Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 2

The People's Champion - Howard Zinn

"Go to school, but don't become an educated dummy." 

-----Eddie Zinn to son Howard when he was a boy. (Duberman, 187) 

 

Labor Day is a good time to pay tribute to the late Howard Zinn, a rebel historian who broke with the tedious orthodoxy of "patriotic" history to tell the tale of those consigned to the bottom of the social pyramid: Indians, slaves, factory workers, indentured servants, sharecroppers, farmers, immigrants, political prisoners, soldiers, socialists, pacifists and other anti-war protesters. His most famous work, "A People's History of the United States," has by now surpassed four million in sales, an unheard of success record for a history book. 

Raised in grinding poverty, Howardgrew up resenting smug media commentators, politicians, and corporateexecutives who talked of how in Americariches were the inevitable reward of hard work. No matter how well this lie wastold, it implied with insulting clarity that people who had not become rich could only blamethemselves for lack of effort. Howard knew better from personal experience,that hard labor was the leastrewarded, and certainly no ticket out of poverty. (Moving Train, p. 165) His fathercarried trays of food at weddings and restaurants for decades until a suddenheart attack ended his life at 67. He frequently had to borrow to make the rent and never had the means to retire. (Moving Train, p.166)

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Unlike the vast majority of professors, Zinn was more comfortable on a picket line than in most academic settings, where the urgency of class conflict was easily ignored or dismissed, though not by Zinn. 

A revealing anecdote captures the spirit of Howard's life better than any ponderous essay could even hope to. The year was 1970 and professor Zinn was due to appear in court in Boston for an act of protest he had engaged in. Zinn chose to ignore his court obligation and participate in a Baltimore debate entitled, "The Problem of Disobedience," which he had been invited to do. During the debate Zinn argued that the problem wasn't disobedience, but obedience: "Our problem is the number of people across the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their governments and have gone to war, and millions have died from that obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and famine and stupidity and war and cruelty. That is our problem." When he returned to Boston, two police detectives arrested him outside his classroom for his failure to appear. (La Jornada, 8/29/22)

This anecdote reveals that for Zinn, history was more about what we do than what we think, a conviction that led him to the conclusion that change comes when masses of people realize this and mobilize to solve their grievances directly. Elections and politicians don't produce change, they react to it.

So during the early days of Obama-mania a skeptical Zinn sounded a discordant note, warning that Obama would not implement change unless surrounded by a sufficiently powerful and persistent social movement forcing him to. "Our time and energy should be dedicated to educating, agitating, and organizing our fellow citizens at the workplace, in the streets, and at school," Zinn said, pointing out that the great changes in the time of Lincoln, FDR, and the 1960s came about precisely because the American people rose up and took such responsibilities seriously in those years.

Zinn regularly said that history is made up of fortuitous surprises that can only be detected in retrospect. He liked to point out that when his colleagues yearning for change used to lament the apparent lack of prospects for it in the 1950s due to the failure of Americans to mobilize, just in those moments small and isolated acts of rebellion and disobedience in the U.S. South occurred, eventually exploding into the Civil Rights Movement. 

Progress, Zinn felt, comes not as a gift handed downfrom above, but from resistance, popular education, and organizing: strikes, boycotts, soldiers refusing to fight, multitudes renouncing injustice and war. 

Howard was never afraid to court controversy. In an interview with David Barsamian he noted that long before the Nazis there was a European holocaust in the Americas, that "perhaps 50 million indigenous people or more died as a result of enslavement, overwork, direct execution and disease. A much higher toll even than the genocide of Hitler." (Future of History, p. 19)

Given his commitment to social change, Howard could not be satisfied with transmission of knowledge as a measure of his teaching success. "I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it," he said. (Moving Train, p. 183)

He rejected academic neutrality as a false standard. He believed in being as scrupulous as possible in adducing the facts, but did not feel objectivity was actually attainable. This was clearly a recipe for trouble, but submission to injustice was everywhere a permanent disaster.

