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Opinion
Neoliberalism in France Receives a New Blow as Yet Another Government Falls
France has now lost its third prime minister in 12 months as political parties from the far-right to the hard-left refuse to back draconian budget proposals as a means of addressing the country’s financial woes.
Sep 08, 2025
Europe’s second-largest economy has plunged into political paralysis again, as the French government has been overthrown by yet another no-confidence vote. This time, the no-confidence vote was against Prime Minister François Bayrou and his proposals to reduce the country’s public deficit from a projected 5.4% in 2025 to 4.6% in 2026—and to fall within the European 3% by 2029—with highly unpopular measures that would have included a “freeze” on government spending, over 5.3 billion euros in cuts to local authorities, and 5 billion euros in cuts in the country’s healthcare budget, yet with plans underway to significantly boost defense spending in the next few years. Bayrou’s 2026 budget envisaged in total around 44 billion euros ($51.3 billion) in cuts, tax increases, and even the scrapping of two public holidays, with the latter stirring as much outcry in France as the austerity budget itself.
Essentially, France has now lost its third prime minister in 12 months as political parties from the far-right National Rally (RN) to the hard-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) refuse to back draconian budget proposals as a means of addressing the country’s financial woes. The collapse of the Bayrou government was not a surprise, and some of us had even predicted that it would “meet the same fate” as the government that preceded it, namely that of Michel Barnier. Indeed, there is no other country in Europe with continuous anti-neoliberal struggles as France. Opposition to the normalization of the neoliberal socioeconomic reality has been in constant motion since the mid-1990s when President Jacques Chirac launched a direct attack on the foundational principles of the welfare state.
However, since assuming the presidency in 2017, Emmanuel Macron and his various governments (France has a semi-presidential system) have sought to shove neoliberalism down people’s throats at a record-breaking speed. Unsurprisingly enough, in a recent IFOP poll conducted for Le Journal du Dimanche, French President Emmanuel Macron and his now ousted Prime Minister François Bayrou emerged as the most unpopular leadership duo in the history of the Fifth Republic.
On August 25, Bayrou, who wanted to be known as “Mr. Anti-Debt,” stunned even his political allies when he announced that he would call for a vote in the National Assembly for his neoliberal budget proposals to rescue France from its ailing finances. It was a political grenade that no one had expected. Moreover, Bayrou did so even though he was fully aware of the fact that he was not, in all likelihood, going to avoid the collapse of his government. In fact, he seems to have predicted the outcome of the confidence vote on Monday, September 8, when he said on a radio interview just a few days earlier, in a rather philosophical and quintessentially French fashion, that “there are worse disasters in life than the collapse of the government.”
The most obvious reason why Bayrou gambled with a confidence vote on his plans to reduce France’s public deficit is because he had miscalculated all along the concerns of the French people about deficits and debt. He had embarked on a PR campaign to convince the public that the future of France was at stake on account on the nation’s worrying state of financial affairs. He employed distressful images by invoking the Greek debt crisis of the early 2010s as a warning of what might happen to France and spoke with an apparent earnestness of the possibility of a market meltdown if the French government failed to act boldly and quickly. In his speech to the National Assembly ahead of the confidence vote, Bayrou said that France’s excessive debt load is “life-threatening.”
Yet, typical of neoliberal attitudes and self-serving policies, Bayrou failed all along to realize that while the average French citizens were not insensitive to the realities of the country running a budget deficit of 5.8% of GDP and a national debt of 114% of GDP, they found socially unacceptable the neoliberal economic measures proposed for addressing its financial woes. One could say that, from their own point of view, if the organization of the economy along the principles of neoliberal capitalism is the cause of France’s financial woes, then neoliberalism certainly could not be the answer to their solution. Indeed, an IFOP survey conducted in July found that 57% of respondents believed that a plan was needed to reduce the country’s public deficit and national debt, but only 26% found the measures to be “just.”
The French people, from the far-right to the far-left, have made it very clear that they do not consider neoliberal policies as a remedy either to economic problems such as unemployment or to financial situations like public deficits and national debt.
As a matter of fact, both Bayrou and Macron failed to grasp the fact that it is neoliberalism itself that has fueled the surge both of RN and the New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition of left-wing parties that won the largest number of seats in the snap parliamentary election that was held in July 2024, even if the far-right and the hard-left are worlds apart in terms of the overall social and political values that they embrace and advocate.
