+ On Friday, Aysenur Eygi, a 26-year-old American peace activist, was shot in the head and killed by an Israeli sniper during a demonstration against illegal settlements and land seizures in the West Bank village of Beita, near the city of Nablus. Eygi was taken to Rafida Hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival. […]
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Aspen in Sagebrush Steppe on Kiesha’s Preserve, Idaho. (No livestock grazing for 27 years) Photo: John Carter.
The Aspen Decline
What will our forests in the west be like in fall without those golden yellow leaves shining in the sun? Aspen forests in the Intermountain West support levels of biodiversity only exceeded by riparian (stream) communities. In this time of Climate Breakdown, aspen have been declining due to drought and temperature stress, with die-offs of large areas in the Western US in recent decades. Water stress during drought creates air bubbles in the water transport system of aspen, blocking flow of water and leading to mortality. Forest dieback during drought was simulated under a high emissions climate scenario showing that drought stress will exceed the mortality threshold for aspen in the Southwestern US by the 2050s.
Climate Breakdown
We hear slogans such as “net zero by 2050”, meaning we store as much carbon as we release. But the facts reveal that this goal will not be met. The world growth in energy demand, meat production, and population almost certainly will cause exceedance of the mortality threshold for aspen. Triage in the form of major changes in western land management is a must if we are to have a chance to save aspen, other western plant communities, and the wildlife that depend upon them.
Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and crypto currency with their large data centers consume huge amounts of energy. AI consumes 33 times more energy than traditional computing systems. Barclay’s estimated that the global demand for oil would increase by 15% by 2050 despite adoption of electric vehicles and potential efficiency gains, air travel would place greater demand on oil, and petrochemicals will be the biggest contributor to oil consumption as demand continues to grow. In their “Deadlock” scenario, Barclay’s predicted that the world will fall way short of the goals of the Paris Agreement. This is due to the inability to decarbonize and lack of political will. Livestock production emissions are currently estimated at 11.1 – 19.6 percent of global emissions while global consumption of meat is expected to increase by 90% by 2050.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration acknowledges this. “Our projections indicate that resources, demand, and technology costs will drive the shift from fossil to non-fossil energy sources, but current policies are not enough to decrease global energy-sector emissions. This outcome is largely due to population growth, regional economic shifts toward more manufacturing, and increased energy consumption as living standards improve.” The UN Environment Programme also: “The world is in the midst of a triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution and waste. The global economy is consuming ever more natural resources, while the world is not on track to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.”
Livestock Exacerbate Aspen Decline in the Western US
This is a dire situation exacerbated by the grazing of livestock on hundreds of millions of acres of our public and private lands in the Western US. Approximately 70 percent of National Forest and 90 percent of Bureau of Land Management managed lands are leased for livestock grazing. Other public lands managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, States, and localities also permit livestock grazing.
A review of livestock grazing effects shows that livestock trample and compact the soil, leading to accelerated runoff and decreased infiltration of water into the soil. They remove the ground covering vegetation that shades the soil, thus increasing soil temperatures and evaporation. These factors combine to reduce soil water and elevate the water stress in plants already stressed by drought. Agencies and landowners must manage livestock to protect aspen stands so they and the wildlife that depend upon them have a chance to persist. Here, we use National Forests in southern Idaho and Utah as examples of failure in this respect but this failure is west-wide when it comes to addressing this major stressor of our ecosystems.
The Ashley National Forest Plan to Save Aspen
The Ashley National Forest is a diverse area with high peaks, forests, meadows, lakes and streams. It includes part of the High Uintas Wilderness. It contains habitat for a variety of birds and animals including Canada lynx, black bears, northern goshawk, Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, deer, elk, moose, native cutthroat trout and others.
In an October 2023 Decision the Ashley NF approved the Ashley National Forest Aspen Restoration Project. This project was planned to “treat” up to 177,706 acres that would include any aspen community in the Forest. The treatments included prescribed burning, logging, mastication, chainsaws, girdling conifers, and ripping aspen roots with heavy equipment. These destructive measures were intended to stimulate regeneration of aspen stands. Eighty-three percent of the project would be carried out in roadless areas. The Forest Service uses an Orwellian twist on language to describe destructive activities such as logging and burning as “restoration” as if these forests didn’t do just fine before we came along with our livestock and destructive machines.
The Environmental Assessment produced by the Ashley NF noted, “Many aspen populations across the west are declining due to drought, browsing by large animals such as cattle, elk and deer, and lack of disturbance, particularly fire, requiring active restoration efforts to maintain and improve aspen forest health in the region.” We mapped the fire history and use of prescribed fires in the past in the project area.
Significant areas had already been subjected to fires, so why the decline in aspen? There was no analysis of this fact by the Forest Service as they proposed more burning, and to date, Ashley NF has not addressed the major issue, that of livestock grazing.
Portion of the Ashley NF showing aspen stands (green) superimposed on livestock grazing allotments (pink). Most of the Forest is divided up into 91 of these allotments.
We provided in-depth comments and an objection to this project using best available science asking that the effects of livestock grazing, stocking rates, and suitability of grazing these areas be addressed. Their response to detailed public input such as this was to deflect. In this case, the Decision Notice stated, “Other comments such as range capabilities are not described in detail in this decision due to the fact that many of the concerns were outside of the scope of this project.”
So, a major stressor, livestock grazing, is outside the scope of the project. This is typical of responses we receive from the Forest Service when we ask that well established principles of range science be applied so livestock grazing is managed within the capacity of the land and is balanced with the needs of wildlife, plant communities, and watersheds as the governing laws and regulations require.
The problem for the Forest Service is that if these principles were applied, stocking rates and numbers of livestock would be greatly reduced. This is not politically tolerable, so it is better to deflect and deny or not address the issue at all. Our team filed litigation against the Forest Service to stop this Aspen Restoration Project, resulting in it being withdrawn.
Water Developments – Industrialization of the Forest for Livestock
Map of Duchesne Ranger District in the Ashley NF with aspen stands (pink) and water developments (blue).
Because water developments (troughs, ponds, pipelines) are used by the Forest Service and other land managers to increase the extent of livestock access into previously little used areas, we requested their data for the locations of these water developments in the Ashley NF.
It turns out there are 1,755 of these water developments. When we mapped them and their proximity to aspen stands, there were few aspen stands that were more than a quarter mile from at least one water development, thus ensuring that livestock would have easy access to most stands. Despite this massive number, the Ashley NF had previously approved adding more of these developments which can result in adverse effects up to a mile or more away. Adding these developments is a typical response when degradation by livestock is noted, a placebo to keep the status quo in numbers of cattle and sheep. This is common across the West.
Is the Forest Service Engaged in Willful Blindness?
In 2000, we surveyed habitats in the Bear River Range in SE Idaho’s Caribou National Forest. The Bear River Range is part of the Regionally Significant Wildlife Corridor connecting the Greater Yellowstone Area to the Uinta Mountains and southern Rockies. In our Report, we showed how livestock grazing had degraded conditions in all habitats with the majority of 310 habitat locations including 71 aspen sites, not functioning properly (low production, lack of recruitment, barren understory).
Aspen stand in the Bear River Range adjacent to water troughs for sheep. Trees are stripped as high as sheep can reach and there is no regeneration or understory vegetation. Photo: John Carter.
This is no surprise as nearly 30 years ago the Forest Service Regional Assessments pointed out that aspen regeneration had not been successful due to heavy grazing by domesticated ungulates (meaning cows and sheep).
In the years since those assessments and our report, we have seen no action to reduce or better manage livestock grazing so plant and soil communities, stream systems, or aspen forests can recover and sustain themselves.
Early work by Forest Service research scientists and others documented the loss of aspen recruitment due to livestock grazing. A study of over one hundred aspen stands in Nevada found that in all cases where aspen was protected from livestock, it successfully regenerated without fire or disturbance and maintained multi-aged stands. In areas exposed to livestock grazing, aspen continued to decline.
The Pando Clone of aspen in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest is known as one of the oldest living organisms. It is suffering from lack of regeneration and disease like so many aspen stands across the west where livestock graze. In a 2019 Report, our team demonstrated that livestock (cattle) were removing most of the understory vegetation (70 – 90 percent). Yet, according to the Fishlake NF, “it is thought that the lack of regeneration is due to over browsing from deer and other ungulates. Insects, such as bark beetles, and disease such as root rot and cankers, are attacking the overstory trees, weakening and killing them. ” There is no mention of livestock as deer and other “ungulates” are blamed and no acknowledgement that insects and disease may be related to the stress from browsing and trampling by the dominant “ungulate”, cows. They predict the Pando could be lost, yet cattle still graze while they deflect.
Agency Foot Dragging Perpetuates the Problem
Aspen stand in the Bear River Range dying out in cattle allotment. Photo: John Carter.
In an ongoing case, the Ashley, Uinta and Wasatch Cache National Forests in Utah have been foot dragging in addressing the grazing of tens of thousands of domestic sheep on 160,000 acres of the High Uintas Wilderness. Once again, we have engaged in detailed analysis, comments and meetings, only to have any action delayed for 10 years while the degradation continues.
For decades I have been documenting degradation of these alpine and subalpine areas by domestic sheep. As the Forest Service continues delay, a team of volunteers gathered forage production data and we published a paper showing that if the sensitive nature of the landscape (steep slopes, highly erodible soils) and current forage production was incorporated into a new stocking rate analysis, the numbers of domestic sheep would need to be reduced by 90 percent or more. In other words, this wilderness is not ecologically appropriate for livestock grazing and to do so is to intentionally destroy the ecological integrity of this precious place so that a handful of livestock permittees can graze it with their sheep.
Kiesha’s Preserve – An Example of What Can Be
Aspen stand on Kiesha’s Preserve a decade after removal of livestock. Original trees are the standing dead in the background. Regenerated stand in foreground. Photo: John Carter.
At Kiesha’s Preserve in Idaho, deer, elk, moose, and sage grouse are there year around. When we purchased the land, aspen stands were diseased, had insect boreholes and were dying. We closed the Preserve to livestock 30 years ago and since then, the grasses and flowers and aspen have bounced back, the old aspen stands have died and new, healthy stands have grown back with no insect or disease issues. You can find no evidence of adverse effects from deer or elk because there is natural forage to support them.
Aspen stand on Kiesha’s Preserve with healthy and diverse understory years after livestock removed. Photo: John Carter.
Deer and elk winter in large numbers on the Preserve, finding grass and shrubs beneath the snow as the plant communities have recovered from a century of livestock grazing. On adjacent public lands there is little residual forage left after the livestock leave the allotments, so when an elk or deer digs through the snow, they find no forage for the energy expended.
The Message
As climate heating adds stress to the landscape, increasing mortality to aspen and other forest types, livestock effectively increase the effects of drought. It is time for the Forest Service and other land managers to stop deflecting around the destruction of aspen and native plant communities by livestock and begin to address the problem by removing water developments, reducing stocking rates and providing long term rest so plant communities such as aspen have a chance to recover and are better able to withstand drought.
For a library of books and articles on livestock grazing in the West, see Sage Steppe Wild.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Carter.
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As students worldwide head back to school this fall, in Gaza, there are no schools left. The U.N. considers the systemic obliteration of the education system by the Israeli military to be a “scholasticide” — all universities, over 80% of schools, the Central Archives of Gaza, and at least 13 libraries have been destroyed, as of April 2024, in Israel’s relentless bombing campaign. Almost 10,000 students are dead and 16,000 wounded, many killed in attacks on schools being used as sites of refuge.
Academics and university administrators in Gaza released an open letter asking for solidarity and resistance from the rest of the world: “We call upon our colleagues in the homeland and internationally to support our steadfast attempts to defend and preserve our universities for the sake of the future of our people, and our ability to remain on our Palestinian land in Gaza. We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again.”
