The defenders of the genocide in Palestine argue that it is not a genocide and, moreover, that there have been other genocides equal to or worse than this one in the recent past. From dehumanizing the victims massacred under bombs or executed daily with absolute impunity, they move on to threatening and criminalizing their critics. The traditional instrument is to accuse them of anti-Semitism and then place them on blacklists so that they lose their jobs or are expelled from their countries of residence, as has happened multiple times.
One of the extortion services, apart from the almost infinite resources of the CIA and Mossad, consists of various harassment archives, such as the most recently recognized by the U.S. government, the doxing Canary Mission (in this case, to criminalize students and professors critical of Israel), and a plurality of actions that one day will be more fully detailed through leaks or declassification of documents, as usually happens and in which we will discover names, both of critics and activists listed for extortion and civil death, as well as mercenary and honorary collaborators, those who volunteer to punish honest individuals through the greatest powers in the world, because their mediocrity and cowardice never allowed them to do so on their own merits—some of whose names we already know.
Of course, there have been other genocides in history. In the case of the Modern Era, the majority and the worst genocides that added up to millions of victims intentionally or systematically suppressed had the great Northwestern empires as perpetuators or principal allies. On this, we have written years ago.
Let us take, for example, one of the worst genocides of the last generations, the genocide in Rwanda. Over three months, the Rwandan Hutu militias, protected by the government under Jean Kambanda, massacred the Tutsis and even some members of their own Hutu ethnicity caught in between. As it could not have been otherwise, this genocide was encouraged and directed by the far-right ideology known as Hutu Supremacy, which considered themselves racially superior to the Tutsis and, consequently, deserving to eliminate them from the face of the Earth. As a way to justify their ancestral right to the land, the Hutus relied on myths about the existence of a Hutu people in Rwanda before the arrival of the Tutsis from Ethiopia. Later, they imposed apartheid in the country’s major state institutions, such as education and the military. Then they criminalized any Hutu who was friends with a Tutsi or dared to defend their humanity. Studies on these Bantu peoples indicate genetic and ethnic differences that are irrelevant when compared to the rest of the neighboring peoples.
In May 1994, the UN imposed an arms embargo against the supremacist and genocidal government of Kambanda and his Defense Minister Théoneste Bagosora. This embargo was violated by the governments of France and apartheid South Africa in its final months of existence. In June, coinciding with Nelson Mandela’s rise to power in South Africa, the UN blue helmets entered Rwanda, and the genocide ended in less than a month. Years later, Bill Clinton regretted not having done anything to stop this genocide, even though interventions from Washington, like those from Europe, never asked anyone for permission. In fact, he did do something: the UN Security Council ordered the withdrawal of its peacekeeping forces before the genocide, and Washington refused to use the word «genocide» while the genocide occurred unrestricted and despite protests from various humanitarian groups worldwide, including military figures like Canadian General Roméo Dallaire.
Approximately half a million Tutsis were killed with the intention of annihilating them as a people or removing them from their lands for the benefit of the dominant ethnic group. That is, a number roughly equivalent to what has been estimated in the case of Palestine in recent years alone, not even going back to the first Nakba from 1946 to 1948 and the constant war against Palestinians in Palestine that, since then and without cease, has left an average of 1,500 Palestinians dead per year, apart from those dispossessed of their lands and human rights by armed settlers, and apart from those kidnapped by the Israeli military itself, including thousands of children.
The difference between the genocide in Gaza and other genocides where hundreds of thousands of deaths are similarly counted is clear. Although the supremacist ideology of Hutu Power had been fermenting for many years, the genocide in Rwanda occurred over a period of three months. Neither its ideologues nor those who carried it out were preaching daily, yearly, and decade after decade in the world’s most powerful media to ensure that no one acknowledged that a genocide was being committed in Rwanda. No one in the world repeated Hutu Supremacy’s excuse that Rwanda had the right to defend itself, much less that massacring children, men, and women of all ages every day was part of that right.
Unlike the Zionists, the Hutu supremacists did not have star journalists in major channels and media outlets worldwide, commenting on the news with a Rwandan flag on the desk, justifying the violence against Tutsis and criminalizing their resistance as antibantú terrorists.
Apart from the Hutus in Rwanda, no group or church in Berlin, Atlanta, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Lagos, or New Delhi justified the Hutus or prayed for their safety, even though they were Christians.
Prime Minister Jean Kambanda did not travel to Washington to give speeches in Congress. He did not receive standing ovations from legislators supporting his supremacist project, passing laws criminalizing defenders of Tutsi rights in the West or imposing loyalty oaths to Rwanda to hold public office or receive aid in the face of climate disasters. Kambanda was not received by every U.S. president to secure trillions of dollars in financial, military, media, and moral support.
The Hutu Supremacy did not have the most powerful lobby in the West, funded by every winning politician in the United States, nor did representatives of the people have Rwandan flags at the entrance of their offices. No one, like Senator Rafael (Ted) Cruz and so many others, declared that their primary mission in Washington was to protect Rwanda. Neither Théoneste Bagosora nor the Hutu Supremacy were unconditionally supported by the majority of European countries or by the President of the European Commission, even though Europe had killed more millions of Africans in Africa than Jews in the Holocaust during World War II and should, in the same way, feel remorse at least as profound for African peoples as for Jewish and Roma peoples.
Neither Americans, nor Germans, nor Argentinians who had Tutsi flags were arrested and beaten by the police in their civilized countries, nor were they accused of inspiring antibantú hatred, even though both Hutus and Tutsis are Bantu peoples. No U.S. president threatened from the White House to kidnap and send to a concentration camp in El Salvador everyone who criticized Rwanda because criticizing Rwanda was being anti-American.
Governors in the United States did not send communications to university professors forbidding them to use words like genocide, Tutsi, or Hutu supremacism. They did not ask students to record their professors, nor did the federal government use masked agents to kidnap students on the streets who wrote articles in defense of Tutsi human rights. Professors of Moral Philosophy or African Studies did not cancel their courses on the History of the Tutsi People or Human Rights in Rwanda out of fear of losing their jobs, whether through dismissal, contract termination violating the norms regulating their tenure, arbitrary salary reductions, or the fear of not finding employment elsewhere once dismissed. Not even South African apartheid had the power to dictate to the presidents and senators of the world’s major powers, such as Europe and the United States, what they should say and do.
The genocidaires of Rwanda did not own the largest financial capitals in the world like BlackRock, JP Morgan, or Barclays. They did not have dealings with the largest surveillance and public opinion manipulation tech companies, such as Palantir. They did not decide dozens of elections around the world, like Team Jorge. They did not possess the most powerful and lethal Secret Agency in the world, nor did they collaborate with the other two largest secret agencies globally.
Jean Kambanda was not in power for three decades but for three months, and he was tried and convicted of genocide. His ministers, military personnel, ideologues of Hutu supremacism, and journalists were also sentenced to decades in prison for genocide, crimes against humanity, incitement, or apology for genocide.
As repugnant as any other genocide, the genocide in Rwanda was neither the cause nor the consequence of a systematic Rwandanization of the world, where debate and dissent were replaced by violence and the politics of cruelty.
By the deafening harassment of power. By the blind reason of the bombers. By the triumph of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. By the prostitution of love. By the commercialization of hate. By the fear of being and feeling. By the fear of thinking differently. By the dopamine of the tribe and the taste of blood. By the manipulation of ideas and emotions. By the social engineering of hunger. By necessity as an instrument of control. By voluntary slavery. By religious fanaticism. By the indoctrination of the masses. By the illusion of individual freedom. By the sanctification of the most powerful. By the criminalization of the weakest. By the militarization of the police. By the politicization of justice. By the whip that educates the slave. By the admiration for the slaveholder. By the law of the psychopath who cannot distinguish between good and evil and replaces it with the only thing that elicits any emotion: winning or losing.
The genocide in Rwanda occurred in Rwanda. The genocide in Palestine occurs in Gaza and in every office, on every corner of every city, in every bedroom of every country.
“Uruguay aims to ‘bring some young Palestinians from the West Bank’ to train them in agriculture through a FAO program, said Lubetkin” (Channel 12, Uruguay, June 6, 2025)
On Monday, May 12, 1919, the British Minister of War, future Prime Minister and hero of World War II, Winston Churchill, referring to his own practice of gassing Arab protesters and rebels, wrote:
“I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare (…) I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror…”
Of the Hindus, he said they were animals who worshipped elephants. Consistent with this, he was directly and knowingly responsible for the famine that killed millions in Bengal in 1943, shortly before he signed an alliance agreement with Stalin in Iran to fight against Nazism.
These words from the British hero and defender of freedom and human rights, these supremacist ideas and actions were not new at the time and did not provoke any scandal. Supremacist and messianic racism, like the Manifest Destiny of O’Sullivan and The White Man’s Burden of Kipling, which in the 19th century justified and promoted the slaughter of “uncivilized peoples” and “inferior races,” were the precursors to Hitler and Nazism. Hitler plagiarized entire paragraphs from Madison Grant for Mein Kampf and thanked him for the inspiration. The popularity of Nazism in countries like England and the United States was deep and widespread, especially among wealthy businessmen and powerful politicians, until they began to lose World War II, and suddenly the Nazi criminals were just a handful of lunatics, not a complicit and cowardly mass of beautiful and superior civilized people with sudden amnesia.
A hundred years later, the history of suppressing the uncivilized, inferior races, and peoples cursed by God is a thousand times worse, and, as then, it seems like it’s not such a big deal. But the real-time information available is also a thousand times greater, so the responsibility and shame (or shamelessness) are multiplied a thousandfold.
Currently, Uruguay is one of those examples that do not quite reach the level of tragedy solely due to its military and propagandistic inability to do so much harm. Not because we are a superior people, as our government so kindly insists on making clear with its own example. Which does not exempt us from the shame of the cowardice of denial or moral wavering in the face of the most tragic events of contemporary history. Cowardice and denial from which those thousands of Uruguayans who do not tremble before the fascists of the moment are exempt, those who terrorize with total impunity from right to left—in that order.
After Uruguayan President Yamandú Orsi refused his party’s (the left-wing coalition Frente Amplio) request to define the massacres in Gaza as genocide, he defended himself by saying that his focus is on actions, not words, and that he prefers not to talk about “the war” and instead offer “concrete solutions,” such as sending powdered milk and rice to Gaza… The Israeli embassy in Uruguay labeled the Frente Amplio’s criticism of the genocide in Gaza as “expressions of disguised hatred” and warned of “dangerous consequences.” B’nai B’rith called the FA’s brief statement a “grave moral failure.”
Due to prior criticism from artists and left-wing activists regarding the wavering of their own government, the president once again tried to put out the fire with more fuel. In a new statement to the newspapers, he said he condemned the “military escalation” and that Netanyahu’s offensive “fuels antisemitism” and generates “weariness” in “important sectors” of the Israeli people.
It is quite obvious that the Zionist genocide can fuel, among other things, antisemitism, as it has always been the Zionists themselves who, for political, geopolitical, and ideological reasons, have strategically confused and identified Zionism with Judaism (like identifying the KKK with Christianity), which is why even the hundreds of thousands of Jews who actively oppose the massacres of Palestinians and apartheid in Israel can end up being blamed for something they condemn.
