Tag: Gaza Bombing

Harris Loses or Trump Genocide Wins

Harris Loses or Trump, Genocide Wins

By Amit Sengupta

The polls in the USA, slated for November 5, 2024, is now on a tight rope. Latest surveys have predicted a neck-to-neck fight between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. There are also indications that in the final instance, Trump might just about make it, given the many reasons behind his steadfast popularity, especially among the White male population of America, including the working class. So much so, even a certain section of Afro-Americans, the Blacks, seems to be turning his way.

That is why the Democrats have roped in Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, including Michele Obama, in a last-ditch effort. No one knows if they will succeed, considering their bad track records when they were at the helm for long periods, especially Obama, who came riding a huge utopian high of ‘yes we can’, and who betrayed most of the promises he made, especially to the marginalized population of Afro-Americans.

Either which way, will the world become any better if this or that candidate wins? Harris or Trump?

As a journalist, I covered the American elections in 2016 in New York and Boston, and spoke to a wide-range of people. The young, educated and millennials hated Hillary Clinton, for the wars she had waged and the ghastly murder of Muammar Gaddafi as a public spectacle, among other things, but hated Trump in equal measure. Barack Obama was no more the hero he once was.

Their first choice, ‘Leftist’ Bernie Sanders, was not allowed to be the presidential candidate – despite a huge support base – by certain powerful lobbies, including, reportedly, Obama, who backed Clinton. When Trump won, there was a wave of depression across the land. Young and old, driven by anxiety, were in tears. Trump had arrived to ‘Make America Great Again’.

The latest joke on social media these days is that Harris-supporters can keep calling him a racist/supremacist, until the ‘ethnic cleansing’ is over and done with in Gaza!

The fact is that the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris establishment has backed Benjamin Netanyahu to the hilt with weapons, bombs and billions, and have chosen to look the other way while the genocide in Gaza was in full swing, despite the ritualistic homilies.

For the record, it’s going to be 50,000 dead soon, including 20,000 children, and an unknown number still under the rubble.

For the record, ethnic cleansing, resembling the nightmares of the Holocaust, is right now in full swing in Northern Gaza. Tens of thousands of people are being bombed, maimed, butchered yet again, including inside hospitals and refugee camps, those alive under the rubble are not allowed to come out, doctors, volunteers and nurses have been killed, 171 plus journalists have been murdered, starvation, thirst and epidemics are stalking the trapped and condemned people, aid is not allowed to come in, even as a trickle, scores of men and young boys have been detained and taken to unknown destinations, and, yet another mass exodus is happening in this ravaged landscape pushed by armed tanks, while the world watches in stunned silence, impotence, and complicity.

Especially Harris and Trump, and their fanatic supporters.

So, will things change in Gaza if either of them win?

That is the uncanny question which is stalking the political subconscious of all sensitive people across the world, who, still believe, that it is possible to move away from the repetitive and vicious cycle of barbarism, on to the finer and more refined nuances of civilization and culture. They include, certainly, the thousands of students and other people who protested against the genocide in Gaza, and demanded an immediate ceasefire and release of the Israeli hostages, across America, and all over the world.

ALSO READ: US Elections And The World Peace

Besides, those backing Kamala Harris with her Indian, Asian and African origins, and as the first possible woman president of the USA, seem to know all about Trump – and it is there to be seen in each rally of his campaign. The crass, insensitive and  masculine language, the racist ideology, the vitriolic, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the mass phobia against ‘outsiders’.

Meanwhile, some of his former top aides, have come out against Trump. It has been claimed that he has ‘fascist and dictatorial’ tendencies, that he looks down at war veterans who were caught in the battlefield,  or, those who have been disabled in action, and that he might actually use the military against American citizens.

