MEDIA: Full Debate: Biden and Trump in the First 2024 Presidential Debate | WSJ

NEWS: The Debate Debacle: Trump v Biden

By now most of you who are interested will have seen this TV debate. In it, US President Joe Biden displayed that he was, basically, too old and frail to compete on this stage. He repeatedly failed to end his sentences, he lost his train of thought, he ended some sentences with bizarre out of place comments that even seemed to go directly against the principles of his own Democratic party, or they fizzled out in incomprehensible drivel. He seemed to stare into mid-space slack-jawed and dull eyed in the silences. And so on and so forth. It was what we should have expected, in fact, because he has been like this for a while now. In some ways it seems cruel that he was put through this torture, in front of millions, appearing to be senile. But afterwards the verdict of the Democrat commentariat was, surprise!!  - At this surprise, are we not entitled to be surprised?  What did they expect from him? Why wait until now to be alerted to these facts?

The whole show was a disaster, not just for the catastrophic performance of Biden for the Democrats, but for US politics and democracy. The only positive that you could take from it was that Trump did not use Biden’s obvious discomfort to his advantage, which was sensible but also remarkably honourable from the convicted felon. Trump lied repeatedly, as was expected, and CNN did not fact check him at all. It was like a display of the worst possible aspects of US democracy distilled. The last part of it, where both exchanged little grumpy digs about their golfing prowess summed it all up. Two privileged men too old and out of touch with too much power.

https://youtu.be/cV8ULfwTneE?si=1YbPTaOBxM0oPEAv

  

THEORY: Words against Genocide

Words, words, words; they seem weak, futile, in the face of the violence. What can words do? But even the words have failed to do what they normally do, what they are expected to do, today, they have failed to condemn the most heinous crimes, war crimes, genocide. We are in a new period, post Gaza. Hemingway said something somewhere about bourgeois liberals waking up surprised to find that they were Nazis. This happened recently. Many of our western leaders are now war criminals, complicit in genocide. We are supposed to vote for these people, as if nothing has happened, as if business as usual. Frankly, it is gobsmacking, flabbergasting, and exhausting in the way it causes our stupefaction.

But perhaps they have not yet had the surprise, they are too hypnotized to notice even this, so they have not really woken up. They are sleepwalking through this crisis, helped, instigated, defended, by their media. All of which support the imperialist strategies of the US, which sees Israel as one of its important appendages for policing the Middle East, near the oil fields and the Suez Canal.

And all those humanist humanitarian institutions, built up after WWII and the Holocaust are powerless, or even worse, enable these bourgeois classes to feign as if they care, along with their press, who employ every trick in the book to ensure that the killing of Palestinian children, for instance, can pass by as registered, but not identified with as truly human suffering.

How is it that we can see all this, amongst all this sleight of hand and evasion? It all happened too suddenly, they did not prepare us enough, only now are the forces of the far right being gathered in the land of politics, a bit late to the party, but that is how it goes, unevenly, chaotically.  

Do we have to say that genocide is wrong? Yes! Today it is necessary! - The worst genocide in history was against the Jews in Germany in the middle of Europe. Today’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza is not at that scale, but proportionally it is just as atrocious.  If we look at it historically, we see a similar evasion from the western powers about what the German fascists were doing to the Jews, a similar fudging of the morals, a kind of tactical selective blindness to the horrors which left millions of Jews dead, abandoned.

What is happening today is a consequence of those events. Today is essentially a continuation of the friction that caused it, of the antisemitism and racism and the economic crisis that begat these horrors, - we have rampant inflation yet again. It might seem strange, ironic, perverse even, that it is Israel, the Jewish State, that is perpetrating this genocide, or at least which is the vehicle for it, in the hands of US imperialists. But it makes an awful logic.

When the western nations who had won their victory in WWII against the Nazis did not want to accept displaced Jews, when their antisemitism continued, and they pushed Jews towards Palestine, this was just the same war continuing in a different way. The ruling classes saw the Jews as a useful future tool for white western imperialism in the Middle East, and so Palestinians would now be the new victims of European economic contradictions.

The original meaning of the term antisemitism referred to racism against people from that region, Arabs or Jews or Bedouin etc, not specifically Jewish people, this is a modern inflection. The original meaning is far more useful and correct.  So called Islamophobia, and anti-Judaism, are both antisemitism, and nobody is immune to being an antisemite, or a racist, just by virtue of their skin, nationality, or history.

It remains sadly true that to kill people en masse, in a conflict, it helps if your soldiers regard the enemy as less than human. The enemy of imperialist conquest today is the Palestinian people. Israel needs to expand because its capital needs to expand, and its capital needs to expand because western capital seeks to expand, and this seeks to expand because US capital seeks expansion.

