The Coming of BRICS+ Decentralized Monetary Ecosystem
• 1,400 WORDS •
Get ready for what may well be the geoeconomic bombshell of 2024: the coming of a decentralized monetary ecosystem.
Welcome to The Unit – a concept that has already been discussed by the financial services and investments working group set up by the BRICS+ Business Council and has a serious shot at becoming official BRICS+ policy as early as in 2025.
According to Alexey Subbotin, founder of Arkhangelsk Capital Management and one of the Unit’s conceptualizers, this is a new problem-solving system that addresses the key geoeconomic issue of these troubled times: a global crisis of trust.
He knows all about it first-hand: a seasoned financial professional with experience in investment banking, asset management and corporate matters, Subbotin leads the Unit project under the auspices of IRIAS, an international intergovernmental organization set up in 1976 in accordance with the UN statute.
The Global Majority has had enough of the centrally controlled monetary framework put in place 80 years ago in Bretton Woods and its endemic flaws: chronic deficits fueling irresponsible military spending; speculative bubbles; politically motivated sanctions and secondary sanctions; abuse of settlement and payment infrastructure; protectionism; and the lack of fair arbitration.
In contrast, the Unit proposes a reliable, quick and economically efficient solution for cross-border payments. The – transactional – Unit is a game-changer as a new form of international currency that can be issued in a de-centralized way, and then recognized and regulated at national level.
The Unit offers a unique solution for bottlenecks in global financial infrastructure: it is eligible for traditional banking operations as well as for the newest forms of digital banking.
The Unit can also help to upend unfair pricing in commodity trading, by means of setting up a new – fair and efficient – Eurasian Mercantile Exchange where trading and settlement can be done in a new currency bridging trade flows and capital, thus paving the way to the development of new financial products for foreign direct investment (FDI).
The strength of the Unit, conceptually, is to remove direct dependency on the currency of other nations, and to offer especially to the Global Majority a new form of apolitical money – with huge potential for anchoring fair trade and investments.
It is indeed a new concept in terms of an international currency – anchored in gold (40%) and BRICS+ currencies (60%). It is neither crypto nor stablecoin – as it’s shown here.
The Beauty of Going Fractal
The Global Majority will instantly grasp the primary purpose of the Unit: to harmonize trade and financial flows by keeping them outside of political pressure or “rules” that can be twisted at will. The inevitable consequence translates as financial sovereignty. What matters in the whole process are independent monetary policies focused on economic growth.
That’s the key appeal for the Global Majority: a full ecosystem offering independent, complementary monetary infrastructure. And that surely can be extended to willing Unit partners in the collective West.
Now to the practical level: as Subbotin explains, the Unit ecosystem may be easily scalable because it comes from a fractal architecture supported by simple rules. New Unit nodes can be set up by either sovereign or private agents, following a detailed rule-book in custody of the UN-chartered IRIAS.
This means that connection is available to all open DEX and digital platforms operated by both commercial and Central Banks around the world.
The endgame is that everyone, essentially, may use the Unit for accounting, bookkeeping, pricing, settling, paying, saving and investing.
No wonder the institutional possibilities are quite enticing – as the Unit can be used for accounting and settlement for BRICS+; payment and pricing for the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU); or as a reserve currency for Sub-Saharan Africa.
And now comes the clincher: the Unit has already received backing by the BRICS Business Council and is on the agenda at the crucial ministerial meeting in Russia next month, which will work out the road map for the summit next October in Kazan.
That means the Unit has all it takes to be on the table as a serious subject discussed by BRICS+ and eventually be adopted as early as in 2025.
Will Musk and the NDB Be on Board?
As it stands, the priority for the Unit conceptualizers – whom I followed for over a year during several, detailed meetings in Moscow – is to inform the general public about the new system.
The Unit team is not interested at all in getting straight into political hot waters or to be cornered by ideologically-laden arguments. Direct references to inspiring but sometimes controversial concepts or authors like Zoltan Pozsar may bury the Unit concept into pigeon holes, thus limiting its potential impact.
What may lie ahead could be extraordinarily exciting, as the Unit appeal could extend all the way from Elon Musk to the BRICS’s New Development Bank (NDB), hopefully engaging an array of crucial actors. After a positive evaluation by Finance Minister Anton Siluanov – who remains on the post in the new Russian government – it’s not far-fetched to imagine Putin and Xi discussing it face to face this week in Beijing.
As it stands, the major takeaway is that the Unit should be seen as a feasible, technical solution for the theoretically Unsolvable: a globally-recognized payment/trade system, immune to political pressure. It’s the only game in town – there are no others.
Meanwhile, the Unit conceptualizers are open for constructive criticism and all manners of collaboration. Yet sooner or later the battle ranks will be lined up – and then it will be a matter of seriously upping the game.
“Academically Sound, Technologically Innovative”
Vasily Zhabykin, co-author of the Unit white paper and founder of CFA.Center, Unit’s technological partner at Skolkovo Innovation Hub in Moscow, crucially stresses: the Unit “represents apolitical money and can be the connector between the Global South and the West.”
He’s keen to point out that “the Unit can keep all the wheels turning unlike most of the other concepts that feature ‘dollar killers’, etc. We do not want to harm anybody. Our goal is to improve efficiency of currently broken capital and money flows. The Unit is rather the ‘cure for centralized cancer’’’.
Subbotin and the Unit team “are keen to meet new partners who share our approach and are ready to bring additional value to our project.” If that’s the case, they should “send us 3 bullet points on how can they help and improve the Unit.”
A bold follow-up step should be, for instance, a virtual conference on the Unit, featuring leading Russian economist Sergey Glazyev, Yannis Varoufakis, Jeffrey Sachs and Michael Hudson, among others.
“I have been following the development of Unit for more than a year and can confirm that Unit offers a very timely, feasible solution. It is academically sound, technologically innovative and at the same time complementary to the existing banking infrastructure.
Launching it under the auspices of an UN institution gives Unit legitimacy, which the current Bretton Woods framework is clearly lacking. Recent actions by the US administration and loud silence from IMF clearly indicate the need for change.
A decentralized approach to emission of potential global trade currency, whose intrinsic value is anchored in physical gold and BRICS+ currencies, makes Unit the most promising of several approaches being considered. It balances political priorities of all participants, while helping each sovereign economy develop along its optimal path.
The New Development Bank (NDB) and BRICS+ shall embrace the concept of Unit and help it to become the pinnacle of the new emerging global financial infrastructure, free from malign political interferences while focused instead on fair trade and sustainable economic growth.”
A clear, practical example of possible Unit problem-solving concerns Russia-Iran trade relations. These are two top BRICS members. Russian trade with Iran is unprofitable due to sanctions – and both cannot make payments in US dollars or euros.
Russian companies suffer significant losses after switching to payments in national currencies. With each transfer, Russian businesses on average lose as much as 25% due to the discrepancy between the market rate in Iran and the state rate.
And here’s the key takeaway: BRICS+ as well as the Global Majority can only be strengthened by developing closer geoeconomics ties. The removal of Western speculative capital shall free up local commodity trading, and enable the pooling of investable capital for sustainable development. To unlock such a vast potential, the Unit may well be the key.
If resonant flutes would spring up from olive trees, certainly you would not doubt that olive trees are aware of the Art of the Flute
Zeno of Citium
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane
Marcus Aurelius
You are sailing in the Gulf of Morbihan (“Little Sea”, in Breton language) in Bretagne, France, NATOstan, occasionally negotiating the second most powerful marine currents in Europe. Water circulates in a giant labyrinth of creeks, rocks and islands. Fishermen and oyster catchers are in heaven.
And then there are the powerful winds. And you start thinking about Plato. You may even picture him, by the sea, watching the wind puffing the sails of a boat. And he thought about pneuma: “vital breath”.
Plato had already had the intuition that the soul is eternal – and in transmigration, incorporates several bodies. Hence the soul may be defined as the idea of vital breath (pneumatos) diffused in every direction. The soul, for Plato, is composed of three parts: rational (logistikon), with its HQ in our head; passional, with its HQ in our heart; and appetitive, in our navel and liver.
And yet this vital breath is not conducted by bodies. And that bring us to the Stoics.
And the whole thing gets much trickier.
Seneca, in his Epistles, writes that the Stoic Cleanthes and his disciple Chrysippus could not agree on walking. Cleanthes said that the Art of Walking was pneuma (spiritum) extending itself from principale (hegemonikon) all the way to our feet. Chrysippus said it was the principale by itself.
In a commentary on a fragment by Cleanthes, British classicist A.C. Pearson – author of The Fragments of Zeno and Cleanthes, published in 1891 – says that Cleanthes was the first man ever to explain the notion of pyr by Heraclitus as pneuma.
Pearson tells us that “the introduction of the pneuma [by Cleanthes] is the truest description of the divine permeating essence, which Zeno had characterized as ether”.
And he also tells us that the Latin term spiritum – used by Tertullian of Carthage – is the translation for the Greek term pneuma.
Tertullian of Carthage – who was at his peak around the year 200 – is a pretty big deal. He is considered the first Western Christian author to write in Latin.
The term “spirit” then, when introduced in medieval Christian theology still in its infancy, essentially carries the lingering notion of Stoic paganism – and not anymore the image of the breath of God coming from ancient Mesopotamian religion.
So, in a sense, the whole of Western civilization is actually indebted to Stoic wisdom.
When a Stoic meets a Hindu
All of the above brings us to an astonishing comparative study of Greek and Hindu philosophy by Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought.
We are immersed in a vast panorama of several centuries – in which the correlations between Greek and Hindu sages and philosophers are displayed in a natural setting – with Mesopotamia as the original source.
McEvilley writes that “not only the structures of the Stoic and Purana universes and its religious and ethic attitudes” are “very similar”, but the strength that is found in the basis of both spheres, “physical and ethical (pneuma for the Stoics, prana for the Hindus)” is described in a surprisingly close parallelism.
So McEvilley, a specialist in History of Art, Classical Philology and Sanskrit, in fact wrote a 700-page study on the nearly homogenous constitution of wisdom in India, Mesopotamia and Greece, without excluding Egypt and Phoenicia.
He concluded that the ancient civilization of Acadia – the first multi-ethnic empire in History, in Mesopotamia – would have kick-started “the whole meta-narrative of a universe mathematically and astronomically ordained”, which resulted in the logic and scientific revolution promoted by the Greeks.
So we owe a debt to the Stoics as much as we owe it to lost Acadia. And what about extrapolating it all the way to China? Think of Stoic Epictetus, so close to the Tao in his laconic wisdom.
For Zeno of Citium, Ethics depends on a natural exercise of the hegemonikon over desires or emotions: an exercise that is neither trivial nor without effort.
Where the Platonic-Aristotelian finds categories, reason, passions, as irreconcilable differences that must be simultaneously equalized, for the empirical Stoic reason/emotion depends on how the hegemonikon is capable of conducing passions – like conducing one’s legs. And that requires non-stop practice.
“Destiny conduces those of good will”
The great dilemma across the modern West that opposes free will – so eulogized by the bourgeois revolution – to the Law of an Omniscient God, omni-powerful, Mesopotamian, would seem quite pathetic to the Stoics.
They would say there’s no problem in solving the exercizes of human will within a framework of possibilities created by an original Higher God; and the same applies for the lesser gods, local, regional. The result is the enchainment of Destiny. And on this enchainment, the Higher God exercizes His will.
Seneca, in his Epistles, presented us with how Cleanthes approached this tension between human will and divine will with a remarkable sense of humor:
Destiny (or Zeus) conduces those of good will; Those of bad will, He drags.
(Epistles 107.11)
So we started with the sound of the wind in the Gulf of Morbihan evoking Plato’s pneuma; but the synchronicity had actually started days before in Rio, when prior to one of my recent conferences in Brazil I was presented with a precious essay by Ciro Moroni who essentially revived Pearson’s nearly forgotten 1891 gem.
I read Moroni’s essay on a flight to Salvador, the Brazilian Africa, and in a white fort facing the deep blue South Atlantic sea, silently praised his role as part of the “educated people’ that Western civilization cultivated until the mid-20th century”. This column owes as much to an educated man in Rio as to classicist Pearson and the Stoic posse.
Until recently, across the collective West, Stoics were packaged in a bundle, alongside Epicureans and Skeptics, as if they were mere variations of a quite eclectic period, Hellenism.
These three philosophical strands would look like the equivalent of a cultural response to Platonists and Aristotelians, who would be credited as the foundational currents of Hellenism in Greek philosophical literature in the 6th, 5th and 4th century B.C.
In an essay on the Stoics included in my previous book, Raging Twenties, I noted how the great ascetic Antisthenes was a companion of Socrates – and a precursor of the Stoics.
The first Stoics took their name from the porch – stoa – in the Athenian market where Zeno of Citium used to hang out.
Stoic specificity is a must. The collection of Stoic theses established by its founders was replicated for at least 5 centuries, non-stop, by authors from Athens and Alexandria to Rhodes and Rome – all the way to the Prince of the Romans, Marcus Aurelius, who wrote, in Greek, a devoted dissertation on the Stoic conduct.
Stoic tradition got some bashing by Plutarch because they did not actively participate on public matters and on war.
But then Marcus Aurelius broke the mold – in an epic way. He was one of the five “enlightened” and quite successful emperors of the Antonine dynasty. Marcus Aurelius was an active Prince; a roving leader of this troops in several ops in the Danube; and while camping, he found time to write the legendary Meditations.
Then we have Panecius from Rhodes – who was at the top around 145 B.C. Panecius was quite influential in Rome, and is considered a peripatetic Stoic-Platonic synthesizer, anticipating the way more famous Antiochus, who brought the stoa into the Academy, trying to show that Stoic beliefs featured heavily in Plato.
By the way, the translation of stoa to porticus in Latin gave us “porch” in English and “portico” in Portuguese and Spanish.
The antidote to the current insanity
Today we know there was a massively important movement of scientific, geographic and historical expansion of a new Greco-Roman synthesis from 200 B.C. to the year 200. This period may be easily compared to the Renaissance (roughly 1450-1600).
Stoic themes are absolutely determinant in the Greco-Roman renaissance – even if they were traditionally obscured by Platonic theology or Aristotelian science. They were also neutralized in logic and epistemology by skeptical rhetoric and philosophical pessimism, and underestimated in ethics by Christian religious propaganda.
Well, never underestimate the power of Heraclitus. Zeno and Cleanthes directly used Heraclitus to formulate their theses. Later on, Plotinus would come up with a legendary quote: “Ethereal Fire lies down, transforming itself”.
Jean-Joel Duhot, writing on Epictetus and Stoic wisdom, noted that Stoicism is not materialism: that would only make sense under the Platonic perspective of the rejection of matter.
Anthony Long, an expert in Hellenistic Philosophy, got closer: Stoics are not materialists. They would be better described as vitalists.
The Way, the Stoics tell us, is to own only the essentials, and to travel light. Lao Tzu would approve it. Wealth, status and power are ultimately irrelevant. Once again, Lao Tzu would approve it.
So let’s finish, inevitably, where we began: by the sea, the wind – pneuma – on our sails. And let’s remember the Syrians – in many aspects quintessential Pilgrims of the Sea. Via Syrian colonies, papyrus, spices, ivory and luxury wines spread out all the way to, for instance, Bretagne.
In Naples, Palermo, Carthage, Rome, even the Sea of Azov, Syrians and Greeks have been prime historical pilgrims on an ever-renewed Maritime Silk Road.
Sail away. Be Stoic. The complete antidote to the current insanity.
Если бы вы действительно любили себя, вы бы вели дневник. Смелое заявление, я знаю, но я серьезно. Высший акт любви к себе – это самовыражение. Это уверенность в том, что ваши мысли, как глупые, так и серьезные, достойны внимания, без исключений. Полагаю, я не одинока в том, что провела детство и по крайней мере половину подросткового возраста в спорадических попытках вести регулярный дневник и неизменно терпела неудачи.
Даже будучи маленькой девочкой, когда стыд и сдерживание должны были влиять на 0 % моих решений, ведение дневника с ежедневными мыслями и чувствами казалось мне несерьезным и постыдным, и мне никогда не удавалось написать больше одной-двух записей, прежде чем я сдавалась.
Я прекрасно справлялась с тем, чтобы танцевать как дурачок в проходах церкви или уверенно выкрикивать неправильные ответы на уроках, но что-то в ведении дневника смущало меня так, как ничто другое, что не имеет никакого смысла, верно? Разве мы обычно не думаем о смущении как о чувстве, которое мы испытываем только в толпе, о чувстве, которое возникает как прямой результат того, что нас осуждают?
Почему же тогда мысль о ведении дневника, который предназначался только для меня, смущала меня до такой степени, что я отказывался от него большую часть своей жизни?
Почему та же мысль до сих пор удерживает многих взрослых от ведения дневника?
Думаю, потому, что мы судим себя строже, чем кто-либо другой. В нашем, по крайней мере в идеале, обществе, основанном на заслугах, нас учат, что хорошими идеями стоит делиться, а плохие – держать при себе, что хорошие песни должны попасть в альбом, а плохие – остаться на полу в раздевалке. Я не утверждаю, что плохие песни должны попасть на альбом, я просто говорю, что вы никогда не напишете хорошую песню, пока не напишете пару плохих.
В своем дневнике. Не стесняясь этого. Мы все заслуживаем места, где мы можем свободно творить, не боясь осуждения со стороны кого бы то ни было, включая нас самих. Дневник – это место, где вы можете хранить все свои плохие песни, все свои ужасные любовные стихи и все обыденные подробности вашего дня. Это место, где вы проявляете сострадание к себе, не предъявляя к себе никаких других стандартов, кроме производственных, место, где вы делаете, документируете, сохраняете и вымаливаете каждое написанное вами слово, самоутверждаясь в своем праве быть услышанным.
Ваш дневник может быть блокнотом, блогом, скетчбуком или кучей голосовых заметок в телефоне – неважно. Но какую бы форму он ни принимал, ведение дневника – это способ узнать самую правдивую, самую уязвимую часть себя. Это страшно, интимно и странно, но оно того стоит. Так многому можно научиться, если взять аморфную кашицу мыслей, идей, чувств и воспоминаний в своем сознании и материализовать их любым доступным способом.
И так много можно получить. Не верьте мне. Попробуйте. Я осмелюсь. Я осмелюсь предложить вам завести дневник, в котором вы будете писать каждый день. Я осмеливаюсь любить себя по одному предложению за раз. Я осмелюсь показать вам, что ваш голос достоин быть услышанным, даже если единственный человек, который его слышит, – это вы сами. Я осмеливаюсь сидеть в одиночестве в толпе и аплодировать каждой своей плохой песне, с блаженным безразличием относясь к ее судьбе быть оставленной на полу в раздевалке
James Jones is not an author often characterized as a leader in radical thought. An American author working from the early ’50s to the mid-’70s, Jones is best known for novels like From Here to Eternity (1951), Some Came Running (1957), and The Thin Red Line (1962), all of which saw major motion picture adaptations and deal with soldiers facing life during or after wartime. For this reason, he is popularly understood to be a “war novelist:” a writer whose oeuvre deals primarily with the battlefield and the lives of veterans. Jones himself spent time in the US Army during World War II, where he witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor firsthand and served in the brutal Guadalcanal campaign, experiences that indeed influenced much of his writing. But James Jones: The Limits of Eternity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), the latest from Southern Illinois University professor Tony J. Williams, challenges to its core the strict categorization of Jones as a writer of war fiction. In fact, Williams implies that this phrase does a disservice to the mission of Jones’ work, which sought to address a corruption eating away at the American psyche. War is just one of many symptoms of this corruption in Jones’ work, which taken as a whole is more so a comprehensive meditation on American life than a reactionary reflection on war specifically. As Williams writes, “The value of his fiction lies in the fact that no real difference exists between civilian and American life. They are both parts of the same oppressive American structure.”
Limits of Eternity provides as well-rounded and thorough an examination of Jones’ corpus as the author’s work did for his contemporary national condition. Williams works through each of Jones’ publications and provides a strong case for viewing the author outside of specific genre codification, and moreover seeks to hold the author’s work up to that of his contemporaries to place him in something like the American literary canon (though Williams is reasonably resistant to this phrase). Jones attacks conformity with blunt force, and his puncturing of mid-century sexual mores situates him in the conversation around a national heritage of sexually marginalized voices. The conflicts in his novels very often pit an individual against oppressively mundane societal structures and provide testimony to the destructive power enabled by desperately clinging to a specifically mandated way of living. Jones’ personal writings and comments in interviews point to an author who spotlights these flaws not out of some sense of empty bitterness, but as the kind of constructive criticism born from love of country that one would expect from a person who served in the military during wartime. For this reason, Williams describes Jones as a “literary winter soldier,” a veteran who recognizes his complicity in a degraded American dream and who hopes to help see the public to a better way forward in service of its country’s ideals.
Tony J. Williams has, at times, found himself to be an individual pitted against hegemonic institutional conformity, but he remains prolific. While his work is primarily in film scholarship (his book Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film remains a staple in horror film genre study, and saw a reissue in 2014), he has also engaged with the American literary tradition at length. Limits of Eternity is the culmination of an affinity for James Jones that spans decades. Recently, I spoke with Williams about Jones, film, the election, and his career as an academic.
Starting on pretty general terms here, I was wondering what drew you to James Jones initially?
I had been teaching classes on the Vietnam War and American war film, was involved with the Viet Nam Generation group associated with the Popular Culture Association in the late 1980s, and one of its founding members Kalí Tal who wrote that excellent book, Worlds of Hurt, dealing with trauma in the cases of Vietnam War veterans, rape, and incest survivors, mentioned the case of James Jones, who she said suffered from PTSD. While I was in Arizona, visiting my wife’s grandmother, I picked up a paperback copy of From Here to Eternity and began reading it. I only knew the film version, and was really surprised at how interesting this book was in terms of its very perceptive view of American society in wartime and beyond. Jones was a very interesting critic in terms of looking at movies and how they misrepresented human aspirations and ideals in the American 20th century. So I went on from that to read the rest of his novels and came to the conclusion that he was badly categorized as a war novelist. He was really dealing with the American individual dilemma going back to Poe and Hawthorne and expanding those ideas into the 20th century.
Another aspect I was wondering about is whether or not place, his sense of place or his place in an American geographic sense, drew your interest at all given that you towards the beginning of the book express this pretty intimate knowledge of his home state of Illinois. And knowing the institution where you were I was wondering if that had drawn you in at all as well.
The location of Southern Illinois University and Robinson was sheer accident. But to answer your question, Jones always looked on himself as a Midwestern writer. He identified with small-town Illinois, but at the same time was very critical of its institutions and how it basically wrought havoc on the American personality. And the reason that I had to begin the book with “The Ice Cream Headache” was to show these very things about how basically the sense of space and place, the rural economy, sexual repression, and false values wreaked havoc on the human personality well before many of these males ended up in the Army. The job had been mostly done before they arrived in the Army in terms of conformity and following the status quo both socially and psychologically, which really ruined them and made them all, men and women, victims of the dominant ideological status quo of America in the mid- 20th century.
Tangentially related here, and this is more sort of a production aspect question: what kind of institutional support did you have?
(laughs) I’m laughing because I had none whatsoever from my university. When I began the entire project my department was merging into another college, and that department was very anti-intellectual. I transferred to English in 1994, then other book projects came around and in 2006 we had the awful ethics test foisted on us by the Illinois governor who eventually went to jail for unethical conduct. I was threatened with deportation unless I signed a document that most of the faculty willingly signed saying that I’d committed a criminal act by answering an ethics test in under 10 minutes. Nobody knew that the second time this test was going to be instituted there was a time deadline and I knew very well as I was on a Green Card at the time in post 9/11 America, if I’d signed such a document I would never be able to get American citizenship. Also, I was very angry at the fact that it was very much a McCarthyite ploy and because the whole test involved snitching and ”naming names” I certainly wasn’t going to do that at all. So I fought a battle with my university and at the 11th hour they backed off. It was only about 5 years ago that I was able to return to the project and complete it to my satisfaction. So in terms of institutional support I had absolutely none whatsoever.
Good Lord, that was a hornet’s nest of a question!
It certainly was, and you got a hornet’s nest of an answer.
So speaking of naming names, and we can strike this from the record but our readers will probably draw the conclusion, we’re talking Blagojevich here, right?
Yes, please don’t strike it from the record because it is an official record!
I did not know about the, as you said, McCarthyite paranoia at the root of that administration. I knew he was a crook, I didn’t know he was a tyrant.
What he wanted the second time he instituted the ethics test was more guilty people to be eventually accused than he was finally in the state of Illinois. It was also a way to bring academics to heel, very much a tactic used in the McCarthy era.
Is there something particularly cinematic about Jones’s work that maybe eases the transition for you between literature and film scholarship?
I’ve always been interested in both fields because when I studied for my MA in Warwick University in England under Robin Wood (and Andrew Britton was there as a graduate student at the time), we also did classes with the American literature people on the Western. Andrew was very keen on how Hollywood cinema linked to the classical American tradition in the writings of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. Robin once said the classical Hollywood cinema is indebted to the American literary tradition in one way or another. They both complement each other.
That sort of calls to mind for me Beneath the American Renaissance by David Reynolds and this idea of the layers of subversion underneath the layers of veneer in American literature.
There’s one American scholar whose work I’m deeply indebted to, and that’s David Greven at the University of South Carolina, a very good colleague. A lot of his ideas I used in my book, with acknowledgement of course!
Continuing on this topic of translation between literature and film: I’m sort of obsessed with the Stanley Kubrick/Stephen King feud over The Shining. So I’m wondering what your thoughts are regarding authors weighing in on film adaptations of their work. Jones does that a little bit in his letters it seems.
A director has a right to go in whatever artistic direction he wants. Stephen King should’ve taken the advice of Graham Greene, who said that once he sold the book for a film version, that he had no other rights to it. The Shining is a good novel. It belongs to the American literary naturalist tradition, which is indebted to Emile Zola as I’ve written elsewhere. Kubrick has gone into his own type of artistic, cinematic direction. So I see the feud as being absolutely futile and going nowhere. King really should’ve respected what Kubrick was doing, and you do remember that awful miniseries of The Shining on television. It was absolutely dreadful.
You touched on exactly how I feel about it. Especially this idea of once the transaction happens, once you bow to a sort of capitalistic use of art…
Don’t forget Stephen King’s only film as a director. Maximum Overdrive, wasn’t it? By any stretch of the imagination, it was really awful.
Yeah I have fond memories of watching replays of that film on TV on Saturday afternoons but nothing else really beyond that. I mean, it was a really cool movie when you’re six years old right?
Good point.
Your project, aside from ensuring that Jones doesn’t slip into obscurity, is in part a push against strictly codifying him as a war novelist. I’m wondering what you think the limitations of categorizing an author like that are?
It puts him into a very convenient slot, beyond which his diverse mode of thought and artistic creativity cannot really extend. Jones first and foremost critiqued the American society of his own day, the political and sexual conformity, in the same way that Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville did in their era in the 19th century. There is so much rich material in James Jones that goes beyond the battlefield. Jones of course would remain a war novelist, he suffered from PTSD, but his works extend beyond the battlefield into the broader reaches of society: the dehumanization of the ordinary soldier, the oppressive officer classes very similar to CEOs today (and university administrators). There’s a lot of relevance in his writing that I feel has not been understood, even by those in the academic community who’ve focused on him in one narrowly focused degree or another.
On the topic of him resonating, there’s an air to his work of him as this author that’s seeking empathy in age of espionage and intrigue, and I’m wondering how we can extrapolate or learn those lessons today?
Jones was very sympathetic to the outcast elements of society, I would say, in particular gays and lesbians. He had a very deep relationship with his sensitive and troubled young sister Mary Ann. In one of the early letters he says to her, “I don’t care if you’re a lesbian or not. I value you as my sister.” He took Montgomery Clift with him on a visit to the writer’s colony in Marshall, Illinois, which he was mostly funding out of his royalties from From Here to Eternity. He very much sympathized with the dilemma of Montgomery Clift. When somebody asked, “Why didn’t you sleep with him?” Jones said, “Well, he didn’t ask me.” Looking at the so-called restored version of From Here to Eternity and the edited version, there is a sympathy with gays who are basically being used by some of these soldiers. Many of them are treated as creative individuals and victims of an FBI roundup which happened some 8-10 years after From Here to Eternity was written. The novel was written against the background of the Cold War, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and of course the oppression of gays and lesbians in that very dark era of American society.
I hate how pressing all of these topics feel post-November 8th. And I’m wondering if you think there’s any chance of the spirit of Jones surviving after January 21st.
You have to think about resistance. There’s been other dark periods of American history before. The Know-Nothing movement of the 19th century. The Southern support of slavery with Northern complicity. The Cold War era of McCarthyism. J. Edgar Hoover. There’ve been other negative eras in American history, but there’s always been that spirit of resilience and resistance. I make a joke about November the 8th in terms of certain groups having PDTSD: Post Donald Traumatic Stress Disorder. I think it’s unnecessary because now is the time to mobilize against these dark forces, in the same way people had to mobilize against Thatcher in the 1980s (and I was a refugee from Thatcher in 1984). Even today in England you have, let’s say, a possibility with Jeremy Corbyn and people really angry at the way in which the Tory party is refusing benefits to disabled people, even wanting to get mentally ill people back to work on the ideological grounds “Arbeit macht frei,” the sign outside Auschwitz: “Work makes you free.” There’s growing resentment at the moment. So even with Donald and his cabinet appointees so far, the odious Jeff Sessions and others, this is a time to stand up and resist, not break down emotionally. It’s a testing time. I think in James Jones, as a writer, there is support for resistance, because he was writing his first two novels From Here to Eternity and Some Came Running in a period of very bleak ideological and political reaction, much worse than what we’re seeing today.
That makes me feel a little better. And I agree, I’ve never felt more energized to think about resistance.
That’s right, organize. As Lenin and Trotsky would say, “Now is the time.” Remember, the Bolshevik revolution was totally unforeseen at the time it actually happened. This is no time for pessimism or capitulation.
On the point of rescuing James Jones from obscurity, I’m wondering why Jones doesn’t have the cult of personality surrounding contemporaries like Capote and Kerouac, even though I see some parallels between their work and his work. So as you were working on this book, did you get a sense for how Jones was perceived in the public eye or what his popular image-creation was like?
If you look at the first dust jacket cover of From Here to Eternity, Jones appears like a young tough guy wearing a striped t-shirt. And this was the image he used to sell his work. So Jones would be regarded in his heyday as a vulgar novelist, using the “f-word” in literature for the first time (Norman Mailer was really mad at him for that), and exuding a macho type persona which supposedly infected his writings. But when you go into the writings, you see he is as far from the macho ideal as possible. Jones’ works were works of sensitivity more than anything else. He was also a very modest person. He didn’t want to project himself in the way that other writers did. He was never into a cult of personality. He was somebody who let his writings speak for themselves. This was the way in which he operated, and because he wasn’t, let’s say, a celebrity. That’s why his works have suffered, and of course it was due to the fact that people did not read them with the seriousness they deserved.
In your chapter on Whistle, you express a hope that more critics will engage with 20th Century authors. I’m wondering if you think we’re on the verge of seeing more postwar texts entering the American literary canon?
I hope that is the case, but there’s been other writers who are marginalized like Jones. Irwin Shaw’s been virtually forgotten since he died. But I think there’s a need for understanding the context in which they were writing and how the issue within those contexts speaks to us even today. There’s a need for a greater recognition, and this recognition will only come when the post-modernist critical school is overthrown and the master narratives dealing with history, politics, and individual survival are again restored to the place they once had within the literary tradition.
So canonization, does that come with the restoration?
Well, my attitude is, ‘screw the canon.’ It’s a completely useless, obnoxious distraction. You’ve got to see each work on its particular merits and demerits. Evaluate it for what it says, both to its era and to us today. If a work speaks beyond its era, it’s not archaic, it’s not redundant, it’s still relevant. But it’s amazing how many institutional voices are afraid of recognizing the relevance in these very, very different authors. There’s the idea of “don’t rock the boat.” Take the monster going into the White House now, very much like the Omen thesis coming alive, and the fear of independence which has always perversely occupied the American spirit. The conformity which came in with the “man in the gray flannel suit” movement and the Greatest Generation in the postwar era, as well as the suppression of alternative politics within the IWW in the 1930s and Trotskyism in America in the postwar era, the hideous nature of Stalinist Communism, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Moscow Trials, played havoc in terms of any real great forms of literary, and to an extent cinematic, expression.
As you note, both in the book and earlier in our conversation, Jones prefigures in some way modern considerations of PTSD.
Oh yes he does, because he suffered from it himself. In his first unpublished novel They Shall Inherit the Laughter, if you read it in the form he wrote it not the edited rewritten version by the James Jones Literary Society, you’ll see it’s a common thread running throughout the entire early raw novel that he produced. Of course he recognized that. In WWII and Whistle were concepts of the evolution of the soldier into a dehumanized fighting machine and then devolution back to some form of normality. The victims in Whistle in one way or another are affected by PTSD from their wartime experiences, as well as the dehumanizing conditioning of the military machine. You see it definitely present.
And veterans’ health affairs and mental health in veterans, these things are in some way part of a national conversation fairly recently, maybe post-Vietnam when talking about the correlation between veterans of Vietnam and heroin addiction. So I think this issue of PTSD has in some way come into the limelight, but I also think it’s been perverted.
Yes I very much agree with you, because if you go way back into American history there’s a book called Embattled Courage dealing with oral, transcribed narratives of Civil War veterans. There’s WWI “shell-shock,” as it was defined then. If an officer had it, like Wilfred Owen, it was fine; if it was an ordinary soldier they were marched straight to the firing squad. And of course John Huston’s Let There Be Light (1946) and the tendency to resort to alcohol with veterans in Some Came Running. Christa Fuller, the widow of Samuel Fuller, told me her late husband suffered from PTSD. So did Jones.
So can reading Jones or drawing an audience towards Jones, can that translate into helping us have a more honest conversation about PTSD?
It depends how Jones is read, and whether his work is taken seriously in terms of the recognition that war is dehumanizing in all its aspects. It wreaks havoc on the human personality in the same way that any type of conformity, whether in McCarthyite America or Stalinist Russia, does to the individual men and women and children who are victims of this type of conditioning. Those go together, I believe.
In your chapter on From Here to Eternity, you touched on the way that Jones can help us to unpack this sense of creeping militarization in society. Do you think that a message like that resonates more urgently when it comes from someone who’s been embedded in military culture?
It does but unfortunately it’s not listened to. One of the greatest talents to have emerged from the Vietnam War is not Tim O’Brien, but W.D. Ehrhart, the veteran poet/writer in his trilogy of novels and poetry, and he’s still writing today in terms of civilized and wartime issues. He has a very important manner of articulation and protest. But he is marginalized and often ignored in the same way that people who are critical of American culture get marginalized. Today I discovered that Sara Paretsky, the author of the V.I. Warshawski novels, had written a book critical of the Patriot Act and George Bush in 2007 (Writing in the Age of Silence) and it was published in Verso Press in London, not in an American press. The later works of Gore Vidal were published by independent presses. They were all banned from the mainstream.
You know, not a thing you really hear about. Censorship seems like such a thing of the past.
Oh it’s still going on in very subtle ways. Not as explicit, except for the odd reactionary emergence of a deliberate type of censorship like the banning of a book in a school. But it’s going on very subtly in terms of, “This won’t make money. Let’s have this dumb superhero blockbuster,” rather than let’s say a work taking off from William Klein’s Mr. Freedom, an American artist living in Paris who in 1969 directed and wrote the most devastating critique of the American superhero phenomenon, which I’ve written on in Film International.
And that form of subterfuge censorship almost scares me more because it’s harder to spot. But much like you were saying in regards to the reaction to the election, staying aware, staying vigilant, staying organized, right?
That’s right and not having any false illusions or fantasies. Robert Aldrich, a director I very much admire, speaks in terms of staying in the ball game no matter what you have to do and realizing that the movement forward may be very limited but if you can move the ball one step further, you’ve got a chance of eventually winning the game. But it’s a long and hard process.
I like that though. Regardless of the hard work ahead there’s obviously an endgame.
Yes. And that has to be always kept in sight.
Speaking of words of warning, your book ends on this point about maintaining our critical thinking in the face of social ills. What are your thoughts on our present ability to work towards what you term “positive forms of cure”?
At the moment absolutely dire. If Hillary had gotten in we would’ve been in the middle of World War III already. The system is bankrupt. Gore Vidal defined both political parties as the same System with identical heads. So there has to be another, different form of alternative organization to really change things. And it’s going to be hard but it’s the only way forward. Forget the Democrats, the Republicans are a lost cause anyway.
What are our tools in terms of maintaining or strengthening critical thinking? You sort of hinted earlier about funding of humanities departments. Not to stand on my own soapbox here, but valuing the ability to explicate I think is something that can carry over socially and I fear that it doesn’t get the attention or import that it deserves. Would you agree there?
Yes, but I would also stress the value of self-education. Jones never went to a university except for a few courses in NYU and Hawai’i. Likewise Jack London in California who described university education as “the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence.” These two talents engaged in self-education, representing the important way of learning and seeing critically that often institutions hinder, particularly now. They can give you the basic tools, but from there on you’ve got to go in your own direction. Always educate. Always read. Always learn.
So sort of switching gears, another production question. You really rolled up your sleeves with archival materials, especially when it comes to digging through his letters.
That’s right, because archival work, when you have the support to go to an archive, is very important. I did that with my book Jack London: The Movies (1992). It’s really important to go to those primary sources, but how many people are allowed in? And the lack of institutional support presently, and what support there is really is absolutely miserable. Many institutions don’t want certain things to come out, whether they’re in the archives or not, particularly, universities dependent on funding from the state. “Wasting the taxpayers’ money” is a term used against us now. A Board of Trustees with business people is invested in keeping the status quo rolling.
And what was the research process like? You thanked the University of Texas, where Jones’ archives are held?
Yes, the Harry Ransom Humanities archive, for the help. I believe I had a grant from my university way back in 1990 when I first began doing it, which allowed me to spend an entire month in Austin.
This question’s sort of been answered, but because of this hands-on approach, and as you’ve touched on the extenuating circumstances, would you consider this a lengthier book project for you in terms of how long you had to work on it?
Well, it could have been lengthier. I had a limited time, and when I was there the material was uncatalogued. It is now catalogued, but looking at its website I think I covered most of it. I could have written about the film versions as well, but I decided to leave that aside. I could write something on They Shall Inherit the Laughter, even though it’s a raw manuscript. I find it interesting in so many ways. So if I continue with Jones, assuming that universities are still in existence in the next five years, there’s always the possibility. But you never know what’s coming around the corner. It could be good or it could be bad.
So it sounds like you started this in 1990, but because of all of this institutional…what do we want to call it?
Crap, I would say.
Because of the institutional crap it was dragged out for much more than it needed to be.
I could do a whole interview about the crap I’ve had to deal with over the past 25 years with different departments. I can’t be a detective writer, because if I wrote it would be about universities and the equivalent of “the butler did it” would be “the administrator did it,” as the final revelation. My detective hero would enact a Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer I, the Jury/Vengeance is Mine revenge on some of those types. Isn’t it a shame Donald won the election? He would make a great Hammer in a film directed by Eli Roth, produced by Tarantino.
(laughs) And if you wrote detective novels what do you think your pen name would be?
I don’t know I just tossed that out as a humorous little aside. I’m exploring the detective novel tradition at the moment in view of a class I’m teaching because my one on Hitchcock was poached by another department. Matt [Sorrento, Identity Theory‘s film editor] will tell you the whole story.
Yeah, speaking of departmental obstacles and such, I’m sure you’ve heard from him.
Oh yes, I have. It’s bad all over, particularly in England now, if you read The Guardian (UK) last Thursday about adjuncts in British universities.
No, what’s the latest?
In last Thursday’s online Guardian there’s a whole load of links about “adjunctivitis,” as I term it, affecting British universities, as there is over here.
It’s disheartening to hear that becoming a sort of global symptom.
That’s the globalization which people reacted at in protest and voted Donald in.
Well, on a lighter note let’s talk about horror films. So, if you’ll indulge me, some questions on your work as a film scholar.
Please do. I was looking at The Witch (2015)last night, I finally got around to that. A friend from New York sent it to me.
I do have a question related to that. But going down this side-path, what did you think?
I thought it was a very interesting film. Of course it’s spoken in very soft dialogue and my heating unit came on so I missed some of the dialogue and I had to watch it again in my office where the ventilation sound is not too loud. I thought it was a very interesting treatment of the Puritan tradition within the American horror film, which has been very scarcely touched upon. There’s this other film called Eyes of Fire (1983) directed by Avery Crounse which I did manage to see when it first came out, but nobody has looked into this particular element. Viewing The Witch I thought there was a very interesting ambivalence between the fact that it was supernatural, and also the alternative view was coming out of the Puritan family repressive mechanisms.
That’s a great point. I think Perry Miller has work on the sort of dark heart of America that Puritans were afraid of, and I never thought about until now how there is this rich mine of horror that could be accessed in the Puritan tradition.
I deal with it in the first chapter of Hearths of Darkness: The Family and the American Horror Film (2015).
So that actually gets to my first question on your film scholarship. Hearths of Darkness, which I believe was given an update edition not too long ago, shares a theme it seems with Limits of Eternity in that it also gets into this sense of war and violence encroaching on domestic life.
I think it’s a much broader theme than I initially thought when I wrote the horror film book, because I’m now exploring the work of Ross Macdonald, the Californian crime writer with The Galton Case, and the later novels deal not with criminals but with people being affected by dysfunctional family violent incidents in the past which affect the present. Now I don’t know if my surmise is correct, but I have a feeling that Macdonald deals with the dark elements of the Californian family dysfunctional dream. I’ll have to go further into his work.
So you touched on seeing a larger theme across your works. Domesticity and familial space, investigating those, is that something maybe up until now you hadn’t consciously molded your work around?
When I began my MA under Robin Wood, who wrote an introduction to the Modern American Horror Film which was published in Film Comment in 1977, we were all exploring the family horror film in America. And that was the basis of my dissertation with relationship to the Western, and it became the first edition of Hearths of Darkness. So I’ve always been exploring the family horror film, but I thought it was central to the 1970s and went back to the American cultural tradition. Now I believe more strongly that it may be endemic to the whole western material experience in the way of dysfunctionality in following a wrong social path, when there are alternatives out there which represent better directions, whether personally, sexually, or politically.
My next question here is in full recognition of the fact that critically lauded horror films and independent horror filmmakers are things that have both been around for quite some time, but pop culture media outlets presently seem to think we’re on the verge or in the midst of something of a horror renaissance or an indie boom. Is this something that you’ve been tracking at all?
Well they’ve been saying that for years, from the Blair Witch films going into the present day. I think that with the vitality of the independent horror film section, and people wanting to do things on a low budget, you don’t need a big budget to do a work of art. There’s things like garage rock and using a digital camera, as my writer-director friend Evans Chan is doing in his Hong Kong films, that one can explore without the necessity of a big budget.
Do you think that within these spaces then there’s definitely hope for a pushback against franchise filmmaking? And maybe specifically in the horror genre but I guess we can blow this up to a larger point about the present state of Hollywood.
I think if people just stay away from big budget crap, stop paying these huge prices in these corporate-owned cinema chains and go to alternative venues, let’s say the Internet is really great for showing these things, then there may be a way forward, a type of restoration. But the fact is, as long as the crap makes money the system is going to remain. If it loses money, then as was the case with the big blockbusters in Hollywood which lost money like Star and others that I don’t remember now, there may be a way forward. It’s Trotsky’s “permanent revolution,” not just in politics but in film. Artistry has to go on evolving, going into new directions. If you’re restricted by formula, it results in stagnation and fatigue.
You used a word here that touches on my next question. You mentioned “restoration.” I read your recent review of A Thousand Cuts, about film collectors, and it got me dwelling on a topic that I haven’t really been able to shake recently: contemporary films that emulate a ’60s/’70s B movie aesthetic. I’m thinking of Tarantino’s Grindhouse. I’m thinking of The Autopsy of Jane Doe, which was produced by an IFC sub-label called IFC: Midnight, so they’re being very upfront about the fact that they’re trying to recreate this sense of “midnight movies” or the “graveyard matinee.” Do you have any kind of angle on why these films persist, or why this sense of restoration persists, and what kind of effect it might have?
The reason for this influence is the achievements of the 1970s. A French critic, David Roche, wrote a book about the difference between the ’70s horror films and their remakes. I think that era represented a potential for alternative expression but I feel one cannot now entirely follow that alternative because the era’s past. George Romero said to me once that people are always on at him about repeating aspects of his Dawn of the Dead. He can’t do it because the mall culture is now gone. The important thing is trying to move forward in as original a direction as possible. Use the heritage of the past by all means, but, never copy: develop and innovate. That’s the best way forward in my opinion.
Reading your review also made me wonder if there’s maybe been more energy behind making new movies look like old movies because we’re in an age of digitization. Is there maybe an anxiety around celluloid films, it’s such a fragile material, do you think that maybe directors are pouring an anxiety into this work about these celluloid films disappearing?
Maybe. I don’t know, I don’t go all that much these days. In fact, the number of theatrically released films in this cultural backwater I see each year can be counted on fingers with one hand. I saw Sully and Snowden and Trumbo with Bryan Cranston. I’m more interested in exploring the past, excavating what’s been neglected, and what should be developed. I’m watching Naked City at the moment, a TV series, on DVD. Amazing stories, amazing acting too, all shot on location in New York.
So I actually was thinking of maybe ending on this point of where you are now. Naked City, tell me more about that, is that a crime series?
Naked City was a very popular late 1950s, early ’60s TV series based on the film of the same name by Jules Dassin. We saw some seasons in England, and this one is shot on location, often featuring up and coming young actors like Bruce Dern, George Maharis, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, and a very young David Janssen in the episode I was looking at last night. Veterans like Luther Adler and Eli Wallach also appear as well as Walter Matthau before he became famous. The acting was absolutely superb. There was a very good tradition of television acting represented by people like the “Green Girl” Susan Oliver (I’ve written on her in Film International) that was first-class, before the formula affected television. There’s this lost direction in television which needs to be explored, and so many people dismiss it. “Oh it’s black and white. It’s creaky. It’s archaic.” It isn’t. The best examples stand up today. Another example is the Defenders TV series with E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed, the first season of which has been released on DVD.
What you’re saying about there being a prestige history in television stretching back beyond where we are now, obviously you have Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I don’t know if that communicates at all with what you’re looking at.
Yes, but there were a lot of others and they tend to have been forgotten. I found out that with William Shatner, a very good actor before Captain Kirk, not that Captain Kirk was bad, but he was so versatile before and he appears often in these early ’60s TV series. He’s in season one of The Defenders playing a veteran who’s a killer, and he did a spin-off with Howard Da Silva, the black-listed American actor, in another legal series which seems to have disappeared.
Ending on a note of looking forward, you’re looking at Macdonald?
Yes I’ve begun reading the detection fiction of Ross Macdonald, because there are a lot of gaps in my education which I must catch up on. I heard about him from my friend Mike Nevins who lives in St. Louis, a retired professor of law, friend of and expert on the late director William Witney, and the biographer of Cornell Woolrich. He’s been a friend of mine now for nearly 30 years who has written crime fiction and film, detective novels, and criticism.
So I guess I don’t know if there is anything you’d like me to plug.
No, I think you have been very thorough, and like James Jones I tend to be very modest. You might find other academics and writers who would want to plug themselves (laughs).
“‘Why does the world have to be like it is?’ Warden said, letting himself go completely. ‘I don’t know why the world has to be like it is.’” James Jones, From Here to Eternity
Tony J. Williams, professor of English at Southern Illinois University, has produced James Jones: The Limits of Eternity, a new study of the American novelist. It is a serious, thought-provoking book about a serious artist.
Other works by Williams include Structures of Desire: British Cinema, 1939-1955 (2000), The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead (2003) and Body and Soul: The Cinematic Vision of Robert Aldrich (2004).
Jones (1921-77) is best known for From Here to Eternity (1951), Some Came Running (1957), The Thin Red Line (1962) and the posthumously published Whistle (1978), as well as short stories collected in The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories (1968).
Jones is an intriguing and complicated figure. A contemporary, more or less, of Saul Bellow (born 1915), Norman Mailer (1923) and James Baldwin (1924), Jones wrote a very different kind of book than those three authors: less intellectually and psychologically sophisticated, set in wartime or small-town America, and also capable of delivering energetic and remarkable insights into American class and social relationships of the mid-20th century. At his best, Jones cut through a great deal of establishment mythology and offered, as Tony Williams notes in our conversation below, “some very unpalatable home truths that many people don’t want to hear.”
Born in Robinson, Illinois, a town of a few thousand people near the Indiana border, Jones grew up in a difficult, intense family. Unable to go to college, he enlisted in the US military in 1939 at the age of 17. He was stationed in Honolulu at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and subsequently took part in the bloody Guadalcanal campaign in 1942-43. He was discharged in 1944.
Jones’s first novel, From Here to Eternity, written in the late 1940s, is set on the eve of US entry into World War II. Its central figure, Robert E. Lee Prewitt, is a young career soldier stationed at the Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. The son of a coal miner from Harlan County, Kentucky, Prewitt turned hobo during the Depression before joining the military.
This is the description of his mother’s death: “When the boy Prewitt was in the seventh grade his mother died of the consumption. There was a big strike on that winter and she died in the middle of it. If she had had her choice, she could have picked a better time. Her husband, who was a striker, was in the county jail with two stab wounds in his chest and a fractured skull. And her brother, Uncle John, was dead, having been shot by several deputies.”
Prewitt, labeled a “Bolshevik” by fellow soldiers and superiors, is stubborn and fierce. He gets into trouble with his company’s commanding officer, Captain Dana Holmes, by refusing to join the regimental boxing team (Prewitt once blinded a sparring partner). Despite receiving “The Treatment,” which includes extra duties, abuse, punishment, exhausting physical demands, Prewitt refuses to give in.
First Sergeant Milt Warden effectively runs the company. He has contempt for the officers above him, who are invariably lazy, incompetent and stupid. Warden enters into an affair with Captain Holmes’ wife, Karen, who is bored and unhappy with her life. She sets her sights on Warden becoming an officer, something that makes him distinctly uneasy. (“And now I’m supposed to go on and become an Officer, the symbol of every goddam thing I’ve always stood up against, and not feel anything about it. I’m supposed to do that for you.”)
Prewitt undergoes various difficulties and torments, eventually ending up in the stockade. The prisoners there are routinely beaten and placed in solitary confinement. Prewitt meets Jack Malloy, a charismatic (and not entirely convincing) former member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and now a proponent of Gandhian “Passive Resistance.” Tony Williams argues that Jones views those who find themselves in the stockade “as orphaned heirs of the early socialists and IWW.”
In the book’s most brutal scene, Staff Sergeant “Fatso” Judson, the prison second-in-command, beats a man to death in front of the other prisoners. Prewitt vows to kill Judson, a vow he makes good on once he has been released. He thereupon goes AWOL and into hiding at the home of his girlfriend Alma, a prostitute. After the Japanese attack, Prewitt decides to return to his unit. He is stopped by guards, who prepare to arrest him because he has no identification. Prewitt runs off, and the guards shoot him.
Mailer, whose The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948, was based on his experiences in the Philippines campaign during World War II, described Jones’ work as “a big fist of a book with powerful virtues and serious faults, but if the very good is mixed with the sometimes bad, those qualities are inseparable from the author. Jones writes with a wry compassionate anger which is individual and borrows from no writer I know.”
From Here to Eternity does have serious faults. Jones is prone to abstract psychologizing and soliloquizing that make for a good many tedious passages and even entire chapters (in this book and others). However, those failings are more than compensated for by the insights he provides into American life at the end of the Depression, the military and the nature of modern warfare.
The reader needs to discover this for him or herself, but these are a few examples.
This is Warden, thinking to himself: “Warden had a theory about officers: Being an officer would make a sinner out of Christ himself. No man could swallow so much gaseous privilege and authority without having his guts inflated.… In every war there were two wars, the war for officers and the war of the enlisted man.”
And this is Prewitt: “So that he had gone right on, unable to stop believing that if the Communists were the underdog in Spain then he believed in fighting for the Communists in Spain; but that if the Communists were the top dog back home in Russia and the (what would you call them in Russia? the traitors, I guess) traitors [i.e., the victims of Stalin] were the bottom dog, then he believed in fighting for the traitors and against the Communists. He believed in fighting for the Jews in Germany, and against the Jews in Wall Street and Hollywood. And if the Capitalists were top dog in America and the proletariat the underdog, then he believed in fighting for the proletariat against the Capitalists. This too-ingrained-to-be-forgotten philosophy of life of his had led him, a Southerner, to believe in fighting for the Negroes against the Whites everywhere, because the Negroes were nowhere the top dog, at least as yet.”
This is Warden again, contemplating the approach of war: “If the Government was getting ready for a war in July of 1941, that was not the same as being in one. That it was bound to come eventually did not mean it would be here tomorrow. It would take something pretty big, before the country would be willing to get in; and all the rifles in the world did not make a war-Army until you had talked the people into shooting them.”
Tony Williams insists correctly throughout his book and in our interview that Jones was not merely a “war novelist,” but a commentator on the contradictions of American society and the human condition generally. Significant sections were cut out of From Here to Eternity before its publication, especially those treating sexual behavior and homosexuality in particular. Williams argues that the recent availability of the unexpurgated version of Jones’s first novel “reveals the presence of an author who was a humanitarian and sexual radical combating the psychological and physical manifestations of authoritarianism that extend into our current generations.”
From Here to Eternity is an honest, angry book. It teaches mistrust in the military and every other subdivision of the establishment. It suggests that countries do not go to war for high ideals, including the United States in the “good war,” World War II. (As Warden tells Karen Holmes, “Each country calls it [their national identity] by a different name so they can fight all the other countries that look liable to get too powerful.”) It urges tolerance and compassion, even as it casts a critical eye on its damaged human subjects.
This comment by Jones that Williams cites seems to sum up the novelists’ view: “The meaning of the army for me is one of personal degradation, a degradation that is inescapable once a man is hooked, a degradation rising directly out of the system of caste and privilege and arbitrary authority.”
From Here to Eternity was turned into an award-winning film, directed by Fred Zinnemann and released in 1953.
Some Came Running, Jones’s next novel, opens in 1947 and closes with the onset of the Korean War. It takes place in a fictional Parkman, Indiana, a version of Robinson, Illinois. Williams suggests that the book is “closely aligned with its author’s knowledge of another changed America of the 1950s where conformity and materialism have taken a firmer grip on American consciousness … America is changing and for the worse.”
Dave Hirsch, the novel’s central character, is a cynical World War II veteran and a writer, who returns to Parkman after 16 years. His brother Frank, who owns a jewelry store, is a pillar of respectability, with dreams of suburban shopping malls and interstate highways. The brothers clash. Dave Hirsch hangs around with a crowd of gamblers (above all, Bama Dillert), drinkers and “loose women,” although he falls in love with the virginal Gwen French, a teacher.
There are good things here, and some bad. The conversations in bars, restaurants and poolrooms are convincing and authentic. The picture of postwar economic life and the enrichment of the town’s elite also ring true. The road trips and drinking sprees speak to both the economic optimism of the time and its spiritual confusion and even demoralization. The population will not go back to the terrible years of the Depression, but where is it going?
In one scene, Hirsch observes a “tough,” damaged World War II veteran in a barroom. “There goes all of us, he thought. In Raymond Cold, imbued with an almost classical Greek inevitability of self-destruction and carrying the same sense of tragic fitness. … What a nation we were turning into. It was like living in the last wild days of the Roman Empire. Everybody drinking and discussing and destruction sweeping down in hordes from the north. We will maintain our policy of Business As Usual.”
Jones goes on, keeping up the ancient Roman metaphor: “These were the Plebs, he [Hirsch] thought looking around the booth. The maimed veterans of the Legions, the shopkeepers without shops, the wives without husbands, the whores without cribs. The teeming, life-devouring ant heap of the Forum, living their lives out in the taverns and the occasional circus given them for their vote …”
This is unusual and interesting. Not too many American artists were dealing with the problems and even bleakness of working class lives in 1957.
What Hirsch has to say about his brother Frank, in Williams’s words, “on the way to becoming a millionaire ‘big shot’ as the novel ends … with his succession of mistresses and self-destructive activities,” is also refreshing: “It was like watching some foreign person, a Russian or somebody, about whose strange incomprehensible life you really knew absolutely nothing. He [Frank] really believed all those damn sanctimonious things he spouted. … He really knew no more about life than he did about flying a jet airplane. He was a walking mass of other humans’ ill-considered, un-thought-out opinions, which he had accepted, something hed read, something hed heard, something hed been told. And he believed he was right.” [Jones’s punctuation.]
Other sections of the books, especially those involving Hirsch and Gwen French, are far less insightful and intriguing. The breathless talk about sex, or the lack of it, owes something at times to the “soap opera” novels of the time. It is not effective, and Jones at his weakest.
Williams writes early on in his study that “Jones sees twentieth-century society as a battleground between the forces of Eros [Love] and Thanatos [Death] with American institutional Puritanism fully subscribed to supporting the latter against the former.” Kaylie Jones, the novelist’s daughter, once commented that the “subject” that angered her father the most was “the American Puritan ethic and sexual repression, which he fervently believed was at the root of most of America’s problems. He wanted to blow the lid off the whole thing.”
Jones’s attitude was a very commonly held one in the 1950s and 1960s, when the class struggle and economic questions seemed to many intellectuals and artists to have dropped off the map. What remained, it appeared to them, were the psycho-sexual issues, irrationalism, alienation, “aloneness,” manifestations of human angst and so forth. Williams observes in his introduction that “the messianic promises of socialism, and the IWW were no longer feasible in postwar America.” Whether the promises of socialism in the earlier part of the 20th century were “messianic” or not (and, in our view, they were not), the situation had certainly changed—but the contradictions of capitalism had not disappeared.
Indeed, the resurgence of conformism and the propagation of straight-laced, ultra-conventional morality in the postwar era had everything to do with the fraught economic and political state of affairs. It was not the resurrection of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The American ruling elite, now presiding over the leading capitalist economy and in the process of absorbing into itself all the contradictions of the global social order, had a more desperate need than ever to inoculate the mass of the population against any hint of radical or left-wing thought. It was not a sign of enduring health. Official piety and sanctimoniousness went hand in hand with the quasi-state religion of anti-communism, intended to subordinate the working class through the Democratic Party and the trade unions to the status quo. As the Russian Marxist Plekhanov once argued, “at the basis of all this complex dialectic of psychological phenomena there were facts of a social nature.”
Vincente Minnelli directed a film version of Some Came Running, released in 1958.
James Jones’s next novel, The Thin Red Line (leaving aside The Pistol [1959], which is something of a novella) is considered the second work in his war trilogy. It treats the landing of US forces—whose first taste of battle this is—on a Japanese-held island during World War II and the bloody, ferocious campaign to oust the enemy troops.
Jones’s experiences at the Battle of Mount Austen, the Galloping Horse, and the Sea Horse during World War II’s Guadalcanal Campaign weigh heavily on the novel. Several of the characters in From Here to Eternity reappear here and later in Whistle, with different names in each book. Warden, for example, becomes Welsh in the second part of the trilogy and Winch in the third, while Prewitt comes back as Witt and, later, Prell.
The Thin Red Line follows C-for-Charlie Company as it is thrown into the brutal and dehumanizing reality of combat. Jones’s fierce desire to demythologize war, the military and every leading institution is evident early in the book. Private Doll, for example, we read, “had learned something during the past six months of his life. Chiefly what he had learned was that everybody lived by a selected fiction. Nobody was really what he pretended to be. It was if everybody made up a fictional story about himself, and then just pretended to everybody that that was what he was.”
Sergeant Welsh takes a clear-eyed view of the war and America’s reasons for being in it. He keeps muttering to himself, “Property. Property. All for property.” The novel continues: “Because that was what it was; what it was all about. One man’s property, or another man’s. One nation’s, or another nation’s. It had all been done, and was being done, for property. One nation wanted, felt it needed, probably did need, more property; and the only way to get it was to take it away from those other nations who had already laid claim to it. There just wasn’t any more unclaimed property on this planet, that was all. And that was all it was.” Welsh (and Jones) likes the phrase about “property” so much, he repeats it four more times in the book.
Terrible things go on in the novel. The American troops disinter a Japanese corpse for sport. They execute soldiers trying to surrender. They extract gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. There are also moments of tenderness and expressions of sexual love among the soldiers.
When Private Doll kills a man, he has this revelation: “Doll felt guilty. He couldn’t help it. He had killed a human being, a man. He had done the most horrible thing a human could do, worse than rape even. And nobody in the whole damned world could say anything to him about it.”
Jones maintains a calm, objective tone throughout, at times perhaps almost too calm, verging on the slightly cynical. Nonetheless, as Tony Williams suggests, Jones places the overall blame for the atrocities on circumstances within which the soldiers find themselves. As Jones writes about an individual member of Company C, the troops as a whole are “trapped in every direction,” no matter where they turn.
There are extraordinary revelations and insights in The Thin Red Line (filmed twice, in 1964 and 1998)—as there are in Whistle, based on Jones’s time in a veteran’s hospital back in the United States during World War II.
Considering the civilian and military authorities, one wounded veteran in Whistle thinks to himself: “It was not because they were insane. He had suspected that before, from the beginning. It was not that modern war itself was insane. He had known that, too. It was not even that in ten years these same men battling down there, those who survived, would be making trade agreements with each other, signing mutual business deals for mutual profit, while the dumb luckless dead ones moldered in some hole. Landers had been cynically aware of all that, long before. It was that, seeing it, it was all so foolish, so abysmally stupid and ridiculous and savage, he could not consider himself a part of it.”
Jones told an interviewer in 1958, “modern war … isn’t even war anymore, as far as that goes. It’s an industry, a big business complex.”
Jones’s short stories are also worth mentioning. Tony Williams spends some time on The Ice-Cream Headache, set in a Midwestern town in 1935. Its central character is adolescent Tom Dylan, whose family history is painful and blighted. His grandfather, a tough sheriff, produced four sons, all “drunken weaklings.”
The Great Depression and the boom in the auto industry have impoverished the family (the sons were directed by their father to become veterinarians, but horses, of course, were put “out of business” by automobiles). Tom has vague sexual designs on his sister and a friend of hers. His date with the two girls, with its disturbing overtones, never comes to pass because he is overcome by a strange illness as he enters his grandfather’s house. The story brings together many of Jones’s concerns in an unusually concise and dramatic fashion.
Jones, at his best, represented something radical, raw and honest in American letters. He underwent bitter experiences that he did not run away from. He attempted, to the best of his ability, to bring out the truth of his life and times for the benefit of others.
One of the more remarkable comments about Jones was written by his granddaughter, Eyrna Jones Heisler, then a high school student, in a 2012 essay. She argued that the most devastating event in her grandfather’s life was the “hand-to-hand combat” in which “he took the life of a Japanese soldier. The man was in his very early twenties, a poor farm-boy, with nothing in his wallet but a few pictures of young women, no money, and a membership card for a soldier’s club in the Philippines. Discovering that his enemy was his counterpart changed my grandfather’s view of war forever. He kept the Japanese soldier’s wallet with him for the rest of his life. …
“Pearl Harbor spurred my grandfather to take action. He spent his life writing about the experience of war and warfare. He wrote novels that were controversial because they did not describe the war as ‘good’ or the soldiers as heroic. His main goal as a writer, he always said, was to ‘tell the truth.’ Historians and novelists portraying Americans as morally correct heroes enraged him.”
David Walsh Interviews Tony Williams November 2016
Tony Williams
David Walsh: To the matter at hand. It’s a very interesting book about a very interesting guy. I am curious to know how you developed the interest in James Jones.
TW: Back in the latter part of the 1980s, I was involved with a Vietnam Generation group that used to meet at the Popular Culture Association, and one of the key figures was Kali Tal, author of Worlds of Hurt, about Vietnam veterans, along with rape and incest survivors. Our interest also extended to earlier conflicts like World War II and the American Civil War. The name of James Jones cropped up in conversation, and in 1989 I picked up a paperback copy of From Here to Eternity and read it from cover to cover.
I developed from there. I read all of Jones’s work, and decided I was going to write a book on him. I visited the Harry Ransom archives in Austin, Texas where Jones’s work is located, including letters and so forth. It took me about 25 years to complete the book.
DW: Do you feel that Jones is underappreciated in academic circles? And if so, why?
TW: He’s not appreciated because he’s not a postmodernist, flamboyant writer. He’s writing about people’s everyday lives in a particular historical context, telling some very unpalatable home truths that many people don’t want to hear. So if Jones crops up in academia it’s merely as a “war novelist.” Many figures are pigeon-holed in that fashion so they can be easily discussed, and misinterpreted.
DW: Your book is obviously an intense study of his writings, not a biography, but for the benefit of our readers could you give some general overview of his life?
TW: James Jones was born in 1921 in Robinson, Illinois, a small town in what is regarded as southeastern Illinois. His father was a dentist and his family suffered downward mobility, as well as a high degree of dysfunction. He had a cherished younger sister, Mary Ann, who eventually died of a brain tumor. His mother died of diabetes, and his father committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, both deaths occurring while Jones was in the military.
In the 1930s, he couldn’t go to university because his family had lost its money, so the only choice he had was to go into the military, just like many of the other victims in From Here to Eternity. He was in Hawaii, at the Schofield Barracks, during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He fought in the Pacific campaign at Guadalcanal and other battles. He not only suffered physical injuries, but PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], which wasn’t defined at that time.
When he returned to Robinson, he was really angered at and appalled by the superficiality of the country club set. He also became an alcoholic. It was Lowney Handy, who established a writers’ colony in nearby Marshall, Illinois, who basically adopted him and helped him on the path to becoming a writer, which led to From Here to Eternity. Jones remained in Robinson after that book. He helped fund the writers colony in Marshall, but he had outgrown that area. So when the opportunity arose to relocate to Paris, in 1958, he did so. As in the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald and others, Paris was the place to be.
So he remained in France for about fifteen years, until the exchange rate made it difficult for him to remain. He returned to America and first taught creative writing at Florida International University in Miami. And eventually he settled down in Long Island, New York. Throughout all this time he remained a very critical commentator on the American scene and world politics, although he played his cards very close to his chest. You have to remember this was the period of the Cold War and McCarthyism. Lingering elements of that atmosphere were still in the air and ready to tarnish any writer.
He wrote in a particular manner to make evident to anyone who read his work seriously and in depth what his real subject matter was all about. To those who read him and wrote to him, if Jones felt they were on the right wavelength, he would reply in detail and go into an elaborate discussion by letter about the ideas in his books.
He suffered from congestive heart failure that he inherited from his family. He died in May 1977 in hospital, one year before his final novel, Whistle, was posthumously published.
DW: Did he make a living as a writer in the 1950s?
TW: Yes, he did. He was also—particularly when he and his wife Gloria moved to Paris—doing screenplays on the side. His widow told me that he regarded it simply as a way of making money in between writing his books. He worked with American directors like Nicholas Ray and John Berry, who was blacklisted. Some of his film work, I think, had an element of seriousness and was not just done for money. He was more or less living on his royalties as a writer, which you could do in France at that time.
DW: You explain a number of times that in your view Jones is not merely a “war novelist,” but a writer dealing with American society and its contradictions and dilemmas in the 20th century, someone who treated the “historical and material aspects of American society” and the “oppressive mechanisms thwarting the full development of human personality.” Could you elaborate on that a bit?
TW: As I mentioned earlier, it’s very convenient to categorize Jones as a war novelist and limit him to that particular tradition. But he was a commentator on the American experience and From Here to Eternity has as much to do with the oppression of human beings in the 1930s and 1940s as it does with war. Novels like Some Came Running, which was slammed by the critics after the success of From Here to Eternity, dealt with the postwar era, from 1947 to the beginning of the Korean War.
And what Jones was doing in Some Came Running was to criticize American society and its social and personal rigidity, a society in the pursuit of material wealth, a society that regarded the less well-off, the working class, as disposable. It was a society that operated within a strict system of sexual and religious morality, designed as a form of social manipulation.
His novels in one way or another tried to reveal the mechanisms which instilled mental and intellectual conformity into people and got them to follow the status quo, even though it was against their best interest and caused a lot of emotional damage.
DW: You mention that Some Came Running was greeted with hostility in 1957. I have to say I think it’s a very uneven book. I think there are wonderful passages and some far less than wonderful passages. Overall, why do you think it was treated so harshly?
TW: First of all, there is the American habit of attacking someone who’s had a successful first book or film. Look at Michael Cimino, and what happened to him after The Deer Hunter [1978], when he tried to make Heaven’s Gate [1980]. Heaven’s Gate is a Western critical of the status quo.
I would agree that Some Came Running is uneven, it’s a mammoth book. Critics jumped on him because he didn’t use any apostrophes or any kind of academic grammar. He was trying to reproduce everyday speech as it was performed by ordinary people, as well as revealing the total hypocrisy of small-town American society in the fictional milieu of Parkman, Indiana, which was really Robinson, Illinois. It’s an attack in part on the world of Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver, and the type of bland movies that were coming out in the mid-1950s.
DW: There’s a remarkable comment from Dewey Cole in Some Came Running, one of the young guys in the bar: “My folks was always too busy fighting. What do they give my generation to believe in: A happy home. A happy home, a union to increase my wage, a new car, and an automatic washing machine. We’re not even a lost generation, my generation. We’re an unfound generation. The ‘Unfound Generation’ of the ‘Forties.’”
TW: He is one of the young veterans and he’s commenting on their status. A particular disposable, non-affluent generation. It is a remarkable comment. It’s based on feelings Jones had and those of many of the people he associated with. He was a writer who did not treat the working class and ordinary people with disdain. He understood their feelings, frustrations and hopes, and never stereotyped them.
DW: I want to speak a minute about Jones’s literary influences. He has his central character in Some Came Running carry around the novels of the “big five,” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe. Do you think that Jones felt those were the biggest American influences on his own writing?
TW: At the time, yes. In his later letters, he speaks about the influence of Stendhal, The Red and the Black, and of course Stendhal’s treatise on love, the demolition of romantic love. And also Dostoyevsky.
DW: And you mention Jack London. Was that an unconscious influence?
TW: I think he’s there consciously, because the end of Whistle is pretty much a reproduction of the end of Jack London’s Martin Eden. Prewitt also discovers London’s political works in Alma’s apartment in the later chapters of From Here to Eternity.
DW: He never mentions Theodore Dreiser, who came from nearby Terre Haute, Indiana. Why do you think that is?
TW: Dreiser is one of the absences. But I think you have to look at the time he was writing. Dreiser had joined the Communist Party toward the end of his life and Jones knew very well about HUAC and the Red Scare, and the general attack on radicalism. He knew that if he wanted to be recognized as a writer and not labeled as a political writer, he had to be very careful about how he referred to certain people in certain things. It was only in the complete manuscript of From Here to Eternity that you find references to “monsters” like John Rankin [ultra-right Congressman from Mississippi] and others. The editor asked him to remove a lot from that manuscript and I think many of the revisions went out for political reasons.
DW: When were they editing that?
TW: Toward the end of the late 1940s and at the beginning of the 1950s. The first editor was the legendary Maxwell Perkins, and then someone else took over. The publishing house could see the writing on the wall in terms of what they could publish in a period of reaction in America.
DW: How did Jones get his feeling, which you refer to, for the Industrial Workers of the World [IWW] and the early Socialist Party?
TW: Of course, he grew up in the Great Depression and there were political influences from that period. I also have a feeling that he learned about socialism and radicalism from his fellow enlisted men in the army, many of whom had joined up to escape the Depression and several of whom had been involved politically during that time. He tapped into a particular oral tradition which was still alive.
Jones was very alert to what was going on in the Soviet Union at the time and he mentions the decline of Marxism as a result of Stalinism. I think he basically gained his knowledge from working class men in the army or outside, as well as having a very deep interest in world affairs.
DW: Are there any references in his correspondence to his following events in the Soviet Union? Of course there are references in From Here to Eternity.
TW: His letters do refer to what’s happening in the Soviet Union, the failure of the Communist experiment there and the search for a much freer form of existence. But like certain other writers he despaired of political systems because he felt they became rigid ideologies.
DW: There’s a passage in From Here to Eternity where Prewitt the “Bolshevik” is speaking about his sympathy for the underdogs and his identification with those being persecuted by Stalin. Prewitt says if he were asked by a House Committee what his views were, he would reply that he was “a sort of super arch-revolutionary, the kind that made the Revolution in Russia and that the Communists are killing now, a sort of perfect criminal type, very dangerous, a mad dog that loves underdogs.”
TW: He definitely knew what was going on in his historical epoch. He was never blinkered into denial.
DW: Jones is unlike most (or all) present writers in expressing skepticism about the motives for war, even the “good war,” World War II. He is angry and mistrustful about those who are making war.
TW: Yes, he poured cold water on the “Greatest Generation” nonsense and the notion of the self-sacrificing home front in Whistle in particular.
DW: You cite him, “In every war there were two wars, the war of the officers and the war of the enlisted men.” Such a view is practically unheard of today, even in the best writing on Iraq and Afghanistan, even Vietnam. And you have the line of Sgt. Welsh in The Thin Red Line: “Property. Property. All for property”?
TW: And if Jones were around and writing about the Iraq war, you’d have another sergeant saying, “Oil, oil, all for oil.” He is very clear-eyed and almost Marxist without naming the philosophy behind that perception.
DW: At the same time I think also it reflects the fact that even within the military at the time there was a far higher social consciousness. There was a far more critical view of the war than is presented 50 years later. The soldiers had come out of the Depression and they had no reason to be in love with the American ruling class.
This is typical of Jones: “They are sons of bitches, but the fault is not theirs. The fault belongs to the society, the system under which they live—not just the economic system, but the moral system of righteousness.” That insight is largely lost today …
TW: This gives Jones’s war novels the necessarily wider context within which they really should be read, not just according to narrow generic classification.
DW: It’s not prettification, that comment. People do some pretty awful things, but why do they do these awful things?
TW: Exactly, and he was onto the mechanisms that made them do these awful things.
DW: And he was present in some of the places where the worst things were done. I would like to refer to the first piece you deal with in your book, a short story, The Ice–Cream Headache. It’s a beautiful story, one of the most perfectly composed of his works.
TW: That’s why I chose to deal with it in the opening chapter. It really is the key to understanding what Jones’s work in all its variations is really about.
DW: Because it brings together a number of themes and elements in a convincing fashion. Both the economic issues—the Wall Street crash, the auto industry boom and all that—and the presence of the grandfather, the oppressive authority, the law, the state, the military, the repressive psychic structure of American capitalism. It also gives a very concrete feeling of small-town America.
TW: Definitely, he understands it, he’s from it, he knows its faults, but he’s not condescending. He’s critical in the best sense of the word without putting people down, people who often are acting badly for no real inner fault of their own.
DW: What do you make of the incestuous element in that story?
TW: At the time, he was a deep reader of Sigmund Freud, he also read the Kinsey Report. He was concerned with the complex motivations within the human personality, good, bad and destructive. I think the critic Robin Wood once pointed out that the closeness and rigid conformity of the family system often operate in such a manner as to bring those incestuous feelings out. It is a disturbing story. He brings out the negative aspects in many of his writings of the American personality in that period.
DW: Jones was not immune to the pressures of the times. How did he resist the Cold War propaganda barrage, and how did he accommodate himself to it?
TW: I think he resisted it in terms of his fiction. He never participated in any demonstrations or protests, he never followed any crowd of any description. Basically, I think he isolated himself during this period from the official barrage, if only to preserve his identity as a writer living an independent existence.
Jones was a product of a dysfunctional family and an equally dysfunctional society. Then he was in the military, in which the institution owns you, body and soul. I think he was very concerned to preserve his freedom of expression and not be too outspoken in that era. So in the sense of accommodation, that’s how I would define it. But I would define that in terms of the goal of personal survival and not for any selfish or careerist reasons.
DW: I’m struck by the numerous references in Jones’s work to “the next war.” He is always predicting that the present war or the present peace is a mere interlude. Where did that understanding come from?
TW: That sentiment is not confined to Jones in the postwar period. The play Fragile Fox [Norman Brooks], which is the basis for Robert Aldrich’s film Attack [1956], ends with two stretcher bearers talking about the next war. In the film noir Crossfire [1947], the dubious individual played by Paul Kelly speaks about enlisting soon in “the next war” and making some money.
The film I ran in my [filmmaker] Anthony Mann class here last night, Men in War [1957], has Robert Ryan’s Lieut. Benson say to Sgt. Montana [Aldo Ray], “I think this war is going to last a long time.” It’s a Korean War film. One of the screenwriters, who was not credited because he was blacklisted, was Ben Maddow. The name on the screenplay is Philip Yordan, but he was well known to be a front for many blacklisted writers. So I think that that feeling about “the next war” was a common one among radical thinkers and writers in the postwar era.
DW: This is from Whistle, his last novel: “It was not because they were insane. He had suspected that before, from the beginning. It was not that modern war itself was insane. He had known that, too. It was not even that in ten years these same men battling down there, those who survived, would be making trade agreements with each other, signing mutual business deals for mutual profit, while the dumb luckless dead ones moldered in some hole.”
TW: Doesn’t this fit in with what the WSWS says about the state of perpetual war? Jones is really farsighted in making that statement.
DW: What do you think of the various films that were made from his books?
TW: Well, Jones basically disliked [Fred Zinnemann’s] From Here to Eternity [1953]. He came around to seeing why it had to be adapted. He always hated Some Came Running. That film works well as a Vincente Minnelli melodrama, if you’ve never read the novel. But once you’ve read the novel, you can’t look at the film in the same way. Again, the film was made immediately after the publication of the book. It’s a commercial product of its time.
There is an earlier version of The Thin Red Line by [Hungarian-born director] Andrew Marton released in 1964, made by the same company that did Men in War and God’s Little Acre [1958], two films directed by Anthony Mann with Robert Ryan. The Marton film I think is more interesting in some ways than the transcendentalism that Terrence Malick chose to focus on in his later remake [1998]. I would say the film versions to one degree or another have always been unsatisfactory, because Jones’s ideas contain too much dynamite for a Hollywood film, which aims to please the audience and make money.
DW: Malick did keep the Welsh line, or a version of it: “Property! Whole fuckin’ thing’s about property.” Minnelli’s Some Came Running is a much narrower work than the book, but it does capture something about the disillusionment or disappointment with postwar America.
TW: Jones praised the performance of Dean Martin as Bama Dillert. He is something of the salt-of-the-earth, charismatic American. The central character idolizes him very much like Prewitt in From Here to Eternity idolizes the Wobbly [IWW member] in the stockade. But in both cases the characters are found to have feet of clay.
DW: All in all, Jones was an interesting figure and certainly someone who deserves to be read. You would obviously encourage people to read his books.
(Moscow) 9 May 2024 – Note the flag with Lenin to the far left in the photo of Russian Army veterans marching in the Victory Day Parade. Also the WW2 Soviet flags with a hammer and sickle Communist flag. Is this a mere acknowledgement of the past by the ruling political class? Is there nostalgia in the population for the Soviet workers state, however deformed and hobbled by the Stalinists? I do not know. But, time will tell…
The NATOstan lackeys will remain dazed and confused. So what; lackeys lack strategic depth, they just wallow in the shallow waters of irrelevancy.
Startling mirror images swirl around two major developments this week directly inbuilt in the Grand Narrative that shapes my latest book, Eurasia v. NATOstan, recently published in the U.S.: Xi Jinping’s visit to Paris and the inauguration of Vladimir Putin’s new term in Moscow.
Inevitably, this is a contrasting tale of Sovereigns – the comprehensive Russia-China strategic partnership – and lackeys: the NATOstan/EU vassals.
Xi, the quintessential hermetic guest, is quite sharp at reading a table – and we’re not talking about Gallic gastronomic finesse. The minute he sat at the Paris table he got the Big Picture. This was not a tete-a-tete with Le Petit Roi, Emmanuel Macron. This was a threesome because Toxic Medusa Ursula von der Leyen, more appropriately defined as Pustula von der Lugen, had inserted herself in the plot.
Nothing was lost in translation for Xi: this was graphic illustration that Le Petit Roi, the leader of a third-rate former Western colonial power, enjoys zero “strategic autonomy”. The decisions that matter come from the Kafkaesque Eurocracy of the European Commission (EC), led by his Nanny, the Medusa, and directly relayed by the Hegemon.
Le Petit Roi spent the whole of Xi’s Gallic time babbling like an infant on Putin’s “destabilizations” and trying to “engage China, which objectively enjoys sufficient levers to change Moscow’s calculus in its war in Ukraine”.
Obviously no pubescent adviser at the Elysee Palace – and there’s quite a crowd – dared to break the news to Le Petit Roi about the strength, depth and reach of the Russia-China strategic partnership.
So it was up to his Nanny to volunteer out loud the fine print on the “Monsieur Xi comes to France” adventure.
Faithfully parroting Treasure Secretary Janet Yellen in her recent, disastrous Beijing incursion, the Nanny directly threatened the superpowered hermetic guest: you are exceeding in “over-capacity”, you are over-producing; and if you don’t stop it, we will sanction you to death.
So much for European “strategic autonomy”. Moreover, it’s idle to dwell on what can only be described as suicidal stupidity.
Steadfastly defending a debacle
Now let’s switch to what really matters: the chain of events leading to Putin’s lavish fifth inauguration at the Kremlin.
We start with the chief of GRU (main intelligence department) of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Admiral Igor Kostyukov.
Kostyukov, on the record, actually re-confirmed that right on the eve of the Special Military Operation (SMO), in February 2022, the West was ready to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia in Donbass, just as before the Great Patriotic War (Victory Day, incidentally, is celebrated this Thursday not only in Russia but also across the post-Soviet space).
Then the ambassadors of Britain and France were called at the Russian Foreign Ministry. They spent roughly half an hour each, separately, and left without addressing the media. There were no leaks about the reasons for both visits.
Yet that was more than obvious. The Foreign Ministry handed the Brits a serious note in response to David “of Arabia” Cameron’s babbling about using British long-range missiles to attack the territory of the Russian Federation. And to the French, another serious note on Le Petit Roi’s babbling about sending French troops to Ukraine.
Immediately after this compounded NATO babbling, the Russian Federation started drills on the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
So what started as a NATO verbal escalation was counterpunched not only with stern messages but also an extra, clear, stern warning: Moscow will regard any F-16 entering Ukraine as a potential carrier of nuclear weapons – regardless of its specific design. F-16s in Ukraine will be treated as a clear and present danger.
And there’s more: Moscow will respond with symmetric measures if Washington deploys any ground-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles (INF) in Ukraine – or elsewhere. There will be a counterpunch.
All that happened within the framework of astonishing Ukrainian losses in the battlefield over the past two months or so. The only parallels are with the 1980s Iran-Iraq war and the first Gulf War. Kiev, between dead, wounded and missing, may be losing as many as 10,000 soldiers a week: the equivalent of three divisions, 9 brigades or 30 battalions.
No compulsory mobilization, whatever its reach, can counter such debacle. And the much-advertised Russian offensive has not even started yet.
There’s no way the current U.S. administration led by a cadaver in the White House, in an electoral year, is going to send troops to a war that from the beginning was scripted to be fought to the last Ukrainian. And there’s no way NATO will officially send troops to this proxy war, because they will be minced into steak tartare in a matter of hours.
Any serious military analyst knows NATO has less than zero capability to transfer significant forces and assets to Ukraine – no matter the current, grandiloquent Steadfast Defender “exercises” coupled with Macron’s mini-Napoleon rhetoric.
So it’s Ouroboros all over again, the snake biting its own sorry tail: there was never a Plan B to the proxy war. And at the current configuration in the battlefield, plus possible outcomes, we’re back to what everyone from Putin to Nebenzya at the UN have been saying: it’s over only when we say it’s over. The only thing to negotiate is the modality of surrendering.
And of course there will be no sniffin’ sweaty sweatshirt cabal in place in Kiev: Zelensky is already a “Wanted” entity in Russia, and in a few days, from a legal standpoint, his government will be totally illegitimate.
Russia aligns with the world majority
Moscow has to be fully aware that serious threats remain: what NATOstan wants is to test the strategic capability of hitting Russian military, manufacturing or energy installations deep within the Russian Federation. This could be easily interpreted as a last shot of bourbon at the counter before the 404 saloon goes down in flames.
After all, Moscow’s response will have to be devastating, as already communicated by Medvedev Unplugged: “None of them will be able to hide either on Capitol Hill, or in the Elysee Palace, or on Downing Street 10. A world catastrophe will happen.”
Putin, at the inauguration, was cool, calm and collected, unfazed by all the hysterical incandescence across the NATOstan sphere.
These are his main takeaways:
Russia and only Russia will determine its own fate.
Russia will pass through this difficult, milestone period with dignity and become even stronger, it must be self-sufficient and competitive.
The key priority for Russia is safeguarding the people, preserving its age-old values and traditions.
Russia is ready to strengthen good relations with all countries, and with the world majority.
Russia will continue to work with its partners on the formation of a multipolar world order.
Russia does not reject dialog with the West, it is ready for dialog on security and strategic stability, but only on an equal footing.
All that is supremely rational. The problem is the other side is supremely irrational.
Still, a new Russian government will be in place in a matter of days. The new Prime Minister will be appointed by the President after the Duma approves the candidacy.
The new head of the Cabinet must propose to the President and the Duma candidates for deputy prime ministers and ministers – except for the heads of the security bloc and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The heads of the Ministry of Defense, FSB, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Emergency Situations and Ministry of Foreign Affairs will be appointed by the President after consultations with the Federation Council.
All ministerial candidacies will be submitted and considered before May 15.
And all that will happen before the key meeting: Putin and Xi face to face in Beijing on May 17. Everything will be in play – and on the table. Then a new era starts – outlining the path towards the BRICS+ summit next October in Kazan, and the subsequent multipolar moves.
The NATOstan lackeys will remain dazed, confused – and hysterical. So what; lackeys lack strategic depth, they just wallow in the shallow waters of irrelevancy.
The White House and Congress rally around the Star of David Flag
• 2,800 WORDS •
When, as expected, President Joe Biden signs off on the Antisemitism Awareness Act the Department of Education will be empowered to send so-called antisemitism monitors to enforce civil rights law at public schools as well as at colleges to observe and report on levels of hostility towards Jews. The monitors’ reports will eventually wind up in Congress which can propose remedies as required, including cutting funding and recommending civil rights charges in extreme cases. One of the more regrettable features of the act is that it accepts the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism as it applies to the state of Israel, making criticism of the Jewish state ipso facto antisemitism. Its text includes the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” as an antisemitic act. In reality, however, actual antisemitism is not as prevalent as Israel partisans claim. Most of what they call antisemitism is simply criticism of the legally self-proclaimed apartheid “Jewish State” and most of the animosity Israel experiences is opposition to its brutal treatment of the Palestinians. Giving legal sanction to that presumption that Israel must be protected from bigots means that the United States is well on the way to forbidding any criticism of Israel at all. Americans can criticize their own country or nations in Europe, or at least they are able to do so currently, but bad-mouthing Israel could soon constitute a criminal offense.
The Antisemitism Awareness Act is just one aspect of how the power of organized Jewish groups over the government and media is shaping the kind of society that Americans will be living in in the near future. It will be a society devoid of several fundamental constitutional rights, like free speech, due to deference to the preferences of one tiny demographic. And the one most interesting aspect of that power is how it has successfully hidden the fact that it even exists while also propagating the myth that Jews and Israel are especially worthy of special consideration because they are frequently or even always perceived as victims, an extension of the holocaust myth.
Indeed, Israel is recently always in the news and most often completely protected by the media and the talking heads elements, particularly true if one sinks to watching Fox or reading the Wall Street Journal, New York Times or Washington Post. Even the loathsome Benjamin Netanyahu frequently gets good press while nonviolent student peace demonstrators are invariably described as anti-Israeli or pro-Hamas terrorists even when they are assaulted by Zionist thugs led by an Israeli special ops officer and funded and armed by Jewish billionaires as occurred recently in Los Angeles.
Nevertheless, sometimes something slips through the defenses that reveals all too clearly what is going on. In responding to a question from a journalist, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken made a claim recently that absolutely no one who has spent any time in Washington will believe. The journalist had asked whether the Federal Government in making its foreign policy decisions tended to favor and/or excuse the behavior of some countries while condemning others for exactly the same actions. Blinken replied “We apply the same standard to everyone. And that doesn’t change whether the country in question is an adversary, a competitor, a friend or an ally.”
Everyone in the room understood very clearly that Blinken wasn’t telling the truth and was trying to preserve the fiction that the United States holds allies and clients to the same “rules based international order” standard that it uses for others, most notably competitor nations like Russia and China or adversaries like Iran. No one takes what Blinken says seriously in any event, and it does not help his general credibility when he feels compelled to lie for no reason whatsoever.
Would that someone in the room had had the temerity to cite one of Blinken’s most egregiously partisan comments, his greeting to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the airport tarmac of Ben Gurion airport shortly after the October 7th Hamas attack. He said “I come before you as a Jew. I understand on a personal level the harrowing echoes that Hamas’s massacres carry for Israeli Jews – indeed, for Jews everywhere.” It prompted one to mutter, “No Anthony, you are the Secretary of States of the United States of America. You are there to represent American interests in avoiding a major war in the Middle East, not to represent the interests of your tribe by declaring yourself one of them.”
The Blinken meeting with Netanyahu was particularly telling as few in Washington would doubt that the Joe Biden White House and Congress have totally surrendered to Israeli interests rather than serving the needs of their constituents in the United States. Paul Craig Roberts describes it as “The US Congress has become an extension of the Israeli government.” To answer the journalist’s question honestly Blinken should have admitted that the Biden government is fully committed to protecting Israel and even its perceived interests when they conflict with normal US policy. On Wednesday the Biden administration indicated that it has indefinitely delayed a required report investigating potential Israeli war crimes in Gaza that was supposed to be released by the US State Department. If the report had concluded, which it should have, that Israel violated international humanitarian law, the US would have to stop sending foreign aid due to the Leahy Law, which makes it illegal for the US government to provide aid to any foreign security forces found to be committing “gross violations of human rights.” So Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken decided to deep six the report instead to protect Israel by breaking US law, though they have reportedly delayed one shipment of bombs lest they be used on civilians in Rafah. Nevertheless, Biden clearly means what he says when he repeatedly stumbles to confirm that US security guarantees to Israel are “ironclad.” Indeed, the tie with the Jewish state goes well beyond what is generally due to anyone even described as an ally, which Israel, also no democracy, is not in any event, as an alliance requires both reciprocity and a precise understanding of the red lines in the relationship.
Nothing illustrates the total subservience of Washington to Israel better than how the United States is unnecessarily getting itself involved in an argument that might well prove to be a major embarrassment as well as trouble in America’s relationship with many foreign states. And, as is often the case, it involves Israel. There have been confirmed reports that the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague is preparing to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and two other senior Israeli officials in connection with war crimes related to the ongoing genocide directed against the Gazans. Netanyahu is reportedly reaching wildly out to his many “friends” to prevent such a development. And, in line with Washington-Jerusalem thinking that every good crisis deserves an excessive use of force or even a military solution, there are already reports that pressure, including threats, is being exerted both by Israel and the US against the jurists on the court and even directed against their families. The Israeli government warned the Biden administration that if the ICC issues arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, it will take retaliatory steps against the Palestinian Authority that could lead to its collapse, further destabilizing the region. Israel is also conducting a parallel diplomatic channels outreach in Europe to convince the local governments to advise their representatives on the court that it would be desirable to squash its investigation.
Netanyahu, who called President Joe Biden and asked for help, has in response to news reports tweeted that Israel “will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense. The threat to seize the soldiers and officials of the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state is outrageous. We will not bow to it.” Netanyahu also denounced the possible warrants as an “unprecedented antisemitic hate crime.” As ICC deliberations are secret it would appear that an American or British jurist must have leaked the story to enable Netanyahu to mount a campaign against it. The White House and Congress are already moving full speed ahead to make the warrants go away and are exploring options to directly confront and discredit the court if the Israelis are actually punished.
The US has nothing to gain and much to lose in confronting the ICC as the court is generally well respected. And more might be coming. There are reports that prosecutors from the ICC have interviewed medical staff at two of Gaza’s largest hospitals in their investigation of other possible war crimes committed by Israel in connection with the mass graves recently discovered. ICC was founded in 2002 as a last resort court to deal with war crimes and crimes against humanity that were not addressable otherwise. The court was established by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute). Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute and does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction. However, should a warrant in Netanyahu’s name be issued, his travel could be restricted, as the 123 countries that recognize the court may consider themselves obliged to arrest him.
As of March 2023, there were 123 member states of the Court. The United States is no longer a member because on May 6th, 2002, the United States, having previously signed the Rome Statute, formally withdrew its signature and indicated that it did not intend to ratify the agreement. Another state that has withdrawn its signature is the Sudan while some states that have never become parties to the Rome Statute include India, Indonesia, and China. United States policy concerning the ICC has varied by administration. The Clinton administration signed the Rome Statute in 2000, but did not submit it for Senate ratification. The George W. Bush administration, which was the US administration at the time of the ICC’s founding, stated that it would not join the ICC. The Obama administration subsequently re-established a working relationship with the Court as an observer. There has been no change in the status since that time, but the relationship is regarded as inactive.
What will the United States do to bail out Israel one more time? It has already made its position known. White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre stated “We’ve been really clear about the ICC investigation. We do not support it. We don’t believe that they have the jurisdiction.” Deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel doubled down on that declaring “Our position is clear. We continue to believe that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over the Palestinian situation.” The White House was joined by leading congressional Republicans. Zionist Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has pressured the White House and State Department to “use every available tool to prevent such an abomination,” explaining how conceding the point to ICC “would directly undermine US national security interests. If unchallenged by the Biden administration, the ICC could create and assume unprecedented power to issue arrest warrants against American political leaders, American diplomats, and American military personnel.”
There is a precedent to the US taking action against the ICC. On September 2, 2020, the United States government imposed sanctions on the ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, in response to an investigation by the court into US war crimes in Afghanistan, so there is some sensitivity to the fact that as the US is the world’s leading source of war crimes, it would be wise to delegitimize agencies that would look too deeply into that fact. But the ICC sometimes has its uses as when the Biden administration publicly welcomed a war crimes investigation by the ICC against Russian President Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine. Asked why the United States supported an International Criminal Court investigation into Russian officials, Patel declared that “There is no moral equivalency between the kinds of things that we see [Russian President Vladimir Putin] and the Kremlin undertake in comparison to the Israeli government,” once again demonstrating that what Blinken said to the journalist was nonsense.
The Republican Party is seeking to outdo the White House in demonstrating its love for Israel. A letter signed by twelve GOP Senators was sent to Karim Khan, chief prosecutor on the ICC. The letter threatens members of the court over the possible indictment of Netanyahu and company. The group of 12 Republican senators who I like to refer to as the “Dirty Dozen” due to the large political contributions they receive from pro-Israel sources, sent a letter to the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan that threatens “severe sanctions” if the court goes ahead with the plan to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his Defense Minister and one other senior official. The letter, dated April 24, referenced the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, a law that authorizes the president to use any means to free any US personnel detained by the ICC even though it does not apply to Israel. It says, ridiculously, that “If you issue a warrant for the arrest of the Israeli, we will interpret this not only as a threat to Israel’s sovereignty but as a threat to the sovereignty of the United States” and goes on to deny that the ICC even has jurisdiction to issue warrants since Israel is not a member of the court. The apparent drafter, Senator Tom Cotton, was seemingly unaware that Palestine is a member of the ICC and the arrest warrants would be based on war crimes committed by Israel on its nominal territory, Gaza and the West Bank.
The letter concludes with a heavy-handed threat: “The United States will not tolerate politicized attacks by the ICC on our allies. Target Israel and we will target you. If you move forward with the measures indicated in this report, we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and your associates, and bar you and your family from the United States. You have been warned.” A few days later, the ICC issued a statement condemning the threats made against the court and said attempts to “impede, intimidate, or improperly influence” ICC officials must “cease immediately.” The 12 Republican senators who signed on to the letter include Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn, Katie Boyd Britt, Ted Budd, Kevin Cramer, Ted Cruz, Bill Hagerty, Pete Ricketts, Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, and Tim Scott. Only Lindsay Graham was missing and he was probably busy drumming up support for his plan to “destroy the enemies of the state of Israel.” Cotton, who has recommended that people who are inconvenienced by protesters should confront them and beat them up, has also introduced legislation denying college loan relief to students who faced state or federal charges while demonstrating against the deaths in Gaza. Some other Republican congressmen who are short on brain cells but strong on Israel are seeking to have protesters “convicted of unlawful activity on the campus of an American university since October 7th 2023” deported to do six months community service in Gaza, though how that would be implemented is not clear. Congressman Randy Weber of Texas explained “If you support a terrorist organization and you participate in unlawful activity on campuses, you should get a taste of your own medicine. I am going to bet that these pro-Hamas supporters wouldn’t last a day, but let’s give them the opportunity.”
So the United States will again go to bat for Israel and Israel will ignore what comes out and dodge any consequences. The real losers in the process will be the American people, who more clearly than ever will see and hopefully recognize that they have a government that spends an awful lot of time and money on Israel and doing things that are being promoted by Jewish groups. We have a legislature and executive branch that have been corrupted and compromised from top to bottom, always doing what is wrong for the most selfish reasons, often out of loyalty to foreign governments like Israel that could care less. The United States was once a symbol of freedom and opportunity. Now it has become an international embarrassment.
If you’ve ever taken a lifesaving course, you know there’s a real possibility that a drowning person will drag you under and you’ll both die. It’s a lesson that should be kept in mind when discussing America’s relationship with Israel. (adapted from)@LarryBoorstein
On Monday, Israel intensified its airstrikes on Rafah, bombing more than 50 sites in the heart of the city. Video footage on Twitter showed plumes of smoke rising from the makeshift encampments and residential buildings where more than 1.4 million refugees are presently huddled in the most densely populated place on earth. Israel’s air campaign was accompanied by a sizable ground-offensive that deployed tanks and armored vehicles to the southern border where Israeli troops quickly seized the Rafah Crossing without resistance.
The sudden uptick in violence has triggered widespread panic among the Palestinians many of who have already gathered their families and belongings onto carts and buses and fled northward to safety. The opening assault on the civilian enclave is reminiscent of earlier attacks on Gaza City and Khan Younis both of which followed a similar pattern. The launching of random bombings is designed to amplify feelings of terror within the population while the humanitarian blockade tightens the stranglehold on critical food and medical supplies. The objective here is not to kill as many Palestinians as possible, but to force them into sprawling tent cities where they will languish amid the rubble until the international community finds a way to spirit them out of the country. For Israel, the endgame has always been ethnic cleansing, a comprehensive erasure of the native population. The ground invasion of Rafah represents the final phase of that maniacal strategy. This is from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:
The assault on Rafah comes despite the acceptance by Hamas Monday of a proposal for a temporary cessation of hostilities in exchange for the release of hostages. But after spending weeks attempting to blame the Palestinians for the ongoing war, Israeli officials flatly rejected the proposal….
In response to the murderous Israeli onslaught, multiple US officials reiterated their unlimited support for Israel. “We have always made clear that we are committed to Israel’s defense,” said State Department spokesman Vedant Patel on Monday. “That commitment to Israel’s security remains ironclad.” US reiterates “ironclad” support to Israel as Netanyahu launches assault on Rafah,World Socialist Web Site
The cynical and misleading phrase “Israel’s right to defend itself” has become synonymous with the premeditated mass-murder of civilians. Most people have never seen anything as horrific as Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza which explains why college campuses across the United States have become hotbeds of political activism almost overnight. America’s students now serve as the nation’s conscience by opposing a flagrantly-immoral onslaught that deliberately targets defenseless women and children.
Not surprisingly, Israel has yet to produce any hard evidence that their 7 month-long bloodbath has killed even one Hamas militant. Instead, we are expected to believe the unverified claims of IDF spokesmen who have proven themselves to be thoroughly unreliable time and time again. For all we know, the Hamas death figures are completely fabricated like the “40 beheaded babies” or the numerous fictitious rape allegations. All of these elaborate hoaxes have turned out to be part of a twisted, public relations campaign aimed at building support for Israel’s relentless butchery.
In fact, there is no reason to believe that Israel’s operation has anything to do with Hamas at all. Hamas is merely a pretext for corralling the Palestinians and driving them out of Gaza. That’s the real goal.
But while surveys show that a large majority of the global population opposes Israel’s demented crusade, that is not the case in Israel. A recent article by Philip Giraldi stated that “92% of Israelis fully support the slaughter of the Palestinians by Netanyahu and his psychopaths.” Author Norman Finkelstein has largely corroborated Giraldi’s findings but provided more detail in a recent interview on You Tube. Here’s what he said:
“It’s not just the Israeli state. If you look at the Israeli society… overwhelmingly supports the genocidal war in Gaza. It’s about 95% of the Jewish Israelis who support the war. … I have to admit, I was astonished when I read the numbers… As of January, only 3.2 percent of Jewish Israelis believe the IDF is using too much firepower in Gaza. Can you believe those numbers? As of January, when the case had already reached the ICJ on the question of genocide, only 3.2 percent of Jewish Israelis believed the IDF was using too much firepower in Gaza. So, when people blame Netanyahu for the insanity …that is a misrepresentation of the facts…. The whole population agrees with what Netanyahu is doing. (Finkelstein also reports that 60% of Jewish Israelis oppose even providing Palestinians with humanitarian aid.) Norman Finkelstein on Israel Palestine, YouTube 55:10 min
In a 2-minute video on Rumble, Finkelstein provided even more interesting datapoints which help to illustrate the monstrous character of the current Israeli rampage. Not surprisingly, his remarks were scrubbed from You Tube but presented instead on a smaller “free speech” platform called Rumble. Here’s part of what he said:
I have very little sympathy for what has become of that state. It’s a satanic state…. If you look at every metric: Intensity of bombing; Payload of bombs; Imprecision of bombs; Destruction of civilian infrastructure; Ratio of civilians to combatants killed; Ratio of women and children to total numbers killed. By every metric,… what Israel is doing in Gaza is in a class all of its own. …They are killing people in a concentration camp. They are killing people in a concentration camp. They can’t go anywhere. They can’t flee. Norman Finkelstein on the Satanic state of Israel, Rumble
What are we to make of this? After all, Americans are constantly being told that Israelis are just like them, and that we share the same western values and western beliefs. So, why the vast discrepancy? Why, for example, do 75% of Democrats now oppose Israel’s action in Gaza (Majority in U.S. Now Disapprove of Israeli Action in Gaza, Gallup) while an overwhelming majority of Israelis think the bloodletting should continue? And why do we constantly hear Israeli political leaders and senior-level bureaucrats denigrating Palestinians in the most vitriolic and hateful language? And, finally, why do we see a myriad of videos on social media of Israelis celebrating the destruction of Palestinian hospitals, universities and mosques, or blocking food trucks headed for Gaza, or gleefully mugging for a camera while mistreating the prisoners in their care? How do we explain this phenomenon? What twisted ideology has poisoned the minds of these people that they would treat others with such egregious inhumanity? (Check out this video of joyous Israelis celebrating the invasion of Rafah.)
Scenes like this (in the video) are bound to make ordinary people scratch their heads and wonder why the Israelis are so happy that their army is being used to crush a civilian population. What glory is there in that?
None at all. Many people are equally baffled when they hear Israeli politicians spew their loathing for Palestinians while making the case that women and children deserve the same punishment as Hamas. Where does that wellspring of hatred come from? And why would anyone in their right-mind want to block humanitarian aid trucks from delivering food to starving women and children? How sick is that?
How do people get this way? What sort of social environment produces people who celebrate sadistic acts of brutality and cruelty?
Author Lawrence Davidson helps to answer these questions by showing how the transplanting of mainly European Jews to Palestine created “cultural and ‘racial’ incubators for an ‘us (superior) vs. them (inferior)’” which is fairly common among settler populations. Here’s more:
The founders of modern Zionism were both Jews and Europeans, and (as such) had acquired the West’s cultural sense of superiority in relation to non-Europeans…..This sense of superiority would play an important role when a deal (the Balfour Declaration) (in which), the British would… help create a “Jewish national home” in Palestine…
…in other European colonies, where large numbers of Europeans resided, the era following World War II saw their eventual evacuation as power shifted over to the natives….Unfortunately, in the case of Palestine, this process of de-colonization never occurred…..
Soon thereafter, the Zionists began executing a prepared plan to conquer the “Holy Land” and chase away or subjugate the native population. And what of that imperial point of view which saw the European as superior and the native as inferior? This became institutionalized in the practices of the new Israeli state….
That made Israel one of the very few … self-identified “Western” nation states to continue to implement old-style imperial policies: they discriminated against the Palestinian population in every way imaginable, pushed them into enclosed areas of concentration and sought to control their lives in great detail.
If one wants to know what this meant for the evolving character of Israel’s citizenry who now would live out the colonial drama as an imperial power in their own right, one might take a look at a book by Sven Lindqvist entitled Exterminate All The Brutes (New Press 1996). This work convincingly shows that lording it over often resisting native peoples, debasing and humiliating them, regularly killing or otherwise punishing them when they protest, leads the colonials to develop genocidal yearnings….
The Israelis have taught their children the imperial point of view, augmented it with biased media reporting, labeled the inevitable resistance offered by the Palestinians as anti-Semitism and took it as proof of the need to suppress and control this population of “Others.”
And, from the Zionist standpoint, this entire process has worked remarkably well. Today all but a handful of Israeli Jews dislike and fear the people they conquered and displaced. They wish they would go away. And, when their resistance gets just a bit too much to bear, they are now quite willing to see them put out of the way…..
Now that apartheid South Africa is no more, the Israelis are the last surviving heirs to that dreadful heritage. Origins of Israel’s Anti-Arab Racism, Consortium News
Repeat: “…lording over… resisting native peoples, debasing and humiliating them, regularly killing or otherwise punishing them when they protest, leads the colonials to develop genocidal yearnings….”
Does that sum up the Palestinian experience for the last 75 years?
It does.
And have those “genocidal yearnings” matured into a full-blown genocide transforming all of historic Palestine into a free-fire zone in which the wholesale slaughter of civilians is applauded as a struggle against Hamas?
Yes, again.
It’s worth noting, that the views of other analysts are not entirely in synch with Davidson’s. For example, here’s how author Ron Unz responded when he was asked if he thought ‘racism played a role in the way the Palestinians are treated (by Israel)?
As I discussed in a long 2018 article, the word “racism” is far too mild a term to describe the attitude of traditional Orthodox Judaism towards all non-Jews. Drawing upon the seminal work of Israeli Prof. Israel Shahak, I highlighted some important facts:
… unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact……
Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications….
My encounter a decade ago with Shahak’s candid description of the true doctrines of traditional Judaism was certainly one of the most world-altering revelations of my entire life. But as I gradually digested the full implications, all sorts of puzzles and disconnected facts suddenly became much more clear….
For example, my history books had always disapprovingly mentioned Germany’s Max Nordau and Italy’s Cesare Lombroso as two of the founding figures of European racism and eugenics theories, but it was only very recently that I discovered that Nordau had also been the joint founder with Theodor Herzl of the world Zionist movement, while his major racialist treatise Degeneration, was dedicated to Lombroso, his Jewish mentor…
Obviously the Talmud is hardly regular reading among ordinary Jews these days…But it is important to keep in mind that until just a few generations ago, almost all European Jews were deeply Orthodox,… Highly distinctive cultural patterns and social attitudes can easily seep into a considerably wider population, especially one that remains ignorant of the origin of those sentiments, a condition enhancing their unrecognized influence. A religion based upon the principle of “Love Thy Neighbor” may or may not be workable in practice, but a religion based upon “Hate Thy Neighbor” might have long-term cultural ripple effects that extend far beyond the direct community of the deeply pious. If nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand years were taught to feel a seething hatred toward all non-Jews and also developed an enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty to mask that attitude, it is difficult to believe that such an unfortunate history has had absolutely no consequences for our present-day world, or that of the relatively recent past. The Jewish Roots of the Gaza Rampage, Ron Unz, The Unz Review
IMO, both of these answers help to explain Israel’s unusual penchant for cruel and sadistic behavior.
Whether that behavior is an expression of a colonial-settler mindset that sees the occupier as inherently superior to the native people or a religious doctrine that denigrates outsiders as “merely beasts in the shape of men”; the outcome is the same. In both cases, the aggressive behavior of one group is justified in terms of his basic superiority to the other. This is the type of Nietzschean logic that allows a nation to pound an entire civilian population into dust and then try to dignify it as a ‘war between equals.’ What a joke. As Finkelstein says, “They are killing people in a concentration camp.” Gaza is not a gladiatorial cage-match, it’s the moral equivalent of a firing squad.
We also must ask ourselves why Netanyahu is pressing ahead with the Rafah operation when it has clearly exacerbated Israel’s growing isolation and strained relations between Tel Aviv and Washington. The reason is, quite simply, that the plan to expel the Arab population from Palestine precedes the creation of the Jewish state by nearly 50 years. In other words, the plan to forcefully eradicate the indigenous people from their historic homeland dates back to the beginnings of Zionism itself more than a century ago. As “Zionist zealot Yosef Weitz said in 1940 – eight years before the founding of the state of Israel:
“It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples … If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us …. The only solution is a Land…without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises… There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries … Not one village must be left, not one tribe… There is no other solution.” Israel’s Architect of Ethnic Cleansing, Stefan Moore, Consortium News
Here’s some additional background from Moore’s column:
In 1932, when Weitz joined the Jewish National Fund, there were only 91,000 Jews in Palestine (roughly 10 percent of the population) who owned a mere 2 percent of the land…. Changing that demographic reality called for a radical two-pronged solution first, to convince the British Mandate in Palestine to allow more Jewish migration and, simultaneously, develop an efficient program to expel indigenous Palestinians.”….
Thanks to Weitz’s obsessive commitment to the mass expulsion of Palestinians he became known as the “architect of transfer” — a euphemism for ethnic cleansing… that would reach its apotheosis in the Nakba of 1948….
“There is no room for us with our neighbours. . . . . the only way is to cut and eradicate them [the Palestinian Arabs] from the roots...
Speaking in 1938, David Ben-Gurion …announced in a 1938 speech:
“After we become a strong force…we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine…The state will have to preserve order – not by preaching but with machine guns.”….
Plan D, it was the final Masterplan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine:
“The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expelling residents; demolishing homes; and, finally, planting mines in the rubble to prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning…”
When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s indigenous population, over 750,000 people, had been uprooted; 531 villages had been destroyed… and an estimated 10-15,000 Palestinians were dead….
….Meanwhile, the racist language used by Israel’s leaders to justify the mass eradication of Palestinians remains unchanged: “We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly,” spits Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant; “This is a battle, not only of Israel against these barbarians,” intones Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “it is a battle of civilization against barbarism.” And “There are no Palestinians, because there isn’t a Palestinian people,” declares Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
“It is tempting to dismiss the revival of transfer … as the wild ravings of right-wing extremists,” writes Nur-eldeen Masalha. “Such a dismissal is dangerous, however, and it is well to be reminded that the concept of transfer lies at the very heart of mainstream Zionism. Israel’s Architect of Ethnic Cleansing, Stefan Moore, Consortium News
A careful reading of Moore’s article should convince readers that the current furor over October 7th is merely a smokescreen that’s being used to conceal the real motive for the war, which is Israel’s determination to control all the land between the River to the Sea in order to establish a demographically viable Jewish state with a clear Jewish majority. That is the primary objective of the Zionist project and it has been for more than a century. The last remaining obstacle to achieving that goal is the nearly two million Palestinians who would rather die than abandon their homeland.
Police in the Turkish city of Adana detained 11 suspects, five Israeli and two Syrian, on allegations of organ trafficking, the Daily Sabahreported on 5 May.
The Provincial Directorate of Security’s Anti-Smuggling and Border Gates Branch began investigating after examining the passports of seven individuals who arrived in Adana from Israel about a month ago by plane for the purpose of health tourism. The two Syrian nationals, ages 20 and 21, were found to have fake passports.
Further investigation revealed that Syrian nationals had each agreed to sell one of their own kidneys to two of the Israeli nationals, ages 68 and 28, for kidney transplants in Adana.
During searches at the suspects’ residences, $65,000 and numerous fake passports were seized.
Israel has long been at the center of what Bloombergdescribed in 2011 as a “sprawling global black market in organs where brokers use deception, violence, and coercion to buy kidneys from impoverished people, mainly in underdeveloped countries, and then sell them to critically ill patients in more-affluent nations.”
The financial newspaper added, “Many of the black-market kidneys harvested by these gangs are destined for people who live in Israel.”
The organ-trafficking network extends from former Soviet Republics such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova to Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, and beyond, the Bloomberg investigation showed.
Accusations of Israeli involvement in organ trafficking also apply to the occupied Palestinian territories.
In 2009, Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, Aftonbladet, reported testimony that the Israeli army was kidnapping and murdering Palestinians to harvest their organs.
The report quotes Palestinian claims that young men from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli army, and their bodies returned to the families with missing organs.
“‘Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,’ relatives of Khaled from Nablus said to me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin as well as the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who all had disappeared for a few days and returned by night, dead and autopsied,” wrote Donald Bostrom, the author of the report.
Bostrom also cites an incident of alleged organ theft during the first Palestinian intifada in 1992. He says that the Israeli army abducted a young man known for throwing stones at Israeli troops in the Nablus area. The young man was shot in the chest, both legs, and the stomach before being taken to a military helicopter, which transported him to an unknown location.
Five nights later, Bostrom said, the young man’s body was returned, wrapped in green hospital sheets.
Israel’s Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir Forensic Medicine Institute harvested skin, corneas, heart valves, and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians, and foreign workers without permission from relatives.
The Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place but claimed, “This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer.”
Israel’s assault on Gaza since 7 October has provided further opportunities for the theft and harvesting of Palestinians’ organs.
On 30 January, WAFA news agency reported that the Israeli army returned the bodies of 100 Palestinian civilians it had stolen from hospitals and cemeteries in various areas in Gaza.
According to medical sources, inspection of some of the bodies showed that organs were missing from some of them.
On 18 January, the Times of Israel reported that the Israeli army confirmed reports that its soldiers dug up graves in a Gaza cemetery, claiming its soldiers were trying to “confirm that the bodies of hostages were not buried there.”
The Transformation is accelerating. The harsh, often violent, police repression of student protests across the U.S. and Europe, in wake of the continuing Palestinian massacres, exposes sheer intolerance towards those voicing condemnation against the violence in Gaza.
The category of ‘hate speech’ enacted into law has become so ubiquitous and fluid that criticism of the conduct of Israel’s behaviour in Gaza and the West Bank is now treated as a category of extremism and as a threat to the state. Confronted by criticism of Israel, the ruling élites respond by angrily lashing out.
Is there a boundary (still) between criticism and anti-semitism? In the West the two increasingly are being made to cohere.
Today’s stifling of any criticism of Israel’s conduct – in blatant contradiction with any western claim to a values-based order – reflects desperation and a touch of panic. Those who still occupy the leadership slots of Institutional Power in the U.S. and Europe are compelled by the logic of those structures to pursue courses of action that are leading to ‘system’ breakdown, both domestically – and concomitantly – provoking the dramatic intensification of international tensions, too.
Mistakes flow from the underlying ideological rigidities in which the ruling strata are trapped: The embrace of a transformed Biblical Israel that long ago separated from today’s U.S. Democratic Party zeitgeist; the inability to accept reality in Ukraine; and the notion that U.S. political coercion alone can revive paradigms in Israel and the Middle East that are long gone.
The notion that a new Israeli Nakba of Palestinians can be forced down the throats of the western and the global public are both delusional and reek of centuries of old Orientalism.
What else can one say when Senator Tom Cotton posts: “These little Gazas are disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate, full of pro-Hamas sympathisers; fanatics and freaks”?
When order unravels, it unravels quickly and comprehensively. Suddenly, the GOP conference has had its nose rubbed in dirt (over its lack of support for Biden’s $61bn for Ukraine); the U.S. public’s despair at open border immigration is disdainfully ignored; and Gen Z’s expressions of empathy with Gaza is declared an internal ‘enemy’ to be roughly suppressed. All points of strategic inflection and transformation – likely as not.
And the rest of the world now is cast as an enemy too, being perceived as recalcitrants who fail to embrace the western recitation of its ‘Rules Order’ catechism and for failing clearly to toe the line on support for Israel and the proxy war on Russia.
It is a naked bid for unchecked power; one nevertheless that is galvanising a global blow-back. It is pushing China closer to Russia and accelerating the BRICS confluence. Plainly put, the world – faced with massacres in Gaza and West Bank – will not abide by either the Rules or any western hypocritical cherry-picking of International Law. Both systems are collapsing under the leaden weight of western hypocrisy.
Nothing is more obvious than Secretary of State Blinken’s scolding of President Xi for China’s treatment of the Uighurs and his threats of sanctions for Chinas trade with Russia – powering ‘Russia’s assault on Ukraine’, Blinken asserts. Blinken has made an enemy of the one power that can evidently out-compete the U.S.; that has manufacturing and competitive overmatch vs the U.S.
The point here is that these tensions can quickly spiral down into war of ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ – ranged against not just the China, Russia, Iran “Axis of Evil”, but vs Turkey, India Brazil and all others who dare to criticise the moral correctness of either of the West’s Israel and Ukraine projects. That is, it has the potential to turn into the West versus the Rest.
Again, another own goal.
Crucially, these two conflicts have led to the Transformation of the West from self-styled ‘mediators’ claiming to bring calm to flashpoints, to being active contenders in these wars. And, as active contenders, they can permit no criticism of their actions – either inside, or out; for that would be to hint at appeasement.
Put plainly: this transformation to contenders in war lies at the heart of Europe’s present obsession with militarism. Bruno Maçães relates that a “senior European minister argued to him that: if the U.S. withdrew its support for Ukraine, his country, a Nato member, would have no choice but to fight alongside Ukraine – inside Ukraine. As he put it, why should his country wait for a Ukrainian defeat, followed by [a defeated Ukraine] swelling the ranks of a Russian army bent on new excursions?”
Such a proposition is both stupid and likely would lead to a continent-wide war (a prospect with which the unnamed minister seemed astonishingly at ease). Such insanity is the consequence of the Europeans’ acquiescence to Biden’s attempt at regime change in Moscow. They wanted to become consequential players at the table of the Great Game, but have come to perceive that they sorely lack the means for it. The Brussels Class fear the consequence to this hubris will be the unravelling of the EU.
“At bottom, the liberal assault on free speech [on Gaza and Ukraine] is a bid for unchecked power. By shifting the locus of decision from democratic deliberation to legal procedures, the élites aim to insulate [their neoliberal] cultish programmes from contestation and accountability. The politicisation of law – and the hollowing out of politics go hand in hand”.
Despite these efforts to cancel opposing voices, other perspectives and understandings of history nonetheless are reasserting their primacy: Do Palestinians have a point? Is there a history to their predicament? ‘No, they are a tool used by Iran, by Putin and by Xi Jinping’, Washington and Brussels says.
They say such untruths because the intellectual effort to see Palestinians as human beings, as citizens, endowed with rights, would force many Western states to revise much of their rigid system of thinking. It is simpler and easier for Palestinians to be left ambiguous, or to ‘disappear’.
The future which this approach heralds couldn’t be farther from the democratic, co-operative international order the White House claims to advocate. Rather it leads to the precipice of civil violence in the U.S. and to wider war in Ukraine.
Many of today’s Woke liberals however, would reject the allegation of being anti-free speech, labouring under the misapprehension that their liberalism is not curtailing free speech, but rather is protecting it from ‘falsehoods’ emanating from the enemies of ‘our democracy’ (i.e. the ‘MAGA contingent’). In this way, they falsely perceive themselves as still adhering to the classical liberalism of, say, John Stuart Mill.
Whilst it is true that in On Liberty (1859) Mill argued that free speech must include the freedom to cause offence, in the same essay he also insisted that the value of freedom lay in its collective utility. He specified that “it must be utility in the largest sense – grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being”.
Free speech has little value if it facilitates the discourse of the ‘deplorables’ or the so-called Right.
In other words, “Like many other 19th-century liberals”, Professor Gray argues, “Mill feared the rise of democratic government because he believed it meant empowering an ignorant and tyrannical majority. Time and again, he vilified the torpid masses who were content with traditional ways of living”. One can hear here, the precursor to Mrs Clinton’s utter disdain for the ‘deplorables’ living in ‘fly-over’ U.S. states.
Rousseau too, is often taken as an icon of ‘liberty’ and ‘individualism’ and widely admired. Yet here too, we have language which conceals its’ fundamentally anti-political character.
Rousseau saw human associations rather, as groups to be acted upon, so that all thinking and daily behaviour could be folded into the like-minded units of a unitary state.
The individualism of Rousseau’s thought, therefore, is no libertarian assertion of absolute rights of free speech against the all-consuming state. No raising of the ‘tri-colour’ against oppression.
Quite the reverse! Rousseau’s passionate ‘defence of the individual’ arises out of his opposition to ‘the tyranny’ of social convention; the forms, rituals and ancient myths that bind society – religion, family, history, and social institutions. His ideal may be proclaimed as that of individual freedom, but it is ‘freedom’, however, not in a sense of immunity from control of the state, but in our withdrawal from the supposed oppressions and corruptions of collective society.
Family relationship is thus transmuted subtly into a political relationship; the molecule of the family is broken into the atoms of its individuals. With these atoms today groomed further to shed their biological gender, their cultural identity and ethnicity, they are coalesced afresh into the single unity of the state.
This is the deceit concealed in classical Liberalism’s language of freedom and individualism – ‘freedom’ nonetheless being hailed as the major contribution of the French Revolution to western civilisation.
Yet perversely, behind the language of freedom lay de-civilisation.
The ideological legacy from the French Revolution, however, was radical de-civilisation. The old sense of permanence – of belonging somewhere in space and time – was conjured away, to give place to its very opposite: Transience, temporariness and ephemerality.
“Discontinuity of culture coexists with the loss of the sense of the past … The loss of this sensibility has had an unsettling effect on culture itself and has deprived it of moral depth. Today, the anticultural exercises a powerful role in western society. Culture is frequently framed in instrumental and pragmatic terms and rarely perceived as a system of norms that endow human life with meaning. Culture has become a shallow construct to be disposed of – or changed.
“The western cultural elite is distinctively uncomfortable with the narrative of civilisation and has lost its enthusiasm for celebrating it. The contemporary cultural landscape is saturated with a corpus of literature that calls into question the moral authority of civilisation and associates it more with negative qualities.
“De-civilization means that even the most foundational identities – such as that between man and woman – is called into question. At a time when the answer to the question of ‘what it means to be human’ becomes complicated – and where the assumptions of western civilisation lose their salience – the sentiments associated with wokeism can flourish”.
Karl Polyani, in his Great Transformation (published some 80 years ago), held that the massive economic and social transformations that he had witnessed during his lifetime – the end of the century of “relative peace” in Europe from 1815 to 1914, and the subsequent descent into economic turmoil, fascism and war, which was still ongoing at the time of the book’s publication – had but a single, overarching cause:
Prior to the 19th century, he insisted, the human way of being had always been ‘embedded’ in society, and that it was subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations i.e. to a civilisational culture. Life was not treated as separated into distinct particulars, but as parts of an articulate whole – of life itself.
Liberalism turned this logic on its head. It constituted an ontological break with much of human history. Not only did it artificially separate the ‘economic’ from the ‘political’, but liberal economics (its foundational notion) demanded the subordination of society – of life itself – to the abstract logic of the self-regulating market. For Polanyi, this “means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market”.
The answer – clearly – was to make society again a distinctly human relationship of community, given meaning through a living culture. In this sense, Polanyi also emphasised the territorial character of sovereignty – the nation-state as the pre-condition to the exercise of democratic politics.
Polanyi would have argued that, absent a return to Life Itself as the pivot to politics, a violent backlash was inevitable. (Though hopefully not as dire as the transformation through which he lived.)
When a writer says that he believes that Western civilization is falling he is called a pessimist. Perhaps he is really an optimist. Was it not well for the world that the vile old civilisation of Rome, built upon a tenement-housed population of slaves, passed away? How otherwise could the virile young nations of Christendom have arisen? When we survey the urban civilisations of our own time, with their shoddy cinematograph amusements to stupefy a mass of wage-slaves, just as the circuses of old stupefied the mobs of Rome – with their worship of wealth, their ugliness and joylessness and disease – are we pessimists if we think that Providence soon will make a clear sweep of the mess, and will makes a way for the unspoilt peoples?
— Aodh De Blácam, Heroic Ireland
The Economist Philip Pilkington wrote an essay on what he called “Capitalism’s Overlooked Contradiction”. He identified this contradiction as the “tendency of the rate of people to fall.”
Pilkington was here borrowing from Marx, whose prediction of a necessary collapse of capitalism and transition to communism was premised on a fundamental contradiction he believed he had identified in the logic of capitalism: since labour was the source of all value, as capitalists invested in technology the amount of surplus value they could squeeze out of the production process would necessarily fall, leading eventually to a collapse.
Marx’s predictions proved incorrect, but as Pilkington argues, when it comes to population, there does seem to be a contradiction which limits the necessary continuous expansion of a capitalist economy. As per capita GDP increases, the total fertility rate declines, the share of retirees and people reliant on welfare thus increases, in turn lowering economic growth. And so, Pilkington concludes:
Left to its own devices, capitalism’s categorical imperative of work and consumption is, in the end, at odds with its structural needs, as it discourages family formation and thus stymies the capitalist economy’s ability to grow. This is the core contradiction of capitalism—much more profound than anything Marx imagined.
Though nationalists and conservatives are reluctant to attack capitalism as a source of their woes, the tendency Pilkington describes is responsible for the greatest “supply pressure” on immigration, as employers demand an expanding workforce and consumer base, and unimaginative economists and politicians turn to immigration as the only solution to society’s problem of a growing proportion of old age dependents.
Japan stands out as a country that has resisted this, though they have done so by keeping wages and economic productivity extremely stagnant, and now, they too are resorting to a large influx of economic immigrants.
This is not just a problem for advocates of immigration restriction. A few decades ago, if someone spoke of “the population crisis”, you would assume they were talking about the Malthusian catastrophe of the world’s population expanding beyond carrying capacity. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, published in 1968 , started a trend of catastrophizing predictions about the earth expanding beyond its carrying capacity.
Now, if one hears discussion of an incoming population crisis, it’s safe to assume they are talking about the predicted rapid decline in global population after its projected peak this century. It’s all the rage now for neoliberal intellectuals to opine on the causes of and solutions to the universal trend of economic development cratering birthrates. Anyone familiar with Elon Musk’s X feed will know that he and other Silicon Valley libertarians believe population decline is the issue of our time.
Long term projections show that the population collapse will be hugely transformative. Take South Korea, a first world country with the lowest fertility rate in the world. Under current trends, its population of 52 million is projected to drop below 30 million by 2076, and to just 16.5 million by the end of the century.
East Asian countries are especially plagued by population decline. Japan’s population peaked in 2008, at 128 million. The number of births reached another new low in 2023, and the Japanese government projects that by 2070 the population will have fallen by 30%. By 2100, Japan’s population will have shrunk by half, to 63 million.
Things are not much better outside Asia. Iran, an Islamic theocracy, has had a dramatic drop in its fertility rate in recent years, to as low as 1.61 in 2021. Across Europe birthrates are shrinking, even in Scandinavian countries which had seemed to have a lot more resilience to this trend than the rest of Europe. And south of the continent the picture is especially bleak, with Spain and Italy continuing to slump to record lows.
But falling birthrates are just the most obvious and immediately consequential effect of capitalist economic development. Here are some other alarming trends that mass affluence under consumer capitalism has brought us:
There is a mental health crisis in Western societies that is getting worse. About one in five adults in America has a mental illness. One in four young women in the UK has a mental health disorder. The suicide rate rose 655% in Ireland since the 1960s.
We have a loneliness crisis. 61% of young Americans report “serious loneliness”. In the UK, the number of young adults who report having only one or no close friends jumped from 7% to nearly 20% between 2012 and 2021. 22% of millennials in the US report having no close friends.
IQ is declining. The so-called “Flynn effect” of generally increasing IQ’s has ceased, and research across the world has shown intelligence scores declining. The trends of affluent society where having kids is not a necessity has been for lower IQ people to reproduce at higher rates, suggesting this will get worse.
We have a fat crisis. Over half of European adults, and over two thirds of Americans, are overweight.
We have an addiction crisis. Almost 17% of Americans reported a substance abuse problem in the past year. Half of British teens feel addicted to social media.
In short, the affluence and individual liberation delivered by capitalism and mass democracy is not only leading to us no longer replacing ourselves, but there is a startling decline in mental, physical and genetic health which is making populations who experience this cycle incapable of reproducing themselves. Mass society is not dying due to ecological collapse or a proletarian revolution, but through alienation, nihilism and despair. The alienated, secular, modern worldview, unmoored from traditional beliefs which sacralized the mundane, simply lacks the capacity to vitalize populations.
Marx thought his historical materialism could predict the society that would follow of necessity after capitalism. History would culminate in a post-scarcity communist society, where man related freely to his fellow man, and where the distinction between ‘private and common interest’ evaporated. If capitalism is going to reach a crisis due to social collapse and stagnation caused by a population crisis, what can we forecast as the next social formation?
Population decline and populism
In a paper titled Golfing with Trump, researchers looked at the demographic makeup of areas that favoured Donald Trump over his moderate Republican party rival Mitt Romney, who ran for President in 2012. They discovered the common characteristic of areas that swung hard toward Trump was that they were formerly tight-knit, homogeneous communities which had suffered a population and employment decline. This phenomenon is not unique to the United States. Depopulation also seems to precede populism in Europe:
There are important parallels with the experience of other countries which suggest that our results may be more generalisable. For example, the Gilets Jaunes movement came from the declining peripheries of rural France; the rise of the Lega across many parts of Italy has been ignited by the long-term stagnation of the tight-knit communities of the formerly highly successful industrial districts in Northern and Central Italy; the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Germany comes, in part, from the declining industrial and small-town communities of Eastern Germany.
A number of recent economic studies show that an ageing population is responsible for a lot of the decline in innovation and entrepreneurship, there is a diminished inflow of young people needed to energize business dynamics and take risks. Economic stagnation follows depopulation everywhere.
The nature of capitalism is such that, if it’s not growing, it’s dying. Capitalism requires compounding economic growth to avoid catastrophe. When a first world economy has just a couple of quarters of no growth, this is considered a crisis. As consumer demand falls, businesses close, and there is a knock-on effect across the economy. Businesses, states and cities are extremely leveraged, and the shock of a dramatic fall in population could trigger a series of defaults and economic crises wherever it occurs.
Depopulation typically does not leave behind great affluence, with the remaining population having fewer mouths to feed with the existing pie. Instead, we observe economic decline everywhere we see significant population decline, and a common struggle for “shrinking cities” is infrastructure crises, as cities for a much larger population must serve a shrinking population at the same cost. Just look at Detroit, a city that lost 40% of its population in 60 years. This might not be such a problem in a society which plans long term and can facilitate degrowth, but our entire economic model functions like a large ponzi scheme, requiring tomorrow’s growth to pay for today.
People in peripheral regions who have watched their communities decline, with no national plan for rejuvenation or development of native industry, naturally turn to populist politics. We should therefore expect populism to continue on an upward trend, as Western elites lack any vision or will to answer this crisis other than hoping the market can provide the innovation and growth needed to lift everyone up, while turning in the short-term to unpopular mass-immigration policies to supplement the population loss.
Changing birthrates, changing politics
Demographic projections can tell us more about the future than the raw population numbers. This is because our political preferences seem to be largely shaped by pre-rational personality traits and tendencies which have a biological foundation.
The research of Jonathan Haidt has revealed that liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral values in thinking about politics. Haidt breaks down our basic moral attachments into six values: care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.
The conclusion from studying conservatives and liberals attachment to these values is that liberals tend to place greatest value on the first three — care, liberty, and fairness — and give little weight to the others. Conservatives value all of these moral ideas. What explains liberals overlooking sanctity, authority and loyalty? If we wanted to connect it to more fundamental personality traits, we might say sanctity is a reflection of people’s natural disgust sensitivity, and both authority and loyalty reflect the degree of what psychologists term “openness”.
Indeed, we find that both high openness and low disgust sensitivity are strong predictors of leftist social views. The more fundamental difference though, is that liberals are more individualistic than conservatives. Ideals like liberty and fairness are rather abstract, individualist-oriented values. Loyalty and authority are important to maintain group cohesion. If your concern is only for yourself as an individual, it’s hard to see why authority has any value in itself. We know that all the traits that predict leftism — openness, neuroticism, individualism — are highly heritable. Looking at who is having children, then, can tell us a lot about the direction society will take.
Genetic studies show political conservatism is heritable, with one of the most comprehensive studies on this estimating its heritability as high as 0.6 (meaning 60% of the variation in conservatism in a population is due to genetics vs. 40% environmental). This is even higher than the estimate for the heritability of religion, which has been estimated to be 30% to 45% heritable.[1] Interestingly though, this rises to 0.65 for people who have had “born again” religious conversions.[2] This suggests that if we were to see a big return to religion in Western societies on a large scale, there would be a great knock-on effect in the birthrate.
We know conservatism and religiosity are significantly heritable. We also know that religious and conservative people are having more children than the rest of the population. Some of the reasons for this in the case of religion are fairly obvious: all the Abrahamic religions encourage large families and prohibits or discourages contraception. Religious people also suffer less of the neuroticism that puts people off having children, and they tend to be lower IQ — IQ correlates negatively with fertility.[3]
In a world where the population is collapsing, and having children is a choice fewer and fewer make, the high fertility of certain religious groups can become highly significant in shaping the world that is to come.
Who is checking out?
In The Past is a Future Country, Edward Dutton presents a wealth of data to show that these trends will lead to a future that is more religious and more conservative, where White people are more ethnocentric, where IQ is in decline, and where the extremely liberal that now dominate our elite class make up a smaller and smaller portion of the population. Dutton writes that the simulations resulting from his data conveys “one singular message”:
liberalism is now dying—everywhere. It is dying among the more intelligent; it is dying among the less intelligent. It is dying among blacks; it is dying among whites. It is dying among men; it is dying among women. Only, it hasn’t been dying up till now of course; liberalism has been thriving. It is liberal genes that have been dying.[4]
By making a childless life easier and more appealing than ever, liberalism is creating a new kind of evolutionary selection pressure where those less affected by left-liberal ideology will have far more kids relative to the rest of the population. We might even expect this to be exacerbated by environmental concerns in the next century, after all, it has now become common to see respectable liberal publications publish think-pieces on the virtue of living a childless life as a response to climate change. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez once mused in a stream to her followers that “There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?”
Research is starting to bear out the anecdotal evidence of increasing numbers of environmentally conscious young people choosing to forgo children due to climate concerns. In 2023, researchers at University College London conducted a review of 13 studies on this topic, and found that all but one concluded stronger concerns about climate change were associated with a desire for fewer children, or none at all.[5]
These concerns are not limited to privileged western liberals either, a study from the University of Bath found that nearly 40% of 16 to 25 year olds, surveyed from several countries, stated that they were hesitant to have children because of climate change. Climate change is something that worries young people a lot more, and is steadily becoming more central to mainstream political discussion, a trend that will likely spread with time. If the consequence of this ideology is the diminishment of the birthrate among the 40% most environmentally conscious and neurotic of the population, this will basically be selecting against the most left-wing segments of the population, further increasing the relative advantage conservative people already have in birthrates.
The economics of religion
One thing that becomes apparent from looking at these trends is that religion is definitely here to stay. In fact, the religious shall inherit the earth. This would likely come as a great shock to the many skeptics of religion who assume modernity and scientific progress bring about secularism as surely as night follows day.
In fact, sociologists have been predicting the end of religion for decades. It seemed like a simple equation for those skeptical of religion: religion is irrational, a relic of an age where we had to resort to magic and mythology to explain the natural world and comfort us in the face of death. Now that science can explain the workings of nature, and economic development has given us greater freedom from death and disease than ever, people will naturally turn away from the comforting myths of old. If you looked just at elite opinion, this might be a fair assumption.
It now seems clear that reality has not conformed to the “secularization thesis”. Sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke wrote that
After nearly three centuries of utterly failed prophecies … it seems time to carry the secularization doctrine to the graveyard of failed theories, and there to whisper “requiescat in pace.”[6]
The problem is, most sociologists ignore biology and the heritability of traits like religiosity, and resist the predictive power of raw demographic forecasts in favour of more idealistic theories. But even setting aside the demographic trends discussed, proponents of the secularization thesis would still be wrong.
One particularly frustrating case for the believers of whig history is the United States, which, decades into its status as an economic, cultural and military superpower should have left religion well behind at this point. After all, Europe has become very secular, and the United States is just as modern, more economically powerful, more individualist, and has more free speech. Surely, anyone convinced of the inevitability of secularism would look at the US as the ideal environment for the spread of atheism.
Yet unlike Europe, the US has remained stubbornly Christian. Not only is America more religious than Europe, but it has only gotten more religious since its founding, producing two “great awakenings” of mass religious fervor in the late 19th and mid-20th centuries.
A similar “great awakening” to evangelical Christianity is currently happening in another large country: Brazil. Catholicism has been in decline for decades in Brazil, but rather than moving to atheism, most former Catholics have embraced various Protestant churches. Brazil went from being a country where almost everyone was Catholic, to a country where 31% are evangelical Protestant.
The most obvious similarity between America and Brazil is the preponderance of evangelical Christian denominations. Could this offer a hint as to why they haven’t secularized like Europe? It turns out, sociologists have pursued this thread by studying the “supply side” economics of religion. The sociologist of religion Rodney Stark argued that the degree of a country’s religiosity could be predicted by the degree to which it allows a “free market” of religion.
We are used to thinking this way about economics: if you have a bustling, competitive market environment to produce the best and most cost-effective products, the consumer will be rewarded with more choice and more individually appealing options. In this way, supply itself generates demand, as advocates of the market mechanism celebrate. The logic of supply-side economists was that the way to ignite an economy was thus to recognize this basic truth and simply step out of the way of the free market. Could the same be true of religion? What if a more unregulated religious market just satisfies religious demand better, even demand we didn’t know existed?
Stark argues exactly this. When there is ease of start-up for religious denominations, and they have to compete to deliver the most appealing “product” to bring people to their denomination, there is a general increase in religiosity. In contrast, state religions tend to suffer most from secularization trends, just as monopoly firms suffer inefficiency. The prophet of the invisible hand himself, Adam Smith, noted that among the Church of England:
the clergy, reposing themselves upon their benefices, had neglected to keep up the fervour of faith and devotion of the great body of the people; and having given themselves up to indolence, were incapable of making vigorous exertion in defence even of their own establishment
Obviously, when churches have the backing of the state, and that state is able to control the culture, populations are very religious. But the compromise is that these churches suffer more from the general “desacralization” of society. One can think of the intermingling of church and state in Ireland in the 20th Century, marked by little sacral acts in everyday affairs like the custom of a bishop throwing in the ball to kickstart gaelic football matches of significance. There has been a trend of desacralization which has brought people away from established churches. The argument of Stark, though, is that this is followed by a period of stagnation and then religious revival, as the religious scene becomes “deregulated”.
A number of studies have shown not just greater religiousness in countries with more religious pluralism, but also, within America, areas with more religious pluralism tend to have higher rates of religious participation. It really does seem as if “opening up” the religious space and leaving people a lot of options when it comes to religion increases religiosity, regardless of other trends. But what about Europe? It doesn’t seem like anywhere in Europe is observing a kind of religious revival or outbreak of evangelical Christianity analogous to Latin America.
Stark argued that although established churches have declined in Europe, there still isn’t yet a period of revival because the religious market is not unregulated. Many Protestant countries like Norway still have an official state church that receives privileges from the state. In Catholic countries like Ireland, there is a good deal of de facto regulation and stigma associated with religious pluralism. We also overstate how religious the population was in countries with religious monopolies, since it wasn’t very fashionable or even tolerated to be honest about one’s lack of belief. Even in what we look back on as religious golden ages, the average person was far less pious or wedded to their religious dogma than we imagine.
In his classic survey of religion and magic in Middle Ages Britain, Keith Thomas wrote that
it is problematical as to whether certain sections of the population at this time had any religion at all. Although complete statistics will never be obtainable, it can be confidently said that not all Tudor or Stuart Englishmen went to some kind of church, that many of those who did went with considerable reluctance, and that a certain proportion remained throughout their lives utterly ignorant of the elementary tenets of Christian dogma.
Other religious scholars have described the belief of the average peasant in Middle Ages Europe as a kind of animism and spirit worship which included Christian content. Although almost everyone was nominally Christian, few attended church services:
through most of this era, when more than 90 percent of Europe’s population lived in rural areas, churches were to be found only in towns and cities; therefore hardly anyone could have attended church. Moreover, even after most Europeans had access to a church, whether Catholic or Protestant, most people still didn’t attend, and when forced to do so, they often misbehaved.[7]
As well as undermining the idealistic view some hold of the pious Middle Ages, this should also dampen the enthusiasm of proponents of the secularization thesis who think the drop off in religion in Europe has been remarkable. But what of this effect of “supply side” changes in religion making Europe less secular?
Two major studies on the effect of religious pluralism on religiosity in Europe concluded that pluralism strongly increases religious participation. Economist Laurence Iannaccone published a study of fourteen Protestant countries in Europe in his paper “The Consequences of Religious Market Structure”,[8] while a separate study by Stark looked at majority Catholic countries:
Both studies measured pluralism by the Herfindahl Index, a standard measure of market concentration, and gauged religiousness by weekly church attendance. The studies showed that pluralism has a remarkably strong influence on religiousness: it accounts for more than 90 percent of the total variation in church attendance across these nations.[9]
As the trend of pluralism and decline of state churches continues in Europe, we should expect periods of stagnation and irreligion to be followed by religious revivals and the growth of smaller sects.
Now recall the study mentioned earlier, which showed that “born again” religious converts have even higher rates of fertility than other religious and conservative people. If the trend of religious pluralism and the increasing demographic dominance of conservatives and religious people leads to a great religious awakening, we should expect the people returning to the faith with newfound fervor to have even higher birthrates, further exacerbating these trends in a positive feedback loop.
A Protestant future?
Reflecting on this, it may seem that the return of religion will come in the form of a mass of small evangelical Protestant sects, similar to America’s last “great awakening”. What hope does Catholicism have as just one among thousands of Christian churches in a religious marketplace?
