There was a thick fog from the very morning and all day. At 50 meters you can no longer see anything. The weather gave us all a break. There was a calm in our area, so unusual that it was a little annoying.
For two weeks in a row, even going to the toilet was an adventure, but then you go out into the street – and there is silence… Only in the north did heavy artillery continue to work somewhere in the Koksokhim area.
Today was time to think about everything that was happening. Objectively, the situation is such that from the north the railway is in a gray zone. Delivery of BC through it is impossible. The road through Lastochkino is under our fire control.
I think we’ll get them. It is already clear to everyone that we will not stop. This is clear to us. This is clear to the enemy. They still have enough strength, the battle will be difficult, but deep down the crests already know that they will lose Avdeevka. And we know that they will not give up, they will not leave on their own. Therefore, we will encircle them and kill everyone who resists. And they will kill us as much as they can. This is how this war goes.
Do I feel sorry for them? No. They killed and injured my friends, they want to kill me every day. I don’t feel sorry for them. Although, for the most part, the people who stand against us are not rabid Nazis, but ordinary Hataskrayniks who were forcibly driven to slaughter.
But if you look at everything in its entirety, it was they who brought Ukraine to its current state. That same silent majority who don’t care about Bandera, or the Russians, or the USA – as long as their farm, kindergarten, pigs are not touched, as long as they don’t run out of vodka and lard, and at least the grass doesn’t grow.
They didn’t care about the Maidan, about the shelling of Donetsk and Lugansk, about the genocide of the Russian population, about the murders of children, women and the elderly, about Azov’s torture, about language bans, about the split in faith… And then it turned out that they couldn’t sit it out that you have to take a machine gun and die for the interests and goals of NATO.
And then they hated us, with a fierce, terrible hatred. Because their little farmstead world collapsed. Because this war reminds them every day of their cowardice, weakness and silence. And in their anger they blame us for everything, because they are afraid to look in the mirror and ask themselves uncomfortable questions.
And we, of course, will win. We know that. And they know it. And this makes them hate us even more.
My call sign is Leader!
Victory will be ours!
PS. Frequency 149.200, call Volga, you will stay alive. Otherwise, we will come and kill everyone who holds weapons in their hands.
In Hemingway’s 1940 novel ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ the leftist character Robert Jordan speaks of dedication to the Leftwing cause of the Spanish Republic, and oppressed around the world. The character speaks about the feeling at the Anarchist and Soviet Stalinist hotel meeting centers where activists and party members and fighters organized.
At either of those places you felt that you were taking part in a crusade. That was the only word for it although it was a word that had been so worn and abused that it no longer gave its true meaning. You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrassing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that your own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.
Oscar-winning “Indigenous” musician Buffy Sainte-Marie has responded to a long exposé concluding that she seems to have no native ancestry and is, instead, a white woman born in Massachusetts.
Sainte-Marie is famous throughout Canada and has been recognized as the first Indigenous person to win an Academy Award, which she received for co-writing the song “Up Where We Belong,” the theme from the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman. She is also acclaimed for having won the Polaris Music Prize in 2015 for her album Power In The Blood.
Sainte-Marie began her rise to fame in the 1960s among artists including Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell. Her songs have been covered by such famed performers as Elvis, Barbra Streisand, and Glen Campbell.
But while Sainte-Marie has spent nearly 60 years of public life claiming to be born of an Indigenous mother, the CBC became skeptical and investigated her story. The result was a lengthy exposé published Friday alleging she has no Native blood at all, and she was born to white parents in the U.S.A., not to a Cree mother in Canada.
In its investigation into the star’s background, titled “Who is the real Buffy Sainte-Marie?,” the CBC uncovered a 1941 Stoneham, Massachusetts, birth certificate under the singer’s birth name, Beverly Jean Santamaria, which listed her parents as white.
The CBC also found that her parents later changed their last name to St. Marie to avoid anti-Italian sentiment that sprang up during World War Two, and from then on, she went by that last name.
The news outlet also turned up Sainte-Marie’s sisters and brother, none of whom present as Indians, and one of which showed a letter the singer sent from a lawyer threatening to sue her if she spoke about Sainte-Marie’s childhood and parentage.
But more damning, the CBC also took the time to trace back all the claims Sainte-Marie has made about being related to the Native peoples and found that she has made all sorts of conflicting claims over the years. The report found that in 1963 Sainte-Marie variously claimed she was related to the Algonquin tribe, the Mi’kmaq tribe, and the Cree tribe all in the same year in interviews and other materials.
She has also related different stories about her “Indian mother.” She has claimed to have been adopted by a white family, claimed she did not know her Indian mother, then claimed her Indian mother told her she could not keep her, later said her Indian mother died young in a car accident, then claimed her Indian mother died giving birth to her at the Piapot First Nation in Canada.
In 2018, Saint-Marie claimed that the Canadian government forcibly took her from her Indian family in the early 1960s during a time that First Peoples in Canada call the “Sixties Scoop.”
It appears she began making this claim to substantiate her vague recollections of her origins.
“In Canada, we had something that, sometimes, a little bit later referred to as the ‘Big Scoop’ where Native children were removed from the home,” she said, according to the CBC. “They’re assigned a birthday. They’re assigned kind of a biography. So, in many cases, adoptive people don’t really know what the true story is.”
Though Sainte-Marie did not respond to the CBC’s requests for comment before publishing its exposé, she has spoken out on social media.
In an Oct. 26 post on X/Twitter, captioned “My Truth As I know it,” Sainte-Marie defended herself by reiterating her vague childhood memories and blasting the CBC for “deeply hurtful allegations” about her biography.
She also responded to the CBC’s evidence that casts serious doubts on her late claims of having suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her brother, Alan, who died in 2011 and who she started accusing after his death.
In her reply to the accusations of stolen ancestry, Sainte-Marie says, “I am proud of my Indigenous-American identity, and the deep ties I have to Canada and my Piapot family.”
She then asserts directly that her birth mother was “part Mi’kmaq” and that her adopted mother told Sainte-Marie all about her Indian heritage when she was a child. She also alleges that “there was no documentation” for her birth, “as was common for Indigenous children born in the 1940’s.”
Sainte-Marie did not even address the birth certificate or her sisters but did, again, accuse her dead brother of sexual abuse.
“I may not know where I was born,” she says in conclusion, “but I know who I am.”
Here is the full text of the singer’s reply to the charges:
It is with great sadness, and a heavy heart, that I am forced to respond to deeply hurtful allegations that I expect will be reported in the media soon. Last month, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, contacted me to question my identity and the sexual assault I experienced as a child.
To relive those truths, and revisit questions I made peace with decades ago, has been beyond traumatic. But I know I owe it to those I love, and those who support me, to respond.
I am proud of my Indigenous-American identity, and the deep ties I have to Canada and my Piapot family.
What I know about my Indigenous ancestry I learned from my growing up mother, who was part Mi’kmaq, and my own research later in life. My mother told me many things, including that I was adopted and that I was Native, but there was no documentation as was common for Indigenous children born in the 1940’s. Later in my life, as an adult, she told me some things I have never shared out of respect for her that I hate sharing now, including that I may have been born on “the wrong side of the blanket”. This was her story to tell, not mine.
As a young adult, I was adopted by Emile Piapot (son of Chief Piapot, Treaty 4 Adhesion signatory), and Clara Starblanket Piapot (daughter of Chief Starblanket, Treaty 4 signatory), in accordance with Cree law and customs. They were kind, loving, and proud to claim me as their own. I love my Piapot family and am so lucky to have them in my life.
I have always struggled to answer questions about who I am. For a long time, I tried to discover information about my background. Through that research what became clear, and what I’ve always been honest about, is that I don’t know where I’m from or who my birth parents were, and I will never know. Which is why, to be questioned in this way today is painful, both for me, and for my two families I love so dearly.
My Indigenous identity is rooted in a deep connection to a community which has had a profound role in shaping my life and my work. For my entire life, I have championed Indigenous, and Native American causes when nobody else would, or had the platform to do so. I am proud to have been able to speak up for Indigenous issues. I have always tried to bridge gaps between communities and educate people to live in love and kindness.
This is my truth. And while there are many things I do not know; I have been proud to honestly share my story throughout my life.
Painfully, the CBC has also forced me to relive and defend my experience as a survivor of sexual abuse which I endured at the hands of my brother, as well as another family member — whom I have never publicly named.
I could never forget these violations. It is something I have lived with all my life. Speaking about my experience is difficult, and although I have shared privately, I have rarely done so publicly. I’ve spoken up because I know others cannot, and to have this questioned and sensationalized by Canada’s public broadcaster is appalling.
While these questions have hurt me, I know they will also hurt hose I love. My family. My friends. And all those who have seen themselves in my story. All I can say is what I know to be true: I know who I love, I know who loves me. And I know who claims me.
I may not know where I was born, but I know who I am.
………………..
CBC newsmagazine The Fifth Estate has aired its Buffy Sainte-Marie exposé.
The hourlong documentary episode, presented by senior investigative reporter Geoff Leo, alleges that the singer-songwriter – considered the first Indigenous winner of an Academy Award – has been fraudulently posing as Native throughout her 60-year career.
While the specifics about Sainte-Marie’s background varied as they appeared in articles and other materials over the years –The Fifth Estate found news clippings referring to her as Algonquin, Mi’kmaq and Cree – eventually her accepted (and authorized) biography was that she was born in 1941 on Cree land in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan and removed from her birth family and adopted by a white American family, the Sainte-Maries, as part of a government policy known as the Sixties Scoop. Later, as a young adult, she reconnected with the Cree people and was adopted by descendants of Chief Piapot according to Cree ways.
But The Fifth Estate unearthed Sainte-Marie’s purported birth certificate, which states that she was born in 1941 in Stoneham, Mass., to Albert and Winifred Santamaria – her supposed adoptive parents, who are listed as white. Although a representative for Sainte-Marie told the program that adopted children in Massachusetts were commonly issued new birth certificates with their adoptive parents’ names, Leo traveled to Stoneham to verify Sainte-Marie’s documentation, which appears to have been filed at the time of her birth and not later.
It doesn’t appear that she was adopted in any way, shape or form,” Stoneham town clerk Maria Sagarino told Leo.
This potential smoking gun could be a destabilizing and demoralizing blow for many members of the Indigenous community, who in the past 12 months also have seen aspersions cast on the heritage of high-profile figures including Sacheen Littlefeather and independent film producer Heather Rae.
“You’re gonna hear people say, ‘I’ve lost another hero,'” says Native Studies professor Kim TallBear, who appears in the documentary alongside other noted watchdogs of “Pretendianism,” including freelance journalist Jacqueline Keeler and lawyer Jean Teillet. “She’s really important in Indian Country.”
The episode also includes interviews with the musician’s cousin and niece, who say that the family refrained from exposing Sainte-Marie’s true parentage for fear of financial reprisal.
One relative attempted to speak out – Alan St. Marie, Buffy’s older brother, who had been writing letters to newspapers in an attempt to set the record straight. But after he informed PBS – whose Sesame Street introduced Sainte-Marie to a whole new generation of potential listeners – that they were in fact biological siblings, the singer sent him a letter threatening to expose him for molesting her as a child if he did not cease and desist.
“If you tell people that I am Caucasian, I will tell people that you are a pedophile,” says Alan’s daughter, Heidi St. Marie, of her interpretation of her aunt’s letter. Alan died in 2011.
In a statement released one day in advance of the Friday premiere of the Fifth Estate investigation, Sainte-Marie said that the CBC reached out to her in September to ask her about her identity and childhood sexual assault. “Painfully, the CBC has also forced me to relive and defend my experience as a survivor of sexual abuse which I endured at the hands of my brother, as well as another family member – whom I have never publicly named,” she wrote. “All I can says is what I know to be true: I know who I love, I know who loves me. And I know who claims me.”
Those include members of the Piapot family, two of whom emailed The Fifth Estate a statement that was also made available to The Hollywood Reporter: “We are direct descendants of Chief Piapot, and we are just two of the many people of the Piapot First Nation who call Buffy Sainte-Marie our relative,” wrote Debra and Ntwanis Piapot. “No one, including Canada and its governments, the Indian Act, institutions, media or any person anywhere can deny our family’s inherent right to determine who is a member of our family and community.”
