DV Readers Get to Hear Bright Green Lies

Degrowth and setting the clock BACK

by Paul Haeder / July 8th, 2025

“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

Listen to an activist, man, interviewed the real way, no bloody Alt or Indie Podcast where the same usual suspects go round and around and around. Airs August 13, KYAQ FM, streaming kyaq.org!

Go to Biocentric — his Substack. “Alternative Cultures Are Beautiful and Important. They’re Also Not Enough. ‘The conscious destruction of a competing ethic’ and the need for organizing and direct action”

LINK.

Max Wilbert: Co -Coordinator of Community Resistance & Resilience, and Publicist

Max is a writer and biocentric community organizer. He is the author of two books, most recently Bright Green Lies: How The Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, and writes the newsletter Biocentric on Substack. Max has been part of grassroots political movements for 25 years. He is currently splitting his time between studying for a Masters Degree in Degrowth, defending against a mining company lawsuit, running a mentorship program for young activists, and participating in several campaigns and coalitions to protect nature. His work has been featured on CNN, the New York Times, NPR, Le Monde, BBC, and elsewhere.

I interviewed Max Wilbert. He works for CELDF, and you already got that bonus of me interviewing his Executive Director, Kai.

Max is in the Eugene area, and he has his Biocentric Substack. We talked much about the state of the state of play in capitalism, that capitalism all based on war against the land, species, hogs-cattle, against education, against philosophy, against critical thinking and agency, against Utopian Thought Experiments, against activism, against one child in Gaza or a few tens of millions in Iran.

This is an orgy, this society, an orgy of blood America. And the roots of that go to EuroTrashLandia, and alas, UK. We are the DNA morphed sloughed off crap of the White Race of Paranoia.

So, did it all start with the steam engine? You betcha. Advance now into the black pool of death, oil, and now we are here, Homo Plasticus, Homo TerraBiteSapiens.

I’ll throw some extra stuff below, but the interview is a winner!

We have all sorts of conundrums, no?

• Is CO₂ the culprit, or are we now in a flurry of diseases thanks to the synergistic chemical orchestration of so many toxins — chemicals — working their chronic disease and extended illness magic on the entire world?
• What is resilience? Do we do a complete power shift, and move toward revolution since a world without ice is on the horizon, and those 60 percent of the world near or on the seas will disappear?
• Overshoot?
• Carrying capacity?
• Population bomb?
• Sixth, Seventh, 10th mass extinction?

Several times in the distant past, catastrophic extinctions have swept the Earth, causing more than half of all species―from single-celled organisms to awe-inspiring behemoths―to suddenly vanish and be replaced by new life forms. Today the rich diversity of life on the Earth is again in grave danger―and the cause is not a sudden cataclysmic event but rather humankind’s devastation of the environment. Is life on our planet teetering on the brink of another mass extinction? In this absorbing new book, acclaimed paleontologist Peter D. Ward answers this daunting question with a resounding yes.

Elaborating on and updating Ward’s previous work, The End of Evolution, Rivers in Time delves into his newest discoveries. The book presents the gripping tale of the author’s investigations into the history of life and death on Earth through a series of expeditions that have brought him ever closer to the truth about mass extinctions, past and future. First describing the three previous mass extinctions―those marking the transition from the Permian to the Triassic periods 245 million years ago, the Triassic to the Jurassic 200 million years ago, and the Cretaceous to the Tertiary 65 million years ago―Ward assesses the present devastation in which countless species are coming to the end of their evolution at the hand of that wandering, potentially destructive force called Homo sapiens.

The book takes readers to the Philippine Sea, now eerily empty of life, where only a few decades of catching fish by using dynamite have resulted in eviscerated coral reefs―and a dramatic reduction in the marine life the region can support. Ward travels to Canada’s Haida Gwaii to investigate the extinctions that mark the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods. He ventures also into the Karoo desert of southern Africa, where some of Earth’s earliest land life emerged from the water and stood poised to develop into mammal form, only to be obliterated during the Permian/Triassic extinction.

Rivers of Time provides reason to marvel and mourn, to fear and hope, as it bears stark witness to the urgency of the Earth’s present predicament: Ward offers powerful proof that if radical measures are not taken to protect the biodiversity of this planet, much of life as we know it may not survive.

More than 200 million years ago, a cataclysmic event known as the Permian extinction destroyed more than 90% of all species and nearly 97% of all living things. Its origins have long been a puzzle for paleontologists, and during the 1990s and the early part of this century a great battle was fought between those who thought that death had come from above and those who thought something more complicated was at work.

