The Empire, Not Just Biden, Has Dementia

BY ANIS SHIVANI

JULY 12, 2024
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I had just left Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and started heading west on Highway 138 toward the coast a hundred and fifty miles away when the Biden/Trump debate started. I could only catch a few minutes of it before I lost the signal for the next few days. So it was only the following week that I was able to catch up on what had happened. But I heard enough in just those few minutes to find it shocking, even for my jaded senses. Not only was Biden’s voice hoarse and pretty much undecipherable, but his sentences and logic made no sense at all. Meanwhile, Trump, in his very first response, sounded solid and authoritative, his voice booming—even if his content was likewise junk. But at least he was in control of the protocols of language, whereas Biden seemed to have lost the speech function altogether.

I have generally been skeptical of people saddling Biden with Alzheimer’s or dementia going back to 2019 when he started running for election. My mother had Alzheimer’s so I have personal familiarity with its ravages, and I’m careful to make such diagnoses from a distance. There was no doubt that compared to 2012 (when Biden handily demolished Paul Ryan in the debate), not to mention much earlier in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s—much as you might disagree with his racist, punitive, sexist actions—Biden had suffered severe cognitive decline. There were the outbursts against voters in the audience during 2019-2020. He seemed to be receiving some form of pacifying medication, when the rants and rages, or the inordinate attention to women’s hair or little girls’ bodies, got too much to bear. They probably administered some cocktail of medication for him to successfully get through the “debate” with Bernie Sanders, who unilaterally laid down arms anyway and let himself, and the left movement, be savaged. The debates with Trump in the fall of 2020 were more subdued affairs, when the cognitive decline was more obvious, and Biden had the excuse of Covid not to have to campaign in public.

Since then, his handlers seem to have been able to mostly hide him away, except for the rare occasion when he appears in public and each time is manifestly more fragile and incoherent. This whole cover-up got blown in the debate in such a manner that nobody can unsee it. Any doubts as to his mental decline have been removed.

The empire has in fact been running for the last four years on auto-pilot. The darkest, craziest, most doomsdayish forces in the deep state have actually been managing this empire, without any democratic input, or any care for the sentiments of the public. No one listens. It is in fact Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Janet Yellen and other insane apparatchiks who decide the policies that Biden then rubber stamps, since he has no brain left to argue otherwise.

To a large extent, this explains Biden’s meandering inaction, or rather full complicity, in the Gaza genocide. It explains the mad drive toward direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia in a way that reminds us of Dr. Strangelove. It explains the total withdrawal of any progressive policy initiatives in the first year of the administration and letting Manchin and Sinema ensure that nothing substantive passed. Obama, Clinton, or a president Kamala Harris would never have given one hundred percent license to Israel to do whatever it wanted, no matter their own Zionist inclinations; the complete passivity is not normal.

Nobody is there to stop the runaway train, and there hasn’t been for four long years. That’s an amazing fact, a testament to the empire’s ability to run on the writ of nameless bureaucrats who are actually autocrats driven by passionate narrow agendas that have no regard for democratic sentiments. It doesn’t matter if seventy or eighty percent of the people oppose the Gaza genocide, or if overwhelming numbers of young people want student debt forgiveness, or none of the people except deep state operatives are for war with Russia. The deep state on auto-pilot doesn’t care about any of it.

Biden’s speech patterns are not an impediment or stutter but a rhetorical style suited to the moment. I don’t want to go all the way back to, say, FDR or LBJ or JFK or Nixon, but each president, in the mode of spectacle, has a pattern of speech that reflects the needs of the moment. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but there’s a pretty strong correlation. Bill Clinton’s convoluted reasoning—hair-splitting, if you will—worked well with the triangulation and Third Way strategies involved in imposing a neoliberal way of life upon an unsuspecting public. George W. Bush’s macho West Texas swagger—as fake an artifact as we’ve ever seen in American politics—suited the Project for a New American Century’s designs to forcefully implement the next phase of the New World Order upon recalcitrant foreign countries. Barack Obama’s resort to high-minded vagueness reflected the unease of the elites toward the devastation neoliberalism had wrought and their unwillingness to do anything about it except to seek refuge in verbal flights of fancy. Trump came along with his fake working-class grievances and the simplistic reduction of the world to those who belonged and those who didn’t in the wake of a neoliberalism that had reached the end of its persuasiveness for non-believers.

