The Horror

Evil Times that Call for Revolution

An online diary from the last two weeks….

“Died in the Fighting”

February 29, 2024: A National "Public” Radio News broadcaster just said that "30,000 people have died so far in the fighting in Gaza." What a demented and deceptive choice of words! Try "30,000 human beings, most of them women and children, have been slaughtered in the one-sided US-Israel genocidal crucifixion of Gaza."

If I was President

March 1, 2024: If US funding, equipping, and protecting of open genocide doesn't convince you that capitalist-imperialist Uncle Sam is irredeemably malignant and needs to be torn to shreds with his sociopathic and exterminist system overthrown, I can't imagine what will. How that's not game over and the last straw for many seemingly decent and progressive folks' faith in reformist/incrementalist/pragmatic/ electoralist/revisionist anti-revolutionary politics is a mystery to me.

March 1, 2024: Some liberal asked me “okay, what would you do about Gaza if you were POTUS?" Well, to be clear, if someoone with my world view was POTUS that would mean that there had been a proletarian socialist revolution in the USA and perhaps/ideally across North America. The revolutionary state that I had helped form would deploy US and perhaps North American socialist republic military forces to (among other things) dismantle the Judeo-fascist IDF and assist the creation of a single secular socialist government across Israel-Palestine, a state that outlawed discrimination by religion or race. Vast swaths of the Israeli establishment would be tried for war crimes. Netanyahu would be shipped to Teheran. Trump, Biden, and a host of other capitalist and imperialist criminals would face stern popular justice. Capital punishment (reserved for only the most egregious crimes) would not be off the table. Trump's response to Covid-19 in 2020 would bring charges carrying the death penalty. So would his reckless murder of the top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani on Iraqi soil in January of 2020. Obama would be prosecuted for the destruction of Libya and for dozens of criminal drone strikes among other lawless actions. Biden would be sent in chains to the Hague to be prosecuted for his mass-murderous Ukraine and Gaza policies.

President Street

The Horror “as the United States Supplies Weapons for This [Genocide] and Vetoes Cease-Fire Resolutions at the United Nations”

March 4, 2024.  I have no words of my own to add to this report from Democracy Now:

‘Report from Rafah: U.S. Airdrops Food to Gaza While Arming Israel to Drop Bombs. The death toll from Israel’s assault on Gaza has surpassed 30,000 as health officials say at least 16 Palestinian children have died in recent days from starvation and dehydration. UNICEF is warning the number of child deaths will likely “rapidly increase” unless the war ends. As Palestinians desperately seek aid being withheld by Israel, officials have accused Israeli forces of attacking crowds gathered to retrieve the little humanitarian supplies entering the besieged territory. Live from Rafah, Gaza-based journalist Akram al-Satarri shares his brother’s account of surviving an Israeli attack while attempting to secure food for his kids. “It looks like the objective is to continue the starvation of the people of Gaza and to kill them when they dare to think that they can secure something to feed their children,” says al-Satarri, who reports that U.S. airdrops of aid are doing little to relieve the suffering of millions in Gaza while U.S. military aid supports Israeli attacks. “In one hand, they are providing people with food, and in the other hand, they are providing people with death.”

March 7, 2024: So will Joe defend the right of Nazi Germany to defend itself from the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto in his State of the Union Address (SOUTA) tonight?

March 10, 2024: F#*k Joe Biden and the American Empire and their participation in and protection of Israel’s genocide in Gaza! I know all about Trump and how he'd be even worse regarding Gaza, but DO NOT COME AT ME WITH VOTE FOR BIDEN SHIT. Talk to me about anti-imperialist revolution in the USA. Seriously.

March 10, 2024: Here are some text messages from Mohammed Alshannat, a doctoral student in linguistics and a resident of Gaza, published by the centrist New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff today:

'Jan. 27, 2024: My son was seriously injured on Dec. 22. A large shrapnel entered his right flank. He is 13 years old and was injured while we were running for our lives. Hospitals are out of service and I had to carry him bleeding under heavy artillery shelling for two hours. I found a doctor who was sheltering in a school, and he took a risk and saved my son’s life. He went through a complicated surgery later and still unable to walk. He is very sick and suffers from malnutrition. I am scared and bone tired. It took me 36 days just to get this internet connection to send a WhatsApp message. Please pray for us!

Feb. 6, 2024 I am still in the north with my family. We are in a great famine. My injured son’s health is deteriorating because of the famine. There is no milk, meat, vegetables, fruit or anything to feed him. He lost most of his weight. Medicine and other stuff completely disappeared from the markets. My mother’s diabetes medicine has run out and she is very, very sick. My children are crying from hunger all the time. People are hoping that Israel nukes us so we get rid of this pain.

