How does light get in?

Two candidates for genocide at the US elections

A few people have asked me about the upcoming US elections, so I felt it might be useful to write down a few thoughts.

I dislike most things about the US, especially right now, and specifically the relevance of such a dilapidated and spiritually moribund place for the rest of the world. That being said, the “democratic” decision to be made between Kamala “Holocaust” Harris, and Donald Trump, does offer useful or even perfect material through which to discuss the relationship between formal “democratic” systems and the lesser-evil approach to politics.

For starters, and something that seems to get forgotten, lesser-evils are - the clue is in the name - still evil. They still trend towards evil. The only plausible merit one might argue is contained in a politics of lesser-evilism is that it takes you more slowly into evil; hardly a compelling argument and quite possibly - by its very incrementalism - more dangerous in the prospect of evil arriving gradually, up until it encircles you and you don’t even recognise you have been enmeshed within evil.

But, quite apart from this, there can be no dispute either that that baton of “lesser evil” has now passed firmly from The Democrats who ordinarily wield it, to Donald Trump (notionally the Republican candidate).

Simply put and Kamala Harris, alongside Joe Biden, has helped commission the murder of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians… and Donald Trump hasn’t. All laws of logic then mean he is by definition the lesser-evil until that situation is altered — something that hopefully won't have to happen at a cost of even more Palestinian life. To paraphrase the idea that virtue untested is no virtue at all, so too is greater evil accused (the entire Democrat strategy for campaigning against Donald Trump) not the same as evil, especially not when alleged by those practising genocide.

All this is nonetheless still to grant western “democracies” greater democratic credentials than they deserve. It is to assume the idea that changing governments equates to changing policies, that there is a real choice here, something that is quite clearly not the case, least of all where US support to the Israelis is concerned.

The western, imperial-democracy dream is for people to believe that their participation in politics is reducible to elections that then meaningfully alter social-political directions. This fallacy has been internalised in the US up to and beyond the point wherein the two options available need have little clear distinction beyond their chosen colours. From the perspective of empire, the ideal western citizen is one who will uphold this myth of how to attain political change, and thus shy from dissent, employment choices, boycott, protest, industrial action or civil disobedience; all far more meaningful mechanisms to bring change than those — so the dream tries loudly to insist— that are the proper and best mechanisms to achieve it.

Mechanisms and ideals

Like any system, there are two way of looking at democracy and two types of adherents to democracy. Let us first separate democracy into its mechanism (counting votes) and its ideal (all humans are of equal worth and with a right to dictate the direction and choices of their society). What the west has witnessed, with the US in its regular cultlike ways the best example, is an almighty corruption of the ideal of democracy, taken right up until the point where — for many — the mechanism is now worshipped higher than the ideal, and certainly at the expense of the ideal. That either victor in the US election will almost certainly spend four years contesting the count that handed victory to the other is almost further proof of this fascination, and the centrality of the mechanism and not the ideal.

The legitimising notion behind this is that so long as something (no matter what, and no matter the choices) is being counted, then democracy is being implemented. One could argue that in a system where capitalism becomes godlike, this is inevitable: counting is essential to capitalism, the essence of capitalism is that the quantifiable has more value than the qualitative; we count money, we count profit, we count likes, culture is emptied-out by events like sporting spectacle where we count points. Counting is god and counting votes that alter nothing is - as far as the system is concerned - the highest form of achievement.

Under these conditions, with elections stripped of meaningful choices, it becomes far more effective to consider elections as public signals of consent or rejection, and (sadly) not as harbingers of meaningful change. Elections are just opinion polls with a little more heft.