But what about the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians massacred, mutilated, traumatized, and starved? Are they not the direct victims of the hatred and violence that insists that “in Gaza there are no innocents, not even children,” which justifies exterminating them before they become “terrorists”? Could it be that the European settlers who claim to be descendants of a man named Abraham who lived 4,000 years ago in what is now Iraq are the real antisemites? A man who first had a child with his slave at the request of his infertile wife. But the son of Abraham and the slave produced the lineage of the Arabs. When something went wrong, Sarah had her son at the age of 90 by a miracle of the Lord, the one who produced the lineage of the Israelites (according to the same tradition that identifies those Israelites from 3,000 years ago with the current ones) as an improved version of his brother’s race. But let’s leave this surreal line of reasoning, which is only obvious to fanatics in perpetual trance.
The mere idea of sending milk and rice to Gaza under the slogan of “actions, not words” hides a profound ignorance of what happens with humanitarian aid in Palestine or, more likely, denialism and a well-known fear of criticizing the powerful who are committing genocide—let’s say massacre, so as not to offend the sensitivity of the killers and their apologists.
Of course, if you mention it, the automatic argument is “I haven’t seen you condemn the October 8th attack.” Which is false and paradoxical, since it is always said by those who have never condemned and will never condemn the repeated massacres and systematic violation of human rights against Palestinians and other neighbors since World War II, when the same Zionists proudly identified themselves as terrorists.
Uruguayan Chancellor Mario Lubetkin (former Director of Institutional Communication for FAO in Latin America) has come out to put out the fire (now a blaze) of criticism from his political base by announcing plans to allow “some young Palestinians from the West Bank” to come to the country to train in sustainable agriculture. In another radio program, he stated that the Palestinian youth could “think about the day after” by becoming entrepreneurs and starting their own start-ups.
The day after what? Why do we, the Western masters, have to tell them what they must do to civilize themselves, how to indoctrinate themselves and adapt to progress and submission to Anglo-Saxon capitalism? Of course, to exile them again, far from their land and their own sovereign decisions as individuals and as a people.
Beyond the murky conscience of Uruguay’s Foreign Ministry, many do not understand or imagine that in Palestine there are thousands of bilingual professionals and academics whose schools and universities were bombed to rubble. In Israel, they are considered beasts of burden, and in the West, they believe they can teach them how to plant olive trees.
At the beginning of 2024, I met with the International Affairs officers at my university in the United States to propose the creation of “humanitarian scholarships” for students affected by armed conflicts. While the idea was very well received, it sank into the apathy of donors. But what a great idea, that of taking Palestinians out of Palestine to teach them how to cultivate other lands! How had it not occurred to them before? It’s not about giving scholarships to the youth who lost everything under the bombs so they can prepare and wage an international struggle for the sovereignty of their people, but so they can learn to cultivate the land, other lands that have nothing to do with their own, which they know like the back of their hand and have cultivated for thousands of years in a more than sustainable way.
Where is the mantra we Western professors hear with toxic frequency about the need to “train global leaders”? Every time I criticize this colonialist slogan in a meeting, many struggle to understand me.
Displacing Palestinian youth to learn “sustainable agriculture” in Uruguay is such a good idea that it resembles the “Final Solution,” which members of Netanyahu’s cabinet—and the majority of Israelis—talk about so much; according to a survey by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, 82 percent of the population supports the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
At this point, I don’t know what’s worse, having a Trump in Argentina or a Biden in Uruguay.
The empire of denial closes its eyes and believes.
“Professor, “a student told me,” take a chance and say who will win tomorrow.
“Trump.
I had already said it in various media, but I am not interested in partisan politics in my classes.
“According to all the polls, Kamala wins. Why would she lose?
“Because of Gaza. You can’t hide the sun with a finger. Hours after learning the election results, the major networks, from CNN to Fox News, began to digest Donald Trump’s victory. The most well-known figures seemed to agree that three issues had hit the Democrats: 1. the economy, 2. the migration crisis, and 3. the conflict in the Middle East. In other words, it is about pocketbooks, racism, and morality. In the three points, we see the fabrication of ideas and sensibilities of the propaganda of those same media:
1. The domestic economy is not doing well, but let’s see that this is not due to a particular government but to a much larger structural problem that goes from the legalized corruption of the corporations that have bought everything (politicians, media) to continue accumulating the wealth (surplus value) that they have been kidnapping from the middle and working class. Since 1975, the working class has transferred 50 billion dollars (twice the GDP of China) to the richest one percent.
The other economic factor is the loss of hegemony and power to dictate by Washington in the rest of the world, which has not only aggravated its natural aggressiveness but has found itself with a competition it does not accept. But if we limit ourselves to the current administrations, we will see that during the period in which Trump was president, the GDP grew less than during the Biden period. True, there was a pandemic, but the same argument applies when praising the lower fuel prices in the previous period due to the drastic reduction in road traffic.
2. There is an immigration problem on the southern border, but not a crisis. That is a media fabrication fueled by politicians who benefit from the demonization of the weakest who do not vote and do not have lobbies to pressure and buy them. As a general rule, illegal immigrants are neither criminals nor do they increase crime, but rather reduce it. They do not live off state services but pay taxes by consuming and collecting their salaries, with the payment of taxes that they never claim but go to Social Security for the benefit of someone else. They do not steal anyone’s job but do the work that citizens do not want to do and, in this way, lubricate the economy so that it continues to function. According to Trump, “Illegal immigrants are criminals who are entering without control.” He threatened Mexico with high tariffs if it did not stop drug trafficking, without mentioning that his country is the root of the problem, not only in consumption but also in the distribution of drugs and weapons. As documented, criminals, genocidaires, and terrorists live free and legal in Florida and are influential donors to his political party.
3. Although Americans usually vote with their pocketbooks, a portion (although a minority, they number in the millions) vote with a strong moral conviction. This has been the case of the genocide in Gaza that the Democrats have tried to silence in order not to talk about the weapons and tens of thousands of dollars they sent in just one year to Israel to massacre tens of thousands of children under the rhetoric of “Israel has the right to defend itself” or, as Bill Clinton responded, “because King David was there three thousand years ago.” Or candidate Harris, silencing every question about Gaza with the same nasal arrogance: “I’m the one who speaks.” The government has ignored the numerous student protests, violently repressed the mass urban marches, the truck drivers’ marches… Then, when the punishment vote appeared, the same media that had made the massacre in Gaza invisible wanted to explain the electoral catastrophe by resorting to the same thing: relegating the moral issue to a third position and talking about the “crisis in the Middle East,” avoiding saying Gaza, Palestine, and genocide. Not even massacre.
This genocide is becoming a metastasis in the Middle East, one more stop in the Ring of Fire (Ukraine, Syria, Palestine, Iran, Taiwan) produced by the friction of the Alpha Male of the West who tries to surround the Dragon that has already awakened. Instead of negotiating and benefiting its people through global cooperation, Alpha Male goes after eliminating the competition. This metaphor comes from the pack led by a male wolf, now by the ideologues of the right. They forget that when the alpha male ages and faces a younger one, it ends in a deadly conflict.
In 2020, Democrats won Wisconsin and Michigan, two states with a solid Arab population. Now, Republicans won both. However, Palestinian-born Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) retained her seat with 70 percent of the vote and Ilhan Omar (Minnesota) did so with 75 percent. More than a vote for Trump (who had lost the election four years earlier for some reason) it was a vote against Harris and the Democrats. An indignant and hopeless vote. This electoral system is a legacy of slavery and the political-media system has been bought by the technological and financial corporations, which are the ones that govern this country. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock (a financial company that manages as much money as five times the economy of Russia), made it clear: “It doesn’t matter who wins; Harris or Trump will be good for Wall Street.”
It is a sack of force: money goes from the parties to the media for advertising and promotion. That is to say, the same dollar buys politicians and the media twice. Presidents are in charge of the circus. They are in charge of keeping passions alight, especially racial and gender. There is no better strategy to make social class problems invisible. Racism is the most effective way to make invisible the deep social class problem we have, including its global translation, imperialism. We will finally have a president convicted of justice (34 cases), who boasted of being smart for not paying taxes. Of course, being smart is not enough. It is necessary to have the people brutalized with identity divisions, with individuals alienated by the same technologies that dominate the economy, politics, and geopolitics. Something that is not difficult in a people accustomed to believing above the facts. People trained in churches to close their eyes and replace reality with desire until reality changes. Because of the religious mentality, narrative reality matters more than factual reality: “In the beginning was the Word…”.
From there applying the same intellectual skills and convictions when leaving one temple to enter others (banks, stock exchanges, television, political parties) is only a step. Sometimes, not even that.
On September 4, 2024, a tropical storm descended upon Jacksonville. The conversation with Jill Stein at the Jacksonville University auditorium was scheduled for 5:30 PM, a time when darkness had already fallen due to the storm. To deter attendance, the Democratic Party Committee arranged for Kamala Harris, then a Senate candidate, to deliver a speech on the same campus at Jacksonville University’s Business School, just an hour earlier, leaving attendees with few parking options.
At the conclusion of the talk, an audience member accused me of being “too polite” with Stein. Recognizing him as a known Democratic activist, and by all accounts, a congenial person, I replied, “I’m not a journalist; the purpose here was to delve into Stein’s ideas.”
I’ve always disliked aggressive interviewing styles, like Univisión’s Jorge Ramos’s, preferring instead the nuanced, almost psychoanalytic silences epitomized by Spain’s Jesús Quintero.
After the lecture, we shared a modest meal in a nearby museum hall, reserved by my colleagues, to express gratitude to Jill, former congressman and Green Party coordinator Jason Call, and their team for their efforts to join us. The university’s catering provided the meal, and without servers or additional guests, we engaged in an enriching discussion, details of which I’ll keep private out of respect for the space. However, I can connect one thought to the elections and the global tragedy that envelops us more each day.
Seated beside Jill, I recounted a visit to Deutsche Welle in Berlin, where I dined with a leading journalist who mentioned she was married to Cem Özdemir, then-Green Party leader in Germany and current Minister of Agriculture. Özdemir had accepted my invitation to speak in Florida in late 2019. Still, German police uncovered a plot by the US branch of the violent neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division to assassinate him, thwarting his visit.
This marked our alignment with Europe’s Greens, though Jill pointed out a key difference between the Green Parties of the U.S. and Germany: Ukraine. Her stance mirrored mine completely. To convey what Stein suggested that evening, I’ll articulate my viewpoint instead of recounting her words.
When President Biden withdrew U.S. troops from Afghanistan, he left behind millions in military hardware. After two decades of occupation and nearly a decade since supposedly eliminating Osama bin Laden, the U.S. military’s hasty exit was reminiscent of Vietnam. The American investment in Afghanistan amounted to $14 trillion—seven times Brazil’s GDP—not in schools and hospitals but in military dominance that fueled the drug trade and private companies, as evidenced by the Wall Street Journal.
After 20 years, the U.S. reinstated the Taliban, erstwhile CIA allies, after eliminating another former ally, bin Laden. An ideal business scheme: creating more problems to invest in new military solutions.
America’s military failures stem not only from inefficiency but also from the lucrative nature of war losses for private corporations ruling U.S. politics and media narratives. In a previous article, we noted the looming advent of another war, driven by the urgency of a new plan.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine. Many of us believed NATO did everything to provoke this by prompting Zelensky, viewed as Washington’s puppet, to confirm Ukraine’s NATO membership process. NATO, Hitler’s dream realized (two directors were his aides), succeeded again in escalating tensions to extend Western dominance—post-WWII Anglo-Saxon hegemony, avoidable had Stalin’s 1952 “Stalin notes” been considered.
