It was well-encapsulated in this 10-minute compilation video from 12 March 2014, “Ukraine Crisis – What You’re Not Being Told” (also archived here and here).
That 10-minute documentary’s only error is at 22 seconds in, where its narrator said the year “two thousand thirteen” when he obviously meant to say “two thousand fourteen”; but, other than that, I have verified the authenticity and correctness of each one of its many sources and allegations, and find that it is the best (most comprehensive, brief, and accurate) single history of the 20-26 February 2014 coup in Ukraine, which has yet been done.
It shows Victoria Nuland, whom Obama had selected to plan, organize, oversee, and direct, the coup in Ukraine, instructing America’s Ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to get to become appointed to take over control of Ukraine’s government after the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, will be overthrown. That phone call from Nuland occurred on 27 January 2014, a month before Obama’s coup there was completed, and the person whom she selected to run Obama’s government of Ukraine was the rabidly anti-Russian Arseniy Yatsenyuk, or “Yats” as she sometimes referred to him in this video — and he did get the appointment a month later.
Here is that complete phone-conversation, which is merely excerpted in the 10-minute documentary. And here is my transcript of it, along with my explanations of what she was referring to and why.
This recorded phone-conversation is the most “smoking gun” evidence that I know of for any coup that has ever taken place; and for this reason and also on the basis of all of the other evidences on this coup, I agree with what the founder and head of the Stratfor ‘private CIA’ corporate advisory firm said about the matter, that it was “the most blatant coup in history”. (But then, a year later, at the Website of a former convicted Wall-Street trader, he posted an opinion-article to which he slipped in, as-if it were an aside, mention that though on “the internet and Twitter, … you will find me saying the United States staged the most blatant coup in history,” and he went on to misrepresent what he had actually said, and he then alleged that he hadn’t said that, and then he said that “It was no coup,” it was nothing more than “a systematic campaign to saturate the internet, the Russians fed the quote back into some major Russian print publications, then back onto the internet, until it resonated and fed back on itself,” and, so, he alleged that it was just a nothingburger, which “the Russians” had cooked up. He needed to retain his mega-corporate customers.)
On 4 November 2019, I headlined “The Obama Regime’s Plan to Seize the Russian Naval Base in Crimea,” and provided my latest summary of, and links to, the evidences regarding the planning of Obama’s coup in Ukraine, and of the Obama regime’s extensive pollings of Ukrainians, and especially of Crimeans, both before the coup and after the coup, and noted the polls’ findings, which confirmed and made clear that the U.S. Government couldn’t go public with their poll-findings, because those findings were entirely consistent with the 16 March 2014 Russian-managed pebiscite in Crimea, which had found that 95.6% of Crimea’s voters had marked the option of “Join the Russia Federation as Federal subject of Russia.” Although that percentage was slightly higher than the pollings that the U.S. regime had commissioned, which were closer to 90%, any public challenging of that plebiscite on the basis of these poll-findings would have required the U.S. regime to acknowledge that both the U.S. polls and the Russian plebiscite could simultaneously be right; and, so, there was no U.S.-and-allied publicity given to those polls.
Furthermore: any such allegation (challenging the Crimean plebiscite’s 95.6% figure) by the U.S. regime might also cause to become dredged up Obama’s plan, as part of the coup, for Russia’s main naval base, which since 1783 has been in Crimea, to become replaced by yet another U.S. naval base (the only part of Obama’s plan that had failed — perhaps because Crimeans overwhelmingly despised the U.S. Government, by a margin of 76.2% “negative” to 2.8% “positive,” which is 96.3% negative to 3.7% positive, in the U.S. regime’s April 2014 poll of Crimeans — so, it would have been a hopeless cause for Obama to continue with that part of his plan, and to challenge that 95.6% plebiscite).
My 4 November 2019 article also documented Obama’s (Nuland’s, Yatsenyuk’s) plan to kill enough residents in the far-eastern region of Ukraine, which had voted over 90% for Yanukovych, for the population there to become either exterminated or else terrorized by the U.S.-imposed regime, so that enough of Yanukovych’s supporters would be culled from Ukraine’s electorate (around a million of them fled to Russia), so as to virtually assure that subsequently elected national leaders of Ukraine would likewise be rabidly anti-Russian, pro-U.S. regime. This ethnic cleansing by the U.S.-imposed Ukrainian regime, was likewise documented in that article.
So: this is how the war in Ukraine actually started. It started in 2014, by Obama, not by Putin (such as the U.S. regime and its colonies allege).
Even NATO’s leader Jens Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s leader Volodmyr Zelensky deny the U.S. Government’s lie that the war in Ukraine started on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, and acknowledge that it started eight years before that, in 2014; Stoltenberg said, about this, “The war didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014.” Zelensky said about it, “I made a point that the war in Ukraine has been lasting for eight years. It’s not just some special military operation.” So, the U.S. Government’s lie, such as U.S. ‘Defense’ (Offense) Secretary Lloyd Austin expressed it, on 1 June 2024, is rabidly false, that:
“In February of 2022, Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine shocked the world — and this region [Singapore]. And since then, Putin’s war of aggression has provided us all with a preview of a world that none of us would want. It’s a glimpse of a world where tyrants trample sovereign borders, a world where peaceful states live in fear of their neighbors, and a world where chaos and conquest replace rules and rights.
That’s a baldfaced lie, which blames Putin, not Obama, for the war in Ukraine.
Similar lies are common in U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, such as:
“When Russian President Vladimir Putin started the war in Ukraine, he tried to shift the blame to NATO, calling it the instigator. He argued that Russia had no choice but to defensively launch the invasion to prevent NATO from surrounding Russia from all sides. Reality, of course, was different. NATO was a defense alliance in retirement, collecting its “peace dividend” from the breakup of the Soviet Union. Most of its members maintained their defense spending below their shared commitment.” (Note that that commentator calls this “NATO … collecting its ‘peace dividend’ from the breakup of the Soviet Union” — as-if all that matters is peace for the U.S. regime, and that Russia’s authentic national-security concerns to protect Russia’s citizens against a possible U.S.-NATO invasion, should just be ignored — and that it says “NATO was a defense alliance in retirement … from the breakup of the Soviet Union,” though, in fact, that military alliance secretly continued on the American side after the USSR’s Warsaw Pact military alliance ended in 1991 — didn’t ever go into any ‘retirement’ when the Cold War on Russia’s side DID end. So: that’s not actually a “defense alliance” — it is very clearly an aggression alliance, against Russia itself.)
and,
“Putin started the war in Ukraine.”
and,
“In 2014, Putin started the war in Ukraine by annexing the Crimea.”
and,
Though the second of the two sentences in that last one is true, nothing was wrong with Putin’s having presented those demands at that time, on 17 December 2021, as his requirements for a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine issue. Ukraine is the only country whose border is a mere 317 miles — five minutes of a nuclear missile’s flying-time — away from hitting The Kremlin and so decapitating Russia’s central command. That is the reason why the U.S. regime has wanted Ukraine so much as to risk WW3 over winning it (as they did) and keeping it (as they won’t): because the U.S. regime demands to ‘win’ WW3, not to merely avoid it. If they can’t be #1 over the whole world, they don’t want anything; they don’t have any “plan B,” yet, unless it’s WW3 itself. On 29 December 2016, I headlined about “America’s Secret Planned Conquest of Russia,” tracking that plan (now called “Nuclear Primacy”) back to at least 2006 as constituting the new mainstream view in the U.S. Government; and, on 19 April 2023, I headlined “U.S. Nuclear-War Strategy”, tracking even farther back, to 1981, when Nuclear Primacy, the goal of winning WW3, first was proposed to replace the pre-existing (but still dominant in Russia and China) “Mutually Assured Destruction” or “M.A.D.” view, that nuclear weapons exist only in order to prevent a WW3, not in order to win a WW3 (via attaining and using “Nuclear Primacy”).
If Obama had not wanted the war in Ukraine, then he wouldn’t have started it. He wouldn’t have hired people such as Victoria Nuland to get it done. (Maybe he had gotten a good laugh privately when he had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 before he had achieved anything in his Presidency.) He, and not Putin, started the war in Ukraine. Under international law, “the aggressor” is supposed to be the side that STARTED the war, not the side which was mortally endangered by that aggressor and needed to respond in the way it considered existentially necessary in order to respond effectively to and divert that threat, that danger, to one’s nation’s very existence.
In this case, it is clear that the U.S. regime’s #1 objective is to control the entire world, all countries, including Russia and China, and Iran, and Venezuela, and North Korea, and any other hold-outs. In Russia’s case, this demand by the U.S. regime is so extreme that it placed a requirement upon Finland for Finland to allow the U.S. to position its nuclear weapons in Finland in order for Finland to be allowed to become a NATO member. Finland isn’t as close to Moscow as Ukraine is (it’s 507 miles instead of Ukraine’s 317 miles away from the Kremlin); and, so, it demanded Finland to allow its nuclear missiles, and Finland said yes. That proves how psychopathic the U.S. regime actually is.
And one should not forget the longstanding post-1991 lies by NATO about what it is: “NATO is not a threat to Russia.” / “NATO has tried to build a partnership with Russia, developing dialogue and practical cooperation in areas of common interest. Practical cooperation has been suspended since 2014 in response to Russia’s illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea, Ukraine, which NATO will never recognise.” / “NATO is not at war with Russia.”
But the actual fact is, and has been since NATO’s very start in 1949: NATO has always been the post-WW2 U.S. regime’s main military alliance to conquer Russia. For it to have continued after the Soviet Union ended in 1991, is, and should be punished as, an immense international-war crime. It is simply WW3 pushing to happen. Why, then, are not the world’s other nations demanding that NATO end — demanding: End NATO Now! NATO has terrorized all decent countries. They are too afraid to condemn it publicly. (Similarly, for a different example” “Israel can get away with mass-murder because the world’s super power, USA, defends and excuses them of accountability.“)
The 14 November 2014 ARD German Government TV network broadcast interview of Putin https://www.youtube.com/watch?
https://web.archive.org/web/
“English: Exclusive ARD interview with Russian President Putin” | Günther Jauch | ARD. 17.Nov.2014
10:55: JAUCH: For the West, this [Russia’s annexation of Crimea] was a clear breach of international law. PUTIN: What’s the question? JAUCH: The question is, did you underestimate the reaction of the West? … PUTIN: We find this reaction absolutely disproportionate. … When we’re confronted with the accusations that Russia has violated international law, I can hardly feel anything but astonishment. What is international law? First and foremost, it’s the charter of the United Nations. … A vivid and fresh precedent was set in Kosovo. JAUCH: You mean the judgment of the International Criminal Court, with respect to Kosovo, which said that Kosovo had the right to self-determination, and that the people of Kosovo could vote on whether they wanted to have their own state or not? PUTIN: Exactly so, but there’s more to it than that. The most important thing mentioned there was that in terms of self-determination, people populating a certain area are not obliged to ask the opinion of the central authorities of the state where they are resident. There’s no need to have permission from the central governmental authorities, in order to take the necessary steps to self-determination. This is the most crucial point, and nothing that transpired in Crimea was any different from that which happened in Kosovo. I am deeply convinced that Russia has not violated any international laws. I am very open about this. It’s a fact, and we’ve never concealed it. … Besides, what is democracy? You and I know very well, what does demos mean, it means people. Democracy means the rule by the people. In our case, it’s the people’s right to be independent.
— earlier in it was:
https://web.archive.org/web/
8:32: JAUCH: There was an agreement [between the national Government and the Maidan demonstrators, on 20 February 2014] which called for national conciliation and a national government. This agreement lasted about 24 hours and then was dead. You followed the events of the 21st of February very closely. Did you talk with President Obama or Chancellor Merkel at the time? PUTIN: Yes. Indeed, on the 21st of February, it was not only the German Minister of Foreign Affairs who came to the Ukraine, to Kiev, but also the ministers of Foreign Affairs of Poland and France. They acted as guarantors [along with the EU’s representative] for the agreement between the then President Yanukovych and the opposition. They were agreed that the process should be carried out peacefully. They signed this document, this agreement between the authorities and the opposition as guarantors, and the authorities actually thought that it would be executed accordingly. And indeed, I had a phone conversation with the President of the United States on the same evening [February 21st], and we discussed this problem in exactly this manner. However, the next day, a coup took place, despite the guarantees given by the Western powers [Obama’s Polish and French, and EU Minister of Foreign Affairs, stooges], the buildings of the Presidential Administration and the Government were taken over. In this context, I would like to stress the following: [10:00:] Either the European Minister of Foreign Affairs [Lord Catherine Ashton, recorded here in a private 26 February 2014 phone call about this matter] shouldn’t have signed the paper and guaranteed the execution of the agreement, or, having done so they should have insisted on its execution. Instead, they distanced themselves from it. Moreover, they seem to prefer not to remember the agreement, as-if it had never existed. I think it’s completely wrong; and even more so, it’s counterproductive. [10:38]
The U.S.-and-allied line on why Yanukovych was overthrown was that he had turned down the EU’s offer on 20 November 2013. But actually, that was a set-up deal, set up to be rejected in order for Nuland’s plan then to go directly into action. As I headlined on 27 March 2015, “The $160 Billion Cost: Why Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych Spurned EU’s Offer, on 20 Nov. 2013”. Even earlier than that, Putin had explained this to the Russian people, though without mentioning the $160 billion bottom-line price tag for Ukraine to enter the EU:
On 5 June 2014, less than a half year after Obama had grabbled Ukraine and started the war there, Putin did an interview about the Ukraine war, on Russia’s Voice of Russia channel. It was broadcast the next day, headlining “Russia never annexed Crimea, no plans to intervene in Ukraine, it’s a Western delusion – Putin”. Here are highlights:
On what happened in Ukraine:
Vladimir Putin: There was a conflict and that conflict arose because the former Ukrainian president refused to sign an association agreement with the EU. Russia had a certain stance on this issue. We believed it was indeed unreasonable to sign that agreement because it would have a grave impact on the economy, including the Russian economy. We have 390 economic agreements with Ukraine and Ukraine is a member of the free trade zone within the CIS. And we wouldn’t be able to continue this economic relationship with Ukraine as a member of the free trade zone [with the EU]. We discussed this with our European partners. Instead of continuing the debates by legitimate and diplomatic means, our European friends and our friends from the United States supported the anti-constitutional armed coup. This is what happened. We did not cause this crisis to happen. We were against this course of events.
The point is no one should be brought to power through an armed anti-constitutional coup, and this is especially true in post-Soviet space where government institutions are not fully mature. When it happened, some people accepted the regime and were happy about it, while other people, say, in eastern and southern Ukraine, just won’t accept it. And it is vital to talk with the people who didn’t accept this change of power instead of sending tanks, as you said yourself, instead of firing missiles at civilians from the air and bombing non-military targets.
On Russian troops in Ukraine:
The interviewer told the Russian President that the United States claimed they had evidence that Russia had intervened in the conflict by sending troops and weapons.
Vladimir Putin: Proof? Why don’t they show it? The entire world remembers the US Secretary of State demonstrating the evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, waving around some test tube with washing powder in the UN Security Council. Eventually, the US troops invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein was hanged and later it turned out there had never been any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq [ever since 1998]. You know, it’s one thing to say things and another to actually have evidence. I will tell you again: no Russian troops…
There are no armed forces, no Russian ‘instructors’ in southeastern Ukraine, and there never were any.
On whether Russia wanted to annex Ukraine and tried to destabilize the situation there:
Vladimir Putin: We never did that. The Ukrainian government must now sit down and talk with their own people instead of using weapons, tanks, planes and helicopters. …
On Crimea:
Vladimir Putin: It’s a delusion that Russian troops annexed Crimea. Russian troops did nothing of the kind.
Russian troops were in Crimea under an international treaty on the deployment of the Russian military base. It’s true that Russian troops helped Crimeans hold a referendum on their (a) independence and (b) desire to join the Russian Federation. No one can prevent these people from exercising a right that is stipulated in Article 1 of the UN Charter, the right of nations to self-determination.
In accordance with the expression of the will of people who live there, Crimea is part of the Russian Federation and its constituent entity.
I want everyone to understand this clearly. We conducted an exclusively diplomatic and peaceful dialogue – I want to stress this – with our partners in Europe and the United States. In response to our attempts to hold such a dialogue and to negotiate an acceptable solution, they supported the anti-constitutional state coup in Ukraine, and following that we could not be sure that Ukraine would not become part of the North Atlantic military bloc. In that situation, we could not allow a historical part of the Russian territory with a predominantly ethnic Russian population to be incorporated into an international military alliance, especially because Crimeans wanted to be part of Russia. I am sorry, but we couldn’t act differently. …
There are basically no Russian troops abroad while US troops are everywhere. There are US military bases everywhere around the world and they are always involved in the fates of other countries even though they are thousands of kilometers away from US borders. …
On the collapse of the Soviet Union:
Vladimir Putin: We will not promote Russian nationalism [patriotism yes, nationalism no], and we do not intend to revive the Russian Empire. What did I mean when I said that the Soviet Union’s collapse was one of the largest humanitarian – above all humanitarian – disasters of the 20th century? I meant that all the citizens of the Soviet Union lived in a union state irrespective of their ethnicity, and after its collapse 25 million Russians suddenly became foreign citizens. It was a huge humanitarian disaster. Not a political or ideological disaster, but a purely humanitarian upheaval. Families were divided; people lost their jobs and means of subsistence, and had no means to communicate with each other normally. This was the problem.
Practically everything that The West alleges about the war in Ukraine is false. It’s intentionally that way, not due to any mere negligence.
The Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama deserves to be tried at the International Criminal Court for the international war crime of aggression. The biggest problem in this regard is that no sensible definition of “aggression” yet exists in international law. (At the end of that article linked-to there, I proposed a new definition of the term. One of my longer articles explained the history behind that immense collective failure.) For another example of that failure: How is perpetrating an international coup — which in reality is an international war-crime; and it was that against Iran in 1953, Chile in 1973, Ukraine in 2014, and so many others — being addressed in current international law? It’s not; it is instead ignored. The International Criminal Court was designed by victor countries against victim countries. It wasn’t designed to sustain peace and prevent war. It’s a bad joke. However, historians nonetheless have an obligation to 100% truth, never to falsify. In the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’), they shirk that obligation, because 100% truth can cripple their careers. This is the reality, no matter how much historians in some countries (the countries that have dominated the world for far too long) might publicly deny it. Academic scholarship is profoundly corrupted by this reality.
The latest version of YouGov’s “World’s Most Admired” pollings around the world is the “World’s most admired 2021” version; and it is headlined: “The Obamas remain the world’s most admired man and woman”.
The post Obama’s Guilt for Ukraine’s War first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Orientation
How dare you!
Anyone who is critical of the Democratic party from the left will be greeted by these slogans, warnings and accusations.
What is dogmatism?
A little over a year ago I wrote an article titled The Dogmatic Personality. In it I attempted to show fourteen characteristics of dogmatic thinking and contrasted it to open-minded thinking. Please see the table at the end of this article. As in my previous article, I will follow Judy J. Johnson’s book What’s So Wrong with Being Absolutely Right: The Dangerous Nature of Dogmatic Belief.
Which social class is dogmatic?
When we think of a dogmatic personality, we are likely to imagine a conservative “Archie Bunker” type, a lower middle-class or working-class man. The open-minded person seems likely to be a well-educated middle-class or upper middle-class liberal, and probably someone who votes for the Democratic Party. But times have changed. For the last 50 years, the Democratic Party has shifted from a center-left party to a right-wing Neoliberal party which has been increasingly embattled and compromised through its involvement in overseas wars, a deindustrialization process, financial debt accumulation and austerity programs for working class and poor people. I will describe in this article that, in fact, the Democratic Party has become a dogmatic, authoritarian party whose leaders and loyalist followers can easily be characterized as dogmatic in all fourteen characteristics.
What is the relationship between dogmatism and authoritarianism?
Now that you have reviewed the fourteen characteristics of dogmatic thinking in the table, we need to clarify what its relationship is to authoritarianism. Johnson sees authoritarianism as a subcategory of dogmatism. According to Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarian Specter, authoritarianism means the principle of blind submission to authority, as opposed to individual autonomy in thinking and acting. He defines authoritarianism as the co-variation of three kinds of attitudes:
The first nine characteristics of dogmatism plus characteristic number 14 are all psychological or social psychological qualities. Authoritarianism is more sociological involving the relationship between groups (characteristics 10-13). In terms of personality, Judy Johnson says that 6 out of the 14 characteristics of dogmatism would qualify a personality as dogmatic. While it is hard to imagine an authoritarian personality with characteristics 10-13 would not have the other dogmatic qualities as well, it is not too far-fetched to imagine a dogmatic person minding their p’s and q’s when it comes to large groups.
My claim
My aim in this article is that the Democratic Party and its upper middle class loyalists have all of these dogmatic and authoritarian characteristics.
Five Cognitive Ingredients in Dogmatic Thought
The Five Characteristics of Dogmatic Cognition are:
Intolerance of ambiguity
The Neoliberal Democrats insist that there are only two choices: Democrats or Republicans. Any votes outside the Democratic Party are a vote for Trump. Under these conditions, the Democrats cannot imagine that people voting for a third party do so in the hopes of building a third party over time. For them a vote for a third party can only be a vote for a second party. But what about the people who don’t vote? In any given election, over the past fifty years between 40-50% of the population do not vote. For Neoliberal Democrats this is not a problem. Why? Because they treat people who don’t vote as if they are the ignorant, stupid or apathetic lower classes. What Neoliberal Democrats cannot comprehend is that the reason people do not vote is because there are no candidates that represent their interests. They think the uncommitted are weighing between them and a Green party, when what is really going on is the uncommitted weighing between voting Green and not voting at all.
