Ethnic Cleansing or Genocide?

by Kim Petersen / February 10th, 2025

[A] coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.

— Raphael Lemkin describes genocide¹

Protesters in Australia urge the government to back South Africa’s court case against Israel. (AAP Photo)

South Africa took leadership among the world’s nations by filing a request for the application of the Genocide Conventionn against Israel with the International Court of Justice. On 20 April 2024, The Lancet published an article that cited a “not implausible … 186 000 or more” dead Palestinians following the Israeli massacres on Gaza after Hamas stepped up its 7 October 2023 resistance to Israeli occupation and oppression. It must be noted that a group living under the conditions of occupation and oppression has a right of resistance. But apparently not for the US government.

The US is Israel’s preeminent supplier of weapons. Since 7 October, the US has supplied Israel with F-15 jets, tank cartridges, explosive mortar cartridges, army vehicles, more than 10,000 2,000-pound bombs and thousands of Hellfire missiles. Obviously, the US is not a neutral party to the fighting between Israel and Palestine. In fact, the US’s involvement makes it a participant in a proxy war against the lightly armed Palestinian resistance, who have no fighter planes, no tanks, no Iron Dome.

Seeing an opportunity, US president Donald Trump declared that the US would take over the Gaza Strip. So said Trump in a White House press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Of note is that Trump’s guest has an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes dating back to 8 October 2023.

Trump boasted, “We’ll own it … We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal … the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump stated that the Gaza Strip has been “a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades” and “an unlucky place for a long time.” Trump called on “countries of interest with humanitarian hearts” to build “various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza.”

Though the US will own it, according to Trump, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that there was no plan to put American boots on the ground in Gaza and that the US would not pay for Gaza reconstruction. Ownership without investment.

One imagines that Trump’s Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner, an investor who remarked in March 2024 that “Gaza’s waterfront property it could be very valuable,” must be rubbing his hands together with glee.

Of course, there was widespread consternation and condemnation of Trump’s plan to take over Gaza. It is blatantly illegal. There are several UN Security Council resolutions on the borders of Palestine, and UN Security Council resolutions are binding upon UN member states. Moreover, Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory.”

Curiously, writer Pepe Escobar in an interview described Trump’s taking over Gaza as “transforming a genocide into an ethnic cleansing operation.” (around 15:30)

It seems that Escobar saw ethnic cleansing as diminishing the genocidal onslaught.

The UN Genocide Convention states in Article II that

genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Obviously, (b) and (c) would factor in when it comes to determination of a genocide versus ethnic cleansing.

Citing Trump’s figure of 1.8 million Palestinians to be transferred, whereas the Gaza population was given as 2.3 million prior to 7 October 2024, Escobar is among the analysts who have noted that the uncounted Palestinian population of 500 000 might portend a much higher fatality count that what is reported in the mass media.

Linguistic Accuracy

Previously, I wrote an article about an academic paper by public health researchers Rony Blum, Gregory H. Stanton, Shira Sagi and Elihu D. Richter. Blum et al. called for the expunging of the term “ethnic cleansing” from official use, declaring that it “bleaches the atrocities of genocide and its continuing use undermines the prevention of genocide.” The researchers noted, “The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ is used as a euphemism for genocide despite it having no legal status.”

The researchers considered that mislabeling a genocide as ethnic cleansing might well provide cover for further killing. Consequently, they advocated

The researchers considered that mislabeling a genocide as ethnic cleansing might well provide cover for further killing. Consequently, they advocated linguistic accuracy so that agents of flagrant criminal actions will bear full culpability and responsibility. Blum et al. made a compelling case for ditching the term “ethnic cleansing” and calling genocide what it is. Given the abhorrence evoked by genocide, linguistic cleansing is required.

Arguably, of greater importance than linguistic accuracy though is the recognition and identification of the genocidaires. Blum et al. focused on countries outside their backyards and overlooked genocides perpetrated by their own countries. This is not only intellectually dishonest, but it detracts from the morality that implicitly underlies their position.

Ilan Pappe, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, at first drew a distinction between genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Did Pappe fudge on the question of genocide?

