At this fraught moment, Americans cannot use Trump to hide from themselves, as many of them, especially their purported leaders, are very prone to doing.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with U.S. President Donald Trump at the Ben Gurion airport in Israel in 2017. (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Amos Ben Gershom, CC BY-NC 2.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost
Donald Trump does not seem to have too much trouble shocking people. In the three weeks since he resumed his residency in the White House, he has shocked the Danes (America must have Greenland), the Canadians (Canada will become our 51st state), the Panamanians (the Canal is ours), and the Mexicans (It’s “the Gulf of America” now).
Along with Elon Musk, his frighteningly fascistic sidekick, our new president has shocked (and awed) Washington more or less daily these past three weeks. All of this, fair to say, has also left the rest of the world, as it watches the Trump circus, in one or another state of shock.
But nothing comes close to the shock of Trump’s declaration last week that the U.S. will assert its sovereignty over the Gaza Strip, remove the 2 million Palestinians who live there, and turn the territory into “something really nice, really good” — into, indeed, “the Riviera of the Middle East.” The implications of this plan — to the extent Trump makes plans as against making it up as he goes along — are nearly too far-reaching to calculate.
Let’s do our calculations to the extent we can at this early moment. We will find that, among all that is shocking about Trump’s Gaza thinking — is this my word?—there are things that are, on careful consideration, entirely in keeping with American policy over the course of many decades and so are shocking only to those lost in the game of eternal pretend that prevails in our late-stage imperium.
As all paying-attention people will know, Trump announced his over-the-top plan to depopulate the Gaza Strip and turn it into some kind of paradise built atop the bones of terrorist Israel’s victims in the presence of Bibi Netanyahu, who, as of the International Criminal Court’s November 2024 ruling, is now a fugitive charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Zionist state’s prime minister was the first foreign leader to visit the Trump White House, and we can count his presence in the Oval Office a shock in its own right, however “normalized” America’s repellent relations with “the Jewish state” may be. But here I mean to mention a couple of remarks Netanyahu made in response to Trump’s presentation.
Trump held forth a good long while before the Israeli PM, beaming the psychotic’s smile with which we are familiar, took the microphone. According to an early transcript produced by Roll Call, apparently machine-generated, he began by praising Trump for the infamous transgressions of Trump’s first term: “You recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. You moved the American embassy there. You recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. You withdrew from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal.”
All regrettably true: Trump had just boasted of these disgraces. Then came the spew of lies we commonly associate with Netanyahu and other Israeli officials — and, for that matter, with Israel. UNRWA, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, “support[s] and fund[s] terrorists.” With reference to the Oct. 7 attacks, “Hamas monsters savage — savagely murdered 1,200 innocent people… They beheaded men. They raped women. They burned babies alive….” And so on.
You would think any Israeli speaking in public would avoid mentioning such matters, given every one of these assertions has been wholly discredited as part of Israel’s screen of fabricated propaganda. But no, within the walls of the Trump White House, if nowhere else in the world, one can say such things and be warmly welcomed.
In this moist hothouse of unreality, perfectly suitable to the occasion and the man hosting it, Netanyahu then turned to the just-revealed Gaza plan:
“You cut to the chase. You see things others refuse to see. You say things others refuse to say…. This is the kind of thinking that will reshape the Middle East and bring peace.”
These last remarks may read like mere flattery, but there is something important in them. They seem to me key to our understanding of what just happened between Trump and his criminal guest. Among Trump’s various sins, so far as orthodox Washington considers it, is his habit of saying the unsayable, as I like to put it: He makes statements that seem preposterous but are perfectly true and have long been true but are carefully kept out of accepted discourse.
Trump at the White House on Feb. 4 announcing his plan for the U.S. to take over with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looking on. (The White House, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
To Trump again:
“We should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this,” he said, “and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending the death and destruction and frankly bad luck.”
This is Trump’s latest reference, a gentle, disguised reference, to the forced expulsion of Gazans to Egypt and Jordan, both of which have made it clear in strenuous terms they will accept no new influx of Palestinians. During an earlier session with Netanyahu, Trump, as quoted in The New York Times, dismissed these objections out of hand. “They say they’re not going to accept,” Trump said. “I say they will.”
