“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
US Airman Aaron Bushnell, speaking of the slaughter and deliberate starvation of Gaza before immolating himself in protest at the Israeli Embassy.
Aaron Bushnell saw something important about the genocide in Palestine, that this is not just about Gaza. The slaughter there may be the worst thing in the world, but similar atrocities are happening all over, and for similar reasons. The corporate / colonial Empire centered on the USA and spearheaded by Israel insists on consuming and dominating everything, and they are destroying the world to keep control over it.
They are wreaking extreme violence everywhere, including within the imperial nations themselves. If you want to see what the future holds, look at Gaza. Or Haiti, or Congo, or Libya, or any of a dozen other places.
Haiti is Gaza
Haiti, the western part of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, was once a French colony. People there are not being starved and massacred wholesale like in Gaza, but they are being ground down into abject misery, have absolutely no control over their government, and have been occupied off and on since 1915 by the US or forces organized by the US.
How did this happen? In the 17th and 18th century, Haiti was one of the richest places in the world, thanks to the sugar and tropical crops they grew with slave labor and exported to Europe. In 1804, Haitians pulled off the only successful slave revolt in human history, and France, the US, Canada and the whole global north have made them suffer for it ever since.
The freed slaves were forced by US/European militaries to pay the French slave owners for their freedom, at high rates of interest, which they were still paying back in the 1940s, making it impossible to develop their country.
Extreme poverty darkens lives in the city slums, while the oligarchs who own everything live in fantastic mansions in the hills. People become desperate; drug dealing and violence are everywhere.
When they try for democracy and better living conditions, as when they twice elected Jesuit priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the tiny but extraordinarily wealthy oligarch class calls in US support and overthrows the democrats. Then the people must go on laboring for $2 / day or less, having their natural resources shipped north, while being a captive market for American, French and Canadian imports they cannot afford.
Then, media and political pundits say, ‘Haiti is a failed state. Those Blacks can’t govern themselves. They need the civilized world’s armed intervention.’
I’ve lost count of how many times this has happened, but it’s happening again now. Haitian rebels led by Jimmy Chérizier have driven out President Ariel Henry, who had been installed by the Americans at the request of the oligarchs. They are trying to organize a new government that serves the people. The rebels are described as ‘Aristides with guns,’ because they saw what happened to the unarmed Aristide.
They are breaking out of their prison the way Hamas broke out of Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, and the America-centered Empire plans to treat them the way Gaza has been treated. The US haven’t yet found the proxy forces to do it, but they’re trying. Their headlines scream about gangsters and thugs terrorizing people. The oligarchs’ reps plead for American intervention. People are starving.
Congo is Gaza
The situation in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) looks a lot like Gaza or the Haitian capital of Port-Au-Prince. People sheltering in tents or cardboard boxes, searching for food and clean water, while trying to avoid attack by armed militias. Nobody is trying to ethnically cleanse the Congolese, but their children are conscripted as slaves in the mineral mines or as soldiers in the militias. Their food is looted by armed men and their homes destroyed by guns or bombs.
Congo’s history is a lot like Haiti’s. The Belgians may have been the cruelest colonizers of all the European powers, enslaving and massacring the people and stealing everything from gold to ivory to food, working people to death. When they achieved independence in the 1960s, Belgian and US intelligence agencies assassinated their beloved leader Patrice Lumumba.
Now corporations and oligarchs compete to loot the mineral wealth that powers our devices. Neighboring countries such as Rwanda and Uganda send in militias that fight for the profits of slave labor, all ultimately funded by Western corporations.
Other Gazas and attempted Gazas
I could give many more examples, because this is a global phenomenon. In Libya and Syria, Sudan and Sri Lanka, Burma and Yemen, people are being massacred and whole countries destroyed. This is what capitalism/colonialism does, especially when a military-industrial complex is making its decisions.
Only the pace of destruction and the weapons have changed. In Gaza, we can see happening in a few months what happened to the Native Americans over centuries. The capitalist/colonialist system will turn the whole world into Gaza if left to their own devices.
They can, however, sometimes be stopped. The US has tried for 20 years to turn Venezuela into Haiti, and they have failed because of the strong leadership — called “dictators” by the West — of Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, and the Venezuelan military. Cuba has also avoided the way of Haiti through their people’s militias and 30 years of support from the Socialist countries, when such places existed.
What happens to the colonizers
Don’t think it’s only poor, Black and Brown people who become Gazified. Look at what happens to the colonizing countries. In Israel, Germany, the UK, and America, people are being locked up or losing their jobs for opposing genocide and war. Demonstrations and free speech are stopped or curtailed if they oppose war. In Congo, peaceful demonstrators against armed forces are massacred. More and more of rich societies’ wealth goes to weapons. The wars never stop.
