Israeli media are now reporting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering “a brief resumption” of the onslaught in Gaza in order to pressure Hamas to make concessions and change the terms of the ceasefire agreement which was signed on January 19.
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering a brief resumption of fighting against Hamas to pressure the terror group into making further concessions, according to an Israeli television report aired Saturday as he held high-level deliberations on the stalled negotiations to advance to the second stage of the hostage-ceasefire agreement in Gaza.
“Hamas has rejected Israel’s proposal to extend the first, 42-day stage of the deal, which formally expires Saturday night, insisting that the deal proceed with phase two, which Israel has largely refused to negotiate for the past month.
Thirty-three Israeli hostages were released, eight of them dead, in exchange for nearly 2000 Palestinian prisoners. Five Thai nationals held hostage in the Gaza Strip were freed separately.
“With the ceasefire expected to lapse at midnight, Netanyahu and DefenCe Minister Israel Katz will meet Sunday, along with other security officials, to discuss preparations for a potential resumption of fighting in Gaza and a review of all potential war fronts, Channel 12 news reported.”
Headlines should not be that ‘Hamas refuses to extend the first phase of the ceasefire’ – they should be that ‘Israel refuses to begin talks on the second phase of the ceasefire’, which would bring a definitive end to the war. Israel has also repeatedly violated the ceasefire.
In reality the terms of the ceasefire deal say that Israel and Hamas were supposed to move on to phase two of the agreement this weekend, but Israel has been refusing to negotiate the second stage of the agreement this entire time because it would entail a withdrawal of Israeli troops and a commitment to a lasting peace.
This idea that the first phase of the ceasefire should be “extended” instead of continuing on to the second phase is a brand new proposition the US and Israel just started pushing a few days ago.
It is therefore Israel which is rejecting the ceasefire as written and trying to write up new terms for the deal; Hamas is just insisting on the terms of the ceasefire it agreed to.
But today we’re being hammered with this message that Hamas is rejecting peace. A tweet by Axios’ Israeli intelligence operative Barak Ravid reads as follows:
“Israeli Prime Minister’s office says Israel agreed to a US proposal for extending the Gaza ceasefire in return for release of hostages but claims Hamas refuses.”
So that’s the official message we’re being fed by the consent-manufacturing machine, as the Trump administration sends even more weapons to Israel. The White House has just used its “emergency powers” to bypass congressional oversight for a $3 billion weapons transfer to the Netanyahu regime, right after posturing as a stern tough guy who cares about making peace in his controversial dustup with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Zelensky show was nice but doing this on the eve of the possible collapse of the Gaza ceasefire deal is absolutely despicable (article by @KyleAnzalone_) pic.twitter.com/THhdVSLvVz
As readers have no doubt already heard, the entire Western political-media class has been in an uproar since Trump and Vice-President JD Vance made international headlines by publicly raking Zelensky over the coals for his role in “obstructing peace” with Russia, even accusing him of “gambling with World War Three.”
Democrats are rending their garments over the public humiliation of Saint Zelensky and crying about the “bullying” behaviour of Trump and Vance, while Republicans are applauding the whole ordeal as a sign that Trump is a strong and heroic peacemaker who doesn’t take any guff from Washington’s warmongering proxies.
But the most immediate and glaring point about Zelensky’s public castigation is that this same administration doesn’t appear to be taking that same energy to Benjamin Netanyahu as he prepares to resume a genocide.
What we witnessed on Friday was Trump speaking to Zelensky in public the way Adelson probably speaks to Trump in private. We can certainly never expect to see him speaking that way to Netanyahu.
It is good that things are moving toward peace in Ukraine, but this war was never intended to be permanent. It was only ever intended to be a temporary quagmire to bleed and divert Russia as much as possible while advancing strategic objectives elsewhere, which we recently saw manifest in the empire’s successful regime change operation in Syria.
Zelensky, like every other US imperial asset, was only ever intended to be used and then discarded. The gears of the imperial war machine roll onward.
In the year marking 40 years since the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French secret agents and 71 years since the most powerful nuclear weapons tested by the United States, Greenpeace is calling on Washington to comply with demands by the Marshall Islands for nuclear justice.
“The Marshall Islands bears the deepest scars of a dark legacy — nuclear contamination, forced displacement, and premeditated human experimentation at the hands of the US government,” said Greenpeace spokesperson Shiva Gounden.
To mark the Marshall Islands’ Remembrance Day today, the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior is flying the republic’s flag at halfmast in solidarity with those who lost their lives and are suffering ongoing trauma as a result of US nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.
On 1 March 1954, the Castle Bravo nuclear bomb was detonated on Bikini Atoll with a blast 1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
On Rongelap Atoll, 150 km away, radioactive fallout rained onto the inhabited island, with children mistaking it as snow.
The Rainbow Warrior is sailing to the Marshall Islands where a mission led by Greenpeace will conduct independent scientific research across the country, the results of which will eventually be given to the National Nuclear Commission to support the Marshall Islands government’s ongoing legal proceedings with the US and at the UN.
Still enduring fallout
Marshall Islands communities still endure the physical, economic, and cultural fallout of the nuclear tests — compensation from the US has fallen far short of expectations of the islanders who are yet to receive an apology.
Former Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony deBrum’s “nuclear justice” speech as Right Livelihood Award Winner in 2009. Video: Voices Rising
“To this day, Marshall Islanders continue to grapple with this injustice while standing on the frontlines of the climate crisis — facing yet another wave of displacement and devastation for a catastrophe they did not create,” Gounden said.
“But the Marshallese people and their government are not just survivors — they are warriors for justice, among the most powerful voices demanding bold action, accountability, and reparations on the global stage.
“Those who have inflicted unimaginable harm on the Marshallese must be held to account and made to pay for the devastation they caused.
“Greenpeace stands unwaveringly beside Marshallese communities in their fight for justice. Jimwe im Maron.”
Chair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission Ariana Tibon-Kilma . . . “the trauma of Bravo continues for the remaining survivors and their descendents.” Image: UN Human Rights Council
Ariana Tibon Kilma, chair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission, said that the immediate effects of the Bravo bomb on March 1 were “harrowing”.
“Hours after exposure, many people fell ill — skin peeling off, burning sensation in their eyes, their stomachs were churning in pain. Mothers watched as their children’s hair fell to the ground and blisters devoured their bodies overnight,” she said.
“Without their consent, the United States government enrolled them as ‘test subjects’ in a top secret medical study on the effects of radiation on human beings — a study that continued for 40 years.