To resuscitate what was left of the American empire, what was then needed was a vacant mind, a vacant stare, a man who came so far from the past—a literal walking zombie from the era before consciousness of race and class registered even on neoliberal terms—that global military aggression could proceed apace again, as if the last fifty years hadn’t happened.

And that’s what Biden’s rhetoric—and it is a form of rhetoric, even if demented—represents at every moment: It is as if the last fifty years of even gestural progress in social justice terms hadn’t occurred. It is as if domestically we were living in the age of opposition to busing and Storm Thurmond’s hold on the South, and in the arena of foreign policy there were those who believed that Kissinger’s détente toward Russia had gone too far in the direction of pacification. The deep state needed that kind of leader to revive its fortunes against a Trump who threatened to cease perpetual war, not give due respect to enemies real or imagined, and instead direct the country to a form of crass vulgarism whose culmination he represented in his own body and spirit.

The interview with George Stephanopoulos was even worse than the debate. This is when I first came around to accepting the Alzheimer’s thesis. On the one hand, his political instincts seemed as sharp as ever. Biden knew exactly how to deflect every one of the awkward questions Stephanopoulos directed at him about whether he would submit to cognitive tests, whether he would consider stepping aside, and whether he would feel shame if Trump won because of his weakened condition. He had the correct political answer ready in every instance to deflect attention from the real problem. His defiance—I would say arrogance—knew no bounds in this interview, as it hasn’t in other settings since the debate debacle. He remains immovable, regardless of whether he has Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or some other neurodegenerative syndrome that causes the slurred speech and stiff gait.

After the first few hours and days when his position seemed quite untenable, it’s possible that he may have rallied enough support to outlast the storm, being able to convince the party elites that to displace him now would be even more disastrous than going forward with a replacement. Someone is doing the convincing.

In the Stephanopoulos interview, he barely mentioned even the token gestures toward progressive policies that his administration has enacted, such as the minimal student debt forgiveness, or helping some undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens. He kept raving about expanding and fighting the wars and being the only one who could stand up to Russia. That’s it, the wars are what his mind has distilled to. One domestic policy he never forgets to mention, however, is the reduction in the price of insulin for seniors, but aside from war, both in the debate and in the interview, it’s as if he has no other presidential function to perform. Quite aptly, his big demonstration of cognitive facility is supposed to occur at the press conference heralding NATO’s 75th anniversary in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, fully two weeks after the debate.

In the 1990s, we were wayward horndogs, newly liberated from Reaganite 1950s family consensus and suburban bliss (minus feminism), and Clinton gave us the ribald, semi-repressive tunes to sing by, fake jazz and all. In the 2000s, we needed to revive past wars without awkward remembrance of our own role in creating historical backlash, so we ordered up a Texas cretin, or one who acted like one for the duration of the presidency. In the current stage of empire, the rising competitors are all but ready to speed past us in the race, and all we can do is muster up incoherent idiots who harken back to an America that has ceased to exist, in the form of bringing back that extinct reality intact via Trump, or forgetting that the world has changed drastically in fifty years if we go with Biden. Essentially, they are mirror images of each other, since in the debate Trump also narrowed his own talking points to just a handful of enemies that needed to be beaten, as if he couldn’t be bothered to contemplate the range of policy options available to him. They both have very few words left, at least to go by the evidence of the debate.

Again, it is remarkable to think that the empire has been firing on all cylinders without an ignition key or a driver all this time. When it has a chance to run like this, infinite war and destruction on a planetary scale are empire’s natural and only instincts. It has no goodness left in it to release when left unchecked.

What about Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom and the other younger leaders who have the right vocabulary? Essentially, they are all post-Obama wordmongers, wanting to stay within neoliberalism’s confines in a world that is disgusted with neoliberalism, even if ordinary people cannot articulate the problem in so many words. Theoretically these “challengers” to senile Biden exist, but it’s interesting that empire in its last days always seems to fixate on doddering old fools who have quite literally lost control of their body functions and cannot connect the tongue to the mind. The theoretical counterforce, in the form of those who are still able to articulate empire’s rationale, is just that, theoretical, meant to appease, built into the system as a validating force but not much more than that.