Paleontologist Peter D. Ward, fresh from helping prove that an asteroid had killed the dinosaurs, turned to the Permian problem, and he has come to a stunning conclusion. In his investigations of the fates of several groups of mollusks during those extinctions and others, he discovered that the near-total devastation at the end of the Permian was caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide leading to climate change. But it’s not the heat (nor the humidity) that’s directly responsible for the extinctions, and the story of the discovery of what is responsible makes for a fascinating, globe-spanning adventure.

Carrying Capacity: Carrying capacity is a well-known ecological term that has an obvious and fairly intuitive meaning: “the maximum population size of a species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment”. Unfortunately, that definition becomes more nebulous the closer you look at it – especially when we start talking about the planetary carrying capacity for humans. Ecologists claim that our numbers have already surpassed the carrying capacity of the planet, while others (notably economists and politicians…) claim we are nowhere near it yet!

Overshoot: When a population surpasses its carrying capacity it enters a condition known as overshoot. Because carrying capacity is defined as the maximum population that an environment can maintain indefinitely, overshoot must by definition be temporary. Populations always decline to (or below) the carrying capacity. How long they stay in overshoot depends on how many stored resources there are to support their inflated numbers. Resources may be food, but they may also be any resource that helps maintain their numbers. For humans one of the primary resources is energy, whether it is tapped as flows (sunlight, wind, biomass) or stocks (coal, oil, gas, uranium etc.). A species usually enters overshoot when it taps a particularly rich but exhaustible stock of a resource. Like oil, for instance…

The rate of population decline and how far it will fall is hard to predict. That will depend on many things but primarily on if and when globalization collapses. The collapse of globalization will bring about civil strife, border wars, and famine around the world.

Note the green, wild animal, portion. Notice the wild animal portion of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass, by 1900, had dropped to about 20% of its historical value. Then by 2000, it had dropped to half that amount. Then by 2050, we expect that 2000 value to be cut in half again.

By 2100, it will very likely all be gone. Well, almost all gone. There will still be plenty of rats and mice and perhaps a few other small vertebrates will still survive, but all the large megafauna, except humans, will be gone. Gone forever… or at least for the next million years or so. It will take that long for new megafauna to evolve after the human population has been greatly reduced to a billion or even a few million people.

But the far distant future is of little concern to us now. The sad fact of the matter is your descendants will live in a world completely free of wild megafauna. There is no way to avoid that fact now, it is already too late to stop the destruction.

WHY?

Yes, why? Why are we destroying the earth’s ecosystem? Why are we driving most all wild animals into extinction? Why have we dramatically overpopulated the planet with human beings? Why did all this happen? However, when you ask why, you are implying that all this had a cause, that someone or some group of people are to blame for this damn mess we have gotten ourselves into.

Was it the early farmers who invented agriculture. Or was it the early industrialists like James Watt or Thomas Edison? Or was it Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, are they the villains that got us into such a damn mess? No, it was none of these people. It was no one person or no group of people. It was not even any revolution like the industrial revolution, the medical revolution or the green revolution. There is no one to blame and there is nothing to blame.

Agriculture enabled the very small early population to expand. The industrial revolution and later the green revolution enabled more people to be fed. The medical revolution enabled more babies to survive and people to live much longer. Our population has exploded simply because it could. We have always lived to the limit of our existence and we always will. It was just human nature pure and simple.

Now many will say that we are now controlling our population, that we have learned how to limit our fertility rate. Well, yes and no. Reference the below chart and table that were produced by the Population Reference Bureau in 2012.

Max just had a kiddo, a newborn, and so we had that looming in the foreground, since I have a 29 year old daughter traumatized by her radical dad her entire life.

The zoomass of wild vertebrates is now vanishingly small compared to the biomass of domestic animals. In 1900 there were some 1.6 billion large domesticated animals, including about 450 million head of cattle and water buffalo (HYDE 2011); a century later the count of large domestic animals had surpassed 4.3 billion, including 1.65 billion head of cattle and water buffalo and 900 million pigs (FAO 2011). Calculations using these head counts and average body weights (they have increased everywhere since 1900, but the differences between larger body masses in North America and Europe and lower weights elsewhere persist) yield estimates of at least 35 Mt C of domesticated zoomass in 1900 (more than three times the total of all wild land mammals) and at least 120 Mt C in the year 2000, a 3.5-fold increase in 100 years (and 25 times the total of wild mammalian zoomass). And cattle zoomass alone is now at least 250 times greater than the zoomass of all surviving African elephants, which in turn is less than 2 percent of the zoomass of Africa’s nearly 300 million bovines (Table 2).

The Earth currently has about 19.6 billion chickens, 1.4 billion cattle, and 980 million pigs being raised as livestock.

*****

And the rest of the world? The world we have dominated?

