brendan halpin

I think something has been missed in the whole Ed Sheeran/Macklemore/Everybody but Ed quits the tour controversy.

First of all, even Bob Kraft, who got Macklemore tossed from the tour, doesn’t actually believe that criticism of the actions of the Israeli government is antisemitic. Kraft is a supporter of Trump. You know, the guy who famously said there were “very fine people on both sides” when incels with tiki torches marched through UVA chanting “Jews Will Not Replace Us!”

Kraft is a very rich guy and doesn’t care about antisemitism because he doesn’t believe it, or anything else, can touch him. But he cares deeply about preserving a status quo that has made him incredibly wealthy.

So what he doesn’t want, and what nobody with power in this country wants, is for the citizens of the United States to start being critical of the way “the good guys” use military power.

It’s probably hard to explain to anyone who didn’t grow up here the degree to which young people in this country are indoctrinated with the idea that the United States of America is not just a country; it is the best, most morally correct country in the world. And if the USA occasionally does things like incinerate entire cities full of civilians, well, that’s just because they were trying to save American and Japanese lives, see! Because if they hadn’t dropped the bomb, they would have had to invade, and so many more people would have died! So incinerating two cities full of civilians was the moral course of action!

They really told us stuff like this. And we really believed it.

And Israel is probably the only other country that we ascribe this level of virtue to. (And let me say this as a GenXer—when I was growing up, Holocaust survivors were alive. I met a couple. If you’re even like 40 years old, the Holocaust probably seems like ancient history to you, but for us it was a thing that happened to our grandparents. And so a lot of folks see any resistance against the actions of the Israeli government as a continuation of the Holocaust’s project of eliminating Jewish people from the face of the earth. I don’t agree with this perception, but I get how you arrive at that point of view. But that point of view is not driving billionaire and government overreaction to people pointing out that maybe the government of Israel should stop doing genocide.)

The position of the United States in the world is, in large part dependent on the implicit threat that the US government will use military force to accomplish its aims. But this threat rests on VERY shaky foundations due to the fact that we have a volunteer military. In other words, you have to convince people that they are signing up for a virtuous project when they join the US military, or else fewer will sign up.

The US establishment was stung by the widespread opposition to the Vietnam War. So much so that they abolished the draft in order to squash said opposition. It worked! As soon as they stopped drafting people, the protests stopped! And while we’ve protested other wars, they haven’t drawn the massive opposition that Vietnam brought because our wars are, by and large, fought by poor people.

But now the establishment is in a pickle. Because they really can’t bring the draft back without massive pushback. And they can’t continue to recruit people to project force across the globe unless they can get them to believe that they are soldiers of righteousness, fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.

So unquestioning support for Israel is where they’ve decided to draw the line. Because it’s not too far a step from realizing that the US is funding a genocide committed by our client state in the Middle East to realizing that maybe US military actions in the world aren’t really about spreading democracy any more than Israel is committing a defensive genocide. Maybe the aims of our military actions are actually venal and ignoble. While some people will still definitely want to sign up to be international bullies, it’s a smaller number than would want to sign up to do something brave and noble.

So this, I believe, it’s what’s behind the wild overreaction to people expressing the idea that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are human beings who deserve to exist. Because the United States is on the side of genocide in this conflict. We are not the good guys here. And the more people who believe this, the shakier American military power becomes.