“Today on Remembrance Day the trauma of Bravo continues for the remaining survivors and their descendents — this is a legacy not only of suffering, loss, and frustration, but also of strength, unity, and unwavering commitment to justice, truth and accountability.”
The new Rainbow Warrior will arrive in the Marshall Islands early this month.
Alongside the government of the Marshall Islands, Greenpeace will lead an independent scientific mission into the ongoing impacts of the US weapons testing programme.
Travelling across the country, Greenpeace will reaffirm its solidarity with the Marshallese people — now facing further harm and displacement from the climate crisis, and the emerging threat of deep sea mining in the Pacific.
The Trump administration’s war with the Deep State is not a purgative. It is not about freeing us from the tyranny of intelligence agencies, militarised police, the largest prison system in the world, predatory corporations or the end of mass surveillance.
It will not restore the rule of law to hold the powerful and the wealthy accountable. It will not slash the bloated and unaccountable spending — some $1 trillion dollars — by the Pentagon.
All revolutionary movements, on the left or the right, dismantle the old bureaucratic structures.
The fascists in Germany and the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, once they seized power, aggressively purged the civil service. They see in these structures, correctly, an enemy that would stymie their absolute grip on power.
It is a coup d’état by inches. Now we get our own.
Rearguard battles — as in the early years of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany — are taking place in the courts and media outlets openly hostile to Trump.
There will be, at first, pyrrhic victories — the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were stalled by their own judiciaries and hostile press — but gradually the purges, aided by a bankrupt liberalism that no longer stands or fights for anything, ensures the triumph of the new masters.
The road to dictatorship. Video: Chris Hedges
Investigator officials fired
The Trump administration has expelled or fired officials who investigate wrongdoing within the federal government, including 17 inspectors-general. Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, such as the FBI and Homeland Security, are being purged of those deemed hostile to Trump.
Courts, as they are stacked with compliant judges, will be mechanisms for the persecution of state “enemies” and protection rackets for the powerful and the rich. The Supreme Court, which has granted Trump legal immunity, has already reached this stage.
“The original purge after the Shah’s fall sought to rid the ministries of senior-level holdovers from the former regime and to provide the revolutionary faithful with jobs,” reads a declassified CIA memo, dated 28 August 1980, on the then newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran.
“The second wave of purges began last month after a series of Khomeini speeches. Lower-level individuals who had been part of the Shah’s bureaucracy, those with Western training, or those who were deemed to lack full Revolutionary fervor have been retired or fired on an increasingly large scale.”
We are repeating the steps that led to the consolidation of power by past dictatorships, albeit with our own idiom and idiosyncrasies. Those naively lauding Trump’s hostility towards the Deep State — which I concede did tremendous damage to democratic institutions, eviscerated our most cherished liberties, is an unaccountable state within a state and orchestrated a series of disastrous global interventions, including the recent military fiascos in the Middle East and Ukraine — should look closely at what is being proposed to take its place.
The ultimate target for the Trump administration is not the Deep State. The target is the laws, regulations, protocols and rules, and the government civil servants who enforce them, which hinder dictatorial control.
Compromise, limited power, checks and balances and accountability are slated to be abolished. Those who believe that the government is designed to serve the common good, rather than the dictates of the ruler, will be forced out. The Deep State will be reconstituted to serve the leadership cult. Laws and the rights enshrined in the Constitution will be irrelevant.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump boasted on Truth Social and X.
Chaos replaced by disciplined plan
The chaos of the first Trump administration has been replaced with a disciplined plan to throttle what is left of America’s anemic democracy. Project 2025, the Center for Renewing America and the America First Policy Institute compiled in advance detailed blueprints, position papers, legislative proposals, proposed executive orders and policies.
The legal cornerstone for this deconstruction of the state is the unitary executive theory, articulated by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissenting opinion in the case of Morrison v. Olson.
In Scalia’s opinion, Article II of the Constitution means that everything not designated as legislative or judicial power must be executive power. The executive branch, he writes, can execute all the laws of the United States outside of everything that is not explicitly given to Congress or the judiciary in the Constitution. It is a legal justification for dictatorship.
Although the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 does not use the term “unitary executive theory,” it advocates for policies that align with the theory’s principles. Project 2025 recommends firing tens of thousands of government employees and replacing them with loyalists.
Key to this project is the weakening of labour protections and rights of governmental employees, making it easier for them to be fired at the behest of the executive branch. Russell Vought, the founder of Center for Renewing America and one of the key architects of Project 2025, has returned as director of the Office of Management and Budget, a position he also held in Trump’s first term.
One of Trump’s final acts in his first term was signing the order “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service.” This order removed employment protections from career government bureaucrats. Joe Biden rescinded it.
It has been resurrected with a vengeance. It too has echoes from the past. The Nazis’ 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” saw political opponents and non-Aryans, including Germans of Jewish descent, dismissed from the civil service.
Bolsheviks also purged military, civil service
The Bolsheviks likewise purged the military and civil service of “counter-revolutionaries”.
The firing of more than 9500 federal workers — with 75,000 others accepting a less-than-ironclad deferred buyout agreement amid plans to cut 70 percent of staff from various government agencies — freezing of billions of dollars in funding and ongoingseizure of confidential data by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is not about downsizing and efficiency.
The cuts to federal agencies will do little to curb the rapacious spending by the federal government if the military budget — Congressional Republicans are calling for at least $100 billion in additional military spending during the next decade — remains sacrosanct.
And while Trump wants to end the war in Ukraine, part of his effort to build an alliance with the autocrat in Moscow he admires, he backs the genocide in Gaza.
The purge is about gutting oversight and protections. It is about circumventing thousands of statutes that set the rules for government operations. It is about filling federal positions with “loyalists” from a database compiled by the Conservative Partnership Institute. It is about enriching private corporations — including several owned by Musk — that will be handed lucrative government contracts.
This deconstruction is also, I suspect, about increasing Musk’s cloud capital, his algorithmic and digital infrastructure. Musk plans to turn X into the “everything app.” He is launching “X Money,” an add-on to the social media app, which gives users a digital wallet “to store money and make peer-to-peer transfers”.
A few weeks after the announcement of X Money’s partnership with Visa, DOGE requested access to classified Internal Revenue Service data, including millions of tax returns. The data includes Social Security numbers and addresses, details on how much individuals earn, how much money they owe, properties they own and child custody agreements.
Official data commercialised and weaponised
In the wrong hands, this information can be commercialised and weaponised.
Musk is pursuing an “AI-first” agenda to increase the role of artificial intelligence (AI) across government agencies. He is building “a centralised data repository” for the federal government, according to Wired.