Defensive cognitive closure
The Neoliberal Democratic candidates act like they are entitled to the vote of anyone on the socialist left. They don’t think they have to work to get it, or that they might be expected to answer to potential voters for their past failures. They insist they are the only game in town for “reasonable” people. Only a privileged person can afford to vote for the Green Party. In other words, racial minorities are all voting Democrat and as a white person you would be voting against them. The problem with this argument is that Trump is gaining more and more support of African American and Latino voters. Just as large numbers of working-class people left the Democratic Party decades ago, so now their much-vaulted race base is starting to break ranks.
Rigid certainty (cannot state the conditions for admitting they are wrong)
As many of you know, the philosopher of science Karl Popper claimed that a good scientific theory must insist on stating the conditions under which they can be proven wrong. It is also a good rule in argumentation classes to state the conditions under which your claim could be wrong. Do the Democratic Party politicians or their loyalists do this when they solicit new voters? No, they don’t. To be fair, the entire politician system in Mordor is not set up for parties to actually account for the contradictions between their promises and what they deliver. But if you talk to an upper-middle class loyalist and ask them what are the conditions under which they would give up on their loyalty to the Democrats they look like deer caught in the headlights. Next to no one has traced the relationship between promises and deliverance. Though well-educated, they have not thought seriously about what their liberal beliefs really are and how well the party has been faithful to them. No matter what the Democrats have done or not done over the past four years, they expect you to wipe the slate clean and simply say we have to vote for them.
Cognitive compartmentalization – sealing off contradictory beliefs
My hunch is that a large number of people who consider themselves liberal today believe the following:
I could go on but you get the idea. The problem is that when the Democratic Party has gained power over the last 50 years they have not done any of these things. It takes a great deal of cognitive internal gyrations to know these things and still vote for Neoliberal Democrats.
Lack of self-reflectiveness – refusal to bend back and analyze themselves
Hillary Clinton, with all the Deep State wealth and the Neoliberal capitalists behind her, managed to lose to Donald Trump. In a political party that was sensitive and self-reflective, they would say “where did we go wrong? Why did so many people not vote? We used to depend on working class votes. How can it be that many working class people are Republicans? What is wrong with our candidates? What population demographics were weak?”. They did none of this. Instead, in true paranoic style they blamed the Russians. Since 2016, whenever the Democratic Party failed it was the Russians. This is a powerful change in party affairs. For 15 years the Democratic Party mocked and dismissed the 9/11 Truth movement for its tinfoil, paranoic conspiracy theory. For the past eight years the Democratic Party has so little understanding of its right-wing 50-year drift that its answer to all its problems are now “the Russians”.
The Four Emotional Disorders
Although Neoliberal Democrats, being upper middle class, have more control over their minds than working class dogmatists they can still reify their emotions, making them “rigid states” rather than processes that can be changed by cognitive changes in interpretations, explanations or assumptions. Neoliberal Democrats, like everyone else, has a need for social connection, but as an upper-middle person they are surrounded by most people who are not like them. Yet they must find commonality with them became they want them to join the Democratic Party. Because they are more or less oblivious of the social class distinctions, they find ways to avoid talking about them. They are most emotionally sensitive to race relations, since most African-Americans and Latinos are not upper middle class.
The four kinds of emotional issues that arise, according to Judy Johnson are:
For Neoliberal Democrats the anxiety and fear they have centers around:
Anxiety and fear
Faithfully, like clockwork, the only claim to winning voters over is fear of is what will happen if a right-winger like Trump gets in. Over the past 4 years with the Democratic Party in power, we have billions of dollars wasted in Ukraine followed by a massacre of Palestinians funded by the Democratic Party. How much worse can it be than this? The Neoliberal fears know no bounds. They never state the conditions under which they are willing to admit there really is not much difference between the two parties, let alone to say there is only one party, capitalism, with two wings.
Secondly, Neoliberal Democrats fear the great unleashing of the great unwashed Trump followers. These folks are imagined to be goosestepping Gestapos terrorizing these liberals when they decide to have an outdoor brunch. It will be too late for liberal Karens to call the police! In reality the laughable power of Trump’s followers came about over a temporary “take-over” of the White House in 2021. Did his followers block the roads, seize the radio and TV stations and begin broadcasting like what would happen in a real coup? No, they simply wandered around, perhaps breaking a few things before being taken over by the police. For Neoliberal Democrats, this is the end of civilization. As for their treacherous fascist leader, Trump, he was nowhere to be found.
Lack of a sense of humor
Having a sense of humor means you can step out of situations and see them in perspective. Humor allows for a break in being serious before returning to serious endeavors. Lack of humor (being humorless) means you are serious all the time. This comes out most clearly in the Neoliberal attempts to control people’s vocabulary so they are “politically correct”. Up to a point it is reasonable to expect people to upgrade their vocabulary to be more sensitive racial and sexist issues. But past a certain point, as communication grinds to a halt because every word is dissected, the situation becomes laughable. But for the Neoliberal Democrat, this is no laughing matter. The combination of self-righteousness mixed with completely unrealistic expectations makes it understandable why the right-wingers get fed up at best and full of hatred at worst.
Oversensitivity to unintended infringements which result in anger
At the same time, the Neoliberal Democrats are terrified of being called a racist.
After all, they work so hard to “understand” the history of racism and the conditions of Blacks and Latinos today. They feel betrayed when they themselves are called out on some racism. This is where accusations of being a “snowflake” really come from. For example, liberals are only dimly aware of their racism when it comes to Black politicians. For them, any Black man or woman who is well-educated must be liberal. Lo and behold, when presented with people like Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell or Barak Obama it comes as a great surprise they could be so right-wing. No, Obama was never FDR in waiting. He is a Harvard lawyer, trained in the Chicago School market fundamentalism and his political actions were consistently right-wing. But to this day Neoliberals refer to him as a great liberal. Their racism comes in when they do not grant the full political spectrum to any minority politician.
Excessive pessimism and despair
As I’ve pointed out in other articles, the beginning of Neoliberalism came about through the Rockefeller orchestrated Club of Rome report followed by a book called the Limits to Growth. Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission was founded around the same time. This was a clarion call to let Americans know that the days of abundance, a high standard of living, more leisure time and a better life through science was ending. Instead, we were told that people needed to tighten up their belts and do with less (Jimmy Carter). Why? Because nature was limited. Secondly, there were too many people on the earth and the population problem would soon be out of control. Thirdly, there was global warming caused, according to them, by the industrial revolution. Lastly, thanks to all our high living we have polluted the earth. This systemic attack on the values of the Enlightenment by the Rockefellers, together with their control over Think Tanks and Universities and mass media has been the methodical message of Neoliberal Democrats for 50 years. Ironically, the countries of the multi-polar world like China, Russia and Iran are carrying on the Promethean tradition of the Enlightenment with their infrastructure projects, harnessing of many forms of energy.
Five Behavioral Characteristics of Dogmatism
Dogmatism is not just what is going on cognitively and emotionally inside of people. Dogmatism is also about how people behave and act. The five behavioral characteristics of dogmatism are:
An Arrogant, dismissive communication style
Because Neoliberals usually make their living from speaking and writing, like lawyers and academic professors, they are at home in stressing the importance of language. Compared to them, both Trump and his supporters are at a disadvantage. Neoliberals are at their worst when it comes to attempting to control language. Secure in their tenured college professions Neoliberal professors control their classroom by making them open forums for every possible identity politics group to have their say. At the same time they insist that other members of the class learn to use the right words while addressing an identity politics group from gender pronouns on down the line. In their drive to inclusivity, they imagine they are liberating humanity and winning new people for the Neoliberal Democrats. The problem is that the largest sector of the population is unaffected by these battles about identity politics on college campuses. Some of the most interesting hypocrisy within Neoliberal Democrats is that the arm-twisting that takes place on college campuses never reaches the upper echelons of the party. Are Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer or Joe Biden going to be corrected by Kamala Harris when they refer to a non-binary man as “he” when he prefers to be addressed as a “they”?
Preoccupation with power and status in form
Neoliberal Democrats are snobs. A very simple comparison which brings this out is the difference between how they react to Obama vs how they react to Trump. Obama above all has all the formal qualities they look for. First of all, he is Black, but not too black, not Marshawn Lynch black. He is tall, slender and graceful in mannerisms. He is articulate, seems easy-going and reasonable. He doesn’t seem to get angry and he plays basketball. He went to the right schools and did well for himself as a Harvard lawyer. As Neoliberal Democrats swoon over the lure of his appearance and his rhetorical skills the way he acted as a president – the wars started, his failure to stem the economic tide of 50 years of decline, his failure to help working class Blacks economically – go unnoticed.
On the other hand, Trump is viscerally hated. He is a loud blowhard who neither knows nor cares about political protocol or diplomacy. He is fat, with a ridiculous wig along with orange face makeup. He looks like the worst lower middle-class used car salesman you can imagine. He knows nothing of history and bullies his way through press conferences. He has a string of unsuccessful business disasters under his belt and his behavior towards women infuriates Neoliberal feminists. He prides himself in mocking the politically correct. He has the attention span of a gnat and has no coherent foreign policy. But if you ask Neoliberals about his political actions, whether domestic or international they usually don’t know. What matters is they find him disgusting on a personal and psychological basis and that is enough for them and unsuited to be the President of the United States.
The same class contempt is visited upon his followers. For Neoliberals, Trump followers are “deplorables”. They are uneducated, don’t care about facts and do not know how to reason logically. They think dualistically and more are likely to be some kind of ignorant, fundamentalist Christian. They know nothing about history, or geography and could care less. They are fat, have teeth missing and don’t dress properly. They watch too much TV and are preoccupied with the worst types of entertainment from World Wrestling to Reality Shows. This class contempt blinds Neoliberal Democrats from being sympathetic to the fact that Trumpsters are overworked and underpaid, have insecure jobs and are living from paycheck to paycheck. Secure in their own professional jobs, Neoliberals are too proud to visit the Trumpeters where they live and come electoral campaigns, deal with their own discomfort. Trump did next to nothing for working-class or lower middle-class in his four years, but he did visit them, unlike Queen Hillary or Bernie Sanders who stayed close to the college campuses.
Glorification of the in-group and vilification of the out-group
For this category let’s turn from domestic to international affairs. For Neoliberal Democrats Russia has been their enemy even after the break-up of the Soviet Union. When you hear the name Vladimir Putin the Pavlovian response is “evil dictator”. There is normal reasoning about his political leadership with its pros and cons. Neoliberal Democrats who get on their hobby horses of “Putin”, “Putin” usually have no understanding of what Putin has meant for the recovery of Russia after being left for dead by Obamas buddies the Chicago boys in the 1990s. The same dualistic sloganeering treatment is metered out for Syria, Iran, Lebanon, North Korea and Venezuela.
In the case of the glorification of an in-group let us turn to Israel. “The only democracy in the Middle East” has just massacred over 40,000 Palestinians and yet the Democratic president supplied the Zionists with billions of dollars in weaponry. “Israel has a right to defend itself”! What are you, antisemitic?” Then there is the war in Ukraine. The Ukrainians fascists became “freedom fighters” for Neoliberals against the evil Putin. It never occurs to these Neoliberals that the money spent on arming Ukraine could have been spent on infrastructure repairs at home, building low-cost housing, supporting the growth of unions and upgrading the minimum wage. Since the working class is invisible to Neoliberal Democrats this alternative way of spending money never occurs to them.
Thanks to the work of Matt Ehret and Cynthia Chung, the British Empire has been exposed as at the root of imperialism in the Western world. The British Empire sided with the South in the American Civil War. All along the line, this Empire tried to prevent the United States from industrializing because it feared the competition. In the 20th century the British Empire was supporting the growth of fascism in Europe long before Mussolini or Hitler. After the Soviet Union defeated the Nazis, the British Empire helped arrange to have Nazi scientists and political bigwigs safely transported to the Western world where they were never prosecuted. Yet England is naively seen by Neoliberal Democrats as some kind of benign “liberal democracy” worthy of a “special relationship”.
Dogmatic authoritarian submission to authorities
To understand this let us look at the manner in which the Democratic Party dictated that there will be no competing candidates in the 2024 primaries. This is an attempt at totalitarian control of the party. “No” you might say, “the other candidates agreed not to run a campaign”. Was that a real democratic process? During the Moscow Purges, members of the Communist Party willingly confessed their guilt before the Central Committee and were purged. “No” say the anti-communist Democrats. There must have been some ‘sinister psychological brainwashing’ on the part of the evil Stalin”. But when it comes to the dictates from on-high, Powers that Be within the Democratic Party saying that there will be no party competition, where is the outcry from the Neoliberal Democrats? Why aren’t we permitted to imagine there must have been some sinister psychological brainwashing on the part of the Democratic Party elite to keep other candidates from running. No Neoliberal Democrat would dare point the finger at AIPAC, the most powerful Israeli Lobby in the United States. That would be antisemitic!
There is also passivity of liberal Democrats to leaving their own party and building another one. Upper middle-class Neoliberals make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. There is no reason why they couldn’t pool their money and start a new party closer to an FDR model. Sure, it would take maybe 12 years to become a force to be reckoned with. However, upper-middle class people are trained to think long-term in their work. They are well-educated and can envision a long-term trajectory, not just within Mordor, but internationally. Since liberal Democrats support capitalism, surely they are smart enough to notice that finance capital and wars are not productive for capitalism in the long-run. Why is there no movement to leave the Democrats? To do so would be disobedient to the leaders of the Democratic Party and those capitalists’ national and international interests that stand behind them.
Dogmatic authoritarian aggression towards minorities
If the Neoliberal Democratic Party lived up to its name, it would welcome competition from a third party, especially from the left. They would say “let us compete! Your program will teach us some things and the competition will be good for our ‘democracy’”. Instead, faithfully every four years it spends a great deal of money on lawsuits attempting to keep the Green Party off the ballot. It rigs the debates so the Green Party candidate cannot compete with the Republican and Democratic candidates on the stage. The Democratic Party would scream “totalitarianism” if there were only one party to vote for. Somehow the addition of one more party makes the political system go from totalitarian to democratic. But if you add a third or fourth party wouldn’t that make it more democratic? Not for Neoliberal Democrats. A third or a fourth party would make things chaotic and confuse people. Besides, authoritarian Democrats know what’s best for the people even though two thirds of the Mordor population wants more than two parties.
Conclusion
When Judy Johnson wrote her book on dogmatism it appeared that the targeted population were the lower middle-class and the working-class people. Middle-class and upper middle-class people could breathe easy since dogmatism was not really much about them. In fact, liberals like these were probably the model for fourteen characteristics of open people. My argument has shown that Neoliberal Democrats could be just as dogmatic in these fourteen characteristics. The following is a summary of how the Neoliberal Democrats and how their loyalists stack up against fourteen characteristics of dogmatism.
Intolerance of ambiguity
You cannot vote for a left-wing party. There are only two parties, you have to pick one.
Defensive cognitive closure
We are entitled to your vote regardless of past failures. Only privileged people vote for third parties.
Rigid certainty (cannot state the conditions under which they are willing to admit they are wrong)
Past failures are ignored. The Party’s 50 year slide to the right is ignored. No matter how bad they are, the Republican party (Trump) is worse.
Cognitive compartmentalization
Both the DNC and their loyal followers act like social-schizophrenics. They pretend to be following tried and true liberal principles while, in fact, they fund wars all over the world, blow up pipelines, support fascist Ukraine and support right wing Jewish fundamentalism against Palestine.
Lack of self-reflectiveness: refuse to bend-back and analyze themselves
The Democratic Party blames Russia for its losses, rather than examine its internal failures. They become paranoid and see the “evil” Putin everywhere.
Anxiety and fear
The Democratic Party and their loyalists know no limits to how the horrible things can be if Trump or any Republican wins an election. Similar fear of what the Trumpster followers will do if Trump wins. Yet their ineptitude shows in the pathetic political theater of January 2021.
Lack of a sense of humor
They have a seriousness and moralistic policing of people’s vocabulary to the point of failing to recognize the humor in trying to change people’s vocabulary all at once.
Oversensitivity to unintended consequences which result in anger
They imagine that they could never behave in a racist way, not realizing that Black politicians can be extremely right wing: Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell and Barak Obama are examples. Their racism is not granting blacks the full political spectrum of commitment that they grant to whites.
Excessive pessimism and despair about the future
By buying hook, line and sinker the anti-Enlightenment Rockefeller program of austerity, global warming, overpopulation and pollution.
Arrogant, dismissive communication style to the lower classes
The war of college professors and their loyalists in the public and students who do not care about identity politics and gender pronouns. They silence students in their communication unless it conforms to their standards. They have a double standard since the heads of the Democratic Party do not have to adhere to these standards.
Preoccupation with power and status of appearance and rhetoric
Their obsession with good form and rhetoric skills in politicians like Obama. Hatred of the bad form, appearance and personality weaknesses in both Trump and his followers. They downplay the political content in their political performance.
Glorification of the in-group and vilification of the out-group
In international affairs the out-group, the evil Russia (Putin), Iran, North Korea and Syria can never do anything good. Meanwhile in Mordor, their European vassals along with Israel carry on the great tradition of liberalism, democracy and human rights. For this in-group these Neoliberals always find extenuating circumstances for all coups, assassinations and imperialistic pillaging.
Dogmatic authoritarian submission to the authorities
This has to do with the Neoliberal Democratic, upper-middle class loyalists’ acceptance that there will be no competition in the Democratic primaries. This authoritarian move has been meekly accepted. Neither do serious New Deal liberals have the nerve to break with their own party and found a new party which is closer to an FDR model.
Dogmatic authoritarian aggression to minorities
This is found in the repression of the Green Party to block their access to getting on the ballot and for controlling the ground rules for the Green Party for getting into the debates.
Dogmatic vs Openminded Thinking
| Dogmatic Thinking | Open-minded Thinking |
| 1) Intolerance of ambiguity Black and white Either/ Or Thinking |
Tolerance of ambiguity Can suspend judgment |
| 2) Defense cognitive closure (Having barbed wire around declarations) |
Open, inviting a response |
| 3) Rigid certainty
Cannot state conditions of being proven wrong |
Flexibility Qualifying statements Falsification—stating conditions where you could be proven wrong |
| 4) Compartmentalization Sealing off contradictory beliefs |
Dialectically using contradictions to create new knowledge |
| 5) Lack of self-reflectiveness Refusal to bend-back and analyze themselves |
Self-reflective of one’s own part in creating problems |
| 6) Belief associated with anxiety or fear (they underestimate their ability to cope) |
Curiosity and confidence in their ability to cope |
| 7) lack of a sense of humor to keep perspective If humor is used, it is sarcasm to undermine the gravity of the situation |
Uses humor to keep things in perspective |
| 8) Belief associated with anger Oversensitivity to unintentional infringements |
Does emotional work Gives people the benefit of the doubt |
| 9) Excessive Pessimism | Moderate optimism, not pollyannish |
| 10) Pre-occupation with power and status | Is aware of, but not preoccupied with, status and power |
| 11) Glorification of in-group Vilification of out- group |
Critical of in-group Welcoming of out-group |
| 12) Authoritarian aggression towards minorities
|
Assertive, not aggressive Sympathetic to minorities |
| 13) Authoritarian submission Excessive obedience and blind trust of authorities |
Critical of the authorities |
| 14) Arrogant, dismissive communication style | Open to what is strange or what appears to be a problem |
• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Premise
Consider this paradox: without the Soviet Union (U.S.-designated nemesis since 1917), the United States would have never succeeded at placing the planet under its unilateral grip—often referred to by U.S. imperialists as the “new world order”. Or, rephrased differently, a world whereby the U.S. wants to rule unchallenged. This how it started: first, forget the Soviet Politburo—Mikhail Gorbachev practically annulled its role as the supreme decision-maker body of the Soviet Communist Party before proceeding to dismantle the Soviet state. In sequence, he, his foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, other anti-communists in his inner circle, and the Yeltsin group were the material instruments in the downfall of the USSR thus leading to U.S. success.
By a twist of events, with its unrelenting policy of economic, geopolitical, and military pressure to submit the new Russia to its will, the United States effectively forced it to intervene in Ukraine many years later. After 33 years from the dismantling the Soviet Union (first by Gorbachev’s contraptions of perestroika and glasnost, and then by Yeltsin’s pro-Western free-marketers), Russia is now breaking up the monstrous American order it helped create. Today, it seems that Russia have reprised its founding principles in the world arena—not as an ideologically anti-imperialist Soviet socialist republic, but as an anti-hegemonic capitalistic state.
The process for the U.S. world control worked like this: taking advantage of Gorbachev’s dismantlement of the socialist system in Eastern Europe and his planned breakup of the USSR, the United States followed a multi-pronged strategy to assert itself as the sole judge of world affairs. The starting point was the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. With the success of its two-stage war to end that occupation (Operations: Desert Shield, 1990, and Operation: Desert Storm, 1991) the United States achieved multiple objectives. Notably, it removed the USSR completely from the world scene even before it was officially dismantled, and it put Iraq and the entire Arab world under its effective control, and it tested its new world order.
Far more important, with a considerably weakened Russia taking the seat of the USSR at the Security Council, the United States finally completed its takeover of the United Nations. Although the hyperpower is known for routinely operating out of the international norms and treaties, and has myriad methods to enforce its influence or control over foreign nations, it is a fact that whoever controls the Security Council can use its resolutions—and their ever-changing interpretations— as authorization for military interventions in the name of so-called collective international legality.
