Burlington, Vermont saw its second snowfall of the 2020-2021 winter on January 2, 2021. The five-inch covering wasn’t much by Vermont standards and it certainly didn’t stop the city from functioning. In fact, it can even be seen as a welcome diversion in these days of quarantine and COVID-19. It did remind me of another snowfall a couple decades ago, though. That was also in Burlington. It was only a few days before the city’s mayoral election and the race was close between the Progressive candidate Peter Clavelle and the GOP incumbent Peter Brownell. Brownell’s failure to clean the streets and sidewalks of snow that day except in Burlington’s wealthier neighborhoods (including where he lived) caused his defeat. It was my introduction to snow politics.

There’s another mayoral election this March in Burlington. It will be forty years since Bernie Sanders won his first term as Burlington’s mayor in 1981. Similar to the dynamics of that year, the current Democratic mayor has proven to be a friend of developers and financiers. His network of associates and advisors is the 2020 version of a good old boys’ network. In other words, it’s not just made up of heterosexual men. His opposition includes a thirty-something Progressive and independent candidate Ali Dieng. It wasn’t more than a couple days after the Progressive candidate Max Tracy received the nomination of the Progressive Party for Burlington’s mayoral race that the local CBS affiliate WCAX-TV (known for its conservative leanings) ran a segment portraying him as too radical. Interspersing their commentary with images from local Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality protests, the story featured sound bites from liberal city council member Jane Knodell and the consistently conservative GOP politician Kurt Wright. The implication was that Tracy is a far-left radical whose politics are not what Burlington needs in these times. In an earlier story in Vermont’s more liberal Seven Days Vermont newspaper discussing the Progressive Party’s virtual caucus, Tracy was contrasted with his caucus opponent, longtime Progressive Brian Pine. In this article the reporter could find little difference between the two men’s politics, choosing instead to focus on style and approach. Seven Days, too, quoted GOP stalwart Kurt Wright, who more or less revealed his opinion of Tracy, stating that Tracy “is viewed as very, very far left in almost every circumstance….” Current mayor Democrat Weinberger echoed Wright in his speech accepting the Democratic Party nod in his reelection campaign, saying “As the Democratic Party has been establishing itself, both nationally and locally, as a Party committed to people through policy and progress that are based in science, data, and expertise, today’s Burlington Progressive Party has been moving in a different, rigid, ideological direction.” Not only do these remarks deny that Tracy and those to Weinberger’s left also use data, science and expertise but draw different conclusions than the Democrats, they also pretend that the Democrats are beyond ideology when, in reality, their ideology is an ideology that puts landlords, developers and banks ahead of workers, tenants and the poor. Although this piece was written in the early days of the campaign season, the remarks by Weinberger and Wright and the article by Seven Days indicate that the anti-Progressive elements in Burlington are trying to steer the campaign in a direction where perception matters more than fact. Bernie Sanders certainly knows something about that.

During Bernie Sanders’ first campaign for mayor of Burlington (and for the rest of his political life), his opponents attempted to pin a similar label on him. When Sanders first became Mayor in 1981 at thirty-nine years of age, the city of Burlington had been controlled by a good old boys’ network of establishment Democrats nominally led by Gordon Paquette. Their circle of friends were real estate developers and others who saw dollar signs instead of people. Bernie Sanders’ campaign for mayor put people—specifically working people—at the center of the campaign’s conversation. The campaign was hard fought and, in the end, it can be argued that it was the votes of less than a dozen voters who aligned themselves with anarchist and social ecologist Murray Bookchin’s politics that put Sanders over the top. Because of the success of his first term, Sanders was re-elected handily in the next mayoral election. For most of the 1980s his opponents in the Democratic/Republican establishment continued to call him a socialist. At the time it was a label Sanders proudly wore.

Jump ahead forty years to 2021. The city of Burlington has been ruled by Democrats for most of the past nine years. Democrat Miro Weinberger has been mayor since 2012 and only recently did the Progressives take back the majority on the city council. Weinberger, like his predecessor Paquette, is cozy with developers and banks. One of his biggest supporters is Councilperson Joan Shannon, who is a realtor and has made it clear throughout her tenure that she represents the landlord class in Burlington. During Weinberger’s tenure, the cost of housing in Burlington has continued to rise at alarming rates. While it is fair to argue that this would have happened anyhow, my point is that the city has done little to ameliorate this situation. In fact, they have consistently opposed rent control and other potentially helpful legislation. Indeed, I can’t recall if rent control has ever even made it to a council subcommittee. The current charter change proposal supported by the Progressives on the City Council that would require landlords to have just cause to evict tenants has a clause against unreasonable rent hikes. According to local activist Charles Winkleman’s Burlington and Vermont Politics on the Left blog, Shannon is rallying landlords to oppose this change, apparently seeing it as an attempt to sneak rent control into the city. Instead of using political power to ameliorate the rising rents in Burlington, Weinberger and the city establishment continue to argue that building more units will lower rents and costs. However, history proves that building more units does no such thing. Yet, like a bulldozer driven by a blind man, the developers continue to push their agenda and the mayor forges their way. This remains so even after a recent hoodwinking of the developer class by Wall Street players resulting in a shopping mall in Burlington’s downtown being torn down and nothing built in its stead after financing from the multinational financier Brookfield pulled out of the project. Currently, there is a giant pit surrounded by construction fencing at the site.

Meanwhile, like much of the United States, the people of Burlington face crises exacerbated by growing inequality, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and a police department that thinks it runs the city. The solution to these problems does not lie in business as usual. The element of the Progressive Party who appear uneasy with Tracy’s nomination (Clavelle and Knodell are representative of that element) were instrumental in marrying the Progressives to the Vermont Democratic Party. It was a marriage that saw the Progressives as the abused spouse afraid to leave the relationship. It was also their leadership that helped create the current situation. The need for a different approach is apparent. After years of compromise with big business interests and other wrong turns, the Progressive Party has a chance to reassert itself as the party of the people. Flawed moves like that by the 2006-2012 Progressive administration of Bob Kiss to bring the arms manufacturer Lockheed into a public-private partnership with Burlington might even be forgiven, if not forgotten. Of course, the infrastructures—economic and otherwise—put in place to support these various predations are not going to dissemble merely because the mayor is not beholden to developers and banks. The power of the latter is great and protected by the legislation it helps write. At the same time, the power of people can be determined. Occasionally, it even wins. The proposed charter changes that will protect tenants and put more community control over the police department are representative of Tracy’s politics. At the same time, these changes are already fiercely opposed by those whose power they challenge. The need for the changes is obvious by the fact they have made it to the ballot with more public input and support than I can remember in the past thirty years. Tracy’s support for these issues—which will upend the way things are run should they pass—is why he’s been painted as a far-left ideologue. The fact that his candidacy represents how popular these changes actually are will be dismissed by his opponents.

In a similar manner, the other charter change supported by Tracy and the Progressives would give the city’s residents and elected officials more say in the way the police department is run. Like many municipalities in the United States, the Burlington Police Department is mostly immune from oversight outside the department. What this means is that officers who use excessive force and otherwise violate accepted codes of conduct cannot be dismissed from their jobs by non-police officials. Furthermore, any complaints about their performance on the job can only be reviewed in-house. This has created a situation where police can act with impunity and little fear of serious repercussions. The proposed charter changes would change this, making the police department and its employees subject to civilian review while giving the Mayor and City Council more power in the hiring and firing of police officers. Like similar proposals in other cities, this charter change is opposed by the police and their union (along with various pro-police groups.) As the mayoral campaign heats up, one can be sure these elements will become more vocal in their opposition. Various monied interests will amplify it. The Tracy campaign will have to knock on lots of doors to overcome the rhetoric from that corner.

Although I was not living in Vermont in the 1980s, one thing I quickly learned when I did move here in 1992 was that even when Bernie was in the Mayor’s office, the power of the monied interests in Burlington never really ebbed. Many of the achievements Sanders is credited with—the public waterfront, the housing trust programs—would not exist if it weren’t for the doggedness of Burlington residents who had no reason to compromise with banks or developers. They had no skin in the game, no power to lose, unlike the men and women in office. They had only their lives and the well-being of their families to think of. Even when Bernie might have considered backing down and letting developers build right on the lake as a bargaining chip for some other program, these citizens kept the pressure on. It was only in later years under the Clavelle and Kiss administrations that the Progressives gave in to the private interests wanting to build closer to the lake. I remain convinced that if enough Burlington residents had opposed that development, the waterfront would continue to be free of shops, condos and restaurants. It’s as if the potential represented by the 1980s Progressive city governments fell to the false charms of neoliberal capital. Instead of coming up with radical alternatives to the privatization of public space represented by the development on the waterfront, City Hall accepted the options offered by the forces of capital as the only possibilities. This approach assumes that capitalism will solve the problems it creates. That is an assumption that does not stand.

Max Tracy has been painted by his opponents as an ideologue. This implies that he is unwilling to compromise. A fairer and more honest definition would say that it means he has certain principles he will not forsake. Over the years, I have discovered that all too often the powerful in our world define compromise as surrendering to them. In Vermont and elsewhere, it’s grown increasingly clear that accepting surrender as compromise forces politicians to betray their constituents and their ideals. As the political trajectory of Bernie Sanders makes clear, this happens even to those who once identified as radical, if not revolutionary. It’s obvious that a politician must consider their ability to get elected when they make political decisions. In the case of leftists running for office, this means deflecting and ignoring everyone to your right—mainstream Democrats, right-wingers, mainstream and right-wing media, etc. Sanders weathered such attacks as mayor of Burlington, even though some of his positions changed once he sought higher office. His administration also developed programs that did what they were supposed to do; they helped working people have better lives. It is those programs which won his argument against his opponents.

Many of those programs are no longer what they were intended to be. Some do not even exist. Monied interests and the politicians they support have manipulated these programs to work for them and not for those the programs were originally intended for. This is part of the reason poverty is on the increase in Burlington: programs designed to ameliorate said poverty no longer work. Instead of lamenting this, there needs to be a way to resolve it with that reality in mind. A radical vision is required. Bernie Sanders and the Progressives had such a vision in the 1980s. The fact that today’s political successors to the long-ago Paquette administration and the region’s conservative media are painting candidate Max Tracy with the same labels Bernie Sanders was painted with in 1981 means Tracy must be doing something right.

The post Burlington, Vermont, Harbinger of Change? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

On a balmy evening in November, a somber, slow-moving 68-year-old man removed his wide-brimmed cowboy hat and placed it over his heart. Moments earlier, Karl Gleim had laid a wreath in front of the most famous building in Texas. To Gleim, the wreath laying was a sacred act, one the retired state worker has participated […]

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

U.S. intelligence agencies and corporations have pushed back against the so-called Pink Tide, the coming to power of socialistic governments in Central and South America. Examples include: the slow-burning attempt to overthrow Venezuela’s President; Nicolás Maduro; the initially successful soft coup in Bolivia against President Evo Morales; and the constitutional crises that removed Presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.

