Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“In the beginning was the word,” John 1:1 commences like Genesis, connecting the God of Israel to the word. And the deliverance of the word is confirmed by the Ten Commandments being physically handed to Moses and the Israelites, legend has it, on Mount Sinai. It was a defining moment in Jewish reverence for words and the law. But much has changed since those Biblical times.

The United Nations General Assembly (GA) asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to give a non-binding advisory opinion on Israel’s obligations to facilitate aid into Palestinian territory. Starting April 28, for one week, diplomats and lawyers from 40 countries and three multilateral organizations argued in the Hague to try to force Israel to allow aid to enter. Once again Israel chose to ignore the ICJ, considered the World Court. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called it “another shameful proceeding” meant to delegitimize Israel.

How to understand Israel’s continuing defiance of international law, including its blockade of aid to Palestinians? Since March 2, 2025, Israel has cut off all supplies to the 2.3 million people still trapped in the Gaza Strip. Stockpiles of food have virtually run out. “It’s about the survival of millions of Palestinians,” Alain Pellet, an advocate for Palestine and an eminent French professor and international lawyer, pleaded before the Court.

The hearings were technical, legal arguments about Israel’s obligations as the occupying power in Gaza and the West Bank and as a member of the United Nations. The precise title of the hearings was “Obligations of Israel in relation to the Presence and Activities of the United Nations, Other International Organizations and Third States in and relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The GA demand for an advisory opinion resulted from the October 2024 Israeli parliament’s vote that prohibits the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from operating in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

U.N. legal counsel Elinor Hammarskjöld said Israel has clear obligations as an occupying force to facilitate aid under international humanitarian law. “These obligations,” she said, “entail allowing all relevant U.N. entities to carry out activities for the benefit of the local population.”

Other experts agreed. “Israel must facilitate full, rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian provision to the population of Gaza, including food, water and electricity, and must ensure access to medical care in accordance with international humanitarian law,” Sally Langrish, legal director and advisor at the UK’s foreign office, argued, specifically citing articles 59 and 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that outlines the obligations of an occupying power. “The occupying power must facilitate relief schemes by all means at its disposal,” she added. “This obligation is unconditional.”

Already in July 2024, the ICJ had ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories including the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem was illegal under international law. In an advisory opinion, the Court ordered Israel to end its occupying presence as well as to make reparations for damages done. “This illegality relates to the entirety of the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967,” the court said in a statement.

Not having followed the 2024 ICJ opinion about its occupation, how does Israel now justify not allowing aid into the occupied territories? Israel maintains that UNRWA should not be allowed to function. In January 2024, Israel accused 12 UNRWA workers of involvement in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks. However, a UN investigation of the accusations, published in April 2024, found no evidence of wrongdoing. The report noted that Israel had not responded to requests for names and information or given evidence of any previous concerns about UNRWA. UNRWA has denied these accusations, saying there is “absolutely no ground for a blanket description of ‘the institution as a whole’ being ‘totally infiltrated.’”

My former colleague and former Secretary-General of the Institute of International Law, Marcelo Kohen, representing Jordan, pleaded before the Court that, “Israel’s primary obligation is to respect the Palestinian’s people’s right to self-determination.” That is, Israel should not “hinder the realization of this right, to adopt all necessary and measures to protect the Palestinian civilian population.”  According to Kohen, Israel, cannot obstruct the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, a right confirmed by GA Resolution 78/192 of December 2023.

On the other side, the U.S. argued that “There are serious concerns about UNRWA’s impartiality, including information that Hamas has used UNRWA facilities and that UNRWA staff participated in the 7 October terrorist attack against Israel,” according to Josh Simmons, of the U.S. State Department legal team. “Given these concerns, it is clear that Israel has no obligation to permit UNRWA specifically to provide humanitarian assistance. UNRWA is not the only option for providing humanitarian assistance in Gaza,” he added. Israel boycotted the hearings but submitted written objections. (The U.S. and Hungary were the only countries that supported Israel’s position before the Court.)

What are the constraints on an occupying power? According to a U.S. State Department legal adviser; “An occupational power retains a margin of appreciation concerning which relief schemes to permit. Even if an organisation offering relief is an impartial humanitarian organisation, and even if it is a major actor, occupation law does not compel an occupational power to allow and facilitate that specific actor’s relief operations.”

But Marcelo Kohen and the renown international jurist and legal scholar Georges Abi-Saab refuted this argument in a commentary in EJIL TALK!: “When occupation ceases to be a provisional factual situation and turns into an open-ended political project, the rules of military occupation no longer apply… The protection afforded to the civilian population, the territory, and its resources is then governed – more comprehensively – by other bodies of international law, notably international human rights law, the right to self-determination, and the right to humanitarian assistance, none of which permit derogation in the name of military necessity or the security interests of the occupying power.”

In addition to the legal questions about Israel’s blocking aid and its obligations as an occupying power, there are larger legal and moral questions about Israel’s actions since October 7, 2023. Already in January 2024, The ICJ found it “plausible” that Israel had committed acts that violate the Genocide Convention. The Court’s president, Joan Donoghue, delivered a provisional order that Israel must ensure, “with immediate effect,” that its forces not commit any of the acts prohibited by the Convention. (Just recently, on May 4, 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel, once again, is “on the eve of a forceful entry to Gaza.”)

Furthermore, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against the Israeli Prime Minister on November 21, 2024, for being “Allegedly responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024.”

As far as the United States’ continuing complicity with Israel is concerned, during an early April 2025 drop by to the White House, Netanyahu said; “This was a very productive visit, a very warm visit…” “[W]arm visit” to Washington by someone “Allegedly responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”?

(As a reminder about Trump and respect for the law: He swore on January 20, 2025, “I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” When asked in a recent television interview whether, as president, he needed to “uphold the Constitution of the United States,” Trump replied, “I don’t know.”)

Israel, a self-proclaimed Jewish state, should be an example of respect for the rule of law. Its defiance of the ICJ and ICC, and continuing alliance with the United States’ non-respect for the rule of law is contrary to all the country claims to be as well as contrary to the very foundations of its religious and cultural heritage.

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Toshiro Mifune in The Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa dir, Toho Films, 1954. Photo the author.

Preface: The big screen

When I was young, movies were big. The Continental Theatre on Austin Street in Forest Hills, Queens, which opened in 1963, was a relatively small movie house, with 300 seats and a screen about 25 feet wide. The Cinemart on Metropolitan Avenue had five times as many seats, and a screen nearly the size of a tennis court. When I saw Saturday Night Fever there in 1977, I flinched with each syncopated strep by John Travolta during the iconic, “Stayin’ Alive” title sequence.

Since moving to Norwich, Harriet and I have made almost weekly pilgrimages to Cinema City, the local art house. As well as new releases, they show classics I’ve seen many times before, mostly on TV or a laptop. Though no theatre seat is as comfortable as your own bed, seeing people, places, and situations larger than life is uniquely pleasurable. Last week, we saw The Seven Samurai (1954), directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film thrilled me when I first saw it in the ‘70s and did again last week in Norwich. It offers lessons in the struggle against Trump and his team of bandits.

Lesson one: “Find hungry samurai.”

In the movie, set in Japan in 1586, poor villagers learn by accident that bandits plan to steal their crop of barley as soon as it’s harvested. Knowing nothing of fighting, they decide to hire some Samurai to protect them. But how will they pay the warriors? Their answer: “Hire hungry Samurai,” and support them with warm beds and rice meals.

The villagers’ first recruit is Kambei, an elder rōnin (displaced or masterless samurai) whose wisdom inspires allegiance. He in turn identifies six other samurai, each of whom has a different, equally admirable trait. The master swordsman Kyūzō, for example, is quiet to the point of taciturnity. He stands at the perimeter of any gathering and his voice is rarely heard. But his acts of skill and daring speak for themselves. The youngest and least experienced samurai, the handsome Katsushirō, models himself after Kyūzō, however his poise is perturbed by his love for Shino, a shy and pretty villager, disguised as a boy for protection.

The seventh samurai, Kikuchiyo, played by the charismatic Toshiro Mifune, is not a samurai at all but a homeless wannabe. His clowning amuses the villagers, but when the battle begins, his fearlessness, inspires them. (Aside: I was so pretentious a teenager that when anybody asked me who was my favorite movie actor, I’d reply “Toshiro Mifune.”) Kikuchiyo is a shifter, a liaison between peasant farmers (that’s his origin) and higher status fighters. After the burial of the first samurai killed by the bandits, Kikuchiyo plants on the tomb a flag painted by fellow fighter, Gorobai. It represents the samurai as circles and Kikuchiyo as a triangle. Below them is the syllable ta in the Hiragana writing system, which represents “rice field” and thus by metonymy, vulnerable peasants. The flag is a symbol of class solidarity between the peasants, the orphaned and placeless Kikuchiyo, and the masterless samurai – all oppose the feudal order that failed to feed or protect them.

Whether in Sengoku era Japan or the contemporary U.S., resistance is born of necessity. Faced with invasion, natural disaster, or economic calamity, people find a way to fight back. But resistance can enable tyranny as much as democracy. Millions of American workers, furious at austerity for the many and largesse for the few, twice rejected capitalist democracy and installed a fascist narcissist as president. They stood mostly silent as he appointed to his cabinet a dirty dozen billionaire bandits including DOGE head, Elon Musk; Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessant; Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick; and Education Secretary, Linda McMahon.

If there is to be a broad-based, democratic resistance, Kurosawa’s film suggests, the “hungry Samurai” who lead it must mobilize desire as well as necessity. The seven samurai offered villagers a future of pride, camaraderie, self-reliance and abundance. In the current U.S., Democratic party and civil society leaders must themselves act like “hungry samurai” providing inspiring images of a future in which education and healthcare are treated as natural rights, work and leisure become rewarding and fulfilling for all, old age is secure, and the natural environment cherished and protected. AOC, Bernie and UAW leader Shawn Fain may be hungry samurai. We need four more and better ones. When the seven call an assembly, we (the poor farmers) need to stand beside them, accept their guidance, and pull together to protect our village from the bandits.

Lesson two: “If you only think of yourself, you’ll only destroy yourself.”

The Seven Samurai instruct that greed and self-interest are useless in a fight, while altruism and collaboration are essential. At the start of the movie, the farmers squabble and turn on each other. As the narrative progresses, they gain skills needed to build fortifications, undertake patrols and sentry duty, and use sharpened bamboo poles for self-defense and even attack. By the end, they are a formidable fighting force able to quickly dismount, trap, and kill any bandits who manage to gallop into the village.

Some of the last scenes in the film show villagers planting rice. They are seen in medium shots as well as close-ups, revealing both the collective nature of the activity, and the villagers’ individual satisfaction. The sequence recalls Soviet films, such as Sergei Eisenstein’s The General Line (1929) and Aleksander Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) about collective agriculture, but without the Russians’ tendentiousness. Though not usually described as politically radical, The Seven Samurai is indebted to the Marxism Kurosawa learned at the pre-war Proletarian Artists’ League, where the future director enrolled in 1928. Later in life, he wrote:

“There was a fever among young people. They did not know how to use their energies. I would say that almost all the intellectual urban youth in that period were at one time or another Marxists. They were not satisfied with the government and its policies. I was one of them. In reflection, we were also enjoying the thrill of being Marxists.”

The Japanese “Marx boys” [Marukusu bōi] had no shortage of books and magazines to consult, from Kawakami Hajime’s popular Introduction to Marx’s Capital (Shihonron nyūmon, 1919), to the proletarian literature magazines Literary Front (Bungei Sensen) and Battleflag (Senki) which by 1930 had combined circulations of over 50,000. Almost until the invasion of China in 1937, Japan had among the most robust and sophisticated Marxist traditions in the world.

Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai arises from the long history of Japanese Marxist debates over what’s called “the national question”; that is, whether the Meiji Restoration (1868) represented a bourgeois-capitalist transformation of the country that prepared it for socialist revolution; or if the nation, well into the 20^th century, remained economically and politically backward, still semi-feudal. If that was the case, a slower, more deliberate revolutionary strategy was called for. Kurosawa’s film, produced two decades after the political repression of the dictatorial Shōwa era, suggests the former — that even as far back as the 16^th century, peasant consciousness was moving in the direction of collectivism and solidarity.

The Samurai motto, embraced by the villagers, “if you only think of yourself, you’ll only destroy yourself,” recalls Marx’s “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need” from the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). Both propose that selfishness is destructive of the individual and collective, while selflessness assures prosperity for both.

Artist unknown, Enroll in the proletarian Art Academy., 1930. Photographer unknown.

Kurosawa’s politics in Samurai was discreet. The Red purges undertaken by Douglas McArthur and the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers in the immediate post-war years prevented anything else. Commercial viability also mandated understatement. Even the title of the film plays down politics. It reminds us of traditional Japanese Buddhist tales of the seven gods of good fortune, illustrated by Katsushika Hokusai in the early 19^th century.

Katsushika Hokusai, The Seven Gods of Good Fortune, c. 1808-27, Metropolitan Museum (Public domain).

But the film’s lesson about working class solidarity nevertheless brushed against the grain of the emerging era of rapid economic development and self-enrichment. Its message to Americans today is obvious: That in the face of fascist onslaughts against legal and educational institutions, immigrants, women, students and the environment, no one can afford to think only about themselves or their institution – that way lies destruction. “In a battle,” the six samurai tell the seventh, Kikuchiyo, “you never fight individual actions.”

Lessons three: “A samurai must be able to run fast.”

Among the first lessons the elder Kambei imparts to the young Katsushirō is that a good samurai must be able to run fast. The nugget is surprising because we expect samurai to stand their ground and fight, not run away. However, the proposition was quickly validated. When the samurai first entered the village, they were ignored by the farmers, fearful of their vaunted protectors. That’s when Kikuchiyo sounded an alarm by banging on the end of a thick length of bamboo. Were the bandits coming? Everybody started running, including the samurai, who with their speed and acumen, quickly discovered there was no threat. Kikuchiyo simply wanted to focus the community’s attention on the danger they faced and the seven samurai, poised to help protect them.

Later, after the real battle started, running was key to defending the village. The samurai and villagers sprinted from one lookout post to another to warn defenders of the timing and intensity of the next onslaught. Speed was also of the essence during patrols outside their barricades – the samurai had to be able to sprint away from any bandits they spotted and tuck back behind their fortifications. Kurosawa’s movie might have been titled The Seven Speedy Samurai! Protecting yourself by running away means not just saving your own life, but the community that depends on you.

Protesters and demonstrators in the U.S. today face police and private security forces trained to target, arrest and sometimes deport them. That’s why protesters’ best defense in many cases is their feet. If they see police or other security forces massing nearby – sometimes armed with shields, clubs, and zip ties as well as standard issue guns, tasers and handcuffs – they should speedily run away. University expulsion, imprisonment or deportation don’t advance Palestinian statehood, environmental protection, immigrant rights, or the rule of law. Escape allows protesters to fight another day, and build an even bigger coalition, less likely to be targeted by police. The defeat of fascism requires both speed and the force of numbers.

Lesson four: “A good fort needs a gap.”

Like lesson four, lesson three, is counter intuitive. The best forts are impregnable; a gap is a weakness that an enemy can exploit, or as the saying goes, “a chain is no stronger than its weakest link.” But not in all cases: The main element of the samurai’s carefully drawn defensive plan was a barrier around the perimeter of the village composed in some areas of a tight skein of logs, branches and vines, and in others of water deep enough that a horse and rider can’t easily ford. But equally important for the village’s defense is a gap in the barrier, wide enough for two of three horses to pass through, but small enough for defenders to close off with their bodies, swords and bamboo spears. The idea was to let in just a few bandits at a time, close off the opening and then swarm and kill the isolated ones.

The strategy worked brilliantly, even with the heavy rains and rising waters that obscured vision and slowed villagers and samurai during the final battle. After the fighting ended, Kambei crossed off the last of the 40 circles on his tally sheet of bandits. The battle was over, and the village was saved. A similar defensive strategy – absent the swords and sharpened bamboo – can help protect today’s threatened protesters, non-profits and other anti-Trump organizations.

Rallies, campus encampments, and demonstrations today, such as those organized by 50501, need openings in their defenses. A gap encourages police to enter at a single, observable spot, giving protesters a better chance to make their escape through another gap. “Always know your available exits” is among the most important pieces of advice demonstration organizers impart to protesters. A contest between students and police is not a fair fight, and unless getting arrested is a carefully considered tactic, flight is the best response to police calls to disperse, or to the appearance of masses of armed officers. Protesters can always come back!

But the instruction “a good fort needs a gap” is also valuable for organizations not undertaking protests or direct action. The Trump administration’s assault on civil rights, and educational, legal, environmental, and art organizations are so numerous and intrusive, that non-profits and other civil society groups must pick their battles, allowing some bandits to pass through gaps in their defenses, the better to protect the rest of the organization.

In some cases, Trump is his own worst enemy and must be allowed or even encouraged to proceed unhampered. The most obvious example is tariffs. The implementation of broad-based tariffs, especially against China – if they proceed — will increase inflation, decrease consumer spending and reduce business investment. The result will be “stagflation,” the combination of stagnation (low business investment and high unemployment) and inflation, like that which persisted in the mid and late 1970s and doomed the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Such an eventuality will lead to a crushing Republican defeat in the midterms, and the beginning of the end of Trump’s authoritarian rule. Stagflation will also reduce energy use, providing a respite in the rising use of fossil fuels and release of greenhouse gasses. I remember, in the late 1970s, driving across upstate New York and New England, seeing abandoned homes, farms and factories reclaimed by nature. It was both a depressing and wonderful sight; within a decade, development was supercharged and ugliness and waste – worse than ever before — blotted many parts of the landscape.

The goal of any successful Democratic Party must be to seize upon the economic crisis caused by Trump and the Republicans and implement policies that support and protect workers while hobbling multinational corporations – fossil fuel, aerospace, armament, AI, media and financial – that are in the ascendant today. Excess profit taxes are better than tariffs at protecting good paying U.S. jobs; fees charged for every stock, monetary and commodity trade will reduce speculation and unproductive profit seeking; much higher marginal income tax rates will reduce income inequality; a carbon tax (with funds directed for tax rebates to workers and green investment) can reduce the release of greenhouse gases and other pollutants; limiting patent and copyright protection can reduce exploitative, rent-seeking behavior; Medicare for all will lower healthcare costs, reduce illness, and reverse the decline in life expectancy.

Trump and his bandits are running headlong into gaps in the tattered democratic infrastructure. Courts and lawyers are not strong enough to stop them, but villagers and hungry samurai – supported by law — can. That work will require greater effort at organizing and collective action – rallies, boycotts, and strikes — than we have seen so far. The resistance will have to “run fast,” create a “good fort” with a gap, and reject “individual action.” The coming battle – waged without swords or sharpened bamboo poles – will be worth joining and then later watching on a large screen.

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Photo by Kyle Ryan

The mainstream media have examined the governance of Donald Trump over the first term and the hundred days of the second term, using the familiar techniques of bureaucratic politics and the use of mostly anonymous sources.  In this way, the media have examined the politics, policies, and fulsome propaganda of the Trump’s presidency.  But the media for the most part have foresworn or underplayed the central question of Trump’s presidency: Is Donald Trump psychologically fit to be president of the United States and, even more worrying, the commander-in-chief of the most powerful and expensive military forces in the world?  We know the answer to that question and it couldn’t be more worrisome.

The first term produced several books on Trump’s dangerously disordered presidency, including a trenchant one by Trump’s niece, Mary Trump (“Too Much and Never Enough”) that diagnosed Donald Trump’s threat to domestic and international security.  There was sufficient polling by 2018 to indicate that most Americans agreed that Trump was unfit to be president.  The mental health experts who contributed to these works fortunately ignored the so-called ethical principle of the American Psychiatric Association (the Goldwater Rule), which prohibited psychiatrists from diagnosing a public figure they had not personally encountered.  But the erratic behavior of Trump during the 2015-2016 campaign and the first two years of his first term prompted a reassessment and a challenging principle: the duty to warn.  Now it is seven years later, and Trump’s actions and statements have created the highest level of domestic and international anxiety since the end of World War II.

Trump’s malignant narcissism has certainly worsened—his claims that he knows more than anyone else and that only he can fix our problems marked the first term; “I run the country and the world” typifies the second term.  His demonization of his perceived enemies as a result of two congressional impeachments and numerous court cases has become far more threatening.  His treatment of women, minorities, and immigrants point to paranoia as well as a cruel and heartless approach designed to rid the country of migrants and force women and minorities out of the federal work force.  The lack of empathy, of course, accompanies narcissism.

There has been far more damage and destruction in the first hundred days of the second term than there was in the full four years of the first term.  There were moderates in the latter period who seemed prepared to deal with Trump’s paranoia and impulse control that were constantly on display and threatened destructive acts.  There was an unusual level of public criticism from chief of staff John Kelly, secretary of state Rex Tillerson, national security adviser H.R. McMaster, and director of national intelligence Dan Coats.  The criticism by Tillerson and McMaster cost them their jobs.  As retired and active general officers, the criticism by Kelly and McMaster violated the professional military’s duty to never criticize a sitting president.  Economic disasters were avoided because economic advisers such as Gary Cohn and secretary of the treasury Stanley Mnuchin kept certain information from Trump’s purview, even removing documents from the president’s desk in the Oval Office.

The second term already is a greater disaster, as cabinet level appointees such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Director of Homeland Security Kristi Noem embarrass the country and themselves with desperate attempts to demonstrate fealty to their Donald.  Rubio has cancelled the visas of more than 1,500 international students (only to have the courts bring at least a temporary halt to the process).  Noem has flown to El Salvador for a photo opportunity at the CECOT prison in front of the prisoners flown illegally from the United States.  She was smiling and brandishing her $50,000 Rolex watch. There are no limits on the efforts of Trump’s appointees to prostrate themselves for their leader.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is destroying the Department of Justice, and illegally using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants. FBI Director Kash Patel is destroying the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and reassigning experienced agents to participate in the roundup of immigrants.  Lord knows what is happening to Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, where the rumors are frightening in terms of the threat to U.S. national security.  And does anyone really believe that Marco Rubio can lead the Department of State, the National Security Council, what little is left of the Agency for International Development, and the National Archives?  The only certainty is the weakening of U.S. national and international security.

The first hundred days of the second term created crude displays that we could see for ourselves, including the mugging of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the most heroic figure in the international arena, and Trump’s appearance with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a leader in the field of domestic terrorism, that was nauseating to watch.  Vice President J.D. Vance smirked his way through both of these meetings, and even upbraided Zelensky for not thanking the president of the United States for all he had done for Ukraine, which presumably includes interrupting military supplies and military intelligence in a way that led to additional civilian Ukrainian deaths.  Trump even suggested to Bukele that more prisons should be built in El Salvador to accommodate our “homegrown” terrorists, meaning U.S. citizens.

The first hundred days of the second term has been far worse and dangerous than the four years of the first term because America’s putative civic leaders been willing to prostrate themselves to avoid or weaken the abuses and threats of Donald Trump.  Publishers from the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, Jeff Bezos and Dr. Soon- Shiong, who depend on government support in their other endeavors, have altered the news gathering of their papers.  Some of the most prominent and powerful law firms in the country offered tens of millions of dollars to do pro bono legal work for Donald Trump and his family.

University presidents, particularly at Columbia University, bent the knee rather than   challenge or defy Trump’s dictates.  Harvard University is getting much credit for standing up to Trump to protect its tax status, but Harvard’s first instincts were to comply with the White House by removing the two leading officials of its Middle East Institute.  Too many campuses are restricting freedom of speech in order to comply with Trump’s phony campaign against antisemitism, which is in fact a campaign against those who criticize Israel’s genocidal war.

Paul Krugman, a columnist at the New York Times, resigned because Times’ editorial staffers were weakening his columns.  The senior producer at CBS’s 60 Minutes resigned because of similar interference from CBS’s parent company, Paramount Studios; the same thing happened at ABC, where its parent company, Disneyland, caved in to a Trump law suit that should have been fought.

The political destruction and the craven behavior is sadly reminiscent of Germany 1933.  But Hitler removed far fewer civil servants and the like in the beginning because he was motivated by racial policies and not politics.  Hitler initially removed the Jews who he believed were undermining Germany; Trump is targeting a far larger number of perceived enemies who he believed were undermining him.  Think of judges, lawyers, and the members of the so-called “deep state.”  The major incidents in Germany were reported in the international press, but not the German press.  Our own press needs to be more aggressive.

There are obvious reasons for not going too far in comparing Germany and the United States or, for that matter, Hitler and Trump.  Hitler wanted war; Trump doesn’t.  But both are despicable man.  Germans were anxious for good reason as early as 1933.  Americans are anxious in 2025 for reasons not altogether different.  The German people became hostage to Hitler in the 1930s; we cannot let that happen to us in the 2020s.a

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When President Trump’s cabinet picks trooped up to Capitol Hill earlier this year for Senate confirmation hearings, hardly any boasted about their past union connections. But Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins did.

