Zionists Bomb Hospitals, Biden Warmly Embraces The Head Butcher

Two ghouls embrace, and drip with
 the blood of Palestinian children

Yesterday, I noted that Blinken had joined with Netanyahu in demanding that over 1 million people, in Gaza, move from the North to the South, or face being bombed in their homes, schools and hospitals.  Those that moved South found that they were bombed anyway, both on their journey, and in their destinations.  It just acted to corral them into even larger charnel houses for the Zionist butchers to slaughter them more efficiently.  Even those, including US and other citizens, waiting to escape via the Rafah Crossing, found they were just in a large open air compound, waiting to be slaughtered by Zionist war planes.  Then, last night, one of the most dramatic pieces of slaughter, in Gaza City came with the bombing of the Baptist Hospital, with 500 people being rendered, flesh from bones, in a huge explosion.  But, today, even as Arab leaders shun Biden, as the chief weapons provider for all this carnage, he went to Israel, and warmly embraced the head butcher, the fascist Netanyahu.

 

The Zionists have claimed, belatedly, that they were not to blame for the bombing of the hospital, and, of course, the US, UK and EU imperialists acquiesce in their claims, as though, even were it true, that changes the facts of the genocide that the Zionist state is inflicting on Palestinians, mostly in Gaza, but also across the occupied West Bank, and in Israel itself.  I have no way of knowing, from here, whether the Zionist claims that it was a misfired rocket from Islamic Jihad that hit the hospital, are true or not.  However, the Palestinian and Egyptian ambassadors to the UN, in a press conference, pointed out that Zionist spokespeople had earlier tweeted that they had done it, and then, as they saw the global furore erupting, deleted it.  What is also apparent is the size of the blast, which is many times that of any caused by Palestinian rockets.  Nor does it change the fact that the Zionist war machine had previously told Palestinians to leave or face their schools and hospitals being bombed with them inside, or the fact that they had already done so with many other schools and hospitals, including the many run by UN agencies.

Biden's decision to still go to visit the head Zionist butcher, and to warmly embrace him, with his own bloody hands, clasped around him like two ghouls, illustrates the contradiction of US imperialism, today.  On the one hand, it is the pre-eminent imperialist, military power.  It has more means of global destruction than any other state on the planet, the ability to destroy on an epochal scale, anywhere and everywhere.  Its economy, remains the most technologically advanced, and despite attempts to slow it, in order to avoid wages and interest rates rising, which would crater the prices of the financial assets of the ruling class, that economy continues to grow and to employ more and more labour.

Yet, at the same time, its global empire is crumbling, and despite its military superiority, it has proven time and again to be impotent.  It was unable to win a war against Korean peasant nationalists, and it lost to Vietnamese peasant nationalists.  It has repeatedly promoted right-wing, vicious dictators, such as the Shah, Saddam Hussein, Pinochet, and assorted Latin American and Arab regimes, in order to act on its behalf across the globe, as an alternative to the costs of running a colonial regime, as European states did in the 19th century, and with the consequent effect that those dictators made sure to fill their own pockets, and pursue their own interests.  When the US intervened, it was often only to replace one dictator that had failed them, with another, they hoped would do better.

A previous alliance of butchers

In Afghanistan, they armed and financed Osama Bin Laden to fight the USSR, and again used Bin Laden as intermediary to finance and arm the criminal gang of the Kosovan Liberation Army, used to engage in ethnic violence against Kosovan Serbs, to stir up a war, in which it could intervene against Russia's ally in Serbia.  But, Bin Laden, then, turned on the US allies in the feudal Gulf Monarchies, and, then was brought into conflict with the US itself.  Saddam failed, despite being provided with WMD by the US, and its allies, to defeat Iran, and so the US looked for a replacement.  But, its replacement had no support in Iraq, and despite its military power, the US was ultimately forced to leave, with the main target of its ambitions, Iran, simply moving in to fill the vacuum, something that was always predictable given that the only thing preventing the majority Shia community from exerting power, was the Bonapartist regime of Saddam.

The attempts to arm and finance the jihadists in Syria, via the CIA, and Saudi Arabia, likewise ended in disaster, as it simply resulted in Iran, the Iraqi Kurds, Hezbollah, and Russia, intervening against them.  In Libya, the same approach, but without the countervailing forces, simply resulted in a counter-revolution, taking the state back to even pre-bourgeois relations, and the collapse of the unity of the nation state into competing warlordisms.  The same happened in Afghanistan, where the US failed to build anything, and, now, China is filling that void.

The point is that 18th and 19th century European colonialism did actually build something, wherever it settled.  It established unified colonial states, and by the very operation of capital, created the basis of domestic markets, and generalised commodity production, which leads inexorably to the development of domestic capital, and the process of concentration and centralisation that goes with it.  As Marx says about British colonialism in India, it brought about the only genuine social revolution the country had experienced.  It did so, by brutal means that socialists certainly would not defend, but its consequence was historically progressive.

US imperialism has none of that.  Imperialism, can only really operate where a level of industrial development has already occurred, which is why the rapid development of the Asian Tigers, and of a number of Latin American countries, was possible.  That development makes it possible for multinational companies to invest in these economies, and extract surplus value from production.  In these instances, imperialism really does not need the intervention of military forces, as the general capitalist development of the economy does what is required to enforce the interests of capital, foreign and domestic, just as it does in the imperialist heartlands.  China seems to have learned that lesson with its Belt and Road programme.

Butchers In The Service of US imperialism

But, the US has sought to defend its global hegemony in conditions when its global economic power is in decline, much as happened, in the past with the decline of the British economy, at the end of the 19th century, and rise of others to challenge it such as Germany, the US, and Japan.  As with Britain, then, the only means of trying to cling to that hegemony is the use of the superior military might.  Hence the use of Ukraine as a human battering ram against Russia, pumped up by the supply of US weapons and military technology, and hence the US continued support for the fascist Netanyahu, and his genocidal, Zionist regime, that appears to be rushing headlong towards the fate of all such states into its oblivion.