Israel Is Terrified the World Court Will Decide It’s Committing Genocide

South Africa, a party to the Genocide Convention, charged Israel with genocide in the International Court of Justice.

By Marjorie Cohn , 

TRUTHOUT

January 6, 2024

An inside view of International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, on July 23, 2018.ABDULLAH ASIRAN / ANADOLU AGENCY / GETTY IMAGES

Israel Is Terrified the World Court Will Decide It’s Committing Genocide


South Africa, a party to the Genocide Convention, charged Israel with genocide in the International Court of Justice.
By Marjorie Cohn , TRUTHOUTPublishedJanuary 6, 2024An inside view of International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, on July 23, 2018.ABDULLAH ASIRAN / ANADOLU AGENCY / GETTY IMAGE


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For nearly three months, Israel has enjoyed virtual impunity for its atrocious crimes against the Palestinian people. That changed on December 29 when South Africa, a state party to the Genocide Convention, filed an 84-page application in the International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court) alleging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

South Africa’s well-documented application alleges that “acts and omissions by Israel … are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent … to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group” and that “the conduct of Israel — through its State organs, State agents, and other persons and entities acting on its instructions or under its direction, control or influence — in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, is in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention.”

Israel is mounting a full-court press to prevent an ICJ finding that it’s committing genocide in Gaza. On January 4, the Israeli Foreign Ministry instructed its embassies to pressure politicians and diplomats in their host countries to make statements opposing South Africa’s case at the ICJ.

In its application, South Africa cited eight allegations to support its contention that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza. They include:

(1) Killing Palestinians in Gaza, including a large proportion of women and children (approximately 70 percent) of the more than 21,110 fatalities and some appear to have been subjected to summary execution;

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(2) Causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza, including maiming, psychological trauma, and inhuman and degrading treatment;

(3) Causing the forced evacuation and displacement of about 85 percent of Palestinians in Gaza — including children, the elderly and infirm, and the sick and wounded. Israel is also causing the massive destruction of Palestinian homes, villages, towns, refugee camps and entire areas, which precludes the return of a significant proportion of the Palestinian people to their homes;

(4) Causing widespread hunger, starvation and dehydration to the besieged Palestinians in Gaza by impeding sufficient humanitarian assistance, cutting off sufficient food, water, fuel and electricity, and destroying bakeries, mills, agricultural lands and other means of production and sustenance;

(5) Failing to provide and restricting the provision of adequate clothing, shelter, hygiene and sanitation to Palestinians in Gaza, including 1.9 million internally displaced persons. This has compelled them to live in dangerous situations of squalor, in conjunction with routine targeting and destruction of places of shelter and killing and wounding of persons who are sheltering, including women, children, the elderly and the disabled;

(6) Failing to provide for or ensure the provision of medical care to Palestinians in Gaza, including those medical needs created by other genocidal acts that are causing serious bodily harm. This is occurring by direct attacks on Palestinian hospitals, ambulances and other healthcare facilities, the killing of Palestinian doctors, medics and nurses (including the most qualified medics in Gaza) and the destruction and disabling of Gaza’s medical system;

(7) Destroying Palestinian life in Gaza, by destroying its infrastructure, schools, universities, courts, public buildings, public records, libraries, stores, churches, mosques, roads, utilities and other facilities necessary to sustain the lives of Palestinians as a group. Israel is killing whole families, erasing entire oral histories and killing prominent and distinguished members of society;

(8) Imposing measures intended to prevent Palestinian births in Gaza, including through reproductive violence inflicted on Palestinian women, newborns, infants and children.

South Africa cited myriad statements by Israeli officials that constitute direct evidence of an intent to commit genocide:

“Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything,” Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. “If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week. It will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.”

Avi Dichter, Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, declared, “We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” a reference to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create the state of Israel.

“Now we all have one common goal — erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth,” Nissim Vaturi, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and Member of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee proclaimed.
Israel’s Strategy to Defeat South Africa’s Case at the ICJ

Israel and its chief patron, the United States, understand the magnitude of South Africa’s ICJ application, and they are livid. Israel usually thumbs its nose at international institutions, but it is taking South Africa’s case seriously. In 2021, when the International Criminal Court launched an investigation into Israel’s alleged war crimes in Gaza, Israel firmly rejected the legitimacy of the probe.

“Israel generally doesn’t participate in such proceedings,” Prof. Eliav Lieblich, an international law expert at Tel Aviv University, told Haaretz. “But this isn’t a UN inquiry commission or the International Criminal Court in the Hague, whose authority Israel rejects. It’s the International Court of Justice, which derives its powers from a treaty Israel joined, so it can’t reject it on the usual grounds of lack of authority. It’s also a body with international prestige.”

A January 4 cable from the Israeli Foreign Ministry says that Israel’s “strategic goal” is that the ICJ reject South Africa’s request for an injunction to suspend Israel’s military action in Gaza, refuse to find that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and rule that Israel is complying with international law.

“A ruling by the court could have significant potential implications that are not only in the legal world but have practical bilateral, multilateral, economic, security ramifications,” the cable states. “We ask for an immediate and unequivocal public statement along the following lines: To publicly and clearly state that YOUR COUNTRY rejects the outragest [sic], absurd and baseless allegations made against Israel.”

The cable instructs Israeli embassies to urge diplomats and politicians at the highest levels “to publicly acknowledge that Israel is working [together with international actors] to increase the humanitarian aid to Gaza, as well as to minimize damage to civilians, while acting in self defense after the horrible October 7th attack by a genocidal terrorist organization.”

“The State of Israel will appear before the ICJ at The Hague to dispel South Africa’s absurd blood libel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spokesperson Eylon Levy declared. South Africa’s application is “without legal merit and constitutes a base exploitation and contempt of court,” he said.

Israel is pulling out all the stops, including disingenuous accusations of “blood libel,” an anti-Semitic trope that erroneously accuses Jews of the ritual sacrifice of Christian children.

“How tragic that the rainbow nation that prides itself on fighting racism will be fighting pro-bono for anti-Jewish racists,” Levy added ironically. He made the astonishing claim that Israel’s military campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza is designed to prevent the genocide of the Jews.

As the old adage goes, when you’re being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and act like you’re leading the parade.

The Biden regime rose to defend its staunch ally Israel. U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby lambasted South Africa’s ICJ application as “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.” Kirby claimed, “Israel is not trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. Israel is not trying to wipe Gaza off the map. Israel is trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat,” echoing Israel’s preposterous assertion.

Kirby’s contention that Israel is trying to prevent genocide is particularly absurd, given the fact that since Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis on October 7, Israeli forces have killed at least 22,100 Gazans, about 9,100 of whom are children. At least 57,000 persons have been wounded and at least 7,000 are reported missing. Untold numbers of people are trapped beneath the rubble.

Provisional Measures Against Israel Can Have Immediate Impact

South Africa is requesting that the ICJ order provisional measures (interim injunction) in order to “protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people under the Genocide Convention.” South Africa is also asking the court “to ensure Israel’s compliance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention not to engage in genocide, and to prevent and to punish genocide.”

The provisional measures South Africa seeks include ordering Israel to “immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza” and to cease and desist from killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm to Palestinians, inflicting on them conditions of life intended to destroy them in whole or in part, and imposing measures to prevent Palestinian births. South Africa wants the ICJ to order that Israel stop expelling and forcibly displacing Palestinians and depriving them of food, water, fuel, and medical supplies and assistance.

The judicial arm of the United Nations, the ICJ is composed of 15 judges elected for a nine-year term by the UN General Assembly and the Security Council. It is not a criminal tribunal like the International Criminal Court; rather it resolves disputes between countries.

