“Mistah Kurtz – he dead.” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad once said that before he had been to the Congo he was a simple animal. It was in one of those lands partially mapped out by the cruelty and hypocrisy of the imperial ethos that Conrad discovered European colonialism in its undiluted, most terrible incarnation, duly depicted in Heart of Darkness – one of the great consciousness-raising epics in the history of literature.
It was in the Congo that Conrad, an ethnic Pole born in what is still known today as “Ukraine”, then controlled by Poland, and who only started to write in English when he was 23, forever lost any illusion over the civilizing mission of his race.
Other eminent Europeans of his time seamlessly experienced the same horror – participating in Conquest Atrocity Spectaculars; helping the Metropolis to hack and plunder Africa; using the continent as backdrop to their – murderous – juvenile adventures and rites of passage; or only testing their mettle while “saving” the souls of the natives.
They went through the savage heart of the world and made their fortune, their reputation or their penitence just to come back to the sweet comfort of unconsciousness – when they were not shipped back in a coffin, of course.
To dominate assorted “primitive” peoples, Britannia replaced the iron and the sword with trade. Like any monotheistic faith, they believed there was only one way to be; one way to drink your tea; one way to play the game – any game. Everything else was non-civilized, savage, brute, at best providing raw materials and acute headaches.
The jungle inside
For the European sensibility, the sub-equatorial world, actually the whole Global South, was where the White Man went for personal triumph or for dissolution, becoming somewhat “equal” to the natives. Literature, from the Victorian era onwards, is full of heroes traveling to “exotic” latitudes where passions – like tropical fruit – are bigger than in Europe, and perverted forms of self-knowledge can be experienced to oblivion.
Conrad himself placed his tortured heroes on Earth’s “obscure” places to expiate their shadows alongside the shadows of the world, far away from “civilization” and its conventional punishments.
And that brings to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: he’s in a class by himself because he arrives at an extreme of self-knowledge virtually unheard of in European literature, facing the full revelation of the malignity of his mission and his species.
In the Congo, Conrad lost his innocence. And his main character lost reason.
When Kurtz migrated into the movies in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and Cambodia replaced the Congo as the Heart of Darkness, he was denigrating the image of the Empire. So the Pentagon sent a warrior-intellectual to kill him, Captain Willard. Coppola depicted the passive spectator Willard as even more insane than Kurtz: and that’s how he pulled off the psychedelic unmasking of the whole farce of civilizing colonialism.
Today, we don’t need to set sail or embark on a caravan looking for the source of misty rivers to live the neo-imperial adventure.
We just need to turn on the smartphone to follow a genocide, live, 24/7, even in HD. Our meeting with the horror… the horror – as immortalized in Kurtz’s words in Heart of Darkness – can be experienced while shaving in the morning, doing Pilates or dining with friends.
And just as Coppola in Apocalypse Now, we are free to express a humanist moral stupor when facing a “war”, actually a massacre, that is already lost – impossible to be ethically sustained.
Today we are all Conradian characters, just glimpsing fragments, shadows, mixed with the stupor of living in a gruesomely memorable time. There is no possibility of grasping the totality of facts – especially when “facts” are fabricated and artificially reproduced or bolstered.
We are like ghosts, this time not facing the grandeur of nature, or traversing the thick, irreversible jungle; but plugged to a devastated urbanity as in a video game, co-authors of the non-stop suffering. The Heart of Darkness is being constructed by “the only democracy” in West Asia in the name of “our values”.
There are so many invisible horrors enacted behind the fog, in the heart of a jungle now replicated as an urban cage. Helplessly watching the wanton killing of women and children, the carpet bombing of hospitals, schools and mosques, it’s as if we are all passengers in a drunken ship plunging into a whirlpool, admiring the powerful majesty of the whole scenery.
And we are already dying even before we glimpse death.
We are the epigones of T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men. The haunting cries from the jungle don’t come anymore from an “exotic” hemisphere. The jungle is here – creeping inside all of us.
Hamas paraglider troops cross into Israel, October 7, 2023
There is a truism that I often cite when discussing the various analytical approaches to assessing the wide variety of geopolitical problems facing the world today—you can’t solve a problem unless you first properly define it. The gist of the argument is quite simple—any solution which has nothing to do with the problem involved is, literally, no solution at all.
Israel has characterized the attack carried out by Hamas on the various Israeli military bases and militarized settlements, or Kibbutz, which in their totality comprised an important part of the Gaza barrier system, as a massive act of terrorism, likening it to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks against the United States. Israel supports this characterization by citing the number of persons killed (some 1,200, a downward revision issued by Israel after realizing that 200 of the dead were Palestinian fighters) and detailing a wide variety of atrocities it claims were perpetrated by Hamas, including mass rape, the beheading of children, and the wonton murder of unarmed Israeli civilians.
The problem with the Israeli claims is that they are demonstrably false or misleading. Nearly a third of the Israeli casualties consisted of military, security, and police officers. Moreover, it turns out that the number one killer of Israelis on October 7 wasn’t Hamas or other Palestinian factions, but the Israeli military itself. Recently released video shows Israeli Apache helicopters indiscriminately firing on Israeli civilians trying to flee the Supernova Sukkot Gathering held in the open desert near Kibbutz Re’im, the pilots unable to distinguish between the civilians and the Hamas fighters. Many of the vehicles that the Israeli government has shown as an example of Hamas perfidy were destroyed by the Israeli Apache helicopters.
Likewise, the Israeli government has widely publicized what it is calling the “Re’im massacre,” citing a death toll of some 112 civilians it claims were murdered by Hamas. However, eyewitness accounts from both surviving Israeli civilians and military personnel involved in the fighting show that the vast majority of those killed died from fire from Israeli soldiers and tanks directed at buildings where the civilians were either hiding or being held hostage by Hamas fighters. It took two days for the Israeli military to recapture Re’im. It only did so after tanks fired into the civilian residences, collapsing them onto their occupants, and often setting them ablaze, causing the bodies of those inside to be consumed by fire. The Israeli government has publicized how it has had to make use of the services of forensic archeologists to identify human remains at the Kibbutz, implying that Hamas had burned the occupants’ home. But the fact is it was Israeli tanks that did the destruction and killing.
Footage from Israeli Apache helicopters of attacks on Israeli civilians, October 7, 2023
This scene was repeated in other Kibbutzes along the Gaza barrier system.
The Israeli government treats the Kibbutz as being purely civilian, and yet has publicized how armed security teams of several Kibbutzes—drawn from the so-called “civilian” residents—were able to mobilize in time to successfully repel the Hamas attackers. The reality is that every Kibbutz had to be treated by Hamas as an armed encampment, and as such assaulted as if it were a military objective, for the simple fact that they were—all of them.
Moreover, until Israel relocated several battalions of IDF forces to the West Bank, each Kibbutz had been reinforced by a squad of around 20 IDF soldiers who were billeted in the Kibbutz. Given that Hamas had planned this attack for well over a year, Hamas had to assume that these 20 IDF soldiers were still located in each Kibbutz, and act accordingly.
The Israeli government has had to walk back its claims that Hamas beheaded 40 children and has provided no credible evidence that Hamas was involved in the rape or sexual assault of a single Israeli female. Eyewitness accounts describe the Hamas fighters as disciplined, determined, and deadly in the attack, and yet courteous and gentle when dealing with civilian captives.
The question arises as to why the Israeli government would go out of its way to manufacture a narrative designed to support the false and misleading characterization of the October 7 attack by Hamas on the Gaza barrier system as an act of terrorism.
The answer is as disturbing as it is clear—because what happened on October 7 was not a terrorist attack, but a military raid. The difference between the two terms is night and day—by labeling the events of October 7 as acts of terrorism, Israel transfers blame for the huge losses away from its military, security, and intelligence services, and onto Hamas. If Israel were, however, to acknowledge that what Hamas did was in fact a raid—a military operation—then the competency of the Israeli military, security, and intelligence services would be called into question, as would the political leadership responsible for overseeing and directing their operations.
Hamas video still of drone attack on Israeli guard tower, October 7, 2023
And if you’re Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this is the last thing you want.
Benjamin Netanyahu is fighting for his political life. He was already facing a crisis of his own making, having pushed for legislation which re-wrote Israeli Basic Law in a way which placed the Israeli judiciary under the control of the Knesset, effectively terminating its status as a separate but equal branch of government (so much for Israel being the “greatest democracy in the Middle East”). This act brought Israel on the verge of a civil war, with hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets to denounce Netanyahu. What makes Netanyahu’s actions even more despicable is that it represented little more than a naked power play designed to prevent the Israeli court system from trying him on several credible allegations of corruption which, if Netanyahu were found guilty (a distinct probability), would have put him in jail for many years.
Netanyahu had billed himself as Israel’s top defender, a specialist on the threats facing Israel abroad, and how to best respond to them. He has openly advocated a military confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. Netanyahu is also a proponent of political Zionism in its most extreme application and has promoted the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which use tactics that forcibly displace Palestinians from their homes and villages, as part of an overall plan to create a “greater Israel” that mirrors that of Biblical times.
Part of Netanyahu’s strategy to accomplish this dream of a “greater Israel” is to weaken the Palestinian people and their government to the point of irrelevancy, thereby preventing them from achieving their dream of obtaining an independent Palestinian state. To facilitate this strategy, Netanyahu has, over the course of the past two decades, promoted the growth of Hamas as a political organization. The purpose of this support is simple—by promoting Hamas, Netanyahu weakens the Palestinian Authority, the governing body of Palestinian people, headed by its President, Mahmoud Abbas.
Mahmoud Abbas, President, Palestinian Authority
Netanyahu’s plan was working—in September 2020 Netanyahu signed the Abaraham Accords, a series of bilateral agreements brokered by the administration of then-President Donald Trump that sought the normalization of relations between Israel and several Gulf Arab States, all at the expense of an independent Palestinian nation. Prior to the Hamas attack on October 7, Israel was on the cusp of normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, an act which would have proven to be the final nail in the coffin of Palestinian statehood.
One of the main reasons for Israel’s progress in this regard was its success in creating a political divide between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
On October 7, however, this success was washed away by the victory that Hamas achieved over the IDF. The precise means by which this victory took place is the subject for another time. But the basic elements of this victory are well-established.
Hamas effectively neutralized Israel’s vaunted intelligence services, blinding them to the possibility of an attack of this scope and scale.
When the attack occurred, Hamas was able to strike with precision the very surveillance and communication nodes the IDF relied upon to mobilize a response in case of an attack.
Captured Israeli Merkhava tank, October 7, 2023
Hamas defeated those Israeli soldiers stationed along the barrier wall in a stand-up fight. Two battalions of the Golani Brigade were routed, as were elements of other vaunted IDF units.
Hamas struck the Headquarters of the Gaza Division, the local intelligence hub, and other major command and control facilities with brutal precision, turning what should have been a five-minute response time into many hours—more than enough time for Hamas to carry out one of its primary objectives—the taking of hostages. This they did with extreme proficiency, returning to Gaza with more than 230 Israeli soldiers and civilians.
The Marine Corps defines a raid as “an operation, usually small scale, involving a swift penetration of hostile territory to secure information, confuse the enemy, or to destroy his installations. It ends with a planned withdrawal upon completion of the assigned mission.”
This is precisely what Hamas did on October 7.
What were the objectives of this raid? According to Hamas, the purpose behind the October 7 raid were threefold.
First, to reassert the right of the Palestinian people to a homeland not defined by the Abaraham Accords.
Second, to release the more than 10,000 Palestinians held prisoner by Israel, most without having been charged with a crime, and none with any notion of due process.
Third, to return the sanctity of the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Islam’s third holiest place, which had been desecrated repeatedly by Israeli security forces over the past years.
Hamas Special Forces
To accomplish these goals, the October 7 raid needed to create the necessary conditions for victory. This was achieved by humiliating Israel sufficiently to provoke a predictable outcome—the implementation of the Dahiya Doctrine of collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza, combined with a ground attack on Gaza that would lure the IDF into what was in effect a Hamas ambush.
The taking of hostages was meant to provide Hamas with negotiating leverage for the release of the 10,000 prisoners held by Israel.
The Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza has resulted in international revulsion against Israel as the world recoils from the humanitarian disaster that is unfolding before their very eyes. The streets of major cities around the world are full of angry protestors demonstrating on behalf of the Palestinian people—and Palestinian statehood. The United States is now stating that a two-state solution—something the Abrahams Accord was designed to prevent—is now the only way forward for peace in the Middle East.
The United States would never have said this on October 6.
The fact that the United States has taken this stance is because of the Hamas raid of October 7.
Attendees, Meeting of Islamic States in Saudi Arabia
Israel is in negotiations with the United States and others about a possible prisoner exchange involving the Hamas hostages and certain categories of political prisoners—women and children—held by Israel (yes, you read that right—children. And now you know the wisdom of Hamas’ decision to take Israeli children hostage.)
Such a possibility would never have occurred if it weren’t for the Hamas raid of October 7.
And in Saudi Arabia, the largest gathering of Islamic nations in modern history has convened to discuss the Gaza crisis. One of the top agenda items is the issue of the Al Aqsa Mosque and ending Israeli desecration.
This was a discussion that would never have taken place if it were not for the Hamas raid of October 7.
It goes without saying that the Hamas raid of October 7 unleashed a firestorm of brutal recrimination in the form of bombs, shells, and bullets on the civilian population of Gaza. These are people who, for nearly eight decades, have been denied a homeland of their own by the Israelis, who violently evicted the Palestinians from the land currently called Israel in one of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing in modern history—the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948.
The destruction of Gaza by Israeli forces, October 2023
These are people who have suffered untold deprivation at the hand of their Israeli occupiers while awaiting the moment they will see their dream of a Palestinian homeland come true. They know that a Palestinian homeland cannot be realized so long as Israel is governed by those who embrace the notion of a Greater (Eretz) Israel, and that the only way to remove such people is by defeating them politically, and the only way to trigger their political defeat is to defeat them militarily.
Hamas is accomplishing this.
But there is a price to pay—a heavy price. The French lost 20,000 civilians killed to achieve the liberation of Normandy in the Summer of 1944.
So far, the Palestinian civilians of Gaza have lost 12,000 civilians killed in the effort led by Hamas to militarily defeat their Israeli occupiers.
That price will go higher in the days and weeks to come.
But it is a price that must be paid if there is to be any chance of a Palestinian homeland.
The sacrifice of the Palestinian people has compelled an Arab and Islamic world which, with few exceptions, has been mute over the depravations carried out by Israel against the Palestinian people. Who did nothing as the cause of Palestinian statehood was mooted by the Abraham Accords.
Only because of the suffering of the Palestinian people is anyone paying attention to the cause of Palestinian statehood today.
Or the welfare of the Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
Or the sanctity of the Al Aqsa Mosque.
These were all stated objectives of Hamas in launching their attack of October 7.
And all objectives are being accomplished as we speak.
Only because of the actions of Hamas and the sacrifices of the Palestinian people.
Which makes the October 7 assault on Israel by Hamas the most successful military raid of this century.
#Massachusetts – Protesting Thanksgiving in Plymouth – 23 Nov 2023
An annual tradition since 1970, National Day of Mourning is a solemn, spiritual and highly political day. Many of us fast from sundown the day before through the afternoon of that day (and have a social after NDOM so that participants in NDOM can break their fasts). We are mourning our ancestors and the genocide of our peoples and the theft of our lands. NDOM is a day when we mourn, but we also feel our strength in action and solidarity.
WHEN AND WHERE IS DAY OF MOURNING?
Thursday, November 23, 2023 (U.S. “thanksgiving” day) at Cole’s Hill, Plymouth, Massachusetts, 12 noon SHARP. Cole’s Hill is the hill above Plymouth Rock in the Plymouth historic waterfront area.
WILL THERE BE A MARCH?
Yes, there will be a march through the historic district of Plymouth. Plymouth agreed, as part of the settlement of 10/19/98, that UAINE may march on National Day of Mourning without the need for a permit as long as we give the town advance notice. PROGRAM: Although we very much welcome our non-Native supporters to stand with us, it is a day when only Indigenous people speak about our history and the struggles that are taking place throughout the Americas. Speakers are by invitation only. This year’s NDOM will be livestreamed from Plymouth.
-Note that NDOM is not a commercial event, so we ask that people do not sell merchandise or distribute leaflets at the outdoor program. We will have UAINE t-shirts available for sale following the march.
-We also ask that you do not eat (unless you must do so for medical reasons) at the outdoor speak-out and march out of respect for the participants who are fasting.
-Dress for the weather!
SOCIAL: There will be box lunches available, but we will not have a full sit-down social due to COVID concerns.
TRANSPORTATION: If you cannot get to Plymouth, you can watch our livestream! We will also post information about buses from NY, CT and elsewhere if applicable at the UAINE facebook event.
ELDERS/DISABLED PEOPLE: We have some chairs available for any Elders and others who need to sit during the initial rally on Cole’s Hill. We also will have ASL interpreters on-stage.
DONATIONS: Donations are gratefully accepted to help defray the costs of the day and of UAINE’s many other efforts during the year: information TBA.
……………
A Stone’s Throw From Plymouth Rock – Hoping for Special Guest Speaker – US Senator Elizabeth Warren Indigenous Native American First People’s Indian Heroine – Hoping for Music: by Buffy St. Marie
Verso mezzogiorno ho guidato la mia bicicletta lungo Train Street fino alla cima di Pope’s Hill e sono rimasto colpito da quanto faceva freddo.
Perché dovrei andare a Copely Square, a diversi chilometri di distanza, per le strade della città in una giornata fredda. Non mi univo ad altri militanti con la mia stessa mentalità per distribuire volantini. Non avevo intenzione di fare la guardia a un tavolo della letteratura, né di portare uno striscione o un cartello nella marcia di protesta. Ero solo. A cosa servivano me alla marcia di protesta?
Appena oltre la cima della collina del Papa andai a sinistra in una strada laterale pensando alla mia casa relativamente calda e ad un’altra tazza di caffè.
Ho scoperto della protesta controllando la sezione “Eventi” di Massachusetts Peace Action. Ho pubblicato l’immagine sul sito di social media Gab.
Indossavo strati di vestiti e un cappuccio sopra il casco e il cappello da bici. Mi sono pentito di non avere una sciarpa. Ho pensato a una sciarpa ma ho pensato a Isadora Duncan che veniva strangolata da una sciarpa impigliata in una ruota. La strada laterale era piena di sole e faceva più caldo e ho guidato verso nord, ma ho iniziato a cambiare idea mentre tornavo verso Train Street. Ho pubblicato online molte immagini e parole sulla guerra israeliana contro i palestinesi. Ma volevo essere ad una manifestazione dal vivo. Sono stupito quando posso vedere online la protesta a Londra, Parigi o New York in tempo reale. Ma anch’io ho bisogno di partecipare ad una vera protesta, anche se ho immagini ad alta definizione da vedere a casa. Così mi sono diretto verso Copely Square e di nuovo la manifestazione.
Ho percorso Dorchester Avenue dove non c’era molto traffico dato che era domenica e la strada era costellata di negozi di riparazione auto, riparazione pneumatici e forniture per auto. Non sono sicuro del perché. Dato che faceva un freddo di 45 gradi, o giù di lì, non c’erano molte persone fuori a mezzogiorno. L’inizio del rally era indicato alle 13:00 e le mappe online dicevano che mi ci sarebbero voluti trentacinque minuti per percorrere le cinque miglia e mezzo. La mia ebike ha un motore elettrico così posso andare più veloce più a lungo di chi pedala da solo.
Sono passato davanti al McDonald’s all’incrocio tra Mass e Cass, diventato famoso per essere una tendopoli di tossicodipendenti e senzatetto ubriachi. La città ha deciso di applicare le leggi contro il montaggio di tende sui marciapiedi a partire dal 1° novembre 2023.
Il South End dopo il Boston University Hospital era vuoto. Ho fatto clic su alcuni mattoni sciolti sui marciapiedi di mattoni.
Nella zona di Back Bay il numero dei pedoni aumentava e dovevo scendere in strada e fare attenzione alle macchine. Non volevo morire. Pensavo allo sciopero dei sindacati al Westin Hotel mentre passavo davanti all’ingresso principale di Huntington Avenue. Ho camminato lungo il picchetto e distribuito volantini dei sindacati radicali. “I picchetti significano non incrociarsi!” Avrei bloccato l’ingresso con il mio corpo se i dirigenti sindacali allora avessero dato la parola o se i lavoratori lo avessero fatto spontaneamente. Ma i leader sindacali di solito vogliono uno sciopero pacifico e legale che non metta in imbarazzo i politici democratici per cui sembrano lavorare. Sono andato ai picchetti in tutti e cinque gli hotel in sciopero.
In Copely Square potevo sentire il ruggito della folla radunata davanti ai gradini di pietra della Biblioteca pubblica di Boston, sul lato est. La piazza di fronte alla Trinity Church aveva una grande recinzione a causa dei lavori in corso, quindi il raduno era schiacciato sulla strada e sull’ampio marciapiede. Quando sono arrivato alle 12:45 sembrava che ci fossero circa 500 persone. C’erano molte bandiere palestinesi. Un oratore ha annunciato che le persone potevano ottenere una bandiera palestinese per 20 dollari e portarla con sé per la protesta e alla fine avrebbero ricevuto i loro 20 dollari se avessero riportato indietro la bandiera, o se avessero tenuto la bandiera. La folla era composta per circa il 20% da studenti universitari dall’aspetto giovane o ventenni, c’erano molte persone che sembravano arabe o dell’Asia occidentale. Molte famiglie con padri, madri e bambini piccoli e Stoller. C’erano donne con il velo, ma non più del 10% o meno.
I canti parlavano costantemente di un “cessate il fuoco adesso”.
Ho notato una giovane donna con la frangetta tagliata dritta e una striscia bianca al centro, sembrava essere un’organizzatrice di dimostrazioni. Un manicomio pazzesco, ho pensato tra me.
Sono rimasto sul lato sud e ai margini del rally cercando di non intralciare la gente con la mia ebike. Ho chiesto a un uomo l’ora, non avevo né orologio né telefono. Ha detto che era l’1:05.
Dopo essere rimasto un po’ in piedi ho dovuto allontanarmi verso la pensilina dell’autobus e mi sono seduto su una panchina. Potevo sentire il discorso di una donna arrabbiata mentre la folla di tanto in tanto urlava di consenso. La gente proveniva dalla stazione della metropolitana della linea verde di Back Bay, un isolato a sud.
Ho potuto vedere un contingente di poliziotti in giro che sembravano rilassati e non erano in tenuta antisommossa. Erano davanti a una barricata che bloccava Arlington Street, all’angolo della biblioteca. Il numero totale sembrava essere una cinquantina compreso un contingente di una dozzina di agenti di polizia in bicicletta. Come me. Ma avevo un motore.
Stavo pensando di andarmene. Avevo le mani fredde anche con i guanti da equitazione. Mi sono alzato e ho girato intorno alla Trinity Church e su Boylston Street verso l’altro lato del raduno. Volevo che il sole mi scaldasse. Mi sono fermato all’estremità della folla e ho guardato in basso verso la scuola superiore pubblica Snowden Academy di Boston, dove avevo lavorato molte volte.
Una donna con una bicicletta con un gruppo in giubbotti di sicurezza arancione brillante si è avvicinata a me e mi ha chiesto: “Sei qui per la manifestazione?”
“Sì”, ho detto.
“Vorresti aiutare la squadra di sicurezza?” lei chiese. Era una giovane donna sui vent’anni che parlava bene, con capelli castano chiaro e una maschera marrone chiaro intonata al viso. Pensavo alla giovane Krupskaja, la moglie di Lenin.
Ero felice che non mi considerasse un avversario o un pazzo solitario. Non avevo distintivi, ornamenti o bandiere che potessero far capire dove mi trovo. I miei vestiti erano tutti neri e indossavo un casco. È importante indossare occhiali trasparenti per non sembrare un minaccioso “Racer X” di Speed Racer.
Alla mia sinistra una donna anziana con un berretto beige cominciò ad aggiungere qualcosa mentre parlavo con la donna più giovane. La squadra di sicurezza in bicicletta si è spostata e ho continuato a parlare con la donna più anziana che mi ha detto che era metà slovacca e metà turca e suo padre era ebreo.
