NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, October 9th, 2025, and our dear friends, Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff, join us. Welcome back.
RICHARD WOLFF & MICHAEL HUDSON: Glad to be here.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Since everybody's talking about the Trump peace plan, I want to start with that. Michael, what's your take on what is happening? You've sent me an email. You've mentioned that what has happened in Gaza is not Israel's war, it's NATO's war. What's your point in that?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Trump told Fox News last night: The important thing is for people to love Israel again. I told Bibi that Israel cannot fight against the whole world.
And Netanyahu has been saying that this war goes far beyond simply between Gaza and Israel.
It's really a fight, a ninth front. And that ninth front is: Who is going to control how Americans view international relations, the geopolitics of what's happening? And I think if the military confrontation stopped, at least temporarily, then this conflict has now shifted to the political and the cultural battlefield. And I think we have to look at that.
This is turning out to be a much deeper and long-lasting conflict, and it goes beyond Palestine and Israel. To answer your question, the war in Gaza and the West Bank isn't simply a military conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Just like Russia isn't simply in a military conflict with Ukraine, the Palestinians are not in a war with Israel, but with NATO led by the United States, and Britain, and Germany. And Israel's strategy is — well, how do we keep the loyalty of the U.S., now that the opinion polls show that younger people are taking the side of the Palestinians, not Israel? What does that bode for continued American support for Israel?
Well, this is a much longer lasting fight, and it goes beyond the military battlefield, and it's how the world frames the thinking about what's happening to it. And this is the deepest, and it's even the most threatening battlefield over control of the narrative — the narrative of how to frame the issue — and what's being taught in the schools, in the universities, and spread to the internet platforms and the mass media — that is now already come under the control of extremist Zionist hardliners.
And that's what the whole fight, over the last week, has been over TikTok. President Netanyahu has explained that Israel is at war with what he calls this ninth front: to control the United States. That's the real war that's happening. And this control isn't to be established militarily, but by controlling the U.S. public opinion through, essentially, extremist Zionist billionaires, the Silicon Valley billionaires, who control the mass media. You've seen them take control of automatic intelligence to buy out TikTok, and redesign the algorithms of TikTok to replace the pictures that TikTok was showing about murdered Palestinian babies, all sorts of horrendous genocidal attacks. All this is going to be out.
And the new algorithm is blocking any discussion or any exposé of what Israel has been doing to Gaza and to the West Bank. And just like Israel has concentrated — the army has concentrated — on killing two groups of people: journalists — they must destroy any attempt to let the world know what they are doing — and doctors — the doctors must not heal the injured, especially the children who can grow up — and growing up with a memory of what's happening to them.
And Israel says, if these children live, it is a threat to Judaism, because Israel is a Judaic state — meaning, as Alistair Crooke says — meaning a theocracy; and a theocracy has no room for anyone who is not a member of the Judaic state.
So, you're having this war extending to the churches. You know, what are the churches going to say? Are they going to say this war of Israel against the Palestinians is part of the Bible — of the Lord backing Israel, as America's ambassador to Israel has claimed, that he has to follow the Bible?
There's a whole attempt to create this, not only a false, narrative, but by using the algorithms for all the main internet platforms — Facebook, Google, even X — if you try to use these platforms — and you can now expurgate or censor any discussion that is not reflecting an Israeli opinion — then you're shaping public opinion. And if you can take over the news, like CBS News was just taken over by an ardent Zionist —
You're turning the universities, who are preventing any student demonstrations in favor of peace — they say: If you want peace, and not fighting, then you're antisemitic, we are expelling you — and if you're a professor, who describes this ‘we will expel you,' as Columbia University has done, other universities are doing —
This is a cultural war, and that's what is being overshadowed by all of this military discussion. And since neither Richard nor I are military specialists, I think that that's really what needs to be discussed on your site, because you have enough military people who are explaining the brutality of what's happening.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: [muted, addressing Richard Wolff] … from a different angle, but you have your point. We talked about it before. Go ahead. Your take?
RICHARD WOLFF: Let me frame it slightly differently, but, I think, in a way that is complementary to what Michael has just said. Here's my interpretation of what — translation should be a better word — translation of what Trump said on Fox News, that Michael cited. Here's my translation. This is not what the president said, but here's what I think lies behind the words he said: that he has come to the conclusion, with his advisors, that the tide has changed in the world; that Israel is now losing the hearts-and-minds campaign that it launched, and that it did, in that area, too little, and too late; and that it could not overwhelm what the reality was, of what they were doing to the Palestinians in Gaza for the last two years.
