The New World Order Under Joe Biden: How the Normalization and Escalation of Atrocities, Dehumanization, Authoritarianism and a Rampant Disregard for the Rule of Law Not Only Reflect An Empire In Full Collapse, But Place The Entire World At Risk

“Looking back over the past two centuries, these imperial transitions are often marked by two troubling trends. First, dying empires often plunge into costly, sometimes disastrous military misadventures in a desperate attempt to recover their fast fading imperial glory. And, second, they tend toward political extremism as the painful loss of empire overseas demoralizes the citizenry back home.” – Alfred W. McCoy, American historian and Fred Harvey Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, The Progressive Magazine

I know for those who receive the majority of their global and domestic news from sources like MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other forms of corporate-owned media, it is easy to believe that the United States’ greatest peril festers in men like Donald Trump and countries like Iran, China and Russia. I don’t mean to suggest that there is no peril or concern to be found there. There certainly is. But none of it holds the immediacy or caliber of threat that the United States’ current 2-party corporate duopoly does as a whole. Many of the above-mentioned “threats” are threatening precisely because America poses itself as a violent, antagonizing and lawless force in the world as it desperately tries to maintain its already lost global hegemony. Even the dangers posed by Trump (Christian fascism) are sweepingly exacerbated by the Democratic Party’s insistence on using anti-democratic and unprecedented tactics and attacks against Trump – for which he will undoubtably seek retribution once in power. Add to that the stark reality that the Biden Administration hand-in-hand with leading neoliberal Democrats and neocons have normalized a level of brutality, authoritarianism and lawlessness usually reserved for dictatorships and banana republics. These normalizations will be both exploited and intensified by the next administration, Republican or Democrat, Biden or Trump.

These are the machinations of an Empire in collapse. The poverty, disenfranchisement, inequality, endless and barbaric wars and the rise of demagogues that come as a result of such historical events are now in full swing. Most of this can be traced back to the introduction of neoliberalism into American and global politics. This pernicious variation on capitalist ideology sped up the demise of the American experiment and left us in full empiric free-fall.

“It doesn’t matter how many wars they lose – Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan – how many debacles and fiascos – and we can add Ukraine and the funding by the Biden Administration as well as massive arms shipments to sustain a genocide. It’s all ultimately – I mean aside from the moral aspects of it – completely counterproductive to the American Empire. But empires in Decline – and and we are certainly in precipitous decline – engage in what historians call micro-militarism. They’re very judicious at the beginning of the empire about the use of military force, but at the end they seek to regain a loss of hegemony through military adventurism which only accelerates the decline. There’s historical example after historical example of that, but the Athenian Empire would be a good one where they attack, the fleet is sunk, the forces are wiped out or taken captive… and this leads to the kind of breakup of the Athenian Empire. That’s the point that we’re at and this constant military posturing, of course, internally, is seeing the country cannibalized from the inside, our cities and infrastructure and everything else is crumbling. Arnold Toynbee writes quite a bit about this… the decline of world Empires. He cites that unregulated, uncontrolled militarism as being the death knell of Empire…” – Chris Hedges, Q&A w/ Chris Hedges — What I’m Doing After Real News

The United States could have been (and may one day be if we collectively strike against the corporate powers and political elites in charge today) a country that fosters innovation and progress. A country that helps unite the world. That’s certainly our own self-mythology. But reality couldn’t be further from this mission. Instead, we have empowered those for whom world dominance and supremacy (racially, genetically, militarily and economically) are the only goal. At any cost.

“By the end of the 19th century, the Western dominance was complete. Western Powers could just kick the shit out of anybody and they colonized every place in the world… and this was the power, the arrogance, the insolence of the West. We are the inheritors of that insolence. We are of the view that we are superior we are dominant… We run the world and the neocons are the ultimate absurd trivialization and expression of this long process. People who have no historical sense, no prudence or judiciousness, but they think we’re playing Risk and we’re going to put our piece on every part of of the board… This claim of Western Supremacy was a historical moment that is going away and, like most of human history, we’re going to be in a world where different parts of the world have strengths and have power and, in many areas, China’s more advanced than the United States in technology, and some areas not as advanced in technology. And of course throughout Asia there’s great leadership, and Russia has a lot of technology… and a lot of smart people and a lot of great scientists and mathematicians and so on. So the idea that we’re just going to kind of whisk Russia off the board…That this is easy, that’s part of the delusional mindset of these neocons and, unfortunately, Biden is a kind of not much of a thinker – ever in his life – but he’s a kind of a fan of all of this. So to put it in succinct terms, we’re at the end of a 500-year swing – in my opinion – we’ve reached, economically, multipolarity… It doesn’t mean the end of the world. It just means other places have some chance, thank you very much. It’s not just the West, but we can’t get this through our thick skulls that other parts of the world can also have prosperity, can have innovation. Our line is “well, they must be cheating, they must have stolen everything.” …The fact that they have more scientists and engineers pouring out of their wonderful universities than the United States never crosses the minds of these neocons. So this is where we’re at now.” – Jeffery Sachs, economist and public policy analyst, professor at Columbia University, Bad Faith podcast episode: Risky Business

