Alternatives International

Annihilation of Caste: Why and How

Anand Teltumbde — 2026-04-19T22:33:29Z

An edited transcript of the online speech delivered on 17 April 2026 at the seminar on Brahmanization at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Long ago, while speaking about the annihilation of caste to the audience like you, I put forth my view in the form of a paradox:

Annihilation of Caste is not possible without a revolution. And revolution is not possible without the Annihilation of Caste.

It may sound as a clever formulation, but it is not. It succinctly captures the reality of what ailed India as a civilization. It is a living, breathing description of the trap that Indian society finds itself in. It will tell you why every movement for social justice in this country has either stalled, been co-opted, or been strangled before it could walk.

I may use this paradox as a framework for today's discussion too.

So today, I want to do two things. First, I want to make the case for why caste must be annihilated — not reformed, not managed, not accommodated, but annihilated. And second, I want to speak about how — not through the comfortable illusions of reservation politics or constitutional tinkering, but through the far harder, far more demanding work of structural and psychological revolution.

Before we can talk about annihilating caste, we must understand what caste actually is. And I submit to you that most people — even those who oppose it — do not fully understand it. As you all know, I have been writing on these issues for over five decades and have seriously gathered this impression. I published a book recently, “The Caste Con Census” to explain what caste is.

Caste is typically described as a system of social stratification. A hierarchy. A ladder with Brahmins at the top and Dalits at the bottom, with everyone else arranged in between. Ambedkar analogized it as a multi-storey tower without a staircase connecting the storeys. This metaphorical description is not wrong. But it is radically insufficient.

It depicts caste as a stagnant, fossilized, frigid system without life. This understanding still informs much of anti-caste activism which starts and ends with abusing Brahmins and selectively citing Ambedkar. No, caste have evolved and they are still evolving, Caste are not what they were in Buddha's time. They are not what they became in Mauryan period or Gupta period or in medieval times or in colonial times. Castes are not even what they were spoken or written about or fought against by Ambedkar. Our contemporary castes have since evolved. They are largely shaped by the Constitution and the post-colonial political economy. That is why I called them as “constitutional castes”. You may see it in my book, “Republic of Caste”. They are the contemporary castes that we are faced with.

A simple way to understand caste is to see it as a structure that is homomorphous with Indian society itself. What does homomorphous mean? It means that caste does not merely exist within Indian society as one institution among many. It means that caste and Indian society share the same form. The same shape. The same skeleton. To say that caste is homomorphous with Indian society is to say that if you were to remove caste from Indian society, you would not have Indian society minus caste. You would have something fundamentally, structurally different. Something that has never yet existed.

Think about what this means. It means caste is not a feature of Indian society. It is the architecture of Indian society. It is not something that sits in Indian society. It is something that Indian society sits in.

Look at the economy. The caste division of labour is not incidental to Indian economic organization. The hereditary assignment of occupations — the fact that certain communities were confined to sweeping, to tanning leather, to carrying night soil, to washing clothes, to fishing, to farming — this was not a market outcome. This was not voluntary specialization. This was a forced economic architecture in which your birth determined your labour, your labour determined your income, your income determined your life chances, and your life chances were deliberately kept asymmetric to reproduce the hierarchy across generations.

A simple way to understand caste is to see it as a structure that is homomorphous with Indian society itself.

Look at land. Land ownership in India has always been, and continues to be, substantially a caste phenomenon. The agrarian structure of this country — who owns the land, who tills it, who is landless —still follows caste lines with remarkable consistency. When you see Dalits being denied land rights in villages across UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu — you are not seeing isolated incidents of prejudice. You are seeing the economic structure of caste reproducing itself.

Look at marriage. Endogamy — marriage within the caste — is the biological mechanism by which caste reproduces itself across generations. This is what Ambedkar identified as the key to caste. Not untouchability. Not pollution. Not even hierarchy. Endogamy. Because as long as people marry within caste, caste reproduces. As long as caste reproduces, everything else that flows from it — the economic asymmetry, the social hierarchy, the cultural contempt — reproduces with it.

Look at religion. The ritual order of Hinduism — as it has been historically practiced, not as it is sometimes theoretically described — is a caste order. Who can enter the temple. Who performs the puja. Who reads the scripture. Who interprets the law. The entire ritual architecture of mainstream Hindu practice has been, for centuries, architecture of caste privilege.

Look at politics. The vote bank. The caste arithmetic. The fact that in most Indian elections, caste is the single most powerful predictor of voting behaviour. The fact that political parties are essentially caste confederacies dressed in ideological clothing. The fact that even parties that claim to oppose caste organize themselves along caste lines to gain power. You cannot ignore the caste maths in India's electoral politics. Look at the rise and fall of the Bahujan Samaj Party!

Look at the family. Look at the kitchen. Look at who can sit where. Who can touch whom. Who can draw water from which well. Who can wear what clothes. Who can ride a horse at their own wedding.

Caste is everywhere. It is in the economy, in the polity, in religion, in marriage, in the family, in the kitchen, in the body. It is not a system that operates within society. It is the operating system of society itself. And that is precisely why it is so devastatingly difficult to dislodge.

But structure alone does not explain the full tenacity of caste. If caste were merely a structural arrangement — if it were merely a matter of who owns what and who does what — then it could theoretically be dismantled through redistribution, through land reform, through economic restructuring. Difficult, yes. But conceivable.

What makes caste something qualitatively different — different from all other stratification systems that necessarily existed in all ancient societies but in course of times disappeared— what makes it perhaps the most formidable system of social control ever devised — is that over centuries of conditioning, it has embedded itself not just in social structure but in social psychology. It has colonized not just the body but the mind. Not just behaviour but belief. Not just practice but identity. Here comes the role of Brahminism that masquerades as Hindutva today!

Caste is everywhere…It is not a system that operates within society. It is the operating system of society itself

The genius of caste — and I use the word genius with full irony and full horror — is that it persuaded its own victims of its legitimacy. It created, in the oppressed, what Ambedkar called the graded inequality — a system where each level of the hierarchy had just enough superiority over the level below to give them a stake in the system. The Shudra could look down upon the Atishudra. The lower OBC could look down upon the Dalit. The Dalit could find someone even more marginalized to distinguish himself from. And so the pyramid held, because everyone in it had something to lose by its demolition.

There has been incessant internecine struggle for superiority among castes within their vicinity that kept the overall structure unchallenged. That explains the longevity of the caste system. That is why this evil system becomes the longest living man-made system in the world.

This is social psychology that became automated social control. It's conditioning is so deep that the oppressed become the enforcers of their own oppression.

And this conditioning does not spare the oppressor either. The upper-caste individual who has internalized caste — who genuinely believes, at some level, in the naturalness of the hierarchy, in the ritual logic of purity and pollution — is not simply a villain making a rational choice. They are also a product of centuries of conditioning. Their humanity has been deformed by caste just as surely as their victims' humanity has been denied by caste. The deformation takes a different form, but it is deformation nonetheless.

I say this not to excuse complicity. Complicity must be confronted and held accountable. I say it because if we misunderstand the depth of the psychological problem, we will prescribe insufficient remedies. And insufficient remedies, in a crisis of this magnitude, are worse than no remedy at all. Because they create the illusion of progress while the structure remains intact.

Some of you might identify what lacked in the communist movement: They stressed structural revolution but ignored to deal with the social psychology shaped by Brahminism. The similar may be said of the Dalit movement that problematized the social psychology but ignored the structural constitution. They have to be conjointly dealt with.

The Paradox equates Annihilation of Caste with the Revolution. And by revolution, I mean radical transformation, as Marx conceived through the culmination of class struggle. The million dollar question is what is this class struggle.

Constitutional reforms like abolition of unouchability, right to equality, positive discrimination in favour of the Dalits and OBCs created an illusion in peoples' mind that they were revolutionary measures. Yes, in a historical process, they were important but they were certainly not revolutionary.

I would not dismiss Constitution as a bourgeois device. Taking stock of the extant balance of forces, I think only that much was possible. However, even within the bourgeois framework, there was an opportunity to set the directions in the Constitution so as to propel the country on the path of reforms like weakening castes, lessening inequality, building capability of people, and so on, as has been done in many countries. But what is done in the Constitution is reverse; it strengthened castes. It accentuated inequality and impaired peoples' capacities. The constitution making, so much eulogized by the people, was an exercise in self-deception. I can only touch upon it. Those who want my explanation, may see my latest book- “Dalits and the Indian Constitution” and the forthcoming book: “We the Non-People of India.”

Let us consider the so called most revolutionary measure of the Constitution: the Abolition of Untouchability. It is the recorded fact of the history that all the upper caste reformers, who came in contact with western civilizations, felt ashamed of the inhuman custom of untouchability and wanted to abolish it. But never by mistake they spoke against caste. Gandhi famously represented this trend. Naturally, when the opportunity came while writing the Constitution, they unanimously abolished untouchability. Only three members, ironically all from Bengal where ‘touch-me-notism' form of untouchability was weakest in India, spoke against it. The first was Pramath Ranjan Thakur, the great grandson of Harichand Thakur, the founder of the Matua movement and the first barrister from the Dalit community. He said that he did not understand how untouchability could be abolished when the castes lived. Two more Bengalis, both Bhadralok, supported him. Barring them none uttered a word and relished in contributing to the self-congratulatory chorus.

Was caste abolition not possible? There was a tacit argument that perhaps silenced the SC (Scheduled Caste) members, which is that if the castes were abolished, their reservations would go away. Was it true? Reservations were instituted by the Government of India Act 1935 on the basis of an administrative category created by the colonial rulers, “Scheduled Caste”. It was not a Hindu Caste. Therefore, the Hindu caste system could have been very much abolished if they wanted to do so without affecting the extant reservations. No they did not want to let the caste go off. Caste and religion had proved their prowess in Britishers' divide and rule strategy. The post-colonial rulers would not like to lose them. Castes were preserved with above intrigues and the religion was preserved with the skilful dodging of true secularism. Notwithstanding the impression that the Constitution has given us secularism, its text does not have this word beyond the Preamble, which also was an illegitimate insertion in 1976, during the Emergency.

Even reservations could have aided the project of annihilation of caste if the rulers had the honest intent. They only had to upend the rationale behind it from being a helping hand to uplift Dalits to be a countervailing force against the prejudice the society bears against them. It would have rightly pushed the onus on society to correct itself so as to do away with this exceptional policy at the earliest. The present provision implicitly stigmatized Dalits as a disable lot. But instead of doing such a thing they proliferated reservations to “Backward Castes” with an awkward criterion of “social and educational ”backwardness. In a country like India, which even today ranks among the most backward societies, which community would not meet such a criterion? No wonder, there is no community that has not staked claim to reservation as socially and educationally backward community.

The key to understand all this lies in the fact that the post-colonial rulers adopted the entire colonial state apparatus that served colonial purpose in suppressing people. Some positive looking changes like universal franchise, justiciable fundamental rights, and non-justiciable directive principles were incorporated in tune with the ethos of times but they were overwhelmed by the larger structural logic. The constitution that was created with much hullabaloo also borrowed most of its contents from the 1935 Act and validated colonial infrastructure of the state. The constitutional state therefore was the colonial state plus Brahminic cunning, the perfected machine to suppress Indian people, which is what we empirically experience today.

Take the case of very radical provision of universal franchise. Its entire positive essence is lost in the choice of the election system: First-Past-the-Post (FPTP), which structurally loses most votes while maintaining the illusion of popular participation. No party that ruled India touched even 50 per cent datum of popular votes but still claimed invincibility. What does it mean? It means that more than 50 percent voters at any point did not give their consent to the rulers to rule. Except for the election rituals, the people do not have any recourse to participate in the democracy. In fact, the FPTP election does not have a minimum datum and hence it is not the peoples' votes that matter but the political strategies of political parties in the Indian democracy.

