{"id":281422,"date":"2024-12-02T12:00:01","date_gmt":"2024-12-02T12:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=281422"},"modified":"2024-11-27T05:45:52","modified_gmt":"2024-11-27T05:45:52","slug":"from-genocide-joe-to-omnicide-joe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/12\/from-genocide-joe-to-omnicide-joe\/","title":{"rendered":"From Genocide Joe to Omnicide Joe"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

U.S. President Joe Biden shakes hands with President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky after a meeting in the White House 21 Sep 2023 in Washington, D.C.\u00a0 (Photo by Drew Angerer\/Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

Whether heralded or reviled, Biden\u2019s supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

25 Nov 2024 <\/em>– President Biden has never wavered from approving huge arms shipments to Israel<\/a> during more than 13 months of mass murder and deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza<\/a>. Biden\u2019s crucial role earned him the name \u201cGenocide Joe.\u201d<\/p>\n

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That nickname might seem shrill, but it\u2019s valid. Although Biden will not be brought to justice for serving as a key accomplice to the horrific crimes against humanity that continue in Gaza, the label sticks\u2014and candid historians will condemn him as a direct enabler of genocide.<\/p>\n

Biden could also qualify for another nickname, which according to Google was never published before this article: \u201cOmnicide Joe.\u201d<\/p>\n

In contrast to the Genocide Joe sobriquet, which events have already proven apt, Omnicide Joe is a bit anticipatory. That\u2019s inevitable, because if the cascading effects of his foreign policy end up as key factors in nuclear annihilation, historians will not be around to assess his culpability for omnicide<\/a>\u2014defined as \u201cthe destruction of all life or all human life.\u201d<\/p>\n

That definition scarcely overstates what scientists tell us would result from an exchange of nuclear weapons. Researchers have discovered that \u201cnuclear winter<\/a>\u201d would quickly set in across the globe, blotting out sunlight and wiping out agriculture, with a human survival rate of perhaps 1 or 2 percent<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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While Russia\u2019s invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putin\u2019s crimes by giving much higher priority to Washington\u2019s cold-war mania than to negotiation for peace\u2014or to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With everything\u2014literally everything\u2014at stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the world\u2019s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a president\u2019s to-do list. But that hardly has been the case with Joe Biden since he first pulled up a chair at the Oval Office desk.<\/p>\n

In fact, Biden has done a lot during the first years of this decade to inflame the realistic fears of nuclear war. His immediate predecessor Donald Trump<\/a> pulled the U.S. out of two vital treaties — Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces<\/a> and Open Skies<\/a> — and Biden did nothing to reinstate them. Likewise, Trump killed the Iran nuclear deal<\/a> negotiated during the Obama administration, and Biden let it<\/a>\u00a0stay dead<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Instead of fulfilling his 2020 campaign promise to adopt a U.S. policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, two years ago Biden signed off on the Nuclear Posture Review<\/a> policy document that explicitly declares the opposite. Last year, under the euphemism of \u201cmodernization,\u201d the U.S. government spent $51 billion<\/a> — more than every other nuclear-armed country combined — updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that\u2019s set to continue for decades to come.<\/p>\n

Before and after Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, Biden showed a distinct lack of interest in actual diplomacy to prevent the war or to end it. Three days before the invasion, writing<\/a> in the Financial Times<\/em>, Jeffrey Sachs pointed out: \u201cBiden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized\u2014NATO enlargement\u2014there has been no American diplomacy at all. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO\u2019s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine\u2019s choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Russia\u2019s invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putin\u2019s crimes by giving much higher priority to Washington\u2019s cold-war mania than to negotiation for peace\u2014or to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.<\/p>\n

From the outset, Biden scarcely acknowledged that the survival of humanity was put at higher risk by the Ukraine war. In his first State of the Union speech<\/a>, a week after the invasion, Biden devoted much of his oratory to the Ukraine conflict without saying a word about the heightened danger that it might trigger the use of nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

During the next three months, the White House posted more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiques about the war in Ukraine. They all shared with his State of the Union address a stunning characteristic — the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers\u2014even though many experts gauged those dangers as being the worst<\/a> they\u2019d been since<\/a> the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.<\/p>\n

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With everything\u2014literally everything\u2014at stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the world\u2019s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a president\u2019s to-do list.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With occasional muted references to not wanting a U.S. military clash with nuclear-armed Russia, during the last 33 months the Biden administration has said it did not want to cross its own red lines\u2014and then has repeatedly proceeded to do so.<\/p>\n

A week ago superhawk John Bolton, a former national security advisor to President Trump, summarized<\/a> the process on CNN while bemoaning that Biden\u2019s reckless escalation hasn\u2019t been even more reckless: \u201cIt\u2019s been one long public debate after another, going back to \u2018Shall we supply ATACMS [ballistic missiles] to the Ukrainians at all?\u2019 First it\u2019s no, then there\u2019s a debate, then there\u2019s yes. \u2018Should we supply the Ukrainians Abrams tanks?\u2019 First it\u2019s no, then there\u2019s a long debate, then it\u2019s yes. \u2018Should we supply the Ukrainians with F-16s?\u2019 First it\u2019s no, then there\u2019s a long debate, and it\u2019s yes. Now, \u2018Can we allow the Ukrainians to use ATACMS inside Russia?\u2019 After a long debate, now it\u2019s yes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether heralded or reviled, Biden\u2019s supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s recent green light for Ukraine to launch longer-range missiles into Russia is another jump toward nuclear warfare. As a Quincy Institute analyst wrote<\/a>, \u201cthe stakes, and escalatory risks, have steadily crept up.\u201d In an ominous direction, \u201cthis needlessly escalatory step has put Russia and NATO one step closer to a direct confrontation\u2014the window to avert catastrophic miscalculation is now that much narrower.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken as well as the Democratic and Republican phalanx of Ukraine war cheerleaders on Capitol Hill, Bolton doesn\u2019t mention that recent polling shows strong support among Ukrainian people for negotiations to put a stop to the war. \u201cAn average of 52 percent of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible,\u201d Gallup reported<\/a> last week, compared to only 38 percent who say \u201ctheir country should keep fighting until victory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden and other war boosters have continued to scorn, as capitulation and accommodation to aggression, what so much of the Ukrainian population now says it wants\u2014a negotiated settlement. Instead, top administration officials and laptop-warrior pundits in the press corps are eager to tout their own mettle by insisting that Ukrainians and Russians must keep killing and dying.<\/p>\n

Elites in Washington continue to posture as courageous defenders of freedom with military escalation in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands<\/a> have already died. Meanwhile, dangers of nuclear war increase<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Last week, Putin \u201clowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks,\u201d Reuters <\/em>reported<\/a>, \u201cand Moscow said Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles\u2026. Russia had been warning the West for months that if Washington allowed Ukraine to fire U.S., British and French missiles deep into Russia, Moscow would consider those NATO members to be directly involved in the war in Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n

For President Biden, the verdict of Genocide Joe is already in. But if, despite pleas for sanity<\/a>, he turns out to fully deserve the name Omnicide Joe, none of us will be around to read about it.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine<\/a><\/strong>, was published in paperback with a new afterword about the Gaza war in autumn 2024. Full Bio ><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Go to Original – commondreams.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

25 Nov 2024 – Whether heralded or reviled, Biden\u2019s supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":195093,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,2197,1854,1268,87,865,88,427,2159,278,961,70,965,1025],"class_list":["post-281422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-biden","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-european-union","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-israel","tag-palestine","tag-rogue-states","tag-russia","tag-ukraine","tag-usa","tag-war-crimes","tag-west-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":281424,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281422\/revisions\/281424"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}