In 2009, the Obama administration (2009-17) backed a coup against President Manuel Zelaya. Since then, Honduras has endured a decline in its living standards and democratic institutions. The return of 1980s-style death squads operating against working people in the interests of U.S. corporations has contributed to the refugee-migrant flow to the United States and to the rise of racist politics.

EMPIRES: FROM THE SPANISH TO THE AMERICAN

Honduras (pop. 9.5 million) is surrounded by Guatemala and Belize in the north, El Salvador in the west, and Nicaragua in the south. It has a small western coast on the Pacific Ocean and an extensive coastline on the Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic. Nine out of 10 Hondurans are Indo-European (mestizo). GDP is <$25bn and over 60 percent of the people live in poverty: one in five in extreme poverty.

Honduras gained independence from Spain in 1821, before being annexed to the Mexican Empire. Hondurans have endured some 300 rebellions, civil wars, and/or changes of government; more than half of which occurred in the 20^th century. Writing in 1998, the Clinton White House acknowledged that Honduras’s “agriculturally based economy came to be dominated by U.S. companies that established vast banana plantations along the north coast.”

The significant U.S. military presence began in the 1930s, with the establishment of an air force and military assistance program. The Clinton White House also noted that the founder of the National Party, Tiburcio Carías Andino (1876-1969), had “ties to dictators in neighboring countries and to U.S. banana companies [which] helped him maintain power until 1948.”

The C.I.A. notes that dictator Carías’s repression of Liberals would make those Liberals “turn to conspiracy and [provoke] attempts to foment revolution, which would render them much more susceptible to Communist infiltration and control.” The Agency said that in so-called emerging democracies: “The opportunities for Communist penetration of a repressed and conspiratorial organization are much greater than in a freely functioning political party.” So, for certain C.I.A. analysts, “liberal democracy” is a buffer against dictatorships that legitimize genuinely left-wing oppositional groups. The C.I.A. cites the case of Guatemala in which “a strong dictatorship prior to 1944 did not prevent Communist activity which led after the dictator’s fall, to the establishment of a pro-Communist government.”

REDS UNDER THE BED

To understand the thinking behind the U.S.-backed death squads, it is worth looking at some partly-declassified C.I.A. material on early-Cold War planning. The paranoia was such that each plantation laborer was potentially a Soviet asset hiding in the fruit field. These subversives could be ready, at any moment, to strike against U.S. companies and the nascent American Empire.

In line with some strategists’ conditional preferences for “liberal democracies,” Honduras has the façade of voter choice, with two main parties controlled by the military. After the Second World War, U.S. policy exploited Honduras as a giant military base from which left-wing or suspected “communist” movements in neighboring countries could be countered. In 1954, for instance, Honduras was used as a base for the C.I.A.’s operation PBSuccess to overthrow Guatemala’s President, Jacobo Árbenz (1913-71).

Writing in ‘54, the C.I.A. said that the Liberal Party of Honduras “has the support of the majority of the Honduran voters. Much of its support comes from the lower classes.” The Agency also believed that the banned Communist Party of Honduras planned to infiltrate the Liberals to nudge them further left. But an Agency document notes that “there may be fewer than 100” militant Communists in Honduras and there were “perhaps another 300 sympathizers.”

The document also notes: “The organization of a Honduran Communist Party has never been conclusively established,” though the C.I.A. thought that the small Revolutionary Democratic Party of Honduras “might have been a front.” The Agency also believed that Communists were behind the Workers’ Coordinating Committee that led strikes of 40,000 laborers against the U.S.-owned United Fruit and Standard Fruit Companies, which the Agency acknowledges “dominate[d] the economy of the region.” In the same breath, the C.I.A. also says that the Communists “lost control of the workers,” post-strike.

A PROXY AGAINST NICARAGUA

A U.S. military report states that “[c]onducting joint exercises with the Honduran military has a long history dating back to 1965.” By 1975, U.S. military helicopters operating in Honduras at Catacamas, a village in the east, assisted “logistical support of counterinsurgency operations,” according to the CIA. These machines aided the Honduran forces in their skirmishes against pro-Castro elements from Nicaragua operating along the Patuca River in the south of Honduras. By the mid-1990s, there were at least 30 helicopters operating in Honduras.

In 1979, the National Sandinista Liberation Front (Sandinistas) came to power in Nicaragua, deposing and later assassinating the U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle (1925-80). For the Reagan administration (1981-89), Honduras was a proxy against the defiant Nicaragua.

The U.S. Army War College wrote at the time: “President Reagan has clearly expressed our national commitment to combating low intensity conflict in developing countries.” It says that “The responsibility now falls upon the Department of State and the Department of Defense to develop plans and doctrine for meeting this requirement.” The same document confirms that the U.S. Army Special Operations Forces (SOF), the 18^th Airborne Corps, was sent to Honduras. “Mobile Training Teams (MTT) were dispatched to train Honduran soldiers in small unit tactics, helicopter maintenance and air operations, and to establish the Regional Military Training Center near Trujillo and Puerto Castilla,” both on the eastern coast.

A SOUTHCOM document dates significant U.S. military assistance to Honduras to the 1980s. It notes the effect of public pressure on U.S. policy, highlighting: “a general lack of appetite among the American public to see U.S. forces committed in the wake of the Vietnam War [which] resulted in strict parameters that limited the scope of military involvement in Central America.”

According to SOUTHCOM, the Regional Military Training Center was designed “to train friendly countries in basic counterinsurgency tactics.” President Reagan wanted to smash the Sandinistas, but “the executive branch’s hands were tied by the 1984 passage of the Boland Amendment [to the Defense Appropriations Act], banning the use of U.S. military aid to be given to the Contras,” the anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua. As a result, “the strong and sudden focus instead on training, and arguably by proxy, the establishment of [Joint Task Force-Bravo],” an elite military unit assigned a “counter-communist mission.”

The Green Berets trained the contras from bases in Honduras, “accompanying them on missions into Nicaragua.” The North American Congress on Latin America noted at the time that “Military planes flying out of Honduras are coordinated by a laser navigation system, and contras operating inside Nicaragua are receiving night supply drops from C-130s using the Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System,” first used in Vietnam and operational only to a few personnel. “The CIA, operating out of Air Force bases in the United States, hires pilots for the hazardous sorties at $30,000 per mission.” The report notes that troops from El Salvador “were undergoing U.S. training every day of the year, in Honduras, the United States and the new basic training center at La Union,” in the north.

SPECIAL UNITS AND ANTI-COMMUNISTS

The U.S. also launched psychological operations against domestic leftism in Honduras. This involved morphing a special police unit into a military intelligence squad guilty of kidnap, torture, and murder: Battalion 316. Inducing a climate of fear in workers, union leaders, intellectuals, and human rights lawyers is way of ensuring that progressive ideas like good healthcare, free education, and decent living standards don’t take root.

In 1963, the Fuerza de Seguridad Pública (FUSEP, Public Security Force) was set up as a branch of the military. During the early-‘80s, FUSEP commanded the National Directorate of Investigations, regular national police units, and National Special Units, “which provided technical support to the arms interdiction program,” according to the CIA, in which “material from Nicaragua passed through Honduras to guerrillas in El Salvador.” The National Directorate of Investigations ran the secret Honduran Anti-Communist Liberation Army (ELACH, 1980-84), described by the C.I.A. as “a rightist paramilitary organization which conducted operations against Honduran leftists.”

The C.I.A. repeats allegations that “ELACH’s operations included surveillance, kidnappings, interrogation under duress, and execution of prisoners who were Honduran revolutionaries.” ELACH worked in cooperation with the Special Unit of FUSEP. “The mission of the Unit was essentially … to combat both domestic and regional subversive movements operating in and through Honduras.” The C.I.A. also notes that “this included penetrating various organizations such as the Honduran Communist Party, the Central American Regional Trotskyite Party, and the Popular Revolutionary Forces-Lorenzo Zelaya (FPR-LZ) Marxist terrorist organization.”

Gustavo Adolfo Álvarez (1937-89), future head of the Honduran Armed Forces, told U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s Honduras Ambassador, Jack Binns, that their forces would use “extra-legal means” to destroy communists. Binns wrote in a confidential cable: “I am deeply concerned at increasing evidence of officially sponsored/sanctioned assassinations of political and criminal targets, which clearly indicate [Government of Honduras] repression has built up a head of steam much faster than we had anticipated.” But U.S. doctrine shifted under President Reagan. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Thomas O. Enders, told Binns not to send such material to the State Department for fear of leakage. Enders himself said of human rights in Honduras: “the Reagan administration had broader interests.”

Under Reagan, John Negroponte replaced Binns at the U.S. Embassy in the capital Tegucigalpa, from where many C.I.A. agents operated. In 1981, secret briefings informed Negroponte that “[Government of Honduras] security forces have begun to resort to extralegal tactics — disappearances and, apparently, physical eliminations to control a perceived subversive threat.” Rick Chidster, a junior political officer at the U.S. Embassy was ordered by superiors in 1982 to remove references to Honduran military abuses from his annual human rights report prepared for Congress.

THE MAKING OF BATTALION-316

In March 1981, Reagan authorized the expansion of covert operations to “provide all forms of training, equipment, and related assistance to cooperating governments throughout Central America in order counter foreign-sponsored subversion and terrorism.” Documents obtained by The Baltimore Sun the reveal that from 1981, the U.S. provided funds for Argentine counterinsurgency experts to train anti-Communists in Honduras; many of whom had, themselves, been trained by the U.S. in earlier years. At a camp in Lepaterique, in western Honduras, Argentine killers under U.S. supervision trained their Honduran counterparts.

Oscar Álvarez, a former Honduran Special Forces officer and diplomat trained by the U.S., said: “The Argentines came in first, and they taught how to disappear people.” With training and equipment, such as hidden cameras and phone bugging technology, U.S. agents “made them more efficient.” The U.S.-trained Chief of Staff, Gen. José Bueso Rosa, says: “We were not specialists in intelligence, in gathering information, so the United States offered to help us organize a special unit.” Between 1982 and 1984, the aforementioned Gen. Álvarez headed the Armed Forces. In 1983, Reagan awarded him the Legion of Merit for “encouraging the success of democratic processes in Honduras.” When C.I.A. Station Chief, Donald Winters, adopted a child, he asked Álvarez to be the godfather.

After WWII, the U.S. Army established, in the Panama Canal Zone, a Latin American Training Center-Ground Division at Fort Amador, later renamed the U.S. Army School of the Americas and moved to Fort Benning, Georgia. Now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the C.I.A.’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam and its MK-ULTRA mind-torture programs influenced the Honduras curriculum at the School.

In 1983, the U.S. military participated in Strategic Military Seminar with the Honduran Armed Forces, at which it was decided that FUSEP would be transformed from a police force into a military intelligence unit. “The purpose of this change,” says the C.I.A., “was to improve coordination and improve control.” It also aimed “To make available greater personnel, resources, and to integrate the intel production.” In 1984, the Special Unit was placed under the command of the Military Intelligence Division and renamed the 316^th Battalion, at which point “it continued to provide technical support to the arms interdiction program” in neighboring countries.