Oracle founder, business associate of Elon Musk and longtime Trump donor Larry Ellison, who recently announced a $500 billion AI infrastructure plan alongside Trump, urged nations to move all of their data into “a single, unified data platform” so it can be “consumed and used” by AI models.
Ellison has previously stated that an AI-based surveillance system will guarantee that “Citizens will be on their best behaviour because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
Trump has, like all despots, long enemy lists. He has pulled security details from former officials from his previous administration, including retired General Mark Milley, who was the highest-ranking officer in the military during Trump’s first term, and Mike Pompeo, who was Trump’s Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Secretary of State.
He has revoked or threatened to revoke, the security clearances of President Biden and former members of his administration including Antony Blinken, the former Secretary of State, and Jake Sullivan, the former National Security Adviser. He is targeting media outlets he deems hostile, blocking their reporters from covering news events at the Oval Office and evicting them from their working spaces in the Pentagon.
Chris nails it. Unfortunately few seem to recognize this power-grab for what it is. They see it as a sorta revolutionary movement to clean out corruption & bureaucratic rot.
It’s just a technocratic mutation led by oligarchs & demagogues. A further concentration of wealth/power. pic.twitter.com/KfCLWEpS4V
Expanding enemy lists
These enemy lists will expand as larger and larger segments of the population realise they have been betrayed, widespread discontent becomes palpable and the Trump White House feels threatened.
Once the new system is in place, laws and regulations will become whatever the Trump White House says they are. Independent agencies such as the Federal Election Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Reserve System will lose their autonomy.
Mass deportations, the teaching of “Christian” and “patriotic” values in schools — Trump has vowed to “remove the radicals, zealots, and Marxists who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education” — along with the gutting of social programmes, including Medicaid, low-income housing, job training, and assistance for children, will create a society of serfs and masters.
Predatory corporations, such as the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, will be licensed to exploit and pillage a disempowered public. Totalitarianism demands complete conformity. The result, to quote Rosa Luxemburg, is the “brutalisation of public life.”
The hollowed-out remnants of the old system — the media, the Democratic Party, academia, the shells of labor unions — will not save us. They mouth empty platitudes, cower in fear, seek useless incremental reforms and accommodation, and demonise Trump supporters regardless of their reasons for voting for him.
They are fading into irrelevance. This ennui is a common denominator in the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. It engenders apathy and defeatism.
‘Trump’s Birthday’ law
The “Trump’s Birthday and Flag Day Holiday Establishment Act,” introduced by Congresswoman Claudia Tenny, is a harbinger of what lies ahead. The act would designate June 14 as a federal holiday to commemorate “Donald J. Trump’s Birthday and Flag Day.”
The next step is choreographed state parades with oversized portraits of the great leader.
Joseph Roth was one of the few writers in Germany to understand the attraction and inevitable rise of fascism.
In his essay “The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind,” which addressed the first mass burning of books by the Nazis, he counseled fellow Jewish writers to accept that they had been vanquished: “Let us, who were fighting on the front line, under the banner of the European mind, let us fulfill the noblest duty of the defeated warrior: Let us concede our defeat.”
Roth, blacklisted by the Nazis, forced into exile and reduced to poverty, did not delude himself with false hopes.
“What use are my words,” Roth asked, “against the guns, the loudspeakers, the murderers, the deranged ministers, the stupid interviewers and journalists who interpret the voice of this world of Babel, muddied anyhow, via the drums of Nuremberg?”
He knew what was coming.
A ‘great catastrophe’
“It will become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe,” Roth, after going into exile in France in 1933, wrote to Stefan Zweig about the seizure of power by the Nazis.
“The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.”
But Roth also argued even if defeat was certain, resistance was a moral imperative, a way to defend one’s dignity and the sanctity of the truth.
“One must write, even when one realises the printed word can no longer improve anything,” he insisted.
I am as pessimistic as Roth. Censorship and state repression will expand. Those with a conscience will become an enemy of the state.
Resistance, when it happens, will be expressed in spontaneous eruptions which coalesce outside the established centers of power. These acts of defiance will be met with brutal state repression.
But if we do not resist, we succumb morally and physically to the darkness. We become complicit in a radical evil. This, we must never allow.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times. This article was first published on his Substack page. Republished from the Chris Hedges X page under Creative Commons. The article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible’s list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of The New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal.
President Donald Trump has shared a shockingly awful AI-generated music video envisioning a future Gaza that has been turned into an ostentatious resort town where everyone parties amid showers of cash while Trump and Netanyahu sip drinks by the pool.
The video is intended to reflect Trump’s plans for a Gaza Strip that has been permanently ethnically cleansed of Palestinians.
If you haven’t watched it yet you definitely should, because words can’t do justice to just how terrible it is.
The most powerful government on earth celebrated the idea of Trump and Netanyahu presiding over orgiastic parties for the obscenely wealthy on a land that has been purged of its indigenous inhabitants following a year and a half of brutal slaughter. Image: caitlinjohnstone.com.au
This video is simultaneously the most American thing that has ever happened and the most Israeli thing that has ever happened. Fake. Gaudy. Sociopathic. Genocidal. Emblematic of all the ugliest values that both dystopian civilizations have come to embody.
They used the most artless art medium in existence to digitally dance on the graves of mountains of dead civilians. The most powerful government on earth celebrated the idea of Trump and Netanyahu presiding over orgiastic parties for the obscenely wealthy on a land that has been purged of its indigenous inhabitants following a year and a half of brutal slaughter.
Twerking to shitty AI-generated techno music surrounded by golden Trump statues and hundred dollar bills, because you are so happy that you finally found a Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem.
President Trump’s AI vision for Gaza – “Fake. Gaudy. Sociopathic. Genocidal.”
It doesn’t get any more American than this, and it doesn’t get any more Israeli. This soulless, artless, conscienceless expression of egotistic masturbation lubricated with the blood of dead children is the Empire at its most honest. This is the very best this globe-dominating power structure has to offer our world.
This entire civilisation is diseased. Not just the United States and Israel but every nation on earth that is subject to the metastases of their cancerous influence. They’re making us all dumber, sicker, nastier, crueler.
Less creative. Less artful. Less caring. Less insightful. They are poisoning our minds and turning our hearts into shit.
This video, in and of itself, is a sufficient argument for the entire US empire to be demolished and sold for scrap metal. https://t.co/18B1t2o2r7
I’ve always said that the only thing I like about Trump is that he puts an honest face on the Empire. In terms of actual policy and actions he’s not much different from any other Republican president, but he has this compulsive inclination to constantly yank off the plastic smileyface mask of the Empire and reveal the snarling blood-spattered face beneath.