Economic security for its own sake never interested Howard, who lived by the maxim that "risking your job is a price you pay if you want to be a free person." (Moving Train, p. 184)

Daniel Ellsberg called Zinn "my hero," while dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky held him in similarly high esteem: "There are people whose words have been highly influential, and others whose actions have been an inspiration to many. It is a rare achievement to have interwoven both of these strands in one's life, as Howard Zinn has done. His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding history and its crucial meaning for our lives. He has always been on call, everywhere, a marvel to observe. When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be in the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide." (Chomsky quoted in Detmer, p. 530n.)

Chomsky was also impressed by Zinn's remarkable performance on the speaker's platform: "What has always been startling to me . . . is Howard's astonishing ability to speak in exactly the right terms to any audience on any occasion, whether it is a rally at a demonstration, a seminar (maybe quite hostile, at least initially) at an academic policy-oriented graduate institution, an inner-city meeting, whatever. He has a magical ability to strike just the right tone, to get people thinking about matters that are important, to escape from stereotypes and question internalized assumptions, and to grasp the need for engagement, not just talk. With a sense of hopefulness, no matter how grim the objective circumstances. I've never seen anything like it." (Detmer, pps. 527-8n.)

Zinn had no use for history written without a social conscience behind it; or merely as a professional duty, if it was done only to get something published or get a university position, tenure, a promotion, or to earn prestige. He saw the profit system behind such shallow motives, making private gain the key to what gets produced while leaving a lot of valuable things unproduced, and many stupid things produced in great abundance. Most historians just play it safe and cash history in for their personal advantage. Howard refused to do that, a decision that promises to continue enriching Americans' understanding of themselves for generations to come. (Future of History, p. 1)

 

Sources:

Howard Zinn, "The Future of History - Interviews With David Barsamian" (Common Courage, 1999)

Howard Zinn (with David Barsamian), "Original Zinn - Conversations On History and Politics" (Harper, 2006)

Howard Zinn, "The Zinn Reader - Writings On Disobedience and Democracy," (Seven Stories, 1997)

David Detmer, "Zinnophobia - The Battle Over History In Education, Politics, And Scholarship," (Zero Books, 2018)

Howard Zinn, "You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train - A Personal History,"  (Beacon, 2022)

Martin Duberman, "Howard Zinn - A Life on the Left," (New Press, 2012)

Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States," (HarperCollins, 2003) 

"American curios / El historiador rebelde," La Jornada (Spanish), August 29, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Never Again" Culminates in "Again"

Israel's armed forces continue massacring up to one hundred Palestinians a day with no fear of consequences, including recently five journalists at Nasser Hospital in Jan Yunis,* one of the few that remain functioning in the Gaza Strip. 

As usual, the Israeli military quickly offered its hypocritical regrets for damage done to innocent bystanders, and absurdly claimed that it does not target journalists, though in the first nine months of its civilian slaughter in Gaza it killed more of them than in any other conflict in history, and, by now, more than two hundred have perished there.

It's incredible that Israeli apologists can keep a straight face while claiming that such systematic killing legitimately qualifies as mere "collateral damage," to use the revolting language designed to make meticulously planned mass murder seem like a car accident.

Outside a small circle of cynical experts, everyone else paying attention has been able to see for some time now that the U.S. and Israel are carrying out a deliberate and systematic elimination of Palestinians and the journalists who report on them (overwhelmingly Palestinian themselves), as a way of preventing the world from getting an up-close picture of the Gaza extermination campaign.

Killing those dedicated to documenting the worst crime of the 21st century the U.S. and Israel hope to completely erase it from human consciousness and historical memory.  

Fat chance. Especially in their efforts to kill by mass starvation the national security state fanatics have reached a level of sadism that doesn't just drastically restrict the entry of food to Gaza, but murders the hungry people who come to the distribution centers hoping to get a portion of what little gets through. That image is already well etched in our collective memory.

As the United Nations Relief and Works Agency recently pointed out, we are bearing witness to the fact that "never again" has become "over again." In fact, it may very well become "over and over again," as each self-righteous victim group takes its turn as the victimizer.

Reports of the death of affirmative action are greatly exaggerated.

*This was also a "double-tap" attack, which means that Israel killed in two stages - with the initial raid on the hospital, then again when rescue workers arrived to aid the survivors.