Latin America was extremely Catholic until the second half of the twentieth century, when restrictions on other religions were lifted and an explosion in Protestantism followed. But far from replacing Catholicism, this explosion of religious pluralism actually energized the Catholic Church. Stark wrote that the Catholic Church had undergone a stunning awakening in Latin America:
Where once the bishops were content with bogus claims about a Catholic land and a reality of low levels of commitment, the Catholic churches in Latin America are now filled on Sundays with devoted members, many of them also active in charismatic groups that meet during the week. And the source of this remarkable change has been the rapid growth of intense Protestant faiths, which created a highly competitive pluralist environment.
Simply put, Latin America has never been so Catholic—and that’s precisely because so many Protestants are there now
Something similar happened in the United States in the 19th Century. After an influx of Catholic immigrants from Europe, many defected to Protestant churches. But the Catholic church in America was energized and adapted to Protestant competition. Soon, the church in America was stronger, and with more active members, than anywhere in Europe. In a pluralist environment, Catholicism and Orthodoxy will undergo selection pressure that makes them more successful at attracting an active clergy.
There is another reason Catholicism and Orthodoxy may be more attractive to people in an environment of pluralism — they are bound up with tradition in a way Protestant churches are not. This may seem like less of an advantage given that the Catholic church has spent decades modernising in response to its declining influence in the modern world. But when people return to religion, especially as the tired castoffs of secularism, they are more likely to appreciate the traditional aspects of the church which seem like a more complete escape from a desacralized world.
We need look no further than the interest in Latin mass within the church. Traditional Latin Mass, as well as other traditional church services, are experiencing explosive growth and, while Traditional Catholics are still just a small minority of Catholics, they are the only demographic of Catholicism that is growing in the West.
Follow the trends
What matters is growth trends, not raw numbers. In general, we tend to underestimate the power of compounding growth, and this certainly applies to making sense of sociological change. Rodney Stark was able to demonstrate how Christianity could conquer the ancient world with a growth rate of just 3 to 4% per year. On its face, this doesn’t sound like a huge growth rate for a sect that had under 10 thousand members at the end of the first century. But then we see how this expands over time. That 3 to 4 percent represents growth of about 40% per decade, which, translated to real numbers looks like this[10]:
7,500 Christians by the end of the first century (0.02% of sixty million people)
40,000 Christians by 150 AD (0.07%)
200,000 by 200 AD (0.35%)
2 million by 250 AD (2%)
Early Christianity spread through proselytising. Bart Ehrman, in The Triumph of Christianity outlines two main reasons for the Jesus movement’s success. First, Christianity’s doctrinal commitment to spreading the gospel through missionary was something novel in the ancient world. Paul’s insistence on the removal of Jewish dietary restrictions and circumcision and his evangelising to gentiles opened up Christianity to a potential audience of the whole world. Second, Christianity was different from other pagan religions in claiming exclusivity. To be a Christian meant to abandon any other gods or religious beliefs. This was also a radical departure from custom in the pagan world, where worshipping a new god or gods did not mean abandoning the old ones. By being exclusivist, Christianity not only spread itself, but it extinguished pagan beliefs when it did spread.
So Christianity spread mostly through its unique ability to make new converts and dispose of competitor beliefs, but birthrates were also an important factor. Romans practiced infanticide, particularly the practice of “exposure” where infants were left to the elements to either be adopted or die. It was far more common to practice this on infant daughters, since women were of far less value in Roman society.
Christians eschewing this practice would have meant that, aside from the obvious advantage of not killing many of their children, they would also avoid the same kind of gender ratio imbalance Romans had due to mostly removing girls, which could provide a big comparative advantage in birthrates — removing potential mothers from society drags down the birthrate far more than removing men. Some research has suggested this could have been compounded by the population shock caused by plague in the 2nd Century, when Christians would have been far more capable of replenishing their pre-plague numbers due to the sex ratio imbalance.[11]
Looking at the rise of early Christianity shows that seemingly minor advantages in breeding patterns can create massive change over the course of centuries, and that even these comparative advantages can be massively exacerbated by population shocks.
No church today has the advantage of being the first evangelising religion, as Christianity did in the first century. But there are sects which have massive endogenous growth rates, something which becomes very significant in the midst of a population bomb.
The Mormon church is growing at an even faster rate than early Christianity. They grew by 45.5% in a decade, jumping from 4.2 million in 2000 to 6.1 million in 2010. Stark projected that at a conservative growth rate of 30% per decade, there could be 63 million Mormons by 2080. If they grow by more than 50% per decade, we may enter the next century with this peculiar sect of American Christianity overtaking Buddhism.[12] A fine example of the transformative power of birthrates! And as remarkable as this might sound, another obscure American sect received a similar growth rate in the 20th century: the Amish. Despite almost no growth through conversion, their high birthrates have made their numbers increase from 5,000 in 1900 to over 377,000 today.
Can the state defuse the population bomb?
The Amish stand out as a particularly separatist religious group managing to thrive outside modern mass society, but it’s not necessary to give up electricity to achieve this. The other groups succeeding in growing their numbers — traditional Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Mormons — are in, but not of modernity. They manage to retain cultural autonomy while participating (quite successfully) in the modern economy. The mass affluence of modernity is a double-edged sword: it discourages family formation for the traditional core of bourgeois civilization, but for those that choose to do so, it is relatively easy to opt out of ideological modernity without having to accept poverty or isolation.
We can be quite confident that humanity isn’t finished yet. Although the “population bomb” is inevitable, there will always be religious communities eager to endure. The question of our time is not whether the population decline will be reversed, but whether social planners can identify how intentional communities defy the trends and apply the lessons on the scale of mass society.
Typically, politicians have turned to financial incentives as the means of rescuing cratering birthrates. Writing for Unherd, Tom Chivers presented the “progressive way” to boost birthrates. Given that the average number of children people in developed countries want to have is above replacement levels, the most easily fixable problem is addressing the obstacles to people that already want children being able to have them, which are chiefly financial:
rather than policies which coerce women, we could encourage a higher birth rate by creating policies which give women more financial freedom. More generous maternity leave, for instance, seems to raise birth rates, as do simple cash payments to new parents. Subsidising childcare (or helping older people retire more easily, so they can help look after their grandchildren) has a similar effect.
This has been the approach of France and Sweden, two countries with higher than average birthrates by European standards (though still below replacement).
The Swedish social democratic model for family formation was based on the work of economic strategist Gunnar Myrdal, who, at the height of the Great Depression in 1934 wrote a best-selling book on the population crisis. Myrdal argued that the solution to falling birthrates would be making it easy for women to both raise children and have careers.
The solution then, would mostly be generous welfare programs to redistribute wealth to those having families. Sweden now has a world renowned public preschool system and very generous paid parental leave. The French system is also geared heavily towards financial incentives for mothers, and, as a result, Sweden and France spend well above the OECD average on childcare. In each case, these numbers are now propped up by migrants, who have more children than the native populations. Nevertheless, Sweden maintained an above or close to replacement level birthrate throughout the 1990s, when it was still very homogeneous, so it’s hard to argue the Nordic model was not somewhat successful.
In contrast, Italy took a lax approach to falling birthrates, did not look to the welfare state as the solution in the same way, and suffered from poor public finances, and by the 1990s, its birthrate had fallen under 1.2.
But money alone is not enough. Many countries have tried to reverse course with generous government spending and tax incentives, with minimal impact. South Korea has spent over $200 billion trying to reverse its fertility crisis in the past 15 years to little effect — its birthrate currently stands at 0.81. Simply turning on the tap of financial incentives is easy, but purely economic policies don’t change the social structures which more fundamentally dictate attitudes to family formation.
Many of the studies drawn on to support the idea that simple financial rewards directly increase fertility suffer from a flaw: they examine effects in a short window of time, say a few years. With this time frame they are able to show that immediately after the implementation of a monetary reward for childbearing, childbearing increases.
The problem is, this response is likely made up of many people who were going to have children anyway, but just changed their timing, in which case there is no effect on total fertility. This is what a review of programs on family formation throughout the OECD concluded, and it probably explains a lot of the much touted baby boom that happened during COVID lockdowns. After all, if a couple planned on having a child anyway, what better time than during a lockdown with everyone on UBI? That’s not to say finances are irrelevant. Comparing developed countries, like Sweden with Italy, shows that even developed, feminist countries can do a lot to maintain birthrates with a welfare state, but this isn’t enough on its own, and it’s no quick fix, as countries like South Korea and Japan are discovering.
The Georgian model
If you want to see a real success story of a state which has countered the anti-natal trend of modernity, you won’t find it in Nordic welfare states or hyper-religious Muslim countries. Instead, look to the Caucasus. More specifically, look to “the gem of the Caucasus”. Georgia is a small former Soviet republic of 3.7 million people nestled between Turkey and Russia, whose greatest claim to fame is giving the world Joseph Stalin. Its birthrate of 2.08 may not sound remarkable, until one compares it to its neighbours: both Armenia and Azerbaijan have been stagnant at about 1.5 since the start of the century, and Georgia was there too, until it undertook a fascinating experiment.
Georgia is a very religious country, with a population that is 90% Orthodox Christian. In 2007, Patriarch Ilia II of the Georgian Orthodox Church, a figure of great national renown, decided to tackle the problem of declining birthrates head on: he announced to the nation that he would personally baptize and become godfather to any third or above child born to a married couple in Georgia.
This remarkable experiment was a success. Georgian birthrates increased right away, especially the third-order births most affected by the patriarch’s campaign, which nearly doubled between 2007 and 2010, then continued to rise. This happened at a time when the unmarried fertility rate continued to fall.
The Georgian state played its part with a suite of financial incentives in 2013, but the evidence is that the effect of these was minimal compared to the exhortations of the Georgian Patriarch. The economist Lyman Stone, in a report studying Georgia’s mini baby-boom, concluded that the actions of the Patriarch were more decisive than any economic incentive:
The effect [of government subsidies] is substantially smaller than the effect observed from Ilia’s baptism offer, and, of course, the price tag far, far higher, with these programs costing Georgia an appreciable share of its budget.
Nonetheless, it seems plausible that the continued rise of higher-order birth after 2013, while lower-order births fell, could reflect expanded financial incentives. Giving money for kids does have some effect, just not as much as encouragement from beloved religious leaders.
It’s not that financial incentives don’t matter, but it’s social capital that really counts. And the two great sources of social capital outside of liberalism come from religion and national pride, something the small, homogeneous and faithful nation of Georgia can draw on like few others, yet the effect has been a sudden and lasting swing in fertility that some governments would (and will) spend billions to achieve.
The solution for states then, would seem to be a combination of the Nordic model’s economic incentives, with the Georgian model’s social capital incentives. Financial incentives can lessen the gap between desired fertility and actual fertility, and empowering the forces of nationalism and religion can produce the necessary social capital.
Can this be achieved? Using this formula, Israel has managed to maintain a birthrate above replacement and well above what one might expect for a country which has had a developed economy for decades. Israel’s fertility success has drawn on religion, with the ultra-Orthodox women in Israel averaging 6 to 7 children. But even the secular section of the population has stayed above replacement levels, and that’s where this potent combination of economic incentives, the influence of religious attitudes and ethnonationalism come into play.
In a study intended to explain the high secular birthrate of Jews in Israel, the authors attribute it to Israel’s comprehensive welfare regime for child-rearing, coupled with:
the continuing importance of familist ideology and of marriage as a social institution; the role of Jewish nationalism and collective behaviour in a religious society characterized by ethno-national conflict; and a nationalist discourse which defines women as the biological reproducers of the nation.[13]
Of course, Israel is certainly anomalous, with its unique conflict with Palestine and its history of outside threats keeping a strong national consciousness in the minds of Israelis. Social engineers will look at case studies like Georgia and Israel and realize neither can be precisely replicated by their techniques. No government program can gin up a population that deeply values the perpetuation of its nation, or the word of its religious spokespeople.
Ethnically homogeneous, rooted nations might be easy to take apart, but they can’t be manufactured. The solution of Georgia won’t be the solution of South Korea, Japan or the United States, but they will contain subgroups with their own patriarchs and communities that will create the social capital necessary to make it out the other side of modernity.
Modern globalist civilization is failing to create more humans because it’s fundamentally inhuman, misanthropic, and hostile to human life at any age. The very fact that its administrators only understand the crisis of people not having children through the lens of consumer spending, pension funding, and bond market speculation modeling speaks to its inhumanity.
Much ink will be spilled in the coming decades on how to resolve the birthrate crash while maintaining modern mass society. But the core contradiction at the heart of this project is that the alienation from tribal humanity that is integral to modernity is also at the root of the demographic crisis.
If capitalism cannot solve its core contradiction, and produce babies or technology fast enough to replace those on the way out, it may be a tumultuous transition into whatever comes next. Contrary to the techno-optimist’s progressive vision of the future, the vision of humanity’s future offered here is more parochial, more communitarian and more religious. What this will mean for politics on the grand scale remains an open question. But for my part, I find a lot to like in a world more like Georgia.
Notes
[1] Bouchard Jr, Thomas J. “Genetic influence on human psychological traits: A survey.” Current directions in psychological science 13, no. 4 (2004): 148-151.
[2] Bradshaw, Matt, and Christopher G. Ellison. “Do genetic factors influence religious life? Findings from a behavior genetic analysis of twin siblings.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47, no. 4 (2008): 529-544.
[3] Boutwell, Brian B., Travis W. Franklin, J. C. Barnes, Kevin M. Beaver, Raelynn Deaton, Richard H. Lewis, Amanda K. Tamplin, and Melissa A. Petkovsek. “County-level IQ and fertility rates: A partial test of Differential-K theory.” Personality and Individual Differences 55, no. 5 (2013): 547-552.
[4] Dutton, Edward, and J. O. A. Rayner-Hilles. The past is a future country: The coming conservative demographic revolution. Vol. 76. Andrews UK Limited, 2022.
[5] Dillarstone, Hope, Laura J. Brown, and Elaine C. Flores. “Climate change, mental health, and reproductive decision-making: A systematic review.” PLOS Climate 2, no. 11 (2023): e0000236.
[6] Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke. Acts of faith: Explaining the human side of religion. Univ of California Press, 2000.
[7] Stark, Rodney. The triumph of faith: Why the world is more religious than ever. Simon and Schuster, 2023. Pg. 44
[8] Iannaccone, Laurence R. “The consequences of religious market structure: Adam Smith and the economics of religion.” Rationality and society 3, no. 2 (1991): 156-177.
[9] Stark, Rodney. The triumph of faith: Why the world is more religious than ever. Simon and Schuster, 2023. Pg. 59
[10] Stark, Rodney. The rise of Christianity: A sociologist reconsiders history. Princeton University Press, 1996. pg. 7
[11] Philbrick, Kenneth J. “Epidemic Smallpox, Roman Demography, and the Rapid Growth of Early Christianity, 160 CE to 310 CE.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014.
[12] Stark, Rodney. The rise of Mormonism. Columbia University Press, 2005.
[13] Okun, Barbara S. “An investigation of the unexpectedly high fertility of secular, native-born Jews in Israel.” Population Studies 70, no. 2 (2016): 239-257.
An NYPD spokesperson waved a scholarly book about terrorism around on TV in an attempt to associate Columbia University protesters with terrorists. Well, we actually read it. The claim is as absurd as you might guess.
Following its brutalraid on the antiwar student protesters occupying Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, the top brass of the New York Police Department (NYPD) appeared on right-wing cable network Newsmax with an alarming message for the country: the students responsible weren’t acting alone, but had been radicalized and taught “how to be a professional agitator, how to be a professional protester” by some unknown, malevolent force providing funding and training.
“These students were more than prepared,” observed cohost Katrina Szish.
“Extremely prepared,” stressed NYPD deputy commissioner Kaz Daughtry. He presented viewers the “serious, disturbing propaganda” they had found at Hamilton Hall as proof of this claim: a book, roughly A4 size, titled Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction.
“A book on terrorism,” said Daughtry, eyes wide with disbelief.
One person who strenuously disagrees? The author of that book, British historian Charles Townshend, who said the claim that it’s an incitement to violence “seems defamatory.”
“The suggestion that my book in some way encourages terrorism is a misrepresentation that will be plain to anyone who actually reads it,” Townshend told Jacobin over email.
So reading the book is exactly what we did, tracking down the supposedly sinister 2003 volume, which holds a 3.33 star rating on GoodReads and is accessible at libraries across the world, as well as for $12.99 on Amazon.
Combing through its 160-some pages, it was hard not to notice the distinct lack of pro-terrorism content within, not to mention the complete absence of instructions for how one would go about occupying a university building — let alone becoming a terrorist or carrying out a terrorist act. This may go some way to explain why it had been published (and continues to be sold) by the Oxford University Press, which is yet to be listed as a terrorist entity by the US government. In fact, on closer inspection, you get the distinct impression that it is simply a scholarly treatment of the subject of terrorism, part of a long-running series of over 750 titles examining everything from slavery to adolescence.
It’s safe to say that if Townshend’s book really was the lynchpin of a shadowy, well-funded effort to turn America’s campuses into hotbeds of terrorism, it would likely also be an incompetent and ineffective one.
Terrorism is sorely lacking in any practical advice for either student protesters or actual would-be terrorists. “How would these students know how to barricade a door?” Daughtry asked on Newsmax, as he charged that protesters wouldn’t have been capable of measures like locking doors with chains, blocking them with vending machines, or disabling security cameras.
Yet Terrorism turns out to be entirely unhelpful to this end, which at no point mentions these or any other techniques for occupying a building.
This is hardly surprising, since occupations are acts of civil disobedience long used by activists, including during the anti–Vietnam War, civil rights, and anti-apartheid movements. Townshend’s book, on the other hand, is exclusively concerned with, in the relatively few times it mentions them, the tactics of actual terrorists (whom he describes at various points as having a “simplified view of politics” and who “go out and kill innocent people in cold blood”): bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, and airline hijackings, among other acts of violence that are far removed from unarmed students refusing to leave a building.
Much of the book, in fact, is devoted to a bird’s eye discussion of the history of terrorism, its origin and causes, the effectiveness of government efforts to combat it, and its actual track record of success. On that last note, Terrorism is decidedly skeptical: Townshend repeatedly discusses the limited success terrorist movements have had in achieving their political goals, and even the counterproductive impact they’ve had in doing so.
Pointing to the “limited efficacy of terrorism in pursuit of radical objectives,” Townshend notes the “corrosive and possibly corrupting effect on social bonds” of terrorism, and charges that “those who have adopted a purely terrorist strategy have not been successful liberators.”
“The apocalyptic dreams which have animated many terrorist groups have never materialized,” he writes at one point, suggesting that those “who argue that terrorism has always failed are right,” because “shock and horror have their limits.” “Neither bombs nor any other technological miracles have made men free,” he writes, arguing that “no successful twentieth-century “wars of national liberation” have “succeeded by terrorism alone,” but rather required political movements to actually achieve their goals.
“The most striking failures have been those of the purest adherents to terrorist methods,” writes Townshend, “the result of whose campaigns has typically been not the overthrow of states but the intensification of state and public security, a general degradation in the quality of freedom.” He singles out in particular the 1970s Tupamaros guerrillas in Uruguay, approvingly quoting one French philosopher who argued their actions had caused them to become “the gravediggers of liberal Uruguay.”
“The verdict on urban guerrilla action was ultimately negative,” writes Townshend, pointing out that despite the Tupamaros largely winning support from Uruguayan public opinion and getting widespread acceptance of their critiques of the established order, their pursuit of terrorist tactics triggered an authoritarian response from the government that wound up both turning the public against them and leading to their demise. It also degraded the country’s democracy, he argues, for which the “end result was a far more illiberal state, and less social justice.”
Elsewhere, Townshend points to another example of the unintended, counterproductive effect of terrorism, by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). “The reaction to the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings by the IRA, for instance, was not a demand for British withdrawal but an insistence on refusing to concede to violence,” he writes.
In other words, it’s hard to see how anyone could read through Townshend’s book and, as the NYPD alleges, be brainwashed into thinking terrorism was the way to go. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone at the NYPD opened even a single page of the book. What seems most likely is that a police officer saw a book with the word “terrorism” on its cover and decided they could wave it around in front of television cameras to scare the public into associating student protesters demanding an end to genocide with 9/11 hijackers or Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing.
Ironically, one of the only examples Townshend gives where a strategy of terrorism actually succeeded was in historic Palestine, by Zionist terrorists whose ranks included several future Israeli prime ministers and out of which current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party, Likud, has its origins.Ironically, one of the only examples Townshend gives where a strategy of terrorism actually succeeded was in historic Palestine, by Zionist terrorists whose ranks included several future Israeli prime ministers.
“But this outcome was rare indeed,” notes Townshend, noting that the campaigns of Palestinian terrorist organizations have, by contrast, “been much longer . . . but far less successful,” and even could be “argued to have been counterproductive,” since “the general position of the Arabs of Palestine is substantially worse than it was as the outset of the ‘international’ terrorist campaign in 1969.”
“What class is this on?” Daughtry had asked about Townshend’s book. But while Columbia’s course reading lists aren’t available online, Terrorism does hold useful lessons for Israeli leadership, on whose behalf the NYPD spent the past week hospitalizing Americans.
“The Second World War was not won by bombing,” writes Townshend, “and nor has any subsequent war been won by bombing alone.”
Yet the Allied carpet bombing of World War II has been repeatedlycited by a host of Israeli and US officials as justification for Israel’s similar indiscriminate bombing campaign as a necessary evil for defeating Hamas. Elsewhere, Townshend points to the fact that terrorists’ reliance on ideological conviction, not rational cost-benefit analyses of whether terrorism really works, as “the reason why traditional notions of deterrence are ineffective against such a subject.”
Israeli officials poured resources and focus on the “targeting of leaders of terrorist organizations,” Townshend points out in the book, yet “even after this has been done time and again, it has not succeeded in eliminating or even reducing the level of terrorist attacks” — which hasn’t stopped leaders form promising that Israeli retaliation would eventually defeat terrorism. It’s both tragic and prescient to read these words more than two decades later, as Israeli officials continue to make this argument in the midst of the current war.
The NYPD’s heavy reliance on a book that has nothing to do with either occupation of buildings, nor certainly advocacy for terrorism, raises doubts about its allegations that the protests at Columbia and around the country are being directed and financed by an unnamed outside force. This hasn’t stopped police officials to continue to bandy about the claim, with NYPD chief of patrol John Chell claiming as recently as two days ago that “there is an unknown entity who is radicalizing our vulnerable students.” Townshend told Jacobin that the NYPD’s claims about his book carry “the implication that some subjects simply should not be studied” and so threaten academic freedom.
Jacobin reached out to the NYPD to ask how they square the book’s contents with their claims about its role in radicalizing Columbia students. They have not provided a response as of the time of writing.
Should Daughtry and others ever get around to reading the book, they may find it holds lessons for themselves, too. “The threat to democracy posed by terrorist acts is less important than the response that such acts evoke,” Townshend warned in the book, quoting another scholar. “[D]emocratic societies are particularly ‘vulnerable to a form of violence that incites governments to overreact’ and so lose legitimacy.”
“Ok, let’s be clear. If the intelligence community led by the CIA is not the “deep state,” what is?” — Jeffrey Tucker
You realize, don’t you, that the gross misconduct of government officials from RussiaGate on down to the courtroom of Judge Juan Merchan has amounted to one continuous operation against the American people? If it were ever honestly adjudicated, many hundreds of them might go to prison, or worse. Each successive seditious and treasonous action they attempt against their arch-nemesis, Mr. Trump, only compounds their criminal liability — the Steele Dossier, CIA agent Eric Ciaramella’s 2019 impeachment prank, the Covid-19 caper, the George Floyd-BLM hustle, the 2020 election hijinks, the J-6 op and the House J-6 Committee conjured up to spin it, the present battery of farcical court cases — and yet the Golden Golem of Greatness not only remains defiantly at large, but seems to amass ever more electoral mojo.
The epic failure of these mighty efforts, and the humiliation entailed, has lately driven this vast bureaucratic cabal — collectively styled as “the blob” — to a stage of abject desperation that looks a lot like insanity. They fear for their lives, their fortunes, their chattels, and their families, and they seem ready to wreck the republic to save themselves. They have so far pretty much wrecked American justice with their lawfare tactics — a degenerate campaign to use the vested authority of prosecutors and judges to twist and cheat the law at the cost of the law’s legitimacy. Merrick Garland, Norm Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, Marc Elias, Christopher Wray, Letitia James, Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg have made law the enemy of the people.
All this becomes more obvious each day, for instance events of the past week in Judge Aileen Cannon’s federal courtroom in Florida where the Mar-a-Lago documents case proceeds. Turns out that Special Counsel Jack Smith has deliberately messed with the evidence, which is patently felonious. Also, turns out that sometime between the “Joe Biden” inauguration and the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago in August, 2022, boxes of presidential documents stored by the US General Services Administration were “delivered” to Mr. Trump’s mansion without any proper accounting for what might have been in them. A set-up you suppose? Why not? After everything else the FBI and the DOJ have attempted since 2015?
Christopher Wray in particular might have wanted some surefire probable cause to get his agents into Mar-a-Lago where, rumor has it, Mr. Trump kept his own dossier of evidence against the FBI and DOJ officials who concocted the “Crossfire Hurricane” chapter of RussiaGate. Even if you assume that Mr. Trump had multiple copies of the thing, FBI Director Wray — in position since 2017 throughout most of RussiaGate — surely wanted to see what Mr. Trump was holding if it would become necessary for current and former FBI / DOJ officials to defend themselves in court against very serious charges.
You see the desperation, don’t you? And how stupendously amateurish these machinations have been? Planting evidence and then fiddling around with it? I’m waiting for the moment when Judge Cannon summons Jack Smith and announces to his face that she is tossing the case for prosecutorial misconduct. Will she add a criminal referral to that? How will that affect the other case (attempting to overturn the 2020 election) brought against Mr. Trump in Judge Tanya Chutkan’s DC federal district court? Who will prosecute it if Jack Smith can no longer function as Special Counsel? And since the case was contrived in his name — even if Eisen, McCord, Weissmann, and others are really the authors — does that case blow up, too?
Letitia James’s real estate case under Judge Arthur Engoron was so idiotic it can’t possibly survive an ultimate appeal, and the Alvin Bragg confection under Judge Merchan is playing out like something that usually only happens in places like Honduras or Liberia. Yet the American Left, the “progressive” Democratic Party, is staking everything on it. It’s all they have left Lawfare-wise, at least for now. Which brings us to the question: Why do the non-governmental elites of this land, the managerial and thinking classes, the college presidents, the cable news producers, the corporate execs, the movie directors, the whole arts establishment. . . why do they feel compelled, for nearly a decade now, to hitch their identity and their self-respect to this fantastic train of Kafka-esque corruption, tyranny, and abuse? How did they get owned by the blob?
We may never find out, and they may never know either, even after they snap out of the mass formation they’ve been in thrall to. But they have made themselves ridiculous — figures like Sam Harris, Stephen Colbert, and Rob Reiner — yelling about “saving our democracy” while the blob they worship systematically disassembles the US Constitution, and makes American law a global laughingstock.
Most of my old ex-friends are riding the same ideological bus. You have to wonder: how did the likes of “Joe Biden,” Merrick Garland, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Christopher Wray, Fani Willis, Anthony Fauci, Klaus Schwab, and Bill Gates become their heroes? Did the Covid vaccines destroy their minds? Are they really avid for central bank digital money and surveillance of their every move? Do they want to be told how to live by the WHO? Things are going south fast now in our country. If these people ever cherished the idea of being free to think their own thoughts and live their own lives, it’s getting late in the game. They will end up prisoners of themselves.
It’s exactly what it sounds like: an entire news report about the feelings that some Israelis are feeling in their feely bits about protests in another country on the other side of the world. The Guardian’s Jason Burke asked some random people about their feelings outside a theater in Jerusalem, and then presented this weird nothing thing as relevant news reporting.
“We didn’t know so many people hated Israel,” some random security guard is quoted as saying.
“Such feelings appear widespread among the Jewish majority in Israel, seven months after war was triggered by surprise attacks launched by Hamas into the south of the country in which about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 250 taken hostage,” writes Burke.
“Jewish Israelis interviewed by the Guardian this week blame outrage overseas on misinformation, ignorance, historical hostility from international institutions such as the UN, global ‘double standards’ and entrenched antisemitism,” Burke informs us.
If you’re just tuning in, it might seem odd to you that a major news outlet would publish a story about the emotions that some Israelis are feeling about foreign protests against an active genocide being committed by their country. After all, this is not a news story. A story about how some people’s feelings are feeling is not news, and is not journalism.
But that’s exactly what the last seven months have looked like in the imperial media: a nonstop fixation on feelings instead of facts. Israelis have upset feelings about anti-genocide protests. Western Jews have upset feelings at campus demonstrators. Biden has upset feelings at Netanyahu. Last October the imperial media suddenly got a lot less interested in reporting on the facts on the ground with Israel and Gaza, and a whole lot more interested in reporting on how some groups of people feel about it instead.
Western reporters, pundits, politicians and officials cannot stop talking about this. The feelings of Israelis and western Jews are not only given more importance than the feelings of Palestinians or any other group, they are given more importance than Palestinian lives. Some Zionist kid pretending to feel “threatened” on an Ivy League campus will get more coverage than the daily massacres that have been occurring in the densely-packed city of Rafah.
Watch Matt Orfalea’s latest video about the deluge of coddling, cooing media coverage that was given to a Zionist activist who falsely pretended to have been “stabbed in the eye” by a pro-Palestine activist for a good example of this behavior:
Israel is the only issue where the western political-media class treats people’s feelings as a matter of supreme importance.
If you’re a stressed-out single parent struggling to pay bills and keep a roof over your kids’ head, they don’t care about your feelings.
If you’re an American who’s been cast into destitution and homelessness by medical bills, they don’t care about your feelings.
If you’re a Palestinian whose apartment complex was bombed with your entire family inside, they definitely don’t care about your feelings.
But if you’re a western Zionist who doesn’t like the cognitive dissonance that comes with encountering anti-genocide protesters, or even if you’re an Israeli who’s upset about anti-genocide protests in whole other country on the other side of the planet, they’re very, very interested in your feelings.
This is of course because the west’s unconditional support for Israel cannot be defended through facts, so the narrative control needs to focus instead on one nonstop appeal to emotion fallacy. Their position is so gross and indefensible that all they have left is babbling about some select people having upset feelings and holding those feelings as more important than stopping an active genocide.
The propagandists and empire managers don’t have facts on their side and don’t have morality on their side, so they attempt to manipulate by pulling on the heart strings using sympathy and compassion. They appeal to some of the healthiest impulses within us in order to dupe us into supporting some of the most evil actions the world has ever seen.
Which is an absolutely disgusting thing to do, naturally. But, again, it’s all these freaks have left.
I have just been immersed in an extraordinary experience: a mini-tour of conferences in Brazil encompassing four key cities – Sao Paulo, Rio, Salvador, Belo Horizonte. Full houses, sharp questions, fabulously warm people, divine gastronomy – a deep dive into the 8th largest economy in the world and major BRICS+ node.
As much as I was trying to impress the finer points of the long and winding road to multipolarity and the multiple instances of frontal clash between NATOstan and the Global Majority, I was learning non-stop from an array of generous Brazilians about the current inner contradictions of a society of astonishing complexity.
It’s as if I was immersed in a psychedelic journey conducted by Os Mutantes, the iconic trio of the late 1960s Tropicalia movement: from the business front in Sao Paulo – with its world-class restaurants and frantic deal-making – to the blinding beauty of Rio; from Salvador – the capital of Brazilian Africa – to Belo Horizonte, the capital of the third-wealthiest state in the Federation, Minas Gerais, a powerhouse of iron ore, uranium and niobium exports.
Chancay-Shanghai
I learned about how China chose the state of Bahia as arguably its key node in Brazil, where Chinese investment is everywhere – even if Brazil is not yet a formal member of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
In Rio, I was presented with an astonishing work on Stoics Zeno and Cleanthes by essayist Ciro Moroni – delving among other issues into the equivalences between Stoic theogony/theology and the Hindu Vedanta – the tradition of culture, religion and sacred rituals in India up to the Buddha era.
And in a sort of psychedelic synchronicity, I felt like Zeno in the Agora as we debated the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine at a lovely round pavillion – a mini-Agora – in fabled Liberty Square in Belo Horizonte, across the street from a fabulous exhibition of Treasures of Peruvian Art.
Much to my astonishment, a Peruvian, Carlos Ledesma, flew in from Lima especially for my conference and the exhibition; and then he told me about the Chancay port being built south of Lima, owned 70% by COSCO and the rest by private Peruvian capital; that will be a sister port of Shanghai.
Chancay-Shanghai: APEC in action across the Pacific. Next November, there will be three nearly simultaneous key events in South America: the G20 in Rio, the APEC summit in Lima, and the inauguration of Chancay.
Chancay will be boosted by no less than five rail corridors that may eventually be built – certainly with Chinese investment – from the agribusiness Valhalla in the Brazilian Center-West all the way to Peru.
Yes, China is all over the place in its largest trade partner in Latin America – much to the despair of a Hegemon sending lowly functionary Little Blinken to Beijing to hear the letter of the new law by Xi Jinping himself: it’s cooperation or confrontation, a “downward spiral”. Your downward spiral.
A river from Tibet to Xinjiang
At the Belo Horizonte conference, I shared the stage with remarkable Sebastien Kiwonghi Bizaru from Congo, who supervises PhD programs at the Candido Mendes University as well as being a Professor of International Law, after an extraordinary academic journey.
He is also the author of a ground-breaking book examining the highly debatable role of the UNSC in the conflicts of the Great Lakes – focusing on Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
With top researcher Natacha Rena, we pored over a map of China retracing her travels east to west last year all the way to the Xinjiang border – as she filled me in on the astonishing Honggqi River – or Red Flag River – Project, first proposed in 2017: no less than an attempt to divert water from Tibet to the dry lands and deserts of Xinjiang by building an enormous, over 6,000 km-long artificial river, including the branch canals.
The projected river will be slightly less longer than the Yangtze, diverting 60 billion cubic meters of water a year, more than the annual flow of the Yellow River. Predictably, ecologists in China are attacking the project, which may have already had an official go-ahead and is proceeding discreetly.
And then, as I was on the road between Rio and Minas Gerais, the BRICS 10 Ministers of Economy and heads of Central Banks met in Sao Paulo: and all of them hailed the drive towards “independent” payment settlement mechanisms. Russia is the 2024 president of this crucial group.
Russian Vice-Minister of Finance, Ivan Chebeskov, went straight to the point: “Most countries agree that payment in national currencies is what the BRICS need.” The Russian Ministry of Finance privileges the creation of a common digital platform congregating the BRICS Central Banks’ digital currencies and their national systems of transmitting financial messages.
Crucially, at this BRICS 10 meeting, most members stressed they are in favor of totally bypassing the U.S. dollar for trading.
Russian Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov was even bolder: he said that Russia is proposing to BRICS the creation of an independent and “de-politicized” global system of payments.
Siluanov hinted that the system may be based on blockchain – considering its low cost and minimal control exercised by the Hegemon.
BRICS map the new world in Sao Paulo
A day before the meeting in Sao Paulo, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow supported the development of these BRICS strategies, noting that “if we manage to develop independent financial mechanisms, that will seriously question the globalization mechanism currently led by the West.”
As over 100 nations are currently researching or embryonically implementing a digital currency in their Central Banks, a big breakthrough is imminent in Russia – a process I have been following in detail since last year.
In the end, it’s all about Sovereignty. That was the crux of the most serious debates I had this past week in Brazil, with academic players and on several podcasts related to the conferences. It’s the overarching theme hanging over the Lula government, as the President seems to cast the figure of a lonely fighter cornered by a vicious circle of 5th columnists and comprador elites.
In Belo Horizonte I was presented with yet another astonishing book by a former, brilliant government official, the late Celso Brant. After a sharp analysis of the modern history of Brazil and its interactions with imperialism, he reminds the reader of what stellar Mexican writer and poet Octavio Paz said in the 1980s about Brazil and China: “These will be the two great protagonists of the 21th century.”
When Paz rendered his verdict, every indicator favored Brazil, which since 1870 held the largest GDP growth in the world. Brazil exported more than China, and from 1952 to 1987 was growing at annual rate of 7.4%. Continuing the trend, Brazil would be the 4th largest economy in the world by now (it’s between 8th and 9th, side by side with Italy, and could be the 5th, were not for direct destabilization by the Empire starting in the 2010s, culminating with the Car Wash operation).
That’s exactly what Brant shows: how the Hegemon intervened to crash Brazilian development – and that started way before Car Wash. Kissinger was already saying in the 1970s that “the United States will not allow the birth of a new Japan under the Equator line.”
Hardcore neoliberalism was the privileged tool. While China under Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping and then Jiang Zemin went Full Sovereign, Brazil was mired in neocolonial dependency. Lula tried – and is now trying it again, against all odds and surrounded on all sides, with Brazil branded as a “swing state” by U.S. Think Tankland and potential victim of new rounds of imperial Hybrid War.
Lula – and some solid academic elites away from power – know full well that as a neo-colony, Brazil will never fulfill its potential of being, side by side with China, as prophesized by Paz, the great protagonist of the 21st century.
That was the major takeaway of my psychedelic tour of Tropicalia: Sovereignty. Viktor Orban – accused by simpletons of being a member of a fuzz “Neofascist International” – nailed it with a simole formulation: “The inglorious period of Western civilization will be brought to an end this year, by replacing the world built on progressive-liberal hegemony with a Sovereigntist one.”
While the collective west is in the grips of an existential legitimacy crisis, the RIC is devising its own security order to protect the rest of the world from the ‘genocidals.’
The Hegemon has no idea what awaits the Exceptionalist mindset: China has started to decisively stir the civilizational cauldron without bothering about an inevitable array of sanctions coming by early 2025 and/or a possible collapse of the international financial system.
Last week, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and his list of delusional US demands was welcomed in Beijing by Foreign Minister Wang Yi and President Xi Jinping as little more than an annoying gnat. Wang, on the record, stressed that Tehran was justified in defending itself against Israel’s shredding of the Vienna Convention when it attacked the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
At the UN Security Council, China now openly questions not only the state terror attack on the Nord Streams but also the US–Israel combo’s blocking of Palestinian statehood. Moreover, Beijing, just like Moscow recently, hosts Palestine’s political factions together in a conference aiming to unify their positions.
Next Tuesday, only two days before Moscow celebrates Victory Day, the end of the Great Patriotic War, Xi will land in Belgrade to remind the whole world about the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Chinese embassy by the US, UK, and NATO.
Russia, meanwhile, provided a platform for the UNRWA – the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, which Israel has sought to defund – to explain to high representatives of BRICS-10 the cataclysmic humanitarian situation in Gaza, as described by UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini.
In short, serious political business is already being conducted outside of the corrupted UN system, as the United Nations disintegrates into a corporate shell with the US dictating all terms as the largest shareholder.
Yet another key example of BRICS as the new UN: Russian Security Council chairman Nikolai Patrushev met in St. Petersburg with his Chinese counterpart Chen Wenqing on the sidelines of the 12th International Security Summit, congregating over 100 nations, including the security heads of BRICS-10 members Iran, India, Brazil, and South Africa, as well as Iraq.
The SCO security show
But the key crossroads these past few days was the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) defense summit in Astana, Kazakhstan. For the first time, the new Chinese Defense Minister, Dong Jun, met with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, to emphasize their comprehensive strategic partnership.
Dong, significantly, stressed the “dynamic” nature of China–Russia military interaction, while Shoigu doubled down, saying it “sets a model for interstate relations” based on mutual respect and shared strategic interests.
Addressing the full SCO assembly, Shoigu emphatically refuted the massive western propaganda drive about a Russian “threat” to NATO.
Everybody was at the SCO defense ministers’ meeting – including, at the same table, India, Iran, Pakistan, and Belarus as an observer. Minsk is eager to join the SCO.
The interlocking Russia–Iran–China strategic partnerships were totally in sync. Apart from Dong meeting Shoigu, he also met Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Ashtiani, who lavishly praised Beijing’s condemnation of the Israeli terror air strike in Damascus.
What is happening now between Beijing and Tehran is a replay of what started last year between Moscow and Tehran, when a member of the Iranian delegation on a visit to Russia remarked that both parties had agreed on a mutual, high-level “anything you need” relationship.
In Astana, Dong’s support for Iran was unmistakable. Not only did he invite Ashtiani to a security conference in Beijing, mirroring the Iranian position, he also called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Shoigu, meeting with Ashtiani, provided extra context when he recalled that “the joint fight against international terrorism in Syria is a vivid example of our long-standing friendly relations.” The Russian defense minister then delivered his clincher:
The current military-political situation and threats to our states oblige us … to common approaches to building a just world order based on equality for all participants in the international community.
A new global security order
Establishing a new global security order is right at the heart of BRICS-10 planning – on par with the de-dollarization debate. All of this is anathema to the collective west, which is incapable of understanding the multifaceted, intertwined Russia, Iran, and China partnerships.
And the interaction goes on in person. Russian President Vladimir Putin will be visiting Beijing later this month. On Gaza, the Russia–Iran–China position is in complete sync: Israel is committing genocide. For the EU – and NATOstan as a whole – this is not genocide: the bloc supports Israel no matter what.
After Iran, on 13 April, changed the game in West Asia for good, without even using their finest hypersonic missiles, the key question for the Global Majority is stark: in the end, who will restrain the genocidals, and how? Diplomatic sources hint this will be discussed face-to-face by Putin and Xi.
As one Chinese scholar, with unique aplomb, remarks:
This time, the barbarians are facing a 5,000-year continuing written civilization, armed with Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Mao thought, Xi’s dual circulation strategy, Belt and Road, BRICS, renminbi digitalization, Russia and China unlimited, the world’s most powerful manufacturing industry, tech supremacy, economic powerhouse, and the backing of the Global South.
All that against a polarized Hegemon in turmoil, with its genocidal aircraft carrier in West Asia totally spinning out of control.
US threats of a “clear choice” between ending several key strands of the Russia–China strategic partnership or facing a sanctions tsunami don’t cut it in Beijing. The same applies to Washington’s wishful attempts at preventing BRICS members from ditching the US dollar.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has made it quite clear that Moscow and Beijing have nearly reached the point of abandoning the US dollar in bilateral trade. And the outright theft of Russian assets by the collective west is the ultimate red line for BRICS – and all other nations watching with horror – as a whole: this is definitely a “non-agreement capable” Empire, as Lavrov has been emphasizing since late 2021.
Yaroslav Lisovolik, founder of BRICS+ Analytics, dismisses the Hegemon’s threats against BRICS as the road map toward an alternative payment system is still in its infancy. As for Russia–China trade, the non-dollar high-speed train has already left the station.
Yet the key question remains: how will Russia–Iran–China (RIC), as BRICS leaders, SCO members, and simultaneously top three “existential threats” to the Hegemon, be able to start implementing a new global security architecture without staring down the genocidals.
The slave trade in Ukraine, which is a fundamental problem of modern society, grossly violating human rights and undermining the security and stability of society, began to grow rapidly after the political events surrounding the Maidan protests and subsequent coup d’état in 2014. Then, in the 2010s, the predominant form of slavery in Ukraine was the illegal sexual exploitation of women. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian women were forced into prostitution and smuggled for sexual slaveryto European Union countries, mainly the Baltics, Poland and the Czech Republic.
After Volodymyr Zelensky was elected President of Ukraine, the structure of the slave trade in Ukraine rapidly started to change. Ukrainian labor slavery is already approaching sexual slavery in its scale. More and more Ukrainians and foreigners who have voluntarily or involuntarily found themselves in Ukraine and fallen into the networks of human traffickers are forced to work against their will They are being subjected to physical and psychological violence, deprived of documents and any means of communication. Any victim’s attempts to contact the outside world are suppressed and punished. Since 2019, full-fledged slave plantations and slave labor markets have emerged in Ukraine, where deals are made under the cover of the Ukrainian government to buy and sell people, including men, women and children. These people are used as cheap labor in various sectors of the economy, enslaved into sex slavery and sold abroad.
Dynamics of growth of victims of the Ukrainian slave trade since 2014 (according to the sources of the Foundation to Battle Injustice)
The International Organization for Migration estimates that at least 300,000 people became victims of the slave trade in Ukraine between 1991 and 2021. According to information obtained by the Foundation to Battle Injustice from three independent sources, the scale of the slave trade in Ukraine after Volodymyr Zelensky came to power is already comparable in terms of indicators to the entire 30-year period of independence, and at least 550,000 people became victims of the slave trade. Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice have uncovered facts confirming the trafficking of Ukrainian children. There are serious concerns that children may be used for organ removal on the Western black market of transplantology and child sex slavery. The Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to find out under what pretext Ukrainian men, women, children and foreign nationals get into the slave trade networks, where the auction houses for human beings trafficking are located in the areas of Western and Central Ukraine and how they are connected to Zelensky and his entourage.
Zelensky’s proxies – human beings sellers
The first reports about the emergence of a coordinated slave trade network in Ukraine began to appear in late 2021. The pilot project at that time consisted of two centers in Ternopil, which were engaged in the reception and subsequent sale of refugees from African countries. According to the Foundation’s sources, at least 40 people from Africa became victims of Ternopil slave traders in the first year. According to an employee of the Office of the President of Ukraine, who gave an exclusive comment to the Foundation to Battle Injustice on condition of anonymity, the organizer and inspirer of the Ukrainian slave trade network was Ruslan Stefanchuk, a close friend of Zelensky, a member of Zelensky’s party “Servant of the People” and the 15th chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.
Ruslan Stefanchuk, Zelensky’s associate and current chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine
A source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice from the Office of the President of Ukraine claims that Stefanchuk is the main beneficiary of illegal slave trade networks and the main figure in the Ukrainian slave trade. Human trafficking is carried out through private organizations registered to Stefanchuk’s relatives and friends. For the legal side of the criminal business are responsible the younger brother ofthe speaker of the Verkhovna Rada, Mykola Stefanchuk, and his wife Marina Stefanchuk, both of whom are graduated lawyers.
The structures of Marina Stefanchuk, who is a major entrepreneur and the ultimate beneficiary with a 25 percent stake in the capital of LLC “Legal Portal Ratio Decidendi”, are responsible for finding potential victims for the slave trade through the registration of shell companies placing fake trap ads looking for employees.
Ruslan and Marina Stefanchuk, cronies of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The Foundation’s sources hold them personally responsible for the spread of the slave trade in Ukraine
An important figure in the criminal slave trade scheme, in addition to Ruslan Stefanchuk, is his advisor Аleksandr Svyatotsky,director of Ratio Decidendi Legal Portal LLC. An official from the Office of the President of Ukraine told the Foundation to Battle Injustice on condition of anonymity that thanks to established contacts with criminal organizations in Ukraine, people controlled by Stefanchuk, primarily his freelance advisor Svyatotsky, are intensively expanding slave trade networks:
“Everything is built to look as legal as possible. Ukrainian women, children and men are invited for interviews at respectable companies in Kiev, Ternopil, Lviv or Ivano-Frankivsk. They are made tempting financial offers and paradisiacal working conditions. Then, under a plausible pretext, their identity cards are confiscated. After that, they can do absolutely anything they want with them.“
According to the source, Svyatotsky and his numerous legal assistants are responsible for making sure that from a legal point of view everything looks perfectly ordinary and does not raise any questions.
Аleksandr Svyatotsky, director of Ratio Decidendi Legal Portal LLC and external advisor to the speaker of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. Sources of the Foundation to Battle Injustice link Svyatotskyy to the slave trade in Ukraine
An employee of the Ukrainian President’s office told the Foundation that due to the expansion of the Ukrainian slave trade network, President Zelensky imposed a moratorium on the investigation of any reports of human trafficking in the spring of 2022, which was brought to the attention of representatives of all law enforcement agencies in Ukraine. A source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice is convinced that this “blessing” of the criminal scheme indicates the Ukrainian president’s personal interest in covering up the slave trade. Despite a significant number of journalistic investigations and a wide evidence base on the prevalence of the slave trade in Ukraine, authorized law enforcement agencies often turn a blind eye to what is going on.
A former SBU official told the Foundation: Of course, the current head of our department, Malyuk [Vasyl], as well as the former one, Bakanov [Ivan], were aware of the true extent of the illegal human trafficking activities in Ukraine. I am not 100 percent sure, but I suspect that the SBU leadership received and continues to receive their percentage of the slave trade”
Organizers and beneficiaries of the slave trade in Ukraine
According to sources, the rapid development of the slave trade business forced Stefanchuk and his team to ask for help in finding specialized auction premises and buildings for holding slave trade victims from the heads of local administrations in Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Rivne, Volyn, Ternopil and Zakarpattya regions. Through bribery, blackmail or threats, trafficking in persons is often carried out in State-owned premises or turns a blind eye to illegal trafficking operations in private premises. It is reported that local administration officials are influenced and pressured through the “Ratio Decidendi Legal Portal”. Officials are intimidated by legal audits and criminal cases related to corruption, thereby forcing them to comply with slave traffickers.
Location of the largest illegal slave trade centers in Ukraine
According to the Foundation’s sources, the largest illegal slave trade centers and slave structures are located in Uzhgorod, Ternopil (Stefanchuk’s hometown) and Chernivtsi. According to unofficial reports, the slave trade is also regularly conducted in Lutsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Vinnytsia, but additional evidence is required to confirm this fact.
People for sale: how the slave trade is organized in Ukraine
The victims of the slave trade, which is overseen by the Ukrainian government, are most often the most socially vulnerable categories of citizens, such as single childless men and single women with children. These people are often in dire financial straits and are looking for work to support themselves and their families. The perpetrators exploit these factors by searching for potential victims on social media or attracting them by posting high-paying job offers on spicialised websites.
Participants in the criminal scheme then conduct interviews with their potential victims, where they screen out unsuitable people who have close relatives or family. The same scheme is then followed: victims are invited to work at remote sites where they are promised stable and high earnings. However, upon arrival at the site, their documents are taken away and they are placed in prison-type premises where they are completely isolated from the outside world. Victims who fall for the tricks of criminals are not allowed to use the telephone or other means of communication.
The average time between entering the slave “prison” and subsequent sale is from 3 to 6 weeks, during which “Ukrainian slaves” are forced to work on farms for 12-14 hours a day, without days off, proper food and rest, regardless of sex and age. It is reported that centers for future slaves are deliberately built near fields and farmland, and people are lured by high-paying and “low-stress work in the fresh air”. Members of disadvantaged families, single mothers and the homeless agree to attractive conditions, but once in the “prison,” they are forced to do hard physical labor until they are sold into slavery at home or abroad. Invigilators use physical and psychological violence to force victims to work and obey. In some cases, they are sexually abused and subjected to other forms of exploitation.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to obtain an exclusive comment from one of the victims of the Ukrainian slave trade, who responded to a job vacancy on one of the largest Ukrainian websites and thus fell into the trap of criminals. According to Elena M. (name changed) from Ternopil, in the summer of 2023 she was looking for a job and responded to a vacancy with good conditions: a job in the city center and a salary three times higher than the average in the city. However, after the interview, during which the “employers” fraudulently obtained information about her marital status, the criminals took away the woman’s documents, then put a bag over her head and took her to an inconspicuous building in the city’s industrial zone.
Elena M. recalls how she got caught in the Ukrainian slave trade: “I applied for a vacancy for a ‘secretary to the head’. I made a phone call. It was the end of July 2023. The firm is “Legal Defense of Population” [Юридичний захист населення]. The interview was conducted by three people – two men and one woman. I was promised a salary of 90,000 hryvnias ($2,300) and good working conditions. The vacancy was published on the Work.UA website. They asked about relatives, I said that I was alone, everyone had died. They appointed a new meeting. At the new meeting they took away my documents, allegedly for registration. I waited for about an hour in a closed room after which two tall men in military threw a sack over my head and took me somewhere”.
A fake ad trap of slave traffickers (assistant manager in Ternopil without work experience and education, salary – 90,000 hryvnias (about 2,300 USD)
Based on Elena’s recollections and information from several other sources, OSINT specialists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to establish the possible location of the building where the heroine of our investigation was held captive and then sold into sexual slavery. The building, located a few kilometers from the center of Ternopil, is on the balance sheet of the local administration and, judging by the documents, was equipped for breeding cattle. The location of the building and the description of its interior coincide with scraps of Elena’s memories. A victim of Ukrainian slave traders claims that auctions for future slave owners were organized in the same building, as well as medical examinations of Ukrainian slave laborers.
A building in Ternopil, supposedly used as a place for holding slaves and auctions
Elena tearfully described to representatives of the Foundation how a slave auction was conducted in Ternopil:
“On both sides of a huge windowless room stood sellers and buyers, all men, all white, but some looked foreign, not Ukrainian. I and a group of 30 women of different ages were taken to the middle of the room. Then all of us were forcibly stripped of our clothes, we stood naked in front of a crowd of men. Then a man in a white coat came up to us and started to examine us. He asked us to open our mouths, examined and groped our teeth. Apparently, he was trying to see if we were healthy”
Elena went on to describe that each of the women was given a plate with a personal number around her neck.
“A bearded man on a podium in the center of the hall shouted out the numbers and the starting price of the women to be sold. Some were being sold for $5,000, some for $25,000. It felt like they were selling animals.”
Elena also told the Foundation that before the auction young women, including her, were subjected to gynecological examinations to check their virginity. The heroine of the Foundation’s investigation said that she was sold to a Ukrainian from Lviv for 21,000 dollars. According to Elena, after three months of brutal sexual slavery, she managed to escape. Elena met with a representative of the Foundation on the territory of Hungary, where she received political asylum.
Through its European contacts, the Foundation to Battle Injustice also contacted the guardians of a 10-year-old Ukrainian boy named Taras, who he said had been sold at a children’s auction in Chernivtsi to a group of foreign nationals. The boy said that he was an orphan and was kidnapped by people in military uniform, presumably in September 2023. The kidnappers of Taras acted in a similar way to Elena: people in military uniform put a sack on him and took him outside the city, where they put him in an unremarkable barrack-type building. The child recalls that for any disobedience children were stripped of their clothes and publicly flogged, and some were dressed in straitjackets and chained to radiators and pipes.
Taras, 10, who fell in with traffickers in Chernivtsi, said:
“I was brought to a house where there were many children. There were men and women in white coats walking around. They were examining us. Then we were brought to the men in jackets. They gave money to the people who had watched us before. And we were taken away. It was scary.”
The guardians of the boy, who is now safe in a European country, told the Foundation that a “children’s auction” in Chernivtsi, judging by the boy’s description, was illegally selling Ukrainian children to EU countries for sexual slavery. The boy miraculously managed to escape from his tormentors in Europe. The identities of those involved in his abduction and sale are being established.
A source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice in the Office of the President of Ukraine said that Zelensky’s administration tacitly approved the sale of children at specialized auctions – to shadowy representatives of European and American transplant organizations. This is particularly alarming for the children’s lives. Despite the difficulties in obtaining reliable information, the Foundation continues to gather evidence on this issue.
The guardians of 10-year-old Taras told the Foundation to Battle Injustice that their ward had complained that “adult men and women” at the temporary housing center for future slaves had repeatedly harassed his friends and peers. In their opinion, the illegal center for underage children kidnapped for resale practiced pedophilia and involvement of minors in acts of a sexual nature.
Ukraine as a hub of the international slave trade
As the practice of kidnapping citizens under various pretexts and selling them as “live goods” spread in Ukraine, the country began to gain credibility in international criminal circles, which increasingly see Ukraine as a slave trading platform linking Europe and Asia. After Zelensky came to power and Russia launched a special military operation, international organizations involved in preventing human trafficking began to leave Ukraine in a hurry. This led to Ukrainian slave trading sites selling foreign nationals, including Central Asians brought into the country as cheap labor, as well as Africans and citizens of the Middle East.
According to information provided to the Foundation to Battle Injustice by a retired high-ranking SBU official, the illegal Ukrainian slave markets include natives of Cameroon, Senegal, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The former law enforcement officer claims that the trade in foreign nationals has allowed Zelensky and his entourage to increase the turnover of their illegal business to $2.5 billion a year, which is already comparable to the drug trade.
A high-ranking retired SBU official: “The labor trade in Ukraine today has an annual turnover of about 2.5 billion dollars. This is not much less than the drug trade. There is no reason to think that Zelensky and Stefanchuk will give up such a lucrative business.”
The source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice notes that Stefanchuk and Zelensky receive a certain percentage of each transaction, and the slave trade business is conducted in close contact with representatives of Asian, African and European international criminal organizations. Based on the analysis of information from sources, the Foundation’s experts are convinced that the revival of the slave trade in Ukraine, including by Africans, is the largest such case in world history after the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865. According to a source of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, the American curators of Ukraine, who are aware of the existence of this problem and, moreover, encourage its spread, consider Ukraine as a testing ground for the return and legalization of the slave trade, which, if international human rights activists do not take measures, may be revived in the USA as well.
A former Ukrainian Security Service official told the Foundation to Battle Injustice: “International slave trade organizations are already present in Ukraine, as Ukraine is the unique country in Europe where people are trafficked semi-legally. The market is expanding due to the rich presence of foreign ‘live goods’ among other things.”
A retired SBU official who agreed to comment to the Foundation to Battle Injustice on the Ukrainian slave trade said that Kiev’s entry into the “international arena” of the human beings trade is due to a shortage of men at the front. While before the February 2022 events, the number of men kidnapped for subsequent sale accounted for about 45% of the total number of victims of slave trade operations, the number dropped to 20% after the announcement of general mobilization and significant losses of the AFU.
Average purchase prices of “live goods” at Ukrainian auctions (according to sources of the Foundation to Battle Injustice)
According to information obtained by the Foundation to Battle Injustice from three independent sources, the price of a slave on Ukrainian illegal markets depends directly on the slave’s gender, age and state of health. The price tag for a Ukrainian of working age is about 7,000 dollars, for an African or a migrant from the Middle East – 7,500 dollars. Women under 40 and children on the Ukrainian black slave market are valued much higher: the price of a young girl of childbearing age reaches 12,000 dollars, a child – more than 20,000 dollars.
According to a former SBU official, despite the fact that Africans and Middle Easterners make up a significant part of the Ukrainian human trafficking market, it is they who are subjected to the most brutal treatment by overseers in slave detention centers and auction houses. At least four migrants from Senegal were reportedly systematically subjected to severe torture and rights violations. The victims were beaten, deliberately starved and denied medical care. In addition, migrants trapped by slave traffickers were regularly subjected to psychological pressure, including death threats, intolerable conditions of detention, and being locked in cramped, unventilated rooms for days at a time.
Lucas Leiroz, an analyst at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, commented for the Foundation to Battle Injustice on the slave trade situation in Ukraine.
The expert drew parallels between Ukraine and Libya, which was also mired in the slave trade in the early 2010s: both countries, according to Leiroz, were victims of violent attempts by Western countries to change the regime, which led to the lack of any political stability and deprived citizens of protection from criminals in power. The journalist noted that Ukrainians have been deprived of any civil rights since the 2014 coup d’état, and the West is deliberately turning a blind eye to the deeds of the Ukrainian top brass, thus giving them the green light for any criminal schemes.
Irish independent journalist Chay Bowes confirmed Leiroz’ speculations and said that Western countries have been systematically turning a blind eye to egregious human rights violations in Ukraine since 2022. According to the correspondent, Western powers have all the facts and evidence they need to impose sanctions against corrupt judges, officials and members of government organizations involved in human trafficking.
Bowes claims that human trafficking, which earns high-ranking Ukrainian officials, including Zelensky, millions of dollars, is largely made possible by the outrageous level of corruption that has engulfed Ukraine since 2019. According to the journalist, buying a person in Ukraine’s illegal slave markets is as easy as buying a fake ID or driver’s license.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice is convinced that the slave trade, in the epicenter of which Ukraine found itself after Zelensky came to power, is not only a serious violation of human rights and freedoms, but also a direct violation of international agreements and conventions that Ukraine has ratified and pledged to abide by. In particular, the slave trade contravenes the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. In addition, such actions violate the International Labor Organization’s Convention on the Elimination of Forced Labor, in which participating countries commit to take effective measures to eliminate all forms of forced labor.
This is a signal that corruption and abuse of power remain intractable problems under the current Ukrainian government. Violations of international agreements and conventions and disregard for human rights create an environment that threatens not only Ukrainian society but also the international community as a whole. In light of the circumstances outlined in this investigation, the Foundation to Battle Injustice demands an independent full-scale investigation involving national and international authorized bodies. Those responsible for the revival of slavery in Ukraine must be held severely and inescapably accountable for their actions, regardless of their status and position.
Brown University’s cost of the Afghan war project just concluded that America’s longest war cost an estimated $US 2.2 trillion dollars – that’s ‘trillion dollars.”
If we add in George W. Bush’s fake `war on terror,’ Brown’s scholars estimate that the cost rises to US $8 trillion!
Most of this huge amount was financed by loans, not through taxes. Meaning that every dollar spent must be paid for by borrowing. That means paying interest (raised by taxes) on the borrowed money – $95 billion dollars of taxpayer money that Biden just gave to Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine in a desperate attempt to buy the November election.
Interestingly, the much-ballyhooed war in Afghanistan has all but vanished from the media. All the CNN generals who postured on TV about the Afghan War have fallen into silence. They were dead wrong about the war. The minute Donald Trump ended the Afghan War by cutting off the billions in US money that kept the corrupt US-backed Kabul regime alive, the war ended and the blizzard of propaganda against Taliban abated. The $2.2 trillion war abruptly became unimportant.
I was blacklisted by top newspapers and TV stations in the US, Mideast and Europe for having predicted that the Taliban resistance movement would win the conflict. I wrote that Taliban was the only legitimate mass political movement in Afghanistan. America co-opted other groups, like the heroin-dealing Tajik Northern Alliance and some anti-Taliban factions backed by Russia or Iran. The US ended up backing the Afghan heroin trade – which Taliban has completely shut down since it returned to power in Kabul.
The United States is the most over-propagandized nation on earth. Americans are barraged around the clock by government propaganda, commercial messages, internet agitprop and pro-war movies. Even the old Soviet Union was not so flooded by non-stop propaganda.
Today, we get 24/7 advertising for Ukraine, Taiwan and, of course, Israel. Women have been a particular target for the anti-Taliban propaganda – the same Taliban that were US allies in the 1980’s, as I saw. Taliban’s mountaineers are a wild and crazy bunch of warriors. Everything they believe in runs counter to the overly feminized United States.
The zeitgeist of the Afghan warriors Taliban’s credo is ‘tobacco, guns, and war.’
My columns about why war in Afghanistan was a huge mistake made me an object of hate. A former born-again evangelical prime minister of Canada actually sent his flunkies to get my 40-year old column dropped from the nation’s largest newspaper. He detested what I had to say but apparently lost no sleep over the scores of Canadian soldiers he sent to their death in Afghanistan or the millions wasted on the foolish Afghan War.
Politicians and generals who lose wars and trillions of dollars should admit their folly and resign. The media that promoted the colonial Afghan war should be rid of the propagandists infesting its ranks. Today, we see CNN, the New York Times, and Fox, the twin voices of America’s neocons, cheer-leading for the massacres in Gaza.
Instead, those newscasters who shilled for the Afghan War are now busily promoted President Biden’s wars. They and TV commentators seem to have no shame when it comes to their hugely bloody, expensive errors in Afghanistan. Nor do we find many commentators or critics who share the least guilt over carpet bombing Afghan villages by B-52 and B-1 heavy bombers.
How many Afghan civilians did we kill? The Pentagon refuses to release estimates. The Soviets are estimated to have killed two million Afghans. I believe the US has killed at least one million.
A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, suddenly we are taking about real money. Part of the dangerous inflation that today bedevils America was caused by reckless government spending on Afghanistan – as well as Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
The original Gaza Solidarity Encampment, just minutes after NYPD arrested ~100 protesters, and still surrounded by a large protesting crowd of students as well as bystanders. عباد ديرانية, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
The American media are never short of red-letter days when it comes to their wonderful combination of superciliousness and irresponsibility. But last week the mainstream dailies and magazines went all the way to scarlet and alizarin crimson. The brighter the better, I say, when the derelictions of our media are on display such that readers can no longer miss the deceptions and distractions that are at this point their intent.
I was reading along over breakfast last Thursday in search of the overnight news on the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza when I came upon the headline in The New York Times, “Laundry Detergent Sheets Are Poor Cleaners.” Wow. This is a story The Times had been following since its April 5 opener, “The 5 Best Laundry Detergents of 2024,” but my friends on Eighth Avenue left me hanging. At last I could go forth into the day confident I was a well-informed American, altogether engagé.
Last Thursday, last Thursday: Wasn’t that the day the U.N. Relief and Works Agency reported that Israel’s military operations “continue from air, land and sea” and that “in northern Gaza only five hospitals remain operational, and in the south only six”? Yes, I read this on a U.N. website, but The Times didn’t have room for it.
Then I was even better informed last Sunday, when The New Yorker published a long, delightfully inane conversation between David Remnick, who has very excellently overseen the ruination of what was once a good magazine, and Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian who always has a lot of important things to say. The occasion was … I shall let Remnick explain:
And now, for the first time, he has directed a movie. It is about a Russian Orthodox monk in the sixteenth century who starves himself to death rather than give in to the depredations of tsarist society. No, it isn’t. It’s about the race in the early sixties between Kellogg and Post to invent the Pop-Tart. Yes, really. It is called “Unfrosted” and will air on Netflix on May 3rd. It is extremely silly, in a good way.
Extremely silly in a good way. I think I understand.
Elsewhere in the news, as they say in the broadcast trade, the Israel Occupation Forces continued bombing Rafah as the Remnick item came out last Sunday—Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where the IOF had ordered Gazans to flee for their safety as they, the Israelis, bombed and bulldozed northern Gaza to the point of uninhabitability.
But let us not allow brutalities of Medieval-style gore, savagery for which we pay, to disturb our psyches. With what shall our media fill our minds? The dropping of American ordnance on Palestinian children or the history of Pop–Tarts, humorously told?
We knew the answer by the time The New Yorker published the adolescent, time-wasting badinage Remnick and Seinfeld shared because we had watched—the caker over this past week—the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last Saturday evening. We watched a stream of reporters eager for some passing social connection to celebrity and power stride disdainfully by people demonstrating against the Israeli–U.S. genocide. We watched Medea Benjamin of Code Pink get thrown out of the dinner for holding up a placard reading, “100 journalists killed in Gaza.”
And we heard Colin Jost conclude his 23 minutes of sometimes-pithy humor with his ode to what was most conspicuously missing in that roomful of feckless poseurs. “Decency is why we’re all here tonight,” the television comedian said with unfeigned seriousness. “Decency is how we’re able to be here tonight.” By then Jost, at bottom a court jester, had already told his audience of narcissists, “Your words speak truth to power. Your words bring light to the darkness.”
Yes, believe it, in the spring of 2024 people still say these sorts of things about corporate journalists. And the people so addressed take them to be true.
Words. Words. Language, its use and misuse.
As I reviewed the week that was in our media, I thought of a book that greatly impressed me when it came out in the mid–1990s. In “The Unconscious Civilization” (House of Anansi, 1995; Free Press, 1997) John Ralston Saul, the Canadian scholar and writer, was early in identifying the disconnection between language, as used in our public discourse, and reality. The expansion of knowledge has not produced an expansion of consciousness, Saul observed. It has instead caused us to take refuge in a universe of illusions wherein clear language becomes a kind of transgression. We render ourselves unconscious. Ideologies substitute for thought.
And then I thought of something else altogether. I thought of all those principled, clear-eyed students pitching tents, occupying buildings and holding placards across the U.S. in support of the Palestinian cause—which is to say the human cause. What is the difference, I came to wonder, between the demonstrating students and the journalists writing about laundry detergents and junk breakfast food or obscuring best they can the daily atrocities in Gaza? If the question implies the two are comparable, good. I think they are in some essential respects.
If we understand those who populate corporate media as painfully representative of the unconsciousness of our civilization—and I cannot see disputing this—we can stay with Saul’s terms and rotate our gaze to recognize those demonstrating in many American colleges and universities as, before they are anything else, highly conscious human beings. May the future lie with them. They are riveted to reality, while the media class flinches from it. While corporate journalists hide in forests of frivolity, the students we read of daily take refuge in nothing unless we count all those tents they’ve pitched on campus quads and greens. At writing, students at Columbia and other universities are besieged by police in riot gear—or, at UCLA, marauders, presumably students but maybe not, who swing sticks in defense of the Zionist cause.
Listen to the language of the demonstrators, not only for what they say but for how they say it. The diction, simplicity and clarity of their placards and public statements have the force of true conviction. Reconnecting language to reality lies at the core of our recovery into consciousness, Saul argued. Or there is Hannah Arendt’s variation on the thought: “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.” So: As demonstrators speak, they make themselves humanizers.
Put this next to the mainstream’s coverage of the protests. It is replete with foggy language, intentionally obscure pieces casting the perfectly obvious distinction between anti–Zionism and anti–Semitism as some kind of insoluble conundrum. Nonsense. I have heard any number of Jews complain that Zionism rips off their religion, their beliefs and their identity, and in this way they consider Zionism what is truly anti–Semitic in our midst.
This business of anti–Semitism everywhere, or anti–Semitism as “shadowing the demonstrations”—a phrase from The New York Times brimming with mal-intended suggestion but with no discernible meaning—is a case of language misused for the most cynical and corrupt of reasons. This Wednesday we were treated to a House vote on legislation that will define criticism of Israel as anti–Semitic. I blame mainstream media for encouraging over many years this outright abuse of language by pretending the equivalence deserves to be taken even the slightest bit seriously.
Between the demonstrators and the journalists, you have clarity and you have blur—language well used and language misused. There is, once again, much hope implicit in the former, none in the latter.
There is one question that divides, more radically than any other, those acting on behalf of the Palestinian people and those either ignoring or obscuring Israeli–U.S. aggression. This is the question of power.
Look at the David Remnicks, or those at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (which became an idiotic obscenity long before the Gaza crisis), or The Times’s laundry correspondent. What are these people doing if not running for their lives—or at least their careers—from any serious confrontation with power? Those at the White House dinner, so eager to identify with power and its demotic distant cousin, celebrity: Are they not merely power-worshiping wards of the very state they are supposed to report upon?
You may have noticed that I have treated together those refusing to cover the daily atrocities in Gaza truthfully—or any of the other crises confronting our lapsing imperium, for that matter—and those filling their newspapers with … what’s my phrase? … insidious garbage. To explain this I propose to introduce the notion of passive dereliction.
Outright fabricators such as Jeffrey Gettleman are the most craven servants of power, true. And parenthetically, I can hardly wait to see what The Times, which is very inventive when it comes to punishing correspondents who embarrass it, does to Gettleman now that his “sexual violence” stories have so publicly collapsed. The Manhattan real estate desk, maybe?
But no reporter writing stories about the merits or otherwise of laundry detergent, or the importance of Beyoncé washing her hair—yes, I read a piece on this the other day—can claim to be outside the loop of responsibility as to the duties of professional journalists. Those helping to fill newspapers with distracting rubbish to crowd out worthy news reports, especially during a time of crisis such as ours, are also complicit in keeping the public distracted and misinformed in the service of power. This is what soma, that perversely calming drug Huxley imagined in “Brave New World,” looks like. These people administer daily doses of it.
By contrast, if there is one thing shared in common among the demonstrators who have their administrations, police departments and a lot of people in Washington quaking, it is their unabashed, right-out-front determination to confront power. What has brought them onto the streets and the commons of their universities is a world-historically depraved use of power to exterminate a people. They are exactly where they ought to be. But I hope they understand that the Israeli–U.S. genocide is but one manifestation of a vastly larger question, the question of late-imperial power.
And I hope they stay with it when they recognize, as eventually they must, that it is this larger question that requires address if the humanity for which they stand is to be served. Cubans, Syrians, Venezuelans, Iraqis, Nigeriens, Nicaraguans, others—let’s take the famous post–September 11 phrase and make it: They are all Palestinians now.
Texas state troopers try to break up pro-Palestinian demonstration at the University of Texas in Austin on April 24. (Photo: Jay Janner / Austin Statesman)
Democrat Biden, Republicans Smear Protests as “Anti-Semitic”
Cops/Security Guards Off Campus!
Labor: Defend Student Protesters!
APRIL 30 – As the U.S./Israel war on the Palestinian population of Gaza reached its 200th day (April 23), almost 43,000 Palestinians have been killed in the genocidal slaughter. The horror continues to mount relentlessly: over half of all homes in the strip destroyed by bombing, “flour massacres” as Israeli troops shoot hundreds of people desperately seeking food from aid trucks, the targeted murder of humanitarian aid workers, the spectre of imminent mass starvation. Now mass graves are being uncovered at Gaza hospital sites following raids by the Zionist military. As the Democratic administration of U.S. president Joe Biden continues to supply Israel with arms to carry out the butchery, on the home front Democrats and Republicans lyingly label anti-Zionist protests “anti-Semitic.” This filthy libel reached a crescendo at an April 17 hearing in Congress interrogating Columbia University president Nemat Shafik, who thanked the inquisitors and vowed to crack down on pro-Palestinian students and faculty.
In her groveling performance before the Congressional witch-hunters, Shafik condemned chants and slogans that have drawn the Zionists’ ire, promising lawmakers that “there will be consequences” for pro-Palestinian protesters. This set off a firestorm back at Columbia. That afternoon, as she was testifying in Washington, student protesters set up a Gaza solidarity encampment occupying the New York City campus’ South Lawn, leading to split-screen TV coverage. Faculty members complained that the university president threw academic freedom under the bus, while 20 Jewish professors slammed the witch-hunters’ weaponization of anti- Semitism. That night, Shafik called on the New York City Police Department to clear out the encampment, which they did the next morning, arresting 108 participants. The students were suspended from school and barred from campus; those living in dormitories were evicted on the spot, given 15 minutes to clear out their stuff.
Statistical summary of the U.S./Israeli genocide of the Palestinian population in Gaza, currently under way.
(Graphic by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor)
Rather than squelching protest, this vindictive repression had the opposite effect, spurring Gaza solidarity actions across the country. Within hours of the police action, a new encampment sprouted at Columbia. On Friday, April 19, tents appeared in a plaza outside the New York University business school; that night, some 150 were arrested as hundreds yelled “Let them go.” The police complained that faculty protesters were the most vocal against the cops. The following Monday, April 22, an encampment sprung up at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, where at least 60 were arrested. In the next days, Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. suspended the undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and closed off Harvard Yard, but students set up an encampment there anyway. Occupations spread to other area schools, including Emerson College in downtown Boston, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and a little later, at Northeastern University.
The encampments began at elite Ivy League universities and private colleges in the Northeast, but soon spread to state universities across the country, including the University of Minnesota, Ohio State, Indiana University, the University of South Carolina, University of Texas, University of Colorado and Arizona State. In all of those cases, police were called in to clear the tents and carry out mass arrests, often brutally. At UT Austin, Republican Texas governor Gregg Abbott sent baton-wielding state police, some on horseback, to break up a pro-Palestinian demonstration – not even an encampment – saying “these protesters belong in jail” and that students in “hate-filled, anti- Semitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.” On April 24, the Republican House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson staged a provocation at Columbia, telling protesters to “stop the nonsense,” and saying that if it didn’t stop, university president Shafik should be fired and the National Guard called in.
It’s not just right-wing Republicans who are smearing and repressing the Gaza solidarity camps and pro-Palestinian demonstrations. On April 21, the White House issued a statement in reference to the Columbia protests, saying “This blatant anti-Semitism [sic] is reprehensible and dangerous – and it has absolutely no place on college campuses.” After speaking at the University of Virginia the next day, Democratic president Biden told the press “I condemn the antisemitic protests” – putting the presidential seal of approval on this disgusting slander of young people rightly indignant at the genocidal war armed and financed by his administration. The same day, New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul beat Johnson to the punch, rushing to Columbia to denounce “anti-Semitism,” seconded by New York City’s Democratic mayor Eric Adams. In Boston, liberal Democratic mayor Michelle Wu sent city police to assault the Emerson encampment (118 arrests) and liberal Democratic governor Maura Healey deployed Massachusetts state police to bust up the Gaza solidarity camp at Northeastern (102 arrests).
The brutality of the cop attack in several places horrified many. At Emory University in Atlanta, a CNN video shows a woman professor with a handbag admonishing university, city and state police to stop beating a protester when a beefy officer viciously manhandles and throws her to the ground, another piles on and a third stands watch with a semi-automatic pepper-ball gun. This wanton violence against peaceful protesters and even a faculty member passing by is hardly surprising coming from Atlanta police who each got a $500 bonus for harshly repressing the 2020 protests over the racist police murder of George Floyd; who at the height of those protests shot and killed Rayshard Brooks for falling asleep in a Wendy’s drive-thru lane; and who in December 2022 executed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (Tortuguita) in their war against demonstrators protesting the “Cop City” police training center.1 What shocked liberals was this kind of repression being meted out at Emory, a top-flight university with a $60,000 tuition.
Against the Gaza Genocide, Bring Out the Power of the Working Class
Banner at the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University in New York City, April 22. (Photo: Stefan Jeremiah / AP)
For hundreds of thousands of people across the United States – and millions worldwide – who have taken to the streets to protest the horrific slaughter in Gaza, the solidarity encampments on U.S. campuses have spurred hopes that they would mushroom into a mass movement. In New York City alone, the mayor reported more than 1,900 pro-Palestinian protests in the five months from October 7 to mid-March. Yet so far these have had no visible effect on U.S. policy, much less on the ground in Gaza. As of the end of April, some 80 encampments have been reported and over 800 arrests, climbing toward 1,000 as campus administrators look to police power to discipline academia. This is very significant, but nowhere near the scope of the 2020 mass marches that rocked U.S. cities for months protesting racist police murder, and it is politically still far from the radicalization of the student/youth revolt against the Vietnam War symbolized by the 1968 Columbia University occupation.
The reality is that the present protests have yet not gone beyond the dead-end of liberal pressure politics, seeking to turn capitalism’s universities into morally liberated zones. But the hardline Zionists in Jerusalem, together with the imperialist mass murderers in Washington who finance, arm and jointly carry out the U.S./Israel genocide in Gaza, will not be pressured into “changing their priorities.” They can only be stopped by a potentially stronger force, that of the working class here and internationally. It is to that force that the most serious student activists must turn. This requires a program of sharp class struggle.
Of course, new developments may change the course of events, such as a bloody eviction of an encampment. As the old saying has it, the brutality of a cop’s riot stick can quickly raise consciousness and dispel “ivory tower” illusions. Meanwhile, the Israeli military is readying what could be mass murder on an even greater scale with an offensive in Rafah in the southern end of Gaza. There, a million Palestinians are bottled up, many in makeshift shelter after fleeing their now-destroyed homes, stuck on a waterless desert amid the searing summer heat. As people watch an actual genocide taking place before their eyes, and are desperately seeking some way to take action against it, various intractable forces are interacting. You have kill-crazed Zionist militarists; U.S. imperialist rulers seeking to stave off the unraveling of their dominance and pushing the world closer to WWIII; McCarthyite witch-hunters in Washington and university authorities desperate to “restore order” to save their jobs. The result could be an explosive situation that goes beyond the campuses.
As the school year draws to an end, continued spread of protests, and of repression, could lay the basis for student strikes and walkouts across the country. This would certainly be an important development, but rather than illusions in “student power,” looking to and linking up with the power of the working class that can bring everything in society to a halt is key. These things don’t fall from the sky; revolutionaries work to bring the program of class struggle into the fight. Our comrades in Portland, Oregon have won construction workers unions to call for workers action to stop arms shipments to Israel, as Palestinian unions in Gaza urged. Building on that and putting such calls into practice, is a concrete way to strike a blow against Israeli and U.S. warmakers. In the face of repression against the student Gaza solidarity encampments, bringing out labor to defend the protesters could significantly change the balance of forces.
The key is a revolutionary program and revolutionary leadership. In the campus protests, this starts with a clear understanding that universities are part of the capitalist system, and those that administer them are servants of the capitalist ruling class. They can’t be made into “friends of the people” or allies of the oppressed. The war on Gaza is not a case of “mistaken priorities” but an expression of the barbarism of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalist, in a state of accelerating decay. Thus, it is vital to connect today’s struggles to the fight to overthrow this system through international socialist revolution.
The Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth (RIY) have been present daily at solidarity protests outside Columbia University, as well as at the New School and NYU. Members of RIY and the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York (CUNY) are participating in the Gaza solidarity encampment at City College. As early as last October and repeatedly since then, the Internationalist Clubs have taken the lead in protesting McCarthyite repression against defenders of the Palestinian people at Hunter College and elsewhere in CUNY.2 In the face of the snowballing repression, we call to drop all charges against pro-Palestinian demonstrators and demand police and security guards off campus. And we appeal to the unions – beginning with the Professional Staff Congress representing 30,000 faculty and staff at CUNY – saying Labor: defend the students protesting genocide in Gaza!
Revolutionary Internationalist Youth at University of California, Berkeley Gaza solidarity encampment, April 22. (Photo: Jose Carlos Fajardo / Bay Area News Group)
Across the country, the IG and RIY have been to multiple encampments in the Boston area (Emerson, MIT, Northeastern, Tufts); at Portland State University in Oregon where a building takeover is underway, to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and participated daily in the encampment at the University of California in Berkeley. Everywhere we have combined the call to link up with the power of the working class, to the program for a binational Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East.
Above all this struggle is a political fight against the combined forces of the capitalist state, and its leading parties, Democrats and Republicans, which are responsible for financing, arming and jointly waging genocidal war against the Palestinians. It is not about “bearing moral witness,” “speaking truth to power” or other liberal platitudes. Against the bipartisan war party in Washington, which just voted $95 billion to wage U.S. imperialist wars, we call to build a revolutionary workers party that can lead the struggles of all the oppressed. The stakes couldn’t be higher. ■
Anti-genocide groups are being targeted by media and government
• 2,600 WORDS •
Well friends, the verdict is in! If you are opposed to Israel’s slaughter of something like forty thousand Palestinians, mostly women and children, or the clearly enunciated plans by that nation’s government to ethnically cleanse the rest of historic Palestine, making the developing Eretz or Greater Israel a legally Jewish state, and are prepared to protest or speak up about it, then you are an antisemite Jew-hater and probably even a holocaust denier. If you are a student demonstrating against the slaughter you are increasingly being referred to by talking heads and the media as a pro-Hamas terrorist. That you must be condemned and sanctioned or even criminalized as a consequence of the labels is only fair in a country that apparently has come to believe that Jews and Israel, uniquely, cannot be criticized due to their cited ad nauseam victimhood and their anointment by God no matter what the First Amendment to the US Constitution relating to freedom of speech might say. After all, it’s just an old piece of paper though it might strike some as a bit odd that a group of people carrying out a genocide are being given a pass while those trying to stop it are being beaten, going to jail and, in some cases, being denied that degree they earned from four years at college.
That antisemites and even evil foreign governments like China are behind the recent student demonstrations over the atrocities in Gaza is gradually becoming part of the new Gospel, ritually endorsed by the cowering university administrators themselves as well as by a large majority in Congress, the White House and the mainstream media. Pro-Palestinian groups are being routinely shut down and their supporters clubbed, gassed and arrested while Jewish groups supporting Israel’s “right to defend itself” are being allowed to express their rage violently, as occurred at the University of California in Los Angeles on last Tuesday night with police standing by to let the pro-Israel attackers (who were mostly non-students) have access to beat on the pro-Palestinian campers. It was an alignment of hearts and minds that apparently serves both justice and God, who has declared Jews to be his “chosen.” The University of Southern California’s administration has labeled pro-Palestinian groups as “homegrown violent extremists” as an excuse to shut down graduation ceremonies later this month. Governors in Texas and Florida have declared war on those despicable antisemites, insisting that there will be no Jew haters in their states and expressing a willingness to use police and national guard to make sure that that is the case. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has vowed that any student who speaks up or demonstrates against Israel will be expelled from college. National Guard troops have also been called in to clear campuses in a number of other states, with more than a thousand demonstrators being arrested and removed on Tuesday alone.
Some jest how it is Israel that controls much of US foreign policy “wag the dog,” not to mention interfering in elections and dictating what must be taught about world i.e. Jewish history in public schools together with mandatory trips to taxpayer funded holocaust museums that are sprouting up like mushrooms throughout the land. The United States is pledging itself to become antisemitism free as quickly as possible, which is surely the right thing to do given all those holocaust survivors who are living down in Miami and apparently starving to death according to all those ads one sees on TV and hears over the radio featuring dispensationalist hucksters like Mike Huckabee, who should move to Israel immediately since he loves the place so much, taking those of a like mind in Congress with him when he goes.
America under Joe Biden and also undoubtedly under Donald Trump if re-elected is pledged to take the lead in protecting Jews worldwide and will sanction anyone who violates that trust. Who else, for example, is so uber sensitive to Jewish issues as to have a Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues and an Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism entrenched with ambassador status and full staffs and budgets in their Foreign Ministry? Not even the cringing Krauts who routinely let Israel lie to them and intimidate them while still sending millions to the apparently endless series of so-called holocaust survivors in Israel as they also are shipping arms to Tel Aviv to assist in killing more Pals. That’s what true friends and allies are for! Britain has Conservative Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Israel which together constitute a majority in Parliament. Both UK party leaders do their best to make love to Israel on a regular basis. And France, Canada and Australia? There is no space between them and Netanyahu. They are as “ironclad” on Israel as Joe Biden constantly professes himself to be!
Greater love hath no man nor no woman to compare to the love of American politicians for Israel! Look what Papa Joe Biden has done for Israel over the past four years out of appreciation for the more than $4 million in donations that he has received from the Israel Lobby in political donations in his career. The $26 billion in the pipeline for Netanyahu is certainly an appropriate reward for the great man who single handedly has prevented Iran from getting a nuclear arsenal, something he has been warning about for the past twenty-five years! Biden’s first rule in politics, which he has been observing for forty years, is always do what Israel wants no matter what the cost because the Jewish state and the Jewish US domestic lobby together with its media wing are crucial to getting nominated and elected!
Only American politicians have the gall to call in heads of major universities and berate or even call for their firing if they are not doing enough about antisemitism! During an April 17th House hearing on antisemitism US Congressman Rick Allen asked Columbia University President Minouche Shafik if she was concerned that God might “curse” the university. Allen had first quoted a passage from the Bible that says God will curse those who curse Israel and added that he personally views Jerusalem as the “center of the universe”. He also suggested the university should create a course teaching students about the Bible so they can learn about “the wrath of God” and how “indoctrinating” professors fail to tall students that don’t know how they “will be cursed by God”.
If Israel is truly America’s greatest friend in the world and best ally there should be some positive evidence of that in the interaction of the two countries. So let’s take a look in terms of reciprocity relating to what has been happening over the past couple of weeks! First of all, at the macro level, i.e. continuing the fighting, Biden has warned the Israelis that if they invade Rafah they will not be supported. Netanyahu has responded, “We will enter Rafah and obliterate all the Hamas battalions there — with or without a deal, to achieve total victory” lest there be any confusion about what he intends to do no matter whether a temporary ceasefire with a hostage exchange is arranged or not. Biden and his amazing talking horse Anthony Blinken did not respond apart from pushing even harder for a ceasefire on Israel’s terms, which would be bad for the Gazans in any event given the key word “temporary” in front of “ceasefire.” Israel will be free to resume killing even though more fighting will be bad for Biden’s electoral prospects in November and he knows it. So does Netanyahu.
Blinken has called for an impartial international investigation of the two mass graves recently discovered at the bombed hospital sites in Gaza, containing four hundred or more bodies, many of which were tortured and/or executed with their hands tied behind their backs or dragged out of hospital beds to be buried still alive in deep pits. Some bodies showed signs of hasty surgery indicating that their organs, a valuable commodity, were removed, a regular signature piece appearing on victims of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the Most Moral Army in the World according to that strange looking Franco-Jewish so-called intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy. The Netanyahu and the IDF replied that Israel would do its own investigation saying “What is there to investigate?” Blinken did not object.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is preparing to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and two other senior Israeli officials in connection with war crimes. Netanyahu is reportedly reaching wildly out to his many “friends” to prevent such a development. He tweeted that Israel “will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense. The threat to seize the soldiers and officials of the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state is outrageous. We will not bow to it.” ICC deliberations are secret so it appears that an American or British jurist has leaked the story to enable Netanyahu to mount a campaign against it. The White House and Congress are already moving full speed ahead to make the warrants go away up to and including threats to directly take on and discredit the court if the Israelis are actually punished. Zionist Speaker Mike Johnson has pressured the White House and State Department to “use every available tool to prevent such an abomination.” The US has never before threatened the ICC and has nothing to gain and much to lose in so doing. Rule of Law anyone? There are reports that prosecutors from the ICC have interviewed medical staff at two of Gaza’s largest hospitals in their investigation of other possible war crimes committed by Israel in connection with the mass graves.
To be sure some pushback from inside the US government as well as from voters is developing. Fully 92% of Israelis fully support the slaughter of the Palestinians by Netanyahu and his psychopaths but 72% of Americans do not approve of what is taking place in Gaza, for which Biden will likely pay a heavy electoral price. A group of American lawyers, at least 20 of whom work in the Biden administration, are also calling on the US government to stop selling arms to Israel and are, of course, being ignored. There have also been other lawsuits as well as resignations of senior government officials who have been shocked by the US support of the genocide being conducted against the Palestinians.
Congress has just passed by an overwhelming vote pf 320 to 91 the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which will, inter alia, place antisemitism monitors in American colleges and universities. Criticism of Israel, defined ipso facto as antisemitism, will be part of their brief. It is being pushed by groups like the infamous Anti-Defamation League (ADL) whose leader Jonathan Greenblatt has called pro-Palestinian demonstrations “Jew haters” and has demanded criminal charges. Several congressmen have likewise called for all Palestinians to be killed, but there seems to be no demand for an Anti-Palestinian Act to protect the Pals. Benjamin Netanyahu has also called out the demonstrators saying “What’s happening on America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students, they attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. The response of several university presidents was shameful.” By shameful Netanyahu means that the presidents did not crawl enough and beg forgiveness from himself, Israel, and all diaspora Jews as well as from a Zionist Congress and White House.
Joe Biden intends to sign the anti-antisemitism legislation in spite of its direct assault on the First and Fourth Amendments to the US Constitution. The new legislation will join the recently approved FISA renewal that will allow the US government to spy on citizens without a warrant. It should surprise no one to learn that the FISA bill was particularly pushed by Greenblatt and ADL to “protect Jews” by making it easier to spy on suspected antisemites. The US government ban on TikTok was also promoted by ADL due to the fact that the site includes too much information critical of Israeli behavior. Clearly, the US Congress does what Greenblatt wants.
Finally, a US pledge to determine responsibility and sanction perpetrators for the killing of American citizens in Israel, as well as the harassment and killing of Palestinian civilians on the West Bank, has not gone anywhere. The State Department investigation found that five IDF units had committed “individual incidents of gross violations of human rights” prior to October 7th, including the beating to death of an 80 year old Palestinian-American and the sniper execution of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh. The investigation determined that there was one particularly nasty extremist-fundamentalist Netzah Yehuda battalion which had killed the octogenarian and others whose capital offense consisted of walking in their town on the West Bank. They could have joined the roughly 10,000 Palestinian prisoners held in “preventive” detention without any charges by the Israeli government, but instead they were picked up on the street, were not charged with anything, and were then beaten and killed. The killing should surprise no one. On Monday Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the death of Gaza saying “There are no half measures. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. ‘You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven’ – there’s no place under heaven.” The reference to “Amalek” was from a line in the Hebrew Bible where Amalek was a nation that the Israelites were commanded to destroy, God telling them to “slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.” Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir came up with a similar genius solution to the country’s overcrowded prison problem – many of the Palestinians should be released and then killed to make more room.
Blinken, who has not commented on either the Smotrich or Ben-Gvir suggestions, has been sitting on the IDF report but was confronted with a challenge by House Speaker Mike Johnson who threatened to take steps to block any White House action directed against our best friend in the whole world Israel. As a result, the State Department will now neither restrict military aid nor in any way sanction the punishment of any of the units in question, even though it is actually illegal under US law to provide arms to governments committing human rights violations and war crimes. The US backdown also came after Netanyahu stated that the US would not be allowed to in any way punish or interfere with IDF units. Blinken then rolled over completely when confronted by the power of the Jewish state with a State Department spokesperson saying the units “have effectively remediated these violations,” whatever that is supposed to mean.
So killing Americans does not even merit a slap on the wrist if Israel is involved… That is where we Americans now find ourselves: fundamental rights are disappearing and our government and society are victims of Israel and its army of paid-up friends here in the US. Will Americans wake up in time to stop the rot? Not likely, as the mainstream party choices Biden and Trump will do whatever the Jewish state demands. That is our dilemma.
Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, the new series on Netflix by Brian Knappenberger, is a documentary about the Cold War and the current US conflict with Russia.
“With firsthand accounts and access to prominent figures around the world, this comprehensive docuseries explores the Cold War and its aftermath,” reads Netflix’s breathless promotional blurb.
The mushroom cloud from the world’s first test of a thermonuclear device, dubbed Ivy Mike, over Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands on November 1, 1952. [AP Photo/Los Alamos National Laboratory]
The documentary’s trailer features chilling excerpts from interviews with such figures as whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers, Garrett M. Graff, author of Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself–While the Rest of Us Die (2017), a book about the United States’ secret nuclear war plans, and historian Timothy Naftali, who revealed American government collaboration with leading German Nazis after World War II.
As the series progresses, however, historians and critics of US foreign policy are replaced by some—for lack of a better phrase—of the world’s leading war criminals, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects of the Iraq War, and Robert Gates, who, as Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, presided over the Iran-Contra scandal and later served as Secretary of Defense.
Condoleezza Rice in Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War
It gradually emerges that this “monumental” documentary is, in fact, an equally monumental exercise in the dissemination of US militarist propaganda. Its disclosures about Washington’s foreign policy crimes serve primarily to give credence to its central purpose of agitating for world war against Russia.
In the course of the documentary, Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia and a leading proponent of the Ukraine bloodbath, offers a comment that sums up in microcosm the documentary’s overall approach.
“I would say very openly: Has the CIA been involved in coups? The answer to that is, yes, of course. The 1953 Iranian coup against Mossadegh. There are lots of examples of that. To the best of my knowledge, the CIA was not doing that in Ukraine in 2004, or Russia in 2011. Or in Ukraine in 2013 and 2014.”
This comment, presented without comment or criticism, combines an undeniable truth with an absurd lie. It is, of course, well-known that the CIA was the leading force behind the overthrow of the Iranian government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953.
It is equally true, however, that, in the words of a recent New York Times article, “a decade ago … The C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies” initiated a “partnership” that “transformed Ukraine … into one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.” In English, this is called a coup.
McFaul’s amalgam of embarrassing truth with bald-faced lies is the modus operandi of the series. It freely discusses the crimes of American imperialism, provided they took place years ago, while excluding anything but benevolent and altruistic motives and exemplary conduct in current US foreign policy.
This approach, which involves both selective admissions and falsifications, means that the series resides in a sort of parallel universe to Knappenberger’s previous documentary, Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror.
Brian Knappenberger
The villains who funded and armed Osama bin Laden and launched the disastrous and murderous invasion of Iraq based on the doctrine of “preemptive war” in the previous series become the heroes of the “struggle for democracy” in the new one, without any attempt to explain the change in casting.
Substantive revelations
With that said, the admissions the series does make are significant and valuable.
The first episode includes a horrific depiction of the effects of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a frank reference to the fact that the decision to use them was aimed at sending a message to the Soviet Union that any further military advances into Eastern Europe and China would be met with overwhelming American military force. “Some would say [it was a] war crime,” declares one historian in the first episode.
The episode includes a detailed and harrowing account of the displacement of Japanese Americans during World War II in a climate of state-promoted anti-Japanese racism.
The second episode—drawing heavily on an interview with Ellsberg—reveals that during the Cold War human civilization came far closer to total destruction during the Cuban Missile Crisis than had been publicly known. Ellsberg explains that not only did the US president have the authority to wipe out humankind, but a large number of other military officials did as well. Dr. Strangelove was a “documentary,” not a work of fiction, Ellsberg observes.
Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove
In the third episode, the viewer is presented with a litany of CIA crimes during the Cold War, including coups all over the world, the promotion of disinformation and the control of the press. One historian notes:
The early CIA, from the late 1940s into the 1960s, had hundreds of influence operations where they purchased the favor of a newspaper editor in places like Cairo, Tokyo, or Berlin. There were a handful, some say more than a handful, of American journalists who were paid by the CIA or cooperated with the CIA free of charge.
From documentary to propaganda
However, as noted above, after these initial episodes, the series ceases to resemble a documentary in any meaningful fashion and becomes an extended piece of propaganda.
Anne Applebaum with husband
New faces and voices appear, including those of Anne Applebaum and a shockingly broad array of prime ministers and leading officials from the US and its NATO allies. The stench of CIA/State Department propaganda, which co-producer Alexandra Poolos peddled covering the Balkans for Radio Free Europe, becomes overwhelming.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War
The final episodes are turned almost directly over to Rice, National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State under George W. Bush, and Gates, Defense Secretary under both the younger Bush and Barack Obama.
The documentary’s premise
The second half of Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War revolves around the assertion that the present war in Ukraine is a seamless continuation of the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union.
In an interview, Knappenberger explains,
The basic premise is the Cold War is not over, and never was over. We still live with some of those same tensions of the Cold War. We just keep telling those events up to the invasion of Ukraine, which has all of the same tactics and all the same tensions as the rest of the Cold War. That’s the main thing we do that hasn’t been done. The collapse of the Soviet Union is just one part of this story.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the Cold War as “the state of political hostility that existed between the Soviet bloc countries and the US-led Western powers from 1945 to 1990.”
Knappenberger’s documentary, in the form of interviews with leading state figures, attempts to redefine that definition, arguing that the Cold War never ended. While nationalized property may have been privatized with the end of the USSR, both the Soviet Union and the present-day Russian Federation are essentially one, in that both are “empires.”
The US meanwhile, standing for the ideals of freedom and self-determination, has opposed “imperialism”—both in its Soviet and Russian varieties.
This thesis is crude, stupid and reactionary, but the producers have managed to craft a 12-hour series, involving over a hundred interviewees, some highly distinguished and knowledgeable, around it.
In fact, the basic thesis of the documentary is refuted by Ellsberg in the third episode. He declares:
The Russian army had been enormously overestimated. The Russians were not on a crash program to build missiles, which the people around me all took for granted that they were and were not superior. We’re not trying to be superior, which meant that they were not trying for a first strike capability against the US, which in turn really meant they weren’t trying to dominate the world militarily, that discovery should have led to a rethinking of our whole paradigm, their whole world perspective as to who we were confronting and what their aims were, and how we don’t put them, but it didn’t at all.
The narrative of the permanent “evil empire” is not a mere fiction, but a direct inversion of reality. American capitalism, and not the Soviet Union or the post-Soviet Russian state, is an “empire” bent on subjugating the world.
Revelations by omission
If there is one image associated with the dangers and horror of nuclear war firmly etched in the consciousness of certain generations of Americans, it is the 60-second 1964 campaign ad by Lyndon B. Johnson, known as the “Daisy” ad. It depicts a little girl counting as she plucks the petals from a daisy, followed by a nuclear countdown and footage of an atomic explosion.
Yet, seemingly inexplicably, Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, in its 12 hours, could not find space to include this 60-second clip. Why?
The omission is not an oversight. Including the famous campaign ad would require an explanation of the bitter factional divisions within the American state over nuclear war with the Soviet Union: an examination that the documentary strenuously refuses to undertake.
The “Daisy” ad targeted Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, author of Why Not Victory?, which argued that the US was insufficiently aggressive in confronting the Soviet Union because the American population was too fearful of nuclear war.
In fact, Goldwater’s name is not mentioned in the mini-series.
“A craven fear of death is entering the American consciousness,” the Arizona Republican wrote, “We want to stay alive, of course; but more than that we want to be free.”
Democratic Party candidate Johnson countered Goldwater’s slogan, “In your heart, you know he’s right,” with the rhyme, “In your heart, you know he might”—implying that Goldwater might bring about the end of the world by using nuclear weapons.
Commenting on Goldwater’s campaign in his well-known essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” American political theorist Richard Hofstadter noted that what had “become clear by 1964, and what could not be undone in the campaign, was the public impression that Goldwater’s imagination had never confronted the implications of thermonuclear war.” The Republican candidate, Hofstadter wrote, “seemed strangely casual about the prospect of total destruction.”
At the time, Johnson, and with him dominant sections of the US political establishment, rejected Goldwater as a quasi-lunatic, willing to destroy the planet in a monomaniacal quest to vanquish the Soviet Union.
Beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, however, the policy of “containment” relative to the Soviet Union was replaced with that of “rollback.” Washington initiated a massive nuclear arms buildup, coupled with the funneling of arms to proxy forces such as the Mujahideen, led by Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, and the Contras in Nicaragua.
In the face of overwhelming military and political pressure from American imperialism, the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy made the decision to liquidate the USSR and funneled the wealth of state-owned industry into its own pockets, as well as the pockets of its imperialist paymasters.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union has led to the eruption of an orgy of imperialist violence, from the Gulf War to the bombing of the former Yugoslavia, to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan within the framework of the “war on terror.”
In this period, the political forces arguing for the most aggressive actions with regard to the Soviet Union during the Cold War came to dominate US foreign policy. The doctrine of American imperialism was summed up in a 1991 editorial statement in the Wall Street Journal: “force works.”
Robert Gates in Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War
Which leads us to the featured interviewees in the last two episodes of Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War: Rice and Gates.
These two imperialist bandits, who between them oversaw the plotting of aggressive war and countless terrorist attacks, and who devised or approved shockingly sadistic forms of torture, make use of the extended platform to offer pearl-clutching monologues about their horror and dismay at the audacity of Vladimir Putin to oppose the American military.
However, in fact, the pair fit seamlessly into the documentary, alongside the dozens of other interviewees, mostly Democrats, in an almost uniform monoculture of military and diplomatic strategy.
The overall tenor of opinion in the second half of the series finds appropriate expression in a social media post from Kaja Kallas, Estonian prime minister, announcing the series:
The new @netflix series about the Cold War is out. I explain based on Estonia’s and my family’s history why we can’t let Russian aggression pay off in Ukraine. If we fail, we’ll wake up in a more dangerous world. Weakness provokes aggressors, not strength.
This view is summed up with somewhat greater sophistication in the concluding episode by Mary Sarotte, of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, who declares:
How do we stand up to what Putin is doing and defend our values despite the risk of nuclear catastrophe? That is an immense challenge. Fortunately, we have the history of the Cold War, to help us to guide us because we’re going to need what we learned during the cold war again. So we need to find a way even in full consciousness of the risk of nuclear escalation to stand up for values, to stand up for what is right in the face of evil.
The basic conception is that the United States, by abandoning all restraints on nuclear rearmament, by arming terrorists like Bin Laden and the Contras, and by being willing to tolerate nuclear annihilation, “won” the Cold War.
According to this reckless doctrine, the winner in the game of nuclear war is the one willing to risk the most. The conclusion of the 1983 film WarGames, “the only way to win is not to play at all,” becomes, “the only way to win is to be willing to die.”
American imperialism’s “victory” in the Cold War is to be repeated on an even greater scale through forcing the breakup of Russia, a country in possession of the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal.
Goldwater’s disciples, once the “lunatic fringe” of American politics, practitioners of the “paranoid style,” now encompass nearly the totality of official American military and strategic thought, from the “neo-conservative” Rice, to the former Goldwater Republican turned Democratic warmonger-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
The constant invocations of the power of military violence to solve all problems, the declaration that caution is tantamount to treason, are expressions of deep and irremediable crisis.
“His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last, / For violent fires soon burn out themselves,” Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt observes of Richard II.
Я просматривал фотографии, которые разместил на Imgur.com, в основном это фотографии из новостей дня, которые я хочу выделить. Я увидел фотографию, которую сделал, когда заглянул в мусорную корзину и увидел рисунок, который я сделал среди вторсырья. Там есть печатный материал, банка из-под сардин бронзового цвета, чашка из пенопласта от Dunkin Donuts и пустая бутылка из-под оливкового масла — дорогие вещи, не из моего дома. Из всех букв, полуслов и ингредиентов, напечатанных на бумаге в мусорном ведре, мой рисунок — единственное, что сделано вручную, нарисовано вручную.
Я уже долгое время пытаюсь рисовать на каждом клочке бумаги или картонной коробке, которые выбрасываю в мусорную корзину. Я стал заядлым рисовальщиком, потому что рисую постоянно. Когда коробка с хлопьями готова, я разбираю ее и рисую коричневым прозрачным слоем внутри коробки. У меня есть банки со сломанными мелками, ручки и карандаши в банках, и эти инструменты для рисования и игрушки находятся под рукой в каждой комнате моей пятикомнатной квартиры. Через какое-то время, когда я вижу чистый лист бумаги, или картонную коробку, или даже чистую поверхность, я мгновенно думаю о том, какой линейный рисунок я хотел бы разместить там прямо здесь, прямо сейчас.
Много лет назад я сказал одной из своих жен, что буду каждый вечер выбрасывать все свои наброски в мусорную корзину. Я хотел перестать относиться к результатам художественного выражения как к объектам. Предметы, которые следует почитать и копить, а также украсть и охранять вооруженные люди.
Через некоторое время она посмотрела на некоторые рисунки в синей мусорной корзине и сказала, что некоторые из них довольно хороши и что мне следует просто отложить их в сторону и сохранить. Поэтому я начал сохранять те, которые мне нравились. Но у меня определенно выработалась привычка много рисовать и не беспокоиться о том, что израсходуются дорогие материалы или даже неиспользованная бумага, или думать об «искусстве» как о чем-то, что нужно оформить, сохранить, наградить и монетизировать и так далее.
Я хотел подчеркнуть свое полное неприятие такого образа мышления. Это проклятие. Так появились простые линейные рисунки, с помощью которых я выражаю себя. Нравится мне это или нет, но я не могу остановиться. Когда я начал бесцеремонно относиться к бумаге, я наполнял ее всякой ерундой, которая приходила мне в голову, или рисовал пальцами больше, и я чувствовал себя свободнее, как будто я уволился с работы. У меня действительно сохранилось большое количество рисунков, потому что они повторяются в чем-то одном, но есть достаточно вариаций, которые меня заинтересуют, и время от времени они действительно меня радуют.
Я видел, что Леонард Коэн сделал много схематичных, ленивых, на первый взгляд детских набросков, которые напоминали мне о моих работах. Но когда я вижу серию его рисунков и некоторые песни или стихи этого человека рядом, я получаю большее понимание визуального выражения этого человека через, казалось бы, простые рисунки. Детский? или Детский?
Я прочитал несколько советов по «самопомощи» в статье, в которой предупреждалось о том, что следует проявлять осторожность с первым делом утром, которое человек делает, потому что это может установить ментальные стереотипы, определяющие его поведение в течение всего дня. Другими словами, встать и мгновенно проверить телефон или зайти за компьютер в социальные сети — это метафорически «перепрограммировать» мозг человека так, что он практически живет в мире компьютеров и смартфонов.
Поэтому мне было интересно, когда я прочитал, что первое, что сделал Леонард Коэн, проснувшись, — это нарисовал автопортрет. Дерьмовая кучка закорючек, которая заняла минуты три. Но посмотрите, как он настроил свой мозг на остаток дня, сделав рисование своим первым занятием.
Неудивительно, что у этого человека была вторая или третья музыкальная карьера, когда его обманули на большую часть денег, когда ему было за шестьдесят. Он оставался творческим и просыпался, пробуждая свои творческие способности. Так что, думаю, я на правильном пути. Рисуй, рисуй, рисуй! Я даже рисую обертки зеленого чая Пола Ньюмана.
Je regardais les photos que j’avais publiées sur Imgur.com, principalement des photos de l’actualité du jour que je souhaitais mettre en avant. J’ai vu la photo que j’avais prise en regardant dans ma corbeille et j’ai vu le dessin que j’avais fait parmi les matériaux recyclés. Il y a des imprimés et une boîte de sardines un peu bronze, un gobelet en polystyrène de Dunkin Doughnuts et une bouteille d’huile d’olive vide, des trucs chers, qui ne viennent pas de chez moi. De toutes les lettres, demi-mots et ingrédients imprimés sur le papier dans la poubelle, mon dessin est la seule chose qui est faite à la main, dessinée à la main.
J’essaie depuis longtemps de dessiner sur chaque morceau de papier brouillon ou sur chaque boîte en carton que je jette à la corbeille. Je suis devenu un dessinateur habituel car je dessine de temps en temps. Lorsqu’une boîte de céréales est terminée, je démonte la boîte et j’utilise l’intérieur marron transparent de la boîte pour dessiner. J’ai des boîtes de crayons cassés et des stylos et crayons étranges dans des boîtes et j’ai ces outils de dessin et ces jouets à portée de main dans chaque pièce de mon appartement de cinq pièces. Au bout d’un moment, lorsque je vois une feuille de papier vierge, ou une boîte en carton, ou même une surface transparente, je pense instantanément au genre de dessin au trait que j’aimerais mettre ici, tout de suite.
Il y a de nombreuses années, j’ai dit à l’une de mes femmes que j’allais jeter tous mes croquis à la corbeille tous les soirs. Je voulais arrêter de traiter les résultats des expressions artistiques comme des objets. Objets à vénérer et à thésauriser, volés et gardés par des hommes armés.
Au bout d’un moment, elle a regardé certains dessins dans la corbeille bleue et a dit que certains d’entre eux étaient plutôt bons et que je devrais simplement les mettre de côté et les conserver. J’ai donc commencé à sauvegarder ceux qui me plaisaient. Mais j’avais définitivement pris l’habitude de dessiner beaucoup et de ne pas m’inquiéter d’utiliser du matériel coûteux, ou même du papier inutilisé, ni de considérer « l’art » comme quelque chose à encadrer, à sauvegarder, à récompenser et à monétiser, et cetera.
Je voulais souligner mon rejet total de cet état d’esprit. Cette malédiction. C’est ainsi que sont partis les simples dessins au trait qui constituent ma façon de m’exprimer. Qu’on l’aime ou qu’on le déteste, je ne peux pas m’arrêter. Quand j’ai commencé à avoir une attitude cavalière envers le papier, je remplissais toutes les bêtises qui me passaient par la tête, ou avec mes doigts, je faisais plus de dessins et je me sentais plus libre et comme si j’avais quitté mon travail. J’ai sauvegardé un grand nombre de dessins car ils sont répétitifs d’abord, mais il y a suffisamment de variations pour m’intéresser et de temps en temps des variations qui me plaisent beaucoup.
J’ai vu que Leonard Cohen faisait beaucoup de croquis au trait sommaires, paresseux, apparemment enfantins, qui me rappelaient mon travail. Mais lorsque je vois une série de ses dessins et certaines chansons ou poèmes de l’homme juxtaposés, j’apprécie davantage l’expression visuelle de l’homme à travers des dessins apparemment simples. Puéril? ou enfantin ?
J’ai lu des conseils d’auto-assistance dans un article qui mettait en garde contre la nécessité de faire attention à la première chose qu’une personne faisait le matin, car cela pourrait établir des schémas mentaux sur la façon dont la personne se comporte toute la journée. En d’autres termes, se lever et consulter instantanément un téléphone, ou aller sur un ordinateur pour consulter les réseaux sociaux, pourrait métaphoriquement « recâbler » le cerveau d’une personne, de sorte qu’elle vit presque dans le monde des ordinateurs et des téléphones intelligents.
J’ai donc été intéressé lorsque j’ai lu que la première chose que Leonard Cohen faisait en se levant était de dessiner un autoportrait. Un petit tas de gribouillis merdiques qui a pris environ trois minutes. Mais regardez comment il a préparé son cerveau pour le reste de la journée en faisant du dessin sa première activité.
Pas étonnant que l’homme ait eu une deuxième, ou une troisième, carrière dans la musique lorsqu’il a été escroqué d’une grande partie de son argent alors qu’il avait la soixantaine. Il est resté créatif et s’est réveillé en réveillant sa créativité. Donc, je pense que je suis sur la bonne voie. Dessine, dessine, dessine ! Je m’inspire même des emballages de thé vert Paul Newman.
POLITICO – Story by Natalie Allison, Alex Isenstadt and Brittany Gibson
RFK Jr says Biden is ‘worse’ for democracy than Trump
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s increasingly frequent appearances on conservative media platforms are beginning to raise alarms at Mar-a-Lago.
It’s another sign of the rising threat that Kennedy, the independent presidential candidate, poses to Trump.
In recent months, Kennedy has become a regular on Fox News and Newsmax, and he is now a staple on the conservative podcast circuit — being interviewed by the likes of Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck and Megyn Kelly. While railing against President Joe Biden, Kennedy is actively courting an audience with the young listeners of bro podcasters and conservative-coded YouTubers that skew anti-“woke.”
That’s squarely on Trump’s turf, not Biden’s.
“It is concerning and beyond logic,” said Chris LaCivita, Trump’s co-campaign manager, “that there are some conservative platforms that continue to give a voice to someone that has called the NRA a terrorist group, who believes in eliminating gas powered engines, believes in a 70% tax bracket and generally subscribes to the same school of thought as Karl Marx.”
Two other senior Republicans close to Trump’s campaign and granted anonymity to speak freely similarly expressed frustration about Kennedy’s appearances on conservative airwaves.
Though Kennedy has been popular with conservative media since he initially launched his candidacy as a Democrat, his frequent appearances on Trump-aligned platforms now come as he runs as an independent candidate who could cut into Trump’s support. The former president this past weekend went on multiple tirades about Kennedy on his Truth Social site, declaring him a “Democrat ‘Plant’” and “far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat.” And he said “A Vote for Junior’ would essentially be a WASTED PROTEST VOTE.”
Kennedy, meanwhile, is talking to millions of right-leaning voters on traditional conservative platforms. A POLITICO analysis of Kennedy’s 69 media appearances since January, as listed on his campaign’s website, found a plurality of them — nearly half — were with conservative, libertarian-leaning, or openly anti-”woke” hosts, with the remaining interviews divided between liberal, politically neutral, and spiritual or environmentalist hosts.
“They see an opening, they see a robust ecosystem on the right that they can pull votes from,” said Matt Gorman, a former communications adviser for Sen. Tim Scott’s presidential campaign, referring to Kennedy. “I think sometimes, Republicans tend to lull ourselves into believing, ‘Oh, he’s just taking votes from Biden.’ No, he’s going after everybody.”
Kennedy has also taken on championing one of Trump’s top policy issues: closing the U.S. border. That’s in addition to questioning the legitimacy of the charges brought against rioters at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, a cohort who Trump has praised and suggested he would pardon.
In a statement to POLITICO, Shapiro, one of the conservative hosts who has interviewed Kennedy, described him as a “fascinating figure” worth interviewing.
“RFK Jr is the highest polling third-party candidate since Ross Perot,” Shapiro said. “He’s a fascinating figure and I regularly interview newsworthy people across the political spectrum on my show. With that said, I’ve made clear that I support President Trump’s reelection effort, and have even co-hosted a campaign event for him.”
While polling averages show Trump with a slight lead over Biden in most swing states, Kennedy is currently averaging 8 to 10 percent of the vote in those states, drawing about evenly from both major-party candidates.
A Monmouth poll released this week shows 17 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of both Biden and Trump — sometimes referred to as “double haters” — and tend to be younger. Among voters under 35 years old, 27 percent fall into that category, the poll found, while Kennedy’s overall favorability rating has gone up by double digits among both independents and Republicans since December.
And a survey of under-30 voters conducted in April for Snapchat by SocialSphere, which is owned by Harvard pollster John Della Volpe, found that 52 percent of those young voters were at least considering a vote for Kennedy.
If Kennedy’s appearances on conservative media are frustrating to Trump’s campaign, Kennedy’s supporters are reveling in the increased attention that Trump’s broadsides against the candidate have given him.
“No one is worried that Kennedy is on Trump’s radar,” a person familiar with the Kennedy campaign said, adding it’s seen as free advertising.
One Republican strategist speaking on condition of anonymity noted that Kennedy seems to be following a strategy employed by a number of GOP candidates in recent years trying to drive up their name recognition among conservatives — not just going on conservative television channels like Fox News and Newsmax, but taking advantage of the proliferation of right-leaning podcasts and other programming.
“In a way Kennedy’s taken the tack of a B-level Republican Senate candidate,” the GOP strategist said.
Like millions of people on this fine planet, I count myself a lifelong Stephen King fan.
In fact, King is one of the reasons I do what I do. As a kid, I always liked reading, but it was discovering works of science fiction like “Dune” and King’s mind-bending novels that demonstrated how powerful and transporting books could be. As a teenager, I wolfed down tomes such as “Salem’s Lot,” “The Green Mile,” “Firestarter” and “Carrie.”
I wrote my own sci-fi stories, and privately mused about making a pilgrimage to Maine, where King lived — it might as well have been in Mid-World, on the other side of the country from my suburb in Sacramento — to see if he would take me in as an apprentice. Years later, as I was fumbling down the road to becoming a working writer, I found wisdom, and hope, in his nonfiction treatise “On Writing.”
Which is why it pained me to see King mischaracterize a group that I’ve grown quite close to in recent the years — the Luddites — and to argue that it’s folly to resist technologies such as generative AI.
Last week, the Atlantic published a story that revealed one of the major large language models (LLMs) — the systems that make generative AI possible — had been trained on tens of thousands of pirated books. Meta’s LLaMa had been fed some 170,000 copyrighted works of fiction and nonfiction; the Atlantic named Michael Pollan, Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood and Sarah Silverman as among the authors whose works had been used, without their knowledge or permission, to train the AI.
“The future promised by AI is written with stolen words,” the Atlantic wrote.
Many writers were angry and exasperated. “Generative AI programs are plagiarism machines and whatever you produce with them will be composed of other people’s copyrighted work,” the author Cole Haddon wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
The news landed in the wake of months of complaints and anxieties among authors and writers. Silverman, for one, had already filed a headline-grabbing lawsuit against OpenAI and Meta because their AI systems were able to emulate her 2010 book, and were “likely” trained on a copy without her consent; now she has proof that was indeed the case. Meanwhile, 10,000 writers have signed an open letter put forward by the Authors Guild, imploring AI companies to obtain permission before ingesting books, and to compensate authors when they do so.
Further backlash from writers against the AI services that are relying on their work to make them tens of millions of dollars a month was to be expected.
But there was one notable figure who didn’t share the outrage — though he did share the anxiety. Because also included in that corpus of AI training data were the books of Stephen King.
King responded to the news that his work had been ingested by the AI companies in a short piece that the Atlantic also published shortly after. The gist seems to be that new technologies can be scary, but humans learn to adapt, and even embrace them, and that it would be folly to resist the advancing tides of technology when it comes to generative AI.
Characteristic of King, it’s evocative and direct, clever and sharply written. He’s primarily concerned with the question of whether the output of a generative AI can be considered truly creative; whether ChatGPT might yield art surprising enough to rival a human’s. “Creativity can’t happen without sentience, and there are now arguments that some AIs are indeed sentient,” he writes, and if that’s true, “then creativity might be possible.”
Then there’s the section that caught my eye:
“I view this possibility with a certain dreadful fascination. Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces.”
Opposing generative AI, he says, is like opposing the tide coming in — resistance is futile, and makes you a Luddite.
Now, as it happens I’ve spent the last three years or so researching and writing a book about the Luddites, and why their struggle remains deeply relevant today. And the single biggest misconception about the Luddites is the one King hits on here — that they were trying to stop industrial progress.
They were not opposed to progress, and certainly not to technology; most were skilled technicians themselves, who spent their days working on machines at home or in small shops. It is true that the Luddites hammered certain machines to pieces, but it wasn’t technology itself they were protesting — it was the bosses that were using those machines to cut their pay and shepherd them into factories.
There was nothing preordained that held that industrial progress had to take this shape — we can, with some ease, imagine a future in which technology advanced accordingly, but the cloth workers benefited more equally from the new industrial machinery, hosting it in their small shops, or sharing in the gains it produced more equally, rather than those gains accruing to a handful of factory bosses, who maximized profits and immiserated their workers.
Which brings me to King’s essay. The point here is not to “well, actually” Stephen goddamned King, or to try to embarrass him, but to point out why it’s so important that we understand the distinction between the myth of the Luddites — ignoramuses who smashed machines because they didn’t understand them — and the true Luddites: skilled, proud cloth workers who understood all too well how machinery was being deployed against them, and fought back. And the sentiment that generative AI is somehow inevitable is hardly relegated to bestselling novelists; it may be the predominant attitude I run into in conversations about the technology.
The reason that, 200 years later, so many creative workers are angry and unnerved by AI is not that they fear it will become so good, so powerful that they may as well up and quit writing, drawing, or acting. It’s that, like the Luddites, they are painfully aware how bosses will use AI against them. To most working authors (and artists, screenwriters, illustrators, and so on) the fear over AI is not philosophical; it is economic, and it is existential.
In “On Writing,” one of the most resonant sections describes King’s road to becoming a published novelist: toiling in obscurity, teaching college classes, publishing short stories in horror magazines, and, eventually, hitting the jackpot after his wife rescues an early manuscript of “Carrie” from the trash can. A publisher gives him a $2,500 advance for the hardcover, and it gets picked up for an eye-watering $400,000 advance for the paperback (which King split with his original publisher 50/50).
The industry has already changed such that almost no one can make any money selling short stories at all, and such life-changing advances, rare then, are all but impossible now for untested genre authors. Generative AI stands to further erase revenue streams for working creatives who are struggling to break into the game, making the odds of a future Stephen King finding success all the more slim.
Corporate clients are turning to generative AI for in-house creative work, firms are deploying ChatGPT for copywriting, and movie studios have made it clear they want the right to use it to make scripts. Some of that stuff isn’t necessarily creative writing, but as the science fiction writer Ted Chiang has pointed out, it’s eliminating crucial opportunities for writers to practice their craft.
Meanwhile, self-published authors now have to contend with an onslaught of AI-generated content on Amazon, and certain sci-fi magazines have had to close submissions altogether — they were getting spammed with too many AI creations.
All of these make for pretty good reasons to oppose generative AI, or to oppose the way that it’s being used by corporations right now — it’s less about the technology, but the ends to which it is being put, and the livelihoods it’s threatening as a result.
Before they took up their hammers, those who would become Luddites lobbied for minimum wages, machinery taxes, and pauses on development — and were ignored. When they did finally rise up to smash the machines of their exploitation, they were thunderous and popular on a level equaled only by Robin Hood. It took the full might of the state and a domestic occupation to put the Luddites down — and to slander their name in history as backwards-looking dummies.
Things are different now, of course; unionization was illegal back then, and England was not yet a democracy. We have better options, and a real shot at having a say in the way that technologies like generative AI shape the way we live and work.
In King’s piece, he lists two poets whose work the generative AI isn’t yet up to imitating; one is William Blake. Among Blake’s most famous poems is ”And did those feet in ancient time,” which contains his most-quoted lines:
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
That poem was published in 1808, just three years before the Luddite rebellion took shape. Blake was lamenting the rise of the machine-filled factory, too, because he saw the way that it stood to blight communities and immiserate workers.
I was fortunate enough to be able to follow a path staked out by one of my first author heroes, to pay the bills with odd writing jobs on the way to becoming a full-time human text generator. King’s points engaging with the abilities of the technology are good ones. I’m just humbly asking that he return to the source material of one of his favorite poets, and reconsider why it was that the Luddites — of 200 years ago, and of now — were so moved to break those machines.
The late 1890s were a time of acute social and economic upheaval in China. Foreign governments dramatically increased their economic penetration and influence in China during this period, and the Chinese suffered an embarrassing military defeat at the hands of Japan in a war that began in the summer 1894. Catastrophic floods of the Yellow River in the final years of the century devastated thousands of square miles and directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. Famine and disease followed in the wake of the floods, driving massive movements of people and leaving millions of peasants in the north of the country in conditions of extreme poverty. Amidst these overlapping crises, “1898 was a good year for the Christians,” and the missionaries added “a new threat to peasant well-being.”[1]That year also saw the political turbulence of the Hundred Days of Reform and its aftermath, in particular the coup d’état that made Empress Dowager Cixi the head of the Qing government.
It is within this context that the Boxer Uprising materializes. While the general circumstances surrounding the Uprising have become a familiar story to many in the United States, it is nonetheless poorly understood, our accounts shaped by Western chauvinism and the old, embarrassed desire to rationalize the brutality of the West’s efforts to “civilize” benighted foreigners. A popular romanization of the movement’s actual name is Yi-he quan, which has been translated as “righteous and harmonious fists.”[2] But the group was “dismissively known by members of the Western embassies”[3] in Beijing as the Boxers, owing to ritualistic martial arts practices to which confused westerners referred as “Chinese boxing.” As historian and China expert Joseph W. Esherick observes, the “boxing” of the Yi-he quan movement “was really a set of invulnerability rituals—to protect them from the powerful new weapons of the West.” Professor Esherick observes that even the popular name “Boxer Rebellion” is a misnomer pointing to a degree of historical misunderstanding, as the Boxers were never actively rebelling against the Qing dynasty and its Manchu ruling class.[4] As a matter of fact, the Boxers had expressed support of the Qing and had always made it explicit that theirs was a struggle against foreign influence generally and the Christian missionary presence in particular. The Qing dynasty likewise expressed its support for the boxers in 1900 as the Eight-Nation Alliance moved toward the capital, as discussed below.
At the time of a serious economic crisis, the Boxers observed the clear connection between burgeoning Christianity, propelled by ever-bolder missionary leaders, and the growing power of Western governments in their country. Just as many of the most important and sacred temples were being repurposed as churches by the Christian missionaries, so was much of China’s wealth being expropriated by the foreign powers. Their history and culture were being destroyed before their eyes while millions of Chinese sank into lower and lower states of poverty and need. Unlike many contemporary accounts, “[t]he classic works on modern China” correctly “stressed the crucial role of Western and Japanese imperialism” in reducing China to the crisis state of social and economic breakdown the country witnessed during the first half of the twentieth century.[5] The Boxer Uprising is among the most important events for developing an understanding of several related phenomena that continue to shape the world of today; it is one of the major immediate preludes to the decades-long conflict between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party, and it helps to explain current relations between China and the West, particularly the foreign policy of the United States as today’s dominant imperial power.
Through a combination of military pressure and economic coercion, the major powers of Europe had acquired strategically important pieces of territory and broad concessions of authority that allowed them power over tariffs and trade and supplanted local governments and laws in much of the country on important issues. Such grants of privilege to foreign governments, accomplished through a series of humiliating unequal treaties, had become a source of controversy, rightly resented by the Chinese population. The governments of the United Kingdom and France, for example, held some concessions in China for almost one-hundred years.
The Boxers were a genuinely decentralized, bottom-up, people’s uprising against a destructive, extractive economic system foisted upon Chinese people from without—a system that could not have been erected or maintained without war. The Boxers understood the connection between economic extraction and imperialistic wars better than most people do today, because they lived and observed that connection and its material consequences. Today’s war hawks and imperialists follow directly from the government elites of the major European powers of the nineteenth century and the turn of the century in pretending that there is an equivalence between high notions of free trade and gunboat diplomacy. The elites of the capitalist West believed it their clear and unquestionable prerogative to “open China,” and this they did through force, the language of “free trade” notwithstanding.
The Uprising’s crescendo was the Boxers’ siege of the international legations. Founded after China’s defeat in the Second Opium War, the Legation Quarter was an area of the capital city that was the prime real estate home to the diplomats of the foreign powers. The siege lasted almost two months during the summer of 1900, until the Boxers were overcome by the Eight Nation Alliance of Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Italy, and Austria-Hungary. The Eight Nation Alliance’s attacks on the Taku Forts in June of 1900 had led to the Qing government’s decision to support the Boxers in the fighting that took place at the legations. It is noteworthy that there was no formal declaration of war against China. Among the Eight-Nation Alliance, Japan committed far and away the largest number of troops, with over 20,000 of its soldiers descending upon the Chinese capital. Of the soldiers the British sent to the war, thousands were unwilling conscripts from India, forced at the point of a gun to a faraway war in which they held no stake. In the brutal aftermath of the Alliance’s victory at the capital city, suspected boxers were tortured and killed, often publicly decapitated. The Alliance’s looting remains legendary. An estimated 80% of Beijing’s cultural objects were either looted or destroyed. Missionaries, too, knew an opportunity to loot when they saw it, demanding indemnity payments for losses incurred during the Uprising; the payment amounts and terms reflected the power of the missionaries—they were new unequal treaties intended to punish local populations. They took whatever they could, reaping a massive windfall from the proceeds of the stolen booty. The excesses of one well-known missionary, William Scott Ament, made headlines back in the United States, particularly after Mark Twain entered the fray.
Published in the February 1901 issue of the North American Review, Twain’s satirical essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” addressed the controversy of the church engaging in the exploitative looting of China. In it, Twain skewered the ideological foundations of imperialism with characteristic trenchance, addressing the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising, and in particular the actions of Ament. A Congregationalist minister, Ament had left for China on a missionary effort shortly after his ordination in the fall of 1877. In China, Ament was the “ideal missionary,”[6] an able preacher in Mandarin Chinese who became one of the most influential missionaries in China. Twain regarded Ament as a moral hypocrite and fraud, and his treatment of the reverend was cuttingly sarcastic:
We all hold [Ament] dear for manfully defending his fellow missionaries from exaggerated charges which were beginning to distress us, but which his testimony has so considerably modified that we can now contemplate them without noticeable pain. For now we know that, even before the siege, the missionaries were not “generally” out looting, and that, “since the siege,” they have acted quite handsomely, except when “circumstances” crowded them. I am arranging for the monument.
Mark Twain was a key figure in the foundation of the American Anti-Imperialist League, becoming one of the organization’s Vice Presidents in 1901. He was a forceful and adamant opponent of war and imperialism and became a “red-hot anti-imperialist.”[7] In 1900, in a piece for the New York Herald, Twain had written of his conversion experience, remarking on his time as a “red-hot imperialist” who “wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific.” Twain soon came to understand that the mission of the U.S. government in the Philippines was the same old one, a mission not to free, but to subjugate—not to redeem, but to conquer. Twain’s experience reflects that of so many anti-war and anti-empire activists, who have been disabused of their jingoism by a growing awareness of history and respect for their fellow human beings.
In school, many received a boring, whitewashed version of Mark Twain—a humorist of bottomless wit certainly, and comfortably critical of American slavery and racism, but without a more comprehensive anti-authoritarian worldview. Though the ideological underpinnings of his anti-imperialism have been debated, Twain clearly understood a relationship between monopoly capitalism and imperialism.[8] The anti-imperialism that was so important a part of his life and character has been blotted out because it is not a fit with the worldview of a decadent, out-of-touch American ruling class. It is difficult to deny the judgment reached by R. Samarin in the 1950 article “The True Mark Twain,” which argued that America’s culture-makers had presented Twain “to the reading public in a false light,” promoting him as a shallow and “easy-going humorist.” Samarin contends that Twain’s indictments of capitalism and his “attack against the dictatorship of the dollar in American life” were deliberately buried.[9] His work for the League was incredibly important to him, and later in life, the failure of the anti-imperialist movement left Twain with an increasingly pessimistic and “despairing world view.”[10]
The American Anti-Imperialist League was founded in 1898 as a response to the ongoing Spanish-American war. The anti-imperialists’ platform protested against “the subjugation of the weak by the strong,” anticipating today’s critics of empire in resisting a so-called rules-based order that cynically ratifies the arbitrary violence of the hegemonic power. The organization’s members, though extremely diverse in background and ideology, understood well that embarking on a project of global conquest and empire would fundamentally change the character of America’s social, cultural, and political institutions, debasing and corrupting them. History has of course borne out their worries, as an increasingly powerful arms industry and ever-expanding military-industrial complex have neutralized and neutered democratic institutions in favor of a comparatively tiny elite. American society is now bereft of democracy. We have trillions of dollars for war-making while Americans go hungry and unhoused—and, crucially, this was both predictable and predicted by the anti-imperialists of over one-hundred years ago.
Charles Ames, a prominent member of the League and a Unitarian minister, warned that the quest for empire would mean a “trampling on the principles of free government,” making the United States “one more bully among bullies,” “only add[ing] one more to the list of oppressors of mankind.”[11] Ames represents another kind of Christian and man of the cloth, one who understood Jesus as a radical messenger for love and peace in a world racked by a sick, destructive obsession with purity and rules, the kind of ideology that divides people from one another. It is critical to understand the nuanced perspective with which the members of the American Anti-Imperialist League approached this subject: their opposition to war and empire was not only about the rights and freedoms of the people whose countries and cultures were being ravaged, though this was certainly a central aspect of their opposition. Crucially, it was also about the domestic upshots of empire, the politico-economic cementing of a permanent war machine incarnated as a standing army, a permanent military intelligence bureaucracy, and a nominally private war industry, well-connected to finance capital and political decision-makers. It was obvious to late nineteenth century American anti-imperialists that this conflux of organized and centralized incentives held the potential to foreclose the possibility of freedom and people’s government.
The connection between imperialism and racial animus was also always clear to those paying attention. It is impossible to manufacture public support for the conquest of faraway lands and peoples without cultivating the pretense of ethnic and cultural superiority, the idea that the imperial power actually helps the conquered by sharing its more advanced culture. Both President William McKinley and President Theodore Roosevelt attempted to buoy their unpopular war-making by “branding their Filipino foes as little better than ungrateful savages,”[12] just as the American and European press had reported on the Boxers with already-established racist tropes, appealing to scare tactics associated with characterizing Asians as “the Yellow Peril.” As there is today, there was much overlap a century ago between the anti-imperialist movement and activism for equality of rights under the law between racial and ethnic groups.
Moorfield Storey is among the most important figures in the history of the League, serving as its President from 1905 until the final days of the organization in 1921. Storey is more well-known as among the founding members of the NAACP, serving as its first president from the organization’s founding in 1910 until he died in 1929. Storey was a pioneer in the use of targeted, strategic litigation to secure civil rights victories and raise awareness of important civil rights issues (later taken up by the ACLU and others), and he was instrumental in bringing an end to the exclusion of Black Americans from the American Bar Association.[13] He believed that domestic racial violence and domination were intimately connected with a broader way of thinking in which a ruling class formulates an ideology of both economic and ethnic stratification, with a ruling class using ideology to manufacture consent among the middle classes for a profoundly violent and immoral system. In this thinking, he was of course many decades ahead of his time.
Our political and media class, even (perhaps especially) our liberals, harbors a system of belief not so very different from the one held by the turn-of-the-century imperialists against whom Twain railed. They continue to believe, against all available evidence, that we’ve arrived at a kind of end of history, that Washington should, indeed must, project America’s cultural, political, and economic paradigm around the world—as a boon to the world. As the late Palestinian-American scholar and activist Edward Said observed over 20 years ago, this is all predicated on “the theory that imperialism is a benign and necessary thing,” the ability of the oppressor to see itself as “unlike all other empires,” with a mission “not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.” Notwithstanding its proponents’ pretenses to enlightened liberalism, this is a philosophy that proceeds in direct continuity from the one underpinning the genocide of the peoples the Spanish and English wiped out in the Americas. Today’s colonial enterprises demonstrate that we are not nearly as far from these ideologies of racial hierarchy and extreme violence as we think. Most people in the white, educated West have committed themselves to a vast complex of politics to which they don’t realize they’ve committed themselves. Imperialism and colonialism are fundamentally attempts to define and establish one’s own culture as the foundation of or condition precedent to the cultures of other peoples. Inequality is always at the center of such projects.
But across time, people everywhere have desired self-determination and organized within their communities to resist the subjugation and oppression of foreign rulers. For wanting just what we all want and expect, they have been hatefully slurred as uncivilized, as animals, terrorists, savages, rebels, criminals, and subversives. But they never sought the violent domination of conquering foreign nations looking for resources to plunder. The modern era’s imperial powers have always feigned shock that the peoples they want to steal from and sentence to permanent second-class status in their own homelands are not ready to welcome them with open arms. In the world that is emerging now, a more grounded geopolitical posture will be an absolute imperative for the United States, particularly after the massive loss of respect and legitimacy that will come from the rest of the world now.
We are entering a new moment of global discontent with the arrogance and license of an increasingly brutal imperial order.
Like those who fight for freedom today, the Boxers didn’t need to be taught revolutionary consciousness. They wanted to protect their families, their home, and their way of life. They understood something philosopher Chantelle Gray observed in a recent interview: “Revolution is not something that is this kind of event,” but is rather “something that we practice in the here and now, individually, together, all the time” as “a persistent action towards freedom—towards more freedom.” They understood and lived this intuitively. Twain famously referred to himself as a Boxer and wished the movement success, calling the Boxers patriots. We must learn to see today’s Boxers in the same light.
Notes.
[1] Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (University of California Press 1987), page 185.
[2] To avoid confusion, I’ve chosen to refer to the movement as the Boxers here, rather than using their actual name.
[3] David J. Silbey, The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China: A History (Hill and Wang 2012).
[4] Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (University of California Press 1987), page xiv.
[5] As against the view, growing in popularity at the time of Esherick’s article in 1972, that “imperialism fostered economic development, progressive Western-style nationalism and institutional modernization.”
[6] Larry Clinton Thompson, William Scott Ament and the Boxer Rebellion: Heroism, Hubris and the “Ideal Missionary”(McFarland & Company 2009), page 2.
[7] Selina Lai-Henderson, Mark Twain in China (2015 Stanford University Press).
[8] John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (Oxford University Press 2000), page 134.
[9] James L. Machor, The Mercurial Mark Twain(s): Reception History, Audience Engagement, and Iconic Authorship (Routledge 2023).
[10] Hunt Hawkins. “Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialism.” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, vol. 25, no. 2, 1993, pp. 31–45. In 1906, Twain writes, “The woes of the wronged and unfortunate poison my
life and make it so undesirable that pretty often I wish I were 90 instead of 70.”
[11] Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (Henry Holt and Company 2017).
[12] Kenneth Osgood, Andrew K. Frank, Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century(University Press of Florida 2010).
[13] Paul Finkelman, ed. American Encyclopedia of Civil Liberties: Volume 3, R-Z (Routledge 2018), page 1571.
David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.
Cops on the campus of Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts
When I strolled into Harvard Yard around 6:00 pm on Friday, a Shabbat service was taking place in the student encampment for Palestine. Dozens of young people were seated in a large circle on the lawn, many wearing keffiyehs, a few wearing kippahs, and at least one wearing both. A guitar player strummed and led the circle in a Yiddish song while campers nearby talked in small groups, or stared at laptops, perhaps preparing for finals. Three police SUVs were parked in sight of the camp on the centuries-old Yard, and a keffiyeh was tied around the sculpted head of the university’s namesake, John Harvard.
The encampment—or “the Liberated Zone,” as a big banner proclaimed it—now consisted of more than 40 tents. It had grown since Wednesday, when it was assembled by surprise during a noon rally on the last day of classes. Video of the moment shows students suddenly dashing onto the grass with backpacks, tarps, and bags to begin erecting tents while supporters cheer.
I had come to observe the camp and speak with Lea Kayali, a campus organizer and Palestinian American in her third year at Harvard Law School. Her family is from Jaffa and the West Bank, and the bombardment of Gaza has hit her hard. “I wake up and read the names of the dead,” she said, “the places that have been destroyed. Each headline is more gutting than the last.” Even Kayali’s cousins in the West Bank, whom she said don’t leave their houses for fear of being attacked by settlers or arrested, always remind her: “Keep eyes on Gaza.”
Though the devastation of Gaza can feel distant in the US, according to Kayali it is not. This is the point being made by student protesters at Harvard, Columbia University (where an encampment, and its police suppression, first made headlines), and other campuses across the country. Student demands include disclosure of investments in Israeli companies and others profiting from the attack on and occupation of Palestine, and divestment from those companies.
Kayali has been heartened by the enthusiasm of students new to the movement. “It’s been activating for many on campus,” she said, emphasizing the collective labor the camp requires. Students coordinate food and organize political programming, like a teach-in on the history of student activism. The camp, she said, “is an exemplar of community care, mutual aid.”
The moment the tents popped up, Kayali said, “the only sound you could hear was cheering. And this was from students who were just walking through the Yard!” Arabic students began to dance the dabke, a Palestinian folk dance, in a huge circle after the tents were raised. “Seeing a revolutionary joy that has really been absent the last seven months gave me more assurance that we can build the world we want,” she added. (When I left her, Kayali got up to help a couple of Black students practicing the steps to the dabke.)
Another inspiring moment for Kayali came Thursday during a visit to the encampment at Northeastern University, across the Charles River in Boston. There, the camp was encircled by a large ring of Boston police in riot gear, with helmets and zip tie handcuffs. But the activists stood in a smaller circle around the tents, linking arms and standing their ground. For about 20 minutes, she said, there was an intense stand-off. And then the police backed off.
Kayali’s visit to Northeastern typifies the supportive relationship among area encampments, as many student activists communicate across campuses. For instance, a speaker at a pro-Palestinian rally this week at Berklee College of Music mentioned spending time at the Emerson College encampment before it was violently broken up by police and over 100 arrests were made. That Berklee rally ended with a march to join the Northeastern encampment.
Though the police pressure on Northeastern dissipated Thursday without mass arrests, early Saturday morning the school administration followed through on their threats to break up the camp. This time, Northeastern police, the Boston police, and Massachusetts state troopers detained over 100 students, arresting those who could not or would not produce Northeastern IDs. The tents and other camp equipment were thrown into moving trucks.
I saw one of these moving trucks leaving as I entered the Northeastern campus Saturday morning around 10am. Where the camp had been was an unbroken green expanse, empty of tents and students, surrounded by metal barricades. Nearby, a group of students faced some police officers and chanted “Israel bombs, NEU pays! How many kids did you kill today?”
A Northeastern student on the scene, senior Sarah Barber, told me that Northeastern’s ties to the defense industry, particularly Raytheon, had long been a subject of debate on campus. Even when she was a freshman, there were posters in common spaces that said “Pull out of Raytheon.” In fact, in 2023 the Student Government Association voted to call on school administration to end contracts with private military companies.
Barber said she was sympathetic to the camp, but also worried that if she joined, the university might withhold her diploma. She saw many on campus who were supportive of the encampment and the Palestinian cause, but others were hostile, and tempers sometimes ran high. Barber said, “I once walked by a girl in a hijab being screamed at by people. I asked if she was okay, and she said, ‘They just started screaming at me about Gaza.’”
The administration’s excuse for breaking up the camp was that it included “professional protesters” from outside, and that antisemitic chants had been heard, including “Kill the Jews.” But as another pro-Palestinian student on the scene, Alina Caudle, pointed out, that phrase was actually yelled by a counter-protester Friday night at the camp. In video of the incident, a young man draped in an Israeli flag shouted, “Kill the Jews! Anybody on board? That’s what you chanted for!” Pro-Palestinian students can then be heard shouting him down.
