By Richard Mellor in California
Folks need to recognise why the US rogue regime is the only country in the UN that voted against, in fact vetoed, the last Security Council resolution calling for an unconditional cease fire in Gaza. The Trump administration’s flunky, “our” unelected representative there, says the US “would not support any measure that fails to condemn Hamas and does not call for Hamas to disarm and leave Gaza”.
Why on earth would Hamas do that?
The US representative at the UN also demands the UN label Hamas a terrorist organisation. The rest of the world must laugh. The US has supported many terrorist organisations and mass killers. The Apartheid government in South Africa, for example. And what is the IDF but a terrorist organisation par excellence.
The Zionist regime has made it clear its intentions are to ethnically cleanse Gaza and the entire region of the Palestinian people and their culture. This is genocide, and the Israeli regime does not hide its intentions. And Netanyahu and his regime have made it clear that hostages are not the issue. They could have been released a long time ago.
Hamas was elected to govern Gaza in an election that Jimmy Carter witnessed and claimed was fair and open. The people of Gaza were fed up with the corrupt Palestinian Authority and its allegiance and support of the US/Israeli alliance. The PA was not and is not a serious defender of the rights of Palestinians in Palestine and that can be seen very clearly with its role in the occupied territories. When the PA, the US and Israel are in negotiations, the Palestinians have no representatives.
The Israelis have assassinated many, often in other countries
One may not like Hamas or agree with its program, but given the absence of any other serious alternative that would stand up to, and be independent of, US imperialism and its Zionist colony, Hamas was it. And, no matter what, the leadership of Hamas has died along with its people. The Zionists have assassinated many of them, even while in negotiations, and often in other countries. This Zionist regime is a ruthless, violent animal; the whole world sees this.
What the horrific sacrifices of the Palestinian people have shown are that all the talk over the decades coming out of the mouths of US, British, and Israeli politicians was just rhetoric and intended to wear the Palestinian people down, hoping they would leave their homes and land voluntarily. They have suffered under siege, bombings, humiliations at checkpoint after checkpoint, their children as young as 10 imprisoned, having their crops, and trees uprooted and their water wells poisoned by fascistic religious maniacs settled with the help and funding of the US taxpayer.
October 7 2023 was a long time coming, as Gaza was under siege from 2007. Could you imagine escapees from Auschwitz being labelled terrorists? When US and Russian troops liberated the concentration camps that the Nazis had herded Jews into, they often shot the German guards; no trial, no mercy. Good on them.
Propaganda against Hamas has been fierce and intense
I am an American, an English immigrant, having been here for 51 years. I am a proud member of the US working class and through years of horrible administrations and their imperial leaders, I have never been ashamed to admit that, here in the US or abroad. Governments are one thing, the people, another. But we have to stand up. I do not believe the average US worker would agree with its government’s stance here. Yes, the propaganda, particularly against Hamas has been fierce and intense. But workers do learn from history.
Our own veterans, workers sent to fight a colonial war in Vietnam on the side of a government that couldn’t get elected by its own people, wandered the streets of our cities for decades, mentally and physically damaged (67,000 of them died in that war), homeless, addicted to drugs as an escape from the horrors of war. I lost two friends (30 years after that war in Vietnam) from cancers due to Agent Orange. The US poured it on its own troops as well.
War is not a Hollywood movie. John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone, all the actors that glorify war in film rarely, if ever, found themselves in one, just like the macho US presidents who send more of our youth to wars that are against their own self-interest.
Millions of us in the US are homeless. Millions have no health care or are bankrupted by health care costs. Read about Palestine, or [the explosion in] West, Texas, or the Oroville Dam catastrophe, or the poisoning of the river in West Virginia, or the Standing Rock civil war, as Native Americans fought the state in their efforts to protect their lands.
Trump is a maverick and an unpredictable mad man
The first victims of US imperialism, believe it or not, are the US working class. We are in the belly of the beast here, and a maniacal sexual predator, convicted felon and con man is at the helm. He is a bourgeois, but even among his own class he is a maverick, an unpredictable mad man, a modern-day Rasputin. But, I stress, they all nurtured him, ingratiated themselves in the hope of making a buck without working. The system is guilty
I have stated many times that there are other forces in US society that are complicit in in this assault on workers here at home and even more violently abroad; unions, religious organizations, etc. The heads of organised labour are included in this. They have over the decades supported the Democratic Party, the other capitalist party, and are worshipers of the so-called free market; they all support US foreign policy.
They are championing the capitalist courts as the saviours of working people against the excesses of the Trump administration rather than the combined power of the organised and unorganised working class. They are completely out of touch and act as agents of the capitalist class inside the workers’ organisations that took sacrifice and courage to build.
Rank and file union members must build a movement from below that can dislodge this clique that sits atop our organisations. This moribund leadership is akin to rotten apples on a tree; they appear to be strong, in good shape, but the slightest breeze changes all that, sends them packing. This is what must occur within organised labour. They can only stay there if we do nothing.
I am sorry my friends if this is not easy reading. It’s a rant in a way, but these thoughts have been in my head a long time and I have just written them out very quickly and with no preparation.
I had to do it.
This is the latest blog from Richard Mellor, on the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original is here.