Source:

Gaza: "The Unthinkable Over Again," La Jornada (Spanish) August 26, 2025

Israel Bombs and Shoots The Starving, Claims To Be Anti-Famine

The United Nations has officially declared famine in Gaza City, after experts warned that over half a million people find themselves in a "catastrophic" situation. Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the UN, says that the famine doesn't have to do with food per se, but with the deliberate collapsing of the systems necessary for human survival.

The High Commissioner for Human Rights at the UN, Volker Turk, maintains that it is a war crime to use lack of food for military purposes and blames the current famine directly on the Israeli government.

AP reporters say they have seen chaos on access roads to food distribution centers, and almost daily report Israeli troops firing on Palestinians trying to get food. Many have been killed in the process.

Hundreds of Gazans are believed to be dead of starvation.

International Humanitarian Organizations (Save The Children, Plan International, Oxfam, and Action Against Hunger) have condemned the catastrophe, maintaining that children pay the highest price and that the famine's effects will be irreversible for many of them in the Gaza enclave.

The Palestinian National Authority, which governs the occupied West Bank, requests the immediate opening of borders so that aid can enter Gaza, as well as a strong international response to the situation.

Predictably, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu characterizes the UN declaration as an "absolute lie" and deadpans that Israel doesn't have a famine policy, but rather, a famine prevention policy. He also maintains that refuting lies is always more difficult than inventing them, which certainly helps account for his conduct.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz threatens to destroy Gaza City and "open the gates of Hell" within days unless Hamas capitulates to Israel's negotiating terms, warning that should they fail to do so the city will be devastated like Rafah and Beit Hanun have been. 

Dozens of Palestinians continue to be killed in Gaza every day, and while the total Gazan death toll since October 7, 2023 is said to be over 62,000, the real figure is likely to be many times that.

 

 

Sources:

"Famine In Gaza," La Jornada (Spanish), August 23, 2025

"Israeli Attacks In Gaza Continue In The Midst of Famine; 33 Dead," La Jornada (Spanish), August 23, 2025

 

Threats and Delusions Multiply As U.S. Decline Accelerates

At the opening of the South American Defense Conference 2025 in Buenos Aires the commander of the United States Southern Command Alvin Holsey warned that the Chinese Communist Party continues its methodical incursion in the region, looking to export its authoritarian mode of governance, extract resources, and establish dual-use infrastructure, from ports to outer space. The admiral asserted that China's presence and influence has far-reaching consequences in the Southern Cone where vital shipping lanes like the Magellan Straits and Drake Passage function as strategic bottlenecks that could be used by the Chinese Communist Party to project power, disrupt commerce, and defy the sovereignty of Latin American nations and the neutrality of Antarctica. 

At the same time the State Department reiterates that it doesn't recognize the legitimacy of the Venezuelan government and offers twenty-five million dollars for help that leads to the arrest and conviction of the Venezuelan Minister of the Interior Diosdado Cabello Rondón,* who it accuses of promoting a "narcoterrorist conspiracy" between the Cartel of The Suns and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Just a few days ago Washington displayed three destroyers equipped with guided missiles off the coast of Venezuela, allegedly to confront threats emanating from Latin American drug cartels, which White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said was part of President Trump's policy of "using all the resources in his power to stop the entrance of drugs" to the United States.

Rounding out this recent volley of U.S. belligerence, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions against four judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Court whom he characterized as threats to U.S. national security and instruments of judicial war against Washington and its ally Israel. For those keeping score, that now makes eight functionaries of the International Criminal Court that face prosecution by the U.S. for daring to suggest that Israel is guilty of genocide and its prime minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) of crimes against humanity. 

Meanwhile, on the home front, masked agents of the state continue abducting workers guilty of the civil violation of being undocumented as though they were Nazi gangsters, dispatching them to places like "Alligator Alcatraz," where they are subjected to systematic abuse while the Trump administration hawks alligator hats and MAGA enthusiasts take selfies in front of the prison as though it were just another Florida tourist site. This carnival atmosphere helps distract from minor matters like the gutting of Medicaid, more massive tax breaks for the obscenely rich, cuts in food aid to the poor, and rising inflation and bankruptcy. 

In short, what we're seeing is boundless hypocrisy, schizophrenia, Orwellian language, and imperial arrogance, washed down with a staggering dose of Trumpian vulgarity.