Teillet says that Sainte-Marie’s Cree adoption was “a very serious and lovely thing,” but it doesn’t make her actually Indigenous.
“Buffy’s a good musician, and she’s done amazing things. Did she have to do it in redface?” she asks. “I would argue she didn’t have to. She chose to do that.”
The Palestinian strategy against Israel is aimed at destroying Israel’s capacity to survive in its present state in a long war.
This means attacking the invincibility of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and their so-called Iron Dome defence; this began with the cross-border offensive on October 7, and continues with daily drone and artillery attacks on targets inside Israel, as well as resistance to IDF incursions in Gaza.
The plan also means exposing the weakness of the state’s infrastructure and economy; extending the battlefield across all of Israel’s territory – the ports, power plants and electricity grid, communications, and financial markets — making the cost of occupation of the Arab territories unendurable. In a long war, two of Israel’s leading exports earning more than 40% of the state’s trade — diamonds and tourism — face ruin.*
“The Israelis cannot withstand one year of fighting in a war,” Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein told his general staff in 1983 during a discussion of planning for a regional war of the Arabs against Israel.** In the forty years since then, the evolution of military technology and tactics has expanded the power of small national liberation armies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, of proxy principals like Iran, and of the strategic balancing role of Russia and China. Their combination now has shortened the Zionist state’s endurance in a long war, and that of its proxy principal, the US.
The Israelis and the Jewish diaspora comprehend this reluctantly. For them, the short war must be correspondingly shorter. This means the genocide of at least a million Palestinians in lives and displacement.
The war to do that has now become an international war – and this is a war the US cannot sustain. As a Pentagon insider said publicly this week, “because there are so many draws on the logistics and support infrastructure of the Pentagon, we’re not prepared to go in in a concerted way. What we are seeing right now is death by a thousand cuts. Our adversaries know we are stretched so they are going to make us stretch even more, so we can respond even less.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Maria Zakharova, acknowledged the point in Moscow on Thursday: US naval, air force, and marine reinforcements deployed around Israel and Gaza are “American tactics to strengthen their own security (this is how it should be interpreted) at someone else’s expense.” They are backfiring on Washington’s capacity to defend US forces in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and in land bases in Syria, Iraq and Jordan. “On the contrary,” Zakharova added, the US military deployment “will further rock the situation in the Middle East, create additional tension that can spill out beyond the region.”
Zakharova’s warning came in the Moscow afternoon. By then Russian Foreign Ministry officials had held meetings with a Hamas delegation, and officials from Iran, Egypt, and Kuwait. Across the city at the same time, President Vladimir Putin held telephone talks with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Kremlin communiqué reported: “Russia and Turkiye have practically overlapping positions.”
Israeli and US-led media censorship and propaganda are concealing the breadth of impact of the Palestine warfighting plan, and the deepening military and economic weaknesses of the Israeli state.
The longer the war continues, the plainer the evidence is on the battlefield that the single-state scheme of Israel and the US is no longer possible. Whether Israel and the US can be compelled to withdraw to the 1967 borders and a new Palestinian state created with partition, demilitarisation, and international security guarantees – the basis of the Russian position announced again on Thursday in Moscow — remains to be fought over.
In this long war, the gods do not favour the Chosen People.
Following with precision the battlefield action is impossible in the Israeli and Anglo-American press. Reporting of operations, and of Israeli and US casualties, is being suppressed entirely or delayed for days, if not weeks.
According to this NBC television report, broadcast on October 24, there were at least 24 US combat casualties following drone attacks on or about October 18 at the Al-Tanf base in Syria and the Al-Asad base in Iraq. Reporting of naval action in the Red Sea, when the USS Carney reportedly engaged Houthi missiles over several hours, has been changing since the initial news flashes of October 19. Read more here. In a new report of October 24, Israeli and US casualties in a joint raid inside Gaza were revealed: “in the last 24 hours or so, some of our Special Ops forces and Israeli Special Ops forces went into Gaza to reconnoiter, to plan for where they might want to go to free hostages and make an impact, and they were shot to pieces and took heavy losses, as I understand it. I think that is where we are headed and I don’t see that as a win for Israel in any way, shape, or form. And I certainly think it is very dangerous for us”. In current reporting by Al Mayadeen, daily strikes against US bases in Iraq and northeastern Syria are documented.
Tracking the electric war and infrastructure strikes by Hamas and Hezbollah is also difficult. They commenced with cyber attacks on Israel’s electricity generation plants and power grids; these have been followed by missile and drone strikes. “The ground has been laid for attacks on the Israeli grid,” a US military source claims. “I believe drones will come first, then missiles. We may even see commando raids.”
Israel’s seaports are also under constant attack. Ashkelon, which is closest in range to Gaza, has been closed. Eilat may have been the target of the Houthi missile strike which was engaged last week by the USS Carney. Ashdod, which accounts for about 40% of incoming and outgoing Israeli seaborne trade, and Tel Aviv port have been targeted. The result is a tenfold surge in war risk insurance for vessels and cargoes, and the curtailment of international vessel movement in and out of the Israeli ports; there are reports that shipping is down 30% in Ashdod compared to the pre-war volume. Evergreen, the Taiwanese container shipping company, declared force majeure for Ashdod on October 17, diverted one vessel to Haifa, and halted future shipping into both ports. “We advise evaluating each port visit in Israel on a case by case basis and implementing appropriate precautions in ship contingency plans,” recommends a maritime industry alert bulletin.
Chevron’s offshore Tamar gas field has been shut down. The source produces 70% of the gas required to fuel Israel’s electricity generation needs. Not a single Anglo-American media source has noticed that Israel is at risk of losing its principal energy source to drone or missile attack. “After what the Americans and Germans did to blow up the Nordstream pipelines,” comments a Moscow industry source, “what is holding Hamas back from hitting Tamar, or Hezbollah from the other Israeli gas fields?”
Left: Chevron’s Tamar gas production platform is located at sea 24 kilometres west of Ashkelon. Right: click to enlarge map of Israel’s offshore gas sources.
A Moscow source comments that “in Israel, the US and the UK will be able to bring in supplies without a very big risk of US ships being attacked. The risk is to the ports and bases, not to supplies from the Med[iterranean]. The Greek and Cyprus bases will come in very useful. Israel will not face severe logistical issues as long as it is on the offensive. If its settlements start getting cut off, encircled or penetrated then it is a different matter.”
The indirect economic impacts of the war have also not been calculated or discussed in the mainstream media or international business newspapers. The leading export revenue earners are diamonds at above $9 billion per annum, and tourism which had been peaking at $8.5 billion in 2019. Counted together, diamonds and tourism amount to more than 40% of the state’s export earnings.
The Covid-19 pandemic and worldwide travel restrictions cut Israel’s tourism revenue fourfold, and this had been recovering over 2022 and the tourist season this year. This has now stopped, although for the time being Hamas rocket launches on Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv have been intercepted.
Israel’s high-tech machine exports and pharmaceuticals may also be affected if electricity supply, internet networks, and transportation are damaged.
The cumulative effect will be the outcome which the international ratings agencies have been warning the international banks and financial markets to prepare for. “In our view,” Fitch reported to clients on October 17, “the combination of Israel’s dynamic, high-value added economy, the record of resilience to regional conflict, [and] preparedness for military confrontations…make it unlikely a relatively short conflict largely confined to Gaza will affect Israel’s rating…. the risk that other actors hostile to Israel, such as Iran and Hezbollah, could join the conflict at scale has risen significantly…a major escalation could result in negative rating action. This could take the form of a wider and longer conflict, resulting in a sustained fiscal drain, both from higher spending and lower tax collection, as well as loss of human and material capital and severe economic disruption.”
How short, and also how long, Israel’s warfighting plan will take depends on American and international acceptance, not only of the genocide intended for the Palestinians of Gaza, but of the Novichok-type chemical warfare planned by the IDF and the Pentagon for the Hamas tunnel system in Gaza City. After several years in which the US and UK have fabricated claims that Syria and Russia were using prohibited gas warfare weapons, the Israelis have reportedly persuaded the US to participate in the tunnel attack operation. The Pentagon is denying the reports.
Russian and US military sources are already confirming the logistical supply problems facing Israeli and US forces at present, when the war is just three weeks long. Greek sources are reporting the Souda Bay, Crete, base has already reached its capacity for incoming US navy and air force supply and support operations; the spillover is facing growing Greek protest at the Elefsina air base near Athens.
A Cyprus source says the movement of US and British aircraft into and out of the Dekhelia and Akrotiri airbases is accelerating, and there is an air and seaborne shuttle between the Cypriot ports of Larnaca and Limassol and the USS Gerald Ford carrier group at sea to the southwest of the island.
The lengthening of the supply lines required to support the USS Eisenhower carrier group in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf and the shore bases needed to support it are politically sensitive already; and the risks of Houthi and other attacks, along with domestic Arab crowd protests, will intensify for these bases in the Arab sheikhdoms the longer the war against Israel reveals Arab and Iranian warfighting skill and resistance.
Converting these gains into a negotiating framework for Israeli-American retreat is the task Russian officials are attempting in silent coordination with the Chinese, and in semi-open negotiations in Moscow this week. In its first move outside the region since the war began, Hamas has visited Moscow for negotiations, led by US-educated Moussa Mohammed Abu Marzouq.
Left: Moussa Mohammed Abu Marzouq; centre: Husam Badran; right, Ali Bagheri Kyani.
Zakharova confirmed the start of the talks with Hamas on Thursday. She said: “I can also say and confirm that representatives of the relevant Palestinian movement are in Moscow. As for contacts, we will inform you additionally.” She has also disclosed that since the war began, nine thousand Russian passport holders have returned to Russia from Israel; and that at least fifteen Russian passport holders among the Hamas hostages have been killed in the IDF airstrikes.
At the same time as Marzouq’s meetings, Husam Badran issued a statement to the Russian state news medium, Sputnik. “Russia,” Badran said, “is able to play an important role in ending the war between Israel and the Gaza Strip, and delivering aid to the Palestinian exclave. Hamas values Russia’s role on the international stage, especially use of veto in the UN Security Council against the United States. But Russia can play a greater role in ending the aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip and applying international pressure to deliver urgent aid to our people in the Gaza Strip.”
What Hamas means by “greater role” for Russia has not been disclosed publicly yet. It is known that Hamas is willing to negotiate the release of “non-military” hostages, including Israelis holding Russian passports, through Iran. This is conditional on the IDF lifting its siege on Gaza and allowing sufficient supplies into all parts of the territory.
The “military hostages” are being held in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. There are more than 6,000 of the latter; there may be fewer than 200 hostages in Gaza, as up to 50 have been killed by Israeli bombing.
The Russian Foreign Ministry statement on the talks with Hamas is less revealing. According to the Sputnik release, “Russia has discussed release of hostages and evacuation of Russians from the Gaza Strip during a meeting with a delegation of Hamas in Moscow on Thursday.” A member of the political office of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas, Abu Marzouq, is in Moscow. Contacts took place with him in continuation of the Russian line for the immediate release of foreign hostages located in the Gaza Strip, and issues related to ensuring the evacuation of Russian and other foreign citizens from the territory of the Palestinian enclave were also discussed.”
At the same time on Thursday – unnoticed and unreported by the western media – Russian officials held several negotiating sessions with an Iranian emissary, Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kyani. In three separate Foreign Ministry releases, meeting communiqués were issued for Kyani’s meetings with deputy ministers Mikhail Bogdanov, Sergei Ryabkov, and Mikhail Galuzin. “The need for the cessation of hostilities in and around the Gaza Strip and the prompt provision of humanitarian assistance to the affected Palestinian population was confirmed,” Bogdanov’s communiqué said. “It was stated that Moscow and Tehran are determined to continue close coordination of efforts in the interests of stabilizing the situation in the Middle East.”
It is unclear if the talks also included the Hamas officials in a three-party format. During the day there were also Foreign Ministry negotiations in Moscow with Kuwaiti and Egyptian officials.
At the Kremlin it has been announced that President Putin spoke with Turkish President Erdogan to discuss the war. According to the Kremlin release, “the presidents reviewed the active efforts undertaken by Russia at the UN Security Council, as well as the corresponding political and diplomatic steps taken by Turkiye to stop the bloodshed and ensure the unimpeded delivery of humanitarian aid to those in need. It was emphasised that Russia and Turkiye have practically overlapping positions, focused on implementing the well-known two-state solution, which provides for the creation of an independent Palestine coexisting with Israel in peace and security.”