Okay. It's too late. Whether you want to give the credit to the global critical media, whether we pin another medal on Greta Thunberg, I don't know — but he's losing. And I don't think President Trump cares about it anyway.
But what his advisors have told him is that the tide is turning inside the United States. It is becoming politically impossible for him to continue the policies of Biden and Trump, of being 100% pro-Israel — more than half the people of Israel are, in terms of the war policy. It's becoming dangerous. AIPAC, for all the money it spends, and all the influence it has, has not prevailed.
And he is telling Bibi: Listen, Jack, I can't keep supporting you if, in my country, the opinion is shifting away from you. I've done as much as I can do. I'm bailing. You've got to now do — and then he says something which is ridiculous: You've got to make the world love you.
Well, I know what he means. He means that AIPAC has to do something to change the direction of American political opinion. And there, again, I would remind everyone: We are now a very few weeks away from an election, which the polls suggest is going to bring an anti-Israeli Muslim socialist into being the mayor of the largest city in the country. This is an extremely powerful message being sent. Even if he were to lose the election — it doesn't look like that, but even if he were — look how far he has already come!
And if you follow it — which I've been doing, from the beginning of his effort, long before he became well-known — one of his key supporters was an organization called the Jewish Voice for Peace, which is a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli war, Jewish organization — in the city that has more Jews than any other in the United States. I mean, wow! What?
And I think they're learning, and they're very worried. Marjorie Taylor Greene has announced she's voting with the Democrats because she can't go along with the policy of undercutting Medicaid for poor people. Mr. [Thomas] Massie is relentlessly trying to get the Epstein files opened up. There's serious speculation that the real reason they shut the government down had nothing to do with Medicaid, or anything else: it had to do with postponing the denouement of the Epstein files.
Okay, I don't know whether these things are true or not, but if you put them all together, they suggest that Michael is right; that there's a turning point here; that this issue, even the Israelis and the Americans now understand that the military action in Gaza has to stop — because it's counterproductive, it is damaging. The whole point was to give them more security, and as the critics have told them, for years now: that's not going to work. You're making your situation more difficult.
And you're seeing around the world, even among comedians — Jon Stewart, explaining to his audience that Netanyahu is the one threatening a global wave of antisemitism. What did he mean? Because of what you're doing in Gaza, you crazy people, you are, in the name of preserving yourself, you're killing yourself. And that allows me to say — and bear with me: Nothing — nothing — is more typical of declining empires than having their leaders do things which everyone shouts at them: Don't do that! That makes your decline worse.
But they can't hear it. They're stuck in these ways of doing things. And I don't know whether Netanyahu can hear any of this (either), but that's my suspicion. Mr. Trump is realizing he's going to have to choose, and it's very clear who's going to be sacrificed.
You know, the Germans did a Holocaust — they did a genocide — and they are suffering, to this day, with the reputation they have around the world for that. How it has all played out in a million people's minds — you know, you don't undo this quickly. Hitler is dead in 1945: Here we are, eighty years later, and we can still see — Germany inside the European Union. I mean, my family is part-French and part-German. I have lived the lifelong effects of all of this all my life. Even though I'm born in the United States — I'm an American, and all of that — I'm fully aware that that is alive and, well, in a thousand ways, Israel will take a very long time, if ever, to crawl out from under what it has done.
And Mr. Trump is now telling them: You're going to lose me too, because I'm not going to sacrifice my political life — because AIPAC is not able to buy and control the narrative, the way Michael laid out. It used to — it was very good at it. We all admired, in our way, how it did it. But we all knew — if you think about it — it wouldn't last forever. Well, ironically, the most aggressive effort to hold on to it — the Gaza destruction — is also the end of it.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Richard, a few months ago, Netanyahu said that the greatest enemy of Israel are the assimilationist Jews. This is relevant to [Zohran] Mamdani's running for election. He said, because the assimilationist Jews want to be part of their own society, want to be part of their own economy, they don't look to Israel — they don't put Israel first. And if the American Jews will put America first, European Jews will put Europeans first — they are the enemy.