As a graduate student, an aspiring professor, and the child of a Jewish academic, I take this call for solidarity seriously. Where and how do we learn ideologies of resistance, radicalism, and revolution? Once we have inherited a radical idea, what do we do with it? And how do we choose what ideas not to inherit?
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Image by Pau Casals.
These days, I find myself in a strange place. Despite the Democrats’ miraculous replacement of Biden, Trump’s reelection remains distinctly possible. I studied authoritarianism for my master’s degree, and I strongly believe that a second Trump presidency would represent the end of American democracy. Yet even so, I find myself frequently tempted to dismiss commentators’ pleas as hyperbolic handwringing. I think I’m probably not alone in this confusing toggling between panic and blaséness. After some soul-searching, I think one of the reasons for the ever-present allure of complacency, other than the natural human tendency towards denial, is Trump’s humor.
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“It’s hard not to feel invisible as a Palestinian-American. Our trauma and pain feel unseen and ignored by both parties. One party uses our identity as a slur, and the other refuses to hear from us.” – Rep. Rashida Tlaib Israel drew all sorts of US military forces and intelligence assets into the Middle East […]
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As the United States’ position of dominance in the world has been challenged in recent decades, economic sanctions have taken a more central position in its strategy for maintaining global power and influence. As Stuart Davis and Immanuel Ness noted in a 2022 article arguing that sanctions are a form of war, “the US has […]
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In 2007, the writer Tal Nitsán isolated instances where Israeli male combatants systematically used sexual violence against Palestinian women to the war of 1948. In essentially marking off such conduct from more contemporary practices, she relied on media accounts, archival sources, the reports of human rights organizations and the testimony of 25 Israeli reserve male […]
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Whatever frail hope people had for Kamala Harris making a clean break from Biden’s unrelenting and unapologetic support for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians living in Gaza was repeatedly and irrevocably shattered this week in Chicago. And not just Harris. The entire leadership of the party, from AOC to the Obamas joined in. Even Bernie […]
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UNRWA school in Gaza being used as a shelter by Palestinian refuges, bombed by Israelis. Photo: UNRWA.
State Terrorism in the Age of Killing Zones
What sets Israel’s war on Gaza apart is not only its violent military operations, marked by the indiscriminate killing of women and children, but also its relentless assault on dissent, criticism, and even the mildest opposition to its internationally condemned human rights violations and war crimes. Israel’s ongoing and brutal military campaign, coupled with its “policies of extreme inhumanity against the Palestinian people,” is inextricably linked to a state-sanctioned effort to legitimize and normalize its actions in Gaza.[1] This includes waging an ideological war of censorship and defamation against any challenge—no matter its source—to what Kenneth Roth, co-founder of Human Rights Watch, condemns as “Israel’s system of apartheid,” [2] and what Aryeh Neier, Holocaust survivor and co-founder of Human Rights Watch, describes as “genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” [3]
The full scope of Israel’s assault on Gaza is revealed through its relentless military actions, characterized by indiscriminate violence against women, children, the elderly, and non-combatants. According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the scale of destruction imposed on Gaza is not only devastating but ethically unimaginable. Since the start of the war, and as of the end of November 2023, Israel has reportedly dropped over 25,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip, a force equivalent to two nuclear bombs. This means that the destructive power of the explosives dropped on Gaza in just over two months exceed that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.[4] According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the use of such highly destructive bombs in residential areas constitutes a war crime.
The consequences of these bombings were tragically displayed on August 10, 2024, when Israel bombed the Tab’een School in Gaza, a distressingly common occurrence. The school had provided shelter to nearly 2,500 people fleeing demolished areas, many of whom were children. The Israeli bombs targeted a prayer hall at dawn, where hundreds were praying. According to an investigation by Euro-Med Monitor, “over 100 Palestinians were killed, including several [entire] families.” The bombs’ immense destructive power reduced victims’ bodies to shredded and burned remains, leaving numerous others with severe injuries.[5] CNN reported that Fares Afana, director of Ambulance and Emergency Services in northern Gaza, stated that all those targeted “were civilians—unarmed children, the elderly, men, and women.”[6] Euro-Med Monitor found no evidence that the school “was being used for military objectives.”[7] Despite the documented evidence of Israel’s ongoing killings, abductions, forced starvation, and torture of Palestinians, including children,[8] Netanyahu and his cabinet members have astonishingly claimed that Israel has “the most moral army in the world.”[9]
Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinians. Save the Children reports that “more than 15,000 children are estimated to have been killed by Israel’s relentless assault on the strip [while estimating]that up to 21,000 are missing.”[10] The overall number of deaths may be vastly understated. Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf, three health officials, stated in The Lancet, a prestigious peer-reviewed British medical journal, that as a result of deaths caused by indirect rather than direct violence it is likely that the actual number of deaths is closer to 186,000.[11] Andre Damon writing on the World Socialist Web Site observes that Israel is waging a war of extermination against the Palestinian people and its aim is to not only “…massacre tens of thousands but also to destroy all aspects of civilization in Gaza, contributing to the deaths of tens of thousands through malnutrition, communicable diseases and lack of healthcare.”[12] The egregious horror of this violence is underscored by its engagement in acts of profound brutality, including the bombing of schools, the torture of prisoners,[13] the use of starvation as a weapon, and the targeting of hospitals and a large part of Gaza’s health facilities, among other barbarous policies.
Such acts have been condemned as genocide by legal groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights, over 50 governments including South Africa, and various United Nations agencies and non-governmental organizations.[14]Additionally, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is considering a request by the court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, to issue arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for committing “war crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip.”[15] Khan has also requested similar arrest warrants for certain Hamas leaders.
As Jewish scholar Judith Butler points out, Israel’s far-right leaders have been both public and unapologetic about their eliminationist plans following the Hamas attack on October 7th. Their goal has been to systematically undermine “the livelihood, the health, the well-being, and the capacity [of the Palestinians] to persist” amidst Israel’s vengeful and disproportionate military assault. [16] After the surprise Hamas terrorist attack, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called for a complete siege of Gaza, declaring, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” [17] Some Israeli ministers have called for the dropping of an atomic bomb on Gaza.[18]
In a statement that defies moral and legal boundaries, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, claimed that “no one in the world will allow us to starve 2 million people, even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages.”[19] Smotrich’s remark not only trivializes the suffering of millions but also overlooks a critical fact: the deliberate starvation of civilians is unequivocally a war crime. This is the language of fascist politicians who speak with the weight of corpses in their mouths and blood on their hands. Such dehumanizing rhetoric doesn’t merely target Hamas fighters; it extends to the entire population of Gaza, effectively labeling all Palestinians as terrorists and less than human. By dehumanizing an entire group, this rhetoric facilitates and legitimizes Israel’s oppression of all Palestinians, justifying the denial of basic human needs and the commission of war crimes.
The ultimate aim of Israel’s war in Gaza appears to be the eradication of any possibility of a Palestinian state and the eventual expulsion of Palestinians from their land. This is evident in the “complete siege” taking place in Gaza, and Netanyahu’s explicit opposition to the future existence of a Palestinian state. Given Israel’s current assault on Gaza, which has nearly obliterated the daily survival prospects of its inhabitants, this aim becomes clearer. Sharon Zhang underscores this point by noting that Netanyahu has explicitly stated his intent “to quash any hope of the existence of a Palestinian state in its entirety.” [20] She writes:
“Advocates for Palestinian rights have said that this has been Israeli officials’ plan all along, as Israeli forces slaughter Palestinians en masse in Gaza while working to erase evidence that Palestinians ever existed in the region. However, this is one of the clearest statements yet from Netanyahu himself amid the current siege, suggesting his confidence that he will be able to carry it through with help from allies like the U.S.[21]”
In a number of articles, Kenneth Roth has written eloquently about Israel’s violations of international law.[22] He argues that none of Hamas’s actions, however horrific, justify Israel’s violation of the laws of war. He states that “that the Israeli government has repeatedly violated international humanitarian law in ways that amount to war crimes.” He points to Israel’s attack on civilian structures including schools, museums, and libraries. He cites Haaretz’s claim that “Israel has created ‘kill zones’ where soldiers shoot anyone who enters, armed or not.” He points to Israel’s destruction of hospitals, its torture of detained Palestinians and how some detainees “have died in military custody [while others] have reportedly needed to have their limbs amputated due to injuries sustained from prolonged handcuffing. He argues that the Israeli government has “imposed enormous obstacles to the delivery of aid, particularly food—a policy that amounts to using starvation as a weapon of war.”[23] What Roth makes clear and what many Western nations have ignored is that Israel is a rogue state guilty of horrendous war crimes and has repeatedly violated international law.
War crimes do more than destroy bodies; they erode morality, memories, and the deeply rooted habits of public consciousness. The brutality of Israel’s military actions in Gaza is painfully evident in the images of children’s bodies, torn apart amidst bombed mosques, hospitals, and schools. These atrocities are often justified by a discourse of dehumanization and self-defense—a state-sanctioned narrative as morally appalling as the suffering it enables, particularly among the most vulnerable. What is frequently overlooked, especially by mainstream media, is that Israel’s war on Gaza is not just a physical assault but an attack on history, memory, and cultural institutions. This erasure is a calculated effort to obscure its war crimes, brutal violence, and history of settler colonialism, all cloaked “under the security of the blanket of historical amnesia.”[24]
Scholasticide as a Structural and Ideological War
Genocide manifests itself not only in the creation of “kill zones,” where soldiers indiscriminately shoot Palestinians and in the use of lethal force against non-military targets such as hospitals and schools but also in the systematic destruction of Gaza’s entire intellectual, cultural, and civic infrastructure.[25] This calculated erosion seeks to eliminate the very fabric of Gaza’s society, extending beyond physical violence to the obliteration of its historical and cultural identity.[26]
The ongoing and increasingly meticulous documentation of Israel’s war crimes not only exposes the horrific realities on the ground but also sheds light on the broader implications of these violations. The unfolding crisis extends beyond the immediate brutality and physical destruction in Gaza, revealing a deeper, insidious form of violence that transcends the battlefield. This violence is rooted in an ideological agenda that legitimizes such barbarism while systematically attacking any form of education and criticism that seeks to expose it. This assault manifests as both a soft and hard war on education, history, critical inquiry, and any viable movement of dissent. Karma Nabulsi of the University of Oxford called this “war on education” a form of scholasticide and argued that it would affect generations of Palestinian children.[27] At the heart of this war on dissent and education are repeated attempts by Israel’s right-wing government to dismiss all critiques of Israel’s war on Gaza as a form of antisemitism. For example, when the war on Gaza is occasionally contextualized and historicized in reports, the Israeli government and its defenders swiftly weaponize the charge of antisemitism against critics, especially Palestinians, but also Jews. Historian Ilan Pappe highlights how this accusation is wielded by Israel’s far-right government to silence not only critics of the war but any narrative that exposes its five-decade-long campaign by “occupational forces to inflict persistent collective punishment on the Palestinians… exposing them to constant harassment by Israeli settlers and security forces and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of them.”[28]
The expansive, indiscriminate, and staggering violence unleashed on Gaza by Israel demands not only a new vocabulary but also a deeper understanding of the politics of education and the education of politics. It also requires a redefined comprehension of what constitutes a war crime, coupled with a mass international movement resisting the far-right Israeli government’s deliberate and brutal attacks on the Palestinian people and their quest for freedom and sovereignty. Additionally, it is crucial to recognize that this violence in its multiple forms, includes a less visible form of violence that is often overlooked. This form of violence, frequently obscured by the genocidal slaughter and annihilation unfolding in Gaza, is the violence of organized forgetting—the systematic erasure of dangerous memories, histories, and collective remembrance.