It has become clear to many – though certainly not all or even, perhaps, enough – that the United States is the prime instigator of all of this instability and bloodshed. The U.S. – currently under Democratic leadership and Joe Biden – are forcefully thrusting us into the single most perilous position the world has ever known. All for a delusory desire for global dominance by people who have an extremely tenuous grasp on reality. Once again, Jeffery Sachs:

“[What] makes me extremely worried is the fact that we can’t win this neocon Risk game. We’re not going to get all our pieces on the board. We’re not going to have NATO in Ukraine. The only question is, when will we recognize it and, thereby, save Ukrainians. The longer we go, the more Ukrainians die. That’s a simple and brutal arithmetic… That realization is gradually seeping into the blob, but the possibilities of escalation by the US are real. We are a nuclear superpower. We have lots of arms. We still have people like Biden, it seems because he says it all the time, who believe in American Primacy, who believe in this hegemonic aspiration, who believe that America, of course, leads the world, that it’s the indispensable country and all of that rhetoric of the neocons. And whether for domestic political reasons, to avoid embarrassment, or out of a fixation of ideology, or out of supreme misunderstanding and miscalculation, they can escalate. And we are in a world of thousands of nuclear weapons and we could have, of course, the Armageddon that ends everything. What worries me is not the long-term direction, but the risks that we’re facing along that path. And I’m extraordinarily worried about our side in those risks – more than the other sides. China’s not going to attack us. Russia’s not going to attack us. But we could continue the escalation because we’re the ones that say we insist on having every piece on the board.”

I can think of no action more imperative and grave than understanding and responding en masse to the stark reality that the United States is, currently, the single most dangerous country on the planet. And yet… all attempts to reverse course, to minimize human casualties and plead for common sense is met with the fiercest of resistance by those whose power comes at the hands of their corporate masters, without whom their power and positions would not exist. That misguided and anti-democratic resistance is often supported by a portion of the public so ensconced in the narrative of the American Dream and American Exceptionalism (or the Democratic Party as a force for good in the world narrative) that they have lost sight of the forest for the trees. Truth and reality are calculatingly obscured by the world’s most effective, widespread, well-financed and media-compliant propaganda machine. All the while, neocons and neoliberals have joined forces behind a shared hegemonic, militaristic and autocratic ideology disguised as virtue.

“I hear about it all the time. The narrative that America is righteous, it’s peaceful, it’s always a matter of defense, never offense. Well, a lot of people hold these views because this is a part of our civic culture. One can say also American exceptionalism has been part of American civic culture going back to the founding of the nation itself. But the neocons are a very extreme variant of that exceptionalism. The neocons emerged really at the end of the Cold War with the view that now there is one superpower in the world. It’s a unipolar world, the US can do what it wants, the US has a responsibility as the world’s policemen. This is put quite explicitly. Sometimes when critics say we shouldn’t be the world’s policemen, others say no, no, no, we’re not the world’s policemen, we’re just trying to keep security. But for the neocons, they said, yes we should be the world’s policemen, that’s our unique responsibility. Well, that gets you into a lot of wars all over the place that you don’t really understand very well. We’re in parts of the world where we have no knowledge, no history, no basis, no reason for being there.  

