The gap between what needs to be done to save the Earth from the environmental disaster of unchecked global warming and what is actually being done continues to widen. Yet another exemplar of this gap is the funding practices of the world’s biggest banks. Capitalists not concerning themselves with small things like the future ability […]

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As Russian forces were closing in on a bunker on April 21 in the heavily bombed and surrounded Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, preparing on an assault on the “fortress-like” underground bunker where an estimated 2000 remaining Ukrainian troops are said to be holed up, Russian President Vladimir Putin reversed his order and told Russian troops to surround the hard-pressed Ukrainians until, out of ammunition, food, and water, they came out voluntarily.

Reporting on this decision, the New York Times, in an update to a story on the city’s final battle, claimed Putin had made the decision to avoid his troops having to fight their way through tunnels taking inevitably heavy casualties. What the Times didn’t mention was Putin’s saying that he also did not want to have fought in the bunker (or clearly, to hit it with a bunker-busting bomb, which could have been done long ago) because of hundreds of civilians said by Ukrainian sources to be “hiding” there. Russia views them as captives being used by the mostly Azov Battalion forces as hostages (itself, if true, a war crime).

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What about whataboutism? This new and misleading term now appearing in social media posts usually about the war between Russia and Ukraine is an attempt to deny the role history plays in current events. In essence, those who use this term to dismiss critiques of the war they disagree with are promoting an ahistorical approach that pretends that in the discussion of the war history began with the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. When one takes this approach, they can pretend that nazism is not a factor in the Ukrainian government, that NATO was not created to provide a military force to enhance Washington’s post World War Two push for market hegemony, and that it is not the US military that is the most murderous since the end of World War Two. Furthermore, the use of this term is quite often effective in shutting down any attempt by those opposed to the war to explain the whys and wherefores of their opposition.

Denying history has its uses. In Israel, the denial of history gives the rulers in Tel Aviv the rationale to steal land from those who have possessed it for centuries. Likewise, the Israeli denial of Palestinian history provides its military and its settlers a rationale for their brutality and arrogance. In the United States, the denial of history can take a variety of forms. It can be as openly racist as a politician like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banning books discussing the history of slavery in the US; it can also be as brutal as a white cop kneeling on George Floyd’s neck until he dies or another white cop shooting a Black man in the back of the head after tackling him during an unwarranted traffic stop. Denying history in the United States can also mean putting a Black man or woman in a position of power while at the same time rejecting legislation that could begin to resolve the economic inequality experienced especially by non-white people that is the legacy of a white supremacist past. In Britain, denying history is what gives people the idea that Winston Churchill was a great man of war and peace and not the racist mass murderer history proves he was.

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Before Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book there was The Little Red Song Book, which included lyrics to rabblerousing ballads written by labor troubadours such as Joe Hill in order to organize the Industrial Workers of the World. A 1979 documentary about the IWW is being re-released on April 29, making the stand-up-and-cheer The Wobblies – as IWW members were nicknamed – the absolutely perfect film to see for May Day.

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Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The great American novelist John Steinbeck was born in 1902 and died in 1968 – the same year a wave of radicalism perfumed across the world; from the revolutionary upheavals in France to the anti-Vietnam war protests which were exploding across the US, from the Civil Rights movement to the Prague Spring.   Steinbeck himself had come of age as a novelist some decades before, in the context of another great historical shift – the depression era dust-bowl migrations which saw vast swathes of rural poor take to their caravans and carts, seeking out the brighter horizons of the Californian coast.

Steinbeck’s greatest novel, The Grapes of Wrath, was infused with this spirit of historical change; the desperation, hope and courage of the poverty-stricken who have taken to the road, as the thunder rumbles in the darkness above, and the conditions of their former existence fade into the past.  Steinbeck’s novel was a masterful, searing and tragic depiction, not simply because he felt, with an artist’s intuition, something of the great change which was moving through society and uprooting all the traditional certainties of yore, but also because he understood to a tee the spirit and psychology of those individuals who were swept up in it.

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Black studies or Africana Studies emerged from the larger social and political movement of global Black liberation in the late 1960s as a nascent academic field. Notably, Black students at San Francisco State College in 1968 mobilized a mass protest strike to demand their ‘white’ controlled institution alter its curricula centering Europeans to study people of the African diaspora, and to re-center their teaching and scholarship to meet the needs of everyday people, particularly African people. Their protest led to the creation of the first Black Studies department in the United States. According to Turner and McGann, the intellectual foundation of Black Studies began with sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois who maintained that within the context of a white supremacy capitalist society only skilled Black scholars could provide an accurate interpretation of Black life. Historian Carter G. Woodson was also a founding framer of Black Studies who created the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History in 1915 to promote the study of Black life and history in order to “bring about harmony between the ‘races’ by interpreting one to the other.” Du Bois and Woodson’s contribution to the development of Black Studies is often erased, just as are the various movements throughout history that called for the recognition of Black contributions to the advancement of humanity and knowledge.