Was there no alternative? When the election system was proposed by the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms in 1919, the Proportional Representation (PR) system was suggested by the Select Committee considering India's diversity. Obviously nothing was done and the Westminster FPTP system was adopted for the Indian elections as default. Since then all Indian politicians were accustomed to this system. During the constitution-making, however, the issue of election system was hotly debated and its proponents, mostly Muslim members and even many non-Muslim stalwarts supported the PR system. But it was ignored. None other than D R Gadgil, the famous economist and senior Congress leader, supported the PR system but revealed that the Congress leaders, whom Granville Austin called oligarchy would never accept it because they wanted a single party strong government at the centre which only could be guaranteed by the FPTP system. The single biggest merit of the PR system is that it is a customisable system whereas the FPTP system is a rigid system. One could configure it to have near perfect democracy as per one's polity. In the context of caste, the PR system would have dampened the caste politics to a great deal.

After the initial decade of Congress dominance—sustained by its aura from the freedom struggle—shifts in the political economy reshaped the polity and made electoral competition more intense. In this context, caste-based vote banks emerged as a central axis of electoral politics, effectively giving caste a renewed and instrumental life within modern statecraft.

Classes in any society should be constitutive of caste, gender, races, ethnicities, etc. and…should be regarded as an integral part of the class struggle

When political power is organized through caste, it strengthens caste as a category even as it redistributes power among castes. You have not weakened the logic of caste. You have operated entirely within its logic. You have, in a sense, rewarded caste identity by making it the currency of political power. And in doing so, you have made caste more, not less, central to social life.

Enough on the viciousness of caste and the need to annihilate it. Let me now turn to the harder question: how to annihilate it—and, in line with my foundational paradox, how to think about revolution in this country.

I know this may sound like a grand claim—as if, in a few minutes, I am about to hand you some secret mantra for an Indian revolution. Nothing of the sort. What I intend to do is far more modest: to indicate some key approaches. In the present climate of confusion, even that, I believe, is not without value.

What I mean by revolution is not merely seizure of state power, though that may be part of it. I mean revolution in the fullest, most comprehensive sense — a total transformation of structures, relations, and consciousness simultaneously. Of course, these are not separate components but are to be incorporated into the process of class struggle. And what is this class struggle? That question might hold the key.

Class, most people think is associated with economics. Our communist parties deepened this notion. The classes are to be conceived in the context of extant conditions of the society and not the idealised ones in someone's imagination. Even the Manifesto's dictum that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” alluded that classes are to be constitutive of all other contradictions. Classes in any society should be constitutive of caste, gender, races, ethnicities, etc. and the contradictions associated with each one of it has to be resolved with conscious struggle, and which should be regarded as an integral part of the class struggle. We have erred. The world has erred. And it cost us revolutions.

We have to put in serious effort to clear the accumulated confusion. Take caste: India today is, more caste'ized than ever before. This has been the result of constitutional reservations and electoral politics. Every caste and sub-caste now proudly flaunts its identity. And, quite ironically, many of the most oppressed castes are often at the forefront of this assertion.

This kind of identity politics is a powerful intoxication—it can mobilize, yes, but it can also confine us within the very categories we seek to transcend. That is something we must work through consciously: neither dismissing it, nor romanticizing it.

The task before us is formidable. But it is necessary. Because the alternative is unacceptable: to let society decay, to accept that the majority lives in conditions unworthy of human dignity, and to remain silent while a few continue to enforce and benefit from that injustice.

We have a choice—to confront this reality and transform it, or to become complicit in its persistence.

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Cost Without Consent: The Political Economy of Permanent War

Sankha Subhra Biswas — 2026-04-19T00:01:18Z

War, in its official presentation, is a collective sacrifice—an inevitable but necessary cost imposed on the present to secure the future. In practice, the American experience since 1950 suggests something closer to a permanent fiscal regime, in which costs are socialised, profits are privatised, and accountability is systematically displaced. The question is no longer whether the United States can afford its wars. It is why a political system continues to fund them in ways that transfer risk downward and reward upward—and why that arrangement has proven so resistant to democratic control, despite growing public dissent and calls for accountability from various social movements.

The scale alone should have forced a reckoning. Estimates place total US military spending on post-9/11 wars at over $21 trillion (1). National debt has surpassed $38 trillion (2), with war expenditure functioning not as an episodic burden but as a persistent structural contributor. By 2024, annual interest payments had reached roughly $881 billion—exceeding both defence spending and Medicare (3). The wars, in formal terms, are largely over. Their financial architecture is not. It has instead become embedded in the structure of the federal balance sheet, contributing to ongoing national debt and influencing future fiscal policies.

What matters politically is not just the overall cost but also how it is distributed. The Korean and Vietnamese wars established a lasting framework: extensive military commitments funded through unacknowledged trade-offs (4). Lyndon Johnson's escalation in Vietnam did not only involve waging war abroad; it also limited the domestic aspirations of the Great Society at home (5). The decision regarding the trade-off between military expenditure and social welfare was made at a structural level, yet it is consistently obscured in public discourse—this ongoing pattern persists to the present day, as evidenced by the continued prioritisation of defence budgets over social programs in government policy discussions.

After September 2001, this pattern hardened. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were financed in ways that severed cost from consent. Taxation did not rise in proportion to expenditure; instead, the wars were funded through borrowing, shifting their burden forward in time and dispersing it across a population never asked to approve their true cost (6). This was not simply a lapse in fiscal discipline. It functioned as a political strategy: making war electorally cheap in the present while rendering it economically inescapable in the future.

At the heart of this arrangement is a deeply institutionalised partnership between the state and private capital. Roughly half of Pentagon outlays since 2001 have gone to private contractors (7). This is not outsourcing in any conventional sense. It is the routinisation of profit extraction from public violence.

The trajectory from policy to profit is neither obscure nor incidental. When Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defence, commissioned a study on privatising military logistics, the contract went to Kellogg, Brown and Root, then a subsidiary of Halliburton. Cheney later became CEO of Halliburton before returning to government as vice president. The Iraq War followed, along with tens of billions in contracts to the same corporate network (8). This is not simply a matter of individual conflict of interest. It illustrates a broader institutional pattern in which public policy and private gain are closely interwoven.

The wider defence sector reflects this dynamic on a large scale. Firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman have absorbed hundreds of billions in public funds while delivering shareholder returns that often outperform the wider market (9). For these actors, war is not a contingency but a revenue model. Like any successful model, it is politically defended. Lobbying, campaign finance, and the routine circulation of personnel between industry and government ensure that military spending is treated less as a contested choice than as a baseline assumption (10).

This helps explain why the system persists despite repeated failures on its own terms. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did not achieve their stated strategic objectives (11). They failed to produce stable states and did not eliminate the threats used to justify their initiation. Yet strategic failure does not translate into political or economic loss for those most directly invested in the system. On the contrary, prolonged conflict can expand flows of contracts, appropriations, and justifications for future spending. In this sense, failure is not an anomaly. It is compatible with, and sometimes functional to, the system's reproduction.

The waste and fraud that periodically surface—billions lost to overbilling, unaccounted funds, or corruption—are better understood as systemic features rather than deviations (12). A system designed to move vast quantities of public money through private channels with limited oversight will predictably generate leakage. The relative absence of meaningful prosecution reflects the political weight of the actors involved and the institutional reluctance to disrupt an arrangement on which many careers, constituencies, and profit streams depend.

The human consequences of this system are both evident and systematically obscured. Bureaucratic language—terms like “casualties” and “collateral damage”—routinely processes hundreds of thousands of direct deaths in post-9/11 wars, millions displaced, and entire regions destabilised for decades (13), stripping these events of their political immediacy. What resists abstraction, however, is the long tail of obligation. Veterans' care will extend for decades, while interest on war-related debt will compound across generations (14). These costs are not only high; they are structured to outlast the political decisions that produced them.

Domestically, the effects are becoming increasingly apparent in the federal budget. Debt servicing is taking up a larger portion of public resources, thereby crowding out investment in education, infrastructure, and public health (15). This is not merely a fiscal imbalance. It is a reallocation of state capacity away from social provision and toward the maintenance of past military commitments. The economy is not simply burdened by war; it is being reorganised around its aftereffects, which include increased military spending and reduced funding for social services that support the population's needs.

At this point, the language of “trade-offs” is insufficient. The United States is balancing competing priorities. It is systematically privileging a form of military expenditure that generates concentrated private gain while dispersing public cost. The ongoing nature of this pattern across different administrations and political parties indicates a lasting alignment between political institutions and economic interests, rather than merely a succession of isolated policy mistakes.

The question, then, is not only whether reform is desirable but whether it is structurally possible within the existing configuration of power. A system that distributes benefits upward, diffuses costs outward, defers burdens into the future, and embeds its key actors within the decision-making process is unlikely to be corrected by electoral cycles or marginal reforms. It would require confronting the interests that sustain it—and recognising war not as an external necessity but as an internal political economy, which involves understanding how these interests are maintained through political, economic, and social structures that benefit a select few while marginalising the majority.

Until such a confrontation occurs, the arithmetic will continue to accumulate—not as an accident, and not as an inevitability, but as the predictable outcome of a system functioning as it has been built to function.

Footnotes

(1) Congressional Budget Office, Long-Term Budget Outlook.
(2) Costs of War Project, Brown University, “U.S. Costs of War,” updated 2023–2024.U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Debt to the Penny,” 2024.
(3) Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2024 to 2034 (Washington, DC: CBO, 2024).
(4) Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, Table 3.2 (Outlays by Function and Subfunction).
(5) The Guns of August (contextual); see also Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times (Oxford University Press, 1998).
(6) The Three Trillion Dollar War (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008); Congressional Budget Office reports on deficit financing.
(7) Costs of War Project; U.S. Department of Defense, contract spending data.
(8) U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Defense Contracting” reports; U.S. Congressional investigations (2000s).
(9) Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Arms Industry Database; corporate annual reports.
(10) OpenSecrets, defense sector lobbying data.
(11) Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Lessons Learned Reports.
(12) Government Accountability Office, Pentagon audit reports.
(13) Costs of War Project; UNHCR displacement data.
(14) U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; Congressional Budget Office long-term projections.*
(15) Congressional Budget Office, Long-Term Budget Outlook.

Sankha Subhra Biswas is Editorial Board Member of Alternative Viewpoint

Source: https://altviewpoint.in/cost-without-consent-the-political-economy-of-permanent-war/

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Apartheid, Waiting for Ethnic Cleansing: Israel's 'Only Remaining Problem'

Hagai El-Ad — 2026-04-07T00:31:55Z

A population that has been displaced, which has had its homes and sources of livelihood destroyed, becomes more vulnerable to ethnic cleansing at the 'right' time.

To put it succinctly, by every possible measure but one (and a tiny bit more) – the Zionist victory over the Palestinians is total. Political, military and economic power is entirely in our hands. So too is the control over land, water and other natural resources. Throughout the Land of Israel, Jews are stronger and wealthier than Palestinians, by a large margin. We won.

There is only one aspect in which we did not defeat them: demographics. In this regard, we did not replicate in 1967 the far-reaching achievements of 1948. As a result, while we have not returned to Zionism's starting point over a century ago, when Jews were but a small minority here, we have arrived at a demographic tie. For now, still, half of the people who live here, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, are Palestinians. This is the only parameter by which the struggle between us and them has not ended in their defeat but rather in parity: parity not in political power, not in rights, not in land and not economically. But numerical parity – yes. In this, we are stuck.

This gap – between the fact that by every possible measure we have managed to organise our existence here so that to us – everything, and to them – nothing, and the fact that numerically we and them are 50-50 – is deeply troubling to us. Our politics, and what we do with the tools at our disposal – the actions of the government and its ministries, the military, the courts, the planning authorities and through legislation – largely focus on this gap and what can be done about it.