The verbal attacks on Beijing for its alleged intention to do everything that the United States has been doing in Latin America for more than a century-and-a-half almost defy belief. Washington accuses China of threatening commerce while it imposes arbitrary tariffs on the entire world. It talks of sovereignty while promoting coups, installing military bases, and imposing economic blockades. It arrogates to itself the unique right to appoint governments, dispatch warships to intimidate others, and offer bribes for the overthrowing of governments that refuse to obey Washington's dictates.  Meanwhile, the very existence of the Southern Command, tasked with "defending" Central and South America and the Caribbean, testifies to the fact that the only risk to regional sovereignty comes from the United States and its local right-wing allies.

Rubio denounces pro-Palestine demonstrators as "crazy," and J.D. Vance says the same about military officials who object to using U.S. soldiers to occupy Washington D.C. 

When madmen rule, sanity is a threat. 

Keep your wits about you.

 

*And $50 million for Nicolas Maduro 

Sources:

"The United States: Insane Government," La Jornada (Spanish) August 21, 2025

"Trump's Alligator Alcatraz ICE Prison Shut Down by Judge," Status Coup (You Tube), August 21, 2025

Ignoring Russian Rights Cannot Bring Peace - Russian Foreign Minister

Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday that a lasting peace in Ukraine will not be possible if Russian interests and the rights of the Russian native population in Ukraine are not taken into account. Lavrov added that any summit between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukranian president Volodymir Zelensky must be preceded by exhaustive preparation beginning with negotiations between experts and going through all the necessary preliminaries before culminating in a summit. Most important will be how to properly deal with the origins of the conflict, especially the expansion of NATO to the East. Lavrov pointed out that at the recent Ukraine conference in Alaska there was discussion of security guarantees for Ukraine and Europe but no mention of protection for Russia. He added that European leaders continue to have an arrogant approach to obligations under international law, making favorable mention of rights on paper that are false in practice.

Lavrov criticized the West for its assumption that Zelensky can and should impose any agreements he feels like on Russia without it occurring to anyone that it might be a good idea to repeal laws that violate the rights of the Russian native population of Ukraine before entering into negotiations.

Source:

"Lasting Peace With Ukraine Only If Russian Interests Are Respected: Lavrov," La Jornada (Spanish), August 20, 2025

Ukraine "Peace" Summit Guarantees More Bloodshed

Donald Trump's summit with European heads of state yesterday ostensibly dedicated to obtaining peace between Russia and Ukraine has only accentuated the gap between a fading superpower and its partners in the NATO alliance, as well as the pathetic role to which Ukranian president Volodomyr Zelensky has been reduced.

 Zelensky; the Secretary General of NATO Mark Rutte; the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen; British prime minister Keir Starmer; the prime minister of Italy Giorgia Meloni; Finland president Alexander Stubb, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, president Emmanuel Macron of France, all by now have learned the lesson of never publicly contradicting Donald Trump while they fall all over themselves offering praise for the Dear Leader and his efforts, in spite of the obvious clash of interests, goals, and strategies that marked the summit from start to finish. 

While Trump reiterated his round rejection of admitting Kiev to NATO and left aside the issue of hardening sanctions against Moscow, Starmer renewed his commitment to an irreversible path for Ukraine to join the military alliance, and, through a spokesperson, repeated the nonsense of deploying British troops in Ukraine, along with other countries forming a "coalition of the willing," to re-use the name originally given to the imperial extras in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, hardly an appropriate reminder for a summit allegedly dedicated to peace.

Zelensky out-did Starmer's lunacy by claiming that Russia can only be forced to concede peace, and that President Trump alone wields the necessary force, a reckless invitation to direct U.S.-Russian conflict that carries a high risk of nuclear annihilation of the human race.