Abbiamo parlato di politica europea e lei ha detto che gli assegni erano tutti “ebrei”. Gli slovacchi erano cattolici. Ha detto che si era convertita al cristianesimo e le ho chiesto quale chiesa. Ha alzato le spalle? Non sapeva che tipo di protestante fosse? Ho pensato, forse qualche chiesa evangelica pazza.
Abbiamo parlato di un “cessate il fuoco” e ho detto che volevo vedere la Turchia sbarcare truppe a Gaza e aprire un porto per rifornire Gaza. Se è la guerra che vogliono…
Ha detto che un uomo del suo lavoro in fondo alla strada aveva parcheggiato la sua macchina vicino alla manifestazione ed era sceso per discutere con la gente perché sosteneva Israele. La folla cresceva, non ero più al limite. Mi sono voltato per scusarmi per aver bloccato il passaggio, anche se ero in strada e non sul marciapiede. Mi sono voltato, la donna non c’era più.
La folla crebbe fino a un migliaio o più di persone, immagino, quando iniziarono a formarsi dietro un camion con altoparlanti e bandiere. Ho visto Steve Kirschbaum, un noto organizzatore della sezione di Boston del Worker World Party e in precedenza leader sindacale degli autisti di autobus. Trent’anni fa era sulla prima pagina del Boston Herald quando a Dorchester Heights, nel sud di Boston, si tenne una manifestazione di un’ala destra. Kirschbaum stava distribuendo volantini all’ingresso della fermata della metropolitana del municipio. Lo Stalinist Workers World Party ha organizzato per quattro decenni manifestazioni a Boston per varie cause, organizzando e mettendo insieme la manifestazione affinché altri potessero entrare, parlare ed essere segnalati dai media. Le manifestazioni hanno sempre le richieste più deboli e deboli possibili. Pace adesso… genere di cose. I liberali radicali richiedono che un democratico disamorato possa firmare e, forse, riuscire a parlare davanti a un pubblico. Il Partito Mondiale dei Lavoratori non sembra crescere grazie al lavoro. Le persone che aiutano a crescere. Ma sono ancora in giro, anche se i capelli di Kirschbaum sono completamente grigi e la sua lunga coda di cavallo mi dice che si è ritirato dalla guida dello scuolabus.
Alcuni anni fa Steve Kirschbaum fu falsamente accusato di aggressione dai capi della compagnia di autobus. Sono andato alla manifestazione al tribunale di Dorchester prima del processo. Mi sono seduto nel tribunale gremito e ho abbozzato tutto e tutti mentre aspettavamo per ore. Fuori, dopo aver marciato in un picchetto, Steve Kirschbaum è venuto da me e mi ha detto: “Grazie per essere venuto oggi”. Ho risposto: “Un’offesa a uno è un’offesa a tutti”.
L’ho visto davanti alla folla che scendeva per strada usando il telefono per scattare una foto. Kirschbaum aveva un grande sorriso stampato in faccia. Era raggiante. Anni fa, durante una manifestazione contro la guerra al MIT, chiesi a un collega militante mentre circolavamo tra la folla distribuendo volantini: “Perché tutti sorridono?” Stavamo protestando contro una guerra crudele. “Perché sono così contenti di se stessi”, rispose. Lui aveva ragione. Non credo di aver visto nessun altro con un sorriso idiota. Non credo di aver visto alcun tipo di black bloc anarchico. Non ho visto nessun contro-manifestante. Ho visto una faccia decenni fa mentre un maoista anziano si fermava sulla sua bicicletta e prendeva un cartello e dei volantini in una cassa di plastica del latte. Mi sembra di ricordare molti anni fa che ero nella stazione della metropolitana di Harvard Square mentre un ragazzo grosso più di un metro e ottanta molestava questo maoista. Si è avvicinato a me probabilmente riconoscendomi dalle manifestazioni e ha detto “mi sta dando fastidio”. Mi sono messo in mezzo ai due e ho detto al ragazzone e grosso: “Lascialo in pace”. Non sono grande, ma posso trasmettere un messaggio con la mia voce profonda. Ero pronto a combattere. Anche per difendere il diritto dei maoisti di distribuire volantini nella metropolitana. Il ragazzone si voltò. Non ho mai parlato con i maoisti, e nemmeno allora.
Con lui ho visto una donna che avevo visto decenni fa montare uno striscione e poi una donna parlare attraverso un megafono ai margini della manifestazione. Penso che una volta fossero il Partito Comunista Rivoluzionario (RCP) e ora sono i RevComs, Comunisti Rivoluzionari.
L’oratore ha fatto eco al loro volantino con slogan con cui posso essere d’accordo “Gli Stati Uniti e Israele non tolgono le mani al popolo palestinese” “Hamas non è una forza di liberazione – Il popolo palestinese ha bisogno di una vera rivoluzione!”
Il raduno dell’establishment filo-palestinese cantava “Dal fiume al mare, la Palestina deve essere libera”. In altre parole, uno slogan nazionalista palestinese che qualsiasi capitalista palestinese potrebbe sostenere.
Lo slogan che uso sempre quando pubblico è “Difendi i palestinesi, ferma la macchina da guerra israeliana!” Ho affisso qualche volantino sui giri in bicicletta, ma alla manifestazione non ho portato nulla di politico. Non una cosa. Non avevo uno zaino. Se fossi stato fermato, per qualsiasi motivo, non avevo con me altro che un documento d’identità. Avrei portato con me il telefono, ma quando me ne sono andato non era carico. Non vivo guardando il mio telefono. Avevo un po’ di soldi, ma non molti. Non mi aspettavo di essere arrestato, quindi non avevo i soldi per la cauzione. Non questa volta.
Il camion che si muoveva lentamente e la folla fitta si spostarono da Copely Square lungo Arlington Street fino a Newbury Street. Mi sono mosso lentamente lungo i marciapiedi con la mia bicicletta mentre la gente era fuori al sole nei bar lungo la strada e camminava. Newbury Street è un quartiere commerciale di fascia alta con alcuni degli affitti più alti del New England. Ci sono alcune gallerie d’arte e molti posti per capelli al piano seminterrato. Ho sentito un piccolo gruppo di persone che mi passavano accanto e parlavano francese. Continuavo a rimanere intrappolato a guardare la manifestazione per strada. Ho notato che la strada davanti al corteo era chiusa al traffico automobilistico. Ho spostato la bici avanti camminando e mi sono diretto verso la strada aperta. Ah… libertà. Potrei navigare lungo la strada deserta, libera dalle macchine, guardando i negozi di Chichi.
Il gruppo di poliziotti in bicicletta era davanti al raduno e anche all’estremità dell’isolato, dove si incrociava la strada successiva. Con l’ebike posso pedalare dolcemente e il motore entra in azione e aiuta molto. Oppure è possibile tenere premuta una leva e l’ebike viene alimentata esclusivamente dal motore elettrico.
La strada era in ombra, quindi ho individuato un punto soleggiato dove fermarmi mentre la folla che si muoveva lentamente si muoveva in mezzo alla strada. Ci sono stati molti canti entusiastici, ma nessuna sensazione di violenza o caos imminente. Probabilmente la folla era composta equamente da uomini e donne, e c’erano molti bambini e persino neonati nei passeggini.
C’era una caffetteria Starbucks in Newbury Street e la manifestazione si è fermata per castigare l’establishment per qualcosa che i filo-palestinesi consideravano contro i palestinesi o a favore di Israele.
“Vergogna, vergogna”, hanno cantato ripetutamente.
Mentre aspettavo al sole, quattro commissari di rally con giubbotti arancioni ed elmetti mi si sono avvicinati.
“Sei qui per la manifestazione?” chiese una donna.
“Sì e no”
“Ci aiuteresti a bloccare le auto?”
“NO.”
Durante il picchetto di uno sciopero sindacale bloccherei i veicoli degli scioperanti. Non bloccherò strade a caso per una manifestazione perché queste persone vogliono mostrare potere sugli automobilisti a caso intrappolati per strada. Le persone nelle loro auto non sono militari israeliani.
Il corteo ha svoltato in Massachusetts Avenue e io mi sono tenuto a distanza perché non ero sicuro di cosa stessero dicendo alla polizia. Ho visto una donna bloccare un’auto in Mass Avenue con la sua bicicletta e l’auto si è spostata leggermente in avanti e un poliziotto era a un metro e mezzo di distanza. Il raduno sembrava contenere circa 2.000 persone mentre si muoveva verso il ponte sul fiume Charles. Una sezione del ponte non aveva traffico e potevo salire e guardarmi intorno stando in punta di piedi sui pedali.
Ho visto un paio di ragazzi di dieci o undici anni saltare lungo Mass Avenue cantando e ridendo come se fossero in una giornata fuori con la loro famiglia. Dato che la folla si muoveva lentamente, ho fatto una deviazione lungo alcune rampe fino alla pista ciclabile del fiume Charles. Venivo qui spesso per pattinare diversi decenni fa. L’ho ritenuto interessante poiché mi sono tornati in mente i vari percorsi percorsi.
Mentre procedevo sotto gli alberi con l’autostrada dall’altra parte di una recinzione e gli alberi e il fiume dall’altra parte, mi sono imbattuto in un branco di anatre che beccavano le foglie arancioni e marroni e il terreno. Mi sono fermato e ho guardato abbastanza da vicino. Mi hanno prestato poca attenzione. Niente paura. Un’altra bicicletta ci superò sul sentiero. Nessun volo sparso. La gente passeggiava. Questi uccelli erano a pranzo…
Mi sono voltato e sono tornato verso il ponte a ovest, risalendo il fiume. La grande folla si stava appena muovendo attraverso il ponte. Ho pensato a come gli altri militanti avevano chiamato questo tipo di marce sfocate e noiosamente lunghe “strisciate per la pace”. Infatti.
Ho spinto la mia bici su per la ripida rampa e sul marciapiede del ponte affollato dalla coda della folla. Mentre attraversavano il ponte per entrare a Cambridge, mi voltai e mi diressi a sud, verso casa. Questo mi è bastato. Almeno per oggi. Soffiavano venti freddi e il sole stava tramontando.
As you know, I have supported your bid for the presidency even before you declared last spring. I have admired and believed in you for years, and when you entered the race I felt hope for the first time in decades that your non-violent impulses, honed by your tragic family history and a deep revulsion for our country’s imperial wars and violent history, would triumph and usher in a new era of peace. Despite the naysayers who dismissed you from the start, I said Yes, that you would shock those who ridiculed and maligned you and that you would be the man to carry out President Kennedy’s American University speech and fulfill his and your father’s legacy of “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women” because “we all breathe the same air” and “we all cherish our children’s futures” and “we are all mortal.”
I suggested that you would heal the divide and not expand it. Seeing you stumble on your way by throwing your full support to the Zionist leaders of Israel has been a body blow to me. At first I thought it might be explained by your reaction to the false antisemitic accusations that were hurled your way once word emerged that you might enter the presidential race. But as time went on it dawned on me that I was wrong and that you were in sync with the powerful Israel Lobby. So now, I feel as if we are in the tenth round of fight for your soul’s compassion. That you have not defended the children of Gaza and condemned their massacre by the thousands has shocked and sickened me.
As a scholar of religion and its intersection with politics, I have been meditating on current events.
Religion has for a very long time been used as a cover for slaughtering people and seizing their land. This is true for the United States and Israel. It is built into their theological underpinnings. So it should not be at all surprising that the current Israeli massacre of Palestinians is fully supported by the U.S. government led by President Joseph Biden and by almost every presidential aspirant. You, however, as a self-styled anti-war candidate are a great surprise to me, although I may be naïve and shouldn’t be since you gave your unequivocal support to the Israel government a month ago, following the October 7 Hamas-led incursion into Israel that killed innocent Israelis (many of whom were also probably killed by the IDF as Jonathan Cooke has reported). Despite that, I still expected your conscience would surely prompt you to condemn what can only be described as genocide, the slaughter of the innocents in Gaza that is ongoing.
You have undermined your claim to “end the forever wars” and to defend children. Why you have done (or not done) this is a question that so many of your supporters and former supporters are asking. Only you can say. Perhaps we might only know if you unequivocally condemned Israel’s actions and faced whatever might come your way as a result. This is unlikely, I now realize, but one can still hope. I think it would take a spiritual miracle of moral courage, because of your claim that your historical analysis that you say is sincere and true that Israel now and always has been the just and innocent party and the Palestinians the evil ones. I find your analysis unbelievable and your silence as innocents are being slaughtered indefensible, even as I applaud so many of your other positions, as you know. Everyone knows that running for the U.S. presidency creates strange bedfellows, but your touting of the Israeli propaganda in which you conflate the Palestinian people with Hamas to justify massacring civilians is beyond strange – it is immoral.
I know how much you respect Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and you no doubt have heard his words before.
“And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular – but one must take it simply because it is right.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Conscience calls to you, Bobby. Be true to that voice within. Politic as it may be, there is a heavy burden of guilt for abandoning the Palestinians to slaughter by silence. King learned this when he saw those photos of the napalmed and dead Vietnamese children and was conscience-stricken to come to Riverside Church in New York to give his speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.” You can do the same. The pictures of dead Palestinian children, victims of U.S. support for Israeli bombs, are there to see. Martin quoted your uncle, John, that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” He said that we can no longer worship the God of hate and retribution. He said, “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.”
You too, Bobby, can break your silence, step up high and let your conscience also leave you no other choice but to condemn the genocide in Gaza. As Martin said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”
You say you are making “a moral case for Israel” as the justified party in its seventy-five year long war with the Palestinians. In doing so you have reneged on your campaign promise to emulate President John Kennedy, who would be appalled by your silence. Your website, Kennedy 24, declares that “[you] Kennedy will revive a lost thread of American foreign policy thinking, the one championed by his uncle, John F. Kennedy who, over his 1000 days in office, had become a firm anti-imperialist.” In genuflecting to the Israel genocide while touting your connection to JFK and your father, Senator Robert Kennedy, you have in fact taken a position toward Israel diametrically opposed to theirs. One could sense this coming when under pressure this past summer, you withdrew your support for Roger Waters, a strong Palestinian supporter who was falsely accused of being anti-Jewish, and you then allowed your “friend” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to say that Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, killed your father in 1968 when you knew that was a lie and was part of a sophisticated intelligence conspiracy to blame the patsy who was said to hate Israel. To allow Shmuley to audaciously and heartlessly repeat a CIA trope about your father’s assassination was a telltale sign of worse to come.
For both the U.S. and Israel, the Bible has been used to cover up the crimes of their foundings. They have analogous histories rooted in religious myths. In both cases, the indigenous peoples were considered less than human – savages, infidels – or in the description of Palestinians by the current Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, “human animals.” Such racist, dehumanizing language has been repeated time and again throughout the American and Israeli narratives used to justify their crimes against those they killed and whose land they stole. The gloss of civilized hypocrisy has been unmasked by such language, just as it was when Hitler repeatedly called Jews “vermin.” Irony aside, the Nazi rhetoric of denigration and racial superiority to justify exterminating Jewish people has been repeatedly mirrored by American and Israeli leaders, whether it was against the Original Free Peoples of North America, Vietnamese, Koreans, Iraqis, etc. or the Palestinians. It is the master/slave mentality deeply rooted in U.S. and Israel history.
Bobby, you have said that you hope to be the second independent candidate to become president, the first being George Washington. Yet Washington was a racist and slave owner who supported the extermination of the Indian natives so the white settlers could take their land. He himself did so, speculating in Native lands together with most of the other prominent politicians from the early days of the Republic, including Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, Andrew Jackson, et al. For the governors and legislators of the thirteen states it was also open sesame on the seizure of Indian land which required their slaughter in turn.
One can learn this in Peter P. d’Errico’s important recent book, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples, where he makes clear how U.S. law was used to codify such “legal” theft and killing. Such federal law was, as d’Errico writes, a claim of unlimited U.S. power and not really law at all but the suspension of law as it granted the U.S. government complete authority over Native peoples, their lives, and their land. Legal theft, in other words. Like the English justification for their claim to their colonies – the “right of discovery” proclaimed in Henry VII’s commission to John Cabot: “to subdue and take possession of any lands unoccupied by any Christian Power” – a series of three Supreme Court rulings in the 1830s by Chief Justice John Marshall were based on the claim of “Christian discovery,” which in turn was based on a papal grant from Pope Alexander the Sixth in 1493 that gave to Christopher Columbus’s sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella, ownership of any land Columbus might discover. This divine right required the killing and subjugation of non-Christian infidels and heathens who were considered brute animals, just as the Palestinians are today.
Similar justifications have been used by Zionists for the killing of Palestinians and the seizure of their land in the name of the Biblical Jewish God and his instructions to them. This myth claims that God gave them the ancestral Palestinians’ land, therefore, like native peoples of North America who, according to the non-law U.S. Indian law, only had the right of occupancy, the Palestinians could be killed and dispossessed by the God-given rightful owners, which they were in 1948. Netanyahu has made such claims many times, as have his predecessors. He calls for a holy war of annihilation against the Palestinians, based on the Hebrew Bible. This is widely known and has a long history in the Zionist propaganda narrative that has allowed for seventy-five years of killing and the systematic shrinking of Palestinian land to its pitiful size today.
It is interesting to note that the three primary countries that intersect in the use of religious justification for colonial and imperial policies are England, the U.S., and Israel – together with the Papacy and its May 4, 1493 bull Inter Caetera issued by Pope Alexander the Sixth to declare Christian discovery. I mention this since I am an Irish-American Catholic, and it was the Irish uprising against the English colonial occupiers that has become a key inspiration for anti-colonial rebels throughout the twentieth century and beyond. I have taken inspiration from my Irish ancestors. This is your heritage also, Bobby, so it becomes even more surprising that you, even as you tout the American Revolutionary War rebel fighters against the English colonialists, would support the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. As a lawyer, you must be aware of Federal Indian Law and how it, like all law, is rooted in a metaphysics of being human; has presuppositions that are brought to the bar, and in the case of federal Indian law, a Christian nomos at odds with that of Native peoples’.
You surely know that the Israeli assault on Gaza is a massive war crime according to international law, and even within the moderate Catholic just war theory, is, by its distorted proportionality, evil and must be rejected as immoral and a terrible sin. You claim to want to end all wars but support the ongoing slaughter of thousands upon thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, including so many children and women. Nor have you said a word against Biden’s saber rattling with aircraft carriers, U.S. drones, and assistance for Israel’s bloodthirsty assault that raises the threat of a much wider war that could turn nuclear.
Yes, the question is why such silence, which you can break now. I beg you to speak out. You are a man of conscience. MLK, Jr. speaks to us all still.
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular – but one must take it simply because it is right.
The Global South was expecting the Dawn of a New Arabian Reality.
After all, the Arab street – even while repressed in their home nations – has pulsed with protests expressing ferocious rage against Israel’s wholesale massacre of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Arab leaders were forced to take some sort of action beyond suspending a few ambassadorships with Israel, and called for a special Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit to discuss the ongoing Israeli War Against Palestinian Children.
Representatives of 57 Muslim states convened in Riyadh on 11 November to deliver a serious, practical blow against genocidal practitioners and enablers. But in the end, nothing was offered, not even solace.
The OIC’s final statement will always be enshrined in the Gilded Palace of Cowardice. Highlights of the tawdry rhetorical show: we oppose Israel’s “self-defense;” we condemn the attack on Gaza; we ask (who?) not to sell weapons to Israel; we request the kangaroo ICC to “investigate” war crimes; we request a UN resolution condemning Israel.
For the record, that’s the best 57 Muslim-majority countries could drum up in response to this 21st-century genocide.
History, even if written by victors, tends to be unforgiving towards cowards.
The Top Four Cowards, in this instance, are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morrocco – the latter three having normalized relations with Israel under a heavy US hand in 2020. These are the ones that consistently blocked serious measures from being adopted at the OIC summit, such as the Algerian draft proposal for an oil ban on Israel, plus banning the use of Arab airspace to deliver weapons to the occupation state.
Egypt and Jordan – longtime Arab vassals – were also non-committal, as well as Sudan, which is in the middle of a civil war. Turkiye, under Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once again showed it is all talk and no action; a neo-Ottoman parody of the Texan “all hat, no cattle.”
BRICS or IMEC?
The Top Four Cowards deserve some scrutiny. Bahrain is a lowly vassal hosting a key branch of the US Empire of Bases. Morocco has close relations with Tel Aviv – it sold out quickly after an Israeli promise to recognize Rabat’s claim on Western Sahara. Moreover, Morocco heavily depends on tourism, mainly from the collective west.
Then we have the big dogs, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Both are stacked to the rafters with American weaponry, and, like Bahrain, also host US military bases. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) and his old mentor, Emirati ruler Mohammad bin Zayed (MbZ), do factor in the threat of color revolutions tearing through their regal domains if they deviate too much from the accepted imperial script.
But in a few weeks, starting on 1 January, 2024, under a Russian presidency, both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi will expand their horizons big-time by officially becoming members of the BRICS 11.
Saudi Arabia and UAE were only admitted into the expanded BRICS because of careful geopolitical and geoeconomic calculations by the Russia-China strategic partnership.
Along with Iran – which happens to have its own strategic partnership with both Russia and China – Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are supposed to reinforce the energy clout of the BRICS sphere and be key players, further on down the road, in the de-dollarization drive whose ultimate aim is to bypass the petrodollar.
Yet, at the same time, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi also stand to benefit immensely from the not-so-secret 1963 plan to build the Ben Gurion canal, from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Eastern Mediterranean, arriving – what a coincidence – very close to now devastated northern Gaza.
The canal would allow Israel to become a key energy transit hub, dislodging Egypt’s Suez Canal, and that happens to dovetail nicely with Israel’s role as the de facto key node in the latest chapter of the War of Economic Corridors: the US-concocted India-MidEast Corridor (IMEC).
IMEC is a quite perverse acronym, as is the whole logic behind this fantastical corridor, which is to position international law-breaking Israel as a critical trade hub and even energy provider between Europe, part of the Arab world, and India.
That was also the logic behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s UN charade in September, where he flashed the whole “international community” a map of the “New Middle East” in which Palestine had been totally erased.
All of the above assumes that IMEC and the Ben Gurion Canal will be built – which is not a given by any realistic standards.
Back to the vote at the OIC, US minions Egypt and Jordan – two countries on Israel’s western and eastern borders, respectively – were in the toughest position of them all. The occupation state wished to push approximately 4.5 million Palestinians into their borders for good. But Cairo and Amman, also awash in US weapons and financially bankrupt as they come, would never survive US sanctions if they lean too unacceptably towards Palestine.
So, in the end, too many Muslim states choosing humiliation over righteousness were thinking in very narrow, pragmatic, national interest terms. Geopolitics is pitiless. It is all about natural resources and markets. If you don’t have one, you need the other, and if you have none, a Hegemon dictates what you’re allowed to have.
The Arab and Muslim street – and the Global Majority – may rightfully feel dejected when they see how these “leaders” are not ready to turn the Islamic world into a real power pole within emerging multipolarity.
It wouldn’t happen any other way. Many key Arab states are not Sovereign entities. They are all boxed in, victims of a vassal mentality. They’re not ready – yet – for their close-up facing History. And sadly, they still remain hostage to their own “century of humiliation.”
The humiliating coup de grace was dispatched by none other than the Tel Aviv genocidal maniac himself: he threatened everyone in the Arab world if they don’t shut up – which they already did.
Of course, there are very important Arab and Muslim brave-hearts in Iran, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. While not a majority by any means, these Resistance actors reflect the sentiment on the Street like no other. And with Israel’s war expanding each day, their regional and global clout is set to increase immeasurably, just as in all of the Hegemon’s other regional wars.
Strangling a new century in the cradle
The catastrophic debacle of Project Ukraine and the revival of an intractable West Asian war are deeply intertwined.
Beyond the fog of Washington’s “worry” about Tel Aviv’s genocidal rampage, the crucial fact is that we are right in the thick of a war against BRICS 11.
The Empire does not do strategy; at best, it does tactical business plans on the fly. There are two immediate tactics in play: a US Armada deployed in the Eastern Mediterranean – in a failed effort to intimidate Resistance Axis behemoths Iran and Hezbollah – and a possible Milei election in Argentina tied to his avowed promise to break Brazil-Argentina relations.
So this is a simultaneous attack on BRICS 11 on two fronts: West Asia and South America. There will be no American efforts spared to prevent BRICS 11 from getting close to OPEC+. A key aim is to instill fear in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi – as confirmed by Persian Gulf business sources.