It is interesting that the entire country got upset with Biden for not having the words to justify worldwide slaughter and the destruction of the planet. The genocide was quite okay, the media would never challenge him on that, but not being able to articulate why we are complicit in the genocide presents an insurmountable problem. All the economic tyranny—the doubling or tripling of the cost of living in the Biden years—is fine, not worthy of getting riled over, but the media cannot stand someone who does not articulate empire’s rationale the way that Obama did in the years of his terroristic onslaught on innocent nations, and the impact this has on the quality of life of citizens in this country. That’s the problem with Trump too, although he does it intentionally.

In that sense, the media—and most of the American people—have not yet caught on to the degree to which Biden’s speech pathologies are in fact perfectly synchronized with where the empire stands at this point, and the need for a vacuum for the deep state to step in after Trump’s unholy utterances. No words are needed at this point. Biden’s vacant stare, when he is searching for words that just won’t come to him at the start or in the middle of a sentence, is where the empire really stands: staring at the pure abyss.

It is the abyss of forgetfulness and madness and denial, shrouded by an arrogance so deep that the complete failure of the body is not enough to rectify it. It is also why RBG and Diane Feinstein went the way they did, protected until the last by enabling servants, just as Jill Biden and the president’s closest associates are pretending that someone is there when nobody is.

Anis Shivani is the author of many critically-acclaimed books of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. His recent political books include Why Did Trump Win?, A Radical Human Rights Approach to Immigration, and Confronting American Fascism. 

Settler Colonialism and the Engineering of Historical Amnesia

BY DONALYN WHITE - ANTHONY BALLAS

 JULY 11, 2024Facebook

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It should come as no surprise to those of us with even a cursory understanding of the history of U.S. imperialism that the once sovereign Kingdom of Hawai’i became the very first state in the nation to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Hawai’i is an occupied nation, and has been since 1893 when the U.S. launched a coup to overthrow the sovereign rule of Queen Liliʻuokalani. We don’t need to dive that far back into historical memory to discover that even this imperialist overthrow was acknowledged by none other than then president Bill Clinton, who, in 1993 (on the centennial of the coup) issued an official apology to the Hawaiian Kingdom—an apology that notably did not include a return of the land to the people of this occupied island nation.

In fact, we only need to turn the dial of history back less than one year to the devastating wildfires that occurred in Maui in August of 2023 to understand the imperial and settler colonial legacies of U.S. intervention in Hawai’i — a legacy so potent that it even made it to the opinion pages of the New York Times, as Yarimar Bonilla put it,

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has acknowledged that the climate crisis is rooted in the exploitation and degradation of the environment, people and cultures, which were foundational principles of colonialism. Settlers prioritized immediate resource gains over long-term ecological health, shunning Indigenous land management practices as outdated barriers to progress.”

Although partial credit is perhaps due to the The New York Times for this as well as their earlier reporting on the colonial history of U.S., French, and Canadian intervention in Haiti, readers of the so-called “paper of record” should ask why NYT journalists were censored from using words like “Palestine,” “genocide,” and “ethnic cleansing” in their reporting in the midst of Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza.

A quick peek at NYT reporting during the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1919-1934) might yield a historical clue: while U.S. colonialism exported its brand of Wall Street imperialism and expansion to the island nation during the military occupation of 1915-1934 (and after), the NYT normalized this legacy for its millions of subscribers; a relation that continues up through our present moment.

That the NYT was just awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for International Journalism adds insult to injury: as reported by The Grayzone, The Intercept, and, most recently, The Times of London, the NYT has been systematically debunked for their coverage of “mass rape” and other falsified atrocities alleged to have been committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

That Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, currently sits on the Pulitzer Prize Board should not be a surprise, given their recent involvement in authorizing the violent suppression of student journalists who were covering the police raids on anti-genocide student encampments on the Columbia campus. This entanglement is seamlessly aligned with the NYT’s frequent normalization of colonial, imperial, and genocidal violence.

It should also not come as a surprise that Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, backed ideologically, financially, and materially by the U.S. State Department has caused an uproar on college campuses across the country—and around the world. These Students, not unlike the Hawaiian state legislature, are not only directing their passionate demands for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza but also focalizing the long history of settler colonialism and imperialism that continues to be disavowed by the media and the U.S. ruling elite. How else can we understand Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which includes forced starvation, ecocide, ethnic cleaning, and, at the time of this writing, upwards of 35,000 people murdered, nearly 15,000 of which are children, unless we situate it in the longue durée of settler colonialism and U.S. imperialism?

