Lake Toronto in central south Chihuahua. If you look closely you can see the water line on the embankment and just how far it’s gone down. Photo: Todd Miller.

When I first meet the fisherman Gerardo Delgado, he is sitting in his boat, surrounded by pelicans, off the shore of Lake Toronto, in central south Chihuahua, Mexico. Perhaps the pelicans are waiting for Delgado to toss a fillet, but his catch is, yet again, meager. In the last couple of years, it’s been hard to make a living from fishing on the lake. I am with another fisherman, Alonso Montañes, and we approach Delgado on a motorboat.

Across the lake I can see Delgado’s town, El Toro, on top of a large embankment, about two stories high. Montañes tells me the embankment used to be the floor of the lake, which once reached the houses of El Toro. The lake—which is a reservoir created when the Boquilla Dam was constructed in 1916—is quickly receding. It is at 15 percent of its capacity, Montañes tells me. Never has it been so low.

Fisherman Gerardo Delgado shows me his catch on Lake Toronto. Photo: Todd Miller).

Delgado is in a blue motorboat. I ask how many fish he has caught, and he shows me his plastic orange container with about five fillets scrunched in a corner. “This will probably earn me 60 pesos,” he tells me, adding that so far today, after about six hours, he has spent 350 pesos on gas. “So you are going to lose money?” I ask. “Every day,” he says.

Two years ago, Delgado tells me, El Toro’s community well went dry. Now to get water, they have to buy it from expensive “pipa” trucks that come from out of town. There used to be 40 families in El Toro. Now there are 17. Two of Delgado’s sisters are already in the United States.

It takes a bit for it to set in, but I finally realize that I am in a climate-change hot spot. I’m reminded of Marinduque, Philippines, which I visited in 2015. There, I saw water lapping into a destroyed house like it was a carcass. For me, in that moment, climate change went from abstract to raw and real. On Lake Toronto there is also this palpable sense of violence with the drought. Throughout the day, as we cruise the lake, Montañes tells me an “ecocide” is happening before our very eyes.

Fisherman Alonso Montañes driving his boat on Lake Toronto. Photo: Todd Miller.

I am there because I am working on a book about climate change, water, and the border. And being there on the cusp of 2025 is significant for two reasons. One, of course, is the change in presidential power in the United States and the uncertainty that brings. But also 2025 is the year that Mexico, as stipulated by a 1944 treaty, is obligated to pay a water debt to the United States. Every five years Mexico has to pay the United States 1.75 million acre-feet of water, and in March it had supplied only 382,000. Farmers in Texas’s faraway Rio Grande Valley also depend on this reservoir’s water, which will flow north in the Rio Conchos and become the Rio Grande after Presidio, Texas. In other words, on Lake Toronto we are floating on the water that will become the U.S.-Mexico border. In May, Texas congresswoman Monica de la Cruz stood before the U.S. House and said, “We need to use every tool that we have available to force Mexico to abide by the treaty. We want our water. We demand our water!”

“Está cabrón,” another fisherman named Jesús Chávez tells me on the shores of Lake Toronto, a few miles from where Delgado was. He is not referring to de la Cruz’s words, nor to the United States’ demands. He is referring to having caught “nothing” after putting out his nets and traps the night before. At his feet are discarded watermelon rinds. He tried to grow the crop to supplement his income but couldn’t sell it for a good price. “Do you want a slice?” he asks me.

“Está cabrón,” he tells me as I eat the watermelon, meaning “it’s fucked up.” “Should be the title of your book.”

Fisherman Jesús Chávez on the shores of Lake Toronto. Photo: Todd Miller.

Later at dusk in the small town of Camargo, where I am staying, I get a coffee at a small stand in the town’s central plaza and sit on a wrought-iron bench. All around are holiday lights. All around are people out and about, kids on scooters and tricycles. I see Christmas trees decorated with large ornaments in the storefronts. December into the holidays is my favorite time of the year. Even with a dire forecast for next year, life always slows down, becomes more reflective, more present. There are indeed many things to worry about. But there is something about this plaza here in Mexico, where I can find a calm joy, at least for now.

As I sit, I read the late Irish poet John O’Donohue’s book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. I think about my day on the water as the poet contends that the violation of beauty is a fundamental element of today’s global crisis. “When we awaken to the call of beauty,” O’Donohue writes, “we become aware of new ways of being in the world.” Soon it is dusk, and the sky has clouds blazing across it, and there are even a few surprising raindrops. Across from me a group of women have gathered, two sitting on another wrought-iron bench, but several others have brought chairs from their homes as if the plaza were their living room. I come to understand, over the next few days, that this is a nightly ritual. Each time I see it, I think how much I love Mexico. And how imperative it is to think about things globally, not territorially, especially when it comes to environmental chaos.

Maybe 2025 could be the year to discard artificial borders—not necessarily the physical, militarized ones, which won’t be budging for a while, but the more easily movable ones, the psychological ones. Maybe 2025 could be a year that focuses on interconnectedness between people and peoples—like underground mycelia networks—rather than the brute territorial divisiveness that will surely emanate from Washington. I am, indeed, searching for new ways of being.

The Rio Conchos in central south Chihuahua. It is feared that the river will dry up considerably in 2025 threatening the water supply of the town of Camargo. Photo: Todd Miller.

The next day I visit a rancho. It consists mainly of a pecan grove, but also has a drying alfalfa field. There, I meet with a farmer named Miguel. “What do you think about the incoming president?” he asks, referring, of course, to Donald Trump. At this point we have been talking for about 15 minutes. We are walking under the pecan trees on dry cracked soil near Camargo. The soil tells the story of 2024: it hasn’t rained. There isn’t enough water in the reservoir to irrigate this year, and Miguel knows this.

We are just a few miles away from the Boquilla Dam, which was commandeeredby the Mexican military in 2020. The military tried to open the valves to pay the United States with what was going to be irrigation water. What resulted was a serious water battle. Thousands of farmers converged around the dam and, after many clashes, forced the military out. The farmers shut down the valves. This time, when I ask if people thought the military would come for the water again, the response has been “what water?”

Miguel walks through the pecan trees. Photo: Todd Miller.

Miguel tells me he asked about Trump because before he came to this farm 15 years ago (he is an employee), he had lived in the United States for decades. He worked the corn harvests near Albuquerque, New Mexico. He picked grapes and chiles. If there is no water to irrigate here, Miguel tells me, there could be a lot of migration north. And if there is a mass deportation, he tells me, “there’s going to be a lot of problems.” He goes on, “I know because I worked the fields there. What are they going to do with the fields? The agriculture? Undocumented people are the ones who work there. Are they going to deport them here?”

And here, he says, “va a correr sangre antes de correr agua”: blood will flow before water does.

He asks what I think they should do, since I come here commissioned by the United States. I tell him I am not commissioned by the United States; I’m an independent journalist. I tell him I came here because the world seems to be at a crossroads, a crucial moment, and things like borders and water are at the center of that. I think about Alonso Montañes, on Lake Toronto, Gerardo Delgado showing me his meager catch, and Jesús Chávez saying “está cabrón.” I think about the women in the central plaza meeting up every night, even as the threat of water running out in Camargo looms for 2025. Would these people be the guides to a new way of being? I think that’s likely. That’s why I’m here, I tell Miguel. That’s why I’m talking to you, because you are the person who knows.

This originally appeared in The Border Chronicle.

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Putin meeting with Bashar al-Assad. Photo: Valery Sharifulin, TASS.

The lightning collapse of the Assad government in Syria in recent weeks made it clear that pretty much no one, inside Syria or out, considered this to be a state worth fighting for. It also seemed pretty clear that Turkey (with the probable backing of Israel and the US) had taken the opportunity to use the forces it had been training in Idlib for some years to make a serious power play. The west have long sought to turn Syria into a ‘failed state’ on the Iraq-Libya model, and the new situation has allowed Israel to destroy, almost overnight, the vast bulk of the country’s military installations, and expand its occupation in the South. This is what they have all been working for for thirteen years. What is less clear is the extent to which Russia was in on this move.

The mainstream interpretation is essentially that the latest turn of events is a major blow to Russia. Syria was Russia’s only solid Arab ally, home to its only warm-water naval base (Tartus) as well as a huge airbase (Hmeimim) crucial for its operations in Africa in particular. The ‘loss’ of Syria was therefore a crippling blow to Moscow; a consequence, supposedly, of the Russian army being bogged down in Ukraine and thus unable to commit the necessary military resources to put down the insurrection in Syria.

Combined with the fact that Iran and Hezbollah were also both recovering from Israeli attacks, this created a window of opportunity for the insurgents and their backers to make their move. And it was a window that might have been very brief: Hezbollah could regroup quickly and, if Trump were to honour his promise to immediately impose a peace deal on Ukraine on coming to office, large numbers of Russian forces could be again free to operate in Syria, perhaps within a couple of months.

This is obviously part of the picture. Russia’s options were clearly limited. Any deal it cut would have been made from a position of weakness, at least relative to its position in, say, 2018. But that doesn’t mean no deal was made at all. It is incredibly unlikely, in my view, that Putin would not have been consulted in advance.

Firstly, the risk of large swathes of Turkey’s carefully groomed insurgents being simply wiped out by Russian airstrikes was serious, and both Erdogan and HTS would have sought to avoid this eventuality if at all possible. Even if Putin lacked the capacity to ultimately defeat the uprising, they would certainly have attempted to convince him not to try rather than simply cross their fingers and hope that he didn’t.

Secondly, although it is easy to say in hindsight, this takeover was clearly in the cards for some time. All the fighters from former opposition-held territories retaken by government forces during the war had been pushed into Idlib. There they were joined, in March 2020, by over 20,000 Turkish troops, including special forces, armoured units and light infantry including the 5th Commando Brigade which specialises in paramilitary operations and mountain warfare. They were not there for a picnic; for four years they have been, in plain sight, training and consolidating the insurgent forces to relaunch their insurrection. Russia was obviously aware of this and would have planned for it.

Furthermore, although Russia might have found it difficult to commit large numbers of its own troops to Syria, it could certainly have subsidised the salaries of Syrian army soldiers, which could well have gone some way to mitigating the mundane bread-and-butter defections and passivity within the Syrian army. It chose not to do so, presumably for a reason.

This does not mean, of course, that the whole thing was a Kremlin plot all along, as some are now trying to suggest. One theory claims that Putin, by allowing the Syrian government to fall, has cunningly set a trap for the west, who will now be bogged down trying to stabilise Syria for years to come, just as the Soviets were bogged down in 1980s Afghanistan. But this suggestion makes no sense – the transformation of Syria into a ‘failed state’ has always been the west’s aim, which is why they have backed the most sectarian forces to accomplish it. They achieved this in Libya without getting ‘bogged down;’ they hoped to repeat their success in Syria, and they have now done so. This theory seems to be a desperate clutching of straws by people who simply cannot interpret any event as anything other than a genius plan by the Grand Master.

The truth, I suspect, is rather more nuanced. Here is a  working hypothesis: the basic parameters of the HTS takeover of Syria were worked out and agreed in advance by Erdogan, Netanyahu, Putin and Trump. I suspect Trump offered Putin a straight swap – Syria for eastern Ukraine; with the caveat that Russia could keep its Syrian bases. This was acceptable to Putin for several reasons.

Firstly, obviously, eastern Ukraine is his priority. Secondly, his only real concern in Syria was those bases, anyway. He may well have come round to the west’s ‘Divide and Ruin’ strategy – essentially, that it is easier and cheaper to secure your specific assets (bases, mines, oil wells etc) in a failed state using local militias, private security and/or your own armed forces than it is to secure an entire state to do so for you. Thirdly, Assad had, by all accounts, not been fully playing ball with Russia, and had been unwilling to turn Syria into the pure vassal state that Putin was demanding, making himself less valuable and more expendable in so doing. Fourth, Russia’s ultimate goal to take over patronage from the US of its Middle East client states can only be done by demonstrating Russia’s usefulness to Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia. In facilitating the fruition of those states’ thirteen-year regime-change operation in Syria, he has certainly done that, paving the way for (and perhaps already part of) future collaborations and deepening alliances. Fifth, just because Iran is an ‘ally’ of Russia, does not mean Russia wants it to be strong and autonomous. Quite the opposite. Like any imperial power, what Russia seeks are not allies, but dependencies. This latest move has gone a long way to transforming Iran from a Russian ally to a Russian dependency.

Cutting off Iran from the resistance in Lebanon and Gaza is no bad thing from Russia’s point of view: partly because Iran’s patronage of those groups acts as a source of power and autonomy for Iran, giving it some kind of ‘deterrence’ independent of the Russian defensive umbrella. If the resistance is cut off and neutered, Iran’s only source of deterrence (other than its own, admittedly formidable but nonetheless heavily Russian-reliant, defences) is Russia. And popular, autonomous, working-class resistance militias (such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis) are a nuisance for any imperial power anyway, a constant potential spanner-in-the-works to any colonial carve-up agreed by the Big Men.

And finally, of course, as discussed above, Putin’s options were limited; he could certainly have slowed the rebel advance but it is unclear whether he could have defeated it, and even the attempt to do so would have entailed some, potentially quite significant, diversion of manpower from the war on Ukraine. With limited options available, a deal that allowed him to keep eastern Ukraine and his Syrian bases would have likely seemed like the best available.

Claims that the latest events are a huge blow to Russia are therefore overstated. In strategic terms, if the bases are maintained, nothing has really been lost, other than a tedious responsibility to maintain an unpopular and disobedient client. And, in the longer-term, regional picture, much may have been gained, as suggested above.

The other argument often made is that this is a blow to Russian ‘prestige,’ that its ‘stock’ as a power willing and able to defend its allies will have been reduced significantly. A report from the Institute for the Study of War published shortly before the fall of Damascus, for example, claims that “Assad’s collapse would damage the global perception of Russia as an effective partner and protector, potentially threatening Russia’s partnerships with African autocrats and its resulting economic, military, and political influence in Africa.”

That’s possible, of course. But Putin’s ditching of Assad might in fact send a different message to Putin’s new African friends: “Don’t think you can just do whatever you want and still expect to be protected. Remember you are expendable. We can throw you to the dogs at any moment. And without our support, you won’t last five minutes. Never forget you are not an ally, but a client.” African leaders contemplating any resistance to the full integration of their armies under Russian tutelage may well be chastened by this message, and in a way entirely beneficial to Russian interests.

And whilst it is true that EU leaders are now demanding that HTS kick out the Russians, the truth is that it is not really the EU’s opinion that matters, but Trump’s. Let’s see what he says on the matter; and more importantly, what he does.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It’s been a bad few months for democracy. Election results offensive to the European Union were annulled in Romania; an attempted coup occurred in Georgia over elections that didn’t go the way the west wanted; the French government, widely hated, teetered over the abyss as president Emmanual Macron tried to ignore the last election; on December 16, Washington’s pet German government fell; lots of funny-business happened in the Moldovan referendum and election, amid widespread disenfranchisement of Moldovan voters living in Russia; elections were long ago cancelled in dictatorial Ukraine; and South Korea hosted an attempted coup. In short, western democracies’ storied enchantment with elections is over. As western populations grow sick and tired of their political class and vote against it, what are elites to do? Annul, cancel, overturn and ignore the elections, that’s what. The problem, for the west, is the voters.

What will happen if far-right Alternative for Deutschland sweeps the early German elections in February, or if far-left France Insoumise does the same in France? Will the U.S. through its NATO and EU tentacles annul those votes? Don’t think it won’t try. And Washington doesn’t even have to give the order, because its European puppets know exactly what’s expected of them. Granted, the Romanian front-runner, so feared by NATO, Calin Georgescu, was far right. But so what? Besides, I doubt that’s what led to the constitutional court vacating the vote. More likely it was his opposition to the Ukraine War – hence the court citing “foreign influence” (translation: Russian) via TikTok as its flimsy basis for negating the election. Incidentally, reports are coming in that the heat and internet to Georgescu’s house have been cut off, and, surprise! he can’t get anyone on the phone to help with this.

But you can’t blame European honchos for ditching elections. They’re just following Washington’s lead. After all, the post-2016 phony Russiagate hysteria may not have succeeded in ousting Trump, as was intended, but it did provide the template for American vassals. The four years of lawfare against Trump (and then another four after he left office) blazed the trail for Europe, so that now, if a candidate not favored by political bigwigs wins, all they have to do is scream “Russian influence!” to dump the election. In other words, democracy is dying in the west. It’s kicking the bucket in Europe – and if Trump ends the Ukraine War (provided Biden doesn’t utterly sabotage his peace efforts before he takes office) or gets us out of the NATO sinkhole, you can bet your paycheck the 2028 establishment campaign will dust off the 2016 playbook and get right to work.

In western media, Georgescu has been portrayed as an unknown. This is false. He is well-known in Romania and had a diplomatic career. But he is also a religious nationalist, and that’s verboten in the EU; worse yet, the U.S., aka NATO, built its biggest military airbase in Europe – where? You got it, Romania. So Washington can’t have just anybody running that country. It must be someone who will keep everything copacetic with the U.S. A nationalist opposed to Washington’s pet proxy war in Ukraine is not that someone.

 As for Georgia, there the electorate proved itself most unreliable to the Exceptional Empire. It voted in a government that actually dares to require foreign NGOs to register as such – you know, the way we do, here in the United States. But here, those NGOs don’t aim to overthrow the government, like they do in Georgia, in order for Tbilisi to open a second front against Moscow. Indeed, the vast majority of rioters against the Georgian government, who were arrested, were – I’m shocked! Shocked! – foreign, i.e. European. The icing on the cake is that the French president of Georgia refused to leave office when her term expired – a president with French and Georgian passports, who boasts Nazis in her family tree.

The EU finagled things more successfully in Moldova. That nation’s October 20 referendum on joining the EU won – kinda. In country, the Moldovan government only snagged 50 percent of the vote, but Moldovan expats in Europe gave it a boost, while the 400,000 Moldovans living in Russia found, to their dismay, only two polling stations open for them, by their government, in Moscow. That meant as few as 10,000 of them got to vote. And as East European expert and political scientist Ivan Katchanovski tweeted October 21, many pro-Russian citizens in Transdniestria could not vote. So all in all, the Moldovan referendum was a sorry excuse for a democratic exercise. Then there was also Moldova’s presidential election, equally compromised. But hey, Washington’s EU vassal got to lure a country out of Russia’s orbit, and that’s all that counts, not mere democracy, right? After all, Washington doesn’t stand for democracy. It stands for and has long stood for something quite different – power. Just look at it backing a terrorist takeover of Syria, among them a ruler on whose head Washington has a $10,000,000 bounty. Let that sink in. One American hand posts a huge reward for a terrorist, while the other hand paves his way to power. The obvious conclusion (also obvious to any student of American-backed coups and regime changes abroad going back at least 70 years) is that U.S. doesn’t stand for anything besides power (certainly not anything as antiquated and nettlesome as international law). That’s the definition of a gangster state.

If you doubt that, just peek at South Korea, where the CIA’s man, president Yoon Suk Yeol, faced a grim electoral future. The voters were unlikely to support him in the next election, given that they mostly back the opposition. And that opposition, per Col. Douglas Macgregor, wants a Korean four-star general, not an American one, to head the roughly 500,000 Korean armed forces and also wants to boot the 30,000 U.S. troops off the peninsula. This, of course, goes over in Washington with all the joy of a root canal.

So what to do? Yoon took the bull by the horns December 3 with martial law. During the few hours when it looked like our man in Seoul had pulled off a coup, the Biden gang was coyly silent. But there is nothing enduring in this world, as Gogol noted, and even the most brazen attempts at subverting democracy occasionally fail. The opposition gathered and voted against Yoon. His defense minister was deposed, jailed and attempted suicide, and Yoon’s own tenure came now, ahem, under a cloud, to say the least, as insurrection charges loomed, and he was impeached and suspended from office.

And don’t forget France, where Macron, affronted by an EU parliament vote last summer that installed many anti-Ukraine War representatives, totally lost it and, quite idiotically and hubristically, called snap elections. He promptly lost those to the left, but then snubbed the voters by breaking with tradition and refusing to appoint a left-wing prime minister. Surprising no one, the center-rightist he chose received a vote of no confidence, and Macron’s government looked likely to fall. That was temporarily forestalled by the appointment, December 13, of a centrist prime minister. But if his government does ultimately crash, expect Macron to do something really stupid, like suspend the legislature, call a national emergency or, a la Yoon, declare martial law.

Lastly of course we have Ukraine, that shining example of democracy, where its president rules illegally, having cancelled elections, banned the opposition, throttled the press, exiled the church, jailed anyone he doesn’t like and press-ganged thousands of vehemently objecting Ukrainian men into the military. All this while ferociously lining his pockets with western, mainly American, funds. This is the tyranny upon which Biden bestows hundreds of billions of our hard-earned tax dollars. It’s not even supported by Ukrainians, most of whom, according to recent polls, want the war over. But Joe “War Is My Legacy” Biden, in his crazed enthusiasm for Ukrainian combat, just won’t stop. On December 11, Ukraine fired six ATACAMS into Russia. We can all thank God they did little damage, since the Russians shot two down and diverted four with electronic warfare. Had they inflicted real harm, we in the west might very well have had worse troubles than the death of democracy, namely death itself. Biden appears oblivious to this reality. For us, what’s at stake is life itself, and the whole, wondrous human and natural world. For him, it appears to be just another step on the path of endless war, another day, another dollar.

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This fall, shortly after the election, the House passed a dangerous piece of legislation that many are calling the “nonprofit killer” bill.

The bill has an incongruous title: the “Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act.”

Among other things, it would give the Treasury Department the authority to unilaterally accuse nonprofit organizations of supporting “terrorism” — and revoke their nonprofit status. Critics like the ACLU say it’s a blank check for presidents to shut down organizations that criticize them.

When the bill was introduced in the spring, it was largely viewed as an effort to silence pro-Palestinian activism. At the time, dozens of House Democrats supported it alongside most Republicans. But after Donald Trump’s White House win, amid fears that the incoming president would use it as a tool to bludgeon his perceived enemies, it passed with significantly less Democratic support.

But really, it should never have been introduced or passed to begin with, no matter the political winds. The bill is considered unlikely to pass the Senate this year, but could be reintroduced next year and signed by President Trump.

This would have a dangerous chilling effect on speech.

Consider the Florida woman Briana Boston, who recently said “Delay, deny, depose. You people are next,” during a phone call with a health insurance representative after her coverage was denied. It was a reference to what the killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson wrote on bullet casings in a now-infamous targeted assassination.

Boston has no history of violence, nor does she own firearms. But she wasn’t only arrested — she was charged with threatening to commit an act of terrorism.

What she was really guilty of was expressing vitriol against corporate CEOs for an inhumane business model. It’s not hard to imagine such a scenario applied to nonprofits in the coming years either.

Nonprofits are effectively the voice of civil society in the United States. And even without HR 9495, they already have severe limits on their speech. In order to keep their nonprofit status, groups have to follow strict guidelines published by the Internal Revenue Service when speaking about elections.

As a journalist who works in the nonprofit world, I’ve seen the resulting self-censorship first hand. Many journalists and nonprofit leaders feared compromising their institutions if they warned about Donald Trump’s fascism, or even criticized Joe Biden over Gaza, ahead of the 2024 election.

Meanwhile, for-profit industries have enjoyed continuous and ever-growing impunity to advocate for whatever they want, no matter how destructive.

