“A Dying Empire Led by Bad People”For a certain niche of America’s pundit class, Joe Biden’s lack of popularity remains something of a mystery. Is it the economy? Inflation? Gaza? Biden’s catastrophic approval ratings make the question difficult to ignore, but few seem able to settle on an answer. As Ross Douthat fairly observed in March, “There isn’t a chattering-class consensus or common shorthand for why his presidency is such a political flop.” I have no special insight into the causes of Biden’s unpopularity as such. Being a socialist, I thought (and argued vociferously) that he would make a bad president and that predictions of an “FDR-sized” administration were more a case of liberal wish fulfillment than a serious possibility. Suffice it to say, it was probably not a good idea for a man born closer to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln than his own to seek reelection when 70 percent of voters didn’t want him to. Whatever the official story might be about the state of the US economy or the wonders of Bidenomics, there also remains plenty of financial pain and general hardship throughout the country even if the pace of inflation has slowed. When it comes to the segment of the electorate in which Biden is the least popular, however, the debate’s tendency toward mystification is a lot more puzzling. Having won the under-thirty vote by a comfortable margin of twenty-three points in 2020, Biden is now trailing Donald Trump with that cohort in several battleground states and is essentially drawing even with him nationally. Being election season, analyses of Biden’s cratering youth support have tended to emphasize immediate factors like the economy and cost of living, and the terrain of discussion has often been about whether these or the president’s support for Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza are the reason such a reliably Democrat-leaning demographic seems to be jumping ship.
https://jacobin.com/2024/06/biden-polling-cynicism-young-votersLike Sri Lanka once did, Israel has turned ‘safe zones’ into killing fieldsThe parallels between Sri Lanka 2009 and Gaza 2024 are uncanny. In both cases, the military displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians, instructing them to gather in “safe zones” where they would not be harmed. In both cases, the militaries proceeded to bomb the designated “safe zones,” indiscriminately killing and injuring a large number of civilians. In both cases, the militaries also bombed medical units responsible for saving the lives of the civilians. In both cases, military spokespeople justified the strikes, admitting that they had bombed the safe zones, but claiming that the Tamil Tigers and Hamas were responsible for the civilian deaths since they had hidden among the civilian population, using them as shields. In both cases, Western countries criticised the killing of innocents, but continued supplying the militaries with weapons. In Sri Lanka’s case, Israel was among the main suppliers of weapons. In both cases, the UN claimed that the warring parties were carrying out war crimes and crimes against humanity. In both cases, the governments mobilised a cadre of experts who used legal acrobatics to justify the massacres. Their interpretation of the rules of engagement and of the application of fundamental concepts of international humanitarian law including distinction, proportionality, necessity and the very notions of safe zones and warnings were put in the service of eliminatory violence. But there is also one important difference between the two cases.The genocide in Gaza is not taking place in the dark. Whereas in Sri Lanka it took time to gather evidence of violations and carry out independent investigations, the global attention on Gaza – and the live-streamed images of beheaded babies and charcoaled bodies in “Block 2371” – can prevent the repetition of the Sri Lankan horror.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/6/11/like-sri-lanka-once-did-israel-has-turned-safe-zones-into-killing-fieldshttps://archive.is/CyF6bWar on Anarchism - Bill Beech: A response to two articles by Wayne Price in the anarchist journal Black Flag.The split in the anarchist movement between antimilitarists and Natopolitan Anarchists2 has grown deeper since February 2022. The Natopolitans continue to support the arming of the Ukrainian state, the escalation of hostilities, both in weapons and in scale, despite the numbers of dead Ukrainians, regardless of the threat of nuclear conflict, regardless of the reality of this war and its unending suffering meted out on the working class of Ukraine. In doing so, they are waging war on anarchism, here, over there and everywhere.3 If only the Natopolitan Anarchists were as honest as Pyotr Kropotkin during WWI. His position was that, of all the imperialisms, the German one was the most abominable, and that is why he sided with the imperial alliance to bring about its defeat. The Natopolitan position is an ‘anarchism’ even more degenerate than Kropotkin’s because often they don’t accept the existence, and never the crucial role, of US Imperialism (and its EU client states) in provoking this war. If they wanted to be truthful to Kropotkin’s position of lesser-evil-cheerleading, they would support the Russian state, since it is working to bring about the downfall of the most over-reaching and lethal empire in existence.4 That would mean they at least held some healthy antagonism towards their own ruling class. Instead, one can’t escape the impression that Natopolitan Anarchists are nothing more than good liberals,5 believing that when Russia broke international law in its invasion of Ukraine, given no redress was available, they had to rush to the Global Policeman (the USA), just this once, in this most moral of wars, just until the Russian Hitler was beaten back. To mask the contradiction between their supine liberal self and their anarchist self, they have spewed a number of myths since February 2022. Wayne Price is a typical example of this breed of Natopolitan Anarchist, which is why it is useful to examine some of his statements published on the pages of Black Flag.
https://libcom.org/article/war-anarchism-bill-beech