This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.
That one video, all by itself, tells you more about what the US Empire really is than every movie its PR agents in Hollywood have ever produced. This is the real America. This is the real Israel. This is the real Empire.
The Western media went into overdrive this week to work the laconic Kiwis into a mild frenzy over three Chinese naval vessels conducting exercises in the Tasman Sea a few thousand kilometres off our shores.
What was really behind this orchestrated campaign?
The New Zealand government led the rhetorical charge over the Hengyang, the Zunyi and the Weishanhu in mare nostrum (“Our Sea”, as the Romans liked to call the Mediterranean).
“We cannot hide at this end of the world anymore,” Defence Minister Judith Collins said in light of three Chinese boats in the Tasman.
Warrior academics were next . “We need to go to the cutting edge, and we need to do that really, really fast,” the ever-reliable China hawk Anne-Marie Brady of Canterbury University said, telling 1 News the message of the live-firing exercises was that China wants to rule the waves.
The British Financial Times chimed in with a warning that “A confronting strategic future is arriving fast”.
Could this have anything to do with the fact we are fast approaching the New Zealand government’s 2025 budget and that they — and their Australian, US and UK allies — are intent on a major increase in Kiwi defence funding, moving from around 1.2 percent of GDP to possibly two percent? A long-anticipated Defence Capability Review is also around the corner and is likely to come with quite a shopping list of expensive gear.
The New Zealand government led the rhetorical charge over the Hengyang, the Zunyi and the Weishanhu in mare nostrum (“Our Sea”, as the Romans liked to call the Mediterranean). Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
What’s good for the goose . . .
It is worth pointing out that New Zealand and Australian warships sailed through the contested Taiwan Strait and elsewhere in the South China Sea as recently as September 2024. What’s good for the goose is good for the Panda.
And, of course, at any one time about 20 US nuclear submarines are prowling in the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea. Each can carry missiles the equivalent of over 1000 Hiroshima bombs — truly apocalyptic.
Veteran New Zealand peace campaigner Mike Smith (a friend) was not in total disagreement with the hawks when it came to the argy-bargy in the Tasman.
“The emergence apparently from nowhere of a Chinese naval expedition in our waters I think may be intended to demonstrate that they have a large and very capable blue water navy now and won’t be penned in by AUKUS submarines when and if they arrive off their coast.
“I think the main message is to the Australians: if you want to homebase nuclear-capable B-52s we have more than one way to come at you. That was also the message of the ICBM they sent into the Pacific: Australia is no longer an unsinkable aircraft carrier.”
According to the Asia Times, China fired the ICBM — the first such shot into the Pacific by China — just days after HMNZS Aotearoa sailed through the Taiwan Strait with Australian vessel HMAS Sydney.
Smith says our focus should be on building positive relationships in the Pacific on our terms. “Buying expensive popguns will not save us.”
China Scare a page out of Australia’s Red Scare playbook
For people good at pattern recognition this week’s China Scare was obviously a page or two out of the same playbook that duped a majority of Australians into believing China was going to invade Australia. They were lulled into a false sense of insecurity back in 2021 — the mediascape flooded with Red Alert, China panic stories about imminent war with the rising Asian power.
As a sign of how successful the mainstream media can be in generating fear that precedes major policy shifts: research by Australia’s Institute of International & Security Affairs showed that more Australians thought that China would soon attack Australia than Taiwanese believed China would attack Taiwan!
Once the population was conditioned, they woke one morning in September 2021 with the momentous news that Australia had ditched a $90 billion submarine defence deal with France and the country was now part of a new anti-Chinese military alliance called AUKUS. This was the playbook that came to mind last week.
There are strong, rational arguments that could be made to increase our spending at this time. But I loathe and decry this kind of manipulation, this manufacturing of consent.
I also fear what those billions of dollars will be used for. Defending our coastlines is one thing; joining an anti-Chinese military alliance to please the US is quite another.
Prime Minister Luxon has called China — our biggest trading partner — a strategic competitor. He has also suggested, somewhat ludicrously, that our military could be a “force multiplier” for Team AUKUS.
We are hitching ourselves to the US at the very time they have proven they treat allies as vassals, threatened to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal, continue to commit genocide in Gaza, and are now imposing an unequal treaty on Ukraine.
Australia’s ABC News on Foreign Minister Winston Peter’s talks in China. Video: ABC
Whose side – or calmer independence?
Whose side should we be on? Or should we return to a calmer, more independent posture?
And then there’s the question of priorities. The hawks may convince the New Zealand population that the China threat is serious enough that we should forgo spending money on child poverty, fixing our ageing infrastructure, investing in health and education and instead, as per pressure from our AUKUS partners, spend some serious coin — billions of dollars more — on defence.
Climate change is one battle that is being fought and lost. Will climate funding get the bullet so we can spend on military hardware? That would certainly get a frosty reaction from Pacific nations at the front edge of sea rise.
The government in New Zealand is literally taking the food out of children’s mouths to fund weapons systems. The Ka Ora, Ka Ako programme provides nutritious lunches every day to a quarter of a million of New Zealand’s most needy children.
Its funding has recently been slashed by over $100 million by the government despite its own advisors telling it that such programmes have profound long-term wellbeing benefits and contribute significantly to equity. In the next breath we are told we need to boost funding for our military.
The US appears determined to set itself on a collision course with China but we don’t have to be crash test dummies sitting alongside them. Prudence, preparedness, vigilance and risk-management are all to be devoutly wished for; hitching our fate to a hostile US containment strategy is bad policy both in economic and defence terms.
In the absence of a functioning media — one that showcases diverse perspectives and challenges power rather than works hand-in-glove with it — populations have been enlisted in the most abhorrent and idiotic campaigns: the Red Peril, the Jewish Peril and the Black Peril (in South Africa and the southern states of the USA), to name three.
Our media-political-military complex is at it again with this one — a kind of Yellow Peril Redux.
New Zealand trails behind both Australia and China in development assistance to the Pacific. If we wish to “counter” China, supporting our neighbours would be a better investment than encouraging an unwinnable arms race.
In tandem, I would advocate for a far deeper diplomatic and cultural push to understand and engage with China; that would do more to keep the region peaceful and may arrest the slow move in China towards seeking other markets for the high-quality primary produce that an increasingly bellicose New Zealand still wishes to sell them.
Let’s be friends to all, enemies of none. Keep the Pacific peaceful, neutral and nuclear-free.
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and he is a regular contributor to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific.