He helped win broad bipartisan approval for his nomination from a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee (SVAC) that includes Bernie Sanders (I-VT) by mentioning that he belonged to the United Food and Commercial workers, while working for five years at a Georgia grocery store chain.  Said Collins: “I believe that the employees of the VA, whether they’re union or not, are very valuable and I respect that… I get the issue.”

At another point in the hearing, he pledged to “be the biggest cheerleader for every VA employee out there who is getting up every morning, doing it right [and] making sure we are taking care of our veterans.” And during questioning about President Trump’s intention to end remote work arrangements at the agency, Collins acknowledged that “a large portion of the VA workforce is unionized and they’re in contracts” so “we’re going to have to work together to get people back to work.”

Four months later, there’s little evidence of Collins and VA unions working together on anything. Instead, Collins has been an eager implementer of Trump’s attempted cancellation of collective bargaining rights for most VA union members—on the grounds that they’re engaged in “national security work.”

A Broader Exclusion

Trump issued an executive order based on this far-fetched claim in late March. It invoked a provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA), which has long allowed the federal government to exclude intelligence agency and some federal law enforcement personnel from union representation. Under Trump’s sweeping new interpretation of CSRA, two-thirds of the federal workforce, in 18 different agencies, would be ineligible for contract coverage because of national security considerations.

According to recent guidance provided by Trump’s Office of Personnel Management, this clears the way for Trump cabinet members to fire large numbers of employees, as part of their upcoming reduction in force plans, without regard for existing collective bargaining agreements.

The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents other federal workers, secured a preliminary injunction on April 25 against Trump’s executive order, as it applied to its own members in other agencies. Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE). hailed that result as a helpful precedent for “restoring collective bargaining rights that federal employees are guaranteed by law.”

To further weaken labor organizations, federal agencies also ended payroll deduction of union dues in April. VA unions affected by this change include AFGE, the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), National Nurses United (NNU), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its affiliate, the National Association of Government Employees (NAGE).

On behalf of 400,000 of the VA’s 482,000 workers, all five unions have recently sued the Trump Administration over multiple issues, including its mass firing of probationary workers throughout the federal government and attempted dismantling of entire agencies. (This pushback was, of course, perceived to be a “declaration of war on President Trump’s agenda,” as a White House “fact sheet”helpfully explained.)

A Waiver for Some VA Unions?

As more than 120 members of Congress (including Senators who voted to confirm Collins) argued in an April 8 letter to the VA Secretary, Trump’s directive is, thus, “primarily retaliatory in nature”—payback for “unions that have stepped up to defend employees’ rights in the face of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) attacks.”

The letter signers urged Collins “to act quickly and decisively to defend the VA workforce from this Executive Order by requesting a waiver for all Department Employees,” because the EO “cloaks itself in the false cover of ‘national security” and is in “likely violation of the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute (FSLMRS). Under that law, to be exempt from collective bargaining, an agency must demonstrate that its “primary function” involves intelligence, counter-intelligence, investigative, or national security work.

Collins responded with an April 17 notice-posting in the Federal Register, in which he “specifically concurs with the President’s determinations” about who is and is not doing “national security work.” In a move that won’t help the administration’s legal defense of its VA de-unionization effort, Collins signaled that his HR department would continue to deal with local unions affiliated with the Laborers, Machinists, Teamsters, Electrical Workers, Firefighters, American Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees.

None of these labor organizations ever had the “national consultation rights” of the larger AFL-CIO affiliates targeted by Trump because their bargaining units within the VA are small and miscellaneous. But, as Everett Kelley points out, many of their members do the same jobs as AFGE-represented “cemetery workers, house-keepers, cooks, mechanics, nurses, and other health care employees.”

So how, Kelley asks, could some “patriotic public servants” be allowed to keep their contract protections, while others performing equivalent duties—and posing no greater “threat to national security”—were stripped of theirs?

Adapting to New Conditions

While that question gets litigated by AFGE and other VA unions, they must still adapt to workplace conditions even worse than those created by Robert Wilkie, the right-wing Republican who was Trump’s second VA Secretary during his first term. All of them have long operated on the “open shop” basis mandated by federal law. But now workers who voluntarily join and financially support federal unions must switch their dues paying to alternative methods, like AFGE and NNU’s “E-dues”collection systems, because payroll deduction of dues has been discontinued.

The AFL-CIO has tried to help fill any representational void by recruiting and training 1,000 lawyers in 42 states to serve as a Federal Workers Legal Defense Network. This group will provide legal advice and support for individual employees who face adverse action by their agencies, but still retain civil service rights and protections.

Federal workers, newly awakened to the dangers facing them, are also joining the Labor Notes-assisted Federal Unionist Network. FUN is a cross-union network of rank-and-filers who organized a successful “day of action” in February, with what was then minimal support from their respective national unions.

FUN co-founder Colin Smalley, an employee of the Army Corps of Engineers, is among those warning co-workers that federal sector labor relations have reverted, for the time being, to what they were before 1962, when the Kennedy Administration first recognized the right to unionize.

Despite that challenging new/old terrain, “federal workers still have legal protections against retaliation and reprisal for collectively using their workplace rights.” Even in the absence of a union contract, they can “act like a union” by following the advice contained in a new guide prepared by Smalley and posted by the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.

Among its recommended responses, FUN counsels to: “Speak out: get creative with whistle-blowing. A well-scripted ‘march on the boss’ or a petition are great ways to take collective action that’s protected by the Whistleblower Protection Act, so long as they disclose any violation of law, regulation, rule, or policy, or an abuse of authority.”

VA Defenders

On April 16, members of the NNU, which represents 16,000 registered nurses at the VA nationwide, held a protest rally in San Diego against staffing cuts and union contract cancellation—one of many events around the country, involving VA patients, their families, labor and community allies.

“No matter who you cut from the VA, veterans are going to be affected,” warned RN Safiah Dhada. “If you cut housekeeping, nurses will be bagging trash, taking time away from patient care. If you cut supply techs, nurses will need to chase down supplies, delaying care…Our veterans deserve timely care, not delays that negatively impact health outcomes.”

One veteran of struggles against Trump during his first term is Irma Westmoreland, NNU secretary-treasurer and a nurse for 26 years who works at the VA Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia.

She’s optimistic about the outcome of the fight this time around, because “we came out stronger last time.” Nothing that Doug Collins does, she says, “will keep us from doing the things we need to do to represent VA nurses.” But “taken together, all of these actions are aimed at crippling and then privatizing the VA… And only the unions are standing in the way of privatization.”

The post On “National Security” Grounds: Most (But Not All) VA Workers Lose Union Bargaining Rights? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo: David Bacon.

On the plane to Hanoi in December of 2015, I opened my morning copy of the New York Times to find an article by Dave Philipps: “After 60 Years, B-52’s Still Dominate the U.S. Fleet.” The piece stuck with me.  For the next two weeks as I traveled through north Vietnam I tried to unravel the U.S. attitudes it reveals towards the people of this country and what they call “the American war.”

It ends by quoting a former South Vietnamese Navy officer, Phuoc Luong.  “American technology is super,” he told Philipps.  “It’s a great plane. In Vietnam we didn’t use it enough. That’s why we lost.”

If anyone knows the B-52, it’s the people of Hanoi. The enormous planes bombed them day and night for twelve days at Christmas in 1972.  Today there’s a museum dedicated to the bomber, and the wreckage of one still sits in a small lake in the middle of the city.

When I tried to imagine what it was like living amid the constant deafening explosions, I found an earlier article in the archives of Mr. Philipps’ newspaper that gives an idea.  It describes a visit by Telford Taylor, who’d been a judge at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, folksinger Joan Baez, and two other U.S. citizens in 1972.  They’d gone to Hanoi that Christmas to deliver mail to pilots of those B-52s.  Some had managed to survive being shot down while delivering President Nixon’s brutal holiday greeting, and then were apprehended by the people they’d been bombing.

The visitors described their fear in the midst of cataclysmic destruction, and their subsequent journey through the city and its ruins.  “The most horrible scene that I’ve ever seen in my life was when we visited the residential area of Khan Thieu, and as far as I could see, everything was destroyed,” mourned Yale University Divinity School associate dean Michael Allen.

Thirty years later another Times writer, Laurence Zuckerman, also wrote about this iconic airplane:  “The B-52’s Psychological Punch: The Enemy Knows You’re Serious.”  Zuckerman was reacting to a documentary on the B-52s by filmmaker Harmut Bitomsky.  Zuckerman’s piece was not exactly a paean to the aging airplane, but like Philipps, he couldn’t quite hide a certain admiration for its long life.

The B-52 was built originally in the early 1950s to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union.  Since then it’s carried “conventional” bombs, releasing them instead over people and homes in dozens of other countries. “It is the longevity and versatility of the giant bomber, which started flying in 1952 and is expected to remain in service until 2037, that is so fascinating,” Zuckerman commented.

While both writers carefully note that carpet bombing inspired massive protests both in the U.S. and internationally, what’s glaringly absent in their pieces is any sense of what it means to be under the B-52, on its receiving end.

The Christmas bombing of Vietnam was a war crime.  No U.S. official was ever tried and punished for it, and it was as irrational as it was savage.  The negotiations for the U.S. troop withdrawal from South Vietnam would reach a conclusion within a few weeks of it.  Could some minute extraction of leverage in those talks have been worth the deaths of so many?

Throughout the eight years in which the U.S. bombed North Vietnam, its bombers had few military targets.  One airman quoted by Philipps tried to claim that bombing nevertheless had some strategic value:  “We’re doing a lot more than killing monkeys and making kindling wood out of the jungle,” he claimed.  The B-52s targets, however, were people and the infrastructure that held their lives together.  U.S. planes bombed dikes to try to cause flooding in Hanoi and the countryside.  They bombed the Long Bien railroad bridge – the link that brought food and coal into Hanoi so that people could eat and keep warm.

The B-52s and their accompanying F-4s and F-14s bombed the small town of Sapa in the hills north of Hanoi, near the Chinese border.  Sapa is the cultural center for many of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities.  It has no military value.  Why bomb it, if the purpose was not to terrorize people and extract revenge for their defiance?

Traveling through the north, I sometimes asked ordinary people – taxi drivers or restaurant workers – what I should see in Hanoi.  Mostly they’d tell me to go to the Army Museum.  One morning I did, and I could see why.  On the ground outside the main halls are captured tanks, a Huey helicopter, and rows of bombs.  In the courtyard pieces of shot-down planes have been welded together into a tower, topped by the tail assembly of a U.S. jet.

Kids are climbing all over them.  At the museum entrance sits an old MIG fighter the Vietnamese got from the Soviet Union.   Parents send their children up a small ladder bolted to the side, and there they pose for iPhone pictures, next to the 14 red stars painted on the fuselage, each representing a U.S. plane it shot down.

It was a moment for conflicting feelings. I was glad to see the instruments of war surrounded by happy families – no war anymore.  Then I thought about the pilot of the MIG.  How terrifying it must have been to fly up into the anti-aircraft and missile fire above Hanoi and shoot at the B-52s and their phalanx of fighter escorts.  And then I realized, it must have been terrifying for the U.S. pilots too.  Eighty four planes were shot down over Vietnam during the Christmas bombing, including 34 of the giant Stratofortresses, according to the museum.

Today’s remote controlled wars, with drones guided from computer screens in Colorado, seem antiseptic by comparison — for the pilots.  Not so for those under the bombs.  For people living in the ancient cities of Gaza or Sana’a or Kunduz, the reality today is much as it was for people in Hanoi that Christmas.

I believe people also had another reason for urging me to go to the museum.  Hanoi has long since been rebuilt.  In the city and its environs Vietnam is on a building binge, and the impact of the war is no longer so visible.  Children born during the Christmas bombing are celebrating their 43^rd birthdays.

People walk through the Army Museum exhibit halls, mostly lined with photographs showing all the things they did during that war.  Some show Central Committee meetings that made the decision to fight the Americans.  Some show people in demonstrations, especially in the South, demanding that the foreigners leave.  Some show the hard work of people in the north, sending food and soldiers south to drive them out.  There are many portraits of people killed, or imprisoned in the infamous tiger cages, for fighting the U.S. and the South Vietnamese government it propped up until the last helicopter took off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy on May 1, 1975.

But despite the bombing and the meticulous documentation of the war’s terrible cost, I felt little hostility or bitterness in the people I met.  In the end, they’d won.  How could the war’s planners back in Washington have thought it would turn out otherwise?  The Vietnamese were no latecomers to insurrectionary organizing.  They were hardly ignorant or apolitical countryfolk, although this was certainly the prevalent stereotype in Congress and the Pentagon.

The Army Museum is focused on the American war.  But the half dozen other museums in Hanoi that also document Vietnam’s revolutionary history make plain how long liberation took.  Sophisticated political organizations took decades to mature and gain experience.  By the time of the U.S. intervention, they’d been at it for many, many years.  That experience finally brought about the U.S. defeat.

If anything, the Vietnamese official history on display in museums is even angrier with France than with the U.S.  Long rooms and galleries of photographs show the nationalists and their first resistance to the French colonizers starting in 1858.  It joined the rising revolutionary wave of the early 20^th century, and crystallized in the launch of the Indochinese Communist Party in the 1930s.

Hanoi Hoa Lo monument (now largely overshadowed by a new office and residential complex) preserves the prison where the anti-French resisters were held.  In the cells of the old French Maison Centrale, dioramas of prisoners in manacles and leg irons shout at their jailers with their fists raised.  Two guillotines, used to chop the heads off those who couldn’t escape, sit in dark corners of this and the official history museum.  Even the women’s museum has a floor dedicated to those imprisoned by the French.

That history of resistance went on far longer than the U.S. war – almost a hundred years.  During much of it Ho Chi Minh was not even in Vietnam to lead it.  He was first an itinerant sailor, then in Moscow working for the Comintern, and finally was sent to one country after another, to jumpstart movements like those that had already begun in his own country.  While it’s possible to see why western governments feared and demonized him as a hardened revolutionary, the Vietnamese resistance movements were not dependent on any single person.  The final defeat of the U.S. came several years after Uncle Ho had died.

The language used to demonize Vietnam’s Communists and nationalists by those they sought to overthrow was just as vituperative as that used in the U.S. Congress against Muslim radicals today.  Terrorist, after all, was a term used to describe anarchists and socialists for over a century.  That language of terrorism and the cold war was used to create hysteria that easily justified sending U.S. advisors, and then troops, into Vietnam once the French had been defeated in 1954.  Ultimately, it was used to justify the B-52s and the 1972 Christmas bombing.  It cost millions of Vietnamese lives, and tens of thousands of U.S. lives as well.

When President Reagan and his successors sought to overcome the “Vietnam Syndrome” to make later interventions acceptable, they once again used that language.  It justifies even today’s use of the B-52s, 63 years after they began flying.  The U.S. Air Force has no intention of retiring the 76 remaining planes in its fleet.  In fact, the successors to General Curtis (“Bomb them back to the stone age”) LeMay now want to deploy them in Syria.

They are institutionally unwilling to remember.  Bombing did not defeat the Vietnamese.  Phuoc Luong is wrong.  More B-52s would not have won that war.  They will not win any new war against a people willing to do whatever it takes to survive and win.

Walking through the streets of Hanoi, I could see see why.  One morning I went out to Long Bien Bridge to take photographs at sunrise.  The trains going north leave downtown Hanoi just as it gets light.  It’s a great moment to see them emerge from the warren of houses next to the tracks, their old cars flashing past as they set out across the long span over the Red River.

Long Bien is an old bridge, and was one of the four great bridges of the world when it was built in 1902.  A plaque at one end reminds the commuters who trundle past on bicycles and scooters that it was built by Gustav Eiffel, who used the same iron that went into his tower along the Seine in Paris.  During the American war it was probably the one structure U.S. bombers could clearly see from on high, and they blew it apart over and over.

Down below the bridge abutment is the Long Bien market, where many of the city’s fruit and vegetable sellers go to meet farmers bringing produce into the city.  As I took pictures of the train and the stalls below, I tried to imagine the columns of smoke, the deafening roar of jet engines and then explosions, the screams of people torn to shreds with their dogs, their pushcarts and melons.

As the trains passed I wondered if the locomotives were the same as those that must have been repaired a thousand times during the war.  They look old.  Despite the glitz of Hanoi’s new wave of foreign investment, Vietnam is still a poor country.  Things must be saved and reused again and again, including railroad cars and bridges.

I felt that persistence as the sun came up.  It’s why the bombing, despite its immense destruction, failed so utterly.

Then I went down into the old quarter below, looking for a cup of Hanoi’s excellent coffee.

This first appeared on FPIF.

The post Why the B-52 Failed to Defeat the Vietnamese appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Nathaniel St. Clair

It’s been over 100 days since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. Most NGOs to the right of the Heritage Foundation are alarmed about his confrontational international posture and related erosion of the rule of law.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), a supposedly liberal organization, is also concerned. But their problem is that the president hasn’t gone far enough – at least in the case of Venezuela. HRW’s latest report on Venezuela calls for intensified illegal measures that cause misery and death, outflanking Trump from the right.

Ignoring the US hybrid war

At issue for HRW is last July’s Venezuelan presidential election that saw Nicolás Maduro declared the winner. Beyond issues with supposed electoral irregularities lies the elephant in the room that is utterly disregarded by HRW. The US hybrid war against Venezuela was the biggest obstacle to free and fair elections. Venezuelans were under economic siege with coercive measures aimed at pressuring them into backing the US-backed opposition.

Also telling is the opposition’s refusal to submit their electoral records to the Venezuelan supreme court, when summoned to do so because they do not recognize the constitutional order in Venezuela. Legally, there was no way for them to claim victory even if they had legitimately won.

Post-election protest demonstrations were predictable. The opposition, which has a long history of anti-democratic street violence, threatened them if it lost. HRW characterizes the riots as mostly peaceful, while accusing the government of responding with a “brutal crackdown.”

Yet the widespread damage of public property such as health clinics, government offices, schools, and transportation facilities – along with murders of government security personnel and party members – were inconvenient facts entirely ignored in HRW’s over 100-page report. Such actions can hardly be called peaceful, nor blamed on the government.

A cure worse than the disease

For argument’s sake, let’s not contest HRW’s claim that the books were cooked in Venezuela’s presidential election in order to examine the NGO’s solution.

On April 29, the US State Department celebrated 100 days of “America first” accomplishments, highlighting the revocation of oil importing licenses and the establishment of potential secondary tariffs on countries that still dare to import Venezuelan oil.

The next day, HRW’s report demanded even harsher punishment. Frustrated that the “Trump administration appears to be prioritizing cooperation” with Venezuela, HRW called for expanding sanctions and deepening pressure. And this is despite Washington’s plans to further maximize its maximum pressure campaign to achieve regime change in Caracas.

Specifically, HRW urged the US and other states to “counter Maduro’s domestic carrot-and-stick incentives that reward abusive authorities and security forces, making them loyal to the government” by imposing even more “targeted sanctions.”

Further compounding the impact of individual targeted sanctions is the reality of overcompliance. Even individualsanctions end up contributing to collective punishment. A 2019 statement by HRW recognized that “despite language excluding transactions to purchase food and medicines, these sanctions could exacerbate the already dire humanitarian situation in Venezuela due to the risk of overcompliance.”

But now the 1,028 existing unilateral coercive measures (the correct term for sanctions) on Venezuela by the US and its allies apparently aren’t enough for these sadists.

HRW admits that these coercive measures have “failed to make a dent” in correcting what they see as bad behavior. Why then persist if ineffective? Perhaps, because they’re very effective in punishing errant states and warning others.

HRW also lobbied for yet more foreign intervention in Venezuela’s internal affairs: “Foreign governments should expand support for Venezuelan civil society groups… a sustained and principled international response is crucial.”

Selective sanctimony on sanctions

HRW criticized the Trump administration’s sanctions targeting the International Criminal Court (ICC) because they might potentially “chill” the tribunal’s ardor to go after Venezuela.

Revealingly, this particular HRW report shows no concern that Trump’s sanctions might stifle the court’s prosecution of the US/Zionist genocide in Palestine. What HRW is instead focused on is having the court “prioritize its investigation” of Venezuela.

HRW never mentions in this report that the US does not accept the ICC’s jurisdiction over itself. In other words, this report fails to criticize Washington’s evading accountability as long as the ICC can be weaponized against Venezuela.

The ICC has, in fact, been blatantly politicized regarding Venezuela. Caracas has requested in vain that the ICC investigate US coercive measures that have caused over 100,000 civilian deaths in Venezuela, constituting a crime against humanity.

The HRW report is sanctimonious about the “brave efforts of [opposition] Venezuelans who risked—and often suffered,” but is callously unsympathetic regarding the devastating effects on the population at large of the very measures it is advocating.

HRW laments the US administration’s cutting funding to astroturf “humanitarian and human rights groups” promoting regime change in Venezuela. But it does not express sympathy for ordinary Venezuelans suffering economic hardship, food insecurity, or lack of medicine due to broader US sanctions. Notably absent from this report is acknowledgement of the humanitarian consequences of Washington’s unilateral coercive measures.

The human rights organization’s primary critique of the enormous humanitarian toll of the unilateral coercive measures is that they have “failed to produce a transition.”

Sanctions kill

The HRW report frames US sanctions as supposedly justified efforts to enforce imperial restrictions on Venezuela and not as part of a regime-change hybrid war.

As Venezuelanalysis reported: “US economic sanctions against Venezuela are a violent and illegal form of coercion, seeking regime change through collective punishment of the civilian population.” Investigations by the UN’s high commissioner for human rights found “sanctions that threaten people’s lives and health need to be halted.”

Even HRW’s own World Report 2022 cited UN findings that sanctions had exacerbated Venezuela’s economic and social crises. Yet HRW apparently considers the burden warranted, which invokes Madeleine Albright’s infamous defense of Iraq sanctions: “we think the price is worth it.”

Follow-the-flag humanitarianism

HRW has long maintained a “revolving door” relationship with the US government personnel. The organization is also significantly associated with George Soros and his Open Society Foundations. UN Independent Expert and human rights scholar Alfred de Zayas describes how HRW and similar NGOs have become part of what he calls the “human rights industry,” instrumentalizing human rights for geopolitical agendas.

Unilateral coercive measures are a major component of the US imperial tool kit. But HRW opportunistically fails to note that such sanctions are illegal under international law. In fact, Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective penalties against protected persons.

As Mark Weisbrot with the Center for Economic and Policy Research observes, HRW has “ignored or paid little attention to terrible crimes that are committed in collaboration with the US government in this hemisphere,” while it “has repeatedly and summarily dismissed or ignored sincere and thoroughly documented criticisms of its conflicts of interest.”

HRW recognizes that the coercive measures against Venezuela, which impact the general populace, have not succeeded in imposing an administration subservient to Washington – what they euphemistically call “restoration of democracy.” So why continue advocating more sanctions and support for Venezuela’s far-right opposition? The answer is that Washington’s NGO epigones talk “reform” but aim at fomenting insurrectionary regime change.

The post Liberal NGO Pushes for Harsher Venezuela Sanctions appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Photograph Source: Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street – OGL

In England last week, in addition to a byelection for a parliamentary seat in Runcorn, Cheshire, there were 6 mayoral elections, elections for 24 local councils. and 1,641 seats in these 24 councils. All seats on 14 county councils and eight unitary authorities in England were up for election. Most of these seats were last contested at the 2021 local elections. The 2025 local elections were the first to follow the general election 10 months ago.

The Runcorn byelection was caused by the resignation of its Labour MP, Mike Amesbury, who quit after receiving a suspended prison sentence for punching a constituent to the ground when drunk, and following up the initial assault with 5 further punches (according to CCTV video of the incident).

Labour lost the Runcorn byelection to Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform party by a mere 6 votes, surrendering its previous majority of 14,700 votes in one of its safest seats. Many customary Labour voters– vexed by having to go to the polls on account of the fisticuffs of their bibulous ex-MP— stayed at home this time and thus made all the difference. Moreover, Starmer’s decision not to visit Runcorn in the run-up to the byelection was an obvious contrast to Farage who visited the constituency 3-4 times and knocked on doors on polling day. Labour was largely passive while Reform turned out its electoral machine.

Overall, Labour lost two-thirds of the seats it was defending– its vote fell on average by as much as 19 points.

The Labour postmortem indicated clearly that its lacklustre record after 10 months in office has had a chilling effect on many of its core supporters. There have been constant rows over Labour’s failure to eliminate the two child benefit cap imposed by the Tories when they were in power; as well as the closing-down of the winter fuel supplementary payment given to pensioners, the slashing of disability benefits, the backtracking on policies dealing with the climate crisis, the party’s much-publicized thirst for freebies from donors, and the refusal to take a firm stance against Israel over Gaza. The Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer/finance minister, Rachel Reeves, has also warned of further cuts to public services.

Starmer’s rigidity on these issues (some have called it his “tin ear” or emotional illiteracy) alienates progressive voters, many of whom can’t discern a sliver of socialism in Labour’s policies.