The 2025 grades range from a B in ports to a D in stormwater and transit. For the first time since 1998, no Report Card categories were rated D−. Among the 18 categories assessed, eight saw grade increases. Many of those categories had been chronically stuck at D- or D for years. This improvement was possible due to the government and private sector prioritizing investments in systems that historically had received little attention. Two categories—energy and rail— were downgraded because of concerns related to capacity, future needs, and safety. Broadband was introduced as a graded category in 2025, coming in at a C+. Although evidence points to improvements throughout infrastructure’s system-of-systems, nine categories remained within the D range—a clear sign that more needs to be done to improve the health of America’s built environment.

• With ongoing sea level rise, flooding is an increasingly pressing issue. Coastal communities are already experiencing increased tidal flooding and storm surges, which are only expected to worsen with time.
• People living on small, low-lying islands are also severely impacted. Whole island nations such as Tuvalu, Maldives, Palau, Fiji, Kiribati, and the Philippines could be swallowed by sea level rise (pictures below) and their inhabitants are in danger of being displaced and becoming climate refugees.
• Climate change will especially impact poor, Black, and Indigenous people, as well as other people of color, who already suffer due to poverty, racism, and other oppressions. White, wealthy, and Western people will be able to distance themselves from disaster, despite contributing more to carbon emissions that cause climate change.

Many hungry people live in countries with food surpluses, not food shortages. The issue, largely, is that the people who need food the most simply don’t have steady access to it.

In the hungriest countries, families struggle to get the food they need because of several issues: lack of infrastructure, frequent war and displacement, natural disaster, climate change, chronic poverty and lack of purchasing power.

The majority of those who are hungry live in countries experiencing ongoing conflict and violence — 489 million of 821 million. The numbers are even more striking for children. More than 75 percent of the world’s malnourished children (122 million of 155 million) live in countries affected by conflict.

*****

USA’s report cards!

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Paul Haeder's been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.

Death by Fungi: Cashing in on Erin Patterson

by Binoy Kampmark / July 9th, 2025

She has become a notorious figure of international interest, shamelessly exploited for news cycles, commercial worth, and career advancement. After a trial lasting nine weeks, conducted at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts in Morwell, Victoria, Erin Patterson, a stocky, thick-set mother of two, was found guilty of three murders and an attempted murder. Date: July 29, 2023, in the town of Leongatha. Her weapon in executing her plot of Sophoclean extravagance: death cap mushrooms (Amanita phalloides) served in a beef Wellington. Her targets: in-laws Don and Gail Patterson, Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, and Heather’s husband, Ian Wilkinson. Of the four, only Ian survived the culinary killings – barely. Prudently, estranged husband Simon chose not to attend.

News outlets thought it useful to produce graphics about this Australian’s terminating exploits. CNN produced one with voyeuristic relish, making it appear much like a Midsomer Murders episode. Details aplenty are provided, including the gruesome end for the victims. “Gail and Heather died on August 4 [2023] from multiorgan failure, followed by Don on August 5 after he failed to respond to a liver transplant.”  Fortunately, Ian Wilkinson survived, but the rumour-mongering hack journalist can barely take it, almost regretful of that fact: “after almost two months of intensive treatment”, he was discharged.

Having an opinion on this case has become standard fare, amassing on a turd heap of supposition, second guessing and wonder. The range is positively Chaucerian in its village variety. The former court official interviewed about the killer’s guilty mind and poisoning stratagems, stating the obvious and dulling. The criminologist, keen on career advancement and pseudo-psychology, attempted to gain insight into Patterson’s mind, commenting on her apparent ordinariness.

One example of the latter is to be found in The Conversation, where we are told by Xanthe Mallett with platitudinous and forced certainty how Patterson, speaking days after the incident, “presented as your typical, average woman of 50.” If attempting to kill four people using fungi is a symptom of average, female ordinariness of a certain age, we all best start making our own meals. But Mallett thinks it is precisely that sense of the ordinary that led to a public obsession, a mania with crime and motivation. “The juxtaposition between the normality of a family lunch (and the sheer vanilla-ness of the accused) and the seriousness of the situation sent the media into overdrive.”

This is certainly not the view of Dr. Chris Webster, who answered the Leongatha Hospital doorbell when Patterson first presented.  Realising her link to the other four victims suffering symptoms of fungal poisoning, Webster explained that death cap mushrooms were suspected. Asking Patterson where she got them, she replied with one word: “Woolworths.” This was enough for the doctor to presume guilt, an attitude which certainly gave one of Australia’s most ruthless supermarket chains a graceful pardon. “She was evil and very smart to have planned it all and carried out but didn’t quite dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’.”

