Some Corpses Are More Worthy Than Others

 In a macabre exercise in  Orwellian double-think, President Biden has officially declared that a "prayer for peace" be uttered by one and all on this Memorial Day. Even the chattering war-mongers of the weapons manufacturer-sponsored  corporate media followed orders and at least shut up for a hot minute of silence - before drowning out the sacred bell-tolling with the normal discussion of who to bomb next.

And even as Biden and his fellow politicians all bowed their own heads in simulation of prayer for peace, the bombs and ammo were en route with a vengeance to Israel, Ukraine,  and wherever else on the planet that fine war products are sold.

Honoring all the dead American troops for having made the "ultimate sacrifice" for the sake of an "idea"  serves the purpose of our never-ending state of war by separating the dead professional killers (potential if not actual) from the killed. Those who die while waring a uniform and holding a gun are declared to be more respectable, and thereby more  more grievable,  than "official" enemy combatants and unarmed civilians alike.

Putting a halo on dead soldiers also lets the masters of war ignore the fact that war is in its modern essence a capitalistic enterprise, designed to protect and enhance the power and the profits of the few.  So if they use words like "freedom" and "democracy" and "sacred" often enough to justify their mass murder, it is that much easier to separate, demote and dehumanize all those non-uniformed men, women and children. At best these victims  are barely sympathetic "collateral damage." At worst they are the complicit "human shields" of the latest designated enemy.

They are deemed not worthy of grief on this Memorial Day. 

As  Simone  Weil wrote in her brilliant antiwar essay, with the epic antiwar poem  the Iliad as her centerpiece, the victims of war are conveniently transformed into "things."  If If the masters of war can magically transform people into things even before  violently killing them, it naturally follows that they are also mere things after their deaths.

Weil's opening paragraph:

" Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors."

War, she continues, makes a person into a thing by literally turning him or her either into a pre-corpse or an actual one. "Somebody is here, and the next minutes, nobody is here at all."

The occult purpose of Memorial Day, therefore,  is not so much about honoring the designated  war heroes as it is  it is about honoring - and fearing -  the force and the power that they represent. It's a bait and switch holiday that allows "us" to mawkishly bow our heads for a minute before firing up the barbeque for the official start of summer.

And even as they're urging us to join in their maudlin festivities of death, hamburgers and fun in the sun, they're also trying to make us feel guilty that we ourselves have not been elevated to their rarefied ranks of either  potential or actual war dead. 

In both the  United Kingdom and the United States, there are renewed calls from rulers for more lumpen folk to enlist for Permawar - euphemized as patriotic "national service."

"Only one percent of Americans serving in the military is problematic"  scolded Rep. Pat Ryan, Democrat (from my own Hudson Valley district). The military-industrial complex sent him and his GOP partner, Mike Waltz of Florida, to a Sunday talk show in order to gaslight the audience on Memorial Day weekend. The public-private war industry made sure to send bona fide US Army veterans. It simply wouldn't have done to use, for example, the actual commander in chief, who during the Vietnam war enjoyed five separate draft deferments due to a case of chronic asthma from which has since apparently recovered.

Ryan and Waltz were quick to deny that their bipartisan push for enhanced financing for military recruitment in any way presages a return to the draft, (which was more egalitarian in the Vietnam era, when even upper middle class guys couldn't always avoid becoming cannon fodder). Recruitment will still be done according to class and be heavily concentrated in low-income school districts.

Moreover, they are insisting that mandatory national service wouldn't necessarily entail putting on a uniform or carrying a weapon. They do understand that there are still some pacifists out there, especially among the young people protesting their genocide of Palestinians.

Rather, they mask their nationalistic propaganda in the rhetoric of  social service, with Waltz gushing that it "could" include "national parks, inner city tutoring, elderly (sic) care."

And we all know (wink, wink, nod) that not only would this national service be either low paid or voluntary, it would also free up more money for the weapons contractors - money which is now being wasted on the public education of poor Black and Brown kids public schools in those "inner cities" and that all that Medicare money going to nursing care for old people could be going to Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, not to mention their  Wall Street investors.

In other words, they have "things"-both with uniforms and without - all figured out.