If a party to the Genocide Convention believes that another party has failed to comply with its obligations, it can take that country to the ICJ to determine its responsibility. This was done in the case of Bosnia v. Serbia, in which the Court found that Serbia violated its duties to prevent and punish genocide under the Convention.

The obligations in the Genocide Convention are erga omnes partes, that is, obligations owed by a state towards all the states parties to the Convention. The ICJ has stated, “In such a convention the contracting States do not have any interests of their own; they merely have, one and all, a common interest, namely, the accomplishment of those high purposes which are the raison d’être of the Convention.”

Article 94 of the UN Charter says that all parties to a dispute must comply with the decisions of the ICJ and if a party fails to do so, the other party may go to the UN Security Council for the enforcement of the decision.

An average ICJ case from start to finish can last several years (it was nearly 15 years from the time that Bosnia first filed its case against Serbia in 1993 to the issuance of the final judgment on the merits in 2007). However, a case can have an immediate impact. The filing of a case in the ICJ sends a strong message to Israel that the international community will not tolerate its actions and seeks to hold it accountable.

Provisional measures can be issued quickly. For example, the ICJ ordered measures 19 days after the Bosnian case was initiated. Provisional measures are binding on the party against whom they are ordered, and compliance with them can be monitored by both the ICJ and the Security Council.

Judgments on the merits rendered by the ICJ in disputes between parties are binding on the parties involved. Article 94 of the United Nations Charter provides that “each Member of the United Nations undertakes to comply with the decision of [the Court] in any case to which it is a party.” The judgments of the court are final; there is no appeal.

Public hearings on South Africa’s request for provisional measures will take place on January 11 and 12 at the ICJ which is located in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands. The hearings will be livestreamed from 4:00-6:00 a.m. Eastern/1:00-3:00 a.m. Pacific on the Court’s website and on UN Web TV. The court could order provisional measures within a week after the hearings.
Other States Parties to the Genocide Convention Can Join South Africa’s Case

Other states parties to the Genocide Convention can either request permission to intervene in the case filed by South Africa or file their own applications against Israel in the ICJ. South Africa’s application identifies several countries that have referred to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They include Algeria, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Iran, Palestine, Türkiye, Venezuela, Bangladesh, Egypt, Honduras, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Pakistan and Syria.

On January 5, Quds News Network tweeted, “Jordan’s minister of Foreign Affairs, Ayman Safadi, announces that his country backs South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the ICJ. He added that the Jordanian government is working on a legal file to follow up on the case. Turkey, Malaysia, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) had announced that they back the case too.”

The newly formed International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine, endorsed by more than 600 groups throughout the world, has convened to urge states parties to invoke the Genocide Convention.

The coalition contends, “Declarations of Intervention in support of South Africa’s invocation of the Genocide Convention against Israel will increase the likelihood that a positive finding of the crime of genocide will be enforced by the United Nations such that actions will be taken to end all acts of genocide and those who are responsible for the acts will be held accountable.”

During the first week of January, delegations of “grassroots diplomats,” spearheaded by CODEPINK, World Beyond War and RootsAction, mounted a campaign across the United States urging nations to submit Declarations of Intervention in South Africa’s case against Israel in the ICJ. Activists traveled to 12 cities, visiting UN missions, embassies and consulates from Colombia, Pakistan, Bolivia, Bangladesh, the African Union, Ghana, Chile, Ethiopia, Turkey, Belize, Brazil, Denmark, France, Honduras, Ireland, Spain, Greece, Mexico, Italy, Haiti, Belgium, Kuwait, Malaysia and Slovakia.

“This is the rare case where collective social pressure urging governments to support the South African case can be a sharp turning point for Palestine,” said Lamis Deek, a Palestinian attorney based in New York, whose firm convened the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation’s Commission on War Crimes Justice, Reparations, and Return. “We need more states to file supporting interventions — and we need the court to feel the watchful eye of the masses so as to withstand what will be extreme U.S. political pressure on the Court.”

Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild, noted, “The increasing global isolation of Israel and the U.S. and their European allies is an indicator that this is a key moment for popular movements to move their governments in the direction of taking these steps and being on the right side of history.” Indeed, since October 7, millions of people throughout the world have marched, protested and demonstrated in support of Palestinian liberation.

RootsAction and World Beyond War have created a template that organizations and individuals can use to urge other states parties to the Genocide Convention to file a Declaration of Intervention in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the ICJ.


MARJORIE COHN is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of the national advisory boards of Assange Defense and Veterans For Peace, and the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. She is founding dean of the People’s Academy of International Law and the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues. She is co-host of “Law and Disorder” Radio.

An Open Border Could Benefit Us All. Instead, Both Parties Want to Build a Wall.

The GOP pushed Texas’s horrific new bills into law, but both parties have stoked expansion of immigration policing.

By Alex S. Vitale ,

TRUTHOUT

January 8, 2024

Asylum seekers wait next to the U.S. border wall to be processed by the U.S. Border Patrol after crossing from Mexico on December 13, 2023, in Jacumba Hot Springs, California.

QIAN WEIZHONG / VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES


Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently signed two bills into law designed to further harden the southern border. SB 3 provides $1.5 billion for additional wall building and to support more state law enforcement targeting of low-income immigrant neighborhoods, like Houston’s Colony Ridge. SB 4 gives local police the power to engage in immigration enforcement, including arresting people for not having the right citizenship papers and deporting people into Mexico, regardless of their country of origin.

The bills, which Abbott signed into law on December 18, represent a dangerous and almost certainly unconstitutional expansion of police power, consistent with Abbott’s earlier interventions along the border, which have included dispatching the National Guard as part of Operation Lone Star, which directly contributed to drowning deaths on the Rio Grande border. The U.S. Department of Justice has already filed suit claiming that this interferes with the federal government’s constitutional authority to regulate immigration. The main accomplishment of this cynical expansion of police power will be to mobilize conservative voters in local elections and gin up more right-wing pressure on the federal government to further militarize the border; something with a long history in American politics.
Border Control Has Always Been a Racial Project

The use of border restrictions to mobilize racial resentment and punitively control labor is nothing new. Until the late 19th century, the U.S. had no formal immigration restrictions. The border was essentially open, with only customs controls directed at shipping. Beginning in the 1870s, the U.S. began to create restrictions after 200,000 Chinese laborers immigrated to build the railroads and perform farm labor in the West. In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act restricting immigration to Chinese women, and in 1882, it passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to prohibit further immigration of anyone Chinese. Much of the language used in debating the act was explicitly racist and consistent with local bans on the right of Chinese people to own property and appear as witnesses in court.

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With the rise of mass European immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries came growing nativist resentment. Throughout this period, groups such as the Immigration Restriction League and the nativist American Party organized around ideas of racial purity, cultural superiority and religious prejudice to demand an end to open immigration. This was finally achieved in 1924 with the passage of the Immigration Act, which established nationality-based immigration quotas for the first time. To enforce these quotas, Congress created the U.S. Border Patrol.

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The new Border Patrol focused on limiting unauthorized immigration from Mexico. Most enforcement was at designated border crossings, with only a few “linemen” patrolling in between. In practice, individuals and even vehicles needed only to venture a few miles from a formal checkpoint to cross. Part of the reason for weak enforcement was the strong desire for Mexican workers among growers in Texas and California, who vehemently opposed restrictions on their access to cheap labor. The enforcement that did occur was often profoundly racist, with overt brutality and extrajudicial killings. Historian Kelly Hernandez in her book Migra! describes numerous incidents of revenge killings and reckless shootings of border crossers.

