Counterpunch: Graham Crackers: The words of a professional warmonger: 13-09-2026: *************** Jeffrey St. Clair

July 13, 2026 Graham Crackers: The Words of a Professional Warmonger Jeffrey St. ClairFacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail Lindsey Graham on Meet the Press. (Screen capture from video posted to X.) Lindsey Graham said he would die with Israel and it has come to pass. One of the weirdest characters in US politics, Graham’s career was consistent in only one respect: war was his solution to any diplomatic problem. He had the mentality of a red-scare Cold Warrior in a time when the Cold War had ended. But Graham couldn’t relinquish his toxic animus for Russia, even as Russia embraced US-style gangster capitalism, imperialist ambitions and religious prudery. As a political figure, Graham was a senator in search of a father figure. First, he latched on to John McCain, almost to the point of slavish mimicry. But McCain at least enjoyed the appearance of independence, occasionally bucking his own party (largely because he craved the media spotlight that came with a performative “maverick”) and had a perverse sense of humor, even if his barbs were usually at the expense of a rival. Graham seemed lonely and lost after McCain’s death, uncomfortable in his own skin. He inherited McCain’s seat on the Sunday talk shows. But he had none of McCain’s crusty charisma. Instead, Graham hectored and scolded and whined and pouted. But he was humorless and abrasive. His only rhetorical talent was for invective. Graham’s media appearances came off as bombast with a bullhorn. His voice evinced none of the seductive qualities of the southern gentility, in whose political raiment he attempted to adorn himself. Graham’s voice, especially when excited, had a shrill, shrieking-like quality that often verged on hysteria. His speeches alienated, even frightened, more than they persuaded. Like many professional attack dogs, Graham needed a master; he had neither the guts nor the intellect to chart his own course or to build new coalitions. So he transferred his loyalty from McCain to the man McCain hated more than any other: Donald Trump. Graham willingly swallowed Trump’s insults like daily doses of cod liver oil. He renounced his moderate positions on trade, abortion, campaign finance reform, immigration and climate change to be in sync with his new skipper. But like most sycophants, Graham couldn’t be trusted, not even by those at whose feet he bent the knee. Graham once declared it was patriotic for Americans to cheat on their taxes. Of course, he’d’ve been the first one to jail, and probably torture, war tax resisters. A few months ago, Graham said he “felt good” about where the country was heading under Trump: “We’re killing all the right people and cutting your taxes.” This is a pretty concise description of the American imperial project since the Spanish-American War. Graham’s enduring legacy will be that of a blood-thirsty sycophant, willing to jettison any values and self-worth he once professed to be invited into the anterooms of power and receive a few patronizing pats on the head. Ultimately, Lindsey Graham will go down as an inconsequential figure in American history, a bloodthirsty cheerleader for some of the nation’s most disastrous wars who lacked the courage to stand up for the few convictions he once held. To paraphrase Henry Kissinger on Bill Clinton being called a war criminal, “Lindsey Graham doesn’t have the moral fortitude to be consigned to the 9th Circle of Hell with the A-listers.” He’ll have to settle for some more obscure region of eternal torment, where nobody will even recall his name. +++ “Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war.” “Today, I’m 60, I’m not married, I don’t have any kids.” “It’s really American to avoid paying your taxes, legally.” “I don’t blame anybody for using the tax code to their advantage.” “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed, and we will deserve it.” “[Trump] He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. But he doesn’t represent my party.” “I don’t like what he says about John McCain. But when we play golf, it’s fun.” “If you don’t like me being the president’s friend, you’re probably not going to like me.” “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” “What Cruz and others are doing is going to make sure that another 9/11 happens.” “If we can convince the American people to provide assistance and prevent abortions at the 20th week, nothing bad is going to happen. Good things will happen.” On Trump and Cruz: “It’s like being shot or poisoned,” Graham said at a Capitol Hill press conference in January. “What does it matter?” “Finally, a president willing to take on this absurd policy of birthright citizenship.” + On Trump’s impeachment trial: “I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.” + “If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets.” + On Matt Gaetz: “I fear the process surrounding the Gaetz nomination is turning into an angry mob, and unverified allegations are being treated as if they are true. I’ve seen this movie before.” + On Pete Hegseth: “The allegations against Pete are from anonymous sources. I’m not going to make any decisions based on an anonymous source. If you’re not willing to raise your hand under oath and make the accusation, it doesn’t count. I’ve heard everything about these people. None of it counts. No rumors, no innuendo.” + “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” + “To young people out there, young people of color, young immigrants, this is a great state, but one thing I can say without any doubt, you can be an African American and go to the Senate, but you just have to share our values. If you’re a young, African American or an immigrant, you can go anywhere in this state; you just need to be conservative, not liberal.” +++ + “Do not give the terrorists, the enemy combatants, the people who blow up folks at weddings, who fly airplanes into the twin towers, the ability to sue our own troops all over the country for any and everything.” + “President Bush has shown great leadership. He has said that the 21st century will not be ruled or dictated by terrorists, dictators or murderers. He’s absolutely right. God bless him for his resolve.” + “I think the worst thing in the world is to have the courts decide who to target in the war on terrorism. And courts are not military commanders.” + “The worst nightmare in the world is a radical Islamic regime with a weapon of mass destruction.” + “I think our nation’s at war with radical Islam. The primary goal of these groups is to attack our nation. Washington’s a prime target.” + “Whether you’re the wedding cake baker or the gay couple or the Baptist preacher, radical Islam would kill you all if they could.” + “I intend to make America strong again. I’m going to be the champion of the middle class, where I came from. If you make me your president, our best days are ahead. I’m ready to be commander-in-chief, ladies and gentlemen, on day one. I intend to win a war