The Red Line

Is there no depth to American depravity?

I’ve talked a lot about Donald Trump and Fascism, but today we need to pull off a painful band aid. It’s time we talked about the fascism of Joe Biden.

We see a great deal of chatter these days about “saving American Democracy,” as it pertains to the presidency. The fears of the USA turning into a theocratic fascist dictatorship do seem rather close to coming to pass, but to tell it as a binary story, one in which fascism starts on January 20, 2025, is farcical.

I must confess to feeling some hope when Joe Biden was declared the winner of the American Election in 2020. This was not ideological, but practical; Biden’s appalling record as it pertains to foreign policy and mass incarceration were sufficient for me to not see him as anything positive in him, but rather in the absence of Trump. The stable hands of a career politician could at least loosen the Republican hold on power.

How wrong I was.

The Biden Presidency has been a catastrophic disaster for the American people and the world that they are only now barely heeding. Since taking office he has:

• Starved Afghanistan by sanctioning their entire economy,

• Destroyed the American response to COVID, already damaged by Trump,

• Made no serious effort to oppose Trump,

• Openly and blatantly lied about Palestinian atrocities,

• Made increasingly draconian anti-immigration laws,

• Presided over the loss of abortion rights with nary a whisper,

• Maintained the migrant concentration camp system run by ICE,

• Encouraged and supplied a brutal war of attrition in Ukraine which he has no effective means of winning,

• Maintained the Prison-Industrial Complex complete with slave labour,

• Declared open American support for the Azov Brigade,

• Overseen in silence as the country attacks LGBTQS2 people, and

• Actively supported the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

This man and his establishment a menace to life on Earth. This establishment is in fact, in terms of foreign policy, quantifiably worse than Trump. I’m sure this wasn’t a pleasant thing to read, I know it wasn’t pleasant to write, but my dear reader, you must know.

There is but one case for electing Biden over Trump, and that is the GOP’s undisguised authoritarianism. It rests, in fact, on hypotheticals. “If they do this,” and “he will do that when elected,” can only go so far in an election when one is competing with four years of raw sociopathic violence.

This was the Red Line for many, was the appalling debate performance of Biden, a man clearly in cognitive decline, and not anything listed above.

There’s the rub.

While America fights over it’s soul and democracy, we in the rest of the world see it for what it is: soulless and undemocratic. The democratic system they seem intent on upholding is in fact just a contest between two geriatric mass murderers with a penchant for lying.

We see unfolding before us the culmination of decades of political ossification, blatant corruption, fanatical militarism and unfettered capitalism coming together in a morass in which the only effective choice given is “which fascist do you prefer?”

Joe Biden: Fascism for thee.

Donald Trump: Fascism for me.

Police roam the streets of the United States and murder with impunity. Mass shooters kill kids in schools and the Government lifts not one finger. Israel runs numerous concentration camps in which prisoners are tortured, raped, beaten, set upon by dogs, starved and murdered, all while their violence is bankrolled by the USA. The Nazis are now so powerful in Ukraine that they just got the Chief of Staff of the entire army replaced.

How many people does this man have to kill before the Americans criticize him for it? Not online leftists and unhinged right-wing theocratic fascists, but actual mainstream members of the American body politic?

A chart of the two candidates that is wildly misleading. This is what 2024 genocide denial looks like. Source: Stolen because to hell with them.

What is the Red Line? How far is too far?

As I sit here, on so called “Canada Day,” our military plans to evacuate citizens from Lebanon in the event that Israel invades, a move endorsed by Biden. Will this be a line too far? Unlikely.

It’s not just evil but also aggressively stupid. Israel will not win a war with Hezbollah, especially given that it is already losing to the current Palestinian resistance. Starving people, probably the bravest in the world, in tracksuits with homemade rockets continue to embarrass the IDF, and the IDF itself says it will not be able to destroy Hamas. The potential operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon has been refereed to as “The IDF’s Charge of the Light Brigade,” by former soldier and activist Greg Stoker.

There is an important dynamic at play here: Those who would support these actions abroad will logically do them at home if pressed. They are dangerous. The fact that people called the Afghan withdrawal, or the COVID response, the Ukraine War, Gaza, or anything a “success” is a dreadful reflection on how bad the rot as spread.

It has been said many times before, “scratch a Liberal and a Fascist bleeds,” and as the Democratic Party rockets towards electoral and humanitarian disaster, they got scratched and proved the adage.