Pappe writes, “Massacres accompany the operations [of ethnic cleansing], but where they occur they are not part of a genocidal plan: they are a key tactic to accelerate the flight of the population earmarked for expulsion. (p. 2) [italics added]

“Ethnic cleansing is not genocide, but it does carry with it atrocious acts of mass killing and butchery.” (p. 197) [emphasis added] Pappe is generous with the definition of “ethnic cleansing” (e.g., “part of the essence of ethnic cleansing is the eradication, by all means available, of a region’s history”) but parsimonious with the definition of “genocide.”²

My colleague Gary Zatzman wrote, in a personal communication (March 2007):

Here’s the thing about ethnic cleansing: it’s not the same as genocide. The latter [genocide] is consciously aimed at destroying the people-hood of a people by attacking how, as well as where, they live, their ideas, their outlook, their culture etc etc. The former [ethnic cleansing] displaces people, but the question of whether there is a genocidal intention, or merely a desire to take over the land and property of others, is left moot.

Ilan Pappe is one of those who fudges this question. He says what the Zionists do today in Gaza is genocide, but what they did in Mandate Palestine since 1947 and in the West Bank since 1967 was ethnic cleansing. DISINFORMATION ALERT! …

It is ALL genocide. The intention of the Haganah was to genocide the Palestinians. It’s very convenient to say, à la Golda Meir, that the Zionists didn’t think of the Palestinians as a people or nationality, just an inconvenient obstacle. The FACT is they prepared and executed genocide. It doesn’t matter, either, that the Zionists didn’t get all the Palestinians in one fell swoop, but have dragged it out over the last 58 years. It is still genocide. To suggest the survivors of the Judeocide were incapable of such a thing, which seems to be the only substance at the heart of the liberal Zionists’ argument, is utter nonsense. Were these survivors not psychically damaged by what they experienced before they were “liberated”? Such people were the ideal human material to set upon the Palestinians like wild beasts.

Perhaps the excellent analyst Escobar might reconsider his usage of the term “ethnic cleansing” — especially if referring to it as a lesser form of genocide.

ENDNOTES:

• 1
  Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide.” In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation — Analysis of Government — Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.:  Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 79-95. Available at prevent genocide international. 
• 2
  See Kim Petersen, “Nakba: The Israeli Holocaust Denial,” Dissident Voice, 18 March 2007.

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Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. Read other articles by Kim.

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The Hijacking of Palestine

How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea by Thomas Suárez

by Edward Curtin / February 13th, 2025

A Review

Much has been written in the alternative press over the past year about the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and its other war crimes in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, etc. This has often been viewed within the historical context of the self-declared Zionist Israeli state’s founding in 1948 up to the present day. But far less has been said about the Zionist’s racial-nationalist-settler-colonialist movement’s history of terrorism to seize Palestine and kill and drive the Palestinians into exile that goes back for more than a century

For those who think Donald Trump’s recent announcement that the United States will take over Gaza and force the besieged Palestinians to leave their country is shocking, the history presented by Thomas Suárez will disabuse them of that notion. The Zionist Trump is stating baldly the ultimate goal of the ethnic cleansing of all non-Jews from Palestine, which has been the Zionists’ goal from the beginning and lies behind Biden, who considers himself a Zionist, and Trump’s recent support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

When questioned why he supported the Zionist leaders’ efforts to drive the Palestinians from their land, Winston Churchill, in 1937, replied, “I do not admit the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time.”

As Suárez, a London-based historical researcher, former West Bank resident, violinist, and composer, writes, “He denied that ‘a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the Black people of Australia’ by their replacement with ‘a higher grade race’.” This higher grade race rhetoric is racism, pure and simple, and it has been applied to the Palestinians by the Zionists from the start. Dogs, vermin, etc. Hitler would be proud.

It is nothing new. Ethnic supremacy and a pure Jewish state have always been the goal, even as the Zionists used Nazi rhetoric and tactics that they allegedly abhorred while working with the Nazis to get German Jews into Palestine but nowhere else. What became known as The Haavara Transfer Agreement is proof of that.