There is, however, an additional and probably more important reason why Bayrou gambled on a confidence vote over his neoliberal budget proposal even though he knew that the odds of carrying the day were stacked against him. He was hoping that his decision to do so would compel lawmakers in the National Assembly to think twice about toppling his government by reflecting on the impeding consequences stemming from the planned actions of the grassroots protest movement organized around the cry “Block everything” (“Bloquons tout”), scheduled for September 10. The movement’s organizers hope to bring the country to a complete standstill (which, coincidentally, is what the US needs in light of the autocratic actions of President Donald Trump which are turning the country into a third world dictatorship), but the prevailing climate in French politics and society is such these days that even mainstream political parties have offered backing to this nationwide shutdown that will, apparently, take place even with the collapse of the Bayrou government.
Love it or hate it, one must agree that French politics is never boring. More important, the protest movements in the country—starting at least with the French opposition to the Algerian war, later on with the May ’68 events and more recently with the yellow vest protests and now with the new protest movement dubbed “Block everything”--should provide tremendous inspiration to popular struggles against exploitation, oppression, and social injustices everywhere in the world.
What French President Emmanuel Macron’s move might be following the collapse of Bayrou’s government remains to be seen. Nonetheless, it would be politically naive of him to think that a new government will fare better in the future if it insists on pushing neoliberal measures as a solution to the country’s financial woes. For the French people, from the far-right to the far-left, have made it very clear that they do not consider neoliberal policies as a remedy either to economic problems such as unemployment or to financial situations like public deficits and national debt.
Indeed, even the center-right in France, which in recent years has rallied around Emmanuel Macron and his neoliberal vision, has generally been very cautious about the Anglo-American economic model with its attack on government and worship of the market. No doubt, this is why the prevailing sentiment in France is that not only Macron’s governments cannot sustain themselves in the current political climate but that Macron himself is finished and must go.
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The Return of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine
The Trump agenda in Latin America is about protecting US economic and financial interests, just as it was under Kirkpatrick’s reign of terror-for-profit.
Sep 08, 2025
In August 1981, US Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick traveled to Santiago to meet with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, eight years after he seized power in a military coup. Kirkpatrick cheeringly described their talk as “most pleasant” and announced that the Reagan administration would fully normalize relations and resume arms sales—support that Pinochet quickly used to claim renewed legitimacy and crack down on opponents.
The episode crystallized what became known as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine: the notion that the US government should embrace any autocrat who aligned with Washington’s anti-communist agenda while working to undermine, sanction, or topple any left-wing leader who refused to “play ball,” even if they were democratically elected (and popular). Protecting American economic interests was the lodestar, and just about anything was permissible in service of that goal.
The Kirkpatrick Doctrine shaped US Cold War policy across Latin America under President Ronald Reagan. It was invoked to justify participation in Operation Condor, a transnational repression system that coordinated dictatorships’ assassinations and torture chambers. It was used to rationalize funneling weapons and training to Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and to support Brazil’s military junta and its anti-communist crusade.
And it explained why Washington turned a blind eye to the Argentine junta’s Dirty War, which disappeared tens of thousands of citizens while receiving US diplomatic cover. In Kirkpatrick’s view, these horrors were an acceptable price for preserving American hegemony and global “liberalism.” Kirkpatrick is still hailed as a “True American Hero” by conservatives, knowing full well the horrors she committed.
This imperialist view was not entirely new. US foreign policy had long operated on behalf of economic interests. The “Banana Wars” and “Banana Republics” of the early 20th century and the invasions of the Philippines and Caribbean islands were justified in the same way. What changed under Reagan was the sheer arrogance and brazenness of American evil. Washington packaged its hyper-capitalist, immoral backing of tyrants and terrorists under the banner of freedom, insisting to the world that the US was a “shining city upon a hill.” It was nonsense, but the message resonated at home.
The main architect of this approach was Jeane Kirkpatrick. Long discredited after the Cold War ended, her ideas seemed destined for the dustbin. Yet under US President Donald Trump, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine’s ghost has come hauling back. It is now a cornerstone of foreign policy in conservative circles.
Human rights, democracy, and human progress are expendable when they collide with American profits and hegemony.