The legitimate resistance of the Palestinians to Israeli colonialism exists, but has it assisted the imperialist project by being terrorist? In the west we have our own ideas of legitimate freedom fighters, these ideas have universal aspects but are also different depending on the context. The Middle East has been deliberately fought over in a brutal way, in a way that rarely holds back from the most heinous massacres. This was started by British colonialism in the Mandate period, supporting Zionism for its own interests, and is being continued by western colonialism today. Why this extreme brutality? Because it diminishes the political maturity of the entire region, leaving its ruling classes susceptible to interference, to bribes and corruption, weakening their states. So, on this altar is to be sacrificed Palestinian children. Tomorrow it will be other peoples’ children.

 

NEWS: Macron’s election gamble creates general bemusement and political farce in France

Politics happens in time, not in space. So, politics can be either progressive or reactionary. But like most other capitalist western democracies, politics is framed in the bourgeois media as a Left, Centre, Right array, and in practice this has become a political cartel that prevents any genuine democratic progress.

The French regularly get the far-right thrust at them as a threat in the media, and in European elections the electorate have now vented their anger at the incumbent politicians and voted for the most anti-EU seeming party, which is the far-right of Marine Le Pen, now called National Rally (Rassemblement national, RN, the old National Front or le Front national). They obviously don’t care that much about Europe and just want any party that defends their interests, which are suffering under the exorbitant cost of living. Not that the far-right have said anything serious about defending the interests of, for instance, the farmers, who have a lot of gripes, and what they do say is all very vague, and they have no manifesto. But despite this, they won a big victory in the European elections, gaining 31% of the vote, pushing president Macron’s party into relative insignificance. - Many media pundits abroad were now certain of further far-right success and enthusiastically projected the Euro voting figures immediately onto the national French vote, so that Le Pen’s party became the leaders of France, with young Jordan Bardella as PM, who was previously only known for robotically railing against ‘rapist immigrants’ and having a sort of blank expression. He has suddenly become the telegenic, nice fascist.

Reacting to this, the centrist pro-business president Macron, in a fit of hubris, suddenly called an election for July 7, conveniently just before the Olympic games were due to start in Paris. We are sure he sees this a masterful move, but it appears to be vanity. The election that this move entails would only be about the National Assembly, called the ‘elections législatives’, and the post of prime minister, but not the presidency; Macron’s position was safe for another couple of years. However, whoever won the election, if they were not in his party, would have to deal with him as president, unless the result was so opposed to him that he would have to step down. He was obviously gambling with the fate of the country, and for some reason, unconcerned about the far-right.

The biggest response throughout France, according to the media, was surprised bemusement, but tinged with trepidation that this could allow the far right to get a real political foothold. What could be the president’s tactics here, they wondered? The suppositions were that he wanted to ‘clarify things’, because currently his centrist party, Renaissance as it was now called, had no real majority in the assembly and he could not push through his unpopular ‘reforms’, such as making people work longer for their pensions. Maybe he had been lying in wait for just this moment, hoping to get his revenge, seething in silence.

The French CAC 40 stock market started to fall. Then cue a big round of transparently selfish and panicky manoeuvrings on the part of all varieties of politicians, left, right, and centre, which quickly descended into farce. Probably because of the short time to the election date everything political was happening like a speeded-up film, which gave it a highly comedic aspect and threw into sharp relief all the opportunism.

Eric Ciotti, president of the rightist The Republicans party (Les Républicains, LR) suddenly sought an alliance with the now apparently to be taken seriously fascists, the RN. He appeared smiling like a naughty little goblin looking out of the party’s HQ window, or some window or other. Apparently, he had locked himself in when he heard about the uproar in his party that his proposal had caused. They wanted to oust him, but they could not open the door and had to go away sheepishly. They got in eventually, finding a spare key, but he was nowhere to be found. Maybe he hid up the chimney? Later, a legal decision over whether he could be ejected was won by Ciotti. He was stuck there, perhaps president of not much anymore. This man wanted to ally his party, formerly normal conservatives, with the RN, but Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella have not yet published a manifesto (did I say that?). They are probably hoping to get away with this slight omission by just voicing some blurry statements. Curiously, they want to nationalize the motorways of France, perhaps seeking to emulate German autobahns - ‘invented by the Nazis’? But at the same time to privatise national media outlets.  Nationalise! Privatise! – that makes sense. They obsess most over immigration, with tacked on concern about the cost of living and security, but also linking these things to immigration, both legal and illegal. In the recent past they wanted to give French nationals preference in jobs, benefits and social housing, which would probably involve trying to change the constitution and would be contrary to European rules, and, yes, to throw out immigrants who were unemployed for more than a year, and to protect the police against complaints against them when they commit violence - probably against immigrants, again. Immigrants! Immigrants! If you have any doubts about what a vote for the far-right really entails this article quote explains it clearly:

