Genocide and the English Language

Over the past two months, media coverage of the presidential election has focused relentlessly on questions of aging and mental stability. For weeks after President Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance in late June, questions about his capacity to govern for a second term dominated headlines. After the handover of the Democratic presidential nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris, similar questions were posed about Donald Trump instead, with countless articles and television commentary speculating about ​“cognitive decline” and asking experts to project such clinical diagnoses onto stump speeches and candidate interviews.

Ultimately, it’s a fool’s errand to try to tease apart the former president’s verbal incontinence from his aggressive ignorance. Every day delivers new examples to puzzle over: from his recent confusion of two Black politicians in a bizarre anecdote about a near-death helicopter ride intended to malign Harris’s character, to his rambling dialogue last week with X CEO Elon Musk (which environmentalist Bill McKibben called ​“the dumbest climate conversation of all time”).

In the end, speculation about the supposed ​“cognitive decline” of politicians is a distraction from the far more worrying decay of political language and political intelligence in the country more broadly.

For years, progressive political satire has settled into the habit of not caricaturing but simply recording the incessant stream of racist outbursts, bizarre conspiracies and gaffes from the Right. In grotesque times, the line between comedy and campaigning is porous; witness how the MAGA GOP’s ​“weirdness” has become a potent meme, as Democrats tap the goldmine of misogynist outpourings (“Childless cat ladies,” etc.) from Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who seems not to have passed up any invites from crackpot podcasters. As with Trump’s car crash of an interview at the late July meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists — during which Trump declared himself ​“the best president for the Black population since Lincoln” and claimed Harris suddenly ​“became a Black person” at some point in her political career — the toxic absurdity of this kind of political speech means that citation can do without commentary.

We laugh, but this involution of political speech comes at a cost, often serving as a comforting distraction from the social and economic dynamics that enable the further consolidation of far-right politics. It also averts attention from the glaring evidence that, when it comes to the ongoing U.S.-supported genocide in Gaza, Biden’s has also been a post-fact presidency, marked by brazen disregard for evidence of Israeli criminality and a persistent disavowal of the findings of international law tribunals. 

Two decades of the U.S. ​“War on Terror” have accustomed us to official mendacity in the service of imperial designs, from Colin Powell’s anthrax vial at the UN to Tony Blair’s ​“dodgy dossier.” But the infuriatingly inane responses that Biden administration spokespeople trot out when asked about U.S. collusion with Israeli war crimes belong to a distinct genre. In response to the daily atrocities carried out by the IDF against civilians, doctors and journalists, these flacks offer familiar refrains: that ​“Israel has a right to defend itself,” that concerns have been voiced, investigations are ongoing, that Israel is complying with international law.

When the highest international court finds incontrovertibly against Israel’s occupation, apartheid and warfare, and a leading Israeli historian of the Holocaust concludes that Israel is indeed ​“acting ​‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part,’ the Palestinian population in Gaza,” this is waved away as irrelevant to U.S. foreign policy. On August 12, Secretary of State Antony Blinken commemorated the 75^th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions— which include ​“the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War” — by affirming the United States’ ​“steadfast commitment to respecting international humanitarian law and mitigating suffering in armed conflict.” But the next day, Blinken approved $20 billion in new military sales to Israel.

Meanwhile, the public is gaslit with repeated claims that Hamas is the only obstacle to a ceasefire deal — notwithstanding the fact that, while the Palestinian armed group has repeatedly accepted ceasefire terms, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has openly rejected any cessation of its assault on Gaza and has now assassinated Hamas’ chief negotiator (and Palestine’s only ever democratically-elected prime minister), Ismail Haniyeh. Questioned about the assassination, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel replied: ​“We have seen the Israelis engage in constructive conversations that we have been having about a ceasefire deal. And so we continue to believe both that a ceasefire deal is both achievable and urgent and it is something that our partners in Israel want.” 

One is reminded of George Orwell’s observation that, in times when political language is ​“largely the defense of the indefensible,” it ​“has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”

It’s not just that the total disjunction between this language and political reality has a debasing and disorienting effect on public discourse; it is also symptomatic of a vacuum of thought at the heart of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Take Biden’s evocation of ​“ancient hatred of Jews” as the cause of the October 7 attacks. Or Blinken’s repeated denunciations of the same attacks — when carried out by Russians against Ukraine — that the United States supports when they’re committed by Israel. The impression is that of a senile Cold War imperialism running on autopilot. 

The French thinker Guy Debord’s maxim that ​“once the running of a state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be led strategically,” seems amply borne out today. The refusal even to acknowledge the broader context around the October 7 attacks, or the century of dispossession that preceded it, is connected to the United States’ drift into an all-out war across the region that it claims to want to avoid. It is striking that even previous administrations fiercely committed to U.S. imperialism — like those of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan — were more reluctant than the Biden administration to give Israel a blank check, occasionally even willing to condition military aid on moderating Israeli aggression. (When Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger threatened to stop supporting Israel in 1973 if they continued fighting the Egyptian army, a ceasefire was agreed the next day.)

The grotesque apotheosis of this corrupted discourse was undoubtedly Netanyahu’s speech at the U.S. Congress in late July. While numerous Democrats boycotted the speech on principle, on the whole, this reception was a bipartisan affair (much like the multiple bills equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, or the defaming and repression of anti-genocide student activists). 

If State Department pressers are little more truthful these days than Kremlin communiqués, one would likewise struggle to find more sycophancy at a Workers’ Party of Korea Congress than was on show at the Capitol. Amid a craven and bombastic exercise in genocide denialism — reducing the reality of starvation in Gaza to a ​“blood libel” and making cynical paeans to the multiculturalism of Israeli troops — the audience’s (23!) standing ovations were so frequent and enthusiastic that they might have foregone sitting altogether. 

As philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, at the time of the Pentagon Papers, ​“the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends have been with us since the beginning of recorded history.” Similarly, the rank hypocrisies of Western liberals have been the object of anti-colonial critique for a century or more. James Baldwin put it plainly: ​“All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.” 

Today, this humanist pretense is predicated on silencing voices for Palestine and against the ongoing genocide. While the family of an Israeli-American hostage was given the podium at the Democratic National Convention — whose ​“big tent” is ample enough for Über’s chief legal counsel and several Republicans—the Uncommitted movement’s request for a Palestinian-American speaker was rebuffed. 

As Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman declared Wednesday night, at a sit-in protest of the DNC’s exclusion of Palestinian-American voices from the convention lineup, ​“Today I watched my party say, ​‘Our tent can fit anti-choice Republicans,’ but it can’t fit an elected official like me? I do not understand. I do not understand why being a Palestinian has become disqualifying in this country.”

It doesn’t seem like an exaggeration to note that a threshold has been crossed in the past few months in the global delegitimation of U.S. and European claims to moral superiority. The combination of incontrovertible legal rulings on Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, the personalized live-streaming of genocide and the disgracefully vapid and mendacious apologias for Israeli war crimes coming out of the White House and State Department will be far more corrosive, in the long run, than any of the offensive idiocies coming out of Trump and the GOP. 

In many ways, Netanyahu’s speech to Congress crystallised the fact that liberal U.S. imperialism is a dead man walking, propped up by the coercion of bases, embargos and bombings but garnering vanishing little consent across the world. The emptiness of its claims to morality and leadership is only matched by the glaring inanity of its global strategy, ultimately reduced to the invocation of a ​“bear hug” with Israel’s settler-fascist regime which looks likely to drag the world, and especially the Middle East, into a chaotic conflagration.