The warning signs of genocide in Gaza had been there for all to see. But the lack of will on the part of UN members to implement 3246 not only let it happen but then failed to stop it even when its ferocity passed all comprehension.

When October 7 erupted the West attempted to airbrush the pre-existing conditions Israel had imposed on Gaza and pretended Hamas started the ‘war’. But 1,000 lawyers, scholars, and practitioners immediately sounded the alarm about “the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” and issued an open letter as early as 15 October.

For a start they reminded everyone that in 1982 the UN General Assembly condemned the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps as “an act of genocide”.

Pre-existing conditions in the Gaza Strip had prompted discussion on genocide before, with warnings given over the years that the siege of Gaza (from 2006 onwards) might amount to a “prelude to genocide” or a “slow-motion genocide”.

And since 2007, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, Israel had defined the Gaza Strip as an “enemy entity”.

Earlier in 2023 Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich called Palestinians “repugnant”, and “disgusting” and proposed “wiping out” the entire Palestinian village of Huwwara in the West Bank.

Here’s a timely reminder of what else the open letter said.

• In the short space of time between 7 October and 15 October (when the open letter was written), 2,329 Palestinians were killed and 9,042 Palestinians injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza, including over 724 children, huge swathes of neighborhoods, and entire families across Gaza were obliterated.

• Israel’s Defence Minister ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip prohibiting the supply of fuel, electricity, water, and other necessities. This intensifies an already illegal and potentially genocidal siege turning it into an outright destructive assault.

• The ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) stated that orders to evacuate, coupled with the complete siege, are incompatible with international humanitarian law. Almost half a million Palestinians have already been displaced and Israeli forces have bombed the only possible exit route that Israel does not control (the Rafah crossing to Egypt) multiple times.

• The World Health Organisation published a warning that “forcing more than 2000 patients to relocate to southern Gaza, where health facilities are already running at maximum capacity and unable to absorb a dramatic rise in the number of patients, could be tantamount to a death sentence”.

• In the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, since 7 October, Israeli settlers backed by the IDF and police, have attacked and shot Palestinian civilians at point-blank range (as documented in the villages of a-Tuwani and Qusra), invaded their homes, and assaulted residents. Several Palestinian communities have already been forced to abandon their homes, after which settlers arrived and destroyed their property.

• Between 7 and 15 October, Al-Haq documented the killing by the Israeli military and settlers of 55 Palestinians in the West Bank with 1,200 injured there.

• Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared on 9 October: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly”, and afterward announced that Israel was moving to “a full-scale response” and he had “removed every restriction” on Israeli forces, also stating: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.”

• On 10 October, the head of the Israeli Army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed a message directly to Gaza residents: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell”.

• Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari acknowledged the wanton and intentionally destructive nature of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza: “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

• On 7 October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay an “immense price” for the actions of Hamas fighters and asserted that Israel will wage a prolonged offensive that will turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centers “into rubble”.

• Israel’s President emphasized that the Israeli authorities view the entire Palestinian population of Gaza as responsible for the actions of militant groups, and subject accordingly to collective punishment and unrestricted use of force: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

• Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz added: “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”

• On 12 October UN Special Rapporteurs condemned “Israel’s indiscriminate military attacks against the already exhausted Palestinian people of Gaza, comprising over 2.3 million people, nearly half of whom are children. They have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years, and already gone through five major brutal wars, which remain unaccounted for”.

• UN experts warned against “the withholding of essential supplies such as food, water, electricity and medicines. Such actions will precipitate a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where its population is now at an inescapable risk of starvation. Intentional starvation is a crime against humanity”.

• On 14 October the UN Special Rapporteur, on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, warned against “a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale” as Israel is carrying out “mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the fog of war”.

• The Palestinian population of Gaza appears to be presently subjected by the Israeli forces and authorities to widespread killing, bodily and mental harm, and unviable conditions of life – against a backdrop of Israeli statements that evidence signs of intent to physically destroy the population.

• Article II of the Genocide Convention provides that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as # Killing members of the group; # Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; # Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; # Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; # Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

• The Convention provides that individuals who attempt genocide or who incite genocide “shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals”.

• The International Court of Justice has clarified that “a State’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed. From that moment onwards, if the State has available means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harboring specific intent (dolus specialist), it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit”. (The many means available to the British Government include sanctions – readily applied to other delinquent nations – and withdrawal of favored-nation privileges, trade deals, and scientific collaboration).

• Competent elements of the United Nations, particularly the UN General Assembly, are required to take urgent action under the Charter of the United Nations appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide. Emphasis is on the General Assembly given that the Security Council is compromised by the US and UK (both permanent veto-holding members) sending military forces to the eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel.

• All relevant UN bodies, including the Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, as well as the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, are called on to immediately intervene, carry out necessary investigations, and invoke the necessary warning procedures to protect the Palestinian population from genocide.