During World War II there was a great need for farmworkers. The Border Patrol largely ignored Mexican immigration while keeping an eye out for possible enemy combatants, though almost none were discovered. The U.S. government developed the Bracero Program to try to regularize migrant farm work. Employers were obligated to provide decent wages and working conditions, and migrants received official permits to work in the United States. Enforcement was lax, and wages and working conditions were quite poor and well below the standards set for other workers. Women, children and domestic workers were not covered by the program, so unauthorized immigration continued. In addition, many employers refused to use the new program, especially in Texas. Farmers and ranchers resented federal intervention in their longstanding labor systems, which often amounted to peonage. Workers who complained or organized against low wages and abysmal conditions were simply handed over to the Border Patrol for deportation.


The bills, which Abbott signed into law on December 18, represent a dangerous and almost certainly unconstitutional expansion of police power.

In 1954 the U.S. launched “Operation Wetback” to try to stem the tide of post-war migration through intensive border enforcement and raids in cities and on ranches, forcing more employers to utilize the Bracero Program. More than a million people were deported. In the end, the farmers and ranchers relented, especially after workplace protections were reduced and heavy penalties for worker organizing enacted. The title of the operation, however, speaks volumes about the mindset of federal officials and the Border Patrol.

U.S. border enforcement has always been primarily about the social production of whiteness as a racial identity distinct from Latinos and economic inequality through discriminatory labor control. The border has never been truly closed to poor immigrants. They have been allowed in, with tight regulation, or officially denied entry but in practice allowed to enter in large numbers, with few legal protections from employer exploitation and abuse. Each of these systems place immigrants in a degraded economic position where their rights to organize are denied and they are forced to work in substandard conditions for low wages.

From early on, the Border Patrol has engaged in racial profiling — and empowering local police to enforce immigration will only exacerbate this problem. Border police have always argued that “looking Mexican” is sufficient grounds for stopping, questioning and demanding identification. In 1973, the Supreme Court codified these practices in U.S. v. Brignoni-Ponce, in which it upheld the right of the Border Patrol to use racial profiles as the sole basis for vehicle stops and forced identifications. The ruling was based in part on a 1953 federal regulation created by the Justice Department that gives Border Patrol agents the right to suspend constitutional protections within a hundred miles of the border and stop, search and ascertain the immigration status of any person, whether or not they have any probable cause or even reasonable suspicion.
Local Police Don’t Belong in Border Enforcement

In the 1990s the Clinton administration significantly expanded federal and local border policing, creating new criminal penalties, dramatically expanding the size of the Border Patrol, creating new federal immigration courts and detention centers, and offering local police the opportunity to receive official authority and resources to enforce federal immigration law. This authority, under section 287(g) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, has created a huge dilemma for some local police, who have been pressured to participate, but in many cases view that cooperation as counterproductive to “good” policing. In areas with high rates of unauthorized immigrants, fear of police is already very high. If people believe that they or their friends, family members, co-workers or neighbors may be at risk of deportation, they will be gravely reluctant to bring any issues to the attention of police. That is why many cities have either refused to participate in 287(g) or designated themselves “sanctuary cities” that refuse to cooperate with immigration enforcement efforts.


Abbott’s decision to take on Donald Trump’s cries to “build a wall” will not only fail to stop migration, it will further endanger the lives of those who attempt it.

Past measures giving local police immigration enforcement powers has created a burden for mostly Latino communities by increasing racial profiling in all kinds of police interactions, leading to more traffic stops, more families torn apart, and more needless low-level criminalization across the board because of increased interaction between police and poor people. It has also created fear among entire communities that have been subjected to increased identity checks. As William Lopez shows in his book Separated, entire communities will need to worry about being able to prove their identity and citizenship status at all times or risk being arrested or even wrongly deported. In addition, many families contain a mix of documented and undocumented members, meaning routine interactions with police even for documented people may lead to the arrest and disappearance of their loved ones, often with no information about what has occurred.

Low-level misuse of funds and corruption are also a risk when local law enforcement get involved. Since 2003, the Department of Homeland Security has been increasingly pulling local police into the job of border enforcement. While 287(g) asks for police cooperation in identifying criminal aliens, Operation Stonegarden directly subsidized local police to undertake a variety of border enforcement activities, offering money for overtime pay and special equipment for drug raids, pursuing suspected undocumented migrants and patrolling the border. There has been almost no oversight of how this money is spent. The Arizona Daily Star uncovered massive overtime payments to officers, sometimes in excess of their base salaries, leaving local taxpayers to come up with dramatically higher pensions as officers retire and collect pensions based on these inflated salaries.
There Is Another Way

Abbott’s decision to take on Donald Trump’s cries to “build a wall” will not only fail to stop migration, it will further endanger the lives of those who attempt it. The U.S. government has been trying to build a wall along the southern border for many decades and has little to show for it, other than massive fiscal profligacy and the deaths of migrants pushed into ever harsher and more remote terrains. There is no logistical way to build an effective wall between the U.S. and Mexico. The terrain is too difficult, the cost too great, and the ways around it too many. For one thing, 40 percent of all people in the country illegally come by plane and overstay one of a variety of visas. Walls can’t just be built and left to do their thing. They must be staffed and maintained. Any wall can be breached, climbed over or tunneled under if no one is watching. That would require a vast army along the fence, which would undoubtedly contribute to more unnecessary deaths.

Heavy-handed immigration policing and wall building won’t make us safer or more prosperous. The last 20 years have taught us that trying to wall ourselves off from migration in hopes of benefiting from economic imperialism does not create broad prosperity. The wealth of the United States has increased dramatically in the last two decades, but all of that growth has gone exclusively to the richest 10 percent. The rest of us have seen wages and government services decrease. Our standard of living is not declining because of migrants but because of unregulated neoliberal capitalism, which has allowed corporations and the rich to avoid paying taxes or decent wages. It is that system that must be changed.

If the U.S. wants immigrants, documented or not, to be more “integrated” into society, it should end all federal immigration policing, remove social barriers in housing and employment, and acknowledge their important role in revitalizing communities and stimulating economic activity.


Our standard of living is not declining because of migrants but because of unregulated neoliberal capitalism.

Unfortunately, both dominant political parties have embraced the expansion of immigration policing, whether as part of a system of restricted and managed legalization or as part of a fantasy of closing the border. Rather than debating how many additional Border Patrol agents to employ, how many more miles of wall to build, or whether to bring more local police into the process, we should instead move to largely de-police the border. Borders are inherently unjust, and as Reece Jones points out in his book Violent Borders, they reproduce inequality, which is backed up by the violence of state actors and the indignity and danger of being forced to cross borders illegally.

Until the Clinton administration, unauthorized cross-border migration was widespread, yet it did not lead to the collapse of the U.S. economy or culture. In fact, in many ways it strengthened it, giving rise to new economic sectors, revitalizing long-abandoned urban neighborhoods, and better integrating the U.S. into the global economy. And when the EU lowered its internal borders, there were fears that organized crime would benefit, local cultures would be undermined, that mass migration would create economic chaos as poorer southern Europeans moved north. None of this happened. In part because the EU began developing poorer areas within Europe as a way of producing greater economic and social stability.