that we cannot afford to lose.” + “Philanthropy is lost. The human spirit is suppressed. Most people want a legacy; they want to give something back, a library, a hospital wing, a donation to their church. This is a form of socialism that must go.” + “The Lindsey Graham via foreign policy is going to beat Rand Paul’s libertarian view of foreign policy. It will beat Barack Obama’s view of foreign policy. It will beat Hillary Clinton’s view of foreign policy.” + “Well, the big elephant in the whole system is the baby boomer generation that marches through like a herd of elephants. And we began to retire in 2008.” + “I think most Americans understand that radical Islam can’t be compromised with or appeased. And the only way we can be safe is to form partnerships over there that will protect us over here.” + “We cannot win this war on terror if people are undercutting us. And one way to undercut us is to empower Iran.” +++ + “If ‘Obamacare’ becomes fully implemented in 2014, it’s going to bankrupt states.” + “If Barack Obama cannot appreciate that our troops are winning in Iraq, he should not be their Commander in Chief.” + “President Obama chose politics over leadership. ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’ have become bait-and-switch.” + “I’m running because I think the world is falling apart.” + “I would love to have a good deal to end the nuclear ambitions of the Iranians, but I don’t trust the Iranians. They’ve been lying and cheating.” + “I’m the ranking Republican on the foreign aid appropriations subcommittee, so I know Tunisia well.” + “We will never win this war until we understand the effect that Guantanamo Bay has had on the overall war effort. And we’ll never get the support of the American people if we can’t prove to them that these folks that we’re dealing with are not common criminals. We’re going to keep them – keep you safe from them.” + “You want to see a war on women? Come with me to Iraq and Afghanistan, folks. I’ve been there 35 times. I will show you what they do to women.” + “The Afghan security forces will always have the help of the U.S. American military to ensure that Afghanistan never fails.” + “This idea of holding the Defense Department hostage to the tax debate makes me sick to my stomach. Knock it off.” + “And here’s the first thing I would do if I were president of the United States. I wouldn’t let Congress leave town until we fix this [reducing Pentagon budget]. I would literally use the military to keep them in if I had to. We’re not leaving town until we restore these defense cuts. We are not leaving town until we restore the intel cuts.” + “We have never seen more threats against our nation and its citizens than we do today.” + “We have gutted our ability to detect the next attack.” +++ + “The Prime Minister [Netanyahu] convinced me that Israel is developing weapons that will change the future of warfare. They would love to partner with the United States, which is the most important form of aid we could ever give them and the most important event that would provide security to both countries. + “Moving our embassy from Tel Aviv to western Jerusalem is not inconsistent with any peace proposal. It is consistent with the reality – as I and many others understand it – that the capital of Israel is Jerusalem,” + “The Palestinians in Gaza are the most radicalized population on the planet who are taught to hate Jews from birth. It will take years to fix this problem.” + “When I hear ‘From the river to the sea,’ it reminds me of the ‘Final Solution.’ The Hamas terrorists are the SS on steroids.” + “Give Israel what they need to fight the war they can’t afford to lose. This is Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids.” + “I’m tired of the word ‘genocide’… if Israel desired to commit genocide, they possess the means but choose not to.” + “This court [ICC] is for Africa and thugs like Putin. It is not for democracies like Israel and the United States.” + On Mossad: “They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me.” +++ + “Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out. You would be doing your country – and the world – a great service. The only people who can fix this are the Russian people. Easy to say, hard to do. Unless you want to live in darkness for the rest of your life, be isolated from the rest of the world in abject poverty, and live in darkness you need to step up to the plate.” + “The Russians are dying…Best money we’ve ever spent.” + “To know that my commitment to Ukraine has drawn the ire of Putin’s regime brings me immense joy.” + “To the Russian people: Putin is leading you into the abyss. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers killed and wounded. An economy smaller than Italy’s in volume, with pressure approaching. Russia is isolated like never before. This does not make Russia great; it makes it a rogue state.” + “They [Ukraine] just need weapons to free their country of a terrible invasion. They’re sitting on a trillion dollars’ worth of minerals that could be good to our economy. So I want to keep helping our friends in Ukraine. We can win this. They need our help.” + “Ukraine isn’t the problem. Russia is the problem.” + “Iran is part of the problem, not the solution. And the Russian government is ignoring reality.” +++ + “Everything I know about the Iranians I learned at the pool room. I met a lot of liars, and I know the Iranians are lying.” + “After announcing he was going to take a genetic test, Graham told Fox News: “I’ll probably be Iranian. That’d be, like, terrible.” + “If Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them. So, to all the people listening, if this diplomatic effort fails, President Trump is going to take the Strait of Hormuz.” + “Americans are dying and the U.S. is spending billions to dislodge the terrorist Iranian regime that threatens the region. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia seems to be issuing statements and doing things in the background that are marginally helpful, but unwilling to participate in military operations to end the reign of terror coming out of Iran. Hopefully Gulf Cooperation Council countries will get more involved as this fight is in their backyard,” he went on. “If you are not willing to use your military now, when are you willing to use it?” + “When this [Iran] regime goes down, we are going to have a new Middle East, and we are going to make a ton of money.” + “This regime is in a death throe now; it is gonna be on its knees, it’s going to fall, and when it falls, we’re going to have peace like no other time, we’re going to have prosperity unlike anyone could ever imagine.” + “I feel good about where we’re going as a nation. We’re killing all the right people and cutting your taxes. Trump is my favorite president. We’ve run out of bombs. We didn’t even run out of bombs during World War II.” + “Without a credible threat of the use of military force, nothing changes in Venezuela.” + “Cuba’s next.” + “I will be with Israel to my dying day.” Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.