For example, the health insurance and fossil fuel industries play with people’s lives by denying coverage and spewing carbon, respectively, but have been given the right to spend enormous amounts of their ill-gotten gains in campaign contributions, putting an outsize thumb on the democratic scale.

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, they have greater means to make anonymous donations to Political Action Committees to lobby government and help elect politicians.

The Supreme Court has long considered corporations to be, in a legal sense, people. In contrast to such abstract entities, we humans can be jailed, silenced, or even killed by corporate-controlled systems — and the nonprofits representing our interests can be officially sanctioned for “political speech.”

Today, not only do corporations have greater means to speak more freely than the rest of us do, they are increasingly grabbing political power to cement their stranglehold.

Trump’s incoming cabinet will likely be filled with billionaires. And his proposed Treasury Secretary pick — who would ostensibly oversee the department making determinations under HR 9495 — is a longtime hedge fund  investment manager named Scott Bessent. Trump has also openly promised to bend regulations for billionaire investors.

Seen within this context, HR 9495 is not only a danger to civil society’s right to speech — it is a serious escalation in favor of corporations.

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On December 1, President Joe Biden announced that he was pardoning his son Hunter for all the crimes he committed from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024. Biden’s sweeping pardon of all of his son’s abuses epitomizes how presidents and their families are now above the law. It also illustrates how the “King James Test for American Democracy” could become the death of the Constitution.

The American Revolution was heavily influenced by a political backlash that began across the ocean in the early 1600s. King James I claimed a “divine right” to unlimited power in England, sparking fierce clashes with Parliament. Since the 9/11 attacks, some of the same moral and legal principles have been advanced in this nation, but few people recognize the historical roots.

Before he became king of England in 1604, James was king of Scotland. He cemented his claims to absolute power there by launching witch panics and burning hundreds of Scottish women alive to sanctify his power. Harsh methods were not a problem because James insisted that God would never allow an innocent person to be accused of witchcraft. “While James’s assertion of his [Scottish] royal authority is evident in his highly unorthodox act of taking control of the pre-trial examinations, it is his absolutism which is most apparent in his advocating the use of torture to force confessions during the investigations,” according to the University of Texas’s Allegra Geller, author of “Daemonologie and Divine Right: The Politics of Witchcraft in Late Sixteenth-Century Scotland.” Torture produced “confessions” that spurred further panic and the destruction of far more victims. England did not have similar witch panics because officials were almost entirely prevented from using torture to generate false confessions. James justified the illicit torture, “asserting his belief that as an anointed king, he was above the law,” and similar rationales emitted from the Bush administration from 2002 onward in the name of the 9/11 attacks.

After Queen Elizabeth died and James became king, he vowed that he had no obligation to respect the rights of the English people: “A good king will frame his actions according to the law, yet he is not bound thereto but of his own goodwill.” And “law” was whatever James decreed. Nor did he flatter the men elected to the House of Commons: “In the Parliament (which is nothing else but the head court of the king and his vassals) the laws are but craved by his subjects and only made by him at their rogation.” James proclaimed that God intended for the English to live at his mercy: “It is certain that patience, earnest prayers to God, and amendment of their lives are the only lawful means to move God to relieve them of their heavy curse” of oppression. And there was no way for Parliament to subpoena God to confirm his blanket endorsement of King James.

James reminded his subjects that “even by God himself [kings] are called Gods.” Seventeenth-century Englishmen recognized the grave peril in the king’s words. A 1621 Parliament report eloquently warned: “If [the king] founds his authority on arbitrary and dangerous principles, it is requisite to watch him with the same care, and to oppose him with the same vigor, as if he indulged himself in all the excesses of cruelty and tyranny.” Historian Thomas Macaulay observed in 1831, “The policy of wise tyrants has always been to cover their violent acts with popular forms. James was always obtruding his despotic theories on his subjects without the slightest necessity. His foolish talk exasperated them infinitely more than forced loans would have done.” Macaulay scoffed that James was “in his own opinion, the greatest master of king-craft that ever lived, but who was, in truth, one of those kings whom God seems to send for the express purpose of hastening revolutions.” After James’s son, Charles I, relied on the same dogmas and ravaged much of the nation, he was beheaded. Charles I’s son ascended to the English throne in 1660, but his abuses spurred the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and sweeping reforms that sought to forever curb the power of monarchs.

A century and a half after King James denigrated Parliament, a similar declaration of absolute power spurred the American Revolution. The Stamp Act of 1765 compelled Americans to purchase British stamps for all legal papers, newspapers, cards, advertisements, and even dice. After violent protests erupted, Parliament rescinded the Stamp Act but passed the Declaratory Act, which decreed that Parliament “had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” The Declaratory Act canonized Parliament’s right to use and abuse Americans as it pleased.

The Declaratory Act ignited an intellectual powder keg among colonists determined not to live under the heel of either monarchs or parliaments. Thomas Paine wrote in 1776 that “in America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” The Founding Fathers, having endured oppression, sought to build a “government of laws, not of men.” That meant that “government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand — rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers,” as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek noted in 1944.

For generations, American politicians spoke reverently of the Constitution as America’s highest law. But in recent years, the Constitution has fallen into disrepute. The rule of law now means little more than the enforcement of the secret memos of the commander-in-chief.

We now have the “King James Test for American Democracy.” As long as the president does not formally proclaim himself a tyrant, we are obliged to pretend he is obeying the Constitution. Government is not lawless regardless of how many laws it violates — unless and until the president formally announces he is above the law.

While King James bluntly declared his right to absolute power 400 years ago, recent presidents only make such claims via their lawyers, often in secret documents that citizens are supposed to never see.

The most important recent change in American political thinking is nonchalance regarding government criminality. The notion that “it is not a crime if government does it” is the new conventional wisdom in Washington. It doesn’t matter which agency or official broke the law. Instead, the only prudent response is to pretend nothing is amiss.

Nowadays, every act of government is judged in a vacuum, as if every constitutional violation is a fluke. This is the mirror image of how the Founding Fathers viewed government power. In 1768, John Dickinson wrote that colonists fixated on “not what evil has actually attended particular measures but, what evil, in the nature of things, is likely to attend them.” Dickinson pointed out that because “nations in general, are not apt to think until they feel … nations have lost their liberty.” The Founding Fathers looked at the liberties they were losing, while modern Americans focus myopically on the rights they supposedly still retain. Law professor John Phillip Reid, in his seminal work The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, observed that liberty in the 18th century was “largely thought of as freedom from arbitrary government…. The less a law restrained the citizen, and the more it restrained government, the better the law.”

But government officials now claim unlimited discretion to define the law and their own prerogatives. Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2003–04, later explained how top Bush officials dealt with “laws they didn’t like: they blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations.” It is no longer a question of having good laws, including laws that permit officials limited flexibility for contingencies. The rule of law has come to mean nothing more than finding a single lawyer who will say “Yes, Master!” to his political overlords. But it is folly to make the survival of liberty hinge on lawyer’s sense of shame.

If the Iraq war had not turned into a debacle, most of the media and the political ruling class would have continued deferring to President George W. Bush almost across-the-board. As long as his popularity ratings were high, he could do little or no wrong. America’s “best and brightest” were as naive or craven as the courtiers who defended the mass burning of Scottish women 400+ years earlier.

The Constitution’s checks and balances failed to deter recent administrations from erecting the legal scaffolding of dictatorship. Instead, implausible denials of seizing excessive power have been followed by “dictatorial apathy.” Lawless power grabs have become another background noise in Washington. Presidents and their legal teams can claim absolute power — and almost no one inside the government or the Justice Department blows the whistle. President Bush could boast that he was obeying the law because his appointees assured him that he was the law. Legions of government employees safeguarded their careers by going along and enforcing Bush-era absolutist legal doctrines. That settled any doubts about whether Justice Department officials would be willing tools for future presidents who trample the Constitution.

Inside the Beltway, a mystical adoration of power is taken as proof of wisdom. In 2007, Bush nominated former federal judge Michael Mukasey as attorney general. Three years earlier, Mukasey had proclaimed that “the hidden message in the structure of the Constitution” is that the government is entitled to “the benefit of the doubt.” Mukasey did not reveal where the message was hidden. Mukasey’s “benefit of the doubt” assertion may have helped him snare the top law-enforcement job in the nation, where he provided all the benefits Bush needed.

The more power politicians capture, the more flattery they hear, and the more deluded they usually become. A phalanx of academics is always ready to cheer power-hungry presidents. In 2007, Harvard University government professor Harvey Mansfield exalted “one-man rule” in a Wall Street Journal oped, scoffed at the rule of law, and declared that “free government should show its respect for freedom even when it has to take it away.” And since the president is entitled to vast power, how would we know it is still a “free government?” Presumably because it would be a crime to assert otherwise. Mansfield scorned contemporaries who “forget to consider emergencies when liberties are dangerous and law does not apply.” The previous year, Mansfield wrote in a Weekly Standard article that the “Office of President” is “larger than the law” and that “ordinary power needs to be supplemented or corrected by the extraordinary power of a prince, using wise discretion.” Mansfield also asserted that in emergencies, “liberties are dangerous and law does not apply.” Such assertions may have swayed the National Endowment for the Humanities to select Mansfield in 2007 to deliver its Jefferson lecture — “the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities.”

Mansfield’s cheerleading fits a pattern that goes back millenniums. Throughout history, intellectuals downplayed the perils of political power. As long as court intellectuals were treated royally, rulers were indemnified for any and all abuses of the peasantry.

As French philosopher Bertrand Jouvenal noted in 1945, “Authority can never be too despotic for the speculative man, so long as he deludes himself that its arbitrary force will further his plans.” John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century, exemplified this attitude. Keynes declared in 1944 that “dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.” And who is to judge whether the community “thinks and feels rightly?” The same politicians seizing boundless power.

The same passion for absolving high-level wrongdoers is often expressed in muffled terms by the editorial pages of the Washington Post and other leading papers. From 2008 onwards, the Post inveighed against permitting lawsuits that sought to hold former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other top officials liable for the torture and other abuses that occurred on their watch. One Post editorial fretted: “Officials should not have to fear personal lawsuits for performing their duties in good faith and in violation of no established legal precedent.” This practically assumed the existence of “good faith torture” — as if maiming and beating people to death was the moral equivalent of a clerical error.

Unfortunately, the same “absolve everything” mindset often prevails in the federal judiciary. Government officials have become practically untouchable at the same time that they have become far more dangerous. The Supreme Court has expanded sovereign immunity like a toxic legal cloud. As Senator John Taylor warned in 1821, “There are no rights where there are no remedies, or where the remedies depend upon the will of the aggressor.”

Nowadays, lawless government is simply benevolence on amphetamines. Rather than the rule of law, we now have the “friend of humanity rhetorical test.” As long as politicians profess to be doing good, it is bad taste to quibble about legal technicalities or archaic constitutional clauses. The question is not what the president actually did but whether he “meant well.” The word “dictator” applies only to government officials who publicly announce plans to do bad things to good people.

How many dictates must a politician issue before we can label him a dictator? Sen. Daniel Webster warned in 1837 that “the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” Americans must decide whether they want good leashes or a good master. We can either stop politicians from continuing to abuse their power, or we can spend our time looking for a wise and merciful despot. Either way, democracy cannot survive power worship.

*** An earlier version of this piece was published by the Future of Freedom Foundation

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Photograph Source: Shark1989z – CC BY-SA 4.0

For the past several decades, the United States and Israel have tried to isolate Syria in the Middle East.  Only U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, after the October War in 1973, tried and succeeded in bringing Syria into the step-by-step peace process negotiations with Israel.  Since then, however, U.S. efforts to negotiate a peace such as the Reagan plan in 1982 or the unsuccessful efforts to arrange an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon have ignored any role for Syria.  Currently, U.S. tolerance of Israeli military power against Syria complicates the task of reducing the violence and allowing the Syrian rebels to have the time and space to establish a stable government in Damascus.

For most of its history, Syrian authority has been marked by instability due to authoritarian leadership and a diverse population.  The fragmented nature of Syrian society; the absence of a strong national identity; and the debilitating conflict with Israel have contributed to weak governance.  Any Syrian government, particularly the current one that tries to take hold after 14 years of confrontation, will face a difficult geopolitical environment that limits policy options; inhibits risk-taking; and compromises central authority.  The various ethnic divisions, even among the majority Sunni Moslems, will make it difficult to achieve political and economic cohesion.

One hundred years ago, the wife of the British consul described inter-communal relations in a way that still fits: “They hate one another.  The Sunnis excommunicate the Shias, and both hate the Druze; all detest the Alawites; the Maronites do not love anybody but themselves are duly abhorred by all; the Greek Orthodox abominate the Greek Catholics and the Latins; and all despise the Jews.”  The Alawites. who have politically dominated the country in recent times, were singled out for persecution in the past by the Sunni majority,  Most of the population in Syria is Moslem, but 20 percent of the Moslems belong to various schismatic sects.

Today, Syria is in predictable chaos, and the presence of numerous foreign powers adds to the conflict.  Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have made it particularly difficult for the new regime by launching hundreds of air strikes against Syria, and seizing territory beyond the Golan Heights that provided a sightline to Damascus.  Former Israeli Air Force officers commented on social media that these attacks were carried out as part of an operation based on plans that were drawn up years ago.

Turkey has backed various Syrian rebel groups along the Syrian-Turkish border, and plans to continue the fight against Syrian Kurds based in northeastern Syria, where the Kurds have support from nearly 1,000 U.S. military personnel.  Among the foreign powers in Syria, Turkey has the greatest access and influence with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led the fight against former president Bahshar al-Assad.

There are several favorable signs that point to opportunities for HTS.  The Russians appear to be preparing to withdraw forces from some of its bases in Syria.  Unfortunately, it is likely that Ukraine will pay the price for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s humiliation in Syria. Moscow’s setback in Syria may make it harder to get Russia to enter negotiations with Ukraine to end a war that is reaching the three-year mark.

Iran’s initial reluctance to get engaged in any effort to save the Assad regime or to threaten the new Syrian transition government also points to a possible opportunity for HTS.  Iran has withdrawn its Quds forces that consisted mainly of refugees from Pakistan and Afghanistan who had fled to Iran.  Syria had been the only state in Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” to weaken Israel.  Iran’s ability to arm Hezbollah forces in Lebanon will become far more difficult.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; the U.S. mainstream media; and Biden’s national security team are jointly assigning credit to the United States and Israel for allowing the Syrian rebels to swiftly take over the government.  In actual fact, if there is one foreign power that deserves the credit for the rebel takeover, it would be the courageous fighters from Ukraine who have fought the Russian army to a standstill and made it impossible for Russia to provide necessary support to former Syrian President al-Assad.  Iran’s preoccupation with Israeli military power and the defeat suffered by Hezbollah prevented any support role for Assad.

Israel can be counted on to make every effort to destabilize the transition government in Syria, and only the United States could threaten to cut off military aid to Israel that could bring a stop to Israeli air strikes. It seems unlikely that either the Biden administration or the incoming Trump mob will consider doing so.  Even worse, the Netanyahu government, which seems to favor protracted fighting everywhere, could decide to use its air power in the wake of two successful raids against Iran in April and October 2024, to try to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.

There are conflicting signals coming from the Biden administration.  On the one hand, the United States has entered discussions with officials from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in the wake of its overthrow of the Assad government.  The United States considers HTS a terrorist organization, so the Biden administration’s willingness to engage in discussions is a healthy sign.  But the Biden administration is still deploying air power in Syria against Islamic State militants. Nor has Biden ever indicated a willingness to put a stop to the obscene militancy of Israel against its Arab neighbors, particularly the Palestinians.  The United States would benefit from the emergence of a stable government in Damascus that will not resort to terrorism at home or abroad. Over the long run, this could lead to a U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East.

It is difficult to imagine that a Trump administration will apply any pressure against the Netanyahu government, and it is particularly threatening that both the Netanyahu national security team and the incoming Trump team support the notion of military force against Iran.
Indeed, Trump and his national security appointees have threatened to walk away from the Syrian situation, which Trump wanted to do in his first term.

The military engagement of U.S., Israeli, and Turkish forces will make it difficult  for the application of international diplomacy that could ameliorate the current situation in Syria  But if the United States were willing to lead an international coalition made up of European states, Japan, and Australia, it is possible that a stable interim government could be created in Syria.  But if Trump decides to enforce a rigid “American First” policy and refuses to engage in an international effort to end the violence, then the Syrian situation will worsen.  If so, as Garrison Keillor used to say, “things will get worse before they get worse.”

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A new kind of unity around Palestine is finally finding its way to the Palestine solidarity movement worldwide.

The reason behind this unity is obvious: Gaza.

The world’s first live-streamed genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the growing spontaneous compassion, thus solidarity, with the Palestinian victims, helped recenter priorities from the typical political and ideological conflicts back to where they should have always remained: the plight of the Palestinian people.

In other words, it is the sheer criminality of Israel, the steadfastness, resilience and dignity of the Palestinians, and the genuine love for Palestine by ordinary people that have imposed themselves on the rest of the world.

While many solidarity groups, despite their differences, have always found margins for unity around Palestine, many did not.

Instead of rallying in support of a Palestinian justice-based discourse, mainly focused on ending the Israeli occupation, dismantling apartheid, and obtaining full Palestinian rights, many groups have rallied around their own ideological, political, and often personal priorities.

This led to deep divisions and, ultimately, the unfortunate splintering of what was meant to be a single global movement.

Though many rightly claim that the movement has suffered the dire consequences of the Syrian war and other conflicts linked to the so-called Arab Spring, in truth, the movement has historically been prone to divisions, long before the recent Middle East upheavals.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, starting in 1990, has left permanent scars on all progressive movements across the world, where, in the words of Domenico Losurdo, ‘western Marxists’ retreated to their academic hubs, and ‘eastern Marxists’ were left alone fighting the scourges of the US-led ‘new world order’.

The balkanization of the socialist movement globally, but mainly in western countries, can still be seen in the view of many socialist groups regarding the events underway in Palestine, and of their proscribed ‘solutions’ to the Israeli occupation.

Whether these ‘solutions’ are pertinent or not, it is of very little value to the struggle of the Palestinians on the ground; after all, these magic formulas are often developed in western academic laboratories, with little or no connection, whatsoever, to the events underway in Jenin, Khan Yunis or Jabaliya.

Additionally, there is the problem of transnational solidarity. This type of solidarity is simply conditioned on the expected return of an equal amount of solidarity in the form of political reciprocity.

This notion is a misinformed application of the concept of intersectionality, as in various disaffected groups offering mutual solidarity to amplify their collective voice and advance their interests.

While intersectionality at a global level is hardly functional, let alone tested – interstate relations are usually governed by political strategy, national interests, and geopolitical formations – intersectionality within a national and local framework is very much possible.

For the latter to carry meaning, however, it requires an organic understanding of the struggles of each group, a degree of social immersion, and genuine love and compassion for one another.

In the case of Palestine, however, this noble idea is often conflated with negotiable and transactional solidarity, which might work at the political stage, especially during times of elections, but rarely helps cement long-term bonds between oppressed communities over time.

The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza has certainly helped many groups expand the margins of unity so that they may work together to bring the extermination of Gaza to an end, and to hold Israeli war criminals accountable in any way possible.

This positive sentiment, however, must continue long after the end of the genocide, until the Palestinian people are finally free from the yoke of Israeli settler colonialism.

The point here is that we already have numerous reasons to find and maintain unity around Palestine, without laboring to find ideological, political, or any other kind of common ground.

The settler-colonial Israeli project is but a manifestation of western colonialism and imperialism in their classical definitions. The genocide in Gaza is no different than the genocide of the Herero and Nama people of Namibia at the turn of the 20th century, and US-western interventionism in Palestine is no different than the destructive role played by Western countries in Vietnam and numerous other contested spaces all over the world.

Placing the Israeli occupation of Palestine in a colonial framework has helped many liberate themselves from confused notions about Israel’s ‘inherent’ rights over the Palestinians.

Indeed, there can be no justification for the existence of Israel as an exclusively ‘Jewish State’ in a land that belonged to the native Palestinian people.

By the same token, the much-touted Israeli ‘right to self-defense’, a notion that some ‘progressives’ continue to parrot, does not apply to military occupiers in an active state of aggression or those carrying out genocide.

Keeping the focus on Palestinian priorities also has other benefits, including that of moral clarity. Those who do not find the rights of the Palestinian people compelling enough to develop a united front were never intended to be part of the movement in the first place, thus their ‘solidarity’ is superficial, if at all genuine.

The road for Palestine liberation can only go through Palestine itself and, more specifically, the clarity of purpose of the Palestinian people who, more than any other nation in modern times, have paid and continue to pay the highest price for their freedom.

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Photograph Source: Suzie Tremmel – CC BY 2.0

International law is by nature multilateral.  Its ontology is universal and cannot be interpreted or applied selectively, today this way, tomorrow somewhat differently — or not at all.  In some cases violations of international law are loudly denounced by the international community; in other circumstances, comparable violations are followed by a deafening silence.  Indeed, the “crime of silence” implies tacit consent.  Qui tacet consentire videtur.  Individuals and States can thereby become complicit in the crime.  If not legally, certainly morally.

Experience in the United Nations and other international institutions illustrates how the vast body of international law with all of its treaties and protocols suffers from an acute bout of double standards, both in the interpretation and application of norms.  As politicians and journalists invoke international law à la carte, widespread cynicism sets in, resulting in a significant loss of the authority and credibility of the institutions

The UN Charter binds all States and peoples.  International treaties, whether bilateral or multilateral, bind the States parties and should be applied in good faith according to the principle pacta sunt servanda (Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, article 26[1]).  Whereas human rights are juridical, justiciable and, in principle, enforceable, the United Nations General Assembly and the Human Rights Council have a track record of applying international law selectively. Debates in the GA and HR Council are characterized by political instrumentalization of the facts and by what I would call “fake law”, since many diplomats simply invent “the law” as they go along. Enforcement becomes a farce, when it is done in the service of hegemons and not of humanity at large. When judgments and advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice are not enforced, the “rule of law” itself suffers.

We can and should demand professionalism and objectivity from the institutions established to protect our rights. These institutions should ensure accountability for violations of international law by governments and non-State actors, including transnational corporations.  The General Assembly and Human Rights Council should take appropriate measures to ensure that recourse and appropriate remedies for violations are made available to the victims.

Priorities are crucial in all human endeavors. What is on the agenda of the GA and HR Council? What is being discussed, what is being deliberately ignored? It is up to us to ensure that the institutions function according to their terms of reference, that there are checks and balances, that political action is ethical, not amoral, short-sighted and utilitarian. At least in democracies the electorate can demand transparency, ethics and justice.

Responsibility to Protect

If the “doctrine” of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) means anything (GA Resolution 60/1 of 24 October 2005, paragraphs 138-9), then it should have been invoked decades ago in the context of the Israeli denial of the right of self-determination of the Palestinian People, in the context of mass evictions, arrests, expulsions and ethnic cleansing, the Nakba.  R2P should have prevented the tragedy unfolding since 2020 in the Armenian Republic of Artsakh, better known as Nagorno Karabakh.  It should have been applied on behalf of the Sahraouis of Western Sahara, the Igbos and Ogonis of Biafra, the Tamils of Sri Lanka, the Kurds of Turkey, Iraq and Syria.

