Which Genocide Are You On?

IN FOCUS, 27 Jan 2025

Mr. Fish | ScheerPost - TRANSCEND Media Service

By Mr. Fish

“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.” 
– Voltaire

24 Jan 2025 – It has so far been impossible for human beings en masse to recognize the intrinsic right of all people everywhere to live their lives unmolested by oppressive elements of the privileged class. And while this might ultimately be an insurmountable problem of how we think rather than what we think, there remains a great deal of evidence that given the glaring mistakes of past transgressions against the silenced majority, the marginalized, and the disposed segments of our global population we are indeed capable of doing better and preventing a great deal of extraneous misery if only we were more willing to act as active participants in determining our collective fate rather than mere spectators.

Take, for instance, the bureaucratic example of the Statue of Liberty, which was conceived by French abolitionist Edouard de Laboulaye for the singular purpose of celebrating the end of slavery in the United States, a radically humane gesture in 1865, despite the troubling irony that the 111-foot cheerleader megaphoning the accomplishment was a woman whose gender would not be granted the right to vote for another half-century.

Regardless, when Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi who designed the structure shared the details of the monument’s architecture with the committee that was convened to oversee the artwork’s construction, dismantlement, and eventual re-mantlement in New York Harbor, details that included broken chains and shackles to be held in the statue’s left hand to symbolize the emancipation of black people from white supremacy, U.S. financiers threatened to pull their funding and cancel the project.

Why? Because when one attempts to broadcast to the rest of the world that equality and human dignity are principles that all of us should all wholeheartedly embrace, respect, defend, and advance above all others, especially those rendered in defense of inequality and conditional human dignity, one runs the risk of communicating the democratizing truism that rich people are actually no more important than anybody else and, in fact, they are just poor people with money and are therefore undeserving of a social status that affords them manipulative powers over others.

Such generosity would surely undermine the whole point of capitalism, which is to discourage any perception of humanity charitable enough to suggest that life would most certainly be better if it weren’t regulated by a privately owned and operated faux-Darwinian system that insists on the strictest possible obedience to the most exploitative, alienating, and anti-democratic dictums and directives ever dreamt up by pitiless noblemen.

Consequently, in order to appease the principled racism and erudite bigotry of the financiers, the statue was redesigned to have the chains and shackles removed – though remnants still remain at Liberty’s feet – and replaced with a tablet bearing the date July 4, 1776, signifying America’s Declaration of Independence and the time when slavery was legal and only white men owning property had the rights and privileges of free people and the indigenous population was being eradicated by the millions – between 8 and 114 million to be inexact, the imprecision of the count explained by this simple question: how often are we encouraged to catalogue the number of masticated dandelions we invoke when we mow our lawns?

Thus, the statue was erected the color of chocolate and soon turned the color of money, simultaneously becoming both a rousing beacon of contempt for black, brown, yellow, and red Americans and an electrifying declaration of praise and acceptance of plutocratic authoritarianism and the normalization of muted public discourse concerning how best to equalize our treatment of each other regardless of class, ethnicity, gender, politics, or religion.

Which brings us to the modern-day example of Donald Trump and the unsettling entrenchment of Christian nationalism as the primary marketing technique of our elected officials who, in partnership with the most nefarious elements of the business class, have been able to convince the American public that a unilateral surrender to kleptocratic fascism is equivalent to an exhilarating unification with power, forgetting that the U.S. government did not give rights to women, blacks, queers, workers, poor people, immigrants, prisoners, environmentalists, and artists.

Not at all. In fact, the U.S. government, like all governments, will always need to be forced by cultural revolutions mounted outside of politics to recognize the intrinsic rights of all people that already exist. Equitable human rights do not require permission from the state to be real any more than a teardrop requires permission from a cheek to be wet or a raised fist requires permission from the sky to be a show of solidarity among those demanding deliverance from tyranny. Since when does truth require permission from bullshit to define who we are as a freethinking population? What does this mean? It means that we won’t be able to save ourselves from drowning in the miasma of our own confusion about what we’re told to be as citizens and who we want to be as people if all we ever do is waste our time pleading with the powerbrokers perched on the planks from which we were pushed to throw us a life preserver. No, the only way to save ourselves is to stop panicking and learn how to swim, thereby making the planks, the powerbrokers, and the life preservers completely irrelevant.

Which then brings us to the serviceable metaphor presented by the genocidal assault on the people of Gaza by the occupying state of Israel and the efforts by the international privileged class and their supplicants and toadies to crush opposition and resistance movements that insist first on a permanent ceasefire and then the prosecution of those guilty of the gleeful and shameless murder of unarmed civilians, journalists, and aid workers.