As is entirely clear and widely understood, Trump now proposes to ethnic-cleanse the Gaza Strip. While avoiding the phrase, he has made reference to this idea numerous times; it is now his formally stated policy. It must follow immediately there is no legal basis for any such project, at no point has the will of Palestinians been considered, and forced relocations under any circumstances are prohibited under the Geneva Conventions of 1948. There is, to state the obvious, no ground to withhold unqualified objection to Trump’s plan on this basis alone.
As we do, we must summon to mind that set of facts we know as history. President Harry Truman declared U.S. recognition of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, 11 minutes after its founding. Al–Nakba, the forced removal of Palestinians from their land, was then six months under way. And from the precise moment of Truman’s declaration until ours, America has been the premier sponsor of the ethnic-cleansing that is now at issue in Gaza.
Let us not be mistaken as to what Trump proposed at the White House last week. It is straight up and down condemnable. But we must be clear as glass as to what must be condemned. Impetuous as he is, as blessedly ignorant as he is of what is sayable and unsayable, Trump simply wants to get this done more openly than his predecessors and with more dispatch.
As a footnote here, it is worth noting a story behind Truman’s rush to recognize. Gore Vidal, longtime friend of the Kennedys, relates it in his introduction to Jewish History, Jewish Religion (Pluto Press, 1994), by Israel Shahak. It goes this way:
“Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. ‘That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.’ As neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike his father and my grandfather), we took this to be just another funny story about Truman and the serene corruption of American politics.”
Truman in the Oval Office, evidently receiving a Menorah as a gift from Israel’s Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, on right, with Abba Eban, Israel’s U.S. ambassador, May 8, 1951. (Government Press Office of Israel, Wikimedia Commons,CC BY-SA 3.0)
Possible, maybe, probable: We cannot weigh the truth of the tale with dead certainty. But Vidal saw fit to tell it in print, and Shahak, a Holocaust survivor, a professor of chemistry at Hebrew University, and a respected if occasionally controversial student of Judaism, put it on page one of his book. At the risk of teleological reasoning, if Truman took $2 million ($26 million today) from the Zionists, it is right in line with what American pols have harvested from the Jewish lobby all the way up to the $100 million Trump reportedly accepted from Miriam Adelson, widow of arch–Zionist Sheldon Adelson.
From The New York Times piece quoted earlier:
“In unveiling the plan, Mr. Trump did not cite any legal authority giving him the right to take over the territory, nor did he address the fact that forcible removal of a population violates international law and decades of American foreign policy consensus in both parties.”
This sentence is true from start to finish. But we must read the last bit, concerning the foreign policy consensus in Washington, very carefully. I hope we can all now agree, having witnessed Joe Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s genocide, that Trump’s proposal to ethnic-cleanse the Gaza Strip is entirely in line with “decades of American foreign policy consensus” but for the crudity of Trump’s way at it.
The question on which Trump broke the bounds of convention turns on sovereignty. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” Trump said at his news conference with Bibi Tuesday evening. He elaborated:
“We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs… level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out…. Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area. Do a real job, do something different.”
Trump receives a menorah from Miriam and Sheldon Adelson at the Israeli American Council National Summit, Dec. 7, 2019, in Hollywood, Florida. (White House, Joyce N. Boghosian)
After he and Bibi spoke, a reporter asked Trump if this project would require the dispatch of American troops. “If it’s necessary, we’ll do that,” he replied with that strange nonchalance he affects. “We’re going to take over that piece and develop it.” He has since stepped back from this. “The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” he declared on Truth Social, his digital megaphone. “No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed!”
Two points. One, it is hard to imagine executing a project of this magnitude in a locale as politically charged as Gaza without involving American troops. Two, troops or no troops seems a small distinction in the scheme of things. There are already reports of “foreign contractors” assisting Israeli forces on the ground in Gaza.
This is the first time an American leader at any level of government has publicly favored the physical acquisition of land beyond America’s borders in who knows how long. The shock here is Trump’s proposed introduction — or reintroduction, better put — of territorial dominion of the imperial sort, and by force if force is needed. His topic last week was the 140 square miles that comprise the Gaza Strip. But note the similarity with his ideas for Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal. This is what Trump meant in his inaugural speech when he spoke of America as “a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory….”
As those remarks plainly indicated, Trump is well aware that he presides over an imperium. He could not otherwise think and speak as he does. But it is remarkable how often this man fails to recognize the rather basic facts concerning the imperium’s history and conduct. His theme is land, or as he would be comfortable putting it, real estate. But the imperium’s theorists and managers are not into real estate anymore — not on any kind of permanent basis.