This is the violence of “scholasticide.” This type of violence seeks to erase the Nakba from history, to destroy institutions that preserve the memory of the forced removal of 700,000 Palestinians from their land, and to enforce historical amnesia as a means of preventing future generations from learning about Palestinian resistance against colonial violence, dispossession, and erasure that has persisted for decades. Isabella Hammad, British-Palestinian author, rightly expresses outrage on how the pedagogical incubators of soft scholasticide work to condemn Palestinian protesters and cover up crimes of genocide. She is worth quoting at length:
“Israel’s war in Gaza targets not only memory, knowledge, and critical inquiry but also extends to the destruction of educational institutions where history exposes past crimes and the movements for liberation and resistance. This is a war waged not just against bodies but also against history itself—against memories, legacies of cruelty, schools, museums, and any space where a people’s history and collective identity are preserved and transmitted to present and future generations. This assault on historical consciousness, remembrance, critical ideas, and the enduring history of settler colonialism represents a form of ideological violence that strategically underpins the tangible, bloody war that destroys Palestinian lives and the institutions safeguarding vital memories. In this context, the concept of “scholasticide” emerges, signifying the deliberate destruction of educational spaces that pass on essential knowledge, memories, and values, becoming a central element in Israel’s broader war against the Palestinian people.[29]”
As a form of historical, political and social amnesia, scholasticide works through what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence” — a gradual, incremental, and often less visible form of harm. In this context, scholasticide manifests through verbal contortions marked by diversions, lies, fear, threats, and intimidation. Language, images, and sensationalized tsunamis of hate across various media outlets and platforms are used to distract people from the crimes taking place in Gaza. As a result, scholasticide works to normalize the bloody war on Gaza and suppress free speech. However, it is crucial to recognize that scholasticide also takes on a more brutal and immediate expression in what I call the “savage structural violence of scholasticide.” This form of scholasticide targets the destruction of schools, universities, and museums while systematically repressing dissenting scholars, students, and others. It involves real weapons of mass destruction, attacking not just bodies and minds but also the institutions that sustain intellectual life.
In what follows, I will analyze the brutal structural violence of scholasticide taking place in Gaza, where educational institutions are systematically targeted and destroyed. I will then examine the ideological violence of scholasticide, characterized by the suppression of free speech and academic freedom, increasingly enforced through state mechanisms of surveillance, job losses, and other punitive measures, including detention. These two forms of scholasticide are not isolated; they reinforce each other, serving a larger project of imposing a repressive state in Israel. This analysis will also reveal how these practices signal a broader, insidious trend in the West, where censorship, repression, and various forms of pedagogical terrorism are aggressively deployed to suppress dissent and critical thought, leading to a brutal global trajectory of intellectual and academic oppression. These two forms of scholasticide—ideological and structural—are deeply interconnected. The ideological assault on free speech and academic freedom lays the groundwork for the physical destruction of institutions essential to critical education as a practice of freedom and liberation. In this way, the ideological forces of scholasticide act as a precursor and precondition for the eventual annihilation of the very foundations of emancipatory education.
Scholasticide in Gaza
Israel’s brutal war in Gaza not only targets bodies but also attacks the preservation of history, knowledge, and critical thought. By destroying educational institutions, it aims to erase narratives of past crimes and Palestinian movements for liberation. This is a war against history itself—against memories, legacies of resistance, and the institutions that safeguard a people’s collective identity for future generations. The repression of historical consciousness and the history of settler colonialism is a form of ideological violence that fuels the ongoing conflict devastating Palestinian lives and erasing vital memories. This deliberate destruction of educational institutions, spaces, and history, known as “scholasticide,” is central to Israel’s broader war against the Palestinian people. Chandni Desai, writing in The Guardian, describes scholasticide as an act of ethical savagery and pedagogical repression, noting: “It obliterates the means by which a group—in this instance, Palestinians—can sustain and transmit their culture, knowledge, history, memory, identity, and values across time and space. It is a key feature of genocide.” [30]
The structural violence of scholasticide in Gaza since the horrific October 7th Hamas attack is undeniable and practically unthinkable. The world has witnessed Israel’s deliberate targeting of schools, universities, and other cultural sites in Gaza. As Sharon Zhang notes, “It is a war crime to target civilian infrastructure in war, but Israel has a long history of flagrantly violating international law with impunity — including targeting educational institutions that preserve Palestinian history, identity, and culture.”[31] According to the UN, 90 percent of Gaza’s schools have been destroyed, and all 12 universities have been bombed, damaged, or reduced to rubble. Chandni Desai reports that “approximately 90,000 Palestinian university students have had their studies suspended; many will be driven to forced displacement through genocide, as Gaza has become uninhabitable.”[32] It gets worse. UN officials and the Palestinian ministry of education report that Israeli military operations have killed at least 5,479 students, 261 teachers, and 95 university professors in Gaza, including deans, university presidents, award-winning physicists, poets, artists, and prominent activists. [33]
Schools in Gaza faced significant challenges even before the war, including overcrowding, double shifts, a shortage of buildings, and restricted access to construction materials and school supplies. As Stephen McCloskey highlights, “in June 2022, Save the Children reported that 80 percent of children in Gaza were ‘in a perpetual state of fear, worry, sadness, and grief.”[34] The war has only exacerbated these issues, leaving Gaza’s youth to grapple with repeated traumas, mental health crises, and the constant threat of death or injury. These hardships are compounded by extreme poverty, continuous violence, forced displacement, and inadequate health care.
Moreover, the brutal realities extend beyond the battlefield. It is well-documented that many children held without charge in Israeli detention centers have been subjected to physical, sexual, and mental abuse. Save the Children has collected testimonies from children that reveal increasing levels of violence, particularly since October, when stricter rules were implemented that block visits from parents or lawyers. Some children have reported broken bones and beatings, highlighting the severe abuse occurring in these detention centers.”[35] Amid such a dire humanitarian crisis, Palestinian children and their parents are left with an agonizing choice: “between dying of exposure, disease, bombs, starvation, infectious disease, or leaving.” [36] This grim reality underscores that the destruction of Gaza’s education system is part of a broader campaign by Israel to render the region unlivable.
Israel’s war on education and culture extends further, targeting the very fabric of Gaza’s identity. The bombing and destruction of numerous libraries, archives, publishing houses, cultural centers, activity halls, museums, bookstores, cemeteries, monuments, and archival materials illustrate a systematic effort to erase Palestinian heritage. [37] Various news outlets and social media have provided stories and images confirming that Israeli soldiers are not only destroying but also stealing archeological artifacts. In one particularly egregious instance reported on social media, stolen artifacts from the Gaza Strip were openly displayed in a small showcase in the Israeli parliament, known as the Knesset. [38]
Israel’s policy of scholasticide, aimed at destroying Palestinian education, especially its less violent methods, are not limited to Gaza. They also extend to students, faculty, and other critics of the war within Israel. Israeli scholar, Professor Maya Wind, argues that Israel’s universities have become centers of military research, propaganda, and repression.[39] For instance, she notes . that “academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories service Israeli occupation and apartheid.” She is worth quoting at length:
“Hebrew University, among others, are training intelligence soldiers to create target banks in Gaza. They are producing knowledge for the state… which is state propaganda, or legal scholarship to help thwart attempts to hold Israel accountable for its war crimes, such as the case brought to the ICJ by South Africa. And they are, in fact, actually granting university course credit to reserve soldiers returning from Gaza to their classrooms. So, Israeli universities are deeply complicit in this genocide.[40]”
Writing in The New York Review of Books In addition, Neve Gordon and Penny Green reported that Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was arrested for signing a petition titled “Childhood Researchers and Students Calling for Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza.”[41] She was one of many Palestinian educators intimidated by the far-right Netanyahu government for criticizing the war.[42] The reach of Israeli state censorship and punishment also includes Jewish faculty members such as the renowned Professor Peled-Elhanan subjected to a disciplinary hearing because she sent messages on a staff WhatsApp that was deemed supportive of Hamas.
Gordon and Green also noted that “in the three weeks following Hamas’s attack, well over a hundred Palestinian students in Israel, nearly 80 percent of them women, faced disciplinary actions for private social media posts that supported the end of the siege on Gaza… expressed empathy with Palestinians in the Strip, or simply included memes about suffering Palestinian children.”[43] Attempts by the Israeli state to destroy education in Palestine is part of a broader project to destroy any vestige of a liberation movement in Palestine. Wind notes this is obvious not only in terms of the repression of Palestinian critics in Gaza and Israel, but also in the West Bank, including West Jerusalem. She states that Palestinian universities are routinely raided by the IDF. She adds:
“Student activists and organizers in over 411 Palestinian student groups and associations that have been declared unlawful by the Israeli state are routinely abducted from their campus, from their homes in the middle of the night. They are subjected to torture. They are held in administrative detention without charge or trial for months. And so, what we’re really seeing is a systemic attack of the Israeli military and the Israeli military government on Palestinian higher education, and particularly on Palestinian campuses as sites of organizing for Palestinian liberation.[44]”
Conclusion
What stands out regarding Israel’s policy of scholasticide is not only the visceral killing, suffering, and terror inflicted upon the Palestinian people in Gaza but also the calculated effort to obliterate institutions that preserve Palestinian history, educate current and future generations, and forge links between the past and a future of freedom and justice. This is not just an assault on memory; it is an attack on the very essence of education as a liberating force—indispensable for a society where informed judgment, civic courage, and critical agency are essential to upholding the ideals of freedom and justice through mass resistance.
It is crucial for critical educators and anti-war activists to acknowledge that this war on education in Gaza parallels the ongoing assault on higher education in the United States and other authoritarian regimes, revealing a disturbing global alignment in the attack on intellectual freedom and historical truth. The strategy of scholasticide is both a violent structural project and a calculated ideological and pedagogical effort to silence dissent within and outside of higher education, particularly dissent that holds Israel’s genocidal war and its apparatuses of ideological indoctrination and repression accountable. The horrors unfolding in Gaza represent the extreme endpoint of a broader, insidious campaign aimed at crushing dissent across universities in the United States, Europe, and beyond, including nations like Hungary. In the U.S., schools and cultural institutions may not be bombed, but they are systematically defunded and turned into fortresses of academic repression. Books are banned, student protesters face police brutality, faculty are purged, and history is whitewashed. Meanwhile, billionaire elites and administrative enforcers ruthlessly work to “engineer the intellectual, social, and financial impoverishment of the educational sector,” silencing anyone who dares to challenge their pursuit of national and ideological conformity.[45]
Scholasticide is a modern form of McCarthyism that intensifies from silencing opposition to the outright destruction of academic and cultural institutions that enable both individual and collective resistance. It begins by targeting informed judgment, historical memory, and dissent, and then escalates to obliterating civic infrastructures like schools and museums. In its wake, it leaves a trail of bloodshed, broken limbs, wounded women and children, and a chilling legacy of violence, mass deaths, and ethical emptiness. Scholasticide is the canary in the coal mine, signaling an imminent and grave threat to academic freedom, free speech, critical education, and democracy itself.
Notes.
