On the Erudite Idiocy of the Liberal-Centrist Intelligentsia

Wading Through Some Recent Bullshit at The New York Times and The Atlantic

I never cease to be amazed by the  ideologically mandated stupidity of what flows from the minds, fingers and keyboards of the erudite liberal-centrist intelligentsia.

I Respond to Nicholas Kristof’s Downplaying of Ziofascist Genocide and His Insulting of 1970s Maoists

Here is an example from the esteemed New York Times columnist Nichoas Kristof’s recent commentary on “The Things We Disagree on About Gaza,” where Kristof responds to criticisms of his calls for Israel to “dial way back” (his words) its genocide in Gaza.  Kristof puts in boldface his paraphrase of criticism he has gotten and then responds:

Kristof Critic:  “Israel was attacked. Children were butchered. Women were raped. So why are you criticizing Israel rather than the Hamas terrorists who started this war?”

Kristof’s response: “That’s a fair question. Yes, Hamas started this war with its brutal attack on civilians, and it has been indifferent to Palestinian lives. As someone who has reported regularly from Gaza over the years, I’m aghast at the admiration some American leftists show for an organization as cruel, misogynistic and economically incompetent as Hamas; it’s an echo of the left’s appalling admiration for Mao a half-century ago.”

My response to Kristof:

No, Mr. Kristof, it’s NOT “a fair question,” it’s a bullshit question. Yes, the reactionary Islamist group Hamas’s military wing criminally attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, but as you point out, Israel’s response has been wildly disproportionate. In the first sentence of your column you note that “Israel’s counterattack on Gaza…appears to have killed a woman or child about once every eight minutes for the past three months.” Four or so paragraphs below you elaborate:

“..Israel had dropped 29,000 bombs, munitions and shells by mid-December, while the United States dropped 3,678 munitions in Iraq between 2004 and 2010, according to The Wall Street Journal. The United States used a mammoth 2,000-poud bomb only once in its entire multiyear war against ISIS; Israel is believed to have used hundreds in just a few months in Gaza… Two academic researchers using satellite imagery have found that at least 68 percent of buildings in northern Gaza have been damaged, which according to The Financial Times is a higher proportion than were damaged in Dresden.”

Why do you say, “appears to have killed” instead of “killed” and “is believed to have used” instead of “used,” Mr. Kristof?  And why didn’t you add that Israel has killed 25,000 Gazans, mostly women and children, whereas the 10-7 Hamas attack killed 1200 Israelis. Given the famine and disease resulting from what you really ought to call “a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing” and given also Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s  promise to continue the crucifixion of Gaza into 2025, it seems possible if not likely that the Gazan death toll will hit and climb above 50,000.

Israel’s genocidal body count is so far 20 times greater than Hamas’s and rises every day.  It is a sickening example of collective punishment, a great war crime.

“Buildings in northern Gaza have been damaged” is woefully understated, Mr. Kristof. We have all seen the images of whole vast stretches of apartment blocks levelled to the ground.  And then Israel levels residential buildings, buildings, and hospitals and refugee camps in southern Gaza, where it told Gazans to relocate. 

So, l really, who are the real “terrorists” here?  

Mr. Kristof, you fail to use the critical and accurate word genocide in your column. Five pages below your mealy-mouthed commentary, contributing Times Opinion writer Megan Stack points out that South Africa’s argument (before the International Court of Justice) that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is very strong:

“The harrowing details from Gaza go on and on. The crushing of the medical system. The slaughter of aid workers. The killing of journalists. The war on libraries, houses of worship and culture. The destruction of families and economic needs and possibility itself… Nowhere is safe in Gaza. This line is repeated in the South African suit. Most of the people are starving. Around 70 percent of the dead are women and children and two mothers are killed every hour, the United Nations has estimated. On Thursday, the South African advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi referred to Israel’s denial of fuel and water to Gaza. ‘This admits of no ambiguity: It means to create conditions of death of the Palestinian people in Gaza,’ Mr. Ngcukaitobi said. ‘To die a slow death because of starvation and dehydration or to die quickly because of a bomb attack or snipers. But to die, nevertheless.’ The destruction of bakeries, water pipes, sewerage and electricity networks. The hoisting of Israeli flags over the wreckage.”

And no, Mr. Kristof, Hamas didn’t “start this” so-called “war,” which is really a one-sided campaign of genocidal ethnic cleansing backed by the world’s leading imperialist aggressor state, the United States. The Zio-fascist occupation and apartheid state of Israel started it by violently penning 2.3 million Palestinian human beings up in a vast open air concentration camp that Adolph Hitler would have admired for its sheer racist brutality.  In months preceding the 10-7 attack, illegal Israeli settlers and the so-called Israeli Defense Forces accelerated provocations in ways that led many to fear a coming violent response from Hamas, the nominal political ruler of Gaza that the Israel’s right wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had long supported. The operational plans for and possibilities of the horrific Hamas action were known to Israeli and US intelligence well in advance.  The US imperial pit-bull Israel leapt at the unsurprising attack as their Pearl Harbor/9-11-like for launching a savage campaign that is clearly meant to “transfer” the surviving Palestinian residents of Gaza to other nations in the Middle East.

