How the Gaza genocide shattered the illusion of Western humanity

The nations that are complicit—the US, Canada, Germany, the UK, and others—aren't just bystanders, they are architects of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and have shown their inhumanity with their inaction to stop Gaza's horrors. 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

We have often heard political leaders talk about “Western humanity” over the decades. But the phrase is now a sick joke. A bedtime fable for adults who want to believe that their governments are the “good guys”. After more than two years of Israeli bombardment, engineered famine, and industrial-scale murder in Gaza, the fairy tale of Western governments being defenders of human rights or humanity is dead.

 

Over the last 25 months the self-anointed guardians of the so-called “rules-based international order” have proven they are nothing but a criminal cabal heading so-called “Christian” nations that weaponize international law against the powerless and suspend it for the powerful and their friends. They have shown that anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia runs deeper in Washington, London, Berlin, and other capitals in the Western alliance than any commitment to human life.

As children we are told that monsters live only in myths and fairy tales. As adults we learn the terrifying truth. Monsters live among us, they are always human, they wear suits and ties, and they lead nations like Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. What else but monstrous hatred explains the refusal to stop Israel's genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, even after every single Israeli hostage has been returned? What else explains a refusal to act when major human rights organizations, hundreds of genocide and Holocaust scholars, the United Nations and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has labelled Israel's actions as genocide?

Look at the timeline from the current bleak vantage point. The latest “ceasefire” was sold to the world as simple—if Hamas returned all Israeli hostages Israel would stop their military assault on Palestinians. The last living hostages were freed weeks ago. Even the bodies of the deceased have been repatriated. Yet Israel's murder spree continues. In the past month alone—during the so-called ceasefire—Israeli forces have murdered another 242 Palestinians, including 85 children, while injuring 619 more with live fire and tank shells. On November 19th, in Khan Younis, 33 civilians waiting for flour were shredded by an Israeli airstrike. This is not merely a breach of the ceasefire, but rather proof that the ceasefire was always a lie to allow Israel to rearm and continue its genocidal crimes.

The scale of the crimes are beyond comprehension. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, one of the few organizations still able to document on the ground, reports that as of October 2025 Israel has killed at least 75,190 Palestinians in Gaza—including 21,310 children and 13,987 women—with 173,200 wounded and tens of thousands facing lifelong disability. But these official figures are grotesque undercounts. Israeli academic Yaakov Garb, using satellite imagery and data from the Israeli military, published a report via Harvard Dataverse which estimates that between 377,000 and 400,000 Palestinians have simply “disappeared”—their bodies blown apart or buried beneath 51 million tons of rubble. Australian academics Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, factoring in direct killings plus deaths from starvation, disease, and the total collapse of Gaza's healthcare system, calculated over 680,000 excess deaths by April 2025 alone. A number that is likely to be far higher today.

This is the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) multiplied—a catastrophe not born in 2023, but forged in the fires of 1948, when Zionist militias unleashed a calculated campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing to carve out a Jewish state from the land of Palestine. Over 750,000 Palestinians—more than half the non-Jewish population—was violently expelled from their homes in what historians like Ilan Pappé have unflinchingly documented as the crime of ethnic cleansing. It began with a blueprint drafted in 1948 aimed at “clearing” Palestinian villages to secure strategic corridors for the nascent Israeli state. Massacres followed, like the infamous Deir Yassin slaughter on April 9, 1948 where Irgun and Lehi terrorists gunned down hundreds of villagers, including women and children. By war's end, 531 Palestinian villages were wiped from the map, their centuries old olive groves and orchards torched, wells poisoned, and inhabitants herded like cattle toward Gaza, the West Bank, or exile in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria—creating the world's longest unresolved refugee crisis, with 6.1 million descendants still denied the right of return today.

If the Nakba was the overture, Gaza's horrors are the crescendo—a genocide that not only echoes the Holocaust but indicts its solemn vow of “Never Again” as a hollow lie. The Holocaust, that meticulously documented abomination that claimed 11 million lives, including six million Jews, was a six-year frenzy of industrialized death, hidden from prying eyes until Allied boots kicked down the gates of Nazi concentration camps in 1945. Gaza's slaughter, by contrast, is a brazen spectacle, live-streamed in high-definition horror—drones assassinating aid-seekers, so-called “precision” bombs vaporizing hundreds in tents, emaciated toddlers crying as starvation ravages their bodies, and even Israeli soldiers flaunting their crimes on TikTok. Where Nazis shrouded the cattle cars filled with their victims in secrecy, Israel's genocidal killing machine operates under global spotlights, with impunity.

Israeli scholars like Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg and Omer Bartov decry Israel’s actions as settler-colonial genocide, a perversion where “Never Again” mutates into “Never Again to Us,” dooming brown and Muslim bodies. The perversity deepens with the duration of the criminal acts. Where the Holocaust's terror ended with the defeat of the Nazis, Gaza is a 77-year dirge of attrition, only lacking the moral outrage that toppled Hitler.

Ha’aretz polls reveal the depth of the rot and anti-Palestinian hate in Israeli society. More than 80% of Jewish Israelis back ethnically cleansing all Gazans, while 47% endorse the mass slaughter of every Palestinian, children included, echoing the Nazi dehumanization that once targeted Jews as “vermin.” This is an escalation which shows that Israeli society has sunk to lows last seen in Nazi Germany, and illustrates that Israel's actions have the social licence of almost half of Israeli Jews.

South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ is one of the few things that gives hope to Palestinians seeking justice. Armed with their own research and additional data from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and the UN, the ICJ case stands as a lone legal bulwark against Israel, yet faces US threats and sanctions on truth-tellers like UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Gaza surpasses the Holocaust not in raw numbers but in its “prolonged generational agony,” a structural evil sustained for decades by Israeli cruelty and Western support, where grandparents fled Zionist massacres in 1948 only for their grandchildren to perish during a two year long genocide. This moral hierarchy—Jewish suffering enshrined in memorials while Palestinian agony is dismissed as “tragic” and “collateral damage”—mirrors forgotten horrors like the Congo genocide of the early 20th Century under Belgium's King Leopold where 10 million were killed, or Winston Churchill's orchestrated Bengal Famine in 1943 where three million were starved.

