Remembering the Sacrifice of US Airman Aaron Bushnell

by Alfred de Zayas / February 26th, 2025

One year ago, on 25 February 2024 the 25-year old US Airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. to protest against the Israeli genocide of tens of thousands of Palestinians, he said that he refused to be “complicit in the genocide of Palestinians”, and as his body burnt in flames, he cried out six times “Free Palestine”.

The politicians in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin took no notice.  No one cared.  Washington and the Europeans continued delivering lethal weapons to Israel, weapons to kill more women and children.  And, indeed, since Aaron’s death, many tens of thousands have lost their lives under Israeli bombardment in Gaza, Palestine and Lebanon.

The International Court of Justice has issued three orders requiring Israel to stop the killing.  Orders that were ignored by Israel.  The ICJ also issued an Advisory Opinion on 19 July 2024 specifically ruling that the Israeli occupation was illegal, demanding its termination and the payment of compensation to the Palestinian victims. To no avail, because Washinton, London, Paris and Berlin are all complicit.

On 27 February 2024 I published an article honouring Aaron Bushnell. Allow me to quote from that article:

The live-streaming and subsequent videos of US active duty airman Aaron Bushnell’s extreme sacrifice in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. on Sunday 25 February 2024 should make us reflect on the complicity of our governments in the on-going genocide being perpetrated by Israel on the hapless Palestinian people….

The self-immolation brings back memories of the Vietnamese monks who self-immolated in the 1960s in protest against the oppressive Saigon government and the US aggression of their country. Further self-immolations took place in the United States, including on 16 March 1965, Alice Herz, an 82-year old peace activist, in front of the Federal Department Store in Detroit, Norman Morrison, a 31-year old Quaker pacifist, who poured kerosene over himself and set himself alight outside the Pentagon, and Robert LaPorte in front of the United Nations.

It reminds us of the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi who in 2010 self-immolated in protest against the police brutality of the Tunisian government, and whose sacrifice was the occasion that triggered what came to be known as the ‘Arab spring’, and which I consider more like a neo-colonial effort on the part of the US and Europe to cement their control in the MENA region….

Aaron Bushnell, a young man of 25 with all of his life before him, performed the ultimate protest to make the point against the indifference of the world in the face of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, a continuing tragedy which Professor Norman Finkelstein has documented in his comprehensive book Gaza and in his numerous articles and television appearances.

On the video, minutes before setting himself ablaze, Bushnell said with a quiet, measured, resolute voice:  “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.”  Bushnell was a respected and loved cyber defence operations specialist with the 531st intelligence support squadron at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.

In an interview with Newsweek Senator Bernie Sanders said, “It’s obviously a terrible tragedy, but I think it speaks to the depths of despair that so many people are feeling now about the horrific humanitarian disaster taking place in Gaza, and I share those deep concerns…. The United States has got to stand up to Netanyahu and make sure this does not continue.”

Yes, a genocide is unfolding before our eyes.  Articles 2 and 3 of the Genocide Convention are clearly engaged, and the issue of “intent” is overwhelmingly established in pages 57-69 of the legal brief submitted by South Africa to the ICJ.  On television and the internet we watch the bombardments of hospitals, schools, UN shelters.

While the entire world is clamouring for a cease-fire, the U.S. government abused the veto power in the Security Council three times to block the three draft resolutions on a cease-fire….

On 26 January 2024 the International Court of Justice issued a comprehensive order of “provisional measures” of protection, an injunction, which is legally binding under article 41 of the Statute of the ICJ, and which Israel has systematically violated, as it violated the ICJ’s earlier Advisory Opinion on the Wall, dated 9 July 2004.

On 16 February the ICJ published a decision on the South African second request for additional measures of protection:

“The Court notes that the most recent developments in the Gaza Strip, and in Rafah in particular, ‘would exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare with untold regional consequences’, as stated by the United Nations Secretary-General (Remarks to the General Assembly on priorities for 2024 (7 Feb. 2024)). This perilous situation demands immediate and effective implementation of the provisional measures indicated by the Court in its Order of 26 January 2024, which are applicable throughout the Gaza Strip, including in Rafah, and does not demand the indication of additional provisional measures. The Court emphasizes that the State of Israel remains bound to fully comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention and with the said Order, including by ensuring the safety and security of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

While I understand Aaron Bushnell’s motivation and his noble hope that his self-immolation would make an impact on our politicians, I fear that the deep-seated cynicism in the US and Israeli governments and the cavalier attitude of the mainstream media will effectively give carte blanche to … Netanyahu, who will continue ignoring all calls for a cease-fire and will very soon “cancel” the memory of Bushnell’s sacrifice….