Counterpunch: Pete Hegseth's Unholy war: 18-09-2026: **********

September 18, 2026 Pete Hegseth’s Unholy War Liz TheoharisFacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0 There is a question Christians have been asking for generations: What would Jesus do? It is a deceptively simple question that is printed on bracelets and bumper stickers, taught to children in Sunday schools, and invoked when Christians are discerning how faith should shape public life. The question becomes considerably more demanding when the decisions at stake concern war, immigration, poverty, political power, and the use of military force. In addition to the recent attention about his military strategy, social and political beliefs, and leadership style, Pete Hegseth’s public theology deserves serious attention from those unfamiliar and disinterested in religion as well as adherents of Christianity. As secretary of defense, Hegseth has increasingly spoken about American power in explicitly Christian language. He has hosted Christian worship at the Pentagon, invoked Scripture in connection with military service, emphasized the Christian foundations of the United States, and described some Trump administration policies — including border enforcement — as “biblical.” Indeed, speaking at a Christian media convention last February, Hegseth connected the health and founding of the United States with Christianity and characterized border and immigration policies as mandated in the Bible. The question about Hegseth’s faith and religious practice, however, cannot simply be whether he is sincere. The question is more fundamental: What kind of Christianity is being proclaimed when the language of Jesus is attached to military power? Or perhaps a simpler but harder question: In the face of war, authoritarianism, economic, environmental, and political crises: What would Jesus do? A Christianity of Power The Christian faith has always contained competing visions of what it means to follow Jesus. There is a Christianity that blesses kings, armies, empires, and national ambitions. There is another Christianity that remembers a Palestinian Jewish leader who was unhoused and a migrant and was executed by an imperial power after heralding the arrival of a radically different kingdom. This distinction matters a great deal. Hegseth routinely emphasizes strength, warriors, national identity, borders, enemies, and divine blessing. And joining forces with Israel to prosecute the war with Iran has only heightened the stakes of his rhetoric. Early in the conflict, Hegseth cited Psalm 144, including its language about God training hands for war and fingers for battle. There is nothing inherently un-Christian about a person in the military having a sincere religious faith. People of faith serve in the armed forces for many reasons. Generations of religious scholars and adherents have considered war and conflict as it relates to the faith through theories and practices of religious pacifism, “just war,” defensive war, theologies of self-defense, conceptions of the last days, and the ethical limits of violence in humanitarian conflicts, among others. The theological problem arises, however, when the power of the state begins to present itself as an instrument of God’s purposes. That is a very old temptation. Empires have long claimed divine sanction. Kings have declared their wars holy. Nations have wrapped their ambitions in sacred language. And Christians have at times sought to confuse the interests of the nation with the kingdom of God. But Jesus does something profoundly disruptive to this arrangement: He refuses to identify God with Caesar. The People at the Margins Consider where Jesus directs our attention. Throughout the Bible, Jesus embraces people whom those with power, military might, and wealth have pushed aside: the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, immigrants, women, children, tax collectors, and those treated as religious outsiders. In Matthew 25, one of the most famous Bible passages — sometimes called the “Last Judgment” — Jesus identifies with the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these,” he teaches, “you did for me.” That is not an incidental teaching. It is a political and theological reorientation. And it is directed at nations, not simply individuals or religious congregations. The question Jesus asks his followers is not first, “How strong is your nation?” It is not, “How effectively have you defeated your enemies?” It is not even, “How faithfully have you defended your borders?” Instead, he asks: How has your nation treated the most vulnerable among you? This matters enormously when Christian language is used to justify violent and exclusionary immigration policy or when it is used to promote cutting off families from food or lifesaving healthcare. If we claim that border enforcement is “biblical,” then Christians must practice the Bible’s extraordinary insistence on welcoming the other. After all, Scripture commands God’s people to remember that they, too, were once strangers in a foreign land, and the way to honor and worship God is by welcoming the immigrant neighbor. If Matthew 25 means what Christians have traditionally claimed, Christ is encountered precisely among the hungry, the unhoused, the incarcerated — and that as long as anyone is unfree and impoverished, it is the responsibility of the nation to do something about it. Theology of the Enemy There is another problem with a Christianity centered on military strength: its understanding of the enemy. Christianity does not teach that some people become less human because they are someone’s adversaries. It does not profess that God blesses battleships nor justifies genocide (even if Hegseth’s spiritual adviser claims it does). Jesus’s command to love one’s enemies may be among the most difficult teachings in the entire New Testament. It is also one of the clearest. Jesus does not say, “Love your friends and destroy your enemies.” He says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Jesus does not say, “Blessed are the powerful because they shall dominate.” He says, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the descendants of God,” and “Blessed are the poor for they shall be first under God’s reign.” That does not mean that people of faith must be naïve about violence. It does not mean governments face no genuine security threats. It does not erase the moral complexity of protecting human beings from violence. But it does mean that people who call themselves Christians should be extraordinarily cautious whenever military violence is described as holy, righteous, inevitable, or divinely ordained. Christian tradition contains a long history of wrestling with war. It also contains an even deeper tradition of martyrs, peacemakers, conscientious objectors, abolitionists, human rights activists, and nonviolent movements that have insisted that human beings cannot be reduced to enemies. On “Christ Is King” One phrase that increasingly appears in Hegseth’s public religious rhetoric is “Christ is King.” On the surface, this is an ancient Christian confession. But Christians should be careful about what happens when it is fused with nationalism. If Christ is King, then Caesar is not. If Christ is King, then the nation cannot be God. If Christ is King, then military might cannot be the ultimate measure of righteousness. And if Christ is King, then Christians must remember what kind of king Jesus was. Jesus did not arrive in Jerusalem on a tank. He did not establish his kingdom through an air campaign. He did not recruit an army to seize the Roman state. Jesus entered the city on a donkey. He washed his disciples’ feet. He touched people considered untouchable. He fed hungry crowds. He stood with the condemned. And when his disciples reached for weapons, Jesus told them to put them away. This is not weakness; it