Dispatch #168 White Lesbian Age 73 Considers One Day, When It’s Safe and It’s Too Late to Hold Anyone Accountable, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This Starvation

July 26th 2025  

Day 189 White Supremacist Misogynist Christian Nationalist Regime 

1132 Days Since SCOTUS Ruled American Women Don’t Have Human Rights

640 Days Since Israel Began Genocidal Campaign on Palestinians in Gaza

Starvation in Gaza is destroying communities – and will leave generational scars | The Guardian 23 July 2025.

Starvation is not only killing Palestinians in Gaza one by one, but is also destroying Palestinian society and inflicting permanent damage on bodies and minds, experts say. Starvation forces the body to consume its own muscle and organs for energy, which can cause permanent injury, harms children’s futures by stunting the growth of their bodies and minds, and may even damage the health of survivors’ children.

Starvation destroys communities by turning people against each other in their desperation for food and forcing them to do shameful, humiliating or violent things to survive. Even if they recover physically, the trauma of having to choose between children, turn away relatives begging for food, sell their own bodies or a sister or a daughter for food, stays with them for life, famine experts say.

“You can approach starvation as a biological phenomenon experienced by individuals, but it is also a collective social experience,” said Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, and author of Mass Starvation: the History and Future of Famine. “Very often that societal element – the trauma, the shame, the loss of dignity, the violation of taboos, the breaking of social bonds – is more significant in the memory of the experience of survivors than the individual biological experience.”  www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/23/starvation-in-gaza-is-destroying-communities-and-will-leave-generational-scars 

The US and Israel have just ended their so-called ceasefire talks with Hamas. Netanyahu’s fascist government will fall if he agrees to a permanent ceasefire.  The world watches daily reports with haunting pictures documenting dead and slowly dying children. The US and Israel continue their collaboration to normalize the genocide in Gaza and to dismantle international law, international norms of compassion and humanity, and human rights.   

Gaza is Starving & the World Looks Away. Adnan Hmidan | Middle East Eye 20 July 2025.  

In Gaza, mornings no longer begin with the sound of explosions — but with the quiet, urgent cries of hunger. Mothers wake to infants with no milk. Children search for scraps to ease empty stomachs before the bombs return to flatten what little hope remains. 

As former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan once warned: “When food becomes a weapon, humanity itself has collapsed.” Gaza is facing that collapse — and the international system is allowing it to happen. www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250720-gaza-is-starving-and-the-world-looks-away/ 

I’m witnessing the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s children – why is the world letting it happen? Nick Maynard | The Guardian 22 July 2025.

I want to be clear – what is being done to Palestinians in Gaza is barbaric and entirely preventable. I cannot believe we have come to a point where the world is watching as the people of Gaza are forced to endure starvation and gunfire, all while food and medical aid sits across the border just miles away from them. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/22/gaza-israel-deliberate-starvation-ceasefire-aid 

Hunger kills a child in Gaza, but, it is world leaders who should be dying of shame. Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi | Middle East Eye 25 July 2025. 

We are not starving by accident - we are being starved by design. This is not a natural disaster, but a deliberate, man-made catastrophe. A starvation genocide. Can you not see it? Can you not hear it? Children with swollen bellies. Mothers fainting in food lines. Grandparents wasting away. Do you have eyes to see? Ears to hear? Then name it for what it is. But we will not forgive, and we will not forget. www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-hunger-killing-us-where-is-world-not-forgive-or-forget 

Aaron Bushnell said this about his choice to self-immolate: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, "What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?" The answer is, you're doing it. Right now.”  The US is 100% complicit in the starvation of Gaza.

Bipartisan Group of Senators Meets With Netanyahu Despite ICC Arrest Warrant | truthout 11 July 2025.  These Senators, smiling in a group picture with Netanyahu the brazen and ruthless war criminal, must be shamed and decried without end for their cowardice and their vile and amoral complicity in genocide and starvation:

Senators Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), Chris Coons (D-Delaware), Steve Daines (R-Montana), Jon Husted (R-Ohio), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), Dave McCormick (R-Pennsylvania), Jim Risch (R-Idaho), Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada), Adam Schiff (D-California), Chuck Schumer (D-New York), Ted Cruz (R-Texas) John Thune (R-South Dakota). https://truthout.org/articles/bipartisan-group-of-senators-meets-with-netanyahu-despite-icc-arrest-warrant/ 