In March 2022, France’s Le Monde labeled Paco Ignacio Taibo II and me as “leftist intellectuals pro-Putin,” although I consistently opposed the invasion and condemned the hypocritical narrative pushing history from that day forward, ignoring the prolonged harassment, massacres in Donbas, and the Western-backed coup against democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych.
I’m not “pro-someone” but “pro-causes,” such as non-interference in sovereign affairs. These interventions perpetuate global South issues—the shared sentiments that September 4th night.
On November 1, Europe’s Greens requested Jill Stein to withdraw from the election and support Kamala Harris to avert Trump’s fascist return. Their concern over Ukraine ignores the genocide in Palestine.
Democrats blame Jill Stein for potential losses but refuse to avert electoral suicide by dismissing millions of Democrats outraged over Palestinian genocide. At every rally, Kamala Harris dismisses protests with, “I’m speaking,” proceeding to recite familiar scripts about unrelated “important issues” like grocery costs.
No greater hypocrisy and arrogance exist. Her husband announces placing a mezuzah at the White House entrance, tolerable privately but ill-timed. Bill Clinton tries appeasing Gaza protests by citing Israel’s “special rights” due to King David’s presence millennia ago.
So, dear Democrats, cease lamenting impending national fascism if you’re the architects of global fascism.
Jill Stein In conversation at Jacksonville University
Prof. Richard Mullaney: Thank you for coming out for this event, we’re very privileged to have a presidential candidate. The Institute Policy Institute on behalf of Jackson University President Tim Cost, the Board of Trustees, Jackson University and the Stein College of Fine Arts and Humanities want to welcome all of you to this very special conversation and a warm and special welcome to Doctor Stein, who is running for President of the United States as the candidate for the Green Party. By the way, election date is just over 60 days away. A truly historic election.
We’re very pleased to have Dr. Stein on campus. She is a physician. She went to Harvard for undergraduate school, graduating Magna Cumulate. But I would like to mention that cause we believe in great academic standards here at Jackson University too. She went on to Harvard Medical School. She was a practicing physician, and in the 1990s she began to notice that the toxic exposure, the link of toxic exposure, was having a tremendous impact on health, illness and well-being. And she began a career in addition to being a physician and that is as an activist –at the Public Policy Institute, we call this somebody interested in public policy. And she became to advocate and advocate in a number of areas. And I’d like to outline a few of those for you. In the 1990s, she began, and this has continued into this very day, fighting for a healthy environment and the closure of toxic facilities and improving air quality standards for coal plants. That included, by the way, and she was in Massachusetts at the time she helped lead the fight to clean up the filthy five coal plants in Massachusetts. She helped close a toxic medical waste incinerator. In Lawrence, MA, which is one of the poorest communities in New England she saw, by the way, she became a big advocate for campaign finance reform when she saw the effect that lobbyists and campaign contributions were having on health, environmental and worker protection. And she used that, and she worked to help pass the clean election law by voter referendum in Massachusetts. Doctor Stein Co-founded the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities, a nonprofit organization that fought for health and the well-being of Massachusetts communities, including healthcare, local green economies, Environmental Protection, labor rights, and grassroots democracy. She also helped lead the effort to secure a green future ballot initiative to move subsidies from fossil fuels to renewable energy and to create green jobs. These are just some, and they continued to this day with that passion for what we’d like to call “public policy” and others call “career activism,” no surprise that she would run for elective office. And by the way, she became the green rainbow party candidate and running for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and 2010. Unsuccessful in those bids, ran as a third party and then as many of you may. She ran for president in 2012. That was year Barack Obama won, getting about half a million votes. She ran again in 2016, the year Donald Trump won, getting about 1.5 million votes and been very successful this year in 2024 and getting on the ballot because remember how this is done? This is done in 50 states. It’s an Electoral College you need to be on the ballot of all 50 states, getting a very favorable ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court recently, that’s allowing her to stay on the ballot in Wisconsin, a whole separate conversation we can have as to why some parties might spend millions of dollars to keep people off ballots when in fact it’s so hard for third parties to get on ballots. But what’s important for this election and in many elections, the swing states. Is being on the ballot and the Big Blue wall, which is Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, very important areas for the outcome of this election as well as Arizona and Nevada, North Carolina.
I think working towards Georgia, all that’s a long way of saying that doctor Stein could have a very significant impact both in policy and otherwise, and this year’s presidential race, and we are very pleased to have this discussion led as you just heard by Doctor Jorge Majfud, who teaches International Studies here at Jacksonville University. So, I hope all of you will join me in welcoming Dr. Stein and Professor. Food for this great conversation.
Jorge Majfud: Jill, thank you for accepting our invitation to come to Jacksonville University. I didn’t plan this, but we have to start with very bad news. Few minutes ago, we learned that a new shooting in a school in Georgia between Athens and Atlanta, I think it is called Apalachee High School, where four people were killed, two teachers and two students. This is, unfortunately, a never-ending story that is in some way connected to our conversation today, for example, connected to the lobbies problem. Would you like to comment briefly about that tragedy?
Jill Stein: Sure. This news about the school shooting in Georgia is absolutely tragic. Both the loss of life and the fact that it’s a 14-year-old child, apparently now in custody for doing the shooting. So, this is just a tragedy upon. Entity and the fact that this is so commonplace now in the US that we’ve had at this point, I don’t know what the number is, but it’s lots of mass shootings. It’s lots and lots in spite of the strong feelings of the American people who want common sense in gun control. The Second Amendment is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, but the American people want action, common sense action which has enormous support for things like an assault weapons ban, the ban on further sales, and a voluntary buyback program for waiting periods; for raising the age of purchase, for closing the so-called gun show loopholes, for red flag laws that clarify when gun owners are in a very dangerous position at risk for doing harm to others or to themselves. There are many things that we can do to reduce gun violence within the limits of the law, and unfortunately, we have, you know, we have very powerful interests, in this case the NRA, but there are many other examples of powerful lobbies who basically buy their way into either action or, more commonly, non-action to prevent the passage of laws that are broadly supported by the American people. I would add that it’s not only the power of lobbyists, but it’s the very essence of our political system which is bought and paid for by very big money. And it’s well established that laws that move policies that actually get passed in the US Congress are those that have the support of very powerful financial interests. There was a study done at Northwestern and Princeton maybe 10 years ago, something like this, a definitive study of decades worth of policy which established very clearly that there is a near zero relationship between what the public’s priorities are and what Congress actually passes. So this great tragedy that we’re hearing about today, which is so commonplace, which could be greatly reduced is, unfortunately, the rule and not the exception for how laws either get passed or don’t passed and whose interests are elected officials are serving in the current political climate, and I should just add, you know, that’s part of the reason why the Green Party exists. That’s why people like me run for office outside of the system of big money politics so that we can have policies that actually meet the needs and the really strong, urgent interests of the American people because we don’t take that money. We do not take corporate money. We do not use the loopholes like Super PACs, for example, which allows single donors to pour in millions, actually unlimited amounts of money, so-called dark money. There are many ends runs around the rules of campaign finance, so-called “victory funds”, which began, I think, with the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 that allow a single donor to write one check, for now it’s up to $1,000,000. A single donor can write $1,000,000 check for the presidential campaign and that money basically gets directed to that campaign, even though the laws according to the Federal Election Commission limit donations to $3300 per election cycle. That’s not a small amount of money, but it’s a very small amount of money compared to $1,000,000 and more. If you’re going through super PACs. So again, we have the best democracy money can buy, which is no democracy at all, which accounts for the fact that policies are being sold right out for. Under us, and it’s commonplace for our elected officials to be taking marching orders from their big donors and from the parties that survive on that big donor money rather than meeting the interests of the American people.
Jorge Majfud: You mentioned the Second Amendment. You know, the American Constitution is so old that it’s like a religious text. So, it’s a matter of interpretation. “A well-regulated militia.” What does it mean? In the 30’s, the Supreme Court had a completely different interpretation to the current interpretation of what that line means. And that was basically due to the NRA lobbies that began in the 70s. So it’s basically a matter of interpretation and regulation. You don’t even need to change the constitution, but to regulate it. In an airport, the Second Amendment doesn’t apply. Now, many journalists in different countries asked me a very, very simple question. They ask, how different is the Green Party or this Green Party from the Twin Parties, Democrat and Republican?
Jill Stein: You know, I think the overarching difference between the Green Party and the establishment parties you know, really is the money and who therefore pulls the strings, and you know, that’s kind of like the overarching framework. But what that then results in is the fact that Greens can advocate to meet the really urgent needs. Of regular, everyday people. We’re not out there fighting for what the lobbyists want. We’re out there fighting for what regular people want. So what is that? It’s things like healthcare as a human right for every. One, you know, we have a continuing crisis here in the US in spite of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, healthcare is still not affordable. It’s far from it. Even if you are getting your healthcare through the Affordable Care Act, it’s a very tough road to hoe. And it’s somewhere around the numbers are now somewhere around 60 million Americans who do not have adequate healthcare, who either are uninsured, or they’re not adequately insured yet. We could have a system like expanded improved Medicare for All, which basically covers everyone comprehensively. It covers your mental health, your dental care, your eyeglasses, your hearing, and your chronic care. If your parents were you or a child need chronic care at home that’s actually covered. Under Medicare for All, it’s not covered currently, unless you spend yourself into poverty and then you can get covered under Medicaid. But if you have chronic conditions, it’s very hard right now. For example, if you get a diagnosis of cancer, the answer is the odds are more than 40% that within two years you will have spent down your life savings and may even you know, lose your house on account of just taking care of your cancer. So, the Greens advocate for healthcare for everyone. As a human right and, by the way, through Medicare for All, it actually saves us half a trillion dollars a year because when you have only one insurance provider instead of hundreds of them. You save so much money on the bureaucracy and the red tape right now we need a whole army of bureaucrats just to figure out what insurance company is going to cover you or not cover you for everything that you need? If you go into a hospital and you need an aspirin they ask, does your insurance company cover the aspirin? And how much of the aspirin do they cover? I mean, it’s minutiae like this that we are spending actually one out of every three healthcare dollars. Now for just the bureaucracy in the red tape. Medicare does away with all of that instead of a 30%. Overhead, it has more like a 3% overhead. So, by consolidating those administrative expenses, we can actually expand healthcare to cover everyone and still have half a trillion leftover. That’s one of the main issues for Greens.
Another one, is the endless wars, the endless wars which are actually costing us? Half of our congressional dollars right now are being spent on the endless war machine, so it’s about a trillion dollars a year. We advocate for cutting that at least 50% right now. We’re spending more than the next 10 biggest spenders combined. And what does that get us? It gets us a lot of interventions. We’ve sent the military in 250 times in the last 30 years. That’s according to the Congressional Research Service, you know, and it’s trillions of dollars that we’re spending on major war after major war, which are not making the world a safer place. Don’t make us safer. Get us embroiled in all kinds of conflicts that we should not be involved in so. That’s another place where we differ, we say cut the military budget. Let’s have an actual defense policy rather than an offense policy. And let’s put those dollars into true security here at home, ensuring that we have the healthcare, the quality schools, the education.