Feb. 11: Rice, on which we have been living off in the last four months, has completely disappeared from the markets. Me and my wife have decided to eat a meal every two days just to keep our kids alive as long as we can. What is left for us is hay. We have started grinding it, bake it and eat it. Because we have started eating the hay bread, we now defecate blood mixed with hay.

I lost my house, my car and my olive farm. Yesterday my cousin lost her 2-month-old baby because there is no milk to breastfeed him, because there is nothing for her to eat. He was her only and she is 45 years old. She also lost her house and her husband in December. She is a brilliant brain surgeon. She is refusing food and has not spoken a word since.

Feb. 29: When the Israeli army invades an area, we run to safer places. When they withdraw, some of the Israeli soldiers’ leftovers like tuna cans, bread, etc. remain. My cousin, Esa, thought that they have withdrawn and quickly rushed in the hope that he finds leftovers to eat.

After the Israeli army finally withdrew, we found him dead, rotten and half eaten by wild dogs. He seemed to be carrying some tuna cans. We couldn’t bury him as his body was so decomposed. We covered him with sand and left him. His name is Esa Alshannat. He was 20 years old. He was a sophomore student in the department of computer science at Gaza university. He was a brilliant pianist who wanted to pursue a music degree in Italy. I still remember my last meeting with him. He had big dreams and was full of hope, peace and love. He was very hungry and very skinny.'

Kristof signs off with this comment: “That was the last message from Alshannat. Roughly 1 percent of Gaza’s people today are Hamas fighters. To understand what the other 99 percent are enduring, as the United States supplies weapons for this war and vetoes cease-fire resolutions at the United Nations, think of Alshannat and multiply him by two million.”

Jesus F'ng Christ, people, the horror, the US-funded/equipped/protected horror. Dropping food to keep people alive only to be killed by US-made bombs!

The Sick Quadrennial Extravaganza: Genocide Joe v. Adolph Trump, WTF!

March 2, 2024: The Dems might want to run somebody else. The New York Times today:

‘Voters Doubt Biden’s Leadership and Favor Trump, Times/Siena Poll Finds. The share of voters who strongly disapprove of President Biden’s handling of his job has reached 47 percent, higher than in Times/Siena polls at any point in his presidency… Biden is struggling to overcome doubts about his leadership inside his own party and broad dissatisfaction over the nation’s direction, leaving him trailing behind Donald J. Trump just as their general-election contest is about to begin, a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College has found. With eight months left until the November election, Mr. Biden’s 43 percent support lags behind Mr. Trump’s 48 percent in the national survey of registered voters.

Only one in four voters thinks the country is moving in the right direction…The poll offers an array of warning signs for the president about weaknesses within the Democratic coalition, including among women, Black and Latino voters. So far, it is Mr. Trump who has better unified his party, even amid an ongoing primary contest… Democrats remain deeply divided about the prospect of Mr. Biden, the 81-year-old chief executive, leading the party again. About as many Democratic primary voters said Mr. Biden should not be the nominee in 2024 as said he should be — with opposition strongest among voters younger than 45 years old.’

March 5, 2024: News flash: two of the most disgusting and dangerous people of all time met to discuss funding the fascisation of Amerika. See Maggie Haberman et al., “Donald Trump, Seeking Cash Infusion, Meets with Elon Musk,” New York Times, 5 March, 2024:

‘Donald Trump, who is urgently seeking a cash infusion to aid his presidential campaign, met on Sunday in Palm Beach, Fla., with Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, and a few wealthy Republican donors, according to three people briefed on the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private discussion…Mr. Trump and his team are working to find additional major donors to shore up his finances as he heads into an expected general election against President Biden. Mr. Trump has praised Mr. Musk to allies and hopes to have a one-on-one meeting with the billionaire soon, according to a person who has discussed the matter with Mr. Trump…It’s not yet clear whether Mr. Musk plans to spend any of his fortune on Mr. Trump’s behalf. But his recent social media posts suggest he thinks it’s essential that Mr. Biden be defeated in November — and people who have spoken to Mr. Musk privately confirmed that is indeed his view. With a net worth of around $200 billion, according to Forbes, Mr. Musk could decide to throw his weight behind Mr. Trump and potentially, almost single-handedly, erase what is expected to be Mr. Biden and his allies’ huge financial advantage over the former president.’

A chilling report flawed only by the pretense that there’s any doubt that Trump’s fellow sociopath and fascist Musk will help fund the Trump campaign.