At bottom, Western Europe stubbornly insists on continuing a policy of "everyone against Russia" that emerged during the Crimean War (1853-1856), when London, Paris, and a part of the future Italian state joined together to prevent Moscow from expanding into a power vacuum around the Black Sea due to the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The hostility to Russia created then and exacerbated during the years of the Soviet Union continued after the demise of the Eastern Bloc nations and their military arm the Warsaw Pact, at which point NATO ceased to have any legitimate reason to exist. Nevertheless, instead of dissolving itself in recognition of the disappearance of its ideological and geopolitical enemy, NATO continued to expand eastward, making itself an instrument of shackling Russia with a chain of hostile countries all along its Western flank. From the beginning this was at the initiative of the White House, which sought to widen U.S. hegemony over Europe and guarantee that Moscow would never again be a world power. The permanent hostility against Russia had the unplanned but predictable effect of stirring up Russian nationalism and facilitating the rise to prominence of Vladimir Putin, who halted Western expansionism in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, when a coup d'etat orchestrated by Washington and Brussels installed a client regime whose current leader is Zelensky. 

In an effort to bleed Russia dry, ex-president Joe Biden decided to escalate tensions, to the point of precipitating an essentially civil war between Ukraine and Moscow, using Ukrainian soldiers and civilians as cannon fodder. In spite of the severe damage done to the Russian economy and of the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in 42 months of mutual massacre, the West has not managed to destroy Russia or topple Putin. Meanwhile Trump, who entered his second term promising to end the Ukraine war "in a day," and who seems genuinely reluctant to continue financing a puppet like Zelensky, is nevertheless helping Brussels fight the war "to the last Ukrainian," in spite of the fact that no Ukranians can be found to voluntarily enlist in the military, a fact conceded even by the most NATO-sympathetic media. 

In short, Zelensky, Von der Leyen, Starmer, Merz, Macron and their media lackeys stubbornly continue sacrificing the Ukrainian population in a power game that offers them no prospect of military victory, disguising it as a struggle for liberty and democracy while ignoring Ukraine's immediate helplessness should the White House decide to leave them to their fate. 

 

Source: "Washington: Disappointment For The Hawks," La Jornada, August 19, 2025 (Spanish)

22 Jews More Important Than Tens of Thousands of Palestinians

Almost one hundred thousand people (according to organizers) poured into the streets of Tel Aviv yesterday to demand an end to Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip  and to urge the Netanyahu government to negotiate the return of forty-nine Israeli hostages still said to be in the hands of Hamas, of whom twenty-seven are believed to have already been killed by Israel's indiscriminate bombing attacks on Palestinian territory. An Israeli demonstration of comparable size has not been seen since the early days of Israel's wholesale massacre of Gazans in October 2023, and was provoked by the Netanyahu administration's announced proposal to take total control of Gaza, an initiative that is opposed not just by a broad sector of the Israeli public but also by Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces Eyal Zamir, who warned that a total occupation of Gaza will trap Israeli soldiers in a prolonged conflict, otherwise known as a forever war.

Days before that disastrous plan was announced, 550 ex-leaders of espionage, military affairs, police, and diplomacy, all members of the movement Commanders For Israeli Security, sent a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to pressure Netanyahu to end the military offensive in Gaza. These ex-functionaries, among whom are counted three former directors of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, five ex-leaders of Shin Bet (internal security), and three former chiefs of the Army, agree that everything achievable by force already has been achieved, while insisting that the remaining hostages can only be brought home via negotiated settlement. 

This would seem to be a rational assessment from a group generally committed to ideological insanity, as more than one hundred thousand tons of explosives were dropped on tiny Gaza in the first nineteen months of the current slaughter, the equivalent of seven Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. Nevertheless, Netanyahu insists he has no choice but to "finish the job" and "complete the destruction of Hamas," as more savage destruction is self-evidently the best way to bring about peace. Even the Palestinians are eager for this conclusion, suggests the Israeli prime minister, as he insists they are begging to be liberated from what remains of Hamas.

The announced intention to occupy Gaza City and reinforce colonial subjugation of Palestine is so outrageous that it forced even the most obsequious flatterers of Israeli security policy, up to now unable to credit the evidence of their own eyes that a mass extermination is taking place, to finally draw a line in the sand. German Prime Minster Friedrich Merz, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, all have called for Israel to back away from the reckless folly of fully occupying Gaza.

Incredibly, these politicians, the former heads of Israeli security (read Jewish supremacy), and nearly the whole of Israeli society do not even make passing mention of the thousands of Palestinians daily put at risk of massacre by Israeli soldiers and settlers, or of the five million Palestinians in permanent exile, but rather, confine their objections to the risks ongoing extermination policy poses to the lives of a couple of dozen of Jewish hostages. This moral obtuseness extends across both U.S. and Israeli society, including academia, the mass media, and the wealthy and governing classes. 