War Crimes and Punishment

On the same day that a prosecutor from the International Criminal Court (ICC) requested arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister for committing genocidal war drimes in Gaza, Julian Assange has won the right to appeal his extradtition to the United States to face charges of committing journalism.

As far as American officials are concerned,  the exposure of their war crimes is worse than the actual commission, or aiding and abetting of, war crimes. They've already been caught aggressively trying to quash the warrants against Bibi and his fellow genocidaires. Some hardliners in the US Congress had even explicitly threatened  to invade The Hague if Bibi should  ever be captured and held for trial there. (Congress already passed a law that requires the US military to swoop in and rescue, say, George Bush or Dick Cheney if they are ever brought to international justice for their Iraq war crimes. So l imagine Lindsay Graham and Tom Cotton feverishly writing legislation right this minute to codify things and specifically add Bibi to the official rescue list of mass murderers kidnapped by those vicious human rights terrorist folks.)

 At the same time, both political parties in the United States have ensured that Assange continues to rot in jail. This is notwithstanding President Biden's recent vague mutterings that his administration is considering dropping the Espionage Act charges against Assange.

He left the impression that they're running out the clock on the ailing Assange. They have already done their utmost to destroy both his physical and mental health.  By the time Biden belatedly decides to set him free. Assange's condition will have deteriorated to the point that they feel he no longer poses a threat to them, His appearance upon release will be so shocking that it will put the big chill on aspiring truth-tellers all over the world. The lucrative US war racket will survice and thrive while killing and maiming and displacing even more victims.

As I write this post, there still has been no official reaction from the White House concerning the ICC request for the arrest warrants against the Israeli officials as well as for two top leaders of Hamas. There also has been no reaction from the Biden administration regarding the granting of the Assange appeal.

Coverage of both legal stories has been relatively muted in the mainstream media, what with the helicopter crash killing Iran's president and the overheated saga of the ongoing Trump hush money trial, both of which were taking pride of place on the New York Times digital home-page this morning.

The two separate court cases, regarding as they do US-financed and abetted violations of human rights - against Assange as an individual and against innocent civilians in occupied territory in Gaza, the West Bank and in Israel itself - do not put the Biden administration in a good light, as they attempt to install the aging president in another four year term. 

It wouldn't even be a stretch for the ICC prosecutor to include Biden and the entire US Congress in his arrest warrant request. After all, without the billions of dollars in American military aid, this genocidal rampage would not be possible.

One ominous sign that the ICC will never touch the United States with a ten foot pole, and that this legal process is as much about political theater as it is about justice, is that prosecutor Karim Khan singled out human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, wife of George Clooney, for special thanks for her assistance in building the cases against Israel and Hamas leaders.

Her husband is set to headline a gala fundraiser for Joe Biden next month before heading to Broadway to reprise his film role as  legendary journliast Edward R. Murrow. Playing a journalist beats actually working as one every single time. Just ask the stenographers in the modern war-funded corporate media.

The War Comes Home

 The Gaza Solidarity Encampment at our local state college, about a half-mile from where I live was so new, so quiet and so relatively small compared to the scenes at other schools, that I didn't even know it existed. Not, that it is, until I started hearing the ominous droning sound at around 10:30 Thursday night.

Since we don't live below any flight paths, my first naive thought was that the waxing and waning noise above us was a small plane making helpless circles and that its pilot was either incapacitated or dead. It seemed that it would only be a matter of time before it ran out of fuel and crashed in a blazing fireball somewhere in the immediate vicinity. I almost called  the town police to report the noise - before it dawned on me that there was probably nothing they could do to bring the plane's distressed pilot safely down to earth.

It's a good thing I decided not to bother them because it turned out that they were otherwise occupied, with more than a hundred state, county and local police in riot gear and armed with nightsticks and zip ties  arresting more than a hundred State University of New York demonstrators right down the road. The sounds I heard were surveillance drones and perhaps a helicopter sweeping relentlessly back and forth for over an hour the dark skies above.

