This Week with David Rovics

How Liberalism and Fascism Are Flip Sides of the Same Coin

From top to bottom, Americans can virtue-signal like nobody's business.  But material conditions of most of society in the US indicate a total failure of governance.

"The Generals' Plan"

Bombing daily for well over a year
A death sentence for everyone here
The Lancet said it's 200K killed
Body parts strewn, mass graves filled
Shooting at families, then when medics arrive
Shoot again, leave no child alive

They announced their intentions, to clear the north
And they rolled in the tanks, firing forth

How many months now with nothing to eat
A twenty-mile strip of rubble-strewn streets
With no power, no water, schools destroyed
An occupying army completely devoid
Of one little trace of morality
After totally demolishing Gaza City
Beit Hanoun, Zeitoun, Jabaliya
Khan Yunis, Deir al Bala and Beit Lahia

Destroying everything everywhere
Producing their own footage as if to dare
Anyone else to do anything
To stop the destruction of everything
To stop them from killing everyone
Every daughter and every son
A zone of carnage, ruins and drones
That won’t even leave a living child alone

To starve them out is just what they say
As the air strikes are called in day after day
As the disembodied heads and hands
Scattered across this forsaken land
Get bulldozed into the ground to hide
The holocaust where everyone died
Killed by Biden, by Netanyahu
To colonize for the chosen few

The western media equivocates
Along with the leaders of the western states
Are they really aiming to kill them all?
Maybe we should do something to try to forestall
The end of this ancient civilization

But they just stand alongside the genocide nation
Who knew Jabaliya would end like this
The ghost of another apocalypse

They’re calling it the Generals’ Plan
Laying waste to whatever they can
Mechanized warfare run by AI
Where anyone living is subject to die

Higher-tech killing than ever before
Across the Atlantic, plans being made for
Condos on the Mediterranean sea
Where the people of Gaza used to be

How the Left Shrank

The decline of the left in the US that I've been witnessing now for decades has been a process of exclusion that bears trying to describe.

"Jill Stein"

I'm not much for playing Charades, so I never actually got around to voting in an election until Ralph Nader ran for president in 2000. I also sang at various events with him, and at the Green Party national convention around that time, and at the last Green Party national convention online, and many other Green Party events in between.

I've also voted for lots of Greens over the years since I started voting more consistently, here in Oregon, where you're automatically registered to vote when you get a state ID or driver's license, the ballots arrive in the mail, making it all extremely easy, even for an anarchist to bother with.

I wrote this song, "Jill Stein," in 2016. I never got around to making a good recording of the song, but after seeing some particularly offensive posts about Jill on social media, I felt inspired to make a better recording of the song, after changing one word in it. See if you can guess which one!

With concern to the US political system, we can either keep on playing along with the "lesser evil" philosophy and hope to speed towards that proverbial wall more slowly, or we can turn the train around. Given those options, supporting Jill Stein seems like the right decision to me. I understand why other people disagree. It's a hard choice, between the near future and the further-off future. I've always been one for the long game myself, though I can also be very impatient.

They Call It Democracy

I had been thinking that maybe "The Ballad of Donald and Kamala" was all I was going to have to say about this election cycle, but apparently there's more.

One Year On EPISODE 3

Episode 3 of 3 of my audio seminar on the Gaza genocide.  All of the  episodes can be found at davidrovics.com/palestine.

One Year On EPISODE 2

Episode 2 of the Apocalypse in Review. You can listen to episode 1 at davidrovics.com/palestine.

One Year On: the Apocalypse in Review PODCAST SPECIAL

To mark a year of high-tech war being waged against the Palestinian people, there have been many different efforts at putting the past year into context, by many individuals and media outlets. Here's mine -- or the first of the three episodes in the series, anyway. The other two will soon follow.

This first episode is a crash course in the history of Zionism in Palestine, up until October 6th, 2023. The second episode is focused on the fall of 2023, and the third one on 2024.

Writing, recording, and putting together this sort of thing is very time-consuming. If people like it, it's worth it. Either way, it's a relatively new way of presenting things for me, and I'd appreciate your feedback, whether positive, negative, or in between.

Gig Organizing 101

The first time I organized a show for someone, I think five people showed up.

"Arc of Justice" REMIX

The Hawai'i department of the Ministry of Culture has given us a haunting remix of the song I wrote about those Iranian missiles that hit those Israeli military targets the other day.