More than 200 people were arrested Monday outside the New York Stock Exchange, where they were protesting the US-financed genocide in Gaza as well as the escalation of Israeli aggression against the citizens of Lebanon and any day now, of Iran. The demonstrators were charged with blocking the entrances to thefortress wherein the stocks of such war profiteers as Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin are bought and sold at record profits.
Given the escalating slaughter in the Middle East, it was wholly appropriate that the protest was staged on Indigenous People's Day, which is still officially called Columbus Day in the United States.
It's been a near- unbroken line of genocide by various imperial powers in various parts of the globe ever since Columbus first landed on Hispaniola in 1492 and began wiping out the Taino people.
Now it's Israel, the proxy of the West in the latest campaign of murderous ethnic cleansing and land-grabbing. Joe Biden admitted as much years ago, when he kvelled that if Israel did not yet already exist, the US would have had to invent it, in order to protect American "interests" in that oil-rich portion of the world.
Populated as it is by descendants of European refugees from pogroms and by descendants of victims of the Nazi genocide, the Israel proxy/client state is the perfect actor to carry out mass extermination in Arab lands, in the interests of its Western investors, funders and zionist idealogues. The Holocaust, one of the most grotesque and well-documented acts of mass murder in modern history, is repurposed as the perfect weapon of "self defense." wielded by a nation-state made up of a historically oppressed ethnic group. It enables the United States and its European allies to wallow in their own historic racism even as the liberals among them pretend to be staunchly ant-racist as they pander for political support in their home countries.
Meanwhile, the same politicians badger their own citizens, claiming if they're against their leaders' campaign of genocide, then they must be antisemitic.
Besides being a proxy, Israel has also been the West's insurance policy. Remember that it was only a few years after the 1948 Nakba (forced expulsion of Palestinians) that the CIA fomented the coup in Iran and installed its own puppet on behalf of British Petroleum. Now that Iran's counterrevolution is a done deal, it's been a imperative ever since to topple the Islamic regime in the interests of controlling the global oil supply. The defense of Israel is their only excuse... and it is wearing mighty thin. The rest of the world is simply not buying it.
It is only because a presidential election is looming that the current Democratic administration is feebly demanding that Israel tone down the rampage just a bit. The Biden crew wrote a letter threatening to withhold "some" future arms shipments unless food and water relief is allowed in Gaza. This is tantamount to ensuring that the lambs are fattened up before the slaughter. It would never do to have images of delib erately starved, emaciated children circulating over the Internet before they are rendered out of sight and out of mind under tons of rubble.
The main difference between the joint US-Israel extermination campaign and all the genocides of the past is that the people back at home are now all too aware of the atrocities being committed in their name. And the imperialist propaganda simply iis not working as well as it once did.
Back in the 19th century heyday of the British Empire, for example, there were few critics and no crowds of anti-genocide protesters storming the Chancellor of the Exchequer or Buckingham Palace. People had only the complicit news sheets to keep them informed. They were not about to question the sources of the sugar they put into their imported tea or coffee. And if they did consider themselves to be informed, they were taught that exterminating lesser people was humane, because their very backwardness and "savagery" were already condemning them to extinction anyway. Imperialsts were only too happy to pounce on Darwin]s new theory of evolution and use a secious"survival of the fittest" excuse for their mass murders.:
As Sven Lindqvist writes in his magisterial "Exterminate All the Brutes" -
"After Darwin ,it became accepted to shrug your shoulders at genocide. If you were upset, your were just showing your lack of education. Only some old codgers who had not been able to keep up with progress in natural history protested."
Now, of course, trhere many more codger-ritics, both young and old. And since so many of them are Jewish thnmselves, they are more impervious to the antisemitism whose increasingly desperate ubiquity are rendering them ineffective if not totally meaningless. To the extent that antisemites do exist, they are becoming more emboldened, feeling free to verbalize their own racism against both Jews and Muslims. Antisemitisim and Islamaphobia are indeed two sides of the same coin.
"We do not want to remember," wrote Seven Lindqvist back in the 90s in his history of genocides which did, in part, inspire and enable Hitler to conduct his campaign of human annihilation. :We want genocide to have ended with Nazism, That is what is most comforting.... The air he (Hitler) and all Western people in his childhood breathed was soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races. It was a conviction which had already cost millions of lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application."
Perhaps, at long last, the cycle of mass public acceptance of, or ignorance of, the long history of genocide has come to a long overdue and much-deserved end.
And for those who think that Donald Trump is the only source of fascism, just remember that the highest ranking members of the New York City police state apparatus are either under criminal indictment or have already resigned in disgrace. It is cause for optimism when the lords of genocidal capitalism are threatened with even a momentary loss of their publicly funded private security forces. At the very least, brute force capitalism is losing more face by the day when it arrests peaceful protesters not beholden to corporate education being foisted upon them.
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