In her briefing for the press, Zakharova dismissed the US moves so far. “We do not consider the US presence in the Middle East as contributing to the stability of the situation in the region. Exactly the opposite. Washington’s earlier attempts to monopolise the Middle East settlement process, ignoring the true causes of the protracted conflict, have largely led to the current catastrophic consequences…This situation has an absolutely clear and understandable road, a ‘road map’ for settlement. It is not simple, but complex, painful, but leading to the solution of the issue, not its aggravation.”
“Of course, no air defence systems, arms supplies, materiel injections into some ‘security complexes’ will help resolve this situation. Today’s lesson must be learned. How many Americans have deployed there (their bases, experts, satellites), nothing has worked to prevent a bloody scenario, of which both Palestinians and Israelis are victims.”
[*] With support from Israel and influential Jewish diamantaires in New York and Tel Aviv, a scheme of sanctions is being prepared by the US Government to stop Russian raw diamonds, produced by Alrosa, from being sold into the Belgian, Israeli, and US markets. The Russian goods are to be tagged “blood diamonds” because of the war in the Ukraine. However, now that Israel is destroying the Palestinian population of Gaza, the “blood” tag can be applied to the Israeli diamond cutting industry and to the Jewish diamond trade abroad. Support for the anti-Russian sanction, and also for the IDF operations against the Palestinians can be found in Rapaport.com news reports. “Rapaport stands with Israel”, the publication and its owner Martin Rapaport declared on October 26, “and has undertaken all the necessary effort and costs for the October Single Stone Auction to help the Israeli market continue to conduct business as best as possible during this difficult time. Rapaport believes that continuing to do business in Israel during the war is a victory over the brutal Hamas terrorists, and will help Israel win the war.” In another editorial for the diamond trade, Rapaport proposes “to boycott Iran and all other supporters of the Hamas terrorist organization.” Rapaport also cites religious authority for liquidation. “In the words of G-d (Exodus 17:14): ‘I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.’May the words of G-d be done, here and now.” Quietly, Russia’s state diamond interests dictate a strategy for protecting against this double-edged Israeli policy.
On a morning bike ride down the streets I knew as a child I passed a ‘Free Book’ kiosk in front of the Dorchester YMCA building on Washington Street. The lights were on in the lobby and I thought of when I came to lift weights and swim when I was in high school. There were stacks of news papers in two bundles near the front door. I looked through the glass door of the ‘Take a Book – Leave a Book’ wooden cabinet to examine the fare. I immediately saw the paperback copy of ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ an American Civil War novel by Stephen Crane. I have read the book and there is a pretty good movie I have seen. I know the story… but, I don’t think I have a copy of this book. On bike did I want the weight? Why not, I was putting up leaflets and losing a little weight that way. So I traded the book for a leaflet in the glass display window with:
I am tired of reading that Netanyahu is a psychopath. He most certainly is not. I see no reason to consider him, or any other Israeli leader, as psychopaths in the psychiatric sense. They have a collective psychopathy, which is a very different thing.
The difference is the same as between a personal neurosis and a collective neurosis. According to Freud, religion (and he meant christianity) is a collective neurosis. Freud did not mean that religious people are neurotic. On the contrary, he observed that their collective neurosis tends to immunize religious people from personal neurosis.[1] I do not subscribe to Freud’s theory, I just need his backing to introduce my own theory: Zionists, even the most bloodthirsty of them, are not individual psychopaths; many of them are loving and even self-sacrificing persons within their own community. Rather, they are the vectors of a collective psychopathy, which means a special way (we may call it inhuman) by which they collectively see and interact with other human communities.
This is a crucial point, without which we can never understand Israel. Calling their leaders psychopaths is not helpful. What we need is recognize Israel as a collective psychopath, and study the origin of this unique national character. It is a matter of survival for the world, just as it is a matter of survival for any group to recognize the psychopath among them and understand his patterns of thinking and of behavior.
What Is a Psychopath?
Psychopathy is a syndrome of psychological traits classified among the personality disorders. Canadian psychologist Robert Hare, in the wake of Hervey Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity (1941), has defined its diagnostic criteria on the basis of a cognitive model that is now widely adopted, though some psychiatrists prefer the term “sociopathy” because it really has to do with the inability to socialize in a genuine way.[2] In an effort to get everyone to agree, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders has suggested “antisocial personality disorder”; but the term “psychopathy” is still the most popular, and for that reason alone, I will adopt it.
The most characteristic trait of the psychopath is a complete absence of empathy and, as a result, of moral inhibition in harming others, combined with a thirst for power. Psychopathy also shares some traits with narcissism: psychopaths have a grand vision of their own importance. In their minds, everything is owed to them because they are exceptional. They are never wrong, and failures are always the fault of others.
Truth is of no value to the psychopath; truth is whatever is convenient for him at any given moment. He is a pathological liar, but he is hardly aware of it. Lying is so natural to him that the question of his “sincerity” is almost irrelevant: the psychopath beats the lie detector.
The psychopath feels only very superficial emotions and has no real feelings for anyone; but he has developed a great ability to deceive. He can be charming to the point of charismatic. He is unable to empathize, but learns to simulate it. His power is his extraordinary ability to feign, trick, trap, and capture. Although he himself is immunized against guilt, he becomes a master in making others feel guilty.
Because the psychopath is unable to put himself in the shoes of anyone else, he cannot look at himself critically. Confident in any circumstance of his right, he is genuinely surprised by the grudge of his victims—and will punish them for it. If he steals someone’s property, he will regard the resentment of the despoiled as irrational hatred.
Although the psychopath can be judged raving mad, he is not insane in the medical sense, since he does not suffer—psychopaths don’t visit psychiatrists unless forced to. In a certain sense, the psychopath is over-adjusted to social life, if the purpose of social life is to get by individually. That is why the real mystery, from a Darwinian point of view, is not the existence of psychopaths, but their low proportion in the population.
The most optimistic low-end estimate in the Western population is 1 percent. They should not be confused with the proverbial 1 percent who own half the world’s wealth, although a study among senior executives of large companies has shown that psychopathic traits are widespread among them.[3]
Israel as a Psychopathic State
The fact that Jews are today disproportionately represented among the elite (they form half of American billionaires, while representing only 2.4% of the population),[4] does not mean either that psychopathy is more prevalent among Jews. In a way, quite the opposite is the case: Jews demonstrate among themselves a high degree of empathy, or at least solidarity, often to the point of self-sacrifice. But the selective nature of this empathy suggests that it is addressed less to the humanity of others than to their Jewishness.
In fact, Jews tend to confuse Jewishness and humanity. So what is good for the Jews must necessarily be good for humanity. Conversely, a crime against the Jews is a “crime against humanity,” a concept they created in 1945. Confusing Jewishness with humanity is a sign of collective narcissism, but when it comes to regarding non-Jews as less than human, it becomes a sign of collective psychopathy.
Collectively, Jews consider themselves innocent of the charges brought against them. That is why Zionist pioneer Leo Pinsker, a medical doctor, regarded Judeophobia as “a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.” By way of consequence, the Jews are “the people chosen for universal hatred” (even atheist Jews cannot help defining Jewishness as chosenness).[5]
Israel, the Jewish State, is the psychopath among nations. It acts towards other nations in the way a psychopath acts towards his fellow men. “Only psychiatrists can explain Israel’s behavior,” wrote Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in Haaretz in 2010. However, his diagnosis, including “paranoia, schizophrenia and megalomania,”[6] is mistaken. Considering Israel’s absolute self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians, and its extraordinary capacity to lie and manipulate, we are dealing with a psychopath.
By drawing a parallel between psychopathy and the attitude of Israel, I do not blame Israelis or Jews as individuals. They are part of this collective psychopathy only to the extent of their submission to the national ideology. We can make a comparison with another sort of collective entity. In The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Joel Bakan noted that large companies behave like psychopaths, insensitive to the suffering of those they crush in their pursuit of profit: “Corporate behavior is very similar to that of a psychopath.”[7] My analysis of Israel is based on the same reasoning. Except that Israel is much more dangerous than any giant company (even Pfizer), because the ideology that causes its personality disorder is much more insane than the liberal, social-darwinian ideology that rules the Stock Market. Israel’s ideology is biblical.
The Biblical Virus
Israel’s collective psychopathy is not genetic, it is cultural, but it was formed is very ancient times, and so it is embedded in the ancestral subconscious (whatever that is): it ultimately comes from the jealous god invented by the Levites to control the starving tribes they set out to conquer Palestine some three thousand years ago. By birth, Israel is the nation of the psychopathic god.
Yahweh, “the god of Israel,” is an angry and lonely volcano god who manifests toward all other gods an implacable hatred, and ends up considering them as non-gods, him being, in fact, the only true god. This very clearly characterizes him as a psychopath among gods. By contrast, for the Egyptians, according to German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, “the gods are social beings,” and harmony between them guarantees harmony in the cosmos.[8] There was, moreover, a degree of translatability between the pantheons of various civilizations. But Yahweh taught the Hebrews contempt for the deities of their neighbors—making them, in the eyes of these neighbors, a threat to the cosmic and social order. Yahweh is essentially, says Assmann, a theoclastic god: “You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods, on high mountains, on hills, under any spreading tree; you must tear down their altars, smash their sacred stones, burn their sacred poles, hack to bits the statues of their gods and obliterate their name from that place” (Deuteronomy 12:2-3).
Yahweh may be a character of fiction, but his hold on the Jewish mind is nevertheless real. “To appeal to a crazy, violent father, and for three thousand years, that is what it is to be a crazy Jew!”[9] said Smilesburger in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock. Jews have been taught by Yahweh to keep strictly separate from other people. Food prohibitions serve to prevent all socialization outside the tribe: “I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26).
The nature of the covenant is not moral. The sole criterion for approval by Yahweh is obedience to his arbitrary laws and commands. To slaughter treacherously hundreds of prophets of Baal is good, because it is the will of Yahweh (1Kings 18). To show mercy to the king of the Amalekites is bad, because when Yahweh says, “kill everyone,” he means “everyone” (1Samuel 15). In the biblical historiography, the fate of the Jewish people depends on them following Yahweh’s orders, no matter how insane. As well said by Kevin MacDonald:
The idea that Jewish suffering results from Jews straying from their own law occurs almost like a constant drumbeat throughout the Tanakh—a constant reminder that the persecution of Jews is not the result of their own behavior vis-à-vis Gentiles but rather the result of their behavior vis-à-vis God.[10]
If the Jews follow Yahweh’s command of alienating themselves from the rest of humankind, in return, Yahweh promises to make them rule over humankind: “follow his ways, keep his statutes, his commandments, his customs, and listen to his voice,” and Yahweh “will raise you higher than every other nation he has made”; “You will make many nations your subjects, yet you will be subject to none” (Deuteronomy 26:17-19 and 28:12). This sounds very much, actually, like the pact Satan proposed to Jesus: “the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage.’” (Matthew 4:8-9).
If Israel follows scrupulously the Law, Yahweh promises to submit all nations to the domination of Israel, and destroy those that resist. “Kings will fall prostrate before you, faces to the ground, and lick the dust at your feet,” whereas “the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish” (Isaiah 49:23 and 60:12). Nations must either recognize Israel’s sovereignty, or be destroyed. Yahweh told Israel that he has identified “seven nations greater and stronger than yourself,” that “you must put under the curse of destruction,” and not “show them any pity.” As for their kings, “you will blot out their names under heaven” (Deuteronomy 7:1-2, 24).
The war code of Deuteronomy 20 commands to exterminate “any living thing” in the conquered cities of Canaan. In practice, the rule is extended to all people who resist the Israelites in their conquest. It was applied by Moses to the Midianites, although in this case Yahweh allowed his warriors to keep the young virgin girls (Numbers 31). It was applied by Joshua to the Canaanite city of Jericho, where the Israelites “enforced the curse of destruction on everyone in the city: men and women, young and old, including the oxen, the sheep and the donkeys, slaughtering them all” (Joshua 6:21). In the city of Ai, the inhabitants were all slaughtered, twelve thousand of them, “until not one was left alive and none to flee. … When Israel had finished killing all the inhabitants of Ai in the open ground, and in the desert where they had pursued them, and when every single one had fallen to the sword, all Israel returned to Ai and slaughtered its remaining population.” Women were not spared. “For booty, Israel took only the cattle and the spoils of this town” (Joshua 8:22-27). Then came the turns of the cities of Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, and Hazor. In the whole land, Joshua “left not one survivor and put every living thing under the curse of destruction, as Yahweh, god of Israel, had commanded” (10:40).