America laid the foundations of the empire that now burdens us and the rest of the world during the Spanish–American War, an eight-month affair in 1898. There were early disgraces such as the Philippines, which the U.S. wrested, with great brutality from the Spanish and kept as a colony for nearly five decades. Guam was seized as a coaling station for American cargo vessels sailing to and fro “the East.” Ditto American Samoa. This was the way it was done. The Europeans had empires, and now we must have one: This was the orthodox reasoning when figures such as Mark Twain and William James formed the Anti–Imperialist League in response to the war against the Spanish.
Washington granted Filipinos independence in 1946. The date is significant. By that time, the eve of the independence era, London and Paris recognized that territorial dominion was a 19th century technology, way out of date. What we call neocolonialism was the new thing. Washington understood this, too. It has, accordingly, had no interest in taking over other peoples’ lands since the 1945 victories. Those operating the imperium are interested in dictators and other sorts of compradors through whom to project power. This is why the postwar decades are pockmarked with coups, assassinations, color revolutions and the like. It isn’t about land, or the American flag luffing in the wind above it.
How can Trump fail to see this? (And who in hell advises him in these matters, you have to wonder.) But are we now supposed to continue pretending Washington has not run an empire for nearly 80 years? Caitlin Johnstone, the spiky Australian commentator, occasionally remarks on the skill required to maintain an empire and hide it from the American populace. True enough. But so far as I can make out, fewer of us by the day are so deceived. If there is any virtue in Trump’s plans, Gaza and the rest of them, there is no hiding the reality of empire anymore.
Trump proposals breach international law. America has been breaching it for decades. Trump proposes to ethnic-cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza. America has sponsored that project since Israel came into existence. Trump may sanction the Zionist state’s annexation of the West Bank in coming weeks — another big one he let drop last week. Such a sanction has been informally in effect since the settler movement began.
Trump wants to take over Gaza. The U.S. will be yet more a participant in Israel’s terror than it was under the Biden regime. This is new. It is egregious, altogether shocking. But I ask a couple of questions, genuinely posed: How new, exactly? Is Trump’s plan simply another step along the road Washington has traveled since Truman, if he did, accepted that suitcase on that day in May 77 years ago?
Many officials, political figures and commentators have expressed doubt that Trump’s Gaza plan can ever be executed. I must withhold judgment on this question for now. But his announcement, all by itself, has already set free ultra–Zionists of all sorts. It is now perfectly acceptable for public officials — Mike Huckabee, Elise Stefanik, Tom Cotton, numerous others — to advocate Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. Some of these retrograde cretins, the Times has reported, now take to rejecting “the West Bank” in favor of the Biblical “Judea and Samaria.” This is a significant shift in nomenclature, amounting to a vicious statement of intent. Ownership of Gaza or no, Trump has turned a significant corner.
But all of last week’s shocks, excluding none, have been latent in American policy for decades — since May 1948, indeed. Let us not miss this. At this fraught moment, we cannot use Trump to hide ourselves from ourselves, as many Americans, especially their purported leaders, are very prone to doing.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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Mr. Lawrence seems to have said the right things and got them right here, certainly seems he did to me. Adding to his record of telling it like it is.
Nothing good to be said here about what he has to say here. I have nothing to say.
The incredibly huge cost of the Trump – Musk mugging of the U.S. Federal Government is likely to brake the Federal Reserve IMHO unless something else is coming to equalize this disruption, so far n unannounced.
I simply do not get it.
Patrick Lawrence thanks for the your great effort here.
David Ben – Gurion arrived in the U.S. (for the frst time) May 1915 becoming very active in organizing and speaking in 35 U.S. cities. Wrote a book in 1918 that made $20K profit.
From IRmep’s Israellobby – Laws of New York, 1920 April 14, Chapter 205 An Act to Incorporate Zionist Organization of America passed with three fifths of the body present
1930 David Bem Gurion active in Zionist Labor activities .
9/6/38 is the first AZO gets FARA notice of here from teh U.S. State Department. This history continues to 3/3/1960 DOJ asks ZOA legal council about the status of FARA registration. ZOA recieved seven previous inquiries from FARA previous to the 3/3/1960 DOJ inquiries.