Those nations that are complicit—the US, Canada, Germany, the UK, and others—aren't just bystanders, they are architects which, with their silence and inaction to stop Gaza's horrors, are no less criminal than those who wore Nazi uniforms as they slaughtered Jews. The West knew Gaza was a genocide from the very first weeks because the experts made it clear that it was. Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal called it a “textbook case of genocide” before October 2023 was even over. By the end of that month more than 800 genocide scholars and international-law experts issued a public warning that Israel was committing genocide in real time. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor branded it “the most transparent genocide in human history.” The ICJ called Israel's actions “plausible genocide,” and ordered them to prevent genocidal acts in January 2024. But none of it mattered. The US ignored the words of those who had studied the crime for decades, vetoed every meaningful UN resolution to halt the slaughter quickly, shipped billions more in military hardware to Israel as it committed atrocities, while Israel ignored the ICJ’s judicial orders, and global community’s condemnations.

There is no complexity here. This is anti-Palestinian hatred plain and simple, so deeply embedded in Western governments, media and civil society institutions that it's a part of their cultural and political DNA. It's clear that Palestinians are not seen as human in the corridors of Western power, the same way Jews weren't considered human in the halls of European power in centuries past. They are an obstacle, a demographic problem, “human animals” in the words of Israeli leaders, a term borrowed from European history once used to describe Jews. The same governments that weep crocodile tears over the Holocaust now fund, arm, and defend a 21st-century Holocaust in Gaza.

The West's failure to take action to halt the Gaza genocide has shown us that monsters are real and they walk among us, and they lead us. So let's never talk again about Western “humanity” nor Canada’s defence of “international rule of law” again. Let's see Western leaders for what they are—criminals and monsters. And those of us that have a moral compass, let's join together to build the just society that former prime minister Pierre Trudeau once spoke of more than half a century ago.

©  2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the pinnacle of evil in the world today

Without decisive action by the international community to halt the Gaza genocide, Israel’s impunity will cement its legacy as the 21st century’s exemplar of evil rivalling that of Nazi Germany. 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza stands as a stark monument to 21st-century barbarity and evil. As a deliberate campaign to annihilate a people it mirrors the darkest atrocities the 20th Century and will go down in history as the failure of the so-called “international rules based order” that Western nations like to invoke so often against their adversaries. Israel’s actions have convinced numerous respected voices that their crimes constitute the crime of genocide as defined under the Genocide Convention.

Among those who have come to this conclusion have been the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Israeli academics Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg, and Omer Bartov, hundreds of Jewish health care professionals, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, the United Nations, and many others. In public statements and letters all of these individuals and organizations have cited evidence of deliberate killings, starvation policies, and conditions aimed at destroying Palestinians as a people. This horror, which the world has watched on their social media feeds for more than two years, far from being an isolated eruption of Israeli violence, is the latest phase of a century-long Zionist colonial project, rooted in ethno-supremacist ideology akin to the 20th century’s worst genocides. It has positioned Israel as the Middle East’s gravest threat to peace and a prime example of modern evil no different than what the Nazis did during the Holocaust.

The Gaza genocide evokes the Holocaust’s horror, where Nazi Germany exterminated six million Jews alongside seven million Roma, disabled individuals, political dissidents and others in death camps like Auschwitz, driven by an ethno-supremacist ideology, and a dehumanizing rhetoric labelling victims as “vermin.” Gaza’s devastation parallels this with Israeli leader Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoking “Amalek”, a biblical call to exterminate an entire people and lay waste to their society. Similarly, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant branded Palestinians as “human animals,” justifying a siege to deny food, water, fuel, and other things necessary for human survival. Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested using nuclear weapons to annihilate the people of Gaza, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demanded Gaza’s erasure, echoing Nazi calls for a “final solution.” The UN’s 2025 report confirms violations of the Genocide Convention—mass killings, intentional harm, and life conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians, while Amnesty International’s 2024 report calls it a “live-streamed genocide,” with hospitals, schools, and UN shelters bombed, killing more than 75,000 directly and potentially more than 600,000 indirectly.

This brutality recalls the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1917, where 1.5 million people were killed through death marches and starvation, and the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War Two, where 13,000 Jews were killed and the 50,000 who remained were sent to Nazi death camps. Gaza’s blockade since 2007, tightened post-2023, mirrors these historic atrocities with Israel forcing Palestinians into so-called “safe zones” only to bomb those who had survived previous bombings. The population of Gaza numbered 2.3 million in October 2023, half of them children. Since the start of Israel’s genocidal assault they have been subjected to bullets, bombs, mortars, starvation, deprivation and disease, in a 365 square kilometre open air concentration camp, with over 90% of the hospitals, 95% of the schools and universities, and more than 80% of the homes and buildings damaged or destroyed.

The international community’s inaction—despite warnings by the UN and hundreds of genocide scholars—echoes the Allies’ indifference to Armenian pleas in World War One, and the pleas of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in the lead up to World War Two. The Rwandan Genocide of 1994, where 800,000 Tutsis were hacked to death in 100 days amid Hutu radio calls for extermination, finds its parallel in Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians. Israeli airstrikes replicates the Nazi’s orchestrated slaughter of 11 million during the Holocaust. The Bosnian Genocide’s Srebrenica massacre is echoed in the way that Palestinians were herded into Gaza’s so-called “safe zones,” and bombed while in flimsy tents just trying to survive.

B’Tselem’s 2025 report—“Our Genocide”—details the “coordinated destruction” of Gaza, with 80% of the territory’s infrastructure razed, making everything in what were once the major centres of the enclave look like Hiroshima did after the atomic bomb was dropped. Dresden’s firebombing (25,000+ dead), Tokyo’s incineration (100,000+ dead), and Hiroshima-Nagasaki’s atomic annihilation (200,000+ dead)—share Gaza’s disproportionate carnage. Israel’s use of 2,000-pound bombs in dense neighbourhoods, documented by Human Rights Watch as “extermination,” prioritizes destruction over precision. Japan’s Nanjing Massacre (300,000+ killed) parallels the rape of Gaza women by Israeli soldiers and summary executions, with IDF soldiers’ TikTok videos boasting of atrocities, echoing the confessions contained in the diaries of Japanese soldiers.

The Gaza genocide is not a post-October 7, 2023 anomaly but the apex of Zionism’s colonial violence that began with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which ignored 700,000 indigenous Palestinians in historic Palestine to promise a “national home” to European Jews. The slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land,” coined by Israel Zangwill was Zionist propaganda that erased Palestine’s vibrant Muslim, Christian, and Jewish society, rivalling Nazi propaganda’s erasure of Jewish humanity in Germany.