Without a doubt, many politicians today deserve being indicted and prosecuted by the International Criminal Court, surely those guilty of the crimes of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001.  Notwithstanding legal briefs filed with the ICC Prosecutor since 2004, no one was ever indicted. An investigation started by Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda[2] was terminated by her successor Karim Khan[3].  Over a period of 23 years since its establishment in 2002, the ICC has displayed a certain bias, indicted Africans, and enemies of the US and EU, including Vladimir Putin[4]. That is why it was comparable to an earthquake when Prosecutor Khan asked for arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu[5] and Hamas leaders.  This may eventually save the ICC from total collapse of its tenuous credibility.

Self-determination of peoples

A Special Session of the Human Rights Council on the issue of the self-determination of peoples would be appropriate, since the right of self-determination of peoples constitutes a jus cogens norm of international law, and thousands of human beings in all continents are being denied this right and many are killed in the attempt to claim it.  It must be well understood that the right of self-determination laid down in Articles 1 and 55 of the UN Charter, in Chapters XI and XII of the Charter, in common article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is not limited to decolonization, but extends the right to autonomy and/or independence to all peoples.  States are not only obliged to refrain from hindering this right; they have a duty to  pro-actively implement it.  Who are the rights holders?  As I proposed in my 2013 report to the General Assembly[6], the United Nations should accept petitions from all peoples deprived of self-determination, those living under foreign occupation, those enduring Apartheid, etc.  Among the many aspirants to self-determination we recognize the French of Quebec, the Scots, the Catalans, the Corsicans, the South Tiroleans, the Kurds, the West Papuans, the Rapa Nui, the native population of Hawaii, the indigenous peoples of Alaska and those living in “reservations” in the United States, the Mapuche of Chile and Argentina, the Igbos of Biafra, the Bubis of Equatorial Guinea, the Luchu of Okinawa (Ryukyu islands illegally annexed by Japan in 1880).

Progress and Retrogression

Progress and retrogression characterize the history of international law and human rights. Today the world is in chaos, but not more so than in the 18th. 19th and 20th centuries. At least we are not burning witches or massacring indigenous Hopi, Iroquois, Mohawks, Sioux, Taínos, Arawaks, Quechua — the slave trade is abolished, colonialism is drastically reduced. We have seen a phenomenal codification of legal norms, the UN Charter, the UDHR, the establishment of regional human rights courts. We hail the growing recognition of the rights of half the population of the planet – women, the measures taken on behalf of persons with disabilities. We welcome the gradual abolition of the cruelty of “capital punishment”. Yet, there is also significant retrogression in many fields, including the erosion of the concept of Peace as a Human Right, the backsliding from General Assembly Resolution 39/11 of 1984. Today there is scarce protection of the right to know, the right to access truthful information, the right to freedom of opinion and expression. We see censorship by governments and the private sector, the blocking of RT and Sputnik by the EU, the Orwellian new Digital Services Act, the brazen indoctrination practiced by the media, the excesses of “cancel culture”, the epidemic of self-censorship, the social acceptance of Islamophobia, Russophobia and Sinophobia. the crimes committed against 25 million victims of human trafficking, including 3.4 million children. Serious retrogression is evident in the weakened protection of family life and family values, the attacks on the concept of the family and parental authority, the denigration and ridicule of religious beliefs.

Retrogression is also apparent in the practices of institutions established to protect our rights. Many institutions have been hijacked for geopolitical and ideological purposes. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Iuvenalis, 6^th Satire, verses 347-48) Who guards over the guardians?[7] Institutions such as the UN Human Rights Council, ECHR, IACHR, OPCW often let themselves be hijacked by major powers and thus betray their mandates, weaponizing human rights instead of devising preventive strategies and mechanisms to promote and protect human dignity, to ensure that there are recourse and adequate remedies for the victims. Only we can be the guardians. While we realize that governments and the media lie to us, that they suppress crucial information, we — as citizens of democratic countries — must push back and reclaim democracy. We do not need any Ministry of Truth as in 1984.  But are we not already living in the dystopia of Huxley’s Brave New World ?

Prevention or Punishment?

Among the gravest instances of retrogression is the Western obsession with punishment, the primitive lex talionis, that self-righteousness that invites us to lapidate the adulteress[8], the arrogance of “lawfare” against dissidents, the persecution of whistleblowers.

If Christianity taught us anything, it is that we must forgive to be forgiven: et dimite nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimitimus debitoribus nostris[9]. Yet, the politicians and some mainstream ngo’s have transformed the notion of “amnesty”[10] into a curse word, as they have transformed “appeasement”[11] into an insult, although in the nuclear age the only rational approach in international affairs is conflict-prevention through diplomacy, give and take, quid-pro-quo, compromise.

Punishment is always after the fact, ex post facto.  Punishment does not make the victims whole.  Very often violations of international law and human rights are irreparable.  What is crucial is to prevent violations of international law and human rights, to set up mechanisms of “early warning” so as to address grievances before they degenerate into violence and grow into a threat to the peace and security of mankind.  Essential to conflict-prevention is confidence-building, engaging in dialogue, building bridges, creating the conditions for peace.  Si vis pacem, para pacem (if we want peace, we must proactively appease). Amnesties are not bad per se. Sometimes amnesties can pave the way to reconciliation. Revenge is incompatible with the acquis of civilization. Punishment is not a wise or civilized answer to problems.

Hope for the Future

Is there hope for humanity?  Of course there is!  It is in our hands to demand pro-active peace making from our governments, to demand more professionalism and objectivity from the United Nations and other international bodies.

Knowledge of the root causes of conflict facilitates the prevention or war. We need to reject provocations and escalations.  We need to develop the faculty of self-criticism so as to correct our own mistakes before we go around pointing fingers at others.  We must practice international solidarity, applying international law in good faith and not à la carte.

Our resolution for 2025 should be to continue waging peace, speaking truth to power, strengthening the United Nations Charter as a world constitution, rediscovering the spirituality of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Notes.

[1] https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventions/1_1_1969.pdf

[2] https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-icc-prosecutor-fatou-bensouda-following-appeals-chambers-decision-authorising

[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/6/icc-prosecutor-defends-dropping-us-from-afghan-investigation

[4] https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest-warrants-against-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin-and

[5] https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/11/1157286

[6] https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n13/421/23/pdf/n1342123.pdf

[7] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajes.12542

[8] John 8, 1-11.  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%208:1-11&version=NLT

[9] Mathew 6, 9-13  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%206%3A5-15&version=ESV;NIV

[10] Alfred de Zayas, “Amnesty Clause” and “Westphalia, Peace of” in R. Bernhardt (ed.) Encyclopedia of Public International Law, North Holland, Amsterdam 2000.

[11] https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/08/09/appeasement-reconsidered/

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Liberals hate Trump, no question about it. He’s the definition of illiberal: authoritarian, racist, sexist, and downright nasty. Not only that, he’s a living repudiation of the liberal delusion that America runs on meritocracy.

But you want to know a dirty, little secret? In back alleys, encrypted group chats, and off-the-record conversations, liberals will still support Trump on a case-by-case basis. Of course, they’d never vote for the guy, but they’ll give two cheers for some of his policies.

I discovered this ugly truth during Trump’s last term while writing an article on the shift in U.S. policy toward China from lukewarm engagement to hostile decoupling. The general consensus among the foreign policy elite was that, at least in terms of relations with Beijing, Trump was a useful idiot for slowing China’s roll with harsh rhetoric and tariffs.

“Trump is a madman, but I want to give him and his administration their due,” one prominent liberal intellectual told me. “We can’t keep playing on an unlevel playing field and take promises that are never delivered on. It’s really China’s turn to respond, and it’s long overdue.”

It wasn’t just China. For years, liberals and conservatives alike were, for instance, pushing the concept of burden-sharing: getting U.S. allies to cover more of the bill for their security needs. But it was only Trump who really made it happen by blackmailing NATO members and other U.S. partners into doing so.

Sure, few warmed to the idea of the United States actually pulling out of NATO, but even many of our European allies, though they publicly grumbled, were secretly happy about The Donald’s gaiatsu. That’s the Japanese word for outside pressure that enables a leader to force through unpopular changes by blaming it all on foreigners. The self-described liberal leader of NATO, Dutch politician Mark Rutte, even came out in the open after Trump’s reelection to praise the American president for making European countries more militarily self-sufficient.

It wasn’t just liberals who thrilled to Trump’s unorthodox foreign policy during his first term either. Some of those further to the left also embraced Trump the engager (with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un), Trump the isolationist (and his threats to close U.S. military bases globally), and Trump the putative peacemaker (for concluding a deal with the Taliban to end the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan).

Trump, in other words, was not just an unanticipated crisis; he was also an opportunity. Deep in their hearts, anyone unhappy with the status quo will support a disrupter. Quite a few Democrats disgusted with this country’s border policies, inflation, and its coastal elites even crossed over to vote for Trump in November because they wanted change, regardless of the consequences.

Trump 2.0 is going to be the same but worse, like a strong cheese voted out of the refrigerator only to grow ever more pungent as it moldered in a dark corner of Florida. The latest version of Trump has promised more violence and destruction the second time around, from mass deportations to mass tariffs. And he’s planning to avoid appointing anyone to his administration who might have a contrary thought, a backbone to resist him, or the least qualification to enact sensible policy.

In the face of such a vengeful and truculent force returning to the White House, surely, you might think, it will be impossible to find any liberals embracing such anarchy the second time around.

Think again. This is how American politics works, if only for liberals. The modern Republican Party routinely boycotts Democratic administrations: blocking Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination, working overtime to shut down the federal government, voting en masse against legislation it would have supported if introduced by a Republican administration. The MAGA crowd has, in fact, turned noncooperation into something of an art form.

Liberals, on the other hand, pride themselves on bipartisanship, on getting things done no matter who’s in power. So, inevitably, there will be cooperation with the Trump team as it sets about the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (as Trump cheerleader Steve Bannon once put it). Worse, there will even be some silver-lining liberals (and a few leftists) who pull up a seat to applaud the wrecking ball — not perhaps for its wholesale destruction of neighborhoods but at least for its demolition of a select number of buildings that they deem irreparable.

Each time such destruction takes place, the self-exculpatory comment from such silver-liners will be: “Well, somebody had to come along and do something!” If Trump is the only tool in the governing toolbox, some liberals will indeed try to use him to pound in a few nails they think need hammering.

Burning Bridges with China

In his 2024 State of the Union address, Joe Biden argued that he did a better job than Donald Trump of standing up to China. He certainly devoted more Pentagon dollars to containing China. And not only did he not roll back Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, but he added some of his own, including a 100% tax on Chinese electric vehicles. Biden also made concrete moves to decouple the U.S. economy from China’s, especially when it came to the supply chains for critical raw materials that Beijing has sought to control. “I’ve made sure that the most advanced American technologies can’t be used in China,” he insisted, adding, “Frankly for all his tough talk on China, it never occurred to my predecessor to do any of that.”

Biden’s moves on China, from export controls and subsidies for chip manufacturers to closer military relationships with Pacific partners like Australia and India, received the enthusiastic support of his party. No surprise there: It’s hard to find anyone in Washington these days who has a good word to say about engaging more with China.

So, when Trump takes office in January, he won’t actually be reversing course. He’ll simply be taking the baton-like stick from Biden while leaving all the carrots in the ground.

That said, Trump’s proposed further spike in tariffs against China (and Canada and Mexico and potentially the rest of the world) does give many liberals pause, since it threatens to unleash an economically devastating global trade war while boosting prices radically at home. But trade unions backed by such liberals support such measures as a way to protect jobs, while the European Union only recently imposed stiff tariffs of their own on Chinese electrical vehicles.

So, yes, neoliberals who embrace free trade are going to push back against Trump’s economic policies, but more traditional liberals who backed protectionist measures in the past will secretly (or not so secretly) applaud Trump’s moves.

Back to the Wall

On taking office, Joe Biden rolled back his predecessor’s harsh immigration policies. The rate of border-crossings then spiked for a variety of reasons (not just the repeal of those Trump-era laws) from an average of half a million to about two million annually. However, in 2024, those numbers plummeted, despite Trump’s campaign claims — but no matter. By then, many Democrats had already been reborn as border hawks.

That new, tougher attitude was on display in executive actions President Biden took in 2024 as well as the border security bill that Democrats tried to push through Congress earlier this year. Forget about finding a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants who keep the American economy humming, Biden’s immigration policy focused on limiting asylum petitions, increasing detention facilities, and even allocating more money to build Trump’s infamous wall.

As Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, pointed out on the eve of the November election, “What we are seeing is that the center of the Democratic Party is now adopting the same policies, the same postures, that MAGA Republicans were fighting for about six years ago.”

And yet such punitive policies still weren’t harsh enough for MAGA Republicans and their America First followers. The bottom line was that immigration-averse voters didn’t want to support Democrats pretending to be MAGA Republicans. When it came to the White House, they wanted the real thing.

As politics change hands in Washington next January, it’s going to be difficult to find any Democrats who will support the mass detentions and deportations Trump is promising. Yet many liberals, like the unprecedented number of Latinos who pulled the lever for Trump in 2024, do want major changes at the border with Mexico. In Arizona, Democrat Ruben Gallego won a squeaker of a Senate election by emphasizing border security and even backing a border wall (in certain areas). Such liberal border hawks will be happy when the Republican president does the dirty work so that Democrats don’t suffer the political fallout that is sure to follow.

Remapping the Middle East

On the face of it, the Abrahamic Accords were a liberal nightmare. The brainchild of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, they promised to repair relations between Israel and the major authoritarian regimes in the region: Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Morocco, and Sudan. The deal was a reward for illiberal leaders, particularly Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. The primary losers would, of course, be the Palestinians, who would have to give up their hopes for a separate state in exchange for some Saudi handouts, and the Sahrawi people who lost their claim to the Western Sahara when the United States and Israel recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the entire region.

Instead of shelving the Accords, however, the Biden administration pushed ahead with them. After roundly criticizing Saudi autocrat Mohammed bin Salman for, among other things, ordering the murder of a U.S.-based Saudi journalist, Biden mended ties, fist-bumping that rogue leader, and continuing to discuss how and when the Kingdom would normalize relations with Israel. Nor did his administration restrict Washington’s staggering weapons deliveries to Israel after its invasion and utter devastation of Gaza. Yes, Biden and crew made some statements about Palestinian suffering and tried to push more humanitarian aid into the conflict zone, but they did next to nothing to pressure Israel to stop its killing machine (nor would they reverse the Trump administration’s decision on the Western Sahara).

The liberals who support Israel (come what may) like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, New York Congressman Ritchie Torres, and the New Democrat Coalition in the House of Representatives are, of course, going to be enthusiastic about Trump’s ever tighter embrace of Netanyahu next year. But there are also likely to be quiet cheers from other corners of the liberal-left about the harder line Trump is likely to take against Tehran. (Remember Kamala Harris’s assertion during her presidential run that Iran was the main adversary of the United States?) The Arab Spring is long gone and a strong man in the White House needs to both schmooze with and go toe to toe with the strong men of the Middle East — or so many liberals will believe, even as they rationalize away their relief over Trump’s handling of a thoroughly illiberal region.

Looking Ahead (Or Do I Mean Behind?)

Anyone to the left of Tucker Carlson will certainly think twice about showing public enthusiasm for whatever Trump does. Indeed, most liberals will be appalled by the new administration’s likely suspension of aid to Ukraine and withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, not to mention other possible hare-brained maneuvers like sending U.S. troops to battle narcotraffickers in Mexico.

Trump will attract liberal support, however quietly or even secretively, not because of his bridge-building genius — in reality, he couldn’t even get a bridge-building infrastructure bill through Congress in his first term — but because all too many liberals have already moved inexorably rightward on issues ranging from China and the Middle East to immigration. The MAGA minority has seized the machinery of power by weaponizing mendacity and ruthlessly breaking rules, in the process transforming politics much the way the Bolshevik minority did in Russia more than a century ago. In the pot that those Republicans put on the stove, the water has been boiling for more than a decade and yet the left-of-center frogs barely seem to recognize just how altered our circumstances have become.

In normal times, finding overlapping interests with your political adversaries makes sense. Such bedrock bipartisanship stabilizes fractious countries that swing politically from center left to center right every few years.

These are, however, anything but normal times and the second-term Trump team anything but center-rightists. They are extremists bent on dismantling the federal government, unstitching the fabric of international law, and turning up the heat drastically on an already dangerously overcooking planet.

In 2020, I raised the possibility of a boycott, divestment, and sanction (BDS) movement against the United States if Trump won the elections that year. “People of the world, you’d better build your BDS box, paint ‘Break Glass in Case of Emergency’ on the front, and stand next to it on November 3,” I wrote then. “If Trump wins on Election Day, it will be mourning in America. But let’s hope that the world doesn’t mourn: it organizes.”

Four years later, Trump has won again. Do I hear the sound of breaking glass?

Here, in the United States, a stance of strict non-engagement with Trump 2.0, even where interests overlap, would not only be a good moral policy but even make political sense. When things go disastrously south, laws are broken, and the government begins to truly come apart at the seams, it’s vitally important that no left-of-center fingerprints be found at the scene of the crime.

Let’s be clear: the Trump administration will not be playing by the rules of normal politics. So, forget about bipartisanship. Forget about preserving access to power by visiting Mar-a-Lago, hat in hand, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “Fascism can be defeated,” historian Timothy Snyder wrote immediately after the November elections, “but not when we are on its side.”

So, my dear liberal-left, which side are you on?

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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Map of Northwestern Syria offensive (2024)

Syria, known throughout history as the “crossroads of civilization,” now finds itself at a crossroads of its own. After 54 years, the Assad family’s brutal dictatorship in Syria has finally ended.

“I never thought I’d live to see this day,” said my dad, who left Aleppo as a teenager. My parents grew up there.

After Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, elated Syrians rejoiced in the streets. Moving videos emerged of political prisoners being freed after enduring decades of torture in the regime’s notorious prisons. The whereabouts of many still remain unknown.

Assad’s fall is undeniably worth celebrating — it’s a rare unifying force for a deeply fractured country. But after decades of oppression and 14 years of war, it will take much more to heal these wounds and guarantee a new era of freedom, justice, prosperity, and reconciliation.

The popular uprising for Syrian dignity that ignited in March 2011 was violently crushed by Assad and morphed into several proxy wars involving Russia, Iran, Israel, the U.S., Turkey, and numerous armed groups, including Al Qaeda linked-terrorists.

Heinous war crimes and other human rights violations were committed by all parties throughout the war, which has killed over 350,000 people. In the world’s largest forced displacement crisis, over 13 million Syrians have either fled their country or have been displaced within its borders.

The war has damaged Syria’s infrastructure while Western sanctions have further shattered Syria’s economy. Poverty is widespread and more than half of the population currently grapples with food insecurity.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), once allied with Al Qaeda in Syria, was largely responsible for Assad’s overthrow on December 8. Designated by the U.S as a terrorist organization, HTS has its own track record of brutality in Syria. The rebel group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, founded the Al Nusra Front, once had ties to ISIS, and still has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head.

Jolani has since renounced his ties with Al Qaeda and recently said he supports religious pluralism in Syria. But it’s reasonable to be skeptical that HTS and its allies are now truly committed to freedom, justice, and human rights for all long-suffering Syrians.

Still, foreign occupation and intervention are antithetical to a sovereign and “free” Syria.

Following Assad’s fall, Israel has launched hundreds of airstrikes and unlawfully seized more territory beyond its illegal, 57-year occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights. Whether Turkey gives up occupied land in northern Syria also remains to be seen, especially if Syrian Kurds end up forming an autonomous region within the country.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military still occupies part of Syria, including the oil fields in the northeast, and it’s unclear when the U.S. will withdraw its remaining 900 soldiers. In addition to respecting Syria’s territorial integrity and the aspirations of its people in a future government, the U.S. should immediately lift all sanctions on Syria to help with reconstruction and economic recovery.

As a Syrian American, I try to remain hopeful as I think about my relatives in Aleppo, friends in Damascus, and the generous strangers who’ve taken care of me as their own when I’ve visited. I look forward to returning to a Syria where people can finally breathe, rebuild, and live in dignity. But I also fear for the future.

Syrians have always taken pride in their rich ethnic and religious diversity. An inclusive and democratic government that guarantees the equal rights of all Syrians is essential to ensuring that the country stays unified and doesn’t plunge into sectarian chaos. It would be tragic if one authoritarian ruler is replaced by another or the country becomes balkanized into armed factions.

While much remains uncertain and immense challenges are ahead, prioritizing the immediate needs of Syrians is a logical first step. And, more than anything else, we must ensure that the Syrian people are the ones who steer the destiny of a peaceful, post-war Syria that reflects their remarkable resilience, courage, hopes, and dreams.

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Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, military leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Screengrab from CNN interview.

As the rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Syria Liberation Committee) seized Damascus, Syria’s capital, on December 7, 2024, the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad boarded a flight to Moscow, Russia. It was the end of the rule of the Assad family that began when Hafez al-Assad (1930-2000) became president in 1971, and continued through his son Bashar from 2000—a 53-year period of rule. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which seized Damascus, was formed out of the remnants of the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra (Front for the Conquest of Syria) in 2017, and led by its emir Abu Jaber Shaykh and its military commander Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.

For the past seven years, HTS has been restrained in the city of Idlib, in Syria’s north. In 2014, a group of al-Qaeda veterans created the Khorasan network (led by Sami al-Uraydi, the religious leader), whose intent was to control the city and the Islamist movements. Over the next year, al-Nusra tried to form alliances with other Islamist forces, such as Ahrar al-Sham, particularly for the governance of the city. The Russian military intervention in 2015 damaged the ability of these groups to advance out of Idlib, which led to the formal break of many of the Islamists from al-Qaeda in 2016 and the creation of HTS in January 2017. Those who remained linked to al-Qaeda formed Hurras al-Din (or Guardians of the Religious Organization). By the end of the year, HTS had seized the initiative and become the major force inside Idlib, took over the local councils across the city and declared that it was the home of the Syrian Salvation Government. When the Syrian Arab Army, the government’s military force, moved toward Idlib in early 2020, Turkey invaded Syria’s north to defend the Islamists. This invasion resulted in the Russian-Turkish ceasefire in March 2020 that allowed the HTS and others to remain in Idlib unscathed. HTS rebuilt its ranks through alliances with Turkish-backed armed forces and with fighters from across Central Asia (including many Uyghur fighters from the Turkistan Islamic Party).

Operation Deterrence of Aggression, launched by HTS in November 2024 with Turkish and Israeli support, whipped down highway M5 from Aleppo to Damascus in about fourteen days. The Syrian Arab Army dissolved before them and the gates of Damascus opened without enormous bloodshed.

The Jihadi Blitzkrieg

The surprise victory of HTS had been predicted in November by Iranian officials, who informed Assad about the weakness of the state’s defenses because of the sustained Israeli attacks on Syrian army positions, of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and of the war in Ukraine. When Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi met with Assad in Damascus after Aleppo fell to the rebels, Assad told Araghchi that this was not a defeat but a “tactical retreat.” That was clearly illusionary. Araghchi, knowing this, told Assad that Iran simply did not have the capacity to send new troops to defend Damascus. It had also been made clear to the Assad government that the Russians did not have the surplus capacity to defend the government, not even the Russian naval base in Tartus. During the HTS drive against the Syrian army, the Russian presidential envoy for Syria Alexander Lavrentyev said that he had been in touch with the incoming Trump administration to discuss a deal between “all parties” over the Syrian conflict. Neither Russia nor Iran believed that the Assad government would be able to unilaterally defeat the various rebels and remove the United States from its occupation of the eastern oil fields. A deal was the only way out, which meant that neither Iran nor Russia was willing to commit more troops to defend the Assad government.