It is rare to see someone today actually following his principles and going through to the ultimate (and excruciatingly painful) sacrifice.  In my opinion, and in that of many peace-activists, it would have been more sensible to live for the cause of peace and not to die in protest against a criminal war.  Peace-making is work-in-progress, a daily commitment.

The deconstruction and desacralization of Western society has made gestures as Aaron Bushnell’s harder to relate to than in the past, because our society has lost its moral compass, its capacity for empathy. Indeed, Western society is impregnated with cynicism to such a degree that a sacrifice for a cause greater than oneself seems incomprehensible, a far harder concept to grasp intellectually — let alone feel — for modern rootless materialists. …

I urge fellow Americans and the US military, especially Bushnell’s Airforce comrades,  to demand that the US government stop supplying arms to Israel immediately and that the US cease blocking the Security Council when a resolution is tabled by Algeria or any other country.

We know that the world stood and watched when Pol Pot massacred his own people in Cambodia in the 1970s, the world did nothing to stop the Rwandan genocide of 1994.  Today it is up to us to demand accountability.  We must all stand together against the genocide in Gaza.

And if we really mean it, we should pray for all the victims of this senseless slaughter in Gaza, we should also pray for the soul of Senior Airman Bushnell.  I would like to see a bronze monument erected to him, exactly where he self-immolated himself.  His extreme sacrifice must not be forgotten.

As a practising Catholic, I will have Masses read for his soul.  I also extend my deepest sympathies to his family and friends.  God bless his soul….”

On the night of 8 March 2024 Dave Clennon, a former US Air Force Training Corps member, delivered a eulogy at a vigil held for Aaron Bushnell at the Venice Pier over the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles, California.  Clenon said : “I do not know how to express the reverence, and the gratitude, and the sense of loss we all feel about Aaron Bushnell. All I can say is, ‘Aaron, our brother, we thank you, we bless you, we grieve you, and we will honor you, by our actions. We will carry on your struggle.’… Aaron Bushnell knew he was serving in an Air Force that was supplying bombs and rockets to the ruthless, vicious, Israeli pilots, and navigators, who are slaughtering the people of Gaza, with no mercy, and not the slightest sign of remorse. Because he knew that he was serving a radical evil, Aaron liberated himself from that unholy force, by an act of divine violence….In defiance of his criminal government, Aaron martyred himself.”

On 10 March 2024 the West Bank city of Jericho renamed a road after Aaron Bushnell. The mayor revealed the new sign of Aaron Bushnell Street in front of a small gathering of people. Bushnell “sacrificed everything” for the Palestinians, said Jericho mayor Abdul Karim Sidr.

On the first anniversary of Aaron Bushnell’s death, let us reflect on the meaning of his act. Let us work for peace and reconciliation throughout the world.

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Alfred de Zayas is a US and Swiss citizen, residing in Geneva, Switzerland.  Former Secretary of the UN Human Rights Committee, former UN Independent Expert on International Order. Read other articles by Alfred.

 

Palestine at the Heart of Things

A Lament in Poetry and Prose

by Phil Rockstroh / February 26th, 2025

‘Francisco Goya, ‘Disasters of War’ ‘What good is a cup?’

Naivety can be rectified by experience. Yet stupid, and its attendant willful and belligerent ignorance, is a hazard to all near it. Trump careens down his death-besotted path as the Democrats simply step out of his way.

Democrats, smugly muttering, “I told you so,” will not suffice. Antiduopolists could retort, we warned you against rigging the apparatus of the Democratic Party in an attempt to enthrone Hillary, then, because stupid tends to double down on fuckwit, rigging the process for Biden.