Well, one friend of mine the other day commented that it's as if Netanyahu has read [George] Orwell's 1984, and he took to heart his statement that those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future. And so what Israel is trying to do is to reframe the whole past, and the whole history, of the settlement of Israel, from the very beginning — the Israeli Holocaust, the Nakba, the mass assassinations, the whole military history.
Well, as I mentioned: To establish all of this, you have to control the narrative. And it's a historical narrative, it's an ongoing news narrative — and it's capped by what students are taught.
I want to discuss the economics of how this narrative came about — and I have some personal experience in this. Back in the 1970s, more than seven decades ago, I saw how the groundwork was being laid for the cultural war that was being prepared. I was a Wall Street economist, and some of my oldest friends were working for Drexel Burnham — that was the investment banking firm for corporate-raiding junk-bond takeovers.
I often met with them, and I addressed their board meetings sometimes, and a number of their managers told me that the most important thing to them in their life was Zionism. And Drexel [Burnham] was the investment banking firm that developed the junk bonds to take over companies, and turned them into financial vehicles to make capital gains. It was part of the whole transition from America's industrial capitalism to predatory finance capitalism — by making buyout offers to take companies, to make them into financial vehicles.
And the main organizer, Michael Milken, went to jail for organizing insider-dealing with Drexel's investors. And the important thing — it was spelled out to me — was that these investors were all Jewish, and they were more than Jewish — they were Zionists.
The financial details have been widely reported about all of this, but what is not recognized is that there was sort of a personal compact among all of these investors — that they were going to be made very rich by playing by new rules — that the "white-shoe" law firms, and investment companies, wouldn't do — of making hostile takeovers, instead of friendly merger proposals. And the deal was, they were all expected to give a substantial portion of their earnings to the Zionist cause — and that went beyond AIPAC: it meant supporting the Zionist cause in many, many dimensions.
And a few decades later, I met with some of the former Drexel strategists who'd gone on to create firms of their own. And they applied this principle — that in order to join this corporate raiding — and we're talking about these investors were the ones who took over Silicon Valley, and the internet stocks, and the information technology stocks — they focused on that from the beginning. They became multi-billionaires and, in the case of Larry Ellison, a trillionaire now — they were able to operate with a freedom of attacking the economy-at-large, that the traditional investment banks and companies, and law firms, didn't.
Well, fast forward to the last decade or so: You have the largest investment firms, those of Silicon Valley — and these firms are all led by Zionists, working together with Israel and the Likud Party, as well as with AIPAC. They're active in U.S. political campaigns. They're using some of their billions of dollars to promote the Zionist cause.
And this attempt to shape American public opinion is centered in the financial sector, and, specifically, the financial control of the information technology sector, the main platforms for internet communication — everything that I was discussing earlier, where the information war is being fought, including the takeover of CBS News to promote Zionist positions; the takeover of networks here; the takeover of mass media publications; and the huge propaganda within the churches; especially the fundamentalist churches, to give this fake Christianity, based on the Scofield Bible and the idea that God told Israel: Kill all the non-Jews — so that you'll have the end of history — and Jesus can come back and send all of us up to heaven, and everyone else to hell —
This is the craziness that has been sponsored, essentially, by the Israelis, pushing the gullible Christian churches to transform — you know, what people think of America as a Christian country is not something that either the traditional Catholics or most Protestant churches, as they existed before 1900, would even recognize today.
So, this is why Trump made the deal with China, forcing the sale of TikTok as part of this campaign — along with Facebook and X, and other platforms and media — to create the Zionist perspective.
And, you remember, Hitler created a fake history: As the world was wrecked by the debt problems of the 1920s and the 1930s, Hitler tried to blame it all on Jewish bankers. Well, the fact is that American banking and European banking was pretty antisemitic. And the origin of these international bankers — they were created by the Catholic Church, in the 13th century, to raise war loans to the kings who were loyal to the church and fighting religious wars and the crusades on its behalf — so there was this fake history.
And the fact is that the Jewish financial presence in the United States was not in banking. When I began to work for banks in the 1960s, there was a marked antisemitism there. They wouldn't hire Jewish people. And one bank I worked for even hired a black employee before they would hire a Jew.