Everything I later learned about the police crackdown on campus came from the excellent student newspaper, The Oracle. It is the best source of local news around. What still remains of local mainstream media in this area (and in most of the rest of the United States) is behind a paywall. And anyway, what little information that could be obtained from a larger-circulation daily in Kingston came from a New York State Police press release. Just the facts, ma'm, with all the details and local color professionally omitted for your protection.

They were so professional, in fact, that they herded the arrested students, some of whom were injured, straight  into the parking lot of the Student Health and Wellness Center for initial processing. Because the local town court and lockup was too small to host them all, they were transported to facilities far away from the actual scene in order to to be formally arraigned.

By the next day, the number of student demonstrators had swelled and hundreds more of them walked out en masse from classes at noon Friday, bringing the protest directly to the office of the college president.  

 Participants chanted “40,000 people dead, you’re arresting kids instead” and sang the protest song Solidarity Forever. 

First-year education major Soph Rullo said, “I wasn’t too involved in what was going on. I saw what happened last night, and it was completely unnecessary and disgusting. Now, I feel like I need to get involved.

 Another first-year student who attended the walk-out said, “I’m here for the people who were arrested last night and couldn’t come here today. I want to stand for Palestine but also for the students that were taken.” 

Although The Oracle reports that students at the New Paltz campus were inspired by the protests at Columbia University, this was not their first protest gainst Israel's genocide of the Palestinians. 

In February, they'd demonstrated against the presence of three IDF soldiers, who had been brought on campus by the  Students Supporting Israel, an international group which is not an officially recognized group at the school.

Anticipating violence among students that never occurred,  college officials had limited attendance at the SSI lecture and slideshow to 60 ticket-holders, whose bags were checked and whose bodies were canned  before admittance. The barricaded event was guarded by state troopers, both inside and outside the venue. The anti-genocide protesters outside were peaceful and vocal.

So much for politicians like Joe Biden decrying the non-existent violence and "chaos" of student protesters rising up throughout the country. Although of an age to have participated in the youth demonstrations against the Vietnam War more than 50 years ago, Biden was too busy studying to land near the bottom of his Syracuse University law school class to have participated. No wonder he always brags that his wars will entail no American boots on the ground, when he hiimself had  balked at ruining his Weejuns in the antiwar protests he found so annoying.

The preppie college boy with the sweater wrapped strategically around his neck has ungracefully aged into a president whose strategic foreign policy is endangering and killing people all over the world.  So says career diplomat Hala Rharrit, who just publicly resigned from the State Department to protest the genocide of Palestinians.. In a devastating interview on Democracy Now!, she effectively and accurately called Biden a war criminal who is making everybody less safe, both at home and abroad.

As disgusting and maniacal he and his merry group of war profiteers are, however, they're doing us a pretty big favor. They are radicalizing a whole generation of young people, whose protests are already expanding from fighting against one genocide into fighting the whole corrupt military industrial complex. As I watch these young people, I feel the knot in my stomach relax,  knowing that the current gerontocratic regime will not last forever despite all the concierge health care their ill-gotten money can buy. Biden, far from squelching the righteous outrage on college campuses and in the streets, is only feeding it. His piecemeal loan forgiveness crumbs are blowing away on the hot air of his own sneering bombast.

Solidarity is rearing its lovely head. And the empty rhetoric of powers-that-be is falling into a million little pieces. 

A sure sign that they're losing their messaging war is that  they interrupted Friday's White House press briefing with Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame playing "Joe-E-Wan-Kenobe" in Biden's trademark aviator shades.

The fawning Guardian reporter gave the performance a rave review, even detailing the hilarious and supportive and appreciative reactions of the supporting players in the press corps.The writer further noted that Biden has enlisted both the dollar and performative help of Hollywood in an effort to boost his sagging poll numbers.

So it was a bit jarring to read at the end of the piece that actor Robert De Niro had gone on MSNBC to apparently commit the heresy of fuming  “The guy’s a monster. He is beyond wrong. It’s almost like he wants to do the most horrible things that he can think of in order to get a rise out of us. I don’t know what it is but he’s been doing it and doing it, and it’s fucking scary.”

It turns out he fooled you. He was talking about Trump, you utterly silly people!

I think I'd better stick with reading student newspapers, the last bastion of a free and independent press.