John Kelly is a former four-star general and was the longest serving chief of staff of Trump. He told The New York Times that Trump “preferred the dictator approach”, fits into the concept of a “fascist”, disliked the American Constitution, and threatened to use the military against American citizens whom he considered his enemies. According to him, Trump seems to have an obsessive fascination for Adolf Hitler, and often seemed to want American generals to obey his command as the Nazi generals used to obey Hitler.

 Kelly told The Atlantic that Trump wished his military personnel showed him the same deference Hitler’s Nazi generals showed him.

“Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?” Kelly asked Trump. He added, “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.”

(It is not clear if he had also explained that there were some major attempts by generals and soldiers in Hitler’s army who tried to stage a coup, or assassinate Hitler. Most of them were caught and executed.)

The point is, a large number of white Americans, including women, are fanatic supporters of Trump precisely because of these reasons! They want him as that masculine, macho, misogynist, who revels in indulging in that particular kind of language! They want him as a dictator and a fascist. They want him to clamp down on dissenters and ‘Leftists’ – with Harris being dubbed as a neo-Marxist by Trump. And they want Trump to close down the borders, hound out the immigrants and their children, and ‘Make America Great Again’! For some, it actually means, ‘Make America White Again’!

As this reporter found out in 2016, many of them hide within their deepest hearts the insatiable desire that ‘slave trade’ should come back, that Afro-Americans, among others, should be treated as second class citizens, and that what the whites did, in terms of organized carnage and elimination, to the original, native and indigenous inhabitants of this land, was obviously correct.

In their warped minds, the short history of American colonialism and occupation, genocide and slave trade, was the golden, utopian past, which should be resurrected. And only Trump, the real estate tycoon, can do that.

The truth is that America is not a great nation, as their politicians claim. It never was. Across the world, it is the American establishment, which has, over the years, propped up miscellaneous dictatorships, banana republics, tin-pot fascists (as it was in Latin America), apartheid regimes (as it was in South Africa, with Nelson Mandela dubbed as a terrorist), totalitarian monarchies (as in the Middle East), and rogue genocidal regimes such as the one in Tel Aviv.

Indeed, Israel is the ‘Nazi operator’ of the US (and its Western allies) in the Middle East, backed by powerful lobbies in America, and it has continued to do now what it has been doing in the past – mass murders of innocents and targeted assassinations of opponents. None of them really believe in the principles of secular, modern, liberal, egalitarian democracy, especially when it comes to rest of the world.

So Harris or Trump, does it really matter?

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Gaza on the lips of campus protestors

Gaza On Their Lips

By Amit Sengupta

Give Flowers to the Rebels who Failed!
– Wall writing, Sorbonne. France. May, 1968, students’ uprising

It’s just that, now, the rebels have not failed! Instead, they are flying on the wings of justice, painting the walls with the water melon colours of the Palestine flag. And they are all dancing the ‘Dabke’ dance on the same liberating song from Palestine, hands holding hands, wearing the black and white keiffyah, going round and round in circles, their young faces flush with all the luminescent colours of youthful rebellion and freedom!

Perhaps they know. Perhaps they don’t. April 30, 2024 marked the ‘Liberation Day’ in Vietnam. A tiny country with no military power defeated the world’s mightiest military and financial empire. The war started in 1955. After 19 years of mass murders of innocents, relentless bombing, burnt out villages, the guerilla forces of Vietnam, using the dense forests, defeated the Americans. Legendary communist revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, led the guerillas, and, finally, became victorious in 1975. Most American soldiers who came back alive suffered all their lives – with guilt, remorse, nightmares of what they did and what they saw, and ‘mass psychological trauma’.

Remember Apocalypse Now, the movie, by Francis Ford Copolla, with Marlon Brando in an epical role, as a brilliant American soldier (tipped to be a future general), who turned a rebel leader in Cambodia: The film begins with a famous song by Jim Morrison of ‘The Doors’:

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end…

The My Lai massacre shocked the world. More than 500 unarmed people of a South Vietnam village were killed by what was called a ‘search and destroy’ mission, on March 16, 1968. And who can ever forget that stunningly horrific picture – naked Vietnamese children running, screaming, scared out of their minds, as they were ‘napalmed’– genocide by bombs which spread like a raging fire burning all that is around, including human flesh.

In Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi (1970), an educated young man looking for a job is asked by an interview board, as to what was the most significant event in the 20th century? He says, it was the victory of the Vietnamese people against the US. They said, why not the landing on the moon? He said, cryptically, that with the progress of science, this was waiting to happen – hence, it was predictable. However, who could have ever imagined that a little country would defeat the mightiest military empire in the world? They ask, cynically: Are you a communist? He says that one does not have to be a communist to accept this truth!

Now Vietnam has resurrected yet again, as yet another dead-end called Gaza, with the mass protests of the 1960s stalking the campuses and the American conscience. One thousand flowers are now blooming in almost every campus. This magical ‘flower- power’ has spread across to other countries: Switzerland, Canada, Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Puerto Rico. In Amsterdam, where the cops are almost always invisible, they have suddenly turned brutal. Hundreds have been arrested in the US, including faculty members. At UCLA, the cops allowed Right-wing Zionists to enter the campus and attack the students with rods and chemical spray. At Columbia, where it all started, they have broken the ‘Free Palestine’ encampments, while the students have resurrected them again and again.

The faculty wrote in a letter on May 3, 2024: “We, faculty members of the History Department of Columbia University, condemn the use of police force against students, as well as the ongoing presence of the NYPD on our campus. We insist upon the rights of students and scholars to engage in non-violent protest or public speech, and we deplore the arbitrary disciplining of students, faculty, or staff for doing so. We are also dismayed that the use of public force resulted from a decision-making process, from which faculty were excluded. We disagree about many of the issues being debated on campus this year, but we agree that history shows how deeply damaging it is for a university to meet students’ protests with violence and criminalization. Since the last time the police were called on this campus in large numbers, in 1968, Columbia has worked hard to restore community, build shared governance, deal peacefully with protest, and maintain a culture of respectful debate. We must hold on to this legacy.”

So who is Hind Rajab?

She was a six-year-old beautiful girl in Gaza who was murdered by the Israeli army. So the students in Columbia captured the Hamilton Hall, with it etched memories of the 1960s, and renamed it ‘Hind’s Hall’!

Hind Rajab

Since her murder, Hind’s mother had withdrawn into a silence of infinite suffering. On hearing this news, she said: “I started crying, because I wanted all these movements and support to come while Hind was still alive! Wake up now! Why are others like Hind still going through this?”

Writes Keenga Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker, (May 8, 2024): “Students who engage in civil disobedience do so with the expectation of some reprisal. That is, after all, the moral imperative at the heart of this particular form of activism: self-sacrifice in the name of a higher political goal. But many of the student activists had not anticipated being arrested; they were shocked when set upon by police aggressively seeking to clear an area or simply to forbid public demonstration… Whatever the cause of arrests, the punishments pursued by school administrations have been excessive and cruel. Students and faculty members who have participated in the protests have been suspended and banned from campuses, and evicted from university housing, before disciplinary proceedings have begun. Some have been expelled; others have been banned from graduation ceremonies, have faced uncertainty about their legal records, and have generally been treated as pariahs. The level of repression has been shocking.” (Taylor is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, among other acclaimed books.)

Despite the State repression, with a shaky, discredited, Joe Biden at the helm, the ‘counter-narrative’ as ‘counter culture’ is now etched on the walls. In Canadian campuses, streets are being renamed with Gaza landmarks. In Naples, Italian artist Eduardo Castaldo turned his photographs into street murals as a form of ‘creative resistance’.  He has visually documented life under Israeli occupation as a photojournalist. ‘Bella Ciao’ is being sung, with the sublime strings of guitars. Frida Kahlo is now a Palestinian. And so is Jesus Christ on the cross.