My question is was David Ben Gurion the father of the Zionist movement in Israel or the U.S. or doing something else?
Enter Israel Shahak and Gore Vidal’s story, from JFK no less, about Truman and 2 million dollars, which is a very large of money in 1948. This is a classic sounding ‘cock and bull’ story. An effective smear of two American presidents .
The timing though suggests something much more sinister to me, could the money have been funds to grease the rails in D.C. to allow the NUMEC diversion? 2 million dollars was a quite large amount of money in 1953. (NUMEC Est. Shanak was a accomplished organic chemist physicist and worked closely with those in Israel . Enter Ernest David Bergman, nuclear physicist, who was chairmen (1952) of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, IAEC In 1961, (JFK elected) he attended Stanford U. in the US and returned to Israel in 1963 (JFK Murdered) when he returned to Israel.
“Just the facts”, Lawrence the first rule of sleuthing, remembering of course there are no such things a coincidences in solving mysteries.
Sounds like a stretch to me. All the known participants named in the story were dead and Shahak after all could not help himself and put the story on page one of his books. Was he bragging? Was he, a Zionist, the person who supposedly delivered the money to Truman and was it Zionist money maybe from the many at the USAEC.
Inquring minds want to know and judging from the actions of Zionist of late encourages my suspicions.
Truman did worse than take the bribe JFK related in his story. Six months earlier, Truman bribed and arm-twisted sovereign member nations of the UNGA to change their intentions to vote AGAINST the partition of Palestine as per UNGA 181. In addition, since the vote looked clearly to be lost, Truman pulled all the stops to get the UNGA to postpone the vote until after the Thanksgiving weekend in 1947 in order to set his ‘diplomatic’ musclemen loose on the handful of countries alluded to. This story is told in its necessary detail in the Collins/Lapierre “O Jerusalem” book on the events of 1947-49. For more in-depth documented scholarship on what went on with international Zionist pressure, American Zionist pressure, and inside White House Zionist pressure on Truman throughout this period, John Judis account clearly tells the story: “Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Israeli-Arab Conflict”. Truman was played back and forth like a ping pong ball, since both his Sec. State Marshall and his Sec. Defense Forestall were opposed to supporting the creation of the Zionist state, on the grounds that it was not in the best interests of the United States. Forestall even goes into detail about it in his diaries.
Another great article from Mr. Lawrence. What about the blatant realities that are being purposely over looked by the MSM and others. These realities can seen and felt by the US populace at the ground level. The majority of US Citizens have been the other victims of these war for wealth initiatives. For decades they have borne the brunt of these self defeating policies, as their cost of living skyrockets and their quality of live has reached subterranean levels. I have heard time and again, testimonies from people of all age groups, who are working two jobs at below sustenance pay to barely cover shelter and food for their children. Perpetual war is the handmaid of predatory Capitalist economics. The billionaire class, who are the main recipients of the blood soaked revenue generated by these violent campaigns, are in the midst of sociologically engineering a society that only comfortably sustains 20% of the current US population. Many of those I spoke with are horrified by what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank but, don’t believe they have the agency to do anything about it.
Trump seems to be trying to trump (pun intended) all of the tyrants of history in his efforts to conquer the world by any means.
Standing up there at the podium with the most barbaric killer since Hitler, he talks as if he is an Emperor of old, demanding, dictating and denigrating – trampling all over the rights and sovereignty of other peoples and nations. He is a megalomanic, and clearly enjoys shocking everyone with his outrageous statements.
By any standard, he is insane – deluded and deranged. He makes Biden look positively meek and mild by comparison (& Biden was as nasty as they come!).
I also think Trump is insane. And while he has lost his mind, Netanyahu has lost his humanity, with no regard for human life apart
from his own.
A guy named Adolf followed the same course. He was not insane when he built his party by beating communists in the streets during protests. He was not insane when he became Chancellor (with only 40% of the vote) in the early 1930’s. A horrible right-winger, yes, but insane, no. But, by 1943-45, he’d “evolved” into a madman who shouted and screamed at people around him, who could not be told any bad news, who ordered “the final solution” and a “scorched earth” defense of Germany knowing he planned on suicide and wanting to leave nothing behind. Germany was a mess in 1946, but it would have been worse if some of his final orders had been carried out.
