By Steve Halpern
During the course of my 72 years of living in the world, the so-called news media in this country has been consistent. They've worked diligently in tailoring their coverage to support wars made possible by the United States government.
In the year I was born, the media argued that young people needed to go across the Pacific Ocean and go to war against Korea. In my teenage years, the media argued that young people needed to go across the Pacific Ocean again in a war against the people of Vietnam. Then, they made up more stories arguing that we needed to go around the world in wars against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Closer to home, they supported the wars against Panama and the tiny island of Grenada.
Nowhere in all these stories do we find even one editorial that makes the following argument. If the United States government used a tiny fraction of the human and material resources to give genuine assistance to the nations it went to war with, this would be a profoundly better world.
Since October 7, 2023 the U.S. news media has come up with a new story. For the past 76 years, the nation of Israel has forced Palestinians out of their homeland, murdered thousands, and denied Palestinians living the the occupied territories equal rights. Palestinians worked diligently demanding that the state of Israel grant them basic human rights in their homeland. The Israeli government responded to those appeals with indifference and bloodshed.
Faced with this reality, the Israeli government used a carrot and a stick to deal with the Palestinian organization Hamas. On the one hand, they gave support to Hamas since its founding in 1987, and allowed a billion dollars in aid to the group coming from Qatar. However, Israel also regulated everything and everyone going in and out of the Gaza Strip. This meant that Palestinians living in Gaza would be trapped in what many have called an "open air prison."
The contradiction for Hamas is that on the one hand it is the repressive police force in Gaza, while arguing that it is in the leadership of the Palestinian liberation movement. We might consider that the African National Congress of South Africa never worked as a police force before they took power. This contradiction prompted Hamas to organize the October 7 raid that has had unimaginably horrendous consequences.
The news media, as well as the governments of the United States and Israel labelled the October 7 raid as a "pogrom" and the worst anti-Semitic act since the Nazi organized Holocaust. Following this flawed logic, the U.S. government increased its aid to Israel from $3.8 billion per year, to $18 billion. Without that aid, the Israeli organized genocide against Palestinians would not have been possible.
We might consider that the word pogrom came from the racist raids against Jews organized by the Russian terrorist organization the Black Hundreds. Those raids were similar to the raids on the Black community in this country organized by the Ku Klux Klan. However, all those murderous raids took place in the context of a systematic discrimination against Jews and Black people.
Palestinians have not been the perpetrators of discrimination. They have been the clear victims of systematic discrimination in the nation of Israel for 76 years. Therefore, just as with other arguments the news media disseminates, the argument that Hamas carried out a pogrom on October 7 has no merit.
I identify as a member of the working class of the world. In my opinion, an injury to any worker in the world is an injury to me. It is from that perspective that I look at the vicious mythology that the mainstream news media routinely disseminates.
George Washington and the revolution of the thirteen colonies
I begin my critique of the mainstream news in an unlikely place. This is with the revolution of the thirteen colonies that the United States memorializes on the national holiday of July 4. This commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
For me, the Declaration of Independence gives us a glimmer into the thinking of the leaders of the revolution in the thirteen colonies. This document contains a list of grievances the colonists had against the British.
In one section, the DOI labelled Native Americans with the racist term "savages" which means less than human. The DOI criticized the British for limiting the aid given to the colonists in their genocidal war against the indigenous people of this part of the world.
Understanding this sentiment, most Native American nations supported the British who they viewed as a lesser evil colonist. Given this relationship of forces, George Washington, gave the following order to General John Sullivan.
"The Expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the Six Nations of Indians (Iroquois—Haudenosaunee) with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more."
Sullivan's forces destroyed about 41 Iroquois villages, murdered about 200 people, and destroyed their means to live. The estimate is that about 1,000 Iroquois would eventually die resulting from famine and exposure to an extremely cold winter.
So, this number is almost exactly the same as the number of people murdered in the October 7 Hamas organized raid. Many of those who lost their lives in that raid might have been killed by Israeli air strikes that incinerated its victims. However, the so-called media analysis of these two events couldn't be more divergent.
The capital of the United States is named for George Washington, as well as an entire state. His portrait is on the one dollar bill in your wallet. However, the so-called news media has consistently argued that the genocide against Palestinians was necessary because Israel needed to defend itself. The only problem some media outlets had with the Israeli organized genocide was that it might have been too excessive.
So, how do we compare General George Washington's orders for Sullivan's Campaign to the Hamas organized raid on Israel? Washington was clear in that he wanted "total destruction and devastation of their settlements and capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible." The Hamas organized raid ultimately cost the lives of a similar number of people as the Sullivan Campaign. In my opinion, both these raids were wrong in that they both targeted civilians. The question remains: Why is the life of George Washington celebrated, while the organization Hamas is demonized?
