Seymour Hersh: FORCE EVACUATION AND SMASH THE CAMPS

A report from inside Gaza

SEYMOUR HERSH

NOV 20, 2024

∙ PAID

Displaced people use animal-drawn carts for transportation in Deir al-Balah on the central Gaza Strip on November 20. / Photo by Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images.

Israel, fortified by bombs and funding from the Biden administration, is escalating the forced evacuation of hundreds of thousands from the north of Gaza to the south, amid fierce bombing and the deprivation of food and water for those who stay behind. This is continuing amid marches and other demonstrations sponsored by the religious right in Israel whose leadership also is calling for north Gaza to be turned over to Israeli settlers. What was a worrisome rumor in Gaza more and more seems like a reality.

Control over all of Gaza and the West Bank is the core demand of the religious right in Israel that now dominates the government. I was told this week by a well-informed Washington official that the Israeli leadership will formally annex the West Bank in the very near future—perhaps in two weeks—in the hope that the decisive step will end, once and for all, any talk of a two-state solution and will convince some in the skeptical Arab world to reconsider financing the planned reconstruction of Gaza. Arab communities in the West Bank have been under increasingly violent pressure from Israeli police and armed settler attacks have become a sad staple of life.

Meanwhile, life for the two million Palestinians in Gaza grows dimmer by the day as food and fresh water are harder to find and more costly as United Nations relief truck convoys have increasingly become targets of attacks in areas presumably under the control of the Israeli Defense Force. The cargo ends up in the hands of criminal gangs that are rarely challenged by the IDF or local Palestinian police, who only act when confronted by public pressure.

I spoke recently with someone who has a sophisticated on the ground knowledge of life in Gaza today, both the north and south. This is a current report that goes beyond what even the best foreign correspondent would be able to access. Getting in and out of Gaza is extremely difficult for journalists, academics and other outsiders these days, involving coordination with the Qatari or the Emirates governments. The vast majority of Gazans are unable to get out.

Below is the report, which I have condensed and edited. It’s not pleasant reading.

“The conditions in the north of Gaza are holocaust conditions. We don’t use the word because it has a special place in the Western imagination and heart, but this is a holocaust in terms of collective punishment and dehumanization and the technical tools. But is it a holocaust eighty years later being done remotely and on people’s bodies. . . . A missile is dropped in a densely populated civilian area, tents mostly, and then you have drones coming in afterward to pick off people one by one. We didn’t have drones during World War II, but we do now, and the logic is pretty much the same.

“What we’re seeing happening in north Gaza is what I told you months ago the Israelis were going to do, and this what they did. They will annex the north and they will annex the West Bank. Soon you will see all in the press turn to the West Bank. The Israeli settlers have been more armed since October 7. The government and the Supreme Court in Israel support the settlers, and there are right-wing organizers and community representatives who themselves live in settlements and they are ready.

“They feel there is no leadership in the United States at this moment to stop them. And that is really how the Middle East feels, period. This will be the new phase, and suddenly the world’s attention will go away from Gaza and Lebanon. And everybody will be talking about the annexation of the West Bank in a month or two.

“The Israelis have built roads and bypass roads and corridors in the north of Gaza, and they are now starting to nicely connect all with each other as you can see if you look at satellite images. The Israelis always said they were going to do this. . . . And those Palestinians living in north Gaza will either be exterminated en masse, as they are now, or they will be pushed south where they are humiliated and stripped and tortured and have to endure unbearable conditions. Anyone I speak to who recently came from the north to the south describes the horrid condition of having their children taken away from them. . . . Children are being lined up on one side, and the Gazans are told to pick up a random child and go with that child to the south even if it’s not their child . . . and not knowing if your child made it. These kinds of horrific tearing of the social fabric are happening.

“Meanwhile in the south, where there once was food but no cleaning materials, there is now no food. The Israelis are likely preparing to gather everybody into specific pockets in the south. So it is not only about annexing the north but it’s also about concentrating the population in specific pockets in the south. This is what they will do.

“And I’m not being a pessimist. This is what they will absolutely do: they are budgeting for it and making plans for it now. If you see it, you see it, and if you do not, then you will be surprised in a few months when the Israelis declare it themselves.”

“If you are looking for hope, it is in the fact that people in Gaza haven’t become zombies and are not eating each other or ripping each other apart. That is not what’s happening, but the social fabric is being sundered. There are kids coming into hospitals from stab wounds from uncles and fathers because they ate too much. And there are cases of rape coming in. I mean there is a breaking of the social fabric after a year of hellish nightmares . . . after a year of all international order and systems collapsing and failing to treat Palestinians as humans. There is absolutely a breaking, but there is still hope that I see in that people are not ripping each other apart. There is still production of art. And people are still growing foods and crops in the camps.

