Letter to Vice-President Harris (October 2024)

<via online form>

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October 27, 2024

Dear Vice-President Harris,

I hope that in a couple of weeks, you will be President-Elect Harris.

The disturbing alternative is what I liken to America moving towards something that would resemble the State of Alabama—a 19th century world of white, monied interests and their hangers-on. I never thought I'd see the day when George Wallace—who I had long thought was an Alabama aberration—would be reincarnated.

That said, whether you win the presidential election or not, I hope that afterwards you will do everything in your power to stop this mad endorsement of Israel's indiscriminate war on Arab civilians in Gaza as well as in the West Bank and now Lebanon.

Many say they will boycott your ticket on account of what they consider to be complicity with the Netanyahu regime, and I understand. I agree that the U.S. has wrongly given unending military and diplomatic support for Israel's war on Gaza. Though many different rationalizations have been offered, none justify arming a government, ally or not, that so casually kills civilians as if they're subhuman life forms. Not only does this violate international law but it obliterates the reasons why the international rules of war were so badly in need of being rewritten after World War II. U.S. policy is undermining the fragile collection of post-WWII humanitarian law it helped establish with its precedent-setting actions (and inactions) regarding Israel’s conduct of its war—ostensibly against Hamas.

While U.S. policy in the Middle East is very important to me, it is more important that America not go down the road of fascism. I'm reminded of an absurdist short story, 'The Argentine Ant,' in which Italo Calvino allegorizes how fascism "creeps into everyday life, slowly and insidiously."

Could America do (again) what Israel is doing now?

Regards,

Peter McMillan