A C.I.A. officer based in the U.S. Embassy is known to have visited the Military Industries jail: one of Battalion 316’s torture chambers in which victims were bound, beaten, electrocuted, raped, and poisoned. Battalion torturer, José Barrera, says: “They always asked to be killed … Torture is worse than death.” Battalion 316 officer, José Valle, explained surveillance methods: “We would follow a person for four to six days. See their daily routes from the moment they leave the house. What kind of transportation they use. The streets they go on.” Men in black ski masks would bundle the victim into a vehicle with dark-tinted windows and no license plates.

Under Lt. Col. Alonso Villeda, the Battalion was disbanded and replaced in 1987 with a Counterintelligence Division of the Honduran Armed Forces. Led by the Chief of Staff for Intelligence (C-2), it absorbed the Battalion’s personnel, units, analysis centers, and functions.

In 1988, Richard Stolz, then-U.S. Deputy Director for Operations, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in secret hearings that C.I.A. officers ran courses and taught psychological torture. “The course consisted of three weeks of classroom instruction followed by two weeks of practical exercises, which included the questioning of actual prisoners by the students.” Former Ambassador Binns says: “I think it is an example of the pathology of foreign policy.” In response to the allegations, which he denied, former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, Elliott Abrams, replied: “A human rights policy is not supposed to make you feel good.”

Between 1982 and 1993, the U.S. taxpayer gave half a billion dollars in military “aid” to Honduras. By 1990, 184 people had “disappeared,” according to President Manuel Zelaya, who in 2008 intimated that he would reopen cases of the disappeared.

THE ZELAYA COUP

After centuries of struggle, Hondurans elected a President who raised living standards through wealth redistribution. Winner of the 2005 Presidential elections, Manuel Zelaya of the Liberal Party’s Movimiento Esperanza Liberal faction increased the minimum wage, provided free education to children, subsidised small farmers, and provided free electricity to the country’s poorest. Zelaya countered media monopoly propaganda by imposing minimum airtime for government broadcasts and allied with America’s regional enemies via the proposed ALBA trading bloc.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported at the time that “analysts” reckoned Zelaya’s move “runs the risk of jeopardizing the traditionally close state of relations with the United States.” The CRS also bemoaned Zelaya delaying the accreditation of the U.S. Ambassador, Hugo Llorens, “to show solidarity with Bolivia in its diplomatic spat with the United States in which Bolivia expelled the U.S. Ambassador.”

Because Zeyala did not have enough Congressional representatives to agree to his plan, he attempted to expand democracy by holding a referendum on constitutional changes. Both the lower and Supreme Courts agreed to the opposition parties blocking the referendum. In defiance of the courts, Zelaya ordered the military to help with election logistics, an order refused by the head of the Armed Forces, Gen. Romeo Vásquez, who later claimed that Zelaya had dismissed him, which Zelaya denies. Using pro-Zelaya demonstrations as a pretext for taking to the streets, the military mobilized and, in June 2009, the Supreme Court authorized Zelaya’s capture, after which he was exiled to Costa Rica.

In the book Hard Choices, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s ghostwriters, with her approval, refer to Latin America as the U.S.’s “backyard” and to Zelaya as “a throwback to the caricature of a Central American strongman, with his white cowboy hat, dark black mustache, and fondness for Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro” (p. 222). The publishers omitted from the paperback edition Clinton’s role in the coup: “We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras” (plus the usual boilerplate about democracy promotion.)

Decree PCM-M-030-2009 ordered the election be held during a state of emergency. The peaceful, pro-Zelaya groups, La Resistencia and Frente Hondureña de Resistencia Popular, were targeted under Anti-Terror Laws. The right-wing Porfirio Lobo was elected with over 50 percent of the vote in a fake 60 percent turnout (later revised to 49 percent). U.S. President Obama described this as “a restoration of democratic practices and a commitment to reconciliation that gives us great hope.” Hope and change for Honduras came in the form of economic changes benefitting U.S. corporations:

The U.S. State Department notes: “Many of the approximately 200 U.S. companies that operate in Honduras take advantage of protections available in the Central American and Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement.” Note the inadvertent acknowledgement that “free trade” is actually protection for U.S. corporations. The State Department also notes: “The Honduran government is generally open to foreign investment. Low labor costs, proximity to the U.S. market, and the large Caribbean port of Puerto Cortes make Honduras attractive to investors.”

Four years into Zelaya’s overthrow, unemployment jumped from 35.5 percent to 56.4 percent. In 2014, Honduras signed an agreement with the International Monetary Fund for a $189m loan. The Center for Economic and Policy Research states: “Honduran authorities agreed to implement fiscal consolidation… including privatizations, pension reforms and public sector layoffs.” The Congressional Research Service states: “President Juan Orlando Hernández of the conservative National Party was inaugurated to a second four-year term in January 2018. He lacks legitimacy among many Hondurans, however, due to allegations that his 2017 reelection was unconstitutional and marred by fraud.”

RETURN OF THE DEATH SQUADS

Since the coup, the U.S. has expanded its military bases in Honduras from 10 to 13. U.S. “aid” funds the Honduran National Police, whose long-time Director, Juan Carlos Bonilla, was trained at the School of the Americas. Atrocities against Hondurans increased under the U.S. favorite, President Hernández, who vowed to “put a soldier on every corner.” SOUTHCOM worked under Obama’s Central America Regional Security Initiative, which supported Operation Morazán: a program to integrate Honduras’s Armed Forces with its domestic policing units. With SOUTHCOM funding, the 250-person Special Response Security Unit (TIGRES) was established near Lepaterique. The TIGRES are trained by the U.S. Green Berets or 7^th Special Forces Group (Airborne) and described by the U.S. Army War College as a “paramilitary police force.”

The cover for setting up a military police force is countering narco- and human-traffickers, but the record shows that left-wing civilians are targeted for death and intimidation. To crush the pro-Zelaya, pro-democracy movements Operation Morazán, according to the U.S. Army War College, included the creation of the Military Police of Public Order (PMOP), whose members must have served at least one year in the Armed Forces. By January 2018, the PMOP consisted of 4,500 personnel in 10 battalions across every region of Honduras, and had murdered at least 21 street protestors.

Berta Cáceres co-founded the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras. One of the Organization’s missions was resisting the Desarrollos Energéticos (DESA) corporation’s Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque River, which is sacred to the Lenca people. DESA hired a gang, later convicted of murdering Cáceres. They included the U.S.-trained Maj. Mariano Díaz Chávez and Lt. Douglas Geovanny Bustillo, himself head of security at DESA. The company’s director, David Castillo, also a U.S.-trained ex-military intelligence officer, is alleged to have colluded with the killers. The TIGRE forces oversaw the dam’s construction site.

Between 2010 and 2016, as U.S. “aid” and training continued to flow, over 120 environmental activists were murdered by hitmen, gangs, police, and the military for opposing illegal logging and mining. Others have been intimidated. In 2014, for instance, a year after the murder of three Matute people by gangs linked to a mining operation, the children of the indigenous Tolupan leader, Santos Córdoba, were threatened at gunpoint by the U.S.-trained, ex-Army General, Filánder Uclés, and his bodyguards.

Home to the Regional Military Training Center, Bajo Aguán is a low-lying region in the east, whose farmers have battled land privatization since the early-1990s. After Zelaya was deposed, crimes against the peoples of the region increased. Rights groups signed a letter to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who facilitated U.S. aid to Honduras, stating: “Forty-five people associated with peasant organizations have been killed” between September 2009 and February 2012. A joint military-police project, Operation Xatruch II in 2012, led to the deaths of “nine peasant organization members, including two principal leaders.” One 17-year-old son of a peasant organizer was kidnapped, tortured, and threatened with being burned alive. Lawfare is also used, with over 160 small farmers in the area subject to frivolous legal proceedings.

“BACK TO THE PAST”

In the 1980s, Tomás Nativí, co-founder of the People’s Revolutionary Union, was “disappeared” by U.S.-backed death squads. Nativí’s wife, Bertha Oliva, founded of the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras to fight for justice for those murdered between 1979 and 1989. She told The Intercept that the recent killings and restructuring of the so-called security state is “like going back to the past.”

The iron-fist of Empire in the service of capitalism never loosens its grip. The names and command structures of U.S.-backed military units in Honduras have changed over the last four decades, but their goal remains the same.

The post The Evolution of U.S.-Backed Death Squads in Honduras appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

On a balmy evening in November, a somber, slow-moving 68-year-old man removed his wide-brimmed cowboy hat and placed it over his heart. Moments earlier, Karl Gleim had laid a wreath in front of the most famous building in Texas. To Gleim, the wreath laying was a sacred act, one the retired state worker has participated in monthly for the last three years as a member of the Texas Nationalist Movement.

Under the guise of making the Alamo more visitor-friendly and inclusive, officials want to erase the Battle of the Alamo from the minds of future generations, Gleim said. The San Antonio City Council and George P. Bush, Commissioner of the Texas General Land Office, want to turn the Shrine of Texas Liberty, Gleim said, “into a United Nations-run, progressive lesson on the evils of Anglo imperialism.”

Proponents of the Alamo redevelopment plan—which the City of San Antonio and the Texas General Land Office agreed to in 2018—say Gleim and likeminded Texans are misinformed.

“They say I’m trying to erase Anglo-Saxon history, but we’re not,” San Antonio City Councilman Roberto Treviño said. “The full story of the Alamo hasn’t always been told. For too long many Mexican-Americans have felt disconnected and victimized by the story.”

The battle over how to redevelop the Alamo and remember the site’s history has provoked death threats and emerged as a cause célèbre among Texas’s network of grassroots conservatives, some of whom believe Bush, whose mother is from Mexico, planned to erect a statue of Mexican dictator Santa Anna at the Alamo. Bush called the rumor “patently false” and “flat out racist.”

The fight is a flashpoint in the national conflagration about whose version of history we should officially sanction. It’s a fight over how to honor, if at all, men who putatively fought for liberty, yet enslaved and killed people of color.

At the Alamo in 1836, Lt. Col. William Travis commanded a group of about 190 men—mostly Anglo settlers of what was then the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. The group included Davey Crockett, the most famous American in the world at the time, and Jim Bowie, American folk hero, famed knife fighter, and slave trader. They faced off against at least 1,500 Mexicans under the command of Santa Anna. They fought to the death.

“The men died,” Gleim said, “defending the most Texan of ideals—liberty and freedom.” These ideals, he added, are again under vicious attack by those Gleim sees as wanting to rewrite history.

Conservative Texans like Gleim are not standing down.

In December 2019, heavily-armed activists gathered in Alamo Plaza to protest the relocation of the Alamo Cenotaph, a 60-foot tall marble statute erected in 1939 to honor the Alamo defenders. Moving the Cenotaph 500 feet south, city officials say, is essential to redeveloping in a way that reflects the site’s 300 years of cultural history. The Alamo was founded as a Spanish mission in the early 18^th century and was an important site to Native Americans. The Cenotaph overpowers the area, officials argue, and represents only one moment in history.