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John Reed’s Snowball’s Chance takes its intriguing departure from Animal Farm, and set me thinking again about Orwell. These days I can’t get through almost any page of Orwell without a shudder, though in my teens I often had the Penguin selection of his essays in my pocket. I’d learned to loathe Animal Farm earlier at my prep school, Heatherdown, where any arguments for socialism would be met with brays of “and some are more equal than others” by my school mates.

Some writers admired in adolescence stay around for the rest of the journey, perennial sources of refreshment and uplift: P.G. Wodehouse, Stanley Weyman, H.L. Mencken, Flann O’Brien, to name but four I’d be glad to find in any bathroom. Now, why can Mencken delight me still, while the mere sight of a page of Orwell carries me back to memories of England and of British-ness at full disagreeable stretch: philistine, vulgar, thuggish, flag-wagging?

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Alexander Dugin, 2019.

Alexander Dugin is quite possibly, after Steve Bannon, the most influential fascist in the world today. His TV station reaches over 20 million people, and the dozens of think tanks, journals and websites run by him and his employees ultimately have an even further reach. You, dear Counterpunch reader, will almost certainly have read pieces originally emanating from one of his outlets.

His strategy is that of the ‘red-brown alliance’ – an attempt to unite the far left and far-right under the hegemonic leadership of the latter. On the face of it, much of his programme can at first appear superficially attractive to leftists – opposition to US supremacy; support for a ‘multipolar’ world; and even an apparent respect for non-western and pre-colonial societies and traditions. In fact, such positions – necessary as they may be for a genuine leftist programme – are neither bad nor good in and of themselves; rather, they are means, tools for the creation of a new world. And the world Dugin wishes to create is one of the racially-purified ethno-states, dominated by a Euro-Russian white power aristocracy (the ‘Moscow-Berlin axis’) in which Asia is subordinated to Russia by means of a dismembered China. This is not an anti-imperialist programme. It is a programme for an inter-imperialist challenge for the control of Europe and Asia: for a reconstituted Third Reich.

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Ruth First playing herself in Jack Gold’s film on her imprisonment with husband Joe Slovo during the treason trial.

A few years ago I filed Freedom of Information Act requests for FBI, CIA, and US State Department files held on the murdered anti-apartheid activist, Ruth First. My interest in Ruth First was initially raised because so much the research she did for her activist writings was based on anthropological forms of participant observations. She researched her books and articles by living amongst the people she wrote about, and her analysis brought the sort of bottom-up perspectives gifted ethnographers strive to produce. Some of her approach appears to have come from her personality, but some of it also came from her academic training at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1940s, which included anthropology courses; and she later wrote about the formative impact on her life of doing field research for her books and articles documenting the brutalities of her Apartheid.

Ruth First was born in Johannesburg in 1925, to immigrants Tilly and Julius First, whose socialist political orientation shaped her early critique of apartheid. As a university student, Ruth First’s exposure to sociological critiques of power relations and anthropological methods of bottom-up inquiry shaped elements of her later work. She joined the Communist Party and helped form an activist group known as the Federation of Progressive Students, which challenged the basic assumptions of apartheid. She worked as a social worker, labor union organizer, taught in black schools, and learned the craft of writing reporting for various newspapers including the Communist Party’s Johannesburg paper The Guardian. Though The Guardian was banned in 1951, she created new journalistic outlets to publish important series of articles showing South Africans and the world the realities of apartheid. Her investigative journalism often involved simple, but dangerous, through stints of fieldwork observation she spent significant stretches time in rural settings, documenting the daily degradations of life in South Africa. She also chronicled problems facing the African National Congress (ANC).

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Richard Hansen in an interview with Vice News, 2020.

Richard Hansen is a white, Mormon archeologist and capitalist from the United States. He has been working for over 40 years in Petén, Guatemala in the Maya Biosphere Reserve among the ancient Maya city of El Mirador. Coupled with his archeology, Hansen has been working toward building a privately-owned ecotourist wilderness resort in the forests of El Mirador. Most of the Maya Biosphere Reserve is occupied by concessions communities that manage these forests through sustainable logging. These communities are made up of Indigenous Maya and local Ladino communities, some of which have been stewarding these forests for generations despite decades of anti-leftist, genocidal, “scorched earth” campaigns enacted against them by their own government (funded-and-backed by the U.S. and Israel, of course). Hansen’s project would ban logging, turning Maya and local communities from collective stewards of a forest to employees of a park. It would also bring “spiritual tourism” from Book of Mormon-themed companies like Anderson Tours, LDS Tours Cancun, Helaman Tours, Alma’s LDS Tours, and LehiTours (Helaman, Alma, & Lehi are Book of Mormon names).

“Any use of this particular area of forest other than ecotourism would be, to me, the equivalent of using the Grand Canyon for a garbage dump.” Hansen told Smithsonian Magazine while they flew over the Reserve. Just as many U.S. National Parks were created through settler enacted massacres & forced displacements of Indigenous Peoples of this land, Hansen’s project would also take a militarized anti-Indigenous approach to establish this private park in Maya land.

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