Speaking as an editorial cartoonist whose job it is to identify, condemn, and criticize the potential crimes, cruelties, and corruptions of various powerbrokers in government, big business, and rote status quo elitism, there has existed for many decades the lazy and inane notion that when anybody condemns the actions and policies of the Israeli government – while expressly not basing their condemnation on pandering stereotypes that denigrate the history, beliefs, or traditions of Judaism – they are being antisemitic. It would be as if condemning Barack Obama’s murderous drone program would also make them racist, or that condemning police brutality would also make them chaos agents of anarchism.

Indeed, while a suspicion of antisemitism – like a suspicion of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ableism, and so on – should be examined if only to reaffirm the imperative that anybody facing allegations of hate speech be given the opportunity to establish context and intent regarding their communication, we must be forever vigilant and contemptuous of the grotesque presumption that accusations and recriminations should be allowed to stand alone as sufficient proof of villainy and, therefore, censorship and persecution. Having been targeted unfairly in recent months – dare I say years! – by rightwing media outlets, conservative careerists of the U.S. Congress, and the cowardly interim president of the university where I teach for the willful misreading of critiques I’ve made about both Israeli and U.S. foreign and domestic policies, I speak from experience, though the speaking, regrettably, has never reached the wayward sympathies of my accusers whose vitriol, like all self-fellating piousness, much prefers the thrilling rat-a-tat of externalized hatred over the dozing conviviality of fact-based compromise and arbitrated clemency.

Understand, too, that editorial cartoonists and political artists of all sorts have always had to grapple with the possibility that a misreading of their work, willing or otherwise, could disrupt the intention and usability of their commentary, thereby complicating the trajectory of whatever debate might follow. Images, after all, like reality itself, are infinitely more loquacious than their lingual counterparts and if it is true that a picture paints a thousand words, it must be understood that not every viewer who engages with a picture, like engaging with reality, will speak the same political language as either the artist or other viewers.

That means that the thousand words that one might use to decipher an image could literally be anything ranging from the most eloquent of arias to the most discordant barking imaginable, which means the idiom has less to do with what the artist is attempting to communicate and more to do with whatever political or cultural values already exist inside the viewer’s head, which the artwork will confirm, deny, augment, confuse, incite, or infuriate.  Of course, the potential differential between what is intended by an artist and what is interpreted by a viewer in such a scenario can be problematic for both parties if only because conflict can be unpleasant, and a negotiated compromise can be labor intensive though imperative for the continued health and wellbeing of a functioning family, commune, community, nation, or democracy. This is not puffery, nor is it hyperbole.

When, however, the political climate has been made cantankerous by egregious agents, attendants, and operators in government and big business who are hellbent on sowing discontent among the rabble and common citizenry for the sole purpose of making them okay with forgoing their rights to privacy and their exercise of personal freedoms in exchange for an increase in authoritarianism and restrictions regulating law and order as an emollient to the troubling proposition that chaos and instability are just around the corner without it and when there has been a deliberate and steady dismantlement of public forums and contemplative venues wherein the free exchange of ideas can happen, not to mention an increase in limitations placed upon what is considered acceptable speech in print, on the airwaves, and in the classroom, then such arguments are immediately abandoned having been rendered inaccessible.

At that point, we are in serious trouble as an open society whose cohesion has always and must always rely upon its ability and willingness to rigorously self-assess and, with all due respect for the airing of diverse opinions, encourage the cooperation of all its participants without fear of retribution.

That said, it is important to understand that there has never existed a time in human history when a critic of power hasn’t first been accused of attempting to subvert moral decency and degrade civility in favor of mayhem over probity, as if the pain and discomfort that comes from struggling against the restraints of oppression were somehow more deleterious to the soul than succumbing to one’s fate as a captive.

Take, for instance, the most obvious examples of Eugene Debs, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Angela Davis, Harvey Milk, Caesar Chavez, Lenny Bruce, Jesus Christ, Galileo, and Socrates, just to name a few, all of whom were accused of wrongdoing by encouraging the contrarians and victims of persecution to raise their voices and to prioritize recognition of the worthwhile pain of resistance over the ignoble painlessness of acquiescence – that is, of prioritizing the torment that comes from struggling against restraints rather than believing in the propaganda that guarantees a lasting relief by succumbing to them.

To reiterate, each and every one of those named were considered outlaws and enemies of conscientious virtue by the leadership of the dominant culture of their time only later to be exonerated by the inevitable emergence of the truth that equitable human rights are an inherent value applicable to all without exception over the bullshit theory that our differences can be codified into transactional currencies reflective of a prejudicial spoils system designed to perpetuate the gross inequalities demanded of hierarchy.

Of course, when a society has been coopted by its leadership to rejoice in the undemonstrated virtues of its nation’s charter – that is, to rejoice in her inspiring reputation as being a dedicated advocate for peace, freedom, and equal justice without actually prioritizing the practice of such things – it is the leadership insisting that the population celebrate the transparency of the fresh air flowing freely through the bars set inside their windows and ignoring the fact that the breeze caressing their grateful and incurious faces is being propelled by the portent language of totalitarianism, though the totalitarianism might be meted out on a sliding scale.

