Call to a Broad Meeting of Syrian Civil and Political Forces and FiguresSovereignty, Citizenship, Democratic Transition (SAMA) February 15-16, 2025

Arabic original: الاجتماع الموسع للقوى والشخصيات المدنية والسياسية السورية  

On the morning of December 8, 2024, the freemen of Daraa and Swaida entered the capital, Damascus, followed by armed factions from the north and various provinces, to end half a century of tyranny and bloody oppression.

This historic national milestone signaled the beginning of the end for injustice, despotism, and dictatorship. However, we have also witnessed actions and initiatives that contradict the foundational principles of the March 18, 2011 Revolution: “One, one, one—the Syrian people are one.” Kurds and Arabs united, Christians and Muslims hand in hand, Sunnis and Alawites in solidarity—a state of citizenship for all Syrians, where people are citizens, not subjects. These principles, for which our people sacrificed nearly half a million martyrs, remain the cornerstone of our vision.

We remind our people: liberation from tyranny does not justify the presence of any non-Syrian fighters on the soil of our beloved homeland. We categorically reject any military force monopolizing national decision-making, regardless of its size or strength. We will not accept any ideology replacing fifty years of Baathist misery, nor will we tolerate any authority imposed by the force of arms.

Yes, the criminal Assad regime has fallen. Yet, familiar hands—known to all Syrians—are working to reproduce the old system under new guises, perpetuating internal conflicts, war crimes, and cycles of revenge.

Today, as regional powers have granted Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) authority over operations in Damascus, we are witnessing blatant attempts to manipulate those who entered the Presidential Palace. Each faction seeks to secure its interests first, ensuring that the new authorities align with Western-Turkish regional agendas. These actors exploit the fact that the current leadership in Damascus lacks popular legitimacy, tainted by Syrian blood, marred by purges of allies and opponents alike, and susceptible to external influence on issues dictated by foreign powers.

We Syrians now find ourselves under a weak new authority shackled by the misconduct of its leaders. Armed militias, including foreign fighters, have become the dominant force in Syria's security and military institutions, seeking to impose their vision in any national dialogue or discussion. Meanwhile, external powers play the role of overseers, dictating the steps of the “caretaker government.”

The Syrian state cannot be rebuilt without the collective effort of all its people, grounded in a shared sense of ownership and responsibility. No decision-maker in Damascus, or their opposition, can afford to ignore the root causes of our current tragedy: since 2011, politicians, armed groups, and the regime have all sought external validation to gain “legitimacy” and maintain power.

Many parties to the conflict, to varying degrees, have contributed to instilling fear and division among Syrians, reducing them to sectarian, religious, ethnic, or tribal identities, perpetuating the absence of a citizenship-based state—a situation that began with Assad the father’s rule.

Both Islamists and secularists have fallen into the trap of populism, driven by momentary emotions, at great cost. The time has come for rational, wise dialogue—one that moves beyond narratives of defeat or victory.

Principles to Unite Syrians:

1. Sovereignty and equal citizenship.

2. Human dignity and rights for all, regardless of nationality, religion, or sect.

3. Gender equality—women as equals to men.

4. Freedom of expression and political participation.

5. The rule of law.

6. Balanced economic development.

Necessary Steps:

• Establish a National Military Council: Dissident officers must form a council to oversee the rebuilding of a unified Syrian national army.

• Convene a General National Conference: Inclusive of all Syrian national forces,  excluding no one, under international sponsorship. This aligns with UNSC meeting on  12/18/2024 AD to implement UNSC Resolution 2254, aiming to create a transitional  governing body, a constitutional drafting committee, and an independent judicial body  for transitional justice.

• Form an Interim Technocratic Government: Its mandate will end with the election of a government under the new constitution.

• Revive and Expand the Syrian Network for Free and Fair Elections.

• Establish the Syrian National Commission for Human Rights: A collaborative  effort between human rights organizations and lawyers’ unions to guarantee and  protect all human rights in Syria, with special emphasis on women’s rights.

• Respect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: All parties must commit to  the principles Syria ratified in 1968, distinguishing those dedicated to citizenship and  democracy from those seeking to reproduce dictatorship.

• Criminalize Hate Speech and Sectarian Incitement: Enact laws against hate speech  based on religion, race, ethnicity, or nationality and amend the Penal Code to increase  penalties for systematic sectarian violence and killings.

Additional Points:

• Foreign Occupation: The world, as well as the Syrian people, is well aware of the  presence of multiple occupying forces in our country, including American, Turkish,  and Israeli troops currently stationed on Syrian soil. We have witnessed the blatant  Israeli aggression against Syrian territory, targeting the military’s infrastructure,  research centers, and defense factories. It appears there is an unspoken agreement or  coordination between the de facto authorities, their supporters, and the Israeli military  to disengage under Israeli terms, along with those of the powers backing the current  regime. Yet, we have not heard any condemnation from the Security Council,  Western parties, or even a clear and unequivocal demand for the withdrawal of all  foreign forces from Syrian soil. This serves as a crucial lesson for all Syrians: the urgent need to build a national army dedicated to ensuring the departure of these  foreign forces and preserving the unity and integrity of Syria’s entire territory.

• Economic Sanctions: The Syrian people have suffered under unilateral sanctions for  two decades, which have affected every aspect of life. We demand the immediate and  unconditional lifting of these sanctions to relieve our people’s suffering.

All these demands require urgent action. Delays, procrastination, or neglect are unacceptable. History teaches us that the absence of clear timelines leads to catastrophic consequences.

Call to Action:

In three weeks of discussions among political and civil forces, we recognized the need for the broadest meeting to unify all those committed to building a sovereign state, inclusive citizenship, and democratic transition. This pivotal meeting will take place in a Syrian city capable of hosting it, with parallel gatherings via video conference in Geneva and major Syrian cities.

This broad national meeting aims to develop a unified roadmap, foster collaboration among active forces, and envision a Syria that reflects its people. All indications we observe today point to the intentions of the de facto authorities to establish military and security apparatuses that replicate the tragedies our people endured in Idlib at the hands of the same decision- makers now in control of Damascus. These include the re-seizure of decision-making power from professional unions and the perpetuation of retaliatory and vengeful actions against large segments of our population.

The Preparatory Committee invites all Syrians to join this effort, rejecting exclusion and division, to prevent new dictatorships and avoid the perils of civil war and partition.

Long live free, independent Syria!