Chock-full of hate

All this was quickly followed by the UK Lawyers’ Open Letter Concerning Gaza of 26 October 2023, which contained important warnings regarding international law — for example:

⦁ The UK is duty-bound to “respect and ensure respect” for international humanitarian law as set out in the Four Geneva Conventions in all circumstances (1949 Geneva Conventions, Common Art 1). That means the UK must not itself assist violations by others.

⦁ The UK Government must immediately halt the export of weapons from the UK to Israel, given the clear risk that they might be used in serious violations of international humanitarian law and in breach of the UK’s domestic Strategic Export Licensing Criteria, including its obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty.

So, within 3 weeks it was clear to everyone paying attention that the Israeli leadership, chock-full of hate, were set on a course of vicious and brutal genocide. Yet the following month John Kirby, the White House National Security Communications Advisor, dismissed claims that Israel was committing genocide and told everybody that “Israel is not trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. Israel is not trying to wipe Gaza off the map. Israel is trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat. So if we’re going to start using that word, fine. Let’s use it appropriately.”

Yes, and let’s use the term “right of self-defence” appropriately. In Gaza and the West Bank it only applies to the Palestinian resistance, not the belligerent illegal occupier.

Incredibly, we’re now entering the 9th month of the genocide in Gaza and it has gone from bad to much, much worse. And there is still no let-up. People worldwide have been watching day after day mainstream and alternative media reports, seeing for themselves the horrors endured even by children, and aghast at the wholesale and wanton destruction of the Palestinians’ homeland. They cannot believe how depraved, immoral and spineless the international community has become, and how paralysed the UN in allowing the slaughter to continue. They are especially sickened by the conduct of the so-called ‘major powers’ and by the lunatic Netanyahu whom their own politicians call ‘friend and ally’ who thinks he can still dictate what happens in Gaza after he eventually condescends to end the butchery.

If he thinks Israel can now grab Gaza by conquest he may be disappointed. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter expressly prohibits aggressive war and Article 5(3) of General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 1975 (which includes the definition of Acts of Aggression) nullifies any legal title acquired in this way. And 5(3) says “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations“.

In carrying through its genocidal assault on Gaza’s civilians and their homes, infrastructure and livelihoods Israel cannot possibly claim to abide by international law or honour their obligations under the Charter. And by encouraging Israel — and supplying the weaponry — neither can the US and UK.

And now we have Biden, Israel’s loony protector, setting ‘red lines’ which Israel must not cross while merrily carrying on with their genocide. But they are so elastic that, with US permission, the hateful maniacs can almost do as they please to satisfy their genocidal lust. Biden arrogantly overrules the red lines on war crimes and crimes against humanity that are already set out by international law.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Solitude for the Romantic movements emerged as a process of disengagement. By withdrawing from the noise of society artistic (creative) potential could be enhanced. Contemplation was often focused on nature or introspection. The work produced in the process, whether in literature or visual arts, created an iconography for human isolation and alienation. At the same time, nature served as a source of potential redemption from all those sources of alienation found in society. Nature in various forms also became a repository of the divine. The paintings of Caspar David Friedrich are well-known examples for this process in the visual arts. The Prelude, by William Wordsworth, is certainly exemplary in the literary arts.

Wordsworth began The Prelude in 1799 and finished it in 1805, although he made several revisions in the course of his life. The poem can be understood as a literary investigation into the forces and events that shaped the personality of the author and his poetical labour. In Book Four he wrote:

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude-
How potent a mere image of her sway!
Most potent when impressed upon the mind
With an appropriate human centre: hermit,
Deep in the bosom of the wilderness;
Votary (in vast cathedral, where no foot
Is treading, where no other face is seen)
Kneeling at prayers; or watchman on the top
Of lighthouse, beaten by Atlantic waves;
Or as the soul of that great Power is met
Sometimes embodied on a public road,
When, for the night deserted, it assumes
A character of quiet more profound
Than pathless wastes.[1]

Wordsworth began as a great supporter of the French Revolution and ended greatly disappointed by it. The poem examines the path that transformed him into a revolutionary and led him away from revolution in the end. The revolution had promised to reorganise society along principles of equality as articulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Wordsworth and others felt it had failed. The dictatorship and imperial ambition of Napoleon Bonaparte were proof that it was impossible to create a society based on New Testament equality by removing the divinely ordained monarchy.

It is important to add here that these judgements were based on reports scarcely more circumspect than found in today’s mass media. Wordsworth would not have been able to see the results of the Jacobin societies in the provinces or to measure the violence with which the changes introduced were opposed by the counter-revolution with its foreign supporters. The rejection of the French Revolution by much of the English intellectual caste and England’s emergent cultural power in the 19th century constitute a bias which still overshadows the appreciation of the 1789 revolution beyond the English-speaking world. Even today very little attention is given to the counter-revolution and foreign intervention. Almost all school and university texts focus on the Jacobins and the so-called Terror, although the “White Terror” killed substantially more people.

At the same time the foundation of what we once recognized as modern science, evolving as it did from the same cultural context, emerged as the product of solitary investigation. In fact by the end of the 19th century the image of the scientist and the artist merged as solitary investigators, discoverers and innovators were ranked among the upper strata of Western society and the artistic creator/ scientific genius became clichés.

