Voting for Genocide
If Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Kuzinski were the candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties, which one would you vote for?
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both have more blood on their hands than either of these serial killers, and they promise to kill many more. Both of them supported the latest $20 billion to Israel, to keep the project to eradicate the people of Gaza on schedule. Voting for them means giving them permission and encouragement to keep the rivers of blood flowing, so I won’t do it. I might vote for Jill Stein or the Libertarian candidate, but I’m inclined not to play the game. It’s a personal choice — a symbolic one, you might contend.
But so is yours, if you are voting for a major party candidate. Did you select either of them to be a candidate? Can you think of a better one? Of course you can. In fact, every one of you is probably a better candidate yourself. That’s why your vote is symbolic. You don’t win either way. And either way, your vote says to the party or candidate, “Your support for genocide is not going to keep me from voting for you.”
What can we do about it? As Emma Goldman said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” That was a century ago, and it is more true today — with Citizens United solidifying corporate and special interest (e.g. AIPAC) control of our elections and our electeds — than it was then. Our only influence in government is with issues that have little interest for the powerful, such as women’s reproductive rights, other than to be used by the powerful to manipulate and deceive us into thinking that our vote makes a difference.
As individuals, we must take responsibility for our participation in this rigged game. Are we willing to vote for one mass murderer over another just for the opportunity to play? Daddy, what did you do during the Great Genocide?
Collectively, a voter strike might be in order. Vote None of the Above! Perhaps we need a new movement that defies the system rather than participating in it. Picket the polling stations and tell people not to vote, that doing so sends the message that they support genocide.
I have no illusions how difficult it is to create a mass movement, especially one that seeks to wrest control from those who rule us. But genocide puts special obligations upon us. Individually, at the very least, our integrity is at stake. Are you actually going to participate — and be complicit — in genocide? We all have choices. Let your conscience decide. Make yourself and your descendants proud of you.
Why the Genocide Continues
According to the New York Times, U.S. officials say there’s no excuse, on the warmakers’ own terms, for the genocide they are arming:
“Israel has achieved all that it can militarily in Gaza, according to senior American officials, who say continued bombings are only increasing risks to civilians while the possibility of further weakening Hamas has diminished…. William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, is due in Qatar on Thursday. Brett McGurk, President Biden’s Middle East coordinator, has headed to Egypt and Qatar. Amos Hochstein, a senior White House adviser, landed in Lebanon. One of the messages the officials are expected to deliver is that there is little more Israel can accomplish against Hamas.”
But there’s another message they’re delivering:
the weapons will never stop flowing from the United States to Israel.
According to opinion polls, the majority of U.S. voters want the weapons shipments to stop now and have wanted that for some time.
But there’s another message many of them are delivering:
OMG it’s so awesome how Kamala tells peace advocates to shut up, she and Walz bring joy to my life like like like like yeah you know?
If Harris were to demand that Biden or Congress or the UN stop the weapons shipments, and were they to stop, I would start campaigning for Harris-Walz to take office in Washington. As long as that doesn’t happen, I’ll support Biden-Harris taking seats in the dock at The Hague.
Unless of course somebody takes a notion to uphold U.S. laws and prosecute them here. Every weapons shipment violates the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, the Foreign Assistance Act, the Arms Export Control Act, the U.S. War Crimes Act, the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, and the Leahy Law. Just ask former Senator Leahy who says the U.S. government is making a mockery of the law that bears his name.
Biden is still scheduled to be officially president for about as long as the Gulf War took from start to finish, about twice as long as the Spanish-American war, about three times the Falklands war, several times various U.S. wars in Latin America and around the globe, and several times what it took for the U.S. to overthrow the government of Afghanistan prior to failing to grasp the need to leave that place for decades.
Biden’s remaining months are also longer than it has taken for polls to show dramatic turns of opinion against wars, commonly labeled “war fatigue” as though noticing the horror of the mass killing requires sleepiness rather than insight. But the “fatigue” has already been awakened.
Of course, politicians also hear messages from war-profiting bribers of their campaigns, and from weapons-funded stink-tankers. The war machine has a great deal of inertia even when it has no excuse. Peace making has been bizarrely redefined as “anti-Semitism.” Opposition to genocide is now “terrorism.” And all the microphones have been gathered up in a big pile and placed in front of corporations peddling that BS.
But too many people know better. Too many people grew up believing genocide was evil. We’ve been here before, and it didn’t work out well for the forever-war candidate. His losing worked out horribly for everyone, of course, but his winning would likely have done the same.
We need an election in which people insist on not voting for war. We need an election in which people develop too much self-respect to give a flying F-35 what kind of tacos a candidate eats, which candidate you’d like a beer with, which you’d hire as a babysitter, which you’d vote for as prom king or queen.
Why does the killing never end? Panem et circenses.
No comments:
Post a Comment