In this age of social media, it is inevitable that we will come across a debate where one party will portray their opponents as modern-day equivalents of Nazis. The latter is evil personified – and accusing someone with that word stirs the passions.

We have all heard or read the words – Eco-Nazi, feminazi, Soup Nazi – and now a variation on a theme, Chinazi, a portmanteau deployed by Hong Kong protesters comparing the Beijing regime to Nazi Germany. Ok, I understand that Seinfeld was being comical when writing the soup Nazi episode.

However, the misuse and exaggerated recycling of the Nazi/Holocaust analogy is anything but funny. It is sloppy thinking, serves to inflame polarising rhetoric, and trivialises the serious nature of the historical nature of Nazism, but also underestimates the growing problem of white supremacist ideology today.

Anti-vaccine protesters have misused the Holocaust analogy, and in their latest protest in France, in July, they displayed their wilful distortion of contemporary history. Wearing the yellow Star of David similar to the symbol imposed upon Jewish people in Nazi-aligned Vichy France, anti-vaxxers portrayed themselves as a beleaguered minority, objecting to the proposal by French President Macron to implement a health pass only for vaccinated individuals. That vaccine passport would allow people to mingle and visit public areas, vaccinated against Covid-19.

Arthur Caplan, an expert on medical ethics, wrote that in discussions about medical practices, inevitably, a participant will invoke the Nazi analogy:

Whether the subject is stem cell research, end-of-life care, the conduct of clinical trials in poor nations, abortion, embryo research, animal experimentation, genetic testing, or human experimentation involving vulnerable populations, references to Nazi policies or practices tumble forth from critics. “If X is done, then we are on the road to Nazi Germany” has become a commonplace claim in contemporary bioethical debates.

In countering the anti-vaxxer protest in France mentioned earlier, Holocaust survivor Joseph Szwarc, now in his nineties, condemned the far right protesters. He stated that he and his fellow Jews were victims of white supremacy and antisemitism; the anti-vaccination crowd knew nothing about the horrendous suffering of Jewish people under Nazism.

The discussions today surrounding euthanasia, gun control, medical testing conducted on animals, stem cell research and so on, are grounded in a strong foundation of bioethics, respect for the dignity of each individual person, and promoting individual human autonomy and decision-making. The Nazi party, and its cothinkers around Europe, were motivated by the philosophy of eugenics and white supremacy. Classifying people into racial categories, they were determined to exterminate all those whom they regarded as sub-human.

The Nazi euthanasia programme, for instance, had nothing to do with consideration of quality of life, nor with the provision of palliative care for the terminally ill. In fact, labeling the Nazi policy of systematically murdering the differently-abled ‘euthanasia’ is a misnomer. The white supremacist ideology is that of a death cult, condemning the nonwhite nations to oblivion through industrialised killing.

Scientifically informed and medically sound responses to the pandemic, medical approaches to serious illness and public health measures have nothing to do with the mass slaughter of the Holocaust. In fact, the latter is being trivialised when we invoke horrid comparisons with that crime against humanity, demeaning the suffering of those who lost their lives.

When Ben Carson, former Republican presidential candidate, misuses the Nazi analogy in a debate about gun control – comparing Obama’s proposed gun control legislation as akin to Hitler and the Nazis – he is demonstrating his appalling ignorance. The Weimar Republic, the regime prior to the Nazis ascent to power, had tougher gun control legislation that the Nazi regime.

Carson recycled the damaging myth of ‘good guys with guns’, stating that Jews could have reduced the numbers killed in the Holocaust if only they were allowed guns. This ridiculous, good cowboy-with-a-gun stereotype is demolished by the facts of World War 2 – Jewish people in the ghettos did fight back, with guns, and were overwhelmed and killed by German forces.

Mike Huckabee, Republican stalwart, denounced any kind of deal with Iran on the subject of nuclear weapons, by stating that former President Obama’s arrangement with Iran was like marching Israelis to the door of the ovens. Such inflammatory and wildly inaccurate statements fit the pattern of reductio ad Hitlerum. Accusing your opponent of ‘behaving like Nazis’ shuts down debate, and distracts from the very real and growing problem of white supremacist groups around the world.

Should the use of the Nazi/Holocaust analogy be completely terminated? No. Just make sure you know the history of WW2, Nazism and fascism before you start casually throwing around the Nazi analogy. Ensure that your comparison does not serve to simply slander your opponent, or merely turn up the heat of a debate without shedding any new light on your case.

This month, Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian President elect, will assume office. This provides an opportunity to restart the stalled dialogue between Tehran and Washington. For its part, the Biden administration should stop listening to the advice of a fanatical and delusional cult, which has steadily gained access to, and high-level supporters on, Capitol Hill.

The Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), People’s Mujahedin of Iran, began as an anti-monarchist, semi-socialist and Islamist group fighting to overthrow the US-backed Shah of Iran. Participants in the 1979-80 Iranian Revolution, they have gradually metamorphosed – deteriorated – into a dictatorial exile cult, dependent on imperialist support. Serving as a cat’s paw of the US, they have gained a devoted band of neoconservative supporters, and plush offices – and have incited the US into a belligerent and bellicose stand against Tehran.

Once regarded as a terrorist group, the MEK was delisted from that classification in 2012, by an American administration intent on cultivating exiled Iranian forces able and willing to confront the regime in Tehran. Bravely fighting the US-supported monarchy in the 1960s and 70s, they played a strong part in the overthrow of the Shah and the defeat of his US-trained secret police.