The solitude, whether in science or the arts, was in many ways a recovery of the penitentiary tradition in the Latin Church. In order to discover god and attain grace it was necessary to exercise as close to purity as possible. If artistic or scientific truth approached that of the divine or substituted for it, then it was also to be obtained by the investigator isolated from sources of corruption thus able to perceive pure data. The scientist sought this isolation in research performed in private laboratories that were sometimes associated with university faculties. The concept of academic freedom—a secularization of monastic privileges—was interpreted to assure the necessary solitude for unbiased research and pursuit of truth. Thus although scientific research is inevitably a collective activity, the fiction of solitary research was created by formally isolating the university from daily political and commercial interests.

The artist sought places in the countryside or abandoned his native land for a self-imposed exile or quest. George Gordon Byron’s death in the Greek war of independence in 1824 is only the most notorious.

By the end of the 19th century the literary-artistic and scientific-scholarly caste was endowed with its own ethic and processes for transforming the pure into the true. This ideal was based on a critique of society’s corruption and the striving to transcend it. The bearer of this ideal was to become the autonomous self, solitude incarnate.

Following the defeat of Napoleon the Congress of Vienna not only restored the monarchical system, if somewhat “embourgeoised”, it reinstalled the deification of truth and knowledge as something otherworldly in origin. As Nietzsche observed at the end of the century, god was restored in all but name, while the name of “god” became an empty category, a mere symbol for the will to power.

The emergence of the autonomous Self, whose access to identity and truth derived from exercises in solitude, derived from two traditions. One, already mentioned, was the penitentiary. The individual withdraws from society as a source of sin and by contemplation, absorption and submission to God attains a higher degree of grace and eventually redemption from the sins with which society has soiled him.

The other tradition is that of natural divinity. The individual withdraws in order to contemplate and then engage the creative forces of nature. By comprehending them the artist becomes an agent of creation. Like nature he becomes capable of producing exemplifications of truth. The truth-value of these exemplifications is claimed by virtue of the method applied to create them. This is sometimes called “scientific method” or “artistic creativity”. Until recently it has been assumed that integrity of the respective methods was essential to the value of the product.

The Romantics found that solitude created the conditions by which they could contemplate the problems with which they had been confronted in society. The psychic isolation of the countryside or a foreign environment permitted them to focus on what remained in them when they were no longer influenced by daily social interaction. The longer the isolation continued the more they were exposed to themselves. In some cases this resulted in a “stripping” of their personalities down to the basics, e.g. the interaction of the human with nature unmitigated by social instructions. At some point the artist or scholar would arrive at an essence from which his personality could be redesigned, primarily through the creative or investigative work. The principle can be illustrated simply enough. If anyone has been left alone with a problem long enough, especially one which is highly conventionalized but for which there is no external solution available, there is at least a tendency for the person to use whatever means are at his disposal to solve the problem—even if they are unconventional. If a person is left in a group with the same problem and attempts to use that unconventional method, he will likely feel enormous pressure to abandon it in favour of the approach used by everyone else in the group.

One of the additional products of this solitude, voluntary psychic isolation, is to develop the strength of persona necessary to reproduce the solution created even under social pressure. Thus solitude is not only a strategy for stripping but for clothing the Self. There is certainly enough anecdotal evidence to justify statements like “he is too headstrong because he has been working alone too long.” One of the Romantic contributions to cultural transformation has been the adaptation of solitude to the modern scientific construction of the Self.

The Self as envisioned by the Romantics was a liberated personality, freed from the oppressive social structures and thus able to act as an agent of social transformation. However another Self was developed in response to the revolutionary impulses.

In 2002, British filmmaker Adam Curtis produced a television documentary, roughly based on a book by Stuart Ewen, called The Century of the Self. [2] Curtis’ central thesis is that the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, initiated and for a while led a movement that would turn the concept of the Self into the central instrument of social control in the West. In his study of public relations, the euphemism for propaganda Bernays introduced after World War I, Ewen explains how the culture of the Self was appropriated and exploited by corporate and political communications actors (Business and Government) to produce a society of individuals who believe themselves to be autonomous but are in fact manipulated in their every thought and move. Bernays drew on his uncle’s theories of the unconscious to show that control could be exercised over people by speaking to what they “really” thought and felt as opposed to what they actually said.

Instead of individuals—as the Romantics imagined—creating an authentic Self and entering society to act on the basis of this authenticity, Bernays and his successors devised methods they believed would suggest to the masses of isolated individuals ways they could reconstruct themselves in the interests of those who rule society. This presumed that one could create individuals in isolation that could be sufficiently alienated to engage in searching strategies. The aim was to exploit industrial and especially post-war psychic distress among masses of people whose lives had been irreversibly affected by the world war. These people would be encouraged in their sense of alienation. That alienation would be labelled individualism. The emotional duress would be sustained by graduated fear. This fear was sublimated in the reconstitution of groups of alienated individuals.