Starmer and his team have chosen to address the UK’s economic ailments by pursuing growth, not by introducing taxes on the wealthy and increasing public expenditures, but by creating a financial climate supposed to encourage the private sector to make the requisite investments in growth-inducing economic activities. This approach will not be easy—for one thing, the private sector is struggling with the Brexit drag on production, as costs increase and supply chains get disrupted. Starmer refuses to talk about Brexit, for fear of firing up those who voted Leave in the 2016 referendum. Labour optimists however remind us that the next election is not for another 4 years, and that Labour will have its huge parliamentary majority until then, giving it the time needed to prime the economy for improvement.

In addition to picking up a parliamentary seat and gaining control of 10 councils, Reform also performed well in other areas, especially by winning 674 council seats. Reform are now in second place in most Labour and Lib Dem seats giving them a headstart as putative change candidates in the future. Reform’s advance was especially devastating for the Conservatives, who lost more to Reform than Labour did. The Tories lost 674 councillors, and their uninspiring leader, Kemi Badenoch, had to apologize for this “bloodbath”.

The centrist Lib Dems also picked up seats from the Tories. Clearly a major realignment is occurring on the UK’s political right, though it’s much too early to say what its final forms will be. The Tories have decided to play “catch up” with Reform, and tacked towards Nigel Farage, albeit with little success. An ersatz move to the populist right is no match for Farage’s genuine item.

Labour has also tacked towards Reform, with the outcome that there are 3 parties now vying for the same rightwing spot. The Lib Dems, typically viewed as a centrist party, is now more to the left than Labour. But further twists lie ahead.

Reform, committed to a Trumpist agenda, will rein-in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), back-pedal on measures to tackle climate change, adopt lower rates of taxation, as well as ending working from home. How congenial will this be for erstwhile Labour supporters now backing Reform?

An Apella poll conducted after the elections found Reform voters to be in favour of a sturdily interventionist, leftwing economic prospectus, including nationalizing utilities, raised taxes on corporations, a well-funded NHS, and for Britain to adopt protectionist measures in order to shield local industries from foreign competition. The primary common ground between these voters and their party leadership is of course immigration, as well as the nationalization of utility companies. Apart from that, viewpoints start to diverge. For instance, Farage favours an insurance-based healthcare system using vouchers, lower corporate taxes, and reduced government spending. The biggest shift will be in climate policy–  Reform will abandon existing carbon emission targets, accelerate North Sea oil and gas licences, scrap annual green energy subsidies, and speed up “clean” nuclear power. Defence spending will be increased.

None of this has been costed. For instance, it is already being asked how increased defence spending will be paid for when taxation is being reduced at the same time?

The other question concerns Farage’s leadership. It has been said he has several qualities in common with Trump—narcissism, vanity, petulance, the ability to bullshit, grifting, and fickleness, to name a few. As a result he treats the Reform party as a personal fiefdom, which could become an issue when it expands its membership and increases its representation on electoral bodies. Reform will then have to become more than a one-man show.

The Tory party having imploded, Labour will be waiting to see if the same happens to Reform.

The post Disaster For Labor and Tories in English Local Elections appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Ever since Trump’s electoral victory in November 2024 I have been receiving multiple daily solicitations for funds to support the Democratic Party, individual Democratic candidates for Congress or State Offices, and notification of worthy campaigns on public issues such as the protection of Social Security, Medicare, and reproductive rights, as well as on voter protection in various forms. I am personally sympathetic with resistance to this perverse Republican effort to dismantle democracy and constitutional governance in the United States by taking giant steps toward legitimating autocratic rule with fascist features.

I expect many will be critical of what I write here as a diversion from attacking the main targets of concern: a White House dangerously out of control, a subjugated Republican Congressional presence, and a Supreme Court that subscribes to the subversive Trump ethos 90% of the time and is due to be further ‘packed’ in coming years. My response: failure calls for self-criticism, and criticism from an ally can be restorative, at least indirectly.

Funding Entrapment Techniques

Against this background, I find myself increasingly alienated by procedural and substantive aspects of the chosen approach being taken by the Democratic Party leadership to oppose such an undesirable and dangerous set of developments in the governance of the country. On procedural issues, besides crudely reducing electoral politics to matters of raising money for electoral campaigns, giving the impression that democratic politics is little more than a continuous funding appeal. This is the overt posture of the Democratic Party establishment. I find this turn from ideas to money deeply distressing.

It lends itself to ultra-manipulative fundraising tactics. This outlook employs a variety of techniques to induce presumed liberal voters to take an opinion survey by responding to simplistic, almost rhetorical, questions about the Trump agenda and a preferred Democratic alternative. Not a word is mentioned that the survey is a sleeper leadup to a mandatory monetary contribution in which the survey respondent is given only a choice of what amount will be contributed. Clearly a funding entrapment mechanism. After taking time to answer a series of questions, there is no way to submit a completed survey without committing to a specific campaign contribution.

The choice foisted upon an innocent respondent is to pay or abort the survey. This technique exhibits a mentality of deception that more and more dominates bipartisan relations of the two political parties with their own followers, and of course with the citizenry as a whole. And not only in relation to electoral politics but across the board of public concerns. To restore trust and animate robust activism the Democratic Party needs to cultivate reasoned honesty, however radical, and abandon its present style of hysterical rhetoric pretending either that all is won or everything lost by outcomes in the political sphere. Political prospects are bleak enough without resorting to hollow exaggerations that annoy rather than motivate.

An Escapist Nationalist Policy Agenda

If anything, my substantive objections are more serious and raise my concerns to such a level of disillusionment that I am teetering on the brink of withdrawing support, financial and otherwise, from the Democratic Party. I am appalled that the Democratic establishment continues to adopt a posture of total silence with regard to US foreign policy, which encourages an interpretation of implied unconditional support for Israel despite its transparent and prolonged Gaza genocide. Such criminality itself thinly disguises Israel’s territorial objectives that depend upon coerced ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s censure of those who stayed on the sidelines in the struggle against South African apartheid is surely applicable here: “It is my conviction that if we are neutral in situations of injustice, we have chosen the side of the oppressor.” To be silent is more morally tone deaf than to be neutral. It was Kamala Harris’s silence on hot issues, including but not limited to Gaza, that quite likely led to Trump’s victory last November and certainly undermined her leadership credibility for the future. To play it safe to avoid controversy amounts to the self-neutering of political identity that has long plagued liberal politics by being shamelessly pragmatic rather than principled when it comes to the hard issues that have arisen over the years in US foreign policy. If Harris had expressed either measured and informed opposition to Israel’s policies or even venture her own Biden-free rationale for continuity of US policy in the Middle East, she would have earned respect rather than scorn. If she had not distanced herself from controversy during her campaign for the presidency, she might now be heading a revitalized opposition rather than feebly mending fences with a stunned public helplessly watching de-democratization proceed daily without an energizing sense of credibly fighting back.

This unseemly silence by the Democratic Party leadership and liberal media on Israel/Palestine extends to foreign policy in general. Outsiders perceive an America that wants to run the world and is willing to pay the price of doing so but is indifferent to how or why. To be disappointed by Trump only because of his wrecking ball approach to a liberal domestic agenda while overlooking global issues is beyond misleading – it verges on insanity given the nature of the global challenges. It means indifference to the UN, the diplomacy of war and peace, foreign aid, relations with China, nuclear disarmament, and support for international law. Its willed blindness considerably outdoes the monkey that sees no evil!

If Trump is subtly attacked for building walls, not bridges, the Democrats are not far behind. It is hard to reconcile this inward turn with their overwhelming support for a huge ‘peacetime’ budget to fund the military while the poor at home suffer and the infrastructure rots. It is hard to explain the disparity between this huge investment in the world that the global imperialists in Washington of both political parties dream about and pursuit of humane forms of sustainable governance that the leaders of the Democratic Party should be championing to meet 21^st century challenges at home and internationally. Among the mistakes being made is to suppose that a costly hegemonic foreign policy can be divorced from a supposed dedication to domestic priorities. The Democratic Party seems intent on promoting such a divorce, which invites a deep misunderstanding of the linkages between disappointment at home and running the world by reliance on a militarized geopolitics. 

To explain my discomfort with this presumed disinterest of US voters in anything beyond their borders and to show that I was not overstating this mood of apparent contentment with a walled in America, I list the issues selected in a typical recent funding appeal by the Democratic Party that polls Democrats about their main concerns as a prelude to a funding appeal. The only issue on this list that might justify inclusion in a foreign policy agenda is ‘addressing the climate crisis.’ Even climate concerns so described might be understood as no less domestic than the others given its wording, differing from Trump only with respect to not dismissing global warming as a hoax. The list below is in the exact language used in official Democratic Party appeal text:

Which of the following best describes why you support Democrats? (Select all that apply.)

I believe in addressing the climate crisis.

I believe in creating more good-paying jobs and supporting unions.

I believe in reproductive freedom.

I believe in affordable health care.

I believe in protecting and expanding rights for the LGBTQ+ community.

I believe in protecting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

I believe in protecting democracy and the right to vote.

I believe in moving our country forward, not backward.

I believe in protecting critical federal services for working people, veterans, children, and the elderly.

I believe in strong, stable leadership.

All of the above

Other

Concluding Remark

My final assessment of this recipe for despair is that without a revitalized internationalism, America’s prospects are dismal at home as well in the world. Unless the Democratic Party reconstitutes itself with a sense of urgency the nation’s future will remain under a darkening sky. To restore hope that is not a cover for ‘wishful thinking’ requires reconnecting what we wish for at home with what we do abroad. Without adding demilitarization and denuclearization to the policy agenda the challenges facing the country and the world will continue to be misconceived. Without dedication to the prevention of and opposition to genocide, apartheid, and ecocide, prospects for cooperative problem-solving in multilateral venues will not be forthcoming. As well, without a stronger United Nations that rejects the primacy of geopolitics, any hopes for humane global governance, let alone war prevention, will be in vain.

Perhaps it is too much to wish, but in the spirit of ‘a politics of impossibility’ I would like to believe that the leaders of the Democratic Party are still capable of listening to voices of disillusionment. Revisions of messaging to the faithful is only the tip of the iceberg. The underlying challenge is to make opposition to Trump turn on a transformational vision of how to frame political and economic agendas for a brighter future at home and abroad.

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Midwife Salome (fresco in monastery of Latomou)

May 5 is International Day of the Midwife, but Ricardo Jones, a doctor and midwife, is spending it under house arrest after recently being sentenced to 14 years prison for assisting with a home birth in which the baby later died of congenital pneumonia. He says the sentence is the same had he gone “into a hospital and shot a baby in the head.” The case comes as health systems globally push towards unnecessary cesarean-sections and foster obstetric violence that disregards pregnant people’s agency.

The International Confederation of Midwives established May 5 as a day for celebrating and raising awareness of the midwifery profession. They stress that midwives “can provide up to 90% of sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn, and adolescent health services.” Further, various studies have demonstrated that home births with midwives see better obstetric and neonatal outcomes for low-risk pregnancies than hospital births, and spontaneous births are 3.4 times more likely at home with a midwife.

However, Jones’ sentence appears to be a deliberate attempt to delegitimize midwifery, as part of a concerted push towards profitable hospitalizations. Jones, a Brazilian gynecologist and obstetrician, was found guilty of homicide in the first degree (i.e. intentional murder) on 28 March. He told me he was imprisoned for three weeks, before being released into house arrest.

The incident took place 15 years ago. He described helping to deliver a 30-week-old baby. “It was a very normal labor, but the baby was breathing too fast,” he said. He and his wife, a midwife nurse who received an 11-year sentence, encouraged the mother to go to hospital two hours after the birth – standard procedure – and though the mother was initially reluctant, they did so. Overnight in the hospital, the baby had a lot of problems, and she died 24 hours after birth. It is estimated that pneumonia contributes to between 750,000 to 1.2 million neonatal deaths annually.

“The first doses of antibiotics the baby received occurred four and half hours after she arrived at the hospital,” Jones said, stressing that antibiotics were key to the baby having a chance of surviving. “But there were a lot of problems at the hospital.”

A year later, Jones was summoned by the medical council and prosecuted, despite having followed protocols. His medical license was canceled six years later. The criminal prosecution then followed and argued that he had murdered the baby because he used a humanized childbirth protocol and, according to the prosecution, his “ideology” caused the baby’s death. “They basically decided that a doctor who abides by the protocols of the World Health Organization and … the Ministry of Health of Brazil is a criminal,” Jones said.

Massive increase in C-sections

Brazil has the second-highest C-section rate, at 56%, reaching almost 90% of births in private clinics. The rate is 33.5% in Australia and New Zealand and 32% in the US, but the WHO recommends rates should be closer to 15%. In the UK, only 15% of women say they would prefer a C-section, but in England, 42% of deliveries are by cesarean – up from 29% just five years ago. Of current cesareans in the UK, 67% were elective, meaning they were planned, rather than based on an emergency or health concerns.

The huge increase in the UK corresponds to an increase there in maternal and neonatal deaths, and increasing numbers of women or people giving birth reporting traumatic birth experiences. In the US, maternal mortality has more than doubled over the past century, and even after controlling for risk factors that might have made a C-section more likely, the risk of death after the procedure is 3.6 times higher than after vaginal birth.

On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that pregnancy and birth care approaches that prioritize human relationships, collaborative multidisciplinary teamwork, and midwife-led care are associated with safer outcomes, physiological births (spontaneous, minimal intervention), and lower health-care costs.

According to the Lancet, pregnant people are having C-sections that aren’t medically indicated due to fear of labor pain, fear of pelvic floor damage and urinary incontinence, concern about impact on sexual relationships, and a belief that they are safer. Prior negative experiences with a vaginal birth, including sub-optimal care, can also be a factor, as well as the media presenting C-sections as controllable, convenient, and modern.

In the US, a cesarean section in the hospital for someone without insurance costs US$8,000-71,000, while a home birth and delivery with midwife is US$1,500-$5000. In Canada, delivery costs US$3,195 on average, and a C-section US$5,980. A meta-analysis on ResearchGate found that for-profit hospitals are more likely to perform C-sections than non-profit hospitals.

Jones stressed that while a vaginal birth can take a day, a C-section is “20 minutes and then it’s over, and … hospitals prefer C-sections because they can organize staff to work at a specific time, they can schedule the day, choose if it’s before Christmas or after it.”

Doctors performing C-sections often get paid more, with one researcher finding that doctors will prescribe them for non-medical reasons, “selling” the cesarean to the pregnant person by saying that the labor is too slow, their pelvis isn’t wide enough or the baby too large. In India, a surge in C-sections has been blamed on their profitability, convenience (including a hospital preference for day surgeries over late-night births), and doctor performance targets.

Obstetric violence and dehumanizing women

Prioritizing profits or efficiency over women’s well being goes beyond C-sections. There is a global prevalence of 60% for obstetric violence, with the most identified category being non-consented care (37%).

Jones said that in Brazil, common types of of violence include abuse of or overuse of drugs, not allowing the father or other parent to be present, use of the Kristeller maneuver (pressure to the top of the uterus), episiotomy (a surgical incision made in the perineum; routine ones are not recommended), excessive light or noise in hospital rooms, and not allowing women or people to choose the position they give birth in. “In Brazil, 90% of births are lying down, rather than squatting or vertical,” he said.

Such violence represents a loss of autonomy for women and increases the risk of postpartum depression, obstetric injury, and pregnancy-related morbidity and mortality.

“Women in childbirth are transformed (by many hospital systems) into children, and children have no voice, they are submissive, they just obey. Further, birth is part of a woman’s sexual life, ” Jones said, arguing that women’s sexual life is controlled. He added, “That’s why (many) doctors don’t accept women making choices (about where they’ll give birth, in what position, in what conditions, who will be present). In a patriarchy, men won’t want women to be free. So we control women’s sexuality and we control birth.”

There is now a campaign to support Jones, and it goes beyond his case to demanding support for women’s autonomy and dignity.

“Something must be done to prevent other doctors in Brazil from going to prison just for protecting the wishes of their clients and women. People understand that in Brazil, there is a push to try to criminalize spontaneous birth and out-of-hospital birth,” said Jones.

The post Midwife’s 14-Year Sentence Highlights Attacks on Women’s Autonomy, Global Surge in Unnecessary C-sections appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Alger Hiss testifying before Congress in 1948. Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.

Although the details of the case would be lost on him (don’t forget, presidential aides had to explain the historical rudiments of Pearl Harbor when Tropical Storm Donald made landfall in Hawaii), Trump’s assault on democracy and the Bill of Rights has its antecedents in the 1949 persecution of former State Department official Alger Hiss, who was sent to a federal penitentiary for forty-four months for denying under oath that he had seen Whittaker Chambers after January 1, 1937.

Hiss’s conviction, less than a month later, led to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1950 proclamation that he had in his hand the names of 205 Communist subversives buried deep within the State Department. The Hiss case also assured Richard Nixon’s political ascendency—Nixon was a young member of Congress when Hiss was ensnared by the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC)—and he rode Hiss’s conviction to the vice-presidency and later the presidency on the assertion that there were probably many Communists hiding under innocent American beds.

Then in 1984, after Ronald Reagan became the corporate sponsor in the White House of an angry right-wing agenda, the celluloid president conferred political sainthood upon the same Whittaker Chambers, Hiss’s nemesis and accuser who leveraged histrionics, lies, prosecutorial misconduct, and FBI duplicity to attack Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. (In the 1930s Hiss had been with FDR in the Agriculture Department and later went with him to Yalta.)

Reagan wasn’t the only president to deify the creepy Chambers (when he worked at Time magazine, Chambers kept a loaded gun in his desk). In 2001, the dark circle that schemed George W. Bush into the presidency held a secret, almost voodoo-like ceremony in the White House to celebrate the centenary of Chambers’ birth, to make the point that his underground journey from Communist errand boy to conservative icon was the inspirational story of America itself.

Finally, in 2017 and then again in 2025, when Trump restored his rackets to American politics, the legacies of the Hiss case and the subsequent McCarthy era of witch-hunting were re-inshrined in the White House. The consigliere who instilled in Trump the idea of American politics as a hate-crime was the Army-McCarthy hearing chief counsel, Roy Cohn Esq., who also railroaded Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the gas chamber. Cohn was not one of the prosecutors who sent Hiss up the river, except in spirit, but if you are looking for a connection between McCarthyite injustice and Trump’s current assault on individual freedom, Cohn is one of the lynchpins.

In the same way, an understanding of the Hiss case, distant as it is in our political memory, is crucial to understanding the extent to which the modern Republican Party sees its mission to conduct government as one endless show trial (now with Trump as the only judge and juror).

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By good fortune, the University Press of Kansas has just published Jeff Kisseloff’s excellent Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss, which is both a fresh examination of the campaign to clear Hiss’s name and overturn his convictions, and a deep dive into the Hiss archives and related papers. Unlike many previous writers on the subject, Kisseloff has run down every suspicion and lead, consulting the trial transcripts, the grand jury testimony, the vast FBI files on the case, and the many papers and documents he was able to study during his fifty years as a Hiss researcher. (His rebuttal of the theory that Priscilla Hiss typed the so-called Baltimore documents is a masterclass in investigative journalism.)

The result isn’t so much a blockbuster as a calm recitation of the facts in the case, along with profiles of the major players (many of whom Kisseloff met), and descriptions of the trials that are trenchant and often humorous. Here, for example, is how he describes the first public testimony that Chambers gave against Hiss, which gives an excellent example of the extent to which Richard Nixon and his HUAC accomplices used their Hiss allegations to form the basis of the broad political attack on the New Deal (just in time for the 1948 presidential election):

It was Nixon’s unique theory that if Hiss was lying about his relationship with Chambers, then he must also be lying when he denied being a Communist. Since Hiss said he didn’t know anyone “by the name” of Chambers, the committee could pretend he was denying that he had known him, which Nixon and Mandel knew to be untrue.

According to Chambers, Mandel came up with the plan to call Chambers before the committee again, but this time in executive session. They would ask him questions about the Hisses’ home furnishings or their hobbies with the intention of proving that Chambers had known them. The committee would then subpoena Hiss and ask him the same questions, so he would inadvertently confirm Chambers’s story. While technically this proved nothing, since Hiss had known Chambers, the opening was there for HUAC to leak Chambers’s testimony and Hiss’s testimony selectively to give a false impression that Chambers was telling the truth and Hiss wasn’t.

Chambers testified on August 7 for four hours of friendly questioning about the Hisses and still botched most of it. His testimony about the Hisses was so frequently and incredibly wrong that it was clear he hardly knew them. If one were to follow Nixon’s reasoning, that would have meant that Hiss was not a Communist.

But from that early hearing, the suspicion has lingered that Hiss might have “done something” for the Russians.

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For those too young to recognize the name Alger Hiss, let me provide a libretto to the case that divided American politics after World War II and the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945.

Born in 1904, Hiss grew up in Baltimore and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. His father’s death when Alger was age two created a void in his childhood. Still, Hiss managed to attend Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School, and after graduating he was chosen to clerk for the legendary justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

In the Depression of the 1930s, Hiss answered the New Deal’s call to service , and from 1933 to 1947 he occupied positions of increasing responsibility in the Agriculture, Justice, and State departments and on the Nye committee—always with the goal of promoting Franklin Roosevelt’s policies.

Hiss’s accusers would later say he was a closet Communist in the 1930s, but no evidence of that exists. He was a New Deal Democrat who wanted to alleviate the widespread unemployment of the Depression, but his tastes in literature ran to Victor Hugo, not Karl Marx, and his persona was that of a Harvard-trained civil servant ready to throw downfield blocks for the causes of the New Deal. This, to be sure, made him enemies around Washington, including the likes of the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and the wealthy investor Bernard Baruch. Kisseloff writes:

In the fifteen years between 1933 and 1948, beginning with Fuller, Alger earned the enmity of five influential people, Leonore Fuller, Ray Murphy, James Byrnes, Ben Mandel, and John Cronin, all of whom contributed to his downfall. Fuller’s comments were still a prominent part of the FBI’s case.

When World War II broke out on December 7, 1941, Hiss was assigned to the Far Eastern division of the State Department, where he was among those (including most of the U.S. government) who missed the warning signs of a pending Japanese attack on American outposts.

During the war years, his responsibilities shifted to international organizations, including the nascent United Nations, and it was Hiss who was the secretary of its first meeting in San Francisco in April 1945. Before that, he was a junior aide in the presidential delegation that met Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Yalta (but he was more a notetaker than someone whispering in FDR’s ear).

Later on, when the American right-wing came to the conclusion that Yalta had been a sell-out to Stalin’s Russia, Hiss became a convenient scapegoat to charge with espionage (even though the charges against him related to passing documents to Chambers in 1937-38, something Hiss denied).

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So who or what brought down Alger Hiss and turned him into a symbol, in the minds of many, of Communist subversion of the American government at its highest levels?

Technically, the charges brought against Hiss were for perjury: for lying under oath that he had never seen Chambers (whom he knew as George Crosley) after January 1, 1937. More broadly, however, Hiss was alleged to have passed State Department documents to his courier, Chambers, who had them photographed and passed on to other Moscow agents. But by 1948 the statute of limitations had run out on any charge of espionage (besides, in 1938 the United States was not at war with Russia). So Hiss’s tormentors (notably Richard Nixon) had him frogmarched on perjury charges, which are a prosecutorial catch-all when you want to “get” someone.

From the beginning and through his two trials for perjury, the only real accuser Hiss ever had was Whittaker Chambers, although over the course of ten years (roughly 1939 – 1949) the witch-hunting Chambers picked up right-wing fellow travelers who found it politically expedient to attack the New Deal by charging that all sorts of men and women in Roosevelt’s administration had been closet Communists.

Mind you, during World War II, the Soviet Union was a close American ally, and if you were looking for American officials who aided and abetted the Russians, you need not look any further than President Franklin Roosevelt, who almost single-handedly kept the Soviets alive at Stalingrad in 1942 with American aid. (During the war, when told by an aide that there were suspicions about Hiss being a Communist, FDR just laughed.)

In the 1930s, Russia was not an American ally, but the U.S. domestic political spectrum included many parties promoting socialism, labor, communism, and other collectives. (Ironically, Hiss was not involved in any these flirtations, despite Chambers’ later accusations.)

In 1948, when Harry Truman was running (in effect, for Roosevelt’s fourth term), and the Soviet Union was seizing eastern and central Europe for its sphere of influence, it made for good retail Republican politics to make the point that the New Deal Democrats were nothing more than the dupes and stooges of Stalin’s darkness at noon.

FDR himself was dead, but there were lots of junior ministers (including Alger Hiss) who might well turn out Republican votes if they could be tarred-and-feathered in the smear of an illicit Communist past.

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To make the charges against a fifth column buried deep within the Roosevelt administration, no one played the part better than Whittaker Chambers, whose troubled childhood on Long Island, New York, turned him into a chameleon who could change to the color of whatever powerful man wanted him to do their bidding.

Although he dressed like an unmade bed, Chambers was intelligent, well read, good at languages, and a facile writer. But the truth wasn’t in him. He lived his life as if a character in a fabulist novel, assuming a series of names, identities and professions. In one such fictional pose, he was freelance magazine writer George Crosley who professed interest in writing articles about the Nye Committee, for which Alger Hiss served as the general counsel in 1935.

During this period (a difficult time in the Depression, when Chambers was struggling to feed his family), Hiss and Crosley were friendly; Hiss even sublet him an apartment for a few months, and gave him a car and some money.