The arming of genocidal Zionists didn’t help you either with citizens who take their conscience into consideration when deciding whether to vote or not.

MAGA will continue to act on behalf of the insatiable greed of oligarchs, and will continue feeding the bloodlust of spiteful soreheads. Yet Democrats will only regret the loss of a status quo that serves no one but their own donors.

Francisco Goya, Proud Monsters

As noted above, stupid cannot be rectified. The only redemption possible is: a movement toward novelty. Two party despotism took us to this dismal spot. Time to chart a new course appropriating a compass constructed of the sublime material of one’s own heart, mind and soul.

At present, the needle of the heart’s compass points towards Palestine.

Impersonal Catastrophes…that feel so damn personal: Tragedy in Palestine, that could well be one’s own: Speaking as the son of a mother who escaped Nazi, Germany on Kindertransport, then delivered into the homes of strangers in the UK, as her father, had been arrested by the Gestapo and was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp: I ask — I implore you:

Israel, do you not realize that you have broken your house?

The news of the cosmos arrives as blood, bone, and other urgent dreams of flesh, soil and breath — thus: Do dispatches from history cause you to recall wild thunderstorms shaking mid-August afternoons? Then silence returns. And what of the ghostly lamentation of empires, risen like sunflowers, teeming in the summer air, then withering and falling within an interlocking eternity of arrivals and departures? Comes a vision risen on the horizon of the World’s Mind: a towering, crimson nimbus laden with the blood of Palestinian children.

Francisco Goya, Enterrar y callar Bury them and keep quiet

At Passover Seder, my family, among our traditional reading of tribal mythos, chanted liturgy and song; we joined voices in the declaration, “L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim” i.e., “Next year in Jerusalem”.

Thus, turning eastward in the direction of my mythical home: a catastrophe shakes my heart; a decimation of the soul.

Witness/Rebuke — the sneering pride of those in possession of minds made of bullets, of those seething in their death cult wherein rifles, missiles and bombs seemed to be held as liturgical accoutrements.

Mortified/Enraged — compelled to insist the killers and their dissembling apologists answer the following:

How did it come to be that you are driven to attempt to murder all beauty by stabbing at the heart of the world with a knife you have placed on the violated altar of our God — who you have transfigured into a god of death?

I ask you again: Israel, do you not realize that you have broken your house?

You cannot walk through your house without wading through blood.

Angry ghosts shuffle upon your rooftops. The ceilings of your homes stare down at you in rebuke.

We, the living, bestowed, albeit in reluctance, to be the eyes of Heaven and Hell, continue to witness the unfolding abomination.

We could not forgive ourselves — we would loath the very air agitated by our own words — if we were to turn away.

Francisco Goya, Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer (Sad forebodings of what must come to pass)

Once again we must remind ourselves to consult the heart’s compass: Palestine must be at the present heart of all things…

In places —veiled, everywhere — from sight:
the past refuses to depart,
the dead do not rest,
the unspoken sings in endless stanzas of verse,
musical notes rise as mountains,
and spirits grief and renewal envelop all things in concentric rings.
At this moment, this place is Palestine,
Besieged Palestine, located in the indomitable heart,

Here, now, we are induced to dismantle despair’s ad hoc architecture and begin building living monuments to the grace bequeathed in every breath — the quality known to us humble human beings as compassion.

Blood of the blameless will continue to pool the streets. Bombs will bounce Levant rubble. Lies, thick as Old Testament locust, swarm the air.

Israel, I have stared into your face until I disappeared. I have inhabited the shadow of your mendacity. To this day, I stumble through the landscape of my heart amid ruins left by your campaign of genocide-justifying lies.

I drown everyday in the rising of your blood-tide, unloosed by means of your god-ordained guns and hate-garrisoned pride.

Your children, from birth, fed on lie-rancid milk, have grown rifles for hands; their hearts are now predator drones; their breath meets the world as bombs.

Francisco de Goya, Well-Known Folly

In childhood, I was instructed to plant trees to provide cooling shade for a desert homeland, according to the lore of my people, now regained due to the death agonies inflicted on six million of our tribe.