Curtis’s 4-episode film continues with a focus on commercial activity. Edward Bernays argued if he was able to produce advertising that would persuade people to go to war and fight he ought to be able to do this to sell products. After World War I ended the US was faced with massive overproduction. There were just too many goods that had been produced just to be wasted in war and now the plant lay idle and the goods collected dust in warehouses. Modern advertising was initiated to move those goods and restore the enormous profitability of wartime industrial manufacturing. He shows that creating desires and fears were complementary aims. On one hand the individual has to be freed from inhibitions like thrift, morality, social responsibility, or just a realistic assessment of his financial condition. The objective impositions of society are to be stripped from him so that he can feel his true nature as a desiring subject. Then he is intensively exposed to the prefabricated objects he ought to desire. This process is stimulated by fear, either the inability to satisfy those desires or the injection of ever more desires for which he has not yet the means of satisfaction. Dissatisfaction and fear are the constant state in which the individual is to be confined. Society does not offer him comfort, whether as routine or sustenance. Instead it exposes him to continuous competition for the satisfaction of the desires cultivated in him during his enforced isolation. Society becomes a machine for enforcing the private desires and the cycles of satisfaction – dissatisfaction, safety – fear that are translated into spending and consumption.

This process of alienation could not have become industrialized without political force. At the same time as individualism was being encouraged, Business and the State were waging vicious war against any genuinely autonomous collectivities like labour unions and popular movements, especially communism in the industrialized world and anti-colonialism/ nationalism among the peoples subjugated by colonial and imperial rule. Although Business was certainly enamoured with Bernays’ approach to mass marketing of products and services, there was also great demand for technologies of the “Self” by state actors.

The State’s interest in the Self, as opposed to the citizen, has not ceased. Curtis shows how the CIA and other covert agencies of the State promoted large-scale experimentation with the technology for creating or modifying the “Self”. One of the most notorious was the work of Dr Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal during the 1950s and 1960s. There experiments were performed on people who were subjected to pharmaceutical treatment in combination with electro-shocks and various degrees of sensory deprivation. The principle driving this work was that humans could have their consciousness erased and be “reprogrammed” on demand.

Although the Allan Memorial was eventually closed and Dr Cameron’s work denounced, there is no evidence that this kind of involuntary psychic isolation for political and social engineering goals has discontinued. The rudimentary descriptions available of programs run by the CIA and US military at the Guantanamo Detention Center, US Naval Base Guantanamo Cuba since the beginning of the century bear similarities to those run by Dr Cameron so great that they ought to be equally disturbing. Yet despite numerous pledges this center remains in operation with some 700 persons incarcerated at last count.[3]

The mass incarceration, appropriately denoted with prison jargon as “lockdowns”, organized and enforced to varying degrees from March 2020 to the end of 2021 has been excused by medical grounds discredited almost as soon as the public health authorities proposed them. Studies are only beginning to emerge that raise the question: what were the real reasons for these forced isolations, in innumerable cases, solitude and involuntary psychic isolation.

One of Dr Cameron’s experiments was to use covert media, e.g. hidden audio recordings, to introduce thoughts and verbalization to the brain of his presumably erased subject. The recordings would be played during the sleep sessions.

When the first reports and complaints about torture in Guantanamo Detention Center became public there was frequent mention of forced exposure to loud music and audio-visual material the prisoner would presumably find offensive. Sensory deprivation was combined with saturation exposure to foreign stimuli.

During the so-called “lockdowns” I was particularly struck by the closures and domestic incarceration in Portugal. In 2005, I was in Fatima for the first time. My friend and I were amazed at the people assembling there. Cripples of all sorts, people visibly disfigured or disabled by every conceivable illness made their way to the sanctuary. They were on their way to ask for the blessing and healing power of the Holy Virgin, Mother of God. Who knows if any of them had infectious illnesses? The power of the Almighty was present and able to heal. Yet during the mass incarceration the Shrine of Fatima was closed. Had I still been a practicing member of the Latin Church I would have been in uproar. How could the State presume to be more powerful than Our Lord and the Mother of God? How could anyone presume to keep me from the omnipotent divine?

To end, again with Wordsworth:

Oh, yet a few short years of useful life,
And all will be complete, thy race be run,
Thy monument of glory will be raised!
Then, though (too weak to tread the ways of truth)
This age fall back to old idolatry,
Though men return to servitude as fast
As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame
By nations sink together, we shall still
Find solace—knowing what we have learnt to know,
Rich in true happiness if allowed to be
Faithful alike in forwarding a day

Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work
(Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe)
Of their deliverance, surely yet to come.
Prophets of Nature, we to them speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blessed by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which, mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine.
(“The Prelude,” Book fourteen, 430-454)

ENDNOTES

[1] William Wordsworth, “The Prelude” cited from The Prelude and other Poems, Alma Classics (2019)

[2] Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin, New York, 1996; Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, originally released on BBC Two in 2002. Available on YouTube.