After the success of the anti-American 1979-80 revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini and associated mullahs turned again the MEK. The latter fought back with bombings, street-battles and guerrilla warfare, but their days were numbered. Most of the MEK militants were killed, or fled to neighbouring Iraq. Here, with the official support of the Ba’athist regime, they became willing footsoldiers of the Iraqi army in its long war against revolutionary Iran.

In the 1980s, setting up at Camp Ashraf, the MEK lost its support inside Iran, viewed as an accomplice to a foreign regime. Iraq’s President, Saddam Hussein, was an ally of the US and the western powers. Only after the Iraqi regime became an officially demonised enemy of the US in 1991, did the MEK gain listing as a proscribed terrorist organisation.

Headed by Maryam and Massoud Rajavi, the MEK began its descent into a dictatorial, obsessive cult. Former members have spoken of the strongly controlled lifestyle, enforced gender segregation and celibacy, and the indoctrination of MEK members. Abandoning its origins in the struggles of pre-Revolutionary Iran, MEK militants had only one purpose in life – to sacrifice their lives to overthrow the Islamic republic.

In 2003, with the American invasion of Iraq, the MEK transferred their base of operations to Albania – a client state of the US in the Balkans. There, the MEK soldiers live in their compound, shut off from the outside world. Massoud Rajavi, disappearing in 2003, is rumoured to be dead. Maryam Rajavi has since become the public face of the totalitarian cult, and has deliberately cultivated links with the most hawkish ultrarightist politicians in Washington.

However, it would be shortsighted to focus exclusively on the US Republicans who support the MEK, such as former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former national security adviser John Bolton, and previously mayor of New York and Trumpist advocate Rudy Giuliani. Democrat politician Howard Dean, former Congressman and civil rights activist the late John Lewis, former FBI director Louis Freeh, former CIA chief Porter Goss, and former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, have all spoken at MEK events, lent their voices to the group, and successfully lobbied to have them delisted from the proscribed terrorist groups label.

Republican and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich compared Rajavi to George Washington in one of his many occasions championing the cause of the MEK. Lauded as a ‘government in exile’, the latter has gained the support of strongly pro-Zionist voices, such as Alan Dershowitz, and the late Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. The Israeli spy agency, the Mossad, has used MEK operatives to carry out terrorist acts of sabotage inside Iran, in line with ‘regime change’ policy in Washington.

Delusional and terroristic cults, like the Rajavi MEK, are fostered by powerful American politicians to create an illusion of legitimacy. This cult, agitating for outright war with Iran, is not a credible source on which to rely for policy decisions. The US administration, already a belligerent protagonist with regard to Iran, has contributed financially and materially to what was considered by US authorities until 2012 as a terrorist organisation. Removing the MEK from the terrorism listing does not retroactively legalise the activities criminalised by the original legislation.

It has been a long way to respectability on Capitol Hill for the MEK.

Last year, when the US House of Representatives voted to condemn QAnon and its harmful conspiracist ideology, Democratic Congressman and chair of the House Rules Committee Jim McGovern, called it a sick cult. In that spirit, it is high time to condemn the MEK as an equally destructive and delusional cult, and its influence on American foreign policy towards Iran must be cancelled.

Current US Vice President, Kamala Harris, made her first overseas trip as sitting VP to Mexico and Guatemala in June this year. She had a blunt, concise messages to the people of Central America seeking refuge in the US – do not come. She pointedly told the asylum seekers from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – the main countries from where Hispanic refugees originate – that they will be turned back if they approach the US border.

Interestingly, there is one group of Hispanic refugees who are received with welcoming arms in the US – the pro-imperial anti communist Cubans, largely based in Miami. They were on full display as participants in the January 6 2021 assault on Capitol Hill, waving the pre-Revolution Batista flag. The Miami Cubans have long circulated ultranationalist conspiracy theories in their immediate circles, and have supported the most belligerent, war-mongering policies of successive US administrations.

Intersectional imperialism

Harris’ statement, while lacking Trumpist vulgarities, is essentially the same message that the anti-immigrant Republicans have advocated. Harris, whose African American and Asian background was leveraged by the Biden campaign, ignored the fundamental role of US imperialism in undermining the living conditions of Central American republics, thus creating the outflow of refugees. Harris, herself the child of migrant parents, was upheld as a candidate purportedly sympathetic to the plight of new immigrants.

The Vice President’s statement, a continuity of anti-immigration and refugee-hostile policies, is also evidence of a deeper political process. While overt white supremacy is out of fashion, there is a distinct adoption of a multicultural facade for US imperial policies. The cooptation of racial diversity by the US ruling class is indicative of an important tactical ploy – intersectional imperialism.

American imperial wars, and institutions, now come with a rainbow flag and multicultural appearance. Thomas Friedman, the court jester for US empire, encapsulated this sentiment in one of his drivel-pieces masquerading as journalism. Writing in April this year about the US war on Afghanistan, he noted that the strength of US military forces derives from one essential feature – racial diversity. White, black, Hispanic, Asian – all the ethnicities are represented in the special forces and elite troops occupying Afghanistan.

Barely three months after Friedman wrote that, the multicultural forces of the US empire quietly packed up their belongings and, in the dead of night, fled the sprawling Bagram air base, once the pride of the US imperium in Afghanistan. Be that as it may, the ruling circles in Washington have relentlessly pursued this message of ‘wokeness’ – posturing as racially inclusive, LGBTQIA-friendly, ecologically-sound institutions, all the while carrying out the same predatory policies overseas and domestically.