Human sacrifice, the suicidal kind, has been around for a long time. You don’t have to approve of it to be deeply moved by the altruism it represents. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle
Lest we forget. On 25 February 2024 Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active duty US serviceman, self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.
His last words on this Earth, as the fire consumed him, were: “Free Palestine!”
Earlier that day, Aaron posted on X what I am sure will become a historic question re-posed for generations to come:
“What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.” Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
“Many of us like to ask ourselves ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or Apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
I will never forget the photos of the smiling, obviously sweet young man I looked at, in contrast to the same young man, in the combat dress of a US serviceman, dousing himself in fuel and setting himself ablaze.
In memory of Aaron Bushnell . . . “I will never forget the photos of the smiling, obviously sweet young man I looked at, in contrast to the same young man, in the combat dress of a US serviceman, dousing himself in fuel and setting himself ablaze.” Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
How do I contrast that level of commitment with the yawning indifference to genocide I have witnessed so often over the course of the past 16 months? How do I contrast that commitment with politicians calling for more defence force funding without calling for a rupture in our military engagement with Israel or the total diplomatic and economic isolation of the racist, genocidal State of Israel?
When I was a child, 82-year-old Quaker Alice Herz became the first person to self-immolate in the US to protest America’s crimes against the Vietnamese people. She appealed to people to “awake”.
Remember Alice Herz
As she set herself on fire she said she was protesting “the arms race and a president using his high office to wipe out small nations.” We should remember Alice Herz — and her message.
As he calmly walked up to the perimeter fence of the Israeli Embassy one year ago, Aaron Bushnell said:
“I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers, it’s not extreme at all.
“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine.”
Human sacrifice, the suicidal kind, has been around for a long time. You don’t have to approve of it to be deeply moved by the altruism it represents. Given the chance, I would have done everything in my power to deflect Aaron from the course of action he chose.
I commend groups like CodePink in the US who are holding vigils to honour Aaron. CodePink is a women-led grassroots organisation working to end US warfare and imperialism, led by human rights activists including Medea Benjamin.
“Aaron Bushnell made the ultimate sacrifice for peace,” CodePink told me in reply to a request for comment. “His final act against our forced complicity in genocide serves as a poignant reminder of the collective trauma being inflicted on humanity each day we allow this genocide to continue.
‘Bushnell’s blood on officials’ hands’
“Make no mistake, the blood of Aaron Bushnell is on the hands of US elected officials who fund and support the genocide in Gaza. Let us honour Aaron Bushnell’s memory as a catalyst for peace and justice.”
Last weekend I participated in the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) conference in Wellington which was addressed by a variety of speakers. Keynote addresses included the Palestinian author Samah Sabawi (who has just released Cactus Pear For My Beloved: A Family Story from Gaza, Penguin).
She told us, “The popular chant in protests ‘We are all Palestinians!’ is more true than most people realise. All of us are changed by the genocide because Israel has lowered our expectations, normalised in our culture behaviour that is criminal.”
The veteran antiracism campaigner John Minto reminded us that we are not here to bear witness to genocide but to stop it.
None of us should feel we have to make the kind of sacrifice that Aaron Bushnell made but all of us need to do that little bit more — if nothing else, than to save our own humanity from vanishing into the sea of indifference that Western culture is drowning in.
On the wall of my office is a photo of my grandfather, Dermot O’Brien. My family is from Cork and members of it were active in the struggle to drive the British out of Ireland.
My grandfather suffered destruction of his home, imprisonment, years on the run, a traumatised family, and other hardships which drove him to an early grave.
But his comrade in the struggle, Terence MacSwiney, paid a greater price. It was not a match or lighter fuel that killed him but his hunger strike.
Terence MacSwiney was the Lord Mayor of Cork, and like Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc, like Aaron Bushnell, like Alice Herz and like so many Palestinian people, he just could no longer tolerate the injustice being inflicted by the powerful of this world. He died in a prison in England in 1920.
At the end he said: “It is not those who can inflict the most but those who can endure the most who will conquer.”
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
A new narrative is being aggressively pushed by Israel and its apologists to justify resuming the Gaza genocide, conveniently just as an important deadline for ceasefire negotiations draws near.
The Israeli “Defence” Force (IDF) is now claiming that the Israeli children Kfir and Ariel Bibas “were both brutally murdered by terrorists while being held hostage in Gaza, no later than November 2023.”
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari told the press on Friday that, “Contrary to Hamas’ lies, Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered by terrorists in cold blood.
“The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys, they killed them with their bare hands. Afterward, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”
Anyone who has been following the events in Gaza over the last year and a half will be unsurprised to learn that Israel provided no evidence to support these incendiary claims.
Benjamin Netanyahu released a video statement in his signature American English waving around an enlarged photograph of the children and talking about what savage monsters the Palestinians are.
“Hamas murdered them in cold blood,” Netanyahu says, while the camera zooms in on the adorable little redheads. “As the prime minister of Israel, I vow that I will not rest until the savages who executed our hostages are brought to justice. They do not deserve to walk this earth.
“Nothing will stop me. Nothing.”
Sabotaging ceasefire negotiations
This happens just as Netanyahu has been working to sabotage ceasefire negotiations by adding new non-starter demands that were not in the original agreement, just as sources in Israeli media predicted he would do upon his return from Washington earlier this month.
The six-week-long first stage of the ceasefire deal with Hamas is set to expire at the beginning of March next weekend
This is obvious babies-on-bayonets atrocity propaganda, being released at the most convenient of times. After Israel has been caught lying about beheaded babies and mass rapes and so much more, only an idiot would take any of these claims on faith.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
“Today is a tragic day. It’s a day of boundless sorrow, of indescribable pain.
Four-year-old Ariel Bibas, his baby brother one-year-old Kfir and 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz were brutally murdered by Hamas savages. pic.twitter.com/7TMchvOZ9E
But it’s doing the job. Now everywhere you look you’ll see Israel supporters calling to end the ceasefire and reignite the Gaza holocaust to avenge these innocent children. I just saw an article from Tablet Magazine titled “Their Time Is Up,” subtitled “The murder of the Bibas children caps off an 18-month catalog of horrors that has told us exactly who our Palestinian neighbors are.
“Backed by a friend in the White House, Israel must secure its future through strong unilateral action.”
Most likely cause of death
All this despite the fact that we know the most likely cause of the children’s death was the fact that their own government was raining military explosives on places where hostages were being held during that time.
Hamas reported back in November 2023 that the Bibas children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike along with their mother. In December 2023 it was reported in the mainstream press that Hamas had offered to return their bodies to Israel but Israel had refused, telling the press that “Israel will not address propaganda-based reports coming from Hamas”.