Historian Rashid Khalidi notes this myth was used as a justification of the British-backed dispossession, setting the stage for the Nakba in 1948. That event, burned into the souls of Palestinians, saw Zionist terrorist militias—Haganah, Irgun, Lehi—ethnically cleanse 750,000 Palestinians, destroy 500 villages via Plan Dalet, and murder thousands of Palestinians, to secure a Jewish-majority state. Massacres like Deir Yassin and Lydda mirrored Nazi massacres of entire towns, with Palestinian survivors denied the right of return under UN Resolution 194, a condition of Israel’s 1949 UN admission which it immediately violated. More than seven million refugees and their descendants remain stateless around the world, which is a crime of ongoing displacement.

Zionism’s ethno-supremacist ideology, equating Jews as “God’s chosen people” with divine land rights in historic Palestine and beyond, parallels the Nazi slogan of Aryans being the “master race. David Ben-Gurion’s 1937 call to “expel Arabs and take their places” and Golda Meir’s 1969 denial of Palestinian existence, despite documents showing she was born in “Palestine” and therefore was a Palestinian, are reminiscent of Nazi deputy fuehrer Heinrich Himmler’s dehumanization of Jews.

Israel’s history of aggression extends beyond Gaza, instigating nearly every conflict with its neighbours in the region since 1948. The 1956 Suez Crisis saw Israel invade Egypt’s Sinai, unprovoked, alongside Britain and France. The 1967 Six-Day War, a pre-emptive strike on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, led to the illegal occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Sinai, and Golan Heights, violating Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. The 1978 and 1982 Lebanon invasions, including the Sabra-Shatila massacre (3,500 dead, facilitated by eventual PM Ariel Sharon), and multiple wars in Gaza since 2008 reflect a clear pattern of instigating violence. This is also evident in Israel’s attacks against Lebanon, and bombings of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar since 2023—often without provocation—acts which breach sovereignty, international law, and the UN Charter. Israel’s criminality can also be seen in over 50 assassinations since 1948, in Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia and Syria—once again, all violations of international law.

The Zionist project’s colonial roots trace back to the late 19th century, when the founder of the Zionist movement Theodor Herzl envisioned a Jewish secular state in Palestine, disregarding its indigenous population. His disdain for the inhabitants of Palestine (Muslim, Christian and Jewish) was made clear in 1904 when he said, “The Zionist colony would form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” His vision was helped by the Balfour Declaration, which prioritized Zionist settlers over the territory’s 700,000 Palestinians, setting an ugly precedent for ethnic cleansing and exclusion.

This colonial framework, as Israeli historian Ilan Pappé argues in his 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, mirrors settler-colonial genocides in Australia and the Americas, where indigenous peoples and societies were erased to make way for settler societies made up primarily of white Europeans. The Nakba’s ethnic cleansing was not a spontaneous event but one that was meticulously planned, with Zionist leaders like Ben-Gurion (born in modern day Poland) explicitly advocating for “transfer” [ethnic cleansing] to ensure Jewish dominance in historic Palestine. In a letter to his son Amos in October 1937 he wrote, “We must expel the Arabs [Palestinians] and take their places . . . And, if we have to use force, not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places, then we have force at our disposal.” The ongoing Gaza genocide extends this logic, aiming to render the territory uninhabitable for Palestinians through systematic destruction of agriculture, water systems, cultural heritage, all manner of civilian infrastructure, and mass murder, as documented by UN reports. This calculated erasure aligns with Raphael Lemkin’s genocide definition—acts to destroy a group’s “essential foundations of life.”

Western complicity, particularly from the United States, amplifies Israel’s impunity. Beyond financial aid, the US provides diplomatic cover, and has vetoed multiple UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s actions, a pattern since 1972. This protection has emboldened Israel’s violations, from the 1967 occupations to Gaza’s siege, mirroring how Nazi Germany exploited the League of Nations’ weakness. Western media often sanitizes Israel’s atrocities, framing Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” while ignoring Israel’s state terror, as noted in critiques of news outlets like CNN and BBC. This double standard dehumanizes Palestinians, the same way Nazi propaganda vilified Jews, thereby enabling public indifference to Gaza’s suffering. The supply of American precision-guided munitions, used in Gaza’s indiscriminate bombings, implicates the US directly in war crimes, as stated by respected human rights organizations and legal scholars.

Since its creation Israel’s actions have destabilized the Middle East, leading to wider conflicts. Its unprovoked strikes on Iran and Syria, alongside proxy wars via US-backed militias, have inflamed regional tensions. The 2025 Qatar attack, targetting Hamas officials, underscores Israel’s disregard for international law, and territorial sovereignty, provoking responses from groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis. This recklessness, fuelled by Zionism’s expansionist zeal, threatens to draw the US and other Middle East nations into a wider war, echoing how unchecked aggression in the 1930s led to global conflict. The International Criminal Court’s 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes signal growing global concern, yet Western inaction to stop the genocide persists.

The Gaza genocide’s scale is compounded by Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, a tactic rooted in Zionist goals to erase Palestinian presence, and mimicking tactics the Nazis used in the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War Two. Hospitals have been bombed repeatedly while medical staff and patients have been targeted and killed, violating Geneva Convention protections for medical facilities. UN reports document the destruction of over 90% of Gaza’s healthcare system, leaving millions without access to care, a strategy to maximize civilian suffering and death. This mirrors the Nazi destruction of Warsaw’s infrastructure to crush resistance, prioritizing annihilation over military objectives. Such actions, as Segal notes, aim to “destroy the group as such,” fulfilling genocide’s legal definition.

Israel’s religious and political rhetoric further exposes its genocidal intent. Beyond Netanyahu’s Amalek invocation, religious leaders have called Palestinians “beasts” and “animals” unfit for coexistence, while Knesset member Avi Dichter described Gaza’s assault as “rolling out the Nakba.” These statements, combined with half of Israeli Jews supporting genocide, and policies like cutting off Gaza’s electricity and water, reflect a supremacist ideology that justifies extermination, akin to Nazi depictions of Jews as subhuman. The Balfour Declaration’s legacy, seeing Jews as humans while dehumanizing Palestinians, continues to shape this violence, with Western powers complicit in its perpetuation. American historian Norman Finkelstein (a child of Holocaust survivors) argues that Israel’s actions constitute a “public genocide,” conducted openly with Western-supplied weapons.

