Dear Progressive Reader,

The official death toll in the war in Gaza is approaching 30,000, with more than 69,000 injured in the bombing. Yet on Tuesday, the United States again used its veto power to block a draft resolution in the United Nations Security Council calling for a ceasefire. On our website this week, Nobel Prize nominee and peace activist Kathy Kelly laments the bombing of hospitals in Gaza, fueled by U.S. supplied munitions. “If we can’t find the morality to stop supplying weapons for ongoing Israeli onslaughts against Palestine and its places of healing,” she writes, “we may find that we have created a world in which no one can count on upholding basic human rights. We may be creating intergenerational wounds of hatred and sorrow from which there will never, ever be any safe place to heal.” Meanwhile, nurse Abeer Alharthi pens an op-ed calling for a greater opening for humanitarian aid to reach the everyday people suffering under the attacks. “The harsh reality is that there will always be casualties in an armed conflict,” she notes. “Yet the blatant disregard for International Humanitarian Law and the restriction of aid by Israel mark a failure in the global commitment to equity. The international community must stand ready to shield aid workers and allow them to do their work, and to maintain our humanity by ensuring those in crisis have hope that aid will reach them without barriers.”

Meanwhile, today marks the second anniversary of the devastating Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to a United Nations report, more than 10,000 civilians have been killed, and nearly 20,000 injured. Additionally, military estimates place the battlefield deaths and injuries in the two-year-long conflict at as many as 500,000. As Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies say this week, “The war is still grinding on, but the United States could help end it through diplomacy.” They continue, “U.S. war policy in Ukraine is predicated on . . . a gradual escalation from proxy war to full-scale war between Russia and the United States, which is unavoidably overshadowed by the risk of nuclear war. This has not changed in two years, and it will not change unless and until our leaders take a radically different approach.” Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin is becoming more authoritarian in his rule and more bellicose toward the west as he heads for another presidential election on March 17.

Speaking of elections, Donald Trump seems poised to win the South Carolina Republican primary today, in spite of that state’s former governor opposing him on the ballot. Meanwhile, Trump today will address South Carolina voters from the state of Maryland, where he is scheduled to speak at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Trump’s campaign speeches have continued to become more and more frightening as Chris Edelson points out this week: “We’ve been so overwhelmed by Donald Trump’s constant stream of outrageous, profoundly irresponsible statements that it has become necessary for the sake of one’s sanity not to attend to each one. It is essential, however, to pay attention to his most incendiary statements—because they illustrate precisely how dangerous he is.”

In addition to his campaigning, Trump is, of course, involved in numerous trials this season, as chronicled by Bill Blum in the most recent issue of The Progressive. But it is perhaps also interesting to look briefly at another trial that began 100 years ago this week on February 26. Following a failed coup in a Munich beer hall, a former corporal and would-be politician named Adolf Hitler was brought to trial for his attempt to overthrow the government. As William L. Shirer writes in his 1960 classic history The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, “Hitler was shrewd enough to see that his trial, far from finishing him, would provide a new platform from which he could not only discredit the compromised authorities who had arrested him . . . He was well aware that correspondents of the world press [would] cover the trial.” Much as Trump appears to gain from his indictments and even his convictions, Hitler, too, (with the aid of a sympathetic judge) used the trial to transform “defeat into triumph” and impress “the German people with his eloquence and the fervor of his nationalism.” Trump’s performance at his New York defamation trial in January, and earlier in his civil fraud trial, show that for him these proceedings were more about public perception than legal consequences. The former President, who has been indicted ninety-one times, even took opportunities to informally address the press outside the courtroom, in some ways echoing Hitler’s technique of impugning the right of judges to even rule on him. “For it is not you, gentlemen, who pass judgement on us,” the future dictator intoned in his closing remarks in 1924. “That judgment is spoken by the eternal court of history.”

The playbook is a familiar one. As historian George Mosse noted in his 1966 study Nazi Culture, paraphrasing french historian Georges Sorel, “All great movements are compelled by ‘myths.’ A myth is the strongest belief held by a group, and its adherents feel themselves to be an army of truth, fighting an army of evil. . . . Hitler took the basic nationalism of the German tradition and the longing for the stable personal relationships of olden times, and built upon them as the strongest belief of the group.” As we approach the 2024 presidential election in just a little more than eight months, it is critical to look at all the issues in this election with eyes wide open, and an awareness of the goals and the agenda of the forces of the right seeking to diminish or destroy the gains of nearly 250 years of democratic processes.

In other news on our website this week, Jeff Abbott reports on how climate change is fueling massive fires in South America; Sajad Hameed and Qazi Shibli look at recent farmers protests in India in the months before Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party stand for re-election in April and May; Kevin Gosztola analyzes the issues behind publisher Julian Assange’s extradition hearing this week in Britain; and Jim Goodman calls for putting people before profits in our food system and international trade agreements.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. – Don’t miss a minute of the “hidden history” of 2024 – you can still order The Progressive’s new Hidden History of the United States calendar for the coming year. Just go to indiepublishers.shop, and while you are there, check out some of our other great offerings as well.

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