As for the unnamed “leftists” who have shown “admiration” for Islamo-fascist and arch-sexist Hamas, Mr. Kristol, they are idiots who don’t understand what revolutionary politics and morality are about. You have no business likening their dense and ugly foolishness to some 1970s US radicals’ supposedly “appalling” appreciation of the great communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, a fierce enemy of reactionary theocracy and old-world patriarchy as well as US-led capitalism-imperialism. Consistent with his strong and principled background in Marxism-Leninism,  Mao would have in no uncertain terms condemned the reactionary sentiments of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the theocratic regime atop Iran. Mao held great understandable appeal to 1960s and 1970s radicals because of his profound and unwavering commitment to anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolution, something very different from the tepid anti-revolutionary revisionism of the state-capitalist Soviet Union and the alternately milquetoast and destructive tendences of most of the US “left,” including the deeply conservative US Communist Party and the ridiculous, revenge-addled Weathermen.        

Mr. Kristof, you might want to read the following from a recent publication by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, which was formed by people who admired Mao for some very good reasons “a half century ago”:

“US Imperialism Must Go! … but Iran, the Houthis and ‘the Axis of Resistance’ Are Not the Answer. ..The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), together with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, the Houthis in Yemen and some other forces, claim to be an ‘axis of resistance’ to Israel and the U.S. But resistance for what? All of these forces are bound together by medieval, misogynist and deeply oppressive religious fundamentalism. Just look at Iran: Last year, women and men waged a fierce six-month struggle just for the right of women to go out in public with their hair showing! Hundreds were killed by the IRI, thousands imprisoned!” 

Mao Zedong would agree with the Revcoms.

David Graham: Missing Trump’s Fascist Anti-Marxism

Let’s turn now from the Times to the militantly “nonpartisan” centrist and vaguely liberal-ish magazine The Atlantic’s much-ballyhooed special January-February 2024 issue titled “If Trump Wins.”  In an essay bearing the accurate title “Trump Isn’t Bluffing,” Atlantic staff writer David Graham  begins by quoting from and commenting on a chilling speech the 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump gave last fall:

“ ‘We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,’ Donald Trump said this past November, in a campaign speech that was ostensibly honoring Veterans Day. ‘The real threat is not from the radical right; the real threat is from the radical left … The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.’”

“ What immediately leaps out here is the word vermin, with its echoes of Hitler and Mussolini. But Trump’s inflammatory language can overshadow and distract from the substance of what he’s saying—in this case, appearing to promise a purge or repression of those who disagree with him politically.”

Why the false dichotomy between (a) the supposedly “distracting” and “overshadowing” word “vermin” on one hand and (b) the real “substance” of political repression on the other hand?  With Trump as with Hitler (and Mussolini), (a) and (b) go together in fascist unity with a strong racist content, reflecting the Nazis’ identification of their enemy as “Judeo-Bolshevism” and joining virulent anti-Semitism with virulent anti-Marxism.

What’s with “appearing to promise a purge or repression of those who disagree with him politically”?  Why  not just say “promising a purge or repression of those who disagree with him politically”?

“What immediately leaps out” from the fascist Trump’s statement that Graham quotes is up to the listener/reader, no? The first thing that got me was the absurdity of the Trump merging “fascists” with “Communists, Marxists” and “the radical left.”  Fascism has always targeted communists, Marxists, socialists and the left as its top blood enemies and Trump says that “the real threat is from the radical left.”

The second thing that “leapt out” at me was Trump saying that the real “threat” to America is “from within.”  That is classic Nazi palingenetic-nationalist “stabbed in the back” rhetoric from the 1920s and 1930s, positing that a once great nation, Germany, was being undermined by an alleged internal cancer: Judeo-Bolshevism and weak-kneed liberalism and conservativism.  

And what’s with “those who disagree with him politically”? Does Graham not understand that Trump, like a good fascist, directed his “vermin”/“threat from within” language specifically at “the radical left”? Just look at the passage Graham quotes.

Jeffrey Goldberg and Tom Nichols: “Trump Has Finally Earned the Epithet ‘Fascist”

Here Graham might somewhat reasonably object that for Trump the terms “communist,” “Marxist” and “radical left” absurdly apply to the capitalist Democratic Party. Okay, but that suggests the need for a discussion of Trumpism’s specifically fascist ideology, which preposterously conflates mainstream non-fascist parties and politicians with the Marxist enemy. And one of the grave problems with The Atlantic’s special issue is its almost complete silence and its utter stupidity on the problem of fascism. Remarkably enough as a new Amerikaner fascism that has been  mainstreamed into the Republican Party and enabled by the Weimar Democrats nears the precipice of consolidating full, triple-branch national power this and next year,  the dreaded “F-word” appears just two times in the entire special issue. 