The marketer, thrilled with branding and promotion, suggests how Patterson Inc. can become an ongoing concern of merchandise, plays, and scripts. (Think of a shirt sporting the following: “I ate beef Wellington and survived”.) The ABC did not waste much time commissioning Toxic, a show created by Elise McCredie and Tony Ayres, aided by ABC podcaster Rachel Brown. Ayres hams it up by saying that, “True stories ask storytellers to probe the complexities of human behaviour. What really lies beneath the headlines? It’s both a challenge and a responsibility to go beyond the surface – to reveal, not just to sensationalise.” Given that this project is a child of frothy publicity born from sensationalism and hysteria, the comment is almost touching.

The media prompts and updates, mischaracterising Patterson as “The Mushroom Murderer”, leave the impression that she really did like killing fungi. But an absolute monster must be found, and the press hounds duly found it. Papers like the Herald Sun preferred the old Rupert Murdoch tactic: till the soil to surface level to find requisite dirt. According to a grimy bit of reporting from that most distinguished of Melbourne rags, “the callous murderer, whose maiden name was Scutter before marrying Simon Patterson in 2007, was secretly dubbed ‘Scutter the Nutter’ among her training group.” The Australian was in a didactic mood, unhappy that the judge did not make it even more obvious that a crime, committed by a woman involving poison and “not a gun or a knife”, was equally grave.

To complete the matter was an aggrieved home cook, Nagi Maehashi, who also rode the wave of publicity by expressing sadness that her recipe had become a lethal weapon. (Presumably, Maehashi did not have lethal mushrooms in her original recipe, but precision slides in publicity.)  Overcome with false modesty in this glare of publicity, Maehashi did not wish to take interviews, but felt her misused work deserved a statement.  “It is, of course, upsetting to learn that one of my recipes – possibly the one I’ve spent more hours perfecting than any other – something I created to bring joy and happiness, is entangled in a tragic situation,” she moaned on Instagram. Those familiar with Maehashi will note her tendency to megalomania in the kitchen, especially given recipes that have been created long before she turned to knife and spatula.

The ones forgotten will be those victims who died excruciatingly before their loved ones in a richly sadistic exercise. At the end of it all, the entire ensemble of babblers, hucksters, and chancers so utterly obsessed with what took place in Leongatha should thank Patterson. Her murders have excited, enthralled, and given people purpose. She will start conversations, fill pockets, extend careers, and, if we are to believe some recent reporting, make meals for her fellow inmates in prison.

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

 

Fueling Genocide: Inside the Global Supply Chain that Delivers Jet Fuel to Israel’s Military

by Visualizing Palestine / July 9th, 2025

Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza has been fueled by a surge in deliveries of military-grade jet fuel from U.S. providers. In this visual, we expose the companies and governments complicit in this supply chain, while highlighting grassroots efforts to track and disrupt this deadly cargo through direct action, boycott campaigns, and community resistance.

Visualizing Palestine is the intersection of communication, social sciences, technology, design and urban studies for social justice. Visualizing Palestine uses creative visuals to describe a factual rights-based narrative of Palestine/Israel. Read other articles by Visualizing Palestine, or visit Visualizing Palestine's website.

 Gunfire Communication with “Zombie Hordes”: The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the IDF

by Binoy Kampmark / July 8th, 2025

It’s made to order. First, eliminate the aid system after creating circumstances of enormous suffering. Then, kill, starve, vanquish, and displace those in need of that aid.  Finally, give the pretence of humanity by ensuring some aid to those whose suffering you created in the first place.

As things stand, the system of aid distribution in the Gaza Strip is intended to cause suffering and destruction to recipients. Since May 26, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an opaque entity with Israeli and US backing, has run the distribution of parcels from a mere four points, a grim joke given the four hundred or so outlets previously operated by the United Nations Palestinian relief agency. The entire process of seeking aid has been heavily rationed and militarized, with Israeli troops and private contractors exercising murderous force with impunity. Opening times are not set, rendering the journey to the distribution points even more precarious. When they do open, they do so for short spells.

Haaretz has run reports quoting soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces claiming to have orders to deliberately fire upon unarmed crowds on their perilous journey to the food sites. In a June 27 piece, the paper quotes a soldier describing the distribution sites as “a killing field.”  Where he was stationed, “between one and five people were killed every day.” Those seeking aid were “treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”

The interviewed soldier could recall no instance of return fire. “There’s no enemy, no weapons.” IDF officers also told the paper that the GHF’s operations had provided a convenient distraction for continuing operations in Gaza, which had been turned into a “backyard”, notably during Israel’s war with Iran. In the words of a reservist, the Strip had “become a place with its own set of rules. The loss of human life means nothing. It’s not even an ‘unfortunate incident’ like they used to say.”