In January 1933 when Hitler came to power as German Chancellor, there were international calls for a boycott of German goods and services, supported by prominent Jews and Christians. The boycott caused a severe blow to the Reich’s economy. But an agreement with Hitler was arranged by Zionists to circumvent the boycott and provide Germany with needed capital, with Hitler allowing German Jews with sufficient wealth to emigrate to Palestine in return for their purchase of German goods and equipment, a quid pro quo arrangement that provided Germany with a propaganda win by claiming the boycott-breaking deal was made by Jews. Four years later, Adolph Eichmann, on a trip to Palestine, was involved in a follow-up effort with the Zionist terrorist militia, the Haganah, and its representative Feival Pokes, for the Nazis to pressure German Jewish groups to urge Jews to go only to Palestine and no other countries.

The irony of Churchill’s racist statement is that the Zionists, despite the UK’s Balfour Declaration of 1917 declaring its support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” turned on their British accomplices, who were in Palestine as “administrators” under a League of Nations mandate following WW I, with a savage terrorist campaign to drive the British out. This gave the Zionists a narrative propaganda myth that they have exploited to the present day that they were the victims of occupation in their own land, while it was the Zionists who, through terrorism, were driving the Palestinians from the land that was theirs for a very long time.

Treachery of this nature defines the history of all those arrayed against the Palestinians from the start – as today, with Trump being no exception.

Suárez makes it clear that the “Palestinians also committed terror attacks, and this book’s focus on Zionist and Israeli terror must never be misinterpreted as excusing Palestinian violence against innocents,” but the “Palestinian terror occurred principally during the uprisings of the late 1920s and late 1930 after years of being institutionally discriminated against and killed for the benefit of the Zionists, and after non-violent resistance – diplomacy, entreaties, strikes, boycotts – proved futile.” His focus in this book, therefore, is to document and offer a comprehensive and structural analysis of the decades-long terror campaign the Zionist racial-nationalist settler movement used to obliterate the “inferior” Arabs who were “dogs in the manger.”

The Zionists’ twin terror campaigns against the Palestinians and the British forced the British to withdraw in 1948. They then turned their full attention to exterminating the Palestinians, which resulted in the what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba – the purging of nearly a million Palestinians from their land and the destruction of more than five hundred of their villages – (what Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, called “a miraculous simplification of our task” ). It was then that the siege of Gaza began, not as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his accomplices claim began after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.

As Suárez writes, “The siege of Gaza began in 1948, fifty-eight years before the 2006 election of Hamas, which Israeli now uses to justify it. It served then the same purpose it serves today: to block people of the wrong ethnicity from returning home.”

From its start, the Zionist settler project was rooted in a fanatical messianism marketed as the myth of these modern Jewish settlers simply sailing back to the Hebrew land of the Bible after a 2,000 year absence, a land that belonged to them even though they had never lived there. They were just returning to their sovereign home, decreed by God, and those Palestinians living there, no matter for how long, were usurpers who had to be driven from their homes, killed, or forced into exile. The branding of the Jewish state “Israel,” a name entrenched in the messianic Jewish and Christian culture of the West, was crucial since it called up all the nostalgia for the Holy Land of yore and all the images of one’s “true” homecoming. This was crucial to get Christian support in the West.

Palestine Hijacked (2022) is a book of deeply documented historical research (686 detailed endnotes) that tears the mask off the narrative that paints Zionism as a benign force. Through assiduous archival research in poorly accessed and newly declassified archives of the Central Intelligence Agency, the British National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Zionist Organization of America, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, etc., Suárez uses original source documents to hoist the well-known Zionist leaders with their own petards, often in their own words, words never meant to see the light of day. Chaim Weizmann, Theodore Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Moshe Sharett are exposed as liars, and the latter three as ruthless terrorists, with the former three in complete accord with their terror tactics. The same is shown to be true for those Western leaders who supported the terrorist seizure of Palestine by a Zionist racial-nationalist settler movement that had zero legal or moral right to the land, as they still do not.