[1] Gerald Sussman, “The US-Israeli Regime of Despair,” Counter Punch (July 21, 2024). Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/21/the-us-israeli-regime-of-despair/
[2] Kenneth Roth, “Crimes of War in Gaza” The New York Review of Books [July 18, 2024]. Online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/07/18/crimes-of-war-in-gaza-kenneth-roth/
[3] Aryeh Neier, “Is Israel Committing Genocide?” The New York Review of Books[June 6, 2024]. Online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/06/06/is-israel-committing-genocide-aryeh-neier/
[4] HuMedia, “Israel hits Gaza Strip with the equivalent of two nuclear bombs,” Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (November 2, 2023). Online: https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/5908/Israel-hits-Gaza-Strip-with-the-equivalent-of-two-nuclear-bombs#:~:text=Geneva%20%2D%20Israel%20has%20dropped%20more,a%20press%20release%20issued%20today
[5] Editorial, “Initial Euro-Med Monitor investigation finds no evidence of military presence at site of Tab’een School massacre in Gaza,” Countercurrents.org (August 24, 2024). Online: https://countercurrents.org/2024/08/initial-euro-med-monitor-investigation-finds-no-evidence-of-military-presence-at-site-of-tabeen-school-massacre-in-gaza/
[6] Irene Nasser, Abeer Salman, Ibrahim Dahman, Mohammed Tawfeeq, Lex Harvey and Allegra Goodwin, “Israeli strike on mosque and school in Gaza kills scores, sparking international outrage,” CNN World (August 11, 2024). Online: https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/10/middleeast/israeli-school-strike-gaza-intl-hnk/index.html
[7] HuMedia, “Initial Euro-Med Monitor investigation finds no evidence of military presence at site of Tab’een School massacre in Gaza,” Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (August 11, 2024). Online: https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6432/Initial-Euro-Med-Monitor-investigation-finds-no-evidence-of-military-presence-at-site-of-Tab%E2%80%99een-School-massacre-in-Gaza
[8] Miranda Cleland, “Why Israel can torture detained Palestinian children with impunity,” Middle East Eye (December 1, 2023). Online: https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-war-torture-detained-palestinian-children-impunity
[9] Greg Shupak, “Israel may have the least ‘moral army’ in the world: The rate of civilian death during Israel’s assault on Gaza has few precedents this century,” Canadian Dimension (February 17, 2024). Online: https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/israel-may-have-the-least-moral-army-in-the-world
[10] Arwa Mahdawi, “Nearly 21,000 children are missing in Gaza. And there’s no end to this nightmare” The Guardian [June 27, 2024]. Online: https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/27/gaza-missing-children
[11] Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, Salim Yusuf, “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential” The Lancet [July 5, 2024]. Online: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext
[12] Andre Damon, “Lancet warns Gaza death toll could be over 186,000,” World Socialist Web Site (July 7, 2024). Online: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/08/xgqe-j08.html
[13] Press Release, “UN report: Palestinian detainees held arbitrarily and secretly, subjected to torture and mistreatment,” United Nations Human Rights (July 31, 2024). Online: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/07/un-report-palestinian-detainees-held-arbitrarily-and-secretly-subjected
[14] Gerald Imray, “Genocide case against Israel: Where does the rest of the world stand on the momentous allegations?,” Associated Press (January 14, 2024). Online: https://apnews.com/article/genocide-israel-palestinians-gaza-court-fbd7fe4af10b542a1a4e2c7563029bfb;
[15] Mike Corder, “International Criminal Court judges mulling arrest warrants consider legal arguments on jurisdiction,” Associated Press(August 9, 2024). Online: https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-icc-court-warrants-jurisdiction-12df89805cf654df030a56264ad38bb8#:~:text=THE%20HAGUE%2C%20Netherlands%20(AP),attacks%20by%20Hamas%20in%20Israel.
[16] Amy Goodman, “Palestinian Lives Matter Too: Jewish Scholar Judith Butler Condemns Israel’s “Genocide” in Gaza.” Democracy Now[October 26, 2023]. Online: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/26/judith_butler_ceasefire_gaza_israel
[17] Sanjana Karanth, “Israeli Defense Minister Announces Siege On Gaza To Fight ‘Human Animals’,” The Huff Post (October 9, 2023). Online: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israel-defense-minister-human-animals-gaza-palestine_n_6524220ae4b09f4b8d412e0a
[18] Patrick Kingsley, “Top U.N. Court Decision Adds to Israel’s Growing Isolation” New York Times [May 24, 2024]. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/world/middleeast/icj-israel-rafah-isolation.html
[19] Guardian Staff and Agencies, “Israel minister condemned for saying starvation of millions in Gaza might be ‘justified and moral’,” The Guardian (August 8, 2024). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/08/israel-finance-minister-bezalel-smotrich-gaza-starve-2m-people-comments
[20] Sharon Zhang, “Netanyahu Says Israel’s Goal Is to Wipe Out All Possibility of Palestinian State,” Truthout (January 18, 2024). Online: https://truthout.org/articles/netanyahu-says-israels-goal-is-to-wipe-out-all-possibility-of-palestinian-state/#:~:text=War%20%26%20Peace-,Netanyahu%20Says%20Israel’s%20Goal%20Is%20to%20Wipe%20Out%20All%20Possibility,amid%20Israel’s%20genocide%20in%20Gaza.&text=Honest%2C%20paywall%2Dfree%20news%20is,a%20donation%20of%20any%20size.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Kenneth Roth, “Crimes of War in Gaza” The New York Review of Books [July 18, 2024]. Online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/07/18/crimes-of-war-in-gaza-kenneth-roth/; See also, an interview with Roth in Carolyn Neugarten, “The Right Fight” The New York Review [July 27, 2024]. Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/07/27/the-right-fight-kenneth-roth/
[23] All of the quotes in this paragraph are from Kenneth Roth, “Crimes of War in Gaza” The New York Review of Books [July 18, 2024]. Online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/07/18/crimes-of-war-in-gaza-kenneth-roth/
[24] Donalyn White, Anthony Ballas, “Settler Colonialism and the Engineering of Historical Amnesia” Counter Punch [July 11, 2024]. Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/11/settler-colonialism-and-the-engineering-of-historical-amnesia/
[25] See, Kenneth Roth, “Crimes of War in Gaza” The New York Review of Books [July 18, 2024]. Online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/07/18/crimes-of-war-in-gaza-kenneth-roth/. A brilliant, critical, and encompassing analysis of Israel’s war crimes can be found in Jeffrey St. Clair’s Gaza Dairy Archives published in CounterPunch.
[26] Gaza Academics and Administrators, “Open letter by Gaza academics and university administrators to the world.” Al Jazeera [May 29, 2024]. Online: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/5/29/open-letter-by-gaza-academics-and-university-administrators-to-the-world
[27] Faisal Bhabha, Heidi Matthews, Stephen Rosenbaum, “OPEN LETTER FROM NORTH AMERICAN ACADEMICS CONDEMNING SCHOLASTICIDE IN GAZA” Google Docs [April 2024]. Online: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc7_K7qybzbeiBAg7sYTxbp1VOyYBrYPaxRf8jvHuBa0kQHlg/viewform?pli=1
[28] Ilan Pappe, “Why Israel wants to erase context and history in the war on Gaza.” Al Jazeera [November 5, 2023]. Online: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/5/why-israel-wants-to-erase-context-and-history-in-the-war-on-gaza
[29] Isabella Hammad, “Acts of Language” The New York Review of Books [June 13, 2024]. Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/06/13/acts-of-language-isabella-hammad/
[30] Chandni Desai, “Israel has destroyed or damaged 80% of schools in Gaza. This is scholasticide” The Guardian [June 8, 2024]. Online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/08/israel-destroying-schools-scholasticide
[31] Sharon Zhang, “Israel Bombs Girls’ School in Gaza, Killing 30 and Wounding Over 100,” Truthout (July 29, 2024). Online: https://truthout.org/articles/israel-bombs-girls-school-in-gaza-killing-30-and-wounding-over-100/
[32] Ibid. Chandni Desai.
[33] Chris Hedges, “Israel destroyed my university. Where is the outrage?” The Real News [February 9, 2024]. Online: https://therealnews.com/israel-destroyed-my-university-where-is-the-outrage
[34] Stephen McCloskey, “Israel’s War on Education in Gaza” Z Network [January 8, 2024]. Online: https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/israels-war-on-education-in-gaza/
[35] News Release, “Palestinian children in Israeli military detention report increasingly violent conditions,” Save the Children (February 29, 2024). Online: https://www.savethechildren.net/news/palestinian-children-israeli-military-detention-report-increasingly-violent-conditions
[36] Chris Hedges, “Israel destroyed my university. Where is the outrage?” The Real News [February 9, 2024]. Online: https://therealnews.com/israel-destroyed-my-university-where-is-the-outrage
[37] Ibid. Chandni Desai.
[38] Palestine Chronicle Staff, “Israeli Forces Display Stolen Gaza Artifacts in Knesset,” The Palestine Chronicle (August 14, 2024). Online: https://www.palestinechronicle.com/israeli-forces-display-stolen-gaza-artifacts-in-knesset-reports/
[39] Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (New York: Verso, 2024).
[40] Amy Goodman, “”Towers of Ivory and Steel”: Jewish Scholar Says Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom” Democracy Now[March 15, 2024]. Online: https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/15/maya_wind_towers_of_ivory_and
[41] Neve Gordon and Penny Green, “Israel’s Universities: The Crackdown” The New York Review of Books [June 5, 2024]. Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/06/05/israel-universities-the-crackdown/
[42] Ibid. Maya Wind.
[43] Ibid. Neve Gordon and Penny Green.
[44] Amy Goodman, “Maya Wind: Destruction of Gaza’s Universities Part of Broader Israeli Project to Destroy Palestinian Liberation” Part 2. Democracy Now [March 15, 2024]. Online: https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/15/maya_wind_part_2
[45] Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “How Authoritarians Target Universities,” Lucid (July 11, 2023). Online: https://lucid.substack.com/p/from-fascism-to-hungary-and-the-us
The post Scholasticide: Erasing Memory, Silencing Dissent, and Waging War on Education from Gaza to the West appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Henry Giroux.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Eman Abdelhadi speaks at the Bodies Against Unjust Laws march in Chicago on Sunday, August 18. Photo by Steel Brooks
Eman Abdelhadi’s speech from the “Bodies Outside of Unjust Laws” demonstration on Aug. 18 in Chicago.
Chicago, we all know why we are here.
We are drowning, and our hearts are broken.
We are drowning in debt. In medical bills. In rising rents. In inflation.
We are under attack in this country. The Right has declared war on people of color, on trans people, on women. They are trying to dismantle our systems of education, trying to criminalize teaching Black history and the realities of racism, oppression and exploitation in this country.
They openly call for mass deportations and want to strip Black people of voter rights.
Demonstrators on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Photo by Steel Brooks.
Every year, the climate crisis kills more people of heat, of floods, of fires. Every year, the number of climate refugees at home and abroad climbs and climbs.
And in this moment of absolute disaster, of absolute crisis.
The American ruling class —the people descending on this city for the Democratic National Convention — have seen fit to spend our money on killing children in Gaza.
They have provided an infinite supply of bombs to destroy Gaza’s homes, its schools, its hospitals, its playgrounds, its mosques, its churches, its croplands, its infrastructure.
As the most powerful country on earth, they have bullied the rest of the world in the name of protecting a far-right government openly committing a genocide.
And now …
Now they want our votes.
They say they have earned them by showing a little more empathy towards those poor Palestinians they happened to kill.
Vice President Harris, we hear your shift in tone.
But …
Your tone will not resurrect the dead.
Your tone will not shelter the living.
Your tone will not pull bombs out of the sky.
Your tone is not enough.
Genocide Joe would still be on the ticket if it were not for this movement, for all of us. Our movement is one of the main reasons that you are now the Democratic candidate for President in the most powerful country on the planet.
You, Vice President Harris, get to run for office because we ousted your predecessor right here in these streets. But it was never just about him. It was about the 40,000 Palestinians he helped kill.
And now we are telling you that “Not the other guy” is not a platform.
We are telling you that you actually have to earn our votes.
And we are telling you exactly how to earn them.
We are telling you we want a weapons embargo.
We are telling you we want a permanent ceasefire.
And we are telling you that we want them NOW.
You keep telling us that democracy itself is on the line.
You keep telling us that fascism is knocking at the door.
You keep telling us that Trump would be worse.
But the majority of Americans, in poll after poll, say they disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Study after study shows that a weapons embargo would earn you more votes, would secure you this election.