Since 2011, Israel’s air force has struck several Syrian military bases, including bases that hosted Iranian troops. These strikes degraded Syrian military capacity by destroying ordinance and materiel. Since October 2023, Israel has increased its strikes within Syria, including hitting Iranian forces, Syrian air defenses, and Syrian arms production facilities. On December 4, the heads of the militaries of Iran (Chief of Staff Major General Mohammad Bagheri), Iraq (Major General Yahya Rasool), Russia (Defense Minister Andrey Belousov), and Syria (General Abdul Karim Mahmoud Ibrahim) met to assess the situation in Syria. They discussed the movement of HTS down from Aleppo and agreed that with the fragile ceasefire in Lebanon and the Syrian government’s weakened forces, this was a “dangerous scenario.” While they said that they would support the government in Damascus, there were no concrete steps taken by them. The Israeli attacks inside Syria meanwhile increased the demoralization within the Syrian army, which has not been properly reorganized after the stalemate began with the rebels in Idlib in 2017.

When Russia entered the conflict in Syria in 2015, the Russian military command insisted that the Syrian government no longer permit pro-government militia groups (such as the Kataeb al-Ba’ath and the Shabbiha) to operate independently. Instead, these groups were integrated into the Fourth and Fifth Corps under Russian command. Meanwhile, the Iranian officers organized their own battalions of Syrian soldiers. The soldiers’ declining economic standards combined with the foreign command accelerated the demoralization. Even the Republican Guard, tasked with defending Damascus and in particular the presidential palace, had lost much of its historical power.

At no point after 2011 was the Syrian government in control of the territory of the country. Already, since 1973, Israel had seized the Golan Heights. Then, during 2011, Turkey had eaten into the borderlands of northern Syria, while the Kurdish resistance forces (YPG and PKK) had formed a zone alongside the Syria-Turkey border. Northwestern Syria had been taken by the rebels, who included not only HTS but also a range of Turkish-backed militia groups. Northeastern Syria was occupied by the United States, which had taken charge of the oil fields. In this region, the US forces contested the Islamic State, which had been pushed out of both northern Iraq and northeastern Syria, but which continued to appear in spurts. Meanwhile, in southern Syria, the government had made a series of hasty agreements with the rebels to provide an appearance of peace. In cities such as Busra al-Sham, Daraa, Houran, and Tafas, the government could not send any of its officials; these, like Idlib, had come under rebel control. When HTS moved on Damascus, the rebels in the south rose up as did the rebels in the country’s eastern edge along the border with Iraq. The reality of Assad’s weakness became apparent.

Israel’s Advantage

As if in a coordinated fashion, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the occupied Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1973, and announced, “This is a historic day in the history of the Middle East.” He then said that his government had ordered the Israeli army to invade the UN buffer zone between the Israeli occupation of Golan and the Syrian army posts that had been established during the armistice of 1974. Israeli tanks moved into the countryside of Quneitra Governorate and took over the main town. The border between Israel and Syria has now been shaped by this invasion, since Israel has now moved several kilometers into Syria to seize almost the entire length of the border.

During the final days of the HTS advance to Damascus, the Israeli air force provided the rebels with air support. They bombed military bases and the headquarters of Syrian intelligence in the center of Damascus. With the excuse that they wanted to destroy weapons depots before the rebels seized them, the Israelis struck bases that housed Syrian troops and stockpiles of weapons that the Syrian army might have used to defend Damascus (this included the Mezzah Air Base). Israeli officials have said that they will continue these air strikes, but have not indicated whom they plan to target.

The Israeli assault on Syria deepened during the protest movement in 2011. As fighting between the rebels and the Syrian government spread across southern Syria, near the Israeli border, Israel began to fire across the border at Syrian forces. In March 2013, for instance, the Israelis fired missiles at Syrian military posts, weakening them and strengthening the rebels. At the end of 2013, Israel created Division 210, a special military command, to begin engagements along the Israel-Syrian armistice line. Importantly, when the HTS predecessor and al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra began to make gains along the Israeli line of control, Israel did not strike them. Instead, Israel hit the Syrian government through shooting down Syrian air force jets and assassinating senior Syrian allies (such as General Mohammad Ali Allahdadi, an Iranian general, in January 2015, and Samir Kuntar, a Fatah leader, in late 2015). A former press officer in Damascus told me that the Israelis effectively provided air support for the HTS assault on the capital.

Syria’s Future

Assad left Syria without making any announcement. It is said by former government officials in Damascus that some senior leaders left with him or left for the Iraqi border before the fall of Damascus. The silence from Assad has bewildered many Syrians who had believed fundamentally that the state would protect them from the onslaught of groups such as HTS. It is a sign of the collapse of the Assad government that his Republican Guard did not try to defend the city and that he left without any words of encouragement to his people.

The country is polarized regarding the new government. Sections of the population that had seen their way of life degraded by the war and sanctions welcome the opening, and they have been on the streets celebrating the new situation. The larger context for the Middle East is not their immediate concern, although depending on Israel’s actions, this might change. A considerable section is concerned about the behavior of the Islamists, who use terms of disparagement against non-Sunni Muslims such as nusayriyya (for Alawites, the community of the al-Assad family) and rawafid (such as the large Shia population in Syria). Calling non-Sunni Muslims ahl al-batil or the “lost ones” and using strong Salafi language about apostasy and its punishment sets in motion fear amongst those who might be targets of attacks. Whether the new government will be able to control its forces motivated by this sectarian ideology remains to be seen.

Such sectarianism is only the opening of the contradictions that will emerge almost immediately. How will the new government deal with the Israeli, Turkish, and US incursions into Syrian territory? Will it seek to win back that land? What will be the relationship between the Syrian government and its neighbors, particularly Lebanon? Will the millions of Syrian refugees return to their home now that the basis for their migration has been removed, and if they return, what will be awaiting them inside Syria? And centrally, what will all this mean for the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians by the Israelis?

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Getty Images and Unsplash+.

The stakes are extremely high as the impact of fossil fuels on climate change goes to The Hague for hearings December 2-13, 2024 to determine whether nations are obligated to phase out fossil fuels. Will the esteemed court issue an opinion that truly impacts climate change?

The court’s opinion is expected in 2025.

{Special Notification: Antarctica is experiencing a frightening collapse that has polar scientists fearful and speaking out like never before. A link to an interview with James Woodford, a New Scientists’ reporter, who attended a recent emergency session with 450 polar scientists is found at the end of this article. Woodford: “Nobody could have foreseen Antarctic sea ice dropping off a cliff in the way that it has.”}

James Hansen (Earth Institute, Columbia University) and three climate scientists from the Netherlands, conducted a panel discussion December 9^th, 2024 regarding the International Court of Justice at the Hague, as part of hearings from scores of nations before it issues its advisory opinion on the Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change: “The key issue is whether international law requires nations to phase out production, distribution and use of fossil fuels and otherwise pay damages to the most vulnerable and hardest hit of nations.” (Source: James Hansen, International Court of Justice Proceedings in The Hague, December 9, 2024)

What if it is determined that “international law requires nations to phase out production, distribution and use of fossil fuels”? What happens next?

For starters, the setting for this all-important trial has been extensive on a worldly basis: “As of publication, 98 states and 12 international organizations have registered to participate in oral hearings at the court Dec. 2–13. The engagement conveys the urgency and gravity of the climate crisis, and the importance states place on setting straight what international law requires.” (Source: Courts May Be More Effective on Climate Action Than UN, Bloomberg Law, Nov. 22, 2024)

Potential benefits of the hearing before The Hague

The court’s opinion should prove to be an antidote to the political inertia overhanging UN Conference of the Parties (COP) affairs. This strikes at the heart of 30 years of do-nothing conferences because of politically oriented negotiated outcomes that dilute, obstruct, and/or reduce to the lowest common denominator, making UN COPs a laughingstock.

Also, the court can look beyond the UN climate convention or the Paris Agreement to identify responsibilities and duties, e.g., by relying upon longstanding customary international law.

And the court’s advisory opinion can have concrete effects by carrying weight as “authoritative interpretations of binding law.”

“The forthcoming legal opinions on climate change from the ICJ and Inter-American Court of Human Rights, should further clarify states’ obligations to curb drivers of the crisis—including through regulation of companies—and remedy mounting climate harms. They will also affirm the critical role of courts in enforcing ambitious climate action and accountability,” Ibid.

Significantly, ICJ advisory opinions can become part of “customary international law,” which is then legally binding.

Meanwhile, the world climate system has never been more vulnerable, to wit: Perilous Times on Planet Earth: 2024 The State of the Climate Report, 25 of 35 planetary vital signs are at record extremes. Two-thirds with record-extremes is viewed by climate scientists as a clear mandate for a planet “on the edge.”

Climate Science – One of History’s Great Analytical Triumphs

Superimposed on this extraordinary hearing at The Hague: “There has, of course, been a decades-long campaign aiming to discredit climate research and, in some instances, defame individual climate scientists. But if you step back from the smears, you realize that climatology has been one of history’s great analytical triumphs. Climate scientists correctly predicted, decades in advance, an unprecedented rise in global temperatures. They even appear to have gotten the magnitude more or less right.” (Source: Paul Krugman, The Stench of Climate Change Denial, The New York Times, May 27, 2024)

Climate deniers should take a moment to correlate their denialism with a remarkable stretch of scientists’ warnings hitting the mark, bullseye, on target. Yet, twenty-five percent (25%) of America’s congressional members are climate deniers. In sharp contrast to this demonstration of ignorant denialism, climate scientists have been spot-on.

Nevertheless, according to James Hansen: “Nations of the world meet at annual COP meetings (Conferences of the Parties), where they promise to reduce emissions to ‘net zero’ at some distant date, an almost meaningless pledge. There is no plan to actually stabilize climate…Global temperature took an unprecedented leap of half a degree Celsius in the past two years, which confounded the climate research community… We are headed to global warming greater than 2°C.”

What happens at 2°C (above pre-industrial)

“Mortality from extreme heat could surpass that of all infectious diseases combined, and rival that of cancer and heart disease.” (Source: Why Heat Waves of the Future May Be Even Deadlier Than Feared, The New York Times, October 25, 2024)

Heatwaves that have already been documented taking tens of thousands of lives will morph into “Super Heatwaves” with temperatures exceeding 50C (122F). Already, serious deathly heat waves have become prominent in hotspots of the globe, see: Mysterious Global Hotspots.

Regions of the planet will become uninhabitable. In some parts of the world the combination of heat and humidity will reach lethal levels for hours, days, and weeks.

Parts of the globe subject to severe drought will increase by 50%. The Mediterranean, southern Africa and parts of Australia and South America will be particularly affected. The Amazon rainforest already suffers from repeating bouts of scorching drought. Intense and prolonged droughts will decimate food crops and cause high rates of livestock deaths, leading to severe food shortages.

One of the most worrying changes will be the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) which includes the Gulf Stream, dramatically altering weather patterns throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Europe is especially vulnerable.

With 2C of warming, according to Earth.org, global mean sea level is projected to rise by 1.51-3.25 feet this century, although more recent research indicates that is a low, low number.

Antarctic Emergency Session of 450 Polar Scientists – The Link

Regarding the threat of sea level rise well above expectations, of significant interest for the world at large, the following link is a YouTube video interview about the emergency proceedings of 450 polar scientists: Antarctica Emergency: Scientists Shocked as Sea Ice Melts / New Scientists Weekly 279.

What 2C of Warming Will Look Like: A Comprehensive Assessment, Earth.org. d/d September 2, 2024.

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Photograph Source: David Lienemann – Public Domain

A flurry of commentary has followed Joe Biden’s decision to invoke his presidential privilege in issuing a “full and unconditional pardon” to his son, Hunter Biden, who faced prison time for filing false tax statements, tax evasion, and carrying an unregistered gun. Leading Democrats, including Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and California Governor Gavin Newsom, came out in opposition to Biden’s nepotistic act, and a former Bernie Sanders adviser saw it as “a big fuck you” to the Democratic Party for forcing him to withdraw from the presidential race.

Commenting in CounterPunch on December 6, Melvin Goodman criticized the hypocrisy of the Democrats who, on the one hand, questioned Biden’s moral turpitude and, on the other, failed to point out the president’s major crimes in material, political, and diplomatic support for the Israeli genocide. Goodman, I believe, in correct in this specific critique, but his larger claim about “president’s admirable and ethical 50-year political career” is quite dubious. Going back to his years in the Senate and as vice president and president, Biden, among his many other acts of bad judgement, has had a long history of being a warmongering chicken hawk defender of US imperial power.

Although he initially held back support for the Gulf War in 1990-1991, he expressed regret for that decision and took hawkish positions on every US invasion thereafter. Even on occasions where he first expressed reservations about US intervention, he always came around to supporting the military option. An extensive research article on Biden’s political career found that he backed “the constant bombing of Iraq, [promoted] regime change as official policy, and [used] economic sanctions to ‘cripple’ the country.”

Biden’s support for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria in 2014 opened up the region for US bombing, ground intervention, massive deaths of civilians, displacement of millions of refugees, and permanent instability. In large part, these attacks were gratuitous acts of support for Israel, cynically arming the forces of ISIS and Al Qaeda, as in Syria, in efforts to bring down the Assad government in Damascus, which finally succeeded on December 8, 2024. The radical Islamic group that claimed victory in Syria, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham is referred to the mainstream media as merely a “rebel” group, even as the US government still lists it as a “terrorist organization.” Not a problem, as long as they’re our terrorists.

In support of the 78-day bombing of Syria in 1999, causing the deaths of more than 2,000 civilians, Biden called for “a Japanese-German-style occupation” of the country, a mindset that points to his predilection for fascist-style reactions (consider Gaza) to perceived enemies. There is nothing inconsistent with his defense of empire and his crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank.

To recognize Israel as an extension of US power in the Middle East is to understand how genocide is just another one of the tools the US has employed against recalcitrant nations and movements. Vietnam was the prime example, but only one in which the mass slaughter of civilians has been a central part of US strategy to break the back of struggles for national liberation.

If George W. Bush is the principal 21^st century architect of forever wars in the Middle East, the credit for the disaster in Ukraine and moving the doomsday clock to 90 seconds before midnight (the moment the world ends in nuclear conflagration), the closest it’s ever been, belongs to Joe Biden. In 2014, as Obama’s vice president with the informal portfolio for handling Ukraine, for which he was a “super-hawk,” Biden helped to design the regime change policy of taking Viktor Yanukovych out of power in Kiev. Unhappy with Yanukovych’s ties to Russia, Biden and his main operative, the undersecretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, Victoria Nuland, engineered his ouster with active encouragement and material support for what became the Maidan protests in 2014.

As Ivan Katchanovski has noted, however, the peaceful protests during the “Orange Revolution” in 2004-2005, which, with direct US involvement denied Yanukovych the presidency, were upgraded in the 2014 Maidan street demonstrations with violent interventions by multiple neo-Nazi organization (Right Sector and Svoboda) snipers that shot protesters and riot police (Berkut) from their positions in nearby buildings and the Hotel Ukraina, turning the plaza into a bloodbath. After the neo-Nazi firebombing of government buildings, Yanukovych was forced to resign and flee from Kiev in February 2014.

Already weeks before, Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine were already hand-picking his replacement, Petro (“Chocolate King”) Poroshenko, who had been an active informant at the US Embassy. Poroshenko, who would serve as Washington’s puppet president, was aligned with the US-backed “Our Ukraine” faction in the government. At the same time, Nuland also picked the new neoliberal, pro-EU Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be prime minister.

For his support of Poroshenko as president, Biden, like a traditional mafia boss, expected personal favors in return. One was allowing his son Hunter Biden to serve on the board of the Ukraine’s largest energy company, Burisma. For this, young Biden, along with an adviser to then secretary of state John Kerry, neither with any experience in Ukraine or in the energy sector, received, according to a congressional report, $1 million per year for doing virtually nothing except as acting as totems for US backing. In fact, Biden junior never even travelled to Ukraine. This was clearly a payoff for the service that Biden senior had delivered in the overthrow of the Yanukovych government and the installation of the coup government, two months earlier.

The only cog in the wheel was that a widely-recognized independent-minded prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, was in the process of investigating the crooked Burisma Holdings company and its billionaire owner Mykola Zlochevsky too studiously. In a series of phone calls between vice president Biden and Poroshenko, as documented by a French podcast, Les Crises, Biden clearly bribed the then Ukrainian president into firing Shokin in exchange for receiving a US-backed IMF loan of $1 billion. Indeed, Biden openly bragged about how, like a “wild west” sheriff, he gave Poroshenko six hours to respond. The mainstream media saw no problem with the vice president consorting with a corrupt oligarch or in playing a proconsul role in US imperial politics.

Biden’s imperial outlooks, drawn from Washington’s and the mainstream media’s commitments to maintaining US hegemony in the world, has placed him among the world’s leading war criminals, alongside those, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, who led the genocide in Vietnam, where millions of people were bombed, gassed, maimed, and disfigured by chemical weapons. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have been killed with American indiscriminate weapons of mass murder under Biden’s command. He is also the effective commander in chief of the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and the mass murder of women and children. Given his political history, a modern restaging of the Nuremberg trials would certainly include Joe Biden on the docket.

Pardoning his son clearly reflects his belief, shared with Trump, that presidents and their families are above the law. Only days after the initial shock at Biden’s wanton disregard for what the public widely sees as the corruption of his office and the precedent he has set, leading Democrats began making apologies for his “just being a dad.” What will the Supreme Court draw from his behavior when it comes to Trump acting above the law?

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Luigi Mangione

Below is the short manifesto written by Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City last week. To our knowledge, no major news outlet has published this in full, found in his backpack when Mangione was captured in Altoona, Pennsylvania. We believe it’s newsworthy enough to share here and insightful about Mangione’s potential motivations. As of September 2024, UnitedHealthcare saw a profit of over $90 billion over twelve months, up from $60 million in 2020. The company’s so-called “denial rate” is higher than any other health insurer and has been accused of using algorithms to deny medical treatments.

“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

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Leavenworth Federal Prison, 1992.

I don’t know about you, but personally, the whole festive holiday thing seems to be falling a bit flat this year. Don’t get me wrong, like every other year, I do plan to really go to town on a pumpkin pie or two. But this year, the annual deluge of Black Friday ads egging us on to higher levels of consumption–with corresponding carbon emissions and solid and liquid waste–seemed particularly hollow, morbid–predatory, even–falling as Black Friday did this year on November 29, the date the U.N. first recognized in 1977 as International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. This year all the excess, forced pageantry, and planned obsolescence of Black Friday seems in such stark and ironic contrast to the poverty in Gaza.

From Plymouth to Palestine

Winter is coming soon to Gaza where hundreds of thousands of shell-shocked people are struggling against the odds to care for themselves and their families–from infants to elders and recent amputees on crutches and in wheelchairs, as well as people with other disabilities– eking out lives in the streets, tents, and precarious ruins of shelled out apartments. In The Guardian, Kaamil Ahmed and Ana Lucía González Paz describe Gaza as a “sonic hellscape” filled variously with the “incessant buzzing of drones” and “more violent intrusions: Israeli missile strikes, sirens, gunfire and the screams of frightened people.” And the situation is unlikely to get better under Herr Trump.

The man who as president moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem stands to personally profit from, as reported in The Guardian, investment his son-in-law Jared Kushner has in the removal of Palestinians from Gaza and its development as an Israeli waterfront resort. And no doubt Trump is also well aware of the profits to be had from exploiting Gaza’s offshore marine gas fields. But, if Jewish-led protests at the Thanksgiving Parade in New York City, and more recently in the Canadian Parliament, are anything to go by, solidarity actions against the unfolding genocide to Gaza are likely to continue to build in the run up to Hanukkah and the January inauguration.

But in the lead up to Christmas, Joe Biden seems as willing as ever to continue the seemingly limitless supply of U.S. weapons to help annihilate Gaza. I’m just speculating here, (so, please, sir, do not to put me to the dunking stool!) but Jesus himself might be the first to observe that giving birth in a manger sounds pretty idyllic right now to women in Gaza weakened by hunger, giving birth in the rubble of buildings that used to be apartments, universities and hospitals. No sterile sheets, no antiseptic, nothing to dull the pain, nothing to stop the next forced removal, the next relocation. The Palestinian Trail of Tears.

The links between Native American and Palestinian experience being so many and so obvious, it seems fitting that the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People follows so closely on the heels of Thanksgiving, that annual rite of colonial simulacra on such a spectacular national scale that Walt Disney himself would have been proud to call it his brainchild. We’re talking about a holiday that begins indoctrinating American school children, from kindergarten onward, into a history that never was. And for all you teachers out there, I’d be remiss for not noting that, for decades, Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project have been developing K-12 curriculum that centers Native voices, culture, and history, and goes a long way toward puncturing those myths.

Still, far too many Americans remain unaware of the fact that since 1970, the fourth Thursday in November also has been recognized as a “National Day of Mourning,” heralding as it does, the arrival of settlers bent on claiming the land as their own– in the pithy words of the late 19^th century colonialist hymn–“from sea to shining sea.” Today we may hear the echo of that much celebrated American phrase in Netanyahu’s and the Likud Party’s longstanding vision of a Jewish state purged of Palestinians, one that extends “between the Sea and the Jordan River.”

Red Power was in the air on Thanksgiving Day in 1970, when Aquinnah Wampanoag activist Wamsutta (Frank B.) James, drafted the speech he planned to deliver on behalf of the United American Indians of New England as an invited guest of settlers gathering at Plymouth. A year earlier on Thanksgiving Day in 1969, 78 Indigenous activists calling themselves “Indians of All Tribes” (IAT), had cast off from San Francisco, disembarking at Alcatraz Island. That act kicked off an internationally visible 19-month long occupation–and standoff with the Feds. When the settlers organizing the event in 1970 got wind of Wamsutta’s speech, they revoked their invitation in an attempt to silence him.

Accumulation By Dispossession

More reason to amplify Wamsutta’s words describing “Thanksgiving Day [as] a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands and the erasure of Native cultures,” but also of “Native resilience.” You can read the full speech here, including Wamsutta’s call to transform Thanksgiving into a “protest against the racism and oppression that Indigenous people continue to experience worldwide.” It wouldn’t have been too surprising if Palestine was on his mind when Wamsutta issued that global call not four years after the ’67–or Six Days– War, which ended with Israel occupying the “Sinai peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and most of Syrian Golan Heights – effectively tripling the size of territory under Israel’s control.” Beginning in the 1970s, the American Indian Movement (AIM) saw clear parallels between colonialism on Turtle Island and the Palestinian experience of removal and dispossession.

“Accumulation by dispossession” is how Marxist geographer David Harvey describes the logic of capitalism, which is inextricably linked to colonialism. Throughout history, Indigenous people–from Palestine to the U.S.– have been on the frontlines of dispossession and removal, their lands drowned or exploited for hydropower or contaminated in service of the empire–whether by mine tailings and nuclear waste or bombs, bullets or other forms of military ordinance. And the same hard-hit communities are now on the frontlines of climate collapse, disproportionately hit by rising sea levels, by typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other extreme weather events.