Even vassal leaders at the OIC show would have been aware that we are now deep into The Empire Strikes Back. That also largely explains their cowardice.
They know that for the Hegemon, multipolarity equals “chaos,” unipolarity equals “order,” and malign actors equal “autocrats” – such as the new Russian-Chinese-Iranian “Axis of Evil” and anyone, especially vassals, that opposes the “rules-based international order.”
And that brings us to a tale of two ceasefires. Tens of millions across the Global Majority are asking why the Hegemon is desperate for a ceasefire in Ukraine while flatly refusing a ceasefire in Palestine.
Freezing Project Ukraine preserves the Ghost of Hegemony just a little bit longer. Let’s assume Moscow would take the bait (it won’t). But to freeze Ukraine in Europe, the Hegemon will need an Israeli win in Gaza – perhaps at any and all costs – to maintain even a vestige of its former glory.
But can Israel achieve victory any more than Ukraine can? Tel Aviv may have already lost the war on 7 October as it can never regain its facade of invincibility. And if this transforms into a regional war that Israel loses, the US will lose its Arab vassals overnight, who today have a Chinese and Russian option waiting in the wings.
The Roar of the Street is getting louder – demanding that the Biden administration, now seen as complicit with Tel Aviv, halt the Israeli genocide that may lead to a World War. But Washington will not comply. Wars in Europe and West Asia may be its last chance (it will lose) to subvert the emergence of a prosperous, connected, peaceful Eurasia Century.
Casi al mediodía subí en bicicleta por Train Street hasta la cima de Pope’s Hill y me sorprendió el frío que hacía.
¿Por qué iría a Copely Square, a varios kilómetros de distancia, por las calles de la ciudad en un día frío? No me uniría a otros militantes de ideas afines para distribuir folletos. No iba a custodiar una mesa de literatura ni a llevar una pancarta o un cartel en la marcha de protesta. Estaba solo. ¿Para qué me necesitaban en la marcha de protesta?
Justo encima de la colina del Papa giré a la izquierda hacia una calle lateral pensando en mi hogar relativamente cálido y en otra taza de café.
Me enteré de la protesta consultando la sección “Eventos” de Massachusetts Peace Action. Publiqué la imagen en el sitio de redes sociales Gab.
Llevaba varias capas de ropa y una capucha sobre mi casco de bicicleta y mi gorra. Lamenté no tener bufanda. Pensé en una bufanda, pero pensé en Isadora Duncan siendo estrangulada por una bufanda que se enganchó en una rueda. La calle lateral estaba llena de sol y hacía más calor y conduje hacia el norte, pero comencé a cambiar de opinión mientras regresaba hacia Train Street. He publicado en línea muchas fotografías y palabras sobre la guerra israelí contra los palestinos. Pero quería estar en un mitin en persona. Me sorprende poder ver protestas en Londres, París o Nueva York en tiempo real en línea. Pero yo también necesito estar en una protesta real, incluso si tengo imágenes de alta definición para ver en casa. Así que me dirigí nuevamente hacia Copely Square y la manifestación.
Conduje por Dorchester Avenue, donde no había mucho tráfico ya que era domingo y la avenida está llena de tiendas de reparación de automóviles, reparación de llantas y suministros para automóviles. No estoy seguro de por qué. Como hacía frío, aproximadamente 45 grados, no había demasiada gente afuera al mediodía. El rally estaba previsto que comenzara a la 1 de la tarde y los mapas en línea decían que me tomaría treinta y cinco minutos recorrer las cinco millas y media. Mi bicicleta eléctrica tiene un motor eléctrico, por lo que puedo ir más rápido durante más tiempo que alguien que pedalea solo.
Pasé por el McDonald’s en la intersección de Mass y Cass, que se ha hecho famoso por ser una ciudad de tiendas de campaña para drogadictos y borrachos sin hogar. La ciudad decidió hacer cumplir las leyes contra el montaje de tiendas de campaña en las aceras el 1 de noviembre de 2023.
El South End después del Hospital Universitario de Boston estaba vacío. Oí un clic a lo largo de algunos de los ladrillos sueltos de las aceras de ladrillo.
En la zona de Back Bay el número de peatones aumentó y tuve que salir a la calle y estar atento a los coches. No quería morir. Pensé en la huelga sindical en el hotel Westin mientras pasaba por la entrada principal de Huntington Avenue. Caminé en el piquete y distribuí folletos sindicales radicales. “¡Los piquetes significan no cruzar!” Habría bloqueado la entrada con mi cuerpo si los dirigentes sindicales hubieran dado la orden entonces, o si los trabajadores lo hubieran hecho espontáneamente. Pero los líderes sindicales normalmente quieren una huelga legal pacífica que no avergüence a los políticos demócratas para los que parecen trabajar. Fui a los piquetes en los cinco hoteles en huelga.
En Copely Square pude oír el rugido de la multitud reunida en los escalones de piedra de la Biblioteca Pública de Boston en el lado este. La plaza frente a la Iglesia de la Trinidad tenía una cerca grande debido a la construcción, por lo que la manifestación se apretujó hacia la calle y la acera ancha. Cuando llegué a las 12:45 parecía haber unas 500 personas. Había muchas banderas palestinas. Un orador anunció que la gente podría obtener una bandera palestina por 20 dólares y llevarla durante la protesta y recibir sus 20 dólares al final si la devolvían o se quedaban con ella. La multitud tenía aproximadamente un 20% de estudiantes universitarios jóvenes o veinteañeros, había muchas personas que parecían árabes o de Asia occidental. Muchas familias con padres, madres, niños pequeños y Stollers. Había mujeres con velo, pero no más del 10% o menos.
Los cánticos se referían constantemente a un “alto el fuego ahora”.
Noté a una mujer joven con flequillo recto y una raya blanca en el medio; parecía ser la organizadora de una manifestación. Explosiones de manicomio, pensé para mis adentros.
Me quedé en el lado sur y en el borde del rally tratando de no estorbar a la gente con mi bicicleta eléctrica. Le pregunté a un hombre la hora, no tenía reloj ni teléfono. Dijo que eran las 1:05.
Después de un rato de pie tuve que alejarme hacia una parada de autobús y sentarme en un banco. Podía escuchar el discurso de una mujer enojada mientras la multitud ocasionalmente gritaba de acuerdo. La gente venía desde la estación de metro Back Bay Green Line, una cuadra hacia el sur.
Pude ver un contingente de policías alrededor que parecían estar relajados y no llevaban equipo antidisturbios. Estaban en una barricada que bloqueaba Arlington Street en la esquina de la biblioteca. El número total parecía ser de unos cincuenta, incluido un contingente de una docena de policías en bicicleta. Como yo. Pero tenía un motor.
Estaba pensando en irme. Tenía las manos frías incluso con los guantes de montar. Me levanté y rodeé Trinity Church y subí por Boylston Street hacia el otro lado del mitin. Quería que el sol me calentara. Me detuve en el extremo más alejado de la multitud y miré hacia la escuela secundaria pública de Boston Snowden Academy en la que había trabajado muchas veces.
Una mujer en bicicleta con un grupo con chalecos de seguridad de color naranja brillante se acercó a mí y me preguntó: “¿Estás preparado para la manifestación?”.
“Sí, he dicho.
“¿Le gustaría ayudar al equipo de seguridad?” ella preguntó. Era una joven bien hablada de unos veinte años, con cabello castaño claro y una máscara de color marrón claro que hacía juego con su rostro. Pensé en la joven Krupskaya, la esposa de Lenin.
Me alegré de que ella no pensara en mí como un oponente o un loco solitario. No tenía insignias, adornos o banderas que permitieran saber cuál es mi posición. Mi ropa era toda negra y llevaba un casco. Me propongo usar gafas transparentes para no parecer un amenazador ‘Racer X’ de Speed Racer.
A mi izquierda, una mujer mayor con una boina beige comenzó a añadir algo mientras yo hablaba con la mujer más joven. El equipo de seguridad en bicicletas se movió y yo seguí hablando con la mujer mayor que me dijo que era mitad eslovaca y mitad turca y que su padre había sido judío.
Hablamos de política europea y ella dijo que los Cheques eran todos “judíos”. Los eslovacos eran católicos. Ella dijo que se había convertido al cristianismo y le pregunté en qué iglesia. ¿Se encogió de hombros? ¿No sabía qué clase de protestante era? Pensé, tal vez alguna iglesia evangélica loca.
Hablamos de un “alto el fuego” y dije que quería ver a Turquía desembarcar tropas en Gaza y abrir un puerto para abastecer a Gaza. Si lo que quieren es guerra…
Dijo que un hombre de su trabajo en la misma calle había estacionado su auto cerca de la manifestación y salió para discutir con la gente porque apoyaba a Israel. La multitud crecía y yo ya no estaba al límite. Me volví para disculparme por bloquear el camino, aunque estaba en la calle, no en la acera. Me volví y la mujer ya no estaba.
La multitud creció a unas mil personas o más, supongo, cuando comenzaron a formarse detrás de un camión de sonido con parlantes y banderas. Vi a Steve Kirschbaum, un conocido organizador de la sección de Boston del Partido Mundial de los Trabajadores y anteriormente líder sindical de conductores de autobús. Hace treinta años apareció en la portada del Boston Herald cuando un derechista realizaba una manifestación en Dorchester Heights, en el sur de Boston. Kirschbaum repartía folletos en la entrada de la parada de metro del Ayuntamiento. El Partido Mundial de los Trabajadores estalinista ha tenido cuatro décadas de organizar mítines en Boston por diversas causas, donde ellos organizan y organizan la manifestación para que otros entren, hablen y aparezcan en los medios. Los mítines siempre tienen las exigencias más bajas posibles para los débiles. Paz ahora… ese tipo de cosas. Los liberales radicales exigen que un demócrata descontento pueda firmar y hablar ante una audiencia, tal vez. El Partido Mundial de los Trabajadores no parece crecer gracias al trabajo. Las personas a las que ayudan a crecer. Pero todavía existen, incluso si el cabello de Kirschbaum es completamente gris y su larga cola de caballo me dice que se ha retirado de conducir un autobús escolar.
Hace algunos años, Steve Kirschbaum fue acusado falsamente de agresión por los jefes de la compañía de autobuses. Fui a la manifestación en el Palacio de Justicia de Dorchester antes del juicio. Me senté en el tribunal abarrotado y dibujé a todos y a todo mientras esperábamos durante horas. Afuera, después de marchar en un piquete, Steve Kirschbaum se me acercó y me dijo: “Gracias por venir hoy”. Respondí: “Un daño a uno es un daño a todos”.
Lo vi frente a la multitud caminando por la calle usando su teléfono para tomar una foto. Kirschbaum tenía una gran sonrisa en el rostro. Estaba radiante. Hace años, en una manifestación contra la guerra en el MIT, le pregunté a un compañero militante mientras circulamos entre la multitud repartiendo folletos: “¿Por qué todos están sonriendo?”
Estábamos protestando por una guerra sombría.
“Porque están muy satisfechos de sí mismos”, respondió. Él estaba en lo correcto.
No creo haber visto a nadie más con una sonrisa idiota. No creo haber visto ningún tipo de bloque negro anarquista en absoluto. No vi ningún contramanifestante. Hace décadas vi una cara cuando un maoísta anciano se detuvo en su bicicleta y sacó un cartel y folletos en una caja de plástico para leche. Me parece recordar que hace muchos años estaba en la estación de metro de Harvard Square mientras un tipo grande de más de seis pies acosaba a este maoísta. Se acercó a mí, probablemente reconociendome por las manifestaciones, y me dijo: “me está molestando”.
Me puse entre los dos y le dije al tipo grande y fornido: “Déjalo en paz”. No soy grande, pero puedo transmitir un mensaje con mi voz profunda. Estaba listo para pelear. Incluso para defender el derecho maoísta de repartir folletos en el metro. El grandullón se dio la vuelta. Nunca he hablado con los maoístas, y tampoco lo hice entonces.
Vi a una mujer con él a la que vi hace décadas colocando una pancarta y luego una mujer habló a través de un megáfono al borde de la manifestación. Creo que alguna vez fueron el Partido Comunista Revolucionario (PCR) y ahora son los RevComs, los Comunistas Revolucionarios.
El orador se hizo eco de su folleto con lemas con los que estoy de acuerdo: “Estados Unidos e Israel no toquen al pueblo palestino”. “Hamas no es una fuerza de liberación: ¡el pueblo palestino necesita una revolución real!”
La manifestación del establishment pro palestino cantaba “Del río al mar, Palestina debe ser libre”. En otras palabras, un eslogan nacionalista palestino que cualquier capitalista palestino podría apoyar.
El lema que uso todo el tiempo cuando publico es “¡Defender a los palestinos, detener la máquina de guerra israelí!” He colocado algunos folletos sobre los paseos en bicicleta, pero no traje nada político al mitin. No es una cosa. No tenía mochila. Si me detenían por cualquier motivo, no llevaba nada encima más que una identificación. Iba a traer mi teléfono, pero al salir no estaba cargado. No vivo mirando mi teléfono. Tenía un poco de dinero, pero no mucho. No esperaba que me arrestaran, así que no tenía dinero para la fianza. No esta vez.
El camión que avanzaba lentamente y la multitud apiñada se movieron desde Copely Square por Arlington Street hasta Newbury Street. Me movía lentamente por las aceras con mi bicicleta mientras la gente tomaba el sol en los cafés a lo largo de la calle y caminaba. Newbury Street es un distrito comercial de alto nivel con algunos de los alquileres más altos de Nueva Inglaterra. Hay algunas galerías de arte y muchas peluquerías en el sótano. Escuché a un pequeño grupo de personas pasar a mi lado hablando francés. Seguí quedando atrapado a un lado viendo la manifestación en la calle. Noté que la calle frente a la marcha estaba cortada al tráfico de automóviles. Avancé mi bicicleta caminando y me dirigí hacia la carretera abierta. Ah… libertad. Podía navegar por la calle vacía, libre de coches, mirando las tiendas Chi-Chi.
El grupo de policías en bicicleta estaba al frente de la manifestación y también al final de la cuadra donde cruzaba la siguiente calle. Con la bicicleta eléctrica puedo pedalear suavemente y el motor arranca y me ayuda mucho. O bien, se puede mantener presionada una palanca y la bicicleta eléctrica funciona únicamente con el motor eléctrico.
La calle estaba sombreada, así que localicé un lugar soleado para detenerme mientras la multitud avanzaba lentamente por el medio de la calle. Hubo muchos cánticos entusiastas, pero ningún sentimiento de violencia o caos inminente. La multitud probablemente estaba compuesta por hombres y mujeres, y había muchos niños e incluso bebés en cochecitos.
Había una cafetería Starbucks en Newbury Street y la manifestación se detuvo para criticar al establecimiento por algo que los propalestinos consideraban contra los palestinos o a favor de Israel.
“Vergüenza, vergüenza”, corearon repetidamente.
Mientras esperaba bajo el sol, cuatro comisarios del rally con chalecos y cascos naranjas se me acercaron.
“¿Estás aquí para el mitin?” preguntó una mujer.
“Si y no”
“¿Nos ayudarías a bloquear los autos?”
“No.”
En el piquete de una huelga sindical, bloquearía los vehículos de los rompehuelgas. No bloquearé calles al azar para una manifestación porque esta gente quiere mostrar poder sobre los automovilistas al azar atrapados en la calle. Las personas en sus autos no son militares israelíes.
La manifestación giró hacia Massachusetts Avenue y yo mantuve la distancia porque no estaba seguro de lo que le decían a la policía. Vi a una mujer bloquear un auto en Mass Ave con su bicicleta y el auto avanzó un poco y un policía estaba a cinco pies de distancia. La manifestación parecía ser de unas 2.000 personas a medida que avanzaba hacia el puente sobre el río Charles. Una sección del puente no tenía tráfico y podía subir y mirar alrededor de puntillas sobre mis pedales.
Vi a un par de niños de diez u once años saltando por Mass Ave cantando y riendo como si estuvieran de día con su familia. Como la multitud se movía lentamente, tomé un paseo por algunas rampas hasta el carril bici del río Charles. Venía mucho aquí a patinar hace varias décadas. Me pareció interesante cuando volví a recordar los distintos cursos de trayectoria.
Mientras caminaba bajo los árboles con la autopista al otro lado de una valla y los árboles y el río al otro lado, me encontré con una manada de patos picoteando las hojas anaranjadas y marrones y el suelo. Me detuve y miré bastante de cerca. Me prestaron poca atención. Sin miedo. Otra bicicleta pasó junto a nosotros por el camino. Sin vuelo disperso. La gente pasaba. Estos pájaros estaban almorzando.
Me di la vuelta y regresé hacia el puente hacia el oeste en dirección río arriba. La gran multitud estaba cruzando el puente. Pensé en cómo mis compañeros militantes habían llamado a este tipo de marchas desenfocadas y tediosamente largas “marchas por la paz”. En efecto.
Subí mi bicicleta por la empinada rampa y llegué a la acera del puente llena de gente que estaba al final de la multitud. Mientras cruzaban el puente hacia Cambridge, giré y me dirigí hacia el sur, hacia casa. Eso fue suficiente para mí. Al menos por hoy. Soplaban vientos fríos y el sol se estaba poniendo.
ي فترة الظهيرة تقريبًا، ركبت دراجتي في شارع ترين ستريت إلى قمة تل بوب وأذهلني مدى برودة الجو.
لماذا أذهب إلى ميدان كوبلي، على بعد عدة أميال، عبر شوارع المدينة في يوم بارد. ولم أكن أنضم إلى مقاتلين آخرين مثلي في التفكير لتوزيع المنشورات. لم أكن سأحرس طاولة أدبية، أو أحمل لافتة أو لافتة في المسيرة الاحتجاجية. كنت وحدي. ماذا احتاجوني في المسيرة الاحتجاجية؟
فوق قمة تل البابا مباشرة، توجهت يسارًا إلى شارع جانبي أفكر في منزلي الدافئ نسبيًا وفنجان آخر من القهوة.
لقد اكتشفت أمر الاحتجاج من خلال مراجعة قسم “الأحداث” في منظمة Massachusetts Peace Action. لقد نشرت الصورة على موقع التواصل الاجتماعي جاب.
كنت أرتدي طبقات من الملابس وغطاء رأس فوق خوذة دراجتي وقبعة. لقد ندمت على عدم وجود وشاح. فكرت في وشاح، لكني فكرت في إيزادورا دنكان التي تم خنقها بواسطة وشاح عالق على عجلة. كان الشارع الجانبي مليئًا بالشمس وأكثر دفئًا، فتوجهت شمالًا ولكني بدأت أغير رأيي عندما عدت نحو شارع القطار. لقد نشرت العديد من الصور والكلمات عن الحرب الإسرائيلية على الفلسطينيين على الإنترنت. لكنني أردت أن أكون في اجتماع حاشد بالجسد. أنا مندهش عندما أستطيع رؤية الاحتجاجات في لندن، أو باريس، أو نيويورك في الوقت الحقيقي عبر الإنترنت. لكن، يجب أن أكون في مظاهرة حقيقية بنفسي، حتى لو كان لدي صور عالية الوضوح لأراها في المنزل. فتوجهت نحو ساحة كوبلي والمظاهرة مرة أخرى.
ركبت في شارع دورشيستر حيث لم يكن هناك الكثير من حركة المرور منذ أن كان يوم الأحد وكان الشارع مليئًا بالكثير من متاجر إصلاح السيارات وإصلاح الإطارات ومستلزمات السيارات. لست متأكدا لماذا. نظرًا لأن درجة الحرارة كانت باردة 45 درجة، أو نحو ذلك، لم يكن هناك الكثير من الناس بالخارج عند الظهر. تم إدراج التجمع على أنه يبدأ في الساعة الواحدة ظهرًا، وقالت الخرائط الموجودة على الإنترنت إن الأمر سيستغرق خمسة وثلاثين دقيقة لقطع مسافة خمسة أميال ونصف. تحتوي دراجتي الإلكترونية على محرك كهربائي حتى أتمكن من السير بشكل أسرع لفترة أطول من شخص يقود الدراجة بمفرده.
مررت بمطعم ماكدونالدز عند تقاطع ماس وكاس الذي أصبح مشهورًا بكونه مدينة خيام لمدمني المخدرات والسكارى المشردين. قررت المدينة تطبيق قوانين ضد نصب الخيام على الأرصفة في 1 نوفمبر 2023.
كان الحي الجنوبي بعد مستشفى جامعة بوسطن خاليًا. لقد قمت بالنقر على طول بعض الطوب السائب على الأرصفة المبنية من الطوب.
في منطقة باك باي، زاد عدد المشاة واضطررت إلى النزول إلى الشوارع ومراقبة السيارات. لم أكن أريد أن أموت. فكرت في إضراب النقابات العمالية في فندق ويستن بينما كنت أقود سيارتي عند المدخل الأمامي لشارع هنتنغتون. مشيت في خط الاعتصام ووزعت منشورات نقابية راديكالية. “خطوط الاعتصام تعني عدم العبور!” كنت سأغلق المدخل بجسدي لو أن قادة النقابات العمالية أعطوا الكلمة في ذلك الوقت، أو لو أن العمال فعلوا ذلك بشكل عفوي. لكن زعماء النقابات العمالية يريدون عادة تنظيم إضراب قانوني سلمي لا يحرج السياسيين الديمقراطيين الذين يبدو أنهم يعملون لصالحهم. ذهبت إلى صفوف الاعتصام في جميع الفنادق الخمسة المدهشة.
في ساحة كوبلي، كنت أسمع هدير الحشود المتجمعة عند الدرجات الحجرية لمكتبة بوسطن العامة على الجانب الشرقي. كانت الساحة الواقعة أمام كنيسة الثالوث تحتوي على سياج كبير بسبب أعمال البناء، لذلك تم ضغط التجمع على الشارع والرصيف الواسع. عندما وصلت الساعة 12:45 بدا أن هناك حوالي 500 شخص. كان هناك الكثير من الأعلام الفلسطينية. أعلن أحد المتحدثين أنه يمكن للناس الحصول على العلم الفلسطيني مقابل 20 دولارًا وحمله للاحتجاج وسيحصلون على 20 دولارًا في النهاية إذا أعادوا العلم أو احتفظوا بالعلم. كان الحشد يضم حوالي 20% من طلاب الجامعات الذين يبدو مظهرهم شابًا أو في العشرينات من العمر، وكان هناك الكثير من الأشخاص الذين يبدون وكأنهم عرب أو غرب آسيويين. الكثير من العائلات التي لديها آباء وأمهات وأطفال صغار وعربات أطفال. وكانت هناك نساء محجبات، ولكن ليس أكثر من 10% أو أقل.
وكانت الهتافات باستمرار تدور حول “وقف إطلاق النار الآن”.
لاحظت وجود امرأة شابة ذات غرة مستقيمة وخط أبيض في المنتصف، بدت وكأنها من منظمي المظاهرة. فكرت في نفسي: انفجارات اللجوء المجنونة.
بقيت على الجانب الجنوبي وعلى حافة التجمع محاولًا ألا أعترض طريق الناس بدراجتي الإلكترونية. سألت الرجل عن الوقت، ولم يكن لدي ساعة أو هاتف. قال إنها الساعة 1:05.
وبعد الوقوف لبعض الوقت، اضطررت إلى الابتعاد نحو موقف الحافلات والجلوس على أحد المقاعد. كنت أسمع خطاب امرأة غاضبة بينما كان الحشد يهتف بالموافقة من حين لآخر. كان الناس قادمين من محطة مترو أنفاق باك باي جرين لاين على بعد مبنى واحد إلى الجنوب.
كان بإمكاني رؤية فرقة من الشرطة حولي ويبدو أنهم مرتاحون ولم يكونوا يرتدون معدات مكافحة الشغب. كانوا عند حاجز يسد شارع أرلينغتون عند زاوية المكتبة. ويبدو أن العدد الإجمالي كان حوالي خمسين شخصًا، بما في ذلك فرقة مكونة من اثني عشر ضابط شرطة على الدراجات الهوائية. مثلي. لكن كان لدي محرك.
كنت أفكر في المغادرة. كانت يدي باردة حتى مع قفازات الركوب الخاصة بي. نهضت وتجولت حول كنيسة ترينيتي وشارع بويلستون باتجاه الجانب الآخر من التجمع. أردت أن تدفئني الشمس. توقفت عند الحافة البعيدة من الحشد ونظرت إلى مدرسة سنودن أكاديمي بوسطن الثانوية العامة التي عملت فيها عدة مرات.