To be sure, this is not a new or original PR tactic. The Israeli military, to improve its image abroad, has frequently run pinkwashing campaign, as well as showcasing its transgender-friendly policies. Disguising the violent and inhumane character of its occupation of Palestinian Territories, the Israeli armed forces have deliberately cultivated an image of a socially-progressive institution.

Humans of the CIA

Earlier this year, an American institution known for its secrecy and covert activities tried its hand at wokewashing – the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Releasing a recruitment video in March this year, the CIA featured personnel from nonwhite backgrounds, speaking about the exciting and rewarding careers they have in an ethnically diverse organisation. One young woman, describing herself as a cisgender millennial with generalised anxiety disorder, spoke glowingly about the awards she has won while working for the racially-respectful CIA.

The CIA would like its audience to forget its long, sordid and criminal activities in overthrowing democratically elected governments overseas. Perhaps we should forget the CIA’s underhanded and predatory role in arming nationalist Chinese in Myanmar (Burma) in the 1950s and 60s, organising the remnants of the Kuomintang party as a secret army waging a terroristic war against China.

The CIA-supported Chinese rebels, not only found sanctuary in Burma to carry out their covert war, but also financed their activities by turning to the drug trade. This secret operation, in which the CIA was fully involved, is the origin of the booming Golden Triangle narcotics trafficking business.

Myanmar (Burma) is not the only instance where the CIA has aided and nurtured a criminal enterprise – Afghanistan, long a target of a secret war of destabilisation by CIA-backed Mujahideen militants, became a safe haven for the cultivation and export of opium. While the politicians in Washington hailed the Afghan Mujahideen as ‘freedom fighters’, the CIA allocated billions to a covert war that still casts a long shadow over Afghan affairs to this very day.

When the late great Reverend Dr Martin Luther King demanding racial equality, he was tackling not only the ideology of white supremacy – important as that is. He was also exposing the intricate linkages between imperial wars overseas, economic inequalities and racial disparities at home. Let’s not reduce the demand for racial diversity to a PR exercise in wokewashing the racist nature of American capitalism.

Pan-Turkism, the ideology that underpins the modern Turkish state, provides the impetus for the imperial ambitions of President Reyyip Erdogan. Negotiations are currently underway between the US and Turkey, the latter intending to deploy troops to Kabul airport once the US completes its Afghanistan withdrawal. Turkish military forces are already present in Libya, staking out a claim in that nation’s affairs.

Pan-Turkism is the political philosophy that holds all Turkic people, regardless of their cultural and linguistic particularities, belong to one supranational and racial Turkish nation – with Ankara at its head. This idea is not new, originating in the late 19th century with the rise of European and Balkan nationalist movements. However, Pan-Turkism acquired a new lease of life in 1990-91, with the disbanding of the USSR. The newly independent Central Asian republics, most of whom have Turkic ancestry, established relations with Turkey.

Is Pan-Turkism a resurrection of the Ottoman Turkish empire? Yes and no. Certainly, bringing all the Turkic peoples into one overarching political and economic union has its similarities with the Ottomans of old. However, Pan-Turkism is also a distinct departure away from the Ottoman Empire template. The modern day Turkish Republic, established by the Young Turk Revolution (1908), advocated a specifically racial definition of a Turkish person.

The Kemalist Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), deliberately cultivated a racist concept of Turkishness, and projected this template onto any territory where Turkish people lived. For instance, Crimean Tatars, while under Russian sovereignty, were said to be one branch of the Turkic family, and therefore to be brought under Turkish control. The Kemalist authorities set about eliminating non-Turkish minorities, carrying out the genocide of the Armenians, Assyrians, and purging vestiges of Hellenism in Turkey.

This is in stark contrast to the cosmopolitan nature of the Ottoman Empire. For while there were conflicts, the Ottoman Sultan accepted the presence – grudgingly – of non-Turkish minorities within the Ottoman realm. Arabs, Greeks, Jews – all found their place within the Ottoman territories. In fact, Ottoman identity was an ethno-religious one, not a racial category. While the Sultan dealt with nationalist rebellions in his empire, the Ottomans attempted to meld a distinctly Ottoman identity from the diverse peoples of the empire.

The European powers, engaging in their own acts of colonialism, postured as ‘champions’ of the Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire. Their concern was not humanitarian, but cynical politics – the weakening of the Ottoman Turkish polity would open up vast territories for European expansion. In fact, European colonialism, rather than providing self-determination for the formerly subject peoples, implemented a sectarian division of the Arab peoples in furtherance of colonial objectives.

When the French took over the former Ottoman territory of Syria, they created not a united Syrian nation, but a divided confessional patchwork of sectarian polities. Alawis, Druzes, Sunnis, Shias and Maronite Christians all had their sectional territory, with the state of Lebanon carved out of Syria for the Maronite minority. The Ottomans, for all their faults, allowed minorities to live together under the one political federation.

Theodor Herzl, one of the founding fathers of political Zionism, approached the Ottoman sultan with a business proposition; in exchange for a financial contribution to alleviate the Ottoman Empire’s debts to foreign powers, the Zionist movement would acquire Palestine as a territory to build a new Jewish state. Attempting to buy land from the Ottomans was initially an appealing idea; but the Sultan rejected the proposal. Indeed, Ottoman Jews rejected Zionism, professing their loyalty to the Ottoman Sultan.

The military assertiveness of the modern Turkish state derives, not from a sense of Ottoman cosmopolitanism, but from an ideology of racist Pan-Turkish exclusivity. Whether it is the Turkish republic’s covert and critical support for ISIS militants in Syria, or the tactical outreach to the neofascist regime in the Ukraine, Ankara’s motivation is not an Ottoman-era respect for multicultural confessionalism, but a desire to acquire strategic depth and establish an ethnically pure Turkish polity.