The gap could be closed by redistributing political power among all the inhabitants of this land, with all the ramifications that will follow. That is, to allow the numerical parity to realise its democratic function and thus to live in a binational reality – as we already do – but without denying it and without forcibly perpetuating the supremacy of one people over another. It is pointless to elaborate here on this possibility since it has almost no supporters and, in any case, has not been – and is not – the path of Zionism in practice for over a hundred years.

The gap could also be closed through population transfer: expulsion and ethnic cleansing. This would allow demographics to catch up with the rest of the indicators. Everything will be in our hands (as now); the novelty would be our constituting the entire population. This would also free us from the stain of apartheid, which involves a measure of discomfort, despite our not paying a price for it on the international stage.

For years now, liberal Zionists have liked to posit Israel as being in a dilemma, forced to choose between a “Jewish and democratic” state in part of the Land of Israel and a binational state in Greater Israel. Thus the third option – ethnic cleansing – is denied, both as a part of Zionist history in the form of the 1948 Nakba and as a still-viable option for the present and the future. As such, David Ben-Gurion's remarks in the Knesset in April 1949 are fondly quoted: “When we were faced with the choice between the entire Land of Israel without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without the entire Land of Israel, we chose a Jewish state without the entire land of Israel.”

But the truth is that in a rarely quoted part of the very same speech, Israel's founding prime minister and defence minister in fact explained well the borders of the land while weighing in on a different topic – Deir Yassin. Ben-Gurion said: “A Jewish state without Deir Yassin throughout the country can only be in a dictatorship of the minority.” In plain words, Ben-Gurion explained that there is no effective ethnic cleansing without massacres like the one that took place in Deir Yassin in 1948. He told his critics in the Knesset that if they wanted both “the entire Land of Israel” and “a Jewish state”, more massacres were needed. We must perpetrate “Deir Yassin throughout the country” to expel the Palestinian population from more and more parts of the Land of Israel: “A Jewish state in the current reality, even just in the western part of the Land of Israel, without Deir Yassin, is impossible if it is to be democratic, for the number of Arabs in the western part of the Land of Israel is larger than the number of Jews.”

Thus, the borders of the State of Israel are not purely a military or political matter, but primarily a demographic one: Israel after 1949 was as large as the area in which it could carry out “Deir Yassins” and enjoy their consequences. Indeed, after that war, within the Green Line – the armistice demarcation line that separated Israel and the West Bank – we succeeded in engineering a state in which everything was in our hands, including a demographic majority. After 1967, we gained the “entire land” – albeit by expelling around 2,50,000 Palestinians – but without a second Nakba. This is how we got stuck with “Arabs in the western part of the Land of Israel”, whose number is equal to the number of Jews.

And today? Despite the distractions, deep down we all understand that not a single one of the violent regional moves that Israel has made in recent years – recurrent wars with Iran, repeated campaigns in southern Lebanon and even the creation of a buffer zone in southern Syria – will resolve the fundamental issue that Ben-Gurion spoke about 77 years ago. Nor will regional diplomatic moves – the 2020 Abraham Accords or even a future peace agreement with Saudi Arabia – change the demographic balance in the western part of the Land of Israel. Regional peace or, alternatively, regional wars, will not cause even a single Palestinian to leave their homeland.

But wars can – and how! – indeed be a time that “enables” the expulsion of Palestinians, as we did in 1948 and (to a much lesser extent, as noted) in 1967. And under the cover of the war that began two and a half years ago, Israel is once again choosing the option that we know – and know to be effective – the one we have used in the past and have never taken off the table: Deir Yassin.

This is the strategy behind the ongoing pogroms and the recurrent killings of Palestinians in parts of the West Bank; as Ben-Gurion said, ethnic cleansing requires nothing less than murderous violence.

The same logic is behind the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in refugee camps in the West Bank, as well as the destruction of the Gaza Strip and the expulsion of the Palestinian population from half its territory. The scale, the pace and the justifications given differ according to circumstance and what has been made possible. In both the West Bank and Gaza, “what has been made possible” at this stage is not the reduction of the number of “Arabs in the western part of the Land of Israel”, but rather “only” their displacement from their homes and concentration into ever-smaller areas. Internal ethnic cleansing, if you will.

Along the way, we establish our control over more and more territory while destroying entire Palestinian communities and cities. The hope is that a population that has been displaced on one – or more – occasions, along with the destruction of its homes and sources of livelihood, is a population on which it is easier to perpetrate external ethnic cleansing, when circumstances permit.

This is not an Israeli dilemma between a democratic state (for Jews) in part of the land and a binational state in the ‘Greater Land of Israel'. And certainly, there is no Israeli quandary over equality for all the land's inhabitants. The only question is how to manage the unresolved demographic issue, along the spectrum between apartheid and ethnic cleansing: the more we advance the latter, by means of murderous violence, the more we will reduce the discomfort surrounding the former.

This is the reality of life in Deir Yassin: history denied yet omnipresent; a massacre that everyone knows about but whose secrets remain buried in the state archives; a place that we erased but that is nevertheless right here, in Jerusalem – and not only in the minutes of the Knesset, from the mouth of Ben-Gurion, but physically, between the modern suburban neighborhoods of Givat Shaul and Har Nof.

This is that niggling “tiny bit” mentioned in the first paragraph, that something extra added to the unresolved demographic issue: the narrative. The fact that we did not come to an “empty land”, the historical memory of this land being the homeland of also another people, and the full recognition of the violence, bloodshed and massacres that our forebears committed, that we commit, and that we impose on our children so that they may live in “Deir Yassin throughout the country.”

Hagai El-Ad is a writer based in Jerusalem. He tweets @HagaiElAd

Source: https://thewire.in/world/apartheid-waiting-for-ethnic-cleansing-israels-only-remaining-problem

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The Ongoing Illegal War on Iran: Trump-Netanyahu Threaten Bigger War Crimes While Modi Continues To Obfuscate Its Criminality

Vinod Mubayi — 2026-04-06T17:32:09Z

The illegal Israel-US war on Iran now grinds on to a second month of conflict with no clear end in sight. Trump's dream of doing a Venezuela-type operation has proved to be an illusion as Iran has shown itself to be a more formidable opponent. As this editorial is being written (April 5, 2026), Trump has issued an obscenity laced post on his Truth Social account threatening to commit bigger war crimes destroying Iran's infrastructure of power plants and bridges unless the Strait of Hormuz is opened to shipping by Tuesday April 7. He wrote: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F**kin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” This is the rant of a frustrated narcissist who considers himself as the world's monarch. General Mark Milley, who was Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2019-2023 during Trump's first term, described Trump to author Bob Woodward in the following words: “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he's a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country.”

What do Israel and the US hope to achieve in this conflict they have engineered on completely false pretenses? The charge that Iran was a “few weeks” away from acquiring nuclear weapons is ludicrous as Trump himself had boasted in the bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities in June 2025 of “obliterating” Iran's nuclear capacity. Secretary of State Rubio claimed that the US attacked because Israel was going to attack. In fact, the entire US leadership has been caught in a web of lies on the reasons underlying the war they have provoked and are continuing to wage in defiance of international law and the provisions of the UN charter. Adding to their despicable conduct, they attacked Iran while active negotiations were ongoing and not just once but twice, in June 2025 and again in February 2026.

Israel's goal is clearly to become the sole hegemon of the entire Middle East and to obtain what Hitler's Nazi regime called “lebensraum” to fulfil the alleged biblical prophecy of Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) as the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. In pursuit of this goal under its current extreme right-wing government, Israel is moving forward to annex the remaining portions of Palestinian territory, Gaza and the West Bank, as well as significant portions of Syria and Lebanon.

Iran has been the main obstacle to the Israeli plan, so Netanyahu has been itching for years to obtain US help to attack Iran as it could not do so solely on its own. Netanyahu determined to either achieve regime change in Iran, like, for example, bringing the former Shah's son to power to replace the Islamic regime or, failing that, to make Iran a failed state on the lines of Libya and Syria that can offer no challenge to Israeli hegemony. In the bombastic style typical of fascists, Netanyahu cast the “historic struggle” against the Islamic Republic of Iran in civilizational terms: “We have to be more powerful than the barbarians, or they will…crash our gates and destroy our societies.” A truly ironic statement by the leader of a country committing genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, attacking and killing hundreds, if not thousands, in Lebanon, and grabbing significant portions of Syrian territory while assassinating much of the senior leadership of Iran along the lines of the decapitation strategy pursued against Hamas and Hezbollah. While Iran is no liberal democracy, it is not engaged in violent assaults on neighboring countries aimed at annexing portions of their territory. In fact, “barbarian” would be too mild a term to describe Israel's fascist regime or even a large majority of the country's population that applauds the genocide in Gaza and the mass killings of innocent civilians, including children, elsewhere.

As far as the US role is concerned, Graham Plattner, Democratic Party candidate for the US Senate in Maine, recently said it plainly: “Benjamin Netanyahu finally found a president who was stupid enough and sucker enough to launch the war with Iran that he has been pushing for 30 years. This war with Iran is illegal. The United States military is committing war crimes… Not only have thousands of innocent Iranian citizens been killed – including over 100 children at a girls' elementary school… We have lost American soldiers whose families got the worst news any military spouse, parent, or child can get. All for nothing.”

Trump faces a disaster of his own making in Iran. He had no plan to address Iran's predictable retaliation, including closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which almost a quarter of the world's oil, gas and fertilizer trade passes, and Iran's attacks on US military bases in the Gulf states like Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, and Saudi Arabia in response to the US-Israeli bombing of Iran. As could be expected, the price of crude oil has skyrocketed affecting the world economy; the availability of LPG and fertilizer has sharply reduced negatively impacting people in Asian countries as well as US farmers.

On Wednesday, April 1, Trump gave a prime-time speech, disconnected from reality in his usual style, where he insisted everything was going great and that the Hormuz Strait was not his problem as the US didn't need any Middle Eastern oil, it was some other countries' problem and they should take care of it. His latest post threatening grave war crimes bombing Iran's infrastructure is a complete U-turn from what he said a few days earlier. Pivoting from “the Strait of Hormuz not being our problem to we will commit massive war crimes,” suggests columnist Paul Krugman that “Trump, for all his pretense of, ‘I'm always winning,' is aware of how completely he screwed things up, that he's aware that he has basically led America into an epic strategic defeat” and “it sounds like he's unable to accept it and that he is going to try and do something truly awful in an attempt to somehow redeem himself and the situation.” Krugman emphasizes that “If we had a functioning democracy, 25th this would be Amendment time. [Impeachment of the President under the Constitution]. This guy should not have any authority at all… any authority on matters of state violence when this is the kind of mood he's in.”

The Modi regime's relative silence on the US-Israel war on Iran, apart from a few vacuous pronouncements by the Ministry of External Affairs, exposes the vacuum at the heart of Indian foreign policy that has consisted of little else than kowtowing to the US under Trump and promoting Hindutva's embrace of Zionism as evidenced by Modi's fervent embrace of the genocidal Netanyahu literally on the eve of the assault on Iran.

An incisive and insightful article in the Caravan magazine of April 3 by Sushant Singh is worth quoting at length:

“THE US-ISRAEL WAR ON Iran has exposed, across the board, the limits of state capacity and the hollowness of carefully crafted images. Amid this escalating global crisis, India finds itself navigating choppy waters, with the captain quite literally at sea. For over a decade, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's political project has rested on a narrative of muscular nationalism that brooks no dissent. Once again, when India most needs quiet competence and strategic clarity, we have a leader obsessed with optics, confused about priorities and unmoored from institutional constraints. The current moment, exposed by the crisis in West Asia, marks the end of that long summer of the Modi era.

The war poses a direct assault on Indian interests. Crude and gas prices jumped sharply the moment traffic was threatened along the Strait of Hormuz, pushing up fuel, fertilizer and transport costs for hundreds of millions of Indians already living on the edge, and shredding the Modi government's claims of stability. Shipping insurance premiums for Indian carriers spiked and key Gulf trade routes have become more volatile, choking a lifeline for exporters and importers alike. With no credible evacuation or income-protection plan from New Delhi beyond verbose press releases, families in Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, who depend on remittances, have watched in fear as Gulf labor markets wobble.

