Debate in the time of genocide

The Trump-Biden "debate" was a fitting elegy to the death of the City upon a Hill.

At the time of its founding, the United States of America was likely the most literate society in the world. The English settlers who crossed the Atlantic in search of their City upon a Hill, where they would be free from persecution and would be able to start a new society as they wished, made up the most literate society that existed until that point in time in history. In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman writes that “between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time. (The literacy rate for women in those colonies is estimated to have run as high as 62 percent in the years 1681-1697.)” (Those numbers were helped by the fact that they didn’t count the natives and the slaves brought in from Africa.)

The early settlers brought many books with them on the Mayflower and among the top imports of the early American society were books from the English metropole. There was such a pervasive culture of learning in New England that “between 1682 and 1685, Boston’s leading bookseller imported 3,421 books from one English dealer, most of these non-religious books,” writes Postman. “The meaning of this fact may be appreciated when one adds that these books were intended for consumption by approximately 75,000 people then living in the northern colonies. The modern equivalent would be ten million books.”

When Thomas Paine published his pamphlet Common Sense in revolutionary America, it would go on to sell over 100,000 copies in just two months. America at the time was proliferated with written tracts that came in all forms and sizes, ranging from newspapers and magazines to pamphlets and books. When not reading in their free time, Americans were flocking to listen to speakers of various stripes, from religious preachers to politicians.

This vigorous spirit for learning continued into the 19th century and at the political level was probably best epitomised in that century by the series of seven Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 when the two politicians vied for the votes of the Illinois Senators. So focused were the two politicians about conveying their points of view over garnering the applause of their audience that at one point during one of the debates, Douglas remarked, “My friends, silence will be more acceptable to me in the discussion of these questions than applause. I desire to address myself to your judgement, your understanding, and your consciences, and not to your passions or your enthusiasms.”

The white progenies of the original English settlers and those who followed them from various parts of Europe built a society that valued education, knowledge, and critical thinking. They took great pride in cultivating their mental faculties. Everywhere one looked, there were signs of a society that valued the use of its brains over other organs. “Public figures were known largely by their written words, for example, not by their looks or even their oratory,” writes Postman. “It is quite likely that most of the first fifteen presidents of the United States would not have been recognized had they passed the average citizen in the street.”

If you witnessed last week’s debate between Trump and Biden, however, the above description of American society would sound like an alien culture. The two men, vying for the highest post in the land, lied profusely, veered off topic frequently, boasted about their accomplishments in fields that had nothing to do with their ability to run the most powerful country in the world, expounded upon their proficiency in committing genocide more effectively than the other, and eagerly attempted to prove their bona fides in total subservience to Israel — the country they really represent. Even more stunningly, the current White House incumbent showed precisely zero ability to string together one coherent sentence.

In many ways, the debate between a former TV personality — better known for his bombastic persona — and a senile old man in rapid cognitive decline whose best days are well past him, unwittingly presented the snapshot of a society that scarcely bears any resemblance to the days of its founding and the century that followed.

According to one survey, 46 percent of Americans did not read even one book in all of the last year. A significant number of Americans seem to reach the apotheosis of their existence while witnessing the achievements of others in some meaningless sporting competition or at drunken revelries at musical concerts. The quality of the political discourse for most Americans rarely rises above the mouthing of slogans — the louder the better — advertised to them by the apparatchiks of the two political parties that claim to represent them.

None of these would be a problem, however, if America were a normal country that minded its own business and if it weren’t actively fuelling and funding a genocide for the past nine months. A genocide that has claimed nearly 40,000 innocent lives, over 16,500 of them children. A genocide in which a further 21,000 children are reported missing. If nothing, this issue of mass slaughter and displacement in broad daylight being perpetrated with American support should galvanise its public to repudiate the two genocide enthusiasts vying for the Oval Office and rip the mask off the carefully-cultivated façade of “democracy” and “rules-based order” that their country pretends to uphold. However, by the evidence of the reaction to the debate, no such thing is happening.

The commentariat on this platform, many with orange and purple check marks that imply anywhere between “hundreds of paid subscribers” to “thousands of paid subscribers,” have published grotesque stories with headlines that would make one puke their guts out. Sample this outright lie for a title: “Biden Wins Debate” (nearly 1,500 likes at the last count) and this downright imbecilic headline: “Why I’m still with President Biden” (over 3,400 likes). These pied pipers are doing a good job of leading the sheep to the slaughter, as the likes and comments under such posts show:

This is not a simulation.

Neither is this.

Even I received a “fan mail” from one of my early subscribers as a reply to my previous article, which, mind you, had nothing to do with America, Biden or the last week’s debate. Here’s the short, but pointed, email:

As if any of this is normal.

A vast majority of these partisans would struggle to find the Middle East on a map, but they would want the Palestinians “bombed to the stone age” because “Hamas bad,” as their favourite check-marked commentator told them.

Which brings to mind Richard Hofstadter, who in his book Anti-intellectualism in American Life writes, “If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.”

A significant majority of the American public seems to have an “excess of commitment” to these shameless hacks, who, unbeknownst to them, are not only delivering the Palestinians to the slaughterhouse but also leading them to an even more tyrannical future.

While there was never going to be anything positive in the election cycle, debates, or the presidential election itself for the Palestinians, the sheer depraved spectacle of the debate was still stunning.

At the debate — which was conducted by two pro-Israel Zionist Jews for a network that is a mouthpiece for the Zionists — stood two politicians. One of them has received more money from Israeli lobbyists than any other current leader, while the other is overtly swimming in Israeli funds and is being openly coveted by Israeli interests as the one who will do their bidding with even more subservience from the White House.

In the American polity that has kept a no-questions-asked uninterrupted flow of incendiary weapons to perpetuate a genocide being committed in full public glare by a regime that holds it captive; a regime, whose benefactors have openly boasted about buying its political leaders, and that has just helped push through a legislation that outlaws even citing the number of Palestinians it kills, the Palestinians were always going to be a footnote in this presidential debate — or any American debate for that matter.

And that, as the live-streamed Holocaust of the Palestinians enters its tenth month, says more about the state of America and whose interests it serves than anything ever will.

“The Founding Fathers,” writes Hofstadter, “were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics, and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.” For all their good qualities, the slave-owning Founding Fathers were not moral or nation building exemplars with their much-vaunted constitution deeming slaves as only 3/5th of a free individual and failing to grant all citizens equal rights. However, the challenges that America faces today, the most pertinent being its complete usurpation by a foreign entity, it will need leaders of the calibre of its Founding Fathers to extricate itself from the deep hole it has dug itself into. But if the quality of its Congress, not just its presidential candidates (to say nothing of its partisan voting public), is any indication, no matter how pompously it celebrates Fourth of July, the day of its liberation is nowhere in sight.

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