March 7, 2024: GENOCIDEN W/BIDEN v. THE SICK ORANGE SACK OF FASCIST SHIT. WHAT A CHOICE! WHAT A SYSTEM!! “The Orange Nazi/KKKer is even worse than Genocide Joe,” a distinguished Marxist historian writes me, “but more honest: he wants genocide; Joe pretends to dislike it, and clutches when Israel just uses US ordinance to murder Palestinians.”

March 8, 2024: In his SOTUA, Joe talked so fast I had a hard time following him. Lots of slurred words and phrases. Will read his speech this afternoon. If he really wants to prove his continuing fitness he needs to swim across the Potomac.  No wet suits and no Pomade unless he’s wearing a bathing cap!

March 8, 2024: I am seeing a lot of folks who ought to know better bending over backwards to deposit saliva on the back end of warmongering Genocide Joe! Just wait for when he hands the keys back to Adolph Trump: these folks will blame "the left" (there’s a left?) and Russia.

March 8, 2024: Biden’s campaign slogans: "Clearly Not Totally Senile Yet!" + "Less Senile Than You Thought” + “Not Too Senile to Actively Back Genocide!”

March 8, 2024: Thanks, Obama – thanks for rescuing this vapid and deceptive running dog corporate imperialist (who can’t even stop his beloved German Shepherds from biting his Secret Service agents) from the condescension of posterity by putting his sorry ass on the center stage of history. Great job, Barack!

March 9, 2024: The dismal Dems running the blood-drenched warmonger Genocide Joe Biden is a way of re-electing the fascist nightmare Trump. They expect people of real conscience and humanity to go "oh well, I have to vote for him anyway." But if there's no red line of for funding, equipping, and protecting GENOCIDE, then really...there's no red lines at all. It stretches the Lesser Evil Voting thing past moral limits in ways that will likely cost Biden the big Electoral College slate in Michigan, for example. I say this fully aware ---  as intensely aware as any human on Earth --- of how horrific Trump is and of the fact that a Trump White House would be even worse on Israel-Palestine.

March 10, 2024: Here's something I've seen forever, sadly: "left" progressives foolishly dreaming that they can make the capitalist imperialist Dems be more like them and in the process getting made more like the capitalist-imperialist Dems. The irony is heating up like crazy in the quadrennial extravaganza year.

March 11, 2024: Looks like the oddsmakers are picking Donald the Fascist Danger Clown Next November.

Against Postponement

March 9, 2024: Okay, say Biden somehow squeaks out a victory (he has maybe a 30% chance) and survives the resulting fash uprising in 2024-25....Then of course he's just his same old awful capitalist-imperialist self, continuing his pandering to and conciliation of revanchist Republifascism and his lethal warmongering and genocide-backing. He dies in office, putting the neoliberal horror show  KopMala Harris in the WH and then we get the fascist Greg Abbott-Tucker Carlson administration in 2029. Meanwhile the climate catastrophe gets more lethal than ever, the insane reckless US-NATO provocation of Russia leads to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and...I could go on.  Gee, maybe we are out of time for seeking postponements instead of a whole new way of life, instead of another possible world, instead of revolution, instead of what Dr. King called (at least to himself in an essay published after his death) “the real issue to be faced...the radical reconstruction of society itself." Existential clocks are nearing midnight as we dither with political discussions dominated as usual every four years by the latest quadrennial US big money corporate mediated major party candidate-centered electoral extravaganza that is sickeningly sold to us as "that's politics," the only politics that matters. Postponement means the "common ruin" of all, which Marx and Engels noted was the only alternative to "the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large.”

March 7, 2024: This is incredible, mandatory reading, and a chilling reflection on the lethal world our imperialist rulers have made. As the New York Times candidly reports in an interactive essay titled “THE BRINK,” “The rick of nuclear war is rising. Nuclear nations are building up their arsenals, speeding towards the next arms race.” Read it. I will return to this topic soon.

March 12, 2024: The “common ruin” is well underway, courtesy of capitalism-imperialism the system, as I have been saying and showing for many years now. A lot of my “left” readers lose their shit, roll their eyes, and turn away when I quote the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian, but so what? He’s right:

“IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY—the billions in all parts of the world who are denied a decent life and a future worth living in, or any future at all:  threatened with literal extinction because of the destruction of the environment by this system and the danger of nuclear war between the U.S. and its rivals in Russia and China—all of them ruthless imperialist powers.

We can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity.  And it is a scientific fact that humanity does not have to live this way. A whole different way of living is possible:  a whole different way to organize society, with a radically different economic foundation and political system, emancipating relations among people and an uplifting culture—all of this oriented to meeting the basic needs and fulfilling the highest interests of the masses of people.”