Diplomatically, India has painted itself into a corner. New Delhi's visible alignment with Washington and Tel Aviv has enraged public opinion from Tehran to Kuala Lumpur. Moreover, the Modi government has taken this position without any serious leverage over US or Israeli decision making, nor has it shown the courage to defend Iranian sovereignty. Modi has reduced this grave crisis in West Asia to another episode of telephone calls and photo opportunities. He has offered no parliamentary debate, no honest assessment of the risks to energy security and diaspora safety, and no explanation for why—as the leader of a country that depends on the Gulf for oil, jobs and remittances—he has tied India so tightly to a reckless US–Israeli war whose costs will be paid by Indians and not by those whose favor he craves.”

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Demonstrations and Demographics

Bill Fletcher Jr — 2026-04-03T23:40:08Z

In the aftermath of the “No Kings Day” demonstrations of March 28th, there has been renewed interest—and concern—that in many cities the participation of people of color generally, and Black people specifically, has been limited. To my knowledge, no one has done any study on this, so we are forced to rely on a combination of anecdotal information and historical analysis and patterns.

What is completely obvious to anyone who looks at our situation is that the victories won by progressive social movements in the ‘1960s' have been set back over a more than forty-year period of relentless attacks. Focusing on the Black Freedom Movement for a moment, these setbacks have been resisted over time and taking many forms. The Black-led electoral upsurge that began in the late 1970s and lasted through the end of the 1988 Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign is a case in point of that resistance. That said, the combination of repression (including assassinations of leaders and activists), strategic confusion and disagreements, and the decline in active mass democratic organizations among African Americans, contributed to a growing malaise, tending towards despair. Not altogether different from the twenty-year aftermath of the defeat of Reconstruction, there started to be a noticeable though not overwhelming turn inward, with parallels in the direction of the politics and philosophy of Booker T. Washington.

In our era, the 1995 Million Man March was an example of this turn inward in the aftermath of defeat. The march had two significant downsides. First, it was all-men. To paraphrase the late Amiri Baraka, one does not go to war and leave half the army at home. Second, there were no demands on the state or corporate America. The march was very much focused inwardly on Black America and, specifically, on Black men. Though mass activism certainly did not disappear in the 1990s, the fact that more than a million people would converge on Washington, DC and not place demands on the state given what was happening—and continued to happen—to Black America was phenomenal.

Over time and with the exception of the trade union movement, non-profit advocacy rose to largely replace mass organizing and the building of member-controlled mass democratic organizations. While those engaged in the advocacy work are overwhelmingly dedicated and very much committed to justice and democracy, the large-scale turn away from building personal connections with the grassroots along with challenges associated with the growth of social media, the increased environment of isolation has had a noticeable impact on the willingness of many people to engage in struggle, at least over the longer term.

2020, and the rebellions and protests that followed the murder of George Floyd may appear to be an exception to this but one must be careful with such a conclusion. The 2020 revolt was both amazing and historic. Black-led but multi-racial, it appeared to shake the foundations of the country. In fact, the protests resulted, almost immediately, in shifts in policy by government and corporations alike. I would further argue that it contributed to the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 elections.

Nevertheless, that movement failed to build and sustain a progressive institutional presence. While many organizations received significant financial grants to do their work, few of them turned in the direction of mass organizing and the building of mass democratic organizations. There was also little attention paid to the inevitable counterattack that we should have all been expecting from the far Right. When that counterattack occurred, specifically in the context of the attacks on alleged Critical Race Theory, along with the hysteria built by the far Right in connection with Latin@ immigration, the progressive movements of color were caught flat-footed. Of course, there was resistance but the momentum arising from 2020 was lost during the remaining Covid years and the period of the Biden administration. The far Right was able to shift the narrative and, along with frustration and anger in connection with Biden's support for the Israeli genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, cynicism, nihilism and paralysis grew.

Thus, today we have found ourselves attempting to come to grips with a level of despair and demobilization that is the result of a combination of the pounding that Black America in particular has received, as well as the absence of a counterstrategy that will take us to a post-Trump/post-neo-liberal USA. Arguments about African Americans being fearful of demonstrating are ludicrous, though there are some African Americans who have promoted such a fear, encouraging us to sit home lest we somehow provoke Trump to bring about martial law. Those who say that the demonstrations fail to address the demands of Black people have only an element of truth in that, yes, the demands need to expand. That said, Black folks have marched many times under banners that have not specifically addressed us. Ask any number of Black trade union members who have gone on strike over wages, hours and working conditions (sometimes with demands that ignore outright the issues faced by Black workers).

If anything, I would suggest that there is a challenge for the Black Left and, for that matter, all leftists of color. During the Vietnam War it was not unusual to see antiwar demonstrations that were overwhelmingly white. Though people of color were always active in such demonstrations, things tended to change when leftists of color organized and mobilized their respective constituencies to engage. Probably the most notable example among people of color was the 1970 Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War that mobilized tens of thousands of Chicanos in the streets of Los Angeles. Within Black America, significant work was done by the Black Panther Party, SNCC and others to reach Black America in connection with the war, not to mention the impact of the oration of Dr. Martin Luther King during the final year of his life. The antiwar work among Black Americans also included organizing among enlisted personnel in the military. The Young Lords Party, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and other Puerto Rican radicals mobilized Puerto Ricans on the island and the mainland in opposition to the war. There was nothing short of a ‘rainbow' of opposition to US aggression and the growing Right led by then President Nixon.

Today's Black Left—indeed, all leftists of color—needs to make it their mission to replicate such an approach but under 21st century conditions. There is nothing wrong with having our own contingents in larger rallies; there is nothing wrong with specific outreach to our constituencies. In fact, that is precisely what we need to do. But we must also connect this to a fight for what many people refer to as a Third Reconstruction, that is a progressive future grounded in demands we articulate right now which reflect the needs and aspirations of the oppressed.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to address a community gathering in Baltimore, Maryland that a friend of mine helped organize. The aim was to speak about ICE and the threat that it held for not only Latin@ immigrants but for all immigrants of color and for non-immigrant populations. Perhaps thirty people in the room. They were Black Baltimore residents, many of whom had little to no historical background on ICE, nativism in the USA, and the threats to democracy that are hiding behind the sophistry of the Trump administration. They sat there and listened; they asked great questions; and many of them wanted to do something as a result of the meeting. They were not viewing this gathering through a computer screen, doing their email at the same time. They were there in-person and were engrossed. That's how we begin.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a longtime trade unionist, cofounder of the Black Radical Congress, past president of TransAfrica Forum, cofounder of standing4democracy.org, and an author of fiction and nonfiction. Born in 1954, he has been an activist since his teen years. Upon graduating from college he went to work as a welder in a shipyard, thereby entering the labor movement. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns. He has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941”; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice“; and the author of “‘They're Bankrupting Us' – And Twenty other myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web.

Source: https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/demonstrations-and-demographics/

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April 3, 2026

Refusing to Be Silenced: Palestine and Education in the UK

Ananya Wilson-Bhattacharya — 2026-04-02T15:19:48Z

How UK teachers are resisting the repression of Palestine solidarity in classrooms.

Since the start of Israel's genocide in Gaza just over two years ago, the repression of any support for Palestine has been rampant across UK institutions including workplaces and universities. Schools are no exception. In 2023, CAGE International handled 118 cases of Palestine-based repression in schools including exclusions, isolations and students being referred to the Islamophobic Prevent programme.

Little has changed since then. In October 2025, Muslim organisation Maslaha and grassroots collective Parents for Palestine carried out a survey on the experiences of young people and their families in expressing solidarity with Palestine in schools, which revealed ‘a concerning pattern of institutional silence, racism, censorship, punishment, and a lack of support'. From staff being made to remove badges and other expressions of solidarity, to pro-Israel narratives being peddled in the classroom, the clampdown on support has been far-reaching and deeply hypocritical.

Of course, given the ongoing and historic complicity of the British establishment in upholding the Israeli occupation and funding the genocide, the attempted silencing of pro-Palestine voices in UK schools - as dictated by councils and local authorities - is no surprise.

Yet teachers and students have refused to be silenced. I spoke to three current or former teachers about their experiences of speaking out on Palestine, the consequences they faced, and the broader failings of the education system reflected by their schools' handling of the genocide.

Bassem, a former trainee maths teacher on a course at Sheffield Hallam University, described how, during their placement at the local Yewlands Academy, they were instructed to remove a small pin badge depicting the Palestine flag on their lanyard. Bassem's refusal led to the incident snowballing and ultimately impacting their overall teaching career.

‘I got pulled out by a member of the senior leadership team,' Bassem recalled. ‘He asked me to remove [the badge], because it's a political symboI.' Upon refusing, Bassem was advised by the university not to go in whilst the school figured out whether they were allowed to wear the badge. ‘This was a really important time of the placement, when I was starting to take over lessons and do more teaching. It really hindered my progress.'

After about a week of asking for clarity and receiving no reply, Bassem returned to the school wearing the badge – having self-advocated through the school's National Education Union (NEU) rep. They were informed that the CEO of the school's trust had banned them from wearing the badge and were subsequently removed from their placement.

Bassem points to the hypocrisy of this school having held Ukraine solidarity events and noted that the school had Israeli flags up in the geography area. But was Bassem the only staff member with a pin on their lanyard?

‘Some people had pride pins, which I also had. If you consider that nonpolitical, then why would you consider a flag political? Someone had a Refugees Welcome badge…poppies…an Italy badge…I was also wearing a Lebanon flag on my lanyard.'

Despite the university eventually finding Bassem a new placement, the university's legacy of sporting a Palestine flag continued to negatively impact Bassem's experience. ‘In my new placement, they were doing a football game with [people bringing] flags from their own countries…I said, I have a flag to offer. And I was told by the head teacher, “I think I can guess what flag you're going to bring. We don't think we want that flag.” I was told it was because they didn't want to cause any disruption.'

Support for Palestine is deeply personal for Bassem. ‘Having grown up in Lebanon, I was raised with the understanding of Israel as a settler colonial state guilty of war crimes and illegal occupation in both Palestine and surrounding countries. There is never any question for me of being vocally pro-Palestine.'

For Bassem, the experience – which they believe has left them struggling to find a teaching job, given their reduced placement – has shown the unwillingness of schools to challenge establishment designations of the political. ‘It is the construction of the controversy around showing any support for Palestine… that is political. A lot of people keep saying to me that they agree with me. What use are your feelings if you use your power to shut down even the tiniest symbolic signs of support for Palestine?'

Another teacher I spoke to, Lila, had fought similar battles over what is political. ‘We initially [following October 7] had a blanket statement from the borough and council saying schools are apolitical organisations, therefore…we will not be allowed to talk about it. I went to the headteacher [saying] there is no such thing as apoliticism, taking that stance is politicized.' When Lila was met with the same council statement, they tried a different approach to little avail. ‘[I said] we actually have [first generation] Palestinian children in the school. What does this mean for them?'

The clampdown on Lila's solidarity with Palestine in their London classroom has manifested in indirect ways. ‘There was never any issue in teaching about colonialism. But ever since I started to show solidarity with Palestine, [my head of department told me] I am not allowed to teach about colonialism...They're finding other ways to respond to the fact that they don't like that I'm standing in solidarity.'

Has Lila's career been impacted by speaking out? ‘I definitely will not be given a promotion at this school…they do not want anybody that wants to challenge the system.'

Like Bassem's flag game, Lila once oversaw an activity where students had to research a country of their choice. ‘Naturally, students chose countries that tied into their ethnicity. But we were told students are not allowed to research Palestine. Israel was not banned. If we're doing this weird “apoliticism”, maybe you [ban] any countries that are experiencing war.' The school's reasoning was that Palestine is not officially recognized as a country.