اقتربت مني امرأة على دراجة مع مجموعة يرتدون سترات أمنية برتقالية زاهية وسألتني: “هل تسمع المظاهرة؟”
“نعم انا قلت.
“هل ترغب في مساعدة فريق الأمن؟” هي سألت. كانت شابة في العشرينيات من عمرها تتحدث جيدًا، ولها شعر بني فاتح وقناع بني فاتح يناسب وجهها. فكرت في كروبسكايا الشابة، زوجة لينين.
لقد كنت سعيدًا لأنها لم تعتبرني خصمًا أو شخصًا وحيدًا. لم يكن لدي أي شارات أو زخارف أو أعلام يمكن أن تخبرني بمكاني. ملابسي كلها سوداء وكنت أرتدي خوذة. أحرص على ارتداء نظارات شفافة حتى لا أبدو مثل “Racer X” المهدد من Speed Racer.
على يساري، بدأت امرأة أكبر سنًا ترتدي قبعة باللون البيج تضيف شيئًا ما بينما كنت أتحدث إلى المرأة الأصغر سنًا. تحرك فريق الأمن على الدراجات وظللت أتحدث مع المرأة الأكبر سناً التي أخبرتني أنها نصف سلوفاكية ونصف تركية وأن والدها كان يهودياً.
تحدثنا عن السياسة الأوروبية وقالت إن الشيكات جميعهم “يهود”. وكان السلوفاك كاثوليك. قالت إنها تحولت إلى المسيحية، فسألتها عن الكنيسة. هزت كتفيها؟ لم تكن تعرف أي نوع من البروتستانتية هي؟ فكرت، ربما كنيسة إنجيلية مجنونة.
تحدثنا عن “وقف إطلاق النار” وقلت إنني أريد رؤية القوات البرية التركية في غزة وفتح ميناء لتزويد غزة بالإمدادات. إذا كانت الحرب يريدونها…
وقالت إن رجلاً من عملها في الشارع أوقف سيارته بالقرب من المظاهرة وخرج ليجادل الناس لأنه يدعم إسرائيل. كان الحشد يتزايد، ولم أعد على الحافة. التفتت لأعتذر عن قطع الطريق، رغم أنني كنت في الشارع وليس على الرصيف. عدت إلى الوراء، وكانت المرأة قد ذهبت.
وقد نما الحشد إلى حوالي ألف شخص أو أكثر على ما أعتقد عندما بدأوا يتجمعون خلف شاحنة صوتية بها مكبرات صوت وأعلام. لقد رأيت ستيف كيرشباوم، وهو منظم معروف في فرع بوسطن لحزب العمال العالمي وكان سابقًا قائدًا لنقابة سائقي الحافلات. قبل ثلاثين عاما، كان على الصفحة الأولى لصحيفة بوسطن هيرالد عندما نظمت مظاهرة في دورتشستر هايتس في جنوب بوسطن من قبل جناح أيمن. كان كيرشباوم يوزع منشورات عند مدخل محطة مترو أنفاق City Hall. كان لحزب العمال العالمي الستاليني أربعة عقود من تنظيم التجمعات في بوسطن لأسباب مختلفة حيث يقومون بالتنظيم وجمع التجمع معًا حتى يتمكن الآخرون من التجول والتحدث وتسليط الضوء على وسائل الإعلام. تحتوي المسيرات دائمًا على أقل المطالب الضعيفة الممكنة. السلام الآن… نوع من الشيء. ربما تكون المطالب الليبرالية الراديكالية التي يمكن للديمقراطي الساخط التوقيع عليها والتحدث إلى الجمهور. لا يبدو أن حزب العمال العالمي ينمو بسبب هذا العمل. الأشخاص الذين يساعدونهم على النمو. لكنهم ما زالوا موجودين، حتى لو كان شعر كيرشباوم رماديًا تمامًا وذيله الطويل يخبرني أنه تقاعد من قيادة حافلة مدرسية.
منذ بضع سنوات، اتُهم ستيف كيرشباوم زورًا من قبل رؤساء شركة الحافلات بالاعتداء. لقد ذهبت إلى التجمع الحاشد في محكمة دورتشستر قبل المحاكمة. جلست في قاعة المحكمة المزدحمة ورسمت الجميع وكل شيء بينما انتظرنا لساعات. في الخارج، بعد السير في خط الاعتصام، اقترب مني ستيف كيرشباوم وقال: “شكرًا على حضورك اليوم”. فقلت: إن إصابة أحد هي إصابة الجميع.
أيته أمام الحشد وهو ينزل في الشارع وهو يستخدم هاتفه لالتقاط صورة. ارتسمت على وجهه ابتسامة كبيرة على كيرشباوم. كان مبتهجا. منذ سنوات مضت، في تجمع مناهض للحرب في معهد ماساتشوستس للتكنولوجيا، سألت أحد زملائي المتشددين بينما كنا نتجول بين الحشد ونوزع المنشورات، “لماذا يبتسم الجميع؟”
كنا نحتج على حرب قاتمة.
فأجاب: «لأنهم راضون جدًا عن أنفسهم». لقد كان محقا.
لا أعتقد أنني رأيت أي شخص آخر بابتسامة غبية. لا أعتقد أنني رأيت أي نوع من الكتلة السوداء اللاسلطوية على الإطلاق. ولم أر أي متظاهرين مضادين. لقد رأيت وجهًا منذ عقود مضت عندما توقف أحد الماويين المسنين على دراجته وأخذ لافتة خروج ومنشورات في صندوق حليب بلاستيكي. يبدو أنني أتذكر منذ سنوات عديدة مضت عندما كنت في محطة مترو أنفاق هارفارد سكوير حيث كان رجل كبير يزيد طوله عن ستة أقدام يضايق هذا الماوي. لقد جاء إليّ، ربما تعرف عليّ من المظاهرات، وقال: “إنه يضايقني”.
وقفت بين الاثنين وقلت للرجل الضخم: “اتركه وشأنه”. أنا لست كبيرًا، لكن يمكنني أن أنقل رسالة بصوتي العميق. كنت على استعداد للقتال. وحتى للدفاع عن حق الماويين في توزيع المنشورات في مترو الأنفاق. تحول الرجل الكبير بعيدا. لم أتحدث قط مع الماوي، ولم أفعل ذلك بعد.
ورأيت معه امرأة رأيتها منذ عقود مضت وهي ترفع لافتة ثم تحدثت امرأة عبر مكبر صوت على حافة المسيرة. أعتقد أنهم كانوا ذات يوم الحزب الشيوعي الثوري (RCP) والآن هم الشيوعيون الثوريون.
وردد المتحدث منشوراتهم بشعارات أستطيع أن أتفق معها: “الولايات المتحدة وإسرائيل ارفعا أيديكما عن الشعب الفلسطيني”، “حماس ليست قوة للتحرير – الشعب الفلسطيني يحتاج إلى ثورة حقيقية!”
وكان التجمع المؤيد للفلسطينيين يهتف “من النهر إلى البحر يجب أن تتحرر فلسطين”. بمعنى آخر شعار قومي فلسطيني يمكن لأي رأسمالي فلسطيني أن يدعمه.
الشعار الذي أستخدمه دائمًا عندما أنشر هو “دافع عن الفلسطينيين، أوقف آلة الحرب الإسرائيلية!” لقد وضعت بعض المنشورات أثناء ركوب الدراجة، لكنني لم أحمل معي أي شيء سياسي إلى المسيرة. لا شيء. لم يكن لدي حقيبة تحمل على الظهر. إذا تم إيقافي لأي سبب كان، فلن يكون معي سوى بطاقة الهوية. كنت سأحضر هاتفي، لكن عندما كنت أغادر لم يكن مشحونًا. أنا لا أعيش وأنا أنظر إلى هاتفي. كان لدي القليل من المال، ولكن ليس كثيرًا. لم أكن أتوقع أن يتم القبض علي، لذلك لم يكن لدي أموال الكفالة. ليس هذه المرة.
تحركت الشاحنة البطيئة والحشد المكتظ بإحكام من ساحة كوبلي أسفل شارع أرلينغتون إلى شارع نيوبري. تحركت ببطء على الأرصفة بدراجتي بينما كان الناس يخرجون تحت أشعة الشمس في المقاهي الممتدة على طول الشارع ويمشون. نيوبري ستريت هي منطقة بيع بالتجزئة راقية تتمتع ببعض أعلى الإيجارات في نيو إنجلاند. توجد بعض المعارض الفنية والكثير من أماكن تصفيف الشعر في الطابق السفلي. سمعت مجموعة صغيرة من الناس يمرون بجانبي ويتحدثون الفرنسية. ظللت محاصرًا على الجانب وأنا أشاهد المسيرة في الشارع. ولاحظت أن الشارع أمام المسيرة كان مغلقًا أمام حركة مرور السيارات. حركت دراجتي للأمام مشيًا وتوجهت إلى الطريق المفتوح. آه… الحرية. كان بإمكاني الإبحار في الشارع الخالي من السيارات والنظر إلى متاجر تشي تشي.
كانت مجموعة من شرطة الدراجات في مقدمة المسيرة وأيضًا في أقصى نهاية المبنى حيث يتقاطع الشارع التالي. باستخدام الدراجة الإلكترونية، يمكنني التجول بلطف ويبدأ المحرك ويساعدني كثيرًا. أو يمكن للمرء الضغط على الرافعة لأسفل ويتم تشغيل الدراجة الإلكترونية بواسطة المحرك الكهربائي فقط.
كان الشارع مظللاً، لذا قمت بتحديد مكان مشمس للتوقف فيه بينما يتحرك الحشد البطيء في منتصف الشارع. كان هناك الكثير من الهتافات الحماسية، ولكن لم يكن هناك شعور بالعنف أو الفوضى الوشيكة. ربما كان الحشد يتألف من الذكور والإناث بالتساوي، وكان هناك الكثير من الأطفال وحتى الأطفال الرضع في عربات الأطفال.
كان هناك مقهى ستاربكس في شارع نيوبري وتوقف التجمع لانتقاد المؤسسة بسبب شيء اعتبره المؤيدون للفلسطينيين ضد الفلسطينيين أو لصالح إسرائيل.
وهتفوا مرارًا وتكرارًا: “العار، العار”.
وبينما كنت أنتظر في الشمس، جاء إليّ أربعة من حراس الحشد يرتدون سترات برتقالية وخوذات.
“هل أنت هنا من أجل التجمع؟” سألت امرأة.
“نعم و لا”
“هل ستساعدنا في منع السيارات؟”
“لا
على خط الاعتصام أثناء إضراب النقابات العمالية، كنت سأمنع المركبات التي تكسر الإضراب. لن أقوم بإغلاق الشوارع العشوائية من أجل مسيرة لأن هؤلاء الأشخاص يريدون إظهار قوتهم على سائقي السيارات العشوائيين المحاصرين في الشارع. الأشخاص الذين في سياراتهم ليسوا من الجيش الإسرائيلي.
تحول التجمع إلى جادة ماساتشوستس، وحافظت على مسافة لأنني لم أكن متأكدة مما كانوا يقولونه للشرطة. رأيت امرأة تعترض طريق سيارة في شارع ماس أفينيو بدراجتها، فتحركت السيارة للأمام قليلاً وكان شرطي على بعد خمسة أقدام. بدا أن التجمع يضم حوالي 2000 شخص أثناء تحركه نحو الجسر فوق نهر تشارلز. لم يكن هناك أي حركة مرور في جزء من الجسر، وكان بإمكاني الركوب والنظر حولي واقفًا على أطراف أصابعي على الدواسات.
أيت اثنين من الصبية الصغار في العاشرة أو الحادية عشرة من العمر ينزلون في شارع ماس أفينيو وهم يهتفون ويضحكون كما لو كانوا في يوم بالخارج مع أسرهم. نظرًا لأن الحشد كان يتحرك ببطء، قمت برحلة جانبية أسفل بعض المنحدرات إلى طريق تشارلز ريفر للدراجات. كنت آتي إلى هنا كثيرًا للتزلج منذ عدة عقود. لقد اعتقدت أن الأمر مثير للاهتمام حيث عادت إليّ دورات المسارات المختلفة.
بينما كنت أسير تحت الأشجار، حيث كان الطريق السريع على الجانب الآخر من السياج والأشجار والنهر على الجانب الآخر، صادفت قطيعًا من البط ينقر على الأوراق البرتقالية والبنية والأرض. توقفت ونظرت عن كثب. لقد دفعوا لي القليل من الاهتمام. لا خوف. مرت دراجة أخرى بجانبنا على الطريق. لا رحلة متفرقة. تجول الناس من خلال. كانت هذه الطيور في الغداء.
ستدرت وعدت نحو الجسر إلى الغرب متجهًا نحو أعلى النهر. كان الحشد الكبير يتحرك عبر الجسر. فكرت في الطريقة التي أطلق بها زملائي المسلحين على هذه الأنواع من المسيرات الطويلة والمضجرة غير المركزة اسم “زحف السلام”. بالفعل.
قمت بدفع دراجتي إلى أعلى المنحدر شديد الانحدار وعلى رصيف الجسر المزدحم بنهاية الحشد. وبينما كانوا متجهين عبر الجسر المؤدي إلى كامبريدج، استدرت واتجهت جنوبًا نحو المنزل. وكان ذلك كافيا بالنسبة لي. على الأقل لهذا اليوم. كانت الرياح الباردة تهب، وكانت الشمس تغرب.
Nearly five decades ago, the organization that would become the Democratic Socialists of America united around core principles, including universal health care, workers’ rights, and support for the social-democratic state of Israel. That group included such left-liberal luminaries as California Congressman Ron Dellums, the intellectuals Irving Howe and Cornel West, and future New York Mayor David Dinkins.
The writer and activist Michael Harrington, whose Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee was a precursor to the DSA, declared in 1975: “I support Israel as an internationalist. Israel is a democratic country whose people are passionately defending its self-determination.” He added that to “preposterously charge” that Zionism is racism—as the United Nations General Assembly asserted in a resolution that year—“is to drain the concept of racism of any serious meaning.”
For Harrington and his comrades to speak that way in today’s unsubtle times would be inconceivable. DSA leaders, their organization swollen to 75,000 members, now describe Israel as an apartheid colonialist state. When, on October 7, Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups slaughtered 1,200 men, women, children, and infants, defiling and burning bodies, and took more than 240 prisoners into captivity, the DSA, along with much of the organized left, called for members to swell the streets in protest. The object of their anger was not Hamas but Israel. “DSA is steadfast in expressing our solidarity with Palestine,” the DSA proclaimed on X, formerly Twitter, on the day of the massacre. “Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime … Free Palestine.”
Two days later, the San Francisco chapter of DSA went a rhetorical step further. “We call on all those who share our vision of global working-class emancipation,” the chapter declared in a statement, “to join the fight to end the occupation and decolonize Palestine—from the river to the sea.” Given that Hamas is a theocratic organization dedicated to installing an Islamic state in Palestine, that call translates as: Eradicate the state of Israel.
These militant turns by DSA persuaded two dozen prominent socialists to tender resignations in the past few weeks. Their public letters and articles speak to a disaffection with a movement that gave meaning and shape to their political lives. “In its inability to distinguish between acts of resistance to unjust and oppressive rule and acts of terror against civilians, and in its confusion of authentic striving for national liberation with theocratic, fascistic crimes, DSA has shown that it has become completely unmoored,” declared a letter signed by two dozen members and published in The New Republic.
The Hamilton College historian Maurice Isserman, who signed that letter and wrote an essay in The Nation entitled “Why I Just Quit DSA,” was approaching a half century in the organization. He opposes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government, and reviles the Jewish settlers who steal West Bank land and bully and kill Palestinians. But he draws a bright line at equivocating about the brutal Hamas attacks. “These hostages are colonial ‘settlers’? Those were ‘settler’ babies who were decapitated,” Isserman told me. “I’m sorry I’m getting angry, but this is abusing the language to excuse the inexcusable.”
Some DSA members greeted the resignations with derision, describing those departing as old and white and few in number. The writer Ben Burgis posted on X: “I really love that out of a total membership of … what … 77,000? … they found two dozen whole people to sign.” Another writer sardonically waved goodbye to people old enough to sit on “the 1982 Dissent editorial board”—a jibe at a revered left-wing magazine..
These comments carry more than a whiff of generational tension. The DSA experienced a great surge in membership following Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 congressional victory. As young people all but tumbled through the DSA’s doors, the group became the largest organization in the nation to the left of the Democratic Party. The DSA soon helped elect a startling number of candidates in cities and towns across the country.
Those newly minted legislators have been instrumental in pushing left-wing causes, such as rent control, in many cities.
These successes, however, came accompanied by that occupational hazard of the left: a profusion of factions, splinterings of factions, and splinterings of splinter factions. There are libertarian socialists and Marxist-Leninists, electoralists and non-electoralists, and a caucus that brands itself the “un-caucus.” Some feuds are self-defeating, even maddening. A few years ago, the Afrosocialist faction blocked a prominent Black Marxist professor, Adolph Reed Jr., from speaking to the New York chapter. Reed—a lifelong socialist—had had the audacity to argue for focusing on class solidarity rather than race and gender differences. This, the Afrosocialists argued, was a capitulation to racial capitalists.
The prevailing approach differed greatly in the 1970s and ’80s. Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee cast itself in the model of European social-democratic parties and worked within the Democratic Party. Candidates were not required to toe any party line.
In 1990, Mayor Dinkins, a DSA member and loyal member of the Harlem Democratic machine, welcomed Willy Brandt—a former West German chancellor from the Social Democratic Party—and the Socialist International to City Hall. He was so fraternal toward Israeli and Jewish leaders that disgruntled Black nationalists referred to him as “Yarmulke Dave.”
Today’s DSA offers a full-throated socialism. And for all its electoral victories—largely in liberal enclaves—internal debates rage about whether the DSA should participate in Democratic Party politics, and how to enforce its ideological writ on candidates.
The organization appears less and less tolerant of dissent from its pro-Palestinian position. In 2018 Ocasio-Cortez told a reporter that she “believed absolutely in Israel’s right to exist.” DSA caucus leaders were not amused. Some posted a stern letter on Medium. Socialists, they noted, always side with the oppressed. “Ocasio-Cortez’s first impulse should not be to affirm the rights of a settler-colonial state to exist,” the letter declared. She must, the DSA commissars warned, be more uncompromising about her socialist principles.
Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York transgressed too, and he was met with less leniency. Elected in suburban Westchester County, Bowman traveled to Israel with J-Street, a liberal-left Jewish organization that is both Zionist and deeply critical of Israel’s behavior on the West Bank and in Gaza. Bowman also voted to underwrite Israel’s anti-missile defense, known as Iron Dome. Attacked for his perfidies, Bowman recently dropped his DSA membership.
The departures and feuds and attacks have stung the DSA. Burgis assayed a defense of the DSA in the socialist magazine Jacobin, arguing it had “unequivocally” condemned the killing of civilians. The group did in fact mourn violence on October 7 but sidestepped any reference to Hamas. Meanwhile, wilder sorts are grabbing hold of the reins at the group’s local chapters. The Metro D.C. DSA chapter has called on members to rally as “fascist Israel continues its genocide in the Middle East.” And DSA’s International Committee recently signed on to a resolution defending the “violence of the oppressed” in Palestine and arguing that “as a colonial project and an imperial outpost, the Israeli state stands against the tendency of history to advance towards liberation.”
One explanation for some of the tumult inside the DSA is that Israel itself has changed greatly. The Israel of the 1970s appeared highly vulnerable, having recently survived attempts by Arab nations to wipe it out, and the social-democratic Labor Party, a member of the Socialist International, was a formidable power in the country’s politics. Today the Labor Party is near defunct, while Netanyahu and his Likud Party bend ever more to the right. Religious fundamentalists hold sway in the cabinet and on the West Bank.
Many Israelis see these changes as dire, and by the hundreds of thousands they protested Netanyahu’s attempts to bring to heel their nation’s Supreme Court. Some of those protesters once counted themselves members of Peace Now, which advocated for a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
One can read through many recent DSA communiqués without coming across a hint of such complexity. And the group’s language, which seems intoxicated with the dark wine of violence and faux historical inevitabilities, is a universe away from the animating vision of its founders.
Some members now take to labeling Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and other stalwarts of the American left as promoters of genocide for denouncing Hamas and calling for a humanitarian pause in Gaza rather than a cease-fire.
I can’t help but wonder about the prospects of an organization that so insistently denounces allies and labels an admittedly flawed but real Israeli democracy as a settler-colonialist state. How can it hope to persuade tens of millions of Americans to make the broad and deep changes it seeks in the United States?
One word aptly describes the current state of the American empire: schizophrenia.
Take Washington’s relationship to its subjugated white majority. One branch, the Department of Defense, appears to be quietly acknowledging that it can’t win wars if patriotic white men refuse to enlist. This epiphany is completely out of sync with the Department of Justice, which is rolling tanks into Middlesex County, New Jersey to terrorize and chase down the very same loyal white army men Uncle Sam desperately needs.
How about Venezuela? As Washington’s diplomats beg Nicolas Maduro, who they have spent years trying to overthrow, to sell America oil as a backup plan in case of a Middle East conflict, the US military is simultaneously supporting a brazen play by Guyana and Exxon-Mobile to drill for oil in the disputed Essequibo Strip. Venezuela has long claimed Essequibo to be part of its sovereign territory and Guyanese/US activities in the area are a direct violation of the 1966 Geneva Agreement. Venezuelan attempts to resolve the issue in appropriate venues have been ignored, leading them to begin mobilizing troops to their border and raising the prospect of war in the Western hemisphere.
After two years and $75 billion dollars (that we know of), Joe Biden gave a rare televised address to the American people seeking to give an explanation — for the first time ever — for why we need to deplete our treasury and weapons stockpiles to meddle in the Russo-Ukraine war. He awkwardly drew connections between propping up the thug-likeOstjuden junta ruling Ukraine to supporting Israel’s ongoing mass murder of Gazan children in an attempt to compel the Zionist-owned Republicans to back a $106 billion dollar foreign aid package, which only served to confuse ordinary Americans unfamiliar with the Jewish machinations driving these foreign policy decisions behind the scenes. Two weeks later, Biden administration officials started leaking to the media that they are actively looking to negotiate Ukraine’s surrender, confusing the situation even further.
For enjoyers of black comedy, the delusions outlined in National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s recently published liberal interventionist apologia, Sources of American Power, serve as a satisfying appetizer . Apparently written right before Hamas’ October 7th offensive into Israel, Sullivan confidently assures us that the Middle East “is quieter than it has been for decades.” The irony was not lost on Sullivan, who insisted the Foreign Policy journal correct this minor oversight in the online version of its publication.
As for Biden, he tends to respond to nervous questions about biting off more than the empire can chew with his catchphrase, “We’re the United States of America, for God’s sake!”
The old man is not totally demented. In 2022, our military spending swelled to an outrageous $1.5 trillion dollars. The US dollar remains the strongest its ever been, mostly at the expense of European satellite states. Just like our elderly political officials bitterly refuse to retire, it would be a mistake to expect the Washington juggernaut to notice the writing on the wall and quietly sunset like the Soviet Union once did.
But not every problem can be fixed with bribes and bluffs. The geopolitical contradictions created in large part by the Washington empire’s choices of winners and losers have now tumbled into several full-fledged wars as post-WWII and post-Cold War have-nots take the opportunity to assert themselves.
Joe “I’ve raised more money from AIPAC than you have” Biden has all but conceded that the US government is at best a junior partner to the nuclear-armed inbred maniacs running the Israeli regime. Thanks to the Zionist coopting of our nation, the primitive savages in charge of the Israeli military are wielding first world weapons provided by US taxpayers to wage war against defenseless people in hospitals, residential apartment blocks, churches, ambulances and refugee centers, causing the civilized world to both gasp in horror and roll its eyes at American and European Union “human rights” hypocrisy.
As Jews drag America by the hand into a wider regional conflict, US forces are simultaneously struggling to deter Israel’s enemies. American forces occupying Syria, Iraq and beyond are coming under steadily intensifying rocket and drone attacks from Iranian aligned militias across the Middle East. For all their bluster, the Israelis have not yet embarked on a full-scale invasion of Gaza, likely due to fear that Hezbollah, which allegedly has the means to severely undermine America and Israels qualitative military edge, will formally enter the war.