Suárez sets the scene early on page 14:

Through the decades to come [from the early days of Zionism], from mainstream leaders like David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann to the fanatical terror gang Lehi, the ideological pronouncements of the settler project were couched in the language of messianism. Zionism was building the final Kingdom, the Biblical Third Temple, a resurrection rising from the ashes of the fabled Second Temple and Solomon’s Temple. Zionism’s battles, its enemies, its conquests, its tragedies, were Biblical, and its establishment of the Israeli state in 1948 was sold as the resumption, the reconstitution, of the Biblical realm. As Ben-Gurion put it, “the Bible is our mandate” to take Palestine.

[my emphasis above]

Again, as with Trump’s pronouncement, the old is new and the new, old; thus today we have American conservative Christian evangelicals’ (Christian Zionists) passionate support for Netanyahu’s war crimes, justified and blessed by the Biblical canard that lives on in the propagandistic narrative promoted by Israel and the corporate media.

It’s all here in Suárez’s chronicle. Not just details about the rather well-known Zionist terror attacks such as the bombing of The King David Hotel that could be turned into Zionist propaganda, but all the years of the slaughters of Palestinians, old and young, men and women and children in small villages and markets, in homes and on the roads and in the fields, done without mercy and carried out with a Biblical gleefulness by fanatics doing their “God’s will.” It chills the soul to read the details of such genocide’s long history.

Suárez writes:

The King David bombing endures as the iconic terror attack of the Mandate years, and history books falsely cite it as the most deadly. The 1940 bombing of the Patria [an immigrant ship] bombing was three times deadlier, killing about 267 people, and the two atrocities are identical in the claim that only infrastructure, not people, were the targets.

Of the attacks in which the killing was the acknowledged purpose, at least one of the Irgun’s bombing [the Irgun, the Lehi, and the Haganah were the Zionist’s three main terror groups] of Palestinian markets killed more (July 6, 1980, about 120), and the Zionist armies coming slaughter of villages such as Deir Yassin – still during the Mandate – would also kill more people than the King David attack.

If you wish to understand the terrorist nature of today’s Israeli government, you need to read this book.

If you think the recent Israeli use of exploding pagers has no history, learn about the Zionist use of exploding leaflets long ago.

If you think critics’ use of the term Nazi to describe the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians is over-the-top, learn about the history of Zionist collaborations with Hitler and the Italian fascist Mussolini.

If you think the Israel designs and attacks on Lebanon and Syria are something new, think again.

If you are shocked by the question: Does Israel have a right to exist?, discover the illegal and immoral nature of its claims to that right. Then ask yourself to answer.

If you are afraid to learn these things for fear of being called antisemitic, learn how the Zionist founders of Israel weaponized that term long ago, against fellow Jews and anyone else who dared question their legitimacy, and how their progenitors and the U.S. government that supports them now stand rightly condemned as supporters of genocide.

If you think Zionism and Judaism are synonymous, you have swallowed a package of lies wrapped as a treacherous gift; for Jews with a conscience know that the Zionist project is a terrible stain on their name.

Thomas Suárez has written a brave and great book. He should have the last word:

The reason Israel holds millions of human beings under various levels of apartheid, the reason it keeps millions more languishing in refuge camps, is not that they are Palestinians, not that they are Arab.

It is rather, strictly, because they are not Jewish. If they were Jewish, whether Palestinian or Arab or anything else, they would be welcomed and given a generous subsidy to move in from whatever part of the world they live and take over a house whose owner was expelled because s/he is not Jewish.

Nothing in the history of Zionism, of the Israeli state, or the so-called conflict can be understood divorced from this.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies. Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.

 

Cutting the Ghost Budget: Elon Musk versus the Pentagon

by Binoy Kampmark / February 11th, 2025

The rampaging antics of a querulous, sociopathic tech oligarch as he busies himself identifying which government departments to raid, trim, if not abolish altogether, understandably concerns those in the business of government.  And there is much to be concerned about with Elon Musk’s merrily psychotic scything as chief of the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), notably in terms of security access to payment and data systems.

Established on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration via executive order, the new department is charged with implementing “the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity”.  Trump made it clear that virtually no agency or department would be exempt.  “Pentagon, [the Department of] Education, just everything.  We’re going to go through everything.”  In an interview with Fox News, Trump was convinced that, “We’re going to find billions, hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and abuse.”