“And this is what Israel is now targeting: the vigor of the refugees and the camps. These are the enemies of Israel. The Israelis thought by turning people into refugees they would break them. But they actually are empowering them. So this is why they are going after the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and targeting the right of return, targeting the refugees. And why the Israelis are constantly bombing, bombing, and smashing things . . . the tents and refugee camps that are built all over Gaza now, in addition to what already existed. Israel is going after the refugees and the camps because they see after eight decades of doing what they did that these are places of memory and history and organizing and identity, and that is what they are trying to smash. Right? When you are trying to smash a population from existence that is what you go after. 

“So the Israelis are not following the logic of war; they are following the logic of genocide. And when we understand that, we can also understand why their bombing is happening the way it is.”

I will report on the Israeli point of view about the future of Gaza in another column tomorrow. 

Election 2024: AFL-CIO Leaders Pass the Buck

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED

11-17-24

 

The heads the AFL-CIO have some neck on them. In the aftermath of the crushing defeat of their choice for President of the US, the Democrat Kamala Harris, Liz Shuler, the president of this national body to which most US unions are affiliated, said that the Democrats lost the election because the party didn’t listen to low income voters. Another top labor official added that the reason was the party resorted to, “telling people not listening”. The Democrats have an excuse for their actions, it is a party that represents billionaires, the critics in question claim to represent working class people even if they do call us “middle class” to confuse things. It simply exposes their bankruptcy further.

 

Liz Shuler never offered such criticism as recently as a month ago issuing a press release saying, “From her time as attorney general to U.S. senator to being a partner in the most pro-union administration in our lifetime, Kamala Harris has delivered for working people every step of the way,”  Liz Shuler AFL-CIO President, Sept. 30 2024

 

Speaking to the Building Trades Legislative Council earlier this year, Shuler made it clear that workers are facing only two options in election 2024:

“……they're being offered two paths right, now one is to demonize, turn on their fellow workers to divide ourselves by Race by orientation, by religion, by immigration status; and then there's the other path, the better path, the path where we come together where we take on our real enemies where we bring hope and better lives to tens of millions of people. Those are the two paths.”

 

If you want to get a taste of why so many union members pay little attention to what top officials are saying, these comments are it, and watch this video of that speech, it’s nauseating, I couldn’t get through it all. When I watched it, it only had 66 views in 6 months, there’s no way the average building trades worker could sit through it, it is not speaking to their needs either. 

 

Shuler is not alone. Only a short while ago, Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, was portrayed as the new radical face of the organized labor movement. Campaigning for the Democratic Party, Nelson praised Kamala Harris, “Trump wants to fire striking workers….”, she said, “…..and Biden and Harris have upheld our right to strike.”  She also said, “We see one candidate as the collective bargaining agent in chief and the other as the union buster in chief.”. No thinking worker, if they’re honest with themselves, believes this

 

This is less than a year after Biden introduced emergency legislation, (with Harris’ support) in the US Congress denying railway workers the right to strike despite the strike being legal. The Democrats and Republicans have no trouble reaching out across the aisle when it’s a choice between workers’ rights and living standards and corporate bosses’ right to profits. Liz Schuler and the rest of the AFL-CIO leadership did nothing as this sacred right for workers was denied overnight.

 

If the heads of major corporations gave such glowing reports as profits sank they’d be out of work.

 

Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers President campaigned for Harris and portrayed this election as between the “billionaire and corporate class” and that the Democratic Party was on the opposite side of the class war to the Republicans. He painted Kamala Harris as some sort of working class hero, almost the 21^st century’s Mother Jones. One UAW member told me he thought Fain was her campaign manager. It appears that all a politician from a major capitalist party has to do to win the support of the labor hierarchy is walk a picket line holding a sign for a minute or two. They often come down to picket lines for photo ops when there are elections. Believe it or not, the average worker sees this con for what it is.

 

“The Democratic party is interested in working-class people and what they have to say and they want to be in our coalition”, Fain told union members in Michigan on October 29^th. “We’re in a vicious cycle where the billionaire and corporate class take more and more for themselves and rewrite the rules of the game to keep it that way,”

 

Now the dust has settled, and the Democratic Party is licking its self-inflicted wounds, the heads of organized labor are doing what they always do, blaming their favorite Party when things go awry. They are not only bankrupt ideologically; they are political cowards. 

