SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Aug 21 (IPS) – A comment by George Orwell – “whoever controls the present controls the past, and whoever controls the past controls the future” – is particularly relevant to the way President Biden spoke about Gaza during his speech at the Democratic convention on Monday night.
His words fit into an 11-month messaging template, in which the U.S. administration has relentlessly pursued peace while supplying the weapons and bombs that have enabled Israel’s continued slaughter of civilians. “We will continue to work to bring hostages home, to end the war in Gaza, and to bring peace and security to the Middle East,” Biden told the cheering delegates. “As you know, I wrote a peace treaty for Gaza. A few days ago, I put forward a proposal that brought us closer to that goal than we have been since October 7.” It was a trip into an alternate universe of political cunning from a president who had approved an additional $20 billion in weapons to Israel just six days earlier. Still, Biden’s delegates in the convention hall responded with a crescendo of roaring admiration. Applause swelled as Biden continued: “We are working day and night, my Secretary of State, to prevent a wider war and to reunite hostages with their families, and to send humanitarian health and food aid to Gaza now, to end the suffering of the civilians of the Palestinian people and finally, finally, finally bring about a ceasefire and end this war.” At the United Center in Chicago, the president was bathed in admiration as he claimed to be a peacemaker despite a record of literally enabling the methodical slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Orwell would have understood. A political reflex has been set in motion by key American leaders who claim to be peacemakers while aiding and abetting the slaughter. Normalizing deception about the past sets a pattern for perpetrating such deception in the future. And so, operating within the paradigm Orwell described, Biden exercises control over the present, seeks to control narratives about the past, and tries to make it all seem normal, predicting the future. The eagerness of delegates to applaud Biden’s mendaciously absurd story about his administration’s policies on Gaza was part of a larger context: the convention’s declaration of love for the lame-duck president. Hours before the convention began, Peter Beinart released a short video essay anticipating the fervent adulation. “I just don’t think that when you analyze a presidency or a person, you capture what happened in Gaza,” he said.
“I mean, if you’re a liberal person, you believe that genocide is about the worst thing a country can do, and it’s about the worst thing your country can do if your country weapons genocide.” Beinart continued: “And it’s actually not that controversial anymore that this qualifies as genocide. I’ve read the academic writings on this. I don’t see any real scholar of international human rights law who says that it’s not there. . . . If you’re going to say something about Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, you have to take into account what Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, has done with respect to Gaza.
It’s critical to his legacy. It’s critical to his character. And if you don’t do that, then you’re saying Palestinian lives just don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter on this particular day, and I think that’s inhumane. I don’t think we can ever say that the lives of a particular group of people just don’t matter because it’s inconvenient for us to talk about them at a particular time.” The grotesque moral bluntness of the convention stage was underscored by the jubilant display of generations as the president praised and embraced his descendants. Joe Biden walked off the stage holding the hand of his adorable little grandson, a precious child no more precious than any of the many thousands of children the president has helped Israel kill.
Norman Solomon is the National Director of RootsAction.org and Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books, including War made easy. His last book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machinewas published in 2023 by The New Press.
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© Inter Press Service (2024) — All rights reservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service