Indeed, survival in incarceration will often encourage such an alteration to reality, as seeing oneself as a powerless victim of circumstance will never be preferable to imagining that one’s failure to exist outside a prison is a personal one and has little to do with extenuating circumstances originating with the brutal cabal residing at the top of a hierarchy whose integrity relies entirely on the captivity of subordinates in denial. In other words, it must be assumed that the number one tactic for persevering through jailtime, through being crushed beneath the boot of tyranny, is to pretend that one is being encouraged to lay down and stay pressed hard against the ground because it is restful and restorative and therefore not an act of barbarity but rather a gesture of magnanimity.

Thus arises a leading complication that often comes when the critic of power is attempting to encourage those being manipulated, enslaved, and exploited onto their own two feet and into acts of resistance: they must consider the disarming possibility that they are being abused by their circumstance because of the complicity of all those who came before them. The question then arises: Were these willing participants in the big shots’ agenda or were they dolts and idiots too stupid to recognize when they were being abused by the guards and wardens whom they seemed all too happy to continue to suckle and blow without complaint – guards and wardens whom they were in fact conditioned to admire with grateful and pandering enthusiasm?

This inference, of course, is often the very narrative suggested by the powerful as being the true and demeaning subtext of the critic’s disdain for moral decency and civility, the idea being that the critic of power is really a critic of those whom the power has hobbled, as if to say that anybody duped by a ruling class of assholes must also be assholes, themselves. This is an argument so juvenile and pedestrian that its sustainability is wholly based on the most vulgar uninquisitiveness imaginable – an uninquisitiveness, that is, the powerful reward and promote as not only proper and essential, but also the essence of merit-badged gallantry. And this is precisely what has happened with the grim controversy of Israeli nationalism, Zionism, and the decades-long occupation, murder, and displacement of Palestinians, again, a credible allegory for the daily exploitations suffered by those of us dehumanized and relegated as refuse by the carnivores of the kingdom.

In the same way that the fossil fuel industry spends billions of dollars every year to kill green legislation and delegitimize the warranted concerns and incontrovertible findings presented by climate scientists, citizen environmental groups, and common-sense advocates of clean energy and sustainable living, so too are billions of dollars spent every year by groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Republican Jewish Coalition, J Street, the Democratic Majority for Israel, NORPAC (not an acronym), and others, to silence protest movements and delegitimize the warranted concerns and incontrovertible findings of reporters, international human rights organizations, and Palestinians, themselves, regarding the war criminality of Israel and the role the U.S. government plays in supplying aid and weapons for ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the continued maintenance of a brutal apartheid state.

And just as it is with big oil and gas where there’s every evidence that its unmitigated malfeasance will continue to make victims of the poorest and least protected among us – a demographic, to be clear, that is expanding exponentially every day and swallowing up more and more of us as wealth becomes more and more concentrated and insolvency proliferates – so too will endure the embargo on all serious and strenuous debate over the rights of Israel to disregard the equalizing tenets of international law, expand its settlements, and wage its extermination campaign without either restraint or interruption on a world stage that such flagrant disregard has opted to retrofit with blood gutters, drains, and privacy screens.

So then, what is left for us to do, for we who embrace the radical hospitality of critical thinking, who mandate the urgent necessity for fair and honest and essential debate while strenuously refusing capitulation to kingmakers and kings regardless of whether they’re baring their teeth, their tongues, or their taints as coercion?  How do we lead with love and empathy when challenging the troubling inaccuracies of what we perceive to be dangerous opinions and questionable values, forgiving others their trespasses without requiring they first ask for forgiveness while expecting equal consideration? What do we do to advance the most practical and rewarding certitude that moral consistency requires the universal surrender of all our egos in deference to a common good made equitable by common access? How do we embrace a grounding humility commensurate with the benign vulnerabilities of all our bodies, an inspiring and massively precious collective perpetually driven by a deep desire to simply live another day free from agony and in comradery with peace and harmony?

We just do it. And we do it without asking for consent or approval from those with whom a compromise would mean a catastrophic surrender, like asking for mercy when you’re already in the belly of the beast convinced that your succulence had nothing to do with why you were devoured and everything to do with why you should be saved.

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Dwayne Booth (a.k.a. Mr. Fish) is a cartoonist and freelance writer, has been published in many reputable and prestigious magazines, journals and newspapers. In addition to Harper’s Magazine, his work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, TRANSCEND Media Service, The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones Magazine, the Advocate, Z Magazine, the Utne Reader, Slate.com, MSNBC.com and various European newspapers. He has also written novels, screenplays, short fiction and cultural criticism collections, and several volumes of political cartoons.

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