Combine megalomania and absolute power and then the famous philosophy that absolute power corrupts absolutely appears to apply to the mind and the soul. Or, to quote the poetry of Roger Waters …
“Crazy,
Toys in the attic I am crazy,
Truly gone fishing.
They must have taken my marbles away.
Crazy, toys in the attic he is crazy.
You little shit you’re in it now,
I hope they throw away the key”
— “The Trial”, from the opera “The Wall”, by Roger Waters and Pink Floyd.
Netanyahu never had any humanity.
Alas, alas. A great tumble down since the elementary school soaring adulation of the US Constitution and the amazing
nation where justice and freedom for all luminously revealed our (moral, patriotic) superiority and excellence. Gone
now the shine. In its place, darkness. And truth. The Fall engineered by the crass and spiritually, morally impoverished
“corporate way” , the gradual collaboration of the Democratic Establishment and the citizenry either numbed to or split off
from their instincts.
The citizenry is brainwashed. I got lucky, not too many after me managed to escape. Madison Avenue’s mind control machine was already powerful by the MadMen era of the late 1950’s. Television had been added to the radios and films that Goebbels had used. But, a generation revolted against that, and they did so by turning off Madison Avenue and the rest of the machine. If you had asked a member of that generation about an article in the New York Times, you’d have gotten back a reply of “Who cares what the squares think?” Thus, they created an immunity for themselves against the mind control.
I got lucky. In the early 80’s, when my instincts said to protest against Reagan (and in just a few years, Biden), I met some of the remnants of that movement, and they taught this child well. They helped me free myself from mental slavery.
But, once unplugged, I watched the mind control grow even stronger. Television used to be a small handful of channels that went off the air playing the national anthem at midnight. News was half an hour on TV in the evening. The mob mentality of social media was only in the future the dreams of psychopathic oligarchs. But, now, TV is a 1000 channels 24 hours a day. News is now 24/7, with multiple channels always blaring at you whereever you go as if in an orwellian nightmare. Social media is now the modern tool for book burnings as it seems to bring out the worst of mob mentality.
“Numbed” is not a bad description of it, for those who see the reality that is ignored by the comfortably numb surrounding them. But, what it is is Mind Control. And it is defeated by turning it off. People don’t have to be old fashioned and say “Who cares what the squares think?”, but people do need to hit that Off switch.
Sooner would be much better than later. Then, convince the sleepwalkers around you to turn off the seductive sedative machines. Disaster may be closer than it appears in the funhouse mirrors.
Bill Clinton didn’t wait for Trump to make it acceptable to talk about “Judea and Samaria” instead of the West Bank. In his unhinged campaign speech for Kamala Harris in Michigan, he told the audience that Jews had been living in Judea and Samaria before Islam existed. He also said that anyone upset by what was happening in Gaza should understand how Israelis feel.
With presidents like Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Biden and Trump, America doesn’t need enemies.
Trump: “We will occupy the Gaza Strip, based on US authority”
American Empire … out in the open through Trump , the blabbering executive.
Well, “out in the open” for the rest of the world. Americans have a remarkable ability to keep their eyes firmly shut. Americans can sleepwalk while claiming they are woke.
Yes, an increasing part of the world will see this, below the oligarch level that is, and that will have very negative consequences upon an increasingly isolated America. Hoover’s isolation that led to the Great Depression won’t be nuthing compared to being shunned as genocidal monsters. But, the Americans will still shout “We’re Number One” with pride, and not notice the smoke from ‘the showers’ added to all the rest of the capitalist pollution that enriches the oligarchs.
Besides, America’s crematoriums have been running full-tilt for awhile now. The Democrats just set the record for dead Americans in a four year term. I think, as its not very publicized by either pro-death party. Trump had held the previous record. A society that puts profits over people can kill you.
Have a problem with pointing out that president IT spoke re: U.S. foreign policy as no other “president” before has … to domestic or world .
The U.S. has been a colonialist imperium from its very beginning; a heritage it acquired from its British forebearers. It began with the expansion into the Northwest Territories (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois) and continued through the Louisiana Purchase, Texas, the Spanish colonies in the south west, the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii, Alaska, the Philippines, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, you name it. All of it bought or stolen from someone else. The Monroe Doctrine (1823), which prohibited European interference in the Western Hemisphere made it clear; this half of the world is ours.