“So the bottom line is, whether they know it or not – and many do, some don’t – the US is engaged in overthrowing governments all over the world. It sometimes resorts to open war to do so as it did in Libya in 2011, or as it did in Serbia in 1999, breaking that country apart, creating a new statelet, Kosovo, and then putting one of NATO’s largest military bases there. Exactly the game of Risk: create a new country, put a huge military base in Southeast Balkans territory. You can’t make this stuff up, but that’s how it works… These end up in disasters, coups, ongoing civil wars, massive instability. That’s American foreign policy. It’s not a good foreign policy and I recently suggested that we pay a little bit of attention to an important warning given by the bulletin of atomic scientists who keep the Doomsday Clock – they try to assess how close we are to nuclear war and they put us closer to nuclear war now than at any time since the beginning of the nuclear age…

“[We are engaged in] lots of CIA covert operations that have no business being done. We tend to hear about them fleetingly if at all… You know, we tried to overthrow the Syrian government. This was an Obama initiative. It started in 2011 and it was a covert CIA operation called Timber Sycamore and it went on for many years and it was running jihadists, which became a kind of approach of the CIA and of the US government in its regime change operations. And of course it destroyed lots of Syria, it destabilized the Middle East and it did not overthrow Bashar al-Assad, it didn’t succeed in its basic operation.

“Now it’s a big story President Obama signing an order to the CIA to overthrow secretly a leader of another country, the whole project failing, hundreds of thousands of people dying. You’d think someone would cover it. Well, the New York Times mentioned it, I think twice – I stand to be corrected, maybe it was three times – are we kidding? How can we be grown-ups in this country if we don’t talk about reality?”  – Jeffery Sachs, economist and public policy analyst, professor at Columbia University, Bad Faith podcast episode: Risky Business

Meanwhile, America’s working class continues to be further decimated and left to fend for themselves (or turn to demagogues like Trump in the absence of any other support, aid or recognition) and told there simply isn’t money to help them while our leaders fight vigorously to send hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons to foreign countries and weapons manufacturers. Those who openly call out this humanitarian nightmare, the disempowerment and disenfranchisement of the majority of American citizens and the mountains of overt lies that accompany it, are met with punitive resistance in the form of social alienation, accusations of bigotry and racism, firing from jobs, having their passports revoked and/or being labeled as traitors and threatened with imprisonment.

Scott Ritter

One recent example among many was Scott Ritter – a former US Marine officer and United Nations weapons inspector who has become a prominent opponent of the US/NATO war against Russia – who last week had his passport revoked as he attempted to fly to St. Petersburg, Russia to attend an economic forum. Confiscating Ritter’s passport is a direct violation of American law. But the law no longer matters – it holds no relevance for elites unless it can be used in their favor. Otherwise, it is nothing more than an annoying obstacle to be disdainfully cast aside.

“[Scott Ritter] was a very disturbing moment. It replicates the kind of tactics that were used in the Red Scare. Remember, they took away Paul Robson’s passport and I think we are clearly moving into an era like that because the ruling Elites really have no answer anymore to the deep and legitimate rage that is rippling across the country. So instead of actually altering the system and who they serve, the idea is to crush and silence dissidents – and the Democratic party is at the forefront of this. These figures like Schumer and Biden and Pelosi and others, they wouldn’t hold the positions that they hold if they weren’t awash in corporate cash and so they’re running around talking about the danger of Trump destroying what’s left of our democracy. And they’re not wrong, but they won’t do anything meaningful to address the disenfranchisement and the alienation that is pushing people to support Trump because, if they did, they would lose their positions of privilege and power and they would rather risk everything than give up those positions.”  – Chris Hedges, Q&A w/ Chris Hedges — What I’m Doing After Real News

At this point in our political history, there is very little daylight, ultimately, between Biden and Trump when it comes to the larger, global picture.

“Why would Biden crack down on immigration in a Trumpian way? Well, because Biden’s has no moral core… He did it to essentially out-Trump Trump… Biden has – his entire career – he’s been obsequious to the centers of power. They used to call him Senator Credit Card. I teach in prison and half of my students wouldn’t be there but for Biden and Clinton. That’s the Three-Strikes-You’re-Out law, the massive militarization of police, the tripling of sentences. That’s all Biden. Biden was calling for the invasion of Iraq five years before we invaded Iraq. He used to oppose abortion. Obama picked him because, basically, he’s a Republican… But his entire political career has been devoid of any moral center at all and, you know, he’s not deviating from that now.” – Chris Hedges, Q&A w/ Chris Hedges — What I’m Doing After Real News

As I write this, America, under Joe Biden, is not only alienating itself from much of the globe, it has created a set of rules in which mass-murder, the decimation of entire cultures and the systematic destruction of the most basic survival infrastructure can be not only justified, but twisted into a moral imperative.