The Preparatory Committee for the Broad Meeting of Syrian Civil and Political Forces and Figures

For inscription please: ➤ https://syrnc.org/

Sunnis, Alawis, Druze, Christians, Arabs, Kurds: one people

JONATHAN POLLAK“I saw that the floor was covered with blood. I felt fear run like electricity through my body. I knew exactly what was about to come”Testimonies from the Zionist gulag

Rape. Starvation. Fatal beatings. Mistreatment. Something fundamental has changed in Israeli prisons. None of my Palestinian friends who have recently been released are the same people they used to be

Jonathan Pollak, Haaretz  , 9/1/2025
Translated by Shofty Shmaha, Tlaxcala

Tlaxcala's Note: Haaretz finally translated this article from Hebrew into English, allaying our fears that they wouldn't. You can read their version here 

Jonathan Pollak (1982) was one of the founders of the Israeli group Anarchists Against the Wall in 2003. Wounded and imprisoned on several occasions, he contributes to the daily Haaretz. In particular, he refused to appear before a civilian court, demanding to be tried by a military tribunal, like a common Palestinian, which he was obviously refused.

 

Jonathan Pollak facing an Israeli soldier during a protest against the closure of the main road in the Palestinian village of Beit Dajan, near Nablus, occupied West Bank, Friday, March 9, 2012. (Anne Paq/Activestills)



Jonathan Pollak at the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court, arrested as part of an unprecedented legal campaign by the Zionist organization Ad Kan, January 15, 2020. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)



Activists hold up posters in support of Jonathan Pollak during the weekly demonstration in the Palestinian town of Beita, in the occupied West Bank, February 3, 2023. (Wahaj Banimoufleh)

Jonathan Pollak alongside his lawyer Riham Nasra at the Petah Tikva court during his trial for throwing stones during a demonstration against the Jewish settler outpost of Eviatar in Beita, occupied West Bank, September 28, 2023. (Oren Ziv)

When I returned to the territories [occupied since 1967] after a long detention following a demonstration in the village of Beita, the West Bank was very different from what I knew. Here too, Israel has lost its nerve. Murders of civilians, attacks by settlers acting with the army, mass arrests. Fear and terror around every corner. And this silence, a crushing silence. Even before my release, it was clear that something fundamental had changed. A few days after October 7, Ibrahim Alwadi, a friend from the village of Qusra, was killed along with his son Ahmad. They were shot as they accompanied four Palestinians who had been shot the day before - three by settlers who had invaded the village, the fourth by soldiers who were accompanying them.

After my release, I realized that something very bad was happening in the prisons. Over the past year, as I regained my freedom, thousands of Palestinians - including many friends and acquaintances - were arrested en masse by Israel. As they began to be released, their testimonies painted a systematic picture of torture. Fatal beatings are a recurring motif in every account. It happens in prisoner counts, during cell searches, at every movement from one place to another. The situation is so serious that some inmates ask their lawyers to hold hearings without their presence, because the path from the cell to the room where the camera is installed is a path of pain and humiliation.

I hesitated for a long time about how to share the testimonies I heard from my friends who had returned from detention. After all, I'm not revealing any new details here. Everything, down to the smallest detail, already fills volume upon volume in the reports of human rights organizations. But for me, these are not the stories of faraway people. These are people I have known and who have survived hell. None of them is the same person they once were. I seek to tell what I’ve heard from my friends, an experience shared by countless others, even while changing their names and obscuring identifiable details. After all, the fear of reprisals recurred in every conversation.

Blows and blood

I visited Malek a few days after his release. A yellow gate and guard tower blocked the path that once led to the village from the main road. Most of the other roads passing through the neighboring villages were all blocked. Only one winding road, near the Byzantine church that Israel blew up in 2002, remained open. For years, this village had been like a second home to me, and this is the first time I’ve been back there since my release. 

Malek was detained for 18 days. He was interrogated three times, and during all the interrogations, he was asked trivial questions. He was therefore convinced that he would be transferred to administrative detention - that is, without trial and without evidence, without being charged with anything, under a veneer of secret suspicion and with no time limit. This is indeed the fate of most Palestinian detainees now. 

After the first interrogation, he was taken to the Garden of Torment. During the day, the guards would remove mattresses and blankets from the cells and return them in the evening when they were barely dry, and sometimes still wet. Malek describes the cold of winter nights in Jerusalem as arrows penetrating flesh to the bones. He tells how they beat him and the other inmates at every opportunity. At every count, every search, every movement from one place to another, everything was an opportunity to hit and humiliate.

“Once, during the morning count,” he told me, ”we were all on our knees, our faces turned towards the beds. One of the guards grabbed me from behind, handcuffed my hands and feet, and said in Hebrew, 'Come on, move'. He lifted me up by the handcuffs, behind my back, and led me bent over across the courtyard next to the cells. To get out, there's a sort of small room you must go through, between two doors with a small window”. I know exactly which little room he’s talking about, I’ve passed through it dozens of times. It's a security passage where, at a given moment, only one of the doors can be opened. “So we got there,” Malek continues, “and they slammed me against the door, my face against the window. I looked inside and saw that the floor was covered in clotted blood. I felt fear run through my body like electricity. I knew exactly what was going to happen. They opened the door, one came in and stood by the window at the back, blocked it, and the other threw me inside onto the floor. They kicked me. I tried to protect my head, but my hands were handcuffed, so I didn’t really have any way of doing that. They were murderous blows. I really thought they might kill me. I don’t know how long it lasted. At some point, I remembered that the night before, someone had said to me, “When they hit you, scream at the top of your lungs. What do you care? It can’t get any worse, and maybe someone will hear and come.” So I started shouting really loud, and indeed, someone did come. I don't understand Hebrew, but there was some shouting between him and them. Then they left and he took me away. I had blood coming out of my mouth and nose”.

Khaled, one of my closest friends, also suffered from the violence of the guards. When he was released from prison after eight months’ administrative detention, his son didn’t recognize him from afar. He ran the distance between Ofer prison and his home in Beitunia. Later, he said that he hadn’t been told that the administrative detention was over, and he was afraid that there had been a mistake and that they would soon arrest him again. This had already happened to someone who was with him in the cell. In the photo his son sent me a few minutes after their meeting, he looks like a human shadow. All over his body - his shoulders, arms, back, face, legs - were signs of violence. When I came to visit him, he stood up to kiss me, but when I took him in my arms, he groaned in pain. A few days later, examinations showed edema around the spine and a rib that had healed.

In the Megiddo prison

Every action is an opportunity to hit and humiliate

Another testimony I heard from Nizar, who was already in administrative detention before October 7, and has since been transferred to several prisons, including Megiddo. One evening, the guards entered the cell next door and he could hear the blows and cries of pain from his cell. After a while, the guards picked up an inmate and threw him alone into the isolation cell. During the night and the following day, he moaned in pain and never stopped shouting “my belly” and calling for help. No one came. This continued the following night. Towards morning, the cries stopped. The next day, when a nurse came to take a look around the ward, they understood from the tumult and the screams of the guards that the inmate was dead. To this day, Nizar doesn't know who it was. It was forbidden to speak between cells, and he doesn't know what day it was. 

