Against Normalization, Genocide

& the New International Fascism

Shooting Baskets Out of Doors in Mid-December in the Upper Midwest

Three days ago I was walking through Iowa City’s College Green Park and noticed that someone had left a basketball next to the park’s nicely kept basketball hoop. It was 55 degrees out so I took off my jacket and started shooting around.  There was no wind. I got in a nice little groove. 

It was great except for one thing. It was mid-December. You're not supposed to be shooting baskets outside in mid-December in the upper Midwest. You're supposed to be ice-skating out of doors.

I’m old enough to know in my bones as well as from the science how much the climate has changed for the worse as the melting of the poles changes the northern jet streams in ways that make an Iowa December feel like an Iowa October or what a Mississippi December used to feel like.

History as an Antidote to Bad Normalization

One of the reasons to know history (by direct experience and/or study) is to possess understandings not just of what’s old and where current conditions come from in the past but also of what’s new and unprecedented, including developments that should not be accepted as a “new normal.”  For example, it should not be considered normal and therefore unworthy of mass and extreme alarm that one of the United States’ two dominant political parties has become essentially fascist and that the other one of those reigning parties enables, collaborates with, and conciliates the fascist one[1]. It’s a horrifying and new development that calls for mass resistance, however much Christian white nationalist neofascism ala Trump et al is rooted in US-American history deeply understood.

We are in uncharted territory with the climate crisis.  The ever-escalating project of turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas chamber is a lethal experiment for which there is no real precedent. It calls for the radical replacement of our soulless, fossil fuel-addicted capitalist system by revolutionary socialism[2]. If we want to save livable ecology we need to become actual revolutionaries; the old, reformist ways won’t work. And neither will the old communism; a new version, one shorn of production-ism and the futile drive to conquer nature rather than to live in harmony with the broader web of life.

Humanitarian Relief Leaders: “We Have Seen Nothing Like the Siege of Gaza”

Speaking of what’s new, listen to these words from a New York Times Op-Ed published by the leaders of six leading humanitarian disaster charities[3] last week:  

“We are no strangers to human suffering — to conflict, to natural disasters, to some of the world’s largest and gravest catastrophes. We were there when fighting erupted in Khartoum, Sudan. As bombs rained down on Ukraine. When earthquakes leveled southern Turkey and northern Syria. As the Horn of Africa faced its worst drought in years. The list goes on…But as the leaders of some of the world’s largest global humanitarian organizations, we have seen nothing like the siege of Gaza. In the more than two months since the horrifying attack on Israel that killed more than 1,200 people 18,000 Gazans — including more than 7,500 children — have been killed, according to the Gazan health ministry. More children have been reported killed in this conflict than in all major global conflicts combined last year… this humanitarian nightmare [being imposed] on millions of civilians…is not a path to accountability, healing or peace. In no other war we can think of in this century have civilians been so trapped, without any avenue or option to escape to save themselves and their children… The Biden administration must stop its diplomatic interference at the United Nations, blocking calls for a cease-fire….The few areas left in Gaza that are untouched by bombardment are shrinking by the hour, forcing more and more civilians to seek safety that does not exist. Over 80 percent of 2.3 million Gazans are now displaced. The newest Israeli offensive is now forcing them to cluster on a tiny sliver of land….The bombardment is not the only thing brutally cutting lives short. The siege of — and blockades surrounding — Gaza have led to a critical food scarcity, cutoffs of medical supplies and electricity, and a lack of clean water. There is barely any medical care to be found in the enclave and few medications. Surgeons are working by the light of their mobile phones, without anesthetics. They are using dishcloths as bandages. The risk of waves of waterborne and infectious disease will only grow in the increasingly overcrowded living conditions of the displaced … Among leaders in Washington, there is constant talk about preparing for the ‘day after.’ But if this relentless bombardment and siege continue, there will be no ‘day after’ for Gaza. It will be too late. Hundreds of thousands of lives hang in the balance today.”

Like most of my readers and listeners I’m sure, I am chilled to the bone by the stories of what US-backed Israel is doing to the Palestinian people (the West Bank is also under escalated assault). It is unconscionable almost beyond words. The Palestinian body count in the US-Israel  Crucifixion of Gaza (the “Israel-Hamas War”) is certainly by now well over 20,000. Emergency service providers with longtime war and disaster experience report that they've never encountered something this horrific.

“Israel Feels So Free to Annihilate the Palestinian People While the World Watches”

What’s new about this crucifixion? Not genocide and ethnic cleansing.  Not soulless and sadistic, mass-murderous attacks on civilians. Not US backing – funding, equipping, politically protecting – of Israel and other horrific regimes that commit crimes against humanity (the US itself has directly engaged in such attacks again and again across the many decades of the Pax Americana and before, really from its imperial and genocidal origins).  Not Israel murdering Palestinian civilians, who they have been oppressing and repressing with mass terror to enforce racist occupation and apartheid for 75 years.

