No Kings, Fascism, and Democracy

"The disease gets worse and worse every year, and the only remedy that will have permanent effect is to abolish private ownership of industry and production for profit, and substitute public ownership with production for use."

                                                              -----Upton Sinclair, 1933 

Donald Trump, after talking with the San Francisco mayor and wealthy business leaders in the Bay Area, has at least temporarily backed off from unleashing a Chicago-style ICE spectacle there.

This is but the latest un-fascist display by the Orange "Hitler," who couldn't even bring down Jimmy Kimmel, much less conquer and subdue a string of countries on multiple continents.

In reality, the fascist thesis as applied to Trump doesn't really hold together well, especially if it is seen as a repetition of Nazism. Unlike Hitler, who was probably the most popular political leader in German history before WWII, Trump struggles to maintain approval in the low-forties and has yet to find a single issue that can forge a robust national unity behind the Dear Leader.

More importantly, he does not seek to establish a new system of representation beyond parliaments and traditional parties to replace the liberal model, as the Nazis did, but to enhance his own fame and fortune by picking the carcass of a collapsing U.S. empire while promising an impossible return to its "glorious" past. He's a con-man, not a conqueror.

Do we really think that blowing up fishing boats and trying to finish wars in a single weekend to avoid stock market losses (Trump's strategy in bombing Iran last June) represent the martial glory fascists live for?

Even if Trump wanted to be a Nazi cult leader, he wouldn't be able to, as mass culture doesn't exist today like it did in the 1930s. Cultural space these days is highly fragmented due to neo-liberal stratification and anti-social media, which make mass mobilization much more difficult than it was for the Nazis. So while Trump can give us more January 6s, he can't deliver anything like Hitler's Nuremberg rallies, and his capacity to transform U.S. culture as a whole is nil. 

His talent is for division, not unity, and his erratic policies look more like a staccato sequence of lunatic reality TV episodes than they do the unfolding of a fascist ideological program. Programmatic change requires order, after all, whereas Trump is an agent of chaos, which by definition can't be normalized.

As a response to Trump's admittedly harrowing second term, repeatedly declaring, "This is fascism!" in a rising tone of righteous indignation really does not constitute opposition, nor does it achieve anything more than a demonstration of the highly agitated state of the outraged person, which only delights the MAGA base, as such reactions are proof of their "owning the libs." 

Government of the triggered, by the triggered, and for the triggered will not win the day.

Realistically, we are in for an extended period of trench warfare, not a violent subjugation by "fascists." The contending parties are Trump, who aspires to personal dictatorship based on his victories at the polls, and the dictatorship of money, which has never been elected by anyone. In the middle are we-the-people, who must quickly find a way to create real democracy or else be crushed by polarized elites who agree on nothing more than that the people must shut up and obey.

The beginning of this process may be the fact that Trump has stirred up a broad, uneasy "resistance" movement in the nine months since he returned to the White House. Although still too superficial in its approach, it's definitely a plus that some seven million people in more than 2700 demonstrations throughout the fifty states of the fragmenting American union recently came together to reject the anti-democratic regression propelled by his administration. Under the slogan "No Kings," political activists, celebrities, and concerned citizens from all parts of the country denounced the magnate's ploys to dismantle institutional checks on executive power in an effort to amass boundless personal power unto himself, warning that he has set himself on a path that may soon convert the American republic into a monarchy or worse.

Unfortunately, the "King" thesis appears to be poorly thought through. If Trump is King, then Netanyahu must be the King of Kings, able to reduce the U.S. monarch to his personal lackey at the snap of his fingers. This has to be a major concern for any authentic resistance movement, but at the "No Kings" march in New York City, there was (1) an approved list of chants (!) and (2) "Free Palestine!" wasn't on it (!)

Hopefully, the movement's paternalism will disappear and its priorities improve.

In any event, the "King" problem is hardly restricted to the Republican side of the aisle. We got Trump in the first place because Democrats rigged the 2016 elections against the most popular politician in the country - Bernie Sanders - then pumped up Trump as the opponent they could most easily beat, but then couldn't do so. They barely defeated him in 2020 only thanks to Covid, but then refused to hold primaries in 2024 and put up the vegetable Biden, replacing him late in the campaign with Kamala Harris, who never won a single delegate when she ran for president in 2020. Meanwhile, "King" Trump has taken on and defeated a wide field of candidates running against him over the course of the decade he has dominated American politics.