I stopped by the MIT encampment on Sunday, a warm spring day. Students talked, snacked, worked on laptops, or spoke to visitors. While I was there, a couple of mothers from Lexington came to ask how they could help, and a high school student took some pictures. Seated on a lawn chair in the sun, I spoke for over an hour to Zeno (who uses just his last name), a graduate student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management—Netanyahu’s alma mater.
Zeno, a former captain in the Air Force, had been active in the Black Graduate Students Association (BGSA) before October 7. He explained, “We were doing a lot of group studies on different liberation movements. My family’s Black American and my mother’s Puerto Rican—through that side there’s indigenous Taino—so being Black and indigenous, I know oppressed populations when I see them.”
Groups that Zeno organized with demonstrated for a ceasefire and held a teach-in about Black and Palestinian solidarity. MIT Graduates for Palestine began researching and publishing about MIT’s ties to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Student groups also created referenda calling for an immediate ceasefire and an end to MIT’s “special relationship” with the Israeli ministry; a vote by MIT undergraduates resulted in 63% support for such a resolution, and MIT graduate students voted 70% in favor.
“One of the more concerning pieces of research,” Zeno said, “involves autonomous robotic swarms. Imagine quadcopter drones being AI-driven rather than piloted, and imagine if they could swarm together. AI built by Zionists—how dangerous would that be? Sci-fi kind of stuff.”
When the police cracked down at Columbia, MIT students quickly came together on the night of Sunday, April 21, to set up tents. Zeno said it garnered a lot of support from other students and faculty.
He explained, “It’s a hearts and minds campaign—but first hearts. When you put yourself on the line, risking arrest, risking your career, that inspires people. We get more and more courage. Someone might say, ‘I was nervous about what my lab might think of me,’ but now they’re spending the night out here. So every day we’re growing the community.”
Zeno understands the risks better than many. When the Emerson College encampment was threatened late Wednesday night, he and about ten other MIT students answered a call for support and crossed the Charles River to join the Emerson activists.
Zeno said, “The state troopers pulled up with lots of cars, zip ties, face shields, very militarized.” The MIT students were chanting when confronted by a policeman, who said they wouldn’t be arrested if they left immediately. “We didn’t reply except to start chanting ‘Free Palestine,’ at which point the cops got…agitated.”
He said his face was slammed against the wall, and then he was slammed against the hood of the police car. “I told the cop, I’m a disabled veteran, I have an autoimmune disorder that makes my fascia tight, so you have to be careful how you’re cuffing me. My arms don’t move that far up my back! But he kept trying to force them farther up.” According to Zeno, his friend, a Black Muslim, had his head banged on the ground, resulting in a concussion. Despite this and other injuries to protesters, police initially claimed the only injuries were to officers.
Just as the crackdown at Columbia begot more college encampments, though, this police violence only increased students’ solidarity. Zeno described how, as he was being cuffed with his face against the hood of the car, he was looking into the eyes of another MIT student being cuffed on the other side of the car. Laughing, he said, “She was newer to the camp, I hadn’t even talked to her yet, but we trauma-bonded.”
When I ask about how solidarity with Palestine connects to other causes, Zeno warms to his topic. He talks about white supremacy, corruption in the military, the two-party system, the working class, climate change, while a student in a colorful crocheted kipah with a Star of David necklace steps closer and starts nodding. “I see vets unhoused and people walking over them! This is a full-on dystopia and this is not how society is supposed to function. And then I come here and see people helping each other, pooling their resources, and not to add to their 401k.”
He pauses. “We could be so much better. We have the imagination to build a better society, and it’s people like this administration who can’t see it.”
His words reminded me of the Shabbat service I’d heard two days before at Harvard. Someone was unfolding the passage where the prophet Moses asks to see the face of God. They said, “Moses, after fleeing persecution, dares to ask for the unimaginable. When I think of my ancestors, I think of his courage in asking this. But the difference is, what we are asking for is not unimaginable. We are imagining it here together as one. Shabbat Shalom!”
In the background, I could see Kayali still practicing the dabke. She had been joined by a couple more people who jumped and wheeled together, the circle widening as I walked away.
Since the U.S. military brought its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to South Korea in 2017, it has met with sustained local resistance. THAAD is the centerpiece of the numerous actions the United States has undertaken to enmesh South Korea in its hostile anti-China campaign, a course that Korean peace activists are fighting to reverse.
In a unanimous decision at the end of March, South Korea’s Constitutional Court dismissed two challenges lodged by residents of Seongju County against the deployment of THAAD. [1] Since its arrival, the THAAD system has met with recurring demonstrations in the nearby village of Soseong-ri. The hope in the Yoon and Biden administrations is that the court’s decision will dishearten opponents of THAAD. In this expectation, they are already disappointed, as anti-THAAD activists responded to the court’s decision by vowing to “fight to the end.” [2]
Although protestors have regularly held rallies on the road leading to the THAAD site, swarms of Korean police cleared them away to allow free passage for U.S. military supply trucks. Opposition to THAAD has angered U.S. officials, leading the Biden administration to dispatch Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Seoul to deliver the message that it deemed the situation “unacceptable” and progress on establishing the base needed to accelerate. Austin also raised objections to protests by residents in Pohang over noise from U.S. Apache attack helicopters conducting live-fire exercises. [3] Predictably, the Yoon administration responded by prioritizing U.S. demands over the welfare of the Korean people and promised “close cooperation for normalizing routine and unfettered access to the THAAD site” and “improvement of the combined training conditions.” [4]
THAAD is billed as an anti-missile defense system consisting of an interceptor missile battery, a fire control and communications unit, and an AN/TPY-2 X-band radar. The ostensible purpose of THAAD in Seongju is to counter incoming North Korean missiles, but serious doubts exist about its efficacy in that role. In terms of coverage, THAAD’s position in Seongju puts it in range to cover the main U.S. military base in South Korea, Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek, but out of range to protect Seoul, which at any rate is indefensible due to its proximity to the border. Even so, it is questionable how much utility the system offers even for Pyeongtaek. THAAD’s missiles are designed to intercept incoming ballistic missiles at an altitude of 40 to 150 kilometers. The THAAD battery would have less than three and a half minutes to detect and counter-launch against a high-altitude ballistic missile fired from the farthestpoint in North Korea. By then, the incoming missile would have fallen below the lower-end altitude range of 40 kilometers, leaving it invulnerable to interception. [5] That would be the best-case scenario, as in the event of a war, the North Koreans are not likely to be so accommodating as to launch ballistic missiles from as far away as possible.
Furthermore, the THAAD battery in Seongju is equipped with six launchers and 48 interceptor missiles. With a thirty-minute THAAD battery launcher reload time, incoming missiles would not take long to deplete THAAD’s ability to respond, even under the most accommodating circumstances.
An upgrade was recently made to integrate THAAD with Patriot PAC-3 defense to intercept ballistic missiles at a lower altitude. This enhancement is of doubtful utility, as the radar’s response would still be constrained by the short flight time of an incoming missile. For all the hype about the successful interception of Iranian missiles fired at Israel, the Patriot’s showing in a more suitable scenario was less than stellar. It had an advantage there, as Iranian and Yemeni launch sites were situated much farther away from their target than in the Korean case. Yet, out of 120 Iranian ballistic missiles, the Patriot system shot down only one. The others were intercepted primarily by U.S. warplanes. [6]
North Korea’s development of a solid-fuel hypersonic intermediate-range missile has added another unmeetable challenge for THAAD. Because of its proximity, it is doubtful that North Korea would target US forces with high-altitude ballistic missiles in case of war. Instead, it would likely rely on its long-range artillery, cruise missiles, and short-range ballistic missiles, flying well below the lower limit of THAAD’s altitude coverage.
Despite its doubtful defensive effectiveness on the Korean Peninsula, the United States attaches enormous importance to THAAD’s deployment in South Korea, which suggests an unstated motivation. A clue is provided by the stationing in Japan of two stand-alone AN/TPY-2 radars without an accompanying THAAD system. [7] In other words, it is the radar that matters to the U.S. military, and the linkage to THAAD interceptors is primarily a pretense made necessary by popular feeling in Korea. What makes the AN/TPY-2 special is its ability to operate in two modes. In terminal mode, it feeds tracking data to the THAAD missile battery, allowing it to target an incoming ballistic missile as it descends toward its target. In forward-based mode, the THAAD missile battery is not involved, and the role of the radar is to detect a ballistic missile as it ascends from its launching pad, even from deep into China. In this mode, the radar is integrated into the U.S. missile defense system and sends tracking data to interceptor missiles stationed on U.S. territory and Pacific bases. [8] As a U.S. Army publication points out, when in forward-based mode, a field commander may use the radar system “to concurrently support both regional and strategic missile defense operations.” [9]
There are hints that preparations may already be underway to establish the conditions necessary for THAAD to operate in forward-based mode. Last year, South Korea and Japan agreed to link their radars to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii. [10] The ostensible purpose is to enhance the tracking accuracy of missiles fired from North Korea, but the concept applies equally well to Chinese missiles. It is not a stretch to imagine that if South Korean and Japanese radars have been linked to the United States, the same may be true with the THAAD’s AN/TPY-2. Certainly, if the U.S. Army switches the mode, it will not be informing South Korean authorities, so sure are the Americans that they can freely treat Korean sovereignty with contempt. Switching an AN/TPY-2 radar from one mode to the other takes only eight hours, a quick process that is opaque to outsiders. [11]
An anti-ballistic missile system can easily be overwhelmed by a full-scale enemy attack. The system’s primary purpose is to support a first-strike capability, in which the United States takes out as many of the enemy’s missiles as possible, leaving the anti-ballistic missile system to counter the few surviving missiles. In essence, that makes the radar in the THAAD system a first-strike weapon. The closer the radar is stationed to an adversary’s ballistic missile launch, the more precise the tracking provided to the U.S.-based anti-missile system. South Korea is ideally located for the AN/TPY-2, where its radar can cover much of eastern China. [12] The effect is to enlist South Korea, willingly or not, in U.S. war plans against China. When residents in Seongju argue that THAAD makes them a target, they are not mistaken.
The Yoon administration is taking integration with the U.S. missile defense system one step further in planning to spend an estimated $584 million to procure American SM-3 interceptor missiles, suitable for protecting the United States and its bases in the Pacific.[13] The SM-3 interceptors are to be deployed on South Korean Aegis destroyers, which will need to be upgraded at additional cost to handle them. [14]
Residents in Seongju are also concerned about potential health risks associated with living adjacent to the THAAD installation. Radars transmit pulses of high-frequency electromagnetic fields, and the AN/TPY-2 radar generates radio frequencies of 8.55 to 10 GHz. [15] According to the World Health Organization, radio frequency waves below 10 GHz “penetrate exposed tissues and produce heating due to energy absorption.” [16] One study observes that radars generate pulsed microwaves “in very high values of peak power compared to mean power emitted.” To evaluate risk, one must also take peak values into account. In that case study, exposure levels for 49 workers were assessed, where it was noted that “peak values are about 200 – 4000 times higher than corresponding mean values.” Although recorded mean values fell below exposure limits that could have caused thermal effects, the peak values suggested potential non-thermal impacts, and “peak power density frequently exceeded the reference level and were correlated with nervous system effects.” [17]
The AN/TPY-2 relies on a phased array antenna. The U.S. Army publication on Ground-based Midcourse Defense Operations warns, “Dangerous radio frequency power levels exist on and near antennas and phased-array radars during operations. Radio frequency electromagnetic radiation may cause serious burns and internal injury. All personnel must observe radio frequency danger indications and stay outside designated keep out zones.” It adds that the keep out zone can vary according to power output “but may extend out from a radar face in excess of 10 kilometers and sweep more than 70 degrees on each side from the system bore sight.” [18] In other words, the extent of risk depends heavily on the radar’s power output and disposition.
Where the radar is aimed matters; the extent of human exposure is sharply reduced outside of the direct path of the primary beam. The U.S. Army’s AN/TPY-2 forward-based operations field manual specifies three search plans for the radar while in that mode. The “standard operations mode,” named Autonomous Search Plans, “normally provides multiple search sectors,” and in general, the larger the ballistic missile named area of interest, “the larger the search volume of the radar sector.” [19] Since China constitutes a vast area of interest, the THAAD radar in forward-based mode potentially exposes a wide range of the local population to radiation.
Shortly after THAAD was brought to South Korea, the Daegu Regional Environmental Office attempted to ascertain the environmental impact through periodic measurements; results registered at safe levels at a point in time when the THAAD system was not yet fully implemented. However, the Environmental Office noted that the radar’s power output level and vertical and horizontal angles were unknown “due to military secrecy.” [20] While the low measurements were suggestive, they were essentially meaningless without knowing what radar settings were being measured.
Since the arrival of THAAD in 2017, the local population’s concerns about possible health impacts from electromagnetic radiation had gone unanswered until June 21 last year, when the Ministry of Defense issued a press release announcing the result of its THAAD environmental impact assessment. The Ministry of Environment judged the impact as “insignificant.” [21] The press release reported that the highest measurement registered was 0.018870 watts per square meter (W/㎡), far below the limit for human exposure.
An earlier series of tests in Gimcheon City, at four locations northwest of the radar, produced a slightly higher but comparable measurement to the Seongju test, definitely within a safe limit. The tests were conducted over one year, ending in May 2023. The highest and maximum readings were registered at the farthest location, 10.2 kilometers from the radar. [22] However, as in the earlier Daegu test, nothing about how the radar operated was known.
At first glance, the Seongju test result would appear to allay concerns over the radar’s health impact. But has it? The most striking aspect of the press release is its lack of transparency. No information is provided other than a single result. The Ministry of Defense withheld information because it would be “likely to significantly harm the vital interests of the state if disclosed.” [23] It is unclear how revealing details about the test conditions, such as the radar’s angle, would pose a security risk. More likely, United States Forces Korea preferred to hide the details from public view so that the test could be conducted in a way sure to produce safe readings.
Unlike the earlier Gimcheon report, which identified the populated areas where measurements had been taken, the Seongju environmental impact assessment “was done for the entire base, including the site negotiated by the Daegu Regional Environmental Office.” [24] The phrasing suggests that no measurements were taken outside of the THAAD base, an odd choice given the concerns of nearby residents. Even within that limitation, less than thirty percent of the base was included in the assessment. [25]
Several factors can produce dramatically different results when measuring radiation. The public’s only knowledge of the Seongu test is that radiation poses no risk in an unknown set of conditions. Risk remains a mystery in other scenarios. We do not know which mode(s) the test included. It is probable that only the terminal mode was involved, aligning with the fiction that the radar’s purpose is purely defensive. Estimated ranges for the AN/TPY-2 vary but are consistently far higher when set to forward-based mode. Therefore, a test in forward mode could be expected to produce a higher electromagnetic radiation reading, as the longer the range, the higher the average power the radar has to generate. [26]
There are also the factors of angle and direction. The press release was silent on these matters, as well. In none of the measurements was it known in which direction the radar was pointed. In terminal mode, the radar would presumably point north. The forward-based mode should have the radar directed toward China in a different and much broader range of directions. Furthermore, the AN/TPY-2 can be set at any angle ranging from ten to 60 degrees. [27]Presumably, the angle would be positioned much lower in forward-based mode than in terminal mode, resulting in a more direct environmental impact on the ground.
The highest radiofrequency radiation is in the path of the radar’s main beam. Outside of that, there is a sharp drop-off, typically at levels thousands of times lower. [28] If measurements are taken outside the line of the beam, then results would be misleadingly low. Also unknown are the positions of the radar in various planned operation scenarios. What populated areas would be situated directly in line of the beam? Without that information, let alone corresponding measurements, potential risk remains unknown.
The U.S. Army conducted the Seongju test, and the South Korean Air Force, partnering with the Korea Radio Promotion Association, measured the radiation. [29] There was no outside involvement in planning or conducting the test. Lacking independent outside oversight, the U.S. military chose the test conditions based on the motivation to produce a reassuring finding. In coordination with selected third parties, the Ministry of Environment’s sole role was to review the measurements handed to them by the South Korean military.
In its recent decision, the Constitutional Court dismissed every point in the two appeals that challenged the deployment of THAAD. The petition filed by Won Buddhists charged that THAAD violated their freedom of religion by requiring them to obtain permission from the military to conduct religious activities and meetings and by restricting pilgrimages. Similarly, the petition by residents argued that security restrictions imposed on farmers required them to seek permission from the police to work their fields. To both complaints, the court ruled that restricted access to a religious site and farmland does not apply to the constitution, as a joint U.S.-Korean commission had decided to deploy THAAD in accordance with the Mutual Defense Treaty. The court summarized its point by asserting, “If the exercise of public authority has no effect on the legal status of the applicants, there is no possible violation of their fundamental rights in the first place.” It was a curious framing for the court to adopt in that it ignored the impact on residents who could no longer conduct their activities in a normal manner. In dismissing the challenges relating to health concerns and noise pollution, the court cited the Ministry of Defense’s environmental test press release in evidence. Finally, in rejecting the challenge that THAAD would make Seongju a target in times of war, the court made the specious claim that since the system is defensive, it cannot be said that it “is likely to threaten the peaceful existence of the people by subjecting them to a war of aggression.” [30] Chinese complaints about the nature of THAAD are well known in South Korea; the judges could hardly have been unaware of how deployment has been perceived in the People’s Republic of China.
Following close on the heels of the publicized environmental test result, the court’s decision surely had Washington in a jubilant mood. South Korea’s military promised to “work closely with the U.S. side to faithfully reflect the opinions of the U.S. side so that the project can proceed.” [31] They plan to expedite the steps needed to “normalize” the base and ensure its permanent emplacement.
THAAD can be considered a microcosm representing everything unsettling about the U.S.-South Korea military alliance. It is a relationship serving American geostrategic objectives in which Koreans play a subservient role, often acting against their interests. As East Asian specialist Seungsook Moon explains, “While there have been variations and changes in the U.S. relationships with host countries over time, the military relationship between the USA and South Korea has been persistently neocolonial.” Moon adds that, in “maintaining the boundary between us and them,” the South Korean state “imposes the unequal burden of hosting the missile defense system on lower-class and rural citizens” and “exacerbates class inequality by diminishing these citizens’ quality of life and human security.” [32] The costs of U.S. militarism are also offloaded onto Koreans in other ways, as well, including communities impacted by toxic pollution from active and abandoned American bases. Those living near live-fire practice exercises must endure unbearable noise levels, while crimes committed by American soldiers victimize residents near bases.
As for South Korea as a whole, the presence of U.S. bases in the context of American hyper-militarized confrontation with China and North Korea poses an ongoing danger of dragging the nation into war. Indeed, the United States is quite explicit about the role it assigns to South Korea. Shortly after taking office, in a revealing statement, President Biden declared, “When we strengthen our alliances, we amplify our power.” [33] That leaves no doubt about whose interests allied nations are expected to serve. In South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, the United States has found an ideal lackey, a true believer who eagerly prioritizes American demands over the welfare of his people. It has long been a U.S. goal for its alliance to expand beyond the Korean Peninsula. With Yoon in power, the United States had been progressing toward moving the alliance in that direction. Austin and South Korean Defense Minister Shin Won-sik recently announced that the alliance is committed to “operate across the region with greater bilateral and multilateral political-military alignment to realize this vision of a true global comprehensive strategic Alliance…” [34]
The U.S. objective is total economic, diplomatic, and military domination of the Asia-Pacific. When Yoon met with Biden last year, he signaled his support for that policy, including the usual anti-China euphemisms. [35] Biden and Yoon have also been ramping up regional tensions with a nearly nonstop series of aggressive full-scale military exercises intended to intimidate and threaten North Korea and China. [36]
Yoon and Biden have underestimated the determination of the Korean progressive movement, which is unswayed by recent developments. If anything, the setbacks have energized them. On April 27, the seventh anniversary of the introduction of THAAD in Soseong-ri, activists held a demonstration at the site to proclaim their undying opposition, shouting, “We will be with you until the day THAAD is dismantled!” [37]
One of the speakers, student Lee Ki-eun, pointed out that THAAD’s radar is intended to defend the United States and Japan. “It is completely for foreign powers.” She added, “What is Korea? At the forefront of the confrontation with North Korea and China, the lives of our people are sacrificed for foreign powers.” Lee urged her audience: “With greater determination, with an even greater life force like a bursting prairie fire, let’s continue the anti-THAAD struggle!” [38]
The anti-THAAD battle is part of a broader movement by Korean progressives against the deepening military alliance with the United States and Yoon’s colonial mindset that sacrifices Korean sovereignty and the welfare of the Korean people on the altar of U.S. imperialism. As Ham Jae-gyu of the Unification Committee declared at the rally, “The Japanese colonial period merely passed the baton to U.S. imperialism, and subjugation by imperialism is accelerating. The United States is trampling every corner of Korea.” [39]
[2] Kwan Sik Yoon, “Anti-THAAD Group: ‘The Constitution Does Not Protect Basic Rights…We Will Fight to the End,” Yonhap, March 29, 2024.
[3] Oh Seok-min, “S. Korea, U.S. Working Closely on How to Improve THAAD Base Conditions: Seoul Ministry,” Yonhap, March 29, 2021.
[4] Press Release, “54th Security Consultative Meeting Joint Communique,” U.S. Department of Defense, November 3, 2022.
[5] Yoon Min-sik, “THAAD, Capacity and Limitations,” Korea Herald, July 21, 2016
[6] Lauren Frias, “US Fighter Jets, Destroyers, and Patriot Missiles Shot Down Loads of Iranian Weapons to Shield Israel From an Unprecedented Attack,” Business Insider, April 15, 2024.
Vera Bergengruen, “How the U.S. Rallied to Defend Israel From Iran’s Massive Attack,” Time, April 15, 2024.
[7] “U.S. Defense Infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific: Background and Issues for Congress,” p. 39, Congressional Research Service, June 6, 2023.
[16] “Electromagnetic Fields and Public Health: Radars and Human Health,” Fact Sheet N 226, World Health Organization.
[17] Christian Goiceanu, Răzvan Dănulescu1, Eugenia Dănulescu, Florin Mihai Tufescu, and Dorina Emilia Creangă, “Exposure to Microwaves Generated by Radar Equipment: Case Study and Protection Issues,” Environmental Engineering and Management Journal, April 2011, Vol. 10, No. 4, p 491-498.
[18] ATP 3-27.3, “Ground-based Midcourse Defense Operations,” U.S. Army, October 30, 2019.
[19] ATP 3-27.5: “AN/TYP-2 Forward Based Mode (FBM) Radar Operations,” U.S. Army, April 16, 2012.
[20] Press Release, “성주 사드기지 소규모 환경영향평가 협의 완료,” Daegu Regional Environment Agency Environmental Assessment Division, September 4, 2017.
[21] Song Sang-ho, “S. Korea Completes Environmental Assessment of U.S. THAAD Missile Defense Base,” Yonhap, June 21, 2023.
[22] “사드기지 소규모 환경영향평가 후속조치 기술지원 결과,” Republic of Korea Ministry of Environment, undated report.
[33] “Remarks by President Biden on America’s Place in the World,” The White House, February 4, 2021.
[34] Press Release, “Defense Vision of the U.S.-ROK Alliance,” U.S. Department of Defense, November 13, 2023.
[35] “Leaders’ Joint Statement in Commemoration of the 70th Anniversary of the Alliance Between the United States of America and the Republic of Korea,” The White House, April 26, 2023.
[36] Simone Chun, “Unprecedented US War Drills and Naval Deployment Raise Fear of War in Korea,” Truthout, April 7, 2024.
Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute board member. He is a contributor to the collection, Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy (Haymarket Books, 2023). His website is https://gregoryelich.org Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich.
Antony Blinken is now in China for his second such journey as secretary of state and his third encounter with senior Chinese officials: This is our news as April marches toward May. I have to say, it is a stranger state of affairs than I can figure when the State Department and the media that clerk for it tell us in advance that America’s top diplomat is going to fail to get anything done as he sets out for the People’s Republic.
“I want to make clear that we are realistic and clear-eyed about the prospects of breakthroughs on any of these issues,” an unnamed State Department official said when briefing reporters last week on Blinken’s agenda. This is how State warns in advance that the secretary will be wasting his time and our money during his encounters in Shanghai and Beijing.
What is this if not an admission of our secretary of state’s diplomatic impotence? Or do I mean incompetence? Or both? This is the man, after all, who arrived in Israel five days after the events of last Oct. 7 to announce, “I come before you as a Jew.” Does this guy understand diplomacy or what?
The media followed the State Department’ lead, naturally, in advising us of the pointlessness of Blinken’s sojourn in China—this at both ends of the Pacific. CNBC: “Washington is realistic about its expectations on Blinken’s visit in resolving key issues.” Japan Times: “While crucial for keeping lines of communication open, the visit is unlikely to yield major breakthroughs.”
Matt Lee, the very able diplomatic correspondent at The Associated Press, got it righter than anyone in his April 22 report: The point of Blinken’s three days of talks with top Chinese officials, he reported, is to have three days of talks with top Chinese officials. “The mere fact that Blinken is making the trip might be seen by some as encouraging,” Lee wrote, “but ties between Washington and Beijing are tense and the rifts are growing wider.”
This is our Tony. As the record makes pitifully clear, there’s no mileage in predicting success when Blinken boards a plane for the great “out there.” This is unequivocally so in his dealings with the western end of the Pacific.
There is a long list of the topics Blinken was set to raise with Chinese officials, notable among these Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Taiwan and the South China Sea, military-to-military contacts, artificial intelligence applications, illicit drug traffic, human rights, trade: These are standards on the American menu when a U.S. official addresses Chinese counterparts. The last is especially contentious just now, given the Biden regime’s disgraceful determination to subvert those Chinese industries with which the U.S. cannot compete. With plans to block imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles already afoot, last week President Biden announced new tariffs on imports of Chinese steel. And it is now “investigating” China’s shipping and shipbuilding industries, which sounds to me like prelude to yet more measures to undermine China’s admirable economic advances.
But the premier question Blinken was to address has to do with Sino–Russian relations. As he made clear before departing, the secretary of state will more or less insist that the Chinese stop selling various industrial goods to Russia because the U.S. considers them “dual use,” meaning the Russians could use such things as semiconductors in their defense industries—so implicating China in Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.
Before going any further, let’s try one of those “imagine if” exercises. Imagine if Beijing sent Foreign Minister Wang to Washington to tell the Biden regime to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine as this implicates the U.S. in Ukraine’s war with Russia and this is not on because China and Russia are friends.
It is not even fun, this “imagine if,” so nonsensical is it. Any such exercise would turn Wang, an acutely skilled diplomat, into another Antony Blinken—the thought of which is nonsensical times 10.
But never mind sense and nonsense. Blinken and those who speak for him at State boldly previewed the secretary’s presentation in the days before his departure. Here is Blinken speaking to reporters last Friday:
We see China sharing machine tools, semiconductors, other dual-use items that have helped Russia rebuild the defense industrial base that sanctions and export controls had done so much to degrade. Now, if China purports on the one hand to want good relations with Europe and other countries, it can’t on the other hand be fueling what is the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War.
A day later the unnamed State Department official elaborated with this:
We’re prepared to take steps when we believe necessary against firms that … severely undermine security in both Ukraine and Europe. We’ve demonstrated our willingness to do so regarding firms from a number of countries, not just China. We will express our intent to have China curtail that support.
As tough diplomatic talk goes, it does not get much tougher. And as dumb diplomacy goes, it does not get much dumber.
For one thing, the Biden regime is demanding that China act against what we can count Beijing’s closest partner—this as leading non–Western nations are coalescing behind a joint project to create a new, let’s call it post–Western world order. I am reminded of a brilliant tweet someone wrote just after Russia began its Ukraine operation two years ago and the Biden regime sought to recruit Beijing against “Putin’s Russia,” as people such as Blinken insist on referring to the Russian Federation. “Please help us defeat Russia,” the tweet read, “so we can turn our aggression on you when we’re done.”
But precisely.
For another, the Chinese Foreign Ministry made its response to Blinken’s preposterous intentions clear even before the secretary boarded his plane (and just prior to the passage in the House last week of $60.1 billion in new aid for the Kiev regime). “It is extremely hypocritical and irresponsible for the U.S. to introduce a large-scale aid bill for Ukraine,” a ministry spokesperson said last week, “while making groundless accusations against normal economic and trade exchanges between China and Russia.”
I cannot think of a handier way of shutting down Antony Blinken.
One other thing while we are on this topic. Among the principles on which a post–Western global order will rest are respect for the sovereignty of all nations and noninterference into the internal affairs of others. These are two elements of civilized statecraft, as it is destined to be in the 21st century and of which the secretary of state has absolutely no clue.
Why did Secretary Blinken bother to raise this question of Sino–Russian trade when he must have known the response as well as you and I know it. I see two immediate explanations.
One, the crooks in Kiev have already lost Washington’s proxy war with Russia—and goodness knows how much of the just-approved aid they will steal—and Blinken’s presentation in Beijing reflects mounting desperation among the policy cliques who got the U.S. into this hopeless-from-the-start conflict.
Two, and closely related to the above, when Antony Blinken goes to Beijing he does not talk to the Chinese: He talks at them and is not especially concerned about their responses. He is talking only to the American public and the China hawks on Capitol Hill, who have the White House stretching to out-hawk them at every turn.
If you need support for this latter thought, there is Blinken’s assertion Monday, when introducing the State Department’s annual human rights report, that China is guilty of “genocide and crimes against humanity” against the Uighur population in Xinjiang Province. This charge has been highly suspect since Mike Pompeo, Blinken’s fanatically Sinophobic predecessor at State, conjured it before leaving office in 2021. And given no charge of genocide has ever been supported with evidence, what in hell was Blinken doing raising this question (1) on the eve of a diplomatic visit to Beijing during which he purported to want other things out of the Chinese, and (2) given his government’s open sponsorship of what we must now call the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza?
My mind goes back to March 2021 when I read these things. It was then, in an Anchorage hotel (named the Captain Cook) that Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s new national security adviser, made an utter disaster out of their first encounter with senior Chinese officials, Wang Yi among them. It was then and there that Blinken and Sullivan, all by themselves, tipped over Sino–U.S. relations with just the sort of shockingly ignorant display of late-imperial presumption Blinken is trying on yet again in Beijing this week.
Sino–American ties have never recovered from the encounter in Anchorage. And Blinken has learned nothing from the mess he made.
Lessons, of which several.
One and as suggested above, a creeping desperation now pervades the Biden regime’s foreign policy cliques. They do not know what to do about Russia and they do not know what to do about China.
Two and related to one, the level of incompetence evident among those directing this administration’s foreign policies is very likely unprecedented in the history of postwar American diplomacy. This now reaches the point it is a danger—most evidently in the cases of China and Russia.
Three, there is no self-awareness among these people. They are not present in their diplomatic encounters—reading, instead, from ideologically driven scripts. Again, three years into the Biden regime this is a clear danger.
Four, last, and by no means least, the Biden regime does not have a China policy. Think carefully about this: In the single most important relationship the U.S. will have to navigate in the 21st century, those running policy are paralyzed—no map, no diplomatic design, no clear objective other than to oppose, literally, the 21st century in the name of prolonging the 20th. This is why the warmongers, the economic saboteurs, and the paranoids left over from the “Who lost China?” years remain ascendant in Washington.
Nature abhors a vacuum. So does a foreign policy made of nothing but ignorance and empty bluster. It is the gravest of charges, but Antony Blinken in China makes me feel unsafe.
ប៉ុន្តែខ្ញុំបានរៀនកាន់តែច្រើនឡើងអំពីពាក្យ និងបរិបទ និងតួអក្សរ និងគ្រោង។ ខ្ញុំបានធ្វើតេស្តយ៉ាងល្អលើការធ្វើតេស្តស្ដង់ដារធំៗនៅក្នុងសាលា ហើយបានចូលសាលាប្រឡង Boston Public Schools។ ខ្ញុំចាប់ផ្ដើមរក្សាសៀវភៅកំណត់ហេតុនៅវិទ្យាល័យពេលខ្ញុំមានអាយុ១៦ឆ្នាំ។ ខ្ញុំត្រូវបានបំផុសគំនិតដោយ Winston Smith នៅក្នុងប្រលោមលោក ‘1984 ។’ ខ្ញុំក៏បានគិតថា Henry David Thoreau មានគំនិតគួរឱ្យចាប់អារម្មណ៍មួយចំនួនអំពីការរស់នៅ និងការសរសេរដោយសម្លឹងមើលពិភពលោកដែលមើលទៅហាក់ដូចជាមនុស្សជុំវិញខ្លួន។
I would never say I expected more from Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, as that would have required me to expect anything good from him. But I still found myself surprised when he referred to the Columbia University protests against Israel’s war on Gaza as a form of “pogroms.”
Nor did I expect more from The Wall Street Journal, which ran an op-ed arguing that Hamas and Hezbollah are “working with and grooming” pro-Palestine activists. Nor from Benjamin Netanyahu, who compared the campus protests to Nazi Germany. Nor from House Speaker Mike Johnson or Anti-Defamation League President Jonathan Greenblatt, both of whom called for the National Guard to be sent to Columbia.
Yet I have been consistently taken aback at just how ridiculous these and other claims from the media and politicians about the growing pro-Palestine movement have become recently.
Politicians and the mainstream media outlets that support them are consistently simplistic in their analyses, or flat-out wrong, or, well, stupid. But over the last few weeks, it feels like the stupidity has ramped up to a level previously unreached—a level that can no longer be described as misinterpretation or obfuscation or spin, but rather as a complete detachment from reality.
And this condition of near-psychosis appears to be spreading. It’s not just the far-right that’s responding to largely peaceful protests with extreme rhetoric and action. College administrations have sent in police in riot gear to arrest peacefully demonstrating students and faculty, suspended or expelled students, canceled graduations, and even hastily barricaded their campuses with plywood in a fashion that feels both barbaric and Wile-E.-Coyote-esque.
To understand this state of unreality, it’s important to understand that the United States and the elite media are nearly always, to some extent, in a state of unreality. We’ve known this for a while. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman outlined the process by which Americans become unwilling or unable to confront the violence endemic in American life (whether the violence of US-backed wars in other countries or the violence of corporate-backed plutocracy at home) way back in 1988.
As they argued in Manufacturing Consent, a crucial step toward enabling war is the creation of groups of worthy and unworthy victims. Chomsky and Herman were writing about Vietnam and the lack of attention paid to the millions killed in that failed war, but the same is happening today.
Since October 7, politicians and leading media outlets have made it clear, over and over again, that they consider Israeli lives to be worthier than Palestinian ones. Now, the media’s relentless focus on Columbia and other college campuses is proof in itself that it cares, and, crucially, wants us to care, more about any perceived victims of the protests in the US (even if their victimization consists of not being able to teach a class on classical music as they’d prefer), especially if they are from elite institutions, than they do about the lives of Palestinians.
This distorted reality enabled by the media—in which the supposed dangers of student organizing get significantly more coverage than the thing the protests are actually about—partially explains the unhinged reactions of the last few weeks. If one consumes only mainstream US media, one gets a very hysterical version of reality. It’s the same reason Americans think crime is going up all the time even as it falls to historic lows. Feeling constantly under threat, while ignoring people who actually are constantly under threat, is a time-honored, mass-media-enabled, American tradition.
But, in a way, the propaganda model does not give the hysterics in this case enough credit. The average Fox News watcher can perhaps be excused for their histrionic view of the world, but American senators and presidents and highly educated op-ed page writers and university administrators should know better. And, of course, they do!
This is why it might be more useful to see their delusional rhetoric as not only a form of propagandistic misdirection but also a tool of linguistic power and control. By reframing disagreement and protest and discomfort as violence, those in power get to play victim, and thus feel righteous in their use of, or support for, actual violence—whether that’s the bombardment of Gaza or the brutality inflicted on US college students.
As Sarah Schulman brilliantly argues in her 2016 book Conflict Is Not Abuse, this strategy has been used for ages by those with privilege to hide their power over, and fear of, those they oppress. We can see it in, for example, the rape accusations leveled against Black men by white women that led to lynchings.
“Sometimes, when we are upset, we pretend or convince ourselves that Conflict is actually not only Abuse, but a crime,” Schulman writes. “When we have nowhere to go but inside ourselves, and when that self that we inhabit is convinced that it cannot bear to be seen, we call the police.”
The recent Congressional hearings leading to a bloodbath of university presidents brings back memories from my teen-age years in the 1950s when everyone’s eyes were glued to the TV broadcast of the McCarthy hearings. And the student revolts incited by vicious college presidents trying to stifle academic freedom when it opposes foreign unjust wars awakens memories of the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War and the campus clampdowns confronting police violence. I was the junior member of the “Columbia three” alongside Seymour Melman and my mentor Terence McCarthy (both of whom taught at Columbia’s Seeley Mudd School of Industrial Engineering; my job was mainly to handle publicity and publication). At the end of that decade, students occupied my office and all others at the New School’s graduate faculty in New York City – very peacefully, without disturbing any of my books and papers.
Only the epithets have changed. The invective “Communist” has been replaced by “anti-Semite,” and the renewal of police violence on campus has not yet led to a Kent State-style rifle barrage against protesters. But the common denominators are all here once again. A concerted effort has been organized to condemn and even to punish today’s nationwide student uprisings against the genocide occurring in Gaza and the West Bank. Just as the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) aimed to end the careers of progressive actors, directors, professors and State Department officials unsympathetic to Chiang Kai-Shek or sympathetic to the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1975, today’s version aims at ending what remains of academic freedom in the United States.
The epithet of “communism” from 75 years ago has been updated to “anti-Semitism.” Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin has been replaced by Elise Stefanik, House Republican from upstate New York, and Senator “Scoop” Jackson upgraded to President Joe Biden. Harvard University President Claudine Gay (now forced to resign), former University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill (also given the boot), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth were called upon to abase themselves by promising to accuse peace advocates critical of U.S. foreign policy of anti-Semitism.
The most recent victim was Columbia’s president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, a cosmopolitan opportunist with trilateral citizenship who enforced neoliberal economic policy as a high-ranking official at the IMF (where she was no stranger to the violence of “IMF riots) and the World Bank, and who brought her lawyers along to help her acquiesce in the Congressional Committee’s demands. She did that and more, all on her own. Despite being told not to by the faculty and student affairs committees, she called in the police to arrest peaceful demonstrators. This radical trespass of police violence against peaceful demonstrators (the police themselves attested to their peacefulness) triggered sympathetic revolts throughout the United States, met with even more violent police responses at Emory College in Atlanta and California State Polytechnic, where cell phone videos were quickly posted on various media platforms.
Just as intellectual freedom and free speech were attacked by HUAC 75 years ago, academic freedom is now under attack at these universities. The police have trespassed onto school grounds to accuse students themselves of trespassing, with violence reminiscent of the demonstrations that peaked in May 1970 when the Ohio National Guard shot Kent State students singing and speaking out against America’s war in Vietnam.
Today’s demonstrations are in opposition to the Biden-Netanyahu genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. The more underlying crisis can be boiled down to the insistence by Benjamin Netanyahu that to criticize Israel is anti-Semitic. That is the “enabling slur” of today’s assault on academic freedom.
By “Israel,” Biden and Netanyahu mean specifically the right-wing Likud Party and its theocratic supporters aiming to create “a land without a [non-Jewish] people.” They assert that Jews owe their loyalty not to their current nationality (or humanity) but to Israel and its policy of driving the Gaza Strip’s millions of Palestinians into the sea by bombing them out of their homes, hospitals and refugee camps.
. The implication is that to support the International Court of Justice’s accusations that Israel is plausibly committing genocide is an anti-Semitic act. Supporting the UN resolutions vetoed by the United States is anti-Semitic.
The claim is that Israel is defending itself and that protesting the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank frightens Jewish students. But research by students at Columbia’s School of Journalism found that the complaints cited by the New York Times and other pro-Israeli media were made by non-students trying to spread the story that Israel’s violence was in self-defense.
The student violence has been by Israeli nationals. Columbia has a student-exchange program with Israel for students who finish their compulsory training with the Israeli Defense Forces. It was some of these exchange students who attacked pro-Gaza demonstrators, spraying them with Skunk, a foul-smelling indelible Israeli army chemical weapon that marks demonstrators for subsequent arrest, torture or assassination. The only students endangered were the victims of this attack. Columbia under Shafik did nothing to protect or help the victims.
The hearings to which she submitted speak for themselves. Columbia’s president Shafik was able to avoid the first attack on universities not sufficiently pro-Likud by having meetings outside of the country. Yet she showed herself willing to submit to the same brow-beating that had led her two fellow presidents to be fired, hoping that her lawyers had prompted her to submit in a way that would be acceptable to the committee.
I found the most demagogic attack to be that of Republican Congressman Rick Allen from Georgia, asking Dr. Shafik whether she was familiar with the passage in Genesis 12.3. As he explained” “It was a covenant that God made with Abraham. And that covenant was real clear. … ‘If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you.’ … Do you consider that to be a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God of the Bible?”[1]
Shafik smiled and was friendly all the way through this bible thumping, and replied meekly, “Definitely not.”
She might have warded off this browbeating question by saying, “Your question is bizarre. This is 2024, and America is not a theocracy. And the Israel of the early 1st century BC was not Netanyahu’s Israel of today.” She accepted all the accusations that Allen and his fellow Congressional inquisitors threw at her.
Her main nemesis was Elise Stefanik, Chair of the House Republican Conference, who is on the House Armed Services Committee, and the Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Congresswoman Stefanik: You were asked were there any anti-Jewish protests and you said ‘No’.
President Shafik: So the protest was not labeled as an anti-Jewish protest. It was labeled as an anti-Israeli government. But antisemitic incidents happened or antisemitic things were said. So I just wanted to finish.
Congresswoman Stefanik: And you are aware that in that bill, that got 377 Members out of 435 Members of Congress, condemns ‘from the river to the sea’ as antisemitic?
Dr. Shafik: Yes, I am aware of that.
Congresswoman Stefanik: But you don’t believe ‘from the river to the sea’ is antisemitic?
Dr. Shafik: We have already issued a statement to our community saying that language is hurtful and we would prefer not to hear it on our campus.[2]
What an appropriate response to Stefanik’s browbeating might have been?
Shafik could have said, “The reason why students are protesting is against the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, as the International Court of Justice has ruled, and most of the United Nations agree. I’m proud of them for taking a moral stand that most of the world supports but is under attack here in this room.”
Instead, Shafik seemed more willing than the leaders of Harvard or Penn to condemn and potentially discipline students and faculty for using the term “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” She could have said that it is absurd to say that this is a call to eliminate Israel’s Jewish population, but is a call to give Palestinians freedom instead of being treated as Untermenschen.
Asked explicitly whether calls for genocide violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Dr. Shafik answered in the affirmative — “Yes, it does.” So did the other Columbia leaders who accompanied her at the hearing. They did not say that this is not at all what the protests are about. Neither Shafik nor any other of the university officials say, “Our university is proud of our students taking an active political and social role in protesting the idea of ethnic cleansing and outright murder of families simply to grab the land that they live on. Standing up for that moral principle is what education is all about, and what civilization’s all about.”
The one highlight that I remember from the McCarthy hearings was the reply by Joseph Welch, the U.S. Army’s Special Council, on June 9, 1954 to Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s charge that one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist front organization. “Until this moment, senator,” Welsh replied, “I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. … Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
The audience broke into wild applause. Welch’s put-down has echoed for the past 70 years in the minds of those who were watching television then (as I was, at age 15). A similar answer by any of the three other college presidents would have shown Stefanik to be the vulgarian that she is. But none ventured to stand up against the abasement.
The Congressional attack accusing opponents of genocide in Gaza as anti-Semites supporting genocide against the Jews is bipartisan. Already in December, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) helped cause Harvard and Penn’s presidents to be fired for their stumbling over her red-baiting. She repeated her question to Shafik on April 17: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct?” Bonamici asked the four new Columbia witnesses. All responded: “Yes.”
That was the moment when they should have said that the students were not calling for genocide of the Jews, but seeking to mobilize opposition to genocide being committed by the Likud government against the Palestinians with President Biden’s full support.
During a break in the proceedings Rep. Stefanik told the press that “the witnesses were overheard discussing how well they thought their testimony was going for Columbia.” This arrogance is eerily reminiscent to the previous three university presidents who believed when walking out of the hearing that their testimony was acceptable. “Columbia is in for a reckoning of accountability. If it takes a member of Congress to force a university president to fire a pro-terrorist, antisemitic faculty chair, then Columbia University leadership is failing Jewish students and its academic mission,” added Stefanik. “No amount of overlawyered, overprepped, and over-consulted testimony is going to cover up for failure to act.”[3]
Shafik could have pointedly corrected the implications by the House inquisitors that it was Jewish students who needed protection. The reality was just the opposite: The danger was from the Israeli IDF students who attacked the demonstrators with military Skunk, with no punishment by Columbia.
Despite being told not to by the faculty and student groups (which Shafik was officially bound to consult), she called in the police, who arrested 107 students, tied their hands behind their backs and kept them that way for many hours as punishment while charging them for trespassing on Columbia’s property. Shafik then suspended them from classes.
The clash between two kinds of Judaism: Zionist vs. assimilationist
A good number of these protestors being criticized were Jewish. Netanyahu and AIPAC have claimed – correctly, it seems – that the greatest danger to their current genocidal policies comes from the traditionally liberal Jewish middle-class population. Progressive Jewish groups have joined the uprisings at Columbia and other universities.
Early Zionism arose in late 19th-century Europe as a response to the violent pogroms killing Jews in Ukrainian cities such as Odessa and other Central European cities that were the center of anti-Semitism. Zionism promised to create a safe refuge. It made sense at a time when Jews were fleeing their countries to save their lives in countries that accepted them. They were the “Gazans” of their day.
After World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust anti-Semitism became passé. Most Jews in the United States and other countries were being assimilated and becoming prosperous, most successfully in the United States. The past century has seen this success enable them to assimilate, while retaining the moral standard that ethnic and religious discrimination such as that which their forbears had suffered is wrong in principle. Jewish activists were in the forefront of fighting for civil liberties, most visibly against anti-Black prejudice and violence in the 1960s and ‘70s, and against the Vietnam War. Many of my Jewish school friends in the 1950s bought Israel bonds, but thought of Israel as a socialist country and thought of volunteering to work on a kibbutz in the summer. There was no thought of antagonism, and I heard no mention of the Palestinian population when the phrase “a people without a land in a land without a people” was spoken.
But Zionism’s leaders have remained obsessed with the old antagonisms in the wake of Nazism’s murders of so many Jews. In many ways they have turned Nazism inside out, fearing a renewed attack from non-Jews. Driving the Arabs out of Israel and making it an apartheid state was just the opposite of what assimilationist Jews aimed at.
The moral stance of progressive Jews, and the ideal that Jews, blacks and members of all other religions and races should be treated equally, is the opposite of Israeli Zionism. In the hands of Netanyahu’s Likud Party and the influx of right-wing supporters, Zionism asserts a claim to set Jewish people apart from the rest of their national population, and even from the rest of the world, as we are seeing today.
Claiming to speak for all Jews, living and dead, Netanyahu asserts that to criticize his genocide and the Palestinian holocaust, the nakba, is anti-Semitic. This is the position of Stefanik and her fellow committee members. It is an assertion that Jews owe their first allegiance to Israel, and hence to its ethnic cleansing and mass murder since last October. President Biden also has labeled the student demonstrations “antisemitic protests.”
This claim in the circumstances of Israel’s ongoing genocide is causing more anti-Semitism than anyone since Hitler. If people throughout the world come to adopt Netanyahu’s and his cabinet’s definition of anti-Semitism, how many, being repulsed by Israel’s actions, will say, “If that is the case, then indeed I guess I’m anti-Semitic.”
Netanyahu’s slander against Judaism and what civilization should stand for
Netanyahu characterized the U.S. protests in an extremist speech on April 24 attacking American academic freedom.
What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel, they attack Jewish students, they attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. We see this exponential rise of antisemitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians.
It’s unconscionable, it has to be stopped, it has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done.[4]
This is a call to make American universities into arms of a police state, imposing policies dictated by Israel’s settler state. That call is being funded by a circular flow: Congress gives enormous subsidies to Israel, which recycles some of this money back into the election campaigns of politicians willing to serve their donors. It is the same policy that Ukraine uses when it employs U.S. “aid” by setting up well-funded lobbying organizations to back client politicians.
What kind of student and academic protest expressions could oppose the Gaza and West Bank genocide without explicitly threatening Jewish students? How about “Palestinians are human being too!” That is not aggressive. To make it more ecumenical, one could add “And so are the Russians, despite what Ukrainian neo-Nazis say.”
I can understand why Israelis feel threatened by Palestinians. They know how many they have killed and brutalized to grab their land, killing just to “free” the land for themselves. They must think “If the Palestinians are like us, they must want to kill us, because of what we have done to them and there can never be a two-state solution and we can never live together, because this land was given to us by God.”
Netanyahu fanned the flames after his April 24 speech by raising today’s conflict to the level of a fight for civilization: “What is important now is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization, to stand up together and to say enough is enough.”
Is what Israel is doing, and what the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and most of the Global Majority oppose, really “our civilization”? Ethnic cleansing, genocide and treating the Palestinian population as conquered and to be expelled as subhumans is an assault on the most basic principles of civilization.
Peaceful students defending that universal concept of civilization are called terrorists and anti-Semites – by the terrorist Israeli Prime Minister. He is following the tactics of Joseph Goebbels: The way to mobilize a population to fight the enemy is to depict yourself as under attack. That was the Nazi public relations strategy, and it is the PR strategy of Israel today – and of many in the American Congress, in AIPAC and many related institutions that proclaim a morally offensive idea of civilization as the ethnic supremacy of a group sanctioned by God.
The real focus of the protests is the U.S. policy that is backing Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide supported by last week’s foreign “aid.” It is also a protest against the corruption of Congressional politicians raising money from lobbyists representing foreign interests over those of the United States. Last week’s “aid” bill also backed Ukraine, that other country presently engaged in ethnic cleansing, with House members waved Ukrainian flags, not those of the United States. Shortly before that, one Congressman wore his Israeli army uniform into Congress to advertise his priorities.
Zionism has gone far beyond Judaism. I’ve read that there are nine Christian Zionists for every Jewish Zionists. It is as if both groups are calling for the End Time to arrive, while insisting that support for the United Nations and the International Court of Justice condemning Israel for genocide is anti-Semitic.
What CAN the students at Columbia ask for
Students at Columbia and other universities have called for universities to disinvest in Israeli stocks, and also those of U.S. arms makers exporting to Israel. Given the fact that universities have become business organizations, I don’t think that this is the most practical demand at present. Most important, it doesn’t go to the heart of the principles at work.
What really is the big public relations issue is the unconditional U.S. backing for Israel come what may, with “anti-Semitism” the current propaganda epithet to characterize those who oppose genocide and brutal land grabbing.
They should insist on a public announcement by Columbia (and also Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who were equally obsequious to Rep. Stefanik) that they recognize that it is not anti-Semitic to condemn genocide, support the United Nations and denounce the U.S. veto.
They should insist that Columbia and the other universities making a sacrosanct promise not to call police onto academic grounds over issues of free speech.
They should insist that the president be fired for her one-sided support of Israeli violence against her students. In that demand they are in agreement with Rep. Stefanik’s principle of protecting students, and that Dr. Shafik must go.
But there is one class of major offenders that should be held up for contempt: the donors who try to attack academic freedom by using their money to influence university policy and turn universities away from the role in supporting academic freedom and free speech. The students should insist that university administrators – the unpleasant opportunists standing above the faculty and students – must not only refuse such pressure but should join in publicly expressing shock over such covert political influence.
The problem is that American universities have become like Congress in basing their policy on attracting contributions from their donors. That is the academic equivalent of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Numerous Zionist funders have threatened to withdraw their contributions to Harvard, Columbia and other schools not following Netanyahu’s demands to clamp down on opponents of genocide and defenders of the United Nations. These funders are the enemies of the students at such universities, and both students and faculty should insist on their removal. Just as Dr. Shafik’s International Monetary Fund fell subject to its economists’ protest that there must be “No more Argentinas,” perhaps the Columbia students could chant “No More Shafiks.”
Many Europeans would opt for making Europe competitive again; making Europe a diplomatic actor, rather than as a military one.
Theodore Postol, Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at MIT, has provided a forensic analysis of the videos and evidence emerging from Iran’s 13th April swarm drone and missile ‘demonstration’ attack into Israel: A ‘message’, rather than an ‘assault’.
The leading Israeli daily, Yediot Ahoronot, has estimated the cost of attempting to down this Iranian flotilla at between $2-3 billion dollars. The implications of this single number are substantial.
Professor Postol writes:
“This indicates that the cost of defending against waves of attacks of this type is very likely to be unsustainable against an adequately armed and determined adversary”.
“The videos show an extremely important fact: All of the targets, whether drones or not, are shot down by air-to-air missiles”, [fired from mostly U.S. aircraft. Some 154 aircraft reportedly were aloft at the time] likely firing AIM-9x Sidewinder air to air missiles. The cost of a single Sidewinder air-to-air missile is about $500,000”.
Furthermore:
“The fact that a very large number of unengaged ballistic missiles could be seen glowing as they reenter the atmosphere to lower altitudes [an indication of hyper-speed], indicates that whatever the effects of [Israel’s] David’s Sling and the Arrow missile defenses, they were not especially effective. Thus, the evidence at this point shows that essentially all or most of the arriving long-range ballistic missiles were not intercepted by any of the Israeli air and missile-defense systems”.
Postel adds,
“I have analyzed the situation, and have concluded that commercially available optical and computational technology is more than capable of being adapted to a cruise missile guidance system to give it very high precision homing capability … it is my conclusion that the Iranians have already developed precision guided cruise missiles and drones”.
“The implications of this are clear. The cost of shooting down cruise missiles and drones will be very high and might well be unsustainable unless extremely inexpensive and effective anti-air systems can be implemented. At this time, no one has demonstrated a cost-effective defense system that can intercept ballistic missiles with any reliability”.
Just to be clear, Postol is saying that neither the U.S. nor Israel has more than a partial defence to a potential attack of this nature – especially as Iran has dispersed and buried its ballistic missile silos across the entire terrain of Iran under the control of autonomous units which are capable of continuing a war, even were central command and communications to be completely lost.
This amounts to paradigm change – clearly for Israel, for one. The huge physical expenditure on air defence ordinance – 2-3 billion dollars worth – will not be repeated willy-nilly by the U.S. Netanyahu will not easily persuade the U.S. to engage with Israel in any joint venture against Iran, given these unsustainable air-defence costs.
But also, as a second important implication, these Air Defence assets are not just expensive in dollar terms, they simply are not there: i.e. the store cupboard is near empty! And the U.S. lacks the manufacturing capacity to replace these not particularly effective, high cost platforms speedily.
‘Yes, Ukraine’ … the Middle East paradigm interlinks directly with the Ukraine paradigm where Russia has succeeded in destroying so much of the western supplied, air-defence capabilities in Ukraine, giving Russia near complete air dominance over the skies.
Positioning scarce air defence ‘to save Israel’ therefore, exposes Ukraine (and slows the U.S. pivot to China, too). And given the recent passage of the funding Bill for Ukraine in Congress, clearly air defence assets are a priority for sending to Kiev – where the West looks increasingly trapped and rummaging for a way out that does not lead to humiliation.
But before leaving the Middle East paradigm shift, the implications for Netanyahu are already evident: He must therefore focus back to the ‘near enemy’ – the Palestinian sphere or to Lebanon – to provide Israel with the ‘Great Victory’ that his government craves.
In short, the ‘cost’ for Biden of saving Israel from the Iranian flotilla which had been pre-announced by Iran to be demonstrative and not destructive nor lethal is that the White House must put-up with the corollary – an attack on Rafah. But this implies a different form of cost – an electoral erosion through exacerbating domestic tensions arising from the on-going blatant slaughter of Palestinians.
It is not just Israel that bears the weight of the Iranian paradigm shift. Consider the Sunni Arab States that have been working in various forms of collaboration (normalisation) with Israel.
In the event of wider conflict embracing Iran, clearly Israel cannot protect them – as Professor Postol so clearly shows. And can they count on the U.S.? The U.S. faces competing demands for its scarce Air Defences and (for now) Ukraine, and the pivot to China, are higher on the White House priority ladder.
In September 2019, the Saudi Abqaiq oil facility was hit by cruise missiles, which Postol notes,
“had an effective accuracy of perhaps a few feet, much more precise than could be achieved with GPS guidance (suggesting an optical and computational guidance system, giving a very precise homing capability)”.
So, after the Iranian active deterrence paradigm shift, and the subsequent Air Defence depletion paradigm shock, the putative coming western paradigm shift (the Third Paradigm) is similarly interlinked with Ukraine.
For the western proxy war with Russia centred on Ukraine has made one thing abundantly clear: this is that the West’s off-shoring of its manufacturing base has left it uncompetitive, both in simple trade terms, and secondly, in limiting western defence manufacturing capacity. It finds (post-13 April) that it does not have the Air Defence assets to go round: ‘saving Israel’; ‘saving Ukraine’ and preparing for war with China.
The western maximalisation of shareholder returns model has not adapted readily to the logistical needs of the present ‘limited’ Ukraine/Russia war, let alone provided positioning for future wars – with Iran and China.
Put plainly, this ‘late stage’ global imperialism has been living a ‘false dawn’: With the economy shifting from manufacturing ‘things’, to the more lucrative sphere of imagining new financial products (such as derivatives) that make a lot of money quickly, but which destabilise society (through increasing disparities of wealth); and which ultimately, de-stabilise the global system itself (as the World Majority states recoil from the loss of sovereignty and autonomy that financialism entails).
More broadly, the global system is close to massive structural change. As the Financial Times warns,
“the U.S. and EU cannot embrace national-security “infant industry” arguments, seize key value chains to narrow inequality, and break the fiscal and monetary ‘rules’, while also using the IMF and World Bank – and the economics profession– to preach free-market best practice to EM ex-China. And China can’t expect others not to copy what it does”. As the FT concludes, “the shift to a new economic paradigm has begun. Where it will end is very much up for grabs.”
‘Up for grabs’: Well, for the FT the answer may be opaque, but for the Global Majority is plain enough – “We’re going back to basics”: A simpler, largely national economy, protected from foreign competition by customs barriers. Call it ‘old- fashioned’ (the concepts have been written about for the last 200 years); yet it is nothing extreme. The notions simply reflect the flip side of the coin to Adam Smith’s doctrines, and that which Friedrich List advanced in his critique of the laissez-faire individualist approach of the Anglo-Americans.
‘European leaders’, however, see the economic paradigm solution differently:
“The ECB’s Panetta gave a speech echoing Mario Draghi’s call for “radical change”: He stated for the EU to thrive it needs a de facto national-security focused POLITICAL economy centered around: reducing dependence on foreign demand; enhancing energy security (green protectionism); advancing production of technology (industrial policy); rethinking participation in global value chains (tariffs/subsidies); governing migration flows (so higher labour costs); enhancing external security (huge funds for defence); and joint investments in European public goods (via Eurobonds … to be bought by ECB QE)”.
The ‘false dawn’ boom in U.S. financial services began as its industrial base was rotting away, and as new wars began to be promoted.
It is easy to see that the U.S. economy now needs structural change. Its real economy has become globally uncompetitive – hence Yellen’s call on China to curb its over-capacity which is hurting western economies.
But is it realistic to think that Europe can manage a relaunch as a ‘defence and national security-led political economy’, as Draghi and Panetta advocate as a continuation of war with Russia? Launched from near ground zero?
Is it realistic to think that the American Security State will allow Europe to do this, having deliberately reduced Europe to economic vassalage through causing it to abandon its prior business model based on cheap energy and selling high-end engineering products to China?
This Draghi-ECB plan represents a huge structural change; one that would take a decade or two to implement and would cost trillions. It would occur too, at a time of inevitable European fiscal austerity. Is there evidence that ordinary Europeans support such radical structural change?
Why then is Europe pursuing a path that embraces huge risks – one that potentially could drag Europe into a whirlpool of tensions ending in war with Russia?
For one main reason: The EU leadership held hubristic ambitions to turn the EU into a ‘geo-political’ empire – a global actor with the heft to join the U.S. at Top Table. To this end, the EU unreservedly offered itself as the auxiliary of the White House Team for their Ukraine project, and acquiesced to the entry price of emptying their armouries and sanctioning the cheap energy on which the economy depended.
It was this decision that has been de-industrialising Europe; that has made what remains of a real economy uncompetitive and triggered the inflation that is undermining living standards. Falling into line with Washington’s failing Ukraine project has released a cascade of disastrous decisions by the EU.
Were this policy line to change, Europe could revert to what it was: a trading association formed of diverse sovereign states. Many Europeans would settle for that: Placing the focus on making Europe competitive again; making Europe a diplomatic actor, rather than as a military actor.
Do Europeans even want to be at the American ‘top table’?
Я люблю истории с самого детства. Мне нравилось повествование. Я любил закадровый голос в некоторых фильмах. Придавать смысл вещам. Приводить все в порядок. Начало, середина и конец, как заметил Аристотель. Я начал с комиксов. У друга, который жил напротив станции Эшмонт, был целый ящик бюро, заполненный комиксами, и я любил сидеть и читать. Одним из моих любимых видов комиксов была иллюстрированная классика, своего рода великие книги для детей. В средней и старшей школе чтение художественной литературы было для меня спасением. Я читал романы не потому, что хотел стать умнее, и не потому, что они были частью какого-то плана.
Я просто натыкался на книги в публичной библиотеке и читал из любопытства. Летними вечерами я читал до поздней ночи. Мама кричала мне с лестницы, чтобы я погасил свет и лег спать. Она видела, как свет в моей спальне отражается на кирпичах гаража за окном кухни. Иногда я читал под одеялом с фонариком, когда книга настолько увлекала меня, что мне просто необходимо было прочесть следующие строки. Но я узнавал все больше и больше о словах, контексте, характере и сюжете. В школе я хорошо сдавала большие стандартизированные тесты и поступила в экзаменационную школу Бостонских государственных школ. Я начал вести дневник в старших классах, когда мне было 16 лет.
Меня вдохновил Уинстон Смит и роман “1984”. Я также подумал, что у Генри Дэвида Торо есть интересные идеи о том, как жить и писать, обращая внимание на кажущийся обыденным мир вокруг человека. Когда я учился на подготовительном курсе Уэслианского университета, один из моих преподавателей сказал, что у меня есть способности к творческому письму. Ему понравился поток моих слов. Воодушевленная, я стала посещать занятия по творческому письму в колледже. Я работал с Тони и Ф.Д. Ривом, которые убеждали меня сосредоточиться и писать больше. Я написал пару десятков рассказов, а в качестве выпускного проекта – повесть о неспокойной Северной Ирландии. За работу над романом я получил диплом с отличием. После колледжа я написал еще один роман о работе в “Макдоналдсе” и отношениях с женой и маленьким ребенком.
Ancient old books on shelf in the library. Tiled Bookshelf background
На протяжении многих лет я продолжал вести свой дневник, иногда писал больше, иногда позволял неделям проходить без записей. Я связался с агентом в Бостоне по поводу моего романа о работе в “Макдоналдсе”, он проявил интерес и попросил показать рукопись. Но из этого ничего не вышло, и я не видел особых возможностей для продвижения своей работы. Я все больше и больше писал в журнале и просто не думал о публикации или о том, чтобы обратиться к какой-либо аудитории. Я писал, как и читал художественную литературу, исключительно для саморазвлечения и просвещения. Затем появился доступ к интернету, социальным сетям, онлайн-блогам и местам, где можно оставлять комментарии. Я был в ударе. Я мог написать пост из пяти абзацев за считанные минуты. Я научилась печатать на клавиатуре, когда училась в школе, летом, потому что считала свой почерк безнадежно уродливым. Я ходила на занятия по машинописи в летнюю школу, потому что училась в школе для мальчиков, и там не преподавали машинопись. Я была в восторге, когда увидела, что в классе машинописи в летней школе Берк Хай учатся одни девочки.
Но там почти не было общения, мы просто упражнялись в наборе текста, а не обсуждали художественную литературу и короткие рассказы. В двадцатые годы я печатала фантастические рассказы, работала над двумя своими романами и вела дневник. Я одолжила у сестры электрическую пишущую машинку и чувствовала себя скромным профессионалом. Время от времени я работала учителем английского языка, и у меня было немного ежедневного общения с художественной литературой. По ночам и по выходным я писал короткие рассказы и виньетки.
Но я начал продавать на улице леворадикальные газеты и ходить на общественные собрания. Идея вложить в вымышленную историю, которую в будущем прочтут несколько человек, которые, возможно, поймут смысл, потеряла для меня свою привлекательность. Лучше выйти в субботу на улицу и продать несколько номеров леворадикальной газеты, чем прятать смысл в заумной фантастике. Я по-прежнему читаю много художественной литературы, особенно произведения прошлого. Моей специальностью в бакалавриате была сравнительная литература в Колледже писем. Курсы были похожи на великие книги. Упор делался на западноевропейскую литературу, а американские произведения вставлялись в конце. Когда я учился в старших классах, я увидел рекламу “Великих книг западного мира” – серии из примерно 50 томов, выпущенной “Энциклопедией Британика”. Я заполнил открытку и объявление в журнале, написав, что заинтересован. Какой-то незадачливый продавец явился ко мне домой без предупреждения, когда я, как говорила моя мама, была в разъездах. Набор стоил тогда около 300 долларов.
Лет 10 назад я вспомнил об этом сериале и поискал его в Интернете. Набор все еще выпускался, но его стоимость составляла уже 1000 долларов. Я поговорил с компьютерным экспертом о своем желании приобрести “Великие книги”, и он сказал мне, что нам нужно переосмыслить то, как мы смотрим на книги. Все произведения этой серии находятся в общественном достоянии, и все они доступны бесплатно в Интернете на таких сайтах, как Project Gutenberg, а также в виде аудиокниг на LibriVox. Однажды я случайно заглянул на Craigslist в раздел “Книги на продажу”.
Там был выставлен на продажу комплект The Great Books – 49 долларов. Я немедленно позвонил и, к своему восторгу, обнаружил, что продавец находится в Ямайке Плейн, в 20 минутах езды от меня. Когда я отдавал деньги, увидев слегка потрепанный комплект 1954 года, я сказал продавцу: “У этих книг должна быть какая-то история, в чем она заключается? Он рассказал мне, что купил эти книги 20 лет назад у женщины, которая присоединилась к Саентологии и переехала в Швецию, чтобы работать в церкви. Значит ли это, что я присоединюсь к Саентологии, если прочитаю эти книги? Или она присоединилась к Саентологии только потому, что не читала эти книги? спросил я, смеясь. Я протянул ему сдачу, что его очень удивило. Вы собираетесь их читать? Или они для украшения полки? спросил он, пока мы несли книги к моей машине на соседней улице.
О, я собираюсь их прочитать, – ответила я. Мне нравятся эти истории. Когда я привез свою сокровищницу домой и мой 16-летний племянник увидел коробки с томами в коричневых переплетах и с позолоченными краями, он сказал: “Они похожи на те книги в библиотеке, к которым никто никогда не подходит. Лучше бы кто-нибудь подошел к ним, ведь вся ваша цивилизация основана на идеях, изложенных в этих книгах, – ответил я. Его замечание стоило 49 долларов. Мне нравилось видеть, как великие произведения художественной литературы прошлого превращались в фильмы или мультфильмы. Когда мои дети были маленькими, я записал серию мультфильмов по мотивам великих литературных произведений, которую показывали по воскресеньям утром на канале Nickelodeon. Там были рассказы Диккенса, такие как “Большие надежды” и “Повесть о двух городах”. Когда лет 10 назад я просматривал старую кассету VHS, там была реклама аудиокомплекта “100 величайших книг мира”.
Мне стало интересно, существует ли еще эта серия, ведь кассете было около 20 лет. Я заглянул в Интернет и обнаружил, что серия все еще предлагается, и купил комплект из 50 компакт-дисков. На дисках есть примерно 10-минутное вступление о произведении и авторе, а затем краткое изложение сюжета. Эти диски – хорошее введение в старую пыльную работу, которую, возможно, трудно понять, просто открыв первую страницу и погрузившись в нее. Я записал видео с горящими свечами и аудиолекции и разместил их в Интернете, чтобы помочь другим людям, интересующимся старыми книгами, а также чтобы попрактиковаться в редактировании видео и аудио. Я слушаю аудиокниги с художественной литературой почти каждый день. Мой дом наполнен художественными книгами, видео, фильмами и анимацией.
В каждой комнате моей квартиры есть художественные книги. И все же у меня нет желания сочинять фантастику. Это даже не приходит мне в голову. Я пишу каждый день. Но я пытаюсь рассказать честные истины, честные чувства, я не пытаюсь выдать свои наблюдения за вымысел. Я не пытаюсь втиснуть реальную жизнь со всеми ее неувязками и сюжетными дырами в опрятный мир художественной литературы, коротких и длинных рассказов, повестей и романов. Я живу в такое время и в таком месте, где у меня есть относительная свобода просто открыто говорить то, что я думаю и что, по моему мнению, следует делать. Мне не нужно прятать свои мысли на воображаемых островах вроде Лилпута или в далекой-далекой галактике.
Мне не нужно уклоняться от цензуры с помощью вымысла. Итак. Я, любитель фантастики прошлого, не думаю о нынешней фантастике. Я понятия не имею, кто пишет нынешнюю фантастику. Я сидел в школьном кафетерии с молодой студенткой колледжа и разговаривал о старых книгах и классической литературе, когда она перешла к некоторым из своих нынешних фаворитов. Я никогда не слышал ни об одном из них, и мне было неинтересно узнавать, кто они такие. У меня есть гора классики прошлых лет, которую я до сих пор не прочитал. Когда я хочу узнать о современном обществе, я обращаюсь к новостям и комментариям в Интернете о том, как обстоят дела. Меня не интересует беллетризованная версия того, что находится прямо передо мной. Я всегда считал, что романная форма письма – это отличный способ привести все в порядок, чтобы придать смысл какому-то аспекту жизни. Итак, я вспоминаю некоторые моменты из своего дневника, который веду уже почти 50 лет.
Около 8 лет назад я работал преподавателем в колледже на полставки. Я хотел не пить и не курить и сосредоточиться на своем предмете. Я начал набирать трехлетний отрезок своего дневника, когда встречался с Эми Файнголд. В течение 5 месяцев я просматривал записи, сделанные от руки. Я печатала и добавляла фотографии и описания. Когда в дневнике говорилось о пребывании на Гарвардской площади, я добавлял фотографии площади 1970-х годов, когда мы с Эми были там. Но я обнаружил, что чувствую тревогу и боль, которые были в отношениях с той девушкой. За 5 месяцев работы над книгой у меня получилась 250-страничная рукопись. В ночь, когда я закончил работу, мне захотелось выпить, покурить и познакомиться с новой женщиной.
Я отправился в ночной клуб Vincent’s и познакомился с женщиной. Я разместил 250 страниц, которые написал, на Blogger. Вскоре после этого мой аккаунт на YouTube был аннулирован из-за нарушения авторских прав на музыку. Мой аккаунт в Blogger также был аннулирован, а 250 страниц исчезли. Примерно в то же время компьютер, на котором я набирал 250-страничную работу, умер, а вместе с ним и рукопись. Такова жизнь. У меня осталась распечатанная копия. Это почти как роман. Так что моя история художественной литературы сводится к дневнику с применением художественных приемов. В следующий раз мне стоит попробовать поместить свои работы в таблички из обожженной глины, как те, которым 6000 лет, из древнего Шумера. Глиняные таблички кажутся неразрушимыми. Я подумал о том, чтобы купить камнедробилку и выложить из камня несколько стихотворений или рассказов. Думаю, я также мог бы научиться сохранять свои работы на USB-накопителе. Что бы я ни делал, я не могу представить себя планирующим какие-либо художественные произведения. Почему бы просто не рассказать правду?
J’aime les histoires depuis mon enfance. J’aimais la narration. J’aimais la voix off dans certains films. Donner un sens aux choses. Mettre de l’ordre dans les choses. Un début, un milieu et une fin, comme le disait Aristote. J’ai commencé par les bandes dessinées. Un ami qui vivait en face de la gare d’Ashmont avait un bureau rempli de bandes dessinées et j’adorais m’asseoir et lire. L’une de mes bandes dessinées préférées était les classiques illustrés, une sorte de grands livres pour enfants. Au collège et au lycée, la lecture de romans me permettait de m’évader. Je ne lisais pas de romans parce que je voulais devenir plus intelligent ou parce qu’ils faisaient partie d’un plan.
Je tombais simplement sur des livres à la bibliothèque municipale et je lisais par curiosité. Les soirs d’été, je lisais jusque tard dans la nuit. Ma mère me criait dans l’escalier d’éteindre la lumière et d’aller dormir. Elle voyait la lumière de ma chambre se refléter sur les briques du garage derrière la fenêtre de la cuisine. Je lisais sous les couvertures de mon lit avec une lampe de poche, parfois lorsque j’étais tellement impliquée dans un livre que je devais lire les lignes suivantes. Mais j’ai appris de plus en plus de choses sur les mots, le contexte, les personnages et l’intrigue. J’ai obtenu de bons résultats aux grands tests standardisés de l’école et j’ai été admise à l’école d’examen des écoles publiques de Boston. J’ai commencé à tenir un journal au lycée, à l’âge de 16 ans.
J’ai été inspiré par Winston Smith et le roman 1984. J’ai également pensé que Henry David Thoreau avait des idées intéressantes sur le fait de vivre et d’écrire en s’intéressant au monde apparemment banal qui entoure toute personne. Lorsque je suivais un programme préuniversitaire à l’université de Wesleyan, l’un de mes professeurs m’a dit que j’avais un don pour l’écriture créative. Il aimait la fluidité de mes mots. Encouragée, j’ai suivi des cours d’écriture créative à l’université. J’ai travaillé avec Tony et F.D. Reeve qui m’ont incité à me concentrer et à écrire davantage.
J’ai écrit quelques douzaines de nouvelles et, comme projet de fin d’études, j’ai écrit une novella sur les troubles en Irlande du Nord. J’ai obtenu mon diplôme avec mention très bien pour mon travail sur la nouvelle. Après l’université, j’ai écrit un autre roman sur le travail chez McDonald’s et la gestion d’une femme et d’un jeune enfant. J’ai continué à écrire mon journal au fil des ans, parfois en écrivant davantage, parfois en laissant passer des semaines sans rien écrire. J’ai contacté un agent à Boston au sujet de mon roman sur McDonald’s. Il a exprimé son intérêt et a demandé à voir le manuscrit. Mais cela n’a rien donné et je n’ai pas vu beaucoup de possibilités d’exposition pour mon travail. J’ai écrit de plus en plus dans un journal et je n’ai tout simplement pas pensé à publier ou à atteindre un public.
Mon écriture, et mon écriture de fiction, étaient comme mes lectures de fiction, purement pour me divertir et m’éclairer. Puis vint l’accès à l’internet, aux médias sociaux, aux blogs en ligne et aux endroits où poster des commentaires. Je n’avais plus rien à faire. Je pouvais écrire un billet de cinq paragraphes en quelques minutes. J’avais appris à taper à la machine à écrire quand j’étais au lycée, pendant l’été, parce que je trouvais mon écriture désespérément laide. J’ai suivi les cours d’été de dactylographie parce que j’étais dans un lycée de garçons et qu’il n’y avait pas de cours de dactylographie. J’ai été ravie de voir que le cours de dactylographie des cours d’été du lycée Burke était réservé aux filles. Mais il n’y avait guère d’interaction, nous faisions des exercices de dactylographie, nous ne discutions pas de fiction et de nouvelles. Dans la vingtaine, j’ai dactylographié des histoires de fiction, travaillé sur mes deux romans et tenu un journal.
J’empruntais la machine à écrire électrique de ma sœur et je me sentais modestement professionnelle. À l’occasion, j’ai travaillé comme professeur d’anglais, ce qui m’a permis d’avoir une petite interaction quotidienne avec la fiction. J’écrivais des nouvelles et des vignettes le soir et le week-end. Mais j’ai commencé à vendre des journaux de la gauche radicale dans la rue et à participer à des réunions publiques. L’idée de donner un sens légèrement gauchiste à une histoire fictive qui pourrait être lue à une date ultérieure par quelques personnes susceptibles de comprendre le message a perdu de son attrait pour moi. Mieux vaut sortir un samedi et vendre quelques numéros d’un journal de gauche radicale que de cacher un sens dans une fiction obscure. Je continue à lire beaucoup de fiction, en particulier des œuvres du passé. J’ai étudié la littérature comparée à la faculté des lettres.
Les cours étaient comme de grands livres. L’accent était mis sur la littérature d’Europe occidentale, les œuvres américaines étant ajoutées à la fin. Lorsque j’étais au lycée, j’ai vu des publicités pour The Great Books of the Western World, une série d’environ 50 volumes publiée par l’Encyclopædia Britannica. J’ai rempli une carte postale et une annonce dans un magazine pour dire que j’étais intéressé. Un vendeur malchanceux s’est présenté chez moi à l’improviste alors que j’étais en voyage, comme le disait ma mère. La série coûtait environ 300 dollars à l’époque. Il y a une dizaine d’années, j’ai repensé à cette série et je l’ai recherchée en ligne. La série était toujours commercialisée, mais elle coûtait désormais 1 000 dollars. J’ai parlé à un informaticien de mon désir d’avoir les Grands Livres et il m’a dit que nous devions repenser notre façon de voir les livres. Tous les ouvrages de la série sont dans le domaine public, et tous sont en ligne gratuitement sur des sites comme le Projet Gutenberg et sous forme de livres audio sur LibriVox. Un jour, j’ai regardé par hasard sur Craigslist dans la section des livres à vendre.
J’ai appelé immédiatement et j’ai découvert avec joie que le vendeur se trouvait à Jamaica Plain, à environ 20 minutes de voiture de chez moi. Au moment de remettre l’argent, après avoir vu le coffret légèrement usé de 1954, j’ai dit au vendeur : “Ces livres doivent avoir une histoire, quelle est-elle ? Il m’a répondu qu’il les avait achetés 20 ans plus tôt à une femme qui avait rejoint la Scientologie et s’était installée en Suède pour travailler pour l’Église. Cela signifie-t-il que je rejoindrai la Scientologie si je lis ces livres ? Ou est-ce parce qu’elle n’a pas lu les livres qu’elle a rejoint la Scientologie ? ai-je demandé en riant. Je lui ai rendu la monnaie exacte, ce qui l’a surpris. Allez-vous les lire ? Ou est-ce qu’ils sont là pour décorer l’étagère ? m’a-t-il demandé alors que nous transportions les livres jusqu’à ma voiture, dans la rue en contrebas. Oh, je vais les lire, répondis-je. J’adore ces histoires.
Lorsque j’ai ramené mon trésor à la maison et que mon neveu de 16 ans a vu les boîtes de volumes aux reliures brunes et aux tranches dorées, il a dit : “On dirait les livres de la bibliothèque que personne n’approche jamais. Je lui ai répondu que quelqu’un ferait bien de s’en approcher, car toute votre civilisation est basée sur les idées contenues dans ces livres.
Sa remarque valait bien les 49 dollars. J’aimais voir comment les grandes œuvres de fiction du passé étaient transformées en films ou en dessins animés. Lorsque mes enfants étaient petits, j’ai enregistré une série de dessins animés basés sur de grandes œuvres littéraires qui passait sur Nickelodeon le dimanche matin. Il y avait des histoires de Dickens comme Les grandes espérances et Le conte de deux villes. Il y a une dizaine d’années, en regardant une vieille cassette VHS, j’ai vu une publicité pour un coffret audio des 100 plus grands livres du monde. Je me suis demandé si la série existait toujours, puisque la cassette avait environ 20 ans. J’ai regardé en ligne et j’ai découvert que la série était toujours proposée et j’ai acheté le coffret de 50 CD. Les CD contiennent une introduction d’environ 10 minutes sur l’œuvre et l’auteur, suivie d’un résumé de l’histoire sous forme de “cliff notes”.
Les CD constituent une bonne introduction à une œuvre ancienne et poussiéreuse qui pourrait être difficile à comprendre si l’on se contente d’ouvrir la première page et de se plonger dans l’histoire. J’ai enregistré des vidéos des bougies qui brûlent et de la conférence audio et je les ai mises en ligne pour aider d’autres personnes intéressées par les livres anciens et pour exercer mes compétences en matière d’édition vidéo et audio. J’écoute des livres audio de fiction presque tous les jours. Ma maison est remplie de livres de fiction, de vidéos, de films et d’animations.
Chaque pièce de mon appartement contient des livres de fiction. Pourtant, je n’ai aucune envie de composer de la fiction. Cela ne me vient même pas à l’esprit. J’écris des choses tous les jours. Mais j’essaie de dire des vérités honnêtes, des sentiments honnêtes, je n’essaie pas de faire passer mes observations pour de la fiction. Je n’essaie pas d’enfermer la vie réelle, avec tous ses détails et ses failles, dans le monde bien rangé de la fiction, des nouvelles et des récits, des novellas et des romans. Je vis à une époque et dans un lieu où j’ai la liberté relative de dire tout simplement ce que je pense et ce qui devrait être fait. Je n’ai pas à cacher des choses sur des îles imaginaires comme Lilput, ou dans une galaxie lointaine. Je n’ai pas besoin d’esquiver la censure par la fiction.
Donc. Moi qui aime la fiction du passé, je ne pense pas à la fiction actuelle. Je n’ai aucune idée de qui sont les auteurs de fiction actuels. J’étais dans une cafétéria d’école, assise avec une jeune étudiante qui parlait de livres anciens et de littérature classique, lorsqu’elle a commencé à parler de ses livres préférés du moment. Je n’avais jamais entendu parler d’aucun d’entre eux et je n’avais aucune envie de savoir qui ils étaient. J’ai une montagne d’anciens classiques que je n’ai toujours pas lus. Lorsque je veux en savoir plus sur la société actuelle, je consulte les nouvelles et les commentaires en ligne sur la situation actuelle. Je ne suis pas intéressé par une version romancée de ce qui se passe sous mes yeux.
J’ai toujours pensé que la forme romanesque de l’écriture était un excellent moyen de mettre de l’ordre dans les choses et de donner un sens à certains aspects de la vie. Je pense donc à certains éléments de mon journal que je tiens depuis près de 50 ans maintenant. Il y a environ 8 ans, je travaillais à temps partiel en tant que professeur d’université. Je voulais éviter de boire et de fumer et me concentrer sur mon sujet. J’ai commencé à taper une section de trois ans de mon journal lorsque je sortais avec Amy Feingold. Pendant cinq mois, j’ai épluché les entrées de mon journal écrites à la main.
J’ai dactylographié et ajouté des photos et d’autres descriptions. Lorsque le journal parlait d’un moment passé à Harvard Square, j’ajoutais des photos de la place datant des années 1970, lorsqu’Amy et moi y étions. Mais je me suis retrouvé à ressentir une partie de l’anxiété et de la douleur que j’avais eues dans ma relation avec cette petite amie. J’ai obtenu un manuscrit de 250 pages en cinq mois de travail. Le soir où j’ai terminé, j’ai ressenti le besoin de boire et de fumer et de rencontrer une nouvelle femme. Je suis allé au Vincent’s nightclub et j’ai rencontré une femme. J’ai publié les 250 pages que j’avais écrites sur Blogger. Peu de temps après, mon compte YouTube a été supprimé pour cause de violation des droits d’auteur. Mon compte Blogger a également été supprimé et les 250 pages ont disparu. À peu près au même moment, l’ordinateur sur lequel j’avais tapé les 250 pages est mort, et le manuscrit avec.
C’est la vie. J’avais une copie papier que j’avais imprimée. C’est presque un roman. Mon histoire de la fiction se résume donc à un journal dans lequel j’ai appliqué des techniques de fiction. Ensuite, je devrais essayer de mettre mon travail sur des tablettes d’argile cuite comme celles de l’ancienne Sumer, vieilles de 6000 ans. Les tablettes d’argile sont apparemment indestructibles.
J’ai pensé à me procurer un broyeur de pierre et à graver des poèmes ou des nouvelles dans la pierre. Je suppose que je pourrais aussi apprendre à sauvegarder mon travail sur une clé USB. Quoi qu’il en soit, je ne me vois pas planifier des œuvres de fiction. Pourquoi ne pas dire la vérité ?
There is very obviously an element of opposition to the ongoing protests on college campuses that is rooted in familiar partisan rhetoric. The political right’s hostility to college professors and insistences that students are brainwashed into holding liberal politics, for example, is a regular undercurrent to the discussion. There are real disputes at play, certainly, and a complex weave of First Amendment issues, but there are also familiar partisan disparagements and insinuations.
That includes one that is both ironic, given the context, and very misleading.
The New York Post offers the most useful distillation of the claim in the headline of a story it published on Friday: “George Soros is paying student radicals who are fueling nationwide explosion of Israel-hating protests.” This claim that the students are being funded by Soros — a Holocaust survivor who is a favorite boogeyman of the right thanks to his hefty donations to leftist groups — has been picked up and echoed elsewhere, too.
By itself, this is a reflection of the idea that student activism is necessarily insincere or a function of young people being hoodwinked. Claims about Soros being the engine behind political or social movements have also been identified as being intertwined with antisemitism or explicitly antisemitic, given historical tropes about wealthy Jewish people controlling the world.
Here, then, this antisemitic framework is being deployed to undermine protests on college campuses … that have been repeatedly cast as being antisemitic.
More importantly, it’s simply not true. Or, more accurately, the connection between the protests and funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) is so tenuous as to be obviously contrived.
One might begin by asking what Soros is theoretically paying for. After all, this is just kids setting up tents on a college campus. Is the allegation that Soros is planting students at Columbia University (for example) and fronting the $68,000 tuition?
No. The New York Post article suggests other ways this largesse is apparently manifested.
“The cash from Soros and his acolytes has been critical to the Columbia protests that set off the national copycat demonstrations,” it reads, later describing the scene at Columbia: “Students sleep in tents apparently ordered from Amazon and enjoy delivery pizza, coffee from Dunkin’, free sandwiches worth $12.50 from Pret a Manger, organic tortilla chips and $10 rotisserie chickens.”
The “tents from Amazon” bit is a nod to a theory floating around on right-wing social media that someone is buying all of these tents for students, as though it would be otherwise impossible for a student to buy a $20 tent on her own. Mind you, there’s no evidence that the other stuff mentioned was bought by some billionaire donor, but the New York Post has been having fun recently referring to the food as “luxurious” as it wonders “[w]ho or what organization is behind the food delivery.” Clearly no average individual could have bought Dunkin’ doughnuts.
But back to that “cash from Soros and his acolytes.” At no point does the Post article demonstrate how this purported cash has been critical, instead simply listing organizations that have been involved in the protests to some extent and tracing their funding back to OSF.
Take the group U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. It, the New York Post alleges, has a fellowship program that includes three people who have been at rallies on college campuses. In an illustration, the three are identified as “paid protesters” — suggesting that their motivation for participation is the money and not the views that led them to seek the fellowship in the first place.
“George Soros and his hard-left acolytes are paying agitators who are fueling the explosion of radical anti-Israel protests at colleges across the country,” the story hyperventilates. Eventually, it describes how.
U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights is registered with the IRS as Education for Just Peace in the Middle East (EJP). And EJP has received grants from OSF.
The largest was $300,000, given in 2018. During that fiscal year, EJP took in just over $1 million in revenue. It spent about $1.3 million, meaning it operated at a loss. In fiscal 2019, it had net assets of about $165,000 — meaning that a big chunk of that OSF grant was already spent.
EJP also received a grant from OSF for $150,000 in 2021 and a two-year grant for $250,000 in 2022. The New York Post’s suggestion (echoing one published earlier in the week by the Wall Street Journal) is that this money went to those “paid protesters.” But money is fungible. During those years, the organization also spent $2.4 million, at least $2 million of which wasn’t OSF money.
If the campus fellows identified by the New York Post are being paid the same as those who can currently apply for those positions, the total one-time cost to the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights was about $10,000. Nor are the fellows identified in the article still fellows. A spokesperson for the organization confirmed in an email to The Washington Post that the individuals featured in the New York Post article were from last year’s class. In other words, they are no longer “paid” at all.
The New York Post story also accuses Students for Justice in Palestine of being “Soros-funded” and fundamentally involved in the protests. (That the protests metastasized nationally only after police raided the Columbia encampment undercuts the idea that this is driven from the top down, but so be it.) So where does the Soros money come from?
Well, the story alleges, Students for Justice in Palestine is funded by the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation, or WESPAC. And WESPAC received $132,000 from the Tides Foundation at some point. And the Tides Foundation has received millions in funding from OSF over the years.
It’s true that the Tides Foundation has received more than $11 million in OSF grants since 2017. It is also true that the Tides Foundation reported $298 million in revenue … in fiscal 2017 alone. The reported grants from OSF total less that 0.3 percent of Tides’ revenue from 2017 to 2022.
Regardless, Students for Justice in Palestine denies that it receives any money from WESPAC, nor is there any public indication that it does. In a statement to The Washington Post, a representative for the group indicated that the foundation “neither funds nor influences our organization’s political activity but instead extends its legal tax-exempt status to us in order to support our mission.”
“We refuse to engage with baseless claims regarding our funding in the middle of a genocide funded, militarily supported, and politically backed by the United States,” the statement concluded.
The group Jewish Voice for Peace, also identified in the New York Post article, has received grants from OSF in recent years, both to its 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4), the latter of which can engage in political advocacy. Here again, though, the issue is scale. From 2017 to 2022, the two organizations received $875,000 from OSF and, over that period, spent $19.6 million. The OSF money constituted less than 5 percent of the total spent.
All of this is very in the weeds, as we must be when assessing specific claims. Taking a step back, the allegations do not get more compelling. Soros (or, rather, the foundation he created) gave money to organizations a few years ago to influence protests that emerged in response to the six-month-old war in Gaza? Even if the money from OSF flowed directly into the $3,300 stipends of those three campus fellows, we’re meant to think, what? That although none of them attend Columbia, this is all their fault? That it’s intentional somehow?
What we’re meant to think, of course, is something simpler. That Soros is a nefarious figure bent on using his wealth to reshape the world in his image, an impulse manifested here in somehow being the engine of the protests (or, at least, somehow the doughnut donor). It’s just vague insinuations leveraging well-worn rhetoric and a preexisting visceral response to the Jewish billionaire.
This past weekend, April 20, 2024 the US House of Representatives passed a bill to provide Ukraine with another $61 billion in aid. Then the meassure quickly passed the Senate and was signed into law by Biden within days.
The funds, however, will make little difference to the outcome of the war on the ground as it appears most of the military hardware funded by the $61 billion has already been produced and much of it already shipped. Perhaps no more than $10 billion in additional new weapons and equipment will result from the latest $61 billion passed by Congress .
Subject to revision, initial reports of the composition of the $61 billion indicate $23.2 billion of it will go to pay US arms producers for weapons that have already been produced and delivered to Ukraine. Another $13.8 billion is earmarked to replace weapons from US military stocks that have been produced and are in the process of being shipped—but haven’t as yet—or are additional weapons still to be produced. The breakdown of this latter $13.8 amount is not yet clear in the initial reports. One might generously guess perhaps $10 billion at most represents weapons not yet produced, while $25-$30 billion represents weapons already shipped to Ukraine or in the current shipment pipeline.
In total, therefore, weapons already delivered to Ukraine, awaiting shipment, or yet to be produced amount to approximately $37 billion.
The remainder of the $61 billion includes $7.8 billion for financial assistance to Ukraine to pay for salaries of government employees through 2024. An additional $11.3 billion to finance current Pentagon operations in Ukraine—which sounds suspiciously like pay for US advisors, mercenaries, special ops, and US forces operating equipment like radars, advanced Patriot missile systems, etc. on the ground. Another $4.7 billion is for miscellaneous expenses, whatever that is.
In other words, only $13.8 billion of the $61 billion is for weapons Ukraine doesn’t already have!
And that $13.8 billion is all Ukraine will likely get in new weapons funding for the rest of 2024! Like the $23 billion already in theater, that will likely be burned up in a couple of weeks this summer once Russia’s coming major offensive—its largest of the war—is launched in late May or early June. So what does the US do in order to continue to fund Ukraine’s economy, government and military efforts this fall and thereafter?
In other words, what’s the Biden/NATO strategy for aiding Ukraine, militarily and economically, after the $37 billion is expended by late this summer? Where’s the money to come from?
To understand how the US/NATO plan to fund subsequent weapons production for Ukraine in late 2024 and early 2025, one must consider not only the $61 billion bill but a second bill also passed by Congress this past weekend that hasn’t been given much attention in the mainstream media.
That second bill may potentially provide up to $300 billion for Ukraine from USA and its G7 allies, especially NATO allies in Europe where reportedly $260 of the $300 billion resides in Eurozone banks.
Biden/US Short-Term Strategy 2024
The $61 billion is clearly only a stopgap measure to try to get the Ukraine army and government funded through the summer. Beyond that, the broader Biden strategy is to keep Ukraine afloat until after the US November elections. In addition to the $61 billion—which the US hopes will get Ukraine through the US November election (but likely won’t)—US strategy includes getting the Russians to agree to begin some kind of negotiations. The US will then use the discussions to raise a demand to freeze military operations on both sides while negotiations are underway. But Biden’s ‘freeze and negotiate’ strategy is dead on arrival, since it is abundantly clear to the Russians it is basically about US and NATO ‘buying time’ and Russia has already been played by that one. As the popular US saying goes: “fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me”.
The Russians already fell for that ‘let’s suspend fighting and negotiation ploy’ with the Minsk II treaty back in 2015-16. It agreed to halt military operations in the Donbass back then but NATO and the Ukraine government used the Minsk agreement as cover to re-build Ukraine’s military force which it thereafter used to attack the Donbass provinces. European leaders Angela Merkel of Germany and Francois Holland of France thereafter publicly admitted in 2022 that Minsk II was just to ‘buy time’.
The Russian’s were again similarly snookered at the Istanbul peace discussions held in April 2022. They were asked by NATO to show good faith in negotiations by withdrawing their forces from around Kiev, which they did. Negotiations were then broken off by Zelensky, on NATO’s strong recommendation, and Ukraine launched an offensive chasing the withdrawing Russians all the way back to the Donbass borders.
Russia is therefore extremely unlikely to fall a third time for a Biden/NATO request to ‘freeze’ military operations and negotiate again.
Biden may want to ‘buy time’ once more, but that hand’s been played twice already and the West will be (is being) told by Russia they aren’t interested in buying anything from the West and its ‘money’ no longer has any value.
Speaker Johnson’s Volte Face
The passage of the stop-gap $61 billion for Ukraine by the US House of Representatives was the result of House Speaker, Johnson, doing an about-face and allowing the vote on the House floor after saying he wouldn’t for weeks. There’s been much speculation in the US mainstream media as to why Johnson reversed his position and allowed the Ukraine aid bill to the House floor for a vote. However, it’s not difficult to understand why he did reverse his view.
In recent weeks there was intense lobbying behind the scenes by US weapons companies with key Republican committee chairmen in the House. After all, at least $37 billion in payments for weapons—both already delivered and to be delivered—was involved. Not a minor sum even for super-profitable companies like Lockheed, Raytheon and the like. Rumors are that corporate lobbying had its desired effect on Republican committee chairs in the House, who then in turn pressured Johnson to allow the vote on the floor. The final vote in the House was 310 to 111 with 210 Democrats joining 100 Republicans to pass the measure—revealing that the core support for the US Military Industrial Complex in the House of Representatives is at least three-fourths (the US Senate likely even higher).
So the vote was the result of a ‘parliamentary maneuver’ in which all the Democrats crossed over to support the Republican Speaker of the House (who de factor switched parties for the moment). A minority of Republicans joined him. A slim majority of Republicans opposed the measure. Their opposition remains. Thus it is highly unlikely Congress will appropriate more funding for Ukraine for the rest of this year—even when the $61 billion for weapons and Ukraine’s government run out by this late summer.
So what happens if and when the $61 billion is exhausted well before the November elections?
A possible answer to that question lies in the passage of a second Ukraine funding measure this past weekend. The $61 billion was not the most important legislative action in the US House. While most of the media commentary has been on that Ukraine aid bill, hardly anything has been said in the mainstream media about another bill that the US House also passed over the weekend. This second measure has greater strategic implications for US global interests than the $37 billion in actual weapons shipments for Ukraine. This second measure is HR 8038, a 184-page bill misnamed the ‘21st Century Peace Through Strength Act’ which amounted to yet another package (the 16th?) of US sanctions.
Transferring Russia’s $300 Billion Assets to Ukraine
The first section of the bill arranges a procedure for the US to force the sale of the China company, Tik Tok, to a consortium of US financial investors, reportedly led by former US Treasury Secretary under Trump, Steve Mnuchin. This is part of the expanding list of sanctions on China. Also sanctioned are China’s purchases of Iranian oil, as well as a host of additional sanctions on Iran itself. However, the most significant measure related to sanctions on Russia.
The 21st Century Peace Through Strength Act calls for the US to transfer its $5 billion share of Russia’s $300 billion of seized assets in Western banks that were frozen in 2022 at the outset of the Ukraine war. It provides a procedure to hand over the $5 billion to Ukraine to further finance its war efforts! This move has been rumored and debated in the USA and Europe since the assets were seized two years ago. But now the process of actually transferring the seized funds to Ukraine has begun with the passage of this second bill by the US House.
The USA’s $5 billion share in US banks is just a drop in the bucket of the $300 billion. Russia could probably care less about it, i.e. a mere ‘rounding error’ in its total revenue from the sale of oil, gas and other commodities. But Europe holds $260 of the $300 billion, according to European Central Bank chair, Christine Lagarde. A tidy sum which Russia has threatened to retaliate against Europe should the EU follow the US/Biden lead and also begin to transfer its $260 billion to Ukraine.
The US bill is very clear that the transfer of the US’s $5 billion is imminent. The bill requires the Biden administration to establish a ‘Ukraine Defense Fund’ into which the US’s $5 billion will be deposited. If parts of the $5 billion are not in liquid asset form, the US president is further authorized by the bill to liquidate those assets and deposit the proceeds in the fund as well. So the seizure and transfer of the $5 billion to Ukraine is a done deal. And when it happens a legal precedent will be made that Europe may use to follow and transfer its $260 billion.
One can expect the US to pressure Europe strongly to do so. Biden is further authorized by the bill to ‘negotiate’ with Europe and other G7 partners to convince them to do the same—i.e. seize their share of the $300 billion, liquidate and then transfer the cash assets into the US ‘Ukraine Defense Fund’. And to date the US has been able to ‘convince’ Europe—via its control of NATO and influence over Europe’s economy and its umbrella political elites in the European Commission and European Parliament—to follow US policy without too much resistance. Europe is fast becoming an economic satrapy and political dependency of the USA in recent decades, more than willing to bend in whatever policy direction the USA wants.
It is clear the seizure & redistribution to Ukraine of the $300 billion via the Ukraine Defense Fund is the means by which the US/NATO plan longer term to continue to finance the Ukraine war after the $61 billion runs out sometime in 2024; and certainly in 2025 and beyond. For the US has no intention of ending its NATO-led proxy war in Ukraine anytime soon. It is just seeking to ‘buy time’ in the interim before its November elections.
For a majority of both parties in the US—Democrat and Republican—are united on continuing the war. It will matter little who wins the presidency or which party has majorities in Congress after November. Political elites on both sides of the aisle in Congress are united in pursuing the war in Ukraine—just as they are united in continuing to fund Israel as well as to continue the US’s steadily expanding economic war with China. In just the past week it is obvious more US sanctions on China are also coming soon, including possibly an announcement of financial sanctions on China for the first time after US Secretary of State, Blinken’s, most recent visit.
Failed Russian Sanctions: Past and Future
The geopolitical objectives of the US and its commitment to continuing its three wars are resulting in unintended, negative effects on the economies of the US and its G7 allies, especially Germany. But those same sanctions have had little to no negative impact on Russia’s economy.
The recently passed US transfer of its $5 billion share of Russia’s $300 billion will accelerate the negative consequences, especially for Europe should the latter follow the US lead and distribute its $260 billion share to Ukraine, which it eventually will.
As EBC chairperson, Lagarde, put it referring to the US plan and legislation: “It needs to be carefully considered”. UK political leaders are already on record advocating the confiscation and transfer of Europe’s $260 billion holdings of Russian assets to Ukraine. Europe in recent years has a strong history of capitulating to US economic policies and demands. It will be no different this time.
Should Europe join the USA in transferring its $260 billion share of Russian assets in European banks (most of which is in Belgium), it’s almost certain that Russia will reply similarly and seize at least an equal amount of European assets still in Russia. The Russian Parliament has officially recently said as much.
Part of the G7/NATO sanctions to date included forcing Western businesses in Russia to liquidate and leave Russia. Some have done so. But many have not. Russia’s response has been to arrange the transfer of those EU companies’ assets that have left to Russian companies. This has actually stimulated the Russian economy. It resulted in Russian government subsidies—and thus government spending—to Russian companies assuming the assets, as well as additional investment by those companies after their acquisition of the departed EU companies’ assets.
In short, the Western sanctions measure pressuring Western companies to leave Russia has backfired in its predicted result of reducing Russian government spending and business investment.
In contrast, the US/NATO’s fifteen or so sanctions packages to date have had little, if any, impact on Russia’s economy since the commencing of the war in February 2022. To cite just a few of the performance of Russia’s key economic indicators under the sanctions regime: (Note: all following data is from the US global research source https://tradingeconomics.com):
Russia’s GDP in the latest six months has risen between 4.9% (3rd quarter 2023) to 5.5% (4th quarter). Russia’s PMI statistics show robust expansion for both manufacturing and services during the same period while in most of the major European economies, both PMI indicators are contracting. Wage growth in Russia over the six months has averaged 8.5% for both quarters (whereas in the US is it less than half that and in Germany less than 1%). Russian government revenues rose from roughly 5 trillion rubles in the third quarter to 8.7 trillion in the 4th. Military expenditures are up from $69.5 billion (dollars) to $86.3 billion. Consumer spending is at record levels in the latest quarter. Russian household debt as a percent of GDP remains steady at around 22% (whereas in the USA it is 62.5%). Crude oil production and general exports continue to steadily rise. Gasoline remains at 60 cents a liter (whereas in US five to six times that and in Europe more than ten times). And the unemployment rate in Russia remains steady at 2.9% (whereas in the US and Europe it’s a quarter to a half higher). Interest rates and inflation are higher in Russia but that represents an economy firing on all economic cylinders and is not necessarily a negative.
In short, it’s hard to find a single statistic that shows the Russian economy has been negatively impacted by the US/NATO sanctions regime over the past two years. Indeed, an argument can even be made the sanctions have stimulated the Russian economy not undermined it.
The latest sanction in the form of the US and G7 transfer of the $300 billion in seized Russian assets in Western banks will almost for certain have a similar effect on Russia’s economy. Namely, distributing the $300 billion will result in the Russian government’s seizure of at least an equivalent of European companies’ assets still in Russia. And that will provide funding for still further government subsidy spending benefiting Russian companies followed by more private investment.
Is the US Empire Shooting Itself in the Foot?
But there is an even greater consequence to follow the US and Europe’s desperate act of transferring Russia’s $300 billion in assets in western banks to Ukraine.
Western bankers, economic policymakers, and many economists alike have warned against the seizure and transfer of the $300 billion. Heads of US and other central banks, CEOs of large commercial banks, and even mainstream economists like Shiller at Yale have continually warned publicly that transferring the assets will seriously undermine faith in the US dollar system which is the lynchpin of the US global economic empire.
What countries in the global South will now want to put (or leave) their assets in western banks, especially in Europe, if they think the assets could be seized should they disagree on policies promoted by the empire? It’s clear the US has now begun to impose ‘secondary’ sanctions on countries that don’t abide by its primary sanctions on Russia. Will the US also seize the assets of these ‘secondary’ countries now in western banks if they don’t go along with refusing to trade with Russia? And what about China, as the US has now begun to expand its sanctions—primary and secondary—on that country as well? Watch for unprecedented financial sanctions on China that may be forthcoming following Blinken’s visit to China this week.
The US does not realize this is not the 1980s. The global south has developed massively in recent decades. They are insisting on more independence and more say in the rules of the empire—without which they will simply leave now that an alternative is beginning to appear in the expansion of the BRICS countries.
Recently expanded to 10 members (all of which in the Middle East and heavily oil producers), no fewer than 34 more countries have now petitioned to join the BRICS. Furthermore, it is reported that at the BRICS next conference in late 2024 an ‘alternative global financial framework’ will be announced! That will likely include some alternative currency arrangement as well as an alternative international payments system to replace the US SWIFT system (by which the USA via its banks can see who is violating its sanctions). Likely forthcoming will be something to replace the US-run IMF in order to ensure currency stability and an expansion of China’s Belt & Road as an alternative to the US-run World Bank. (Perhaps that is the real topic of Blinken’s forthcoming China visit?)
In short, the US global economic empire is entering its most unstable period. And yet US policy is to accelerate alternatives to it by seizing and transferring funds to Ukraine to continue the war! The blowback from the seizure and transfer will prove significant, both to US and European interests. It will render past resistance to US sanctions pale in comparison.
How to Crash an Empire!
History will show that US geopolitical objectives and strategies in the 21st century were the single greatest cause of the decline of US global economic hegemony over the last quarter century. Much of those objectives and strategies have been the work of the most economically ignorant foreign policy team in US history, who are generally referred to as the Neocons.
The seizure and transfer of the $300 billion may provide a way to continue funding Ukraine in the US/NATO proxy war against Russia through 2024 and beyond. But the timing could not be worse for US/Europe imperial interests, coming on the eve of the historic BRICS conference later this year. The desperate act of seizure and transfer will only convince more countries of the global South to seek another more independent alternative by joining the BRICS, or increasingly trade with that bloc.
History shows empires rest ultimately on economic foundations. And they collapse when those underlying economic foundations fracture and then crumble.
The longer run consequence of the $300 billion transfer and the exiting of the global South from the US empire can only be the decline in the use of the US dollar in global transactions and as a reserve currency. That sets in motion a series of events that in turn undermine the US domestic economy in turn: Less demand for the dollar results in a fall in the dollar’s value. That means less recycling of dollars back to the US, resulting in less purchases of US Treasuries from the Federal Reserve, which in turn will require the Fed to raise long term interest rates for years to come in order to cover rising US budget deficits. All this will happen to an intensifying fiscal crisis of the US state rapidly deteriorating already
In other words, blowback on the US economy from declining US global hegemony—exacerbated by sanctions in general and seizure of countries like Russia’s assets in particular—is almost certain in the longer run, just as it will be for Europe’s economy in the even more immediate term.
But such is the economic myopia of the US neocons and the incompetent political elite leadership in both parties in the USA in recent years. As that other American saying goes: ‘We have found the enemy and they are us!’
This is not a Whodunit. The serial killers are known to us, are friends of ours, are supported by us. ~ilana
The U.S. has undertaken the role of IDF deputy in advancing the genocide of Gazans. ~ilana
American foreign policy is a museum of horrors in which Gaza 2023/2024 is the main exhibit.
It is my conviction that Gaza is much more than just one more American foreign-policy failure, an event and topic to swill around like mouth wash, spit out and move on, once the usual “tsk, tsk” bromides have been disgorged.
Uncle Sam’s usual deathly mixture of ignorance, cruelty and superiority has been exceeded with respect to Gaza. It is my belief that the United States’ open, even-energetic support for genocide is a defining event in the annals of American foreign-policy aberrations—repeatedly and vigorously vetoing UN Security Council resolutions against Israel’s atrocities, justifying Israel’s violations of the law, as well as, alternatively, pretending these violations had never occurred and making like the laws of man and the laws of God don’t apply to Israel.
This American failure is probably qualitatively different from blunders that went before. What the United States has approved in Gaza is the crime of all crimes, appallingly carried out in broad daylight.
Duly, the annihilation of a community and the landmass that supports it has been achieved. The arteries of supplies that sustain this Palestinian society are all but closed. The mass murder of members of the targeted group proceeds apace. Daily. Shamelessly. Before our very eyes. And as I write.
It is the case of the senile (Joe Biden) supporting the criminally insane (Israel).
To press my point: Mass graves are uncovered near the ruins of the Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals. Therein hundreds of Palestinians have been interred, bodies stacked, some handcuffed, others still tethered to medical tubes. The White House’s response amounts to, “Where, what, who, and how can this possibly be? Who could have done this horrible thing? Yes, we, too, want answers right away. Let’s do the forensics. Let’s ask the Israelis to look into it, shall we? See you tomorrow.”
This is not a Whodunit, you feckless, malevolent morons.
The serial killers are known to us. We know who murdered over 34,183 Palestinians and maimed an estimated 77,143. The serial killers loosed on millions of Gazans—their guns at the ready, pointed at the civilians huddled in the southern tip of the Strip—these are friends of ours.
Empowered by Empire, Israeli serial killers are not on-the-lam, running from the Law. They are free to come-and-go, to travel, to hobnob; at liberty to enjoy undeserved freedoms, as their innocent victims are confined, held captive, catacombed, awaiting death by one or another diabolical means. In fact, the serial killers of the Palestinians of Gaza are proudly paraded as freedom fighters in their country of Israel, and are backed and exculpated by the powerful in our own country, the United States of America.
Support for Israel’s offensive against Gaza’s civilians comes courtesy of our carpetbagger representatives, left and right. Israel is lavished with munitions despite the fact that the American taxpayer’s endorsement of the carnage these cause began dropping in November of 2023. By late March of 2024, a Gallop poll reported that 74 percent of Americans were keenly engaged with the topic and a majority now opposed Israel’s excesses.
Even young Evangelicals might well be rethinking their allegiances.
Exquisitely sensitive to its Christian Zionist base in America, the Jerusalem Post, honestly if opportunistically, divulged that, “Young Evangelical support for Israel has plummeted. Seven out of 10 Evangelical and born-again young Evangelicals … surveyed as far back as 2021 adhere to the postmillennial and amillennial theological views, which see the Jewish people and the state of Israel as no longer necessary in the fulfillment of God’s plan for the second coming.”
So settled in their habits, indications are that the elders of the Zionist, Christian Right have failed to read their young.
Indeed, these are austere days for American leadership and reputation. By dint of undertaking the role of IDF deputy in advancing genocide in Gaza—the United States has crossed a threshold. In Gaza, Uncle Sam has finally achieved an official or formal inversion of all cherished, universal values. It has earned the “Great Satan” appellation it was once awarded.
There is a vast power differential in the US-Israel relationship. The colossus that is the American Hegemon appears helpless before the tiny Jewish State, leading one to wonder which country deserves the Great Satan moniker and which the Little One.
On the scale of national crimes and misdemeanors, Gaza is simply indefensible. And our young sense this and are incensed by it.
For now, the degenerative process in America is being halted by students. “[F]rom Massachusetts to California,” students have gathered from far and wide demanding an accounting from their representatives for the industrial-scale mass murder being carried out in their name.
“The demonstration, held one block away from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, came just hours before the Senate overwhelmingly approved a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes about $17 billion in arms and security funding to Israel. ‘At the core of the Passover story is that we cannot be free until all people are free,’ Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace, told Democracy Now! ‘The Israeli government and the United States government are carrying out a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, over 34,000 people killed in six months in the name of Jewish safety, in the false name of Jewish freedom.”
To cover his wretchedness, a foreign country’s prime minister libeled these quintessentially American, anti-genocide campus protests—which, we hope, may swell to match those begun in Columbia University in 1968, against the Vietnam War—as antisemitic, even terroristic.
These “antisemitism” claims-makers aim to silence and sunder dissenting free speech, one of the most cherished American (Voltairean) values, clearly not shared by our serial-killer besties. Framing loud protest against Israel as “antisemitic” is intended, very plainly, to silence opposition to the mass murder and displacement of Gazans.
The protesters across American campuses are not antisemitic. But even if they were; in America, free speech refers to the words people shout, write, tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly or burn, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies and rituals they enact, the insignia, paraphernalia, even the goose-stepping and Hitler salutes they muck around with—all this is protected speech in our country. Genocide backers, stateside and abroad, may not like it; but this speech is both constitutional and licit in natural law.
Provided protesters are not engaged in acts of violence against others—then the words they emit are irrelevant. Antipathy to Jews qua Jews, if expressed—for which there is no good evidence whatsoever—amounts to a thought “crime.”
Thought crimes are the prerogative of a free people in a free country. Americans, left and right, must join libertarians in unapologetically rejecting the very idea of policing, purging, persecuting or prosecuting people for holding or expressing politically unpopular ideas.
Superlatives cannot capture the plight of these poor people. What is clear is that patience is native to their character. Palestinians might appear enslaved, but they cannot be brought into submission by any Pharaoh.
Deliverance is possible for a long-suffering people.
Here’s what everyone needs to understand about Ukraine:
The United States has already moved on to Plan B. No, the Biden administration has not issued an official statement on the matter, but the shift has already begun. The Washington Brain-trust has abandoned any hope of winning the war outright (Plan A) and has, thus, adopted a different strategy altogether. (Plan B)
Plan B is a combination of two main elements:
A—A Strategy of Denial, which is ‘a defensive approach designed to stop an adversary’ from achieving its goals. In this case, the objective is to prolong the conflict for as long as possible to prevent Russian from achieving a clear victory. That is the top priority.
B—To continue to increase and intensify asymmetrical attacks on vital infrastructure and civilian areas in Russia proper in order to inflict as much damage on Russia as possible.
This, in essence, is Plan B. Any concern for the Ukrainian people or the future viability of the Ukrainian state, have not been factored in to Washington’s cynical calculation. What matters is preventing a Russian victory and inflicting as much pain on Russia as possible. Those are the primary objectives. In practical terms, that means that more Ukrainian soldiers will be slaughtered wholesale in order to continue using Ukraine as a launching pad for attacks on Russia. In fact, UK warlords have already confirmed what we are saying here. Check out this excerpt from an article at Zero Hedge:
… UK defense chief, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, telling Financial Times that the West’s new infusion of military aid will help Ukraine increase its long-range strikes on Russian territory:
Ukraine is set to increase long-range attacks inside Russia as an influx of western military aid aims to help Kyiv shape the war “in much stronger ways”, the head of the UK military has said….
Adm. Radakin continued, “As Ukraine gains more capabilities for the long-range fight . . . its ability to continue deep operations will [increasingly] become a feature” of the war…… More of Radakin’s words point to escalation (and not negotiations) in the following… UK Defense Chief Says Ukraine To Increase Long-Range Strikes In Russia, Zero Hedge
See what I mean? This is Plan B spelled out in black and white. There is no longer any expectation that Ukraine will win the war. None. The country will merely be used as a platform for hectoring, harassing and terrorizing the Russian people. That’s Plan B in a nutshell.
But how can we be certain that Plan B has already begun?
First, consider the allocation of resources provided under the new “National Security Supplemental” that Biden signed into law earlier this week. The bill provides $61 billion for Ukraine, of which a mere $13 billion will be spent on weapons and weapons systems. How is that paltry sum going to help defeat the Russian Army?
Keep in mind, the US and NATO allies have already spent more than $200 billion funding the war in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are losing. How is another $13 billion supposed to make a difference?
It won’t, nor is it intended to. As we said earlier, the real purpose of the money is to prevent a clear Russian victory by launching random attacks on critical infrastructure and civilian areas in Russia. Once you understand that the basic operational plan has changed, developments on the ground begin to make sense. The goal is to antagonize a geopolitical rival not to win a war. Capisce?
Here’s what the $61 billion aid package will not do: (According to political analyst Ted Snider)
It will not provide enough money. It will not provide the badly needed weapons, nor deliver them on time. It will not provide the even more badly needed troops. And it will not provide victory…..Though $61 billion is a massive amount of money, it is not massive enough to defeat Russia. What $61 Billion for Ukraine Won’t Do,The American Conservative
It’s worth noting, that most of Ukraine’s best-trained combat units have already been obliterated. They’re gone. That has forced the Zelensky regime to abduct men off the streets of Kiev and send them into battle with just two-weeks training, which is why casualties are so high. No one believes that these “green recruits” are going to rout the Russian Army or even slow its inexorable advance. No one. These men are simply being sacrificed so Washington can continue to launch its drone attacks on Russian oil facilities near Moscow or bomb civilian villages on the Russian border or conduct airstrikes on the Kerch Bridge . In other words, this ongoing orgy of carnage is being perpetuated so that deranged western elites can continue to deliver glancing blows that the Russian bear brushes off like a pesky mosquito. That is the value these billionaire elites place on human life. It means nothing to them. Check out this clip from an article by Scott Ritter:
US President Joe Biden recently signed a long-delayed $95 billion package, including $61 billion in aid for Ukraine, into law. At least $13.8 billion of this sum will be used to deliver weaponry, such as long-range ATACMS missiles and F-16 fighter jets….
“The $13.8 billion in military assistance that will be provided to Ukraine will be insufficient to basically halt the ongoing Russian advance,” and “to change the outcome on the battlefield,” he stated….
The American people who foolishly believe that the new supplemental aid package will help to expel the “evil” Russians from Ukraine are living in La la land. Nothing could be further from the truth. No one who follows events on the ground thinks Ukraine has any chance of beating a well-equipped and highly-motivated Russian Army that boasts nearly unlimited reserves, unlimited industrial capacity, unlimited resources and a firm conviction that the West is using Ukraine to break up their country and install its own puppet in Moscow. That’s what they are fighting for, and that’s why they’re going to win. Here’s more from Snider:
“$61 billion will not change the outcome of this war,” Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhodes and the author of The Tragedy of Ukraine, (According to) Valery Zaluzhny…..That… would require five to seven times that amount, or $350-400 billion.” (But) Even if the money was sufficient, it would not provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs because the weapons are not available for purchase. (According to) Retired U.S. Army Colonel Daniel Davis, Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities: “even if you get the money, you’re not going to have the number of artillery shells, interceptor missiles for air defense. You can’t make the artillery shells any faster than we are right now. It’s a matter of physical capacity: we can’t do it.”…
Even if the West could provide Ukraine with the weapons on time, the “big problem for Ukraine,” Davis says, is not the provision of weapons, but the “manpower issue.” Ukraine’s losses on the battlefield, to death and injury, have left Ukraine with a bigger manpower problem than artillery problem…. even if the U.S. gave Ukraine all the weapons it needed, they “don’t have the men to use them.” What $61 Billion for Ukraine Won’t Do,The American Conservative
This is all pretty basic stuff. Obviously, if you don’t have the men or the money or the weapons, you’re going to lose. And, the maniacal stewards of this failed anti-Russia crusade KNOW that Ukraine is going to lose, but they’ve chosen to continue the war anyway. Why?
Because the lives, and the destruction, and the dissolution of the Ukrainian state don’t matter to them. All that matters is inflicting pain on Russia, whatever the cost. That is the ‘noble cause’ for which 500,000 Ukrainians have given their lives. And that is why this bloody debacle continues to drag on endlessly even though the outcome has never been in doubt.
(Boston, MA, Emerson College Student Released From Lock Up After Tent Protest Against The Israeli War Machine – 26 April 2024)
As more campuses join the protests against Israel’s continuing engagement in war crimes in Gaza, one common thread runs through the student demands – divest from supplying the Netanyahu government and the IDF with weapons of mass destruction. What compels many of these youthful demonstrators to occupy the public spaces and offices of their universities is the complicity of college portfolios with investments in US weapon manufacturers. They know that the products of defense contractors, like Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet and General Dynamics MK 84 – 2000 pound bombs, are slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians throughout Gaza.
They also understand that the US government, from President Biden to the Congress, is opposed to legislative efforts to hold Israel accountable to its violation of various on-the-books prohibitions for governments “engaged in gross human rights abuses” (Section 502 B of the US Foreign Assistance Act). Instead, they see the Biden Administration exploiting every loophole in any restrictions to supply Israel with unending transfers of bombs and military equipment. While countries, like Canada and numerous others, have stopped shipping weapons to Israel, the US seems oblivious to the suffering and devastation caused daily by the IDF in Gaza.
They are aware that Israeli state propaganda spreads constant disinformation about its war crimes in Gaza, from rationalizing its attacks on the staff and patients in hospitals to the murder of over 200 aid workers. They know that countless human rights agencies have condemned these kinds of war crimes in Gaza. (These same human rights agencies have also condemned the brutal killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7). In order to justify the murder of so many innocent civilians, the Netanyahu government has insisted that they have actually killed 9000 Hamas militants. However, if they read one of the recent articles in the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz from March 31, they understand this figure is reflective of what the IDF calls “kill zones” (think “free-fire zones” in the US war on Vietnam) where anything in those zones, including women and children, were legitimate targets to then be counted as Hamas militants.
They are surely aware of what Netanyahu cabinet members have said about the Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank that they are just “human animals.” The Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, has bragged about destroying the “electricity, food, and fuel” in Gaza. One of his advisers, a former IDF General, reflective of the targeting of aid workers, including those murdered seven from World Central Kitchen, acknowledged that “in order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza.” Such mass murder and wanton destruction of property in Gaza is part of a campaign of killing that one UN official has cited as “probably the highest kill ratio of any military killing anybody since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”
When students see and hear about all of this, they are obviously motivated to express their moral outrage. On one hand, these expressions may not always comport with so-called civility. On the other hand, they are not prepared to remain silent and/or passive in the face of an unfolding genocide. In their adherence to Dr. King’s reference to the “fierce urgency of now,” they are committed, as Dr. King was, to disturbing the peace.
Indeed, we need to be reminded of another quote from Dr. King that was central to his famous Riverside Address (“A Time to Break Silence”) from April 4, 1967. He warned prophetically that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Beyond the horrors in Gaza and the long tragic history of the oppression of Palestinians, these student protestors are trying to save their own nation from its bloated “defense” budget (now approaching almost one trillion dollars) and death-dealing spiral. What their protest ultimately signifies is their commitment to an authentic advocacy for peace and justice abroad and at home.
Fran Shor is a Michigan-based retired teacher, author, and political activist.
The Middle East will not be the same in the wake of 7 October 2023. More was breached on that day than the prison wall that Palestinian fighters burst through. The fantasy Israel has staged-managed, and the United States has parroted, for over seven decades has finally seen the light of day. The global community can no longer be gaslit.
Merriam-Webster defines gaslighting as “the act of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.” The term has resonance for what Israel and the United States have successfully done over a number of generations—create a benign identity for Israel that has never corresponded with its ruthless settler-colonial reality.
The awful truth is that it has taken the death of over 34,000 Palestinians for many in the United States and the world to say “Free Palestine.” The mainstreamed Israeli “good guy” narrative that has colonized the U.S. body politic for so long is being whittled away by the horrific images of daily genocide and ecocide from Gaza.
A country does not become cruel overnight. It takes intent, years of practice and strategies to effectively hide the cruelty. Since it declared itself a state in 1948, the occupied territories known as Israel has relied on an elaborate state-run public relations industry to convince Western audiences, particularly Americans, of its bravery and noble intentions.
For over six months, Israel’s brutality has been brought into the living rooms of America. Until then, Israel had made certain that its foundational myths and beacon of democracy tale dominated American politics and government, religion, journalism, academia, cinema and television.
Those who have been successfully gaslit, whether consciously or unconsciously, and who wish to maintain existing power structures continue to deny the genocide being live-streamed before their eyes, and have galvanized to crush those opposed to Israel’s war on Palestinians.
American Politics and Government
For decades, Israel has manipulated U.S. politicians emotionally and financially to advance its expansionist ambitions. Israeli lobby groups, like the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), have poured billions into the coffers of receptive politicians.
Pro-Israel spending has fueled Congress’s overwhelming support for the apartheid regime. Rarely, if ever, do they question why aid is being given to the fourteenth richest (per capita) country in the world. From 1990 to 2024, for example, the “I am a Zionist,” president, Joe Biden has received$5,736,701 from pro-Israel lobbies.
In 2024, AIPAC plans to spend $100 million in an effort to unseat progressive members of Congress (eight in number) who have been critical of Israeli policy and who have called for a ceasefire in Gaza.
In January 2024, The Guardian newspaper published its analysis of campaign data. It found that congressional members supportive of the war received the most money from Israel lobby groups. It also revealed that 82 percent of its members support Israel; 9 percent are supportive of Palestine; and 8 percent were equally supportive of both.
Religion
Israel’s leaders have also capitalized on the powerful force of religion to whitewash their settler-colonial project. They have exploited the ideology of biblical chosenness and divinely sanctioned land ownership to legitimize land theft, to dispossess the Palestinians and to sell its genocidal war on Gaza.
An Israeli Democracy Index, 2013 survey revealed that two-thirds (64.3 percent) of Israeli Jews consider Jews to be the “chosen people.” The prominence of this belief has resulted in attitudes and government policies of exclusion, entitlement and ethnic chauvinism.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war rhetoric has been suffused with violent biblical references. He has cynically ascribed the term Amalek—the staunch enemy of biblical Israelites—to Palestinians. The far-right in Israel has, for a long while, used such references to justify killing Palestinians.
The Evangelical right has stood solidly with Israel; even more so during its war on Gaza. The Israel, Zionist lobby and Christian Zionist (religious right) alliance have had enormous influence over U.S. Middle East policy. For every one Jewish Zionist, there are 30 Christian Zionists. Netanyahu has courted Evangelicals cognizant of the power they exert within Congress.
Christian Zionism demands of its followers absolute support for Israel, believing that the Rapture and Second Coming of Christ require the gathering of all Jews in Israel, and that supporting Israel will bring God’s blessing on them and on their nation.
Many American evangelicals, have been cheering Israel’s war on Gaza, believing it to be a prelude to the end times prophecy.
Christian Zionists have found powerful allies in the White House and in the U.S. Congress. In the Trump White House, for example, evangelicals held seats of power with the likes of former Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
There are at least 100 evangelicals currently serving in Congress, including the Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. It has become almost mandatory for members to attend AIPAC and Christian evangelical events, as well as excursions to Israel to assure the apartheid leaders of their continued loyalty.
Journalism
American public opinion has been molded to look with favor on Israel. Mainstream journalism has become largely a stenography service for U.S.-Israeli interests. Most of the pundits and so-called experts on television, for example, come from think tanks funded by pro-Israel groups: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Research Institute, The Heritage Foundation and Council on Foreign Relations.
Intellectually honest analysis or criticism of Israel is met with orchestrated pressure from Jewish lobby groups or with the dreaded label of antisemitism. Such tactics have been used to create a climate of intimidation, which has often led to self-censorship.
It is useful to look at a few examples to understand how alternative narratives regarding Palestine have been discouraged for decades.
Ariel Sharon, former Israeli defense minister, filed a libel suit after Time magazine ran a cover story in 1983 accusing him of encouraging the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in September 1982. In 1984, Americans for a Safe Israel filed a petition requesting that NBC’s license be revoked over its reporting of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. CBS faced similar criticism for airing veteran reporter, Bob Simon’s “60-Minutes” report about Christians living under Israeli occupation. A full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal excoriating Simon appeared soon after.
CNN’s founder, Ted Turner, caused an uproar when he told the Guardian in 2002 that Israel was engaging in terrorism against the Palestinians, resulting in threats to the networks revenue. Walter Isaacson, then CNN Chair, appeared on Israeli television to denounce Turner and the network’s chief news executive, Eason Jordan, flew to Israel to appease the regime.
Magazines such as The New Republic, The Atlantic and Commentary have also been influential in creating an Israel-centric worldview. Pro-Israel syndicated columnists Thomas Friedman, Bret Stephens, George Will and David Brooks—whose son has served in the Israeli army—dominate the op-ed pages of major newspapers.
Since the October assault, a number of journalists have faced censorship, retaliation or dismissal for presenting the Palestinian narrative or for criticizing Israeli violence. The firing in October of Michael Eisen, editor of eLife, a prominent academic science journal, after he retweeted an article from the satirical Onion titled, “Dying Gaza’s Crticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas,”reflects how censorship has reached into all media platforms.
All foreign news organizations operating in Israel are subject to Israeli military censors. To suppress the horrors coming from Gaza, Israel has refused to permit foreign journalists independent access to that beleaguered Strip. Only Palestinian reporters already there have been able to report; for that, they and their families have been targeted. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as of 25 April, at least 97 journalists and media staff have been killed and 16 injured since the war began.
Academia
For over two hundred days, Israel’s supporters have been straining to preserve their stranglehold over American universities. They are aware that people are losing their fear of Israel’s watchdogs like Canary Mission, Stand With Us and Hillel; groups that have made it their mission to suppress critical discussion around Israel on college campuses.
Academic freedom has been denied professors who have bravely challenged accepted Israeli renderings. Professors Rabab Abdulhadi, California State University, San Francisco, Steven Salaita, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Norman Finkelstein, De Paul are among the academics who have been intimidated or terminated.
Pro-Israel forces have stepped up their pressure on administrators, as demonstrations on university campuses have grown. Wealthy donors have used threats to withhold, or have withheld, donations if speech critical of Israel is allowed. Administrators have responded, dismissing professors, setting limits on free speech, conflating protests with antisemitism and using police to breakup demonstrations. More than 100 Columbia University students were arrested on 18 April after the university called in the New York Police Department to clear a protest encampment.
Students reported being sprayed with a putrid smelling chemical agent at a Columbia demonstration. They later learned that they were sprayed with a chemical called “skunk;” an agent developed by Israel and that has been used for years by the Israeli military against Palestinians in occupied Palestine.
Earlier in April, the University of Southern California, citing unspecified security concerns, cancelled plans for a graduation speech by this year’s valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, a Muslim student. Disappointed, Tabassum said the school had succumbed “to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice.”
Pro-Israel groups have also looked to Congress to neutralize the growing pro-Palestinian protests. House Republicans have held hearings to “investigate” antisemitism at America’s prestigious universities. Thus far, the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have resigned following their appearances. And on 24 April, Speaker Johnson called for the president of Columbia University, Nemat Minouche Shafik, to step down.
Safety and antisemitism have been used as weapons to silence campus criticism of Israel. In November, after Jewish students complained of feeling unsafe upon hearing remarks critical of Israel, Columbia banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.
The intensity of Israeli indoctrination is reflected in the reaction of some Jewish students who believe that protests targeting Israel constitute personal attacks on them as Jews.
Many young American Jews have been raised with the idealized image of Israel as a righteous state, necessary for Jewish safety. A large number have made the free ten-day trip to Israel sponsored by Birthright Israel, an organization supported by the Israeli regime and wealthy philanthropists like the late Sheldon Adelson. Birthright, founded in 1999, has played a large role in shaping loyalty to Israel. Predictably, the reality of the occupation has never been a part of the group’s tour.
Cinema and Television
Israel loyalists have masterfully utilized the media to shape public perceptions and attitudes. Movie and television screens have been filled with an abundance of positive, sympathetic images of Israel that have shaped public perceptions.
Undoubtedly, the 1960 film, Exodus, firmly implanted the heroic image of Israel in the minds of many Americans. The heroism of the Palestinian people fighting to preserve their homeland from Israeli domination has yet to hit the big screen.
Beginning with the 1921silent film classic, The Sheik, filmmakers have cast Middle Easterners, Arabs and Muslims as exotic, uncultured, idiotic, lecherous and violent, indistinguishable from one another.
Although racist depictions of Arabs is not new to the film and television industry, media providers Showtime, Netflix and HBO have amped up the propaganda with series such as Homeland, Fauda (meaning chaos in Arabic), The Messiah, The Spy, and Our Boys. These dramas, from which many Americans draw their information, portray Israel’s secret police as virtuous defenders of law, hunting down threatening Arab “terrorists.”
Caricatures and negative cinematic imagery have contributed to the destructive dehumanization of Arabs, as witnessed today in Gaza. The powerful political narrative created around Arabs has allowed Israel’s genocide of Palestinians to become an image on a screen or just another news event.
For more than eight decades—from photoplay sheik movies of the 1920s to the elaborately produced films of the present—Hollywood filmmakers have perpetuated Middle Eastern stereotypes that have cultivated prejudice and division between peoples and nations. These stereotypes have created a pattern of socialization that has made the Middle Eastern world distant and vulnerable to attack.
Conclusion
Although the pro-Israel camp and their allies continue to dominate and influence Congress and the executive branch, they have slowly begun to lose control of the narrative.
President Joe Biden, however, remains dedicated to the Israeli fantasy. He has embraced and subsidized a racist supremacist Israeli regime; a 57-year apartheid occupation; squatter colonialism and genocide in Gaza.
While professing commitment to achieving a Palestinian state, the United States alone vetoed a 18 April Security Council resolution that would have allowed full United Nations membership for the state of Palestine. And while Israel continues its intense bombing in Gaza, Biden signed legislation on 24 April allocating another $26.4 billion for Tel Aviv to continue its atrocities.
Israeli gaslighting has reached into and exerted influence in almost every segment of American society. Consequently, Israel has grown into an entity unbound by borders, exempt from international law and able to commit genocide with impunity. The horrific images coming from Gaza are, however, are making it increasingly difficult for Israel and its U.S. allies to silence dissent and to continue gaslighting the American public.
The recent presence of police on the campus of Columbia University to stop pro- Palestinian protesters is reminiscent of turbulence on the same campus in 1968. While the past and present issues of contestation at Columbia are different, the issues of free speech and student activism reflect an ongoing tension between students and universities in general. Student/administrators differences, sometimes violent, are nonetheless healthy and necessary parts of a democratic society.
The current issue between students and university administrators focuses on the Middle East crisis. Protesting students have taken up the cause of Palestinians against Israel. Over one hundred student protesters were recently arrested by New York City police on Columbia’s campus. “It’s like there’s been a military coup on campus,” a student was quoted in Le Monde. “There are cops everywhere,” she said. At Columbia, on-campus classes have been cancelled; students were urged to stay home. Police have also intervened at New York University and Yale.
The fact that Columbia’s president and other university officials have called in the police “to restore order on campus” shows the gap between the students’ actions and how the university seeks to govern. In a larger context, the current campus turmoil highlights the failure to incorporate student idealism into university policies.
Threats to security and order are superficial excuses for calling in the police. Student idealism is the problem. “Columbia’s move to send in police so quickly after these demonstrations began chills student expression, marks a significant departure from past practice, and raises questions about the university’s disparate treatment of students based on their views,” Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union said in a statement.
A similar statement by the Columbia and Barnard chapters of the American Association of University Professors condemned Columbia president Minouche Shafik’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests: “We are shocked at her failure to mount any defense of the free inquiry central to the educational mission of a university in a democratic society and at her willingness to appease legislators seeking to interfere in university affairs.”
Chilling student expression by university administrators is part of an endless tug of war between youthful idealism and the conservative forces of law and order. University presidents, as representatives of what they perceive to be larger responsibilities, weigh student demands with their perceptions of societal interests. And the students usually lose, particularly in the current situation of academic institutions resembling bureaucratic corporations.
As eminent academic free speech expert Professor Stephen Rosow observes: “University administrations seem to view the relation of the university as a seat of knowledge to the public sphere as one of mirroring public opinion rather than leading public discussion and debate.” “They are,” he adds, “beholden to the ideological forces that stand behind donors, but their vision of the university as necessary to a robust democracy is at best in retreat.”
Student activism is part of an endemic conflict between students and authority, including university administrators, government, and society. While the conflict may manifest itself violently from time to time, it is part of a normal process. Eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds should be idealistic. The tension between the protesters and the university administrators is more than the question of the limits of freedom of speech; it’s about the freedom to think, the freedom to question, the freedom to create, the freedom to act. The incapacity of universities to incorporate student activism into their regular activities is threatened when administrators call onto campus the forces of law and order. It is indeed chilling when a campus is seen as the site of a military coup.
It is also chilling when universities are given government warnings of what the forces of law and order may do. As proof of how chilling society can be, witness Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s aggressive questioning of three university presidents about antisemitism on their campuses before a House of Representatives subcommittee. Stefanik’s political posturing sent a clear message to universities, both private and public, that the government will oversee what is happening on campuses. Stefanik and people like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are attempting to thought-police higher education.
What happens on campus is thoroughly political in terms of the freedom given to students to express their opinions. In the classroom, questioning authority by critically examining iconic texts is naturally followed outside the classroom by students questioning campus authorities and beyond. Critical questioning is what higher education is all about.
But questioning does not necessarily lead to physical confrontation One of my fondest memories of college is the evening when Lyndon Johnson announced his steps to limit the bombing of North Vietnam and his decision not to seek re-election. I called the president of the college to say we should celebrate. (He was far from an anti-war radical.) He immediately invited me and a small group over to his residence where he opened his plentiful liquor cabinet, still in pyjamas, and discussions/celebrations began. Together.
If the latest Harvard Youth Poll shows that students in the 18-24 age range have different political opinions than those older, that is to be expected. University students are different from the general society. Some call students irresponsible; I prefer to call them idealistically positive, creative, and active. The reason to study at a university is to expand the mind and personal possibilities, not to limit one’s intellect and activities.
Creative thinking is messy. Questioning authority is inherently disruptive. Both can be found on campuses as part of a natural tension between students and administrators. If campuses become war zones, it is the result of the failure of administrators to engage with their constituents on the students’ terms. Unlike the endless wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, endless critical questioning of authority through political activism is the very foundation of a democratic society.
In striking at the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1 Bibi Netanyahu has made himself an April Fool. Israel has been bombing Syria for years with no provocation or retaliation by Syria. For years it has bombed its airports which disrupted humanitarian aid to Syria’s civilian population who were suffering in its long civil war. Iran responded to the Israeli strike on its Damascus consulate by asking its allies, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza, to refrain from their retaliatory strikes on Israel and let Iran make a military retaliation by itself. This was to ensure that Israel got the message. In the future, Iran will not rely on its proxies but will itself attack Israel. Israel and the US intercepted all but a few of the Iranian drones, and Israel trumpeted this as a victory for it and a defeat for Iran. But in fact the Iranian response was a political and strategic victory.
Netanyahu has been spoiling for a war with Iran for a long time, and since October 7 he has seeking ways to drag the US into another war in the Middle East. While Biden said the US would fully back Israel in its confrontation with Iran, he also cautioned Netanyahu. A CNN story said this:
Biden sought to frame Israel’s successful interception of the Iranian onslaught as a major victory: — with the suggestion that further Israeli response was unnecessary…Biden told Netanyahu to consider Saturday a win because the US assessed Iran’s attacks had been largely unsuccessful and demonstrated Israel’s superior military capability, Biden made clear that the US will not participate in any offensive operations against Iran in response, a senior administration official told CNN.
In the meantime, US Senator Tim Kaine who was Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential candidate has spoken up about the US relationship with Netanyahu and his rightwing government. Kaine is a close ally and is a member of the Senate foreign relations and armed services committees. Kaine said, “Joe Biden now understands that Benjamin Netanyahu ‘played’ him during the early months of the war in Gaza but ‘that ain’t going to happen anymore.’[i] Netanyahu’s strategic blunders in the Gaza war and now the strike in Damascus have got him in quite a pickle. His major concern is to stay in office to avoid looming criminal prosecution. His quandary is not unlike that of his friend Trump. If they are friends—if either really has any friends. Each in psychiatric terminology is mentally ill with what is diagnosed as ‘malignant narcissism.’ Each is willing to sacrifice anything to save himself. Kaine said as much of Netanyahu in his interview:
“He’s going to end up being one of the most successful politicians and most destructive public servants to be on the world stage in the last quarter century, because he’s successful if you measure it by maintaining his own position but, in terms of what he has done … has made Israel less safe and less secure.”[ii]
Benny Gantz, the ‘moderate’ Israeli politician who joined the war cabinet after October 7 has spoken of how the reaction to Iran’s attack showed the unity of Israel and its western allies. He said, “Israel against Iran, the world against Iran. This is the result. That is a strategic achievement which we must leverage for Israel’s security.” Whether he actually believes this I do not know. But if he does he is deluding himself. The key event was not Iran’s retaliation but the Israel’s strike on the Iranian consulate. That event only reinforced the view of its western ‘allies’ and almost all the other nations of Israel as a rogue state, whose now increasingly reckless actions in Gaza and Syria threaten to bring a wider war to the Middle East—which no one wants, except it seems Netanyahu and his neo-fascist cabinet.
That means that if Israel goes to war against Iran it will go alone. If it continues to provoke the Hezbollah in south Lebanon, it will find itself fighting on two fronts which it doesn’t have the military capacity to do. The last time Israel confronted Hezbollah in 2006, it lost. Since then Hezbollah has acquired more advanced weaponry and, what is more, its soldiers are battle-hardened veterans from their combat in alliance with the Syrian army in the decade of civil war. The reservists Israel called up for the attack on Gaza would be no match for Hezbollah fighters. Netanyahu has painted himself into a corner with the Damascus strike. For a long time the EU—especially France—has tired of Israel’s aggressions in the Middle East. Now its last ally the US has apparently had enough too.
Israel was designed by its Zionist founders to be an aggressive state, a new Jewish ghetto really But an aggressive one. They saw it as a necessity. Israel needed to be at war lest the Jewish settlers be assimilated into the Arab people all around them.
The slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ now denounced by some people in the US as ‘anti-Semitic’ was actually also a part of the Likud Party’s original charter which Netanyahu helped write. It is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media that Israel helped start Hamas. It is well-documented that when Netanyahu became prime minister, he and others in Likud channeled money to it through Qatar in order to weaken Fatah with a fundamentalist party that wanted to obliterate Israel thus giving Netanyahu and his backers a way to claim that there was no one to negotiate with. This was simply a cynical delaying tactic while the Israeli settlements metastasized throughout the West Bank. But on October 7 the folly of Netanyahu’s connivance in the creation Hamas was apparent. How clever he was—until he wasn’t.
The foundation of Israel in 1948 was in a way the big bang of the post-war Middle East. The humiliating defeat of the states created out of colonial designs of Britain and France led to revolutions in the Arab world.
The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a non-starter for some years. Israel has stolen too much land in the West Bank for a viable Palestinian state. It is still touted by the US and most of the EU. It does serve one purpose, however. It makes apparent that the real obstacle to a peaceful settlement of the conflict is solely Israel. The only possible solution is a single secular state of Palestine where Arabs and Jews are equal citizens. Hamas and the radical Jewish fundamentalists in Netanyahu’s administration will have to deal with it from the sidelines—the majority of Israelis and Palestinians are not religious fundamentalists. The Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan met with Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar. Fidan said according to Turkish news media. “In our political talks with Hamas for years, they have accepted a Palestinian state to be established within the 1967 borders.”[iii]
While Netanyahu is the driver behind Israel’s latest gambles in Gaza and elsewhere, he’s simply explicitly mouthing Israeli aims—expansion and ethnic cleansing. He has espoused and worked purposefully against the two-state option. He has tolerated and even collaborated with Hamas. He is the most arrogant and duplicitous politician in the world. Biden should never call him again. He should call for his arrest and imprisonment not only for fraud breach of trust and bribery—the charges pending in Israel—but for crimes against humanity.
