Dear Friend and Reader:
IF NUCLEAR WAR BREAKS OUT, at least I’ll have enough preserved garlic in olive oil to last for a while. And I probably have a three-year supply of fermented habañeros. That’s what I am thinking, here on the edge of a solar eclipse in Libra.
But I wonder why.
I wonder why every time something happens, as in some kind of “news event,” the world gets worse. I don’t mean in my personal life, or in yours. It’s possible to improve one’s own lot in life, to a real degree, if you’re determined and you remove obstacles and you stick to it and are somewhat lucky, and all that.
This does not work for everyone, however. Those of us with good lives, or pretty good ones, need to remember: there is a big “other half.” Many places, they burn plastic to cook food and stay warm.
I mean the world itself. Global and national problems that existed when I was a child are no better today, and most are far worse: a world constantly at war, people enslaved by and dying from narcotics, the pandemic of cancer and chronic illness, six billion prescriptions a year sold in the United States (up from 4 billion when I checked a few years ago, and nobody any healthier for it). Then there’s the trafficked, abused and neglected children, failing relationships, lonely people, hungry people, environmental degradation, greed as the motivation for most actions, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer and everyone in between squeezed.
Where exactly is the progress? I thought that’s what our civilization was all about.
The Doomsday Clock
I was worried about nuclear war when I was a young adult. Reading The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell was life-changing for me. That’s the book with the first chapter titled “A Republic of Insects and Grass,” describing who would be most likely to survive a nuclear holocaust.
The Cold War is now behind us. But somehow the Doomsday Clock stands at 90 seconds to midnight — indicating a time of unprecedented danger. Due to recent events in West Asia — this latest outbreak of conflict between Israel, Hamas and allegedly Iran — I think this is reflective of reality.
In 2012, the Doomsday Clock stood at five minutes to midnight. In 2002, after the 9/11 incident, the clock stood at seven minutes to midnight. In 1991 at the end of the Cold War, it was 17 minutes to midnight — the furthest it’s ever been.
This essay is not intended as a complaint. I am here to ask a question. Why? Why does nothing get better? For all of us, collectively?
Please check me: what exactly is better today than it was 50 years ago — besides technology that is, itself, responsible for most of the new problems? This iMac I’m typing on is beyond amazing. I love that I can go into Loews and have the choice of 10 kinds of epoxy. Those things do not make the world a better place.
Rhetoric from the Top
The talk by public and corporate officials is all about improvement — the rhetoric from the top, especially at election time. Then there are the big nonprofits and NGOs running untold billions through their bank accounts, while poverty mounts and the oceans fill up with plastic. We’re all gonna do our part and the world will be fantastic. I am waiting for anything — literally, anything in the world — to improve and stay that way for a while.
Anything except technology. That is the hypnotic substance that keeps us in a trance, presenting the illusion that something at least is getting better. All the functionality of all the apps on my iPhone would have fit into a modest-sized building in 1980 (darkroom, movie editing, recording studio, post office, etc). That has made my life quite a bit better for me (as a media producer) but it has not made the world better.
Much technology has made the world worse, including the internet turning the planet into a psych ward having a collective hallucination.
The claimed mRNA “vaccine” advance that is said to have saved lives and won the Nobel Prize has also been associated with the most vaccine injuries and deaths in history — more than the past three decades combined (since when data collection began, in 1990). Why does anyone think that’s better, unless are told it is so, over and over?
Please, name some actual improvements. Are we happier? More relaxed? More social? Are there more forests? Do we have more free time? Are our communities friendlier? Are schools more conducive to learning? Why are many of them now armed fortresses, where kids must be run through active shooter drills? Have we surpassed the Beatles, The Rolling Stones or Talking Heads?
I think it’s strange that this “lack of improvement” issue is not a topic of discussion. But then not much is these days.
About Last Week’s Digital Drill
This past Wednesday, Oct. 4, Russia, Colombia and the United States tested their national digital alert systems. I was not kidding with my references to a false-flag alien invasion (look for some version of that around 2025; that will be a perfect match for the nascent United States of California).
Besides incoming nuclear missiles, that was the only reason I could think of to have a system that tells all Americans the same thing at the same time. All emergencies, including meltdowns of commercial nuclear reactors, are local or regional.
That leaves two possibilities: an alien invasion, and inbound nuclear missiles.
If you recall, I have been describing the problem of drills matching up with reality; how when a drill happens, it seems something related to the drill manifests in real life. Just 72 hours after the national alert drill, the world finds itself in yet another situation that could lead to nuclear war: the claim of a massive attack by Hammas on Israel.
Besides all of the immediate grief and agony, Iran is being implicated. And the Western powers have wanted to “Bomb Iran, bomb bomb Iran” (sung to the tune of the Beach Boys song) for a long time. We all know they “have it coming” (but I’m not sure why). A friend, older and in some ways wiser than I, wrote casually on my Facebook page, “Yes there will be a nuclear attack on Iran.”