The ‘Caitlin Newsletter’ quoted Secretary of State Anthony Blinken: “Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond. And, of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can’t –  we can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”

The newsletter says: “Notice how he said the word “narrative” three times? That’s how empire managers talk to each other, because that’s how they think about everything. This is because empire managers are always acutely aware of something that normal human beings are not: that real power comes from manipulating the stories –  narratives –  that people tell themselves about their reality. They understand that humans are storytelling animals whose inner lives are typically dominated by mental narratives about what’s happening, so if you can control those narratives, you can control the humans. They understand that power is controlling what happens, but true power is controlling what people ‘think’ about what happens.… That’s what’s going on with all the mass media propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, plutocrat-funded think tanks, and mainstream culture manufacturing in New York and Hollywood. A few clever manipulators understand that you can control a society by controlling its dominant narratives…”

It’s just that the counter-narrative has come to stay. And it is spreading far and wide. This time, even in Sorbonne, the rebels have not failed! They are, instead, winning an impossible war. In solidarity with the trapped people of Gaza and Rafaa. While the slogan resounds in collective chorus – Say no to Genocide! Ceasefire Now! Free Free Palestine!

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The West Is Blind To The Rest

The West Is Blind To The Rest

By Amit Sengupta

The global fault-lines, which have been ripped open after the ongoing genocide in Gaza, has been unparalleled in world history, especially in the recent past. For instance, western opinion and active participation consequent to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the order of the International Court of Justice in Hague on Russia, has had no impact on Vladimir Putin.

The mindless war continues with thousands dead across both sides, many of them with shared families, cultures and memories, who fought the Nazis together during and after the Holocaust, and made massive sacrifices. More than 20 million people of Soviet Russia died fighting the fascists. Also, after the Russian invasion, if the heart of America, Britain, France and Germany beats so hard for Ukraine, whatever happened in Gaza?

Remember the ethnic-cleansing and repeated massacres of one community during the civil war in Serbia-Bosnia-Herzegovnia — this too was happening right inside the heart of Europe. It took the entire West months of deadpan detachment to act, before NATO unleashed its jet aircraft and bombs. Slobodan Milosevic, the Butcher of Serbia — was he punished in his lifetime? Many of these butchers were, ironically, former communists in Yugoslavia.

Come to think of it, till the time Adolf Hitler attacked Poland in 1939, America and Europe acted totally blind to the long convoys of trains taking millions of Jews to the gas-death chambers, zigzagging through Europe. They simply chose to look the other way, even while France and Britain pretended to be helpless after the extermination of most of their young men in the first world war, another mindless war where the League of Nations was as impotent, as has been the role of the United Nations during the NATO wars unleashed in Iraq and Syria, the American invasion of tiny Vietnam earlier, while backing dictators of sundry banana republics in Latin America.

Did anyone ever say that George Bush was a war criminal for the tens of thousands of Iraqis dead whereby they did not find one weapon of mass destruction in this insatiable American quest of ‘blood for oil’? And that Bush too should have been hauled up in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Hague like Ratko Miladic, for the mass murders he unleashed in what was former Yugoslavia? Or Hillary Clinton, for unleashing a relentless wave of destruction in Syria and the bestiality unleashed in the murder of Gaddafi in Libya?

Imagine the mass suffering, as a civil war erupted in Iraq, with the war splitting over to Syria unleashed by Clinton and Barack Obama, with entire communities of Yazidi women taken as sex slaves by the ISIS. Who were the patrons of ISIS and where did they get their arms? The American regimes and its allies have their best interests in keeping the pot boiling in the Middle-East till the time oil exists in its vast underground, and till the time Israel can be used as a strategic military force by the US.

ALSO READ: Gaza – Where Tears Have Run Dry

The ICJ did not order Israel to stop its armed assaults – it has asked it to stop its genocidal actions, thereby recognizing that it is a genocide and that the situation in Gaza is catastrophic. While it may take years to give a final judgement, it has largely followed the nine “provisional measures” demanded by South Africa. It is significant that South Africa which suffered an apartheid regime backed by the US and Britain, is now fighting another apartheid regime, backed by the US and Britain!