In May 2020, dozens of self-styled modern-day Alamo defenders—many with weapons at the ready—again made a show of force at the site. The day before, someone had written “[down with] white supremacy,” and “[down with] the ALAMO” in red spray paint on the Cenotaph.

And in September 2020, dozens of Texans—many members of a group called This is Texas Freedom Force—offered fiery testimony as the Texas Historical Commission debated moving the Cenotaph. The commission denied the city of San Antonio’s request to do so.

Prominent state politicians—including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick—have proclaimed their opposition to changing the Alamo in any way that would take the focus off the 1836 battle. Gleim appreciates the support, but he is not convinced his side will win.

Nevertheless, like the Alamo defenders in 1836, Gleim told me, “Texas patriots have crossed a line in the sand and are prepared to take a stand for freedom.”

On the afternoon of May 30, a group of Black Lives Matter supporters yelled at a row of San Antonio police standing in front of the Alamo Cenotaph. The death of George Floyd had driven hundreds of thousands around the country to the streets in protest against racial injustice. San Antonio was no exception.

San Antonio native 43-year-old Brandon Burkhart, a white man, stood a few feet behind the police with several dozen members of This is Texas Freedom Force. Heavily armed, the men had heard that protesters aimed to damage the Alamo, Burkhart said. He later told me the protestors’ goal was “to destroy Anglo-Saxon history.”

Standing 6 foot 4 inches tall and weighing north of 240 pounds, Burkhart struck an intimidating figure. As the president of This is Texas Freedom Force, a group that “preserves Texas History and protects Texan’s Rights,” according to organization’s website—Burkhart is passionate about Texas and what he sees as threats to Texans—namely the removal of Confederate monuments and government infringement on the right to own guns. Perhaps the most pernicious threat to the Texans, Burkhart contends, are the liberal politicians who want to rewrite the history of Texas’s most sacred site.

Burkhart has been an outsized presence at dozens of public meetings on the Alamo redevelopment. In 2018, he was thrown out of an Alamo Citizen Advisory Committee meeting for yelling at committee members, including San Antonio Councilman Robert Treviño. “Treviño,” Burkhart said, “is nothing more than a Mexican army sympathizer.” (Treviño told me he has received at least a dozen death threats due to the Alamo redevelopment plan.)

After sharing his opinion of Treviño, Burkhart encouraged me to visit This is Texas Freedom Force’s Facebook page. (Facebook deactivated the page in November.) The page was replete with photos of guns and memes that make clear the group’s cultural perspective—“Shooting someone who says ‘I’m from California,’ should be considered self-defense”; “Texas Lives Matter, no one cares about the color of your skin”; “Texans—Women love us, Antifa fears us.” The group’s website offers T-shirts for sale—one with the slogan “I came to party like it’s 1836”—and for $40 you can have a membership card and a Velcro This is Texas Freedom Force patch.

“We’re going to keep fighting for our history,” Burkhart said, “no matter who gets in our way.”

***

On a sunny Sunday afternoon in September, San Antonio resident Ruben Cordova pointed up at the Alamo Cenotaph. “Calling the Alamo a shrine of liberty reflects a misunderstanding of why these men were fighting,” he said. Cordova, an art historian who curated The Other Side of the Alamo: Art Against the Myth, at San Antonio’s Galería Guadalupe in 2018, motioned for me to walk to the other side of the monument.

“They were fighting for Mexican land and the right to enslave black people on that land,” Cordova said.

Many Texans refuse to confront this history because the site is part of the creation myth of Texas, Cordova said, but the words of the Republic of Texas’s founding fathers are clear.

On May 4, 1836, Stephen F. Austin—one of the first Anglo settlers to Texas, the first Secretary of State of the Republic of Texas, and regarded by many as the Father of Texas—wrote to Missouri Sen. L.F. Linn to request aid for the Texas War of Independence. Austin called the fight “a war of barbarism and of despotic principles, waged by the mongrel Spanish-Indian and Negro race, against civilization and the Anglo-American race.” Austin, who had worked for years to make slavery legal in Texas, also warned of “negro insurrection” and called Mexicans the “natural enemies of white men and civilization.”

After the battle, “remember the Alamo” became a slogan for anti-Mexican sentiment in popular culture, Cordova added. The 1915 movie Martyrs of the Alamo— produced by D.W. Griffith, the director of the virulently racist Birth of a Nation—portrays Mexicans as lecherous and evil and helped fuel the Texas creation myth, Cordova said.

The erection of the Cenotaph, John Wayne’s 1960 film Alamo, and inaccurate school books have all fueled the myth, Cordova said. It’s a stubborn myth still officially sanctioned by the state, he added. In 2018 historians called for the Texas State Board of Education to change state curriculum standards which refer to the Alamo defenders as “heroic.” The board demurred.

Cordova also suggested that this anti-Mexican sentiment is why President Donald Trump mentioned the “last stand” at “the beautiful, beautiful Alamo” in his 2020 State of the Union address.

After speaking with Cordova, I called Frank de la Teja, the inaugural State Historian of Texas in 2007. When de la Teja talks about the Alamo, people don’t always like what they hear. Offering a complex understanding of the most sacrosanct Texas origin myth makes people uncomfortable, he said.

The story of the Alamo and the founding of Texas is “not solely a racial story, but race does play a role,” de la Teja said. The men who fought for Texas independence, he said, were also fighting to keep black people enslaved.

Getting Texans to take a more nuanced view of the Alamo isn’t easy, he added. It’s one reason past attempts to redevelop the Alamo didn’t gain traction.

“Updating the Alamo to make it more significant to a broader population would be good,” de la Teja said. “There’s history beyond the 13-day battle in 1836.”

***

Standing a few feet west of the Alamo Cenotaph on the evening of Sept. 22, Burkart couldn’t stop smiling. The Texas Historical Commission had just voted to block the City of San Antonio’s request for permission to move the Cenotaph. Some observers were stunned.

“My immediate reaction was shock,” Burkhart said.

During the meeting, Treviño and U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, the only black Republican in the House of Representatives, passionately presented the city’s case. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, several state representatives, and dozens of opponents of moving the monument also weighed in.

“The architects of this plan have hidden their true motives,” one man said, “they want to erase our history.”

Wallace Jefferson, commission member and former Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, voted in favor of moving the monument. Jefferson, a black man and a Republican, said he was disappointed by the public testimony of some who “questioned people’s motives instead of focusing on an objective analysis and practical concerns.”

Archeologist and commission member Jim Bruseth voted against granting the permit to move the Cenotaph. “The emotional public response affected the vote, but commissioners considered the totality of the evidence,” Bruseth said.

The vote left Treviño disheartened.

“This failing today,” Treviño told reporters, “puts the whole project in jeopardy.”

At a San Antonio City Council meeting in November, Treviño, was more sanguine.

“We as the San Antonio City Council must continue to fight for the soul of this project,” he said. “We owe it to the generations of people who call San Antonio home to tell their stories and assure their history is preserved.”

The post The New Battle of the Alamo appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The ascent of Joe Biden and his neocon “promoters of democracy” to the White House likely means renewed attention to the idea of Color Revolutions once thought to bring liberation to nations under the heel of dictators. First in line for this latest geopolitical blessing could be Belarus, already site of protracted street protests in the wake of a hotly-challenged August election. The familiar moral imperative: get rid of a deeply-entrenched ruler (“another Hitler”) standing in the way of all that is enlightened, democratic, “Western” – in this case, also a Putin ally! If President Trump exhibited little interest in regime-change crusades, an emboldened Biden administration can be expected to seize any new opportunity with ideological zeal. And what better opportunity than a politically turbulent country on the doorstep of the tyrannical Russian empire.

Biden and his presumed Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, have already called for a more vigorous U.S. geopolitical presence in the Middle East and Europe, crucial to the goal of a revitalized neoliberal order presumably in need of more regime changes, possibly new wars that should bring the Pentagon and deep state back to less-disputed prominence in American political life. Biden recently said: “I continue to stand with the people of Belarus and support their democratic aspirations. I also condemn the appalling human rights abuses committed by the Lukashenko regime.”

Blinken, it turns out, is the ultimate neocon, with an abiding love of the Pentagon, CIA, corporate power, and Israel – matched, of course, by obligatory hatred of Russia and Putin. Blinken and Biden have been allies for nearly two decades, both Democrats havingp vigorously supported the Iraq war as well as the Libya debacle. Both are hell-bent on removing President Assad in Syria, segue to Obama’s unfinished regime-change mission there. Since 2018 Blinken has worked at WestExec Advisors, a strategic firm where the military, CIA, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley converge around shared global ambitions. Among its Beltway exploits, WestExec has serviced a good many Fortune 500 corporations, especially those doing business with the Pentagon.

In the wake of recent political dramas in Belarus – a lopsided and seemingly-fixed presidential election, massive street protests, agitated reactions from both Russia and the European Union – it seems another Color Revolution could be on the agenda, inspired by interventions in Serbia during the late 1990s and Ukraine in both 2004 and 2014 (not counting Libya in 2011). In such cases social turbulence gives rise to political breakdown and regime change.

Belarus voting in August gave Alexander Lukashenko his sixth presidency since 1994, this time with a staggering – and obviously suspicious – 80 percent of the total. That result was immediately contested by rival candidate Svetlana Tikhonovskaya, lodged from her new habitat in Vilnius, Lithuania. Street protests, already planned in late June, quickly spread and intensified. A “Freedom March” in late August attracted more than 250,000 people in the capital Minsk alone, most hoping to overthrow a leader widely referred to as “Europe’s Last Dictator”. Although no monitors had been invited to observe the election, EU leaders denounced the outcome as “illegitimate” and called for a new round of balloting, along with economic sanctions that would soon target nearly 60 Belarus elites. The opposition took off virtually overnight, fueled by hopes for a “reborn Belarus”. Described accurately in the Western media as a “sheer display of people power”, the political scene brought forth images of earlier strife in Serbia, Libya, Georgia, and Ukraine.

Could Belarus, with a population of ten million bordering Russia, eventually follow the trajectory of the “Maidan Scenario” in 2014 Ukraine, a Washington-organized coup bringing to power a motley assortment of oligarchs, neo-fascists, and rightwing nationalists? That coup, as is now well known, was engineered by a well-funded coalition of U.S. regime-changers: neocons, the CIA, a team of NGOs financed by George Soros, a group of Democrats including Biden (Obama’s “point man” in Ukraine). The established Color Revolution playbook, however, now seems less relevant to Belarus, given the enormity of the protests – meaning any Biden regime-change efforts could face less difficulty.

Worth asking at this juncture, then, is whether the political forces mobilized to oust Lukashenko signify a genuine domestic upheaval based in grassroot movements, rather independent of Western designs. In fact close scrutiny of post-election Belarus reveals the emergence of a surprisingly durable opposition to Lukashenko’s heretofore stable reign. Viewed thusly, parallels with Ukraine turn out to be actually weak. Recent (late November) demonstrations brought more than 100,000 people into the streets of Minsk alone. There have been eleven major protests since August – all large and militant though somewhat dispersed – drawing mainly from Catholics, sectors of labor, and students in consistently big numbers. On Saturdays women gather in Minsk by the tens of thousands, sometimes displaying the banner “March Against Fascism”. Masked security forces have used tear gas and stun grenades to break up the crowds; more than 15,000 have been arrested in just the past several weeks. Police repression, including frequent shutdown of Internet services, has only served to perpetuate a thriving resistance.