[3] From the time the US Government announced its program of “extraordinary renditions” and incarceration of “terrorists” at its illegally occupied south-eastern Cuba naval station, Guantanamo Bay aka as GITMO, there have been estimates and official claims ranging between 1,500 and 20 over the past two decades. Thus far there is no way to be certain exactly how many prisoners were or are held at this high security naval base. Therefore 700 is considered a conservative number, even if it may exceed current official claims.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

Photo by Ahmed Zalabany

President Vladimir Putin ordered his army in Ukraine to observe a 36-hour ceasefire for the Russian Orthodox Christmas holiday this weekend, a move which will raise hopes of a longer-term end to the fighting. It is the first such truce covering the whole battlefield since the Russian invasion 11 months ago and serves Russian interests more than those of Ukraine.

The Russian temporary truce is apparently unconditional and has the propaganda advantage of making it appear that it is Moscow that wants to stop the fighting and Ukraine that wants to continue it.

Earlier in the day, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered to act as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine. But it is difficult to see how a short unilateral truce by Russia would open the way to a ceasefire or a peace agreement. Both Kyiv and Moscow are still making maximalist demands and believe they can improve their positions on the battlefield.

Putin is demanding that Ukraine withdraws from territory which Russia claims to have annexed, and that Kyiv recognises Russian annexation of what it already holds. Kyiv is demanding that Russia withdraws from all of Ukraine.

“Vladimir Putin reaffirmed Russia’s openness to a serious dialogue, provided that the Kiev authorities fulfil the well-known and repeatedly voiced requirements and take into account the new territorial realities,” the Kremlin said.

Given that it is Ukrainian forces which have been advancing since last September, there is no reason for Kyiv to accept the Russian demands and many reasons for them not to. For the moment, Ukraine has the upper hand militarily and will not want to lose momentum or give time for Western support to ebb. On the contrary, President Volodymyr Zelensky is pressing the US and its allies for more and better weapons, enabling Ukraine to resume its counteroffensive.

Earlier in 2022, when Russian armoured columns were still stalled close to Kyiv, Ukraine showed itself more open to Turkish mediation and to compromise over territory. But its military and diplomatic position is now far stronger, and Ukraine and its Western allies suspect that a ceasefire would only serve for Moscow to reorganise and re-equip its forces in order to launch another offensive. The moment may come for an open-ended ceasefire, but not yet.

Russia failed to take Kyiv and topple the Ukrainian government when it invaded with 190,000 troops on 24 February. Almost nothing has gone right for the Kremlin since its initial disastrous miscalculation, which Putin sought for six months to pass off as a “Special Military Operation” which would have little impact on the day -to-day life of the Russian people.

The success of a Ukrainian counteroffensive around Kharkivm in the east of the country, and the Russian withdrawal from Kherson in the south in September and October, produced a partial Russian mobilisation of 300,000 extra troops. But, as with every other aspect of the Russian war effort, the mobilisation was ill-organised and looks unlikely to produce sufficient trained troops to shift the military balance.

The only Russian success in Ukraine so far has been to degrade Ukrainian infrastructure – and the electrical grid in particular – by the use of precision-guided ground-to-ground missiles and drones. It might also use – though for now the chances are remote – tactical nuclear weapons.

Away from Ukraine, Russia has so far had surprising success in limiting the economic damage caused by Western sanctions, while the rest of Europe has suffered severe economic consequences from the rise in oil and gas prices.

The present balance of power might change. Suppose Russian forces suffer more defeats, the Kremlin might become more interested in a ceasefire along current front lines, but this probably would not bring a lasting peace any closer. Ukraine currently has little incentive to quit while it is ahead, and Zelensky would have difficulty in selling any such deal to the Ukrainian public when they feel that they are winning. Only if Ukrainian forces began to suffer serious defeats – and probably not even then – would Kyiv have any incentive to stop the fighting.

Moscow may calculate that, even if Ukraine shows no sign of buckling, its Western backers may begin to put serious pressure on Kyiv to negotiate and accept some form of deal to bring an end to the war. But this would only happen if the Western powers thought that Putin and Russia would do a deal in which Moscow accepted that it had been defeated – and there is no sign of this happening.

In warfare any outcome is possible, but for now escalation still looks a more likely option than a temporary or long-term peace.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Cockburn.

Just in case you didn’t notice, authoritarianism was on the ballot in the 2022 midterm elections. An unprecedented majority of candidates from one of the nation’s two major political parties were committed to undemocratic policies and outcomes. You would have to go back to the Democratic Party-dominated segregationist South of the 1950s to find such a sweeping array of authoritarian proclivities in an American election. While voters did stop some of the most high-profile election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and pro-Trump true believers from taking office, all too many won seats at the congressional, state, and local levels.

Count on one thing: this movement isn’t going away. It won’t be defeated in a single election cycle and don’t think the authoritarian threat isn’t real either. After all, it now forms the basis for the politics of the Republican Party and so is targeting every facet of public life. No one committed to constitutional democracy should rest easy while the network of right-wing activists, funders, media, judges, and political leaders work so tirelessly to gain yet more power and implement a thoroughly undemocratic agenda.

