EDITOR—The oligarchs have long eviscerated democracy, says Chris Hedges, and now the masses confront a gloomy choice, to stand up and fight or be smashed by brutal fascism American style.
CHRS HEDGES—President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease. The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump, which paved the road to an American totalitarianism. Deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, unchecked predatory corporations, including the health-care industry, wholesale surveillance of every American, social inequality, an electoral system that is plagued by legalized bribery, endless and futile wars, the largest prison population in the world, but most of all feelings of betrayal, stagnation and despair, are a toxic brew that culminate in an inchoate hatred of the ruling class and the institutions they have deformed to exclusively serve the rich and the powerful. The Democrats are as guilty as the Republicans.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Until the empire has been dismantled, the world will never know justice. These swamp creatures will be able to worm their way around back and forth through the revolving door between Washington’s official government and its unofficial government while murdering, displacing and tormenting as many innocents as they please, with total impunity.
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal was also made to leave asking Blinken why he allowed hundreds of journalists to be murdered in Gaza, telling State Department spokesman Matt Miller that he “smirked through a genocide.”
Husseini was then forcibly removed for asking questions about Gaza, and about Israel’s nuclear program and Hannibal directive.
ED CURTIN—Then this proclivity of mine toward philosophical thought and dark humor flipped in my mind as the pictures of dead and weeping Palestinian children swept in and tortured me in dreams. I had seen the photos and videos of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians and felt sick and outraged afterwards. I have written against it many times. Yet as I wrote about this issue of nostalgia, I felt like a speculator in abstractions, and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s experience when on January 14, 1967 he was at an airport restaurant thumbing through a Ramparts magazine and saw an article by the journalist William Pepper, “The Children of Vietnam” that featured photos of Vietnamese mothers holding dead and napalmed children.
CHRIS HEDGES—This post packs 2 important topics. In one, Hedges interviews MIT students standing in opposition to the university sharing and developing technologies —like AI and advanced computer systems—that benefit the imperial war machine, and especially its Zionist colony in the Middle East. In the second part, Hedges provides a careful analysis of the history of Israeli/Palestinian peace accords, and the appalling dishonesty of Israel that now precludes a genuine and full celebration of the latest agreement.