I should mention we also call for a public higher education. As a human right covering that for free, which was done in my day in my higher education, was a public higher education either free or just about free. We call for bailing out the students who are locked into virtually unpayable student debt. We call for paying that off as a major public investment to unleash incredible, you know, productivity. In our economy, we know from the GI Bill, every dollar that we spend on higher education is returned sevenfold back into the economy, from what we get out of that investment.
And I’ll just mention one other thing about Greens aside from our, you know, environmental policies and all that, which maybe I’ll go into later, but we also call for addressing the housing emergency. We have an absolute housing crisis in this country right now, where half of all renters are spending 30 to 50% of their income, which is almost impossible. People are severely financially stressed trying to keep a roof over their heads. We call for rent control and on a federal basis right now to stabilize rents. We call for ending the power of private equity to buy up housing right now and basically just hanging on to it in order to drive the cost up and lower the supply of housing. We also call for a tenant Bill of Rights so that you cannot be evicted simply because your landlord wants to upgrade and drive the rent up and gentrify the neighborhood. And we also call for so-called social housing back in the Clinton administration, Bill Clinton passed a bill called the Faircloth amendment, that ended public dollars for public housing. It basically ended the institution of public housing and allowed it to basically degrade over, you know, the coming decades, so that there’s very little public housing and the quality has been just really devastated over the years. We call for investing again in public housing. And as a social good, we call for housing as a human. And right in the same way that healthcare should also be a human right, these should not be allowed to be profiteered into absolute unaffordability and create the crisis that we have for a reasonable investment we can create. We actually call for 15,000,000 units of. Affordable public housing, which is high quality, which is built according to integrated green principles. Meaning, they’re very energy efficient. They are provided with public transportation so that they don’t add to, you know, the problems of sprawl and pollution and traffic congestion and all that protects green space through concentrated housing and include. Green space as an essential component of healthy communities and healthy housing. People are much healthier if we have access to green space and recreational space.
Jorge Majfud: We are going to go back to the plutocracy problem, but we still have a structural problem with the electoral system.
The current electoral system is very indirect and rooted in the legacy of slavery. States like California, Texas, and New York require twice as many votes as Alaska or Mississippi for each elector, undermining the democratic principle of “one person, one vote.” Additionally, every state, regardless of population, elects two senators so sparsely populated states like Alaska (with less than one million people) have the same Senate representation as populous states like California ―with 40 million people.
Currently, the real third party in the U.S. is the Abstention Party, with about 80 million eligible voters not participating in the 2020 election. Biden received 81 million votes. Many feel their vote doesn’t matter in solid red and blue states. For instance, in California, Biden got 11 million votes to Trump’s 6 million. Even if 3 to 5 million people voted for a third party, it wouldn’t change the elector distribution due to the winner-takes-all system.
Jill Stein: A great point. You know, the question is really, how do we create a real system of democracy when there are so many things in our system right now which are quite anti-democratic and you know, that includes not only the Electoral College. It includes the first past the post system, which gives all the Electoral College votes to whatever candidate gets the largest chunk, and it may not even be a major purity. It is the ballot access laws that make it very hard by design, for other choices to appear on the ballot. And we know that the American people are really hungry for more choices. We see this in poll after poll. There’s a poll that’s run by Gallup every year that asks people you know, are they satisfied with the two-party system? Or do they see the need for another option? And that number keeps going up and up. It’s now at a record 63% of Americans who say yes, we really need another major political party because the two that we have are doing such a bad job of responding to the public interest. So, you know, there are there many things that contribute.
This crisis of democracy is the difficulty, even getting on the ballot to be a choice for the American people who are saying yes, we need more choices. That is part of the crisis you may have seen some coverage in the news recently about the challenges. To our ballot lines, we are fighting to provide another choice in this election, a choice which is Antiwar, Anti Genocide, pro workers. Addressing the climate emergency, things that are not actually dealt with at all by the other campaigns, and we’re fighting to get into the public discussion, because if you just leave it to the two major players, they’re not going to mention.
You know these issues about the genocide, about the endless war machine that’s robbing us blind about the climate crisis. You’re not hearing them talk about that, not at all. And the Democrats in particular claim to have solved the problem, but they’re not solving the problem in the least. Maybe we’ll get to that later. But they, you know, they provide lip service without actually solving the problem.
We know, for example, that both Joe Biden and Barack Obama broke all records for fossil fuel emissions and for exports and made the US the leading producer of fossil fuels at the same time. That they’re claiming to be the friends of the climate well. No, it doesn’t work that way. The climate actually doesn’t care about renewable energy. People do, but the climate doesn’t. The climate really cares about fossil fuel production, and the Democrats have been every bit as bad as the Republicans. In fact, have exceeded Republicans, both in extraction on public land and the sales of public land for the purpose of fossil fuel extraction, and also for actually the emissions, so this problem is not getting solved at all and that’s why you know fundamentally we are fighting to be on the ballot so that we can offer a choice. We also address the, you know, the the crisis of democracy. In our system, one of the things I didn’t mention was the role of money in politics, which has totally gone off the charts. You may have seen at the Democratic National Convention. Currently coverage by actually it was Chris Cuomo on News Nation if you saw…
Jorge Majfud: Yes, I did. Chris Cuomo mentioned the suites that were in the upper ring of the Chicago Bulls stadium, which cost between $500,000 and $5 million each.
Jill Stein: Each!
Jorge Majfud: Those are the donors to the Democratic and Republican parties. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris was talking about regulating the rich and taxing their earnings. I guess they were laughing…
Today the New York Times published a report that shows that in local elections in the US, they mentioned 27,400 local elections, and out of those, 14,400 cases had only one candidate on the ballot. That is a single party candidate, mostly Republican. The report mentioned Missouri, for example, but that is also connected with plutocracy, something we can call, instead of democracy, demo-crazy.
The post-Civil War mega-corporations continued the legacy of the slave corporations. 1888 President Rutherford Hayes complained: “The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few… Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen… This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.”
In 2010, the Supreme Court held that corporate funding to parties cannot be limited under the First Amendment and that these limitless donations can sometimes be kept secret.
According to a 2016 USA Today investigation, thousands of laws passed by state legislatures were “copy and paste” of texts that congressmen received from big corporations. Another proof of legalized corruption, which may explain why, from 1975 through 2018, 90 percent of Americans transferred the equivalent of two USA economies to the top one percent.
It looks like a Political Democracy trapped in an economic dictatorship. How could ordinary people or a Third Party change that long and powerful tradition of legal corruption?
Jill Stein: Great. I mean, that’s kind of the $24,000 question. How do we ever change this, when the system is so locked down? And I want to come back to that in just a second. But, as evidence of how hard it is to change is the fact that, you know, the Democratic Party announced back in March that they had hired an army of lawyers to throw competitors like myself off the ballot. And Robert Kennedy Jr., and Cornell West. You know, they’re trying to throw their competitors off the ballot by hiring lawyers to basically conduct law fair, which is essentially looking for little technical gotchas, violating the spirit of the law and finding little ways to block their competition, which is extremely anti-democratic from the get-go. They didn’t stop there though, and they’ve challenged us in three states so far we’ve prevailed. We’ve been able to fight them in court and to win and secure our ballot status. So far in these three states. One more challenge to go right now, but they also started advertising for infiltrators and spies, and we actually have that job posting to manage infiltrators and spies in order to wreck our, you know, our ballot access drives. And they also hijacked our public funding. There’s just a little bit of public funding right now that was part of this system to create an alternative to corporate funding. So, candidates wouldn’t have to sell their souls.
That program still exists. We are one of the few candidates and parties that actually use it. They were to have provided us with about $300,000 almost two months ago for part of our ballot access drives and they refused to provide that money. They found a technical excuse basically to hang on to it. We may be getting it in coming weeks, but they. Blocked it also to make it even harder to get on the ballot, you know, so and this is the Democratic Party.
Let me just describe one other thing that they did. This was in 2020-22 where they impersonated the Green Party and they called up people who had signed the petition of one of our candidates running for Senate in North Carolina in 2022, running at the federal level for Senate, and they called people who had signed his petition and told them that they were the green. Party. They weren’t the Green Party. These were people being managed by the Democratic National Committee. The DNC [Democratic National Committee] hired people to basically fraudulently misrepresent themselves as saying that they were the Green Party and they wanted names taken off the position because they decided they didn’t want this guy running for office anymore, but they happened to call the Co-chair of the Green Party. And tell him that they were the Green Party and would he please take his name off the off the ballot petition and he had the presence of mind to record the conversation, which was then brought to court and the Democrats were convicted and found guilty of so-called operating with dirty hands. I don’t know why they don’t call that fraud and election interference. I mean, we talk about election interference from foreign power. Is based on tweets. How is it not election interference when you’re fraudulently misrepresenting yourselves in order to get candidates taken off the ballot, so you know the bottom line here. Is that people always talk about the Republicans and how they interfere with democracy after the election? Well, the Democrats also do it in advance of the election. They do it. Honestly, and you know, it’s not like we have to wait for Donald Trump for fascism to get here. We have fascism, authoritarianism, wherever you want to draw the line. But this is completely anti-democratic. And you know that is being done.
So back to your question, on how do we ever solve this problem? They’re in charge and they have control over the airwaves. They have control over mainstream, you know, but they don’t have perfect control. Put it that way. And they especially don’t have control over social media. In the year 2020, as you pointed out, it was one out of every three eligible voters who did not vote because they didn’t buy what was being rammed down their throats the candidates. Back in 2016, the numbers were even higher. It was more like 40, 42 percent of eligible voters, something like that. It was a higher percentage that was not voting. So, the American people are not happy and they are looking for other options, and the question is, when is that tipping point going to be hit? Because right now people are struggling. Against incredible economic and racial disparities. A younger generation has basically been locked out of survival. Polls of young people now under age 25, half of young people, say that they are hopeless about the future, and 1/4 of young people are actually saying that they’ve contemplated harming themselves within two weeks of the poll.
Things are that bad and not going well when you have two major parties who are bought. Paid for by the war machine by Wall Street, by the health insurance and Big Pharma. When they’re running the show, it’s not working for ordinary people, and ordinary people have really reached the end of their rope. Over 60 per cent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and are not happy about it. So, the question is, when will we break through in this race? You know, because the genocide is a red line for many voters who are saying they’re not going to hold their nose and vote for genocide, not with either party.
We’re seeing a whole lot of interest and organized power coming into our campaign and into the Green Party now, which suggests that maybe we’re getting to a tipping point. Because the genocide doesn’t stand alone. It’s part of this very overblown military industrial complex which is robbing us blind and depriving us of the things that we really urgently need right now. It’s anybody’s guess what will happen in this election.
A poll was just released (I think three days ago) of Muslim American voters showing that I am tied with Kamala Harris now. Basically, the vote is divided between the two of us. This is absolutely unprecedented and represents a huge drop-in support for the Democrats. Arab Americans and Muslim Americans are taking the genocide very seriously because they are up close and personal to what’s going on. Americans in general are personally impacted by the squandering of our tax dollars on the endless war machine and the failure to actually provide health care and housing and quality education, things that. Countries far poorer than us, you know, have a better shot at than we do here in this country.
I just want to make the point that this is a moving target right now and to quote Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has, and it never will.” So that’s number one. If we don’t stand up for what we want, we’re never going to get it and people are forever being intimidated out of voting for what they want, whether it’s peace in Palestine and Israel, whether it is cutting the war budget and putting that money into education here, people are forever being told “No, don’t vote for what you need. Vote for whatever the power that be tell you to do.”