You don’t need to trust Hamas or anyone else to deduce that a woman and two children being killed by Israeli airstrikes in an area where many women and children were being killed by Israeli airstrikes every day is a much more likely scenario than Palestinian resistance fighters spontaneously deciding to murder children with their bare hands instead of using them as negotiating leverage as planned.
As journalist Muhammad Shehada recently noted on Twitter, Israel already has an established track record of lying about Hamas killing hostages who were actually killed in Israeli airstrikes.
In December 2023, Israel informed the families of three hostages that they had been murdered by Hamas. The mother of one of the hostages kept digging and eventually discovered that they had died of asphyxiation when IDF troops “gassed” the tunnel they were hiding in.
Last September, the IDF admitted that they had killed the hostages in an airstrike and lied about it.
Three weeks ago Shehada correctly predicted in an article with Zeteo that Israel was preparing to use the Bibas deaths as an excuse to terminate the ceasefire, long before any of this started.
Shehada noticed the way pro-Israel narrative managers had been pushing the line that great vengeance must be exacted upon Gaza if it turns out the Bibas children have been harmed, despite Hamas having announced their deaths more than a year ago.
They knew those children were dead, so after the ceasefire was announced in late January they began circulating the narrative that discovery of their demise would be a valid reason to end it.
🚨BREAKING | Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinian children, ages 12 and 13, in the illegally occupied West Bank today. Both were reportedly shot in the back. https://t.co/6iqVf7Nasg
Israel forces shoot dead 2 Palestinian children
Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinian children in the West Bank just yesterday — both of them shot in the back. You could be forgiven for not knowing that this happened, because the Western political/media class has been too focused on the deaths of two little white kids to pay attention to such trivialities.
Israel needs to keep “discovering” new Hamas atrocities from 2023 because otherwise it just looks like one-sided atrocities being committed by Israel this whole time. First it was beheaded babies, then later it was “We’ve discovered Hamas did mass rapes!”, and now it’s the Bibas kids.
They need to do this because the Hamas attack was the last time anything happened where Israel could frame itself as the victim, so they’ve been milking it and milking it and milking it for as long as possible while committing orders of magnitude worse abuse in Gaza.
It’s all designed to drum up outrage, and to draw sympathy toward Israel and away from the obvious victims who Israel has been abusing, displacing and mass murdering for a year and a half.
As calls to rain vengeance upon Gaza grow louder, remember this: the Bibas kids aren’t the reason, they’re the excuse. The excuse to advance pre-planned agendas against the Palestinians that have been in place since long before those children were born.
“Gaza is not [President Trump’s] business venture, and it is not for sale. Gaza is our home, our land, our inheritance.” Image: Instagram/#flyer_for_falastin/@tahiapretiti
OPEN LETTER: By Hassan Abo Qamar
Dear Mr Trump,
I am writing to you as a Palestinian and a survivor of genocide, who was born and raised in Gaza — a city of love and resilience.
I have read your statements about Gaza and frankly, I am confused.
You claim to be a “peacemaker”, but encourage Israel to continue its genocide, calling for “all hell” to break loose if your demands are not fulfilled.
Mr Trump, we have already been through hell. We lost 60,000 martyrs in it.
You claim credit for the ceasefire deal, and yet your government — one of its guarantors — refuses to pressure Israel into fulfilling all its obligations under it.
You call Gaza a “demolition site” but conveniently fail to name the criminal responsible — while simultaneously supplying it with more bombs, funding, and diplomatic cover.
You talk about Palestinians being “safe” and “happy”, yet you refer to us as if we are a burden to be offloaded onto Jordan, Egypt, or any country willing to take us.
You claim that we “only want to be in the Gaza Strip because [we] don’t know anything else”.
“Gaza is not [President Trump’s] business venture, and it is not for sale. Gaza is our home, our land, our inheritance.” Image: Instagram/#flyer_for_falastin/@tahiapretitiYou profoundly misunderstand us
Mr Trump, I think you profoundly misunderstand who we are and what Gaza is to us.
You may think of us as a mere obstacle to your vision of luxury resorts, but we are a people with deep roots, long history, and unalienable rights.
We are the rightful owners of our land.
Gaza is not your business venture, and it is not for sale.Gaza is our home, our land, our inheritance.
And no, it is not true that we want to stay here because we “know nothing else”.
Although the 17-year-long Israeli siege has made life incredibly difficult for us, some of us have still managed to travel — for education, medical treatment or work. But these people still return because Gaza is home.
He earned his master’s degree in the UK and later completed his PhD at Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Despite having the opportunity to stay abroad, he chose to return to Gaza, where he taught creative writing and literature at the Islamic University.
He also co-founded We Are Not Numbers, an initiative that paired young Palestinian writers with experienced authors to amplify their voices and resist occupation through storytelling. One of these voices is mine.
Last spring, I, too, had the opportunity to leave, but I decided against it. I could not leave my family, friends and Gaza amid a genocidal war. However, like many others, I plan to travel to complete my education and then return to help rebuild and support my people.
The Palestinian way
This is the Palestinian way – we seek knowledge and opportunities, not to abandon our homeland, but to build and strengthen it.
Speaking of building — you talk about your plans to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. The thing is, Gaza was the Riviera of the Middle East. Our ancestors built it into a flourishing trade hub, port city and cultural centre. It was “magnificent” — to use your words — until Israel was created and it started destroying it.
And yet, after every brutal Israeli assault on Gaza, Palestinians would rebuild. Despite all the Israeli violence, restrictions and thievery, Palestinians still made sure Gaza was a safe place with a cosy rhythm of life, where its youth were doing their best to pursue decent livelihoods, where families were happy and together, and where homes thrived.
Israel has now tried to reduce all of Gaza to rubble and death so we are no longer able to live in it. You have picked up on the idea, effectively endorsing our ethnic cleansing under the veneer of humanitarianism.
No, Mr Trump, we will not be “happy” and “safe” elsewhere.
But I agree with you on something else you said: “You’ve got to learn from history”. Indeed, history teaches us that settler-colonialism in modern times is unsustainable. In this sense, your plans and Israel’s plans are doomed to fail.
We, the people of Gaza – like any Indigenous people – refuse to be uprooted. We refuse to be dispossessed. We refuse to be forced into exile so that our land can be handed to the highest bidder. We are not a problem to be solved; we are a people with the right to live in our homeland in freedom and dignity.
No amount of bombs, blockades, or tanks will make us forget that. We will not be relocated, resettled, or replaced.