Americans have never been content with what they have. There has always been the push for more land, more wealth, more power. It is a disease, a cancer which will, one day, destroy its host.
@w.r. knight:
thank you for reminding us that 1948 isn’t the [only] year
to remember when it comes to US american imperial history:
ever since mayflower pilgrims disembarked near plymouth rock
around 1620, US history was based on killing other peoples, on
grabbing their land[s] and thinking: “american exceptionalism!”
#45+47’s america first is thus not new, just popularly rephrased.
i am shocked to realize how little opposition against imperialism
i see in my EU country – whose lawmakers never tire to tell us how
“peace- ‘n’ democracy-loving!” we are and how rules-based our order is.
they violate that order with each and every hypocritical breath they take.
because what used to be, for a fraction of a historical second, the common
idea of “let us not repeat the destruction, horrors and pain of world war two!”,
has long re_turned into: “insatiable white might makes right!”
jean ziegler, a swiss sociologist and former UN rapporteur for the right to food,
calls our world order “cannibalistic”. he’s optimistic that resistance movements
of today shall change that order. maybe they will – probably not in my lifetime …
I wish people knew what the Monroe Doctrine was.
At the time, there was a debate in revolutionary America. On one side, there was John Quincy Adams, a future President, who spoke about how if America went abroad seeking monsters to slay, that if America began this sort of ‘humanitarian’ cause of bringing liberty to other nations, then America was doomed to lose its own hard-won liberty. They would send good-wishes to other seeking liberty, but no real support.
Monroe instead supported the other revolutions in the hemisphere, including I think Simon Bolivar in Venezeula. The Europeans were trying their usual bankers games to enslave these new republics by debts. With the soon-to-come step of seizing assets or nations because of ‘bad debts’. Monroe did go abroad with his Monroe Doctrine to try to protect these other fledgling revolutions from the predatory EU bankers by saying “hands off bleepity-bleeps”.
Of course, by the War is a Racket era of America, this had been twisted far from its original revolutionary intent and into American imperialism. America no longer supported revolutionaries in the hemisphere, but aimed to suppress them for United Fruit Company and other “American interests” citing an old revolutionary doctrine in the usual capitalist obfuscation.
I agree of course with everything Mr. Lawrence has said here. Of course the great big obstacle to generating opposition to Trump’s plans is the corporate/state media and its framing of issues. Most especially Israel. Anyone following independent reporting on Gaza is painfully aware of the one sided reporting on the condition of some Israeli hostages. Notice they haven’t reported on the hostages who look perfectly healthy and well cared for and have spoken out about their good treatment. And not one word, photo or video of the condition of the prisoners being released from Israel’s gulag prison system. I saw one photo of a man who had been imprisoned as a teenager and released 10 years later. He looked no different from those released by the Red Army at Auschwitz. Must not allow propagandized Westerners to view this evidence.
I do believe Trump’s grand plans will all fall flat, but not before more damage is done to innocents domestic and abroad and to the further erosion of the tattered reputation of the US. I suppose the latter is a good thing as we need to come to grips with the reality of US policy that has caused so much suffering in our world. Our day of reckoning is definitely coming. Let’s hope we survive long enough to get there.
Israel runs congress, our media, and Chump. musk is doing his utmost to control social media, making it all the more important for those of us who see the metastasizing cancer to shout from the mountaintops. Thank you Lois, for your voice.
Chump’s plans will create outrage and violence in West Asia as never seen before. But as Chump see it: it will be good for the MIC, and whatever generates income for a collapsing Empire is a good thing.
We might also note the subtle use of language in just about all media reports :
Israelis are hostages.
Palestinians are prisoners.
The use of the term ‘prisoners’ subtly suggests wrong-doers paying the deserved price for their crimes (the major crime seemingly being Palestinians.
‘Hostages’ suggests helpless victims of circumstance, notwithstanding that they might be military and have contributed to the current situation via their actions.
Quite right. Excellent point.
Yes. The Palestinians are indeed hostages. In fact, they are all being held hostage whether inside or outside Israel’s gulag system.
Hey
I can’t believe my fellow countrymen voted this lying bastard in for another term. And the rationales make me want to puke every time they make excuses for this buffoon.
They voted for him because the other candidate was seriously proposing a WWIII scenario, and under these circumstances, it is rational to choose an oligarchic dictatorship over species extinction, IMO.