We could do the same thing in North America, but instead have largely done the opposite. The North American Free Trade Agreement had devastating consequences for agricultural production in Mexico, displacing and impoverishing millions. The end of state-subsidized corn farming in Mexico led to the collapse of the rural economy there, driving hundreds of thousands to attempt to migrate to the U.S. By opening the doors to capital and goods but not people, we have created tremendous pressure to migrate. Instead, we should be opening the borders and working to develop the poorest parts of the United States and Mexico. This would create economic and social stability that might reduce the extent of migration. The $23 billion a year we spend now on border policing could go a long way toward that goal. It turns out that most people would rather stay in their own cultural setting than migrate if given the opportunity.

Ultimately, we must work toward developing a more internationalist ethos and analysis. The reality is that many people in Central America and Mexico are poor at least partially because of U.S. economic policies. By consistently subverting democracy, the U.S. government helped create the dreadful poverty in those places. In 2009, the U.S. government backed a coup against the democratically elected left-wing government in Honduras. That government went on to torture, execute and disappear environmental and labor activists. This was just the most recent in a long string of foreign direct and indirect interventions in the politics of Central America, including Ronald Reagan’s backing of dictatorships in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as of the Contras’ attempt to overthrow the leftist government in Nicaragua.


Abbott surely knows that these measures are unconstitutional and will be overturned. This whole endeavor is merely a theater of cruelty.

Once we understand migration as a global process driven in large part by the policies of our own government, we in the United States should feel obligated to end those practices and open our doors to those fleeing them. Migrants are human beings who are no better and no worse than American citizens and should enjoy the same rights and opportunities. As the group Immigrant Movement International notes, migrants have as much right to international movement as “corporations and international elites”; “the only law deserving of our respect is an unprejudiced law, one that protects everyone, everywhere. No exclusions. No exceptions.” We should be working to improve the conditions where people come from and allowing them access to the opportunities we have. We cannot and should not rely on ever more intensive, violent and oppressive border policing to manage problems that we ourselves helped create.

Gov. Abbott’s grandstanding on the border will do nothing to make us safer or more economically secure, but that isn’t the point. Abbott surely knows that these measures are unconstitutional and will be overturned. This whole endeavor is merely a theater of cruelty designed to accelerate the politics of resentment against the most vulnerable among us so that we overlook those really responsible for our economic and social insecurity: the wealthy elites funding Abbott and the rest of the extreme right.

ALEX S. VITALE is professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center and author of The End of Policing.

 

Social Formation

by Hiroyuki Hamada / January 7th, 2024

1. The overview

If you often ask yourself “How can people believe those lies and deceptions?” when facts clearly indicate them to be untrue, you are not alone.  If you ask how so-called leaders can get away with a policy that guarantees disastrous, anti-human consequences, you are not alone either.

In order to examine these questions, let us look at how our minds operate.  We have the conscious part of our minds and the unconscious part of our minds. Both operate together. They can be separated into an instinctual part, a daily operational part, and the part that guides us with set principles. Freud described these as id, ego and superego. As we live in our given social framework, all parts of our minds operate within the imperatives of the social formation. As our minds develop, our instincts are trained to fit what we perceive as reality. Reality, our social interactions, and the ideas and rules generated by society condition and shape our daily thoughts and routines.

Our idealistic principles are ultimately formed according to the prevalent ideas of good and bad, how things should be and so on. This transfers a collective sense of ideal notions into the guiding principles of individual minds. This basic mechanism allows us to be social beings working together to achieve the goals and objectives of the society. We are individuals with our own ideas and interests, but we are also parts of an entity we perceive as our society. We are individual entities, but we also exist as a collective, as a species in a vast geological time frame.

But what if our social relations are subservient to the values, norms, and beliefs of the ruling class? What if social institutions are dominated by wealthy and powerful people? What if our society is flooded by their propaganda?

Our society is highly hierarchical based on financial power. It forms a caste-like system, with social mobility bound by conditions set by ruling class imperatives. No kingdoms in the past achieved the degree of accumulation of wealth we observe today.  Social media platforms are built to facilitate divisions and commodify collective power within the capitalist framework.  Digitalization allows corporate entities to cultivate certain public opinions while excluding others.  AI technology can effortlessly steal collective ideas while reinforcing prevalent ideas firmly within the acceptable range of the authority. The advent of the Internet, AI, and financialization of the economy have strengthened the ways to condition people according to the rules stipulated by the money dominated social institutions. All of these are manifesting in new ways to place our thoughts, our ideas, and our social relations within the acceptable range of the ruling class.

The capitalist social formation has an inherent contradiction that leads to periodic crises: The capitalists– the ruling class– get too much money and the rest of the people stop having purchasing power, while unsold products pile up. This has been the primary cause of the major predicaments of our times.

The ruling class shifts its mode of exploitation and subjugation in order to keep the basic structure intact, generating new ways to profit and maintain its dominance. The actual crisis of capitalism is constantly replaced with distorted and narrowly defined prepackaged “crises” which provide pretexts for the economic and social restructuring necessary to float the economy.

For example:

The deprived living conditions, poverty, and destruction of inner-city communities—all stemming from the crisis of capitalism—were portrayed as an emergence of inner-city criminal youth, “superpredators.” The demonization, along with the slogan “tough on crime,” exacerbated the momentum for gentrification, militarized police and school-to-prison pipeline, contributing to enriching associated industries.

Muslim populations have been demonized as “terrorists” as their leaders are called dictators, allowing embargoes, economic blockade, proxy wars, and military assaults against them, ultimately resulting in western corporate powers restructuring their societies to accommodate western corporate interests.

Legitimate environmental activism has been shaped to narrowly focus on CO2,  which has created a myriad of environmental issues of its own. This has destroyed the momentum for real environmental activism based on actual damages and accountabilities, while creating a momentum for “green capitalism” for profits.  The CO2 focus has also created the carbon trade pyramid scheme for the rich while punishing those developing countries without the capacity to invest in new technologies and infrastructures.

We are flooded with crisis after crisis—“war on terror,” “global warming,” “pandemic,” “Russian threat,” and etc. And the pace of the cycle accelerates as the crisis of capitalism continues to be insolvable, and the western hegemony faces the economic as well as military powers of countries which have been defying the western colonial trajectory.

Meanwhile, our minds, facing obvious manipulations and deceptions, struggle to maintain their integrity by keeping certain things conscious and others unconscious in order to exist within the given social formation. This has been facilitated by active propaganda, educational indoctrination, political rituals, and structural violence against the oppressed. We are given false narratives to swallow in exchange for keeping our positions in the social hierarchy while our livelihoods and well-beings are at gunpoint. This conscious/unconscious process of swallowing the status quo by omission of facts ties us to an invisible cage of the ruling class imperatives. Our minds are forced to employ various psychological defense mechanisms to further disassociate ourselves from the root of the problem.

This has resulted in an enormous decrease of our abilities to perceive ourselves, our relationships to others and the social formation.  It has also been eliminating facts and our history from our minds. Our minds and bodies are conditioned to go along with the social imperatives, and the process diminishes our capacity to grow as human beings.

This parallels the increased powers of those who profit from our collective labor and our collective knowledge. The acute concentration of wealth allows the rich and powerful to dominate social institutions.  This allows them to impose their agendas and policies through many layers of conditions and extortion regimes against those who are trapped in the social hierarchy.

One might not keep his job or social position if he holds disagreeable opinions about the authority. Or those with disagreeable ideology could be excluded from various social networks.

Let’s say that you hold a position in a community organization, and you are an anti-war activist. Your position can be taken away easily by a few wealthy donors with political motives. They effectively blackmail the organization, saying that so and so is on the side of the enemy country, advocating terrorism, and etc. They threaten to boycott the organization unless you are removed. The little organization, which you have been part of, has struggled so hard to serve the community with no resources of its own. The organization has no choice but to ask you to step down. And having struggled together with the organization for years, you can’t risk damaging the organization by making the event public. The anti-war activism suffers, and you are traumatized by the expulsion. In the process, the organization is shaped to stay within the imperial framework.