If Trump is a King, then what are James Clyburn and Nancy Pelosi? They are as entrenched in their positions as any King could be, tolerating no primaries or debates, ruling apparently until death with no possible successful challenge from within the Democratic Party.

If we are serious about transforming U.S. politics we must not only remove Donald Trump from office, but also what the late economist Edward Herman called the un-elected dictatorship of money, the massive centers of private wealth that dominate the state and fund both political parties, precisely in order to prevent any possibility of citizen-led democracy. It is these conglomerations of capital and their fatuous dream of limitless profit (at public expense) that are at the root of our most pressing political problems today.

We have an "immigration problem" because Big Capital holds down living standards abroad then welcomes fleeing workers as "cheap labor" when they reach the U.S., flouting the law and passing on the social costs to others.

We have a "homeless problem" because there is more private profit in dislodging the poor from their homes and "gentrifying" them, than in guaranteeing housing to all as a matter of right. 

We have a "healthcare crisis" because capitalism defines medical care as a commodity and rations it according to ability to pay, not medical need. The poorest and sickest people get the worst care and die the youngest; the wealthiest and healthiest people get the best care and live the longest. Got a problem with that? Fuck you.

There is no solution to these and many other problems without challenging the right of capital to transform societies into collections of profitable commodities to be bought and sold by the highest bidder.

American society must be de-commodified by a popular democratic movement aiming to reconstitute the state in order to establish the dignity of labor and broad social equality. This admittedly ambitious goal will necessarily take us far beyond the Democrat-Republican ideological fight into the realm of establishing a culture of social justice, which is what Dr. King gave his life for.

A state dedicated to social justice cannot content itself with being a neutral arbitrator between rival criminal organizations (the DNC and the GOP), but must strive to meet the demands of justice for all. It must cease looking for guidance from financial markets and begin to look to the needs and talents of the people it is supposed to serve. It must dismantle the vast networks of private wealth fastened like barnacles to the state and build democratic legitimacy through policies in the interest of and articulated by an organized majority. Those policies must reverse neo-liberal austerity and return to national development, this time under the aegis of public profit. Private profit can and should continue to exist, but released from subordination to monopoly interests, which will help small business and the entire culture to flourish.

Wages must be substantially raised, employment and medical care guaranteed to all (the latter free at the point of service), and a sovereign financial system capable of channeling savings to innovation and the productive sector established. A public banking system must be created to free the economy from the shackles of usury and convert production into an engine of national development rather than an intermediary of parasitic capital. Without democratic control over credit there can be no real political economy; without political economy there is no real sovereignty. 

As things stand right now, we are a nation of dependent paycheck nomads, not independent citizens. We might reasonably call ourselves the United Corporations of America, but not the United States of America, and certainly not a democracy. There can be no democracy under plutocracy.

This is not a call to hand over the economic steering wheel to pointy-headed  government bureaucrats, but to subordinate capital to the national interest. Massive concentrations of private wealth can be of no general benefit unless brought under democratic citizen control. Capital should propel a broad network of small and medium-sized productive units to fulfill the economic needs of the American people, not shower the Elon Musks of the world with public money so they can create a trillionaire class. Who needs a trillionaire class?

A citizen-directed state can and should direct, regulate, and guard against private interests re-capturing public decisions and distorting national priorities. Private capital can be an ally of democracy, but never its boss, for it ceases to be democracy at that point. We must create a strong government grounded in democratic legitimacy and technical capacity, capable of disciplining private economic power and putting it at the service of the common good. Only in that way can the state and productive sector be instruments of national sovereignty, rather than a doorway through which an un-elected dictatorship of profiteers enters to restore private domination of public policy. 

Our economic goal should not be to administer stagnation and decline, as the neo-liberals have done, nor to surrender to delusions of restoring the robber baron era of U.S. capitalism, which is neither desirable nor achievable. We should dedicate ourselves to crafting a national economic policy that articulates the needs and goals of science, energy, and business, to be carried out by an efficient state planning body capable of coordinating public and private investment in fulfillment of a chosen democratic purpose. Without state direction, the best-laid plans will fizzle out; without broad democratic legitimacy, the economy will fragment and popular sovereignty melt away. 

Economic transformation will require educational transformation. We should not have to rely on brain-draining talent from other countries. Our own schools should produce the talent we need. This means an education system oriented towards national production, innovation, and work. Treating workers as mindless atoms of production and lazy maximizers of consumption is an abysmal failure. There is no justification for divorcing production from learning and consumption from creativity - except to perpetuate a professional servant class and highly undemocratic elite governing a failing society. We have had enough of that already.