Vice President Harris, why are you risking the end of democracy, the rise of fascism, the return of Trump to protect Netenyahu’s war on children?
You are not the protector of democracy.
We are the protectors of democracy.
If you want to see democracy, look to Chicago’s streets this week. We are democracy speaking back to power, saying we will not be ignored.
We want to house our unhoused.
We want to feed our hungry.
We want to heal our sick.
We want to guard our planet.
We want to build our future, not rob Gaza’s children of theirs.
You may think that the people who make it into the United Center today are the ones who get to shape the future of this country.
That’s not true.
We make the future of this country. We make it where we’ve always made it, right here on the streets.
Vice President Harris, you have a choice. You could join a movement for justice. You could make a place for yourself in history. You could be a leader who chose to listen to her people rather than the interests of the war manufacturers. Or you could aid and abet a war criminal.
Vice President Harris, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, WE ARE SPEAKING.
Hear us. We will not be placated by tone.
We need you to act — and we will not leave the streets until you do.
This piece was published in collaboration with In These Times.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eman Abdelhadi.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Photograph Source: Jonathan McIntosh – CC BY 2.0
Martin Luther King, Jr. believed that consumerism was one of the major shortcomings of US society. The other issues were militarism and racism. Those were the three major themes King raised in his famous “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered in April 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City. King spoke against the ongoing debacle of the US war in Southeast Asia.
The apron of the big-box store in western Massachusetts was populated and littered with all manner of consumer goods, both big and small on the first day of the state’s tax-free weekend. There are usually lots of people in this area outside the store, but the huge dollies and trucks parked at the perimeter of the store spoke to the feeding frenzy of shopping.
Many of the items were big-ticket items: huge flat-screen TVs, masses of furniture such as chairs and sectional couches, and a whole host of other consumer goods. The clutch of people and trucks carrying away these items made it difficult to walk unimpeded on the sidewalk without having to step out onto the road at the edge of the big-box parking lot.
Consumerism is a way for people in the US and other so-called developed societies to assuage a number of issues. The feel-good reaction to grabbing all that a person can is like a scene out of the children’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1972) where a character can be sated with all of the chocolate he ever dreamed of eating.
Recall George W. Bush’s advice to go out and shop as a way of responding to the September 11, 2001 attacks.
“This version of patriotism — consumer patriotism — was on full display after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 in 2001. The message from political leaders was that the way for Americans to move past the tragedy and overcome their fears was to spend money and spur the economy.
“In an address to the nation on the evening of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush reassured the public that “our financial institutions remain strong” and the American economy was still “open for business.” He would go on to tell people to “get down to Disney World in Florida” to help shore up the country’s hurting airlines. “Take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed,” he said. Vice President Dick Cheney called for the public to “stick their thumb in the eye of the terrorists” by not letting what had happened “in any way throw off their normal level of activity.” Political leaders declared that the terrorists “hate our freedoms” — of religion, of speech, and, apparently, of the ability to snap a picture with Minnie and Mickey and buy stock in Exxon (Vox, September 9, 2021).”
As a society we need to pay attention to the big-ticket consumer items that would slow climate destruction. Stopping that destruction may be beyond those efforts at this point. In relatively wind-rich western Massachusetts, the same paltry number of wind turbines from over a decade ago are the same ones I see today. There has been an effort to build some solar arrays and some homes have solar panels, but the cost of installing a solar system, even with state and federal government assistance, is prohibitive. Electricity is expensive, as can be seen in cooling costs for the current hot summer. The major electric company and state will help with energy efficiency, but will not buck fossil fuel generated electricity production. Other sources of energy efficient energy production are not considered. Electric or hybrid cars and trucks remain expensive compared to gasoline driven engines.
I’ve learned what I call the two-week test about consumerism. I imagine what a particular consumer good would look like after two weeks of having indulged in its purchase. This behavior change has resulted in remarkable results, as I put a consumer item back on its rack after applying the two-week consumer test inside the big-box store on this tax-free weekend. I neither needed nor wanted the item. The two-week consumer-resistance test is arbitrary, but any time frame will do. In relation to the environment, where consumer goods are particularly destructive of the climate, vegetarianism and veganism are perhaps the greatest single behavior change a person can make toward returning to a more sustainable world (Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine). Countering the raising and slaughter of animals, besides the cruelty involved, is the area a person can make the greatest contribution in reversing climate destruction.
Consumerism cannot begin to compare to the enormous use of fossil fuels in war. No personal change of behavior can begin to address the addiction to war, both overt and covert. Wars are CO2 producing catastrophes. Heating of the environment releases methane, a more potent source of destructive warming than CO2, from former frigid areas of permafrost. The loops of destruction increase and intensify.
Growing food in a vegetable garden is also an important pushback against environmental ruin, but it is only a baby step in that direction in a society seemingly unconcerned about environmental destruction and committed to incessant economic “growth.” A vegetable garden, while enviable, is tinkering around the edges of the environmental catastrophe.
Only days after this tax-free weekend, skies in western Massachusetts were darkened by wildfire smoke creating an unhealthy level of pollution.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Howard Lisnoff.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence, … truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree […]
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+ Here’s a brief recap of the last week in US/Israeli relations. The IDF shot an American citizen, Amado Sison, in the West Bank. The US announced it would continue funding the notorious IDF unit that shot the American citizen. The IDF bombed a school being used as a shelter for Palestinians who’d been bombed […]
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Image by Evgeniy Smersh.
Any rock music fan worthy of being considered as such knows that the Pacific Northwest was a major focal point of the music in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Indeed, a sound the industry called grunge began there. Essentially, grunge is punk rock with a lot more fuzz and a few more hooks in the melody lines. In its artistic heyday, so-called punk bands like Nirvana, Mudhoney, the Melvins and TAD played clubs, dorm rooms, basements, bars and art galleries in their quest for the fulfillment playing music brings. Somewhere along the line, the media and industry recognized the phenomenon and labeled it grunge. Some of the bands were able to make a living at it and some became incredibly wealthy—something which wasn’t necessarily the best (or the intended) outcome. Other bands brought in other sounds and styles to the music and the scene it created. Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell brought in his version of a soaring and melodic metal guitar; Bikini Kill and Mecca Normal brought in a feminist anger and a legion of female fans. The Gits did a bit of everything and, in doing so, stood alone in the scene; they weren’t grunge, metal, or riot grrl. Their singer Mia Zapata had a voice that sometimes sounded a little like Pat Benatar, sometimes a little like Patti Smith, and sometimes like that folksinger you heard one afternoon in the park. Comparisons barely help describe her singing because it remained distinctly her own. The guitar of Joe Spleen, the bass of Matt Dresdner, and the percussion section that included Bob Lee, Bruce Docheneaux and Steven Moriarty completed the sound.
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A Far-Right Conspiracy in the Open
Project 2025, the far-right’s ambitious policy planning guide published as Mandate for Leadership, is designed to dismantle the “Deep State” and install a president and proven loyalists who will carry out Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda. Now the Project supposedly is no more—but not really. Trump’s campaign, concerned about the bad press Project 2025 was getting, ordered that it be disconnected. But make no mistake about it: While Trump may disagree with some of the project’s recommendations, it’s designed with him and only him in mind.
Trump claims to “know nothing about Project 2025,” but his name appears in the document more than 300 times; CNN counts at least 140 people who worked on the Project 2025 document and who previously worked for the Trump administration; and Trump maintains close ties to the Heritage Foundation, which published the document. If there is another Trump presidency, the contributors to Project 2025, many from the Heritage Foundation and others from a far-right network in Washington called the Conservative Partnership Institute, will populate his administration.
In this two-part analysis, I explore those chapters of Mandate for Leadership that concern international affairs and US foreign policy. In part 1, I will note the authoritarian aspects of the document and then look at its policy proposals with regard to China and Russia. In part 2, I will examine what the paper has to say about trade, nuclear weapons and military spending, North Korea, the Middle East, and Latin America.
The Plan to Reorder America
Most of the US media and Democratic lawmakers’ attention has, rightly, been devoted to the domestic side of Project 2025’s agenda—its plans for putting the justice department at the service of the President, getting rid of the department of education as a step toward emasculating public education, making America unwelcome for immigrants of color, prohibiting abortion nationwide, giving the fossil fuel industry whatever it wants, and containing public dissent.
Ideas about foreign affairs track that agenda because they all depend for implementation on an all-powerful executive and a bureaucracy that has been purged of liberals and leftists. (“Large swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda and vision,” says the document).
Project 2025 proposes three essential tasks of governance to promote its cause: reasserting the dominant role of the President in policy making, dismantling key government agencies concerned with social welfare, and replacing many civil servants who don’t pass the loyalty test (they will be reclassified as ordinary workers) with political hacks loyal to the Chief Executive. The plan seeks ways around the government’s sprawling bureaucracy, in and of itself an aim in common with all previous administrations.
But it differs dramatically in its bowing to Trump’s authoritarian impulses. Every page of the document stresses that officials and other personnel must align their views with the President’s, with the strong implication that failure to do so will result in dismissal or reassignment. It’s a formula for limiting policy debate within or between agencies to what the President has already decided.
China and Russia Policy
Project 2025 is absolutely obsessed with China. As was once true of US views of the Soviet Union, now China is believed to lurk behind every problematic situation on every continent. China gets so much attention, says the author of the section on the State Department, because it is “the defining threat.”
That’s Kiron K. Skinner, who formerly was in charge of Trump’s policy planning at the State Department and then joined the Heritage Foundation staff. Similarly, writes Christopher Miller in the section on the defense department, “Beijing presents a challenge to American interests across the domains of national power.” (Miller, a retired Special Forces colonel, was Trump’s acting defense secretary for about three months.)
Moreover, the military threat that China poses is especially acute. He portrays China as an “immediate threat” to Taiwan and US allies in the Pacific, not to mention a nuclear danger as well–all with no compelling evidence. Nevertheless, Miller urges as the highest priority “conventional force planning construct to defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan before allocating resources to other missions . . .” Those other missions probably include Ukraine.
Skinner takes Biden’s China policy to task for coddling China. She argues that some foreign policy professionals “knowingly or not parrot the Communist line. Global leaders including President Joe Biden have tried to normalize or even laud Chinese behavior.”
Actually, the opposite is true. Biden has likewise exaggerated the threat from China, and labeled Xi Jinping a “dictator.” When Skinner writes that China is a country “whose aggressive behavior can only be curbed through external pressure,” she has chosen to ignore how, under Biden, the US has lined up several countries in East Asia, including Japan, India, South Korea, and Philippines, in coalition against China–which is why Beijing accuses the US of again pursuing a containment policy.
The Project’s treatment of Russia is a far cry from its analysis of China. Russia is a threat only with respect to Ukraine’s security. There is no consideration of Vladimir Putin’s belief in Russian exceptionalism, his policy ideas, his human rights record, or his imperial ambitions. (The Project 2025 paper gives more space to the Arctic than to Russia.)
Skinner notes three strands of conservative thinking about Ukraine policy and concludes:
“Regardless of viewpoints, all sides agree that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unjust and that the Ukrainian people have a right to defend their homeland. Furthermore, the conflict has severely weakened Putin’s military strength and provided a boost to NATO unity and its importance to European nations.”
Skinner concludes that US support of Ukraine should continue, provided it is “fully paid for; limited to military aid (while European allies address Ukraine’s economic needs); and have a clearly defined national security strategy that does not risk American lives.”
Some Trump Demurrers
Donald Trump has never spoken of Ukraine’s right of self-defense or the importance of NATO unity in the face of Russian aggression. Nor does he subscribe to fully paying for the Ukraine mission. Trump’s main concern is relations with Russia and Europe, not Ukraine’s security. He has said many times that Putin is a great friend, that Putin wouldn’t have started a war with Ukraine if Trump had been President, and that he, Trump, will arrange a peace agreement very quickly.