Similar dynamics are at work against all individuals who hold views which are unacceptable to the authority. Under the current social formation, our individual productive activities can be exploited by profiteers who set the goals and the objectives, while those who engage in actual activities are deprived of access to the actual collective results. The pattern of domestication of ideas and social relations is not restricted to those who sign contracts with their employers. The fact that social institutions are dominated by the ruling class means that our social relations in general are under the guiding hands of the ruling class.

For example:

-Even though they might have good intentions, volunteers for NGOs can be guided to perform activities within the framework of the ruling class, since the NGOs rely on funding from the wealthy. Even if the NGOs survive co-option by the wealthy, their policies and agendas can always be limited by obstacles presented by capitalist dominated social institutions.

-Grass roots activism can also be at any point co-oped by the interests of the ruling class or neutralized by corporate backed institutions.

-If you happen to be good at anything and garner popularity among the people, sooner or later, your activities can also be forced to conform to the imperatives of corporate entities.  Or, you could be excluded from one social network or another as your world view collides with money dominated entities along the way, until you find it unsustainable to be in your field.

This is basically the same mechanism observed by Robert Owen in the 19th century as noted by Frederic Engels in Utopian and Scientific. Owen noted “If this new wealth had not been created by machinery, imperfectly as it has been applied, the wars of Europe, in opposition to Napoleon, and to support the aristocratic principles of society, could not have been maintained. And yet this new power was the creation of the working class.”

This fundamental dynamic of exploitation and subjugation and use of the collective power of the people to shift the course of society for the interests of the ruling class has evolved for the past two centuries, fully normalizing the hidden mechanism, while cultivating layers and layers of protective mechanisms to prop up the basic structure. Our social relations are filtered through so many layers, constantly being scrutinized to fit the current social formation. In exchange for contributing to the harvesting of the collective power, we receive money which can only be used within the economic markets which are dominated by the capital. We are deprived of our powers and in exchange we receive smaller powers which can be used to support the economic structure, which is controlled and manipulated by various institutions.  What suffers in the process are things we can’t buy with our tokens: love, friendship, community, culture, nature and etc.

The strength of colonization through the economic structure can be observed as we see how a regional economy in the global south can lose its tradition, sustainable local economy, and communities with the introduction of Wall Street style economy. As the economy shifts to a winner-takes-all, profit oriented structure, social relations shift to conform to the interests of the rich. This goes along with importation of media, where entertainment commodities are geared toward imperial propaganda. Hollywood movies are filled with western-centric narratives. How many of the movies that we see have Russian villains and Muslim terrorists? Mainstream media outlets, now owned by a mere 6 corporate entities, have been serving the corporate and military interests of the west for generations. Western NGOs can also operate with western funding to spread narratives friendly to the west while demonizing the local authority, which defies the infiltration of western propaganda, cultural imperialism and economic restructuring favorable to western corporate interests.

2. The Hierarchy 

Here it should be strongly noted that there is a real sense of community, warmth of togetherness and potentially sustainable social relations among those who are engaging in building community momentum. No one can deny those feelings and the actual benefits. This is obvious when we see people finding the real sense of belongingness, pride, and meaning in the communities they build. This can even be said about institutions more obviously facilitated by the intentions of the ruling class —religious, political, military and so on. However, the point here is that our nature to be social and find collective goals to survive can be systemically and structurally co-opted by the structural arrangement of exploitation and subjugation. This should be noted throughout this text, especially as we discuss the inner workings of individuals. Accountability for inhumanity should be squarely placed against the system and its beneficiaries. The purpose of unfolding the mechanism here is not to blame the people who are victims of the domestication. Doing so would bring us to the cynical conclusion that it is human nature to be exploited and brutally attack each other. We must not equate the nature of humanity, however we term it, with the conditions created by the current social formation that allows the ruling class to domesticate the rest of us while depriving us of our humanity and causing devastating consequences to the environment.

The difficult part, of course, is that we can say with certainly that slave owning landlords or those who appeared in lynching post cards smiling right next to black men hanging from a tree probably had happy families and friendships amongst themselves. But as soon as you stepped out of the stipulated boundaries of the community, the smiley faces of your fellow humans could turn into the faces of terrifying perpetrators of lynching. The happiness one gained by belonging to the community had dual functions: ensuring your livelihood and well-being while augmenting the then legitimate social institution of slavery. The enormous sacrifices paid by the enslaved people co-existed right next to the happy families of “good old times.”

When the values, norms and beliefs of the collective are subservient to the ruling class imposed framework of the social hierarchy, it automatically normalizes the most brutal and inhumane discrimination and biases in institutionalized forms throughout the “democratic” sphere.  This is the true nature of the notion of “rule by the majority”– a prominent feature of western democracy today.

This mechanism is at the core of US imperialism. When western corporate entities restructure a country with their neoliberal economic policies, it expands its “democratic” sphere, normalizing exclusion and discrimination, which, in turn, facilitates the exploitation and subjugation.

In this regard, the age-old colonial view of “others” still dominates the underlining momentum of western colonialism.  The most important psychological element of colonizing is to define the subject population as inferior to the colonizers.  The sub-humans must be helped so that their lives can rise to the level of the colonizers, or more precisely, modified to serve the colonizers.

The sense of mission allows the colonizers to do whatever necessary, regardless of the actual well-being of the subject population.  All sacrifices among the population are worth it in the end for their own good.

A military action against them is always justified but the resistance against it is always denied as “inhumane”, “barbaric” and “brutal” because ultimately the counter action does not serve the subject population according to the colonizers. Countless lives of the subject population simply do not weigh the same as the lives of colonizers in the imperial minds.

This sense of mission is also very useful in exploiting and subjugating oppressed people within the country engaging in the colonizing. The grievances and dissenting voices against the ruling class are set aside in order to instead fight the “barbaric people.” Those who oppose this would be defined as traitors, terrorist supporters and so on.

In this broader overview, it is clear that the problem is not the “barbaric people who need help” or “terrorist supporters”.  The problem is clearly with the colonizers.

The social hierarchy, with its very bottom tier, the very top and everything in between, is the clear manifestation of the social formation of exploitation and subjugation. The political institution of so-called western democracy manifests itself somewhere between social democracy and fascism. In either case, the political parties are backed by capitalists. Their policies and agendas stay within the interests of the owners of the political parties. The constant move between “left” and “right” within acceptable politics creates the sense of political struggle and progress, but in reality, all is restricted within the corporate interests.

However, capitalist hierarchy as a whole doesn’t only shift itself between its fascist mode and social democracy mode in perpetuating itself. The class analysis of the social formation reveals the elements of fascism and socialism within the existing social formation.

The effect of the corporate domination and measures implemented against the people can be felt severely among the most oppressed people while the benefits of state protection and favoritism are felt by the rich. The elements of fascism–authoritarianism, social hierarchy, suppression of opposition, censorship, militarism, and so on—are literally the reality among the oppressed without waiting for the fascist dictatorships to come along. For the rich the state functions tremendously to forward their interests. The political notion of fascism to describe political opponents by the “left” only appears when the interests of the privileged class are threatened, while the political notion of socialism to describe political opponents by the “right” only appears, again, when the interests of the privileged class are threatened. The true liberation of the people can only be possible if we grow out of the hierarchical social formation based on money and violence.