The question when are we gonna break away from that? Well, the companion to the Frederick Douglass quote is Alice Walker saying, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” If you add up the number of people who want to end the genocide right now, the number of people who are locked into student debt, that’s 44 million. The number of people who are struggling with their healthcare, and that’s about 60 million. Right now, you have more than the numbers needed to win a three-way presidential race, so you know, in my mind the answer to that question about how do we break through the most critical thing is for us to exercise the courage of our convictions and to flick the switch in our own minds. From being powerless, which is what we’re told all the time to being powerful to actually having the power to cast our votes and stand up, whether it’s five percent or whether it’s 51 percent, you have to start from where you are and build from there and not be intimidated out of your power. Power in democracy is our votes. If we’re not using our votes, we’re basically contributing to the shutdown of our democracy.
Jorge Majfud: Some of us are waiting for a new 60s in the next decade that maybe more or less what you are suggesting. You know, civil rights movements, etcetera. However, in the last 20 years, we have been moving towards the Middle Ages and now in a more conscious way. Some people, particularly in the Republican Party are more in favor of a Dark Illustration. That is a reversal of the equality principle of democracy and certain ideals of the Illustration. That brings me to another topic, which is freedom of speech and education. That’s very important, particularly here in Florida.
In June 2021, General Mark Milley responded in Congress about the Critical Race Theory and the accusation of being “woke”: He said: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”
In 2021-22, just 11 people were responsible for filing 60 percent of thousands of book challenges. Thousands of books were removed from schools and libraries. Even topics or words like gay or slavery have been limited when not directly silenced. For freedom, the most devastating effect is not only censorship but self-censorship.
On August 2, Rey Rodrigues (Chancellor of the Board of Governors of the State University System of Florida) emailed every Florida public university and college to “review relevant course resources such as textbooks … for either antisemitic material and/or anti-Israeli bias.” Gonsales wrote: “Any course that contains the following keywords: Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish, or Jews will be flagged for review.”
Some people and parties win elections by repeating freedom, freedom, and freedom ―but once in power, they practice ban, ban, and bang.
Why this open attack on academic freedom? Are we finally moving from making free speech irrelevant (like during Slavery) to censoring it directly, in the name of freedom?
Jill Stein: That’s a great question. Why this attack on academic freedom, you know, in the form of banning books and banning ideas… The statistic you pointed out is really incredible, that just 11 people were responsible basically for banning 60 percent of the books that were banned. I mean, it’s still just shocking. That tells you how incredibly, you know, anti Democratic this whole regime is.
Jorge Majfud: Florida is epicenter, and Texas as well.
Jill Stein: I want to connect the dots here because it’s not just books that are being banned and ideas that are being banned. You know, we saw with the assault on Julian Assange that went on for about 14 years, an absolute assault on freedom of the press. We’re looking at an assault on freedom of speech. And the right to protest, which is also under fire, both on campuses as well as you know out there in the world. We’re looking at a ban on basically on political discourse as well. Just yesterday, we were in Tampa, where the so-called Uhuru movement, which is basically a left African American group, is being charged essentially as a “foreign agent,” that to criticize US foreign policy is being a foreign agent. No, I don’t think so.
These are like, lifelong, deeply held beliefs of these activists who are now being threatened with 15 years in jail, for participating in elections and running on their beliefs. I had the same challenge thrown at me in 2016 for basically standing up on the issues. You know, for being an anti-war candidate for being an anti-nuclear candidate on a pro-peace candidate I was accused of being a Russian. Is that mainly because that was politically convenient? It was a politically convenient charge that was essentially issued by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, who were trying to marginalize me by trying to brand me as a Russian asset. I was investigated for three years by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Because of that and essentially, you know, eventually I proved my innocence, which is ridiculous to have to prove your innocence. You’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. But the tide is turned when you have a political accusation.
Jorge Majfud: Sounds like McCarthyism.
Jill Stein: McCarthyism, exactly. This is a new kind of McCarthyism, which is very full blown. And that’s what’s happening on campus. This is what’s happening politically. This is part of the effort of the Democratic Party now to shut down its political opposition. This is not what democracy looks like. This is the opposite of democracy. This is why, in my view, we don’t have to wait for Donald Trump to see fascism growing in this country when we have the Israeli Defense forces training our local police all across the country in these very vicious and horrific abusive tactics for policing. This is going on not only at the cop’s city in Atlanta, but there are also about 80 such cop cities. That are under construction now across the whole country. Unbeknownst to many people, the draft is also back. It’s not been activated, but the database is up to date and if you have kids between what 18 and 25, they are registered in that database and Uncle Sam’s knows where you are. We are being essentially railroaded into this very militarized economy. A very militarized society. And the price we pay is our democracy and our right to free speech, the right to protest. The reason Julian Assange was targeted is because he exposed war crimes, torture, abuse and corruption. This is the role of journalism. That’s what the press is supposed to do. They’re not supposed to be lap dogs to power. They’re supposed to be watchdogs to power. But we’re in a situation right now where we’re seeing incredible abuses of power, and that includes this assault on our First Amendment. Our 4th Amendment rights and our right to privacy and our basic constitutional protections are under assault. The American people do not like this. Do not want this. Want this to be debated.
This is another reason why we are fighting to be on the ballot and to be in the debates and in the discussion and covered by the media. Because the basics of our democracy, our economy, our environment are being sold out from under us to the highest bidder. This is a very dangerous situation for all of us, and what’s going on with the banning of books, unfortunately, is just one detail in this larger situation. If democracy prevails, we will roll all that back. Because it does not have public support, but in the same way you made the point that we’re, I think you said, a plutocracy, we are ruled by the very few and the very rich because our political system is bought and paid for. This is a crisis, as money has been more and more concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, to wear the richest three people in the US now have as much money as 50 percent of the population. So, wealth and power are very concentrated and in the words of the famous Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “we can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.” Unfortunately, in this country we have chosen vast concentrations of wealth. When wealth is concentrated into very few hands, it finds ways to buy power and to basically. Through legalized forms of corruption, and sometimes not so legalized to buy its way to ever greater power, we are in the crisis of that moment right now, and it’s absolutely unsustainable and unsurvivable now to the majority of the American public. And the question is when are we going to have a real debate? About this and set it right that. What happened? The minute our democracy is unleashed, that’s not going to happen from the two political parties that are now running the show, we need to open up our democracy and have more voices and more choices so that the American people can actually have a fighting chance.
Jorge Majfud: After the U.S. took over more than half of Mexico’s territory―from Texas to California―to expand slavery where it was previously illegal, expansion halted at the Rio Grande. This was to avoid incorporating areas heavily populated by what congressmen of the time considered «inferior races.» Instead, the U.S. established protectorates and military bases in Latin America.
In the 19th century, Washington conducted thousands of military interventions in Latin America to teach the N-people to govern themselves. This continued into the 20th century. During the Great Depression, the U.S. withdrew marines from some “banana republics” but left behind its local psychopaths in their governments, dictatorships that lasted for many generations.
During World War II, Washington neglected Latin America, which is why that region recovered a dozen democracies. But, just born, the CIA replaced the N-word with communists in every speech. Once again, Washington sent tsunamis of dollars to finance Latin American armies and coups.
In 1959, Senator John F. Kennedy said in Congress: “I don’t think giving this aid to South America is to strengthen them against the Soviet Union… (This money) is down the drain in a military sense, but in the political sense we hope they make effective use of it.”
President Nixon confirmed that idea in 1970; “I will never agree with the policy of downgrading the military in Latin America. They are power centers subject to our influence. The others (the intellectuals) are not subject to our influence.”
By the 1970s, a dozen democracies in Latin America had been lost, transformed into bloody military dictatorships (when not “obedient democracies”), guardians of American corporations’ “freedom of enterprise” and their accomplices, the Latin American oligarchy.
This story never ended; today, it is practiced in other ways.
What would be a Green Party Foreign Policy?
Jill Stein: The Green Party foreign policy would be very different. Just to add to what you were describing about what US foreign policy looks like actually. Since the Second World War, there have been approximately 70, 75 regimes change operations covert conducted largely by the CIA and by the US regime change operations like overthrowing the democratically elected government of Guatemala in order to prevent a land reform, which the United Fruit Company did not want. They did not want to be land reformed out of their monopoly over the land, which was basically starving the peasants. So, you know, the CIA came into the rescue and overthrew that government and installed one of their own. Same thing in Iran around the same time in the in the early 1950s, where the democratically elected government of Iran was going to nationalize the oil and use the oil supply of Iran for the Iranian people and the US and the UK came in and overthrew Mosaddeq and installed the Shah, a brutal dictator who was there for basically generations, a cruel and vicious dictator who was there essentially until the Islamic revolution overthrew him. The point here is that when the US has come into mess with, other sovereign nations, we create an incredible mess that lasts for a long time, and this blows back at us as well through global instability through failed states, like in Libya, where there are open air slave markets after US and NATO intervention. Arter overthrow Gaddafi in Libya, you have mass migrations as people flee the desperate conditions of their countries and continuing terrorist threats, it resolves nothing to basically overthrow governments and install violent dictatorships.
It’s a disaster. So, the Green Party would have none of that. We would move from a foreign policy based on currently on military might and economic domination and neocolonialism. We would move from that to a foreign policy based on international law, human rights and diplomacy, and use that as our guide and. Not use raw militarism instead of enforcing. This current concept of a monopolar world, a world dominated by the US empire. Instead, we would join with the Community of nations to be a multipolar world living according to the laws of nations, because it will either be the laws of nations or the laws of the jungle.
The US is no longer the dominant economic power, so we are not going nor are we now the dominant military power. So, we need to get with the program and start operating like a mature adult member of the Community, not like the bully in the schoolyard so that we can have a sustainable, peaceful world that will work for all of us.
Because this monopolar, imperial dominated world is actually not working for anyone and is extremely unstable. We have at least three areas now of very serious conflict. Two of them are hot wars, obviously around Ukraine and in Israel Gaza that’s they’re both enlarging hot wars. And then there’s a Cold War that could easily turn hot right now around China and all of these could go nuclear. Not hard to imagine how that could happen. So, we are on a very dangerous trajectory on this imperial notion of US domination. We would leave that behind us and get with the program of a foreign policy based on International Law, Human Rights and diplomacy that we can all live with.
Jorge Majfud: Let’s move quickly to Immigration. Illegal immigrants have much lower criminal rates than US citizens despite having a disproportionate number of young males. Still, every time some of them commit a crime, he immediately makes the headlines, and politicians escalate the criminalization of a vast group that cannot vote and has no lobby.
They don’t know the language or the laws, but they still manage to find jobs, which are crucial for our society. Unlike outsourcing, they produce and consume here and are ready to work from the first day without the usual government investment of 12 or 20 years of education and health care.
We are against illegal immigration but also against the criminalization of a very vulnerable group. Usually, poor, desperate people take Coyote’s 10- or 15-thousand-dollar loans to come here illegally. Why? Because the US immigration laws hate poor workers. In a US embassy, it is better to say you are a lazy, sluggish person with an exciting bank account than a hard worker if you don’t want to be denied a visa.
Besides all that, in proportion, the US is one of the least compassionate countries in the World receiving refugees.
What would be the Immigration policy of the Green Party?