Still, it is incorrect to say that the United States has become the omnipotent controller without considering the other three permanent members of the Security Council: Britain, France, and China. First, aside from being the two states with a known history of imperialism and colonialism, Britain and France are NATO countries. As such, they pose no threat to U.S. authority. This leaves China. (For now, I shall briefly discuss China’s role vis-à-vis the U.S. taking control of the Security Council after the demise of the USSR, while deferring its relevance to U.S. plans in Ukraine to the upcoming parts)
China has been rising as world power since the early 1990s onward. That being said, China’s world outlook has been consistently based on cooperation and peace among nations. China is neither an imperialist nor expansionist or interventionist state, and its claim on taking back Taiwan is historical, legal, and legitimate. That being said, China’s abstention from voting on serious issues is seriously questionable. Interpretation: China seems primarily focused on building its economic and technological structures instead of antagonizing U.S. policies that could slow its pace due to its [China] growing integration in the global capitalistic system of production. Consider the following two Western viewpoints on China’s voting practices:
Observation: but the period 2000–2006 was the post-9/11 Orwellian environment in which the United States broke all laws of the U.N. and turned the organization into its private fiefdom. Does that mean China had caved in to U.S. pressure and subscribed to its objectives? Based on its history, ideals, stated foreign policy principles, and political makeup, my answer is no. Yet, we do know that China has often been moving alongside U.S. objectives—by remaining silent on them. Examples include the U.S. 13-year blockade of and sanctions on Iraq (starting in 1990 and theoretically ending after the U.S. invasion in 2003), as well post-invasion occupation that is lasting through present by diverse ways and methods.
Observation: by abstaining, China seems playing politics and patently taking sides with Washington on critical issues. Is china conspiring, in some form, with the U.S. for selfish reasons? Are there other reasons?
No science is needed to prove that China is neither fearful of the United States nor subservient to it or uncertain about its own great place in the world. Simply, China favors dialogue over confrontation and patience over nervous impulses. Although such conduct may unnerve some who want to see China stand up to the hyper-imperialist bully, the fact is, China is no hurry to play its cards before the issue of Taiwan is resolved. Still, by its own problematic actions at the Security Council, China is not a dependable obstacle to U.S. plans. Of interest to the anti-imperialist front, however, is that China’s voting record on Iraq, Libya, and Yemen has left dire consequences on those nations.
Russia’s Intervention in Ukraine: Dialectics
Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was calculated and consequential. It was calculated based on symmetric response to U.S. long-term planning aiming at destabilizing it. The consequentiality factor is significant. Russia’s action did not precede but followed a protracted standoff with Ukraine following U.S.-organized coup in 2014. Not only did that coup topple the legitimate government of Viktor Yanukovych, but also veered Ukraine’s new rulers toward a fanatical confrontation with Russia and ethnic Russians—a sizable minority in Donbass.
Could comparing U.S. and Russian reactions to each other’s interventions shed light on the scope of their respective world policies? How does all this apply to Ukraine? First, Ukraine is not a conflict about territory, democracy, sovereignty, and all that jargon made to distract from the real issues and for the idle consumption of news. Second, to understand the war on Ukraine, we need to place Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in a historical context that —at least since the dismantlement of the USSR.
Premise
The study of reactions by political states to military interventions and wars is an empirical science. By knowing who is intervening, who is approving, and who is opposing, and by observing and cataloging their conduct vis-à-vis a conflict, we can definitely identify pretexts, motives, and objectives. For example, when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the reaction of the United States, key European countries, Israel, Arab Gulf states, Egypt, and Jordan were unanimously approving—and supporting with instigation, money, weapons, and logistics. The Soviet Union on the other hand, called for dialogue, negotiation, and other ways to end the conflict.
In the Iraq-Iran War, the U.S., Europe, and Israel wanted the war to continue so both would perish by it. Henry Kissinger the top priest of U.S. Zionism simplified the U.S. objective with these words, “The ultimate American interest in the war (is) that both should lose”. Consequently, Western weapons sales to both contenders skyrocketed—war is business. The Arab Gulf states, for example, financed and wanted Iraq to defeat Iran—its revolutionary model threatened their feudal family systems of government. They also looked for surgical ways to weaken Iraq thus stopping its calls for the unification of Arab states.
It turned out, when the war ended after eight years without losers and winners, that U.S. and Israel’s objective evolved to defeat Iraq that had become, in the meanwhile, a regional power. The opportunity came up when Iraq, falling in the U.S. trap (April Glaspie’s deception; also read, “Wikileaks, April Glaspie, and Saddam Hussein”) invaded Kuwait consequent to oil disputes and debts from its Gulf-U.S.-instigated war with Iran. As for Iran, it became the subject of harsh American containment and sanction regimes lasting to this very date.
Another example is the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. While the USSR, China, Arab States, and countless others only condemned but did nothing else as usual, Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, approved and sent his marines to break up the Palestinian Resistance and expel it from Lebanon, which was an Israeli primary objective.
United States: Reaction to the Russian Invasion of Afghanistan
When the USSR intervened in Afghanistan in 1979, that country became an American issue instantly. Cold war paradigms played a paramount role in the U.S. response. Not only did the U.S. (with Saudi Arabia’s money) invent so-called Islamist mujahedeen against the Russian “atheists” (operation Cyclone), but also created ad hoc regional “alliances’—similar to those operating in Ukraine today—to counter the Soviet intervention.
Russia: Reaction to U.S.’s many interventions and invasions
When Lyndon Johnson invaded the Dominican Republic (1965), when Ronald Reagan mined the Nicaraguan ports (1981-85), and when George H.W. Bush invaded Panama (1989) and moved its president to U.S. prisons, the USSR reacted by invoking the rules of international law—albeit knowing that said law never mattered to the United States. The Kremlin of Mikhail Gorbachev stated that the invasion is “A flagrant violation of the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter and norms of relations among states”.
But did he do anything to hold the U.S. accountable? Gorbachev knew well that words are cheap, and that from an American perspective such charter and norms are ready for activation only when they serve U.S. imperialist purpose. The U.S., of course, did not give a hoot to Gorbachev’s protestation—and that is the problem with Russian leaders: they avoid principled confrontation with the futile expectation that the United States would refrain from bullying Russia. One can spot this tendency when Russian leaders kept calling U.S. and European politicians “our partners” while fully knowing that the recipients are probably smirking in secret.
Another catastrophic example is Gorbachev’s voting (alongside the United States) for the U.N. Resolution 678 to end Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait by January 15, 1991. According to my research, that was the first time in which a resolution came with a deadline. Meaning, the United States (and Gorbachev) were in a hurry to implement Bush’s plan for world control.
Not only did the Gorbachev regime approve Resolution 678, but also approved all U.S. resolutions pertaining to Iraq since the day it invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. The statement is important. It means that Gorbachev’s role was structurally fundamental in allowing the United States to become the de facto “chief executive officer” of world affairs. At the same time, his role was also the material instrument in turning Russia into a U.S. vassal for over two decades since the dissolution of the USSR. [After becoming a former president of a superpower, Gorbachev made a living by taking commissioned speeches at various U.S. universities and think tanks]
From attentively reading Resolution 678, it is very clear that the objective was not about the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait. Decisively, it was about the disarming of Iraq for the sake of the Zionist entity in Palestine. In fact, the U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991 was never meant just to end that occupation by dislodging Iraqi forces from Kuwait. It was enacted to destroy Iraq’s civilian structures and infrastructures, its army, and its nascent military industry including its nuclear capabilities.
The point: Gorbachev as a convert from communism to capitalism closed his eyes to U.S. objectives in Iraq and the world—these were unimportant to his plan since he obviously tied a deeply altered USSR to the wheel of U.S. imperialism while thinking he and his regime still mattered. With that, he doomed future Russia to protracted hardship and the world to suffer at the hands of U.S. violent imperialists and Zionists.
The Example of Libya: Zionist hyper-imperialist Barack Obama bombed Libya in 2011. [For the record, the Jerusalem Post (top publication in the Zionist state) called Obama, “An insider’s view: Eight years watching the first Jewish US president”. (Describing Obama as Jewish is irrelevant. He was a Zionist at the service of Israel via a constructed career powered by opportunism and sycophancy) Obama’s bombing of Libya is testimony to Russia’s betrayal of just causes when that suits its calculations.
Russia of Dmitry Medvedev (and Putin as his prime minister) explicitly accepted the U.S. plan by not vetoing UNSC 1970, and UNSC Resolution 1973 that declared the whole of Libya a No-Fly Zone. Once the resolution was passed, the U.S. (and NATO) transformed it at once into a colossal bombing of that country. (Debating whether Russian’s general conduct toward U.S. tactics was an expression of pragmatism, concession, collusion, or weakness goes beyond the scope of this work. I reported on Lavrov’s statement on the Libyan issue further down in this series.)
As for the United States, a fascist Hillary Clinton disguised as an “intelligent diplomat” epitomized the U.S. role for government change in Libya as follows. Referring to the brutal murder of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Obama’s Secretary of State said, “We came, we saw, he died”. Aside from theatrically debasing Mark Anthony’s famous victory exclamation with her crazed laughter, Clinton’s “WE” confirmed the basics: Odyssey Dawn was a code name, not for a romantic beginning for Libya but for Obama’s imperialist war to conquer its oil and depose its leader.
Two other events are significant for their long-term implications: U.S. invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). Regardless of U.S. pretexts, Russia reacted to each invasion differently. In the case of Afghanistan, it sided with the United States in spite of the fact that Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban had nothing to do with the still very much suspicious attack on the United States on September 11, 2021. It is imperative to recall what Tony Blair said prior to the Anglo-American invasion. Media and public records of the British government can confirm that Blair thundered to the Taliban, “Surrender Bin Laden, or lose power”. The Taliban offered to comply if the U.S. could prove that Bin Laden was behind the attack. The U.S. never responded—it just invaded.
In the case of Iraq, Russia, together with France and Germany, vehemently opposed the planned invasion but only within the realm of the UNSC. The U.S. and Britain invaded nevertheless. Aside from protesting, however, neither Russia nor any other country took any punitive action against the top two imperialist powers. More than that, Russia of the first Putin presidency sent neither weapons nor money to Iraq and Afghanistan to help them fight the invaders. Germany and France did the same. Was that for “solidarity” with invaders or fear from U.S. retribution?
What is worse, Russia and China had even accepted the U.S.‑imposed U.N. resolution 1483 that crowned the United States and Britain as the occupying powers of Iraq. That acceptance is a moral, historical, and legal blunder that the passing of time will never erase. This how it should be interpreted politically: with the passing of that resolution, Russia and China had not only legalized the U.S. imperialist occupation of Iraq, but also lent international legitimacy to the invasion and it is false motives.
A question: why did not the United States and Britain try to declare themselves as the occupying powers of Afghanistan? The answer is prompt: look no farther than the Zionist Israeli project to re-shape and control Iraq and other Arab countries via the United States. Accordingly, Afghanistan is not relevant to this scheme.
To close, I’m not suggesting that interventions by any country are tolerable as long as “A” can do whatever “B” does or vice versa, or, as long as they do not stand in the way of each other. That would void the struggle for a just world system where natural states could enjoy independence and security. Rather, to address persistent questions on the current configuration of the world order, we must tackle first the issue of exclusive entitlement. That is, we like to know according to what rule Russia, China, or any other country should remain mute while the dictatorial, violent hyper-empire continues staking its claim to arrange the world according to its vision? If this rule turns out to be by means of fire, death, and printed money, then we may finally understand the miserable situation of the world today and find all possible means to end it.
It is no small matter, but the “indispensable nation” [Madeleine Albright’s words] seems to think it deserves this exclusivity. American biblical preachers, hyper-imperialists, multi-term politicians, think tanks, proselytes of all types, military industry, and neophyte politicians seeking promotions within the system, and, before I forget, Zionist neocon empire builders often declare that the U.S. is predestined to rule over others. Biden, a self-declared Zionist has recently re-baptized the notion of U.S. ruling over others when he declared that the U.S. must lead the new world order.
Another Subject: American ideologues of permanent wars persistently talk about what appears to be a fixed target: Ukraine must win and Russia must lose. What hides behind such frivolous theatrics? First off, why Ukraine must win and Russia must lose? Stating so because Russia intervened in Ukraine is non sequitur. The United States, Britain, France, and Israel have been punching the world with invasions for decades without anyone being able to stop them. Ineluctably, therefore, there should be fundamental reasons for wanting to see Russia lose.
To begin, U.S. tactics to frame wars in terms of winning and losing is at the very least childish and makes no sense. Further, whereas waging wars of domination are built on a hypothetical model that ends with “we win they lose”, the resulting indoctrination paradigm is invariably translated into an ideological construct whereby winning is a sign of power and losing is a sign weakness. Again, that makes no sense. One could lose not out of weakness or could win not out of strength. In endless situations, winning or losing in any field is a function of varied dynamic and static forces leading to either outcome by default.
In real context, the fabricated philosophy pivoting around the must-win scenario while discarding potential devastating reactions by a designated adversary is of paramount significance to understand the dangerous mindset of American politicians and war planners. As they prepare pretexts for a war by choice, they completely jump over the possibility that an opposite response could devastate them. How does the process work?
The post Imperialism and Anti-imperialism Collide in Ukraine (Part 3 of 16) first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Instead of there being the U.S.-Government-promised ‘peace dividend’ after the Soviet Union ended in 1991, there has been soaring militarism by the U.S., and also soaring profits for the American producers of war-weapons. Both the profits on this, and the escalation in America’s aggressiveness following after 1991, have been stunning. Whereas there were 53 “Instances of United States Use of Armed Forces Abroad” (U.S. invasions) during the 46 years of 1945-1991, there were 244 such instances during the 31 years of 1991-2022, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service. From a rate of 1.15 U.S. invasions per year during Cold War One (1945-1991), it rose to 7.87 per year during Cold War Two (1991-2022).
Furthermore: the U.S. Government began in 1948 its many dozens of coups (starting with Thailand in that year) to overthrow the leaders of its targeted-for-takeover countries, and its replacement of those by U.S.-chosen dictators. Ever since 25 July 1945, the U.S. Government has been aiming to take control over the entire world — to create the world’s first-ever all-encompassing global empire.
Cold War Two is the years when Russia had ended its side of the Cold War in 1991 while the U.S. secretly has continued its side of the Cold War. This deceit by America was done during the start of Russia’s Yeltsin years, when the G.H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton Administrations sent the Harvard economics department into Russia to teach Yeltsin’s people how to become capitalists by partnering U.S. billionaires with whomever Russia would privatize its assets to, and so created an incredibly corrupt economy there, which would be dependent upon decisions by America’s billionaires — Russia was then in the process of becoming the U.S. Government’s biggest colony or ‘ally’ after it would be trapped fully in the thrall of America’s billionaires, which was the U.S. regime’s objective. Then, while getting its claws into Russia’s Government that way, Clinton lowered the boom against Russia, by blatantly violating the promises that Bush’s team had made (but which violation by Bush’s successors had been planned by Bush — Bush secretly told his stooges (Kohl, Mitterand, etc.) that the promises he had told them to make to Gorbachev, that NATO wouldn’t expand toward Russia, were to be lies) to Gorbachev, and that NATO actually would expand toward Russia and would exclude Russia from ever being considered as a possible NATO member-nation (i.e., Russia wasn’t to be another vassal nation, but instead a conquered nation, to be exploited by the entire U.S. empire). The expansion of America’s NATO toward Russia was begun by Clinton — on 12 March 1999 near the end of his Presidency — bringing Czechia, Hungary, and Poland, into NATO, blatantly in violation of what Bush’s team had promised to Gorbachev’s team.
Russia’s top leadership now knew that America’s top leadership intended to conquer Russia, not merely for Russia to become yet another vassal-nation in the U.S. empire; and, so, Yeltsin resigned as President on 31 December 1999, and passed the nation’s leadership (and Russia’s then seemingly insuperable problems from it) to Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who promptly began to clean house and to inform Russia’s billionaires that either they would do what he asks them to do, or else he would make sure that Russia would pursue whatever legal means were then available in order to get them into compliance with Russia’s tax-laws and other laws, so as for them not to continue to rip-off the Russian nation (as they had been doing). Even the post-2012 solidly neoconservative British newspaper Guardian headlined on 6 March 2022 “How London became the place to be for Putin’s oligarchs” and touched upon the surface of the escape of “Russian oligarchs” to London (and elsewhere in America’s EU-NATO portion of the U.S. empire), but their article didn’t mention the worst cases, such as Mikhail Khordorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky. Each of these were individuals who had absconded with billions in Russia’s wealth. (I previously posted to the Web my “Private Investigations Find America’s Magnitsky Act to Be Based on Frauds”, presenting in-depth the case of the American-in-Russia financial operator Bill Browder’s theft of $232 million from Russia, and documenting Browder’s lies on the basis of which President Obama got passed in the U.S. Congress the Magnitsky Act protecting Browder and sanctioning Russia on fake charges that were cooked up by Browder and by the billionaire George Soros’s ’non-profits’. Not all of the American skimmers from Russia were billionaires; some, such as Browder, weren’t that big. But their shared target was to win control over Russia; and this was the U.S. Government’s objective, too.)
The U.S. regime also changed its entire strategy for expanding its empire (its list of colonies or ‘allies’ — vassal-nations) after 1991, in a number of significant ways, such as by creating front-organizations, an example being Transparency International, to downgrade creditworthiness of the U.S. regime’s targeted countries (so as to force up their borrowing-costs, and thus weaken the targeted nation’s Government), and there were also a wide range of other ‘non-profits’, some of which took over (privatized) much of the preparatory work for the U.S. regime’s “regime-change” operations (coups) that formerly had been done by the by-now-infamous CIA.
One of these ‘non-profits’, for example, is CANVAS, Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, which “was founded in 2004 by Srđa Popović, and the CEO of Orion Telecom, Slobodan Đinović.” Just about all that is online about Đinović is this, this, this, this and this. It’s not much, for allegedly the 50% donor to CANVAS. Actually, that organization’s major funding is entirely secret, and is almost certainly from the U.S. Government or conduits therefrom (including U.S. billionaires such as Soros), since CANVAS is always aiding the overthrow of Governments that the U.S. regime aims to overthrow.
Both Popović and Đinović had earlier, since 1998, been among the leading members of another U.S. astroturf ‘revolution for democracy’ organization, Otpor! (“Resistance!”), which had helped to overthrow Milosevic and break up Yugoslavia. Otpor! ended successfully in 2004, at which time Popović and Đinović founded their own CANVAS, which they designed to institutionalize and spread to Ukraine and other countries the techniques that Otpor! had used and which had been taught to Otpor! by the U.S. regime under Bill Clinton. These were techniques which had been formalized by the American political scientist Gene Sharp.
Even well before Popovic and Dinovic had joined in 1998 (during the U.S-NATO’s prior overthrow-Milosevic campaign to break up the former Yugoslavia) the Otpor student movement to overthrow Yugoslavia’s President Slobodan Milošević, the American Gene Sharp had created the detailed program to do this. Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute published and promoted Sharp’s books advocating pacifism as the best way to force a ‘dictatorship’ (i.e., any Government that the U.S. regime wants to overthrow) to be overthrown. Sharp presented himself as being an advocate of ’non-violent resistance’ as practiced by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other actual anti-imperialists, but Sharp himself was no anti-imperialist (quite the contrary!); he was instead purely a pacifist, and not at all anti-imperialist. Einstein, like Gandhi, had been no pacifist, but didn’t know that Sharp, whom Einstein never met, accepted imperialism, which Sharp’s claimed hero, Gandhi, detested. So, Einstein unfortunately accepted the cunning Sharp’s request to write a Foreword for Sharp’s first book praising Gandhi, Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, and Sharp then used that Foreword as ‘proof’ that Sharp was a follower of Einstein (even naming his Institute after the by-then deceased physicist) — which was as false as Sharp’s claimed advocacy of Gandhi’s philosophy was. Sharp was a master self-publicist and deceiver. Einstein’s 321-word, 1.3-page-long, Foreword praised the work and its young author, but he might just have cursorily skimmed the manuscript. He probably would have have been appalled at what followed from Sharp.
Sharp, thus, carefully avoided clarifying that, for example, he would have been a pacifist if he had been in America during the U.S. Revolutionary War, or even perhaps if he had been a northerner during the Civil War, or else been an anti-Nazi partisan during WW II (a pacifist ‘anti-Nazi’). Sharp’s recommendations are useful for the U.S. regime’s coups, because Sharp’s recommendations provide a way to make as difficult as possible for a head-of-state that the U.S. regime has targeted for removal, to remain in office. Sharp’s recommendations are for such a head-of-state to need to employ so much — and ever-increasing — violence against so many of his domestic opponents (fooled non-violent resistors — ‘martyrs’), as to become forced to resign, simply in order not to become himself a casualty of the resultant soaring backlash against himself as being viewed by his own public as simply a ruthless tyrannical dictator, for imprisoning or even killing those ‘democracy protesters’ who had been fooled by agents of the U.S. empire. So: Sharp’s methods are ideal to use so as to increase the public’s support for what is actually a U.S. coup. And that’s their real purpose: to facilitate coups, instead of to create any actual revolution. (As the commentator at the opening there noted, “Missing from Gene Sharp’s list are ‘Constructive actions’ – actions you take to build the alternative society you hope to create.” Sharp’s entire system is for destroying a Government — nothing to create a new one except that it should be ‘democratic’ — whatever that supposedly meant to his fools.) And, then, the coup itself is carried out, by the U.S. professionals at that, once the targeted head-of-state has become hated by a majority of his population. That’s the Sharp method, for coups.
This is an alternative to what had been the U.S. regime’s method during 1945-1991, which was simply CIA-run coups, which relied mainly upon bribing local officials and oligarchs, and hiring rent-a-mobs so as to show photographic ‘mass-support’ for overthrowing a ruler, in order to replace the local ruler with one that the U.S. regime has selected (like this).
On 12 November 2012, the pacifist John Horgan headlined at Scientific American, “Should Scientists and Engineers Resist Taking Military Money?,” and he wrote:
Defense-funded research has led to advances in civilian health care, transportation, communication and other industries that have improved our lives. My favorite example of well-spent Pentagon money was a 1968 Darpa grant to the political scientist Gene Sharp. That money helped Sharp research and write the first of a series of books on how nonviolent activism can bring about political change.