Trees, you told me, that would serve as living tributes in memory of my murdered kinsfolk in the death mills of Europe. But you watered those trees with the blood of the innocent.

The desert air speaks: The history that made you has become a harvest of shame. The scent of those flowering trees cannot conceal the reek of tens of thousands of corpses.

No matter how innumerable in number — the fragrance of a billion flowering trees will never conceal the reek of genocide.

Go to the dead, those you left in Europe and you have killed in Palestine, and let their ghosts do to you what they will.

Francisco Goya, No hay quien los socorra There is no one to help them

Often, when the crimes of Israel are enumerated, Zionist apologists bandy the assertion, “the history of the Middle East is too complex for such over-simplified critiques.”

The assertion amounts to a noxious and death-besotted display of casuistry. What is complex about starving and slaughtering men, women, and children with agendas of ethnic cleansing?

My maternal DNA relates the history of my Ashkenazi Jewish origins. In brief, out of the Levant, we came, delivered as slaves into southern Italy then, when freed, into the north of Italy then settling into the German Rhineland.

Not a single Palestinian acted in the manner of the various oppressors whose crimes against my ancestors’ humanity drove us ever northeastward across Europe. Not a single Palestinian harmed my ancestors during the anti-Jewish rampages of 1096 across the Rhine river region of Germany, nor shattered glass on Kristallnacht, nor held positions in the Frankfurt-based IG Farben corporation where Zyklon B had been manufactured to be used as an agent of mass extermination against Jews in death camps across the face of Europe.

Yet the Palestinians lost their homeland and are forced to live on their knees in a perpetual state of submission and contrition for the crimes of Germany. Why doesn’t the Zionist state stand in the Rhineland? In this light, Germany’s unwavering support of Israel seems convenient and self-serving, at best.

German and other European leaders’ blinkered reaction ensures the ethnic cleansing inherent to Zionism continues without consequence. Can you imagine any other nation, other than the United States, actions being defended, much less enabled, as they committed crimes against humanity to the degree of the Zionist state?

Goya, Francisco, There is no remedy

My mother, who, as I noted above, escaped Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport, in the final years of her life came to question her Zionist affiliations. I’m certain viewing the overkill, to say the least, a constant in the response of Zionists towards Palestinian acts of resistance, she would express a deep sense of shame, as do I, for the lack of humanity displayed by our troubled tribe in the present day Levant.

My Ashkenazi DNA, carrying my ancestor’s memory of oppression, cries out, from my blood and bones, to stand for and with the people of Palestine.

I possess dual US/German citizenship, because the Nazis stripped my mother’s family of their citizenship — which I have since reclaimed. My ancestral homeland, on the maternal side, at least, is Germany.

The Zionist “right of return” is based on a number of noxious fallacies e.g., 1) the White Man’s Burden-type, racist mindset of European colonialist settlers — who believed that they possessed the “manifest destiny” to dispossess “less civilized” inhabitants of their native lands, in order to, as the Zionist propaganda trope goes, “to make the desert bloom”; 2) The ancient, tribal myths of the Old Testament/Torah.

If you listened to the rebuke of the dead, you would be compelled to do the same. If only such a thing could come to be.

Francisco Goya, They escape among the flames’

As for myself, I have heard an earful. I must affix my attention upon the composition of these words of poetry — or else I might go sobbing into the streets, reeling in lamentation.

On Genocide and Indomitable Feathers

In periodic dreams, all manner of things had wings: Tortoises. Ukuleles. Rocks. Rhinoceros on rooftops. Coffins — migrating flocks of them cast long shadows under the afternoon sun.

Then a crushing tyranny — The Keepers Of The Separation Wall And Perpetual Shackle — stormed the land and seized power. Wings were clipped and confiscated. The earth withered into wasteland.

Phalanxes of police descended on university campuses; once, sanctums where the young were instructed in the art of flight.

Abandoned dreams were converted into slave ships then launched to cross dark, storm-tossed skyways.

The ships docked at islands of imperium in the sky. Therein, forsaken dreams served at the caprice of a brutal regime sustained by the life-force of usurped lives.

The overseers were squads of monsters known as: The Sum of All Fears.