When it comes to Musk’s hungry intentions regarding the US Defense Department, things start getting cloudily confusing.  In the first place, letting this “special government employee” loose on a department with which his own companies, notably SpaceX, have contracts with, sounds like a recipe for self-interested slashing.

The broader premise of cutting back on wasteful Pentagon spending, however, is nigh irrefutable.  And as much as he is loathed by establishment wonks in the Pentagon, that other Trump ally-in-cutting, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is merely stating the wondrously obvious in noting that many programs at the Pentagon “don’t have the impact you want them to.”

Much to the horror of defence mandarins, Hegseth has also insisted that the Pentagon pass “a clean audit.”  That, at the very least, was what the US taxpayers deserved.  “They deserve to know where their $850 billion go, how it’s spent, and make sure it’s spent wisely.”

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has already identified an area of interest for the DOGE razor gang: shipbuilding.  “Everything there seems to cost too much, take too long and deliver too little to the soldiers… We need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process.”

Defence departments the world over specialise in innovative, fantastic, even fraudulent accounting in justifying projects that will either never see fruition or, if they do, will only do so at vast cost to the taxpayer.  From the outset, the question of necessity is almost never asked in any serious way, let alone the need to coherently identify the relevant threat against which, presumably, the weapons system is intended to combat.

The unaccountable costs and expenditures associated with US defence place it in an almost peerless category.  When one can fork out money to the value of $5 trillion for failed and catastrophic conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan, something is rotten in the state of budgetary economics.  Much of this can be put down to post-9/11 spending, which dramatically departed from the previous model which focused on raising the marginal tax rate and reducing non-war expenditure.  Taxes were actually cut in 2001, 2003 and 2017, while expenditure ballooned.  Huge borrowings for war were made and emergency funds, which do not fall within standard processes of oversight, became the norm.

What emerged was the phenomenon Linda Bilmes describes as the “Ghost Budget”.  It was aided by abundant capital markets the US Treasury could readily draw upon, a dysfunctional budget system typified by hobbling federal government shutdowns, and a Pentagon determined to reverse the post-Cold War budget cuts it had suffered.  Money flowed in the nature of funding for emergency and Overseas Contingency Operations, passing under the radar of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting & Execution Process.  This incentive for underwriting permanent wars was also a license for permanent waste, characterised by the continuous resort by administrations to supplemental emergency funds (assistance to Ukraine being a case in point) with minimal administrative and Congressional scrutiny.

This situation is further complicated by the entanglements governments have with self-interested weapons companies and arms manufacturers, whose boards are very often packed by former government employees and civil servants who identify their own profits with the security of the nation.

Defence budgets the world over would seem to be subject to a more elastic treatment than those of other departments.  The $400 billion deal for the transfer and construction of nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy by the United States is a case in point, a project criminally needless as to demand those overseeing it to be charged with sedition and baleful stupidity.  It has all the ingredients that should make it a prime target for trimming, if not culling altogether: the absence of a genuine security threat (China is lazily designated as the primary one); the presence of self-interested former politicians who quaff and gobble from a seemingly endless gravy train; and military fatuity.

Defence departments also tend to behave like powers unto themselves.  Criticism, however accurate, can be weathered with arrogant reserve.  The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), to take that other paragon of dedicated waste, has dutifully ignored criticism from Parliament’s watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO), to commit a string of budgetary howlers.  It would be hard to forget the £6 billion blow out on the aircraft carriers, Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales, described by Lord David Richards, former chief of defence staff, as “behemoths … unaffordable vulnerable metal cans”.  Another former senior naval officer told national security reporter Richard Norton-Taylor that the carrier project involved a “combination of naval vanity and pork barrel politics”.

Since making it to sea, both vessels have been dogged by mechanical maladies (flooding and defective propeller shafts have featured), requiring them to spend lengthy sessions in dry dock for repairs.  Instead of participating in NATO exercises intended to show British prowess at sea, wasteful, inefficient indulgence has been on offer.

Trump, then, aided by the furniture breaking teams at DOGE, are onto something – but only up to a point.  Any proper slimming of the Pentagon must come with broader reforms to its funding agenda and how projects are accounted for.  Those arrangements were, after all, aided by previous US presidents convinced that the Republic, to survive, must be doing permanent battle across the globe.