“If you are still supporting Israel, you must recognize the global rules you are now establishing. Unless you are a racist who thinks this is only allowable for Palestinians, you are saying it’s also ok to murder tens of thousands of Brits, Americans or Israelis, to destroy their homes, churches, synagogues, hospitals. To siege them, starve them, torture them, throw them in dungeons. These are the actions you justify. This is the world you are defending. This is the future you are building.” –  Craig Mokhiber, Former United Nations human rights official and a specialist in international human rights law, policy, and methodology

There are many world leaders watching closely to see how this plays out and exactly what is becoming acceptable behaviour toward other human beings, populations, races, religions, political ideologies and any group gathered behind a common goal or belief. What Joe Biden and leading Democrats and Republicans are financing, morally supporting, denying and giving political cover to will be the New World Order. The United States is telling the world that this is justifiable, that it is a matter of self-defense and that it is our duty to financially, morally and militarily support its continuation. As author, journalist, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and current candidate for the Workers Party of Britain in Blackburn, Craig Murray, preciently points out:

“One of the things that worries me is that I think [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi is watching what Netanyahu is getting away with very, very closely… obviously there have been the riots and killings and destruction of mosques in places like Gujarat. We’ve seen the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] rhetoric in the latest election campaign where they were routinely referring to Muslims simply as jihadists rather than Muslims. My fear is that if Israel continues with impunity and if Netanyahu continues with impunity, that the next genocidal moves against Muslims could well come within India.”

The global consequences for allowing Israel, the U.S. and the UK’s genocidal campaign to continue is catastrophic. Israel is already a country that is destroying itself from the inside. It will never bounce back from this. This will forever be Israel’s legacy. The only alternative we have to counter this future for the rest of us in any substantive – not to mention decent and humanitarian – way, is if there are stark and immediate consequences for these actions. Those measures have begun in earnest with the ICC and ICJ and the newest ruling by the UN Human Rights Council declaring after a long investigation that Israel is “responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, including extermination, intentionally directing attacks against civilians, murder or wilful killing, using starvation as a method of war, forcible transfer, gender persecution, sexual and gender-based violence amounting to torture, and cruel or inhuman treatment.” However, if the United States and the Biden Administration are allowed to continue on this path AND face no lawful consequences, then the message is sent that international rule of law is nothing more than a set of words without consequence or action. In other words, something to be dismissed outright without fear of retribution.

Certainly the global South has been more than a little vocal in their deep distress and distrust of the United States. And with good reason. Biden’s unequivocal support of Israel’s genocide against an entire population, as well as Biden closing the borders and making it near impossible to seek asylum or ask for refugee status in the United States, alongside Biden’s continued funding of what was once thought of as “Trump’s wall” along the Mexico border (something Biden called for long before Trump ever did), is the veritable writing on the wall. As the climate crisis increases unabated and military aggressions escalate, those in need around the world will be met with the same callousness, dehumanisation and violence now normalised by the United States, Israel and much of the Western world.

“I think that genocide is not something we can countenance. We can’t kind of hold our nose. It also presses a kind of New World Order and people in the global South are very acutely aware of this. As the mass migrations and climate crisis disrupts the ability of states to maintain control, you will inevitably see the global North – and Biden, of course, is doing this now by sealing off the border with Mexico – build these climate fortresses and use the industrial weapons at their disposal to slaughter those Franz Fanon called “The Wretched of the Earth.” So I think part of the angst and anxiety in the global South is – number one, of course – many of these countries like South Africa understand Apartheid and colonialism and settler colonial projects, but I think also they’re worried about the precedent that it sets for the world to come.” – Chris Hedges, Q&A w/ Chris Hedges — What I’m Doing After Real News

“But the American people will never allow this to happen,” you might counter. But they will. They already have. If you are voting for either Biden or Trump, you have already condoned this. Ever since 9/11, the United States has used “fear of other” to enact some of the most anti-democratic laws in the history of our country. We have almost completely abandoned the Constitution at this point. And mostly with the consent of a majority of the voting public. We have aggressively provoked what looks to be the making of a very real third world war as Russian ships and submarines carrying nuclear warheads have now entered Cuban waters off the coast of Florida in response to the Biden Administration and NATO’s insistence on making Ukraine a NATO member and giving permission to the Ukrainian military to use U.S. weapons to strike targets inside of Russia. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg recently revealed that:

“Allies are offering forces to NATO’s command at a scale not seen in decades. Today we have 500,000 troops at high readiness across all domains, significantly more than the goal that was set at the 2022 Madrid Summit.”