Yet, across the earth, in hidden places, in dreams within dreams within dreams, in sanctuaries of the heart, refuges unreachable to the usurpers, banished imagination brooded, molted feathers, then took flight across internal skies.

Shortly thereafter, great birds of impossible beauty winged westward towards vast reservoirs of the collective soul and in their beaks bore back water to quench the thirst of those stranded in parched lands and restore the memory of flight.

Flights of the indomitable heart such as these are winging, at this moment, to the spaces of the heart where young and old, our wings restored, will continue wage a campaign of conscience to put an end to genocide.

Another thing I know, birds of the restorative heart will not make their nests in the absent heart of either of the present political system’s war parties.

Francisco Goya, Contra el bien general Against the common good

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Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist, and essayist. His poems, short fiction, poetry and essays have been published in numerous print publications and anthologies; his political essays have been widely posted on the progressive/left side of the internet. Visit and subscribe to  Phil’s Substack newsletter at https://substack.com/@philrockstroh. Read other articles by Phil.

 

Who Protects the People from the Human Rights Protectors?

Can Palestinians get a little Humanitarian Intervention?

by Ajamu Baraka / February 27th, 2025

Of all the ideological mystifications created by the white West to rationalize and justify its brutal exploitation and colonization of the world the last five hundred years, the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on the colonized and the entire world is the idea that the West has the capacity or intent to define and protect something called human rights.

The conquest fueled by advanced weapons and a style of war that has as its objective the annihilation of the enemy, the barbarians that poured out of what became “Europe” into what was eventually named the Americas burned, murdered, raped and destroyed cultures and peoples in a war of extermination. The people that were spared, or who escaped or resisted, were enslaved alongside Africans brought by the millions to provide free labor that would result in consolidation of  riches and capital key to the development of what has been characterized as  Western civilization.

In this process of conquest and subsequent global colonization there is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that what is referred to as Western civilization possesses any ideas that propels collective humanity forward. Every intellectual and religious production, from Christianity to the so-called enlightenment period was undermined and distorted by a fundamental flaw in European culture and thought. That flaw was graphically captured not by the cartesian assertion of Western “man” as rational, but by Thomas Hobbes’s accurate characterization of European society reflected in a “state of nature” or in civil society that life was, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

This characterization was for life in Europe. For non-Europeans, the assumptions were even worse. Non-Europeans did not even qualify to be included in the category of “human.” The conquest, slavery and colonization institutionalized conceptual and moral frames that defined who belonged in the category of human and who was to be excluded. They defined who was human and, thus, deserving of inalienable rights and who were “killable” as Europeans “discovered” new lands and peoples, and exercised their “God given” providence of “manifest destiny.”

This exercise of power, of “white power” defined and informeds to this day by the colonial/capitalist, racialized, gendered world views of Westerners who still believe they have the right to determine who lives and who dies, who is provided for and who is not, and what kinds of governments should exist and whose lives count.

Native Savages, Niggers and Amalek: The White Supremacist Normalization of Genocide

Charles Mills argues that to understand the material base of global white supremacy it is necessary to understand the economic importance of the Global South in the rise of Europe and “the structuring of “whiteness” (and those racialized-as-white) as power.

The Indigenous peoples from the territories that became the United States have always expressed amazement by how after they were hunted down like animals. The scalps of Indigenous men, women and children used as evidence to confirm their deaths so as to collect a bounty, women raped and their lands stolen and villages burnt to the ground – how, after all of that, they, the Indigenous, were labeled as the savages. But that is the psychopathology of white supremacy. The victims of white colonial violence become the aggressors preserving the innocence and victimhood of whiteness.

Benjamin Netanyahu, representing the newly minted white people who make up the Israeli settler ruling class, pimping Judaism to rationalize their own present-day campaign of nazism against Palestinians,  reminds the population of “Amalek,” the biblical enemies of Israel, that they deserved to be completely erased from history. He reinforced this idea by  unleashing over four hundred and eighty days of bombings, burnings, starvation, rape of men and women by Israeli soldiers, forced displacement, and torture in Gaza.