Indeed, Pan-Turkism is the application of a European settler-colonial ideology in the context of Western Asia (what we normally call the Middle East). The forced Turkification of place names, cities and villages inside Turkey is the domestic face of an expansionist Pan-Turkism. When linguistic and cultural policies are deployed to construct a racialist narrative of Turkey’s pre-Kemalist history, it is an outright denial of the multinational composition of the Ottoman Empire.

As I frequently remind members of my own Armenian tribe, the enemy is not some amorphous mass called ‘the Turks’, or Muslims, or refugees, or mosques, or Islam. The enemy is Pan-Turkism and its manifestation in the Turkish state. It is not only myself saying this – there are mass Turkish and Kurdish political parties and organisations who strongly oppose the Turkification policies of Ankara, reject imperial expansion, and ally themselves with the oppressed and anti-colonial non-Turk minorities.

An anti-imperialist platform, crossing over multiethnic and confessional boundaries, is a necessary first step in defeating the destructive ideology of Pan-Turkism.

It has been at least six months since the January 6 Capitol Hill riot, incited and carried out by white supremacist and QAnon conspiracist groups. It was a jarring assault on the democratic process.

Alongside these white supremacists were a motley collection of ultrarightist multiethnic refugee groupings – South Vietnamese Saigon loyalists, pre-Revolution era Cuban Batista cultists, Tibetan independence flag-wavers, Iranian-American Shah loyalists, and xenophobically-resentful Hong Kongers agitating for US intervention. While this assortment of multicultural footsoldiers for imperialism may seem strange, actually it is not.

Cultivating a multiethnic flavour of imperialism is a cynical and perverse tactic of the United States to portray itself as a bastion of freedom. Those refugees who reflect the imperatives and ideological underpinnings of American empire receive a favourable welcome and a media platform to disseminate their views.

The Australian government imprisons refugees in offshore detention centres, marginalising their presence. However, there are refugees who acquire the status of ‘heroic dissidents’ because of their functional utility in the service of US imperial power.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch-Somali refugee, has received preferential treatment, been given a multimedia platform to advocate her views, and has had books published as a self-proclaimed ‘expert’ on radical Islam. Her personal story, that of a courageous formerly Muslim woman, escaping the clutches of patriarchal and tyrannical Islam to find sanctuary in the enlightened liberal West touches the heart strings. Fleeing war and religious persecution, Hirsi Ali has leveraged her personal journey into a remarkable story of tenacity and hope. That is all well and good, except for one consequential detail – none of it is true.

Provided a comfortable life and education in a UN-funded school in Kenya, she never actually witnessed the war-torn conditions of Somalia. In a 2006 interview, she admitted fabricating huge portions of her personal story, and she was never in danger of being forced into an arranged marriage, or subject to the threat of an honour killing. Playing up the stereotypes of the misogynistic Muslim family, she found favour with the anti-immigrant and far righting Dutch government of former PM Rita Verdonk.

Ali, elected to the Dutch parliament in 2003, did her best to advocate Islamophobic politics, pushing anti-immigrant xenophobia and denying refugees from sub-Saharan Africa a legitimate status. After her bogus claims were exposed in the Netherlands, the Verdonk government fell, and Ali fled to the homeland of the foreign-born bigot, the United States.

Taking up a position as an ‘intellectual’ at the neoconservative swamp masquerading as a think tank – the American Enterprise Institute, she has continued to outdo Donald Trump in promoting Trumpist state violence against the Muslim-majority nations. Her statements, bordering on incitement to homicidal violence, make her the perfect spokesperson for the imperialist project – an African woman demanding the genocidal intervention of the US military.

Interestingly, there is another Somali refugee woman, Representative Ilhan Omar, who has escaped war and violence in her homeland, respected the US political system, and risen through the ranks to become an advocate for the oppressed and marginalised in the US. She is the first woman of colour to represent Minnesota.

While Ali’s star has waned over the years, newer ultranationalist refugees have risen to become repurposed as ‘heroic dissidents.’ Both Alexei Navalny and Roman Protasevich, from Russia and Belarus respectively, have achieved celebrity dissident status in our corporate media. Each claims to be fighting domestic tyranny – Putin in Russia and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko pigeonholed into the respective role of ‘dictator’ – but each has a political track record which indicates white nationalist racism and subservience to American imperial power.

Navalny, rebranded as a liberal defender of democracy in the West, has a long history of racist and anti-immigrant views. Denouncing the peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia as ‘cockroaches’, he has advocated for the creation of an ethnically pure Russia, in line with white supremacist thinking. A far rightist businessman, Navalny has fallen foul of the Russian business community, and has spent his energies condemning the Putin administration as a reincarnation of Soviet Communism – a demonstrably ludicrous proposition.

At the same time that Navalny was having health problems, allegedly at the hands of devious Kremlin agents, Roman Protasevich was fighting alongside neo-Nazi militias in the Ukraine, using that as a springboard for his regime-change activities in his native Belarus. Arrested by Belarusian authorities after his plane was forced down in May this year, his detention prompted a wave of hypocritical denunciations in the West. It is no secret that the United States, in an act of air piracy, forced the landing of former Bolivian President Evo Morales’ plane in 2013.

Protasevich, initially denying his neofascist connections, has lost his initial lustrous appeal once his unsavoury activities came to light. His reputation, virtually unsalvageable, has not stopped the corporate media campaign to cast him as a principled democratic crusader.