What feels novel is the brazenness and sheer unambiguous and plain transparency of the genocidal violence, fully available to any US American who takes the time to access relevant mainstream news sources in the belly of the world imperialist beast. It’s all there for almost any American adult or teenager (or grade schooler) who bothers to look.  It’s openly racist genocide and ethnic cleansing, pure and simple mass slaughter. “The fact that Israel feels so free to annihilate the Palestinian people while the world watches,” Peter Dauo has said, “ought to terrify all of us.”[4]

(The flaw in Dauo’s remark is that millions around the world have not just passively “watched” but have in fact risen up against Israel’s actions while 153 nations have voted for a resolution calling for a ceasefire in the United Nations General Assembly.)

You had to look a lot deeper into alternative news sources to learn how gruesome and appalling  the direct US crucifixion of Fallujah and “murder of Iraq” was two decades ago. The same was true of the horrors inflicted on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos during the direct US crucifixion of Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s or the mass murder of tens of thousands of Central American peasants, workers, and intellectuals by US-backed death squads and “Third World fascist” regimes in the 1980s, and the US-approved slaughter of the East Timorese in 1975 and …the list goes on.

Why So Easy to See?

Why is the genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Gazans as widely reported and readily available as it is in the dominant US media?  Maybe there’s a calculation that US-Americans don’t understand that Israel is a US imperialist outpost and pit bull and therefore that it is possible to report Israel’s crimes without fear that doing so will harm the US government’s legitimacy at home. Maybe there’s a reckoning that Israel is so popular while Arabs and Muslims are so unpopular with US Americans that what Israel is doing can be reported without evoking outrage. Maybe the stench of Ziofascist Israel’s racist and repressive practices has simply become too great for some media authorities to tolerate.  Maybe the neofascist and Trump-friendly nature of Israel’s current far-right Prime Minister, “Bibi” Netanyahu – the openly authoritarian and corrupt leader of a party (Likud) and Ziofascist movement seeking to collapse bourgeois-democratic checks and balances within their own  government – helps encourage US imperial-bourgeois-democratic media to let more of the terrible truth out. Maybe the horrors in Gaza are just too great to hide and there’s a sense that the news of what Israel is doing will make it into the public eye no matter what (on the Internet and alternative media) so that the best thing to do is get ahead of the story to contain it. Maybe the scale, energy, and moral force of the remarkable Palestinian solidarity movement outside and inside the US is compelling more honest and detailed coverage. Maybe it’s about a combination of all these things.

Whatever the cause(s), this feels new to me – the openness with which Israel’s horrifying crimes are being reported, something that helps expose the brazen, morally rotten hypocrisy of the Biden White House backing Israeli crimes that far exceed the Russian crimes it stridently denounces in Ukraine[4]. (Wait for the deal in which the Biden administration and the Democrats make big concessions to Republi-fascist anti-immigrant nativism in order to secure Congressional funding: to “defend Ukraine” – to prolong a vicious military stalemate that led to mass Ukrainian death and maiming and that could have been prevented if the US had agreed that Ukraine cannot be a US/NATO military outpost and to further arm Israel in its so-called War on Hamas).

The New Fascist International, No Mustaches Required  

Speaking of fascism, a recent Talking Points Memo (TPM) report reminds us that Trumpism is part of the international fascist movement. “Outside the MAGA bubble,” TPM writer Hunter Walker observes, “fears of a Trump dictatorship are fueled by his own campaign platform, including the potentially criminal efforts to overturn and question the last election, his vows to crush political enemies, or as he has called them ‘vermin,’ promises to use the military to quash protest, and vows to suppress the press.”

Indeed. Walker might also have mentioned Trump’s call for the extra-judicial execution of suspected shoplifters, the Trump campaign’s pledge to build giant concentration camps for “illegal” migrants and asylum-seekers, Trump’s promise to invade Mexico, Trump’s claim that he wants to be a “dictator for one day” (whatever the F that means) because “I want to build the wall and drill, drill, drill,” and Trump’s recently repeated white supremacist, blood and soil claims that non-white immigrants are spoiling white American pedigree and stock – “poisoning our blood.” 

Here is Trump’s latest statement in the pure racist Nazi spirit, at a recent rally in Durham, New Hampshire:

“They are poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they have done. They poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country.”

Say, US media: how about we don’t normalize all this explicit Amerikaner FASCISM by covering and commenting on US politics with the usual both-side-ism and horse-race reporting?

Also fueling fears of Trump among knowledgeable observers is the presence of prominent European neofascists in and around his campaign.  Walker reports the following about a recent Trump speech at the annual Young New Republicans’ annual gala in Wall Street:

“The crowd who gathered at the swank Cipriani Wall Street for the New York Young Republican Club’s annual gala included Gerald Grosz, an Austrian politician and former presidential candidate who has been part of a political party founded by Nazis and who has deep ties to a late leader who often praised the Third Reich. Grosz was one of several figures from the European far right who attended the event and have previously associated with the club that hosted Trump.. Grosz is currently on the board of a society dedicated to Haider’s memory. Last year, Grosz ran for president with a decidedly Trumpian flair, as his main slogan was ‘Make Austria Grosz Again’…Along with Grosz, the gala was attended by Susanna Ceccardi, a member of the European Parliament from Italy’s right-wing Lega party. Another member of the European Union’s legislative body, Maximilian Krah of Germany’s right wing Alternative fur Deutschland party, or AfD, was also present for the festivities along with David Bendels, the editor of a publication that is aligned with the AfD. While they hail from different countries, Grosz, Ceccardi, and Krah have all been part of movements that are staunchly nationalist and anti-immigrant. In Germany, AfD has been described by critics as a ‘neo-Nazi’ organization, an allegation it has rejected. The group has also been classified as a right-wing extremist group by state-level intelligence agencies.” 

