Mass Death, Catastrophe, War, and Fascism Normalized

Part 2: US-Israel’s Final Solution, Empire Media, and the Need for Revolution

Two New Items First…

Before putting up the remainder (and slightly larger part) of this essay, here are two important items related to my sobject matter here that recently came to my attention:

#1.  Inauguration of Fascism Day, 2025. Consistent with Part 1’s portrait of Trumpism-fascism, The Washington Post reports that “Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.”  

Read the report here – there’s more spine-chilling details on the very specific plans for fascism, Amerikan style, something I have been talking about here on The Paul Street Report from the start.

Now would be a good time for some Trumpenleft cretin to accuse me of “crying wolf”!

#2. Normal Finkelstein’s Righteous Moral Ass-Kicking of Bernie Sanders. Thank you, thank you to Norman Finkelstein (NF) for calling out the vaguely social democratish running dog imperialist and major party electoral sheepdog Bernie Sanders (BS). NF has just rightesouly skewered BS for providing loathsome cover to Zionist genocide. As NF says in a YouTube video addressed specifically to Bomber Bernie:  "With all due respect, the things you've been saying since October 7 are positively ill. When you say you oppose a ceasefire you become a moral monster. Now, I know your thinking and you think some of the things I've said are ill. Fair enough. However we can disagree on that. And we can disagree, uh, forcefully on that. But, when you say you oppose a ceasefire, you become a moral monster. I'm gonna say that again: you become a moral MONSTER." Then NF goes on to quote from BS’s own tweet about how Isarael is indiscriminately bombing hospitals, bombing schools, killing civilians. "When you oppose a cease fire at this time you are in effect and in fact giving Israel carte blanche to continue to indiscriminately target the civilians infrastructure and civilian population of Gaza, 1.1 million of whom are children. You have become a moral monster." NF goes on to rightly mock BS's idiotic pretense that BS's discomfort with Israel's indiscriminate war crimes might change Israel's behavior. This is such a richly deserved moral ass-kicking of Sanders. Buh-bye, Bernie the Bomber.

Part 2…

Israel’s Final Solution

Emboldened by longstanding US backing, Israel’s genocidal politicians and pundits have openly declared support for war crimes and crimes against humanity. As Andy Worthington writes, in a richly sourced passage that merits lengthy quotation:

“Western leaders immediately pledged their unconditional support for Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’, failing to react publicly with any caveats when, the next day, the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, stated, unambiguously, ‘I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly’…On October 14, in the most prominent warning that Israel also had nothing but contempt for international humanitarian law, which absolutely prohibits the indiscriminate targeting of a civilian population, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog fully endorsed the collective punishment of the entire population of Gaza, stating, ‘It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware not involved, it’s absolutely not true’, while, in an interview, Sara Netanyahu, the Prime Minister’s Wife, went even further than Yoav Gallant, hoping for ‘a very big revenge’, and adding, ‘I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals.’…Others explicitly called for genocide — the journalist Shimon Riklin, for example, who tweeted that ‘Gaza should be wiped from the face of the earth’, and another journalist, Roy Sharon, who stated, ‘I spoke about a million bodies not as a goal, I said that if, in order to finally eliminate the military capabilities of Hamas … we need a million bodies, then let there be a million bodies.’ The popular Israeli singer Eyal Golan, meanwhile, said, ‘Erase Gaza, don’t leave a single person there’, while Moshe Feiglin, a former Likud MP, stated, ‘It is not Hamas that should be eliminated. Gaza should be razed and Israel’s rule should be restored to the place. This is our country.’…More recently, on Israeli TV, Feiglin, visibly consumed with genocidal hatred, said, ‘We still have not revenged in a biblical way. We did not burn Gaza to ashes immediately. Create a tremendous humanitarian crisis. Level the entire area. Do not leave a stone upon stone in Gaza. Gaza needs to turn to Dresden. Annihilate Gaza now!’…Another journalist, David Mizrahy Verthaim, noted admiringly that ‘World War II ended with the USA inflicting a Holocaust on Hiroshima, and even before giving the Japanese a chance to digest, dropped another bomb on Nagasaki, while promising that every Japanese city would be destroyed until surrender. The Japanese were no less crazy than the Arabs.’…

Jesus Fascist Christ!

There’s a US-/West-backed plan behind Israel’s  savagery: the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza, a “second Nakba.”  A leaked Israel Ministry of Intelligence document created six days after the Hamas attack calls for the permanent forced transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million Palestinians Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. This forced modern day Trail of Tears “has,” writes the former longtime New York Times Middle East correspondent Chris Hedges, “long been the dream of Israel’s crypto-fascists…Jewish extremists” who now “make up the ruling coalition government” in Tel Aviv. As Hedges notes:

“They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Ammonites, massacred by the Israelites. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged…These Jewish fanatics have begun their version of the final solution to the Palestinian problem.”

And not just in Gaza – the ongoing campaign of killing Palestinians in the largely Jewish-occupied West Bank is escalating.

“America’s favorite truck is finally here.”