The 17 judges in Hague ordered that Israel should do everything in its power to avoid killing Palestinians, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, creating unlivable living conditions in, or intentionally preventing Palestinian births, which is a pointer to scores of children being killed due to the bombing of hospitals, the murder of doctors and nurses, and stark absence of medical facilities.

Pointing at the crass declarations by politicians, including Israel’s president and defence minister, calling for the elimination of all Palestinians, including children and women, branding the people of Gaza as animals, etc, the court said that Israel should do more to “prevent and punish” public incitement to genocide. The court ordered “immediate and effective measures” to look into the humanitarian catastrophe.

Isreal can disobey the order, but it is morally bound to obey it, even as it its government is totally isolated across the entire globe, while there have been huge protests in Tel Aviv asking Benjamin Netanyahu to quit. Indeed, the Hague ruling is unprecedented because it has created a huge public perception against Israel across the globe, and serious moral dilemma for the US, Britain, Germany and France, who are openly backing the mass murder of children in Gaza, with Joe Biden actually funding the bombings with millions.

Called ‘Genocide Joe’ now, even by his Democrat supporters, especially the millennials, and hitting 80, there have been massive protests in America (300,000 in Washington DC) and in Europe (half-a-million in London) – as well as in other nations. Even the caucus rally in South Carolina by a thoroughly discredited Kamala Harris had Palestinian flags in the audience.

Indeed, Jewish Groups for Peace in America have been the most vociferous against Netanyahu’s brand of Zionism, whereby he is using mythical narratives to unleash the savagery. The role of notorious Jewish lobbies, including among big business and multinationals, have been dissected publicly by activists, academics and journalists, especially that of the shadowy America Israel Pubic Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Not only does this outfit have tremendous power over various American regimes, both Republicans and Democrats, with their huge money resources and powerful connections, they can shape the destiny of the presidential polls in America. There are allegations that they are pumping in huge money to get those candidates defeated who have opposed the regime in Tel Aviv.

It is indeed a bad faith choice for Americans now, between two very old and unprincipled men who have discarded all values of basic humanity and ethics, and who seem untouched by the 10,000 dead children, the daily violation of international laws, the bombing of churches, mosques, schools, university campuses, refugee camps, hospitals, the killings of more than 100 journalists. They stand totally committed to the ultra-orthodox, Rightwing, extremist Israeli regime, and its barbarism in Palestine.

For a capitalist empire with vast inequalities and thousands of homeless on its big city streets in this freezing cold, the collective guilt and anxiety for its relentless mass murders across the globe – from Vietnam to Gaza – is a psychological epidemic. That thousands have consistently protested across its cities, especially women and the young, only shows that a regime which feeds on barbarism has no democratic credibility, and is as inhuman as any other totalitarian or fascist regime.

With all credit to the West and Europe for its resurrection of arts, architecture, classical music, cinema, academics and culture in the post-war scenario, its governments are most often followers of the Hobbesean principle – they are short, nasty, brutish and barbaric. And that they care a damn for democracy, higher civilizational values, and basic human conduct.

Hence, this high moral ground with which the white empire looks down at the Orientals, has been yet again exposed with its total endorsement of the genocide in Gaza. Yet again, it has taken 25,000 human beings to die by Hiroshima-Nagasaki type of bombing, including 10,000 plus children, and infinite suffering and injustice, to show the cracked, blood-stained mirror to these western empires.

Indeed, it is the people of these countries, now on the streets in mourning and in protest for Gaza – they must show the way. It’s time the West and America discovers a radical paradigm shift in its politics, and creates a new counter-culture of humane civilizational evolution, defying the medieval cruelties of the present and the past. Or else, it would continue to be Eyeless in Gaza and other endless stories of stark silence and barbarism!