An IDF officer involved in overseeing security at one of the distribution centers was full of understatement. “Working with a civilian population when your only means of interaction is opening fire – that’s highly problematic, to say the least.” It was “neither ethically nor morally acceptable for people to have to reach, or fail to reach, a [humanitarian zone] under tank fire, snipers and mortar shells.”

Much the same story can be found with the security contractors, those enthusiastic killers following in the footsteps of predecessors who treat international humanitarian law as inconvenient if not altogether irrelevant. Countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq can attest to the blood-soiled record of private military contractors, with the killing of 14 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad city’s Nisour Square by Blackwater USA employees in September 2007 being but one spectacular example. While those employees faced trial and conviction in a US federal court in 2014 on an assortment of charges – among them murder, manslaughter, and attempted manslaughter – such a fate is unlikely for any of those working for the GHF.

On July 4, the BBC published the observations of a former contractor on the trigger-happy conduct of his colleagues around the food centers. In one instance, a guard opened fire on women, children, and elderly people “moving too slowly away from the site.” Another contractor, also on location, stood on the berm overlooking the exit to one of the GHF sites, firing 15 to 20 bursts of repetitive fire at the crowd. “A Palestinian man dropped to the ground motionless. And then, the other contractor who was standing there was like, ‘damn, I think you got one’. And then they laughed about it.”

The company had also failed to issue contractors any operating procedures or rules of engagement, except one: “If you feel threatened, shoot – shoot to kill and ask questions later.” No reference is made to the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers. To journey to Gaza was to go to a land unencumbered by laws and rules. “Do what you want” is the cultural norm of GHF operatives. And this stands to reason, given the reference of “team leaders” to Gazans seeking aid as “zombie hordes”.

The GHF, in time-honored fashion, has denied these allegations. Ditto the IDF, that great self-proclaimed stalwart of international law. It is, therefore, left to such contributors as Anas Baba, NPR’s producer in the Gaza Strip, to enlighten those who care to read and listen. As one of the few Palestinian journalists working for a US news outlet in the strip, his observations carry singular weight. In a recent report, Baba neatly summarised the manufactured brutality behind the seeking of aid in an enclave strangled and suffering gradual extinction. “I faced Israeli military fire, private US contractors pointing laser beams at my forehead, crowds with knives fighting for rations, and masked thieves – to get food from a group supported by the US and Israel called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”.

If nothing else, it is high time that the GHF scraps any pretense of being humanitarian in its title and admits to its true role: an adjutant to Israel’s program of extirpating Gaza’s Palestinian population.

“Thou Shalt Not Kill”: The World’s Silence Is  Complicity

by Sammy Attoh / July 7th, 2025

I do not write from comfort. I write from the salt of grief. From the agony of watching the world orchestrate its distractions while an entire people are burned, buried, and erased.

The world has failed the Palestinian people. Utterly and entirely.

This is not a political crisis—it is a moral apocalypse.

Since October 2023, more than 64,000 Palestinians—the vast majority women and children—have been killed in Gaza. That figure, cited by the Watson Institute, only scratches the surface. A 2024 Lancet study estimated that up to 186,000 deaths may be attributable to the ongoing conflict—caused not only by direct violence but by famine, trauma, disease, and a shattered healthcare system. At that time, Ralph Nader placed the number closer to 200,000.

These are not numbers. These are obliterated lineages. Neighborhoods razed. Babies recovered from beneath rubble in what were meant to be shelters—not graves. Hospitals bombed. Schools incinerated. Families starved. Children turned to ash inside classrooms. Elders murdered in wards they once trusted as safe.

And how has the world responded? With silence. With vague “regrets.” With weapons shipments.

Where is the United Nations and its so-called peacekeeping mandate? Where is the Arab League? Where are the global faith leaders who quote “Thou shalt not kill” from the pulpit—but seem deaf to the cries from Gaza?

“Thou shalt not kill.” Inscribed in the Bible, Qur’an, Torah, Gita—yes. But also enshrined in international law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the charters of the United Nations. It is sacred. It is legal. It is universal. And it has been violated. Repeatedly. Brazenly. Unforgivably.

Those who sponsor this genocide sleep beside holy texts while investing in weapons and war stocks. They pray with one hand and push missile buttons with the other.

Yet those sponsoring this genocide sleep beside these holy texts while investing in war stocks and boasting defense profits. They pray with one hand and press missile buttons with the other.

This is not just genocide—it is infanticide, ecocide, scholacide, culturecide, and medicide.

Let us name it fully:

• Infanticide: Babies buried under bombed maternity wards.
• Scholacide: Teachers and students turned to ash inside classrooms.
• Ecocide: Farmland poisoned, aquifers drained, trees reduced to cinders.
• Medicide: The annihilation of healthcare, as ambulances are shelled and doctors are slaughtered in their scrubs.