Of course such an agenda will be dismissed as "Bolshevism" and worse, but we should not let disingenuous calls for "consensus" and "pragmatism" lead to capital subordinating public interest to private gain all over again. Public functions should be plainly in public hands, animated by a program of public profit, democratically determined. 

Real transformation does not come from conciliation and deference to private power. It comes from confrontation, breaking with dependence, bureaucratic mediocrity, and parasitic elites. This is a historic necessity, not a misguided indulgence of the non-existent "radical left." Every real gain, from the abolition of slavery to legal labor unions to universal suffrage of the adult population, was a battle against fear, complacency, and bureaucratic inertia.

Let's abandon the rearguard struggle to hold on to the remnants of past gains without challenging the legitimacy of private interests dominating the state and leading us to ever greater disaster. We shouldn't want to perpetuate power, but transform it. 

Sources:

"Trump, 'Fascism,' and Other Erroneous Ideas," Maciek Wisniewski, La Jornada (Spanish), October 18, 2025 

"The Second Floor and the Pending Mission," Jose Romero, La Jornada (Spanish), October 22, 2025 

The C.I.A. Wins Another Nobel Peace Prize

While millions waited in hopes that the Global Sumud Flotilla would win this year's Nobel peace prize for its epic solidarity with Palestine, the Norwegian committee charged with granting the award gave it to Maria Corina Machado instead, veteran CIA coup plotter in Venezuela. As the late Gore Vidal aptly advised, "Never underestimate the Scandinavian sense of humor."

A day later in Gaza the Israeli army destroyed the children's hospital Al Rantisi with dynamite charges exponentially more powerful than those conceived by their inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), creator of the prize that carries his name. With the victims' bodies barely cold in the rubble where the hospital previously stood, Machado praised the Holy State as a "genuine ally of liberty" while sending compliments to the "long-suffering Venezuelan people" as well as President Trump: "I accept this award in your honor, because you really deserve it."

Congratulations poured in, among them, from Barack Obama, who won the peace prize in 2009 on his way to authorizing seven wars in Muslim countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria). Also from Guatemalan president Bernardo Arevalo, who called Machado a "world class Venezuelan," an appraisal that would have shamed his father (Juan Jose Arevalo), the first democratically elected president of the Central American republic and author of "The Shark and the Sardines," a strong anti-imperialist essay whose title alone captures the historic power dynamic between Washington and Latin America.

Machado, a pseudo-Venezuelan "sardine" eager to sell-out her country to the "shark" in Washington, was received in the White House in 2005 by George W. Bush in recognition of the quality of her aspirations, and twenty years later she is still at it, imploring Trump to invade Venezuela in the name of liberty, democracy, and the struggle against narco-terrorism. Of course this has nothing to do with Venezuelan's proven oil reserves of 303.8 billion barrels, the most of any country in the world.  Perish the thought.

Dr. Nobel, an arms manufacturer, got the idea for awarding a peace prize from his secretary Bertha Felicie Sophie, who was a pacifist and feminist, as well as the author of "Lay Down Your Arms" (1889). In his will Nobel stated that the profits from his considerable fortune were to reward "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Since its creation (1901) the prize has been accompanied by pious Eurocentrism and conditioned by Great Power geopolitics that have more to do with tweaking the conditions of permanent war than they do with establishing peace. This was never more evident than in the case of Woodrow Wilson, who won the prize in 1919.

Elected on a peace platform, Wilson immediately plunged the U.S. into the bloodiest war in world history (at the time) - World War I - transforming an expensive battlefield stalemate into a lopsided victory for the Allies, who promptly imposed a bitter and humiliating "peace" on starving Germany, which began to take growing note of the German-supremacist denunciations of an obscure Austrian corporal. Forgotten was Wilson's Fourteen Points declaration he had boomed across the Atlantic on the pretext it contained the secret to human happiness and permanent world peace.  Once his complete lack of strategic sense was revealed at Versailles, Europe's veteran imperialists ignored his pious nostrum about establishing a "machinery of friendship" in favor of perpetuating European colonialism, leaving Wilson unable to convince even his own country to join his crowning glory - the League of Nations.  