 

MLK Day Turned into BMS Day

by B.R. Gowani / February 11th, 2025

Priscilla Chan, her husband Mark Zuckerberg of Meta/Facebook, Lauren Sanchez, her fiance Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet/Google, and Elon Musk of Space X in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington DC on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, for the 60th Presidential Inauguration. IMAGE/AP/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Poo/The Hill

Nothing can be more diametric and tragic than an unfolding fascist, joined by some of the world’s most richest men, being sworn-in for the second time on January 20, 2025 on the official Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

On August 28, 1963, in the US capital, Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., addressing a rally at the March On Washington D.C., dreamt:

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal.’”

Dr. King’s dream will have to wait until the current system gets destroyed due to its arrogance, terrorism, violence, and overstretch; or, the people in the US revolt to change the over rotten almost two and a half century exploitive capitalist system.

On January 20, 2025, the billionaires, who consider themselves more equal than all other men (women and genders) got their dream for absolute freedom to loot, realized. Martin Luther King Day was turned into Billionaires Maximum Sovereignty Day.

Mind you, the rich have always been in power in the US; it’s just that whatever little facade of restraint there was, is being removed rapidly.

The rich have been running this country since its inception but preferred, mostly, to maintain a thin veneer. However, with Trump, a billionaire, who is more exhibitionist than President Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (1901-1909), things were bound to change, and indeed they did. The tech billionaires, Fox News hosts, and big donors were inside the Capitol Rotunda whereas Republican governors such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Mississippi’s Tate Reeves, Georgia’s Brian Kemp, Indiana’s Mike Braun, and Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, were dumped in the Emancipation Hall overflow viewing space. In fact, they do belong there. What are most of the governors, mayors, elected officials, and even presidents? They are merely agents of the filthy rich.

The rich were sitting in the front row but the Trump’s cabinet members were in the row behind.

Many individuals and corporations donated more than $170 million to cover the expenses for inauguration and related events.

Billionaires pageant

Jeff Bezos, the 2nd richest person had this banner on his newspaper Washington Post, bought in 2013: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Now he should change it to “Democracy Shines in Orange Glow.” Washington Post, which had been endorsing presidential candidates for almost 40 years, refrained in 2024 from endorsing Kamala Harris under pressure from Bezos. He wanted to play safe and continue to get his government contracts with the new government — whether under Harris or Trump. Bezos is “extraordinarily aggressive” and uses various tactics to get contracts. (200,000 digital subscribers of Post were angered by non-endorsement and cancelled their subscription. It doesn’t make much difference to the second richest person. Boycotting Amazon services could hurt him to some extent.)

Mark Zuckerberg, who once toyed with the idea of running for the US presidency, now concentrates on making money and pleasing President Trump. Once when he was asked about users’ privacy on Facebook, he asserted: “Those who have nothing to hide, have nothing to fear.”

But Zuckerberg himself is fearful of Trump; who knows what he is hiding. The unpaid taxes, his company Facebook registered in Ireland, and so on. He knows how vengeful Trump [1] is. In January 2021, after the then president Trump incited attack on US Capitol, Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram sites removed Trump from both platforms. In 2023, both accounts were reinstated but with “new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses.” The guardrails were removed in July 2024. Around that period, Trump had threatened to put Zuckerberg behind bars, if re-elected. Zuckerberg also ended third party fact checking program on his sites; now whatever Trump, Musk, and their acolytes say will be treated as fact and so no checking will be needed.

On January 27, 2025, Meta announced it will “allow more free speech by lifting restrictions.” According to Intercept, the training materials include the following racist, anti LQBTQ, anti immigrants, hateful statements: “Black people are more violent than whites,” “Mexican immigrants are trash,” “transpeople are immoral,” “gays are freaks,” “immigrants are grubby filthy pieces of shit,” or the description “look at that tranny [i.e., transgender person],” under the photo of a 17-year-old girl.