is a different conception of power and a different idea of violence, military and force. And it stands worlds away from the Hegseth’s professed belief in a conquering Christ. Christian nationalism raises the question of who counts as part of the nation — and, implicitly, who counts as part of the Christian community. Hegseth’s religious politics have attracted scrutiny because of his association with a conservative Reformed Christian milieu and his willingness to amplify figures and institutions associated with Christian nationalist ideas. That should concern Christians not because Christianity should be banished from public life, but because Christianity is too important to be reduced to a tribal identity. There is no nationalism in the Sermon on the Mount; there is no exceptionalism in the Last Judgment. Jesus did not teach his followers to build communities divided by race, citizenship status, wealth, or political loyalty. The early Christian proclamation was astonishing precisely because it created a community in which Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female could belong together. Christianity becomes spiritually dangerous when it is transformed from a call to discipleship into a badge of national membership, and a cross becomes something very different when it is used to sanctify exclusion, violence, and war, especially against the poor and marginalized. So, What Would Jesus Do? Let’s stop treating “What would Jesus do?” as a sentimental slogan. Instead, ask the question concretely. What would Jesus do when a family fleeing poverty and violence arrives at the border? What would Jesus do when a child is separated from a parent? What would Jesus do when a nation considers going to war? What would Jesus do when military personnel are asked to kill (and the nation suggests canceling student debt to those who sign up to do that killing)? What would Jesus do when poor communities are abandoned while enormous resources flow into weapons? What would Jesus do when a government claims God has blessed its political program? And what would Jesus do when Christians begin to believe that their nation has a special claim on God? The Gospels give us clues. Jesus runs toward suffering rather than away from it. Jesus challenges religious authorities who use God to legitimize their own power. Jesus feeds people rather than lecturing them. Jesus welcomes the stranger. Jesus stands with those society declares expendable. And Jesus tells his followers that greatness consists not in domination but in liberation. That is a radically different theology of power. Another Christian Patriotism Christianity offers an alternative to nationalism that does not require Christians to abandon love of country, but it begins by refusing to worship their nation. It means loving one’s neighbors, including neighbors who have crossed a border. It means seeking peace rather than glorifying war. It means protecting human life rather than measuring success by military superiority. It means asking whether public resources are being used to ensure that every person has food, housing, healthcare, education, dignity, and a meaningful opportunity to flourish. And it means remembering that the Bible’s central story is not the triumph of one nation over all others. It is the liberation of an oppressed people. It is the insistence that Pharaoh does not have the final word. That is why the question “What would Jesus do?” cannot be separated from the question raised by Florence Reece’s popular song written in 1931 in Harlan County, Kentucky, during the union organizing drive of the United Mine Workers: “Which side are you on?” Christian faith does not ask us to look down from the Pentagon, the White House, or any other seat of power and decide which people deserve compassion. Instead, Jesus teaches us to love God, love your neighbor, love even your enemy — and recognize Christ in the people that those in power tell you to hate and fear. When Christian nationalism asks its followers to choose between faith and the stranger, between military might and peacemaking, between national supremacy and human solidarity, Christians — including the Christians in the highest reaches of power — should ask a different question. Not “How can we make America powerful enough to win?” But: What would Jesus do? The answer begins where the Gospel always has: feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrant, freeing the oppressed, and telling the people at the bottom that God has not forgotten them. That is not a weak Christianity. It is Christianity’s most dangerous claim about power: The last shall be first. The mighty shall be brought down. And the kingdom of God belongs not to those who dominate, but to those who serve. The piece first appeared on TomDispatch. Liz Theoharis, a TomDispatch regular, is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor and We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign. Follow her on Twitter at @liztheo.

Counterpunch: When Monsters Walk Among Us. Henry Giroux: 18-09-2026: **********

September 18, 2026 When Monsters Walk Among Us Henry GirouxFacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain We have many monsters to destroy. –George Seferis But how can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth? –Bertolt Brecht More than four decades ago, the Greek composer and public intellectual Manos Hadjidakis issued a warning that now reads less like a reflection on fascism than a prophecy of our own time. The greatest danger, he suggested, comes when we grow accustomed to the monster, when its presence no longer shocks the conscience and its violence begins to merge with the routines of everyday life. Tolerance does not diminish the monster; it multiplies the conditions that allow it to flourish, strengthening its presence in public life until monstrosity itself acquires the authority to govern. In this instance, the collapse of conscience is inseparable from the uncoupling of “belief from judgment, conviction from action.” We have reached such a moment. The monsters are no longer hiding in the shadows. They occupy presidential offices and ministries, command armies and police forces, control digital platforms, dominate television screens, administer borders, build detention centers, and transform the suffering of others into political theater. Their language of racial purification, mass deportation, extermination, vengeance, and disposability no longer produces the outrage it once might have summoned. Cruelty is displayed as strength. Humiliation becomes entertainment. The spectacle of suffering becomes a source of political pleasure. What should be unbearable becomes familiar; what should provoke resistance is absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life. The monster triumphs not simply when it commits atrocities, but when its language becomes ordinary, its violence becomes acceptable, its weaponization of racial and class divisions goes unnoticed, and its presence no longer disturbs the moral imagination. Toni Morrison gave us another language for understanding how monsters become ordinary. She called it “dead language,” a language emptied of ethical responsibility and enlisted in the service of domination. Morrison’s dead language is itself monstrous. As she writes, oppressive language “does more than represent violence; it is violence.” It is a 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.” Morrison’s insight reaches beyond rhetoric. Monsters require a language that prepares the ground for their violence, strips their victims of humanity, and teaches people to accommodate the unthinkable. Dead language is one of the conditions that allows monstrosity to pass into everyday life disguised as common sense. Primo Levi once observed that “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” Levi remains right about the role of unthinking