Hi there–
I hope you’re well? Another tumultuous week– and yet another totally horrendous week for the people of Gaza. They have now passed seven weeks since the Israeli military slapped a total, wall-to-wall ban on the entry of any goods, even basic necessities, into the Gaza Strip.
That blockade– and the repeated, extremely deadly assaults from air, land, and sea the Israelis have undertaken against Gaza over the past month– have been complete violations of the agreement the Israeli government and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) signed on January 15, which stipulated an 18-week period of ceasefire with each successive 6-week period seeing additional relief for Gaza’s hard-pressed population along with the release of additional numbers of captives by each side.
Israel has also, meanwhile, pushed the survivors among Gaza’s once- 2.3. million people into ever smaller zones within Gaza. On the UN-OCHA map here (click on it to see it better, or download the whole PDF here), Gaza’s Palestinians are now forbidden from entering all the zones shaded purple or red.
Where is international law, you may ask?
Where are the Geneva Conventions?
Where are international institutions like the United Nations, a body that was born from the defeat of the largest-scale perpetrator of genocide ever seen in the 20th century?
The United State, under most of its presidents in recent times including former Pres. Biden, has frequently used Washington’s privileged position within the U.N. to openly flout international law and to give “ironclad” support to Israel as it has also done the same.
Pres. Trump is now taking that scofflawery to totally unprecedented new levels. In international affairs as in domestic affairs he has taken a wrecking ball to institutions and norms that, while never perfect, have nonetheless proved their value over time and were previously capable of improvement.
Here within the U.S., the long-established norms of constitutional government seem to mean nothing to trump. The NYT columnist Ezra Klein– never a firebrand– phrased it well in this hard-hitting column today about the fate of deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia:
To the Trump administration, Abrego Garcia is not a mistake. He is a liability, and he is a test. A test of their power to do this to anyone. A test of whether the loophole they believe they have found — that if they can get you on a plane, they can hustle you beyond our laws and leave you in the grips of the kind of gulags they wish they had here.
They are not ashamed of this. They are not denying their desire to do it to more people.
This is how dictatorships work. Trump has always been clear about who he is and the kind of power he wants. Now he is using that power.
And everyone around him — including Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem — is defending his right to wield that power.
There is a clear, open gleefulness in the way Trump (and his foot-soldier Salvador’s President Bukele) talk about what they have done to Abrego Garcia– and to untold scores of other immigrants herded off to Bukele’s mega-prisons. This gleefulness is shocking and deeply unsettling. It is also deeply familiar to anyone who has followed the way Israeli military commanders, Defense Ministers, and foot-soldiers all openly brag about the atrocities they have already committed in Gaza, and the future ones they’re planning.
The cruelty and the open and sadistic displays of it are the point. It is a clear attempt to terrorize the rest of the public into submission.
Four years ago, I spent some months on a project to track the earliest years of the attempts that a number of White, West-European polities pursued to build sprawling empires that for the first time in human history were transoceanic and thus reliant on excellent command of shipbuilding, navigation– and naval gunnery. The first polity to launch such a project was not Spain, but Portugal. In 2021 I summarized my understanding of that effort in this piece, published free on Medium.
In a later piece I summarized the new features that building a transoceanic empire– as opposed to the kind of land-based empire that many polities have built throughout history– now allowed. Key among them was its “hit and run” capability: The people who ran these new kinds of empire no longer had to establish mechanisms that would allow their own people live alongside the peoples they had conquered. They could– and did– genocide the Indigenes wholesale, force them into slavery, and if too many of them objected the European rulers could simply round them up in large numbers and trans-ship them to a distant corner of the empire to provide unpaid slave labor there…
Sounds familiar, huh.
… Anyway, this morning I decided to reconnect with that work I did back in 2021, drawing a straight-ish line back from the cruelty that we see Trump and Netanyahu deploying against Brown people today to the cruelty the Portuguese deployed against Indigenous communities on the shores of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, in the early 1500s.
I think it’s important to recognize that the deployment (and open celebration) of cruelty against non-White people is a clear feature of all the White empires that have dominated the global balance for the past 500 years. It is not a bug.
Anyway, here’s the piece I wrote on my Globalities platform about this, today. (The Bab El Mandeb Straits were a key location back in 1506 CE, for what it’s worth, just as they are today.)
I hope this essay might energize all of us to work harder to end the stranglehold that the tiny, less than 12 percent of humanity who are of West European origin have exercised over world affairs for far too long…
Maybe, just maybe, with Trump’s latest, deranged economic war against the rest of the world, we might hope to see that stranglehold being broken soon?
But Gaza is still the fulcrum. The suffering there is unbearable. And it is all being fueled and actively supported by my government, using my tax dollars to destroy the lives of my friends.
20 April 2025