That may be why Ukraine is not even mentioned in the Republican Party’s platform, which refers simply to restoring “peace in Europe.” In short, Trump wants to get rid of the Ukraine problem by appeasing Russia. He’s only on the same page as Project 2025 in arguing that Europe and NATO should be treated in transactional terms—that is, insisting the Europeans pay more for defense and give more in terms of trade.
Trump may also not be entirely on board with Project 2025 when it comes to Taiwan. As he has demonstrated in the past, financial gain and vindictiveness are hallmarks of his approach to international relations, whether dealing with friends or adversaries.
Recall that Trump entered office in 2017 believing that both Japan and China had ripped off the US in trade relations. Then he distanced himself from NATO, arguing that its members either need to pay more for their defense or sacrifice US support.
So when he was asked in an interview with Bloomberg News in June 25 what his policy would be on Taiwan, his thoughts were not about defending the island, which Republicans in Congress consider the first priority, but this: “They did take about 100% of our chip business. I think, Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.” That doesn’t mean Trump will abandon Taiwan; he could simply be prodding it to pay more, just as he has demanded of NATO.
Cold War II
In summary, Project 2024 is less a serious, objective analysis than an ideological document. It upgrades the level of international threats to US interests, with China the central enemy; supports a huge expansion of presidential power; urges greater emphasis than under Biden on nuclear weapon modernization and expansion; leaves to allies the main responsibility for confronting Russia; pushes for major increases in the US military budget; and argues for strengthening the US defense industrial base and increasing US arms sales abroad.
Don’t look for diplomatic initiatives, human rights issues, environmental concerns, the role of international law, or discussion of poverty, autocracy, or democracy. If a Trump-Project 2025 agenda were implemented, we can expect widening crises in central Europe and the Middle East, new arms races with Russia and China, another trade war with China, and new tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
A “stable genius” will be in charge. Anyone who did not live through the first Cold War will have another opportunity.
The post Project 2025: Authoritarian Rule and Foreign Policy Mayhem appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mel Gurtov.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
From 1933 to 1939, Hitler provided the future government of Israel with the assets of German Jews in exchange for aid undermining an international anti-Nazi boycott. On March 19, 1933 — less than three months after Adolph Hitler had been elected chancellor of Germany — flags of the reigning National Socialist German Workers’ Party bearing […]
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Seeing Donald Trump aggress top Black journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) made for uncomfortable viewing. The gasps of disgust, even from Harris Faulkner, were unsurprising. Trump’s unskilled wordplay actually reminded me of a cab ride made in Detroit just under forty years ago, including the redeeming nature of what happened afterwards. […]
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For about the 30th time since last October, we’re being asked to believe that Biden has reached his limit with Netanhayu. Two spoke by phone last week, after Israel’s dual assassination strikes in Beirut and Tehran. Supposedly Biden said during the call that the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran was “poorly timed,” […]
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Silence in the face of a polio epidemic
Last week, Gaza’s Ministry of Health announced the detection of poliovirus in sewage water samples, placing residents at significant risk of contracting this highly infectious virus. Despite a 99% decline in global polio cases since 1988 due to extensive vaccination campaigns, the eradication of polio is now under threat. The ongoing conflict in Gaza, characterized by Israeli military actions that have damaged or destroyed water infrastructure, has exacerbated conditions conducive to the spread of diseases. Limited access to clean drinking water, poor hygiene, overcrowding, and disruptions to childhood immunizations, including boosters, all contribute to this public health crisis.
In response to this alarming development, U.S. medical professional organizations have remained conspicuously silent. On November 3, the American Public Health Association (APHA) issued a statement recognizing Israel’s right to self-defense but failed to address the 16-year blockade of Gaza and its devastating humanitarian impact. The APHA referred to the situation as a “growing humanitarian crisis arising from limited access to basic human necessities” without mentioning the ongoing bombing campaign targeting civilians in Gaza. Less than two weeks later, the same organization issued a one-sentence call for an immediate ceasefire in the “Hamas-Israel war.”
On November 11, the American Medical Association’s (AMA) House of Delegates declined to consider a resolution co-sponsored by the Minority Affairs Section supporting a ceasefire in Israel and Palestine. Former AMA president, Andrew Gurman, MD, stated, “This resolution deals with a geopolitical issue, which is in no way the purview of this house,” emphasizing that their role is to address issues facing doctors and patients in the U.S. This stance contrasts sharply with the AMA’s previous condemnation of attacks on healthcare workers and facilities in Ukraine, where it called for an “immediate ceasefire and an end to all attacks on health care workers and facilities.”
Why are medical professional organizations staying silent?
As reported in MedPage, nine months into the genocide, the AMA passed a resolution calling for peace in Israel and Palestine but still refrained from demanding a ceasefire. In April, the World Medical Association (WMA), alarmed by the escalating healthcare and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, including starvation and lack of medical care, unanimously passed a resolution calling for a “bilateral, negotiated, and sustainable ceasefire,” with support from the Israeli Medical Society.
A compelling article published by Mondoweiss, an online journal providing analysis on Palestine, Israel, and the U.S., questioned the silence of U.S. public health institutions amidst a genocide financially and ideologically supported by their own government. The author suggested several reasons: a failure to recognize the root causes of health disparities driven by colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism; a history of harm inflicted by U.S. medical institutions on marginalized communities; and the substantial investments of U.S. universities in the weapons industry.
I propose an additional explanation. For too long, U.S. physicians have been blind to the paradox within our training and healthcare system. As Eric Reinhart argues in a JAMA Commentary published last year, medical education has been political, but in a manner that is “overwhelmingly conservative, profoundly uncritical, and reflexively protective of an ethically bankrupt field that has spent a century building up a capitalist healthcare industry.” This has led doctors and medical students to accept and uphold a for-profit, market-driven healthcare system that often disregards how politics shapes our profession.
Medical professionals must speak out
Given this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that many health professionals lack the moral courage to acknowledge a genocide. However, we must demand more from our professional associations. They should call for an immediate ceasefire, safe and unrestricted humanitarian access to Gaza, the evacuation of urgent medical cases including children with family members, the protection of civilian infrastructure, and an end to the transfer of weapons and ammunition to Israel. These actions are essential to uphold our ethical obligations and avoid complicity in what UN experts describe as potential serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian laws.
The medical community must rise to the occasion, recognizing and addressing the genocide in Gaza, which today includes a potential polio epidemic, with the urgency and moral clarity it demands. We cannot afford to remain silent in the face of such profound suffering and injustice.
The post Finding the Moral Courage to Recognize a Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ana Malinow.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Although the movie Sing Sing is, as the promos say, “based on a true story,” it’s a work of art. The film, directed by Greg Kwedar and co-written by Kwedar and Clint Bentley, is also about art: in this case, a play performed inside Sing Sing prison, via a program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts. […]
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A new U.N. report revealed that “Palestinians detained by Israeli authorities since the Oct. 7 attacks faced waterboarding, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, dogs set on them, and other forms of torture and mistreatment.” These abuses are clear war crimes. The report contains testimonies of men held in Gaza by the Israeli military “including UNRWA staff […]
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Photograph Source: A.Savin – CC BY 3.0
I correctly anticipated significant criticism of my last piece for CounterPunch, which argued that President Vladimir Putin’s was not “unproved,” that NATO expansion was a significant factor in the Russian use of force, and that our policymakers and so-called experts failed to understand the central national security aspects of Soviet/Russian policy. Among the critics of my CounterPunch article were Walter Slocomb who served in Clinton’s national security council and lobbied for NATO expansion, and a former colleague of mine at the National War College, Marvin Ott, who supported expansion and is anticipating a Russian victory in Ukraine to be followed by Putin’s aggression elsewhere.
I am not trying to minimize the Russian challenge to U.S. national interests throughout the Cold War, but there needs to be recognition of U.S. efforts to exaggerate the Soviet threat as well as the acknowledgment of systemic Russian domestic weakness. A further problem is that there are too few U.S. experts on either Russia or East Europe, and too few institutes devoted to such study. I benefitted from my graduate work at Indiana University’s Russian and East European Institute. And I benefitted financially as well thanks to the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Program and the generosity of Indiana University.
At the same time, the decline in expertise on arms control and disarmament also contributes to the decline in substantive exchanges with both Moscow and Beijing as well as Tehran and Pyongyang. I was fortunate to have served as the intelligence adviser to the U.S. delegation in Vienna, where the SALT and ABM treaties were hammered out. We could be facing a nuclear confrontation because of the lack of political discussions with these four key states. The fact that we don’t even recognize Iran and North Korea shows how our diplomats have failed us and our policymakers have been so short-sighted. [Arms control not only led to Soviet-American detente, it fostered European detente, which allowed 380,000 Soviet troops to withdraw from East Germany without incident.]
We are at a serious juncture with two mindless wars in East Europe and the Middle East. Instead of developing a policy toward these two disasters, we are fixed on building so-called alliance relationships in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times even wants to form an alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia to combat Iran. We should be dealing with Iran directly in an effort to avoid such alliance building, which will have no satisfactory outcome. The expansion of NATO has weakened NATO politically, and contributed to a major war. Our efforts to contain China with a series of alliance arrangements has only made it more difficult to deal with China regarding political security. As a result of our efforts, we have pushed Moscow and Beijing into their closest relationship in their histories, and we are looking for ways to match and exceed their defense spending and nuclear modernization.
In the 1990s, in the wake of the Soviet collapse, the United States sought to change the European theatre balance for no real reason. The continued effort to expand NATO and to deploy power in East and Central Europe preordained a Russian reaction no matter who was in charge in the Kremlin. U.S. planners thought the expansion of power in Europe would deter Russia from seeking advantages in the Third World, but this was another miasma in our thinking. Russia has never developed a sophisticated power projection force that would be needed for a significant expansion of Russian power. Nor does China appear to be interested in power project. Only the United States believes that it needs 700 military facilities around the entire world.
No industrialized country has been willing to place military goals ahead of social and economic welfare, which isn’t the case regarding Soviet and Russian leaders over the decades. Putin’s war in Ukraine has backfired on every level, not only in Ukraine itself, but has led to a revival of NATO that finds two additional members in Sweden and Finland as well as increased military spending in most of the NATO countries. Putin now justifies the war as an existential conflict with the United States and the European members of NATO. There is still strong support for the war with Ukraine throughout the country because it follows fromRussian fears of military vulnerability and even conquest.
Border security is essential to Russian national security policy. By comparison, think about what German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said about the border safety of the United States: He called the United States lucky for its foreign politics situation, saying that the “Americans are a very lucky people. They’re bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish.” Compare that to the difficult situations on Russia’s borders.
When Russians themselves write their histories, these works are rarely triumphal but emphasize the horrors and loses of confrontation. When they write about their southern border, it is always described as the “sensitive” southern border because of battles fought long ago. The western border is particularly sensitive because of the Swedish, French, and German invasions over the past several centuries. We may claim the “greatest generation” for the success in World War II, but the war itself was fought largely by the Russians on the western frontier who were responsible for most German fatalities and casualties in the war. It is difficult to imagine the success of the Normandy invasion, if the best Germany troops were not preoccupied with Russia.
The United States ignored a major strategic opportunity when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. In his containment writings in the late 1940s, George F. Kennan argued that, once Russia had demonstrated that it would behave in a moderate and conciliatory fashion in the world community, it would be essential to “anchor” or tie Moscow to the West. In our triumphal and exceptionalist mood, we did just the opposite.
