“Order Must Prevail.”
Don't ignore these foreshadowing words spoken by Joe Biden
In the past few weeks the truth of college students calling on universities to disclose and divest their investments in companies and organizations linked to Israel and its war on Gaza has been twisted by our mainstream corporate media, and the president himself, to insinuate they are antisemitic. Protected by only their T-shirts, our kids with thousands of Jewish students in solidarity have faced off with the police in full riot gear. In some cases, the police have stood idly by while radical, violent Zionist supporters of a massive and openly exercised crime against humanity have attacked them across the nation. They’ve been kicked in the face, maced, clubbed, stunned with grenades and pushed down cement stairs. Many likely face suspension or expulsion for their courage in demanding their institutions of supposed higher learning and free speech serve human justice.
Instead, we have seen brutal suppression by the police state, as student encampments, the result of university administrators refusing to engage in conversation, beholden as they are to the big money boards that benefit from the status quo, also known as the military industrial complex, call the cops and put these courageous young people down with brute force for protesting the genocide of Palestinian people.
The world can plainly see the horror of 34,789 dead Palestinian civilians, two thirds women and children, which include mass graves at two hospitals, nearly 400 bodies total, including some executed with their hands tied behind their backs, and others buried alive.
Biden says, “There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos.” He says, “People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.” Antisemitism, he adds, “has no place” in America.
A self-proclaimed Zionist, Biden either can’t see the truth clearly, or has a not so hidden agenda. In October, he assured Netanyahu, "I don't believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist."
The knee-jerk response to any criticism of Israel is to be accused of antisemitism. These protests have nothing to do with antisemitism. They have to do with what most of the world can plainly see, the horror of 34,789 dead Palestinian civilians, two thirds women and children, which include mass graves at two hospitals, nearly 400 bodies total, including some executed with their hands tied behind their backs, and others buried alive.
It’s not antisemitic to be horrified by mass murder. Yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization whose mission is the obliteration or dissolution of Israel. Yes, Hamas launched an attack on Israeli citizens on October 7, that left 1,139 dead and an estimated 8,730 injured. Yes, Israel needed to respond to that, within reason.
However, there has been no reason, instead just a flimsy rationale, for the wholesale extermination of human beings that fails to address hatred and murder that goes back literally thousands of years. The pertinent, specific problems here are twofold. One, the creation of the Israel in 1948 was doomed by a long, complicated history in a hostile environment, and two, Gaza has been an open air concentration camp for decades. Palestinians can’t leave without passing through armed check points and suffer from a 36 percent poverty rate, unemployment over 40 percent, and food insecurity around 50 percent. 83 percent of workers are paid less than the minimum wage. Apartheid is alive and well in Israel. The survivors of the 34,789 dead have no choices with Hamas being the de facto ruler of the Gaza Strip since 2007.
A little history is in order
The formation of Israel in the aftermath of WWII as proposed by the United Nations in 1947 is based on scholarly study of the Hebrew Bible. The claim of a Jewish homeland in Israel goes back to the late 9th century B.C. when King David ruled. Before King David, it is thought that the descendants of Abraham, the father of Judaism, were enslaved by the Egyptians before settling in Canaan, which was in the region of modern-day Israel.
The history of Israel includes invasion by the Assyrians around 722 B.C. and the Babylonians around 516 B.C. In succeeding centuries what is now modern Israel was conquered and ruled by Persians (an Iranian ethnic group), Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, Egyptians, Mamelukes (slave soldiers serving Arab and Ottoman Muslim dynasties), Islamists and others. The persecution of Jews is real.
A more complete, but reasonably brief history of Israel’s tumultuous, violent existence for can be found here.
The horrors of Jews and other “undesirable” ethnic minorities in WWII should not be forgotten of course, but the very actions of Netanyahu whose ancestors were victims make Gaza a sad and tragic irony. Biden delivered remarks at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington on Tuesday.
“We give voice to the six million Jews who were systematically targeted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II. We honor the memory of victims, the pain of survivors, the bravery of heroes who stood up to Hitler’s unspeakable evil. And we recommit to heading and heeding the lessons of one of the darkest chapters in human history, to revitalize and realize the responsibility of never again.”
How Biden cannot see the hypocrisy of his words by the support of US weapons enabling the slaughter of Palestinians is baffling. Except it’s not. I’ll tell you why.
What’s really going on here?
