeli PM" Ehud Olmert]
Once entering it, and you are forced to enter it, because there are no other places going to be left where you are free from being bombed. So, once in that camp, you are not allowed to leave except, apparently the plan is, except for a foreign country.
Supposing you don't want to leave, the conditions inevitably were so awful in these camps, because they're overcrowded, there will never be adequate medical services available, so, there will be slow diminishing of numbers by wastage and death through deprivation. It's a clear case of genocide. And the parallel is obvious with Nazi camps.
Some Nazi leaders, well known for being kind to animals, and because the Jews regarded by them as human animals, they're going to be like they would be to animals, humanitarian in executing the complete extermination.
For example, by trying to avoid them knowing about their fate early enough so that they don't suffer anxiety.
This was their kind of humanitarian approach to camps.
So, it's not a new concept, this kind of humanitarian camp idea.
Once you are set upon an ethnic cleansing and a destruction of a people, it's inevitable that you have to prepare it with dehumanization of your subjects, whom you're going to perpetrate all this on.
Otherwise, you wouldn't get cooperation from anybody in executing this plan.
I think the drip, drip effect of being brought up in these conditions distorts people's views, both intellectually and emotionally.
— How many civilians have been killed in Gaza, from what you know?
— Who gives a shit?
— Okay. But don't you feel like, for example, children?
— Children grow up to be Arabs.
And I found that, sadly, even a part of my family which suffered the Holocaust and ended up in Israel, had been completely reformed by this propaganda.
This even affected the cousin, who was a teenager during her deportation to Auschwitz, and was put to work in warehouses where they were sorting the clothes of those who were killed in the gas chambers.
And then one day, she had to sort her own parents' clothes, which must have been an enormous trauma.
Eventually, she came back. She survived, and when I met her in Haifa, I found her racist, completely racist, just like all the others.
And frankly, I found it almost incomprehensible, that somebody with that experience is still... was prey to this propaganda.
Any comparison between what's happening in Gaza and the genocide there and the Holocaust, World War II, and any denial or prohibition of a comparison is a taboo which must be broken. Because it's quite clear and it's declared by the leadership of the Israeli government that the aim is ethnic cleansing and extermination.
Bezalel Smotrich : We will annihilate everything that still remains of the strip, and leave nothing standing. Just look at the videos of what's happening in the Gaza Strip. For two and a half months we didn't allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. Would I want to avoid the need to bring a single grain into the Gaza Strip, not even for the civilians? Could be. We're breaking Gaza apart leaving it as a pile of rubble with total unprecedented destruction. And the world still hasn't stopped us.
If we witness what is going on daily, the continuous murdering of the Palestinian civilian innocent population, witnessing all that and not protesting or looking the other way, is making us accepting a virtual rebirth of a fascist regime.
And we have to resist it in order to be on the right side of history.
And with regard to Netanyahu, he kind of impersonates all that, he's obviously a war criminal, as it has been established, but we mustn't make the mistake of thinking that it is simply to do with Netanyahu because the leadership all around him, and unfortunately a majority of the country, are of the same mind.
— If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second. I would press it right now!! Give me that button and press it right now!
— There you go.
— Hahahaha!! And I think most Israelis would!
[Two Nice Jewish Boys]
A recent Hebrew University poll has shown that 82% of the Jewish Israeli population agrees that there are no innocents in Gaza. [Mondoweiss, Overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis share genocidal belief there are 'no innocent people' in Gaza, 3.07.2025]
And what is needed is a complete dismantling of the Zionist state and the Zionist movement, and we have to resist the tendency towards the travel in the direction of fascism at every stage.
Fascism, which happens in stages incrementally.
We can see this tendency, this direction of travel already clearly in, say, Germany and the United States, particularly on university campuses. And more and more, we find this incremental increase of limiting free speech and the freedom of protest here in this country [the United Kingdom... and almost the wholeEurope].
I was eyewitness to how the leader of Stop the War Coalition was treated. [Chris Nineham]
Suddenly, the police converged on him as if by an order and, very violently, knocked him down and piled on top of him.
Because it was a totally unnecessary and shocking piece of violence, I thought it was intended as a message to movements supporting the Palestinian people, that they are after us.
Subsequently, people that were standing right next to me, Jeremy Corbyn and John MacDonald, were called in for questioning under caution.
Others were also called in for questioning under caution, including myself.
It's a very difficult problem, because at times, to resist the official line and tendencies goes with great risks.
Nonetheless, if you don't do it, you acquire guilt by association, by indifference. It's one kind of guilt.
And there had been, in my experience of the Holocaust, very brave people who went against. It is possible, at great risk.
Well, I just want to mention an actual example of how brave people can resist, at risk, certainly, to themselves, but able to resist the evils of the day. There was a friend of our extended family called Emil Wiesmeyer.
[He helped Jews flee Holocaust: his printing company made fake passports as part of efforts by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg to save Jews from Nazi death camps.]
He was an owner of a printing works. He was not Jewish, but was against what was going on, and at night, at his risk, he was printing false documents to save Jewish people. He took enormous risks. Obviously, if he was discovered, he would have been executed without any doubt. You've got to take risks. This is the conclusion.
If you want to be on the right side of history, you can't avoid but have to take risks.
You don't have to be a hero, but you have to be able to take a degree of risk, a risk with your career maybe, or your qualifications, if you are a student, which some very brave people are doing, but maybe this should be on a much larger scale.
As the mainstream media turns the other way and minimizes or doesn't represent the truth about what's going on in Gaza and the West Bank, I think it's extraordinarily important to have platforms like Double Down News, which does tell the true story, and I think it should be supported.
So, if you can, support Double Down News on Patreon.
Le sionisme est né à la fin du XIXe siècle, marqué par la montée du nationalisme raciste, avec son suprématisme et sa volonté d’annihiler l’autre, son colonialisme et son impérialisme purs et simples. L’ouvrage de Herzl, « L’État juif », écrit à Vienne en 1896, est marqué par cette expérience. En réponse à l’antisémitisme, il imagine un État colonial purement juif en Palestine ou en Argentine, dans l’esprit de l’époque, comme une perspective d’émancipation politique du judaïsme. (...)
Voici l'allocution d'Ilan Pappé au Premier Congrès juif antisioniste de Vienne, le 13 juin 2025 :
Modérateurs internationaux et équipe d'organisation en Autriche :
Dalia Sarig, Maya Rinderer, Shadi Abu Daher, Monika Vykoukal, Sali Attia, Topoké, Dr. Michael Kösten, Axel Magnus, Naama Farjoun, Rames Najjar, Marco Wanjura, Gülmihri Aytac Gülmihri, Astrid Wagner, Stéfane Jouteux, Martin Weinberger, Fernando Romero-Forsthuber et Stefan Kraft.