Lila, too, highlights the hypocrisy of their school's approaches to Palestine and Ukraine. ‘People would have Ukraine badges or flags. The take was, we have children in the school who are Ukrainian. It is our responsibility to take a stance…Whereas, with Palestine, it was [the] polar opposite. They've reinvented all the rules.'

How have students responded to the clampdown?

‘Students largely have been very compliant. [Once] in my classroom, the word “genocide” was mentioned in another context, and then one of the students was like, “like in Palestine”, and all the students turn[ed] around, as if they just swore at the teacher. Everyone was on tenterhooks, like it was wrong to talk about it.'

The tabooing of Palestine in the classroom, Lila suggests, has led to a lack of understanding among students. ‘Are they not coming to school to learn? The history of Palestine should be part of the history curriculum. We need to be actively creating safe spaces where students can discuss and debate. Loads of the students are feeling really strong feelings, but we haven't taught them the political vocabulary and literacy that they need to be able to have these discussions.'

So why are these conversations so difficult to initiate?

‘There's a lack of skilling up teachers, making teachers feel confident [in talking about Palestine]. It's not something that we should be fearful of.'

Noor, another former teacher in a school in Haringey, North London, recounted the shift in their school's approach to talking about Palestine. ‘At the start [of the genocide], kids were drawing flags and sticking them up in classes. We would talk about it in my tutor group. Then quickly, they started taking down the stickers. The kids got the message that they weren't allowed to talk about Palestine.' Unlike Lila's school, Noor's school did previously discuss Gaza at training days with external speakers. ‘But that stopped,' Noor explains. ‘We had no assemblies, nothing about the genocide.'

But the silencing and erasure didn't start with October 7. ‘In my classroom, [several] years back, I had a map of Gaza [showing how] the occupation increased over the years. I went off sick, and when I came back, it had been removed. One of the senior vice principals was using my room.'

Of course, trainee teachers like Bassem are some of the most vulnerable to being fired. One of the openly pro-Palestine teachers at Noor's school was a head of year. As for Noor, ‘I'd been there for 14 or 15 years, so they had to be careful.'

However, many teachers in Noor's school were cautious, especially those close with the senior leadership. ‘[Some teachers] were sympathetic to Palestine, but they wouldn't say, unless they were with me or with two or three other people.'

Palestinian students, meanwhile, would get in trouble for speaking about Palestine – once again, unlike Ukrainian students. ‘They said, “we're Palestinian, why can't we talk about our own country?”' This discrimination extends further: Ebrahim, head of year 10 at Noor's school, informed me that ‘Palestinian and Syrian students are disproportionately excluded from school [while] students arriving from Ukraine receive comprehensive support, including tailored pastoral interventions.'

Noor notes that there was some freedom of expression afforded to the students. ‘Some of the kids, on World Book Day, wore Palestine football [outfits] or dressed up as a [Palestinian] character. There were about seven or eight of us who they knew they could [support Palestine] in front of…they'd just spurt out how they felt.'

What can be done externally to support staff and students in speaking out? Noor points to the national workplace days of action organised by various pro-Palestine and anti-war organisations. ‘Parents, or people in the community, could do something outside the school: a stall, flags, cakes, or dates…that would definitely put pressure on the school. Our parents were very aware. If they had come to the school, they would have been up in arms about it.' Maslaha have also created a guide for families on approaching schools to discuss their approach to Palestine.

For Noor, the silencing of solidarity with Palestine is a fundamental failure on the part of schools. ‘Teachers are supposed to be the moral compass and we're not modeling that we're against the genocide because we're too scared. It's absolutely wrong.'

Nonetheless, pro-Palestine teachers in Noor's school have won small victories – like when the school invited a speaker from BAE Systems (https://investigate.afsc.org/company/bae-systems) , a UK-based defense contractor with a decades-long record of supplying military technology to Israel. ‘A group of teachers, who happen to be Muslim, sent them a letter, and they disinvited the person.' Bassem, too, sees such collective organising as crucial. ‘We won't win with facts and logic. The people in power can do what they want and get away with it. But only if we let them. We only win with collective action.'

31 March 2026

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MAGA Aesthetics and Fascist Power: Spectacles of White Supremacy

Henry A. Giroux — 2026-03-30T21:46:54Z

The United States is not merely awash in brutalizing and murderous acts of state-sanctioned violence. It is being restructured by them. The killings of Rachel Good and Alex Pretti are not aberrations or tragic mistakes; they belong to a longer and darker history that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) once named with chilling precision. In earlier periods of American turmoil, such killings were called lynchings, acts “carried out by lawless mobs, although police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice.” Today, this violence extends well beyond the bullet and the baton. It takes form in the expansion of prison camps, what Thom Hartmann rightly calls concentration camps, the war on immigrants, and the routine assault on Black and brown lives made disposable through policy, indifference, and neglect. At the same time, the country is saturated with a culture steeped in fascist spectacle and authoritarian display. Under the Trump administration, aesthetics itself becomes a battleground, a weaponized field where power works on desire, memory, bodies, and pleasure to consolidate domination.

As Toni Morrison warned in her Nobel Prize lecture, oppressive language does not merely describe violence; it does violence, narrowing thought, erasing responsibility, and preparing the ground for cruelty. For Morrison, this is dead language “that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind… Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance.” In his monumental The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin chillingly grasped this danger with prophetic clarity, insisting that the connective tissue between state violence and the colonization of public consciousness lies in the corporate-controlled pedagogical apparatuses of print culture, screen culture, and social media. In a hyper-mediated society, as the historian Richard J. Evans argues, fascism does not rely solely on force or decree. It aestheticizes politics itself, converting violence into pleasure, domination into entertainment, and obedience into desire. That insight quietly underwrites much of what follows. This fusion of language, image, and power forms the theoretical groundwork for understanding how fascist aesthetics now operate in the United States.

Fascism Educates Before It Governs

We live in an age in which fascist aesthetics has become a powerful tool of authoritarian pedagogy, functioning, in part, to mobilize myth, emotion, ritual, and spectacle in order to celebrate fascist sentiments including white nationalism, racial and ethnic hierarchies, state terrorism, and the performative cruelty of the powerful, but also to crush dissent and prevent the redistribution of power.

Fascism educates before it rules, working through spectacle, cruelty, myth, facile beauty, and erasure long before it consolidates power through formal political institutions. In the Trump era, this spectacle-driven authoritarianism illuminates the aestheticization of power by offering pageantry and the pleasure of submission as beautifying practices that celebrate war, hierarchy, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, regressive individualism, and the militarization of everyday life. Fascism aestheticizes politics to render domination pleasurable, converting power into spectacle and obedience into desire, and this logic is now unmistakably visible in the visual culture that saturates Trump-era authoritarianism. Politics, in this sense, follows culture because political agency itself is culturally produced, not merely through policy or ideas but through affect, image, and embodiment.

Aestheticizing Power: Trumpism and the Visual Grammar of Fascism

The visual grammar of fascism is on full display in government-produced videos of immigrants filmed in chains and marched onto deportation planes, which transform state violence into spectacle, staging cruelty as administrative order and teaching the public who belongs and who is disposable. Trump's grotesque, AI-generated fantasy of Gaza, recast as a luxury playground, extends this aesthetic logic outward, laundering colonial devastation through the visual grammar of real estate branding, imperial leisure, and technological fantasy. Violence is not denied in these images; it is aestheticized, stripped of history and consequence, and re-presented as progress itself. Cruelty, deportations, and ICE assaults on immigrants and people of color are recast as reality-TV entertainment through a steady stream of slick propaganda videos produced by the Department of Homeland Security.

White Supremacy as Pedagogy: The Nation as a Biological Project

The same pedagogy of contempt animates the circulation of grotesque spectacles, including images that depict Trump defecating from an airplane onto protesters below, a scatological allegory that converts hatred of democratic dissent into visual pleasure and collective affirmation for his followers. This aesthetic does not merely signal oppression; it luxuriates in it, inviting audiences to take pleasure in humiliation itself. At its core lies an unabashed embrace of white supremacy. MAGA spectacles, racist imagery, and governing policies are organized around the presumption of a racial hierarchy with whiteness fixed at the apex. White supremacy is not incidental to Trump's politics; it is their animating DNA. As the historian Robert O. Paxton argued in The Anatomy of Fascism, a defining feature of fascism is the redefinition of the nation as a biological rather than a civic entity. Crucially, this redefinition is not transmitted only through doctrine or law but also through a dense pedagogical field of images, rituals, performances, spectacles, and cultural apparatuses that teach audiences how to see the nation, how to recognize enemies, and how to feel righteous in their exclusion.

Under the Trump regime, citizenship is severed from even the fragile promise of shared democratic values and anchored in racial belonging, a violent recalibration that redraws the moral and political map of the nation, determining who counts, who is disposable, and who must be expelled. In this logic, the very claim to citizenship by non-white populations is treated as a criminal act, and their presence in the United States is recast as a crime scene. Exclusion is elevated into civic virtue, while assaults on racialized communities are not only permissible but necessary. Such reasoning does more than authorize cruelty; it normalizes the language and practice of racial cleansing and, at its most lethal extreme, summons the specter of genocide itself.

Once the nation is defined as a biological project, exclusion no longer appears as excess but as necessity. What follows is a cascade of policies, images, and performances that give administrative form to racial hierarchy and train the public to accept cruelty as governance. This logic surfaces in policies that welcome only white South Africans as refugees, in the systematic weakening of civil rights protections, and in claims that immigrants with “bad genes” are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. It appears in the deployment of armed federal agents into states with disproportionately non-white populations, creating what civil rights advocates have described as a new and terrifying reality for targeted communities. Trump's racist rhetoric is evident in his disparagement of people from African nations and Haiti as coming from “shithole countries,” and in his dehumanization of Somalis as “garbage.”

Trump's embrace of white supremacy is further revealed in his claim, in an interview with the New York Times, that the civil rights movement and the policies it produced hurt white people who were “very badly treated.” He extended this logic on the global stage, asserting in a speech to the United Nations that Europe faced a civilizational crisis because of mass migration, which he cast as a threat to Western culture itself. This worldview reached its most unvarnished expression when Trump posted on Truth Social a blatantly racist, AI-generated video portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, an image drawn directly from the archive of colonial and fascist racism. Such vile language and imagery would be at home in Ku Klux Klan pamphlets. As Susan Sontag observed, these authoritarian fantasies are inseparable from “the fetishization of dominance found in fascist aesthetics,” where cruelty becomes spectacle and racial hatred is staged as entertainment.

Cruelty as Spectacle: Rallies, Rituals, and Authoritarian Pleasure

Trump's rallies intensify this toxic authoritarian aesthetic, transforming politics into a mass performance that fuses theatrical cruelty, racial grievance, white supremacy, and ritualized obedience. What emerges is a carnivalesque politics in which humiliation is rewarded, submission is celebrated, and dissent is disciplined through spectacle. This dynamic reaches a chilling apotheosis in the viral video of Kristi Noem posed like a plasticized Barbie doll before El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison, where mass incarceration and authoritarian punishment are aestheticized as moral clarity, strength, and order. In this grotesque aesthetic performance, state violence is stripped of its brutality and re-presented as virtue, resolve, and national renewal. The scene lays bare a central truth: fascist aesthetics do not vanish with history's defeat of earlier regimes; they are endlessly reinvented, adapting to new contexts while preserving their core logic of domination, cruelty, and enforced submission.

Taken together, these spectacles form a continuous pedagogical landscape of power, binding cruelty, obedience, and excess into a single visual regime. The gaudy reinvention of Mar-a-Lago as a gilded monument resurrects the visual language of the Gilded Age, converting obscene affluence into political virtue and inequality into patriotic display. A similar aesthetic animates the Jeff Bezos–backed propaganda film Melania, which, as Xan Brooks observes, operates less as a documentary than as “an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy,” ice-cold, grotesquely and spectacularly unrevealing. Brooks likens it to a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest, a spectacle in which couture, gold baubles, vacant glamour and designer dresses function as distractions, carefully diverting attention while power consolidates in the background and democratic institutions are quietly dismantled.