 

Until the wire, the majority of labor leaders supported the Democratic Party painting a doomsday scenario if Trump got elected. We would have no unions within a short period of time. Totalitarianism and worse, outright fascism was on the doorstep if union members and workers in general didn’t vote for the Democrat. One would think that if they believed that, they would have made some moves to organize their members to defend themselves in the event of a Trump victory. But there’s two main problems with that; one is that it takes work and the other, more important issue, is mobilizing a few million workers, organizing meetings in union halls, workplaces and so forth, would inspire workers as we get a sense of our potential power; it would increase expectations. But, like the Democrats, the labor hierarchy supports capitalism, believes profits are sacrosanct and that the market is the answer to all things.  Mobilizing the membership to act in our own defense, rely on our own strength, would threaten that world view and only chaos will follow.

 

Admittedly, union members turned out for Harris at a higher rate than the general public, but that is also due to the failure of the labor bureaucracy to broaden their approach and use organized labor’s potential power to draw the wider working class in to its ranks. In the recent Machinists strike at Boeing, a major issue to the members' was the return of the defined benefit pension plan. The leadership should have put this front and centre and also taken it in to the wider labor movement and working class communities as so many of us have lost it. But they fear the support such an approach would garner among the working class in general.

As it stands, with only one in ten US workers in a union, the impact of organized labor’s electoral power is limited, though our ability to stop the US economy from functioning through workplace stoppage is real. Just two recent strikes at Boeing and in the East Coast ports can do that.

 

While I thought the fascism scare might eke out a win for Harris, the result is not surprising as the US working class, disgusted with the two parties of capital and the status quo it represents, has retreated from electoral politics over the decades, Many have drawn the incorrect conclusion that politicians are all corrupt as is politics in general. Almost 100 million opted out in 2016.  

 

In my view, numerous factors contributed to Trump’s victory in 2024, people being worse off than they were four years ago, misogyny, racism, xenophobia and also a sticking it to the regular crowd stance as well. The Democrats woke agenda doesn’t appeal either and one working class Latino voter pointed out that having Megan Thee Stallion twerking at a rally or having Beyonce on stage didn’t win his vote. There’s a good article here about the Democratic Party’s reliance on celebrity endorsements.

 

Organized labor spent a lot of money and resources on the Harris campaign. UNITE union claimed to have launched the largest labor-led campaign for Harris knocking on 3.5 million doors and the AFL-CIO spent more than one million on a digital ad campaign in swing states. But we can’t beat capital at its own game, they have more money than us that’s why they’re called capitalists.

The election results prove in a way that material conditions matter. The Democratic Party could not attract the vast majority of workers it needed to defeat Trump because it can’t develop a program that speaks to workers needs; let’s not lose sight of the fact that Harris had more billionaires supporting her than Trump.

 

Trump, a serial sexual abuser, is an unstable though savvy character. He is appointing a menagerie of freaks in important positions, the lunatics are running the asylum sort of thing. But he is also appointing people who are at odds with each other. This is purposeful as it places him in the center directing operations, the Godfather of the political mafia. The period ahead is going to be some battleground, Trump will not have it all his own way. 

In addition, despite the bankruptcy of the trade union bureaucracy, we can’t determine exactly how organized labor will respond to the attacks on the horizon. This is particularly the case with the public sector as Musk, a man like Trump who's had everything handed to him on a platter, aims to cut government spending by at least a third but not on his projects. The Pentagon alone employees some 3 million employees. The public sector is a target as all of the functionaries around Trump are privatizers.

 

Many local unions are still pretty democratic organs. If you are active in your local union you should be working to build a caucus around a program that meets the needs of the working class, wages, Jobs, environmental protection, housing, health care, education, leisure time etc.

 

Introducing resolutions like this and explaining why we should support them, and how we can win,  forces a debate on the issues that those who support class collaboration want to avoid. Debating and arguing why a resolution should be passed is as important as passing it. 

 

This is how I myself and a few others got my local to end its support for Democratic Party candidates. For a number of years, Afscme Local 444, was known nationally as a prominent local union around the campaign for an independent working class or Labor Party; it held a public meeting in 1989 with Anthony Mazzochi, a prominent official in OCAW who was raising the issue, the main speaker.

 

I am not in agreement with those that have such a low opinion of the 14 million members in organized labor who argue that the trade union leaders are so entrenched they cannot be removed and our unions cannot be changed. Some leftists even argue that the trade unions are not even workers organizations. This is a mistake and a thoroughly defeatist position in my view. 