— Mots d'ouverture par Dalia Sarig, Samy Ayad et Ronnie Barkan.
— Messages vidéo du Dr Mohammad Salha, directeur médical de l'hôpital Al Awda (Gaza) et de Roger Waters.
— Pourquoi ce congrès maintenant ? Avec Ghada Karmi, Ilan Pappé, Francesca Albanese (en ligne) et Rima Hassan.
Modération : Haim Bresheeth-Žabner.
— De la Convivencia (coexistence) au Bund et à l'antisionisme : (Co)existence historique juive.
Traditions juives de coexistence, résistance au sionisme et leur pertinence aujourd'hui. Avec Yakov Rabkin (visioconférence), Donny Gluckstein, Haim Bresheeth, Awad Abdelfattah.
Modératrice : Rahma Zein. Animatrice : Maya Rinderer
— Répression et muselement des militants pro-palestiniens : une menace pour les droits démocratiques et civils. Avec Katie Halper, Rahma Zein, Wieland Hoban, Astrid Wagner.
Modération: Ronnie Barkan et hôte : Dr. Med. Shadi Abu Daher.
— Du nettoyage ethnique au génocide : un État démocratique unique (ODS / ÉDU) est-il encore possible ?
Examen du passage de l’expulsion historique aux pratiques génocidaires actuelles
Avec Ilan Pappé, Ghada Karmi, Ramzy Baroud.
Modération : Peter Eisenstein. Présentation : Gülmihri Aytaç
— Réaffirmer l'antifascisme et lutter contre l'instrumentalisation de l'antisémitisme.
Réaffirmer les traditions antifascistes tout en s'attaquant aux accusations mensongères et manipulatrices d'antisémitisme visant à museler la dissidence.
Avec Tony Greenstein, Stephen Kapos, Wieland Hoban, Wilhelm Langthaler.
Modération: Stefan Kraft.
— Contre le Sionisme et l'Impérialisme : Vers la fin de l'impunité et la mise en œuvre de sanctions.
Stratégies pour lutter contre l'impunité et renforcer la pression internationale par le biais de sanctions et d'actions politiques.
Avec Peter Eisenstein, Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, Tarkan Tek, Irina Vana.
Modération : Stéfane Jouteux. Présentation : Michael Kösten.
— Décolonisation et libération : la pertinence des modèles historiques.
Réflexions sur les luttes de libération et leurs enseignements.
Avec Ronnie Barkan, Ramzy Baroud, Roshan Dadoo.
Modération : Haim Bresheeth. Animateur : Dieter Reinisch.
— De la fierté au déni : Les Juifs arabes et l’intégration dans le monde arabe.
Expériences complexes des Juifs arabes face à leur identité et à l’effacement. L’État sioniste comme projet de suprématie européenne dans le monde arabe.
Avec Iris Hefets, Reuven Abergel, Camille Levy Sarfati.
Présidente : Naama Farjoun.
Rappel : nous sommes des millions et nous pouvons transformer qui que ce soit en tigre en papier !
Le sionisme est l'idéologie qui est à la base de l'État fasciste d'Israël. Se présenter comme une idéologie morale et moralement justifiée, et calomnier ses détracteurs, voire ses dénonciateurs, est un double but stratégique qui dispose aujourd'hui d'une machine à propagande et à diffamations bien huilée et rôdée.
Analysons un récent cas de figure, connaissons les coulisses du cas Gary Lineker —un homme juste taxé d'antisémite— dans un contexte plus large et trop pourri concernant la BBC, puissant modèle de conditionnement du public fort pénétré de sionisme.
Faisons-le à l'aide d'une vidéo proposée aujourd'hui 3 juin par la plateforme indépendante britannique d'information et d'analyse DOUBLE DOWN NEWS : What REALLY Happened to Gary Lineker. Les liens et les crochets sont de mon cru.
TRANSCRIPTION :
LOWKEY, rappeur et journaliste:
Gary Lineker's career as both a footballer and a sports presenter has spanned decades, but the one thing that pushed him out of his job was Israel.
The campaign against Gary Lineker has been vicious and lengthy, and led by the UK Lawyers for Israel group.
But who are they? The head of the UK lawyers for Israel, Jonathan Turner, went on record stating that the blockade of Gaza could cause a decrease in obesity.
This follows a complaint by UKLFI on behalf of some Jewish patients, who said that they felt vulnerable and victimised by this display.
The display was of decorated plates, along with their original designs and explanations about their significance. The designs were said to have been created by children at two UNWRA schools in Gaza: the Beit Lahia Girls’ School and the Jabalia Prep Boys’ A School. However, the drawings all appear to be professional artwork, in the same style, and carried out by the same person. (…)
…and worked to edit textbooks for children in school and increase the amount of times the word terrorist was used to refer to Palestinians.
MEE Report, 1 April 2021, 08:45 BST: UK school textbooks on Middle East conflict altered to favour Israel
Publisher says it is now pausing further distribution of the books which it had amended after a complaint from UK Lawyers for Israel.
The international publisher Pearson has paused further distribution of two textbooks used by UK high schools after a group of academics said in a report that they distorted the historical record and failed to offer pupils a balanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The report found that alterations had been made to text, timelines, maps and photographs, as well as to sample student essays and questions.
It concluded that "school children should not be supplied with propaganda under the guise of education" and called for their immediate withdrawal.
When the UK Lawyers for Israel was first registered with Company's House in 2010, the original name for the grouping was Action for Peace Limited [5.10.2010 - 7.01.2011].
But who was behind the foundation of this group?
In May 2011, a page on the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website announced the creation of UK Lawyers for Israel.
In June 2012, the UK Lawyers for Israel hosted a seminar for two days with both the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Israeli Embassy in London.
In January 2013, the UKLFI hosted Arthur Lenk, of the Legal Division of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA).
Caroline Kendall, an employee of the UK Lawyers for Israel [Director of operations for UKLFI], in August 2015 stated:
"As an organization, we won't seek out publicity. We only want to be effective, and often it's operating below the radar, and actually not publicly."
Curiously, in 2016 September, the UK Lawyers for Israel registered as a charity [a ‘Charitable Trust’].
And again, in January 2017, the UKLFI hosted a talk with the former deputy director of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
An Israeli lawyer who specialises in huge civil suits against terror groups such as Hamas and Hizbollah has claimed British lawyers are "timid" when it comes to "lawfare".
Jerusalem-based Nitsana Darshan-Leitner's law firm, Shurat HaDin, was instrumental in stopping the second Gaza flotilla by threatening the boat insurers that they could be charged with "aiding terrorism".