Across these images, fascism does not persuade through argument or policy; it stages itself. Power becomes seductive through spectacle, cruelty, and fantasy, teaching audiences not how to think politically but how to feel obedience, admire domination, and mistake violence for destiny. In this sense, MAGA aesthetics functions, borrowing Frederick Exley's phrase from Pages from a Cold Island, as “a great human fungus” that poisons the atmosphere of society, rendering the present image of the United States “homicidal and menacing.”

What begins as a visual strategy does not remain confined to isolated images. MAGA aesthetics is not an isolated cultural phenomenon or a series of incidental excesses. It derives its power, and increasingly its legitimacy, from a dense ecosystem of authoritarian rituals, images, and performances that circulate across multiple sites and institutions. Nazi salutes by prominent figures such as Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, white nationalist songs embedded in Department of Homeland Security's official recruitment efforts, fascist slogans and symbols normalized through online subcultures, and slick videos aestheticizing ICE assaults on migrants and protesters all function as mutually reinforcing scenes in a larger authoritarian drama. Amplified by the affective machinery of right-wing media, these rituals do more than communicate ideology, they habituate the public to force, fear, and racialized cruelty as ordinary instruments of governance. What emerges is not mere propaganda but a sprawling pedagogical racist juggernaut, one that saturates the senses, disciplines political imagination, and educates subjects to mistake repression for order and domination for strength. It is through this cumulative cultural/pedagogical conditioning, rather than through law alone, that fascism first secures its foothold.

Fascism does not announce itself only through emergency decrees, mass arrests, or the suspension of rights. It arrives first through images, styles, rituals, and pleasures that train people to experience power as desirable and domination as normal. Long before it rules, fascism educates. It works through spectacle and affect, through pageantry and performance, transforming violence into beauty and obedience into common sense. Sontag's warning that fascism is the aestheticization of politics remains chillingly relevant because it names not merely a propaganda strategy but a cultural logic through which social catastrophe is converted into spectacle and collective suffering into fascination.

MAGA Aesthetics and the Authoritarian Body

The resurgence of authoritarian politics in the United States has occurred not only through policy proposals, court rulings, or executive power grabs. It has advanced just as forcefully through images, bodies, performances, and styles that acclimate people to domination before they are invited, if ever, to think critically about it. As Umberto Eco argued in his reflections on Ur-Fascism, authoritarianism often takes hold first as an aesthetic project. Writing about Benito Mussolini's regime, Eco noted that Italian fascism was “the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.” Fascism, in this sense, educates through appearances before it governs through law, habituating subjects to hierarchy, discipline, and submission as matters of taste, identity, and belonging. What Eco identified under Mussolini has not disappeared but migrated, reemerging in contemporary authoritarian movements that similarly treat style, spectacle, and affect as primary instruments of political formation.

Nowhere is this dynamic more visible than in the MAGA aesthetic, a contemporary cultural regime defined by studied ugliness, theatrical cruelty, and the normalization of domination as spectacle. Hyper-stylized faces overwritten with fillers and plastic surgery, square jaws, militarized postures, rigid masculinist displays, and pornographic performances of punishment and control have become central to the visual grammar of Trumpism. These aesthetics do not merely signal political allegiance; they operate pedagogically, shaping desire, disciplining bodies, and rehearsing violence as common sense itself. Long before authoritarianism demanded obedience through policy, it secured consent through culture.

MAGA aesthetics operates as an embodied politics, a way of teaching power through posture, gaze, and gesture rather than argument. It fuses cruelty with glamour, punishment with pleasure, and grievance with entitlement. Bodies are trained to feel dominant, armored against empathy, and hostile to vulnerability. This is not simply bad taste or vulgar display. It is an aesthetic formation that prepares subjects for authoritarian rule by making domination feel natural and resistance feel weak. MAGA aesthetics, in this sense, is violence before the blow, pedagogy before policy.

This cultural logic has a long intellectual genealogy. The MAGA aesthetic is not accidental. Fascist movements have always understood aesthetics as pedagogy, as a way of training people to feel power before they are allowed to think about it. Walter Benjamin warned that fascism aestheticizes politics to mobilize the masses without granting them rights, replacing democratic participation with spectacle, ritual, and submission. Susan Sontag likewise observed that fascist aesthetics glorify obedience, hierarchy, and the eroticization of force, transforming domination into visual pleasure and cruelty into style. As Sontag later argued, this aestheticization of power does not merely depict authority; it trains desire itself. In Sontag's terms, the spectacle does not merely depict power, it trains the eye to desire it. The MAGA look follows this script precisely. It abandons democracy's appeal to reasoned judgment, ethical responsibility, and public accountability, substituting civic persuasion with spectacle, visual aggression, and emotional coercion. Its ugliness mirrors its politics with chilling precision: cruel, nostalgic, obsessed with hierarchy, and openly hostile to pluralism. What we see here is not bad taste but a deliberate visual language of authoritarianism, an aesthetic designed to normalize exclusion, glorify force, strip joy and imagination from public life, and prepare the ground for repression.

This contemporary spectacle at work in the Trump regime offers a crucial point of entry into a much older and more dangerous cultural logic. Fascist movements have always understood that power must first be felt before it can be obeyed. Long before authoritarian regimes consolidated themselves through law and force, they worked through culture, mobilizing images, rituals, and pleasures that transform domination into beauty and submission into belonging. It is this deeper aesthetic logic that Walter Benjamin named when he warned that fascism resolves social crises not by redistributing power but by aestheticizing politics itself.

At its core, MAGA aesthetics pays homage to the fascist subject, disembodied, cruel, racist, morally vacant, and rigidly militarized. It takes shape within a culture of images driven by corporate disimagination machines that dull moral sensibilities and anesthetize the injuries produced by gangster capitalism and its militarized techno-structures of domination and disposability. Within this visual regime, social change is not merely postponed but actively undone through the relentless circulation of images that normalize psychic numbness and political paralysis, training subjects to consume cruelty as spectacle. At the core of the MAGA aesthetic is a stylized performance of authoritarian masculinity that draws on the visual grammar of fascism to aestheticize command itself. It glorifies the body as militarized warrior, disciplined and armored, animated by what Sontag terms a “contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.”

Militarized Style and the Performance of Unaccountable Power

Hyper-controlled bodies, exaggerated rigidity, militarized dress, and resurrected authoritarian silhouettes work together to make domination appear natural, inevitable, and even desirable. Nowhere is this aesthetic more pronounced than in ICE, whose paramilitary uniforms project an image of communal power and solidarity forged through fear, coercion, and sanctioned lawlessness rather than democratic consent. This logic was on full display in the costumed theatrics of Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, whose long black trench coat functioned less as clothing than as a visual performance of unaccountable authority, staging power as spectacle and intimidation as legitimacy. As the Wall Street Journal observed, the coat appeared disturbingly reminiscent of the wardrobe of Hermann Göring, a comparison later sharpened when Gavin Newsom remarked that it was as if the outfit had been lifted from SS regalia. Here, authority is neither argued for nor justified; it is worn. In this aestheticized register, power bypasses reason and forecloses dissent. What emerges is not merely spectacle but an authoritarian pedagogy that teaches submission through intimidation, trains desire to admire domination, and shapes subjects prepared to mistake force for legitimacy.

What is taking shape in the MAGA aesthetic belongs to a long and well-established tradition in which culture functions as a form of political education, shaping how power is felt, admired, and internalized before it is ever justified. Fascist movements have always understood that domination must first be made emotionally compelling. Images, rituals, styles, and pleasures do the work that arguments cannot, training people to experience hierarchy as natural, discipline as beautiful, and violence as redemptive. This is the cultural logic Susan Sontag identified in her analysis of fascist imagery, where obedience is glorified, force eroticized, and submission transformed into visual pleasure. The sections that follow trace this aesthetic logic across fascist spectacle, eroticized violence, and even oppositional cultures, revealing how domination is learned long before it is enforced.

This logic reached its most refined expression in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, whose choreographed masses, monumental architecture, and hypnotic rhythms did not simply depict Nazi power but actively trained audiences to desire it, binding aesthetic rapture to political submission. That same logic resurfaces in cinema decades later, most disturbingly in The Night Porter, a film I once critiqued in Cineaste, where fascism is wrenched from its historical and genocidal foundations and recast as an intimate, eroticized psychodrama. By privatizing terror and aestheticizing cruelty, the film drains violence of its political meaning, transforming domination into a matter of psychological fascination rather than naming it for what it is: a collective crime organized by the state and sustained through culture. Crucially, even cultures of resistance have proven vulnerable to this aesthetic capture, where dissent itself can be stripped of its political force and refashioned as style.

Yet the struggle over aesthetics does not end with fascist spectacle; it also unfolds within movements that seek to oppose it. Early punk aesthetics, particularly in the work of Vivienne Westwood, sought to desecrate authority through ugliness, sexual provocation, anti-nationalist rage, and a refusal of respectability. As Mika Nijhawan observes, Westwood was a pioneer in producing grass-roots designs during the formative stages of the punk movement. Her clothes did not merely reflect punk fashion; they “dressed the entire movement,” giving visual form to its anger, refusal, and insurgent politics. In its earliest formations, punk was not simply a style but a cultural intervention, an assault on the fascist romance of order, purity, discipline, and heroic masculinity. It rejected the monumental, the uniform, and the disciplined body in favor of fragmentation, irony, and desecration, orchestrating outrage as a counter-pedagogy aimed at making authority appear ridiculous rather than sublime. Yet as punk was absorbed into consumer culture, its oppositional force was hollowed out, preserved as style while its political content was neutralized and repurposed within the very systems it once sought to challenge. Together, these examples reveal how gangster capitalism operates most effectively at the level of feeling, colonizing desire, suspending ethical judgment, and teaching people how to relate emotionally to violence, authority, and belonging long before coercion becomes explicit, normalized, or legally enforced.

Fascist Aesthetics as Political Education

The work of Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School, Václav Havel, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and others in the cultural politics tradition remains indispensable because it shifts our attention away from fascism as a purely political formation and toward culture as its enabling condition. Fascism does not seek democratic participation or critical consent; it substitutes spectacle for deliberation and affect for reasoned judgment. Politics becomes ceremony, war becomes pageantry, and domination is rendered beautiful, inevitable, and emotionally satisfying. In this sense, aesthetics functions as a form of mass education, a pedagogy that trains people to accept hierarchy as natural, to experience obedience as belonging, and to view violence not as a moral rupture but as a necessary expression of order.

This pedagogical power becomes most dangerous when fascist violence is severed from history and ethics and re-presented as intimate, seductive, or abstracted from collective responsibility. Fascist aesthetics does its most enduring work not through overt propaganda alone but through cultural forms that dissolve political accountability into private feeling, fascination, and pleasure. As images circulate without context, repetition replaces judgment and affect displaces analysis. What emerges is not ignorance but a trained indifference, a learned incapacity to connect spectacle to structure, desire to domination, or beauty to brutality.

What this history makes clear is that fascism is not imposed from above by force alone; it is learned, internalized, and normalized through culture. This insight lies at the heart of Gramsci's insistence that “all politics is pedagogical.” Politics does not simply govern bodies; it shapes consciousness, habits, desires, and modes of identification. Education, universally understood, is the primary terrain on which this struggle unfolds. When schools, media, and cultural institutions discourage critical inquiry and reward conformity, they help produce the passivity and moral numbness on which authoritarianism depends.

