By Reza Fiyouzat

Jill Stein, happily breaking bread with Michael Flynn, Vladimir Putin and other war criminals.

The question assumes that the Green Party will get that much of the total votes cast nationally.

What That Number Will Do
In a system of winner-take-all (except in Maine and Nebraska) to decide the delegates for the electoral college, 270 of which is necessary to win the presidency, and in a tight race as it is, that one percent can make the difference between holding off a rabidly and increasingly and openly fascistic tendency to take the U.S. presidency, or …

Or buying some time for the socialist left to get its act together and behave like socialists and not just a bunch of commentators.

As Marx famously said in his Theses on Feuerbach, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” The American socialist left, for the past forty-fifty years, has been such ‘philosophers’, or, as it counts in today’s world, commentators. (In the olden days people would look to philosophers for answers, these days they look to commentators.)

All Societies Have Reactionary Social Layers
All former socio-economic formations came with their dominant ideologies. However, as Marx observed, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and to paraphrase, simply because those socio-economic formations have disappeared, it does not follow that those ideologies have gone away with them.

In the United States, those ideologies are basically racist ones, bestowing supremacy to the white European colonizers. Up until the mid-1960s, those people had privileges that don’t exist in law anymore. They still do have certain privileges (like not ending up dead due to a blown taillight) that people of color don’t enjoy; that’s a given. But the laws have changed, and open discrimination is not allowed. Again, not that the laws are always applied, but they still exist.

Now … Up to the mid-sixties is not a long time ago. I’m in my sixties. There are tens of millions of people in this country whose parents and grandparents enjoyed those whites-only privileges. They have also been subjected to the neo-liberalism that has driven the economic policies of both Democrats and Republicans for the past (at least) forty years. They have experienced repeated recessions and loss of jobs, lesser access to jobs that pay a living wage, precarity of the jobs they do have, lack of meaningful healthcare, erosion of their public school’s ability to educated them. Social pressures are crushing them.

What Trump’s first presidency did was to tap into that old-yet-not-lost feeling of privilege. He reanimated it back into life in the form of a nation-wide movement. The people in that movement have tasted the power Trump can give them, and they like the taste. That movement is not going anywhere. It is funded by billionaires. It has a multitude of deep organizational capabilities, and it is determined to take total power. It is only a matter of time before it does.

The Democrats can hold the dam for only so long. Eventually the dam with break, and reactionary, violent crazies will be free to do as they are driven to do: Wipe out our rights and hunt us down.

“But we have all these institutions in the U.S., built exactly to prevent such things happening here,” you might object. Those institutions are as flimsy as the twigs on a dying plant. With the U.S. Supreme Court as it is right now, those institutions are up for grabs.

We the Greater Middle Eastern & North African Diaspora
I speak as a Middle Eastern socialist who escaped from a fascistic state. I am only one of millions of us Middle Eastern diaspora, along with those from North African countries as well as from Afghanistan. We are doctors, nurses, engineers, educators, business owners, journalists, technical workers, and some of us grow crops and restore wilderness habitats, yet others are manual workers in various industries, gig workers driving Uber or Lyft to make a living.

We all escaped fascistic regimes.

Some Marxist (or otherwise leftist) academicians or activists may object to my use of the word ‘fascist’ or ‘fascism’ for what Trump could bring about. But it’s really not that complicated. For most of the human being’s social history, for thousands of years, we humans lived under what modern human beings would characterize as outright fascistic. A majority of current state formations around the globe are still openly anti-democratic dictatorial states. One-person rule is pretty much what it is!

We the diaspora don’t want to live under another fascistic regime here in the U.S., with tons more power and tons more surveillance capabilities, super charged with a Supreme Court too welcoming to the idea of an all-powerful presidency with no limitations. We have seen it all before.

And Jill Stein is playing with our lives when her 1% can bring back our worst nightmare.

So, if you are in a swing-state and feel disgusted by the Democrats’ allowing a genocide in Gaza (as I do), I urge you to think twice before you cast your vote for Jill Stein. The difference of just a few thousand votes can hand the presidency to Trump.