Her firm has sued Hamas, Hizbollah and the Palestinian Authority on behalf of victims of terrorism, targeting their assets in America and Europe.
No cases are pending in the UK. But on a visit to London last week, she said: "That does not mean the country is clean. It means the lawyers here don't have so much courage. There is a large Arab population. The government and the Jewish community are timid."
But a leading British barrister has claimed in fact it was UK lawyers who made the critical move in stopping the flotilla leaving Athens for Gaza in May – by urging the Greek authorities to inspect the boats' seaworthiness.
Jonathan Turner, head of the Zionist Federation's legal group, said: "Shurat HaDin did great work, but they did not co-ordinate the response".
He said the steps taken by Shurat HaDin, to warn firms against insuring the vessels, "may have hampered our opponents, but they were still going.
"We had contacts with a top Greek lawyer to explain to the head of the Greek coastal police the grounds on which the ships could be arrested, including inspecting them for faults and evidence they were putting passengers at risk."
The Greek lawyer, whose identity Mr Turner is protecting, was "a personal friend of the family of Moshe Dayan."
While doing so, they worked alongside an Israeli law firm by the name of Shurat HaDin [also Israel Law Center, ILC, a NGO founded in Tel Aviv in 2003. Web].
A leaked US embassy cable stated that Shurat HaDin took direction directly from Israeli external intelligence agency Mossad on which cases they should take legal action over.
[Cf. The Electronic Intifada, Israeli lawyers group Shurat HaDin unmasked as Mossad proxy, 24.10.2013]
However, there is another very key aspect to this story, which has not been dealt with seriously. The employer of Gary Lineker was the BBC. But, as I will demonstrate, the BBC is an entirely penetrated organization.
Meet Robbie Gibb. According to the BBC,
“[As one of the non-exec directors on the BBC Board,”] Robbie Gibb “is responsible for upholding and protecting the independence of the BBC by acting in the public interest and exercising independent judgment.”
Let's not forget that Robbie Gibb was the head of communications for British Prime Minister Theresa May.
After that, he went on to head a consortium that took ownership of the Jewish Chronicle, but has not told journalists where the money came from for the procuring of the Jewish Chronicle.
[Cf. Prospect Magazine, Who really funds the Jewish Chronicle? Why it’s troubling that we don’t know…
Four years ago, a mysterious consortium came to the rescue of the beleaguered publication—and nobody is really clear about who is behind the scenes. But openness matters, especially when politics is involved
By Alan Rusbridger, April 26, 2024]
This consortium also featured John Woodcock, formerly the head of Labour Friends of Israel, and Jonathan Sacerdoti, formerly head of the UK Zionist Federation [former Director of Public Affairs at the Zionist Federation].
And until August of last year [12 August 2024], Robbie Gibb was registered as the sole director and owner of the Jewish Chronicle.
The Jewish Chronicle has been found to publish fake news seemingly at the behest of the Israeli prime minister's office.
Ben Reiff, +972 Magazine, September 11, 2024, Why did a British Jewish newspaper publish fake Israeli intelligence?
Israel’s army suspects fabrications published in the Jewish Chronicle were part of a pro-Bibi influence campaign, while the article’s author is not as he claims]
But the connections between the BBC and Israel really do not stop there.
Who is the man behind the headlines that you so often see from the BBC, where the passive voice is used to describe Palestinians killed by the Israeli army?
BBC: Israel accuses South Africa of false claims at ICJ
BBC: Gaza convoy: IDF says it fired at 'suspects' but not at aid trucks
BBC: Aid convoy denied entry to northern Gaza, UN says
BBC: Israel-Gaza war: More than 100 reported killed in crowd near Gaza aid convoy
BBC: “Jabalia: Israel air strike reportedly kills dozens at Gaza refugee camp”
BBC: “Israel Gaza: Father loses 11 family members in one blast”
That man is none other than BBC online editor Raffi Berg [Middle East editor of the BBC News website].
Raffi Berg not only published a book in collaboration with Israeli intelligence agents about their operations, he then went on to take a picture of himself with Israeli ambassador Mark Regev [born 1960 in Melbourne as Mark Freiberg] and frame it on his wall.
Once his book was published, Benjamin Netanyahu openly and publicly praised it.
And Raffi Berg took the letter he was sent by Netanyahu and framed it on his wall also. In fact, he was so enthusiastic about this support from Netanyahu that he tweeted Netanyahu's son telling him of his father's support for the book.
— Yair Netanyahu, X, Aug 20, 2019: “Just watched the “Red Sea Diving Resort”, by Netflix, starring Chris Evans! Awesome movie that shows the unbelievable story of how Israel saved the Jewish community of Ethiopia!” — Raffi Berg, X, 7.12.2021: “Your dad has my book Red Sea Spies: The True Story of the Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort, and sent me a lovely letter about it. The real story is even more spectacular than the one told in the movie!” [Malgré le décalage, les dates sont correctes.]
This is clearly a partisan actor. How is it conceivable that he could be the online editor for the BBC on the issue of Gaza?
The BBC stands for the British Broadcasting Corporation, but it's clear that they are doing a lot of work to support Israel during this genocide.
[Several “dialogues” on BBC News:]
— “Denying access to food is collective punishment and that we should all be clear in saying that.”
— BBC presenter: “Israel will argue, obviously, that it has a right to defend itself”.
LIVE Khan Younis, 16:20
— “…And we are continuing that process until we end the starvation”.
— BBC: And… uh… of course, you know, you will know that Israel says it its policy is not one of starvation…
BBC News
— This is a genocide happening in front of our eyes.
— BBC presenter: We have… yeah… we… that word is, as you know, incredibly emotive and the Israelis, as you know, will be saying that they are targeting Hamas only.
— Woman at home, in London: Preservation of life is the number one priority and after 15 months of genocidal assault.
— BBC presenter: I don't want to go down the avenue around genocide.
LIVE Rochdale
— The Labour Party of all political parties, which has always had a strong peace contingent within it, is now actually supporting genocide.
— BBC journalist: Okay, if we can maybe just avoid that language, if that's okay.
All this talk of impartiality… where was that, when the BBC hired Eli Ovitz?
Eli Ovitz claimed to be working as a spokesman for the Israeli military at the same time as being a producer for the BBC.
And BBC editor Mark Berg went from working for the BBC, editing key programs, to then becoming the director of Israel's largest lobby group in this country, BICOM [Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre], which directly targets BBC journalists.
After working for several years as a director at BICOM, he went back to working for the BBC, including BBC HARD Talk, the show which supposedly holds powerful people to account.