Sharp’s writings have reportedly inspired nonviolent opposition movements around the world, including ones that toppled corrupt regimes in Serbia, Ukraine [he was referring here to the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’, but Sharp’s methods were also used in the 2014 ‘Maidan Revolution’], Georgia–and, more recently, Tunisia and Egypt [the ‘Arab Spring’]. Sharp, who has not received any federal support since 1968, has defended his acceptance of Darpa funds. In the preface of his classic 1972 work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, he argued that “governments and defense departments — as well as other groups — should finance and conduct research into alternatives to violence in politics.” I couldn’t agree more.
So: Sharp’s pacifists are the opposite of anti-imperialists; they are neocons: agents to expand the U.S. empire, by means of (i.e., now preferring) coups instead of military invasions.
On 11 December 2000, the Washington Post headlined “U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition,” and reported:
The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government’s foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).
While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution’s ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.
During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.
“What was most amazing to us was to discover that what we were trying to do spontaneously in Serbia was supported by a whole nonviolent system that we knew nothing about,” said Srdja Popovic, a former biology student. “This was the first time we thought about this in a systematic, scientific way. We said to ourselves, ‘We will go back and apply this.’ ”
Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharpe, whom he describes as “the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement,” referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist. Six months later, Popovic can recite Helvey’s lectures almost word for word, beginning with the dictum, “Removing the authority of the ruler is the most important element in nonviolent struggle.”
“Those Serbs really impressed me,” Helvey said in an interview from his West Virginia home. “They were very bright, very committed.”
Back in Serbia, Otpor activists set about undermining Milosevic’s authority by all means available. Rather than simply daubing slogans on walls, they used a wide range of sophisticated public relations techniques, including polling, leafleting and paid advertising. “The poll results were very important,” recalled Ivo Andric, a marketing student at Belgrade University. “At every moment, we knew what to say to the people.”
The poll results pointed to a paradox that went to the heart of Milosevic’s grip on power. On one hand, the Yugoslav president was detested by 70 percent of the electorate. On the other, a majority of Serbs believed he would continue to remain in power, even after an election. To topple Milosevic, opposition leaders first had to convince their fellow Serbs that he could be overthrown.
At a brainstorming session last July, Otpor activist Srdjan Milivojevic murmured the words “Gotov je,” or “He’s finished.”
“We realized immediately that it summed up our entire campaign,” said Dejan Randjic, who ran the Otpor marketing operation. “It was very simple, very powerful. It focused on Milosevic, but did not even mention him by name.”
Over the next three months, millions of “Gotov je” stickers were printed on 80 tons of imported adhesive paper–paid for by USAID and delivered by the Washington-based Ronco Consulting Corp.–and plastered all over Serbia on walls, inside elevators and across Milosevic’s campaign posters. Printed in black and white and accompanied by Otpor’s clenched-fist emblem, they became the symbol of the revolution.
However, a WikiLeaked email from Jake Sullivan to Hillary Clinton on 26 July 2011, about the Subject “Gene Sharp,” discussed Egypt’s “April 6 movement,” which had overthrown Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. Sullivan told her that “In order to assess … the role of Gene Sharp’s ideas in the January 25 revolution, several members of the Policy Planning Staff (S/P) looked into the issue during a recent fact-finding trip to Egypt. They met with representatives of a wide range of protest groups — including the April 6 movement — major civil society organizations, and political parties.” And Sullivan concluded that “ the earlier reporting on these purported ties to Gene Sharp now seems somewhat overblown. … Most other analysts … credit this to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Sullivan wrote from ignorance. On 3 March 2018, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper headlined “The Resistance Guide That Inspired Jewish Settlers and Muslim Brothers Alike: Opponents of Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and anti-government protesters in Iran have adopted the civil disobedience principles of the late Prof. Gene Sharp,” and recounted that, “Participants in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 also owe many of their achievements to Sharp’s ideas. In Egypt it’s known that at least four groups of activists were influenced by them. Even the Muslim Brotherhood [the group that Sullivan said was NOT influenced by Sharp’s ideas], whose tradition of violence struck fear into the hearts of many, viewed Sharp’s book as a manual and posted it in Arabic translation on its website.” And, for example, even Wikipedia, in its article on the “April 6 Youth Movement,” says: “The April 6 movement is using the same raised fist symbol as the Otpor! movement from Serbia, that helped bring down the regime of Slobodan Milošević and whose nonviolent tactics were later used in Ukraine and Georgia. Mohammed Adel, a leader in the April 6 movement, studied at the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, an organization founded by former Otpor! members.”
Jake Sullivan was stunningly ignorant — not merely arrogant. The U.S. intelligence community has intimately cooperated with Otpor, CANVAS, and other such astroturf ‘revolution’-generators for American billionaires. For example, Ruaridh Arrow, the writer and director of a eulogistic biopic on Gene Sharp, “How to Start a Revolution,” headlined “Did Gene Sharp work for the CIA? Correcting the Conspiracies.” He wrote: “Funds were provided by the NED and IRI to activists for Albert Einstein Institution projects, for example in Burma, but the Institution was never able to fund groups in its own right.” (And what is that “but”-clause supposed to mean?) However, Arrow also wrote there: “Gene Sharp never worked for the CIA, in fact he was highly critical of them and advised activists not to take money from intelligence services. He argued that reliance on outsiders could weaken their movement and make them reliant on a foreign state which could suddenly cut off money and support, causing serious damage to their cause. It’s one thing to deny involvement with the CIA, it’s quite another to go around the world giving convincing arguments NOT to take money from them. … See below for a video of Gene Sharp telling people NOT to take money from the CIA.”
Sharp’s operation, and that of the other ’non-profits’ such as CANVAS that adhere to it, don’t need money from the CIA, because they can get plenty of money from the billionaires who benefit from America’s coups. On 26 January 2001, David Holley in the Los Angeles Times headlined “The Seed Money for Democracy: Financier George Soros has put out $2.8 billion since 1990 to promote a global open society. His efforts include funding the student movement that helped oust Milosevic in Yugoslavia.” He wrote:
Yugoslavia was a case where everything democrats had worried about–extreme nationalism, ethnic conflict, corruption, media controls and bickering among opposition political parties–were at their worst. Yet, just as Soros had calculated, it was a grass-roots surge by strong citizen organizations that won the battle for democracy.
Soros’ branch in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, was among the earliest backers of Otpor, which grew under young and decentralized leadership to strengthen the fractured opposition to Milosevic. “We gave them their first grant back in 1998, when they appeared as a student organization,” said Ivan Vejvoda, executive director of the Fund for an Open Society-Yugoslavia, the network’s branch here.
Foreign financial support helped Otpor surreptitiously print about 60 tons of posters and leaflets in the months before the Sept. 24 election that led to Milosevic’s ouster, said Miljana Jovanovic, a student who is one of the movement’s leaders. …
The vast majority of groups funded by Soros are not nearly as powerful as Otpor, nor do they play for such huge stakes.
More typical are efforts such as “horse-riding therapy” for disabled children, funded by the network’s Polish branch, the Stefan Batory Foundation.
I found that article only recently. On 18 April 2022, I had headlined “History of the Ukrainian War” and here was a passage in it that included the Stafan Battory Foundation, but I didn’t know, at the time, that this organization was actually Soros’s Open Society Foundation in Poland. Here is the relevant portion from that history of the Ukrainian war:
*****
On 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy to Ukraine in Kiev, a series of “Tech Camps” started to be held, in order to train those Ukrainian nazis for their leadership of Ukraine’s ‘anti-corruption’ organizing. Simultaneously, under Polish Government authorization, the CIA was training in Poland the military Right Sector leaders how to lead the coming U.S. coup in neighboring Ukraine. As the independent Polish investigative journalist Marek Miszczuk headlined for the Polish magazine NIE (“meaning “NO”) (the original article being in Polish): “Maidan secret state secret: Polish training camp for Ukrainians.” The article was published 14 April 2014. Excerpts:
An informant who introduced himself as Wowa called the “NIE” editorial office with the information that the Maidan rebels in Wrocław are neo-fascists … [with] tattooed swastikas, swords, eagles and crosses with unambiguous meaning. … Wowa pleadingly announced that photos of members of the Right Sector must not appear in the press. … 86 fighters from the then prepared Euromaidan flew over the Vistula River in September 2013 at the invitation of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The pretext was to start cooperation between the Warsaw University of Technology and the National University of Technology in Kiev. But they were in Poland to receive special training to overthrow Ukraine’s government. … Day 3 and 4 – theoretical classes: crowd management, target selection, tactics and leadership. Day 5 – training in behavior in stressful situations. Day 6 – free without leaving the center. Day 7 – pre-medical help. Day 8 – protection against irritating gases. Day 9 – building barricades. And so on and on for almost 25 days. The program includes … classes at the shooting range (including three times with sniper rifles!), tactical and practical training in the assault on buildings. …
Excited by the importance of the information that was presented to me, I started to verify it.
The Office of the Press Spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to answer the questions about the student exchange without giving any reason. It did not want to disclose whether it had actually invited dozens of neo-fascists to Poland to teach them how to overthrow the legal Ukrainian authorities. …
Let us summarize: in September 2013, according to the information presented to me, several dozen Ukrainian students of the Polytechnic University will come to Poland, at the invitation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In fact, they are members of the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz – he declined to comment on his visit to Legionowo.
Poland’s ‘fact-checking’ organization is (appropriately) titled demagog dot org (Demagog Association), and it is funded by the Stefan Batory Foundation. Demagog’s article about that NIE news-report rated it “NIEWERYFIKOWALNE” or “ NOT VERIFIABLE”. The sole reason given was: “The Ministry [of Foreign Affairs] strongly opposes such news, emphasizing that the weekly (magazine) has violated not only the principles of good taste, but also raison d’etat (reasons of state).” No facts that were alleged in Miszczuk’s article were even mentioned, much less disproven. How can his article be “unverifiable” if the evidence that it refers to isn’t so much as even being checked?
Miszczuk’s article’s mention of “the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz” referred to the key person (Dmitriy Yarosh) and the key group (his Right Sector paramilitary organization and political party) that has actually been running Ukraine behind the scenes ever since the coup, and they also were the key people who had led the snipers who were firing down from tall buildings upon the Ukrainian Government’s police and upon the anti-Government demonstrators at Kiev’s Maidan Square — the violence simultaneously against both sides — that the newly installed post-coup government immediately blamed against the just-ousted democratically elected President, so that the new top officials were all blaming the ones that they had replaced.
*****
On 4 October 2017, the historian F. William Engdahl, who unfortunately leaves many of his allegations not linked to his alleged sources, wrote:
Goldman Sachs and Stratfor
Even more interesting details recently came to light on the intimate links between the US “intelligence consultancy”, Stratfor — known as the ”Shadow CIA” for its corporate clients which include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and U.S. government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
It was revealed in a huge release of internal memos from Stratfor in 2012, some five million emails provided them by the hacker community Anonymous, that Popović, after creating CANVAS also cultivated very close relations with Stratfor. According to the Stratfor internal emails, Popović worked for Stratfor to spy on opposition groups. So intimate was the relationship between Popović and Stratfor that he got his wife a job with the company and invited several Stratfor people to his Belgrade wedding.
Revealed in the same Stratfor emails by Wikileaks was the intriguing information that one of the “golden geese” funders of the mysterious CANVAS was a Wall Street bank named Goldman Sachs. Satter Muneer, a Goldman Sachs partner, is cited by Stratfor’s then-Eurasia Analyst Marko Papic. Papic, asked by a Stratfor colleague whether Muneer was the “golden goose” money behind CANVAS, writes back, “They have several golden gooses I believe. He is for sure one of them.”
Now the very remarkable Mr Popović brings his dishonest career to Hungary where, not a dictator, but a very popular true democrat who offers his voters choices, is the target for Popović’ peculiar brand of US State Department fake democracy. This will not at all be as easy as toppling Milošević, even if he has the help of student activists being trained at Soros’ Central European University in Budapest.
If he had linked to those WikiLeaks documents, then copies of his article that were made before the U.S. regime removed some WikiLeaks files from the Web would have archived those files, but that didn’t happen; and, so, today, a Web-search for the 3-word string
Stratfor Popović wikileaks
produces finds such as
https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/
https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/
of which no copies were saved at any of the Web archives.
However, a prior article, by Carl Gibson and Steve Horn of Occuy.com, on 2 December 2013, was headlined “Exposed: Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated with Intelligence Firm Stratfor,” and it has links to the WikiLeaks documents. From all of this, it’s clear that the obscure Srđa Popović and Slobodan Đinović, are each well-connected to wealth, if not themselves quite wealthy, from their business, of fomenting coups for the U.S. regime, in the names of ‘peace’ and of ‘democracy’.
Apparently, CANVAS remains quite active today:
On 6 October 2023, Kit Klarenberg, at The Grayzone, headlined “A Maidan 2.0 color revolution looms in Georgia,” and reported that:
The arrest of US regime change operatives in Tbilisi suggests a coup against Georgia’s government could be in the works. As Ukraine’s counteroffensive fails, the West appears eager to open a new front in its proxy war.
On September 29, in a disclosure ignored by the entire Western media, the US government-run Radio Free Europe’s Russian-language portal Slobodna Evropa revealed that three foreign operatives had been summoned for questioning by the Georgian Security Service, for allegedly assisting opposition elements prepare a Maidan-style regime change scenario in Tbilisi.
The operatives were staffers of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies. …
The ruling Georgian dream [NO — it’s the Georgian Dream Party] has been portrayed in the west as a pro-Kremlin government. In reality, it’s simply reverted to a longstanding policy of balancing between East and West. For the neoconservative establishment, its true sin is being insufficiently supportive of the Ukraine proxy war. Thus Ukrainian elements are set to be involved in a possible color revolution. If such an operation succeeds, it would open a second front in that war on Russia’s Western flank.
The development seemingly confirms warnings from local security officials earlier this September. They cautioned “a coup a la Euromaidan is being prepared in Georgia,” referring to the 2014 US-backed color revolution which toppled Ukraine’s elected president and ushered in a pro-NATO government. The purported lead plotters are ethnic Georgians working for the Ukrainian government: Giorgi Lortkipanidze, Kiev’s deputy military intelligence chief; Mikhail Baturin, the bodyguard of former President Mikheil Saakashvili; and Mamuka Mamulashvili, commander of the notorious Georgian Legion.
A September 6 investigation by The Grayzone revealed that Georgian Legion chief Mamulashvili is centrally implicated in a false flag massacre of Maidan protesters, which was pivotal in unseating elected President Viktor Yanukovych. He apparently brought the shooters to Maidan Square to “sow some chaos” by opening fire on crowds, and provided sniper rifles for the purpose.
Georgian officials say that now they’ve uncovered evidence that young anti-government activists are undergoing training near Ukraine’s border with Poland to enact a similar scheme, which would feature a deadly bombing during planned riots meant to take place in Tbilisi between October and December, when the European Commission is expected to rule on whether Georgia can formally become an EU candidate country.
The Wikipedia article “Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies” says:
CANVAS’ training and methodology has been successfully applied by groups in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (
2004), Lebanon (2005), The Maldives (2008)?, Egypt (2011)?, Syria (2011)? and Ukraine (2014). It works only in response to requests for assistance.
However: anyone who participates in such ‘Revolutions’ is placing oneself at severe personal risk, in order to facilitate a coup by the U.S. Government and its controlling owners, who are billionaires. People such as Sharp, Popović, and Đinović, are merely well-paid and maintained servants to America’s billionaires.
Here’s how they market their operation, to peaceniks:
They open by paying homage to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This is mocking them — aping their influence, not spreading it.
And here is how the neoconservative Tina Rosenberg, in the neoconservative Donald Graham’s Foreign Policy magazine, promotes CANVAS, as being “Revolution U“:
As nonviolent revolutions have swept long-ruling regimes from power in Tunisia and Egypt and threaten the rulers of nearby Algeria, Bahrain, and Yemen, the world’s attention has been drawn to the causes — generations of repressive rule — and tools — social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter — animating the wave of revolt. But as the members of the April 6 movement learned, these elements alone do not a revolution make. What does? In the past, the discontented availed themselves of the sweeping forces of geopolitics: the fall of regimes in Latin America and the former Soviet bloc was largely a product of the withdrawal of superpower support for dictatorships and the consolidation of liberal democracy as a global ideal. But the global clash of ideologies is over, and plenty of dictators remain — so what do we do?
The answer, for democratic activists in an ever-growing list of countries, is to turn to CANVAS. Better than other democracy groups, CANVAS has built a durable blueprint for nonviolent revolution: what to do to grow from a vanload of people into a mass movement and then use those masses to topple a dictator. CANVAS has figured out how to turn a cynical, passive, and fearful public into activists. It stresses unity, discipline, and planning — tactics that are basic to any military campaign, but are usually ignored by nonviolent revolutionaries. There will be many moments during a dictatorship that galvanize public anger: a hike in the price of oil, the assassination of an opposition leader, corrupt indifference to a natural disaster, or simply the confiscation by the police of a produce cart. In most cases, anger is not enough — it simply flares out. Only a prepared opponent will be able to use such moments to bring down a government.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists. Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said:
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.”
He never said he had evidence, because he didn’t.
Rumsfeld, who enjoyed his verbal games, was the quintessential bullshitter and liar for the warfare state. This encounter took place when Rumsfeld and his coconspirators were promoting lie after lie about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and conflating false stories about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to build a case to wage another war against Iraq, in order to supplement the one in Afghanistan and the war on “terror” that they launched post September 11 and the subsequently linked anthrax attacks.
A year later on February 5, 2003, U. S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U. N. Security Council and in a command performance assured the world that the U.S. had solid evidence that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” repeating that phrase seventeen times as he held up a stage prop vial of anthrax to make his point. He said, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources — solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” He was lying, but to this very day his defenders falsely claim he was the victim of an “intelligence failure,” a typical deceitful excuse along with “it was a mistake.” Of course, Iraq did not have “weapons of mass destruction” and the savage war waged on Iraq was not a mistake.
Scott Ritter, the former Marine U.N. weapons inspector, made it very clear back then that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but his expertise was dismissed, just as his current analysis of the war in Ukraine is. See his recent tweet about Senator Diane Feinstein in this regard:
Thirteen months after Rumsfeld’s exchange in the news conference, the United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, knowing it had no justification. It was a war of aggression. Millions died as a result. And none of the killers have been prosecuted for their massive war crimes. The war was not launched on mistaken evidence; it was premeditated and based on lies easy to see. Very, very easy to see.
On January 28, 2003, eleven days before Powell performance, I, an independent writer, wrote a newspaper Op Ed, “The War Hoax,” saying:
The Bush administration has a problem: How to start a war without having a justifiable reason for one. No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem. If they can’t find a justification, they may have to create one. Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. . . . Yet once again, the American people are being played for fools, by the government and the media. The open secret, the insider’s fact, is that the United States plans to attack Iraq in the near future. The administration knows this, the media knows it, but the Bush scenario, written many months ago, is to act as if it weren’t so, to act as if a peaceful solution were being seriously considered. . . . Don’t buy it.
Only one very small regional Massachusetts newspaper, the North Adams Transcript, was willing to publish the piece.
I mention this because I think it has been very obvious for a very long time that the evidence for United States’ crimes of all sorts has been available to anyone who wished to face the truth. It does not take great expertise, just an eye for the obvious and the willingness to do a little homework. Despite this, I have noticed that journalists and writers on the left have continued to admit that they were beguiled by people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden, con men all. I do not mean writers for the mainstream press, but those considered oppositional. Many have, for reasons only they can answer, put hope in these obvious charlatans, and some prominent ones have refused to analyze such matters as the JFK assassination, September 11th, or Covid-19, to name a few issues. Was it because they considered these politicians and matters known unknowns, even when the writing was on the wall?
Those on the right have rolled with Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump in a similar manner, albeit for different reasons. It causes me to shake my head in amazement. When will people learn? How long does it take to realize that all these people are part of a vast criminal enterprise that has been continuously waging wars and lying while raking in vast spoils for the military-industrial complex. There is one party in the U.S. – the War Party.
If you have lived long enough, as have I, you reach a point when you have, through study and the accumulation of evidence, arrived at a long list of known knowns. So with a backhand slap to Donald Rumsfeld, that long serving servant of the U.S. war machine, I will list a very partial number of my known knowns in chronological order. Each could be greatly expanded. There is an abundance of easily available evidence for all of them – nothing secret – but one needs to have the will for truth and do one’s homework. All of these known knowns are the result of U.S. deep state conspiracies and lies, aided and abetted by the lies of mass corporate media.
My Known Knowns:
Donald Rumsfeld, as a key long time insider to U.S. deep state operations, was surely aware of my list of known knowns. He was just one of many such slick talkers involved in demonic U.S. operations that have always been justified, denied, or kept secret by him and his ilk.
One does not have to be a criminologist to realize these things. It is easy to imagine that Rumsfeld’s forlorn ghost is wandering since he went to his grave with his false “unknown unknowns” tucked away.
When he said, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice-versa,” he did say it, of course. Despite double-talkers like him, evidence of decades of U.S. propaganda is easy to see through if one is compelled by the will-to-truth.
“Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.” – Norman O. Brown
Note: If you think I too have no evidence, look at this for many of them.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
If Joe Biden will become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Presidency, then almost any Republican nominee would likely beat him because he had committed America’s Government to victory in Ukraine — done it is such a way that there can be no going back on it that won’t strip him of the public’s respect for him on account of America’s loss in that war:
21 February 2023: “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never. (Applause.)”
13 July 2023: “We will not waver … for as long as it takes”.
24 August 2023 “Our commitment to Ukraine’s independence is unwavering and enduring.”
21 September 2023 “Mr. President [Zelensky], we’re — we’re with you, and we’re staying with you.”
If Kamala Harris will become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Presidency, then she will never be able to disassociate herself from having been his #2.