Fascist Targeting of Homeland “Traitors”

Along the way, the ruling Jewish fascists are carrying out fascist revenge against Israelis who dare to question this “final solution.” As Hedges adds:

“Israel, at the same time, is turning on ‘Jewish traitors’ who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the horrific violence of the state. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are already being targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as ‘disloyal’ will be deported…Fascists do not respect the sanctity of life. Human beings, even from their own tribe, are expendable to build their deranged utopia.”

Read this remarkable account of the fascist repression being inflicted on dissenting left Israelis by the Knesset member Ofer Cassif:

“It is forbidden to demonstrate and protest against the war. The “only democracy in the Middle East” forbids demonstrations, of both Arab and Jewish citizens — not in support of Hamas, perish the thought — but to oppose the war or simply express humane sympathy for the innocent civilians of Gaza. They are not allowed to do so. Yesterday, there was an attempt by my friends and comrades in Haifa, in the north of Israel, to demonstrate. It was brutally disbanded by the police who beat them and arrested some of them. Right now, it is a fascist regime, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It is forbidden to express sympathy for the people of Gaza. It’s forbidden to express pain for the kids in Gaza being killed. It’s forbidden to object to the war on social media. People have been fired from their workplaces for doing so. Students have been suspended from their colleges and universities. We’re not talking about one or two people; we’re talking about over 100 and perhaps hundreds. So this is a part of the strategy, as the main victims of the repression are Palestinian citizens.

It’s also true that there are many Jews this is affecting as well. A friend of mine, just today, announced that he was fired from a school he was teaching in because he wrote an objection to the war on Facebook. But the main victims are Palestinians. The state wants them to be silent. The state wants them to bow on their knees in order to live, not to be citizens but subjects. This is part of the subjugation plan.

The worst part I left for the end. It is now legitimate to kill and shoot Palestinian citizens as well as democratic or leftist Jews, as far as the public discourse is concerned. It is not only the public discourse, as the police have turned into a private militia of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

One week ago, there were two demonstrations in Tel Aviv against the war. It was still allowed then. At one of them, the police beat some of the demonstrators, men and women who were 70-plus years old. And then another slightly bigger demonstration, a few hours afterwards, again in Tel Aviv, was viciously and violently attacked by bystanders. The police didn’t help the demonstrators and assisted those who attacked them.”

Conflating Gazan Children with the Nazis

Meanwhile here in the USA, the Republi-fascist Trumpsucker Senator Lyndsey Graham (Rf-SC) says that the US should place “no limit” on number of Palestinian children Israel can kill response to the Hamas terror attack. A common narrative on Fatherland (FOX) News and across the Republi-Nazi swamp genocidally rejects any distinction between Islamo-fascist Hamas and the people of Gaza – this despite polling showing that two thirds of Gazans this summer wanted Hamas to maintain a ceasefire with Israel and that nearly three fourths of Gazans backed a proposal for the Palestinian Authority “take over the administration [of Gaza],  with Hamas giving up separate armed units.”   

Last Wednesday, the Republi-fascist US House member Brian Mast (Rf-FL) equated Palestinian civilians to civilian supporters of Adolph Hitler during WWII. "I would encourage the other side,” the former Israeli Defense Forces volunteer Mast said on the House floor, “to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians," Mast said. Not be outdone for anti-Palestinian hatred, Mast’s fellow House Republi-fascist Matt Zinke (Rf-MT) – a former Secretary of the Interior under Herr Trump –  “introduced a bill last Thursday to ban Palestinians from entering the U.S. and possibly expel those already living in the imperial homeland. The demented Republi-Nazi and Q-curious House member Marjorie Taylor Greene (RF-GA) rolled out a bill that would absurdly censure the Palestinian-American House member Rashida Tlaib for "antisemitic activity, sympathizing with terrorist organizations, and leading an insurrection."

Media’s Job: Trying to Keep Us in Da Box So We’ll Never Know There’s a Whole Other Way the World Could Be

The US corporate media is tasked with trying to pretend that all this lethal and fascistic madness is well, customary and routine, nothing thing to get all crazy and revolutionary about. Its job includes trying to normalize the escalating and deadly insanity – to take all the out da box shit reflecting the coming together of underlying contradictions and try to put it back into the container of the conventional, to make the new normal seem same as it ever was and ever could be. It will make its peace with a Fascist Amerika in 2025.

Thus, the dominant US communications complex persists for the most part in describing the ever more Nazified white Christian nationalist GOP as “conservative” and in treating the contest between the imperialist fascism-enabling Weimar Democrats and the eliminationist/exterminist Republi-fascists as pretty much the same old electoral horse race between America’s traditional two parties: the “liberal” (and even “left”) Democrats versus the “conservative” Democrats. “We’ll see what happens in 2024, by golly. The people will decide at the ballot box!”