Contemporaneous with sublime acts of historical disavowal such as President Biden’s recent rhetoric regarding Hamas’ “ancient desire” to exterminate the state of Israel, and Antony Blinken and Mitt Romney’s dorm room, pseudo-intellectual struggle session linking the congressional ban of Tik-Tok to Israel’s failing PR image, students on university and college campuses are on the frontline of an ideological war, struggling against the tides of historical amnesia and modern day capitulation to fascism; their collective demands that institutions of higher education divest immediately from Israel and U.S. weapons manufacturers are an organized, measured, and ultimately strategic national and international political intervention which recenters the twin legacies of settler colonialism and U.S. imperialism, as well as, to borrow the title of Alberto Toscano’s recent book, the “late fascism” that marks our present moment.

In tandem with the ongoing “history wars” taking place in professional circles, college campuses, as well as state legislatures, former presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton recently took to the airwaves to berate students protesting genocide, telling the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, that students “don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history, in many areas of the world, including in our own country.”

We must remember, following the lead of students protesting Israel’s genocide, that the mentality that spurred on the colonization of Turtle Island was the deeply held conviction behind the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny, which served as the justification for the genocide and forced removal of millions of Indigenous people while also, over time, permeating both the European-American psyche and the United States legal system (in another moment Americans like to forget, even the liberal’s sweetheart, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, cited the Doctrine in 2005 as reason to rule against tribal sovereignty).

Such creation and ownership mythology is also at the root of the Zionist project, exemplified not only through the old adage used in the creation of Israel about a land without a people but also in fictions of birthright narratives. European settlers colonized Turtle Island with similar creation myths and strategies used by the European Zionist settlers who have been colonizing Palestine. And the cultural forgetfulness that conveniently downplays “residential schools” in America is the same that allows for Israel to bury the history of the Yemenite Children Affair, in which thousands of babies and children from Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, and other nearby countries were kidnapped out of absorption camps by Israeli authorities and adopted into Israeli families — two contemporaneous tragedies on the historical timeline. It becomes all too clear how the descendants of the early Puritan settlers and the original Zionists are so easily able to come together in their joint willful ignorance of the brutality of their practices, both past and present.

For decades, Israel, like many colonizing nations, has been able to hide under the security of the blanket of historical amnesia. It’s been all too easy for Israel to float by in the public eye as the world pays little attention to its past supporting violent regimes. For instance, it’s rarely broached by our politicians or mainstream U.S. media that Isreal supplied weapons and surveillance technology to the right-wing government and military in El Salvador; planned and helped to execute “scorched earth” plans against the indigenous populations of both El Salvador and Guatemala; provided military training and support for General Jose Efrain Rios Montt’s successful coup and violent dictatorship; and gave weapons and training alike to the Rwandan military and Hutu militias before and throughout the 1994 genocide.

The mobilizing of the global Palestinian solidarity movement happens simultaneously with the receding of this historical amnesia — the very selective forgetting which has both served to keep empire safe from mass resistance has also been weaponized by political leaders to discredit the movement and the people leading it. It’s not hard to read the fear cloaked in disdain in Hillary Clinton’s remarks. Ironic, though unsurprising, for such commentary coming from someone who has relied on the general historical ignorance of her own problematic history; recall her time using prison labor for yard and house work while in the Arkansas governor’s mansion, among other misdeeds of imperialism which bear her bloody signature.

Her commentary also conveniently neglects to address the fact that if young people in America don’t know about history, it’s because it has been kept from them through deliberate attempts to facilitate and spread such historical amnesia. The American education system has long been known to erase and whitewash much of its history, and major publishers of school textbooks have a record of purposely publishing discrepancies in their history books. In the case of SWANA history in particular, students often find the history skipped over entirely, and one major publisher, McGraw Hill, was forced by Zionist lobbyists to discontinue a book with a map of Palestine in it. Meanwhile, those very students Clinton speaks of are educating themselves and each other by creating content and leading teach-ins about the historical and current connections of settler colonialism across the globe.

Clinton’s interview reveals her own insecurity and anger that the younger generations are calling attention to what she and the ruling powers would like to keep hidden: the reality of the historical and ongoing colonial violence of both Israel and the United States. Such insecurity is also at the root of Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles introducing a bill to convict and send the Palestinian solidarity student protestors off to Gaza. The historical amnesia they feel receding from the minds of the young masses terrifies them because their positions of power are reliant on maintaining a culture of minimizing and outright denying past and current atrocities.