There has been plenty of talk about this being the new Monroe Doctrine. A Newsweek piece this week argued that Trump’s America First agenda in Latin America is a “MAGA Monroe Doctrine.” But there is a contemporary precedent to Trump’s kind of imperialist chest-thumping.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a handful of other Trump-aligned hawks have pushed for the Kirkpatrick Doctrine’s revival. The GOP, under Trump, has openly flirted with copying Reagan’s playbook in Latin America and making it clear the region is a no-go zone for foreign competitors. US military and economic power could, at any time, be deployed to bully Southern nations into protecting American profits, once again.
This thread runs through both Trump terms. In the first, neoconservatives like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Elliott Abrams held sway. In the second, the torch has been picked up by figures like Mike Waltz, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and Rubio.
In just over four years, the US has shown itself willing to deploy military forces against “subversive forces,” allegedly support coups such as the Silvercorp operation in Venezuela or the Organization of American States-assisted 2019 ouster of socialist Evo Morales in Bolivia, and meddle in elections to achieve its preferred outcome.
It has protected and propped up leaders engaged in authoritarian wars on drugs and socialism—Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Argentinian President Javier Milei, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele—while punishing leftist leaders like Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva Lula, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro with tariffs, sanctions, and economic warfare. It has also supported right-wing opposition figures across the continent, from son-of-Nazi-SS-lieutenant José Antonio Kast in Chile to oligarch María Corina Machado in Venezuela to far-right groups in Peru and Colombia.
The US has also supported paramilitary groups. Colombia is the clearest case. For decades Washington poured weapons, training, and billions of dollars into the Colombian military, mostly under the Plan Colombia program, all while it collaborated with right-wing paramilitary death squads that murdered tens of thousands of civilians.
The US participated in the “False Positives” scandal, where the Colombian Army, armed with US weapons, training, and equipment, killed thousands of civilians before claiming they were guerrilla fighters, often planting evidence to do so.
Similarly, police and military units engaged in war crimes and brutality have been given US weapons and training. In Brazil, most foreign weapons for the police and military are American, including the very snipers used to gun down children in favelas. Meanwhile, the US has sanctioned any Latin American country from purchasing Chinese and Russian weapons, equipment, and technology, to help feed the American military-industrial complex’s profits.
The doctrine also shows up in how the Trump administration uses pressure campaigns. In Venezuela, the “Maximum Pressure” campaign from the first term has escalated to outright military confrontation. Just last week, the US allegedly destroyed a fishing boat in Venezuelan national waters, killing 11 people. It claimed the boat was transporting drugs headed to the US, affiliated with Tren de Aragua.
There is no evidence for this claim, and even if there was, should drug traffickers be massacred without respect for sovereignty, due process, or congressional approval? Such a war crime could lead to full-on regime change or a new War on Drugs on Venezuelan shores.
This is all while ExxonMobil and Chevron have practically bought Washington’s Venezuela policy, and as the Venezuelan opposition, backed by the US, has said it would give oil rights to US corporations.
The underlying interests are clear. The US wants to maintain dominance over investment and markets, ensuring preferential treatment while shutting out competitors like China and Russia. This has meant pressuring governments not to buy BYD cars, threatening sanctions for buying Russian oil and weapons, strong-arming Panama to ditch Belt and Road projects, and trying to block Chinese banks from opening across the continent.
As South America becomes a breadbasket for the world, countries are turning to Brazilian, Russian, and Chinese fertilizers, cutting into US Big Agriculture’s profits. Oil and gas are front and center in Venezuela, where the largest proven reserves on Earth remain largely untapped.
Mining is increasingly important in the Andes, with lithium, copper, and other critical minerals needed for the global energy transition—and US firms want to be at the center of it, despite Chinese companies leading the way. This can help explain why the administration, particularly Marco Rubio, is so obsessed with supporting oil-rich Guyana, where ExxonMobil and Chevron have billions at stake.
The region is viewed as an extension of US dominance over global commerce—and measures to protect that dominance will be taken accordingly.
Locally, elites close to Trump are eager to profit from the US. They expect fatter contracts, looser regulations, and lower taxes under right-wing authoritarian governments backed by Washington. Brazilian business magnates, including real estate developers involved in building a Trump hotel in Rio de Janeiro that was shut down over corruption investigations, were key actors in pressuring Trump into putting 50% tariffs on Brazil, a move that has backfired massively.