The first time comes in Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg’s short introduction. “Trump has gone lower, lower, and lower,” Goldberg writes.  “If there is a bottom – no sure thing – he’s getting closer.  Tom Nichols, who writes The Atlantic’s daily newsletter and is one of our in-house experts on authoritarianism, argued in mid-November [of 2023] that Trump has finally earned the epithet ‘fascist’.”  

Goldberg quotes Nichols on how Trump’s 2023 comments on how immigrants are supposedly “poisoning the blood of our country” and Trump’s political targeting of “his fellow [U.S.] citizens” means that Trump has, in Nichols’ words, “crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fashion.” 

So Goldberg and Nichols are abject political and historical idiots?  Forget all the actually radical left Marxists and communists like me, who understood Trump and Trumpism as fascist from the launching of the Donald’s sick racist campaign in 2015. (We are of course invisible to the likes of Goldberg and Nichols.  We don’t count in their world.)  Forget Charlottesville, “shithole countries,” Trump telling Border Patrol agents to shoot asylum seekers, the pardon of Eddie Gallagher,  Lafayette Square, the sending of paramilitaries to Portland, the Big Hitlerian Election Lie and….um, January F’ng Six, when Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Fash Militia with AR-15s Want to Shoot Nancy Not Me” Trump tried to physically cancel previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy. Yes, forget all that stuff since 2016 and read the following passage from the vaguely liberal centrist writer Adam Gopnik in the vaguely liberal centrist establishment journal The New Yorker in May of 2016:

“There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word ‘fascist.’ …his personality and his program belong exclusively to the same dark strain of modern politics: an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government…is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and ‘success.’… The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history.” (Adam Gopnik, “Going There With Donald Trump,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2016).  

Or listen to then US president Barack Obama, who said this to Hilly Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine in October of 2016: “Tim, remember…You've got to keep a fascist out of the White House.”

Is Jeffrey Goldberg actually stupid enough to approvingly quote Tom Nichols moronically thinking that Trump has “finally earned the epithet ‘fascist’” in the fall of 2023? Seriously?

And what’s this with calling ‘fascist” just an  “epithet”?  Fascism is not just some angry term of abuse and disparagement to hurl at people you don’t like. It is the name of an actual political ideology, some of whose basic contours were captured by Adam Gopnik in 2016.  As Refuse Fascism, formed in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s first election, says:

“Fascism is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’ Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power. What is crucial to understand is that once in power fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights.”

I have been documenting and exposing how Trump, Trumpism, and the Trump-captive Republi-fascist Party have fit this definition for close to eight years now. The notion that Trump has only crossed into fascist space in the fall of 2023 is truly absurd. Please see my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (New York: Routledge, 2021).

Sorry But We are “Already in a Struggle with Fascism,” Mr. Nichols

The second place the F-word appears in The Atlantic’s special issue comes at the end of Nichols’ new essay (in the special issue) on how a second Trump administration may cultivate loyalty from the US military.  Nichols moronically writes this: “Some Americans fear that the United States is already in a struggle with fascism.  The firm constitutional loyalty of the armed forces during Trump’s presidency was a reminder that such fears are overblown, at least for the moment.”

That’s really dumb.  Fascism is a social and political ideology and movement that has taken hold of one of the nation’s two dominant capitalist-imperialist political parties.  A fascist occupied the White House for four years. He helped stock the federal judiciary with Christian fascists from the Supreme Court on down. More than 20 US states are under Republi-fascist control, with horrific consequence for their residents’ human, civil, reproductive, and environment rights.  Trump and his team tried  to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy in 2020-21 and is currently sitting pretty for a return to power atop the world’s most powerful and dangerous nation, this time with (as The Atlantic’s special issue repeatedly notes) an ambitious authoritarian political and policy agenda worked up by an army of (now fascisized) Republican policy operatives.

I could go on, but the main point here is that the US military does not have to have gone fascist for “Americans [to] fear” – how about accurately observe – “that the United States is already in a struggle with fascism.” 

Nichols’ special issue essay (one of the longest in the January-February Atlantic) warns that there is a very real prospect that the US military could in fact fall under the fascist Trump’s control in a second Trump administration. That simple fact in and of itself suggests that “the United States is already in a struggle with fascism” and that fears of an American fascism are NOT at all “overblown”!

Despite these and other criticisms I have of “If Trump Wins,” I consider The Atlantic’s special issue essential reading for reasons I will develop in my next Paul Street Report.