That said, the miserable theocratic imams of Iran have done the world a favor. They have put the US between a rock and a hard place, and forced Biden to say, Enough, we won’t support any further action of Israel against Iran. Which will also increase greater anxiety in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and will expose them for the shits they are.[iv]
The strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus was to distract the world press from the genocidal assault on Gaza. Israel responded with a missile attack on Iran itself. Iran’s retaliation to that attack that showed that Iran—is more cautious. It seems now not likely to retaliate to the Israeli strike.
On the other hand, Netanyahu has already drawn blunt criticism for the Israeli strike on Iran. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir—who was convicted by an Israeli court of supporting terrorism—said the Israeli attack on Iran was “lame.” after Tehran thwarted a small IDF drone strike early on Friday. Netanyahu is under attack even by members of his own cabinet. As they say down South, he’s up to his waist in alligators. Netanyahu is caught now in a vise of his own making between the assault on Gaza and the strike on Damascus. It was bound to happen ever since 1948. He is simply the catalyst who finally brought it on. With the US finally drawing a line, Israel’s last ally is saying enough is enough. AIPAC is now challenged by another Jewish lobby, J Street, and American politicians are taking note of AIPAC’s diminishing power. It’s power politics and Bibi is losing.
The American decision not to veto a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza was another shock to Netanyahu—it was a first for a US administration. Netanyahu’s response was to cancel a planned Israeli meeting with the Biden administration in Washington. Israel is now more isolated more isolated than ever in the international world. Hamas is outfoxing Israel at every step. Israel is learning the hard way that an empire will sacrifice the interests of a small piece of it to the greater interests of the empire.
Yair Lapid, who is the leader of the opposition Yesh Atid party, said the resolution was “dangerous, unfair, and Israel will not accept it.” Minister Hili Tropper, a close ally of Netanyahu’s rival Benny Gantz — who polls say would win handily if an election were held today —said, “The war must not stop.” These comments did not differ greatly from the angry reactions by extreme-right leaders such as Bezalel Smotrich or Itamar Ben Gvir.
More people in the Israeli security establishment are saying that eliminating Hamas is not an achievable goal. Former IDF spokesman Ronen Manelis was quoted recently saying. “To say that one day there will be a complete victory in Gaza — this is a complete lie. Israel cannot completely eliminate Hamas in an operation that lasts only a few months.”
The near-unanimous rejection of a ceasefire shows the cross-party support for an invasion of the Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. But Netanyahu is holding off after the US allowed the resolution. Also figuring in his calculations is the call by thirty members of Congress including Nancy Pelosi for a suspension of military aid to Israel.
Likewise in the UK, opposition parties and parliamentarians from the governing Conservative Party, and hundreds of lawyers and judges have called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to stop the sale of weaponry to Israel.
At the same time the families of the Israeli hostages are becoming more critical of Netanyahu’s failure to cut a deal with Hamas to free the hostages. The futility of continuing the war has become clear—the goals of eliminating Hamas and freeing the hostages are conflicting. Hamas has politically won the war.
Before October 6, most Israelis thought that a resolution of the Palestinian issue could be put off indefinitely. October 6 shattered that illusion.
There are only two responses to the collapse of the status quo after October 6. One is to recognize the presence of Palestinians and their right to a state. The other is a genocidal war. Israel had chosen the latter. Its slaughter of over thirty-four thousand people, almost all of them innocent civilians (the IDF counts all adult males in Gaza as members of Hamas) its denial of food, water and medicine—all these acts have increased the anger and disgust with it all around the world. The recent murderous assault on the World Kitchen Central—the WKC—is the latest outrage. Israeli’s claim that it was an accident is not believable. It was intentional. The death of an American aid worker simply brought it to the attention of the mass media in America. Israel has been killing aid workers of such organizations as the International Rescue Committee and Médecins Sans Frontières since the beginning of its assault on Gaza—in the case of the WKC it didn’t reckon on one of the victims being an American. If all of these actions are not genocidal then the term has no meaning.
“WCK [aka WFK] is not just any relief organization,” wrote Jack Mirkinson in TheNation magazine. He said of José Andrés, “Andrés is a global celebrity with ties to the international political establishment. WCK had been working closely with the Israeli government both in Gaza and in Israel proper. It would be difficult to think of a more mainstream, well-connected group.” It was as if Israel were showing off, Mirkinson added, “flaunting its ability to cross every known line of international humanitarian law and get away with it.”[v]
Were more evidence needed to support Mirkinson’s description of Israel’s actions, a recent story in the Washington Post confirms it.
The story describes how on January 29 a six-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, was calling for help on her cell phone—when she was intermittently conscious—from the backseat of a car near a Gaza City gas station. She told the emergency dispatchers that ID tanks were getting closer. Her cousin Layan took the phone and told a cousin that Israeli soldiers and were firing at it. Everyone in the car was dead except her and Rajab. They told her that paramedics were on their way. Hind Rajab and all the paramedics were killed. The paramedics notified an IDF agency COGAT that they were going to rescue wounded children and COGAT told them the safest route to take. The paramedics never made it to Hind Rajab. Their ambulance was destroyed Israeli tank fire—they probably would have been safer if they had not notified COGAT. It was twelve days later that family members could make their way to the scene. The car was riddled with bullets as were the bodies of Hind Rajab and her family members. Again despite the statement of the IDF that they would ‘look into it,’ the story in the Washington Post makes it clear with a mass of forensic evidence that the IDF murdered the paramedics and Hind Rajab and her family in cold blood.[vi]
A video posted recently on various news sites showed an endless line Palestinians walking on al-Rashid Road next to the sea, returning to the north of Gaza defying the Israeli warning that they should remain near Rafa. Their home are mostly rubble now but one Palestinian woman said, “If I have to die I want to die in my home.”
As I write Monday April 22, The US has imposed sanctions on the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda battalion, which has been accused of serious human rights violations against Palestinians in the West Bank. It’s now deployed in Gaza. What’s more, The Israeli paper Haaretz has reported that the US was also considering similar moves against other police and military units. What took so long?
When people mention Israel to me—“the Zionist Entity” as its Arab foes call it—I think of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem founded by the Crusaders in 1099. It lasted until 129I when Saladin took Jerusalem. I want to say to them, ‘Where is the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem?’ The Palestinians will win simply by staying in Palestine while Israel atrophies as the apartheid state of South Africa did. It won’t take two centuries as Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem did.
October 7 was a war crime but a relatively minor one when set in the context of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and the US invasion of Iraq—which caused the deaths of somewhere between half a million to a million Iraqis. But now Bibi’s blundering response to the Hamas assault has resulted in another Big Bang. Global condemnation of Israel.
Notes.
[i] “Tim Kaine: “Biden knows Netanyahu ‘played’ him in early months of Gaza war.” The Guardian, April 10, 2024.
[v] Ellen Cantorow: “Dead on Arrival.” AntiWar.com, April 17 2024. The Jack Mirkinson article, “The Ghoulish Ostentatiousness of Israel’s Latest War Crimes, cited by Ellen Cantorow appeared in The Nation on April 4, 2024.
[vi] Meg Kelly, Hajar Harb, Louise Loveluck, Miriam Berger and Cate Brown. “Palestinian paramedics said Israel gave them safe passage to save a 6-year-old girl in Gaza. They were all killed.” Washington Post, April 16, 2024.
We live in an age of increased disasters and encroaching fascism. This is a historical moment marked by a systemic attempt by an emerging authoritarianism to disable language and dissent of any substantive meaning, remove actions from the grammar of moral witnessing, and disassociate power from institutional justice. As all levels of society are hollowed out, notions of democratic community, the social contract, and compassion give way to a politics in which all matters of responsibility are individualized, privatized, and removed from broader systemic considerations. The habits of oligarchy are animated by fear and reproduced through relentless attacks on human possibilities, while “the disorder of real history is replaced by the orderliness of pseudo-history.”[1] In a time of widespread suffering and unrest, higher education is feared for its critical functions and students are expected to be silent, unresponsive to wider social issues, and ignore the relationship between the dynamics of power, marginality, and knowledge. Amid the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the carceral state, faculty and students are expected to look away or inward, unresponsive to the language of imagined futures.
This process of depoliticization is intensified by a frontal attack on dissent, free speech, academic freedom, and institutions that support and nurture these crucial democratic rights and practices. Increasingly, higher education, in particular, under the influence of right-wing billionaires, authoritarian politicians, and cravenly boards of trustees is attacked for its critical functions, reduced to morally dead zones of the imagination and a mind-numbing conformity. Disdained as a public good whose purpose should be to educate young people to be informed and critical citizens, higher education is under pressure by far-right members of the GOP to renounce its responsibility to teach students to question, challenge, and think against the grain. One model for this regressive form of education is on display in Florida where Gov. Ron DeSantis has transformed New College, a once progressive college, into a citadel for anti-woke ideology and pedagogy–cleansed of classes where faculty and students can think critically, test their opinions, and realize themselves as engaged citizens.
No longer considered a public good where ideas and important social issues are nurtured, debated. and interrogated, institutions of higher education are being transformed into indoctrination centers where critical ideas and empowering pedagogies are held in contempt, transformed into apparatuses of censorship and hopelessness. Derided as a haven for critically informed social criticism, the far-right wants to reduce teaching and learning to what might be called cloning pedagogies, designed to clone culture, knowledge, ideas, and extremist world views.
Even worse. Higher education is increasingly being attacked by the far-right for its liberal claim of equality and a common good. As an institution that aligns with a notion of “citizenship… equated with human dignity [and] equality on multiple fronts,” it has garnered the wrath of fascists for whom hostility to universal citizenship is a central element of its mobilizing passions.[2] This hatred of equality reinforced by the selective definition of who counts as an American now feeds both the attack on higher education and an increasingly vicious racist politics. As Eddie S. Claude notes, the fantasy of a “lily-white America” and the call to banish Black and brown people “from the nation’s moral conscience” create landscapes of illusion, enable white supremacy, while furthering racist violence and the logic of exclusion and annihilation.[3] The far-right views thinking as dangerous as is the notion that education is central to politics and must be defined through it claims on democracy and its role in a time of tyranny.
Moral restrictions seem obsolete as another colonial war rages in Gaza, during which thousands of Palestinians are killed, while attempts to criticize what various international organizations label as war crimes are summarily dismissed as antisemitism. This refusal to acknowledge the violence being waged against Palestinians has morphed into a war against critical journalists, cultural workers, and increasingly higher education, now viewed by the far-right as a citadel of pernicious socialist thought. Under such circumstances, those who react to the suffering of others are subject to the dehumanizing and morally cannibalistic, verbal orgies of hatred, and increasingly, state violence. They are also at risk of a society in which civic death leads state violence, domestic terrorism, and a politics of disposability.[4]
In this historical moment, attacks on higher education make clear that struggling for freedom, equality, and justice comes with great risks. Such attacks give credence to an emerging fascist politics both in the U.S. and abroad that mark students who question settler colonial dispossession and state violence as objects of disparagement and potential violence by a racist-criminogenic state. Displays of civic courage now qualify students as objects of critique, exclusion, and in some cases arrests. In the current repressive climate, this points to not only the egregious act of censorship, but also to the death of the university as a public good and civic institution, regardless of its flawed notions of equality and civic knowledge.
For Trump and his Vichy-like enablers, higher education is portrayed as a laboratory of left-wing ideologies whose ultimate purpose is “to destroy family, community, and national unity.”[5] These repressive policies represent the return of what Ellen Schrecker has called “the new McCarthyism,” which uses the smear of communism to attack critical education, teacher autonomy, and “real-world issues of race, gender, and social inequality.”[6] She writes:
The current [McCarthyite] campaign to limit what can be taught in high school and college classrooms is clearly designed to divert angry voters from the deeper structural problems that cloud their own personal futures. Yet it is also a new chapter in the decades-long campaign to roll back the changes that have brought the real world into those classrooms. In one state after another, reactionary and opportunistic politicians are joining that broader campaign to overturn the 1960s’ democratization of American life. By attacking the CRT bogeyman and demonizing contemporary academic culture and the critical perspectives that it can produce, the current limitations on what can be taught endanger teachers at every level, while the know-nothingism these measures encourage endangers us all.[7]
The right’s attack on universities as citadels of leftist ideology dates back further than the purge of academics by the rabid anti-communists under Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. Authoritarian governments in the 1930s performed a similar task in order to control universities. As Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes:
From the fascist years in Europe…right-wing leaders have accused universities of being incubators of left-wing ideologies and sought to mold them in the image of their own propaganda, policy, and policing aims. … Given the virulence the Nazis showed in silencing their critics in and out of the academy after Hitler took power in 1933, it is remarkable that this talking-point has retained traction for the right. It has done so thanks, largely, to the military juntas of the cold war era, which gave new life to fascism’s battles against the left.[8]
More recently, McCarthyite tactics became rampant during George W. Bush’s presidency. This was particularly evident when Vice President Cheney claimed that critics of the administration’s Iraq policy “abetted terrorists.”[9]Simultaneously, the Bush-era witnessed the emergence of McCarthyite institutions like Campus Watch, the David Project, Students for Academic Freedom, and other groups designed to police Middle East Studies and the liberal arts in general for any vestige of dissent against US domestic and foreign policies. Discoverthenetwork.org and other extremist organizations listed the names of professors considered un-American, similar to how ACTA listed the names of alleged unpatriotic professors after the 9/11 attacks.[10]
In an age dominated by feral social media platforms, a malignant form of censorship has emerged in even more virulent forms. For example, this is evident in the work of organizations such as StopAntisemitism, which engages in online vigilantism by doxing critics of Israel’s war on Gaza by “posting personal information online to encourage harassment — thereby chilling debate.”[11] Not only are such critics named, shamed, and harassed, but many of them are expelled from college and often terminated from their jobs.
At present, a more dangerous form of McCarthyism has returned with a vengeance. This authoritarian turn in higher education has been accelerated by the increasing suppression of dissent by critics of Israel’s war in Gaza. Against Israel’s historically based claim of ontological innocence and perpetual victimhood, a new generation of critics argue, as Pankaj Mishra makes clear, that “oppression does not improve moral character.”[12] Israel can no longer absolve its crimes by drawing upon its own tortured unfathomable history of repression and genocide. Federic Lordon goes further and argues that Israel’s brutal war of revenge on Gaza and its call to prevent a Palestinian state represent a form of “moral suicide.” He adds: “Never before has there been such a colossal squandering of symbolic capital that was thought to be unassailable, which had been built up in the wake of the Holocaust.”[13]
Netanyahu’s war on Gaza has intensified protests on university campuses against Israel’s brutal violence against Palestinians. In response, the mainstream media and a number of pundits, with the blessing of pro-Israeli interests, has weaponized antisemitism, a label which has been reduced to any critique of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza or the West Bank. As William I. Robinson observes, one consequence of this pernicious criticism by the far-right is that “academic freedom and free speech are under an all-out attack on university campuses in the United States, not just from college administrations and pro-Israeli groups, but also from the highest levels of the Israeli state.”[14]
Student activists who criticize Israel are facing harassment, monitoring, expulsion, public shaming, and, in some cases, mass arrest for disruptions, evidenced by recent events at Columbia and Yale University, and increasingly several other universities.[15] The protester’s call for colleges and universities to divest from corporations that profit from Israel’s war on Gaza along with their demand for “a complete ceasefire in Gaza” are buried in the blanket charge of antisemitism and the force of police violence.[16] These arrests serve as another indication of the collaboration between certain Ivy League colleges and the far-right in the assault on student voices.[17] Ari Paul observes that mainstream news has generally delighted in the crackdown, making clear “that campus safe spaces where speech is banned to protect the feelings of listeners are good, depending on the issue.” [18] This is not to suggest that attacks on Jewish and students supporting Palestinian rights should be overlooked, but the real objective of the war being waged on elite universities poses a far greater threat than generalized and undebated charges of antisemitism. The inquisition at work in the house committee hearings investigating campus antisemitism is heavily inundated with political theater displayed by Elise Stefanik and her GOP colleagues. What is obvious in this show trial, as David Bell notes, is that they “do not have any real interest in solving campus problems. Their goal is to expose liberal elites as corrupt, dangerous, and anti-American.”[19] The real objective of these hearings is to weaponize protests against the war in Gaza as components of a larger strategy aimed at exercising a defining role in the control of higher education. Robert Kuttner rightly notes in The American Prospect that this McCarthyite assault is part of a broader effort “to suppress fundamental freedoms of expression.”[20]
While the issue of campus antisemitism warrants discussion and debate, it is not within the purview of congresswomen, Elise Stefanik. Nor is any serious discussion of widespread Islamophobia and the squelching of dissent by various campus groups supporting Palestinian rights. By leading the charge in Congressional hearings on antisemitism on college campuses, Stefanik adopts a flame-throwing confrontational approach aimed at dictating “the academic mission of a university,” prescribing disciplinary measures against professors, and formulating guidelines “for acceptable campus speech.”[21] The irony and hypocrisy here are hard to overlook given Stefanik’s “Puritan superego,” belligerent stance, and self-assured role as an opponent of campus antisemitism.[22] This is especially noteworthy in light of her denial of elections results, characterization of individuals who attacked the Capitol as “January 6 hostages,” and her impassioned and staunch defense of Trump, who associates with prominent antisemites such as Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.[23]
The hypocrisy at work in criticism by far-right politicians is not limited to Stefanik. Senator Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and other MAGA supporters of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6 have called for President Biden, whose election they refused to accept, to use the National Guard to arrest students on college campuses. For the MAGA group, violence waged by insurrections is legitimate, but students protesting against the massacre of Palestinians represent a threat to the state. On full display here is the irony of warmongers calling for violence against students who are calling for “the American government to stop sending military aid to Israel” and “for universities to stop investing in weapons manufacturers…who profit from Israel’s invasion of Gaza.”[24] Hypocrisy in the service of violence is perfectly aligned with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s characterization of student protesters on American university campuses as “”antisemitic mobs” that must be stopped.[25] Senator Bernie Sanders aptly criticized Netanyahu’s derogatory remarks as a ploy to use antisemitism “to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government.”[26] He further adds:
No, Mr. Netanyahu. It is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months, your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000—70% of whom are women and children. It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless—almost half the population.[27]
Of course, hypocrisy is important to point out but what really is at issue here is a political party and its far-right media apparatchiks who believe in using state force and the exercise of violence against their own people in order to shut down free speech. Yes, this is a form of domestic terrorism and it is a fundamental element of fascist regimes. Campus protests are not merely seen as unwelcome disruptions but are criminalized by far-right university administrators and politicians.
Compounding these crude attacks on students protesting against the war on Gaza and the corporations that provide them with military weapons is the aggressive involvement of pro-Israel groups, some with the backing of the Israel state, in a broad campaign to shame and publicly disclose information about pro-Palestinian protesters, including students and faculty. Commenting on the repressive nature of this intervention by the Israeli state, Robinson states that the Israeli government has initiated what appears to be a wide-ranging covert campaign and action plan “to harass and intimidate students, faculty, and administrators into silence.”[28] He elaborates on some of the chilling specifics of the plan:
The plan aims at ‘inflicting economic and employment consequences on antisemitic [read: pro-Palestinian/anti-genocide] students and compelling universities to distance them from their campuses.” The plan specifies that actions taken “should not have the signature of the State of Israel on it.’… It calls for ‘personal, economic and employment repercussions for the distributors of antisemitism.’ According to the plan, the inter-ministerial task force will carry out ‘naming and shaming’ by ‘publicizing the names of those generating antisemitism on campuses — both students and faculty and impacting the employment of those identified as the perpetrators of antisemitism.’ Those targeted ‘will struggle to find employment in the U.S. and will pay a significant economic price for their conduct.’[29]
Within this frigid climate of censorship, doxing, and punishment, faculty are being fired and students are being intimidated, harassed, and silenced. One egregious example took place when the University of Southern California’s campus canceled a valedictory commencement address by Asna Tabassum, a Muslim student—more than likely because of her expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people.[30] In another instance, which has become all too familiar, some “New York University students were hauled in for disciplinary hearings after staging a reading of poetry by the Palestinian author Refaat Alareer,” who was killed in an Israeli airstrike.[31] After students erected tents on the campus of Columbia University in protesting the slaughter of Palestinians taking place in Gaza, the university president, Nemat Shafik, called in the city’s Police Department to remove them. Over a hundred students were arrested, all of them were suspended, their student IDs were deactivated, and they were evicted from their dorms.[32] Such actions are reminiscent of the protests and arrests of over one thousand students that took place at Columbia University in 1968. It is worth noting, as Judd Legum states, “In 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the 1968 arrests, then-Columbia President — and noted First Amendment scholar — Lee Bollinger said the decision to call in the NYPD in 1968 was ‘a serious breach of the ethos of the university’.”[33] Clearly, this is a lesson that President Shafik has chosen to ignore and in doing so is complicit in supporting this new wave of McCarthyism and its intensifying attacks on free speech taking place on more and more college campuses.
Her moral vacuity in calling the police to arrest students–who should be celebrated for their courage not punished–is astonishing given her comment that she has initiated “this extraordinary step because these are extraordinary circumstances.”[34] What is extraordinary is that students are protesting the fact that over 34,000 Palestinians are dead, including more than 14,000 children, and that 80 percent of the population in Gaza are homeless, many of whom are starving in the midst of an intentionally imposed famine.
What is extraordinary is that students are opposing Columbia University’s investment and ties with corporations that profit from Israel’s war on Gaza. What is extraordinary is that students are calling for an end to obscene and morally reprehensible acts of violence, such as Israel‘s bombing of Rafah—”where more than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has sought refuge from fighting elsewhere.”[35] Such attacks have resulted in the indiscriminate killing of women and children who have no place to escape.
What is extraordinary is that students are trying to stop an Israeli military attack on Gaza in which war crimes are being committed in violation of international law, as evidenced by the fact that over 300 bodies have been discovered in “a series of mass graves near Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza….The dead include men, women and children….Some were discovered handcuffed, indicating that victims were killed in mass summary executions.”[36] What Shafik willfully fails to acknowledge is that the real crime is not students demonstrating against the war–asserting their sense of moral agency—but the scale of human suffering in Gaza to which they are opposed. As an educator, Shafik is shamefully blind to the fact that Israel has not only destroyed or damaged all 12universities in Gaza but has engaged in a “wholesale destruction” of Gaza’s educational system, committing what UN experts have labeled as scholasticide.[37] In all of these matters, Shafik displays an astonishing degree of moral weightlessness, rooted in an appalling mix of ignorance and political irresponsibility.
While genuine antisemitism exists, it is now being used and maligned by the far-right—known for its own embrace of antisemitism–to engage in targeted harassment and shut down all criticism of the violence waged in Gaza against the Palestinian people, especially women and children. In this context, all criticism of Israel is being branded as antisemitic. This reflects more than a blind commitment to the Israeli state under a far-right leadership; it covers up an institutional machinery of state repression while reproducing a central tenet of authoritarianism, which is to silence those minds that dare to criticize its totalitarian ideology, policies, and anti-democratic tendencies. It is worth repeating that this far-right call for an “ecstasy of obedience” increasingly uses the charge of antisemitism on university campuses as a wedge issue to attack colleges and universities, which they claim are too liberal. It is worth noting that while the Biden white house condemned antisemitic incidents taking place at Columbia University, student journalists at the school stated that many of the incidents took place “on the fringe of campus, not involving students.”[38]
What is often forgotten by critics of the new McCarthyism is that this upgraded attack on higher education is worse than anything that took place in the 1950s. Ellen Schrecker, one of the great historians of McCarthyism, has written that the current assaults on higher education are “worse than McCarthyism.” She is worth quoting at length:
It’s worse than McCarthyism. The red scare of the 1950s marginalized dissent and chilled the nation’s campuses, but it did not interfere with such matters as curriculum or classroom teaching. Its goal was to eliminate communism (however loosely defined) and all the individuals, organizations, and ideas associated with it from any position of influence within American society. The witch hunters achieved that goal by firing people who had once been in or near the small, unpopular Communist party and/or refused to inform on their ex-comrades. They also relied on blacklists, loyalty oaths, speaker bans, and interference from the FBI and other anti-communist investigators. … the classroom was not targeted.[39]
History matters and it is crucial to remember that higher education since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 has been under severe attack by the forces of neoliberalism intent on turning education at all levels into nothing less than adjuncts of the workplace and laboratories for ideological repression. As I have stated in another article:
Across the globe, a new historical conjuncture is emerging in which attacks on higher education as a democratic institution and on dissident public voices in general – whether journalists, whistleblowers, or academics – are intensifying with alarming consequences for both higher education and the formative public spheres that make democracy possible. Hyper-capitalism … has put higher education in its crosshairs and the result has been the ongoing transformation of higher education into an adjunct of the very rich and powerful corporate interests… In fact, the right-wing defense of the neoliberal dismantling of the university as a site of critical inquiry is more brazen and arrogant than anything we have seen in the past. [40]
Since 2016, with the election of Trump as president, the attack on higher education has increased in scope and intensity and resembles forms of education similar to what took place in Nazi Germany.[41] The attempts by conservatives “to deplore knowledge, deride academic inquiry for its own sake, and discourage intellectual curiosity in our children and the American public” has a long and sordid history.[42]
What is different today is that an emerging fascist politics driven by a range of far-right billionaires and groups have education in their crosshairs. For instance, as Judd Legum recently noted, college administrators are facing “substantial political pressure from the right,” and some like Columbia President Minouche Shafik are too willing to buckle under such intimidation.[43] As Irene Mulvey, the President of the American Association of University Professors observed, we are experiencing a “new era of McCarthyism where a House Committee is using college presidents and professors for political theater.”[44] The recent attacks by the far-right on higher education are designed to reach deep into the classroom in order to erase dangerous moments of history, eliminate criticism of systemic racism, banish subjects dealing with sexual orientation, shut down any discussions of social problems, and weaken any control teachers or faculty have over their classrooms. This is more than an airbrushing of what the far-fight considers unpalatable and dangerous.
This is an education that produces moral blindness, ignorance, and reveals contempt for empowering ideas, critical thinking and civil liberties. It is a war against history, memory, solidarity, and the dissolution of the social ties that bind us together in a set of shared values.[45] As Donald Howard argues, educators and others cannot risk failing to speak and act against the current right-wing assaults, especially at a time when a range of democratic educations are under assault and “the very fabric of our democracy is frayed, if not unraveling. We cannot risk silence.”[46] Silence in the face of an emerging fascist politics offers a warning of the danger to come and the lessons to be addressed.
Such attacks function as a massive disimagination machine and a tool of subjugation by enacting a pedagogy of obedience and repression. This type of education is about more than turning schools into indoctrination centers; it is about creating an educational system that normalizes fascist ideologies and denies critical modes of agency.[47] This is nothing less than a resurgence of a poisonous neo-McCarthyism that threatens not only free speech and academic freedom, but also the central principles of democracy itself.
The acts of civil disobedience currently taking place on campuses are imbibed with spirit of the 1960s Berkely Free Speech Movement. Then, as now, students are fighting for the right to be heard, overturn acts of social injustice, and to bring to an end what Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the movement, called “the operation of the machine [that has become] so odious [that] you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon …the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”[48] What the students protesters at Columbia, Yale, New York University and other campuses throughout the U.S. are making clear is that power must be held accountable and that the plague of silence over the war on Palestinians has to be broken so as to inject the struggle for human rights back into the language of a politics built upon the values of equality, social justice, liberty, and human dignity. What young people are teaching the world today, heeding the words of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, is that freedom is an empty abstraction if people fail to act, and that “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.”[49] What they are fighting for is not just a call to end the war against the Palestinian people, a war that is a moral litmus test of our time, but what it means to imagine and fight for a more just and better world.
Damn right!
Notes.
[1] Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth, ed (Boston: faber and Faber, 1986), p. 26.
[4] Judith Butler’s various writings and books are brilliant on this issue. See, for instance, Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence (New York: Verso, 2024). Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, (London: Verso Press, 2004).
[5] Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Right’s War on Universities,” The New York Review of Books (October 15, 2020). Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2020/10/15/the-rights-war-on-universities; see also her larger work on authoritarianism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020).
[10] I have taken up this issue in detail in Henry A. Girox “Democracy, Freedom, and Justice after September 11th: Rethinking the Role of Educators and the Politics of Schooling,” Teachers College Record 104:6 (September 2002), pp. 1138-1162. Also on-line at www. TCRecord.Org (January 21, 2002), pp. 1-33.
[37] Press Release, “ UN experts deeply concerned over ‘scholasticide’ in Gaza,” United Nations Human Rights (April 18, 2024). Online: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza The full comment is worth quoting: “After six months of military assault, more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors have been killed in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers have been injured – with numbers growing each day. At least 60 per cent of educational facilities, including 13 public libraries, have been damaged or destroyed and at least 625,000 students have no access to education. Another 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years of history. Israa University, the last remaining university in Gaza was demolished by the Israeli military on 17 January 2024.”
[49] Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation, speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 4, 1857, in Philip S. Foner, Ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 2 (New York: International, 1950), p. 437.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy.
Israel and its friends malign them as “antisemites”
• 1,700 WORDS •
If you were wondering why or how the mainstream media coverage of what is taking place in Gaza is so slanted as to make it look like a real war between two well-armed and competitive adversaries instead of a massacre of civilians, wonder no longer! A leak has exposed a New York Times internal document that provides editorial guidance about words that should not be used in any article relating to Gaza or to Palestine. They include “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “occupied territory,” and even “Palestine” itself. The intent is clearly to eliminate any words with negative connotations what might be applied in some fashion to Israel and to what Israel is doing, even going so far as to not include any suggestion that Palestine itself might be considered a legitimate political entity. At the same time the media is letting be heard arguments that Israelis killing Palestinians is justified as they are all “terrorists,” even the little ones who will grow up to become enemies of Israel and Jews worldwide.
To a large extent, it is the Zionists themselves that created the need to censor the language being used to describe developments between Israel and its neighbors and that is because Israel, which de facto and illegally occupies all of historic Palestine, made itself de jure “the nation state of the Jewish people” back in 2018 in spite of its Christian and Muslim citizens which, at the time, amounted to something like 20% of the population. To put it simply, a Jewish state cannot also be a democracy for all of its citizens any more that the US can be a Christian state, so it is necessary to divert attention away from that paradox. And there are other degrees of unpleasantness that spring from that necessity, including the fact that devout Jewish believers actually do follow the ten commandments, including “Thou shall not kill!” while Israel has been doing nothing but killing since its foundation as well as plenty of violations of “Thou shall not steal” and “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor!” So instead of behaving better and trying to live peaceably with its neighbors, the “Jewish state” opted instead to cultivate a partly mythical saga of victimhood referred to as the “Holocaust” and to label all of its lethal overreactions as legitimate “right to defend itself” responses. This in turn has spawned another line of defense, what has become the virtual industry which might be referred as the pursuit of “antisemitism.” And to make it really dangerous for the average American citizens who still believe that it is possible to criticize the behavior of foreign countries, the chant of “antisemitism” has been picked up wholeheartedly by the politicians and it is being turned into laws particularly at state levels to punish people who attempt to criticize Israel. National level politicians in Congress are also submitting draft laws that would apply similar restraints throughout the country so it will inevitably be goodbye the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech.
The current unrest of pro-Palestinian “encampments” and “liberated zones” at 33 college campuses in the US protesting against what is clearly a genocide taking place in Gaza by calling for a ceasefire and a halt to institutional investment in Israel as well as a suspension of ties to Israeli government educational bodies. The movement is, as a consequence, being assiduously labeled a manifestation of “antisemitism” by Congress, by Joe Biden in the White House and by nearly all of the mainstream media. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, responding to the unrest, is saying, inevitably, that “antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities” similar to Nazi rallies in the 1930s and he called for a major security crackdown on the demonstrators. And it should be observed how the reaction by the universities has been fairly consistent, i.e. to shut down Palestinians groups or speakers on campus while leaving Jewish groups supporting Israel’s actions alone, indicating clearly that this has not been an even-handed response to political unrest. The House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has made his pro-Israel sentiments very clear, spoke at Columbia University, where the movement began, on Wednesday and dismissed suggestions that the protests were legally protected free speech. He was addressing what he thought were “Jewish students” but was nevertheless heckled by demonstrators as he said the university must restore order on campus and had “failed to protect Jewish students amid concerns about antisemitism on and around campus. This is dangerous. We respect free speech, we respect diversity of ideas, but there is a way to do that in a lawful manner and that’s not what this is.”
Speaking of the Columbia University administration, Johnson asked plaintively whether “They cannot even guarantee the safety of Jewish students? They’re expected to run for their lives and stay home from class? It’s just, it’s maddening.” If the Speaker had done a little more investigating he would have learned that nearly all alleged instances of “antisemitism” on campus have been greatly exaggerated by organizations like the Anti-Definition League (ADL), whose Director Jonathan Greenblatt has been a prime rabble rouser in calling for criminal charges against all those he accuses of “hating Jews.” Neither Greenblatt nor Johnson, himself a Christian Zionist, is evidently troubled at all by the fact that Israel has slaughtered likely well upwards of 40,000 unarmed civilians, including many children. It is a death toll that includes the torture and killing of prisoners execution style, mass graves of victims and the deliberate destruction of hospitals, schools and churches. It even encompasses the removal of organs from captives and cadavers for transplant, for which product Israel has a well-known and highly developed international clientele. But such details are regarded as unproven or even as an irrelevancy to Greenblatt and Johnson, as is the reality that many American Jews possessing consciences are participating in the demonstrations. They presumably will soon be labeled as “self-hating Jews” to make the approved narrative complete.
It is difficult to ignore what a monster Israel has become under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of thugs. When Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir responded to reports that Israel has run out of jail room for its circa 10,000 Palestinian prisoners by saying the solution was to take some of them out and kill them to make more room, there was no response from Washington. Perhaps a better solution would be to free the majority of those prisoners, who are being detained without charges, since imprisoning people without due process is considered to be unacceptable in most “rule of law” civilized countries, which Israel and Joe Biden’s US consider themselves to be but manifestly are not.
So, I welcome the student rebellion against Israeli atrocities even though they have already been confronting a massive wave of oppression from the school authorities and even from alumni who are withholding donations and also forming groups that will advise prospective employers of the names of students who are regarded as anti-Israel, presumably denying them employment after graduation. The universities themselves are engaging in suspension or expulsion of the protesters, including an email sent by Princeton University to all students on Wednesday threatening that students participating in Pro-Palestinian protests like those at Columbia, Yale and other universities would be subject to “arrest and being immediately barred” from campus followed by expulsion. Meanwhile the civil authorities will be called upon to continue to arrest protesters, when necessary, using both police and the National Guard resources. It all recalls the shooting of nonviolent student demonstrators at Kent State University 54 years ago! Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a major recipient of Israel Lobby money, is advocating that demonstrators, whom he describes as “pro-Hamas criminals,” be confronted by angry citizens who ought to “take matters into [their] own hands” and directly punish the offenders.
And meanwhile the government of this fair country, which has become the full-time defender of Israel, will be bleating in unison that the demonstrators are “antisemites” and even Hamas-aligned “terrorists,” demeaning them to such an extent that anything done to them will be considered okay by the media and opinion makers. There will not be a critical word uttered about what Israel is doing apart from vague Biden-esque appeals to take some “humanitarian” steps to kill less, which are routinely ignored by Netanyahu. On the contrary, Congress and Biden are rewarding Israel for its behavior with their recent foreign aid grant of $26 billion to rearm the Jewish state, which an in-debt Washington can no longer afford even though Biden claims that the gift will “make the world safer” and be remembered as a “good day for world peace.” Ironically, part of the money is intended for “humanitarian aid” which might suggest something for the Palestinians, but as the US refuses to deal with the UN assistance agency (UNRWA) and most certainly will not work with what remains of existing formerly Hamas government in Gaza, Israel will no doubt limit and control the aid, just as it is doing now, before pocketing all of the leftover cash. How Israel treats the United States as a chattel, a source of money, weapons and unlimited political cover without providing anything at all in return apart from constant unrest and complicity in crimes against humanity is what the real tale should be all about. One can only hope that the courage of the students who have begun some pushback with their encampment at Columbia will produce some understanding among the American public of how uncritical deference to Israeli “needs” and interests has seriously corrupted the United States and might well lead to the brink of ruin for both countries.
EXCERPT FROM AN EMAIL WRITTEN IN RESPONSE TO A REQUEST FROM A FRIEND ASKING FOR HIS ASTUTE ANALYSIS OF IRAN’S DRONE AND MISSILE ATTACK ON ISRAEL.
Theodore Postol is Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.
I apologize for not getting back to you sooner with answers to your questions. I have been spending time trying to find any video data from the Iranian attacks on Israel that might be informative.
I have attached three video clips derived from some of the sources I found and have put them together in a way that will hopefully be helpful to you and your colleagues.
This clip shows two long-range Iranian missiles passing through the atmosphere, impacting, and exploding in Israel. The incoming missiles are bright spots in the video because they are traveling at a high enough speed (Mach 10 to 13) to be incandescent from atmospheric heating. For now, I will only give you several important highlights, but there is a lot more that can be derived from this particular video.
The video is cut into four sections.
The first section is simply the video as it appears in real time. The time-sequence is roughly 13 seconds long. The soundtrack has four sharp sounds like “gunfire,” which are simply the sounds from the ground-explosions delayed in time due to the speed of sound being much slower than the speed of light. Note that you can see only two ground-explosions, but the sound indicates there are two additional ground-explosions that occurred outside the field-of-view of the camera.
The second section is simply the first section repeated at one third speed, so you have a better chance of observing details.
The following two sections are simply a repeat of section 1 and section 2.
There are many other videos of unengaged ballistic missiles arriving, but all of them cut off before the warheads reach the ground. This is almost certainly due to Israeli classification rules that do not allow the press to publish videos of ground-explosions.
The second video clip titled:
Damage to Israeli Air Base In April 14, 2023 Iran Attack.
This clip shows some of the ground damage at one of the two Israeli airbases that were the direct targets of these ballistic missile attacks. The first sequence shows a crater that was probably from a 200 to 400 kilogram explosive warhead. There are also photographs of lower levels of damage and smaller craters that may possibly be from drones that were not intercepted. The drones are known to have 50 kg warheads and would thereby produce much lower levels of ground damage and smaller craters.
A very interesting section of the video shows the Israelis repairing a runway, which must have been hit by a munition, requiring that the airbase to quickly fill in the crater and cover it with fast-annealing concrete.
All military airports have this capability as it is expected that runways will be attacked so as to limit the ability for the airbase to handle combat aircraft for taking off and landing.
The last 10 seconds of the video shows a ballistic missile arriving, and no interceptors in the air attempting to engage it. If you look carefully at the dark sky immediately above the building the warhead passes behind, you should be able to see one or more faint flashes in the sky. These faint flashes are indications of intense light from a ground explosion that is being reflected by particles in the sky.
The third video titled:
Israeli Drone Shootdowns on April 14, 2024 (Normal and Slo Mo-P35)240.mp4 (1.1 MB)
This video shows aircraft “gun camera” images of drones and cruise missiles that are being shot down with air-to-air missiles.
The gun camera images show cruise missiles:
1.png 2.png and drones: 3.png The cruise missiles travel at a speed of roughly 500 to 600 km/h while the drones travel at a much slower speed, about 220 to 250 km/h.
The videos show an extremely important fact.
All of the targets, whether drones or not, are shot down by air-to-air missiles.
The workhorse air-to-air missile of the United States Air Force is a AIM-9x Sidewinder.
The cost of a single Sidewinder air-to-air missile is about $500,000.
The cost of a drone is perhaps 10,000 or $20,000, and the cost of an Iranian cruise missile is probably about $100,000.
An extremely important fact released by the Israeli government is that the cost of defending Israel from this particular Iranian attack was about $1.3 billion!
The implications of this single number are substantial.
This indicates that the cost of defending from waves of attacks of this type is very likely to be unsustainable against an adequately armed and determined adversary.
The actual scale of the attack is summarized according to CNN in the image below:
The clear and unambiguous evidence from all of the videos of ballistic missiles arriving over Israel show that Iron Dome interceptors were essentially not used in any attempts to engage the ballistic missiles.
The decision to not even try to engage the long-range Iranian ballistic missiles is completely sound.
The Iron Dome interceptor would have a good chance of intercepting either a cruise missile or a drone that had leaked through the very substantial aircraft implemented air-defense system.
This almost certainly means that the bulk of the $1.3 billion cost of the defense was almost certainly expended on shooting down drones and cruise missiles with fighter aircraft launching air-to-air missiles against targets.
Since there is essentially no evidence of long-range ballistic missiles being engaged by Iron Dome, it could only mean that they were not engaged at all, or there were attempts to engage them with the Arrow and David’s sling defense systems.
The fact that a very large number of unengaged ballistic missiles could be seen glowing as they reenter the atmosphere to lower altitudes, indicates that whatever the effects of David’s Sling and the Arrow missile defenses, they were not especially effective.
Thus, the evidence at this point shows that essentially all or most of the arriving long-range ballistic missiles were not intercepted by any of the Israeli air and missile-defense systems.
An additional observation that is relevant to the situation of Israel relative to South Korea is illustrated in the two maps below:
The maps indicate that the drones and cruise missiles had to travel distances of 1300 to 1500 km from Iran to Israel, and roughly 2000 km from Yemen to Israel.
This transit requires many hours allowing for fighter aircraft to engage drones and cruise missiles. There are now reports that the US Navy provided airborne warning and control systems (AWACS, specifically, Navy E-2 Hawkeyes)) which were extremely effective in vectoring fighter aircraft to targets that they could then quickly acquire and destroy.
Such an opportunity would be much more limited in the case of similar types of mass attacks from North Korea against South Korea. AWACS will certainly be tremendously helpful in the case of defending South Korea from this type of attack, but the engagement-rate limitations of combat aircraft against very large numbers of drones and cruise missiles would make the effectiveness of this kind of combat-air defense much lower than was the case for the Israeli defense against Iran.
Another very serious problem that analysts will need to consider is that commercially available technology is now good enough for constructing cruise missiles and drones that have limited but usefull capabilities to “recognize” their targets and home on them.
On September 14, 2019 Iranian produced cruise missiles were used to attack the Abqaiq Oil Facility in Saudi Arabia. The nature of the damage to the facility indicated that the cruise missiles had an effective accuracy of perhaps a few feet, much more precise than could be achieved with GPS guidance.
I have analyzed the situation, and have concluded that commercially available optical and computational technology is more than capable of being adapted to a cruise missile guidance system to give it very high precision homing capability. The proof of this conclusion is in the satellite photograph below:
as can be seen from this satellite image produced by the company Digital Globe and paid for and released by the US government. It shows that four cruise missiles struck four oil processing tanks at Abqaiq at essentially the same point on each of the tanks. Such precision could not possibly be achieved with GPS guidance alone.
In order to convince myself that my conclusion that the optical homing could be done with nothing more than satellite data, I stimulated the homing process by taking the satellite image of a single isolated oil processing tank,
I then performed a well-known procedure called “image cross-correlation” on the original satellite images of the tanks.
The correlation “functions” that were produced by this very simple computer experiment are shown below,
And the results are projected onto an actual satellite photograph of the tanks, showing that the correlation methodology provides very high precision in identifying the central location on a tank that is to be hit.
Since the optical and computational systems needed to perform these correlations in near-real-time on a homing missile are well within the capabilities of commercial cameras and computer chips (NVidia chips are well up to the job), it is my conclusion that the Iranians have already developed precision guided cruise missiles and drones.
The implications of this are clear.
The cost of shooting down cruise missiles and drones will be very high and might well be unsustainable unless extremely inexpensive and effective anti-air systems can be implemented.
It is certainly possible to shoot down drones and cruise missiles with antiaircraft guns, although these systems will be of limited range and will need to be relatively close to targets they are defending.
At this time, no one has demonstrated a cost-effective defense system that can intercept ballistic missiles with any reliability. So far, even Iron Dome has been a failure against artillery rockets, which are of quite short range and are of quite simple and inexpensive.
The Israelis claim an outrageous cost per Iron Dome interceptor of between $60,000 and $80,000 an interceptor. It seems that this claim must be untrue.
Similarly sophisticated interceptors, whether they are the Javelin antitank missile, which costs about $200,000 each or the AIM-9x air-to-air missile are tremendously more expensive.
The Israelis Iron Dome system has been to a very good first approximation completely funded by the US government. Any consideration for purchasing the system must be accompanied by proof it can work in combat and by accurate cost estimates of the different components.
Only then should any consideration be given to whether or not purchase Iron Dome.
I have a lot more I can say about these issues, but I fear I have probably already overwhelmed you with details that raise many more questions that I am not sure I can answer.
Those people who advocate buying these active defenses should be asked to provide data that shows what I have collected herein and elsewhere is not supported by the facts.
Anyone who advocates a defense approach for their country should be able to show that they have a fully reasoned argument, which includes information about the effectiveness of the strategy and its affordability.
Wishful thinking, like what has happened in Ukraine, will at best be a recipe for tremendous expenditures for little capability.
I would welcome to hear the arguments of those who want to make such purchases. I am open to learning and to obtaining data that could lead me to a different conclusion.
Persuading any Southern autoworkers to join a union had long been one of the U.S. labor movement’s most enduring challenges, despite persistent efforts by the UAW to organize this workforce.
The victory follows the UAW’s most successful strike in a generation against Detroit’s Big Three automakers, through which it won higher pay and better benefits for its members in 2023.
Volkswagen said it will await certification of the results by the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency responsible for enforcing U.S. workers’ rights to organize. As long as neither side challenges the results within five business days, the NLRB will certify them – greenlighting the start of bargaining over a contract.
Based on my five decades of experience as a union organizer and labor historian, I anticipate that, recent momentum aside, the UAW will face resistance from the other foreign automakers that operate in the South. The pushback is also coming from Southern politicians, many of whom have expressed concern that UAW success would undermine the region’s carefully crafted approach to economic development.
But the outcome of this first election among Volkswagen’s more than 4,300 workers in Tennessee who were eligible to vote represents an impressive first step in the union’s ambitious campaign to organize foreign-owned automakers in the South and other nonunion factories across the country. With about 73% of the workers who voted choosing to say “yes,” according to the company and additional sources, I believe that this historic victory will boost UAW organizing in the South and will likely inspire other workers seeking to unionize their workplaces.
Lauding the ‘perfect three-legged stool’
After the region’s formerly robust textile industry imploded in the 1980s and 1990s because of an influx of cheap imports, Southern business and political leaders revived the region’s manufacturing base by successfully recruiting foreign automakers.
The strategy of those leaders reflects what the Business Council of Alabama has described as the “perfect three-legged stool for economic development.” It consists of “an eager and trainable workforce with a work ethic unparalleled anywhere in the nation,” accompanied by a “low-cost and business-friendly economic climate, and the lack of labor union activity and participation.”
The prospect of a low-wage and reliable workforce has lured the likes of Nissan, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, Honda, Volkswagen and Hyundai to the South in recent decades.
Although many of those companies negotiate constructively with unions on their home turf, the lack of union membership and the protections that go with it have proved a draw for them in the United States.
Blaming unions for bad job prospects
One way automotive employers in the South have blocked unions is by portraying them as outdated institutions whose bloated contracts and rigid work rules destroy jobs by making domestic auto companies uncompetitive.
Automotive executives in the South argue the region has developed an alternative labor relations model that provides management with flexibility, offers wages and benefits superior to what local workers have earned previously and frees employees from any subordination to union directives.
With the UAW ramping up its organizing efforts again, Southern governors are sounding alarms once more.
On the eve of the Volkswagen election in Chattanooga, six of these governors issued a joint statement denouncing the UAW as a “special interest” that would “threaten our jobs and the values we live by.” They asserted that a vote for the UAW would undermine their ability to attract auto manufacturers and “stop growth in its tracks.”
Although these arguments from anti-union politicians haven’t changed much over the years, the context certainly has.
The UAW’s big wins on pay and benefits resulting from its 2023 strike against General Motors, Ford and Stellantis have increased its clout and credibility.
Many automakers with a U.S. workforce not covered by the UAW – including Volkswagen, Honda, Hyundai and other foreign transplants – responded by raising pay at their Southern plants. The union justifiably describes those raises as a “UAW bump.”
The UAW is citing these pay hikes in its outreach to workers at Tesla and other nonunion companies.
“Nonunion autoworkers are being left behind,” the UAW’s recruiting website warns. “Are you ready to stand up and win your fair share?”
The pitch continues: “It’s time for nonunion autoworkers to join the UAW and win economic justice at Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Tesla, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Subaru, Volkswagen, Mazda, Rivian, Lucid, Volvo and beyond.”
Some Southern autoworkers, meanwhile, have been expressing concerns over scheduling, safety, two-tier wage systems and workloads that they believe a union could help resolve.
It’s also clear they’ve been emboldened by the gains they have seen UAW members make.
Revving up
The UAW’s campaign is just starting to rev up. And the timing is ideal.
A 2023 National Labor Relations Board ruling provides unions with additional leverage in this process. If management refuses to grant the union’s request for recognition, the employer would then be required to seek an NLRB representation election.
To win, unions normally need a majority of those voting. But in accordance with the new ruling, if management is found to have interfered with workers’ rights during the election process, it could then be required to bargain with the union.
I believe that the stakes are high for all workers, not just those in the auto industry.
As D. Taylor, the president of Unite Here, a union that represents workers in a wide range of occupations, recently observed: “If you change the South, you change America.”
A recent survey from YouGov found that 61% of Americans think a world war within the next five to ten years is “very likely” or “somewhat likely,” while only 21% say that such a scenario is “not very likely” or “not likely at all.”
It’s notable that Democrats, who are much more likely to view Russia as the source of the world’s evils, are less likely than Republicans to believe a world war is coming by a strong margin; although it is still only 28% of Democrats in the two “unlikely” categories. At the same time, Republicans who may want rapprochement with Russia mostly see this as a way to free up resources to fight China. The reality is that our ruling class has decided that a global conflict is inevitable and as such are doing nothing to stop it. Further, they are actively hostile to anything which could reduce hostilities with Russia while also proactively antagonizing China.
Our ruling class is far along in creating a simplistic good vs evil narrative which they hope to get into the history books—should anyone survive to write them—but for those of us living through it, it’s obvious the only cause would be the madness of today’s rulers. The most devastating of wars do not commonly arise out of unsolvable problems, but from rulers who refuse to solve them. Further, the drive towards oblivion is usually obvious to many observers, even if the rulers and much of the public are caught in a jingoistic mania. Things are just the same today.
There is a modern perception that World War I took the powers of Europe by surprise and that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was a spark which made war inevitable. Perhaps this is believed because of the human need to understand the degree of devastation from a war which more than others lacks a clear meaning. However, author Rebecca West, in her landmark text Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which was written in the 1930s, tells a different story. West explains that all of Europe expected that the Central Powers were preparing for an aggressive war, writing, “It is said that both France and Russia were for some reason convinced that Germany and Austria would not make war until 1916, and certainly that alone would explain the freedom with which Russia announced to various interested parties in the early months of 1914 that she herself was not ready to fight.”1
According to West’s account, Austria then worked quite hard to make the assassination their pretext although the plot had almost no connection to the Kingdom of Serbia. This isn’t a perfect parallel to our moment, but it’s notable that no one was trying to stop the war; they simply wanted time to arm themselves. Similarly, Germany and other countries in Europe have not hidden their current lack of preparedness, but made it clear their interest isn’t avoiding war, but fighting one. In the classic satirical antiwar novel The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Havec, the author repeatedly includes the line “an empire this stupid shouldn’t exist” in regards to the Austro-Hungarian ruling class; because of the war they, launched it soon wouldn’t.
The closest parallel to the dangers arising from the war in Ukraine comes from the first book of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. The most immediate cause of the war was civil dissension within a colony leading to conflict with the mother city, and ultimately seeking the protection of that city’s enemy. However, what has gotten more notice recently about this text is one passage that is applied to China, which is now known as the Thucydides Trap. Thucydides wrote, “The real cause however, I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.” For all that people have commented on this, it is not that incisive to say that one country’s power growing would alarm another country. What is more commonly missed is that no one forced Athens to expand recklessly to the extent that it caused war with Sparta. It was an unforced error which caused them the briefest moment of greatness followed by utter devastation. On the other side, no one forced Sparta to respond with war, and Sparta’s post-war supremacy was also short-lived. Unfortunately the leaders on both sides chose conflict over co-existence, and in many ways Greece never recovered from that war and the ones which followed.
In America it is part of our founding mythology that War of Independence against the United Kingdom was inevitable because of conflicting interests between the Americans and the British. However, if one reads key British authors of the time, it is clear that the wiser men of the era knew that the British government was barreling towards a devastating and pointless war for no good reason. The reality is that the volume of trade in the British American colonies was growing so rapidly that peaceful reconciliation at any cost was in Britain’s self-interest; The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776 and contains some incredible statistics in this regard. Directly taxing the American public instead of levying taxes from their colonial governments was in no way a point worth proving, especially given the profitability of peace and trade.
Edmund Burke was a leader of the peace faction in the British Parliament and his timeless words about avoiding war should be remembered. Burke wrote, in March 1775, “The proposition is Peace. Not Peace through the medium of War; not Peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negociations; not Peace to arise out of universal discord…not Peace to depend on the Juridical Determination of perplexing questions…it is simply Peace; sought in its natural course…laid in principles purely pacific”2 It is obvious in our current times that peace could be preserved with Russia and China if it was approached with this principle, but that is considered out of the question by our rulers.
The world is currently a tinderbox and every day we watch our rulers pour on more gasoline and throw out extinguishers. I have to wonder what our descendants will think of us and the war which seems to be coming. There is certainly no chance that they can create a clear World War II sort of narrative about this. I often think of the European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen saying, “Ukrainians are ready to die for the European perspective,” a statement which should only exist as a parody of the vapid state of Western “values.” They want us to believe Vladimir Putin is obsessed with rolling his tanks across Europe, but that makes no sense and clearly isn’t possible. They certainly can’t admit the lengths they went to in order to provoke Russia into war in Ukraine.
There is absolutely no justification for not doing the work necessary for a lasting and equitable peace with Russia and China. When all is said and done, if there are people left to comment on the causes of the Third World War that so many think we are about to experience, perhaps people will say the same as the famous character Captain Edmund Blackadder said of World War I, “the real reason for the whole thing was that it was too much effort not to have a war.” The majority of the American public thinks countless millions will die in a new world war, and if that comes to pass, it will be because our rulers found going to war easier than making peace.
គ្មានការសង្ស័យទេ នេះគឺនៅពីក្រោយការចាប់អារម្មណ៍ដ៏ពេញនិយមនៅក្នុងខ្សែភាពយន្តនេះ។ Civil War គឺជាភាពយន្តលេខមួយនៅ Box Office អាមេរិកខាងជើងកាលពីចុងសប្តាហ៍មុន ដោយវ៉ាដាច់ Godzilla x Kong ជាមួយនឹងការលក់សំបុត្រប្រមាណ 25.7 លានដុល្លារ។
Civil War ដើរតួជា Kirsten Dunst ជាអ្នកកាសែតរូបថត Lee Smith ដោយ Wagner Moura ដើរតួជាមិត្តរួមការងាររបស់ Lee គឺ Joel ។ Cailee Spaeny ដើរតួជា Jessie Cullen ដែលជាអ្នកកាសែតវ័យក្មេងដែលធ្វើអោយតួឯករបស់ Dunst ។ ‘អ្នកកាសែត’ នៅក្នុងភាពយន្តប្រើការថត មិនមែនវីដេអូទេ។ សាលាចាស់ត្រជាក់។ តួឯកប្រុសដ៏ឆ្នើម Stephen McKinley Henderson ប្រមូលផ្តុំតួសំខាន់ជា Sammy ដែលយើងត្រូវបានប្រាប់ថា គឺជាអ្នកកាសែតម្នាក់ក្នុងចំណោមអ្នកកាសែតមួយចំនួនដែលនៅសល់នៅ New York Times ។
ក្នុងលំដាប់មួយដែលមានអ្នកលបបាញ់ម្នាក់និងទាហានពីរនាក់ដែលគាត់បានខ្ទាស់នោះ Joel សួរទាហានថាពួកគេនៅខាងណា ហើយខាងណាដែលអ្នកលបបាញ់ប្រយុទ្ធដើម្បី។ Garland រៀបរាប់ពីលំដាប់ដែលជាផ្នែកមួយនៃការសម្ភាសន៍របស់ Times ដោយដកស្រង់ចេញពីការសន្ទនាដែលគាត់បានសរសេរ។
Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israeli military sites on April 13-14 signals a tectonic shift in the regional balance of power. While the media remains preoccupied with the number of outdated Iranian drones that were shot down during the onslaught, military analysts are far more focused on the way that Iran’s ballistic missiles cut through Israel’s vaunted air defense systems striking sites at the Nevatim and Negev Air Bases.
What the operation proved is that Israel’s “deterrents supremacy” is largely a fiction based on overly optimistic assumptions about the performance of their air defense capability. When put to the test, these systems failed to stop many of the larger and more destructive ballistic missiles from hitting their targets. This, in turn, revealed that Israel’s most heavily-defended and critically-important military sites remain overly-exposed to enemy attack.
More importantly, any future attack will not be announced days in advance nor will Iran attempt to avoid high-value targets or heavy casualties. Instead, they will use their most lethal and state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles to inflict as much death and destruction on Israel as is required to make sure that the Jewish state is unable to lift a hand against Iran in the future. In short, what Iran’s historic attack on Israel shows is that any future provocation by Israel will be met by an immediate and overwhelming response that will leave Israel battered, bloodied and broken. This is an excerpt from a recent article by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter:
Iran’s purpose in launching the attack was to establish a deterrence posture designed to put Israel and the United States on notice that any attack against Iran, whether on Iranian soil or on the territory of other nations, would trigger a retaliation which would inflict more damage on the attacker than the attacker could hope to inflict on Iran. To achieve this result, Iran had to prove itself capable of overcoming the ballistic missile defense systems of both Israel and the United States which were deployed in and around Israel at the time of the attack. This Iran was able to accomplish, with at least nine missiles striking two Israeli air bases that fell under the protective umbrella of the Israeli-US missile defense shield.
The Iranian deterrence posture has implications that reach far beyond the environs of Israel or the Middle East. By defeating the US-Israeli missile defense shield, Iran exposed the notion of US missile defense supremacy that serves as the heart of US force protection models used when projecting military power on a global scale. The US defensive posture vis-à-vis Russia, China, and North Korea hinges on assumptions made regarding the efficacy of US ballistic missile defense capabilities. By successfully attacking Israeli air bases which had the benefit of the full range of US anti-ballistic missile technology, Iran exposed the vulnerability of the US missile defense shield to modern missile technologies involving maneuverable warheads, decoys, and hypersonic speed. US bases in Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East once thought to be well-protected, have suddenly been revealed to be vulnerable to hostile attack. So, too, are US Navy ships operating at sea. Checkmate, Scott Ritter, Substack
Keep in mind, that the Iranian government has not officially confirmed that it used its most technologically-advanced hypersonic glide vehicles in the assault. Most weapons experts, like Ritter, believe they only used their older, less advanced missiles in order to conceal the dramatic improvements to their stockpile. Even so, Iran was able to put five ballistic missiles on their target at the Nevatim Air Base and another four at the Negev Air Base, arguably two of the most heavily-protected bases in the world today. In short, Iran was able to slip by Israel’s robust radar and air defense systems and deliver a blow at the heart of the Israeli war machine using second class munitions and technology. Imagine the damage they would inflict if they felt forced to use their unstoppable hypersonic missiles. This is why it is unlikely that Netanyahu will order a direct attack on Iranian territory. The consequences for Israel would be nothing short of catastrophic. Here’s more from Ritter:
“My understanding is that Iran used 3 types of ballistic missiles. One ballistic missile uses a warhead that separates and then burst-fires a number of decoys that are specifically designed to attract Iron Dome missiles. …so, Iron Dome will fire 25 interceptors…Meanwhile smaller more maneuverable warheads burst through those interceptors and hit the Israeli air defense systems… and that appears to be the case. So, they are telling the Israelis ‘How we are going to take you out’... The next thing we see, is missiles coming in that the warheads separate from the missile body and then there is a booster engine on the warhead that drives it down into the ground blowing away any ability for radar intercept hitting the target. And what this does is clear the space, clear all the air defense. and the final thing is these heavy warheads that come off the heavy missiles that hit the runways and blew the big craters in them. This was a three-layered ballistic missile attack that was specifically designed by the Iranians to destroy Israeli air defense to clear the way to show the Israelis that we can put the big warheads on the target anywhere in Israel we want to. This was successful, and the beauty of this is, they didn’t use their best missiles…. This was just a single strike-package. …Iran can repeat this process all day long and what they’ve showed Israel is that “This is what we can do.” And I guarantee you that their are intelligence officers like me writing reports right now telling Israel, “Stop all the nonsense. We can’t win this war. It’s over, guys. We have no defense here. If Iran wants to come in, we are powerless. Stop it now.” The Missiles of April, Scott Ritter, You Tube; 6:30 minute mark
Notice the difference between ‘weapons pro’ Ritter’s analysis and the nonsense in the western media. Here’s a short blurb from a piece at the Jerusalem Post which captures the flavor of most of the articles published in the MSM since the attack:
Iran’s weekend drone and missile attack on Israel was an “embarrassing failure,” the US said, stressing that it highlighted the IDF’s defensive prowess as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet weighed reprisal actions.
“I’ve seen reporting that the Iranians meant to fail that this spectacular and embarrassing failure was all by design,” US National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby told reporters in Washington on Monday…
“Let’s be straight, given the scale of this attack, Iran’s intent was clearly to cause significant destruction and casualties,” Kirby said as he spoke of how a coalition of five armies — Israel, the US, Jordan, France, and Great Britain — repelled over 300 missiles and drone targeting the Jewish state. Iran’s attack is an ‘embarrassing failure,’ a success for Israel, says US, Jerusalem Post
If it was Iran’s intention to cause “significant destruction and casualties”, then why didn’t they bomb downtown Tel Aviv or Haifa? Wouldn’t that have made more sense? And why did Iran communicate their plans 72 hours in advance to everyone, including the United States via the Saudis? And, if the attack was such an “embarrassing failure”, then why is Israel still hesitating to strike back?
The fact is, the Israeli war cabinet has already met four times since the incident and has not yet decided how to respond. Why?
Because Iran’s deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri has told Israel in no uncertain terms that if they launch another attack on Iran, they should expect to “get hit harder, faster, and with more immediacy.” So, the flexibility Israel has enjoyed for the last two decades, of bombing and assassinating its neighbors whenever it gets the urge, is over. Just like Israel’s long streak of impunity is over. Tehran has thrown down the gauntlet and let it be known that it if Israel crosses its red lines, there’s going to be a war.
Indeed, Iran will be better prepared and will do everything in their power to overwhelm the enemy and bring this decades-long confrontation to a swift and decisive end. We’ll let Ritter have the last word:
The failure of the combined US-Israeli defense systems in the face of a concerted Iranian missile attack exposed the short-comings of the US ballistic missile defense capabilities world-wide… This means that the US and NATO forces in Europe are vulnerable to attack from advanced Russian missile technologies which match or exceed those used by Iran to attack Israel. It also means that China would most likely be able to strike and sink US navy ships in the Pacific Ocean in the event of a conflict over Taiwan…. And that North Korea could do the same to US ships and forces ashore in the vicinity of Japan and South Korea… The global strategic implications of this stunning Iranian accomplishment are game-changing... Checkmate, Scott Ritter, Substack
It would be wise for the Israeli leadership to mull over what Ritter has to say before stumbling blindly into a war they will certainly lose.
Фильм без политики и социального контекста. «Гражданская война 19 апреля» — это боевик студии A24, действие которого происходит в ближайшем будущем Америки, в разгар продолжающейся междоусобной войны между федеральным правительством, несколькими штатами и конкурирующими силами ополчения.
Номинальная тема фильма — Соединенные Штаты на последних этапах гражданской войны, поставившей общество на грань варварства, — явно имеет огромную актуальность и интерес. Фильм был выпущен в разгар избирательной кампании 2024 года и чуть более трех лет спустя после беспорядков Джорджа Флойда в США летом 2020 года или предполагаемого невооруженного «переворота» 6 января 2021 года, в ходе которого действующий президент пытался заявить, что демократы будут обманывать и подтасовывать результаты выборов, а также пытался остановить передачу власти посредством юридического маневра, препятствующего сертификации. В Техасе произошли столкновения между вооруженными подразделениями Национальной гвардии Техаса и вооруженными агентами Федеральной таможни США, которые проводили иммигрантов через границу и открывали заборы для вновь прибывших. Нынешний лидер Республиканской партии в борьбе за выдвижение в президенты, Трамп, предстает перед судом во многих штатах демократами, а в некоторых штатах не участвует в голосовании.
Несомненно, именно это и стало причиной широкого общественного интереса к фильму. «Гражданская война» стала фильмом номер один по кассовым сборам в Северной Америке в прошлые выходные, обогнав «Годзиллу х Конг» с продажами билетов примерно в 25,7 миллиона долларов.
Однако Гражданская война в конечном итоге ничего не объясняет. Более того, он пытается сделать добродетелью даже не пытаться сделать это.
В фильме рассказывается о путешествии и внутренней борьбе горстки репортеров и фотожурналистов, направляющихся из Нью-Йорка в осажденный Белый дом, чтобы услышать последние слова и «последний выстрел» президента-диктатора перед его уходом. Да, собеседование требуется. Это похоже на поездку в Берлин, Германия, в апреле 1945 года, чтобы посмотреть, можно ли получить «интервью» с Гитлером, чтобы узнать его реакцию на текущие события.
В фильме «Гражданская война» Кирстен Данст играет фотожурналиста Ли Смита, а Вагнер Моура играет коллегу Ли-репортера Джоэла. Кейли Спэни играет Джесси Каллен, молодую фотожурналистку, которая боготворит персонажа Данст. «Фотожурналисты» в фильме используют кадры, а не видео. Старая школа крутая. Превосходный характерный актер Стивен МакКинли Хендерсон завершает основной состав в роли Сэмми, который, как нам говорят, является одним из немногих оставшихся журналистов в New York Times.
По пути журналисты в своих касках, бронежилетах и дорогих фотоаппаратах становятся свидетелями и фотографируют сцены суммарных казней, пыток, перестрелок и других форм насилия. Первые две трети фильма героиня Данст холодно фотографирует кровавую бойню, в то время как ее честолюбивая протеже Джесси, очевидно, все еще цепляющаяся за свою человечность, рушится и плачет. В последней трети фильма пара меняется ролями перед смертельным и крайне неудовлетворительным финалом.
Ник Офферман, известный по роли человеконенавистнического бюрократа-либертарианца в комедийном телешоу «Парки и зоны отдыха», имеет всего несколько минут экранного времени в роли неназванного президента Соединенных Штатов. Его политические мотивы, его политика и к какой партии он принадлежит, неизвестны, хотя его личность отдаленно напоминает Трампа, и, как говорят, он баллотировался на третий срок. Есть мимолетные упоминания о бомбардировках собственного народа, казнях журналистов на Южной лужайке Белого дома и роспуске ФБР.
Еще одним примечательным персонажем в фильме является Джесси Племонс, который в титрах не указан в роли нервирующего милиционера в розовых очках и с М-16. В своей единственной сцене Племонс угрожающе допрашивает журналистов, спрашивая каждого из них, что может иметь смертельные последствия: «Какой вы американец?»
Режиссером и сценаристом фильма выступил британский писатель, сценарист и режиссер Алекс Гарланд. Среди его предыдущих писательских работ — захватывающий зомби-фильм «28 дней спустя» (2002) и сверхжестокий «Дредд» (2012). В 2015 году состоялся режиссерский дебют Гарленда с интересным научно-фантастическим триллером «Из машины». В центре этого фильма – программист, его правый босс-миллиардер и реалистичные и умные роботы, созданные компанией.
В интервью Гарланд заявил, что завершил сценарий «Гражданской войны» до 6 января 2021 года. И хотя в фильме время от времени появляются кадры протестующих и ОМОН, сражающихся на улицах (которые прерываются взрывом бомбы), что больше всего в нем поражает это то, чего он не делает. В фильме нет никаких попыток каким-либо образом рассмотреть политические, социальные и исторические обстоятельства, вызвавшие гражданскую войну, которая является предметом фильма.
В интервью газете «Нью-Йорк Таймс», опубликованном на выходных, Гарланд заявляет: «Я думаю, что гражданская война — это просто продолжение ситуации… Эта ситуация — это поляризация и отсутствие ограничивающих сил для поляризации». Что касается того, что вызывает поляризацию и почему для нее нет ограничений, он молчит и, по-видимому, совершенно не размышляет, как и его интервьюер.
«Гражданская война» представляет собой серию изображений, демонстрирующих жестокое насилие, вспыхивающее не в какой-то далекой стране, а на городских улицах, в зеленых пригородных кварталах и, казалось бы, тихих сельских городках Соединенных Штатов. Но нет никакого «почему», нет даже намека на мотивы участников, не говоря уже о более фундаментальном «почему», исследующем социальные силы, которые порождают мотивы в сознании мужчин и женщин.
В одном из эпизодов, в котором участвуют снайпер и два солдата, которых он прижал, Джоэл спрашивает солдат, на чьей стороне они и на какой стороне сражается снайпер. Гарланд рассказывает этот эпизод в своем интервью Times, цитируя написанный им диалог.
На вопрос, на чьей они стороне, один солдат отвечает: «Вы не понимаете ни слова из того, что я говорю». Он поворачивается к Джесси: «Йоу. Что там, в этом доме?» Джесси отвечает: «Кто-то стреляет». Этот ответ удовлетворил солдата.
Гарланд продолжает своим собственным голосом: «Это связано с тем фактом, что, когда ситуация становится экстремальной, причины, по которым ситуация дошла до крайности, больше не становятся актуальными, и острие проблемы — это все, что действительно остается актуальным. Так что в этом контексте на самом деле не имеет значения, за какую сторону они сражаются или за что сражается другой человек. Это просто сводится к выживанию».
Здесь буквальное бездумие является предполагаемым эффектом.
По ходу фильма героиня Данст объясняет, что она отправила обратно свои фотографии из заграничных конфликтов, чтобы сказать американцам: не делайте этого. Как на уроках безопасного вождения, когда показывают кадры автокатастроф, чтобы предупредить новых водителей об опасности.
Режиссер Гарленд, очевидно, придерживается такого же отношения к фильму в целом: «Не устраивайте гражданской войны, потому что это было бы ужасно». Но без какого-либо изучения причин такое предупреждение, каким бы благим оно ни было, не имеет смысла.
Отказ принять чью-либо сторону или изображение обеих сторон как по сути эквивалентных не служит никакой цели, художественной или иной. В отличие от Гарленда, гражданская война – это не просто вопрос неспособности людей контролировать свои разногласия. Чтобы общество раскололось на враждующие лагеря, должны быть более глубокие причины, и кинорежиссер не может избежать своей позиции.
Представьте себе, что вы изображаете Гражданскую войну в США 1861–1865 годов, не занимая при этом позиции по вопросу рабства. Кровопролития будет много, но все это будет бессмысленная резня. Такое отношение в конечном итоге привело бы к описанию конфликта как «Войны между штатами», как ее назвали апологеты Конфедерации, в которой не было ни исторического права, ни морального превосходства, занимаемого Линкольном и силами Союза. Предполагаемый нейтралитет на самом деле будет маскировать проконфедеративную позицию.
В фильме Гарленда столько дыр в сюжете, что это скорее дыра, чем сюжет.
Нет никаких объяснений, почему «западные силы», очевидно, состоящие из техасцев и калифорнийцев всех рас и классов, решили поднять оружие против правительства США. Можно подумать, что правительство Калифорнии более пролиберально-демократическое, а правительство Техаса — республиканское и популистское. Зачем этим двум штатам быть вместе? Не думайте об этом слишком много.
Также нет объяснений по поводу других фракций, которые кратко упоминаются в фильме, включая «Флоридский альянс», включающий несколько южных штатов, и «Новую народную армию», состоящую из нескольких штатов на северо-западе Тихого океана. Очевидно, существуют «лоялистские» территории, простирающиеся через Средний Запад и в Новую Англию, хотя в таком случае, почему президент остается в Вашингтоне, а не отступает на более безопасную территорию?
В одной из сцен оператор заправочной станции отвергает американские доллары как бесполезные, но охотно принимает канадские счета. Таким образом, очевидно, что гражданская война, бушующая в Соединенных Штатах, не оказала существенного влияния на их северного соседа. Это лишь самый очевидный геополитический абсурд в представлении гражданской войны в США – в XXI веке! – как чисто национального события.
Отказ принять чью-либо сторону или даже дать связное описание сторон, возможно, был, как говорит Гарланд, художественным выбором, каким бы ошибочным он ни был. Но, скорее всего, продюсеры и дистрибьюторы поддержали его по другим, гораздо более корыстным причинам. В конце концов, вы не хотите снимать фильм, который может оттолкнуть часть публики, которая ходит в кино и покупает билеты.
Этот неудачный вывод подтверждается, когда персонаж фильма говорит, что Ли Смит (Данст) впервые оставила свой след фотографиями «резни против антифа». Отсылка настолько намеренно эллиптическая, что зритель понятия не имеет, была ли это резня, устроенная «антифа» против незадачливых автомобилистов, сигналивших протестующим, блокирующим улицы, или антифашисты сами были убиты враждебными элементами.
Важно отметить, что фильм не дает ни малейшего намека на роль огромной американской военной машины в гражданской войне, которая ведется в основном с использованием стрелкового оружия и ручных ракетных установок, с последующим добавлением джипов и вертолетов. Никакой артиллерии, никаких крылатых ракет, никакого воздушного боя и, очевидно, никакого ядерного оружия малой мощности.
В отличие от превосходного американского фильма 1964 года «Семь дней в мае», в котором изображен военный переворот в США, «Гражданская война» не углубляется в ту решающую роль, которую американские военные должны будут сыграть в поддержке диктатуры в США. Революция — это не борьба против армии, революция — это борьба за армию.
Вместо серьезного исследования того, как гражданское общество и власть разумных социальных законов могут и разрушаются в Соединенных Штатах, в фильме чередуются напряженные моменты крайнего или потенциального насилия, за которыми следуют сцены путешествий под аккомпанемент поп-песен. и дискуссии о роли «объективной» фотожурналистики во время войны.
После шести месяцев геноцида в секторе Газа, в ходе которого героические журналисты рисковали своей жизнью, подробно описывая ежедневные преступления израильского правительства, поддерживаемого Соединенными Штатами и их союзниками, заявление персонажа Данст о нейтралитете и объективности, когда он фотографировал массовых захоронений мирных жителей могилы или взорваны во время выпрашивания воды для некоторых изнашиваются.
В целом, «Гражданская война» совершенно не способна реализовать то, что могло бы стать убедительной предпосылкой.
Civil War est un film d’action des studios A24 qui se déroule dans le futur proche d’une Amérique au milieu d’une guerre intestine en cours entre le gouvernement fédéral, plusieurs États et les milices rivales.
Le sujet nominal du film – les États-Unis dans les dernières étapes d’une guerre civile qui a amené la société au bord de la barbarie – est clairement d’une immense pertinence et d’un immense intérêt. Le film est sorti en pleine campagne électorale de 2024 et un peu plus de trois ans après les émeutes de George Floyd aux États-Unis à l’été 2020, ou le prétendu « coup d’État » non armé du 6 janvier 2021, au cours duquel le président sortant a tenté de prétendre que les démocrates tricheraient et voleraient une élection et a tenté d’arrêter le transfert de pouvoir par une manœuvre légale empêchant la certification. Au Texas, des affrontements ont eu lieu entre les troupes armées de la Garde nationale du Texas et les agents armés des douanes fédérales américaines qui guident les immigrants à travers la frontière et ouvrent les barrières aux nouveaux arrivants. L’actuel favori du Parti républicain à l’investiture présidentielle, Trump, est traduit en justice dans de nombreux États par les démocrates et exclu du scrutin dans certains États.
C’est sans aucun doute ce qui explique l’intérêt populaire généralisé pour le film. Civil War a été le film numéro un au box-office nord-américain le week-end dernier, dépassant Godzilla x Kong, avec des ventes de billets estimées à 25,7 millions de dollars.
Cependant, Civil War ne fournit finalement aucune explication. En fait, il tente de faire valoir le fait de ne même pas essayer de le faire.
Le film se concentre sur le voyage et les luttes internes d’une poignée de journalistes et de photojournalistes alors qu’ils se dirigent de New York vers la Maison Blanche assiégée pour obtenir les derniers mots et le « dernier plan » d’un président-dictateur sur sa sortie. Oui, un entretien est demandé. Un peu comme aller à Berlin, en Allemagne, en avril 1945, pour voir si l’on pouvait obtenir « une interview » avec Hitler pour connaître ses réactions aux événements actuels.
Civil War met en vedette Kirsten Dunst dans le rôle du photojournaliste Lee Smith, avec Wagner Moura dans le rôle du collègue journaliste de Lee, Joel. Cailee Spaeny incarne Jessie Cullen, une jeune photojournaliste qui idolâtre le personnage de Dunst. Les « photojournalistes » du film utilisent des images fixes et non des vidéos. C’est cool la vieille école. L’excellent acteur Stephen McKinley Henderson complète le casting principal dans le rôle de Sammy, qui, nous dit-on, est l’un des rares journalistes restants du New York Times.
Tout au long du trajet, les journalistes, avec leurs casques de presse, leurs gilets pare-balles et leurs coûteux appareils photo, assistent et photographient des scènes d’exécutions sommaires, de torture, d’échanges de tirs et d’autres violences. Pendant les deux premiers tiers du film, le personnage de Dunst photographie froidement le carnage tandis que son aspirante protégée Jessie, apparemment toujours accrochée à son humanité, s’effondre et pleure. Dans le dernier tiers du film, les deux hommes inversent les rôles, avant la conclusion mortelle et profondément insatisfaisante.
Nick Offerman, célèbre pour avoir joué un bureaucrate libertaire misanthrope dans la série télévisée comique Parks and Recreation, ne dispose que de quelques minutes à l’écran dans le rôle du président anonyme des États-Unis. Ses motivations politiques, sa politique et le parti auquel il appartient sont inconnus, bien que sa personnalité soit vaguement trumpienne et qu’il se soit présenté pour un troisième mandat. Il y a des références passagères au bombardement de son propre peuple, à l’exécution de journalistes sur la pelouse sud de la Maison Blanche et à la dissolution du FBI.
Une autre performance notable du film est celle de Jesse Plemons, qui fait une apparition non crédité en tant que milicien déconcertant arborant des lunettes teintées en rose et un M-16. Dans son unique scène, Plemons interroge les journalistes de manière menaçante, leur demandant à chacun, avec des conséquences potentiellement mortelles : « Quel genre d’Américain êtes-vous ?
Le film a été écrit et réalisé par l’auteur, scénariste et réalisateur britannique Alex Garland. Ses précédents crédits d’écriture incluent le film de zombies captivant 28 jours plus tard (2002) et l’hyper-violent Dredd (2012). En 2015, Garland a fait ses débuts en tant que réalisateur avec l’intéressant thriller de science-fiction Ex Machina. Ce film est centré sur un programmeur informatique, son patron milliardaire de droite et les robots réalistes et intelligents créés par l’entreprise.
Dans des interviews, Garland a déclaré avoir terminé le scénario de Civil War avant le 6 janvier 2021. Et bien que le film présente occasionnellement des images de manifestants et de policiers anti-émeutes combattant dans les rues (interrompus par l’explosion d’une bombe), ce qui est le plus frappant c’est ce qu’il ne fait pas. Il n’y a aucune tentative d’aborder de quelque manière que ce soit les circonstances politiques, sociales et historiques qui ont produit la guerre civile qui fait l’objet du film.
Dans une interview accordée au New York Times publiée ce week-end, Garland déclare : « Je pense que la guerre civile n’est qu’une extension d’une situation… Cette situation est la polarisation et l’absence de forces limitantes sur la polarisation. » Quant aux causes de la polarisation et aux raisons pour lesquelles il n’y a pas de limites, il reste silencieux et apparemment totalement inconscient, tout comme son intervieweur.
Civil War propose une série d’images montrant une violence brutale qui explose, non pas dans un pays lointain, mais dans les rues des villes, les quartiers verdoyants des banlieues et les villes rurales apparemment calmes des États-Unis. Mais il n’y a pas de « pourquoi », pas même une allusion aux motivations des participants, sans parler du « pourquoi » plus fondamental, qui examine les forces sociales qui génèrent les motivations dans l’esprit des hommes et des femmes.
Dans une séquence impliquant un tireur d’élite et deux soldats qu’il a coincés, Joël demande aux soldats de quel côté ils se trouvent et pour quel camp le tireur d’élite se bat. Garland raconte la séquence dans le cadre de son interview au Times, citant le dialogue qu’il a écrit.
Un soldat répond à la question de savoir de quel côté ils sont : « Vous ne comprenez pas un mot de ce que je dis. » Il se tourne vers Jessie : « Yo. Qu’y a-t-il là-bas, dans cette maison ? Jessie répond: “Quelqu’un tire.” Cette réponse satisfait le soldat.
Garland poursuit, de sa propre voix : « Cela est dû au fait que lorsque les choses deviennent extrêmes, les raisons pour lesquelles les choses sont devenues extrêmes ne deviennent plus pertinentes et le tranchant du problème est tout ce qui reste vraiment pertinent. Dans ce contexte, peu importe donc peu importe pour quel camp on se bat ou pour quoi l’autre se bat. C’est juste réduit à une survie.
Ici, l’effet escompté est l’inconscience littérale.
Au cours du film, le personnage de Dunst explique qu’elle a renvoyé ses photos de conflits à l’étranger pour dire aux Américains de ne pas faire ça. Comme dans un cours de conduite sécuritaire, où ils montrent des images fixes d’accidents de voiture pour avertir les nouveaux conducteurs du danger.
Le réalisateur Garland adopte évidemment la même attitude à l’égard du film dans son ensemble : « Ne faites pas de guerre civile car ce serait terrible. » Mais sans examen des causes, un tel avertissement, aussi bien intentionné soit-il, n’a aucune substance.
Le refus de prendre parti, ou la représentation des deux côtés comme étant essentiellement équivalents, ne sert à rien, artistique ou autre. Une guerre civile n’est pas, contrairement à Garland, simplement une question d’incapacité des gens à contrôler leurs désaccords. Pour que la société se divise en camps belligérants, il doit y avoir des causes plus profondes, et le cinéaste ne peut éviter de prendre position.
Imaginez décrire la guerre civile américaine de 1861-1865 sans prendre position sur l’esclavage. Il y aurait beaucoup d’effusion de sang, mais ce serait un massacre inutile. Une telle attitude aboutirait finalement à une description du conflit comme « la guerre entre les États », comme l’ont qualifié les apologistes confédérés, dans laquelle il n’y avait aucun droit historique ni aucune hauteur morale occupée par Lincoln et les forces de l’Union. Une prétendue neutralité masquerait en réalité une position pro-confédérée.
Le film de Garland a tellement de trous dans l’intrigue qu’il est plus un trou qu’une intrigue.
Il n’y a aucune explication pour laquelle les « Forces occidentales », apparemment composées de Texans et de Californiens de toutes races et classes sociales, ont décidé de prendre les armes contre le gouvernement américain. On pourrait penser que le gouvernement de Californie est plus pro-libéral-démocrate et que le gouvernement du Texas est républicain et populiste, pourquoi ces deux États seraient-ils ensemble ? N’y pensez pas trop.
Il n’y a pas non plus d’explication pour les autres factions brièvement mentionnées dans le film, notamment « l’Alliance de Floride » qui comprend plusieurs États du sud, et la « Nouvelle Armée populaire », composée de plusieurs États du nord-ouest du Pacifique. Il existe apparemment des zones « loyalistes » qui s’étendent à travers le Midwest et jusqu’en Nouvelle-Angleterre, mais dans ce cas, pourquoi le président reste-t-il à Washington plutôt que de se retirer vers un territoire plus sûr ?
Dans une scène, un exploitant de station-service rejette les dollars américains comme étant sans valeur, mais accepte avec enthousiasme les factures canadiennes. Il est donc évident que la guerre civile qui fait rage aux États-Unis n’a eu aucun effet significatif sur son voisin du nord. Ce n’est là que l’absurdité géopolitique la plus évidente dans la présentation d’une guerre civile américaine – au XXIe siècle ! – comme un événement purement national.
Le refus de prendre parti ou même de fournir une description cohérente des deux côtés a peut-être été, comme le dit Garland, un choix artistique, aussi erroné soit-il. Mais il est probable que les producteurs et les distributeurs l’ont adopté pour d’autres raisons, bien plus mercantiles. Après tout, vous ne voulez pas faire un film qui pourrait aliéner une partie du public qui va au cinéma et achète des billets.
Cette conclusion malheureuse est renforcée lorsqu’un personnage du film affirme que Lee Smith (Dunst) a d’abord fait sa marque avec des photos du « massacre d’Antifa ». La référence est si délibérément elliptique que le spectateur ne sait pas s’il s’agit d’un massacre mené par des « antifas » contre de malheureux automobilistes klaxonnant contre les manifestants bloquant les rues ou si les antifascistes ont eux-mêmes été tués par des éléments hostiles.
Surtout, le film ne donne pas la moindre allusion au rôle de la vaste machine militaire américaine dans la guerre civile, qui est menée en grande partie avec des armes légères et des lance-roquettes portatifs, auxquels s’ajoutent ultérieurement des jeeps et des hélicoptères. Pas d’artillerie, pas de missiles de croisière, pas de combat aérien et, évidemment, pas d’armes nucléaires de faible puissance.
Contrairement à l’excellent film américain de 1964, Seven Days in May, qui dépeint un coup d’État militaire aux États-Unis, Civil War n’aborde pas le rôle critique que l’armée américaine devrait jouer dans le soutien d’une dictature aux États-Unis. Une révolution n’est pas une lutte contre l’armée, une révolution est une lutte pour l’armée.
Au lieu d’un examen sérieux de la façon dont la société civile et l’État de lois sociales raisonnables peuvent s’effondrer aux États-Unis, le film alterne des moments tendus de violence extrême ou potentielle, suivis de scènes de voyage accompagnées de chansons pop, et des discussions sur le rôle du photojournalisme « objectif » pendant la guerre.
Après six mois de génocide à Gaza, au cours desquels des journalistes héroïques ont risqué leur vie pour détailler les crimes quotidiens du gouvernement israélien, soutenu par les États-Unis et leurs alliés, la revendication de neutralité et d’objectivité du personnage de Dunst lorsqu’il photographie des civils enterrés en masse les tombes ou les explosions en mendiant de l’eau sont minces pour certains.
Dans l’ensemble, Civil War ne parvient pas complètement à répondre à ce qui pourrait être une prémisse convaincante.
The Second Round of Retaliation Between Israel and Iran Has Just Begun
Joe Biden is caught in a trap caused by his own weakness
• 2,200 WORDS •
Given the lying and fact twisting that have routinely been part and parcel of accounts of what is occurring in the Middle East, the past several weeks have nevertheless been shocking in terms of how an abysmally low standard of truth can be reduced even farther. Looking at developments objectively, one comes up with a series of facts. First of all, Israel was not at war with either Syria or Iran during the first weeks in April. Iran had never attacked Israel prior to that point and Syria last fought Israel in 1973, over fifty years ago. Israel, however, has regularly been assassinating Iranian officials and scientists and it has been frequently been bombing Syria since 2017, increasing the pace to weekly and sometimes even daily attacks over the past six months paralleling the Gaza fighting. A particularly devastating attack took place on March 29th when the Israeli military launched massive strikes against a weapons storage depot in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo which killed at least 40 people, most of them Syrian soldiers. The air strikes produced a series of explosions that also killed six Lebanese Hezbollah fighters.
But three days later on April 1st a very damaging and unprovoked attack was directed against the Iranian Embassy’s Consulate General, which was located in an upscale neighborhood in Damascus, Syria’s capital. The building was completely destroyed by missiles fired from F-35 fighter planes that had crossed over the Syrian border from Israel, killing Iranian diplomats as well as Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Zahedi’s deputy, General Haji Rahimi, and also Brigadier General Hossein Amirollah, the chief of general staff for the al-Quds force in Syria and Lebanon. Syria subsequently confirmed that a total of 13 people were killed in the attack, including six Syrians and a Lebanese Hezbollah militiaman. Both Iran and Hezbollah vowed revenge.
Attacking a diplomatic mission is considered a major war crime according to the Vienna Convention, but there was no condemnation of the incident coming from the US and the usual suspects in Western Europe. Instead of doing what was right by pressuring Israel to stop attacking its neighbors and thereby possibly preventing a major war in the Middle East, President Joe Biden repeated his pledge that the United States would regard as “ironclad” its commitment to guarantee Israel’s security if Iran were to strike back. This guaranteed to Israel that any action taken by it would be supported by Washington. The Biden Administration also predictably voted against a Russian and Chinese drafted UN Security Council resolution to condemn the Israeli attack on the Iranian Consulate, which was a clear violation of international law and an act of war committed by Israel. The US reportedly cast its veto vote “no” after “Diplomats said the US told council colleagues that many of the facts of what happened on Monday in Damascus remained unclear.” What was actually unclear was the fog that generally surrounds the Biden foreign policy and national security team since it was pretty transparent who was the aggressor in terms of means, motive and outcome.
When Iran did retaliate on April 13th, it carried out a carefully calibrated moderate strike against military targets intended to do damage but not cause a large number of casualties. It reportedly hit several airbases from which the Israeli fighter bombers had begun their attack on Damascus as well as an Israeli Air Force intelligence center in the formerly Syrian Golan Heights. No one was killed in spite of the 300 estimated drones and missiles that were launched, most being intercepted by Israel and its allies. But the attack nevertheless sent a message from Tehran that next time it could be much worse, both immediate in timing and “considerably more severe” than its response on Saturday night had been. Iran also claims that it attempted to prevent an escalation by warning the US about their plans, which would be passed on to Israel, that a “controlled” retaliation was coming. The Pentagon denied that it had been told anything, which may mean that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asleep at his desk once again.
Not content with the outcome, Israel inevitably struck back on Friday, hitting a major airbase near Isfahan, and, to make sure no one was missed, targets in both Iraq and Syria. Iranian military sources advise however that the loud explosions heard by local residents were Iranian air defenses shooting at some flying objects, presumably drones. Per the New York Times and other accommodating media, the strike was a warning that Israel could penetrate Iranian airspace and not intended to do serious damage. The Pentagon was apparently informed shortly before the Israeli action. Iran’s counter-counter retaliation is now pending, but it is clear that Netanyahu will not be deterred by electoral considerations in the United States to stay his hand in his own counter-counter response.
And how does the United States fit into the story? The White House response to the Iranian attack on Israeli territory was inevitably completely unlike the previous uncritical response to Israel’s Consulate General attack, namely condemnation of Iran and the repetition of the usual tripe about “Israel has a right to defend itself” and the sanctity of the “ironclad” defense arrangement. Biden also attempted to cover himself against political blowback due to his licking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s shoes in the upcoming November election by making it known that he had spoken with and advised Netanyahu, recommending not carrying out a reprisal of the reprisal, which Washington would be unable to support as it could/would lead to major escalation. Netanyahu, not fearing Biden’s displeasure, blew the advice off and he and his war cabinet made clear that they were working on a response as well as setting a timetable for invading Rafah in south Gaza, which Biden had also recommended against.
The White House completed its groveling to Netanyahu by vetoing a UN Security Council resolution on April 18th that would have advocated full UN membership status for the state of Palestine, demonstrating that kicking the Palestinians is always a good way to maintain Israeli favor! The vote was 12 (including France, Japan and South Korea) in favor, two abstentions (the shameless United Kingdom and, surprisingly, Switzerland) and an American veto. The US insisted that elevation of Palestine’s diplomatic status can only be obtained after negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield absurdly raised another objection: “Right now, the Palestinians don’t have control over a significant portion of what is supposed to be their state. It’s being controlled by a terrorist organization.” She was referring to Hamas but the comment actually more correctly is applicable to Israel. In any event, a leaked White House memo had previously revealed that Biden opposes full UN membership and statehood for the Palestinians without Israel’s approval, which, of course, will not be forthcoming.
So we have Israel as the aggressor against two countries that were not declared enemies and had not attacked the Jewish state in any way in many, many years. But when Israel attacked them, committing a major war crime Joe Biden and company preferred to sit on their hands and mumble, saving their vituperation for when Iran staged a deliberately mild counter-attack as a warning. That is called hypocrisy, to turn things on their head to provide the answer that one wants to see and it applies equally to Biden accusing the Russians of “illegal occupation” in Ukraine while Israel’s theft of Syria’s Golan Heights and ongoing seizure of the West Bank goes unchallenged by Washington. And the pushback against Iran is unlikely to diminish very soon as the Jewish controlled US Congress also has the bit between its teeth to demonstrate how much it loves Israel. Congressman Steve Scalise, GOP House Majority Leader, has announced that “In light of Iran’s unjustified attack on Israel, the House will move from its previously announced legislative schedule next week to instead consider legislation that supports our ally Israel and holds Iran and its terrorist proxies accountable. The House of Representatives stands strongly with Israel, and there must be consequences for this unprovoked attack.” Over at the Senate Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is advocating punishing Iran by beating on its possible friends in the US, physically attacking folks who are demonstrating in support of the Palestinians. Cotton said that the “pro-Hamas criminals” should be confronted by angry citizens who “take matters into [their] own hands” and confront the offenders, endorsing the use of force against peaceful demonstrators.
But there is also the back story behind why Israel likely attacked the Iranians in Syria in the first place. I and a number of other observers immediately after the Israeli attack assumed that the Jewish state had staged a deliberate over-the-top provocation to draw Washington into its wars. Just as in the case of the October 7th Gaza attack by Hamas, which Israel had full knowledge of and let happen, Netanyahu sought to create a situation in which it would goad Iran into being forced to retaliate to force an “ironclad” Biden to protect its “ally” by taking on Iran directly.
Why did Israel do it beyond the obvious desire to destroy Iran just like it is destroying the Palestinians? It was done because Israel has likely become aware that it is viewed as the world’s greatest pariah state due to its genocide in Gaza, to include the recent horrific killing of hundreds of Palestinians in the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza as well as the targeted assassination of seven employees of a charity that was bringing in food to those starving due to Israel’s blocking the entry of relief supplies. And also because Israel is actually not winning its war against Hamas, it needed to shift the narrative to something different. That would be using its time-honored technique of making itself once again the “victim” in confronting a powerful new enemy, Iran, which would make the problem of bad public relations with the world over Gaza be in part mitigated.
A shift in the story would also presumably bring with it the expected help from the United States and its European allies to do the hard work in killing Iranians. And the trick seems to have worked, predictably. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain has been recently facing demands to cut off arms shipments to Israel because of the devastating death toll in Gaza, but on the following Monday, he was able to salute the British warplanes that had shot down some Iranian drones sent by Iran to attack Israel. It was a telling example of how Israel has been able to scramble the equation in the Middle East. Faced with a intensively publicized barrage of Iranian missiles, Britain, the United States, France and others rushed to help the Israelis who had in fact started the conflict. The United States is also currently planning on increasing the pressure on Iran through a series of tough new sanctions being prepared by Treasury Secretary Janice Yellen, saying “Treasury will not hesitate to work with our allies to use our sanctions authority to continue disrupting the Iranian regime’s malign and destabilizing activity.” Yellen notably did nothing when Israel committed a major war crime in its attack on the Iranian Consulate General in Damascus, nor has she supported sanctions over the Israeli Gaza genocide. She is, of course, Jewish. More aid for the Jewish state is also still waiting for a congressional vote to approve the $14 billion currently in the pipeline, with Washington Reportclaiming that this year’s total US aid to Netanyahu will likely exceed $25 billion “in direct costs related to its fervent support for Israel.”
Right now, the dilemma for the US government will be that it must pull out all the stops in supporting Israel or face inter alia retaliation by the Israel Lobby working through its donors and media resources to defeat Biden in November. And there hovers in the peripheries of one’s mind the worse grim possibility that Israel, if rebuffed by its “allies,” will use its secret nuclear arsenal to blow up the Middle East and presumably a large chunk of adjacent areas in Europe and Asia as well. There are stories already circulating suggesting that the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona might have been an Iranian target and that Israel is right now preparing to take out Iranian nuclear research sites. Netanyahu is calling the shots while a befuddled White House looks on. Israel has baited a trap and Joe Biden has stepped right into it.
Civil War is an action film from A24 studios set in the near-future of an America in the midst of an ongoing internecine war between the federal government, several states and rival militia forces.
The nominal subject of the film—the United States in the last stages of a civil war that has brought society to the brink of barbarism—is clearly of immense relevance and interest. The movie has been released in the midst of the 2024 election campaign and just over three years since the George Floyd Riots across the US in the summer of 2020, or the supposed unarmed ‘coup’ of January 6, 2021, in which the incumbent president attempted to claim that Democrats would cheat and steal an election and attempted to stop the transfer of power through a legal maneuver preventing certification. In Texas there have been confrontations between Texas National Guard armed troops and US Federal Customs armed agents guiding immigrants across the border and opening fences for the newcomers. The current Republican Party front runner for the presidential nomination, Trump, is being brought to trial in numerous states by Democrats and kept off the ballot in some states.
No doubt this is behind the widespread popular interest in the film. Civil War was the number one movie at the North American box office this past weekend, surpassing Godzilla x Kong, with an estimated $25.7 million in ticket sales.
However, Civil War provides in the end no explanation of anything. Indeed, it attempts to make a virtue of not even trying to do so.
The movie focuses on the journey and internal struggles of a handful of reporters and photojournalists as they make their way from New York City to the besieged White House to get the last words and “final shot” of a president-dictator on his way out. Yes, an interview is sought. Kind of like going to Berlin, Germany in April 1945 to see if one can get ‘an interview’ with Hitler to get his reactions to current events.
Civil War stars Kirsten Dunst as photojournalist Lee Smith, with Wagner Moura playing Lee’s reporter colleague, Joel. Cailee Spaeny plays Jessie Cullen, a young photojournalist who idolizes the Dunst character. The ‘photojournalists’ in the movie use still shots, not video. Old school cool. The excellent character actor Stephen McKinley Henderson rounds out the main cast as Sammy, who we’re told is one of the few remaining journalists at the New York Times.
Along the journey, the journalists, with their press helmets, body armor and expensive cameras, witness and photograph scenes of summary executions, torture, firefights and other violence. For the first two-thirds of the movie, the Dunst character coldly photographs the carnage while her aspiring protege Jessie, apparently still clinging to her humanity, crumbles and cries. In the final third of the movie, the pair reverse roles, before the deadly, and deeply unsatisfying, conclusion.
Nick Offerman, famous for playing a misanthropic libertarian bureaucrat on the comedy television show Parks and Recreation, has only a few minutes screen time as the unnamed President of the United States. His political motivations, his policies, and what party he belongs to are unknown, although his persona is vaguely Trumpian and he is said to have run for a third term. There are passing references to bombing his own people, executing journalists on the South Lawn of the White House, and disbanding the FBI.
One other notable performance in the movie is that of Jesse Plemons, who makes an uncredited appearance as an unnerving militiaman sporting rose-tinted glasses and an M-16. In his only scene, Plemons menacingly interrogates the journalists, asking them each, with potentially lethal consequences: “What kind of American are you?”
Jesse Plemons
The movie was written and directed by British author, screenwriter, and director Alex Garland. His previous writing credits include the gripping zombie film 28 Days Later (2002) and the hyper-violent Dredd (2012). In 2015, Garland made his directorial debut with the interesting science fiction thriller Ex Machina. That movie centers around a computer programmer, his right-wing billionaire boss, and the lifelike and intelligent robots created by the company.
Alex Garland Director of ‘Civil War’
In interviews, Garland said he completed the script of Civil War before January 6, 2021. And while the film occasionally features images of protesters and riot police fighting in the streets (to be interrupted by a bomb explosion), what is most striking about it is what it does not do. There is no attempt to address in any fashion the political, social and historical circumstances that have produced the civil war that is the subject of the movie.
In an interview with the New York Times published over the weekend, Garland declares, “I think civil war is just an extension of a situation … That situation is polarization and the lack of limiting forces on polarization.” As to what causes the polarization and why there are no limits on it, he is silent, and apparently entirely unreflective, as is his interviewer.
Wagner Moura as Joel and Cailee Spaeny as Jessie Cullen in A24’s Civil War.
Civil War provides a series of images showing brutal violence exploding, not in some distant land, but in the city streets, leafy suburban neighborhoods and seemingly quiet rural towns of the United States. But there is no “why,” not even a hint as to the motives of the participants, let alone the more fundamental “why,” examining the social forces which generate the motives in the minds of men and women.
In one sequence, involving a sniper and two soldiers he has pinned down, Joel ask the soldiers which side they are on and which side the sniper fights for. Garland narrates the sequence as part of his Times interview, quoting from the dialogue he wrote.
One soldier replies to the question, what side are they on, saying, “You don’t understand a word I say.” He turns to Jessie, “Yo. What’s over there in that house?” Jessie replies, “Someone shooting.” That answer satisfies the soldier.
Garland continues, in his own voice, “It’s to do with the fact that when things get extreme, the reasons why things got extreme no longer become relevant and the knife edge of the problem is all that really remains relevant. So it doesn’t actually matter, as it were, in this context, what side they’re fighting for or what the other person’s fighting for. It’s just reduced to a survival.”
Here, literal thoughtlessness is the intended effect.
In the course of the movie, Dunst’s character explains that she sent back her still photo images from overseas conflicts to tell Americans, don’t do this. Like in a safe driving class when they show car crash stills to warn new drivers about danger.
Movie director Garland evidently adopts the same attitude to the movie as a whole: “Don’t have a civil war because it would be terrible.” But without any examination of the causes, such a warning, however well-intentioned, has no substance.
Nor does the refusal to take sides, or the depiction of both sides as essentially equivalent, serve any purpose, artistic or otherwise. A civil war is not, contrary to Garland, just a matter of people being unable to control their disagreements. For society to split into warring camps, there must be more profound causes, and the moviemaker cannot avoid taking a position.
Imagine portraying the American Civil War of 1861-1865 without taking a position on slavery. There would be plenty of bloodshed, but it would all be pointless slaughter. Such an attitude would ultimately resolve into a description of the conflict as “The war between the states,” as the Confederate apologists have labeled it, in which there was no historical right and no moral high ground, occupied by Lincoln and the Union forces. Supposed neutrality would actually mask a pro-Confederate position.
Nick Offerman as the President of the United States in A24’s Civil War.
Garland’s film has so many holes in the plot that it is more hole than plot.
There is no explanation why the “Western Forces,” apparently comprised of Texans and Californians of every race and class, decided to take up arms against the US government. One might think the government of California is more pro-Liberal Democrat, and the government of Texas is Republican and populist, why would those two states be together? Don’t think about it too much.
There is likewise no explanation for the other factions which are briefly mentioned in the movie, including the “Florida Alliance” which includes several southern states, and the “New People’s Army,” comprised of several states in the Pacific Northwest. There are apparently “Loyalist” areas stretching across the Midwest and into New England, although in that case, why does the president remain in Washington rather than retreat to safer territory?
In one scene, a gas station operator rejects American dollars as worthless but eagerly accepts Canadian bills. So evidently, a civil war raging across the United States has had no significant effect on its northern neighbor. That is only the most obvious geopolitical absurdity in the presentation of an American civil war—in the 21st century!— as a purely national event.
The refusal to take a side or even provide a coherent description of the sides may have been, as Garland says, an artistic choice, however misguided. But it was likely embraced by producers and distributors for other, far more mercenary reasons. You don’t want to make a film which might alienate a portion of the movie-going, ticket-buying public, after all.
This unfortunate conclusion is reinforced when a character in the film says that Lee Smith (Dunst) first made her mark with photos of the “Antifa massacre.” The reference is so deliberately elliptical that the viewer has no idea if this was a massacre conducted by “antifa” against hapless motorists honking at protesters blocking streets or if the anti-fascists were themselves killed by hostile elements.
Crucially, the movie gives not the slightest hint of the role of the vast American military machine in the civil war, which is conducted largely with small arms and hand-held rocket launchers, with a later addition of jeeps and helicopters. No artillery, no cruise missiles, no aerial combat, and, obviously, no small yield nuclear weapons.
In contrast to the excellent 1964 American film Seven Days in May, which depicts a military coup in the US, Civil War does not delve into the critical role the US military would have to play in supporting a dictatorship in the US. A revolution is not a struggle against the army, a revolution is a struggle for the army.
Instead of a serious examination of how civil society and the rule of reasonable social laws can, and are, breaking down in the United States, the movie alternates tense moments of extreme or potential violence, followed by travel scenes to the accompaniment of pop songs, and discussions about the role of “objective” photojournalism during war.
After six months of genocide in Gaza, in which heroic journalists have risked their lives to detail the daily crimes of the Israeli government, backed by the United States and its allies, the Dunst character’s claim of neutrality and objectivity while photographing civilians being buried in mass graves or blown up while begging for water wears thin for some.
Overall, Civil War fails completely to deliver on what could be a compelling premise.
A Holy of the Holies was shattered in the Holy Land as Iran staged a quite measured, heavily choreographed response to the Israeli terror attack against its consulate/ambassador residence in Damascus, a de facto evisceration of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic immunity.
This game-changer will directly interfere on how the Anglo-American system manages its simultaneous conflagration with Russia, China and Iran – three top BRICS members.
The key problem is escalations are already built in – and will be hard to remove. The Total Cancel War against Russia; the genocide in Gaza – with its explicit policy masterfully decoded by Prof. Michael Hudson; and the decoupling/shaping the terrain against China won’t simply vanish – as all communication bridges with the Global Majority keep being torched.
Yet the Iranian message indeed establishes a “New Equation” – as Tehran christened it, and prefigures many other surprises to come from West Asia.
Iran wanted to – and did send – a clear message. New equation: if the biblical psychopathic entity keeps attacking Iranian interests, from henceforth it will be counter-attacked inside Israel. All that in a matter of “seconds” – as the Security Council in Tehran has already cleared all the procedures.
Escalation though seems inevitable. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak: “Netanyahu is influenced by his [fundamentalist] political partners to go into an escalation so he can hold onto power and accelerate the coming of the Messiah.”
Compare it to Iranian President Raisi: “The smallest act against Tehran’s interests will be met with a massive, extensive, and painful response against all its operations.”
Goodbye to Your ‘Invincible’ Defense Maze
For Tehran, regulating the intensity of the clash in West Asia between Israel and the Axis of Resistance while simultaneously establishing strategic deterrence to replace “strategic patience” was a matter of launching a triple wave: a drone swarm opening the path for cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.
The performance of the much-vaunted Iron Dome, Arrow-3 and David’s Sling – aided by F-35 fighter jets and the US and the UK naval force – was not exactly stellar. There’s no video of the “outer-layer” Arrow-3 system shooting down anything in space.
At least 9 ballistic missiles penetrated the dense Israeli defense network and hit the Nevatim and Ramon bases. Israel is absolutely mum on the fate of its Golan Heights intel installation – hit by cruise missiles.
Amidst classic fog of war, it’s irrelevant whether Tehran launched hundreds or dozens of drones and missiles. Regardless of NATOstan media hype, what’s proven beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the supposedly “invincible” Israeli defense maze – ranging from US-made AD/ABM systems to Israeli knockoffs – is helpless in real war against a technologically advanced adversary.
What was accomplished by a single operation did raise quite a few professional eyebrows. Iran forced Israel to furiously deplete its stock of interceptors and spend at least $1.35 billion – while having its escalatory dominance and deterrence strategy completely shattered.
The psychological blow was even fiercer.
What if Iran had unleashed a series of strikes without a generous previous warning lasting several days? What if US, UK, France and – traitorous – Jordan were not ready for coordinated defense? (The – startling – fact they were all directly dispensing firepower on Tel Aviv’s behalf was not analyzed at all). What if Iran had hit serious industrial and infrastructural targets?
Establishing an Equation Without Disturbing a Pivot
Predictably, there has been less than zero debate across NATOstan about the sudden collapse of the Fortress Israel Myth – which underpins the larger myth of Zionism offering Impregnable Security for those living in Israel. No more. This narrative spin is D.O.A.
Iran, for its part, could not care less about what NATOstan spins. The shift towards the New Equation in fact was generous enough to offer Tel Aviv a de-escalation escape route – which will not be taken, at Israel’s peril.
For Tel Aviv, everything that happened so far spells out Strategic Defeat across the spectrum: in Gaza, in Lebanon, with the economy tanking, totally losing legitimacy around the world, and now with the added painful loss of deterrence.
Israeli Counterattack: decision made, but timing uncertain
The Israel Defense Forces have finalized their decision on how to respond to Iran’s attack, however, they have not yet determined the timing, as reported by The Jerusalem Post, citing sources.
All eyes are now on what may happen next: will it finally become clear whether the Hegemon prevails or whether Israel runs the “wag the dog” show?
It’s essential to consider the Russia-China strategic partnership view. The consensus among Chinese scholars is that the Hegemon prefers not to commit too many resources to West Asia, as this would affect the – already collapsing – Project Ukraine and the strategic planning to counter China in the Asia-Pacific.
Additionally, later this week Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani – who said Iran will respond “within seconds” to any new Israeli attack – visits Moscow for the Conference on Nonproliferation and will also meet with the top echelons of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
It’s quite remarkable that Iran managed to establish the New Equation without disturbing its own pivot to Eurasia – after the collapse of the 2015 nuclear deal – while protecting the complex framework engaged in the defense of Palestine.
The Hegemon’s options are dire. They run from being eventually expelled from West Asia and the Persian Gulf to an unwinnable existential clash against three civilization-states – Russia, China, Iran.
What’s left as the number one feasible scenario is a carefully calculated retreat to an easily controlled backyard: Latin America, especially South America, manipulating new, convenient, sovereign-deprived asset Argentina.
That does not change the fact that US power projection on the wane, globally, is the way the wind is blowing. The Straussian neocon psycho-dementia is unsustainable. The question is whether they can be progressively purged from the US power structure before they attempt to plunge the Global Majority into their irrational depths of doom.
And Don’t Forget the New BRICS Equation
By contrast, on the Global Majority front, over 40 nations want to join BRICS – and counting, according to the head of the Russian Council Committee on International Affairs, Grigory Karasin.
After a meeting of the chairmen of the international affairs committees of BRICS Parliaments last week in Moscow, Karasin noted how many BRICS member-nations understand that they should not rush to create a rigid charter, “seeing how counterproductive and even provocative the European Union is acting.” The name of the game is flexibility.
Nigeria’s intent to join BRICS is in line with its interest in a more equitable global financial and development system, Ben Akabueze, the director general of the country’s Budget Office, told Sputnik.
Alastair Crooke has touched on a key theme that runs through my new book, Eurasia v. NATOstan: “Anything that was good and true about Western civilization is preserved and thriving in Russia. This is the unspoken insight that so infuriates the western elites. And it is also why, in part, BRICS states so evidently look to Russia for leadership.”
The New Equation established by Iran, a sovereign BRICS member, will do wonders to solidify this – multilateral, multicultural – state of cooperation as the Empire and its “aircraft carrier” in West Asia, except in the covert ops department, are increasingly reduced to the role of a paper tiger.
Israeli military expert Or Fialkov said on 17 April that authorities gave false information about the rate of interception of Iranian drones and missiles during Tehran’s operation against Israel over the weekend.
Israel had claimed on 14 April following Iran’s Operation True Promise that 99 percent of the projectiles fired during the operation were intercepted.
“The interception percentage of the missiles is about 84 percent, a very high percentage but not comparable to the numbers that the IDF provided, which gave the feeling that there had been an absolute interception of all Iranian threats,” Fialkov told Hebrew newspaper Maariv in an interview released Wednesday.
“When they publish crazy success rates (99 percent) and create a [false] state of perfection, it can cause complacency in the citizens as well as in the military,” the Israeli researcher added.
He also said that an Iranian attack on settlements would have resulted in “significantly higher casualties.”
Iran chose to target military sites instead. Following the Iranian operation, Tel Aviv admitted that the Nevatim airbase in southern Israel was damaged in the attack. Iran’s Armed Forces said the Nevatim base was the site from which Israeli jets took off to attack the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
Tehran also targeted intelligence sites in the Jabal al-Sheikh mountains between Syria and Israeli territory, which “provided the intelligence for the Israeli airstrike on Iran’s diplomatic mission in Damascus,” Iranian army chief Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri said on Sunday.
Authorities in Iran also said that their operation was purposefully limited and measured, and aimed to send a strong message that Tehran is capable of much more.
Several Iranian officials have vowed a much harsher attack if Israel escalates the situation with a response.
“This operation showed that our armed forces are ready,” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said in a speech on 17 April, adding that Operation True Promise “brought down the glory of the Zionist regime.”
“The slightest act of aggression” by Israel will lead to “a fierce and severe response,” he warned.
The Iranian defeat of the US-Israeli missile defense architecture has global security consequences.
The world’s attention has, rightfully so, been focused on the fallout from Iran’s retaliatory strike against Israel on April 13-14, 2024. Iran’s purpose in launching the attack was to establish a deterrence posture designed to put Israel and the United States on notice that any attack against Iran, whether on Iranian soil or on the territory of other nations, would trigger a retaliation which would inflict more damage on the attacker than the attacker could hope to inflict on Iran. To achieve this result, Iran had to prove itself capable of overcoming the ballistic missile defense systems of both Israel and the United States which were deployed in and around Israel at the time of the attack. This Iran was able to accomplish, with at least nine missiles striking two Israeli air bases that fell under the protective umbrella of the Israeli-US missile defense shield.Defending Dixieu2019s …Bishop, Isaac C.Buy New $16.49(as of 04:31 UTC – Details)
The Iranian deterrence posture has implications that reach far beyond the environs of Israel or the Middle East. By defeating the US-Israeli missile defense shield, Iran exposed the notion of US missile defense supremacy that serves as the heart of US force protection models used when projecting military power on a global scale. The US defensive posture vis-à-vis Russia, China, and North Korea hinges on assumptions made regarding the efficacy of US ballistic missile defense capabilities. By successfully attacking Israeli air bases which had the benefit of the full range of US anti-ballistic missile technology, Iran exposed the vulnerability of the US missile defense shield to modern missile technologies involving maneuverable warheads, decoys, and hypersonic speed. US bases in Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East once thought to be well-protected, have suddenly been revealed to be vulnerable to hostile attack. So, too, are US Navy ships operating at sea.
Israel’s ballistic missile defenses were given a supercharged boost by the deployment of an advanced AN/TPY-2 X band radar on Israeli soil. The radar, operated by the US Army’s 13th Missile Defense Battery, is located on Har Qeren, a height which rises out of the Negev Desert near the city of Be’er Sheva. The AN/TPY-2 is a missile defense radar that can detect, track and discriminate ballistic missiles, discriminating between threats and non-threats (i.e., incoming missiles and space debris).
The AN/TPY-2 operates in two different modes. The first, known as the “forward-based mode,” detects and tracks ballistic missiles as they are launched. The second—“terminal mode”—is used to guide interceptors toward a descending missile. The AN/TPY-2 is optimized to work with the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile defense system by guiding the THAAD missile to its target.
The US had deployed at least one, and possibly two, THAAD missile batteries to Israel at the time of the Iranian missile attack. In addition to assisting the THAAD missiles in shooting down incoming threats, the AN/TPY-2 radar data was integrated with Israeli radar data and other technical intelligence collected by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization’s (BMDO) network of early warning satellites deployed for the sole purpose of monitoring and reporting Iranian ballistic missile launches. This integrated early warning/surveillance/tracking system was tied into a multi-layered missile defense architecture which included the US THAAD and Israeli Arrow 2, Arrow 3, advanced Patriot, and David’s Sling anti-ballistic missile interceptor systems.
Adding to the capability and lethality of the US-Israeli ballistic missile defense architecture was the presence of at least two US Navy ballistic missile defense (BMD) system-capable Aegis-class destroyers equipped with the SPY-1 S band radar and SM-3/SM-6 interceptor missiles. The Navy BMD-capable ships are configured to tie into the ground-based AN/TPY-2 X band radar as well as the broader BMD system through the Command and Control, Battle management, and Communications (C2BMC) system. The combination of ground-based radars and interceptors with the US Navy BMD system provides US military commanders with theater-wide protection from hostile ballistic missile threats. This integrated system is designed to detect, acquire, and track incoming threats and, using complex computer-drive algorithms, discriminate targets and destroy them using hit-to-kill kinetic warheads (i.e., a “bullet hitting a bullet”).The Kids’ Money …McGillian, Jamie KyleBest Price: $12.99Buy New $48.14(as of 04:45 UTC – Details)
On April 13-14, 2023, this system failed. In short, the combination of US and Israeli anti-ballistic missile defense capabilities deployed in and around the Negev desert made the Israeli air bases located there the most protected locations in the world from threats posed by ballistic missiles.
And yet Iran successfully struck both locations with multiple missiles.
The global strategic implications of this stunning Iranian accomplishment are game-changing—the US has long struggled conceptually with the notion of what is referred to as “A2/AD” (anti-access/area denial) threats posed by hostile ballistic missiles. However, the US had sought to mitigate against this AA/A2 threat by overlaying theater ballistic missile defense architecture like that that had been employed in Israel. The failure of the combined US-Israeli defense systems in the face of a concerted Iranian missile attack exposed the short-comings of the US ballistic missile defense capabilities world-wide.
In short, this means that the US and NATO forces in Europe are vulnerable to attack from advanced Russian missile technologies which match or exceed those used by Iran to attack Israel. It also means that China would most likely be able to strike and sink US navy ships in the Pacific Ocean in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. And that North Korea could do the same to US ships and forces ashore in the vicinity of Japan and South Korea.
Until which time the US can develop, produce and deploy missile defense systems capable of defeating the new missile technology being deployed by nations like Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea, US military power projection capabilities are in a state of checkmate by America’s potential adversaries.
The Middle East is on the brink of war precisely because western politicians indulged for decades every military excess by Israel
Suddenly, western politicians from US President Joe Biden to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have become ardent champions of “restraint” – in a very last-minute scramble to avoid regional conflagration.
Iran launched a salvo of drones and missiles at Israel at the weekend in what amounted a largely symbolic show of strength. Many appear to have been shot down, either by Israel’s layers of US-funded interception systems or by US, British and Jordanian fighter jets. No one was killed.
It was the first direct attack by a state on Israel since Iraq fired Scud missiles during the Gulf war of 1991.
The United Nations Security Council was hurriedly pressed into session on Sunday, with Washington and its allies calling for a de-escalation of tensions that could all too easily lead to the outbreak of war across the Middle East and beyond.
“Neither the region nor the world can afford more war,” the UN’s secretary general, Antonio Guterres, told the meeting. “Now is the time to defuse and de-escalate.”
Israel, meanwhile, vowed to “exact the price” against Iran at a time of its choosing.
But the West’s abrupt conversion to “restraint” needs some explaining.
After all, western leaders showed no restraint when Israel bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus two weeks ago, killing a senior general and more than a dozen other Iranians – the proximate cause of Tehran’s retaliation on Saturday night.
Under the Vienna Convention, the consulate is not only a protected diplomatic mission but is viewed as sovereign Iranian territory. Israel’s attack on it was an unbridled act of aggression – the “supreme international crime”, as the Nuremberg tribunal ruled at the end of the Second World War.
For that reason, Tehran invoked article 51 of the United Nations charter, which allows it to act in self-defence.
Shielding Israel
And yet, rather than condemning Israel’s dangerous belligerence – a flagrant attack on the so-called “rules-based order” so revered by the US – western leaders lined up behind Washington’s favourite client state.
At a Security Council meeting on 4 April, the US, Britain and France intentionally spurned restraint by blocking a resolution that would have condemned Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate – a vote that, had it not been stymied, might have sufficed to placate Tehran.
At the weekend, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron still gave the thumbs-up to Israel’s flattening of Iran’s diplomatic premises, saying he could “completely understand the frustration Israel feels” – though he added, without any hint of awareness of his own hypocrisy, that the UK “would take very strong action” if a country bombed a British consulate.
By shielding Israel from any diplomatic consequences for its act of war against Iran, the western powers ensured Tehran would have to pursue a military response instead.
But it did not end there. Having stoked Iran’s sense of grievance at the UN, Biden vowed “iron-clad” support for Israel – and grave consequences for Tehran – should it dare to respond to the attack on its consulate.
Iran ignored those threats. On Saturday night, it launched some 300 drones and missiles, at the same time protesting vociferously about the Security Council’s “inaction and silence, coupled with its failure to condemn the Israeli regime’s aggressions”.
Western leaders failed to take note. They again sided with Israel and denounced Tehran. At Sunday’s Security Council meeting, the same three states – the US, UK and France – that had earlier blocked a statement condemning Israel’s attack on Iran’s diplomatic mission, sought a formal condemnation of Tehran for its response.
Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, ridiculed what he called “a parade of Western hypocrisy and double standards”. He added: “You know very well that an attack on a diplomatic mission is a casus belli under international law. And if Western missions were attacked, you would not hesitate to retaliate and prove your case in this room.”
There was no restraint visible either as the West publicly celebrated its collusion with Israel in foiling Iran’s attack.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak praised RAF pilots for their “bravery and professionalism” in helping to “protect civilians” in Israel.
In a statement, Keir Starmer, leader of the supposedly opposition Labour party, condemned Iran for generating “fear and instability”, rather than “peace and security”, that risked stoking a “wider regional war”. His party, he said, would “stand up for Israel’s security”.
The “restraint” the West demands relates only, it seems, to Iran’s efforts to defend itself.
Starving to death
Given the West’s new-found recognition of the need for caution, and the obvious dangers of military excess, now may be the time for its leaders to consider demanding restraint more generally – and not just to avoid a further escalation between Iran and Israel.
Over the past six months Israel has bombed Gaza into rubble, destroyed its medical facilities and government offices, and killed and maimed many, many tens of thousands of Palestinians. In truth, such is the devastation that Gaza some time ago lost the ability to count its dead and wounded.
At the same time, Israel has intensified its 17-year blockade of the tiny enclave to the point where, so little food and water are getting through, the population are in the grip of famine. People, especially children, are literally starving to death.
The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, chaired by an American judge, ruled back in January – when the situation was far less dire than it is now – that a “plausible” case had been made Israel was committing genocide, a crime against humanity strictly defined in international law.
And yet there were no calls by western leaders for “restraint” as Israel bombed Gaza into ruins week after week, striking its hospitals, levelling its government offices, blowing up its universities, mosques and churches, and destroying its bakeries.
Rather, President Biden has repeatedly rushed through emergency arms sales, bypassing Congress, to make sure Israel has enough bombs to keep destroying Gaza and killing its children.
When Israeli leaders vowed to treat Gaza’s population like “human animals”, denying them all food, water and power, western politicians gave their assent.
Sunak was not interested in recruiting his brave RAF pilots to “protect civilians” in Gaza from Israel, and Starmer showed no concern about the “fear and instability” felt by Palestinians from Israel’s reign of terror.
Quite the reverse. Starmer, famed as a human rights lawyer, even gave his approval to Israel’s collective punishment of the people of Gaza, its “complete siege”, as integral to a supposed Israeli “right of self-defence”.
In doing so, he overturned one of the most fundamental principles of international law that civilians should not be targeted for the actions of their leaders. As is now all too apparent, he conferred a death sentence on the people of Gaza.
Where was “restraint” then?
Missing in action
Similarly, restraint went out of the window when Israel fabricated a pretext for eradicating the UN aid agency UNRWA, the last lifeline for Gaza’s starving population.
Even though Israel was unable to offer any evidence for its claim that a handful of UNRWA staff were implicated in an attack on Israel on 7 October, western leaders hurriedly cut off funding to the agency. In doing so, they became actively complicit in what the World Court already feared was a genocide.
Where was the restraint when Israeli officials – with a long history of lying to advance their state’s military agenda – made up stories about Hamas beheading babies, or carrying out systematic rapes on 7 October? All of this was debunked by an Al Jazeera investigation drawing largely on Israeli sources.
Those genocide-justifying deceptions were all too readily amplified by western politicians and media.
Israel showed no restraint in destroying Gaza’s hospitals, or taking hostage and torturing thousands of Palestinians it grabbed off the street.
All of that got a quiet nod from western politicians.
Where was the restraint in western capitals when protesters took to the streets to call for a ceasefire, to stop Israel’s bloodletting of women and children, the majority of Gaza’s dead? The demonstrators were smeared – are still smeared – by western politicians as supporters of terrorism and antisemites.
And where was the demand for restraint when Israel tore up the rulebook on the laws of war, allowing every would-be strongman to cite the West’s indulgence of Israeli atrocities as the precedent justifying their own crimes?
On each occasion, when it favoured Israel’s malevolent goals, the West’s commitment to “restraint” went missing in action.
Top-dog client state
There is a reason why Israel has been so ostentatious in its savaging of Gaza and its people. And it is the very same reason Israel felt emboldened to violate the diplomatic sanctity of Iran’s consulate in Damascus.
Because for decades Israel has been guaranteed protection and assistance from the West, whatever crimes it commits.
Israel’s founders ethnically cleansed much of Palestine in 1948, far beyond the terms of partition set out by the UN a year earlier. It imposed a military occupation on the remnants of historic Palestine in 1967, driving out yet more of the native population. It then imposed a regime of apartheid on the few areas where Palestinians remained.
In their West Bank reservations, Palestinians have been systematically brutalised, their homes demolished, and illegal Jewish settlements built on their land. The Palestinians’ holy places have been gradually surrounded and taken from them.
Separately, Gaza has been sealed off for 17 years, and its population denied freedom of movement, employment and the basics of life.
Israel’s reign of terror to maintain its absolute control has meant imprisonment and torture are a rite of passage for most Palestinian men. Any protest is ruthlessly crushed.
Now Israel has added mass slaughter in Gaza – genocide – to its long list of crimes.
Israel’s displacements of Palestinians to neighbouring states caused by its ethnic cleansing operations and slaughter have destabilised the wider region. And to secure its militarised settler-colonial project in the Middle East – and its place as Washington’s top-dog client state in the region – Israel has intimidated, bombed and invaded its neighbours on a regular basis.
Its attack on Iran’s consulate in Damascus was just the latest of serial humiliations faced by Arab states.
And through all of this, Washington and its vassal states have directed no more than occasional, lip-service calls for restraint towards Israel. There were never any consequences, but instead rewards from the West in the form of endless billions in aid and special trading status.
‘Something rash’
So why, after decades of debauched violence from Israel, has the West suddenly become so interested in “restraint”? Because on this rare occasion it serves western interests to calm the fires Israel is so determined to stoke.
The Israeli strike on Iran’s consulate came just as the Biden administration was finally running out of excuses for providing the weapons and diplomatic cover that has allowed Israel to slaughter, maim and orphan tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza over six months.
Demands for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel have been reaching fever pitch, with Biden haemorrhaging support among parts of his Democratic base as he faces a re-run presidential election later this year against a resurgent rival, Donald Trump.
Small numbers of votes could be the difference between victory and defeat.
Israel had every reason to fear that its patron might soon pull the rug from under its campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza.
But having destroyed the entire infrastructure needed to support life in the enclave, Israel needs time for the consequences to play out: either mass starvation there, or a relocation of the population elsewhere on supposedly “humanitarian” grounds.
A wider war, centred on Iran, would both distract from Gaza’s desperate plight and force Biden to back Israel unconditionally – to make good on his “iron-clad” commitment to Israel’s protection.
And to top it all, with the US drawn directly into a war against Iran, Washington would have little choice but to assist Israel in its long campaign to destroy Iran’s nuclear energy programme.
Israel wants to remove any potential for Iran to develop a bomb, one that would level the military playing field between the two in ways that would make Israel far less certain that it can continue to act as it pleases across the region with impunity.
That is why Biden officials are airing concerns to the US media that Israel is ready to “do something rash” in an attempt to drag the administration into a wider war.
The truth is, however, that Washington long ago cultivated Israel as its military Frankenstein’s monster. Israel’s role was precisely to project US power ruthlessly into the oil-rich Middle East. The price Washington was more than willing to accept was Israel’s eradication of the Palestinian people, replaced by a fortress “Jewish state”.
Calling for Israel to exercise “restraint” now, as its entrenched lobbies flex their muscles meddling in western politics, and self-confessed fascists rule Israel’s government, is beyond parody.
If the West really prized restraint, they should have insisted on it from Israel decades ago.
Dr. Melina Abdullah, center, Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles at the “#BLM Turns 10 People’s Justice Festival” on Saturday, July 15, 2023, at the Leimert Park neighborhood in Los Angeles. [AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes]
In an appearance on the Wednesday morning edition of The Tavis Smiley Show, independent presidential candidate Cornel West revealed that his running mate will be Melina Abdullah, a tenured professor at California State University, Los Angeles, co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM), and founder of Black Lives Matter Grassroots (BLMGR).
West and Abdullah have placed their racial identity and religion front and center. In a campaign statement announcing his selection, West cited Abdullah’s “unique Black analysis,” which he claimed “helps us confront our crumbling era of empire, white supremacy, and patriarchy.”
In his interview with Smiley, West declared, “I’m running for Jesus, she’s running for Allah!” Abdullah said in the same interview that after West invited her to be his running mate, it “felt as if God was speaking to me.”
Unlike the two official ruling class parties, West, like all third-party candidates, is obligated to name a running mate before he can begin petitioning for signatures to be on the ballot in November in many states. In one of the many anti-democratic obstacles placed in front of third parties by the Democrats and Republicans, over half of US states (26), and the District of Columbia, require third-party candidates to name a running mate before petitioning for ballot access.
In choosing Abdullah, (née Reimann), West is deliberately amplifying the politics of racial division, practiced and propagated by the upper-middle class and the Democratic Party.
While presenting herself almost exclusively as a “Black woman,” Abdullah is the daughter of John Reimann, a non-practicing Jewish person born in New York in 1946.
Adbullah’s paternal grandfather, and John’s father, was Günter Reimann (born Hans Steinicke), a German-Jewish Marxist economist who fled Germany during the rise of Adolf Hitler. As a teenager, Günter wrote for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s Die Rote Fahne (The Red Banner), the press organ of the Spartacus League in Germany. Following the January 1919 assassinations of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, the paper continued to be published by the Communist Party of Germany until Hitler came to power in 1933.
Günter died in 2005. John is still a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, with which Abdullah also has close relations. On his personal blog, Reimann advocates US funding for the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
Unlike her grandfather, Abdullah rejects a class-based analysis. Prior to founding BLM-Los Angeles, Abdullah chaired the Pan-African Studies Department at California State University. In her 2003 dissertation, titled, “Greater than the sum of her parts: A multi-axis analysis of Black women and political representation,” Abdullah advanced the “intersectional” and post-modernist framework that has served as the bedrock of Democratic Party ideology for decades.
Arguing for politics based on racialism and mysticism, Abdullah claimed:
Black women stand at the intersection of race and gender, their identity cannot be wholly defined simply by the sum total of race disadvantage and gender disadvantage; a third position of disadvantage is birthed at the intersection which cannot be divided out and attributed to either the race axis or the gender axis alone.
“Thus,” Abdullah postulated, “Black women are in the unique position of being full members of their gender group, their racial group and the group of Black women.” Ergo:
Black women representatives are uniquely qualified to serve as authentic representatives for Blacks (regardless of gender), women (regardless of race), and Black women.
Ten years after writing her dissertation, Abdullah would go on to become a leading member and organizer of the Black Lives Matter organization. From the 2013 police murder of Trayvon Martin to today, BLM leaders, including Abdullah, have repeatedly intervened in protests against police violence to sow illusions in reforming the police by “defunding” them and appealing to Democratic Party politicians. At the same time, BLM falsely presents police violence, which affects workers and poor people of all ethnicities, in purely racial terms.
By deliberately covering up the class role of police in capitalist society, Abdullah and BLM seek to block the development of a class-based movement against police violence, which is an international phenomenon.
Abdullah and the reactionary and self-centered politics that dominate BLM found expression in the scandal that engulfed the leadership of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) following the resignation of co-founder Patrisse Cullors in 2021.
In 2022, Abdullah sued BLMGNF, claiming the organization pilfered money and misused donations. This included the purchase of a $6 million mansion in Los Angeles, which served as the setting for an infamous video featuring Adbullah and fellow BLM leaders Alicia Garza and Cullors. In the video, Cullors, Garza and Abdullah dine on hors d’oeuvres and sip champagne while complaining about the hardships they endured collecting some $90 million in donations between 2020 and 2021.
In 2023, a Los Angeles judge dismissed Abdullah’s lawsuit against BLMGNF and ordered her to pay Shalomyah Bowers, an executive of the organization, over $100,000 in legal fees.
Abdullah is almost a caricature of identity politics. If one didn’t know any better, one would think her entire public persona was performance art. For years on her Twitter/X account, Adbullah, posting under the handle @DocMellyMel, has advanced reactionary Black nationalist, pro-capitalist and, frankly, racist conceptions.
A sample of some of Abdullah’s inane and racist tweets. [Photo: @DocMellyMel]
Abdullah has repeatedly tweeted in favor of “Black liberation” via the boycotting of “white corporations.” Last November, she tweeted the hashtag, “Build Black, Buy Black, Bank Black.”
Abdullah makes a practice of tweeting in favor of racial separatism despite the fact much of her family is white. In a July 6, 2019 tweet, Abdullah complained that she was “compelled to step off the sidewalk three times during my 30-minute walk so that White folks and their dogs could pass.” She continued: “Got me feeling like #gentrification is #JimCrow revisited.”
In a June 18, 2021 tweet, Abdullah wrote that “White folks don’t get to come to the #Juneteenth barbecue,” which she clarified in a later tweet was a “CELEBRATION DAY for Black people” and “PAY REPARATIONS DAY for white folks…”
During the 2020 Democratic presidential debates, Abdullah declared, “Nobody White should ever refer to the nation of Niger. Periodt. (sic)”
Just over two months ago, on February 11, Abduallah tweeted, “Why do I feel like it’s slightly racist to be a Taylor Swift fan?” When a user responded that “everything and everyone is racist,” Abdullah responded, “Nope. Only white people can be racist.”
Predictably, Abdullah is a fan of the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a racialist falsification of American history. The project postulated, among many falsehoods, that “Black people alone” fought back against racism and slavery. In January 2023, Abdullah favorably tweeted quotes from the main author of the “1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, when Jones was promoting the Hulu television adaptation of the project in Los Angeles.
Like West, Abdullah has abandoned any fight against the ongoing spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has even expressed anti-vaccine sentiments. In September 2020, she tweeted, “Who’s gonna be first in line to get the rushed, untested COVID-19 vaccine? #NotIt #PresidentialDebate2020.”
There is nothing remotely progressive, let alone left-wing, in the black nationalist and anti-Marxist campaign of West and Abdullah. Workers and youth interested in ending police violence and the genocide in Gaza must be armed with a political perspective that is aimed not at racial division, but at uniting the international working class is a mass movement against the source of police violence, war, inequality, racism and fascism—the capitalist system.
Iran’s retaliatory strikes against Israel were not conducted alone. Strategic partners Russia and China have Tehran’s back, and their role in West Asia’s conflict will only grow if the US doesn’t keep Israel in check.
A little over 48 hours before Iran’s aerial message to Israel across the skies of West Asia, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov confirmed, on the record, what so far had been, at best, hush-hush diplomatic talk:
The Russian side keeps in contact with Iranian partners on the situation in the Middle East after the Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria.
Ryabkov added, “We stay in constant touch [with Iran]. New in-depth discussions on the whole range of issues related to the Middle East are also expected in the near future in BRICS.”
He then sketched The Big Picture:
Connivance with Israeli actions in the Middle East, which are at the core of Washington’s policy, is in many ways becoming the root cause of new tragedies.
Here, concisely, we had Russia’s top diplomatic coordinator with BRICS – in the year of the multipolar organization’s Russian presidency – indirectly messaging that Russia has Iran’s back. Iran, it should be noted, just became a full-fledged BRICS+ member in January.
Iran’s aerial message this weekend confirmed this in practice: their missile guidance systems used the Chinese Beidou satellite navigation system as well as the Russian GLONASS system.
This is Russia–China intel leading from behind and a graphic example of BRICS+ on the move.
Ryabkov’s “we stay in constant touch” plus the satellite navigation intel confirms the deeply interlocked cooperation between the Russia–China strategic partnership and their mutual strategic partner Iran. Based on vast experience in Ukraine, Moscow knew that the biblical psychopathic genocidal entity would keep escalating if Iran only continued to exercise “strategic patience.”
The morphing of “strategic patience” into a new strategic balance had to take some time – including high-level exchanges with the Russian side. After all, the risk remained that the Israeli attack against the Iranian consulate/ambassador’s residence in Damascus could well prove to be the 2024 remix of the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
And don’t forget the Strait of Hormuz
Tehran did manage to upend the massive Western psychological operations aimed at pushing it into a strategic misstep.
Iran started with a misdirecting masterstroke. As US–Israeli fear porn went off the charts, fueled by dodgy western “intel,” the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) made a quick sideways move, seizing an Israeli-owned container ship near the Strait of Hormuz.
That was an eminently elegant manoeuvre – reminding the collective west of Tehran’s hold on the Strait of Hormuz, a fact immeasurably more dangerous to the whole western economic house of cards than any limited strike on their “aircraft carrier” in West Asia. That did happen anyway.
And once again, with a degree of elegance. Unlike that ‘moral’ army specialized in killing women, children, and the elderly and bombing hospitals, mosques, schools, universities, and humanitarian convoys, the Iranian attack targeted key Israeli military sites such as the Nevatim and Ramon airbases in the Negev and an intel center in the occupied Golan Heights – the three centers used by Tel Aviv in its strike on Iran’s Damascus consulate.
This was a highly choreographed show. Multiple early warning signs gifted Tel Aviv with plenty of time to profit from US intel and evacuate fighter jets and personnel, which was duly followed by a plethora of US military radars coordinating the defense strategy.
It was American firepower that smashed the bulk of what may have been a swarm of 185 Shahed-136 drones – using everything from ship-mounted air defense to fighter jets. The rest was shot down over Jordan by The Little King’s military – the Arab street will never forget his treachery – and then by dozens of Israeli jets.
Israel’s defenses were de facto saturated by the suicide drone-ballistic missile combo. On the ballistic missile front, several pierced the dense maze of Israel’s air defenses, with Israel officially claiming nine successful hits – interestingly enough, all of them hitting super relevant military targets.
The whole show had the budget of a mega blockbuster. For Israel – without even counting the price of US, UK, and Israeli jets – just the multi-layered interception system set it back at least $1.35 billion, according to an Israeli official. Iranian military sources tally the cost of their drone and missile salvos at only $35 million – 2.5 percent of Tel Aviv’s expenditure – made with full indigenous technology.
A new West Asian chessboard
It took only a few hours for Iran to finally metastasize strategic patience into serious deterrence, sending an extremely powerful and multi-layered message to its adversaries and masterfully changing the game across the whole West Asian chessboard.
Were the biblical psychopaths to engage in a real Hot War against Iran, there’s no chance in hell Tel Aviv can intercept hundreds of Iranian missiles – the state-of-the-art ones excluded from the current show – without an early warning mechanism spread over several days. Without the Pentagon’s umbrella of weaponry and funds, Israeli defense is unsustainable.
It will be fascinating to see what lessons Moscow will glean from this profusion of lights in the West Asian sky, its sly eyes taking in the frantic Israeli, political, and military scene as the heat continues to rise on the slowly boiling – and now screaming – frog.
As for the US, a West Asian war – one it hasn’t scripted itself – does not suit its immediate interests, as an old-school Deep State stalwart confirmed by email:
That could permanently end the area as an oil-producing region and astronomically raise the oil price to levels that will crash the world financial structure. It is conceivable that the United States banking system could similarly collapse if the oil price rises to $900 a barrel should Middle East oil be cut off or destroyed.
It’s no wonder that the Biden combo, days before the Iranian response, was frantically begging Beijing, Riyadh, and Ankara, among others, to hold Tehran back. The Iranians might have even agreed – had the UN Security Council imposed a permanent ceasefire in Gaza to calm the regional storm. Washington was mute.
The question now is whether it will remain mute. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of the General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, went straight to the point:
We have conveyed a message to America through the Swiss Embassy that American bases will become a military target if they are used in future aggressive actions of the Zionist regime. We will consider this as aggression and will act accordingly.
The US dilemma is confirmed by former Pentagon analyst Michael Maloof:
We have got some 35 bases that surround Iran, and they thereby become vulnerable. They were meant to be a deterrence. Clearly, deterrence is no longer on the table here. Now they become the American’ Achilles heel’ because of their vulnerabilities to attack.
All bets are off on how the US–Israel combo will adapt to the new Iranian-crafted deterrence reality. What remains, for the historic moment, is the pregnant-with-meaning aerial show of Muslim Iran singlehandedly unleashing hundreds of drones and missiles on Israel, a feat feted all across the lands of Islam. And especially by the battered Arab street, subjugated by decrepit monarchies that keep doing business with Israel over the dead bodies of the Palestinians of Gaza.
Most Western analysts were popping champagne corks today proclaiming Israel’s “massive” victory over Iran’s 14 April combined drone, cruise missile and ballistic missile attack on targets in Israel. I don’t know if they are really this blind to what happened or are willing participants in a psychological operation to persuade Israel that it had a victory and does not need to escalate. Regardless, let’s deal with the facts.
Iran told the United States and several neighboring countries exactly what it was going to do. We know this thanks to an article in the Financial Times published on April 12 — 36 hours before Iran launched.
Iran has signalled to allies and western nations that it will retaliate against a suspected Israeli air strike on its Damascus consulate in a “calibrated” manner to keep an all-out regional conflict at bay, according to officials briefed on the talks.
Tehran is unlikely to target Israeli diplomatic facilities in the region, said an official briefed on talks between Iran and Oman, the Gulf state that has often facilitated back-channel diplomacy between Tehran and Washington.
US intelligence on any impending attack appears to be detailed and specific, according to the officials briefed on the situation, giving Israel a window to prepare its defences. . . .
Even a direct attack in Israeli territory would probably be “calibrated” in a manner that would show a robust response, without triggering an Israeli retaliation that would lead to Iranian assets in Lebanon and Syria being decimated, the western official said, while warning that a miscalculation is possible.
Iran’s goal was to demonstrate it could hit Israel if it wanted to, but was providing advance warning to give the Israelis time to protect personnel in order to minimize casualties. Iran was not trying to cause mass casualties.
Turkish, Jordanian and Iraqi officials said on Sunday that Iran gave wide notice days before its drone and missile attack on Israel, but U.S. officials said Tehran did not warn Washington and that it was aiming to cause significant damage. . . .