This deeply rooted movement has surged from the margins of our political system to become the defining core of the GOP. In the post-World War II era, from the McCarthyism of the 1950s to Barry Goldwater’s run for the presidency in 1964, from President Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, President Ronald Reagan, and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in its current Trumpian iteration, Republicans have long targeted democratic norms as impediments to establishing a neoliberal, race-based version of all-American authoritarianism. And that movement has been far too weakly opposed by far too many Democratic Party leaders and even some progressives. Don’t think of this phenomenon as right-wing conservativism either, but as a more dangerous, even violent movement whose ultimate aim is to overthrow liberal democracy. The American version of this type of electoral authoritarianism, anchored in Christian nationalist populism, has at its historic core a white nationalist pushback against the struggle for racial justice.

Liberal Democracy for Some, Racial Authoritarianism for Others

Liberal democracy had failed generations of African Americans and other people of color, as, of course, it did Native Americans massacred or driven from their ancestral lands. It failed African Americans and Latinos forced to work on chain gangs or lynched (without the perpetrators suffering the slightest punishment). It failed Asian Americans who were brutally sent to internment camps during World War II and Asians often explicitly excluded from immigration rosters.

The violent insurrection of January 6, 2021, was just the high (or, depending on your views, low) point in a long-planned, multi-dimensional, hyper-conservative, white nationalist coup attempt engineered by President Donald Trump, his supporters, and members of the Republican Party.

The benefits of liberal democracy — rule of law, government accountability, the separation of powers, and the like — that were extended to most whites existed alongside a racial authoritarianism that denied fundamental rights and protections to tens of millions of Americans. The Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s defeated the longstanding, all-too-legal regime of racist segregationists and undemocratic, even if sometimes constitutional, authority. For the first time since the end of the Reconstruction era, when there was a concerted effort to extend voting rights, offer financial assistance, and create educational opportunities for those newly freed from slavery, it appeared that the nation was again ready to reckon with its racial past and present.

Yet, all too sadly, the proponents of autocratic governance did anything but disappear. In the twenty-first century, their efforts are manifest in the governing style and ethos of the Republican Party, its base, and the extremist organizations that go with it, as well as the far-right media, think tanks, and foundations that accompany them. At every level, from local school boards and city councils to Congress and the White House, authoritarianism and its obligatory racism continue to drive the GOP political agenda.

The violent insurrection of January 6, 2021, was just the high (or, depending on your views, low) point in a long-planned, multi-dimensional, hyper-conservative, white nationalist coup attempt engineered by President Donald Trump, his supporters, and members of the Republican Party. It was neither the beginning nor the end of that effort, just its most violent public expression — to date, at least. After all, Trump’s efforts to delegitimize elections were first put on display when he claimed that Barack Obama had actually lost the popular vote and so stolen the 2012 election, that it had all been a “total sham.”

During the 2016 presidential debates, Trump alone stated that he would not commit himself to support any other candidate as the party’s nominee, since — a recurring theme for him — he could only lose if the election were rigged or someone cheated. He correctly grasped that there would be no consequences to such norm-breaking behavior and falsely stated that he had only lost the Iowa caucus to Senator Ted Cruz because “he stole it.” After losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College in 2016, Trump incessantly complained that he would have won the popular vote, too, if the “millions” of illegal voters who cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton hadn’t been counted.

Donald Trump decisively lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, 74.2 million to 81.2 million in the popular vote and 232 to 306 in the Electoral College, leaving only one path to victory (other than insurrection) — finding a way to discount millions of black votes in key swing-state cities. From birtherism and Islamophobia to anti-Black Lives Matter rhetoric, racism had propelled Trump’s ascendancy and his political future would be determined by the degree to which he and his allies could invalidate votes in the disproportionately Black cities of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia, and Latino and Native American votes in Arizona and Nevada.

The GOP effort to disqualify Black, Latino, and Native American votes was a plot to create an illegitimate government, an unholy scheme that took an inescapably violent turn and led to an outcome for which the former president has yet to be held accountable. Sadly enough, the forces of authoritarianism were anything but dispatched by their defeat on January 6th. If anything, they were emboldened by the failure so far to hold responsible most of the agents who maneuvered the event into motion.

Democracy, Authoritarianism, or Fascism?

The last decade has exposed a severely wounded American democratic experiment. Consider it Donald Trump’s contribution to have revealed how spectacularly the guardrails of liberal democracy can fail if the breaking of laws, rules, and norms goes unchallenged or is sacrificed on the altar of narrow political gains. The most mendacious, cruel, mentally unstable, thin-skinned, vengeful, incompetent, narcissistic, bigoted individual ever elected to the presidency was neither an accident, nor an aberration. He was the inevitable outcome of decades of Republican pandering to anti-democratic forces and white nationalist sentiments.

Scholars have long debated the distinction between fascism and authoritarianism. Fascist states create an all-engulfing power that rules over every facet of political and social life. Elections are abolished; mass arrests occur without habeas corpus; all opposition media are shut down; freedoms of speech and assembly are curtailed; courts, if allowed to exist at all, rubber-stamp undemocratic state policies; while the military or brown shirts of some sort enforce an unjust, arbitrary legal system. Political parties are outlawed and opponents are jailed, tortured, or killed. Political violence is normalized, or at least tolerated, by a significant portion of society. There is little pretense of constitutional adherence or the constitution is formally suspended.