These are not metaphors. They are facts. And the so-called international community is not watching helplessly—it is watching profitably.

Let us not be deceived: silence is not neutrality. Silence is a moral alignment with power.

A carpenter does not build chairs to store under the bed. A tailor does not sew garments just to hide them away. And the arms industry does not make weapons for decoration. These machines of death must be sold. And sold they are—through wars.

The children of Gaza were not accidental casualties. They were sacrificed at the altar of empire, profit, and political cowardice.

So I ask:

To the architects of this violence: What crime did the Palestinian children commit? What sin warranted this obliteration?

To the silent majority: When does neutrality become complicity? What will you tell your children when they read of this— —or will even that history be erased?

This is not only about Gaza. It is about all of us. About what we become when we no longer act. About the future we construct through our indifference.

I offer this piece not just as protest, but as lament. Not just as lament, but as sacred indictment.

In the name of every holy book used to bless bombs, In memory of every mother whose child was stolen by missiles, In the name of all prophets who warned us against such evil: Let it be known— The world has failed the Palestinians.

We are called not only to pray but to protest. Not only to mourn but to move. Not only to witness, but to refuse— Refuse to accept that this is the world we inherit or pass down.

But we, the people of conscience, will not be silent.

And to my fellow activists, faith leaders, citizens of truth and resistance, I say this:

The silence of the world is not passive. It is participation. And it will be remembered that the entire world stood by while Palestinians were genocided—generation after generation.

Sammy Attoh is a Human Rights Coordinator, poet, and public writer. A member of The Riverside Church in New York City and The New York State Chaplains Group, he advocates for spiritual renewal and systemic justice. Originally from Ghana, his work draws from ancestral wisdom to explore the sacred ties between people, planet, and posterity. Read other articles by Sammy.

Blood and Ashes: Genocidal

Deathscapes from Treblinka to Gaza

by Phil Rockstroh / July 7th, 2025

“He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand? 20 He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or say, “Is there not a lie in my right hand?” Isaiah 44:20”

My maternal family, being Jews in 1930s Germany, were forced to affix yellow stars upon their clothing and were subject to daily public harassment. Finally, my mother and her sister, a few small family valuables sown by their mother into the lining of their clothes, escaped the madness on a Kindertransport, their father arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

At present, and since the inception of the Zionist state, in the name of those who survived Nazi inflicted brutality and blood lust, Palestinians suffer the Zionist’s version of crimes against humanity — that includes a type of Final Solution being enacted upon the inhabitants of Gaza.

War, in general, should be as outmoded among people possessed of heart, mind, and soul as is cannibalism, incest, and public lynching. Yet the political elite of the West not only permit Israel to perpetrate genocide but supply the weaponry that enable mass slaughter.

While, in the US, ICE thugs, with jackboots for minds, come for blameless human beings, as the Gestapo did my grandfather, as the worst among us cheer them on. The concept of Alligator Alcatraz (and the fact MAGA miscreants find it all so amusing) seems like a comic book version of Nazi evil. Himmel might have averred, “Das ist ein bisschen stark! Ist das eine Art Witz”! (“That’s a bit much! Is this some kind of a joke?”). The joke would have gone over like a flaming zeppelin at a Berghof dinner party.

Treblinka, Hiroshima, Wounded Knee and the US government-planned mass starvation of people of the American Great Plains, and Gaza are regarded as aberrations in human events. Yet, on closer examination, the demarcation point between civilization and human barbarity is nebulous at best.

Which side, one should ask oneself, again and again, of the tattered and torn divide are you on?

(Pictured: My son and I, in Berlin, in 2019, standing in front of the house stolen from our family by the Nazis. Palestinians, throughout Israel, could stage their version of the scene.)

Every action nations commit in war would be a crime in times of peace in a just society. Israeli actions, committed, by the IDF and the Zionist settler class, even before the Gaza genocide campaign, transgressed the boundaries of human decency. It is known, abused people, long after their horrible experiences, can become abusers. But whole societies? A cultural mythos of perpetual victimhood, it seems, can lead a people, once wronged, to become convinced they can do no wrong. Hence, the tragedy of a culture of grievance creates a compassion-bereft position towards outsiders.

A late uncle of mine, when a Jewish boy growing up in The Bronx in the 1920s, he and his brothers had to cross through treacherous-to-outsiders Irish, Black, and Italian city blocks when returning from school and other daily rounds. Often, they had to dodge barrages of thrown rocks and other threats to bodily safety. In adulthood, the European Holocaust re-enforced his animus toward the other and he conflated the survival of global Jewry with the existence of Israel.

Uncle Sol would pace the house and he was given to fulminate, even sans context, “an Arab is a Jew with his brains knocked out. Bomb them, that is all they understand.”