How is it possible that an institution like the BBC, which supposedly exists to serve the public interest and goes to great length to state its impartiality, could have so many people associated with it who are pro-Israel to this extent?
The BBC has pushed out one of their most popular stars of all time in order to satisfy the Israel lobby, while, at the same time, censoring a documentary about Gaza's health care system.
Where is the right-wing media, which supposedly supports free speech and is against cancel culture?
The mainstream media is claiming that Gary Lineker was pushed out following a backlash, as if you and me want him gone from the BBC, when actually, this was a manufactured backlash, by both the Israel lobby and the mainstream media, in order to finally get rid of him.
Supposedly, a reposted Instagram story caused significant distress.
Israel is decapitating children and starving people, demolishing hospitals, schools, and places of religious worship on an industrial scale, wiping Gaza off the map forever, and Gary Lineker and his tweets are the problem?
Ask yourself: why did Gary Lineker have to be silenced?
Gary Lineker: I know where I stand on this. I'm sorry, It's more important than what the BBC what's going on there, is, you know, the mass murder of thousands of children, is… probably something that we should have a little opinion on.
— But the BBC, as a whole, needs to be impartial about it.
Gary Lineker: Why? It needs to be factual.
It's not about anti-semitism at all. It's about taking down a popular mainstream figure for the crime of opposing the killing of children on an industrial scale.
The tide is turning, and as the hand of history moves, the more desperate, those who are on the wrong side of it, will become.
Every time one person is shut down, you reveal more to the world your desperation to stifle the truth, and many more will rise in his place, because the tide is turning and history is not on your side.
The BBC is supposed to be journalism in public interest. But in 2025, we can see very clearly that that role has switched to independent media, like Double Down News. It would be extremely difficult to public information like this anywhere else. So, please support Doubledown News with everything you can and join their Patreon now.
Discours de Chris Hedges au Sanctuary for Independent Media à Troy, dans l'État de New York, le 21 octobre 2022. Il présentait son dernier livre, intitulé “The Greatest Evil is War” (« Le plus grand mal, c'est la guerre », Seven Stories Press, 20.09.2022).
Cette condamnation sans concession de l'horreur et de l'obscénité de la guerre s'appuie sur son expérience et des entretiens, fondements d'un ouvrage qui examine les coûts cachés de la guerre et ses conséquences pour les individus, les familles, les communautés et les nations.
À la mémoire de Meghan Marohn, 1980-2022
TRANSCRIPTION (Les liens et les contenus entre crochets sont de mon cru) :
I didn't really want to write another book on war. My first one was a force that gives us meaning was not cathartic, was extremely difficult to cope with and process, but the kind of sickening euphoria over the war in Ukraine raised the familiar bile and so, I have this book here…
_____________________________
Preemptive war, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, is a war crime. It does not matter if the war is launched on the basis of lies and fabrications, as was the case in Iraq, or because of the breaking of a series of agreements with Russia, including the promise, by Washington, not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, not to deploy thousands of NATO troops in eastern Europe, not to meddle in the internal affairs of nations on Russia's border, and the refusal to implement the Minsk II peace agreement. This provocation, which includes establishing a NATO missile base 100 miles from Russia's border, was foolish and highly irresponsible. It never made geopolitical sense. The invasion of Ukraine would —I expect— never have happened if these promises had been kept, Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed, and angry, but to understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine —under post Nuremberg Laws— is a criminal war of aggression.
I know the instrument of war. War is not politics by other means. It is demonic. I spent two decades as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East Africa, and the Balkans, where I covered the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.
I carry within me the ghosts of dozens of those swallowed up in the violence, including my close friend, Reuters correspondent, Kurt Schork, who was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone with another friend, Miguel Gil Moreno.
I know the chaos and disorientation of war, the constant uncertainty and confusion. In a firefight, you are only aware of what is happening a few feet around you. You desperately, and not always successfully, struggle to figure out where the firing is coming from, and the hopes you can avoid being hit.
I have felt the helplessness and the paralyzing fear, which years later descend on me like a freight train in the middle of the night, leaving me wrapped in coils of terror, my heart racing, my body dripping with sweat.
I have heard the wails of those convulsed by grief as they clutch the bodies of friends and family, including children. I hear them still. It does not matter the language: Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Dinka, Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Ukrainian, Russian. Death cuts through the linguistic barriers.
I know what wounds look like. Legs blown off. Heads imploded into a bloody, pulpy mass. Gaping holes and stomachs. Pools of blood. Cries of the dying, sometimes for their mothers. And the smell: the smell of death. The Supreme sacrifice made for flies and maggots.
I was beaten by Iraqi and Saudi secret police, I was taken prisoner by the Contras in Nicaragua, who radioed back to their base, in Honduras, to see if they should kill me, and again, in Basra, after the first Gulf War, never knowing if I would be executed under constant guard and, often, without food, drinking, out of mud puddles.
The primary lesson in war is that we, as distinct individuals, do not matter. We become numbers. Fodder. Objects. Life, once precious and sacred, becomes meaningless, sacrificed to the insatiable appetite of Mars. No one in wartime is exempt.
“We were expendable!,” Eugene Sledge wrote of his experiences as a Marine in the South Pacific in World War II. “It was difficult to accept. We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness. It is a humbling experience.”
The landscape of war is hallucinogenic, it defies comprehension, you have no concept of time in a firefight. A few minutes. A few hours… War, in an instant, obliterates homes and communities, all that was once familiar, and leaves behind smoldering ruins and a trauma that you carry for the rest of your life.
You cannot comprehend what you see. I have tasted enough of war, enough of my own fear, my body turned to jelly, to know that war is always evil, the purest expression of death, dressed up in patriotic cant about Liberty and Democracy, and sold to the naïve as a ticket to glory, honor, and courage. It is a toxic and seductive elixir. Those who survive, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, struggle afterwards to reinvent themselves and their universe which, on some level, will never make sense again.
War destroys all systems that sustain and nurture life-familial, economic, cultural, political, environmental, and social. Once war begins, no one, even those nominally in charge of waging war, can guess what will happen, how the war will develop, how it can drive armies and nations towards suicidal folly.
There are no good wars. None. And this includes World War II, which has been sanitized and mythologized to mendaciously celebrate American heroism, purity and goodness. If truth is the first casualty in war, ambiguity is the second. The bellicose rhetoric embraced and amplified by the American press, demonizing Vladimir Putin and elevating the Ukrainians to the status of demigods, demanding more robust military intervention along with crippling sanctions meant to bring down Putin's government is infantile and dangerous.
The Russian media narrative is as simplistic as ours.