Global inaction mirrors historical failures, enabling Israel’s crimes. The UN’s inability to enforce resolutions, hampered by US vetoes, recalls the League of Nations’ collapse before Nazi aggression. The failure to act in Rwanda and Bosnia (also hampered by UNSC vetoes) allowed genocides to unfold, and Gaza faces a similar fate as Western leaders deflect accountability with claims of “Israel’s right to self-defence.” International law, including the Genocide Convention, is rendered toothless when powerful nations shield perpetrators, as seen with US support for Israel’s war crimes. Grassroots movements, like global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns, represent growing resistance, but political elites remain complicit as they ignore or willingly support Israeli actions.

The broader implications of Israel’s actions threaten global stability. Its attacks on multiple nations—Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Qatar—risk escalating into a regional war, potentially involving nuclear powers, reminiscent of pre-World War Two escalations. Unconditional support by the US, including sale of advanced weaponry, fuels this danger, implicating it in Gaza’s atrocities. The Zionist ideology’s expansionist vision, as articulated by Herzl and the current Zionist leadership of Israel aiming for a “Greater Israel,” drives this aggression, and threatens to destabilize the Middle East and beyond. The international community’s failure to hold Israel accountable risks normalizing genocidal violence, undermining global human rights frameworks and political stability.

Ending Israel’s apartheid, “de-Zionizing” Israeli society, enforcing Palestinian refugees’ right of return, and prosecuting war crimes demand urgent global resolve. The moral failures evident in the Gaza genocide, as in the Holocaust, Armenia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, lies in the collective silence and inaction of most of the global community. The Zionist myth of a “land without a people” and Jews being “God’s chosen people” continues to justify ethnic cleansing, echoing colonial genocides worldwide. Without decisive action—sanctions, arms embargoes, and ICC enforcement—Israel’s impunity will cement its legacy as the 21st century’s exemplar of evil, a state whose supremacist ideology and Western-backed genocidal violence rivals that of Nazi Germany.

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Slow erosion of our rights is a betrayal of those Canadians who died to protect our freedoms

Remembrance transcends ritual commemoration; it demands active reclamation of the democratic legacy.

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

As the chill of November settles over Ottawa the solemn rituals of this week’s Remembrance Day ceremonies are now etched into our collective memory—a moment to salute the valour of those who ventured into the inferno of global conflicts. From the blood-soaked trenches of Europe, to the beaches of Normandy, the frozen hills of Korea, and the dusty trails of Afghanistan, Canadian service men and women laid down their lives not for glory, but for the sake of “freedom” and “democracy”, or so they were told.

In total since World War One, over 113,000 Canadians perished, their ultimate sacrifice helping to forge a Canada where citizens’ voices could speak out and dissent, where people could gather without fear of reprisal, and political leaders could be held accountable for their actions. These warriors did not storm foreign shores merely to repel invaders. They battled to enshrine a birthright of freedom from tyranny, equality under the law, and governance by the consent of the people, free from the shadows of authoritarianism.

However, as the wreaths are removed from cenotaphs and as the red poppies are put away for another year, a disquieting question lingers, what endures of their legacy when the very foundations freedom, democracy and human rights they bled to secure are being slowly dismantled bit by bit? In the years since those cataclysmic struggles, Canada has morphed into a nation where safeguards against governmental overreach now yield to the imperatives of “security”, and to ideological fervour.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the aspirational 1982 compact born from decades of constitutional struggles, now faces insidious encroachments. Nominally a society that embraces freedom and civil liberties, Canada now grapples with a creeping curtailment of personal freedoms, masked as bulwarks against terrorism, crime and societal harmony. If the ghosts of Vimy Ridge, Dieppe, or Kandahar could peer through the mist of time, they might recoil at the sight of a democracy seemingly adrift, where the clamour of protest is muffled because it bothers certai n communities, where expressions of dissent are branded as dangerous, and where elected official’s voices are reduced to mere echoes of their political masters.

Consider the legislation coming out of Parliament, cloaked in the garb of safety and security. The Strong Borders Act (Bill C-2), unveiled in June, promises to fortify our borders against shadowy transnational threats. At first glance, it evokes the steadfast resolve of those sent off to distant lands to defend Canadian values. Yet, within its pages lies a network of provisions that erode the bedrock of privacy and mobility enshrined in the Charter of Rights, ones that empower Canadian Border Service officials with sweeping authority to scrutinize digital footprints and personal data, often without judicial approval or oversight, under the flimsy veil of “reasonable suspicion. Critics from more than 300 advocacy organizations, representing refugee networks to digital rights sentinels, decry it as a Trojan horse for unchecked surveillance which could threaten human rights, refugee and migrant rights, and the privacy of all Canadians. This legislation is no mere bureaucratic tweak but rather a concession of the freedoms that Canadians fought to defend from the spectre of authoritarian ideologies.

No less alarming is Bill C-8, the Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act. Framed as a bulwark against threats to vulnerable infrastructure—from power grids, to telecommunications infrastructure, to financial institutions—it compels companies under federal jurisdiction to undertake exhaustive audits of their vulnerabilities, with regulators able to dictate the removal of suspect technologies or the overhaul of protocols. While the spectre of cyber incursions is a real threat, with this legislation the federal government tilts perilously close towards a scenario where the Charter’s protections against unreasonable searches and protections of personal security—Sections 7 and 8—are ignored in the name of advancing national priorities and strengthening Canada’s economic resilience. In an era where data and technology is critical to economic success, such overreach risks transforming the open and free spaces where Canadians live their lives into places of constant surveillance, much like it is in present day China.

This escalation of restrictions extends to municipal governance in several jurisdictions across Canada, where officials, reacting to persistent protests against the genocide in Gaza, have instituted “bubble zone” bylaws that impose spatial buffers around key civic institutions. In Toronto, a city characterized by its pluralism and diversity, the city council approved a regulation establishing 50-meter exclusion zones around places of worship, educational facilities, and childcare centres, prohibiting assemblies deemed “disruptive” on the basis of subjective reports of discomfort. Initially conceived as a protective measure for entities affected by intense demonstrations—many of which have condemned Israel for committing horrific atrocities—the policy has evolved into a broader mechanism of control, targeting non-violent gatherings under the rationale of “protecting” citizens. Violations incur penalties of up to $5,000, administered by municipal enforcement officers with police support, even though law enforcement authorities maintain that existing legislation is adequate.