The refugees arriving in Australia are victims of wars and economic/ecological devastation wrought by the policies of the United States and its allies. Do not weaponise their stories into a toxic narrative of US ‘emancipatory’ liberation. The politics of Hirsi Ali, Navalny and Protasevich found expression in concentrated form on January 6 this year at Capitol Hill. We would do well to stop implementing destructive policies which create outflows of refugees in the first place.

Canada, in contrast to the United States, has an international reputation of being the nice one in North America. The quiet Canadian is usually held up as the nicer person as opposed to the loud, ugly American. There is a component of truth to this; any nation with a half-decent health care and education system appears reasonable in contrast to the ultraindividualistic dystopian nightmare that is the US.

However, a closer examination of Canadian capitalism reveals the brutal and racist underbelly of that nation. Why is such a deeper scrutiny warranted? In the wake of the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the grounds of the former residential school for Indigenous children at Kamloops, British Columbia – followed by a similarly grisly discovery of 751 unmarked graves of Indigenous children buried at the Marieval Indian Residential school in Saskatchewan – a spotlight is shining on the genocide of the Indigenous nations implemented by the Canadian ruling class.

These gruesome discoveries are only the tip of the iceberg; the residential school system in Canada was implemented to assimilate the indigenous children, on the presumption that the Catholic faith provided a superior set of morals and values to indigenous ethical systems.

Canadian residential schools, established in conjunction with churches, were intended to forcibly assimilate indigenous children into the mainstream Christian religion and culture. Begun back in 1831, and finally abolished in 1996, the Canadian state, along with their religious counterparts, kidnapped thousands of indigenous children and separated them from their families. This policy of cultural genocide was challenged by indigenous peoples, and in June 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to investigate the full extent of the residential school system.

In 2015, the TRC concluded that over the span of one hundred years, more than 150 000 indigenous children were taken from their families. These boarding schools, usually run by the Catholic Church, were decrepit places where physical and sexual abuse was rampant. The residential schools were spread out over the nation, and thousands of unmarked gravesites remain to be uncovered. Until today, indigenous communities still struggle to maintain a level of equality with non-indigenous Canadian society – be it lack of access to potable drinking water, or racism in the healthcare system.

You may read more about the impact of the residential school system on indigenous communities here. For our purposes, let’s examine the other troubling, and no less traumatic, features of Canadian capitalism.

There is a persistent myth that Canada, the nice guy, did not have slavery, like the obnoxious United States. Is that true? Yes and no. Canada did not have a large slave-worked plantation economy like the Deep South of the US. The colder climate in Canada made it impossible to construct profitable mass plantations of tobacco, sugar, cotton, rice – all of which were worked by African slaves in the US and the Caribbean.

However, Canada did have slaves – and entrenched slave trading. British and French controlled territories in what became the Canadian federation definitely used and traded in the African slave trade. When the Canadian state was officially created in 1867, the story of slavery had to be glossed over. After all, a new nation cannot afford to admit that one group of its citizens were oppressed, and still uphold itself as an example of constitutional liberty in action.

While Canada has a reputation of being a peaceful nation, as opposed to its militaristic neighbour to its south, the Canadian military has participated in all US imperialist wars overseas. The Canadian military was deployed to the USSR, as part of the multinational foreign intervention in 1918-22 to overthrow the new Bolshevik regime. The foreign military forces, such as the Canadian forces, assisted the White anticommunist Russians in their failed bid to restore the Tsarist system.

Canada has provided military and logistical support to the ultranationalist regime in Kiev, the Ukraine. Canada has a long history of providing refuge to Ukrainian ultrarightist and neo-Nazi war criminals, giving sanctuary to those Ukrainians who collaborated with Nazi forces during World War 2. These Ukrainian communities in Canada have helped to push Canadian politics in a rightward direction.

Canada allowed itself to become a haven for Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and subsequent generations of Canadian politicians have recycled the ultranationalist view of history bequeathed to them. Racism against ethnic minorities – including Islamophobic killings – has reared its ugly head in Canada. Ottawa’s participation in the ‘war on terror’ has brought its domestic consequences of increasing racism against Islamic communities to its doorstep.

It is time to cancel Canada Day as a first step towards confronting Canada’s racist past. Only by being honest about the horrific discoveries of the recent past – and the impact they have on perpetuating racist practices in the present – can we rebuild a new equitable vision of the future.

Zionism, the underlying ideology of the state of Israel, claims to be the Jewish equivalent of Black Lives Matter, and an expression of national self-determination. Israel, we are told, provides a sanctuary for the Jewish people from the ravages of antisemitism. These claims are without foundation – Zionist leaders have a long history of seeking antisemitic allies. Antisemites in Europe have long argued that Jews are a distinct and unassimilable racial minority – a position accepted by Zionism.

The charge of antisemitism is thrown at the supporters of the Palestinian cause by Zionist organisations. If the Palestinians can be portrayed as motivated by irrational bigotry, then their case for self-determination can be easily dismissed. This accusation is obscene and perverse, given that the founders of political Zionism made clear that their platform depends upon the support of European antisemitism. Theodore Herzl, writing in his seminal pamphlet The Jewish State, explicitly says that European antisemitic powers will be the allies of the Zionist project in Palestine.

Antisemitism is in fact a white European creation – an ideology which views the presence of European Jews as a ‘problem’ to be solved. It is not surprising that European Christendom has a long history of persecuting and expelling historical Jewish populations. However, it is with the rise of 19th century European nationalism that provided a racialist basis for the redefinition of antisemitism from its original religious foundations.

