© Strategic Culture Foundation
With the candidates neck and neck, a sliver of undecided voters in a handful of states will decide the result. Both parties are making a frenetic push to win those pivotal votes. With that frenetic atmosphere comes some feverish rhetoric.
Ultimately, though, it's a meaningless clown show.
American "democracy" is offering a bizarre choice. On the one hand, Trump, we are told, is the man to prevent World War Three and nuclear armageddon. That is the latest spin from Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F Kennedy Jr, both former presidential candidates who defected from the Democratic camp.
On the other hand, Trump is assailed with potentially damaging warnings from former top aides that he is a "Hitler admirer" and "a fascist to the core." John Kelly, who served as Trump's Chief of Staff during his presidency (2016-2020), gave interviews to the New York Times and the Atlantic this week in which he claimed that The Donald was a big fan of the Führer and pined to have Nazi Wehrmacht Generals in charge of the U.S. military.
Those lurid claims tally with another former senior Trump aide, General Mark Milley, who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Milley is quoted in a new book by veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, describing Trump as a "fascist to the core" and the "greatest threat to our democracy."
Other former senior Republican figures have also rallied against Trump with dire predictions that he is seeking to impose a dictatorship. Trump has not helped quell such concerns with his own comments about how he would like to use the U.S. military to go after political opponents.
What a crazy quandary presented before voters. Vote for Trump to stop World War Three, or if you vote for Trump, then you are voting for Hitler reincarnated.
Tulsi Gabbard, the former congresswoman for Hawaii, announced this week that she had quit the Democratic Party and was joining the Republicans. She is endorsing Trump for president, saying that "he is our best hope for peace."
With undeniable validity, Gabbard denounced the Democratic Party as becoming a party of the financial elite and the warmongering military-industrial complex. She said the party would no longer be recognized by former leaders like President John F Kennedy because it had abandoned the interests of workers and was a tool of Wall Street and war-makers.
In this assessment, Gabbard is correct. The Biden administration and Kamala Harris are gung-ho about pushing the war in Ukraine against Russia. If Harris is elected, the obsessive confrontation with Russia is likely to escalate with the real danger of it turning into an open war between nuclear powers.
Trump is sensibly calling for an end to the conflict in Ukraine. He seems to have a more skeptical position toward the Ukrainian regime and its bottomless pit of demands for American taxpayer money and military aid. Trump has said he would immediately push for a diplomatic solution to the nearly three-year war if he is elected.
On that narrow score alone, the Republican candidate is worth voting for. Anyone who understands the insanity of fueling an open conflict with Russia - as Harris is wont to do - is surely the person deserving support, one would think.
However, there should be no delusion. Trump is not a peace candidate who will save the world. He might step back from the brink in Ukraine but there is plenty of evidence that Trump would readily ignite a conflagration in some other part of the world.
At a recent rally in Fayetteville in the battleground state of North Carolina, Trump declared to a cheering crowd that Israel should bomb Iran's nuclear sites in response to Iranian retaliatory air strikes on October 1.
The "candidate to stop World War Three" has no qualms about supporting Israel's genocidal war on Gaza and Lebanon, having urged the fascist Israeli regime to "finish the job." (Neither has Harris any qualms about sponsoring Israeli massacres and criminal occupation, albeit with a softer tone than Trump.)
Team Trump is also banging the war drum when it comes to confronting China over a range of alleged grievances. A second Trump presidency will ramp up the hostility toward China over Taiwan by sending more arms to the breakaway island territory and deploying more U.S. military forces in the region. The danger of an open conflict with nuclear-powered China is probably greater under Trump compared with Harris.
What an infernal choice, which is an indictment of American so-called democracy. Nuclear conflagration with Russia under Harris or with China under Trump.
As for Trump's alleged Nazi and fascist tendencies. It's an oxymoron to focus on Trump alone over such claims. The entire U.S. political class - whether Democrat or Republican - fits the description of fascist. All of them are besotted with criminal warmongering for imperialist power with total disdain for international law.
Harris reacted smugly to the latest "Hitler-admirer" claims against Trump by saying: "This shows what kind of Commander-in-Chief he would be." As if she is any more reasonable and law-abiding, considering she supports Israel "unwaveringly" and wants to send more weapons to the NeoNazi regime in Kiev to attack Russia.
Tulsi Gabbard may claim that Trump will spare American citizens and soldiers from war. That's a delusion. He might check the insanity in Ukraine, but Trump will direct the American war machine to engender some other conflict in the Middle East or Asia-Pacific.
The American capitalist system is a fascist war machine serving corporate interests. Harris is every bit a fascist puppet as Trump is. It's a mirage to present one candidate as being any better than the other. World peace is threatened by both because the United States is a threat to world peace.
The real choice Americans must make is this: perpetuate the existing system or create another, radically different one.
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