On the other hand: If RFK Jr. will be the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Presidency, then he will surely win the Presidency (unless he becomes assassinated) because he has been saying, all along, that Biden’s refusal for Ukraine to negotiate with Russia was serving only to increase the bloodshed in that war — which has been proven to have been correct. He not only criticized what Biden was doing but said that Biden’s saying that if Russia wins the war, then America loses the war, and that if America wins the war, then Russia loses the war, casts that war as being of existential importance to both countries, which is blatantly false because Ukraine has nothing to do with America’s national security. It’s thousands of miles away and poses no threat to America, but it is only 300 miles away from the Kremlin. It is, therefore, even closer to Russia’s central command than Cuba was to America’s central command in Washington DC in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. American missiles in Ukraine would pose an even bigger threat to Russia than Soviet missiles in Cuba would have posed to America. RFK Jr. has strongly opposed Biden’s Ukraine policy, which was Obama’s Ukraine policy — the policy aimed at conquering Russia — but Trump never did anything to reverse the Obama-Biden Ukraine policy. So, if America loses the war in Ukraine, then RFK Jr. would trounce Trump, but Trump would trounce Biden.
If Trump becomes the Republican nominee, then he would easily beat Biden as the opposite Party’s nominee but would lose to Kennedy as that Party’s nominee, because Trump, while he still was in office, did nothing to reverse the horror that Obama had done to Ukraine by grabbing it in his 2014 Maidan U.S. coup and installing there a rabidly anti-Russian government which produced the war in Ukraine, which started soon after that coup.
Biden was carrying out Obama’s Ukraine-policy against Russia, but Trump did nothing to reverse it and to end the war there that Obama had started by grabbing Ukraine.
Therefore, if Russia wins the war in Ukraine, then virtually any Republican would beat Biden as the Democratic nominee, but RFK Jr. would beat any Republican nominee. RFK Jr. has none of the taint of the Obama-Biden Ukraine policy, but Obama and Biden couldn’t have carried out that policy if it didn’t have virtually unanimous support from congressional Republicans. Whereas RFK Jr. can free the Democratic Party of the taint of the Obama-Biden Ukraine policy, there is no Republican who can free the Republican Party from the taint of that policy.
If Russia wins in Ukraine, then only RFK Jr. could beat any Republican nominee.
However, if America wins in Ukraine (which Russia won’t allow, because that would pose a severe existential threat to Russia’s national security; it would mean the end of Russia as an independent sovereign nation), then Biden (or another neoconservative Democrat) will (tragically for the entire world) win in 2024.
Of course: if Ukraine’s war drags on for as long as Biden is hoping it will, then the likelihood is high that he will win the nomination; and, then, he would stand a reasonably strong chance of again winning the Presidency. This is the reason why I’m expecting Russia to win the war on its terms and within the next few months (this year) — not allow it to drag on until the 2024 voting starts in America.
Among the most dangerous people in the US are those who actually once fervently believed the foundational myths of the country’s social and political order.
It’s the true believers — we who are schooled on republican virtues, democratic procedures, universal equality, and fair play that are said to be deeply embedded in the US experience — who become radical crusaders when their beliefs are shattered by the truth.
The true believers are cast as traitors to humanity, nation, race, or creed when they turn on those who foster a false loyalty or cheap patriotism based on lies or deception.
The late Daniel Ellsberg was one of these soldiers of truth. Once a handmaiden for US foreign policy, experience brought home the murderous, cynical, and false execution of that policy. At great risk — even physical risk — Ellsberg bravely cast aside his privileged, highly respected position and exposed the ugly, hypocritical US intervention in Southeast Asia, an engagement that led to and fueled the savage destruction wrought by the Indochinese war. Ellsberg devoted the rest of his life to opposing the abuse of his once deeply felt ideals.
Thinking of Ellsberg before his death while reading Norman Finkelstein’s new book, I’ll Burn that Bridge When I Get to It!, I could not help but see Finkelstein cast in a similar light. Certainly, they are different people, with different burdens, and different circumstances. But they are alike in important ways: both have shown uncommon courage and uncompromising idealism. Both have known the lash of ostracism.
Where Ellsberg’s idealism was violated by the US empire’s betrayal of his ideals, Finkelstein’s idealism forces him to stand almost alone against cherished beliefs that none dare challenge. Ellsberg confronted US power, Finkelstein attacks the sanctity of conventional, officially-protected thought.
Finkelstein’s new book is not easy to discuss. It is many things — not in a bad way, but in a personal, boldly eccentric way. He is a remarkably good writer: a careful grammarian, a skilled wordsmith, with a keen, logical mind. No doubt the logical construction of his arguments inflames his foes even further.
The book is divided into two sections: 1.) an extensive argument against the latest fashions of the academic left, capped with an effective critique of their embodiment, Barack Obama, and 2.) an ambitious attempt to defend a John Stuart Mill-inspired account of academic freedom and academic responsibility.
In Part I (Identity Politics and Cancel Culture), Finkelstein effectively foregoes theoretical foreplay and leaps right into discussions of some of today’s more prominent, celebrated figures, locating them and their ideas within the framework of a purported remolding of anti-racism. With the writings and initiatives of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, and Ibram X. Kendi, Finkelstein finds a bogus path to curing racism as a societal cancer, a path strikingly deviated from the tradition of his (and my) past heroes and heroines in the struggle against racism and racial inequality.
Finkelstein carefully, and in great detail, challenges the scholarship of the writers and the political weight of their ideas. His own scholarship is impeccable, though he favors the time-honored effectiveness of hitting the nail on its head until the head breaks off! He is relentless.
To many of the young, college-educated activists who have come to understand the scourge of racism though Crenshaw, Coates, DiAngelo, Kendi, and their colleagues, the Finkelstein critique will itself appear as racially insensitive, an attack on identity that is truly worthy of cancellation.
Finkelstein counters this “Little Red Book” mob reaction by extensively and passionately quoting from his own anti-racist icons: Frederick Douglass, WEB DuBois, Paul Robeson, and Martin Luther King. His brilliant contraposing of DuBois against Kendi is a veritable seminar in deep and productive anti-racist thinking. The contrast alone diminishes Kendi’s thought. Shrewdly, Finkelstein lets the history of sacrifice, defiance, activism, and razor-sharp analysis by these giants of human advancement address the shallow bromides of smug, secure, petty-bourgeois academics.
From the perch of an insular, arid academic office, the question of racism is a question of manners and self-styled group recognition; from the path that Douglass, DuBois, Robeson, and King trod, the question of racism was a question of emancipation, ending exploitation, and achieving economic security.
If I had my preferences, the author would have broadened his attack beyond these mostly African-American intellectuals to include the vast body of US academics engaged in navel-gazing and supplicating before the ruling class. When leading philosophers are reduced to pondering the depth of “sentiments” and public intellectuals are selling the empty, emotive catch-all-that-we-hate concept of “authoritarianism,” the commodification of anti-racism earns no special place. Intellectual life as contained in academia in general is numbing.
Finkelstein expresses a well-earned contempt for Barack Obama, his hypocrisy, and his self-regard. In many ways, Obama gave agency to appearance over substance in a way similar to the scribblings of Crenshaw, Coates, DiAngelo, et al. Obama sold the appearance of change and delivered none.
By contrast, Finkelstein casts Bernie Sanders as an authentic agent of change shackled by the Democratic Party leadership. But surely Sanders knew about those shackles and did little to break them. In the end, he, too, sold the appearance of change and delivered none, though perhaps not as cynically as did Obama.
Finkelstein’s politics are influenced by his earlier immersion in Gang of Four Maoism. Forgoing his parents’ Popular Front leftism for REAL revolution, the author’s fingers were burnt. Like so many recovering Little Red Bookers, he now struggles to imagine any politics not going through the Democratic Party, despite his contempt for that party. Apparently, Marxist “orthodoxy” was never considered an option.
Which brings us quite naturally to the other part of Finkelstein’s book, Part II (Academic Freedom). Like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and a handful of other US commentators, Finkelstein is part of a dying breed — the true, classic liberal who believes passionately and deeply in freedom of speech, a free press, free academic inquiry, and many other freedoms associated with enlightenment values.
By the third decade of the twentieth century, history has shown these rights to be rights of convenience. The bourgeois state recognizes these rights when it is useful for propaganda purposes or when the state detects no threat, should they be exercised. Otherwise, when the state is made insecure by freedom of speech, assembly, movement, etc., these rights are squelched.
In political theory, rights of convenience are actually privileges, where privileges are the warrants granted capriciously by those in power. With the end of the Cold War and its propaganda function, the pretense of universal rights, of absolute freedoms, is just that — a pretense. The current tribalism around both red and blue allegiances demonstrates how shallow goes the popular commitment to the Bill of Rights.
Yet Finkelstein, like other true-believers — nineteenth-century liberals, their admirers, and a smattering of libertarians — still clings to these beliefs and attempts to support them in a world grown cynical.
He wrestles with the idea that a university or its educational counterparts should have freedom of inquiry and its necessary condition, freedom of speech. He relies almost exclusively on John Stuart Mill’s rule-utilitarian justification, citing the potential and actual good that comes from accepting these principles (rules).
At the same time, Finkelstein concedes the obvious counterexamples (e.g., advocating paedophilia) that nullify the universality of Stuart Mill’s rule-utilitarianism. He and we are left with a principle neither absolute nor real-world operant.
For Finkelstein and other enlightenment liberals, academia should be a marketplace of ideas, when, in fact, it is a class war. More broadly, the battle for ideas is waged between classes.
Nonetheless, we should embrace the idealism of Finkelstein and the other doctrinaire liberals, but without illusions. Absent a measure of free speech, the little chance we have of getting radical ideas past the gatekeepers drops sharply.
My reservations aside, Finkelstein and his book are treasures. At a time of mind-numbing conformity and groveling before power, a figure who defies conventions and takes us where the thought police do not want us to go should be cherished.
I’m reminded of my teenage epiphany when I found and read Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. Today, I would disagree with nearly everything in the book, but at a time of stifling Cold War conformity, it broke those chains for me.
Finkelstein, too, is a chain-breaker.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama met privately in the White House with the newly elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, to get him to end Ukraine’s neutralist position ever since 1991 and join the U.S. Government’s EU and NATO alliances against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor Russia, but Yanukovych said no. And, then, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled in 2010 to Kiev to give this another try, and again Yanukovych said no. By the time of June 2011, the Obama Administration started planning the coup to replace Ukraine’s Government with one that the U.S. would select. This plan started being implemented by no later than 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy in Ukraine, to train Ukraine’s racist-fascist, or ideologically Nazi, haters of Russians, how to use the internet in order to organize ‘anti-corruption’ demonstrations against — and to overthrow and replace — the neutralist Yanukovych by a Ukrainian regime that would be committed against Russia. On 27 January 2014, Obama’s agent overseeing the U.S. coup told the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev that Arseniy Yatsenyuk should be placed in charge when the coup would be completed, and this was done on 27 February 2014. Obama’s plan to turn Ukraine rabidly anti-Russia succeeded. (The only part of it that failed was Obama’s plan to grab Russia’s largest naval base, in Crimea, and turn that into yet another U.S. naval base.) It also succeeded in turning Ukrainian public opinion vastly more against Russia than it had been before.
The objective of all this was ultimately to achieve a 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse, by which the U.S. will ultimately place at least one nuclear missile only about 300 miles away from Moscow and then demand Russia’s capitulation. If Russia says no, then within only five minutes from America’s firing its knockout missile, Moscow can be annihilated, Russia’s central command beheaded, and that is too fast for Russia to be able to recognize that it had been done and then to launch its retaliatory weapons against America. So, there might be a reasonable chance for America to eliminate Russia by a blitz-nuclear attack from Ukraine — or at least there are influential people in the U.S. Government and academe who think so (including virtually the entire Biden Administration, just like in Obama’s and Trump’s).
Ever since at least 2006, the idea had become mainstream in American geostrategic planning circles for America to abandon the prior nuclear meta-strategy — “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD — of using nuclear weapons in order to avert a nuclear war, to becoming instead “Nuclear Primacy,” to use nuclear weapons in order to win a nuclear war. Biden pushed it almost beyond the point of no return until Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022 so as to push back Ukraine’s nearest border from its present roughly 300 miles away from Moscow to perhaps a thousand miles away. However, even that would be nearer to Moscow than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis standard, which was Cuba being 1,331 miles away from Washington DC. And now Finland, which aims to join NATO, might move that to only 507 miles; so, America’s goal of conquering Russia is still very much a national-security threat to the people in Russia. In fact, by 2017, America already had become frighteningly near to being able to perpetrate a ‘victorious’ blitz-nuclear attack against Russia.
By contrast, Russia has never tried to place its ground-based nuclear missiles that near to Washington DC. Cuba was the last opportunity to do that, and it was during the time of the Soviet Union, and it was instead 1,331 miles away from DC. Russia, today — now that NATO has grown to surround it (especially in Ukraine, which has the nearest border to Moscow) — is in enormous danger from this. On 17 December 2021, Russia formally presented separately to America, and to NATO, Russia’s fundamental national-security concerns, and on 7 January 2022 both America and its NATO said no to all of them — not even for negotiation. Russia’s only remaining option then was to invade and conquer Ukraine. America has no national-security interest in Russia’s nearest neighbor, Ukraine, but Russia certainly does and must win this war or else capitulate to the U.S. regime. Russia doesn’t have the option of allowing this Ukraine to serve as an American nuclear launching-pad against The Kremlin. Whether it will allow Finland (the second-nearest) to become that is not yet clear.
If Russia’s Government were like America’s Government, then Russia might now be considering to turn Mexico against America like America has turned Ukraine against Russia. On March 21st, Ben Norton headlined “‘Mexico is not a US colony!’: AMLO condemns invasion threats, celebrates nationalization of oil, lithium” and quoted from recent speeches by Mexico’s President, who has made clear the depths of the mutual hostility on both sides of that border. The current Mexican President has transformed his country’s international policies into a clear condemnation of the arrogance and psychopathic greed of America’s billionaires and their Government. What is remarkable is that Russia has given no sign of trying to turn Mexico into a Russian launching-pad against America as America is now straining to bring to culmination Obama’s plan for Ukraine to become America’s launching-pad against Russia.
Clearly, Russia’s Government is fundamentally different from America’s, vastly less aggressive. It’s obvious to any rational person. For Russia to lose the war in Ukraine would be disastrous, whereas for America to lose it would be just another defeat for America, like Vietnam was, and Afghanistan was, and Iraq was, and Syria was, and Libya was, and so many others have been — and none of those defeats after 1945 has even nicked the U.S. regime’s ability to dictate to the rest of the world like it demands to do. Maybe this one would, but that would be all to the good, for the entire world — if America doesn’t resort to nuclear war in order to try to assert its supremacy. What’s at stake for Russia in this matter is its very existence as an independent country. What’s at stake for America in it — this war on Russia’s border, not on ours — is whatever America’s billionaires will choose it to be. And if they choose to lose, then everyone (including especially in Europe) will be better off as a result. But if America’s billionaires choose to ‘win’ (if they’re that power-crazed), then the world won’t survive this. So, yes: since 1945, there’s a huge difference between Russia’s Government, and ours.
The post A Huge Difference Between America’s and Russia’s Governments first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama met privately in the White House with the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, to get him to end Ukraine’s neutralist position ever since 1991 and join the U.S. Government’s EU and NATO alliances against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor Russia, but Yanukovych said no. And, then, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled in 2010 to Kiev to give this another try, and again Yanukovych said no. By the time of June 2011, the Obama Administration started planning the coup to replace Ukraine’s Government with one that the U.S. would select. This plan started being implemented by no later than 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy in Ukraine, to train Ukraine’s racist-fascist, or ideologically Nazi, haters of Russians, how to use the internet in order to organize ‘anti-corruption’ demonstrations against — and to overthrow and replace — the neutralist Yanukovych by a Ukrainian regime that would be committed against Russia. On 27 January 2014, Obama’s agent overseeing the U.S. coup told the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev that Arseniy Yatsenyuk should be placed in charge when the coup would be completed, and this was done on 27 February 2014. Obama’s plan to turn Ukraine rabidly anti-Russia succeeded. (The only part of it that failed was Obama’s plan to grab Russia’s largest naval base, in Crimea, and turn that into yet another U.S. naval base.) It also succeeded in turning Ukrainian public opinion vastly more against Russia than it had been before.
The objective of all this was ultimately to achieve a 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse, by which the U.S. will ultimately place at least one nuclear missile only about 300 miles away from Moscow and then demand Russia’s capitulation. If Russia says no, then within only five minutes from America’s firing its knockout missile, Moscow can be annihilated, Russia’s central command beheaded, and that is too fast for Russia to be able to recognize that it had been done and then to launch its retaliatory weapons against America. So, there might be a reasonable chance for America to eliminate Russia by a blitz-nuclear attack from Ukraine — or at least there are influential people in the U.S. Government and academe who think so (including virtually the entire Biden Administration, just like in Obama’s and Trump’s).
Ever since at least 2006, the idea had become mainstream in American geostrategic planning circles for America to abandon the prior nuclear meta-strategy — “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD — of using nuclear weapons in order to avert a nuclear war, to becoming instead “Nuclear Primacy,” to use nuclear weapons in order to win a nuclear war. Biden pushed it almost beyond the point of no return until Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022 so as to push back Ukraine’s nearest border from its present roughly 300 miles away from Moscow to perhaps a thousand miles away. However, even that would be nearer to Moscow than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis standard, which was Cuba being 1,331 miles away from Washington DC. And now Finland, which aims to join NATO, might move that to only 507 miles; so, America’s goal of conquering Russia is still very much a national-security threat to the people in Russia. In fact, by 2017, America already had become frighteningly near to being able to perpetrate a ‘victorious’ blitz-nuclear attack against Russia.
By contrast, Russia has never tried to place its ground-based nuclear missiles that near to Washington DC. Cuba was the last opportunity to do that, and it was during the time of the Soviet Union, and it was instead 1,331 miles away from DC. Russia, today — now that NATO has grown to surround it (especially in Ukraine, which has the nearest border to Moscow) — is in enormous danger from this. On 17 December 2021, Russia formally presented separately to America, and to NATO, Russia’s fundamental national-security concerns, and on 7 January 2022 both America and its NATO said no to all of them — not even for negotiation. Russia’s only remaining option then was to invade and conquer Ukraine. America has no national-security interest in Russia’s nearest neighbor, Ukraine, but Russia certainly does and must win this war or else capitulate to the U.S. regime. Russia doesn’t have the option of allowing this Ukraine to serve as an American nuclear launching-pad against The Kremlin. Whether it will allow Finland (the second-nearest) to become that is not yet clear.
If Russia’s Government were like America’s Government, then Russia might now be considering to turn Mexico against America like America has turned Ukraine against Russia. On March 21st, Ben Norton headlined “‘Mexico is not a US colony!’: AMLO condemns invasion threats, celebrates nationalization of oil, lithium” and quoted from recent speeches by Mexico’s President, who has made clear the depths of the mutual hostility on both sides of that border. The current Mexican President has transformed his country’s international policies into a clear condemnation of the arrogance and psychopathic greed of America’s billionaires and their Government. What is remarkable is that Russia has given no sign of trying to turn Mexico into a Russian launching-pad against America as America is now straining to bring to culmination Obama’s plan for Ukraine to become America’s launching-pad against Russia.
Clearly, Russia’s Government is fundamentally different from America’s, vastly less aggressive. It’s obvious to any rational person. For Russia to lose the war in Ukraine would be disastrous, whereas for America to lose it would be just another defeat for America, like Vietnam was, and Afghanistan was, and Iraq was, and Syria was, and Libya was, and so many others have been — and none of those defeats after 1945 has even nicked the U.S. regime’s ability to dictate to the rest of the world like it demands to do. Maybe this one would, but that would be all to the good, for the entire world — if America doesn’t resort to nuclear war in order to try to assert its supremacy. What’s at stake for Russia in this matter is its very existence as an independent country. What’s at stake for America in it — this war on Russia’s border, not on ours — is whatever America’s billionaires will choose it to be. And if they choose to lose, then everyone (including especially in Europe) will be better off as a result. But if America’s billionaires choose to ‘win’ (if they’re that power-crazed), then the world won’t survive this. So, yes: since 1945, there’s a huge difference between Russia’s Government, and ours.
Before the MH17 passenger plane was shot down over the civil-war zone in Ukraine on 17 July 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama needed to persuade 9 EU countries that were opposed to adding more sanctions against Russia — needed to force them to approve adding those sanctions. He needed to supply them with ‘evidence’ that Russia was doing heinous things in Ukraine’s civil war. On 15 July 2014, Russia’s RT headlined “9 EU countries ready to block economic sanctions against Russia,” and reported that:
France, Germany, and Italy are among EU members who don’t want to follow the US lead and impose trade sanctions on Russia. US sanctions are seen as a push to promote its own multibillion free-trade pact with Europe.
“France, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, and EU President Italy see no reason in the current environment for the introduction of sectorial trade and economic sanctions against Russia and at the summit, will block the measure,” a diplomatic source told ITAR-TASS.
In order for a new wave of sanctions to pass, all 28 EU members must unanimously vote in favor. EU ministers plan to discuss new sanctions against Russia at their summit in Brussels on Wednesday, July 16. Even if only one country vetoed, sanctions would not be imposed. With heavyweights like France and Germany opposed to more sanctions the measure will likely again be stalled, the source said.
After the plane was shot down, America, UK, and Ukraine immediately said that Russia and Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine did it, and then, within just a few weeks, all 9 of the EU hold-outs switched to approve the added anti-Russian sanctions that Obama wanted.
