Orwellian legacy

Planet Watch

Trump’s global imperial court

When US President Donald Trump first proposed establishing a so-called “Board of Peace” to oversee governance of the Gaza Strip for a transitional period back in September, the idea was quickly likened to a form of colonial takeover. The UN nonetheless adopted a Security Council resolution in November giving its blessing to the board’s creation—a vote some member states may now regret. The board was just officially inaugurated in a ceremony in Davos, Switzerland, where Trump was attending the World Economic Forum. But Gaza seems almost incidental to its true mission, which appears to be creating a global strongmen’s club—led by Trump, potentially for life—to rival, if not replace, the UN itself. (Image via Wikipedia)

Iran

Iran & Minneapolis: fearful symmetry

As ICE agents open fire on protesters in Minneapolis, Portland and Los Angeles, Trump frames his military threats against Iran in terms of human rights and democracy—an atypical nod back to the neocons. Following mass deadly repression, the protests in Iran appear to have abated—for now. In Minnesota, both Trump and protesters are turning up the heat. Trump’s blatant hypocrisy highlights the imperative of international solidarity. The challenge for stateside protesters is to repudiate the calumny that the Iran protests are CIA or Mossad astroturf, and recognize them as a genuine self-organized popular uprising. The challenge for Iranian protesters is to repudiate Trump’s bid to exploit them for his imperial ends, as well to reject the ambitions of the reactionary “crown prince” Reza Pahlavi to install himself as leader. In Episode 313 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg urges that explicit mutual support between the anti-authoritarian struggles in the US and Iran is what can move the historical process forward at this grim hour. (Photo: Chad Davis)

Watching the Shadows

Podcast: Trump for War-is-Peace Prize III

Trump’s perverse ambition to win the Nobel Peace Prize was given a boost by his “winning” of the first “FIFA Peace Prize“—just as he is carrying out illegal deadly air-strikes in the Caribbean, and threatening Venezuela with war. “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth is denying claims that he gave orders to “kill them all” in the strikes, but Congress is preparing an investigation. Regardless of whether this order was given, the strikes are clearly illegal under the international laws of war. Nonetheless, the Pentagon has opened an investigation into Sen. Mark Kelly for his video calling for troops to refuse illegal orders. Trump—who pardoned soldiers convicted of war crimes in his first term—has called for Kelly to be hanged for sedition. In Episode 307 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg continues to be flabbergasted by the Orwellian war-is-peace propaganda. (Image via Twitter)

Watching the Shadows

Podcast: Trump for War-is-Peace Prize II

Trump continues to pursue his perverse ambition to win the Nobel Peace Prize—now proffering “peace” plans for Ukraine and Gaza that would actually reward war crimes, and therefore portend wider war. In both cases these new “peace” plans are merely sanitized recapitulations of earlier proposals—for the surrender of the Donbas and Crimea to Russia, and for Israeli annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and “transfer” of their indigenous inhabitants. Meanwhile, the actual winner of this year’s Peace Prize, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, is obsequiously pandering to Trump, and playing along with his bellicose designs on her country. In Episode 306 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg cuts through the Orwellian war-is-peace propaganda. (Image via Twitter)

Watching the Shadows

Podcast: The Twenty-Fifth Hour revisited

The case of Kilmar Abrego García, shunted from detention in one country to another, with no end in sight, recalls the World War II-era classic of dystopian fiction The Twenty-Fifth Hour by Romanian writer C. Virgil Gheorghiu. The wartime transnational detention system, harrowingly depicted in the novel, was seen by Gheorghiu as an inevitable manifestation of our technocratic civilization that exalts the machine above humanity, ultimately resulting in the treatment of human beings as mere cogs in the state-industrial apparatus. This process is more advanced today with the current hypertrophy of the technosphere, which is related to the re-emergence of abuses approaching those of the fascist era, and ultimately bodes poorly for humanity’s future. In Episode 294 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg takes an unsparing look at this grim juncture for the human race. (Image via Cocosse)

Central America

Podcast: MAGA-fascism and the struggle in El Salvador II

Kilmar Abrego García, released from extrajudicial detention in El Salvador, now fights deportation to Uganda. Hundreds of the Venezuelans sent by the US to the Salvadoran prison gulag have now been returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap. But El Salvador remains on the growing list of human rights offenders cultivated by the Trump regime as surrogate detention states. The Trump State Department’s farcical “Human Rights Report” seeks to sanitize dictator Nayib Bukele’s anti-crime police state. And adding to the Orwellian nature of the Trump-Bukele axis, the US Justice Department has dropped charges against MS-13leaders who collaborated in the consolidation of the new Salvadoran dictatorship. In Episode 293 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg exposes the perverse charade. (Photo: Policía Nacional Civil de El Salvador via InfoDefensa)