Power and wealth will not decide the fate of Gaza. History is not written by thieves – it is written by those who resist, by the will of the people. No matter the pressure, our connection to this land will never be severed. Surrender and abandonment are not an option. We will honour our martyrs with resistance by nourishing this land with love, care and remembrance.
Wishing you all the best in your futile pursuits,
Hassan Abuqamar Gaza, Palestine
This open letter was first published by Al Jazeera.
The New Zealand government and the mainstream media have gone ballistic (thankfully not literally just yet) over the Cook Islands move. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
The New Zealand government and the mainstream media have gone ballistic (thankfully not literally just yet) over the move by the small Pacific nation to sign a strategic partnership with China in Beijing this week.
It is the latest in a string of island nations that have signalled a closer relationship with China, something that rattles nerves and sabres in Wellington and Canberra.
The New Zealand government and the mainstream media have gone ballistic (thankfully not literally just yet) over the Cook Islands move. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
The Chinese have politely told the Kiwis to back off. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters that China and the Cook Islands have had diplomatic relations since 1997 which “should not be disrupted or restrained by any third party”.
“New Zealand is rightly furious about it,” a TVNZ Pacific affairs writer editorialised to the nation. The deal and the lack of prior consultation was described by various journalists as “damaging”, “of significant concern”, “trouble in paradise”, an act by a “renegade government”.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters, not without cause, railed at what he saw as the Cook Islands government going against long-standing agreements to consult over defence and security issues.
“Should New Zealand invade the Cook islands?” . . . New Zealand Herald columnist Matthew Hooton’s view in an “oxygen-starved media environment” amid rattled nerves. Image: New Zealand Herald screenshot APR
‘Clearly about secession’
Matthew Hooton, who penned the article in The Herald, is a major commentator on various platforms.
“Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown’s dealings with China are clearly about secession from the realm of New Zealand,” Hooton said without substantiation but with considerable colonial hauteur.
“His illegal moves cannot stand. It would be a relatively straightforward military operation for our SAS to secure all key government buildings in the Cook Islands’ capital, Avarua.”
This could be written off as the hyperventilating screeching of someone trying to drum up readers but he was given a major platform to do so and New Zealanders live in an oxygen-starved media environment where alternative analysis is hard to find.
The Cook Islands, with one of the largest Exclusive Economic Zones in the world — a whopping 2 million sq km — is considered part of New Zealand’s backyard, albeit over 3000 km to the northeast. The deal with China is focused on economics not security issues, according to Cooks Prime Minister Mark Brown.
Deep sea mining may be on the list of projects as well as trade cooperation, climate, tourism, and infrastructure.
The Cook Islands seafloor is believed to have billions of tons of polymetallic nodules of cobalt, copper, nickel and manganese, something that has even caught the attention of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Various players have their eyes on it.
Glen Johnson, writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, reported last year:
“Environmentalists have raised major concerns, particularly over the destruction of deep-sea habitats and the vast, choking sediment plumes that excavation would produce.”
All will be revealed
Even Cook Island’s citizens have not been consulted on the details of the deal, including deep sea mining. Clearly, this should not be the case. All will be revealed shortly.
New Zealand and the Cook Islands have had formal relations since 1901 when the British “transferred” the islands to New Zealand. Cook Islanders have a curious status: they hold New Zealand passports but are recognised as their own country. The US government went a step further on September 25, 2023. President Joe Biden said:
“Today I am proud to announce that the United States recognises the Cook Islands as a sovereign and independent state and will establish diplomatic relations between our two nations.”
A move to create their own passports was undermined by New Zealand officials who successfully stymied the plan.
New Zealand has taken an increasingly hostile stance vis-a-vis China, with PM Luxon describing the country as a “strategic competitor” while at the same time depending on China as our biggest trading partner. The government and a compliant mainstream media sing as one choir when it comes to China: it is seen as a threat, a looming pretender to be South Pacific hegemon, replacing the flip-flopping, increasingly incoherent USA.
Climate change looms large for island nations. Much of the Cooks’ tourism infrastructure is vulnerable to coastal inundation and precious reefs are being destroyed by heating sea temperatures.
“One thing that New Zealand has got to get its head round is the fact that the Trump administration has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord,” Dr Robert Patman, professor of international relations at Otago University, says. “And this is a big deal for most Pacific Island states — and that means that the Cook Islands nation may well be looking for greater assistance elsewhere.”
Diplomatic spat with global coverage
The story of the diplomatic spat has been covered in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. Eyebrows are rising as yet again New Zealand, a close ally of Israel and a participant in the US Operation Prosperity Guardian to lift the Houthi Red Sea blockade of Israel, shows its Western mindset.
Matthew Hooton’s article is the kind of colonialist fantasy masquerading as geopolitical analysis that damages New Zealand’s reputation as a friend to the smaller nations of our region.
Yes, the Chinese have an interest in our neck of the woods — China is second only to Australia in supplying much-needed development assistance to the region.
It is sound policy not insurrection for small nations to diversify economic partnerships and secure development opportunities for their people. That said, serious questions should be posed and deserve to be answered.
Geopolitical analyst Dr Geoffrey Miller made a useful contribution to the debate saying there was potential for all three parties to work together:
“There is no reason why New Zealand can’t get together with China and the Cook Islands and develop some projects together,” Dr Miller says. “Pacific states are the winners here because there is a lot of competition for them”.
I think New Zealand and Australia could combine more effectively with a host of South Pacific island nations and form a more effective regional voice with which to engage with the wider world and collectively resist efforts by the US and China to turn the region into a theatre of competition.
We throw the toys out
We throw the toys out of the cot when the Cooks don’t consult with us but shrug when Pasifika elders like former Tuvalu PM Enele Sopoaga call us out for ignoring them.
In Wellington last year, I heard him challenge the bigger powers, particularly Australia and New Zealand, to remember that the existential threat faced by Pacific nations comes first from climate change. He also reminded New Zealanders of the commitment to keeping the South Pacific nuclear-free.
To succeed, a “Pacific for the peoples of the Pacific” approach would suggest our ministries of foreign affairs should halt their drift to being little more than branch offices of the Pentagon and that our governments should not sign up to US Great Power competition with China.
Ditching the misguided anti-China AUKUS project would be a good start.
Friends to all, enemies of none. Keep the Pacific peaceful, neutral and nuclear-free.
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
The United States shares the pathologies of all dying empires with their mixture of buffoonery, rampant corruption, military fiascos, economic collapse and savage state repression.
ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges
The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalising the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.
Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire’s diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths.
Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.
The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg ruler, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities. They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society. Cartoon: Mr Fish/The Chris Hedges Report
They are removing government reports and data on climate change and withdrawing
from the Paris Climate Agreement,. They are pulling out of the World Health Organisation.