Other "great" Americans who won a Nobel peace prize include Nordic-supremacist Teddy Roosevelt, for whom war was a greater thrill than life itself, and whose popular book series, The Winning of the West, was worthy of Himmler.  He estimated that "nine out of every ten" Indians were better dead than alive, deemed "coloreds" degenerate by nature, and looked on Latin peoples ("damned dagoes") as little more than children. He applauded U.S. civilian massacres in the Philippines, which killed hundreds of thousands.

However, the most genocidal U.S. winner of the peace prize would have to be the late Henry Kissinger, who befriended apartheid South Africa, ushered General Pinochet into power in Chile, gave the green light to Indonesia's mass extermination of East Timor's mountain people, and killed millions of Indochinese with saturation bombings. His comment about the Cambodian phase of the latter attacks, which paved the way for Pol Pot's rise to power, make an ideal epitaph for the career of the clueless foreign policy expert: "I may have a lack of imagination, but I fail to see a moral issue involved."

With the Scandinavian sense of humor continuing to enrich our political folklore, there's no reason for Donald Trump to lose hope of winning his own peace prize one day.

 

Sources: 

"Otro Nobel para la CIA," La Jornada (Spanish) October 15, 2025

Stuart Creighton Miller, "Benevolent Assimilation - The American Conquest of the Philippines," 1899-1903, (Yale, 1982) pps. 88-9, 188, 194 

Daniel B. Schirmer, "Republic or Empire - American Resistance to the Philippine War," (Schenkman Publishing Company, 1972) pps. 142-3 

Page Smith, "A People's History of The Progressive Era - America Enters The War," (McGraw Hill, 1985), pps. 638, 651-3 

Bullitt Lowry, "Armistice 1918," (Kent State, 1996) p. xi

Gore Vidal, "The American Presidency," (Odonian, 1998)

Henry Kissinger quoted from The White House Years, (Little, Brown, and Co., 1979)

Palestine Survives "War"; Will It Survive "Peace"?

First the good news: A cease fire is at last in place, following one final gesture of contempt by Israel in leveling al-Rantisi, a children's hospital. 

And now the bad news: The Trump plan is just one more fake peace crafted by deluded colonial leaders with no input from Palestinians, who continue to be regarded as terrorist scum. Anything remotely approaching national liberation for such beasts remains unthinkable. 

According to the Trump 20-point plan, Israel will partially withdraw from Gaza, all Hamas hostages will be released, but Israel will keep the majority of the Palestinians it has abducted.  

The long-recognized just demands of the Palestinian people - self-determination, sovereignty, and the right to live in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 - make no appearance in the Trump Plan, which appears to actually be the Netanyahu Plan. 

It can't be a coincidence that this plan was announced by the Narcissist-In-Chief just hours before the Norwegian Nobel committee was scheduled to announce its peace prize winner, which Trump yearned to have be himself, based on the modest assumption that he has personally stopped eight wars around the world. He sees no contradiction in promoting himself as the Prince of Peace while arming Israel, bombing Iran, repeatedly blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean, threatening to annex Canada and invade Mexico, Greenland, Venezuela, and Panama, and militarily occupying American urban centers (shit-hole cities?) to conquer what he calls the "internal enemy," a category defined to include everyone but his most shameless flatterers. 

Thankfully, however, Israel's extermination campaign is finally on hold. But in the same way that the falsely claimed end of the war between Israel and Iran didn't produce peace, but rather, the temporary freezing in place of profound, complex, and dangerous political conflict and rivalry, so the Trump Plan will not end the deeply entrenched hostilities in Palestine. If Trump really desired peace he could have proved that by announcing his terms long ago, sparing Palestine and the world a prolonged genocidal horror show. Even now, he has failed to make evident any credible commitment to achieving it, such as by cutting all financial and military aid to Israel and allowing the ICC to proceed with trying the Netanyahu government for its massive crimes in Gaza, if not throughout the Middle East.

As long as Washington and its Western vassals don't allow Israeli leaders to be brought to account for their crimes, the Holy State will keep "redeeming" Palestinian land via conquest while cleansing it of its rightful inhabitants through assassination and expulsion. That has been Zionism's default setting from the beginning.

The current deal includes a pause in Israeli attacks, the release of Hamas's remaining hostages in exchange for 250 Palestinians serving life sentences in Israeli jails and another 1700 detainees from Gaza taken over the past two years. Netanyahu predicts that the "next phase" of peace will see the Hamas combatants disarmed and Gaza demilitarized, but he remains utterly blind to the much more urgently needed denazification of Israel, as does president Trump, who constantly conflates his own desires, opinions, fantasies, and delusions with verified facts. 