After his release, he realized that during the time he was detained, this detainee had not been the only one to die in Megiddo. Tawfik, who was released in winter from Gilboa prison, told me that during a check of the area by prison officers, one of the inmates complained that he wasn’t allowed out into the yard. In response, one of the officers said to him: “You want the yard? Say thank you for not being in the Hamas tunnels in Gaza”. Then, for two weeks, every day during the noon count, they took them out into the yard and ordered them to lie on the cold ground for two hours. Even in the rain. While they lay there, the guards walked around the yard with dogs. Sometimes the dogs would pass between them, and sometimes they’d actually step on the inmates lying down; they’d walk all over them.

According to Tawfik, every time an inmate met a lawyer, it came at a price. “I knew every time that the way back, between the visiting room and the ward, would add at least three more volleys of blows. But I never refused to go. You were in a five-star prison. You don’t understand what it’s like to be 12 people in a cell where even six are cramped. It’s like living in a closed circle. I didn’t mind at all what they were going to do to me. Just seeing someone else talking to you like a human being, maybe seeing something in the corridor on the way, that was worth everything to me”.

Munther Amira   - the only one here to appear under his real name - was released from prison by surprise before the end of his period of administrative detention. Even today, no one knows why. Unlike many others who have been warned and fear reprisals, Amira told the cameras about the catastrophe in the prisons, calling them cemeteries for the living. He told me that one night, a Kt’ar unit burst into their cell at Ofer prison, accompanied by two dogs. They ordered the inmates to strip down to their underwear and lie on the floor, then ordered the dogs to sniff their bodies and faces. Then they ordered the prisoners to get dressed, led them to the showers and rinsed them with cold water while clothed. On another occasion, he tried to call a nurse for help after an inmate attempted suicide. The punishment for calling for help was another raid by the Kt’ar unit. This time, they ordered the inmates to lie on top of each other and beat them with truncheons. At one point, one of the guards spread their legs and hit them in the testicles with a truncheon. 

 Hunger and disease

Munther lost 33 kilos during his detention. I don't know how many kilos Khaled lost, having always been a slim man, but in the photo sent to me, I saw a human skeleton. In the living room of his house, the light from the lamp then revealed two deep depressions where his cheeks used to be. His eyes were surrounded by a red outline, that of someone who hadn't slept in weeks. On his skinny arms hung loose skin that looked as if it had been artificially attached, like plastic wrap. Blood tests on both showed severe deficiencies. Everyone I spoke to, regardless of the prison they passed through, repeated almost exactly the same menu, which is sometimes updated, or rather reduced. The last version I heard, from Ofer prison, was: for breakfast, one and a half boxes of cheese for a cell of 12 people, three slices of bread per person, 2 or 3 vegetables, usually a cucumber or a tomato, for the whole cell. Once every four days, 250 grams of jam for the whole cell. For lunch, one disposable plastic cup with rice per person, two spoonfuls of lentils, a few vegetables, three slices of bread. At dinner, two spoonfuls (coffee, not soup spoons) of hummus and tahini per person, a few vegetables, three slices of bread per person. Sometimes another cup of rice, sometimes a falafel ball (just one!) or an egg, which is usually a bit spoiled, sometimes with red dots, sometimes blue. And that’s it. Nazar told me: “It’s not just the quantity. Even what's already been brought in isn’t edible. The rice is barely cooked, almost everything is spoiled. And you know, there are even real children there, the ones who have never been in prison. We've tried to take care of them, to give them our rotten food. But if you give a little of your food away, it's like committing suicide. In the prison there is now a famine (maja'a مَجَاعَة), and it's not a natural disaster, it’s the policy of the prison service.”

Recently, hunger has even increased. Because of the cramped conditions, the prison service is finding ways to make the cells even tighter. Public areas, canteens - every place has become an extra cell. The number of prisoners in the cells, which were already overcrowded before, has increased still further. There are sections where 50 extra prisoners have been added, but the amount of food has remained the same. Not surprisingly, prisoners are losing a third or more of their body weight in just a few months.

Food is not the only thing lacking in prison, and inmates are in fact not allowed to own anything other than a single set of clothes. A shirt, a pair of underwear, a pair of socks, a pair of pants, a sweatshirt. That's it. For the duration of their detention. I remember once, when Munther's lawyer Riham Nasra visited him, he came into the visiting room barefoot. It was winter and freezing cold in Ofer. When she asked him why, he simply said: “There aren't any”. A quarter of all Palestinian prisoners suffer from scabies, according to a statement by the prison service itself in court. Nizar was released when his skin was healing. The lesions on his skin no longer bled, but scabs still covered large parts of his body. “The smell in the cell was something you can't even describe. Like decomposition, we were there and we were decomposing, our skin, our flesh. We’re not human beings there, we’re decomposing flesh,” he says. “Now, how could we not be? Most of the time there's no water at all, often only an hour a day, and sometimes we had no hot water for days. There were whole weeks when I didn't have a shower. It took me over a month to get soap. And there we are, in the same clothes, because nobody has a change of clothes, and they’re full of blood and pus and there’s a stench, not of dirt, but of death. Our clothes were soaked with our decomposing bodies”.

Tawfik recounted that “there was only running water for an hour a day. Not just for showers, but in general, even for toilets. So, during that hour, 12 people in the cell had to do everything that required water, including natural needs. Obviously, this was unbearable. And also, because most of the food was spoiled, we all had digestive problems almost all the time. You can't imagine how bad our cell stank”.

In such conditions, the health of the prisoners obviously deteriorates. Such rapid weight loss, for example, forces the body to consume its own muscle tissue. When Munther was released, he told his wife Sana, who is a nurse, that he was so dirty that his sweat had dyed his clothes orange. She looked at him and asked, “What about the urine?” He replied, “Yes, I peed blood too.” “You idiot,” she yelled at him, ”that wasn't dirt, that was your body rejecting the muscles it had eaten”.

Blood tests on almost everyone I knew showed that they suffered from malnutrition and severe deficiencies of iron, essential minerals and vitamins. But even medical care is a luxury. We don't know what goes on in the prison infirmaries, but for the prisoners, they don’t exist. Regular treatment has simply ceased. From time to time, a nurse makes a tour of the cells, but no treatment is administered, and the “examination” amounts to a conversation through the cell door. The medical response, at best, is paracetamol and, more often, something along the lines of “drink some water”. Needless to say, there's not enough water in the cells, as there's no running water most of the time. Sometimes a week or more goes by without even the nurse visiting the block.