Washington’s diplomatic maximalism is now widely perceived as absurd, unfair and meriting resistance. The US government holds firm in its belief that it has a right to threaten war with Beijing over the supposed sovereignty of the Taiwanese Kinmen Islands, which are located a mere 10 minute boat ride from mainland China. Former Secretary of State John Bolton and others like him continue to insist on cleaving off a random piece of Iraq populated by Arabs for a new Kurdish state, even though the historic Kurdish homeland has mostly been located in Turkey. Instead of taking a now lost opportunity to find a diplomatic solution to the issue of Donbass Russians who have been fighting to rejoin their motherland since 2014, Washington indulged Kiev’s laughable fantasies of demanding an unconditional surrender from the Russians, only to accumulate hundreds of thousands of casualties and find themselves out of options following their failed summer counter-offensive.
And Antony Blinken’s offer to the Palestinian people? A micro-state where the Jew Blinken and Benjamin Netanyahu reserve the right to choose their leaders for them.
Much of established American imperial power has been contingent on the idea that the United States is a fair and neutral arbiter of international affairs. By creating a disingenuous distinction between state power and private enterprise, Washington was able to convince the world that it could be trusted to impersonally oversee the global economy, the internet, international law, and many other important chokepoints of power.
The Jews who run America have flagrantly violated this trust by using access to SWIFT as a political extortion tool, weaponizing digital omnipotence to spy on the entire world, as the Edward Snowden leaks and Israeli NSO Group scandal revealed, utilizing dirty tricks to try and prevent rival states from producing and selling superior technology, as the crusade against Huawei shows, and exposing international law as a selective and cynical propaganda tool to demonize enemies, as the US’ role in the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict demonstrates.
Both in the realm of hard power and soft power, the American empire is running on borrowed time (and money). The Washington regime thinks it can take on China, Russia, Iran, and several smaller nations while also oppressing the white majority at home. Their chance of success is non-existent, and there are many forces, including us, who are ready to politically replace this compromised and traitorous ruling class as soon as possible.
The question we must now all ask ourselves is how much damage will this thrashing, wounded animal inflict on its surroundings before it submits to the inevitable? God help us all.
Около полудня я проехал на велосипеде по Трейн-стрит к вершине Поупс-Хилла и был поражен тем, насколько холодно.
Зачем мне идти на Копели-сквер, расположенную в нескольких милях отсюда, по улицам города в холодный день? Я не собирался присоединяться к другим единомышленникам для распространения листовок. Я не собирался охранять столик с литературой или нести транспарант или плакат на марше протеста. Я был один. Зачем я им был нужен на марше протеста.
Сразу за вершиной Папского холма я пошел налево в переулок, думая о своем относительно теплом доме и еще одной чашке кофе.
Я узнал о протесте, заглянув в раздел «События» Массачусетской миротворческой акции. Я разместил изображение на сайте Gab в социальной сети.
На мне были несколько слоев одежды и капюшон поверх велосипедного шлема и шапки. Я пожалела, что у меня нет шарфа. Я подумал о шарфе, но подумал об Айседоре Дункан, которую задушил шарф, зацепившийся за колесо. Переулок был залит солнцем и теплее, и я поехал на север, но начал менять свое мнение, когда вернулся к Трейн-стрит. Я разместил в Интернете много фотографий и слов о войне Израиля с палестинцами. Но мне хотелось присутствовать на митинге во плоти. Я поражаюсь, когда вижу протесты в Лондоне, Париже или Нью-Йорке в режиме реального времени онлайн. Но мне самому нужно присутствовать на настоящем протесте, даже если у меня есть изображения в высоком разрешении, которые я могу посмотреть дома. Поэтому я снова направился к площади Копели и демонстрации.
Я ехал по Дорчестер-авеню, где было не так много машин, поскольку было воскресенье, и на проспекте было множество магазинов по ремонту автомобилей, шиномонтажу и автозапчастей. Я не уверен, почему. Поскольку на улице было около 45 градусов холода, в полдень на улице было не так уж много людей. Было указано, что митинг начнется в 13:00, а на онлайн-картах было указано, что мне понадобится тридцать пять минут, чтобы преодолеть пять с половиной миль. У моего электровелосипеда есть электродвигатель, поэтому я могу ехать быстрее, чем кто-то, крутящий педали в одиночку.
Я проезжал мимо «Макдоналдса» на перекрестке Масс и Касс, который стал печально известным палаточным городком наркоманов и бездомных пьяниц. Город решил обеспечить соблюдение законов, запрещающих установку палаток на тротуарах 1 ноября 2023 года.
Саут-Энд после больницы Бостонского университета был пуст. Я цокал по рассыпавшимся кирпичам на кирпичных тротуарах.
В районе Бэк-Бэй количество пешеходов увеличилось, и мне пришлось выйти на улицу и следить за машинами. Я не хотел умирать. Я думал о забастовке профсоюзов в отеле «Вестин», проезжая мимо главного входа на Хантингтон-авеню. Я ходил по пикету и распространял радикальные профсоюзные листовки. «Линии пикета означают: не пересекайте!» Я бы заблокировал вход своим телом, если бы лидеры профсоюзов дали слово тогда или если бы рабочие сделали это спонтанно. Но лидеры профсоюзов обычно хотят мирной законной забастовки, которая не поставит в неловкое положение политиков-демократов, на которых они, похоже, работают. Я пошел на пикеты во всех пяти бастующих отелях.
На Коупли-сквер я слышал рев толпы, собравшейся у каменных ступеней Бостонской публичной библиотеки на восточной стороне. Площадь перед Троицкой церковью из-за строительных работ была ограждена большим ограждением, поэтому митинг был ограничен улицей и широким тротуаром. Когда я прибыл в 12:45, там было около 500 человек. Там было много палестинских флагов. Оратор объявил, что люди могут получить палестинский флаг за 20 долларов и нести его во время акции протеста, а в конце получить свои 20 долларов, если они вернут флаг или сохранят его. В толпе было около 20% молодых на вид студентов колледжей или лет двадцати с небольшим, было много людей, выглядевших арабами или выходцами из Западной Азии. Множество семей с отцами, матерями, маленькими детьми и Столлерами. Были женщины в платках, но не более 10% и менее.
Постоянно скандировали: «Немедленно прекратить огонь».
Я заметил молодую женщину с прямой челкой и белой полосой посередине, она, похоже, была организатором демонстрации. «Безумная хуйня в приюте», — подумал я про себя.
Я остался на южной стороне и на краю митинга, стараясь не мешать людям на своем электробайке. Я спросил у мужчины время, у меня не было ни часов, ни телефона. Он сказал, что это было 1:05.
Постояв немного, мне пришлось отойти в сторону автобусной остановки и сесть на скамейку. Я слышал речь разгневанной женщины, когда толпа время от времени ревела в знак согласия. Люди шли со станции метро Back Bay Green Line, расположенной в квартале южнее.
Я увидел вокруг отряд полицейских, которые выглядели расслабленными и не были в защитном снаряжении. Они находились у баррикады, перегораживающей Арлингтон-стрит на углу библиотеки. Всего их было около пятидесяти, включая группу из дюжины полицейских на велосипедах. Как я. Но у меня был мотор.
Я думал уйти. Мои руки были холодными даже в перчатках для верховой езды. Я встал и проехал вокруг Троицкой церкви и по Бойлстон-стрит в сторону другой стороны митинга. Я хотел, чтобы солнце согрело меня. Я остановился в дальнем краю толпы и посмотрел вниз, на Бостонскую государственную среднюю школу «Академия Сноудена», в которой я много раз работал.
Ко мне подошла женщина на велосипеде с группой людей в ярко-оранжевых жилетах безопасности и спросила: «Вы слышите демонстрацию?»
Жена Ленина Крупская «Да», — сказал я.
«Хотите помочь команде безопасности?» она спросила. Это была молодая женщина лет двадцати с хорошей речью, со светло-каштановыми волосами и светло-коричневой маской в тон лицу. Я подумал о молодой Крупской, жене Ленина.
Я был рад, что она не считала меня противником или психом-одиночкой. У меня не было значков, украшений или флагов, которые могли бы дать понять, где я нахожусь. Моя одежда была вся черная, и на мне был шлем. Я ношу прозрачные очки, чтобы не выглядеть грозным «Гонщиком Икс» из «Speed Racer».
Слева от меня пожилая женщина в бежевом берете начала что-то добавлять, пока я разговаривал с молодой женщиной. Охрана на велосипедах переехала, а я продолжал разговаривать с пожилой женщиной, которая сказала мне, что она наполовину словачка, наполовину турчанка, а ее отец был евреем.
Она сказала, что мужчина с ее работы на улице припарковал свою машину возле демонстрации и вышел, чтобы поспорить с людьми, потому что он поддерживал Израиль. Толпа росла, я уже не был на краю. Я повернулся, чтобы извиниться за то, что заблокировал путь, хотя находился на улице, а не на тротуаре. Я обернулся, женщины уже не было.
Толпа выросла до тысячи или более человек, как я мог догадаться, когда они начали формироваться за звуковым грузовиком с громкоговорителями и флагами. Я видел Стива Киршбаума, известного организатора бостонского отделения Всемирной рабочей партии, а ранее возглавлявшего профсоюз водителей автобусов. Тридцать лет назад он был на первой полосе Boston Herald, когда правый нападающий проводил демонстрацию на Дорчестер-Хайтс в Южном Бостоне. Киршбаум раздавал листовки у входа в метро City Hall. Сталинистская Всемирная рабочая партия на протяжении четырех десятилетий организовывала митинги в Бостоне по разным причинам, где они организовывали и организовывали митинги, чтобы другие могли прогуляться, выступить и быть освещенными в средствах массовой информации. На митингах всегда предъявляются самые низкие требования слабаков. Мир сейчас… что-то в этом роде. Радикальные либералы требуют, чтобы недовольный демократ мог подписаться и, возможно, поговорить с аудиторией. Кажется, что Всемирная рабочая партия не растет благодаря работе. Люди, которым они помогают расти. Но они все еще здесь, даже несмотря на то, что волосы Киршбаума полностью седые, а его длинный хвост говорит мне, что он ушел из вождения школьного автобуса.
Я видел, как он перед толпой шел по улице и фотографировался на телефон. На лице Киршбаума появилась широкая улыбка. Он сиял. Несколько лет назад на антивоенном митинге в Массачусетском технологическом институте я спросил своего товарища-боевика, когда мы ходили сквозь толпу, раздавая листовки: «Почему все улыбаются?»
Мы протестовали против жестокой войны.
«Потому что они так довольны собой», — ответил он. Он был прав.
Не думаю, что я видел кого-то еще с идиотской ухмылкой. Я не думаю, что вообще видел анархистов из черного блока. Никаких встречных протестующих я не увидел. Десятилетия назад я видел лицо, когда стареющий маоист подъехал на своем велосипеде и взял вывеску и листовки в пластиковом ящике из-под молока. Кажется, я помню, как много лет назад я был на станции метро «Гарвард-сквер», когда здоровенный парень ростом более шести футов приставал к этому маоисту. Он подошел ко мне, наверное, узнав меня по демонстрациям, и сказал: «Он меня беспокоит».
Я встал между ними и сказал большому, мускулистому парню: «Оставь его в покое». Я невелик, но могу передать послание своим глубоким голосом. Я был готов драться. Даже чтобы защитить это право маоистов раздавать листовки в метро. Здоровяк отвернулся. Я никогда не разговаривал с маоистом, и тогда я этого не говорил.
(Фото протеста от 12 ноября 2023 г.)
Я видел с ним женщину, которую видел несколько десятилетий назад, устанавливающую транспарант, а затем женщина говорила в мегафон на краю митинга. Я думаю, что когда-то они были Революционной коммунистической партией (РКП), а теперь они — Ревкомы, революционные коммунисты.
Спикер повторил листовку с лозунгами, с которыми я согласен: «США и Израиль прочь от палестинского народа». «Хамас не является силой освобождения. Палестинскому народу нужна настоящая революция!»
Митинг пропалестинского истеблишмента скандировал «От реки до моря Палестина должна быть свободной». Другими словами, палестинский националистический лозунг, который мог бы поддержать любой палестинский капиталист.
Лозунг, который я использую все время, когда публикую сообщения: «Защити палестинцев, останови израильскую военную машину!» Я расклеил несколько листовок на велопрогулках, но ничего политического с собой на митинг не взял. Ничего. У меня не было рюкзака. Если меня остановили по какой-либо причине, у меня при себе не было ничего, кроме удостоверения личности. Я собирался взять с собой телефон, но когда я уходил, он не был заряжен. Я не живу, глядя на свой телефон. У меня было немного денег, но не много. Я не ожидал, что меня арестуют, поэтому у меня не было денег под залог. Не в этот раз.
Медленно движущийся грузовик и плотно набитая толпа двинулись от Копели-сквер вниз по Арлингтон-стрит к Ньюбери-стрит. Я медленно двигался по тротуарам на велосипеде, пока люди стояли на солнце в кафе вдоль улицы и гуляли. Ньюбери-стрит — элитный торговый район с самой высокой арендной платой в Новой Англии. На цокольном этаже есть несколько художественных галерей и множество парикмахерских. Я услышал, как мимо меня прошла небольшая группа людей, говорящих по-французски. Я все время оказывался в ловушке на обочине, наблюдая за митингом на улице. Я отметил, что улица перед маршем перекрыта для движения автомобилей. Я двинул велосипед вперед и направился к открытой дороге. Ах… свобода. Я мог плыть по пустой улице, свободной от машин, и рассматривать магазины «Чи-Чи».
Группа велосипедной полиции находилась в начале митинга, а также в дальнем конце квартала, где пересекалась следующая улица. С электровелосипедом я могу ездить осторожно, мотор включается и очень помогает. Или можно удерживать рычаг, и электровелосипед будет приводиться в движение исключительно электродвигателем.
На улице было тенисто, поэтому я нашел солнечное место, чтобы остановиться, пока медленно движущаяся толпа двигалась по середине улицы. Было много восторженных песнопений, но не было ощущения неминуемого насилия или хаоса. Толпа, вероятно, была поровну мужчин и женщин, было много детей и даже младенцев в колясках.
На Ньюбери-стрит была кофейня Starbucks, и митинг остановился, чтобы раскритиковать это заведение за что-то, что пропалестинцы считали направленным против палестинцев или в пользу Израиля.
«Позор, позор», — неоднократно скандировали они.
Пока я ждал на солнце, ко мне подъехали четверо маршалов ралли в оранжевых жилетах и шлемах.
«Вы здесь на митинге?» — спросила женщина.
“Да и нет”
«Вы поможете нам блокировать машины?»
“Нет.”
На пикете профсоюзной забастовки я блокировал машины штрейкбрехеров. Я не буду перекрывать случайные улицы для митинга, потому что эти люди хотят продемонстрировать власть над случайными автомобилистами, оказавшимися в ловушке на улице. Люди в их машинах — не израильские военные.
Митинг свернул на Массачусетс-авеню, и я держался на расстоянии, потому что не был уверен, что они говорят полиции. Я видел, как одна женщина на Масс-авеню заблокировала своим велосипедом машину, машина немного продвинулась вперед, а полицейский был в пяти футах от нее. Митинг, судя по всему, собрал около 2000 человек, двигаясь к мосту через реку Чарльз. На участке моста не было движения, и я мог подъехать и осмотреться, стоя на цыпочках на педалях.
Я видел пару мальчиков десяти или одиннадцати лет, прогуливающихся по Масс-Авеню, распевая и смеясь, как будто они провели день со своей семьей. Поскольку толпа двигалась медленно, я спустился по съезду к велосипедной дорожке реки Чарльз. Несколько десятилетий назад я часто приезжал сюда кататься на коньках. Я подумал, что это интересно, поскольку мне вспомнились различные курсы обучения. Когда я ехал под деревьями, автомагистраль по другую сторону забора, а деревья и река по другую сторону, я наткнулся на стадо уток, клюющих оранжевые и коричневые листья и землю. Я остановился и присмотрелся. Они не обратили на меня особого внимания. Без страха. Мимо нас по тропе проехал еще один велосипед. Никакого рассеянного полета. Люди прогуливались. Эти птицы были на обеде.
Я развернулся и пошел обратно к мосту на западе, направляясь вверх по реке. Большая толпа просто двигалась по мосту. Я подумал о том, как коллеги-боевики называли подобные бесцельные и утомительные марши «ползанием мира». Действительно.
Я въехал на велосипеде по крутому съезду и выехал на тротуар моста, заполненный хвостом толпы. Когда они перешли мост в Кембридж, я повернул и направился на юг, к дому. Для меня этого было достаточно. По крайней мере на сегодня. Дул холодный ветер, и солнце садилось.
បន្ទាប់ពីឈរបានមួយសន្ទុះ ខ្ញុំត្រូវរើចេញទៅរកកន្លែងដាក់ឡានក្រុង ហើយអង្គុយលើកៅអីមួយ។ ខ្ញុំអាចឮសុន្ទរកថារបស់ស្ត្រីដែលមានកំហឹង ខណៈដែលហ្វូងមនុស្សបានគ្រហឹមម្តងម្កាល។ មនុស្សបានមកពីស្ថានីយ៍រថភ្លើងក្រោមដី Back Bay Green Line ប្លុកមួយទៅភាគខាងត្បូង។
ខ្ញុំកំពុងគិតចង់ចាកចេញ។ ដៃរបស់ខ្ញុំត្រជាក់ សូម្បីតែស្រោមដៃជិះរបស់ខ្ញុំ។ ខ្ញុំក្រោកឡើងជិះជុំវិញព្រះវិហារ Trinity និងឡើងលើផ្លូវ Boylston ឆ្ពោះទៅម្ខាងទៀតនៃការប្រមូលផ្តុំ។ ខ្ញុំចង់ឱ្យព្រះអាទិត្យកក់ក្តៅខ្ញុំ ខ្ញុំបានឈប់នៅគែមឆ្ងាយនៃហ្វូងមនុស្ស ហើយក្រឡេកមើលទៅសាលា Snowden Academy Boston Public high school ដែលខ្ញុំបានធ្វើការជាច្រើនដង។
Vers midi, j’ai remonté Train Street à vélo jusqu’au sommet de Pope’s Hill et j’ai été frappé par le froid.
Pourquoi irais-je à Copely Square, à plusieurs kilomètres de là, dans les rues de la ville par une journée froide ? Je ne me joignais pas à d’autres militants partageant les mêmes idées pour distribuer des tracts. Je n’allais pas garder une table de publications, ni porter une banderole ou une pancarte lors de la marche de protestation. J’étais seul. Pourquoi avaient-ils besoin de moi lors de la marche de protestation ?
Juste au sommet de la Colline du Pape, je suis allé à gauche dans une petite rue en pensant à ma maison relativement chaude et à une autre tasse de café.
J’ai découvert la manifestation en consultant la section « Événements » de Massachusetts Peace Action. J’ai publié l’image sur le site de médias sociaux Gab.
Je portais plusieurs couches de vêtements et une capuche par-dessus mon casque de vélo et mon chapeau. J’ai regretté de ne pas avoir de foulard. J’ai pensé à un foulard, mais j’ai pensé à Isadora Duncan étranglée par un foulard accroché à une roue. La rue latérale était pleine de soleil et plus chaude et j’ai roulé vers le nord mais j’ai commencé à changer d’avis en retournant vers Train Street. J’ai publié en ligne de nombreuses images et mots sur la guerre israélienne contre les Palestiniens. Mais je voulais assister à un rassemblement en chair et en os. Je suis étonné lorsque je peux voir des manifestations à Londres, à Paris ou à New York en temps réel sur Internet. Mais j’ai besoin de participer moi-même à une véritable manifestation, même si j’ai des images haute définition à voir chez moi. Je me suis donc dirigé vers Copely Square et à nouveau la manifestation.
J’ai emprunté l’avenue Dorchester où il n’y avait pas beaucoup de circulation puisque c’était dimanche et l’avenue est parsemée de nombreux magasins de réparation automobile, de réparation de pneus et de fournitures automobiles. Je ne sais pas pourquoi. Comme il faisait environ 45 degrés, il n’y avait pas beaucoup de monde dehors à midi. Le rassemblement était indiqué comme commençant à 13 heures et les cartes en ligne indiquaient qu’il me faudrait trente-cinq minutes pour parcourir les cinq milles et demi. Mon vélo électrique est équipé d’un moteur électrique, ce qui me permet d’aller plus vite plus longtemps que quelqu’un qui pédale seul.
Je suis passé devant le McDonald’s à l’intersection de Mass et Cass, devenu tristement célèbre pour son campement de toxicomanes et d’ivrognes sans abri. La ville a décidé d’appliquer des lois interdisant d’installer des tentes sur les trottoirs le 1er novembre 2023.
Le South End après l’hôpital universitaire de Boston était vide. J’ai cliqué le long de certaines briques détachées sur les trottoirs en brique.
Dans le quartier de Back Bay, le nombre de piétons a augmenté et j’ai dû descendre dans la rue et faire attention aux voitures. Je ne voulais pas mourir. J’ai pensé à la grève syndicale à l’hôtel Westin alors que je passais devant l’entrée principale de Huntington Avenue. J’ai marché sur la ligne de piquetage et distribué des tracts syndicaux radicaux. « Les lignes de piquetage signifient ne pas traverser ! » J’aurais bloqué l’entrée avec mon corps si les dirigeants syndicaux avaient donné l’ordre à l’époque, ou si les ouvriers l’avaient fait spontanément. Mais les dirigeants syndicaux souhaitent généralement une grève légale et pacifique qui ne gêne pas les politiciens démocrates pour lesquels ils semblent travailler. J’ai participé à des piquets de grève dans les cinq hôtels en grève.
J’ai emprunté Dorchester Avenue où il n’y avait pas beaucoup de circulation depuis Copely Square, j’entendais le rugissement de la foule rassemblée sur les marches de pierre de la Boston Public Library, du côté est. La place devant l’église de la Trinité était dotée d’une grande clôture en raison de travaux de construction, de sorte que le rassemblement s’est déroulé dans la rue et sur un large trottoir. Quand je suis arrivé à 12h45, il semblait y avoir environ 500 personnes. Il y avait beaucoup de drapeaux palestiniens. Un orateur a annoncé que les gens pouvaient obtenir un drapeau palestinien pour 20 dollars et le porter pour la manifestation et recevoir leurs 20 dollars à la fin s’ils rapportaient le drapeau ou le gardaient. La foule comptait environ 20 % de jeunes étudiants ou d’une vingtaine d’années, il y avait beaucoup de gens qui avaient l’air arabe ou asiatique occidental. Beaucoup de familles avec des pères, des mères, des petits enfants et des Stollers. Il y avait des femmes portant le foulard, mais pas plus de 10 %, voire moins.
Les chants parlaient constamment d’un « cessez-le-feu maintenant ».
J’ai remarqué une jeune femme avec une frange droite et une mèche blanche au milieu, elle semblait être une organisatrice d’une manifestation. Un asile de fous, pensai-je.
Je suis resté du côté sud et en bordure du rallye en essayant de ne pas gêner les gens avec mon vélo électrique. J’ai demandé l’heure à un homme, je n’avais ni montre ni téléphone. Il a dit qu’il était 13h05.
Après être resté debout un moment, j’ai dû m’éloigner vers un abribus et m’asseoir sur un banc. Je pouvais entendre le discours d’une femme en colère alors que la foule rugissait parfois son accord. Des gens arrivaient de la station de métro Back Bay Green Line, située à un pâté de maisons au sud.
Je pouvais voir un contingent de policiers autour qui avaient l’air détendus et qui n’étaient pas en tenue anti-émeute. Ils se trouvaient devant une barricade bloquant Arlington Street, au coin de la bibliothèque. Le nombre total semblait être d’une cinquantaine, dont un contingent d’une douzaine de policiers à vélo. Comme moi. Mais j’avais un moteur.
Je pensais partir. Mes mains étaient froides même avec mes gants de moto. Je me suis levé et j’ai contourné l’église Trinity et remonté Boylston Street vers l’autre côté du rassemblement. Je voulais que le soleil me réchauffe. Je me suis arrêté à l’extrémité de la foule et j’ai regardé vers le lycée public Snowden Academy de Boston où j’avais travaillé à plusieurs reprises.
Une femme avec un vélo avec un groupe portant des gilets de sécurité orange vif s’est approchée de moi et m’a demandé : « Êtes-vous entendu pour la manifestation ?