Extreme suffering equivalent to suffering under a fascist dictatorship is inherently present for the oppressed population structurally at all times. The incarceration rate in the US is by far the highest globally. In particular, the rate of incarceration for black people has been higher than apartheid South Africa. Every major city in the US contains tent cities where people are subjected to life without basic human rights. One out of five children is facing hunger in the US. The number goes up twice as much for minority children. Without universal healthcare, the cost of major illnesses would easily bankrupt the average household. Three people are killed by police officers every day on average in the US. Meanwhile, the wealthy people often avoid jail time with their political connections, better lawyers, and ability to pay bail. The richest among the US population pay less tax than the average household. The overwhelming favoritism for the rich in the social layers has been institutionalized in various ways, allowing three people in the US to own more wealth than the bottom half of the US population. “Socialism” only for the wealthy is well functioning for the ruling class at all times.

In order to fully perceive and appreciate life for the benefits for all,  we must recognize the overwhelming role of ruling class imperatives in the formation of collective values, beliefs and norms among us.  The class hierarchy and the process of “othering” based on the dominant world view play significant roles in determining our perceptions.

3. The Minds

Now, getting back to our minds, the fact that we internalize the authority as our guiding principle in order to form society creates an unintuitive phenomenon—our thoughts and behaviors follow the ruling class imperatives automatically. All commonly known psychological defense mechanisms are fully employed by individual minds to cling onto the existing social formation. Instead of recognizing the exploitive nature of the system as a whole, our minds are forced to blame “others” for not following unjust laws and ruling class-centric ideas. For example, economic insecurity and poverty due to austerity measures, job exports to overseas, lower wages and etc. would be blamed on immigrants, who are forced to migrate to the US due to the US imperial policies within their home countries. Inconvenient contradictions and world shattering facts stemming from the systemic exploitation are simply repressed as individuals face cognitive dissonance. Accountability for imperial war crimes, colonial policies, and brutal oppression by the authority are projected onto propagandized characters of “enemies.” Unsolvable contradictions lead to regression, resulting in violent behavior against others.

The social structure is not forcefully activated by top-down coercion only. Each individual plays a significant role in helping to mobilize the entire structure. This is the secret of “western democracy” managing to reign as an imperial power in the name of “freedom,” “justice” and “humanity” and exploiting and subjugating the global south for so long. The collective power of the imperial mind acts like a power steering wheel, allowing a handful of the ruling class to set their goals and objectives in how to use the stolen collective power of the people.

This is facilitated by the fact that the social formation, which doesn’t allow social relations based on one’s own interests, deprives one of the ability to perceive their surroundings correctly. Instead, “the reality” is projected onto the people as prepackaged corporate narratives through the media industrial complex, educational industrial complex, political industrial complex and so on. One is either forced to swallow a prepackaged social framework or one develops a personal world view based on one’s own position in the social hierarchy.  For those who embrace the prepackaged world view, dissenting opinions become threats to their very own existence—an attack against the authority literally is an attack against a part of their psyche, the internalized authority. For example, the dissident voices against the US proxy wars and the military actions against other countries would appear unpatriotic, “terrorist supporting” and so on in their minds.

For those who develop personal world views based on their own position within the hierarchy, it also creates a desperate struggle to embrace that position, instead of offering to understand the view which derives from a different circumstance and work together to eliminate the root cause.  The legitimate grievances of minority groups to access job markets, social safety nets, equal rights and so on are seen as threats among the rest of the already struggling population. This results in divisions amongst the subject population and lack of understanding amongst the people, while augmenting the social hierarchy as a whole.

Dissident groups often split or disappear as emerging crises reveal their narrow interests within class hierarchy, resulting in infighting. For example, some among those who have vehemently opposed measures forwarded by the medical industrial complex—forced “vaccination,” profit oriented Covid measures, the associated media censorship and etc.—have been quick to side with the establishment in Israel and its allies’ settler colonial violence after the 10/7/23 Palestinian military operation against Israel. Those who oppose losing their human rights within the imperial framework have failed to recognize over 75 years of colonial occupation, apartheid policies and genocide against Palestinian people by the US imperial project in the Middle East. This has resulted in devastating divisions among activists. The power which should be directed against the thieves of the collective power is directed toward one another, within the hierarchy.

Quite often a social mobilization is expressed as “war”–war on drugs, war on crime, and so on. A state of war does not allow discussion, alternate views, or reconciliation on a personal basis or collective basis without the commander in chief saying so. Instantly, dissenting actions are deemed “treason.” The urgency and seriousness of “war” is orchestrated by media propaganda, educational indoctrination, political measures, legal restrictions, and so on. The internalized authority in people’s minds creates a massive storm of self-censorship, infighting amongst families, friends and communities under the notion of absolute allegiance to the authority.  A McCarthyism-like social atmosphere appears every time we are subjected to this sort of mobilization.

Without understanding the structural mechanism as well as the psychological mechanism, one can also develop a warped abstract notion of a collective enemy—Jewish bankers, globalists, Illuminati, and so on. These prepackaged enemies can serve the system by preventing people from seeing the actual mechanism of exploitation and subjugation, while depriving them of the actual measures to dismantle the system.

For many, these processes involving psychological defense mechanisms are unconscious, while the framework of the society where they belong is upheld unconditionally. The cage of capitalism stays invisible to the subject population. Also, the fact that we are deprived of access to facts and history due to the domination of social institutions by capital adds to the confusion while making the authority a single entity to obey.

For those who manage to be conscious about the contradictions and unjust policies coming out of the authority, the situation is very difficult. Most of us do not wish to fight a systemic mafia enterprise operating in our neighborhood. If they demand a protection fee, many will simply pay instead of having their houses burned down at night.  In this case, we are talking about the entire system colluding with institutions to run its operation. It is unlikely that any legal system, any media outlets, and so on, will take your side. In most cases the idea gradually subsides into unconsciousness, turns into cynicism, or creates various sorts of mental dysfunctions amongst the subject population.

Yet, conscious efforts to point out the problem of this social formation have been with us for centuries. Unfortunately, history is abundant with violent repression against dissidents with anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist views. The degree of the use of violence is unimaginable to ordinary people. The brutality and scope of the violence defines the  determination and criminality of the ruling class to perpetuate its dominance over the subject population. Assassinations, imprisonment, systemic eradication of dissident organizations by state violence, various war crimes committed by its military and so on have created an aspect of the authority as an invincible “mafia enterprise.” This notion lurks on the border between the unconscious and the conscious as we wonder about the legitimacy of the authority and the grave violence committed by it in the name of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “humanity,” as it quietly demands compliance by its threatening presence. This is far from how a “free country” is said to run its business.

The internalization of the authority is a colonization of the mind in each and every one of us. Trauma creating events due to economic oppression, lack of social safety nets, destruction of communities and so on strengthen the presence of the internal authority, just like victims of domestic abuse cling onto the abusers. Pain and suffering are a firmly integral part of the social formation.

The collective wounds of a trauma—racism, sexism and so on—can also be utilized to augment capitalist measures and imperial measures. These create opportunities for the same system which institutionalizes trauma-inducing discriminations to effectively enlist people of stigmatized identities who are willing to collaborate in exploitation and subjugation.  The first black President Barak Obama came in with a thundering popularity.  He managed to bomb seven countries, effectively working with corporate entities to install neoliberal restructuring regimes in many areas, while protecting the interests of the criminal banking system.  The legitimate criticisms against him were termed racist, while the actual deep seated racist sentiment amongst the population muddied the aim of the legitimate criticisms as well. A similar mechanism is at work in Israel’s brutal imperial settler colonialism.  The Israeli government, along with the western establishment, has been openly equating opposition to Israel’s apartheid policies and settler colonial violence against Palestinians with anti-semitism. This has created a vicious cycle of anti-imperial momentum advertised as “anti-semitism” through corporate media, adding to the escalating violence against Palestinians with impunity. This has allowed Israel to function as a military base for the US empire in the middle east and beyond for generations. The US financial aid to Israel surpasses the aid to any other country, amounting to over $317 billion since 1946. The vast majority of the aid goes to the military.