Picking Sides Again
This is the second major military conflict to “break out” in two years; the Russia-Ukraine war is in day 596 as of Thursday. That conflict was ramped up in February 2022. That, too, is a proxy war between the United States and NATO with the potential to escalate into a nuclear conflict.
With that development, it only took about five minutes for Ukrainian flags to appear across the countryside (and I do mean on State Rt. 32 et al). That was it — poof, everyone was pro-Ukrainian. This week we woke up and everyone had to be pro-Israeli. We are greeted to visions of death and devastation on every news channel and social media feed.
As far as I am concerned, there is only one side to be on: that of the innocent people getting bombed on both seeming sides of this disaster.
Most people think that these things just happen. If there is planning, that’s said to be a conspiracy, and therefore, theoretical. We’ve all been alive long enough to figure out that just about everything is planned. Nothing just happens.
I have some ideas about some of that planning, which I will offer at the top of the new Planet Waves FM Friday night.
My final thoughts about the Libra solar eclipse are in the STARCAST above.
Thanks for tuning in — good to be with you.
With love,
As the son of a Jewish mother and grandfather who had to flee Vienna in 1938 when Hitler annexed Austria, I wish to record my disgust at the biased and one-sided coverage in all the capitalist media of the recent events in Gaza and totally ignoring the factual history of the past 80 years since the criminal establishment of Israel. See attached article from wsws.org which sets the record straight.
“Blame for these tragedies must be assigned where it belongs: In the first instance to the criminal Israeli apartheid regime and its US backers, together with the whole reactionary Zionist project of establishing an exclusivist Jewish state by expelling Palestinians and confining them to a constantly shrinking set of open-air prisons and ghettos.”
Who is responsible for the violence in Israel and Gaza?
Tom Carter@CarterWSWS
The governments and media of all the imperialist countries have been mobilized for a massive propaganda operation to poison public opinion about the ongoing popular uprising against the Israeli occupation in Gaza and to justify the retaliatory decimation of Palestinians being prepared by Israel’s far-right regime.
The tone was set by US President Joe Biden, who declared Saturday following a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that his “support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering,” condemning the “appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza.” This was followed by what amounted to a roll call of the entire cast of characters that constitute the American political establishment, who lined up over the weekend to make appearances and issue statements denouncing “terrorists” and the “attack on Israel,” while expressing their “horror” and “outrage” at reports of deaths among Israeli civilians.
Similar scenes played out in all the imperialist capitals, with Israel’s national flag being projected onto public monuments. Any equivocation or wavering from this line was swiftly labelled as “antisemitism” or tantamount to “supporting terrorism.”
There is no denying that, particularly in the opening hours of the breakout from Gaza, there have been significant casualties among Israeli civilians, many of whom doubtless bore no individual responsibility for the oppression of Palestinians. There is an element of tragedy in the fates of many such people, who simply found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fighters from Gaza, hardened by a lifetime of atrocities under Israeli occupation and accepting that they would not return to Gaza alive, exacted their revenge on the first Israelis they found, including those who had staged a dance party on the outskirts of what amounts to a concentration camp.
But the question must be posed: Who bears ultimate responsibility for their deaths? Blame for these tragedies must be assigned where it belongs: In the first instance to the criminal Israeli apartheid regime and its US backers, together with the whole reactionary Zionist project of establishing an exclusivist Jewish state by expelling Palestinians and confining them to a constantly shrinking set of open-air prisons and ghettos.
The unanimous denunciations of the “terrorism” and “violence” of the uprising by the imperialist powers are hypocritical in the extreme. No official expressions of “horror” and “outrage” on a remotely similar scale have ever been made on behalf of the far more numerous victims of violence and terror among the Palestinians.
While Biden’s speechwriters offered his “prayers” Saturday for “all of the families who have been hurt by this violence,” Biden is a war criminal himself and no stranger to violence. In 2003, he voted in the Senate for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, which resulted in over a million deaths.
Contrary to the upside-down official picture of events, according to which the Palestinians are the aggressors and the state of Israel is the victim, the oppression of the Palestinian masses by imperialism is an entirely one-sided conflict, in which for three-quarters of a century the Israeli government—armed to the teeth by the imperialist powers—has brutally put down all resistance. In the three-week 2008–09 aerial bombardment of Gaza, for example, which killed hundreds of people, Palestinian casualties exceeded Israeli casualties by a ratio of 100 to 1.
Palestinians in the West Bank have been reduced to living in hundreds of separate ghettos surrounded by hundreds more Israeli military checkpoints, while Gaza itself has been transformed into one giant open-air prison: the Gaza Strip, only a handful of miles wide and 25 miles long. At the mercy of the Israeli government for every necessity, more than 2 million Palestinians are confined in this open-air prison in some of the most densely populated and desperate conditions on earth. In this context, the uprising in Gaza that broke out over the weekend is more akin to a prison break than an “attack” and only the latest chapter in a long saga.
As the imperialist capitals resound with hypocritical denunciations of “violence” and “terrorism,” a retaliatory onslaught to terrorize the population of Gaza is already unfolding.
Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has declared “a complete siege on Gaza,” using language that fully exposes the character of his regime and its underlying ideology. “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed,” Gallant said. “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
Former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, a candidate for the Republican presidential primary nomination, declared that the uprising was “not just an attack on Israel” but “an attack on America,” directly demanding that Netanyahu “finish them.” Netanyahu, for his part, declared ominously yesterday, “What we will do to our enemies in the next few days will echo for generations.”
Behind all this ferocious imperialist hypocrisy is the fundamental class attitude of the oppressors to any resistance by the oppressed, whether it is in Gaza or anywhere else. “We, the oppressors, are free to use force whenever we decide that it serves our interests,” they say. “We can bomb you indiscriminately, we can blockade and starve you, we can rob you and imprison you and kneel on your necks. But force is our monopoly and our sole prerogative. You, the oppressed, are not under any circumstances permitted to use force in response.” It is this class attitude that animates the repeated use of the word “terrorist” to describe anyone who takes up arms against the occupation.
Underscoring the degree of hypocrisy involved, it is worth pointing out that in a New York Times article in August of last year, “Behind Enemy Lines, Ukrainians Tell Russians ‘You Are Never Safe,’” correspondent Andrew Kramer celebrated the work of Ukrainian terror squads carrying out assassinations with car bombs behind Russian lines: “They sneak down darkened alleys to set explosives. They identify Russian targets for Ukrainian artillery and long-range rockets provided by the United States. They blow up rail lines and assassinate officials they consider collaborators with the Russians.” Such methods are permissible to proxies of American imperialism, just not to those resisting its proxies.
In 1831, a slave uprising led by Nat Turner took place in Southampton County, Virginia. The escaped slaves used knives, hatchets and clubs to massacre dozens of white men, women and children. The rebellion was put down with even more extreme savagery, with roving militias and mobs murdering black people on sight regardless of whether they were involved in the rebellion. Turner’s body was flayed and his skin was turned into souvenir purses.
Any objective historian, with the benefit of hindsight, would place the blame for the terrific violence of such uprisings, not on the slaves, but on the slave system itself, with all its colossal inhumanity. To denounce the Turner uprising on the grounds that it was “violent” would be hypocritical and ahistorical and would amount to an indirect apology for slavery.
“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains,” Leon Trotsky wrote in 1938, are not “equals before a court of morality!”
For his part, in his second inaugural address in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln expressed the idea that the tremendous violence with which the country was afflicted was the inevitable historical reckoning for the institution of slavery, which required that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
By the same token, the repression now being carried out by the Israeli government against the population of Gaza is not fundamentally different from that used by Britain against the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, by France in the Algerian War of Independence, against South Africans struggling against the apartheid regime, or for that matter by the US military against the popular resistance to its occupation of Iraq. As always the political elites among the oppressors denounce armed resistance as terrorism and then proceed to carry out merciless retribution a thousand times more destructive.
In one rare deviation from the propaganda deluge, Palestinian National Initiative leader Mustafa Barghouti was interviewed by Fareed Zakaria on CNN yesterday, in which he was permitted to make the point that armed resistance is the inevitable result of the refusal of the government of Israel to recognize any other form of opposition by Palestinians as legitimate: “If we struggle in a military form, we are terrorists. If we struggle in a non-violent way, we are described as violent. If we even resist with words, we are described as provocateurs.”
Indeed, in 2018–19, there were mass protests in Gaza under the banner of the Great March of Return, demanding the right to return to the homes from which Palestinians were driven during the 1948–49 and 1967 wars. The Israeli military responded to these protests by gunning down Palestinian protesters as they approached the walls and fences that enclose them within the Gaza Strip. At least 223 Palestinians were killed, over 9,200 were injured, and hardly any of those personalities now preaching morality to the Palestinians batted an eyelash.
There is, in fact, deep opposition in the working class within Israel itself to the criminal Netanyahu regime, which will be seen as the principal instigator of this new bloody eruption of violence. This opposition has already been expressed in mass protests and a general strike earlier this year in opposition to the regime’s efforts to grant itself unchallengeable and legally unreviewable powers.
But the violent form taken by the uprising in Gaza is not unrelated to the absence of a genuine and principled left-wing and socialist leadership within Israel itself. In the mass protests earlier this year, the self-proclaimed leaders remained defenders of the Zionist state and scrupulously avoided any turn towards the struggles of the Palestinian masses, who would have been natural allies.
The massive propaganda campaign now underway to browbeat the population into accepting the official line reflects a fear that hundreds of millions of people around the world will not be inclined to accept that line, including within the US and Israel itself. Spontaneous demonstrations in support of the Palestinian uprising have already taken place around the world.
However great may be the challenges and obstacles to implementing this strategy, the only path to a peaceful future and the only way to settle accounts with the Zionist regime is through the unity of Israeli and Palestinian workers, who together must oppose the bloody onslaught against Gaza, bring down Netanyahu’s regime and join together in the struggle for a unified socialist society.