“Elections of masters,” Marcuse says, “don’t change master slave relations”. By giving a false impression of temporary and temporal power of electing one of the two more or less identical candidates with lots of premeditated and prearranged fanfare people are given a false sense of autonomy and expression of their free will, willed freely against their collective interests.
To deceive the masses, the entire charade of their fake autonomy is blown beyond proportion. It’s a dreadful show of people’s impotence masqueraded behind the façade of freedom and democracy.
“What is immediately given to us,” Hegel says, “cannot be true”. Nevertheless, in recent times do people need Hegel’s advice to know the brazen fact haunting them albeit they find themselves helpless to get rid of it? The electoral farce as Noam Chomsky wrote in Defence of Anarchism became evident to the American people during the electoral farce of 2000 when despite gaining majority Al Gore was sidelined and George W. Bush was selected by the Federal court, ordering to stop the recounting of votes in some crucial states.
By then, Bush or someone of his ilk became a necessity to realize the stagnant accumulated capital through warfare. Despite diverting the capital to the housing bubble by the Bill Clinton administration, the crisis not only lingered on but became acute. The falling rate of profit was not good enough to gratify the lust of American capitalists, especially for those dealing with the war industry.
Taking advantage of 9/11 –which might turn out to be one of the biggest hoaxes of the century— Bush went to a war first in Afghanistan and later to Iraq to slaughter millions of innocent civilians in the badly concocted allegation of Iraq possessing the Weapons-of- Mass- Destruction, another hoax.
Facing the Great Depressions of 1929 that lasted until 1941, Roosevelt used the identical tactic of going to war against Japan hence joined ranks with the forces of Allies. In 1937, Japan had already occupied the north-eastern part of China, naming it Manchuria. The occupation hindered the US colonial interests in the region. Later in 1940, its occupation of Indo-China complicated the matter even more. The US was also competing with Japan to control the Asian mineral resources. When Japanese were planning to attack Pearl Harbour the US administration knew it beforehand. Instead of countering the attack, it instigated and green-lighted it, for it became a God-sent excuse for going to war with Japan and Germany against the wishes of 90 percent of Americans
(https://www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=408).
The results were as planned. The sale of state bonds floated in the market by the US government fetched an enormous sum of money and in a fit of patriotism thousands joined the army. Not only the US state was awash with money, but the job creation solved the problem of an unemployed army of labour gliding towards socialism.
Later all its adventures from Vietnam to the Bay of Pig and from Afghanistan to Iraq to its proxy wars in Syria, Libya, Ukraine and occupied Palestine are the outcomes of the same capitalistic anarchy alluded to by Marx, i.e., the solution to the over-accumulated capital, overproduction and loss of rate of profit. No matter how high the prices of commodities are, in this case the weapon of destruction, slowing or lack of circulation leads to lowering of rate of profit.
As far as Ukrainian saga is concerned, it is all over but the shouting. Not only it has lost a large swathe of area to Russia for good but also held hostage to the American multinationals, the military-industrial complex, the BlackRock, Monsanto and many others. The bread basket of Europe has become a basket case. History is with Russia. From Bonaparte to the attack of White forces to the blitzkrieg of Nazism, nothing could defeat the Russian resolve to defend its freedom.
Occupied Palestine is a distinct case. The British imperialism impeded the formation of institutions necessary to build a state in Palestine.
Despite coercion and suppression by imperialism, Palestine, like all other Arab dominated regions under the Ottoman Empire existed as a semi-autonomous province. For more than four centuries, it enjoyed peace, prosperity and religious harmony under the Ottomans.
Jaffa, now Tel Aviv, was one of the most advanced sea-ports in the entire Middle East, where people from different parts of Levant came to find jobs. Haifa had almost the same history while Gaza, a thriving town on the road that joined Alexandria with Alexandretta, now Iskenderun in Turkey, was a junction where many cultures of the world met and exchanged their diversities as described by Ilan Pappa. The present day Gaza, world’s largest open air prison turned into rubble, is the creation of Israel to cage the Palestinians.
At the preliminary session of the Bandung Conference, the Chinese premier Zhou en Li predicted the complete demise of colonialism during the next quarter of a century. Barring the exception to Palestine his precision and clairvoyance were unflawed, though liberation of South Africa, Namibia and Angola took another fifteen years.
Unlike Palestine, South Africa, under the apartheid regime presented a different picture. The Afrikaners were a slim minority and needed black working class to build their hegemonic apartheid state backed by the West and the US-Israel nexus.
Despite the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, Zionists initially needed the cheap labour of Gaza and West Bank to construct an imitation of a Western state in the Middle East. Ironically, most of the infrastructure, buildings and even the apartheid wall that separated the West Bank from Israel were built by the Palestinians. The liquidation of the Soviet Union brought a significant number of largely atheists ethnic Slavs with minimal or mythological relationship with Judaism. Despite their non-Jewish atheistic background, their skin-colour helped dilute the Palestinian majority. Besides, it not only assisted to de-Arabization of an Arab society but provided a source of cheap labour as well.
Israeli democracy is as farce as any bourgeois democracy of the world can be. “You cannot become half pregnant even if you like,” Gideon Levi wrote in Haaretz “hence you cannot be a half democracy, democracy for the Jewish but not for the rest, the non-Jewish population”. It’s the same democracy practiced by the white South African regime for its white minority which excluded the black majority.
The democratic distribution of racism, megalomania and paranoia against the Palestinians are the salient features of Israeli democracy. Before October 7, Israel had five elections in the last four years, a competition between Tweedledee and Tweedledum, between right and far right parties, both joining hands to destroy Israel.
After October 7 Israel has become what it always was, “not a state” Finkelstein says “but a death cult”. The reporting of IDF causalities falls under the category of subversion and is treated as such. Borrowing the Nazi jargon, Netanyahu and his cabinet members are talking about the final solution and liquidation of the Palestinians. The live-streaming of genocide is proudly relayed on social media by the soldiers of the “most moral army”. The only democracy in the Middle East has become a Draconian dictatorship.
Its mentor is also undergoing an electoral process where the competition is between two equally incompetent, reactionary and anti-Palestinian capitalists backed by the AIPAC, Wall Street and the Military Industrial complex. A real estate agent who received 100 million $ from the widow of a Zionist to support the Palestinians’ massacre is contesting against a woman, whose stature for Finkelstein “is 000-1”, and she never went through the primaries even. This is the devastating indictment of the system which has outlived its utility. American people, like always are facing a Hobson’s choice to replace an evil with evil and this is no exception unless they have become addicted to self-deception.
If Kamala Harris loses the contest, it will be the first time in the American history that a candidate is punished for her grisly participation in a foreign country. Will it change anything for the Palestinians, nothing? Trump and Kushner can be vindictive and anti-Muslim, but they cannot do more harm neither to the freedom struggle nor to the Axis of resistance. It’s not 2016; Iran is neither weak nor standing alone. Both Russia and China are right behind it, and of course the myth of Israeli army’s invincibility is blown to bits. The world has changed, and a business tycoon with his frequent utterance of inanities will realize it soon.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024