functionaries, but today the monsters themselves have acquired institutional power and public legitimacy. Emboldened by staggering economic inequality, empowered by the machinery of high-tech authoritarianism, and legitimated by an expanding culture of state violence, they have moved from the political margins to the commanding heights of American society. Here Hannah Arendt’s warning about the failure of thinking takes on a renewed urgency. Monstrosity thrives when judgment is surrendered, when the obligation to think becomes a burden, and when ignorance is transformed from an absence of knowledge into a cultivated refusal to know. We might call this the banality of ignorance: the willful suspension of judgment that allows people to see suffering without confronting it and to hear lies without rejecting them. The monster does not merely demand obedience. It needs subjects who have learned not to think about what their obedience makes possible. Yet Hadjidakis’s warning poses a question more disturbing than whether monsters now govern us. What does it mean for a society to begin to resemble its monsters? And what pedagogical forces are at work in creating and normalizing that resemblance? Resemblance does not mean that everyone becomes a killer or a fascist. It means that the habits of thought, structures of feeling, and forms of indifference on which monstrosity depends begin to penetrate everyday life. The banality of ignorance becomes a social condition, a cultivated form of moral blindness in which not knowing offers a refuge from responsibility and refusing to think becomes a condition of belonging. But such ignorance does not exist outside the realm of desire. It has an emotional register, a psychology of authoritarianism and a pedagogy of terror through which people learn not simply to live with cruelty but to bathe in its emotional charge, finding pleasure and belonging in “patterns of domination and submission [that harden] into a syndrome of attitudes regarding hierarchy, power, sexuality and tradition.” The monster has a long history, born in the darkest regions of the social imagination where fear, difference, and power converge. As Manvir Singh has observed, monsters have long haunted the boundaries between the human and the inhuman, the familiar and the terrifying, the civilized and what it casts outside its gates. But monsters are never simply creatures of fantasy. They are warnings, projections, embodiments of collective fears, and often weapons for deciding who belongs within the circle of humanity and who can be expelled from it. What matters politically is what happens when the monster steps out of myth and fantasy, takes possession of the institutions of power, and acquires the authority to decide who may live, who must suffer, and who can be made disposable. There is, however, another problem with the metaphor of the monster itself. To imagine Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu, or other architects of contemporary authoritarian violence simply as monsters risks placing them outside history, as if their cruelty originated in some private pathology detached from the society that produced them. The monster can then become an alibi for the society that created him. Moral outrage becomes individualized, while the institutions, economic interests, racial hierarchies, cultural apparatuses, and political forces that make organized cruelty possible disappear. This is the crucial insight in Jorge Gonzalez Arocha’s argument that turning perpetrators into monsters can itself become a way of looking away. Arocha argues that “reducing the perpetrator to nothing more than a monster protects us from recognising ourselves as potential perpetrators. It distances us from the event and its reality, while placing us in a position of moral superiority….[It] is a way of denying that the ability to destroy also belongs to us, that it forms part of the human condition.” The problem is not that monsters do not exist. The problem begins when monstrosity becomes an explanation rather than a question. Monsters do not descend upon society from somewhere outside history. They are produced within history, cultivated through institutions, protected by bureaucracies, legitimized by law, financed by powerful economic interests, amplified by media, and normalized through culture. The political significance of monsters lies not simply in the horrors they commit, but in the social order that makes those horrors possible, useful, legitimate, and eventually ordinary. A singular focus on monsters can obscure the deeper structure of gangster capitalism, a system that “prioritises certain forms of power over the common good and enables the gradual dehumanization of our societies.” The question must therefore change. We must move from monster to machinery, from the pathology of the individual to the political economy of organized cruelty, and from there to the cultural and educational forces that teach people how to live with the suffering such machinery produces. Monsters do not act alone. Their power becomes visible in the institutions that protect them, the wealth that sustains them, the laws that authorize them, and the violence that follows in their wake. We see their handiwork in streets stained with blood, in migrants brutalized and left to die in detention centers, in the torture documented in Israeli prisons, and in the bodies of children and families torn apart by Israeli and American bombs in Gaza. Behind these abstractions are torn limbs, dismembered bodies, children pulled from rubble, families burned and buried beneath the ruins of their homes, and human beings reduced to flesh and bone by systems in which cruelty has been organized, authorized, and repeated until even the most horrific violence threatens to lose its capacity to shock. The horror lies in a society’s growing accommodation to monsters, in the silence surrounding their crimes and the erosion of moral and political boundaries that once made their actions intolerable. Such silence is never innocent. It is the rigor mortis of ethical and political decay, the point at which a politics organized around death begins to pass as ordinary life. The nightmare no longer lurks in the shadows; it claws its way into daylight and is met with indifference, resignation, or applause. The question is how people learn to live amid mass suffering and eventually look away. What forms of power require such silence? What institutions cultivate it? What culture teaches people to turn away from the bodies left behind? And most important, what pedagogical machinery teaches millions not merely to tolerate cruelty but to identify with those who inflict it, desire the power they embody, and experience the suffering of others as the price of their own imagined liberation? Political economy, culture, and pedagogy converge here. The monster becomes inseparable from gangster capitalism, pedagogical terrorism, and the culture of cruelty. Gangster capitalism does not accidentally produce monsters. It increasingly requires them, along with publics capable of loving them. Arendt’s concept of radical evil takes this argument further, moving us from the failure of judgment to the political machinery that renders human beings superfluous. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, radical evil emerges from a political order capable of stripping human beings of rights, history, individuality, and finally their claim to membership in the human community. The concentration camp represented the most extreme realization of this logic, but its political significance extended beyond the camp. Totalitarianism required institutions capable of transforming human beings into disposable matter. Arendt’s later account of Adolf Eichmann complicated the picture further. Eichmann did not appear before her as a demonic figure possessing some unfathomable depth of evil. He appeared frighteningly ordinary: bureaucratic, careerist, obedient, incapable of thinking seriously about the consequences of his actions. The banality of evil did not mean that his crimes were banal. It meant that extraordinary crimes could be administered through ordinary routines, bureaucratic language, professional ambition, obedience, and the suspension of judgment. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the Nazi machinery of terror and mass murder, represents another configuration of the political monster. Here ideological fanaticism, administrative intelligence, and extraordinary institutional power converged. Eichmann and Heydrich should not be collapsed into the same psychological type, but both expose the inadequacy of treating atrocity simply as the work of monsters. Modern systems of terror require administrators, lawyers, technicians, police officers, propagandists, intellectuals, journalists, and functionaries. Evil becomes most politically dangerous when it acquires an office, a budget, a bureaucracy, a vocabulary of necessity, and a public willing to accept its premises. Primo Levi understood this danger in another register. He rejected the consoling temptation to divide the world neatly between innocent humanity and incomprehensible monsters. As he once put it, “It is a stupid mistake to see all the demons on one side and all the saints on the other…. To divide into black and white means not to know human nature.” His concept of the gray zone gave this insight its most disturbing political force. The gray zone did not abolish distinctions between victim and perpetrator; it exposed the ways systems of domination corrupt moral life itself. The political lesson is disturbing precisely because it denies us the comfort of believing that atrocity belongs to another species of human being. Modern barbarism does not emerge outside civilization. It is organized through civilization’s institutions, technologies, forms of expertise, and structures of obedience. Umberto Eco made a related point about fascism. Fascism does not possess a single immutable costume. It changes its language, symbols, technologies, and institutional forms. Eco warned that “Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.” To search only for Mussolini’s blackshirts or Hitler’s brownshirts is therefore to risk missing fascism when it returns wearing a business suit, carrying a Bible, appearing on podcasts, commanding an algorithm, or invoking the language of freedom, national rebirth, border security, and popular sovereignty. Fascism survives precisely because it learns how to inhabit the historical conditions of its own time. If fascism changes with the historical conditions it inhabits, then those conditions become central to understanding how its monsters are produced and sustained. The problem of the monster must therefore be situated within political economy, culture, pedagogy, and history. The conditions that make monstrosity possible are neither accidental nor timeless. They emerge from societies in which extreme inequality is treated as natural, cruelty becomes entertainment, racial hierarchy is defended as common sense, militarism becomes a national virtue, and entire populations are designated as disposable. The monstrosity of the present did not suddenly appear with Trump. Its genealogy runs through the long history of American empire and, with particular force, through the War on Terror. In the name of fighting terrorism, the United States unleashed wars whose direct death toll exceeded 600,000 people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, while estimates of deaths produced indirectly through destroyed infrastructure, disease, displacement, and malnutrition run into the millions. Such devastation cannot be reduced to the language of catastrophic policy failure. It constituted a vast machinery of racialized disposability in which entire populations could be bombed, tortured, displaced, imprisoned, and abandoned while their suffering barely registered within the moral vocabulary of American political life. Aimé Césaire understood long ago that imperial violence never remains safely confined to the people against whom it is first directed. Colonial brutality, he warned, produces a “terrific boomerang effect”: the habits of dehumanization, racial hierarchy, lawlessness, and organized violence cultivated abroad eventually return home. The War on Terror offers a terrifying contemporary illustration of that warning. The torture chambers of Abu Ghraib, indefinite detention at Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition, drone assassination, mass surveillance, and the normalization of permanent war did more than devastate other societies. They helped educate the American public into accepting torture, surveillance, militarized policing, lawless executive power, and the designation of whole populations as threats. Trumpism did not invent this political culture. It inherited it, intensified it, and turned its imperial habits inward. In this sense, the monster came home because the machinery that produced it had been operating for decades. Under gangster capitalism, the imperial machinery of disposability turns inward, assuming an especially lethal domestic form. Wealth concentrates, public goods are stripped for private profit, democratic institutions are subordinated to billionaire power, and the punishing state expands as the social state contracts. Abandonment and repression become two sides of the same political order. Pedagogy becomes central because fascism is never merely imposed from above. It must be learned. People must be taught whom to fear, whom to hate, whose suffering matters, whose suffering can be ignored, and whose disappearance can be celebrated. They must learn to experience cruelty as strength, domination as freedom, racial hierarchy as natural, and violence as national purification. Pedagogical terrorism names this process. It operates through schools and churches, television and social media, podcasts, political rallies, digital platforms, advertising, and the spectacular theater of state violence. These cultural apparatuses do more than communicate ideas. They organize attention, shape consciousness, mobilize desire, and teach habits of feeling. They create the emotional and ideological conditions under which disposability becomes common sense. Private anxieties are given public enemies. Loneliness is transformed into the counterfeit solidarity of the tribe, powerlessness redirected into aggression, and resentment elevated into a moral virtue. Fear is converted into hatred and humiliation into the desire to humiliate others. Fascism thrives on this emotional economy because it gives private suffering a public target. The wounds inflicted by an increasingly brutal social order are redirected away from the structures that produce them and toward immigrants, Black people, Palestinians, feminists, intellectuals, queer people, dissidents, and anyone else designated as an enemy. A culture of barbarism takes hold when cruelty is no longer confined to the state or its most fanatical leaders but enters everyday life, shaping public consciousness, political desire, and the boundaries of who is considered human. Barbarism becomes cultural when large numbers of people support forced removal, collective punishment, starvation, exterminatory violence, and the destruction of civilian life without experiencing such policies as a moral catastrophe. Israel offers a chilling example. In May 2025, a survey conducted by Pennsylvania State University professor Tamir Sorek found that 82 percent of Israeli Jews surveyed supported the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, with 54 percent saying they were “very” supportive. More disturbing still, 47 percent agreed that when the Israeli military conquers an enemy city it should act