Netanyahu, forced to accept his humiliating failure to annihilate Hamas, now has to settle for merely disarming the Islamic militants. If this "can be achieved the easy way," he says, "very well." But "if not," he warns, "it will be achieved the hard way." He makes no mention of the fact that two years of massive Israeli firepower (i.e., the hard way) has come nowhere near producing this outcome. Epic fail.

Palestinian human rights attorney Diana Buttu notes that it is simply repulsive to have to negotiate an end to genocide with those that have been carrying it out. Overwhelming international political pressure should have spared Palestinians this ghastly fate by imposing crippling sanctions on Israel long ago. Palestine solidarity still has a long way to go.

To take one example, there are currently eleven thousand Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails being starved, tortured, and raped. Only 250 are to be freed under the Trump plan. At the same time there are another 1700 from Gaza  - doctors, nurses, journalists - captured since October 7, 2023, and thousands more from the West Bank, who face unknown fates. While all eyes have been on Gaza, more than one thousand Palestinians have been killed on the West Bank in the last two years. Only massive and sustained international pressure has any chance of stopping this. Fortunately, we may be seeing its emergence. The Global Sumud Flotilla had some 26,000 volunteers to choose from. The corresponding figure today is said to be 100,000. 

But the climb to actual peace will be steep, as Israel continues to have control over the territory of Gaza and every morsel of food that enters it.

Sources:

"Trump: un impasse no es la paz"; "An Impasse Isn't Peace," La Jornada (Spanish), October 9, 2025

"After Gaza Ceasefire, 'Massive Political Pressure' Needed to Prevent Israel from Restarting the War," Democracy Now, October 10, 2025

What About October 7?

Two years have passed since Hamas broke out of the Gaza concentration camp to launch a devastating attack against Israel, which immediately responded with wholesale massacre of the Gazan population, eventually culminating in a policy of massive bombardment and deliberate starvation of close to two million people.

We still lack a complete account of what happened that day, but we do know that much of what Israel initially claimed, and was uncritically passed on as news by a complicit media, was not, in fact, true.  For example, Hamas terrorists were said to have decapitated children and babies, baked babies in ovens, and engaged in mass rape. These are common enough charges in situations of great political violence, but typically hysterical exaggerations or propaganda falsehoods, which is all the more reason why the allegedly fact-driven mass media should have been prepared to regard them with skepticism. This they did not do, however, and even after the charges were revealed to be Israeli propaganda they were never reported as such.

Hamas, for its part, defended the October 7 attack as an act of war directed against Israeli military targets, which included intense rocket bombardment of a diverse set of targets, and which directly led to enormous fatalities on the Islamic organization's part - 1609 combatant deaths. Israel had been caught completely off guard and responded in confusion with massive firepower. Hamas maintains that many of the Israeli dead were actually killed by crossfire, as was the case at the music festival at Reim, where Israeli helicopters firing at Hamas combatants killed party-goers, according to a Haaretz investigation. Also, some of the reported "civilian" deaths were actually of armed Israeli settlers resisting the attack. The point about the settlers raises the question of exactly how many "civilians" there can reasonably be said to be in Israel, a heavily militarized society where the vast majority of Jews are past, present, or future soldiers.

Also relevant is the fact that in its July 7 edition of 2024 Haaretz reported that during the October 7 attack Tel Aviv put its Hannibal Directive into practice, which calls for Israel to kill its own soldiers and civilians if and when they are in imminent danger of being captured by enemy forces (to prevent their being used as bargaining chips). This would have been the case in several barracks that Hamas combatants had infiltrated, suggesting that an undetermined number of Israeli dead were killed by their fellow Israelis.

Furthermore, it's truly odd that the Netanyahu government did nothing to prevent the attack, though Israeli intelligence services had been forewarned it was coming. Worse, soldier testimonies contend that Israeli security routines at the Gaza border were ordered suspended in the hours preceding the attack. Why?