And if there’s little talk of rape, there’s no need to mention sexual humiliation - videos of prisoners being led around completely naked by the prison service have been posted on social networks. These acts could not have been documented other than by the guards themselves, who sought to brag about their actions. The use of the search as an opportunity for sexual assault, often by hitting the groin with the hand or metal detector, is an almost constant experience, regularly described by prisoners who have been in different prisons.

I didn’t hear about assaults on women first hand, obviously. What I have heard, and not once, is the lack of hygienic material during menstruation and its use to humiliate. After the first beating on the day of her arrest, Mounira was taken to Sharon prison. On entering the prison, everyone goes through a body search, but a strip search is not the norm and requires reasonable cause to suspect that the inmate is hiding a prohibited object. A strip search also requires the approval of the officer in charge. During the search, no officer was there for Mounira, and certainly no organized procedure to verify reasonable suspicion. Mounira was pushed by two female guards into a small search room, where they forced her to remove all her clothes, including her underwear and bra, and get down on her knees. After leaving her alone for a few minutes, one of the guards came back, hit her and left. In the end, her clothes were returned to her, and she was allowed to get dressed. The next day was the first day of her period. She was given a sanitary pad and had to make do with it for the whole of her period. And it was the same for all of them. By the time she was released, she was suffering from an infection and severe inflammation of the urinary tract.

Epilogue

Sde Teiman was the most terrible place of detention, and this is supposedly why they closed it down. Indeed, it’s hard to think of the descriptions of horror and atrocity that came out of this torture camp without thinking of the place as one of the circles of hell. But it was not without reason that the state agreed to transfer those held there to other locations - principally Nitzan and Ofer. Sde Teiman or not, Israel is holding thousands of people in torture camps, and at least 68 of them have lost their lives. Since the beginning of December alone, the deaths of four more detainees have been reported. One of them, Mahmad Walid Ali, 45, from the Nour Shams camp near Tulkarm, died just one week after his arrest. Torture in all its forms - hunger, humiliation, sexual assault, promiscuity, beatings and death - does not happen by chance. Together, they constitute Israeli policy. This is the reality.

 

BENOÎT GODINForty years after his death, Éloi Machoro's battle continues unabated

Benoît Godin, Billets d’Afrique, January 2025
Translated by Fausto Giudice, Tlaxcala

Benoît Godin is a French journalist and activist with the Survie association, which fights against Françafrique. Author of the radio documentary Le combat ne doit pas cesser : Éloi Machoro, un super-héros pour Kanaky 

On 12 January 1985, the GIGN [National Gendarmerie Intervention Group] shot dead Éloi Machoro, bringing to a halt two months of an uprising that shook the colonial order in New Caledonia and revealed to the world the existence of the Kanak people and their fight against French domination. Forty years on, that struggle is still painfully relevant today.

Who took the decision to shoot Éloi Machoro and one of his comrades in arms, Marcel Nonarro, on 12 January 1985? Edgard Pisani, the French Republic's High Commissioner, who had just arrived in New Caledonia with extensive powers to deal with a quasi-insurrectionary situation? Someone higher up in Paris? Or the GIGN men sent to the scene, the same ones who had been humiliated a month and a half earlier by Machoro and his comrades and who had allegedly gone beyond their orders? Forty years on, the question remains.

 But is it really that important? The real culprit in this double murder - for it was one - is known: it was the French state, always implacable when confronted with peoples rebelling against the colonial yoke. That morning, France eliminated one of the men most hated by the whites of New Caledonia (the announcement of his death was greeted by howls of joy in the central square of Nouméa). He was the emblematic figure of the first major post-war Kanak uprising (and even since the wars of 1878 and 1917), which marked the beginning of the hardest phase of the period known as the ‘events’.

 A man on the ground

Who was Éloi Machoro? Before those terrible weeks that shook the colonial order, he was already a leading local figure, elected to the Territorial Assembly. Along with Yeiwéné Yeiwéné and above all Jean-Marie Tjibaou, he was one of the most prominent representatives of the young Kanak generation who, in 1977, took over the reins of the archipelago's oldest political party, the Union calédonienne (UC), transforming it into a pro-independence movement. In 1981, Éloi Machoro even became the party's Secretary General after the assassination of his predecessor, Pierre Declercq. In this role, he was responsible for organising the life of the party. This man of easy approachability and obvious charisma was constantly on the move in the four corners of the country, in contact with activists of all ages and even of all origins. He was a man on the ground. And so it was there, on the ground, that he was to be found, quite logically, at the end of 1984, leading part of the Kanak forces.

 The broken ballot box

 There are many similarities between the Kanak uprisings of that time and this Spring of 2024, and one of the most obvious is the way they were triggered. Back then, restricting the electorate was already at the heart of the pro-independence demands. The aim was to counter the effects of almost a century and a half of colonisation, which had ended up with the indigenous people in a minority on their own land. The Socialists in power in Paris refused to take this into account: they imposed a new statute, known as the Lemoine Statute (named after the Secretary of State in charge of the French overseas departments and territories), and organised open territorial elections on 18 November 1984. This was too much for most pro-independence organisations, led by the UC, who formed the Front de libération nationale kanak et socialiste (FLNKS) and called for an ‘active boycott’ of the elections. On D-Day, the territory was ablaze with demonstrations, blocked roads, occupied town halls and even arson attacks.

 Eloi's axe, by Miriam Shwamm

That morning, Éloi Machoro and a group of activists invaded the town hall in Canala, his home town on the east coast of Grande Terre. Armed with a tamioc, a traditional axe, he smashed the ballot box. It was a powerful gesture, immortalised by the local daily's correspondent. The photo went around the world. The struggle of the Kanak people suddenly came into the open, and it had a face: the severe face of Éloi Machoro, wearing a cap, sunglasses and a thick moustache.

It was the starting point of an epic story that was as dazzling as it was influential for Kanaky-New Caledonia. Two days later, Éloi Machoro and other activists from Canala joined the Kanaks in Thio, some forty kilometres further south, to occupy the gendarmerie. They vacated the premises after a day, but immediately began a ‘siege’ of the commune: for almost a month, the pro-independence fighters held Thio, setting up roadblocks and controlling all access routes.