According to a recent report from The Telegraph on June 16, 2024:

“Nato is in talks to deploy more nuclear weapons in the face of a growing threat from Russia and China, the head of the alliance has said…”

Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers are doing what they can to prepare more American soldiers for what seems to be a large-scale, global, military inevitability. Political writer Caitlin Johnstone writes in her recent article The US Is Preparing For WWIII While Expanding Draft Registration:

“US lawmakers are working to expand draft registration to women and to automate registration for men, both of which would help broaden the pool of warm bodies the US would have available to throw into a hot war with a major military power.”

What was once deemed unthinkable is now framed and accepted as being for the “greater good.” Even the genocidal atrocities being committed by Israel and the United States are already in danger of becoming the wallpaper on our phones and computers; the unsurprising background of our day to day lives. Caitlin Johnstone shares:

“The dead children don’t affect me like they used to.

“The images. The videos. They still disturb and horrify, but not like they did in the beginning. Not anywhere close.

“And, honestly, I hate it. I hate that that part of me has been stolen.

“As much as I hated having my heart kicked around all day and having nightmares all night, I’d rather have that than this decreased sensitivity.

“People should not become desensitized to such horrors. People should not become accustomed to decapitated babies and small, mangled bodies. To corpses run over by tanks. To body parts carried in plastic bags by loved ones.

“These things should jar you. They should rattle you to your core. But they don’t anymore. Not here.

“I held onto it for as long as I could. It felt like a solemn duty, to hold on to that part of me that still screamed with an appropriate mixture of grief and outrage at the latest tiny shredded body. But desensitization sets in whether you want it to or not. That’s how they create soldiers, after all…” – excerpt from Caitlin Johnstone’s Behold The World Gently

It’s only a short matter of time before many American allies switch sides and distance themselves from the violent debacle that is the United States. Much in the same way the US distances itself from the decimated countries and dictators it installs, props up and then systematically destroys and abandons. As it will do with Ukraine and as it will eventually do with Israel.

“That’s all we do anymore is make weapons. The war machine drives foreign policy whether it’s rational or not. We knew, for instance, the Washington Post published the Afghanistan Papers. Everybody knew the war was un-winnable years before we pulled out… But we didn’t leave because it’s money. And so when we left Afghanistan, the arms industry, the weapons industry, their stocks went down and then Ukraine started and stocks went back up and, of course, now they’re making immense profits off of the genocide in Gaza. They’re just out of control. Karl Liebknecht, the German socialist, called German militarism ‘the enemy from within.’ That’s what they are. They’re the enemy from within.” – Chris Hedges, Q&A w/ Chris Hedges — What I’m Doing After Real News

In the meantime, the U.S. election frenzy shifts into high-gear. But U.S. elections have long-since been stripped of their democratic origins and intent. As early 20th century political activist and writer Emma Goldman once pointed out, “If voting was that effective, it would be illegal.”

George McGovern

“[George] McGovern – because of the calcification of the Democratic Party in the 1960s – especially if you remember the Chicago Convention of 1968 – McGovern ran the rules committee and it opened up the process to non-traditional candidates that weren’t picked by the party bosses. McGovern became the nominee but, as soon as he became the nominee he – and I would say since World War II, he and Henry Wallace were probably the only two major political figures (Wallace had been Roosevelt’s vice president and then ran for president) that tried to take on the military industrial complex. And they were crucified for it.

“So as soon as George McGovern became the nominee, the leadership of the Democratic party conspired with the leadership of the Republican party to destroy his candidacy, which they successfully did. And I think that after that, we have not seen either of the parties put forth a candidate that would take on the war machine which is disabling the country, destroying the country.

“I don’t see the rise of a figure – at least out of the major parties – and of course the two parties have conspired to essentially block third party candidates… I have long been a supporter of third parties. Not because I think the third parties can win – there’s too much stacked against them – but as Ralph [Nader] often said, if we can pull 5, 10, 15 million people out to vote for a progressive Third Party candidate, that’s the only way we have left to put pressure on the Democratic party to essentially break this slavish obsequiousness to corporations.”