And what will Trump do? As sure as the sun rises in the east, he will give the OK for Israel to annex all of the West Bank and Gaza. Of course, in return, he will demand exclusive rights to build Trump Towers and Resorts along Gaza’s Mediterranean coast. Picture that for a minute!

Who Does Jill Stein Care About?
Now … what does Jill Stein really want to do? Is her 1% going to change anything in the Middle East for the better? Clearly not.

She says she wants to ‘teach the Democrats a lesson’. What a deceptive claim! As if Democrats learn, or even give a single thought to a ‘lesson’ issued by a mosquito-weight political hack.

(Mosquito- as opposed to flyweight, since, despite its tiny mass, a mosquito can inflict serious illness and even death on humans.)

Why am I making such an outrageous characterization?

Well, let’s take a look. Who would sit at the same dinner table (in 2015) with Michael Flynn, Putin’s then-Deputy Chief of Staff, Putin’s then-former Chief of Staff, Putin’s then-Spokesman, and Vladimir Putin himself?

We are talking about Putin, the butcher of Grozny, the co-destroyer of Syria, the co-mass-murderer of half a million Muslim Arabs in Syria. Let’s not forget the more than a hundred thousand Palestinian refugees who were dispossessed and displaced again in that civil war, yet again driven to another refugee camp in another country.

That’s who Jill Stein befriends. You think she cares about our misery, our destitution and our mangled and dead bodies?

When did she hold fundraising events in the past ten years, not for herself or the Green Party-cum her own political trading post, but to raise money to send to Palestinian refugees?

Come to think of it … she is the leader of the GREEN Party, right? When did she hold fundraising events to provide resources and help the residents of the Cancer Alley in Louisiana? Or any other community suffering from environmental injustice.

Green Party claims to be a friend of the labor. When was the last (or any) time, under the leadership of Jill Stein, they held fundraising events to contribute to strike funds for teachers on strike, hotel workers on strike, fast food workers or auto workers on strike, or ANY workers on strike?

So, now, to ‘teach Democrats a lesson’, Jill Stein is willing to hand the presidency to a man who will do away with environmental regulations! Let’s not forget that the Supreme Court has set the precedent to deny regulatory agencies the power to regulate as needed. So, up goes Cancer Alley! And all the communities suffering from environmental injustice.

Is she OK with putting a man in the White House that will go after our labor rights with utmost ferocity?

Is she OK with Trump making it even easier for the police to get away with killing Black motorists due to broken taillights?

How about paving the way to the White House for a man who will attack us Middle Easterners (whom she claims to be fighting for) on a daily basis? Have we forgotten his ‘Muslim Ban’? Our communities of Middle Eastern diaspora will again be under racist attacks, supported by the power of the bully pulpit of the presidency. Our children will be bullied in schools. Our communities physically attacked by rightwing thugs with impunity.

Is she OK with millions of undocumented immigrants rounded up and put in concentration camps? In order to cleanse the gene pool?

Is she OK with increasing rightwing attacks on Trans kids, on their rights and their wellbeing? Attacks that will be supported by a sick lunatic in the White House and his White Christian Nationalist allies?

We the diaspora from fascistic regimes are sick and tired of Western liberals (in both white and black shades) using our misery, our destitution, our mangled and dead bodies to raise their own political fortunes, add new qualifications to their resumes, and commentate about our miseries to sell newspapers and raise funds for their organizations, newspapers, and the like.

Jill Stein is playing with our lives!

Message to Socialists
Since you have been absent in myriad social movements that have arisen in the past few decades, you have hidden behind commentating about those horrible Democrats, and how they’ve sold out the people again and again.

Well, DUH! That’s what they do! That’s not socialist activism. That’s stating the observable obvious, over and over again, for decades. Commentating.

But what have YOU been doing? Unlike us socialists in the underworld, living under fascist-type state formations, where mere utterances can have us killed, you have been operating openly, protected legally.