It was the Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on a strict reading of the Bible, that gave rise to the identification of European Jewry with descent from the biblical ancient Hebrews. This alleged historical continuity enabled the Zionist movement to utilise a particular millenarian theology to disguise the colonisation of Palestine as a biblically-sanctioned ‘repatriation’ of the Jewish people. In fact, European Jews are not the direct genetic descendants, over thousands of years, of the biblical Hebrews, but rather, European converts.

In the 19th century, the linguistic category Semitic – denoting a group of languages – became transformed into a racial classification. European antisemitic thinkers, from Houston Stewart Chamberlain to Wilhelm Marr, popularised racist ideas, dividing the white ‘Aryan’ race from the ‘Semitic’ Jews. Antisemitism became an indispensable tool for the construction of white supremacy.

European Jews reacted with furious opposition to the rise of racialist thinking – not so the Zionist movement. Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau and Zionist proponents accepted that Jews were a biologically distinct and unassimilable ‘race’ living in the midst of Christian Europe. Their solution was to build a separate ethnonationalist state in Palestine. Herzl, writing in his diaries, stated that:

The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.

The Zionist movement sought the cooperation of Europe’s antisemitic governments, finally securing the agreement of Imperial Britain to provide a state in Palestine. In 1920, as the British acquired the mandate to govern Palestine, the first military governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, made clear Britain’s intentions to create a loyal Jewish Ulster in Palestine.

As Zionist colonisation proceeded in Palestine, there was one particular antisemitic European government that looked favourably upon Zionism – Nazi Germany. Since the 1933 assumption of power by the Nazis in Germany, the one German Jewish organisation that actively sought an accommodation with the Nazi regime was the Zionist federation. In 1935, when the Nuremberg laws were passed preventing Aryans and Jews from intermarriage, German Jewish anti-Zionist groups opposed those laws – but the Zionist federation welcomed them.

While Hitler himself was never a committed Zionist, the Nazi leadership did see a marriage of convenience with Zionism as a practical implementation of their antisemitism – ridding Europe of its Jews and transferring them to Palestine. In the 1930s, the Nazis sent envoys to Palestine to solidify connections with the Zionist settlers there. One of those delegates was none other than SS officer Adolf Eichmann, who spoke glowingly about the Zionist effort to construct a state in Palestine.

With the end of World War 2, the full horrors of the genocide of the European Jews was revealed to the international community. The logical endpoint of European antisemitism was on trial at Nuremberg. However, the end of the world war meant the demolition of the Nazi regime, it did not mean the end of antisemitism. In Europe today, ultranationalist and far right antisemitic parties are among the most enthusiastic supporters of the Israeli state.

Hungary’s PM Victor Orban, known for his praise of Hungary’s antisemitic wartime dictatorship of Admiral Horthy, is a strong proponent of cooperation with Tel Aviv. It is not only the European antisemitic far right that upholds Israel as a model ethnostate worth emulating; Brazil’s ultrarightist President, Jair Bolsonaro, speaks of the Israeli state in gushing terms, and has rejected the demands of the Palestinians.

European antisemitism, a form of racism, has existed symbiotically with Zionism. The latter cannot proceed without the active cooperative of the former. The ideological and practical alliance of Zionism with antisemitism can no longer be ignored. The Palestinians are paying the price, with the loss of their ancestral homeland, for the crimes of European antisemitism. It is time to repudiate this settler-colonial Ulster in Palestine.

In early June, the centenary of the Tulsa race massacre was marked in that town, by US President Joe Biden and the Oklahoma state authorities. Biden is the first US President to officially acknowledge that massacre and express his support for the remaining survivors. The suburb of Greenwood, in Tulsa, was reduced to smoking ruins and its African American inhabitants murdered by rampaging white racist mobs – with the connivance and participation of law enforcement authorities.

Greenwood in Tulsa was known, prior to 1921, as the ‘black Wall Street.’ African Americans had successfully started up businesses, theatres, churches, libraries and had proven themselves industrious in the decades after emancipation. The Oklahoma authorities, driven by white racial resentment, seethed at the success of the African American community. The local newspapers, seizing upon a false allegation of sexual assault of a white woman by a black man, incited the Tulsa community to basically attack the African American minority in Greenwood.

The white supremacist mob, armed with weapons from local law enforcement, and backed up by bombs from the air, proceeded to burn and demolish black-owned businesses, and murder black families. One of the survivors, Viola Fletcher (now 107), remembers the dead bodies, the stench, the plumes of smoke, the sheer terror of fleeing as her parents collected their kids to protect them.

The psychological trauma of the survivors, and the loss of a thriving and vibrant community, are incalculable. More than just the financial loss of business, the silence and coverup of the racial massacre added to the injuries of the survivors.

There was no official acknowledgment or apology, and no compensation was forthcoming. Black advancement, and seeing the African American community doing the ‘right’ things – working, getting an education, starting businesses and so on – was met with white racial resentment.

This deadly act of white domestic terrorism – an act of economic injustice as well – should be a cause of concern. President Biden urged his fellow Americans to reflect seriously on why racial terrorism is such a blight on the nation. In fact, the 1921 Tulsa race massacre was not an isolated incident. During the year of 1919, African American communities throughout the United States – especially returning black WW1 veterans – were targeted for racial killings.

African American WW1 veterans thought their service would be a pathway to equality. Sadly, they were wrong. Rejected by white society, denounced as interlopers ‘stealing jobs’ from ‘real’ Americans, black communities were targeted by white supremacist lynch mobs, usually with the connivance of the police. The black veterans, given their combat experience, organised the nucleus of armed resistance against racist attacks.