 

Don’t mourn, organize as Joe Hill advised us all those years ago. 

Reprinted from the UK socialist website, Left Horizons.

Trump’s cabinet appointments point to chaos and upheaval

17 November 2024

By John Pickard

The election of such a man as Donald Trump as US president is a measure of the profound moral and political crisis within the capitalist system. But cause and effect are interlinked here, and it looks like his actions in appointing so many mavericks to high office, will further accelerate disintegration, decay and crisis within the US political establishment.

Commentators had suggested that Trump will have learned from his previous administration, between 2017 and 2020, but it seems he has learnt the wrong lessons. In his first cabinet, there were some “adults in the room” who could act as a counterweight to Trump’s tendency to being erratic, although many of these soon departed.

This time, his selections for key leadership positions, based purely on their loyalty and subservience to the Trump brand of Republicanism, seem designed to create the maximum possible distruption of the civil service, the military, the internal security apparatus and the judicial system. As the Financial Times editorial put it, “…it is hard to know which [appointment] is the most dumbfounding.” These are a few of the people Trump has picked for key appointments:

Mike Gaetz – appointed Attorney General. Gaetz has been the subject of an investigation by the justice department – the department he will lead – into allegations of sex trafficking, and ethical breaches including sexual misconduct, drug use and the acceptance of gifts. It is almost certain that the report on this investigation will be leaked or published before he takes office.

Referring to the FBI and the Department of Justice at meeting of right wing activists last year, Gaetz wowed his audience by promising to bring them both to heel. “We either get this government back on our side”, he said, “or we defund, and get rid, abolish . . . every last one of them,”  If Trump is able to use the judicial system to “go after” his political opponents, Gaetz will be the principal attack-dog.

Pete Hegseth – appointed Secretary of Defense. Apart from a brief spell in the US army and National Guard, Hegseth’s only qualification to manage the humungous US arms budget – $800bn – as well as 2.3m civilian and active sercie personnel, is to be a presenter for Fox News.

Hegseth too has also faced allegations of sexual assault. He has intimated in the past that the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, General Charles Brown, only got his appointment because he is Black and accused him of “pursuing the radical positions of leftwing politicians”. (Guardian, November 13)

The Wall Street Journal has reported on a draft executive order of Trump’s to the effect that he might appoint a special ‘board’ of retired senior officers, which would be able to ‘purge’ unsuitable generals and admirals. Hegseth would no doubt be in charge of that.

Hegseth’s nomination, the Guardian reports, is also a boost for the far right in Israel, as he has “shown support for territorial expansion and suggested that Jews could build a new temple on the sacred compound around al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, known to Jews as the Temple Mount”. How that would go down with two of the most important Arab allies of the US – Egypt and Saudi Arabia – remains to be seen.

Robert F Kennedy Junior – appointed as Health Secretary, in charge of a $1.7tn health budget. Kennedy is a vaccine sceptic and an intervention of his in Samoa, promoting suspicion about immunisations, led to an outbreak of measles that resulted in scores of child deaths.

Kennedy’s nomination as the country’s top health official will alarm public health experts across the USA. The Financial Times reports that “He has described the Covid-19 jab as “the deadliest vaccine ever made” and last year said the virus was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people”.

Public Citizen, a progressive nonprofit organisation, told the Guardian “Robert F Kennedy Jr is a clear and present danger to the nation’s health. He shouldn’t be allowed in the building at the department of health and human services (HHS), let alone be placed in charge of the nation’s public health agency.”

Tulsi Gabbard – appointed as director of national intelligence, she apparently shares the enthusiasm of other Trump acolytes about the need to get rid of the “woke shit” such as “diversity, equity and inclusion programmes”. (Financial Times editorial)that they claim have weakened the military.

It is possible that some of these appointments may yet be blocked. Trump seems to feel that his control of the presidency, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court enable him to do whatever he wishes. But events will prove more complex. Even some Republicans, are aghast at his selections and some may vote with the Democrat senators to block one or two.

Some Republican senators have already raised questions about his nomination in no uncertain terms. One of them, Susan Collins of Maine, told reporters she was “shocked” by the appointment of Gaetz as attorney general and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska further added that he was “not a serious nomination” for the post. “I’m looking forward,” she added, “to the opportunity to consider somebody that is serious. This one was not on my bingo card.”

The chair of the joint chiefs of staff, General CQ Brown. Hegseth, soon to be Secretary of Defense, has suggested his appointment was because he was Black. Picture: from Wikimedia Commons, here. 