They are sanctioning officials who work at the International Criminal Court — which issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza.
They suggested Canada become the 51st state. They have formed a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” They call for the annexation of Greenland and the seizure of the Panama Canal.
They propose the construction of luxury resorts on the coast of a depopulated Gaza under US control which, if it takes place, would bring down the Arab regimes propped up by the US.
Uttering nonsensical remarks
The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg ruler, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities. They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society.
These Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration, are unapologetic about their hatred for pluralistic, secular democracies. They seek, as they exhaustively detail in numerous “Christian” books and documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to deform the judiciary and legislative branches of government, along with the media and academia, into appendages to a “Christianised” state led by a divinely anointed leader.
They openly admire Nazi apologists such as Rousas John Rushdoony, a supporter of eugenics who argues that education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches and Biblical law must replace the secular legal code, and Nazi party theorists such as Carl Schmitt.
They are avowed racists, misogynists and homophobes. They embrace bizarre conspiracy theories from the white replacement theory to a shadowy monster they call “the woke.” Suffice it to say, they are not grounded in a reality based universe.
Christian fascists come out of a theocratic sect called Dominionism. This sect teaches that American Christians have been mandated to make America a Christian state and an agent of God. Political and intellectual opponents of this militant Biblicalism are condemned as agents of Satan.
“Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and ‘Christian values’ form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all,” I noted in my book.
“Labour unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytising mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and ‘homeland’ security.”
Chris Hedges talks to Marc Lamont Hill on Up Front on why “democracy doesn’t exist in the United States” today. Video: Al Jazeera
Comforting to most Americans
The Christian fascists and their billionaire funders, I noted, “speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past.”
They commit logocide, killing old definitions and replacing them with new ones. Words — including truth, wisdom, death, liberty, life and love — are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings.Life and death, for example, mean life in Christ or death to Christ, a signal of belief of unbelief. Wisdom refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the doctrine.
Liberty is not about freedom, but the liberty that comes from following Jesus Christ and being liberated from the dictates of secularism. Love is twisted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those, such as Trump, who claim to speak and act for God.As the death spiral accelerates, phantom enemies, domestic and foreign, will be blamed for the demise, persecuted and slated for obliteration.
Once the wreckage is complete, ensuring the immiseration of the citizenry, a breakdown in public services and engendering an inchoate rage, only the blunt instrument of state violence will remain. A lot of people will suffer, especially as the climate crisis inflicts with greater and greater intensity its lethal retribution.
The near-collapse of our constitutional system of checks and balances took place long before the arrival of Trump. Trump’s return to power represents the death rattle of the Pax Americana. The day is not far off when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, Congress will take its last significant vote and surrender power to a dictator. The Democratic Party, whose strategy seems to be to do nothing and hope Trump implodes, have already acquiesced to the inevitable.
The question is not whether we go down, but how many millions of innocents we will take with us. Given the industrial violence our empire wields, it could be a lot, especially if those in charge decide to reach for the nukes.
Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponised to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the UN and other multilateral organisations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the US military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.
Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds “democracy promotion” and “judicial reform” that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the grip of the empire.
USAID, for example, paid for a “political party reform project” that was designed “as a counterweight” to the “radical” Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo) and sought to prevent socialists like Evo Morales from being elected in Bolivia. It then funded organisations and initiatives, including training programmes so Bolivian youth could be taught the American business practices, once Morales assumed the presidency, to weaken his hold on power.
Kennard in his book, The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire, documents how US institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South.
Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. The heavily funded aid programmes, designed to bring down Morales, eventually led the Bolivian president to throw USAID out of the country.
The lie peddled to the public is that this aid benefits both the needy overseas and us at home. But the inequality these programmes facilitate abroad replicates the inequality imposed domestically. The wealth extracted from the Global South is not equitably distributed. It ends up in the hands of the billionaire class, often stashed in overseas bank accounts to avoid taxation.
Our US tax dollars, meanwhile, disproportionately funds the military, which is the iron fist that sustains the system of exploitation. The 30 million Americans who were victims of mass layoffs and deindustrialisation lost their jobs to workers in sweatshops overseas. As Kennard notes, both home and abroad, it is a vast “transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically”.
Legitimises theft at home
“The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimises theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest,” he writes. “The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.”
Foreign aid maintains sweatshops or “special economic zones” in countries such as Haiti, where workers toil for pennies an hour and often in unsafe conditions for global corporations.
“One of the facets of special economic zones, and one of the incentives for corporations in the US, is that special economic zones have even less regulations than the national state on how you can treat labour and taxes and customs,” Kennard told me in an interview.
“You open these sweatshops in the special economic zones. You pay the workers a pittance. You get all the resources out without having to pay customs or tax. The state in Mexico or Haiti or wherever it is, where they’re offshoring this production, doesn’t benefit at all. That’s by design. The coffers of the state are always the ones that never get increased. It’s the corporations that benefit.”
These same US institutions and mechanisms of control, Kennard writes in his book, were employed to sabotage the electoral campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of the US empire, for prime minister in Britain.
The US disbursed nearly $72 billion in foreign aid in fiscal year 2023. It funded clean water initiatives, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. In 2024, it provided 42 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations.
Humanitarian aid, often described as “soft power,” is designed to mask the theft of resources in the Global South by US corporations, the expansion of the footprint of the US military, the rigid control of foreign governments, the devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction, the systemic abuse of workers in global sweatshops and the poisoning of child labourers in places like the Congo, where they are used to mine lithium.
The demise of American power
I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organisations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.
The seizure of government personnel records and classified material, the effort to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts — mostly those which relate to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), the offers of buyouts to “drain the swamp” including a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency — now temporarily blocked by a judge — the firing of 17 or 18 inspectors generals
and federal prosecutors, the halting of government funding and grants, sees them cannibalise the leviathan they worship.
They plan to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education
and the US Postal Service, part of the internal machinery of the empire. The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.
Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the US will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression. This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates.
The funding of at least 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain. The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by an inchoate rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism.
Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit — witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.
When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”
“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just 27 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the US invaded Iraq],” he writes.
The array of tools used for global dominance — wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties, including due process, torture, militarised police, the massive prison system, militarised drones and satellites — will be employed against a restive and enraged population.
The devouring of the carcass of the empire to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.
![“Gaza is not [President Trump’s] business venture](https://davidrobie.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Palestine-is-not-for-sale-@Flyer-680wide-.png "Palestine is not for sale @Flyer 680wide")