“Mainstream candidates are never going to implement our top legislation because they don’t work for us. They work for Goldman Sachs and Exxon and Chevron and Raytheon and everyone else who pays them… Their lobbyists write the legislation. I think that Kshama Sawant probably got it right. We have to build a militant labor movement because the only power we have left to effectively pressure those who run the country is the strike. Without rebuilding a militant labor movement, things are just going to get worse and worse and worse…

As Theresa Amato writes in her book [Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny] – she was Nader’s campaign manager – she wrote a very good book on all of the mechanisms the two parties use to block Independent and third party candidates. Cornel is just not going to get on very many ballots. I think with the Green Party he would have gotten more, but I don’t think the goal is winning. I think the goal is to spook the Establishment. If enough people are willing to step outside of it and challenge it – and that has been the role of progressive parties throughout history. I mean, Teddy Roosevelt, who was kind of a retrograde political figure, broke up all the monopolies because you had powerful Progressive parties and socialists who were beginning to put heat on the center within the American system… But we have to hold fast. Ralph would be polling between four and seven percent, but then people would get into the polling booth and he wouldn’t walk away with those kinds of numbers. I think he always said it was because he thought people finally were frightened once they got into the booth because in the American political system you don’t actually vote for who you want, you vote against those you dislike…

“The whole system is a criminal enterprise. That’s what it is. The whole electoral system is legalized bribery that’s all it is. There were all these pushes to get petitions to get money out of politics and, well, what politician in Washington would support it because they wouldn’t be there if they got dark money out of politics? The person who’s done the best at kind of laying all this out is Sheldon Wolin and his book [‘Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism‘] – which is worth reading. He’s probably our most important contemporary political philosopher. He was Cornel West’s intellectual mentor.” – Chris Hedges, Q&A w/ Chris Hedges — What I’m Doing After Real News

As Theresa Amato herself writes:

“All it takes for nothing to change is for voters to keep voting for the “least worst” major party candidate instead of voting for someone who represents their choice and who has earned their respect and their votes.

“If the American people keep failing to change our 18th-century voting regime, the two-party, winner-take-all system will remain and continue to render choices unpalatable to the majority of Americans with mounting desperation, when neither party nominee is within nose-holding tolerance. The consequences for our collective futures should not be underestimated.” – Theresa Amato

Despite the lengths the powers-that-be will go to convince a frightened and disenfranchised public that they only have one choice come November, the reality is that there are other very real choices. Anyone who wants can vote for peace. Anyone who wants can vote against the deadly duopoly that has brought us to the very brink of destruction and ruin and bloodshed.

Jeffery Sachs explains in a very succinct and sound manner why he will be voting for Jill Stein come election time, why this is such a critical moment for widespread action and why this is very much NOT a game:

“Well, it’s easy. [Jill Stein’s] the only candidate for peace that’s going to be on the ballot across the country, and I’m for peace. I think this is the number one issue of our time. I am absolutely afraid of miscalculations, accidents, of a Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight. This is not a small thing. This is not a game we are not playing. I don’t like when people say “Well, they probably won’t use nuclear weapons.” Holy shit, do not talk that way – “They probably won’t…” Let us stay away from the nuclear brink. So we have a peace candidate. She will be on the ballot across the country. We have two leading candidates, each in their own way part of this long-term foreign policy set of miscalculations. When Trump was President, I was complaining about Trump. When Biden’s president, I complain about Biden. When Obama was President, I complained about Obama. I’m an equal opportunity complainer. I am not partisan. I am not focused on a party. I am not focused on the tactics of elections. I don’t want a job in the US government, god forbid. So in this sense, I am complaining about facts as we see them and I want a candidate of peace to win.”

So the question is: “Who is willing to act now? Who is willing to speak out against this today? Who is willing to vote against a criminal enterprise that has essentially orchestrated a corporate coup of the American Empire? Who is willing to vote for what they believe in as an act of direct defiance – to demand a stop to the bloodshed and suffering – even if those parties or individuals won’t win in this election?” Sure, it will be much easier years from now in retrospect to say we supported this or that and opposed this or that, but what matters to that future (and millions of human lives today) is what we do right now. In this moment.