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said on Sunday that Iran gave neighbouring countries and Israel’s ally the United States 72 hours’ notice it would launch the strikes.
Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said it had spoken to both Washington and Tehran before the attack, adding it had conveyed messages as an intermediary to be sure reactions were proportionate.
“Iran said the reaction would be a response to Israel’s attack on its embassy in Damascus and that it would not go beyond this. We were aware of the possibilities. The developments were not a surprise,” said a Turkish diplomatic source.
Not surprisingly, Biden officials are vehemently denying they had advanced warning according to the Reuters report:
“That is absolutely not true,” the official said. “They did not give a notification, nor did they give any sense of … ‘these will be the targets, so evacuate them.’”
Tehran sent the United States a message only after the strikes began and the intent was to be “highly destructive” said the official, adding that Iran’s claim of a widespread warning may be an attempt to compensate for the lack of any major damage from the attack.
“We received a message from the Iranians as this was ongoing, through the Swiss. This was basically suggesting that they were finished after this, but it was still an ongoing attack. So that was (their) message to us,” the U.S. official said.
Statements from U.S. officials can no longer be accepted as accurate given their established history of lying. This is a “cover-my-ass” denial. Can you imagine the political outrage that would ensue if the Biden team copped to the fact that they had forewarning from Iran? Do you think that the Turkish and Jordanian officials did not communicate to Washington what they had been told? Of course not.
Iran’s attack in the early morning hours of Sunday was symbolic retaliation. The mullahs and IRGC commanders put Israel on notice that any further attacks on Iran, especially Iranian territory, will be answered by Iranian attacks on Israel. Iran demonstrated a remarkably sophisticated attack using three different weapon systems — drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. They did not use their most advanced, sophisticated weaponry.
The drones were used in the same way that pawns are employed in a chess match — draw out the opponent and create vulnerabilities. Israel used up over 700 Iron Dome missiles in countering Iran’s 300 plus drones. Why? You normally fire two Iron Dome missiles per target to ensure a hit. Ditto for the cruise missiles.
What we know for a fact is that most of the ballistic missiles hit their targets in Israel. Here is a video of one of the strikes. Iran demonstrated a remarkably sophisticated capabilitiy — i.e., a maneuverable warhead. Notice that the inbound Iranian missile evades the Israeli interceptor and strikes the target. Wow!!
Scott Ritter summed it up best with this Xwitter (pronounced Shitter):
The U.S. has an advanced AN/TPY-2 X-band radar stationed at Har Qeren, in the Negev desert. Its mission is to detect Iranian missile launches, and pass targeting data to Israeli Arrow and David’s Sling and U.S. THAAD ABM batteries deployed to protect sensitive Israeli sites, including Dimona and the Nevatim and Ramon air bases.
Iranian missiles struck both Nevatim and Ramon air bases. The best surveillance radar in the world, working in concert with the most sophisticated anti-missile defenses in the world, were impotent in the face of the Iranian attack.
For all those trying to spin yesterday’s events as an Israeli victory, chew on that fact: The best missile defense system in the world could not protect the sites they were tasked with protecting from attacks by Iranian missiles.
Who has deterrence supremacy? It ain’t Israel.
I agree with Scott. While Israel and its Western allies proved adept at shooting down slow moving drones, they failed when it came to defeating ballistic missiles armed with a conventional explosive warhead.
We are now in the wait-and-see mode. There are contradictory signals out of Israel. Some insist Israel’s retaliation is imminent. Others suggest there will be no retaliation. I believe Israel is under the control of some genuine crazies and will try to hit an Iranian oil facility or military installation in Iran. When they do that Iran will make good on its promise and will launch a much larger, more devastating attack on Israeli military and intelligence targets. This is a fight Israel cannot win. If it chooses to pursue this course of action it will lead to the unraveling of its military effort to defeat Hamas and rescue any hostages still alive.
I discussed the aftermath of Israel’s attack with the Judge during our regularly scheduled Monday morning chat.
Iran made history yesterday by launching “Operation True Promise”. In our usual style here, let’s cut through all the noise currently clogging up social networks and incisively demonstrate the facts as thoroughly as possible, while also pointing out how this was a game-changing and historic event which has brought Iran onto the world stage in a big way.
Firstly, as establishment, Iran’s stated goal for the operation was to strike back at the bases from which the Israeli consular attack was launched on April 1:
IRGC has listed its objectives for last nights missile attack: Ramon and Nevatim airbases (where attack on Iran Consulate was conducted from). Israeli Air Force intelligence HQ in Tel Aviv (where attack on Iran Consulate was planned) and degrading of Israeli air defence radars and assets.
The footage is of the Intelligence HQ getting hit. I have yet to see evidence of 99% interception. Ramon has been badly hit. Nevatim was hit by more than 7 missiles. Air Force Intelligence HQ completely leveled. Other strikes on air defence installations obviously not close to population centres and out of view but I’m sure sat intel will show extent of damage.
And another:
➖Nevatim Airbase in the south of occupied Palestine
➖Ramon Airbase in the south of occupied Palestine
➖The Israeli top-secret intelligence-spy base in Jabal al-Sheikh (Mount Hermon) in the north of the occupied Golan
It should be noted that the rest of the explosions or hits in other areas of the occupied territories are related to the confrontation of the Israeli air defense systems with the projectiles in the sky or the falling of the wreckage of the interceptor missiles or the wreckage of Iranian missiles.
Now, let’s get down to the nuts and bolts.
This strike was unprecedented for several important reasons. Firstly, it was of course the first Iranian strike on Israeli soil directly from Iranian soil itself, rather than utilizing proxies from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, etc. This alone was a big watershed milestone that has opened up all sorts of potentials for escalation.
Secondly, it was one of the most advanced and longest range peer-to-peer style exchanges in history. Even in Russia, where I have noted we’ve seen the first ever truly modern near-peer conflict, with unprecedented scenes never before witnessed like when highly advanced NATO Storm Shadow missiles flew to Crimea while literally in the same moments, advanced Russian Kalibrs flew past them in the opposite direction—such an exchange has never been witnessed before, as we’ve become accustomed to watching NATO pound on weaker, unarmed opponents over the last few decades. But no, last night Iran upped the ante even more. Because even in Russia, such exchanges at least happen directly over the Russian border onto its neighbor, where logistics and ISR is for obvious reasons much simpler.
But Iran did something unprecedented. They conducted the first ever modern, potentially hypersonic, assault on an enemy with SRBMs and MRBMs across a vast multi-domain space covering several countries and timezones, and potentially as much as 1200-2000km.
Additionally, Iran did all this with potentially hypersonic weapons, which peeled back another layer of sophistication that included such things as possible endoatmospheric interception attempts with Israeli Arrow-3 ABM missiles.
But let’s step back for a moment to state that Iran’s operation in general was modeled after the sophisticated paradigm set by Russia in Ukraine: it began with the launch of various types of drones, which included some Shahed-136s (Geran-2 in Russia) as well as others. We can see that from the Israeli-released footage of some of the drone interceptions:
At the 0:49 mark you can see what looks like a Shahed, though it appears similar to the jet-engine-equippedShahed-238 variety.
After a certain pre-timed span, Iran then released cruise missiles so that they could strike roughly in a similar window as the drones. One video from last night confirmed the low-flying cruise missile presence:
It’s not known for certain, but it appears it could be the new Abu Mahdi missile which has the appropriate ~1000km range. Here’s some other possibilities:
Then, following the appropriate time interval, Iran launched the coup de grace, its vaunted ballistic missiles. Here’s Iran’s own released footage of the start of Operation True Promise, which includes the ballistic launches:
As stated, all three layers of the attack were timed to coincide, with the slowest (drones) going first, then next fastest (cruise missiles), followed by the fastest time-to-target, the ballistic missiles.
The U.S. scrambled a large coalition to shoot the threats down, which included the U.S. itself, UK flying from Cyprus, France, and, controversially, Jordan which allowed them all to also use its airspace and even partook in the shoot downs.
Dozens of images proclaimed the “successful” shoot downs of Iranian ballistic missiles, like the following:
The problem is, all of those are the ejected booster stages of two-stage rockets. There is no conclusive proof that any ballistic missiles were shot down, and in fact all the evidence points to the opposite: direct footage of the missiles penetrating the AD net and striking targets. But we’ll get to that.
Missile Types
First: what kinds of ballistic missiles did Iran use?
There are speculations and then there’s what can be dutifully confirmed.
As for the confirmed, with my own eyes from the actual longer released launch video we can see the following:
Which appears to match what is likely the Shahab-3 below:
Here’s another photo from a Shahab-3 test:
In the launch photo, the very top warhead nose cone does appear slightly shorter and may match the Sejjil rocket better. The Sejjil is in fact a much newer evolution of and upgrade to the Shahab that has both a two-stage and three-stage variety for an extremely long range of 2500km+. And some also claim it might be the Ghadr-110, but this is also an evolution and similar ‘upgrade’ of the Shahab-3 system, which likewise looks almost identical.
There are some other launch videos that appear to show possible Zolfagher or the updated Dezfulsystems as well.
Then there is the closest shot of the launch video, which gives us the most accurate confirmation of one of the missile types:
On the fuselage you can see what appears to be EMA written, and the same can be seen on this photo from today of a “downed missile” somewhere in Iraq:
This comes closest to confirming that missile to be an Emad from the chart above, which is one of Iran’s most advanced and can feature a MaRV (Maneuverable Re-entry Vehicle) warhead. This is where it starts getting interesting, because the hits we saw in Israel appeared to potentially utilize some form of MaRV or hypersonic glide vehicle, which would mean Iran could have made history even beyond what we thought.
So let’s get there by first mentioning the other controversial claimthat Iran possibly used its most advanced new hypersonic Fattah-2 system:
In none of the launch videos was this visible, but that doesn’t necessarily preclude Iran having secretly launched and tested some of the above. An Iranian academic stated the following:
“Iran has not fired its hypersonic missiles. In fact, most of the drones and missiles that were fired were older drones and missiles. They were very inexpensive and were used as decoys. So Iran spent a couple of million dollars to force the Israelis to spend $1.3 billion in anti-missile missiles, which was itself a big achievement by the Iranians. And then a number of other missiles that the Iranians fired…cut through and struck their targets,” the academic and geopolitical affairs commentator told Sputnik.
And lastly, there are some experts who believe Iran utilized its elusive hypersonic Kheybar Shekan missile, which also features a highly maneuverable MaRV.
These are two shots from last night’s launch video:
And here is a stock photo of the Kheybar nosecone and warhead:
This is where it gets most interesting, and why I’ve prefaced it so thoroughly.
In short: while Israel and the U.S. claim they shot down 100% of everything, and while it’s possible that the drone and cruise missile lures were mostly shot down—though we have no strong evidence one way or the other—we do have evidence that the ballistic missiles largely went unopposed, slicing through what’s claimed to be the densest air defense in the world. Not only Israel’s itself, comprised of a layered defense of David Slings, Arrow-3s, Patriots, and Iron Dome, but also the aforementioned allied airforces, as well as what’s now been reported to be a U.S. Arleigh Burke warship firing upwards of 70+ SM-3 missiles from the Mediterranean shore.
The hits that we saw were spectacular in one profound way: the terminal velocity of the Iranian ballistic missiles appeared stunningly fast. Let’s review some of the most exemplary videos.
Here’s by far the most revealing one, which totally refutes Israeli claims of 100% shoot downs. Note the massive swarm of air-defense missiles going up at the onset, then at the middle mark, watch as Iranian ballistics crash through the AD net totally unopposed at high speed, slamming into the ground:
As a quick aside, this next video was claimed by many to show Israeli Arrow-3 missiles shooting down Iranian ballistics in the exoatmosphere, i.e. in space:
But in reality, all it shows is the stage separation of the Arrow missiles as they climb toward the exoatmospheric zone. It does not show any actual successful interceptions, nor is there any evidence of a single ballistic missile being shot down.
But here’s where we get down to business. The next video is the most eye-opening in terms of the capabilities of these missiles. The two most important things to note are: 1) the terminal velocity right before impact and 2) note how some of the missiles strike very precisely onto the same location in groups.
First video, note the terminal speed here:
Here note the speed but also the grouping accuracy:
In particular at 0:31 above what looks like a runway on the rightside of the screen can be seen, which could indicate this to be the Nevatim airbase in the Negev desert—where Arabic speaking Bedouins live, which explains the Arabic in the video.
Not all the impacts exhibit the high speed of a potentially hypersonic re-entry vehicle. For instance, this video shows perhaps somewhat slower missiles that nevertheless are easily bypassing the joint Israeli-Western AD net:
But getting back to the hypersonic question. Here’s a video showing one of Iran’s missile tests, which appears to show one of the hypersonic glide vehicle style warheads from the Ghadr missile:
A new video of the moment one of the IRGC’s ballistic missiles was hit during last year’s solar exercise near Chabahar has been released with 60 frames per second, where you can clearly see the impact of the Ghadr missile warhead for the first time. This warhead also has a very good final speed around Mach 7 and will be very strategic. The three-cone body of this cap is completely and severely melted, and you can also see the burning marks on the small parts of this cap in the first frame of entering the frame.
Photo:
The speed appears to coincide with the videos of the faster strikes, and you can see the vehicle looks like it may be glowing white-hot, which could explain the somewhat odd fact that in all the strike videos, the Iranian missiles appear ‘red’ as if they are still burning their engines. But we know most ballistic missiles like the Iskander have a burn-out phase after which the engine stops burning. Thus the red-hot nature of the strikes could potentially indicate not a burning engine, but rather the heat of the vehicle’s outer skin from hypersonic re-entry.
Further, most ballistics strike on a pretty steep or straight down decline, while many of the Iranian hits are on a shallower trajectory which could indicate a glide-style vehicle, though in the above ‘test’ it clearly shows it coming down at a 90 degree angle, so it’s likely capable of both.
That being said, it may not be an unpowered glide vehicle but one of the thrust-capable re-entry vehicles like so:
Unfortunately, we just don’t know the exact details—like construction material for instance—that would allow us to fully confirm its terminal speed. However, based on visual eye-balling, some of the strikes appear to be landing at minimum Mach 3.5-5 if not higher, which according to some, is even higher than Iskander terminal velocity.
That being said, while the Iranian MRBMs feature very complex propulsion systems, given that they are two and even three stage for extra-long range, while Russia and the U.S. lacks these because of their previous adherence to the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile Treaty, the guidance aspect of Iranian MRBMs remains a question mark. We don’t know how accurate they are, and in the end, how effective the strikes actually were in hitting their targets. That’s because beyond the general macro objective of “hitting Nevatim airbase”, for instance, we don’t know what precisely inside that giant airbase Iran may have targeted.
However, Israel did confirm the base was hit upwards of 7 times, but claims the damage was minor. In fact, they’ve now released footage showing them repairing one of the hit runways:
And some satellite photos have been released showing what appears to be possible strike damage throughout the base:
And another before and after timelapse, though unclear, shows possible damage to a hangar. Keep in mind this is the base which housed F-35s:
Could Israel be downplaying serious damage by releasing the video of a minor runway hole? For instance, they posted another video of an F-35 landing back at Nevatim base as a demonstration that the base is unharmed, but some have alleged that it is old footage:
That’s not to mention the official Israeli account tried to pass off old footage of Russian MLRS launches from Ukraine as Iranian ballistic launches last night:
Thus it’s clear that truth is no obstacle for Israel, which means we certainly cannot take their word on anything regarding last night’s operation.
Conclusion?
What can we conclude about last night? We don’t have any definitive ‘final words’ on how effective Iran’s strikes were because:
We don’t know Iran’s exact granular targets
We don’t know Iran’s exact intentions
For the second, what I mean is that many now believe Iran merely strove to provide a ‘demonstration en force’, as Will Schryver puts it. A show merely as a ‘warning’ to Israel, and to create deterrence from future Israeli escalations. In fact, Iranian officials have now warned that Iran will respond similarly to all future Israeli attacks:
They call this the New Equation. Anytime Israel attacks them, Iran now intends to strike them ‘head on’, i.e. directly from its soil as is their newly demonstrated capability.
Beyond this, Iran broke new ground in setting new milestones for missile technology and modern warfare, as stated in the outset. Iran demonstrated the capacity to bypass the most powerful and advanced anti-missile systems in the world—ones that have no built-in excuse as is the case in Ukraine. In Ukraine, the excuse is that the Patriots and other systems are manned by under-trained Ukrainians, and are not reinforced and integrated as wholly into layered Western systems as they would be in Western hands.
But last night, Iran penetrated every missile shield manned and operated by NATO itself, with all the trappings and advanced C4ISR and SIGINT capabilities inherent to the entire Western alliance; from THAAD, to Patriot, David’s Sling, Arrow-3, SM-3, Iron Dome, and even ‘C-Dome’ from Israeli corvettes—not to mention the entire complement of the West’s most advanced A2A defenses flown from F-35s, Typhoons, Eurofighters, and likely much more.
One must understand that ballistic missiles are precisely the apex predator that these most advanced Western AD systems were created to handle—and last night, they failed spectacularly in the same way the Patriots did in Desert Storm before them:
This sends a signal that Iran is now truly capable of striking any of the most high profile, high value targets of the West’s, in the entire sphere of the Middle East, within a radius of 2000-4000km. That is a significant capability that dwarfs even anything Russia or the U.S. itself is capable of in the same efficient way. Sure, Russia can send Avangards (very few, and highly expensive) and far slower long range cruise missiles, but due to the Treaty, no other country can match Iran’s cheap and immediate ballistic missile capability. The U.S. would have to send up a load of slow planes and do the traditional long range stand off attacks with slow munitions to hit targets at such distances.
As I said, the only question that remains is still of effectiveness by way of accuracy. It’s one thing to develop long range rockets via the luxury of a two-stage allowance, but there’s far more technology that goes into making such objects critically accurate—and I suspect here Iran may fall short of Russia and the U.S.’ capabilities, given that there’s a whole host of special electronics (signal boosting, EW reflecting, etc.) and guidance redundancies that are required for extreme accuracy. This is where Russia’s systems shine. Iran’s missiles have been shown to be quite accurate during tests in Iran under ideal conditions—but in highly contested EW environments, when the GPS/Beidou/Glonass signals are jammed, it could be a completely different story. Furthermore, the science behind signal retention in hypersonic plasma bubbles is quite extreme and no country has yet even proven the capability to consistently do this—but we won’t get into that for now, as I may cover that in an upcoming article focusing on the Russian Zircon.
The optics of seeing Iranian missiles flying over the Israeli Knesset surely sends chills down Israel’s spine because it states: we could have easily destroyed your Knesset, and much else, but we chose to be lenient, for now:
Who came out the winner?
There are now two chief competing ‘takes’ on the situation.
One says that Iran was ‘humiliated’ as Israel intercepted everything, and more importantly, that Iran has now blown its only advantage of surprise and strategic uncertainty/ambiguity by ‘showing its hand’ and not achieving much. They argue that Iran’s one true advantage over Israel was the threat that it could effect a mass launch of its feared ballistic missiles, wiping out huge swathes of Israel. But now that the perceived ‘damage’ from the attack was low, Iran has shown itself to be weaker than expected, which could imbue Israel with even more courage and motivation to continue striking and provoking Iran, as they might see they have nothing to fear from Iran’s long-touted missiles.
This is certainly a reasonable argument. I’m not saying it’s totally wrong—we simply don’t know for a fact because of the aforementioned reasons that:
We don’t actually know how much damage the strikes caused, due to Israel’s obvious lies of “100% interceptions” and disproved fakes.
We don’t know whether it was merely Iran’s goal to do a ‘light’ showing in the interest of ‘escalation management’. I.e. they may not have wanted to cause too much damage deliberately, simply to send a message but keep from provoking Israel to respond too aggressively.
Iran is said to have thousands of such missiles, so obviously having launched only 70+ or so is likely not indicative of a major attack tasked with actually causing serious destruction to Israeli infrastructure.
Then there’s the converse side: Iran came out the big winner by demonstrating all the previously-outlined abilities of bypassing the West’s densest AD shields.
Here’s why I think in some ways this conclusion to be the more correct in the long term.
Firstly, one of the common counterarguments is that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, which ultimately trumps anything Iran can throw at them. But in reality, now that Iran has proven the ability to penetrate Israel, Iran too can cause nuclear devastation by striking the Israeli Dimona nuclear power plant. Destroyed nuclear plants would produce far more radioactive chaos than the relatively ‘clean’ modern nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Israel is much smaller than the comparatively gigantic Iran. Iran can take many nuclear hits and survive; but a single mass nuclear event in Israel could irradiate the entire country, making it uninhabitable.
Secondly, recall the main fear of Iraqi Scarabs and Scuds back in the day: that they could contain chemical/biological warheads. Iran too could technically load its missiles with all kinds of nasty goodies of this sort: either chem-bio or even unenriched Uranium—which it has aplenty—to create a ‘dirty bomb’. Now that we know it can penetrate Israel easily, Iran could actually wipe the country out with a mass un-enriched nuclear, chemical, or biological attack with these now-proven hyper- or quasi-hypersonic ballistics. That threat alone now presents a psychological Damocles Sword that will act as asymmetrical deterrent or counter to any Israeli Samson Option threat.
Thirdly, this was Iran’s very first foray into such a direct strike. It can be argued that they gained critical data and metrics from the entire Western alliance’s defensive capabilities as well as Israeli defensive vulnerabilities. This means that there is an implied threat that any future attack of this scale could be far more effective, as Iran may now ‘calibrate’ said attack to maximize what it saw were any failings or weaknesses on its part last night. Russia has had two years of launching such strikes, and it has only been semi-recently that they’ve calibrated and finetuned the precise timings of the sophisticated multi-layered drone-ALCM-ballistic triple threat attack. Iran can improve with each iteration as well and maximize/streamline the effectiveness with each attempt.
Fourthly, there is the now-confirmed mass discrepancy of operational costs:
Israel’s defense of last night’s Iranian missile and drone attack is estimated to have costed over $1.3 billion in jet fuel, surface-to-air missile interceptors, air-to-air missiles, and other military equipment utilized by the Israeli air defense array; with an “Arrow 3” hypersonic anti-ballistic missile alone believed to cost between $5-20 million.
One unconfirmed source claimed Iran’s attack cost as little as $30M, while the number floated for the West’s interceptions is around $1B to $1.3B.
Given that the average interceptor missile is minimum from about $1M to upwards of $15-20M for the SM-6s, this total price is plausible. Given that Iran was said to have fired a total of ~350+ drones/missiles, and that the standard procedure is to fire 2 interceptors at each threat, one can clearly see the math: 350 x 2 = 700 x $1-15M.
The point is that, just as we’re in the midst of the Houthis having proven the West’s total inability to sustain defense against mass persistent drone swarms, here too Iran may have just proven an absolutely lethal inability of Israel and the West to sustain against a potential long drawn-out Iranian strike campaign; i.e. one prosecuted over the course of days or weeks, with consistent daily mass-barrages. Such a campaign would likely critically deplete the West’s ability to shoot down even the lowest scale Shahed drone threat. Just look at Ukraine—it is going through the same lesson as we speak.
Lastly, what does this mean?
One neglected consequence of this is that Iran now stands to field the ability to totally disrupt Israel’s economic way of life. If Iran were to engage in a committed campaign of mass strikes, it could totally paralyze the Israeli economy by making entire areas uninhabitable, causing mass migrations in the same way the Hamas attack led thousands of Israelis to flee.
Unlike Israel’s barbaric and savage genocide aimed primarily at civilians, last night’s Iranian attack exclusively targeted military sites. But if Iran wanted to, they could launch mass infrastructure attacks in the way Russia has now done to Ukraine’s energy grids, further compounding the economic damage. In short: Iran could mire Israel in months’ and years’ long economic malaise or outright devastation.
Don’t forget this attack was still relatively limited to Iran alone. Sure, the Houthis and even Kata’ib Hezbollah reportedly sent a few drones, but it was minor. That means in the future, should Israel choose to escalate, Iran still reserves several levels of its own escalatory advantage. If push came to shove, imagine Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, Hamas, Syria, and Iran all launching full-fledged attacks on Israel in all out war. Maybe that’s what Israel wants, some would argue. After all, there are echoes of the various Arab-Israeli wars where Israel ‘triumphed’ against such large Arab coalitions. But times have changed, the calculus is slightly different now. Short of using nuclear weapons, how would Israel survive a full-scale war against Hezbollah in the north while Iran rains daily barrages of hypersonic missiles, drones, and everything in between on Israel’s industries, crippling its economy?
Of course, at that point the question of the U.S. coming to help is brought up, but, clearly desperate for an off-ramp, Biden just stated:
An Important Overlooked Point
The final aspect for consideration is to remember that all of the preceding and ensuing events could very well be part of the Israeli plan. Recall, Israel didn’t choose to blow up the Iranian embassy—a huge, unprecedented maneuver—and slaughter Iranian generals just for its health. This appeared part of a clear strategy of escalation aimed at baiting Iran into an escalatory spiral, presumably with the end goal of drawing the U.S. into a large scale war to cut down Iran once and for all.
In light of that, some experts now speculate that Iran foolishly “fell into the trap”. However, as stated earlier, Iran can be said to have wisely ‘managed’ the escalation for precisely this reason: to show its strength while not going too far in a way that would invite a wider American response—or even an Israeli one for that matter.
But I simply mention this to temper any ‘celebratory’ touts from the resistance sphere. While Iran’s strikes may inspire some chest-beating chauvinism, in reality it may very well have played into Israel’s hand. However, the U.S.’ unwillingness to support Israel into further escalation could very well deflate Netanyahu’s goals and simply leave Israel with egg on its face with Iran coming out the winner in the exchange.
We’ll have to wait and see where it leads: as of this writing, the story has changed three separate times; the last two being that Israel decided not to respond, with news now claiming that Israel not only has chosen to retaliate, but will even do so as early as tonight, perhaps within minutes or hours of this publication’s release. If that turns out to be the case, then we’ll have to see if Israel chooses its own ‘face-saving’ off-ramp ‘light touch’ attack just for damage control’s sake, or whether it truly aims to keep climbing that escalatory ladder in force. Any major action without American backing is risky: not only because it could fail, and Israeli planes could be shot down, but also because Iran could make good on its word and unleash another far more devastating attack.
Final Thoughts
Why now? Why did Israel bait Iran into such an action at this precise moment?
The clue to the answer lies in the news from several days ago that Israel totally withdrew its forces from Khan Younis:
I suspect that Israel—or Netanyahu in particular—is facing failure, after not having accomplished any of the stated objectives, and thus is desperate to create a new distraction as a vector for continuing the war in some way that could keep the world, and Israelis, from reaching the conclusion that the war has been totally lost.
We’ve lost. Truth must be told. The inability to admit it encapsulates everything you need to know about Israel’s individual and mass psychology. There’s a clear, sharp, predictable reality that we should begin to fathom, to process, to understand and to draw conclusions from for the future. It’s no fun to admit that we’ve lost, so we lie to ourselves.
Some of us maliciously lie. Others innocently. It would be better to find solace in some airy carb with a total-victory crust. But it might just be a bagel. When the solace ends, the hole remains. There’s no way around it. The good guys don’t always win.
The astonishing article, which jibes with the sentiments of many Israelis, goes on:
After half a year, we could have been in a totally different place, but we’re being held hostage by the worst leadership in the country’s history – and a decent contender for the title of worst leadership anywhere, ever. Every military undertaking is supposed to have a diplomatic exit – the military action should lead to a better diplomatic reality. Israel has no diplomatic exit.
The article concludes that the calculus has changed, and that Israelis may now never be able to return to the northern border, given the situation with Hezbollah.
Another classic line:
No cabinet minister will restore our sense of personal security. Every Iranian threat will make us tremble. Our international standing was dealt a beating. Our leadership’s weakness was revealed to the outside. For years we managed to fool them into thinking we were a strong country, a wise people and a powerful army. In truth, we’re a shtetl with an air force, and that’s on the condition that its awakened in time.
The author then focuses his condemnation on the upcoming ‘Rafah operation’:
Rafah is the newest bluff that the mouthpieces are plying to fool us and make us think that victory is just moments away. By the time they enter Rafah, the actual event will have lost its significance. There may be an incursion, perhaps a tiny one, sometime – say in May. After that, they’ll peddle the next lie, that all we have to do is ________ (fill in the blank), and victory will be on its way. The reality is that the war’s aims will not be achieved. Hamas will not be eradicated. The hostages will not be returned through military pressure. Security will not be reestablished.
In short: this is why Netanyahu needed an escalation. It’s to divert attention from the ongoing catastrophe of Israel’s potential defeat to Hamas, the catastrophic loss of standing of Israel’s image in the world community, the complete turning against Israel by the entire world. Rather than admit defeat and face the end of his career, as well as the coming trials and tribunals that would put Bibi in jail, he chose to take the only remaining option: to continue escalating in the hopes that a wider-scale war could wash away his sins and undo the past mistakes. Unfortunately, just like the ill-fated Zelensky, Netanyahu’s doomed plan appears destined to coincide with the U.S.’ historic decline, reaching its zenith now in this pivotal year of 2024.
At the critical moment when Israel needed the strongest possible America, they got the weakest America in its history. That is Israel’s blunder, which may be its ultimate, calamitous undoing. But Bibi will likely have no choice but to continue escalating, or at least keep a strategy of tension a constant presence in order to survive.
Only last quick postscript note is to say that the ensuing events could affect the Ukrainian aid bill, as there is now talk of ramming through an emergency Israeli aid package, in light of events, which could have Ukrainian aid attached; but we’ll have to see what happens, as there is still strong opposition among some Republicans.
‘Democrats see ordinary Americans as the great unwashed’
Who would vote for the Democrats now? Certainly not working-class Americans. Once the voice of the union man, the Democratic Party is now more interested in acting as a mouthpiece for the college-educated elites. These supposed progressives care more about imposing woke ideology and Net Zero penury on ordinary people, than they do about improving their lives. And yet Democrats remain baffled as to why working-class voters are turning to Donald Trump.
Ruy Teixeira, co-author of Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, joined Brendan O’Neill on the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss all this and more. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.
Brendan O’Neill: How did the Democrats lose so much of their working-class voter base so quickly?
Ruy Teixeira: On a raw, empirical level, the Democrats are rapidly losing the support of working-class Americans. In 2020, Biden lost non-college-educated and working-class voters, which was very unusual for the Democrats until recently.
Now there’s been an even greater deterioration of working-class support for Biden and the Democrats. Trump is beating Biden by 14 points among working-class voters in the polls – that’s a 10-point increase compared with 2020. But Biden is up more than 15 points among college-educated voters. We’re seeing this kind of educational polarisation not just among white voters, but also among other racial groups.
In a pure, nose-counting sense, the Republicans have indeed replaced the Democrats as the party of the working classes. And there’s a very simple reason for this. The Democratic Party lost a lot of white working-class voters in the last half of the 20th century, because it embraced soft neoliberalism. Slowly but surely, working-class voters became less convinced that the Democrats were on their side when it came to economic issues. In fact, the Democrats began adopting what economists called the ‘compensate the losers’ strategy, which promised to transfer the benefits of neoliberal globalisation to the masses. But this never really happened.
More recently, we’ve seen the Democrats become increasingly responsive to an ever-more important part of their base. That is, the liberal, college-educated, incredibly sensitive white voter. These voters are interested in social, cultural and political issues that are utterly alien to what most working-class voters care about – be they black, white or Hispanic. It’s almost unimaginable that the Democratic Party of 30 years ago would have been on board with radical attitudes toward defunding the police, gender-affirming care, relaxed border controls and the endless hectoring about racial ‘equity’.
Back then, the Democratic Party had enough common sense, and enough anchoring in the working classes, to avoid these divisive ideas. But nowadays, the party is steered by voters from the commanding heights of cultural production. The party is particularly responsive to these voters because, quite frankly, they need their money and support.
Obviously, Democrats in competitive districts aren’t going to run on platforms like ‘defunding the police’ and providing gender-affirming care – but the party is still the party. And its image is antithetical to what a lot of working-class people are comfortable with or believe in.
These days, you could reasonably argue that the Democrats are actually anti-working-class. Of course, the party will always argue that it still pursues policies in the economic interests of the working classes. But in a lot of ways, Democrats really don’t like working people. They treat ordinary Americans as the great unwashed. In books like White Rural Rage, which are popular in Democratic circles, rural Americans are painted as xenophobic, authoritarian troglodytes opposed to everything that decent people stand for. The Democrats are meant to be the party of the working classes, and yet its members outright resent them.
O’Neill: Would you say that working-class voters turned their backs on the Democrats for cultural reasons or are the economic factors more important?
Teixeira: It’s definitely a combination of the two. There’s an old, well-known Gallup poll that asks voters which party will do the best job of keeping America prosperous and secure in the next few years. Democrats used to have a huge advantage on this issue, particularly among working-class voters. In the 70s and 80s, however, that advantage really started disappearing – and it’s never come back. To this day, Democrats are rated below the Republicans on which party can keep the country prosperous.
More recently, the Democrats have gone far beyond the popular ideals of tolerance, opposing discrimination and supporting equality of opportunity. These common-sense positions have been replaced with boutique ideas in support of ‘reverse discrimination’ and the non-existence of the gender binary. This radical push has led to the ‘culturalisation’ of important economic and political issues in the US. The climate issue is a perfect example of this.
The culture of the Democratic Party has evolved in a way that makes achieving a sensible industrial policy quite difficult. Instead of propping up competitive industries, like oil and gas, the Democrats have adopted this green-oriented approach favouring renewable energy and electric vehicles. Working-class people simply aren’t interested in this. And they especially aren’t interested when their energy bills start rising. Fundamentally, environmentalism has evolved from protecting the environment and reducing pollution into an apocalyptic crusade against global warming.
None of this makes economic sense and it doesn’t do a lot of good for the working class. But when the party culture is constructed in such a way that the highly educated and hyper-liberal have all the power, this is exactly the kind of nonsense you’re going to get. The climate, after all, is a huge issue for the elites. They don’t care if it ranks 17th on the list of priorities for ordinary, working-class people. They’re going to pursue radical climate policies anyway. It’s just one example of how cultural radicalism has completely infected the Democrats’ approach to economic issues.
Democrats have ceased asking themselves the fundamental question: ‘How are we going to make the lives of working-class people better?’ Sensing this, working Americans are looking elsewhere.
The whole planet awaits with bated breath the avowedly inevitable Iranian response to the attack against its consulate/ambassador residence in Damascus by the biblical psychopaths responsible for the Gaza genocide.
Enveloped in an aura of secrecy, each passing day betrays the immensity of the challenge: the possibly asymmetrical response must be, simultaneously, symbolic, substantive, cogent, convincing, reasonable and rational. That is driving Tel Aviv totally hysterical and the deciding instances of the Hegemon extremely itchy.
Everyone with a functioning brain knows this wet dream of a stunt from the point of view of hardcore Zionists and US Christian zio-cons was a serious provocation, designed to draw the US to the long-cherished Israeli plan of striking a decisive blow against both Hezbollah and Tehran.
The IDF’s Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi all but gave away the game, when he said this past Sunday that “we are operating in cooperation with the USA and strategic partners in the region.”
Translation: never trust the Hegemon even as the notion is floated – via Swiss mediators – that Washington won’t interfere with Tehran’s response to Tel Aviv. One just needs to remember Washington’s “assurances” to Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War.
It’s impossible to take Hegemon back-channel assurances at face value. The White House and the Pentagon occasionally dispense these “assurances” to Moscow every time Kiev strikes deep inside the Russian Federation using US-UK satellite intel, logistics, weaponry and with NATO in de-facto operational control.
The state terror attack on Damascus, which shredded the Vienna convention on diplomatic immunity, crucially was also an attack on both the expanded BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Iran is a member of both multilateral bodies, and on top of it is engaged in strategic partnerships with both Russia and China.
So it’s no wonder the leadership in both Beijing in Moscow is carefully considering all possible repercussions of the next Iranian move.
Tel Aviv’s purposeful escalation – when it comes to expanding war in West Asia – happens to mirror another escalation: NATO’s no way out in Ukraine except by doubling down, with no end in sight.
That started with the invariably out of his depth Secretary of State Little Tony Blinken affirming, on the record, that Ukraine will (italics mine) join NATO. Which any functioning brain knows is translatable as the road map towards a Russia-NATO hot war with unbelievably dire consequences.
Little Blinkie’s criminal irresponsibility was duly picked up and reverberated by the Franco-British duo, as expressed by British FM David “of Arabia” Cameron and French FM Stephane Sejourne: “If Ukraine loses, we all lose”.
At least they got that (italics mine) right – although that took ages, when it comes to framing NATO’s approaching cosmic humiliation.
“Dual Opposition” to “Dual Deterrence”
Now let’s switch from clownish bit players to the adults in the room. As in Russian FM Sergei Lavrov and Chinese FM Wang Yi discussing literally every incandescent dossier together earlier this week in Beijing.
Add to it the confirmation that President Putin and President Xi will hold at least two bilaterals in 2024: at the SCO summit in June and at the BRICS summit in October.
In a nutshell: the dogs of Forever Wars bark while the Eurasian integration caravan marches on.
Both Lavrov and Wang made it very clear that while steering through “the natural course of history”, the Russia-China strategic partnership will keep seeking a way to resolve the Ukraine tragedy, taking into account Russia’s interests.
Translation: NATO better wake up and smell the coffee.
This bilateral at the FM level in Beijing is yet another graphic proof of the current tectonic shift in what the Chinese usually describe as the “world correlation of forces”. Next month – already confirmed – it will be Putin’s turn to visit Beijing.
It’s never enough to remember that on February 4, 2022, also in Beijing, Putin personally explained to Xi why NATO/Hegemon expansion into Ukraine was totally unacceptable for Russia. Xi, for all practical purposes, understood the stakes and did not subsequently oppose the SMO.
This time, Lavrov could not but refer to the 12-point peace plan on Ukraine proposed by Beijing last year, which addresses the root causes “primarily in the context of ensuring indivisible security, including in Europe and the world over.”
Your “Overcapacity” is Driving Me Nuts
Both Tehran and Moscow face a serious challenge when it comes to the Hegemon’s intentions. It’s impossible to definitely conclude that Washington was not in the loop on Tel Aviv’s attack on Iran in Damascus – even though it’s counter-intuitive to believe that the Democrats in an election year would willingly fuel a nasty hot war in West Asia provoked by Israel.
Yet there’s always the possibility that the White House-endorsed genocide in Gaza is about to extrapolate the framework of a confrontation between Israel and Iran/Axis of Resistance – as the Hegemon is de facto implicated in myriad levels.
To alleviate such tension, let’s introduce what under the circumstances can be understood as comic relief: the “Yellin’ Yellen goes to China” adventure.
US Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen went to Beijing to essentially deliver two threats (this is the Hegemon, after all).
1.Yellen said that Chinese companies could face “significant consequences” if they provided “material support for Russia’s war on Ukraine.”
2. Yellen accused Chinese companies of “overcapacity” – especially when it comes to the electric-vehicle (EV) industry (incidentally, 18 of the top 20 EV companies around the world are Chinese).
The Chinese, predictably, dismissed the whole show with barely a yawn, pointing out that the Hegemon simply cannot deal with China’s competitive advantage, so they resort to yet another instance of “de-risking” hype.
In sum: it’s all about barely disguised protectionism. Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao went straight to the point: China’s advantage is built on innovation, not subsidies. Others added two extra key factors: the efficiency of supply chains and ultra-dynamic market competition. EVs, in China, along with lithium batteries and solar cells, are known as the new “three major items.”
Yellin’ Yellen’s theatrics in Beijing should be easily identified as yet another desperate gambit by a former hyperpower which no longer enjoys military supremacy; no dominant MICIMATT (the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex, in the brilliant formulation by Ray McGovern); no fully controlled logistics and sea lanes; no invulnerable petrodollar; no enforced, indiscriminate fear of sanctions; and most of all, not even the fear of fear itself, replaced across the Global South by rage and utter contempt for the imperial support for the genocide in Gaza.
“The official US position recognizes that it can’t be an industrial exporter anymore, though how is it going to balance the international payments to support the dollar’s exchange rate? The solution is rent-seeking. That’s why the United States says, well, what’s the main new rent-seeking opportunity in world trade? Well, it’s information technology and computer technology.
That’s why the United States is fighting China so much, and why President Biden has said again and again that China is the number one enemy. It moved first against Huawei for the 5G communications, and now it’s trying to get Europe and American and Taiwanese exporters not to export a computer chip to China, not for the Dutch to export chip-engraving machinery to China. There’s a belief that somehow the United States, if it can prevent other countries from producing high-technology intellectual property rents, then other countries will be dependent.
Rent-seeking really means dependency of other countries if they don’t have a choice to pay you much more money than the actual cost of production. That’s rent, the price over value. Well, the United States, since it can’t compete on value because of the high cost of living and labor here, it can only monopolize rent.
Well, China has not been deterred. China has leapfrogged over the United States and is producing its own etching machinery, its own computer chips. The question is, what is the rest of the world going to do? Well, the rest of the world means, on the one hand, the global majority, Eurasia, the BRICS+, and on the other hand, Western Europe. Western Europe is right in the middle of all this. Is it really going to forego the much less expensive Chinese exports at cost, including normal profit, or is it going to let itself be locked into American rent-extraction technology, not only for computer chips but for military arms?”
Graphically, this eventful week provided yet another howler: Xi officially received Lavrov when Yellin’ Yellen was still in Beijing. Chinese scholars note how Beijing’s position in a convoluted triad is admirably flexible, compared to the vicious deadlock of US-Russia relations.
No one knows how the deadlock may be broken. What is clear is that the Russia-China leadership, as well as Iran’s, know full well the dangers roaming the chessboard when the usual suspects seem to go all out gambling everything, even knowing that they are outgunned; outproduced; outnumbered; and outwitted.
It’s a tawdry Greek tragedy remix, alright, yet without the pathos and grandeur of Sophocles, featuring just a bunch of nasty, brutish specimens plunging into their unblinking, self-inflicted doom.
As it continues to engage in a “plausibly genocidal” mass murder spree in Gaza, the state of Israel has embraced the most psychotic and psychopathic interpretation of one of the most violent narratives from the Hebrew Bible. This is fueling a narcissism that puts the very existence of Israel at risk.
On October 28, as Israeli ground forces began turning Gaza into a free-fire zone, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed his nation. He vowed to destroy Hamas for “our existence” and also “for the benefit of all of humanity.”
During the speech he said, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”
This sparked immediate global controversy and concern. Amalek was the son of Eliphaz and Timna, which are not household names for the adventitious Abrahamic religious adherent. But Eliphaz was the son of Esau, and Esau was the twin brother of Jacob. Esau and Jacob were sons of Isaac. These two have one of the most infamous rivalries in the Western Canon. Jacob’s line leads to the Israelites while Esau’s leads to the Amalekites:
“…descendants of Amalek, were an ancient biblical nation living near the land of Canaan. They were the first nation to attack the Jewish people after the Exodus from Egypt, and they are seen as the archetypal enemy of the Jews.”
According to the Hebrew Bible, the Amalekites went full 1973 on the embryonic state of Israel:
“While the Jews were still at Rephidim, recuperating from their escape from Egypt, the nation of Amalek launched a vicious surprise attack on them—though the Jews had no designs on Amalekite territory and were not even headed in that direction.”
As Libertarian Institute Executive Editor Sheldon Richman mused, “Since Yahweh many times had ‘hardened Pharaoh’s heart,’ causing him to refuse to free the Israelites, perhaps Yahweh put the Amalekites there for some unknown reason.” In any event, the Jews defeated the Amalekites in fierce battle. Almost 400 years later, Samuel advised Saul:
“This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” [emphasis added]
Hence the uproar over Netanyahu’s Amalek comment. However, Netanyahu’s rhetoric got even more spicy, when he said Israeli soldiers were “joining this chain of Jewish heroes. A chain that has started 3,000 years ago from Joshua ben Nun until the heroes of 1948, the Six Day War, the ’73 October War and all other wars in this country.” [emphasis added]
Why Joshua? Netanyahu could have referenced the first man, Adam. Or Noah, who saved humankind. He could have started the chain almost 4,000 years ago with Abraham, considered the first Jew and one of the Three Patriarchs of Judaism by scholars. Or Isaac or Jacob, the other two patriarchs. Jacob in particular was renamed Israel.
Netanyahu could have drawn a line to one of Jacob’s twelve sons, who gave rise to the twelve tribes (and thus the very foundation) of Israel. The obvious choice would be Levi or Judah, but there’s also Joseph, who became the trusted advisor of the Pharaoh. When famine hit the land of the Jews, Jacob and his sons sought immigrant assistance services in Egypt and Joseph was able to provide some much-needed administrative aid. That famine, by the way, was natural, unlike the famine being deliberately inflicted on Gaza by Israel.
Of course, the Jews ended up enslaved by the Egyptians. Moses eventually led the Jews out of Egypt, but it was Joshua who led them in victorious battle against the Amalekites and then onward into the Promised Land. He was a spy, a warrior, and a commander of men; no wonder Netanyahu evoked him.
We should keep in mind that archaeologists and other scholars have found no artifactual or documentary evidence of Israelite enslavement in Egypt or an exodus of two million people through the Sinai over forty years. And the Promised Land, Canaan, was part of the Egyptian Empire at the time.
Joshua fits perfectly as the patron saint of the Israeli Military-Intelligence Establishment. People around the world, and especially in America, should be able to empathize with such hero-worship.
The Joshua narrative portrays the Amalekites as archetypal, malevolent, and predatory evil. Contrast this with the portrayal of the Trojans in the Iliad, a Greek epic created for Greek audiences that actually views the enemy as human:
“Achilles is the hero of The Iliad, but he’s not described as the noble man—that title belongs to Hector the Trojan. The Greeks are just as much interested in the enemy as in their own troops, and they describe them with dignity and compassion and appreciation…There is a sense of respect for the other side: champions are matched as equals, and this is particularly Greek…The Homeric epics date to almost exactly the same period as the Book of Judges. Read the Book of Judges and see the way in which the Semitic Israelites regard their enemy. It’s a very different story.”
The Greeks destroyed Troy and killed and raped everyone they could get their hands on, but they acknowledged the Trojans’ humanity. Israel has stopped viewing its enemies as human. And that has allowed it to plan potentially suicidal military action.
The Palestinians are human beings. The Yemenis are human beings. The Lebanese are human beings. The Syrians are human beings. The Iraqis are human beings. The Iranians are human beings. Israel’s inability to accept this reality is a narcissistic flaw that imperils its existence.
Does anyone in Washington care about Israel’s crimes?
• 2,400 WORDS •
One expects that anyone involved in politics will lie whenever they think they can get away with it to burnish one’s own image and while also distorting reality to promote policies that are being favored. Nevertheless, the record of high crimes committed by a series of presidents and their top aides since the so-called “war on terror” began has established a new low for government veracity. One would have thought that the fake intelligence fabricated by a group of Zionists in the Pentagon and White House to launch the misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq would be as bad as it could possibly get, but the Joe Biden team has outdone even those unfortunately unindicted criminals by allowing itself to be maneuvered by friends in NATO and by Israel into situations that are one step short of nuclear war.
Listening to John Kirby, Lloyd Austin, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield speak suggests that a course of remedial English might be in order as they cannot articulate a sentence that is coherent, especially as they are frequently lying or being deliberately evasive. And then there is teleprompter Joe himself who can pout over the killing of 13,000 children in Palestine while also secretly sending weapons to the Israelis who are eager to slaughter still more based on the judgement that they will grow up to be “terrorists.” Joe’s idea of a exchange of views with the Israeli government is a threat to maybe do something unspecific followed by a strongly worded message from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling him to “Go to hell!”
Joe’s gang cannot confirm that the Israelis are committing war crimes linked to genocide even though the rest of the world, including a majority of Americans, watch it happening on television and are convinced regarding what is taking place. But hey, Israel is a wonderful little democracy and America’s best friend and ally in the whole wide world. Or at least that is what Congress and the White House as well as the Jewish dominated media want you to believe. In reality, Israel is a racist and sectarian state that has been a US liability since it was founded, something that Secretary of State George Marshall warned about, but Harry Truman wanted Jewish money so he could get reelected. Some things never change as we watch Biden and Trump battle for the shekels by pledging their loyalty to Israel.
The latest wrinkle on the consequences of loving Israel so much comes with what it going on with Iran, which had its Embassy Consulate General building in Damascus Syria attacked by Israeli fighter planes, killing two senior Iranian generals plus a number of other Iranians, Lebanese and Syrians. For what it’s worth, embassies and consulates are generally speaking regarded as untouchable military targets under the terms of the Vienna Convention, which sought to keep enemies talking to each other even under the most adverse circumstances. In fact, Syria last fought Israel in 1973, more than fifty years ago, and has not gone to war with the Israelis since that time while Israel has been bombing Syria regularly as well as killing Iranian officials and scientists for many years. Iran, like Syria of late, has never attacked Israel.
Iran has said it will retaliate and Israel has gone on high alert. So what does Biden do? He warned Iran to back off and ignores the fact that it was Israel that did the unprovoked attacking and started the whole business and pledges “ironclad” support for the Jewish state if Iran dares to do anything serious in response. There are also reports that Israel and the US are planning jointly their possible retaliation if Iran were to strike. General Erik Kurilla, commander of the US Central Command, is now on his way to Israel and is expected to meet Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and senior Israel Defense Forces officials to coordinate possible US responses with those of Israel. Nota bene that President Biden has flipped the right or wrong of the entire affair over to do exactly what Israel wants, i.e. hopefully have the US go to war with the Iranians. This has been Netanyahu’s intention right from the beginning and there is also a bit of blackmail thrown in for good measure with Israel threatening to start using its secret nuclear arsenal if the United States stops supplying the Jewish state with weapons. Israeli Knesset member Nissim Vaturi, a representative in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, issued the threat in an unsubtle way while discussing the probability that Iran would retaliate against Israel for bombing its embassy. He said “In the event of a conflict with Iran, if we do not receive American ammunition … we will have to use everything we have.” In other words, Israel will have no choice but to start dropping nuclear weapons on its enemies and might also attack its friends who failed to support it, a reference to the Samson Option in which a beleaguered Israel would use its nukes to “take everyone down with them.”
The timing of the embassy attack suggests that Israel is acting as it does, i.e. taking steps to shift the narrative and restore its perpetual “victimhood,” because it definitely needs a public relations boost in a world where only the US and a few other nations aligned with Washington are not yet ready to give up on Bibi and his wild plans for regional domination. The horrific killing of hundreds of Palestinians in the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza as well as the targeted assassination of seven employees of a charity that was bringing in food to those starving due to Israel’s blocking the entry of relief supplies have been the top stories all over the world, and rightly so. The Israeli disdain for any behavior that might show weakness in the drive to remove the Palestinians from Palestine has resulted in the Jewish state’s being condemned and boycotted by much of the world with more to come.
Nevertheless, even in those countries that have made illegal pro-Palestinian expressions, demonstrations calling for a ceasefire have attracted hundreds of thousands of protesters. The governments confronting elections later this year, including the US and Germany, are under considerable pressure to respond to the popular sentiment. Indeed, it is already being mooted that President Joe Biden might well fail to be re-elected due to his kid gloves handling of Netanyahu who has assessed Biden’s weakness and has heedlessly taken US support as a given while also ignoring the warnings that are now coming out of Washington and elsewhere over the genocide taking place.
Indeed, it would be useful to speculate that the conflict in Gaza is in part being used as a smokescreen for developments with Iran and other Israeli neighbors that may prove more dangerous in the long run. Even the well-informed might be surprised to learn that even though Israel is not actually at war legally with several of its neighbors, it is nevertheless de facto at war with three countries, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. It has been exchanging fire with the Lebanese Hezbollah militias on its northern border on an almost daily basis since fighting with Hamas began in October and has sought and apparently obtained US guarantees of direct support should Hezbollah escalate its activity. In Syria, which has not in any way attacked Israel, the Israeli air and missile forces have staged numerous attacks against targets that it invariably claims to be “Iranian” even though most of the casualties are Syrians. There have been missile and bombing attacks on Syria nearly weekly since 2017, including a number of recent incidents involving both Damascus and Aleppo international airports that endangered civilian passengers and air crews.
As reported above, the most recent and most damaging attack was directed against the Iranian Consulate General, which was attached to the Iranian Embassy located in an upscale neighborhood in Damascus, Syria’s capital. The building was completely destroyed by six missiles fired from F-35 fighter planes that had crossed over the Syrian border from Israel, killing several long-serving diplomats alongside Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Zahedi’s deputy, General Haji Rahimi. It was also reported that Brigadier General Hossein Amirollah, the chief of general staff for the al-Quds force in Syria and Lebanon, was among the victims as was at least one Hezbollah member. Sources in Syria confirmed that a total of 13 people were killed in the attack, including six Syrians. Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said afterwards that “We consider this aggression to have violated all diplomatic norms and international treaties. Benjamin Netanyahu has completely lost his mental balance due to the successive failures in Gaza and his failure to achieve his Zionist goals.” Both Iran and Hezbollah vowed revenge.
And just days before the attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, the Israeli military had launched massive strikes against a target in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo which killed at least 40 people, most of them soldiers. The air strikes hit a weapons depot, resulting in a series of explosions that also killed six Hezbollah fighters.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) subsequently revealed that it had strengthened air defenses and called up reservists in expectation of a response either from Lebanon or directly from Iran itself. Zahedi was an important Iranian official, reportedly responsible for the IRGC’s operations in Syria and Lebanon, for Iranian militias there, and for ties with Hezbollah, and was thus the most senior commander of Iranian forces in the two countries. His killing was the most significant death of a senior Iranian official since the murder in Baghdad of General Qassim Soleimani by the Trump Administration in January 2020. As the IRGC is a US-designated terrorist organization, Washington may have in advance approved of the Israeli action, though that was denied by the Pentagon.
Iran’s possible reprisal includes the capability to respond by directly launching missiles from its own territory rather than via any of its proxy groups, which include the militias it supports in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. Responding to that possibility, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz has warned on social media that if Tehran attacked from its territory, Israel would react and “attack in Iran.” Iran may therefore choose to respond indirectly or through a proxy, but any major reprisal would be giving Israel an excuse to elevate the conflict, which just might be the main reason for the attack on the Consulate General in the first place. It is, however, widely believed that the Iranian leadership is eager to avoid any escalation into a major or even a minor exchange that could be referred to as a war. Nevertheless, posters have gone up around Tehran in a sign of public pressure for an Iranian response. “The defeat of the Zionist regime in Gaza will continue and this regime will be close to decline and dissolution,” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech to the country’s officials in Tehran. “Desperate efforts like the one they committed in Syria will not save them from defeat. Of course, they will also be slapped for that action,” he added.
Israeli Defense Minister Gallant responded to the Ayatollah, saying that Israel is “increasing preparedness” in the face of threats from all across the Middle East. Gallant said that the country’s defense establishment is “expanding our operations against Hezbollah, against other bodies that threaten us,” and reiterated that Israel “strikes our enemies all over the Middle East… We will know how to protect the citizens of Israel and we will know how to attack our enemies.”
Intelligence sources in Washington suggest that Iran will try to respond by possibly blowing up an Israeli Embassy or other building, or even by assassinating an Israeli official, but they will more likely do something indirectly through a proxy like Hezbollah or the Houthis. They could also send a more subtle message by accelerating their nuclear program, though there is a danger that that would definitely bring the US into the game, which is precisely what Israel would like to see. They want to cripple Iran but would much prefer that all the heavy lifting – and the casualties and costs – be endured by Washington. If a US intervention were to occur and there were a misstep, it could easily escalate into a regional war with Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran all lined up against the US and Israel with China and Russia likely to be playing a supporting role aiding the Arabs and Iranians. And don’t forget that Israel is nuclear armed. If it gets in trouble it would see itself as a victim and would be tempted to do something very dangerous.
So it is easy to see that Israel has staged a deliberate provocation to draw Washington into its wars. It is playing with fire in an attempt to once and for all establish its dominance over all of its neighbors. Interestingly, the tone deaf Biden Administration appears to be falling into the trap set by the Israelis. Beyond the “ironclad” pledge, it also voted against a Russian and Chinese drafted UN Security Council resolution to condemn the Israeli attack on the Iranian Consulate General. The vote should have been a no brainer given the clear violation of international law and act of war committed by Israel in doing what it did, but the US was joined by Britain and France in casting the veto vote “no” reportedly after “Diplomats said the US told council colleagues that many of the facts of what happened on Monday in Damascus remained unclear.” It all means that Biden is stepping in it yet again in a situation where Netanyahu is in control and running circles around him.
ZURICH—“Technological change, while it helps humanity meet the challenges nature imposes upon us, leads to a paradigm shift: It leaves us less capable, not more, of using our intellectual capacities. It diminishes our minds in the long run. We strive to improve ourselves while risking a regression to the Stone Age if our ever more complex, ever more fragile technological infrastructure collapses.”
That is Hans Köchler, an eminent Viennese scholar and president of the International Progress Organization, a globally active think tank, addressing an audience here last Thursday evening, April 4. The date is significant: The day before Köchler spoke, +972 Magazine and Local Call, independent publications in Israel–Palestine, reported that as the Israel Defense Forces press their savage invasion of the Gaza Strip, they deploy an artificial intelligence program called Lavender that so far has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as kill targets. In the early weeks of the Israeli siege, according to the Israeli sources +972 cites, “the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.”
Chilling it was to hear Köchler speak a couple of news cycles after +972 published these revelations, which are based on confidential interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have been directly involved in the use of AI to target Palestinians for assassination. “To use technologies to solve all our problems reduces our ability to make decisions,” Köchler asserted. “We’re no longer able to think through problems. They remove us from real life.”
Köchler titled his talk “The Trivialization of Public Space,” and his topic, broadly stated, was the impact of technologies such as digital communications and AI on our brains, our conduct, and altogether our humanity. It was sobering, to put the point mildly, to recognize that Israel’s siege of Gaza, bottomlessly depraved in itself, is an in-our-faces display of the dehumanizing effects these technologies have on all who depend on them.
Let us look on in horror, and let us see our future in it.
We see in the IDF, to make this point another way, a rupture in morality, human intelligence, and responsibility when human oversight is mediated by the algorithms that run AI systems. There is a break between causality and result, action and consequence. And this is exactly what advanced technologies have in store for the rest of humanity. Artificial intelligence, as Köchler put it, is not intelligence: “It is ‘simulated intelligence’ because it has no consciousness of itself.” It isn’t capable, he meant to say, of moral decision-making or ethical accountability.
In the Lavender case, the data it produced were accepted and treated as if they had been generated by a human being without any actual human oversight or independent verification. A second AI system, sadistically named “Where’s Daddy?”—and how sick is this?—was then used to track Hamas suspects to their homes. The IDF intentionally targeted suspected militants while they were with their families, using unguided missiles or “dumb” bombs. This strategy had the advantage of enabling Israel to preserve its more expensive precision-guided weapons, or “smart” bombs.
As one of +972’s sources told the magazine:
We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity… . On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.
Once Lavender identified a potential suspect, IDF operatives had about 20 seconds to verify that the target was a male before making the decision to strike. There was no other human analysis of the “raw intelligence data.” The information generated by Lavender was treated as if it was “an order,” sources told +972—an official order to kill. Given the strategy of targeting suspects in their homes, the IDF assigned acceptable kill ratios for its bombing campaigns: 20 to 30 civilians for each junior-level Hamas operative. For Hamas leaders with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, +972’s sources said, “the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”
In other words, Israeli policy, guided and assisted by AI technology, made it inevitable that thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, would be killed.
There appears to be no record of any other military deploying AI programs such as Lavender and Where’s Daddy? But it is sheer naïveté to assume this diabolic use of advanced technologies will not spread elsewhere. Israel is already the world’s leading exporter of surveillance and digital forensic tools. Anadolu, Turkey’s state-run news agency, reported as far back as February that Israel is using Gaza as a weapons-testing site so that it can market these tools as battle-tested. Antony Lowenstein, an author Anadolu quotes, calls this the marketing of “automated murder.”
And here we find ourselves: Haaretz, the Israeli daily, reported on April 5 that “intelligent” weapons proven effective in Gaza were major attractions when Israel marketed them last month at the Singapore Airshow, East Asia’s biggest arms bazaar.
Hans Köchler, who has studied the impact of digital technologies for many years, did not seem to have read the +972 Magazine report before he spoke here last week. This made his remarks all the more disturbing. He was not describing—not specifically—the murderers operating Lavender and other such technologies in Gaza. We will all live and die by these Faustian technologies: This, our common fate, was Köchler’s topic. Over the past six months, this is to say, Israel has announced the dehumanization that awaits all of us in that AI systems are technologies against which we have little defense. “Self-determination gives way to digital competence,” Köchler said. “We can’t distinguish between virtual reality and reality.”
Along with the +972 report on the use of AI came others in a week notable for its stomach-churning news of Israeli depravity. In its April 3 editions The Guardian revealed that the IDF intentionally deploys snipers and quadcopters—remotely controlled sniper drones—to target children. The evidence of this comes from U.S. and Canadian doctors who, while serving in Gaza, treat many children with wounds consistent with and easily identified as caused by snipers’ bullets. These are larger than the ammunition generally used in combat because they are intended to kill rather than wound.
The Biden regime never addresses these barbaric developments, and our corporate media, with rare exceptions such as The Guardian piece just cited, tell us almost nothing of them. Official and media accounts of events in Gaza, their “narratives,” are utterly at odds with these realities. How, we are left to ask, do they get away with these day-in, day-out dishonesties? This was the obvious question last week, given the extremes to which the IDF’s criminality now extends.
If you Google “Lavender” and “The New York Times,” you get “Lavender Oil Might Help You Sleep” and similarly frivolous headlines. Neither has The Times made any mention of the +972 investigation. If you read detailed accounts of the April 1 air attacks on the World Central Kitchen’s three food-delivery vehicles, which killed seven aid workers, it is inescapable that the Israeli military systematically targeted them, one truck to the next, until all three were destroyed—this after WCK had carefully coordinated its deployment of the vehicles with Israeli authorities. These killings are entirely in line with the directive Yoav Gallant, Israel’s repulsive defense minister, issued Oct. 9: “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed.”
And what did we read of this incident in mainstream media?
Per usual, the Israeli military was authorized to investigate the Israeli military—an absurdity no U.S. official and no media account questioned. On April 5 the IDF announced that two officers were dismissed and three other reprimanded for “mishandling critical information.” President Biden declared he was “heartbroken.” The New York Times called the attack “a botched operation,” explaining that the IDF’s top officers “were forced to admit to a string of lethal mistakes and misjudgments.” Over and over we hear the refrain that Israel “is not doing enough to protect civilians.”
So it was a regrettable accident, we are led to conclude. Israel is doing its best. It has all along done its best. Put this against the raw statistic: The IDF has killed more than 220 humanitarian workers since it began its siege last October, to go by the U.N.’s count. How can one possibly believe that these were 220–plus accidents? “Let’s be very clear. This is not an anomaly,” an Oxfam official, Scott Paul, said after the WCK attack. “The killing of aid workers in Gaza has been systemic.”
There is reality and there is meta-reality, a term I have used previously in this space. How do the two stand side-by-side? How does the latter, the conjured “reality,” prove so efficacious? How do so many accept the 220–plus-accidents “narrative?” Why, more broadly, do so many accept propaganda and lies when they know, subliminally, they are constantly fed lies and propagandized?
I go back once again to Hans Köchler. In his speech and in various of his many books, he argues that electronic media—television chief among these—have conditioned people to rely for information on pictures and images instead of reading. “They lose the ability to analyze text, and so the ability to understand problems,” he said here. “People come to live in virtual worlds.”
We cannot think of a better description of the “narratives” advanced by the Biden regime and disseminated in corporate media: They present us with a virtual world—fully aware that, our minds habituated to pictures and images, most of us will mistake this virtual world for reality, just as Köchler warns. As a member of the audience here put it, “How is it possible to watch a genocide in real time and no one says anything? Knowledge no longer has any value. Anything goes, and if anything goes, nothing goes.”
The Biden regime supplies Israel with weaponry to prosecute its criminal siege of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians. It gives the apartheid state diplomatic cover at the United Nations and legal cover at the International Court of Justice. It distorts and obscures the IDF’s “Stone Age” conduct. All of this requires us to speak now not of Israel’s genocide but of the Israeli–U.S. genocide.
But the Biden regime is culpable in inflicting these multiple wounds on humanity in one other dimension we must not miss. With its incessant attempts to suspend us in a virtual reality of its making, distant from what it is doing in our names, it leads us into the dehumanized, grotesquely technologized future Köchler describes just as surely as the Israelis do as they murder human beings wholesale with AI weapons and kill innocent children with remotely controlled sniper drones.
Cornel West tapped university professor and prominent Black Lives Matter activist Melina Abdullah to be his running mate on his long-shot presidential bid.
Abdullah has never run for political office before and is the former chair of the Pan-African Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles.
Melina Abdullah
“I wanted to run with someone who would put a smile on the face of Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr. from the grave,” West said.
He announced his pick on Wednesday’s episode of the Tavis Smiley Radio Show on KBLA radio.
West is running as an independent candidate and faces significant challenges in his campaign for the White House. West’s fundraising has lagged behind his opponents, raising less than $1 million since launching his bid last summer.
Since getting in the race, West has switched parties twice, leaving the People’s Party and the Green Party to ultimately run as an independent. The switch mandates an expensive and difficult process to get his name on the ballot in 50 states and Washington, DC. Officially choosing his vice president allows him to start collecting petition signatures to get on the ballot in about 20 states.
“Both of us want to disrupt the narrative that you have only two choices,” Abdullah said of their ticket. “We can be expansive and imaginative … we enter this really as faithful people who are not more pragmatists than we are faithful.”
Through partnerships with existing third parties, West is already on the ballot in three states. But this method was not successful in California, one of the hardest states to gain ballot access, as West lost the Peace and Freedom Party’s primary to the Party for Socialism and Liberation candidate in March.
(Party For Socialism and Liberation candidates for US President and VP)
Abdullah, who is also an organizer of grassroots and local Black Lives Matter chapters, said she “was not expecting the phone call that I got last week at all, like it was the furthest thing from my mind. And then he and his wife Annahita [Mahdavi West] asked and immediately my heart just soared.”
Black Lives Matter doesn’t endorse candidates, she said, but individuals involved with the organization may endorse her separately. Abdullah, who is also a Howard University graduate and member of the AKA sorority, said she would not step away from her work organizing with the grassroots local chapters.
West also said there wouldn’t be any political “burden” being associated Black Lives Matter, which has called for defunding the police and was alleged to be associated with property destruction at civil rights demonstrations in 2020.
As a practicing Muslim, Abdullah also spoke of the auspiciousness of her announcement on Eid, the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramandan. She talked openly about her faith, using a similar approach to West’s on the campaign trail. West is a Christian and the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary.
“I’m running for Jesus. She’s running for Allah. That’s a beautiful thing,” West said.
The announcement was a major milestone for West’s campaign but was not without issue. A technical difficulty affecting West’s audio input cut him out from their joint interview for almost 10 minutes.
Democrats were swift to criticize West’s announcement. “Despite Cornel West announcing a running mate, our view remains the same: only two candidates have a path to 270 electoral votes, President Biden and Donald Trump,” said DNC spokesperson Matt Corridoni. “The stakes are high, and we know this is going to be a close election — that’s why a vote for any third party candidate is a vote for Donald Trump.”
On the morning of West’s announcement, the New York Times reported that Trump allies view third-party candidates as advantageous for Trump’s reelection chances. One ally, Scott Presler, has messaged both West and the Green Party’s Jill Stein about helping them get on the ballot on social media.
West co-campaign manager Ceyanna Dent said, “Scott Presler has not worked with the campaign in any capacity.” Though Dent added that the campaign staff was briefed on his overtures.
West was asked by Smiley about being a possible spoiler in 2024, and said, “No politician owns a vote. We stand for what we stand for. If you go with us, then come with us and change the world.”
The U.S.’ growing urgency in ‘containing’ China’s development was thrown in sharp relief this week as Janet Yellen arrived in Beijing for what turned out to be an execrable beggar’s tour. Just days prior to her arrival, she had buzzed the punditry with her historically memorable exclamation that China was now operating at “overcapacity”(!!).
What is overcapacity, you ask? It’s a new word for me, too—so let’s consult the dictionary together:
overcapacity noun o·ver·ca·pac·i·ty: ō′vər-kə-ˈpa-sə-tē 1: When an insolent upstart nation’s surging economic activity totally humiliates the reigning hegemon’s own faltering economy, causing the many expensive dentures and porcelain veneers of the ruling class gerontocracy to rattle and grate with moral outrage and jealousy.
1b: An undesirable situation causing Janet Yellen and Nancy Pelosi’s stock portfolio to droop like a pair of botox-sapped jowls.
Granted…my dictionary might be slightly different to yours, I have a rare edition. That said, are we on the same page? Good.
The above definition may be missing in the new official regime argot pamphlet, but it’s safe to say the inept leaders of the U.S. are down to making up creative new euphemisms for describing China’s total undressing and upending of the economic order.
But if you were skeptical about the meaning behind Yellen’s risible “overcapacity” solecism, her speech from inside of China confirms precisely what’s on the regime’s mind:
“China is now simply too large for the rest of the world to absorb this enormous capacity. Actions taken by the PRC today can shift world prices….”
And the bombshell:
“When the global market is flooded with cheap Chinese goods, the viability of American firms is put into question.”
Well, I’ll say.
The important distinction to note in the above statement is that for a long time the ‘cheap’ moniker used to describe Chinese goods often underhandedly referred to their quality, in the secondary definitional sense. Here, Yellen is referring to cheap as in price: the distinction is significant because it’s referential to the fact that Chinese manufacturing processes have simply far exceeded the efficiency in the West, as recently highlighted by videos of the Xiaomi e-car factory with its own native Giga Press that’s claimed to be able to pump out a car every 17 seconds.
The fact of the matter is, China is simply leaping ahead of the decrepit, deteriorating U.S. by every measure and the panicked elites have sent Yellen to beg China to “slow down” and not embarrass them on the world stage.
How is China doing this? Let’s run through a few of the most poignant ways:
[1]
First and foremost, it’s become almost a passe bromide to observe: “The U.S. funds wars, while China funds development.” But it really is true. Think about this for a moment:
The above is factual: Esquire reported that a Brown University investigation found the U.S. has spent an ineffable $14T on wars since 9/11:
And yes, the current U.S. debt is a massive $34T. That means quite literally almost half of the entire current U.S. debt was blown on endless, mindless, genocidal wars in the Middle East.
The U.S. has wasted its entire blood and treasure on war. Imagine what the U.S. could have built with $14 trillion dollars? Where the U.S. could have been in relation to China for that amount? As someone else noted, the U.S. could have very well built its own “one belt and road” project for that money, connecting the world and reaping untold benefits.
China hasn’t spent a cent on war, and puts everything right back into economic development and wellbeing for its own people.
China is winning lion’s share of construction projects in Africa
Chinese companies accounted for 31% of African infrastructure contracts valued at US$50 million or more in 2022, compared with 12% for Western firms, according to a new study.
It is worth to be noted that in the 1990s, about eight out of 10 contracts to build infrastructure in Africa were won by Western companies.
The illustrative statistics for this are endless:
What makes this historic malappropriation of American funds most tragic is that none of it came at the benefit of American people. The entire operation was carried out by an ethnic cabal within the U.S. government with loyalties only to Israel, and no one else. I’m speaking of course of the PNAC clan, who masterminded the entire breadth of the 21st century wars which have engulfed America in wretched shame and misery, irreversibly gutting the country and squandering its global standing. These wars had nothing whatsoever to do with America’s national interests or security, and have done naught but make Americans less safe and the entire world more dangerous and unstable.
China doesn’t have this problem: there is no inimical ‘out’ group parasitizing their country’s leadership, literally assassinating (JFK) and blackmailing their presidents (Clinton). China is therefore able to focus on the interests of its own people.
And yes, for those wondering, it’s now fairly proven that Lewinsky was a Mossad honeytrap used to blackmail Clinton in assenting to various Israeli demands vis-a-vis the Oslo Accords, Wye River Memorandum, etc.
The fact is, Israel is a destructive parasite sucking the lifeblood out of America, causing the host to wage unnecessary wars on its behalf which have utterly removed every advantageous and competitive edge the country might have had over its Chinese ‘rival’.
[2]
As a corollary of the above, beyond just the simple kinetic nature of the profligately wasteful wars, America wastes an exorbitant amount of money just on maintenance and upkeep of its global hegemony. The reason is, it costs a lot of ‘enforcement’ money to strongarm vassals who hate you into compliance.
China doesn’t form vassals, it forms partners. That means it spends comparatively far less spreading its influence because that influence has compounding abilities owing to the fair bilateral nature of China’s arrangements. The U.S. has to spend comparatively inordinate amounts of blood and treasure to maintain the same level of ‘influence’ because that ‘influence’ is totally artificial, confected out of a poisonous mixture of fear, strong-arming tactics, economic terrorism that leads to blowback which hurts the U.S. economy, etc. In short, it is mafia tactics versus real business partnerships.
One big difference between China and the U.S. is that China is open to sharing the earth, willing to co-prosper with the U.S. Conversely, the U.S. is unwilling to abdicate its global domination:
The above was highlighted by Graham Allison, coiner of the Thucydides Trap idiom in relation to U.S./China. The Thucydides Trap, as some may know, describes a situation where an emerging power begins to displace the incumbent global power, and how historically this almost always leads to major war. To popularize the theory apropos U.S./China, Graham Allison used the historical example of the Peloponnesian war, where a cagey Sparta was forced to take on the rising power of Athens.
Allison was recently invited by President Xi to a forum for U.S. business leaders where Xi told him directly:
Contrast President Xi’s magnanimous statements with those of the seething, guilt-wracked, bloodthirstily conniving Western ‘executives’. In fact, Xi called for more exchanges between China and the U.S. in order to entwine the two countries in mutual understanding, to avoid the Thucydides Trap:
This is the enduring image of what global leadership truly looks like, and the principles it embodies.
Meanwhile, when one thinks of America’s progressive decline, the one enduring image that comes to mind is of a bitterly frightened but dangerous, beady-eyed cornered rodent, conspiring on how to inflict damage and suffering onto the world in order to mask its own downfall.
[3]
The U.S. government does a grave disservice to its own development by cooking all of its economic books. Every country does it at times to some degree—and going by U.S.’ notoriously frequent accusations of China in this regard, one would think China to be the most flagrant violator—but in fact, no one does this more than the current U.S. regime.
The recent “jobs” report touted as a major victory by the Biden administration was a disgraceful travesty. The admin touted major jobs figures:
But it turned out every job was either part time, a federal job, or went to illegals:
In reality, the U.S. economy is in atrocious shape with sky-high inflation.
“The Fed chair just confessed that #Bidenomics is just a migrant job fair. There is actually a million less American citizens working today than there were in 2020.”
Biden created 5 million migrant jobs! So don’t be fooled by his propaganda that’s spewed by the liberal machine. YOU DONT MATTER!
The data is cooked even more when comparing to China’s economic situation. As the following Tweeter explains:
While Chinese INCOMES are below American INCOMES, Chinese have much higher NET WORTH than Americans. How? They own apartments at a much higher rate and with a lot more equity than Americans. The MEAN and MEDIAN insight is even more beautiful. This graphic here is pretty much the only thing you need to understand about the difference between the economies of China and United States. But you really need to understand it and you need to have a deep understanding of what it means.
The above naturally springs the question of how China is able to do these things while the U.S. cannot. One of the answers comes by way of this fascinating explainer which shows that, contrary to the West’s depiction of China as some kind of rigidly authoritarian system, forward-looking President Xi is actually utilizing very cutting edge economic experimentation models to keep the Chinese economy as innovative, limber, and supple as possible.
In short, a deep study of thousands of official documents shows a huge upswing in language promoting economic experimentation in the directives issued under Xi’s government.
This is further compounded by the most important point of all: that under President Xi, China has embarked on a meticulous plan of curbing financialization and speculation of the ‘Western model’ in its economy. This is where it starts getting important so buckle up.
The article gives a brief history of financialization, from the Genoese bankers to modern times, observing the historical cycles that have precipitated America’s current deterioration:
Observers of the current American hegemony will recognize the transformation of the global system to suit American interests. The maintenance of an ideologically charged ‘rules-based’ order – ostensibly for the benefit of everyone – fits neatly into the category of conflation of national and international interests. Meanwhile, the previous hegemon, the British, had their own version that incorporated both free-trade policies and a matching ideology that emphasized the wealth of nations over national sovereignty.
In describing the cycle of financialization and its connection to the death of empires, the article notes about Britain:
For example, the incumbent hegemon at the time, Great Britain, was the country hardest hit by the so-called Long Depression of 1873-1896, a prolonged period of malaise that saw Britain’s industrial growth decelerate and its economic standing diminished. Arrighi identifies this as the ‘signal crisis’ – the point in the cycle where productive vigor is lost and financialization sets in.
And yet, as Arrighi quotes David Landes’ 1969 book ‘The Unbound Prometheus,’ “as if by magic, the wheel turned.” In the last years of the century, business suddenly improved and profits rose. “Confidence returned—not the spotty, evanescent confidence of the brief booms that had punctuated the gloom of the preceding decades, but a general euphoria such as had not prevailed since…the early 1870s….In all of western Europe, these years live on in memory as the good old days—the Edwardian era, la belle époque.” Everything seemed right again.
However, there is nothing magical about the sudden restoration of profits, Arrighi explains. What happened is that “as its industrial supremacy waned, its finance triumphed and its services as shipper, trader, insurance broker and intermediary in the world’s system of payments became more indispensable than ever.”
In short: as an empire dies, loses its industrial and manufacturing capacity, finance takes over, pumping up huge bubbles of phony speculative money that gives the brief appearance of economic prosperity—for a time. This is what’s currently happening in the U.S., as it drowns in its self-created agony of debt, misery, corruption, and global destabilization.
One thing to note—if you’ll allow me this not-so-brief aside—is that the entire Western system is based on the actual institutionalized economic sabotage and subversion of the developing world. Books like the following go into some of it:
The rise of the underground economy: The book reveals how the United States’ underground economy evolved parallel to its legitimate economy, exploiting loopholes and leveraging secrecy jurisdictions to facilitate illegal activities such as drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and money laundering.
The “dark” side of globalization: Mills challenges the prevailing narrative of globalization as a force for progress, highlighting how it has facilitated the expansion of illicit networks across borders and allowed criminal enterprises to flourish.
The complicity of financial institutions: The author examines the role played by major financial institutions in enabling money laundering and illicit transactions. He underlines the need for stronger regulations and accountability to prevent banks from becoming facilitators of underground activities.
I challenge you to read notes on the National Memorandum 200, if you haven’t heard of it before:
Incidentally, John Michael Greer just penned a new column (thanks to whoever shouted out this blog in the comments!) about the neologism he coined: Lenocracy, which derives from the Latin “leno” for pimp; i.e. a government run by pimps, or pimpocracy.
His definition of pimps in this case is that of middlemen who are the classic rent-seeking leaches—or rentier class—which extract economic rent without adding any value to the economy—all Michael Hudson territory, for those in the know.
Bear with me, I promise this will all tie together into an overall picture of China.
JMG characterizes the ‘pimps’ as basically all the unelected, bureaucratic, red-tape-weaving, blood-sucking monetary vultures killing growth and livelihoods by each taking their nibbles in turn from the carcass of the working class, exacting some small transactional charge at every step of routine business in Western nations, particularly the U.S. This has served to suffocate the average small business or entrepreneurship in general, not counting the big ticket venture capitalists who are mostly offshoots of global financial and investment firms. This is part and parcel to the lethal ‘financialization’ of the country that has spelled doom for its future.
Now, getting back to Thomas Hon Wing Polin’s precis, and how it relates to this. He notes:
It is noteworthy that the CPC leadership recently launched a major drive to build China into a “financial great power,” with a financial system “based on the real economy.” That would be the antithesis to Anglo-American-style economic financialization.
Read that last part: “…set pure profit-making aside.”
Pay attention to this big kicker:
Beijing is powering ahead with the epic project.
“China’s 461-trillion-yuan (US$63.7 trillion) financial industry and its regulatory regime will be heavily prioritised in a broad economic reshuffle engendered by the country’s top leadership, with the sector remoulded to serve national objectives like sustainable growth and advancement in the global tech race.
Are you beginning to get it yet? If not, here’s the crowning finial:
Specifically, it vowed to rein in Wall Street-style practices seen as unsustainable and crisis-prone, and move toward functionality as an overriding value for the financial system rather than profitability.
It also mandated that Chinese financial institutions have “higher efficiency” than their peers in the capitalist world and provide inclusive, accessible services in the pursuit of common prosperity.
“Like it or not, banks and other institutions on the supply side should expect top-down directives and overhauls cued by the CFC,” said Zhu Tian, a professor with the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS).
And there it is. In essence: China is creating a revolution, striking out a new path of finance which steers away from the wild excesses of the West into a bold new direction. Finance to benefit the real economy, the common man, the people. This is what the fig leaf of Rothschild-pushed ‘stakeholder capitalism’ is meant to be, or better yet: pretends to be.
It’s hard not to wax poetic on these developments, because they are truly groundbreaking. China is paving a new path forward for the entire world. The Chinese banking industry is now by far the largest on earth and President Xi has wisely put his foot down with a bold edict: we will not follow the path of destruction chosen by the West, but rather will set our own new path.
This is an iconoclastic, paradigm-breaking revolution which ends six centuries of Old Nobility world finance dominion, traced from the Spanish-Crown-allied Genoese bankers, to the Dutch then English banking system which now continues to enslave the world, and is referred to by a variety of names in the dissident sphere: from Hydra, to Leviathan, to Cthulu, to simply: the Cabal.
All those 600 years are going up in smoke with China’s repudiation of the ‘old standards’, which privilege predatory, deceptive, extractive terms and practices meant to benefit only the Old Nobility elite class. China’s system is true stakeholder finance: the government will forcibly bend the bankers to its will, making sure that finance serves the common good and the people first, rather than speculation, financialization, capitalization, and all the other wicked inventions of the Western Old Nobility class.
It begins like so:
“…bringing greed is good era to an end.”
The big one:
“Government has called for banks to abandon a Western-style ethos and adopt an outlook in line with broader economic priorities.”
It’s a revolution in the making.
But if you’re thinking my dramatic flights above verge a touch on hyperbole or idealism, you could be right. I, of course, still proceed with caution; we can’t be sure that China will succeed in its grand demolishment of the age-old paradigm. But all signals point to early success thus far, and more importantly, it’s clear that China has a leader that fundamentally understands these things at the most rooted level. Western leaders not only are incapable of even grasping the complexities involved of reining in capital, they are unable to do so for the mere fact that they’re totally bought and paid for by the representatives of that very capital class. The cabal of Capital is so deeply and institutionally entrenched in Western governmental systems that it’s simply impossible to imagine them being able to see ‘the forest for the trees’ from within the forest itself.
By the way, in light of the above, here’s the West’s truly desperate, pathetically envious, face-saving attempt to tarnish and mischaracterize China’s new direction:
The above is particularly astounding in its admissions. Read carefully:
Market-based US and European economies are struggling to survive against China’s “very effective” alternative economic model, a top US trade representative has warned, according to Euractiv.
Katherine Tai told a briefing in Brussels on Thursday that Beijing’s “non-market” policies will cause severe economic and political damage, unless they are tackled through appropriate “countermeasures.” Tai’s remarks came as the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) kicked off in Leuven, Belgium.
“I think what we see in terms of the challenge that we have from China is… the ability for our firms to be able to survive in competition with a very effective economic system,” Tai said in response to a question from Euractiv.
In short: China isn’t playing fair—they’re actually privileging their people and economy over financial speculation, and this is causing their firms to outcompete ours!
But what she’s really talking about gets to the essence of the difference in the two systems:
The trade official described China as a system “that we’ve articulated as being not market-based, as being fundamentally nurtured differently, against which a market-based system like ours is going to have trouble competing against and surviving.”
These are code words: what she means by “market based” is free market capitalism, while China uses more of a centrally-planned directive system, as outlined earlier. Recall just recently I posted complaints from Western officials that their companies are not able to compete with Russian defense manufacturers due to their ‘unfairly’ efficient ‘central planning’ style.
Here too, what they mean is that the Chinese government creates directives that spurn ‘market logics’ and are aimed at direct improvements to the lives of ordinary citizens. In the West there’s no such thing: all market decisions are based merely on the totally detached financial firms’ speculations and are exclusively at the behest of a tiny claque of finance and banking elite at the top of the pyramid.
You see, the U.S. is threatened because it knows it can never compete with China fairly, by squelching or containing its own gluttonous financial elite—so that leaves only one avenue for keeping up: sabotage and war.
This is the real reason the U.S. is desperate to stoke a Chinese invasion of Taiwan by various provocations, including weapons shipments. Just like the U.S. used Ukraine as the battering ram to bleed and weaken Russia economically, disconnecting it from Europe, U.S. hopes to use Taiwan as the Ukraine against China. It would love to foment a bloody war that would leave China battered and economically set back to give the failing and greed-suffocated U.S. economy some breathing room.
But it’s unlikely to work—China is too sagacious to take the bait and fall for the trap. It will patiently wait things out, allowing the U.S. to drown in its own endless poison and treachery.
No, there will be no Thucydides Trap—it’s already too late for that. The Trap worked for Sparta because it was still at its peak and able to thwart Athens. The U.S. is in terminal decline and would lose a war against China, which is why they hope to stage a proxy war instead, cowardly using Taiwan as the battering ram. But China can read these desperate motives with the clarity of finely glazed porcelain.
The isolation of Gaza is almost complete. The laws of war have been torn up and the enclave is now completely at Israel’s mercy
After six months – and many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian women and children later – western commentators are finally wondering whether something may be amiss with Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Three missiles, fired over several minutes, struck vehicles in a World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid convoy heading up Gaza’s coast on one of the few roads still passable after Israel turned the enclave’s homes and streets into rubble. All the vehicles were clearly marked. All were on an approved, safe passage. And the Israeli military had been given the coordinates to track the convoy’s location.
With precise missile holes through the vehicle roofs making it impossible to blame Hamas for the strike, Israel was forced to admit responsibility. Its spokespeople claimed an armed figure had been seen entering the storage area from which the aid convoy had departed.
But even that feeble, formulaic response could not explain why the Israeli military hit cars in which it was known there were aid workers. So Israel hurriedly promised to investigate what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a “tragic incident”.
Presumably, it was a “tragic incident” just like the 15,000-plus other “tragic incidents” – the ones we know about – that Israel has committed against Palestinian children day after day for six months.
In those cases, of course, western commentators always managed to produce some rationalisation for the slaughter.
Not this time.
‘This has to stop’
Half a year too late, with Gaza’s entire medical infrastructure wrecked by Israel and a population on the brink of starvation, Britain’s Independent newspaper suddenly found its voice to declare decisively on its front page: “Enough.”
Richard Madeley, host of Good Morning Britain, finally felt compelled to opine that Israel had carried out an “execution” of the foreign aid workers. Presumably, 15,000 Palestinian children were not executed, they simply “died”.
When it came to the killing of WCK staff, popular LBC talk-show host Nick Ferrari concluded that Israel’s actions were “indefensible”. Did he think it defensible for Israel to bomb and starve Gaza’s children month after month?
Like the Independent, he too proclaimed: “This has to stop.”
The attack on the WCK convoy briefly changed the equation for the western media. Seven dead aid workers were a wake-up call when many tens of thousands of dead, maimed and orphaned Palestinian children had not been.
A salutary equation indeed.
British politicians reassured the public that Israel would carry out an “independent investigation” into the killings. That is, the same Israel that never punishes its soldiers even when their atrocities are televised. The same Israel whose military courts find almost every Palestinian guilty of whatever crime Israel chooses to accuse them of, if it allows them a trial.
But at least the foreign aid workers merited an investigation, however much of a foregone conclusion the verdict. That is more than the dead children of Gaza will ever get.
Israel’s playbook
British commentators appeared startled by the thought that Israel had chosen to kill the foreigners working for World Central Kitchen – even if those same journalists still treat tens of thousands of dead Palestinians as unfortunate “collateral damage” in a “war” to “eradicate Hamas”.
But had they been paying closer attention, these pundits would understand that the murder of foreigners is not exceptional. It has been central to Israel’s occupation playbook for decades – and helps explain what Israel hopes to achieve with its current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
Back in the early 2000s, Israel was on another of its rampages, wrecking Gaza and the West Bank supposedly in “retaliation” for Palestinians having had the temerity to rise up against decades of military occupation.
Shocked by the brutality, a group of foreign volunteers, a significant number of them Jewish, ventured into these areas to witness and document the Israeli military’s crimes and act as human shields to protect Palestinians from the violence.
They arrived under the mantle of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led initiative. They were keen to use what were then new technologies such as digital cameras, email and blogs to focus attention on the Israeli military’s atrocities.
Some became a new breed of activist journalist, embedded in Palestinian communities to report the story western establishment journalists, embedded in Israel, never managed to cover.
Israel presented the ISM as a terrorist group and dismissed its filmed documentation as “Pallywood” – a supposedly fiction-producing industry equated to a Palestinian Hollywood.
Gaza isolated
But the ISM’s evidence increasingly exposed the “most moral army in the world” for what it really was: a criminal enterprise there to enforce land thefts and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Israel needed to take firmer action.
The evidence suggests soldiers received authorisation to execute foreigners in the occupied territories. That included young activists such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall; James Miller, an independent filmmaker who ventured into Gaza; and even a United Nations official, Iain Hook, based in the West Bank.
This rapid spate of killings – and the maiming of many other activists – had the intended effect. The ISM largely withdrew from the occupied territories to protect its volunteers. Meanwhile, Israel formally banned the ISM from accessing the occupied territories.
Meanwhile, Israel denied press credentials to any journalist not sponsored by a state or a billionaire-owned outlet, kicking them out of the region.
Al Jazeera, the one critical Arab channel whose coverage reached western audiences, found its journalists regularly banned or killed, and its offices bombed.
The battle to isolate the Palestinians, freeing Israel to commit atrocities unmonitored, culminated in Israel’s now 17-year blockade of Gaza. It was sealed off.
With the enclave completely besieged by land, human rights activists focused their efforts on breaking the blockade via the high seas. A series of “freedom flotillas” tried to reach Gaza’s coast from 2008 onwards. Israel soon managed to stop most of them.
The largest was led by the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel laden with aid and medicine. Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship illegally in international waters in 2010, killing 10 foreign aid workers and human rights activists on board and injuring another 30.
That is the proper context for understanding the latest attack on the WCK aid convoy.
Israel has always had four prongs to its strategy towards the Palestinians. Taken together, they have allowed Israel to refine its apartheid-style rule, and are now allowing it to implement its genocidal policies undisturbed.
The first is to incrementally isolate the Palestinians from the international community.
The second is to make the Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli military’s goodwill, and create conditions that are so precarious and unpredictable that most Palestinians try to vacate their historic homeland, leaving it free to be “Judaised”.
Third, Israel has crushed any attempt by outsiders – especially the media and human rights monitors – to scrutinise its activities in real-time or hold it to account.
And fourth, to achieve all this, Israel has needed to erode piece by piece the humanitarian protections that were enshrined in international law to stop a repeat of the common-place atrocities against civilians during the Second World War.
This process, which had been taking place over years and decades, was rapidly accelerated after Hamas’ attack on 7 October. Israel had the pretext to transform apartheid into genocide.
Unrwa, the main United Nations refugee agency, which is mandated to supply aid to the Palestinians, had long been in Israel’s sights, especially in Gaza. It has allowed the international community to keep its foot in the door of the enclave, maintaining a lifeline to the population there independent of Israel, and creating an authoritative framework for judging Israel’s human rights abuses. Worse, for Israel, Unrwa has kept alive the right of return – enshrined in international law – of Palestinian refugees expelled from their original lands so a self-declared Jewish state could be built in their place.
Israel leapt at the chance to accuse Unrwa of being implicated in the 7 October attack, even though it produced zero evidence for the claim. Almost as enthusiastically, western states turned off the funding tap to the UN agency.
The Biden administration appears keen to end UN oversight of Gaza by hiving off its main aid role to private firms. It has been one of the key sponsors of WCK, led by a celebrity Spanish chef with ties to the US State Department.
WCK, which has also been building a pier off Gaza’s coast, was expected to be an adjunct to Washington’s plan to eventually ship in aid from Cyprus – to help those Palestinians who, over the next few weeks, do not starve to death.
Until, that is, Israel struck the aid convoy, killing its staff. WCK has pulled out of Gaza for the time being, and other private aid contractors are backing off, fearful for their workers’ safety.
Goal one has been achieved. The people of Gaza are on their own. The West, rather than their saviour, is now fully complicit not only in Israel’s blockade of Gaza but in its starvation too.
Life and death lottery
Next, Israel has demonstrated beyond doubt that it regards every Palestinian in Gaza, even its children, as an enemy.
The fact that most of the enclave’s homes are now rubble should serve as proof enough, as should the fact that many tens of thousands there have been violently killed. Only a fraction of the death toll is likely to have been recorded, given Israel’s destruction of the enclave’s health sector.
Israel’s levelling of hospitals, including al-Shifa – as well as the kidnapping and torture of medical staff – has left Palestinians in Gaza completely exposed. The eradication of meaningful healthcare means births, serious injuries and chronic and acute illnesses are quickly becoming a death sentence.
Israel has intentionally been turning life in Gaza into a lottery, with nowhere safe.
According to a new investigation, Israel’s bombing campaign has relied heavily on experimental AI systems that largely automate the killing of Palestinians. That means there is no need for human oversight – and the potential limitations imposed by a human conscience.
Israeli website 972 found that tens of thousands of Palestinians had been put on “kill lists” generated by a program called Lavender, using loose definitions of “terrorist” and with an error rate estimated even by the Israeli military at one in 10.
Another programme called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked many of these “targets” to their family homes, where they – and potentially dozens of other Palestinians unlucky enough to be inside – were killed by air strikes.
An Israeli intelligence official told 972: “The IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
As so many of these targets were considered to be “junior” operatives, of little military value, Israel preferred to use unguided, imprecise munitions – “dumb bombs” – increasing dramatically the likelihood of large numbers of other Palestinians being killed too.
Or, as another Israeli intelligence official observed: “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of smart bombs].”
That explains how entire extended families, comprising dozens of members, have been so regularly slaughtered.
Separately, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on 31 March that the Israeli military has been operating unmarked “kill zones” in which anyone moving – man, woman or child – is in danger of being shot dead.
Or, as a reserve officer who has been serving in Gaza told the paper: “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.”
This, Haaretz reports, is the likely reason why soldiers gunned down three escaped Israeli hostages who were trying to surrender to them.
Palestinians, of course, rarely know where these kill zones are as they desperately scour ever larger areas in the hope of finding food.
If they are fortunate enough to avoid death from the skies or expiring from starvation, they risk being seized by Israeli soldiers and taken off to one of Israel’s black sites. There, as a whistleblowing Israeli doctor admitted last week, unspeakable, Abu Ghraib-style horrors are being inflicted on the inmates.
Goal two has been achieved, leaving Palestinians terrified of the Israeli military’s largely random violence and desperate to find an escape from the Russian roulette Israel is playing with their lives.
Reporting stifled
Long ago, Israel barred UN human rights monitors from accessing the occupied territories. That has left scrutiny of its crimes largely in the hands of the media.
Independent foreign reporters have been barred from the region for some 15 years, leaving the field to establishment journalists serving state and corporate media, where there are strong pressures to present Israel’s actions in the best possible light.
That is why the most important stories about 7 October and the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel have been broken by Israeli-based media – as well as small, independent western outlets that have highlighted its coverage.
Since 7 October, Israel has barred all foreign journalists from Gaza, and western reporters have meekly complied. None have been alerting their audience to this major assault on their supposed role as watchdogs.
Israeli spokespeople, well-practised in the dark arts of deception and misdirection, have been allowed to fill the void in London studios.
What on-the-ground information from Gaza has been reaching western publics – when it is not suppressed by media outlets either because it would be too distressing or because its inclusion would enrage Israel – comes via Palestinian journalists. They have been showing the genocide unfolding in real-time.
But for that reason, Israel has been picking them off one by one – just as it did earlier with Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – as well as murdering their extended families as a warning to others.
The one international channel that has many journalists on the ground in Gaza and is in a position to present its reporting in high-quality English is Al Jazeera.
The list of its journalists killed by Israel has grown steadily longer since 7 October. Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh has had most of his family executed, as well as being injured himself.
His counterpart in the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akhleh, was shot dead by an Israeli army sniper two years ago.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Israel rushed a law through its parliament last week to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terror channel”, claiming it participated in Hamas’ 7 October attack.
Al Jazeera had just aired a documentary revisiting the events of 7 October. It showed that Hamas did not commit the most barbaric crimes Israel accuses it of, and that, in fact, in some cases Israel was responsible for the most horrifying atrocities against its own citizens that it had attributed to Hamas.
Al Jazeera and human rights groups are understandably worried about what further actions Israel is likely to take against the channel’s journalists to snuff out its reporting.
Palestinians in Gaza, meanwhile, fear that they are about to lose the only channel that connects them to the outside world, both telling their stories and keeping them informed about what the watching world knows of their plight.
Goal three has been achieved. The lights are being turned off. Israel can carry out in the dark the potentially ugliest phase of its genocide, as Palestinian children emaciate and starve to death.
Rulebook torn up
And finally, Israel has torn up the rulebook on international humanitarian law intended to protect civilians from atrocities, as well as the infrastructure they rely on.
Israel has destroyed universities, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries, as well as, most critically, medical facilities.
Over the past six months, hospitals, once sacrosanct, have slowly become legitimate targets, as have the patients inside.
Collective punishment, absolutely prohibited as a war crime, has become the norm in Gaza since 2007, when the West stood mutely by as Israel besieged the enclave for 17 years.
Now, as Palestinians are starved to death, as children turn to skin and bones, and as aid convoys are bombed and aid seekers are shot dead, there is still apparently room for debate among the western media-political class about whether this all constitutes a violation of international law.
Even after six months of Israel bombing Gaza, treating its people as “human animals” and denying them food, water and power – the very definition of collective punishment – Britain’s deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, apparently believes Israel is, unfairly, being held to “incredibly high standards”. David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary for the supposedly opposition Labour party, still has no more than “serious concerns” that international law may have been breached.
Neither party yet proposes banning the sale of British arms to Israel, arms that are being used to commit precisely these violations of international law. Neither is referencing the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide.
Meanwhile, the main political conversation in the West is still mired in delusional talk about how to revive the fabled “two-state solution”, rather than how to stop an accelerating genocide.
The reality is that Israel has ripped up the most fundamental of the principles in international law: “distinction” – differentiating between combatants and civilians – and “proportionality” – using only the minimum amount of force needed to achieve legitimate military goals.
The rules of war are in tatters. The system of international humanitarian law is not under threat, it has collapsed.
Every Palestinian in Gaza now faces a death sentence. And with good reason, Israel assumes it is untouchable.
Despite the background noise of endlessly expressed “concerns” from the White House, and of rumours of growing “tensions” between allies, the US and Europe have indicated that the genocide can continue – but must be carried out more discreetly, more unobtrusively.
The killing of the World Central Kitchen staff is a setback. But the destruction of Gaza – Israel’s plan of nearly two decades’ duration – is far from over.
Norms, Conventions and Laws of Conduct Are Being Erased
• 1,900 WORDS •
We stand on the cusp of what might be termed Chaotic War. Not the formula used by Israel often in the past to intimidate adversaries; this is different.
Israeli reporter Eddie Cohen said, in the wake of the attack on the Iranian Consulate: “We are very clear that we want to start a war with Iran and Hezbollah. Do you still not understand?”
“Israel wants to drag Iran into a full-scale war in order to be able to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities”, though these facilities are beyond American and Israeli reach, buried beneath mountains.
Cohen, and of course, Israel’s military leadership, will know that; but Israel nonetheless is locking itself into a logic that can only lead to defeat. Iran’s nuclear facilities are safe from Israeli assault. The destruction of civilian Iranian infrastructure, which is out in the open, may kill many, but will not, per se, collapse the Iranian state.
Trita Parsi places Israel’s objective in attacking the Iranian Consulate in Damascus in a different context:
“An important aspect of Israel’s conduct – and Biden’s acquiescence to it – is that Israel is engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to destroy existing laws and norms around warfare.
Even during wartime, embassies are off-limits [yet] Israel just bombed an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus.
Bombing hospitals is a war crime, [yet] Israel has bombed EVERY hospital in Gaza. It has even assassinated doctors and patients inside hospitals.
The ICJ obligated Israel to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Israel actively prevents aid from coming in.
Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited under international humanitarian law. Israel has deliberately created a famine in Gaza.
Indiscriminate bombings are illegal under international humanitarian law. Biden himself admits that Israel is bombing Gaza indiscriminately”.
The list goes on and on … However, Israel’s breach of Vienna Convention immunity accorded to diplomatic premises – plus the stature of those killed – is highly significant. It is a major signal: Israel wants war – but with U.S. support, of course.
Israel’s aim, firstly, is to destroy the norms, conventions and laws of warfare; to create geo-political anarchy in which anything goes, and by which, with the White House frustrated, yet acquiescing to each norm of conduct obtrusively trodden underfoot, allows Netanyahu to grip the U.S. bridle and lead the White House horse to water – towards his regional End of Times ‘Great Victory’; a necessarily brutal war – beyond existing red lines anddevoid of limits.
As symbolically significant as the Damascus attack is that the U.S., France and Britain – after a brief ‘hat tip’ to the Vienna Convention – refused to condemn the levelling of the Iranian Consulate, thus placing the shadow of doubt over the Vienna Convention’s immunity for diplomatic premises.
Implicitly, this refusal to condemn will be widely understood as a soft condoning of Israel’s first tentative step towards war with Hizbullah and Iran.
This Israeli chaotic ‘Biblical’ nihilism, however, bears no relationship in purely rational terms to Netanyahu’s aspiration for a ‘Great Victory’. The reality is that Israel has lost its deterrence. It won’t return; the deep anger across the Islamic world generated by Israel through its massacres in Gaza during the last six months precludes it.
Yet, there is a second, adjunct reason why Israel is set on deliberately flouting humanitarian law and norms: Israeli journalist, Yuval Abraham reports in +972 Magazine in great depth how Israel has developed a AI machine (called ‘Lavender’) to generate kill lists in Gaza – with almost no human verification; only a “rubber stamp” check of about “20 seconds” to make sure the AI target is male (as no females are known to belong to the Resistance’s military).
The blatant extra-legality behind the Gaza ‘kill list’ methodology, as reported by Abraham’s various sources, can only be immunised and sheltered through normalising them as but one amongst a general pattern of illegalities – and in effect, claiming sovereign exceptionalism:
“[T]he Israeli army systematically attacks the targeted individual whilst in their homes — usually at night whilst the whole family is present — rather than during the course of military activity … Additional automated systems, including one, [callously] called “Where’s Daddy?” were used – specifically to track targets when they had entered their family’s residences… However, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all”.
“The result is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions”.
“”We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives when they were in a military building … or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation – as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations”.
“In addition … when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs) which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]”.
“… The army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians … in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander – the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander”.
“Lavender — which was developed to create human targets in the current war — has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected “Hamas militants”, most of them junior, for assassination (the IDF Spokesperson denied the existence of such a kill list in a statement to +972 and Local Call)”.
So, there it is – no wonder Israel might seek to camouflage the details within a normalised general array of transgressions against humanitarian law: “They wanted to allow us to attack [the junior operatives] automatically. That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy”.
It is not difficult to speculate what the ICJ might determine …
Does anyone imagine that this flawed Lavender AI machine would not be asked to churn out its kill lists, were Israel to decide to surge into Lebanon? (Another reason for normalising the procedures first in Gaza).
The key point made in the +972 Magazine report (with multiple sourcing) is that the IDF were not focussed on pin-point elimination of Hamas’ Qassam Brigades (as claimed):
“It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low”, said one source about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants:
“I nicknamed those targets ‘garbage targets.’ Still, I found them more ethical than the targets that we bombed just for ‘deterrence’ — high-rises that are evacuated and toppled just to cause destruction”.
This report makes clear nonsense of Israel’s claims to have dismantled 19 out of 24 Hamas Battalions: One source, critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy, points out the obvious flaw: “It’s a vague boundary”; How to tell a Hamas fighter from any other Gazan civilian male?
“At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets”, said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defence personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs”.
Just last week, War Cabinet member and Minister Ron Dermer, was delegated to travel to Washington to plead that the IDF success in dismantling 19 Hamas battalions justified an incursion into Rafah to dismantle the 4 to 5 battalions that Israel claims still remain in Rafah.
What is clear is that AI was a key Israeli tool to its Gaza ‘Victory’. Israel was going to sell a ‘smoke and mirrors story’ based on ‘Lavender’.
By contrast, Palestinians, who are aware of their quantitative inferiority, have a very different outlook: they switched to a new way of thinking that gives the simple act of resisting a civilisational meaning – a path to metaphysical victory (and quite possibly a kind of military victory), if not in their lifetimes, then for the Palestinian People, thereafter. This constitutes the asymmetrical nature of the conflict that Israel has never managed to understand.
Israel wants to be feared, believing this will restore its deterrence. Amira Hass writes that regardless of any revulsion for this government and its members: “The vast majority [of Israelis] still believe that war is the solution”. And Mairav Zonszein writing in Foreign Policy, notes that “The Problem Isn’t Just Netanyahu, It’s Israeli Society”:
“The focus on Netanyahu is a convenient distraction from the fact that the war in Gaza is not Netanyahu’s war, it is Israel’s war—and the problem isn’t only Netanyahu; it’s the Israeli electorate … A large majority—88 percent—of Jewish Israelis polled in January believe the astounding number of Palestinian deaths, which had surpassed 25,000 at the time, is justified. A large majority of the Jewish public also thinks that the [IDF] is using adequate or even too little force in Gaza … Putting all the blame on the prime minister misses the point. It disregards the fact that Israelis have long advanced, enabled, or come to terms with their country’s system of military occupation and dehumanization of Palestinians”.
Yet neither Israel, nor the U.S., has a comprehensive strategy for this mooted war. Israel’s approach is all tactical – claiming to have degraded Hamas; turning Gaza into a humanitarian hellscape and setting the scene for the “decisive plan” devised by Bezalel Smotrich for the Palestinians. Amira Hass again:
“Either agree to an inferior status, emigrate and be uprooted ostensibly voluntarily, or face defeat and death in a war. This is the plan now being carried out in Gaza and the West Bank – with most Israelis serving as active and enthusiastic accomplices, or passively acquiescing in its realisation ”.
The U.S. ‘vision’ is also tactical (and far removed from reality) – Imagining the transformation of Gaza into a ‘Vichy collaborator’ statelet; imagining that political pressure by the French in Lebanon will force Hizbullah’s retreat from its ancestral lands in south Lebanon; and imagining that the Biden White House is able to achieve politically through pressure what Israel cannot do militarily.
The paradox is that, with Israel and the U.S. being dependent on an ‘image’ that has been confused with reality, this too works to Iran’s and the Resistance Front’s advantage. (As the old adage goes, ‘do not disturb an adversary who is making mistakes’).
Havana Syndrome, it turns out, is a figment of lots of overheated imaginations. There are no death-ray microwaves aimed at American heads in the U.S. embassies in nations Washington doesn’t like. In March, the National Institutes of Health said so. NIH studies found neither vocational harm, nor brain injury, nor blood biomarkers, pace 60 Minutes. The whole thing was a massive hoax that started eight years ago, after which the ball really got rolling in 2017, as U.S. military and intelligence officers reported symptoms from India and China. According to Wikipedia: “The most recent studies of over 1000 reported cases of Havana Syndrome have ruled out foreign involvement in all but a couple dozen cases.” Now the NIH has presumably dismissed even those. The nefarious furren conspiracy to scramble American brains was just, well, a hallucination, suggesting some of those brains had already been scrambled due to prolonged exposure to the madness called U.S. foreign policy. Still, the hoopla wasn’t as loony as it could have been – no Havana Syndrome sufferers claimed twinges in their teeth due to electromagnetic messages zapping their fillings, though conceivably that could come next. In fact, the NIH study didn’t stop 60 Minutes from airing a story about Havana Syndrome being caused by the Russians. So there may well be more insanity in the pipeline.
It started in Havana in 2016. According to Spyscape, a U.S. embassy staff person “awoke to a loud, piercing sound in one ear, followed by acute nausea and vertigo. Within years, similar symptoms of the mysterious illness had been reported by hundreds – some say as many as 1,000 – U.S. spies, diplomats and defense officials in China, Russia, Austria, Serbia, the White House and beyond.” Sound like a mass paranoid panic attack by those with brains fried by Washington propaganda? If you said yes, you could be onto something.
“Theories range from some weapon attack to nerve agents and microwave death rays.” The CIA “hasn’t ruled out foreign involvement –including in cases that originated in the U.S. Embassy in Havana.” So the CIA basically straight up said the commies could have a death ray and are using it on us. Next those wicked reds will be hypnotizing us through our laptops to steal the formula for Preparation H and send it to Wikileaks.
Official U.S. government theories included pulsed, directed, radio-frequency attacks and microwave beams aimed at the U.S. embassy. One CIA officer who awoke in a Moscow hotel room with vertigo told Spyscape: “Of course I’m concerned about the adversaries behind this, because ultimately I believe it’s an act of war.” One Havana embassy staffer described himself as a “zombie;” all I can say is keep careful track of your body parts when in contact with these cannibals in the foreign service, since who knows what they might decide to chow down on. Nor was the foreign service the only branch of government affected. One National Security council staffer “described collapsing at the White House gates, convinced he was going to die.” My question is, would he then have risen from the dead and tried to eat the president? Clearly, it was not just a mass psychosis, but a highly contagious one, with serious meal-time ramifications that I hope the secret service carefully kept tabs on.
You’d think the belief that an illness is in reality an act of war perpetrated by a hostile foreign government would, prima facie, disqualify whoever made the charge from being taken seriously. You’d also think such a fantasy would be easy to refute, but apparently not. It took the American health bureaucracy eight years to rule out enemy death rays, and I’m sure many Havana syndrome sufferers still consider themselves targets of a deadly foreign conspiracy. Such convictions require a hefty dose of megalomania, but believing that your headache is a foreign enemy attack indicates that megalomania is not in short supply.
Nor is hysteria about contamination by foreigners, bringing to mind General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove and his obsession with the purity of his bodily fluids. Indeed, the 60 Minutes opus revealed that an FBI agent who interviewed a Russian for 80 hours experienced disorientation, among other Havana Syndrome symptoms, leading one to wonder why nobody asked about the possible health implications of 80 hours of interrogation. Disorientation, crippling or otherwise, would seem to be a logical result of such a marathon. Clearly contact with foreigners, life abroad, or a stint out of the country, has stimulated some rather bizarre ideation in our diplomats, spies and military men, ideation that lay not too far below the surface and just needed the slightest nudge to come roaring wildly into view.
Meanwhile, a Northeastern professor hypothesized a different cause: he blamed crickets, specifically the Indies short-tailed cricket. This bug, “has a chirp that’s extremely annoying to the point where it can harm you,” according to professor Kevin Fu. An advisory group working with the state department agreed. “The group performed a pulse repetition analysis,” according to Northeastern Global News June 13, 2023, “of audio captured in Cuba and audio of the crickets and found they were remarkably similar.” Reassuring to hypochondriacs everywhere, the CIA asserted in 2022 that “the mysterious illness was not caused by a ‘sustained global campaign by a hostile power.’” The CIA did not reveal if arthropods were to blame.
The 1980s were particularly rife with mass hysterical illnesses. There was the West Bank fainting epidemic of 1983, the Hollinwell fainting and nausea attacks of 1980, the U.S. navy breathing difficulty attack in San Diego in 1988, which led to evacuating 600 men from barracks. Other instances of mass hypochondriacal lunacy include the supposed poisoning of thousands of Kosovans by toxic gases in 1990, Pokemon shock, wherein thousands of Japanese children allegedly had seizures while watching Pokemon in 1997 and fever, nausea and walking difficulty for over 500 female adolescents in Mexico City in 2006. And one of the most unforgettable – an outbreak of twitching, headaches and dizziness at a Virginia high school in 2007. Twitching was a new and rather disturbing addition to the collection of odd psychologically-induced symptoms. The thought of a large group of high-schoolers, twitching uncontrollably, is not one you want to contemplate for long.
So Havana Syndrome has a long and illustrious pedigree in the annals of hypochondriacal phantasmagoria. As such, I predict we’re not done with it yet. CIA agents who believe the heirs to Fidel Castro focused death rays at their skulls and believe it with such conviction that they suffered vertigo, nausea and felt they were going to die and then rise from the dead to eat other government officials, will not willingly let go of their peculiar and addled pensees. To the extent that Havana Syndrome is projection, one has to wonder what our spooks have been up to – have THEY been testing sonic beams or microwaves that induce nausea in the floridly paranoid? We’ll never know. But given the outlandish CIA experiments on the human body and psyche down the years, it’s a good bet they have.
And of course, some experts say never say die. “Dr. David Relman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford…argued in an editorial…” CNN reported March 18, that while brain scans “appear to show that ‘nothing or nothing serious’ happened with these cases, coming to this conclusion ‘would be ill-advised.’ Earlier work found evidence of abnormalities, he said, and the same is true for the study that did a wider variety of tests.” Relman argues we need better medical tests that can detect “more specific blood markers of different forms of cellular injury.” And tests, I would like to add, to screen potential zombies out of the foreign service.
CNN rather unhelpfully adds that we still lack a clear definition of this syndrome (thus throwing fuel on the lunatic fire) – “or what the government terms ‘anomalous health incidents.’” It even cites an intelligence panel saying in 2022 that in some instances, the symptoms could “plausibly” have come from external “pulsed electromagnetic energy.” That nitwit conclusion’s not conspiratorial, is it? But hey, if you were in the intelligence community, you’d likely figure, well what would you do if you could, if the shoe was on the other foot? You’d aim a death-ray at the heads of diplomats from countries you didn’t like and then skedaddle before they dined on you, that’s what you’d do.
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Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Lizard People. She can be reached at her website.
“Submission to the pressure of bourgeois society has repeatedly thrust nominally Marxist currents towards revisionism, the process of ruling out Marxism’s essential conclusions.” —“Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League,” adopted by the founding conference of the Spartacist League, September 1966
The latest issue of Spartacist marks a watershed moment in the sad history of the International Communist League (ICL). Formally junking the core of its program and political heritage going back to its founding—a tradition it denounces as “centrist” at best—the ICL now frames its raison d’être as the fight against “liberalism.”
An IBT comrade intervened at a public forum of the Trotskyist League, Canadian section of the ICL, held in Toronto on 30 September to introduce the new approach. He pointed out that this orientation is precisely towards a kind of liberalism: bourgeois nationalism. The ICL claims that it previously opposed “bourgeois nationalism in oppressed nations based on sectarian class purity” (“The ICL’s Post-Soviet Revisionism,” Spartacist No.68).
What is the “sectarian class purity” that supposedly undermined the ICL’s fight for revolution? While the recent issue of Spartacist leaves many questions unanswered, it provides a good sense of where the ICL is heading. Rejecting as “social-democratic” their founder James Robertson’s orthodox Trotskyist defense of permanent revolution, the ICL now projects “national liberation as the fundamental lever for proletarian revolution” (“In Defense of the Second and Fourth Comintern Congresses,” Spartacist No.68). Instead of viewing class struggle as the “fundamental lever for proletarian revolution” in the neocolonial world—the central idea of Trotsky’s permanent revolution—the ICL resurrects the concept of the “anti-imperialist united front” with the national bourgeoisie of oppressed countries. It goes so far as to suggest that rejecting the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” which Lenin himself abandoned as outdated over a century ago, means renouncing “the alliance between workers and peasants” and even the early Soviet government (Ibid.).
To be sure, the ICL still pays lip service to proletarian independence and the struggle against the influence of nationalist ideology—revisionists have always been careful to have “orthodox”-sounding formulations to confuse people. But in promoting the fight against national oppression as the “fundamental” mechanism for revolution; advocating “anti-imperialist” alliances with the national bourgeoisie; and drawing an equals sign between the struggle for a two-class “democratic dictatorship” and permanent revolution, the ICL has finally embraced the Pabloite revisionism that the founders of the Spartacist League fought against. Indeed, according to the ICL, only “sectarians” (or is it “social democrats”?) “denounce bourgeois nationalism in oppressed countries as simply reactionary” (Ibid.). Ernest Mandel would be pleased.
“What was the point of your group for the past half century?” our comrade asked the Trotskyist League. “Was it all a waste of time? Did it ever mean anything?”
The painful truth is that it once meant everything. The Spartacist League was founded to restore the revolutionary Marxist program, to ensure continuity with Trotsky’s Fourth International, destroyed by a Pabloite revisionism that sought other “fundamental levers” for socialist transformation, whether in Stalinist, social-democratic or bourgeois-nationalist parties. From its founding until its political degeneration in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the international Spartacist tendency embodied the Trotskyist program. Even after its degeneration, it was able to hold onto its core programmatic ideas at least in a formal sense, despite notable deviations in practice. The SL was distinguished from the Pabloites on a range of important political questions, from Northern Ireland to Israel/Palestine, from the Iranian Revolution to the Malvinas/Falklands War, from Mexico to Quebec and beyond. All of that has now been erased.
The chair clearly did not much like this critique and cut our representative off before the allotted time was up. But ICL comrades who are not exhausted, not demoralized, not resigned, not cynical, who are committed to advancing Trotskyism instead of neo-Pabloism must stop and ask themselves: “How did we get here?” Answering that question means taking seriously the IBT’s critique of a process of degeneration over the last four decades.
Je suis allé chercher du café et des beignets et j’ai échangé quelques comptines avec l’homme qui signait des livres de poésie. Je ne savais pas qui il était. Il était irlandais, je savais qu’il avait des poèmes sur les problèmes que l’Irlande a rencontrés au fil des ans. J’avais du temps libre et j’ai entendu parler de la réception littéraire ; Je suis alphabétisé, alors j’y suis allé.
J’avais une assiette avec un bagel à l’oignon alors que je me dirigeais vers le poète et lui disais : « Il était une fois un garçon de Dundalk qui ne savait pas trop marcher… ».
“C’est la faute des Britanniques, réfléchissez-y”, a-t-il répondu avec un doigt en l’air pour souligner tout en me regardant directement. Il souriait. J’aime jouer avec les mots, et lui aussi.
Je pensais qu’il appréciait un petit jeu de mots sans fard parmi tous les fans complaisants qui lui demandaient son gribouillage au début d’un livre. J’ai recommencé : « Il était une fois un garçon du Pérou qui ne savait pas trop quoi faire, il est allé voir sa maman, qui lui a montré un lama… et le reste de la comptine dépend de vous.
Il rit. Je ne me souviens pas de sa réponse à cela. C’était une journée ensoleillée d’avril alors que nous discutions dans la bibliothèque de l’école avec quelques dizaines d’autres personnes autour de nous, nous étions contre une bibliothèque.
Nous avons parlé de Lord Montbatten tué par un commando de l’IRA lors d’un assassinat ciblé en 1979. Il a parlé de Mountbatten comme d’un maître colonial en Inde appliquant la domination anglaise, et du fait qu’il n’était pas seulement un pêcheur aléatoire avec un titre. Heaney a parlé de Montbatten comme étant le dernier vice-roi britannique de l’Inde, un dictateur non élu d’un pays étranger. J’ai mentionné que Lord Montbatten avait été le responsable britannique en charge de l’occupation alliée du Vietnam à la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et Montbatten a réarmé l’Empire japonais. Des troupes militaires pour réprimer un soulèvement de la classe ouvrière trotskyste vietnamienne en 1945 à Saigon.
“Je ne le savais pas”, m’a-t-il dit comme si une petite pièce d’un puzzle important avait été ajoutée.
Il m’a dit qu’il dirigeait une école d’écriture de poésie pendant l’été dans l’ouest de l’Irlande et que j’apprécierais peut-être de venir à cette réunion. J’espérais dans ma tête avoir assez d’argent pour acheter de l’essence pour rentrer chez moi dans ma voiture ce soir-là, pas pour payer une retraite d’écrivains de l’autre côté de l’océan.
Un membre du corps professoral m’a plaisanté quelques jours plus tard : « tu as parlé plus que lui ». Je ne savais toujours pas qui était cet homme. Je savais qu’il était irlandais, je savais qu’il avait écrit des poèmes sur la malheureuse histoire de l’Irlande. J’avais sa traduction de Beowulf sur mon étagère à la maison. Quelle histoire.
Plus tard, j’ai découvert que cet homme plein d’esprit avait reçu le prix Nobel de littérature. Honnêtement, je ne suis pas impressionné par cela. Le président Obama a un prix Nobel de la paix. Les personnes qui votent pour les gagnants sont l’élite norvégienne et les politiciens du gouvernement ; ils choisissent tout ce qui est à la mode avec cette clique. Pourtant, les bonnes personnes gagnent grâce à des efforts qui en valent la peine. Henry Kissinger a reçu le prix Nobel de la paix. Imagine ça.
Dès le lendemain, j’ai reçu un avis officiel de mon chef de service m’informant qu’on ne me proposerait pas d’emploi l’année suivante et qu’il devait me prévenir à cette date. Mes folles journées de discussions littéraires gratuites devraient passer à autre chose. J’ai toujours su que je finirais par transmettre de la poésie en tant que professeur dans une « école de haie ».
Mais au fil des années, j’ai vraiment réfléchi à sa réponse à mes paroles : « Il était une fois un homme de Dundalk qui ne savait pas vraiment marcher… » La réponse de Heaney : « C’est la faute des Britanniques, réfléchissez-y » m’a vraiment fait réfléchir à cette réponse. Voulait-il dire que l’homme ne pouvait pas marcher parce qu’il avait été blessé par les soldats britanniques ? Voulait-il dire que l’exploitation britannique à long terme de l’Irlande a conduit la population irlandaise à devenir en grande partie pauvre et incapable de se permettre des soins de santé adéquats ?
Voulait-il dire que les Irlandais imputaient tout aux Britanniques plutôt que d’assumer eux-mêmes leurs responsabilités ? J’y ai pensé de temps en temps au cours des douze années qui se sont écoulées depuis que Heaney les a prononcées.
Je n’ai toujours pas de réponse à Seamus Heaney. Mais il est sur mon étagère, dans la bibliothèque et vivant dans ma mémoire.
“All my life I’ve questioned why I should do something. I had contempt for authority. I would resist it, I would trick it, I would outmaneuver it, I would do anything rather than be treated like a cipher.”
“I am really moved and motivated by things that occur that are unjust. I’ve always hated people trampling on other people.”
—Marlon Brando
April 3 marked 100 years since the birth of actor Marlon Brando in Omaha, Nebraska. He died in July 2004.
Brando was a film and stage actor who enjoyed at certain points immense popular and financial success, but, above all, he was someone who strove for artistic and social truth in everything he did. The conditions, in the postwar American film world in particular, were not often favorable to the level of commitment he demanded of himself and of others. This brought down upon his head much abuse and slander and also—along with a series of personal tragedies—disappointed and wore him down in the end. He truly fell “upon the thorns of life” and bled.
On one of the audiotapes Brando left behind at the time of his death, he explained, “I wanted very much to be involved in motion pictures, so I could change it into something nearer the truth. And I was convinced that I could do that.” (Excerpts from the tapes are presented in Stevan Riley’s remarkable 2015 documentary, Listen To Me Marlon.)
Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
If Brando did not succeed as he would have liked, if he even took on occasion serious missteps, it was not for a lack of will. No one in postwar American cultural life was more determined to change the prevailing conditions or exhausted him or herself more in that effort. His life and struggle verify once again Marx’s well-known observation that human beings “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances.”
It is a paradox that Brando was perhaps the finest screen actor of his time, or any time, yet never appeared in a genuine artistic masterpiece. The films he is perhaps best known for, directed by Elia Kazan, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954), are intensely problematic works, artistically and, in the second case, also morally and politically.
Kazan infamously ratted in April 1952 to the House Un-American Activities Committee about his former Communist Party comrades. He directed On the Waterfront to elevate the informer to the status of a social hero. The film concerns a longshoreman who eventually agrees to testify before a crime commission against a local union leadership. In his autobiography, Brando makes the remarkable but no doubt sincere claim that “I did not realize then … that On the Waterfront was really a metaphorical argument” by Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg [also an informer] “to justify finking on their friends.”
Brando also explained in his memoirs that when shown the completed version of On the Waterfront, “I was so depressed by my performance I got up and left the screen room. I thought I was a huge failure.” On another occasion, he explained, “I was so embarrassed, so disappointed in my performance.” In fact, despite its immense notoriety, Brando’s performance is overwrought and, at times, almost a caricature of “Method” acting. Unhappily, Kazan succeeded in communicating something of his own lack of principle, self-pity and intense bad faith through Brando and other performers.
Last Tango in Paris (1972) has interesting moments of Brando revealing something about his own life, but it is a pretentious, dubious work overall. He appeared in two films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979). The former has intriguing and forthright elements, depicting organized crime as a division of American big business. Brando saw the story as being “about the corporate mind, because the Mafia is the best example of capitalists we have” (cited in Stefan Kanfer’s biography, Somebody). However, the film glamorizes and romanticizes the Mafia thugs, also one of Brando’s concerns prior to filming. His portion of Apocalypse Now, a film that includes striking imagery of American military violence and madness during the Vietnam War, sadly, is the work’s weakest and murkiest.
On another of the tapes, the actor later commented bitterly,
I didn’t make any great movies. There’s no such thing as a great movie. In the kingdom of the blind, the man with one eye is the king. There are no artists. We are businessmen, we’re merchants. And there is no art. Agents, lawyers, publicity people. … It’s all bullshit. Money, money, money. If you think it’s about something else, you’re going to be bruised.
Marlon Brando and Christian Brando in Listen to Me Marlon (2015)
Brando involved himself to the best of his power and ability in the civil rights movement, opposition to nuclear arms and the death penalty, the cause of Native Americans. Author James Baldwin recalled that Brando was “totally unconventional and independent, a beautiful cat. Race truly meant nothing to him—he was contemptuous of anyone who discriminated in any way.” The actor himself said, “I’m standing up, not for the black race, I’m standing up for the human race. All men are created equal.”
Notably, when Brando won an Academy Award for The Godfather in March 1973, he sent Native activist Sacheen Littlefeather to take his place and reject the award because of “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry.” At the time, some 200 Oglala Lakota and followers of the American Indian Movement (AIM) were occupying Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In fact, Brando emerged in the late 1960s in particular as a severe critic of American capitalist society. The FBI had kept him under surveillance since the 1940s.
Two letters to the Los Angeles Times in July 2004, at the time of his death, express something about Brando as a human being and social personality. The late professor Susanne Jonas, a scholar in Latin American studies, explained that in response to an op-ed piece she had written criticizing US actions in Guatemala, Brando “contacted me and initiated an hourlong discussion about the history of U.S. operations there. Outraged at U.S. military training and CIA manuals on killing in Central America, he wanted to understand how it was possible to turn normal American boys into killers and torturers abroad.”
The second Times letter came from one Jon Dosa, who had been the producer of a television talk show in the Bay Area in 1968. Two Black Panther leaders, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver, had been booked to appear. Brando was accompanying them. “Although his reclusive nature and disdain for public attention was well established by then,” Dosa wrote, “I approached him with the request that he join the two dissidents on the show. He declined the invitation. I said, ‘Of course, you must realize that if you appear, everybody will watch.’ Without any further hesitation, he agreed. … The show got the press’ attention and, of course, everybody watched it.”
Brando grew up in an unhappy family. His father, a salesman, who had his own history of family neglect, “was tough,” according to his son. “He was a bar fighter. He was a man with not much love in him. Staying away from home, drinking and whoring all around the Midwest. He used to slap me around, and for no good reason.”
The actor described his mother, who was an aspiring actress, as “the town drunk. She began to dissolve and fray at the ends. When my mother was missing. Gone off someplace, we didn’t know where she was. I used to have to go and get her out of jail. Memories even now that fill me with shame and anger.”
On one occasion, Brando recalled, “my old man was punching my mother and I went up the stairs and I went in the room. And I had so much adrenaline, and I looked at him and I fucking put my eyes right through him and I said, ‘If you hit her again, I am going to kill you.’”
Brando and sister Jocelyn in The Chase (1966)
Brando was sent to military school, to make “a man of him.” He despised it. “It was a cruel and unusual punishment. The mind of the military has one aim: to be as mechanical as possible. To function like a human machine. Individuality simply did not exist. I had a lot of loneliness.”
At 19, he headed to New York City, eventually coming under the wing of famed acting teacher Stella Adler, whom Brando credited with transforming his life. “I arrived in New York,” he explains on one of his audiotapes, “with holes in my socks and holes in my mind. I remember getting drunk, lying down on the sidewalk and going to sleep. Nobody bothered me. I was always somebody who had an unquenchable curiosity about people. I liked to walk down the street and look at faces.”
Brando brought this “unquenchable curiosity” into his acting. He electrified audiences from his first performances on stage with his naturalness and honesty.
His performances in The Men (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953), The Wild One (1953) and On the Waterfront turned him into a film star, an international celebrity, something he was extremely uncomfortable with. He refused to discuss his stardom or his acting with anyone. His children would later learn that questions about his performances only angered him.
Brando represented something meaningful and inspiring for a generation searching for an alternative to deadening Cold War, Eisenhower America. “It was pre-sixties,” he said. “People were looking for rebellion, and I happened to be at the right place at the right time with the right state of mind. In a sense, it was my own story.”
However, Brando quickly encountered the reality of 1950s Hollywood. In the wake of the anticommunist blacklist (which devoured the careers of his mentor Stella Adler’s brother, Luther, and Brando’s own sister, Jocelyn, an actress and a supporter of various left-wing causes), the intense realism of the 1940s had become something dangerous and forbidden. He found himself performing in the mid- and late-1950s in a series of bloated, generally mediocre films (Desirée, Guys and Dolls, The Teahouse of the August Moon, The Young Lions). Brando had become sufficiently discontented by the end of the decade to form his own production company and produced, directed and starred in One-Eyed Jacks (1961), a revenge Western, which has compelling moments.
As we noted in an obituary in 2004, Brando’s “radical social views no doubt influenced his unhappiness with the increasingly conformist character of the film roles he was offered. After sharp disagreements with director Lewis Milestone on Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), during which Milestone claimed Brando used to stuff cotton in his ears so as to block out the director’s instructions, the actor became known as ‘difficult.’”
Burn! (1969)
Brando asserted on one his tapes that Mutiny on the Bounty “was perhaps my very worst experience in making a motion picture. I never want to do that kind of picture again as long as I live.” Certain directors, he argued, “don’t know what the process is. How delicate it is to create an emotional impression. They cover up their sense of inadequacy by being very authoritative, commanding things.” On Mutiny, “There was a great deal of friction, confusion and desperation, disappointment and disgust, there were fist fights.”
Brando hoped for better things with Charlie Chaplin on A Countess From Hong Kong (1967), but that also proved an unsatisfying experience. Released the same year, Reflections in a Golden Eye, based on Carson McCullers, about a repressed homosexual military officer, is another muddy “psychological study,” a Southern Gothic, but at least Brando and director John Huston saw eye to eye.
Huston later told French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier that it was
a pleasure working with Brando. I was told he was very difficult. On the contrary, he was great. He spent his time trying to deepen his character, trying to find little touches that reinforce the meaning of the film. It would take me hours to say all the good things I think of him. I think he’s the best actor I’ve ever worked with.
And Huston had worked with Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Edward G. Robinson, Sterling Hayden, Jose Ferrer, John Garfield, Gregory Peck, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Kirk Douglas and numerous others.
“Brando has an exceptional power,” he added. “He can take a small detail and make it his own, integrating it as if it were a part of himself.”
In 1969, he featured in Burn! (Queimada), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo (The Battle of Algiers), as a British agent provocateur sent to encourage a slave revolt on a Caribbean island against Portuguese rule. A puppet regime emerges dependent on a British powerful sugar company, and later Brando’s character returns to brutally suppress a second revolt. The Chase (1966), directed by Arthur Penn, is another one of Brando’s more promising film ventures.
The Godfather (1972)
The last decades of Brando’s life, by which time he had grown obese, part of his revolt against his own glamorous image, were not happy ones. But then neither were they for the American cinema—or the American population. Family disaster added to his artistic woes. In 1990, his son shot and killed the boyfriend of his daughter, after she falsely asserted that the latter had abused her. “Misery has come to my house,” he painfully told the media. Brando’s daughter killed herself some years later.
To the end, he remained an enemy of official American society. He could only say about the powers that be: “They lie. Congressmen, presidents, all of them. They lie when they’re alone, they lie when they’re asleep.” We never “see faces without lies anymore, except the dead ones. They’re the true assassins, the true murderers.”
Speaking of the responsibilities of artists, Brando argued that everything “that we do should reflect the atmosphere of our lives. We’re living now in this mad, crazy, murderous world.”
He referred on one of his tapes to
Shakespeare addressing all artists [in Hamlet’s speech to the actors]: Suit the action to the word, the word to the action. … To hold the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time its form and pressure.
There are tragic elements to Brando’s life and career, but he set an example and a high standard of artistic and moral principle. Even many of his mistakes are fascinating and illuminating.
Given Brando’s level of artistic and social steadfastness, it doesn’t seem inappropriate to conclude with the language Mary Shelley used in regard to her husband, the poet Shelley. After his death, she referred to “the eagerness and ardour with which he was attached to the cause of human happiness and improvement.” To purify “life of its misery and its evil was the ruling passion of his soul; he dedicated to it every power of his mind.” Whatever faults he had, she continued, “ought to find extenuation among his fellows, since they prove him to be human.”
The Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon money laundering machine
The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats tho’ unseen amongst us, -visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.- Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening,- Like clouds in starlight widely spread,- Like memory of music fled,- Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
As the de facto North Atlantic Terror Organization celebrates its 75th birthday, taking Lord Ismay’s motto to ever soaring heights (“keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down”), that thick slab of Norwegian wood posing as Secretary-General came up with a merry “initiative” to create a 100 billion euro fund to weaponize Ukraine for the next five years.
Translation, regarding the crucial money front in the NATO-Russia clash: partial exit of the Hegemon – already obsessing with The Next Forever War, against China; enter the motley crew of ragged, de-industrialized European chihuahuas, all in deep debt and most mired in recession.
A few IQs over average room temperature at NATO’s HQ in Haren, in Brussels, had the temerity to wonder how to come up with such a fortune, as NATO has zero leverage to raise money among member states.
After all, the Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon money laundering machine. For instance, assuming the White House-proposed $60 billion package to Ukraine would be approved by the U.S. Congress – and it won’t – no less than 64% of the total will never reach Kiev: it will be laundered within the industrial-military complex.
Yet it gets even more dystopic: Norwegian Wood, robotic stare, arms flailing, actually believes his proposed move will not imply a direct NATO military presence in Ukraine – or country 404; something that is already a fact on the ground for quite a while, irrespective of the warmongering hissy fits by Le Petit Roi in Paris (Peskov: “Russia-NATO relations have descended into direct confrontation”).
Now couple the Lethal Looney Tunes spectacle along the NATOstan front with the Hegemon’s aircraft carrier performance in West Asia, consistently taking its industrial-scale slaughter/starvation Genocide Project in Gaza to indescribable heights – the meticulously documented holocaust watched in contorted silence by the “leaders” of the Global North.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese correctly summed it all up: the biblical psychopathology entity “intentionally killed the WCK workers so that donors would pull out and civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly. Israel knows Western countries and most Arab countries won’t move a finger for the Palestinians.”
The “logic” behind the deliberate three tap strike on the clearly signed humanitarian convoy of famine-alleviating workers in Gaza was to eviscerate from the news an even more horrendous episode: the genocide-within-a-genocide of al-Shifa hospital, responsible for at least 30% of all health services in Gaza. Al-Shifa was bombed, incinerated and had over 400 civilians killed in cold blood, in several cases literally smashed by bulldozers, including medical doctors, patients and dozens of children.
Nearly simultaneously, the biblical psychopathology gang completely eviscerated the Vienna convention – something that even the historical Nazis never did – striking Iran’s consular mission/ambassador’s residence in Damascus.
This was a missile attack on a diplomatic mission, enjoying immunity, on the territory of a third country, against which the gang is not at war. And on top of it, killing General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon, his deputy Mohammad Hadi Hajizadeh, another five officers, and a total of 10 people.
Translation: an act of terror, against two sovereign states, Syria and Iran. Equivalent to the recent terror attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow.
The inevitable question rings around all corners of the lands of the Global Majority: how can these de facto terrorists possibly get away with all this, over and over again?
The sinews of Liberal Totalitarianism
Four years ago, at the start of what I later qualified as the Raging Twenties, we were beginning to watch the consolidation of an intertwined series of concepts defining a new paradigm. We were becoming familiar with notions such as circuit breaker; negative feedback loop; state of exception; necropolitics; and hybrid neofascism.
As the decade marches on, our plight may at least have been alleviated by a twin glimmer of hope: the drive towards multipolarity, led by the Russia-China strategic partnership, with Iran playing a key part, and all that coupled with the total breakdown, live, of the “rules-based international order”.
Yet to affirm there will be a long and winding road ahead is the Mother of All Euphemisms.
So, to quote Bowie, the ultimate late, great aesthete: Where Are We Now? Let’s take this very sharp analysis by the always engaging Fabio Vighi at Cardiff University and tweak it a little further.
Anyone applying critical thinking to the world around us can feel the collapse of the system. It’s a closed system alright, easily definable as Liberal Totalitarianism. Cui bono? The 0.0001%.
Nothing ideological about that. Follow the money. The defining negative feedback loop is actually the debt loop. A criminally anti-social mechanism kept in place by – what else – a psychopathology, as acute as the one exhibited by the biblical genocidals in West Asia.
The Mechanism is enforced by a triad.
The transnational financial elite, the superstars of the 0.0001%.
Right beneath it, the politico-institutional layer, from the U.S. Congress to the European Commission (EC) in Brussels, as well as comprador elite “leaders” across the Global North and South.
The former “intelligentsia”, now essentially hacks for hire from media to academia.
This institutionalized hyper-mediatization of reality is (italics mine), in fact, The Mechanism.
It’s this mechanism that controlled the merging of the pre-fabricated “pandemic” – complete with hardcore social engineering sold as “humanitarian lockdowns” – into, once again, Forever Wars, from Project Genocide in Gaza to the Russophobia/cancel culture obsession inbuilt in Project Proxy War in Ukraine.
That’s the essence of Totalitarian Normality: the Project for Humanity by the appallingly mediocre, self-appointed Great Reset “elites” of the collective West.
Killing them softly with AI
A key vector of the whole mechanism is the direct, vicious interconnection between a tecno-military euphoria and the hyper-inflationary financial sector, now in thrall with AI.
Enter, for instance, AI models such as ‘Lavender’, tested on the ground in the Gaza killing field lab. Literally: artificial intelligence programming the extermination of humans. And it’s happening, in real time. Call it Project AI Genocide.
Another vector, already experimented, is inbuilt in the indirect assertion by toxic EC Medusa Ursula von der Lugen: essentially, the need to produce weapons as Covid vaccines.
That’s at the core of a plan to use funding of the EU by European taxpayers to “increase financing” of “joint contracts for weapons”. That’s an offspring of von der Lugen’s push to roll out Covid vaccines – a gigantic Pfizer-linked scam for which she is about to be investigated and arguably exposed by the EU’s Public Prosecutor Office. In her own words, addressing the proposed weapons scam: “We did this for vaccines and gas.”
Call it Weaponization of Social Engineering 2.0.
Amidst all the action in this vast corruption swamp, the Hegemon agenda remains quite blatant: to keep its – dwindling – predominantly thalassocratic, military hegemony, no matter what, as the basis for its financial hegemony; protect the U.S. dollar; and protect those unmeasurable, unpayable debts in U.S. dollars.
And that brings us to the tawdry economic model of turbo-capitalism, as sold by collective West media hacks: the debt loop, virtual money, borrowed non-stop to deal with “autocrat” Putin and “Russian aggression”. That’s a key by-product of Michael Hudson’s searing analysis of the FIRE (Finance-Insurance-Real Estate) syndrome.
Ouroboros intervenes: the serpent bites its own tail. Now the inherent folly of The Mechanism is inevitably leading casino capitalism to resort to barbarism. Undiluted savagery – of the Crocus City Hall kind and of the Project Gaza Genocide kind.
And that’s how The Mechanism engenders institutions – from Washington to Brussels to hubs across the Global North to genocidal Tel Aviv – stripped down to the status of psychotic killers, at the mercy of Big Finance/FIRE (oh, such fabulous seafront real estate opportunities available in “vacant” Gaza.)
How can we possibly escape such folly? Will we have the will and the discipline to follow Shelley’s vision and, in “this dim vast vale of tears”, summon the transcending Spirit of Beauty – and harmony, equanimity and justice?
Over 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza. Amr Abdallah was one of them.
• 1,500 WORDS •
Amr Abdallah
On the morning Amr Abdallah was killed, he woke before dawn to say his Ramadan prayers with his father, mother, two younger brothers and aunt, in an open field in southern Gaza.
“It is You we worship and You we ask for help,” they prayed. “Guide us to the straight path — the path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have evoked Your anger or of those who are astray.”
It was dark. They made their way back to their tents. Their old life was gone — their village, Al-Qarara, their house — built with the money Amr’s father saved during the 30 years he worked in the Persian Gulf — their orchards, their school, the local mosque and the town’s cultural museum with artifacts dating from 4,000 B.C.
Amr, who was 17, would have graduated from high school this year. The schools were closed in November. He would have gone to college, perhaps to be an engineer like his father, who was a prominent community leader. Amr was a gifted student. Now he lived in a tent in a designated “safe area” that, as he and his family already knew, was not safe. It was shelled sporadically by the Israelis.
It was cold and rainy. The family huddled together to keep warm. Hunger wrapped itself around them like a coil.
“When you say ‘Amr’ it’s like you’re talking about the moon,” his uncle, Abdulbaset Abdallah, who lives in New Jersey, tells me. “He was the special one, handsome, brilliant, and kind.”
Amr in Gaza
The Israeli attacks began in northern Gaza. Then they spread south. On the morning of Friday, Dec. 1, Israeli drones dropped leaflets over Amr’s village.
“To the inhabitants of al-Qarara, Khirbet al-Khuza’a, Absan and Bani Soheila,” the leaflets read. “You must evacuate immediately and go to shelters in the Rafah area. The city of Khan Yunis is a dangerous combat zone. You have been warned. Signed by the Israeli Defense Army.”
One of the leaflets dropped over Amr’s village
Families in Gaza live together. Whole generations. This is why dozens of family members are killed in a single air strike. Amr grew up surrounded by uncles, aunts and cousins.