In whatever manner it occurs, regime change in Belarus could eventually bring additional NATO military deployments along Russian borders. A key question here turns on how Vladimir Putin might respond to stepped-up close to the Federation. The ritual view of mainstream media, in both the U.S. and Europe, is that Lukashenko’s days are indeed numbered – the only uncertainty being just when and how the villainized ruler will be toppled. We are told to believe he has little to offer Belarusians beyond continued dictatorial rule and subservience to Moscow. In reality Lukashenko, despite ample Russian material and political backing, appears so far unable to neutralize the popular tide. At the same time, deeper cultural trends favor closer Belarus ties with the West, placing the “Union State” with Moscow in greater jeopardy.

There remains another question: to what extent has foreign intervention managed to influence the continuing saga in Belarus? Put differently, are interests that so powerfully fed the coup in Kiev now equally at work in Minsk? For Belarus, mounting evidence suggests that the presence of Western interests hardly compares with that of Serbia or Ukraine, though again a Biden presidency could easily feed off something akin to a Maidan spectacle in the early months of his tenure.

While Belarus is relatively small and lacks the strategic (or resource) importance of Ukraine, that could matter little going forward. The stark reality is that regime-change in Minsk would finally bring an end to the Soviet legacy in Europe. One key to Lukashenko’s repeated electoral successes has been retention of a robust Belarus public infrastructure inherited from the Communist era. Its medical, educational, and urban programs are probably the most generous in eastern Europe, surely better than those of Russia while conflicting with harsher neoliberal agendas embraced by Washington and the EU, the “shock therapy” long resisted by Lukashenko. The Big Capital that dominates the West (and championed by billionaires like Soros) constantly seeks newer investment and market outlets, and so far Lukashenko has stood (if partially) in the way, a stubborn enemy of deregulated capitalism.

Should Belarus eventually fall to popular insurgency, one outcome would likely be dismantling of the crucial Druzhba oil pipeline connecting Russia with the rest of Europe – the world’s longest and perhaps most important. That pipeline helps cement the Belarus-Russian partnership, so its possible demise would not be taken lightly by either Putin or Lukashenko. EU leaders have scarcely disguised their hopes of disrupting a pipeline that gives Moscow such vast economic leverage across Europe.

Finally, there is the antiquated NATO alliance that derives its central rationale from targeting a weakened (though still militarily-powerful) Russia. With collapse of the Berlin Wall and then dismantlement of Yugoslavia, Color Revolutions were viewed in the West as the wave of the future. The present scenario would leave Moscow to face a Washington increasingly obsessed, for reasons not fully intelligible, with rekindling a new Cold War. Along this trajectory, presumably, Belarus would end up the receptacle of Western corporate and military interests, no different from the Balkans, Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania. Here the fate of Lukashenko would likely resemble that of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, a “dictator” (though elected) turned into a diabolical war criminal. Since August NATO armed deployments have been augmented near the lengthy Belarus borders with Poland and Lithuania.

The extent to which Maidan-style operatives have been active in Belarus during 2020 has been limited. Both Lukashenko and the Russians insist that Western agents, including many NGOs, are in fact extremely active in Minsk and a few other cities, but their scope hardly approaches that in Ukraine, where well-funded American involvement goes back to 1989. There are reports indicating that CIA regime-change assets are currently being mobilized in Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States, some possibly for action in Belarus. U.S.-funded media (Radio Free Europe, others) has indeed turned more aggressive since the election, no doubt energized by the street protests. Regime-change operatives have identified fertile targets among Catholics and students, as mentioned, along with workers at the rising tech sector (known as High Tech Park) in Minsk. Yet Washington penetration of Belarus currently falls well short of that needed for a successful coup, reflecting in part Trump’s apparent lack of interest in Color Revolutions. The Soros-backed International Renaissance Foundation has not been noticeably active in Belarus, but that too could eventually change.

Even should prospects for a “Maidan in Minsk” increase with Biden and his neocon allies in the White House and a more active deep state, that fantasy comes with enormous risks in a setting where the two most powerfully nuclear-armed states, deeply-suspicious of each other, expand the zone of escalating conflict. Putin, indeed any Russian leader, is very unlikely to tolerate another U.S./NATO Color takeover on his doorstep. Belarus remains a vital buffer state between Russia and the rest of Europe. And retaining hold of the mammoth oil pipeline is surely non-negotiable. Whether Putin would be ready to risk military conflict over Belarus obviously raises even bigger questions. As for Washington, crazed by years of Russiagate and generalized anti-Russia hysteria, one cannot rule out any future geopolitical calamity.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

It was a warm fall day on September 29, 1957, not much unlike any other in the deep Russian interior. Residents in the Chelyabinsk oblast cared for their crops of wheat and potatoes, others herded cattle. Women hung out their family’s clothes to dry as the winds picked up before the sun descended. In the distance, along the ridge in the southern sky, streams of dark colors began to appear. The town paper would speculate that the natural polar lights were responsible for the odd aura along the horizon. But there was a problem: the strange hues were not where the Northern Lights typically appeared. Those lights appeared north, not south of Chelyabinsk—plus, the Northern Lights were shades of blue and green, not gray and black. Something was off, but there was no panic in Chelyabinsk. In the Southern Urals, where Chelyabinsk was located, the local strain of late-1950s culture was not unlike that in the rural farming communities of the American Midwest: people were hard-working, church-going, family-oriented, patriotic, and tough. Their lives, however, were about to change forever.

Government workers descended on the small towns in and around Chelyabinsk, twenty of which were soon evacuated. Around ten thousand people, mostly peasants, were forced out, leaving their pets and possessions behind. Farmers were instructed to slaughter their cows, destroy fertile farmland, and kill off their crops. Their livelihoods and way of life were destroyed, and no reason was given as to why they had to take such drastic measures so quickly.

Mayak was constructed in 1946 and helped procure the Soviets’ first atomic bomb in 1949 under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. Like virtually all of Russia’s nuclear projects during the Soviet era, and just like the United States’s Manhattan Project, Mayak was built and operated in total secret and with outright disregard for local communities and ecology. As one of the Soviets’ covert “plutonium cities,” Mayak became known as Chelyabinsk-40, a sort of dehumanizing code name that would soon become synonymous with disaster.

“Starting in the late 1940s, the Russians released a great deal of radioactive waste into the waterways near Mayak, including lakes, streams, ponds, and reservoirs,” recalls Don Bradley, author of Behind the Nuclear Curtain: Radioactive Waste Management in the Former Soviet Union. “For many years, radioactive effluent at Mayak was released directly into the Techa River, a major source of water for twenty-four villages along its banks.” Every one of these villages, Bradley notes, do not exist. All residents were evacuated years ago. 

***

Today, Mayak no longer makes plutonium, but the facility is still operational and serves as a reprocessing site for spent nuclear fuel. The act of reprocessing spent fuel was banned in the United States in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. His administration believed doing away with spent fuel reprocessing was an important step in reducing nuclear weapons proliferation. Even though Mayak isn’t active as a production site, from the radioactive waste all around it, you’d think that it’s still churning out nuclear fuel.

The body of water that received the most contamination from Mayak’s nuclear fuel production was Lake Karachay. “Contamination [in Chelyabinsk] is perhaps the highest in the world, and the most acute problem in that region is at Lake Karachay,” Thomas Nilsen, a researcher at the Bellona Foundation, an environmental organization headquartered in Oslo, Norway, said in 2001, fifteen years after the accident at Chernobyl, but ten years before the Fukushima meltdown. He continued: “The Soviets started dumping waste from reprocessed plutonium into Karachay in the early 1950s, and extreme levels of radiation are still being monitored there.” 

In fact, an isolated corner of the lake was at one time so chock-full of radioactive particles that human survival after a mere thirty minutes of exposure was fifty-fifty. Over 120 million curies of radioactive waste polluted the body of water. In the 1990s, Don Bradley, along with other researchers, visited one of the least polluted areas of the lake. “We drove out [to] … the lake with a guy holding a Geiger counter and a watch,” recounted Bradley. “After ninety seconds, we came back. In that brief time, we received the equivalent dose of radiation of an airplane flight from Moscow to New York.” 

However, the danger does not just exist in the lake itself. If levels are low, the lake has the potential to dry up during the hotter summer months, leaving open the possibility that the wind could carry radioactive dust across the region. This happened in 1967 when low snowfall resulted in a drastic decline in Lake Karachay’s water levels, producing something of a nuclear summer. Wind currents blew particles from the toxic lake bed across a 1,800 square mile stretch of Chelyabinsk, contaminating upwards of a half-a-million unwitting people. To this day, little is known about what sort of impact the wind-blown particles had on the health of people or the land. In recent years, workers have placed large concrete blocks and stones on the lakebed to keep the dust at bay. There’s no easy solution, of course, and this rudimentary fix could spawn another problem. “The stones help prevent the dust, but the weight also presses the sediments down and moves them closer to the groundwater,” says Thomas Nilsen. “It’s a catch-22.” 

Over a ten year period, from 1948 and 1958, over 17,245 Mayak workers were exposed to radiation overdoses. Dumping of radioactive waste in nearby rivers was also responsible for a number of nuke-related illnesses downstream, where drinking water and agricultural production depended on irrigation.  

While residents were aware that the secret site of Mayak was a problem, they had no idea what had caused those mysterious lights in the sky on that fall afternoon in 1957. The secret was that something had gone terribly wrong at Mayak, where the site had instituted a cooling system early on that continually kept its hot nuclear waste from reaching a critical point. But the waste in a holding cistern buried twenty feet underground began to heat up fast. The system had failed, but nobody knew what was happening until it was far too late. As the radioactive slop reached 350 degrees Celsius, its 160-ton concrete lid began to tremble, and finally blew. The cistern and the eighty tons of boiling gunk inside exploded in a volcanic eruption filled with radioactive steam and soot a half-mile into the air. The black cloud darkened the sky, spreading twenty million curies of blistering atomic particles across 52,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of West Virginia, and contaminating the homes of an estimated 270,000 people. Later, the accident at Mayak became known as the Kyshtym disaster, after the name of the closest town to the blast. In the immediate aftermath, the first wave of forced evacuation, encompassing nearly 10,000 people, was initiated, but it took upwards of two years for other evacuations to be carried out in nearby towns that had also been exposed to the radioactive fallout.  

The blast measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale, which places the Kyshtym disaster behind Chernobyl and Fukushima (both Level 7s) as the third-most significant nuclear disaster ever. It is certainly the least well-known. At the time, just as the United States government kept the inner workings of their own nuclear program shrouded in secrecy, the Soviet government kept Mayak under wraps. Mayak, according to many Soviet maps, did not even exist. 