And what was it, anyway, that Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his 1967 Riverside Church speech about the triple evils of militarism, racism, and materialism and how they intersect? And would he be surprised today by products moving at the speed of light, millions of us wrapping our arms daily around boxes that many contend are stamped with Jeff Bezos’ male member? What would he have said about Bill Gates injecting markets and mines into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), about corporations and militaries jonesing after cobalt, after tantalum, after tin, tungsten, uranium, and gold, after debts and interest, after bodies of children, bodies of water, bodies of workers wearing flip flops into mines?

I write all this as someone who grew up white, middle class, and addicted to oil, plastics, and petrochemicals, someone who basked in endless hours of tv, who marinated in Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, in the blue-gray light of frontier myths and the urge to consume. We cut our teeth on the McUsual contemporary drive-by forms of American planetary annihilation. We grew up watching the world rush limitless past the back window of a Ford or Chevy station wagon. And unlike today, we witnessed the wonders of dinosaur piggy banks, Peter Max towels, and steak knives bestowed on us like a benediction­ every time our parents bought a full tank of gas.

We grew up consuming travel and oxygen, consuming landscapes, countries, cultures, and colonial myths, oblivious to the war in Viet Nam, to sundown towns, and the Green Book. We took cross-country trips and woke bleary-eyed at midnight to stare into the glaring white lights of Mount Rushmore, oblivious to the fact that not far away, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the Justice Department and FBI were busy making back door deals with tribal Chair Dickie Wilson and his “Goons,” who terrorized anyone who resisted the U.S.’s right to ravage Lakota land for uranium for bombs and nuclear energy. If, collectively, they had to break a few eggs, heads, bodies, and the crust of the earth, contaminate rivers and streams, and set up Leonard Peltier to get their hands on that uranium, so be it, right?

Nuclear Colonialism v. Red Power

The world has no shortage of political prisoners–or of environmental martyrs and heroes– but 80-year-old Leonard Peltier, a Lakota and Anishinaabe AIM member, is arguably the most famous, the legal lynching he underwent so outrageous, and his incarceration in a “maximum security” prison so protracted. Even former FBI agents have themselves essentially contended that Pelter was scapegoated by the FBI for the lethal shooting of two agents–Jack Coler and Ronald Williams– on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Michael Apted’s 1992 documentary Incident at Oglala, narrated by Robert Redford, is a good place to start if you’re new to this history. But if you’re looking for insights into the role that uranium mining played in the conflict, you’d be better off checking out Peter Matthiessen’s book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on The American Indian Movement. To hear a first-hand account, check out Peltier’s memoir Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance.

Despite well-documented prosecutorial misconduct powerfully depicted in Apted’s documentary, Peltier’s conviction has yet to be overturned. And in the face of decades of global, high-profile pleas for clemency for Peltier, including by James Reynolds, a “senior US attorney who was involved in [his] prosecution,” no president up until now has been willing to free Peltier. Given that he’s in increasingly poor health, time is running out, and the same president who just pardoned his own son may be Peltier’s last shot at clemency. If you haven’t yet done so, check out the Amnesty International petition– and Amy Goodman’s and Denis Moynihan’s recent column–making the case for his release. The Red Nation media collective also has an extensive playlist of podcasts focused on Peltier’s case and the long struggle to free him.

Peltier, arguably the world’s most visible casualty of nuclear colonialism, was only three years into his sentence when Santee Dakota organizer John Trudell, his contemporary in AIM, delivered a searing 1980 speech at the Black Hills International Survival Gathering. As Zoltan Grossman has documented, “Multinational mining companies, such as Union Carbide and Exxon, proposed the development of the Black Hills for energy resources, including coal mines, uranium mines, and coal slurry pipelines.” The Black Hills gathering brought together a global convergence of more than 10,000 Indigenous activists and non-Native allies to hold the line against a repeat of the 1950s, which, per Grossman, had “result[ed] in the extensive irradiation of the southern Black Hills community of Edgemont.”

A Navy radio operator during the Vietnam War, Trudell was all of 23 when he first came to national visibility as the voice of Radio Free Alcatraz, which aired on the Pacifica Network, during the 1969-71 takeover of the Island. Trudell had also witnessed close-up and personally the massive, militarized violence that the federal government unleashed on Wounded Knee to open up Lakota land for extraction. And by 1980, Trudell had good reason to suspect that his pregnant wife Shoshone Paiute activist Tina Manning, their three children, and Manning’s mother Leah Hicks-Manning had been among its most recent casualties. In 1979, all five died in a house fire that broke out within 12 hours of Trudell burning a U.S. flag outside FBI headquarters. Not surprisingly, following a brief and perfunctory investigation by none other than the FBI itself, the fire was ruled accidental. For Trudell, and so many other AIM members and supporters, U.S. resource wars– whether in Vietnam, Central America, the Middle East, or South Dakota– were extensions of the so-called “Indian Wars.”

To Trudell, nuclear war wasn’t confined to some future exchange between the U.S. and Russia or China. It was unfolding in the present, and not just against Indigenous people, but against everyone who stood to be impacted by mining, radiation, and a nuclear industry that placed profit overall life:

Are they not waging nuclear war on us now when the miners die from cancer from mining that uranium? Are they not waging nuclear war with Three Mile Island when they release that stuff into the air? Are they not waging nuclear war when they build all of these nuclear reactors….? Are they not waging nuclear war when they attack the Indian people on their land militarily… so that they can get at the natural resources to feed their radioactive machine? That is war and they are waging it against us….

To Trudell, “nuclearization” was a “final assault,” a form of madness that needed to be resisted at every turn. The U.S. government and assorted nuke boosters and interests would try to sell us on “the illusion” of safe nuclear power, and of our own “powerlessness” to resist the industry. For Trudell, our very survival depended on recognizing both our dependency on “our Sacred Mother, Earth,” and the power we draw from her–and from each other. “We are Power,” Trudell repeats throughout his speech.

In the wake of the hair-raising standoff between the Ukraine and Russia, when the latter seized the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the site of what remains the world’s largest nuclear disaster; and with Japan now releasing nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean; and some 40% of the world’s nuclear plants routinely buffeted by extreme weather events and rising sea levels; with heightened nuclear saber rattling in the Middle East, Trudell’s Thanksgiving speech is more relevant than ever.

If you want to get a sense of the kind of propaganda that a revitalized and ostensibly “green” nuclear industry is trying to sell us on today, check out Jan Haaken’s 2023 documentary Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance. With corporations bent on selling us the fiction of nuclear energy as a clean, safe, and sustainable answer to the climate crisis– one that will enable the U.S. to continue down the path of limitless extraction, consumption, and war– we’d do well to heed his words: “We cannot protect ourselves if we do not protect the Earth.” Amen to that.

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Photograph Source: Voice of America News: Scott Bobb reports from Azaz, Syria – Public Domain

The sudden regime overthrow in Syria and the long-delayed opportunity to confront the legacy of Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny are either being celebrated or condemned, as explored below, but they come at a time that poses profound problems for solidarity with Palestine.

In Johannesburg, these problems are particularly acute given contradictions exposed last week. There was first, the South African government’s two-faced approach to Israel – condemnatory at The Hague, yet with President Cyril Ramaphosa apparently now backing away from anti-genocide ‘megaphone diplomacy,’ and allowing increased profiteering from local exports into Israel (coal especially, but also diamonds, grapes and even bullets) – just at the moment, second, that Ramaphosa took up formal leadership of the G20 group of wealthy and middle-income states, as the baton was passed from Brazilian President Lula Ignacio da Silva.

To signal the dangers associated with G20 fusion of imperial and sub-imperial economies, Ramaphosa began preparing to host the November 2025 Summit here in his primary hometown by obsequiously offering a state visit and round of golf to Donald Trump. Also underway this week are meetings between G20 finance ministry and central bank officials planning their 2025 reform agenda. Moreover, there is increasing clarity on G20 climate change policy, thanks to a refusal at the recent Baku UN climate summit by South Africa’s new white, rightwing environment minister, Dion George, to respect the African delegates’ critiques of Western climate finance offerings.

But before exploring such African fissures and G20 fusions on another occasion, two urgent challenges arise due first to Ramaphosa’s retreat from Palestine solidarity, and second to the fall of the half-century old rule of the Assad family on December 8 followed by Moscow exile.

Pretoria enters the West Asian drama, this time stage right

A common concern in Johannesburg is that the reinsertion of Trumpism in coming weeks will hasten the genocide of Palestinians and erasure of their homelands, and further destabilize not only West Asia, but also amplify a long-lasting Washington-Pretoria-Tel Aviv relay in which mutual economic interests dominate. Beyond the historical function of the three states collaborating in 1970s-80s nuclear weapons technology, the relay dates most conspicuously, a decade ago, to Ramaphosa predecessor Jacob Zuma’s capitulation to Barack Obama and local South African Zionists during an earlier Gaza War.

A repeat performance is most worrying to progressives here, in large part because South Africa’s Richards Bay bulk minerals port has become – since August – the world’s main terminal for exporting coal to Israel, which depends on the Orot Rabin and Rutenberg power stations for nearly 20% of its energy grid.

It is to be expected that Trump will go on the offensive against the South African filing of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case against Israel. Trump is a proponent of Israel’s mass murder and illegal settlements, calling predecessor Joe Biden a “very bad Palestinian” during a debate last June, for not sufficiently helping Netanyahu to ‘finish the job’ in Gaza.

But instead of helping to build the global movement against Israel by highlighting Trump’s threats, Ramaphosa’s new Ambassador to Washington Ebrahim Rasool – formerly part of the ruling party’s leftwing currents – let slip in an interview this week: “We need to put away the [Palestine-solidarity] megaphone now. And the president’s words were, it is now sub judice… I understand the need to completely recalibrate…that’s the art of the deal. It is about framing the messages in particular ways that make South Africa an ally [of Trump].”

Some might be surprised at this betrayal, including Ramaphosa’s nonsensical sub judice posture. Yet beyond its important ideological advocacy megaphone used at the Hague international courts, the Pretoria government has barely lifted a finger for Palestine.

Backlash against Pretoria begins

The Boycott Divestment Sanctions ‘BDS’ strategy called for by the broadest-ever range of Palestinian civil society in 2005 peacefully addresses one of Israel’s major vulnerabilities: fossil-energy supply. Yet Ramaphosa’s brother-in-law Patrice Motsepe runs a major mining house that partners with Glencore – as did Ramaphosa himself until he became deputy president in 2014 – and thus serves as the main co-supplier of coal to fuel Israel’s genocide of Palestine.

Protest at Glencore Johannesburg headquarters, August 22.

Activists insist on BDS, on ending diplomatic recognition of Israel, and on prosecution of South African mercenaries who illegally serve the Israel Defense Force, but they are making virtually no progress.

Roshan Dadoo, the coordinator of the local Boycott Divestment Sanctions BDS Coalition, wrote in Amandla! magazine last week, “South Africa is increasingly being seen as hypocritical, as it does not follow through with implementing the findings of the ICJ… Government has certainly not taken all measures within its power. The Department of International Relations and Cooperation says that coal sales to Israel are a trade-related matter. The BDS Coalition Energy Embargo campaign has been trying to meet the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, but with little success. A meeting was set up and then cancelled at the last minute, leaving activists frustrated.”

Reflecting that frustration, leading personalities associated with South Africa’s three main (often fractious) local progressive political traditions – which might be termed ‘multipolar’, ‘independent-internationalist’ and ‘liberal-constitutionalist’ – penned a strong Open Letter last week: respectively, former Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils, trade union leader Zwelinzima Vavi and anti-apartheid veteran Rev. Frank Chikane. They warned, “It looks increasingly like the South African government is reluctant to follow its own logic and uphold its legal obligations to isolate and sanction apartheid Israel.”

According to Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane, those obligations include following the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion ruling offered in July, to halt “aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The vast majority of countries voting at the UN General Assembly in September (including South Africa) agreed with the ICJ, that the world must “prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel.”

Coal fuels genocide

But as Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane observe, coal mined especially by Swiss-based Glencore and its longest-standing Johannesburg partner since 2006, African Rainbow Minerals (ARM), is still being “supplied to Israel to generate electricity used to fuel genocide, the Israeli Occupation Forces, including production of military equipment, and maintaining the system of apartheid and illegal settlements.”

In spite of ICJ and UN mandates, trade minister Parks Tau claimed in parliament when asked about coal a few weeks ago, “Sanctions applied by one member against another in the absence of multilateral sanctions by the United Nations would violate the World Trade Organisation principle of non-discrimination and would open the country to legal challenge.” Tau’s specious argument results in his refusal to regulate a dangerous export, a commonly-used state tool.

Tau is not the only minister to ignore appeals to abide by the ICJ/UN mandate to disempower the Israeli genocidaires. Pretoria’s Transport Minister Barbara Creecy also refuses to answer BDS correspondence, though she is responsible for Transnet, whose “rail shipments and Richards Bay port facilitation subsidize the export of coal, which is a state-owned natural resource,” complain Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane.

Another guilty of dereliction is Environment Minister George, who last month co-chaired the climate mitigation committee of the UN climate summit in Azerbaijan (which is also the main supplier of oil to Israel). As Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane point out, over the past year, with a coal price “average of $110/ton, Glencore earns net profits of $40 for each ton of coal sold, what with production costs of $70/ton. Each ton burned creates 2.6 tons of CO² emissions. The resulting ‘social cost of carbon’ is $1056/ton burned, resulting in a net negative impact of nearly $2-billion climate damage due to South African coal sold [to Israel] since October 2023. So, these coal shipments fuel both Israel’s genocide and the climate crisis.”

South Africa’s supply is increasingly vital to Israel, which currently relies on coal to power 17.5% of the electricity in its national grid. The last time fully-disaggregated UN Comtrade coal data were available, in 2021 (before Russia disguised its trade due to sanctions), Israel imported 6.5 million tons, of which 50% was Colombian, 36% Russian, 13% South African and 1% Turkish.

In 2023 Israel consumed 5.2 million tons. According to a June 2024 SPGlobal report, between January-May 2024, of 1.4 million tons, Colombia accounted for 60% and “other key suppliers included Russia with 247,500, South Africa at 169,200, the U.S. at 86,100 and China supplying 53,000.” In May 2024, Turkey imposed full trade sanctions on Israel, although dishonest shippers reroute exports. The maritime-data company Kpler issued South African BDS activists with new data in November for ships bringing coal to Israel’s Hadera and Ashdod coal ports, revealing that a Chinese firm has apparently resumed shipments, along with one from Australia.

Another data source, Vessel Tracker, revealed last week that Colombia didn’t conclusively halt coal shipments as anticipated in August, because on November 27 the Navios Felix took a load of coal – most likely from Glencore – to Hadera. The same ship was in Richards Bay on August 11 to load South African coal to Hadera, arriving on September 27, as its owner Navios Partners acknowledged how its fleet ships “for a broad range of high-quality counterparties, such as… Glencore.”

South Africa became Israel’s main coal supplier in August, overtaking Russia, with more shipments from September-November. Four shipments supplied Israel’s Hadera Port and Orot Rabin power station in recent weeks, each carrying 165 000 tons of South African coal. After the genocide began last October, at least seven ships have left Richards Bay carrying coal to Israel.

Glencore as coal-BDS target

As the world’s largest commodity trader, Switzerland-based Glencore offers no apologies or rationale. In May, at Glencore’s Annual General Meeting, one shareholder asked “if you’re conducting human rights assessments on the use of the coal you’re exporting to Israel to ensure that you’re not held liable”? Board Chairman Kalidas Madhavpeddi replied, “The company supplies to many countries around the world and it’s almost impossible to tell you the answer to your question.”

The shareholder followed up, “So you don’t check how the coal is being used?” Madhavpeddi replied: “Coal is used in power generation, that’s simple.” The two Johannesburg-born South African Glencore directors at the AGM – CEO Gary Nagle and Senior Independent Director Gill Marcus – were notably silent during the questioning.

In 2006, ARM Coal had been set up thanks to a $135 million loan to Motsepe from Glencore’s predecessor Xstrata, along with nearly half the black firm’s investment capital. The deal was a major reason Motsepe vaulted to becoming South Africa’s richest black businessman. That year, Xstrata bragged of 13 million tons of coal exports from Richards Bay: “Outside of Europe, Israel was the largest purchaser of the South African operations’ coal production.”

Glencore acquired Xstrata in 2013 and inherited the relationship with Motsepe’s ARM Coal. Meanwhile in 2014, Ramaphosa sold his own Glencore-allied firm, Shanduka Coal – including a stake in the enormous Glencore-owned Optimum Mine whose board Ramaphosa chaired – to become SA’s deputy president. As head of the Eskom ‘war room’ in 2014-15, Ramaphosa allegedly instructed the power utility to pay a price 3.5 times the former cost of Optimum coal, with profits to Glencore.

Since its 1994 renaming from ‘Marc Rich & Co,’ Glencore has had a terrible reputation in Africa. Initial earnings had included apartheid-era sanctions busting for white South Africa. Its Congolese dealings with Israeli tycoon Dan Gertler continued until the latter’s 2018 blacklisting by the U.S. government. From 2018-22, Glencore was successfully prosecuted under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for widespread bribery and corruption across Africa and Latin America, and paid $1.5 billion in fines. (Suspiciously, it has not been subject to prosecution in South Africa.)

Colombia’s Israel coal sales were typically 5% of recent exports, but in South Africa’s case the equivalent was usually lower than 1%, although that may rise to 2% in 2024. Earnings from these exports fluctuate with price and quantity: $101 million in 2021; $184 million in 2022; and $78 million in 2023. But the full costs of coal exports – in terms of local pollution, greenhouse gas damage and depleted hydrocarbons, as well as labor, operating costs and environmental remediation – are far higher than gross income.

Still, any worker or community adversely affected by BDS against Glencore and other coal mines prevented from selling to Israel, should in 2025 be first in line for compensation from $14 billion in SA’s Just Energy Transition funding.

Another demand was made to Glencore at an August 22 Johannesburg protest: pay reparations, just as did Detroit-based General Motors for profiteering in pre-1994 apartheid South Africa. All firms supporting Israeli genocide should now appreciate this risk.

More SA-Israel trade, perhaps including arms

Stopping coal sales to Israel is crucial but Pretoria also turns a blind eye to the lucrative diamonds and grape trade. And there are new concerns that a 50% upsurge of artillery ammunition being produced by SA parastatal arms firm Denel in a joint venture with German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall finds its way to Israel.

Moreover, both in Pretoria last month and in the U.S. state of Delaware’s bankruptcy courts in August, another weapons link was unveiled when Johannesburg native Ivor Ichikowitz declared that several divisions of his Paramount Group – Africa’s largest privately-held arms dealership – were unable to pay creditors. One of Ichikowitz’s bankruptcy protection requests was for Paramount Industrial Holdings, whose Johannesburg factory was subject to an anti-genocide protest in November 2023.

Meanwhile, Paramount South Africa – set up in 2018 to allegedly support ‘black economic empowerment,’ but mainly so as to gain access to SA military procurement contracts – is being accused by United Arab Emirates officials of merely asset-stripping Intellectual Property that is technically owed to Abu Dhabi Autonomous Systems Investments, following a London arbitration ruling against Ichikowitz.

In the process of Ichikowitz trying to escape a massive debt to the Emiratis’ drone-manufacturing parastatal, he disclosed not only a previously-reported ongoing joint venture with Elbit, but that the main Israeli arms company retains an address at Ichikowitz’s Johannesburg factory.

And Ichikowitz also revealed Paramount’s $725,000 debt to the Israel office of Cognyte Technologies, a spyware firm known previously as a component of Verint, which was prosecuted for corruption in the U.S. and criticized by Amnesty International for contributing to South Sudanese surveillance abuses. Cognyte is also under investigation by even the Israeli courts for providing technology to the Myanmar junta as it carried out a coup and massive civilian killings in early 2021.

Earlier this year, South Africa’s leading investigative journalists’ non-profit, Amabhungane, objected to the secretive nature of another of Ichikowitz’s divisions that went bankrupt: “by operating in low scrutiny jurisdictions, the Paramount group might have placed itself outside of the oversight structures in South Africa that restrict military trade. In addition, questions have been raised about the alleged funding of political interests ranging from South Africa’s ruling party to politicians abroad, and whether political connections have enabled the expansion of the company outside South Africa.”

For much of 2023, the Ichikowitz Family Foundation was indeed the single largest funder of Ramaphosa’s ruling party, the African National Congress. And later in the year, as the genocide got underway, the same foundation was a brazen, public supplier of tefillin (spiritual leather garb) to the Israel Defense Forces. As South Africa’s anti-genocide ICJ case began, Ichikowitz published articles in the Chicago Tribune andFortune condemning the proceedings.

The Delaware court documents suggest the need for a relook by the Pretoria regulator supposedly monitoring such deals, the South African National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC). Several months ago, the notoriously lax NCACC lost a human rights case in local courts for approving an illegal Myanmar arms deal. The same committee had offered late-2023 denials that Ichikowitz and other local firms worked with the Israel Defense Forces, in spite of Ichikowitz’s mysterious Tel Aviv office and his tefillin supply to the genocidaires.

BDS must intensify

Could BDS help end the genocide and other IDF attacks? Kasrils, Vavi and Chikane conclude, “As South Africans, we know that sanctions in support of our liberation struggle played a vital role in bringing down the apartheid regime.”

Indeed 1985 when financial sanctions caused such a squeeze that President PW Botha declared a debt default, imposed exchange controls and shut the stock market. The response by business leaders was to visit Zambia to meet exiled black leaders, beginning the democratization process, as whites fearful of further meltdown finally accepted ‘one person, one vote’ democracy.

But one reason activists suspect sanctions won’t be imposed unless pressure rises, is the role of Motsepe, a generous financial contributor to a range of local political parties. With a net worth estimate of nearly $3 billion, he is Johannesburg’s richest resident.

Motsepe is also the president of the Confederation of African Football and therefore, along with other Federation Internationale de Football Association executives, continues to delay suspension of Israel players from international fixtures, a demand made due to their extensive collusion in genocide and apartheid.

Will activists overcome Pretoria’s failures to impose sanctions, to cut diplomatic relations as was mandated by parliament in November 2023, and to prosecute young mercenaries who take their gap year after Herzlia and King David High School degrees to serve as paid IDF genocidaires?

A growing activist coalition will be needed. Dadoo notes that “South Africa’s largest trade union federation, the Congress of South African Unions, and its affiliate, the National Union of Mineworkers, support a ban on coal exports to Israel. So do environmental groups and social justice movements in the country.” Long gone are the days Ramaphosa organized a national strike as the National Union of Mineworkers leader, 37 years ago.

But links between the various movements are promising, e.g. on August 22 at Glencore’s Johannesburg headquarters and Cape Town oil company branch, and again on October 8 when climate activists included a protest at the Ichikowitz Family Foundation office during an anti-fossils march – in part because of his role providing military ship and air support to protect Big Oil operating offshore Nigeria and Mozambique – and a leader of SA Jews for Palestine addressed the crowd.

Syrian chaos

Another new factor that makes BDS work more important everywhere, is Syria’s new government. After pounding his citizenry with bombs and bullets since the Arab Spring arrived in Syria in March 2011, leaving more than 600,000 dead and six million exiled refugees, Bashar al-Assad had witnessed the carving of his country into a balkanized set of territories characterized by U.S., Russian, Turkish and Israel land and resource grabs.