Education therefore plays a decisive role in either reproducing or resisting fascist culture. When it challenges taken-for-granted assumptions, cultivates critical literacy, and nurtures solidarity rather than fear, it can disrupt the production of the fascist subject. But resistance to fascism cannot be confined to electoral politics or policy reform alone. Without a cultural foundation that sustains critical thought, collective responsibility, and democratic imagination, political action will remain fragile and easily undone. Fascist pedagogy works slowly, affectively, and persistently; countering it requires an equally sustained struggle over how people learn to see, feel, remember, and judge the world they inhabit.

Erotic Fascism and the Seductions of Cinema

Few cultural texts reveal this danger more clearly than The Night Porter. Often defended as a meditation on trauma, memory, or transgression, the film instead exemplifies how fascist violence can be transformed into a stylized erotic spectacle stripped of historical accountability. By recasting Nazism as an intimate psychosexual relationship between two consenting adults, the film evacuates fascism of its political, institutional, and genocidal realities. The concentration camp becomes a backdrop; the SS uniform, an erotic costume, and systemic terror is displaced by private obsession. Mass murder recedes, historical responsibility dissolves, and power is reduced to aestheticized desire.

This privatization of fascism is precisely what makes the film so dangerous. By aestheticizing domination and sexualizing submission, The Night Porter invites viewers to engage fascism at the level of fascination rather than judgment. Violence is no longer something to be confronted politically but something to be consumed affectively. In this sense, the film does not merely misrepresent fascism; it reenacts one of its central mechanisms, the conversion of terror into pleasure and history into style.

This danger was diagnosed with extraordinary clarity by Susan Sontag in “Fascinating Fascism.” Fascist aesthetics, she argues, eroticizes hierarchy, sanctifies discipline, and promises transcendence through submission. It glorifies the surrender of the self to power, offering ecstatic belonging in exchange for obedience. Fascination, in this account, is not a misunderstanding of fascism; it is one of its primary cultural instruments. When fascism is aestheticized, ethical judgment is suspended, historical memory erodes, and violence becomes thinkable precisely because it has been rendered beautiful.

Riefenstahl and the Architecture of Fascist Spectacle

The aesthetic logic that animates the classic film The Night Porter finds its most explicit historical expression in the films of Leni Riefenstahl. Works such as Triumph of the Will perfected the visual grammar of fascism: choreographed bodies, monumental architecture, rhythmic repetition, and the fusion of individual submission with collective exaltation. These films were not documentaries that happened to record Nazi power; they were propaganda machines that constructed reality to serve the image. As Sontag insisted, the Party rally existed in order to be filmed. The image did not reflect power; it produced it.

Riefenstahl's films celebrate what Sontag identified as the fascist ideal: life as art, politics as beauty, and community forged through ecstatic self-control and obedience. Strength is eroticized, weakness despised, and critical reflection cast as contamination. The visual emphasis on purified bodies, synchronized movement, and reverent submission to the leader rehearses a political theology in which dissent appears as deformity and pluralism as decay.

The contemporary rehabilitation of Riefenstahl as a “pure artist,” detached from ideology, reproduces a profoundly dangerous fiction, the belief that aesthetics can be separated from politics. This refusal to judge fascist aesthetics politically is itself a political act. It allows authoritarian spectacle to survive as cultural form even when its explicit ideological content is disavowed, ensuring that fascist longings persist at the level of desire, style, and affect long after regimes fall.

Punk, Vivienne Westwood, and the Capture of Dissent

If fascist aesthetics secures power by making domination desirable, then resistance has often sought to disrupt that pedagogy at the level of style and sensation. Yet the now distant history of punk fashion reveals how vulnerable oppositional styles are to appropriation, commodification, and neutralization. Early punk, particularly in the work of the designer Vivienne Westwood, sought to desecrate authority through ugliness, sexual provocation, anti-nationalist rage, and a refusal of respectability. It attacked the fascist romance of order, purity, discipline, and heroic masculinity at its symbolic core by foregrounding disorder, deviance, and bodily excess. Westwood in both her politics and aesthetics embraced “the core of early punk [which] ‘was calculated anger'.”

In its earliest formations, punk was not simply a style but a cultural intervention, or as Malcolm McLaren observed, “It was never about having a Mohican haircut or wearing a ripped T-shirt. It was all about destruction, and the creative potential within that.” Punk rejected the monumental, the uniform, and the disciplined body in favor of fragmentation, irony, and desecration. It was an orchestration of outrage. It mocked nationalism, unsettled gender norms, and exposed the violence hidden beneath claims to moral order. Many punk bands such as The Clash and the Sex Pistols created art, music, and clothes as part of a social movement of which Westwood was a pioneering force in terms of her mix of aesthetics, fashion, and politics. In this sense, punk represented a counter-pedagogy, an attempt to unlearn obedience by making authority appear ridiculous rather than sublime. It was the Sex Pistols and Britain's major subcultures singing fuck you to bourgeois culture in spite of a bad ending.

Punk's visual language was gradually detached from its political context and absorbed into consumer culture. What began as an assault on domination was transformed into a marketable aesthetic. Transgression became style, shock became branding, and resistance was preserved only as surface. As Sontag warned in her reflections on photography and spectacle, shock alone is never enough; it wears off, becomes familiar, and risks reinforcing the very structures it seeks to oppose. Punk's absorption into fashion culture demonstrates a crucial lesson: fascism does not only impose its own aesthetics; it also colonizes those of dissent, draining them of political meaning while preserving their aesthetic form. In many ways, Westwood's life offers a warning. Her radical merging of fashion and punk politics did not retain its political purity or even its integrity considering her eventual celebrity, status, business practices, and role in participating in consumer culture at the highest levels of elite participation. At the same time, her role in creating what might be called an anti-fascist aesthetic, her endless participation and support of the environmental movement, her support of sexual and gender freedom, and her support of Julian Assange makes clear that her role as a celebrity fashion designer and activist is no small tribute to her and offers a political and pedagogical example of the merging of the aesthetic, radical political beliefs, and activism.

Conclusion: The Making of the Fascist Subject

The rise of MAGA aesthetics cannot be separated from a longer history of cultural and social reproduction in the United States. Submission to authority, intolerance toward marginalized groups, ultra-nationalism, systemic racism, and rigid hierarchies of gender, race, and class have long been cultivated through schools, mainstream media, and a wide array of cultural institutions. Trump's appeal to a mythic “better time,” coded as an era of racial dominance, patriarchal order, and unchallenged authority, draws directly from this authoritarian inheritance. Those who challenge these norms are routinely cast as threats to stability, tradition, and national identity, a dynamic that recalls Wilhelm Reich's warning that fascism flourishes where individuality, sexuality, and dissent are systematically repressed.

The creation of the fascist subject must therefore be understood not as a purely psychological phenomenon but as the outcome of sustained cultural indoctrination, a far-reaching apparatus of socialization and propaganda. The contemporary educational landscape too often fails to equip young people with the intellectual tools needed to question power, recognize manipulation, and resist domination. Trump's language of “patriotism,” “traditional values,” and “law and order” feeds this hegemonic pedagogy by framing dissent as dangerous, deviant, or un-American. As Reich and Theodor Adorno recognized in different registers, mass education and mass media function as decisive instruments in producing subjects who come to accept hierarchy, exclusion, and cruelty as normal features of social life rather than as political choices demanding resistance.

MAGA aesthetics makes this process visible by rendering the pedagogy of domination immediate, affective, and embodied. Fascist movements have always understood that power must first be felt through culture. Fascism endures not because it persuades through reasoned argument but because it seduces through spectacle, training people to experience domination as belonging and cruelty as strength. Images, performances, and styles perform this pedagogical labour long before policies are announced or laws are enforced. Aesthetics prepares the ground on which authoritarian rule becomes thinkable, even desirable, by shaping how people feel power before they are invited to think about it. As Lutz Koepnick argues in his essay “Aesthetic Politics Today: Walter Benjamin and Post-Fordist Culture,” “The fascist spectacle mobilizes people's feelings primarily to neutralize their senses, massaging minds and emotions so that the individual succumbs to the charisma of vitalistic power” while consolidating state power.

If fascism aestheticizes politics to make injustice palatable and domination attractive, then resistance must politicize aesthetics, reclaiming culture as a site of memory, ethical judgment, and democratic possibility. This means refusing the separation of beauty from responsibility, affect from history, and spectacle from power. The struggle against authoritarianism is therefore inseparable from the struggle over how power looks, feels, and is learned in everyday life.

The responsibility that falls to educators, cultural workers, and public intellectuals is thus profound. They are among the few agents capable of confronting the images and narratives that normalize authoritarianism while offering alternative visions of agency, justice, and democratic life. This work demands more than critique; it requires reclaiming education itself as a democratic practice rooted in historical consciousness, ethical responsibility, and collective imagination. Fascism triumphs not by persuading people to surrender their rights but by schooling them, through culture and spectacle, to no longer recognize domination as injustice. Resistance, then, must begin where fascism does, in the struggle over culture itself. Only by reclaiming culture as a radical educational project capable of reshaping how people see, feel, and judge the world can we build a durable resistance, one able not only to confront fascism but to prevent its endless return in ever more seductive forms. •

This article first published on the Counterpunch website.

Henry A. Giroux currently is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), coauthored with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015), and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2016). His website is henryagiroux.com.

March 17, 2026

Source: https://socialistproject.ca/2026/03/maga-aesthetics-and-fascist-power/#more

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How Populism Normalises Dehumanisation

Messaoud Romdhani — 2026-03-27T14:35:03Z

According to sociologists, dehumanisation rarely begins with physical violence. It often emerges gradually through political and cultural narratives that redefine difference as a threat and exclude certain groups from the “moral community”. As contemporary populist rhetoric increasingly frames political disagreement in existential terms, the boundary between legitimate democratic contestation and stigmatisation of the “other” becomes dangerously blurred.

When the Other Is Not Seen as Human

“I did not see them as human… A baby smiles at you innocently, yet you take its life without mercy.”

With these disturbing words, a Hutu participant in the massacres of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 described to a social researcher the psychological mood that accompanied his actions, a testimony cited in Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others by the philosopher and writer David Livingstone Smith. Moreover, Smith's work highlights a troubling insight: the denial of humanity to others rarely begins with direct acts of violence. Rather, it begins with a gradual cognitive shift through which the image of the “other” is transformed within individual perception and collective discourse.

The mass violence associated with the Rwandan genocide, therefore, cannot be understood solely as a tragic historical anomaly. It also reveals a latent potential embedded within the psychological and social dynamics of human communities. When fear converges with political power, and when political, media, cultural, or religious narratives push certain groups outside the “moral community”, processes of exclusion can intensify in ways that make empathy and dialogue increasingly difficult, if not impossible.

The Normalisation of Exclusion

This dynamic reflects a core insight in political theory: large-scale violence is rarely an abrupt process; it is usually heated by a prior moral rupture. For instance, Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of totalitarianism, showed that the greatest danger lies not only in overt brutality, but in the slow erosion of the common denominator that binds individuals together in mutual recognition and responsibility. What makes extreme violence possible is precisely this process of exclusion, through which certain groups are progressively cast outside the sphere of moral concern. In that sense, violence does not begin with weapons, but with narratives—discourses that subtly, then systematically, redefine who is entitled to be seen and treated as “fully human.”

Exploiting Fear and Uncertainty

This dynamic does not arise in isolation but reflects deeper social and political tensions that shape how fear is articulated and directed. It is within this context that the search for scapegoats becomes not only likely, but dangerously normalised.

Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman warned that modern societies often respond to uncertainty by seeking “human targets” onto whom fear and frustration can be projected. In times of political anxiety, this temptation becomes particularly strong.

Populist rhetoric taps into this dynamic by simplifying complex social problems and assigning blame to clearly identifiable “others”. In doing so, it transforms political disagreement into a moral confrontation between supposedly “virtuous” people and the enemies it constructs.

In many Western democracies, the resurgence of populist movements has been accompanied by growing pressure on democratic institutions and norms. Independent bodies such as the judiciary, the media, and civil society organisations are sometimes portrayed not as essential pillars of democratic accountability, but as obstacles to the supposed will of “the people”.