The villagers panicked. Some began to pack. Some refused to leave.
One of Amr’s uncles was adamant. He would stay behind while the family would go to the “safe area.” His son was a physician at Nasser Hospital. Amr’s cousin left the hospital to plead with his father to leave. Moments after he and his father fled, their street was bombed.
Amr and his family moved in with relatives in Khan Yunis. A few days later more leaflets were dropped. Everyone was told to go to Rafah.
Amr’s family, now joined by relatives from Khan Yunis, fled to Rafah.
Rafah was a nightmare. Desperate Palestinians were living in the open air and on streets. There was little food or water. The family slept in their car. It was cold and rainy. They did not have blankets. They looked desperately for a tent. There were no tents. They found an old sheet of plastic, which they attached to the back of the car to make a protected area. There were no bathrooms. People relieved themselves on the side of the road. The stench was overpowering.
They had been displaced twice in the span of a week.
Amr’s father, who has diabetes and high blood pressure, fell sick. The family took him to the European Hospital near Khan Yunis. The doctor told him he was ill because he was not eating enough.
“We can’t handle your case,” the doctor told him. “There are more critical cases.”
“He had a beautiful house,” Abdallah says of his older brother. “Now he is homeless. He knew everyone in his hometown. Now he lives on the street with crowds of strangers. No one has enough to eat. There is no clean water. There are no proper facilities or bathrooms.”
The family decided to move again to al-Mawasi, designated a “humanitarian area” by Israel. They would at least be in open land, some of which belonged to their family. The coastal area, filled with dunes, now holds some 380,000 displaced Palestinians. The Israelis promised the delivery of international humanitarian aid to al-Mawasi, little of which arrived. Water has to be trucked in. There is no electricity.
Israeli warplanes hit a residential compound in al-Mawasi in January where medical teams and their families from the International Rescue Committee and Medical Aid for Palestinians were housed. Several were injured. An Israeli tank fired on a house in al-Mawasi where staff from Médecins Sans Frontières and their families were sheltering in February, killing two and injuring six.
Amr’s family set up two makeshift tents with palm tree leaves and sheets of plastic. Israeli drones circled overhead night and day.
On the day before he was killed, Amr managed to get a phone connection — telecommunications are often cut — to speak to his sister in Canada.
“Please get us out of here,” he pleaded.
The Egyptian firm Hala, which means “Welcome” in Arabic, provided travel permits for Gazans to enter Egypt for $350, before the Israeli assault. Since the genocide began, the firm has raised the price to $5,000 for an adult and $2,500 for a child. It has sometimes charged as much as $10,000 for a travel permit.
Hala has offices in Cairo and Rafah. Once the money is paid — Hala only accepts U.S. dollars — the name of the applicant is submitted to Egyptian authorities. It can take weeks to get a permit. It would cost around $25,000 to get Amr’s family out of Gaza, double that if they included his widowed aunt and three cousins. This was not a sum Amr’s relatives abroad could raise quickly. They set up a GoFundMe page here. They are still trying to collect enough money.
Once Palestinians get to Egypt, the permits expire within a month. Most of the Palestinian refugees in Egypt survive on money sent to them from abroad.
Amr awoke in the dark. It was the first Friday of Ramadan. He joined his family in the morning prayer. The Fajr. It was 5 a.m.
Muslims fast in the day during the month of Ramadan. They eat and drink once the sun goes down and shortly before dawn. But food was now in very short supply. A little olive oil. The spice za’atar. It was not much.
They went back to their tents after prayers. Amr was in the tent with his aunt and three cousins. A shell exploded near the tent. Shrapnel tore apart his aunt’s leg and critically injured his cousins. Amr frantically tried to help them. A second shell exploded. Shrapnel ripped through Amr’s stomach and exited from his back.
Amr stood up. He walked out of the tent. He collapsed. Older cousins ran towards him. They had enough gas in their car — fuel is in very short supply — to drive Amr to Nasser Hospital, three miles away.
“Amr, are you okay?” his cousins asked.
“Yes,” he moaned.
“Amr, are you awake?” they asked after a few minutes
“Yes,” he whispered.
They lifted him from the car. They carried him into the overcrowded corridors of the hospital. They set him down.
He was dead.
Amr in death
They carried Amr’s body back to the car. They drove to the family’s encampment.
Amr’s uncle shows me a video of Amr’s mother keening over his corpse.
“My son, my son, my beloved son,” she laments in the video, her left hand tenderly stroking his face. “I don’t know what I will do without you.”
They buried Amr in a makeshift grave.
Amr’s Burial
Later that night the Israelis shelled again. Several Palestinians were wounded and killed.
The empty tent, occupied the day before by Amr’s family, was obliterated.
#News#RFKjr Wins Radical Liberal Support – Prominent independent pundit stuns co-host by saying he’s considering RFK Jr. for president – by Gabriel Hays (Fox) During a recent episode of political web show “The Young Turks,” co-host Cenk Uygur admitted that he is considering voting for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., slamming President Biden and the Democratic Party for being anti-democracy.
Prior to his announcement, Uygur discussed why he agreed with the candidate’s recent headline-grabbing claims insisting that it could be argued that Biden is a “much worse” threat to democracy than former President Trump.
Kennedy claimed that the Biden administration is “worse” than Trump because it has pushed social media companies to censor certain opinions, especially during the pandemic, among other reasons.
Uygur supported this notion, though he claimed Biden and the DNC were anti-Democratic for reasons different than Kennedy gave, saying that Biden and his party members “love to rig” elections.
“He’s right to be concerned about Biden being a threat to democracy himself, maybe not for the reasons that he’s stating, but Biden did, you know, support anti-Democratic movements within the primary,” Uygur said.
He continued, “The Democratic Party canceled the election in Florida. They tried to keep out every candidate in North Carolina, Tennessee, et cetera. So, they love to rig elections.”
Slamming the media, he added, “Yes, I used the word rigged, OK? So, you can go cry about it if you’re mainstream media. How about you do your job and talk about how they canceled an election in Florida in the primary and just declared Biden the winner.”
Uygur also claimed that the “establishment in a of lot ways has killed democracy long before Donald Trump tried to,” explaining that this has happened through wealthy donors influencing most of the policy in America.” He also slammed both major parties for using “fear” to get votes.
He was critical of Kennedy, too, accusing him of trying to pander to both Republicans and Democrats in his campaign, but went on to say he’s currently considering voting for the independent.
Uygur declared, “The most surprising thing is, for the first time today, I’m now considering RFK, Jr.”
Co-host Ana Kasparian appeared stunned by the announcement, exclaiming, “What?!” on air.
Uygur attempted to explain it to her, granting that the candidate is “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs on vaccines. And on several other things where he believes in conspiratorial theories that I don’t believe in at all.”
“So why on God’s green Earth would I consider RFK, Jr.?” he asked, and then said, “But I thought about it, Ana, and Trump I would never support in a million years, Biden is now funding a genocide and is an awful choice, has been corrupt his whole life. A totally — you’re never going to get anything but corruption from Joe Biden.”
His main rationale was that he doesn’t believe Kennedy would be worse than Biden on major issues.
“So am I positive RFK Jr. would be worse?” Uygur asked, adding, “He would probably — on health and science, definitely he would be worse… But on everything else, like anti-establishment, money out of politics… I’m not positive RFK Jr. would be worse than Biden.”
Американская левая организация «Социалистическая альтернатива», которая в прошлом поддерживала «независимого» сенатора США-социалиста Берни Сандерса как «левое крыло возможного» в 2016 и 2020 годах, теперь переходит к поддержке президентской кампании левого овода академика Корнела Уэста в Выборы 2024 года.
Социалистическая альтернатива
Совсем недавно в статье, опубликованной в прошлом месяце на его веб-сайте под заголовком «Двухпартийная система убивает нас — можем ли мы построить альтернативу?» «Социалистическая альтернатива» указывает на недавно сформированную партию Уэста «Справедливость для всех» как на потенциальную «массовую левую партию рабочего класса». На самом деле партия «Справедливость для всех» лишена какой-либо четкой политической программы и была создана в первую очередь как средство, позволяющее Западу получить статус избирательного бюллетеня.
Корнел Уэст
«Социалистическая альтернатива» впервые заявила о своей поддержке Запада в прошлом году, когда бывший демократ и бывший член Демократических социалистов Америки добивался выдвижения на пост президента от Партии зеленых — после первоначального объявления, что он будет добиваться выдвижения от Народной партии, что было политической операцией. созданный бывшими сторонниками Сандерса. Позже Уэст отказался от участия в выборах Партии зеленых и заявил, что баллотируется как независимый кандидат. Ни одно из этих политических колебаний не остановило «Социалистическую Альтернативу».
16 июня 2023 года Исполнительный комитет «Социалистической альтернативы» приветствовал кампанию Уэста, заявив, что его «кандидатура потенциально может предложить крайне необходимую левую альтернативу для трудящихся и угнетённых». В этом заявлении было не менее 15 отдельных упоминаний Берни Сандерса. Исполнительный комитет посетовал:
Лояльность Сандерса и «Отряда» к Демократической партии использовалась для жестоких нападок на рабочих, включая блокирование забастовки железнодорожников, и это глубоко подорвало способность организовывать движения трудящихся, растрачивая импульс Берни совершил «политическую революцию» своей кампании против класса миллиардеров.
В августе «Социалистическая альтернатива» объявила о кампании «Студенты за Корнел Уэст», написав: «Нам нужны системные изменения, и кампания Корнела Уэста дает нам возможность дать отпор. … Чтобы быть эффективной, нам нужно, чтобы кампания Корнела Уэста носила массовый характер. Молодые люди призваны сыграть центральную роль в создании первоначального импульса на низовом уровне, который может привлечь все больше и больше людей, жаждущих перемен». С тех пор «Социалистическая альтернатива» проводила кампанию за Уэста во всех кампусах, где она действовала. Некоторые рассматривают эту деятельность как способ связаться с общественностью через имя, которое они могут узнать, а затем склонить ее на свою точку зрения, просто используя кампанию Корнела Уэста в своих целях.
В ноябрьской статье «Социалистическая альтернатива» выразила обеспокоенность по поводу «левых и прогрессивных избирателей, которые устали от ложных обещаний демократов» и призвала Запад «шагнуть в пустоту», вызванную вероятными предстоящими выборами между двумя широко презираемыми кандидатами. , Трамп и «геноцид Джо».
Поддержка организацией кампании Запада как «левой, прорабочей» оппозиции демократам и республиканцам является своего рода принятием желаемого за действительное. Уэст – исполнитель левого толка.
Политический послужной список Корнела Уэста
Демократическая партия в настоящее время ведет «тотальную войну» с третьими партиями и независимыми кандидатами, в том числе с предвыборной кампанией Запада, стремясь помешать им получить статус избирательного бюллетеня. Однако это не означает, что Запад представляет собой настоящий вызов двухпартийной системе.
Любой серьезный пересмотр послужного списка Уэста одновременно подорвет способность его кампании удерживать этот огромный гнев привязанным к тупику капиталистической политики и покажет «Социалистическую Альтернативу» как пустую политическую организацию, которая просто цепляется за левое крыло левого крыла демократов.
Уэст потратил десятилетия на продвижение и поддержку политиков-демократов. Он присоединился к радикальной либеральной партии Демократических социалистов Америки (DSA) в 1980-х годах и был ее почетным председателем. Он проводил кампанию за Джесси Джексона в 1980-х годах и поддержал кампанию Барака Обамы в 2008 году, прежде чем подверг критике после выборов.
Демократические социалисты Америки
Уэст выступил с ограниченной критикой Демократической партии, назвав Обаму «черным талисманом олигархов Уолл-стрит». Уэст, как и «Социалистическая альтернатива», участвовал в политическом цирке, известном как Народная партия, сформированном в 2017 году на основе давления на Сандерса с целью создания новой партии. И «Запад», и «Социалистическая альтернатива» также поддержали президентские кампании Сандерса.
Джилл Стейн
В 2016 году «Запад» и «Социалистическая альтернатива» перешли на поддержку кандидата от Партии зеленых Джилл Стайн после того, как Сандерс поддержал Клинтон. В 2020 году их пути разошлись: Уэст призвал проголосовать за Байдена на всеобщих выборах. Социалистическая альтернатива поддержала соучредителя Партии зеленых и кандидата в президенты 2020 года Хоуи Хокинса.
Хауи Хокинс
Партия зеленых действует как группа давления, ориентированная на последние причуды части политического и академического класса и предлагающая причудливые антинаучные решения многих проблем. Зеленые также демонстрируют эмоциональный триггер, который толкает их к жестокому разжиганию войны.
Если и есть какая-то последовательная нить в переходе Уэста от одного политического альянса к другому, то это его расплывчатый реформизм, разрушающий дом. В своей книге «Американское уклонение от философии: генеалогия прагматизма» Уэст подробно излагает обыденный список мелких изменений, направленных на создание «лучшего мира». Рорти, у которого Уэст учился в Принстоне в начале 1970-х годов. Прагматизм имеет различные разновидности, все они вращаются вокруг отрицания возможности объективной истины и связанного с этим неприятия истории как закономерного процесса, в котором закономерности можно наблюдать и изменять. В своих современных формах и особенно в трудах Рорти прагматизм направлен явно против вмешательства в социальную жизнь с целью изменения хода событий к лучшему для большинства людей.
Прагматический подход Корнела Уэста к политике и теории влечет за собой эклектическую смесь чернокожих националистов, расовой политики и политики идентичности, которую он сочетает с открыто религиозными и иррационалистическими концепциями.
L’organisation de gauche américaine Socialist Alternative, qui dans le passé a soutenu le sénateur socialiste américain « indépendant » Bernie Sanders en tant qu’« aile gauche du possible » en 2016 et 2020, s’apprête désormais à soutenir la campagne présidentielle de l’universitaire de gauche Cornel West aux élections présidentielles. Élections de 2024.
Alternative socialiste
Plus récemment, dans un article publié le mois dernier sur son site Internet intitulé « Le système bipartite nous tue : pouvons-nous construire une alternative ? Socialist Alternative désigne le parti « Justice pour tous » récemment formé par West comme un potentiel « parti de masse de la gauche de la classe ouvrière ». En réalité, le parti Justice pour tous est dépourvu de tout programme politique clair et a été créé principalement pour permettre à l’Occident d’obtenir le statut de électeur.
Cornel West Socialist Alternative a déclaré pour la première fois son soutien à West l’année dernière, lorsque l’ancien démocrate et ancien membre des Socialistes démocrates d’Amérique briguait l’investiture présidentielle du Parti vert – après avoir initialement annoncé qu’il solliciterait l’investiture du Parti populaire, une opération politique mis en place par d’anciens partisans de Sanders. West s’est ensuite retiré de la course du Parti Vert et a déclaré qu’il se présentait comme indépendant. Aucune de ces girations politiques n’a fait réfléchir l’Alternative Socialiste.
Le 16 juin 2023, le Comité exécutif de Socialist Alternative a salué la campagne de West, déclarant que sa « candidature a le potentiel d’offrir une alternative de gauche cruellement nécessaire aux travailleurs et aux opprimés ». Dans cette déclaration, il n’y avait pas moins de 15 références distinctes à Bernie Sanders. Le Comité Exécutif a déploré :
La loyauté de Sanders et de la « Squad » envers le Parti démocrate a été utilisée au service d’attaques brutales contre les travailleurs, y compris le blocage de la grève des cheminots, et elle a profondément sapé la capacité d’organiser les mouvements des travailleurs, dilapidant l’élan. Bernie a généré avec sa campagne une « révolution politique » contre la classe milliardaire.
En août, Socialist Alternative a annoncé une campagne « Les étudiants pour Cornel West », écrivant : « Nous avons besoin d’un changement systémique, et la campagne de Cornel West nous offre l’opportunité de riposter. … Pour être efficace, nous avons besoin que la campagne de Cornel West ait un caractère populaire et de masse. Les jeunes ont un rôle central à jouer dans la création de l’élan initial de la base qui peut attirer des couches de plus en plus nombreuses de personnes avides de changement. Depuis lors, Socialist Alternative a fait campagne pour l’Ouest sur tous les campus où elle est active. Certains voient cette activité comme un moyen de se connecter avec le public à travers un nom qu’ils peuvent reconnaître, puis de l’amener à adopter leur propre point de vue en utilisant simplement la campagne de Cornel West à leurs propres fins.
Dans un article de novembre, Socialist Alternative a fait part de ses inquiétudes concernant « les électeurs de gauche et progressistes qui en ont assez des fausses promesses des démocrates » et a appelé l’Ouest à « entrer dans le vide » causé par les probables élections à venir entre deux candidats largement méprisés. , Trump et « le génocide Joe ».
Le soutien de l’organisation à la campagne occidentale en tant qu’opposition « de gauche et pro-travailleurs » aux démocrates et aux républicains est une sorte de vœu pieux. West est un artiste à saveur de gauche.
Le bilan politique de Cornel West
Le Parti démocrate mène actuellement une « guerre totale » contre les partis tiers et les candidats indépendants, y compris ceux de campagne de l’Ouest, dans le but de les empêcher d’obtenir le droit de vote. Cela ne signifie cependant pas que l’Ouest représente un véritable défi pour le système bipartite.
Tout examen sérieux du bilan de West réduirait à la fois la capacité de sa campagne à maintenir cette immense colère liée à l’impasse de la politique capitaliste et présenterait l’Alternative socialiste comme une organisation politique vide qui s’accroche simplement à l’aile gauche des démocrates.
West a passé des décennies à promouvoir et à soutenir les politiciens démocrates. Il a rejoint le parti radical libéral Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) dans les années 1980 et en a été le président honoraire. Il a fait campagne pour Jesse Jackson dans les années 1980 et a soutenu la campagne de Barack Obama en 2008 avant de susciter des critiques après les élections.
Socialistes démocrates d’Amérique
West a émis des critiques limitées à l’égard du Parti démocrate, qualifiant Obama de « mascotte noire des oligarques de Wall Street ». West, ainsi que Socialist Alternative, ont participé au cirque politique connu sous le nom de Parti populaire, formé en 2017 sur la base de pressions exercées sur Sanders pour qu’il lance un nouveau parti. West et Socialist Alternative ont également soutenu les campagnes présidentielles de Sanders.
Jill Stein
En 2016, West et Socialist Alternative ont décidé de soutenir la candidate du Parti vert, Jill Stein, après que Sanders ait soutenu Clinton. En 2020, ils se sont séparés, West appelant à voter pour Biden aux élections générales. Howie Hawkins, co-fondateur du Parti vert et candidat à la présidentielle de 2020, soutenu par Socialist Alternative.
Howie Hawkins
Le Parti Vert fonctionne comme un groupe de pression orienté vers les dernières modes d’un segment de la classe politique et universitaire avec des solutions anti-scientifiques bizarres à de nombreux problèmes. Les Verts font également preuve d’un déclencheur émotionnel qui les pousse à un bellicisme vicieux.
S’il y a un fil conducteur dans la transition de West d’une alliance politique à une autre, c’est bien son vague réformisme brisé. Dans son livre The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, West dresse explicitement une longue liste de changements mineurs visant à instaurer un « monde meilleur ». La philosophie de West appartient à l’école du pragmatisme américain telle qu’elle a été développée notamment par Richard. Rorty, avec qui West a étudié à Princeton au début des années 1970. Le pragmatisme a différentes variétés, toutes tournant autour d’un déni de la possibilité d’une vérité objective et, lié à cela, d’un rejet de l’histoire en tant que processus régi par des lois dans lequel des modèles peuvent être observés et modifiés. Dans ses formes modernes et en particulier dans les écrits de Rorty, le pragmatisme s’oppose explicitement à toute intervention dans la vie sociale visant à changer le cours des événements pour le mieux pour la plupart des gens.
L’approche pragmatique de Cornel West en matière de politique et de théorie implique un mélange éclectique de politiques nationalistes noires, raciales et identitaires, qu’il combine avec des conceptions ouvertement religieuses et irrationalistes.
The American left organization Socialist Alternative, which in the past supported “independent” socialist US Senator Bernie Sanders as the ”left wing of the possible” in 2016 and 2020, is now moving to back the presidential campaign of leftist gadfly academic Cornel West in the 2024 elections.
Socialist Alternative
Most recently, in an article published last month on its website headlined, “The Two-Party System Is Killing Us—Can We Build An Alternative?” Socialist Alternative points to West’s recently formed “Justice for All” party as a potential “mass working-class left party.” In reality, the Justice for All party is devoid of any clear political program and was established primarily as a vehicle for West to obtain ballot status.
Cornel West
Socialist Alternative first declared its support for West last year, when the former Democrat and former member of the Democratic Socialists of America was seeking the presidential nomination of the Green Party—after initially announcing he would seek the nomination of the Peoples Party, a political operation set up by former Sanders supporters. West later bowed out of the Green Party contest and said he was running as an independent. None of these political gyrations have given pause to Socialist Alternative.
On June 16, 2023, the Socialist Alternative Executive Committee hailed West’s campaign, declaring that his “candidacy has the potential to offer a sorely needed left alternative for working people and the oppressed.” In that statement, there were no less than 15 separate references to Bernie Sanders. The Executive Committee lamented:
The loyalty of Sanders and the “Squad” to the Democratic Party has been used in service of vicious attacks on workers, including the blocking of the railroad workers strike, and it has profoundly undercut the ability to organize movements of working people, squandering the momentum Bernie generated with his campaign’s “political revolution” against the billionaire class.
In August, Socialist Alternative announced a “Students for Cornel West” campaign, writing, “We need systemic change, and Cornel West’s campaign offers us an opportunity to fight back. … To be effective, we need Cornel West’s campaign to have a mass grassroots character. Young people have a central role to play in building the initial grassroots momentum that can draw in larger and larger layers of people hungry for change.” Socialist Alternative has since campaigned for West on every campus where it has been active. Some see the activity as a way to connect with the public through a name they may recognize and then sway them over to their own point of view simply using Cornel West’s campaign for their own ends.
In an article from November, Socialist Alternative raised concerns about “left and progressive voters who are sick and tired of the Democrats’ false promises” and called for West to “step into the void” caused by the likely upcoming election between two widely despised candidates, Trump and “genocide Joe.”
The organization’s support of the West campaign as a “left-wing, pro-worker” opposition to the Democrats and Republicans is a kind of wishful thinking. West is a left flavored performer.
The political record of Cornel West
The Democratic Party is currently waging an “all-out war” on third parties and independent candidates, including the West campaign, in an effort to keep them from getting ballot status. This does not, however, mean that West represents a genuine challenge to the two-party system.
Any serious review of West’s record would both undercut the ability of his campaign to keep this immense anger tied to the dead-end of capitalist politics and show Socialist Alternative as an empty political organization that simply latches onto the leftwing of the leftwing of the Democrats.
West has spent decades promoting and endorsing Democratic politicians. He joined the radical liberal Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the 1980s and served as its honorary chair. He campaigned for Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, and endorsed Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign before raising criticisms following the election.
Democratic Socialists of America
West has made limited criticism of the Democratic Party, calling Obama “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs.” West, as well as Socialist Alternative, participated in the political circus known as the People’s Party, formed in 2017 on the basis of pressuring Sanders to launch a new party. Both West and Socialist Alternative also backed Sanders’ presidential campaigns.
Jill Stein
In 2016 West and Socialist Alternative switched to supporting Green Party candidate Jill Stein after Sanders endorsed Clinton. In 2020, they went separate ways, with West calling for a vote for Biden in the general election. Socialist Alternative backed Green Party co-founder and 2020 presidential candidate Howie Hawkins.
Howie Hawkins
The Green Party operates as a pressure group oriented toward the latest fads of a segment of the political and academic class with bizarre anti-science solutions to many problems. Greens also exhibit an emotional trigger that propels them to vicious warmongering.
If there is any consistent thread in West’s transition from one political alliance to another, it is his vague house broken reformism. In his book The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, West explicitly outlines a pedestrian laundry list of minor changes to bring about a ‘better world.’ West’s philosophy belongs to the school of American pragmatism as it was developed in particular by Richard Rorty, with whom West studied while at Princeton in the early 1970s. Pragmatism has different varieties, all revolving around a denial of the possibility of objective truth, and, bound up with this, a rejection of history as a law-governed process where patterns can be observed and changed. In its modern forms and especially in the writings of Rorty, pragmatism is directed explicitly against intervention into social life to change the course of events for the better for most people.
Cornel West’s pragmatic approach to politics and theory entails an eclectic mixture of Black nationalist, racial and identity politics, which he combines with openly religious and irrationalist conceptions.
Last week, a United Nations Security Council resolution to extend the mandate for the UN Panel of Experts on DPRK sanctions was vetoed by the Russian Federation, effectively disbanding the primary enforcement mechanism for the nine rounds of sanctions that have been imposed on the DPRK since 2006, in response to their repeated nuclear and ICBM tests.
On October 9th, 2006, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) conducted their first successful test of a nuclear weapon. In response to this, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed resolution 1718, condemning the DPRK for the test, and imposing a harsh regime of sanctions on the regime. Subsequent to a second test on May 25, 2009, they unanimously passed resolution 1874, which tightened the sanctions regime significantly and established a “Panel of Experts” to “gather, examine and analyze information…regarding the implementation of the measures imposed”, for an initial period of one year. As more and more sanctions resolutions were passed in response to further nuclear and ICBM tests, the mandate for this Panel of Experts was unanimously extended each year until last week.
Leading up to the vote, China and Russia had proposed a compromise to extend the mandate of the Panel of Experts for one year, conditional on adding a sunset clause to the sanctions regime, as the Chinese delegate said “Sanctions should not be set in stone or be indefinite”. The Russian delegate argued that the situation in Korea had changed enormously since 2006, and that continuing the sanctions in the name of preventing the DPRK from becoming a nuclear power was “losing its relevance” and was “detached from reality”.
It is rather ironic that the United States and its allies have been criticizing the Russia veto of an otherwise unanimous Security Council resolution as destabilizing, given that the US routinely uses its own veto power, as most followers of this site are well aware. This Russian application of its veto power has been described as a crisis for the “broader functioning of the UN Security Council and the post World War II international order”, even though it is completely obvious that we would have used our veto against any Russian or Chinese resolution to relax or discontinue the sanctions regime.
Given that the United States government has never been subtle about its desire for regime change in North Korea, and has refused to take first use of nuclear weapons by the United States off the table in the event of war with the DPRK, Kim Jong Un’s rationale is quite compelling. I certainly had no counterargument.
One must remember that the number one goal for the North Korean regime is their own survival, and Kim Jong Un’s strategic decisions (like those of any other political leader) should be evaluated in that context – obviously his priority is to stay alive and keep his job! With that in mind, the continued pursuit of a nuclear deterrent seems like the most rational option. Of course he wants a better life for his people, and relief from economic sanctions, but not at the cost of risking the regime’s collapse.
This was not an isolated incident either, as the US has a long history of breaking negotiated deals with rival nations. In 1994, Bill Clinton negotiated the “Agreed Framework” in which the DPRK would shut down their graphite-moderated nuclear reactors, to be replaced with light water reactors (LWRs) to be provided by the US, with supplies of heavy oil being provided to them to provide energy in the interim. George W. Bush then slow-walked providing the LWRs and stopped the shipments of fuel oil, leading the DPRK to restart the reactors to supply energy to their people.
No wonder they feel the need for a nuclear deterrent when our policy changes so dramatically every four years, making any negotiations effectively pointless. As Kim Jong Un told us, the DPRK policy is always consistent, but the US changes all the time, adding that if they don’t like what is happening, they just wait four years. After we brought a team of NBA players to Pyongyang in 2014, he further remarked that in doing so, we were the first Americans who ever kept their word. No wonder they don’t trust any security guarantees the US has offered them.
Sanctions have been referred to as war by other means (with apologies to Clausewitz), and the US now has sanctions in place against more than 20 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. The most comprehensive sanctions are currently imposed against Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, with sanctions against China growing at an alarming rate. At the same time, the Chinese Yuan is being used increasingly for international trade instead of the US dollar as a result of sanctions prohibiting many countries from using the US financial system.
Is it perhaps more rational to imagine that our overuse of economic sanctions will inevitably create trading blocs and alliances among the countries subjected to them? Iran, Russia, China, and the DPRK have plenty of reasons to dislike one another. China and Russia have had a complex hostile relationship for centuries, with Chairman Mao seeking a better relationship with the US partially because he feared a Soviet invasion. Both China and Russia repeatedly voted in favor of all the sanctions imposed on the DPRK since 2006, because they did not want a nuclear North Korea in their backyard. Iran and Russia have a long history of tensions, as do Iran and China. And Iran and DPRK have only worked together in a partnership of convenience for the last 35 years because of their shared status as pariahs in the eyes of the USA.
Despite the historical tensions between Iran, Russia, China, and DPRK, the sanctions regime has forced these countries into an alliance and trading bloc of convenience, and the US has nobody to blame but themselves. It should surprise nobody that China and Russia want to get the UN out of the DPRK sanctions business. That Russia finally vetoed the continuing mandate for the Panel of Experts should come as no surprise – the only surprise is that it took them 18 years to get there.
The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local Call reveal.
In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was released in English under the pen name “Brigadier General Y.S.” In it, the author — a man who we confirmed to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”
Such a machine, it turns out, actually exists. A new investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.
“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list.
In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”
In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
The following investigation is organized according to the six chronological stages of the Israeli army’s highly automated target production in the early weeks of the Gaza war. First, we explain the Lavender machine itself, which marked tens of thousands of Palestinians using AI. Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes. Third, we describe how “dumb” bombs were chosen to strike these homes.
Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target. Fifth, we note how automated software inaccurately calculated the amount of non-combatants in each household. And sixth, we show how on several occasions, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all, because military officers did not verify the information in real time.
STEP 1: GENERATING TARGETS
‘Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy’
In the Israeli army, the term “human target” referred in the past to a senior military operative who, according to the rules of the military’s International Law Department, can be killed in their private home even if there are civilians around. Intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call that during Israel’s previous wars, since this was an “especially brutal” way to kill someone — often by killing an entire family alongside the target — such human targets were marked very carefully and only senior military commanders were bombed in their homes, to maintain the principle of proportionality under international law.
But after October 7 — when Hamas-led militants launched a deadly assault on southern Israeli communities, killing around 1,200 people and abducting 240 — the army, the sources said, took a dramatically different approach. Under “Operation Iron Swords,” the army decided to designate all operatives of Hamas’ military wing as human targets, regardless of their rank or military importance. And that changed everything.
The new policy also posed a technical problem for Israeli intelligence. In previous wars, in order to authorize the assassination of a single human target, an officer had to go through a complex and lengthy “incrimination” process: cross-check evidence that the person was indeed a senior member of Hamas’ military wing, find out where he lived, his contact information, and finally know when he was home in real time. When the list of targets numbered only a few dozen senior operatives, intelligence personnel could individually handle the work involved in incriminating and locating them.
However, once the list was expanded to include tens of thousands of lower-ranking operatives, the Israeli army figured it had to rely on automated software and artificial intelligence. The result, the sources testify, was that the role of human personnel in incriminating Palestinians as military operatives was pushed aside, and AI did most of the work instead. According to four of the sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call, Lavender — which was developed to create human targets in the current war — has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected “Hamas militants,” most of them junior, for assassination (the IDF Spokesperson denied the existence of such a kill list in a statement to +972 and Local Call).
“We didn’t know who the junior operatives were, because Israel didn’t track them routinely [before the war],” explained senior officer B. to +972 and Local Call, illuminating the reason behind the development of this particular target machine for the current war. “They wanted to allow us to attack [the junior operatives] automatically. That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy.”
The sources said that the approval to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists, which had previously been used only as an auxiliary tool, was granted about two weeks into the war, after intelligence personnel “manually” checked the accuracy of a random sample of several hundred targets selected by the AI system. When that sample found that Lavender’s results had reached 90 percent accuracy in identifying an individual’s affiliation with Hamas, the army authorized the sweeping use of the system. From that moment, sources said that if Lavender decided an individual was a militant in Hamas, they were essentially asked to treat that as an order, with no requirement to independently check why the machine made that choice or to examine the raw intelligence data on which it is based.
“At 5 a.m., [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had marked,” B. said. “We took out thousands of people. We didn’t go through them one by one — we put everything into automated systems, and as soon as one of [the marked individuals] was at home, he immediately became a target. We bombed him and his house.”
“It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low,” said one source about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants. “I nicknamed those targets ‘garbage targets.’ Still, I found them more ethical than the targets that we bombed just for ‘deterrence’ — highrises that are evacuated and toppled just to cause destruction.”
The deadly results of this loosening of restrictions in the early stage of the war were staggering. According to data from the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, on which the Israeli army has relied almost exclusively since the beginning of the war, Israel killed some 15,000 Palestinians — almost half of the death toll so far — in the first six weeks of the war, up until a week-long ceasefire was agreed on Nov. 24.
‘The more information and variety, the better’
The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.
Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination.
In “The Human-Machine Team,” the book referenced at the beginning of this article, the current commander of Unit 8200 advocates for such a system without referencing Lavender by name. (The commander himself also isn’t named, but five sources in 8200 confirmed that the commander is the author, as reported also by Haaretz.) Describing human personnel as a “bottleneck” that limits the army’s capacity during a military operation, the commander laments: “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day.”
The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.
“The more information, and the more variety, the better,” the commander writes. “Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos.” While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of thousands of targets,” while the actual decision as to whether or not to attack them will remain a human one.
The book isn’t the only time a senior Israeli commander hinted at the existence of human target machines like Lavender. +972 and Local Call have obtained footage of a private lecture given by the commander of Unit 8200’s secretive Data Science and AI center, “Col. Yoav,” at Tel Aviv University’s AI week in 2023, which was reported on at the time in the Israeli media.
In the lecture, the commander speaks about a new, sophisticated target machine used by the Israeli army that detects “dangerous people” based on their likeness to existing lists of known militants on which it was trained. “Using the system, we managed to identify Hamas missile squad commanders,” “Col. Yoav” said in the lecture, referring to Israel’s May 2021 military operation in Gaza, when the machine was used for the first time.
“We rank the results and determine the threshold [at which to attack a target],” “Col. Yoav” said in the lecture, emphasizing that “eventually, people of flesh and blood take the decisions. In the defense realm, ethically speaking, we put a lot of emphasis on this. These tools are meant to help [intelligence officers] break their barriers.”
In practice, however, sources who have used Lavender in recent months say human agency and precision were substituted for mass target creation and lethality.
‘There was no “zero-error” policy’
B., a senior officer who used Lavender, echoed to +972 and Local Call that in the current war, officers were not required to independently review the AI system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances.
“Everything was statistical, everything was neat — it was very dry,” B. said. He noted that this lack of supervision was permitted despite internal checks showing that Lavender’s calculations were considered accurate only 90 percent of the time; in other words, it was known in advance that 10 percent of the human targets slated for assassination were not members of the Hamas military wing at all.
For example, sources explained that the Lavender machine sometimes mistakenly flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or PIJ operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives, residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an operative, and Gazans who used a device that once belonged to a Hamas operative.
“How close does a person have to be to Hamas to be [considered by an AI machine to be] affiliated with the organization?” said one source critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy. “It’s a vague boundary. Is a person who doesn’t receive a salary from Hamas, but helps them with all sorts of things, a Hamas operative? Is someone who was in Hamas in the past, but is no longer there today, a Hamas operative? Each of these features — characteristics that a machine would flag as suspicious — is inaccurate.”
Similar problems exist with the ability of target machines to assess the phone used by an individual marked for assassination. “In war, Palestinians change phones all the time,” said the source. “People lose contact with their families, give their phone to a friend or a wife, maybe lose it. There is no way to rely 100 percent on the automatic mechanism that determines which [phone] number belongs to whom.”
According to the sources, the army knew that the minimal human supervision in place would not discover these faults. “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender. “Because of the scope and magnitude, the protocol was that even if you don’t know for sure that the machine is right, you know that statistically it’s fine. So you go for it.”
“It has proven itself,” said B., the senior source. “There’s something about the statistical approach that sets you to a certain norm and standard. There has been an illogical amount of [bombings] in this operation. This is unparalleled, in my memory. And I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism than a soldier who lost a friend two days ago. Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”
Another intelligence source, who defended the reliance on the Lavender-generated kill lists of Palestinian suspects, argued that it was worth investing an intelligence officer’s time only to verify the information if the target was a senior commander in Hamas. “But when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it,” he said. “In war, there is no time to incriminate every target. So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it.”
B. said that the reason for this automation was a constant push to generate more targets for assassination. “In a day without targets [whose feature rating was sufficient to authorize a strike], we attacked at a lower threshold. We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us. We finished [killing] our targets very quickly.”
He explained that when lowering the rating threshold of Lavender, it would mark more people as targets for strikes. “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”
One source who worked with the military data science team that trained Lavender said that data collected from employees of the Hamas-run Internal Security Ministry, whom he does not consider to be militants, was also fed into the machine. “I was bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they used the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely, and included people who were civil defense workers in the training dataset,” he said.
The source added that even if one believes these people deserve to be killed, training the system based on their communication profiles made Lavender more likely to select civilians by mistake when its algorithms were applied to the general population. “Since it’s an automatic system that isn’t operated manually by humans, the meaning of this decision is dramatic: it means you’re including many people with a civilian communication profile as potential targets.”
‘We only checked that the target was a man’
The Israeli military flatly rejects these claims. In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the IDF Spokesperson denied using artificial intelligence to incriminate targets, saying these are merely “auxiliary tools that assist officers in the process of incrimination.” The statement went on: “In any case, an independent examination by an [intelligence] analyst is required, which verifies that the identified targets are legitimate targets for attack, in accordance with the conditions set forth in IDF directives and international law.”
However, sources said that the only human supervision protocol in place before bombing the houses of suspected “junior” militants marked by Lavender was to conduct a single check: ensuring that the AI-selected target is male rather than female. The assumption in the army was that if the target was a woman, the machine had likely made a mistake, because there are no women among the ranks of the military wings of Hamas and PIJ.
“A human being had to [verify the target] for just a few seconds,” B. said, explaining that this became the protocol after realizing the Lavender system was “getting it right” most of the time. “At first, we did checks to ensure that the machine didn’t get confused. But at some point we relied on the automatic system, and we only checked that [the target] was a man — that was enough. It doesn’t take a long time to tell if someone has a male or a female voice.”
To conduct the male/female check, B. claimed that in the current war, “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time. If [the operative] came up in the automated mechanism, and I checked that he was a man, there would be permission to bomb him, subject to an examination of collateral damage.”
In practice, sources said this meant that for civilian men marked in error by Lavender, there was no supervising mechanism in place to detect the mistake. According to B., a common error occurred “if the [Hamas] target gave [his phone] to his son, his older brother, or just a random man. That person will be bombed in his house with his family. This happened often. These were most of the mistakes caused by Lavender,” B. said.
STEP 2: LINKING TARGETS TO FAMILY HOMES
‘Most of the people you killed were women and children’
The next stage in the Israeli army’s assassination procedure is identifying where to attack the targets that Lavender generates.
In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the IDF Spokesperson claimed in response to this article that “Hamas places its operatives and military assets in the heart of the civilian population, systematically uses the civilian population as human shields, and conducts fighting from within civilian structures, including sensitive sites such as hospitals, mosques, schools and UN facilities. The IDF is bound by and acts according to international law, directing its attacks only at military targets and military operatives.”
The six sources we spoke to echoed this to some degree, saying that Hamas’ extensive tunnel system deliberately passes under hospitals and schools; that Hamas militants use ambulances to get around; and that countless military assets have been situated near civilian buildings. The sources argued that many Israeli strikes kill civilians as a result of these tactics by Hamas — a characterization that human rights groups warn evades Israel’s onus for inflicting the casualties.
However, in contrast to the Israeli army’s official statements, the sources explained that a major reason for the unprecedented death toll from Israel’s current bombardment is the fact that the army has systematically attacked targets in their private homes, alongside their families — in part because it was easier from an intelligence standpoint to mark family houses using automated systems.
Indeed, several sources emphasized that, as opposed to numerous cases of Hamas operatives engaging in military activity from civilian areas, in the case of systematic assassination strikes, the army routinely made the active choice to bomb suspected militants when inside civilian households from which no military activity took place. This choice, they said, was a reflection of the way Israel’s system of mass surveillance in Gaza is designed.
The sources told +972 and Local Call that since everyone in Gaza had a private house with which they could be associated, the army’s surveillance systems could easily and automatically “link” individuals to family houses. In order to identify the moment operatives enter their houses in real time, various additional automatic softwares have been developed. These programs track thousands of individuals simultaneously, identify when they are at home, and send an automatic alert to the targeting officer, who then marks the house for bombing. One of several of these tracking softwares, revealed here for the first time, is called “Where’s Daddy?”
“You put hundreds [of targets] into the system and wait to see who you can kill,” said one source with knowledge of the system. “It’s called broad hunting: you copy-paste from the lists that the target system produces.”
Evidence of this policy is also clear from the data: during the first month of the war, more than half of the fatalities — 6,120 people — belonged to 1,340 families, many of which were completely wiped out while inside their homes, according to UN figures. The proportion of entire families bombed in their houses in the current war is much higher than in the 2014 Israeli operation in Gaza (which was previously Israel’s deadliest war on the Strip), further suggesting the prominence of this policy.
Another source said that each time the pace of assassinations waned, more targets were added to systems like Where’s Daddy? to locate individuals that entered their homes and could therefore be bombed. He said that the decision of who to put into the tracking systems could be made by relatively low-ranking officers in the military hierarchy.
“One day, totally of my own accord, I added something like 1,200 new targets to the [tracking] system, because the number of attacks [we were conducting] decreased,” the source said. “That made sense to me. In retrospect, it seems like a serious decision I made. And such decisions were not made at high levels.”
The sources said that in the first two weeks of the war, “several thousand” targets were initially inputted into locating programs like Where’s Daddy?. These included all the members of Hamas’ elite special forces unit the Nukhba, all of Hamas’ anti-tank operatives, and anyone who entered Israel on October 7. But before long, the kill list was drastically expanded.
“In the end it was everyone [marked by Lavender],” one source explained. “Tens of thousands. This happened a few weeks later, when the [Israeli] brigades entered Gaza, and there were already fewer uninvolved people [i.e. civilians] in the northern areas.” According to this source, even some minors were marked by Lavender as targets for bombing. “Normally, operatives are over the age of 17, but that was not a condition.”
Lavender and systems like Where’s Daddy? were thus combined with deadly effect, killing entire families, sources said. By adding a name from the Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A. explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside.
“Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” A. said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”
STEP 3: CHOOSING A WEAPON
‘We usually carried out the attacks with “dumb bombs”’
Once Lavender has marked a target for assassination, army personnel have verified that they are male, and tracking software has located the target in their home, the next stage is picking the munition with which to bomb them.
In December 2023, CNN reported that according to U.S. intelligence estimates, about 45 percent of the munitions used by the Israeli air force in Gaza were “dumb” bombs, which are known to cause more collateral damage than guided bombs. In response to the CNN report, an army spokesperson quoted in the article said: “As a military committed to international law and a moral code of conduct, we are devoting vast resources to minimizing harm to the civilians that Hamas has forced into the role of human shields. Our war is against Hamas, not against the people of Gaza.”
Three intelligence sources, however, told +972 and Local Call that junior operatives marked by Lavender were assassinated only with dumb bombs, in the interest of saving more expensive armaments. The implication, one source explained, was that the army would not strike a junior target if they lived in a high-rise building, because the army did not want to spend a more precise and expensive “floor bomb” (with more limited collateral effect) to kill him. But if a junior target lived in a building with only a few floors, the army was authorized to kill him and everyone in the building with a dumb bomb.
“It was like that with all the junior targets,” testified C., who used various automated programs in the current war. “The only question was, is it possible to attack the building in terms of collateral damage? Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally destroying the whole house on top of its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care — you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”
STEP 4: AUTHORIZING CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
‘We attacked almost without considering collateral damage’
One source said that when attacking junior operatives, including those marked by AI systems like Lavender, the number of civilians they were allowed to kill alongside each target was fixed during the initial weeks of the war at up to 20. Another source claimed the fixed number was up to 15. These “collateral damage degrees,” as the military calls them, were applied broadly to all suspected junior militants, the sources said, regardless of their rank, military importance, and age, and with no specific case-by-case examination to weigh the military advantage of assassinating them against the expected harm to civilians.
According to A., who was an officer in a target operation room in the current war, the army’s international law department has never before given such “sweeping approval” for such a high collateral damage degree. “It’s not just that you can kill any person who is a Hamas soldier, which is clearly permitted and legitimate in terms of international law,” A. said. “But they directly tell you: ‘You are allowed to kill them along with many civilians.’
“Every person who wore a Hamas uniform in the past year or two could be bombed with 20 [civilians killed as] collateral damage, even without special permission,” A. continued. “In practice, the principle of proportionality did not exist.”
According to A., this was the policy for most of the time that he served. Only later did the military lower the collateral damage degree. “In this calculation, it could also be 20 children for a junior operative … It really wasn’t like that in the past,” A. explained. Asked about the security rationale behind this policy, A. replied: “Lethality.”
The predetermined and fixed collateral damage degree helped accelerate the mass creation of targets using the Lavender machine, sources said, because it saved time. B. claimed that the number of civilians they were permitted to kill in the first week of the war per suspected junior militant marked by AI was fifteen, but that this number “went up and down” over time.
“At first we attacked almost without considering collateral damage,” B. said of the first week after October 7. “In practice, you didn’t really count people [in each house that is bombed], because you couldn’t really tell if they’re at home or not. After a week, restrictions on collateral damage began. The number dropped [from 15] to five, which made it really difficult for us to attack, because if the whole family was home, we couldn’t bomb it. Then they raised the number again.”
‘We knew we would kill over 100 civilians’
Sources told +972 and Local Call that now, partly due to American pressure, the Israeli army is no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in civilian homes. The fact that most homes in the Gaza Strip were already destroyed or damaged, and almost the entire population has been displaced, also impaired the army’s ability to rely on intelligence databases and automated house-locating programs.
E. claimed that the massive bombardment of junior militants took place only in the first week or two of the war, and then was stopped mainly so as not to waste bombs. “There is a munitions economy,” E. said. “They were always afraid that there would be [a war] in the northern arena [with Hezbollah in Lebanon]. They don’t attack these kinds of [junior] people at all anymore.”
However, airstrikes against senior ranking Hamas commanders are still ongoing, and sources said that for these attacks, the military is authorizing the killing of “hundreds” of civilians per target — an official policy for which there is no historical precedent in Israel, or even in recent U.S. military operations.
“In the bombing of the commander of the Shuja’iya Battalion, we knew that we would kill over 100 civilians,” B. recalled of a Dec. 2 bombing that the IDF Spokesperson said was aimed at assassinating Wisam Farhat. “For me, psychologically, it was unusual. Over 100 civilians — it crosses some red line.”
Amjad Al-Sheikh, a young Palestinian from Gaza, said many of his family members were killed in that bombing. A resident of Shuja’iya, east of Gaza City, he was at a local supermarket that day when he heard five blasts that shattered the glass windows.
“I ran to my family’s house, but there were no buildings there anymore,” Al-Sheikh told +972 and Local Call. “The street was filled with screams and smoke. Entire residential blocks turned to mountains of rubble and deep pits. People began to search in the cement, using their hands, and so did I, looking for signs of my family’s house.”
Al-Sheikh’s wife and baby daughter survived — protected from the rubble by a closet that fell on top of them — but he found 11 other members of his family, among them his sisters, brothers, and their young children, dead under the rubble. According to the human rights group B’Tselem, the bombing that day destroyed dozens of buildings, killed dozens of people, and buried hundreds under the ruins of their homes.
‘Entire families were killed’
Intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call they took part in even deadlier strikes. In order to assassinate Ayman Nofal, the commander of Hamas’ Central Gaza Brigade, a source said the army authorized the killing of approximately 300 civilians, destroying several buildings in airstrikes on Al-Bureij refugee camp on Oct. 17, based on an imprecise pinpointing of Nofal. Satellite footage and videos from the scene show the destruction of several large multi-storey apartment buildings.
“Between 16 to 18 houses were wiped out in the attack,” Amro Al-Khatib, a resident of the camp, told +972 and Local Call. “We couldn’t tell one apartment from the other — they all got mixed up in the rubble, and we found human body parts everywhere.”
In the aftermath, Al-Khatib recalled around 50 dead bodies being pulled out of the rubble, and around 200 people wounded, many of them gravely. But that was just the first day. The camp’s residents spent five days pulling the dead and injured out, he said.
Nael Al-Bahisi, a paramedic, was one of the first on the scene. He counted between 50-70 casualties on that first day. “At a certain moment, we understood the target of the strike was Hamas commander Ayman Nofal,” he told +972 and Local Call. “They killed him, and also many people who didn’t know he was there. Entire families with children were killed.”
Another intelligence source told +972 and Local Call that the army destroyed a high-rise building in Rafah in mid-December, killing “dozens of civilians,” in order to try to kill Mohammed Shabaneh, the commander of Hamas’ Rafah Brigade (it is not clear whether or not he was killed in the attack). Often, the source said, the senior commanders hide in tunnels that pass under civilian buildings, and therefore the choice to assassinate them with an airstrike necessarily kills civilians.
“Most of those injured were children,” said Wael Al-Sir, 55, who witnessed the large-scale strike believed by some Gazans to have been the assassination attempt. He told +972 and Local Call that the bombing on Dec. 20 destroyed an “entire residential block” and killed at least 10 children.
“There was a completely permissive policy regarding the casualties of [bombing] operations — so permissive that in my opinion it had an element of revenge,” D., an intelligence source, claimed. “The core of this was the assassinations of senior [Hamas and PIJ commanders] for whom they were willing to kill hundreds of civilians. We had a calculation: how many for a brigade commander, how many for a battalion commander, and so on.”
“There were regulations, but they were just very lenient,” said E., another intelligence source. “We’ve killed people with collateral damage in the high double-digits, if not low triple-digits. These are things that haven’t happened before.”
Such a high rate of “collateral damage” is exceptional not only compared to what the Israeli army previously deemed acceptable, but also compared to the wars waged by the United States in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.
General Peter Gersten, Deputy Commander for Operations and Intelligence in the operation to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, told a U.S. defense magazine in 2021 that an attack with collateral damage of 15 civilians deviated from procedure; to carry it out, he had to obtain special permission from the head of the U.S. Central Command, General Lloyd Austin, who is now Secretary of Defense.
“With Osama Bin Laden, you’d have an NCV [Non-combatant Casualty Value] of 30, but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero,” Gersten said. “We ran zero for the longest time.”
‘We were told: “Whatever you can, bomb”’
All the sources interviewed for this investigation said that Hamas’ massacres on October 7 and kidnapping of hostages greatly influenced the army’s fire policy and collateral damage degrees. “At first, the atmosphere was painful and vindictive,” said B., who was drafted into the army immediately after October 7, and served in a target operation room. “The rules were very lenient. They took down four buildings when they knew the target was in one of them. It was crazy.
“There was a dissonance: on the one hand, people here were frustrated that we were not attacking enough,” B. continued. “On the other hand, you see at the end of the day that another thousand Gazans have died, most of them civilians.”
“There was hysteria in the professional ranks,” said D., who was also drafted immediately after October 7. “They had no idea how to react at all. The only thing they knew to do was to just start bombing like madmen to try to dismantle Hamas’ capabilities.”
D. stressed that they were not explicitly told that the army’s goal was “revenge,” but expressed that “as soon as every target connected to Hamas becomes legitimate, and with almost any collateral damage being approved, it is clear to you that thousands of people are going to be killed. Even if officially every target is connected to Hamas, when the policy is so permissive, it loses all meaning.”
A. also used the word “revenge” to describe the atmosphere inside the army after October 7. “No one thought about what to do afterward, when the war is over, or how it will be possible to live in Gaza and what they will do with it,” A. said. “We were told: now we have to fuck up Hamas, no matter what the cost. Whatever you can, you bomb.”
B., the senior intelligence source, said that in retrospect, he believes this “disproportionate” policy of killing Palestinians in Gaza also endangers Israelis, and that this was one of the reasons he decided to be interviewed.
“In the short term, we are safer, because we hurt Hamas. But I think we’re less secure in the long run. I see how all the bereaved families in Gaza — which is nearly everyone — will raise the motivation for [people to join] Hamas 10 years down the line. And it will be much easier for [Hamas] to recruit them.”
In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the Israeli army denied much of what the sources told us, claiming that “each target is examined individually, while an individual assessment is made of the military advantage and collateral damage expected from the attack … The IDF does not carry out attacks when the collateral damage expected from the attack is excessive in relation to the military advantage.”
STEP 5: CALCULATING COLLATERAL DAMAGE
‘The model was not connected to reality’
According to the intelligence sources, the Israeli army’s calculation of the number of civilians expected to be killed in each house alongside a target — a procedure examined in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call — was conducted with the help of automatic and inaccurate tools. In previous wars, intelligence personnel would spend a lot of time verifying how many people were in a house that was set to be bombed, with the number of civilians liable to be killed listed as part of a “target file.” After October 7, however, this thorough verification was largely abandoned in favor of automation.
In October, The New York Times reported on a system operated from a special base in southern Israel, which collects information from mobile phones in the Gaza Strip and provided the military with a live estimate of the number of Palestinians who fled the northern Gaza Strip southward. Brig. General Udi Ben Muha told the Times that “It’s not a 100 percent perfect system — but it gives you the information you need to make a decision.” The system operates according to colors: red marks areas where there are many people, and green and yellow mark areas that have been relatively cleared of residents.
The sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call described a similar system for calculating collateral damage, which was used to decide whether to bomb a building in Gaza. They said that the software calculated the number of civilians residing in each home before the war — by assessing the size of the building and reviewing its list of residents — and then reduced those numbers by the proportion of residents who supposedly evacuated the neighborhood.
To illustrate, if the army estimated that half of a neighborhood’s residents had left, the program would count a house that usually had 10 residents as a house containing five people. To save time, the sources said, the army did not surveil the homes to check how many people were actually living there, as it did in previous operations, to find out if the program’s estimate was indeed accurate.
“This model was not connected to reality,” claimed one source. “There was no connection between those who were in the home now, during the war, and those who were listed as living there prior to the war. [On one occasion] we bombed a house without knowing that there were several families inside, hiding together.”
The source said that although the army knew that such errors could occur, this imprecise model was adopted nonetheless, because it was faster. As such, the source said, “the collateral damage calculation was completely automatic and statistical” — even producing figures that were not whole numbers.
STEP 6: BOMBING A FAMILY HOME
‘You killed a family for no reason’
The sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call explained that there was sometimes a substantial gap between the moment that tracking systems like Where’s Daddy? alerted an officer that a target had entered their house, and the bombing itself — leading to the killing of whole families even without hitting the army’s target. “It happened to me many times that we attacked a house, but the person wasn’t even home,” one source said. “The result is that you killed a family for no reason.”
Three intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call that they had witnessed an incident in which the Israeli army bombed a family’s private home, and it later turned out that the intended target of the assassination was not even inside the house, since no further verification was conducted in real time.
“Sometimes [the target] was at home earlier, and then at night he went to sleep somewhere else, say underground, and you didn’t know about it,” one of the sources said. “There are times when you double-check the location, and there are times when you just say, ‘Okay, he was in the house in the last few hours, so you can just bomb.’”
Another source described a similar incident that affected him and made him want to be interviewed for this investigation. “We understood that the target was home at 8 p.m. In the end, the air force bombed the house at 3 a.m. Then we found out [in that span of time] he had managed to move himself to another house with his family. There were two other families with children in the building we bombed.”
In previous wars in Gaza, after the assassination of human targets, Israeli intelligence would carry out bomb damage assessment (BDA) procedures — a routine post-strike check to see if the senior commander was killed and how many civilians were killed along with him. As revealed in a previous +972 and Local Call investigation, this involved listening in to phone calls of relatives who lost their loved ones. In the current war, however, at least in relation to junior militants marked using AI, sources say this procedure was abolished in order to save time. The sources said they did not know how many civilians were actually killed in each strike, and for the low-ranking suspected Hamas and PIJ operatives marked by AI, they did not even know whether the target himself was killed.
As the US Anglo-Zionist empire ramps up its war against China, an ancient archetype makes its cyclical appearance to offer guidance through “interesting times.” As per a brief Google search, the “Year of the Dragon” represents power, nobility, luck, and success. Up until now, China has demonstrated incredible humility and restraint in response to the outrageous insults and provocations of the US neocon government. Goodbye “Year of the Rabbit,” time for China to “show its pimp hand.”* (*Am. slang- display one’s power.)
First, warmest Year of the Dragon wishes to Emperor President Xi- Earthly Representative of the Tao, Monarch Butterfly Princess Meng Wanzhou, and the people of China.
Second, some readers might accuse me of betraying my “country” by siding with China. Nonsense. The US republic and its Constitution no longer exist. Both were subsumed by the US Anglo-Zionist Empire, a confederation of financial cartels, multinational corporations, oligarchs, the Military Industrial Complex, the Deep State, and the Zionist Lobby. Like all end-stage pathologically corrupt empires, reform is a lunatic’s dream. The best hope for its subjects is to avoid drowning in the sinking behemoth’s vortex. Perhaps the weary survivors who find space on lifeboats or cling to floating wreckage can regroup to form a beautiful ideological-ethno state republic that embraces win-win cooperation as primary global influencer China torchlights humanity’s path to Star Trek Kardashev Level II Civilization.
China’s position has always been- “don’t start none, won’t be none.”* (*A self-defense postulate that advocates conflict avoidance yet acknowledges the right to hit back when attacked). Based on the actions of the US and its vassals, China needs to prepare for continued escalations of aggression. To take creative license with a Socrates attributed saying- “Know thy enemy.”
The Anglo-Zionist war trident contains three sharp points- “extreme war,” “conventional war,” and “economic war.” Sometimes the trident’s prong applications overlap and merge. An example of an overlap-merge application is cyberwarfare.
“Extreme war” primarily entails nuclear and biological warfare. It is extreme because its applications hold the potential to spread beyond the battlefield to take down human civilization.
America uses nuclear weapons as a threat deterrent. In this case, “threat” is a relative term. The US dollar should not say, “In God We Trust,” but rather “In Nukes We Trust,” because its nuclear and military arsenal keep the dollar afloat via dollar hegemony enforcement. As the insanity and idiocy associated with dying empire intensifies and the dollar slips, expect dangerous acts of desperation, e.g. use of tactical battlefield mini-nukes, biological weapon attacks.
As to the US nuclear threat, from my viewpoint, the correct deterrent for China is what I call the “skin in the game”* approach.” (*when the policies or actions of an individual or entity expose them to the same risk or loss as everyone else). The West’s 1% and rootless .01% ruling classes are parasitic leeches and more importantly, cowards. While they may condemn millions or billions to death with little regard, they will do anything to cling to their wretched earthly existences. Chinese intelligence must locate all their bunkers and underground cities and make it known that in the event of nuclear war, China will relentlessly and repeatedly strike their high strata-class rat holes with the strongest bunker-busting nukes available.
With biological war, while an appropriate response is warranted, unless it comes down to a case of revenge killing your enemy before dying, I advise against biological tit-for-tat. Biological weapons can mutate and go global. Barring accidental or insane rogue scientist release, the US is limited in the lethality of its bio-attacks, as super-powerful pathogens could easily turn on their creators. If Chinese intelligence confirms that COVID-19 was a bio-attack, which I suspect it has, then China should publically announce its findings. It’s the “Year of the Dragon.” Expose the motherfuckers.* (*Someone who copulates with their mother or a generic term for a person(s). In this case, both meanings could apply.)
I won’t dwell on “conventional war” strategy because China wins.
Regarding “economic war.” Wall Street outsourced US manufacturing to China to turn America into a usury-based F.I.R.E. (finance, insurance, real estate) economy that sells debt, with the expectation that China would buy that debt and let Wall Street insiders manage China’s economy. This economic model was known as “Chimerica.” While China initially benefited from the arrangement, it rejected the part where a rootless Wall Street class takes over China’s 5000-year-old civilization after they suck the US drier than a mummy’s 陰戶.
US economic numbers are built on fraud. The wildly inflated $65,000 hospital emergency room bill counts toward American GDP. The US stock market stays afloat through Federal Reserve intravenous feeding, stock buybacks, and other forms of corporate welfare and chicanery. Military Industrial Complex profits rely on the captive printing press treasuries of the US and its vassals. It’s a giant scam bubble waiting for the inevitable pin. BRICS is a good start to withstanding the “pop” and also offers an alternative to US economic bullying, debt slavery, and asset seizure. Although, from my viewpoint, China’s best defense is autarky that coexists with global trade.
China’s BRI is a mind-blowing accomplishment. However, as any sandcastle can attest, it’s easier to destroy than create. America’s pretty good at kicking down sandcastles.
The CIA stymied Germany’s energy flow with the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. If the homemade missiles of Houthi freedom fighters can disrupt a major shipping route, imagine what the subs and destroyers of the US or its vassals can achieve. Global infrastructure projects are susceptible to sabotage or attack from CIA-funded terrorist groups. In the event of a major trade shutdown, China must be able to provide all life requirements to its population. I believe it can do that. The weak link is energy. China’s Artificial Sun cold fusion reactor offers a possible solution. I recommend China invest the same ratio of manpower, money, and brain-battery into cold fusion reactors as the US put into its WW2 Manhattan Project. Post-US Empire collapse, Chinese space tankers can fill their hulls from the liquid methane sea of Titan, Saturn’s moon. The current Petroleum Civilization model is unsustainable and is destroying the ecosystems that sustain life on Earth.
Just like China transformed Marxist economics into “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” when the right time comes, I recommend the same evolutionary approach toward globalization. From an energy conservation standpoint, it is illogical for a nation to grow a bunch of carrots for a cost of one dollar and then ship them around the world to buy back the same carrots for three dollars. Or export the carrots only to buy another country’s carrots. While globalization has profited China, at some point it will create negative blowback if the system’s internal defects are not addressed and corrected. Nigeria can produce its own food and textiles. What it cannot do, at least at this juncture, is build a high-speed rail system. Neither can the US.
For decades Hollywood (US cinema/music) conquered the world’s hearts and minds. To quote George Orwell- “All art is propaganda.” One reason the American Empire is dying is because Hollywood can no longer make good movies. They can’t sell the dream. China needs to fill that entertainment void. The shortcut path is simple replication of the movies/music currently mass-produced by Western entertainment corporations using AI/machine learning programs. The longer, but from my viewpoint, more fruitful path, is for China to set up an institute to study American (and Western) cultural entertainment (cinema, music, novels) from the years 1945-1999. While the institute’s technicians will wade through much detritus, they’ll also discover gems that can birth beautiful children.
Outside of religious conflict, spirituality is seldom discussed in the geopolitical arena. Mistake. During the Cold War, the Rothschild-Rockefeller bank cartel set up a system whereby a nationalist revolutionary leader had to choose either colonialist resource-theft capitalism or atheistic materialistic* Marxism. (*materialism not as in capitalist hyper-consumerism, but rather the Marxist belief that humans are biological machines devoid of divine spark, and can be programmed and managed in a purely mechanical capacity). The opposing capitalist and Marxist programs worked as balancing forces within the context of international finance’s world domination program, maintaining the status quo of banker rule. Chairman Mao chose Marxism, which history shows was the correct choice. If he had chosen colonialist resource theft capitalism, an independent Chinese nation-state would not exist today.
Once China broke the chains of Western imperialism it was free to chart its own course, and subsequently transformed Marxism into “socialism with Chinese characteristics” by filtering out the negative elements of Marxism while incorporating pragmatic aspects of capitalism. The atheistic component of Marxism put it at odds with China’s ancient spiritual technologies- Taoism, Buddhism, luck attraction, Chi theory, etc. STEM disciplines answer many things, but can’t sufficiently respond to: “What is this?” and “What is beyond this?” During the CPC’s atheist phase, some spiritual seekers became estranged from the government and that dissatisfaction was capitalized on by the CIA who partnered with disenfranchised religious groups for nefarious purposes. I believe the rift between China and most of these religious groups is repairable. Rapprochement would deal a painful blow to Western intelligence agencies. Better to convert an enemy than fight him.
Just like China transmogrified economic theory, I believe it can do the same thing with spiritual theory. Working in win-win cooperation with spiritual organizations from around the world, I envision China spearheading the development of spiritual technology compatible with Kardashev Level II Civilization. In the yin-yang circle, the science and spirituality compartments coexist in harmonious balance. May the Tao be with you.
In keeping with the Year of the Dragon, I need to address the unbearable arrest and detention of Monarch Butterfly Princess and Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou. So what if Huawei did business with Iran? Why does the US get to dictate who a sovereign Chinese company transacts with? This US-Canadian false-arrest action insulted not just Meng Wanzhou, but the entire Chinese nation. Either the perpetrators issue a full apology or when the light turns green, don’t stop until it’s red.
Do you think the sociopathic and blackmailed Western CEO actors propped up by international bankers and managed by Deep State technocrats will ever speak on behalf of the frog, dolphin, and owl? Huawei with Meng Wanzhou’s influence holds the potential to build the blueprint for the technological-ecological harmonization advocated by scientist Buckminster Fuller in his book, “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.”
Wait a minute. Are you in love with her? Do you plan on showing up at Princess Wanzhou’s door with a bouquet of pretty flowers? Ha ha ha. Pathetic clown. She doesn’t know you exist. I’m actually embarrassed for you.
Hold on. Confession time friend. I’m a pathetic clown too. Is it so terrible to close one’s eyes for a moment to imagine what can never be?
As seen with the Moscow concert hall attack and CIA disruption operations in Maidan-Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang- Western intelligence agencies love terrorism and color revolution. While China avoids terror-targeting civilians (a wise policy) and interfering in the domestic affairs of other nations (perhaps some revision), each provocation must receive the appropriate response. No more humiliation.
It stands to reason that CIA-Mossad will repeat a 9/11-style false flag to push the US public into anti-China war mode. China’s public relations and media teams must be ready to offer swift denial. On a global level, this will prove effective. However, due to hyper-capitalist irrational racism components in America’s founding and the universal mob-think outlined in Gustave Le Bon’s “Psychology of Crowds,” in a post-false flag environment, US Chinese ethnics (and mistaken identity Asians) would be at risk. During WW2 the US government threw US Japanese ethnics into concentration camps while the greedy mob grabbed their assets for pennies on the dollar. To address this possibility, I recommend China build an underground railroad* (US antebellum secret networks that helped Black slaves escape North) or assist in the creation of a warrior-monk based “Monarch Butterfly Princess Holy Order of the Tao.”
What of Taiwan? It’s the “Year of the Dragon.” Go as far as you can go China. Perhaps all the way.
And now a word for Dragon-skeptics.
Some claim that China is already under the control of the Rothschild-Rockefeller bank cartel (or planet owners) and East vs West is WEF kabuki theater. I disagree for the following reasons:
1- Techno-feudalism requires not only the cultural destruction of its subjects, but also their genetic alteration/destruction. All human DNA is considered the property of the owners and can therefore be used as a resource commodity and control mechanism. Under WEF protocol, China’s leaders would have to be willing to destroy their people’s 5000-year-old culture and DNA. I don’t see that happening. While some of China’s technological innovations play into state security (legit action, given CIA history), the tech is primarily used to improve the lives of China’s citizens- the exact opposite of US policy.
2- In its 5000-year history, China never pursued a policy of military invasion or conquest outside of its security/territorial sphere. China built a wall to keep the barbarians out.
3- China’s engagement with foreign nations is of a transactional nature. Unlike the West, they’ve never displayed a proclivity for stealing the DNA, culture, politics, assets, bodies, or souls of the people they do business with.
4- During the COVID-19 pandemic, China offered its citizens traditional vaccines. Although certain CPC officials (they always reveal themselves) pushed for Pfizer mRNA shipments and domestic mRNA vax production, the CPC as a whole rejected the mRNA pressure tactics of the US political class. While you may feel the CPC overreacted with the lockdowns, keep in mind that they faced an unprecedented bio-attack. For future occurrences, I recommend zinc, vitamin C & D, and the 5000-year-old Traditional Chinese Medicine cabinet.
5- For those who believe this is all a perfectly choreographed show, what harm is there in supporting China? NWO is already a fait accompli. If that’s the case, kick back with a bottle of Patrón and Mossberg 12 gauge, and wait for the AI killer drones to arrive.
From my viewpoint, China remains the primary bulwark against the US Anglo-Zionist Empire aggressors and their global financial mafia handlers. Given the terrible power of the international bankers, Emperor President Xi must juggle a complex mishmash of neutrals, allies, and adversaries to navigate China to victory, which by extension means human species survival. Based on my observation, he has upheld the basic tenets of Tao. Until I see evidence to the contrary, like Petula Clark sang in her version- “I will follow him.”
I look forward to watching China’s evolutionary path to national-actualization. As per Oswald Spengler, the “West” is done. Western genius took the world from horse and wagon to modern industrial society. While many amazing creations came from that, so did much suffering and death. If Western philosophy incorporates the principles of karmic law to form yin-yang balance and Europe joins China and Russia in a true Eurasian bloc, I believe Western rejuvenation and positive reintegration into the global family remain possible.
Prepare for takeoff China. Like Far East Movement said, “Now I’m feeling so fly. Like a G6.”
The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has sent shock waves throughout the United States. The bridge was not built to withstand a direct hit from a container ship as large as the Dali, which brought down the structure within minutes after its engine failed and it became an uncontrollable force drifting toward the bridge.
The incident is a symbol of how unfettered capitalism has resulted in safety concerns becoming secondary to profits.
The Dali, operated by shipping giant Maersk, was carrying more than 800 tons of corrosive and flammable materials. Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg likened the 95,000-ton ship to an aircraft carrier and the New York Times explained that “When the bridge was built, cargo ships were not the size they are today.” In fact, such ships have grown steadily in size over the past few decades. One economist told the Times that shipping companies “did what they thought was most efficient for themselves—make the ships big—and they didn’t pay much attention at all to the rest of the world.” This in turn has forced nations to expand waterways to accommodate the behemoths, often at the expense of the public.
Some 90 percent of all traded goods that are shipped from one part of the world to the other are transported by water. As corporate appetites for profits have increased, so has globalized trade. And, safety concerns have taken a back seat, as per an investigation published by Jacobin.
In 2023, the U.S. Department of Labor investigated a complaint against Maersk and concluded that the company had violated the Seaman’s Protection Act by retaliating against a whistleblower employee. At stake was the fact that, as per the Labor Department, “Reporting Policy requires seamen to report safety concerns to the company and allow it time to abate the conditions before reporting to the [U.S. Coast Guard] or other regulatory agencies.” In other words, Maersk, which is one of the world’s top shipping companies, tried to protect itself from government regulators.
A similar scenario of compromising safety in service of profits has unfolded at Boeing, one of the world’s top airplane manufacturers. After an Alaska Airlines flight in January 2024 was forced to make an emergency landing when the Boeing 737 Max plane lost a panel mid-flight, the New York Times published a bizarrely headlined story: “Boeing Faces Tricky Balance Between Safety and Financial Performance.” The story points out a conundrum for Boeing’s executives: “Should they emphasize safety or financial performance?”
The Times explained that, for years the company “put too much emphasis on increasing profits and enriching shareholders with dividends and share buybacks, and not enough on investing in engineering and safety.”
It’s worth stating the obvious: An unsafe aircraft is not an aircraft, it’s a death trap. And yet, within a capitalist framework, everything boils down to a cost-benefit analysis. If the cost of safety for companies like Boeing or Maersk outweighs the financial benefits, it’s simply not worth it for executives and shareholders. While the Alaska Airlines flight thankfully did not result in any deaths this time, hundreds of people on board 737s in 2018 and 2019were not so lucky. Workers at Boeing factories in Washington and South Carolina where aircraft are assembled are required to work at breakneck speed and compromise on safety in the interest of churning out planes as fast as possible.
Who pays the price for such corporate hubris? Vulnerable workers and the public. In the case of the Baltimore bridge accident, all 22 workers on board the Dali were of Indian origin and their quick thinking in notifying authorities that the ship lost power helped ensure that casualties were minimized. As of this writing, they remain trapped on board the ship with one worker having been treated at a hospital for minor injuries. [Ship’s Master appears to be from Ukraine.]
Meanwhile, the six people who are presumed dead and two who were rescued from the frigid waters were all immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America, working on the bridge as part of a construction crew.
These are the same sort of people who suffer racist attacks and ridicule from white supremacist forces in the U.S. A right-wing outlet posted a virulently racist cartoon of the Dali’s crew on social media. And only weeks earlier, Georgia’s unhinged ultraconservative Congressional representative Marjorie Taylor Greene heckled President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address about a white woman who “was killed by an illegal,” in an attempt to whip up anti-immigrant frenzy. [Nursing student kidnapped, beaten, raped, stabbed to death by repeat criminal released by authorities and able to gleefully terrorize US women. ]
Greene appeared utterly unconcerned about the fact that construction workers in the U.S. hail disproportionately from Latin American immigrant communities and many die from work-related injuries. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2022, “Foreign-born Hispanic or Latino workers accounted for 63.5 percent (792) of total Hispanic or Latino worker fatalities (1,248).”
Taxpayers also pay the price for corporate profiteering at the expense of safety. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is apparently footing the bill for the massive cleanup operation from the Baltimore bridge accident. And, President Biden announced that the federal government would “pay the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge.” Meanwhile, Grace Ocean Private, the Singapore-based company that owns the Dali, is expected to invoke a centuries-old maritime law to limit its liability—the same law that the owners of the RMS Titanic used to limit theirs.
In the case of Boeing, the state of Washington in 2013 gave the company the largest ever tax break in the state’s history in exchange for housing its factory and spurring the creation of jobs. The cost to taxpayers was nearly $9 billion. And, because Washington’s governor failed to make job retention a condition for the massive tax break, Boeing then had it both ways when it cut its labor costs by slashing about 15 percent of its workforce in the state a few years later. Washington eventually eliminated the tax break but Boeing still reaps tens of millions of dollars in other state-level incentives tied to aerospace manufacturing.
It’s critically important to contextualize accidents that are the result of corporations putting profits over safety and people. These incidents are not isolated or unpredictable. They are the cost of doing business—a cost that the rest of us pay for in money and lives.
The genocide in Gaza is the final stage of a process begun by Israel decades ago. Anyone who did not see this coming blinded themselves to the character and ultimate goals of the apartheid state.
There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonial project. This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians.
Israel has razed 77 percent of healthcare facilities in Gaza, 68 percent of telecommunication infrastructure, nearly all municipal and governmental buildings, commercial, industrial and agricultural centers, almost half of all roads, over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, 68 percent of residential buildings — the bombing of the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City on Oct. 25, killed 101 people, including 44 children and 37 women, and injured hundreds — and obliterated refugee camps. The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on Oct. 25 killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured 280. Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents.
Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide — in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.
Israel has killed at least 32,705 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. This means Israel is slaughtering as many as 187 people a day including 75 children. It has killed 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000.
Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease — have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated. Over 75,000 Palestinians have been wounded, many of whom will be crippled for life.
“Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children,” writes Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, in her report issued on March 25. “Israel failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent, i.e. adult males, were active Hamas combatants — a necessary condition for them to be lawfully targeted. By early-December, Israel’s security advisors claimed the killing of ‘7,000 terrorists’ in a stage of the campaign when less than 5,000 adult males in total had been identified among the casualties, thus implying that all adult males killed were ‘terrorists.’”
Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians and any building – including mosques, hospitals and schools – protected status. Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.
These accusations, Albanese writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”
In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures – the killing of civlians, dispossession of land, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.
The occupation and genocide would not be possible without the U.S. which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance and is now sending another $2.5 billion in bombs, including 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82 500-pound bombs and fighter jets to Israel. This, too, is our genocide.
The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process. It is not an act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up.
Zionist leaders are open about their goals.
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, after Oct. 7, announced that Gaza would receive “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz said: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened.” Avi Dichter, the Minister of Agriculture, referred to Israel’s military assault as “the Gaza Nakba,” referencing the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, which between 1947 and 1949, drove 750,000 Palestinians from their land and saw thousands massacred by Zionist militias. Likud member of the Israeli Knesset Revital Gottlieb posted on her social media account: “Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!!…Flatten Gaza. Without mercy! This time, there is no room for mercy!” Not to be outdone, Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu supported using nuclear weapons on Gaza as “one of the possibilities.”
The message from the Israeli leadership is unequivocal. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way we annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews.
The specifics are different. The process is the same.
We cannot plead ignorance. We know what happened to the Palestinians. We know what is happening to the Palestinians. We know what will happen to the Palestinians.
But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow in humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.
The genocide, which the U.S. is funding and sustaining with weapons shipments, says something not only about Israel, but about us, about Western civilization, about who we are as a people, where we came from and what defines us. It says that all our vaunted morality and respect for human rights is a lie. It says that people of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. It says their hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom are worthless. It says we will ensure global domination through racialized violence.
This lie — that Western civilization is predicated on “values” such as respect for human rights and the rule of law — is one the Palestinians, and all those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans have known for centuries. But, with the Gaza genocide live streamed, this lie is impossible to sustain.
We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we are Israel, infected with white supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our industrial weapons. Remember The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this?” That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.
The world outside of the industrialized fortresses in the Global North is acutely aware that the fate of the Palestinians is their fate. As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wild fires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians.
US support enables Netanyahu to ignore international pressure
Israel’s plan to expand into an Eretz or “Greater” state incorporating large chunks of its neighbors’ land starts with eliminating the pre-1948 inhabitants of a place once known as Palestine. That nearly all of those who think of themselves as Palestinians must be killed or otherwise removed is perhaps reduced to an aphorism, like “Israel has a right to defend itself,” to absolve the Israeli state and its rampaging army of any guilt in the process. Indeed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ability to avoid any serious consequences for his behavior is remarkable, and it generates further atrocities that might have been unimaginable when the fighting in Gaza started back in October. Al Jazeerahas reported how Netanyahu is now pushing ahead to formalize what has been referred to as the “colonial project,” whereby “the appropriation of all Palestinian Lands will follow on… the outright exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland.” Bibi said in a speech to supporters that “These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”
Journalist Patrick Lawrence, writing at Consortium News, recently described how “Israel’s savagery in its determination to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza — and we had better brace for what is next on the West Bank of the Jordan — marks a turn for all of humanity. In its descent into depravity the Zionist state drags the West altogether down with it.” Indeed, and the United States of America is the foremost great power to be reduced to the status of a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Jewish state, unable to advance its own interests when confronted by the juggernaut of the so-called Israel Lobby and associated Jewish and Zionist-Christian organizations that have corrupted and controlled American foreign as well as select domestic policies.
Witness what has occurred in the last several weeks when the international community has rallied to end the slaughter and deliberate starvation of largely defenseless Gazan civilians. First came a United Nations Security Council move by the United States, which introduced a resolution calling for, but not demanding, an immediate though possibly temporary cease fire in Gaza. When the resolution came up for a vote it was vetoed by Russia and China. There were several problems with the text as it inevitably sought to give Israel considerable flexibility in managing the situation. It included an admonition that the effort to secure a ceasefire must be “in connection with the release of all remaining hostages,” which is an Israeli demand with the willingness of Israel to participate at all very much dependent on the hostage issue. The resolution allowed the fighting to continue and it put control of the entry and distribution of urgently needed relief supplies under the ”security” management of the Israeli army. Then came a Russian and Chinese resolution, approved by all members of the council but the US which “abstained.” The US immediately declared the resolution to be “non-binding” and while the document was meant to permit a ceasefire through the end of Ramadan, it has yet to be enacted by Israel which continues to block food and medicine relief shipments and has focused its latest attacks on the few remaining hospitals, killing hundreds more Gazans. Even though the resolution demanded action on the ceasefire and access to relief supplies Israel has ignored it and so has Washington. As only the United States can compel Israel to change course the fact that it continues to fund Israel and provide it with secret shipments of planeloads weapons, without which Netanyahu would be unable to continue his war, speaks for itself in terms of who is controlling whom.
And don’t be fooled by President Joe Biden’s alleged pressure on Netanyahu to “protect civilians” even as Bibi draws up plans with his war cabinet to invade Gaza’s southernmost Rafah Region, where 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge and are now confronted by imminent death with no way out. Biden is responding to opinion polls in the US that indicate that more than half of Americans are opposed to what Israel is doing in Gaza and the percentage is steadily growing, so he is pretending to have humanitarian impulses and a conscience, neither of which is true, in a cynical effort to support his possible reelection.
To be sure both the White House and Congress, supported by the Jewish dominated media, are totally in Netanyahu’s pocket, something which he has admitted to publicly more than once, saying that the United States is “easily moved” by someone like him. But if one really needed proof positive about who is in charge in the US-Israel relationship, one need only look at the recent omnibus federal government budget bill of $1.2 trillion. Activist Pascal Lottaz has taken the time to go through the complete 1,012 page document detailing where the money goes and discusses his findings in a 9 minute podcast on YouTube. Lottaz has confirmed both the immediate cash payment of $3.8 billion in “tribute money” to Israel plus the already reported blocking of any federal government funding of United Nation Relief and Works Agency for Gaza (UNRWA) for at least a year. As UNRWA is the key humanitarian aid agency, the latter is a prohibition completely inconsistent with Biden’s expressed desire to confront the “surging” humanitarian aid crisis for the Gazans who are facing starvation in the context of an active genocide. The prohibition is in spite of the continuing lack of evidence to substantiate Israel’s claims of “terrorism support” leveled against the UN agency and despite the famine conditions already present in Gaza. In his review of the document, Lottaz has also discovered those and other specific benefits that involve Israel in 10 sections of the bill.
The bill also seeks to protect Israel from accountability under existing or new international law and to limit Palestinian efforts to resist or defend themselves. It requires any organization receiving US funding to show that it is actively taking steps “to combat anti-Israel bias” and it prohibits any funding to support Palestinian statehood unless it is shown that a list of specified conditions are met including satisfactory “cooperation with Israeli security organizations.” It prohibits any funding to the Palestinian Authority if Palestine is granted statehood status by the UN or any UN agency without Israel’s consent. It oddly prohibits any security support to the West Bank or Gaza unless it is shown that satisfactory steps are being taken by the Palestinian Authority to “end torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees.” It should be noted that the Palestinians, not Israel, are required to end abuse of detainees even though it is Israel that routinely engages in those practices. The detailed sections of the bill expanding on what is blocked or prohibited are as follows:
The bill forbids any US funding of the UN International Commission of Inquiry investigation into Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestinian territory: Sec. 7848(C)(2) None of the funds appropriated by this Act may be made available for the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.
The bill defunds the UN Human Rights Council unless the organization drops all inquiry into human rights violations by Israel: Sec. 7048(b)(2)(c) UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL. (1) None of the funds appropriated by this Act may be made available in support of the United Nations Human Rights Council unless the Secretary of State determines and reports to the appropriate congressional committees that participation in the Council is important to the national interest of the United States and that such Council is taking significant steps to remove Israel as a permanent agenda item and ensure integrity in the election of members to such Council.
The bill requires any international organization, department, or agency receiving US funding to show that it is taking “credible steps to combat anti-Israel bias”: SEC. 7048. (a) TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY. Not later than 120 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of State shall report to the Committees on Appropriations whether each organization, department, or agency receiving a contribution from funds appropriated by this Act under the headings ‘‘Contributions to International Organizations’’ and ‘‘International Organizations and Programs’’:
The bill prohibits funding of any support to Palestinian Statehood except under US State Department confirmation that its government meets specified conditions including that is is “cooperating with appropriate Israeli and other appropriate security organizations.”
The bill prohibits any support to the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation: SEC. 7038. None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to provide equipment, technical support, consulting services, or any other form of assistance to the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation.
The bill prohibits any funding to security assistance to the West Bank or Gaza unless the State Department reports on “the steps being taken by the Palestinian Authority to “end torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees”: 7039(C)(2) SECURITY ASSISTANCE AND REPORTING REQUIREMENT. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds made available by this or prior appropriations Acts, including funds made available by transfer, may be made available for obligation for security assistance for the West Bank and Gaza until the Secretary of State reports to the Committees on Appropriations on the steps being taken by the Palestinian Authority to end torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees, including by bringing to justice members of Palestinian security forces who commit such crimes.
The bill prohibits any funding of the Palestinian Authority if Palestine achieves recognition of statehood by the UN or any UN agency without Israel’s agreement or if the Palestinians initiate an investigation of Israel in the International Criminal Court: Sec.7401(k)(2)(A)(i) None of the funds appropriated under the heading ‘‘Economic Support Fund’’ in this Act may be made available for assistance for the Palestinian Authority, if after the date of enactment of this Act the Palestinians obtain the same standing as member states or full membership as a state in the United Nations or any specialized agency thereof outside an agreement negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians or the Palestinians initiate an International Criminal Court (ICC) judicially authorized investigation, or actively support such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.
The bill extends existing loan guarantees to Israel under the Emergency Wartime Supplemental Appropriations Act through September 30, 2029: SEC. 7034(k)(6).
The bill grants $3.3 billion in “Foreign Military Financing” to Israel, to be disbursed within 30 days: 7401(d) ISRAEL.—Of the funds appropriated by this Act under the heading ‘‘Foreign Military Financing Program’’, not less than $3,300,000,000 shall be available for grants only for Israel which shall be disbursed within 30 days of enactment of this Act: Provided, That to the extent that the Government of Israel requests that funds be used for such purposes, grants made available for Israel under this heading shall, as agreed by the United States and Israel, be available for advanced weapons systems, of which not less than $725,300,000 shall be available for the procurement in Israel of defense articles and defense services, including research and development.
The bill authorizes half a billion dollars in military aid to Israel for “Iron Dome” and other missile defense systems: SEC. 8072. Of the amounts appropriated in this Act under the headings ‘‘Procurement, Defense-Wide’’ and ‘‘Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-Wide, $500,000,000 shall be for the Israeli Cooperative Programs.
The bill has passed through Congress, is written into law, and is on its way for Joe Biden’s signature. In other words, the US is willingly complicit in thousands of deaths already plus the impending deaths of some tens of thousands more innocent people. It is funding Israel’s war of extermination against the Palestinians and is opposed to any attempts by the Palestinians to either defend themselves or their interests as a people. It is shameful and our government is behaving monstrously, controlled by a foreign power that has thoroughly corrupted it. And the rot is spreading throughout our political system to include the death of our own right to freedom of speech. Only last week Governor Greg Abbott of Texas boasted of new legislation to stamp out alleged antisemitism and as criticism of Israel or the behavior of Jews is defined as being antisemitic it is likely that students demonstrating against the Jewish state and in support of Gaza will be expelled from universities and even prosecuted. And it is also reported that the Israel Lobby in the US is busy assembling a war chest of $100 million to fund the removal of politicians and other public figures who are critical of Israel. This is serious stuff that will affect all of us.
Inside the WSJ’s ‘Very Intense’ Effort to Free Evan Gershkovich
“Until he’s out, not enough has been done by anyone,” says WSJ publisher Almar Latour.
POLITICO illustration/Photo by Getty Images
By RYAN LIZZA
03/29/2024 05:00 AM EDT
Ryan Lizza is a Playbook Co-Author and the Chief Washington Correspondent for POLITICO
Ayear ago today Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal Moscow correspondent, was meeting with a source at a steakhouse when FSB agents arrested him and charged him with espionage, an allegation he and the Journal said was absurd. The U.S. government agreed. In less than two weeks, the State Department declared that Gershkovich was “wrongfully detained,” an official status that commits the Biden administration to work for his release.
Almar Latour is the publisher of the Journal and the CEO of Dow Jones. One responsibility he did not expect when he took this job in 2020 was assisting in a hostage negotiation with Vladimir Putin. Latour has played a key role in the legal and diplomatic effort to free Gershkovich. He has worked with the Biden administration, foreign governments and through private channels to figure out what exactly Putin wants to secure the 32-year-old journalist’s freedom.
I spoke with Latour on this week’s episode of Playbook Deep Dive to learn the inside story of this effort. We discussed how the shadow of basketball star Brittney Griner’s detainment in Russia is influencing talks to bring Evan home; what Gershkovich’s detention means for Paul Whelan, the only other American considered by the U.S. to be wrongfully detained in Russia.; why a Russian hitman who is serving a life sentence in Germany for murder may be the key to unlocking a deal with Putin; and how the 2024 election may affect Gershkovich’s fate.
What is the current status of the U.S. government’s efforts to bring Evan home and how has this played out over the past year?
Without speaking for the administration in any form, I would characterize it as a very intense effort. There are people dedicated to situations like these in the State Department. The Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs is a unit within the State Department that concentrates on cases like these, not necessarily around press freedom, but around Americans who are wrongfully detained.
There are many senior administration officials who have commented — the president, of course, has commented on the case. There is just a lot of activity from the White House and the State Department. What has been very impressive is how people have coalesced around this cause and how so many people are giving it their all.
That said, the outcome is sort of binary: He’s either free or he’s not. And so if the question is, “Has enough been done?” Well, we’ll know that when he walks free.
There are many senior administration officials who have commented — President Joe Biden, of course, has commented on the case. | Carolyn Kaster/AP
One of the eye-opening pieces of reporting the Journal published this week was about a complex prisoner swap to secure Evan’s freedom that involved both the Russian and German governments. According to the Journal’s reporting, the exchange involved Alexei Navalny before he died and a Russian assassin, Vadim Krasikov, who is in prison in Germany. Can you tell us anything about what happened there?
In the past year, there have been many forays into the realm of trying to free Evan. And there are different channels for that. First, there is the publicity around Evan that keeps him in the news and that helps with making sure that his release is a priority with the administration.
Then, there’s the official diplomacy that takes place that, in my view, would include signals that the president or the White House might send publicly. But also, a lot that happens behind the scenes bilaterally [or] on a multilateral basis.
And then there is what I would call “private diplomacy.” We have retained a law firm that has, among its many specialties, hostage affairs. So [we’re] creating additional channels to find a solution because you never know in cases like these where the eventual solution is going to come from. And so it’s important for us at the Wall Street Journal as an institution, but also, I think, for the administration, to have all these paths work simultaneously.
If that sounds complicated, it is because it is. And I think some of the reporting that you’ve read that I can’t comment on blow-by-blow reflects, at a minimum, that these cases and potential solutions often happen in very muddled terrain and in very blurry circumstances, where there just are a lot of variables.
Obviously, you’re not going to say anything that would jeopardize Evan in any way. But do you feel like the German government has been a good partner in this effort? Do you feel like the German government has understood how important this case is to the Biden administration? Or would you like them to do more?
We want everybody to do more until he’s out. Until he’s out, not enough has been done by anyone, and that goes for all of us. But we’re confident that at some point, he will be released.
I think on the specific Germany question, on this private diplomacy path, we have met a lot of people from a lot of different countries. We have traveled with Evan’s parents to different spots, including very publicly to Davos recently where they had a chance to meet with world leaders. And so, without commenting specifically on the Germans, we’ve had a chance for the parents to meet with world leaders, or for our lawyers to meet with world leaders, in addition to whatever the U.S. administration does on that front. And I think wherever and whenever we’ve done that, when faced with the parents, I’ve seen some senior figures on the world stage realize how much pain this causes for one family.
In addition, I think there is a realization that this case reverberates beyond one individual; that the wrongful incarceration of a journalist has wider implications, very negative implications for press freedom. So I do think that we’ve seen that awareness take hold with world leaders, in Western Europe, and around the world, and certainly also in the U.S.
I wanted to ask you about one of the stranger parts of this effort, and that is Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin, where he asked about releasing Evan. What did you and the Journal learn from that exchange? Did Tucker reach out to the Journal at all, or did he just raise Evan’s case to Putin on his own initiative?
I can’t speak to whom Tucker may have reached out to or not. There was, I think, a public awareness and certainly an awareness in this building that he was going to have that interview. And I think, at least I was under the impression, that the topic might come up. At least to me, there wasn’t a direct request or any notification of that sort, nor were we seeking that per se. We were more focused on Putin’s response.
What did you make of it?
It reinforced the notion that this was something very deliberate and that there was some forethought; that there was no surprise to this question and the answer didn’t seem so spontaneous.
Evan Gershkovich (right) is escorted from court in Moscow, Russia on Jan. 26, 2024. | Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
He was weirdly honest about it, sort of like there was no B.S. about what was really going on with Evan. Or am I reading that incorrectly?
“Honest” is not a word that I would use in a sentence containing “Vladimir Putin.” I think you could see, at that moment, the transactional nature. So, it was a naked portrayal of the motivation, in my view.
Did it spin things forward? Not that I can tell.
So in a weird way, did it give you a little bit more optimism like, “Okay, this guy’s just looking for a deal, and we’ve got to find the deal that will satisfy him.”
Hostage-taking, you know, works like this to begin with.
You knew that already.
This is the whole game, right? We take somebody and we want a ransom or a trade or something in return.
So by this point, nobody on the Russian side is pretending that that’s not what this is about?
I can’t speak to specifically what the Russians have said or not said, but what I can say is that I would dismiss any sort of portrayal that this is anything other than seeking a trade. It comes on the back of another trade that has been made involving Brittney Griner. There’s very little that is truthful that comes out of the Kremlin these days. So even quasi-frank comments have to be seen in that transactional light.
Where were you when you learned that Evan had been arrested?
I was in South Africa. There was a period that preceded that moment where I got a phone call from my head of HR and head of security saying that, “We may have some difficult news and there might be a very difficult situation. A reporter in Russia did not show up at their appointed time.”
And that was really a moment because we have, like many major news organizations, a very strict security protocol where if you go out on something sensitive or you find yourself in a danger zone, there’s a significant amount of planning that happens. And there are appointed times when you check in; and depending on the situation, there might be some tracking. But when somebody doesn’t show up — which was the very first moment of this saga for me — that was alarming.
Putin ‘ready to talk’ about release of US prisoner Evan GershkovichShare
And initially, I suppose you didn’t know why Evan had missed his check-in?
No. And you hope for the best, of course. But a little bit later, it became clear that a second checkpoint had been missed. And Evan did not show up at his apartment — this is some hours later — and so it went from a suspicion that something had gone wrong to an ever-stronger suspicion that something had gone wrong.
And there were also, at that point, some rumors that had reached me indirectly that he might have been arrested. Some hours later, there was a confirmation of some sort that that had happened. And then for me, the next morning, very early morning on the East Coast, the FSB put out a statement.
The FSB statement was the first official word, right?
That was the first official word with context as to what this was and that contained this espionage lie immediately. And when you hear in a hostage situation that somebody has been taken, maybe at first your instinct is, “Let’s address this in the quiet. Let’s have the conversations that we need to have with the authorities in this case, maybe with an embassy or with the right team.”
But this got tossed out into the open right away. There was never really a chance to have that conversation, which is very different than some other cases. But here I think it shows the deliberate nature of what has happened. It got very deliberately pushed out into the world with a very clear message from the Russian Federation.
Let me ask you about two quick things. One, were there signs of the deteriorating situation for journalists in Russia? Was Evan picking up on that? Was your newsroom?
And second, the story that the Journal published this past Wednesday was an amazing piece of journalism, and I assume you’re very intimately aware of all the details. One thing it says is that Putin was looking for a new pawn at this point in time. And I’m just curious if that was something that was on anyone’s radar back then or if it’s just something we all realized in hindsight.
When you read that somebody has been falsely accused of something, you understand that there is some motivation to drive that, whether that is defaming the Western press or something else altogether.
But I think, at that moment a year ago, we were institutionally aware that the circumstances in Russia — and also in some other places around the world — were just more difficult for reporters. And when people are sent out into the field, it’s with their consent, with an elaborate discussion with security. And so we had been monitoring it. Did we know that there was a methodical approach to hostage-taking [by the Russian government] as it looks today? It’s easy to say with hindsight. But the situation did not seem accidental.
Almar Latour has worked with the Biden administration, foreign governments and through private channels to figure out what exactly President Vladimir Putin wants to secure Gershkovich’s freedom. | Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
You know, first off, my heart goes out to Paul and Paul’s family and they’ve been at this for way too long — five years. We want him to be released and we think it’s incredibly important. Our task here is to focus on our colleague. The government is focusing on a broader set of hostage situations. I do think that with the spotlight that we’ve deliberately put on Evan, there’s been, over the past year, a greater awareness of the hostage situations that exist in Russia and even elsewhere. And so in that sense, the Evan situation, when we talk about it implicitly, of course, pertains to Paul as well as to Alsu [Kurmasheva], who recently got apprehended there for what seems like bogus reasons.
Sadly, the court recently extended Evan’s imprisonment by three more months. What’s your reading of how the 2024 presidential campaign and political situation in the United States may or may not play into these efforts to get Evan back?
We have had bipartisan support for Evan’s release, and that has been very consistent throughout.
I think the extension that was made clear this week — through June 30th — has the air of sounding official, but all these things are really arbitrary and in parallel with the official legal system, could be decided separately if the Kremlin wanted to speed things up or slow things down.
So I mainly look at these extensions as the language of the Kremlin and whether they have what they want or not. So this means that at least for the next few months, theoretically, they don’t yet have what they want.
Gershkovich stands in a defendants’ cage at a hearing in Moscow on Sept. 19, 2023. | Dmitry Serebryakov/AP
What did you learn from previous efforts to get wrongfully detained Americans out of Russia? For example, Brittney Griner, who was swapped for the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout?
So, a very different situation… But two decades ago, we did have a situation that did not end well when [Wall Street Journal correspondent] Daniel Pearl was taken hostage [in Pakistan]. And so there is an acute awareness institutionally here that you have to take these situations incredibly seriously. I think that was one lesson: that there’s no guarantee for the outcome necessarily, so you have to give it your all.
And I think that led to a very speedy organization around this where we set up various teams, a comms team, a legal team in the U.S., a legal team in Russia and a lot of other different channels.
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On the Griner case, one conclusion was that putting a spotlight on a situation like this helps. It helps with the prioritization. I think that has been a dominant theme for the past year: to make sure that having that voice, having that spotlight, helps this case. And then I think the transactional nature of the Griner case — having a major arms dealer traded against a basketball player of renown — that shows the crass nature of a situation like this.
So I think those lessons and a few other things quite quickly found their way into our bloodstream as we tried to get organized around this.
I think having the realization that you need to stay in close contact with the family, with the government, and bring to bear anyone you know who might influence the situation — so bring in all your resources — those are all lessons, at least in hindsight, that I think we picked up or we found out along the way.
I want to ask you one last question, and that is to explain to listeners who haven’t been following this case, one, why should they care about this? And two, what can people do if they care about Evan and want to help?
This case is important because it pertains to one man’s freedom, and that matters. Evan is a journalist and he was just doing his job. He was arrested for doing his job. And when that can happen and nobody says anything about it, that has a tremendous negative impact on society, on free press.
His arrest, in my view, was a direct attempt to suppress press freedom, to send a signal that you are not safe as a journalist in Russia. If we let that go by unnoticed, if we don’t say anything about it, if we don’t fight for Evan’s release, that signals to Russia that this is okay behavior. That makes any chance for reliable information to get to Russia even more difficult.
But I believe it can also be contagious. And that this may give other dictators, strongmen, the idea that, “Hey, there’s another way to deal with press that you don’t like,” and that is just by arresting them or by taking harsher measures.
And so what can you do about this? At first, I think, have this awareness and follow the case. I think it does matter to talk about it to your friends, to talk about press freedom to people you know, to talk to your elected officials about it.
I often get this question like, does it really matter? But if you wear that [Free Evan] pin, every little bit helps to support that thesis that free press is a good thing and that society needs that more than ever. And so, in fighting for Evan’s release, I think we can all make a statement for him, but also for society at large.
All Out in Solidarity with the Palestinian People! (Internationalist Group)
Labor activists of S.I. Cobas, the CALP (Autonomous Collective of Port Workers) and other “rank-and-file” unions blockade the port of Genova, Italy on February 23-24, preventing loading/unloading of an Israeli Zim Line ship. (Photo: S.I. Cobas)
With the barbaric war on Gaza now in its sixth month, it is utterly clear that this is an actual genocide, targeting the entire Palestinian Arab population of what has been termed the world’s largest open-air prison. After over 40,000 killed,1 the destruction of more than half of all homes in the densely populated enclave, the bombing of schools and universities and attacks on hospitals, now more than one million people face the spectre of imminent starvation.2 It is also clear that this is a joint U.S./Israeli war, as all the heavy bombs and all the warplanes from which they are dropped are supplied by the Pentagon, while Washington funnels billions in U.S. aid to Israel annually. Millions have marched worldwide to denounce the slaughter and calling for a ceasefire, to no avail. Every appeal to the Zionist/imperialist warmongers has come to naught.
What’s desperately needed is the mobilization of power that can bring the slaughter to a halt, the power of the working class, in the United States and around the world. This coming May 1, the workers day, should become a day of militant international workers action – including strikes and labor-led mass mobilization – to stop the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza. It should be followed up with labor action worldwide to shut down all flights and shipping to and from Israel so long as the Zionist war on Gaza continues. Workers should demand: stop the bombing, stop the massacres, Israeli military and settlers get the hell out of Gaza and all the Occupied Territories NOW!
This is what genocide looks like. Residents of Gaza City gather at site of destroyed building, March 2024 (Photo: Agence France-Presse)
Last October, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) in Gaza and more than two dozen Palestinian unions and professional associations issued an urgent appeal to labor internationally to refuse to build or transport arms for and to Israel. In the U.S., over 200 union bodies have since passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire – but with no action beyond joining “peace” marches. In some cases, notably the AFL-CIO, these appeals are actually support for Israel, denouncing Palestinians for starting the war, not demanding that Israel get out of Gaza and calling for release of all Israeli hostages and nothing about the over 9,000 Palestinians being held hostage in Israeli jails (plus another 4,000 workers from Gaza who were in Israel when the war began and are now being held in military camps).3
The League for the Fourth International and its U.S. section, the Internationalist Group, have called from the outset to “Defend the Palestinians Against U.S./Israel Genocidal War on Gaza!” (The Internationalist, 10 October 2023), “For Workers Action Against Zionist Terror” and “against the shipment of arms to Israel and Ukraine,” where the U.S. and its NATO allies are waging an imperialist proxy war against Russia. We have underlined that, so far, calls for labor solidarity have been mainly on paper, and what port shutdowns there have been were mostly called by community groups rather than the unions, as long-time maritime labor activist Jack Heyman pointed out in his recent article reiterating the call “Dock Workers: Block Military Cargo to Israel” (The Internationalist, 15 February).
Motion calling for ILWU Local 10 to stop work on May 1 in solidarity with the Palestinian people and against genocidal war on Gaza.
Last week, Heyman and others put forward a resolution for International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area to stop work on May Day, the international workers day, “calling for international workers action in solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people, in opposition to the genocidal Israel/U.S. war on Gaza and to stop the flow of arms to that war.” The motion also urged the rest of the union and dock workers internationally to join in taking May Day Palestinian solidarity actions.
Now the Palestinian General Federation of Labor, Gaza has issued a May Day appeal to unions in the United States calling to do just that. The PGFTU statement says frankly that “we have encountered shocking silence and neglect by the international labor movement.” It spells this out:
“The international labor movement … retreated to verbal positions without taking measures on the ground or pressuring the decision-makers to stop this war of extermination, limiting union activities to conferences and statements and not delving deeply into the need to guarantee humanitarian aid, or influencing international public opinion to expose the truth about Zionist crimes and the practices of the allied countries that continue to support Israel.”
(Click here or on image below for the full text of the PGFTU, Gaza appeal.)
In response to the PGFTU’s urgent appeal to unions and trade-unionists in the U.S. and internationally “to be our voice and advocate inside and outside America,” the League for the Fourth International urges labor militants around the world to mobilize workers’ power in hard-hitting labor-led actions on May 1 in solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people against the genocidal U.S./Israel war. Such actions can and should include not only focusing May Day marches on Palestine solidarity and organizing workers aid to Gaza, but blocking arms shipments and carrying out labor boycotts of flights and shipping to and from Israel, and wherever possible, strike action andshutting down production. Such actions should demand an immediate stop to the bombing, forced population transfers and any restrictions on emergency aid to Gaza; an end to all aid to Israel, and for Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza and all the Occupied Territories.
In the U.S., it is crucial to fight for the workers and oppressed to break with the Democrats, who are financing, advising, arming and jointly waging war on the Palestinians in Gaza together with the Israeli government of hardline Zionists and outright fascists; and to oust the class-collaborationist labor bureaucracy, which for decades has chained the unions to the bosses’ parties. A prime example of this is the leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW), which in response to clamor from the ranks, particularly in the Detroit area with its large Arab American population, called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and then turned around and endorsed “Genocide Joe” Biden for president! For their part, the Teamster tops are currently flirting with Donald Trump, who said of the war in Gaza that he would tell Israeli prime minister Netanyahu to “finish it up and do it quickly” (Haaretz, 17 March).
The contours of effective solidarity action with the Palestinian people vary from country to country. In Germany, labor action against the genocidal war must necessarily oppose not only the ferociously pro-Zionist Social Democrat/Free Democrat/Green government (which has banned many pro-Palestinian protests) and the equally rabidly pro-Israel right-wing “opposition” but also the Left Party, as all the parliamentary parties explicitly support “Israel’s right to self-defense,” the formula justifying the mass murder in Gaza. In Italy, where fascists lead a far-right-wing government, organizing effective labor solidarity will require united action by the normally fractious “rank-and-file” unions and bringing out key industrial sectors in a direct challenge to the “mainstream” confederations, which despite talk of a ceasefire are solidly pro-Israel.
Everywhere, the opportunist left seeks to build a “broad antiwar movement,” typically centered on calls for a ceasefire, in order to include dissident liberal or “progressive” elements from the bourgeois and reformist parties, who don’t necessarily oppose the war on Gaza but only its “excesses.” Rather than such “popular-front” coalitions pushing impotent pressure politics, what’s urgently needed is independent, militant class struggle against all the capitalist and governing social-democratic parties, which are all cogs in the imperialist system, and therefore, one way or another, complicit in the genocide being carried out in Gaza. Classless appeals for “peace” are a diversion in the face of implacable U.S. and Israeli mass murderers, who can only be stopped by international socialist revolution.
Activists of Class Struggle Workers Portland (above at 11 November 2023 Palestine labor solidarity rally) call to defend Gaza, defeat U.S./Israel war on Palestinians. Four Portland area unions have passed motions demanding an end to Israeli bombing of Gaza, for Israel out of West Bank and Gaza and to end to U.S. arming and funding. (Internationalist photo)
Highlighting the urgency of this independent class-struggle policy are resolutions that have been passed by four unions – Iron Workers Local 29, IUPAT (Painters) Local 10, IBEW (electrical workers) Local 48 and AFT (education) Local 111 – in the Portland, Oregon area of the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Rather than calling for a ceasefire, which would leave the Israeli in control of Gaza and which plays into the hands of the Biden administration that is now toying with the word, the resolutions, introduced by supporters of Class Struggle Workers – Portland, call for labor action to stop the shipment of arms to Israel, for “the immediate end to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, for Israel to vacate Gaza and the West Bank, and to end all arming or funding to it now” (click here or on reproductions below to read resolutions on the web site of Class Struggle Workers – Portland).
Above all the fight to halt the genocidal U.S./Israel war against the Palestinian people requires a political fight against the capitalist parties. This was addressed by the Portland Painters, who in a 2016 resolution called to break with all the bosses’ parties and build a class-struggle workers party. The call in that resolution for the national union to repudiate its endorsement of the Democratic presidential candidate should be a beacon to worker militants today as unions in the U.S. join calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, and then endorse war criminal Democrat Biden who is responsible for arming, financing and directing the genocidal war.
August 2016 Resolution of International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) Local 10 for a Class-Struggle Workers Party (Excerpt)
“Whereas across the country, from Oakland to Baltimore, police under Democratic mayors regularly murder black men and women with impunity, and
“Whereas the 2016 presidential election offers us the “choice” between a raving, bigoted clown and a career representative of Wall Street, and …
“Whereas Democrats and Republicans are and have always been strike-breaking, war-making parties of the bosses, and
“Whereas so long as the labor movement supports one or another party of the bosses, we will be playing a losing game, therefore be it
“Resolved that IUPAT Local 10 does not support the Democrats, Republicans, or any bosses’ parties or politicians, and
“Resolved that we call on the International Union to repudiate its endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president, and
“Resolved that we call on the labor movement to break from the Democratic Party, and build a class-struggle workers party.
The embattled Palestinian Arabs have been subjected to “ethnic cleansing” for more than three-quarters of a century, following subjugation by the British imperialists and the Ottoman Empire – and now to outright genocide by the Zionist state of Israel and its U.S. patrons. It will take a revolution to put an end to this oppression, a revolution that can only be successful by splitting and exploding Israeli society from within. This requires intransigent, internationalist class struggle, throughout the entire region. As the League for the Fourth International has emphasized since the beginning of that war, and long before that, the bottom line is that defenders of the oppressed and opponents of imperialism must stand foursquare with the Palestinian people against the Zionist oppressors and their state, and that the only solution that promises a just and equitable future to the two peoples inhabiting this tiny land is for an Arab-Hebrew Palestinian workers state, in a socialist federation of the Middle East.
All out for militant international workers action on May Day in solidarity with the Palestinian people against the genocidal U.S./Israel war! ■
(28 March 2024 NYC Protest Versus Biden Fundraiser)
British courts for five years have dragged out Julian Assange’s show trial. He continues to be denied due process as his physical and mental health deteriorates. This is the point.
Prosecutors representing the United States, whether by design or incompetence, refused — in the two-day hearing I attended in London in February — to provide guarantees that Julian Assange would be afforded First Amendment rights and would be spared the death penalty if extradited to the U.S.
The inability to give these assurances all but guaranteed that the High Court — as it did on Tuesday — would allow Julian’s lawyers to appeal. Was this done to stall for time so that Julian would not be extradited until after the U.S. presidential election? Was it a delaying tactic to work out a plea deal? Julian’s lawyers and U.S. prosecutors are discussing this possibility. Was it careless legal work? Or was it to keep Julian locked in a high security prison until he collapses mentally and physically?
If Julian is extradited, he will stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years, along with another charge for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” carrying an additional five years.
The court will permit Julian to appeal minor technical points — his basic free speech rights must be honored, he cannot be discriminated against on the basis of his nationality and he cannot be under threat of the death penalty.
No new hearing will allow his lawyers to focus on the war crimes and corruption that WikiLeaks exposed. No new hearing will permit Julian to mount a public-interest defense. No new hearing will discuss the political persecution of a publisher who has not committed a crime.
The court, by asking the U.S. for assurances that Julian would be granted First Amendment rights in the U.S. courts and not be subject to the death penalty, offered the U.S. an easy out — give the guarantees and the appeal is rejected.
The hearing in February was Julian’s last chance to request an appeal of the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel, and many of the rulings of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in 2021.
If Julian is denied an appeal, he can request an emergency stay of execution from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But it is possible the British court could order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction, or decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard there.
Julian has been engaged in a legal battle for 15 years. It began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad.
Julian took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London for seven years, fearing extradition to the U.S. He was arrested in April 2019 by the Metropolitan Police, who were permitted by the Embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh, a high-security prison in southeast London.
The case against Julian has made a mockery of the British justice system and international law. While in the embassy, the Spanish security firm UC Global provided video recordings of meetings between Julian and his lawyers to the CIA, eviscerating attorney-client privilege.
The Ecuadorian government — led by Lenin Moreno — violated international law by rescinding Julian’s asylum status and permitting police into their embassy to carry Julian into a waiting van. The courts have denied Julian’s status as a legitimate journalist and publisher. The U.S. and Britain have ignored Article 4 of their Extradition Treaty that prohibits extradition for political offenses. The key witness for the U.S., Sigurdur Thordarson — a convicted fraudster and pedophile — admitted to fabricating the accusations he made against Julian in exchange for immunity for past crimes..
Julian, an Australian citizen, is being charged under the U.S. Espionage Act although he did not engage in espionage and was not based in the U.S when he was sent the leaked documents. The British courts are considering extradition, despite the CIA’s plan to kidnap and assassinate Julian, plans that included a potential shoot-out on the streets of London, with involvement by London’s Metropolitan Police.
Julian has been held in isolation in a high-security prison without trial, although his only technical violation of the law is breaching bail conditions after he obtained asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador. This should only entail a fine.
Finally, Julian did not, unlike Daniel Ellsberg, leak the documents. He published documents leaked by U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
Three of the nine legal grounds were accepted by the judges as potential points for appeal. The other six were denied. The two-judge panel also rejected the request by Julian’s lawyers to present new evidence.
Julian’s legal team asked the court to introduce into the case the Yahoo! News report that revealed, after the release of the documents known as Vault 7, that the then-director of the CIA Mike Pompeo, considered assassinating Julian. Julian’s lawyers also hoped to introduce a statement from Joshua Dratel, a U.S. attorney, who said that Pompeo’s use of the terms “non-state hostile intelligence service” and “enemy combatant” were phrases designed to give legal cover for an assassination. The third piece of evidence Julian’s lawyers hoped to introduce was a statement from a Spanish witness in the criminal proceedings underway in Spain against UC Global.
The CIA is the engine behind Julian’s extradition. Vault 7 exposed hacking tools that permit the CIA to access our phones, computers and televisions, turning them — even when switched off — into monitoring and recording devices. The extradition request does not include charges based on the release of the Vault 7 files, but the U.S. indictment followed the release of the Vault 7 files.
Justice Sharp and Justice Johnson dismissed the report in Yahoo! News as “another recitation of opinion by journalists on matters that were considered by the judge.” They rejected the argument made by the defense that Julian’s extradition would be in violation of Section 81 of the U.K. Extradition Act of 2003, which prohibits extraditions in cases where individuals are prosecuted for their political opinions. The judges also dismissed the arguments made by Julian’s attorneys that extradition would violate his protections under the European Convention of Human Rights — the right to life, the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment, the right to a free trial and protections against punishment without law respectively.
The U.S. largely built its arguments from the affidavits of the U.S. prosecutor Gordon D. Kromberg. Kromberg, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia has stated that Julian, as a foreign national, is “not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information.”
Ben Watson, King’s Counsel, who represented the U.K. government during the two-day hearing in February, conceded that if Julian is found guilty under the Espionage Act, he could receive a death penalty sentence.
The U.S. and the U.K Secretary of State were urged by the judges to offer the British court assurances on these three points by April 16.
If the assurances are not provided, the appeal will proceed.
If the assurances are provided, lawyers for both sides have until April 30th to make new written submissions to the court. At that point, the court will convene again on May 20 to decide if the appeal can go forward.
The goals in this Dickensian nightmare remain unchanged. Erase Julian from the public consciousness. Demonize him. Criminalize those who expose government crimes. Use Julian’s slow motion crucifixion to warn journalists that no matter their nationality, no matter where they live, they can be kidnapped and extradited to the U.S. Drag out the judicial lynching for years until Julian, already in a precarious physical and mental condition, disintegrates.
This ruling, like all of the rulings in this case, is not about justice. It is about vengeance.
Lots of people have been blamed for the frenzy to ban TikTok, from the CIA and FBI, to the mainstream media, to political elites, to AIPAC, to competitors like Facebook. But I blame Congress. They pulled the trigger. Now as we teeter on the abyss of a Steve Mnuchin takeover of TikTok – a development, make no mistake, that would be disastrous for everything from free speech to ownership of such a platform by a capitalist super-predator, to intelligent, rational foreign policy, to those who simply object to his let-them-eat-cake wife – we can thank the intellectual heavyweights on capitol hill who thought it would be a dandy idea to wade into a hopeless morass of hysteria and hokum and to extract from it an absolute monster of congressionally regulated speech.
As Arnaud Bertrand noted on Twitter March 14,Ccongress is stealing TikTok because it is “owned by the Chinese government.” He added: “It’s not, China only has a 1 percent stake in the mother company.” To this, someone else tweeted: “This is exactly how the Nazis forced Jewish owners of companies to sell to German capitalists.” Or, as China’s foreign ministry succinctly summed it up: “This is banditry.”
Whatever you want to call it, it’s bad. It sets a lousy financial and business precedent at a moment jam-packed with lousy financial and business precedents – for instance, the west looting Russia’s frozen assets to the tune of $300 billion, or previously making off with Afghanistan’s money, or earlier Venezuela’s gold, or the U.S. blowing up the Nordstream pipeline to corner Europe’s energy market. So now we gonna just straight up steal a company because China owns one percent of it? Who in their right mind will do business with the United States if this nonsense becomes law? I’ll tell you who: Other bandits. And that means one stinking awful thing – ordinary Americans will get fleeced. We’re already getting fleeced, but this just sets it in stone for the foreseeable future.
One thing’s for sure: the youth vote ain’t gonna like this. And overall, there are about 180 million TikTok users. So those people, young and less young, may very well drop Biden like a hot potato come November. He doesn’t seem to think so – how else to explain his eagerness to sign this offensive law? But I noticed Trump came out against it. Remember he’s the one who, back in 2020, called for banning TikTok. But unlike Biden, he figured out which way the wind is blowing, and what it’s blowing from Congress is such a putrid stench that over 100 million voters may very well stampede in the other direction. (Trump may also be trying to align with Jeff Yass, the billionaire stakeholder in TikTok, a moneyman who owns much of another company that recently merged with Trump’s Truth Social, thus possibly legally rescuing the former president by helping him make bail.)
This idiotic House TikTok vote comes at a very bad time, too, as Beijing casts a dour and doubtful eye over all parts of the Washington project. Indeed, a Chinese defense representative stated March 16 that Beijing is “ready to intervene,” should NATO or the U.S. attack Russia. NATO troops recently landed south of Kiev in Cherkassy might want to keep that in mind, as might the megageniuses who cooked up this nitwit scheme. Just as ominously, according to Anti-War.com March 14, U.S. Army special forces soldiers are in Kinmen, “a group of islands that are controlled by Taiwan but located just off the coast of mainland China.” Some are just 2.5 miles from the Chinese city of Xiamen. “The U.S. soldiers are also deployed in Penghu, a Taiwanese-controlled archipelago about 30 miles west” of Taiwan, “and 70 miles east of mainland China.” That’s not provocative, oh no, never!
Making matters worse, according to the Global Times March 21, the U.S. wants to expand the AUKUS military alliance, “forming a mini-NATO in Asia.” And everyone with a brain, and the Chinese have plenty, knows what that means. NATO on Russia’s front porch, in Ukraine, started a big, horrible war. It will try to do the same if mini-NATO expands to include Japan and Canada and muscles in on China’s doorstep. Of course, Washington wants to corral the Philippines into it too, and indeed anyone they can to enhance an aggressive posture that Beltway bandits will no doubt insist, just as they did after the 2014 CIA neo-Nazi putsch in Kiev, is purely “defensive.” It’s called creating the enemy from whose much-hyped putative danger your weapons contractors can then get rich.
And that’s not all. Global Times reports March 14 that “the UK is now mulling curbs on the number of Chinese nationals who can enter the UK on official business and bypass normal visa checks…” The article notes that with an election approaching, “Conservatives could resort to more hawkish China policies and enhance their coordination with the U.S.” It quotes a Shanghai Academy of Global Governance and Area Studies researcher to the effect that the UK has been “hyping China espionage threats since 2023.” Another Chinese researcher cites coordination between the UK and the U.S. on international affairs. This at a time when no diplomat in their right mind wants to “coordinate” with the U.S. on China. But rampant Western Sinophobia long ago ditched the concerns of mere diplomacy.
Also on the bad news radar March 14, a Global Times headline: “Trilateral summit suggests Manila intensifying collusion with U.S., Japan to further complicate S. China Sea issues.” This report warns that the upcoming April summit could destabilize a pelagic expanse already bristling with warships from multiple nations. The three countries will discuss China’s growing “hegemonic activities,” a descriptor Beijing vigorously denies, with a foreign ministry spokesman arguing “that China’s activities in those waters fully comply with domestic and international law.”
Well, good luck with that. If the U.S. is involved, so is the so-called “rules-based order,” which means all bets are off, what Washington says goes and if those imperial commands defy international law, tough luck. The Empire loves is rules-based order, making up those rules as it goes along, and discarding them when they’re no longer convenient. Oh, and the rest of the world better not imitate Washington. Copycats not allowed. Only Beltway mandarins get to junk these opaque rules when they get in the way.
Also alarming to Beijing is the recent replacement of Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland as deputy secretary of state by China Hawk Kurt “Let Congress Critters Swarm Taiwan” Campbell, famous for calling out Beijing’s “provocative” behavior. In what context did he mention such provocations? Back on August 12, 2022, in a statement where he turned a simple factual narrative into a pretzel to trash Beijing. In short, then House speaker Nancy “My Husband’s Stock Trades Are His Business” Pelosi had just jetted into Taiwan, something everyone knew, because Beijing told them, crossed a very bright red line. Even Pelosi herself publicly aired Pentagon worries that her jet might get shot down and thereafter was careful to sneak into Taiwan in the dead of night, like someone who knew darn well she was doing something she shouldn’t. Well, according to Campbell, Pelosi’s little performance – against which everyone with an IQ above the double digits warned and which utterly spoiled Sino-American relations for over a year – was “a visit that is consistent with our One China Policy and is not unprecedented.” So yes, China’s worried about this loose cannon.
There is some good news, however. The head of the House Select Committee on (Bashing) China, Mike “The Chinese Are Coming” Gallagher, a rabid opponent of the 5000-year-old civilization, announced his retirement in February. He’s even leaving early, in April. This should hearten anti-war advocates everywhere, as it will decrease congressional Sinophobic pugilism and the chances of military fireworks erupting between two of the world’s three superpowers. Because we’re all on the same page here – right? We don’t want to glow in the dark or starve via nuclear winter. The five billion of us who would perish come Atomic Armageddon, aka war between the U.S. and China, don’t want that. So anything that blocks such a disaster is a good thing. Besides, it was a good bet Gallagher would find very lucrative employment anyway at a K Street lobby shop or in a right-wing think tank; then came news March 22 via Forbes that Gallagher in fact snagged a comfortable berth at Palantir, a very defense and intelligence connected tech company if ever there was one and one that has led the fight against…dum, da, dum, dum, you got it – TikTok! And by an astonishing coincidence, so did Gallagher while in the House! Golly gee, don’t his goals and Palantir’s dovetail nicely and, evidently, remuneratively, for the congressman?
So in the end, no matter how much of a ruckus our congressional luminaries make while in office, they usually manage a soft, cushy landing when they leave. A win/win situation for everyone who counts, which excludes, of course, all ordinary Americans and most of the rest of the world’s people. But we’re not resentful. We’re just happy they condescend to let us live.
…………………….
Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Lizard People. She can be reached at her website.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a spate of books and articles extolling the word “soul” became the rage in the United States. Soul became the chic word. It popped up everywhere. Everything seemed to acquire soul – cars, toasters, underwear, cats’ pajamas, assorted crap, kitsch, etc. Soul sold styles from boots to bras to bibelots from The New York Times to O Magazine.
The vogue in soul talk spread to every domain as everyone was commodified and capital was financialized. While political, economic, and ecological reality spun out of regular people’s control and they felt unable to feel connected to a religious tradition that cut through the materialistic and war miasma, they were ravaged with a hunger to devour, to consume. It was soul propaganda, highbrow New Ageism at its finest, the religious equivalent of an old-fashioned Ralph Lauren interior. It was the era of consuming souls in a society that had become a spiritual void. At least for those who had become divorced from their bodies and tradition at its best. Fantasy started to rapidly replace reality.
The great popularizer of this new sense of soul and self (though no-self would be more accurate) was Thomas Moore, the author of the best-selling book – Care of the Soul, “a pathbreaking lifestyle handbook” and soon to be soul franchise (The Soul of Sex, Soul Therapy, The Soul of Christmas, etc.) His works replaced the idea of an existential self with a precious, epicurean conception. “You have a soul, the tree in front of your house has a soul, but so too does the car parked under the tree,” he said, adding that things “have as much personality and independence as I do.” Ah, soul!
Not soul as I once learned in Catholic school: the essence of human freedom and consciousness in God united with the body.
Definitely not soul as the essence of a person bound by conscience to God and other human beings.
Not soul as in “For what shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his soul.”
Not even soul as the dictionary defines it” “the immortal essence of an individual life.”
Although I have seen this soul-talk used for decades now to sell all sorts of bullshit and thought I couldn’t be surprised by any more usage, I just stumbled on one that took my breath away. I read in Life Undercover, a memoir by RFK, Jr.’s presidential campaign manager, daughter-in-law, and former CIA spy under nonofficial cover in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Africa, Amaryllis Fox (Kennedy), that CIA work is “soulful work.” I didn’t know this. I thought its job was to spy, kill, and foment chaos for its Wall St handlers (with certain exceptions being some analysts who gather information). I recall former CIA Director Mike Pompeo saying, “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” Or as my friend Doug Valentine, an expert on the CIA, puts it, the CIA is “Organized Crime,” not a bunch of soul-force workers out to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. He writes:
CIA and military intelligence units now operate out of a global network of bases, as well as secret jails and detention sites operated by complicit secret police interrogators. Their strategic intelligence networks in any nation are protected by corrupt warlords and politicians, the ‘friendly civilians’ who supply the death squads that in fact are their private militias, funded largely by drug smuggling and other criminal activities.
Yet Fox effusively thanks her CIA colleagues for their great work and for making her the woman she has become. “Your allegiance is to the flag, to the Constitution, to some higher power, be that God or Love,” she writes in gratitude.
For some reason, I don’t think the assassinated JFK or RFK would buy her love talk; rather, they may quote another eloquent Irish-American, the playwright Eugene O’Neill: “God damn you, stop shoving your rotten soul in my lap.”
The man Fox is trying to elect president of the U.S., Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., also wrote a memoir – American Values – that revolves around an indictment of the CIA for an endless series of crimes: “What are we going to do about the CIA?” he quotes his father saying to his aide Fred Dutton at the beginning of JFK’s presidency, before both Kennedys had yet to be killed by the soulful CIA. Kennedy, Jr. writes:
Critics warned that the ‘tail’ of the covert operations branch would inevitably wag the dog of intelligence gathering (espionage). And indeed , the clandestine services quickly subsumed the CIA’s espionage function as the Agency’s intelligence analysts increasingly provided justification for the CIA’s endless interventions.
Fifty-six years later his campaign manager Fox Kennedy – you can’t make this weirdness up – married to RFK, III, is touting the soulful work of the Agency. She replaced Dennis Kucinich, who was a strong a supporter of the Palestinians. Is Fox and RFK, Jr.’s relationship a matter of what the Boss says to Luke in the iconic movie Cool Hand Luke – “What we got here is failure to communicate” – or the kind of communication that takes place in elite circles behind closed doors?
Sometimes sick people utter truths that lead to sardonic assent. They remind you of history that is so shameful you cringe. Fox and Pompeo also seem to live in separate realities, their psyches twisted by some deep evil force for which they both worked.
And here we are in another presidential election year. When you think about presidential politics, you have to laugh. I like to laugh, so I think about them from time to time. It’s always a bad joke, but that’s why they are funny. It makes no difference whether the president is Ford, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, Biden, or anyone who tries to square the oval office for their special sort of big change that never comes. Those who tell you with a straight face that the lesser of two (or more) evils is better than nothing have not studied history. They choose the evil of two lessers and wash their hands. They live on pipe dreams, as Eugene O’Neill put it in his play The Iceman Cometh:
To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.
I am reminded of advice I was given during the immoral and illegal Vietnam War when I had decided to apply for a discharge from the Marines as a conscientious objector. But if you don’t go to the war, people said to me with straight faces, some poor draftee will. The military needs good people. To which I would often respond: Like the country needs good commanders-in-chief such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. It’s like what people say about buying a lottery ticket when your odds are 1 in 500,000,000 – someone has to win. Ha! Ha! Never reject the system is always the message.
Contemplating U.S. history for the past fifty-five plus years confirms the continuity of government policy for war and economic policies that enrich the wealthy at the expense of the working class and massacre the innocent around the world. But we can pretend otherwise. For an egregious recent example, the three leading candidates in this year’s election – Biden, Trump, and RFK, Jr. – all stand firmly behind the Israeli genocide in Gaza that any human being with a soul would condemn.
That these men are controlled by the Israel Lobby is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.
That this is corruption is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.
We can pretend and pretend and pretend all we want because we are living in a pretend society.
What’s that old Rodney Dangerfield joke: the problem with happiness is that it can’t buy you money? Well, the problem with presidential politics is it can’t buy you the truth, but if you do it right it can fetch you money, a lot of corrupt money to help you rise to the pinnacle of a corrupt government. For the truth is that the CIA/NSA run U.S. foreign war policy and the presidents are figureheads, actors in a society that lost all connection to reality on November 22, 1963.
Now, amid such a tense environment, it appears the C.I.A. has not only green-lighted an actual invasion of the Russian Federation, but more than likely was involved in its planning, preparation and execution.
Never in the history of the nuclear era has such danger of nuclear war been so manifest.
That the American people have allowed their government to create the conditions where foreign governments can determine their fate and the C.I.A. can carry out a secret war which could trigger a nuclear conflict, eviscerates the notion of democracy.
If this is soulful work, God help us.
Ask the 32,000 + dead Palestinians in Gaza whose voices cry out for justice while the top presidential contenders cheer on the Israeli/U.S. slaughter.
“The terrible truth is,” writes Douglass Valentine, “that a Cult of Death rules America and is hell-bent on world domination.”
And yes, presidential politics is a funny diversion from that reality. Eugene O’Neill could be humorous also. He played the Iceman theme to perfection, the Grim Reaper of two faces.
There was a tale circulating in the 1930s that a man came home and called upstairs to his wife, “Has the iceman come yet?” “No,” she replied, “but he’s breathing hard.”
“It’s time for Jews to be feared!” declared Rabbi Shmuley recently. Jews having failed to overcome anti-Semitism by trying to be loved, respected or admired, must now make themselves feared. This is the new watchword.
The problem is, if Jews want to be feared, then they must also accept being hated. “Fear of the Jews” can be translated, literally, as “Judeophobia” (from the Greek phobos, to fear). To be feared, you must have the power to harm, and you must prove it. So if Jews want to be feared in order to fight anti-Semitism, then anti-Semitism has a bright future ahead.
This all doesn’t make much sense. But it’s very biblical. To my knowledge, the Hebrew Bible does not recommend that Jews should strive to be loved by non-Jews. On the contrary, Yahweh said to his people in Deuteronomy 2:25:
“Today and henceforth, I shall fill the peoples under all heavens with fear and terror of you; whoever hears word of your approach will tremble and writhe in anguish because of you”
If Yahweh wants to spread terror among non-Jews, doesn’t that make him a terrorist, or the god of terrorists? It does, and it makes Zionists good Yahwists. In his 1951 memoir The Revolt, Menachem Begin bragged about “the military victory at Deir Yassin,” because the news of this slaughter of 254 villagers (mostly unarmed men, women, and children) immediately led to the “maddened, uncontrollable stampede of 635,000 Arabs. … The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated.”[1] Wasn’t Begin a worthy servant of his national god?
What Netanyahu is doing today is more than a hundred Deir Yassins. And the goal, again, is not just to kill indiscriminately, but by doing so to terrorize millions of Palestinians into leaving “voluntarily”. This explains why they let so many images of the martyrdom of Gaza filter: it is a public crucifixion, meant for all to see. (Andrew Anglin has suggested another reason, not contradictory with this one).
One of Netanyahu’s favorite biblical stories is the Book of Esther. He mentioned it in 2015 before the American Congress, as an argument why America should bomb Iran.[2] The Book of Esther is important for understanding how the Jews want to be feared. Under the influence of his minister Haman, the Persian king Ahasuerus issued a decree of final solution regarding the Jews of his kingdom, because “this people, and it alone, stands constantly in opposition to every nation, perversely following a strange manner of life and laws, and is ill-disposed to our government, doing all the harm they can so that our kingdom may not attain stability” (3:13). But thanks to Esther, Ahasuerus’s secretly Jewish wife, the Jews turn the situation around and obtain from the king that Haman be hanged with these ten sons, and that a new royal decree is promulgated, which gives the Jews “permission to destroy, slaughter and annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, together with their women and children, and to plunder their possessions” (8.11). And so the Jews massacred seventy-five thousand people. Throughout the land, the book concludes, “there was joy and gladness among the Jews, with feasting and holiday-making. Of the country’s population many became Jews, since now the Jews were feared” (8.17).
This story is entirely fictional, but it is very important to Jews, because every year, at Purim, they celebrate the hanging of Haman with his twelve sons, and the massacre of 75,000 people, including women and children.
According to the conclusion of this story, fear of the Jews produces new Jews, meaning Gentiles who become Jews out of fear of the Jews: “many became Jews, since now the Jews were feared.” Or in a more literal translation: “many people became Jews because the fear of the Jews fell upon them.” As I said, fear of Jews is more likely to produce anti-Semites than new Jews. Yet there are many examples of people who make themselves Jews out of fear of the Jews: any non-Jewish politician who one day put a yarmulke on his head and swore eternal loyalty to Israel fits that profile.
There is another story in the Book of Joshua that goes along the same lines. At the beginning of chapter 2, Joshua, who receives his orders directly from Yahweh in the Tabernacle, sends two spies to the city of Jericho. Having been spotted, they hide with a prostitute named Rahab. She helps them escape in exchange for being spared together with her family when Israel attacks the city, because, she says, “we are afraid of you and everyone living in this country has been seized with terror at your approach” (2:9). Because Israel is so terrifying, she assumes that “Yahweh your god is God.”
The French Catholic Bible de Jérusalem adds a footnote saying that “Rahab’s profession of faith in the god of Israel made her, in the eyes of more than one Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.” I find perplexing the idea of making the whore of Jericho a symbol of the Church because, out of fear of Israel, she converted to the god of Israel and helped Israel to commit the genocide of her own city (“men and women, young and old, including the oxen, the sheep and the donkeys, slaughtering them all,” Joshua 6:21).
On the other hand, it is not a bad metaphor for the complicity of the Christian world in the Israeli genocide of Gazans. There is no doubt that, in most Christians today, fear of the Jews is much stronger than pity for the Gazans. And the heads of states of most Christian nation would rather start World War III with Russia than criticize Israel. Russia is, after all, a rational enemy, while no one knows what psychopathic Israel is capable of.
Israel is the only country that openly threatens to blow up the planet. They call it the Samson Option. The Samson Option is the combination of Israel’s nuclear capability and Israel’s reputation as a dangerous paranoid. Everyone knows that Israel has a hundred nuclear warheads (80 according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute). And everyone knows that Israel is biblical, eager to fulfill prophecies, such as Zechariah 14:12:
“And this is the plague with which Yahweh will strike all the nations who have fought against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet; their eyes will rot in their sockets; their tongues will rot in their mouths.”
Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the University of Jerusalem, explained to the British newspaper The Gardian in 2003 that the Palestinians’ recurrent Intifadas will find only one solution: the “transfer” of all Palestinians out of Palestine. On the risk of opposition from the international community to such a project, he added:
“We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions … We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”[i]
That’s the Samson Option in a nutshell. Its essence is nuclear terrorism.
The audacity and impunity of Israel today are incomprehensible if we do not take into account the Samson Option. But the Samson Option, like Jewish Power in general, is taboo: everyone must know about it, but no one has the right to talk about it. This silence is the ultimate test of Israel’s fear. In a very recent post, Seymour Hersh writes:
“No one who’s anyone in Washington is allowed to talk about Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Or how it affects the region. Or whether it serves U.S. interests, even as the Middle East teeters on the brink of regional war.”[3]
As Hersh himself has documented in The Samson Option, it was thanks to the Kennedy assassination that Israel was able to adopt the Samson Option. Jefferson Morley, an investigator on the Kennedy assassination, noted, in a comment on Hersh’s post, that there is also an “Israeli gag” in Kennedy research:
“you can see the effects of the Israeli gag rule in the long-classified testimony of James Angleton, chief of CIA counterintelligence, to Senate investigators in June 1975. The redactions make visible what the U.S. and Israel government seek to conceal in 2024: how Israel obtained nuclear weapons on Angleton’s watch.”[4]
In the extract below, the word “Israeli” has been redacted to conceal the fact that Angleton was running the “Israeli account” and was, in that function, the sole liaison with the Mossad.
In his remarkable biography of Angleton, Morley shows that Angleton’s loyalty to Israel went as far as allowing them and covering their smuggling of nuclear materials and technology. As every Kennedy research knows, Angleton is also the number one suspect in the CIA for the Kennedy assassination. Which means the CIA trail in the Kennedy assassination runs directly into the Mossad trail (something that Morley avoids saying, as a respectable member of the mainstream It’s-the-CIA school).
I must say that I am very disappointed by President Kennedy’s nephew, Robert Kennedy Junior, who either seems to have no idea of the heavy suspicion hanging over Israel in the assassinations of his uncle and father, or else pretends not to know, or just don’t want to know.
And since I started this article talking about Rabbi Shmuley, the sad news is that Rabbi Shmuley is one of RFK Jr.’s friends and advisors. At a rally on July 25, 2023, he introduced Robert Kennedy by mentioning his father:
“On the fifth of June, 1968, at 12:15 am, … Robert Kennedy Sr., one of the greatest Americans who ever lived, was gunned down by a Palestinian domestic terrorist, Sirhan Sirhan, and murdered because of his support for Israel. He was gunned down because he wanted to share the fate of the Jewish people.”
Bobby Jr. listened and took it in, without the slightest sign of disapproval, even though he knows very well that his father was not killed by Sirhan, and certainly not for his support of Israel. He remained frozen and mute in his chair, not even nodding when a brave lady in the audience protested, “Why are you lying? Sirhan Sirhan was not the murderer of Robert Kennedy…”[5] RFK Jr. will not contradict the lying Rabbi.
It’s a sadly revealing moment. By publicly humiliating Robert Kennedy Junior, insulting the memory of his father with his gross lie, right beside him, Shmuley is making an example. To be feared, Jews must show their power by making examples. That’s a good example.
Notes
[1] Menachem Begin, The Revolt: Story of the Irgun, Henry Schuman, 1951, quoted in Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel?,op. cit., p. 81.
[2] “Benjamin Netanyahu Speech to Congress 2015” on YouTube.
A Taurus on display at the 2006 ILA air show. Photograph Source: axesofevil2000 – Public Domain
Watching genteel Bundestag ladies and gentlemen speechifying, often with forceful words and gestures but mostly polite, it is hard to imagine that their topic is war or peace, possibly world war or peace, even atomic war or peace. A key word was Taurus, Latin for “bull.” But they weren’t arguing about Zodiac astrology or the myth about the god Jupiter, cheating on wife Juno by taking on the shape of a bull to abduct a princess. Nor about the starry constellation named for his disguise. The name of that princess was Europa, and the continent bearing her name was indeed involved in the subject of debate: steel-covered missiles called Taurus, weighing 1000 lbs., 17 foot long, which, if fired from a plane well inside Ukraine can reach and pierce the walls of the Kremlin or destroy concrete bunkers as deep or deeper than Moscow’s subway system.
Of course, Volodymir Zelenskiy wants them and any weapons or aid in a war now looking less and less like the triumph he predicted a year ago. Should his wishes, which often sounded more like demands, be fulfilled?
That mythical Jupiter fathered three sons with Europa (I hope he was back in the body of Jupiter by then). Three sons of modern Europa met in a hastily arranged “Paris-Berlin-Warsaw” summit in early March to reach an agreement about Ukraine, especially about Taurus. Poland’s Tusk, only four months into his top job, is seen as more moderate than his predecessor. But he seems no less eager to supply anything if it damages the hereditary Russian enemy and solidifies Poland’s role as main USA outpost in Eastern Europe. However, he soon had to hurry home to mollify farm tractor drivers blockading borders to protest cheap Ukrainian grain imports.
Macron, who had spoken boldly of sending in “European” troops to oppose the Russians, toned that down with the words: “Maybe at some point – I don’t want it, I won’t take the initiative – we will have to have operations on the ground…to counter the Russian forces… France’s strength is that we can do it.”
Evidently Scholz had stepped on the brakes with Tusk and Macron: “To say it sharp and clear: as German chancellor, I will send no Bundeswehr soldiers into Ukraine!” So, at least for now – no Taurus!
Was his seemingly bold front a façade for a general German downward skid in Europe? There was a decline of the economy in 2023. A predicted puny plus of 0.2% for 2024 could mean that Germany is already in a recession, for only the second time since 1945. Economy Minister Habeck warned: “We cannot continue this way!” One expert’s brief analysis: “Germany has lost cheap energy from Russia, flourishing trade markets in China and an almost cost-free guarantee of security from the USA.”
Olaf Scholz’s three-party government has rapidly declined in popularity. The Greens, who promised a “green economic miracle” a year ago, have made one ecology compromise after another, like their go-ahead for big docks for liquid gas from US frackers to replace the Russian gas-oil cut by war, politics and that suspicious explosion of the Baltic pipeline. The new docks threaten both major bird emigration stopovers and some of Germany’s most idyllic beach resorts (once peopled, back in GDR days, by happy, mostly nudist bathers).
Ecology disputes turned dramatic with Elon Musk’s Tesla gigafactory on Berlin’s outskirts, his first and largest in all Europe and now capable of turning out 500,000 E-cars a year, beating out VW. That meant chopping down 740 acres of the protective forest ring around Berlin and draining into crucial aquifers. But Musk now aims at a million cars – costing 420 more forest acres and drying-up ponds and creeks. The village hit hardest voted “No!” and one group plans to defy a planned police onslaught in tree houses and platforms. On March 5th a secret, more extremist group set fire to a high-voltage power pylon, cutting local electricity for a few hours and shutting down production for a few days. Such disputes are getting hotter.
Rounding out the picture, Germany has been facing its biggest strike wave in years: railroad engineers, bus and tram drivers, airport personnel, public service workers, kindergarten teachers, even clinic doctors. Their demands are mostly for enough pay to catch up with inflation and frightening rent increases but also – for many – for a 35-hour work week with no cut in pay.
While the compromising Greens strain to hold onto their dwindling professional college-graduate base and the Social Democrats struggle to win back working-class support, the weakest of the three partners, the Free Democrats (FDP), closest to big-biz, keep flirting with the Christian Democrats across the aisle, blackmailing attempts by the other two to seem socially conscious by resisting remaining environmental restrictions, preventing rules against child labor on products from abroad, limiting aid for the many poverty-ridden children in Germany, reducing assistance for the elderly and, above all, insisting on keeping or lowering low taxes on the super-wealthy, using the old trickle-down argument. More and more, the coalition is coming to resemble a free-for-all wrestling match.