In short, there is still a lot unknown about exactly what happened on October 7, 2023. But what we do know is that Israel's history of dispossession, occupation, repression, and assassination was the relevant context for interpreting the events of that tragic day. As Ralph Nader noted forty days after the attack: 

 

"You want to know what happened on October 7 that doesn't appear in the press? Here's what happened, according to Israeli sources. It was a one-time raid, by several thousand Hamas fighters, chosen at a relatively young age, because they've lost their sisters or their brothers or mothers or cousins or fathers in prior Israeli wars against them. So they chose them because they were motivated that way - for revenge. Number two, they were unemployed, and felt hopeless, they had no will to live anymore, and in that (Palestinian) culture when you're unemployed you're going to have a hard time getting married and raising a family, so they sent them over there. Hamas and others are probably stunned that they even got so far. And it was a homicide-suicide mission. They knew they were going to die, and so they started shooting anything they saw, whether it was soldiers, a party going on, civilians in their homes, until they were wiped out. Some of them got back with hostages, and, of course, there are seven thousand hostages in Israeli prisons (now 11,000 - ed.), the Palestinians, because they are abducted in order to extract information from their relatives in Gaza and the West Bank, that's an old practice, and they control extended families that way . . ." 

 

The facts of October 7 demand a far more objective accounting than we are given in the endlessly-told, but quite fanciful tale of wild-eyed Islamic terrorists endlessly indulging congenital bloodlust against tiny, innocent Israel.

Sources:

"Qué ocurrió el 7 de octubre de 2023?" (What Happened on October 7, 2023?) La Jornada (Spanish), October 8, 2025 

Ralph Nader interviewed by Briahna Joy Gray on her Bad Faith podcast, November 16, 2023

 

Extermination or Effective Solidarity: The Choice is Ours

How is it that so many people are talking about Gaza, a tiny coastal enclave in the Mediterranean about twice the size of Washington DC, but with three times the population of the U.S. capital? There reside a little over two million Palestinians of the approximately fourteen million there are in the world, and they are the descendants of the Palestinians who remained as refugees after Zionist gangs terrorized and expelled some 750,000 Palestinians in the months leading up to Israeli independence in 1948. That effort has culminated seventy-seven years later in the Jewish state's ongoing effort to exterminate the population of Gaza, as part of its presumed mandate from God. This genocidal act is the natural outgrowth of Zionism, a nationalist ideology that has backed the creation and support of an independent Jewish state in its supposed ancestral homeland, the Biblical "land of Israel." 

It is Zionism that explains, if anything truly can, the stubbornly lawless, extreme, and contemptuous attitude of Netanyahu and Israel, which recently kidnapped and jailed five hundred humanitarian activists from forty countries attempting to break the siege of Gaza by bringing in food, water, and medicine via the Global Sumud Flotilla. The Flotilla and its members, composed of more than forty boats from Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the United States, left Barcelona on October 1 determined to open a humanitarian maritime corridor to Palestine that would deliver desperately needed aid to the besieged Gazans. Israel's kidnapping and abduction of these humanitarian activists was yet one more repressive act in violation of international treaties, one that involved both their physical and psychological torture, a well documented Israeli specialty.

Unprecedented international solidarity with the Flotilla activists quickly emerged from Britain, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, and Portugal, while European governments remained silent, demonstrating their complicity with Israel. 

Popular mobilization was particularly impressive in Italy. In the first three days of October, huge Palestine solidarity demonstrations rocked the nation, featuring two million participants in one hundred cities, including Turin, Naples, Palermo, Milan, Cagliari, and Bari, with one million turning out in Rome alone. Organized labor successfully carried out a general strike. 

Italy's popular outpouring overshadowed Donald Trump's 20-point peace plan, which Israel promptly ignored while carrying out ninety-three air and artillery attacks the night of October 4, adding seventy more dead to the likely hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed previously.  

As usual, President Trump said nothing about Israel's latest atrocities, and no country in Europe or elsewhere issued a condemnation or took any restraining action, except Colombia, which broke off diplomatic and commercial relations with Israel in a superb act of dignity and courage.

How many governments are prepared to follow suit? 

Time will tell. 

Meanwhile, the mass extermination in Gaza continues.

Source:

 

Victor M. Toledo, "Stop The Genocide, Support Palestine," La Jornada (Spanish), October 7, 2025

 

Greta Thunberg, Released From Israeli Jail, Blasts "Business As Usual" Genocide

"Let me be very clear. There is a genocide going on in front of our eyes on all our phones. No one has the privilege to say, 'We are not aware of what is happening.' No one in the future will be able to say 'We did not know.' Under international law states have a legal obligation to act, to prevent and to stop a genocide from happening. That means ending complicity, applying real pressure, and ending arms transfers. We are not seeing that. We are not even seeing the bare minimum from our governments. Our international systems are betraying Palestinians. They are not even able to prevent the worst war crimes from happening. And I will never, ever comprehend how humans can be so evil that you would deliberately starve millions of people living trapped under illegal siege as a continuation of decades and decades of suffocating oppression, apartheid, and occupation . . . 