Watching the Shadows

Podcast: Trump for War-is-Peace Prize

In Donald Trump’s perverse ambition to win the Nobel Peace Prize, he is citing his supposed diplomatic victories in ending six conflicts: Armenia-Azerbaijan, Congo-Rwanda, Israel-Iran, India-Pakistan, Thailand-Cambodia and Egypt-Ethiopia. In Episode 292 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg examines each of these examples, and breaks down how claims to have won “peace” are either extremely overstated or (more often) total Orwellian jive. The implication that Russia-Ukraine will be next, as Putin escalates his aggression, puts a hideous crown on the irony. (Image via Twitter)

Southeast Asia

Orwell and the Thai-Cambodia conflict

Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Manet, nominated Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize on Aug. 7, citing his “crucial role” in restoring peace after bloody border fighting with Thailand. The gushy statement praised Trump’s “extraordinary statesmanship” and “innovative diplomacy.” (NYT) Cambodia now… Read moreOrwell and the Thai-Cambodia conflict

North America

MAGA-fascism and anti-Semitic pseudo-anti-anti-Semitism II

The ideological enforcer of MAGA-fascism in American higher education (just met with craven capitulation by Columbia and Brown University) is the Trump regime’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. Purporting to act on behalf of Jewish students, the Trump regime simultaneously attacks policies to promote campus diversity. This replicates the historical function of anti-Semitism—setting up Jews to take the hit for for the oppressive policies of (overwhelmingly) non-Jewish rulers. The perverse fascist pseudo-anti-fascism of the Trump regime has now become anti-Semitic pseudo-anti-anti-Semitism. This cynical feigned opposition to anti-Semitism is especially dangerous when actual anti-Semitism is very much in evidence—not least by the Trump regime itself, over and over! Yet the ever-more egregious manifestations of Jew-hatred are increasingly weaponized by the political right—and ignored or even normalized by the ostensible “left.” In Episode 289 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg takes some encouragement from the growing ranks of Jewish voices breaking with the pro-Israel consensus to protest the Gaza genocide—while being clear in drawing the line against anti-Semitism. (Image: APE)

Palestine

Podcast: Orwell in Gaza

Amid starvation and horrifically escalating atrocities in Gaza, Israel announces plans to build a giant concentration camp on the ruins of Rafah, an evident preparation for forced “transfer” of the Palestinian population from the Strip entirely—an idea Trump enthusiastically embraces. On the West Bank, amid growing settler attacks, more Palestinian land is enclosed behind separation walls built to protect Israeli settlements. Amid all this, Benjamin Netanyahu (wanted for war crimes by the ICC) meets with Trump in Washington to openly discuss the “transfer” plan—and announces that he has nominated the American president for the Nobel Peace Prize. In Episode 286 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg argues that Trump could in fact get get the Nobel prize while facilitating genocide in Gaza and instating a mass detention state in the US—a fitting inauguration of the fascist world order. (Photo: Jaber Jehad Badwan via Wikimedia Commons)

North America

MAGA-fascism, Orwell and the cannabis stigma

Trump is pointing to Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s tattoos to justify his indefinite detention without charge in the ultra-oppressive Salvadoran prison gulag. These notoriously include a cannabis leaf, demonstrating the continued propaganda utility of the “Reefer Madness” stigma, even as a multi-million dollar legal industry emerges. But the White House actually added the characters “MS13” (name of the notorious Salvadoran gang) to the shot of Abrego Garcia’s knuckles in a crude photoshop job—despite transparent denials from Trump. Lubricating the emerging transnational mass detention program with this Orwellian post-truth stratagem, the Trump regime meanwhile moves toward actual deportation of US citizens. Bill Weinberg raises the alarm in Episode 277 of the CounterVortex podcast. (Photo: Donald Trump/Truth Social as seen, e.g., on CNN)

Planet Watch

Podcast: yet further thoughts on the common toad

The digitization and literal disembodiment of every sphere of human reality advances with terrifying rapidity—from the Social Security system to the New York subway system. Rather than dropping swipe-cards and bringing back tokens, returning to what was a manifestly superior and more rational system, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority moves to a still more dystopian “contactless” credit system. Similarly, rather than phasing out automobiles, our corporate overlords are now imposing driverless cars, a further step toward making the human race redundant altogether and portending the ultimate abolition of humanity. In Episode 270 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg continues his Spring ritual of reading the George Orwell essay “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad“—which brilliantly critiqued technological hypertrophy and articulated an imperative for humanistic revolution and scaleback of the mega-machine way back in April 1946. (Photo: Partonez via Wikimedia Commons)