On 5 March 2023, the independent investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg headlined “Meet the British intelligence-linked firm that warped MH17 news coverage,” and he reported how coordinated and pre-planned by British intelligence (which worked hand-in-glove with both Ukrainian and American Governments on this) the MH17 operation had been set up not just to shoot down the plane but to be backed up with faked ‘evidence’ that it had been done by Russia. (In his report, he uses undefined the acronym “JIT”: that refers to the official “Joint Investigative Team” on the downing of MH17.)
On 7 October 2019, I had already headlined “Update on the MH17 case” and documented that Netherland’s Government had signed an “8 August 2014 agreement [never made public] with Ukraine, to find Ukraine not to have perpetrated the downing. But the families [of the 196 Dutch who had been murdered by the shoot-down] don’t know this,” and the Dutch court that was hearing the MH17 case refused to consider any other evidence, especially not from Russia, and refused to consider those families’ urgings for that court to consider any evidence that was being offered on the case — including from Russia, which the Dutch Government pre-emptively was alleging had done the shoot-down. That secret agreement was among the four members of the “Joint Investigative Team,” all four of which were ‘allies’ (vassal-nations) of the U.S. Government: “Netherlands, Ukraine, Belgium, and Australia.” They all agreed that the case would be tried in the Netherlands, because 196 of the 298 corpses came from there. My article links down to the evidence that Russia was wanting to present but was barred from presenting, and it also links down to evidence from the Government of Malaysia and the black boxes it had, and the MH17 pilots’ corpses that Malaysia had, all of which was likewise clear that the MH17 was shot down not by any BUK missile from Russia, but instead by a Ukrainian air force warplane that fired straight at the pilot, whose corpse was riddled with bullets. The Ukrainian warplane pilot, from whose plane those bullets were being fired, was under the command of the Ukrainian government that Obama had installed. In other words: Obama was the Commander-in-Chief of the entire operation. And it obtained its objective: on 31 July 2014, the 9 recalcitrant EU members all switched to approve the new sanctions against Russia.
The post How and Why Obama Downed the MH17 Passenger Plane on 17 July 2014 first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Multiple news outlets reported late Monday that the Biden administration is considering restarting migrant family detentions that were used extensively by previous administrations in an attempt to crack down on border crossings.
While “no final decision has been made,” according to The New York Times, “the move would be a stark reversal for President Biden, who came into office promising to adopt a more compassionate approach to the border after the harsh policies of his predecessor, former President Donald J. Trump.”
Immigrant rights advocates were quick to warn Biden against following through with any plan to revive migrant family detentions, which the administration had largely shut down.
“I’ve got one word for them: unacceptable,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council.
“The thing about family detention is not only that it’s cruel and inhumane,” Reichlin-Melnick added, “but also that it was a money pit and absolutely useless as a ‘deterrent.’”
Bob Libal, an immigration justice advocate and consultant with Human Rights Watch, said it is “absolutely shameful that this is even being considered again.”
Both the Obama and Trump administrations made expansive use of family detention, with the latter attempting to rescind limits on how long children can be held in migrant detention facilities—an effort that was ultimately blocked in federal court.
On the campaign trail, Biden condemned the practice of family detention—as well as the separation of migrant families—as morally bankrupt, writing in a Twitter post: “Children should be released from ICE detention with their parents immediately. This is pretty simple, and I can’t believe I have to say it: Families belong together.”
But with the 2024 election looming, the Biden administration has moved to reinstate immigration policies that it previously denounced as cruel—including a Trump-era asylum ban—as it prepares for the May expiration of Title 42, another Trump administration policy that Biden has used to rapidly deport migrants.
\u201cNO NO NO NO NO NO. \n\n\u201cThe administration will continue to prioritize safe, orderly and humane processing of migrants,\u201d Luis Miranda, a department spokesman, said in a statement.\u201d\n\nFAMILY DETENTION IS INHERENTLY INHUMANE. BABY JAILS ARE INHUMANE. https://t.co/FajlFvBGKj\u201d— Valeria Gomez (@Valeria Gomez) 1678151345
Reuters reported Monday that in addition to restarting family detentions, the Biden administration is “weighing reviving immigration arrests of migrant families within the United States who have been ordered deported.”
“It’s all on the table,” an unnamed official told the outlet.
In the place of family detentions, the Biden administration has used ankle bracelets and other methods—decried as “digital prisons” by rights groups—to track migrant families as they move through the court system.
But as the Detention Watch Network has observed, the Biden administration did not end its contracts with facilities that were previously used to hold migrant families.
“Instead, following cues from the Obama administration, it converted the contract with Berks County to detain adult women and shifted its usage of the Dilley facility to detain single adults,” the organization noted.
Citing one unnamed official, CNN reported Monday that the Biden administration is “looking at multiple options for how to handle migrant families at the southern border, not all of them involving family detention.”
“Another source familiar with the deliberations added that among the options discussed are some that wouldn’t involve detaining families in ICE facilities,” CNN added. “This source said that family detentions would be limited to a small number of days—an attempt to set the policy apart from the Trump administration’s handling of family detentions.”
But it’s not likely that rights groups and advocates would accept such an alternative.
“I was part of a legal team that sued to get access to the first family detention center that President Obama opened (in Artesia, N.M.),” Karen Tumlin, a civil rights litigator, recounted Monday. “Talking to families and kids detained at Artesia was one of the lowest points of my legal career. I can see the cribs lining the hallway now, families and babies crammed into tiny rooms.”
“A family detention policy is a policy of adding trauma to trauma,” Tumlin added. “It is painful to see this as a rumored proposal from the Biden administration.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Multiple news outlets reported late Monday that the Biden administration is considering restarting migrant family detentions that were used extensively by previous administrations in an attempt to crack down on border crossings.
While “no final decision has been made,” according to The New York Times, “the move would be a stark reversal for President Biden, who came into office promising to adopt a more compassionate approach to the border after the harsh policies of his predecessor, former President Donald J. Trump.”
Immigrant rights advocates were quick to warn Biden against following through with any plan to revive migrant family detentions, which the administration had largely shut down.
“I’ve got one word for them: unacceptable,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council.
“The thing about family detention is not only that it’s cruel and inhumane,” Reichlin-Melnick added, “but also that it was a money pit and absolutely useless as a ‘deterrent.’”
Bob Libal, an immigration justice advocate and consultant with Human Rights Watch, said it is “absolutely shameful that this is even being considered again.”
Both the Obama and Trump administrations made expansive use of family detention, with the latter attempting to rescind limits on how long children can be held in migrant detention facilities—an effort that was ultimately blocked in federal court.
On the campaign trail, Biden condemned the practice of family detention—as well as the separation of migrant families—as morally bankrupt, writing in a Twitter post: “Children should be released from ICE detention with their parents immediately. This is pretty simple, and I can’t believe I have to say it: Families belong together.”
But with the 2024 election looming, the Biden administration has moved to reinstate immigration policies that it previously denounced as cruel—including a Trump-era asylum ban—as it prepares for the May expiration of Title 42, another Trump administration policy that Biden has used to rapidly deport migrants.
\u201cNO NO NO NO NO NO. \n\n\u201cThe administration will continue to prioritize safe, orderly and humane processing of migrants,\u201d Luis Miranda, a department spokesman, said in a statement.\u201d\n\nFAMILY DETENTION IS INHERENTLY INHUMANE. BABY JAILS ARE INHUMANE. https://t.co/FajlFvBGKj\u201d— Valeria Gomez (@Valeria Gomez) 1678151345
Reuters reported Monday that in addition to restarting family detentions, the Biden administration is “weighing reviving immigration arrests of migrant families within the United States who have been ordered deported.”
“It’s all on the table,” an unnamed official told the outlet.
In the place of family detentions, the Biden administration has used ankle bracelets and other methods—decried as “digital prisons” by rights groups—to track migrant families as they move through the court system.
But as the Detention Watch Network has observed, the Biden administration did not end its contracts with facilities that were previously used to hold migrant families.
“Instead, following cues from the Obama administration, it converted the contract with Berks County to detain adult women and shifted its usage of the Dilley facility to detain single adults,” the organization noted.
Citing one unnamed official, CNN reported Monday that the Biden administration is “looking at multiple options for how to handle migrant families at the southern border, not all of them involving family detention.”
“Another source familiar with the deliberations added that among the options discussed are some that wouldn’t involve detaining families in ICE facilities,” CNN added. “This source said that family detentions would be limited to a small number of days—an attempt to set the policy apart from the Trump administration’s handling of family detentions.”
But it’s not likely that rights groups and advocates would accept such an alternative.
“I was part of a legal team that sued to get access to the first family detention center that President Obama opened (in Artesia, N.M.),” Karen Tumlin, a civil rights litigator, recounted Monday. “Talking to families and kids detained at Artesia was one of the lowest points of my legal career. I can see the cribs lining the hallway now, families and babies crammed into tiny rooms.”
“A family detention policy is a policy of adding trauma to trauma,” Tumlin added. “It is painful to see this as a rumored proposal from the Biden administration.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Timothy Shenk discusses Realigners—“a biography of American democracy told through its majorities, and the people who made them.”
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Ahead of former President Donald Trump’s Wednesday visit to East Palestine, Ohio—where a Norfolk Southern-owned train transporting carcinogenic chemicals derailed on February 3, prompting a mass evacuation and release of pollutants—progressive critics highlighted the key role his administration played in making the fiery crash and its toxic aftermath more likely.
During his speech, Trump—considered a leading GOP presidential candidate for 2024 despite spearheading a deadly coup attempt following his 2020 loss—criticized how President Joe Biden’s administration has responded to the environmental and public health disaster unfolding in East Palestine, a poor rural town of about 4,700 people located a few miles west of the Pennsylvania border.
But as critics noted beforehand, the Trump administration’s gutting of train safety rules at the behest of railroad industry lobbyists was instrumental in creating the conditions for the derailment and ensuing chemical spill and burnoff, which has provoked fears of groundwater contamination and air pollution.
“He should be apologizing to that community for his administration rolling back rail regulations,” progressive stalwart Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator, tweeted prior to Trump’s address.
\u201cFormer President Trump is on his way to East Palestine, Ohio today. \n\nHe should be apologizing to that community for his administration rolling back rail regulations.\u201d— Nina Turner (@Nina Turner)
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Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch made a similar point in an opinion piece published earlier this week.
“If residents of East Palestine—a modern news desert of downsized or disappeared news sources, which allows misinformation to fester—truly knew the reality, a delegation of townsfolk would likely greet Trump with tiki torches and pitchforks,” Bunch wrote, comparing the former president’s visit to “the tendency of a criminal to return to the scene of his crime.”
Bunch noted that “Trump acted specifically to sabotage a nascent government effort to protect citizens from the growing threat posed by derailments of outdated, poorly equipped, and undermanned freight trains that were increasingly shipping both highly flammable crude oil from the U.S. fracking boom as well as toxic chemicals like the ones that would derail in East Palestine.”
“Trump had been in office for less than a year when he moved to kill the 2015 rule change initiated by the Obama administration that would have required freight trains to upgrade the current braking technology that was developed in the 19th century for state-of-the-art electronic systems,” wrote Bunch, who pointed out that this came after Norfolk Southern and other rail carriers donated more than $6 million to Republican candidates in 2016 and spent millions more on lobbying.
“With the investigation into the East Palestine wreck still in its early phases, it’s not clear if the modern brakes—originally required for installation by 2021—could have prevented the toxic derailment or whether the specific Obama rule would have applied,” Bunch continued. “But experts do believe the new brakes could have mitigated the wreckage—and thus the release of so many hazardous chemicals.”
“The rule reversal wasn’t the only time that Team Trump sided with Big Rail over the forgotten Americans who live on the wrong side of their tracks,” he added. “In 2019, for example, the Trump administration moved to not strengthen but relax regulations on shipping fracked natural gas through communities like East Palestine. The same year, Trump’s White House also killed an Obama-era proposal that would have required two crew members in freight-train locomotives.”
“The Trump approach to the rail industry was to let the companies do what they wanted, which was to avoid regulations, slash jobs, and extract profit.”
Ahead of Trump’s visit, More Perfect Union also argued on social media that the ex-president’s “attempt to portray himself as a friend of the town and as someone who would have stood up to Norfolk Southern… couldn’t be further from the truth.”
As the progressive media outlet observed, the Trump administration “withdrew multiple rail safety recommendations and moved toward a ‘self-regulatory approach’ where rail companies could do as they pleased.”
“It’s no surprise that the Trump years were filled with dangerous deregulation,” More Perfect Union asserted, describing his decision to nominate top rail industry executives to lead the Federal Railroad Administration and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration as “a prime example of the revolving door between business and government.”
“The Trump approach to the rail industry was to let the companies do what they wanted, which was to avoid regulations, slash jobs, and extract profit,” the outlet continued. “This approach, and rail companies’ greed, has led to over 1,000 derailments each year. Some are massive catastrophes like East Palestine. But every single one is harmful. And if the industry isn’t regulated and forced to change, we’ll soon be seeing more disasters.”
When Trump “pretends to care about rail workers, or the people of East Palestine, we can’t believe him,” More Perfect Union added. “His record tells a very different story, the story of his own role in creating this problem in the first place.”
Even some conservative critics of Trump have questioned the sincerity of his visit.
“It’s clear that it’s a political stunt,” Ray LaHood, a Republican ex-member of Congress who led the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) during former President Barack Obama’s first term, told Politico on Wednesday. “If he wants to visit, he’s a citizen. But clearly his regulations and the elimination of them, and no emphasis on safety, is going to be pointed out.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wasted little time in doing exactly that, calling the GOP’s indignation “fake” soon after Trump announced his travel plans.
\u201cGood morning.\n\nThe same Republicans who are up in arms about East Palestine are the same ones who supported Trump\u2019s campaign to gut Obama\u2019s railroad safety regulations. \n\nIt\u2019s all fake indignation.\u201d— Chris Murphy (@Chris Murphy)
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Bunch acknowledged that “it’s beyond hypocritical for Trump to bring his Harold Hill-huckster shtick to East Palestine when residents are still experiencing headaches and breathing foul air from the kind of catastrophe he didn’t lift a finger to stop from the Resolute Desk.”
“But also it’s a bit baffling why Biden or his Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—who seems to be channeling his inner McKinsey & Co. these days—haven’t gone to Ohio,” he argued. “Especially when Trump and any other Republicans hoping to make political hay off of East Palestine’s misery are coming to town empty-handed.”
“None of the anti-Biden critics on this issue have offered a solution, because they can’t,” wrote Bunch. “The only fix for the kind of runaway abuses of modern capitalism that cause these environmental catastrophes is government regulation, aided by empowering worker safety with strong unions—two things that the Trump-led GOP has opposed at every turn.”
Even in the wake of the disaster, Republican lawmakers have refused to demand stronger regulations, as HuffPost reported:
Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), a vocal Biden critic who represents East Palestine, on Tuesday dismissed immediate calls for stricter rail regulations, saying actions toward accountability will hinge on the findings of a National Transportation Safety Board [NTSB] investigation into the derailment.
“That will dictate whether there are laws, regulations that need to be changed, whether there were rules that were violated,” he said during a news conference in East Palestine. “We don’t know any of that yet, and we won’t know that until NTSB releases its report.”
Hours before Trump spoke, Buttigieg announced that he plans to travel to East Palestine on Thursday. His visit is expected to coincide with the publication of the NTSB’s preliminary report about its ongoing probe into the crash.
“Trump and any other Republicans hoping to make political hay off of East Palestine’s misery are coming to town empty-handed.”
On Tuesday, Buttigieg unveiled DOT’s recommendations for improving the safety of the nation’s rail system, though an inter-union alliance of rail workers immediately criticized the plan as inadequate.
Given the scale of the problems—and in light of the transportation secretary’s ongoing refusal to exercise his authority to reinstate previously gutted rules along with his consideration of an industry-backed proposal to further weaken the regulation of train braking systems—union leaders have called for nationalizing the railways and implementing their proposed solutions.
Turner, for her part, emphasized that she has “been outspoken about the two years the Biden administration had [to] fix these problems.”
“The Trump administration is at fault, as is the Obama administration,” Turner contended, referring to the fact that the latter’s regulations were also watered down in response to industry pressure.
“The Ohio GOP is to blame as well,” she added, echoing recent reporting on Norfolk Southern’s campaign to influence state-level lawmakers and officials. “Failure at every level of government and multiple administrations led to this.”
Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future… A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.
— President Biden
Oh, the hypocrisy.
To hear President Biden talk about Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, you might imagine that Putin is the only dictator bent on expanding his military empire through the use of occupation, aggression and oppression.
Yet the United States is no better, having spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.
What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.
War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.
America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion and shows no signs of abating.
Clearly, it’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.
The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.
American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.
Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”
Incredibly, America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.
The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”
This is how a military empire occupies the globe.
After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.
In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.
This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.
Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.
War spending is bankrupting America.
Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.
In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.
Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.
Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.
In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.
Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.
Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.
Unfortunately, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.
As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”
War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”
Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.
A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:
$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.
That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.
Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.
Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.
That needs to change.
The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.
The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.
The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.
The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.
The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.
James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
We are seeing this play out before our eyes.
The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.
Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.
At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:
The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.
This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.
We failed to heed his warning.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, war is the enemy of freedom.
As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.
The post Dictators Bent on Building Military Empires first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
As I was reading Norman Finkelstein’s new book, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, I thought early on of Obama’s joke at the expense of Rahm Emanuel: “he’s one of a kind, and thank god he’s one of a kind.” Finkelstein, too, is very much one of a kind. But the analogy with Emanuel fails, because in fact one Rahm Emanuel is far too many whereas one Finkelstein is not nearly enough. We need hundreds of him. That is to say, we need hundreds of left intellectuals with the courage and intelligence to think for themselves and never sell out, to refuse to compromise—even to risk alienating fellow leftists by publicly repudiating woke culture and the more vacuous forms of identity politics in favor of an unstinting adherence to class politics. Nor would it hurt to have more writers who are as eloquent and hilarious as him.
It is widely known on the left that Finkelstein is, as it were, a martyr to truth and justice, having been subject to outrageous calumniation and denied an academic career because of his relentless advocacy of the Palestinian cause. With I’ll Burn That Bridge, he shows his willingness to burn bridges not only with the establishment but also with the “left” of today, for which he shows scarcely mitigated contempt. He considers it, or dominant tendencies within it, to have degenerated from soaring moral and intellectual heights with Rosa Luxemburg, W. E. B. DuBois, and Paul Robeson into a censorious, narcissistic, morbidly navel-gazing culture preoccupied with subjectivist trivialities like personal pronouns at the expense of solidaristic struggle for a better world. “Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you.” (“You must be living an awfully precious life,” he goes on, “if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns.”) If the book is not simply ignored, one can expect that it will elicit a flood of vituperation from leftists and liberals: “racist, misogynistic, transphobic, white supremacist, juvenile, incoherent, petty!” The intelligent reader will not be tempted by such facile judgments but instead will engage with the book’s substance, because it has important things to say.
It consists of two parts: in the first, Finkelstein “deconstructs” identity politics and the cancel culture it has given rise to, focusing on five figures whom he eviscerates: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Barack Obama. In the second part, he considers a related subject with which he is intimately familiar: academic freedom. To what extent should a regime of free speech reign on the university campus, and under what circumstances should an academic’s “offensive” speech in the public square result in disciplinary action? Is it wrong for universities to grant Holocaust deniers a platform? When teaching, should professors strive for “balance”—presenting with equal force all sides of an issue so that students can make up their own minds—or should they teach only their own perspective? What should we think of campus speech codes? Finkelstein addresses all such questions at length and in a spirit of uncommon seriousness.
One difficulty with the book is that it has a sprawling and meandering character, consisting variously of memoir, brutal polemic, dense argumentation, forensic dissection of texts, scores of long quotations, innumerable long footnotes, and very funny ridicule of everything and everyone from Michelle Obama to Bari Weiss, from the New York Times to woke terms like Latinx (“why would an ethnic group want to sound like a porn site?”). At its core, however, beneath the variegated surface, the book is an anguished cri de coeur against pervasive cultural, political, and intellectual rot—an unapologetic defense and exegesis of the heavily maligned “Western canon” (John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Kant, DuBois, Frederick Douglass, and the like), a sustained lamentation over how far the left has fallen, a furious denunciation of rampant philistinism and pusillanimous groupthink (quoting Mill: “That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time”), and a proudly unfashionable celebration of such quaint notions as Truth, Reason, and Justice (which Finkelstein capitalizes, in a consciously anti-postmodernist flourish). The book’s kaleidoscopic nature and intimidating length might bewilder the reader, so in this review I propose to summarize and comment on several of its main arguments, to facilitate their diffusion.
Before doing so, however, I can’t resist quoting a few Finkelsteinian zingers, to preface the following heavy discussion with a bit of levity. On MSNBC’s Joy Reid: “living proof that not all yentas are Jewish and not all bovines are cows.” On Angela Davis: “Once upon a time she was on the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted List. Now she’s on Martha’s Vineyard’s Five Most Coveted List.” On Henry Louis Gates: “a virtuoso at crawling on the ground while typing on his keyboard.”1 On Amy Goodman (whom he doesn’t name): “Goddess of Wokeness…a woke machine, churning out insipid clichés as her mental faculty degenerates to mush.” On Ibram X. Kendi: “mallet-wielding grifter…preposterous poseur…[whose] ‘definitive history of racist ideas in America’ reduces to a compendium of prepubescent binary name-calling.” On Robin DiAngelo’s morbid obsession with diagnosing “racism”: “She is the monomaniacal Captain Ahab in pursuit of the White Whale. She is little Jackie Paper out to slay Puff the Racist Dragon. Her palette comprises two colors—white and black… What an unremitting, remorseless, insufferable bore!” On the widespread fascination with transgender people: “the first day of a graduate seminar, students used to describe their intellectual interests. Nowadays, it’s de rigueur to declare your sexual orientation. It’s only a matter of time before a student announces, ‘I’m she/her and I’m packing a thick, juicy nine-incher.’”