But when Crosley showed Hiss his true colors as a swindler, Hiss cut him off, which may later explain why Chambers bore a ten-year grudge against the more successful, well-connected Hiss, whose picture appeared routinely in newspaper articles about Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta or the United Nations.

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During the 1930s, one of the personas that Chambers adopted—for which there is no proof other, again, than his own word—was that of a Soviet intelligence courier in the Communist underground. (In all likelihood his alleged handlers were characters in Dostoevsky novels.)

Previously Chambers had been a member of the open Communist Party USA, and a contributing editor to various left-wing publications, including the Daily Worker and New Masses, but now he added “secret agent” to his portfolio, although his clownish public antics gave him more the appearance of Maxwell Smart than James Bond. (Among his college friends it was a great joke that the eccentric Chambers had taken up “spying,” and they wondered what the Kremlin thought of the postcards that he sent in from the cold.)

The other underground that attracted Chambers in the 1930s was cruising homosexuality, which perhaps more than his efforts for the Comintern might explain why he spent so much of his time meeting strange men while standing in the back of dark movie theaters. Kisseloff writes of his duplex personality:

I’m not a psychiatrist, psychologist, or social worker. I’m in no position to diagnose anyone, but as an observer of people and their actions, I believe a sympathetic person can make judgments without formal training. In this case, Whittaker Chambers was not a well man psychologically. Thanks in part to a brutal home life as a young boy, and to societal pressures that led him to believe he should only feel shame about his sexuality, he had no self-esteem, and his natural tendency toward paranoia took root. In later years, it manifested itself in a variety of ways, whether it was thinking that people who had no such intention were out to do him harm and that he needed to act first before he was victimized, a feeling that cost too many people the happiness and success they so deserved. Though he was comfortable financially, he had a compulsion to borrow and steal money, and it was that—not the fear of reprisal from his spy bosses (if he had any)—that caused him to flee the Communist Party.

After the trials in the 1950s, Chambers published a memoir, Witness, which to this day the Reagan/Trump right-wing hails as a definitive account of “the enemy within.” (In both his presidential campaigns Trump harangued “the enemy from within” and spoke of deploying the U.S. military to root out such evil.)

I have read Witness, which is absurd as a political narrative of the “Communist underground” and the threat it posed to American life. (Think of it as world’s longest Time magazine cover story on “The Communist Conspiracy,” written by Time rewrite man Whittaker Chambers.) But if you were to change the word “Communist” to “homosexual” at each instance it appears in the book, Witness could be read as an early gay novel. As a treatise about American politics it is as fatuous as Forrest Gump.

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Hiss’s two show trials for perjury were held in federal court in New York in 1949, and at the zenith of the Cold War he didn’t have a chance. Although the first trial ended in a hung jury, he was convicted in the second, and delivered to Lewisburg penitentiary for his five-year sentence (he ended up serving three years and eight months). He survived in the joint by befriending some influential mobsters, including Frank Costello. (By contrast, despite his consecration as the patron saint of William F Buckley, Jr.’s National Review, Chambers lived out the rest of his life in apparent misery, dying in 1960, but not before failing at several suicide attempts.)

After his release from prison, Hiss returned to New York in 1954, eked out a living as a stationery salesman, and spent the rest of his life (he died in 1996) campaigning to have his guilty verdicts overturned in the courts. He never succeeded. In many other ways, Hiss led a rich and rewarding life, and had strong family ties, despite his marriage failing over his case. He made many friends, spoke on college campuses, and even had his law license restored after Richard Nixon’s fall from grace in 1974. But his hopes for judicial exoneration ended in 1983, when the Supreme Court declined to hear his petition for coram nobis, which would have “set aside” his convictions based on prosecutorial misconduct during the two trials (essentially, the FBI and the prosecution withheld from Hiss’s defense damning evidence it had collected about Chambers).

Instead, the fight for Hiss’s innocence (or continuing guilt, depending on your views) has turned into competing schools of literature, in which authors on both sides of the case weigh in for or against Hiss’s claims.

Around the time of Richard Nixon’s duplicity and presidential resignation, many people were inclined to believe that Hiss was innocent and had been railroaded. Later on, when the United States began lurching to the McCarthyite right (in which the canonization of Whittaker Chambers was an important article of faith), there appeared a series of books and articles, all of which asserted that Hiss was guilty as charged. The most famous book about Hiss’s presumed guilt was Allen Weinstein’s Perjury, which came out in 1978.

Weinstein’s claim to fame (other than riding the tide of neoconservatism into a Reagan administration sinecure) was his assertion that he began his research assuming that Hiss was innocent, but that once he had dug into to archives he found him to be guilty.

Having read Perjury carefully, I can report that Weinstein rewrote Witness (adding in self-serving footnotes, so that he could cite Chambers to…confirm Chambers), and Witness itself is a rewrite of the many FBI field reports that J. Edgar Hoover commissioned to prove that his detractor, Alger Hiss, was a Communist. Hence for 70 years all we have ever had is an endless loop of The Whittaker Chambers Story.

Yes, there are books that take Hiss’s side of the argument, notably John Chabot Smith’s Alger Hiss: The True Story and Meyer A. Zeligs Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. But in the last twenty years there has mostly been an onslaught of books proclaiming that Hiss was America’s Kim Philby, in the pay of the Kremlin and operating as a mole within the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.

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To redress this imbalance we now have Rewriting Hisstory, a book that goes directly to all the controversies in the case.

Kisseloff is in his early seventies and as a undergraduate at Clark College in Wooster, Massachusetts, in the late 1970s, he got an internship in New York City to help the Hiss legal team review all of the documents (some 150,000 pages) that had come their way via the Freedom of Information Act.

As an intern, he got to know Alger Hiss, all of his lawyers, and many of writers and authors who had an interest in the case. He also developed a talent for archival research that mixed well with his passion for gumshoe journalistic reporting. Hence, his new book includes many sentences like this one: “I eventually found [Felix] Inslerman’s widow in a nursing home, and she was enormously helpful.”

You name the allegation against Hiss—those of Chambers, Weinstein, Hede Massing, the Fields, Elizabeth Bentley, Venona, et al.—and in his book Kisseloff has searched the massive Hiss archive to verify who said what about it in FBI reports, to the grand jury, at trial, or in witness statements.

It can make for some complicated paragraphs, but at least, finally, someone has dug into every archive (including Weinstein’s own papers), and he quotes fully from the transcripts. Kisseloff’s conclusion? He writes:

My belief that Hiss was not a spy was an easy call, confirmed by years of careful research into the government and defense files and the simple, straightforward logic that too often has been absent from writing on the Hiss case. Leftists commit political crimes. Alger just wasn’t one of them.

That’s my take, too.

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What’s great about Rewriting Hisstory is that from now on, anyone wishing to write about the Hiss case will have to put in more time than Kisseloff’s fifty years’ of research and interviews. No longer will it be enough in proclaiming Hiss guilty to say, “Well, Weinstein looked into it, and he thought he was guilty.”

When Weinstein’s book was published in 1978, one of the headlines it produced was his report of a dinner party in Vermont at which he alleged that Priscilla Hiss (married to Alger until 1959) announced to the other guests that her former husband had been guilty. For the headline-hunting Weinstein, it was “case closed”—at least against Alger—although as Kisseloff writes:

What she [Priscilla] didn’t know was that Weinstein had a story that he must have thought would clinch the case for him. It involved Priscilla, and it was devastating. It was also untrue, something he must have suspected because he never asked her about it before recklessly putting it into Perjury. The subsequent uproar caused the book’s publication to be delayed.

Later on in his book, Kisseloff adds a postscript to this story:

When the galleys were released, Priscilla was informed of the story and furiously insisted that it was a lie. In Alger’s defense and as a rebuke to Weinstein, she wrote a brief but powerful letter to the editor in the New York Times, quoted here in its entirety:

“For more than a quarter of a century, I have kept silence amid the clamor concerning the conviction of Alger Hiss. Recently, statements have appeared in print to the effect that I have made remarks indicating that Alger Hiss was guilty. I fear that if I do not now speak out, my silence will be interpreted as confirming these statements.

“At all times, and with my every fiber, I have believed in the innocence of Alger Hiss. I have never spoken a word to the contrary. To me the conviction of Alger Hiss represents a cruel miscarriage of justice.

“I do not intend to make any further statements concerning this painful subject.”

Years later, I [Kisseloff] asked Tony [Hiss, Alger’s son] if anyone might still be alive who was at that lunch, and he said that the senator’s daughter, Ellen Flanders, was. I got her number and called. She told me that she had no memory of Priscilla saying any such thing, and that if she had said something as momentous as that, she certainly would have recalled it. Most important, Weinstein never contacted her to check whether the story was true.

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Needless to say, Priscilla Hiss wasn’t the only person that Weinstein abused or misquoted. Several sources sued him and forced retractions. All this should have discredited Weinstein’s book, but now, almost fifty years later, I still see it quoted in the literature as the “final word” on the Hiss case.

Then in 2005 the George W. Bush White House (after conducting its seance with the departed spirit of Whittaker Chambers in 2001) appointed Weinstein as the Archivist of the United States, crowning his career as America’s greatest researcher. Too bad no one consulted Kisseloff about the appointment, as he writes in his book:

At the National Archives, though, he [Weinstein] became even more physically aggressive against women. His behavior was documented in a 2018 exposé by a historian, Dr. Anthony Clark. Clark found that Weinstein was a serial predator who sexually harassed, and at least in one case sexually assaulted, women. The behavior was even conceded by Weinstein’s children—who attributed it to his Parkinson’s. The behavior cost him one job and then a second when he targeted another woman.

Too bad Weinstein died in 2015. He would have fit right into the two Trump administrations, with their institutionalized McCarthyism and use of the Big Lie to attack an endless list of imagined enemies for political gain.

+++

For newcomers to the Hiss case, it’s possible that Kisseloff’s book might come with too many names and too much detail (although his writing is confident and excellent). I met Hiss in the 1970s (about the same time that Kisseloff began his interning for the defense team) and have been reading about and following the case since then. So I can digest the complicated paragraphs about the serial number of the Woodstock typewriter or the contents of the Pumpkin Papers (in Nixon’s hands, agitation propaganda, straight from a Stalinist show trial, but nothing that passed remotely near Hiss’s desk in the State Department). I can imagine someone without any case background finding Kisseloff’s detail, initially anyway, to be daunting.

For someone wanting to dip their toes in Hiss case history, I recommend starting with John Lowenthal’s 1979 film, The Trials of Alger Hiss. Kisseloff is mentioned in the credits, although he confesses in Rewriting Hisstory that he had a complicated relationship with Lowenthal (who in 2003 won a London court case over his denial that Hiss was the Russian asset code-named ALES, as is hinted at in Venona intercepts).

The film is a three-hour viewing on YouTube, but is worth that time, as you see the key figures in the case. The film includes many long interviews with Hiss himself, who candidly answers hard questions about how he lost in court or whether the homosexual Chambers ever made a pass at him (he says he did not).

From the Lowenthal film, I would move on to either the Chabot Smith biography or Friendship and Fratricide, and also a booklet published on the Alger Hiss website entitled Two Foolish Men by William Howard Moore, which explains, in accessible language, how someone with Hiss’s sophistication and intelligence could have found himself entangled with the clearly erratic Whittaker Chambers.

Finally, because it is so well written, I might add to your reading list The Earl Jowitt’s The Strange Case of Alger Hiss, which the English parliamentarian and legal scholar published in 1953, based entirely on the trial transcripts. Then, at long last, I would move on to Kisseloff’s new book, as it answers every lingering question in the case, and includes, in the last section, his take on who framed Hiss and why.

+++

Kisseloff’s thesis is that neither Whittaker Chambers nor Hoover’s FBI (my usual suspects, along with Richard Nixon) decided to take Hiss down, but that two men in particular—right-wing journalist Issac Don Levine and HUAC staffer Benjamin Mandel—had the motivation and means over many years to denounce Hiss within the government and later to fabricate the evidence against him. (Mandel had known Chambers since the 1920s, when both were members of the USA Communist Party—until each saw the light.)

In fingering this axis of evil, Kisseloff eases up a bit on blaming Chambers, presenting him more as a dupe of a powerful faction that wanted to win the 1948 election (if not to dominate American politics as Trump is now doing).

Here’s how Kisseloff describes witness Chambers’ pliability:

The question about why Hiss was targeted becomes even more of a mystery when you consider that until the late 1940s, neither Levine nor Mandel had ever met Hiss, yet there they were dedicating themselves to destroying his life. They both had the same motive—bringing about the end of the Roosevelt administration with the allegations against Hiss acting like poison-tipped arrows. As always with the Hiss case, the answer is there and it’s clear, but to find it you have to navigate through a lot of sludge. To work my way through it, I pulled out a notepad and began making lists of subsets of accusers who led Levine and Mandel to Hiss, the reasons for their animosity toward him, and how they all fit in with each other. I also added Mandel and Levine to the diagram to see where they fit in. Very quickly, my lines and arrows began to make sense, especially when I placed them onto a timeline where they suddenly all fit into place, each with a different role in the conspiracy. Apparently, as with raising children, creating a successful frame-up also takes a village.

But it wasn’t just that they were targeting Hiss to the exclusion of other New Dealers.

Hiss became the the focus of the take-down when instead of pleading the Fifth Amendment or refusing to appear before the HUAC (as many of those falsely-accused did), he walked into the lions’ den and tried to engage the likes of congressmen Nixon and Karl Mundt in Socratic dialogue (when all that interested them was executing a drive-by shooting). As Kisseloff writes: “Like a junkyard dog, Mandel was vicious toward his enemies and fanatically loyal to anyone who petted him, none more so than Chambers, to whom he was devoted.”

In searching for a motive for these crimes, Kisseloff asks:

The one question that Alger Hiss always struggled with was: What was Chambers’s motive? Hiss thought maybe it was because he cut Chambers off personally and financially. Others thought the reason was Hiss had rebuffed Chambers’s sexual advances.

I think both are wrong. It has almost always been assumed that Chambers was the driving force behind the case. I’ve come to believe that was not true at all. Make no mistake, he made his own choices when it came to Hiss, but he did so at the behest of people who knew which buttons to push. The people who framed Hiss hoped to build up his notoriety and then use it to bury the liberal New Deal coalition. They would get help on that end from Chambers and his allies on HUAC and Joseph McCarthy, Wisconsin’s junior senator, who saw in Hiss’s troubles a way to get reelected. Together, they rocked this country so powerfully that the seismic impact is still being felt more than seventy years later.

+++

As much as I admire Hiss, I can acknowledge that for a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former Supreme Court clerk, he was terrible at defending his own legal interests. At one point he attended a critical HUAC meeting without counsel (actually, he never should have turned up at all), and his decision to sue Chambers’ for libel—while admirable for those who believe in truth—did nothing but bring down on his head every spurious allegation from the likes of Issac Don Levine and Ben Mandel (later backed up by hundreds of FBI agents who combed the country looking for dirt on Hiss).

Hiss should have known that the Woodstock typewriter dragged into court as evidence against him wasn’t the one his wife’s family had owned in the 1920s. (Alas, Hiss wasn’t a typewriter man). Finally, at the two perjury trials, he had the chance to destroy Chambers on the witness stand (for his many perjuries, factual inventions, and fictional lives), but somehow let him appear credible to the jury.

Not only did the FBI hide Chambers’ penchant for thievery, assumed names, and homosexuality from the defense, it also infiltrated the Hiss defense team with several moles, including Horace Schmahl and Francis Sayre. It also managed to cover up the fact that much of Chambers’ mysterious “party” activities in the 1930 can best be understood as part of his obsession for grifting.

Intriguingly, Kisseloff raises the possibility that Chambers’s life in the underground was nothing more than an elaborate hoax to pad his party expense account or scam his so-called comrades—agents “running in the field” as fictional cost centers. (At one point Chambers and his wife attempted credit card fraud at some Washington, D.C. department stores, when they figured out that there was a wealthier family named “Chambers” shopping in their neighborhood.)

But at the two perjury trials, the FBI’s front man, Whittaker Chambers, came across as an unfrocked Communist who had seen the light on the road to Moscow and sought nothing more than to purify the poisoned American soul (for which thirty years later Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded him the Medal of Freedom). And now in the White House we have a president who is the spiritual heir of McCarthyite lawyer Roy Cohn and someone who lies with the same facility as Whittaker Chambers, only in Trump’s case it is to mislead the public on his own affiliations as a Kremlin asset.

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Photo by Ana Flávia

How important are voices? President Trump officially fired the head Archivist of the United States, the director of an agency considered the nation’s recordkeeper. Historical records are the voice of a country. Trump’s potential altering of history could change the national voice. The death of Pope Francis is another example of the importance of voice. “Francis’ death silences voice for the voiceless,” headlined an article by Jason Horowitz in the New York Times. “The least among us have lost their voice,” a soup kitchen manager in Rome was quoted in the same article.

Besides changing or losing voice, there is also fear to use one’s voice to describe what is taking place in the United States. Senator Lisa Murkowski, one of the few Republican dissenting voices in Washington, recently told a gathering of non-profit leaders in her home state of Alaska; “We are all afraid,” Murkowski said. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.” Wesleyan University President Michael Roth made a similar comment about why more university leaders are not signing a statement opposing Trump’s assault on academic freedom; “I asked a lot of people to sign, and many people said: ‘I can’t sign. I’m afraid.’”

Faced with changing history, lack of voice and fear, one looks for a different perspective on sound and voice. An unusual exhibit at the International Committee of the Red Cross’ (ICRC) Museum in Geneva highlights the diverse roles of disparate sounds and voices. “Sounds…maybe something passed into the background compared to the visual,” the curator Elisa Rusca explained to me, “But that doesn’t mean they have as much strength, on the contrary, sometimes it’s because of the sound that an image takes on its full power.”

The exhibit “Tuning In – Acoustics of Emotion” focuses on tuning in to non-traditional sounds and voices. “Methodologically,” Rusca said, “the exhibition is indeed an Atlas where the audience can move freely and enter all these different worlds I created, and each world is a different frequence.” Included in the different frequencies are sections on voice and memory, sound at the Museum, emotions and voice, and voice and engagement.

The interdisciplinary exhibition is a welcome relief for those tired of or overwhelmed by current events and too much noise who wish to hear other voices, other sounds. It uses the ICRC’s and IFRC’s audio archives as well as contemporary artists to deal with emotions and sound in an innovative manner; “[M]y wish was to avoid the noise, and to celebrate the richness of diversity,” Rusca wrote. The curator prepared the exhibit with the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (CISA) at the University of Geneva.

By linking sound and voices with humanitarian action, the exhibit highlights the role of emotions, something that is far from obvious in a traditionally visual museum dedicated to humanitarian action. “These are voices, official speeches, but also delegates’ reports, briefings after missions,” Rusca explained. “These are direct shots during situations, crises, but also emergency messages or health radio broadcasts created by national societies.”

Sounds and voices appeal to our emotions. But is there a role for emotions in our intellectual reasoning? How important are emotions in our decision-making process? The eminent philosopher Martha Nussbaum thinks they are very important. She wrote in her 2001 book  Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions: “Instead of viewing morality as a system of principles to be grasped by the detached intellect, and emotions as motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning.”

What questions about our “ethical reasoning” are raised in the “Tuning-In” exhibit? For example, one part of the exhibit shows songs being recorded in response to the 1983-1985 Ethiopian famine. Musicians and celebrities recorded “humanitarian songs” such as Do They Know It’s Christmas? (Band Aid, United Kingdom), We Are the World (USA for Africa, United States of America), Éthiopie (Chanteurs sans frontières, France), Nackt im Wind (Band für Afrika, Germany) and Les yeux de la faim (Fondation Québec Afrique, Canada). What is striking is how quickly the recordings were organized because of the sudden famine as well as the dichotomy between the professional recording studios and the actual situation of the famine victims in Ethiopia.

Several contemporary artists are also featured, such as Dana Whabira and Suzana Sousa. Their conversation on the connection between Ubuntu, African philosophy and love started when Whabira discovered that the word love was not found in the ICRC data base. There is even a soundless exhibit about sign language. Christine Sun Kim’s series of videos produced in collaboration with Thomas Mader, explores the expressiveness of American Sign Language, combining facial expressions and hand gestures.

The Director of the ICRC Museum, Pascal Hufschmid, observed that “Sound is something that penetrates us, it’s something that completely takes us. All of a sudden, if we take this step aside, and look at sound critically and question what the sound conveys and carries with it, it really allows us to better understand the issues and the complexity of humanitarian action.”

More than just allowing us “to better understand the issues and complexity of humanity action,” an exhibit about sound and voice allows us to step back from the enormous noise that now clutters our thinking. Trump and Company are omnipresent to such an extent that we must constantly struggle to find the right descriptive words to accompany our emotional revulsion.

The political has become the psychological. We are living through a national if not international mental health crisis. Nussbaum was spot on; “we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning.” Trump is more than a threat to democracy and the Constitution; he is psychologically disruptive, destabilizing and distracting. Historical allies become enemies, yesterday’s executive order is put on pause, what was said before is no longer valid today. Even historical records in the National Archives can be altered. The traditionally dependable Uncle Sam can no longer be trusted. Our “system of ethical reasoning” needs serious updating.

The ICRC Museum exhibit “Tuning In – Acoustics of Emotion” is a welcome reminder of the importance of sound, voice and emotions. Murkowski’s and Roth’s comments are chilling indications of where we are heading and the necessity of finding new voices and new sounds to replace the deafening noise and sounds that engulf us. The exhibit suggests it’s imperative to tune in to different sounds and voices to find our way out of this emotional tsunami; and that you don’t have to turn on to tune in, nor drop out after tuning in.

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Photograph Source: Becker1999 – CC BY 2.0

Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025

Dear “Cesar,^[1]”

This May Day, as I march with my union, the Berkeley Federation of Teachers,  I will thank them for their role in making Berkeley Unified a sanctuary school district and Berkely, a sanctuary city,  but above all, I would like to thank you.

It’s been over 18 years since your last day in our second grade class—a heartbreaking Valentine’s Day in 2007-–just before your family succumbed to a deportation order forcing you to leave the country, despite your US citizenship.

This year, convicted felon and twice-impeached President Donald Trump’s Valentine’s Day present was to threaten all public schools and universities to desist in teaching about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) or lose funding. He also issued executive orders illegally revoking visas, work permits and even the arrest and detention of immigrants and their allies.

Do you remember the now-censored “DEI” book about Cesar Chavez that I read to your class, Harvesting Hope by Kathleen Krull? She told the story of how the huge Chavez family lost their farm to the depression and drought that scourged Arizona in 1937. Some of you cried when you learned that the Chavez family was forced to trade their productive eighty acre finca for the life of migrant farm workers, developing lesions, blisters, knotted backs and burning eyes and lungs.

But I reassured you: “No hay mal que por bien no venga.—There is nothing so bad that good can’t come of it.” Were it not for the Cesar family’s displacement, he might not have co-founded the United Farm Workers, a union that has saved countless farm workers’ lives, improved working conditions and inspired multitudes internationally.  Similarly, your family’s suffering gave birth to change and hope in the city you were forced to abandon and beyond.

For years I’ve waited until you were old enough to understand my recounting of the resistance leading to the safeguards you inspired.  After you left, your classmates and I would tear up looking at your name on your mailbox and your empty seat.  I fought against tears every time we said the Rosa Parks Pledge:  “to make this world a better place for ALL people to enjoy freedom,’’  because ALL didn’t include you.

Your mother wrote from Mexico that you had transformed from my cheerful, round cheeked model student into a sullen malnourished child who refused to do his school work or eat. I could not stop crying.

Inspired by the ironic letters of my parents’ close friend Blacklist^[2]-breaking Director Dalton Trumbo,  I wrote an Open Letter  to an Immigration Judge:

“Dear Honorable Immigration Judge,

“…how can I go on teaching about equal rights and freedom of speech and all the things our constitution is supposed to defend, and that the very name of our school is supposed to represent,   when the father of my students is deported simply because his skin is darker?  Both my Latine and white students are U.S. citizens.  So how do I explain to the class that one has the right to a family in the United States and the other citizen does not?”

The letter  went  viral.   A community faith organization called BOCA helped my student teacher and me organize an informational event  April 26 with cafeteria tables full of lawyers offering free advice. Rosa Parks’ families pressured the superintendent and police to protect immigrant students. With BOCA’s assistance, as a BFT union representative, I wrote and presented a resolution to the BFT executive board to make BUSD a sanctuary district and it passed overwhelmingly.

Meanwhile your classmates heroically transformed their grief into actions by writing their own “Without You” poems based on Los Panchos’  “Sin Ti” song and read them on an Univision TV special about you.