One reason for this has to do with the fact that the thirteen colonies won the Revolution. However, one of the reasons for the victory of the Revolution had to do with the aid it received from France. France was one of the most powerful nations in the world at that time.
As far as I know, no nation in the world has given armed support to Palestinian liberation. The consequence of the Hamas raid was an unimaginable repression.
Clearly Sullivan's raid took place in the context of the revolution of the thirteen colonies. However, this raid wasn't aimed at the British, but was a continuation of the war to rob Native Americans of their homeland. The Declaration of Independence outlined the reasons for that revolution. There is no question that Palestinians have legitimate grievances that have simmered for over 100 years.
We can also say that the United States government has been highly repressive since its founding. I'm talking about over 100 years of genocidal war against Native Americans. Then there were the decades of the unimaginable horrors of chattel slavery. After the revolution, there were the Shays and and Whisky rebellions that protested the insidious policies of the new government.
However, the news media, the educational system, as well as the government argue that the United States is the greatest democracy the world has ever known. We were all asked to pledge allegiance to the flag they argued represents "liberty and justice for all."
In school, our teachers to view history with the view of formal logic. Either events had positive or negative results.
I view history from the perspective of dialectical materialism. In other words, history unfolds as a result of contending forces. The results of this conflict can have positive and negative results. However, the clash between these contending forces continues and this explains why our environment is constantly changing.
Saying all of that, there were legitimate reasons why masses of people rose up in revolution to expel forces loyal to Britain from this part of the world. Caroline Elkins wrote extensively about the history of the British Empire in her book Legacy of Violence. Without the revolution of the thirteen colonies, we can speculate that the interests of this country would have continued to be subordinate to the British royal family.
Another outgrowth of the revolution and the Civil War was the emergence of the capitalist system. On the one hand, from its infancy, capitalism has been an extremely repressive system. On the other hand, the only reason why capitalists and bankers make investments is because they feel that the system will grow continually.
Thinking about that, the colonists living in the thirteen colonies could not have imagined the world we are living in today. Back in the 1700s, most people lived on farms where they needed to provide for many of their necessities. Today, most people in the United States have direct access to electricity, running water, education, health care, and cell phones. In my opinion, most people prefer to have these goods and services rather than living without them.
Another outgrowth of the revolution of the thirteen colonies and the Civil War was the creation of the working class. The feudal system was ruled by royal families. In capitalism, there is the idea that people can elect their representatives in government. Clearly, capitalist governments routinely represent the interests of the most affluent.
However, in the course of the history of this country many social movements erupted. These included movements of labor, civil rights, women's rights, support for immigrants, LBGT, and against wars. Currently, there is a mass movement demanding a ceasefire in the Middle East. These movements might have been impossible or much more difficult to organize in the feudal epoch.
There is another clear analogy to the Sullivan Campaign. Rashid Khalidi is probably the most highly respected historian of the Palestinian experience. He argues that if people are critical of the October 7 raid, the Israeli organized genocide that took place over the past year was much more devastating.
In fact, just as in the Sullivan Campaign, the miss-named Israeli Defense Force murdered at least 47,000 Palestinians, destroyed their homes, schools, and hospitals, and denied about 2.3 million Palestinians the necessary food to sustain their lives. These genocidal policies could not have been made possible without massive aid from the United States government.
There is another clear difference between Sullivan's Campaign and the Israeli organized genocide. The United States government has been extremely repressive since it's founding. We can say the same about the nation of Israel. However, as I've said there were several progressive reforms since the founding of the United States. The nation of Israel began with a highly developed economy that was made possible by Palestinians. So, there were no real progressive reforms that came about because of the 76 year Israeli history.
When we compare the reality of the Sullivan Campaign to the Israeli organized genocide, there are real parallels. In both these events, the motivating force for Washington and Netanyahu were to remove the indigenous people from their ancestral homeland. The Zionists have been clear about their goals for over 100 years. They want an exclusively Jewish homeland where Palestinians have lived for centuries. The goal of Hamas was to free Palestinians who live in Israeli jails.
Abraham Lincoln and the 38 nooses
Many historians have labelled President Abraham Lincoln, "The Great Emancipator." There is some truth in that statement. When Lincoln became President, chattel slavery was the law of the land.
Upon his election, the slave states seceded from the union and attacked the United States at Fort Sumpter. Their goal was to take control of the United States government and make it completely subservient to the interests of slave owners.
Many in the U.S. government at that time favored a negotiated peace with the slave owners. Although Lincoln wasn't an advocate of abolition of slavery, he mobilized the Union Army in an unimaginably arduous campaign to destroy the interests of slavery in this country.