You openly publish newspapers, magazines, websites, organize national conventions and conferences. Your websites are not blocked by the government. Marx and Engels collected works are available in your public libraries, along with hundreds of other Marxist writers, theoreticians, literary and cultural critics, and so on. Your members are not hunted down, thrown in prison and tortured to death. Your women’s rights activists are not imprisoned, along with their lawyers. Your workers’ rights activists are not jailed for years. Your artists, writers, journalists, film and documentary producers are not jailed for no reason other than doing their work, daring to disagree with the powers that be.

What’s your excuse for having done nothing to stop things from getting to such a point where we now have to depend on corrupt neo-liberals to protect us from being wiped out by the most reactionary social forces in the U.S.?

The same questions I posed to Jill Stein’s political career can be posed to you.

When was the last time you raised funds to support and provide resources to, and not preach at, workers and community organizers you interacted with? When was the last time you were at a rally not just to sell your newspapers and talk at the participants?

In 2018-2019, did American socialist organizations get together to organize fundraising events to raise money, not for their own organizations, but for strike funds for teachers on strike in Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina? Or, this year, for hotel workers on strike across the country? Or in 2012 for fast food workers on strike in New York City, a strike that spread to Los Angeles, Chicago, Kansas City and Memphis? Or for auto workers attempting to unionize in Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Alabama or Mississippi?

Did you ever raise money for people facing evictions by greedy landlords? Or help homeless people get housed, or at least get some food? Or help pay for lunch money for poor kids whose schools don’t provide free lunch in Mississippi, Alabama, or Kentucky, or other former slave states? Are these things too petty for your high-minded revolutionary vision?

In 2006, a huge movement of undocumented immigrants hit the streets of Chicago and Los Angeles, and on May 1^st of that year more than two million people marched in support of that movement across the U.S. Did American socialist organizations get together to raise funds to provide resources to that movement? Or did they just go to those marches and rallies to preach at the participants, telling them the obvious?

So, you can dump on Democrats all you want, but, tragically, they are the last resort in this election cycle precisely because you have failed to be real socialists for too long. You’ve been stuck in bizarro discussions on Lenin v. Kautsky, Stalin v. Trotsky, legitimacy of Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Stalin selling out or buying time in his deal with Hitler. As if we are in 1930s!

Times have changed way too much and the American socialists, many Marxists even, are failing to see the moment for what it is. Maybe the American left suffers from its own form of exceptionalism, thinking ‘it’ cannot happen to them.

Maybe they are too privileged. It takes a well-privileged person to assume that no major difference in their lives would ensue no matter who’s the president, Trump or Harris.

But it makes a great deal of difference for tens of millions of less privileged people. You cannot tell me it makes no difference for undocumented immigrants, or even for documented ones, or for the health of our environment, or for workers ability to organize, or for an-already-enough-bullied Trans kids.

You definitely cannot fool me about which presidency would come with more open racist attacks against our Middle Eastern diaspora communities. Nor about how our children will be treated in schools depending on who wins the White House.

If you are indifferent to these considerations, and many more, you are not a socialist. Not even a true liberal. Maybe you’re just an adventurist, in the sense that Lenin meant it, as an insult.

Again, the choice for socialists is simple: Bide your time (do nothing), and worse vote for Jill Stein in swing states, to show spite, to signal your ‘revolutionary’ virtues. Or buy some time and become real socialists while you still can, before you’re wiped out for a whole generation.

You only have a few months, or a few years, to get your act together.

What’s To Be Done
So, in this election cycle, here is my plea to you as Palestinian-Americans, Muslim-Americans, as members of diaspora from the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, to all American socialists and left-liberals: If you cannot vote for Harris because of her complicity in facilitating the genocide in Gaza, I am with you. But please know that Trump will be infinitely worse for our communities back in the Middle East, as well as here in the U.S.

If you are still willing to risk having Trump in White House again, knowing all we know about him and his plans, at least vote for Democrat candidates down the ballot, for the local and national legislative bodies, so as to ensure a buffer zone between us and the reality of constant attacks on us by an openly racist White House and its stated plans for erasure of our protections, such as they are, yet still standing.

Jill Stein, happily breaking bread with Michael Flynn, Vladimir Putin and other war criminals.