It wasn’t until 1976, when dissident scientist Zhores A. Medvedev wrote an article for the British journal The New Scientist, that the Western world was made aware of what happened.

For many years nuclear reactor waste had been buried in a deserted area a few dozen miles from the Urals town of Blagovehsnesk. The waste was not buried very deep. Nuclear scientists had often warned about the dangers involved in this primitive method of waste disposal, but nobody listened. Suddenly there was an enormous explosion. The nuclear reactions had led to overheating in the burial grounds. The explosion poured radioactive materials high into the sky. It was just the wrong weather for such a tragedy. Strong winds blew the radioactive clouds hundreds of miles away.

Tens of thousands of people were affected, hundreds dying, though the real figures have never been made public. Many villages and towns were only ordered to evacuate when the symptoms of radiation sickness were already apparent. The irradiated population was distributed over many clinics. But no one really knew how to treat the different stages of radiation sickness, how to measure the radiation dose received by the patients and their offspring. Radiation genetics and radiology could have provided the answer, but neither of them was available.

Not all believed Medvedev’s account. Sir John Hill, chairman of Britain’s Atomic Energy Authority, called the report “rubbish” and “a figment of the imagination.” However, Medvedev’s story was later confirmed by ex-Soviet physicist Leo Tumerman, who stated he had seen firsthand the devastation of Kyshtym only a couple of years after the incident. “The area was filled with radiation,” admitted Tumerman. “And you couldn’t drink the water or eat the fish.” Tumerman added that “All the people with whom I spoke, scientists as well as laymen—had no doubt that the blame lay with Soviet officials who were negligent and careless in storing nuclear wastes.”

One anonymous witness wrote of what happened immediately following the blast. “Very quickly all the leaves curled up and fell off the trees.” The observer also described a gruesome scene at a local hospital. “Some of the [victims] were bandaged and some were not. We could see the skin on their faces, hands and other exposed parts of the body to be sloughing off. These victims of the blast were brought into the hospital during the night. It was a horrible sight.”

The explosion was indeed horrific, but radiation doesn’t always have an immediate impact. It can take weeks, months, or even years to make itself known. The fallout from the Mayak explosion landed throughout the region, most of which descended on an area four miles wide and thirty miles long. Streams, lakes, and acres of farmland were blanketed with radioactive soot. In villages closest to Kyshtym, men jumped in space suit-like garments from military helicopters, instructing those tending to the fields to continue to dig out their crops. Entire families worked without proper safety gear. Not even shoes or protective masks were provided. They were told to dump what they had harvested into holes that had been dug by bulldozers. Throughout that fall, these families harvested and stacked wheat and hay into large piles, which were then set on fire. In other villages outside the immediate blast-zone, life appeared normal, until investigators began to look a bit more closely.

Another anonymous eyewitness, who surveyed the area shortly after the blast, discovered a ravaged scene. “[We] crossed a strange, uninhabited, and unframed area. Highway signs along the way warned drivers not to stop for the next twenty to thirty kilometers because of radiation. The land was empty. There were no villages, no towns, no people, no cultivated land; only chimneys of destroyed houses remained.”

In one village, a full week after the accident, monitors discovered something startling. Children there were literally steaming with radiation. S.F. Osotin, who had been a member of the team that carried out those initial findings, recalled that a colleague placed a Geiger counter up to one child’s belly and got a reading of 40-50 microroentgens per second. They couldn’t believe what they were witnessing. Cows that munched on atomically-charged grass were visibly sick, bleeding at the mouth. Soldiers shot them on sight. Chickens too were loaded up with atomic particles, but were still being eaten by locals because they had no idea what was going on. Other unwitting villages had astonishingly high levels of radiation as well. One such town, Berdianish, produced readings of 350-400 microroentgens per second—amounts that will kill you after four weeks of exposure.

***

Though kept a secret by the Soviets, the CIA discovered the Kyshtym nuclear accident a few years after the fact through a network of spies and on-the-ground informants, along with aerial photographs of the wreckage. In May, 1960, U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down by Soviet Air Defense Forces attempting to capture high altitude photographs of the devastation at the Mayak site. Powers was captured and sentenced to three years for espionage, and in 1962 was exchanged for Soviet officer Rudolf Abel.

It wasn’t until 1978, after the Critical Mass Energy Project acquired fourteen heavily-redacted documents, that the CIA admitted they had known about the Mayak disaster all along. Like the Soviets, the United States government kept what they had learned a secret and did not share what they knew with the public—not only to protect their sources, but also, critics argued, in order to avoid raising concern about the United States’s own nuclear program.

“Absent any other reason for withholding information from the public,” nuclear critic Ralph Nader said in a 1978 interview, “one possible motivation could have been the reluctance of the CIA to highlight a nuclear accident in the USSR that could cause concern among people living near nuclear facilities in the United States.”

According to one estimate by the Soviet Health Ministry in Chelyabinsk, the ultimate death toll caused by the Mayak explosion was 8,015 people over a 32-year period. The long-term impacts of the singular event are difficult to quantify, as the facility released an insurmountable amount of radiation for over three decades. 

The Mayak disaster of 1957, while covered up by both the Soviets abroad and the US government at home, should have raised serious alarms about nuclear safety and the risks associated with radioactive contamination. However, being truthful about the danger associated with producing atomic bombs and storing radioactive waste would have also meant having to confront the reality that Hanford, Mayak’s sister facility in the United States, along with other nuclear sites around the country, was putting local populations and environment in serious peril. Keeping the war machine running meant putting a positive spin on nuclear technology, from weapons to nuclear energy. In a sense, American power was based on the myth that there was little downside to nuclear proliferation, only endless potential. The mythical capabilities of atomic energy continue to permeate debates today about combating climate change and challenging our fossil fuel addiction. 

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The renowned historiographer E.H. Carr famously compared the historian with his facts to the fishmonger with fish on the slab; the historian collects the facts, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him. Naturally, the historian will add spices and other ingredients to draw out the precise flavor needed to make an average meal into a palette-pleasing feast for the senses. But, in doing so, there is the ever-present danger that the spices, the tantalizing aroma, and the aesthetically pleasing presentation are merely an attempt to mask the fact that the fish has long since turned rotten.

And when it comes to the course of US politics, there is the distinct stench of putrefaction. And, while America’s putrescent corpus decays further, the unmistakable rasp of circling vultures becomes inescapable, the smell overwhelming.

Enter: Donald Trump – the vulture made flesh. And, as the President-elect circles high above his prey, awaiting the moment that he and his Wall Street-Pentagon flock can begin their feast, it remains for the rest of us to consider just what we’ve lived through, and how the history of this low-water mark will be written.

A distinct narrative has already emerged from various corners of the media and blogosphere: Trump’s victory was due to discontent with neoliberalism and the decades of economic neglect and exploitation of the white working class. And, of course, this makes sense and is undoubtedly a significant factor. However, is it entirely true? Was Trump’s path to the Oval Office truly paved by the precarious economic existence of millions of blue collar white Americans?

But in answering that question, we’re confronted with another, even more complex question: how is economic disaffection among White America actually expressed? And do those expressing that rage have any cognizance of the root causes of their socio-political outlook?

By examining the available data, it becomes clear that while seething anger from economic hardship brought on by neoliberalism may be an aspect underlying much of the core of Trumpism, it is not the dominant factor. Rather, Trump’s win should rightly be understood as the triumph of white identity politics. And the data supports this conclusion.

***

A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst entitled Explaining White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism found that “while economic dissatisfaction was part of the story, racism and sexism were much more important and can explain about two-thirds of the education gap among whites in the 2016 presidential vote.” The analysis used data from a national survey conducted during the final week of October (just days before the election), and concluded that the negative effects of neoliberalism and the rule of Wall Street were not the single most important factor in the victory for Trump. Rather it was “whiteness” and misogyny which played a pivotal role.

It must be stated that the Democratic Party has attempted to explain away its stunning collapse in the face of perhaps the weakest Republican candidate in generations by attributing it entirely to racism and misogyny, thereby absolving itself of any blame. This is, of course, laughable. Still, the question of whiteness looms large.

Scholars at the Universities of Michigan and Texas recently published a key study entitled The Changing Norms of Racial Political Rhetoric and the End of Racial Priming which, among other things, concluded that overtly racialized political rhetoric has become normalized, that it is no longer taboo, and that the election of Barack Obama played a significant role in this process. While undoubtedly true, the researchers highlighted a far more important, and too often overlooked, engine of the Trump Train – “white oppression.”

The researchers noted that:

Whites’ perceptions of their group’s racial distinctiveness and disadvantage may be on the rise…[Studies have found] a rise in White identity over the last several election cycles, and especially since the election of the nation’s first Black president in 2008. Concerns about demographic shifts and economic stagnation may have led many Whites to increasingly think that their racial group is under external threat, and these pressures increase identification (Knowles & Peng 2005). These increases in entatativity [sic] – the perception among group members that they belong to a coherent and unified collective – boosts the acceptability of explicit expressions of prejudice and anger toward outgroups (Effron & Knowles 2015).

While it is typical liberal media swill to portray all anger and resentment at Obama and his disastrous policies as racist reaction against the first Black president, there is still that underlying social illness of white supremacy which undeniably does fuel a good deal of the anger. And that rage had its political expression in Donald Trump who deftly employed racist dog-whistles throughout his campaign. From describing Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers to calling for a ban on Muslims, Trump managed to capitalize on the increased entitativity of White America which, perhaps for the first time since George Wallace, had a political expression, an embodiment in one candidate.

None of this is to say that Hillary Clinton didn’t have plenty of white people supporting her, nor that Trump didn’t have support from non-white communities. But, taken in toto, it was the angry white vote which sealed the presidency for Trump.

As the researchers from Michigan and Texas (Valentino, Neuner, and Vandenbroek) implied, it was the perception of a coherent and unified collective which truly unified the white working class around Trump. It was less his pandering to working class issues than his ability to both overtly and covertly employ racist overtones.

Another study, this one conducted by researchers from UC Santa Barbara and Stanford University (Major, Blodorn, Blascovich), found that personal identification with whiteness was directly related to the perception of oppression and future destruction of white people. Those respondents who were told that nonwhite groups will outnumber white people in the next three decades were more likely to support Trump.

Again, this conclusion illustrates the fact that a significant proportion of Trump’s support came from a fear of a loss of identity, a loss of dominance which translates into a loss of culture, morality, and greatness. Hence the need to recapture that 1950s feeling of white privilege or, put in the parlance of political sloganeering, the need to make America great again.

But let us not dismiss out of hand the claim that Trump’s victory was primarily due to his support from the working class, and that his candidacy fundamentally altered the political identification of class. A useful method for interrogating this question is to examine the relative wealth and financial security of the Trumpistas.

According to an analysis conducted by the Urban Institute:

Among the 55 counties with residents with the highest average credit scores (720 and above), Hillary Clinton won just four of them: Falls Church, Virginia (with an average credit score of 729); San Juan County, Washington (722); Cook County, Minnesota (721); and Washington County, Minnesota (720). High credit scores are associated with long, successful credit histories and bills paid on time and are implicit markers of financial security and stability over a lifetime. High credit scores are also more often held by white consumers.