Next, my spouse and I pulled the best elements of sanctuary ordinances around the country together into a local ordinance and presented it to Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission. It won unanimous support and was recommended to the City Council.  On May 22, 2007 we organized a rally outside city hall in favor of  our beefed up sanctuary ordinance.  Aided by the BFT, many of BFT’s Spanish two-way immersion teachers, KPFA host Larry Bensky, LeConte’s principal and the Berkeley community, the rally reverberated through the city council chambers.  Berkeley Resolution City of Refuge 63711-N.S. was adopted that night (5-22-07) giving a previously symbolic resolution the teeth of law.  Berkeley’s spark of an example ignited other cities that adopted similar ordinances throughout the nation. Months later, BFT president Cathy Campbell got our School Board to adopt our sanctuary District resolution as Board policy.

Over the years, this work has only gained strength.This  January 21st, Berkeley School Board Member Jen Corn submitted an even stronger resolution to the City Council reaffirming  Berkeley’s status as a sanctuary city and it passed overwhelmingly again. And in February,  teachers, principals, office workers and support staff received a two hour training on how to safeguard the rights of our immigrant students. This whole sequence of events began when you, “Cesar,”  my polite, photogenic, straight-A, bilingual seven year-old student, became the poster child of a renewed movement to protect immigrant rights in Berkeley.

So today, as Donald Trump outdoes predecessors in figuratively defiling our Statue of Liberty, Mother of Exiles, thanks to you,“Cesar,” so many more of us are able to defend her call for our “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”   ICE tried to banish the family of one seven year old citizen, and the union and community came together in a powerful fist of defiance, protecting hundreds and inspiring other cities that followed our example. Fear feeds tyranny but you and our union showed us how community and courage can construct democracy.   And no matter what challenges we may face now, there is no going back.

As Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) said,

Once social change begins it cannot be reversed.
One cannot make illiterate those who have learned to read.
One cannot uneducate those who have learned to think.
One cannot humiliate those who feel pride.
One cannot oppress those who are no longer are afraid.

Thank you,” to our Rosa Parks’ Cesar Chavez.

Love,

Maestra Margot^[3]

Notes.

^[1] My student’s pseudonym to protect his privacy.

^[2]Senator Joseph McCarthy was the architect of the Hollywood blacklist with the help of Attorney Roy Cohn, who would go on to mentor Donald Trump.

^[3] My student responded with a very moving note of gratitude, giving me permission to publish this letter.

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Photograph Source: Frank Schwichtenberg – CC BY-SA 4.0

Once the darling of the left for championing electric vehicles, even with a hefty $44,000-plus sticker price on a range of best-selling “S3XY” models, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was regularly pilloried by the right for his presumed eco-friendly stance and generous government loans. Back then, the Chinese carmaker BYD was barely a twinkle in Warren Buffet’s investment eye, but now tops Tesla at over $100 billion in annual sales thanks to lower prices, faster charging times, and Musk’s far-right political conversion. As consumers scramble to keep pace in a fast-changing and uncertain world, the fight for motor supremacy ramps up – more than the increased market share of 100 million cars sold each year is at stake.

Tesla Motors began in 2003 in California, becoming Tesla Inc. in 2010 with the largest-ever initial public offering in auto-making history and in 2017 the highest-valued American carmaker at $50 billion, despite building only 76,000 cars the previous year (compared to GM’s 7.5 million and Ford’s 6.4 million). The brave new electric world belonged to its brash young CEO Musk, who boasted, “When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars, people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with the horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.” Musk promised a new world for a new millennium, propelled via electricity and magnetic induction rather than burnt gasoline and reciprocating pistons, planning to finance a clean green future for the masses via high-end sales, or so he claimed in his 2006 Master Plan. Today, 20% of new car sales are electric and increasing, not least because of Tesla’s pioneering push.

There is no comparison between an electric vehicle (EV) and a gasmobile. As calculated by Martin Eberhard, Tesla’s first CEO and one of five co-founders, an all-electric car can travel 110 miles using the equivalent energy in one gallon of gas. A no-brainer, without including the reduced fuel costs of electricity, minimal maintenance for a leaner, meaner electric engine, or the environmental benefit of no burnt hydrocarbons (e.g., octane).

Taking on the car industry is another story. Back when Ford took on the horse-drawn carriage, manure was the main bugaboo, piling up everywhere on our overcrowded streets. Smelly to be sure but minimal compared to today’s carbon-induced anthropomorphic global warming. In effect, one must take on the oil industry and all of Western civilization. “Drill, baby drill” means “Vroom, baby vroom” and the United States isn’t planning on braking.

EVs can slow the warming, but as the naysayers are keen to point out, if the electric grid runs on fossil fuels EVs will still warm the world and pollute the air, albeit in someone else’s backyard. The dirty grid argument is losing its lustre, however, as renewable energy sources continue to grow – 40% and counting. Likely crossing the 2 ºC (3.6 ºF) thresholdwithin two decades – in what the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states “would pose large and escalating risks to human life as we know it” – global warming is still increasing, but at least one can buy an EV now for more than the eco-vibes if the price is right.

True, the same naysayers don’t believe in global warming, seemingly a MAGA win-win – clean streets and more domestic coal, oil, and gas – piped, trucked, and shipped to all corners of the globe from the number-one petroleum-producing nation ever. Oil not democracy made America great the moment it gushed from a Titusville, Pennsylvania, well in 1859, the original “liberation day.” Global warming may be an existential threat, but the United States has even more to lose from diminished market share and waning influence. Bottom lines matter more to American transactionalists than any downstream damage.

One would think today’s individualist would welcome the independence of making one’s own energy and keeping nature clean – solar power has doubled every three years over the last 12 years to 7%. No longer beholden to outside control, the everyday consumer can easily go it alone thanks to rooftop solar (e.g., 8 kW or 20 400-W panels), meeting all one’s energy needs with photovoltaic (PV) cells and a storage battery, while charging one’s car for free. But after more than a century of oil – safeguarded by the American military – 100 million barrels/day is under threat as demand suffers from growing electrification. No more easy oil profits or taxable revenue. EVs are leading the way to a cleaner future and the end of the US as we know it – on the road was never so liberating. No wonder the Trump administration rolled back EV support and tariffed solar up to 3,500% in a full-throttled fight against change.

There are always jitters as the old gives way to the new until one winner emerges – the heliocentric solar system, steam-powered looms, transistor switching. We are in the midst of even more radical change as gasmobiles lose out to EVs and oil to renewables, despite Trump’s vain attempts to turn back the clock to a presumed former glory via restrictive tariffs.* Seemingly onside with Trump’s great-making revisionism, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni tried to broaden the MAGA scope to “Make the West Great Again,” but as European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen noted, “The West as we knew it no longer exists.” What will emerge is still being worked out as the United States and China duke it out in a thoroughly modern economic spat for new-world supremacy.

For those who measure greatness in GDP, the US is tops at $28 trillion (26%), ahead of the EU $19 trillion (18%), and China $18 trillion (17%) according to the World Bank. But China is in the ascendancy, growing faster and boasting a trillion-dollar positive trade balance compared to the US at minus $1 trillion, the supposed impetus to realign a world economy and $33 trillion in annual trade. Importantly, China holds 90% of rare earths and critical minerals – essential for electronics, satellites, renewables, and AI militaries – now subject to export controls. The US is losing out to a new empire with almost one-sixth of the global population. With feet in both waters, Musk expects the Chinese market to double by 2050.

The EV revolution is safe despite resistance from the usual suspects as the US goes all-in on fossil fuels, cancelling renewable energy projects and even trying to resurrect a long-dead dirty coal industry, now more expensive than all energy sources other than nuclear power. Tesla sales are in free-fall, however, after Musk’s “special government employee” DOGE stint, a.k.a. slasher-flick cameo complete with chainsaw prop. Formerly the world’s top-valued carmaker – having passed Volkswagen in 2019 despite selling one-tenth the number of cars – Tesla’s shares continue to slide, down 50% from a peak value of $1.5 trillion.

The once-vaunted eco-brand may never recover, even as overall global EV sales rise, especially in Europe where both VW and BMW passed the once-dominant Tesla. Tesla’s Q1 sales dropped 13% and profits 71%, showing the depth of displeasure in Musk’s politicking and weak demand for a tired and expensive line-up. At the same time, Volkswagen’s EV sales doubled, GM’s increased 94% (Cadillac 21%), and Ford’s 12%. The car industry is under pressure from the Trump tariffs – jacking up car prices and costing jobs – but Tesla has fared worst, while a growing “Tesla Takedown” includes protests, vandalism, and “I bought this car before Musk went crazy” bumper stickers. Passionate about consumer choices, Germans were particularly outraged by Musk’s support for the far-right and anti-EU Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the most recent federal elections.

The main beneficiary of Musk’s madness is BYD (“Build Your Dreams”), the Chinese carmaker that started out supplying phone batteries for Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung. Co-founded in 1995 by chemist and engineer Wang Chuanfu, BYD benefited from an early infusion of cash from a subsidiary of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, which bought 10% of BYD in 2008 for $230 million, since reduced to 4.4% and now worth $2.4 billion (Yahoo). BYD was soon selling everywhere, including an envious line of electric buses in Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone created in 1980 to aid a rapidly modernizing China.

All 16,400 buses in Shenzhen are electric BYDs with a range of 380 km. With 99% of the world’s electric buses, China is adding thousands of zero-emission transporters per week, and at the current rate will be 100% electric by 2035, displacing more than 1 million barrels of diesel per day. As part of its quest for a “zero-emissions world,” the former battery maker is helping to rid China of its ghastly urban pollution.

In 2009, China passed the US as the world’s top car market, while in the first quarter of 2025 BYD (430,000) surpassed Tesla (337,000) in global sales. Expanding on its success, BYD built its first foreign manufacturing plant in Lancaster, California, in 2013, where it specializes in electric school buses (ESBs). As of 2024, there were almost 5,000 ESBs operating and 7,000 ordered in the US. BYD’s first European plant is under construction in Hungary and will make 300,000 EVs per year. In Brazil, the world’s sixth-largest car market, BYD is building an EV plant on the site of an abandoned Ford factory – 70% of EVs in Brazil are now BYD and is the top seller in the capital Brasilia for all cars, electric or gas.

Initially slow to the game, legacy car companies have all rolled out their own e-versions, such as Nissan (Leaf), BMW (iX), and Ford (Mach-E). BYD is head of the pack, announcing a five-minute charging time, half that of Tesla’s with a new and improved chemical storage process – essentially liquid-fuel filling time. No need to fill up any more on coffee and donuts while you wait for a roadside e-fill. BYD also offers a free autonomous-driving add-on “God’s Eye” that outperforms Tesla’s vaunted autonomous driving option. With a proven range of lower-priced EVs such as the $10,000 Dolphin Surf, today’s car wars are no longer internal combustion versus electric induction, but EV versus EV, while the decreasing demand for oil adds pressure to a world run on petroleum and American dominance.

The electric revolution is roaring, nowhere more than in China that accounts for 90% of BYD’s sales. The inflection point between the old and new is fast approaching as EVs reach price parity with all gasmobiles. For some, the tipping point has come and gone – a $20,000 EV with a 200-mile range. As BYD breaks into more markets, Western carmaking supremacy will suffer and hasten the change to renewables and from West to East.

Enter the new dragon – the Trump tariffs on imported cars and car parts, supposedly intended to return manufacturing jobs to a high-wage US market. It’s hard to make sense of a coherent American strategy amid the contradictory messaging, regular reality-show taunts, and constant flip-flopping – sold as the oddest of negotiating tools that alienates more than rallies others to the MAGA cause – but despite losing more than 600,000 jobs under NAFTA the tariffs are a ruse designed in part to slow the change from brown to green. Tariffs will not raise revenue, return supply chains to the United States, or “reshore” American manufacturing jobs hollowed out of rusted industrial regions. Billion-dollar factories require planning, investment, and tax breaks over at least a decade, not anarchic policies, market uncertainty, and the loss of investor and consumer confidence.

Targeted tax cuts and subsidies are needed to incentive investment, such as the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that made $369 billion available in green spending and was already creating American jobs in renewable energy, battery manufacturing, and critical mineral processing. But with most Trump antics, the goal is to divide and conquer, inciting chaos to advance an authoritarian agenda that increases corporate control at the expense of consumer protection.

American infrastructure is for sale to the highest bidder, including an eventual state-run TikTok sell-off to Trump’s tax-slashing billionaire tech pals as well as Space-X contracts for First Buddy Musk, whose Starlink company owns 60% of 10,000 earth-orbiting satellites. No surprise that space-launch support was spared the chainsaw in Musk’s DOGE clear-out. Next up, a “free trade zone” designation for his expanding empire in Bastrop, Texas, and relaxed regulation on autonomous driving for Tesla’s long-promised fleet of robotaxis. Insider trading is part of the quid pro quo, as in a “Good time to buy!!! DJT” social-media post hours before Trump announced a 90-day tariff pause using the NASDAQ ticker symbol for his company.

After four decades of outsourcing manufacturing to cheap-labour foreign markets (especially Mexico), Tesla also benefits from the tariffs on non-American-sourced cars, because 60% of the youngest American carmaker’s content is domestically produced. As Bernstein auto analyst Daniel Roeska noted, “Tesla is the clear structural winner” from the Trump tariffs, while Detroit’s Big Three, Japan, Korea, and Germany will suffer more because of larger foreign supply chains. It helps to have the ear and mouth of a salesman president using the White House as a backdrop for a new kind of showroom as Trump’s million-dollar donor is rewarded at the expense of American carmakers and workers.

Stellantis has already announced 900 lost jobs at five US factories, while Volvo plans to axe 800 jobs at three US facilities. At the same time, BYD is not subject to the vagaries of the Trump tariffs because it does not export EVs to the United States, choosing instead to concentrate on foreign markets. As June Yoon of The Financial Times noted, “Because BYD does not sell passenger EVs in the US, it is now insulated from the chaos unleashed by Trump’s latest tariff push.” As for other goods, restrictive barriers to Chinese imports (e.g., 145% tariffs) mostly hurt low-income consumers who buy at Walmart, Home Depot, Target, and other cut-price outlets.

Is it all just ignorance, based on a 40-year obsession with tariffs? We already knew Trump couldn’t count after claiming that he won the 2020 election because he received more votes than any previous president – not hard to do when the population keeps growing – albeit fewer votes than his opponent. Or is it another MAGA ruse to distract from a failed economic policy that purports to rejig the global supply chain in favor of a rusted rural America via blanket tariffs? – what Peterson Institute economist Mary Lovely called “re-industrialization in the most inefficient way possible.” If Trump was serious about workers, he would offer incentives to build domestically and impose penalties on corporations that don’t relocate.

After decades of neoliberal neglect, Trump claims that taxing nations more for goods will return manufacturing to the US, called “nostalgic fantasy” by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. In The Post-American World, Zakaria also likened Western decline to professional tennis, once dominated by American players, though now “everyone is playing the game.” Same for the decline in IPOs, scientific papers, and manufacturing. As noted by the IMF, the US will suffer most as growth slows because of the “supply shock” as other countries divert their trade to cover the depressed demand from the US, which imports 25% of its goods.

No one expects the United States to start making the world’s jeans, shirts, and running shoes nor believes Trump’s obvious lies that “tariffs are making us rich.” In fact, the US has even more to lose as others shun American goods and realign trading relations because of his “unilateral bullying.” Treating China as a “hostile trading partner” in a US-designed trading world pushes China towards a new economic model that excludes American markets and expands ties with Southeast Asia, India, and Europe. A new Silk Road is being established that already exports more to Europe ($570 billion) than to the US. The rules-based order begun after World War II is no longer being directed from Washington.

Rather than resurrecting American manufacturing, the Trump game is to roil the competition, such as the European Union reacting piecemeal. The EU proposed a “zero for zero” deal on industrial goods prior to his April 2 tariff, rejected by Trump as “not good enough.” Musk also called for no tariffs between North America and Europe, even though Tesla benefits from the protectionist American market. European worries about German cars, Spanish olive oil, French and Italian wines, and Irish pharmaceuticals have held, but EU unity could falter with individual tariffs. Another prize is to stop investigations into Google, Meta, X, and Apple under the EU Digital Services Act – Meta and Apple were both fined as unfair “gatekeepers.”

Instead of halting China’s rise by “decoupling” the American economy from China’s vast export market – 15% of goods to the US – decoupling has begun from America as Trump pretends to be “actively negotiating” with others to calm the markets. Started in Canada, an “Anything but America” movement is expanding worldwide as consumers stop buying American-made goods, symbolically turning products upside down on supermarket shelves. The EU, China, and others will benefit from Trump’s protectionist policy, disengagement, and provocation as countries trade more freely in a post-American world – an American own goal as 40% of the world’s 50 largest companies are American and 36% of the world’s largest 100 (based on sales, profits, assets, and market value, Forbes). Trump’s Medicine Show is killing the patient as trade reorganizes without the US.

Trump’s callous advice to “hang tough” is okay for millionaires, but not average consumers as prices rise and jobs are shed (a 25% tariff on a $100,000 car won’t deter a millionaire). The Trump tariffs are expected to hike annual US consumer spending by $5,000, car prices by $5,000, and new house prices by $11,000. Similarly, farmers lose out as China turns to Brazil for soya beans (half supplied by the US), American hotels suffer as Canadians and other foreign travellers vacation elsewhere (US visits already down 40%), and low-income families pay extra for everything. Even Christmas will cost more as Chinese toys are marked up beyond Santa’s meagre means. Same for Apple’s iPhone, Sony’s PlayStation 5, and Dell computers, while China cancelled the sale of 50 Boeing jets at $55 million each.

The Trump tariffs have at least exposed the inherent flaws in unregulated capitalism and executive fiat. Retaliate or Negotiate? – sounds like a fawning reality show. Trump may win more Fox viewers but is losing everyone else in a shameless rebranding of the US as a low-end chop shop. The me-first preacher is at war with the world to advance his own greedy Amexit agenda, one more interested in work than workers, reduced governance, and a tax-slashing oligarchy. The reality-show banter may continue to dazzle those who think Trump’s sub-literate and low-IQ thinking is a solution to what ails the world, including his Republican supporters, who should all know by now that Trump is an elitist libertarian to the bone, Republican in name only, the dreaded RINO moniker he uses to mock GOP critics.

Rather than reform a broken America, the goal is to break more to create a free management hand with limited governance and reduced regulations. It is not America First, but a limited monied class first that exploits others and offers no protection to workers, the environment, or community standards. Trump is chief RINO, pretending to support worker ideals.

Given his friendship with Elon Musk, one might also ask if the US president is an oil and gas man or an EV man? Can Trump’s “Drill, baby drill” coexist with Musk’s “Gasmobiles are so yesterday?” Will the new right-wing Muskies take up the slack of the damaged Tesla and USA brands? No more 50% annual growth in sales as Musk predicted. No more American dominance or petroleum power. At least, demand is dampening.

In the face of increased pollution and global warming, slowing down and decreasing demand for oil is good for the earth. That wasn’t Trump’s intention – just the opposite – but slower growth is good. At his January inauguration, Trump also promised that Americans would “be able to buy the car of your choice.” The choice is becoming easier by the day. California already has more EV chargers than gas pumps. With 1.4 billion people, China’s domestic car market will benefit most from increased control over new technology that will ultimately help foreign consumers purchase cheaper EVs.

When the dust finally settles on the ongoing Trump Follies, we may have Elon Musk to thank for upending the basic tenets of capitalism. Beginning with Tesla and followed by BYD, a new future beckons. Electric bicycles, motorcycles, and scooters are all replacing gasoline vehicles in Asian markets, plagued by pollution and expensive gasoline. As Japan conquered the electronics market in the twentieth century, China is conquering the auto industry in this century. Tesla has lost the race for the low-end vehicle and the US is losing the race to lead the world.

Trump is paving the way to the end of the fossil-fuel industry, long supported by unfair regulations, oversized subsidies, and minimal taxation, while getting a free ride on pollution and global warming. EV to gasmobiles is approaching 50-50 with lower prices and improved charging infrastructure. The batteries are stronger, better, and more efficient. Most charging is still overnight at home, but for those on the go, one doesn’t need to worry any more. When the bi-directional grid is finished and batteries are in every home, we will say goodbye to oil, a win-win for citizens and their pocket books.

Rather than dismantling government with excessive downsizing and shrinking a global economy with counterproductive tariffs, American dominance is being diminished everywhere – more divisive than inclusive, more elitist than egalitarian, more Benedictine than Franciscan. Pretending to protect the world from governmental overreach, Trump’s policies are a libertarian free-for-all, a sell-out and sell-off to enrich the already wealthy. Rather than making anything great, Trump will be remembered as The Man Who Tried to Sell the World (and failed miserably).

Tomorrow’s consumerism will not be shaped by American chaos and uncertainty, but by China’s dominance and the transition to renewables. The next US electoral fair may restore some dignity and consistency to a rogue America, but the United States is already in decline. Happily, tomorrow’s world will be cleaner, greener, and quieter.

* Currently 10% on all imports, 25% on aluminum, cars, and car parts, and 145% on China excluding computers and phones (for now) and oil products. Country-specific “reciprocal” tariffs were paused for 90 days (early July), calculated with a simplistic “trade deficit divided by imported goods divided by 2” formula.

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Marco Rubio speaks to the press before departing Paris, France, April 18, 2025. Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett.

There is no more important or prestigious cabinet position than the secretary of state.  The first secretaries included such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay.  All became presidents or almost reached the presidency.  In contemporary times, secretaries of state included Henry Stimson, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, and John Kerry.  More recent secretaries have been less competent or successful (Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo), but no one has been more pathetic than the current secretary, Marco Rubio, who has embarrassed the country, the Department of State, and particularly himself in the first 100 days of the Trump presidency.

Rubio has made the Department of State virtually irrelevant, playing no role in key negotiations involving wars between Russia and Ukraine as well as between Israel and the Palestinians.  Rubio is not participating in the sensitive talks between the United States and Iran to restore the Iran nuclear agreement.  All of these matters are being handled by a billionaire real-estate developer, Steve Witkoff, who has no experience or knowledge in dealing with any of these issues.  But Witkoff is worth $2 billion, and presumably Trump felt that clinching real estate deals is good training for crafting complicated international agreements.

Witkoff has met with Russian President Vladimir Putin four times in the past several months, but the Russian bombardment against Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, has only increased in that period.  We know very little about Witkoff’s experiences in these meetings, but we do know that Trump falsely believes that Putin has made key “concessions.”  The first concession, according to Trump, is that Putin will be “stopping the war.”  The second is even more risible: Putin has agreed “not to take the whole country.”  Even before the Putin-Witkoff talks, Trump endorsed Putin’s key demands: “Crimea will stay with Russia,” and Ukraine “will never be able to join NATO.”

Following the most recent talks between Putin and Witkoff last week, Putin’s key foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov praised the meeting for “allowing Russia and the United States to further bring their positions closer together, not only on Ukraine but also on a number of other international issues.” Trump merely said he heard that Witkoff and Putin had “a pretty good meeting,” but hadn’t been able to talk directly to his envoy.  As for other global matters, Trump falsely claimed he had concluded “200 economic deals,” and that talks had begun on trade and tariff matters between China and the United States, which Beijing officially denied.

Even before Witkoff left his $6 billion condo in Miami Beach and arrived in the White House, Rubio had already begun the destruction of the Department of State as well as the important humanitarian and infrastructure projects of the Agency of International Development (AID) that were so important the world over.  The position of undersecretary for civilian security, democracy, and human rights will be eliminated.  The office of global criminal justice that investigates war crimes and conflict operations to prevent wars will be closed.  My 42 years of bureaucratic experience tells me that folding a smaller office into a larger one—which is what Rubio is doing—essentially means fewer resources and less bandwidth, and the end of institutional memory.

Elon Musk’s elimination of AID is a good example of the damage that Rubio inherited and even expanded. There were 10,000 AID staffers before the Trump administration arrived; there are now 10 full-time employees seconded to the Department of State.  Just as President Bill Clinton’s elimination of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1999 weakened the U.S. capabilities to engage in essential arms control agreements, the elimination of AID means there will no longer be a stand-alone humanitarian assistance bureau.  The recent earthquake in Southeast Asia found Russia and China sending humanitarian missions to Myanmar and Thailand.  The United States send three humanitarian experts to Myanmar who learned upon their arrival that they no longer had jobs with the Department of State.  This is typical of what has become the meltdown of U.S. diplomatic efforts in Trump’s first hundred days.

Rubio has severely weakened the department itself in what the mainstream media euphemistically referred to as a “shake-up.”  The so-called “shake up” involved cutting the department’s budget in half, from $56 billion to $28 billion.  The State Department’s budget is around 5% of the Pentagon’s budget.  Rubio also ended the department’s role in human rights programs, war crimes monitoring, and bolstering democratic institutions abroad.  Rubio was a huge supporter of these programs as a senator, but as an acolyte of Donald Trump, he said that he was at the department to reverse “decades of bloat and bureaucracy” and to eradicate an ingrained “radical political ideology.”  As part of his deference to Trump, Rubio eliminated the office that focused on combating disinformation from Russia, China, and Iran.

When Rubio was selected to become secretary of state, he immediately reversed his positions on key matters in order to align himself with the views of Donald Trump.  Rubio had consistently praised Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself against a more powerful adversary, but in February he said “it’s hyperbole to believe that the Ukrainians are going to completely crush the Russian military.”  Rubio previously emphasized that we must help Ukraine “so that we’re not seen as unreliable and undermined in our credibility.”  Following confirmation, however, he added that we must “do it in a way that doesn’t drain us.”  Rubio added that U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s self-defense was a “costly distraction from efforts to contain China.”

