New post
On my journey back from Japan tour, US news was focused on Epstein and sex trafficking, and I happened to watch the P Diddy doc. I was moved by the anguish and bravery of his survivors. I was also thinking…Diddy and Epstein are really nothing compared to the US govt in the past two years. How are Biden, Harris, Trump, Vance, and most of Congress not sex traffickers? They’ve handed tens of billions of dollars to the IDF to systematically mass rape Palestinians being held without charge in Israeli detention. Including children. The big difference is these sex traffickers don't use their own money, they use yours.
Our two parties don’t merely serve at the whims of IDF sadism or the pleasure of IDF penises. That would be a normal sex trafficker. They spice it up with torture, mass starvation, apartheid, land theft, bombed hospitals, and a poisoned water supply. And we Americans footing the bill are just supposed to be OK with that. It’s good for the GDP, they say. AIPAC money helps mould our top political celebrities, they say.
Rape, torture, abduction and genocide are just good old American capitalist commodities. But unlike any normal marketplace, the US is one where you have no choice but to buy what’s for sale, no matter how outrageous. If you don’t want to buy them, well you must be an anti-Semitic terrorist. You’re under arrest. Unless you’re rich enough to dodge taxes, in which case I guess you actually don't have to buy them.
The modern Israeli soldier’s widely reported tendency towards racist atrocities is not inherent to Jews or Judaism. It is a cycle of abuse passed down from generations of white people going back to the Middle Ages, the most famously anti-Semitic of which were Russians and of course Germans, although anti-Semitism was rampant throughout Europe. It is not learned from Palestinians, nor Gen Z American college students doing sit-ins about arms deals. Today’s IDF rapist is exacting retribution for what was done to their grandparents and great-grandparents. Nazis not being on hand, they attack Palestinians instead. This they were instructed to do, by the victorious rulers of Europe carving up the globe after WWII.
In its strange way, the ugly persistence of racist propaganda in Western society is evidence of an enduring human morality. After all, without racism white Americans would’ve felt pretty guilty kidnapping and enslaving Africans. Nazis would’ve felt guilty doing the Holocaust. Israeli soldiers would feel guilty raping Palestinians or stealing their houses. The ranking of human beings by skin color is a propagandistic invention whose purpose is to morally justify whatever ruling class crimes were going to be committed anyway, but would have seemed unthinkably immoral under any normal circumstances.
While most global Jews do not share the Israeli government’s contempt towards their own racial cousins in the Levant, a hateful minority now enjoys the greatest reward from those in power in the richer, whiter countries of Europe and America. White guilt from centuries of anti-Semitism is now manifesting itself not as a commitment to end atrocities, but an endless stream of money and legal carte blanche to racists to commit more of them.
Of course one glaring irony is that it’s MAGA and Proud Boy style Americans, many of whom openly and violently hate Jews, who handed the White House to the current leader of this movement to fund Israel and its crimes. It’s his signature policy, and the defining policy of the collapsing US Empire. As with the Third Reich, it’s the policy for which it will be most remembered once the empire is gone.
Genocide used to be "never again." Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their toadies in Congress did away with all that. Now crimes against humanity are so normal that the press barely mentions them. Corporate-caused global warming gets almost no coverage at all, and when it does, it’s accompanied by cute pictures of kids playing in a fountain, not millions of people dying in a flood or fighting over scraps of food in other parts of the world as a direct result of bipartisan capitalist policy. Meanwhile billionaires get filthy rich off the unnecessary carnage.
Palestinians crying out for an end to these crimes against humanity by US-funded, AI-enhanced military and police are speaking on behalf of you and your children. They’re trying to save you from the fate that has simply arrived earlier for them than for you. For their trouble they are met with mass murder, no matter which US party is in power, while the murderers get treated as heroes. Likewise Indigenous Brazilians crying out at climate summits for water rights and the phasing out of fossil fuels are speaking on behalf of you and your children. They’re trying to save you from the fate that has simply arrived earlier for them. For their trouble they are met with militarized repression, while the fossil fuel accelerationist countries of the global North get treated as heroes.