In an adaptation of Emma Goldman’s “If I can’t dance, I don’t want your Revolution,” Finkelstein declares: “If I can’t laugh, I don’t want your Revolution.” Political conservatives, too, have complained about the humorlessness of the woke crowd, but if you’re alienating even die-hard leftists, maybe it’s time to rethink your messaging.
Identity politics
Debates on the left over identity politics go back decades, and it is easy to be sick of them. Unfortunately, there is no prospect of their ending as long as identity politics and woke culture remain dominant on the left and in the Democratic Party—as they surely do today, at the expense of a class politics. Finkelstein is aware that the identity politics of the left isn’t quite the same as the identity politics of the Democrats, but he is right that they overlap, and that such a politics is more conducive to being neutered into empty symbolism (statues, token representation in the corporate class, electing a vapid con artist like Obama) than a Bernie Sanders-style—or more radical—class politics is.
Serious leftists, like Robin D. G. Kelley, have written competent defenses of identity politics, and Finkelstein certainly isn’t arguing against the necessity of incorporating anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, and other such “woke” agendas into popular movements. What he objects to are the forms that identity politics often takes, and its tendency to devolve into celebration of an insular tribal identity. The binary, balkanizing drawing of lines between groups and near-contempt for the “oppressing” group—white vs. black, cis vs. trans, straight vs. gay, man vs. woman—is, in its parochialism and vitiating of solidarity against capitalism, not what a real left politics looks like. He quotes at great length some words of Frederick Douglass in 1894 that might well have gotten him “cancelled” today:
We hear, since emancipation, much said by our modern colored leaders in commendation of race pride, race love, race effort, race superiority, race men, and the like… [But] I recognize and adopt no narrow basis for my thoughts, feelings, or modes of action. I would place myself, and I would place you, my young friends, upon grounds vastly higher and broader than any founded upon race or color… We should never forget that the ablest and most eloquent voices ever raised in behalf of the black man’s cause, were the voices of white men. Not for the race; not for color, but for man and manhood alone, they labored, fought and died… It is better to be a member of the great human family, than a member of any particular variety of the human family. In regard to men as in regard to things, the whole is more than a part. Away then with the nonsense that a man must be black to be true to the rights of black men. I put my foot upon the effort to draw lines between the white and the black…or to draw race lines anywhere in the domain of liberty.
Moreover, the very idea of being “proud” of what group one happens to belong to—proud of being black or a woman or gay or trans—is puzzling. “[I]t perplexes why one should feel proud of one’s zoological difference,” Finkelstein writes. “[W]hat sense is there in making a ‘cult’ of that over which one has no choice…? Shouldn’t one aspire to transcend the ‘inevitable’ part—the color of one’s skin—so as to be judged by the ‘free part’—the content of one’s character?” Similarly, the idea of “loving one’s people” is odd, first in that it amounts to “loving one’s self writ large,” which, in its narcissism, hardly seems like a noble thing. It easily becomes chauvinism. Second, one would certainly not love all the individuals who are alleged to constitute “one’s people.” Many or most of them one would likely personally despise—just as, on the other hand, one would “love” many people belonging to a “different group.” Too much identification with some imposed identity such as race is exactly what leads to irrational racial hostility (including against whites), sexist hostility (also against men), and other divisive social forces. Identity politics can be dangerous and destructive, not only on the right but even the left. “In their goodness and badness, there exist only persons, not peoples.”
The vacuousness of contemporary identity politics is best exposed by considering its “great minds,” the Crenshaws, Coateses, Kendis, and DiAngelos. For a really thorough demolition, Finkelstein would have had to review the record of various feminist and queer theorists too, but it’s a big enough task to critique the writers on race. Or, more precisely, that isn’t a difficult task—it’s so easy that Finkelstein is able to devote huge chunks of these chapters to sheer mockery—but it does require patience and a willingness to wade through endless intellectual muck. Take Crenshaw. Unsurprisingly, in her seminal 1989 article on intersectionality “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” “she conspicuously omits class in her dissection of oppression.” It disturbs her that white feminists are presumptuous enough to speak for black women, but she “seems less concerned or, for that matter, even conscious that a high-achieving Black woman speaking for Black working-class women might also be problematic.”
Or take DiAngelo. She has a pathological obsession with racism and an utterly Manichean, paranoid view of the world. If you’re white, you’re a racist—whether you’re John Brown or Jefferson Davis, a fascist or an anti-fascist. Racism is ubiquitous, “immovably entrenched in our psyches and structures” (as Finkelstein paraphrases), “the air we breathe and the water we drink,” all-encompassing and constantly reproduced, she says, “automatically”—and therefore, evidently, ineradicable. At best, it can occasionally be “interrupted”—through the “diversity training” at which DiAngelo excels and for which she charges a hefty fee. Meanwhile, her book White Fragility has sold almost a million copies and has had quite an influence on woke culture, helping to instill a collective fixation on—incidentally—the same idée fixe of Ta-Nehisi Coates (according to Cornel West): the almighty, unremovable nature of white supremacy. “Whites,” says DiAngelo, “control all major institutions of society and set the policies and practices that others must live by.” Yes, whites are a homogeneous master-class: the billionaires and the working class, they’re all equally guilty, they’re all oppressors. And to blacks she says, as Finkelstein summarizes, “Beware! Don’t trust white people! They’re all racists, racists to the core! Every last one of them! They’re hard-wired for racism; it’s in their DNA.” This is a message perfectly calculated to pit workers against each other. No wonder the business class has so enthusiastically promoted her book!
What about Ibram X. Kendi? Finkelstein seems to take particular pleasure in disemboweling this (as he says) non-scholar and non-activist, for his critique/massacre is a full 110 pages long and features withering juxtapositions with a titan, DuBois. It’s sad that a book review can’t communicate the verve or the slicing humor of this chapter (and others). Kendi’s book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, for example, whose “only novelty is to shoehorn the epithets racist or antiracist, segregationist or assimilationist into every other sentence…[is] less a definitive history than an exhaustive, and exhausting, taxonomy that’s as supple as a calcified femur and as subtle as an oversized mallet. It proceeds from the fatuous, almost juvenile, conceit that fastening binary, wooden labels on the actors and ideas incident to Black history will shed light on it.” One problem with Kendi’s and our culture’s promiscuous, indiscriminate use of the label “racist” is that the concept becomes diluted: “to be a racist ceases to be what it ought to be: a scarlet badge of shame… [W]hat information is conveyed by a label that collapses the distinction between Frederick Douglass [whom Kendi considers a racist] and the Grand Wizard of the K.K.K.?” The abolitionists were all racists, as were DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Wright, E. Franklin Frasier, etc. etc.—while Kendi singles out for praise Harry Truman, Michelle Obama, Eldridge Cleaver, Pam Grier, Bo Derek, Kanye West, etc. “[T]he rigor of his taxonomy recalls not the Periodic Table but, on the contrary, Pin the Tail on the Donkey.”
As Finkelstein says, Kendi embraces the woke conceit that, over four hundred years, “African-Americans haven’t registered any progress in the struggle against racism. Each seeming stride forward has been attended by a step backward.” If anything, he implies, things have only gotten worse! Such an “analysis” recalls the flagrantly ahistorical, unabashedly gloomy academic school of Afro-pessimism, and, by reifying differences between “whites” and “blacks” and valorizing anti-white resentment among the latter, serves the same function of hindering the class solidarity necessary to achieve real progress in struggles over the distribution of wealth, working conditions, affordable housing, high levels of unemployment, expansion of public resources, abysmal healthcare, environmental destruction, hypertrophying militarism, and the like. (No wonder, again, Kendi has been fêted by the establishment and can charge $45,000 for his talks.2 It helps, too, that his only real policy proposal is…affirmative action.)
After Finkelstein’s devastating exposure of Kendi’s countless inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and idiocies—his woke dismissal of the Civil Rights Movement in favor of the macho Black Panthers (who, by comparison, achieved almost nothing); his (in Kendi’s words) “striving to accept and equate and empower racial difference” even as he argues that the idea of race is a “mirage” that was invented to rationalize exploitation; his insistence that all racial disparities in society are purely a result of racism; his valorizing of racial differences (e.g., he praises the “irrepressible Blackness” of his friend) at the same time as he says anti-racists see only individuals and not racial behavior (“there is no such thing as Black behavior”); his positing of a deep separation between so-called white culture and black culture; his arguing against the racist “assimilationist” urge to value white culture over black even as he manifestly values white culture over black (lecturing before white audiences, accepting a fellowship at Harvard University, presiding over a research center at Boston University, being proud of publishing in white journals like The Atlantic)—nothing remains but the empty husk of a social-climbing charlatan. That such a person can be widely considered to be more or less on the left is a crushing indictment of the state of the left.
For charlatanry, though, few can beat the next entry on Finkelstein’s shit list: Obama. “Barack Obama is the perfected and perfect instrument of identity politics, its summa summarum. He represents the cynical triumph of form over substance, color over character. He is the cool Black dude who is also the reliable—in Professor Cornel West’s words—‘mascot of Wall Street.’” Most leftists are hardly enamored of Obama, so I need not summarize the case against him. Nor would I even try, because I couldn’t possibly reproduce the distinctive Finkelsteinian humor—and most of this very long chapter consists of (factually grounded) ridicule, directed at nearly everyone in Obama’s presidential coterie, a “revolting retinue of bootlickers.” Aside from Obama himself, the most satisfying skewering, I found, was of Samantha Power, the “Battleaxe from Hell…downright evil…[whose] conscience only bestirs at the suffering of victims of official U.S. enemies.” One might argue that in this chapter Finkelstein’s profound contempt for the “Elmer Gantry in blackface” at the head of this gaggle of amoral mediocrities gets the best of his prodigious literary gifts, since the ruthless mockery goes on and on and becomes somewhat tiresome, but it can’t be gainsaid that it’s all well-deserved.
After six chapters and almost 400 pages on the subject, Finkelstein’s summary of identity politics is worth quoting:
Identity politics has distracted from and, when need be, outright sabotaged a class-based movement [viz., Bernie Sanders’] that promised profound social change. It counsels Black people not to trust whites, as their racism is so entrenched and so omnipresent as to poison their every thought and action. It conveys to poor whites that they, no less than the white billionaire class, are beneficiaries of racism, so that it would be foolhardy of them to ally with Black people… Then, identity politics puts forth demands that either appear radical but are in fact politically inert—Defund the police, Abolition of prisons—as they have no practical possibility of achievement; or that leave the overall system intact while still enabling a handful, who purport to represent marginalized groups, to access—on a “parity” basis—the exclusive club of the “haves.” This, in effect, performance politics has spawned a disgusting den of thieves who brand themselves with radical-sounding hashtags, churn out radical-sounding tweets, and insinuate themselves into positions of prominence, as they rake in corporate donations, cash corporate paychecks, hang out at the watering holes of the rich and famous, and thence can be safely relied upon not to bite the hand that feeds them…
One might object that he’s painting with too broad a brush here, that advocacy of the interests of minorities and women can, depending on the context and the cause, indeed be an essential political program, but he wouldn’t deny this. He has the highest regard for the Civil Rights Movement, after all—although he would deny that that was identity politics. “The human rights of a victimized group must, of course, be uncompromisingly defended.” More problematic than such defense is to make a cult of group differences (group “pride”) in the way of the woke, and to place class issues at the bottom of the heap rather than the top, where they belong. “Human dignity is not possible without the ability to pay for a roof over one’s head, clothes on one’s back, and food on one’s table.”
Whatever genuinely emancipatory political impulses exist in identity politics have long been, on the whole, coopted and buried under an avalanche of left-liberal virtue-signaling, preening and posing, careerism, and sabotage of a substantive left. Just consider how the woke mob reacted to the Sanders campaign, the most serious challenge to the establishment in more than a generation: they tried to “cancel” Sanders for his being a “privileged white male” with a supposed blind-spot on race. His “economic reductionism,” according to Angela Davis, prevented him from “developing a vocabulary that allows him to speak…about the persistence of racism, racist violence, state violence.” (Note the pretentious academic language, as if you need a special “vocabulary” to talk about racism and violence—which Sanders, by the way, did.) As Finkelstein says, “When the ‘hour of serious danger’ to the status quo struck during Bernie Sanders’ class-struggle insurgency, the ‘true nature’ of woke radicalism—not just its opportunism but, even more, its rancid, reactionary core—was exposed as each and all of these erstwhile ‘radicals’ enlisted under the banner to stop him.” Woke cancel culture cooperated with the establishment media’s cancel culture to stop the Sanders juggernaut.
Cancel culture and academic freedom
“Cancel culture might be defined as the turning of a person into a non-person.” By that definition, it has been around for a very long time. Arguably, it is as old as civilization. The first and second Red Scares in the U.S. were instances of cancel culture; so is the corporate media’s treatment of virtually everyone on the left; so is the woke treatment of anyone who publicly strays from the party line. Even if such victims of woke defamation campaigns usually find their footing again or don’t always suffer career consequences in the first place, the mob’s impulse to censor and silence remains operative and ever-vigilant. Finkelstein knows cancel culture from the inside, and it is unsurprising that he resolutely opposes it.
His defense of a regime of nearly untrammeled free speech is rooted, first and foremost, in his conviction that this is the surest way to Truth. He quotes DuBois: when free speech is stifled, “the nation…becomes morally emasculated and mentally hog-tied, and cannot evolve that healthy difference of opinion which leads to the discovery of truth under changing conditions.” But John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is the text he primarily grounds his argument in, and he quotes from it liberally in his chapter on the right of even Holocaust deniers to make their case in public forums such as a college campus. “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion,” Mill writes, “is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth… The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.” As Finkelstein translates, “if you want to rationally hug your certainty, you must first meet the challenge of every naysayer.” Your opponents can even be useful for prodding you to rethink weak points in your reasoning or evidentiary basis, exposing little errors in your arguments, giving you something to think about that you had overlooked, in general giving you the opportunity to more rationally ground your beliefs.
The mob’s desire to silence, attack, and destroy comes from feeling threatened, not from being rationally certain and confident. The latter attitudes are more likely to yield calm composure and willingness to give opponents a hearing because you know you’re able to refute them. When a mob tries to prevent someone from talking because it feels threatened by his speech, it’s quite possible, often, that his speech has some truth in it. Suppressing it—unless it’s merely emotive speech like “fuck you!”—possibly allows his opponents to persist in having false or partially false views.
But someone might reply, “What if his speech is socially harmful? Isn’t that a legitimate reason to suppress it?” Well, the definition of “harmful” is, of course, contested, and it evolves over time. Eugenics and forced sterilization were once considered a very enlightened movement, being supported by progressives like Bertrand Russell, Helen Keller, Jane Addams, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Now eugenics is considered downright evil. Who is to say your definition of “socially harmful” is, in all cases, the right one, or that your application of it is always right? “When it comes to curbing speech,” Finkelstein says, “experience thus confirms the general rule in human affairs: humility is to be preferred over arrogance.”
Moreover, if the “harmful” speech is socially marginal such that hardly anyone believes it, what’s the great danger in letting someone say it now and then? If, on the other hand, it’s not marginal but holds the assent of millions, letting someone express it presents an opportunity to argue against it and thus inoculate people. The strategy of pure suppression is apt to lead many to think there might be something “dangerously truthful” to it—“the establishment doesn’t want us to hear this because it’s threatened by its truth!”—and thus might contribute to its diffusion across the population. People might think they’re being “rebellious” or anti-establishmentarian by believing it, and furthermore that they’re upholding noble values of free speech against authoritarian censoring leftists (as the reactionary right thinks today). I might also note that giving authorities the right to suppress or punish certain kinds of speech, and even encouraging them to do so, will soon lead to their suppressing speech you like.
The left has historically been in the vanguard of fights for free speech, from the abolitionists to the IWW (and most other unions, in fact) to the Socialists during World War I to the Civil Rights Movement. Its departure today from these honorable traditions is yet more evidence that it’s become a pseudo-left, a reactionary left—for the empowering of authorities to regulate speech is ultimately reactionary. It’s ironic that many self-styled anarchists advocate increasing the power of unaccountable bureaucrats to control what is said and what isn’t.
Admittedly, it might have strengthened Finkelstein’s discussion to consider in more depth possible counterarguments. It is, after all, very unfortunate that media operatives like Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and the whole stable of Fox News social arsonists have brainwashed millions of people. It is likely they couldn’t have had such a destructive impact had the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine not been repealed in 1987. Maybe it was right to repeal it, but a case can at least be made that it was wrong. Issues of online content moderation, too, come into play in any debate over censorship, and Finkelstein doesn’t say much about these. The reason, it seems, is that he doesn’t think the internet has raised significantly new questions about free speech, and in any case there is already an extensive literature on web censorship.
Among the many excellent points he makes is one that cuts to the heart of wokeness: the collective obsession with pinning a label—racist or not, sexist or not, transphobic or not—on every thought passing through one’s head and every utterance one makes, and then cancelling all the thoughts that (and all the people who) stray an inch past what’s deemed “acceptable,” is ridiculous and paranoid. It’s also reactionary, because it makes solidarity vastly more difficult. One of the more memorable passages in the book is when he imagines, in some alternate universe, a Robin DiAngelo who actually does care about fighting oppression of blacks and not only grifting off a culture’s pathologies. Were she to speak before a group of workers, she might say something like this (italics in the original):
Although racism is real and you should always be at the ready to fight it whenever it rears its ugly head, you all, Black and white, have a helluva lot more in common. You’re all, Black and white, trapped in dead-end jobs. You all earn poverty wages… [You have to] organize together, as one because you are one, to overthrow this wretched, corrupt, god-forsaken system. You can’t eliminate every fleeting, non-p.c. thought passing through your head. The mind is a tricky business… You can’t wait until everyone’s thoughts are simon-pure. You don’t have the time, and they never will be. You cannot police your thoughts, and it’s probably better that way. Were it otherwise, you wouldn’t be human. You’re fallible, you’re imperfect vessels. You weren’t born, and your minds can’t be, immaculate… If you unite to change the system, then your psyches will fall into place. It’s common struggle, common sacrifice, that produces mutual respect, even mutual love. A connection that binds will be forged by you, united in the heat of battle facing a common enemy, each marching beside the other, each lifting the other, each protecting the other. You don’t become better persons by each of you, singly, struggling with your racist demons. You become better persons by all of you, together, struggling against an antihuman system…
Wokeness is what happens when the destruction of the labor movement proceeds so far, and social atomization becomes so all-consuming, that even the “left” adopts an individualistic, moralistic, psychologistic, censorious, self-righteous, performative approach to making social change.
“The fight against racism must focus…not on the intangible, impalpable, unchangeable, invisible, or unprovable, but, instead, on what’s substantive, meaningful, and corrigible. In the first place, securing economic opportunity and legal equality.” The Sanders program was far more substantively “anti-racist” than the puny liberal programs of most of his woke critics. (As for Sanders’ being constantly hounded to support “reparations” for blacks, I’ve explained elsewhere why that demand is anti-solidaristic, politically impossible, and ultimately a diversion from radical social transformation.)
The last chapter of I’ll Burn That Bridge delves into a specific dimension of cancel culture: when is it appropriate for a professor to be disciplined for his public behavior and statements, whether on social media or in some other context? This issue bears, of course, on Finkelstein’s own career, but he is hardly the only academic to have been disciplined in recent decades for alleged “incivility” or taking unpopular political stands. The chapter is tightly argued and has a more disciplined structure than others, consisting of analyses of four academic freedom cases (Bertrand Russell in 1940, Leo Koch in 1960, Angela Davis in 1969, and Steven Salaita in 2014) and then general reflections that conclude in a discussion of his own case. He endorses the American Association of University Professors’ standard that “a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness to serve [i.e., to teach]”—which was surely not the case in the four instances he examines. But he goes much further and questions whether it should even be seen as a professional obligation that one always use civil language in one’s scholarship (which Finkelstein didn’t when writing about the Holocaust industry and Alan Dershowitz’s lies). Given all the invective in Marx’s Capital, for example, the book would never have been published by a university press today and Marx wouldn’t get a position at a top university. “But if the likes of Marx wouldn’t qualify for a tenured appointment at a first-rank university, isn’t that a reductio ad absurdum? Doesn’t it conclusively demonstrate the inanity of a standard commanding restrained and temperate language?”
One might connect Finkelstein’s lengthy discussion of academic civility with his book’s focus on woke politics by pointing to something his targets have in common: a preoccupation with policing language and thought at the expense of more substantive concerns. Academia insists on politeness, decorum, “neutral” language, which often serves to enforce conventions, emasculate dissent, and uphold power structures; wokeness insists on ceaselessly monitoring your own and others’ language, in fact making that a priority, allowing people to feel “radical” by doing nothing that remotely challenges real power structures. (No surprise that woke culture has largely emerged from the academy.) To do justice to Truth and Justice, though, requires more than this. In the case of scholarly writing and speaking,
There are moments that might positively require breaking free of the constraints imposed by polite public discourse in order to sound the tocsin that, as we indifferently carry on in a privileged sanctuary of peace and prosperity, innocent people are being butchered by our own state. The uncivil reality, not uncivil words, should be cause for reproach and excoriation, while uncivil words might be called for to bring home the uncivil reality.
It can at least be said for Finkelstein that he practices what he preaches: his book, to put it mildly, does not shrink from uncivil words.
The anti-academic
It should be clear from what has been said here that I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It is an unusual book. It requires a lot of patience to read, but I think the effort is worth it. It’s not a “polished” work, but in an academic and literary environment that sometimes seems to value polish above all else, including moral and intellectual substance, one appreciates something a little more raw. And someone with the courage to tear down—in order to build up.