Well, how do you explain the Jewish presence? They were in the brokerage industry. They were in the stock industry, the investment banking industry — such as Drexel Burnham — not in banking at all. And it's this reshaping of the investment banking industry that has cost billions, and I guess you could say trillions, of dollars. Part of this has been to make themselves tax-exempt, from paying anywhere near as high an income or wealth tax as 90% of the population has.
So, I think it's appropriate to explain how the economic powerhouse of this propaganda attempt, that is not only shaping how Americans think of Israel, but [also] because the American internet companies and the associated Silicon Valley companies control the large firms that are active in Europe and Asia. What you're having are these companies using algorithms and automatic intelligence to essentially act as a censorship that goes way beyond the United States, but over the entire world economy that uses Facebook and X, and all of these other internet — TikTok, now.
You're having something that — it's a fight, a global fight, to reshape history in a biased, extremist, Zionist way, a Cold War way, a neocon way, a right-wing, oligarchic way. You're having the whole narrative become oligarchic, neocon, and Zionist. That's really what is the context for the fight that we're going to be seeing unfolding, probably for the next few years.
RICHARD WOLFF: It's very, very useful to have this kind of history. Michael is exceptional in that, and he has been for a long time. The books he writes, the articles he writes, the take-back, they answer the question. Other people notice something. Michael asked the question: Why is it like that? Why, for example, would Jewish people be prominent in a particular industry, not in another industry? And, then, how does that help you explain why Silicon Valley should be peopled by the people that are there now, rather than the conventional banking? And he explains: because Jews were excluded from the historical banking, so they went somewhere else — and that that becomes part of the history.
Well, I want to do the same thing. Jews have been split — for as long as I've heard about any of this — between those who thought that there ought to be a homeland, quote, for Jews — a Zion, a place for them — and we all know what part of the reason must have been: that they were excluded almost everywhere else. Antisemitism, one way or another, could lead people to have the fantastic idea: Gee! If we were in a country that we controlled, maybe, finally, we wouldn't be vulnerable to what has happened to us — in Spain with the Inquisition, in Germany with the Holocaust, and on and on and on; or in America, with the more polite forms of antisemitism that have long been here, and still remain.
And I want to remind people: Why did Jewish people go into financial issues? It used to be a critique, that finance — [Friedrich] Engels once wrote: Socialism can take a stupid form — his word — "stupid." That's when you think that the problem isn't the capitalist, but the Jew. Antisemitism is the stupid-person socialism, was the way he articulated it.
Well, Jews were not allowed to be part of feudal Europe. They were not acceptable — neither as serf, nor as vassal, nor as lord. So, how are they going to live? They can't live on the land, the way everybody else did in what was a rural economic system. So, they became the go-between. They became the merchant who didn't have a piece of land, who moved from one place to another, buying cheap and selling dear — because that's how you live if you're a tradesperson.
Okay, so they become tradespeople, but there's no mystery here. You don't need the Bible to understand any of this. You need a little economic history to know exactly how it evolves.
But that takes me to the point — and perhaps, here, Michael and I disagree. I think he's right in laying it out, but I think one side is now clearly losing, and it's the side that used to be winning. In other words, we're at a point where the former winners, the people who made the deal, the Zionist wing of the Jewish community — which was, by the way, always a minority, but an important one, but they had a lot of resources — they got their little country, they built it up — with the help of Jews outside, of course, and with the help of allies like the United States and Britain.
But it's over. It's over — not because this one or that one failed — because they're part of the losers in the world economy today. That's their problem. That's Mr. Trump's problem. If he didn't have six other crises crashing down on him, he could give Mr. Bibi more. He can't do it anymore. He just can't. It's too costly. And it has now turned into being costly to him politically. And since that's all he has —
He brought three hundred generals and admirals to Washington a couple of weeks ago. He insulted them. He had a numbnuts defense minister tell them that they were fat, and not up-to-snuff. It's outrageous what he did. You know, he's so tone-deaf to do such a thing — Trump, likewise. They're in trouble. That's why they did that crazy thing, and then messed it up.
You know, if you have too many of these, it's no longer the failure of this or that plan, or the mistaken strategic — no, no, you have to put it together. What is happening here? And he's telling Mr. Netanyahu: Look. You've got to change the position of Israel in the world —
That's going to be very hard for Israel. Why would you ask that of a country? Right? You're asking, I mean, the moon — you can't. Why would you be in a position to do that?
