Democrat or Republican, the next presidency will still spell death for others in faraway places.
The genocide in Palestine began a year ago. It’s a strange fact that some want to avoid, but it’s true. And there is no end in sight.
Now, as November approaches, those of us who see genocide as an issue—the only issue—in the election face a choice. It’s not so much a false choice as an unpleasant one: Democrat or Republican, carrion or cellar, each with its own particular flavor of death.
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Mass murder—mechanized, joyous, frenzied, lustful, and hot with corruption—is hard to describe. It remains for us to calculate the losses, to describe the contour through tangents to its surface. The number of people killed. Hospitals and schools are destroyed, and life is cut short. The appearance of poliomyelitis and syphilis. Corrosion of human flesh. Obscenity that touches everything and cripples the spirit. The scale of the horror is unknown, and probably unknowable. Our nightmares shrink before reality.
It is easier to deal with life’s affairs. In America, we fight for our lives. That’s what we were told. We fight for the poor, for justice. And on the eaves, sometimes in the background, but never in the center, hangs genocide. The Palestinians, zombies buried alive for the greater good, are waiting their turn to speak.
It would be incorrect and inaccurate to call Democrats and Republicans more or less the same. The Republican leadership and their media personas seem hateful. They are come close to the use of the N-word on television is a spectacular fallacy, with red meat as the basis. Their lies seem to be designed to provoke a lynching of black people, and their white supremacy seems to be rooted sometimes in resentment, sometimes in a genuine belief in white destiny, which is a clear point in their Bible. Economic descriptions of the worldview of their constituents may be worthy, but they also give them too much credit.
Without a coherent, unifying ideology like hate, Democrats are the party of everything else. It’s a party attended by a billionaire, an environmental activist, a worker fighting for a fair wage, a beggar with a PhD in advanced studies — and of course, it’s a place where masses of black and brown people squat.
The leadership of the Democratic Party, apparently, is interested mainly in self-enrichment, prestige – this is the liberal religion in America – and in the conduct of politics. Democrats risked short-term, isolated victories and collecting peanuts while fighting the enemy at the polls. Still, it’s good enough for the occasional political victory—the maddening alignment of vested interests, special interests, and grassroots organizations occasionally produces things like Obamacare.
And yet the question remains: How did the Democratic Party, the party whose main orientation seems to be “coalition,” the party with all these minorities, lead the total destruction of Gaza? For Israeli terrorist attacks in Lebanon?
As Americans, with our focus on celebrities, heroes and villains, money and the spectacle of the great churchthere is a temptation to give a personalized analysis to the atrocities: Biden is a Zionist; Alexandria Acasio-Cortes is unfaithful.
And individuals are important to the story about the year of the elections and the year of the genocide. Or a genocide year and an election year, depending on your point of view. It is doubtful that the ugly achievements of the Democrats over the past year would have been what they are if Biden had not been doggedly, passionately, with complete faith and commitment to Jewish supremacy in Palestine. That the president values Jewish-Israeli lives more than Palestinian and Lebanese lives, or even Americansobviously. But Biden’s Zionism is not sufficient for the task of explaining this country’s active participation in efforts to destroy Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip.
For most Americans, the idea of empire is baroque. It belongs to Louis XIV and Leopold II and the history books. But the empire still exists today. Consider the fact that voting in November for bodily autonomy, climate justice, or moderately less extractive capitalism—in other words, voting for Democrats—still means death for others in faraway places. Subjects of the empire in Palestine and Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan, or anywhere else do not get the right to vote, but they are forced to live and die, more often than not, die, with savage regularity, in the name of the American empire. Their deaths are monotonous, a leaden thump in the distance. The question is why.
Scholar Aziz Rana describes the empire as having three main attributes. It organizes “the world around an ethno-racial hierarchy…(where) racial origin ultimately shapes the conditions…(of rights and opportunities).” It is “a world system built on economic exploitation” that ultimately creates a third attribute, “truly intense conflicts between imperial rivals.”
The traditional organization of empire has given way to a more flexible, resilient neoliberal reality in which resource stripping is combined with the globalized privatization of industry—one of the legacies of the anti-colonial struggle of the last century. According to Rana, colonialism extracts resources from places, and then charges newly independent countries – whose very organization was created by their former colonizers – high interest rates for lending money for the development of the countries that the colonizers plundered. The result is an empire that earns its profits from sovereign debt – often the only means available to low-income countries seeking to escape the poverty trap – and a military complex that seeks its rent through war.
The entire analysis applies only partially to Palestine and the wider regional war currently underway. Is Iran, for example, really an equal rival of the United States? Is Iranian policy enough to threaten American hegemony in the region, as is clearly the case?
In any case, since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, the US spent almost 18 billion dollars on military support for Israel. Most of that money stays in the United States; it is used to buy war machines from American companies—a job program for ghouls. In the year since the beginning of the genocide, Raytheon Technologies shares have risen in value went overboard for shareholders. Statement of the second largest arms dealer in the country for 2024 reads partially“amid the heightened global threat, demand for our commercial aerospace and defense products is high.”
The history of the genocide in Palestine is far from being fully written. Empire, congressional appropriations and pork, the profit motive embedded in our capitalist system and billion dollar companies, the brutality and Zionism of Joe Biden and the Israel lobby all play a role. But we are far from a complete understanding – too many facts remain unknown. Now that Israel is attacking Lebanon and Iran is responding to Israel’s persistent provocations, the story is only getting harder to tell.
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In his story Death and suffrageDale Bailey imagines a world in which the dead—those who were unjustly killed, but also everyone else—come back to vote. The Supreme Court ultimately rules that the right to vote is reserved only for the living—a neat allegory for life at the heart of an empire, in which the voices, the needs, of the countless dead in faraway places do not matter.
At the end of the story, the narrator remarks, “(The dead) demand nothing of us after all. They are not looking for an end that we can perceive or understand… So we go on living, mere sojourners in a world of deserted tombs, always subject to the merciless inspection of the dead.’
I can’t blame those who would vote for a better life here — in the heart of the empire — by voting Democrat. But I can’t join them either. Genocide has a big role in my life. Every moment brings with it a relentless survey of the dead.
Can we count on you?
The future elections will decide the fate of our democracy and basic civil rights. The conservative architects of Project 2025 plan to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision at all levels of government if he wins.
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