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Could Hamas-Israel War Implode After 12th?

By Jasdev Singh Rai

The Israel-Hamas conflict could take on an unexpected turn after the 13th of December when COP 28 finally ends. This may have been the silent influencer in the Israel -Hamas war that few have paid attention to. Once the UAE is free from COP, and any possibility of disrupting its great moment passes, it is likely that attention will swiftly transfer to Israel -Hamas was and positions will begin to harden.

COP 28 is a very important event for UAE. With 80000 people attending, major decisions being made, all the world’s States represented and World Leaders dropping in, UAE could not afford to risk the Palestinian conflict spreading out and threaten the event.

Most of the Middle East countries cooperated in this situation. UAE didn’t want a security threat stopping the COP. Hence Arab States and Iran have been a bit restrained. 

However COP ends, the mood may change. Iran may feel it is no longer obliged to hold back. Some of the other Middle Eastern countries have also been under immense pressure from their populations to assist the Palestinians.

Israel must be fully aware of this. It is no coincidence that Netanyahu has tried to take advantage of this gap and pounded Palestine remorselessly. Israel’s ferocious attacks appear to be a desperation trying to meet deadlines. Netanyahu gives the impression of a man in a hurry.

The public narrative is that Netanyahu is trying to achieve as much as possible before public opinion within Israel and international opinion generally forces Israel to a ceasefire. However the reality may be that Israel may be aware that the atmosphere of refrain by Muslims countries is likely to change after 12th December, the final day of COP.

The current Israel strategy has done it a great deal of damage. Israel and the Jews in general have benefitted from the sympathy poured by the world after the Holocaust. The Holocaust stands out as an unimaginable crime in world history and the world in general feels a sense of guilt,  understanding and kindness for Jews. Despite antisemitic stories, many countries have enacted antisemitic laws and pursued policies against antisemitism.

However the fury of the Israel State has shocked the world. The October 7 attacks are not endorsed by anyone and rightly condemned almost universally. However the way Israel has responded by killing nearly 20000 Palestine civilians, destroying the Palestine infrastructure, houses and hospitals has numbed this sympathy in many places. Whatever Israel says in its defence, the public narrative hasn’t helped it. Some of the responses by its spokespersons have been arrogant and lacking empathy for the civilian victims of the onslaught.

ALSO READ: Israel-Palestine Conflict – The Never Ending War

The world had expected Israel to show the ‘wisdom’ of the victim, the scars and emotional trauma of the holocaust. The world expects Israel to be kind and benevolent. The images that have gone around the world, show another side.

Of course Israel has the right to defend itself. Israel’s history has been traumatic for thousands of years. It remains insecure with surrounding countries once attempting to remove it out of existence. This fear has hardened Israel’s resolve to survive at any cost and crush external enemies hard. However, what may be militarily right is not always strategically right in the long run.

The October 7 attacks not only shocked and alarmed the Israel public but offended people around the world. Nevertheless, the response has now turned world opinion the other way. The unsuccessful UN Security Council resolution calling for ceasefire is an example. All members except USA were for it. It is likely that in the General Assembly, Israel will have very few friends, if any.

Strategically this may not bode well for Israel. It will isolate the country for a long time. More importantly, antisemitism has now arisen exponentially despite the laws and media gags. This is not a state that Jews generally wish to see. A people scarred by the events of second world war, may find  the rising antagonism very difficult to bear.

Israel needs to act quickly. It needs to accept a ceasefire and appeal to Arab countries to isolate Hamas. It needs to seek a solution and a guarantee for its survival by asking its neighbours for understanding and intervention.

Israel now has only a few days before the Muslim anger against it comes out in the open, becomes entrenched and unshakeable. President Putin has visited UAE. It was surely not a ‘friendly’ visit nor because he had nowhere else to go. He must have offered support for any Arab response to Israel. A general war in Middle East will drag the United States and put it squarely on the other side. US will be forced to ditch Ukraine and lose once staunch allies in the Middle East.

