I want to review, so there is no misunderstanding about my position.

As I have said from the beginning, it is my view that the goal of Israel’s military operation in Gaza is to ethnically cleanse Gaza. /1 The goal is not to fight and win a “war against Hamas.” The goal is also not to rescue the hostages. The war against Hamas is a cover story, and the hostages are a prop. /2

With respect, I think @RnaudBertrand is overthinking this. Yes, we all know the agenda of Carlson and other likeminded portions of the American right with respect to China. /1

https://twitter.com/rnaudbertrand/status/1755782272098488350

But the important thing right now is to end the atrocious war in Ukraine, which has probably killed half a million people, and is threatening to drag even more Ukrainian cannon fodder into the doomed proxy struggle. /2

Israel cannot be resisted effectively if its strategic goals are not understood. The point of its ongoing operation is not to defeat Hamas or recover its hostages. Nor is it merely to inflict collective punishment. /1 Israel’s goal is to eliminate permanently the presence of Palestinian people and Palestinian civilization from the territory of Gaza. //2

The Israelis are not carrying out “indiscriminate” bombing. They are executing a ruthless and well-planned ethnic cleansing operation. In the coming years we will learn how this plan was put together. The plan has surely existed for a long time, but 10/7 provided the pretext. /1

https://twitter.com/danmkervick/status/1721686985859899594

Destroying mosques and churches are not random acts of impulsive vengeance. Places of worship are among the key structures attaching people to a geographical community. If you are trying to remove people from a place, you destroy what attached them to that place. /2

The Israelis are conducting a massive ethnic cleansing campaign. They have already murdered more Palestinians in this operation than were killed in the 1948 Nakba. /1 And there is very good reason to think that when it is over, they will have displaced more than the 750,000 who were displaced by the Nakba. /2

I’m losing my mind. It seems so hard to get through to some people. I not talking about crazed Zionists. They are always the same. I’m talking about zombified normies who seem incapable of grasping and responding to what is happening.

Some normie clichés I’ve come to hate:

/1 “I’m worried Israel doesn’t have plan for the day after.”

(Yes, what, oh what will they do the day after they finish committing GENOCIDE?)

/2

The US and NATO wanted this war. They created the conditions for it for years. They interfered in Ukrainian domestic politics to subvert its elected government and get pro-west nationalists in charge. They sabotaged all efforts at a peaceful diplomatic settlement. /1 The reason they did this is because they expected east victory and Russian regime change. They though a combination of western weapons and sanctions would bring Putin down and Russia to its knees. /2

Where do liberals get their military analysis of the war in Ukraine? I ask this because they always seem convinced the war is “going badly” for Russia. I think many of them honestly believe that. Where do they come by this analysis? /1 Based on the analysis I read and listen to, this is the picture I have:

First, Russia has annexed for Ukrainian regions. They seem to be holding them successfully, and have built massive fortifications and three lines deep defensive lines. /2

“Crime” is the catch-all term people use to refer to any activity in the subaltern orders of society that raises anxiety that those people have broken free of their yokes. /1 When people start complaining about crime, they are usually expressing their fear of things well beyond literal violations of statutory law. It’s a response to anything they perceive as impudent disobedience rumbling the ranks of the servants. /2

Progressive Congress-critters decided that helping Biden hype US-against-the-world conflict would be a cool tactic to get some (re)industrial policy spending thrown around in their American districts and states. /1 The only price would be a few hundred thousand dead in Ukraine, severely heightened risk of escalating a mass-murdering world conflict, and an increase in Sinophobia and anti-Asian bigotry. /2

The first most important thing to understand about the Cold War is that it was a global class war fought to protect the interests and power of the propertied from those who were prepared to challenge those interests and that power. /1 The propertied included many different allies: very old money European aristocrats and established colonizer families, old money US bluebloods, 20th century war fortunes, newer money rising corporate ventures, Jim Crow southern upper and lesser bourgeoisie. /2