When the United States expanded NATO in the Clinton and Bush presidencies, it ignored an old Russian proverb: “Don’t try to skin the Russian bear before it is dead.” Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama ignored this proverb, and the next American president will face a more difficult relationship with Moscow than the one that existed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. President Biden’s constant vilification of Putin will certainly make it more difficult to convince an American audience that it is time for compromise and negotiation, and to convince a Russian leadership that we are prepared to return to substantive discussions. A PERSONAL DISCUSSION OF RUSSIAN NATIONAL SECURITY
I correctly anticipated significant criticism of my last piece for Counterpunch, which argued that President Vladimir Putin’s was not “unproved,” that NATO expansion was a significant factor in the Russian use of force, and that our policymakers and so-called experts failed to understand the central national security aspects of Soviet/Russian policy. Among the critics of my CP article were Walter Slocomb who served in Clinton’s national security council and lobbied for NATO expansion, and a former colleague of mine at the National War College, Marvin Ott, who supported expansion and is anticipating a Russian victory in Ukraine to be followed by Putin’s aggression elsewhere.
I am not trying to minimize the Russian challenge to U.S. national interests throughout the Cold War, but there needs to be recognition of U.S. efforts to exaggerate the Soviet threat as well as the acknowledgment of systemic Russian domestic weakness. A further problem is that there are too few U.S. experts on either Russia or East Europe, and too few institutes devoted to such study. I benefitted from my graduate work at Indiana University’s Russian and East European Institute. And I benefitted financially as well thanks to the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Program and the generosity of Indiana University.
At the same time, the decline in expertise on arms control and disarmament also contributes to the decline in substantive exchanges with both Moscow and Beijing as well as Tehran and Pyongyang. I was fortunate to have served as the intelligence adviser to the U.S. delegation in Vienna, where the SALT and ABM treaties were hammered out. We could be facing a nuclear confrontation because of the lack of political discussions with these four key states. The fact that we don’t even recognize Iran and North Korea shows how our diplomats have failed us and our policymakers have been so short-sighted. [Arms control not only led to Soviet-American detente, it fostered European detente, which allowed 380,000 Soviet troops to withdraw from East Germany without incident.]
We are at a serious juncture with two mindless wars in East Europe and the Middle East. Instead of developing a policy toward these two disasters, we are fixed on building so-called alliance relationships in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times even wants to form an alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia to combat Iran. We should be dealing with Iran directly in an effort to avoid such alliance building, which will have no satisfactory outcome. The expansion of NATO has weakened NATO politically, and contributed to a major war. Our efforts to contain China with a series of alliance arrangements has only made it more difficult to deal with China regarding political security. As a result of our efforts, we have pushed Moscow and Beijing into their closest relationship in their histories, and we are looking for ways to match and exceed their defense spending and nuclear modernization.
In the 1990s, in the wake of the Soviet collapse, the United States sought to change the European theatre balance for no real reason. The continued effort to expand NATO and to deploy power in East and Central Europe preordained a Russian reaction no matter who was in charge in the Kremlin. U.S. planners thought the expansion of power in Europe would deter Russia from seeking advantages in the Third World, but this was another miasma in our thinking. Russia has never developed a sophisticated power projection force that would be needed for a significant expansion of Russian power. Nor does China appear to be interested in power project. Only the United States believes that it needs 700 military facilities around the entire world.
No industrialized country has been willing to place military goals ahead of social and economic welfare, which isn’t the case regarding Soviet and Russian leaders over the decades. Putin’s war in Ukraine has backfired on every level, not only in Ukraine itself, but has led to a revival of NATO that finds two additional members in Sweden and Finland as well as increased military spending in most of the NATO countries. Putin now justifies the war as an existential conflict with the United States and the European members of NATO. There is still strong support for the war with Ukraine throughout the country because it follows fromRussian fears of military vulnerability and even conquest.
Border security is essential to Russian national security policy. By comparison, think about what German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said about the border safety of the United States: He called the United States lucky for its foreign politics situation, saying that the “Americans are a very lucky people. They’re bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish.” Compare that to the difficult situations on Russia’s borders.
When Russians themselves write their histories, these works are rarely triumphal but emphasize the horrors and loses of confrontation. When they write about their southern border, it is always described as the “sensitive” southern border because of battles fought long ago. The western border is particularly sensitive because of the Swedish, French, and German invasions over the past several centuries. We may claim the “greatest generation” for the success in World War II, but the war itself was fought largely by the Russians on the western frontier who were responsible for most German fatalities and casualties in the war. It is difficult to imagine the success of the Normandy invasion, if the best Germany troops were not preoccupied with Russia.
The United States ignored a major strategic opportunity when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. In his containment writings in the late 1940s, George F. Kennan argued that, once Russia had demonstrated that it would behave in a moderate and conciliatory fashion in the world community, it would be essential to “anchor” or tie Moscow to the West. In our triumphal and exceptionalist mood, we did just the opposite.
When the United States expanded NATO in the Clinton and Bush presidencies, it ignored an old Russian proverb: “Don’t try to skin the Russian bear before it is dead.” Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama ignored this proverb, and the next American president will face a more difficult relationship with Moscow than the one that existed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. President Biden’s constant vilification of Putin will certainly make it more difficult to convince an American audience that it is time for compromise and negotiation, and to convince a Russian leadership that we are prepared to return to substantive discussions.
The post A Personal Discussion of Russian National Security appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Image by Heather Mount.
Between armed violence and fascism within the United States and the US government’s support for genocide abroad, manufacturers of weapons are profiting wildly. Within the US, arms producers are responsible for fueling war crimes in Gaza and mass shootings across the United States. The profit models of these companies are the same: more violence means more customers. Stoke the fear, fury, and legitimacy of conflict to sell more of your product. Generate a public culture receptive to the idea of weapons as the answer to insecurity, including through the construction and entrenchment of gender and racial power dynamics.
Profitmaking requires marketing. Enter the so-called militainment industry—the marketing of guns and militarism through films, television, video games, and now social media influencers. Gun manufacturers and military agencies, especially in the United States, have long had an outsized influence on the entertainment industry, and they use gendered and racialized tropes to promote gun sales along with a wider culture of militarism, war, and armed violence. But over the last two decades, the methods by which gun manufacturers and other military contractors have been able to influence people across many geographies—in particular young, white, cisgendered, heteronormative men—have become increasingly insidious. And the ramifications for violence are profound.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Since the first laws and executive orders banning ‘divisive concepts’, such as the idea that racism can be systemic, were implemented in 2021, critics charged that they would censor the past and force teachers to avoid uncomfortable but vital issues of history. Many accused the GOP of attempting to impose a sanitized version of America’s […]
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Whether they want to or not, the Arab people today face a wholesale attack on their future by an imperial power, America, that acts in concert with Israel to pacify, subdue, and finally reduce us to a bunch of warring fiefdoms whose first loyalty is not to their people but to the great superpower (and […]
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Photograph Source: APIMADERO – CC BY-SA 3.0
In what prosecutors called a “landmark ruling in the fight for human rights,” a U.S. jury in Miami has found banana giant Chiquita Brands International liable for the deaths of Colombian civilians due to its financing of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a brutal paramilitary death squad.
The AUC was responsible for thousands of civilian deaths and hundreds of other human rights violations while it was active between the late 1990s and mid-2000s, some of the most violent years of the Colombian civil war. The ruling holds Chiquita accountable for making hidden payments to the paramilitary organization from 1997 to 2004. Even in the early years, the group’s atrocities were already well documented not just in Colombian media, but also in the United States, where the State Department declared the AUC a terrorist organization in 2001.
After 17 years of legal proceedings, the first set of victims and their families have finally attained a measure of closure. The jury ruled that Chiquita must pay $38.3 million to plaintiffs in eight of the nine “bellwether” murder cases presented in the six-week trial.
The families brought the suit after Chiquita pleaded guilty in a U.S. criminal case in 2007 to making over 100 payments to the AUC totaling more than $1.7 million over more than six years.
“This historic ruling marks the first time that an American jury has held a major U.S. corporation liable for complicity in serious human rights abuses in another country, a milestone for justice,” EarthRights International, the NGO that represented plaintiffs, said in public statements immediately following the ruling.
As part of Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country created an independent transitional justice body to investigate crimes against humanity committed by both armed groups and Colombian security forces. The investigations have included cases like the “false positives” scandal, in which the military, with the aid of AUC forces, killed over 6,400 innocent civilians and recorded them as guerilla fighters to inflate rebel casualty statistics at the height of the civil war.
The Miami ruling in the Chiquita case represents a further step towards what Colombia’s peace court has called restorative justice—attempts to offer remedy and justice to the millions of victims killed, displaced, injured, or assaulted during the conflict.
Jurors in Miami sided with plaintiff’s claims that Chiquita Brands chose to profit from the bloodiest period of Colombia’s more than half-century conflict rather than abandon its operations in the country, and that the decision to fund death squads actively participating in that conflict meant the company was liable for the deaths of family members of victims in the case.
In an internal email sent in December 2003, a Chiquita Brands director wrote: “We appear to be committing a felony.” Yet the company continued financing the paramilitary group until well into the next year, according to court documents from the previous criminal case.
Families of the victims of the AUC in the Colombian regions of Urabá and Magdalena Medio have for years sought the right to sue the U.S. fruit giant in civil courts in both Colombia and the United States — petitions that Chiquita Brands delayed for nearly two decades with legal tactics in both countries.
Now, any final settlement with the families will likely involve further litigation and perhaps negotiations with the company. A second case featuring other victims with claims against Chiquita is set to begin preliminary hearings in July.
Chiquita has already announced it will appeal the decision, and unless the fruit giant offers a general settlement, EarthRights lawyers, who also represent other victims, have said they will continue to pursue further litigation in future cases. Chiquita’s legal troubles—including claims from more than a thousand victims in hundreds of cases, as well as a slow-moving criminal case in Colombia accusing executives of “aggravated conspiracy to commit a crime”—are far from settled.
“The struggle for justice is slow, but victory is possible, even against the wealthy and the powerful,” Tatiana Devia, a lawyer with EarthRights who worked on the case, said in a press conference following the verdict. Devia underlined that the ruling is “important for justice in Colombia as well.”
The case marks the first time a foreign company has been held liable for financing death squads in Colombia, an accusation that has also long been made against Coca-Cola, U.S. coal company Drummond, and Canadian mining giant Aris Mining (formerly Colombia Gold), among others.
Some experts suggest the Chiquita ruling could set a precedent in ongoing investigations into the actions of some of these companies as well.
Although the AUC nominally disarmed as part of an agreement with the government in 2006, many of their fighters simply re-armed and joined new criminal groups, perpetuating a dynamic that still fuels low intensity conflict in the country today.
Exacerbating and Profiting from Conflict
In addition to their arguments regarding the illicit paramilitary payments, attorneys for the plaintiffs also presented witnesses, including former AUC leaders and Chiquita employees, that accused the U.S. corporation of providing AUC forces with direct material assistance, including gasoline, transportation, and the use of shipping docks controlled by Chiquita Brands. The AUC used these resources to import weapons on multiple occasions.
Among the several former paramilitary leaders who testified in the trial was Salvatore Mancuso, one of the AUC’s most infamous commanders and a key witness in several ongoing investigations into paramilitary financing cases before Colombia’s transitional justice court.
Mancurso testified that Chiquita executives met personally with top paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño Gil, spokesman and political chief of the AUC, widely considered “the godfather of paramilitarism” in Colombia. The two parties negotiated payment in return for the AUC’s security services against left-wing rebel groups in the region, which had in previous years attacked Chiquita infrastructure.
Rather than denying the atrocities being committed by paramilitaries in those days, key witnesses for Chiquita’s defense stated that the AUC’s brutal reputation and propensity for human rights violations were well known by executives at the time—part of the company’s legal strategy of justifying executives’ actions by claiming that they agreed to work with the AUC only because they feared them.
Chiquita denies that the company should be held liable for violence perpetrated by paramilitary groups, arguing they were extorted by the AUC and financing was provided under duress and out of fear for their own safety and that of their employees.
