Watered-down democracy in the US will mean no end to the war in Gaza

There are more morally and intellectually sound presidential candidates standing for election than either Donald Trump or his opponent Kamala Harris, (Jill Stein and Cornel West being two of them). But the American political process is so heavily stacked in favour of the corporate oligarchs and political lobbyists who line the purses of the Republican and Democratic parties, that independent, critically thinking candidates don’t stand a chance.

The decision facing the American people is then, a stark one – not to engage with a bogus democratic electoral process, to register a protest vote following their principles, or to choose between two ideologically suspect candidates – the afore-mentioned mop-haired old guy, or brown-eyed gal, Kamala Harris, as the new ‘leader of the Free World.’

For the latter it is a choice of, which is the lesser of two evils? Both have been fully supportive of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. Do not be fooled by Harris’s mealy-mouthed platitudes, encouraging restraint on the part of the Israelis in their onslaught on Gaza. Harris, vice-president to president Joe Biden, has been fully supportive of the latter’s Zionist policies all along.

Neither she nor Trump want to upset the apple cart and lose their richest and most prominent lobbyists and supporters.

Stein and West are the choices of independent- minded people, critical thinkers and protest voters, disillusioned by the USA’s unarguably corrupted system. They are under no illusion that the American ‘democratic’ process is a sham. They ask: what happened to the tenets of ‘We the people’ which were enshrined in the American constitution – the world’s oldest written one?

‘We the (ordinary) people’ have now been totally washed out of a system that purports to be the world’s leading democracy, but which behaves only as its rich elite dictate – the infamous uncaring, self-aggrandising, greed is good, one per cent.

The huge gap between the idea of democracy, and democracy in practice has never been so great. Democracy in America is a very watered-down version of the concept enshrined in its revered constitution. It is one which relies totally on propaganda in its pretensions to credibility. To be fair this is a theme riddling democracies the world over, but particularly in the West which now sees a new form of totalitarianism emerging whenever people have the temerity to exercise their alleged democratic right to free speech or protest. Who now dares question the policies of the state, which under international law, are to all intents and purposes illegal?

US voters can be assured of one thing: that whoever wins the election, the new president will continue to give the USA’s full support to Israeli premier, Benjamin Netanyahu in his nation’s genocidal attacks on Gaza and the West Bank, and his further adventures in the Middle East. All serve the USA’s geopolitical aims in the region, though Netanyahu’s obvious psychopathy will see him taking the rap.

And now I come to the point of this letter:

In the dark shadow of the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, and the enforced famine in Northern Gaza, maintaining the refrain: ‘We support the right of Israel to defend itself,’ as the justification for its war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank is no longer tenable and indeed never was, given the history of its illegal occupation and settlement of Gaza and the West Bank.

The States of Guernsey once gave Guernsey’s unequivocal support to Israel. That was something of an embarrassment to the States, moving Deputy Lyndon Trott to remind the States and the Guernsey public that it is not in the remit of the States to opine on matters of defence and foreign relations in which the island defers to the UK Government. Given that, on the issue of Palestine/Israel, the UK Government defers to the US Government, it seems by implication, that the States of Guernsey continues to support the slaughter and war crimes now taking place in Gaza and the West Bank.

So much for the island’s moral autonomy. And I thought Guernsey was free and independent.

Bad things happen because ‘good’ people do nothing.

MARK WINDSOR