2 weeks Ago By Mark O'Connell
In the few moments of Wednesday morning between waking and checking my phone, I hoped to maintain a normal amount of despair for the future. But it was not to be. Even the maintenance of an unconscionable status quo – war of extermination in the Middle East, aggressive westward expansion of Putin’s Russia, unfolding catastrophe of rising global temperatures – was, in the end, too much to be hoped for.
The future, it seems, is likely to bring an intensification of these horrors rather than any hope of their subsiding. One thing I can’t bring to myself to believe, however, is that four years of a Biden administration constituted any kind of blessed interregnum between two Trump terms – not, certainly, from a global perspective. Because in the future when I think of the current waning US presidency the face I suspect I will see is not that of Joe Biden himself – that mask of avuncular charm fading as his presidency wore on into one of decrepitude and near-existential vacancy – but that of Matthew Miller.
Perhaps you don’t know the name but you will surely know the face – with its keen features, its watchful eyes, its expression at once wary and conceited. You have seen him no doubt in his role as US State Department spokesperson, parrying question after question about Israel ’s deepening depravity in Gaza and Lebanon , dismissing with smug resolve reporters who demand to know how many Palestinians and Lebanese must be slaughtered, how much savagery must be countenanced, before his boss will draw a line and say no further. To be fair to Miller, at least momentarily, it would be hard for anyone to seem anything other than despicable in the role he has occupied since last year.
As State Department spokesperson it is his job to communicate to the media the administration’s position in relation to Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, which has for well over a year now been one of blanket support. It is his job to stand there, day after day, press briefing after press briefing, and with an unruffled and implacable demeanour defend the latest violations of international law, the latest crimes against humanity committed with his boss’s ardent financial and political assistance. Think of the most likeable person you can imagine and try to conceive of them as anything but hateful in the performance of such a role.
But Miller has a special flair for the objectionable; he attains a loathsomeness well beyond even that vested in him by his office. Take, for instance, a briefing earlier this week when an Associated Press reporter named Matt Lee asked Miller about Israel’s continued blocking of international aid to Palestinians as a deadline set by the US government to improve the situation approached. (It’s hard to say what missing such a deadline might mean other than Biden shaking his head a little more sadly than previously about all the Palestinian deaths he has paid for.
) Miller admitted that the stipulations for allowing access to aid were not being met but, in response to Lee’s suggestion that this amounted to “a fail”, insisted that “it’s not the end of the semester”. This grim witticism he delivered with a hearty laugh of self-appreciation. “We don’t give out grades in the middle,” he said, warming to his own pedagogical theme, hoisting his eyebrows with humorous delight.
Lee’s response was no less cutting for its restraint. “Well I suspect,” he said, “that the levity is a little bit inappropriate.” It was a profoundly strange moment and a clarifying one.
At the risk of belabouring what should already be abundantly clear, the context in which Miller’s laughter arose was Israel’s continued blocking of aid to the Palestinians in Gaza, a population upon whom it is currently waging what looks increasingly like a genocide. The context in which his laughter arose was the implementation of what Israeli human rights groups have called a plan of “forced starvation” in northern Gaza. The context in which his laughter arose was his apparent disregard for the humanity of the people forced to live, and to die, amid the savagery of Israel’s assault.
How else to account for this laughter? And how else to account for another equally revealing recent utterance of Miller’s: a post on X , the day beforehand, in which he wrote: “Today the United States reaffirms its commitment to ending impunity for crimes against journalists. We call on all governments to protect journalists from violence and hold perpetrators of crimes accountable.” What this statement suggested was that the disproportionately huge number of Palestinian journalists – somewhere around 130 – killed in this war simply don’t count.
How could they? Because if the United States was committed to ending impunity for their killing they would simply end it. According to a report last summer by the Guardian, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has deliberately, and in complete disregard for international law, targeted journalists who work at Hamas-affiliated media institutions in Gaza. Now that his boss’s term is coming to an end, and his boss’s would-be successor has failed to succeed him, Miller will presumably fade from public view.
There is no great relief in knowing this. Because no doubt he will be replaced in a second Trump administration by someone who will make similar defences of the indefensible in a more obnoxious and Trumpian manner. Because there will always be a Matthew Miller: as long as there are empires, as long as there are people in distant places to be killed, and as long as there is a defence to be made of their slaughter.
And that’s the thing about Miller, the thing that makes his presence so objectionable, so abject and unsettling. Whatever form the mask of Caesar takes – whether it’s Biden’s thin and cracking veneer of liberal affability or the authoritarian scowl of Trump – the empire’s true face is Matthew Miller’s: blank, implacable, and chuckling urbanely at the distant reality of suffering and death..