“…in the European parliament, where Bardella has held a seat since 2019. He and fellow RN MEPs voted against the recognition of slavery as a crime against humanity, opposed resolutions on the rescue of migrants at sea and on reducing the wage gap between men and women. They did not support proposals to allocate a budget to combat violence against women or in favour of the EU becoming a zone of LGBTQIA+ freedom. In the French parliament many of them have opposed a constitutional amendment to guarantee free and legal access to abortion.

They pretend to care about social justice and the wellbeing of the poorest, but their votes demonstrate their lack of interest in addressing economic inequality. They have voted against increasing the minimum wage, against indexing salaries to inflation and against increasing student grants. They also opposed freezing prices on rent and essential goods.”

From <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/19/macron-gamble-fate-french-people-far-right>

Marine Le Pen recently welcomed the fact that the historian and lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, defender of Jewish deportees from France, who declared that in the event of a choice between France Unbowed and RN he would vote for the RN, which he decided had now reformed and supported the Jews and Israel, banishing any thought of the fascists possible trickery, given the far right’s unblemished history in this regard (not). The accusation was of the left’s anti-Semitism of course. So, both the far-right and Macron’s centrists at least agreed on this lowest stooping of principles, attack those you disagree with for anti-Semitism whenever you can, whether it is true or not, and regardless of how it degrades the meaning of this term (in this sense, the boot is on the other foot and they are being the anti-Semites); Macron ally Gabriel Attal, the French PM, interviewed on France 2 TV, had also made similar accusations about the left. Meanwhile, Marion Marechal, whose auntie is Marine Le Pen, and of whose party Reconquest she is vice president, and which apparently hates immigrants even more, suggested on TV that they might join with Le Pen, but then the even more right-wing Eric Zemmour, its leader, the next day chucked her out of the party.

On the left there was almost as much ridiculousness, but not quite. NUPES and France Unbowed (La France insoumise, LFI), the Greens, the Socialist Party (PS), and the French Communist Party (PCF) etc, all got together to form the New Popular Front (NPF) against the fascists; they buried their many hatchets, sort of, but Jean Luc Melenchon was not very good at keeping quiet, and the media so wanted to see a fight to balance the rightists one, as was their duty to their class. They found the notoriously ginger left politician, Adrien Quatennens, who had been charged a while ago for domestic violence, lurking around, and a couple of old comrades of Melenchon who he now disliked. Quatennens had to withdraw as a candidate of France Unbowed in Le Nord, to be replaced by Aurélien Le Coq, national co-leader of the LFI youth organization, but also apparently Amy Bah, a feminist, maintained her candidacy after the withdrawal, also under the banner of NPF (?). By now the French electorate was probably fed up with all the name changes of parties, and wise to the fact that they had in them all the same old politicians. Then who should pop up but Francoise Hollande, the ex-president, who was going to also throw his hat into the ring, no longer content with almost destroying his Socialist Party, due to its lack of socialism, he now wanted to attach his obvious abilities to the new alliance at this crucial moment.

In this situation, as a PCF member, I agree with the forming of an alliance, but I cannot help but be wary of the wisdom of forming left popular fronts from the point of view of the communists joining. It seems to me that such an amalgamation waters down and renders invisible the specific truths that the communists can give to the political debate, so that the PCF is in danger of seeming to have the same positions as the socialists, for instance, given that for some time now the Socialist Party has been exposed for what they are, bourgeois, pseudo socialists. On the other hand, to join against the populist fascists is necessary and urgent. The question is, therefore, how can the communists keep their identity but still support the left? If this left succeeds in winning against RN, they will inevitably soon be seen like Macron’s centrists, to be eventually rejected, including the communists, this time leaving only the RN fascists as seeming to be the most radical option. On the other hand, if the left loses with the communists aboard, the communists also lose with them, and for the same reasons.

It of course all depends on what will happen, but for the communists it seems to be a no-win situation whichever scenario of these. Not joining NPF would probably not harm the NPF’s popularity in the future election and retain the uniqueness of the communist argument, keeping its powder dry, so to speak. If RN were to win against NPF, then would this be the fault of the communist’s non-participation, splitting the vote of the left? Possibly. To avoid this the communists could have called for their votes to go to the NPF, but without joining it, keeping an arm’s length so to speak. This, however, has not happened.