As each day passes, the planet heats a little more, weakening our personal, national, and world security. Even as we build so-called renewables, we merely use them to consume more energy, rather than replace fossil fuels that are both destroying a climate we can depend on, and running out. We are experiencing ever more extreme weather events, destroying or diminishing harvests. Climate forced migration and refugees are growing, and the most authoritative scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are growing more pessimistic by the day as we fail to act adequately. The vast majority are in agreement, some 77 percent, that we are on a path to at least 2.5° C (4.5° F) of global warming by 2100. Only six percent thought the internationally agreed upon 1.5° C (2.7° F) limit would be met.
Given our inability to recognize the Limits to Growth and the realities of overshoot, we are headed for a world of shortages, inflation, chaos and violence without the huge societal changes that could save us, which need to begin immediately. The only option to minimize the calamity we have created is degrowth, which I wrote about in detail here. On our current path, economies will break and our illusory assumptions about the future will be shattered.
The early writing is on the wall. Insurance companies, hardly tree huggers, are pulling out of markets from California to Florida where the risks from fires and floods have become too great to underwrite. This isn’t just about the homes and businesses we have seen destroyed, either. Farmers also have to carry insurance, huge amounts. Forever under pressure due to fluctuations from the weather in normal circumstances, unpredictability is growing. How long before diminished or failed crops and rising insurance rates lead to devastating bankruptcies with consequences for all? How many will die in fields toiling in vain, as their bodies fail to wet bulb temperature? Humans rose with agriculture, and we will fall with it, too.
The Limits of Growth found that, in the absence of significant alterations in resource utilization, it is highly likely that there will be an abrupt and unmanageable decrease in both population and industrial capacity. Despite the report's facing severe criticism and scrutiny upon its release, subsequent research consistently finds that the global use of natural resources has been inadequately reformed since to alter its basic predictions.
These issues will lead to hyperinflation. Agriculture, obviously, is core to societal stability. Insurance becoming unavailable or too high to afford will push people from their homes, driving up competition and prices in the rental market. Our most basic needs, food and shelter, will become all we can afford, and many won’t be able to hang on. The mindless entertainment and consumption our comical measurement called GDP depends on will crash. Jobs will disappear and unemployment will rise, driving down wages, impacting the tax base and the ability of the government to respond and provide a safety net (if it even gives a damn). Homelessness, basically treated as criminal in this country, will become an epidemic. Large areas of the country will become uninhabitable.
I believe Joe Biden sees much of this. However, he is an old school, Cold War, law and order politician. He’s basically what used to be a standard Republican, but now most Republicans are far-right Christian fascist, Trump hijacked, climate change denying sociopaths, woefully ignorant, corrupt and ruthless. Biden has no vision, he only knows the old ways, so he’s doubling down with Bibi and trying to hide his support of genocide in plain sight by branding protestors as antisemitic. If he has ever heard of degrowth, he dismissed it instantly. If he’s not deluded, he recognizes the reality that the world we’re heading for is one of massive unrest, billions of climate refugees, and resource wars. With Netanyahu, he’s doubling down on a country we have always backed, a western stronghold in a hostile Middle East, with not coincidentally significant deposits of LNG and oil, in the Mediterranean, off the Gaza coast. Chevron is there. He opened Willow in Alaska for drilling, and I think I know why. Read it here. Those LNG terminals he paused in the Gulf? I wrote about that, too. Look for that pause to be lifted if he’s reelected, or completely psycho, Trump, for that matter. You can’t run an empire without massive amounts of energy, and somebody buying your fossil fuels, to supply the money for the war machine, especially when the empire is in its death throes.
Order must prevail, even if it’s insane. In fact, the crazier it gets, the more order needs to be enforced. Justice has nothing to do with it.
I appreciate your comment. Yes, humans existed before agriculture in extremely small numbers as hunter-gatherers. As I recall, the estimates were very low, population in the tens of thousands. Agriculture did indeed create the circumstances for civilization, as well as the need for governance and standing armies. Overshoot has been in part fueled by unsustainable agricultural practices from fertilizer derived from fossil fuels and a soil crisis from poor practices. I would still stand by the idea we rose with agriculture, without it, we would have just been another minor species on the planet — but I do get your point. You are correct, we can't know for certain if we will become extinct, but we're flirting with the possibility. What's more worrisome to me is the pain and violence our contraction guarantees. Thanks, Patrick.
A great analogy: Biden is.."a standard Republican, but now most Republicans are far-right Christian fascists." I appreciate you and your help to untangle this systemic state of affairs with lessons we have not learned.
Thank you for your thoughts, agreeably insane.