The struggle for Palestinian liberation is intricately tied to the historical and current struggles against colonialism around the globe, and many of these violent forces are intertwined. Consider that Elbit, the very same Israeli company which built the Apartheid wall in Palestine, provided design recommendations and surveillance technology for the US-Mexico border wall as well as on Indigenous reservations in Arizona. There is a reason that Mexico City was a major location of escalation against the Israeli occupying forces in Palestine; protestors threw stones at police officers and set ablaze the Israeli embassy because they were compelled to act against the interconnected forces of colonialism and imperialism which work to violently oppress Indigenous people globally.

In 2017 and 2019, a delegation of Chicanx, Indigenous, and Black activists from Turtle Island visited Palestine to build solidarity in the struggle against apartheid walls and colonial borders. In 2023 and 2024, the chant repeated at protests, “From Palestine to Mexico, these border walls have got to go,” isn’t just symbolically referring to imperialism-made borders, it directly calls out the creators and enforcers of these militarized boundaries.

Meanwhile in May, during the ongoing invasion of Rafah, former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley signed her name on a U.S.-provided Israeli artillery shell, and adorned it with a heart, encouraging the IDF to “Finish them!” On the same trip, she participated in a fear-mongering interview, saying “When these Iranian terrorists say ‘death to Israel’ what do they say next? They say ‘Death to America…Israel is fighting America’s enemies.’” What her statement reveals is that the ruling class knows what the masses are awakening to — not only the connections between the colonization in Palestine and oppression globally, but also the power of resistance movements to fight them off.

Empire always reacts to movements and moments of liberatory potential by tightening its grip, by pushing down their boot on the neck of the colonized because they know what is coming for them when the time is up — as the recent SCOTUS decision regarding presidential immunity seems to indicate (although, there is plenty of evidence that “presidential immunity” has been the status quo for centuries in the United States, particularly in terms of its application abroad, as the history of U.S.-sponsored political assassinations, coups, and other covert actions clearly indicates).

Historical amnesia seeks to have us forget not just how these systems of oppression have functioned, but also how they have been resisted. Just as the Doctrine of Discovery was met with Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763 – 1765); U.S. chattel slavery saw Turner’s Rebellion in 1831 and John Brown’s Rebellion in 1859; French colonial rule of Saint-Domingue was met with the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), which, to quote historian Gerald Horne, “ignited a general crisis of the entire slave system which could only be solved by its collapse.” Meanwhile, the larger cultural milieu under the rule of the colonizers works to have its populace demonize or, better yet, entirely forget the history of these rebellions altogether.

Now that a large Palestinian solidarity movement is erupting as the details of the Israeli colonialist expansion come to mainstream media, our political leaders are reacting from a place of fear that is at the core of every colonizer’s heart. In 1972, Dr. Angela Davis put it well: “They don’t want us to relate to this world wide movement because they feel that we might become a little bit more confident about our ability to win. We might be a little bolder, we might start doing more things to challenge the power of the monopolies here. But things are gonna change.”

We suspect we will continue to see these eruptions in escalation tactics to be led by Indigenous and other people of color around the globe against the tides of settler colonialism and neo-fascism. Hillary Clinton and other rich, white lawmakers know deep in their core that the clock is ticking on their time in power; they can perhaps detect the steady march of the growing people’s movement pulsing like the tell-tale heart pounding beneath their floorboards.

Anthony Ballas is an organizer with NFEE Local 4935. He is a Ph.D. student in Literature at Duke and currently teaches philosophy and social sciences at Northern New Mexico College. His work appears in numerous publications such as Protean Magazine, Truthout, Caribbean Quarterly, Monthly Review, 3:AM Magazine, and elswhere. He is currently co-authoring a volume on the rise of neo-fascism with Gerald Horne. Ballas hosts the De Facto Podcast and co-hosts Cold War Cinema. Find him on Twitter @tonyjballas.

Donalyn White is a community organizer and social justice activist. They are a Ph.D. student in the Cultural Studies Department at Claremont Graduate University studying radical love and liberation. They are currently an adjunct instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Communication Studies at the University of La Verne.