While Canala was now overwhelmingly Kanak, Thio still had a large population of Caldoches (as Caledonians of European origin were known) and remained a stronghold of the colonial right. Its mayor, Roger Galliot, has just set up the local branch of the Front National. But beyond the political symbolism, Thio also represented a major economic challenge: it is home to one of the largest nickel mines in the world. Nickel is New Caledonia's main source of wealth, a windfall for the French state, but one from which the Kanak people have never benefited, with the exception of a few employees

Kanaky's Minister for Security

 Machoro, who became Minister for Security in the provisional government of Kanaky proclaimed by the FLNKS, led the occupation. He and his men went round the homes of the settlers to confiscate their weapons. But at the same time, he demanded unfailing discipline from his militants. Alcohol, looting and even simple damage were forbidden. Those who failed to comply were severely reprimanded (to say the least) and sent straight home. The mine was shut down, but all the equipment was carefully protected. The aim was not only to preserve the economic tools that were essential to the future independent country, but also to show an exemplary face to the journalists who rushed to Thio. Machoro was happy to receive them and gave many interviews, well aware that the Kanak cause needed outside support, both within the administering power and internationally.

On 1 December, the GIGN tried to invade the commune to put an end to the occupation. But it was not to be: dozens of Kanak, armed with rifles seized from the Caldoches, surrounded them as soon as they got off the Puma helicopters, disarmed them and forced them to leave. It was a slap in the face for the gendarmes - the same ones who were to be found a few weeks later near La Foa. The episode left its mark on people's minds, reinforcing Machoro's aura in the Kanak world... and creating psychosis among Europeans, for whom Machoro became public enemy number one. Yet Machoro was anything but a brutal fanatic. After the massacre on 5 December in the Hienghène valley of ten Kanak (including two of Jean-Marie Tjibaou's brothers) by small settlers, he opposed some of his men, who wanted to take revenge on the isolated whites holed up in their homes in Thio. His action probably prevented a bloodbath.

On the other hand, Machoro had no intention of backing down in the face of the State and its ‘loyalist’ allies. If he ended up reluctantly respecting (and ensuring respect for) the FLNKS order to lift the roadblocks issued in mid-December, it was to immediately prepare, with a group of determined militants, for a new coup: the siege of La Foa, on the other side of Grande Terre. Almost a declaration of war in the eyes of the State: it was tantamount to attacking a ‘Caldoche’ commune and above all to cutting off the highly strategic Territorial Route 1 linking Nouméa, the capital, to the north of the island. On 11 January 1985, on the eve of taking action, Machoro and around thirty companions took up position a few kilometres away in a farm on the Dogny plateau. Spotted, they were surrounded by gendarmes. Early the next morning, the snipers did their dirty work.

Ataï (left) and Machoro, painted by Élia Aramoto on a bus shelter in Poindimié. Photo Hamid Mokaddem, 1990

 Responding to colonial brutality

 Forty years on, Éloi Machoro remains an icon in the Kanak world, particularly among young people, on a par with the great chief Ataï who led the war of 1878 against the French occupiers and to whom he is often compared. His portrait is everywhere: T-shirts, banners, tribal walls, Nouméa's working-class neighbourhoods, social networks... Having disappeared before the time of the agreements, Machoro embodies an uncompromising struggle against this colonisation that never ends. On 4 April this year, on the sidelines of a press conference organised at the UC offices in Nouméa, journalists were greeted by an axe stuck in a ballot box... When it comes to action on the ground, the spirit of old Éloi is invoked.

 However, there is still a certain misunderstanding surrounding this relatively unknown man, almost as much on the part of his supporters as his opponents. Both sides maintain a legend which, whether golden or obscure, paints more or less the same picture, that of a hard-line Oceanian Che Guevara. Which has little to do with reality... Because although he died with a rifle in his hand, Machoro never fired a single shot - not even before being shot, contrary to the first version of the ‘law enforcers’ seeking to justify their crime.

He was in fact a man who was very open to dialogue - like other UC leaders at the time. In 1983, alongside Yeiwéné and Tjibaou, he took part in the Nainville-les-Roches round table, during which the pro-independence movement reached out to the other communities in the archipelago, who were recognised as ‘victims of history’. While Éloi Machoro raised the question of resorting to more radical forms of action, it was only in response to the contempt and brutality of the colonial system. In this, his path follows that of his people, who have always been open to exchange, but who have always come up against a French state locked in its criminal imperialist logic. It cannot be stressed enough that the outburst of popular anger on the evening of 13 May 2024, after the National Assembly voted on the constitutional bill to unfreeze the electoral roll, followed months of massive, pacifist mobilisation by the pro-independence forces, first and foremost the Kanak...

In a letter written on 17 November 1984, the eve of the active boycott, and for a long time wrongly presented as his last, Éloi Machoro wrote these words that are still remembered: ‘ The fight must not stop, for lack of leaders or for lack of fighters ’. If the Kanak people have since given the impression that they were less combative, it was only because they were giving the decolonisation process underpinned by the Matignon and then Nouméa Accords a chance. Following Machoro's motto, it never gave up the fight for his emancipation and for the independence of Kanaky-New Caledonia. The past year has proved this once again.

TESTIMONIAL A Gazan woman’s diary: “We died all kinds of deaths”

Nour Z Jarada has lived in Gaza all her life. For  the French daily “Libération”, this psychologist from Médecins du Monde France writes about her daily life in the war-torn Palestinian enclave. Episode six: the anguish of winter and a hint of hope.

by Nour Z Jarada, Gazan psychologist for Médecins du Monde France, Libération  , 12/31/2024
Translated by Fausto Giudice, Tlaxcala

December is drawing to a close and we’re facing a second winter of war. I could never have imagined going through another winter like this one. Winter used to be my favorite season. When asked what my favorite time of year was, I always answered winter. Always. I loved its rain, its coolness, its comfort. I wished it was always winter. But things are different now. I can no longer afford the luxury of loving winter. I no longer have a warm home, winter clothes, blankets or even heating. I no longer have our streets, our gatherings, or our warm cups of tea shared with loved ones. From now on, none of us here can afford the luxury of loving winter.

I remember crying my eyes out at the first rain of the year. The sadness of another winter while we’re still at war was unbearable. My heart broke for us, for the families in the tents. That night, I saw flooded tents on the news and thanked God for the fragile roof over my head. Yet my heart broke for our children and families who spent the night in the icy water, waiting for dawn or simply for the rain to stop. As those dark hours stretched on, a child’s cries rang out from a nearby tent. They pierced the silence, filled with sorrow and pain. I didn’t know if the child was cold or hungry, but I couldn’t sleep. All nights are terrifying in wartime: they are merciless, cruel and endless. As we all know, we dread the long hours between now and morning and pray for the night’s horrors to come to an end.

Displaced people’s tents after heavy rain in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, December 30. (Madji Fathi/NurPhoto. AFP)

Resilience

Today, after more than a year and two months of war in Gaza, I’m a different person. Unfortunately, I’m not sure whether this change is a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, grief weighs heavily on my heart, a wound so deep that not even time can erase it. This injustice opens the door to a myriad of questions racing through my mind: Why? How is it that the geographical space in which we were born, to which we belong, our race, our color, our religion, are all factors that determine our destiny? Our suffering, our trauma? How can these elements, which we have not chosen, control the course of our lives? How can we heal from such merciless traumas? How can I go on living without my loved ones? These questions haunt me, all the more so when I imagine the end of the war.