Trump and Rubio are responsible for giving Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu an even freer hand to conduct genocidal attacks against the Palestinians.  They state that Israeli attacks are being conducted with “clairvoyance and justice” to ensure that the Hamas terrorist organization may never “threaten the people of Israel again.”  Rubio opposes all restrictions on military aid to Israel as well as opposing restrictions on the extremist actions of the Jewish settlers on the West Bank. There is no longer any discussion at the Department of State about a two-state solution in the Middle East, or any other kind of solution.

Rubio’s original plan called for closing down the entire Bureau of African Affairs, but the Central Intelligence Agency lobbied to reverse that decision by intervening at the White House.  Did Rubio not know that African capitals are leading sites for recruiting foreign assets.  Also, without embassies or consulates in Africa, it would be next to impossible for the CIA to base its agents in African capitals.

There is little direct communication between Trump and Rubio, and certainly no love lost between the two men.  They clashed as rivals in the 2016 presidential primaries.  Rubio called Trump a “dangerous con man:” Trump called Rubio a “total lightweight.”  Both men were right…and both are responsible for diminishing the influence of the United States in global diplomacy.

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Just after New Years in 1979 I moved from the East Village to Brooklyn.  Carol was pregnant, but her cramped digs on Carroll Street would not accommodate us.  We found a loft building, very rare in Park Slope, on the lower margins of the neighborhood near 4^th Avenue, a six lane artery running from downtown Brooklyn to Bay Ridge.  Across the avenue a ruined commercial zone of dilapidated red brick structures of unknown provenance, mostly abandoned, spread over both sides of the Gowanus Canal, described in the tabloids as “the most polluted body of water in the nation.”

Creating a home in the loft was a stretch, financed on a limited budget, the $12,000 I’d saved from the combat pay of a first lieutenant in Vietnam, augmented by disability payments.  We had a raw space 30 x 100 feet to enclose, electrify and plumb, roughly half the second floor off the center stairwell in the warehouse of a former wholesaler.  Two existing partitions in lacquered beadboard divided the space in three sections, front, rear and center, and absorbed whatever light the windows on the street side provided, and photos show the interior was always dark even after a large metal door over an opening used for uploading deliveries from an empty lot along the side wall was replaced with a pane of glass half the dimensions of a typical storefront.

Plumbing was a major challenge, and I gaped in awe as our guy melted lead for joints stuffed with oakum in steel drainpipes lowered into the building’s basement to enter the urban sewage.  We found sinks for the kitchen and bathroom, and a gas range and fridge in a used fixtures outlet on Delancy Street in Manhattan.  And we used my brother’s econovan to transport a cast iron tub we found dumped on a street corner in the Bronx.  Finding matching claw feet to support it seemed improbable until I picked through a brim-filled bin with demolition discards in a salvage yard on the fringes of Red Hook.  I picked up translucent glass bricks in the same yard.  These formed a rear wall in the bathroom to allow some natural light after windows along the building’s rear wall were obscured by the narrow corridor we erected leading to a fire exit. The front beadboard partition formed a T and one side became our bedroom, the other a study, dappled with daylight through four large greasy windows facing the street.  To a working chimney we attached a Ben Franklin Stove in front of our bed, acquired how I no longer recall, but fueled by firewood consigned periodically in face cords from a Long Island supplier and hoisted to our loft on a freight elevator accessed from the sidewalk.  A large gas blower suspended from the ceiling in the central space provided most of the heat.

Additional bedrooms were roughed out behind the beadboard to the rear paralleling the kitchen wall, for two kids, the child we were expecting and Carol’s daughter, Sarabinh, then six, in joint custody between her father’s nearby apartment in the upper Slope and our loft.  A hodge podge of chairs, couches and hanging house plants was arranged near the large sidewall window and a hammock of acrylic fiber stretched between two lally columns that helped support the floor above us.  A ballet bar was installed along the rear beadboard wall, which I used for stretching, and in front of that I laid my tumbling mat for acrobatics.  In New York at the time, legal occupancy in a loft building required AIR – Artist in Residence – status.  As a sometimes student of Modern Dance and other movement disciplines, my certification as a dancer was granted under the signature of Henry Geldzahler, the then reigning New York City Culture Czar.  A small sign with AIR in black lettering was affixed near the building’s front door, and applied collectively to all the residents split among six lofts, mostly painters and a sculptor.  In December that year, we hosted a party, a belated celebration of Carol’s birthday in October and Simon’s birth in August.  It would also honor ‘Lofts Labors Won.’

The following August with our one year old in tow, we departed the city on Carol’s literary mission, destination Castine, Maine.  Our first stop was at a commune near Brattleboro, Vermont, where old movement cronies of Carol’s had gone back to the land in the late sixties.  They were an ingrown, argumentative lot which, on their periphery, included two columnist for the Nation in private summer residence.  For three days we labored and convived with these old comrades, one of whom formerly in the Weather Underground and ensconced there pseudonominously, was still wanted by the FBI.  Carol phoned to Castine to confirm our arrival time, and was informed by Mary McCarthy that the visit was off.  This was to have been the first face to face with the subject of the  biography Carol had just begun, postponed now because Mary’s husband had broken his leg falling off a ladder while cleaning the gutters.

A majority of Carol’s forebearers had settled in Maine from colonial times, and a great aunt whose story she greatly revered was buried there in the family plot, along with a host of other Brightmans and Mortons.  The Maple Grove Cemetery played like Thornton Wilder country.  So, Maine trip on.  While passing from New Hampshire into Maine we stopped to orient ourselves at a Visitor’s Center, where I haphazardly grabbed a few brochures, including a pamphlet of real estate listings.  Except where work was concerned – I was also in the midst of a book project –  Carol and I weren’t planners; we were impulsive doers.  On occasion we daydreamed out loud about finding a place “in the country,” never projecting the fantasy beyond the nearer regions of upstate New York.  One real estate offering showed an old federal house on a saltwater farm near where we were now bound. And when our route took us past the office of the agent representing the property, we joked that it was fated.   We’d go check it out, “but we’re not serious,” Carol disclaimed.

The house, which had been empty for a quarter century, was structurally sound with a good roof, and came with several outbuildings, including a barn and the middle twenty acres of the old homestead, in field and woodlot.  An old bachelor farmer had lived there without indoor plumbing or electricity until the early sixties, then in the local tradition took refuge with a younger family for his final years.  Without thinking that this would become the rural equivalent of our recent urban undertaking, another residence to be mounted from scratch, we focused on the $45,000 asking price and bought it on the spot.  We had to lean on friends and relatives to assemble the ten grand downpayment, and we had a rough ride to get a mortgage approved, but while we put that home back together, it became our summer escape for the next six years.

There were always wooded areas where I grew up on Long Island, and I was drawn to them.  I’m sure looking back they were enlarged in a child’s eyes, and minuscule when compared to our twenty acres of tall pines and spruce that blended seamlessly into miles of contiguous woods where I now wandered on frequent constitutionals.  The solitude was compelling and a balm to my mental wellbeing.  That I would soon find on the mothballed Brooklyn waterfront a far from bucolic but equally suitable option for these frequent bouts of solitary wool gathering, not for only three months, but for nine, astounds me still.

Exploring the environs of the Gowanus was my first step toward Red Hook.  Plans for the rehabilitation of the canal would become a topic for a deep investigative dive by Carol and me into the history of the canal from its idyllic indigenous setting as a healthy estuary where foot long oysters grew, to the contemporary canal in decay which civil minded community leaders in Carroll Gardens, the largely Italian American neighborhood bordering the other side of the patch surrounding the Gowanus, had long in their sights for cleanup and development.  We dug into that story for a couple of years, wrote a serious proposal, but nothing ever came of it.  Why, I no longer recall?  When you live by your pen engineering projects from elevated states of endorphin fueled enthusiasm that never reach completion, certainly for me and Carol also, was a not infrequent occurrence.  A colorful sidebar here would include the presence of the Joey Gallo crime family among these mostly silent empty blocks, and while remaining agnostic as to its veracity, news reports on the doings of the New York Mob if the Gowanus warranted a mention might note the neighborhood legend that held the canal was where the wise guys dumped the bodies of their rivals.

We’d soon settled into the neighborhood where a number of familiars from the anti-Vietnam War movement had also settled to start their own families.  Carol was teaching remedial classes at Brooklyn College which had initiated open admissions, at the same time peddling articles, to a variety of outlets.  I still commuted to my non-profit, Citizen Soldier, in the Flat Iron Building on lower Fifth Avenue in the city until early 1982.  It was a movement job at movement wages, advocating for GIs and veterans around a host of issues, most recently the alleged health related illnesses from exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, and for vets who participated in Atomic Tests during the fifties, from radiation.  After twelve years of full time activism primarily related to Vietnam, the move to Brooklyn had severed that umbilical and I was ready for a change, which initially took the form of painting someone else’s living spaces and querying magazines for assignments.  Apart from family responsibilities, my time was my own.

When Simon turned three, we enrolled him in the Brooklyn Child Care Collective, one of those alternative institutions organized by lefties of our generation.  It was located a fair piece from the loft near Grand Army Plaza.  Shaded under the concrete infrastructure of the Williamsburg Bridge in Manhattan I found a shop to custom build a bike adapted to Brooklyn’s rough streets: ten speed, but thick tires, straight handlebar and a large padded seat.  With Simon strapped into a red toddler carrier mounted over the real wheel, I peddled him to day care most mornings.

The exploration of the Gowanus along our stretch of 4^th Avenue from 9^th Steet to Union Street, and taking in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood where many of our informants resided, began during Carol’s and my investigative project.  Often, however, I would walk these blocks on my own, camera at the ready.  My way of seeing the material wreckage strewn along the banks of the canal was informed by the work of Robert Smithson’s, The Monuments of Passaic.  Smithson sited installations “in specific out door locations,” and is best known for his Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake of Utah.  In his article for ArtForum illustrated with six bleak black and white photographs Smithson described “the unremarkable industrial landscape” in Passaic, New Jersey as “ruins in reverse…the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.”  This was the perfect conceptual framework for reflection on what I was looking at.  Embedded in Smithson’s musings, his “set of futures” perhaps made predictable the upscale development that would totally transform the blocks around the Gowanus forty years later; but that’s another story.

In an earlier time, the canal had provided the perfect conduit for the materials from which the surrounding neighborhoods had been constructed.  A small number of enterprises, the Conklin brass foundry, a depot for fuel storage, were still in operation but the vast acreage that once served some productive purpose was littered with industrial waste and the shells of abandoned buildings, some capacious like a former power plant.  Idle cranes and derricks stories high stretched their necks over the canal like metallic dinosaurs.  At three compass points along the horizon billboard sized signs on metal grids perched on spacious roof tops – Kentile Floors, Goya Foods, Eagle Clothes – were markers of manufacturing life, but if still active I never learned.

With my new bike, I began to wander farther afield, making stops along Court Street, the main drag in Carroll Gardens where you’d find an espresso stand where Italian was spoken that seemed to have been imported intact – baristas to stainless counter top – from Sicily.  If only for the historical record, I insert here the presence of two storefronts that were likely unique throughout the entire city.  Pressed tin sheets were still common for ceilings in commercial buildings in New York, and spares in a variety of designs filled upright bins at a specialty shop on Court Street.  In the same block locals who kept roof top flocks of pigeons could buy replacement birds and the feed that sustained them.

The pigeon shop in particular conjured scenes from the Elia Kazan film of Budd Schulberg’s On the Waterfront in which Brando tends his own flock on the roof of a tenement, the typical dwelling for the families of stevedores who worked the Brooklyn docks, once the most active waterfront in the nation.  After World War Two, container ships were rapidly replacing the old merchant freighters with their cargo holds, and increasingly making landfall, not in Brooklyn, but across the harbor in New Jersey.

Frozen in time, the old Brooklyn waterfront, adjacent to the neighborhood known as Red Hook, now became the cycling grounds for my long solitary ruminations.  Access to the area was usually across the swing bridge over the canal on Carroll Street which, after emerging under the Gowanus Expressway, dead ended on Van Brunt Street, a long artery that ran for nearly two miles parallel to the string of wharfs that jutted into the harbor, terminating before an enormous stone warehouse dating from the Civil War.  An old wooden wharf, long and wide, ran that building’s length on the water side, its thick rotted planking making an obstacle course I often ventured over despite the warning sign to keep off.

I could ride Van Brunt and up and down its side streets for an hour without ever seeing another person or being passed by a motor vehicle.  Many of the roadways were paved with cobble stones, safely navigated by my bike’s thick tires.  As with select locations on the Gowanus streets, a sprinkle of diminutive dwellings mysteriously still inhabited and surprisingly well maintained co-existed with the adjoining wasteland, the hold outs from more stable and more populated times.  There was a storefront selling live chickens that, when open, filled small wooden crates on the sidewalk.  And at the end of one particularly isolated block a small two story clapboard-sheathed home behind a chain link fence and next to a vacant lot, but where several late model gas guzzlers were parked at street side, I actually saw live chickens in the yard pecking at the ground.  If I rode down Wolcott Street to the water’s edge, I’d have a close up 400 yards across Buttermilk Channel of Governor’s Island, a military installation for almost two centuries, and since the new millennium the site of a public park accessible only by ferry.  Inhabited all those years, generations of soldiers had a front row view of the rise and fall of the Brooklyn waterfront.

The Loft in 2024.

Just before Christmas on an overcast day I was riding along one of these interior streets feeling hemmed in by the ghostly emptiness surrounding me between shuttered buildings to one side and the old dockside secured behind walls of security fencing on the other, when a pack of feral dogs appeared several hundred feet to my front.  There was a wooden creche at road side  – clearly the devotional installation of a local parish I could never identify – with oversized statues of the cast at the Manger that had become the territorial shelter that four gum baring yelping canines were now furiously defending.  As they began to rapidly close on me, I swung my bike one-eighty and hit the peddles with a sprinter’s gusto, soon realizing I could never outrun them.  In an instant I stopped my bike, dismounted and faced the charging pack, waving my arms high above my head growling and barking as loudly and aggressively as I could.  They stopped in their tracks, turned in formation and low tailed it from whence they’d come.  Not to push my luck, I did the same.  Barely through the door back home, still in the flush of wonder and exhilaration, I yelled to Carol, “you’ll never believe what just happened to me.”

All photographs by Michael Uhl.

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The scene has become tragically familiar in occupied Palestine: the pounding fists on the door in the dead of night, the splintering wood, the shouts in broken Arabic. Soldiers storm in, rifles raised, children jolt awake, and someone is taken for nothing more than attending a protest or being related to someone who did, or throwing a stone, or posting something on social media in protest to the atrocities committed against their own people.

This past Thursday, April 17, 2025, marked Palestinian Prisoners’ Day amid the height of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the West Bank. Commemorated since 1974, this day honors the central role of Palestinian political captives in the struggle for national liberation. It is also a date etched in sorrow as well as resistance. Nearly one million Palestinians have been imprisoned since 1948—teachers, farmers, health workers, children, artists, and leaders. Today, nearly 10,000 remain behind bars, including 3,500 held in administrative detention without charge or trial, 400 children, and 29 women. Many more abducted from Gaza are held in secret military facilities like Sde Teiman, where they endure severe torture, starvation, and denial of medical care. Nearly 40% of Palestinian men in the occupied territories have been imprisoned at least once. These are not statistics. They are fathers, daughters, poets, farmers- lives interrupted, families torn apart, futures deferred.

Palestinian prisoners are not only victims but leaders of the resistance. From inside the prisons, they organize, write, educate, and inspire movements beyond the prison walls. Their leadership is visible not only in political statements and hunger strikes, but also in the forging of cultural and educational collectives that have spread through refugee camps and solidarity tents. During annual commemorations, family members-especially women-gather in massive numbers, surrounding tents and camp walls covered with portraits of imprisoned, martyred, and disappeared loved ones. These gatherings reflect a deep communal identification with the imprisoned, who are seen as both symbols and agents of resistance. In some cases, imprisoned men have smuggled out sperm to enable their wives to conceive, a powerful act of defiance against a system intent on severing family continuity and reproductive futures.

Administrative Detention in Israel

Israel’s policy of administrative detention allows for the imprisonment of individuals without charge or trial, often based on “undisclosed evidence”. This practice has been widely criticized by human rights organizations. As of early 2025, reports indicate that over 10,000 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, with many detained under administrative orders. Detainees endure harsh conditions, including inadequate food, medical care, and reports of physical abuse.(AP, 2025)

The trauma experienced by detainees frequently extends beyond their captivity, a captivity never justified (Guardian, 2025). Former prisoners have reported severe psychological effects, such as insomnia, anxiety, and difficulty reintegrating into family life. For instance, Amer Abu Hlel, after over a year in administrative detention without charges, suffered from physical injuries and profound psychological distress, leading to social withdrawal and fear of re-arrest. Palestinian captives speak of beatings, deprivation, torture, rape: Palestinians speak of the ‘hell’ of Israeli prisons. (Le Monde, 2024)

Gendered Violence in Israeli Colonial Prisons

In the landscape of Israeli colonial repression, the prison emerges not merely as a site of incarceration, but as a gendered apparatus of control. Palestinian feminist scholars and human rights researchers have long argued that sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is not incidental, but structural to the Israeli occupation regime. From degrading strip searches to sexual torture, these acts serve as tools of humiliation, discipline, and subjugation, part of a calculated strategy to dominate and destabilize both individuals and the broader Palestinian social fabric.

Such acts are not random- they are calculated forms of domination. Sexualized violence against male prisoners is used to demasculinize the colonized subject, to strip away dignity and humiliate in ways that destabilize identity and community. This strategy echoes other colonial regimes where emasculation and rape were used not only to extract confessions but to degrade the captive into an object of scorn-even in their own eyes. On the other side of this gendered war is the violation and control of women’s bodies, used to rupture kinship lines and reproductive futures. As Palestinian feminist scholars have long argued, this is not merely about torture-it is about reconfiguring power through gendered, sexualized trauma.

Palestinian criminologist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2009) has been at the forefront of theorizing sexual violence as a pillar of settler-colonial governance. In her foundational study, Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study, she documents how the Israeli state weaponizes threats of rape, sexual humiliation, and coercive tactics such as isqāt siyāsī (political subjugation) to recruit collaborators and terrorize communities. Through a decolonial feminist lens, Shalhoub-Kevorkian contends that sexual violence is not an aberration but a “normal” extension of colonial power, aimed at dismantling kinship structures, eroding resistance, and reinforcing both Israeli domination and internal patriarchal controls (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2009).

Sociologist Nahla Abdo (2014) expands this analysis through her historical account of Palestinian women political prisoners in Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System. Drawing on oral histories and testimonies, Abdo reveals how Palestinian women have endured sexual torture, harassment, and invasive bodily violence as tools of repression. The story of Rasmea Odeh-who was raped, tortured, and later exiled-stands as a harrowing example of how the Israeli prison system targets women’s bodies to punish political dissent and stigmatize resistance. For Abdo, gendered violence is not just about physical harm-it is an assault on Palestinian womanhood itself, aimed at “criminalizing” female fighters and instilling collective fear (Abdo, 2014).

Khalida Jarrar, a Palestinian feminist, former political prisoner, and human rights advocate, contributed further to this field with a 2023 report for the Independent Commission for Human Rights. Based on firsthand accounts from detainees during Israel’s war on Gaza, the report catalogues gendered violations against women, men, and children alike-including threats of rape, verbal sexual degradation, forcible removal of veils, and collective strip searches. Jarrar situates these acts within the framework of colonial gendered violence, emphasizing that such humiliations are not isolated misconduct but “systematic strategies of domination” meant to erode identity and social integrity (Jarrar, 2023).

International findings echo these feminist insights. The 2024 United Nations Commission of Inquiry report on the Occupied Palestinian Territory explicitly recognized the use of sexual and gender-based violence by Israeli forces. It concluded that such acts are “intrinsically linked” to the broader framework of occupation and racial domination. The report confirmed the use of rape, sexual torture, and humiliation against both men and women in detention-including forced nudity in front of family members and rape threats used to extract confessions or silence dissent. These findings offer international validation of long-standing feminist critiques, emphasizing that the body-especially the colonized body-becomes a battleground where control is exercised and trauma inscribed (UN COI, 2025).

Together, these scholarly and investigative efforts reveal a disturbing consistency: Israeli prisons and detention centers function as laboratories of colonial violence where gender and sexuality are weaponized with precision. Whether by emasculating men through sexual torture or stripping veiled women to break cultural codes, these acts aim to humiliate and destroy the social and psychological fabric of Palestinian life. Feminist theorists like Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Abdo remind us that this is not merely about individual suffering; it is about domination through intimate, bodily terror. (Abdo, 2014)

Ultimately, the violence meted out in these carceral spaces must be understood as political and gendered. It is not accidental that Palestinian children, women, and men emerge from Israeli detention systems with scars-visible and invisible-that reshape families and futures. Nor is it incidental that these abuses often go unpunished and unacknowledged. As this feminist and decolonial analysis shows, sexual violence is not a side effect of war-it is a core tactic of colonial rule, designed to break resistance from the inside out.

The Machinery of Dehumanization: The Children

​A 2013 UNICEF report concluded that the ill-treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention is “widespread, systematic and institutionalized.” The report documented practices such as night arrests, physical violence, blindfolding, and coercive interrogations without legal counsel or parental presence. It also noted that children were often forced to sign confessions in Hebrew, a language they did not understand.

Israel’s prison system is not merely punitive-it is a pillar of its colonial regime. It functions to exhaust and disempower a people fighting for freedom. Military courts convict 99% of Palestinians. (Aljazeera, 2018) Children as young as 12 are tried as adults. “Since 2000, an estimated 12,000 Palestinian children have been arbitrarily detained in Israel’s military detention system. They are mostly charged for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, an act punishable by up to maximum 20 years in prison.” (Justice for All, Canada, 2024) Torture, including beatings and stress positions, is routinely used in interrogations-93% of Palestinian children report experiencing it. (Jabr, 2024)

Incarceration becomes a method not only of silencing dissent but of waging psychological warfare.

Solitary Confinement as Torture: Over 500 Palestinian captives are held in solitary confinement, sometimes for months or even years. According to the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Mandela Rules), solitary confinement exceeding 15 days constitutes torture. (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). More than 1400 Palestinians are held in solitary confinement (B’tselm, 2014). Prolonged isolation has severe psychological consequences-ranging from depression and hallucinations to long-term cognitive damage. (Reiter, et al, 2020) In many documented cases, Palestinians with developmental or psychiatric disorders have been subjected to repeated humiliation and neglect rather than care. Ahmad Manasra, arrested at 13 and later suffered serious psychological consequences, in part as a result of prolonged solitary confinement. He is one of many who have suffered under such conditions. (Amnesty, 2023, Abu Sharar, 2021)

Medical Neglect: Writer Walid Daqqa spent 38 years in prison and died in 2024 after Israeli authorities denied him treatment for leukemia. “They are killing me slowly,” he wrote in his final letter, “but my ideas will outlive them.” In March 2025, 17-year-old Walid Ahmad from the West Bank died in Megiddo Prison after six months of detention without charge. An autopsy observed by an Israeli doctor indicated that severe malnutrition and untreated colitis likely contributed to his death. Ahmad had shown signs of starvation, scabies, inflammation of the colon, and overall physical frailty, exacerbated by inadequate food, poor sanitary conditions, and possibly contaminated meals during Ramadan.

Deliberate Disease: In 2024, a scabies outbreak spread to 800 captives in Naqab. Guards withheld medicine and hygiene supplies, leaving detainees to scratch their skin raw. An investigation by Haaretz revealed that a quarter of Palestinian captives in Israeli prisons have been infected with scabies in recent months. Prison authorities have been accused of allowing scabies to spread by restricting inmates’ water supply and depriving them of clean clothes and medical care. Without treatment, these wounds become infected. Left untreated in overcrowded, unsanitary cells, even a condition as treatable as scabies becomes a source of ongoing pain and torture, as a result of systemic neglect. These infections are not incidental-they reflect a broader strategy of dehumanization through deliberate medical denial.

Stolen Childhoods: Palestinian children are the only children in the world systematically prosecuted in military courts. Every year, between 500 and 700 are arrested-most during night raids. They are often blindfolded, shackled, and transported to interrogation centers where they are beaten, threatened, denied access to a lawyer, and coerced into signing confessions in Hebrew, a language many do not understand (DCIP-Military Detention).

In 99% of cases, these children are convicted for minor acts such as throwing stones or posting comments on social media. In 2016, the Israeli Knesset passed legislation allowing children as young as 12 to be sentenced to prison, including life imprisonment. This law has been used to target Palestinian children specifically, violating multiple international legal standards (Time, 2025).

In July 2019, a four-year-old boy named Muhammad Rabi’ Elayyan from Issawiya in occupied East Jerusalem was summoned for interrogation by Israeli authorities after allegedly throwing a stone. A dozen armed officers arrived at his home (Middle East Monitor, 2019). The child cried in terror. His father accompanied him to the police station where he was questioned. While he was ultimately not charged, the event reflects the extreme and surreal nature of repression faced even by toddlers.