The Trump administration has also pressured Latin American governments not to diversify away from the dollar, discouraging them from signing trade deals in yuan or joining BRICS currency initiatives. China’s opening of multiple bank branches across Latin America has also been a target of US pressure. Countries are now able to sign deals, both internationally and regionally, using foreign currencies like the yuan. This threatens dollar dominance, and the US simply cannot abide by a globally competitive system in “our hemisphere.”
The Trump agenda in Latin America is, most conveniently, about protecting US economic and financial interests, just as it was under Kirkpatrick’s reign of terror-for-profit. The rhetoric may change; today it is about fighting socialism, China, or “narco-terrorism” rather than communism; but the underlying logic is the same.
Human rights, democracy, and human progress are expendable when they collide with American profits and hegemony. Ironically, that very logic destroys US credibility, and may help bring about a truly multipolar system in a region long hurt by unipolar imperial control.
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Is Trump Inciting a Civil War 2.0 to Steal the Midterms?
Both JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom have explicitly said that they believe Trump is preparing to use troops for voter suppression in blue areas of the country during the 2026 elections to prevent Democrats from taking Congress.
Sep 08, 2025
Last week, US President Donald Trump posted a stolen valor war meme on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site, with the bonespurs-draft-dodger wearing a US Army Cavalry hat and the slogan, paraphrased from the movie Apocalypse Now:
’ I love the smell of deportations in the morning…” Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of War.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker replied on BlueSky:
The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.
So, how could this play out? It’s important to begin the conversation—and planning—for what appears to be the Civil War 2.0 that Trump’s apparently trying to incite.
First, there’s precedent for the federal government to send federal troops into a state to enforce the law as ordered by a court.
JFK did it in the 1962 Ole Miss crisis to enforce the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision, mobilizing up to 31,000 federal troops, including the 503rd Military Police Battalion, the 108th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and soldiers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. Kennedy also sent federal troops and readied thousands near Birmingham, Alabama during violent resistance to those same federally mandated desegregation efforts.
To accomplish this, Kennedy invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807, which is actually a series of laws passed over a two-decade period, that constitute a virtual blank check for presidential power.
Particularly problematic is Section 253 of the law that allows the president to use troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”
As the Brennan Center for Justice explains:
This provision is so bafflingly broad that it cannot possibly mean what it says, or else it authorizes the president to use the military against any two people conspiring to break federal law.
Adding to Trump’s potential power, in 1827 the Supreme Court ruled that “the authority to decide whether [a crisis requiring the militia to be called out] has arisen belongs exclusively to the President, and... his decision is conclusive upon all other persons.”
Both JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom have explicitly said that they believe much of this is Trump preparing to use troops for voter suppression in blue areas of the country during the 2026 elections to prevent Democrats from taking Congress.
Pritzker said voters “should understand that he [Trump] has other aims, other than fighting crime” and that this is part of a plan to “stop the elections in 2026 or, frankly, take control of those elections.”
Newsom pointed out, “Interestingly, we still have federalized National Guard assigned through Election Day. Is that a coincidence? Through Election Day?!”
Additionally, the governors of 19 blue states issued a statement saying:
Instead of actually addressing crime, President Trump cut federal funding for law enforcement that states rely on and continues to politicize our military by trying to undermine the executive authority of governors as commanders in chief of their state’s National Guard…
Whether it’s Illinois, Maryland, and New York or another state tomorrow, the president’s threats and efforts to deploy a state’s National Guard without the request and consent of that state’s governor is an alarming abuse of power, ineffective, and undermines the mission of our service members. This chaotic federal interference in our states’ National Guard must come to an end.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner went a step further, saying he was willing to actually arrest federal agents who exceed or break the law:
Let’s be clear: If the National Guard comes to Philadelphia and commits crimes, they will be prosecuted locally and Donald Trump cannot pardon them.
So, how does this play out?
Trump is already reportedly positioning Texas National Guard troops and other federal officers at the Naval Station Great Lakes, just north of Chicago, presumably preparing for an invasion of that city as soon as this week.
The vision of former Confederate-state troops seizing control of the largest city in a former Union state is explosive and may well provide Trump with the violence he’d hoped for but didn’t get in LA and DC. Violence he could use to justify invoking the Insurrection Act like Kennedy did, and then using that to lock down the 2026 elections.