As a middle aged and elderly man, he was still dodging stones. His younger brother’s, an orthodox Jew by conviction, children became Israeli citizens and joined the ethnocentric ranks of the Zionist settler class. From the Bronx to Ramallah, through the generations, the madness perpetuates.

Uncle Sol, in his last years, as he descended into Alzheimer’s related dementia, hallucinated Palestinians marauders moved in stealth through his house; a stone-throwing Intifada of the mind shook the old man to his very core. There were peaceful days when he minded an imaginary nursery (he had attended to the care of his younger brother). He was prone to shouting, “Leave the children alone! Let them play!” How is it possible, by his bunker mentality worldview, that Palestinian children could not be viewed as human and that they were deserving of a homeland and a childhood?

“Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me…” — Exodus 20:5.

Problematic passage, to say the least. How does one transform the rage and concomitant tragedy that seems to be passed forward by consanguinity. Furies rule the blood. Is there anything under heaven that will end the blood-drenched madness inherent to generational trauma turned by-reflex into animus?

My DNA reveals, my ancestors were European e.g., Spanish, French, Germanic, with four percent coming from Northern Iraq and Iran. This is crucial: nada from ancient Israel. How is it I have a “right to return” to a land where my ancestors never dwelled but Palestinians, whose blood states that they are descendants of the original Jews of the Old Testament are forbidden to return to the land stolen from them?

Whenever the concept of a One State Solution is suggested to Zionists, they are stricken by the thought that Palestinians, now a majority of the population, would inflict the same brutal, dehumanizing treatment on Jewish citizens that they suffered during Zionist rule. In the childhood city of my birth, Birmingham, Alabama, the White overclass, during the civil rights era, expressed similar trepidation thus resisted granting African-Americans equal rights and protection under the law. The same mindset ruled Apartheid South Africa. The psychological projection is a de facto admission of guilt.

Israel is bleeding population. A new Exodus is extant. Jews, in large numbers, are leaving the Zionist state. Perpetrating Genocide and other acts of perpetual aggression have bankrupted Israeli society, both economically and morally. As the Ashkenazi elite exit the country, the zealots remain, and like my Uncle Sol, in his decline, they are dwelling in an hallucinated, and, in steep decline, version of the world.

Regarding a related false and death-besotted cultural mythos:

It is all over but Trump’s et al. palaver in public declaration and SHOUTING in pixel

Independence Day in the US… the lie of the mind of it all. More than two and a half centuries of the lie. Independence from the crown; then subservience to the moneyed class. Life (taking the lives of the original people of the land). Liberty (being at liberty to be exploited by those whose idea of liberty is enslavement and land theft). The pursuit of happiness (perhaps the most profound delusion promulgated there is manic pursuit – but scant happiness is on display. Only the micro frauds that maintain the macro fraud).

An imposter culture instructs – coerces the individual – to manufacture an imposter self – a social mask so that the culture itself does not destroy you.

Result: The grifter, the predator capitalist, the hollow to the core politician, and the anxious and depressed. Do you want to drive yourself even crazier and make the world even worse in its madness. Refuse to admit your own madness and the madness of simply being human unlooses upon the world.

When you face the abyss – that is, the realization we, all of us, are alone. When you are devoured by it – that is where and when you gain the company of others who feel and grieve for the sadness of the earth; of those who transform mortification witnessing human folly into humor and poetry. Then welcome home, lost and weary traveler. You have gained independence. You have shaken off dependence on the American lie.

In the macro sense; The lies promote nationalism in general; of Zionism; of militarism; of earth decimating, soul-defying cultures of greed and exploitation.

Once, the rancid lies have gone to compost, the green of the novel can rise and bloom. A dreams, yes. But so are the nightmares that are self-resonate feedback loops of past and ongoing tragedy. The legacy of violence begetting violent reprisal is as human and tragic as human and tragic can be. Moving forward, we have a choice: implement a just peace or else be plagued, in perpetuity, by endless torment inflicted by grievance-maddened furies.

“Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” Psalm 51:10

Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man by Salvador Dalí

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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.  Read other articles by Phil, or visit Phil's website

The Rise of the Prison State: Trump’s Push for Megaprisons Could Lock Us All Up

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / July 9th, 2025

America is rapidly becoming a nation of prisons.

Having figured out how to parlay presidential authority in foreign affairs in order to sidestep the Constitution, President Trump is using his immigration enforcement powers to lock up—and lock down—the nation.

Under the guise of national security and public safety, the Trump administration is engineering the largest federal expansion of incarceration and detention powers in U.S. history.