And he's clearly pointing out whose job it is, this impossible job: It's them, not me — I'm back. It's a little bit like what he's been telling the Europeans: You know, I'm not in this war in Ukraine, the way I was. You can do it. You better do it. But I'm not going to help you do it anymore, except peripherally.
That's what he's telling everybody. It's because the United States cannot play the role it did. We are in this — pardon me — ass-backwards way, trying to tell the world, and ourselves, the empire is over, and we have to figure out a whole new narrative, strategy, system of alliances, security framework — whatever language you want. It's over, and we're in a new place. And we can't militarize our way out of it.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, there goes Richard again. He's being reasonable.
I don't think Israel is reasonable. I've known these people. They are fanatics. I've worked with Netanyahu's head of Mossad, his advisors — there is no way they will change. They are not going to be reasonable with the Palestinians. They are committed to exterminating them. The American Christians are committed to genocide. You've seen in the whole decision to get rid of Mr. [Charlie] Kirk, a month ago — he wanted to try to be a little more reasonable and reflect just exactly what Richard's been saying — he was killed. Any refusal to go whole-hog with their program is met in the same way that Republican congressmen here in America are treated — expelled from the insider group, if they don't go 100% with the extremism.
I think we're dealing with an extremist ideology, with a religious fundamentalist conviction, that is not amenable to listening to reason. And Trump loves to make promises, and to say: Here's a promise of peace.
Trump has no intention whatsoever of living up to his promise.
Just in today's news, the Argentine peso is collapsing because Trump had promised $20 billion to [Javier] Milei in Argentina, and he hasn't really done anything — just as he made promises to Russia to try to, at least, stabilize diplomacy. And in the last two days, you've had a Russian spokesman saying Trump has not followed through on a single promise he's making. What you are seeing today is the euphoria of a promise that is going to be broken, just as soon as Israel goes to war with Iran. And you can imagine the aftermath of that.
But I want to continue the logic that I'm saying: What do you do if you're an extremist? You have to be totalitarian when it comes to knowledge. And Trump has declared war in the universities in the United States, to treat student protesters opposing genocide — to expel them. And he's following the example of the Zionist university donors who said they're going to cut off all the funding, to Harvard and other prestige universities who don't support a Zionist, specifically anti-Palestinian, position.
And I think the trauma that the Zionist strategists have in mind are the protests against the Vietnam War by American students — the Kent State killings, that killed the student protesters against the war. And that's what led President Johnson to resign in 1968, and said he wasn't going to run again because he couldn't go anywhere in the United States without escaping through the service entrance of hotels, where nobody would yell: Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
All of this is in the mind when you think you don't want the universities and the young people to take a position of supporting peace — because peace is assimilationism. To want peace is to deny that both the joint U.S. and Israeli control of Near Eastern oil and the whole Near/Middle East is at issue.
Well, last December, you had U.S. Senator Tom Cotton introduce a Senate bill that seeks to eliminate any federal use of the term "West Bank" — and instead substitute "Judea and Samaria." And in Florida, you've had the governor try to insist that the textbooks used in the Florida schools rewrite history to use this different terminology. The terminology is sort of an identification as to whose/what language you're going to use. And the House of Representatives has a bill saying that the government is going to remove all references to the West Bank from U.S. government discussions.
The fighting with Gaza may continue. So Israeli settlers are now redoubling their murder rampage against [Palestinians] on the West Bank. They're burning their olive trees. They're destroying their houses. They're bombing all of their houses to drive them out. The war in the West Bank is now just as vicious as it was in Gaza, but there's no military protection. And it is symptomatic of the control of the news that this has not been discussed anywhere, except on the internet.
Richard said at the beginning of the show that he doesn't have the information, we don't have access to the information. Richard, you and I have better information than President Trump has. We read the internet. We read the newspaper. We know what's happening. Trump is surrounded by neocon Zionists, and despite the fact that he has the public relations perspective that you described, he has no understanding of the big picture that you and I, and I think most people who follow Nima's channel, have. That's what's so striking in all of this.
RICHARD WOLFF: I think time will tell us how this is going to play out. I could be wrong. I could be wrong that it's shifting against Israel and that this is symptomatic of that. But let me give you some more evidence that it might be shifting.