There were no discussions about pacifism in the basements in Sarajevo, when we were being hit with hundreds of Serbian shells a day and under constant sniper fire. It made sense to defend the city, it made sense to kill or be killed. The Bosnian Serb soldiers in the Drina Valley, Vukovar, Srebrenica had amply demonstrated their capacity for murderous rampages, including the gunning down of hundreds of soldiers and civilians and the wholesale rape of women and girls. But this did not save any of the defenders in Sarajevo from the poison of violence, the soul-destroying force that is war. I knew a Bosnian soldier who heard a sound behind a door while patrolling on the outskirts of Sarajevo. He fired a burst from his AK-47 through the door. A delay of a few seconds in combat can mean death. When he opened the door, he found the bloody remains of a 12-year-old girl. His daughter was 12. He never recovered.
Only the autocrats and politicians who dream of empire and global hegemony, of the god-like power that comes with wielding armies, warplanes, and fleets, along with the merchants of death, whose business floods countries with weapons, profit from war. The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe has earned Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Analytic Services, Huntington Ingalls, Humana, BAE Systems, and L3Harris billions in profits. The stoking of conflict in Ukraine will earn them billions more.
The European Union has allocated hundreds of millions of euros to purchase weapons for Ukraine. Germany will almost triple its own defense budget for 2023. The Biden Administration has asked Congress to provide over 50 billion dollars to Ukraine in weapons and aid. The permanent war economy operates outside the laws of supply and demand. It is the root of the two-decade-long quagmire in the Middle East and it is the root of the conflict with Moscow. The merchants of death are Satanic. The more corpses they produce, the more their bank accounts swell. They will cash in on this conflict one that now flirts with nuclear Holocaust.
The same cabal of war mongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, decade after decade, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protein, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican party to the Democratic party and then, back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons, to liberal interventionists. Pseudo-intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery, as they sell perpetual fear and a racist world view, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence. They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state. And the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks project for The New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council, and Brookings Institution. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized, or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any Empire, including ours, leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next.
I reported on the suffering, misery, and murderous rampages these shills for war engineered and funded.
My first encounter with them was in Central America. Elliot Abrams, convicted of providing misleading testimony to Congress on the Iran Contra affair, and later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush, so, he could return to government to sell us the Iraq War, and Robert Kagan, director of the State Department's Public Diplomacy Office in Latin America, were propagandists for the brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as the rapists and homicidal thugs that made up the rogue Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which they illegally funded.
Their job was to discredit our reporting. They and their coterie of fellow war lovers went on to push for the expansion of NATO in Central and Eastern Europe.
They are cheerleaders for the apartheid state of Israel justifying its war crimes against Palestinians and myopically conflating Israel's interests with our own.
They advocated for airstrikes in Serbia, calling for the U.S to, quote, “take out Slobodan Milošević” [Слободан Милошевић].
They were the authors of the policy to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya.
Robert Kagan and William Kristol, with their typical cluelessness, wrote in April [15,] 2002 that, quote, “the road that leads to real security and peace" is "the road that runs through Baghdad.” We saw how that worked out. That road led to the dissolution of Iraq, the destruction of its civilian infrastructure —including the obliteration of 18 of 20 electricity generating plants, and nearly all the water pumping and sanitation systems during a 43-day period, when 90 000 tons of bombs were rained down on the country—, the rise of radical jihadist groups throughout the region, and the proliferation of failed States.
The war in Iraq along with a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan shredded the illusion of U.S military and Global hegemony.
It also inflicted on Iraqis, who had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11, wholesale slaughter of civilians, the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, and the ascendancy of Iran as the preeminent power in the Middle East.
They continue to call for war with Iran, with Fred Kagan stating, quote, “there is nothing we can do, short of attacking, to force Iran to give up its nuclear weapons”.
They pushed for the overthrow of President Nicolas Maduro, after trying to do the same to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and they have targeted Daniel Ortega, their old nemesis in Nicaragua.
They embrace a pure blind nationalism that prohibits them from seeing the world from any perspective other than their own.
They know nothing about the machinery of war, its consequences or its inevitable blowback.
They know nothing about the peoples and cultures they target for violent regeneration.
They believe in the Divine Right to impose their quote-unquote “values” on others by force, fiasco after fiasco, and now, they are stoking a war with Russia.
The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus —Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš [Данило Киш] observed —. Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The Nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that’s to say national, that's to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell – it’s other people (other nations, other tribes). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own image – as nationalists. [A comfortable standpoint, as we noted. Fear and envy. A commitment and engagement needing no effort. Not only is hell other people, in a national key of course, but also: whatever is not mine (Serbian, Croatian, French…) is alien to me. Nationalism is an ideology of banality. As such, nationalism is a totalitarian ideology.]
The Biden Administration is filled with these ignoramuses, including Joe Biden. Victoria Nuland, the wife of Robert Kagan, serves as Biden's Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. Anthony Blinken is the Secretary of State. Jack Sullivan is National Security advisor.
They come from this cabal of moral and intellectual trolls that includes Kimberly Kagan, the wife of Fred Kagan, who founded the Institute for the Study of War. William [Bill] Kristol, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Frum and others.
Many were once staunch Republicans or, like Nuland, served in Republican and Democratic administrations. Nuland was the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.
They are united by the demand for larger and larger defense budgets and an ever-expanding military. Julien Benda called these courtiers to power “the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia.”
They once railed against liberal weaknesses and appeasement. But they swiftly migrated to the Democratic party rather than support Donald Trump, who showed no desire to start a conflict with Russia and who called the invasion of Iraq a big fat mistake.
Besides, as they correctly pointed out, Hillary Clinton was a fellow neocon. And liberals wonder why nearly half the electorate, who revile these arrogant unelected power brokers, as they should, voted for Trump.
These ideologues did not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including children. Every dead body I stood over in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Gaza, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, their intellectual dishonesty, and their sick bloodlust.
They did not serve in the military. Their children do not serve in the military, but they eagerly ship young American men and women to fight and die for their self-delusional dreams of Empire and American hegemony. Or, as in Ukraine, they provide the weaponry and logistical support, so Ukrainians and Russians can bleed in perpetuity.
Historical time stopped for them with the end of World War II. The overthrow of democratically elected governments by the U.S during the Cold War in Indonesia, Guatemala, the Congo, Iran and Chile (where the CIA oversaw the assassination of the commander-in-chief of the army, General Renee Schneider, and president Salvador Allende), the Bay of Pigs, the atrocities and war crimes that define the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, even the disasters they manufactured in the Middle East, have disappeared into the black hole of their collective historical amnesia. American global domination, they claim, is benign, a force for good, “benevolent hegemony.”