Kroupskaïa, l’épouse de Lénine
“Oui,” dis-je.
« Voulez-vous aider l’équipe de sécurité ? » elle a demandé. C’était une jeune femme d’une vingtaine d’années, bien parlée, avec des cheveux châtain clair et un masque marron clair assorti à son visage. J’ai pensé à la jeune Kroupskaïa, la femme de Lénine.
J’étais heureux qu’elle ne me considère pas comme un adversaire ou un cinglé solitaire. Je n’avais pas d’insignes, d’ornements ou de drapeaux qui permettraient de savoir où je me situe. Mes vêtements étaient tous noirs et je portais un casque. Je mets un point d’honneur à porter des lunettes transparentes pour ne pas ressembler à un « Racer X » menaçant de Speed Racer.
À ma gauche, une femme plus âgée portant un béret beige a commencé à ajouter quelque chose pendant que je parlais à la plus jeune femme. L’équipe de sécurité à vélo s’est déplacée et j’ai continué à parler à la femme plus âgée qui m’a dit qu’elle était à moitié slovaque et à moitié turque et que son père était juif.
Nous avons parlé de politique européenne et elle a dit que les Check étaient tous des « Juifs ». Les Slovaques étaient catholiques. Elle a dit qu’elle s’était convertie au christianisme et je lui ai demandé quelle église. Elle a haussé les épaules ? Elle ne savait pas quel genre de protestante elle était ? J’ai pensé, peut-être une église évangélique folle.
Nous avons parlé d’un « cessez-le-feu » et j’ai dit que je voulais voir la Turquie débarquer des troupes à Gaza et ouvrir un port pour approvisionner Gaza. Si c’est la guerre, ils veulent…
Elle a déclaré qu’un homme de son travail dans la rue avait garé sa voiture près de la manifestation et était sorti pour discuter avec les gens parce qu’il soutenait Israël. La foule grandissait, je n’étais plus à la limite. Je me suis retourné pour m’excuser d’avoir bloqué le chemin, même si j’étais dans la rue et non sur le trottoir. Je me suis retourné, la femme était partie.
La foule s’est élevée à environ un millier de personnes, voire plus, je pourrais le deviner, lorsqu’elles ont commencé à se regrouper derrière un camion sonore équipé de haut-parleurs et de drapeaux. J’ai vu Steve Kirschbaum, un organisateur bien connu de la section de Boston du Worker World Party et auparavant dirigeant syndical des chauffeurs de bus. Il y a trente ans, il faisait la une du Boston Herald lors d’une manifestation organisée à Dorchester Heights, dans le sud de Boston, par un ailier droit. Kirschbaum distribuait des tracts à l’entrée de la station de métro City Hall. Le Parti stalinien des travailleurs mondiaux a organisé pendant quatre décennies des rassemblements à Boston pour diverses causes, où il organise et organise le rassemblement pour que d’autres puissent y entrer, parler et être présentés par les médias. Les rassemblements ont toujours les exigences les plus basses possibles. La paix maintenant… ce genre de chose. Les libéraux radicaux exigent qu’un démocrate mécontent puisse s’inscrire et parler à un public, peut-être. Le Parti Mondial des Travailleurs ne semble pas croître grâce au travail. Les gens qu’ils aident à grandir. Mais ils sont toujours là, même si les cheveux de Kirschbaum sont complètement gris et sa longue queue de cheval m’indique qu’il a pris sa retraite de la conduite d’un autobus scolaire.
Je l’ai vu devant la foule descendre la rue en utilisant son téléphone pour prendre une photo. Kirschbaum avait un grand sourire sur le visage. Il rayonnait. Il y a des années, lors d’un rassemblement contre la guerre au MIT, j’ai demandé à un camarade militant alors que nous circulions dans la foule en distribuant des tracts : « Pourquoi tout le monde sourit-il ?
Nous protestions contre une guerre sinistre.
“Parce qu’ils sont tellement contents d’eux-mêmes”, répondit-il. Il avait raison.
Je ne pense pas avoir vu quelqu’un d’autre avec un sourire idiot. Je ne pense pas avoir vu de type anarchiste du black bloc. Je n’ai vu aucun contre-manifestant. Il y a des décennies, j’ai vu le visage d’un maoïste vieillissant s’arrêtant sur son vélo et sortant une pancarte et des dépliants dans une caisse de lait en plastique. Il me semble me souvenir qu’il y a de nombreuses années, j’étais dans la station de métro Harvard Square alors qu’un grand type mesurant plus d’un mètre quatre-vingts harcelait ce maoïste. Il est venu vers moi, probablement en me reconnaissant lors des manifestations, et m’a dit “il me dérange”.
Je me suis placé entre les deux et j’ai dit au gros gars costaud : “Laisse-le tranquille.” Je ne suis pas grand, mais je peux faire passer un message avec ma voix grave. J’étais prêt à me battre. Même pour défendre ce droit des maoïstes à distribuer des tracts dans le métro. Le grand type s’est détourné. Je n’ai jamais parlé aux maoïstes, et je ne l’ai pas fait à l’époque.
J’ai vu avec lui une femme qu’il y a plusieurs dizaines d’années en train d’installer une banderole, puis une femme a parlé à travers un porte-voix au bord du rassemblement. Je pense qu’ils étaient autrefois le Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire (RCP) et maintenant ils sont les RevComs, les Communistes Révolutionnaires.
L’orateur a fait écho à leur tract avec des slogans avec lesquels je peux être d’accord : « Les États-Unis et Israël ne touchent pas au peuple palestinien ». « Le Hamas n’est pas une force de libération – Le peuple palestinien a besoin d’une véritable révolution ! »
Le rassemblement pro-palestinien scandait « Du fleuve à la mer, la Palestine doit être libre ». En d’autres termes, un slogan nationaliste palestinien que n’importe quel capitaliste palestinien pourrait soutenir.
Le slogan que j’utilise tout le temps lorsque je poste est « Défendez les Palestiniens, arrêtez la machine de guerre israélienne ! » J’ai affiché quelques tracts sur les balades à vélo, mais je n’ai rien apporté de politique avec moi au rassemblement. Rien. Je n’avais pas de sac à dos. Si j’étais arrêté pour une raison quelconque, je n’avais rien d’autre sur moi qu’une pièce d’identité. J’allais apporter mon téléphone, mais quand je partais, il n’était pas chargé. Je ne vis pas en regardant mon téléphone. J’avais un peu d’argent, mais pas beaucoup. Je ne m’attendais pas à être arrêté, donc je n’avais pas d’argent pour ma caution. Pas cette fois.
Le camion qui se déplaçait lentement et la foule serrée se sont déplacés de Copely Square vers Arlington Street jusqu’à Newbury Street. Je me déplaçais lentement sur les trottoirs avec mon vélo alors que les gens étaient au soleil dans les cafés de la rue et marchaient. Newbury Street est un quartier commercial haut de gamme où les loyers sont parmi les plus élevés de la Nouvelle-Angleterre. Il y a quelques galeries d’art et de nombreux salons de coiffure au sous-sol. J’ai entendu un petit groupe de personnes passer près de moi et parler français. Je restais coincé sur le côté en regardant le rassemblement dans la rue. J’ai remarqué que la rue devant le cortège était fermée à la circulation automobile. J’ai avancé mon vélo en marchant et me suis dirigé vers la route ouverte. Ah… la liberté. Je pourrais naviguer dans la rue vide, sans voitures, en regardant les magasins Chi-Chi.
Le groupe de policiers à vélo se trouvait à l’avant du rassemblement et également à l’extrémité du pâté de maisons, au croisement de la rue suivante. Avec le vélo électrique, je peux pédaler doucement et le moteur démarre et m’aide beaucoup. Ou bien, on peut maintenir un levier enfoncé et le vélo électrique est alimenté uniquement par le moteur électrique.
La rue était ombragée, j’ai donc trouvé un endroit ensoleillé pour m’arrêter pendant que la foule lente se déplaçait au milieu de la rue. Il y avait beaucoup de chants enthousiastes, mais aucun sentiment de violence ou de chaos imminent. La foule était probablement composée à parts égales d’hommes et de femmes, et il y avait beaucoup d’enfants et même de bébés dans des poussettes.
Il y avait un café Starbucks sur Newbury Street et le rassemblement s’est arrêté pour fustiger l’establishment pour quelque chose que les pro-palestiniens considéraient comme étant contre les Palestiniens ou en faveur d’Israël.
« Honte, honte », scandaient-ils à plusieurs reprises.
Pendant que j’attendais au soleil, quatre commissaires de rallye avec des gilets et des casques orange sont venus vers moi.
« Êtes-vous ici pour le rassemblement ? » a demandé une femme.
“Oui et non”
« Pourriez-vous nous aider à bloquer les voitures ?
“Non.”
Sur la ligne de piquetage lors d’une grève syndicale, je bloquais les véhicules des briseurs de grève. Je ne bloquerai pas des rues au hasard pour un rassemblement parce que ces gens veulent montrer leur pouvoir sur les automobilistes aléatoires coincés dans la rue. Les gens dans leurs voitures ne sont pas des militaires israéliens. Le rassemblement a tourné sur Massachusetts Avenue et j’ai gardé mes distances parce que je n’étais pas sûr de ce qu’ils disaient à la police. J’ai vu une femme bloquer une voiture sur Mass Ave avec son vélo et la voiture a avancé un peu et un flic était à cinq pieds. Le rassemblement semblait rassembler environ 2 000 personnes alors qu’il se dirigeait vers le pont sur la rivière Charles. Une section du pont n’était pas fréquentée et je pouvais monter et regarder autour de moi, debout sur la pointe des pieds sur mes pédales.
J’ai vu quelques jeunes garçons de dix ou onze ans descendre Mass Ave en scandant et en riant comme s’ils étaient en sortie avec leur famille. Comme la foule se déplaçait lentement, j’ai fait un détour par quelques rampes jusqu’à la piste cyclable de Charles River. Je venais souvent ici pour skater il y a plusieurs décennies. J’ai trouvé cela intéressant car les différents parcours me revenaient. Alors que je marchais sous les arbres avec l’autoroute de l’autre côté d’une clôture et les arbres et la rivière de l’autre côté, je suis tombé sur un troupeau de canards qui picoraient les feuilles oranges et brunes et le sol. Je me suis arrêté et j’ai regardé de très près. Ils ne m’ont guère prêté attention. Sans peur. Un autre vélo nous a dépassé sur le chemin. Pas de vol dispersé. Les gens se promenaient. Ces oiseaux étaient au déjeuner..
J’ai fait demi-tour et je suis retourné vers le pont à l’ouest en amont de la rivière. La grande foule traversait le pont. J’ai pensé à la façon dont d’autres militants avaient qualifié ces types de marches floues et fastidieuses de « marches pour la paix ». En effet.
J’ai fait rouler mon vélo sur la rampe raide et sur le trottoir du pont bondé de la queue de la foule. Alors qu’ils traversaient le pont vers Cambridge, je me tournai et me dirigeai vers le sud en direction de chez moi. C’était suffisant pour moi. Au moins pour aujourd’hui. Des vents froids soufflaient et le soleil se couchait.
Just about noon I rode my bike up Train Street to the top of Pope’s Hill and was struck by how cold it was.
Why would I go to Copely Square, several miles away, through city streets on a cold day. I was not joining other like minded militants to distribute leaflets. I was not going to guard a literature table, or carry a banner or sign in the protest march. I was alone. What did they need me for at the protest march.
Just over the top of the Pope’s Hill I went left onto a side street thinking of my relatively warm home and another cup of coffee.
I found out about the protest by checking the ‘Events’ section of Massachusetts Peace Action. I posted the image on Gab social media site.
I had on layers of clothes and a hood over my bike helmet and hat. I regretted not having a scarf. I thought of a scarf but thought of Isadora Duncan being strangled by a scarf that caught on a wheel. The side street was full of sun and warmer and I rode north but started to change my mind as I went back towards Train Street. I have posted many pictures and words about the Israeli war on the Palestinians online. But, I wanted to be at a rally in the flesh. I am amazed when I can see protest in London, or Paris, or New York in real time online. But, I need to be at a real protest myself, even if I have high definition images to see at home. So I headed toward Copely Square and the demonstration again.
I rode down Dorchester Avenue where there was not much traffic since it was Sunday and the avenue is dotted with lots of car repair, tire repair, and car supplies stores. I’m not sure why. Since it was a chilly 45 degrees, or so, there were not too many people out at noon. The rally was listed as starting at 1pm and the online maps said it would take me thirty-five minutes to travel the five and a half miles. My ebike has an electric motor so I can go faster longer than someone pedaling alone.
I passed by the McDonald’s at the Mass and Cass intersection that has become infamous for a tent city of drug addicts and homeless drunks. The city decided to enforce laws against pitching tents on sidewalks on 1 November 2023.
The South End after Boston University Hospital was empty. I clickity clacked along some of the loose bricks on brick sidewalks.
In the Back Bay area the number of pedestrians increased and I had to take to the streets and watch for cars. I did not want to die. I thought of the labor union strike at the Westin Hotel as I rode by the front entrance on Huntington Avenue. I walked the picket line and distributed radical labor union leaflets. “Picket Lines Mean Don’t Cross!” I would have blocked the entrance with my body if the labor union leaders gave the word back then, or if the workers had done it spontaneously. But the labor union leaders usually want a peaceful legal strike that does not embarrass the Democrat politicians they seem to work for. I went to picket lines at all five striking hotels.
In Copely Square I could hear the roar of the crowd assembled at the Boston Public Library stone steps on the east side. The plaza in front of Trinity Church had large fencing because of construction, so the rally was squeezed onto the street and the wide sidewalk. When I arrived at 12:45 there looked to be about 500 people. There were lots of Palestinian flags. A speaker announced that people could get a Palestinian flag for $20 and carry it for the protest and get their $20 at the end if they brought the flag back, or keep the flag. The crowd had about 20% young looking college students or twenty-somethings, there were lots of people who looked Arabic or West Asian. Lots of families with fathers mothers and little kids and Stollers. There were women with headscarf’s, but not more than 10% or less.
The chants were constantly about a ‘cease fire now.’
(This style, not her)
I noted a young woman with straight cut bangs and a streak of white in the middle she seemed to be a demonstration organizer. Insane asylum bangs, I thought to myself.
I stayed on the south side and on the edge of the rally trying not to be in people’s way with my ebike. I asked a man the time, I had no watch, or phone. He said it was 1:05.
After standing a while I had to move away towards a bus shelter and sat down on a bench. I could hear the speech of an angry woman as the crowd occasionally roared agreement. People were coming from the Back Bay Green Line subway station a block to the south.
I could see a contingent of police around who looked to be relaxed and were not in riot gear. They were at a barricade blocking Arlington Street at the corner of the library. The total number seemed to be about fifty including a contingent of a dozen police officers on bicycles. Like me. But, I had a motor.
I was thinking of leaving. My hands were cold even with my riding gloves. I got up and rode around Trinity Church and up Boylston Street towards the other side of the rally. I wanted sun to warm me. I stopped at the far edge of the crowd and looked down toward the Snowden Academy Boston Public high school that I had worked at many times.
A woman with a bike with a group in bright orange security vests came over to me and asked, “Are you hear for the demonstration?”
Lenin’s Wife Krupskaya
“Yes,” I said.
“Would you like to help the security team?” she asked. She was a well spoken young woman in her twenties with light brown hair and a light brown mask to match over her face. I thought of the young Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife.
I was glad she did not think of me as an opponent or a lone nut. I had no badges or ornaments or flags that might let one know where I stand. My clothes where all black and I had on a helmet. I make a point of wearing clear glasses so I don’t look like a menacing ‘Racer X’ from Speed Racer.
To my left an older woman with a beige beret began to add in something as I spoke to the younger woman. The security team on bikes moved and I kept talking to the older woman who told me she was half Slovak and half Turkish and her father had been Jewish.
We talked of European politics and she said the Checks were all “Jews.” The Slovaks were Catholics. She said she had converted to Christianity, and I asked her what church. She shrugged? She didn’t know what kind of Protestant she was? I thought, perhaps some crazy evangelical church.
We spoke of a ‘cease fire’ and I said I wanted to see Turkey land troops in Gaza and open up a port to supply Gaza. If it is war they want…
She said a man from her work down the street had parked his car near the demonstration and got out to argue with people because he supported Israel. The crowd was growing, I was no longer on the edge. I turned to apologize for blocking the path, though I was in the street not on the sidewalk. I turned back, the woman was gone.
The crowd grew to about a thousand or more people I might guess when they began to form up behind a sound truck with speakers and flags. I saw Steve Kirschbaum a well known organizer with the Boston chapter of the Worker World Party and previously a bus driver union leader. Thirty years ago he was on the front page of the Boston Herald when a demonstration was being held on Dorchester Heights in South Boston by a right winger. Kirschbaum was handing out leaflets at the City Hall subway stop entrance. The Stalinist Workers World Party have had four decades of organizing rallies in Boston for various causes where they do the organizing and put the rally together for others to stroll in and speak and be featured by the media. The rallies always have the lowest possible wimpy demands. Peace now… type of thing. Radical liberal demands that a disaffected Democrat could sign on to and get to speak to an audience, maybe. The Workers World Party does not seem to grow because of the work. The people they help grow. But, they are still around, even if Kirschbaum’s hair is completely grey and his long pony tail tells me he has retired from driving a school bus.
Some years back Steve Kirschbaum was falsely accused by the bus company bosses of assault. I went to the rally at Dorchester Courthouse before the trial. I sat in the packed courthouse and sketched everyone and everything as we waited for hours. Outside after marching in a picket line Steve Kirschbaum came up to me and said, “Thanks for coming today.” I replied, “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
(Steve Kirschbaum – file photo)
I saw him out in front of the crowd going down the street using his phone to take a picture. Kirschbaum had a big grin on his face. He was beaming. Years ago at an anti-war rally at MIT I asked a fellow militant as we circulated through the crowd handing out leaflets, “Why is everybody smiling?”
We were protesting a grim war.
“Because they are so pleased with themselves,” he answered. He was right.
I don’t think I saw anyone else with an idiotic grin. I don’t think I saw any anarchist black bloc types at all. I did not see any counter protesters. I did see a face for decades ago as an aging Maoist pulled up on his bike and took a sign out and leaflets in a plastic milk crate. I seem to remember many years ago being in Harvard Square subway station as a big guy over six feet was harassing this Maoist. He came over to me probably recognizing me from demonstrations, and said “he’s bothering me.”
I stepped between the two and said to the big beefy guy, “Leave him alone.” I’m not big, but I can convey a message with my deep voice. I was ready to fight. Even to defend this Maoists right to hand out leaflets in the subway. The big guy turned away. I have never spoken to the Maoist, and I didn’t then.
(RevCom Not 12 Nov 2023 Protest Photo)
I saw a woman with him who I saw decades ago setting up a banner and then a woman spoke through a bullhorn at the edge of the rally. I think they were once the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and now they are the RevComs, Revolutionary Communists.
The speaker echoed their leaflet with slogans I can agree with “US and Israel Hands Off the Palestinian People” “Hamas is not a force for Liberation – The Palestinian People Need Real Revolution!”
The Pro-Palestinian establishment rally was chanting “From the River To the Sea Palestine Must Be Free.” In other words a Palestinian nationalist slogan that any Palestinian capitalist might support.
The slogan I use all the time when I post is “Defend The Palestinians, Stop The Israeli War Machine!” I have put up a few leaflets on bike rides, but I brought nothing political with me to the rally. Not a thing. I did not have a backpack. If I was stopped for, whatever reason, I had nothing on me but an ID. I was going to bring my phone, but when I was leaving it was not charged. I don’t live looking at my phone. I had a little money, but not much. I did not expect to be arrested so I did not have bail money. Not this time.
The slow moving truck and tightly packed crowd moved from Copely Square down Arlington Street to Newbury Street. I moved slowly down the sidewalks with my bike as people were out in the sun at the cafes along the street and walking. Newbury Street is a high end retail district with some the highest rents in New England. There are some art galleries and lots of hair places at the basement level. I heard a small group of people going by me speaking French. I kept getting trapped on the side watching the rally on the street. I noted that the street in front of the march was blocked off to car traffic. I moved my bike ahead walking and made my way to the open road. Ah… freedom. I could sail down the empty street free of cars looking at the Chi-Chi shops.
The group of bicycle police were at the front of the rally and also at the far end of the block where the next street crossed. With the ebike I can peddle gently and the motor kicks in and helps a lot. Or, one can hold a lever down and the ebike is powered solely by the electric motor.
The street was shady so I located a sunny spot to stop while the slow moving crowd moved down the middle of the street. There were lots of enthusiastic chants, but no feeling of imminent violence or chaos. The crowd was probably evenly male and female, and there were lots of children and even babies in strollers.
There was a Starbucks Coffee shop on Newbury Street and the rally stopped to castigate the establishment for something the pro-Palestinians considered against the Palestinians or in favor of Israel.
“Shame, shame,” they chanted repeatedly.
As I waited in the sun four rally marshals with orange vests and helmets came riding up to me.
“Are you here for the rally?” a woman asked.
“Yes, and no”
“Would you help us block cars?”
“No.”
On the picket line at a labor union strike I would block the strikebreakers vehicles. I will not block random streets for a rally because these people want to show power over random motorists trapped on the street. The people in their cars are not the Israeli military.
The rally turned onto Massachusetts Avenue, and I kept my distance because I was not sure what they were telling the police. I saw one woman block a car on Mass Ave with her bike and the car moved forward a little and a cop was five feet away. The rally looked to be about 2,000 people as it moved toward the bridge over the Charles River. A section of the bridge had no traffic and I could ride up and look around standing on tip toes on my pedals.
I saw a couple of young boys ten or eleven years old skip down Mass Ave chanting and laughing as if on a day out with their family. Since the crowd was moving slowly I took a side trip down some ramps to the Charles River bikeway. I was coming here a lot to skate several decades ago. I thought it interesting as the various pathways courses came back to me.
As I road along under the trees with the motorway on the other side of a fence and the trees and river to the other side I came upon a herd of ducks pecking at the orange and brown leaves and the ground. I stopped and look quite close. They paid me little heed. No fear. Another bike rode past us on the path. No scattered flight. People strolled through. These birds were at lunch.
I turned around and went back toward the bridge to the west heading upriver. The large crowd was just moving across the bridge. I thought of how fellow militants had called these types of unfocused tediously long marches “peace crawls.” Indeed.
I wheeled my bike up the steep ramp and onto the bridge sidewalk crowded with the tail end of the crowd. As they headed across the bridge into Cambridge I turned and headed south towards home. That was a enough for me. At least for today. Cold winds were blowing, and the sun was going down.
Ce roman a attiré mon attention pour la première fois lors d’un reportage américain qui soulignait qu’en France un roman, une œuvre de fiction, pouvait avoir un impact politique. Peut-on imaginer cela aux États-Unis au cours des dernières décennies ?
Ce qui intéressait beaucoup dans le roman était le personnage central de Poutine. Un homme qui est un homme politique et médiatique devient un acteur dans l’accession au pouvoir de Poutine. Le roman est une série de réflexions, d’observations et de conclusions sur le pouvoir, Poutine et la Russie d’aujourd’hui. Eh bien, avant la guerre Ukraine-Russie de 2022-2023….
Le premier article que j’ai lu soulignait que dans les cercles politiques et médiatiques américains, l’idée selon laquelle Poutine pourrait être un personnage de chair et de sang agissant pour divers motifs est tout simplement inimaginable car innommable dans ces cercles. Poutine est un pur génie maléfique des bandes dessinées Mavel qui aime les mauvaises choses. Fin de l’histoire. Rien à comprendre.
Je sais lire le français, en quelque sorte. Avec de l’aide. Ou de la patience. Ou le temps…
Quoi qu’il en soit, j’ai mis le texte français en ligne ainsi qu’une lecture audio d’un livre audio pour terminer le travail avec de l’aide. J’ai besoin d’aide. Je ne suis pas française. Même si je pouvais passer à côté lorsque je marchais dans les rues de Paris et que je voyais des jeunes trotskystes combattre de costauds ouvriers du bâtiment communistes lors de rassemblements de gauche. Je me tenais à l’écart, mais j’avais une bonne idée de ce qu’ils disaient. Les socialistes de gauche combattaient les travailleurs communistes dirigés par les staliniens.