Netanyahu brags about the fact that all of the Hamas operatives who planned and carried out the October 7 attacks have long since been killed, depriving Israel of even a pretense of justification for the ongoing massacres of Palestinians who had nothing to do with those attacks. 

But of course it was never about Hamas. It's about making Palestine into a land without a people for a master race of self-chosen people without a land, a goal that long predates Hamas's appearance on the scene.

Sources: 

"Netanyahu: Perpetuating Oppression," La Jornada (Spanish), August 10, 2025

"If We Wanted To, One Afternoon Would Be Enough For Us To Commit Genocide: Netanyahu," La Jornada (Spanish), August 11, 2025

Mass Protest By the Morally Blind

Almost one hundred thousand people (according to organizers) poured into the streets of Tel Aviv yesterday to demand an end to Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip  and to urge the Netanyahu government to negotiate the return of 49 Israeli hostages still said to be in the hands of Hamas, of whom twenty-seven are believed to have already been killed by Israel's indiscriminate bombing attacks on Palestinian territory. An Israeli demonstration of comparable size has not been seen since the early days of Israel's wholesale massacre of Gazans in October 2023, and was provoked by the Netanyahu administration's announced proposal to take total control of Gaza, an initiative that is opposed not just by a broad sector of the Israeli public but also by Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces Eyal Zamir, who warned that a total occupation of Gaza will trap Israeli soldiers in a prolonged conflict, otherwise known as a forever war.

Days before that disastrous plan was announced, 550 ex-leaders of espionage, military affairs, police, and diplomacy, all members of the movement Commanders For Israeli Security, sent a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to pressure Netanyahu to end the military offensive in Gaza. These ex-functionaries, among whom are counted three former directors of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, five ex-leaders of Shin Bet (internal security), and three former chiefs of the Army, agree that everything achievable by force already has been achieved, while insisting that the remaining hostages can only be brought home via negotiated settlement. 

The announced intention to occupy Gaza City and reinforce colonial subjugation of Palestine is so outrageous that it forced even the most obsequious flatterers of Israeli security policy, up to now unable to credit the evidence of their own eyes that a mass extermination is taking place, to finally draw a line in the sand. German Prime Minster Friedrich Merz, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, all have called for Israel to back away from the reckless folly of fully occupying Gaza.

Incredibly, these politicians, the former heads of Israeli security (read Jewish supremacy), and nearly the whole of Israeli society do not even make passing mention of the thousands of Palestinians daily put at risk of massacre by Israeli soldiers and settlers, or of the five million Palestinians in permanent exile, but rather, confine their objections to the risks ongoing extermination policy poses to the lives of a couple of dozen of Jewish hostages. This moral obtuseness extends across both U.S. and Israeli society, including academia, the mass media, and the wealthy and governing classes. 

Netanyahu brags about the fact that all of the Hamas operatives who planned and carried out the October 7 attacks have long since been killed, depriving Israel of even a pretense of justification for the ongoing massacres of Palestinians who had nothing to do with those attacks. 

But of course it was never about Hamas. It's about making Palestine into a land without a people for a self-chosen master race of people without a land, a goal that long predates Hamas's appearance on the scene.

Source:  "Netanyahu: Perpetuating Oppression," La Jornada (Spanish), August 10, 2025

Trump is a problem but Capitalism is THE problem

 

While political, media andother mind managers all but blame the arrogant rich boob currently occupying thesubsidized housing in DC for everything from WW2 to the Korean, Vietnam and Civilwars, global and especially American capitalism has entered a stage of moredanger to life in general than at any previous time in history. The assault onnature and weaponization of markets cannot continue if humanity, let aloneAmerica, is to survive.

 

At the end of the SecondWorld War a republican president warned of the dangers of a military industrialcomplex taking over the country and leading us to ruin. That has come to passand probably in worse ways than Eisenhower or his speechwriter might haveimagined.