If the revenge offensive against Israel starts, there will also be little sympathy for it around the world, given the imagery that has challenged people’s sentiments. It may be a mistake to think that Arab countries are restrained out of fear around taking on Israel. It may just be that they are letting UAE enjoy its hour of glory around COP 28 and then let rip. Putin’s visit is ominous.

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Warsaw Jewish Ghetto – A Mirror Image of Gaza

Warsaw Jewish Ghetto – A Mirror Image of Gaza

By Amit Sengupta

History repeats like bad memory and bad faith. It’s uncanny.

I have not been to Palestine, except in my imagination. But I have walked through Warsaw. And Gaza reminds me of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, and the sprawling Jewish quarters in Warsaw, which was under an endless siege, in the pitch darkness of impending death, denied food, water, medicine, the right to live. Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu is applying the same, vicious logic of extermination on the Palestinians, as what Adolf Hitler did to the Jews of Warsaw! Meanwhile, the West and the US backs his mighty military machine, funded with billions by the American arms industry.

The entire city of Warsaw was erased to the ground by the Nazis. The Jewish quarters was burnt and bombed out. The black & white pictures of this ravaged landscape can be seen in an old-factory, now called ‘The Warsaw Rising Museum’, situated in the Wola district. This dark museum, through a labyrinth of precious, valiant and tragic memories, was established in 1983; it was inaugurated on July 31, 2004, marking the 60th anniversary of this great resistance against the fascist war machine.

About 50,000 citizens and soldiers led the ‘Uprising of 1944’. The Communist Red Army, positioned across the border, was not allowed to help the Poles, under the orders of Joseph Stalin, allowing the resistance to be eliminated by the Germans. The map hangs out there, marked in red, as a reminder of Stalin’s sinister strategy. That is why, the people of Poland, who suffered under a military dictatorship backed by Soviet Russia for decades, hate both the Communists and the fascists in equal measure.

I have entered the replica of the tunnels inside the museum, built inside sewers and gutters, and I was breathless in a few moments. The tunnels now remind me of the cobweb of turrets and tunnels inside Gaza.

I have seen the Warsaw Ghetto, or, its original site. It still sends shivers down the spine. The brilliant ‘Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews’ is located on the site of the former ghetto. Polin in Hebrew means Poland, or, ‘rest here’, and is linked to a narrative about the first Jews who arrived in this country. This incredible museum, a magnificent work of genius, which would take several days to absorb and negotiate, commemorates 1,000 years of Jewish history. It has been built in post-modern style by Rainer Mahlamaki and Ilmari Lahdelma.

This is where the Nazis targeted 400,000 (or, 500,000?) Jews and sent most of them to the concentration camps, labour/death camps, and gas chambers of the Holocaust. I have seen some of their faces – both the Jews and the Nazis, in faded, sepia pictures. Earlier, they were isolated, ghettoized, degraded and starved of food and water for months in abject darkness in the ‘forbidden city’. Thousands of them survived by having one bowl of soup in a day, often made of straw, or smuggled potatoes. If caught with potatoes, they would be instantly shot dead. Even now, inside inexpensive street cafes and magical breweries and pubs in Warsaw, one can find delicious varieties of potato dishes!

I have read and witnessed their life-stories in films, documentaries, literature, books on their history. Most of them were forced into the cramped, degrading journeys through the heart of Europe (as Europe and America watched in abject and shameful silence) to their horrible deaths in over-crowded cattle-trains jam-packed like poultry chicken for mass slaughter, where they had to shit right inside the compartment, and not a wisp of wind or a drop of water would be allowed to enter.

ALSO READ: Ukraine And Gaza – Where The Media Turns Fickle

However, not all succumbed to this fated death journey of absolute condemnation. There were many who chose to resist and fight back – and they fought like brave fighters till the end, almost 60,000 of them. They refused to die in a Nazi gas chamber.