The British political system is now in a state of collapse. I mean, almost all points of view about Britain, inside and outside Britain, would agree. The Labour Party has lost pretty much all of the momentum it got from winning the last election, and putting [Keir] Starmer in the position of prime minister. The Conservative Party that ran Britain for most of the last thirty years is in its final death throes. It may disappear, it is so weak at this point in its existence. The polls are against it. Its leadership is fighting each other. It's really a shadow. And an extreme right-wing reform party is probably the best positioned right now, if there were to be an election. And it is a minority party, with very little of a history, and a very strange man at the head.
But what's clear is that the program of getting rid of a very popular Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, which was accomplished by Mr. Starmer, the guy who's now in office, by pillorying Corbyn — by blaming him for being insufficiently vigilant against antisemitism, where the evidence was support of Palestine — that's over. That's a game you can play once, but you can never play it twice. It's like the threat to commit suicide. You can play it really well once, but by the second time, it doesn't have the punch it did before.
I want to remind everyone that a week ago there was a general strike in Italy. The whole country stopped — because the whole country went out, stopped working in solidarity with the dock workers' union there, which had refused to load, or offload, Israeli cargo from any ship docking in the ports of Italy.
And a few days before that, you had mass movements across France on the 18th of September, on the 2nd of October, on the 10th of September — those three dates — and among all the flags of the millions who went into the streets of France were the Palestinian flags, that were obvious everywhere. It's not just Mamdani in New York. There is a global turning against —
Look. It's remarkable that it took this long, given how long the Israelis have done what they've done in Gaza, and the West Bank; and given the way they treated the Arabs, who, let's remember, are half the population roughly of the country of Israel — so you have this split in the country, and all of that — it's taken a god-awful long time! But I do believe we now have signs. Britain has recognized Palestine as a state. So have most of the other Europeans. Ireland did it long ago, but Spain, Italy — Germany, I believe, is about to do it, — France has done it. I mean, Israel's isolation is virtually total.
You know, you even have conservatives running around the United States trying to explain to the American people that we're pretty soon going to have ten billion people as the population of the earth. Half of them — five billion — are Muslim. You've got a problem here. And it's becoming impossible to pretend otherwise. And all the money of the billionaires in Silicon Valley, and all the expertise that AIPAC has shown, are not enough. You can't go against a historical shift — when its time is here. Michael may be right — it may not be here yet. I may be seeing things which, even in their aggregate, are not enough.
But, I haven't thought so before, but I think so now. The communications I got over the last month, from both France and Italy, and also a little bit from Germany, show the Israeli issue — which in Germany has been very important because of their collective guilt and all of that — it doesn't work anymore. The Alternativ für Deutschland [AfD], which is the right-wing inheritor of the Nazi past, is able to be what it is now, which is the largest single party eclipsing the Christian Democrats in Germany for the first time — and their position is unmistakable. It's not being held back, as it used to be, by the legacy of their Holocaust. For the Israelis, this is all unspeakably bad news.
MICHAEL HUDSON: You've put your finger on the really important thing: What is the rest of the world going to do?
And some of my friends that are still associated with the Democratic Party have suggested imposing a litmus test–pledge on political candidates not to accept any campaign contributions from AIPAC, or other Zionist organization. And if they accept such funding, then the Democratic voters are called upon to reject them; and if they win the primaries, to refrain from voting for them — even if this perpetuates the Republican domination of Congress. You've got to get rid of the AIPAC-funded candidates reflecting Zionist interests.
And beyond electoral politics, you have the whole looming threat of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling. And that is the modern travesty — this is as destructive as the Dred Scott ruling that led up to the Civil War. Congress has to pass an act prohibiting private contributions to political campaigns beyond some circumscribed limit, with penalties for bribery and corruption brought against such violators. That's the only way that you can cut off the money that is supporting this rotten congressional neocon, pro-war, oligarchic, anti-labor position. And without such legislation, the United States and its political system are going to continue to be that of an oligarchy, not a democracy. And it'll be an oligarchy controlled by an extremist minority of wealthy financial institutions, and the international neocons who are supported with them.
So ultimately, it's going to be up to the U.S. And the same thing applies to Europe and other countries. It's up to these other countries — outside of Israel — to lead the opposition to the genocide that's occurring, and to the whole idea of ethnic nationalism and ethnic cleansing that you have in Ukraine against Russian speakers; in the Middle East by the American-supported al-Qaeda and ISIS head-chopper that is the head of it now; and by Israel itself in Gaza and the West Bank.