The economic face of fascism is called neoliberalism, a school of economics that advocates full freedom for finance capital and massive restriction of government support for working people. Under neoliberalism, the rich keep getting richer, while the rest of us become impoverished, imprisoned, or homeless. Tent cities, as seen in Gaza, Congo or downtown Los Angeles are not a problem for neoliberal fascists, just a cost of doing business, which only need occasional sweeping away by police raids.
The same applies to war and mass death, as in Gaza. They are not only acceptable; they are profit centers for military industrial corporations.
When the misery and poverty brought on by corporate economies and wars becomes too extreme for people to tolerate, the state turns against workers to control their efforts to live. The state of Florida recently banned local programs to protect farmworkers from extreme heat. President Biden and Congress stopped a railroad strike demanding safer conditions, at a time when an average of three trains derail each day in the USA. Oil companies are suing Greenpeace for $300 million for blocking ocean oil pipelines and drilling. States are imprisoning animal defenders and water defenders for terrorism. This is how our landscapes come to look like Gaza.
How the world as Gaza will look
Look at the pictures of destroyed Gazan cities. What do they remind you of? To me, the only comparison is with Hiroshima after the atom bomb, and in fact, the total tonnage of explosives dropped on Gaza is equivalent to the Hiroshima blast.
Israeli officials ward off US criticism of their Gaza crimes by comparing them with Dresden, the German city almost completely destroyed, along with its people, by US firebombing in WW2. Such attacks are now considered war crimes, as is most of what Israel is doing, as is most of what the US did in the genocidal wars against the Native Americans. But why should colonizers care? Who will hold them to account?
More to the point, who will stop them from escalating? Who will stop them from going nuclear, destroying the entire world? The US is already challenging nuclear-armed Russia to war in Ukraine. At the same time, they proclaim a coming war with nuclear-armed China as soon as 2025, according to Air Force General Mike Minihan and some military-funded thinks tanks.
So, the US is surrounding China with military installations, as they surround Russia’s western and southern borders. They are slowly turning Ukraine into Gaza and will do the same to Taiwan if they can. The corporations controlling US foreign policy can’t stop. Money and power are their only decision-making guides, because profit is the prime directive of corporations. They were invented for the purpose of allowing investors to profit without any risk for their losses or responsibility for the damage they create. Think oil spills. Think Gaza.
Life and nature cannot be quantified like money can, so Gazan-style genocides show up on corporate bottom lines only as profit. In fact, inter-group conflicts leading to war are huge moneymakers for the MIC, and the US government happily goes around stirring them up. The Israel/Palestine conflict is the most blatant and horrible example, but there are many others, from Ukraine to Hong Kong to Syria and beyond.
It is very difficult to avoid war when military corporations control your foreign policy. Along with the Israel Lobby, this connection accounts for US support for Israel’s wars, just as the interests of powerful tech corporations explain the Congo wars. Corporate capitalism prepares for nuclear war — which would instantly turn the world into Gaza — because the alternative of a more peaceful, just order is unprofitable and thus unthinkable.
Where is the hope
The situation as I describe it sounds hopeless, and many people think it is. But people are fighting back on many levels. Guerillas like Jimmy Chérizier in Haiti and Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigades, and independent nations like Yemen and Iran are standing up against corporate destruction. Those are relatively small forces, and they’re not always lovable people, but you can’t be a nice guy and fight the US corporate empire. They’ll kill you, coup you, or buy you off, as they did democratically-elected leaders like Allende in Chile, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Mossadegh in Iran, and many others.
The biggest countries, China and Russia, are fighting in their own way. China tries to keep the struggle economic with their Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to lift up poor countries to where they can contribute to global (and Chinese) wealth, and live decent lives.
The US Empire can’t compete economically, having sent all its industry to Asia 50 years ago. They want war. The US reaction to every single challenge is to kill it or bomb it.
But China, Yemen, and many others believe that armies like theirs, not driven by corporate profit, can beat much more expensively-armed enemies like the US, EU, and Israel. They can win because they focus on a bigger picture. Corporations don’t make their decisions. They can look at what the world wants and at efficiency and effectiveness, not only at profit.
So, it’s important to push back against war with China, against war with Russia, and especially for Palestine. Right now, two million people are being starved and massacred in Gaza. There, the whole landscape and its water are being despoiled. It’s a bad precedent, and it’s coming to all of us if we don’t stop it. If the Palestinians survive, we have a chance.
Remember what Aaron Bushnell said. Don’t let Gaza be the new normal. Speak out to everyone you know. Disband the military industrial corporations. Stop US support for Israeli genocide now.
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"The corporate / colonial Empire . . . insists on consuming and dominating everything, and they are destroying the world to keep control over it."
I was recently reminded that there is an official psychiatric diagnosis for kids who act out in school: "Oppositional Defiant Disorder" (ODD). I wonder why there is no diagnosis for those compelled to organize their fellows to destroy the planet and each other, e.g., Capitalist Corruption Disorder (CCD). Clearly more pathological.