The Alamo defenders were fighting to keep slavery

While the Tulsa race massacre was suppressed and ignored for decades, the defenders at the Battle of the Alamo have been lionised as martyrs to the cause of freedom. The 1836 battle, portrayed as a David vs Goliath struggle, has become a crucial lynchpin of Texas – and wider American – folklore. The white settlers who fought Mexican troops were not committed to liberty, but to the preservation and extension of slavery.

The Alamo was one battle in a series which resulted in the annexation of Mexican territory by white American colonists, and the foundation of the slave-owning state of Texas. The pro-slavery motivations of the new settlers has been all but written out of the ‘Texas Revolution’ story, and the Alamo’s defenders hailed as a plucky and outnumbered band of liberty-loving patriots dying in the fight against the evil Mexican tyrant, General Santa Anna.

Mexico had in fact abolished slavery in 1829 – sending shivers down the spines of the Texan colonists. Texas, a part of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, was still part of Mexico. The American settlers practiced slavery in violation of the Mexican constitution. They refused to pay taxes to the Mexican government treasury, and acted as a law unto themselves. In the face of this refusal, the Mexican authorities sent troops to quell this nascent white supremacist rebellion.

The Alamo defenders were defeated, and their deaths were politically manipulated to construct a mythology of Texan dedication to patriotism and liberty. The larger American army under General Sam Houston defeated the Mexicans, and Texas broke away to form an independent republic. One of the first clauses in the new state’s constitution was to preserve slavery, and indeed declared that the US Congress had no authority to emancipate slaves in its jurisdiction.

The Alamo defenders, still regarded as ‘heroes’ in Texas, rather than the racist agitators that they were, achieved near-demigod status through conservative folklore. The Walt Disney series Davy Crockett, the latter executed at the Alamo, entered popular consciousness as a courageous frontiersman. John Wayne’s epic 1960 movie The Alamo lionised the American settlers, promoting the values of individual liberty and sacrifice.

The Alamo soldiers were perhaps brave, but they died for the cause of white supremacy. The ideology they supported motivated those who demolished the black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Rather than continuing the Heroic Anglo Man narrative of American history, it is high time to educate ourselves on the white nationalism that glues together the racial pyramid of American capitalism.

The UFO craze has experienced a resurgence in recent months. Prominent news stories about a purported ‘government coverup’ have hit the magazines, and various documentaries about ‘sightings’ have gripped the airwaves. UFO cultists have salivated over the prospects of uncovering government secrets.

Let’s take a step back from minor-celebrity full time nutcase UFOlogy, and examine the influence of the occult, the pseudoscientific and the preoccupation with bizarre issues on our societies.

Shambhala, Tibet and the occult

To be sure, the United States is not the first country to host and elevate interest in the occult, the alien and the pseudoscientific. Nazi Germany provided resources and personnel on numerous quests to substantiate – as they saw it – white Aryan racial superiority theories, by delving into mysterious and mythical pasts. Tibet, long considered by the West a Shangri-La of mysticism and esoteric powers, provided the Nazi leadership with a target to indulge their pseudoscientific theories.

Various Aryan racial theories swirled around regarding Tibet as the ancient ancestral home of the Aryan/Germans. The 1938-39 German expedition to Tibet, reinforced the occultism preoccupation of the Nazi elite. Possessing political as well as pseudoscientific objectives, the SS personnel who visited Tibet, at the invitation of the ruling lama elite, were intent on finding rationalisations for their mystical beliefs in a long lost ancient white Aryan race.

The Nazi delegation that made it to Tibet, underscored by the SS think tank the Ahnenerbe, Ancestral Heritage, not only engaged in scientific activities while in Lhasa. They raised the Nazi swastika in Tibet, hoping to detach the latter from China, and use that territory as a base to threaten British-occupied India. The Nazi delegation collected botanical samples, measured the skulls of the indigenous Tibetans, took in the esoteric myths of Tibetan culture, and never lost sight of the underlying Aryan pseudoarchaeology of their mission.

The Nazi leadership never found the remnants of the mythical lost race up there in the Tibetan plateau. What we can see here is the interplay of quasi-scientific elements with political and economic objectives, and access to media channels, and the pseudoscience spreads. No, UFologists are not neo-Nazis, but belief in the occult and paranormal becomes a danger to society when it is supported by powerful economic and political interests.

The Pentagon and UFOs

Over the last few months, there has been a renewed frenzy regarding UFOs – or to use the new term Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). The CIA released a trove of archival material detailing the Pentagon’s projects to research psychic phenomena, and whether UFOs represent a national security threat. Billions of dollars has been spent, such as on Operation Stargate, to evaluate the veracity, if any, of using paranormal powers to spy on hostile powers. No evidentiary basis has ever been found for alien spacecraft or psychic abilities, but this has not stopped the UFO conspiracy theorists from screaming vindication. Project Stargate ended in failure.

This is not the first instance of the US government declassifying materials on its secretive and expensive forays into the paranormal and UFO subjects. Back in 2018, the federal authorities released information on their multibillion dollar projects, such as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP), to hunt down UFOs and alien beings. After all that research and funding, the project was terminated – but not before UFO cultists went mad claiming that the US government endorsed their views.

What has occurred is that the same UFOlogists and billionaire advocates of alien astronauts have carried out successful PR campaigns to legitimate their pseudoscientific theories. For instance, billionaire pseudoscientist and UFO cultists Robert Bigelow, has put considerable amounts of money into new ‘think tanks’ dedicated to promoting UFology. Coupled with heavyweight political supporters, the UFologists have been able to spread their views far and wide.