But even with a temporary ceasefire in Gaza, the killings continue, as does the conquest for “Greater Israel” evidenced by land grabs in the Occupied West Bank and even extending into Southern Lebanon and, more recently, Syria.  Palestinian children are now freezing to death in Gaza because the Israeli colonists refuse to allow more tents and mobile homes by restricting and weaponizing critical humanitarian aid. And, in the Occupied West Bank, the Israeli fascists are unleashing a military assault that appears to be the largest since the war of 1967. 

The response to this criminal activity in the West Bank from those in the West who purport to stand for and protect human rights  – silence.

Donald Trump laments about all of the deaths in Ukraine and sayshow he just wants to see the killing stopped. However, for Palestinians his message is literally, “bombs away,” especially  if Palestinians do not surrender their legal and human right to resist and defeat their oppressors.  Friedrich Merz, the newly elected Chancellor of Germany, just declared that he will invite Netanyahu to Germany even though he is an indicted war criminal and executing an active genocide of Palestinians.

Merz is proud of his invitation. Palestinian lives do not matter for Merz and, for that matter,  most of the leadership in Europe.  Therefore, the International Criminal Court Indictment of Netanyahu is seen as illegitimate. Moral outrage is reserved for real human beings, not Amalek. That is why Trump is more concerned with “white” Ukrainians and Russians even though both are “Slavs” and occupy one of the lowest rungs on the ladder of whiteness.

There can be no International Peace as long as the West has disproportionate power

The White Westernized left must rid itself of Eurocentrism and white supremacist biases.

I start from the very simple but tragic position that the disproportionate power of the ten percent of the human population that racialized itself as the white western world represents an existential threat to all the rest of us. This historic reading is not a call to genocide the peoples of the West but instead is a call for a serious confrontation with the rationalizing logic of white dominance, of the white supremacy ideology  that prevails in societies of the West but is even more pronounced in white dominated settler societies like the U.S. and Israel.

When I read that the families of the over 600 Palestinians scheduled to be released by the Israeli occupying power are still in limbo, camping out in the cold waiting for their tormentors to release their loved ones, I am reminded of the very simple proposition that he who has the power to define is master.

In a world still characterized by the imposition of normalized white supremacy, who counts as human and whose lives count as lives is informed by the categories of existence informed by colonization, patriarchy, race ideologies and capitalism – the white supremacist, colonial//capitalist patriarchy as enemy of collective humanity. Understanding this and the contours and the driving material and non-material forces of “global white supremacy,” must be seen as critical to any left political and theoretical project, if it is a serious project. 

The determination of who is a human with rights that are to be recognized is still a prerogative assumed by the leaders of the white West.

For the families of the Palestinians waiting to be released in Gaza, families already subjected to unspeakable horrors from the Israeli authorities that defined them as “Amalek” – The true nature of Israeli society and the White West is not mystified. They understand that Western civilization is a myth and is why there will be no humanitarian intervention for them, only more death and struggle. That is the lesson we all must take from the exposure of white West with its irrational support for racist fascism in the state referred to as Israel.

If the West can justify to itself the support for genocide against the occupied Palestinians, no colonized, exploited people or nation attempting to exercise their rights to national liberation and dignity is safe. In order for the world to live, the idea of Europe must die!

That is why for those of us who believe in universal dignity and the collective right to resist by any means necessary, we will be standing shoulder to shoulder with the resisters in Palestine and in Chicago and Atlanta and throughout the colonized world.

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Ajamu Baraka is the Chairman of the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition. Read other articles by Ajamu, or visit Ajamu's website.

 

How Did We Get to Donald Trump

Death of Muammar Gaddafi: A turning point in history

by Dan Lieberman / February 27th, 2025

The “take no prisoners” philosophy and “slash and burn” techniques of the Trump deadministration has its partisans, eager to release their suppressed fury at a glorified past that is being barred from the future. A new world order of rich, powerful, and self-absorbed supremos#2 replaces the previous “carefully constructed fake world,” where rich, powerful, and self-absorbed supremos#1 conspired with the media to delude the public by cheeky references to caring and sharing, while global exploitation, instability, and violence directed their lives. Quoting others, “The entire liberal deep state command and control system is broken.” Quoting nobody, “An anti-liberal deep state command and control system is being constructed to replace the broken liberal model.”