The people will decide …through voting. Oh, indeed, you betchya! Never mind: that the US doesn’t elect its presidents by popular vote; that the absurdly powerful upper chamber of the US Congress is preposterously malapportioned in ways that vastly over-empower the most revanchist states and people of the country; that the lower chamber of the Congress is absurdly gerrymandered; that the whole US political system is distorted and corrupted by plutocratic campaign finance rules upheld by a brazenly corrupt and debased, Christian Fascist Supreme Court that is appointed for life by the undemocratically elected US president and Senate; that American “states’ rights” give revanchist jurisdictions across vast swaths of the country the power to make policy in bold defiance of majority national public opinion; that the “fourth estate,” the mass media that vastly shapes public political knowledge and opinion, is a capitalist-imperialist monopoly owned by a ruling class deeply invested in mass ignorance, division, diversion, and consent.

In da box indeed – the American ballot box, once cleverly described by the Marxian historian Alan Dawley as “the coffin of class consciousness.”   

Normalizing fascism abroad as well as at home, the dominant media covers for “our good friend Israel,” with cable news making sure to follow every depersonalized report on mass Palestinian death (now conservatively estimated at 10,000, seven times the Israeli body count on October 7) with highly personalized stories on Israeli and American October 7th victims –  never mind the massive and growing body county disparity, including a post-10-7  death toll of Gazan children far beyond the all-age death toll from Hamas’s horrific attack.  

I'm sure many of my readers have heard and seen the US media taking seriously Israel’s language on how providing Gaza with fuel to survive will just boost Hamas's "war machine." WAR MACHINE? That takes some chutzpah. Want to see WAR MACHINES? Israel has and is a massive WAR MACHINE, funded and largely equipped by the US WAR MACHINE, which maintains more than 700 bases in more than 80 countries and accounts for 40% of all military spending on earth.

The media also takes seriously the Zionist Israel Lobby’s nauseating insistence that large US  campus and big city protests against Israel’s genocidal war are “anti-Semitic.”  It gives a platform to Zionist students who falsely claim that their elite college and university professors are virulent anti-Semites who revel in Hamas’s criminal attack. And it says nothing about the repellent fascist attacks on anti-genocide dissent within Israel itself.

There is of course never any serious historical and systemic context for the unfolding catastrophes provided in the reigning US media-politics culture. There is no discussion there of how all the destructive madness underway naturally emerges from five hundred-plus years of planet-igniting capitalism-imperialism and the depredations of the US-American Empire, the global superpower to which Israel owes its existence.   

This great analytical and contextual vacuum is required and enforced by class rule and imperial doctrine, deeply internalized by media personnel.  The talking heads and pundits know the rules.  They don’t generally need a leash attached to their collars to walk obediently alongside their ruling class masters. These running dogs of imperial thought/population control behave in accord with the narrow parameters of acceptable debate and commentary set by the dominant order. 

Those who step out of line lose their spots at the feeding bowl. That is the reality behind the oft-quoted Upton Sinclair remark that “it is hard to get someone to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.”  Many US media operatives, politicians, and academics know much more than what they let on, but they also know very well that going public with their knowledge is a career and status killer and so, with rare examples, they comply.

The consent-manufacturing normalization function of the dominant media is not just about the news. That nation’s entertainment media is chock full of the regularization disease. Television, movies, streaming video games are heavily invested in the routinization of sadistic mass killing and humiliation and war, helping seed the fields of genocide, fascism, police-statism, and war amidst an ever-escalating climate catastrophe likely to fuel deepening fascisation, militarism,  and new pandemics. The “banalization of evil” (Hannah Arendt) is one of “our” war and entertainment media’s favorite big money jams. Nothing is sacred under the relentless and cancerous anarchy of capital, under whose reign “all that is solid melts into air.”  Everything, including life and health insurance, is a joke under the bourgeois system:  “I think the duck goes the distance.”

The constant images of mass destruction, death, and devastation that are put up between infantilizing drug and insurance and car and pickup truck commercials on the corporate communications system’s dystopian telescreens feed the notion that “that’s the way it is. This is life.”   The commercials themselves are loaded with capitalist ideology, promoting and serving the soulless religion of bourgeois self and personal acquisition over solidarity and commonality with others.

With the real, scientifically determinable causes of the leading contemporary and mutually reinforcing menaces to a decent human future (ecocide/pandemicide, fascism/arc-authoritarianism, and potentially nuclear global war) left out, no serious discussion of the real solution – people’s socialist revolution and transformation – is thinkable. The tragedies and catastrophes are widely portrayed and seen as unavoidable products of “human nature,” the eternal “human condition,” “God’s will,” punishment for sin, Orwellian conditioning, “hegemony,” and so on. That encourages depression, cynicism, despair, fatalism, and atomization, worsening “the human condition” by giving capitalism and imperialism a free pass to wreak yet more havoc.

It is all a great and outrageous lie. For the criminally normalized catastrophes of our time are in fact the results of scientifically unnecessary oppression and exploitation that could in fact be overcome, As the much and absurdly maligned and misrepresented Revolutionary Communists (the Revcoms)  say, “there’s a whole different we could be living,”  a whole different way of organizing our social, political, and environmental relations: revolutionary socialism on the path to communism and the abolition of all oppressive and exploitative relations.  This is an unthinkable thought for many even and even especially on what passes for a Left in the US. It is  far past the time to make actual people’s revolution thinkable again.  The alternative to thinking on and acting for “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” is now clearly “the common ruin of all.”