The recent deflation of the left movement in the US wasn’t the result of Sanders’s second defeat. It was the result of the white backlash that was triggered when we had people in the street all over the US to rise up against our fascist police regime’s war on black people. /1 The backlash included not just the usual suspects. It included a bunch of white progressives and self-identified leftists who joined in with the great white moan, empowering and boosting the reactionary “moderation” of Crime Bill Joe, a.k.a Jim Crow Joe. /2

Socialists in the US have a special kind of moral obligation that our comrades in other countries don’t typically have. We have to help them all liberate themselves from imperial capitalism, which requires that we adopt a stance of firm dissent toward our domestic establishment. I worry a great deal about budding movements toward “patriotic” and “nationalistic” socialism in the US. That would be appropriate for other countries, but it’s a much more fraught, risky and difficult project in the US.

The Cold War was not really cold. It was a brutal, global campaign against socialists everywhere. It was the class war waged globally on behalf of capital. /1 It employed coups, armed interventions, deaths squads, torture, state terror and disappearances, assassinations at home and abroad, and domestic disinformation and persecutions. It was waged by many, but directed from Washington. /2

Big effort now to spread the idea that Ukraine is losing the war because they didn’t listen to US expert advice. Strangely, this narrative seems to come from both pro-Russian and pro-US camps. /1 It comes from the former because those guys are eager to drive a wedge of dissension between Ukraine and the US. It comes from the latter because US imperial leaders see failure ahead and want to pass the buck in it and salvage some prestige. /2

The US empire was built to fight a global class war, to defend both capital-ISM and the interests of wealthy capital-ISTS, and to destroy socialism and other redistributive political movements of resistance all over the world. /1 It did this by murdering socialists all over the world, sometimes in direct wars, sometimes in proxy wars and sometimes by more irregular (though common) means like death squads, sabotage, assasination, and funding manipulation of internal conflict and violence. /2

The Generation of 1989 clings to power in the US and the west. This is a post-left center-left that decided, following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, that history had judged socialism dead, and that the only thing left for left westies was to spread the US system everywhere. /1 This project is exhausted, and the floor is starting to fall out from under it. The Generation of 1989 is doddering and intellectually barren, and its collective mind has degenerated into an absurd pastiche of lies, stale public relations, cliches and cowardly self delusion. /2

It’s remarkable how similar the “new” Cold War looks to the old Cold War. The US and Europe on one side, Russia and China on the other side, the US attacking or diplomatically pummeling global south countries that are either leftist or insist on non-alignment or independence. /1 But there are some differences. In 2023 the western share of global GDP is only about 1/3, whereas in 1960 it was over 2/3. The rest of the world is now well-poised, in both economic and population terms, to resist western attempts to reestablish hegemony. //2

I think this is almost the opposite of the truth, frankly. The reason these pop-up fringe populist movements never go anywhere is because they insist on divorcing themselves from the deepest, most authentic, most enduring leftist traditions, in both the US and elsewhere. /1 The rise of European and US capitalism, the rise of slavery and white supremacism, and the rise of the ultra violent US settler-colonial republic that brutalizes people at home and abroad - these are all intimately connected phenomena. /2

Why has the “antiwar left” dwindled to the point of almost vanishing? I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think part of the answer is that there are inherent limits to the framework of “antiwar” politics that don’t address what is happening in the present era. /1 Antiwar political pitches in the US often try to appeal to people on the basis of national interest and economic self-interest alone: they try to convince people that a given war is too expensive, or that militarism is too expensive, or that the war is causing costly blowback. /2

Many younger people have little context for understanding US foreign policy, so here is what I take to be a distillation of Neoconservatism in a Nutshell:

“The US should perpetually expand the international order it runs until the entire world is part of that order.” /1 They called the opportunity in history that made such a project seem viable “the unipolar moment.” They called the desired end state of total world domination “benevolent global hegemony.” /2