Mukesh Ambani, an Indian billionaire who has 250 plus companies, including electronic and print media, under his Reliance Empire, never misses a chance to show off his wealth nor lose an opportunity to put as many people as he can around him to show them he’s the boss. Former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, attended his daughter’s lavish wedding in 2018, which cost $100 million. Ivanka Trump, her husband and daughter, were also guests at Mukesh Ambani’s son’s $600-million extravagant wedding in 2024. [2]

Miriam Adelson, very impressed by what Trump did for Israel, wished in 2019 for a “Book of Trump” in the Bible. Adelson donated $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign. Now perhaps Trump deserves an entire new Bible for his grand plan to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” This heist was first proposed by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son in law.

Sundar Pichai was there too. Like an obedient billionaire, Pichai didn’t disappoint the Dear Leader. The Dear Leader wanted a name change and Pichai’s Google agreed to change “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America.” If tomorrow, the Dear Leader says the “Planet Earth” should be called “Planet America,” Pichai’s Google will do it. Google has also gone back on its promise to not develop AI (artificial intelligence) weapons “that cause or are likely to cause overall harm.”

Elon Musk, the richest person on earth, is Trump’s non-elected Secretary of Firing — not executions, at least, not yet, but sacking federal employees and throwing them at the mercy of billionaires like him. Musk spent invested almost $300 million dollars of his own on Trump campaign and so will remain busy for quite some time to recover the investment and realize unlimited profit. (Taylor Swift could have saved us from Musk but she didn’t.)

Bill Gates did not attend the inauguration but had kissed His Fascistness‘s ass when he had a three-hour audience with Trump shortly after Christmas. Gates had given $50 million to Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign just three or so months ago. Billionaires, for whom increasing profit without paying taxes is the main goal, are good at changing sides; people evolve, but billionaires evolve extra fast. According to Gates, it was a “long and actually quite intriguing dinner.” Gates was also “impressed” by Trump’s interest in world health problems. How much Trump is interested in world health matters is clear from his announcement that the United States is leaving the WHO (World Health Organization).

Once again, Dr. King on how government’s handing of free money to rich has a different name, then that for the poor.

Whenever the government provides opportunities in privileges for white people and rich people they call it “subsidized” when they do it for Negro and poor people they call it “welfare.” The fact that is the everybody in this country lives on welfare. Suburbia was built with federally subsidized credit. And highways that take our white brothers out to the suburbs were built with federally subsidized money to the tune of 90 percent. Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all [too] often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr., February 23, 1968 (truthorfiction.com)

The capitalist system is a disaster for our world as it promotes and creates inequality, pollution, climate change, corruption, rat race, family disintegration, etc.; and maybe, for the universe because the rich are planning to colonize Mars, Moon, etc., which will for sure result in space wars.

Those who wants to see our world a better place should heed economist/activist Kshama Sawant’s advise:

“It’s time to declare war on the rich.

“We need to build an organized, unified movement of working people to systematically take on the rich who run society and to undermine their ability to rule. Our goal must be to both fight for radical change in the present and to bring down the billionaires and their system, capitalism.

“There is no other path to avoid total disaster for human civilization and the planet.”

Endnotes:

[1] Trump, like India’s Narendra Modi, is a very vindictive person. This prompted the outgoing President “Genocide Joe” to take precautionary measure of pardoning many people, including his own relatives. One of the persons, who really deserved freedom was Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier. Peltier’s sentence, after almost half a century, was commuted to indefinite home confinement. Though it’s not total freedom, but still was good news. Biden should have preemptively pardoned all the Democrats and all anti-Trump people, more than half of the country, this would have saved Trump, a great deal of time, from going after them. Or may be not, Trump almost always finds ways, like the United States, to get people he doesn’t like.

[2] Ambani was invited but Indian Premier Narendra Modi was not, even though he was desperate to attend. Modi’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar did attend the inauguration. During Modi’s last US visit in September 2024, he avoided meeting Kamala Harris or Trump despite Trump’s remark that Modi is coming to meet him. On the other hand, Trump extended an invitation to China’s Xi Jinping, who wisely avoided the Trump spectacle and, instead, sent his Vice President Han Zheng. Modi and company’s efforts for a meeting with Trump have paid off and he’ll be visiting the US in the second week of February.FacebookTwitter

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B.R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com. Read other articles by B.R..