At the present time, the US — with Harris and her publicly vocal Jewish-Zionist husband, Doug Emhoff, entirely supportive and complicit — is helping the Israelis carry out genocide. Without US support, the genocide would have to stop tomorrow, but Harris believes in that support because she believes in the necessity of genocide. If a voter also believes in genocide this is fine, vote Harris. If the voter doesn’t believe in genocide, don’t vote for Harris. This doesn’t necessarily mean they have to vote for Donald Trump, who has also pursued awful policies (not one of them rectified by the Democrats despite four years in power) against Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians. In many states, where the US two-party, disaggregated dictatorship will see votes pile up in opposition to the eventual winner of the state, a vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, on a platform of public investment and anti-war, anti-genocide policy, is not only morally preferable to a pro-genocide vote for Harris, or a presumed-genocide vote for Trump, it would also — if Stein can amass just 5% of overall votes—bring the Green Party an increase in federal funding; this can then help challenge the corrupt duopoly of US power in ways that are also essential to ameliorating other disastrous features of US society. The reality is that even those who presume themselves to be perenially-disappointed but default Dems (or those Republicans who have realised the GOP to be a machine of corporate power rather than US interests) could vote for Stein at zero-risk of helping a Trump or Harris victory, even if this is a decision that the Democratic Party will nonetheless fight with all its power because it represents a fracturing of the myth of the goodness of the Democratic Party, and the psychological hostage-taking they perpetrate against US voters, promising nothing more than the claim that any alternative to them would be worse.

The truth of US politics is somewhat different; the Democrats are merely the legitimising component in a US system predisposed towards worsening outcomes. Perhaps most common in the Democratic Party’s fearmongering are reproductive rights and abortion access, though the argument of Democratic saviour-status does not stack up, and states including Texas and Kentucky have proven quite able to erode abortion access even under a Democratic presidency, as has the US Supreme Court. The Democrats also like to extol their virtues on climate change policy, but support for the US fracking industry that has made the US among the world’s largest oil producers is now - like foreign policy - overwhelmingly bipartisan; US rig-count follows the oil price and cost of borrowing, not government. On the stimulus known as Green New Deal, the originally touted $3trillion the Democrats promised was eroded to a tenth of that largely by the lobbying efforts of a Democrat senator in West Virginia, Joe Manchin. US politics is culturally and institutionally designed to ensure that all of its worst elements remain locked-in. If a full-blown genocide is not enough to break the psychological enslavement, the addiction to two versions and components of and within the same machine, then what will?

Realpolitik and “America First”

Putting aside the notion that proven genocide (Harris) will always be logically and morally worse than presumed genocide (Trump), there are non-theoretical reasons to believe that Trump could offer something beyond this. Trump might have the close influence of his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner (close family friend of the Netanyahu’s and Trump's previous go-between with Israelis and their Gulf tyrant allies), every bit as much as Harris has her husband's influence, but he does also pay some lip-service to the foreign policy doctrine of “America First”; advocating a more isolationist US policy which could offer a way out on the US-backed aggressions against Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and everyone else. The optimistic logic runs that Trump is an instinctive Zionist because he is a US imperialist, but that he is not so susceptible to the Zionist mythmaking and storytelling that has woven its way so effectively among Democrats.

The hinterland of ideas behind withdrawing US support for the Israelis is also strong. It is a two-decade old foreign policy position, one not even very radical, that the US needs to exit the West Asia and North Africa region (aka “The Middle East”) and engage so-called “peer competitors”; militarily in the case of Russia and China, and economically in the case of China and the European Union. Barack Obama’s Iran-US ‘deal’, where the world reengaged Iran in return for restrictions on its nuclear programme, is the defining policy of this genuinely sensible received wisdom. Obama likewise had a policy of avoiding full US engagement in Ukraine, correctly grasping that Ukraine was existential for Russia but not for the US. This understanding was also shared by the now-deceased Henry Kissinger, whose very name is synonymous with the rapacious pursuit of US interests. The realpolitik of this has also manifested culturally (and arguably has been engendered) in the warmth found in US right-wing and Republican circles towards Russia, and hostility towards Ukraine. If culturally there is a Christian, machismo, “anti-woke" fondness for what Russia and Putin represents, strategically there is a belief that US engagement with Russia in Ukraine is wrongheaded because it guarantees a Russia-China shared-interest that makes it far harder for the US to then challenge China in the Pacific. A purist pursuit of “America First” would see US disengagement from Ukraine, Palestine West Asia, fence-mending with Russia, and a pivot to a greater confrontation with China.