So, if Trump represented an upsurge in poor and working class political power, that was news to the tens of millions of affluent, employed, financially stable white people who voted for him. In fact, according to the data, the more financially secure the county, and the higher its average credit score and median income, the more likely it was to vote for Trump. Naturally, this is in large part due to racial inequalities that persist in the US as Blacks and Hispanics tend to have lower credit scores, less access to credit, lower median incomes, etc.

If anything, the question of class-based support has not been answered. Both Trump and Clinton captured rich people and poor people in their base. The difference is the overwhelming white support for Trump.

And this is borne out by what might be the most comprehensive demographic study on the Trumpen Proletariat yet. Gallup’s Jonathan Rothwell conducted an in-depth analysis which revealed something profound: Trump’s supporters are richer, not poorer, than average. Moreover, he concluded that the overriding factor determining support for Trump was not economics (NAFTA, Chinese competition, etc.) but rather segregation. Specifically, Rothwell found that the core of Trump’s support came from people living in communities mostly or entirely unaffected by immigration.

Consider that for a moment. White people living in all white communities thinking that they are under assault from immigrants, Muslims and other minorities. It is, once again, that entitativity: the feeling that white people form a cohesive and singular group that is increasingly oppressed. It is not immigrants taking their jobs, it’s the idea of immigrants taking their jobs. It’s not Muslims moving in next door, it’s the possibility that it might happen.

It’s not so much that, like the angry citizens of South Park proclaimed: “Dey took er jerbs!!!” Rather it’s that they’re over there down the road, and soon they’ll be here. This form of racism and white supremacy is manifested in the mind of the white racist as a lamentation for the despoiling of a once great white hope. America is under attack because whiteness is under attack. And who better to blame than the non-white?

Trump, Brexit, and the Politics of ‘White Genocide’

Perhaps one of the most effective levers for mobilizing the white racist vote is the meme that has been popularized by fascists – be they of the hooded klansman or the Alt-Right variety – of ‘white genocide’. This idea is multiform as it can take any number of iterations. For some white supremacists, ‘white genocide’ is a conspiracy theory that refers to the literal extermination of whites through immigration, miscegenation, abortion, and other means. However, it can also be used in a broader and more loosely defined sense as simply the process by which non-whites integrate into, and alter the character of, white European and Anglo-American society.

Recently, the well-known leftist academic George Ciccariello-Maher became the victim of an online smear campaign waged by white nationalists and their supremacist allies after he tweeted a satirical comment which read “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.” The tweet, which was intended as a humorous jab at the lunacy of the very notion of white genocide, instead created a media firestorm after hundreds of social media users issued threats against Ciccariello-Maher, his family, and his employer Drexel University.

While it may seem a minor social media hullabaloo, the incident actually cuts to the very core of Trumpism: white identity. For it is only in opposition to the corrupting forces of multiculturalism and diversity that the white identity is constructed. There is relatively little that unites the Irish-Catholic in New York City with the rural Baptist in the South or the Methodist in the Midwest, except for their whiteness, the feeling that they are on the same side in a struggle for survival. Put another way, it is only through the shared delusion of white oppression that something akin to white entitativity –White America as a distinct group – is even possible.

Of course, this phenomenon is not relegated solely to the US. In Britain, 2016 saw the Brexit referendum which many interpreted not as a vote on membership in the European Union, but rather as a referendum on immigration. Indeed, according to The Migration Observatory at Oxford University, at least 77 percent of Britons believe immigration levels should be reduced, with roughly 45 percent of respondents ranking immigration/race relations at the top of the list of important issues – this was up from near zero percent 20 years ago.

In Britain, just as in the US, it is whiteness that is under assault, and it’s the sense of loss of dominance and control that is driving so much of the white anger. And in Britain, just as in the US, that sense of loss of power is manifested in the slogans attached the movement. Where for Trump it was “Make America Great Again” for Nigel Farage and the Brexit supporters it was “Take Back Control.”

With both slogans there is the obvious reactionary quality, the sense that the past was glorious and that if only it could be recaptured things would go back to the way they were. And while both slogans are ostensibly positive, the subtext is clearly one of racism and jingoism. For white Britons, “control” was embodied by the British Empire with its dominion over so much of the world. To “take back control” is to recapture the lost glory, to rekindle the flame. Similarly in the US, making America great again is not a far cry from saying “Make America White Again” as Trumpistas reminisce about the good old days when men were men and ‘Coloreds’ entered through the rear.

Once again these interrelated campaigns are rooted in white identity masked as patriotism. For Trumpistas, America is, by its very definition, white, and any attempts to make it anything else are seen as an existential threat. For Brexiters, national identity, as distinct from that of continental Europe and the EU, was the crux of the issue. But when one probes what exactly that national identity is, it becomes clear that the rocky island off the northwestern coast of Europe has its island status rooted in its self-conception: Britain, the island standing against the human tide.

As Dr. Tim Haughton, Head of the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham incisively noted, “‘Take back control’ effectively combined not just a sense of a positive future albeit never defined or elaborated, but also suggested a sense of rightful ownership.”

Precisely. It is the sense of ownership that is really at issue on both sides of the Atlantic. For Trump and Brexit supporters, it is the white Anglo-European who ‘owns’ the country, and all the brown and black skinned people are mere infiltrators whose very presence taints and despoils the pristine nation.

This very same phenomenon is replaying itself over and over all across Europe. Perhaps the most ominous such development is the steady rise of Marine Le Pen and the National Front in France. According to many political experts, including French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, Le Pen will likely go to a runoff in the May 2017 presidential election where she could prove to be the culmination of the same process that brought us Brexit and Trump. And with Le Pen, whose fascist pedigree is well known both inside and outside France, the notion of white identity as the basis for a political movement will become a hard, inescapable reality.

Similarly, in Russia the fascist philosopher-cum-political operator Alexander Dugin has become a mainstream figure as he promotes his brand of fascism in Russia and throughout Europe and the US. Using powerful state-sponsored media platforms such as RT and Sputnik, Dugin has propagated his so-called “Eurasianist” vision throughout the West. In Dugin’s worldview, it is liberalism and multiculturalism that have corrupted contemporary life with their slavish devotion to modernity and secular liberal values, and only a reconstituted Russian Empire that would fuse together much of Northern Eurasia (with China noticeably absent) into one “civilizational” unit can provide a viable future.

A fundamental feature of Dugin’s Eurasianist vision is the fact that it is racially segregated. According to Duginists, there is a natural order to the world wherein Blacks stay in Africa, Arabs in the Middle East and so on in what amounts to a form of global apartheid. Duginism appropriates left wing economic and political ideas such as anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism within a fascist socio-cultural framework. And, at the core of that ideology is white supremacy and white identity.

Trump, Farage, Le Pen, and Dugin all appeal to a sense of loss of identity. In fact, it’s undeniably their most effective position. But it must be clarified, and shouted from the mountaintops, that it is not simply a loss of national identity as many movement supporters, and political analysts alike, would have you believe. Rather, it is the loss of a white national identity that is at the root.

And so Trump, like his British and European analogues, has ridden a wave of momentum of white identity politics masquerading as pro-working class, pro-social safety net, anti-free trade, etc. But these are mere political chimeras, designed more for their reality TV appeal than ideological substance. In effect, Trump’s appeal was to the white working class on racial lines; his purported position on the social safety net programs mere political posturing whose subtext was really that it’s not going to be lazy blacks and “illegals” who will get their government benefits, it will be hard working whites.

It is almost painful, and certainly embarrassing, to have to explain that this has become the political reality in 2016, but it has. The rising tide of fascism under its many guises is unifying behind the concept of white supremacy or, as Alt-Right svengali Richard Spencer has called it, “racialism.” And, in the US, Donald Trump has managed to transform white identity into a political framework in a way that very few had thought possible.

So we must return to the question of the historian as fishmonger and chef. Yes, it’s true that the ingredients have been collected, the water brought to a boil, the apron and hat impeccably clean. And yet, there is that stench, that overwhelming, vomit-inducing putrid odor. So, what to do? Mask it with fancy spices, a good white wine, and some pungent herbs? Certainly it seems that’s what the lazy and inept chef might do.

Are our analysts and historians equally lazy? Will they mask the stench of racism, xenophobia and white supremacy behind wave after wave of sweet-smelling, but ultimately inauthentic, narratives of anti-neoliberal reaction and working class resurgence? Or will they instead write the real history of this moment, in all its complexity?

If it is to be the latter, then we must demand that the history of this moment be the documentation of a radical rightward shift in US politics. Not because a right-wing Republican is in office, but because the far right has captured political, social, and cultural legitimacy. And white identity politics has been their vehicle.

Naturally, the Mussolini of Midtown will come and go with the structures of oppression and power intact, and indeed expanded in both scope and scale. But the movement that has congealed around him will live on long after he’s ridden into the gold-encrusted sunset of his dreams. So too will the now fully formed socio-political concept of white identity.

This new chapter of struggle is much bigger than Trump, though he is undoubtedly the largest and orangest head on the hydra. This is now one of the defining political struggles of our lifetime.

And as our fishmonger-historian sits down to write the history of this period, what will he say? Will he record the story of the History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire with The Donald as our Nero, tweeting while it all burns? Or will this be a story of redemption as millions of people from around the world came together to defend the oppressed, the marginalized, the exploited, and smash incipient fascism?

I suppose it will be up to us, the actors in this tragicomedy, to determine that.

The post Donald Trump and the Triumph of White Identity Politics appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Hardly covered in English-language media, Morocco’s image abroad is usually set by vapidly laudatory puff pieces and its photogenic tourist sites. The social reality of its inhabitants tells another story. With a Human Development Index score near the bottom of the Arab world, an illiteracy rate above 26%, and approximately 80% of its workforce toiling informally, the North African kingdom provides distinctly un-Instagram-able conditions of life for its disenfranchised majority. Politically, the Moroccan state likes to present itself as a dependably tolerant and reformist regime. In reality, it is currently waging a fiercely illiberal campaign against journalists who expose the economic corruption and malfeasance of the royal palace and its crony elite. This campaign has pioneered a new muzzling strategy which avoids direct political trials of opponents, in favor of tabloid smearing and spurious accusations of impropriety. This repression is being meted out in a frantic attempt to marginalize any remaining credible critical voices, as reigning king Mohammad VI careens towards an impasse not unlike those which led to uprisings in other Arab countries last year.

Caught at the height of this final assault on freedom of expression is Maati Monjib, a pro-democracy activist and among Morocco’s most preeminent modern historians. He has long been in regime cross-hairs due to his critical scholarship, principled political interventions, and intransigent intellectual independence.