 

Cutthroat Diplomacy in the Trump Era

by Paul Larudee / February 10th, 2025

Many people who never liked Donald Trump are predictably outraged by many of his actual and potential foreign policy changes. These include new tariffs on goods from countries with which the US had, until the current administration, enjoyed free trade or Most Favored Nation status, including Mexico, Canada, and the European Union. In addition, he announced imposition or intended imposition of increased sanctions against Iran, Russia and potentially other nations. He also ordered the suspension of all foreign aid except to Israel and Egypt. (The order is currently blocked in federal court.) But his most outrageous proposals are undoubtedly to annex Canada and Greenland, “take back” the Panama Canal, and acquire and develop the Gaza Strip after removing its current Palestinian population.

All of this and more has understandably been used to justify the worst fears of those who predicted disaster. Panic and hysteria are not an uncommon response in some quarters of the press and social media. This is by no means entirely unjustified, but such reactions fail to appreciate what Trump himself perceives as the method behind his madness. He loves panic and hysteria, which he considers useful, if not essential, to his “art of the deal.”

Donald Trump is by nature a businessman, more specifically a salesperson. He makes deals by persuasion, coercion, temptation, reward, and the entire panoply of inducements to achieve an outcome that may or may not be what he or the other participants in the negotiation initially intended. If he makes an outrageous proposal, he expects a counterproposal, and if his outrageous proposal helps to shape the counterproposal, so much the better. If he issues a directive that results in disaster, he expects pushback and revision. That – for better or worse – is how he operates. He doesn’t feel that he needs a lot of analysis or expertise. He depends on others to push and pull the negotiation into the solution of the problem, which can be less or more, better or worse, than either of the negotiators initially intended. His role is to move things along and break the deadlocks. The result may not always be the perfect solution, but it’s often a solution of some kind.

One of the first successes of the Trump administration has been the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. One can only imagine the threats and promises that were made for Trump to achieve this just prior to his inauguration. Did he promise Bibi that he could resume full or even intensified genocide after a short pause, which would allow Itamar Ben Gvir to reverse his resignation from the governing coalition and permit Netanyahu’s to further his own ambitions)? Perhaps. But now Trump’s aim seems to be to prolong the ceasefire by assuring that the US will transfer the Palestinians to other countries (mainly Egypt and Jordan). Never mind that Egypt and Jordan have refused to accept the Palestinians, who have themselves refused to go, and that most or all US allies also oppose the plan. The objective is to promise whatever is necessary to prolong the ceasefire, and to keep coming up with ways to do that, no matter how unrealistic. In this case, the promise is to rid Israel of the Palestinians without even having to use the Israeli military or resources. What more could they want? This buys Israel’s cooperation, and the problems and contradictions get kicked down the road. Donald Trump wants to be seen as someone who can do the impossible, even if his methods are highly, highly unorthodox and coercive, such as a proposal to cut off foreign aid to Egypt and Jordan if they don’t accept.

Thus far, there is no doubt that the ceasefire is a success, if only a qualified one, with many violations (mostly by Israel, which is less than enthusiastic about it). However, the same cannot necessarily be said about Trump’s suspension of the operations and funding of the US Agency for International Development. The humanitarian aid and technological development provided by USAID is a real benefit to the societies that receive it, and it is plausible that people will die without it, especially the medical supplies, equipment and services that preserve life and health in underserved areas. On the other hand, that aid comes with strings attached. USAID, as well as many NGOs that are at least partly funded privately, are frequently a cover for CIA spying, black ops and regime change operations. The overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014 was largely funded and enabled by USAID funds directed by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. The suspension of the USAID program is therefore not entirely unwelcome.

In any case, we can expect such strange and risky moves to be part of the next four years. In Trump’s last administration, he came in largely unprepared. This time, he appears, for better or worse, to be taking charge. It is likely to be a learning experience for all concerned, and the results are likely to be less predictable for us all, as wellFacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Paul Larudee is a retired academic and current administrator of a nonprofit human rights and humanitarian aid organization. Read other articles by Paul.