So we have an ongoing genocide in Gaza. The death toll, as estimated by scientists, is probably north of half a million. (The official toll is laughable and obviously wrong, growth slowing over time.)
Trump was able to use oil piracy and a kidnapping to bend Venezuela to his will.
Now he’s cut off oil to Cuba, and because of how modern economies work, that means famine.
Deliberately causing a famine is genocidal.
This genocide creep. America could have done this to Cuba any time after the fall of the USSR. Sanctions were nasty and caused a lot of suffering and even deaths, but they didn’t rise to the level of “let’s just starve them to death. They’ll give in.”
Mind you, they tried to do this to Yemen, engineering a low-grade famine. Deaths were in the low to mid hundreds of thousands. Genocide. It was intentional, everyone knew that’s what was the intention.
In Israel a lot were killed by arms, but the cutting off of medical supplies, fuel and food I’m sure will have killed even more people.
Multiple times the US and/or its allies has engineered a famine. In Yemen with Saudi Arabian help. Israel with Israelis taking the lead, but the US supporting it all along the way, as when it cut funding to the primary aid agency, UNWRA.
Now Cuba.
This is the way it works. Whenever something evil is done by the powerful to the weak, they look to see if there were consequences. If not, they expand, moving inwards. Yemen is a place no one cares about in the West: there wasn’t a lot of coverage. Palestine got tons of coverage and even law cases, but in the end no one powerful suffered, and the genocide was and is pushed thru. Opponents lost their jobs, went to prison and were deported or lost their banking access (Albanese, for example.)
Since those responsible for the genocide got away with it twice, they’re now doing it a third time.
Everything the powerful do to someone else is something they are willing to do to you if they think it’s in their interest, or just fun.
In the US we have the ICE crackdowns. I wrote for years that if Trump went wild, ICE would be his brown shirts, and here we are. Substantially we have masked men in unmarked cars without badges or in most cases judicial warrants, terrorizing Americans. Not as bad as what Israelis do to Palestinians or America and NATO did in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the same sort of thing. Just call everyone an immigrant or a terrorist and do what you want to them. Refuse to obey the law, ignore judges (what can they do) and on your way.
Start internally with “immigrants” but sweep up lots of citizens and treat them abusively, without reference to their rights.
Set those precedents. And if you get away with it: if no one important winds up punished, then you can expand it. Go after the citizens next. Kick out native Americans. Keep people locked up for months on end without any real judge even knowing about it. Ignore health care problems, let them suffer and die.
Every time the elites of any country get away with abusing regular people, whether foreign or domestic, the line moves on what is acceptable.
We fight for other people to be treated well not just because we aren’t monsters, but because we know that it could be us. Every time we fail to make sure other people are treated fairly and well, we make ourselves less secure. What was done to them can now be done to us. It is for this reasons that even people accused of the worst crimes, like pedophilia and rape have rights, because an accusation isn’t proof and the government and police often get things wrong or lie.
The precedents are now firm that anyone who isn’t in the elite has limited rights: no free speech, no right to see an attorney, no right to security against search and seizure, and so on.
Genocide and ignoring the rule of law, even ignoring judicial rulings, are now the norm.
And the goal isn’t genocide of foreigners. The goal is to get to the point where they can lock up or kill anyone they want domestically.
That’s what American elites want. If an election is going to be lost, fix it. If a person is against a genocide, lock them up or deport them or de-bank them. Anyone who is inconvenient because they oppose what the elite group in power find the rule of law is increasingly no shield. It’s been broken too often, elites know they can mass murder, rape and traffic children and teens with few or no consequences.
What has been done to outsiders will increasingly be done to us, core Western citizens. By failing to protect others, we set the precedents that we were no longer protected.
Never think “it’s OK to do monstrous things to outsiders” because everyone who isn’t an elite eventually becomes an outsider.
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It is now over 20 years ago that I first wrote that Israel would either become a single, secular state, or it would ethnically cleanse or genocide the Palestinian. There were no other solution sets: the land is not actually large enough, nor does it have enough water to divide it into two states and in any case, it was obvious Israelis would never go for that.