Jill Stein: That the most important thing we can do to fix the immigration crisis is to stop causing it in the first place through regime change operations which need to come to an end, we need to respect the sovereignty of other nations. We need to end the war on drugs by treating. Drug use as a public health issue, not as a criminal issue. And the minute we do that, we pull the rug out from under the drug cartels and their violence, which is also forcing many people to leave their homes. We, on day one, would legalize marijuana and we would begin a program to decriminalize other drugs as well, in order to basically end the power of the drug cartels. We would also address, you know, the economic exploitation; to look at Haiti, for example, where we overthrew the Aristide Government twice, we could then suppress the minimum wage laws which had raised the minimum wage from something like $0.30 an hour up to $0.60 an hour. That was the minimum wage law, which had been passed. We were able to suppress that minimum wage law and push it back down, in order to protect the profits of basically the clothing industry that was making out like bandits with cheap labor in Haiti. These are the kinds of policies that created the instability which is driving people here. You know, if you look at the countries and also, we would end the economic sanctions, for example against Cuba and Venezuela and Nicaragua, economic sanctions that are actually illegal (in violation of international law) and drive incredible instability and drive people to force, you know, forcing them to flee for their survival here…
So number one, we would stop causing the migration crisis in the first place, and greatly decompress the numbers of people who are having to flee here. We would also address the climate crisis, by the way, through a green New Deal here, but also assisting other countries in their efforts to green their economies and cope with the climate crisis because it is drought. That have put millions of farmers out of work that is also driving much of the migration coming here, so we would address.
These drivers, some of them are, can be addressed more quickly than others, like the drug cartels that can be addressed fairly quickly, but not the other issues that will take some time. We want to decompress what’s forcing people to flee their homes, and in addition, instead of spending billions of dollars on a wall, which is completely ineffective. All it does is kill people and kill wildlife and destroy ecosystems. Instead of spending money on the wall, we will spend the money on the immigration attorneys on the civil society supports so that people can be quickly process [they request and] can get their background checks. We can ensure that they’re not allowing people with a history of violent criminal records into the country. We can do those checks expeditiously, give people their papers and then allow them in with papers, so they can go to work.
Because when migrants are actually working, they more than pay their own way in their taxes and, contrary to the mythology that’s being peddled now (particularly by Republicans, but increasingly Democrats as well) migrants are peaceful. They actually make our communities more peaceful and secure. They are not bringing the drugs. The drugs are crossing the border in portals of entry carried largely by Americans, not by migrants.
Also, migrants are our hard working and represent, basically, a huge economic resource. A recent study showed that over the next decade, migrants are worth basically about $7 trillion worth of economic development for the country. So, we can do the right thing by way of, you know, human rights, asylum laws, but the right thing for this country as well, by offloading the drivers that are causing the crisis and by expeditiously processing migrants so that they can go to work and become contributing, vibrant members of our communities.
Jorge Majfud: My last question. Very recently, Mr. Trump have said: “if you want to eliminate Israel, then we don’t want you in our country.” On August 14, you published an open letter stating: “The only way to end this madness is to break free from the twin parties of war and Wall Street and vote Green… to end this genocide and forge a new path rooted in justice for Palestine.” On August 15, Trump blamed “our left-wing media institutions” for the rise of antisemitism.
It looks like we cannot discuss moral values and Human Rights outside the ideological box. Antisemitism, historically associated with extreme right-wing groups, has been on the rise due to a neo-Nazi revival in both the USA and Europe, even before the recent conflict in Gaza. But Mr. Trump blamed “a certain candidate for the president of the United States, which is hard to believe in our colleges and universities…” I think he was talking about you. Who else? Not Ms. Harris, for sure.
How do you respond to these very easy and common accusations? How do you respond to this? Very easy common trap of identifying Zionism. It is Judaism and the antisemitism with anti-Semitism for example. What is going on in Gaza and Palestine?
Jill Stein: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s a common mistake. Take to think that, Zionism and Judaism are the same thing. They are not the same thing. Zionism was actually regarded with a lot of skepticism within the Jewish religion for a long time. It’s only recently that there’s been such a strong focus on Zionism. But Zionism is a political ideology. It is not a religion, and we have a duty, in this country, to look carefully at our wars and the wars that we are sponsoring.
You know, I grew up in the Jewish community, attending a Reform synagogue right after the Holocaust, after the Second World War. And I, my community was coming to terms with the Holocaust, and we came to terms with that genocide by vowing that it would not happen again, not to anyone. In the community as I grew up, it’s not just the perpetrators of genocide that we held accountable. We held accountable the bystanders to genocide, the people who just looked the other way and let it happen, and we vowed that we would never do that.
So, you know, to my mind that’s why I am active in fighting against this genocide in Gaza because it is a crime against humanity. It is a crime against all of us. This is not a religious conflict. Jews, Christians and Muslims. Lived in peace for millennia in Palestine, in Jerusalem. It was only with the arrival of the Zionists that conflict erupted, and that conflict was not just the Zionists against the Palestinians. It was also the Zionists against the Jews and the Zionists against the Christians as well.
There’s a lot of just basic education that needs to take place. Right now, the National Archives of Israel only became available for public inspection and for historians to look at in the 1990s. Starting in the 1990s, there was a whole lot more awareness of what kind of happened, even before Israel was founded. The issue was essentially that Zionists were intent on claiming this land, which did not belong to them. There were other occupants there and having been the victims of a genocide doesn’t make it OK for you then to conduct a genocide yourself. So, this is a readily solved problem. It’s solved by international law and the International Court of Justice has had several rulings on this has, as has the United Nations. Over and over again, the genocide needs to, and the occupation needs to end. Israel needs to withdraw from Gaza and from the West Bank, which they’re also in the process of trying to appropriate now. And the apartheid government of Israel also needs to end, and the ethnic cleansing.
This did not begin on October 7th. This has been the story since before the founding of the State of Israel. This began somewhere around 75 or 77 years ago. This is solved by international law and human rights to look the other way is to basically give a thumbs up to the torture and murder of children on an industrial scale. The issue is not, you know, of people like myself and most Americans, I must say 68 percent of Americans, according to a Reuters poll, who want an immediate end to the genocide. That is not anti-Semitic. To say that it’s antisemitic to object to genocide is like saying that Jews approve of genocide, and to my mind that is the most antisemitic thing that anyone could say.
I feel like it’s being faithful to the highest principles not only of Judaism but of Islam, Christianity, and just plain Humanity to say that we cannot allow this absolutely senseless slaughter for no justification whatsoever to continue. It needs to be stopped and the rules of international law need to be abided by.
We can make this happen with a simple. One call, Ronald Reagan did that when Israel had entered Lebanon pursuing the PLO, which was basically the Hamas of its day. It was the resistance force of its day, and thousands of people were being massacred in Lebanon, and Ronald Reagan picked up the phone and he told Menachem Begin, the current Prime Minister at that time to Israel that hat had to stop, that Israel had to withdraw its troops and had to end the missile strikes and the bombing. It was over that day. Dwight Eisenhower did the same thing. When Israel went into Egypt. We need to do the same thing right now. It’s as simple as a phone call. And if Israel and Netanyahu, who is a war criminal, will not comply, then the weapons are cut off.
It’s actually against U.S. law right now to be providing weapons to countries that are violating human rights, that are interfering with the delivery of humanitarian aid and which are out of compliance with nuclear weapons treaties, which Israel is by having nuclear weapons in defiance of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
So based on three laws, it’s actually illegal for the United States to be providing military assistance to Israel right now. In fact it is illegal for us not to be doing that right now and on day one, our administration would do that immediately and ensure that this is a disaster not just for Gaza and Palestine. This is also a disaster for Israel, and Israel is mobilizing its neighbors against. People are leaving Israel by the droves. Its economy is a mess. Having a fascist state is not compatible with survival really for any country in this day and age.
Israel needs to begin complying with international law. We can make that happen. We have the power to do that in the blink of an eye. Otherwise, we are normalizing the torture and murder of children on an industrial scale. We are making mincemeat of international law. We are not going to be top dog around the world for very much longer, so we ourselves need international law here in the US to ensure that we have, you know, we have a world that is. Survivable for all of us because, given the weapons that we have. Right now, not just us, but Russia and China and probably Iran too. There’s a lot of weapons out there that can transcend boundaries readily. We cannot feel that just because it’s over there, we’re safe. We are all in the target hairs. We are all being impoverished by this endless war machine, and we are all endangered by it as well. So, we need to step up to the plate and get with the program, start supporting international law instead of tearing it down. And that begins by ending the genocide in Gaza now.
David lived in Philistine territory a year and four months. [He] and his men went up and raided the Geshurites, the Girzites and the Amalekites. (From ancient times these peoples had lived in the land extending to Shur and Egypt.) Whenever David attacked an area, he did not leave a man or woman alive, but took sheep and cattle, donkeys and camels, and clothes. […] He did not leave a man or woman alive to be brought to Gath, for he thought, “They might inform on us and say, ‘This is what David did.’” And such was his practice as long as he lived in Philistine territory.
1 Samuel 27
In May 2024, parliamentarian Tally Gotliv said in a speech in Israel’s Congress: “The US is threatening not to give us precision missiles. Well, I have news for the US: We have imprecise missiles! So maybe instead of using a precise missile to take out a specific room or a specific building, I’ll use my imprecise missiles to flatten ten buildings. That’s what I’ll do. If you don’t give me precise missiles, I’ll use imprecise missiles.” (TofI)
A massive bombing force has destroyed eighty percent of Gaza. Thousands of people are missing under the rubble. Thousands will die (in fact, they are already dying) from hunger, lack of water, and preventable or curable diseases, as local and international doctors are reporting.
Meanwhile, it is demanded that those kidnapped by Hamas be released as a condition and “definitive solution” to the conflict, which is like saying that if someone kidnaps a member of my family I have the right to kill a thousand or ten thousand residents of their neighborhood and call them “side effects”. Hence, one of the favorite arguments, which functions as a justification for the repeated massacres, is: “Why don’t students in the United States protest for those kidnapped by Hamas?” That would be, they say, because for-peace and anti-genocide protestors “are anti-Semitic”, because “they are pro-Hamas”, as American legislators and the Israeli ambassador to the UN have said. Or “they are anti-Americans”, as Elon Musk uttered, which demonstrates once again that some immigrants need to be nine hundred “American” to feel one hundred percent American—a particular sort of American, needless to say.
Very American but brave and very well-educated students are accused of feeling more pain for some victims than for others, which is why we must legislate prohibiting hatred, etc. These accusations fail the first test of moral reciprocity, but the answer to why the students are protesting is simple:
They protest not an attack that began and ended on October 7, but a continued, ongoing and relentless massive massacre of people equally valuable—a concept many Zionists don’t understand.
They protest the root of the problem, which began generations ago and has not stopped poisoning the rest of the world since then.
They protest because they are involuntary and resistant participants in something they consider immoral. Their money, which students take from their future to study (in addition to their taxes) is not sent to the Palestinian legitimate resistance, or of food or medicines but, systematically and without limits, it is sent to the Israeli military to accelerate this massacre and the never-ending dehumanization of a people without the right to even protest, as has been demonstrated for years.
They protest against an apartheid even more brutal than that of South Africa, as the victims have described in detail, as anyone can see in testimonial videos or read in reports from those Israelis and Jews who have not been dehumanized by religious, political, and chauvinist fanaticism taught in schools and in the media.
