The circus is in town

Vote harder to save democracy because your life depends on it, and other jokes.

Back in the old days circuses had a lot of variety. There would be jugglers, gymnasts, animal tamers, Cyr wheels, contortionists, flying trapeze, and clowns, among many other novelties. The audience would sit enthralled in anticipation of what marvel they would witness next. The variety on offer would be worth every penny they paid. Or at least that’s how I remember going to circuses as a kid with my older cousins, one of whom was very fond of the Wall of Death, the gravity defying bike riders who would complete multiple rounds of the vertical velodrome without ever falling.

In comparison, the circus that rolls around every four years in America is a one-trick pony. The rhetoric is always the same — “vote as if your life depends on it” to “save democracy” because the other party will “abolish elections” and “put you in concentration camps” as “fascism will take hold.” The same old partisan clowns come out with their presidential endorsements, which are as predictable as the sunrise. The candidates are mirror images of each other, although the propaganda machinery, which for some odd reason is known as the news industry in the USA, tries its very best to pretend that those on the ballot couldn’t be more different from each other. Inexplicably, millions fall for it. Or perhaps it’s not so inexplicable after all. Maybe, just maybe the propaganda-industrial complex is so pervasive that a vast majority of the Americans can never think beyond what they are fed by the powers that be. Perhaps all the institutions they attend and the media they are exposed to since childhood are geared towards pushing them in an intended direction so when the powers that be manufacture consent for their next imperial project, there is barely any pushback.

Anyway, back to the election circus. I have seen posts from 67-year-old Americans crying tears of joy at seeing Harris/Walz on the ballot. I have also seen someone write about “crawling through broken glass to vote for Trump” because he is a real American patriot who will deliver manna from heaven at every American breakfast table for the next four years, if he wins.

There are also subtle propagandists. Those are the ones who tell the voters that they can push their parties to the left (or right) by voting them to power. It’s not exactly subtle, if you ask me, but we are living through a time of rapidly falling IQ levels.

Looking from afar, however, this charade makes for a sombre spectacle knowing that it won’t make an iota of a difference to the American imperial projects irrespective if the glass crawlers or tears of joy jerkers get their wish from this round of the circus.

The empire’s bloodlust will continue unsatiated. Millions of Arabs — and other Third World residents — will continue to suffer. Their resources will be pillaged, their children slaughtered in front of their eyes, and their men and women raped and abused. For its unwilling subjects, the empire merely changes its curtains from red to blue or blue to red every few years, everything else remains the same.

Interestingly, some wealthy commentators on this platform have been telling their readers that Trump will be worse for the Palestinians and therefore they must vote for Harris whose administration has supplied weapons near-daily to blow helpless Arabs to smithereens and reduce their once lively neighbourhoods to an apocalyptic rubblescape. It’s a notion so vacuous (and so utterly shameful) that it defies belief. A candidate who has overseen the slaughter of a quarter million innocent Palestinians (and over three thousand Lebanese) is better because of a hypothetical scenario that nobody knows for sure if it will come to fruition. These hacks tell you to throw your morals and principles out of the window and become enablers of a live-streamed genocide, executioners of defenceless Palestinians. You can always wash your bloodstained hands afterwards. It may not clean the stain on your conscience, but who cares for it anyway?

Deny the evidence of your eyes and the reasoning of your intellect. Forget the sight of the children with half of their skulls missing, forget the wails of disconsolate mothers, and forget the tears of helpless fathers with missing limbs. Forget that every single day for one whole year your timeline was replete with such ghastly images. Act according to the wishes of the propagandists who are well compensated for their services to the demonic empire.

The empire’s victims are under no illusion, however. “The United States of America is the official sponsor of terrorism in the world and the main supporter of Zionist terrorism with money and weapons,” said Fathi Abu Ali of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) back in July. “American support for the occupation is embedded in American policy and will not be affected by the change of the American president, whether it is Biden or Trump.” (Replacing Harris for Biden changes zilch.)

Those paying attention would have noticed how the tentacles of the empire are now slowly tightening their grip around the necks of its own citizenry. From the brutalisation of students on university campuses to spraying them with skunk water (an IDF favourite for the Palestinians), and from criminalisation of speech to sweeping surveillance, the signs of escalating imperial boomerang are all too clear and obvious. The citizens of the metropole need to wake up from their propaganda-induced slumber before they become the next Palestinians, if at all they can evade that eventuality. The violence eventually comes home. The circus will soon stop being entertaining.

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I have had to start a fundraiser on my Ko-fi page: https://ko-fi.com/palestinewillbefree. It would be amazing if you could lend a helping hand. Thank you for reading and your support.

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