As wrote Avigail Abarbanel in “Why I left the Cult,” the Zionist conquerors of Palestine “have been following quite closely the biblical dictate to Joshua to just walk in and take everything. … For a supposedly non-religious movement it’s extraordinary how closely Zionism … has followed the Bible.”[11] Kim Chernin, another Israeli dissident, wrote in “The Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial”: “I can’t count the number of times I read the story of Joshua as a tale of our people coming into their rightful possession of their promised land without stopping to say to myself, ‘but this is a history of rape, plunder, slaughter, invasion, and destruction of other peoples.’”[12]
Yahweh offers only two possible paths to Israel: domination of other nations, if Israel keeps Yahweh’s covenant of separateness, or annihilation by these same nations, if Israel breaks the covenant:
“if you make friends with the remnant of these nations still living beside you, if you intermarry with them, if you mix with them and they with you, then know for certain that Yahweh your god will stop dispossessing these nations before you, and for you they will be a snare, a pitfall, thorns in your sides and thistles in your eyes, until you vanish from this fine country given you by Yahweh your god.” (Joshua 23:12-14)
Dispossess others or be dispossessed, dominate or be exterminated: Israel cannot think beyond that alternative.
Zionism is Biblical
What has it got to do with Zionism, you ask? Isn’t Zionism a secular ideology? I think it is high time to dispel this misunderstanding. Zionism is a product of Jewishness, and Jewishness is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh. Whether he has read it or not, whether he judges it historical or mythical, every Jew ultimately bases his Jewishness on the Bible—or whatever he knows about the Bible. Jewishness is the internalization of the psychopathic god. It makes little difference whether Jews define their Jewishness in religious terms or in ethnic terms. From a religious viewpoint, the Bible preserves the memory and the essence of the Covenant with God, whereas from a secular viewpoint, the Bible is the foundational narrative of the Jewish people, and the pattern by which Jews interpret their whole subsequent history (the Dispersion, the Holocaust, the rebirth of Israel, and so on).
It is true that Theodor Herzl, the prophet of political Zionism, did not draw his inspiration from the Bible. Yet he termed his ideology Zionism, using a biblical name of Jerusalem. As for post-Herzl Zionists, and for the actual founders of the modern State of Israel, they were steeped in the Bible. “The Bible is our mandate,” declared Chaim Weizmann in 1919, and in 1948 he offered Truman a Torah scroll for his recognition of Israel. Thus begins the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel:
ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) – the Land of Israel, Palestine] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.
There is no question that the State of Israel was founded on the biblical claim.
David Ben-Gurion, the author of this document and the father of the nation, had a biblical vision of the Jewish people. To him, according to his biographer Dan Kurzman, the rebirth of Israel in 1948 “paralleled the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest of the land by Joshua, the Maccabean revolt.” Ben-Gurion had never been to a synagogue, and ate pork for breakfast, yet he was steeped in biblical history. “There can be no worthwhile political or military education about Israel without profound knowledge of the Bible,” he used to say.[13] Tom Segev writes in his more recent biography:
He sponsored a Bible study class in his home and promoted two concepts to characterize the State of Israel’s moral character and its destiny and duty to itself and the world: the first was “chosen people,” a term coming from the covenant between God and the people of Israel (Exodus 19:5-6); the second was the Jewish people’s commitment to the principles of justice and peace that make it a “light to the nations,” in the spirit of the prophets (Isaiah 49:6). He frequently spoke and wrote about these concepts.[14]
Ben-Gurion’s biblical mindset became more and more apparent as he grew older. Consider for example the fact that, while he was begging Kennedy to let his people have the Bomb because the Egyptians wanted to exterminate them (as they had under Moses), he prophesied in the magazine Look (January 16, 1962) that within twenty-five years, Jerusalem “will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”[15] Ben-Gurion was not crazy, he was simply thinking biblically.
Almost every Israeli leader of Ben-Gurion’s generation and the next shared share the same biblical mindset. Moshe Dayan, the military hero of the 1967 Six-Day War, justified his annexation of new territory in a book titled Living with the Bible (1978). Naftali Bennett, while Israeli minister of Education, has also justified the annexation of the West Bank by the Bible.[16]Zionists can find in the Bible all the justifications they need: for Gaza, they have Judges 1:18-19: “And Judah took Gaza with its territory … Now Yahweh was with Judah, and they took possession of the hill country.” There are now overt Bible freaks in the Israeli government, like the Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who shoot Bible quotes every day. “God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people” is the alpha and the omega of Zionism, not just for Israelis, but for the Christians who, since 1917, have supported the Jewish claim and support Israel today.
Even more than Ben-Gurion, Benjamin Netanyahu thinks biblically, and it is also getting clearer and clearer as he gets older. He also knows Christians cannot seriously argue against the biblical claim. On March 3, 2015, he dramatized in front of the American Congress his phobia of Iran by referring to the biblical book of Esther:
We’re an ancient people. In our nearly 4,000 years of history, many have tried repeatedly to destroy the Jewish people. Tomorrow night, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, we’ll read the book of Esther. We’ll read of a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jewish people some 2,500 years ago. But a courageous Jewish woman, Queen Esther, exposed the plot and gave the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies. The plot was foiled. Our people were saved. Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us.[17]
Netanyahu scheduled his address on the eve of Purim, which celebrates the happy end of the Book of Esther—the slaughter of 75,000 Persian men, women and children. In 2019, Netanyahu’s pronounced these words during a tour of the West Bank, “I believe in the book of books and I read it as a call to action that every generation must do what it can to ensure the eternity of Israel.” The Bible occupies such a large part of his brain that he wants to put a Bible on the Moon!
So please stop calling Netanyahu a psychopath. Or at least, call him a biblical psychopath, a worshipper of the psychopathic god. And while you are there, learn see the Hebrew Bible for what it is: “a conspiracy against the rest of the world,” as said H. G. Wells. In the books of the Bible, “you have the conspiracy plain and clear, … an aggressive and vindictive conspiracy. … It is not tolerance but stupidity to shut our eyes to their quality.”[18]
Notes
[1] Freud developed this theory in three books: Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion.
[2] Robert Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, The Guilford Press, 1993.
[3] Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, HarperCollins, 2007.
[4] Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, University of Chicago Press, 1993; J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, Basic Books , 1997.
[12] Kim Chernin, “The Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial,” Tikkun, Sept. 2002, quoted in Kevin MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilization, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism, Occidental Press, 2007, pp. 27-28.
[13] Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, Touchstone, 1983, pp. 17–18, 22, 26–28.
[14] Tom Segev, A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, Apollo, 2019, kindle l. 286.
[15] David Ben-Gurion and Amram Ducovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116.
Let’s get two things straight. First, Palestinians face brutal national oppression and indiscriminate murder by the state of Israel—they have every right to defend themselves, including through force. Second, the targeted murder of Israeli civilians by Hamas and its allies is a despicable crime which is totally counterproductive for Palestinian liberation. With Gaza now facing starvation and mass murder at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the international workers movement must urgently oppose this onslaught. But to advance and triumph, the struggle for Palestinian liberation needs a totally different road from everything on offer, whether Islamism or secular nationalism. What is needed is not empty sentiments of empathy from the cabal of left liberals and fake socialists but a revolutionary road for Palestinian liberation.
How to Defeat the Zionist State
To defeat one’s enemy, one must exploit its weaknesses and neutralize its strengths. The resilience of the state of Israel comes from the fact that the millions of Jewish people living within its borders see it as the only way to defend themselves in a hostile region. As long as this is the case, Israelis will fight to the death to defend the Zionist state. This was all part of the plan from the time British imperialism decided to back the Zionist project. Today the U.S. and Israel secure their interests in the Middle East by violating the national rights of the Palestinian people and fostering a permanent state of hostility between Jews and Muslims. The combination of a militarized population and imperialist backing gives the Israeli state its strength and appearance of invincibility.
However, this structure is brittle and is maintained only by a siege mentality fostered by the ruling class. The weak point is precisely that it is a militarized theocratic state ruled by an ever more extreme clique of corrupt fanatics. Israeli working people face conscription, religious regimentation and brutal working and living conditions. Resistance to any of this is labeled as betrayal of Jews. This situation creates deep racial, social and political fissures in Israel, which must be exploited to break the Zionist state and liberate Palestinians.
The Hamas strategy of jihad does none of this and plays only to Israel’s strengths. By targeting Israeli civilians, they have succeeded only in rallying all Israelis behind the hated Netanyahu government, guaranteeing that the whole society will be united behind the bloody military response against Gaza. A military confrontation under these conditions will bring defeat and untold death to the Palestinian people. There can be no victory without breaking the link between the Jewish working people and their rulers, and this cannot be done without recognizing the democratic right of the Israeli Jewish people to live as a nation in Israel/Palestine.
Islamists and Palestinian nationalists are always caught between either directing their fight against the entire Jewish people in Israel or accepting cohabitation with the Zionist state. Both are dead ends. The key is to drive a wedge between the Israeli people and the theocratic state. This can only be done with a Marxist military and political strategy, based on the understanding that the interrelated class and national conflicts cannot be resolved within the bounds of private property. Only from this starting point is it possible to elaborate a program corresponding to the interests of both Palestinians and the Israeli working class.
Taking the question of the land, Palestinians justly want restitution for the historical crime carried out against them. Within existing social structures, this is impossible to reconcile with the right of Jewish people to keep the land they have often lived on for generations. But Israel, like all capitalist societies, is extremely unequal. Most land and property is controlled by a tiny fraction of the population while the majority struggles to get by. By targeting this parasitical layer for expropriation, it is possible to both start bringing justice to Palestinians and improve the conditions of Jewish working people.
On the military level, it is necessary to exert the maximum pressure on the IDF to show Israeli society that Palestinian oppression comes at an unbearable cost. Blindly launching rockets on Israeli cities only increases the troops’ willingness to fight. Instead, the entire Palestinian population must be mobilized to oppose every inch of territorial encroachment and to break the siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
But armed resistance alone cannot bring victory: it must be combined with a perspective of class struggle inside Israel. This requires struggles for the economic liberation of workers, against racial discrimination of Arabs and non-white Jews and for the separation of religion and state. These must be connected to breaking the main obstacle standing in the way of any social progress: Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. The overarching task of revolutionaries in Israel is precisely to fight for the workers movement to take up the cause of Palestinian liberation, in struggle against the Zionist labor leaders.
Crucially, the class struggle in the cities must also be brought inside the Israeli army, with a perspective to split it. The IDF is overwhelmingly composed of conscripts who are forced to serve. If military service is no longer seen as vital for the survival of the Jewish people, if the cost of oppressing Palestinian people becomes too great and if conflict within Israel reaches a boiling point, the Israeli army can and will crack.
More than 75 years of brutal history have completely intertwined the fates of Israeli Jews and Palestinians. The liberation of Palestine requires the breakup of the Zionist state, which is impossible without the liberation of the Israeli working class. In turn, the economic, democratic and social advancement of Israeli workers, and even their continued existence in the Middle East, requires the end of Palestine’s oppression, which is the very foundation of the Zionist state.
How to Defeat Imperialism
Israel is backed by the U.S. and all the other imperialist powers, as seen once again with their unconditional support of the onslaught against Gaza. Thus, the liberation of Palestinians requires a strategy to confront and defeat imperialism in the Middle East, and ultimately worldwide. But nationalists are utterly incapable of doing so, placing their faith in the UN and the “international community” or relying on the Arab states to push back against the U.S.
The UN is a den of thieves dominated by the U.S. and the “great” powers, who are themselves responsible for the carving up of Palestine and its continued oppression. The consensus among imperialists is thoroughly pro-Israel. Even if they broker a cease-fire or peace deal, it would necessarily reflect their interest, which is to maintain the Zionist state as their outpost in the region. From the PLO to the BDS campaign, any strategy which relies on the robbers of the world can only intensify the oppression of Palestine and lead to defeat.