Moreover, social activism for equality and justice has become strategized tokenism within the system instead of a struggle to eliminate class hierarchy and ruling class abuses. This trajectory has been openly supported by the establishment in the name of “diversity.” The corporate backed “diversity” firmly operates within the structural imperatives of the established order. Those with minority backgrounds who embrace corporate policies and imperial agendas are chosen for their diverse backgrounds; however, in reality, their corporate orientations and their subserviency toward imperialism reinforce the actual capitalist hierarchy and contribute in exacerbating actual sufferings of the oppressed.

As we grow as humans, we grow in this mold, thinking and acting so that you won’t offend the authority and the internalized authority. Dissenting voices are structurally excluded, deprived of facts, of history and resources and constantly forced to make deals with the establishment to keep themselves alive.

When we shift our attention to the mental states of agents of the ruling class — politicians, bureaucrats, establishment backed “experts,” and super rich individuals — one can’t avoid witnessing psychopathic qualities present in how the interests of the ruling class are blatantly forwarded at the expense of a vast suffering majority. We saw president Obama joking about killing people and joking about drone bombing. We saw Hilary Clinton laughing about assassinating Gaddafi. We heard Madeline Albright stating it’s worth killing half million Iraqi children. Some remarks by president Trump certainly belong to this category as well.

The wealth driven social structure requires leaders who can ruthlessly forward the interests of the ruling class. Psychopathic characteristics are necessary parts of this social formation.

In a society which operates based on the interests of the population in harmony with nature and life forms,  psychological repression is a defense mechanism that protects individuals from devastating traumas. Psychopathic behaviors are treated as unsuitable personal traits for responsible positions in society. However, defense mechanisms are an integral part of the dynamics of the collective mobilization and they are crucial in making the capitalist cage invisible in this social formation. The social formation also utilizes psychopathic individuals in forwarding inhumane exploitive measures.

Suffering and pain create infighting amongst the oppressed, while hopelessness and cynicism turn into self-harm or random violence. The internalized authority in the subject population’s minds directs their attention to their fellow humans, to themselves, or forces them to regress into committing violent actions. These tendencies have been drastically augmented by the prevalent use of mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs in recent decades. Researchers have been noting the devastating consequences brought out by drugs with side effects such as suicidal ideation, psychopathy and so on. (Big pharma makes money, and again, suffering caused by the exploitive environment has created opportunities for industry.)

Where is a formation like this heading in the geological time frame, let alone the development of a few centuries?

4.  The Social Institutions

Our social lives revolve around certain networks in our careers, our interests, our backgrounds and so on. This allows us to find livelihoods and meaning in our daily lives away from the structural issues devastating parts of our population. However, the measures and the policies of the ruling class are also imposed through those networks within the social formation as well. Social institutions, under the strict control of capital and backed by the internalized authority of individuals, quietly guide us to the imperial framework. In a functioning society, a social institution allows facts and history to accumulate in a given field, creating collective assets of knowledge and wisdom. This is a column supporting what we perceive as “civilization.” But what is the implication of it functioning as an element to divide people and impose draconian measures under the umbrella of the ruling class authority? What are the consequences of such oppression for those who are eager to protect the integrity of the institution? And how do we understand our surroundings, facts and history when those change according to the agendas? We lose our common ground to stand on. Our communities are destabilized and ultimately forced to stand on official narratives.

Religious institutions, political institutions, science and etc. often play such a role.  For example, the political institution has been reduced to a machine to form and legitimize ruling class agendas in the name of “democracy” in which money dominated corporate parties meticulously choose and curate problems that will give opportunities for corporate entities. Narratives, slogans and talking points are provided to party members according to their affiliations. The parties, backed by corporate interests, encourage party members to engage in this controlled competition in which rules and objectives are set by corporate interests. This effectively eliminates an actual political process for the interests of the people while giving an illusion of “democracy.” Participation becomes a ritual in which the collective power of the people is stolen in the name of ensuring the betterment of the people.

Just as the collectivity of indoctrinated individual minds acts as a power steering wheel for capitalist agendas, social institutions have become an integral part of the driving force of ruling class agendas.  In particular, corporate funded NGOs, think tanks, academic institutions, research institutions and so on, play a crucial role in formulating effective measures and policies for achieving lucrative goals at the expense of the exploited and subjugated population.

5. Perpetual Now

The depth of the colonization of minds is reflected by how we perceive major events of our time. For example, the people who desperately screamed “Stand with Ukraine” are nowhere to be seen as we are forced to swallow the new slogans on the Palestinian conflict. The 500,000 Ukrainian deaths resulting from the US proxy war do not appear anywhere.  We clearly remember the images of 9/11. But there is no accountability for the deaths of millions of innocent people in the Middle East. The non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, “dead incubator babies,” “viagra supplied soldiers,” and other emotionally charged accusations against the “brutal dictators” do not find any reasoned connections to the actual events and their consequences at all. We are forced to consume incoherent segments of the broken dreams of the ruling class, with ample excuses and justifications, as if we are watching a series of rationalization dreams of the ruling class mind with our wide awake minds.  In this collective process, we are totally detached from history and material reality as we are forced to embrace the fictitious notion of “perpetual now.”  This colonization of our perception, with forced consumption of incoherent propaganda narratives, leads us, sleep walking, into colonial projects of war, colonialism, and neoliberal restructuring.

Our lives count on the healthy functioning of social institutions and social relations based on our interests. We internalize the imperatives of the collective as guiding principles. We naturally build respect and trust for those who protect social institutions with their wisdom and knowledge. We build communities to build social relations based on our interests. Our internal sense of the collective manifests as tradition, myths, culture and so on. We learn to organize ourselves so that we can live harmoniously with ourselves, with each other, with other life forms and with nature. We create art to reflect who we are while also reflecting how things can be, reaching out to the vastness of the universe.

The capitalist hierarchy and its beneficiaries replace these dynamics with imperatives that keep their order intact. Our psychological traits, our collective social mechanism, how we perceive, and the actual facts themselves and history are being manipulated, altered, and abused. They have been taken apart and put back together to form an invisible cage of caste-like social hierarchy which is constantly being shaped and maintained through the process of trauma and conditioning. Our species is being domesticated by the ruling class, which is harvesting our collective powers to pursue this destructive path.

6. Growing Out of the Social Formation

In this writing I have attempted to lay out the psychological aspect, as well as the structural mechanism, of collective mobilization of the people under capitalist domination.

All these processes clearly indicate structural as well as active efforts by the ruling class to impose policies and agendas against the subject population. This particular social formation is extremely inefficient and unproductive in terms of realizing the potential of the collective power of humanity since the captured power has been largely used to concentrate the power of humanity in the hands of a few without regard to the ultimate trajectory of the species as well as our real potential to actualize our capabilities in harmony with our surroundings. The process diminishes our capability to perceive ourselves, each other, and our environment, while depriving us of our abilities to create and grow as human beings. We have yet to see the real potential of our species at this point. Continuation of this trajectory will deprive us of it.