The world, the late Charles Krauthammer insisted, welcomes “our power.” All enemies, from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, are the new Hitler. All U.S interventions are a fight for Freedom that make the world a safer place. All refusals to bomb and occupy another country are a 1938 Munich moment, a pathetic retreat from confronting evil by the new Neville Chamberlain. We do have enemies abroad. But our most dangerous enemy is within.
The warmongers build a campaign against a country such as Iraq or Russia and then, wait for a crisis —they call it the next Pearl Harbor— to justify the unjustifiable. In 1998, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, along with a dozen other prominent neoconservatives, wrote an open letter to President Bill Clinton denouncing his policy of containment in Iraq as a failure and demanding that he go to war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. To continue the, quote, “course of weakness and drift,” they warned, was to “put our interests and our future at risk.” Huge majorities in Congress, Republican and Democrat, rushed to pass the Iraq Liberation Act. Few Democrats or Republicans dare to be seen as soft on National Security. The act stated that the U.S government would work to, quote, “remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein” and authorized $99 million towards that goal, some of it being used to fund Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress that would become instrumental in disseminating the fabrications and lies used to justify the Iraq War during the administration of George W. Bush.
The attacks of 9/11 gave the war party its opening, first with Afghanistan, then Iraq. Krauthammer, who knew nothing about the Muslim world, wrote, quote, “the way to tame the Arab street is not with appeasement and sweet sensitivity but with raw power and victory… The elementary truth that seems to elude the experts again and again… is that power is its own reward. Victory changes everything, psychologically above all. The psychology in the Middle East is now one of fear and deep respect for American power. Now is the time to use it.” Removing Saddam Hussein from power, Kristol crowed, would, quote, “transform the political landscape of the Middle East.”
It did, of course, but not in ways that benefited the United States.
They lust for apocalyptic global war. Fred Kagan, the brother of Robert, a military historian, wrote in 1999 that, quote, “America must be able to fight Iraq and North Korea, and also be able to fight genocide in the Balkans and elsewhere without compromising its ability to fight two major regional conflicts. And it must be able to contemplate war with China or Russia some considerable (but not infinite) time from now” [author’s emphasis].
They believe violence magically solves all disputes, even the Israel Palestine morass.
In a bizarre interview immediately after 9/11, Donald Kagan, the Yale classicist and right-wing ideologue who was the father of Robert and Fred Kagan, called, along with his son Fred, for the deployment of U.S troops in Gaza so we could, quote, “take the war to these people.”
They have long demanded the stationing of NATO troops in Ukraine, with Robert Kagan saying that “We need to not worry that the problem is our encirclement rather than Russian ambitions.”
His wife, Victoria Nuland, was outed in a leaked phone conversation in 2014 with the U.S ambassador to Ukraine, Jeffrey Pyatt, disparaging the EU and plotting to remove the lawfully elected president ViKtor Yanukovych and install compliant Ukrainian politicians in power, most of whom did eventually take power. They lobbied for U.S troops to be sent to Syria to assist quote-unquote “moderate” rebels seeking to overthrow Bashir al-Assad. Instead, the interventions spawned the Caliphate. The U.S ended up bombing the very forces they had armed, becoming Assad's de facto Air Force.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the attacks of 9/11, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Putin, like everyone else they target, only understands force. We can, they assure us, militarily bend Russia to our will.
“It is true that acting firmly in 2008 or 2014 would have meant risking conflict,” Robert Kagan wrote in Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. “But Washington is risking conflict now; Russia’s ambitions have created an inherently dangerous situation. It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it has always been extraordinarily small: Putin was never going to obtain his objectives by destroying himself and his country, along with much of the rest of the world.”
In short, don't worry about going to war with Russia, Putin won't use the bomb.
I do not know if these people are stupid or cynical or both. They are the useful idiots of the War Industry. They are never dropped from the networks, they rotate in and out of power, parked in places like the Council on Foreign Relations, The Brookings Institute, before being called back into government. They are as welcome in the Obama or Biden White House as in the Bush White House. The Cold War, for them, never ended. The world remains binary, us and them, good and evil. They are never held accountable.
When one military intervention goes up in flames, they are ready to promote the next. These Doctor Strangeloves, if we don't stop them, will terminate life as we know it on the planet.
The ruling class divides the world into worthy and unworthy victims. Those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of Modern Warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed or ignored. The terror we in our allies carry out against Iraqi, Palestinians, Syrian, Libyans, Somalian and Yemeni civilians is part of the regrettable cost of war.
We —echoing the empty promises from Moscow— claim we do not target civilians. Rulers always paint their militaries as humane there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable. This lie can only be sustained among those who are unfamiliar with the explosive ordinance and large kill zones of missiles, iron fragmentation bombs, mortar artillery, tank shells, and belt-fed machine guns. This bifurcation into worthy and unworthy victims, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky pointed out in Manufacturing Consent, is a key component of propaganda, especially in war. The Russian-speaking population in Ukraine, to Moscow, are worthy victims. Russia is their savior. The 7.6 million refugees and the millions more Ukrainian families cowering in basements, car parks and subway stations are unworthy “Nazis”.
Worthy victims allow citizens to see themselves as empathetic, compassionate, and just. Worthy victims are an effective tool to demonize the aggressor. They are used to obliterate nuance and ambiguity. Mention the provocations carried out by the Western Alliance, with the expansion of NATO and the missile batteries in Eastern Europe, the U.S involvement in the 2014 ouster of Yanukovych, which led to the civil war in the East of Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukraine's Army, a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and you are dismissed as a Putin apologist. It is to taint the sainthood of the worthy victims and, by extension, ourselves.
We are good. They are evil. Worthy victims are used not only to express sanctimonious outrage, but to stoke self-adulation and a poisonous nationalism. The cause becomes sacred: a religious crusade. Fact-based evidence is abandoned, as it was during the cause to invade Iraq. Charlatans, liars, con artists, fake defectors, and opportunists become experts used to fuel the conflict.
Celebrities, who like the powerful carefully orchestrate their public image, pour out their hearts to worthy victims. Hollywood stars, such as George Clooney, made trips to Darfur to denounce the war crimes being committed by Khartoum. At the same time, the U.S was daily killing scores of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war in Iraq was as savage as the slaughter in Darfur, but to express outrage what was happening to unworthy victims was to become branded as the enemy.
Saddam Hussein's attacks on the Kurds, considered worthy victims, saw an international outcry, while Israeli attacks on the Palestinians, subjected to relentless bombing campaigns by the Israeli Air Force, and its artillery, and tank units, with hundreds of dead and wounded, was at best an afterthought. At the height of Stalin's purges in the 1930s, worthy victims were the Republicans battling the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Soviet citizens were mobilized to send aid and assistance. Unworthy victims were the millions of people Stalin executed, sometimes after tawdry, show trials, and sent to the gulags.