Similar measures have emerged in the cities of Vaughan and Brampton, north of Toronto, and Ottawa is developing its own framework. This creates a fragmented landscape of censorship of political activism that undermines the Canadian Charter of Rights’ protections under Sections 2(b) and 2(c), which cover freedom of expression and assembly. Advocates for civil liberties caution that these bylaws impose a deterrent effect on legitimate and legal protest, especially among underrepresented groups advocating for global justice, thereby converting historically inclusive public spaces into government controlled no go zones.

Exacerbating these trends is the gradual institutional adoption of broadened criteria for identifying prejudice, specifically the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which has been integrated into governmental policy since its federal acceptance in 2019 and subsequent provincial implementations through 2025. Jurisdictions including Ontario, Alberta, and Quebec have codified the definition, presenting it as an instrument to combat rising intolerance. However, its non-binding examples—some of which equate specific criticisms of Israeli state policy with antisemitic intent—risk conflating political analysis and criticism with ethnic and racial animus, thereby capturing human-rights advocacy concerning the Levant within the scope of prohibited speech. Progressive Jewish organizations, like Independent Jewish Voices, and allied civil-society coalitions contend that the definition is being weaponized to suppress substantive and legitimate debate while insulating those who support the suppression of legal free speech contested from scrutiny, thus eroding the freedoms that Allied forces sought to secure during the Second World War. In a society that embraces multicultural integration, such instruments threaten to undermine social cohesion by elevating one interpretive framework above rights guaranteed under the Charter.

Provincial governments, ostensibly custodians of regional autonomy, have increasingly invoked the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause (Section 33) to suspend Charter protections for disadvantaged populations. Quebec’s 2019 secularism law, reaffirmed in 2024, prohibits public-sector employees from displaying religious symbols, thereby overriding guarantees of religious freedom and equality. Saskatchewan’s 2023 requirement for parental consent in cases of gender-identity disclosure by minors, alongside Alberta’s 2025 legislation enabling teacher dismissals during labour disputes, both deploy the clause to preempt Charter challenges. Ontario’s adjustments to electoral boundaries and New Brunswick’s language-policy directives similarly shield contentious measures from judicial review.

Originally conceived in 1982 as a limited override to be used only in the most extraordinary circumstances, to balance parliamentary sovereignty with rights adjudication, the clause has been activated six times by five provinces since 2019, diminishing the Charter’s normative authority and enabling majority governments to violate constitutional rights under the guise of democratic prerogative. The framers of Canada’s constitutional order, informed by the injustices of wartime internment and the use of the War Measures Act during the FLQ Crisis in Quebec, intended the mechanism as an exceptional safeguard. Its contemporary proliferation signals a regression toward discretionary governance in which fundamental rights are sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

At the core of this democratic deficit lies Parliament, the institution designed to translate popular sovereignty into accountable administration. In principle, it functions as the primary arena for executive oversight, where rank-and-file legislators interrogate policy, compel evidence, and, if necessary, withdraw confidence to precipitate governmental collapse. The 1873 Pacific Scandal, in which parliamentary censure over railway corruption toppled Sir John A. Macdonald’s administration, exemplifies an era when Members of Parliament were able to exercise independent judgment unconstrained by party directives. By contrast, the contemporary House of Commons, comprising 343 members following the 2025 redistribution, operates within a rigid disciplinary party structure that prioritizes caucus cohesion and party loyalty over constituent representation. Informal yet coercive party protocols brand nonconformists as outliers and even traitors, and consign them to irrelevance. In the recent federal election the prime minister sustained a narrow electoral plurality, retains exclusive authority over cabinet formation, committee placements, and ancillary benefits such as international travel or remunerated parliamentary roles. Policy direction largely originates not from elected colleagues but from an insulated “palace guard” within the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office—apparatchiks whose primary allegiance is to the executive. Empirical analyses reveals that members adhere to the party line in 99.6 percent of recorded votes, rendering their contributions perfunctory.

This structural weakness arises from the imperatives of minority or slim-majority governance and a leader-centred political approach, where the leader tolerates no internal dissent that might jeopardize legislative stability. Career advancement—parliamentary secretaryships, committee chairmanships, or cabinet portfolios—function as an incentive for compliance, while resistance invites sanction. Consequently, the House of Commons, intended to constrain executive overreach, has devolved into a compliant assembly where rigorous examination atrophies and democratic accountability is limited. Without a credible check on prime ministerial authority, the system ceases to embody representative democracy as was originally intended.

The Canadian combatants who fell at Juno Beach, Kapyong, or Panjwai did not sacrifice themselves for this faded silhouette of self-governance. They confronted totalitarian regimes to defend a society where freedom and democracy is the norm, where dissent is a catalyst for reform rather than repression, and where elected officials serve the public rather than entrenched elites. Their legacy is undermined not by external adversaries but by internal erosion—federal surveillance regimes that intrude upon personal autonomy, municipal ordinances that stifle public expression, provincial suspensions of constitutional rights, and legislatures shackled by partisan discipline.

Reforms of the inadequacies of society requires deliberate intervention. Legislation should mandate conscience votes on ethical issues and insulate committee assignments from leadership discretion. Judicial oversight of Section 33 invocations before they are implemented should become the norm, restricting its use to genuine existential emergencies. Bubble-zone bylaws and the IHRA definition’s overboard applications should be rescinded to restore unencumbered forums for critique. Border-security and cybersecurity initiatives must incorporate robust transparency and warrant requirements. Most critically, statutory reforms should affirm that Members of Parliament owe their primary duty to constituents, not party hierarchies.

Remembrance transcends ritual commemoration; it demands active reclamation of the democratic legacy. We honour the fallen not through ephemeral tributes but by reinvigorating the liberties they secured. Only through such renewal can their sacrifice resonate as the foundation of an enduring, resilient Canada. In their memory, we are compelled to act, before the principles they defended dissolve into oblivion.

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

On Remembrance Day let’s remember that war is the supreme evil, wherever and whenever it occurs

Nowhere is the evil that is identified in the final judgment from Nuremberg more brazen than in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza—a 21st Century reincarnation of what the Nazis did.