The event was attended some of the members of the 21^st Century Fascist International that Trump advisor and propagandist Steve Bannon has been helping cultivate for years. 

Someone taking Noam Chomsky’s new $10-a-month “Master Class” on “independent thinking” might want to ask their professor if he thinks Trump and Trumpism are fascist yet.  

How Ziofascist Israel May Re-Elect Amerikaner Fascist Trump

Sometimes fascist synergies across national lines are more accidental.  Look, for example, at how Israel’s genocidal fascist prime minister Netanyahu is potentially re-electing his friend Herr Donald. Thanks in no small part to his repeated and predicted betrayal of numerous liberal and progressive-sounding campaign promises, the hapless corporate imperialist Joe Biden’s approval ratings were already sunk in late Jimmy Carter territory even before the October 7th Hamas terror attack that gave “Naziyahu” (a longtime de facto ally and protector of reactionary Islamo-fundamentalist Hamas) his pretext for proclaiming Biblical “mighty vengeance” and launching an especially bloody new chapter in the at least century-old Palestinian Nakba. Israel’s atrocious 2023 conduct, backed by “Genocide Joe” with laughably weak caveats, is making the ancient US president look patently ridiculous and lame. As the former CIA analyst Melvyn Goodman writes:

“The combination of the U.S. veto of a cease-fire resolution at the United Nations and the expedited shipment of lethal weaponry calls into question the Biden administration’s so-called warnings to Israel to minimize civilian casualties…Netanyahu remains committed to the goal of destroying Hamas without any idea of what comes next; Biden appears committed to his goal of supporting Netanyahu.  Neither leader appears capable of changing the direction of a military policy that is strengthening—and not weakening—the ideological goals of Hamas.  Meanwhile, the instability in the Middle East worsens with U.S. policies and military forces unable to deter settler violence against Palestinians on the West Bank…Israel is becoming increasingly isolated, and the United States is increasingly isolated in its support of Israel…  Biden supports a two-state solution; Netanyahu rejects a two-state solution.  Biden supports negotiations with the Palestinian Authority; Netanyahu rejects negotiations of any kind…Biden appears increasingly unsure of himself in his public discussion of the war…  Biden believes that as long as the United States stands by Israel and provides endless rounds of military assistance, then Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders will have the confidence to negotiate with the Palestinians and to seek compromise.  Instead, Israeli leaders, particularly Netanyahu, have pocketed U.S. military weaponry and have remained committed to the military defeat of the Palestinian opposition and the humiliation of the Palestinian people.”

As Goodman might have added, Biden’s grotesque embrace of “Bibi” and backing of Israel’s genocide is costing him the willingness of significant parts of the Democratic Party’s based to hold their nose and vote for his sorry ass next fall. “Genocide Joe” is trailing the fascist monster Trump in match-up polls in five of the mere six states that absurdly determine the outcome of US presidential elections under the archaic 18th Century Electoral College. His embrace of the fascist Netanyahu is a boon for the fascist Trump.

Endnotes

+1.  Republi-fascization has been building since at least the 1990s and became the dominant trend in the Republican Party under Obama.  It’s a new and recent development, historically speaking, however much fascism is rooted in US American history (see Chapter 6, “America Was Never Great,” in my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America),  deeply understood.

2. I have explained here many times why hoping for a shift off fossil fuels and ecocide more broadly to an environmentally sustainable economy and society under capitalism is on par with me hoping to become a starting point guard in the National Basketball Association. See this, for one recent example.

3. Michelle Nunn, the president and chief executive of CARE USA; Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, chief executive of Mercy Corps; Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council; Abby Maxman, president and chief executive of Oxfam America; Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International; Janti Soeripto, president and chief executive of Save the Children U.S.

4. Also readily available to those willing to see is the barefaced US hypocrisy of Washington’s backing of the Israel’s despicable crimes. As the above-quoted humanitarian leaders say at the end of their Times Op Ed, “Secretary of State Antony Blinken once said of the war in Ukraine that [Russia’s] targeting of heat, water and electricity was a ‘brutalization of Ukraine’s people’ and ‘barbaric.’ The Biden administration should acknowledge that the same holds true in Gaza.” But of course the Biden administration does no such thing. As the humanitarian leaders would not likely say in the Times, this because Ukrainians assaulted by Russia are considered in the dominant Western imperial media-politics culture to be “worthy victims” since they are under attack from an officially designated US enemy while the Palestinians are considered “unworthy victims” since they are under attack from a longtime key ally and outpost of the American Empire.