While I was reporting from El Salvador in 1984, a Catholic priest [Jerzy Popiełuszko] was murdered by the communist regime in Poland. His death was used to excoriate the Polish communist government, a stark contrast to the response of the Reagan Administration to the rape and murder of four Catholic missionaries in 1980 in El Salvador by the Salvadoran National Guard. Reagan, the Reagan Administration, sought to blame the three nuns and lay worker for their own deaths. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's ambassador to the U.N., said, “The nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists.” Secretary of State Alexander Haig speculated that “perhaps they ran a roadblock.” [Cited in Raymond Bonner, “The Diplomat and the Killer,” The Atlantic, February 11, 2016]
For the Reagan Administration, the murdered Church women were unworthy victims. The right-wing government in El Salvador, armed and backed by the United States, joked at the time: “Haz Patria, mata un cura” (“Be a patriot: kill a priest”). Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated in March of 1980. Nine years later, the Salvadoran death squads would gun down six Jesuits and two others at their residence on the campus of Central American University, in San Salvador. Between 1977 and 1989, death squads and Salvadoran soldiers killed 13 priests.
It is not that worthy victims do not suffer, nor that they are not deserving of our support and compassion. It is that worthy victims alone are rendered human, people like us, and unworthy victims are not. It helps, of course, when, as in Ukraine, they are white. But the missionaries murdered in El Salvador were also white and American, and yet it was not enough to shake U.S support for the country's military regime.
“The mass media never explain why Andreas Sakharov is worthy and José Luis Massera —he was a brilliant Uruguayan, a mathematician who was imprisoned— is unworthy,” [Herman and Chomsky write. They continue:]
The attention and general dichotomization occur “naturally” as a result of the working of the filters, but the result is the same as if a commissar had instructed the media: “Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.” Reports of the abuses of worthy victims not only passed through the filters, but they may also become the basis of sustained propaganda campaigns. If the government or corporate community and the media feel that a story is useful, as well as dramatic, they focus on it, intensively, and use it to enlighten the public.
This was true, for example, of the shooting down by the Soviets of the Korean Air Lines KAL007 in early September 1983 —269 passengers and crew were killed—[, which permitted] an extended campaign of denigration of an official enemy and greatly advanced Reagan administration's arms plans. As Bernard Gwertzman noted complacently in the New York Times of August 31st, 1984, U.S. officials “assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow.” In sharp contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in February 1973 —108 civilians were killed— led to no outcry in the West: no denunciations of “cold-blooded murder,” no boycott.
This difference in treatment was explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility in a 1973 editorial: “No useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai Peninsula last week.” There was a very “useful purpose” served by focusing on the Soviet act, and a massive propaganda campaign ensued. [Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 32.]
It is impossible to hold those responsible for war crimes accountable if worthy victims are deserving of justice and unworthy victims are not. If Russia should be crippled with sanctions for invading Ukraine, which I believe it should, the United States should have been crippled with sanctions for invading Iraq, a war launched on lies and fabrications.
Imagine if America's largest banks —J.P Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo— were, like Russian banks, cut off from the international banking system.
Imagine if our oligarchs —Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon [JPMorgan Chase CEO], Bill Gates, Elon Musk… they are certainly as venal as Russian oligarchs— had their assets frozen, and estates and luxury yachts seized. Bezos's yacht, by the way, is the largest in the world, it cost 500 million dollars, and it is 57 feet longer than a football field.
Imagine if leading political figures, such as George W Bush and Dick Cheney, along with oligarchs, were suspended, were blocked from traveling under visa restrictions. Imagine if the world's biggest shipping line suspended shipments to and from the United States.
Imagine if the U.S international media news outlets were forced off the air.
Imagine if we were blocked from purchasing spare parts for our commercial airliners, and our airliners were banned from European airspace.
Imagine if our athletes were barred from hosting or participating in international sporting events.
Imagine if our symphony conductors and opera stars were forbidden from performing, unless they denounced the Iraq War and, in a kind of perverted loyalty oath, condemned George W. Bush.
The rank hypocrisy is stunning. Some of the same officials that orchestrated the invasion of Iraq, who under international law are war criminals for carrying out a preemptive war, are chastising Russia for its violation of international law.
The U.S bombing campaign of Iraqi Urban centers, called “Shock and Awe,” saw the dropping of 3,000 bombs on civilian areas that killed over 7,000 non-combatants in the first two months of the war —even Russia has yet to go this far.
“I have argued that when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime”, a Fox News host [Harris Faulkner, 28.02.2022] said (with a straight face) to Condoleezza Rice, who served as Bush's National Security adviser during the Iraq War.
“Well, it is certainly against every principle of international law and international order, and that is why throwing the book at them now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is also part of it.” Rice said, “And I think the world is there. Certainly, NATO is there. He's managed to unite NATO in ways I didn't think I would ever see after the end of the Cold War.”
Rice inadvertently made a case for why she should be put on trial with the rest of Bush's enablers. She famously justified the invasion of Iraq by stating, quote, “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
Her rationale [for preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal war of aggression,] is no different than that peddled by the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who says the Russian invasion is being carried out to prevent Ukraine from obtaining nuclear weapons.
What Russia is doing militarily in Ukraine, at least up till now, was more than matched by our own savagery in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Vietnam. This is an inconvenient fact the press, a wash and moral posturing, will not address.
No one has mastered the art of techno war and wholesale slaughter like the U.S.
military. When atrocities leak out, such as the My Lai massacre [16.03.1968] of [more than five hundred unarmed] Vietnamese civilians or the [torture of] prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the press does its duty, by branding them ‘aberrations’. The truth is that these killings and abuse are deliberate. They are orchestrated at the senior levels of the military. Infantry units, assisted by long-range artillery, fighter jets, heavy bombers, missiles, drones and helicopters, level vast swaths of “enemy” territory, killing most of the inhabitants. The U.S. military, during the invasion of Iraq from Kuwait, created a six-mile-wide free-fire zone that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqis. The indiscriminate killing ignited the Iraqi insurgency.
When I entered Southern Iraq in the first Gulf War, it was flattened. Villages and towns were smoldering ruins. Bodies [of the dead], including women and children, lay scattered on the ground. Water purification systems had been bombed. Power stations had been destroyed. Schools and hospitals had been flattened. Bridges had been obliterated.
The United States military always wages war by “overkill”, which is why it dropped the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs on Vietnam, most actually falling on the south, where our purported Vietnamese allies resided. It unloaded in Vietnam more than 70 million tons of herbicidal agents, three million white phosphorus rockets —white phosphorus will burn its way entirely through a body— and an estimated 400,000
tons of jellied incendiary napalm. [Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 79.]