As for the Muslim states, from Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon to Iran, they have a hundred times over stabbed the Palestinians in the back for the sake of their own opportunistic interests. The sheiks, dictators and mullahs lording over the Muslim world will “defend” Palestine only to the extent that it helps their own economic and military aims and strengthens their own position. Any strategy tying the struggle for Palestinian liberation to them will necessarily end up in betrayal.
What is needed is a strategy based not on the “international community” of imperialists and regional capitalist rulers but on mobilizing the international working class against all imperialist and capitalist powers. What is needed is an alliance of workers and peasants throughout the Middle East to throw out the U.S. imperialists and liberate the entire region. This includes Israeli Jewish workers who have no interest in continuing to be used as pawns for the U.S. Furthermore, fighters for Palestine must build an international front with American, British, French and German working-class organizations to stop arms shipments to Israel. These workers are the ones handling this cargo. And it is their struggles which are the surest way to weaken imperialism and advance the cause of Palestinian liberation.
But we can see that these most reliable allies are the ones rejected by the pan-Islamists and nationalists. In allying with the Arab rulers, they ally with the exploiters of the Arab masses. And American and European workers, including Jewish workers, will never be won to a struggle waged under the Islamic banner and for the destruction of all Israelis.
Socialist Cheerleaders for Hamas
Following the Hamas offensive against Israel on October 7, pro-Israeli media have unleashed a massive propaganda campaign to justify Israel’s bloody military retaliation and whitewash Palestinian oppression. To counter this, so-called communists and socialists from the Socialist Workers Party in Britain to the Communist Party of Greece have swept under the rug the criminal targeting of civilians by Hamas in the name of Palestine’s right to defend itself.
Not only does this drag the name of communism in the mud by associating it with the crimes of Hamas, but it also accepts that the Palestinian people will continue to be led by these fanatic Islamist butchers. They know full well that Hamas will not bring about Palestinian freedom yet remain silent on the issue out of empty liberal solidarity.
The entire Hamas strategy is to provoke a strong Israeli reaction, effectively strapping a suicide vest on all of Gaza. It is necessary to unequivocally stand in defense of Gaza against the bloody retaliation by Israel while at the same time opposing this disastrous strategy.
Some leftists such as Left Voice, U.S. section of the Trotskyist Fraction, whisper at the end of their article that “we are on the side of the resistance of the Palestinian people, without suggesting that we share the strategy and methods of Hamas, whose goal is to establish a theocratic state” (7 October). That said, nothing they write is aimed at breaking the hold of nationalism and Islamism on the Palestinian liberation struggle. They like most of the left take on the role of liberal cheerleaders, who cannot be critical of oppressed groups even as they are being led toward the abyss.
The role of the pseudo-socialist left is all the more despicable given the Palestinians’ desperate and ever-growing need of a viable road for liberation. Events are rapidly moving toward a level of carnage and reaction unseen in decades. If socialists do not fight for a revolutionary solution to the conflict, the growing desperation of the Palestinian people will be channeled once more into the arms of Islamist reaction while Jews are pushed deeper into the arms of Zionism. This carnival of reaction will not stay within the borders of Israel and Palestine but will spread far and wide over the Middle East and the world. It is the urgent task of socialists to break this cycle.
Zionist Revenge After Hamas Offensive Shakes Israel to the Core
The full-scale Zionist destruction of Gaza has begun. Rather than hitting individual buildings, as in 2021 and 2014, now the Israeli air force is leveling whole districts, giving no warning to the inhabitants. Above: Palestinians survey extent of damage in Al-Rimal neighborhood of Gaza, October 9. (Photo: Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times)
Drive the Zionists Out of the West Bank and Gaza For International Workers Action Against the Attack on Gaza
For an Arab-Hebrew Palestinian Workers State In a Socialist Federation of the Middle East!
OCTOBER 10 – In the early morning hours of Saturday, October 7, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in Gaza carried out a stunning surprise attack on Israel, the Zionist state that has driven millions of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland and oppresses millions more in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and within Israel. Reportedly over 5,000 missiles were launched, reaching as far as Tel Aviv, overwhelming Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome anti-missile shield. The massive, 30-foot high, 40-mile long border wall that completely surrounds the Gaza Strip was breached in numerous places and Hamas fighters poured out, overrunning two dozen Israeli communities. At this time (October 10) the Israeli military is reporting over 900 Israelis dead, while Palestinian medical authorities report almost 800 Palestinians killed, mostly by Israeli air strikes in densely populated Gaza. In addition, there are thousands of injured on both sides.
The unprecedented number of Israeli dead has deeply shaken the Jewish population. The Zionist media talk of Israeli forces’ “Catastrophic Failure” (Haaretz) while Arab publications hail Hamas’ “Decisive Blow,” headlining “From Indignation to Jubilation” (Al Mayadeen). Western media and politicians denounce pro-Palestinian demonstrators as “apologists for terrorism.” For the first time in more than half a century of clashes, more Israelis were killed than Palestinians. (The usual figure is more than 20 Palestinians dead for every Israeli.1) Israel’s military is quickly turning that around and has already begun, once again, to turn the giant concentration camp that is Gaza into a killing field of Palestinians. Already more than 1,200 homes in Gaza have been destroyed, and as Israel’s rightist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed, the bloody assault on Gaza is “just the beginning.” As for Israel’s patrons in Washington, who pose as champions of “human rights,” they are responsible for the deaths of close to a million people in U.S. imperialist wars just since 2001.2
In a matter of minutes, using simple earthmoving equipment Hamas fighters broke through border fence that cost Israel billions and took years to build. The hated fence kept Palestinians locked up for decades in a Nazi-style concentration camp, “the world’s largest prison,” unable to leave and dependent on their Israeli (and Egyptian) jailers for food, fuel, water and electricity. (Photo: Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa / Reuters)
Currently, the United States under Democratic president Joe Biden is running a bloody proxy war against Russia in Ukraine under the watchword “as long as it takes” – meaning, to fight to the last Ukrainian. But that, and previous squabbling with Netanyahu, hasn’t gotten in the way of Washington marching in lockstep with the perennial hardline Zionist Israeli leader (almost 17 years in office, on and off) as he prepares to flatten Gaza. Israel has requested, and the Pentagon said it will supply, more precision-guided munitions from the U.S. (The Pentagon sent 155-mm. artillery shells from its stockpiles in Israel to Ukraine, but now Israel’s military requires the arms as it gears up to occupy Gaza.) Meanwhile, Biden’s vow – and that of just about every other imperialist leader – that “Israel has a right to defend itself” amounts to giving the Zionist state a “license to kill” Palestinians. This is now an Israel/U.S. war on Gaza.
Any real blow against the Zionist state by Palestinian forces, even by reactionary Islamists, is in the interests of the workers and oppressed of the world. But along with striking at the Israeli military, Hamas fighters carried out an indiscriminate terror attack, killing some hundreds of Israeli party-goers, residents of kibbutz communities and apartment dwellers in southern cities. This is not striking at the Zionist occupation machine but a random assault on Israelis that undermines the defense of the Palestinian people. Such a jihad (holy war) is the method of right-wing nationalists and religious zealots, such as the Islamists of Hamas … and of Zionist militarists of all political stripes. Now the misnamed Israel Defense Force (IDF) is doing the same on a far larger scale, against the entire population of Gaza. The toll will quickly surpass the hundreds of Palestinians the IDF murdered in its 2021 attack on Gaza.
In almost all the imperialist countries, there are now moves to suppress any and all support for Palestinians and enforce a Zionist monopoly on political space. In Germany, pro-Palestinian protests have been banned in Berlin. In France, pro-Palestinian demonstrations scheduled for Paris, Lyon and Marseille have likewise been banned, on the bogus grounds that they “incite racial hate.” Meanwhile, the justice minister has launched an investigation of the leftist Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) and called for a “swift and firm penal response” to any support for Palestine, claiming that this is equal to anti-Semitism. In Italy, the education minister dispatched inspectors to investigate and possibly jail student collectives in Milan that have come out in favor of the Palestinians. It is necessary to denounce and defy these bans and threats, and to link protests against the NATO imperialist war in Ukraine with defense of the Palestinian people. This could include workers action against the shipment of arms to Israel and Ukraine.
Biden speaking at the White House the day after venomous announcement that the U.S. would supply Israel with “what it needs” in weaponry to bomb Gaza into smithereens. This is an Israel/U.S. war on the Palestinians. (Photo: Samuel Corum/Sipa)
In the U.S., the Democratic Party is whipping up pro-Zionist hysteria. New York governor Kathy Hochul went on the warpath against the NYC Democratic Socialists of America for promoting an October 8 pro-Palestinian demonstration she called “repugnant.” She is in effect putting a target on the back of anyone who dares to speak up in defense of a besieged people. What is truly vile is the support of Democrats and Republicans for the Zionist murder machine. Hochul was joined in this by New York City mayor, ex-cop Eric Adams, who recently returned from a junket to Israel, where he currently has a delegation NYPD cops for “training.” At the same time, several universities are “investigating” students and student groups who have come out in defense of Palestinian rights. It is necessary to confront this new McCarthyite witch-hunting head-on.
Yet DSA Democrats in Congress echoed Biden’s vituperation. Their star, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, issued an October 9 statement, “I condemn Hamas’ attack in the strongest possible terms.” While piously calling for “an immediate ceasefire and escalation,” her statement had not a word of criticism of Israel or defense of Palestinians. Another member of AOC’s “Squad,” Jamaal Bowman, made a similar statement.3 Now (October 10) the NYC DSA is backing away from its earlier stance, saying it is “sorry for the confusion our post caused.” All DSAers, as members of this pro-imperialist organization, are complicit in the shameful capitulation before the Zionist and imperialist censors. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American, at least called to lift the blockade, end the occupation and dismantle the suffocating system that produces resistance.
At the White House today, Biden declared: “In this moment, we must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel,” adding that “we will make sure that Israel has what it needs” to attack Gaza. So in this moment, as the imperialist warmongers are insisting it is “which side are you on,” we are equally clear: as Israel is dropping U.S.-supplied bombs on mosques, schools and hospitals, murdering worshipers, schoolchildren and patients, all opponents of imperialism and Zionism must stand with the Palestinian people, oppressed by Israel since its inception, and now subject to genocidal attack.
The Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the League for the Fourth International, has joined recent pro-Palestinian protests with signs calling to “Defend Gaza, Defeat Israeli-U.S. War on Palestinians!” and “Defend Palestinians’ Right to Return!” We called “For Workers Action Against Zionist Terror,” and declared, “Defend Gaza, the New Warsaw Ghetto! Expel Zionist Occupiers from the West Bank!” Our signs call as well as to defeat the U.S./NATO war drive against Russia and China, for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, to break with the Democrats and build a revolutionary workers party, and to fight for an Arab-Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East.
Bitter Fruits of Decades of Bloody Zionist Occupation
Israeli tanks line up in preparation of ground invasion of Gaza that can only be a genocidal slaugher of Palestinians. Drive the Zionists out of Gaza and the occupied West Bank! (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg / AP)
Courageous Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who has reported from and lived in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank for decades, wrote in the liberal Zionist daily Haaretz (10 October):
“In a few days Israelis went through what Palestinians have experienced as a matter of routine for decades, and are still experiencing – military incursions, death, cruelty, slain children, bodies piled up in the road, siege, fear, anxiety over loved ones, captivity, being targets of vengeance, indiscriminate lethal fire at both those involved in the fighting (soldiers) and the uninvolved (civilians), a position of inferiority, destruction of buildings, ruined holidays or celebrations, weakness and helplessness in the face of all-powerful armed men, and searing humiliation.”
The Hamas operation, on air, land and sea – using bulldozers to break through the massive fortifications that Israel spent billions to build, and which have confined Gazans for decades in their barren strip of land; vaulting over the wall on improvised paragliders; knocking out military communications, seizing an Israeli army base, taking out Israeli tanks with drones – caused celebration in much of the Arab world and shock in the Zionist government. Its security apparatus apparently had no inkling of the elaborate operation, which had to involve hundreds of people over many months of preparation. Israel’s vaunted Mossad spy agency, whose deadly skullduggery has become a staple of Hollywood thrillers, was caught flatfooted. The arrogant Israeli leaders, who revel in subjugating Palestinians, were dealt a blow.
Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant orders a racist, genocidal siege of Gaza. (Photo: Middle East Observer / X)
The Zionist leaders are now out for bloody revenge. Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant declared on Tuesday (October 9), “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals. We act accordingly.” This vile declaration of intent to commit genocide is from one of the more “moderate” elements of the hard-right government, who opposed Netanyahu’s judicial reform that hundreds of thousands of liberal Zionists have mobilized against for months. Netanyahu himself said that what the Israeli government was about to do to Gaza “will reverberate with them for generations.” This talk is echoed by U.S. president Biden, who today declared the Hamas attack “pure, unadulterated evil.” That would be a better description of U.S. imperialism’s murderous wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and now in Ukraine.
For 16 years, ever since Hamas took over the territory in 2007, more than 2 million people have been penned up in the tiny Gaza Strip, smaller than the New York City borough of Queens, unable to leave what amounts to the largest prison in the world. Controlled by Israel and Egypt, Gazans are deprived of jobs, dependent on their jailers for food, water, fuel and on the United Nations for meager essential services. The Palestinian population of the West Bank, under Israeli occupation since 1967, is confined to even smaller enclaves, subject to repeated murderous incursions by IDF hit squads and fascist settler gangs. Keep an entire population locked up for decades, condemning them to a threadbare existence, and what did Israel expect? People who feel they have nothing left to lose may strike out in rage.
For Arab-Hebrew Workers Revolution!
Last November, Netanyahu took office yet again, this time at the head of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, including two ministers from the fascist movement of the late Meir Kahane, Bezalel Smotrich (finance minister, also in charge of the West Bank) and Itamar Ben-Gvir (national security minister, in charge of the police). Ever since, there has been a string of provocative police/army attacks on Palestinian cities on the West Bank, particularly in Jenin, searching for “militants.” More than 200 Palestinians were killed in 2023 already before the October 7 attack. And last week, “More than 800 Israeli settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem on Thursday morning under the protection of Israeli forces” (New Arab, 5 October). None of this is mentioned in the Western media, of course.
October 6 was the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israel shook under a surprise attack by Egypt and other Arab countries. It can’t be an accident that Hamas staged its attack early on the next day. In its announcement of the assault, “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’ military arm cited the attacks on the Jerusalem mosque, and the over 5,000 Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails. Hamas justified taking hostages in order to exchange them for the imprisoned Palestinians. Defenders of democratic rights have long called for release of the thousands of Palestinians who are being held by Israel as hostages. But in the present atmosphere, it is doubtful that concern for the lives of Israeli hostages will hold off the Zionist military invasion of Gaza for even a minute.
It is also certainly not accidental that the dramatic Hamas attack came after the huge protests of hundreds of thousands against Netanyahu’s judicial “reform” that would eliminate the ability of Israel’s Supreme Court to block decisions and policies voted by the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Although liberal and “left” Zionists (and their U.S. backers) call this a “coup” by Netanyahu, the present situation, where a few unelected judges can veto the actions of the elected parliament, is highly undemocratic. The real issue is that the Zionist state itself is anti-democratic to the core, a religiously defined “Jewish state” based on the subjugation of the Palestinian population, whether as second-class “citizens” in Israel itself, or as subjects without rights in the occupied West Bank. Yet the liberal Zionists have rigorously excluded any Palestinian flags from their protests.
Speaking at the United Nations on September 22, Israeli prime minister brandished a jumbo marker to draw a map of “The New Middle East” in which the occupied West Bank and Gaza were annexed to the Zionist state. (Photo: Richard Drew / AP)
Hamas may also have calculated that the Biden administration in the U.S. was preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, and thus less able to intervene, which is far from the case; and that its attack would be make it more difficult for Arab regimes to “normalize” relations with Israel, which could turn out to be accurate. Speaking at the United Nations last month, Netanyahu held up a map of the “new Middle East,” and with a red jumbo marker drew an axis extending from the United Arab Emirates across Saudi Arabia and Israel (including the West Bank and Gaza) to Europe. But while such a Zionist pipe dream may be off the agenda for now, the fighting in Israel could spark a regional war. The U.S. moved a naval battle group to the eastern Mediterranean as a warning to Iran not to intervene, but a massacre in Gaza could set off explosive unrest throughout the region.
For now, the liberal Zionists are closing ranks with Netanyahu, as negotiations for a “national unity” government are underway which would include Benny Gantz, the retired general who ran against Netanyahu in the October 2022 elections. While being sold to the Zionist “left” as a way to rein in the fascist ministers, Gantz is no “dove,” having commanded the previous massacre of Palestinians in Gaza in 2021 as defense minister in an earlier “unity” government led by Netanyahu. A full-scale invasion of Gaza will doubtless produce significant casualties in the IDF, as Hamas forces capable of overcoming the border wall in minutes will certainly have prepared deadly traps inside Gaza.4 But no matter what the scale of Israeli losses, the impending Israeli ground attack (for which the IDF has mobilized over 360,000 reservists) will be nothing but a deliberate slaughter of Palestinians.
Many Palestinians living under the yoke of Israeli occupation and Palestinian activists abroad were elated by the Hamas attack. The bourgeois-nationalist PLO and the deeply discredited Palestine Authority it leads are nothing but security guards for Israel, paid for by the United States through the U.S. Security Coordinator, a Pentagon lieutenant general. While it has grown at the expense of the PLO, the Islamic fundamentalism of Hamas and other formations such as Islamic Jihad can only lead to defeat. The surrounding Arab states will not come to Palestinians’ aid in anything more than a token manner, and more likely not at all, as seen in the role of Egypt and Jordan as jailers of Palestinian refugees ever since the 1967 Arab-Israel War. Nor is Iran likely to join a fight with Washington, as it has gone to great lengths to get U.S. sanctions partially lifted. All these forces – including Hamas – in reality seek to strike a deal with the imperialists and Zionists, at the Palestinians’ expense.5
The only road to a future of peace and genuine liberation for the Palestinian masses lies in common revolutionary struggle with the working people of Israel, both Hebrew-speaking and Arab, as remote and unlikely as that seems at present. And the Jewish population of Israel, half of which is not religiously observant, can only look forward to a “future” as a besieged garrison facing the endless threat and periodic reality of war. The Zionist “left” is finished as an electoral force, consumed by the logical evolution of the theocratic state it once led. Meanwhile, the fascistic settler movement may try to seize on the present crisis to carry out longstanding plans to push hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs out of the West Bank and Israel.6 A “Jewish state,” by definition exclusionary and counterposed to the surrounding population, can never be secure in the Middle East, even using genocidal terror, as Israel is now doing.
Internationalist contingent in October 9 Palestinian solidarity march in New York City. (Internationalist photo)
The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International stand squarely on the side of the Palestinian people, which we have always defended against the Zionist oppressor state and its imperialist patrons who have condemned them to a stateless, impoverished existence and exile. Trotskyists opposed the founding of the Zionist state, built on the dispossession and mass expulsion of the Arab majority of Palestine. This historic crime came on the back of the Nazi Holocaust that murdered over 6 million Jews in World War II, and was fed by the refusal of the “democratic” imperialists to accept Jewish refugees during and after the war. We oppose all religiously based states, whether the self-proclaimed “Jewish state” of Israel or the Islamic Republics of Iran and Pakistan, officially Christian states (like Franco’s Spain), etc.
Nevertheless, as a result of this history of crimes upon crimes, there are now two peoples inhabiting the same small territory, the Hebrew-speaking population of some 7 million and an equal number of Palestinians split between the occupied West Bank, Gaza and Israel proper. Meanwhile, there are another 3+ million Palestinian refugees in the immediate vicinity (Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt), and another couple million elsewhere in the diaspora. Defending the oppressed Palestinians against the Israeli oppressor, we fight for the right to return of all Palestinians to their homeland. To open a path toward a just and viable solution, there is no way around it: these two peoples both have national rights to exist. But in a “two state” scenario, as foreseen in the 1994 Oslo Accords, under capitalism who gets scarce resources, like water, will be the stronger entity, which won’t be a small, dispersed Palestinian “state.”
While many “progressives” call Israel a “colonial settler state,” unlike the West Bank settlers, who are mostly émigrés from the U.S., particularly New York City, the vast majority of Hebrew-speaking Israelis have no other home to go back to. The Zionist fortress state of Israel must be exploded from within, and the mass protests of the first nine months of 2023 show plenty of fissures that could crack the seeming monolith. The IG/LFI holds that in such cases of interpenetrated peoples, the only road to an equitable and democratic resolution to competing national rights is through socialist revolution by the common struggle of the working people of both nations. To secure real defense of the Palestinian people, we fight for a binational Arab-Hebrew Palestinian workers state, linking up with the powerful proletariats of Turkey, Egypt and Iran in a socialist federation of the Middle East.
That perspective requires forging the leadership of an Arab-Hebrew revolutionary internationalist workers party based on the genuine communism of Lenin and Trotsky. It is the only road to liberation, and it is a task we must undertake in the dark times ahead. ■
Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan stands in front of a screen promoting the film. (Photo: Valerie Macon / AFP)
By Luca and Karla
A crucial moment in Oppenheimer, this summer’s biggest blockbuster, comes after a long build-up to the film’s depiction of “Trinity” – the test of the atomic bomb developed by J. Robert Oppenheimer’s team of physicists at a secret military site in Los Alamos, New Mexico. When the countdown reaches zero at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the button is pushed to detonate the “gadget” – and sound stops. The screen fills with the terrifying sight of the nuclear blast, flames, flying debris, the mushroom cloud. All this the viewer experiences in silence. Unbearable seconds seem to go on forever – and then we’re hit with the deafening sound of the explosion at the moment an “air blast” of wind and dust reaches the scientists shown on screen.
What was tested at Trinity was a prototype for the bomb that three weeks later, on August 6, the United States dropped on the civilian population of Hiroshima, Japan. On August 9, the U.S. dropped a second atom bomb, on the civilian population of Nagasaki. It is estimated that over 200,000 people were killed in the A-bombing of these two cities, which came after U.S. firebombing of Tokyo (estimated deaths: almost 100,000) and dozens of others had been carried out using “conventional” weapons. These historic crimes, and so many others committed by “our own” U.S. imperialist rulers, must be burned into the consciousness of students and youth today.
“Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” says J. Robert Oppenheimer in the film (as in real life), quoting a phrase from an ancient Hindu text. We later see him reminding Albert Einstein that at the inception of the Manhattan Project (the government’s highly classified project to build the bomb), “We thought we might create a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world.” “What of it?” Einstein asks. “I believe we did,” says Oppenheimer. An image of nuclear flames consuming the world fills the screen – and the closing credits roll.
Certainly the fear of thermonuclear war – and if people don’t know this danger is escalating fast, they’re not paying attention – is one reason many are flocking to see Oppenheimer. Others seem just to seek a few thrills from the latest widely hyped flick from writer and director Christopher Nolan (Dark Knight, Batman Begins, Interstellar). The cast of Cillian Murphy (playing the title character), Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr. and many others plays its assigned roles to the hilt, and the film definitely makes an impact. What’s being debated widely in the media and elsewhere is just what that impact is.
For young Marxist activists like those of us working to put out this issue of Revolution, and hopefully for readers of our paper, Oppenheimer poses questions and topics of great importance. In a short review like this, we can only touch on some of these, while emphasizing how important it is to learn about these crimes of U.S. capitalism, as part of the fight to overthrow it. Together with books and films such as Hiroshima (1953), The Atomic Cafe (1982) and White Light/Black Rain (2007), resources include articles in this and other issues of Revolution. In an article on NYC’s “Nuclear Preparedness PSA” in our previous issue (Revolution No. 19, September 2022), we noted:
“To this day, American schoolchildren are taught that the U.S. mass murder of the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki … was ‘necessary’ to ‘save American lives.’ In reality, the nuclear attacks that killed hundreds of thousands in the blink of an eye were warning shots heralding the imperialist offensive on the Soviet Union we know as the Cold War. (Meanwhile even … ex-general and president Dwight Eisenhower, who played a key role in expanding U.S. nuclear weaponry, later admitted that the criminal bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had little military significance in the inter-imperialist war with Japan.)”
In Oppenheimer this is reflected, briefly, when Oppenheimer says that Henry Stimson, secretary of state under Harry Truman – the Democratic president who ordered the bombings – “tells me we bombed an enemy that was already defeated.”