If this happens, will Pritzker follow Krasner’s model and begin arresting federal agents and Texas National Guard members if they’re found breaking Illinois or Chicago law? Or will he sue at federal court the way Newsom did? Or both?
If he does the former, it could literally kick off a second American Civil War; if he does the latter, Trump may win Civil War 2.0 without a shot fired, particularly if the six corrupt on-the-take Republicans on the US Supreme Court overrule the lower courts and endorse Trump’s actions.
Now is the critical time for all Americans to get educated about what’s going on and prepare for the eventuality of a totally locked-down police state being imposed on multiple blue cities, particularly in states where not counting the urban vote can flip the entire state red.
And if Pritzker and Newsom are right, all of this is being done—along with extreme gerrymandering—as part of the widespread Republican effort to rig the 2026 election so Democrats can’t take back the House and begin subpoena-based investigations of Trump’s crimes from the Epstein era to his recent murder of 11 immigrants in a boat off the coast of Venezuela.
Meanwhile, as Trump pits Americans against each other, dismantles our federal government, ensures future epidemics, and grifts billions in cybercurrencies, China and Russia are pulling the rest of the world together against America. It’s almost as if Russian President Vladimir Putin was giving Trump weekly directions, a dystopian Manchurian Candidate notion that seems more credible with every passing day.
He’s systematically weakening America while boosting Vladimir Putin. By shutting down Voice of America, dismantling defenses against Russian election interference, ignoring Ukraine, and bungling diplomacy with tariffs and summits that drive allies toward Moscow, he’s handed Putin victories that come at the direct expense of US power and security.
In the face of this, Trump is doing everything he can to ramp up tensions and provoke people in blue cities to violence which he can then exploit to increase his power and further crack down on elections, particularly next year.
All, apparently, in service of converting America from a historic liberal democracy into a one-man personality-driven dictatorship that’s increasingly aligned with—and following the model of—other tyrants around the world.
As a result, now is the critical time for all Americans to get educated about what’s going on and prepare for the eventuality of a totally locked-down police state being imposed on multiple blue cities, particularly in states where not counting the urban vote can flip the entire state red (which is most Blue states).
Trump is trying to take down American democracy for good. This is not a drill. Organize, educate, call your representatives, and prepare to show up in the streets.
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'We Will Not Be Silent:' Hearing Stilled Voices of the Gaza Genocide
As Israel routinely murders the healthcare workers and journalists who witness its genocide, we must raise our own voices in protest.
Sep 08, 2025
In his last minutes of freedom before Israel Defense Forces arrested him, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, clad in a medic's white coat, walked alone toward two Israeli tanks. His captors awaited him amid the rubble of Gaza's Kamal Adwan hospital. An artist swiftly created a dramatic poster showing Dr. Safiya striding through the ruins of the hospital he directed. The artist, David Solnit, recently updated the poster's caption. It now reads: Free Dr. Abu Safiya Eight months in prison Dec. 27, 2024 - August 27, 2025.
Dr. Safiya had already endured agonizing losses at the Kamal Adwan hospital. In late October 2024, an Israeli drone attack killed his son, also a doctor. In a November 2024 attack on the hospital, Dr. Safiya was wounded by shrapnel, but continued working, insisting he would not close the hospital. He witnessed his colleagues being humiliated, beaten, and marched off to prison. By December 27, 2024, when Dr. Safiya's ordeal as a prisoner began, most hospitals in Gaza were nonfunctional.
On August 28, 2025, Dr. Safiya's lawyer, Ghaid Ghanem Qassem, visited him in the Ofer Prison. She reports he has lost one-third of his body weight. While imprisoned in in the Sde Teiman military Detention Center, located in an Israeli military base in the Negev desert, he showed signs of torture. Subjected to beating with electric shocks and batons, he sustained blows which may also cause him to lose his right eye. Yet his message remains intact:
I entered in the name of humanity, and I will leave in the name of humanity… We will remain on our land and continue to provide healthcare services to the people, God willing, even from a tent.
Regimes conducting a genocide have more than one reason to eliminate brave professionals attempting, life by precious life, to undo their inhuman work: Doctors not only seek to slow down the dying, but they, like the journalists the Israeli regime so frantically targets, are specially positioned and specially qualified to accurately report on the intensity and nature of Israel's extermination campaign. Silencing the citizens most capable of reporting on genocidal savagery is a key objective of genocide.