The stunning 12-day military campaign coordinated by Türkiye-backed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, began the day after Lebanon’s remaining Hezbollah leadership signed a dubious cease-fire with Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime, on November 27. On December 6, the Israel Defense Forces demolished the crossing from Lebanon to Syria to prevent Hezbollah from importing arms from Iran, but also to halt any Lebanese fighters’ defense of Assad against the rapid HTS advance into the capital city of Damascus.

This has provoked a series of reactions, including at least three dueling leftwing narratives, as usual distinguishing between an emphasis on top-down geopolitricks and bottom-up, social-struggle:

1) a critique of the role of imperialist+sub-imperialist powers – especially Washington-Tel Aviv-Ankara – in a behind-the-curtain, ‘dirty war’ manipulation of HTS jihadis: e.g., in Mohammad Marandi’s account of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s and Joe Biden’s current de facto support for al-Qaeda extremists, or in Vijay Prashad’s summation that “Israeli bombardment of Syrian military facilities had weakened the Syrian armed forces’ logistical and ordinance capabilities… [and] attacks on Iranian supply depots and military facilities in Syria as well as the attacks by Israel on Iran had prevented any build up of Iranian forces to defend the Syrian government… conflict in Ukraine had certainly denied Syria the ability to call upon further Russian assistance… HTS has received aid and support from Turkey, but also covertly from Israel.”

2) in contrast to manipulation, a recognition that for U.S. and Israeli military interests, as Gilbert Achar puts it, “the Assad regime and HTS are almost equally bad” – so instead, the explanatory emphasis is on sectarian religious infighting (which weakened the government army’s commitment to defend Assad’s terrain) plus degraded Iranian, Hezbollah and Russian support for Damascus, that together, provided a gap for HTS – but leaving profound concerns that the extreme-Islamist values of HTS and allies, and oppression of secular democratic forces, mean very tough times ahead, including for the Rojava movement of progressive Kurds in northern Syria; and

3) a celebration of the role of popular will in overthrowing the brutal Assad, leaving us with a generally-progressive, bottom-up success story containing democratic and anti-patriarchal potentials, notwithstanding some dubious elements and threats of restored sectarian extremism: e.g. in Moazzem Begg’s approving description of ecstatic Syrians who long suffered Assad’s totalitarianism and torture chambers, or in in Michal Karadjis’ interpretation that “The Syrian revolution returns with a bang,” and also in the liberal and feminist elements of the Free Syria

Certainly each of the three perspectives contain a degree of truth, but just to disclose, my own far-away interpretation lies somewhere between the second (realist) and third (hopeful) arguments, while still recognizing the fundamental truths of the first line of argument: U.S. imperial malevolence, Israeli regional sub-imperialism, and Turkish brutality to its southern neighbor’s citizenry.

The overarching point, though, is that waging a thirteen-year long set of diverse struggles by movements with so many fractured elements, means many dirty deals were (and are) done – e.g. the Kurds of Rojava getting on-and-off protection from Washington while still managing to run a quasi-liberated zone deservedly famous for progressive advances in social ecology, feminism and municipal-socialist collaboration in the style of Murray Bookchin’s bottom-up confederalism.

At least, for the sake of clarity, Washington’s interests in having a 1000-strong troop presence in Syria were not to support Rojava, no matter the Kurds’ in holding at bay extreme Islam’s armies. Instead, Trump made clear his reason for betraying Rojava by moving hundreds of U.S. army forces around the northeastern region in late 2019, when during a White House meeting he intoned to Erdoğan, “We want to worry about our things [sic]. We’re keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil.”

Although he is forever committed to resource grabs, Trump has more recently expressed nervousness about the 500 remaining U.S. troops being ‘caught in the middle,’ declaring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr that he wanted to pull them out. Meanwhile this week, not only do the four remaining U.S. army bases in the northeast appear to be fully operational, so are the Russian military’s Tartus Mediterranean naval port and Khmeimim air base in western Syria.

Early indications are that the Kurdish liberation movement will defend Rojava, in spite of 100 000 refugees now fleeing violence. The Kurds are fighting the Syrian National Army – which violently captured the city of Manbij just after Damascus fell on Sunday – and also repelling Erdoğan’s ongoing opportunistic attacks. Erdoğan would be furious if an independent Kurdish state emerges from the Rojava Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, because it would empower progressive Kurdish activists across West Asia, especially in Türkiye.

One Rojava statement celebrated Assad’s fall. Yet no one doubts the danger that a full-fledged collapse of Syrian central state power – and ultimately a far worse balkanization and extremist Islamic state – may result from the turmoil. And for Syria’s masses, including Kurds and hundreds of thousands who do not yet dare return from exile, the need for solidarity could again become acute.

Balance needed, as Sam Husseini explains, is that “It’s possible that the US and other outside forces will decapitate Syria. And it’s possible that they will keep it technically whole but subservient. Or it’s possible that genuine freedom and dignity will assert themselves there and a new Syria will be a meaningful force for good.”

The approach from Hamas was to congratulate “the brotherly Syrian people on their success in achieving their aspirations for freedom and justice. We call on all components of the Syrian people to unite, enhance national cohesion, and rise above the pains of the past… Hamas strongly condemns the repeated brutal aggression by the Zionist occupation against Syrian territories and firmly rejects any Zionist ambitions or schemes targeting brotherly Syria, its land and its people.”

The clarity which brave Palestinians provide the world remind of the interrelationships between geopolitics, political economy and bottom-up solidarity – especially critical at a time when even the South African and Colombian governments are failing to meet reasonable expectations to help end genocide.

The post From South Africa to Syria, Rising Perils for Palestine Solidarity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Syrian rebels, Youtube screenshot.

The rebellion in Syria has taken the world by surprise and led to the fall of the Assad family dictatorship, which has ruled Syria since Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, took power in a coup d’etat 54 years ago. Neither the regime’s military forces nor its imperial sponsor, Russia, and its regional backer, Iran, were able to defend it. Cities under the regime’s control have been freed, thousands of political prisoners liberated from its notorious dungeons, and space opened for a new fight for a free, inclusive, and democratic Syria for the first time in decades.

At the same time, most Syrians know that such a struggle faces enormous challenges, beginning with the two key rebel forces, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA). While they spearheaded the military victory, they are authoritarian and have a history of religious and ethnic sectarianism. Some on the Left have claimed without foundation that their rebellion was orchestrated by the U.S. and Israel. Others have uncritically romanticized these rebel forces as rekindling the original popular revolution that nearly overthrew Assad’s regime in 2011. Neither captures the complex dynamics unfolding in Syria today. 

In this interview, conducted amidst a rapidly changing situation in Syria, Tempest asks Swiss Syrian socialist Joseph Daher about the process that led to the fall of Assad’s rule, the prospects for progressive forces, and the challenges they face in fighting for a truly liberated country that serves the interests of all its peoples and popular classes.

Tempest: How are Syrians feeling after the fall of the regime?

Joseph Daher: The happiness is unbelievable. It is a historic day. 54 years of tyranny of Assad’s family is gone. We saw videos of popular demonstrations throughout the country, from Damascus, Tartous, Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Qamichli, Suwaida, etc. of all religious sects and ethnicities, destroying statues and symbols of the Assad’s family.

And of course, there is great happiness for the liberation of political prisoners from the regime’s prisons, particularly Sednaya prison, known as the “human slaughterhouse” which could contain 10,000-20,000 prisoners. Some of them had been detained since the 1980s. Similarly, people, who had been displaced in 2016 or earlier, from Aleppo and other cities, have been able to return to their homes and neighborhoods, seeing their families for the first time in years.

At the same time, in the first days following the military offensive, popular reactions were initially mixed and confused, reflecting the diversity of political opinion in Syrian society, both within and outside the country. Some sections were very happy with the conquest of these territories and the weakening of the regime, and now its potential fall.

But, some sectors of the population were, and are still, also fearful of HTS and SNA. They are worried about the authoritarian and reactionary nature of these forces and their political project.

And some are worried about what will happen in the new situation. In particular, wide sections of Kurds as well as others, while happy for the fall of the dictatorship of Assad, have issued condemnations of the SNA’s forced displacement and assassinations of people.

Tempest: Can you recount the sequence of events, especially the rebel advance, that defeated Assad’s military forces and led to his downfall? What has happened?

JD: Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) and Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) launched a military campaign on November 27, 2024 against the Syrian regime’s forces, scoring stunning victories. In less than a week, HTS and SNA took control of most of Aleppo and Idlib governorates. Then, the city Hama, located 210 kilometers north of Damascus, fell into the hands of HTS and SNA following intense military confrontations between them and regime forces supported by the Russian air force. Following Hama, HTS took control of Homs.

Initially, the Syrian regime sent reinforcements to Hama and Homs, and then, with the support of the Russian air force, bombed the cities of Idlib and Aleppo and its surroundings. On December 1 and 2, more than 50 airstrikes hit Idlib, at least four health facilities, four school facilities, two displacement camps, and a water station were impacted. The airstrikes have displaced over 48,000 people and severely disrupted services and aid delivery. The dictator Bashar al-Assad had promised defeat to his enemies and stated that “terrorism only understands the discourse of force.” But his regime was already crumbling from everywhere.

While the regime was losing town after town, the southern governorates of Suweida and Daraa liberated themselves; their popular and local armed opposition forces, separate and distinct from HTS and SNA, seized control. Regime forces then withdrew from localities about ten kilometers from Damascus, and abandoned their positions in the province of Quneitra, which borders the Golan Heights, which is occupied by Israel.

As different opposition armed forces, again not HTS nor SNA, approached the capital Damascus, regime’s forces just crumbled and withdrew, while demonstrations and the burning of all symbols of Bashar al-Assad multiplied in the various suburbs of Damascus. On the night of December 7 and 8, it was announced that Damascus was liberated. The exact fate and location of Bashar al-Assad was initially unknown, but some information indicated that he was in Russia under the protection of Moscow.

The fall of the regime proved its structural weakness, militarily, economically, and politically. It collapsed like a house of cards. This is hardly surprising because it seemed clear that the soldiers were not going to fight for the Assad regime, given their poor wages and conditions. They preferred to flee or just not fight rather than defend a regime for which they have very little sympathy, especially because a lot of them had been forcefully conscripted.

Alongside these dynamics in the south, others have occurred in different parts of the country since the start of the rebels’ offensive. First, the SNA led attacks on territories controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northern Aleppo, and then announced the beginning of a new offensive against the northern city of Manbij, which is under the domination of the SDF. On Sunday December 8, with the support of the Turkish army, airforce, and artillery, the SNA entered the city.

Second, the SDF has captured most of Deir-ez-Zor governorate formerly controlled by Syrian regime forces and pro-Iran militias, after they had withdrawn to redeploy in other areas to fight against HTS and SNA. SDF then extended their control over vast swaths of the northeast previously under the regime’s domination.

Tempest: Who are the rebel forces and in particular the main rebel formation HTS and SNA? What are their politics, program, and project? What do the popular classes think of them?

JD: The successful seizure of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and of other territories in a military campaign led by HTS reflects in many ways the evolution of this movement over several years into a more disciplined and more structured organization, both politically and militarily. It now can produce drones and runs a military academy. HTS has been able to impose its hegemony on a certain number of military groups, through both repression and inclusion in the past few years. Based on these developments, it positioned itself to launch this attack.

It has become a quasi-state actor in the areas it controls. It has established a government, the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG), which acts as HTS’ civil administration and provides services. There has been a clear willingness by HTS and SSG in the past few years to present themselves as a rational force to regional and international powers in order to normalize its rule. This has notably resulted in more and more space for some NGOs to operate in key sectors such as education and healthcare, in which SSG lacks financial resources and expertise.

This does not mean that no corruption exists in areas under its rule. It has enforced its rule through authoritarian measures and policing. HTS has notably repressed or limited activities it considers as contrary to its ideology. For instance, HTS stopped several projects supporting women, particularly camp residents, under the pretext that these cultivated ideas of gender equality that were hostile to its rule. HTS has also targeted and detained political opponents, journalists, activists, and people it viewed as critics or opponents.

HTS—which is still categorized as a terrorist organization by many powers including the U.S.—has also been trying to project a more moderate image of itself, trying to win recognition that it is now a rational and responsible actor. This evolution dates back to the rupture of its ties with al-Qaeda in 2016 and its reframing of its political objectives in the Syrian national framework. It has also repressed individuals and groups connected to Al-Qaida and the so-called Islamic State.

In February 2021, for his first interview with an U.S.journalist, its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, or Ahmed al-Sharaa (his real name), declared that the region he controlled “does not represent a threat to the security of Europe and America,” asserting that areas under its rule would not become a base for operations abroad.

In this attempt to define himself as a legitimate interlocutor on the international scene, he emphasized the group’s role in fighting against terrorism. As part of this makeover, it has allowed the return of Christians and Druze in some areas and established contacts with some leaders from these communities.

Following the capture of Aleppo, HTS continued to present itself as a responsible actor. HTS fighters for instance immediately posted videos in front of banks, offering assurances that they wanted to protect private property and assets. They also promised to protect civilians and minority religious communities, particularly Christians, because they know that the fate of this community is closely scrutinized abroad.

Similarly, HTS has made numerous statements promising similar protection of Kurds and Islamic minorities such as Ismaelis and Druzes. It also issued a statement regarding Alawites that called on them to break with the regime, without however suggesting that HTS would protect them or saying anything clear about their future. In this statement, HTS describes the Alawite community as an instrument of the regime against the Syrian people.

Finally, the leader of HTS, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has stated that the city of Aleppo will be managed by a local authority, and all military forces, including those of HTS, will fully withdraw from the city in the coming weeks. It is clear that al-Jolani wants to actively engage with local, regional, and international powers.

However, it is still an open question as to whether HTS will follow through on these statements. The  organization has been an authoritarian and reactionary organization with an Islamic fundamentalist ideology, and still has foreign fighters within its ranks. Many popular demonstrations in the past few years have occurred in Idlib against its rule and violations of political freedoms and human rights, including assassinations and torture of opponents.

It is not enough to tolerate religious or ethnic minorities or allow them to pray. The key issue is recognizing their rights as equal citizens participating in deciding the future of the country. More generally, statements by the head of HTS, al-Jolani, such as “people who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly,” are definitely not reassuring, but quite the opposite.

Regarding the Turkish-backed SNA, it is a coalition of armed groups mostly with Islamic conservative politics. It has a very bad reputation and is guilty of numerous human rights violations especially against Kurdish populations in areas under their control. They have notably participated in the Turkish-led military campaign to occupy Afrin in 2018, leading to the forced displacement of around 150,000 civilians, the vast majority of them Kurds.

In the current military campaign, once again SNA serves mainly Turkish objectives in targeting areas controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) and with large Kurdish populations. The SNA has, for instance, captured the  city of Tal Rifaat and Shahba area in northern Aleppo, previously under the governance of the SDF, leading to the forced displacement of more than 150,000 civilians and many violations of human rights against Kurdish individuals, including assassinations and kidnappings. The SNA then announced a military offensive, supported by the Turkish army on the city of Manbij, home to 100,000 civilians, and controlled by the SDF.

There are, therefore, differences between HTS and SNA. The HTS has a relative autonomy from Turkey in contrast to the SNA, which is controlled by Turkey and serves its interests. The two forces are different, pursue distinct goals, and have conflicts between them, although for the moment these have been kept under wraps. For instance, HTS is currently not seeking to confront the SDF. In addition to this, the SNA published a critical statement against HTS for their “aggressive behavior” against SNA members, while HTS reportedly blamed SNA fighters for looting.

Tempest: For many who have not been paying attention to Syria, this came out of the blue. What are the roots of this situation in Syria’s revolution, counter-revolution, and civil war? What has happened inside the country over the recent period that triggered the military offensive? What are the regional and international dynamics that opened space for the rebel advances?

JD: Initially, HTS launched the military campaign as a reaction to the escalation of attacks and bombing of its northwestern territory by Assad’s regime and Russia. It also aimed to recapture areas that the regime had conquered, violating the de-escalation zones agreed upon in a March 2020 deal, negotiated by Moscow and Tehran. With their surprising success, however, they expanded their ambitions and openly called for the overthrow of the regime, which they and others have now accomplished.

The HTS and SNA have been so successful because of the weakening of the regime’s main allies. Russia, Assad’s key international sponsor, has diverted its forces and resources to its imperialist war against Ukraine. As a result, its involvement in Syria has been significantly more limited than in similar military operations in previous years.

Its other two key allies, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iran, have been dramatically weakened by Israel since October 7, 2023. Tel Aviv has carried out assassinations of Hezbollah’s leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah, decimated its cadre with the pager attacks, and bombed its forces in Lebanon. Hezbollah is definitely facing its greatest challenge since its foundation. Israel has also launched waves of strikes against Iran, exposing its vulnerabilities. It has also increased bombing of Iranian and Hezbollah positions in Syria in the past few months.

With its main backers preoccupied and weakened, Assad’s dictatorship was in a vulnerable position. Because of all its structural weaknesses, lack of support from the population it rules, unreliability of its own troops, and without international and regional support, it proved unable to withstand the rebel forces advances and in city after city and its rule over them has collapsed like a house of cards.

Tempest: How had the regime’s allies initially responded? What are their interests in Syria?

JD: Both Russia and Iran initially pledged to support the regime and also pressured it to fight the HTS and SNA. In the first days of the offensive, Russia called on the Syrian regime to pull itself together and “put order in Aleppo,” which seems to indicate that it was hoping for Damascus to counter-attack.

Iran called for “coordination” with Moscow in the face of this offensive. It has claimed that the U.S. and Israel are behind the rebel’s offensive against the Syrian regime’s attempt to destabilize it and divert attention from Israel’s war in Palestine and Lebanon. Iranian officials declared their full support for the Syrian regime and confirmed their intentions to maintain and even increase the presence of their “military advisers” in Syria to support its army. Teheran also promised to provide missiles and drones to the Syrian regime and even deploy its own troops.

But this clearly did not work. Despite Russian bombing of areas outside of the control of the regime, the rebels’ advance was undeterred.

Both powers have a lot to lose in Syria. For Iran, Syria is crucial for the transfer of weapons to, and logistic coordination with, Hezbollah. It was actually rumoured before the fall of the regime that the Lebanese party has sent a small number of “supervisory forces” to Homs in order to assist regime’s military forces and 2000 soldiers in the city of Qusayr, one of its strongholds in Syria near the border with Lebanon, to defend it in the event of an attack by the rebels. As the regime was falling, it withdrew its forces.

On its side, Russia’s Hmeimim airbase in Syria’s Latakia province, and its naval facility at Tartous on the coast, have been important sites for Russia to assert its geopolitical clout in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Africa. Loss of these bases would undermine Russia’s status as its intervention in Syria has been used as an example of how it can use military force to shape events outside of its borders and compete with western states.

Tempest: What role have other regional and imperial powers, particularly Turkey, Israel, and the U.S. played in this scenario? What are their ambitions in the situation?

JD: Despite Turkey’s normalization with Syria, Ankara has grown frustrated with Damascus. So, it encouraged, or at least gave the green light to, the military offensive and assisted it one way or another. Ankara’s objective was initially to improve its position in future negotiations with the Syrian regime, but also with Iran and Russia.

Now with the fall of the regime, Turkey’s influence is even more important in Syria and probably makes it the key regional actor in the country. Ankara is also seeking to use the SNA to weaken the SDF, which is dominated by the armed wing of the Kurdish party PYD, a sister organization of Turkey’s Kurdish party PKK, which is designated as terrorist by Ankara, the U.S., and the E.U..

Turkey has two other main objectives. First, they aim to carry out the forced return of Syrian refugees in Turkey back to Syria. Second, they want to deny Kurdish aspirations for autonomy and more specifically undermine the Kurdish-led administration in northeast Syria, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES, also called Rojava), which would set a precedent for Kurdish self-determination in Turkey, a threat to the regime as it is currently constituted.

Neither the U.S.nor Israel had a hand in these events. In fact, the opposite is the case. The U.S. were worried that the overthrow of the regime could create more instability in the region. U.S. officials initially declared that the “Assad regime’s ongoing refusal to engage in the political process outlined in UNSCR 2254, and its reliance on Russia and Iran, created the conditions now unfolding, including the collapse of Assad regime lines in northwest Syria.”

It also declared that it had  “nothing to do with this offensive, which is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a designated terrorist organization.” Following a visit to Turkey, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for de-escalation in Syria. After the fall of the regime, U.S. officials declared that they will maintain their presence in eastern Syria, around 900 soldiers, and will take measures necessary to prevent a resurgence of Islamic State.

For their part, Israeli officials declared that the “collapse of the Assad regime would likely create chaos in which military threats against Israel would develop.” Moreover, Israel has never really supported the overthrow of the Syrian regime all the way back to the attempted revolution in 2011. In July 2018 Netanyahu did not object to Assad taking back control of the country and stabilizing his power.

Netanyahu said Israel would only act against perceived threats, such as Iran and Hezbollah’s forces and influence, explaining, “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights.” A few hours after the announcement of the fall of the regime, the Israeli occupation army took control of the Syrian side of Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights in order to prevent rebels from taking it over the area on Sunday. Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the Israeli occupation army to “take control” of the Golan buffer zone and “adjacent strategic positions.”

Tempest: Many campists have come to the defense of Assad yet again, this time contending that a defeat for Assad would be a setback for the Palestinian liberation struggle. What do you make of that argument? What will it mean for Palestine?

JD: Yes, campists have argued that this military offensive is led by “Al-Qaeda and other terrorists” and that it is a western-imperialist plot against the Syrian regime intended to weaken the so-called “Axis of Resistance” led by Iran and Hezbollah. Since this Axis claims to be in support of the Palestinians, the campists claim that the fall of Assad weakens it and therefore undermines the struggle for the liberation of Palestine.

Alongside ignoring any agency to local Syrian actors, the main problem with the argument promoted by the supporters of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” is their assumption that the liberation of Palestine will come from above, from these states or other forces, regardless of their reactionary and authoritarian nature, and their neoliberal economic policies. That strategy has failed in the past and will do so again today. In fact, rather than advancing the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, the Middle East’s authoritarian and despotic states, whether aligned with the West or opposed to it, have repeatedly betrayed the Palestinians and even repressed them.

Moreover, the campists ignore the fact that Iran and Syria’s main objectives are not the liberation of Palestine but preservation of their states and their economic and geopolitical interests. They will put those before Palestine every single time. Syria, in particular, as Netanyahu has made abundantly clear in the quote I just cited, has not lifted a finger against Israel for decades.

For its part, Iran has rhetorically supported the Palestinian cause and funded Hamas. But since October 7, 2023, its main goal has been to improve its standing in the region so as to be in the best position for future political and economic negotiations with the U.S. Iran wishes to guarantee its political and security interests and therefore has been keen to avoid any direct war with Israel.

Its main geopolitical objective in relation to the Palestinians is not to liberate them, but to use them as leverage, particularly in its relations with the United States. Similarly, Iran’s passive response to Israel’s assassination of Nasrallah, decimation of Hezbollah’s cadres, and its brutal war against Lebanon demonstrate that its first priority is protecting itself and its interests. It was not willing to sacrifice these and come to the defense of its key non-state ally.