On the other hand, authoritarian states acknowledge constitutional authority, even if they also regularly ignore it. Limited freedoms continue to exist. Elections are held, though generally with predetermined outcomes. Political enemies aren’t allowed to compete for power. Nationalist ideology diverts attention from the real levers and venues of that power. Political attacks against alien “others” are frequent, while public displays of racism and ethnocentrism are common. Most critically, some enjoy a degree of democratic norms while accepting that others are denied them completely. During the slave and Jim Crow eras in this country — periods of racial authoritarianism affecting millions of Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans — most whites in the South (and perhaps a majority outside of it) either tolerated or embraced the disavowal of democracy.

Under the right confluence of forces — a weakened system of checks and balances, populist rhetoric that taps into fears and perceived injustices, an anemic and divided opposition, deep social or racial divides, distrust of science and scientists, rampant anti-intellectualism, unpunished corporate and political malfeasance, and popularly accepted charges of mainstream media bias — a true authoritarian could indeed come to power in this country. And as history has shown, that could just be a prelude to full-blown fascism.

The warning signs could not be clearer.

While, in many ways, Trump’s administration was more of a kakistocracy — that is, “government by the worst and most unscrupulous people,” as scholar Norm Ornstein put it — from day one to the last nano-seconds of its tenure, his autocratic tendencies were all too often on display. His authoritarian appetites generated an unprecedented library of books issuing distress signals about the dangers to come.

Timothy Snyder’s 2017 bestseller On Tyranny was, for instance, a brief but remarkably astute early work on the subject. The Yale history professor provided a striking overview of tyranny meant to dispel myths about how autocrats or populists come to and stay in power. Although published in 2017, the work made no mention of Donald Trump. It was, however, clearly addressing the rise to power of his MAGA right and soberly warning the nation to stop him before it was too late.

As Snyder wrote of the institutions of our democracy, they “do not protect themselves… The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions — even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.” He particularly cautioned against efforts to link the police and military to partisan politics, as Trump first did in 2020 when his administration had peaceful protesters attacked by the police and National Guard in Lafayette Square across from the White House so that the president could take a stroll to a local church. He similarly warned about letting private security forces, often with violent tendencies (as when Trump’s security team would eject demonstrators from his political rallies) gain quasi-official or official status.

The period 2015 to 2020 certainly represented the MAGAfication of the United States and launched this country on a potential path toward future authoritarian rule by the GOP.

The Vulnerabilities of Democracy

Journalists have also been indispensable in exposing the democratic vulnerabilities of the United States. The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen has, for instance, been prolific and laser-focused in calling out the hazards of creeping authoritarianism and of Trump’s “performing fascism.” She writes that while he may not himself have fully grasped the concept of fascism, “In his intuition, power is autocratic; it affirms the superiority of one nation and one race; it asserts total domination; and it mercilessly suppresses all opposition.”

While Trump is too lazy, self-interested, and intellectually undisciplined to be a coherent ideologue, he surrounded himself with and took counsel from those who were, including far-right zealots and Trump aides Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Stephen Miller. Bannon functioned as Trump’s Goebbels-ish propagandist, having cut his white nationalist teeth as founder and executive chair of the extremist Breitbart News media operation. In 2018, he told a gathering of European far-right politicians, fascists, and neo-Nazis, “Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.”

Someone who knows the former president better than most, his niece Mary Trump, all too tellingly wrote that her uncle “is an instinctive fascist who is limited by his inability to see beyond himself.” For her, there is no question the title fits. As she put it, “[A]rguing about whether or not to call Donald a fascist is the new version of the media’s years-long struggle to figure out if they should call his lies, lies. What’s more relevant now is whether the media — and the Democrats — will extend the label of fascism to the Republican Party itself.”

Mainstreaming Extremism and Democracy’s Decline

Given these developments, some scholars and researchers argue that the nation’s democratic descent may already have gone too far to be fully stopped. In its Democracy Report 2020: Autocratization Surges — Resistance Grows, the Varieties of Democracy (VDem) Project, which assesses the democratic health of nations globally, summarized the first three years of Trump’s presidency this way: “[Democracy] has eroded to a point that more often than not leads to full-blown autocracy.” Referring to its Liberal Democracy Index scale, it added, “The United States of America declines substantially on the LDI from 0.86 in 2010 to 0.73 in 2020, in part as a consequence of President Trump’s repeated attacks on the media, opposition politicians, and the substantial weakening of the legislature’s de facto checks and balances on executive power.”

These findings were echoed in The Global State of Democracy 2021, a report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance that argued, “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale.”

The failure of Donald Trump’s eternally “stolen election” coup attempt and the presidency of Joe Biden may have put off the further development of an authoritarian state, but don’t be fooled. Neither the failure of the January 6th insurrection nor the disappointments suffered in the midterm elections have deterred the ambitions of the GOP’s fanatics. The Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, however slim, will undoubtedly unleash a further tsunami of extremist actions not just against the Democrats, but the American people.