A Nazi SS officer, Major General Juergen Stroop, reported that these groups of poorly-armed 20-30 men and women refused to surrender. He said that the women would be “firing pistols with both hands, and unleash hand grenades…”. On the fifth day of this incredible resistance, the Nazis decided to destroy the entire ghetto. Burn it down, they were ordered. (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L Shirer).

Writes the surprised officer: “The Jews stayed in the burning buildings, until because of the fear of being burned alive, they jumped down from the upper stories … With their bones broken they still tried to crawl across the street into buildings which had not yet been set on fire… Despite the danger of being burned alive, the Jews and bandits often preferred to return into the flames, rather than risk being caught by us.”

The operation was commanded by Himmler, Hitler’s close aide. Stroop informed his superiors on April 25, 1943, that 27,564 Jews had been captured and they would be sent to the notorious concentration camp of Treblinka the next day itself. Or else, immediate “liquidation” would be undertaken en masse. He also informed that “1,330 Jews were pulled out of dugouts and immediately destroyed; 362 Jews killed in battle”.

Writes Shirer: “Towards the end of the rebellion, the defenders took to the sewers. Stroop tied to flush them out by flooding the mains but the Jews managed to stop the flow of water. One day, the Germans dropped smoke bombs into the sewer through 183 manholes but Stroop ruefully reported that they failed to have the desired results.”

The Polish-Jewish fighters, with practically no arms, wounded, dying, starving, thirsty, cold and outmaneuvered by the German military, fought it out for one entire month, against all odds, while Stroop reported that by April 26 many of them were “going insane from the heat, the smoke and the explosions”.

On the last day of this ‘controlled massacre’, Stroop reported: “Of the total of 56,000 caught, about 7,000 were destroyed in the former ghetto during large-scale operation, 6,929 Jews were destroyed by transporting them to Treblinka; the sum total of Jews destroyed is therefore 13,929. Beyond that, five to six thousand Jews were destroyed by being blown up, or by perishing in the flames.” Stroop had reported that he had caught a “total of 56,065 Jews, whose extermination can be proved’. He called all the Jews “sub-humans and bandits”.

So what did the Israeli defense minister call the Palestinians after the slaughter of innocents by the Hamas on October 7? “Human animals” – as he announced the “complete siege” of Gaza.

Shirer writes that the Nazi gas chambers amounted for the 36,000 murdered from the Warsaw Ghetto. He writes that the ‘final solution’ continued till the end of the war. So how many Jews murdered in cold blood? “According to the SS witnesses at Nurmemberg, the total was put at between five and six million”. Karl Eichmann, chief of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo, carried out the mass extermination.

Hannah Arendt, later covering the trial of Eichmann, who was captured in Argentina, writes in that seminal essay, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil’, that what was striking in his daily conduct during the trial was that he did not feel an iota of guilt or remorse on the magnitude of the crime he had committed against millions of innocent people. Indeed, this was the dominant social-psychological syndrome expressed by all Nazi and Gestapo officers who willfully participated in the Holocaust.

Now, in the manner in which the world powers, including India and in the Middle-East, are allowing the daily bombing of Gaza, including that of hospitals, schools, homes and refugee camps, the genocide of children and ordinary folks, and slow death in the thirsty and hungry alleys of Gaza, the Eichmann syndrome and Himmler’s doctrine seems to have persisted in the post-war scenario. No lessons have been learnt. The global war machine remains as cruel, prolonged and nasty, and eternally hungry for innocent blood.

German philosopher, Walter Benjamin, who himself committed suicide escaping the fascists, was therefore eternally prophetic when he said: “There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

However, unlike in the armed resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto, in Palestine, the unarmed and displaced refugees in their own homeland, seemed to have become like the trapped and condemned Jews of the concentration camps. Waiting for inevitable death.

Certainly, yesterday’s Warsaw Ghetto is now the Siege of Gaza! And, every day, Netanyahu looks more and more like Hitler!

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