 

This nation officially beganwith an invasion and take over of most of a continent, the murder and economic enslavementof most of its population and continued to become a dominant imperial power,especially since the end of the Second World War, which was the period ofEisenhower’s warning. Since then our War Department – commonly called a DefenseDepartment, which is like calling a rape crisis center a Love Department - hasspent trillions of dollars dominating major parts of the globe, all the whilewith its hired influencers selling that as democracy, peace and humanitarianpolitics, the way a mass murderer might claim to be defending its victims.

 

Most Americans are programmedto see foreign efforts to improve the lives of their people as conspiratorialand murderous plots to deny us our freedom to love our pets while hundreds ofthousands of our people have no place to live. And the bloody assault on thesource of our lives, nature itself, continues long past the point of being thejob of marketing and private investment, but that is what has been running theworld since at least the 19th century and now in the 21sthumanity must wrest control from minorities who have ruled for far too long andcreate a real and not rhetorical democracy to turn the world and all peoplefrom a path leading to devastation to one offering salvation for all and notjust some.

 

A tall order to put it mildlyand given the enormity of the problem for humanity and not just one or anothernation or religion or identity group, the need to come together and act ashumans and not simply market consumers obsessed with individualism as foundationfor the social mass murder of warfare becoming more obvious even with idioticword games to cover its brutality with cosmetic language.

 

Thus we have “rules of war”that treat the insane acts of mass murder as normal parts of nature as ordinaryas tides coming in or out and the sun rising and setting. This dates back tothe beginning of minorities ruling majorities with kings, emperors, queens andempresses acting as gods or special chosen people in whose hands wisdom andinsanity were placed lest ordinary people create democracy before the word ifnot the concept existed. Royals at one point sat on hilltops watching armiesslaughtering one another with rules not to hurt anyone who wasn’t chosen tomurder or be murdered. Supposedly great religions were created and rationalizedto carry out these holy wars, but with some revolutionary religious leaderscalling for peace and love among all people and thus echoing our “pre-historic”– before minorities took control –origins in hunter gatherer people whoperformed in democratic and communistic fashion and were eventually replaced byalleged holy royalty for living such silly notions.

 

Now we have supposedly welleducated people with doctorates in mass murder deciding on proper and improperways of blowing brains out and burning to death “the enemy” and all the whileclaiming this murderous filth has a foundation in morality and intelligence andis the only way to solve problems whether real or alleged. Noisy neighbors?Kill them.

Think you were short changedat the market? Blow it up and kill everyone there. Such idiocy makes greatsense to the moral degenerates who preach, plan and have others carry out warsby mostly convincing innocent people that if they don’t murder this enemyselected by formally educated fiends who wear high fashion and perform lowmorality, we’ll all die in our sleep or worse burn in hell which has beenprepared by a god who, um, loves us all.

 

So we have some murdererslabeled war criminals because they don’t slaughter in accepted fashion whileothers are said to be committing genocide, which somehow differs from usualmass murder by threatening everyone instead of just all people. People whoallegedly suffered genocide in world war two are now charged with performinggenocide in Palestine/Israel. In both cases thousands were murdered with themurderers convinced they were/are doing the right thing. When the United Statesdropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed 200,000 people wasthat genocide and a war crime? Of course not. American rulers believe themselvesthe real chosen people of god and so teach their subjects. But when Hamaskilled a thousand Israelis this was genocide to some and a war crime whileretaliatory violence, which slaughtered far far far more, is only genocide tosome folks, self-defense to others. And of course rape is simply an economicform of dating with no dinner or movie and getting right to the sex at noexpense. Such thought degeneracy makes war seem logical and necessary toleadership that might find brain cancer a sign of good health.

 

Among the successful divideand conquer strategies carried out by rulers and their servants is theseparation of majorities into minority identity groups, never so dangerous thanat the present. All men supposedly act out power over women but rules of warspare women and children, making killing them an alleged war crime depending onwho is doing the murdering and this proves that men are superior just by beingmen and thus the only ones to be murdered in “legal” slaughter. Of course. Now humanityhas been further divided into racial, sexual, tribal and psychopathologicalgroups making it necessary to extoll the wonders of some minorities whilecarrying destruction of majorities dangerously further than ever.

