Genocide Blog No 67 - Capitalist West Lurching into Barbarism - Moment to Rally for Socialism
09.04.2025
The specter of the capitalist “West” lurching into barbarism is a hideous thing to behold.
Yet behold it we must. Even if it means we have had to behold the USA and its Western “allies” joining into the Israeli genocide against the people of Palestine for 550 days now.
We have had to behold the specter of two American Presidents, one after the other, egged on by the corrupt Congress with a skewed judiciary, supervising Netanyahu’s intentional starvation of Palestinian families and his intentional genocidal bombing of Palestinian civilians in cold blood, his slaughter of babes in arms, blown apart and torn to bits, on a vast scale. This is barbarism never witnessed in real time before. We have had to behold Israel assassinating ambulance crews at close range and burying them under the sand, together with their ambulances. Utter barbarism. And have we not beheld bodies of dead Palestinians allowed to rot and then “delivered” in containers, handed over to live Palestinians, delivered this way by the score? Unimaginable barbarism. Have we not beheld journalists slaughtered? Not just one messenger shot but more messengers massacred than the sum total of those killed in literally a dozen previous major wars? And, all the while, the Israeli army bans international journalists from Gaza and the West Bank. Killing journalists is a failure of the barbarism of an attempted cover-up of the barbarism of genocide. Barbarism upon barbarism.
It is a failure of the cover-up. We see all the crimes before our very eyes. Words long ago began to fail us, those of us who try to process in public what we are forced, by our shared humanity, to behold.
It is a sight so terrible that it shakes our humanity. The Israeli state is responsible, and its leaders must be made to answer, to admit to its crimes, and to be held accountable. New Nuremburg-type trials will need to be held. STOP IT, for godsake. And who are these monsters that support the monstrosity of what the Israeli State is doing? Who allows it to go on, and on, and on? Without so much as a UN “No fly zone” instituted? No state comes forward to volunteer soldiers to quell the killing frenzy of the Israeli state? On the contrary, the USA finances it, arms it, strategizes for it and follows Netanyahu’s butchers’ proposed policy of genocide. “I am sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job”, as Trump put it, and as Netanyahu quotes him as saying, day after day since then.
Impunity? Yes. But only until now. Only so far ...
And we behold European countries’ leaders getting themselves into a blood-thirsty frenzy, as they prepare for perpetuating a god-forsaken war against Russia, even as President Trump tries to extricate the USA from this NATO war of expansion, a war based on gross Russia-phobia – even as we behold these same European leaders “allowing” the Israeli state to commit crimes against humanity, and worse still, giving their blessings, their arms, their diplomatic complicity, and pretending that what is happening is not happening at all. We see these leaders, and their panicking bourgeoisies, all running around like chickens without heads (the expression has become common in relation to European leaders), and now rushing to kiss the ring of Donald Trump, the man at the helm of this monstrous Western empire, more violent than ever, in its present death throes. They begin to rush, following in the footsteps of the American bosses, right to his doorstep at the White House or Mar-a-Lago.
What the West is perpetrating in Palestine today, its genocide, alongside its war against Russia and threats of war against Iran and China, its constant belligerence, exposes in condensed form the crude and vicious cruelty of the whole history of 400 years of capitalist colonialism before our own eyes on our own screens. Instead of the Western missionaries to cover-up the slaughter, we now have Western journalists. Just as respectable today as the missionaries were in the 19th and 20th Century. And just as harmful. Doing work just as dirty for colonial empires today as it was in the heyday of colonization.