Purges of Democrats from House committees, McCarthyite-style hearings and investigations, and an all-out effort to rig the system to declare whoever emerges as the GOP’s 2024 presidential candidate the preemptive winner will mark their attempt to rule. Such actions will be duplicated — and worse — in states with Republican governors and legislatures, as officials there bend to the autocratic urges of their minority but fervent white base voters. They will be supported by a network of far-right media, donors, activists, and Trump-appointed judges and justices.

In response, defending the interests of working people, communities of color, LGBTQ individuals and families, and other vulnerable sectors of this society will mean alliances between progressives, liberals, and, in some instances, disaffected and distraught anti-Trump, pro-democracy Republicans. There are too many historical examples of authoritarian and fascist takeovers while the opposition remained split and in conflict not to form such political alliances. Nothing is more urgent at this moment than the complete political defeat of an anti-democratic movement that is, all too sadly, still on the march.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Clarence Lusane.

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Under Myanmar’s Constitution, drafted in 2008 by a previous military-led government, a junta can only extend its tenure twice after a year has passed since a coup, for six months at a time. The regime is now operating under its second half-year extension of emergency rule since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup.

Junta chief Snr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing said in a speech on Aug. 1 marking 18 months of military rule that the regime wanted to hold elections once fighting in the country was brought under control.

The military then significantly increased its ground, air and water attacks, especially in restive Sagaing and Magway regions. Anti-junta opposition groups across the country have said that they will oppose any elections held by the military regime, believing they would not be free and fair.

On the day the junta chief laid out his plan, eight villagers and two People’s Defense Force (PDF) members were killed in a helicopter attack and a ground raid on Let Pan Kyin village in Sagaing’s Myinmu township, with some homes were destroyed by fire.

Local residents of Yin Paung Tine village in Yinmarbin township said they found the bodies of 19 people, including children and the elderly, in the village as a result of a three-day attack from the ground and the air that ended on Aug. 14.

Capt. Boh Bala of the Yinmarbin-based Young Rangers Force, which has been fighting the military forces, told RFA that the junta’s attacks on the villages have been conducted to weaken local PDF units.

“They have now changed their strategy,” he said. “They know that we have no weapons to defend ourselves against the airstrikes, so they attack from the air and conduct lightning raids to gain a military advantage for themselves. I can see that they are launching these attacks to weaken our strength. With these raids, they hope to break down our units and the military strategy we are building."

The air attacks are less discriminating and more innocent citizens are being caught up in the fighting, he added.

Military troops have raided at least 10 villages in Sagaing region since Aug. 1, with about 1,000 houses burned and roughly 15,000 people displaced, local residents said.

Nay Zin Lat, a former lawmaker from the northwestern region, said the military has conducted two-prong attacks in August in areas where the armed resistance is strong.

“There have been more frequent and more vigorous attacks lately,” he said. “They are using helicopters to move quickly from one place to another. With the use of helicopters, they can launch attacks more frequently than before. Even from the water, we can say they have reached a level of using warships.”

Area residents have reported seeing five or six naval ships sandwiched between cargo vessels heading up the Irrawaddy River, Nay Zin Lat added.

“So, we can say they are using all the powers they have from the land, sea and air,” he said.

'Situation is very bad'

Junta troops also have attacked villages in central Myanmar’s Magway region, where anti-regime forces are also strong.

A Myaing township resident, who declined to give his name for fear of his safety, said junta troops have burned villages in Myaing, Pauk, Seik Pyu and Yesagyo townships, which harbor strong anti-junta sentiments, just like in Sagaing.

“In Myaing and Pauk townships, the situation is very bad right now,” he told RFA. “They are attacking in two or three columns.”

Junta forces want to set up administrative systems in areas they control but haven’t been able to in much of the region, the resident said.

“Villages here are without administrators,” he said. “There are no village administrators in about 70% of the villages.”

On July 31, the junta announced that it extended the state of emergency in Myanmar for another six months, to Feb. 1, 2023, or two years after the coup. According to the Constitution, the regime will have to hold elections within six months after that date, so by August.

Min Zaw Oo, executive director of the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security, said that fighting is likely to continue until the elections.

“When there is an armed movement, the rulers will try to weaken and crush it,” he told RFA. “They want it to disappear. But in more than half the townships [in Myanmar], there will still be armed attacks. Bombing attacks will continue.”

It is also uncertain whether Myanmar citizens would participate in any election the military attempted to hold, he said.

Political analyst Sai Kyi Zin Soe said the military is more aggressive in areas where there is strong resistance because it is trying to eliminate anyone who will oppose the holding of an election.

“We are seeing more military offensives, and that they are continuing to make more arrests with malice,” he said about the junta forces. “It is obvious that they’re trying to remove from the political scene all those who do not accept the election and its way of reforming the country.

“One thing is for sure: this election may not be an outlet for the military,” Sai Kyi Zin Soe said. “But what is certain is that they have already decided to continue to implement this plan.”

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane for RFA Burmese. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

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