They protest because they have become aware that democracy and freedom for all resemble the proud phrase “We the People” where people in theory are all of us, but in practice only a small group in power in a system served by slaves.
They protest because 2,500 of them have been arrested just for protesting and none of the anti-protest groups that started the confrontations on campuses have suffered the same fate.
They protest because they are being threatened with blacklists by large companies.
They protest because those who have not yet been arrested for protesting have already been informed that their faces are being recorded by cameras, by the new Artificial Intelligence systems and by the old Ideological Intelligence systems.
They protest because they are not allowed to protest.
Mandatory question: Does Israel not have the right to defend itself?
Terrorist suspected question: Don’t Palestinians have the right to defend themselves?
And the kidnapped?
The human kidnapped or the subhuman kidnapped?
There are currently 9,500 kidnapped people in Israeli prisons, detained without due process. Many have died in those dungeons after being in agony for years. As Jill Stein has acknowledged and courageously denounced, it is estimated that there are tens of thousands of detainees in prisons in Israel, tortured, humiliated, and amputated. The majority are not Palestinians from Gaza but rather the harvest of a long tradition of arbitrary detentions in the West Bank by the Israeli army. A large number of them are minors. Some Israeli soldiers have testified to the rapes and torture that are practiced in these prisons. Other organizations have reported sexual violations of detained minors, which the Israeli government has then labeled as anti-Semitic or “terrorist groups.”
In this latest escalation of violence initiated by the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 (the latest chapter in a long history of violent occupation of Palestine, displacement of its native population, brutalization, dehumanization, and demonization of its resistance as “terrorists,” a story that spans several generations), two great mysteries persist:
Questions on 10/7
Why was a music festival organized just a few miles from the Gaza border?
Did the most powerful and secret intelligence in the world know nothing about Hamas’ plans? Harder to buy than the CIA’s ignorance of 9/11.
Why did the most guarded border in the world let a group of armed militiamen pass through to kill and take hostages, while the Israeli reaction took several (several) hours and, when it was carried out, it did not prevent the kidnappings, but instead killed dozens if not hundreds of its citizens with a massive air strike?
Wasn’t this attack a perfect and carefully designed excuse to finish “killing all the inhabitants of Amalek” and occupy a strategic area in the name of the famous “right to self-defense”?
Questions on Israeli hostages
Why has the indiscriminate destruction of Gaza through massive bombings at a cost of several million dollars a day produced “collateral effects” that have led to the murder of 40,000 innocent people, two-thirds of them children, and women, but supposedly it has killed a very few, probably two or three Israeli kidnapped?
Why is Tel Aviv not afraid to kill any kidnapped Israelis when it drops bombs that wipe out entire neighborhoods?
Are they so sure that there are none of the kidnapped people hiding there, being used as “human shields”? How?
Or do they not matter either, because the goal is not their liberation but the continuation of the dispossession of the “subhuman Palestinians” by “the people of light” due to a 3,000-year-old God’s order?
Does Israeli intelligence know where they are and do they not bomb those “very precise” spots?
How is it possible that one of the most powerful intelligence in the world, operating with one of the most powerful armies in the world, without any type of technical or moral restriction, claims to have found empty and non-existent tunnels in hospitals, terrorist children, but cannot find one of the kidnapped people? Really?
If all the bombing and destruction was done without endangering the lives of the kidnapped people, it only means that Intelligence, the military and the Netanyahu government know perfectly well where the kidnapped people are and where their captors are.
Why haven’t they gone after them and, on the contrary, have dedicated themselves to massacring the population with the equivalent of October 7 every week for more than seven months?
You don’t need rocket science to answer these questions, but the answers are downright dangerous. Or are they also going to criminalize inconvenient questions?
On January 1, 1831, The Liberator, the country’s first abolitionist newspaper and, later, a defender of women’s suffrage, appeared in Massachusetts. At that time, Georgia slavers offered a reward of $5,000 (more than $160,000 in 2024 value) for the capture of its founder, William Lloyd Garrison. Naturally, this is how power reacts to freedom and the fight for the rights of others, but this attempt at violent censorship was not the legal norm at that time. The freedom of speech established by the First Amendment applied to white men, and no one wanted to break the law in broad daylight. To correct these errors there was always the mafia, paramilitarism and, later, secret agencies that are beyond the law―if not legal harassment under other excuses.
In his first article, Garrison already reveals the tone of a dispute that is announced as something long-standing: “I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen…”
The Liberator, exercising its right to freedom of the press, began sending copies to the southern states. The response of the southern governments and the slave owners was not to prohibit the publication, since it was against the law―a law that was made so that some rich white men could protect themselves from other rich white men who never imagined that this freedom could in some way threaten the existence of the political power of all rich white men. Actually, that is what “the land of the free” meant when the poet and slaveowner Francis Scott Key wrote it in 1814: the land of the white men―the “free race.”
Instead of breaking the law, an old method was resorted to. There’s no need to break the rules when you can change them. This is how a democracy works. Of course, not everyone has, nor does they have, the same possibilities of operating such a democratic miracle. Those who cannot change the laws usually break them and that is why they are criminals. Those who can change them are the first interested in ensuring that they are fulfilled. Except when the urgency of their own interests does not allow for bureaucratic delay or, for some reason, an inconvenient majority has been established, which those in power accuse of being irresponsible, childish or dangerous.
In principle, since the First Amendment could not be directly abolished, losses were limited. North Carolina passed laws prohibiting literacy for slaves. The prohibitions continued and spread throughout the 1830s to other slave states, almost always justified by the disorders, protests and even violent riots that abolitionists had inoculated among blacks with subversive literature.
Slavery propaganda was immediate. Posters and pamphlets were distributed warning of subversive elements among the decent people of the South and the dangers of the few conferences on the taboo subject. Harassment of freedom of expression, without actually prohibiting it, also occurred in the largest cities of the North. One of the pro-slavery pamphlets dated February 27, 1837 (a year after Texas was taken from Mexico to reestablish slavery) invited the population to gather in front of a church on Cannon Street in New York, where an abolitionist was going. to give a talk at seven at night. The advertisement warned about “An abolitionist of the most revolting character is among you… A seditious Lecture is to be delivered this evening” and called to “unite in putting down and silencing by peaceable means this tool of evil and fanaticism. Let the right of the States guaranteed by the constitution be protected.”
Abolitionist publications and conferences did not stop. For a time, the way to counteract them was not the prohibition of freedom of expression but the increase in slavery propaganda and the demonization of anti-slavery people as dangerous subversives. Later, when the resource of propaganda was not enough, all Southern states began to adopt laws that limited the freedom of expression of revisionist ideas. Only when free speech (freedom of dissident whites) got out of control did they turn to more aggressive laws, this time limiting free speech with selective bans or taxes on abolitionists. For example, in 1837, Missouri banned publications that went against the dominant discourse, that is, against slavery. Rarely did they go so far as to imprison dissidents. They were discredited, censored, or lynched for some good reason such as self-defense or the defense of God, civilization, and freedom.
After the Civil War broke out, the slaveholding South wrote its own constitution. As the Anglo-Saxon Texans did, just about separated from Mexico, and for the same reasons, the constitution of the Confederacy established the protection of the “Peculiar Institution” (slavery) while including a clause in favor of freedom of expression. This passage did not prevent laws that limited it to one side or the paramilitarism of the slave (well-regulated) militias, origin of the southern police, from acting as they pleased. As in “We the people” of the Constitution, as originally the First Amendment of 1791, this “freedom of speech” did not include people who were neither “the people” nor were they full and responsible humans. It was referring to the free race. In fact, the constitution of the new slave country established in 1861, in its section 12, almost like a copy of the original amendment of 1791: “(12) Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (13). A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
More equitable and democratic, impossible… The secret was that, again, like almost a century before, that of “the people” did not include the majority of the population. If anyone had observed that then, he would be accused of being crazy, unpatriotic, or a dangerous subversive. That is, something that, at its root, has not changed much in the 21st century.
By the time the slave system was legally outlawed in 1865, thanks to the circumstances of a nearly lost war, The Liberator had already published 1,820 issues. Aside from supporting the abolitionist cause, it also supported the women’s equal rights movement. The first woman candidate for the presidency (although not recognized by law), Victoria Woodhull, was arrested days before the 1872 elections on charges of having published an article classified as obscene―opinions against good customs, such as the law of the women to decide about their sexuality. As has been the norm for centuries in the Free World, Woodhull was not arrested for exercising her freedom of speech in a free country, but under the guise of breaking other laws.
However, this is not an exclusive characteristic of the slaveholding South or of the United States as a whole. The British Empire always proceeded in the same way, not very different from the “Athenian democracy” twenty-five centuries ago: “we are civilized because we tolerate different opinions and protect diversity and freedom of expression.” Of course, as long as they don’t cross certain limits. As long as they do not become a real danger to our incontestable power.
In this sense, let us remember just one more example. In 1902, economist John Atkinson Hobson published his classic Imperialism: A Study in which he explained Britain’s vampire nature over its colonies. Hobson was marginalized by critics, discredited by academia and the mainstream press of the time. He was not arrested or imprisoned. While the empire that he himself denounced continued to kill dozens of millions of human beings in Asia and Africa, neither the government nor the British crown took the trouble to directly censure the professor. Many, as is the case today, pointed to him as an example of the virtues of British democracy. Something similar to what happens today with those critics of US imperialism, especially if they live in the United States: “look, he criticizes the country in which he lives…” In other words, if someone points out the crimes against humanity in the multiple imperial wars and does so in the country that allows freedom of expression, that is proof of the moral and democratic goodness of the country that massacres millions of people and tolerates that someone dare to mention it.
How do you explain all these apparent contradictions? It’s not that complicated. An imperial power, dominant, unanswerable, without fear of the real loss of its privileges, does not need direct censorship. What’s more, the acceptance of marginal criticism would prove its benefits. It is tolerated, as long as they do not cross the limit of true questioning. As long as the hegemonic domain is not in decline and in danger of being replaced by something else.
Now let’s look at those counterexamples of hegemonic power and its stewards. “Why don’t you go to Cuba where people do not have freedom of expression, where plurality of political parties does not exist?”
To begin, it would be necessary to point out that all political systems are exclusive. In Cuba, liberal parties are not allowed to participate in their elections, which are called a farce by liberal democracies. In countries with liberal democratic systems, such as the United States, elections are basically elections of a single party called Democratic-Republican. There is no possibility that a third party can seriously challenge the Single Party because this is the party of the corporations, which are the elite that have the real power in the country. Communist parties here were prohibited and now, after FBI and CIA persecution of suspected sympathizers, it has been reduced to a virtual inexistence. On the other hand, if, for example, in a country like Chile a Marxist like the current president Gabriel Boric wins the elections, no one would even think of imagining that this president is going to leave the constitutional framework, which prohibits the establishment of a communist system in the country. The same thing happens in Cuba, but it must be said that it is not the same.
Now, let’s return to the logic of freedom of expression in different systems of global power. To summarize it, I think it is necessary to say that freedom of expression is a luxury that, historically, those colonies or republics that struggled to become independent from the freedom of empires (the “free race”) have not been able to afford. It would be enough to remember of dozens of examples like the Guatemalan democracy, destroyed by the Great Democracy of the United States in 1954 because its democratically elected government decided to apply the sovereign laws of its own country, which did not suit the megacorporation United Fruit Company. The Great Democracy did not hesitate to install another brutal military dictatorship, which left hundreds of thousands of dead over decades.