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

“War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world... A war of aggression is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

These words, etched into the judgment of the Nuremberg Trials following World War II, were not mere rhetoric. They were a solemn indictment of leaders who unleashed industrialized slaughter on humanity, convicting Nazi architects of crimes that devoured 70 to 85 million lives—over 50 million civilians among them. As the gavel fell in 1946, the world vowed (once again) to never to forget war’s futility, its horror, its senseless grind of flesh and bone for the egos and greed of dictators, kings, presidents and prime ministers.

Yet here we stand, on another Remembrance Day in Canada, gazing at the sea of red poppies worn on lapels and laid at cenotaphs that honour the fallen and the scarred—soldiers who marched into the maw of machine guns, who clawed through mud-choked trenches, who watched friends dissolve in clouds of chemical weapon. We commemorate their sacrifice, their valour, their unbreakable spirit, but at the same time we tarnish their sacrifice by being complicit, as a nation, in the very sort of evil they fought in World War II.

Ceremonies swell with anthems and wreaths, stirring national pride and sombre reflection. But in this ritual of reverence, the true venom of war—the supreme evil named at Nuremberg—is whispered only in passing, if at all. We gloss over the architects—the foolhardy politicians whose vanities birthed these cataclysms. We sentimentalize the survivors while burying the deeper truth—that war is not noble tragedy but orchestrated abomination, a crime that devours innocents for fleeting gains. And today, as Western leaders, including those in Canada, funnel arms into fresh infernos, we risk repeating history’s gravest sin—complicity in aggression’s accumulated evil.

Since 9/11 and the Afghanistan War, where 165 Canadians died, Remembrance Day has morphed into a spectacle laced with nationalism and political theatre. In Canada, politicians drape themselves in solemnity, invoking the ghosts of Vimy Ridge, Juno Beach and the Battle of Kandahar to stoke unity. But this veneer obscures the ugly genesis of our traditions.

The First World War was no inexorable clash of ideologies fated to happen. It was the bastard child of European egos—emperors, kings and politicians, entangled in a web of alliances forged by imperial hunger that knocked over the first domino leading to international catastrophe. A century of fragile peace, from Waterloo to Sarajevo, shattered by the assassination of an archduke and an ensuing crisis of ultimatums and mobilizations too rigid to halt. Germany’s blank cheque to Austria-Hungary, Russia’s hasty full mobilization, Britain’s deployment to support Belgium—all foolhardy gambles that dragged empires into four years of slaughter.

By 1918 between 17 to 22 million lay dead, with over 10 million civilians starved, diseased, or shredded by bombs and artillery, with 25 million more wounded, their bodies and minds irreparably broken. Trench warfare birthed death on an industrialized level with the use of poison gas, tanks, and barbed wire turning open fields into abattoirs of human remains. For what? The war’s futility was etched in a poem by Wilfred Owen, “Anthem For Doomed Youth” which evoked horror: “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”

The Treaty of Versailles, meant to end the nightmare and prevent future wars, instead sowed the seeds of its sequel. Punitive reparations crippled Germany, fuelling resentment that Adolf Hitler weaponized to launch World War II, wanting to “make Germany great again”. This second apocalypse claimed between 70 and 85 million souls, with over 50 million civilians gassed, bombed, or starved in genocidal fury. The Nazis embodied pure aggression, their blitzkriegs and death camps was the distilled evil that Nuremberg condemned.

The Americans, the British and Canadians landed at Normandy beaches on D-Day with more than 4,400 killed in the landings. As Allied troops broke through the lines of German defences the cost in human lives was more than 600,000, not counting the civilians who were caught between the two forces. Counting losses in both world wars over 111,000 Canadians, more than 533,000 Americans, and over 983,000 British military personnel died, their blood spilled in conflicts politicians could have averted through diplomacy if they truly believed in peace.

After the German and Japanese surrendered in World War II, the pattern persisted, a grim refrain. Just five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki saw over 200,000 civilians incinerated by the US, the Korean War erupted—a Cold War conflict scripted by superpowers. North Korea, backed by China and the Soviets, invaded the South, and the UN coalition, led by the US (including 26,000 Canadians) countered. What began as ideological saber-rattling teetered on nuclear brinkmanship, ultimately killing 3 to 3.5 million—two million civilians pulverized by bombs, napalm and artillery by 1953. Villages were razed as families fled, not for honour but for the Cold War’s chessboard. Today as those who gave their lives on battlefields are commemorated, there are no parades or ceremonies for the millions of civilian victims of the war machine, their memories fading into footnotes.

“There is no honour in war,” is a sentiment embraced by many, including those who have returned home bloodied and disfigured from battlefields. War is a senseless slaughter for economic plunder or political advantage where the vast majority of victims are not combatants. The 20th century’s ledger drips rivers of blood as civilians, once peripheral to the battles of history. are now those who are the primary victims, courtesy of so-called “smart” bombs and cluster munitions that claim to spare the innocent but never do.

Post-9/11, Western wars—led by the US—unleashed hell in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. The Costs of War Project tallies 4.5 to 4.6 million dead (primarily Muslims and Arabs), with more than 38 million displaced. One analysis pushes the total number of dead to 6 million, the unrecorded results of war’s rubble and ruin. The illegal invasion of Iraq, which Canada dodged, but the fallout of which we reaped, birthed instability in the Middle-East and the carnage in Syria. Millions of Muslims perished in 25 years of such “interventions,” but there are no cenotaphs or monuments for them. These wars, sold as liberation for oppressed peoples, or efforts to root out terrorism, were aggression’s kin—resource grabs or political aggression masked as righteousness, destabilizing a region with more than 400 million people to the point that it has become a perpetual pyre.

As Canada’s World War II veterans dwindle—now numbering under 30,000, averaging 94 years of age—their visceral testimonies fade. The acrid smell of cordite, the screams of the eviscerated, and the stench of rotting bodies—these horrors will recede and the veterans’ stories will be romanticized by some to advance political agendas. When the last veteran passes the insanity of global war risks being slowly erased, leaving only myths of glory. Those who organize Remembrance Day related events must change how the day is commemorated and reclaim the unvarnished horror of war, not just remembering the dead and maimed, but the evil that dispatched them into a maw of horror fed by lies about “protecting democracy” while peddling fear at home.