Yet I’ve also discovered a resilience I never imagined I possessed. I endured fear, displacement, loss, grief, tears and unimaginable sorrow. I’ve faced it all patiently, even when I had no choice. Through it all, it was my unshakeable faith that carried me through, a conviction that there is a reason for everything, even if only God knows it. We believe in God. Every trial we go through carries with it a wisdom we can’t grasp with our minds. We turn our hearts over to God, even when the trial seems humanly beyond our capacity. This faith has driven me to persevere, to keep working, to fight and to support those around me.

Security nowhere to be found

In this war, adversity knows no bounds: the famine in northern Gaza during the year was unthinkable. People were forced to eat tree leaves, desperately searching for the slightest remnant of flour. The “flour massacre” even made international headlines, with people eating blood-stained bread. Countries sent aid by sea, our people drowned trying to reach it. Is it really possible that Gaza, once celebrated for its hospitality and generous cuisine, is now a land of starvation? Yet this is the reality we face. We have died all kinds of deaths. And today, famine has caught up with us in southern and central Gaza, areas supposedly “safe” for displaced civilians. But safety remains elusive.

Food is becoming increasingly scarce, and prices are rising so much that they are becoming unaffordable for most of us. Flour, once a staple, is now hard to come by. Those who manage to obtain small quantities often find it infested with worms or insects, but we sift it before cooking and eating it because we have no alternatives.

I’ve even joked bitterly with colleagues that I’d rather die in an air strike than starve to death: it would be quicker and less painful. What greater injustice can there be than to live in a world where we think about a way to die, about the least unbearable way to leave this life?

Maybe I’ll never write again

Since the beginning of December, there have been a few glimmers of hope; rumors of a potential ceasefire. But nobody dares to be optimistic anymore. That’s another change. Just a few months ago, I was one of those hopeful people. Every time I heard rumors of a ceasefire, I rushed to pack my suitcase, ready to go home. But each time, my heart was broken. Today, I’ve learned not to hope. In psychology, this is called learned helplessness: when repeated failures or hardships leave a person in a state of helplessness, unable to believe that things will change.

Yet I still dream of the end of the war. I dream of returning to my home in northern Gaza, of seeing my grandmother again. She’s over 70 and a resilient, gentle and very religious woman. I haven’t seen her since October 7th. My heart longs to hold her close to me. I can’t imagine how she has endured terror, hunger and grief. Sometimes we talk on the phone, but it’s too painful. We both cry and the calls end with more fear and longing.

At this moment, I imagine myself writing to you next time from the north of Gaza. Maybe a little piece of the hopeful Nour is still there in me. Or maybe I’ll never write again. No one knows what the future is made of. But what I do know is that oppression always ends one day. As the poet Aboul-Qacem Echebbi  wrote: “If it happens to the people, one day, to want to live, fate will have to answer.” And as God promises in the Qur’an: “Next to difficulty is, surely, ease!” Despite all we endure, we cling to our strength and resilience. Every day, we put aside our grief to take on our roles and reach out to those around us. Helping those the world has forgotten gives meaning and purpose to our lives.

Such a simple desire

Last month, a moment seared itself into my memory. A young man visiting our clinic lost his entire family and his right leg in the war. The only survivor, he now lives alone in a flimsy tent. Despite this unimaginable loss, he represents a source of hope for others. During psychosocial sessions, he learned breathing exercises and coping techniques. We’ve noticed that he’s now teaching these exercises to other patients in the clinic’s waiting room, and sharing how he’s coping with his grief. His strength inspires me.

At times, my colleagues and I allow ourselves to dream of returning to our devastated city. We talk about the first things we would do when that day comes. First and foremost, we want to honor the memory of our dear colleague, Dr Maisara, by digging his body out of the rubble of his house after more than a year and giving him a dignified burial. Then we’ll seek shelter; perhaps in tents and work together to rebuild our lives and the clinic, to continue serving our people. As for me, I’ll see my grandmother again. It’s such a simple but profound desire that gives me the strength to continue enduring the hardships.

Honestly, after all this, if I had the choice, I’d choose to be a Ghazawiya, to be a Palestinian, from this land I love again and again, today and forever.

LUCA CELADASilicon Valley’s plan to take over the state The irresistible (or resistible?) rise of the broligarchs

USA: A weaponized and extremist plutocracy is on the verge of taking control of the world’s greatest superpower.

Luca Celada, il manifesto, 17/12/2024

Translated by John Catalinotto, Tlaxcala 

 Luca Celada is the Los Angeles correspondent for the Italian daily il manifesto.

This week, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Open AI’s Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg announced donations of $1 million each as contributions to Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony on January 20. Digital moguls have often been under attack by Trump, who until a few weeks ago asserted that Zuckerberg, in particular, should “go to jail” for censoring right-wing views on his platforms. After Trump’s victory, there was a virtual pilgrimage from Silicon Valley to Mar-a-Lago to perform an act of submission. Last week, Meta’s boss flew there for a meeting with Trump; Bezos has an appointment in the next few days.
Many other plutocrats have a permanent presence in the revolving court that has been orbiting around the returning president since the November elections. Among the many tycoons who generously contributed to his re-election, many were immediately rewarded with ministerial appointments. Among them, Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared, whom he pardoned in 2020 [he had been convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering] , honored with the post of ambassador to France.
(Another “dynastic” appointment is that of first-born Donald J’s (possibly ex) fiancée, Kimberley Guilfoyle, as the new ambassador to Greece, while his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, is set to move from the Republican Party National Committee to the Senate).
Ministers with opulent fortunes (over $1 billion) include Linda McMahon at Public Education, Scott Bessent at Treasury, Doug Burgum at Interior, Howard Lutnick at Commerce, Jared Isaacman as head of NASA, and Steve Witkoff - Trump’s business partner in a new crypto-currency company, World Liberty Financial - as special envoy to the Middle East.
 