A stalwart veteran of the Moroccan left and one of its only spokespeople with a profile abroad, Monjib has had to spend much time under the scrutiny of Morocco’s politicized courts. An international appeal saved Monjib’s life in 2015 by ending his 24-day hunger strike protesting the imposition of a travel ban meant to prevent him from speaking about Morocco to international audiences. Scurrilous judicial harassment has since never ceased, and in October of this year Monjib was charged with “money laundering” on unconvincing grounds. In a country whose metropolitan skylines consist of tacky high-rises universally known to launder the ill-begotten fortunes of the elite, the idea that the personal property of a modest academic such as Monjib is worthy of the attention of the king’s prosecutor is risible. Previously brandishing directly political prosecutions, this change of tack is indicative of the Moroccan state’s current strategy. Reached at home in the capital Rabat, Monjib says, “In the past, an independent or dissident journalist was granted the ‘honor’ of a political accusation: violating entities deemed religiously sacred or threatening the integrity of the state, etc. Today, their reputation is tarnished first, subsequently leading to imprisonment.”

Following the announcement of this prosecution, which had already been leaked to state-aligned media, state security services have begun to harass his family members, including setting up round-the-clock police watches on their homes. “My family is being pushed into settling political scores that they have nothing to do with,” says Monjib, who undertook a three-day hunger strike beginning October 12 to protest his family’s harassment. “I do not like having to use my health as a means to defend myself and my family,” he explains, “I am diabetic and suffer from heart disease and muscle wasting, and all this puts my life in danger when I go on hunger strike. But they have not stopped harassing me and my family since 2015, when I was accused of ‘harming the internal integrity of the state’ due to training journalists.”

In the meantime, Monjib finds it increasingly difficult to puncture the slime of regime-affiliated media to respond to the barrage of defamation. With almost no independent outlets left to publish in, Monjib describes another aspect of the regime’s pressure on critical voices: “Ten years ago, the technique shifted from the closure of press institutions to the individual targeting of every journalist. For example, as an independent opinion writer, I do not have a newspaper that will be closed, but my writings will attract painful defamation by the security services and the judiciary.”

If the monarchy succeeds in depriving Monjib’s voice of a public outlet he will be joining a cohort of distinguished journalists and pro-democracy activists who have either been put behind bars or pushed into exile in the last few years. All have been dragged through the mud of the state-aligned tabloid press and subsequently arraigned on supposedly non-political, moralistic grounds. In Monjib’s case the charges are financial, but, as he puts it, amidst a profoundly conservative, patriarchal society, “moral accusations have become the method because they muddy the waters of public opinion, especially in a society, of course, not without sexual and discriminatory attacks against women.” While it goes without saying that all accusations of sexual violence deserve impartial and transparent review and justice if guilt is proven, there is compelling evidence that the accusations detailed below are part of a concerted, cynical MeToo-washing strategy with a thinly-disguised trail leading to political authorities.

Given the vacuum of independent media in the country, different Moroccan state agencies have cultivated a symbiosis with a craven and philistine media ecology funded by the Casablanca-based economic rentier class. Presided over by the social media-based ChoufTV, the most-watched media outlet in North Africa, owned by regime insider Driss Chahtane (himself imprisoned, and later personally pardoned by the king, for having violated the taboo of reporting on the king’s poor health), these outlets are a crucial link in the state’s smear campaigns. Their cynical click-bait, which promises salacious between-the-sheets gossip about journalists and activists it portrays as debauched dilettantes, picks up scoops from state insiders, and uses them to set the stage and justification for the victims’ arrest and detention.

In 2015, the same year as Maati Monjib’s successful hunger strike forced the authorities to lift extra-legal prohibition of his travel, Hicham Mansouri was among the first Moroccan journalists to face this sex-scandal machine. A colleague and friend of Monjib’s, Mansouri had already been viciously beaten up while under police surveillance for his investigative reporting on internet surveillance. His research ran further afoul of the authorities after he detected malware associated with state intelligence used to spy on journalists. Within days the security services found their opportunity – Mansouri’s home was raided by the police minutes after a female friend came to visit. The police attempted to force him and his friend to remove their clothes and arrange themselves in compromising photos. At the widely-denounced trial, these photos were used to convict Mansouri of adultery, a crime in Morocco, along with a ridiculous charge of having ‘managed a brothel’, for which he served 10 months in jail. He is now in exile in France.

Following the modest success of this defamation model, the coming years saw its full deployment marshaled to repress a major challenge to the regime – the pro-democracy Hirak uprising, which raised radical social and political demands in Morocco’s northern Rif region in 2016 and 2017. In addition to dealing out harsh sentences to the activists, the state has targeted journalists whose coverage of the movement was at all sympathetic. One outlet whose independent coverage of the events marked it and its writers out as targets was the daily newspaper Akhbar Alyoum.

In February 2018, the newspaper’s offices were raided and its publisher, Taoufik Bouchrine, who was at the time preparing an exposé on the bugging of the newspaper’s offices, was arrested and charged with a volley of crimes, mostly sexual in nature. The evidence for Bouchrine’s alleged offenses was predictably dubious, with many of his supposed victims retracting their “confessions”, fleeing the country, and refusing to appear in court. Afaf Bernani, a journalist and one of the women whom police tried to force to testify against Bouchrine by abducting and threatening her, was herself jailed for six months for renouncing her forced testimony. She is now in exile in Tunisia. The profoundly compromised trial found Bouchrine guilty and sentenced him to 12 years in prison, a sentence that was gratuitously later lengthened to 15 years on appeal. In an absurd flourish, among other indictments during Bouchrine’s trial, the newspaper was sued by the Ministry of Interior for publishing false weather forecasts.

Next came one of Akhbar Alyoum’s prominent reporters who had covered the Hirak, Hajar Raissouni. A talented young journalist covering corruption and provision of social services, in August 2019 she was abducted by the police off the streets of Rabat, interrogated, forced to undergo a non-consensual gynecological exam, and subsequently charged with having had sex outside of marriage and an abortion, both of which are illegal in Morocco. A farcical trial led to a sentence of one year’s imprisonment amid a public atmosphere of jeering misogynistic aspersion. Nevertheless, her case occasioned widespread criticism of the kingdom’s arcane sexual statutes (under which thousands of people are prosecuted annually), even leading to thousands of Moroccan women signing a public petition declaring they too had broken the laws Raissouni stood accused of violating. Such embarrassment led to a royal pardon after some weeks in jail, and Raissouni now lives in exile in Sudan.

Unfortunately her uncle, journalist Suleiman Raissouni, also affiliated with Akhbar Alyoum, has also attracted the ire of the regime through his criticism of its secret police. Monjib explains, “Even critical journalists often avoid criticizing the security services, except for a few, and among those few is Suleiman Raissouni, editor-in-chief of Akhbar Alyoum, who had criticized the security services handling of the Corona crisis and was recently arrested on a sexual charge”. Arrested in May this year, Raissouni faces up to ten years in prison based on a semi-anonymous online accusation of rape.

But the most widely covered ongoing trial in Morocco is that of award-winning journalist Omar Radi. He writes primarily for Le Desk, one of the only other independent outlets left standing in the country. A trenchant supporter of the Hirak movement, maintaining an international profile conveying Moroccan politics to an international audience and researching the hugely corrupt process of privatization of vast tracts of public land in the country, Radi has been stalked by the security services for years. In December 2019, he was arrested and charged with insulting a judge, who had handed down heavy judgements on Hirak protestors, in a tweet earlier in the year. He was sentences to four months bail for the “offense”. Meanwhile, Amnesty International published evidence that his and Monjib’s phones had been put under coordinated surveillance, via the Israeli company NSO Group’s spyware. Upon his release, Radi was constantly summoned for further police interrogation, as well as being regularly stalked and slandered by ChoufTV and other regime-aligned media. According to Human Rights Watch, between June 7 and September 15 of this year, at least 136 articles appeared in state-affiliated media smearing Radi and his family.

On July 29 Radi was taken into ‘pre-trial detention’, pending charges of espionage and rape. The former seem, preposterously, to hinge on his journalistic contacts with members of the Dutch diplomatic mission to Morocco, the latter is based on an accusation a former coworker at Le Desk made again him in July, regarding an encounter he maintains was consensual. The ensuing “Affaire Omar Radi” has stirred up predictable public controversy, with international human rights organizations like Amnesty and HRW calling the case a familiar farce, and domestic media coverage remaining relentlessly condemnatory of Radi. As much as a fair trial is deserved by both parties, there’s no chance of it in Rabat’s courts.

Inheritor of both a centuries-old feudal absolutism and the apparatus of French colonialism, and with the assistance of its American and European patrons, the Moroccan state maintains the greatest continuity of undemocratic rule in North Africa. While this authoritarian consistency is often touted as “stability” abroad, its decrepit structure is showing its age at home. Behind the scenes, the state behavior dismantling free expression is symptomatic of a political balance of forces relying more and more on its intelligence and police services to patrol a population amongst whom it is losing hegemonic consent.

While king Mohammad VI, frequently ruling in absentia from his European properties, enjoyed something of a sunny popularity in the early years of his reign, he is increasingly regarded by much of the public with indifference. Although the royal palace unquestionably is still politically sovereign, it has come to rely heavily on the person of Abdellatif Hammouchi, unusually and unprecedentedly the director or both the regular, national police forces and the state intelligence services. Predictably a draconian and steely character, the forces under his command implicated in torture, Hammouchi has amassed considerable influence, bending the state in the direction of a hyper-securitized posture vis-a-vis civil society. Due to his considerable sway over the media, criticism of Hammouchi has become a “red line” that should not be crossed, as “the security services protect an elite that has become rich from the rentier economy and from rampant corruption,” according to Monjib. The motif of “red lines”, which put anyone who crosses them at risk of prosecution, is a constant in Morocco. Traditionally consisting of outright criticism of the monarchy, Islam, or of Morocco’s colonization of the Western Sahara, they are constantly updated to include any person or topic deemed offensive to the authorities.

On a personal note, I myself recently experienced an abbreviated form of these securitized red lines. During a discussion following a student presentation on the Moroccan annexation of the Western Sahara (a non-self-governing territory to Morocco’s south which it holds and claims, in contravention of international law), I ventured to correct a few historical errors mentioned by a student in the flush of feverish nationalism. I thought nothing of it, until my employer notified me that they had received a threatening communication from the Wilaya, quite high in the unaccountable bureaucracy, that I had been reported to the police, presumably by a student or their family, for “questioning the territorial integrity of the kingdom”. Lucky to have only received a threat, I would not have to be issued one twice.

Committing its most talented and courageous activists to jail or exile, restricting those it sees as its subjects to more intense information control than ever before, how long can the Moroccan monarchy tread historical water? Events in Thailand, pitting a similarly bloated, brittle religious monarchy against an impatient younger generation, suggest not forever. “There is great class tension around economic and social policy, and the domination of public opinion by the unelected ruling authorities,” warns Monjib. Does he see any democratic alternatives on the horizon? Hardly: “The dangerous thing is that the killing of politics, parties, civil society and the independent press puts the angry masses face to face with the actual rulers: the palace and its institutional allies among the powerful unelected elite. There is an upcoming explosion that threatens stability and it’s the people who will pay the bill. The powerful and wealthy minority have put their money abroad.”

The post The Moroccan Monarchy’s War on Journalism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.