Wielding their ruthlessly symbiotic power of empire, militarism and US hegemony, the US and Israel are weaponizing antisemitism, white Christian nationalism, and Islamophobia.  Democrats are complicit in normalizing 1) police attacks on pro-Palestinian student protesters, 2) universities restricting free speech and shutting down their campuses, 3) pro-Palestinian protests being equated with antisemitism and terrorism, 4) elected officials ignoring massive public support for Gaza ceasefire. Trump took office inheriting a glide path for his quislings’ plans to normalize white supremacist misogynist christian nationalist authoritarian/totalitarian governance.   AKA Fascism

Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out’. Marci Shore made news around the world when her family moved to Canada. Jonathan Friedland | The Guardian 16 July 2025. Dr. Marci Shore, a Yale University scholar of Eastern European history, discusses the precursors of totalitarianism and fascism emerging under Trump that prompted her and her husband to relocate to the University of Toronto in Canada.  She discusses the implications of the similarities shared by Trump, Hitler, Stalin and Putin as they created and wielded authoritarian power.

“When John McCain chose Sarah Palin, I felt like she was a character right out of the 1930s.” The Republican vice-presidential candidate lived, Shore thought, “in a totally fictitious world … not constrained by empirical reality.” Someone like that, Shore believed, could really rile up a mob.

And then came Trump in 2016.  Once again, it was the lack of truthfulness that terrified her. “Without a distinction between truth and lies, there is no grounding for a distinction between good and evil,” she says. Lying is essential to totalitarianism; she understood that from her scholarly research. But while Hitler and Stalin’s lies were in the service of some vast “eschatological vision”, the post-truth dishonesty of a Trump or Putin struck her as different. The only relevant criterion for each man is whether this or that act is “advantageous or disadvantageous to him at any given moment. It’s pure, naked transaction.”

But when Trump won again last November, there was no doubt in her mind [about moving out of the US]. However bad things had looked in 2016, now was worse. “So much had been dismantled … the guardrails, or the checks and balances, had systematically been taken down. The supreme court’s ruling on immunity; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited, you know, a violent insurrection on the Capitol, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice-president, that he called up the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to find votes. I felt like we were in much more dangerous territory.”

Events so far have vindicated those fears. The deportations; students disappeared off the streets, one famously caught on video as she was bundled into an unmarked car by masked immigration agents; the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as Trump and JD Vance ordered the Ukrainian president to express his gratitude to them, even as they were “abusing” him, an episode, says Shore, “right out of Stalinism” – to say nothing of Trump’s regular attacks on “USA-hating judges” who rule against the executive branch. It adds up to a playbook that is all too familiar. “Dark fantasies are coming true.”

“It’s all almost too stereotypical,” Shore reflects. “A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,” she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. “As for Los Angeles, my historian’s intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia.”

That response captures the double lens through which Shore sees the Trump phenomenon, informed by both the Third Reich and the “neo-totalitarianism” exhibited most clearly in the Russia of Vladimir Putin. 

“The unabashed narcissism, this Nero-like level of narcissism and this lack of apology … in Russian, it’s obnazhenie; ‘laying bare’.” It’s an approach to politics “in which all of the ugliness is right on the surface,” not concealed in any way. “And that’s its own kind of strategy. You just lay everything out there.” She fears that the sheer shamelessness of Trump has “really disempowered the opposition, because our impulse is to keep looking for the thing that’s hidden and expose it, and we think that’s going to be what makes the system unravel.” But the problem is not what’s hidden, it’s “what we’ve normalised – because the whole strategy is to throw it all in your face.”

How bad does she think it could get? Matter-of-factly, she says: “My fear is we’re headed to civil war.” She restates a basic truth about the US. “There’s a lot of guns. There’s a lot of gun violence. There’s a habituation to violence that’s very American, that Europeans don’t understand.” Her worry is that the guns are accompanied by a new “permissiveness” that comes from the top, that was typified by Trump’s indulgence of the January 6 rioters, even those who wanted to murder his vice-president. As she puts it: “You can feel that brewing.”

She also worries that instead of fighting back, “people become atomised. The arbitrariness of terror atomises people. You know, people put their heads down, they go quiet, they get in line, if only for the very reasonable, rational reason that any individual acting rationally has a reason to think that the personal cost of refusing to make a compromise is going to be greater than the social benefit of their one act of resistance. So you get a classic collective action problem.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/16/why-a-professor-of-fascism-left-the-us-the-lesson-of-1933-is-you-get-out