Fatwa on the 2024 American election.
When struggle against an enemy is obligatory, participation in its rituals is impermissible.
The United States is a dying empire which has degenerated into a fascist state. There have been many watersheds that should have led to this simple assessment, from the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the American Wars in Korea and Viet Nam as well as the rest of the former Indochina, to the induction of its end-of-history ideology in the 1990s to the launch of the Global War of Terror and so forth. It has never been a question of whether to make this declaration, but when. What these previous acts had in common is a semblance of legitimacy and lawfulness, not in a true sense, but at least in an illusory sense. Whether or not it was appropriate to hold our tongues until now, knowing that the degeneration into greater and greater brutality and savagery is currently, and has continually been, ongoing and inevitable, there is no longer any attempt to maintain this ruse by the demon Joe Biden. Biden, kept in power only through unrestrained and unprecedented criminalisation of, and fearmongering over, his partisan opposition in a traditionally fascist manner, will plunge his own country into war not only to protect the Zionist occupation, but even to defend the clearly suicidal decisions of individual occupation “politicians”. In so doing, he has already discredited the entire “rules-based international order”, and this will continue. It will not recover from this, no matter what happens.
Donald Trump may have behaved in an uncouth and even fascist manner, he may have employed fascist methods, but the level of control he had over society, particularly in the media and government agencies, was nowhere near enough to actually usher in a fascist period, and in this sense his aministration had less fascist character than those of his predecessors. Joe Biden is a fascist, his administration is a fascist administration, the Democratic Party is a fascist party, and the United States of America is a fascist, rogue state. Although there is even within his own administration significant pushback to his doctrine, Biden has no difficulty whatsoever bringing everyone who matters into all but symbolic file, and his word is law. Donald Trump, positioned as an outsider, allowed the continuing degeneration of the “rules-based international order” to appear as the doing of one man, Donald Trump, and thus the loss of credibility accrued to him, without necessarily implicating the rest of the genocidal infrastructure of necrotised capitalism. Capitalism was in this way protected. Biden is an insider. Biden is as old-guard establishment as it gets.
There is no redeeming the United States; there is no bringing its continued existence into alignment with any decent goal that a decent person may have. If there is a correct vote to cast, it is the one that will hasten the destruction of the United States.
Those living in the United States who share this opinion — ever-increasing in number since decades — might then ask if there is a right vote to cast in this direction on pragmatic grounds. There is not. The United States is doomed regardless of Trump or Biden or DeSantis or whoever. There has never, in my lifetime, been a significant policy change between one American candidate and the next. The election serves only as a myth-building collective mystery cult; a sort of year-long holiday over the course of which the population is aggressively propagandised and brought into seeing and being in the world in a manner dictated by politicians through this propaganda.
The emphasis on young voters has not the effect of changing policy, but only of bringing the young and impressionable into the quadrennial system of brain-rotting fascist propaganda cycles, so that they might both consume and produce it, thereby continuing this ritual, rather than approach it with developed critical minds the way one might the Super Bowl or the thirty sixth season of The Simpsons.
The Palestinian Resistance has, clearly, repeatedly, and unanimously condemned the American enemy for its central role in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, and called for the escalation of all forms of struggle against it. Participation in the central civic ritual of such an enemy is neither appropriate nor permissible. This ritual is the main thing of of the enemy eternal of all of thinking and feeling humanity, it is an idolatrous, fascist ritual of a militaristic, fascist cult. It is not permissible to participate in an American election in any way.
Instead, decent people should distance themselves from the “debate” produced by it and engage in proper contemplation of their lives and circumstances, the study of Marxist-Leninist literature, and building relations with other people, especially those who have also renounced themselves from the electoral process, who amount to about a half of the population, certainly its best half and the half among whom there is the greatest hope to build a decent foundation for a post-American future.
There are those who complain that there are efforts to disenfranchise voters and that this proves the effectiveness and importance of voting — then let them vote for the anti-Zionist candidate and they will see they are on a fool’s errand, that they have accepted a spectrum of debate between genocide and genocide, between fascism and fascism, and that they have decided that it is their moral obligation to passionately distinguish between, and defend their choice of, red fascism or blue fascism, and cause outward conflicts with even their own families over it. These actions should be rejected by all of thinking and feeling humanity as the fascists they are so that their ideological virus is quarantined and contained, so that the attempts of decent people to navigate the ongoing collapse of their civilisation are not undermined by it.
It is not permissible to vote for a fascist, it is not permissible to advocate for a fascist. It is not permissible to vote for a man who starts imperialist wars or a man who will continue them. Deliberating for even a second over which fascist monster to vote for is treason to decency and the behaviour of an idiot. There are many questions to ponder about the nature of power and its transfer, the ways it legitimises itself so forth. One should ponder these questions, drawing on socialist examples and pre-modern examples as well, in order to observe this process in a more educated way. There is much to say about this process; none of it will be said and none of it has been said about any American election in my lifetime.