Seems disturbing, electrifying, and paralyzing. Ho hum. Welcome to the world that is, has always been, and will be until the mushroom cloud signifies resolution of the problem. Started in the Garden of Eden, prophesized by Jesus of Nazareth, emphasized by the Manichaeism of Mani in Persia, eloquently expressed by Voltaire’s Candide, and staged by Anthony Newley in his 1966 musical, Stop the world, I want to get off, the battle between good and evil oscillates the world between low ground and lower ground. Those who gather their extensive knowledge and politely convey to the masses the absurdities of the institutions that govern them are accorded the adjectives of “mad dog,” “berserk,” “enemy of the people,” and a multitude of other kindly expressions. The smartest of all, the eminent Karl Marx, expressed it correctly, “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” The lord of the manor guides the way and the sheep in the manor blindly follow.

It is difficult to characterize the events or specify the day that the nation’s mood changed from acceptance of neoliberalism to rejection, from supporting American “representative” democracy to pondering that it might be a delusion. It is not difficult to characterize what prompted some of the collective to modify approval of the established government. History has shown that, even if the U.S. military prevailed, engagement in a Vietnam War had no benefit to the United States. A war, conducted with no more reason than to slaughter Vietnamese, started the doubt that the will of the people prevailed. The violent execution of Libyan leader, “mad dog” Muammar Gaddafi, on 20 October 2011, during Barak Obama’s administration, finalized the doubt. As the truth of the events leading to NATO’s intervention in the Libyan civil war and the horrific facts of Gaddafi’s execution became known, a more aware public departed ways with Obama’s Democratic Party and 2016 presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, the sponsors of U.S. favoring the NATO attack on Gaddafi’s Libya. Several times in the campaign, the attachment of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the intervention was vigorously discussed. Difficult to prove that the war against Libya played a decisive role in the close 2016 election; not difficult to show the issue persuaded a number of voters to elevate Donald Trump to the highest office and established a modified psyche in the America of today.

Barack Obama entered the presidential office with an appearance of protecting the Palestinians from Israeli oppression and allying with those who sought peace, stability, and freedom for the world’s dispossessed. President Barack Obama remained a system subordinate and betrayed those who supported him. Unlike Citizen Jimmy Carter, who used his knowledge and prestige to fight for the rights of others, Citizen Barack Obama has played it safe, maybe for personal reasons; other black leaders have been assassinated.

The man, in whose assassination Obama played a decisive role, the much maligned Muammar Gaddafi, had scare resemblance to the coordinated media descriptions of him. Someone I met, who had been stationed at Wheelus Air force base in Libya, told me he was walking through Tripoli in 1970, noticed a man sitting on the sidewalk, and immediately recognized him as Colonel Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, Libya’s new leader who had, in the previous year, overthrown the monarchy in a bloodless coup. The solitary person of deep thought and avant-garde behavior in action and dress, is the Gaddafi I sensed from his rhetoric, accomplishments, and interviews. The usual simplified description of an antagonist to U.S. policy as a terrorist, madman, tyrant, and executioner has negligible verification; mostly slanted stories or original fiction from the U.S. Stateless Department and Unintelligence agencies who have issues with revolutionary thoughts and deeds.

As moral, spiritual, and undoubtedly defacto leader in the governing of Libya, Gaddafi used his nation for one of the boldest experiments in participatory democracy. Claiming, as many have, that representative democracy is manipulated, that “in western parliamentary democracies, special interests compete for and gain power without representing the people,” the Libyan leader established a grassroots approach to government ─ a series of Popular Conferences and People’s Committees worked together to propose and a higher elected authority served to dispose. In Gaddafi’s words: “The final step is when the new socialist society reaches the stage where profit and money disappear. It is through transforming society into a fully productive society, and through reaching in production a level where the material needs of the members of society are satisfied. On that final stage, profit will automatically disappear and there will be no need for money.”