This is why many have called Lincoln, "The Great Emancipator." However, just as with the revolution of the thirteen colonies, positive and negative things happened during the same years.
Scott W. Berg wrote his book titled, "38 Nooses—Lincoln, Little Crow, and the beginning of the frontier's end." There is a problem with Berg's usage of the word "frontier" in his otherwise important book.
This is my dictionary definition of the word frontier. "The extreme limit of settled land beyond which lies wilderness, especially referring to the western U.S. before Pacific settlement." So we see that even this definition has problems.
Native Americans have lived in this part of the world for thousands of years. So, there may have been a frontier and a wilderness here thousands of years ago. However, when the Europeans came here there might have been upwards of 100 million people living in what is now the Americas. So much for the ideas that settlers in this country ever lived in on a frontier or in a wilderness.
The Zionist movement made a similar claim. They argued that Palestine was, "a land without a people for a people without a land." The early Jewish settlers who came from Europe would have liked to imagine that the millions of Palestinians who lived in their homeland for thousands of years, simply were not there. Like the early settlers in this country, since the Jewish settlers believed Palestine was a barren landscape, they felt they were justified in forcing the original inhabitants from their homeland.
Aside from that limitation, Berg reported on the environment where the Dakota lived in what is now the state of Minnesota (Minnesota is a Native American name). As with about 400 Native American nations, the United States government violated its treaty with the Dakota.
The Dakota were a self-sufficient people who hunted, fished, and farmed to provide for themselves. When settlers arrived in Minnesota, they took much of that land, making it impossible for the Dakota to continue being self-sufficient. So, the U.S. government agreed to provide the Dakota with all the food they needed. However, during the Civil War, this wasn't happening.
Little Crow (Taoyateduta) was the leader of the Dakota at that time. This is what he said to the Indian agent, Andrew Myrick, who represented the United States government.
“We have no food, but here are these stores filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement by which we can get food from the stores, or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving.”
Myrick responded to these rational words saying that Little Crow and the Dakota could, "eat grass." That statement violated the treaty between the U.S. government and the Dakota. Violating a treaty isn't like breaking a law where a judgement is made in a civil court. Violating a treaty is an act of war.
So, the Dakota people had a decision to make. They could either starve to death, or they could take the food they needed by force. They fully understood that if the Dakota people took what they needed by force, the response by the U.S. government would be relentless.
In all, the Dakota murdered about 94 soldiers and between 400 and 600 civilians. The military eventually apprehended the Dakota. The government put the captured Dakota on trials that lasted a mere ten minutes. Those trials were not translated into the Dakota language so many of the accused had no idea of what was going on. In fact, since the U.S. government caused the uprising of the Dakota by violating an agreement. Those who had been accused of murder were actually political prisoners.
President Abraham Lincoln signed the order to execute 38 of the captured Dakota by hanging. This was the largest mass execution in the history of the United States. One of the reasons for this order had to do with Lincoln's desire to win the electoral votes in Minnesota in an upcoming election.
Conclusion
In this blog, I attempted to show some of the parallels between the genocidal policies of the United States and Israel with respect to Native Americans and Palestinians. The mainstream press in this country denies that genocide ever took place in either this country or Israel. In my opinion, the facts tell another story.
The United States government brutalized Native American children in special schools, so the children would be coerced to forget their history. Over the course of more than 76 years Zionists had the goal of removing Palestinians from their homeland in order to make Israel an exclusively Jewish nation.
Today, the capitalist system in the world appears to be falling apart. Hundreds of millions of people in the world do not have enough food to eat. As a result about 30,000 children die every day.
Because of the gross inequality in the world, most workers in this country haven't experienced that level of exploitation. However, today tens of millions of people in the United States don't have enough food to eat. Yet, prices are skyrocketing and wages have remained essentially flat for the past 50 years.
These conditions have led millions to doubt if future generations will ever experience economic security. So, thinking about this reality, in my opinion there is only one way for the working class of the world to escape this crisis.
This is to organize and put in place a workers government that makes fundamental changes. Those changes can be summarized in the slogan human needs before profits.
The facts are that the resources have been available for a long time to eliminate poverty in the world. The reason why this hasn't happened is because the capitalist system routinely organizes to enrich billionaires at the expense of the working class of the world.
I say all of this to say that no working class movement can be successful without taking an international approach to politics. Another requirement for the working class is to support the unconditional liberation of all oppressed nationalities and this includes Black people, women, LBGT, and immigrants. Today many workers from around the world are discovering the centrality of the demand Palestine Lives.
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