In the wake of the film’s release, a number of articles have enumerated top U.S. military leaders from World War Two whose statements directly contradict the official story about why the A-bombs were dropped.1 Chester Nimitz, for example, who was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific fleet, said: “The use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan, [which was] already defeated and ready to surrender.” Carter Clarke, a brigadier general who summarized intercepted cables for Truman, said: “When we didn’t need do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it … we used [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as an experiment for two atomic bombs.”
First Blast of the Cold War
Mushroom clouds over the atom bombing of Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki, August 1945. Memory of these monstrous war crimes by U.S. imperialist rulers must be seared into the consciousness of students and youth, and everyone today. (Photo: U.S. National Archives)
A mountain of research demonstrated, years ago, that Truman and other leaders of U.S. imperialism were certainly avid to test the bomb on large populations in cities that had not “already been destroyed,” in the words of the official Target Committee. Already at the committee’s first meeting, held at the Pentagon on 27 April 1945, the decision was made to target “large urban areas of not less than 3 miles in diameter existing in the larger populated areas.”2
The willingness to use Japanese civilians in this “experiment,” as Truman referred to it, was facilitated by virulent anti-Asian racism. Widespread in the U.S., this was systematically intensified during WWII, both abroad and “at home,” where liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt put Japanese Americans in camps.
A key factor in the U.S. decision to bomb Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, was that the Soviet Union was about to declare war on Japan, which it did on August 8. Truman’s “human sacrifice” of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was in this sense the first blast of the Cold War: a message of terror that U.S. imperialism, intent on world domination, directed against the Soviet Union. This fact was always clear to the Trotskyists, who upheld military defense of the USSR, a bureaucratically degenerated workers state, while opposing the inter-imperialist war of our “own” capitalist rulers in WWII. But not only to us. It was abundantly clear to the Soviets, 27 million of whose citizens died in that war, in which the Red Army defeated Hitler. It was apparent to millions around the world, from the “democratic” Allies’ colonial subjects in Africa, Asia and Latin America, to the huge numbers of communist workers in war-ravaged Europe.
That the atomic bomb was a threat directed against the USSR was stated repeatedly, but of course not publicly, by a range of U.S. officials. Among them: the military head of the Manhattan Project himself, General Leslie Groves. “Groves said that, of course, the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets,” noted Manhattan Project scientist (later a Nobel Prize winner) Joseph Rotblat. Though the USSR was then allied to the U.S., Groves said that since shortly after taking charge of the A-bomb project he was quite aware “that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis” (Los Alamos Reporter, 19 July).
After 1945, the United States – the only country that has ever used atomic weapons in war – would repeatedly threaten to use them again, and repeatedly come close to doing so over the following decades.3 The Soviet Union’s development of its own nuclear weapons was crucial to staying the hand of U.S. rulers itching to nuke the USSR and China (with “general war plans” that would have resulted in approximately 600 million direct deaths) as well as insurgent colonial peoples from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean.
Aftermath of U.S. atom-bombing of Nagasaki, August 1945. (Photo: U.S. National Archives)
As moving as Oppenheimer‘s’ explosive scene about the Trinity test is, this is about as far as the film goes when depicting the effects of real-life nuclear bombs. One of the controversies swirling around Nolan’s movie is that throughout its three-hour length, the viewer is never shown any images of the death and devastation wrought by U.S. bombs in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.4 Thus the history is seen from the subjective perspective of the “father” of the “gadget” (as Oppenheimer dubbed the A-bomb) rather than the reality of the mass murder and destruction that it caused. Nor is there a glimpse of the effects the bomb tests (and uranium mining for nuclear weapons) would have on Native American, Hispano and other people in New Mexico.5
Obviously this was a conscious choice by the writer and director, who follows the protagonist-eye-view conventions of many biopics. While beset by “qualms” and unnerved by the subsequent drive to build the hydrogen bomb – a thousand times more powerful than the A-bomb – Oppenheimer continued (in the film and in real life) to defend the decision to bomb Hiroshima for the rest of his life. Some argue that the film’s omission of scenes of the bombing is intended to evoke Oppenheimer’s desire to “look away” from the results of his Project. We watch him trying to do just that at one point, as images (that we do not see) of Hiroshima’s devastation are projected on a screen at a meeting he attends. Earlier, amidst a flag-waving celebration at Los Alamos after the news of the bombing arrives, he hallucinates vague faces disintegrating. Outside the cheering, foot-stomping conclave, one young scientist vomits into the bushes.
Other reviewers have argued that Nolan’s decision not to show images from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is some subtle incitement for viewers to go out and find them on their own. For our part, we hope those questioning the social set-up served by U.S. imperialism’s masters of war will be impelled, after watching the film, to dig deeper. The “values” of this social system were on display yet again when Warner Brothers’ “social media engagement” involved hyping the film via “Barbenheimer” mashups making light of the atomic bomb. Facing an outcry in Japan that might affect ticket sales, the company “apologized.”
Witch Hunt Paradox?
From the beginning of Oppenheimer, a central theme is the anti-communist witch hunt that took off in the postwar United States. Kicked off by Democrats and personified by Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, the Cold War purge led to thousands of people losing their jobs and passports, being blacklisted (such as the “Hollywood Ten,” as shown in the 2015 film Trumbo), censored and jailed. The red hunt reached a deadly frenzy as the capitalist state used Sing Sing prison’s electric chair to murder Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 on charges of passing the Soviet Union information on the atomic bomb. (See “Honor the Heroic Rosenbergs,” The Internationalist No. 18, May-June 2004.)
It might seem a paradox that the father of Washington’s pride-and-joy weapon would be a witch hunt target, but it was a sign of the times. The film dedicates most of its last hour to closed-door interrogations, backroom scheming and public hearings against Oppenheimer. These led, in 1954, to the Atomic Energy Commission revoking the security clearance that he had held since ’42, due to associations “beyond the tolerable limits” with “persons known to be” Communists. In part this was because, after the war, he began urging the U.S. government to replace “coercion” with “persuasion” in its foreign policy. He also fell afoul of H-bomb enthusiasts such as Edward Teller, sometimes known as “the real Dr. Strangelove” – a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s hit 1964 film satirizing the U.S. military/nuclear-weapons establishment.
From the beginning of the film, Oppenheimer’s left-wing associations going back to the 1930s generate tension. While he was never a member of the Communist Party, various friends, and family members were or had been; and for some time he backed CP-promoted causes from unionizing lab workers to fund-raising for anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War. By this time the party had moved far away from its revolutionary origins. The “popular front” politics of class collaboration, which Stalin imposed as a corollary of his anti-revolutionary dogma of “socialism in one country,” made the Stalinized CPUSA the most energetic booster of FDR. During the Second World War, it demanded that unions adhere to the “no-strike pact” – and grotesquely hailed the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima.
At one point, Oppenheimer shows its protagonist responding to the red scare’s disruption of his career by declaring: “I’m a New Deal Democrat!” This was true. And clearly for the film’s director, as for so many liberals then and now, the problem with the red scare was that it wound up unfairly besmirching those “innocent” of actually being communists. Which is what we Trotskyists are – revolutionaries who seek to take the red flag of Lenin and Trotsky to victory here and around the world.
Revolutionary Internationalist Youth and Internationalist Group march through New York’s Grand Central Terminal, May Day 2023. “Only Socialist Revolution Can Stop World War III.” (Photo: Valerie Macon / AFP)
Washington’s supposed desire for “peace” (sic) was, after all, part of the sales pitch for the U.S. using the bomb in the first place. An end to nuclear terror can’t come through pacifist pleas to the imperialists to “come to their senses” and “learn to get along” with the rest of humanity. They can’t: imperialism is not a “bad policy” but the highest stage of capitalism, which long ago became a reactionary system. It has to be overthrown by the workers of the world, before it actually does turn the world into a ball of thermonuclear fire.
“I am become death, destroyer of worlds” – if we listen, we can we hear capitalism itself speaking to us in these words. It is up to us to stop it and to “bring to birth a new world” – a socialist world – fit for all humanity. ■
1. See, for example, article quoting “WWII’s US Top Brass,” Consortium News, 9 August.
3. See “Mad Bombers on the Loose (in the White House),” Revolution No. 19, September 2022.
4. The film closely follows the biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2006), by Kai Bird, an editor and columnist for the liberal Nation, and Martin J. Sherwin.
5. The term Hispano is traditionally used in New Mexico by descendants of the Spanish-speaking population that was conquered by the U.S. in the Mexican-American War (1846-48).
Only Socialist Revolution Can Defeat U.S. Imperialism’s Drive To WWIII
By Maeve
May 2023: U.S. president Joe Biden and other leaders of the Group of Seven in front of building now known as the “Atom Dome.” At left, the same building, near ground zero of 6 August 1945 U.S. atom-bombing of the city. (Photos: International Center of Photography; Brendan Smialowski / AFP)
AUGUST 6 – On this day 78 years ago, the United States dropped a new and terrifying weapon – the atomic bomb – on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Two-thirds of the city area was destroyed. No one can say exactly how many people the U.S. bombing killed, but the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us that more than a quarter of Hiroshima’s population was “killed outright or shortly after the blast” and that “approximately 140,000 people, or 55% of the population, were dead by year’s end.” Thousands more would die from aftereffects of the bombing.
The U.S. government’s “Target Committee” had marked Hiroshima for annihilation as the “largest untouched target” in Japan’s “larger population areas.” It noted that Tokyo was unavailable as a testing ground for the A-bomb, since it was “practically all bombed and burned out”1 already. One of dozens of Japanese cities firebombed by the U.S. Air Force, the capital city had been turned to rubble on the night of 9 March 1945, when the most destructive bombing raid in history burned 100,000 Japanese civilians alive and left 1 million homeless.
Excerpt from U.S.’ Target Committee meeting notes, 27 April 1945. “Hiroshima is the largest untouched target….” The city was selected as the first target of the atomic bomb also because it was compact and located in a valley so that virtually the entire city would be destroyed, dramatically showing the power of the bomb.
But now the nuclear message of terror was to be repeated: Nagasaki was next on the A-bomb list. President Harry Truman’s committee had chosen it too for mass death, he had approved the decision, and so, on 9 August 1945, the second A-bomb was dropped there.
The United States remains the only country to have used atomic bombs in war. In 1945, its cold-blooded murder of hundreds of thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki sent the message that the atomic bomb was ready for use against the Soviets and all who might stand in the way of American imperialism’s drive for world domination. In 2023, “our” capitalist rulers are driving toward a thermonuclear Third World War. The only way to prevent this is the revolutionary overthrow of this long outlived and deadly system, by the world’s working class.
Often, if we’re taught about Hiroshima at all, it’s just a quick and hazy reference; war criminals on the winning side largely get a pass. A central goal of this issue of Revolution is to show the connection between U.S. imperialism’s calculated mass murder then and the escalating threat it poses now. A powerful eyewitness account of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing and a Marxist review of the film Oppenheimer in this issue help show this crucial link. So too do the photos at the beginning of this article.
The Meaning of Their Message
War criminals all: leaders of the G7 leading imperialist powers, flanked on left and right by heads of the European Union, hypocritically lay wreaths on the site of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, on May 19 while preparing further escalation of the war on Russia over Ukraine. (Photo: Government of Japan)
On May 19 of this year, U.S. imperialism’s current commander-in-chief Joe Biden, harking back to his Democratic predecessor Truman, used Hiroshima as a symbol and a threat. At the head of a conclave of imperialist leaders known as the Group of Seven (G7), he posed for a photo op, in front of the only structure left standing in the area where the U.S.bomb exploded in 1945. Known today as the “Atom Dome,” back then it was an exhibition hall, located about a third of a mile from Shima Hospital, which was ground zero of the A-bomb’s blast.
The G7 is made up of six North Atlantic Treaty Organization powers: the U.S., Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy, plus Japan, which cooperates closely with NATO. Its gathering was followed on May 20 by a meeting of the Quad “Indo-Pacific” partnership (the U.S., Australia, India and Japan), also held at Hiroshima.
When we revolutionary Marxists describe the meaning of Biden & Co.’s message, it’s not guesswork. The official U.S. broadcasting network proclaimed that “a strong signal was sent to Russia and China as both the G7 and the Quad groups met at Hiroshima, the site of the first atomic bomb attack.” It went on to quote a U.S. foreign-policy pundit who “predicts ‘a more confrontational direction with the West on one side, and China and Russia on the other’” (Voice of America, 20 May).