Trump, on the other hand, may try to find alternative legal processes to confirm his appointments without Senate approval, for example through so-called “recess appointments”. Either way, Trump’s appointments are a recipe for political turbulence on a scale not seen in US politics since the Civil War, mid-nineteenth century.

Trump’s selections for cabinet posts can also be interpreted as a shift in the direction of authoritarian government, as he has hinted in several rambling election speeches. But, again, real life is more complex. As much as Trump would liketo govern the US much like an absolutist medieval king, he does not have the power to do so.

Most workers did not vote or voted against Trump

His ‘maga’ movement achieved widespread electoral support, overwhelmingly based on economic discontent. But this was still based on a minority of the population, because most workers either did not vote, or voted against him. Trump’s movement is not the kind of mass-based ‘fascist’ movement that can extensively penetrate the armed forces, the police and the state apparatus, as the Nazi Party did in Germany in the 1930s.

For all his bluster, Trump will be largely working against the millions of personnel in the civil service and the state. To use a metaphor, it takes an ocean-going tanker five miles to stop or turn around: it is not something that can be done by a handful of swimmers. The juggernaut that is US civil service, health system and military apparatus, will not be turned by these Trump appointments. But, on the other hand, their capacity for injecting chaos, conflict and crises should not be underestimated.

Why is this important? It is because capitalist ‘democracy’ – such as it is – can only be maintained by a stable and relatively broadly-based bureaucracy. How could it be otherwise, when the real ruling class – the property-owning capitalists – are a vanishingly small proportion of the population, far less than the 1% figure in popular culture?

The only way the capitalists can preserve their power and control is by drawing into their embrace and sharing a (small) part of their ill-gotten gains with an upper social layer, who are bribed by higher salaries and positions of power and influence, so they have a ‘stake’ in the system.

These people – and they number several millions – are found in the media, in the civil service and in the armed apparatus of the state, the police and the military. Above all, their positions are based on continuity and stability, both of which are now being threatened by Trump’s appointees.

Sabotage, non-cooperation and non-compliance

What will happen when Gaetz begins to tamper with judical processes at state and federal level? What will happen when the overwhelming majority of Kennedy’s employees in the health sector disagree fundamentally with his ludicrous anti-science outlook? What will happen when Hegseth attempts to bump dozens of top generals and navy personnel?

The short answer is there is likely to be sabotage, non-cooperation and non–compliance. But there will also be an increasing tendency towards chaos and dislocation in government departments, like health, education, transport, environmental protection, and in all of the other functions of the state.

We should be clear that socialists do not support the huge apparatus of coercionupon which capitalism rests, in terms of the police and the military…what Engels meant when the described the state fundamentally as “armed bodies of men”. But neither should we ignore the political significance of the event, when someone like Trump throws a spanner in the works to introduce a new level of pandemonium in the functioning of the capitalist system.

What will undermine Trump and his political support will fundamentally be economicfactors. His cabinet will be composed entirely of extremely wealthy people, including several billionaires, like Elon Musk. Proposed tax increases and tariffs on imports will do nothing to alleviate the insecurities facing ordinary working class households. On the contrary, for the latter, life will become more precarious and uncertain in the coming months and years.

We can expect bigger struggles than ever before in defence of living standards, wages, women’s rights and on other issues. The USA is entering a period of storms and stresses, of sharp polarisation and class conflict. Adding to the mixture, as it were ‘over the heads’ of workers, is the mayhem that Trump is going to unleash at government level.    

Musings of a Working Man. Adam and Eve Didn't Do It For Me.

Just needed to express myself a bit this morning.

Richard Mellor

11-15-24

 

Most workers know that the means of production in society, the factories and workplaces that produce the commodities we use every day from cars to houses, are owned by a small group of people or section of society, we just don’t usually use the term “means of production”. The primary reason for this is that most of us do not read Marx, or left wing historians and if truth be told, any reading at all of that nature.

 

We also know these people basically govern society. Many of us attribute their role or extreme wealth to criminal activity, corruption, bribery and so forth. They’re just nasty people. We tend to call them the elite rather than the capitalist class and certainly not the bourgeoisie. When we do explore this subject a little further we can see where the term bourgeoise comes from and how it is related to urban dwellers and the role certain urban dwellers played in the production of the goods and services a modern society needs.

 

But one thing we are acutely aware of is that they are greedy; money is everything for them. Greed doesn’t explain it though. Some people might consider a well-paid worker greedy for owning a motor home for example or a fishing boat or taking a world cruise . It’s not greed in the abstract that is the problem.  