Nowhere is the evil that is identified in the final judgment from Nuremberg more brazen than in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza—a 21st Century reincarnation of what the Nazis did. Since October 7, 2023, over 75,000 Palestinians have been killed according to official numbers—with one Harvard published study by Israeli academic Yaakov Garb putting the death toll at more than 377,000, and another by two Australian professors asserting that more than 680,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel.

More than 80% of Gaza’s structures have been levelled under Israeli bombardment, children have been bombed in “safe zones”, hospitals and health facilities have been decimated, aid convoys attacked, and food weaponized to orchestrate famine. This is the evil that the Nuremberg judgment spoke of that should be prevented. But here we are in 2025 watching Israel commit crimes no different than what the Nazis inflicted on millions and yet those countries (Canada included) who support the so-called “international rule of law” do nothing to stop it, even though they have the power to do so.

The UN’s September 2025 Commission of Inquiry declared Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, citing four acts under the 1948 Genocide Convention—mass killing, serious harm, life-destroying conditions, birth prevention—inflicted with intent, incited by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, carried out by his military leaders, and supported by almost half of Israeli society according to a Ha’aretz poll. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem echo the UN’s conclusions—deliberate starvation, sabotaging water facilities, starvation as a weapon, reproductive devastation. Israeli data itself reveals that 83% of the dead are civilians, a number unparalleled outside Rwanda or Srebrenica. When leaders dehumanize—”eliminate anything that walks or breathes”—and raze health facilities, cut power to incubators for babies, destroy, the hate and aggression has reached an apex and is an example of the accumulated evil referenced in the Nuremberg judgment.

Yet despite the mountains of evidence—videos, eyewitness testimonies, media reports, social media posts by the Israeli soldiers themselves—Western nations, Nuremberg’s heirs, fuel this inferno. The US pumps $3.8 billion in military aid annually into Israel, plus more than $20 billion since October 2023 in munitions that have pulverized Gaza. The UK, despite suspending 30 export licenses in September 2024, shipped F-35 parts for jets dropping 2,000 pound bombs on schools and tent camps. Canada, feigning a higher morality, exported $18.9 million in weapons components in 2024, adding $37.2 million more by mid-2025, including 421,000 bullets and mortar cartridges via US loopholes. Our political leaders—Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney—have blood soaked hands in a conflict which they hypocritically condemn, while arming the aggressor. This is complicity, plain and simple. They aid Israel’s crimes according to UN experts, while violating the Arms Trade Treaty. Over 60 states, mostly Western, bear this stain, acting as diplomatic shields and economic lifelines, or providing ideological alibis that perpetuate Israel’s genocidal carnage.

On this Remembrance Day, as bagpipes wail and poppies are laid at cenotaphs, let us pierce the pomp and circumstance with a dose of present day reality. Let’s honour the fallen not with platitudes, but by naming war’s evil—the aggression that orphans generations, poisons futures, and mocks the vow made after Nuremberg’s convictions. Those who served after World War II—Canadian sons and daughters—were sent overseas believing the lie that they were fighting for freedom, shielding innocents. Many died needlessly as pawns played by political egos, and while their names grace tombs and monuments their memories are being disgraced by the government and politicians that sent them off to kill brown people.

To truly commemorate November 11th, we must dismantle the ideologies that sow the seeds of war—militarism, imperialism, colonialism, Islamophobia, white supremacy—these are the cancers that are war’s siren call. We must hold politicians accountable for their own complicity, demanding arms embargoes, and an end to support for criminal regimes. We must fight the stealth erosion of our rights via fear mongering bills, the creation of a surveillance state, and hate laws cloaked in the blanket of security and protection. If we fail, letting Gaza’s screams join the echoes of Vimy Ridge, Flanders, and the Dieppe raid, we spit on the fallen. Their blood bought us liberties we squander—speech unbound, bodies sovereign, humanity indivisible. War’s futility is not fate, it’s a choice. We must choose differently by ending the supreme crime and remembering it on the day we commemorate the fallen. If we don’t, the merciless judge of history will convict us all, and we will never see real justice in a world that is becoming more lawless at the hands of national leaders who match the evil of Nazi Germany.

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

How did the US become a nation that Is embracing fascism?

Nine months into Trump’s second presidential term fascism is no longer an imagined threat, it is real and it poses a legitimate threat to American democracy. 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

On November 4, 2025, America delivered a thunderous rebuke to Donald Trump’s second presidency. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani—a 34-year-old Ugandan-born, South Asian, Muslim democratic socialist—shattered a political dynasty by defeating former governor and primary challenger Andrew Cuomo to become the city’s first Muslim mayor. Across the Hudson River, New Jersey voters elected Democratic Congressional Representative Mikie Sherrill governor by a double-digit margin, extending Democratic control of the governor’s mansion for an unprecedented third consecutive term. In Virginia, former Representative Abigail Spanberger became the state’s first female governor, while state Senator Ghazala Hashmi won the lieutenant governor’s race, becoming the first Muslim woman elected to statewide office anywhere in the United States.

These were not routine off-year elections. They were political earthquakes. Turnout in New York City shattered records not seen since 1969, with more than two million ballots cast. The common denominator in every decisive victory was American president Donald Trump—though his name appeared on no ballot. Voters, especially in diverse urban and suburban strongholds, sent an unmistakable message—we reject the cruelty, the racism, and the authoritarian drift that has defined his second term.

Yet the question remains, searing and urgent. How did the United States—a nation that once styled itself as a “beacon of democracy”—become a country that is now embracing fascism, an ideology that more than 400,000 American military personnel died fighting in World War Two? The answer is not a mystery. It is the oldest story that the US has never told with honesty. The most powerful nation in the history of the world was not founded on freedom. It was founded on stolen land, cleared by indigenous genocide, and built by African slaves, who were broken by force. Everything else is decoration.

Let’s start at the beginning. Long before the first enslaved Africans arrived in North America, European settlers embraced the doctrine that the indigenous people of what became the United State were an inferior race. “Our nation was born in genocide,” Martin Luther King Jr. observed in 1963, “when it embraced the doctrine that the Indian . . . was an inferior race.” The Declaration of Independence itself denounces “the merciless Indian Savages,” codifying racial hierarchy in the nation’s founding text. Settlers did not merely conquer Native Americans as they expanded into the interior of the continent, they exterminated them with the help of the US government. By 1900, the pre-Columbian Indigenous population in the contiguous US had plummeted by 96%, from millions to fewer than 250,000. The survivors were herded onto reservations—America’s first concentration camps—with their movements and every aspect of their lives controlled by the government.