Similarly, Iran has proved itself, as at best,  a fickle ally of Hamas. It has reduced its funding for Hamas when their interests did not coincide. It cut its financial assistance to Hamas after the Syrian Revolution in 2011, when the Palestinian movement refused to support the Syrian regime’s murderous repression of Syrian protesters.

In the case of the Syrian regime, the argument against their supposed support for Palestine is airtight. It has not come to the defense of Palestine over the last year of Israel’s genocidal war. Despite Israel’s bombardment of Syria, before and after October 7, the regime has not responded. This is in line with the regime’s policy since 1974 of trying to avoid any significant and direct confrontation with Israel.

On top of that the regime has repeatedly repressed Palestinians in Syria, including the killing of several thousands of them since 2011, laying waste to the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus.  They have also attacked the Palestinian national movement itself. For example, in 1976 Hafez al-Assad, father of his heir and just-deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad, intervened in Lebanon and supported far-right Lebanese parties against left-wing Palestinian and Lebanese organizations.

It also carried out military operations against Palestinian camps in Beirut in 1985 and 1986. In 1990 approximately 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners were detained in Syrian prisons.

Given this history, it is a mistake for the Palestine solidarity movement to defend and align itself  with imperialist or sub-imperialist states that put their interests before solidarity with Palestine, compete for geopolitical gain, and exploit their countries’ workers and resources. Of course, U.S. imperialism remains the region’s main enemy with its exceptional history of war, plunder, and political domination.

But it makes no sense to look reactionary regional powers and other imperialist states like Russia or China as allies of Palestine or its solidarity movement. There is simply no evidence to substantiate that position. To choose one imperialism over another is to guarantee the stability of the capitalist system and the exploitation of popular classes. Similarly, to support authoritarian and despotic regimes in pursuit of the objective of liberating Palestine is not only morally wrong but also has proved itself a failed strategy.

Instead, the Palestinian solidarity movement must see the liberation of Palestine as bound up not with the region’s states but with the liberation of its popular classes. These identify with Palestine and see their own battles for democracy and equality as intimately tied to the Palestinian’s struggle for liberation. When Palestinians fight, it tends to trigger the regional movement for liberation, and the regional movement feeds back into the one in occupied Palestine.

These struggles are dialectically connected; they are mutual struggles for collective liberation. Far-right Israeli minister Avigdor Lieberman recognized the danger that regional popular uprisings posed to Israel in 2011 when he said that the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak and opened the door to a period of democratic opening in the country was a greater threat to Israel than Iran.

This is not to deny the right of resistance of Palestinians and Lebanese to Israel’s brutal wars, but to understand that the united revolt of Palestinian and regional’s popular classes alone have the power to transform the entire Middle East and North Africa, toppling authoritarian regimes, expelling the U.S. and other imperialist powers. International anti-imperialist solidarity with Palestine and the region’s popular classes is essential, because they face not just Israel and the MENA’s reactionary regimes, but also their imperialist backers.

The main task of the Palestine solidarity movement, particularly in the West, is to denounce the complicit role of our ruling classes in supporting not only the racist settler-colonial apartheid state of Israel and its genocidal war against the Palestinians, but also Israel’s attacks on other countries in the region such as Lebanon. The movement must pressure those ruling classes to break off any political, economic, and military relations with Tel Aviv.

In that way, the solidarity movement can challenge and weaken international and regional support for Israel, opening the space for Palestinians to free themselves along with the popular classes in the region.

Tempest: Will the rebels advance in Syria open space for progressive forces to renew the revolutionary struggle and provide an alternative to both the regime and Islamic fundamentalism?

JD: There are no obvious answers except more questions. Will struggle from below and self-organization be possible in the areas in which the regime has been expelled? Will civil society’s organizations (not narrowly defined as NGOs but in a Gramscian sense of popular mass formations outside of the state) and alternative political structures with democratic and progressive politics be able to establish themselves, organize, and constitute a political and social alternative to HTS and SNA? Will the stretching of HTS and SNA forces allow space to organize locally?

These are the key questions, in my opinion, without clear answers. Looking at HTS and SNA’s policies in the past, they have not encouraged a democratic space to develop, but quite the opposite. They have been authoritarian. No trust should be accorded to such forces. Only the self-organization of popular classes fighting for democratic and progressive demands will create that space and open a path toward actual liberation. TThis will depend on overcoming many obstacles from war fatigue to repression, poverty, and social dislocation.

The main obstacle has been, is, and will be the authoritarian actors, previously the regime, but now many of the opposition forces, especially the  HTS and SNA; their rule and the military clashes between them have suffocated the space for democratic and progressive forces to democratically determine their future. Even in the spaces freed from regime control we have yet to see popular campaigns of democratic and progressive resistance. And, where the SNA has conquered Kurdish areas, it violated Kurd’s rights, repressed them with violence, and forcefully displaced large numbers of them.

We have to face the hard fact that there is a glaring absence of an independent democratic and progressive bloc that is able to organize and clearly oppose the Syrian regime and Islamic fundamentalist forces. Building this bloc will take time. It will have to combine struggles against autocracy, exploitation, and all forms of oppression. It will need to raise demands for democracy, equality, Kurdish self-determination, and women’s liberation in order to build solidarity among the country’s exploited and oppressed.

To advance such demands, that progressive bloc will have to build and rebuild popular organizations from unions to feminist organizations, community organizations, and national structures to bring them together. That will require collaboration between democratic and progressive actors throughout society.

This said, there is hope, while the key dynamics was initially military and led by HTS and SNA, in the past few days, we saw growing popular demonstrations and people coming out in the streets throughout the country. They are not following any orders of HTS, SNA or any other armed opposition groups. There is a space now, with its contradictions and challenges as mentioned above, for Syrians to try to rebuild civilian popular resistance from below and alternative structures of power.

In addition to this, one of the key tasks will be to tackle the country’s central ethnic division, the one between Arab and Kurds. Progressive forces must wage a clear struggle against Arab chauvinism to overcome this division and forge solidarity between these populations. This has been a challenge from the start of the Syrian revolution in 2011 and will have to be confronted and resolved in a progressive manner in order for the country’s people to be truly liberated.

There is a desperate need to return to the original aspirations of the Syrian Revolution for democracy, social justice and equality—and in a fashion that upholds Kurdish self-determination. While the Kurdish PYD can be criticized for its mistakes and form of rule, it is not the main obstacle to such solidarity between Kurds and Arabs. That has been the belligerent and chauvinist positions and policies of Arab opposition forces in Syria—beginning with the Arab-dominated  Syrian National Coalition followed by the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the main opposition bodies in exile supported by the West and regional countries, that tried to lead the Syrian Revolution in its early years—and today those of the two key military forces, the HTS and SNA.

In this context, progressive forces must pursue collaboration between Syrian Arabs and Kurds, including the AANES. The AANES project and its political institutions represent large sections of the Kurdish population and have protected it against various local and external threats.

That said, it too has faults and must not be supported uncritically. The PYD and AANES have used force and repression against political activists and groups challenging its power. And it has also violated the human rights of civilians. Nonetheless, it has scored some important achievements, in particular its increase of women’s participation in all levels in society, as well as the codification of secular laws and a greater inclusion of religious and ethnic minorities. However, on socio-economic issues, it has not broken with capitalism and has not adequately addressed the grievances of the popular classes.

Whatever criticisms progressives may have of the PYD and the AANES, we must reject and oppose Arab chauvinist descriptions of it as “the devil” and a “separatist” ethno-nationalist project. But in rejecting such bigotry, we must not uncritically romanticize the AANES, as some western anarchists and leftists have done, misrepresenting it as a new form of democratic power from below.

There has already been some collaboration between Syrian Arab democrats and progressives and AANES and institutions connected to it, and that must be built on and expanded. But, as in any kind of collaboration, this should not be done uncritically.

While it is important to remind everyone that Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its allies are the first responsible for the mass killing  of hundreds of thousands of civilians, mass destructions, deepening impoverishment and the current situation in Syria, the objective of the Syrian revolution goes beyond what HTS leader, al-Jolani, said in his interview with CNN. It is not only to overthrow this regime, but to build a society characterized by democracy, equality, and full rights for oppressed groups. Otherwise, we are only replacing one evil with another.

Tempest: What impact will the fall of the regime have on the region and the imperial powers? What position should the international Left take in this situation?

JD: Following the fall of the regime, HTS leader al-Jolani, stated that Syrian state institutions will be supervised by former regime’s Prime Minister Mohammed Jalali until they are handed over to a new government with full executive powers,  following elections, signalling efforts to secure an orderly transition. Syrian telecommunications minister Eyad al-Khatib agreed to collaborate with HTS’s representatives to ensure that telecoms and the internet would continue to function.

These are clear indications that HTS wants to carry out a controlled transition of power in order to appease foreign fears, establish contacts with regional and international powers, and win recognition as a legitimate force that can be negotiated with. An obstacle to such normalization is the fact that HTS is still considered as a terrorist organisation, while Syria is under sanctions.

A period of instability is nevertheless to be expected in the country. In Damascus, on the day after the fall of the regime, some chaos in the streets could be seen, the central bank was for example looted.

It is still hard to tell what impact the regime’s fall will have on the regional and imperial powers. For the U.S. and western states, the main objective is now damage control to prevent chaos extending into the region. Regional states are clearly not satisfied with the current situation, as they had entered a normalization process with the regime in the past few years. Regarding Turkey, its main objective will be to consolidate its power and influence in Syria and get rid of the Kurdish-led AANES in the northeast. Turkey’s top diplomat actually said on Sunday that the Turkish state was in contact with rebels in Syria to ensure that the Islamic State and specifically the “PKK” do not take advantage of the fall of the Damascus regime to extend their influence.

The different powers have, however, a common objective: to impose a form of authoritarian stability in Syria and the region. That, of course, does not mean unity between the regional and imperial powers. They each have their own, and often antagonistic, interests, but they do not want the destabilization of the Middle East and North Africa, especially any kind of instability that would disrupt the flow of oil to global capitalism.

The international Left must not side with the remnants of the regime or the local, regional and international forces of counter-revolution. Instead, the political compass of revolutionaries should be the principle of solidarity with popular and progressive struggles from below. This means supporting groups and individuals organizing and fighting for a progressive and inclusive Syria and building solidarity between them and the region’s popular classes.

Amidst a volatile moment in Syria, the Middle East, and North Africa we must avoid the twin traps of romanticization and defeatism. Instead, we must pursue a strategy of critical, progressive, international solidarity among popular forces in the region and throughout the world. This is the Left’s crucial task and responsibility, especially in these very complex times.

This piece first appeared in The Tempest.

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Photograph Source: Tomascastelazo – CC BY-SA 4.0

A quiet panic has broken out within immigrant communities across the United States ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025. Mixed-status families are expecting to be separated, DACA recipients foresee their status being revoked, those with Temporary Protected Status are pessimistic about the program remaining valid, and asylum seekers fear the worst. Indeed, if Project 2025’s anti-immigrant agenda is fully enacted, the horrors of family separation that the nation witnessed in 2018 under Trump’s first term will pale in comparison to what’s coming.

And yet, Trump might claim that this time, he’s merely following the public’s desires. The prevailing story of the 2024 presidential election is that voters were so fed up with immigration upending their lives that they picked a leader who promised to do something about it. Headlines such as this New York Times piece on Election Day claimed, “Voters Were Fed Up Over Immigration. They Voted for Trump.” Indeed, polls showed likely voters ranking immigration as either the top issue, or second only to the economy.

What has gone unsaid about public discontent over immigration and Trump’s coming assault on immigrant rights is that the Biden administration paved the way for it, manufacturing a “migrant crisis” and volleying it right into Trump’s hands so he could lob it all the way to the White House. What’s needed are not just better policies but a rewriting of the narratives about immigration and immigrants so that vulnerable human beings are no longer political scapegoats every four years.

Gallup polls show that national anxiety over immigration significantly increased over the four years that Joe Biden was president. The fraction of Americans wanting lower levels of immigration had been slightly decreasing for years, landing at around 30 percent. In 2020 that number began rising, and by 2024, it had jumped to 55 percent.

It’s tempting to conclude that this trend is merely a matter of perception, the result of successful propaganda, of Trump’s constant drumbeat that Biden opened the floodgates at the border, rolling out the welcome mat for millions of people with no papers. Indeed, far too many people hold false views of immigrants in the U.S., from assuming they are more prone to committing violent crimes—not true—to the idea that they are stealing jobs from native-born Americans and longtime residents—also not true. The adoption of such falsehoods is clearly Trump’s doing.

However, there are plenty of credible reports across the country, in small-town America and in urban centers, that demonstrate a real struggle with absorbing tens of thousands of newly resettled people from foreign nations. Such dynamics reinforced the notion that immigration is out of control and gave credence to Trump’s lies about immigrants.

What’s going unsaid is that migrants from nonwhite nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia are being deliberately dumped into towns and cities with no plan for orderly absorption and assimilation—in direct contrast to how well the Biden administration welcomed Ukrainian refugees. A February 2024 in-depth report by Jerusalem Demsas in the Atlantic is one of the few analyses that explored what happened and why.

“Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought a separate influx of displaced people into U.S. cities that quietly assimilated most of them,” explained Demsas. The numbers of Ukrainian refugees and nonwhite immigrants in many towns and cities have been comparable, but the ways in which they were resettled have sometimes been starkly different. Based on interviews with mayors and municipal leaders, Demsas realized there were “two major differences in federal policy” that explained the contrast.

One policy difference was that Ukrainian refugees were allowed to work as soon as they arrived in the U.S., while subsequent waves of migrants were prohibited from working and then demonized for using government aid.

The other difference was that the Biden administration carefully coordinated Ukrainian arrivals with local officials to ensure their proper assimilation. And it chose not to do so with groups arriving from across the Southern border. This meant that those local leaders who could politicize migrants did so by pointing to the chaos their presence seemed to provoke and by adopting policies that deliberately worsened the optics of immigration.

“To call this moment a ‘migrant crisis’ is to let elected federal officials off the hook,” concluded Demsas. If the federal government had treated nonwhite Latin American, Caribbean, African, and Asian migrants the same way it treated Ukrainian refugees, voters would likely not have been as swayed by Trump’s lies as they were.

A similar scenario played out with asylum seekers at the border. Rather than allowing those seeking asylum to make their case in an orderly way, the first Trump administration tried to break the entire system, creating chaos in order to blame asylees. Joe Biden’s administration blithely allowed the restrictions to remain in place, breaking his campaign promise.

The reality is that the undocumented immigrant population in the U.S. increased by only 800,000 people between 2019 and 2022 and remains below 2007 levels. In a nation of 335 million people, this is less than a quarter of a percent of the population. How can such a tiny fraction of people be the source of so many problems as Trump claims?

Americans are not anti-immigrant. In fact, they are pro-immigration. A new Pew Research poll released on November 22, 2024, finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans are happy to have undocumented immigrants remain in the nation with legal protections provided certain conditions are met, such as security checks and lawful employment.

The reason it appears as though Americans are anti-immigrant is because they’re being told that hordes of people are breaking the rules, sidestepping order, and forcing their way in to cause chaos, commit crimes, and steal jobs. This is both Trump’s fault, and Biden’s.

Migration is a large-scale phenomenon of vulnerable populations fleeing war, poverty, persecution, climate change, and more. When given accessible procedures to enter another nation legally, migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers will do everything possible to follow the rules. Because, why not? Why would they deliberately jeopardize their own long-term security when given the chance? It turns out, the system has been deliberately broken in order to manufacture a crisis and help gutless politicians claim they are being “tough on immigration.”

The U.S. desperately needs immigrant workers. This is true not only in low-wage industries but in such highly skilled fields as medicine where immigrants are disproportionately represented.

For example, the Migration Policy Institute found that “[w]hile immigrants represent 14 percent of the Illinois population, they make up 37 percent of its physicians and 19 percent of its registered nurses.” There is a nationwide shortage of medical workers—physicians, nurses, technicians, and home health aides—a gap that could be filled by skilled new immigrants.

As the U.S.’s elder population continues to live longer, needing more care, and as the national birth rate falls, immigrants have stepped in to provide care and pay taxes to fund services they aren’t even allowed to access. Indeed, many nations in the Global South are struggling with the “brain drain” of their most talented workers leaving to work in the U.S. and other Western nations.

The stories we are telling about immigrants are fueling misplaced panic in the U.S. We cannot rely on Trump to fix what he sought to break. In the coming months and years, the devastation the incoming president will wreak on vulnerable populations will test our collective morality.

What’s needed before the next election are truthful narratives about immigrants, including the fact that the migrant crisis has been manufactured and the legal immigration system deliberately broken for political gain, forcing most people into untenable situations.

Most importantly, we need to be clear that our nation needs immigrants just as, if not more than, immigrants need the U.S.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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The mainstream media is largely ignoring President Joe Biden’s moral failure regarding Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza, but piling on unreasonably regarding the pardon given to his son.  Biden’s unwavering support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military campaign could not be more inconsistent with Biden’s overall humanitarian ideals over his long political career.  HIs support for Netanyahu is totally inconsistent with the president’s admirable and ethical 50-year political career, and his propensity for ignoring the plight of the Palestinians over his long career should be condemned.

Biden’s moral failure on Israel received a free pass from the mainstream media, but the response to the pardon has been outrageous and hyperbolic.  The timing of the pardon for Hunter Biden should have received more attention because it followed Trump’s naming of morally challenged men and women to key positions in his second term.  For the most part, these individuals have demonstrated total fealty to the vengeance and revenge that Trump will be pursuing.  Former representative Matt Gaetz has already had to step aside from consideration as Attorney General, and the naming of Pam Bondi as a replacement provides no assurance that the Department of Justice will not be weaponized to go after Trump’s “enemies.”

The naming of Kash Patel as F.B.I. director tells you everything you need to know about the wretches that have been selected thus far.  There is no reason for President Biden to allow his son to enter a cycle of jurisprudence that will be influenced by such corrupt and unworthy individuals.  And then there is the matter of a Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon or a Tulsi Gabbard as an intelligence tsar.  Has there ever been such a ship of fools that was supposed to govern the United States of America?

The mainstream media has been derelict in dealing with Trump and his followers for the past eight years.  The Washington Post’s masthead proclaims that “democracy dies in darkness.”  This turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy when the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, stopped the publication of an editorial that supported Vice President’s Kamala Harris.  The media have falsely branded Trump as “anti-war.”  This description is belied by the fact that former secretary of defense James Mattis was so worried that Trump would have a nuclear war with North Korea that he slept in gym clothes in case of an emergency.  Another indicator of Trump’s irrationality was the fact that Milley and Esper “only narrowly dissuaded” Trump from ordering 10,000 active-duty troops into Washington in the summer of 2020, according to Bob Woodward’s “War.”

Biden should extend pardons to many others who have been threatened by Trump and his minions.  Trump not only pledged to prosecute the Biden family, but issued additional specific threats to the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, as well as to such Trump critics as former representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.  Milley certainly feels threatened by the supporters of Trump in view of the fact that he has installed bullet-proof windows in his house as well as blast-resistant curtains at significant personal expense.

Biden should consider pardons for two retired four-star generals who were critical of Trump: Special Operations commander William McRaven, who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal.  In his first term, according to Woodward’s “War,” Trump threatened to recall both of them to active duty and court-martial them for disloyalty.  The list of enemies goes on and on.

I can’t imagine that any judge or jury would convict such public figures as Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, but they have been threatened as well.  And what about Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the true heroes during the Covid nightmare, whom Trump has called an “idiot.”  As a result of Trump’s ugly accusations aimed at Fauci, the good doctor has received credible death threats and, like other Trump critics, has been forced to hire security guards to protect himself and his family.

There is no precedent for the fact that virtually every key official from Trump’s first term has publicly proclaimed that he should never be returned to the White House and should not have even been placed on the ballot.  This list of luminaries includes former vice president Mike Pence, former secretaries of defense James Mattis and Mark Esper, former national security adviser John Bolton, former director of national intelligence Dan Coats, and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.  Indeed, Trump’s appointees in the first term presented no challenges to confirmation; most of Trump’s current appointees should never be confirmed.

Overall, the mainstream media has been guilty of ignoring the profound political and ethical challenge that Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters represent to the interests of the United States and its citizenry.  For the past eight years, the press has treated Trump as a demagogue and a political aberration, and have tried to make sense out of Trump’s senseless rhetoric.  The New York Times’s view that the Biden pardon will make it “harder for Democrats to defend the integrity of the Justice Department” is particularly obtuse.

Presidential historian Jon Meacham got it right when he stated last month that Trump’s “contempt for constitutional democracy makes him a unique threat to the nation.”  As a president and as a father of a family that has had to deal with more than its share of tragedy, Joe Biden had every right to pardon his son, whose legal problems were made particularly severe because he was the president’s son.

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Reclaiming Freire

Across the globe, many societies deeply rooted in colonial practices and systemic racism are once again invoking the dehumanizing language of colonial oppression to justify exclusion and violence. In France, leaders vilify refugees as threats to national identity, perpetuating fear and division. Israel labels Palestinians with terms that strip them of humanity and engages in a wholesale slaughter of women and children. Similarly, in the United States, Trump has referred to immigrants as “poisoning the blood of Americans,” reviving a dangerous xenophobic trope reminiscent of past atrocities while claiming he will deport 20 million undocumented immigrants.[1]  These examples underscore how the pejorative language of colonialism and authoritarianism is being weaponized today in order to expand and sustain systems of war, inequality, repression, and fascist modes of governance. We live in an age when genocide is legitimated through the language of dehumanization, a culture of lies and the erasure of history and culture.

In this context, Paulo Freire’s work takes on an extraordinary and urgent relevance. His revolutionary pedagogy provides a powerful framework for dismantling the ideologies that sustain colonialism and systemic oppression. [2] It empowers individuals to critically interrogate and resist the narratives that dehumanize, silence, and perpetuate inequality. As global politics increasingly embrace the hallmarks of fascist ideology—ranging from racial cleansing and ultranationalism to violence against marginalized groups and a ferocious disdain for public goods—Freire’s vision of education as both a form of resistance and a horizon of possibility becomes indispensable. His work challenges us to see education not merely as a tool for learning but as a practice of freedom, fostering critical agency and collective action in the struggle for justice and democracy.

Freire’s  work remains a cornerstone for progressive educators, especially at a time when faculty are being fired for critical views, students protesting Israel’s war crimes  are beaten, jailed, and subject “to surveillance, reprisals, and expulsions.”[3] It gets worse, increasingly and aggressively the far-right is transforming higher education into indoctrination  centers for white Christian nationalism.[4]   Freire’s name has become synonymous with critical pedagogy, which is increasingly understood as both a moral and political project for teaching critical thinking, dialogical engagement, and critical literacy. For Freire, education and literacy were revolutionary tools for developing an anti-capitalist consciousness.  However, as Freire’s work traveled from Brazil to Latin America, Africa, and the hybrid cultural borderlands of North America, it was and has often been appropriated in ways that dilute its radical essence. Too frequently, his ideas are reduced to pedagogical techniques divorced from their revolutionary roots, neutralized into depoliticized methods that fail to address their anti-colonial and postcolonial foundations.[5] As Stanley Aronowitz notes, what is conveniently forgotten in this approach is that Freire saw the chief function of education as repression and he wanted  to “establish an egalitarian education system as a vital aspect of the society he wished to bring about.”[6]

Such appropriations are not benign. The North American tendency to invoke Freire’s work as “politically charged” or “problem-posing” too often contradicts its revolutionary intent, turning his legacy into a collection of abstracted labels detached from concrete struggles.[7] This process strips Freire’s pedagogy of its transformative power, relegating it to a bland repertoire of techniques that reinforce, rather than challenge, the systems of privilege and power he sought to dismantle.