As well as creating another blatant conflict of interest for the new president, the family’s entry into production of “Trump coin” is the latest indication of a growing partnership between Trump and the new capitalism incubated in Silicon Valley. Silicon tycoons are fantastically wealthy, and for Trump wealth has always been an ostentatious symbol of success. According to a recent New York Times article, he likes to show off his new political associates like trophies in his kitschy palace. “I’ve brought two of the richest men in the world,” he was recently quoted by the Times as saying, as he introduced himself to a meeting of journalists in the company of Elon Musk and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “You, who did you bring?”
It’s Elon Musk who epitomizes the influence of Silicon Valley’s accelerationists in Trump’s restoration: as we know, he has been entrusted, along with another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswami, with a central post as administrator of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). Musk would, however, have greater freedom of action, including over the composition of the government framework itself, on which numerous collaborators “on loan” from his companies would work in Florida.
Among the key figures would be Jared Birchall, director of Neuralink, the company in charge of neurological implants, but also administrator of the tycoon’s personal finances and generally his right-hand man, in charge of family affaires, the foundation, as well as Musk’s real estate, travel and security. To these tasks are now added talks with potential State Department representatives. The fact that Birchall has no experience of international affairs is clearly not seen as a problem in a selection which, as with other departments, would seem to focus primarily on ideological affinities and the nominees’ loyalty to the President.
Another advisor, this time to select intelligence personnel, is Shaun Maguire, a Caltech physicist who became a billionaire as a partner in Sequoia, one of Silicon Valley’s leading investment funds and (needless to say) a friend of Elon Musk, with whom he shares the cult, so fashionable in the Valley, of the undisciplined, misfit genius, perhaps even a little misanthropic, but always brilliant.
In other words, many of the decisions destined to shape the Trump 2.0 government are in the hands of an ideological faction of extremist “meritocrats,” not to say “Darwinist” theorists of the triumph of the best over the mediocre. Another “advisor” located  in Palm Beach, for example, is Marc Andreesen, the billionaire founder of Netscape and one of the leading ideologues of the neo-reactionary oligarchy, a fervent advocate of radical libertarianism and minimal state interference in corporate affairs.

 

Thanks to its strategic alliance with Trump, a partnership that only really matured in the final stages of the election campaign, this small group of entrepreneurs radicalized by the success of the Silicon Valley oligopolies, now has the opportunity to transport the philosophies of management (and eugenics) to the state apparatus. Musk has, for example, repeatedly expressed the idea that immigration should be managed like a “sports club” selection campaign, required to select the best players and discard the people who for him as for Trump are the much-hated “losers.”
But Musk’s main obsession is cutting public spending, against which he constantly rails in X-posts as a source of inflation and unsustainable budget deficits. These are the classic themes of conservative economic philosophy that the Silicon Valley right has imbued with an almost religious zeal. It is striking that a faction which, until recently, would have been considered fanatically extremist, has risen to such a position of power almost without prior planning. The very creation of Musk’s super-ministry occurred “live” during the recorded live X broadcast of the two men after the failed attack on Trump last July.
“A lot of people just don’t understand where inflation comes from. Inflation comes from government overspending because the checks never bounce when it’s written by the government. So if the government spends far more than it brings in, that increases the money supply,” the Space X owner (who collects billions of dollars in public space contracts) remarked during the conversation. “I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money, to the taxpayers’ hard-earned money is spent in a good way. And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission.”
“I’d love it. […]Well, you, you’re the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, you want to quit? They go on strike. I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that’s okay. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So every one of you is gone and you are the greatest. You would be very good. Oh, you would love it.” (Laughs).
Musk and Ramaswamy don’t miss an opportunity to point out that the main sources of unnecessary spending are programs such as food aid for needy families, pensions and healthcare. “At first, it may cause some discomfort,” Musk even admitted of the dreaded remedy (cutting $2 trillion in public spending, equivalent to more than a third of the state budget), ”but in the long run, it will be better for everyone.”

 ’Captain X’, by Vasco Gargalo

“We’ll see what happens,” Trump asserted in this regard. “It will be an interesting few months. But the country is cluttered with regulations and unnecessary people who could be more productive in the private sector.” Now, with unprecedented influence, Silicon Valley’s “broligarchs”   are preparing to get their hands on the social welfare apparatus like one would a recently acquired subsidiary, with the intention of implementing a colossal “entrepreneurial” reform.
The fortunes accumulated by today’s plutocracy invite comparisons with the “golden age” of the early twentieth century, when the stratospheric wealth of the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and major industrial and banking families underscored the abysmal inequality with the subordinate economic classes. But the political influence of these “robber barons,” remarkable as it was, pales in comparison with the current situation.
That era had been the prelude to a season of enormous social conflicts in the country and to the creation, under Franklin Roosevelt, of the social safety net (health care and pensions) that still exists today. Today, however, the tensions produced by globalization and rampant social inequality have apparently produced a government directly controlled by the most gigantic monopolies generated by neoliberal capitalism, which, in alliance with a populist demagogue and the most reactionary parts of the ideological right, are preparing to dismantle this social pact.
All this is despite a blatant conflict of interest on the part of the corporations who are in fact responsible for dismantling the federal agencies charged with regulating them. The first heads the tech industry would like to see fall are those of Lina Kahn, architect at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the antitrust campaign that recently dragged Google and Amazon through the courts, and Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator who, as chairwoman of the Consumer Protection Authority, is one of the most consistently left-wing voices against corporate overreach (Andreesen has expressly called for her to be “removed”).
However, it’s not just a matter of securing the services of a friendly administration (although with a dealer like Trump, these will be all but assured). Trump’s promised decimation of the “deep state” as an anti-system populist aggregation device is, for Silicon Valley’s activist plutocracy, an ideological goal that Musk pursues with particular fervor.
In their recent book “Character Limit,” Kate Conger and Ryan Mac trace what happened in the days following Musk’s purchase of Twitter. A succession of layoffs, communicated by e-mail, department heads summoned by surprise and asked to justify the usefulness of their jobs in 60 seconds, with their severance packages withheld. An economic “restructuring” was transformed into a theater of cruelty, based on ritual and punitive humiliation. An area of strong affinity between Musk and Trump, already the owner of a reality TV show whose slogan was “You’re Fired!”
The liquidation of 80% of employees “without consequences” for the company (not to mention the destruction of a platform now reduced to a megaphone of disinformation and propaganda), turned Musk into a kind of anarcho-capitalist hero for a large group of followers. And it’s the same recipe many expect him to use to decimate the “Deep State” once and for all. In recent weeks, Musk has often been seen in the company of another associate, Steve Davis, one of the heads of the Boring Company (Musk’s tunnel-building company). According to the Times, Davis, who specializes in cost-cutting, has also engaged in discussions with other experts to “optimize the federal budget.” He too is likely to play a leading role in the new DOGE department.
It may not be possible to replicate Twitter’s 80% cuts, but even Musk’s paradoxical reduction of nearly 50% in government spending would represent a catastrophic apotheosis in the war of the rich against the poor. To prepare the ground, the campaign, amplified by Musk, to vilify the “profiteers” of public subsidies and “liberate” businesses from “suffocating bureaucracies” has already begun on “X.”
The other impulse is privatization, with another Musk team leader: Shervin Pishevar, director and co-founder of Hyperloop (the supersonic capsule company with several projects in the experimental phase). Pishevar hails “the opportunity to reimagine government functions in light of unprecedented economic and technological developments.” A phrase that sums up Silicon Valley’s economic interests and technological messianism. According to Pishevar, services such as the post office, NASA and the prison system “will benefit immensely from the ingenuity of the private sector.” All with the aim of creating a “future aligned with ownership and prosperity”. One of the hallmarks of ultracapitalists is that they glibly boast about what, until recently, and again during Trump’s first term, employer groups would have hushed up and publicly denied.