Ahmad Manasra, arrested at age 13, became a global symbol of this brutality. Severely injured and interrogated while bleeding in custody, his forced confession was broadcast publicly. After nearly a decade of unjust incarceration, solitary confinement, and deteriorating mental and physical health, Ahmad was released on April 10, 2025. Despite evidence that he did not participate in the 2015 stabbing incident in Jerusalem, he was sentenced to 12 years (later reduced to 9.5), following a trial that violated his rights as a child. During his imprisonment, Ahmad was subjected to prolonged solitary confinement, denied adequate medical and psychological care, and endured treatment condemned by international human rights organizations. His release came without proper coordination; he was left alone, disoriented, and deeply distressed in the desert near the prison. He was later reunited with his family and continues to receive psychological support. Ahmad’s case remains a haunting emblem of the systemic “unchilding” of Palestinian youth and a call to end the imprisonment of children under military occupation.(Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, 2025)

Ahed Tamimi, detained at 16 after slapping an Israeli soldier in the wake of her cousin being shot in the face with a rubber bullet, spent eight months in prison. Her case drew international attention, not just for the injustice she endured, but for her defiance. “They think they broke me,” she said upon release. “But this generation was born from the womb of the Intifada” (The Guardian, 2018).

The Psychological Toll of Imprisonment on Palestinian Children

Physical and Emotional Abuse: A 2023 report by Save the Children revealed that 86% of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention experienced physical violence, and 69% were strip-searched. Nearly half (42%) sustained injuries during arrest, including gunshot wounds and broken bones. Such traumatic experiences contribute to long-term psychological distress (Save the Children, 2023).

Psychological Distress and Alienation: The same report highlighted that detained children often suffer from anxiety, depression, and a sense of alienation upon release. Many struggle to reintegrate into their communities, with feelings of fear and mistrust persisting long after their detention (Save the Children, 2023).

Impact on Future Aspirations: A 2023 study titled “Injustice: Palestinian children’s experience of the Israeli military detention system” found that imprisonment disrupts children’s education and future plans. One child expressed, “After you are released from prison you start racing against time trying to catch up… Whatever you had in your mind before your arrest just passed you by” (Save the Children, 2023).

BDS: Breaking the Chains of Complicity

If prison is Israel’s tool of domination, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) is our collective tool of resistance.  BDS calls for economic and cultural pressure on Israel until it complies with international law.

At this moment in history-when the genocide in Gaza continues unabated, when the bodies of the dead and maimed outnumber the living, when fascism parades through global capitals and tyrants rule with impunity-it is easy to lose hope. When every weapon is being waged against our Palestine and her people, when those who speak are censored or arrested, when friends hide their articles and delete their words, and when we all feel we are waiting our turn to be plucked from the path of resistance—it is tempting to believe that our struggle is lost.

But it is not. It is not lost when we remain on the path of steadfastness (sumud), of clarity, of collective care.

History is our witness:

+ Apartheid South Africa was brought to its knees by coordinated global boycott, cultural isolation, and a refusal to normalize oppression.

+ British colonial rule in India fell after decades of economic noncooperation and moral resistance.

+ The U.S. Civil Rights Movement broke segregation’s legal backbone with sustained boycotts and protests.

+ Chile’s Pinochet regime, Argentina’s military dictatorship, and East Germany’s Stasi rule all crumbled in the face of international solidarity and internal resistance.

These movements teach us that boycott, divestment, and sanctions are not abstract theories-they are tools that have toppled empires. Yet we must also recognize that such victories are not permanent. The recent far-right resurgence in Argentina under Milei and the dismantling of civil rights protections in the U.S. under Trump remind us that gains can be reversed when fascism reasserts itself. That is why the fight for Palestinian freedom must be connected to broader global anti-fascist and anti-colonial movements-because the forces we confront do not remain in one place. They metastasize.

And so it is with BDS. Launched in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, BDS is our weapon and our lifeline. If Israel’s tools are walls, prisons, and erasure, ours are presence, refusal, and solidarity.

BDS has already shown its power:

+ AXA Insurance divested from Israeli arms company Elbit Systems.

+ Ben & Jerry’s halted sales in illegal settlements, stating, “It’s inconsistent with our values.”

+ Veolia lost over $20 billion in contracts and withdrew completely from Israel.

+ G4S, under pressure, sold its Israeli prison operations.

+ Dozens of universities, churches, and pension funds have divested from companies profiting from apartheid.

This is not symbolic. This is material. Every contract canceled, every artist who says no, every pension fund that walks away-weakens the machinery of domination.

Freedom Is the Only Antidote

Palestinian captives are not just victims. They are witnesses. They are leaders. They are the barometers of our shared humanity.

When a blindfold is tightened on a child in the dark, it is our moral vision that is obscured. When a prisoner is denied medicine, our silence sharpens the knife.

BDS is not a slogan. It is a form of care. It is a nonviolent weapon in a world that knows only violence.

As Assata Shakur, a Black activist, author, and former member of the Black Liberation Army, wrote:

The chains will break. The cell door will rust.
And we will still be here,
roots deeper than their prisons.

And so we return to the knock on the door—a summons in the dead of night that, for too many Palestinian families, has become the echo of generational pain. These prisons, with their barred cells and perpetually shadowed halls, are meant to vanish people and break their spirits. But from these very sites of despair come the songs, letters, smuggled stories, and steadfast courage that galvanize a global movement.

This article aims to name the systematic brutality against Palestinian prisoners for what it is—an intentional, gendered, colonial assault designed to cripple an entire people’s struggle for self-determination—and, at the same time, to honor the indomitable spirit that refuses to submit. By shining a light on the prison system and the suffering within it, we also illuminate a path of resistance and solidarity. When we choose Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, we choose a peaceful but potent form of collective action—one that can weaken the pillars of apartheid just as similar movements have toppled oppressive regimes worldwide.

What is at stake here is not just the fate of the imprisoned, but the moral fabric that binds us all. Each time a child is blindfolded or a woman is threatened with sexualized violence, our collective conscience is tested. Each time we stay silent or look away, we risk allowing injustice to calcify into permanence. But every refusal to be silent—every poem written on contraband paper, every protest sign raised in the streets, every institution that cuts ties with profiteers of apartheid—becomes proof that solidarity can transcend walls and barbed wire.

If these prisons exist to bury hope, then hope must outgrow the walls. If this system thrives on complicity, then let our voices, our actions, and our global alliances sever the chains. In the unbreakable words of Palestinian prisoners and in the unwavering commitment of those who stand with them, we find the enduring truth: that freedom is both a right and a responsibility. We owe it to one another—and to all who have been caged—to turn each knock at the door into a rallying cry for liberation.

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Image by Hany Osman.

“Rights are granted to those who align with power,” Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student, eloquently wrote from his cell. This poignant statement came soon after a judge ruled that the government had met the legal threshold to deport the young activist on the nebulous ground of “foreign policy”.

“For the poor, for people of color, for those who resist injustice, rights are but words written on water,” Khalil further lamented. The plight of this young man, whose sole transgression appears to be his participation in the nationwide mobilization to halt the Israeli genocide in Gaza, should terrify all Americans. This concern should extend even to those who are not inclined to join any political movement and possess no particular sympathy for – or detailed knowledge of – the extent of the Israeli atrocities in Gaza, or the United States’ role in bankrolling this devastating conflict.

The perplexing nature of the case against Khalil, like those against other student activists, including Turkish visa holder Rümeysa Öztürk, starkly indicates that the issue is purely political. Its singular aim appears to be the silencing of dissenting political voices.

Judge Jamee E. Comans, who concurred with the Trump Administration’s decision to deport Khalil, cited “foreign policy” in an uncritical acceptance of the language employed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Rubio had previously written to the court, citing “potentially serious foreign policy consequences” stemming from Khalil’s actions, which he characterized as participation in “disruptive activities” and “anti-Semitic protests”.

The latter accusation has become the reflexive rejoinder to any form of criticism leveled against Israel, a tactic prevalent even long before the current catastrophic genocide in Gaza.

Those who might argue that US citizens remain unaffected by the widespread US government crackdowns on freedom of expression must reconsider. On April 14, the government decided to freeze $2.2 billion in federal funding to the University of Harvard.

Beyond the potential weakening of educational institutions and their impact on numerous Americans, these financial measures also coincide with a rapidly accelerating and alarming trend of targeting dissenting voices within the US, reaching unprecedented extents. On April 14, Massachusetts immigration lawyer Nicole Micheroni, a US citizen, publicly disclosed receiving a message from the Department of Homeland Security requesting her self-deportation.

Furthermore, new oppressive bills are under consideration in Congress, granting the Department of Treasury expansive measures to shut down community organizations, charities, and similar entities under various pretenses and without adhering to standard constitutional legal procedures.

Many readily conclude that these measures reflect Israel’s profound influence on US domestic politics and the significant ability of the Israel lobby in Washington DC to interfere with the very democratic fabric of the US, whose Constitution’s First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and assembly.

While there is much truth in that conclusion, the narrative extends beyond the complexities of the Israel-Palestine issue.

For many years, individuals, predominantly academics, who championed Palestinian rights were subjected to trials or even deported, based on “secret evidence”. This essentially involved a legal practice that amalgamated various acts, such as the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) and the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), among others, to silence those critical of US foreign policy.

Although some civil rights groups in the US challenged the selective application of law to stifle dissent, the matter hardly ignited a nationwide conversation regarding the authorities’ violations of fundamental democratic norms, such as due process (Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments).

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, however, much of that legal apparatus was applied to all Americans in the form of the PATRIOT Act. This legislation broadened the government’s authority to employ surveillance, including electronic communications, and other intrusive measures.

Subsequently, it became widely known that even social media platforms were integrated into government surveillance efforts. Recent reports have even suggested that the government mandated social media screening for all U.S. visa applicants who have traveled to the Gaza Strip since January 1, 2007.

In pursuing these actions, the US government is effectively replicating some of the draconian measures imposed by Israel on the Palestinians. The crucial distinction, based on historical experience, is that these measures tend to undergo continuous evolution, establishing legal precedents that swiftly apply to all Americans and further compromise their already deteriorating democracy.

Americans are already grappling with their perception of their democratic institutions, with a disturbingly high number of 72 percent, according to a Pew Research Center survey in April 2024, believing that US democracy is no longer a good example for other countries to follow.

The situation has only worsened in the past year. While US activists advocating for justice in Palestine deserve unwavering support and defense for their profound courage and humanity, Americans must also recognize that they, and the remnants of their democracy, are equally at risk.

“Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere,” is the timeless quote associated with Abraham Lincoln. Yet, every day that Mahmoud Khalil and others spend in their cells, awaiting deportation, stands as the starkest violation of that very sentiment. Americans must not permit this injustice to persist.

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Image by Mostafa Meraji.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Voltaire, Enlightenment author and philosopher (1694-1778)

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the United States and Israel have been zealous in their efforts to disempower it. Israel has used its powerful hasbara (propaganda) machine to peddle absurdities about Tehran as a nuclear threat to the region and the world.

For refusing to bend to U.S.-Israeli demands to abandon the Palestinian cause and for standing against their hegemonic plans for the region, Iran has been the target of the most restrictive economic sanctions in history and under perpetual threat of military intervention.

Like any sovereign nation, Iran has a right to defend itself. Nuclear weapons are a security guarantee that Iran has not sought. Unlike Israel and the United States, it has not threatened nor bombed, invaded or occupied its neighbors. However, after Israeli air strikes in April and October 2024 and continued U.S. threats, Iran has had no choice but to debate and reevaluate its long-held nuclear doctrine which regards weapons of mass destruction against Islam.

In a civilized conflict-free world, there would be no need for weapons, nuclear or otherwise. Unfortunately for some countries, like Iran, possessing nuclear weapons may become a necessary tool for survival. For others, like the United States and Israel, the ghastly weapons are used as cudgels to bully countries into submission.

It is important to establish that the U.S. intelligence community—the collective work of America’s 18 spy organizations—has determined that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. It stated as much in its “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community” 2024 report: “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.” Previous reports have also stated that Iran’s military doctrine is defensive and its nuclear program is meant to build negotiating leverage and to respond to perceived international pressure.

The question then becomes why is it that the nuclear issue is front and center when the United States does engage with Iran and why has its program, in existence for more than four decades and intended for civilian energy/scientific purposes, been so falsely represented.

Demonizing Iran has served the imperial interests of the United States and its military outpost Israel in the Middle East. Through the well financed aggressive propaganda efforts of Israeli lobby groups like the tactically benign sounding American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Tel Aviv has been successful in selling Washington, the corporate media and the American public on the provocative idea that Iran is a threat to it, the region and the United States.

The narrative about Iran and its nuclear objectives is replete with myths and distortions. U.S. foreign policy decisions have been largely framed to protect and secure Israeli interests, often to the detriment of America’s own.

A fettered Iran allows Israel unchallenged regional supremacy. Like former U.S. administrations, the Trump White House, in collaboration with Israel and their Arab allies, are determined to strip Iran of its revolutionary identity and undermine its regional clout.

Iran has legitimate security interests and concerns, fully aware that it is the primary target of Israel’s military and nuclear arsenal. A 2025 Arms Control Association report reveals that Israel—the only nuclear weapons power in the Middle East—has an estimated 90 nuclear warheads with sophisticated delivery systems in its inventory, as well as the fissile material stockpiles for at least 200 nuclear weapons.

Iran, on the other hand, is a threshold state. To achieve the weaponization stage, it would need to enrich uranium to 90 percent purity, weaponize the fissile material and develop the delivery systems. None have been done.

Unlike Israel, Iran is a signatory to the 1968 U.N. Non-Proliferation Treaty. As such, it is prohibited from developing, acquiring or using nuclear weapons, although it does have the right to manufacture and enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. In addition, Iran’s leaders have vigorously pursued the establishment of a nuclear weapons-free zone for the region.

There are a number of rational reasons for the Islamic Republic to go down the road toward acquiring nuclear weapons; principally, self-defense.

Former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak (2007-2013), in his memoirs, for example, reveals that the regime of then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came close to attacking Iran at least three times between 2010 and 2012. Barak stated that he and Netanyahu had pushed for military operations against Iranian facilities, but they backed down after opposition from their top security officials.

Barak also discloses that he disagreed with Netanyahu that Iran’s nuclear program posed an existential threat to Israel. He was instead more concerned about the regional balance of power.

Some in Iran’s political class, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,

suspect that the United States, Israel and their Arab allies are intent on

overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Recent history confirms their suspicions.

They point to crippling economic sanctions, covert operations, cyber attacks, assassination of nuclear scientists and military personnel, missile attacks and sabotage of gas pipelines and military sites.

In July 2022, for example, during a visit to Israel, President Joe Biden signed a pledge to never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon and to “…use all elements of its national power to ensure that outcome.”

It is with that pledge and President Trump’s ultimatums that the United States has entered a new round of nuclear talks with Iran, currently underway. Strangely enough, it was Trump, encouraged by Netanyahu, who pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement in 2018 and imposed heavier “maximum pressure” sanctions; believing that economic hardships would drive Iranians to topple the government.

Before the recent nuclear meetings began in early April, Trump threatened: “If they [Iran] don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.” In a show of force, in addition to two aircraft carriers in the Red Sea, the White House has deployed a squadron of fighter jets, stealth bombers, air defenses and large quantities of weapons to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

Also, Netanyahu, incapable of remaining silent, sounded off saying that the only nuclear deal Israel would accept would have Iran agreeing to eliminate its entire program. He further elaborated: “We go in, blow up the facilities and dismantle all the equipment, under American supervision and execution.”

The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported (17 April 2025) that Netanyahu recently sought the U.S. administration’s support to conduct joint commando and air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. Trump, however, vetoed the plan while discussions with Tehran are ongoing. Netanyahu is clearly intent on derailing the negotiations to insure that there will never be rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran.

Except for a short interval during the Obama administration, when Iran and the P5+1 countries (China, France, Russia, U.K., U.S.) plus Germany finalized the JCPOA in 2015, the United States has leaned on a muscular military policy and has never been serious about engaging cooperatively with Iran. It has, however, been serious about insuring Israel’s hegemony in the region.

President Obama’s “new dawn for the Middle East” included moving away from years of failed policies, particularly “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” a 1996 initiative pushed by pro-Israel stalwarts and advanced during the George W. Bush administration.

Following the attacks of 11 September 2001, Bush and Netanyahu set in motion the aggressive goals documented in “Clean Break” to contain, destabilize and overthrow governments that challenged U.S.-Israeli hegemony. Plans were drafted for military action against seven countries, starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. All but Iran have been destabilized and/or balkanized.

Even though the relationship between Obama and Netanyahu was often strained, Obama’s actual record in office makes him one of the most pro-Israel presidents since Harry S. Truman.

The scale of Israel’s barbarity in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and its insatiable addiction to expansion and power forewarns Iran and other actors in the Middle East that they must be vigilant in their defense to survive.

Netanyahu’s jingoistic vision of Zionist Israeli supremacy has never changed. Ten years ago, he bluntly told an Israeli parliamentary committee that there could never be peace with the Palestinians: “I’m asked if we will forever live by the sword,” and I say “yes.”

Israel may not be visibly present at the nuclear negotiating table, its influence over the outcome is, however, palpable and discernible.

What Washington and Tel Aviv fail to understand is that they are dealing with a politically astute country, that deserves the respect it demands as a nation that has

resisted colonizers and colonization throughout its 5,000-year history in West Asia.

No amount of absurdities—American or Israeli—can change that reality.

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Joseph Marshall III.

Since my previous post referenced the renowned Lakota author Joseph Marshall III, it is with great sadness that I inform you of his passing into the spirit world on April 18. It is somewhat coincidental that he departed the day following my discussion of Crazy Horse. His literary works and historical insights have profoundly influenced my perspective. I frequently revisit his writings, particularly those concerning Crazy Horse, as I seek to make sense of the world, especially in times of great suffering. While our political ideologies may differ, his depictions of the last generation of free Lakotas is authentic. And I am very critical of the term “authentic” when applied to American Indian history.

As a historian, one encounters the necessity of engaging with library shelves containing volumes of U.S. apologia of various orientations concerning the theft of a continent and the associated genocide of its Indigenous peoples. A sense of frustration and predictability can often mark this experience. For example, the predominant narrative trajectory concerning Lakota historiography, as articulated by non-Lakotas, generally follows this pattern: initially, the portrayal depicts us as violent savages; subsequently, we are reframed as noble savages. Eventually, the representation culminates in depicting an archetypal image of American Indians: dwelling in tipis, donning headdresses, engaging in war cries, and riding bare-chested across expansive plains. The arrival of Kevin Costner’s Private Dunbar further popularized this image, leading to a widespread belief that others, if they tried hard enough, could become us.

Additionally, some assert that we were latecomers to our own site of creation—territory which we purportedly appropriated—aggressively displacing others until we finally got what was coming to us. (Imagine them telling Christians that Adam and Eve were invaders within the Garden of Eden.) Recently, a Finnish historian has endeavored to restore our rightful position in the historical narrative, concluding that we were imperialists in our own right, akin to the Comanches, competing against our expansionist counterpart, the United States of America. It is noteworthy that most of these authors have neither resided in Lakota Makoce, nor have they mastered the Lakota language, spoken to Lakota experts, or investigated the extensive archives of Lakota knowledge and textual materials. My academic qualifications in history required fluency in at least one foreign language, ideally corresponding with a regional specialization. Mastery of a foreign language is a prerequisite for conducting thorough archival research in a foreign nation. What credibility would we attribute to a Russian historian who lacked proficiency in the Russian language and did not undertake travel or study within Russia? (The answer may suggest otherwise, given the prevailing anti-Russian sentiments in the United States; however, the central argument remains intact.) So why give so much credibility to historians and writers who lack these credentials?

On the other hand, Joseph Marshall, or Joe as I called him, possessed these qualifications. He was a first-language Lakota speaker, and much of his referenced knowledge comes directly from the Lakota oral tradition. Having lived among and been closely related to many of the finest practitioners of Lakota oral history, he provides unique insights. For instance, The Journey of Crazy Horse includes no footnotes or non-Lakota references. Instead, Marshall lists numerous Oglala and Sicangu elders in the book’s sources section, his primary references. Several elders were just a generation away from when Crazy Horse walked the earth. I am unaware of any contemporary histories of the nineteenth century that rely so heavily on oral traditions as primary sources. Marshall exemplified the strength of Lakota knowledge. He was more than a historian; like the elders who served as his archives, he became a living memory for the Lakota people.

I first met him at an American Indian education conference in Oacoma, South Dakota, in 2010. Since that time, his books have occupied a prominent place on my shelves and have been included in many of my high school syllabi. A former student of mine, now an adult, once showed me that they still possess their well-worn copy of “ The Lakota Way, “ which I assigned in my Oceti Sakowin studies course years ago. I have gifted his writings to friends, family, and acquaintances more than any other author, owing to their unwavering commitment to portraying an unapologetic Lakota perspective.

Since the U.S.-backed Zionist genocide in Palestine, it has been hard to ignore the parallels between American Indians and Palestinians. But it’s one thing to pity the victims of genocidal war and quite another to try to understand why they continue to resist, despite facing enemies equipped with more technologically advanced weapons and a propensity for extreme violence. Marshall inspired me to write about Palestinian and Lakota resistance. In the analysis section of The Journey of Crazy Horse, trying to understand Crazy Horse’s spirit of total resistance, Marshall asks the reader to:

[T]hink of the emotional impact if suspicious and pushy people suddenly drove an armored troop carrier into your quiet suburban or rural neighborhood, deployed men with guns, made unreasonable demands that couldn’t be satisfied, and opened fire, killing and wounding your friends, neighbors, and relatives. Any[one] who witnessed such a horrific incident would be suspicious and distrustful of such intruders forever.

Palestinians don’t have to imagine this scenario. They are living it. Lakotas lived it, too. And that’s what Marshall’s books did to me. They humanized the Lakota warriors of the last free generation who did not live on reservations. They were deeply scarred and defined by the horrors they witnessed. Their terror and pain were their motivations for resistance; they were acts of self-defense and survival. And it became more than that. Their courage and skill to defeat their enemies turned them into legends, inspiring future generations. They broke the spell of inviolability that surrounds the colonizer. They tore him from his horse, just as Palestinians in sandals pulled him from his tank, forcing him to confront his mortality, reminding him that we may not be equals in this world, but we are all equals in death. They did this in the face of terrible danger, remaining steadfast and humble protectors while confronting their own shortcomings as human beings, as sometimes imperfect relatives and lovers.

I have observed this same spirit reflected in the eyes of Water Protectors and veterans of the Red Power Movement, aware that they may not live long enough to witness the results of their sacrifices. They embodied the spirit of Crazy Horse. Marshall conveyed it as a living memory for all future generations of the Lakota people and our allies, rather than as an idealistic fantasy of violence and adventurism. This unique essence of recognizing a higher power, or living for a greater purpose, has the potential to inspire ordinary individuals to achieve extraordinary feats. That’s what makes it powerful. It moves people, and, using their only possession—their life, people make history with it.

For that, we know Joe Marshall joins the ancestors. His gift to us was not stories about the best days of the Lakota Nation in the nineteenth century. His gift was that, if we embody the spirit of Crazy Horse, our best days are in front of us.

This piece first appeared on Red Scare.

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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Sue Coe, Touchless Fascism, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

Preface: Emigre politics

When writers go into exile, I read somewhere, they discuss the politics of their former countries more than before they left. I have an image of that in my head – scruffy emigres huddled over coffee and schnapps in a smoke-filled café. Voices are raised, tables are pounded, and drinks are spilled, before a quiet settles on the group — the silence of displacement.

My writer friends here in Norwich are all British, and they don’t go in for fist pounding. Their take on American politics is mostly expressed in eyerolls and feigned shock. They always knew, they seem to be saying, there was something terribly the matter with the U.S; now it’s wrongs are laid bare. “You’re the American,” they say, “what do you think?” In the quiet that follows those conversations, I don’t feel displaced, just a little nauseous.

1. Fascism is embarrassing

The press and liberal politicians have responded with suitable alarm to the Trump administration’s attacks upon education, the environment, law, non-profits, immigrants, the economy (tariffs) and the courts. They have described violations of due process, and the threat of authoritarianism. They have predicted recession, inflation, or stagflation, and warned about the costs to the nation–material, intellectual, cultural-of the deportation or exclusion of immigrants.

Trump’s onslaught has been relentless, and no one is safe. If legal residents – immigrants and students – protected by the first amendment, are subject to deportation because of their speech, so are birthright or naturalized citizens. If law firms are punished for their selection of clients, no one can be confident of obtaining legal representation when they need it. If research scientists can have their funding cut for ignoring Trump administration priorities, then nobody can be sure public health and safety are protected; if non-profits are targeted for their charitable work, how many people will step up to fill the gaps left by a tattered social safety net?