The military colonel turned social and economic prophet may have been derivative and naïve in his approach and dictatorial in forcing the grandiose experiment upon a people not prepared for its implementation. Gaddafi later recognized the dilemma by admitting that people subjected to colonialism may not have acquired the required resources, knowledge, and capability for the extraordinary leap to the socialist ideal; adopting the doctrines in his Green Book needed a more advanced nation. In 2003, despite Libya having the highest GDP/capita and standard of living in Africa, he admitted defeat and pursued more conventional free enterprise economic policies for the Libya nation. The U.S. invasion of Iraq and demise of Saddam Hussein may have contributed to Gaddafi’s decision.

Interviews available at

and at

reveal Gaddafi as a purposively deceptive person, who had knowledge of all issues, intentionally responded quietly and succinctly, controlled emotions, played down his abilities, and strategically placed the “gotcha” questioners into a “gotcha retreat.” These interviews do not show the persona Gaddafi, who is better described in a speech to the Libyan people at

where he displays a forceful personality and ability to speak extemporaneously.

Note: May have to click a few times.

Prophetic Gaddafi admired Barak Obama, principally due to the American president’s African and Muslim heritage, which, according to Gaddafi, enabled Obama to think more as an African and not as a “Yankee.” Gaddafi missed a beat in wanting the person most responsible for his vicious execution to remain in office for eternity. Obama missed more than a beat by listening to the absurd rhetoric that brought the United States to join a NATO-led collation, which, on March 19, 2011 began a military intervention into the ending Libyan Civil War and implemented United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 (UNSCR 1973). The Resolution demanded “an immediate ceasefire” and authorized the international community to “establish a no-fly zone and to use all means necessary short of foreign occupation to protect civilians.”

Principal reason given for the UN Resolution — Gaddafi was prepared to massacre at least 100,000 of his opponents, a 1000 times exaggeration and an obvious impossibility. President Barack Obama addressed the issue with the statement: “Gaddafi declared that he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment.”

Reuters reporting demonstrated large differences between Gaddafi’s remarks and President Obama’s careless interpretation: Gaddafi Tells Rebel City, Benghazi, ‘We Will Show No Mercy, March 17, 2011.

Muammar Gaddafi told Libyan rebels on Thursday his armed forces were coming to their capital Benghazi tonight and would not show any mercy to fighters who resisted them. In a radio address, he told Benghazi residents that soldiers would search every house in the city and people who had no arms had no reason to fear. He also told his troops not to pursue any rebels who drop their guns and flee when government forces reach the city.

Logic tells us that few Benghazi residents had guns to hide, and Gadhafi’s forces were too limited to carry out any large-scale purge. Gadhafi’s comment (much different than Obama’s presentation) was only meant to create fear. No leader would tell his people he intended to kill masses of them. If so, they had nothing to lose by fighting. Why encourage them?

The next morsel of food for thought is that the civil war was no threat to any NATO nation. The clincher – the western nations had not considered any changes in Libya’s future. Suddenly, with no plan, no knowledge of the rebel forces’ constituencies, and no idea as to where the interference would lead, NATO attacked Libya.

Martin Aliker a senior adviser to Yoweri Museveni President Yoweri Museveni of Yoweri, in his memoir, “The Bell is Ringing: Martin Aliker’s Story,” recites his opinion.

They were only interested in “killing Gaddafi, killing Gaddafi, and killing Gaddafi.” Gaddafi was quoted as saying that what the enemies of Libya did not understand was that if they changed his regime the next one would be of Islamic extremists and al-Qaeda.

He said that Libya was the Great Wall which, if broken, would lead to a flood of illegal immigrants into Europe, some of whom would die on the water but some would survive and reach Europe. He said he was ready to talk to the rebels but that the rebels were not ready to talk.

Gaddafi proved to be omniscient and intentionally vilified. On March 17, he directly addressed the rebels of Benghazi: “Throw away your weapons, exactly like your brothers in Ajdabiya and other places did. They laid down their arms and they are safe. We never pursued them at all.”

The duplicitous attack on Muhammar Gaddafi and his nation, promoted by then Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, contributed to her loss in the 2016 presidential election and the entrance of real estate magnate, Donald Trump, into the highest office in the coast-to-coast U.S. mainland.

The 2024 presidential election, and its immediate aftermath may have proved Gaddafi correct ─ representative democracy could be a delusion.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

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Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at substack.com.  He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.