American physicist and paranormal advocate Harold ‘Hal’ Puthoff, a military contractor, helped to platform pseudoscientific views about the occult and UFOs. Using his finances and connections, he has built various science ‘discovery’ institutes dedicated to exploring the mystical side. Skinwalker Ranch, a site of purported UFO activity, has been purchased by alien enthusiasts over the years. The name refers to a Navajo story of a demonic shapeshifter that transforms from humanoid to animalistic form, thus melding myths from differing cultures.

The US government’s embrace of the occult has provided a springboard for the proliferation of pseudoscientific theories and alien astronaut preoccupations. Weaponising psychic powers was the original underlying motivation; investing in the paranormal has given rise to a Frankenstein monster of pseudoscientific myths that infiltrate the general public.

We are all familiar with the impact of Lysenkoism on Soviet genetics; American writers have long been selectively enthusiastic about empirical veracity and the destiny of science in ‘official enemy’ nations. It is time to apply that passion for the fate of science to our own societies as well.

The commingling of UFology, the occult and the paranormal may seem like harmless fun – until we realise that the interconnected threats of climate change, the pandemic, ecological destruction and white supremacy require our urgent attention, and we cannot afford the diversion of our resources to fruitless pursuits.

The last Monday of May is set aside as Memorial Day in the United States. A national public holiday, it is intended as a day of remembrance for all American military personnel who were killed in active combat. Official commemorations focus on themes of patriotism and sacrifice. These topics, while comforting, serve to obscure the imperialist and predatory nature of American wars in pursuit of political objectives.

Rather than engage in mindless flag-waving drivel, this day should provide an opportunity to examine why so many generations have served in US imperial wars overseas. First, some relevant background context; the first Memorial Day event was started by African American Civil War veterans, meeting at the site of a former Confederate military encampment. In May 1865, ten thousand black soldiers held a parade in Charleston to honour and rebury their fallen comrades.

They commemorated the sacrifices of their fellow soldiers, not to agitate for more wars, but to remember the heavy price they paid to gain their emancipation from slavery. Interestingly, this year, when Retired Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter, spoke of the crucial role of black veterans in starting Memorial Day, the organisers of the commemorative event in Hudson, Ohio, cut off his microphone.

Memorial Day has always been contradictory

Decoration Day, as the holiday was first known, was originated officially by former Union general John Logan, in 1868. Conceived as a way of honouring Civil War veterans who fought for the North, it involved decorating the graves of the war dead with flowers. The former Confederate states implemented their own version of memorialising their war dead, and this contradictory situation remained for decades following the conclusion of the Civil War.

While American participation in both the world wars expanded the meaning and scope covered by Memorial Day, it was officially mandated as a public holiday by the federal government in 1971. Intended as a measure to counteract the growing domestic antiwar movement, the holiday has involved patriotic themes, emphasising sacrifice and valour. However, the manner of remembering the war dead was contested, not only by civil rights and antiwar activists, but by Vietnam War veterans themselves.

The US Congress, when declaring Memorial Day a holiday in 1971, took no account of rising US casualties in Vietnam. They considered making the day a public event, associated with summer holidays, BBQs and family picnics. A number of Vietnam veterans, incensed that the day was being cooped into a celebration of US militarism, decided to take action.

Professor Elise Lemire, writing in the Washington Post, noted that Vietnam veterans protested turning Memorial Day into a propaganda instrument to agitate for further predatory wars. They rejected the commercialisation of the day, and the underlying premise that America’s Vietnam War was a ‘noble’ undertaking.

In Massachusetts, the chapter of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War group organised a march, following the pathway taken by American patriots during the 1776 war of independence, thus associating their sacrifice with traditional patriotism. This nullified the frequent charge that the antiwar movement were ‘traitors’ or unpatriotic. As they arrived on Boston Common, 10 000 people had gathered to support their antiwar stance.

They emphasised that Memorial Day should not be used to glorify the US military, or disguise the criminal actions of US soldiers in Vietnam with noble-sounding yet hollow cliches about ‘fighting for freedom.’ Indeed, the US ruling class has a long track record of propagandising for future military adventures, wrapping itself in the cloak of purported ‘humanitarian’ motivations.

Let’s stop misusing World War 2 analogies to disguise the imperialist agenda of wars of conquest. Cynically portraying every officially designated enemy of the US as a ‘new Hitler’, the American financial and military-industrial oligarchy cunningly deploys the ‘good war’ rationalisation to indoctrinate its population into supporting new military interventions.

Prior to the 1989-90 US invasion of Panama, we were inundated with saturation coverage of the Hitler-like behaviour of Panama’s President Manuel Noriega. A dictator and strongman, we were informed that US military intervention – code named Operation Just Cause – was necessary to oust a ‘new Hitler’. After doing a modicum of research, one could find out that Noriega was indeed a long-term CIA asset, whose drug-trafficking was tolerated as he was a studious product of US military intelligence and training.

When Noriega the monster could no longer be controlled, he was ousted in a military operation that killed at a conservative estimate hundreds of ordinary Panamanians. The official US government rhetoric of nobility and humanitarian motivations reeks of sickening hypocrisy.

Memorial Day is not a platform for aggrandising conflict or agitating for future aggressions. Whether it be Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, US military defeats – for that is what they were – cannot be deployed into falsified narratives about the nobility of sacrifice. Future generations must know the imperialist character and toxic legacies of these invasions. We would do well to channel Memorial Day into a vehicle for a peaceful future. We must not forget the reasons why we remember.