To end this writing, I must add one thing. I find many people in the US to be friendly, kind, and extremely sophisticated in their areas of specialization. I have seen so many of them displaying great ingenuity, relentlessness and creativity in what they achieve. As an artist, I do feel waves of corporate pressure against creative freedom and the structural impediments of co-optation. But I also do feel the resilience of artists quietly but surely spreading roots in examining what it is to live and what it is to be humans. The sense of freedom and optimism which has overcome slavery does shine through the spirits of the people. The progress we make for the betterment of all people must stem from the historical reality and the characteristics of the people. Yes, slavery has morphed into current forms of exploitation and subjugation. Yes, the accumulation of wealth and the disparity among haves and have-nots has been exacerbated.  We could see these facts as proving the strength and resilience of the capitalist formation. However, we could also see them as evidence proving the criminality of the social formation as a vast pyramid scheme imposed on the majority. As the list of criminal acts continues to expand, our yearning for life and nature also expands.

It is very difficult to understand the mechanism of exploitation and subjugation which involves many layers of our social structure as well as that of our minds.  Our examination makes it clear that the social formation consists of many elements working together in highly complex ways. The ultimate solution cannot be narrowly defined by one magic bullet.   Although focused measures are necessary to counter immediate risks and impediments to well-being, a narrowly focused solution will ultimately allow the system to morph and absorb that measure into the existing system. The transformation of society from a ruling class-centric one to a people-centric one requires a fundamental shift of social power to the hands of the people.

The discussion leads to new questions:

The system cannot function without the help of the internalized authority in every one of us.  Our understanding of the system and our role in it helps us to do away with the spell put on us by the system, allowing us to have opportunities to refuse to act against our own interests which, in turn, can stop the momentum of the system.  How do we educate ourselves?

The system attempts to commodify love, friendship, community, culture, nature and so on.  All of those have been shaped and defined by the capitalist society to be sold and bought, only to be seen less and less among us.  If we make right choices for ourselves and for others, not for the interests of the ruling class, we can cultivate truly meaningful social relations by valuing what really matters to us, which could lead us to building social institutions which function for us.  Social institutions which work for the interests of the people are the basis of a well-functioning social structure for the people.  How can we achieve that?

We are social beings by nature.  We can achieve by working together what we cannot achieve by working alone.  This collective power belongs to us all. How do we ensure that our power serves the livelihoods and well-beings of us in harmony with nature and other life forms?

Countless people in the US and across the globe have raised their voices against this social formation from various angles. We have much to learn from the successes and failures of people who live under the socialist form of government. We have a vast wealth of knowledge and wisdom going all the way back to the beginning of our species examining how to be as a collective and how to be as individuals. We are one with those people from the past, from now and from the future in our path to outgrow the current social formation.

Hiroyuki Hamada is an artist. He has exhibited throughout the United States and in Europe and is represented by Lori Bookstein Fine Art. He has been awarded various residencies including those at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Edward F. Albee Foundation/William Flanagan Memorial Creative Person’s Center, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the MacDowell Colony. In 1998 Hamada was the recipient of a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, and in 2009 he was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives and works in New York. Read other articles by Hiroyuki.

 

Circle of Secrecy: The Iraq War’s Missing Cabinet Documents

by Binoy Kampmark / January 6th, 2024

They are unlikely to be revelatory, will shatter no myths, nor disprove any assumptions.  Cabinet documents exist to merely show that a political clique – the heart of the Westminster model of government, so to speak – often contain the musings of invertebrates, spineless on most issues such as foreign policy, while operating at the behest of select interests.  Hostility to originality is essential since it is threatening to the tribe; dissent is discouraged to uphold the order of collective cabinet responsibility.

The recent non-story arising from the cabinet documents made available as to why Australia participated in a murderous, destructive and most probably illegal war against Iraq in 2003 proves that point.  The documents available showed, for instance, that a country, without mandatory parliamentary consultation, can go to war under the stewardship of a cabal influenced by the strategic interests of a foreign government.  The Howard government, famously buried in the fatty posterior of the US imperium, was always going to commit Australian military personnel to whatever military venture Washington demanded of it.  (In some cases, even without asking.)

It was modish to suggest during the “Global War on Terror” that governments with fictional weapons of mass destruction might pass them on to surrogate non-state actors.  It was fashionable to misread intelligence material alleging such links, and, when that intelligence did not stack up, concoct it, as Tony Blair’s government happily did, sexed-up dossiers and all, in justifying Britain’s participation in the mauling of Iraq.

The larger story in the recent documents affair over Iraq was what documents were withheld from the provision to the Australian National Archives in 2020.  In his January 3 press conference, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese outlined the process.  Normally, cabinet documents would be released two decades after their creation.  Such documents are provided to the Archives three years in advance by the government of the day.  But on this occasion, 78 were omitted from the transfer, enabling Albanese to point the finger firmly at his predecessor, Scott Morrison. (Those documents have since been transferred to the Archives.)

In Albanese’s view, “Australians have the right to know the basis upon which Australia went to war in Iraq.  Australians lost their lives during the conflict and we know that some of the stated reasons for going to war was not correct in terms of the weapons of mass destruction that was alleged Iraq had at the time.”  Australians, he went on to say, had “a right to know what the decision-making process was”.

The mistake in question had to be corrected, and the Archives had to release the documentation provided to them.  A constricting caveat, however, was appended to the declaration: the release of the documents had to “account for any national security issues  […] upon the advice of the national security agencies.”

The caveat is a good starting point to suggest that this documents saga, and the restrictions upon the disclosure of the missing 78 Cabinet records, are set to continue.  For one thing, Albanese has added to the farce of secrecy by commencing an independent review that is barely worth that title.  The review is to be chaired by the very sort of person you would expect to bury rather than find things: Dennis Richardson, former director of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation and former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).

Richardson’s appointment continues a practice of partisan control over a process that should be beyond the national-security fraternity.  There are fewer strings of accountability, as would apply, say, to the Commonwealth Ombudsman.  There are no terms of reference outlined.  Short of simply being a political manoeuvre that might cast a poor light on the previous government’s practices, it is unclear what Richardson’s purpose really is apart from justifying the retention of any of the said documents from public view.

Either way, he will be on a tidy sum for the task, something which he is becoming rather used to.  As The Klaxon reports, Richardson has been well remunerated by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) for previous work.  A $50,000-a-month contract was awarded to him last year for “strategic advice and review” between August 2 and October 31.  The department refuses to state what it was for, preferring the insufferably vague justification of some “need for independent research or assessment”.  Be on guard whenever the term “independent” is coupled with “inquiry” or “assessment” in an Australian government context.

A media release from the PM&C further notes that no department official or Minister has a direct role in the release or otherwise of the documents in question; the Archives will have the final say on whether those documents will be released or otherwise, whatever Albanese says.  Researchers, transparency activists and those keen on open government, are almost guaranteed disappointment, given the habitual secrecy and dysfunction that characterises the operation of that body.

If there is a true lesson in this untidy business for the Albanese government, it must surely lie in the need to debate, discuss and dissent from matters that concern the entanglement of Australia, not merely in foreign wars but in alliances that cause them.  That, sadly, is a lesson that is nowhere being observed.  Howard’s crawling disposition has found its successor in Albanese’s obsequiousness, in so far as foreign conflicts are concerned.  Wherever the US war machine is deployed, Australia will hop to its aid with gleeful obedience.

And as for anything to do with revealing the Australian decision-making process about the decision to invade, despoil and ruin yet another Middle Eastern state in 2003, one is better off consulting records from the White House and the US State Department.FacebookTwitter

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.