 “[50 years from now] we’ll all be indignant and ring our hands and say “Never again.” And it won’t mean anything because we always stand up for moral causes after those causes are terminated or over. But to stand up for a moral issue, to make a moral stance in the moment, is costly and, of course, people will bathe themselves with the moralists of the past – you know, those people with moral courage – but then very rarely replicate that courage in the present. So once it’s over – I mean, look, we’ve got a postage stamp with Malcolm X’s face on it. I mean, the State was complicit in the assassination of Malcolm X, clearly, but that’s because the liberal class is morally bankrupt so it seeks to appropriate, to posit itself as the moral arbiter within society. The liberal class is used to go after dissidents critics. When I opposed the Iraq War, who were those who sought to discredit me – although I’d spent seven years in the Middle East, I’d been the Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times, I speak Arabic – they were liberals: …George Packer, etc. And Chomsky writes quite pressingly about this. He said that they set those moral lines. When you step outside of those moral lines, when you actually begin to critique the system itself rather than, perhaps, the excesses of the system, then they must destroy you because what you’re doing is challenging their own position as the moral center of society.” – Chris Hedges, Q&A on Palestine

We in the United States, we in the West, we who are the witnesses to this ongoing, televised genocide (ethnic cleansing, criminal mass-murder) are the people living comfortably on the safe side of the walls surrounding Auschwitz. We’re the ones who go about our daily lives as if none of this effected us, concerns us, reaches us in any significant way. Even if we are disturbed and shaken, most will feign or show genuine support in the voting booth for men like Biden who are complicit in genocide, or Trump who vigorously supports it as well. Many will – as is already happening – openly demonise or attempt to shame and punish those who speak out against or simply reveal these atrocities. It is important, I believe, to understand what role those who remain silent, turn a blind eye or help sustain this savagery play in history.

“We know the modern face of Nero, who illuminated his opulent garden parties by burning to death captives tied to stakes. That is not in dispute.

“But who were Nero’s guests? Who wandered through the emperor’s grounds as human beings, as in Rafah, were burned alive? How could these guests see, and no doubt hear, such horrendous suffering and witness such appalling torture and be indifferent, even content?

“There is nothing hidden about this genocide. Over 147 courageous Palestinian journalists have been murdered by the Israelis because they have conveyed the images and stories of this slaughter to the world, martyred for their people, for us.

“We are Nero’s guests. 

“The Palestinians have long been betrayed, not only by us in the global north, but by most of the governments in the Muslim world. We stand passive in the face of the crime of crimes. History will judge Israel for this genocide. But it will also judge us. It will ask why we did not do more, why we did not sever all agreements, all trade deals, all accords, all cooperation with the apartheid state, why we did not halt weapons shipments to Israel, why we did not recall our ambassadors, why when the maritime trade in the Red Sea was disrupted by Yemen an alternative overland route into Israel was set up by Saudi Arabia and Jordan, why we did not do everything in our power to end the slaughter. It will condemn us for not heeding the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which is not that Jews are eternal victims, but that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable.

“The opposite of good is not evil,” Samuel Johnson wrote. “The opposite of good is indifference.”

“The Palestinian resistance is our resistance. The Palestinian struggle for dignity, freedom and independence is our struggle. The Palestinian cause is our cause. For, as history has also shown, those who were once Nero’s guests soon became Nero’s victims.” – Chris Hedges, Nero’s Guests

I will leave you now with some more insights from Mr. Hedges, along with links to some of the video where so many of the above quotes originated:

“The great poison of neoliberalism is that it vomits up all of these figures – Trump, Orban and others. There’s a kind of continuity to Le Pen and France and everywhere else, the far right in Germany… Because the system seizes up. The institutions that once allowed for Democratic participation essentially are converted into funnels to further enrich the power of a tiny oligarchic corporate elite. And in frustration, people turn to these demagogues. I saw the same thing in Yugoslavia with Radovan Karadžić, Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tuđman and others. That’s what happens. Fascism is the result of failed liberalism. I can’t remember who said – I think it may have been Fritz Stern – We live in a failed Democratic liberalism. We’re not immune to these forces.

“Fascism is protean. It comes in different shapes, different forms. It isn’t going to come to America in jack boots and swastikas, it’s going to come with a Christian cross and the Pledge of Allegiance, as Robert Paxton pointed out in The Anatomy of Fascism. So the irony is that, on the one hand, we’re celebrating the defeat of German fascism, while the fascists within our midst are about to assume power.”