“35 percent of the victims,” Nick Turse writes of the war [in Vietnam], “died within 15 to 20 minutes. “Death from the skies, like death on the ground, was often unleashed capriciously. “It was not out of the ordinary for US troops in Vietnam to blast a whole village or bombard a wide area in an effort to kill a single sniper.” [Ibid., 91.]
Vietnamese villagers, including women, children, and the elderly, were often herded into tiny barbed-wire enclosures known as “cow cages”. They were subjected to electric shocks, gang-raped, and tortured by being hung upside down and beaten —a practice euphemistically called “the plane ride”— until unconscious. Fingernails were ripped out. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives. They were beaten senseless with baseball bats and waterboarded. Targeted assassinations, orchestrated by CIA death squads, were ubiquitous.
Wholesale destruction, including of human beings, to the U.S military, perhaps any military, is orgiastic. The ability to unleash sheets of automatic rifle fire, hundreds of rounds of belt-fed machine gun fire, 90-millimeter tank rounds, endless grenades, mortars, and artillery shells on a village, sometimes supplemented by gigantic 2,700-pound explosive projectiles fired from battleships along the coast, was a perverted form of entertainment in Vietnam, as it became later in the Middle East. U.S. troops litter the countryside with claymore mines. Canisters of napalm, daisy-cutter bombs, anti-personnel rockets, high-explosive rockets, incendiary rockets, cluster bombs, high-explosive shells, and iron fragmentation bombs —including the 40,000-pound bomb loads dropped by the giant B-52 Stratofortress bombers— along with chemical defoliants and chemical gases dropped from the sky: these are our calling cards. Vast areas are designated free-fire zones (a term later changed to the more neutral-sounding “specified Strike Zone”), where everyone, in these zones, is considered an enemy, even the elderly, women, and children.
Soldiers and Marines who attempt to report war crimes risk their lives. On September 12, 1969, Nick Turse writes in his book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, George Chunko sent a letter to his parents explaining how his unit had entered a home that had a young Vietnamese woman, four young children, an elderly man, and a military-age male inside. It appeared the younger man was AWOL from the South Vietnamese army. The young man was stripped naked and tied to a tree. His wife fell to her knees and begged the soldiers for mercy. The prisoner, Chunko wrote, was “ridiculed, slapped around and [had] mud rubbed into his face.” [Ibid., 224-225] He was then executed.
A day after he wrote the letter, Chunko was killed. Chunko's parents, Turse writes, “suspected that their son had been murdered to cover up the crime.” [Ibid., 226]
I carry within me death. The smell of decayed and bloated corpses. The cries of the wounded. The shrieks of children. The sound of gunfire. The deafening blast. The fear. The stench of cordite. The humiliation that comes when you surrender to terror and beg for life. The loss of comrades and friends. And then, the aftermath. The long alienation. The numbness. The nightmares. The lack of sleep. The inability to connect to all living things, even to those we love the most. The regret. The repugnant lies mouth around us about honor and heroism and glory. The absurdity. The waste. The futility.
It is only the broken and the maimed that no war. And we ask for forgiveness. We seek redemption. We carry on our backs this awful cross of death, for the essence of war is death, and the weight of it digs into our shoulders and eats away at our souls. We drag it through life, up hills and down hills, along the roads, into the most intimate recesses of our lives. It never leaves us. Those who know us best know that there is something unspeakable and evil many of us harbor within us. This evil is intimate. It is personal. We do not speak its name. It is the evil of things done and things left undone. It is the evil of war, is captured in the long vacant stairs, in the silences, in the trembling fingers, in the memories most of us get buried deep within us, in the tears.
It is impossible to portray war. Narratives, even anti-war narratives, make the irrational rational. They make the incomprehensible comprehensible. They make the illogical logical. They make the despicable beautiful. All words and images, all discussions, all films, all evocations of war, good or bad, are an obscenity. There is nothing to say. There are only the scars and wounds that we carry within us. Those we cannot articulate. The horror. The horror.
I wander through life with this deadness of war within me. There is no escape. There is no peace. All of us who have been to war know an awful truth. Ghosts. Strangers in a strange land.
Who are our brothers and sisters? Who is our family? Whom have we become?
We have become those whom we once despised and killed. We have become the enemy. Our mother is the mother grieving over her murdered child, and we murdered this child, in a mud-walled village of Afghanistan, in a sand filled cemetery in Fallujah or Mariupol. Our father is the father lying on a pallet in a hut, paralyzed by the blast from an iron fragmentation bomb. Our sister lives in poverty in a refugee camp outside Kabul, widowed, desperately poor, raising her children alone. Our brother, yes, our brother, is the Taliban, the Iraqi insurgent, Al-Qaida and Russian soldiers. And he has an automatic rifle. And he kills. And he is becoming us. War is always the same plague. It imparts the same deadly virus. It teaches us to deny another's humanity, worth, being, and to kill or be killed.
There are days I wish I was whole. I wish I could put down this cross. I envy those who, in their innocence, believe in the innate goodness of America and the righteousness of war, and celebrate what we know is despicable. Sometimes it makes me wish for death, for the peace of it. But I know the awful truth, as James Baldwin wrote, that “people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” And I would rather be maimed and broken and in pain than a monster.
I will never be healed. I cannot promise that it will be better. I cannot impart to you the cheerful and childish optimism that is the curse of America. I can only tell you to stand up, to pick up your cross, to keep moving. I can only tell you that you must always defy the forces that eat away at you, at the nation — this plague of war.
Sometimes, I feel like a motherless child a long ways from home, a long ways from home. It is death I defy, not my own death, but the vast enterprise of death. The dark primeval lusts for power and personal wealth, the hyper masculine language of war and patriotism used to justify the slaughter of the weak and the innocent, and to mock justice... I do not use these words of war.
We cannot flee from evil. Some of us who have been to war have tried through drink and drugs and self-destructiveness. Evil is always with us. It is because we know evil, our own evil, that we do not let go, do not surrender. It is because we know violence that we are non-violent. And we know that it is not about us; war taught us that. It is about the other, lying by the side of the road. It is about reaching down in defiance of creeds and oaths, in defiance of religion and nationality, and lifting our enemy up. All acts of healing and love — and the defiance of war is an affirmation of love — allow us to shout out to the vast powers of the universe that, however broken we are, we are not yet helpless, however much we despair we are not yet without hope, however weak we feel, we will always, always, always resist. [And it is in this act of resistance that we find our salvation.]
Thank you.
[Applaudissements]