However, another former AUC leader, Raúl Hasbún, testified that, contrary to the company’s claims, the paramilitaries never forced Chiquita to pay extortion fees. Nor did AUC forces ever attack Chiquita Brands operations institutionally—a fact that Charles “Buck” Keiser, who directed Chiquita’s operations in Colombia from 1987 to 2000, admitted under questioning during his own courtroom testimony on May 3.
On the contrary, the AUC, almost immediately after its formation as a paramilitary group in the region, provided Chiquita with security teams in multiple departments in the north of the country in exchange for regular financing in a relationship that plaintiffs described as “an equal partnership,” according to court documents.
At no point in this period did Chiquita choose to simply leave the country and extricate itself from Colombia’s spiraling conflict. Instead, EarthRights lawyers argued in court, “they chose to exacerbate and profit from” it.
According to court findings from the 2007 case, the company paid 3 cents on the dollar to AUC forces for each box of bananas exported from the country.
Remedies for a Debt Long Owed
As part of the 2007 investigation, Chiquita admitted to making illegal payments, as well as initially trying to conceal them as legitimate business expenditures. The company was fined $25 million in that case, but victims of the AUC never saw any of that money.
This latest ruling does not mean money is changing hands immediately, explained Marco Simons, lead counsel for EarthRights. This is but one case of many, which are part of “an ongoing process,” he said. “We hope that this win will pave the way for compensation and adequate remedies for all plaintiffs.”
For Ignacio Gómez, the verdict is a long-awaited personal vindication. He was the first journalist in Colombia to make these allegations public 21 years ago, and over the years he endured efforts by Chiquita Brands to suppress his work via lawsuits, as well as threats from paramilitary forces.
“I’ve been waiting years for this decision,” he told us. “And for Colombia, the importance of this decision cannot be understated.”
“Chiquita’s history in Latin America goes beyond this case,” he said, retelling the story of the “Banana Massacre” in Colombia, the slaughter of hundreds of striking plantation workers in the early 20th century, back when Chiquita went by another even more infamous name: the United Fruit Company.
“This debt is finally starting to be paid,” Gómez continued. In a country still suffering the after-effects of 53 years of civil war, fueled at least in part by the actions of private sector companies like Chiquita Brands, “we have hundreds of thousands of reasons to celebrate this ruling.”
This article is syndicated in partnership with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniela Díaz Rangel and Joshua Collins.
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Image by Candice Seplow.
Learn how political nonviolence can rehumanize us to one another and defend democracy in the U.S. and around the world.
After the shooting at former President Trump’s campaign rally, many people rushed to say that “political violence has no place in our democracy.”
Let’s go even further and boldly say: political nonviolence is essential for democracy.
The ties between nonviolence and democracy run deep. We know from the groundbreaking research of Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan that even if a nonviolent movement fails to achieve its primary goals, it often leaves a more democratic society in its wake. On the other hand, violence swiftly destroys democracies, shoving them toward authoritarianism and “politics at the barrel of a gun.”
Political violence has a terrible track record. It has spent centuries delivering and defending injustice, abuse, discrimination and destruction.
So, what should we do instead? Boldly and with vision, we should be building a culture of active nonviolence, including defining and implementing new standards of political nonviolence.
For 11 years, Campaign Nonviolence has been working to mainstream nonviolence and build a culture that implements nonviolent values, solutions, worldview and approaches. We have persevered in this work even as political violence has heightened — because we already know that more violence and continued inaction will not get us out of this mess. We need a profoundly different approach.
If we want to have a politics where every voice feels safe and respected, where each citizen has a right to participate, and where no one will be harmed for their political beliefs, nonviolence needs to be both a state and an individual policy.
Amidst the George Floyd Protests in 2020, Vox editor Ezra Klein wrote an essay, “Imagining the nonviolent state,” asking the thought-provoking question: “What if nonviolence wasn’t an inhuman standard demanded of the powerless, but an ethic upon which we reimagined the state?” He goes on to explore new standards of policing, restorative justice and responding to protest movements.
In a world of political nonviolence, we’d see these kinds of changes:
Nonviolent protesters are allowed to exercise freedom of speech and assembly without fear of police repression.
The use of nonviolent action as a tool for social, political, cultural, and economic power is fully protected for all people.
Police are not allowed to use violent repression against unarmed protesters.
Political events are weapons-free for all participants.
Polling places are protected by peace teams. Every citizen trains in violence de-escalation and anti-harassment skills.
No one makes threats of violence or intimidation over political views.
Political campaigns are legally required to refrain from hate speech, discrimination and violent rhetoric
Debate, discourse, voting and democratic process is held as sacred by all.
Each community trains to defend democracy with nonviolent action, learning how to thwart coups, attempts to steal elections and unjust policies that undermine fair participation in the political process.
What can you do to make this vision a reality?
Start talking about political nonviolence and the specific ways we uphold it. Reach out to public officials, policy makers, police and activist groups with these ideas.
Work with groups like Meta Peace Teams, DC Peace Team and Joy To the Polls on election safety and keeping the polls safe for all voters.
Engage with your fellow citizens about this by fact-checking, fostering civic discourse and working to build understanding rather than fear and division. Join efforts like Braver Angels that help people rehumanize one another in times of extreme polarization.
Learn how nonviolent action defends democracy. Check out how Choose Democracy and Hold The Line protected the 2020 elections, and consider how these strategies can be adapted to help us now.
The long-term work of building a culture of active nonviolence can start right here in addressing the political violence that is threatening our country. The United States is not alone in dealing with these issues. Around the world, many nations are grappling with authoritarianism, extreme politics, politically motivated violence and increased repression of protests.
We need political nonviolence more than ever. It’s a vision of democracy worth striving for.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rivera Sun.
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The failure of Israel’s two most important allies, the US and UK, to put an end to the slaughter of the civilian population in Gaza in 2023-2024 and the American and British mainstream media’s refusal to contextualize the 7 October attack raises questions about their status as democratic states. What many independent journalists and academics […]
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The International Court of Justice has made definitive what has been obvious for decades: It’s about the apartheid, stupid. In a sweeping ruling announced on Friday at the Hague, the Court ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories violates international law and should be ended. It determined that the occupation amounts to “annexation” of […]
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The Village Voice, April 13–19, 1980
A Response to Mike Johnson
I read Mike Johnson’s article Choosing Our Opponent: Why I will work to elect Joe Biden in the Stansbury Forum with a mixture of curiosity and concern. Not because I find it surprising that he is going to campaign for Biden’s reelection, but because he reaches back to the Carter presidency to find what he perceives as the U.S. Left’s failure in 1980 then and what needs to be done now. Johnson wrote:
“For me, it helps to go back to 1980, when much of the Left argued against supporting Jimmy Carter’s re-election race against Ronald Reagan, a position which I believe in retrospect was wrong.”
As someone who came of age in post-Vietnam America, the Carter years were a big part of my political life. I was sixteen when Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976. I came from a blue-collar, working class family in Massachusetts, whose hearts really were with the Kennedy’s, despite Chappaquiddick, yet, both of my parents voted for Carter. My Mother, however, had an innate distrust of Southern Democrats (Carter was from Georgia), and my father once cracked, “Don’t trust anybody that smiles that much,” referring to Carter’s trademark smile.
By the time I started college in the fall of 1978, Carter’s presidency had already taken a sharp right turn. It got a lot worse. Soon after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter reinstituted the registration for the draft (military conscription) and I was a member of the first generation of young men that had to register since the end of the Vietnam War. My first national demonstration, in fact, was against the draft in Washington, D.C., while he was still president on a cold, windy day in March 1980.
I write all of this because I know the Carter years really well, so I’m perplexed at why Johnson needs to have a public recantation four decades later of the position that his group the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS) took way back then. While he is not naïve about Carter’s record in office — he gives a long list of Carter’s failures but surprisingly omits many others, especially the Iranian hostage crisis — he appears to miss the big point: the Carter presidency was a transitional regime between the many decades of the Democratic Party domination of national politics since the New Deal to the Republican Party since 1980.
All the key political issues that we identify with the Reagan era, especially deregulation of major industries, including trucking, finance, and the airlines and the attacks on the labor movement, had devastating consequences for workers in what had been up-until-then densely unionized industries. When I was writing my book The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS, I was genuinely shocked to discover the boasting of Carter’s inflation “Czar” Alfred Kahn, a self-described “good liberal democrat” and the former chairman of the Department of Economics at Cornell University, about making the lives of unionized workers worse: He wrote:
“I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off. I want to eliminate a situation in which certain protected workers in industries insulated from competition can increase their wages much more rapidly than the average.”
Mike Johnson recognizes that many leading labor figures hated Carter, including Machinist President William Winpisinger and AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, yet Kirkland endorsed and campaigned for Carter. In one of my favorite interviews with Winpisinger, Village Voice journalists Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway asked:
“Is there any way the President [Jimmy Carter] can redeem himself in your eyes?”
“Yes, there’s one way he can do it.”
“What’s that?”
“Die.”
“So, he’s totally unacceptable as President?’
“I have said so countless times. I don’t intend to relent. He’s unfit to run this goddamn country. He was elected on the crest of the wave of Truth Sayers, and that son of bitch had lied through his fucking teeth every day he’s been there. It’s quite clear he marches to the drum beat of the corporate state.”
Winpisinger went in a different direction than Kirkland and a majority of the leaders of U.S. unions in 1980. He led a walkout of three hundred delegates at the 1980 Democratic Convention to protest Carter’s nomination, and later endorsed radical environmentalist Barry Commoner for President. For the president of a union heavily invested in the U.S. War Machine was pretty gutsy stuff. But, Winpisinger later failed monumentality when he refused to call on his members to honor the picket lines of striking air traffic controllers in 1981, with the devastating consequences that followed.
While I was going through my old Carter file, I found it interesting that so much of what I kept from those years was from the lefty — liberal, iconoclastic Village Voice, secondarily the New York Times, and, lastly a sprinkling of article from the Old Left newspaper the Guardian, which remind how wide and deep the hatred of Carter was. I joined the International Socialist Organization (ISO) soon after I went to college at UMass-Boston and remained a member until 2018. Our newspaper Socialist Worker took the right position then — “No Choice in the 1980 Elections” — and I would defend it now.
I would suggest to Mike Johnson to go back to the 1976 presidential election and recall what Michael Harrington argued then. Harrington was the future leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, and probably still the best known socialist in the United States because of his book The Other America. In an exchange with Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara in 2013 on the legacy of Michael Harrington, I wrote:
Whatever doubts might have lingered for me about the question [voting for the “lesser evil”] were cleared up by a debate between Harrington and Peter Camejo during the 1976 presidential election campaign, when Camejo was running as the presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party.
I read the transcript of the debate when it was published by Pathfinder Press several years after it took place. Harrington and Camejo were both in top form. Harrington was subtle and nuanced. But I thought Camejo, arguing for the importance of socialists remaining independent of the two capitalist parties in the U.S., won the debate.
I wasn’t surprised by Harrington’s pitch for a “lesser evil” vote for Jimmy Carter over the incumbent and unelected Republican President Gerald Ford, but I was struck by one particular point. Harrington said, “The conditions of a Carter victory are the conditions for working class militancy, and the militancy of minority groups, and the militancy of women, and the militancy of the democratic reform movement. We can actually begin to make victories on full employment, national health and issues like that.”
I knew from my own experience of the Carter years that none of this happened — the mass movements didn’t advance because of a Democratic victory. And if we replace Carter with Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry or Obama, can we say any different? This strategic “engagement” urged by Harrington weakened the left terribly during the post-Vietnam war era.
So, when Johnson writes that we should “pick our opponent” and campaign for Biden, I’m reminded that whatever you want to call that strategy, it is a road to nowhere.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joe Allen.
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