What was the main problem of Guatemalan democracy in the 50s? It was his freedom of the press, his freedom of expression. Through this, the Northern Empire and the UFCo managed to manipulate public opinion in that country through a propaganda campaign deliberately planned and recognized by its own perpetuators―not by its Creole butlers, it goes without saying.
When this happens, the young Argentine doctor Ernesto Guevara was in Guatemala and had to flee into exile in Mexico, where he met other exiles, the Cubans Fidel and Raúl Castro. When the Cuban Revolution triumphed, Ernesto Guevara, by then El Che, summed it up remarkably: “Cuba will not be another Guatemala.” What did he mean by this? Cuba will not allow itself to be inoculated like Guatemala through the “free press.” History proved him right: When in 1961 Washington invaded Cuba based on the CIA plan that assured that “Cuba will be another Guatemala,” it failed miserably. Because? Because its population did not join the “liberating invasion,” since it could not be inoculated by the massive propaganda that the “free press” allows. Kennedy found out and reproached the CIA, which he threatened to dissolve and ended up dissolving.
Freedom of expression is typical of those systems that cannot be threatened by freedom of expression, but quite the opposite: when popular opinion has been crystallized, by tradition or by mass propaganda, the opinion of the majority is the best form of legitimation. Which is why these systems, always dominant, always imperial, do not allow their colonies the same rights that they grant to their citizens.
When the United States was in its infancy and fighting for its survival, its government did not hesitate to approve a law that prohibited any criticism of the government under the excuse of propagating false ideas and information―seven years after approving the famous First Amendment. Naturally, that law of 1798 was called The Sedition Act, which made it a crime to “print, utter, or publish any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government.
These resources of the champion of freedom of expression were repeated other times throughout their history, always when the decisions and interests of a government dominated by the big corporations in power felt its interests were seriously threatened. This was the case of another law also called the Sedition Act, that of 1918, when there was popular resistance against the propaganda organized by public opinion manipulators like Edward Bernays and George Creel (“the white hot mass of patriotism”) in favor of intervening in the First World War―and thus ensuring the collection of European debts.
Until a few years before, the harsh anti-imperialist criticisms of writers and activists like Mark Twain were demonized, but there was no need to tarnish the reputation of a free society by putting a renowned intellectual in jail, as they had done in 1846 with David Thoreau for his criticism to the aggression and dispossession of Mexico to expand slavery, under the perfect excuse of not paying taxes. Neither Twain nor the majority of public critics managed to change any policy or reverse any imperialist aggression in the West, as they were read by a minority outside of economic and financial power. In that aspect, modern propaganda had no competition, therefore direct censorship of these critics would have hindered their efforts to sell aggression in the name of freedom and democracy. On the contrary, critics served to support that idea, whereby the largest and most brutal empires of the Modern Era were proud democracies, not discredited dictatorships.
Only when public opinion was too hesitant, as during the Cold War, did McCarthyism emerge with its direct persecutions and later the (indirect) assassination of civil rights leaders, violent repression with arrested and deaths in universities when criticism against the Vietnam War threatened to translate into effective political change―in fact, the Congress of the 1970s was the most progressive in history, making possible the investigation of the Pike and Church Committee against the CIA’s secret regime of propaganda and assassinations. When three decades later the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq occurred, the criticism and public demonstrations had become timid, but the new magnitude of imperial aggression after 2001 made it necessary to take new legal measures, as in 1798.
History rhymed again in 2003. Instead of the Sedition Act it was called the Patriot Act, and it not only established direct censorship but something much worse: the indirect and often invisible censorship of self-censorship. More recently, when criticism of racism, patriotic history and too many rights for sexual minorities began to expand beyond control, the resort to prohibition by law returned. Case in point with Florida’s latest laws, promoted by Governor Ron DeSantis directly banning revisionist books and regulating language in public schools and universities. The creation of a demon called Woke to replace the loss of the previous demon called Muslims―who replaced Communists, who replaced N-people.
Meanwhile, the butlers, especially the sepoys of the colonies, continue to repeat clichés created generations before: “how come you live in the United States and dare to criticize that country, you should move to Cuba, which is where freedom of expression is not respected.” After their clichés they feel so happy and so patriotic that it is a shame to make them uncomfortable with reality.
On May 5, 2023, the coronation ceremony of King Charles III of England took place. The journalist Julián Assange, imprisoned for more than a decade for the crime of having published a minor part of the atrocities committed by Washington in Iraq, wrote a letter to the new king inviting him to visit the depressing Belmarsh prison in London, where hundreds of prisoners are dying, some of whom were recognized dissidents. Assange was allowed the sacred right of freedom of expression generously granted by the Free World. His letter was published by different Western media, which proves the benefits of the West and the childish contradictions of those who criticize the Free World from the Free World. But Assange continues to serve as an example of lynching. Same, during slavery and segregation a few thousand blacks were lynched in public. The idea was to show an example of what can happen to a truly free society, not to destroy the oppressive order itself by eliminating all slaves, poor, workers, critics, and other inferior people.
Una de las poetas y novelistas feministas de Gaza más talentosas, Heba Abu Nada, era la autora de la novela «El oxígeno no es para los muertos». Ayer 21 de octubre escribió: «Si morimos, sepan que estamos satisfechos y firmes, y digan al mundo, en nuestro nombre, que somos personas justas/del lado de la verdad». Su último poema, escrito ayer antes de ser asesinada en medio del genocidio de Israel contra Palestina, dice:
La noche en la ciudad es oscura
excepto por el brillo de los misiles
silenciosa,
excepto por el sonido del bombardeo
aterradora,
excepto por la promesa tranquilizadora de la oración
negra,
excepto por la luz de los mártires.
Buenas noches.
jorge majfud 22 de octubre de 2013
Heba Abu Nada was murdered today
One of Gaza’s most talented feminist poets and novelists, Heba Abu Nada, was the author of the novel “Oxygen is Not for the Dead.” Yesterday, October 21, she wrote: “If we die, know that we are satisfied and firm, and we tell the world, in our name, that we are just people / on the side of truth.” Her last poem, written yesterday before she was murdered in the midst of Israel’s genocide against Palestine, says:
At the edge of the Empire and of the world, an old man lamented day and night and futilely awaited death. While he waited he told this story to those willing to venture out so far:
I have discovered that in the subsoils of the Empire my name is cursed. It would be useless to pursue those who remember me and would only augment the sad fame that will extend my shadow to the end of time. They will remember me for only one day, snuffed out forever in Palestine.
When the protests began (not against my government nor against the Empire, but against one lone man) I never thought of the seriousness of such an insignificant deed. I knew that the Caesar would only care about order, not justice; besides, the rebel was not Roman.
I will say that I, in some way, knew my fate, like someone who has received the revelation of an absurd dream which is quickly forgotten. During the protests I thought, time and again, about the memory of that distant people I governed. I also knew of the case of a Greek prisoner, philosopher or charlatan by profession, who had been condemned to death and the intellectuals remembered him more than they did Pericles. I learned in that now far away land that Eternity depends on the fleeting and confusing moment which is life. Rome is not eternal and one day it will be nothing more than a memory of stones and books; and what the future remembers will not be the best of the Empire.
When everyone was demanding that I crucify the rebel and nobody knew why, I asked for the counsel of others less great than I. The Romans did not care or were distracted, and so I had to turn, several times to Joachim of Samaria, a wise man who I had previously made use of to try to understand his people.
“Tell me, Joachim,” I asked him that day or the day before, “What can I do in these circumstances? I must be a judge and I am not able to distinguish clear water from bad. Is there even anything I can do? I have heard that the rebel himself has announced his death, just as others among your people announced his arrival.”
“The world is in your hands,” said the old man.
“No!” I shouted, “…it is not yet in my hands. First I will be Emperor of Rome.”
“Perhaps Rome and all the Romes to come will remember you for this day, my king.”
“And what will they say about me?”
“How could I know? I am a blind man,” answered the old one.
“As blind as anyone. I would give my eyes to see the future!”
“Even if you had a thousand eyes you would not see it, my king, because the future does not exist for men. It only exists in God who encompasses all things.”
“If your god knows it, then doesn’t the future exist somewhere?” I reasoned. “If God or the rebel can predict what will occur, what is to be done was already done…” I concluded, eloquently. I felt satisfied with that triumph over the wise foreigner.
When the rebel was brought before me, I began to interrogate him, stammering; I knew that was unfitting for a future Caesar and I could almost not contain my anger.
“So you are king?” I asked.
“You have said it,” stated that dark man, serene as if nothing mattered to him. “I came to this world to bring the Truth. And those who can understand it will listen to me.”
“And what is the truth,” I hurried to ask, certain that his answer would not be so great.
There was an infinite silence in response. Immediately the impatient multitude exploded again: “Release the son of man!,” the crowd began to shout, referrng to another prisoner who had used weapons against Rome, not words. And the Caesars will always fear words more than weapons.
I tried to be careful. I calculated my options. I understood that if I chose poorly, Palestine would go up in flames. So many people could not be wrong, and therefore there could only be one decision in the clear mind of a king.
When the soldiers finished whipping the rebel, I took the prisoner out again and said to the people:
“Look, here he is, I have taken him out so you can see that I find no crime in him.”
But the people insisted again:
“Kill him, crucify him!…”
“Better that you take him and crucify him yourselves,” was my answer.
“No, we cannot,” they yelled again, almost as one voice. To one side, the lords of the Law waited patiently for the inflamed masses to restore the sacred order.
Then, I saw the Rebel enter and I asked him:
“Where are you from, that you put me on this crossroads?”
But the Rebel did not answer this time, just like he hadn’t answered the last time.
“Are you not going to answer me? Don’t you know that I have the authority to crucify you or to set you free?”
“You would have no authority if God had not given it to you.”
So I, the governor of Palestine, finally yielded to the crowd, or to the arrogance of that prisoner. I decided for the good of the Pharisean Law and for the peace of Rome.
I delivered the dangerous rebel for the cross, and since his was not a crime against the gods but against the politics of the Caesar and of our allies, I had him executed along with other thieves.
The cries of that day long ago reached all the way to the palace. The people and their priests were satisfied. Except for an infamous minority. The same minority as always.
They crucified him at noon and, until mid-afternoon, the whole land fell dark. A deep cold covered the palace and perhaps the entire city.
“What is happening, my king?” asked Joachim, from some dark corner.
“You cannot see it, but the whole Earth has gone dark and it is because of the Rebel,” I murmured.
“Rome and the World will remember you for this day,” the blind man said.
“How can I be the guilty one? Did you not say that God knows what happened and what is to come? If your God knew that today I would err, how could I be free not to do so?”
“Listen, my king,” said the blind man, “I cannot see the present that you see. Nor can I see the future. Nevertheless, now I know, almost before the rebel knew it, that you made a mistake. But this knowledge, oh, my king, does it suppress something of the freedom you had today to choose?”
Perhaps that is what fate and freedom are together. Now I only have the consolation that one day that handful of men and women will be the people of Rome. My fame will extend, dark and damned the world over, but I will become once again the honorable governor of a province of the Empire, freely deciding on behalf of its fate. And I will be once again remembered in infamy by another handful of prisoners, simply for fulfilling my divine duty. Now I know definitively my other fates. But I will believe once again that I am free, vested with all of the power of Rome.
Escritos Críticos 
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