The progressive privatization of services is an integral part of the programs of many Western liberal governments. But the giga-capitalists now see an opportunity to finish the job very quickly, adopting the slogan “move fast and break things.” Mark Zuckerberg’s motto, favored by tech thaumaturges, would thus apply to the state apparatus to be “reinvented.” After all, even the infamous Project 2025 is based on a “blitzkrieg” aimed at crushing institutional resistance (or constitutional roadblocks) and armoring the apparatus without giving resistance time to organize.

The “blitzkrieg” project promises to assault all areas, starting with research, health and public education, and in some cases is already well advanced. The network of detention centers for migrants to be deported, for example (over 200 in the country, and which mass deportations promise to increase dramatically), is already outsourced by the government to companies in the prison industrial complex, companies like Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group, paid for each prisoner held, and whose share price soared on the day of Trump’s election.
But the revered “disruption” must, in the project of the “broligarchs”, extend to society as a whole. What Pishevar euphemistically calls the “revolutionary restructuring of public institutions” will follow the familiar script of their sabotage and withholding funds with a view to their replacement by “management” companies and, consequently, a massive transfer of public funds to private coffers. Much of this is likely to be implemented by executive order, but on this occasion, Trump and his sponsors have both houses of parliament and a reactionary supermajority on the Supreme Court - an unprecedented convergence of purpose and power.
Still in the context of “innovation”, one significant appointment has partly flown under the radar, that of David Sachs to the invented post of “cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence czar.” A venture capitalist and old acquaintance of Musk’s from his PayPal days, Sachs is one of several South Africans who play a prominent role in Silicon Valley’s reactionary wing. Roelof Botha (grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha) is a Sequoia investor (the same as Shaun Maguire), Patrick Soon-Shiong is the owner of the Los Angeles Times, which had banned pro-Kamala Harris editorials from its editorial board and recently announced the introduction of an AI algorithm to “correct” the progressive biases of its editors.
Of all the digital tycoons with ties to the southern hemisphere, it’s certainly Peter Thiel who has the highest profile. Linked to the anarcho-capitalist think-tank Property & Freedom Conference and the Bilderberg Group, the tycoon, who grew up in Namibia in a German family, is not only a Trump supporter, but has also been the financier and career mentor of JD Vance, whose vice-presidential nomination he directly sponsored and guaranteed.
A founding member of PayPal, Thiel studied at Stanford, where he founded the Young Conservative Journal. Famous for theorizing that “democracy is no longer compatible with freedom,” he is today the eminence grise of Silicon Valley’s neo-reactionary cult.
 
Last month, in an interview with Bari Weiss, he compared the tech ultra-capitalists who led Trump to victory to the resistance fighters who bring down the Empire in Star Wars (an analogy in which Biden would presumably play Darth Vader).
In addition to leading the holy alliance against the “establishment,” Thiel is the owner of Palantir, a data analytics and AI company with multiple military applications (the company is named after the wizard Sauron’s divination stones in JRR Tolkien’s books). Control of artificial intelligence, as we know, will be crucial to the next capitalist and geopolitical phase, and the Trump-oligarchs cabal has therefore also been consumed with a view that they must pursue a new AI arms race, notably with the Chinese arch-rival.
Founded in 2003, Palantir first supplied neural networks and data analysis algorithms to intelligence agencies, then to military special departments. Today, it is a leader in military AI applications, which it also supplies to numerous global customers. Always, it is said, those who are on the “right” side. The company’s CEO, Alex Karp, is a staunch supporter of Israel and a defender of the new U.S.-led global Manichaeism. “We have to explain to Americans that the world is divided into two parts, and one of them is run by terrorists whose goal is to dominate the West,” he asserted at a recent Reagan Institute conference.
In Karp’s thinking, technological supremacy goes hand in hand with the moral superiority of the U.S.-led West. And supremacism is inseparable from the logic of permanent war (which, after all, corresponds to the corporate business model). Karp asserts that “[U.S.] Americans are the most fearful, impartial, least racist and best-disposed people in the world. At the same time, they want us to know that if you wake up in the morning thinking you’re going to hurt us, take us hostage or send fentanyl to kill us at home, something very bad is going to happen to you, your cousin, your lover or your family.”
At Karp’s headquarters, his rantings sounding like a Doctor Strangelove of algorithms are commonplace. “We have the best technology and it has to stay that way,” he declares in another video. “We can’t afford to be equivalent with anyone because our opponents don’t have our moral scruples.” A staunch Zionist and Netanyahu supporter, Karp put his company’s “moral superiority” to work for the IDF in the campaign against Gaza and tested his own artificial intelligence in the Ukrainian theater. In Karp’s new “digital pax americana,” Dr. Fiolamour meets Terminator in a scenario where the “enemy” sky is permanently paved with Starlink satellites (Musk’s subsidiary already has 6,500 in orbit) and numerous others armed with missiles.
 A fortnight ago [Dec. 2, by 166-3 with 15 abstentions], 166 members of the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for a treaty on “intelligent” weapons, “killer robots” with “autonomous decision-making.” This treaty is nothing more than wishful thinking, as the USA is opposed to any compulsory limitation. In fact, the proliferation of smart weapons is already well underway, and will remain a top priority for the next White House.
At the headquarters of Silicon Valley’s new digital military-industrial complex, work is well underway to ensure U.S. supremacy in space and in the oceans, where “swarms” of autonomous robot submarines are already crossing paths, produced by another leading company in the sector, Anduril (a name also taken from Lord of the Rings, this time Aragorn’s sword). These are increasingly common scenarios in which the transhumanism of giga-capitalists veers into the post-human.
The model can now be definitively consolidated by a White House where reactionary ideology and industrial interests will overlap infinitely without distinction, a government composed in equal parts of apocalyptic ideologues and arms industrialists who will have a 100% business partner in the Oval Office.
A state of emergency, roundups and constitutional modifications by decree (the end of birthright citizenship), to start with, followed by radical restrictions on dissent) are on the horizon starting in late January. Behind this project is a faction which, in addition to their certainty they are right, will now have the power to enforce it with the full support of an imperial presidency.