One serious failure in western bourgeois understanding of US policy on Palestine is to root their analysis (if ‘analysis’ is even the right word for such emotion and optics-led assessment of a situation) in personality. Which candidate might like Palestinians more (or less), who is more Islamophobic, more personally multicultural in their dinner parties, or simply a nicer (or worse) person? Donald Trump is an unapologetic and instinctive US imperialist, but to equal extent Kamala Harris is a creature of the institutions that deliver US imperialism; a brown woman who made her political name as a prosecutor in California, famed for the rate at which she incarcerated the black population of the state, particularly black men.

Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris share a bottom line of US interests, which are ultimately the core thing that dictate US policy in Palestine. Given the clear breaking of the moral lever over US political servants, we must deduce that primarily it is where US interests are threatened that US policy will change. US interests are threatened and will be threatened most of all by the military capabilities of resistance in Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and elsewhere. The apparent niceness or lack of it in US leadership is immaterial when dealing with such amoral creatures as both Trump and Harris; the US understands attacks on US military bases, and on the oil infrastructure of its proxies in the Gulf, more than those entreaties that are made domestically by US citizens they have long ago oppressed or indoctrinated. The personality illusion is a co-feature of the democracy illusion, whereby voters and watchers comfort themselves with the illusion that a different personality must represent a different policy position. As the musician Frank Zappa famously said, Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.

Co-signing Genocide

There is one element in which I diverge from the above position that the ideal of democracy is disconnected from the mechanism and method of voting itself. When we vote and place an X in a box, in a democratic system, even a corrupted one, this X in that box becomes our political signature; our mark of participation and consent. It is a sign that “I’m OK with that” or, at best, “I can tolerate that”.

The Democratic Party have conducted a full-throated genocide in Palestine. Kamala Harris, going above and beyond the call of duty, despite no evidence for such claims, and despite Palestinian men having been shot, and children murdered due to them, in the United States itself, continues to repeat the highly evocative lie “women were raped”, when making her fantastical descriptions of what happened when Palestinians broke down the walls of their US-sponsored Israeli concentration camp last October.

Harris, Biden, Ocasio-Cortez and all the rest of them have spent a year lying about ceasefire negotations they never sincerely pursued. They have spent a year performing or lying about their hurt for the tens and hundreds of thousands dead in Palestine, while all the time doing nothing to stop it and everything to enable it. It is impossible to separate this rate of murder, and this callousness towards Arab and Muslim life, from the value that such political figures attach to Muslim and Arab life elsewhere. Trump, sensing votes in it that Harris and the Democrats have been happy to shed, has even begun inviting Muslim and Arab community leaders to his campaign rallies.

Given all this, expecting an Arab or Muslim voter (but truly just for any morally and emotionally conscious person) to put an X in the box that is to sign up for their dehumanisation, is a lot to expect. It is moreover the height of a racism, beyond anything that Trump - in his rather more honest versions of racism as a dislike of difference - has ever offered, to actively expect people entering a polling station to then co-sign their own dehumanisation.

Democrat threats of what Trump, if elected, will do to US Muslims, Arabs, leftists, socialists, Black America or anybody else, exposes again the synergy between the Democrats and the Republicans; the threat of Republican hostility may provide the loaded weapon of US racism, but the Democrats are just as happy to take that weapon and point it at the communities it is intended for, most specifically in the event that they dare to step out of line and withdraw support for the Democrats. In some ways this is worse than being the honest and unasahmed owner of such an obscene weapon to begin with, particularly because the Democrats wield the weapon despite (and alongside) the guise of friendship.

Finally, if —as Harris and Biden have shown — your current political establishment is genocidal, and your society chooses not even to punish them for their genocide, then that by extension shows a society that is also genocidal, or at least comfortable with genocide. In such circumstances, to vote for genocide anyway - and perhaps this is more significant than anything else here - is to concede that one cannot imagine it being any other way.