 

The need to accumulate wealth is built in to the system of production we know as capitalism; they can’t escape it. Capitalists are driven to accumulate capital from the surplus value the workers produce that the capitalist pays no wages for. A portion of that is their profits, or rent to other major capitalists like the big landlords or landowners.  But they also have to plow some of it back in to production, to continue the production process and the profit cycle continues. This is a life and death matter for the owners of capital as if they disrupt this process they die, they cease to be capitalists. Marx said of the capitalist’s role in production, “The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which the miser strives after, by seek­ing to save his money from circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by constantly throwing it afresh into circulation.”

 

 So accumulation of wealth and along with it, ruthless competition and ultimately war and violence, are an integral aspect of capitalism and the so-called free market. They are driven to war and accumulation by the laws of the system

 

We know they rip us off day in day out. Yes, they are rotten bastards but at least they’re our rotten bastards. Even this view is losing its ground. More often than not, it is the understandable but incorrect view that there’s nothing we can do about it, “you can’t change city hall.”

 

What’s just as important as understanding who owns and directs the productive forces of society, it is equally as important to recognize that these same people own the means of producing the dominant ideas in society. What do I mean by that? 

 

Well, what we think about the world, or our consciousness doesn’t just spring out of our heads like the magician’s rabbit from a hat; ideas have a material base. While other things influence what we think about the world, it is the conditions of our existence that is the prominent source of our thinking. Marx’s comments on this had a profound influence on how I saw the world around me when he wrote: 

“The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

 

Through their ownership of society’s mass media, the capitalist counter this class consciousness that arises from our condition as workers.

 

The serious journals of this class of owners, of big capitalists, are far more honest with their content than the outlets that are directed at the working class which is most of us. These are their theoretical journals that have to have a balanced realistic approach; after all, they are discussing how best to govern society. I remember back 1974 in a BusinessWeek edition a quote that makes that clear:

 

“It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow--the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more...Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares with the selling job that must be done to make people accept this reality.”  Business Week 10-12-74

 

That still holds true today but social media for one example is making it harder and harder for them to paint the rosy picture. As I said, in the end, objective reality comes in to serious conflict with the propaganda. Even in early colonial times as European and African workers, bondsmen or chattel slaves worked the sugar plantations of the West Indies, bonds were built between them and people ran away together, fought together. Laws had to be introduced to undermine the solidarity that arises when human beings find ourselves in the same boat, exploited by the same people. That’s what propaganda is and whet the media of the ruling class is intended for. It’s why the concept of a White Race was invented in colonial America.

At all times there is the oppression of women. Capitalism is a patriarchy.

 

In the UK colonised people had to be portrayed as lesser human beings, they had to be demonized; their religion trashed. The Irish were the savage race and the people of the colonies that followed in Africa, India and elsewhere, faced the same barrage of propaganda. Any significant difference was used to explain the need to colonize the savages.

 

Class consciousness which arises from the material conditions, is an obstacle to this warfare so class war is always there when it comes to the exploiters. Resistance can be spontaneous, unplanned unorganized which is easier to crush. The rise of unions and political parties based on the working class and our communities and leaders with a theoretical understanding of what is taking place and what can be done about it is a counter to this. As capitalism encompasses the entire globe, as Marx put it, “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.” solidarity with workers in other countries grows and the capitalists undermine this development with nationalism in particular. 

 

The explosion that took place on October 7^th 2023 when occupants of the world’s largest outdoor prison we know as the Gaza Strip, 2 million people trapped and under siege for almost 20 years, broke free and launched an attack on the occupying power taking hundreds of captives has changed the game. The response from the occupying power has been savage, brutal, with no concern for human life whatsoever. The intention being to eradicate the indigenous people of the European colony set up in 1948. But the aggressor is not the victor. The Zionist regime and its backers in the US has been discredited beyond repair. Both Israel and the US will not recover from this genocide it has waged against an entire group of people. 

 

In this case the propaganda that Israel and its backers in the US and western Europe, although sophisticated, has been exposed primarily though social media but also a rival international media company in the Arab world, Al Jazeera. But it is primarily social media that has exposed the so called liberal democracies and their lies and the brazen confidence that the soldiers committing the genocide have shown by videoing and sharing their brutal acts on the Internet. They have acted in this way for decades without fear of retribution having the backing of the world’s greatest superpower; that era is over. The deaths of 40,000 people have not been in vain.

 

The world will not be the same.