At the same time, immigrants and minority groups frequently become easy targets of political blame, depicted as threats to cultural cohesion or economic stability.

While the contexts differ, echoes of this dynamic can also be observed in Tunisia. The Populist narrative occasionally frames political opponents, civil society actors, or culturally “undesirable” groups not simply as participants in democratic debate, but as dangers to national integrity or social cohesion. Such rhetoric may initially appear symbolic. Yet, as many sociologists have observed, the normalisation of exclusionary language can gradually reshape public perception and weaken the pluralistic foundations upon which democratic life depends.

The Erosion of Democratic Norms

Dehumanisation is therefore not merely an abstract analytical concept, but a social process with profound political consequences. When narratives of fear and exclusion become normalised within public discourse, the erosion of democratic norms and civic trust often follows. Populist rhetoric, by framing difference as a threat to collective identity, risks accelerating this process.

In other words, the danger lies not only in the existence of hate speech, but in its gradual normalisation. Societies rarely collapse into exclusion and violence overnight; rather, they slip incrementally into fear, suspicion, and moral indifference. Each small shift in language, each repeated gesture of othering, lays another brick in the wall that divides citizens from one another.

A Choice Between Dignity and Fear

The challenge, therefore, is not merely political, but civic and ethical: to resist narratives that transform difference into hostility and to reaffirm the principle that citizenship rests on equal dignity rather than ideological conformity. Societies (and mainly elites) are thus faced with a stark choice: confront the monster of dehumanisation before it takes root and spreads, embedding hatred and mistrust in the daily fabric of public life, or allow exclusion and fear to calcify into habits that shape not only the present, but the generations to come. The former requires vigilance, courage, and a commitment to human dignity; the latter ensures a society weakened, fractured, and incapable of sustaining the very freedoms it claims to protect.

Messaoud Romdhani is a Tunisian Human Rights activist, former president of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, former vice president of the Tunisian Human Rights League.

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Between Tyranny and Silence: Understanding Societal Decay in the Arab World

Messaoud Romdhani — 2026-03-12T20:20:09Z

Across much of the Arab world, the absence of genuine democracy is no longer a hidden flaw but a defining political reality.

The Arab region does not merely confront isolated crises; it is caught in a profound structural collapse, the culmination of decades of cultural insularity, unchecked authority, hesitant elites, and obsolete ideologies drained of relevance.

Societies are ensnared in a self-perpetuating spiral: central power suppresses pluralism, elites oscillate between silence and complicity, and political discourse fragments into polarization, leaving almost no space for genuine dialogue or reform. The rot is systemic, the decline methodical, and the consequences, far-reaching.

Ibn Khaldun, the renowned scholar, philosopher, and sociologist, observed that injustice heralds the ruin of civilization. His dictum illuminates this reality with uncanny precision. Despotism erodes social cohesion and corrodes institutional integrity, transforming governance from guardianship of the public interest into an instrument of privilege, domination, and authoritarian perpetuation. When law loses its impartiality and institutions falter, injustice does not merely exist—it embeds itself into society, corroding bonds, eroding trust, and fostering alienation at every level.

Internalized Compliance

Unchecked authority depends not only on overt coercion but also on the quiet complicity of citizens. Those accustomed to submission—or who justify injustice in the name of security or self-interest—become unwitting collaborators, effectively legitimizing the very abuses that undermine their freedoms. Responsibility becomes diffuse, and culpability blends with victimhood, as Nobel Prize–winning writer Najib Mahfoudh observes in Al-Karnak: ‘We are all criminals, and we are all victims.' Opportunism, fear, and silence combine to normalize injustice, making what should be extraordinary seem ordinary

Elite Abdication and Capture

Historically, Elites hold the mantle of conscience and moral guidance. When they retreat, equivocate, or align rhetorically with regimes, they reinforce authoritarian structures, turning political discourses into instruments of distortion rather than illumination. Their abdication creates a moral and political vacuum: citizens adapt where they might resist, silence becomes rational, injustice, habitual. Authority expands unchecked, institutions crumble, and opportunities for reform narrow with each passing day.

Ideology as a Mechanism of Exclusion

Exclusionary ideologies thrive in constrained political spaces. Public discourse hardens into antagonistic blocs; difference is recast as threat, critique as betrayal. Authority fuses with intellectual closure, institutionalizing polarization, perpetuating authoritarian reproduction, and hollowing out civic norms. Social bonds dissolve as society fragments along fault lines of fear and ideology.

The Absence of Genuine Democracy

Across much of the Arab world, the absence of genuine democracy is no longer a hidden flaw but a defining political reality. Elections are staged as rituals of legitimacy rather than mechanisms of choice. Institutions exist, but too often without real independence, while large parts of the media speak for power instead of holding it accountable.

Unchecked authority depends not only on overt coercion but also on the quiet complicity of citizens.

In this environment, the language of rights survives mostly as performance. Accountability is endlessly postponed, and the law becomes a tool for enforcing obedience rather than delivering justice. Over time, the consequences accumulate: economies stagnate, public institutions erode, and growing numbers of young people—frustrated and disillusioned—seek their future elsewhere.

The result is a vicious cycle. Political closure feeds economic weakness: economic weakness deepens social frustration, and frustration gradually turns into resignation. What begins as a political deficit slowly hardens into a broader condition of decline, where stagnation becomes normal and hope increasingly scarce.

The Contemporary Triad of Crisis

In much of the Arab world, three forces converge to keep societies trapped: unaccountable rulers, hesitant or complicit elites, and exclusionary ideologies. Together, they quietly erode institutions, silence debate, and hollow out civic life.

Civilization cannot survive without justice, ethical responsibility, and accountability. When these pillars vanish, decline feeds itself: power escapes scrutiny, elites shrink from action, and ideology narrows the space for pluralism.

Breaking the cycle demands courage, not just reform. Societies must confront abuses openly, defend shared principles, and sustain dialogue even when inconvenient. Only then can balance be restored—and decline turned back.

Entrenchment of Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism is fortified not merely by force but through the erosion of norms, the normalization of deviation, and the suppression of discourse. Societies fractured in structure and consciousness are the result of prolonged repression, silence, and intellectual paralysis. Decay appears inevitable, yet it is the product, not the destiny, of historical and social choices.

Restoring Elite Responsibility

Decay is not fate. Reform begins when elites reclaim conscience, hold power accountable, and craft feasible alternatives. The public sphere must be reconstructed on reasoned deliberation rather than pretext or conflict, and legitimacy rooted in justice rather than dominance. Only then can societies transcend crisis management, address structural dysfunctions, and forge a social contract grounded in rights, responsibility, and historical consciousness. Injustice embeds itself in every institution, so decisive reform and a renewed civic conscience are needed to restore justice and hope.

Messaoud Romdhani is a Tunisian Human Rights activist, former president of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, former vice president of the Tunisian Human Rights League.

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Respecting International Law Depends on Who Breaks It: Why Canada Backed the War Against Iran

Jeremy Wildeman — 2026-03-05T23:53:23Z

When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently warned at the World at the Economic Forum in Davos that “middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu,” many saw this as a defence of international law and the multilateral order. That earned him global accolades.

At the time, Canada and Denmark were under pressure from the Donald Trump administration to surrender territory to the United States: Greenland from Denmark, and either the entirety.

Trump's demands came as a shock to a western leaders who maintain a deeply optimistic interpretation of American intentions and the immutability of their relationships. It also caused significant alarm among U.S. allies in the West, who have spent decades under the American security umbrella.

It's likely because western countries were in disarray and unable to push back forcefully against Trump's bullying that Carney's speech was so well-received.

He appeared to put words into immediate action, rebuilding Canada's fraught relationships with key Global South powers such as China and India while providing leadership on a major trade alliance among Canada, the European Union (EU) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership states to mitigate the impact of Trump's aggressive use of tariffs.

Many observers thought Canada was turning to a principled foreign policy, championing universal liberal values such as democracy, justice, human rights and the rule of law. It seemed as though Canada was coming to the defence of a rules-based order, and this was helping it regain significant international prestige.

So it came as a shock when Carney offered immediate support to an illegal U.S.-Israel war of aggression against Iran on Feb. 28.

The liberal and rules-based orders

Within days Carney was equivocating about the war and his initial statement of support. He seemed to be attempting to balance his stated support for international law with being an American ally. He has said that he supports the U.S. and Israeli war “with regret” and that Canada will stand by its allies “when it makes sense.”

What seems like hypocrisy by Carney is in fact consistent with contemporary Canadian foreign policy and its interpretation of international law.

This can be understood by exploring Canada's participation in two international systems established by the U.S. after the Second World War: the liberal international order and the rules-based order.

The liberal international order expresses some of the highest principles of liberal internationalism: anti-racism, democracy and the right to self-governance, free trade and economic interdependence, multilateral co-operation and respect for international law.

While the rules-based order draws on the liberal international order's rules and norms, it selectively interprets them for U.S. and western interests. Whereas international law is a set of rules that govern relations between states and are enforced by institutions such as the International Court of Justice, the rules-based order is a deliberately opaque concept. Its rules are vague and ill-defined, and it is unclear who has the right to define or generate them.

Crucially, the post-war international order was meant to prohibit or restrict war, as laid out in the United Nations Charter. Article 2, paragraph 4, of the charter has been a cornerstone of international law and the liberal international order, which the U.S. helped establish after the Second World War. It explicitly prohibits states from threatening or using force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other state.

The U.S. appears to invoke these rules primarily when confronting geopolitical rivals such as Russia or China, or when imposing its will on the rest of the world.

The U.S. and other western powers began shifting their rhetorical support from the liberal toward the rules-based order in the 2000s in response to the rise of Global South powers like China. In many ways, the rules-based order is an inequitable, colour-coded system that reinforces western power, and Canada has been a strong supporter of it.

Carney acknowledged this in Davos by saying the rules-based order was never fair because the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, trade rules were enforced asymmetrically and international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This is on vivid display when comparing Canada's strong response against Russia's illegal 2022 invasion of Ukraine compared to its support for the U.S.-Israel illegal 2026 war against Iran, its reluctance in early January to condemn the U.S. government's illegal abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and its de facto support for Israel's illegal occupation and war crimes in Palestine.

Trump and the unraveling of the western order

What changed in 2025 is the Trump government's hostility to the rules-based order, which it considers a costly obstacle to consolidating power around the world.

Its strategic approach has included an explicit disavowal of liberal internationalism's values, including multilateralism and international law. It has threatened to seize western allied territory and resources while imposing tariffs on them and pressuring them to substantially increase U.S. arms purchases.

Carney noted that western states had been fine with the inequities of the rules-based order so long as they benefited from it at the expense of the rest of the world. Their problem was when the U.S. started to treat them like it treats the Global South, through a neo-imperialism built on principles that “might makes right” and the strong should dominate the weak.

Another important factor that may have encouraged some in western capitals to accept the U.S. war against Iran was Secretary of State Marco Rubio's recent Munich Security Conference speech. He lauded Europe's colonial past and encouraged them to join the U.S. in a renewed global domination, plundering the rest of the world like they did in the past.

Canada's decision to back the war with Iran was likely also based on the Carney government's courting of Jewish and Iranian diasporic constituencies and a longstanding institutional reliance on U.S. leadership. But Rubio's speech created conditions favourable for Carney to support the war under the logic of the rules-based order.

At the same time, Canada will have weakened its moral standing if the U.S. turns to territorial expansion in the Americas. The war is also deeply unpopular among Liberal voters, and support for it undermined the prestige Carney gained from Davos, causing him to begin equivocating on his initial position.

Jeremy Wildeman is Adjunct assistant professor, Carleton University; L'Université d'Ottawa/University of Ottawa

Source: https://theconversation.com/respecting-international-law-depends-on-who-breaks-it-why-canada-backed-the-war-against-iran-277684

March 5, 2026

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