A rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem

Israelis indifference to the genocide its right-wing government is committing in Gaza and the millions of its citizens plus its American supporters, conservative politicians and Jewish organized groups, whose fanatical cries for massacring the helpless Palestinians caused me and millions of others to turn with revulsion from the concept of Judaism. The Talmud, the core teaching of the Jewish religion, condemns non-Jews as less than human and fair game to deceive, abuse and murder. Yahweh of the Old Testament is the Israeli God, the War God, which Isaiah induced to kill the other Gods and it is Yahweh who demands absolute obedience from his people under threat of death. I have known many Jews, fellow employees, friends, and lovers who were emancipated from the Talmud and Torah law and would be shocked by their demands, which the religious Jews such as Netanyahu follow. The Jewish Question which Bauer and Karl Marx debated I had read but felt it was unsolvable in the European environment. For years, however, I was angered by the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, their invasion of Lebanon, the stealing of nuclear materials from the United States to secretly develop nuclear weapons and the countless assassinations of politicians, scientists, and civil rights leaders in foreign nations by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency which works closely with U. S. Central Intelligence Agency in criminal objectives that benefit both. The Mossad uses false flag operations which through propaganda spread by the Jewish media and its co-operators fasten the blame on the victims they attack. Many books have been published in recent years on the influence of the deep state on influential officials of a nation whose loyalty is to a foreign power. Israel’s role in the assassinations of the Kennedys and in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has been detailed by investigative researchers. Their search for the truth against the powers that hold the reins of government earn them scorn by the controlled press which never debates the issues but denigrates the messengers. The public has learned never to trust governments owing to the disclosures of courageous investigators and whistleblowers. The general feeling is that the banking interests have through the advent of finance capitalism some fifty years ago grown to an evil beast holding the levers of power. The hedge fund billionaires and all those who use their control of the banking system, the mortgage and loan sharks, called by many the “predators”, enriching themselves through planned bankruptcy and stealing of a company’s assets, through compound interest that casts the general population into debt, these leaches have bought the politicians who will pass their demands into law and now finance Donald J Trump for the presidency of the United Staes with the expectation that he will turn the democracy into an autocracy and crush all opposition with martial force. Some years ago I wrote a detective novel called Overworld/Underworld, in which I dramatized the battle between the Jewish Zionists and the Jewish anti-Zionists within the United States. My research for the novel brought me to an understanding of the deep state and its dangers but I did not foresee the rise of a criminal demagogue whose persuasive powers trapped religious conservatives, the uneducated underclass and the unprincipled ambitious in a net which paralyzed their minds to conceive Trump as a saviour who will make them rulers of the universe or bring Christ back to earth and imbue everyone with Christianity. (Sinclair Lewis foresaw it but so many years ago that the public stopped reading him.)

An American friend of many years, now living in southern France, who, by the way, is Jewish and well experienced in American politics, wrote: 

“From my days at Columbia, I knew a cabal of student leaders at WKCR and the Columbia Spectator who were keen to roll back all of FDR's New Deal accomplishments, social security, et al., and then the later iterations of the Great Society, like Medicare. They were all adherents of Ayn Rand, who they idolized, and who, Ayn Rand, I met personally through them informally. I did not comprehend then that their purpose was to reshape society according to her ideas. They went on to secure the highest and most influential positions (many became household names) in society. Some became early members of the Federalist Society. Their dream is now becoming reality, and this Supreme Court decision is the culmination of many decades devoted to this project. I should say that a few of the early supporters peeled away, but not most. It is a step by methodical step to achieve this state. What I want to emphasize is that I saw this happen as a consequence of their long-range plans they and their ilk had, over 60 years! They never gave up seriously planning and working for the destruction of the New Deal, and creating a world where only the fittest survive...period. It has taken on a White Christian Nation cast as well, but this seems to have been a marriage of convenience. At root, they are Hobbesian and proud of it. And myself? Back then, it seemed to me that one could have freedom of thought and action, and a social safety net; that these were not mutually exclusive. And I thought Ayn Rand was a Nazi in the worst sense. I didn't realize, didn't see, that this was all a stalking horse for a reshaping of our national character that would strip it of its aspirational call for root and branch equal treatment and the supremacy of fair and impartial justice over monarchial and despotic fiat, or to put it more simply, might over right. I just didn't understand nor could I comprehend that their true game plan was to remake America into Ayn Rand's Hobbesian world; ridding it of what they believed were losers, parasites, and the poor performers by denying any help to them.”

My friend’s warning brings another perspective to the problem. Now that the tools for spying and false imprisonment have been foisted on Americans by the George W Bush anti-terrorist laws and introduced into several “democratic” nations, we can envision the Hobbesians joining with the Trumpians to effect the kind of society they want, similar to that in Putin’s Russia. The educated far right, however, once they have come to power on the demagogue’s coattails will dispense with the demagogue and his blind followers. 

How does this vision fit with the catastrophe in Gaza? The seemingly impervious Israeli action, condemned by the United States, its ally, while supplying the 2000 pound bombs and other armaments to destroy an innocent people in a display of blatant hypocrisy demonstrates the weakness of international criminal courts and international law on a global scale while Trumpians and other autocratic leaders want the end of law, constitutions and normalcy on a national scale. Unstoppable violence is their message and fear is their aim. Netanyahu’s alliance with Hamas, which his rightwing faction has financed for years, (both being against the West Bank Palestinian Authority and a Palestinian state alongside Israel), proved that neither has any concern for citizens, Israeli and Palestinian. Ron Unz, the editor of Unz’s reports, wrote that Israel found it easier to bomb unarmed Palestinians, most of them women and children, than to engage Hamas fighters in the tunnels under Gaza. 

Those who support democracy and the rule of law are protesting in vain and look in fear and loathing at a crude, violent criminal force —“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

This hidden force, years in the making, enabled by the assassination of democratic leaders and dissembling about who perpetrated 9/11 and other tragedies, has overturned progressive state laws and crept into the U.S. Supreme Court. Jane Jacobs in her Dark Age Ahead warned that society’s basic pillars jeopardized by decay, irrelevancy and cultural uselessness are Community and family life, higher education, the effective  practice of science and science-based technology, taxes and government powers connected to needs and possibilities and self-policing by the learned professions.

As an example of decay I quote from a message from my former student: “As you may have read our Florida governor, DeSantis, is systematically dismantling higher education in Florida.  Tenure is a joke now with the legislature instituting a five year review.  Academic freedom and freedom of speech are rapidly disappearing. It's almost impossible to hire good new faculty. I could not now in all conscience teach African history.  Why did I devote 35 years of my life to this place?  Way too depressing to dwell on.”

Self-policing by the learned professions? Taxes and government powers? In the U.S. are they not now controlled by outside powers connected to a Republican law that allows dark money to decide issues? Community and family? They have been sundered by divisive politics. Science is split from technology, the latter a fearful tool used to investigate our private lives. Dark Ages begin with memory loss of what once was.