And if you recognize that Israel's war against Gaza and Hamas is against the broadest principles of civilization, that have spent centuries developing the laws of war, the laws of international diplomacy, the laws of, basically, international relations, then you realize the travesty that's occurring in overturning this whole century-long momentum of trying to establish basic civilized —
RICHARD WOLFF: Michael seems to have frozen. Let me pick up while we wait for him to come back.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard. Since you've mentioned the case of Germany, here is the poll that they had in Germany. Three out of five voters believe that Israel's action in Gaza can be called genocide. This is meaningful, as you've mentioned. Go ahead.
RICHARD WOLFF: Yes. But I want to underscore the notion of seeing as a symptom of a larger decline, a rejection, an active rejection of what used to be — at least official — norms of acceptable behavior. I understand. Secretly, those norms are violated by the secret services of many countries, all the time — I understand that, I'm not questioning that. And that's a serious problem.
But it is another step when you do that openly and publicly.
And I think I want to point to something which might even be an argument against what I'm saying. I have watched, and I'm sure you have all seen it, over the last month, on at least four occasions that I'm aware of, the United States has decided to bomb and destroy boats in the Caribbean that are moving in the water near Venezuela. Each time we were told by the president that these boats were involved in the drug traffic and that persons on these boats were killed — and thereby prevented from completing whatever they were doing with the drugs. Okay, so we killed eleven, in one case, four, in another, and I forget the number of people on the other two boats.
Alright, in this situation, the president, who announced and authorized these acts, is functioning as the police, he's functioning as the jury, he's functioning as the judge, and he's functioning as the executioner. In the United States, participation in drug traffic is not a capital crime. You don't get killed for that, if you're found guilty. You have to have a chance to see the evidence presented against you. You have to have a lawyer. You have to be able to question and challenge the evidence. Then it goes to a jury, and only if the jury decides unanimously to find you guilty, will you then be punished with the punishment, 99% of the time, being some sort of imprisonment. We don't kill those people.
We kill in America — it's bad enough — but we kill people, usually, if they have killed somebody. And there is no evidence — not even offered by the president, who showed no evidence of anything, but he didn't show any evidence — that these people had killed anyone. This is extra — and no one in the official positions of the United States government — to my knowledge, I'm no expert — but I haven't heard any outcry — after he did it the first time, he did it a second, third, and fourth time. This is, I mean, this is unbelievable.
This the official murdering of people with no evidence required, no procedure, no due process, no presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Nothing. And the ultimate penalty, execution? Am I the only one here finding this bizarre? Why would you do this? Forget whether it's correct or not that these people were involved in drugs — I don't know — but whether or not they were, why would you do this? Why would it be important not to have your Navy, which is down there, arrest these people? Okay. Board them. Check out, you know, bring them back and subject them to — Why wouldn't you do that? Why would you kill them first?
And here is my answer, again. I am seeing — and I would love [it] to be argued that I'm wrong — I am seeing desperation. I see people getting together in a room. They have to do something. They have that mentality: We are losing something, we must act in a way that will, hopefully, gather support —
And you know, going to war, at least for a few weeks and months, does that for you. It's awful, then, how it falls away, after a few months — and that's been the American experience in Vietnam, in Afghanistan. Those wars were lost, in part, because the American people no longer supported them, the way they had in the beginning. Same is true in Iraq. But for a short time, you get a boost.
And you are now behaving? Look. All the laws of the world don't allow one country to kill people in the boats of another country, and claim that they were involved in some transaction we don't like — which we don't even punish by capital punishment. It is extraordinary behavior, on the end of an extraordinary-behaving regime. So, I see a level of desperation, and I bring it up because I think it should be factored into how we look at all these other questions — because that hysteria, that desperation, is operative across the board.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: It seems that Michael has some sort of problem with his internet connection. Thank you so much, Richard, for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always.
RICHARD WOLFF: As always, and I look forward to talking with you again next week.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: See you. Bye-bye.
Transcription and Diarization: scripthub.dev
Editing: Kimberly Mims
Review: ced
Photo by Aliaksei Lepik on Unsplash