Je m’attendais à un récit sur les capitalistes oligarques gangsters russes qui arment tout le monde comme dans une histoire de mafia italienne. Mais… presque tout de suite, le narrateur parlait d’un autre auteur que j’avais récemment étudié…. Zamiatine le Russe qui a écrit le roman dystopique « Nous » dans les années 1920 après avoir vécu au début de la Russie soviétique.
Je viens de voir un roman graphique intéressant de « We », puis j’ai trouvé un excellent livre audio lu sur Youtube par Grover Gardner que je pense reconnaître et apprécier sur d’autres livres audio. Je pensais que le livre parlerait des premiers jours du stalinisme et de la répression, une trahison de la révolution socialiste. Non…. Le livre semblait avoir été écrit hier, pas dans les années 1920. Rien ne semblait concerner la Russie. Le roman a été écrit par un ingénieur ayant travaillé dans des chantiers navals au Royaume-Uni. Le roman prétend que Zamiatine est retourné en Russie pour soutenir la Révolution dans les premiers jours, mais a commencé à être déçu par la réalité. Les implications du contrôle mécanique et optique des travailleurs, des personnes et de la société étaient évidentes pour Zamiatine et il a exposé les conclusions logiques de ces idées logiques dans Nous. Il est intéressant de noter qu’une grande partie du « 1984 » d’Orwell vient de « Nous ». J’étais juste là où Orwell a écrit : « J’ai finalement mis la main sur un exemplaire de « Nous ».
Il faut confronter les sept décennies de régime communiste en Russie pour comprendre ce qui se passe aujourd’hui en Russie. Le roman détaille le grand-père aristocratique puis le père adaptateur soviétique du narrateur qui donne des descriptions pratiques du fonctionnement du pouvoir en Russie dans une realpolitik de style machiavélique.
Tout le temps que je lis et écoute l’histoire, je me dis : « c’est un Italien qui écrit en français et qui connaît son histoire et sa littérature russes, parle-t-il russe ? Y a-t-il déjà vécu ? Ou est-ce juste une très bonne histoire qui donne une idée de ce qui se passe en Russie ?
Je ne sais pas.
J’étais curieux d’obtenir une version anglaise de l’histoire lorsque j’ai reçu pour la première fois la version française. Je pensais traduire l’œuvre moi-même lorsque j’ai vu une date de sortie prévue dans plusieurs mois. Pourquoi? Je pourrais traduire le travail en quelques jours avec mes ressources limitées et faire lire automatiquement un livre audio. Les éditeurs ont prévu plusieurs mois pour publier l’ouvrage et il a été proposé en prévente le 31 octobre 2023.
Quelle date étrange, ai-je pensé. Puis j’ai réalisé. Ils voulaient sortir un livre sur Poutine à Halloween parce que Poutine est mauvais. J’ai honte d’être éditeur. Je ne me soucie presque pas de gagner de l’argent. Puis, à mesure que la date approchait, l’éditeur a repoussé la date de sortie au 7 novembre 2023. Se rendent-ils compte qu’il s’agit de la date de la Révolution russe de 1917 ? Qu’étudient ces gens avant de devenir éditeurs ? Lorsque j’étais employé dans une imprimerie qui imprimait des livres pour le géant des manuels scolaires Houghton Mifflin et que certains membres du personnel de l’éditeur sont arrivés, ils avaient tous une formation et des diplômes en marketing.
Histoire? Laissez les morts enterrer les morts.
Le roman décrit toujours Poutine comme un méchant qui déplace des pièces d’échecs pour prendre et conserver les sommets du pouvoir. Poutine comprend toutes sortes de mouvements symboliques. Le roman mentionnait la peur de Merkel à l’égard des chiens et du fait que Poutine faisait venir son chien. J’ai regardé les photos. Oui, Poutine semble sourire narquoisement. Le roman ne mentionne pas que Poutine parle très bien l’allemand tout en soulignant qu’il ne parle pas anglais.
Le roman parle de Poutine comme d’un espion soviétique, mais pas qu’il était un avocat et un diplomate pour la bureaucratie soviétique stalinienne et non un assassin de rue en cape et en poignard. Poutine s’est plaint que Lénine avait placé une bombe sous l’État en accordant aux républiques soviétiques le droit de voter elles-mêmes pour sortir de l’Union soviétique et de l’État dominé par la Russie. Poutine a exprimé son soutien au rejet par Staline des idées d’indépendance nationale de Lénine. Poutine a également déclaré que lorsque de nombreux agents de sécurité sont sortis pour brûler leurs cartes du Parti communiste en 1991, il ne l’a pas fait. « Ma carte de membre du Parti communiste se trouve quelque part dans un tiroir de bureau », a déclaré Poutine. Poutine a déclaré qu’il y avait beaucoup de bonnes idées dans le manuel communiste de base utilisé dans l’Union soviétique stalinienne.
Rien de tout cela n’est dans ce roman. Pas machiavélique dans le bon sens ?
Ce qui ressort, c’est que Poutine a remplacé Eltsine, la marionnette ivre de Washinton, qui n’a rien fait pendant le pillage du pays, par une détermination à centrer le pouvoir de l’État russe en Russie. Tous les États reposent sur la force. Poutine a décidé de vaincre les militants soutenus par Washington et l’Islam dans le Caucase avec une force militaire suffisante pour tuer les combattants islamiques ennemis. La Russie a gagné. Poutine l’a fait. Des islamistes sont morts et les journalistes occidentaux ont pleuré.
Le roman semble avoir un peu l’air rêveur d’une histoire de Tourgueniev alors qu’un homme fatigué du monde raconte à un dernier auditeur de quoi il s’agit. La force brute. Comment pourrait-il? C’est Poutine, la quintessence du mal.
Le triste homme des médias est autorisé à s’en aller après que Poutine n’a plus besoin de lui. Ce livre pourrait utiliser un prochain chapitre… Dans le Donbass.
Ou… Était-ce juste le prélude à la Troisième Guerre mondiale ?
Этот роман впервые привлек мое внимание в новостях США, в которых отмечалось, что во Франции роман, художественное произведение, может иметь политическое влияние. Можно ли представить такое в США в последние десятилетия?
Что заинтересовало многих в романе, так это центральный персонаж Путина. Человек, который является политическим деятелем и медийным лицом, становится игроком в приходе Путина к власти. Роман представляет собой серию размышлений, наблюдений и выводов о власти, Путине и современной России. Ну, до украинско-российской войны 2022–2023 годов….
В первой статье, которую я прочитал, отмечалось, что в политических и медийных кругах США идея о том, что Путин может быть персонажем из плоти и крови, действующим по разным мотивам, просто невообразима, потому что в этих кругах она невыразима. Путин — настоящий злой гений из комиксов Mavel, который любит плохие вещи. Конец истории. Нечего понимать.
Я умею читать по-французски, вроде. С помощью. Или терпение. Или время…
В любом случае, я получил в Интернете текст на французском языке, а также аудиокнигу для чтения, чтобы с помощью меня справиться с работой. Мне нужна помощь. Я не француз. Хотя я мог пройти мимо, когда гулял по улицам Парижа и видел, как молодежь-троцкисты сражалась с крепкими коммунистическими строителями на левых митингах. Я стоял в стороне, но хорошо понимал, о чем они говорят. Левые социалисты боролись со сталинистскими рабочими-коммунистами.
Я ожидал повествования о российских бандитах-олигархах-капиталистах, которые вооружают всех, как в истории об итальянской мафии. Но… почти сразу рассказчик заговорил о другом авторе, которого я недавно изучал…. Замятин — русский, написавший роман-антиутопию «Мы» в 1920-х годах, живший в ранней советской России.
Я случайно увидел интересный графический роман «Мы», а затем нашел на Youtube отличную аудиокнигу Гровера Гарднера, которого, я думаю, я узнал и которому он понравился в других аудиокнигах. Я думал, что книга будет о первых днях сталинизма и о подавлении предательства социалистической революции. Нет…. Книга казалась написанной вчера, а не в 1920-х годах. Казалось, ничего не было о России. Роман был написан человеком, который был инженером, работавшим на верфях в Великобритании. В романе утверждается, что Замятин вернулся в Россию, чтобы поддержать революцию в первые дни, но начал разочаровываться в реальности. Последствия механического и оптического управления рабочими, людьми и обществом были очевидны для Замятина, и логические выводы таких логических идей он изложил в «Мы». Интересно, что большая часть оруэлловского «1984» взята из «Мы». Я узнал, что Оруэлл написал: «Наконец-то я получил в свои руки копию «Мы».
Но вернемся к Волшебнику.
Чтобы понять, что происходит в России сегодня, необходимо взглянуть на семь десятилетий коммунистического правления в России. В романе рассказывается о дедушке-аристократе, а затем о советском отце-адаптере рассказчика, который дает практические описания того, как работает власть в России, в стиле реальной политики Макиавелли.
Я все время читаю и слушаю рассказ и думаю: «Это итальянец, пишущий по-французски, который знает свою русскую историю и литературу, говорит ли он по-русски? Он когда-нибудь жил там? Или это просто неплохая история, дающая намек на то, что происходит внутри России?»
Я не знаю.
Мне было любопытно получить англоязычную версию этой истории, когда я впервые получил французскую версию. Я подумывал о переводе произведения сам, когда через много месяцев увидел запланированную дату выпуска. Почему? Я мог бы перевести эту работу за пару дней с моими ограниченными ресурсами и иметь машинное чтение для аудиокниги. Издатели назначили несколько месяцев на выпуск произведения, и 31 октября 2023 года оно было выставлено на предварительную продажу.
«Какое странное свидание», — подумал я. Потом я понял. Они хотели выпустить книгу о Путине на Хэллоуин, потому что Путин — зло. Стыдно быть издателями. Почти не заботятся о зарабатывании денег. Затем, по мере приближения даты, издатель перенес дату выпуска на 7 ноября 2023 года. Понимают ли они, что это дата Русской революции 1917 года? Что изучают эти люди, прежде чем стать издателями? Когда я работал в типографии, которая печатала несколько книг для гиганта учебников Houghton Mifflin, и к нам пришли некоторые сотрудники издательства, все они имели опыт работы и степени в области маркетинга.
История? Пусть мертвые хоронят мертвых.
В романе Путин по-прежнему изображен как плохой парень, передвигающий шахматные фигуры, чтобы захватить и удержать вершины власти. Путин понимает все виды символических шагов. В романе упоминается страх Меркель перед собаками и Путин, приводящий свою собаку. Я посмотрел фотографии. Да, Путин, кажется, ухмыляется. В романе не упоминается, что Путин очень хорошо говорит по-немецки, но подчеркивается, что он не говорит по-английски.
В романе говорится о Путине как о советском шпионе, но не о том, что он был адвокатом и дипломатом сталинистской советской бюрократии, а не уличным убийцей в плаще и кинжале. Путин жаловался, что Ленин заложил бомбу под государство, предоставив советским республикам право голосовать за выход из Советского Союза и государства, в котором доминирует Россия. Путин выразил поддержку неприятию Сталиным ленинских идей национальной независимости. Путин также сказал, что, когда в 1991 году многие сотрудники службы безопасности вышли сжечь свои партийные билеты, он этого не сделал. «Мой членский билет Коммунистической партии лежит где-то дома, в ящике стола», — сказал Путин. Путин сказал, что в базовом коммунистическом руководстве, использовавшемся в сталинском Советском Союзе, содержится много хороших идей.
Всего этого в романе нет. Не Макиавелли в правильном смысле?
Что действительно произошло, так это то, что Путин заменил пьяную вашингтонскую марионетку Ельцина, который ничего не делал, пока страна была разграблена, решимостью сосредоточить власть российского государства в России. Все государства основаны на силе. Путин решил победить Вашингтона и поддерживаемых исламом боевиков на Кавказе, используя военную силу, достаточную для уничтожения вражеских исламских боевиков. Россия победила. Путин сделал это. Исламисты погибли, а западные репортеры плакали.
Кажется, что в романе есть что-то мечтательное, как в рассказе Тургенева, когда уставший от мира человек рассказывает последнему слушателю, о чем идет речь. Грубая сила. Как он мог? Это Путин, квинтэссенция зла.
Грустному журналисту разрешили уйти после того, как Путину он больше не нужен. Эта книга могла бы использовать следующую главу… В Донбасс.
Или… Было ли это всего лишь прелюдией к Третьей мировой войне?
This novel first came to my attention on a US news report that noted that in France a novel, a work of fiction, could have a political impact. Can one imagine that in the US in recent decades?
What was of interest to many about the novel was the central character of Putin. A man who is a political operative and media person becomes a player in Putin’s rise to power. The novel is a series of reflections, observations, and conclusions about power, Putin, and Russia today. Well, before the Ukraine Russia War of 2022 – 2023….
The first article I read noted that in the US political and media circles the idea that Putin could be a flesh and blood character who acts for various motives is simply unimaginable because it is unspeakable in those circles. Putin is a pure Mavel comics evil genius who loves bad things. End of story. Nothing to understand.
I can read French, kinda. With help. Or patience. Or time…
Anyway, I got the French text online and also an audible audiobook reading to get through the work with help. I need help. I am not French. Although I could pass when I walked the streets of Paris and saw Trotskyists youth fighting beefy Communist construction workers at leftwing rallies. I stood on the sidelines, but I had a good idea of what they were saying. Left Socialists were fighting Stalinist led Communist workers.
I was expecting a narrative about Russia’s gangster oligarch capitalists strongarming everyone like in an Italian Mafia story. But… almost right away the narrator was talking about another author I had recently been studying…. Zamyatin the Russian who wrote the dystopian novel “We” in the 1920’s after living in the early Soviet Russia.
I just happened to see an interesting graphic novel of ‘We’ and then found a great audiobook reading on Youtube by Grover Gardner who I think I recognize and enjoyed on other audiobooks. I thought the book was going to be about the early days of Stalinism and the crackdown an betrayal of the socialist revolution. No…. The book seemed like something written yesterday, not in the 1920’s. Nothing seemed to be about Russia. The novel was written by a man who was an engineer who had worked in shipyards in the UK. The novel claims Zamyatin return to Russia to support the Revolution in the early days but began to be disillusioned by the reality. The implications of mechanical and optical control of workers and people and society were obvious to Zamyatin and he spelled out the logical conclusions of such logical ideas in We. Interesting that a lot of Orwell’s ‘1984’ comes from ‘We.’ I red were Orwell wrote, “I finally got my hands on a copy of “We.”
One must confront the seven decades of Communist rule in Russia to have any understanding of what is going on in Russia today. The novel details the aristocratic grand father and then the Soviet adapter father of the narrator who gives practical descriptions of how power works in Russia in a Machiavelli style realpolitik.
All the time I’m reading and listening to the story I am thinking, “this is an Italian writing in French who knows his Russian history and literature, does he speak Russian? Has he ever lived there? Or, is this just a pretty good story giving a hint of what’s happening inside Russia?”
I don’t know.
I was curious to get an English language version of the story when I first got the French version. I was thinking of translating the work myself when I saw a planned released date many months way. Why? I could translate the work in a couple of days with my limited resources, and have a machine reading for an audiobook. The publishers listed several months to put out the work and it was offered for pre-sale on 31 Oct 2023.
What an odd date, I thought. Then I realized. They wanted to put a Putin book out on Halloween because Putin is evil. Ashamed of being publishers. Almost don’t care about making money. Then, as the date approached, the publisher pushed the release date back to 7 November 2023. Do they realize that’s the Russia Revolution of 1917 date? What do these people study before becoming publishers? When I was a worker in a print shop that printed some books for textbook giant Houghton Mifflin and some of the publisher’s staff came in they all had backgrounds and degrees in marketing.
History? Let the dead bury the dead.
The novel still paints Putin as a bad guy moving chess pieces around to take and keep the heights of power. Putin understands all kinds of symbolic moves. The novel mentioned Merkel’s fear of dogs and Putin bringing his dog in. I looked the photos up. Yup, Putin seems to be smirking. The novel does not mention that Putin speaks very good German while emphasizing that he does not speak English.
The novel speaks of Putin being a Soviet spy, but not that he was a lawyer and diplomat for the Stalinist Soviet bureaucracy not a cloak and dagger street assassin. Putin has complained that Lenin placed a bomb under the state by allowing soviet republics the right of voting themselves out of the soviet union and Russian dominated state. Putin has expressed support for Stalin’s rejection of Lenin’s ideas of national independence. Putin also said that when a lot of security officers went out to burn their Communist Party cards in 1991 he did not. “My Communist Party membership card is at home somewhere in a desk draw,” Putin said. Putin said there were a lot of good ideas in the basic communist handbook used in the Stalinist Soviet Union.
None of that is in this novel. Not Machiavellian in the correct way?
What does come through is that Putin replaced the drunken Washinton puppet Yeltsin, who did nothing while the country was looted, with a determination to center the power of the Russian state in Russia. All states are based on force. Putin decided to defeat the Washington and Islamic backed militants in the Caucasus with military enough military force to kill the enemy Islamic fighters. Russia won. Putin did it. Islamists died and Western reporters cried.
The novel seems to have a little of the dreamy air of a Turgenev story as a world weary man tells one last listener what it’s all about. Raw power. How could he? That’s Putin, the quintessence of evil.
The sad media man is allowed to go away after Putin no longer needs him. What this book could use is a next chapter… Into the Donbass.
Many in America are asking this question – especially after the state of Israel rewarded a hated enemy of the US with a hero’s welcome, permanent citizenship, and a lasting pension.
Former US Navy analyst, Jonathan Pollard – who spent 30 years in a US prison for selling top-secret US intelligence to the Israeli government – arrived in Israel in December of 2020 and was greeted on the tarmac, in person by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Pollard was born and raised in Galveston Texas, yet he kissed the ground upon arrival to what he calls his ‘real home.’
“We are ecstatic to be home at last after 35 years,” Pollard, 66, said after landing at Ben Gurion Airport, where he and his wife, Esther, were welcomed with open arms by the Israeli government.
Has Israel acted like the true greatest ally of the United States? To get to our answer we have to look at all the facts, starting with what many call the ‘Israel lobby.’
The Most Powerful Lobby in Washington DC
AIPAC and WINEP are the main core of what many call the ‘Israel lobby,’ but many political scientists describe the lobby as 75 separate organizations, making it the most powerful lobby in Washington DC. Other groups sometimes considered a part of the overall lobby are groups like the ADL and Canary Mission, which sometimes directly or indirectly receive funding from the same donors, and broadly advocate for the same interests.
AIPAC alone was rated Washington’s most powerful lobby by most of congress in 1997 when asked by Fortune magazine, and in 2005, a national journal study found the same thing. Jewish Americans make up the vast majority of the lobby, devoting their life to push American policy in a pro-Israel direction, even if that becomes a detriment to America’s interests.
When President Gerald Ford grew impatient with Israel during their peace negotiations with Egypt in 1975, he threatened to withhold funding from Israel. That was until a bill sponsored by AIPAC, the Israel lobby was signed by 68 senators, blocking the president from withholding funds.
Lobbying for Israel has been happening since before WWI. Woodrow Wilson’s support for the Balfour declaration was influenced by Jewish Supreme Court Justice Louis D Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise.
The Balfour Declaration was a letter written by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lionel Walter Rothschild, in which he expressed the British government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Is Foreign Aid to Israel Worth It?
Economic aid given to Israel is in the form of loans and military aid is in the form of direct grants rather than loans. This format was preferred by Israel and agreed upon by the US.
The total economic and military aid sent to Israel from 2005 to 2007 equals approximately $154 billion and about $ 2 trillion Since 2003.
Israel gets their money usually upfront, whereas other countries receive it in quarterly installments. Israel is able to make interest off the unspent money until it’s used up.
Since the US runs budget deficits, giving all that money upfront requires the US to borrow the money which costs US taxpayers an additional $70 million per year. Then, American taxpayers end up paying Israel more interest when Israel reinvests the unspent portion in US treasury bills. Israel earns about $300 million per year in interest off loans we give them.
When mentioning foreign aid given to Israel, many people point to the fact that Egypt and Jordan also have received billions in Foreign aid. Firstly, Egypt and Jordan have not received trillions in foreign aid since 2003, but most importantly the money we send to both of those countries is effectively also money sent to Israel.
The money we send to Egypt and Jordan, which are number 2 and 3 in recipients of US foreign aid, is to protect Israel and is mainly an incentive for a peace agreement and good behavior between the countries.
The standard yearly installments outside of the military aid we send to Israel equates to $500 per Israeli. In comparison, Egypt gets $20 per Egyptian.
Other notable aspects of foreign aid sent to Israel include:
Private donations to most foreign countries are not usually tax deductible, but American Jews have sent an additional $2 billion tax deductible dollars per year to Israel because of our US-Israel tax treaty with Israel.
Under the FMF program it is required for countries receiving US military aid to spend all of the money here in the US, but Israel is the only country that gets a special rate demotion clause that allows Israel to send just $1 of every $4 in the US
Israel is also able to draw down the grants then in order to reduce the amount of interest it owes the US.
Israel is the only country that receives economic aid that does not have to report how its spent.
They also get loan guarantees which allow them to borrow money from commercial banks at lower rates.
Former prime minister of Israel Shimon Peres admitted that it was private donations from American Jews that helped Israel finance their not so clandestine nuclear program in the 1960’s
Notable contributors according to Israeli journalists were Abraham Feinberg, Samuel Bronfman, and members of the Rothschild family.
A lot of the aid, private and government has gone to colonizing and seizing land in the region which the US frowns upon.
Per capita income is 25th in the world so the country doesn’t even need economic aid, and they’re better off than a lot of European countries like Portugal and Hungary.
The lobby is the reason this is one topic the vast majority of both parties agree on. The democrats and republicans historically have quarreled over every hot button issue, one party can never agree with the other on how to fix the issues we face as Americans. But there is one topic they completely agree on, and that is our undying support for the state of Israel no matter what they do, and the never-ending flow of money we send them.
Now President Joe Biden once said that “It’s the best $3 billion (yearly) investment we make.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested once that “if Washington D.C. crumbled to the ground, the last thing that would remain is our support for Israel.”
The statements are no different from what we hear from house and senate republicans.
Israel Our Greatest Ally?
Israel has continued to defy the US for decades and lied about actions they have taken which have greatly harmed the US and American citizens.
From selling exclusive US military technology to China in 2005 to the 1981 bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor, there are countless examples of how Israel has acted more like a foe than a friend. Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the attack on the USS Liberty, and the Lavon Affair are other more egregious examples.
According to the GAO and many other government officials, Israel also continues to conduct the most aggressive spying operations against the US of any country, including the soviets of the 1980s.
When Israel annexes more land or builds additional settlements on annexed land against the wishes of the US, the American government is forced to respond with a carrot and not a stick. This means that even more billions in economic and military aid are sent to Israel upon agreement to make concessions for peace with its neighbors.
One example would be when the US asked Israel to return the territory they seized in the 6-day war. The Israeli government responded that they only return the land if Nixon promised to give them more airplanes.
Other examples include:
In 1977, when Israel sent US bought carriers into Lebanon which was against our Arms Export Control Act, which requires US military equipment only be used in self defense, they lied about it. It wasn’t only until they got caught lying that they withdrew the equipment, but only after we offered another carrot stick. More aid.
The six day war, which we strongly discouraged, required a rearm supply we sent to Israel reluctantly, this rearm supply resulted in contention with the Arab world and sent oil prices soaring. The US also had to pay off King Hussein of Jordan to remain on the sidelines. Israel almost started a worldwide conflict during the war, as the US had to keep the Soviets from intervening while Israel rejected our ceasefire demands and surrounded Egypt’s third army. The fighting finally stopped but of course we had to offer Israel more financial aid.
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon resulted in US troops having to be sent to the region as a peacekeeping force, this resulted in a suicide bombing of the US embassy that killed 63 and a truck bomb attack on a US marine base that left 241 American marines dead.
Directly after over 200 Americans died as a result of Israel’s actions, congress didn’t only refuse to condemn Israel, they voted to give Israel an additional $250 million against then-President Reagan’s wishes. Reagan stated that congress slipping these funds through a lame-duck session looks like we are rewarding Israel’s actions. After numerous calls to senators from Reagan which were treated with a cold shoulder, congress approved the money. Secretary of State George Schultz at the time said that this just further proves the “leverage Israel has over our congress.”
For decades, Israel has acted as more of an enemy than an ally.
Israel sold military weapons and equipment to Iran while US diplomats were being held hostage by Iran.