as the Israelites did in the biblical conquest of Jericho, by “killing all the residents.” These figures register something more terrifying than support for a particular military policy. They reveal how the language of expulsion and extermination can migrate from the margins of political life into the moral vocabulary of everyday society. This is what a culture of barbarism looks like when disposability becomes common sense and the destruction of another people can be imagined as legitimate, necessary, or even righteous. Omer Bartov has gone further, arguing that Israeli society has become complicit through both action and silence, and is increasingly marked by violence, vulgarity, and indifference. What is at stake here exceeds the crimes of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, or the Israeli military. It points to the pedagogical production of a social order in which the language of elimination becomes thinkable, mass suffering becomes tolerable, and exterminatory violence can be absorbed into the ordinary rhythms of national life. This is the endpoint of pedagogical terrorism: the manufacture of subjects for whom barbarism no longer appears barbaric. The culture of fascism does not merely tolerate monsters; it turns them into celebrities, strongmen, saviors, and objects of identification, reproducing a cult of leadership. Their violations of moral and political norms become signs of authenticity, their cruelty proof of strength. Their contempt for democratic restraints becomes a source of pleasure for followers who experience each transgression as their own imaginary liberation from the obligations of equality, compassion, and mutual responsibility. Trump offered a chilling display of these mobilizing passions of fascism when he called upon his followers to cheat in the November elections. At the Republican convention in Dallas, he instructed thousands of supporters to raise their right hands and repeat an oath of personal loyalty that included the declaration, “I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do.” This was more than another assault on democratic norms. It was a fascist political ritual in which loyalty to the leader, contempt for law, and the thrill of collective transgression were fused into a mass spectacle. Yet the incident was absorbed into the churn of the news cycle as another bizarre Trump performance. This is how fascism becomes ordinary: the outrageous is reported, consumed, and forgotten before its meaning can become a matter of sustained public judgment. What should have registered as a political emergency dissolved into the culture of immediacy, stripped of its historical meaning and reduced to another spectacle without consequence. The political task cannot be reduced to removing individual monsters from power. The language of monstrosity becomes politically disabling when it individualizes what is systemic, directing attention toward pathological leaders while leaving intact the institutions, economic interests, media ecosystems, racial hierarchies, and educational forces that produce authoritarian consciousness. The defining political question of our time is not whether monsters have returned. It is what kind of society produces them, what forms of power need them, and what pedagogical machinery teaches people to follow them. The monster is not the end of the analysis but its beginning. Fascism cannot be defeated by removing its most visible leaders while leaving intact the economic, political, and cultural machinery that produced them. The struggle against fascism must also confront gangster capitalism, white supremacy, militarism, the carceral state, and the institutions that turn human beings into disposable populations. But resistance cannot live on outrage alone. It needs a language of possibility and a politics capable of making hope concrete. Hope is neither optimism nor faith that history bends automatically toward justice. It is a practice born when people refuse the manufactured loneliness of neoliberal life, discover one another in struggle, and recognize that what they experience as private misery is often a public wound produced by structures of power. It takes form in unions, classrooms, demonstrations, mutual-aid networks, abolitionist movements, struggles for Palestinian freedom, immigrant justice campaigns, and organizations capable of turning anger into collective power. There are already signs that such a politics is struggling to be born in the United States. The resurgence of democratic socialism, the extraordinary growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, the electoral victories of socialist candidates, and renewed labor militancy suggest that increasing numbers of people are no longer willing to accept the tyranny of the market as the horizon of political possibility. DSA reported more than 120,000 members by the summer of 2026, alongside a widening field of socialist electoral victories and organizing campaigns. These developments should neither be romanticized nor mistaken for a mass socialist transformation. But they matter because they register something the ruling order desperately wants declared impossible: capitalism is once again being named as a political problem, socialism has returned to public life as a language of possibility, and collective struggle is breaking through the suffocating claim that there is no alternative. Hope is dangerous to fascism because authoritarian power feeds on isolation, historical amnesia, political exhaustion, and the conviction that nothing can be changed. Militant hope shatters that conviction. It turns private suffering into public anger, spectators into political agents, and the loneliness on which fascism feeds into collective power. Against the pedagogy of fear, it creates a pedagogy of resistance and civic courage. Against the culture of cruelty, it makes solidarity a weapon and justice a collective demand. Against a society organized around disposability, it insists that human beings are worth more than markets, borders, property, and profit, and that the institutions producing misery, abandonment, and organized violence must be transformed. The struggle is larger than defeating the monsters who occupy the commanding heights of power. We must destroy the conditions that make them possible by building a mass democratic politics capable of confronting concentrated wealth, dismantling racial and economic hierarchies, defending public goods, breaking the grip of militarism, and returning economic and political power to ordinary people. Democracy cannot survive as the political shell of capitalism, emptied of its substance while concentrated economic power governs from within. It must become a way of organizing social life itself, grounded in equality, collective power, and the struggle for a just future. More than four decades ago, Manos Hadjidakis warned: “When the face of the monster ceases to frighten us, then we must be afraid… because that means we have begun to resemble it.” His warning has never been more urgent. But resemblance is not destiny. The monster depends upon our resignation, our silence, our isolation, and finally our belief that resistance is futile. The most radical form of hope begins with the refusal of that lie. Monsters are made by history, and they can be unmade by collective struggle. That struggle must confront capitalism itself and build a democratic socialist politics capable of wresting power from the ruling elites, returning it to ordinary people, and transforming hope into a force for remaking the world. Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

NEO: Trade surplus or war surplus? Competing visions by the US and China: 12-09-2026: ******