 

The system of minority rule capitalhelps perpetuate its domination by setting humans against other humans andthereby preventing majority rule in material reality while singing hosannas toit in dreams, prayers and legends. It thus becomes more important to have, say,trans gay Jews of color in positions of responsibility to rulers than to havecooperating people arranging material reality without regard to skin tones,sexual preferences, religions or ethnicity so as best to assure survival andbetter lives for all.

 

Now insane leadership inIsrael joins with insane leadership in America –they’ve been intimately runningthis nation for quite some time – to threaten war on Iran while our continuouswar on Russia that began in 1917 and stopped only briefly so it could play the majorrole in defeating Nazi Germany which America still claims as its heroic triumph.And of course the suffering of America in that war, with the loss of more than400,000 lives, vastly surpassed that of Russia- then the Soviet Union, whichsuffered a measly 25 million dead.  Anynose picking moron mathematician can clearly see the proof in those numbers.The continuous madness of war conducted as some heroic statement of goodnessforced into murder because of evil others has lasted much too long, gone fartoo far, and must be stopped or all of humanity will suffer as millions haveand continue too, but now victims may number in the billions and involve usall.

 

This will further the alreadyhappening mass murder and possibly bring us under control and force the rest ofthe world, led by China, Russia and Iran and followed by a majority of theworld’s people, to join into united action against a failing empire led byincreasingly lunatic forces which threaten all of humanity and not justAmerica.

 

We need to wake up and smellthe bullshit before we wind up eating-drinking-breathing and otherwiseabsorbing even more than we already have, act like a democracy and not justtalk about it, and transform material reality before we are destroyed by itunder the control of lunatics who think private profits in war are what makeshumanity great. One or another near imbecile in the white house won’t make adifference as long as we treat earth as real estate and humans as consumerpeasants. The same market research surveys that lead us to poling places tovote for lesser evils, if at all, find that overwhelming majorities of peoplesupport radical changes to bring better lives to a majority of humanity butstill, at least in America, tolerate overwhelmingly powerful consciousnesscontrol that teaches subservience, obedience and escapism only affordable to ashrinking population of the affluent while great masses sink further into debtand poverty. This, while capital rapes nature in pursuit of profit, which makeshumanities loss more dangerous every day.

 

America doesn’t just need anew president but a new congress and especially newer parties to replace thecapitalist demublicans and republicrat groups which serve different aspects ofthe private profit meat grinder that guarantees minority wealth and growingmajority danger. The availability of potential communications among people viaelectronic means is presently totally dominated by minority wealth and servesthe interest of private property which is sustained by public loss. Thoseelectronic means are far more available than the electoral marketplace andshould be transformed on the way to creation of real democracy before murderoushypocrisy makes it too late for anything but surrender. Victory for humanity isnecessary and achievable and never so possible and there is no time but thepresent to begin that work.

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The Alien Presence Is Capitalism

"The demonization of the forces of change, agents of alien ideologies, traffickers in cocaine, Marxism, and other drugs, requires the previous flushing out of historical memory. In reality, the alien presence in America is capitalism (emphasis in original), which was not invented by Manco Cápac or Moctezuma, but imposed from outside and above by sixteenth-century invaders from Europe. The Conquest commercialized American life, imposed the so-much-in-exchange-for-so-much, while the Church proffered by divine order the law of profit and the law of fear: if you obey your reward will be in heaven; if you disobey hell will punish you. On the other hand there is no older tradition in America than the communitarian mode of production and way of life (emphasis in original). In addition to being the oldest tradition, the community is also the most persistent and the most obstinately vital, despite having suffered unceasing persecution for the last five centuries. It may well be said, then, that socialism comes from within and from below, from the most authentic and profound depths of the memory of our lands. 

 

"In the same sense, it's worth mentioning that democracy was not a novelty that the barbarous Indians received from the European monarchies or from its civilized Inquisition (emphasis in original). Outside of Cuzco and Tenochtitlán, which were centers of hereditary despotism, the chronicles of the epoch describe revealing anecdotes that took place in a number of places: the Indians asked who elected the king of Spain or the king of England, because they elected their leaders in assemblies - in which women, it should be said, also expressed their opinions and voted."

 

 

-----Eduardo Galeano, "We Say No - Chronicles 1963-1991," pps. 216-17