"What we aim to do with the Global Sumud Flotilla was to step up when our governments fail to do their legal obligation . . . .This mission should not have to exist . . .

"Leaders, so-called leaders, who are supposed to represent me, who continue to fuel a genocide, death and destruction, they do not represent me. And this is a last resort, that this mission has to exist; it's a shame. It is a shame. 

"And I could talk for a very, very long time about our mistreatment and abuses in our imprisonment, trust me, but that is not the story. 

"What happened here was that Israel, while continuing to worsen and escalate their genocide and mass destruction with genocidal intent, attempting to erase an entire population, an entire nation in front of our very eyes, they once again violated international law by preventing humanitarian aid from getting into Gaza while people are being starved. 

"And we want to also emphasize that we do not only need humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. We need an end to the siege. We need an end to the occupation and the oppression. . . . We cannot take our eyes away from Gaza . . . What we are doing is the bare minimum. This genocide and other genocides are being enabled and fueled by our own governments, our institutions, our media, and companies. It is our responsibility to end that complicity."

 

-----Greta Thunberg, October 6, 2025

 

 

Source: "Greta Thunberg Blasts Israel, 'Complicit' World Leaders After Release From Israeli Jail," DRM News, October 6, 2025

U.S./Israel Push Final Solution As Solidarity With Palestine Soars

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remaining in Gaza City to get out, calling it their "last chance" to save themselves before being considered Hamas terrorists and subjected to the full force of the Israeli military, which is to say they will be murdered in cold blood. Of course, any reference to "Gaza City" is by now obsolete, as what remains of that urban center is a diminishing number of doomed buildings surrounded by mountains of rubble. 

Like all the operations carried out by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank since October 8, 2023, the invocation of Hamas is simply a reflex accompanying the age-old Zionist quest to rid Palestine of its rightful inhabitants, so they can be replaced by a Jews-only state, which goal has been re-iterated to the point of tedium by Prime Minister Netanyahu, his cabinet, and Zionist leaders going back to the very beginning. One unusual note this time around is that Donald Trump and Tony Blair are apparently slated to become honorary Jews, entrusted with administrative duties for a de-populated Gaza after it has been razed to the ground by Israeli soldiers and U.S. arms.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Armed Forces forcefully terminated the Global Sumud Flotilla yesterday, an international humanitarian initiative composed of people from dozens of countries all trying to bring urgently needed food and medical aid to the people of Gaza in the face of a total blockade by Israel, which has committed similar acts of piracy in the past, even killing members of previous flotillas, the most famous of which was the Mavi Marmara. These kidnappings on the high seas are just one more indication of the impunity Israel enjoys thanks to Washington's unquestioning support of the Jewish state.

European governments have disgraced themselves completely over Gaza. No European state has arrested Netanyahu when he has been in European territory, though the International Criminal Court ordered him detained back in November 2024 because of Israel's massive and ongoing crimes in Gaza. Especially shameful has been the conduct of Spain, Greece, Italy, and Turkey, whose governments committed themselves to sending warships to accompany the Flotilla, but then abandoned the humanitarian activists once they entered the high-risk zone and Israel attacked, as had been expected from the beginning.*

Waves of protest have broken out across the world at the seizure of the Flotilla, its passengers, and the continued extermination being waged in Gaza. In Italy, the country's largest union has called for an immediate general strike. 

International solidarity efforts must now re-double their strength to bring unrelenting diplomatic, political, and economic pressure on Tel Aviv, in order to force (1) an end to Israel's barbaric slaughter, (2) a return of the Flotilla hostages it has abducted on the high seas (as well as the thousands of Palestinian prisoners Israel holds in jail), and (3) prompt entrance into Gaza by the thousands of aid trucks waiting to deliver food and supplies to starving Gazans, as well as the supplies confiscated from the Flotilla.

 

*Kieran Andrieu, an activist with the Global Sumud Flotilla, expresses gratitude to the governments that provided escort ships, saying that they prevented people from being killed when Israel attacked with drones even before the Flotilla entered the highest risk zone

Source:

 "Israel: Genocide and Piracy," La Jornada (Spanish), October 2, 2025