Slavery followed the same logic. The US Constitution’s three-fifths clause, its fugitive slave provision, and its extension of the slave trade enshrined white supremacy into the nation’s legal DNA. When the Confederacy lost the Civil War, no one thought that it would win the peace. Reconstruction’s promise of multiracial democracy was drowned in blood with 2,000 Black people lynched in the decade after the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox. Black Codes morphed into Jim Crow laws, and the Supreme Court blessed the concept of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson.

The monuments to the Civil War and Confederate generals told the story. They were not erected in the years immediately after 1865 to mourn the fallen. They rose in the first two decades of the 20th Century and then again, in subsequent decades and between 1954 and 1968, precisely when the white supremacist elites and the racist infrastructure they had built felt threatened. The United Daughters of the Confederacy erected more than 400 statues, each one a warning that Black advancement in the US will be met with terror. When Brown v. Board of Education struck down school segregation in 1954, legislatures in the US south answered with massive resistance and a fresh wave of Confederate memorials. The message was the same—this is white man’s country and Black Americans shouldn’t expect to be part of top tiers of society or expect to achieve the “American dream.”

The truth is that the racist foundation of American society never crumbled after the Civil War. They remained intact and those who benefitted from it adapted. The racists became sheriffs, mayors, governors and senators, and the logic of white supremacy changed shape but never lost its grip. Mass incarceration of Blacks replaced slavery on plantations. The war on drugs replaced the Ku Klux Klan’s targeting of Black people. And economic policies and local ordinances that kept Black Americans from achieving their full potential, replaced Jim Crow laws. The result has been that by 2025, the United States imprisons more people than any nation in history, who are disproportionately Black and racialized.

Enter Donald Trump into the political arena in 2015. He did not invent American fascism or racism, but he did use the foundations that had been laid by others to advance his agenda. And he was unapologetic about saying the unspeakable out loud. When he began his presidential campaign he called Mexican immigrants “rapists”. In 2017 he equated neo-Nazis with counter-protesters, saying there were “good people” on both sides during the white supremacist Charlottesville protests. In 2024 he vowed “retribution” against political enemies if he became president, even suggesting he would use the military. His former chief of staff, John Kelly—a former Marine four-star general—called out Trump’s policies as fascist during the 2024 presidential campaign, saying that he would rule like a fascist if re-elected. Thirteen other former Trump officials signed an open letter backing Kelley’s criticism of Trump.

Nine months into Trump’s second presidential term fascism is no longer an imagined threat, it is real and it poses a legitimate threat to American democracy. In his first 100 days, Trump invoked emergency powers to impose tariffs on every nation on earth, citing “fentanyl” and “trade deficits” as pretexts. Average taxes on imports soared to 18 percent—higher than any time since the Great Depression. Car prices jumped $4,700 overnight; grocery staples followed. Economists warned of a “fiscal folly” that would shrink GDP by 1.3 percent and cost the average American household $1,200 annually. Yet the administration celebrates the billions flowing into federal coffers, money that will likely be used to fund suppression of constitutional rights and civil liberties.

Speaking of suppression, it’s already spreading across the US in the form of crackdowns on illegal immigrants and anti-genocide protesters. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have become Trump’s Gestapo, disappearing hundreds of undocumented immigrants and legal protesters, sending some to a jungle jail in El Salvador, while threatening to deport others for their Palestinian activism to nations like Rwanda. Trump has also threatened to strip birthright citizenship by fiat and has declared transgender identities “invalid.” Additionally, billions in federal funding has been withheld from universities that refuse to purge diversity, equity and inclusion programs from their curriculum, and banned-word lists have circulated in government agencies, with threats of firing if they are included in government websites and documents. The Justice Department has also deployed election monitors to Democratic Party strongholds, citing unproven election fraud.

This is textbook fascism. A cult of the leader, a mythology of national humiliation, a promise of rebirth through violence and purity. Trump’s rhetoric—threats to annex Canada, seize Greenland, retake the Panama Canal, suspend the Constitution—echoes Benito Mussolini’s imperial fantasies. Trump’s allies speak openly of a third presidential term in violation of the 22nd amendment, martial law, and the suspension of elections. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump’s favour that presidents enjoy broad criminal immunity for actions taken in office, has emboldened him further.

Yet Tuesday’s elections prove the rot is not total. In city halls and statehouses, the victories show that a multiracial, multi-faith coalition of people from all socio-economic backgrounds can push back against fascist elements in the US. Mamdani quoted American socialist Eugene Debs in his victory speech. Spanberger pledged to shield Virginia from federal overreach. Sherrill vowed to “solve problems, not manage them.” While Hashmi promised leadership that “lifts people up.”

These victories are not the end, they are the beginning of new movement, because fascism advances when good people normalize the unthinkable. Germany did not fall to the Nazis in a single night. It fell in a thousand small surrenders over a period of years, and the US stands at the same precipice now. To prevent what happened to German from taking hold in the US, Americans must follow Germany’s post-World War Two example. It must enshrine in public memory the racist and genocidal history of the US, and implement laws that make it unrepeatable. It must criminalize racist and fascist symbols like the Confederate flag, which must be banned from public spaces. The true history of American history must be taught in every classroom. In addition, the debt owed to Indigenous nations and descendants of the enslaved must be paid, because reparations are key to healing the national soul.

The voters in the 2025 off-year election have shown the path. They looked into the abyss and said, “Not here. Not now. Not ever.” The question is whether a majority of Americans are willing to follow, or whether they will let the euphoria of a decisive victory fade and then go back to business as usual. American must realize that they are running out of time as the fascist menace grows, but Tuesday proved that change is possible.

The future of the US is in the hands of those who are willing to do as Mamdani and his followers did, and push back against the establishment. They have already told them their time is over, and it’s time for a new generation of progressives and social democrats to lead the way. If America is to be saved from those who have brought the country to the precipice those who rallied to support progressive and left wing candidates like Mamdani need to organize and launch a national movement led by people like the new mayor of New York City and others who share his vision of what could be achieved if they commit to political change.

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.