And it is important in all of this not to allow other conversations to be sidelined by electoralism. During the Black Lives Matter protests, those who recuperated the protests to be about voting for Genocider Joe should have been expelled from the movement. They were not. Democratic politicians participated in the protests, and then, after being elected, destroyed it and every other political “movement”, their “goal” accomplished. The decent participants in BLM walked away disappointed and outraged while the gullible and disingenuous succeeded in turning it into what they wanted it to be. It is the norm for every real discussion about America’s problems to become about the election and disbanded after it.
This WILL happen to the Gaza Holocaust unless someone in America wises up and stops it. It happens to literally everything they talk about there. Netanyahu only needs to continue the holocaust until the year-long election in order to destroy all overseas solidarity that currently exists.
America is dying. It’s going to resort to more and more brutal repression to keep itself together. When that doesn’t work, the brutality will intensify. And this isn’t because of the personality of an individual politician or because of the personal whims of every politician in the country and world. It’s because the world continues to change around America in ways that it can’t handle philosophically, ideologically, spiritually, economically, or especially militarily.
Can this be delayed? Yes. It has been delayed by a century of wars waged by America, between the Great Wars, the Cold War, the Global War of Terror, and the Biden Administration’s now-struggling efforts to re-ignite a European Forever War and expand the settler colonisation of the Middle East. In the traditional American manner, USA has ensured the cooperation of the political “leaders” of the Levantine states and poisoned their people ideologically through the intervention of USAID and other intelligence agencies which promote various pacifying and disorienting ideological tendencies. Through ensuring the disorganisation and sloth of the people, USA has left them vulnerable to similar pushes to settler colonialism. USA sees its window here fading as the War of Terror and the racist ideas that were created to serve it fade away, largely due to the successful efforts of the Palestinians themselves to build connections with American civilians, but also as a natural consequence of repeated military defeats as well as the propagation of Islam in the United States which has succeeded in establishing it as the fastest-growing religion there, thereby creating a natural affinity between America’s growing Muslim population and the people most directly brutalised by American imperialism.
But imperialism’s saving grace comes every four years. The climate of panic and violence that now comes standard with every American election in itself serves as a year-long crisis during which an exhausted populace can be bombarded with new “arguments” and new slogans justifying any fascist crime. America and its pet occupation are now attempting to rush the process of making not just an Israel in the Levant, but an Australia out of the Levant. How many politicians have launched wars in election years or in response to the circumstances of their own careers, attempting to establish themselves as war presidents, etc? Among them is Netanyahu himself, as I’ve talked about before and is well-known.
The possibility of the election itself leading to significant military escalation as well as a drastic ideological shift among the American “left” is a significant danger to overseas solidarity efforts, as well as to the Palestinian resistance itself.
Back when there was an anti-war movement in the United States, it had a slogan: bring the war home. This slogan, echoing the immortal words of Lenin that an imperialist war must be converted into a civil war, had a true revolutionary character, and its supporters armed themselves for a potential conflict with the reactionaries who sought to defend American imperialism — by which was meant not their posting enemies and their racist uncles, but rather the real infrastructure of imperialism. The movement had supporters even within the US military. They carried out mutinies, defected to the “enemy”, and killed their commanders. To this day, Viet Nam and Peoples’ Korea are home to American defectors and their children. It became a true crisis for the United States.
And there is no reason why the war should not be brought home. Just like it was not in Viet Nam, just like it was not in Afghanistan, the war for America is not in the Middle East or Eastern Europe. It’s in America, and Americans need to be the ones fighting it. The children of Gaza and the starving Yemenis should not be fighting this war. Americans should. Rather than votes, Americans need weapons, drills, and lines of command. The insistence that American’s contradictions should not be brought out to be sorted out by Americans, on the grounds that it’ll hurt such-and-such “marginalised group”, is the coddled whining of a cowardly aggressor people who would rather their wars be fought by Pashtuns and Palestinians. Now that the world has seen the true face of American imperialism, thanks to the Palestinian efforts over the course of the ongoing Holocaust, this is no longer acceptable to say. If the Palestinians, living for decades under a blockade, can fight the most important outpost of American imperialism, which America has armed essentially ad infinitum, and win victory after victory after victory, the Americans, who can buy any weapon they want at any time they want, are limited only by their own cowardice and stupidity.
The task of spiritual and ideological re-organisation of American society is deeply urgent, a a year-long electoral distraction is clearly inappropriate. To take the ballot box as a qibla is only to ensure that you will be among those caught off guard by the changing world around you, unable to react to it, much like America itself.
It’s wrong to vote in an American election. It’s wrong to pretend that its outcome matters more than the production itself. It’s wrong to get into arguments about it, on terms framed by your class enemies and the most vicious class enemies the world has ever known, when the final battle against them approaches. It’s wrong to sow discord among friends and family about their votes. It is wrong to allow others to be misled in this way, but it is also wrong to be distracted by arguments against irrational fanatics of politicians who are convinced that if one or the other fascist clown doesn’t “win” the world will end. Their world will end, and it’s their fault for making it their world. You don’t need everyone to agree with you. You need to act correctly, in anticipation with the actual needs of your present and future situation.