Just before the 2024 election, the words fascist or Nazi were beginning to be used by Democratic politicians – including Joe Biden and Kamela Harris – to describe Trump. Those terms have now largely disappeared from public discourse. The savants say they were politically ineffective, turning off the very voters who most needed to be engaged. There’s no evidence to back up those claims. I think the real reason is different: the wolf at the door has taken up residence in our living rooms, and that fact is simply too shameful to acknowledge. A majority of American voters freely elected a fascist, an approbation even Hitler never received. What’s more, they elected a congress willing to disable itself to enable him. Who would want to admit such things?

2. Universal tariffs — a Hitlerian policy

Since inauguration, Trump has done everything he can to cement his power. That’s what dictators do. In Hitler’s time, the process was called Gleichschaltung, meaning stabilization or bringing into alignment. The Reichstag (parliament), the courts, businesses, education, law, unions, the police and military, and the organs of civil society, including charities and arts organizations, were all made to toe the Nazi line. Many did so willingly. Those that didn’t were steamrolled or destroyed.

Hitler accomplished Gleichschaltung in a matter of months. Trump has been in office just four months and has already managed to dismantle entire government agencies and subvert well-established consumer, investor, civil and environmental protections. He has disbanded U.S.A.I.D., the government’s largest provider of foreign aid, and brought to heel some of the nation’s biggest law firms and a few of its wealthiest universities. It’s a veritable Anschluss, and as with Austria, those who accede to the dictator will remain in his thrall for as long as he’s in power. Trump has been less successful so-far, however, in accomplishing what got him elected: improving the economy by reducing prices.

Trump’s economic policies appear at first glance conventional. By embracing the budget framework put forward by the U.S. House – which slashes about $1.5 trillion in spending — Trump plants himself firmly in the camp of austerity. That’s the policy of every Republican since Herbert Hoover. The theory behind it is roughly as follows: Cut spending to reduce the supply of money and lower inflation and interest rates. That makes it easier for businesses to borrow to invest in new enterprises and produce more goods and services. That in turn, increases hiring and raises salaries (because of competition for workers) and improves the general welfare of the nation.

In fact, austerity never works like that. Cuts in spending reduce both employment levels and the social safety net, disempowering workers, and emboldening businesses to lower salaries. Eventually, a lack of consumer demand idles factories and services, propelling the economy into recession. The crisis can be long or short, depending upon outside forces available of to stem the crisis – war or militarization, a major government stimulus, a large increase of credit, or a paradigm changing technology. Under monopoly capitalism, as Paul Sweezy wrote, “stagnation is the norm, good times the exception.” In recent years, the economy has been propped up by enormous profits in the financial sector, but little of that has trickled down to the mass of the population; thus, the continued anger and disillusionment of the American working-class, comprising 70% or more of the population. (The working class consists of those who live on salary alone, paycheck-to-paycheck, not investments).

By firing thousands of federal workers and shuttering whole agencies, Trump is a typical austerity-loving Republican. (That despite stuffing the White House with gold-plated bling.) His vow to cut taxes for the wealthy – even though that would vastly increase the deficit – is also standard Republican fare. It’s always the poor, not the rich, who are forced to accept austerity. But where Trump parts ways with Republican orthodoxy is his plan to achieve economic autarchy (self-sufficiency) through tariffs. His model here isn’t so much President McKinley, Trump’s favorite president, as Adolf Hitler, with whom he also has a relationship.

A tariff is a duty or tax on an imported good. They have been used for millennia, mostly for corrupt purposes, such as increasing the wealth of a ruler or raising funds for wars of conquest. As early as the 15^th century, however, tariffs were used for more benign, or at least more rational reasons: import substitution. Successive English monarchs taxed imported woolens so that domestic producers could gain a bigger share of the market. Indeed, because of tariffs – plus a large navy — England ultimately gained global dominance in cloth manufacture and sale. The English Corn Laws (1815-46) too were a set of tariffs intended to protect British manufacture and trade. They prevented the importation of grain, raising the prices of domestic products and enriching landowners. However, they also increased food costs, exacerbating starvation in Ireland (under English control), and antagonizing manufacturers forced to pay their workers higher wages.

Some of Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, April 2, 2025. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The goal of Trump’s tariff program is something like Britain’s – empire building, or in this case, empire repair. American global dominance has been in decline for a generation, and China is now the world’s leading manufacturer (by far) and the leading trading nation. A closer parallel than imperial Britain, therefore, is Nazi Germany. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he faced an economic crisis. His country was deeply dependent upon imports – especially oil, rubber, animal feed and fertilizer – but lacked the export income to pay for them. In addition, Germany still owed significant war reparations to the United States — those to France and England had already been cancelled. Hitler’s policy therefore, devised by his economic minister Hjalmar Schacht, was to abrogate remaining reparations agreements, embrace tariffs to prioritize exports over imports, and pursue relative autarchy — “a selective policy of disengagement,” as Adam Tooze called it — with its chief trading partners, including the U.S. The roll out of this program was fraught with challenges, but it ultimately allowed the Nazi regime to rapidly re-arm while at the same time boosting the domestic economy. Germany achieved full employment by 1938 with the significant exception of Jews forced from their jobs by the repressive Nuremberg Laws. By 1940, labor shortages began to arise, quickly compensated by slave labor performed by Jews and war prisoners. In the end, of course, Hitler’s economy could not sustain such a massive war effort against the combined forces of the U.S. and US.S.R. and by the spring of 1945, it was decisively defeated.

Like Hitler, Trump is focused on disengaging from historical trading partners – Canada, Mexico, the EU, U.K., Japan, Soth Korea and China — and achieving relative autarchy. He wants to strengthen American imperialism, and expand the American Lebensraum to include Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal. His chief economic target is China, which he’s hit with tariffs as high as 145%, but every nation in the world (including non-nations, like the Heard and McDonald Islands, inhabited only by penguins) are subject to tariffs in an effort to reduce foreign dependency, increase domestic production, and raise money.

Tariffs of the kind currently implemented or proposed, make no economic sense and have no chance of either heading off stagnation or restoring lost dominance. If Trump wants to raise enough money from tariffs to cut or eliminate income taxes, he’s bound to fail since rates high enough to pay for U.S. government services and spending will quickly reduce imports, cutting off the very revenue tariffs are supposed to raise. If his goal is instead to use tariffs to foster domestic manufacturing (import substitution), he must fail since imports – raw materials, silicon chips, machine parts and exotic food items (such as avocados) – are essential to U.S. business expansion and consumer spending. China’s retaliatory threat to cut-off U.S. access to essential rare earth elements is one example of the necessity of imports.

Finally, the underlying premise that high tariffs always buttress American prosperity is fundamentally flawed. Consider the following thought experiment:

The Chinese government, in “an expression of love for the great American people”, decides to give to every American adult an electric car worth about $50,000. The U.S. government at first thinks this is a Trojan Horse, but after examining a thousand cars sent as a downpayment, discovers there are no booby-traps or listening devices. The American public rejoices. Car manufacturers and the U.A.W. are furious.

Question: What should the U.S. do?

Answer: Take the cars.

If the Chinese people want to dispense raw materials, capital and labor with a value of $50,000 – we’d be idiots to turn it down. The cars would increase the net worth (as well as mobility) of American adults, allowing them to buy other goods and services. They would stimulate the economy and greatly reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses. There would be a rush to build charging stations and electric generation to power them, and lots of scrap metal to make new steel. If some auto workers lose their jobs, they can be employed in industries juiced by the $1.25 trillion Chinese gift. The U.S. government can support workers with the transition.

Now suppose the Chinese only offered the value of one-half, one-third, or even just one-tenth of a car? The answer must be is the same – take the money. Turning down cheap Chinese and other imports is the equivalent of turning down the car, so long as the goods are sold at prices below the global, average necessary labor time required for their production. (For model calculations, please see Zhming Long, et al. Also Larry Summers.)

This hypothetical transfer of resources is not in fact, exceptional; it is the basis of Imperialism. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the expropriation of colonial resources and exploitation of people enriched the metropolitan powers, including the U.S. The difference today is that many, so-called “developing” countries self-exploit to establish domestic industries sufficient to move their populations out of extreme poverty. Moreover, they accept as payment for their goods dollars used to buy American products or U.S. Treasury bonds. China is the greatest example of this self-exploiting practice, but its willingness to continue is being tested right now. It may decide to simply accelerate existing plans to increase domestic consumption in pursuit of a long-term policy of “de-globalization” and “co-development.”

In the face Chinese push back, Trump’s protectionist and Hitlerian trade policy is ludicrous. His plans to impose further tariffs on computer chips and pharmaceuticals, or even charge nations to trade with the U.S will, if implemented, speed the coming recession, or deepen it when it arrives. The only plausible way to ameliorate the declining fortunes of the American working class are the ones that Trump and other Republicans (and most Democrats) have ruled out from the start: subsidize or nationalize industries key to a sustainable, green economy; restore high marginal tax rates, like those in effect from 1944-63; tax wealth to reduce inequality; support the growth of labor unions to ensure fair wages; clip the wings of the non-productive finance sector by imposing fees on stock trades; limit patent protection; and establish good, non-coercive trading relationships with other nations.

2. Trump aims to punish immigrants to validate his racism

Trump’s tariff policy discomfits allies and adversaries alike. His capriciousness – tariffs raised one day and lowered the next — is not a flaw in his system, it’s the purpose. By controlling with a word or a tweet the rise and fall of global markets, or a nation’s trade and monetary policies, Trump manifests his dreamed omnipotence, the product of a narcissism that’s Hitlerian in scale if not so far in impact. The pathology is not limited to the economic domain. It’s also apparent in immigration policy, the other issue that got him elected.

During the presidential campaign, Trump called immigrants from non-European countries murderers, rapists, diseased, vermin and blood poisoners, language borrowed from Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and other Nazis. He proposed arresting and expelling twenty million of them (even though there are only about 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S.) and building an archipelago of camps to facilitate the process.

Trump is not alone in his extremism. He’s supported by a vast organizational and personnel infrastructure that includes anti-immigrant think tanks, “English only” advocates (a policy recently advanced by executive order), and opponents of diversity and educational multiculturalism such as Christopher Rufo. Among Trump’s most committed individual allies, naturally, is his vice-president, former Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, who infamously claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating resident’s pets, and last week stated, prior to his visit to the Vatican, that the U.S. Conference of Bishops was settling “illegal immigrants” just to collect federal aid. (A rumor is growing that Vance killed the pope. I have no evidence to prove or disprove the claim.)

Many other prominent Republicans, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller have expressed similarly hateful views.

Miller in the past endorsed openly racist, online publications such as VDARE and American Renaissance and recently demanded “reparations” for all the damage done to U.S. families by “uncontrolled, illegal, mass immigration.”

Lately, Trump has moved away from Nazi-inspired, biological racist language to a rhetoric that focusses instead on public safety. He’s accused large numbers of Latin American immigrants of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, and the El Salvadorian gang MS-13. That was the pretext used to deport about 200 immigrants to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. Few if any of the deportees were afforded due process, and most are neither gang members nor in fact guilty of any crime. (Under federal law, being undocumented is a civil, not criminal offense.) The case of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Venezuelan legal immigrant, deported due to an “administrative error” according to the government, remains the focus of intense interest. Despite a Supreme Court judgement that the U.S. must “facilitate” his release, he remains in prison. Further deportations to El Salvador are currently blocked by a Supreme Court order.

In late March, work was begun on an immigrant detention center at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas. It will hold about 8,000. (Biden previously housed an unknown number of unaccompanied migrant children at Fort Bliss.) The camp would be a model for about ten others at bases across the country from Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station near Buffalo, N.Y., to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Assuming all are built – an unlikely prospect given the coordination and focus required — that would mean that 80,000 immigrants could be housed in camps, awaiting processing, a small fraction of the promised 20 million deportations.

In fact, Trump has so far detained and expelled fewer immigrants than Biden at the same point in his term. The reasons are both banal and programmatic. Trump fired most of the people at the Department of Homeland Security who knew what they were doing. But more important, Trump recognizes that any program of mass expulsions would be devastating to the American economy. At least 40% of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented; 31% of workers in the hospitality sector; and smaller but still large percentages in health care and construction.

Site Monitor, Fort Bliss, April 10, 2025. (Photo: Rose Thayer for Stars and Stripes (U.S. Department of Defense).

Another focus of racial and xenophobic bias is college students. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has expanded its scope to arrest legally resident, but foreign-born students. Many of them – around 1700 so far, but possibly many more — have been involved in pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel protests. Others have had their visas revoked for minor legal infractions, including speeding tickets, or for having been charged, but not convicted of misdemeanors. These students are not however immigrants at all; they are recipients of U.S. educational exports. Foreign-born students collectively add almost $45 billion to the U.S. economy and support almost 380,000 jobs, about ½ the impact of the U.S. auto industry. The improve the U.S. balance of trade.

The point of Trump’s detentions and expulsions is not to end immigration, or even significantly reduce its numbers. It’s to stigmatize immigrants and non-whites, thereby validating the national and racial superiority of the president, his allies and supporters. Still more broadly, it’s to affirm the naturalness and inevitability of a political, economic and social system – challenged by developing nations, allies and rivals — in which the United States occupies the center of the global order. By his actions on tariffs and immigration, Trump is inadvertently hastening the end of that dominance. For that we can thank him. But what will be the cost?

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Photo by Jon Sailer

As President Donald Trump’s second term is about to hit the wall of 100 days, one critique has grown louder: his inconsistency. Critics point to his sudden reversals, contradictory pronouncements, and policies that shift as quickly as his moods. In an age of social media and 24-hour news cycles, these whiplash decisions are magnified—and often amplified. The result is a presidency that feels deeply unmoored, erratic, and impulsive. But is Trump truly the most inconsistent president in modern history? Or is the chaos simply louder now?

History offers a few instructive parallels. And while no two presidents are the same, Trump’s volatility does echo the struggles of past leaders whose inconsistent or indecisive styles defined—and in some cases derailed—their presidencies.

Throughout his first term, Trump’s approach to policy could best be described as transactional. He pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, only to later suggest rejoining it. He simultaneously praised and criticized NATO. One day he was threatening to “totally destroy North Korea,” the next he was praising Kim Jong-un’s leadership. This pattern wasn’t limited to foreign policy. On COVID-19, he vacillated between downplaying its danger and declaring a national emergency—sometimes in the same week.

In his second term, the trend hasn’t changed. Trump has imposed massive and broad tariffs, only to lift them days later, reimpose them, lift, and so on. He has promised mass deportations while signaling support for undocumented workers in politically useful industries. His stance on tech regulation oscillates between government intervention and libertarian restraint. For critics, the result is confusion. For supporters, it’s “strategy”.

But while we find ourselves so deeply immersed, every single day, in all things Trump, it’s worth stepping back for a second and noting that this governing style is not without precedent.

Andrew Johnson, who ascended to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, was similarly unpredictable. Though he was a Democrat on a Republican ticket, many hoped Johnson could help reunite the country after the Civil War. Instead, his presidency devolved into a combative and contradictory mess. He opposed Reconstruction, vetoed civil rights legislation, and clashed violently with Congress—often simply because he could.

From my recollection of college history decades ago, Johnson’s inconsistencies were personal as much as they were political—just like Trump, especially Trump volume 2. To me, both men are deeply led by their own egos—even to the point where not putting your ego into some heart-shaped box will spell almost certain destruction.

Johnson’s refusal to build coalitions or stick to a coherent policy path led to paralysis—and impeachment. Though he survived removal by a single Senate vote, his presidency is widely considered a cautionary tale in leadership undone by personal volatility.

Another instructive comparison is Jimmy Carter. Where Johnson and Trump governed from their gut, Carter was a technocrat, often paralyzed by his own desire to do the right thing. But that didn’t translate into clarity. His foreign policy swung between a moral commitment to human rights and a pragmatic embrace of problematic allies. On energy, he made strong public pronouncements but failed to unify his party around a plan. And during the Iran hostage crisis, his inability to commit to a clear strategy left Americans with a sense that he had lost control.

I remember studying Carter in real time and being struck by his overarching decency. He seemed, at least to me, as someone beautifully fit for the American presidency in theory and hideously so in practice. He was indecisive, like Trump, but this was exacerbated by something completely absent from the Trump persona—deep weakness.

When we look at all of this holistically, the key difference with Trump at least appears to be that his inconsistency isn’t just incidental—it’s wildly performative. He doesn’t hide his unpredictability; he champions it. “I like to be unpredictable,” he has boasted more than once, framing his policy reversals as strategic misdirection, a way of keeping allies, enemies, and the media guessing.

That may serve him in the political arena, but in government, inconsistency has a cost. Foreign allies don’t know whether American promises will last. Government agencies can’t implement policies that change week to week. Business leaders, hungry for regulatory clarity, are left in limbo. And citizens lose faith that their leaders are working with a steady hand. All we need to do is look at today’s news—China refuting Trump’s claim that talks are well underway to again and hopefully finally remove absurdly punitive tariffs between the nations.

There is, of course, a difference between flexibility and flippancy. Great presidents adapt. They change course when new facts demand it. But they do so with purpose, signaling to the nation and the world that leadership means more than instinct. It means coherence.

That’s where Trump’s approach falters. His inconsistency isn’t just about policy—it’s about process. There is often no clear deliberation, no evident consultation with experts, no structured roll-out. A policy may be announced on Monday, walked back on Tuesday, and forgotten by Friday. This instability erodes credibility—not just for Trump, but for the entire government.

Supporters argue that this chaos is intentional—that Trump is a disruptor breaking old norms. They see his reversals not as failures but as recalibrations in real time. But disruption, when not grounded in vision, becomes noise. And governing by impulse is not the same as leading with intent.

Leadership requires clarity. Allies need to trust in American constancy. Citizens need to believe their president governs with something more enduring than impulse. Trump’s challenge is that he blends the stubborn populism of Andrew Johnson with the managerial disarray of Jimmy Carter, in an era where every misstep is immediately broadcast—and archived forever.

Whether this second Trump term results in transformative policy or a deepening of dysfunction will depend not just on what Trump chooses to do, but whether he can ever truly decide what he stands for. History has not been kind to presidents who flail. It remembers those who led.

And leadership, in the end, is not about keeping people guessing. It’s about giving them something to believe in.

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Photograph Source: Sean Spicer – Public Domain

On 27 March 2025, President Donald Trump did one of his favorite things: he issued an Executive Order (EO). He is drawn to issue these proclamations because doing so reinforces his sense of “self-importance, control and perceived superiority, which, in turn, are features of [his] narcissistic personality.”

Past Trump EOs have resulted in real time destruction such as depriving millions of people of their livelihood, damage to the environment, destruction of parts of the national health grid, etc. All of those proclamations ate away at the American quality of life, while allegedly preparing the nation for revival of past greatness. How such national masochism is supposed to make the USA “great again” is a mystery only Donald Trump seems capable of unraveling. Nonetheless, while these past EOs constituted an official blitzkrieg on the present, they lacked that special Orwellian commitment to bending future generations to the will of our present empowered narcissist.

However, now we have the 27 March EO. Why is it different?

Entitled, “Restoring Truth and sanity to American History” this EO seeks to assure control of future American perceptions by putting a stop to any reexamination of the nation’s aging batch of “justification myths”.* Hence, quoting this most recent EO: “Section 1. Purpose and Policy.  Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” My italics.

It is fascinating to witness Donald Trump’s ability to project onto his opponents pretty much what he himself is doing or intends to do. For instance, he is asserting that revision (based on historical evidence) of an idealized, self-glorifying U.S. history is creating a “distorted  narrative.” When, in his opinion, someone else is allegedly “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative” it is a monstrous fault, maybe even a crime. When Trump himself does this same thing, it is heroically redemptive.

What is going on here?

First of all, we should realize that it is quite possible to propagandize a population into believing that a foundation myth or justifications myths are historically factual. It is done by taking as nearly total control of a national narrative as is possible. The Chinese have done this, the Russians did it for nearly a hundred years, believing Christian, Muslims, Hindus have done this relative to their religions. Jews of the Zionist persuasion have done it when it comes to Israel. Finally, a large subset of Americans has bought into their nation’s idealized myths as fact. Yet, now we find that, in the case of the USA, there has been substantial slippage. Where did that come from?

It has been much more than a decade that a large number of historians of U.S. history have been examining America’s various justification myths. This effort has been largely motivated by taking seriously the experience of America’s non-white minorities and colonized people. As a result, such claims as the USA represents to the world an “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” has been called into question. We are thus presented with the choice: (1) To take seriously the work of hundreds of historians over decades exploring such subjects of American history as slavery; a persistent post-Civil War practice of deep-seeded racial bigotry resulting in segregation and persecution; the destruction of the American Indians; the imperial adventures of the 19th and 20th centuries, and so on. (2) Or, accept Trump’s claim, made in his March EO, of America’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty …” as a statement of “objective fact.” Both positions cannot be simultaneously true.

It is option (1) representing an effort to introduce the stories of those long excluded from American history that Trump finds “sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” Putting the cart before the horse, he charges that the result of “the widespread effort to rewrite history also deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame. It seems to me that this is the equivalent of accusing the little fellow who proclaimed “the emperor has no clothes” of pornography.

There is no doubt about it, Donald Trump and those pushing this message have taken a stand that belief in a simplistic, ethically skewed idealization of national history is the only acceptable foundation of patriotism. No doubt millions of patriots in hundreds of other countries take the same stand. But Trump seems to want to go further suggesting that to challenge the myth is itself undermining truth. That might sound like a contradiction based on denial and confusion—but it is obviously a confusion President Trump has taken to heart.

Looking beyond the Tapestry

Why would Trump and his supporters, including some very well educated people: (1) insist that myth is really “objective truth.” (2) That a second look at the historical record will only distort the truth. Specifically, (3) why characterize that second look as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or an otherwise irredeemably flawed”? This is what is being said in recent attacks on the Smithsonian Institution, The National Museum of African American History and Culture, and American Women’s History Museum. Again, quoting from the 27 March  EO:

“Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.  This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive. For example, an exhibit representing that “societies including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement” …. The National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” are aspects of “White culture.”  The forthcoming Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports.”

The Trump administration attack on the Smithsonian and other federal institutions is a good example of Confirmation Bias—the habit of selecting what evidence supports your point of view and ignoring or dismissing all the rest. In our case this use of confirmation bias facilitates turning the Smithsonian and other institutions into shrines—like so many Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields.

Such an effort implies real fear of a balanced view. More specifically, what these attacks suggest is that Trump and his backers are seriously afraid of the “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive” facts that happen to be truthful parts of American history. They refuse to countenance any program of revision based on evidence. Why? Perhaps because these facts represent aspects of history that are incompatible with the claim that we can “MAGA” our way to recovering alleged past glory. As such, historical revision is seen not just as an attack on the national image, but what Trump imagines to be the collective ego of the white America. Denial is the only alternative.

The Fact of Prevailing Ignorance 

It is hard to believe that any broadly educated American would believe Trump’s doublespeak—and, indeed, maybe most such people would not. But one must realize just how few folks are broadly educated, and how the majority of even college graduates are narrowly educated because their schooling has been compartmentalized into occupational specialties. That means that unless they have taken it upon themselves to supplement their education with broad reading, your typical engineer, accountant, businessperson, as well as carpenter, plumber, electrician, etc. will know no more about the historical background of current events than he or she reads in the newspaper. And, newspapers are not well known for presenting objective truth or, for that matter, even paying for fact-checkers.

You can carry this theme of compartmentalization further. A society like the U.S. has always been and remains racially segregated. That means the subset of the white population that voted for and continues to support Trump has no sociological context for understanding why charges of  “institutional racism” or the notions of “woke culture” would make sense to socially aware African Americans. Nor can they historically understand the essential role of immigrants in the history and economy of the U.S.  Existing in what essentially has long been a self-imposed ethnic ghetto, these white Americans have been easily manipulated. This, in turn, has allowed the present government to summarily shut down every federally funded Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) program in the country.

The Tale’s Present Consequences

First, the broad attack on DEI, followed up by the near erasure of public recognition of historical events such as the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, the deletion of photographic records of the contributions of American Indians during World War II, and others constitutes no less than a denial that non-white Americans have any role in the nation’s history except as well-treated supplicants.

Second, once you publicly assert such a mythologized version of your own history as the unassailable, you will be forced to continuously lie to support it. In other words, once you set foot down that path you will be forced to increasingly rely on official censorship and propaganda to maintain the unreal image. Simultaneously, you must claim that any attempt at revision using evidence based research is itself an attempt at distortion. This is a complicated maneuver, even for someone as devious as Trump, and can only be maintained through denial and sustained ignorance.

Third, there is no nation on the planet whose actual history is beyond sin and guilt. The only way you can create that image is by turning history into a fairy tale. Strangely, as far as one can tell, President Trump constantly seeks to present his own history/biography in just this fashion. Now he seeks to do the same with the United States—perhaps as part of a narcissistic process to make the country conform to the notion that,  history is just what President Trump says it is. And, if you contest that claim, you must be some sort of traitor. 

* Justification myths are like foundation myths which, usually growing up around a few actual events, set in place a self-glorifying narrative to explain the nation’s founding, and then, periodically, enhance the narrative with compatible myths justifying subsequent national actions.

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