In one of the most egregious efforts to eliminate a key eye witness, Israeli naval forces, on May 10, 2025, killed 12-year-old Mohammed Saeed al-Bardawil, who, as a passerby alongside his father, had witnessed Israel's March 23rd pre-dawn execution of 15 unarmed emergency rescue workers. The murdered paramedics had driven their clearly marked ambulances to a spot where they intended to retrieve victims of an earlier attack. The bullets that killed them were fired over six minutes as Israeli soldiers advanced to shoot directly into the survivors' heads and torsos, afterwards using earth-moving equipment to bury their corpses and vehicles. On that day, Mohammed and his father were detained and made to lie face down near a burning ambulance. He is listed as a source in a well-documented New York Times video on the massacre, dated May 2. Eleven days later, an Israeli gunboat fired on his father's fishing boat, killing Muhammed in his father's presence off the coast of Gaza's southern Rafah governate.
Almost daily, new faces appear in an assemblage of photos showing hundreds of journalists Israel has killed.
It was two weeks ago, on August 25, that Israel killed Reuters camera operator Hussam Al Masri and 19 others, four of them also journalists, in a series of double-tap precision-guided aerial attacks on buildings and a stairway of the Al Nasser Hospital. Al Masri was easily targetable as he broadcast a live video feed from a Reuters outpost on a top hospital floor. Describing the second wave of the attack, Jonathan Cook writes: "And when Israel struck 10 minutes later with two coordinated missiles, it knew that the main victims would be the emergency workers who went to rescue survivors from the first strike and journalists—al-Masri's friends—who were nearby and rushed to the scene… Nothing was a 'mishap.' It was planned down to the minutest detail."
Snipers and weaponized drone operators routinely kill Palestinians who courageously continue to don bullet proof press jackets, set up cameras, and report on Israel's atrocities. Israel refuses entry to foreign journalists, and when brave, grieving, impassioned young Palestinians insist on carefully documenting their people's agony for Western news outlets, Israel carefully targets them using the traceable phone and broadcasting equipment necessary to their work, before posthumously branding them Hamas operatives. Craven Western officials watch from within Israel's patron states, discounting brown lives on whatever flimsy pretexts white authorities offer them. Almost daily, new faces appear in an assemblage of photos showing hundreds of journalists Israel has killed.
Healthcare workers and journalists who are still alive do their work amid struggles to prevent their families, their colleagues, their neighbors, and of course themselves, from deaths not just by direct massacre but by militarily imposed starvation and its handmaiden, epidemic disease. Surgeons speak of being too weak to stand throughout an operation. Reporters document their own starvation.
Palestinians long for protection, but even the prospect of United Nations mandated protective forces carries terrifying possibilities. What if "peacekeepers" assigned to monitor Palestinians collect data the Israelis will use to control them? Weaponized "stabilizing forces," equipped with US surveillance technology, could be used to target, imprison, assassinate, and starve even more Palestinians.
In the summer of 1942, in Munich, Germany, five students and one professor summoned astonishing courage to defy a genocidal regime to which we, reluctantly, have to look if we want to find a racist cruelty comparable to that currently seizing not just Israel's leadership but, in poll after poll, strong majorities of its non-native population. The students' collective, called The White Rose, distributed leaflets denouncing Nazi atrocities. "We will not be silent" was the final line of each leaflet. Hans Scholl, age 24, and his sister, Sophie Scholl, age 21, hand delivered the leaflets to their university campus in February of 1943. The Gestapo arrested them after a janitor spotted them disseminating the leaflets. Four days later, Hans and Sophie, as well as their colleague Christopher Probst, were executed by guillotine.
With Israel's nuclear arsenal capable of outkilling the Nazi regime over the course of a few minutes, and in the process inciting humanity's final war; and with its leadership and populace radicalized through decades of fascist impunity to the point of endorsing not just a genocide but multiple, preemptive military strikes upon most of its neighbors at once, we may well be arriving at the moment when, as a result of our having let Israel assassinate, with impunity, the reporters of its crimes, there will be no one in the outside world left to receive reports.
The silence we allow ourselves today may soon be involuntary, and absolute. Let us summon up a fraction of Dr. Safiya's, of young Mohammad's, of Sophie Scholl's and Hussam al-Masri's courage and speak while we can.
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