Finkelstein is in the tradition of the great incorruptible truth-tellers. He relates an anecdote from when he was a graduate student at Princeton in 1984: his work exposing a bestselling scholarly hoax on the Israel-Palestine conflict had gotten the favorable attention of the editor of the New York Review of Books and his friend (Arthur Hertzberg) at Columbia University, and he sensed that career possibilities were opening up for him. But then, in a meeting with Hertzberg, he was bluntly asked, “Are you in Chomsky’s stable?” Despite knowing the probable consequences of giving the wrong answer, he unhesitatingly said he deeply admired Chomsky and was grateful for his support—which, of course, was the wrong answer. He never heard from the men again. Even so, “I was proud of myself,” he writes, “not to be tempted, at all, by the lure of fame and fortune, and I was grateful for this test of my fidelity to Truth (and Chomsky), so that I could prove in my own person dead wrong the cynics who imagine, or console themselves, that everyone has a price.”
That unshakeable commitment, that willingness not to conform, combined with intellectual power, is chiefly what has set Finkelstein apart from most of his peers. One hopes that his book and his example will inspire young idealists to follow in his path.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Twenty-one years after the George W. Bush administration opened the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—and 13 years after then-President Barack Obama signed an executive order for its closure—more than 150 groups on Wednesday implored the Biden administration to “act without delay” to close the notorious lockup.
“Among a broad range of human rights violations perpetrated against predominantly Muslim communities over the last two decades, the Guantánamo detention facility—built on the same military base where the United States unconstitutionally detained Haitian refugees in deplorable conditions in the early 1990s—is the iconic example of the abandonment of the rule of law,” the groups said in a letter to President Joe Biden. “The Guantánamo detention facility was designed specifically to evade legal constraints, and Bush administration officials incubated torture there.”
\u201cWe\u2019re proud to join 150+ organizations globally demanding Biden #CloseGuantanamo. \n\n21 years is 21 too many. As long as the US continues to cage and dehumanize people there, we\u2019ll keep fighting to shut it down.\u201d— CODEPINK (@CODEPINK) 1673450992
Since 2002, 779 men and boys have been held at Guantanamo, many of them tortured, and nearly all without ever being charged or tried. According to retired U.S. Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson—who served as chief of staff to Bush-era Secretary of State Colin Powell—Bush, along with his vice president and defense secretary, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, knew that most of the Gitmo prisoners were innocent, but kept them locked up for political reasons.
Obama—whose vice president was Biden—issued executive orders after entering the White House in 2009 that were meant to end torture and close Gitmo. However, Obama—who was blocked by Congress from implementing the prison’s closure—broke a campaign promise and the law by actively shielding Bush-era officials from accountability while torture continued at Gitmo.
“Thirty-five remain there today, at the astronomical cost of $540 million per year, making Guantánamo the most expensive detention facility in the world,” the groups’ new letter states. “Guantánamo embodies the fact that the United States government has long viewed communities of color—citizens and noncitizens alike—as a security threat, to devastating consequences.”
“This is not a problem of the past,” the signers stressed. “Guantánamo continues to cause escalating and profound damage to the aging and increasingly ill men still detained indefinitely there, most without charge and none having received a fair trial. It has also devastated their families and communities. The approach Guantánamo exemplifies continues to fuel and justify bigotry, stereotyping, and stigma. Guantánamo entrenches racial divisions and racism more broadly, and risks facilitating additional rights violations.”
\u201cAs we mark 21 years since the Guant\u00e1namo Bay prison was opened as part of the so-called global \u201cWar on Terror,\u201d we remember the 35 men who remain detained. \n\nRead the statement we released at: \nhttps://t.co/OJ9248zdDR\u201d— The CCR (@The CCR) 1673453843
The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents three of the 21 Guantánamo prisoners who have been cleared for release and which signed the letter, said in a statement:
We should not be marking another year in the life of this ignominious product of U.S. imperialism and racism as we have every January since the first anniversary of its opening in 2002. Yet we will succeed in shutting it down. Despite the lack of will of presidents who have claimed to support closure and the express desire of some political leaders to keep the prison open forever, the prison population has shrunk by 95% from its peak—the result of pressure from a broad coalition from around the globe, including the imprisoned men themselves, their families, and Guantánamo survivors who have been released.
Asked shortly after taking office whether the Biden administration will move to close Gitmo, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said “that certainly is our goal and our intention.”
However, the Biden administration has taken few steps toward that goal, while spending millions of dollars on a new secret courtroom at the prison.
\u201cIt’s now 21 years since the Guantanamo Bay detention camp opened. A centerpiece of a war @POTUS declared over, it looms as a symbol of racial injustice and human rights abuses, while violating the U.S. Constitution and international law. #CloseGuantanamo https://t.co/i8fxDRozbW\u201d— FCNL (Quakers) (@FCNL (Quakers)) 1673467282
Last year, the administration released four Guantánamo prisoners, including 75-year-old Saifullah Abdullah Paracha, the oldest person ever imprisoned there.
“It is long past time for both a sea change in the United States’ approach to national and human security and a meaningful reckoning with the full scope of damage that the post-9/11 approach has caused,” the groups’ letter argues. “Closing the Guantánamo detention facility, ending indefinite military detention of those held there, and never again using the military base for unlawful mass detention of any group of people are necessary steps towards those ends.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
John (Prince) Siddon (Australia), Slim Dusty, Looking Forward, Looking Back, 2021.
On 15 November 2022, during the G20 summit in Bali (Indonesia), Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told journalists that his country ‘seeks a stable relationship with China’. This is because, as Albanese pointed out, China is ‘Australia’s largest trading partner. They are worth more than Japan, the United States, and the Republic of Korea… combined’. Since 2009, China has also been Australia’s largest destination for exports as well as the largest single source of Australia’s imports.
For the past six years, China has largely ignored Australia’s requests for meetings due to the latter’s close military alignment with the US. Now, in Bali, China’s President Xi Jinping made it clear that the Chinese-Australian relationship is one to be ‘cherished’. When Albanese was asked if Xi raised the issue of Australia’s participation in several military pacts against China, he said that issues of strategic rivalry ‘[were] not raised, except for in general comments’.
Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd recently said that the impetus for the deep freeze between Australia and China six year ago was the ‘US doctrine of strategic competition’. This outlook is clarified in the 2022 US National Security Strategy, which asserts that China ‘is America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge’. In Bali, US President Joe Biden said that the US and China must ‘manage the competition responsibly’, which suggested that the US might take a less belligerent posture towards China by not pressuring them through US military pacts in Asia and by reducing the intensification of the crisis over Taiwan. Rudd suggests that Biden’s shift in tone might have given Albanese the opportunity to ‘reset’ relations between Australia and China.
Nura Rupert (Australia), Mamu (Spooky Spirits), 2002.
Before Albanese left for Bali, however, news broke about a plan to station six US B-52 bombers, which have nuclear weapons capability, in northern Australia at the Tindal air force base. Additionally, Australia will build 11 large storage tanks for jet fuel, providing the US with refuelling capacity closer to China than its main fuel repository in the Pacific, Hawaii. Construction on this ‘squadron operations facility’ would start immediately and be completed by 2026. The $646 million upgrade includes new equipment and improvements to the US-Australian spy base at Pine Gap, where the neighbouring population in Alice Springs worries about being a nuclear target in a war that they simply do not want.
These announcements come as no surprise. US bombers, including B-52s, have visited the base since the 1980s and taken part in US-Australian training operations since 2005. In 2016, the US commander of its Pacific air forces, General Lori Robinson, said that the US would likely add the B-1 bomber – which has a longer range and a larger payload capacity – to these exercises. The US-Australian Enhanced Air Cooperation (2011) has already permitted these expansions, although this has routinely embarrassed Australian government officials who would prefer more discretion, in part due to the anti-nuclear sentiment in New Zealand and in many neighbouring Pacific island states who are signatories of the 1986 Treaty of Rarotonga that establishes the region as a nuclear-free zone.
Minnie Pwerle (Australia), Bush Melon Seed, 1999.
The expansion of the Tindal air base and the upgrades to Pine Gap spy base are part of the overall deepening of military and strategic ties between the US and Australia. These ties have a long history, but they were formalised by the Australia-New Zealand-United States (ANZUS) Security Treaty of 1951 and Australia’s entry into the Five Eyes intelligence network in 1956. Since then, the two countries have tightened their security linkages, such as by facilitating the transfer of military equipment from the US arms industry to Australia. In 2011, US President Barack Obama and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard agreed to position a few thousand US Marines in Darwin and Northern Australia and allow US bombers frequent flights to that base. This was part of Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, which signalled the US pressure campaign against China’s economic advancement.
Two new security alignments – the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad, restarted in 2017) and AUKUS (2021) – further enhanced these ties. The Quad brought together India and Japan with Australia and the US. Since 1990, Australia has hosted Exercise Pitch Black at Tindal, a military war game on which it has collaborated with various countries. Since India’s air force joined in 2018 and Japan participated in 2022, all Quad and AUKUS members are now a part of this large airborne training mission. Australian officials say that after Tindal’s expansion, Exercise Pitch Black will increase in size. In October 2022, Prime Minister Albanese and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida updated their 2007 bilateral security pact. The new ‘reciprocal access agreement’ was signed in response to ‘an increasingly severe strategic environment’, according to Kishida, and it allows the two countries to conduct joint military exercises.
China’s foreign ministry responded to news of the expansion of Tindal and Pine Gap by saying, ‘Such a move by the US and Australia escalates regional tensions, gravely undermines regional peace and security, and may trigger an arms race in the region’.
Qiu Zhi Jie (China), Map of Mythology, 2019.
Albanese walked into the meeting with Xi hoping to end China’s trade restrictions on Australia. He left with optimism that the $20 billion restrictions imposed in 2020 would be lifted soon. ‘It will take a while to see improvement in concrete terms going forward’, he said. However, there is no word from China about removing these restrictions, which limit the import of Australian barley, beef, coal, cotton, lobsters, timber, and wine.
These restrictions were triggered by then Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison’s insinuation that China was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before that, in 2018, Australia’s government banned two Chinese telecommunications firms (Huawei and ZTE) from operating in its jurisdiction. This was not a trivial policy change, since it meant a drop from $19 billion in Australia’s trade with China in July 2021 to $13 billion in March 2022.
Fu Wenjun (China), Red Cherry, 2018.
During the meeting in Bali between Albanese and Xi, the Australian side presented a list of grievances, including Beijing’s restrictions on trade and Australia’s concerns about human rights and democracy in China. Australia seeks to normalise relations in terms of trade while maintaining its expanded military ties with the United States.
Xi did not put anything on the table. He merely listened, shook hands, and left with the assurance that the two sides would continue to talk. This is a great advance from the ugly rhetoric under Scott Morrison’s administration.
In October 2022, China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, gave an address in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and China, which will be celebrated on 21 December. During this talk, Ambassador Qian asked his Australian counterparts if they saw China as ‘a champion or a challenger’ of the international order. Australia’s government and press, he suggested, sees China as a ‘challenger’ of the UN Charter and the multilateral system. However, he said, China sees itself as a ‘champion’ of greater collaboration between countries to address common problems.
The list of concerns that Albanese placed before Xi signals that Australia, like the US, continues to treat China as a threat rather than a partner. This general outlook towards China makes any possibility of genuine normalisation difficult. That is why Ambassador Qian called for Australia to have ‘an objective and rational perception’ of China and for Canberra to develop ‘a positive and pragmatic policy towards China’.
Zeng Shanqing (China), Vigorous Horse, 2002.
Growing anti-Chinese sentiment within Australia poses a serious problem for any move towards normalisation. In July 2022, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that Australia would have to ‘correct’ several of its views on China before relations could advance. A recent poll shows that three-quarters of Australia’s population believes that China might be a military threat within the next two decades. The same survey showed that nearly 90% of those polled said that the US-Australia military alliance is either very or fairly important. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore earlier this year, Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles said that countries must engage each other through dialogue and diplomacy. ‘China is not going anywhere. And we all need to live together and, hopefully, prosper together’, he noted.
That Albanese and Xi met in Bali is a sign of the importance of diplomacy and dialogue. Albanese will not be able to get the trade benefits that Australia would like unless there is a reversal of these attitudes and the US-Australia military posture towards China.
The post Nothing Good Will Come from the New Cold War with Australia as a Frontline State first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The suffering of US women under the iron heel of abortion is intensifying, especially for women of color. This makes it imperative to closely examine possible paths forward. As a teenager during the 1960s I witnessed two political paths that remain imprinted on my mind.
LBJ and 14 (b)
Even before classes began in 1963, I had organized the first high school Young Democrats chapter in Texas. By 1964 Houston Young Democrats were attending rallies for presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson, carrying signs reading “All the Way with LBJ – Repeal 14 (b).”
During the height of union activity several decades earlier, congress had passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, 1935) which guaranteed private sector workers the right to form unions. During the beginning of the Cold War and strike waves of 1945 and 1946, congressional Republicans (with the aide of multiple Democrats) passed the Labor Management Relations Act (1947). It placed limitations on union activity, most importantly Section 14 (b). The odious 14 (b) allowed states to pass “Right to Work” laws which prohibited unions from requiring dues as a condition of employment. Workers could benefit from union activity without paying dues, thereby seriously undermining unions.
“Repeal 14 (b)” became the rallying cry. Unions told members “Vote for Democrats.” Despite LBJ’s winning the presidency and having Democratic Party (DP) control of the senate and house, 14 (b) was not repealed. Nor was it repealed during several subsequent administrations having a DP president and majority in both houses of congress.
Unlike gatherings of 1964, today 14 (b) is so ancient that if you ask high school students what they think about it, you will get blank stares. DP power brokers have successfully dumped repeal of 14 (b) into the dustbin of history.
A Most Reactionary President
Four years and a presidential election later Republican Richard Nixon was swept into office and was re-elected in 1972. Carrying 49 of 50 states, Nixon’s re-election was one of the largest landslides in US history and showed overwhelming support for war against the Vietnamese people. Despite endorsement of his right wing agenda, more progressive actions occurred during Nixon’s reign (1969-1974) than during any presidency since (including those of Dems): end to the Viet Nam War, start of the Food Stamp program, decriminalization of abortion, recognition of China, creation of Environmental Protection Agency, passage of Freedom of Information Act, formal dismantling of FBI’s COINTEL program, creation of Earned Income Tax Credits, formal ban on biological weapons, and passage of the Clean Water Act.
When I recount this to my good DP friends, the response is something like “You can’t credit that to Tricky Dick – he was forced to give in to the tremendous upheavals of his time.”
Bingo! That is exactly the point. Nixon had to act as he did due to enormous social pressure. During a 10 year period, a generation of progressives had been exposed to two fundamental truths:
Logic of the Goose
If the Dems win a majority of both houses of congress in November, 2022, a powerful force will make it highly unlikely that they will decriminalize abortion. This will be true whether the decriminalization would come from passing the Women’s Health Protection Act (the easiest route, but vulnerable to a supreme court trashing), expansion of the number of supreme court justices (almost forgotten about), or a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right (apparently unimaginable to the DP).
However, doing any of these would mean that abortion would cease to be a major issue in the 2024 election and make the re-election of Joe Biden virtually impossible. Winning in 2024 is vastly more important to the Dems than a setback in 2022.
As the Washington Post noted, the DP has finally found an issue that might help them at the ballot box. But securing abortion rights in 2022 would remove it from the 2024 agenda. Abortion rights are the Dems’ golden egg and they are not about to hatchet Mother Goose.
The task of DP politicians is NOT to bring better lives to people – it is to get elected. If promises to improve peoples’ lives were kept, then the ability to make the promise evaporates. The true role of DP is to promise without delivering, while somehow getting people to believe the promise.
Each election cycle Dems scrounge around for a golden egg so they can chant their eternal refrain “Vote to get goosed or the Republicans will win!” Dems yearn to have their cake and eat it too. They must dangle abortion rights in front of voters’ eyes – not actually win abortion rights.
Historical Reality of the Goose
As every psychologist should know, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. So, in addition to the Logic of the Goose, the history of the Dems regarding abortion helps chart their course.
During the last 50 years the Democrats could have written Roe vs Wade into law during the administrations of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama; but never did so. As a US Senator, Joe Biden helped Clarence Thomas get on the US Supreme Court via his attacks on Anita Hill.
When Hillary Clinton ran for president, she chose anti-choice senator Tim Kaine as a running mate and said she was “ambivalent” about abortion. Obama botched opportunities to replace Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the supreme court.
This is what Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report wrote about him: “During his 2008 presidential campaign Obama promised to pass and sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have enshrined abortion rights into law, and remove it from the purview of the courts. But he did no such thing. On April 29, 2009 he gave a press conference on his 100th day in office and said, ‘The Freedom of Choice Act is not my highest legislative priority.’ Obama had majorities in both houses of Congress and a veto-proof majority in the Senate. Not only was this legislation not his highest priority, it wasn’t a priority at all. He never attempted to get it passed.”
While the US waited for the supreme court diktat overturning Roe v. Wade, Molly Shah expressed irritation that “there is currently no cohesive national campaign from either the Democratic party or large reproductive rights organizations to fight back.” DP house leaders, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, supported re-election of anti-choice Texas rep Henry Cuellar over an abortion rights challenger.
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Stories of the plight of American women began showing up within weeks of the court decision:
Since the 8th amendment to the US constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment,” (which is “unacceptable due to the suffering, pain, or humiliation it inflicts on the person”) it is not exactly clear why it fails to apply to those whose only crime is becoming pregnant.
Abortion bans have even more severe consequences for those who commit the crime of “being-pregnant-while-Black.”
Knowing that women of color are three times as likely to be criminally charged with abortion, it is reasonable to ask …
Abortion rights have a unique significance for Black women. During slavery, masters offered bounties for hunters who returned escapees to the plantation. Today’s more repressive states reinvent this tradition by offering bounties to anyone who squeals on those associated with an abortion.
… as if They Depend on It
At this critical time it is necessary to defend abortion rights as if women’s lives depend on it. Because they really do.
More and more are realizing that rights have been won by disruptive actions rather than joining cheer-leading squads for unreliable politicians. Rather than being benevolently handed down to women, abortion rights were won “through mass demonstrations, teach-ins, takeovers and sit-ins.” Judith McDaniel recalls disruptive actions such as …
Reviewing multiple social reforms, Paul Street concludes that “None of these things were won simply by voting and/or Supreme Court benevolence alone. They were more fundamentally won through mass popular resistance and disruption: strikes, marches, sit-ins, sit-downs, occupations, work stoppages, movements and movement cultures beneath and beyond the big money major party time-staggered big media candidate-centered electoral extravaganzas that are sold to us as ‘politics.’”
A funny thing happened when fact-checking for 14 (b). When I googled “Repeal of Taft Hartley Section 14(b)” the first link that came up was this very solid resolution by the American Federation of Teachers. Scrolling to the bottom revealed this date: 1965. Think about that – 1965. The date suggests that within two years of electing LBJ and his DP gaggle in both houses of congress, the union movement had backed down from insisting that 14 (b) be repealed. Oh yes, there are routinized statements now and again calling for its repeal, but nothing approaching a thunderous call for its repeal as a condition for unions to continue to support the DP.
With the watchdog snoring, the Dems back-stepped to a state-by-state defense against Right-to-Work legislation. Does this foretell an “abortion-rights-in-some-states-only” strategy for today? The DP seems to have given up on (or never initiated) a mass mobilization for increasing the number of supreme court justices, or a law guaranteeing abortion rights throughout the nation, or (too controversial to even consider) a constitutional amendment for protecting women’s lives.
Though making a lot of racket at election time, post-election Dems will move to a cooling off period so women can adjust themselves to losing a basic right. But the iron is hot and this is no time to cool off. Not six weeks after the court’s Day of Infamy, Kansas voters resoundingly defeated an anti-abortion amendment to their constitution. Between 2010 and the 2022 court decision, the number of Americans saying all abortions should be banned fell from 15% to 8%. During the same time period, those agreeing that abortion should be legal in all cases climbed from 18% to 33%.
Vermont residents will consider the Reproductive Liberty Amendment, stating: “that an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed unless justified by a compelling State interest achieved by the least restrictive means.”
Missouri’s residents also enjoy the right to amend the state constitution. It elects right wing politicians yet simultaneously passes progressive legislation. Missouri voters have repeatedly rejected Right to Work legislation and have approved shutting down puppy mills. Missouri voters gave the nod to medical marijuana and approved Medicaid expansion. This means that 5-20% of Missourians vote for progressive agendas while not voting for Democratic Party politicians.
(If you are registered to vote in Missouri and would help gather signatures for an abortion rights amendment to the state constitution, email gro.ytrapneergiruossimnull@yraterces or call 314-727-8554.)
The current struggle for abortion rights reminds us of the immense efforts for women’s suffrage, which was a roller-coaster battle requiring ongoing civil disobedience. Soon after the creation of the US, women lost the right to vote in New York (1777), Massachusetts (1780), New Hampshire (1784) and all other states except New Jersey (1787), which revoked the right in 1807.
Women’s right to vote was first gained in Wyoming Territory (1869). Women lost the right to vote in Utah (1887) but regained it in 1896. Women’s suffrage won in Washington state (1910), California, (1911), Oregon (1912), Arizona (1912, Kansas (1912), Alaska territory (1913), New York (1917), South Dakota (1917), and Oklahoma (1917). Women won partial suffrage in Illinois (1913), North Dakota (1917), Indiana (1917), Nebraska (1917), and Michigan (1917). The 19th amendment (guaranteeing women’s suffrage throughout the US) was passed by Congress in 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920.
Two lessons stand out: rights which are taken away can provoke intense struggles to regain them; and, rights can be won at the state level as a critical step toward winning them at the national level. Working for a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights can be a double-edged sword. The dull blunt edge can drag the movement into an abyss (like Right to Work) where it will be stuck for eternity if it abandons the goal of a national victory. The sharp edge cuts through the Gordian Knot as it walks the suffragette path of mass civil disobedience.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.