At the center of this campaign is Alligator Alcatraz, a federal detention facility built in the Florida Everglades and hailed by the White House as a model for the future of federal incarceration. But this is more than a new prison—it is the architectural symbol of a carceral state being quietly constructed in plain sight.

With over $170 billion allocated through Trump’s megabill, we are witnessing the creation of a vast, permanent enforcement infrastructure aimed at turning the American police state into a prison state.

The scope of this expansion is staggering.

The bill allocates $45 billion just to expand immigrant detention—making ICE the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history.

Yet be warned: what begins with ICE rarely ends with ICE.

Trump’s initial promise to crack down on “violent illegal criminals” has evolved into a sweeping mandate: a mass, quota-driven roundup campaign that detains anyone the administration deems a threat, regardless of legal status and at significant expense to the American taxpayer.

Tellingly, the vast majority of those being detained have no criminal record. And like so many of the Trump administration’s grandiose plans, the math doesn’t add up.

Just as Trump’s tariffs have failed to revive American manufacturing and instead raised consumer prices, this detention-state spending spree will cost taxpayers far more than it saves. It’s estimated that undocumented workers contribute an estimated $96 billion in federal, state and local taxes each year, and billions more in Social Security and Medicare taxes that they can never claim.

Making matters worse, many of these detained immigrants are then exploited as a pool of cheap labor inside the very facilities where they’re held.

The implications for Trump’s detention empire are chilling.

At a time when the administration is promising mass deportations to appease anti-immigrant hardliners, it is simultaneously constructing a parallel economy in which detained migrants can be pressed into near-free labor to satisfy the needs of industries that depend on migrant work.

What Trump is building isn’t just a prison state—it’s a forced labor regime, where confinement and exploitation go hand in hand. And it’s a high price to pay for a policy that creates more problems than it solves.

As the enforcement dragnet expands, so does the definition of who qualifies as an enemy of the state—including legal U.S. residents arrested for their political views.

The Trump administration is now pushing to review and revoke the citizenship of Americans it deems national security risks—targeting them for arrest, detention, and deportation.

Unfortunately, the government’s definition of “national security threat” is so broad, vague, and unconstitutional that it could encompass anyone engaged in peaceful, nonviolent, constitutionally protected activities—including criticism of government policy or the policies of allied governments like Israel.

In Trump’s prison state, no one is beyond the government’s reach.

Critics of the post-9/11 security state—left, right, and libertarian alike—have long warned that the powers granted to fight terrorism and control immigration would eventually be turned inward, used against dissidents, protestors, and ordinary citizens.

That moment has arrived.

Yet Trump’s most vocal supporters remain dangerously convinced they have nothing to fear from this expanding enforcement machine. But history—and the Constitution—say otherwise.

Our founders understood that unchecked government power, particularly in the name of public safety, poses the most significant threat to liberty. That’s why they enshrined rights like due process, trial by jury, and protection from unreasonable searches.

Those safeguards are now being hollowed out.

Trump’s detention expansion—like the mass surveillance programs before it—is not about making America safe. It’s about following the blueprints for authoritarian control in order to lock down the country.

The government’s targets may be the vulnerable today—but the infrastructure is built for everyone: Trump’s administration is laying the legal groundwork for indefinite detention of citizens and noncitizens alike.

This is not just about building prisons. It’s about dismantling the constitutional protections that make us free.

A nation cannot remain free while operating as a security state. And a government that treats liberty as a threat will soon treat the people as enemies.

This is not a partisan warning. It is a constitutional one.

We are dangerously close to losing the constitutional guardrails that keep power in check.

The very people who once warned against Big Government—the ones who decried the surveillance state, the IRS, and federal overreach—are now cheering for the most dangerous part of it: the unchecked power to surveil, detain, and disappear citizens without full due process.

Limited government, not mass incarceration, is the backbone of liberty.

The Founders warned that the greatest threat to liberty was not a foreign enemy, but domestic power left unchecked. That’s exactly what we’re up against now. A nation cannot claim to defend freedom while building a surveillance-fueled, prison-industrial empire.

Trump’s prison state is not a defense of America. It’s the destruction of everything America was meant to defend.

We can pursue justice without abandoning the Constitution. We can secure our borders and our communities without turning every American into a suspect and building a federal gulag.

But we must act now.

History has shown us where this road leads. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, once the machinery of tyranny is built, it rarely stays idle.

If we continue down this path, cheering on bigger prisons, broader police powers, and unchecked executive authority—if we fail to reject the dangerous notion that more prisons, more power, and fewer rights will somehow make us safer—if we fail to restore the foundational limits that protect us from government overreach before those limits are gone for good—we may wake up to find that the prisons and concentration camps the police state is building won’t just hold others.

One day, they may hold us all.

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John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and author, is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Read other articles by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.