But they agreed on one main issue: in Ukraine, keep that war going! Till victory! The Greens, always most valiant with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock hoping to see Russia “ruined,” are being overtaken as word and banner bearers by the Free Democrats, who now boast a “Defense Committee” spokesperson who is formidable in word, appearance, personality and even name: Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann. Her imperative calls for more weapons until total victory over the Russians rouse up TV viewers almost every single evening. And even when a majority in the Bundestag ended the Taurus debate by voting “Nein” to a Christian Democratic bill to give Kyiv the missiles, she broke the ranks of coalition party discipline and voted “Ja” with the opposition.
Somehow I haven’t yet heard anyone remark that Düsseldorf, which she represents, is also home to Rheinmetall, Germany’s leading armaments manufacturer since 1889. After great sales records in World War I it had giant success in World War II, largely by working thousands of miserable POWs and forced laborers to the bone. Now super-good times are back again thanks to its Panther tanks and all kinds of weapons and explosive ammo. Company boss Armin Papperger, who took home a tidy € 3,587,000 in 2022 (about $3.9 m) and expects this year’s company earnings to finally top its € 10 billion goal made a happy prediction of “a continuing strong growth increase in sales and earnings.” But who could dare to suspect any connection between Rheinmetall and its Düsseldorf neighbor, Frau Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann. (BTW, big hunks of those handsome sums also go to Blackrock in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards and other solid Transatlantic benefactors.)
But in his crumbling coalition Olaf Scholz’s leading Social Democratic Party has also been vigorously supporting the Ukrainian cause! It was he who dramatically called for a “Zeitenwende” an “historic turning point” – with an extra fund of € 100 billion for a major military build up – in Ukraine, Germany, the European Union and NATO, with drones, jets, artillery, ammo, tanks, missiles (but at least not yet the Taunus for Kyiv.
But his Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (Social Democrat) is never sated; for him the Bundeswehr is always far too weak. “It must be made fit for the challenges ahead. Germany needs a Bundeswehr that can fight, one which is operational and sustainable. Germany must defend itself, because ‘war is back in Europe.’ The Bundeswehr must become fit for war again. I know that sounds harsh… But I am concerned with nothing other than preventing war. That is why credible deterrence is the motto of the hour – to be able to fight in order not to have to fight. An important signal in this context is the formation of the brigade in Lithuania.”
Despite all disavowals, some beans have recently been spilled about NATO military experts secretly helping Kyiv ever since 2014. A mysteriously leaked report on a meeting of top German brass revealed plans for helping Ukraine use the Taunus to destroy the Russian bridge to Crimea. The whole atmosphere in Germany is becoming frighteningly “kriegstüchtig,” to use Pistorius’ word – “ready for war.” He also raised the question of renewing the military draft whose last vestiges were ended thirteen years ago – this time perhaps including women. The proposal was a trial balloon – and soon dropped, at least for this pre-election season. Another trial balloon came from the Education Minister, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, who called for air raid drills in schools, with renovated or new shelter rooms in the cellars and more visits by officers to prepare children for the worst – or recruit them. When protests against this proposal grew too strong she modified it a bit – to stress, aside from war, readiness for possible floods or other climate catastrophes.
Weapons, weapons, weapons – the more the better! With ever louder talk about “the foe” and “protective measures”, as if Putin were amassing troops or maneuvering warships along German borders – instead of just the opposite taking place in the Baltic and Lithuania – and no longer so secretly in Ukraine. The blitzkrieg-laden spirit of 1941 Germany is all over the media, with no audible recollections of Stalingrad in 1943 or a wrecked and wretched Berlin (and Dresden, Hamburg and all the others) in 1945.
The reports on Gaza since October contrasted markedly with the anger over the Russian attack on Ukraine; they almost never mentioned Hamas without the prefaced adjective “terrorist” but showed few pictures of devastated Gaza which, for me, bitterly recalled those German cities I saw a few years after the war, like Dresden. Over and over we were shown Israeli soldiers bravely firing away; at what? Or digging in wrecked hospitals; for what? Or showing those “compassionate” parachute drops, a sad joke when small crowds of Israelis were somehow permitted to block hundreds of truckloads of really tangible assistance – and while Germany joined the USA in sending weapons to Netanyahu while stymying UNO efforts to end the slaughter.
But the heart-wrenching pictures of weeping fathers and dead or maimed children in Gaza could not be ignored. Demonstrations, led by Arabs in Germany but including many other, also Jewish Germans, grew larger, despite all attempts to prevent, limit or sideline them. Their calls for negotiations and peace sometimes included the war in Ukraine – and a rejection of SPD-FDP-Green-CDU-CSU militarist unity. But then came the giant rallies against the fascistic Alternative for Germany (AfD). In the past often harassed or at best ignored, they were now amazingly well-organized and coordinated, clearly promoted from above and blessed in the media. I suspect they were consciously aimed at deflecting a progressive, pro-peace trend born of horror at the hugely disproportionate Israeli response to October 7th, misusing a popular anti-AfD cause for the purpose, together with an increased stress on opposing anti-Semitism, while equating it with any criticism of Israeli repression and extreme brutality. It was good that the rallies opposed racism and fascists, but they were no longer leaning toward united left opposition.
Is there now any opposition to top level policies? Yes, of a sort. Or rather of approximately four sorts.
Within the ranks of the Social Democrats, while many admire dynamic (and ambitious?) Minister Pistorius, some others may be coming to their senses. Most courageous recently was Rolf Mützenich, chair of the SPD caucus in the Bundestag and long known as a rare opponent of militarism. During the Taurus debate he asked the Bundestag delegates: “Isn’t it time not only to speak about waging a war but to start thinking about how we can freeze a war and then end it as well?“ He had hardly finished his brief remarks with question when the counterattack began, from fellow politicians and from most of the mass media. Two nasty words recurred shamelessly: “Appeasement” and “Cowardice”. Unlike Pope Francis, who dared to voice similar sentiments, Mützenich had no shred of any “infallibility” status, and the truly vicious attacks forced him to stage a partial retreat to save his neck. But the words had been uttered and some may have listened. As for appeasement, Neville Chamberlain and Daladier let Hitler expand in Spain, then tolerated his expansion eastward to Austria and Czechoslovakia because it meant closing in on the hated USSR. His all-European attack in June 1941 was more analogous to EU-NATO eastward-aimed unanimity than the reverse!
Olaf Scholz often vacillates. But at times, unlike some ministers, he seems to listen to and echo people like Mützenich. “German soldiers must at no point and in no place be linked to targets this Taurus system reaches…Not in Germany either…This clarity is necessary. I am surprised that this doesn’t move some people, that they don’t even think about whether … a participation in the war could emerge from what we do.”
But then, Scholz certainly learned arithmetic at school. The European elections are due this June, Bundestag elections next year, with key state elections in between. In the polls his Social Democratic party is stuck at about a weak 15%, half its traditional Christian rivals and even behind the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Opinions change frequently but 80% now favor diplomatic negotiations for Ukraine and 41% want less weapons sent there. Scholz – or Germany – cannot really change course in such basic matters. But he may think that dragging his feet rather ambiguously might win back more voters.
A second group demanding negotiations and an end to the Ukraine war, perhaps very surprisingly, is the AfD. Although it supports big business, NATO, the draft and German rearmament enthusiastically, it calls nevertheless for negotiations, peace and a resumption of normal trade relations. It is possible that the AfD simply wants only to further increase its popularity , especially in eastern Germany, where there is the least military enthusiasm – and it is already amazingly strong (and dangerous) position, at about30%. Of course they are called “Putin-lovers.” Who knows, perhaps they are. But their top woman in leadership, Alice Weidel, is intelligent, shrewd, a skilled speaker, and made an eloquent plea for peace, while thanking Mützenich and congratulating Scholz for not sending Taurus to Kyiv. Thus creating a difficult complication.
And then there is the Linke party, which has seen itself from birth as the ”party of peace”. Indeed, over the years it has opposed every deployment of German troops or ships outside its borders, it has opposed the payment of giant sums to Rheinmetall and its siblings at home or abroad, it has opposed the export of German weapons to nearly every oppressive government that could be found, it has opposed every form of militarization. A brave and exemplary record, alongside its fight for a higher minimum wage, more money for seniors, for child care and women’s rights. Its stand also forced Social Democrats and Greens to take better positions, if only to avoid a drift of their voters to the small yet potentially growing Linke.
Perhaps it was its successes which became its weak point. Not only the delegates who got elected on the national, state or local level but also their staffs and assistants had good jobs. Some tended, too often, to become a part of the mistrusted “establishment” in the eyes of dissatisfied and disappointed voters – or then non-voters. Their increasingly respectable status led to interest in “identity rights”, immigrant rights, gender rights, but too often to a growing distance from neglected, underpaid, overburdened working people, including temps and the jobless. Some leaders, hoping to crown state cabinet posts with those in a national coalition, watered down their rejection of NATO and its relentless eastward moves and threats. Their rejection of even meager approval of the giant peace demonstration led by Sahra Wagenknecht last year on flimsy grounds borrowed from the mass media proved the last straw for many members and led to the formation of a breakaway party, called (temporarily it is hoped) Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht.
Some in the Linke, convinced Marxists, think it was a mistake to split and leave the party instead of fighting it out, even though they were outvoted by conformist, status quo leaders who now want to force them out just as they did to Sahra Wagenknecht and her adherents. And some believe that if the Linke again becomes more militant in something whose name is hardly even whispered these days (class conflict) then it can be rescued from menacing-oblivion. It is already in great trouble, nationally down to 3%, which would bar it from the next Bundestag.
As for Sahra’s BSW, it stands full square for negotiations and peace, like no other, and certainly for working people’s rights and needs. But much of its program remains vague as yet and seems to be turning out to be less militant than expected. It polls 5 to 7% nationally, not bad for a newbie with rudimentary state structures but less than some had expected in view of Sahra’s popularity. The European Union elections in June and the state elections in September will show how the two stand, now as rivals in a divided Left.
As for the bellicose forces, some pro-American “Atlanticists” are worried about being cast adrift after November 5th by that unpredictable man from Mar-a-Lago, or they are studying geriatric tables. Others, the Germanic wing, who reject American infiltration, from music styles to dirty slang, are scheming and dreaming of the good old days of smart uniforms, clicking heels, Iron Crosses and people knowing their proper place. But they all join Rheinmetall, Lockhead and the others in hoping the warring may last until they get new chances to win out in broad Eurasian expanses, re-establish Germany’s proper position in the world and perhaps for some, a hope to avenge that disaster for their grandfathers back in 1945. More and more, we are engulfed by all their war talk – and preparatory action.
What is desperately needed, not only in Germany but especially in Germany, is a new consolidation of all those in any party, or no party, who still have unaddled brains in their heads and a heart in their chests for an end to the killing and starving of Ukrainians, Russians, the Palestinians and the still as yet far too small number of brave Jewish Israelis (like the “refuseniks”) to build up a dynamic peace movement like that against the Vietnam war, or against missiles in West Germany in the 1980s, or the marches to prevent the Iraq war or, I recent months, to rescue the tortured million and more innocent people of Gaza – yes, and those100 hostages as well. Such a movement is desperately necessary; the clock is ticking away. Can the Jupiters of the world be dethroned? For Europa and for the world. Is that possible?
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Victor Grossman writes the Berlin Bulletin, which you can subscribe to for free by sending an email to: wechsler_grossman@yahoo.de.
It might come as a surprise but the answer to this question derives from influences many of which are beyond our control. For instance, most of us experience attitudinal changes along a spectrum from day to day or maybe even hour to hour. This has to do with our individualized reaction to all manner of hormonal and other secretions in your body. These, in turn, are influenced by epigenetic factors triggered by both internal and external environmental conditions.
A lot of these factors are inherited. You did not choose your genetic makeup or the parents who gave it to you and they did not choose their parents, and so on. This unchosen heritage sets your body up for all sorts of possibilities. Some might turn out to be good for you: nicely working immune system, relatively stable and positive mental disposition and acuity, etc. But it doesn’t have to go like that, and a propensity for illness and instability might be your inherited lot.
Nor did you choose the sort of environment in which you were born. I might tell you to avoid being born into poverty, but you can’t do that. Nonetheless, statistically, the chance for a “prosperous and productive” life is low if early poverty is your fate. I might suggest that you avoid parents who are neglectful or physically/emotionally abusive. Do not grow up next to a “super fund” contaminated site. Just so, you should avoid being born in the middle of a raging war. Despite the fact that all of these outcomes would certainly affect your behavior, none involve choices you can make. It is amazing how much of our history and condition is beyond our control.
What Do We Believe?
Just as we are arbitrarily centered in a body we did not choose, we are arbitrarily centered locally in time and space. That is, in a culture. And, here too, much is beyond our control.
It has been one of the frequent themes of these blog essays that there is something called “natural localism.”* That is, most people tend to settle down in a local community. It is within this locale that they work or go to school, live within a family and friendship network, and come to feel a community identity. That does not mean that people don’t travel (mostly to visit friends and family) or relocate within that same cultural realm for work or school. However, the natural inclination of most is find a place to settle down. There is even an evolutionary aspect to this. Natural localism provides a time and space that maximizes familiarity and predictability. That is why it usually provides a sense of security.
There is, of course, a downside. Natural localism ties one to a community worldview that mitigates against independent questioning and fact-checking. Over time established communities and groups socialize members into views supported by traditions, the interests of whatever passes for a ruling class, and often an ideology that idealizes the community’s raison d’être. Most who live within the range of such an aggregation will, almost habitually, see the world through the community’s lens.
That means, for most of us, our belief system encompassing our notion of what is right and wrong and who is friendly and who is unfriendly, is not something we have independently chosen. There are endless examples of this. Take the Cold War between the U.S. and its allies on one side and the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact countries and China on the other. If you are old enough to remember this time (roughly 1945 to 1991) you should recall that the majority of adults in the U.S. and Western Europe had a hostile outlook toward the USSR and its allies. Most had no direct contact or experience that would provoke this hostility. They got it in an osmotic way. The culturally negative messages in one’s external environment shaped their perceptions so that they conformed to a community-wide point of view.
Of course, just like bodies react differently to hormones and other secretions, individuals have varying reactions to the inherited belief systems of their cultures. A bell curve results—most people will be within an average range of cultural compliance. They will readily accept what they are taught at at home and in school, and hear from their teachers, leaders and media. There may be differences of opinion on the details, but most will buy into the overall message. At the edges of the curve will be found those who, for whatever experiential reasons, ignore or reject the message. The majority will see this minority as weird. At the extreme, they will be seen as a threat to social stability.
The Pathological Potential of Belief Systems
The negative feelings generated during the Cold War were felt by populations that were, for the most part, geographically separated. What happens when this inherited fear and negativity runs between populations sharing the same immediate landscape? What can your community point of view make you feel and do then?
Here are two examples:
The United States prior to the 1960s:
U.S. culture prior to the 1960s was characterized by an institutionally and legally sanctioned racial divide between White and Black Americans. Racism relegated Black Americans to an inferior status enforced by legal segregation and discrimination. This resulted in an impoverished economic and social environment. From the point of view of many Whites, Black disadvantage was an historically ratified “normal” situation. That is, it felt natural and orderly to the White population based on tradition and long practice.
Thus, White Americans had been acculturated to a system that periodically pushed Black Americans to rebellion—“race riots.” These uprisings frightened White citizens who then supported strong police action against Blacks in order to maintain social stability and security. Such a posture only made future uprisings more likely.
This situation did not begin to change until the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v Board of Education, followed by a Black political movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. The goal of this movement was to outlaw segregation and other egregious acts of discrimination in the public sphere. This effort was supported by a liberal sector of the White population who recognized the need for change based on a culturally idealized view of American socio-economic potential. King and his allies were successful in bringing change to the public sphere— essentially creating a new definition of normal based on a more egalitarian United States. However, changing individual laws is relatively easy compared to changing culture. Since the 1980s the country has experienced what is known as “culture wars.” That is, a political pushback by a sizable number of “conservatives” against progressive legislation.
Several things are to be noted here: (1) U.S. culture, since its beginning, has had a racist character that dehumanized its minority populations. It is in this sense that it was and, in some regards, still is pathological. (2) For most of its history this toxic environment was, and for some continue to be, invisible because most Whites were raised in family and/or local community surroundings that registered the toxicity as normal. Despite the change that eventually came in the 1950s and 60s, today some are so addicted to the older worldview that they are waging a political battle to return to a “sick normal.”
Contemporary Israel:
Israel’s story overlaps with that of the United States: (1) A sense of racially/religiously based superiority. While it is White Christians in the U.S., it is Jewish Zionists in Israel. (2) A claim that the country’s land is divinely deeded or blessed. (3) The existence of a largely segregated and disadvantaged class of “others.” In Israel, the “others” are the Palestinians.
Israeli and other Jews, and many who support them (i.e. Joe Biden), have learned about Israel through a biased narrative. The result is an attitude sustained by a customized pro-Zionist history. To maintain the narrative within Israel itself, education has been turned into a process of indoctrination. What is taught in this process? (1) God gave the land of Palestine to the Hebrew ancestors of contemporary Jews. (2) Jews need the State of Israel to be safe in a world where antisemitism is widespread. (3) The world owes it to the Jews to secure this Jewish state. (4) Palestinians are dangerous interlopers who hate Jews and seek to destroy the Jewish state. For Zionists, the Palestinians have replaced the Nazis as perpetrators of another potential Holocaust. The result has been the maintenance of Israel as a fortress nation—roughly resembling ancient Sparta where an elite population lived in fear of the serfs (helots) they had oppressed and driven by that fear, these elites trained constantly for war.
The national and local environment inherited by Israeli Jews is infused with this mindset. Defense against Palestinian and Arab “terrorists” is an important psychological theme of their culture. It is reinforced in the average family setting. It is detailed out for them in school. It provides a sense of camaraderie among friends and within the workplace. It is capped off by a program of near-universal conscription of Jewish Israelis. It is extraordinarily difficult to escape the pressures of such an overbearing cultural climate. Here too, the toxic nature of this environment is invisible to many of Israel’s Jewish citizens because of having been raised in local surroundings that registered their perceptions as normal. The predominant rationalization for the resulting Israeli aggressiveness has always been “national defense.” What can be more normal than that? Hence, the fact that “Israelis overwhelmingly are confident in the justice of the present Gaza war.” And this support of the wholesale destruction of Gaza** is the final confirming factor demonstrating the pathological nature of Israeli/Zionist culture.
Conclusion
The United States and Israel are not the only sick cultures on the planet. However, as noted, they stand together due to a historical symmetry. This connection allowed the Zionists in the U.S. to build a powerful special interest organization and easily convince most of the American population to accept the Israeli narrative that, among other things, claimed the two countries held similar values. This despite the fact that Israel does not even have the framework for an idealized just society. It lacks a constitution and, insisting on a culture of Jewish supremacy, guarantees the absence of equal justice for all.
The connection also sees both nations attempting to deny similar sins while claiming similar virtues: Israeli claim that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East” covers up the reality that it is an apartheid state and, in the case of the U.S., the claim of exceptionalism due to the practice of high ethical standards covers up a continuing national struggle against racism and a foreign policy that contradicts U.S. claims of spreading democracy.
On the other hand, over time the United States did create legislative and judicial ideals for itself based on a self-glorifying narrative—that the U.S. was a nation of superior moral-ethical potential. Thus, when the government fails the citizenry you can get civil rights movements and anti-war protests of historic importance.
Significantly, it is this lurking moral uneasiness with their nation’s hypocrisy, felt particularly by the youth, that is now eroding the American alliance with Israel. The ethnic cleansing and genocide, so acceptable to Israeli Jews, is a behavior that a number of Americans see as indefensible—particularly from an “ally” claiming to hold values similar to their own.
Thus is change possible even in an environment over which we have but nominal control. And, in this case, for the U.S. to get past its own hypocrisy—the sick elements of its own culture—it must finally leave Israel behind.
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Notes.
*See Lawrence Davidson, Foreign Policy Inc. (University Press of Kentucky, 2009), chapter 1.
**The proper historical analogy to the destruction of Gaza is the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.
The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes
Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to the Crocus terror attack. This is as explosive as it gets. Intel sources in Moscow discreetly confirm this is one of the FSB’s prime lines of investigation.
December 4, 2023. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, only 3 months after his retirement, tells CIA mouthpiece The Washington Post: “There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night (…) You gotta get back there and create a campaign behind the lines.”
January 31: Victoria Nuland travels to Kiev and meets Budanov. Then, in a dodgy press conference at night in the middle of an empty street, she promises “nasty surprises” to Putin: code for asymmetric war.
February 22: Nuland shows up at a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event and doubles down on the “nasty surprises” and asymmetric war. That may be interpreted as the definitive signal for Budanov to start deploying dirty ops.
February 25: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine: nothing that Russian intel does not already know.
Then, a lull until March 5 – when crucial shadow play may have been in effect. Privileged scenario: Nuland was a key dirty ops plotter alongside the CIA and the Ukrainian GUR (Budanov). Rival Deep State factions got hold of it and maneuvered to “terminate” her one way or another – because Russian intel would have inevitably connected the dots.
Yet Nuland, in fact, is not “retired” yet; she’s still presented as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and showed up recently in Rome for a G7-related meeting, although her new job, in theory, seems to be at Columbia University (a Hillary Clinton maneuver).
Meanwhile, the assets for a major “nasty surprise” are already in place, in the dark, and totally off radar. The op cannot be called off.
March 5: Little Blinken formally announces Nuland’s “retirement”.
March 7: At least one Tajik among the four-member terror commando visits the Crocus venue and has his photo taken.
March 7-8 at night: U.S. and British embassies simultaneously announce a possible terror attack on Moscow, telling their nationals to avoid “concerts” and gatherings within the next two days.
March 9: Massively popular Russian patriotic singer Shaman performs at Crocus. That may have been the carefully chosen occasion targeted for the “nasty surprise” – as it falls only a few days before the presidential elections, from March 15 to 17. But security at Crocus was massive, so the op is postponed.
March 22: The Crocus City Hall terror attack.
ISIS-K: the ultimate can of worms
The Budanov connection is betrayed by the modus operandi – similar to previous Ukraine intel terror attacks against Daria Dugina and Vladimir Tatarsky: close reconnaissance for days, even weeks; the hit; and then a dash for the border.
And that brings us to the Tajik connection.
There seem to be holes aplenty in the narrative concocted by the ragged bunch turned mass killers: following an Islamist preacher on Telegram; offered what was later established as a puny 500 thousand rubles (roughly $4,500) for the four of them to shoot random people in a concert hall; sent half of the funds via Telegram; directed to a weapons cache where they find AK-12s and hand grenades.
The videos show that they used the machine guns like pros; shots were accurate, short bursts or single fire; no panic whatsoever; effective use of hand grenades; fleeing the scene in a flash, just melting away, almost in time to catch the “window” that would take them across the border to Ukraine.
All that takes training. And that also applies to facing nasty counter-interrogation. Still, the FSB seems to have broken them all – quite literally.
A potential handler has surfaced, named Abdullo Buriyev. Turkish intel had earlier identified him as a handler for ISIS-K, or Wilayat Khorasan in Afghanistan. One of the members of the Crocus commando told the FSB their “acquaintance” Abdullo helped them to buy the car for the op.
And that leads us to the massive can of worms to end them all: ISIS-K.
The alleged emir of ISIS-K, since 2020, is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah Ghafari. He was not killed in Afghanistan in June 2023, as the Americans were spinning: he may be currently holed up in Balochistan in Pakistan.
Yet the real person of interest here is not Tajik Ghafari but Chechen Abdul Hakim al-Shishani, the former leader of the jihadi outfit Ajnad al-Kavkaz (“Soldiers of the Caucasus”), who was fighting against the government in Damascus in Idlib and then escaped to Ukraine because of a crackdown by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in another one of those classic inter-jihadi squabbles.
Shishani was spotted on the border near Belgorod during the recent attack concocted by Ukrainian intel inside Russia. Call it another vector of the “nasty surprises”.
Shishani had been in Ukraine for over two years and has acquired citizenship. He is in fact the sterling connection between the nasty motley crue Idlib gangs in Syria and GUR in Kiev – as his Chechens worked closely with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was virtually indistinguishable from ISIS.
Shishani, fiercely anti-Assad, anti-Putin and anti-Kadyrov, is the classic “moderate rebel” advertised for years as a “freedom fighter” by the CIA and the Pentagon.
Some of the four hapless Tajiks seem to have followed ideological/religious indoctrination on the internet dispensed by Wilayat Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in a chat room called Rahnamo ba Khuroson.
The indoctrination game happened to be supervised by a Tajik, Salmon Khurosoni. He’s the guy who made the first move to recruit the commando. Khurosoni is arguably a messenger between ISIS-K and the CIA.
The problem is the ISIS-K modus operandi for any attack never features a fistful of dollars: the promise is Paradise via martyrdom. Yet in this case it seems it’s Khurosoni himself who has approved the 500 thousand ruble reward.
After handler Buriyev relayed the instructions, the commando sent the bayat – the ISIS pledge of allegiance – to Khurosoni. Ukraine may not have been their final destination. Another foreign intel connection – not identified by FSB sources – would have sent them to Turkey, and then Afghanistan.
That’s exactly where Khurosoni is to be found. Khurosoni may have been the ideological mastermind of Crocus. But, crucially, he’s not the client.
The Ukrainian love affair with terror gangs
Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror galaxy as they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s. Milley and Nuland of course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the past, for instance, between GUR and the CIA.
Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with assorted terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these connections especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus outfits, from the Chechen Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR routinely aims to recruit ISIS and ISIS-K denizens via online chat rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led to Crocus.
One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine, Tatars from Crimea included – from lodging to juridical assistance.
The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by pros – and certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by ISIS-K, but by GUR. A classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under the impression that they were working for ISIS-K.
The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi of online terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile; adapts himself to the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides him with the minimum necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor become disposable.
Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the Crimea bridge, the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware of what he was carrying,
As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a gigantic diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring ISIS operatives from the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then to Afghanistan after the Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project ISIS-K actually started in 2021, after it became pointless to use ISIS goons imported from Syria to block the relentless progress of the Taliban.
Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).
The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established, there will be hell to pay.
But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are not controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western intel via middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.
The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists from Syria and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in terms of direct contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will be very careful when it comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of managing these networks.
But even with plausible deniability, the Crocus investigation seems to be leading exactly to where Moscow wants it: uncovering the crucial middleman. And everything seems to be pointing to Budanov and his goons.
Ramzan Kadyrov dropped an extra clue. He said the Crocus “curators” chose on purpose to instrumentalize elements of an ethnic minority – Tajiks – who barely speak Russian to open up new wounds in a multinational nation where dozens of ethnicities live side by side for centuries.
In the end, it didn’t work. The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes.
No more shadow play. It’s now in the open. No holds barred.
Exhibit 1: Friday, March 22, 2024. It’s War. The Kremlin, via Peskov, finally admits it, on the record.
The money quote:
“Russia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that has a documented intention to use any methods to take Crimea away from it, not to mention the territory of new regions.”
Translation: the Hegemon-constructed Kiev mongrel is doomed, one way or another. The Kremlin signal: “We haven’t even started” starts now.
Exhibit 2: Friday afternoon, a few hours after Peskov. Confirmed by a serious European – not Russian – source. The first counter-signal.
Regular troops from France, Germany and Poland have arrived, by rail and air, to Cherkassy, south of Kiev. A substantial force. No numbers leaked. They are being housed in schools. For all practical purposes, this is a NATO force.
That signals, “Let the games begin”. From a Russian point of view, Mr. Khinzal’s business cards are set to be in great demand.
Exhibit 3: Friday evening. Terror attack on Crocus City, a music venue northwest of Moscow. A heavily trained commando shoots people on sight, point blank, in cold blood, then sets a concert hall on fire. The definitive counter-signal: with the battlefield collapsing, all that’s left is terrorism in Moscow.
And just as terror was striking Moscow, the US and the UK, in southwest Asia, was bombing Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, with at least five strikes.
Some nifty coordination. Yemen has just clinched a strategic deal in Oman with Russia-China for no-hassle navigation in the Red Sea, and is among the top candidates for BRICS+ expansion at the summit in Kazan next October.
Not only the Houthis are spectacularly defeating thalassocracy, they have the Russia-China strategic partnership on their side. Assuring China and Russia that their ships can sail through the Bab-al-Mandeb, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with no problems is exchanged with total political support from Beijing and Moscow.
The sponsors remain the same
Deep in the night in Moscow, before dawn on Saturday 23. Virtually no one is sleeping. Rumors dance like dervishes on countless screens. Of course nothing has been confirmed – yet. Only the FSB will have answers. A massive investigation is in progress.
The timing of the Crocus massacre is quite intriguing. On a Friday during Ramadan. Real Muslims would not even think about perpetrating a mass murder of unarmed civilians under such a holy occasion. Compare it with the ISIS card being frantically branded by the usual suspects.
Let’s go pop. To quote Talking Heads: “This ain’t no party/ this ain’t no disco/ this ain’t no fooling around”. Oh no; it’s more like an all-American psy op. ISIS are cartoonish mercenaries/goons. Not real Muslims. And everyone knows who finances and weaponizes them.
That leads to the most possible scenario, before the FSB weighs in: ISIS goons imported from the Syria battleground – as it stands, probably Tajiks – trained by CIA and MI6, working on behalf of the Ukrainian SBU. Several witnesses at Crocus referred to “Wahhabis” – as in the commando killers did not look like Slavs.
It was up to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to cut to the chase. He directly connected the “warnings” in early March from American and British embassies directed at their citizens not to visit public places in Moscow with CIA/MI6 intel having inside info about possible terrorism, and not disclosing it to Moscow.
The plot thickens when it is established that Crocus is owned by the Agalarovs: an Azeri-Russian billionaire family, very close friends of…
… Donald Trump.
Talk about a Deep State-pinpointed target.
ISIS spin-off or banderistas – the sponsors remain the same. The clownish secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksiy Danilov, was dumb enough to virtually, indirectly confirm they did it, saying on Ukrainian TV, “we will give them [Russians] this kind of fun more often.”
But it was up to Sergei Goncharov, a veteran of the elite Russia Alpha anti-terrorism unit, to get closer to unwrapping the enigma: he told Sputnik the most feasible mastermind is Kyrylo Budanov – the chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
The “spy chief” who happens to be the top CIA asset in Kiev.
It’s got to go till the last Ukrainian
The three exhibits above complement what the head of NATO’s
military committee, Rob Bauer, previously told a security forum in Kiev: “You need more than just grenades – you need people to replace the dead and wounded. And this means mobilization.”
Translation: NATO spelling out this is a war until the last Ukrainian.
And the “leadership” in Kiev still does not get it. Former Minister of Infrastructure Omelyan: “If we win, we will pay back with Russian oil, gas, diamonds and fur. If we lose, there will be no talk of money – the West will think about how to survive.”
In parallel, puny “garden-and jungle” Borrell admitted that it would be “difficult” for the EU to find an extra 50 billion euros for Kiev if Washington pulls the plug. The cocaine-fueled sweaty sweatshirt leadership actually believes that Washington is not “helping” in the form of loans, but in the form of free gifts. And the same applies for the EU.
The Theater of the Absurd is unmatchable. The German Liver Sausage Chancellor actually believes that proceeds from stolen Russian assets “do not belong to anyone”, so they can be used to finance extra Kiev weaponizing.
Everyone with a brain knows that using interest from “frozen”, actually stolen Russian assets to weaponize Ukraine is a dead end – unless they steal all of Russia’s assets, roughly $200 billion, mostly parked in Belgium and Switzerland: that would tank the Euro for good, and the whole EU economy for that matter.
Eurocrats better listen to Russian Central Bank major “disrupter” (American terminology) Elvira Nabiullina: The Bank of Russia will take “appropriate measures” if the EU does anything on the “frozen”/stolen Russian assets.
It goes without saying that the three exhibits above completely nullify the “La Cage aux Folles” circus promoted by the puny Petit Roi, now known across his French domains as Macronapoleon.
Virtually the whole planet, including the English-speaking Global North, had already been mocking the “exploits” of his Can Can Moulin Rouge Army.
So French, German and Polish soldiers, as part of NATO, are already in the south of Kiev. The most possible scenario is that they will stay far, far away from the frontlines – although traceable by Mr. Khinzal’s business activities.
Even before this new NATO batch arriving in the south of Kiev, Poland – which happens to serve as prime transit corridor for Kiev’s troops – had confirmed that Western troops are already on the ground.
So this is not about mercenaries anymore. France, by the way, is only 7th in terms of mercenaries on the ground, largely trailing Poland, the US and Georgia, for instance. The Russian Ministry of Defense has all the precise records.
In a nutshell: now war has morphed from Donetsk, Avdeyevka and Belgorod to Moscow. Further on down the road, it may not just stop in Kiev. It may only stop in Lviv. Mr. 87%, enjoying massive national near-unanimity, now has the mandate to go all the way. Especially after Crocus.
There’s every possibility the terror tactics by Kiev goons will finally drive Russia to return Ukraine to its original 17th century landlocked borders: Black Sea-deprived, and with Poland, Romania, and Hungary reclaiming their former territories.
Remaining Ukrainians will start to ask serious questions about what led them to fight – literally to their death – on behalf of the US Deep State, the military complex and BlackRock.
As it stands, the Highway to Hell meat grinder is bound to reach maximum velocity.
On the “Usual Suspects” list we have Ukraine and we have ISIS (Islamic State). A good case can be made for both. I am posting three videos — some of it is repetitive — that discusses the attack and the very odd behavior of the Biden Administration. Let’s go through the chronology of events.
The Embassy is monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts, and U.S. citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours.
What you need to understand is that this warning was not issued at the discretion of the embassy. This was approved in Washington, DC at Main State and would have required some intelligence that was deemed somewhat specific and “credible.” When I was doing this job at State Counter Terrorism in 1990, this was in the aftermath of the bombing of Pan, 103. It was widely believed in the public that state department, and the CIA had information in advance about the terrorist bombing of that plane, and warned our person out not to get on board. That was not true but it did raise the issue of when, and how to warn the public about a potential threat. We came up with a system that required specific and credible intelligence. The more specific and credible the intelligence, the less need to warn the public. Consider, for example, that if we knew a terrorist attack was going to be carried out on Friday at a public concert hall by a particular group, we would be able to alert appropriate authorities and take precautions to intercept the attack without alarming the public.
On the other hand, if the information was not in great detail, but did come from a credible source, then we would take the time to put together a public warning. That is what happened when the US Embassy Moscow issued the warning on 7 March. They had information they thought was credible, but not terribly specific. This raises a key question — did the United States warn Russian authorities? Normally, when I was doing the job, we would share the information with the appropriate government and law enforcement authorities, in order to try to prevent the attack. Based on public comments by Maria Zakharova and Dimitri Medvedev, following the March 7, warning, and following today’s attack, it appears that the United States did not share any of its information with Russia. I would note there is a Wall Street Journal report tonight, stating that the United States did warn, but Russian authorities insist that they were not provided with an Intel heads up.
What makes the entire situation so bizarre and questionable in terms of what the United States knew, and when it knew it, is that the State Department issued a statement within two hours of the bombing — remember, we still did not know how many attackers, what kind of weapons, how many casualties, and whether or not, they were hostages — declaring that Ukraine was not responsible for this attack. How did State Department know that? It’s strongly suggests that the United States had intelligence, which did not share with Moscow.
Then we have this very unusual X message (formerly Twitter) that was posted at 3:30 AM this morning, 22 March, by OSINTdefender (which I think of has a CIA front for spreading messages the CIA wants out there):
Members of U.S. National Security Council and the White House have reportedly started to become Increasingly Frustrated by “Unauthorized Brazen Actions” taken by Ukraine against Russia, including their recent Campaign of Long-Range Drone Strikes having Targeted at least 25 Oil Refineries, Terminals, Depots and Storage Facilities across Western Russia; with some Biden Administration Officials believing these Strikes will cause a Spike in Global Oil Prices as well as Significant Escalation and Retaliation against Ukraine like was seen during tonight’s Large-Scale Missile Attack.
Do you think that is just a happy coincidence that the Biden White House is bemoaning Ukraine taking “unauthorized brazen actions” on the same day there is a massive terrorist attack in Moscow? I don’t believe in coincidence. I think the Biden ministration was trying to get out ahead of an attack that they knew was coming.
Some claims have emerged late in the day with ISIS, allegedly, taking credit for the attack. What makes that interesting is that we have evidence that some members of ISIS have been fighting in Ukraine against Russia, so this does not necessarily exonerate, either Ukraine or the United States.
Anyway, I deal with these issues from different perspectives in the following videos:
HOW THE AEROSPACE MANUFACTURING COMPANY DECLINED OVER THE DECADES
There’s no doubt that Boeing is in serious trouble. Recent reports of serious safety issues and concerns over workforce diversity campaigns are symptoms of a corporate culture that has been ailing for a while. The legendary American company that helped win WWII and dominated the postwar aviation industry used to attack engineering problems by empowering the organization’s best men with almost dictatorial authority. But over the past quarter-century, Boeing has transformed from a hard-nosed, mission-focus company into a complacent mediocrity defined by bureaucratic entrenchment and financial chicanery.
Boeing’s golden age during WWII was defined by the execution of projects like the B-29: a four-engine bomber that could deliver up to 20,000 pounds of bombs against a target more than 2,600 miles away at a speed exceeding 250 miles per hour, far in excess of any other aircraft in the war. The B-29 was the first bomber with a pressurized cabin, which helped extend its service ceiling above 30,000 feet, well out of the range of Mitsubishi Zeroes. It had remote-controlled machine gun turrets that could be slaved together in a synchronized aiming system run by an analog computer. The plane itself had a startling, graceful silhouette — albatross-like wings that stretched 141 feet, longer than the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk.
The project was a hideously complex and expensive weapons program with a total cost more than double that of the Manhattan Project, requiring the coordination of thousands of contractors and production facilities spread across the United States. After Boeing missed multiple deadlines to deliver combat-worthy planes to the U.S. Army Air Force, Hap Arnold empowered General Bennett Meyers to take control of the production process and do everything possible to bring out the plane; ‘The Battle of Kansas’ thus ensued. Thousands of technicians from all over the country were called into Wichita, modification centers at Great Bend, Pratt, Walter, and Salina, working in subzero weather and snowstorms. The shock force of aircraft technicians replaced the plating on the wings, the glass in the cockpit, modified the cowl flaps around the engines, and removed, replaced, and resoldered every electrical connection.
The ‘Battle of Kansas’ involved direct military control over civilian workforce, and it furnished an example of how centralized authority and accountability could quickly yield results. Within weeks, the first B-29s were flying. By the war’s end, Boeing delivered more than 3,600 Superfortresses. On the night of March 9, 334 B-29s were sent to bomb Tokyo from altitudes between 5,000 and 10,000 feet, each loaded with 16,000 pounds of incendiary bombs. Eventually, the Enola Gay, a B-29, dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
Today, Boeing lacks this commitment to pushing the technological envelope as well as any sense of urgency with regard to the national interest: in this respect it still represents a mirror of America, only now it is a mirror of decline. The history of Boeing over the past thirty years is a story of a critical American institution that sold off its engineering culture and embraced an asset-light focus on margin instead of product vision, and then executed that strategy poorly. In 2024, Boeing is producing fewer planes than it did a decade ago and faces an onslaught of headlines about spectacular accidents, nagging regulators, and disappointing earnings.
A large part of the issues can be traced back to the Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger in 1997. The deal seemed like a good idea at the time. By 1996, McDonnell Douglas commanded only 4% share in U.S. commercial aviation, and its production lines were languishing. Meanwhile, Boeing had a $100 billion backlog, and needed more assembly capacity to ramp deliveries and fulfill its orders. Yet in the event, the joke on Wall Street became that “McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money.” McDonnell Douglas CEO Harry Stonecipher and John McDonnell, the chair of McDonnell Douglas’ board, became the largest shareholders of the combined entity after a stock swap worth $13 billion and they brought McDonnell Douglas’ bureaucratic defense contractor culture of margin-focused, risk-averse financial engineering with them.
This culture almost immediately began to win out over Boeing’s engineering culture committed to innovation and quality. The first “clean-sheet” aircraft produced by the combined entity would be the 787 Dreamliner. From the start of the project in 2003 Stonecipher imposed strict cost controls, demanding that the plane be developed for less than 40% of what it cost Boeing to develop the 777 more than a decade before. He also required each plane’s unit cost to be less than 60% of the cost of a 777. Boeing would accomplish this, Stonecipher said, by abandoning full-fledged, bottoms-up assembly. Instead, for the first time, workers in Boeing’s Everett plant would connect sub-assemblies and integrate disparate systems provided by suppliers rather than attaching every bolt and component themselves.
For the 787, Boeing engineers eschewed the expensive, time-consuming process of designing new components in-house — instead, they provided high-level specifications to their suppliers and let them design the parts, pushing cost and accountability outside the organization and diluting authority. In short, Stonecipher implemented the kind of development and design program that you’d expect from a company that wanted to reduce its assets and costs and guarantee the production of airplanes at a wide gross margin. But his plan backfired: costs ballooned as the problems of orchestrating more suppliers handling more of the work outran the savings generated by outsourcing it in the first place. The 787, named the ‘Dreamliner’, was a beautiful plane — the way that its carbon-fiber wings can flex up and down more than 25 feet make it resemble a living creature, a bird instinctively controlling its feathers as it rides the air. But its deferred costs piled up to more than $30 billion, almost ten times the cost of the 777 program.
The 787 ended up as a financial catastrophe for Boeing: even after delivering more than 1,100 Dreamliners, the program is still billions of dollars in the red. During the pandemic, production of the 787 was moved to Boeing’s North Charleston plant, which had a mandate to increase deliveries to 14 planes per month. But Boeing never came close to those targets: currently North Charleston is only delivering five to six 787s per month.
The conventional wisdom is that Boeing’s recent obsession with quarterly results, margin, and an asset-light balance sheet led to deterioration in quality control that manifested not only in assembly — the Alaska Air flight with the blown-out door — but also in design — the faulty 737 MAX software that sent planes diving toward the ground. But the conventional wisdom is only half-right. Not only did the McDonnell Douglas executives shift Boeing’s strategy to optimize for margin and profitability, but they incompetently executed their own strategy — their new plane, the 787, burned more money than any other Boeing commercial aviation airframe.
Fundamentally, Boeing’s problem was that it lost sight of the truth that advancing complex projects is only possible when command and control is concentrated, rather than dispersed. Extraordinarily committed engineers must be given great authority to execute; groundbreaking planes don’t come together simply because the unit economics are favorable or subcontractor agreements are favorably written.
There’s no sign that Boeing has taken this lesson to heart since the embarrassing state of the 787 program or the 737 MAX’s safety debacle. Before the so-called pandemic, Boeing was neck-and-neck with its chief rival in commercial jetliners, Airbus: in 2018, Boeing delivered 806 commercial aircraft and Airbus delivered 800. But the grounding of the 737 MAX in 2019, coupled with the lockdowns that started in 2020, devastated Boeing’s ability to produce planes. Its 2020 deliveries fell to 157 planes, while Airbus managed to deliver 566 planes. That year, Boeing made the decision to gut its engineering force even further, laying off 1,239 engineers and technical workers and nearly 3,800 machinists. Those cost-saving decisions made in a panic during an industry trough hampered Boeing’s ability to ramp deliveries once the lockdowns ended: in 2021 when Airbus delivered 611 planes, Boeing only delivered 340.
Boeing is still missing its delivery numbers in 2024, even as its market share among the big four domestic airlines fell from 88.7% in 2012 to 69.4% in 2023. In a few years, Delta will be flying a majority Airbus fleet; American Airlines already is. The storied American aircraft manufacturer is literally losing its home market, the densest, most mature commercial aviation market in the world, the market it built, to a state-supported European manufacturer that is outcompeting it in efficiency and volume.
Meanwhile, management is rearranging deck chairs to make them more diverse. In 2022, Boeing tied managers’ incentive compensation to the ‘diversity’ of their interview slates, meaning that their bonuses depended on whether or not they considered women, racial minorities, and the disabled for positions they were hiring for. In Boeing’s Global Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (GEDI) 2023 Report, Sara Bowen, vice president of GEDI, Talent Intelligence, and Employee Listening, wrote: “We know diversity must be at the table for every important decision our company makes — every challenge we face, every innovation we design. Equity, diversity and inclusion are core values because they make Boeing — and each of us individually — better.”
The GEDI report boasted that racial and ethnic minorities now hold 41.4% of all jobs in U.S. Boeing Commercial Airplanes, 28.3% of all jobs in Defense, Space, & Security, and 38.2% of all jobs in Global Services. Minorities accounted for 47.5% of all new hires in 2022, and 34.4% of all promotions. More Boeing employees are disabled — in 2022, 7.7% of Boeing employees had a disability, up 1.3 points from the previous year, the report noted. The proportion of military veterans at the company, on the other hand, is declining.
But DEI is only part of the problem. Historically, Boeing has achieved great results by centralizing authority and control in the hands of the most exceptionally talented engineers. Today, the culture at Boeing is the opposite: listening sessions with the downtrodden, coddling the broken, and tiptoeing around the oppressed. Authority diffused throughout an entire organization’s hierarchy is no authority at all; accountability to technical results becomes challenging, if not impossible, when managers are serving two masters.
“Progress is every teammate acting on our Seek, Speak & Listen habits,” Bowen wrote in the 2023 report. “[It] is every teammate feeling physically and psychologically safe, and ensuring that safety for each other.” In November 2022, Boeing CEO David Calhoun told investors that the company would not introduce a new clean sheet design until the 2030s. This will be the first decade in Boeing’s history that the company will fail to bring out a new airplane; nearly a generation will pass between new aircraft launches, a gap in institutional knowledge and organizational capacity that will impose costs on the company for years to come, if not finish it off for good.
TikTok not only destroys Silicon Valley’s monopoly by competing furiously with its platforms, it also steals their space, which was previously shielded, as the White House believed.
In the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s resounding victory; after an election with a very high turnout (with a lower abstention rate than is usually the case in the West); an even higher approval rating for the current president of the Russian Federation; the contradiction between the real information, witnessed and verified by countless international observers, and the information broadcast on the White House-dominated communication spectrum, forces us to put into perspective an entire information battle taking place in the virtual universe.
When we see news that this or that Silicon Valley platform is leaving Russia, in the light of the war waged on TikTok by the U.S. plutocracy, we can only consider that this departure is fortunate for the country and its people. Had the Russian authorities not made the necessary efforts to build a sovereign digital ecosystem, leaving the country to the propaganda of California, would we be talking about the same results? I have my doubts!
A Rutgers study with the NCRI (Network Contagion Research Institute), on the alignment of TikTok with the geopolitical perspectives of the Communist Party of China, analyzes the information conveyed by the Chinese platform in comparison with Instagram, using, of course, the latter as a control reference.
Subsequently, they draw the conclusion that there is an alignment by saying that, comparing the number of posts between the two platforms, the “pernicious” TikTok and the “transparent” Instagram, posts about Uighurs are 1 (on TikTok) to 11 (on Instagram); about Tibet 1 to 38, Tiananmen 1 to 82 and “democracy in Hong Kong” 1 to 180. The study says that these are “sensitive” topics for the Chinese government. Not for a moment does it question the veracity of such sensitive information for “Communist China”.
A concrete example is the war in Ukraine subject, which pits NATO against the Russian Federation, where posts have a ratio of 5 (TikTok) to 8 (Instagram) when it comes to the “support Ukraine” movement, or the genocide in Gaza, where the ratio is 2 to 6 when it comes to “supporting Israel”. The study does little to analyze the metrics in reverse, i.e. in relation to hashtags that are in opposition to Washington’s interests. But what is truly conclusive is the total disparity between what is mentioned more or less on each of the platforms. The same accusation that is leveled at TikTok regarding sensitive topics for the Chinese government, could also be leveled at the U.S. administration when it comes to topics that run counter to its propaganda, on Silicon Valley platforms. Rutgers doesn’t deal with that, much less the algorithmic biases that justify the disparity in the treatment of certain topics. We know why they exist. And that reason doesn’t work in the White House’s favor, quite the opposite.
If an analysis of the hashtags, which are supposedly in China’s universe of interests, already shows us that what is in China’s interest is diametrically disinterested in Washington’s, there is one issue in particular that is much more sensitive than the rest, and that is the Palestinian cause. For every 3 posts of “support for Palestine” on TikTok, we only have 1 on Instagram. This tells us, in my opinion, more about the U.S. than about China. Considering that the Chinese government is known for not meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and considering that it maintains important trade relations with Israel, this gap between TikTok and Instagram is indicative, above all, of the concerns of the United States.
And here we have a brief indication of the real driving force behind the anti-TikTok wave that has been sweeping the Capitol. The truth is that the American-Jewish community has been the most active in anti-TikTok lobbying. An article on www.jewishreviewofbooks.com, with the title “Israel’s TikTok problem” says in so many words that “protecting Americans from TikTok’s political influence will be a gain for the relationship between Israel and its most important ally”. Words for what?
The big concern is the space given by TikTok to pro-Palestinian groups and ideas they call “antisemitic”, knowing how exacerbated the antisemitic sensitivities of Zionists are. The warning in this article is extremely serious, pointing to the serious problems this elite has with democracy itself. In addition to mentioning, as a negative factor, the demographic weight that countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia or Pakistan have in TikTok, influencing the algorithm – this democracy thing has a lot to say about it – the whole article appeals to the attention of the American ruling class to the fact that a generational confrontation between the young and the old is at stake. What really worries them is that younger people are far more “pro-Palestinian” than “pro-Israeli”. The culprit? It’s TikTok! Why is that? Because it prevents them from effectively spreading their propaganda.
This reality is even acknowledged in the article, when it criticizes the TikTok administration for not accepting a paid advertisement that dramatized the issue of the return of kidnapped Israeli citizens. At the same time, it is the website www.vox.com that reports on the fact that the Israeli foreign ministry spent 1.5 million dollars on propaganda on Youtube, X and the mainstream media about the lie – already confirmed – of the 40 beheaded babies. This is really TikTok’s main sin. Rather than spreading low-quality information or information aligned with Chinese pretensions, the platform is not controlled to the liking of Washington or Tel Aviv.
As if to make my point about democracy and the problems the White House has with it – well reported in its handling of the Russian elections and the choices made by the Russian people – the American Pew Research Center, in an analysis of the importance of social media for democracy, tells us that only in three countries does more than half the population say that social media is bad for democracy: the Netherlands, France and the United States. It’s ironic that the country that has the most social networks and controls them the most – contrary to what it assumes – is precisely the one in which the most people say that social networks are bad for democracy: in this case, the USA, with 64% of responses in the negative. Symptomatic, given the exposure to White House manipulation. Perhaps the American and European people don’t sleep that much.
What does this have to do with all the “Russiagate” propaganda, the anti-Trump “fakenews”, or the recent TikTok affair? In my opinion, everything! Above all, it’s a problem of dealing with an undeniable fact: the opening up of social networks to the world puts the White House’s pretensions in an unfavorable demographic position, dissolving the propaganda that Washington manufactures to denigrate governments that don’t obey it into a huge global majority. As such, platforms that don’t obey its dictates, deleting posts or users that contradict Western propaganda, must be banned. There is no shortage of articles such as the one on www.nbcnews.com, stating that “critics are renewing calls for TikTok to be banned, claiming it has an anti-Israel bias”. A whole unipolar model is at stake.
So, the U.S. problem with TikTok is simple. TikTok represents a digital counterpoint, on a par with the counterpoints that already exist in the real world. Until very recently, the virtual world was seen as a kind of heavenly paradise – like a neoliberal Garden of Eden – totally controlled by the U.S. power clique. Until, one day, some countries began to find solutions that favored the creation of their own digital ecosystems.
The fateful and strategic decision was made by the People’s Republic of China when it rejected a Google and Facebook “without manual brakes”, which did not operate according to the procedures that the White House had defined for its territory, but according to its own. Huawei, Tik-Tok, Weechat, Aliexpress and other top digital platforms are “children” of this decision, which is referred to in the West as “the great Firewall of China”. And the most cartoonish thing about this is that the existence of the “great firewall of China” is, above all, the responsibility of the aggressive and intrusive American foreign policy. If there is any truth to the Rutgers study, it is that the American anti-Chinese agenda has been partly responsible for the generational problems that the U.S. now encounters among its population and which concern relations between its American territory and its arm in the Middle East.
And this reading can be partially confirmed in a Quinnipiac University poll from October 17, 2023, which says that voters aged 18-34 (39%) disapprove of sending arms to Israel to fight Hamas, those aged 35-49 (35%), while those over 50 (only 17%) disapprove. In other words, there is a clear generational divide (50% difference), confirmed by the fact that TikTok’s metrics show an equal number of views over the last 30 days for videos with the hashtag “I support Palestine” and “I support Israel”. Something that doesn’t happen on Silicon Valley platforms.
In response to China’s intention not to be dependent on an ecosystem dominated by Washington, attacks have poured in. “There is no freedom in China”; “there is so much dictatorship in China that not even Google is the same”. Symptomatically, both China and Russia demonstrated early on that they wanted to develop their own digital environment, anticipating, as independently as they did wisely, the risks associated with large-scale access to the minds of their peoples. Through the back door, the White House’s attitude has proved both countries right. Today, it is the White House that wants to protect its vital virtual space.
You may or may not agree with the limitations that the PRC demanded of the search engine at the time, and whose unwillingness to accept them led to the blocking of these applications. Today, we realize that for Alphabet and Meta it wasn’t a question of agreeing to apply “limits”, but of who defined them and ordered them to be applied. Quite simply – and paradoxically – it was up to Uncle Sam to apply limitations, and the Chinese state itself did not have the power to apply them on its territory. Conversely, by applying them here more than ever, Uncle Sam is accusing the PRC of wanting to impose a “digital autocracy”.
Thus, on the material level, with the inauguration of the multipolar world, the growing autonomy of nations such as Iran, China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, it wasn’t long before the “threat” of multipolarity began to be felt on the digital level too. In my opinion, the imposition of the “great firewall of China” was an important step in this process.
The first symptom of this success was Huawei, which challenged the dictatorship of communication technologies, until then monopolized by the U.S. Above all, Huawei meant access to the most advanced technologies of the future for a country considered “lesser” by the Anglo-Saxon supremacist elite and their wannabes. Stemming this development has become one of the main tasks of the U.S., of its “contain China” enterprise. An obvious sign of this success is that U.S. discourse is moving from the level of “containing China” to the more acute level of “countering China”, which seems to indicate a recognition of failure. It is no longer a question of “containing”, but of contradicting, annulling, counter-attacking, “countering” what has not been contained.
The result of these choices is that anyone who reads the bill H.R. 7521 (Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act) or the report issued by the Energy and Commerce Committee, which served as the basis for the bill, can see from the U.S.’s own words what China’s main concerns were at the time of the attempt by Google and Facebook to enter its territory without limits. All the risks that are pointed out to TikTok, many of which have already been pointed out to Huawei, are known practices by the U.S. against countries that do not guard their virtual space as they should and as the protection of their sovereignty and the interests of their peoples would demand.
This is what the Energy and Commerce Committee report says right at the start: “Foreign adversaries have used access to data (…) to disrupt Americans’ daily lives, conduct espionage activities, and push disinformation and propaganda campaigns in an attempt to undermine our democracy and gain global influence and control.”
Symptomatically, we have to take this “control” and “national interest” thing very seriously. According to the data provided by the report itself, TikTok is in 150 countries and serves 1 billion people, including 170 million Americans. And this is a real drama for Washington. How can you control the minds of a people when half of them follow a platform you don’t control? How do you manipulate the minds of 170 million Americans when the technology that could be used to manipulate them is in China? How can you collect the data of 170 million people, aggregating it into profiles and predicting their behavior, so that you can push them in the desired directions, when that data is stored in China? If Israel is in danger, then so are the dollar and hegemony.
Meanwhile, the triggering of the panic button is also related to the effect that Tik-Tok has as a disruptor of the virtual, monopolistic environment created in Silycon Valey. The CIA, through DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), has created an entire virtual ecosystem, transporting every one of its people’s minds into it. This ecosystem, controlled throughout the West only by the security agencies at Washington’s service, wanted a certain degree of invulnerability. In order to be perfect, the flow of data had to be closed and watertight, so that the algorithms could not be infected and, with it, the “harmonious” functioning of the system of “surveillance capitalism”, as Shoshana Zuboff rightly called it, could not be disrupted.
It is this ecosystem, through which U.S. security agencies monitor all the digital information of the world’s peoples in real time, predicting and producing behavior, promoting and demoting parties, governments and public figures, accelerating or delaying agendas, that is at stake. Above all, with TikTok, the Washington regime’s concern exceeds the Trump administration’s anxiety levels with Huawei. Badly or well, with Huawei it was about the more structural, more architectural technological aspects. With TikTok, what’s at stake is the very central nervous system of the internet. China now has privileged access to the neuronal network and the central nervous system of a body, which the U.S. had created in order to dominate the world.
With the virtual monopoly deeply affected, on its own territory, the U.S. is choosing to shoot itself in the foot, as it did when it decided to load Russia with endless sanctions. With this action on TikTok, the U.S. is sending out another serious warning to countries that hold capital and investments in the West. At any moment, a change in the law, a geopolitical pretext or a false accusation could justify confiscation.
To position TikTok in the firing line, the U.S. is once again looking in the mirror. In the preamble, the bill, H.R. 7521, refers to the Chinese National Security Law, published in 2017, clearly distorting both its content and its territorial scope. Referring to what we know to be Article 7 of that law – through the report of the Energy and Commerce Committee – they state that there is a risk that Tik-Tok will be called upon to share international personal data with the Chinese government, since, as they claim, all organizations, public or private, have to collaborate with the efforts of the Chinese intelligence services. This is at least partly true. The text of Article 7 of the PRC’s National Security Law reads: “All organizations and citizens shall support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with the law, and protect the secrets of national intelligence work of which they are aware.”
What the text of the proposal doesn’t mention is what’s in the next article of China’s National Security Law. After all, Article 8 of the same law requires “respecting and protecting human rights, protecting the rights and interests of individuals and organizations”. In other words, contrary to what the U.S. Congress says, this aid is conditional on compliance with the law and the rights of citizens and organizations, and is not a discretionary, authoritarian or autocratic power.
But the main distortion introduced in the energy and trade committee’s report is the territorial interpretation of the Chinese National Security Law. Article 7 of the PRC National Security Law is to be read within the framework of the Chinese constitution, i.e. cooperation is limited to persons and organizations of Chinese nationality, in relation to actions carried out on Chinese territory.
And it is precisely in China that Bytedance maintains its fundamental technological base. That really is the biggest obstacle for the U.S. Contrary to what the promoters of the proposal to “protect Americans from foreign adversaries – the Controlled Applications Act” say, this is not about the fear that their 170 million Americans will be monitored. After all, realistically, we all know from practice and theory that China has a doctrine of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. No matter how much they talk about the Chinese “Data Protection” Law of 2020, arguing that it provides for the use of personal and organizational data to prevent and anticipate risks to national security, none of this is groundbreaking or an exception these days in any country that cares about protecting its people. Monitoring all the people, as the U.S. does, is completely unjustified.
What really worries the American plutocratic and gerontocratic regime is monopoly. An empire is made up of monopolies, and to be an empire it’s not enough to be big, you have to monopolize. And in order to build and maintain a hegemonic empire, it is essential to monopolize the structural sectors of the economy. And this is the real problem. TikTok not only destroys Silicon Valley’s monopoly by competing furiously with these platforms, it also steals their space, which was previously shielded, as the White House believed.
To protect what’s left of the monopoly, how about choosing someone who feels sentimentally connected to it? The choice fell on the illustrious New Delhi-born congressman of Indian descent, Raja Krishnamoorthi. What is certain is that Raja has everything to do with anti-Chinese things, such as his responsibilities on the “U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party”. The Democratic intention is obvious, a way of turning something political into a personal agenda that seeks confrontation and direct provocation.
Thus, we are witnessing yet another act of desperation, the effect of which will be to increase the already established mistrust of the seriousness with which the West views its own “free and open market” ideology. At the head of a sector inaugurated by the U.S. itself, surpassing them at their own game, Titok and China are thus demonstrating that the days of exclusivity and restricted access to the best the world has to offer are long gone. Just as Russia had already shown that the time for excesses around its territory was over.
So, thinking about empires and monopolies – with reference to a resolution recently passed in the European Parliament that aims to “decolonize, de-imperialize and re-federalize Russia” – this TikTok issue once again demonstrates the existence of a disintegration movement. TikTok is to the virtual world as BRICS is to de-dollarization in the material world. Both are inexorable processes that threaten to accelerate the “de-imperialization” of the West.
TikTok’s relationship with Israel is premonitory. The defeat imposed by TikTok on the Zionist narrative is not unrelated to Israel’s role in securing the petrodollar, hegemony and its defeat by the multipolar world. TikTok puts everything at risk!
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Hugo Dionísio is a Lawyer, researcher and geopolitics’ analyst. He is the owner of Canal-factual.wordpress.com Blog and co-founder of MultipolarTv, a Youtube Channel targeted to geopolitical analysis. He develops activity as Human Rights and Social rights activist as board member of the Portuguese Democratic Lawyers Association. He is also a researcher at the Portuguese Workers Trade Union Confederation (CGTP-IN).
They have waited 10 long, suffering years to vote in this election. And vote they did, in massive numbers, certifying a landslide reelection for the political leader who brought them back to Mother Russia. VVP may now be widely referred to as Mr. 87%. In Donetsk, turnout was even higher: 88,17%. And no less than 95% voted for him.
To follow the Russian electoral process at work in Donbass was a humbling – and illuminating – experience. Graphically, in front of us, the full weight of the collective West’s relentless denigration campaign was instantly gobbled up by the rich black soil of Novorossiya. The impeccable organization, the full transparency of the voting, the enthusiasm by polling station workers and voters alike punctuated the historical gravity of the political moment: at the same time everything was enveloped in an impalpable feeling of silent jubilation.
This was of course a referendum. Donbass represents a microcosm of the solid internal cohesion of Russian citizens around the policies of Team Putin – while at the same time sharing a feeling experienced by the overwhelming majority of the Global South. VVP’s victory was a victory of the Global Majority.
And that’s what’s making the puny Global Minority even more apoplectic. With their highest turnout since 1991, Russian voters inflicted a massive strategic defeat to the intellectual pigmies who pass for Western “leadership” – arguably the most mediocre political class of the past 100 years. They voted for a fairer, stable system of international relations; for multipolarity; and for true leadership by civilization-states such as Russia.
VVP’s 87% score was followed, by a long shot, by the Communists, with 3.9%. That is quite significant, because these 91% represent a total rejection of the globalist Davos/Great Reset plutocratic “future” envisioned by the 0.001%.
Avdeyevka: Voting Under Total Devastation
On Election Day Two, at section 198 in downtown Donetsk, not far from Government House, it was possible to fully measure the fluidity and transparency of the system – even as Donetsk was not spared from shelling, in the late afternoon and early evening in the final day of voting.
Afterwards, a strategic pit stop in a neighborhood mini-market. Yuri, an activist, was buying a full load of fresh eggs to be transported to the nearly starving civilians who still remain in Avdeyevka. Ten eggs cost the equivalent of a dollar and forty cents.
At Yasinovata, very close to Avdeyevka, we visit the MBOU, or school number 7, impeccably rebuilt after non-stop shelling. The director, Ludmilla Leonova, an extraordinary strong woman, takes me on a guide tour of the school and its brand new classrooms for chemistry and biology, a quaint Soviet alphabet decorating the classroom for Russian language. Classes, hopefully, will resume in the Fall.
Close to the school a refugee center for those who have been brought from Avdeyevka has been set up. Everything is spotlessly clean. People are processed, entered into the system, then wait for proper papers. Everyone wants to obtain a Russian passport as soon as possible.
For the moment, they stay in dormitories, around 10 people in each room. Some came from Avdeyevka, miraculously, in their own cars: there are a few Ukrainian license plates around. Invariably, the overall expectation is to return to Avdeyevka, when reconstruction starts, to rebuild their lives in their own town.
Then, it’s on the road to Avdeyevka. Nothing, absolutely nothing prepares us to confront total devastation. In my nearly 40 years as a foreign correspondent, I’ve never seen anything like it – even Iraq. At the unofficial entry to Avdeyevka, beside the skeleton of a bombed building and the remains of a tank turret, the flags of all military batallions which took part in the liberation flutter in the wind.
Each building in every street is at least partially destroyed. A few remaining residents congregate in a flat to organize the distribution of essential supplies. I find a miraculously preserved icon behind the window of a bombed-out ground floor apartment.
FPVs loiter overheard – detected by a handheld device, and our military escort is on full alert. We find out that as we enter a ground floor apartment which is being kept as a sort of mini food depot – housing donations from Yasinovata or from the military – that very same room, in the morning, had been converted into a polling station. That’s where the very few remaining Avdeyevka residents actually voted.
A nearly blind man with his dog explains why he can’t leave: he lives in the same street, and his apartment is still functional – even though he has no water or electricity. He explains how the Ukrainians were occupying each apartment block – with residents turned into refugees or hostages in the basements – and then, pressed by the Russians, relocated to nearby schools and hospitals until finally fleeing.
The basements are a nightmare. Virtually no light. The temperature is at least 10 degrees Celsius lower than at street level. It’s impossible to imagine how they survived. Another resident nonchalantly strolls by in his bicycle, surrounded by derelict concrete skeletons. The loud booms – mostly outgoing – are incessant.
Then, standing amidst total devastation, a vision: the elegant silhouette of the Church of Mary Magdalen, immaculately preserved. Dmitry, the caretaker, takes me around; it’s a beautiful church, the paintings on the roof still gleaming under the pale sunlight, a gorgeous chandelier and the inner chamber virtually intact.
The Mariupol Renaissance
The final election day is spent in Mariupol – which is being rebuilt at nearly breakneck speed: the new railway station has just been finished. Voting is seamless at school number 53, housing district 711. A beautiful mural behind the ballot box depicts the sister cities St. Petersburg and Mariupol, with the legendary Scarlet Sails from the Alexander Green story right in the middle.
I revisit the port: international cargo is still not moving, only ships coming from the Russian mainland. But the first deal has been reached with Cameroon – fruits in exchange with metals and manufactured products. Several other deals with African nations are on the horizon.
The Pakrovska church, a Mariupol landmark, is being carefully restored. We are welcomed by Father Viktor, who hosts lunch for a group of people from the parish, and a fine conversation ensues ranging from Christian Orthodoxy to the Decline of the West and the LGBT agenda.
We go to the roof and walk around a balustrade offering a spectacular 360-degree view of Mariupol, with the port, the destroyed Azovstal iron works and the Russian Sea of Azov in the deep background. The massive church bells ring – as in a metaphor for the resurrection of a beautiful city which has the potential to become a sort of Nice in the Sea of Azov.
Back in Donetsk, going to a “secret” school/museum only 2 km away from the line of fire – which I first visited last month – has to be canceled: Donetsk continues to be shelled.
With Avdeyevka in mind, as well as the shelling that refuses to go away, a few questions on numbers pop up on the long 20-hour drive back to Moscow.
In Chechnya, led by uber-patriot Kadyrov, turnout was 97%. And no less than 99% voted for VVP. So, unlike in the past, forget about any ulterior attempt at a color revolution in Chechnya.
Same pattern in the Caucasus, in the region of Kabardino: turnout was 96%. No less than 94% voted for VVP.
Between Kazakhstan and Mongolia, in Tuva, turnout was 96%. And 95% voted for VVP. In the autonomous Yamal-Nenets, turnout was 94%. But VVP got “only” 79% of the votes. In lake Baikal, Buryatia had 74% turnout and 88% of votes for VVP.
The key, once again, remains Moscow. Turnout, compared to other regions, was relatively low: 67%. Well, Moscow is still largely Westernized and in several aspects ideologically globalist – thus more critical than other parts of Russia when it comes to the patriotic emphasis.
And that brings us to the clincher. Even with the resounding success of Mr. 87%, they will never give up. If there ever is a minor chance of a successful Hybrid War strategy provoking a color revolution, the stage will be Moscow. Quite pathetic, actually, when compared to the images of Mr. 87% saluted by a packed Red Square on Sunday like the ultimate rock star.
The Kremlin is taking no chances. Putin addressed the FSB and went straight to the point: attempts to sow interethnic trouble – as a prelude to color revolutions – must be strictly suppressed. The FSB will go for the next level: traitors will be identified by name and targeted without a statute of limitations.
After the electoral euphoria, no one really knows what happens next. It has to be something hugely significant, honoring the historical VVP electoral landslide. He has carte blanche now to do anything. Priority number one: to finish once and for all with the Hegemon-built terror mongrel that has been attacking Novorossiya for 10 long years.
Looking back to what I wrote in 2012, in the midst of the so-called Arab Spring and its aftermath, it is striking just how much the Region has shifted. It is now almost 180° re-orientated. Then, I argued,
“That the Arab Spring “Awakening” is taking a turn, very different to the excitement and promise with which it was hailed at the outset. Sired from an initial, broad popular impulse, it is becoming increasingly understood, and feared, as a nascent counter-revolutionary “cultural revolution” – a re-culturation of the region in the direction of a prescriptive canon that is emptying out those early high expectations …
“That popular impulse associated with the ‘awakening’ has now been subsumed and absorbed into three major political projects associated with this push to reassert [Sunni primacy]: a Muslim Brotherhood project, a Saudi-Qatari-Salafist project, and a [radical jihadi] project.
“No one really knows the nature of the [first project] the Brotherhood project – whether it is that of a sect; or if it is truly mainstream … What is clear, however, is that the Brotherhood tone everywhere is increasingly one of militant sectarian grievance. The joint Saudi-Salafist project was conceived as a direct counter to the Brotherhood project – and [the third] was the uncompromising Sunni radicalism [Wahhabism], funded and armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, that aims, not to contain, but rather, to displace traditional Sunnism with the culture of Salafism. i.e. It sought the ‘Salifisation’ of traditional Sunni Islam.
“All these projects, whilst they may overlap in some parts, are in a fundamental way competitors with each other. And [were] being fired-up in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, north Africa, the Sahel, Nigeria, and the horn of Africa.
[Not surprisingly] …“Iranians increasingly interpret Saudi Arabia’s mood as a hungering for war, and Gulf statements do often have that edge of hysteria and aggression: a recent editorial in the Saudi-owned al-Hayat stated: “The climate in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] indicates that matters are heading towards a GCC-Iranian-Russian confrontation on Syrian soil, similar to what took place in Afghanistan during the Cold War. To be sure, the decision has been taken to overthrow the Syrian regime, seeing as it is vital to the regional influence and hegemony of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.
Well, that was then. How different the landscape is today: The Muslim Brotherhood largely is a ‘broken reed’, compared to what it was; Saudi Arabia has effectively ‘switched off the lights’ on Salafist jihadism, and is focussed more on courting tourism, and the Kingdom now has a peace accord with Iran (brokered by China).
“The cultural shift toward re-imagining a wider Sunni Muslim polity”, as I wrote in 2012, always was an American dream, dating back to Richard Perle’s ‘Clean Break’ Policy Paper of 1996 (a report that had been commissioned by Israel’s then-PM, Netanyahu). Its roots lay with the British post-war II policy of transplanting the stalwart family notables of the Ottoman era into the Gulf as an Anglophile ruling strata catering to western oil interests.
But look what has happened —
A mini revolution: Iran has, in the interim, ‘come in from the cold’ and is firmly anchored as ‘a regional power’. It is now the strategic partner to Russia and China. And Gulf States today are more preoccupied with ‘business’ and Tech than Islamic jurisprudence. Syria, targeted by the West, and an outcast in the region, has been welcomed back into the Arab League’s Arab sphere with high ceremony, and Syria is on its way to assuming again its former standing within the Middle East.
What is interesting is that even then, hints of the coming conflict between Israel and the Palestinians were apparent; as I wrote in 2012:
“Over recent years we have heard the Israelis emphasise their demand for recognition of a specifically Jewish nation-state, rather than for an Israeli State, per se. A Jewish state that in principle, would remain open to any Jew seeking to return: the creation of a ‘Jewish umma’, as it were.
“Now, it seems we have, in the western half of the Middle East, at least, a mirror trend, asking for the reinstatement of a wider Sunni nation – representing the ‘undoing’ of the last remnants of the colonial era. Will we see the struggle increasing epitomised as a primordial struggle between Jewish and Islamic religious symbols – between al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount?
“It seems that both Israel and its surrounding terrain are marching in step toward language which takes them far away from the underlying, largely secular concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been conceptualised. What will be the consequence as the conflict, by its own logic, becomes a clash of religious poles?”
What has driven this 180° turn? One factor, assuredly, was Russia’s limited intervention into Syria to prevent a jihadi sweep. The second has been China’s appearance on the scene as a truly gargantuan business partner – and putative mediator too – precisely at a time when the U.S. had begun its withdrawal from the region (at least in terms of the attention it pays to it, if not (yet) reflected in any substantive physical departure).
The latter – U.S. military withdrawal (Iraq and Syria) – however, seems more a question of ‘when’, rather than if. All expect it.
Put plainly, we have experienced a Mackinder-style ‘pivot of history’: Russia and China – and Iran – are slowly taking control of the Asian heartland (both institutionally and economically), as the pendulum of the West swings away.
The Sunni world – ineluctably and warily – marches towards the BRICS. Effectively, the Gulf finds itself badly wrong-footed by the so-called ‘Abraham Accords’ that tied them to Israeli Tech (which, in turn, was channelling considerable Wall Street venture ‘free money’ their way). Israel’s ‘suspect genocide’ (ICJ language) in Gaza is slowly driving a stake into the heart of the Gulf ‘business model’.
But another key factor has been the smart diplomacy pursued by Iran. It is easy for western Iran-hawks to decry Iran’s politicking and influencing across the region – the Islamic Republic is after all, unrepentantly ‘non-compliant’ with the U.S. aims and pro-Israeli ambitions in the Region. What else, other than pushback, might you expect when all the encircling western ‘fire’ was so concentrated on the Islamic Republic?
Yet, Iran has pursued an astute path. It has NOT gone to war against Sunni Arab states in Syria, as was mooted in 2012. Rather, it quietly has pursued a strategy of diplomacy and joint Gulf security and trade with Gulf States. Iran too, has partly succeeded in shaking itself free from much of the effects of western sanctions. It has joined both BRICS and the SCO and has acquired a new economic and political ‘spatial depth’.
Whether the U.S. and Europe likes it or not, Iran is a major regional political player, and it sits atop, with others, the coalition of Resistance Movements and Fronts that have been woven together through shrewd diplomacy to work in close conjunction with each other.
This development has become a key strategic ‘project’: Sunni (Hamas) and Shi’i (Hizbullah) are joined with other ‘fronts’ in an anti-colonial struggle for liberation under the non-sectarian symbol of Al-Aqsa (which is neither Sunni, nor Shi’a, nor Muslim Brotherhood, nor Salafist or Wahhabi). It represents, rather, the storied tale of Islamic civilisation. Yes, it is, in its way, eschatological too.
This latter achievement has done much to limit the threat of all-out war from engulfing the region (fingers-crossed though …). The Iranian and Resistance Axis’ interest is twofold: First, to retain power to carefully calibrate the intensity of conflict – upping and lowering as appropriate; and secondly, to keep escalatory dominance as much as possible in their hands.
The second aspect encompasses strategic patience. The Resistance Movements well understand the Israeli psyche – therefore, NO Pavlovian reflexes to Israeli provocations are accepted. But rather, to wait and rely on Israel to provide the pretext to any further step up the escalatory ladder. Israel must be seen to be the instigator for escalation – and the resistance merely the responder. The ‘eye’ must be on the Washington political psyche.
Thirdly, Iran draws confidence to pursue its ‘forwardness’ by having innovated a tectonic shift in asymmetric warfare, and in deterrence against Israel and the West. The U.S. might huff and puff, but Iran felt assured throughout this period that the U.S. well knows the risks associated with trying ‘blow the house down’.
Realists in the West tend to believe that ‘power’ is a simple function of national population size and GDP. So that, given the disparity in air and firepower, no way, as an example, can Hizbullah expect to ‘come out quits’ against Israel – a much richer and more populated entity.
This blindspot is the Resistance’s silent ‘ally’. It prevents the West (mostly) from understanding this pivot in military thinking.
Iran and its allies take a different view: They regard a state’s power to rest on intangibles, rather than literal tangibles: strategic patience; ideology; discipline; innovation and the concept of military leadership defined as the ability to cast a ‘magic’ spell over men so that they would follow their commander, even unto death.
The West has (or had) airpower and unchallenged air superiority, but the Resistance Fronts have their two-stage solution. They manufacture their own AI-assisted swarm drones and smart earth-hugging missiles. This is their Air Force.
The second stage naturally would be to evolve a layered air defence system (Russian-style). Does the Resistance possess such? Like Brer Rabbit, they stay mum.
The Resistance’s underlying strategy is clear: the West is over-invested in its air dominance and in its overwhelming fire-power. It prioritises quick shock and awe thrusts, but usually quickly exhausts itself early in the encounter. They rarely can sustain such high-intensity assault for long.
In Lebanon in 2006, Hizbullah remained deep underground whilst the Israeli air assault swept overhead. The physical surface damage was huge, yet their forces were unaffected and emerged only afterwards. Then came the 33 days of Hizbullah’s missile barrage – until Israel called it quits. This patience represents the first pillar of strategy.
The second therefore, is that whereas the West has short endurance, the opposition is trained and prepared for long attritional conflict – missile and rocket barrage to the point that civil society can sustain the impact no longer. War’s aim not necessarily has killing the enemy soldiers as a prime objective; rather it is exhaustion and inculcating a sense of defeat.
And what of the opposing project?
In 2012, I wrote:
“It seems that both Israel and [the Islamic world] are marching in step toward [eschatological narratives] which is taking them far away from the underlying, largely secular concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been conceptualised. What will be the consequence as the conflict, by its own logic, becomes a clash of religious poles? ” [– Al-Aqsa versus the Temple Mount].
Well, the West remains stuck with trying to manage and contain the conflict, using precisely those ‘largely secular concepts’ by which this conflict has been conceptualised and managed (or non-managed, I would say). In so doing, and through the West’s (secular) support for one particular eschatological vision (which happens to overlap with its own) over another, it inadvertently fuels the conflict.
Too late to return to secular modes of management; the genie is out.
The Democratic Party had one last chance to implement the kind of New Deal Reforms that could save us from another Trump presidency and Christian fascism. It failed.
Joe Biden and the Democratic Party made a Trump presidency possible once and look set to make it possible again. If Trump returns to power, it will not be due to Russian interference, voter suppression or because the working class is filled with irredeemable bigots and racists. It will be because the Democrats are as indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza as they are to immigrants, the poor in our impoverished inner cities, those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, credit card debt and usurious mortgages, those discarded, especially in rural America, by waves of mass layoffs and workers, trapped in the serfdom of the gig economy, with its job instability and suppressed wages.
Biden and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to cannibalize the nation. They backed legislation in 1982 to green light the manipulation of stocks through massive buybacks and the “harvesting” of companies by private equity firms that resulted in mass layoffs. They pushed through onerous trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which crippled union organizing. They were full partners in the construction of the vast archipelagos of the U.S. prison system — the largest in the world — and the militarization of police to turn them into internal armies of occupation. They fund the endless wars.
The Democrats dutifully serve their corporate masters, without whom most of them, including Biden, would not have a political career. This is why Biden and the Democrats will not turn on those who are destroying our economy and extinguishing our democracy. The slops in the trough would dry up. Advocating reforms jeopardize their fiefdoms of privilege and power. They fancy themselves as “captains of the ship,” labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes, but they are “actually the wood-eating shipworms who are consuming the thing from inside until it sinks.”
Authoritarianism is nurtured in the fertile soil of a bankrupt liberalism. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia. And it is true now. The Democrats had four years to institute New Deal reforms. They failed. Now we will pay.
A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance. Vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump – the press, the courts, the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, artists, intellectuals, the federal bureaucracy and the Democratic Party.
Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial branches. The plan to snuff out our anemic democracy is methodically laid out in the 887-page plan amassed by the Heritage Foundationcalled “Mandate for Leadership.”
The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million to draw up policy proposals, hiring lists and transition plans in Project 2025 to save Trump from the rudderless chaos that plagued his first term. Trump blames “snakes,” “traitors,” and the “Deep State” for undermining his first administration.
Our industrious American fascists, clutching the Christian cross and waving the flag, will begin work on day one to purge federal agencies of “snakes” and “traitors,” promulgate “Biblical” values, cut taxes for the billionaire class, abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, stack the courts and federal agencies with ideologues and strip workers of the few rights and protections they have left. War and internal security, including the wholesale surveillance of the public, will remain the main business of the state. The other functions of the state, especially those that focus on social services, including Social Security and protection of the vulnerable, will wither away.
Unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which has no self-imposed limits, turns everything into a commodity, from human beings to the natural world, which it exploits, until exhaustion or collapse. It first creates a mafia economy, as Karl Polanyi writes, and then a mafia government. Political theorists, including Aristotle, Karl Marx and Sheldon Wolin, warn that when oligarchs seize power, the only options left are tyranny or revolution.
The Democrats know the working class has abandoned them. And they know why. Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux writes:
[C]ontrary to many pundits’ assumptions, economic issues are driving the problems of Democrats in non-metro working class counties far more than the culture war…[T]hese voters wouldn’t care all that much about cultural difference and the woke thing if they thought Democrats gave more of a damn about economic challenges they face deeply and daily…The voters we need to win in these counties are not inherently right-wing on social issues.
But the Democrats will not alienate the corporations and billionaires who keep them in office. They have opted instead for two self-defeating tactics: lies and fear.
The Democrats express a faux concern for workers who are victimized by mass layoffs while at the same time courting the corporate leaders who orchestrate these layoffs with lavish government contracts. The same hypocrisy sees them express concern for civilians being slaughtered in Gaza while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel and vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. to sustain the genocide.
Les Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers, filled with exhaustive polling and data, illustrates that economic dislocation and despair is the engine behind an enraged working class, not racism and bigotry.
He writes about the decision by Siemens to close its plant in Olean, New York with 530 decent paying union jobs. While Democrats bemoaned the closure, they refused to deny federal contracts to Siemans to protect the workers at the plant.
Biden then invited Siemens’ USA CEO Barbara Humpton to the White House signing of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The photo of the signing shows Humpton standing in the front row along with New York Senator Chuck Schumer.
Mingo County in the early 20th century was the epicenter of an armed clash between the United Mine Workers and the coal barons, with their hired gun thugs from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The gun thugs evicted striking workers in 1912 from company housing and beat up and shot union members until the state militia occupied the coal towns and broke the strike. The federal siege was not lifted until 1933 by the Roosevelt administration. The union, which had been banned, was legalized.
“Mingo County didn’t forget, at least not for a long time,” Leopold writes. “As late as 1996, with more than 3,200 coal miners still at work, Mingo County gave Bill Clinton a whopping 69.7 percent of its vote. But every four years thereafter, support for the Democrats declined, going down and down, and down some more. By 2020, Joe Biden received only 13.9 percent of the vote in Mingo, a brutal downturn in a county that once saw the Democratic Party as its savior.”
The 3,300 Mingo County coal mining jobs by 2020 had fallen to 300, the largest loss of coal jobs in any county in the country.
The lies of Democratic politicians did far more damage to working men and women than any of the lies spewed by Trump.
There have been at least 30 million mass layoffs since 1996 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking them, according to the Labor Institute. The reigning oligarchs, not content with mass layoffs and reducing the unionized workforce in the private sector to a paltry 6 percent, have filed legal papers to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces labor rights. Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s targeted the NLRB – already stripped of most of its power to levy fines and force corporate compliance – after it accused Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking the law by blocking union organizing. The NLRB accused SpaceX of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk. SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joes are seeking to get the federal courts to overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act to prevent judges from hearing cases brought against corporations for violating labor laws.
Fear — fear of the return of Trump and Christian fascism — is the only card the Democrats have left to play. This will work in urban, liberal enclaves where college educated technocrats, part of the globalized knowledge economy, are busy scolding and demonizing the working class for their ingratitude.
The Democrats have foolishly written off these “deplorables” as a lost political cause. This precariat, the mantra goes, is victimized not by a predatory system built to enrich the billionaire class, but by their ignorance and individual failures. Dismissing the disenfranchised absolves the Democrats from advocating the legislation to protect and create decent-paying jobs.
Fear has no hold in deindustrialized urban landscapes and the neglected wastelands of rural America, where families struggle without sustainable work, an opioid crisis, food deserts, personal bankruptcies, evictions, crippling debt and profound despair.
They want what Trump wants. Vengeance. Who can blame them?
The interim report published this month from Operation Kenova, the police investigation into the British spy “Stakeknife”, confirmed that British agents within the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) committed multiple murders.
The Stakeknife operation is among the foulest episodes of British imperialism’s decades long dirty war in Northern Ireland. Infiltration of the IRA and other republican and loyalist paramilitary groups, by British and Northern Ireland security and intelligence forces, was a central component of the 30-year conflict.
Kenova report, March 2024 [Photo: PSNI]
In line with the “Low Intensity Operations” doctrine codified by the British Army’s late General Sir Frank Kitson, infiltration of republican groups provided information allowing arrests, operations to be sabotaged and executions and bloody ambushes set up. Infiltration of, and collusion with, the loyalist, pro-British groups provided them with weaponry and targeting information, allowing them to function as state sanctioned assassination squads.
For several years up to 1991, for motives that remain uncertain, although money played a role, Freddie Scappaticci, a republican from Belfast, in the leadership of the IRA’s Internal Security Unit (ISU) intimidated, tortured, manipulated and murdered IRA members accused or suspected of being British agents. But, from sometime around 1978, Scappaticci was a British agent, feeding information on IRA discussions, operations and members to his British Army paymasters and controllers.
Freddie Scappaticci
Scappaticci was handled by the British Army’s spy operating Force Research Unit (FRU), while maintaining the image of a tough and violent operator respected by the republican leadership. Scappaticci, whose ISU also vetted new recruits to the Provisionals and maintained a brutal dictatorship in working class areas against youth accused of petty crimes, was outed in 2003 after years of suspicion, following failed operations, regarding the existence of top level British spies in the IRA.
In his readable 2023 work, “Stakeknife’s Dirty War” former IRA prisoner and press officer, Richard O’Rawe noted “the road to peace was strewn with dead bodies—many of them ASU [Active Service Unit] members, who were cut down in carefully constructed SAS [Special Air Services] ambushes.”
O’Rawe notes that the late Deputy First Minster of Northern Ireland, former head of the IRA’s Northern Command, Martin McGuinness, was central to Scappaticci’s rise to head the ISU in 1986.
Scappaticci’s treachery ran parallel with efforts of the Sinn Fein leadership to end their guerrilla war and find terms on which they could integrate themselves into the British government in the North and serve as partners in the exploitation of the working class. Remarkably, although sidelined and widely distrusted in republican circles from 1991 on, Scappaticci continued to live in Belfast, unhindered and unharmed.
When he was first publicly named in 2003, then Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams said he initially accepted Scappaticci’s protestations of innocence “at face value.” Stakeknife came to be identified, not because of republican efforts, but primarily through the work of disgruntled ex-FRU member Ian Hurst, incensed at the brutal treatment and murder of other British agents, sacrificed to maintain Stakeknife in place.
Scappaticci eventually fled, later in 2003, to unknown locations in the UK, after abandoning efforts to deny his role. He died in April last year.
He only surfaced in public once, at Westminster Magistrates Court, where he was found guilty of possessing extreme animal pornography. His case was heard by Chief Magistrate and Senior District Judge for England and Wales, Emma Arbuthnot, the same judge who spearheaded the legal torture of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.
“Judge” Emma Arbuthot
Unlike her treatment of the principled journalist and publisher targeted for exposing imperialist war crimes, Arbuthnot thought well of the brutal torturer and murderer Scappaticci. She told him “You have not been before the court for 50 years—and that’s good character in my book,” handing him a suspended sentence.
In 2003, the Stakeknife revelations threatened not only further damaging documentary and legal exposure of the British state’s murderous and cynical methods, and a large number of murder trials, but also to discredit the Sinn Fein leadership with grave political consequences for the Good Friday Agreement. Therefore Operation Kenova was not commissioned until 2015, 13 years after Scappaticci’s exposure and tasked with investigating 24 murders. Scappaticci was not interviewed until 2018.
It has taken another nine years for Kenova to deliver an interim report which does not even formally confirm that Scappaticci was Stakeknife. Instead, Kenova led by led then Chief Constable of Bedfordshire Jon Boutcher, names Scappaticci as “inextricably bound up with and a critical person of interest at the heart of Operation Kenova”. Beyond that, the report rests on generalisations.
For example, Kenova identified three types of murders:
murders committed by agents, including cases in which one agent murdered another.
murders of alleged or suspected agents, carried out as punishment or deterrence, including cases when the victim was not in fact an agent.
murders of both categories which could have been prevented but were not.
Kenova came to its conclusions after following up 12,000 lines of enquiry, taking 2,000 statements and interviewing 300 people, including 40 under caution. Eventually 35 files were submitted to the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland (PPSNI). These referred to over 50,000 pages of evidence acquired from official sources including previously undisclosed files. Newly available forensic techniques were deployed.
More detailed and specific reports on individual murders are going to be handed to families at a later date along with a final report which, Boutcher claims, “will confirm the truth and set out the full facts”.
Much of Boutcher’s interim report is devoted to problems setting up and managing the investigation and his frustrations in dealing with multiple security and legal agencies. These are bound up with the need to draw a line under the dirty war, present all the issues arising out of it as “legacy” while offering a pretence of legal restitution for families whose relatives were killed.
The Shankill road, Belfast during the troubles, circa 1970 [Photo by Fribbler / Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0]
This has given rise to considerable tensions between police and legal authorities—tasked with formally investigating large numbers of unsolved murders—and the huge intelligence, police and military apparatus and their political leadership in Britain and Northern Ireland. The British government and military have no more interest in investigating their crimes in Northern Ireland than in later and current atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan and worldwide.
Boutcher, despite repeatedly insisting on his support for the intelligence services work, writes of:
“The lack of any legal or policy framework to guide FRU and [Royal Ulster Constabulary] agent handlers in particular and of any associated oversight or supervisory mechanisms were very serious failings: they put lives at risk, left those on the frontline exposed and fostered a maverick culture where agent handling was sometimes seen as a high-stakes ‘dark art’ practised ‘off the books’.”
He admits:
“Whether a result of cultural obstruction, documents being over-classified or difficulty identifying and locating relevant material held by the authorities, access to records has been a persistent problem and a legitimate concern to families.”
Despite having negotiated agreements and single points of contact with the Security Service, MI5, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), data was still difficult to extract.
The Kenova team, for example, was given logins to intelligence database, MACER, used by the British Army. It became apparent that the MoD had a different set of logins with access to more records. Kenova was duly given more access, but Boutcher noted that the logins with greater rights had not been available to the series of previous investigations into intelligence activity and collusion in the “Troubles”.
Jon Boutcher [Photo: kenova/kenova.co.uk]
Boutcher complained that MI5 was holding historical material from the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch and the FRU which remained marked as Top Secret.
Boutcher notes that on the very day Kenova intended to submit its first set of files regarding members of both the Provisional IRA and the security forces, MI5 informed his team that their security credentials on their London building had expired.
He placed his difficulties in the context of a series of investigations into intelligence handling and collusion between loyalist killers and the British state, many remain Secret or Top Secret.
These include the Stalker report of 1984 into “shoot to kill” allegations against the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), predecessor to the PSNI. A follow up report, Sampson 1986, also remains Secret while a further review into both the Stalker and Sampson reports, the 1988 McLachlan report, is labeled Top Secret.
Sir John Stevens’ three reports into the leaking of targeting information from the security forces to loyalist killers found that almost all loyalist intelligence came from the British security forces. They were only partly released. A central focus of Stevens’ first report, Stevens 1, was the former soldier Brian Nelson’s role as both intelligence officer for the loyalist Ulster Defence Association and an agent for the FRU. Nelson had a role in as many as 30 murders. He was eventually charged and found guilty of 20 crimes, including conspiracy to murder.
Remarkably, Stevens was entirely unaware of Stakeknife despite Scappaticci being handled by the same FRU that he investigated regarding Nelson. Stevens 1 remains Top Secret. A follow up Blelloch report on agent handling was, until Boutcher requested a change, marked as Top Secret, now downgraded to Secret. Boutcher noted, “Lord Stevens said it was apparent that discussions at the highest level in the Army had resulted in the decision to withhold vital information from his inquiry team.” Stevens 2 remains Top Secret. Stevens 3, released in 2003, found that members of the security forces had colluded with the UDA in loyalist murders including that of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane in 1989.
In his outcomes and findings, Boutcher insists that files handed to the PPSNI “contain significant evidence implicating Stakeknife and others in very serious criminality and that this needs to be ventilated publicly.” But no-one in senior government or military positions claimed to have had any knowledge of Stakeknife. Boutcher points to what he euphemistically describes as “conscious lack of professional curiosity from the very senior leadership of the Army” regarding recruitment and running of agents.
Nevertheless, “Our Kenova investigations have established that agents were regularly involved in inciting and committing serious criminal acts” and “It is undoubtedly the case that some FRU and RUC Special Branch agents disclosed their involvement in criminality to their handlers (both before and after the event) and were assured that their anonymity and status would always be protected and they would never stand trial or spend time in jail.”
Shortly before Boutcher’s report was published, the PPSNI announced it would not be taking action against seven people alleged to have been Provisional IRA members and five retired members of the British Army’s Force Research Unit, said to be agent handlers, and more senior army figures. This follows decisions, stretching back to 2020 to avoid prosecuting former Security Service members and a PPSNI prosecutor.
Late 2023, the PPSNI said it would not be proceeding against “civilian suspects” in connection with murders, conspiracy to murder and false imprisonment, one police officer and six military personnel over allegations of perverting the course of justice and misconduct in public office. Earlier last month the PPSNI decided not to proceed against a further two former soldiers and two alleged Provisional IRA members.
Not one of the files submitted to the PPSNI by Kenova have resulted in a single prosecution.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin addressing an AIPAC forum in Washington, D.C., Jan. 10, 2023. (DoD, Alexander Kubitza)
As was to be expected, considering the extreme complexity of the U.S.-Israel relationship, our recent article on “The Myth of Israel as ‘US Aircraft Carrier’ in Middle East,” far from settling this controversial issue, aroused numerous objections. We see these disagreements as an invitation to respond, in the hope that a friendly debate can contribute to clarifying the issues.
The Aircraft Carrier Image
A reader directly asks us “what individual or entity is the quotation ‘The Myth of Israel as “US Aircraft Carrier” in Middle East’ borrowed from or attributed to?”
There is no single answer, inasmuch as this image is used quite frequently, originally by advocates of the U.S.-Israel alliance, to justify it. That the Zionists make this claim is to be expected, and is no more credible than their other claims.
Our questioning of that expression is directed primarily at pro-Palestinian friends, usually on the left who accept and spread the belief that Israel is a U.S. “strategic asset,” usually meaning it contributes to U.S. control of Middle East oil.
This assumption is often based on the notion that a capitalist power must act in its own economic interest, and thus could not be fooled by ideology or bribery into acting against its own interests.
Not wanting to engage in ad hominem attacks on commentators with whom we largely agree on just about everything else, we have been reluctant to name names. But here goes: a perfect example is a recent interview with the excellent economist Michael Hudson by Ben Norton. Both identify as Marxist. Their interview is titled “Israel as a Landed Aircraft Carrier.”
Norton introduces his interview by citing Biden’s notorious declaration, “if there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one.”
Michael Hudson takes up the theme. He stresses that U.S. support to Israel, is “not altruistic” (no doubt), and provides his own explanation.
“Israel is a landed aircraft carrier in the Near East. Israel is the takeoff point for America to control the Near East…The United States has always viewed Israel as just our foreign military base…”
His initial justification for this statement is historic.
“When England first passed the act saying that there should be an Israel, the Balfour Declaration, it was because Britain wanted to control the Near East and its oil supplies…”
However, we maintain that the reasons for the Balfour Declaration (discussed at length in the book by Alison Weir that we cite) are long out of date and cannot explain current U.S. official devotion to Israel.
By the time Israel came into being, after World War II, the U.S. had effectively taken control of the region and its oil sources and had no particular interest in Israel.
Saudi King Ibn Saud converses with FDR (right) through an interpreter, Feb. 14, 1945, on board the USS Quincy, in the Suez Canal, during which U.S. secured Saudi oil flows in exchange for U.S. security guarantees. (U.S. Navy/Wikimedia Commons)
Hudson’s second justification is a generalization about U.S. imperialism:
“And that’s really the U.S. strategy all over the world; it’s trying to fuel other countries to fight wars for its own control.”
But in fact, the fighting and dying in the Middle East has been done by the United States itself and certain NATO allies, while the only people Israeli soldiers are actively fighting are the Palestinians, whose destruction provides no advantage to the United States.
Uzi Arad in 2011. (Harald Dettenborn, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 de)
Hudson’s third justification is an anecdote. From his work at the Hudson Institute, he became a close associate of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main national security adviser, Uzi Arad. Once they were together at a party in San Francisco, and
“one of the U.S. generals came over and slapped Uzi on the back and said, ‘you’re our landed aircraft carrier over there. We love you.’ ”
So that is what a U.S. general said, and probably believed. It is certainly what the Israeli lobby has been telling the Americans for a long time, to justify all that money and military aid. But is it true?
Perhaps one can say that Israel is an aircraft carrier salesman who never delivers the aircraft carrier. Because Israel for a long time has had the rare privilege of NOT housing a U.S. military base, or at least not housing it openly.
Only in 2017, the U.S. and Israel revealed the inauguration of “the first American military base on Israeli soil,” which the U.S. military said was not an American base but merely living quarters for U.S. personnel working on a secret Israeli radar site in the Negev desert evidently spying on Iran. This facility serves Israeli defense interests. Some aircraft carrier!
And all through the Middle East, the U.S. has its own floating aircraft carriers, as well as great big genuine, non-floating military bases. The largest is Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, and there are important military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Netanyahu as Zelensky
However, Hudson’s argument does not in fact explain how Israel serves U.S. purposes as a military asset, as an “aircraft carrier” in the sense of an unsinkable military base which the U.S. can use to attack its enemies. Rather, Hudson sees Israel as an expendable pawn, a puppet used by Washington to trigger a war that the U.S. wants to wage against Iran, to the ruin of Israel itself.
Hudson sees Netanyahu as “the Israeli version of Zelensky in the Ukraine.” Just as the U.S. used Ukraine to provoke Russia, the United States pushes Netanyahu to escalate against Gaza so that he will provoke Hezbollah to come to the aid of the Palestinians, and since Hezbollah is described as an Iranian proxy, this will be the excuse for the U.S. to go to war against Iran.
March 21, 2019: Netanyahu on phone with U.S. President Donald Trump during a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo to Jerusalem. (U.S. State Department/Ron Przysucha)
Hudson said:
“The whole world has noticed that the U.S. now has two aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, right off the Near Eastern shore, and it has an atomic submarine near the Persian Gulf…. And it’s very clear that they’re there not to protect Israel, but to fight Iran. Again and again, every American newspaper, when it talks about Hamas, it says Hamas is acting on behalf of Iran….
America isn’t trying to fight to protect Ukraine. It’s fighting for the last Ukrainian to be exhausted in what they’d hoped would be depleting Russia’s military. …Well, the same thing in Israel. If the United States is pushing Israel and Netanyahu to escalate, escalate, escalate, to do something that at a point is going to lead [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah to finally say, ‘okay, we can’t take it anymore.
We’re coming in and helping rescue the Gazans and especially rescue the West Bank, where just as much fighting is taking place. We’re going to come in.’ And that’s when the United States will then feel free to move not only against Lebanon, but all the way via Syria, Iraq, to Iran.”
So this implies that the U.S. military and civilian strategists are eager to find an excuse to go to war with Iran, after having failed to gain full control of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan or Syria after attacking them militarily (with help from certain NATO allies, but not from Israel). And Iran is a much more formidable power than any of those.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Armed Forces are having difficulty in recruitment (although they may be counting on filling the ranks with some of the undocumented immigrants flooding across the southern borders). Bogged down in Ukraine, preparing for conflict with China, are U.S. leaders really eager to get into a major war with Iran?
This speculation raises the key question raised by a number of Consortium News readers: what is meant by the U.S. national interest?
The National Interest
As we anticipated, there are readers on the left who interpret our appeal to “the national interest” as proof that we are defenders of capitalism. One reader writes: “The defense of capitalism in this article is truly bewildering. The authors conflate U.S. interests with Corporate interests.” That conflation is being done by the reader who assumes that “national interest” cannot be diversely defined.
Our position is simple. We are not aware of any realistic prospect for abolishing the American capitalist system in the foreseeable future, even though there are many symptoms of its radical decline both domestically and in international relations. This decline is due largely to the way the “national interest” is currently defined and pursued.
“This assumption is often based on the notion that a capitalist power must act in its own economic interest, and thus could not be fooled by ideology or bribery into acting against its own interests.”
Our view is that even under capitalism, some policies are better or worse than others. When it comes to the urgency of the survival of the Palestinian people, or more broadly, of sparing humanity the devastation of nuclear war, prudent policies are worth the risk of benefiting some less harmful branches of capitalism in some way.
Although the political system is largely paralyzed, there exist contrary ways of defining the national interest, and some are more perilous for the future of humanity than others.
The current policies that define the official “national interest” in the United States did not spring forth from a unanimous understanding or scientific analysis of what is best for capitalist profit or for anything else. The current ruling foreign policy doctrine is the product of specific influences and individuals that can be named and identified.
To be precise, the “national interest” that is being pursued by the current administration both on the elected top and especially the deep state below is a theoretical construct that has been created by the convergence of two powers that have excluded their rivals from the process.
These two powers are the military-industrial complex and the intellectual branch of the Zionist lobby, known as the “neoconservatives.”
The Lobby as Policy Maker
Biden in Israel, July 2022. (U.S. Embassy Jerusalem, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
U.S. foreign policy has encountered moments where positive change was possible: after withdrawal from Vietnam, and even more, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At that point, all the interests linked to the military industrial complex were under threat from the prospect of a “peace dividend” involving substantial disarmament.
What was needed was a fresh ideological justification for the MIC, and this was provided by the growing influence of the privately-financed think tanks that began their takeover of foreign policy definition in the 1970s.
In the following decades, these institutions came under the decisive influence of Zionist donors such as Haim Saban, Sheldon Adelson and AIPAC itself, which founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. These think tanks provided echo chambers for pro-Israel neocon intellectuals to shape editorial policy of major liberal media as well as foreign policy itself.
Here is the point: current U.S. policy is not the natural expression of “capitalist corporate interests,” but rather is the product of that process, of the deliberate takeover of U.S. foreign policy by a highly motivated, coherent and talented group of intellectuals, some with dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship. This policy has a name: the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine & PNAC
The text is available on internet and speaks for itself. It was written as the initial version of the Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–1999 fiscal years in the office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz, an ardent Zionist.
The version leaked to The New York Times in March 1992 was officially toned down after it caused an uproar, but it has remained as the guidelines for aggressive U.S foreign policy ever since.
Basically, the doctrine announces that the main objective of the United States is to retain its status as the world’s only remaining superpower. No serious rival must be allowed to develop.
This amounts to decreeing that history has come to a stop, and denies the natural historical process whereby China, for instance, which in the past was a leading power, must not be allowed to resume that status.
Wolfowitz during a press conference at the Pentagon on March 1, 2001. (DoD photo by R. D. Ward)
In 1997, neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagan founded the “Project for the New American Century” with the clear purpose of defining U.S. foreign policy in line with the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
As the “world’s pre-eminent power,” the United States must “shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.” This was to be done neither by virtuous example nor by diplomacy, but by military strength and the force of arms.
PNAC members including Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz took control of policy under President George W. Bush and have kept it ever since.
Inside one administration after another, Robert Kagan’s wife, former Cheney aide Victoria Nuland (who last week said she would be resigning her State Dept. position) has advanced the neocon agenda, notably by managing the Ukrainian disaster. PNAC dissolved itself in 2006, announcing that its job was done.
This job amounted to linking the powerful military industrial complex to the global extension of U.S. power that was turned first and foremost against Israel’s Arab neighbors, starting with Iraq.
This branch of the Lobby, inside the government itself and mainstream media, on the false claim that Iraq was a dangerous enemy of the U.S., got the U.S. to attack and destroy a regime that was in fact an enemy of Israel.
The U.S. was fighting on Israel’s behalf, not the other way around.
The neoconservatives have designed the policy which AIPAC pays members of Congress to support. Every senator has taken AIPAC money.
National Interests Can Be Redefined
The Wolfowitz doctrine is expressed in Nuland’s anti-Russian Ukrainian policy as well as in the American provocations surrounding Taiwan. These policies are not inevitable, even under capitalism.
The expansion of NATO, as an example, was firmly opposed by a generation of U.S. foreign policy experts who have been sidelined and expelled from the policy-making process by the triumphant neocons.
Some are still alive, and others can emerge. So it is neither far-fetched nor “pro-capitalist” to suggest that a more realistic, less arrogant and belligerent foreign policy might be possible.
Such a change cannot be easy, but may be favored precisely by growing recognition of the multiple failures of the reigning neoconservative foreign policy.
For this, a free debate is necessary, in which it is possible to challenge the role of the Lobby without being accused of plagiarizing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
It is obvious that in the United States, where this debate is most significant, there are Zionists who are not Jewish, while a very large proportion of the Jewish population is highly critical of Israel and has nothing to do with the Lobby.
The government in Jerusalem proclaiming itself “the Jewish State” as it slaughters native Palestinians is responsible for any current rise in misguided anti-Jewish feelings, which that government blatantly exploits to attract Jewish immigrants from France and New Jersey, in particular.
A reader suggests: “Some folks may find it emotionally and psychologically comforting to blame The Lobby and Israel for the evil of U.S. foreign policy, and somehow the good ol USA is an unwitting victim.”
Can’t we more accurately suggest: “Some folks may find it emotionally and psychologically comforting to blame the U.S. foreign policy for everything rather than risk the inevitable furious reactions to any mention of the Lobby and Israel?”
“The U.S. was fighting on Israel’s behalf, not the other way around.”
Certainly U.S. foreign policy is responsible for everything it does, and that is a gigantic evil. But that does not mean that everyone else is totally innocent.
The Lobby is most certainly responsible for doing all it can to encourage the very worst tendencies in U.S. arrogant exceptionalism, the MIC, Islamophobia and Christian evangelical fantasies, when they can be used against Israel’s adversaries.
And we maintain that encouraging the worst tendencies is not in the American interest.
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Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
The Four Stooges saga of Bundeswehr officers plotting to blow up the Kerch bridge in Crimea with Taurus missiles and getting away with it is a gift that keeps on giving.
President Putin, in his comprehensive interview to Dmitry Kiselev for Russia 1/RIA Novosti, did not fail to address it:
“They are fantasizing, encouraging themselves, first of all. Secondly, they are trying to intimidate us. As for the Federal Republic of Germany, there are constitutional problems there. They correctly say: if these Taurus hit that part of the Crimean Bridge, which, of course, even according to their concepts, is Russian territory, this is a violation of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.”
Yet it gets curioser and curioser.
When the transcript of the Taurus leak was published by RT, everyone was able to hear Brigadier General Frank Gräfe – head of operations of the German Air Force – speaking with Lieutenant Colonel Fenske from the German Space Command Air Operations on the plan to deploy Taurus systems in Ukraine.
A key point is that during the plotting, these two mention that plans were already discussed “four months ago” with “Schneider”, the successor of “Wilsbach”.
Well, these are German names, of course. Thus it did not dawn on anyone that (Kevin) Schneider and (Kenneth) Wilsbach could instead be… Americans.
Yet that did raise the eyebrows of German investigative journalist Dirk Pohlmann – who I had the pleasure to meet in Berlin years ago – and his fellow researcher Tobias Augenbraun.
They found out that the German-sounding names did identify Americans. Not only that: none less than the former and the current Commanders of the U.S. Pacific Air Forces.
The Four (actually Six) Stooges element gets an extra boost when it is established that Liver Sausage Chancellor Scholz and his Totalenkrieg Minister Pistorius learned about the Taurus plan no less than four months later.
So here apparently we have a clear cut case of top German military officers taking direct orders regarding an attack on Crimea – part of the Russian Federation – directly from American officers in the Pacific Air Forces.
That in itself opens the dossier to a large spectrum ranging from national treason (against Germany) to casus belli (from the point of view of Russia).
Of course none of that is being discussed on German mainstream media.
After all, the only thing that seems to disturb Brigadier General Gräfe is that German media may start seriously prying on the Bundeswehr’s Multiple Stooges methods.
The only ones who actually did proper investigation were Pohlmann and Augenbaun.
It would be too much to expect from German media of the “Bild” type to analyze what would be the Russian response to the Multiple Stooge shenanigans against Crimea: a devastating retaliation against Berlin assets.
It’s so cold in Alaska
During the jolly Bundeswehr conversation yet another “plan” is mentioned:
“Nee, nee. Ich mein wegen der anderen Sache.” (“No, no. I mean the other matter.”) Then: “Ähm … meinst du Alaska jetzt?” (“Ahm, you mean Alaska now?”)
It all gest juicier when it is known that German Space Command Air Operations Centre officer Florstedt will meet none other than Schneider next Tuesday, March 19, in Alaska.
And Gräfe will also “have to go back to Alaska” to explain everything all over again to Schneider as he is “new” in the post.
So the question is: Why Alaska?
Enter American shadowplay on a lot of “activities” in Alaska – which happen to concern none other than China.
And there’s more: during the conversation still another “plan” (“Auftrag”, meaning “mission”) also surfaces, bearing a not clearly understandable code name sounding like “Kumalatra”.
What all of that tells us is that the Crash Test Dummy administration in the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon seem to betting, in desperation, on Total War in the black soil of Novorossiya.
And now they are sayin’ it out loud, with no shadow play, and coming directly from the head of the CIA, William Burns, who obviously sucks at secrecy.
This is what Burns told the members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this week:
“I think without supplemental assistance in 2024, you’re going to see more Avdeevkas, and that – it seems to me – would be a massive and historic mistake for the United States.”
That spells out how much the Avdeevka trauma is impressed on the psyche of the U.S. intel apparatus.
Yet there’s more: “With supplemental assistance, Ukraine can hold its own on the front lines through 2024 and into early 2025. Ukraine can continue to exact costs against Russia, not only with deep penetration strikes in Crimea, but also against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.”
Here we go: Crimea all over again.
Burns actually believes that the humongous $60 billion new “aid” package which must be approved by the U.S. Congress will enable Kiev to launch an “offensive” by the end of 2024.
The only thing he gets right is that if there’s no new package, there will be “significant territorial losses for Ukraine this year.”
Burns may not be the brightest bulb in the – intel – room. A long time ago he was a diplomat/CIA asset in Moscow, and seems to have learned nothing.
Apart from letting cats and kitties galore out of the bag. It’s not only about attacking Crimea. This one is being read with surpreme delight in Beijing:
“The U.S. is providing assistance to Ukraine in part because such activities help curb China.”
Burns nailed his Cat Out of the Bag Oscar win when he said “if we’re seen to be walking away from support for Ukraine, not only is that going to feed doubts amongst our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific; it’s going to stoke the ambitions of the Chinese leadership in contingencies ranging from Taiwan to the South China Sea”.
The inestimable Andrei Martyanov perfectly summed up the astonishing incompetence, peppered with tawdry exceptionalism, that permeates this performance by Burns.
There are things “they cannot grasp due to low level of education and culture. This is a new paradigm for them – all of them are ‘graduates’ of the school of ‘beating the crap from defenseless nations’ strategic ‘studies’, and with the level of economic ‘science’ in the West they cannot grasp how this all unfolds.”
So what is left is panic, as expressed by Burns in the Senate, mixed with the impotence in understanding a “different warrior culture” such as Russia’s: “They simply have no reference points.”
Even as the acronym fest of the CIA and 17 other U.S. intel agencies have concluded, in a report shown to Congress earlier this week, that Russia is “almost certainly” seeking to avoid a direct military conflict with NATO and will calibrate its policies to steer clear of a global war.
After all the Empire of Chaos is all about Forever Wars. And we are all in the middle of a do or die affair. The Empire simply cannot afford the cosmic humiliation of NATO in Novorossiya.
Still every “plan” – Taurus on Crimea-style – is a bluff. Russia is aware of bluff after bluff. The Western cards are now all on the table. The only question is when, and how fast will Russia call the bluff.
In defense of Jonathan Glazer: The Zone of Interest director under venomous attack for Academy Awards statement
James Wilson, from left, Leonard Blavatnik, and Jonathan Glazer accept the award for “The Zone of Interest” from the United Kingdom, for best international feature film at the Oscars on Sunday, March 10, 2024, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. [AP Photo/Chris Pizzello]
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British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer has become the target of a vicious witch-hunt for his remarks at the Academy Awards ceremony last Sunday. Upon receiving the award for best international feature film for The Zone of Interest, about the commandant of Auschwitz, Glazer told the audience:
All our choices we made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say “look what they did then.” Rather, “look what we do now.” Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present.
Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza—all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?
Glazer’s entirely legitimate response to the fact that he and his colleagues have had “their Jewishness and the Holocaust hijacked” by the current Israeli onslaught in Gaza struck a nerve with the professional defenders of Israel’s mass crimes. Someone letting the general public in on a dirty secret, that the Zionists routinely and cynically make use of the horrors of the Holocaust to justify their atrocities—before an international viewing audience that still numbers in the tens of millions—had to be denounced and smeared.
The result has been a stream of vitriolic, hysterical abuse.
Some of the critics were stupid or dishonest enough to misquote Glazer and report that he had simply “refuted his Jewishness.” Meghan McCain, “television personality,” daughter of the late warmonger Sen. John McCain and a reactionary in her own right, denounced a situation in which “a man gets on stage to ‘refute his Jewishness’ and half the room claps.” She was corrected by hundreds of commentators on social media, to no effect of course.
Abraham Foxman, former director of the Anti-Defamation League and a ferocious defender of Israel, also chose to distort Glazer’s statement, asserting that as “a survivor of the Holocaust I am shocked the director would slap the memory of over 1 million Jews who died because they were Jews by announcing he refutes his Jewishness. Shame on you.”
The pro-Zionist forces who managed to grasp Glazer’s comment, however, were no less hostile.
Noa Tishby, a former Israeli government official, has become a leading apologist in the US for Israel’s crimes. She denounced the entire film award event March 10, without mentioning Glazer by name, as “a subtle and overt display of Jew-hatred.”
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, another media-seeking defender of Zionism, took to X to denounce Glazer’s comments as “Absolutely disgusting!” The director, according to Boteach, had “betrayed his people and disgraced himself and trivialized the 6 million martyrs of the holocaust, when he said that Israel’s War in Gaza was hijacking the memory of the holocaust. How dare you compare the two? You fool. The whole purpose of Israel’s war in Gaza is to make sure THERE ISN’T A SECOND HOLOCAUST so we don’t need more of your films because Jews actually remain alive. HAMAS HAS ONE INTENTION. GENOCIDE OF JEWS.”
These are fascist-minded individuals who only restrain themselves, for the moment at least, from bellowing: Kill all the Arabs!
David Schaecter, president of the Miami-based Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA, defensively claimed that Glazer’s comment was “factually incorrect and morally indefensible” and said that Israel “has nothing to do with the Holocaust.” He insisted Glazer was trying to “equate Hamas’ maniacal brutality against innocent Israelis with Israel’s difficult but necessary self-defense in the face of Hamas’s ongoing barbarity.”
The CEO of Combat Antisemitism Movement Sacha Roytman Dratwa claimed that Glazer had appropriated “his religious and ethnic identity to attack the national homeland of the Jewish People which is fighting a war on seven fronts against those who openly call for the genocide of Jews.”
These people can justify anything. One hundred thousand Gazans dead, wounded or missing; 2,000 pound Israeli-“Made in the USA” bombs dropped on residential neighborhoods; the destruction of hospitals, universities, mosques, libraries and schools; the assassination of political opponents, intellectuals, artists; the slaughter of thousands of women and children; the sadistic torture and summary execution of prisoners; the deliberate starvation of an entire population.
The world watches in horror as the Israeli military commits one crime after another, each more heinous than the one before. And through it all, the pack of fascists that comprise Netanyahu’s cabinet, along with the leading voices of the Israeli and global media, and the Biden administration and its European allies insist they are fighting “terrorism” and “antisemitism.”
One of the most repulsive and dishonest attacks on Glazer was posted on the Hollywood Reporter website, appropriately enough, as the publication played a leading role in the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the late 1940s and 1950s. The piece, by one Richard Trank, first of all, lyingly asserts that the current conflict began October 7, not 76 years ago with the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, followed by decades of destruction of villages and orchards, theft of land, persecution, murder and abuse, including almost 20 years of forcing the Gazan population to live in an open-air prison camp.
Trank presents the ongoing genocidal campaign and subsequent events in these terms:
Toward the end of October, the Israeli army attacked Hamas in Gaza, determined to wipe it out forever so that an atrocity like this [October 7] will never happen again. In the subsequent months, we have watched pro-Hamas and anti-Israel forces unleash a campaign of worldwide antisemitism the likes of which has not been seen since the Nazi era.
Trank argues that those actors and others at the awards ceremony March 10 who sported “red pins in support of a Cease Fire Now and Palestinian flags on their lapels” were wearing the equivalent of “swastika pins in sympathy with Hitler’s Reich.”
There is an element of derangement in this type of slanderous comment. Glazer’s observation about “dehumanization” seems entirely fitting. No crime is beyond the Israeli regime and its backers in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin. There are no military, moral or intellectual “red lines.”
Derangement, and extreme anxiety. Tens of millions have expressed their horror at the mass killings in Gaza. Great numbers of Jewish young people, in the US and elsewhere, are participating in the mass protests. Glazer’s remarks, from a filmmaker without a history of political commentary or intervention, demonstrates how far the discrediting of Zionism’s lies has reached.
Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America.
Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.
America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan, and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.
As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy, and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War, and become the “lone superpower” on this planet.
In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. President John F. Kennedy’s White House, manipulated by the CIA into the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.
America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.
Creeping Disaster in Ukraine
Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has been a curiously bipartisan project. As the Soviet Union began breaking up in 1991, Washington focused on ensuring that Moscow’s arsenal of possibly 45,000 nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons then stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at Dnipropetrovsk.
During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine’s future independence and gave what became known as his “chicken Kiev” speech, saying: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” He would, however, soon recognize Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as independent states since they didn’t have nuclear weapons.
When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, though it had no way to actually deliver most of those atomic weapons. To persuade Ukraine to transfer its nuclear warheads to Moscow, Washington launched three years of multilateral negotiations, while giving Kyiv “assurances” (but not “guarantees”) of its future security — the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank account with a zero balance.
Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security in December 1994, three former Soviet republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine — signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and started transferring their atomic weapons to Russia. Simultaneously, Russia, the U.S., and Great Britain agreed to respect the sovereignty of the three signatories and refrain from using such weaponry against them. Everyone present, however, seemed to understand that the agreement was, at best, tenuous. (One Ukrainian diplomat told the Americans that he had “no illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.”)
Meanwhile — and this should sound familiar today — Russian President Boris Yeltsin raged against Washington’s plans to expand NATO further, accusing President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a “cold peace.” Right after that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”
Nonetheless, once those former Soviet republics were safely disarmed of their nuclear weapons, Clinton agreed to begin admitting new members to NATO, launching a relentless eastward march toward Russia that continued under his successor George W. Bush. It came to include three former Soviet satellites, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); three one-time Soviet Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (2004); and three more former satellites, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004). At the Bucharest summit in 2008, moreover, the alliance’s 26 members unanimously agreed that, at some unspecified point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would “become members of NATO.” In other words, having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by annexing that nation to create its own security corridor.
In those years, Washington also came to believe that it could transform Russia into a functioning democracy to be fully integrated into a still-developing American world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia’s governance had been autocratic and every ruler from Catherine the Great to Leonid Brezhnev had achieved domestic stability through incessant foreign expansion. So, it should hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.
In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President Obama recognized the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that land to Russia’s orbit, saying: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”
Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.” At first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and the West reacted with a striking resolve — cutting Europe’s energy imports from Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of Scandinavia, and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.
After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets, and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in Russia’s favor.
Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks, the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s recent reverses on the battlefield.
The Republican Party’s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential to Vladimir Putin during “the now legendarily disastrous press conference” at Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced “the Kremlin held sway over the American president.” But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted recently, the Republican Party’s historic “isolationism is still on the march.” Indeed, between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feels that “Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach… [and] the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.”
Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay its fair share sent shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider what such an alliance would be like without the United States (even as Russian President Vladimir Putin, undoubtedly sensing a weakening of U.S. resolve, threatened Europe with nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington’s global leadership is now anything but a certainty.
Crisis in Gaza
Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that Authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.
In 2005, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving “Israel’s security and international status.” Within two years, however, Hamas militants had seized power in Gaza, ousting the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.
Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic October 7th Hamas attack, theTimes of Israelpublished this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.” In her lead piece, senior political correspondent Tal Schneider reported: “For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”
On October 18th, with the Israeli bombing of Gaza already inflicting severe casualties on Palestinian civilians, President Biden flew to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Netanyahu that would prove eerily reminiscent of Trump’s Helsinki press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised the president for drawing “a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” Biden endorsed that Manichean view by condemning Hamas for “evils and atrocities that make ISIS look somewhat more rational” and promised to provide the weaponry Israel needed “as they respond to these attacks.” Biden said nothing about Netanyahu’s previous arm’s length alliance with Hamas or the two-state solution. Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N. while air-freighting, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including the behemoth 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that were soon flattening Gaza’s high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.
After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes, and nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world. In November and again in February, massive crowds calling for peace in Gaza marched in Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Istanbul, and Dakar, among other places.
Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000 in Gaza, striking numbers of them children, has already weakened Biden’s domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 — including Arab-Americans in the key swing state of Michigan, African-Americans nationwide, and younger voters more generally. To heal the breach, Biden is now becoming desperate for a negotiated cease-fire. In an inept intertwining of international and domestic politics, the president has given Netanyahu, a natural ally of Donald Trump, the opportunity for an October surprise of more devastation in Gaza that could rip the Democratic coalition apart and thereby increase the chances of a Trump win in November — with fatal consequences for U.S. global power.
Trouble in the Taiwan Straits
While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”
After recognizing Beijing as “the sole legal Government of China” in 1979, Washington agreed to “acknowledge” that Taiwan was part of China. At the same time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring “that the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force… that would jeopardize the security… of the people on Taiwan.”
Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese President Xi Jinping told the 20th Communist Party Congress that “reunification must be realized” and refused “to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan. In a fateful counterpoint, President Biden stated, as recently as September 2022, that the US would defend Taiwan “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”
But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that “unprecedented attack” by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs quarantine that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland China. With the island’s major ports at Taipei and Kaohsiung facing the Taiwan Straits, any American warships trying to break that embargo would face a lethal swarm of nuclear submarines, jet aircraft, and ship-killing missiles.
Given the near-certain loss of two or three aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy would likely back off and Taiwan would be forced to negotiate the terms of its reunification with Beijing. Such a humiliating reversal would send a clear signal that, after 80 years, American dominion over the Pacific had finally ended, inflicting another major blow to U.S. global hegemony.
The Sum of Three Crises
Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow, and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, President Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November.
Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.
Outside annual AIPAC meeting in Washington, March 2016. (Susan Melkisethian, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
If Israeli apartheid were to disappear, oil and trade would still flow from the Middle East towards the West.
Why does the United States give total support to Israel?
In answer, there is a common myth shared by both champions and radical critics of the Zionist state which needs to be dispelled.
The myth is that Israel is a major U.S. strategic asset, described as a sort of unsinkable American aircraft carrier vital to Washington’s interests in the Middle East.
The line of argument of those who share this myth is to show that the United States has economic and strategic interests in the oil-rich Middle East (which nobody denies) and to quote American (and, of course, Israeli) political figures who claim that Israel is the best or even the sole U.S. ally in the region.
For example U.S. President Joe Biden has gone so far as to say that if Israel didn’t exist the U.S. should have invented it.
But the crucial evidence, totally missing from their analysis, is the slightest example of Israel actually serving American interests in the region.
If no examples are given, it’s simply because there are none. Israel has never fired a shot on behalf of the United States or brought a drop of oil under U.S. control.
We can start with a common sense argument: If the U.S. is interested in Middle East oil, why would it support a country that is hated (for whatever reasons) by all the populations of the oil producing countries?
In the 1950s, such was the reasoning of most U.S. experts, who put good relations with Arab countries ahead of support to Israel. This no doubt helps explain why AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was founded in 1963, to align U.S. policy with that of Israel.
1967 War & After
U.S. support for Israel took off after the 1967 war. Israel’s success dealt a fatal blow to the Arab nationalism embodied by Egypt’s Gamal Nasser, which some U.S. policy-makers falsely saw as a potential communist threat (which they saw just about everywhere).
But the war was waged by Israel for its own interests and expansion, with no benefit to the United States.
On the contrary: a remarkable official silence has been maintained over the fact that in the course of that short war, the American intelligence gathering ship USS Liberty, which was spying on the conflict, was shelled for several hours by the Israeli air force, with the obvious intention to sink it, killing 34 sailors and wounding 174.
Damage to USS Liberty, June 1967. (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Had there been no survivors, Egypt could have been accused (making it a “false flag” operation). The survivors were ordered not to speak about it, and the incident was never fully investigated, accepting the official Israeli explanation that it was a “mistake.” In any case, Israel’s behavior was not exactly that of a precious ally.
When Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006, that country’s government was perfectly “pro-Western.” What’s more, during the 1991 war against Iraq over Kuwait, the United States insisted that Israel should not participate, because such involvement would have collapsed their Arab anti-Iraq coalition. Again, it’s hard here to see Israel as an indispensable “ally.”
U.S. post-9/11 wars have targeted Israel’s enemies — Iraq, Libya, Syria — with no advantage to U.S. oil companies, on the contrary. The question arises whether the U.S. choice of enemies in the Middle East has not been determined by the interests of a foreign government, contrary to American interests in the region.
Washington & Gaza Today
Now we come to the current situation: what interest does the United States have in the slaughter being perpetrated in Gaza?
In reality, what Washington is doing is trying to maintain good relations with their Arab allies (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States) by pretending to seek a compromise while exerting no effective pressure on Israel – for instance, by cutting off funds.
And why don’t they? The answer is obvious but saying so is politically incorrect, and is rarely discussed by defenders of the myth, except to refute it. It is the action of the pro-Israeli lobby, which de facto controls Congress and without which no president can really act.
The lobby is no secret conspiracy. It is openly coordinated by AIPAC, which spreads billionaire donations throughout the U.S. political system and dictates the line to take on Israel to ensure a successful career.
Outside annual AIPAC meeting in Washington, March 2016. (Susan Melkisethian, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Control is virtually complete over the two parties represented in Congress.
It is achieved primarily through the funding of election campaigns. All those who comply can count on campaign donations, while anyone daring to defy the lobby’s injunctions would quickly be challenged by a very well-funded opponent in the next primary election, thus losing support of his or her own party in the next election — as happened to Georgia representative Cynthia McKinney in 2002.
The lobby also animates smear campaigns against any critic of Israel, as seen recently in the attacks on university presidents (Harvard, MIT, Pennsylvania) for not having sufficiently cracked down on alleged student “anti-Semitism” on their campuses.
There are several books that explain in detail how the lobby works:
They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby (1985) by Paul Findley, a Republican congressman from Illinois, who details how the lobby politically “liquidated” all those who wanted a different policy in the Middle East, precisely because they wanted to defend the interests of the United States.
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (2007) a comprehensive and well sourced book on the functioning and the effects of the lobby.
Against Our Better Judgment : The hidden history of how the U.S. was used to create Israël, by Alison Weir, 2014, which goes back to the Balfour declaration.
One can also watch hidden-camera reports by Al Jazeeraon the lobby’s work in the U.S. and Britain.
The way the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was “eliminated” politically rests entirely on the lobby’s action and campaigns against his (imaginary) anti-Semitism. The same process is currently underway in France with Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his France Insoumise party.
American presidents as different as Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter have complained that their actions were hampered by the lobby. In fact, every American president has wanted to get rid of the “Palestinian problem” (through the two-state solution) but has been impeded by Congress.
As for Congress itself, let us quote very explicit insider testimony, that of James Abourezk, who was first a congressman and then a senator from South Dakota in the 1970s and who sent this letter in 2006 to Jeff Blankfort, an anti-Zionist activist:
“I can tell you from personal experience that, at least in the Congress, the support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear — fear of defeat by anyone who does not do what Israel wants done. I can also tell you that very few members of Congress — at least when I served there — have any affection for Israel or for its Lobby. What they have is contempt, but it is silenced by fear of being found out exactly how they feel.
I’ve heard too many cloakroom conversations in which members of the Senate will voice their bitter feelings about how they’re pushed around by the Lobby to think otherwise. In private one hears the dislike of Israel and the tactics of the Lobby, but not one of them is willing to risk the Lobby’s animosity by making their feelings public.
Thus, I see no desire on the part of Members of Congress to further any U.S. imperial dreams by using Israel as their pit bull. The only exceptions to that rule are the feelings of Jewish members, who, I believe, are sincere in their efforts to keep U.S. money flowing to Israel.”
AIPAC Suppression
Abourezk added that the Lobby made every effort to suppress even a single voice of congressional dissent – as his own – that might question annual appropriations to Israel, so that
“if Congress is completely silent on the issue, the press will have no one to quote, which effectively silences the press as well. Any journalists or editors who step out of line are quickly brought under control by well organized economic pressure against the newspaper caught sinning.”
Abourezk once traveled through the Middle East with a reporter who wrote honestly about what he saw. As a result, newspaper executives received threats from several of their large advertisers that their advertising would be terminated if they continued publishing the journalist’s articles.
Abourezk circa 1977. (Handout photo, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
“I do not recall a single instance where any administration saw the need for Israel’s military power to advance U.S. Imperial interests. In fact, as we saw in the Gulf War, Israel’s involvement was detrimental to what Bush, Sr. wanted to accomplish in that war. They had, as you might remember, to suppress any Israeli assistance so that the coalition would not be destroyed by their involvement.
So far as the argument that we need to use Israel as a base for U.S. operations, I’m not aware of any U.S. bases there of any kind. The U.S. has enough military bases, and fleets, in the area to be able to handle any kind of military needs without using Israel. In fact I can’t think of an instance where the U.S. would want to involve Israel militarily for fear of upsetting the current allies the U.S. has, i.e., Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The public in those countries would not allow the monarchies to continue their alliance with the U.S. should Israel become involved.”
Abourezk said that U.S. encouragement in its invasions of Lebanon “was merely an extension of the U.S. policy of helping Israel because of the Lobby’s continual pressure. … Lebanon always has been a ‘throw away’ country so far as the Congress is concerned, that is, what happens there has no effect on U.S. interests. There is no Lebanon Lobby.”
“The public must realize that far from being an asset, Israel is a chronic liability that squanders billions of American dollars, drags the United States into wars and whose genocidal treatment of the Palestinians is radically destroying America’s moral pretensions in most of the world.”
Alleged Strategic Value
The alleged strategic value of Israel is just one among many examples of claiming that some imperial/colonial project is necessary for the global capitalist system.
The Vietnam war was justified in part by the domino theory: all of South-East Asia would become communist if Vietnam “fell.” The only domino that fell was Cambodia, as a result of U.S. bombing, after victorious Vietnam intervened to overthrow a genocidal regime there.
South African apartheid was supported by the West, in part out of fear of communism, but the end of apartheid had no dramatic effect on capitalist imperialism in Africa.
If Israeli apartheid were to disappear in Palestine, oil and trade would still flow from the Middle East towards the West, and there would be no attempts by Houthis to block shipments in the Red Sea.
A realistic analysis shows that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and aggressive policies toward its neighbors are entirely detrimental to American interests in the Middle East, which the current crisis only serves to highlight even more.
The trouble with the “Israel as U.S. aircraft carrier” thesis is that while it’s very comfortable for its defenders, it is also very damaging for the Palestinian cause.
It’s comfortable because it doesn’t risk incurring accusations of anti-Semitism, as it shifts responsibility for Israeli atrocities to American imperialism and its multinational corporations.
On the other hand, if you emphasize the Lobby’s leading role in U.S. Middle East policy, you will be accused of echoing fantasies and “conspiracy theories” about “Jewish power” dating from times when there was no Israel and thus no Israel Lobby.
Rejection of discredited stereotypes is no reason to ignore the facts of the unprecedented relationship that has developed between the United States and Israel.
Harm to Palestinian Cause
The “Israel as U.S. aircraft carrier” is precisely an Israeli argument designed to win over total U.S. political, financial and military support.
Thus it is no wonder that echoing that argument is extremely harmful to the Palestinian cause. If it were true, how could we hope to end this American support to Israel?
Persuade the American population to revolt against something said to be highly beneficial to U.S. interests? Or wait for American imperialism to collapse? That’s not likely to happen any time soon.
But if the power of the lobby is the key to U.S. support, then the strategy to be followed is much simpler and has a much greater chance of success: we need simply to dare speak out and tell the truth.
The public must realize that far from being an asset, Israel is a chronic liability that squanders billions of American dollars, drags the United States into wars and whose genocidal treatment of the Palestinians is radically destroying America’s moral pretensions in most of the world.
Once this is understood, support for Israel will collapse, and voters may put enough pressure on the national elite, the administration and even the intimidated Congress to reorient U.S. policy in line with genuine national interests.
There are signs that part of the economic ruling class is moving this way: Elon Musk’s defense of free speech on social networks is a step in the right direction (to the rage of Israel’s supporters).
Although Donald Trump, as president, did all he could for Israel, his popular slogan “America First” means something quite different, as understood by anti-interventionists on the right such as Tucker Carlson.
Unfortunately, many on the left cling to an ostensibly “Marxist” view that U.S. support for Israel must be motivated by economic interests, by capitalist profits, by control of the flow of Middle Eastern oil. This belief is not only unsupported factually, it amounts to an invitation to U.S. rulers to keep it up.
With worldwide indignation rising against the genocidal assault on Gaza, how is it possible for any American to claim that Israel is “acting in American interests?” Israel is responsible for its crimes, and it is both true and in the U.S. national interest to recognize that far from being a strategic asset, Israel is America’s No. 1 liability.
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Jean Bricmont is professor of theoretical physics at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), and author of numerous articles and books, including Humanitarian Imperialism, La République des Censeurs,and Fashionable Nonsense (with Alan Sokal).
Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher(Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
As Project Ukraine goes down the drain of history, Project Taiwan will go on overdrive. Forever Wars never die.
This is the Year of the Wooden Dragon, according to China’s classic wuxing (“five elements”) culture. The dragon, one of the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac, is a symbol of power, nobility and intelligence. Wood adds growth, development and prosperity.
Call it a summary of where China is heading in 2024.
The second session of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) was finalized on Sunday in Beijing.
The wider world should know that within the framework of grassroots democracy with Chinese characteristics, an extremely complex – and fascinating – phenomenon, the importance of the CPPCC is paramount.
The CPPCC channels wide-ranging expectations of the average Chinese to the decision level, and actually advises the central government on a vast range of issues – from everyday living to high-quality development strategies.
This year, most of the discussion focused on how to drive China’s modernization even faster. This being China, concepts – like flowers – were blooming all around the spectrum, such as “new quality productive forces, “deepening reform,” “high-standard opening-up,” and a fabulous new one, “major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.”
As the Global Times emphasized, “2024 is not only a critical year for achieving the goals of the ‘14th Five-Year Plan’ but also a key year for achieving the transition to high-quality development of the economy.”
Betting on strategic investment
So let’s start with Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s first “work report” delivered a week ago, which opened the annual session of the National People’s Congress. The key takeaway: Beijing will be pursuing the same economic targets as in 2023. That translates as 5% annual growth.
Of course deflationary risks, a downturn in the real estate market and somewhat shaky business confidence simply won’t vanish. Li was quite realistic, emphasizing Beijing is “keenly aware” of the challenges ahead: “Achieving this year’s targets will not be easy.” And he added: “Global economic growth lacks steam and the regional hotspot issues keep erupting. This has made China’s external environment more complex, severe and uncertain.”
Beijing’s strategy remains focused on a “proactive fiscal policy and prudent monetary policy”. In a nutshell: the song remains the same. There won’t be a “stimulus” of any kind.
Deeper answers should be found in the work report/budget released by the National Development and Reform Commission: the focus will be on structural change, via extra funds to science, technology, education, national defense, agriculture. Translation: China bets on strategic investment, the key for a high-quality economic transition.
In practice, Beijing will be heavily invested in modernizing industry and developing “new quality productive forces” such as new-energy vehicles, biomanufacturing and commercial space flight.
Science Minister Yin Hejun made it clear: there was an 8.1% increase in national investment in research and development in 2023. He wants more – and he will get it: R&D spending will grow by 10% to a total of 370.8 billion yuan.
The mantra is “self-reliance”. On all fronts – from chipmaking to AI. A no holds barred tech war is on – and China is totally focused to counter “tech containment” from the Hegemon as much as its ultimate goal is to wrest tech supremacy from its prime competitor. Beijing simply cannot allow itself to be vulnerable to U.S.-imposed tech choke points and supply chain disruptions.
So short-term economic problems will not be causing sleepless nights. The Beijing leadership is always looking ahead – focusing on long-term challenges.
Learning lessons from the Donbass battlefield
Beijing will continue to steer the economic development of Hong Kong and Macau, and invest even more in the crucial Greater Bay Area, which is the premier southern China high tech, services and finance hub.
Taiwan of course was central to the work report; Beijing fiercely opposes “external interference” – code for Hegemon tactics. That will become even trickier in May, when William Lai Ching-te, who flirts with independence, becomes president.
On defense, there will be only a 7.2% increase in 2024, which is peanuts compared to the Hegemon’s defense budget now approaching $900 billion: China’s stands as $238 billion, even as China’s nominal GDP is approaching the U.S.
A great deal of China’s defense budget will go for emerging tech – considering the immensely valuables lessons the PLA is learning out of the Donbass battlefield, as well as the deep interactions part of the Russia-China strategic partnership.
And that brings us to diplomacy. China will continue to be firmly positioned as a champion of the Global South. That was made explicit by Foreign Minister Wang Yi in a press conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress.
Wang Yi’s priorities: to “maintain stable relations with major powers; join hands with its neighbouring countries for progress; and strive for revitalisation with the Global South”.
Wang Yi once again stressed that Beijing favors an “equal and orderly” multipolar world and “inclusive economic globalization”.
And of course he could not allow U.S. Secretary of State Little Blinken – always out of his depth – to get away with his latest “recipe”: “It is impermissible that those with the bigger fist have the final say, and it is definitely unacceptable that certain countries must be at the table while others can only be on the menu.”
BRI as a global accelerator
Crucially, Wang Yi re-emphasized the drive for “high-quality” cooperation within the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework. He defined BRI as “an engine for the common development of all countries and an accelerator for the modernisation of the whole world”. Wang Yi actually said he’s hopeful about the emergence of a “Global South moment in global governance” – in which China and BRI play an essential part.
Li Qiang’s work report, incidentally, had only one paragraph on BRI. But then we find this nugget as Li refers to the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor – which links China’s landlocked southwest with the eastern seaboard, via Guangxi province.
Translation: BRI will be focusing on opening new economic roads for China’s less developed regions, diversifying from the previous emphasis on Xinjiang.
Dr Wei Yuansong is a member of the CPPCC and also the Chinese Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party – which happens to be one of the eight non-CCP parties in Chinese politics (very few outside of China know about this).
He offered some fascinating comments on BRI to Fengmian News and also stressed the need to “tell China’s story well” to avoid “conflict and incidents” along the BRI road. For that, Wei suggests the need to use an “international language” in telling these stories; that implies using English.
As for what Wang Yi said in his press conference, in fact that was discussed in detail at the closed-door Central Conference on Foreign Affairs Work in late 2023, where it was established that China faced “strategic opportunities” to raise its “international influence, appeal and power” despite “high winds and choppy waters”.
The key takeaway: the narrative war between China and the Hegemon will be pitiless. Beijing is confident it’s capable of offering stability, investment, connectivity and sound diplomacy to the whole Global South, instead of Forever Wars.
That is reflected, for instance, by Ma Xinmin, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s legal advisor, telling the International Court of Justice that the Palestinians have the right to armed resistance when it comes to fighting the colonialist, racist, apartheid state of Israel. Therefore, Hamas cannot be defined as a terrorist organization.
This is the overwhelming position across the lands of Islam and across the majority of the Global South – linking Beijing with fellow BRICS member Brazil and President Lula, who compared the genocide in Gaza to the Nazi genocide in WWII.
How to resist collective West sanctions
The Two Sessions did reflect Beijing’s full understanding that Hegemon containment and destabilization tactics remain the biggest challenge to China’s peaceful rise. But simultaneously it reflected Chinese confidence on its global diplomatic clout as a force for peace, stability and economic development. It’s an extremely sensitive balance that only the Middle Kingdom seems capable of pulling off.
Then there’s the Trump factor.
Economist Ding Yifan, a former deputy director of the World Development Institute, part of the State Council’s Development Research Centre, is one among those who’s aware China is learning key lessons from Russia on how to resist collective West sanctions – which will be inevitable against China especially if Trump is back at the White House.
And that brings us to the absolute key issue being currently discussed in Moscow, within the Russia-China partnership, and soon among the BRICS: alternative settlement payments to the U.S. dollar, increasing trade among “friendly nations”, and controls on capital flight.
Nearly all Russia-China trade is now in yuan and rubles. As much as Russian trade with the EU fell by 68% in 2023, trade with Asia rose by 5.6% – with new landmarks reached with China ($240 billion) and India ($65 billion) – and 84% of Russia’s total energy exports going to “friendly countries”.
The Two Sessions did not get into detail on some extremely thorny geopolitical issues. For instance, India’s version of multipolarity – considering New Delhi’s unresolved love affair with Washington – is quite different from China’s. Everyone knows – and no one more than the Russians – that within BRICS 10 the biggest strategic issue is how to accommodate the perpetual tension between India and China.
What’s clear even behind the fog of goodwill enveloping the Two Sessions is that Beijing is fully aware of how the Hegemon is – deliberately – already crossing a key Chinese red line, officially stationing “permanent troops” in Taiwan.
Since last year U.S. Special Forces have been training Taiwanese in operating Black Hornet nano microdrones. In 2024 U.S. military advisers are deployed full time at army bases on Kinmen and Penghu islands.
Those actually driving U.S. foreign policy behind the Crash Test Dummy at the White House believe that even as they are powerless to handle the Houthi Ansarallah in the Red Sea, they are capable of poking the Dragon.