Trade Surplus or War Surplus? Competing Visions Presented by the US and China Simon Chege Ndiritu, September 12, 2026 The real threat to global stability and the well-being of citizens is not China’s strong economic performance but Washington’s colossal military spending, which drains the social sector and provokes global conflicts. Scott Bessent campaigned against China’s trade surplus US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly campaigned against China’s trade surplus, including rallying 19 G20 members to disrupt China’s $1.2 trillion trade surplus (2025), while ignoring how his country is allocating $1.5 trillion for wars in the 2027 financial year (FY2027). China’s $1.2 Trillion Surplus — Affordable Products to the World China made a record $119.09 billion in trade surplus for August 2026, which was a significant increase from $112.5 billion recorded in the previous month. Meanwhile, the US is estimated to have used nearly the same amount ($103 billion) for the first 120 days of its war against Iran. By September 7, 2026, Brown University reported that Americans have incurred an additional $100 billion while purchasing diesel and gasoline over the period of Washington’s illegal war against Iran, which has also turned into a debacle. Therefore, the US government’s decision to deprive its citizens and channel resources to wars is creating conditions that cause taxpayers to lose even more money. Despite this, the White House and the House Budget Committee have expanded the US budget for wars by 44% to over $1.5 trillion for FY2027. While China’s trade surplus comes from efficient production and comparative advantage, which enables the creation of low-priced, high-quality products to consumers, Washington’s massive defense spending deprives Americans, destroys lives and infrastructure, and threatens the global economy and peace. With the US sanctioning foreign competitors and offering subsidies and bailouts to some of its multinational corporations, Bessent’s attempts to label China’s efforts as non-market are hypocritical China’s annual trade surplus continues to surpass $1 trillion, and is obtained through selling high-quality, low-priced products such as smartphones, laptops, small machinery, electric vehicles, and solar panels to people who would not be able to afford Western alternatives, which are of lower quality and significantly more expensive. Therefore, as Bessent was rallying G20 parties against China’s $1.2 trillion surplus, labeling it unsustainable, it’s the US’s bloated expenditure on the military that cannot be sustained not only by the country but also by the world. In fact, President Donald Trump stated that the US federal government was unable to fund daycare, Medicare, and Medicaid, as it only had money for waging wars. Additionally, in April 2026, Jodey Arrington, the Chairperson of the House Budget Committee, urged both the Republicans and Democrats to acknowledge that major social welfare programs were unsustainable, as an important step in addressing the country’s liabilities. Clearly, Washington is derelict in its basic responsibilities as a state, in favor of the pursuit of militarism, while demanding that its citizens reject affordable products from China, and both actions are unsustainable. Bessent’s description of China’s trade surplus as “excess capacity” is hypocritical, as this “surplus” does not represent output in excess of consumers’ demand, but the amount consumers in other nations have purchased from China in excess of what their own nations have sold to China. With the US sanctioning foreign competitors and offering subsidies and bailouts to some of its multinational corporations, Bessent’s attempts to label China’s efforts as non-market are hypocritical. The reality that the West’s offshoring of manufacturing enhanced China’s economic output shows that the Asian giant is a market economy. Notably, the Chinese Government lacked leverage to force Western firms such as Apple Inc., Tesla, or GM to move their manufacturing to China. Chinese technology firms such as Huawei, Xiaomi, or Alibaba Group only took advantage of conditions that attracted Western firms in the first place. Expecting that only Western firms should thrive within China’s borders is racism, in a similar manner to expecting that China cannot produce a favorable trade surplus at some times in history. China has been driving global economic growth, such that, restricting its exports would cause price inflation in other countries, suppress production not only in China but in countries that use Chinese products for production, and harm the global economy. Therefore, nations should instead try to cultivate production efficiency and develop areas of comparative advantage to correct the trade imbalance with China. However, the real threat to the world today is US militarism. The US’s $1.5 Trillion Military Budget — Bombs on Dissenting Peoples The $1.504 trillion US defense budget for FY 2027, inclusive of $350 billion in mandatory spending, promises further wars launched across oceans against countries such as Iran, Iraq, or Yemen. Surprisingly, while the House Budget Committee projected a 3% annual economic growth between 2026 and 2036, the current administration expanded the defense budget by 44% from $1 trillion for FY2026 to $ 1.5 trillion in FY2027. Past US wars have destroyed billions’ worth of infrastructure and killed tens of millions, including women and schoolchildren, without any recourse, making them destructive for the world. Since the budget is the clearest reflection of priorities, the US administration’s allocation of such huge sums to the military shows how much it values wars, even at the cost of asphyxiating social and economic development in America for the benefit of elites in Washington. Tellingly, the “Rebuilding Our Military” factsheet for FY 2027 released by the White House expressed how President Trump was committed to upgrading the US military to secure “peace through strength,” a euphemism for beating other peoples into submission and taking their minerals. It stated how the increased expenditure on the military will, among other things, facilitate “investment in critical minerals.” Since all the minerals in the US are not militarily contested, it is not a stretch to argue that the expanded military spending is designed to wrestle critical minerals from other countries. For such ends, a military conflict of the WWII scale is not off limits in Washington’s endeavor, as noted in the following excerpt from the aforementioned factsheet; This amount [$1.504] exceeds even the Reagan buildup by approaching the historic increases just before World War II, a level that recognizes the current global threat environment and restores the readiness and lethality of our forces. The White House’s description that the world has an “elevated threat environment” is hypocritical, noting that the US has launched the most destructive wars after WWII, killing and causing the deaths of millions, a bloodbath that can only be rivaled by that caused by the Nazi Germany during the WWII. Therefore, it is more meaningful to scrutinize the sustainability of US military spending than that of China’s trade surplus. An article published in Global Research in 2016 showed that the US had directly killed between 10 and 14 million people in wars after 1945. Meanwhile, its wars, meddling, and interventions had caused the deaths of between 20 and 30 million humans over the period, portraying a nation that needs to face an international tribunal if the ideology driving this behavior is to be stemmed. Consequently, Washington lacks any moral standing to tell others what is sustainable or not. While the global threat to peace and violence would significantly reduce if the US stopped stoking and propagating wars, its massive increase in war budget suggests that it is preparing surplus violence for humanity. A $1.2 trillion trade surplus would be a better choice for humanity any day. Simon Chege Ndiritu is a political observer and research analyst from Africa