The rich countries of the global North, the US especially, are deliberately worsening the climate crisis, by refusing to phase out fossil fuels, AI data centers, factory farms and the military. Who will suffer first, and most, as a result of these policies? The poor countries of the global South. American liberals are apparently OK with this, since seriously challenging this outcome might mean forgoing some favorite corporate convenience. It might mean that sometimes is heard a discouraging word about some favorite Democratic politician. If this mindset sounds familiar, that’s because it’s identical to the philosophy of MAGA, which asserts that whites and capitalists must remain blindly loyal to their political party no matter how murderous their behavior, because of its promise to retain their five hundred year advantage over other races and economic systems.
Liberals are those to whom desperation has yet to arrive. In a few years when the climate-caused famines hit the US, my guess is that most Trump-hating white liberals, their privilege now taken away, will take the final step towards behaving exactly as they now chide the MAGA fans for behaving: They’ll invent rationalizations for why their family deserves food more than their neighbor’s family.
It will be sad when humans start fighting over food, stealing from each other, declaring wars over it. It will have been preventable. At the moment there is still more than enough food to feed the entire human race. Alas, those of us who enjoy food are instead repeatedly told we must keep voting for people like Joe Biden, devoted to profiteering capitalists like a religion, endlessly expanding fossil fuel consumption and profits and handouts, giving the worst polluter on the planet (the US military) stupendous sums of money, scoffing at the Green New Deal, and whose supposedly heroic, climate-friendly policies have zero chance of delivering a livable planet to our children.
When your child, or any child, becomes an adult begging or fighting for scraps of food, or unable to find drinkable water, or unable to afford a place to live, or on the run from AI police drones, or being detained for reading about human rights, or drafted into the US military to fight a war against China or Russia or Iran, my guess is none of us will really care whether it was a Democrat or Republican who happened to be in office when this hellscape was created. Because if one looks at their voting records, one sees that both parties are firmly committed to making it all but inevitable.
Americans don’t lack morality. But we’ve been tricked into allowing lawmakers to shift further and further to the right of our average national opinions on every major issue. Lawmakers that then offer an “alternative” that's even further to the right. If we could allow ourselves to create a viable left alternative that better matches our opinions, this would be something like democracy. Instead we muddle through within a system run by opportunists whose main purpose in life is drive any such alternatives from your mind.
At the same time, we are right now living through a promising moment in which Americans are at last turning en masse against their two ridiculous, decrepit political parties. If we care at all about today’s children, we need to stay focused on exactly what it is about these parties that should never be tolerated again: profiteering from impoverishment of the working class, profiteering from fossil fuels, profiteering from global instability, profiteering from AI warfare and arms dealing, profiteering from mass deportation and detention, profiteering from the annihilation of international laws and frameworks. If our “opposition” is limited to social media memes about Trump, and a few billionaire-sponsored parades, we will fail, and today’s children will be lucky to find food in adulthood.
Even someone who wants multiple mansions, yachts, servants, and cars does not need a billion dollars to get them. The only person who needs that much money is someone who wants to literally purchase the economy itself. Someone who wants to purchase the systems, lawmakers, and press that are meant to hold people like them accountable. Someone who wants control of humanity. That’s expensive. It takes owning entire media conglomerates. It takes bribing hundreds of US politicians of both parties. AIPAC is only the most notorious of these bribery schemes, but there’s one for every other corporate special interest that would be instantly dismissed as egregiously immoral and homicidal if our corrupt system hadn’t made it all legal.
Legal retribution by one party against isolated celebrity politicians of the opposing party may seem appealing in some momentary, Hollywood way. But crimes against humanity enforced after the fact by the victors against the vanquished don’t really discourage future crimes against humanity, since no one commits them expecting to lose. What would be smarter is to avoid knowingly electing and enriching such criminals altogether. Stop defending and upholding a system that rewards crimes against humanity. Stop gifting votes and money to people who commit them. These are people who just invent more problems. Ones they won't even have to deal with, due to their spectacular wealth or advanced age.
Stop electing and enriching genociders. Stop electing and enriching arms dealers. Stop electing and enriching sex traffickers. Stop electing and enriching capitalists. Capitalism can’t solve world war or genocide or the climate crisis. Capitalism is what caused world war and genocides and the climate crisis.
-Greg