Israel was the main military support to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war while the US was backing Iraq.
Israel sold vital us military technology to China and other enemies of the US on numerous occasions.
In the Dotan affair, Israel illegally transferred millions of dollars in US aid, and when the US requested to question Israeli officials, the Israeli government blocked US investigators from meeting with Israeli officials.
Recently, Israel was accused of planting spy devices in Washington DC specifically to spy on President Donald Trump.
Israel continues to attempt to steal military secrets. They even sometimes use American Jews to do so.
Jonathan Pollard was an American intelligence analyst who passed military secrets to Israel in 1985. When pollard was caught, Israel refused to tell the US what Pollard had given them. In 2020 after Pollard’s release, Israel rewarded him with a Hero’s welcome, and granted Pollard and his wife permanent citizenship.
In 2004 a key pentagon official Larry Franklin was arrested on charges of passing classified information regarding US policy toward Iran to an Israeli spy. He had the assistance of two senior Jewish American AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. And these are our greatest allies?
There’s also overwhelming evidence that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, two Jews, were Mossad agents. According to reports, their role was to blackmail US presidents and politicians in order to coerce them to do what’s best for Israel.
President Richard Nixon’s presidency was marked by a number of controversies, and among them were comments he made about Jewish people, particularly in the context of government and politics. These comments were captured on the White House recording system that Nixon himself had installed to document his administration’s activities.
The recordings revealed that Nixon had complex and often contradictory views about Jews. On one hand, he appointed several Jewish individuals to high positions in his administration. For example, Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, served as Nixon’s National Security Advisor and later as Secretary of State.
On the other hand, the tapes also captured Nixon making remarks about Jews, expressing concerns about what he perceived as their influence in American cultural and political institutions.
An Ally in the War on Terror and Against Rogue States?
Historically, our strategic interest in the middle east has been oil. This is precisely why the US expelled Iraq from Kuwait in 1990. There is no reason to attack Iran, Syria, and Iraq. None of these countries have the technological or military capability to harm the US or our interests. Even if one of these countries did obtain the capability for a nuclear bomb, the only country they’d attack is Israel.
So, wars in this region would and have only directly benefited the country of Israel. If their enemies and the region is destabilized, Israel gets even more territory at the cost of American blood. The US tolerates a nuclear Pakistan and India. A nuclear Iran poses no threat to the US. There is no evidence that Iran is even close to obtaining or has even pursued the technological capability to reach the US with a warhead.
Wesley Clark, a former general once disclosed the US plan to take out 7 countries in 5 years, connected to the Iraq war following the 9-11 attacks.
Then of course there is the famous video of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu lobbying the congress to invade Iraq.
Of course, we can’t forget about the Wikileaks emails from Hillary Clinton’s inbox that show a plan to overthrow Assad in Syria in an effort to pursue the security of Israel.
“The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad. Negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program will not solve Israel’s security dilemma. Nor will they stop Iran from improving the crucial part of any nuclear weapons program — the capability.”
There is the email from Sidney Blumenthal to Hillary Clinton regarding Qaddafi’s plan in Libya to establish a pan African currency backed by 143 tons of gold.
” According to sensitive information available to these individuals, Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. In late March 2011 these stocks were moved to SABHA (southwest in the direction of the Libyan border with Niger and Chad); taken from the vaults of the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli. This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).
After this email was sent, Qaddafi was taken out. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shared a laugh with a television news reporter moments after hearing deposed Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had been killed.
“We came, we saw, he died,” she joked when told of news reports of Qaddafi’s death by an aide in between formal interviews.
Israel being our ‘strongest ally’ in the war on terror was the main theme of the ‘Project for a New American Century’ (PNAC) in 2002. Jewish neoconservative Members of PNAC including Rumsfeld, Kristol, Perle, Cohen, and Wolsey sent a letter to Bush declaring this.
But Israel itself has conducted countless acts of terror against the US and our allies in order to achieve their own political goals. Some of the first acts of terror ever actually.
The bombing of the King David hotel to force the British out and in attempts to establish their own official country is one example of many bombings carried out by radical Israeli terror groups. Israel’s own prime ministers were central in the creation of many of their terror groups including the Irgun.
An Ally During the Cold War Maybe?
As the famous Middle East historian Bernard Lewis notes, who is a prominent supporter of Israel, “whatever value Israel might have had as a strategic asset during the Cold War, that value obviously ended when the Cold War itself came to a close.”
Author Bernard Reich of George Washington University came to the same conclusion after the Cold War when he wrote that Israel is now of ‘limited military or economic importance to the United States.
Robert Art, a defense expert of Brandeis University, made similar remarks when he said that Israel now has ‘little strategic value to the United States as is in many ways a strategic liability.’
At the end of the Cold War, it became to clear to anyone paying attention that Israel was becoming more of a liability than an asset. During the Gulf War of 1991, the United States and its allies assembled more than four hundred thousand troops to liberate Kuwait. The US though was not able to use Israeli bases or allow the IDF to participate without jeopardizing the fragile coalition against Iraq.
The US has received some benefits from being so strongly allies with Israel. But what we give, what Americans have sacrificed, the American lives lost and the trillions of dollars in economic and military aid, dwarfs the very few benefits beyond comparison. In the past, during the Cold War we may have had strategic interests in partnership with Israel just based on their geographical position alone, and outside of this, Israel’s defeat of soviet allies causing the soviets to have to constantly re-arm their allies and prevent them from expanding. But not really compared to the costs.
US support for Israel pushed Egypt and Syria into Moscow’s arms in the first place.
US support made the Arab-Israeli conflict worse.
Prior to the US backing Israel in many wars, the view of the US in the Arab world, which is far richer in resources than Israel, was very positive. Arab animosity began and increased and was compounded by the US support for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Sinai, Gaza, and the Golan heights. Our extremely strong alliance with Israel has made Americans more vulnerable rather than less.
Countless Arab leaders, including the spiritual leader of Hezbollah in 2002 have said that the United States is hated by terrorists mostly because of our unconditional support for Israel. Even Bin Laden himself admitted he called for Jihad against America in 1997 because of our support for Israel.
If being allied with Israel is supposed to keep the peace in the Middle East, it’s hasn’t done a great job.
The Israel invasion of Lebanon made the region less stable and led directly to the creation of Hezbollah.
It’s also led the suicide bombers killing 250 marines because of a mess made by Israel that the US had to clean up.
They also outright refused to help us with the soviets on several occasions, and after Israel refused to interact with soviet ground troops, former pentagon officials even said the benefit of having Israel as an ally in the region was grotesquely over-exaggerated.
We couldn’t even use them as a forward base because our presence there would cause political problems in the Arab world and make the soviet situation worse.
Israel Hiding Jewish American Pedophiles
Many Jewish people have decided to use the right of return to build their lives in Israel – after all, the law is meant to offer anyone who is ethnically Jewish a legal way to come to Israel and become a part of the Jewish state. But sometimes this law is used by dangerous criminals attempting to escape justice.
A CBS News investigation recently found that many accused American pedophiles flee to Israel, and bringing them to justice can be difficult because of the protection they receive from the Jewish state.
More than 60 sex offenders from Jewish communities in the United States have fled to the Promised Land and are hiding mainly in ultra-Orthodox communities in Jerusalem.
The law enforcement agencies have failed to address the problem, leaving the work to civilian organizations in the U.S., which track down these people in Israel and helps arrest them.
This was the case with Jimmy Karow, a dangerous sex offender who appeared on Interpol’s 50 most-wanted list and who hid in Israel for the last 20 years having fled there after sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl in Oregon. Since his arrival in Israel, where he is known as Yosef, Karow was convicted in another pedophilia case and even jailed but was never punished for the assault in Oregon.
Thanks to community citizen groups and their pressure, in 2019 he was arrested and brought to justice.
Another case mentioned in the CBS report is Mordechai Yomtov, who pleaded guilty in 2002 to abusing three boys before fleeing to Israel.
A community group was able to track him down in Jerusalem, where he is living illegally, and spoke to him while recording him with a hidden camera.
Yomtov did not admit to any wrongdoing in the case of Mendy Hauck, who was allegedly abused as an eight-year-old when Yomtov worked as a Hebrew teacher. The reported offenses took place in 1999. Police arrested Yomtov in 2001 for sexually assaulting three other boys, aged 8 to 10, at a Los Angeles cheder (religious school for boys).
According to the Forward, He pleaded guilty, served a year in jail, and was required to register as a sex offender. Once freed on probation in 2002, however, Yomtov fled the US via Mexico, where he was able to continue fleeing to Israel with a fake passport. He remains at large to this day.
And then there is Malka Leifer, who was wanted in Australia for no less than 74 counts of sexual assault and rape involving eight of the girls at the ultra-Orthodox school in Melbourne where she was the principal. Leifer was arrested, after fleeing to Israel in 2008 but managed to dodge a trial on the grounds of mental incompetence.
Only in February 2018 was she re-arrested on suspicion of pretending to be mentally ill in order to avoid extradition. Her re-arrest was the result of work by community groups that tracked her down and not the Israeli government.
Israeli Health Minister Yaakov Litzman is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation over suspicions that he used his position to help Leifer.
Israeli authorities eventually extradited Malka Leifer to Australia after pressure from community organizations and several governments early in early 2021, nearly 13 years after she fled Melbourne after a six-year legal process during which a court determined that she had feigned mental illness in order to avoid facing justice.
In a speech in Hebrew on October 28, Netanyahu justified the Israeli slaughter of civilians in Gaza with a biblical reference to Amalek.
You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember. And we fight. Our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza and in all other regions in Israel, are joining the 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 October 73 War, and all other wars in this country. Our hero troops, they have one supreme main goal: to completely defeat the murderous enemy, and to guarantee our existence in this country.
In Netanyahu’s Holy Bible, God gives his chosen people Palestine, and the same God commands them to exterminate the Amalekites, an Arab people that stands in their way. Yahweh asks Moses to not only exterminate the Amalekites, but to “blot out the memory of Amalek under heaven” (Deuteronomy 25:19).
It was left to Saul to finish them up: “kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” Yahweh instructs him (1Samuel 15:8). Because Saul spared the Amalekite king Agag, Yahweh withdrew the kingship from him and drove him mad: “I regret having made Saul king, since he has broken his allegiance to me and not carried out my orders” (15:11). The holy prophet Samuel, who had a direct line of communication with Yahweh, had to butcher Agag himself (“hewed Agag in pieces,” in the Revised Standard Version). Yahweh then gave the kingship to David, who proved a more obedient exterminator, for example when he put the people of Rabba “under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon” (2 Samuel 12:31).
Despite their complete genocide in the Bible, the Amalekites remain the eternal nightmare of Israel. Amalek came to be associated, like his grandfather Esau, with Rome and Christianity, but also with Iran, because the villain of the Book of Esther, Haman, is referred to as an Agagite, that is, a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag. That is why the hanging of Haman with his ten sons and the massacre of 75,000 Persians are often conflated in Jewish tradition with the extermination of the Amalekites and the brutal execution of their king. The Torah reading on the morning of Purim is taken from the account of the battle against the Amalekites, which ends with the conclusion that “Yahweh will be at war with Amalek generation after generation” (Exodus 17:16).[1]
In a 2009 New York Times piece called “Israel’s Fears, Amalek’s Arsenal,” Jeffrey Goldberg reports that, when he asked one of Netanyahu’s adviser’s “to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran,” the answer he received was: “Think Amalek.”[2] Now Netanyahu is calling on Israelis to remember Amalek while their army shells Gaza, men, women, children, infants and livestock included.
Netanyahu has not gone insane, as I explained earlier. He is simply possessed by the Bible, because Israel and the Bible are one. Netanyahu’s insanity is rooted in the Bible. His obsession with Amalek is a collective one, shared by Zionist religious Jews around the world. Let us, for example, listen to this lecture by Rabbi Eliyahu Kin, delivered in 2009, on the question: “Why must Jews destroy Amalek?” Let me summarize it for you. The Amalekites deserved their fate because they opposed the will of God. The will of God is good, and opposing the will of God is evil. So exterminating Amalek is good, while saving just one Amalekite, as Saul did, is evil. In fact, since God is good, exterminating Amalek is the expression of his goodness. And since “the best way to love what Hashem (God) loves is to hate what Hashem hates,” hating Amalek is loving God. The reason why the Amalekites hate the Jews is not because the Jews want to exterminate them. “What bothers Amalek is that the Jew believes in mussar, morality, ethics, being good, being nice.” The Amalekites are also evil because they oppose the Torah — in which God orders them to be exterminated. Ultimately, Rabbi Kin summarizes, “we are cruel to Amalek because we need to be. Because that is exactly what they would do to us if they had the chance.” Why? Because Amalek “is a concentration of hatred.” And Jews must hate hatred — except the hatred of God for Amalek, which they must love as an expression of God’s love. How do you deal with such collective madness?
More to the point: what’s wrong with Netanyahu quoting the Bible? It is the Holy Bible, isn’t it? The Word of God! We, Christianized peoples, have been taught too that in ancient times God chose the Jews, gave them Palestine, and commanded them to exterminate the Amalekites (and the Midianites, and many other peoples, seven nations in all). What can Christians possibly object to the rabbi? That God was hot-blooded in those days, but has now cooled down? That the Amalekites are no longer around, or now have the right to oppose the biblical project? (Because, you know, we are Israel now). Enough with all this hand-wringing! After all, God, the creator of the universe, does order, in our Christian Bible, to exterminate Amalek, men, women, children and babies (and cattle, for Yahweh makes no difference). It is undeniable, indisputable, irrefutable.
Let us face it: the God of the Old Testament is a bloodthirsty devil. Some people have known that for a long time, and tried to warn us. Bakunin, for example, who saw the Jewishness in Marxism, stated in God and the Statethat of all the gods adored by men, Yahweh “was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty.” To quote from John Kaminski, “Yahweh gave the Jews the right to steal the lands of others (Deuteronomy 6:10-13, 6:18-19, 7:1-2). Yahweh gave the Israelites the right to commit genocide, to totally annihilate the peoples whose lands they had the God-given right to take as their own (Deuteronomy 7:16). Yahweh gave the Israelites the right to ‘destroy them (other peoples) with a mighty destruction until they be destroyed’ (Deuteronomy 7:23). Yahweh gave the Israelites the right to murder and plunder other races of their property (Exodus 3:20-22). Yahweh has made the Israelites a ‘holy’ people, a master race among other races (Deuteronomy 7:6).”
Bakunin was among those insightful intellectuals who, in the nineteenth century, woke up to the realization that Israel had been the creation of the most evil deity from the beginning. But most people didn’t hear them, because Israel was, for Christians, an abstraction, a story, a holy legend from mythological times. But today, Israel is real, and its hellish character is plainly manifested for everyone to see. Never before has the realization of Israel’s evil soul been so accessible. We are living in a time of revelation, and we’d better not miss it.
“The Palestinians have unwittingly sacrificed themselves for the purposes of enlightening the entire planetary civilization to the profound evil and satanic nature of the Zionist State of Israel,” wrote the Armchair Prophet.[3] A profound statement. Gaza is Christ, and Israel is Israel.[4] But Gaza is also Amalek. Amalek was Christ from the beginning, but we didn’t see it, because we were told that Christ was Yahweh’s son, and one with him. Now we can begin to see our tragic mistake. This is our wake up call. Let us face the truth about Yahweh and the chosen people he created in his image (or the other way around).
Why have Christians never noticed that, when he promised Israel domination over the nations on the condition of exclusive worship, Yahweh was the very same devil that later appeared to Jesus and “showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor [and] said to him, ‘I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage’” (Matthew 4:8-10). After all, Satan is just an “angel of Yahweh” in the Hebrew Bible (Numbers 22 and 32), indistinguishable from Yahweh himself in 1Chronicles 21.
Netanyahu is opening our eyes, and I am eagerly awaiting his next Bible lesson. After mentioning Amalek, he referred to the biblical Joshua as a “Jewish hero”. Please read the Book of Joshua to understand what he means, and what all Israelis who applaud him mean. Joshua committed genocide after genocide on the order of Yahweh, killing “men and women, young and old” (6:21) In the whole land, he “left not one survivor and put every living thing under the curse of destruction, as Yahweh, god of Israel, had commanded” (10:40).
Three days before that speech, Netanyahu declared to his people: “We shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah.” You may recall from your Sunday school that Isaiah prophesied a time when all nations “will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into sickles” (Isaiah 2:4). But go back to your Bible, and read the full prophecy to understand what Netanyahu means. Isaiah is about a time when “the Law will issue from Zion” and Israel “will judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples” (2:3-4). Here is more from Isaiah: “the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed” (60:12); “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (60:16); “You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory” (61:5-6). “Yahweh’s sword is gorged with blood, it is greasy with fat,” says Isaiah on the occasion of “a great slaughter in the land of Edom [Amalek’s grandfather]” (34:6).
One man, in the second century AD, saw clearly that Jesus could not possibly be the son of Yahweh, that he was instead his archenemy. His name was Marcion. Scholars call him a Gnostic, because he taught that Yahweh was an evil demiurge, and Christ the good god coming down from Heaven to save us from Yahweh. Most texts we call Gnostics promoted this view, in one form or another. In the Apocryphon of John, also from the second century, Yahweh (or Yaltabaoth) is the first of a series of demonic entities called archons, who usurps the position of God by proclaiming: “I am a jealous god, there is none other than me.” Yaltabaoth and the other archons attempt to imprison Adam in the Garden of Eden, a false paradise. But Christ, who is the first aeon, sends Eve to Adam to release the light trapped in him, and lead him to eat the liberating fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
Modern scholarship has established that Gnosticism arose within Judaism, probably in Samaria. In the highly regarded opinion of Gilles Quispel, Gnosticism was a Jewish heresy before it was a Christian heresy. During the first three centuries there were Christian Gnostics and anti-Christian Gnostics, but all are Jews.[5] As a Jewish heresy, Gnosticism can be seen as a rejection by spiritual Jews of the materialistic and sadistic nature of Yahweh. Gnostics, however, still took their Torah too seriously and accepted the premise that, before becoming the god of Israel, Yahweh had been “God”, the creator of the world. In that sense, they were still under a biblical delusion.
In the Jewish infancy of Christianity, there was a struggle between Gnostic Christians and anti-Gnostics Christians. Marcion wrote the first evangelium and established the first organized ekklesia. It was still very strong in the early third century, according to Tertullian, who also tells us that the Gnostic teacher Valentinus almost became bishop of Rome (Against Marcion). Gnostics, relying on Paul’s teaching, believed that Jesus’s new covenant freed them from Moses’s covenant, but their enemies insisted on continuity, and claimed that the New Covenant (or Testament) fulfilled rather than contradicted the Old one. The anti-Gnostics ultimately prevailed, and the Jewish Tanakh became part of the Christian canon. That might have been a wise political move as long as the purpose was to convert Jews. But as Christianity became a Gentile religion, it resulted in Gentiles worshipping Yahweh along with Christ.
Christianity has given us the powerful story of Christ, the man who wanted to free Jews from their evil, ethnocentric god, and was martyred for it. But Christianity also became Yahweh’s Trojan Horse into Gentile civilization. The spirit and the teaching of Christ came to us mixed with the spirit and the teaching of Yahweh. The spirit of Yahweh is the spirit of mass murder: “The spirit of Yahweh came upon him (Samson), and he went down to Ashkelon, where he killed thirty of their men and despoiled them” (Judges 14:19). The spirit of Yahweh is in all Israel, now, stronger than ever before, fed by a century of bloodbaths orchestrated by Zionists.
In a book written under the pen-name Seymour Light, The Marcion Thesis, Revisited,which I recommend, Nick Kollerstrom (also author of the memorable Terror on the Tube) points out that, if we had to draw Yahweh’s portrait, he would have to be a dragon: he “rides through the heavens” (Deuteronomy 33:22) with his wings (Psalm 17:8, 36:8, 91:4), while “smoke rises from his nostrils, and from his mouth devouring fire” (Psalms 18:8 and Samuel 22:9). Yahweh also shares with the evil dragons of lore his lust for gold which he hoards in his dwelling place: “Mine is the silver, mine the gold!” (Haggai 2:8). (According to 1Kings 10:14, the amount of gold hoarded each year into Salomon’s temple was “666 talents of gold”). Like dragons, Yahweh is also a consumer of young virgins: thirty-two of them were offered to him after the slaughter of the Midianites, presumably burnt as holocausts together with the oxen, donkeys and sheep that were also part of Yahweh’s share (Numbers 31).
In the episode of Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Baal, Yahweh’s devouring fire is given as the definite proof that he is God: “You must call on the name of your god, and I shall call on the name of Yahweh; the god who answers with fire, is God indeed” (1Kings 18:24). How spiritual! It is Yahweh’s devouring fire that is now unleashed on Gaza.
You better realize it now: Yahweh, the god of Israel, is Satan.
For more evidence, read my other Unz Review articles:
[1] Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 122-125, 4.
[2] Jeffrey Goldberg, “Israel’s Fears, Amalek’s Arsenal,” New York Times, May 16, 2009, on www.nytimes.com
[3] The Armchair Prophet, “What’s happening in Gaza right now is beyond biblical…beyond apocalyptic,” State of the Nation, November 2, 2023, on https://stateofthenation.co/?p=193985
[5]Gilles Quispel,Gnostica, Judaica, Catholica. Collected Essays of Gilles Quispel, edited by Johannes Van Oort, Brill, 2008. Also Attilio Mastrocinque, From Jewish Magic to Gnosticism, Mohr Siebeck, 2005.
California: Pro-Palestinian protesters delay military supply ship from departing Port of Oakland – by Carlos Castaneda –
Protesters demanding a cease-fire in the Israeli war in Gaza blocked a U.S. military supply ship leaving the Port of Oakland for hours Friday, 3 November 2023, by locking themselves to the vessel.
The protesters also blocked the entrance to Berth 20 where the container carrier Cape Orlando is moored. Protest groups say the ship is bound for Israel after being loaded with weapons and military equipment in Tacoma, Washington.
The protest was organized by the San Francisco-based Arab Resource Organizing Center. Police were at the scene of the protest which appeared to number about 200 people, many holding Palestinian flags and signs demanding an end to U.S. military aid to Israel.
The protest began at 6:45 a.m. and has not disrupted any other cargo handling activities, according to a spokesperson for the Port of Oakland.
Three Palestinian supporters were holding on to a rope ladder and refusing to let workers close a door to the military ship. A U.S. Coast Guard negotiator tried to convince them to get off the ship, but protestors refused.
“It’s a U.S. Military ship. It’s destined to go to Tacoma [Washington], pick up U.S. military arms and then take those arms to Israel,” claimed Palestinian protestor Meena Abushamala.
KPIX has not been able to confirm that information with the government.
Abushamala was one of many demonstrators that blocked a port entrance to the ship. She said she lost several relatives in the war.
“One missile killed three generations. An uncle, their son, and their child,” said Abushamala. “I’m enraged that our government is still sending aid, missiles to Israel.”
Another Palestinian protestor, Noura Khouri, said she also lost a relative in a bombing last week.
“It’s literally impossible for any of us to sleep, to eat, to work, to carry on with our lives,” said Khouri.
Some Jewish people also joined in the protest.
“I’m here as a Jewish person, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. And I grew up hearing the stories of my grandmother surviving the Nazi’s Holocaust, losing her entire family. And today, Israel is weaponizing my history, the history of my family that was killed, to kill Palestinian families in Gaza,” said Alameda resident Anna Baltzer.
Just before 3 p.m., authorities removed the three protesters who held onto the rope ladder, and the ship made its way out of the port. Abushamala and other protestors were disappointed. They hope their action will have a lasting impact on lawmakers.
“No more U.S. military aid to Israel. It is within your power. Do not let the fear stop you,” said Abushamala.
Oakland Police told KPIX it was monitoring the protest and collaborating with the U.S. Coast Guard and the Port of Oakland to ensure the demonstrations remained peaceful. Oakland police said told KPIX they had not arrested anyone.
According to a release from AROC, three protesters who climbed onto the vessel were detained by the U.S. Coast Guard — the federal agency with jurisdiction on the water. As it is an ongoing investigation, Coast Guard Petty Officer Hunter Schnabel said Friday evening that he could not provide specifics but confirmed “multiple individuals are currently under investigation.”
The release from AROC called on “communities in cities around the country and across the world to be on alert for vessels carrying similar cargo.”
xenagoguevicene 