All the veneer of “universal rights” and “we are all born equal”, the veneer of “international law” and “universal values”, of “inalienable human rights”, of “humanitarian law”, has simply peeled off and exposed the capitalist ruling classes, whose aim is none other than to perpetuate their plunder and their wage slavery at any cost, under “full spectrum dominance”. And in this late stage of capitalism, the “rentiers” or “data masters” get billions of people to work for free now, as a slave, for the “data mining” companies, even as we all provide them and their bourgeois states with enough personal information on ourselves to permit the prolongation of their world disorder for a few more hideous years through their awful means of mass surveillance. Repression of all kinds worsens. In the USA and Britain, free speech itself has been curbed. People are just spirited out of the USA, mostly with the Courts and Judiciary simply short-circuited, after writing an editorial. Police become more and more heavily armed. Fascist ideology rises. Democracy continues to shrink. And, behind all this, the finance capitalists, the most inhuman of all capitalists, still run the show. Even as they ransack the planet, poison it to the limits of its sustainability, the Western capitalist world they dominate persists – now only through drastic violence: genocide, sanctions, blockades, war and repression. Trump, to prevent the USA’s economy crumbling under the weight of its debt repayments, has declared a war of tariffs, or taxes on imports, trying to force billions of dollars out of factories not in the USA into the US government’s coffers, but also out of American workers’ pockets. So, it is a war against the working class. That is why Trump has begun banning collective bargaining in a country where it is the only way the working class can operate legally at the enterprise level. The 47,000 workers in the Transport Safety Administration have been banned from collective bargaining, last month, and their check-off dues are no longer paid to the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) in which most workers are unionized. The union is challenging this in the Courts.
Behind all the genocide and war-mongering is the economy.
The economy of the USA is crashing. All empires fall. This one, too, is right now failing, and falling. This causes the disintegration of any moral framework. Even genocide is no longer reprehensible to a panicking USA regime. And perhaps in even a worse state are the economies of the UK and Germany, not to mention the rest of Europe. There, too, the leaders panic, and not only lose the “moral high ground”, but take the low ground – even when it patently will not work.
Trump tries to reverse the fall of the US economy by forcing corporations to “come back to producing goods and employing workers in America”. But it is too late. The factories went, and machines now replace whole sectors of the working class. Time cannot be turned back. Falling empires are doomed, sooner or later, like Humpty Dumpty to “all fall down”. The USA is now the same sized economy as China. But the USA’s economy is going down, down, down. China’s is stable and rising. Trump’s desperate economic and geo-political measures are an irrational and dangerous way of trying to reverse the collapse of the USA’s economy, whose earlier collapse was prevented, or rather “hidden from view”, by the thus-far role of the US currency, the dollar, as a “universal” currency for reserves and for international payments. This double role of its currency allowed it to overspend itself into its present ruin. This role of the dollar can no longer be taken as “lamone kontan”. The over-use of economic blockades, sanctions, and constant threats of confiscation and actual theft of capital from targeted countries, has forced too many countries to begin to operate outside of the US dollar. The list of those targeted is too long and includes economies too big to isolate. Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Sudan, Iran and Russia, and on and on. The Washington Post last year said the past four US presidents had gone over the top on sanctions. One third of the world’s countries were under some kind of US sanctions or other, including 60% of low-income countries. India and China, the two biggest countries by population and amongst the biggest by economic production, feel threatened enough to have linked up with others to form the “BRICS”.
Europe tries to reverse its own fall by flaying around trying to set up a military industrial complex of its own to fight Russia. They attempt a curious form of Keynesianism: using military production to raise bonds from the working people, in order to kill, destroy and maim Russians. But that, like Trump’s tariffs, is too late, too. Russia has, through the sanctions it has suffered, become stronger, not weaker. And it had never lost its military might, which is right at the top of the pyramid alongside the USA.
In response, the BRICS countries are being forced to work more closely together.
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – with another 5 large countries – represent a bigger share of humanity, and a bigger share, too, of production than the G7 of the West. 30 more countries want to join. Because of blockades and sanctions, tariffs and protectionism, they are forced to find new ways of international payments, outside of the USA’s dollar mechanism.
This is why it is so important for Mauritius to stop its negotiations to rent Diego Garcia for the USA’s military base on Diego Garcia. Not only is it “blood money”, that is for sure, but it is unwise. We need to be part of the association that unites other trading partners of Mauritius like China, South Africa, India and Egypt – and to avoid tying the country to the USA. Being attached to a falling empire is no fun.
But, for working people world-wide, when empires are falling, when genocide is being perpetrated, more than ever, we must put socialism on the agenda in each and all our countries. The aim must be for socialism, no less. It is not a “future step”. It must be now. That is LALIT’s aim.