Did the U.S., UK, France, Germany, Italy and Japan – whose historic and present-day crimes against the peoples of the world cannot even begin to be enumerated here – send their leaders to Hiroshima merely to grin into the cameras, lay some wreaths for “peace” (sic) and trade platitudes about “economic resilience”? (The U.S., top dog of world imperialism, plus the other six G7 powers have a combined GDP of $40 trillion, just under half of the global economy.) No – heading the official Fact Sheet on their summit is “United on Ukraine” and “United on China” (whitehouse.gov, 21 May). United, that is, in the U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia that the imperialist powers are waging as a way station toward war against the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state.2
The U.S. has begun delivering cluster bombs to Ukraine, which has regularly used this particularly deadly munition against the Russian-speaking civilian population of Donetsk and Lugansk, where in the assault by fascist-led Ukrainian forces over 14,000 people were killed from 2014 to 2021.
In point 1 of the “G7 Hiroshima Leaders’ Communiqué” (20 May), they vow to “support Ukraine as long as it takes.” Then they “commit to intensifying … military support.” (So far since February of last year, the U.S. has officially pumped in $43 billion in military aid, and this July it signed a declaration pledging “long-term security guarantees” to Ukraine.) The G7 communiqué goes on to blow some of the usual smoke about “disarmament” and wishing for “a world without nuclear weapons,” while the U.S. has 5,244 nuclear warheads (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 16 January) – and in July Biden announced that he would send widely banned cluster bombs to Ukraine, as part of an $800 billion infusion of military aid.
As for “unity on China,” the G7 communiqué pledges to “support a free and open Indo-Pacific” region, echoing Britain’s Opium Wars against China and the U.S.’ demand for an “Open Door” there going back to when its bloody 1898 conquest of the Philippines expanded its foothold in Asia. Early this year, Air Force general Mike Minihan sent a memo “predicting the U.S. will be at war with China in two years” (NBC News, 28 January), while the former chief of the U.S. Indo-Pacific command, retired admiral Philip Davison, warned that a war with China over Taiwan might begin by 2027 (Sydney Morning Herald, 7 March).
Hiroshima 1945 and Today’s U.S. War Drive
For the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the A-bombing of Hiroshima, the co-chair of Princeton’s International Policy program published an analysis, in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the foremost foreign-policy think tank, of why the U.S. decided to drop the bomb in 1945.
“Of central importance, [Truman’s Target Committee] stressed that the bomb should be used as a terror weapon – to produce ‘the greatest psychological effect against Japan’ and to make the world, and the U.S.S.R. in particular, aware that America possessed this new power. The death and destruction would not only intimidate the surviving Japanese into pushing for surrender, but, as a bonus, cow other nations, notably the Soviet Union” (which was about to invade Manchuria).
And through this act of terror, Washington “could help shape the postwar world.”3
What about today? The U.S./NATO powers and allies met at Hiroshima this May to send a message from the ground zero of nuclear terror. Evoking the mushroom clouds of August 1945, their message was about imperialist war today and in the future. But in the words of one Revolution reader: “I get it about World War Two, but how come you Trotskyists say the U.S. is using people in Ukraine now as cannon fodder in a drive for war later on against China – does that even make sense?”
Don’t take our word for it. “Washington Must Prepare for War with Both Russia and China,” proclaimed Foreign Policy (18 February 2022), right before the start of the current war. A year later, an AP report, headlined “How Ukraine war has shaped US planning for a China conflict” (16 February), noted: “As the war rages on in Ukraine, the United States is doing more than supporting an ally. It’s learning lessons – with an eye toward a possible future conflict with China,” which “remains America’s biggest concern.”
There’s plenty more. “Ukraine war has made it easier for U.S. to isolate China in the Pacific,” enthused CNN (6 March). Then Foreign Policy (13 March) weighed in again: “A Russia diminished and made less threatening by Ukraine will also allow for an even more decisive U.S. pivot to Asia later. Military aid to Ukraine should therefore be prioritized….” The theme was repeated again and again; as in prior wars, the bourgeois media beat the war drums, both echoing and being echoed by, the White House and Pentagon masters of war.4
Let’s recall as well that last year Biden, predictably going back on a campaign promise, signed off on a “fundamental role of U.S. nuclear weapons” policy that leaves the door open for first use of nuclear arms “to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.” While escalating its saber-rattling over “threats to our national security” from a “rising China,” Russia, etc., it is U.S. imperialism and its NATO allies that are driving toward World War III. Seven-plus decades after it dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, then developed weaponry 1,000 times more powerful (the H-bomb), the U.S. has approximately 750 bases in 80 countries around the world, with nukes in five NATO member counties (Council on Foreign Relations, 30 March). As we wrote in our previous issue (Revolution, No. 19, August 2022):
“Today, as throughout the Cold War, the U.S. has nuclear missiles stationed in bases across Western Europe; aimed directly at the USSR until its dissolution, since then they’ve been aimed at Russia. With the current war set off by the U.S./NATO drive to encircle post-Soviet, now capitalist Russia, the decades-old ‘doomsday clock’ ticks closer to nuclear midnight. As we have indicated here, history amply shows that U.S. imperialism poses the biggest, clear and present, danger to the world. Intransigently opposing ‘our own’ imperialist bourgeoisie, revolutionaries call for revolutionary internationalist struggle to defeat its on-going war drive against Russia and China.”
The threat that Biden & Co. broadcast from Hiroshima this May highlighted that the U.S./NATO imperialists, who threaten to blow up the world with their war drive against Russia and China, must be defeated. The workers and oppressed worldwide have a vital interest in defending Russia, China and other countries on the imperialists’ hit list against this war drive heading toward WWIII, while giving no political support to their governments. To put an end to the menace of a new, nuclear world war that imperialism has held over humanity’s head since 6 August 1945, we fight for new proletarian revolutions like the one led by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky’s Bolsheviks in 1917.
What They Did and What They Intend to Do
As Australian journalist John Pilger notes in his article “Another Hiroshima Is Coming … Unless We Stop It Now” (excerpts of which we reprint on page 3): “The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of premeditated mass murder….” When we read about what happened there (or in the less-discussed firebombing of Tokyo), we are faced with realities that can seem impossible to bear. We get glimpses in Pilger’s article, and in books like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which in 1946 brought accounts by six survivors of the U.S. A-bombing to millions of readers.
In Steven Okazaki’s intensely moving documentary White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (2007), 13 Japanese men and women who were mainly children or teenagers at the time, together with a woman who was part of the Korean community in Hiroshima, courageously tell us what it was like for them when the A-bombs hit.
The story of Hiroshima was told in a different way when the pioneering anime film Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen) came out in 1983. It is based on the historical manga (graphic novel) series by Keiji Nakazawa, who was six when he lived through the atom-bombing of Hiroshima, his hometown. Among many other works, a small volume titled The Bomb (2010), by popular left-liberal historian Howard Zinn, opens with a wrenching account by Kinuko Laskey of what she experienced as a 16-year-old schoolgirl when the bomb exploded there.
We urge our readers to seek out these and other accounts. Here we will cite just one of the many excerpts included in Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986). It is from a six-year-old boy:
“Near the bridge there were a whole lot of dead people. There were some who were burned black and died, and there were others with huge burns who died with their skin bursting, and some others who died all stuck full of broken glass. There were all kinds. Sometimes there were ones who came to us asking for a drink of water. They were bleeding from their faces and from their mouths and they had glass sticking in their bodies. And the bridge itself was burning furiously….”5
Two months before, U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson recorded in his diary (7 June 1945) some comments that he had made during a meeting with Truman, noting that he had told the president he was a “little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength.” Stimson was just one of the U.S. officials giving voice to the eagerness to test the A-bomb on a large populated area, an urgency that combined with the government’s urgent desire to use this to “subdue the Soviets” (see review of Oppenheimer on page 24.)
Horrific U.S. war crime: aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, August 1945. (Photo: U.S. National Archives)
In August, when Truman received word that the bomb had worked, destroying Hiroshima, he declared: “This is the greatest thing in history” (Newsweek, 5 August 2020).
And what of the war criminals who had made Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama and so many other Japanese cities “unsuitable” for A-bombing because U.S. terror firebombings had already reduced enormous swathes of them to corpse-strewn rubble?6 Among these men were Major General Curtis LeMay, who as head of the 21st Bomber Command planned and organized the low-altitude incendiary bombing of Tokyo and other cities. (He later went on to advocate that the U.S. bomb Vietnam “back into the Stone Age.”) LeMay’s assistant and tactical analyst for the firebombings was Robert McNamara, who became president of Ford Motor Company before overseeing the genocidal U.S. war against Vietnam as Secretary of Defense under JFK and Lyndon Johnson, later moving on to head the World Bank.
Years after leaking the “Pentagon Papers,” the U.S. military’s inside story of the U.S. War on Vietnam, former war-planning expert Daniel Ellsberg recounted some of what he knew about “general war plans” for the use of hydrogen bombs and other weapons in a world war against the “red menace.” These had projected roughly 600 million direct deaths, including not only the Soviet Union and China but also through “collateral damage” in U.S.-allied and neutral countries. At this point one can only surmise what the Pentagon’s detailed plans for war against China entail.
Almost 78 years after the U.S. imperialists unleashed atomic death and destruction on Hiroshima, the current Democratic warmaker-in-chief, at the head of the G7 grouping of imperialist powers whose wars have piled up tens of millions of corpses, went to Hiroshima. Together they broadcast far and wide the message that they are driving toward a new world war. The imperialists cannot and will not be coaxed, pressured or voted out of it. Pacifist pleas asking them to disarm won’t do it; the task is to “defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie,” as Lenin wrote during the first imperialist world war. The Bolsheviks’ revolutionary-internationalist program of class war against imperialist war points the only way forward today: the imperialists can and must be stopped and overthrown – only international socialist revolution will stop them. ■
1. See “Review of Oppenheimer: Socialism or Nuclear Armageddon” in this issue of Revolution. At the Target Committee’s third meeting (28 May 1945), in which it decided the bomb should be aimed at the center of Hiroshima, it noted that “with the current and prospective rate” of bombings by U.S. air forces, “it is expected to complete strategic bombing of Japan by 1 Jan 46 so availability of future [A-bomb] targets will be a problem.” The committee’s minutes are reproduced online as part of the National Security Archive (nsarchive2.gwu.edu) “briefing book” on the atomic bomb.
2. The victory of the Chinese Revolution (1949) led to expropriation of capitalists and landlords, laying the basis for a planned, collectivized economy. But from its inception the Peoples’s Republic of China has been governed by a privileged Stalinist bureaucracy. Despite capitalist inroads, it remains a deformed workers state that Trotskyists defend against imperialism and counterrevolution, while calling for a proletarian political revolution to open the way to socialism.
3. Barton J. Bernstein, “The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered,” Foreign Affairs, January-February 1995.
4. See “You Furnish the Pictures, and I’ll Furnish the War,” Revolution No. 19, September 2022.
5. In Hiroshima Nagasaki (2011), author Paul Ham states: “The schools ‘completely burned’ or ‘totally destroyed’ in Hiroshima included 21 middle (secondary) schools and 18 grammar schools. Schools partially destroyed included eight junior high schools and six grammar schools. Of the 12,000 schoolchildren aged between 12 and 17 who worked in the city as mobilised labour – and who had attended these schools – 8500 were killed instantly or within weeks; most of the surviving child labourers were severely wounded and irradiated.”
6. In February 1945, the historic German city of Dresden was also immolated by firebombing when the U.S. and British air forces dropped over 2,500 tons of explosives and incendiaries, massacring tens of thousands of people.
Biden speaking at the White House the day after venomous announcement that the U.S. would supply Israel with “what it needs” in weaponry to bomb Gaza into smithereens. This is an Israel/U.S. war on the Palestinians. (Photo: Samuel Corum/Sipa)
Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant orders a racist, genocidal siege of Gaza. (Photo: Middle East Observer / X)
Speaking at the United Nations on September 22, Israeli prime minister brandished a jumbo marker to draw a map of “The New Middle East” in which the occupied West Bank and Gaza were annexed to the Zionist state. (Photo: Richard Drew / AP)
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