No posturing will alter the Dragon’s roadmap. The CPPCC’s political resolution on Taiwan calls for uniting “all patriotic forces”, “deepen integration and development in various fields across the Taiwan Straits”, and go all out on “peaceful reunification”. That will translate in practice into increased economic/trade cooperation, more direct flights, more cargo ports and logistics bases.
As Project Ukraine goes down the drain of history, Project Taiwan will go on overdrive. Forever Wars never die. Bring it on. The Dragon is ready.
Protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza interrupt U.S. President Joe Biden’s speech at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. January 8, 2024.
President Joe Biden, better known as Genocide Joe, in cooperation with a perfunctory legislative branch has mired the American people in savage, reckless, costly, and unpopular wars. The White House’s catastrophic foreign policy may force American society to a breaking point.
The American public is increasingly rejecting Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which has already cost well over $100 billion, put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation, and seen Ukrainians killed or injured by the hundreds of thousands.
As Americans are more concerned with simultaneous crises of inflation, healthcare, immigration, and crime, according to the latest Harris poll, 70% of Americans oppose Biden’s policy of unending military aid going to the Ukrainian meat grinder and instead want a diplomatic settlement.
The disconnect between those living in the country and those in Washington DC is highlighted by members of the U.S. Senate openly salivating about drawing Russian blood and funneling tens of billions of dollars into the military-industrial complex.
Arch-neocon and top State Department official Victoria Nuland is threatening Moscow that the United States will assist Ukraine to “accelerate [its] asymmetric warfare” and provide “nasty surprises on the battlefield.” At the same time, French President Emmanuel Macron says deploying NATO troops to Ukraine to fight Russia should not be off the table.
Subsequent to a meeting with other leaders in Europe concerning the effort to weaken Russia with the Ukrainian battering ram, Macron declared, “There’s no consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing can be ruled out.”
In response to Macron’s bluster, Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed in a speech to the Federal Assembly “[our] strategic nuclear forces are on full combat alert, and the ability to use them is assured.” The Russian leader continued, “Now they have started talking about the possibility of deploying NATO military contingents to Ukraine…They must grasp that we also have weapons—yes, they know this, as I have just said—capable of striking targets on their territory.”
Concurrently, the head of the German Air Force has been caught on a leaked tape discussing with his officers plans to provide Taurus missiles to Kiev, weapons which have a range of roughly 300 miles, in hopes of carrying out attacks against Russia. London confirmed last week that “a small number” of British troops are on the ground “supporting the armed forces of Ukraine.”
Despite Putin’s ominous remarks and the sentiments of the American people, NATO is launching massive war games, including on Russia’s borders, in preparation for war with Moscow. As the Libertarian Institute’s News Editor Kyle Anzalone reports, “[These] latest drills are a part of NATO’s Steadfast Defender military exercises—the bloc’s largest series of war games, which will see over 90,000 troops participate in about a dozen maneuvers from January through August.”
Biden’s unpopular war with Russia has brought humanity closer to a nuclear holocaust than ever before. But perhaps more widely despised and devastating to the American soul is the genocidal campaign unleashed by Israel against the Palestinian Muslims and Christians inhabiting the besieged Gaza Strip.
Per a recent Data For Progress poll, two-thirds of the American population oppose the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel and instead want the White House to back a permanent ceasefire. 77% of Democrats, 69% of Independents, and a staggering 56% of Republicans agree regarding this issue.
However, Israel’s globally livestreamed mass killing spree—primarily against women and children—is fully supported by the White House. The same government which practically every member of America’s political class swears is “our greatest ally” has cut Gaza off from food, water, fuel, and electricity. Israel is destroying Gaza, making it uninhabitable by bombing cities, neighborhoods, apartments, homes, schools, universities, hospitals, ambulances, UN shelters, mosques, churches, greenhouses, orchards, and refugee camps.
So far, the Israeli apartheid army has butchered over 30,000 people, including more than 12,000 children. Unfortunately, these confirmed figures paint a picture less macabre than reality, as thousands of men, women, and children are buried beneath rubble and presumed dead. One can only imagine what the final death toll and excess death rate will be.
Often using dystopian AI programs to select targets, the United States and Israel have leveled a greater percentage of infrastructure in Gaza than the Allied bombings in Dresden during World War II. TheGuardian recently reported, “As of 17 January, analysis of satellite data by Corey Scher of the City University of New York and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University reveals that between 50% and 62% of all buildings in Gaza have likely been damaged or destroyed.”
Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, approximately half of which are children, have been bombed everywhere. At times, this has included 2,000-pound bombs raining down on the Israeli-designated safe zones. Virtually every city in Gaza has been eradicated except Rafah, where 1.5 million refugees have fled to and which the Israeli war cabinet plans to hit with a blitzkrieg this month.
Social media feeds in every American household have been flooded with graphic videos and images showing countless Palestinian babies, children, women, elderly people, and men being blown to bits, killed, shot, mutilated, or permanently disfigured with our weaponry.
Last week, in what is known now as the “Flour Massacre,” the Israeli occupation opened fire killing over a hundred Palestinians and injuring hundreds more near Gaza City as they desperately attempted to obtain what they could from a trickle of aid that was allowed into the Strip.
Biden, previously known as “Israel’s man in Washington,” is fond of reciting his assertion that “If Israel didn’t exist, [the United States] would have to invent it.” But each day, new horrors and atrocities are unearthed, revealing Israel to be nothing more than a rogue state (incidentally armed with dozens, if not hundreds, of nuclear weapons).
Caitlin Johnstone perfectly sums up the reaction of normal people with a conscience to the unending stream of Israeli barbarism reported daily:
So it turns out the IDF has been running a Telegram channel featuring homemade snuff films in which Gazans are brutally murdered by Israeli forces, captioned with celebrations of the gore and pain therein like “Burning their mother…You won’t believe the video we got! You can hear their bones crunch.” The IDF had previously denied any association with the channel, but Haaretz now reports that it was directly run by an IDF psychological warfare unit.
This is one of those many, many times where Israel is so awful that at first you’re not sure what you’re looking at. You think you must be misreading the report. Then you read it again and go “Oh wow, that’s SO much worse than I would have guessed.”
However bad you think Israel is, you can always be sure that information will come out later that proves it’s even worse.
Palestinians are being subjected to inhumane torture as well. After TheNew York Times analyzed a report from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the paper reported, “Detainees said they were beaten, stripped, robbed, blindfolded, sexually abused, and denied access to lawyers and doctors, often for more than a month.”
The Times article continues, “Some detainees, according to the report, told UNRWA investigators that they had often been beaten on open wounds, had been held for hours in painful stress positions, and had been attacked by military dogs.”
One prisoner was “beaten so badly that his genitals turned blue and that there was still blood present in his urine…guards made him sleep naked in the open air, next to a fan blowing cold air, and played music so loudly that his ear bled.”
This coincides with numerous Israeli media reports of torture inflicted against the occupied Palestinians at the hands of their Zionist army captors. In January, +972 Magazine reported on the hellish scenes inside Israeli detention centers holding untold numbers of civilians rounded up in Gaza:
“Israeli soldiers subjected Palestinian detainees to electric shocks, burned their skin with lighters, spat in their mouths, and deprived them of sleep, food, and access to bathrooms until they defecated on themselves. Many were tied to a fence for hours, handcuffed, and blindfolded for most of the day…Several people are known to have died as a result of being held in these conditions.”
Israel has the population of Gaza trapped in an open-air concentration camp, with 75% of Palestinians crammed into a single city. More than 90% of the Palestinians living in the Strip have been internally displaced amidst the Israeli onslaught.
It is a repudiation of every treasured American value for our government to make all of us a party to such atrocities under any conditions.
The whole world sees this for what it is. Half of Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 believe he is complicit in genocide. Indeed, the International Court of Justice has issued a preliminary ruling that Israel’s actions may plausibly constitute genocide. Nevertheless, our Congress is committed to financing this systematic destruction of Gaza with another $14 billion of the American people’s hard-earned money.
Palestinians are not only being ripped apart with American bombs and shells, they are being starved to death by the hundreds of thousands. As Antiwar.com News Editor Dave DeCamp reports:
At least 16 Palestinian children have starved to death in the Gaza Strip over the past few days due to the US-backed Israeli siege, and the UN’s child relief agency is warning that the number of child deaths will “rapidly increase” if conditions don’t immediately change.
“Last week, we warned that an explosion in child deaths was imminent if the burgeoning nutrition crisis wasn’t resolved,” said Adele Khodr, UNICEF’s director for the Middle East and North Africa. “Now, the child deaths we feared are here and are likely to rapidly increase unless the war ends and obstacles to humanitarian relief are immediately resolved.”
The latest Palestinian child reported to die of hunger was Yazan al-Kafarna, a 10-year-old with cerebral palsy who was in the al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah. Fifteen children have also died of malnutrition and dehydration at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.
The UN has previously warned that Gaza’s entire population of about 2.2 million people is facing “crisis” levels of food insecurity, and at least 576,000 Palestinians in Gaza are “facing catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation.”
Despite the dire situation, the State Department reaffirmed on Monday that it will continue to provide military assistance for Israel’s genocidal war.
The last vestiges of our deluded American exceptionalism burned up in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. with Aaron Bushnell last month. As the former member of the U.S. Air Force stated before his self-immolation in protest of the genocide in Gaza, “this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
But regardless of what excuses White House spokespeople are able to conjure up in an attempt to hide the blood on their hands, this is not normal and the American people will never accept it. As evidenced by the public opinion polls and protest movements across the country, Biden will pay dearly in the coming election for his role in the mass murder ongoing in Palestine.
NBC News revealed the Biden reelection team has taken “extraordinary steps” to avoid antiwar protesters including “by making [their events] smaller, withholding their precise locations from the media and the public until he arrives, and avoiding college campuses.”
Additionally, the more than 100,000 “uncommitted” protest votes in the Michigan Democratic primary last week foreshadows things to come for Genocide Joe and the Democratic Party establishment. Demonstrators camped out daily in front of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s residence chant “Blinken! Blinken! We see you and all the war crimes that you do!”
In his last words, Bushnell said he could “no longer be complicit in genocide.” His message was one that resonates with perhaps a majority of Americans. But in Washington, his message could not be more alien.
In a video last month, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) was told by a peace activist on Capitol Hill, “I’ve seen the footage of shredded children’s bodies. That’s my taxpayer dollars that are going to bomb those kids.” Ogles responded proudly, “I think we should kill ’em all, if that makes you feel better.”
An American antiwar populace cannot be ruled by unrepentant and unAmerican warmongers in perpetuity; a breaking point cannot come soon enough.
When Napoleon engaged Russia in a European land war, the Russians mounted a determined defense, and the French lost. When Hitler tried the same, the Soviet Union responded similarly, and the Germans lost. In World War 1 and its post-revolutionary civil war (1914-1922), first Russia and then the USSR defended with far greater effect against two invasions than the invaders had calculated. That history ought to have cautioned U.S. and European leaders to minimize the risks of confronting Russia, especially when Russia felt threatened and determined to defend itself.
Instead of caution, delusions prompted ill-advised judgments by the collective West (roughly the G7 nations: the U.S. and its major allies). Those delusions emerged partly from the collective West’s widespread denial of its relative economic decline in the 21st century. That denial also enabled a remarkable blindness to the limits that decline imposed on the collective West’s global actions. Delusions also flowed from a basic undervaluation of Russia’s defensiveness and its resulting commitments. The Ukraine war starkly illustrates both the decline and the costly delusions it fosters.
The United States and Europe seriously underestimated what Russia could and would do to prevail militarily in Ukraine. Russia’s victory—at least so far after two years of war—has proven decisive. Their underestimation stemmed from a shared inability to grasp or absorb the changing world economy and its implications. By mostly minimizing, marginalizing, or simply denying the decline of the U.S. empire relative to the rise of China and its BRICS allies, the United States and Europe missed that decline’s unfolding implications. Russia’s allies’ support combined with its national determination to defend itself have so far defeated a Ukraine heavily funded and armed by the collective West. Historically, declining empires often provoke denials and delusions that teach their people “hard lessons” and impose on them “hard choices”. That is where we are now.
The economics of the U.S. empire decline constitutes the continuing global context. The BRICS countries’ collective GDP, wealth, income, share of world trade, and presence at the highest levels of new technology increasingly exceed those of the G7. That relentless economic development frames the decline of the G7’s political and cultural influences as well. The massive U.S. and European sanctions program against Russia after February 2022 has failed. Russia turned especially to its BRICS allies to quickly as well as comprehensively escape most of those sanctions’ intended effects.
UN votes on the ceasefire issue in Gaza reflect and reinforce the mounting difficulties facing the U.S. position in the Middle East and globally. So does the Houthis’ intervention in Red Sea shipping and so too will other future Arab and Islamic initiatives supporting Palestine against Israel. Among the consequences flowing from the changing world economy, many work to undermine and weaken the U.S. empire.
Trump’s disrespect for NATO is partly an expression of disappointment with an institution he can blame for failing to stop empire’s decline. Trump and his supporters broadly downgrade many institutions once thought crucially central to running the U.S., empire globally. Both the Trump and Biden regimes attacked China’s Huawei corporation, shared commitments to trade and tariff wars, and heavily subsidized competitively challenged U.S. corporations. Nothing less than a historic shift away from neoliberal globalization toward economic nationalism is underway. An American empire that once targeted the whole world is shrinking into a merely regional bloc confronting one or more emerging regional blocs. Much of the rest of the world’s nations—a possible “world majority” of the planet’s people—are pulling away from the U.S. empire.
U.S. leaders’ aggressive economic nationalist policies distract attention from the empire’s decline and thereby facilitate its denial. Yet they also cause new problems. Allies fear that economic nationalism in the United States already has or will soon adversely affect their economic relations with the United States; “America first” targets not only the Chinese. Many countries are rethinking and reconstructing their economic relations with the United States and their expectations about those relations’ futures. Likewise, major groups of U.S. employers are reconsidering their investment strategies. Those who invested heavily overseas as part of the neoliberal globalization frenzies of the last half century are especially fearful. They anticipate costs and losses from policy shifts toward economic nationalism. Their pushback slows those shifts. As capitalists everywhere adjust practically to the changing world economy, they also quarrel and dispute the direction and pace of change. That injects more uncertainty and volatility into a thereby further destabilized world economy. As the U.S. empire unravels, the world economic order it once dominated and enforced likewise changes.
“Make America Great Again” (MAGA) slogans have politically weaponized U.S. empire’s decline, always in carefully vague and general terms. They simplify and misunderstand it within another set of delusions. Trump will, he promises repeatedly, undo that decline and reverse it. He will punish those he blames for it: China, but also Democrats, liberals, globalists, socialists, and Marxists whom he lumps together in a bloc-building strategy. There is rarely any serious attention to the economics of the G7’s decline since to do so would critically implicate capitalists’ profit-driven decisions as key causes of the decline. Neither Republicans nor Democrats dare do that. Biden speaks and acts as if the U.S. wealth and power positions within the world economy were undiminished from what they were across the second half of the 20th century (most of Biden’s political lifetime).
Continuing to fund and arm Ukraine in the war with Russia, like endorsing and supporting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, are policies premised on denials of a changed world. So too are successive waves of economic sanctions despite each wave failing to achieve its goals. Using tariffs to keep better, cheaper Chinese electric vehicles off the U.S. market will only disadvantage U.S. individuals (via such Chinese electric vehicles’ higher prices) and businesses (via global competition from businesses buying the cheaper Chinese cars and trucks).
Perhaps the greatest, costliest delusions that follow from a denial of years of decline dog the upcoming presidential election. The two major parties and their candidates offer no serious plan for how to deal with the declining empire they seek to lead. Both parties took turns presiding over the decline, yet denial and blaming the other is all either party offers in 2024. Biden offers voters a partnership in denial that the empire is declining. Trump promises vaguely to undo the decline caused by bad Democratic leadership that his election will remove. Nothing either major party does entails sober admissions and assessments of a changed world economy and how each plans to cope with that.
The last 40 to 50 years of the economic history of the G7 witnessed extreme redistributions of wealth and income upward. Those redistributions functioned as both causes and effects of neoliberal globalization. However, domestic reactions (economic and social divisions increasingly hostile and volatile) and foreign reactions (emergence of today’s China and BRICS) are undermining neoliberal globalization and beginning to challenge its accompanying inequalities. U.S. capitalism and its empire cannot yet face its decline amid a changing world. Delusions about retaining or regaining power at the top of society proliferate alongside delusional conspiracy theories and political scapegoating (immigrants, China, Russia) below.
Meanwhile, the economic, political, and cultural costs mount. And on some level, as per Leonard Cohen’s famous song, “Everybody Knows.”
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This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
‘We are the masters of the house’: Israeli channels air snuff videos featuring systematic torture of Palestinians
Israeli TV channels aired a number of reports showing the torture and humiliation of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. The videos are consumed by the Israeli public as entertainment, revealing the sadism of Israeli society.
Over the past month, mainstream Israeli television channels have aired what can only be described as snuff films. They depict the systematic torture of Palestinians from Gaza in Israeli jails. Such videos have aired on at least three occasions — twice on Channel 14, and once on the public broadcaster, Channel 13. While Channel 14 is considered right-wing, so is about two-thirds of the Israeli public, and the more “mainstream” Channel 13 has shown no qualms about airing similar footage.
The broadcasts follow prison officials into detention centers to document the mistreatment of prisoners, which seems to be something that the officials — and apparently the viewers — find satisfying rather than revolting. The airing of these snuff films is a demonstration of societal sadism.
As Yumna Patel has recently reported, several rights groups have sounded the alarm over the widespread and systemic abuse that Palestinian prisoners face at the hands of the Israeli authorities. These groups’ calls have been unintentionally buttressed by Israeli soldiers’ unapologetic videos of themselves torturing or demeaning Palestinian detainees, which they boastfully post on social media. Now, it seems that the phenomenon has expanded to mainstream Israeli television.
The two aforementioned reports on Channel 14 (threads with subtitles can be found here and here) contained footage of actual interrogation sessions during which torture was used. The Channel 13 report did not, but it exposed some of the worst prison conditions to be broadcast to the public. These conditions include forcing prisoners to live in inhumane conditions and subjecting them to torture and harassment. Here’s the 11-minute video with translated subtitles.
‘The feeling is one of pride’
“Here, we see the cells in which the Nukhba terrorists are held,” the narrator says.
The “Nukhba” refers to elite Hamas-led fighters who carried out the October 7 attack. In the cell, viewers notice metal bunkbeds without mattresses, and instead of a toilet, there is just a hole in the floor. The room is almost completely dark throughout the day, and prisoners have their hands and legs chained together.
We hear attack dogs barking constantly as prisoners are made to kneel while bound and blindfolded, their heads touching the floor.
“This is how it should be,” a guard says. “This is how a Nukhba prisoner should be…what happened on October 7 will never return.”
In another scene, a guard shouts at prisoners as dogs continue to bark incessantly. “Heads down! Heads on the floor!” he yells.
“There are many prisoners here that I personally saw at the [October 7] events,” a prison official says, taking pride in humiliating them. “The difference is that this time, he is afraid, shaking, with his head on the floor…no Allahu Akbar, nothing. You won’t hear a squeak from him.”
“They have no mattresses,” says a warden shift commander. “They have nothing…we control them 100% — their food, their shackling, their sleep…[we] show them we are the masters of the house.” Even without knowing the background to that phrase, to hear him say it is chilling.
“Masters of the house” was the election slogan of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Jewish Power leader and current Minister of National Security. Ben-Gvir declared war on Palestinian prisoners long before October 7, and this has included shutting down bakeries that supply bread to prisoners — described by Ben-Gvir as an “indulgence” — and drastically limiting prisoners’ water use. So now it’s become much worse.
While one is tempted to believe that all prisoners here are “Nukhba” members, it turns out that many of them aren’t even suspected of that. Rather, they were rounded up in Gaza after October 7, during mass arrests in which hundreds of Gazan men were stripped and paraded in a most sadistic demonstration of power. The mass arrests also included hundreds of women, including pregnant women detained with their babies. Israeli security officials told Haaretz that by their own estimate, “only 10 to 15 percent of the hundreds of the semi-naked and bound Gazan men arrested in the Strip during the recent days are Hamas members or those who identified with the organization.”
Back to the Channel 13 coverage, viewers can hear the nonstop blasting of the Zionist anthem, Am Israel Hai (“the people of Israel live”).
“The prison authorities claim that it is meant to boost the morale of the staff,” the narrator declares. “But it is clear that this is another part of the psychological warfare against the prisoners.”
Torture, in other words.
It’s hard to imagine the depths to which Israeli society has sunk. The official tells the Channel 13 reporter that “the feeling is one of pride.”
The reason such sadism has become formalized as a matter of policy is because this is what the Israeli public demands. The Israeli Democracy Institute released a survey last week showing that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis oppose “the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents at this time,” even if “via international bodies that are not linked to Hamas or to UNRWA.” For right-wing voters, the opposition to aid jumps from 68% to 80%.
This is not Israel’s Abu Ghraib moment, because when Abu Ghraib was revealed, most Americans were revolted. Israeli society, on the other hand, is thirsting for genocide. No wonder they consume such videos as entertainment on mainstream TV.
The Grayzone has obtained slides from a confidential Israel lobby presentation based on data from Republican pollster Frank Luntz. They contain talking points for politicians and public figures seeking to justify Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.
Two prominent pro-Israel lobby groups are holding private briefings in New York City to coach elected officials and well-known figures on how to influence public opinion in favor of the Israeli military’s rampage in Gaza, The Grayzone can reveal. These PR sessions, convened by the UJA-Federation and Jewish Community Relations Council, rely on data collected by Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster and pundit.
A source who was present during several meetings provided Luntz’s slides to The Grayzone. Participants were informed that the presentations and data contained in the slides were strictly confidential, the source said.
“This is NOT helpful,” Luntz stated in response to an email from The Grayzone requesting his comment on the private meetings.
The Luntz-tested presentations on the war in Gaza urge politicians to avoid trumpeting America’s supposedly shared democratic values with Israel, and focus instead on deploying “The Language of War with Hamas.” According to this framing, they must deploy incendiary language painting Hamas as a “brutal and savage…organization of hate” which has “raped women,” while insisting Israel is engaged in “a war for humanity.”
On his personal website, Luntz markets himself as “one of the most honored communications professionals in America today.” He has earned a small fortune crafting talking points for Republican Party heavyweights and scandal-stained corporate clients like Enron, the energy company which collapsed after engineering California’s energy crisis. Following the financial crash of 2008-09, Luntz advised the GOP on shielding the party’s big business donors from scrutiny. At around the same time, he furnished the Republican Governor’s Association with advice on undermining Occupy Wall Street, the movement demanding accountability for the banking industry’s malfeasance.
The celebrity GOP pollster has moonlighted as a consultant for the Israel lobby, producing a “Global Language Dictionary” for the now-defunct Israel Project in the aftermath of the brutal 2008-09 attack on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. In his propaganda handbook, Luntz counseled “leaders who are on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel” to shy from debates related to the illegal occupation of Palestine.
“Avoid talking about borders in terms of pre- or post-1967,” he advised, “because it only serves to remind Americans of Israel’s military history. Particularly on the left, this does you harm.”
Luntz’s Gaza war presentation puts his poll-tested tactics back in the Israel lobby’s hands, urging pro-Israel public figures to stay on the attack with incendiary language and shocking allegations against their enemies.
In one focus group, Luntz asked participants to state which alleged act by Hamas on October 7 “bothers you more.” After being presented with a laundry list of alleged atrocities, a majority declared that they were most upset by the claim that Hamas “raped civilians” – 19 percent than those who expressed outrage that Hamas supposedly “exterminated civilians.”
Data like this apparently influenced the Israeli government to launch an obsessive but still unsuccessful campaign to prove that Hamas carried out sexual assault on a systematic basis on October 7. Initiated at Israel’s United Nations mission in December 2023 with speeches by neoliberal tech oligarch Sheryl Sandberg and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and speaking fees from Israel lobby organizations, Tel Aviv’s propaganda blitz has yet to produce a single self-identified victim of sexual assault by Hamas. A March 5 report by UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence Pramila Patten did not contain one direct testimony of sexual assault on October 7. What’s more, Patten’s team said they found “no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence.”
To further the demonization of Palestinians, the Luntz-crafted slides advise that “Israel’s best response is the brainwashed children of Hamas spewing hatred towards Jews (even more than condemning Israelis) with words they don’t know the meaning of and can’t even pronounce.”
The portrayal of the youth of Gaza as ignorant tools of Hamas is clearly intended to deflect from Israel’s industrial-scale slaughter of some 15,000 children in the Gaza Strip since October 7, as well as the wounding, orphaning and starving of countless more in the besieged territory.
To make their arguments stick, Luntz recommends pro-Israel forces avoid the exterminationist language favored by Israeli officials who have called, for example, to “erase” the population of Gaza, and to instead advocate for “an efficient, effective approach” to eliminating Hamas.
At the same time, veteran pollster acknowledges that Republican voters prefer phrases which imply maximalist violence, like “eradicate” and “obliterate,” while sanitized terms like “neutralize” appeal more to Democrats. Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Donald Trump have showcased similar focus-grouped rhetoric with their calls to “finish them” and “finish the problem” in Gaza.
As in past Israel-lobby seminars, Luntz has urged pro-Israel forces to divert from arguments about Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory by deploying banal slogans like, “Israelis have a right to defend themselves.”
“This is about Israelis,” a Luntz-crafted slide declares, “not about territory.”
According to the pollster’s research, pro-Israel politicians should avoid references to “Israel” entirely and instead discuss “Israelis” when “setting the context” for a debate over the war in Gaza.
The recommended tweak hints at the PR crisis Israel lobby forces have encountered since Israel’s military invaded and besieged Gaza, leaving most of its residents homeless, placing its entire public health and sanitation system out of service, and exterminating over 2% of the overall population, according to conservative death toll estimates.
One slide demonstrates that only a small sliver of those polled by Luntz buy into the Israeli government’s mantra that “Hamas is ISIS.” The same visual aid counsels pro-Israel officials to shy from the phrases “genuine accuracy” and “hard evidence,” and allude more generally to “the truth” when discussing Israel’s actions.
Luntz acknowledges Israel’s mounting PR problems in a slide identifying the most powerful tactics employed by Palestine solidarity activists. “Israelis attacking Israel is the second most potent weapon against Israel,” the visual display reads beside a photo of a protest by Jewish Voices for Peace, a US-based Jewish organization dedicated to ending Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
“The most potent” tactic in mobilizing opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza, according to Luntz, “is the visual destruction of Gaza and the human toll.” The slide inadvertently acknowledges the cruelty of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, displaying a bombed out apartment building with clearly anguished women and children fleeing in the foreground.
But Luntz assures his audience, “It ‘looks like a genocide’ even though the damage has nothing to do with the definition.”
According to this logic, the American public can become more tolerant of copiously documented crimes against humanity if they are simply told not to believe their lying eyes.
Harvard Professor Noah Feldman denounces opposition to the Gaza War as the “New antisemitism”
Time Magazine has chosen as its cover story Harvard Professor of Law Noah Feldman’s maliciously dishonest and morally bankrupt defense of Israel’s savage war against the population of Gaza.
The “old” antisemitism was a central element of fascism, espousing virulent nationalism, anti-communism and anti-socialism, and implementing genocide of defenseless people.
The “new” antisemitism, according to Feldman, is a central element of the left, which opposes the Israeli war machine, nationalist xenophobia, anti-Arab racism, and the mass murder of defenseless and oppressed people in Gaza.
Feldman’s propaganda piece consists of the crudest historical falsifications. He writes, “Ultimately, in different ways, both Nazism and Marxism identified Jews as an enemy deserving liquidation.” This is an outrageous lie.
The Marxist and socialist movement led the struggle against antisemitism in Germany, throughout Europe, and in the United States. Fundamental to Nazi and fascist ideology and politics was the identification of Jews with socialism and the labor movement.
Feldman dissolves Judaism as a religion into Israeli nationalism, proclaims the Israeli state as the supreme manifestation of Jewish existence, and asserts its “status as the only homeland for a historically oppressed people who have nowhere else to call their own.”
This claim ignores the fact that more than half the world’s Jewish population, including Feldman, hold citizenship in countries other than Israel. And, one might add, that thousands of Israelis abandon this “homeland” every year.
Feldman resorts to the most vile sophistries to minimize Israeli crimes, such as the claim that ethnic cleansing practiced by Israel “would arguably not count as genocide under the legal meaning of the term.”
He also states, “The genocide charge depends on intent. And Israel, as a state, is not fighting the Gaza War with the intent to destroy the Palestinian people.”
According to Feldman, since Israel’s “stated war aims” are merely “to hold Hamas accountable,” it cannot be accused of genocide. Israel’s “aims are lawful in themselves.”
Writing as an attorney for mass murderers, Feldman asserts, “There is no single, definitive international-law answer to the question of how much collateral damage renders a strike disproportionate to its concrete military objective.”
Feldman, shedding a tear, writes, “The number of Palestinian dead, over 29,000 as of this writing, is heartbreaking.” But the actual killing of the 29,000, according to Feldman, is not a crime.
Of all the arguments advanced by Feldman, the most cynical is his claim that “Accusing Israel of genocide can function, intentionally or otherwise, as a way of erasing the memory of the Holocaust and transforming Jews from victims into oppressors.”
This is the same argument made by the Polish government in introducing a law in 2018 illegalizing references to the complicity of Poles in the mass murder of Jews during World War II.
The bill passed by the Polish Senate declared that “whoever accuses … the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes … shall be subject to a fine or a penalty of imprisonment of up to three years.”
The fascistic Polish government justified this law on the grounds that references to Polish complicity in the Holocaust detracted from the sufferings of the Polish people during the years of Nazi occupation. Israel denounced the Polish law.
Feldman invokes the Holocaust as a cover for Israeli atrocities. But his defense of Israel’s genocidal war, with the support of the US, is a desecration of the memory of the six million Jewish victims of Nazism and the universal significance of the Holocaust.
……………….
Information Liberation
The Washington Post ran a column from Noah Feldman on Tuesday telling progressive Jews to get with the program and back Israel’s genocide campaign in Gaza or face excommunication.
After paragraph upon paragraph aimed at building rapport with the progressive Jews Feldman is targeting, he finally got to the point at the end of his column.
[Young progressive Jews] believe in the teachings of social justice that compel them to social action. But they also find that they cannot avoid what they see as the broken reality of Israel.
[…] Their solution — their Jewish, progressive, sincerely felt solution — is to express their belief in social justice by criticizing or condemning Israel for its failures of equality, liberty, dignity and human rights.
[…] As today’s college students become adults and gradually assume leadership of their movements, progressive Judaism will have to work out its long-term attitude toward Israel. One possibility is for progressive Jews to tack away from the focus on Israel, to engage their Jewishness in other ways — familial, spiritual and personal. This would entail real theological change.
But so would embracing simultaneously a God of loving social justice and a state that rejects liberal democracy. Israel will not change just because progressive American Jews want it to. They will have to find their own answers to the looming crisis facing them — and soon, before a new generation finds itself alienated from a Jewishness whose inner contradictions it cannot reconcile.
At the individual level, Jews who want to think less about Israel also face serious challenges because Jewishness is a collective identity. If most Jews self-define in relation to Israel, positively or negatively, it is hard for any Jews to choose not to do so.
Yet a turn to a Jewishness that is more personal, familial and spiritual and less national-political may be the inevitable result, even if no formal movement within Jewish life consciously adopts such a policy. If this happens, Jews will have to draw more than ever on their rich traditions of faith, doubt, struggle and love — and do so as families, rather than as a nation.
Translation: get with the program and back Israel’s genocide campaign or face excommunication. Israel’s not going to change anything — and you will never be given any national-political power — so you need to change yourself to get in line with Israel (or become a hermit and stay the hell out of our way).
By any metric, the World Youth Festival running in the Sirius federal territory (Sochi, southern Russia) on March 1-7 is a stunning achievement: a sort of Special Cultural Operation (SCO) encompassing the young Global South.
It starts with the incomparable setting – the 2014 Olympics park of science and art, nested between snowy mountains and the Black Sea – all the way to the stars of the show: over 20,000 young leaders from over 180 nations, Russians and mostly Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, as well as assorted dissidents from the sanctions-obsessed Western “garden”.
Among them are scores of educators, PhDs, public sector or culture activists, charity volunteers, athletes, young entrepreneurs, scientists, citizen journalists, as well as teenagers from 14 to 17, for the first time the focus of a special program, “Together into the Future”. These are the generations that will be building our common future.
President Putin is once again quite sharp: he emphasized how a clear distinction applies between citizens of the world – including the Global North – and the intolerant, extremely aggressive Western plutocracy. Russia, a multinational, multicultural civilization-state, by principle welcomes all citizens of the world.
The World Youth Festival 2024, taking place seven years after the last one, renews a tradition that harks back to the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students when the USSR welcomed everyone on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
The idea of an open platform for young, committed, very organized people attracted by Russian conservative/family values permeates the whole festival – in sharp contrast to the artificial, cancel culture-obsessed “open society” P.R. incessantly sold by the usual hegemonic foundations.
Each day at the festival is dedicated to a main theme. For instance, March 2 was on “responsibility for the fate of the world”; March 3 was for “unity and cooperation among nations”; March 4 was for “a world of opportunities for everyone”.
No less than 300,000 youngsters from around the world applied to come to the festival. So obviously to select a little over 20,000 was quite a feat. After the festival, 2,000 foreign participants will travel to 30 Russian cities for cultural exchange. Exactly what comrade Xi Jinping defines as “people to people’s exchanges”.
It’s no wonder the festival organizers, Rosmolodezh, the Russian federal agency for youth affairs, call it “the largest youth event in the world”. Director Ksenia Razuvaeva noted, “we are destroying the myth that Russia is isolated.”
The Pitfalls of “Asynchronous Multipolarity”
The festival is all about networking among youth groups, intercultural/business ties ranging from the sustainable community level to the larger geopolitical level.
I had the huge honor and responsibility to address a truly multi-Global South audience at the Belgorod oblast pavilion, invited by the Russia Knowledge Foundation, alongside a consultant from Hyderabad, India.
The Q&A session was terrific: ultra-sharp questions from Iran to Serbia, from Brazil to India, from Palestine to Donbass. A true microcosm of the multicultural Young Global South, eager to know everything about the current geopolitical Great Game as well as how national governments can facilitate international cultural and scientific cooperation among young people.
The Valdai Club is running a particularly attractive daily program at the forum, The World in 2040.
A workshop on Sunday, for instance, focused on “The Future of a Multipolar World”, anchored by the excellent Andrey Sushentsov, dean of the School of International Relations at MGIMO, arguably the best international relations school on the planet.
The discussion on “asynchronous multipolarity” was particularly useful to the audience (a solid Chinese presence, mostly PhDs), and elicited ultra-sharp questions by researchers from Serbia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and of course China.
Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of China studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, elaborated on the key concept of “Asian multipolarity” – the many Asias within Asia, something that totally baffles simplistic Western categorizations. After the session we had an excellent exchange about it.
Yet nothing at the forum compares to going from room to packed room, getting a glimpse of the in-depth discussions and then wandering the pavilions in total networking mode. I was approached by everyone from Sudan to Ecuador, from New Guinea to a group of Brazilians, from Indonesians to an official of the Communist Party of the United States.
And then there’s the special prize: the stands of the several Russian republics. That’s when you get the chance to be immersed in a Yamal tea ritual; to receive first-hand information on the Nenets Autonomous Region; or to discuss the procedure to embark on a trip in a nuclear icebreaker in the Northern Sea Route – or Arctic Silk Road: the connectivity channel of the future. Once again: multipolar Russia in effect.
Now compare this peaceful, pan-global gathering focused on all forms of sustainable community programs, drenched in hopes and dreams, to NATO launching a two-week, massive warmongering exercise dubbed “Nordic Response 2024”, carried out by Finland, Norway and newcomer Sweden less than 500 km away from the Russian borders.
“George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” These were the words of famed rapper Kanye West during the 2005 nationally televised telethon benefit for victims of Hurricane Katrina. In this notorious quote, Kanye expressed a popular conception of the Bush administration for a whole generation of people. How is it then, that less than 15 years later the same Kanye West — son of a Black Panther who had previously made commentary on racism in the U.S. — would go on a national tour professing his love for Hitler? Even more recently, beloved star in the Black community, Nicki Minaj, cozied up to Ben Shapiro after rapper Megan Thee Stallion blasted her for misogynoir. Both of these instances illustrate the right’s newfound investment in popular culture in response to young people, people of color and the LGBTQ community’s increasing acceptance of socialism.
Outside of exploiting the fissures in Black popular culture, the right has become increasingly interested in permeating their ideas through internet culture. Popular streamers/podcasters like Sneako and Andrew Tate diffuse ideas of misogyny, queerphobia, and racism to a young and impressionable audience, ensuring they have “first dibs” on shaping their worldview as they enter into adolescence and young adulthood. These instances don’t solely remain within the realm of various -isms or phobias. Right wing media personality Tucker Carlson has been featured on the podcast Full Send promoting a new tobacco product Zyn, for reasons that can only be seen as a promotional money making scheme for the company and its owners.
The right’s new interest in popular culture could be understood as a response to the leftward shift in the U.S. socio-political landscape that occurred between 2016–2020. When the Black Lives Matter movement came to a head after the murder of George Floyd and COVID shut down the economy, capitalist antagonisms were incredibly sharp and noticeable. This was in part because of the horrendous Trump presidency, but also in part because a new socialist movement was set into motion by the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016. This latest utopian socialist moment brought many people into new political life: previously apolitical or demobilized, as well as young people who were experiencing political life for the very first time. This spawned the movements’ very own streamers and podcasters, such as the Red Scare Podcast, the Chapo Trap House Podcast and streamers like Hasan Piker. They sought to speak to, and for, this newly mobilized political base of young workers and students. But as the movement’s energy dwindled, their viewership and popularity declined. At the same time, some of these podcasters and streamers became advocates of “post-left” nihilistic politics, which was due to a concerted effort, perhaps even the first “attack,” by rightwing billionaire Peter Thiel who funds their projects with an endless stream of money. Simultaneously, but not coincidentally, right wing billionaire Elon Musk bought the social media platform Twitter, now known as X. This move was less so aimed at creating a new revenue stream but more so aimed at creating and controlling popular narratives on the internet.
The left has yet to respond to or recover from the right’s new method of disseminating their ideas. The current crisis in capitalism has pushed seemingly unimportant cultural commentary to the wayside for a myriad of reasons, including racist and patriarchal chauvinism, which can’t be discounted.
Where exactly does this leave us? The right wing has become the main agitators of a “culture war” they claim to want no part in, and many socialists have taken them at their word. We’ve seemingly given up on or have no interest in what is not overtly political, economic or legislative. While non-socialist progressives make commentary on culture/cultural events and even give solutions — which may not make adequate considerations to class implications — socialists remain silent, making us look fringe, out of touch and even non-existent. This is especially damning when you take into account the rate in which access to news is being put behind a paywall. Working people are being increasingly priced out of being informed on the world around them and increasingly rely on the media we do consume, which cannot be assumed to be factual.
There are hundreds, if not millions, of people currently in “political limbo.” Some of them are the utopian socialists who were invigorated during the 2016–2020 time period. Many of these people have yet to find a political home or adopt a coherent political agenda and may fall victim to “post-left” nihilistic politics propagated by the aforementioned streamers and podcasters. However, there are many, maybe even more, people who have never or scarcely been mobilized for overt political action, but have political opinions nonetheless. To some socialists, their politics may seem crude or rudimentary, because they are not derived explicitly from political analysis, rather from cultural events that nevertheless do have political implications. Indeed, those who care greatly about and pay attention to popular/celebrity culture are far from vapid or unintelligent. Instead, is it us who’ve failed to recognize their value?
Gramsci’s theory of capitalist cultural hegemony, particularly in the era of a rising fascist movement, is vindicated by the events of today. As the fascist right takes an “all-in” approach to reify its social and cultural dominance, socialists remain glued to “pure” politics. If it is our aim to become a mass party, then we cannot afford to concede the realm of cultural commentary to the far right. Nor should we concede to non-socialist progressives who often fail to center the working class in their approach. A concerted effort on the party’s behalf must be made to confront the current crisis of culture happening in the United States, with a body dedicated to understanding popular culture and the underlying politics. I believe this will breathe political life into those in “limbo” who have yet to be reached or heard.
Massachusetts voters who picked ‘no preference’ hope to send a message to “Genocide Joe” Biden – by Lila Hempel-Edgers
Supporters of the Vote No Preference campaign gathered at Andala Coffee House, a Middle Eastern restaurant, to watch the numbers roll in on Super Tuesday in hopes that enough “no preference” ballots were cast to send a message to President Biden.
Garnering 83 percent of the vote, Biden won a decisive victory in Massachusetts over author Marianne Williamson and Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips, who were also on the Democratic ballot. As results continued to come in Tuesday, “no preference” was winning an even bigger slice of the vote than either Williamson or Phillips, in an indication of dissatisfaction with the president among liberal voters. Around 9:30 p.m., the crowd cheered for over 11,000 ballots cast for no preference. “Not bad for a five day turnaround,” said Sara Halawa, one of the campaign’s organizers. By 10:45 p.m., the group had garnered over 27,000 votes, and they felt the momentum.
“It looks like it’s going to be something like 50,000 or 60,000 [votes] based on how things are going,” Nathan Foster, 27, of Medford, said at around 10:30 p.m., long after Biden was declared the winner. “This is so many votes for no preference, I’m really happy and satisfied with it.”
Omar Siddiqi, a 41-year old resident of Brighton, said the numbers exceeded his expectations.
“We had no clue that we were going to do this, even a week ago,” said Siddiqi. “So I think, given the speed with which this came together, this is exceeding expectations. We would have been happy with 10,000 votes.”
Aly Madan, a 32-year-old from Roxbury, who started the Vote No Preference instagram page for Massachusetts last Wednesday, was also pleased.
“At first I thought ‘I’ll get like 100 of my friends to do this, maybe a thousand.’ Now, we have hundreds of volunteers and thousands of phone calls and texts being made,” said Madan. “I’m just so excited that people are engaged and are aligned and are doing what they can.”
The Massachusetts Vote No Preference effort mirrored a similar movement in Michigan, the Uncommitted Campaign, that amassed over 101,000 “uncommitted” votes during the state’s Democratic Primary last Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.
Many Democratic voters are angry at Biden’s support for Israel in its ongoing war with Hamas that has led to the deaths of 30,000 Palestinians living in Gaza since October.
“When we saw what happened in Michigan last Tuesday, we realized we absolutely have to mobilize here in Massachusetts on Super Tuesday,” said Halawa. “And in the days that followed, we reached out to all of the different people we knew that cared about this, and a coalition came together.”
Over 300 volunteers spent the past three days advising thousands of Massachusetts voters, through phone calls, protests, and over 220,000 text messages, to vote “no preference.” The group gathered in front of several major polling sites across the state on Tuesday morning to suggest people cast their vote in protest of President Biden on their Democratic ballots.
“Over the last four days, we’ve had hundreds of volunteers working with us,” said Cicia Lee, a 31-year-old resident of Jamaica Plain who helped mobilize the coalition.
Some attendees at Tuesday night’s watch party were hopeful that their campaign might motivate Biden to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Merrie Najimy, a Watertown resident and a former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, said that ending the genocide is completely within the the president’s control.
“In the 80s, Ronald Reagan picked up the phone and called Menachem Begin, who was then the prime minister of Israel, and told him to stop the bombing of Southern Lebanon. In 20 minutes, it was over,” said Najimi. “If Biden is saying he doesn’t have that power, then why would we elect him?”
Palestinian territory– The Israeli army’s repeated killings of Palestinian civilians by deliberately running them over alive with military vehicles was vehemently denounced by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor on Sunday, as was the widespread destruction of civilian property. These crimes are part of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the rights group said, ongoing since 7 October 2023.
Euro-Med Monitor documented the Israeli army’s killing of a Palestinian man who was deliberately run over in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood on 29 February after he was arrested. The man was subjected to harsh interrogation by members of the Israeli army, who bound his hands with plastic zip-tie handcuffs before running him over with a military vehicle from the bottom to the top of his body.
The incident occurred on the main Salah al-Din Street in the Zaytoun neighbourhood, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to the Euro-Med Monitor team. Israeli soldiers restrained the victim’s hands before they crushed him, and tramped on his body from the legs up, confirming that he was alive during the incident. To guarantee thorough and complete crushing, the victim was placed on asphalt rather than in an adjacent sandy area.
The victim’s mutilated body and the surrounding area bear obvious signs that a military bulldozer or tank was present. It appears that the victim was purposefully stripped of his clothes, as he was seen wearing only his underpants at the time of his death.
The ramming operation occurred before the Israeli army withdrew to the outskirts of the Zaytoun neighbourhood two days ago, as evidenced by the condition of the entrails and other body parts, which had not yet decomposed when the case was documented.
Another documented incident took place on 23 January, when an Israeli tank ran over members of the Ghannam family while they were sleeping in a shelter caravan in the Taiba Towers area of Khan Younis. As a result, a man and his eldest daughter were killed, and his remaining three children and wife were injured. Amina, his 13-year-old daughter, confirmed that her father and older sister were killed when an Israeli tank unexpectedly and repeatedly ran over the caravan, where the family had been sleeping. While her mother and two other siblings survived the attack, Amina experienced extreme pressure in her eyes, nearly losing her sight.
Euro-Med Monitor also documented Israeli tanks and bulldozers running over and crushing displaced people inside their tents in Beit Lahia’s Kamal Adwan Hospital courtyard on 16 December 2023. Several people were killed during the incident, including individuals who were initially injured and did not ultimately survive. The corpses of those who had been previously buried in the courtyard were also crushed in the 16 December incident, stated the rights group.
More recently, a Palestinian family survived a 20 February running attack after Israeli tracks ran over their tent on the shore of the Khan Yunis Sea. A female civilian said that she was shocked by the tank suddenly running over her tent.
In addition, Euro-Med Monitor has documented numerous incidents of Israeli army tanks destroying civilian property, particularly cars, during Israel’s ground incursions into different parts of the Gaza Strip. Most of these tank attacks have targeted vehicles parked in the streets without any military affiliation, indicating the Israeli army’s deliberate and systematic destruction of Palestinian property.
Euro-Med Monitor affirmed that all of these violations are part of a larger Israeli effort to dehumanise every Palestinian in the Gaza Strip, in order to justifiy and normalise the crimes being committed against them. Crushing civilians with tanks is just one of the many cruel ways the Israeli army murders Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, disregarding their humanity, suffering, and dignity. These practices reflect the desire of Israel’s government and military to collectively punish the Palestinian people, with the aim of eliminating, intimidating, and/or harming them physically and psychologically. These crimes come alongside a public incitement campaign by Israeli officials, media figures, and settlers calling for the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza, and are also a result of the total impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators—evident by the absence of any meaningful action being taken to hold them accountable by any party or at any level.
The human rights organisation warned that the Israeli army has escalated its premeditated murders, extrajudicial executions, and judicial killings against Palestinian civilians since 7 October through direct targeting with snipers, drones, and running operations in various regions of the Gaza Strip. According to Euro-Med Monitor, these actions amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute Basic Law of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
There is no justification for the Israeli army to commit these serious crimes, Euro-Med Monitor confirmed. Even its claim that some of the aforementioned acts were directed towards Palestinian fighters does not release Israel from criminal responsibility, seeing as international law protects both civilians and fighters who have given up or lost all means of defense, with the Rome Statute classifying their killing or wounding as war crimes. The Israeli army’s deliberate and widespread destruction of Palestinian property, carried out in an irresponsible manner and without military necessity, also qualifies as a war crime under the Rome Statute.
In parallel to taking all necessary steps to ensure Israel’s accountability for the crimes it commits against the Palestinian people, Euro-Med Monitor reiterated its call for the international community to immediately implement its international obligations to stop the genocide that Israel has been committing against all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for roughly five months now.
In light of the fact that the ICC has not yet taken any action or filed any charges in relation to the investigations it is supposed to be carrying out into the situation in the Gaza Strip, Euro-Med Monitor expressed deep concern about the ICC Prosecutor’s performance regarding the genocide taking place there. Genocide is one of the most serious international crimes, with catastrophic consequences for civilians. The Court has not said anything about the crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip, even in the face of a plethora of evidence presented by Israeli officials and soldiers themselves, as well as warnings and documentary reports from international organisations, the United Nations and its experts, and the governments of many other nations. The ICC’s last update on the situation in Palestine was posted on 17 November 17 on its official website. This raises serious questions and concerns about its independence and integrity, as well as the extent to which it can perform its duties without becoming politicised or impacted by standards of duality and selective justice.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called for the formation of an independent international investigation committee specialising in Israel’s ongoing military attack on the Gaza Strip. It also urged the international community to enable the work of a separate independent international investigation committee concerned with the Occupied Palestinian Territory, formed in 2021, to carry out its work by ensuring its access to the Strip and opening the necessary investigations into all crimes and violations committed against Palestinians there, including the deliberate killing and extrajudicial execution of civilians.
The rights group also demanded that the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions visit the Gaza Strip as soon as feasible to look into the illegal killings that fall under the purview of his substantive mandate.
No, he sought it and created it, on principle and as a matter of urgency.
It wasn’t a second-year priority or even a second-quarter-of-the-first-year priority.
The new president set out in his initial days and weeks in office to destroy what President Donald Trump had built, most consequentially in the Feb. 2 executive order.
By then, mind you, there had already been significant action to loosen up on the border, including on his first day in office.
The Feb. 2 order emphasized an effort to “enhance lawful pathways for migration to this country” and revoked a slew of Trump rules, executive orders, proclamations and memoranda.
The sense of it was that there’s nothing we can or should do on our own to control illegal immigration; rather, we had to fix deep-seated social, economic and political problems in Central America instead.
It called for getting more refugees into the United States, using parole to let more migrants join family members here, enhancing access to visa programs and reviewing whether the United States is doing enough for migrants fleeing domestic or gang violence, among other things.
No, he sought it and created it, on principle and as a matter of urgency.
It wasn’t a second-year priority or even a second-quarter-of-the-first-year priority.
The new president set out in his initial days and weeks in office to destroy what President Donald Trump had built, most consequentially in the Feb. 2 executive order.
By then, mind you, there had already been significant action to loosen up on the border, including on his first day in office.
The Feb. 2 order emphasized an effort to “enhance lawful pathways for migration to this country” and revoked a slew of Trump rules, executive orders, proclamations and memoranda.
The sense of it was that there’s nothing we can or should do on our own to control illegal immigration; rather, we had to fix deep-seated social, economic and political problems in Central America instead.
It called for getting more refugees into the United States, using parole to let more migrants join family members here, enhancing access to visa programs and reviewing whether the United States is doing enough for migrants fleeing domestic or gang violence, among other things.
And it put on the chopping block numerous Trump policies that had helped establish order at the border, from Trump’s expansion of expedited removal, to his termination of a parole program for Central American minors, to his memorandum urging the relevant departments to work toward ending “catch and release.”
Most important, it targeted two of the pillars of Trump’s success at the border: the Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as Remain in Mexico, and the safe-third-country agreements with the Northern Triangle countries that allowed us to divert asylum-seekers to Central American countries other than their own to make asylum claims.
After a few fits and starts thanks to legal challenges, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas indeed ended Remain in Mexico.
Although he’s now attempting to portray himself to sympathetic journalists as an innocent bystander to Biden’s border policy, he killed the policy knowing exactly what he was doing.
“After carefully considering the arguments, evidence and perspectives presented by those who support re-implementation of MPP, those who support terminating the program and those who have argued for continuing MPP in a modified form, I have determined that MPP should be terminated,” he said in an Oct. 2021 memo.
He acknowledged, by the way, the policy “likely contributed to reduced migratory flows.”
For his part, Secretary of State Antony Blinken moved expeditiously.
On Feb. 6, 2021, he announced the end of the asylum agreements.
And just like that, the carefully crafted suite of Trump polices that had given us control of the border were demolished.
It didn’t require esoteric knowledge of border policy to realize how this would play out.
During the transition, Trump officials warned of a catastrophe if Biden followed through on his promises, and in April 2021, The Washington Post ran a piece headlined “At the border, a widely predicted crisis that caught Biden off guard.”
Now the Feb. 2 memo feels almost like an artifact from another era, as the open-borders orthodoxy begins to show cracks.
The White House sent Biden to visit the border and is considering measures to curtail illegal immigration and calling on sanctuary cities to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while Mayor Eric Adams criticizes aspects of his city’s sanctuary regime.
The executive order, though, is a stark reminder the current chaos is the product of deliberate policy.
It’s all there in black and white, a prelude to a disaster that has roiled the country and could well play an outsize role in Biden losing the presidency.
To the recycle bin, or Marxist Archive, or…. oblivion.
One might ask why the people who took over ‘Workers Vanguard’ wanted to join the Spartacists in the first place. From the outside, it looks like a hostile takeover. Did these people voice opposition to everything the Spartacists had written in ‘Workers Vanguard’ as they joined?
After copying and watching and listening to the Neo-Spartacist versus Internationalist Group debate a number of times an impression comes through to me. The Neo-Spartacist leader is an academic. I have no knowledge of this man’s name even, or personal history. I am making this judgement from his speaking style and evident thinking style. He is used to speaking with a condescending self satisfied smirk of someone who is speaking at a podium with an audience that must listen and be graded.
The Internationalist Group speaker seemed like someone who was used to speaking in many different situations, some calling for short declarative sentences, a joke or bit of humor, and a firm voice when emphasizing and important point. Selling ‘Workers Vanguard’ on the street or at a factory gate may teach one to speak in many different ways to convince people. The Internationalist Group speaker gave example after example of actual workers in the audience who had been on picket lines, in labor unions, at universities during demonstrations.
“All you do is call us names,” was the bizarre response from the Neo-Spartacist speaker.
Simply not used to classical debating techniques. Of the levels of argument, name calling is the lowest form. But, saying that the Neo-Spartacists are following the ideas of Michael Pablo and the tired tiny Trotskyists parties faced with the Stalinist victories of the 1940’s is not ‘name calling.’ Saying that the Neo-Spartacists want to join the ‘mass movements’ is not name calling. True or false, the description is about political activity and writing.
The stunning collapse of the Spartacist in the spring of 2020 was simply dismissed by the Neo-Spartacist speaker. “So you put out a few leaflets,” he said dismissively.
So, what were the Neo-Spartacists doing while the biggest demonstrations in decades were happening across the US after the killing of George Floyd?
At the time, with the media full of death from COVID stories, I wondered if key Spartacists had gotten sick, or died.
Now, I wonder if this was the “Night of the Long Knaves” elimination of the Old Guard Spartacists to complete the take-over and then renunciation of the last thirty years of the Spartacist League. The online meeting format works for some things, but limits all kinds of contact people might have in a political setting where all kinds of incidental meetings and communication may take place. Every crisis is an opportunity apparently.
The Internationalist Group speaker noted that the founders of the Internationalist Group were kicked out of the Spartacist League in 1996 and that was to be the Decline and Fall of the Classic Spartacist League.
Bizarrely the Neo-Spartacist speaker admits, in a hurry, that the expulsion was wrong, but won’t say why. What went wrong? The answer is “that was almost thirty years ago, who cares?” The words of someone who is in charge, but not because of the power to persuade people. The technique works in closed organizations. In the rough and tumble real world, not so much.
The thinking seems the same style of academic glibness that throws out a number of points sounding intelligent enough, questioned on a point immediately transitions to a related, or unrelated topic. Assumes that because they are officially “smart” and degreed they must be right. A pedant…
I noted the multicolor ‘Workers Vanguard’ issued 22 Dec 2024. Color print is more expensive than black ink on newsprint paper. Printing photos is expensive. All this could be on a website at less cost. But, the price is still fifty cents. The articles are more general, essay type pieces so that the issue may be sold many months after print date. Okay.
But what happened to the bi-weekly print schedule? When I first subscribed ‘Workers Vanguard’ had just gone from bi-monthly to once a week. But, the output was hard to maintain for a small revolutionary organization. Now, what is it, twice a year. Are all the articles written by Comrade X?
Curiouser, and curiouser….
I don’t see how this organization can thrive in the US at this time. Listening to Comrade X I feel like I’m back in the 1970’s with the constant talk about “The Movement.” Last summer when there was a UAW strike the Neo-Spartacist called for a General Strike to shut down Detroit. The general strike did not happen. Why not just call for a Detroit Soviet, that’s not going to happen either.
The summer when Lenin was fifteen years old he read the populist novel “What is to Be Done?” In some ways that fictional narrative of a workers cooperative and people who wanted to create a new society is the Foundational Myth of the Soviet Union. One commenter noted that religions and social movements are not based on lists of rules or dry documents… some kind of simple narrative is usually at the heart of the idea. Christians were around for decades before anyone dreamed up the Jesus was born and walked the Earth story.
So, narratives matter.
The Neo-Spartacists narrative is “that was a long time ago.” As the Internationalist speaker said “You are all about the Now.”
Again, back to the 1970’s, it seems.
On the Ukraine Russia War the Internationalist group first adopted the classic ‘both sides are capitalists, workers don’t have a side’ and then reassessed and said this is US Imperialism and the European satellites trying to defeat Russia and then go on to China. So, militant workers should militarily defend the Russians against Western Imperialism. The Neo-Spartacists say that workers labor unions in Ukraine and Russia should oppose their own rulers. I must read and hear three or four solid hours of news about the Ukraine War each day. I have never seen one reference to Ukrainian labor unions. What political power or presence in political life do Ukrainian labor unions have? Do Russian labor unions have any political power or projection. I do not know. I never hear of any. The Communist Party of Russia looks like almost every leader is over 70 and they sound like National Stalinists, not organized workers.
The Neo-Spartacist did protest at Columbia University when the college bosses said there was a ban on pro-Palestinian protests. The Neo-Spartacist did mount a protest against the monarchy in the UK that I would have attended if in the area. So, it is not all negative.
Neo-Spartacist Comrade X complained that the Internationalist Group would not join the Neo-Spartacists in a demonstration they had called. A few months ago the Neo-Spartacist were calling on the Internationalist Group to join them and asked for private meetings. Perhaps Comrade X thought he could use his organizational magic to charm the Internationalist Group into joining his project. The Internationalist Group asked for a public debate instead.
……………
Afterthought…
Comrade X from the Spartacist claimed that “Hundreds of thousands” of black people have been killed by the US police? What? The US police kill about 1,000 people a year over the last half decade that people have been keeping a relatively accurate tally. About 400 of the people shot dead or killed by other methods by police are black. Four hundred a year is a lot, but are there 40,000,000 black people in the US. The police claim that only twenty of the black people killed were unarmed. Do the police lie. Yes. But Comrade X is engaged in hyperbole.
What is the claim “Open Police Archives” supposed to prove. Is it supposed to imply that the police are conducting massive campaigns of repression an violence across the US that is only a vague rumor to the public? 100,000 black people are killed, and no one took note? But, we can expose the Liberals by opening the police archives and see the secret reports of mass systematic repression and thousands and thousands of unknown killings by the state. Hyperbole.
In the Spring of 2020 when the COVID lockdowns and hysteria reigned the Spartacist League…. disappeared. Despite having a functioning website, nothing new was posted. Why? Some have noted in the past that Workers Vanguard articles are edited and checked by numerous people because they are not just a columnist or a person’s opinion but a group statement of matters of public and working class import. Couldn’t that be done online? Or, was something else going on? I don’t know.
The excuse for collapse and other problems that “so did everybody else on the Left” from Comrade X is mind boggling after dealing and listening and reading Spartacist and Leninist and Trotskyist ideas for decades. Having presented Workers Vanguard to workers at factory gates in the morning or on college campuses at noon, the appeal was never “We’re like everybody else on the Left.”
I don’t remember an appeal to build some amorphous outpouring of justified rage like the “Palestinian Justice Movement” as something that militants should seek to build. The outpouring of street protests and anger can and has arrived and then disappeared leaving little of any “Movement.”
So, perhaps the Neo-Spartacist League will latch on to the “Palestine Justice Movement” and become the best builders of the Movement the way the Socialist Workers Party became the best builders the anti-war “Movement” in the 1960’s and 1970’s and then became a cult with the copyrights to a lot of Trotsky’s works that they did not read. The copyrights to those works are close to expiring, and the Socialist Workers Party has a couple of dozen members and they are all over seventy years of age.
I remember in the 1980’s running into American Communist Party members who were outrage that the Spartacists had the gaul to claim to defend the Soviet Union while opposing Stalinist leaders while the CP/USA defended Democrats and held victory parties when Democrats won control of the US Congress. I felt like I was in a play. The old Communist Stalinists were laughable crypto-Democrat Radical Liberals.
And… now the Spartacists are…. crypto-Democrat Liberals looking for Communist allies in the Democratic Socialist USA. Curiouser and curiouser…. I’m still in a play.
…… Founded just months before the 2016 Presidential Election by self-described Silicon Valley conservative Andrew Torba, Gab touted itself as a censorship-free alternative to Twitter and was heavily promoted by the media before becoming associated with far-right extremism and hate after the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. As of 2022, Gab has adopted a militant Christian nationalist bent and boasts of having an excess of one million “cumulative registered accounts”1 as well as having a value of $10 million, despite indisputable evidence to the contrary.
Since Gab’s inception, Torba has shapeshifted and rebranded himself many times in order to attract any group that would promote Gab and give him money. Over the course of Gab’s history, Torba has pandered to nearly every fringe online community on the right-wing spectrum; ranging from 4chan lolicon connoisseurs and edgelords to the QAnon and MAGA cults and beyond. If one looks past Torba’s conservative christian veneer they will find an affinity grifter who says and does everything in his power to keep the façade of Gab being a viable alternative to Twitter going and keep the money flowing. Torba relied on making misleading claims about the user base and utility of Gab in order to rip off millions of dollars from investors, many of whom he swindled using his conservative christian affinity grift. …..
Under cover of fear for MPs’ safety, Labour leader Keir Starmer has helped the ruling Tories paint as villains anyone opposed to Israel’s slaughter of children
For the best part of a decade now, the British establishment has been weaponising antisemitism against critics of Israel, claiming as its biggest scalp the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
He lost the 2019 general election – and stepped down as leader – amid a barrage of smears that he had indulged, if not stoked, antisemitism in the party’s wider ranks.
Corbyn is the only major British party leader to have prioritised the rights of Palestinians over Israel’s oppression of them. He was finally drummed out of the parliamentary party by his successor, Keir Starmer, in 2020 for pointing out that antisemitism in Labour had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons”.
Last week, that same establishment campaign plumbed new depths. Now it is not just the left wing of the Labour Party – traditionally critical of Israel for its decades of oppressing Palestinians – facing demonisation. Large parts of the British public are finding themselves being smeared too – and for the same reason.
The inciting cause is a parliamentary crisis precipitated last week by Starmer’s refusal to identify Israel’s slaughter and starvation of the 2.3 million people of Gaza as “collective punishment” – a war crime.
The House of Commons speaker, who is supposed to be strictly neutral, defied convention to allow Starmer to water down a ceasefire motion on Gaza promoted by the Scottish Nationalists, all so he could avert a rebellion in his party’s ranks.
But while a bitter row ensued between Labour and the ruling Tories over the abuse of parliamentary protocol, it also brought the two sides together on a separate matter.
For different reasons, they exploited the crisis over the ceasefire vote to imply, without a shred of evidence, that demonstrations against Israel’s flagrant, months-long atrocities in Gaza constituted not just antisemitic behaviour but a threat to the democratic order and the safety of MPs.
As a result, the consensus of the English political and media establishment has swiftly shifted onto even more dangerous, and anti-democratic, terrain than the earlier antisemitism smears.
Wilfully deaf
According to a recent survey, two-thirds of Britons support a ceasefire in Gaza – with many of them blaming Israel for killing and maiming at least 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza and imposing an aid blockade that is gradually starving the rest of the population.
Only 13 percent of the public share the two main parties’ view that Israel is justified in continuing to take military action.
For months, many hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of London each week to demand that the UK stop its complicity in what the World Court ruled recently is plausibly a genocide being committed by Israel.
Britain is supplying Israel with arms, giving it diplomatic cover at the United Nations, and has effectively joined Israel in its aid blockade. The UK has frozen funds to the UN’s main aid agency, Unrwa, a last lifeline to the enclave.
But those demanding that international law be upheld – and castigating the political class for failing to do the same – are now finding themselves demonised as potential terrorists.
Already, the talk on both sides of the Commons – and in the media – is of the need for new police powers, curbs on the right of the public to protest, and further security measures to keep politicians shielded from the people they are supposed to represent.
This week, a committee of MPs used pressures placed on the police to manage regular mass marches in London against the slaughter in Gaza as grounds for introducing tighter limits on the right to protest.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took up the refrain, calling for greater police powers against what he described as “mob rule” that was supposedly “replacing democratic rule”.
Separately, he insinuated that this so-called “mob” – those troubled by the killing of at least 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza over the past five months – may not “belong here“, in Britain. Notably, he made these remarks during an address to the Community Security Trust, which was at the forefront of promoting the smearing of Corbyn and his supporters as antisemites.
But the fearmongering is far from restricted to the ruling Tories.
Labour’s shadow international development secretary, Lisa Nandy, publicly complained at the weekend about members of the public shouting “genocide” at her, linking it to the greater security measures she has been taking.
Opposition to Israel’s behaviour is a majority view among the public, but neither major party is prepared to listen or respond. Both are wilfully deaf to public concern that Britain needs to stop actively enabling one of the greatest crimes in living memory.
As Labour MP Diane Abbott, a Corbyn ally and long-time target of death threats, noted, Britain is taking “the first step towards a police state“.
Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza is tearing the mask off Westminster. By the day, Britain is looking more overtly like an oligarchy.
Israel partisans
The full import of last week’s events – when the Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle did a grubby backroom deal with Starmer, effectively sabotaging the Scottish National Party’s ceasefire motion – has been obscured by subsequent politicking and point-scoring.
The real story is to be found in the aftermath.
The pair proferred a dangerous cover story to justify Starmer’s determined efforts to avoid naming Israel’s egregious violations of international law as “collective punishment”.
Hoyle apologised for breaking with long-established convention and allowing Starmer’s watered-down amendment. But he justified his move on the grounds that Labour MPs would have been put in danger if they had been forced to reject the SNP ceasefire motion on their leader’s orders.
He declared: “I don’t ever want to go through the situation of picking up a phone to find that a friend, of whatever side, has been murdered by terrorists.”
The speaker produced no evidence to support this unprecedented claim, one that sounded like it was intended to bring to mind the scenes of the Capitol building being invaded by Trump supporters in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.
Notably, both Starmer and Hoyle are among the many MPs on each side of the aisle who have consistently and proudly demonstrated partisanship towards Israel.
Large numbers of MPs continue to belong to their parties’ Friends of Israel groups, including Starmer, even as the international human rights community has reached a consensus that Israel is an apartheid state – and now that it is committing mass slaughter and starving Gaza’s population.
Hoyle even took time out in November to head off to Israel – now on trial for genocide at the world’s highest court – to be briefed by the very army doing that genocide. He was accompanied by Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, who has repeatedly sought to justify the slaughter.
Starmer himself trumpeted the fact that, before drafting his amendment to the SNP motion, he had called Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, for advice. That is the same Herzog who had earlier argued that Gaza’s entire population, including its children, were legitimate targets for Israel’s military attacks on the enclave.
Moral panic
During the Corbyn years, opposition to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians was denounced as antisemitism.
And in just the same way, reality is being turned on its head once again. Now, the call for an end to Israel’s slaughter of children is being variously denounced as extremism, an attack on democracy, and the stifling of free speech.
Last week, as the Tories dogpiled Hoyle for tearing up the parliamentary rulebook, Sunak warned that the lesson was “we should never let extremists intimidate us into changing the way in which parliament works”.
What could he possibly mean? That the right to protest could not be tolerated within a parliamentary democracy? That free speech was now equivalent to “intimidation”?
Starmer has opened the floodgates to a moral panic in which the people of Gaza are forgotten, except as bit players in a smear campaign to silence those calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal bombing and starvation policies.
In the current climate, it was largely unremarkable that Paul Sweeney, a Labour member of the Scottish parliament, made headlines accusing Gaza protesters of “storming” his offices and “terrifying” his staff – until Scottish police investigated and found no evidence for his claims.
The police described the demonstration as “peaceful”, an assessment confirmed by a reporter for the Scotsman newspaper who was present.
Senior journalists are sticking their oars in too.
The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg claimed the dangers extended beyond politicians to journalists like herself. The current crisis, she suggested, could be traced back to Corbyn’s supporters, who were wont to “boo and jeer” as she and the rest of the media promoted evidence-free claims that Labour was beset by antisemitism.
True charlatans
Sudden concern about the dangers caused by public protest against the slaughter of Palestinians should be ridiculed as the self-serving nonsense it is.
The political and media establishment now whipping up fears for the safety of MPs – so they can continue ignoring Israel’s genocide – is the same establishment that endlessly vilified Corbyn for highlighting Israel’s ugly rule over the Palestinians.
For many years, Corbyn had warned that Israel was brutalising the Palestinian people and stealing their land to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state. His 2019 manifesto promised to end the UK’s arms sales to Israel and recognise a Palestinian state.
History has now proven his stance as warranted, while also demonstrating that the political and media class – and most of all Starmer, a human rights lawyer – are the real charlatans.
But more to the point, no one expressed concern for the safety of Corbyn, Labour’s elected leader, or his supporters when they were being subjected to a years-long campaign of vilification. He was variously painted as an antisemite, a Soviet-era spy, and a traitor.
When the Daily Mail presented Corbyn as Dracula above the headline “Labour must kill vampire Jezza”, everyone chuckled. As they did when Newsnight transposed his face onto the Dark Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter franchise.
When British soldiers were shown using Corbyn’s face as target practice, it made fleeting headlines before being forgotten.
There were no demands for soul searching then, as there are now. There was no panic about the stoking of a dangerous public mood. There was no concern about the threat to democracy or the safety of Corbyn and other MPs who spoke out against Israel.
Why? The question hardly needs answering. Because it was the establishment political and media class doing the smearing and inciting. It was the same people whining now about their safety who were actively endangering elected representatives like Corbyn.
‘Barrage of racist abuse’
This is not just about history, of course.
The establishment campaign that claimed to be outing antisemitism – and that maliciously conflated opposition to Israel’s military oppression of Palestinians (anti-Zionism) with antisemitism – has simply metamorphosed into something even uglier.
Now it seeks to tar those it smeared as antisemites as worse: as a supposed menace not just to Jews but to MPs and democracy. Those trying to stop the slaughter of children are potential terrorists.
One of Corbyn’s few surviving allies – not yet purged by Starmer from the parliamentary party – is the Labour Muslim MP Zarah Sultana.
A tweet of hers that went viral at the weekend read: “Whenever I speak up for the rights of the Palestinian people, I am subjected to a barrage of racist abuse, threats and hate. Things have been particularly bad in recent months.”
As she noted, the prime minister used an Islamophobic trope against her last month, as did another Tory MP, when she urged a ceasefire. Neither apologised. Once again, these incidents barely made ripples, let alone elicited an outpouring of concern.
Though Sultana was careful not to allude to Starmer’s role, she warned that this cynical moral panic must not be allowed to become “a pretext to demonise the Palestine solidarity movement specifically or attack our democratic rights more broadly”.
But the truth is, that boat sailed some time ago.
Plot on parliament?
From the start, Palestine solidarity demonstrations were demonised as “hate marches” by the then-home secretary, Suella Braverman.
Plumbing new levels of disingenuousness, she and other politicians – backed by the media – pretended a longtime leftwing Palestinian solidarity slogan chanted at marches that demands equality for Jews and Palestinians “between the river and the sea” was a call for genocide against Jews.
At the weekend, the Times newspaper turned the flame higher. A front-page article headlined “Plot to target parliament” was meant to evoke in the public’s mind Guy Fawkes’ infamous gunpowder plot in the 17th century to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
But all the stories described were entirely legitimate efforts by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) to lobby parliament to uphold international law and press for a ceasefire.
The Times insinuated that Ben Jamal, leader of the PSC, was behaving in a sinister fashion by calling on the public to “ramp up pressure” on MPs – that is, exercise the most basic of democratic rights.
Meanwhile, Braverman’s successor as home secretary, James Cleverly, insisted that MPs must not be subjected to “undue pressure” – as though it was threatening behaviour for members of the public to give their elected representatives vocal warning that they would refuse to vote for them based on actions such as refusing to oppose a genocide.
Two nasty parties
There is little doubt where this is all designed to lead.
Weaponised antisemitism was always about silencing those protesting against British foreign policy – a foreign policy that prioritises Israel’s pivotal role in promoting western control over the oil-rich Middle East above ending Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
Previously, that chiefly meant smearing Corbyn and the anti-imperialist, anti-war Labour left.
But with public outrage growing at Israel’s genocide, the stakes have risen dramatically. Now the political and media establishments are desperate to shift attention away both from Israel and their complicity in the slaughter of children.
Their preferred method has been pretending that it is only Muslims and leftwing, antisemitic extremists opposed to the genocide. Normal people, apparently, should be invested exclusively in the impossible task Israel claims to have set itself: of “eliminating Hamas”, however many Palestinian children die in the process.
Evoking King Canute trying to hold back the tide, Nandy denounced Tory MP Lee Anderson – and the wider Conservative party – for Islamophobia after he claimed “Islamists” were in control of London and its mayor, Sadiq Khan.
In the Daily Telegraph last week, Braverman advanced similar racist paranoia, arguing that Britain was becoming a country where “Sharia law, the Islamist mob, and anti-Semites take over communities”.
Giving Starmer a taste of Corbyn’s medicine – and illustrating the way career-minded politicians are kept in line – she accused the Labour leader of being “in hock to extremists” and that the party was “still rotten to the core”.
Two nasty parties, each complicit in a genocide of the Palestinian people, are now competing to stoke Islamophobia – one explicitly, the other implicitly.
With no place to hide for his political cowardice, Starmer has opened the gates to the bipartisan vilification of Muslims, not just in Gaza but at home too. Will he get away with it?
He may find it tougher going than he expects. With the slaughter in Gaza playing out on TV screens and social media accounts, many millions of Britons are incensed. Whatever the political class claims, it is not just Muslims and the anti-war left angry at the complicity of British politicians in genocide.
The smearing of Corbyn over his criticisms of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians largely worked. But gaslighting much of the public as a dangerous “mob” for opposing even more egregious Israeli crimes may yet backfire.
Oppenheimer, the film biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist and “father of the atomic bomb,” written, directed and co-produced by Christopher Nolan, has struck an obvious chord with audiences around the world.
The film has met with widespread critical honors, having received some 377 nominations for prizes worldwide. Most recently, at the Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony in Los Angeles on February 24, Oppenheimer earned four major awards (the event only considers acting performances). Nolan’s film is nominated for 13 Academy Awards, and is expected to win in a number of categories at the upcoming event March 10.
The notice the film has received is genuinely deserved. Oppenheimer is a work that bears re-viewing, and the second or third viewing brings out elements that one has previously missed. It has a powerful, multi-layered performance by Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, an extremely complicated personality, and important performances by Robert Downey, Jr., Florence Pugh, David Krumholtz, Tom Conti, Benny Safdie, Gary Oldman, Kenneth Branagh and others, several of them in small roles.
The drama has various fascinating and pertinent elements. Oppenheimer manages to examine a wide range of issues—the development of the nuclear bomb, various debates in theoretical physics, the Cold War and McCarthyism, and more. It presents Albert Einstein (Conti) not merely as a brilliant scientist but as a profound social thinker, Edward Teller (Safdie) as an unpleasant, ambitious opportunist, and Harry Truman (Oldman) as the wretched, criminal figure he was.
Oppenheimer depicts the manner in which the American establishment persuaded or cajoled leading scientists, many of them Jewish and left-wing and often politically naïve, to work on the atomic bomb on the basis of their deep hatred of Hitler and fear that the Nazis would develop the terrible weapon first. Here the Stalinized Communist Party, falsifying the nature of the second imperialist world war and the Roosevelt-Truman administration, played such a devastating role, disorienting the physicists along with many others, leaving them utterly unprepared for the witch-hunts and repression to come.
Even then, numerous figures refused to join the Manhattan Project or criticized it. Nolan’s film offers a relatively nuanced picture of the numerous conflicts and contradictions. In his efforts to convince one scientist to participate, Oppenheimer asserts, “So you’re a fellow traveler [of the Communist Party], so what? This is a national emergency. I’ve got some skeletons, and they’ve put me in charge. They need us.” And the other replies prophetically, “Until they don’t.” Confronted with Oppenheimer in full military regalia, fellow physicist Isidor Rabi (a Nobel Prize winner in 1944, played by Krumholtz) tells him, “Take off that ridiculous uniform—you’re a scientist.”
Oppenheimer deals meaningfully with these remarkable people, many of them torn by conflicting impulses, its lead character in particular. Following the August 6, 1945 bombing of Hiroshima, Oppenheimer addresses a cheering crowd of scientists in these words: “The world will remember this day. It’s too early to determine what the results of the bombing are … But I’m sure the Japanese didn’t like it.” Murphy is able to communicate Oppenheimer’s own awareness of the horrifying callousness of his comment, as the screenplay continues (written in the first person), “I see FLESH RIPPED FROM THE SMILING YOUNG FACES… I see PLASMA ROILING and the DEVIL’S CLAW reach into the night sky… I see piles of ASHES where the young crowd was cheering.”
The story should be an object lesson today for those choosing to believe the lies about America’s “democratic” intentions in regard to Ukraine or Gaza. Oppenheimer and the others fell obediently into line, convincing themselves of the official story. American imperialism manipulated them and subsequently, in many cases, disposed of them, often harshly. As the military packs up the bomb for use in Hiroshima and Oppenheimer offers practical advice, an Air Force officer, speaking, in effect, for the entire ruling elite, informs him, “With respect, Dr. Oppenheimer. We’ll take it from here.” Indeed…
Nolan and his colleagues treat their audience sincerely, arranging issues and arguments in an accessible manner, without pandering or vulgarizing, and people have responded with interest and support.
Tom Conti and Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer has taken in some $960,000,000 at the international box office. It is possible, with an opening in Japan scheduled for March—a controversial event—the film may surpass the one-billion-dollar mark.
How many people have seen Oppenheimer? It is difficult to arrive at a precise figure. The American film industry in particular is only interested in “gross revenue.” With $330,000,000 taken in US ticket sales, and an average movie ticket price of $10, one comes up with the very rough estimate of 30-40 million audience members.
Globally, ticket prices average $5 or so, but they vary so widely that the figure is not very helpful (with a much higher cost in Western Europe and Japan). About certain countries one can be more precise. In France, for example, figures released by the National Cinema Center at the beginning of the new year showed that Oppenheimer was the fifth-most successful film in the country, with 4.39 million individual admissions. The Federal Film Board (FFA) reports that the film was the fourth most popular in Germany last year, with 4.1 million tickets sold.
In the UK, the film’s gross revenue was $74,872,624 and ticket prices averaged US$10.04 last year, for an attendance of approximately 7.45 million people. In Italy, Oppenheimer “secured over 70 percent of market share” during its first five days in cinemas, “and recorded the highest-ever opening weekend in the territory for IMAX screenings.” (Collider) More than two million Australians have watched the film, a figure apparently matched in South Korea. According to the Korea Times in August, “Oppenheimer topped the local box office for five consecutive days, selling over 1.5 million tickets.” If this writer’s calculations are accurate, some five million spectators have attended showings of Oppenheimer in Mexico.
The number of Chinese viewers has probably surpassed 10 million, and perhaps far surpassed that figure. The Hollywood Reporter noted in September that “Despite its long runtime and weighty historical subject matter—which many analysts expected would be a drag in China—Oppenheimer has been boosted by a rave local reception. On the influential fan platform Douban, it has received nearly half a million reviews averaging 8.8, one of the highest scores of any Hollywood film of recent memory. On Maoyan and Alibaba’s Tao Piao Piao ticket services, it averages 9.4 and 9.6, respectively.” Large numbers have also watched Oppenheimer in India, Brazil, Spain, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Poland and Sweden.
In addition, given present-day realities, millions of people internationally have likely seen the film in “pirated” versions, and millions more now through streaming platforms.
Making use of the most conservative estimates, well over 100 million people have seen Nolan’s film, an intense and compressed work dealing with world-historical events, in half a year.
Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer
The reference above, about the response to the film in China having confounded the “expectations” of analysts, holds good everywhere. In the US, above all, empty-headed commentators continue to express astonishment. The Associated Press reported, no doubt accurately if crudely, that “no one in the industry expected that a long, talky, R-rated drama released at the height of the summer movie season would earn over $900 million at the box office.” Variety, for its part, observed that the film’s “numbers” were “more or less unheard of for an incredibly dense, three-hour, R-rated historical drama.”
The Motion Picture Association in the US, revealing all we need to know about its outlook, described Oppenheimer’s box office “haul” as “staggering” for a film “about such a complicated figure that includes no superheroes.” Unable to suppress its surprise, the Association went on to remark that a “long, oft-technical, complicated movie about a historic figure many people knew little about is not supposed to be the type of movie that enchants audiences all over the globe.”
Oppenheimer is now, according to Box Office Mojo, at number 62 on the list of “top lifetime grosses” worldwide. To be blunt, it is the only substantial film for adults among the first 100 films ranked, the others all being either comic book adaptations, children’s movies, James Cameron’s miserable efforts (Titanic, Avatar, etc.) and the like. Indeed, one has to dive deep into the list to find, for example, Rain Man at 428, Schindler’s List at 494, Green Book at 496, Lincoln at 599, The Truman Show at 631. Rising ticket prices over time cloud the picture somewhat, but Oppenheimer’s accomplishment remains significant.
Why has Nolan’s film resonated so strongly with so many people regardless of geography?
A second viewing confirms that Oppenheimer stands out, first of all, for its complexity and challenging character, and its appeal to the viewer’s mental powers, under conditions where film production has become increasingly dominated by noisy, empty blockbusters that insult or benumb the intelligence. Its success demonstrates once again there is a genuine, abiding, growing hunger for more substantial film work.
Nolan’s film treats political life in a convincing and objective manner, both through its scathing portrait of figures such as Truman, Lewis Strauss (Downey) and a collection of military and governmental McCarthyite thugs worthy of an authoritarian dictatorship, and its sympathetic gaze at left-wing intellectual life in the US in the 1930s. Some of the most compelling, intimate scenes take place there. Alex Wellerstein, a science historian specializing in the history of nuclear weapons at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, pointed out to Time magazine that every person in Oppenheimer’s “close circle is or was at one point either a member of the Communist Party or very close, and he was probably very close himself.” Or, as one character in the film observes, Oppenheimer’s security file revealed the existence of “his Communist brother, sister-in-law, fiancée, best friend, wife.”
Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock
It never occurs to any of the pundits that the arguments offered for Oppenheimer’s anticipated lack of broad success—for example, according to one startled critic, “it’s a biopic about a scientist, a morality tale about the creation of the atom bomb, and a red scare courtroom drama” (AV Club)—are precisely what has attracted a wide audience: above all, in other words, the seriousness of the film’s themes and historical setting, and the seriousness of its presentation.
As argued in an initial review last July, Oppenheimer is an “appropriately disturbing film about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. It is intended to leave viewers shaken, and it succeeds in that.” At a time when—with criminal recklessness—the “Biden administration and its NATO allies continue to blithely insist they will not be ‘deterred’ by the threat of nuclear conflict” with Russia in particular, that Nolan’s film “has gained a wide audience speaks to a different sentiment in the general population, one deeply appalled by the possibility of the use of atomic bombs.”
In interviews, Nolan (born 1970) has disclosed that such concerns have been with him for decades. He grew up in Britain in the 1980s, “a time of great fear of nuclear weapons,” he told Deadline in an interview. “It was like growing up in the ’60s, with the Cuban missile crisis.” Nolan went on. “The ’80s were a very similar thing. There were protests, and there was a lot in the pop culture about nuclear weapons. But it was Sting’s song ‘Russians’ [1985] where I first heard Oppenheimer’s name, and there was this very palpable fear of nuclear Armageddon.”
In an intriguing conversation with John Mecklin, editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, prior to the film’s release, Nolan was quite specific, insisting that “our intention with the film—whatever world it was coming out into—absolutely part of the intention of the film is to reiterate the unique and extraordinary danger of nuclear weapons. That’s something we should all be thinking about all the time and care about very, very deeply. But obviously, it’s extraordinarily troubling that the geopolitical situation would have deteriorated once again to the extent that it’s being talked about in the news.”
The writer-director decried a situation in which government and military officials “start to see them [nuclear weapons] as more ordinary armaments … You’re normalizing killing tens of thousands of people. You’re creating moral equivalences, false equivalences with other types of conflict, et cetera, et cetera.” He referred to army spokesmen who “start talking about tactical nukes—that’s the conversation that I now am most afraid of, because I hear that from both sides of the political spectrum, not just from [Russian president Vladimir] Putin. I feel we’re in a world now where people are starting to once again talk about those things as some kind of acceptable possibility for our world.”
Nolan suggested nuclear Armageddon was unlikely to occur through “some Dr. Strangelove-type scenario with bombers getting the wrong signal.” It was far more probable, he said, “to be the normalizing of atomic weapons at the beginning, the use of tactical nukes leading to larger- and larger-scale conflict that will ultimately destroy the planet.” He came away from making Oppenheimer, the filmmaker asserted, “with a different understanding, a different set of fears that ultimately are founded on the same ultimate fear, which is that the world is going to be destroyed by these things.”
Time, in its piece on Nolan, remarked that “Oppenheimer’s little Hiroshima bomb had an explosive power of 15 kilotons—or 15 thousand tons of TNT. A single, modern-day U.S. Trident II missile can carry up to 12 nuclear warheads, packing 475 kilotons of punch each.” In other words, each such missile (of which there are hundreds in existence) contains more than 380 times the destructive power of the bomb that demolished a major city and killed some 100,000 people.
Cillian Murphy and David Krumholtz in Oppenheimer
The filmmaker has taken his pressing concerns, ones that affect humanity as a whole, and acted on them conscientiously and rigorously. A major film is one of the most elaborate, involved artistic undertakings imaginable, with a tremendous number of moving parts. The writer-director has concentrated his attention on this particular theme, and coordinated the efforts and skills of hundreds of collaborators in the same direction, bringing to bear a host of technologies, in such a fashion that the viewer relives or reworks this same problem, this complex of moods and ideas about historical events and about the present. Nolan’s film effectively communicates a sense of urgency because the filmmakers have found a means of materializing their own urgency in the form of a patient, carefully constructed artistic work.
Oppenheimer sets about addressing historical questions for which vast numbers of people, whether they are fully aware of it or not, urgently need answers: How has humanity arrived at its present dangerous, threatening condition? What’s to be done about it? Moreover, it does so not as a lecture or tract, but as an absorbingly human, many-sided drama. Even disagreement with Nolan’s too apologetic, accepting view of Robert Oppenheimer’s role and legacy (“he was definitely a hero” and the scientists on the Manhattan Project “had to do what they had to do”) does nothing to take away from Murphy’s subtle, extraordinarily sincere performance and, as noted, the performances of many of the others.
The repulsive nature of contemporary bourgeois politics, the vast moral and intellectual void it represents, also helps produce an atmosphere receptive to a work like Oppenheimer. The leading political figures in country after country are an assortment of corrupt corporate shills, fascist thugs and warmongers, the dominant parties are generally despised, the authorized sources of information become seen to be as little more than lying extensions of the state. It is unsurprising that millions will look in another direction, perhaps naively and even credulously, to artists for an honest appraisal of life. “Art,” Trotsky wrote in Culture and Socialism, “is one of the forms through which man finds an orientation in the world.” When so little rational orientation is forthcoming from official sources, the filmmaker may take on an outsized importance.
Beyond that, however, one might also argue that Oppenheimer has drawn forth a strong response not simply because of the immediate conjuncture. There is something here of an cumulative effect, which bursts forth “unexpectedly” and “astonishingly” only in the mind of the philistine. Masses of people have undergone traumatic experiences in recent decades, or witnessed them. War has been a constant. Upheaval, disruptions, instigated directly or indirectly by the great powers, have occurred in every corner of the globe. Rough estimates place the number of forcibly displaced and stateless persons at 130 million in 2024, in 133 countries and territories and more than 500 locations.
Nearly everyone on the planet becomes involved. Imperialism is agitating, politicizing and radicalizing great numbers of people, forcing them to think about very basic questions. These are not isolated episodes, small clouds in an otherwise sunny sky, but persistent, recurring, increasingly violent. Decades of conflict and disequilibrium, and now the emergence of a third world war, lead to shifts in popular thinking. People begin to connect up the experiences, to draw conclusions, to search for deeper causes, not the ones offered in the capitalist media. Parochialism, nationalism, “exceptionalism” tend to break down. These are more and more shared, collective global experiences. No wonder there is a hunger for more serious artistic material!
Moreover, in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the enormous historical issues brought to the fore by that trauma, cheap, demagogic radicalism will appear inadequate to a growing number. In the aftermath of the restoration of capitalism in the former “socialist” countries, only the most penetrating arguments and analyses are called for. How was this “failure” possible? Denunciations and sloganeering will not do. Precise and sober examinations once more begin to “catch on.” Even if many matters are not yet understood, there is a growing intuition that difficult, demanding problems have to be tackled, that much hard, taxing work needs to be done.
The potential once again emerges for human beings to consider their own lives as historically and socially shaped, for them to see the life-and-death importance of understanding and mastering crucial historical and social developments. It is not accidental that filmmaking, as a mass, large-scale, industrial-style activity, which tends to function at its best under conditions of popular mobility and seething unrest, begins to pick up on this process. And Nolan himself admits to being “drawn to working at a large scale” and feeling “the responsibility” to use those resources “in the most productive and interesting way.”
Cillian Murphy
Oppenheimer of course is not the only art work that reflects some of these developments, nor has this artistic process just begun. We have pointed to other works, films and television series that have conveyed unease, dissatisfaction, even disgust with the existing state of affairs. But Oppenheimer’s enormous, international prominence represents something of a nodal point.
None of this is meant to suggest that the film is without weaknesses and blind spots. As we noted last July, the problems with Oppenheimer “are not so much the failings of the individual writer-director. They reveal more general problems bound up with understanding the Second World War and mid-20th century political realities.” One might even say that “absolving” Oppenheimer, as it were, becomes obligatory when one works backward, as the filmmakers do, from a defense of World War II as the great battle for democracy and the Roosevelt administration as a social reformist utopia. The weakest portion of the film, when it temporarily turns into something of a formulaic “procedural,” occurs during the organization of Los Alamos as a secret military facility and the preparations for the first atomic bomb test.
As we argued last year, “The working class cannot adopt Oppenheimer as one of its heroes. Although he held sincerely left-wing views in the late 1930s, Oppenheimer became a significant figure in the American military-intelligence apparatus. That the ‘left’ in America by and large, including prominently the Communist Party, cheered on the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that Oppenheimer could more or less seamlessly pass from pro-Roosevelt Popular Frontism to direct participation in the war machine, none of that excuses his role.”
The character of the 1917 October Revolution, which still held such a power for figures like Oppenheimer and his generation, the emergence of Stalinism in the USSR and the betrayal of the revolution, the filthy role of the Communist Party in the US, these are gigantic questions that hover unresolved over Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
In his interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last year, Nolan made suggestive reference to some of the issues. Speaking of “the revolutionary nature of quantum physics in the 1920s,” he added, “You’re dealing with people who were engaged in a revolutionary reappraisal of the laws of the universe, just as Picasso and other artists were engaged in a revolutionary reappraisal of aesthetic art, of visual representation, just as Stravinsky, you know, was there writing all his music, and indeed, Marx, the communists—that is to say, moving on from Marx, the communist 1920s, the Russian Revolution.”
He continued: “It’s kind of an amazing time. And then, of course, as you start to research and look at the drama of his [Oppenheimer’s] story and where it then went, where this revolutionary fervor actually wound up—that’s when so many revolutions wound up in a pretty awful place.”
This is a critical point, although Nolan does not proceed any farther in his comments or perhaps his thinking. There is indeed a profound connection between the “awful place” that the October Revolution “wound up,” as a result of the perfidy and treachery of Stalinism, and the terrible historical dilemma in which vast portions of humanity, including scientists and intellectuals, found themselves in the late 1930s, and in the ensuing slaughterhouse of the world war and the Holocaust. This too is surely a matter to be investigated in a serious artistic film (or films), which would also, we are convinced, gain the interest of millions and millions.
Here’s the key takeaway of these frantic days in Moscow: Normal-o-philes of the world, unite.
These have been frantic multipolar days at the capital of the multipolar world. I had the honor to personally tell Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that virtually the whole Global South seemed to be represented in an auditorium of the Lomonosov innovation cluster on a Monday afternoon – a sort of informal UN and in several aspects way more effective when it comes to respecting the UN charter. His eyes gleamed. Lavrov, more than most, understands the true power of the Global Majority.
Moscow hosted a back-to-back multipolar conference plus the second meeting of the International Russophiles Movement (MIR, in its French acronym, which means “world” in Russian). Taken together, the discussions and networking have offered auspicious hints on the building of a truly representative international order – away from the agenda-imposed doom and gloom of single unipolar culture and Forever Wars.
The opening plenary session in the first day fell under the star power of Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova – whose main message was crystal clear: “There can’t be freedom without free will”, which could easily become the new collective Global South motto. “Civilization-states” set the tone of the overall discussion – as they are meticulously designing the blueprints of economic, technological and cultural development in the post-Western hegemonic world.
Professor of International Relations Zhang Weiwei at Fudan University’s China Institute in Shanghai summarized the four crucial points when it comes to Beijing propelling its role as a “new independent pole.” That reads like a concise marker of where we are now:
Under the unipolar order, everything from dollars to computer chips can be weaponized. Wars and color revolutions are the norm.
China has become the largest economy in the world by PPP; the largest trade and industrial economy; and it is currently at the forefront of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
China proposes a model of “Unite and Prosper” instead of a Western model of “Divide and Rule”.
The West tried to isolate Russia, but the Global Majority sympathizes with Russia. Thus, the Collective West has been isolated by the Global Rest.
Fighting the “theo-political war”
“Global Rest”, incidentally, is a misnomer: Global Majority is the name of the game. The same applies to “golden billion”; those that profit from the unipolar moment, mostly across the collective West and as comprador elites in the satraps, are at best 200 million or so.
Monday afternoon in Moscow featured three parallel sessions: on China and the multipolar world, where the star was Professor Weiwei; on the post-hegemony West, under the title “Is it possible to save the European civilization?” – attended by several dissident Europeans, academics, think tankers, activists; and the main treat – featuring the frontline actors of multipolarity.
I had the honor to moderate the awesome Global South session, which ran for over three hours – it could have been the whole day, actually – and featured several stunning presentations by a stellar cast of Africans, Latin Americans and Asians, from Palestine to Venezuela, including Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Mandla.
That was the multipolar Global South in full flight – as my imperative was to open the floor to as many people as possible. Were the organizers to release a Greatest Hits of the presentations, that could easily become a global hit.
Mandla Mandela emphasized how it’s about time to move away from the unipolar system dominated by the Hegemon, “which continues to support Israel”.
That complemented Benin’s charismatic activist Kemi Seba – who brilliantly personifies the African leadership of the future. In the plenary session, Seba introduced a key concept – which begs to be developed around the world: we are living under a “theo-political war”.
That neatly summarizes the Western simultaneous Hybrid War on Islam, Shi’ism, Christian Orthodoxy, in fact every religion, apart from the Woke Cult.
The next day, the second congress of the International Russophiles movement offered three debate sessions: the most relevant was on – what else – “Informational and Hybrid Warfare”.
I had the honor to share the stage with Maria Zakharova – and after my free jazz-style presentation, focused on over 40 years of practicing journalism across the planet and watching first-hand the utter degradation of the industry, we carried a hopefully useful dialogue on media and soft power.
My suggestion not only to the Russian Foreign Ministry but to everyone all across the Global South was straightforward: forget about oligarchy-controlled legacy/mainstream media, it is already dead. They have nothing relevant to say. The present and the future rely on social media; “alternative” – which is not alternative anymore, on the contrary; and citizen media, to all of which, of course, the highest standards of journalism should be applied.
In the evening, before everyone got down to party hard, a few of us were invited for an open, frank and enlightening working dinner with Foreign Minister Lavrov in one of the magnificent frescoed rooms of the Metropol Hotel, one the grand hotels of Europe since 1905.
A legend with a wicked sense of humor
Lavrov was relaxed, among friends; after an initial, stunning diplomatic tour de force which covered quite a few highlights of the recent decades all the way to the current gloom and doom, he opened the table to our questions, taking notes and answering each one of them in detail.
What’s so striking when you are face to face with the most legendary diplomat in the world for quite some time, in a relaxed setting, is his genuine sadness when faced with the rage, intolerance and total absence of critical thought exhibited especially by the Europeans. That was much more relevant throughout our conversation than the fact that U.S.-Russia relations are at an all-time low.
Lavrov though remains highly driven because of the Global South/Global Majority – and the Russian presidency of the BRICS this year. He hugely praised Indian FM Jaishankar, and the comprehensive relations with China. He suggested the Russophiles Movement should take a global role, playfully suggesting we should all be part of a “Normal-o-philes” movement.
Well, Lavrov The Legend is also known for his wicked sense of humor. And humor is most effective when it is deadly serious. So here’s the key takeaway of these frantic days in Moscow: Normal-o-philes of the world, unite.
If you have paid attention to what various polls and officials in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West have been doing and saying about Ukraine lately, you know the look and sound of desperation. You would be desperate, too, if you were making a case for a war Ukrainians are on the brink of losing and will never, brink or back-from-the-brink, have any chance of winning. Atop this, you want people who know better, including 70 percent of Americans according to a recent poll, to keep investing extravagant sums in this ruinous folly.
And here is what seems to me the true source of angst among these desperados: Having painted this war as a cosmic confrontation between the world’s democrats and the world’s authoritarians, the people who started it and want to prolong it have painted themselves into a corner. They cannot lose it. They cannot afford to lose a war they cannot win: This is what you see and hear from all those good-money-after-bad people still trying to persuade you that a bad war is a good war and that it is right that more lives and money should be pointlessly lost to it.
Everyone must act for the cause in these dire times. You have Chuck Schumer in Kyiv last week trying to show House Republicans that they should truly, really authorize the Biden regime to spend an additional $61 billion on its proxy war with Russia. “Everyone we saw, from Zelensky on down made this very point clear,” the Democratic senator from New York asserted in an interview with The New York Times. “If Ukraine gets the aid, they will win the war and beat Russia.”
Even at this late hour people still have the nerve to say such things.
You have European leaders gathering in Paris Monday to reassure one another of their unity behind the Kyiv regime—and where Emmanuel Macron refused to rule out sending NATO ground troops to the Ukrainian front. “Russia cannot and must not win this war,” the French president declared to his guests at the Elysée Palace.
Except that it can and, barring an act of God, it will.
Then you have Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s war-mongering sec-gen, telling Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty last week that it will be fine if Kyiv uses F–16s to attack Russian cities once they are operational this summer. The U.S.–made fighter jets, the munitions, the money—all of it is essential “to ensure Russia doesn’t make further gains.” Stephen Bryen, formerly a deputy undersecretary at the Defense Department, offered an excellent response to this over the weekend in his Weapons and Strategy newsletter: “Fire Jens Stoltenberg before it is too late.”
Good thought, but Stoltenberg, Washington’s longtime water-carrier in Brussels, is merely doing his job as assigned: Keep up the illusions as to Kyiv’s potency and along with it the Russophobia, the more primitive the better. You do not get fired for irresponsible rhetoric that risks something that might look a lot like World War III.
What would a propaganda blitz of this breadth and stupidity be without an entry from The New York Times? Given the extent to which The Times has abandoned all professional principle in the service of the power it is supposed to report upon, you just knew it would have to get in on this one.
The Times has published very numerous pieces in recent weeks on the necessity of keeping the war going and the urgency of a House vote authorizing that $61 billion Biden’s national security people want to send Ukraine. But never mind all those daily stories. Last Sunday it came out with its big banana. “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin” sprawls—lengthy text, numerous photographs. The latter show the usual wreckage—cars, apartment buildings, farmhouses, a snowy dirt road lined with landmines. But the story that goes with it is other than usual.
Somewhere in Washington, someone appears to have decided it was time to let the Central Intelligence Agency’s presence and programs in Ukraine be known. And someone in Langley, the CIA’s headquarters, seems to have decided this will be O.K., a useful thing to do. When I say the agency’s presence and programs, I mean some: We get a very partial picture of the CIA’s doings in Ukraine, as the lies of omission—not to mention the lies of commission—are numerous in this piece. But what The Times published last weekend, all 5,500 words of it, tells us more than had been previously made public.
Let us consider this unusually long takeout carefully for what it is and how it came to make page one of last Sunday’s editions.
In a recent commentary I reflected on the mess The Times landed in when it published a thoroughly discredited p.o.s.—and I leave readers to understand this newsroom expression—on the sexual violence Hamas militias allegedly committed last Oct. 7. I described a corrupt but routinized relationship between the organs of official power and the journalists charged with reporting on official power, likening it to a foie gras farmer feeding his geese: The Times’s journalists opened wide and swallowed. For appearances’ sake, they then set about dressing up what they ingested as independently reported work. This is the routine.
It is the same, yet more obviously, with this extended piece on the CIA’s activities in Ukraine. Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz tell the story of—this the subhead—“a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.” They set the scene in a below-ground monitoring and communications center the CIA showed Ukrainian intel how to build beneath the wreckage of an army outpost destroyed in a Russian missile attack. They report on the archipelago of such places the agency paid for, designed, equipped, and now helps operate. Twelve of these, please note, are along Ukraine’s border with Russia.
Entous and Schwirtz, it is time to mention, are not based in Ukraine. They operate from Washington and New York respectively. This indicates clearly enough the genesis of “The Spy War.” There was no breaking down of doors involved here, no intrepid correspondents digging, no tramping around in Ukraine’s mud and cold, unguided. The CIA handed these two material according to what it wanted and did not want disclosed, and various officials associated with it made themselves available as “sources”—none of the American sources named, per usual.
Are we supposed to think these reporters found the underground bunker and all the other such installations by dint of their “investigation”—a term they have the gall to use as they describe what they did? And then they developed some kind of grand exposé of all the agency wanted to keep hidden? Is this it?
Sheer pretense, nothing more. Entous and Schwirtz opened wide and got fed. There appears to be nothing in what they wrote that was not effectively authorized, and we can probably do without “effectively.”
There is also the question of sources. Entous and Schwirtz say they conducted 200 interviews to get this piece done. If they did, and I will stay with my “if,” they do not seem to have been very good interviews to go by the published piece. And however many interviews they did, this must still be counted a one-source story, given that everyone quoted in it reflects the same perspective and so reinforces, more or less, what everyone else quoted has to say. The sources appear to have been handed to Entous and Schwirtz as was access to the underground bunker.
The narrative thread woven through the piece is interesting. It is all about the two-way, can’t-do-without-it cooperation between the CIA and Ukraine’s main intel services—the SBU (the domestic spy agency) and military intelligence, which goes by HUR. In this the piece reads like a difficult courtship that leads to a happy-at-last consummation. It took a long time for the Americans to trust the Ukrainians, we read, as they, the Americans, assumed the SBU was thick with Russian double agents. But the Ukrainian spooks enticed them with stacks and stacks of intelligence that seems to have astonished the CIA people on the ground and back in Langley.
So, a tale with two moving parts: The Americans helped the Ukrainians get their technology, methods, and all-around spookery up to snuff, and the Ukrainians made themselves indispensable to the Americans by providing wads of raw intel. Entous and Schwirtz describe this symbiosis as “one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.” Here is how a former American official put it, as The Times quotes him or her:
The relationships only got stronger and stronger because both sides saw value in it, and the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv—our station there, the operation out of Ukraine—became the best source of information, signals and everything else, on Russia. We couldn’t get enough of it.
As to omissions and commissions, there are things left out in this piece, events that are blurred, assertions that are simply untrue and proven to be so. What amazes me is how far back Entous and Schwirtz reach to dredge up all this stuff—even to the point they make fools of themselves and remind us of the Times’s dramatic loss of credibility since the current round of Russophobia took hold a decade ago.
Entous and Schwirtz begin their account of the CIA–SBU/HUR alliance in 2014, when the U.S. cultivated the coup in Kyiv that brought the present regime to power and ultimately led to Russia’s military intervention. But no mention of the U.S. role in it. They write, “The CIA’s partnership in Ukraine can be traced back to two phone calls on the night of Feb. 24, 2014, eight years to the day before Russia’s full-scale invasion.” Neat, granular, but absolutely false. The coup began three days earlier, on Feb. 21, and as Vladimir Putin reminded Tucker Carlson during the latter’s Feb. 6 interview with the Russian president, it was the CIA that did the groundwork.
I confess a special affection for this one: “The Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” Entous and Schwirtz write. And later in the piece, this:
In one joint operation, a[n] HUR team duped an officer from Russia’s military intelligence service into providing information that allowed the C.I.A. to connect Russia’s government to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group, which had been linked to election interference efforts in a number of countries.
Wonderful. Extravagantly nostalgic for that twilight interim that began eight years ago, when nothing had to be true so long as it explained why Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, and why Donald Trump is No. 1 among America’s “deplorables.”
I have never seen evidence of Russian government interference in another nation’s elections, including America’s in 2016, and I will say with confidence you haven’t, either. All that came to be associated with the Russiagate fable, starting with the never-happened hack of the Democratic Party’s mail, was long ago revealed to be concocted junk. As to “Fancy Bear,” and its cousin “Cozy Bear”—monikers almost certainly cooked up over a long, fun lunch in Langley—for the umpteenth time these are not groups of hackers or any other sort of human being: They are sets of digital tools available to anyone who wants to use them.
Sloppy, tiresome. But to a purpose. Why, then? What is The Times’s purpose in publishing this piece?
We can start, logically enough, with that desperation evident among those dedicated to prolonging the war. The outcome of the war, in my read and in the view of various military analysts, does not depend on the $61 billion in aid that now hangs in the balance. But the Biden regime seems to think it does, or pretends to think it does. The Times’s most immediate intent, so far as one can make out from the piece, is to add what degree of urgency it can to this question.
Entous and Schwirtz report that the people running Ukrainian intelligence are nervous that without a House vote releasing new funds “the CIA will abandon them.” Good enough that it boosts the case to cite nervous Ukrainians, but we should recognize that this is a misapprehension. The CIA has a very large budget entirely independent of what Congress votes one way or another. William Burns, the CIA director, traveled to Kyiv two weeks ago to reassure his counterparts that “the U.S. commitment will continue,” as Entous and Schwirtz quote him saying. This is perfectly true, assuming Burns referred to the agency’s commitment.
More broadly, The Times piece appears amid flagging enthusiasm for the Ukraine project. And it is in this circumstance that Entous and Schwirtz went long on the benefits accruing to the CIA in consequence of its presence on the ground in Ukraine. But read these two reporters carefully: They, or whoever put their piece in its final shape, make it clear that the agency’s operations on Ukrainian soil count first and most as a contribution to Washington’s long campaign to undermine the Russian Federation. This is not about Ukrainian democracy, that figment of neoliberal propagandists. It is about Cold War II, plain and simple. It is time to reinvigorate the old Russophobia, thus—and hence all the baloney about Russians corrupting elections and so on. It is all there for a reason.
To gather these thoughts and summarize, This piece is not journalism and should not be read as such. Neither do Entous and Schwirtz serve as journalists. They are clerks of the governing class pretending to be journalists while they post notices on a bulletin board that pretends to be a newspaper.
■
Let’s dolly out to put this piece in its historical context and consider the implications of its appearance in the once-but-fallen newspaper of record. Let’s think about the early 1970s, when it first began to emerge that the CIA had compromised the American media and broadcasters.
Jack Anderson, the admirably iconoclastic columnist, lifted the lid on the agency’s infiltration of the media by way of a passing mention of a corrupted correspondent in 1973. A year later a former Los Angeles Times correspondent named Stuart Loory published the first extensive exploration of relations between the CIA and the media in the Columbia Journalism Review. Then, in 1976, the Church Committee opened its famous hearings in the Senate. It took up all sorts of agency malfeasance—assassinations, coups, illegal covert ops. Its intent was also to disrupt the agency’s misuse of American media and restore the latter to their independence and integrity.
The Church Committee is still widely remembered for getting its job done. But it never did. A year after Church produced its six-volume report, Rolling Stone published “The CIA and the Media,” Carl Bernstein’s well-known piece. Bernstein went considerably beyond the Church Committee, demonstrating that it pulled its punches rather than pull the plug on the CIA’s intrusions in the media. Faced with the prospect of forcing the CIA to sever all covert ties with the media, a senator Bernstein did not name remarked, “We just weren’t ready to take that step.”
We should read The Times’s piece on the righteousness of the CIA’s activities in Ukraine—bearing in mind the self-evident cooperation between the agency and the newspaper—with this history in mind.
America was just emerging from the disgraces of the McCarthyist period when Stuart Loory opened the door on this question, the Church Committee convened, and Carl Bernstein filled in the blanks. In and out of the profession there was disgust at the covert relationship between media and the spooks. Now look. What was then viewed as top-to-bottom objectionable is now routinized. It is “as usual.” In my read this is one consequence among many of the Russiagate years: They again plunged Americans and their mainstream media into the same paranoia that produced the corruptions of the 1950s and 1960s.
Alas, the scars of the swoon we call Russiagate are many and run deep.
……………………
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune , is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows , is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
The collapse of the Ukrainian army following the battle of Avdeyevka, and its disorganized retreat, have accelerated Russian military thinking of how far westward the NATO allies will decide that the Ukrainian statelet can be defended against the expected Russian advance – and how fast new NATO defences can be created without the protection of ground-to-air missile batteries like Patriot, long-range artillery like the M777, and mobile armour like the Abrams, Bradley, and Caesar: all of them have already been defeated in the east.
In short, there is no longer a NATO-command line of fortification east of the Polish border which deters the Russian General Staff. Also, no bunker for the Zelensky government and its NATO advisors to feel secure.
Cutting and pasting from the Russian military bloggers and the Moscow analytical media, as a handful of US podcasters and substackers are doing as often as their subscribers require, is the Comfy-Armchair method for getting at the truth. Reading the Russian sources directly, with the understanding that they are reporting what their military and intelligence sources are saying off the record, is still armchair generalship, but less comfy, more credible.
Offence is now the order of the day up and down the contact line. The daily bulletin from the Ministry of Defense in Moscow calls this “improving the tactical situation” and “taking more advantageous positions”. In the past three days, Monday through Wednesday, the Defense Ministry also reported the daily casualty rate of the Ukrainian forces at 1,175, 1,065, and 695, respectively; three M777 howitzer hits; and the first Abrams tank to be destroyed. Because this source is blocked in several of the NATO states, the Russian military bloggers, which reproduce the bulletins along with videoclips and maps, may be more accessible; also more swiftly than the US-based podcasters and substackers can keep up.
Moscow sources confirm the obvious: the operational objective is to apply more and more pressure at more and more points along the line, in as many sectors or salients (“directions” is the Russian term) as possible simultaneously. At the same time, air attack, plus missiles and drones, are striking all rear Ukrainian and NATO airfield, road, and rail nodes, ammunition storages, vehicle parks, drone manufactories, fuel dumps, and other supply infrastructure, so as make reinforcement and redeployment more difficult and perilous.
What cannot be seen are the Russian concentrations of forces aimed in the north, centre and south of the battlefield. Instead, there is what one source calls “an educated guess is that when the main blow comes, it will be North, Chernigov, Sumy, Kharkov, Poltava, or Centre, Dniepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye, or both simultaneously.” For timing, the source adds, “after the Russian election.”
That is now less than three weeks away, on March 17. President Vladimir Putin will then reform his new government within four to six weeks for announcement by early May. Ministerial appointments sensitive to the General Staff’s planning are the Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who is expected to remain in place; and the Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who may retire.
Following the call of French President Emmanuel Macron for the “possibility” of French ground force deployment to the Ukraine battlefield, and the subsequent clarification by French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu, the Russian assessment has been derisory. “As for Emmanuel Macron’s statements about the possibility of sending NATO troops to Ukraine,” replied Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova, “I would like to remind you that just a month ago, the French Foreign Minister denied Paris’s involvement in recruiting mercenaries for the Kiev regime, and called direct evidence ‘crude Russian propaganda.’ There is a strong impression that the French President is, in principle, not aware of what his subordinates say, or what he says himself. And now I want to remind Macron of the history of France. That is different. In April 1945, Berlin was defended by the French SS division known as Charlemagne, and a number of others. They also directly defended the Fuhrerbunker — Hitler’s bunker. They were among the last to be awarded the Nazi Order of the Knight’s Cross in the Third Reich. The French SS men from Charlemagne became the last defenders of the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery. Emmanuel, have you decided to organize the Charlemagne II division to defend Zelensky’s bunker?”
The view in Moscow is that there is now as much indecision, vacillation, and chaos between the Elysée and the Hexagon Balard in Paris as there is in Washington between the White House and the Pentagon, over what last stand NATO can make in the Ukraine, and where to position it — east of Kiev, or east of Lvov and the Polish border region.
The Moscow source again: “the NATO fortress and bunker plan for the Ukraine is proving a failure, and the Ukrainians are falling back on the old Wehrmacht tactic of ad hoc battlegroups with increasing percentages of unit leftovers and low-quality conscripts acting as fire brigades to plug holes in the lines so as to delay the Russian advances. But what is the bunker fallback plan along what lines – is the plan to wait until the Americans, French, Germans or Poles show up? This is the stuff of Nazi dreams. It’s too late.”
A western military source comments: “I’m not so sure, as some of the Russian milbloggers are, that the broad front approach [Russian General Valery] Gerasimov is taking heralds a new approach to modern warfare – or operational art, if you like. The push at different points, conserving men and materiel in favour of firepower is being done as much, or more out of political considerations, which include those of a domestic character (Putin’s public support, domestic stability); and also the military objective since Day One of the Special Military Operation — to draw in and destroy as many and as much of the US-NATO manpower and equipment in the Ukraine as possible.”
“The Russian ‘retreat’ conducted in Fall of 2022 was part of the plan and struck me as being inspired by the Mongol tactic of attacking, making a big show of running away, only to turn to pursue and then destroy the enemy. The Ukrainians and their NATO handlers fell for it hook, line and sinker. Now they don’t have the forces needed to maintain their fortress strategy, let alone conduct much in the way of counter-attacks. It was in this fashion that Gerasimov gained the upper hand in the two-front war – the one on the Ukrainian battlefield and the one on the Russian home front.”
“Deep battle is still the Russian doctrine. Its form and components may change, but the concept remains the same. The art is in figuring out where and when the holes drilled in the other side’s military, economic, and political structures will line up, and present the path to be exploited by Gerasimov. We can bet he’s known for quite some time.”
Two translations follow of current Russian military analyses. The first is by Boris Rozhin, whose Colonel Cassad Telegram platform is one of the leading military blogs in Moscow. The second is by Yevgeny Krutikov who publishes long pieces in Vzglyad, the semi-official security analysis medium in Moscow, and short pieces in his Telegram account, Mudraya Ptitsa (“Wise Bird”).
The translation is verbatim and unedited. Maps and illustrations have been added.
Source: https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin -- posted on February 27, 2024 – 20:25. Part II has not been published yet.
February 27, 2024 The operational crisis of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine – Part 1 By Boris Rozhin (“Colonel Cassad”)
The successes of our troops strengthen faith in a collective victory. However, it is necessary to soberly assess the three factors that make up the operational situation at the front:
— our forces and materiel – the forces and materiel of the enemy;
— the ratio between them;
— the operational environment.
The situation in which the enemy is now on the defensive can be called an operational crisis. For four months, the Armed Forces of the Ukraine [VSU is the Russian acronym] command concentrated their reserves in Avdeyevka and Chas Yar, weakening other sectors of the front (in particular, Kupyansk and Zaporozhye). Having failed to ensure a crucial preponderance of forces, against the background of an increase in the media importance of Avdeyevka, the enemy lost the operational initiative and is now forced to withdraw to reserve linesof defence. But they are not fully operational.
The transfer of reserves of the VSU is carried out under the increasing attacks of our aviation and high-precision attacks on key railway nodes (for example, Pokrovsk and Konstantinovka). Many VSU units need to be withdrawn for reformation, which is currently impossible. Therefore, they are equipped at the expense of mobilized citizens with low motivation and combat training.
LARGE MAP OF OPERATIONS AS OF FEBRUARY 28, 2024
Source: Rybar. Click on original to enlarge view: https://t.me/s/rybar -- February 29 00:42.
By developing an offensive initiative west of Avdeyevka, our units have deprived the enemy of the opportunity to gain a foothold there. According to the Bakhmut scenario in the summer of 2023, when attacking near Kleshcheyevka and Berkhovka, the VSU created a hotbed of tension, forcing us to hold large forces in position. Today, the Armed Forces of Ukraine do not have the opportunity to fully regroup, so they are withdrawing troops in key operational areas: Zaporozhye (Orekhov) and Slavyansk-Kramatorsk (taking into account our positions in the Avdeyevka and Bakhmut initial areas).
The new [VSU] commander-in-chief, [General Alexander] Syrsky, is confused about exactly where to concentrate his forces. In conditions of simultaneous movement of our formations along the entire front line: in the Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Lugansk (the Svatovo-Kremennaya line) and Kupyansk operational directions, the concentration of forces and materiel in a particular area will inevitably create conditions for a breakthrough of the Ukrainian defence.
The advance of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in the Maryinsk-Ugledar operational and tactical direction and in the area of Novomikhailovka creates conditions for squeezing the enemy west of the Marinka-Ugledar highway and in the direction of Kurakhovo, which in the foreseeable future will become a key node in the VSU defence in this area. The situation is developing in a similar way in the Konstantinovsky direction, where our troops are having success at Chas Yar, advancing at the moment with coverage to Ivanovskoye, the largest defensive line in front of the Chas–Yar fortress area.
MAP OF THE CHAS YAR OPERATIONS AS OF FEBRUARY 28, 2024
Steady pressure is recorded in the area of Yampolovka and Ternov, the Serebryansky forest, as well as on the left bank of the Seversky Donets, where an offensive is underway against Belogorovka in order to reach Seversk. Positional battles continue south of Seversk in the Razdolovka–Veseloe strip. Our units are moving along the railway line, although the tactical conditions of the terrain are not conducive to a rapid offensive there. The situation is more complicated in the Kupyansk direction. However, despite the difficulties of advancing and the altitude differences, we are managing to contain large enemy forces on both banks of the Oskol.
A likely scenario for the development of the situation is that during the coming month the VSU will continue the gradual withdrawal of troops to new lines along a rear echelon from 15 to 20 kilometres back, while simultaneously trying to engage us in battles in areas where terrain conditions and defensive fortifications will allow us to hold positions: these are Chas Yar–Konstantinovka, the southern approaches to Seversk (Rayaleksandrovsky fortress area), the Marinka– Kurakhovo–Ugledar line (Donetsk direction), and Rabodino–Orekhov (Zaporozhye).
At the moment of withdrawal from a particular area, the enemy will transfer his forces from site to site in order to inflict maximum damage to our advancing group. The VSU does not consider any other option, for example, to counterattack, since the concentration of troops required for that risks taking the shape of the Avdeyevka scenario, with the real prospect of falling into a котёл [trap].
February 28, 2024How Russian troops are shifting Ukrainian defenses after Avdeyevka By Yevgeny Krutikov
The advance of Russian troops to the West after the liberation of Avdeyevka has not been stopped at all. The Armed Forces of Ukraine have not been able to gain a foothold on any defensive line for many days, and moreover, this applies not only to the Avdeyevka direction. What is happening on the line of contact in the special operation zone and what will be the target of the Russian army in the coming weeks?
After the liberation of Avdeyevka the units of the Russian Armed Forces maintained a high rate of advance in this section of the line of contact. The enemy hastily tried to create new lines of defence to the west of the city along the Stepovoye–Berdych-Orlovka–Lastochkino–Tonenkoe–Severnoye line. But by Tuesday, February 27, Russian assault units had occupied the first line (Stepovoye, Lastochkino, Severnoye) and began operations to occupy the second line.
In some instances the enemy simply abandoned their positions, unable to withstand the blows of bombs and assault actions. The open spaces (fields, forests, and gullies) west of Avdeyevka came under the control of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation almost without a fight.
There is an explanation for this. First of all, the organization of defence on new frontlines is extremely costly and time–consuming; it requires a huge amount of equipment and specialists, and most importantly, time. It is precisely this time which the Russian troops are seizing to consolidate their positions, denying them to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and constantly putting pressure on them, primarily with long-range weapons.
The VSU, as it now turns out, were not prepared at all for the rapid abandonment of Avdeyevka. In addition, it seems that the enemy cannot withstand a direct clash with Russian troops outside of positions they have fortified in advance. The VSU can cling to long-term fortified areas which have been prepared for a long time, but with the constant pace of the Russian offensive, they are forced to withdraw even from these positions.
Behind the new line of defence of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which has developed in the Avdeyevka area at the moment (provisionally around Orlovka), an empty space has opened up in which there are no natural obstacles capable of supporting new defensive fortifications. There is nothing like this up to the next major settlements of the Donbass, primarily Krasnoarmeysk (Pokrovsky). The enemy has not strengthened the small villages there in any way, thinking it wouldn’t be necessary.
MAP OF AVDEYEVKA AREA OPERATIONS AS OF FEBRUARY 28, 2024
The only limitation on the Russian forces for moving forward in this direction may be the old positions of the VSU on the flanks. For example, Kurakhovo is planned to be another “fortress”, which by the very fact of its existence creates a flank threat to the advance of the Avdeyevka grouping of the Russian forces.
The situation in another section of the contact line, west of Artemovsk, is indicative in this regard. The enemy’s positions in front of Chasov Yar in the villages of Krasnoe (Ivanovskoye) and Bogdanovka have looked to be very strong. But the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation began to move there not head-on, but from the north, pushing through and bypassing the fortified areas of the VSU. As a result, by Tuesday, the assault groups had advanced almost to the centre of the village. At the same time, several heights were occupied, opening the way further to the west.
This manoeuvre is clearly visible on satellite images of the area where the lines of the enemy’s trenches south of Krasnoe are visible. Apparently, the VSU was afraid of the movement of Russian attack aircraft from this direction, from Kleshcheyevka. The ruins of Kleshcheyevka themselves are practically surrounded at the moment, but this direction has become secondary to movement on Chasov Yar.
The first districts of Chasov Yar – east of the canal, where the VSU units are located – are now being constantly shelled by Russian artillery and bombs [ФАБ], which make it impossible for the enemy to manoeuvre their reserves and rotate.
The enemy transferred most of the reserves available at the beginning of February to Kupyansk. In Kiev this stabilization of the front near Kupyansk is considered a great achievement. The Kiev command is motivated to hang stubbornly on to the zone around Kupyansk by the realization that if they lose this node, that would lead to the redeployment of parts of the Russian forces all the way up to Kharkov.
But the most important thing that the intelligence and leadership of the VSU are currently doing is trying to determine where the new main blow of the Russian offensive will occur after Avdeyevka. The fact is that the Russian armed forces are now maintaining an operational pace along the entire line of contact. There is no section of the front line where successful assault operations would not be noted. This “multiple bites” [множества укусов] strategy currently being undertaken by the Russian forces has led to the disorganization of enemy behaviour and the dispersion of its resources.
For example, the first assault detachments of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on Tuesday night already entered the settlement of Terny in the Limansky direction and gained a foothold in it. The movement to Terny had not halted even for a day over several weeks, remaining in the shadow of the larger-scale events in the Avdeyevka direction and around Rabocino. But all of a sudden now it has turned out that in this area, units of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have entered completely new positions, threatening to move further west to the Estuary and looming over the enemy’s Seversk grouping.
In Kiev, there is a well-founded fear that these new landmark breakthroughs by Russian units may generally lead to the collapse of Ukrainian defence and the transition of military operations to the more western regions of Ukraine.
Moreover, almost the entire line of contact, except for the Chasov Yar area, is now so fragmented that the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have the opportunity to enter the operational space in several directions at once. Even the western press is now actively writing that the Russian forces are capable of providing assault operations simultaneously in two or three areas. No one knows which one of them will end up being the main one.
It is possible that there will be no “main” direction of impact, at least in the classical understanding of this concept. The new military reality also offered by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation is a novel tactic: the movement of small assault groups with powerful support from artillery and heavy aerial bombs. Thus, the occupation of enemy strongholds is ensured, and only then are large open spaces cleared with the help of tanks.
In other words, relatively large settlements, turned into strongholds by the enemy, become something like a general direction, a vector of movement. For example, Pokrovskoye (Krasnoarmeysk) is located 40 kilometres west of Avdeyevka. This is clearly the next target for Russian troops. But the movement towards this goal need not be direct, but may be guided by the requirement to bypass and destroy the enemy’s defence lines.
At Chasov Yar, movement that was not in a straight line turned out to be effective for the Russian forces, bypassing from the flanks the enemy’s fortified areas south of Krasny. Operations to hold down the enemy are conducted in Kupyansk in a straight line, while unexpected assault actions on the outskirts of this section of the front (the same Terny) lead to new threats of the encirclement of the defending units of the VSU.
Perhaps in the coming days we will see the next offensive operations of the Russian forces according to a linear scheme: the encirclement of Kurakhovo through the occupation of Krasnogorovka, access to the heights south of Chasov Yar, movement to Seversk, access to the supply lines of Ugledar, forcing the channel in Terny, breaking the enemy’s defences west of Avdeyevka, and much more.
None of these areas will be the “chief” or “main” one, but each of them will create the preconditions for the further liberation of the Donbass.
[*] The lead picture is reproduced by Boris Rozhin to illustrate his battlefield report of February 28, at 19:17, indicating the disorganized retreat of Ukrainian forces west and south along the Berdych-Orlovka-Tonenkoe line in the central sector. “Today, the enemy has actually lost this line. Orlovka is in the process of coming under the control of Russian troops. In the next 24 hours, we should expect the appearance of videos with flags in Orlovka. Berdych is next. An advantageous and prepared line of defence did not last long. The enemy will retreat to the west with subsequent attempts to use natural water barriers and terrain to compensate for the lack of prepared engineering structures.”
Very few people in Russia and across the Global South are as qualified as Sergei Glazyev, the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission (EEC), the policy arm of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), to speak about the drive, the challenges and the pitfalls in the road towards de-dollarization.
As the Global South issues widespread calls for real financial stability; India inside the BRICS 10 makes it clear that everyone needs to think seriously about the toxic effects of unilateral sanctions; and Professor Michael Hudson keeps reiterating current policies are not sustainable anymore, Glazyev graciously received me at his office at the EEC for an exclusive, extensive conversation, including fascinating off the record odds and ends.
These are the highlights – as Glazyev’s ideas are being re-examined, and there’s huge expectation for the green light from the Russian government for a new trade settlement model – which for the moment is in the final stages of fine-tuning.
Glazyev explained how his main idea was “elaborated a long time ago. The basic idea is that a new currency should be first of all introduced on the basis of international law, signed by the countries which are interested in the production of this new currency. Not via some kind of conference, like Bretton Woods, with no legitimacy. At the first stage, not all countries would be included. BRICS nations will be enough – plus the SCO. In Russia, we already have our own SWIFT – the SPFS. We have our currency exchange, we have correspondent relations between banks, consultation between Central Banks, here we are absolutely self-sufficient.”
All that leads to adopting a new international currency: “We don’t really need to go large scale. BRICS is enough. The idea of the currency is that there are two baskets: one basket is national currencies of all countries involved in the process, like the SDR, but with more clear, understandable criteria. The second basket are commodities. If you have two baskets, and we create the new currency as an index of commodities and national currencies, and we have a mechanism for reserves, according to the mathematical model that will be very stable. Stable and convenient.”
Then it’s up to feasibility: “To introduce this currency as an instrument for transactions would not be too difficult. With good infrastructure, and all Central Banks approving it, then it’s up to businesses to use this currency. It should be in digital form – which means it can be used without the banking system, so it will be at least ten times cheaper than present transactions through banks and currency exchanges.”
That Thorny Central Bank Question
“Have you presented this idea to the Chinese?”
“We presented it to Chinese experts, our partners at Renmin University. We had good feedback – but I did not have the opportunity to present it on a political level. Here in Russia we promote the discussion via papers, conferences, seminars, but there’s still no political decision on introducing this mechanism even on the BRICS agenda. The proposal by our team of experts is to include it in the agenda of the BRICS summit next October in Kazan. The problem is the Russian Central Bank is not enthusiastic. The BRICS have only decided on an operating plan to use national currencies – which is also a quite clear idea, as national currencies are already used in our trade. Russian ruble is the main currency in the EAEU, trade with China is conducted in rubles and renminbi, trade with India and Iran and Turkiye also switched to national currencies. Each country has the infrastructure for it. If Central Banks introduce digital national currencies and allow them to be used in international trade, it’s also a good model. In this case crypto exchanges can easily balance payments – and it’s a very cheap mechanism. What is needed is an agreement from Central Banks to allow a certain amount of national currencies in digital form to participate in international transactions.”
“Would that be feasible already in 2024, if there is political will?”
“There are some start-ups already. By the way, they are in the West, and the digitalization is conducted by private companies, not Central Banks. So the demand is there. Our Central Bank needs to elaborate a proposal for the summit in Kazan. But this is only one part of the story. The second part is price. For the moment price is determined by Western speculation. We produce these commodities, we consume them, but we do not have our own price mechanism, which will balance supply and demand. During the Covid panic, the price for oil fell to nearly zero. It’s impossible to make any strategic planning for economic development if you do not control prices of basic commodities. Price formation with this new currency should get rid of Western exchanges of commodities. My idea is based on a mechanism that existed in the Soviet Union, in the Comecon. In that period we had long-term agreements not only with socialist countries, but also with Austria, and other Western countries, to supply gas for 10 years, 20 years, the basis of this price formula was the price for oil, and the price for gas.”
So what stands out is the effectiveness of a long-term, long view policy: “We did create a long-term pattern. Here in the EEC we are looking at the idea of a common exchange market. We already prepared a draft, with some experiments. The first step is the creation of an information network, exchanges in different countries. It was rather successful. The second step will be to set up online communication between exchanges, and finally we move to a common mechanism of price formation, and open this mechanism for all other countries. The main problem is that the major producers of commodities, first of all the oil companies, they don’t like to trade through exchanges. They like to trade personally, so you need a political decision to make sure that at least half of production of commodities should go through exchanges. A mechanism where supply and demand balance each other. For the moment the price of oil in foreign markets is ‘secret’. It’s some type of colonial times thinking. ‘How to cheat’. We must create legislation to open all this information to the public.”
The NDB in Need of a Shake-up
Glazyev offered an extensive analysis of the BRICS universe, based on how the BRICS Business Council had its first meeting on financial services in early February. They agreed on a working plan; there was a first session of fintech experts; and during this week a breakthrough meeting may lead to a new formulation – for the moment not made public – to be put into the BRICS agenda for the October summit.
“What are the main challenges within the BRICS structure in this next stage of trying to bypass the US dollar?”
“BRICS in fact is a club which doesn’t have a secretariat. I can tell it, from a person that has some experience in integration. We discussed the idea of a customs union here, on the post-Soviet territory, immediately after the collapse. We had a lot of declarations, even some agreements signed by heads of state, over a common economic space. But only after the establishment of a commission the real work stated, in the year 2008. After 20 years of papers, conferences, nothing was done. You need someone who’s responsible. In BRICS there is such an organization – the NDB [New Development Bank]. If the heads of state decide to appoint the NDB as an institution which will elaborate the new model, the new currency, organize an international conference with the draft of an international treaty, this can work. The problem is that the NDB works according to the dollar charter. They have to reorganize this institution in order to make it workable. Now it works like an ordinary international development bank under the American framework. The second option would be to do it without this bank, but that would be much more difficult. This bank has enough expertise.”
“Could an internal shake-up of the NDB be proposed by the Russian presidency of BRICS this year?”
“We are doing our best. I’m not sure the Ministry of Finance understands how serious this is. The President understands. I personally promoted this idea to him. But the chairman of the Central Bank, and ministers are still thinking in the old IMF paradigm.”
‘Religious Sects Don’t Create Innovation’
Glazyev had a serious discussion on sanctions with the NDB:
“I discussed this issue with Mrs. Rousseff [the former Brazilian President, currently presiding the NDB) at the St. Petersburg Forum. I gave her a paper about it. She was rather enthusiastic and invited us to come to the NDB. But afterwards there was no follow-up. Last year everything was very difficult.”
On BRICS, “the financial services working group is discussing reinsurance, credit rating, new currencies in fintech. That’s what should be in the agenda of the NDB. The best possibility would be a meeting in Moscow in March or April, to discuss in depth the whole range of issues of BRICS settlement mechanism, from most sophisticated to least sophisticated. It would be great if the NDB sign up for it, but as it stands there is a de facto gulf between the BRICS and the NDB.”
The key point, insists Glazyev, is that “Dilma should find time to organize these discussions at a high level. A political decision is needed.”
“But wouldn’t that decision have to come from Putin himself?”
“It’s not so easy. We heard statements by at least three heads of the state: Russia, South Africa and Brazil. They publicly said ‘this is a good idea’. The problem, once again, is there is no task force yet. My idea, which we proposed before the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, is to create an international working group – to prepare in the next sessions the model, or the draft, of the treaty. How to switch to national currencies. That’s the official agenda now. And they have to report about that in Kazan [for the BRICS annual summit]. There are some consultations between the Central Banks and Ministers of Finance.”
Glazyev cut to the chase when it comes to the inertia of the system: “The main problem for bureaucrats and experts is ‘why they don’t have ideas?’ Because they assume the current status quo is the best one. If there are no sanctions, everything will be good. The international financial architecture that was created by the United States and Europe is convenient. Everyone knows how to work in the system. So it’s impossible to move from this system to another system. For businesses it will be very difficult. For banks it will be difficult. People have been educated in the paradigm of financial equilibrium, totally libertarian. They don’t care that prices are manipulated by speculators, they don’t care about volatility of national currencies, They think it’s natural (…) It’s a kind of religious sect. Religious sects don’t create innovation.”
Now Get on That Hypersonic Bicycle
We’re back to the crucial issue of national currencies: “Even five years ago, when I spoke about national currencies in trade, everybody said it was completely impossible. We have long-term contracts in dollars and euro. We have an established culture of transactions. When I was Minister of Foreign Trade, 30 years ago, at the time I tried to push all our trade in commodities into rubles. I argued with Yeltsin and others, ‘we have to trade in rubles, not in dollars’. That would automatically make the ruble a reserve currency. When Europe moved to the euro, I had a meeting with Mr. Prodi, and we agreed, ‘we will use euro as your currency, and you will use rubles’. Then Prodi came to me after consultations and said, ‘I talked to Mr. Kudrin [former Russian Finance Minister, 2000-2011], he didn’t ask me to make the ruble a reserve currency’. That was sabotage. It was stupidity.”
The problems actually run deep – and keep running: “The problem was our regulators, educated by the IMF, and the second problem was corruption. If you trade oil and gas in dollars, a large part of profits is stolen, there are a lot of intermediate companies which manipulate prices. Prices are only the first step. The price for natural gas in the first deal is about 10 times less than the final demand. There are institutional barriers. A majority of countries do not allow our companies to sell oil and gas to the final customer. Like you cannot sell gas to households. Nevertheless, even in the open market, quite competitive, we have intermediates between producer and consumer – at least half of the revenues are stolen from government control. They don’t pay taxes.”
Yet fast solutions do exist: “When we were sanctioned two years ago, transfer from US dollar and euro to national currencies took only a few months. It was very quick.”
On investments, Glazyev stressed success in localized trade, but capital flows are still not there: “The Central Banks are not doing their job. The ruble-renminbi exchange is working well. But the ruble-rupee exchange doesn’t work. The banks that keep these rupees, they have a lot of money, accrue interest rates on these rupees, and they can play with them. I don’t know who’s responsible for this, our Central Bank or the Indian Central Bank.”
The succinct, key takeaway of Glazyev’s serious warnings is that it would be up to the NDB – prodded by the leadership of BRICS – to organize a conference of global experts and open it for public discussion. Glazyev evoked the metaphor of a bicycle that keeps rolling along – so why invent a new bicycle? Well, the – multipolar – time has come for a new hypersonic bicycle.
Latest privately-owned Moon mission ends abruptly after botched landing
The first privately-owned mission to the surface of the Moon ended prematurely Tuesday as a result of a botched landing that has resulted on the spacecraft ending up lying on its side, unable to use its solar panels to recharge its batteries, and with several antennae pointing in the wrong direction. The lander, named Odysseus, continued collecting data until power failed.
Much is being made in the corporate media about the fact that this is the first-ever Moon landing with a profit-making private corporation in control. The New York Times gushed that that the landing would “inaugurate a more revolutionary era” of more “economical” spaceflight. The Washington Post called it “a significant step toward NASA’s plan to eventually return astronauts” to the Moon. The Wall Street Journal asserted that the landing was a “milestone” for the space industry.
And NASA Administrator Bill Nelson set the tone for the nationalism and jingoism surrounding the event. “Today for the first time in the history of humanity, a commercial company—an American company—launched and led the voyage up there.”
(Steve Altemus, CEO and co-founder of Intuitive Machines, describes how it is believed the company’s Odysseus spacecraft landed on the surface of the moon, during a news conference in Houston on Friday, Feb. 23, 2024. [AP Photo/NASA])
In reality the landing was something of an exercise in reinventing the wheel. As the media and politicians themselves admit, there were landings that were far more technically challenging achieved more than half a century ago, both the famous landings of Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17, and the numerous Soviet Luna landers, which achieved the first soft landing on the Moon in 1966 and the first robotic sample return in 1970.
Odysseus, in contrast, is quite limited. The spacecraft was built and launched by Intuitive Machines, an aerospace company co-founded by Stephen Altemus, Tim Crain and Iranian-American billionaire Kam Ghaffarian, and which focuses on lunar orbits and landings. It was a test bed for six experimental systems and was only slated to last nine or ten days on the lunar surface, according to Crain, which was based on how long the lander’s solar panels were to be exposed to the Sun. There was no backup power for the lander and its instruments to operate or survive the two-week-long lunar night.
Moreover, reports that have come out since the launch indicate that the probe may have been doomed from the start. Odysseus, the primary component of mission IM-1, was launched on February 15 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and descended to the Moon’s surface seven days later. The day after the launch, the company’s header of navigation, Mike Hansen, told Reuters that the lander’s laser-powered range finder wasn’t functional because Intuitive Machine’s engineers failed to unlock a safety switch during pre-flight checks. The range finder measures the time from when a light pulse is emitted from a laser to when the reflected light is detected, and is critical for measuring the craft’s distance from the Moon as it is landing. Range finders are a standard component of the vast majority of all modern landing systems.
The problem was only discovered while the spacecraft was en route to the Moon, and no software on board was able to unlock the switch remotely. As a result, the company was forced to use NASA’s Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing, one of the instruments launched as a technology demonstration, to measure the craft’s distance from the Moon as it was landing.
It’s currently unclear how much data was transmitted back to Earth from Odysseus. Intuitive Machines has been careful to say that “flight controllers intend to collect data” until the lander dies, but has so far provided essentially no information on the amount or quality of the data received. The most concrete bit of information revealed is that two of the lander’s antennae are pointed at the Moon, and the bandwidth between Odysseus and its controllers is much lower than expected.
The fact that the solution partially worked is a credit to the engineers and technicians who developed and operated NASA’s lidar system. Odysseus would have crash-landed otherwise. That the craft landed on its side is likely due to measurement errors caused by using the system in a way that it was never designed for. Intuitive Machines estimates that Odysseus touched down on the Moon at about twice the expected velocity, likely a major factor in why it ultimately tipped over.
The fact that a secondary system had to be relied on at all came from cost-cutting measures by Intuitive Machines. Hansen admitted in his interview with Reuters, “There were certainly things we could’ve done to test it and actually fire it. They would’ve been very time-consuming and very costly.” He continued: “So that was a risk as a company that we acknowledged and took that risk.”
Market pressures no doubt played a significant role. Stock of Intuitive Machines is traded on the NASDAQ and its value had been trending downwards since the company merged with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp. and then went public in 2023. The company’s stock spiked after rumors emerged of some sort of collaboration with SpaceX, but almost immediately tanked. Stockholders were no doubt urging a successful launch as soon as possible in order to boost share values. In that regard, the mission was a success. The value of the company more than doubled in the lead-up to the launch and remains about 50 percent higher than it was at the beginning of the month, despite sharp falloffs after the company reported the poor landing.
That is not to say that the Apollo or Luna projects were themselves flawless. They suffered numerous setbacks, including the tragic loss of the Apollo 1 astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee in a fire during a launch rehearsal. But they were genuinely new developments in humanity’s ability to develop technology and scientific methods to understand the world in which we live. The space race itself was started by the launch of Sputnik 1, a product of the progressive impulse provided the conquest of power by the working class in Russia in October 1917, led by the Bolsheviks, and Sputnik was achieved in spite of the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union.
Now, space flight is either subordinated wholly to militarism, private profit, or both. That so many companies are taking part is not a reflection of the strength of American capitalism, but of its terminal decline. Space travel is an inherently international endeavor, requiring infrastructure around the world to be successful. It cannot be done in any truly progressive manner on the basis of rival corporations, no matter how much money a figure like Elon Musk may have.
This was again proven by the explosion of the Astrobotic Technology lander in January shortly after its launch, the crash of the Japanese company ispace’s lunar lander in 2023, and the crash of Beresheet in 2019, a lunar lander developed privately by the Israeli company SpaceIL. And because the International Space Station is incapable of turning a profit, it is slated to be de-orbited and destroyed by 2030.
The drive by American capitalism to assert dominance in all aspects of geopolitics, which increasingly includes outer space, also plays a major role. Since the 1970s, Japan and India, professed allies of the US, and China, one of the main targets of imperialism, have all landed on the Moon. China launched its own space station, the Tiangong, in 2021, and several other countries have launched their own communications (and spy) satellites and sent missions to Mars. And if another country can send rockets to the Moon or Mars, so the thinking of think tanks and military minds goes, they can launch those same rockets at the US.
Real mastery of space travel will only be achieved when the resources of Earth are marshalled in a globally planned and scientifically coordinated manner. Capitalism has demonstrated time and time again it is incapable of doing this to deal with terrestrial problems—war, pandemics, climate change, social inequality—and it is no surprise that spaceflight is increasingly difficult. Like all the challenges facing modern humans, the issues are fundamentally political and will only be resolved when socialism finally buries capitalism.
Motion calling for ILWU Local 10 to stop work on May 1 in solidarity with the Palestinian people and against genocidal war on Gaza. 
xenagoguevicene 