The bourgeoisie in Mauritius is worried about socialism rising, as capitalism exposes once again its barbaric nature, just as the bourgeoisie everywhere is. The October Russian revolution of 1917 terrified the imperialist bourgeoisie for 100 years, so that they were obliged, for fear of revolution, to provide the “rights” and the “international law” and the humanist values that workers demanded. The bourgeoisie seemed to have forgotten the lesson they got. But they are remembering it, world-wide. The anti-socialist and anti-communist hysteria is coming back.
The “meter chula”, against socialism, which was referred to as the “ultra-progressive Left”, was none other than the genocider-in-chief, Netanyahu, who stands charged with crimes against humanity at the ICC, himself. Speaking in Israel on 27 March, and referring to campus demonstrations against Israel’s genocide:
“This is a reflection of a deep rot,” he said, “that has pervaded the intellectual hub of free societies (sic). And this vilification (sic) of Israel, the Jewish people (sic) and Western values (sic) has been propagated by a systemic alliance between the ultra-progressive Left (sic) and radical Islam. It must be resolutely fought by civilized societies to safeguard their future.” He went on to support Trump’s repression on American campuses, and to call for “pressure” to be put on other countries’ governments. Netanyahu’s twisted mind is exposed. The real meaning of what he said that day is as follows: “Taking a peaceful stand against Israel for its genocide is a sign of a deep rot in universities of the free societies. Criticizing Israel for committing genocide – and he then turns this criticism into communalism pretending that people are criticizing “the Jewish people” which they are not, in fact a huge proportion of the campus protesters are part of the Jewish people. He then conflates criticizing Israel’s policy of genocide with being equivalent to “Western values”. That is a giveaway line.
Whether it is Trump or Netanyahu, they know that they must oppose the struggle for socialism. And we know we must put it on the agenda now. The criticism of Israel, and what he conflates with criticism of Israel, is being propagated by a systemic alliance, whatever kind of alliance that is, between the ultra-progressive Left, meaning socialists and communists, and radical Islam, which presumably is a synonym for “Hamas” which is, to him, a synonym for “terrorists”. This, he says, must be resolutely fought by civilized societies to safeguard their future.
So, the barbarian becomes the civilized one. QED. The civilized people fighting for socialism become, in Netanyahu’s eyes, the barbarians. He said, at the beginning of his speech “Thank you for standing with the forces of civilization against the forces of barbarism.” Talk about reminiscent of George Orwell’s novel 1984, or his other famous novel, Animal Farm, or Repiblik Zanimo, recently republished in Mauritius. George Orwell described himself as a “socialist” and was, like many socialists, including us in LALIT, an anti-Stalinist. We refer people also to George Orwell’s autobiographic Homage to Catalonia about his being a volunteer against the fascists and Nazis and then the Stalinists, during the Spanish Civil War. He signed up with the Partit Obrer d'Unificació Marxista, POUM (The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) a Spanish communist party active at that time.
And it was during the Spanish Civil War that aerial bombing began against civilians in earnest , and the horror of the whole of humanity was expressed in Pablo Picasso’s evocative painting, Guernica, one of the most famous works of art of all times. I use the words “in earnest” of that Aerial bombing because civilians were, in fact, first bombed by the South African government in a punitive raid, as such collective punishment was then called, against the Khoikhoi people who held an uprising in a place called Bondelswarts in Namibia, when South West Africa was mandated territory under South African control, just as Palestine was a British mandated colony at that time. There were mass civilian deaths then, in Namibia, over 100 and 500 civilians were wounded and/or taken prisoner. And over 100 years later, we still face the specter of Israel imposing the Apartheid policies that South Africa, under Apartheid, later systematized from 1948 to 1994, when world-wide protests joined South Africans uprising against Apartheid and ended it. Israel today is imposing collective punishment, just as the then South African Government imposed in 1922. And Israel employs aerial bombing against civilians, just like the then South African government. Today, everyone condemns the Spanish fascist rule. Today everyone condemns the South African Apartheid rule. Today we are moving towards a moment when everyone condemns Israel and the Western governments, except for the barbarians who perpetrate genocide there. Until we stop them. And allow the Palestinian people and all those who want equality and peace to live in an ordinary country, from the river to the sea. And until we stop the wars, destruction and pillage that the capitalist system demands. And create socialist societies that are free and equal all over the planet.
Lindsey Collen,
for LALIT