But in such a context, these are terms that speak less to a political project constructed amidst concrete  struggles than they do to the insipid and dreary demands for pedagogical recipes dressed up in the jargon of abstracted progressive labels. What has been increasingly lost in the North American and Western appropriation of Freire’s work is the profound and radical nature of its theory and practice as an anti-colonial and postcolonial discourse.  More specifically, Freire’s work is often appropriated and taught “without any consideration of imperialism and its cultural representation.” [8]  This suggests that Freire’s work has been appropriated in ways that denude it of some of its most important political insights. Similarly, it testifies to how certain pedagogical practices work in the interest of privilege and power to cross cultural, political, and textual borders so as to deny the specificity of the other and to reimpose the discourse and practice of cultural imperialism.

Freire’s work must instead be reclaimed as a profoundly postcolonial text, one that demands a radical form of border-crossing, especially from North American educators and intellectuals. This involves confronting the privileges and ideologies rooted in the West and interrogating how these positions shape interpretations of Freire’s ideas. To fully engage with Freire, one must move beyond the comfort of Western perspectives and reconstruct his work within the specificity of its historical and political origins. This requires creating spaces for meaningful dialogue where dominant social relations, ideologies, and practices that erase the voices of the oppressed are actively challenged and dismantled.

Academics as Border Crossers

In order to understand the work of Paulo Freire in terms of its historical and political importance, it is necessary to explore what it means for academics and other cultural workers to become border-crossers. This means that teachers and other intellectuals have to take leave of the cultural, theoretical, and ideological borders that enclose him or her within the safety of “those places and spaces we inherit and occupy, which frame our lives in very specific and concrete ways.” [9]  Being a border-crosser also suggests that one has to reinvent traditions not within the discourse of submission, reverence, and repetition, but “as transformation and critique.  [That is]…one must construct one’s discourse as difference in relation to that tradition and this implies at  the same time continuities and discontinuities.”[10]  As a border-crosser, academics must forsake limiting their scholarship to the boundaries of their disciplines. Any serious analysis, for example, of the war crimes, genocide, and atrocities taking place throughout the globe demands “an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates insights from a multitude of areas of expertise including law, history, politics, hard and applied sciences, psychology, journalism and others. Universities are crucial to supporting the evidence-based research needed to do this essential work.”[11]

Of course, at a time when the mission of higher education and its classroom priorities are being defined by far-right billionaires, it is more difficult for educators to take on the role of border crossing, because it is historical, critical, interdisciplinary, and holds power accountable. Under the upcoming Trump administration, the spaces for translation, academic freedom, and critique will become more limited and dangerous.

Vichy Academics in Trump Land

As American society increasingly aligns with a fascist administration, the conservative nature of its cultural and political structures emboldens what can be described as “Vichy academics.” These individuals now have free rein to denounce scholars who engage with social issues, connect their work to broader political and ethical concerns, or recognize pedagogy and classrooms as profoundly political spaces—sites where agency, values, and students’ understandings of themselves, others, and the larger world are actively shaped. Cloaking themselves in neutrality, these academics align with the neoliberal university, often driven by personal quests for power and rewards, while hypocritically insisting that there is no room for politics in higher education.

One egregious example of this delusional and self-righteous stance can be found in recent essays by William Deresiewicz and Michael W. Clune. Clune, in particular, has gone so far as to claim that “the spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to address climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power.” [12]    This position is not only deeply flawed but also complicit in the broader project of erasing critical ideas, books, and liberal faculty from education—a project that serves to maintain oppressive systems of power by presenting classrooms as apolitical spaces. The call for neutrality among many universities in North America is a retreat from social and moral responsibility. It is also a false claim since universities are steeped in power relations both within these institutions and in relation to broader interests. Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta are worth repeating on this issue. They write:

Institutional neutrality serves to flatten politics and silence scholarly debate. It obscures the fact that virtually every activity conducted in universities is political, from decisions regarding who is permitted to enroll to which research gets funding to policies on holding events and putting up posters. Small and large decisions by university administrators inevitably involve political choices.[13]

Intellectuals such as Toni Morrison, Stanley Aronowitz, and Ellen Willis have long recognized the dangers of this supposed neutrality in education. Edward Said, one of the most prominent and courageous public intellectuals of our time, was particularly forceful in rejecting the idea that classrooms could—or should—be void of values and politics in the pursuit of objectivity. Said argued that the classroom is an inherently political site and condemned academics who pretend otherwise. He rightly described those who espouse such apolitical fantasies as “reprehensible,” exposing their claims as both intellectually dishonest and politically complicit in maintaining the status quo:

Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.’[14]

Home, Exiles, and Border Crossing

Border-crossing engages intellectual work as part of the discourse of invention and construction, rather than a discourse of recognition whose aim is reduced to revealing and transmitting universal truths. In this case, it is important to highlight intellectual work as being forged in the intersection of contingency and history arising not from the “exclusive hunting grounds of an elite [but] from all points of the social fabric.”[15]  What is often ignored in the call for objectivity and classroom free from politics are pedagogical practices that provide the conditions to get students to think critically,  reflect on what knowledge is of most worth, how their identities are being shaped within particular relations of power, and learn how to hold power and assigned meanings accountable. There is also a larger challenge here that is crucial to protecting higher education as a public good and democratizing institution. Toni Morrison states it clearly. She writes: “If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or menage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us.” [16]

This task becomes all the more difficult with Paulo Freire because the borders that define his work have shifted over time in ways that parallel his own exile and movement from Brazil to Chile, Mexico, the United States, Geneva, and back to Brazil. Freire’s work not only draws heavily upon European discourses, but also upon the thought and language of theorists in Latin America, Africa, and North America. Freire’s ongoing political project raises enormous difficulties for educators who situate Freire’s work in the reified language of methodologies and in empty calls that enshrine the practical at the expense of the theoretical and political.

Freire is an exile for whom being home is often tantamount to being “homeless” and for whom his own identity and the identities of Others are viewed as sites of struggle over the politics of representation, the exercise of power, and the function of social memory. [17] It is important to note that the concept of “home” being used here does not refer exclusively to those places in which one sleeps, eats, raises children and sustains a certain level of comfort. For some, this particular notion of “home” is too mythic, especially for those who literally have no home in this sense; it also becomes a reification when it signifies a place of safety  which excludes the lives, identities, and experiences of the Other, that is, when it becomes synonymous with the cultural capital of White, middle-class subjects.

“Home”, in the sense I am using it, suggests a “critical de-essentializing gesture.” It refers to the cultural, social, and political boundaries that demarcate varying spaces of comfort, suffering, abuse, and security that define an individual or group’s location and positionality. To move away from “home” is to question in historical, semiotic, and structural terms how the boundaries and meanings of “home” are often constructed beyond the discourse of criticism. “Home” is about those cultural spaces and social formations which work as sites of domination and resistance. In the first instance, “home” is safe by virtue of its repressive exclusions and privileged location of individuals and groups outside of the flux of history, power, and ethics. In the second case, home becomes a form of “homelessness”, a shifting site of identity, resistance, and opposition that enables conditions of self and social formation.  JanMohammed captures this distinction quite lucidly.

“Home” comes to be associated with “culture” as an environment, process, and hegemony that determine individuals through complicated mechanisms. Culture is productive of the necessary sense of belonging, of “home”; it attempts to suture…collective and individual subjectivity. But culture is also divisive, producing boundaries that distinguish the collectivity and what lies outside it and that define hierarchic organizations with in the collectivity. “Homelessness”, on the other hand, is ….an enabling concept…associated with…the civil and political space that hegemony cannot suture, a space in which “alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project can survive. “Homelessness,” then, is a situation wherein utopian potentiality can endure. [18]

For Freire, the task of being an intellectual has always been forged within the trope of homelessness: between different zones of theoretical and cultural difference; between the borders of non-European and European cultures.  In effect, Freire is a border intellectual whose allegiance has not been to a specific class and culture as in Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual; instead, Freire’s writings embody a mode of discursive struggle and opposition that not only challenges the oppressive machinery of the State but is also sympathetic to the formation of new cultural subjects and movements engaged in the struggle over the modernist values of freedom, equality, and justice. In part, this explains Freire’s interest for educators, feminists, and revolutionaries in Africa, Latin America, and South Africa.

As a border intellectual, Paulo Freire disrupts the divide between individual identity and collective subjectivity, making visible a politics that intertwines human suffering with the transformative project of possibility. For Freire, this is not a detached descent into disembodied textuality but an insurgent literacy born in the crucible of political and material dislocations—those inflicted by regimes that exploit, oppress, expel, and devastate human lives. Freire’s work inhabits a terrain of “homelessness,” not as mere exile but as a radical refusal of ideological and hegemonic closure. His vision embraces the endless tensions, contradictions, and reconstructions that shape identity and animate the struggle for justice.

This sense of “homelessness” is not despairing but generative, a continual crossing into the terrains of Otherness. It is here, in the liminal spaces where identities and histories collide, that Freire’s life and work take root. As an exile, a border-being, he occupies the interstices of culture, epistemology, and geography, embodying a politics of location that is always in motion. Freire’s border-crossing is not just a metaphor but a method, a way of engaging the world that defies boundaries and dares to imagine new ways of being, knowing, and resisting.

It is to Freire’s credit as a critical educator and cultural worker that he has always been extremely conscious about the intentions, goals, and effects of crossing borders and how such movements offer the opportunity for new subject positions, identities, and social relations that can produce resistance to and relief from the structures of domination and oppression. While such an insight has continuously invested his work with a healthy “restlessness,” it has not meant that Freire’s work has developed unproblematically. For example,  Freire’s incessant attempts to construct a new language, produce new spaces of resistance, imagine new ends and opportunities to reach them were sometimes constrained, especially in his early work, in totalizing narratives and binarisms that de-emphasized the mutually contradictory and multiple character of domination and struggle.  In this sense, Freire’s earlier reliance on emancipation as the same with class struggle sometimes erased how women were subjected differently to patriarchal structures; similarly, his call for members of the dominating groups to commit class suicide downplayed the complex, multiple, and contradictory nature of human subjectivity.  Finally, Freire’s reference to the “masses” or oppressed as being inscribed in a culture of silence appeared to be at odds with both the varied forms of domination these groups labored under and Freire’s own belief in the diverse ways in which the oppressed struggle and manifest elements of practical and political agency. While it is crucial to acknowledge the theoretical and political brilliance that informed much of this work, it is also necessary to recognize that it bore slight traces of vanguardism. This is evident not only in the binarism that inform Pedagogy of the Oppressed but also in Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau,  particularly in those sections where Freire argues that the culture of the masses must develop on the basis of science and that emancipatory pedagogy must be aligned with the struggle for national reconstruction.

Without adequately addressing the contradictions these issues raise between the objectives of the state, the discourse of everyday life, and the potential for pedagogical violence being done in the name of political correctness, Freire’s work is open to the charge made by some leftist theorists of being overly totalizing. But this can be read less as a reductive critique of Freire’s work than as an indication of the need to subject it and all forms of social criticism to analyses that engage its strengths and limitations as part of a wider dialogue in the service of an emancipatory politics.

The contradictions raised in Freire’s work offer a number of questions that need to be addressed by critical educators about not only Freire’s earlier writing but also about their own. For instance, what happens when the language of the educator is different from that of students or subordinate groups?  How is it possible to be vigilant against taking up a notion of language, politics, and rationality that undermines recognizing one’s own partiality and the voices and experiences of Others?  How does one explore the contradiction between validating certain forms of “correct” thinking and the pedagogical task of helping students assume rather than simply follow the dictates of authority, regardless of how radical the project informed by such authority. Of course, it cannot be forgotten that the strength of Freire’s early work rests, in part, with its making visible not merely the ideological struggle against domination and colonialism but also the material substance of human suffering, pain, and imperialism. Forged in the heat of life and death struggles, Freire’s use of binarisms such as the oppressed vs. the oppressor, problem-solving vs. problem-posing, science vs. magic, raged bravely against dominant languages and configurations of power that refused to address their own politics by appealing to the imperatives of politeness, objectivity, and neutrality. Here Freire strides the boundary between modernist and anti-colonialist discourse; he struggles against colonialism, but in doing so he often reverses rather than ruptures its basic problematic. Benita Parry locates a similar problem in the work of Frantz Fanon: “What happens is that heterogeneity is repressed in the monolithic figures and stereotypes of colonialist representations….[But] the founding concepts of the problematic must be refused.” [19]

In his later work, particularly in his work with Donaldo Macedo, in his numerous interviews, and in his talking books with authors such as Ira Shor, Antonio Faundez, and Myles Horton, Freire undertakes a form of social criticism and cultural politics that pushes against those boundaries that invoke the discourse of the unified, humanist subject, universal historical agents, and Enlightenment rationality.[20]   Refusing the privilege of home as a border intellectual situated in the shifting and ever- changing universe of struggle, Freire invokes and constructs elements of a social criticism that shares an affinity with emancipatory strands of a number of critical theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and C. Wright Mills. [21]  That is, in his refusal of a transcendent ethics, epistemological foundationalism, and political teleology, he further develops a provisional ethical and political discourse subject to the play of history, culture, and power.

As a border crossing intellectual, he constantly re-examines and raises questions about what kind of borders are being crossed and revisited, what kind of identities are being remade and refigured within new historical, social, and political borderlands, and what effects such crossings have for redefining pedagogical practice. For Freire, pedagogy is seen as a cultural practice and politics that takes place not only in schools but in all cultural spheres.  In this instance, all cultural work is pedagogical and cultural workers inhabit a number of sites that include but are not limited to schools.  In a dialogue with Antonio Faundez, Freire talks about his own self-formation as an exile and border-crosser. He writes:

It was by travelling all over the world, it was by travelling through Africa, it was by travelling through Asia, through Australia and New Zealand, and through the islands of the South Pacific, it was by travelling through the whole of Latin America, the Caribbean, North America and Europe-it was by passing through all these different parts of the world as an exile that I came to understand my own country better. It was by seeing it from a distance, it was by standing back from it, that I came to understand myself better. It was by being confronted with another self that I discovered more easily my own identity. And thus I overcame the risk which exiles sometimes run of being too remote in their work as intellectuals from the most real, most concrete experiences, and of being somewhat lost, and even somewhat contented, because they are lost in a game of words, what I usually rather humorously call “specializing in the ballet of concepts.” [22]

It is here that we get further indications of some of the principles that inform Freire as a revolutionary.  It is in this work and his work with Donaldo Macedo, Ira Shor, Antonia Darder, Peter McLaren and others that we see traces, images, and representations of a political project that are inextricably linked to Freire’s own self-formation. It is here that Freire is at his most prescient in unraveling and dismantling ideologies and structures of domination as they emerge in his confrontation with the ongoing exigencies of daily life as manifested differently in the tensions, suffering, and hope between the diverse margins and centers of power that have come to characterize a postmodern/postcolonial world.

Reading Freire’s work for the last 20 or more years has drawn me closer to Adorno’s insight that, “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”[23] Adorno was also an exile, raging against the horror and evil of another era, but he was also insistent that it was the role of intellectuals, in part, to challenge those places bounded by terror, exploitation, and human suffering. He also called for intellectuals to refuse and transgress those systems of standardization, commodification, and administration pressed into the service of an ideology and language of “home” that occupied or were complicitous with oppressive centers of power.  Freire differs from Adorno in that there is a more profound sense of rupture, transgression, and hope, intellectually and politically, in his work. This is evident in his call for educators, social critics, and cultural workers to fashion a notion of politics and pedagogy outside of established disciplinary borders; outside of the division between high and popular culture; outside of “stable notions of self and identity…based on exclusion and secured by terror”;[24]  outside of homogeneous public spheres; and outside of boundaries that separate desire from rationality, the body from the mind.

Of course, this is not to suggest that intellectuals have to go into exile to take up Freire’s work, but it does suggest that in becoming border-crossers, it is not uncommon for many of them to engage his work as an act of bad faith. Refusing to negotiate or deconstruct the borders that define their own politics of location, they have little sense of moving into an “imagined space,” a position from which they can unsettle, disrupt, and “illuminate that which is no longer home-like, heimlich, about one’s home.” [25]

From the comforting perspective of the colonizing gaze, such theorists often appropriate Freire’s work without engaging its historical specificity and ongoing political project. The gaze in this case becomes self-serving and self-referential, its principles shaped by technical and methodological considerations. Its perspective, in spite of itself, is largely “panoptic and thus dominating.”[26]   To be sure, such intellectuals cross borders less as exiles than as colonialists.  Hence, they often refuse to hold up to critical scrutiny their own complicity in producing and maintaining specific injustices, practices, and forms of oppression that deeply inscribe the legacy and heritage of colonialism. Edward Said captures the tension between exile and critic, home and “homelessness” in his comment on Adorno, though it is just as applicable to Paulo Freire:

To follow Adorno is to stand away from “home” in order to look at it with the exile’s detachment. For there is considerable merit in the practice of noting the discrepancies between various concepts and ideas and what they actually produce.  We take home and language for granted; they become nature and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy. The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience. [27]

Of course, intellectuals from the First World, especially white academics, run the risk of acting in bad faith when they appropriate the work of a Third World intellectual such as Paulo Freire without “mapping the politics of their forays into other cultures,” theoretical discourses, and historical experiences. [28]   It is truly disconcerting that First World educators rarely articulate the politics and privileges of their own location so at the very least to be self-conscious about not repeating the type of appropriations that inform the legacy of what Said calls “Orientalist” scholarship.[29]

To conclude, it is crucial to reflect on what it might mean for cultural workers to resist the commodification of Freire’s work, ensuring it does not become merely an academic tool or a one-size-fits-all framework. At the same time, we must consider how to reimagine the radicality of Freire’s ideas within the context of postcolonial discourse, informed by Cornel West’s description of “the decolonization of the Third World, [and characterized by] the exercise of…agency and the [production of] new…subjectivities and identities put forward by those persons who had been degraded, devalued, hunted, and harassed, exploited and oppressed by the European maritime empires.”[30]

Freire’s insights, alongside the contributions of other postcolonial thinkers, open new theoretical possibilities to challenge the authority and discourses rooted in colonial legacies—practices that continue to shape social relations and sustain privilege and oppression as pervasive forces in both the centers and margins of power. Postcolonial discourses have made clear that the old legacies of the political left, center, and right can no longer be so easily defined. Indeed, postcolonial critics have gone further and provided important theoretical insights into how such discourses either actively construct colonial relations or are implicated in their construction. From this perspective, Robert Young argues that postcolonialism is a dislocating discourse that raises theoretical questions regarding how dominant and radical theories “have themselves been implicated in the long history of European colonialism-and, above all, the extent to which [they] continue to determine both the institutional conditions of knowledge as well as the terms of contemporary institutional practices-practices which extend beyond the limits of the academic institution.” [31]

This is especially true for many of the theorists in a variety of social movements who have taken up the language of difference and a concern for the politics of disposability, now in full force under the Trump administration. In many instances, theorists within these new social movements have addressed political and pedagogical issues through the construction of binary oppositions that not only contain traces of racism and theoretical vanguardism but also fall into the trap of simply reversing the old colonial legacy and problematic of oppressed vs. oppressor. In doing so, they have often unwittingly imitated the colonial model of erasing the complexity, complicity, diverse agents, and multiple situations that constitute the enclaves of colonial/hegemonic discourse and practice. [32]

Postcolonial discourses have both extended and moved beyond the parameters of this debate in a number of ways. First, postcolonial critics have argued that the history and politics of difference is often informed by a legacy of colonialism that warrants analyzing the historical contexts, exclusions and repressions that allow specific forms of privilege to remain unacknowledged in the language of Western educators and cultural workers.

At stake here is the task of demystifying and deconstructing forms of privilege that benefit maleness, whiteness, and property as well as those conditions that have disabled others to speak in places where those who are privileged by virtue of the legacy of colonial power assume authority and the conditions for human agency. This suggests, as Gayatri Spivak has pointed out, that more is at stake than problematizing discourse. More importantly, educators and cultural workers must be engaged in “the unlearning of one’s own privilege. So that, not only does one become able to listen to that other constituency, but one learns to speak in such a way that one will be taken seriously by that other constituency.” [33]  In this instance, postcolonial discourse extends the radical implications of difference and location by making such concepts attentive to providing the grounds for forms of self-representation and collective knowledge in which the subject and  object of European culture are problematized.[34]

Second, postcolonial discourse rewrites the relationship between the margin and the center by deconstructing the colonialist and imperialist ideologies that structure Western knowledge, texts, and social practices. In this case, there is an attempt to demonstrate how European culture and colonialism “are deeply implicated in each other.”[35]   This suggests more than rewriting or recovering the repressed stories and social memories of the Other; it means understanding and rendering visible how Western knowledge is encased in historical and institutional structures that both privilege and exclude particular readings, particular voices, certain aesthetics, forms of authority, specific representations, and modes of sociality.

The relationship between the West and Otherness in postcolonial discourse is not one of simple polarities. Instead, it reflects a dynamic interplay in which both are simultaneously complicit and resistant, victim and accomplice. In this sense, critiques of the dominating Other also function as a form of self-criticism. Linda Hutcheon captures the complexity of this relationship with her provocative question: “How do we construct a discourse which displaces the effects of the colonizing gaze while we are still under its influence?”[36]   This question underscores the difficulty of disentangling the legacy of colonialism—a legacy that includes not only cultural imperialism and ideological dominance but also large-scale death and destruction, as we see in real time in Gaza. Yet, it is equally crucial to recognize that the Other is not simply the opposite of Western colonialism, nor is the West a monolithic force of imperialism.

This understanding points to a third rupture made possible by postcolonial discourses. Postcolonial theory challenges the ideological convenience of Western intellectuals who often neglect to interrogate how notions of agency are shaped and distorted within oppressive systems of privilege and power. However, this does not imply a return to humanist conceptions of the subject as a unified or static identity. On the contrary, postcolonial discourse acknowledges the necessity of decentering the subject while resisting the wholesale dismissal of agency and social change.

In this context, agency must be reimagined as intersecting and dynamic, offering the possibility for action and transformation without relying on reductive or essentialist notions of identity. This reimagined agency demands an understanding of the strengths and limits of practical reason, the critical role of affective investments, and the use of ethics as a resource for envisioning social change. Furthermore, it highlights the availability of diverse discourses and cultural resources that form the foundation for struggling toward agency and creating the conditions necessary for informed, critical citizens capable of enacting transformative social action. [37]

Of course, while the burden of engaging these postcolonial concerns must be taken up by those who appropriate Freire’s work, it is also necessary for Freire to be more specific about the politics of his own location and what the discourses of postcolonialism mean for self-reflectively engaging both his own work and his current location as an intellectual aligned with the State. If Freire has the right to draw upon his own experiences, how do these get re-invented so as to prevent their incorporation by First World theorists within colonialist rather than decolonizing terms and practices?

In raising this question, it is vital to underscore that what makes Paulo Freire’s work so enduring is its refusal to stand still. Freire’s texts resist cultural monumentalism, offering themselves not as static relics but as dynamic, evolving frameworks for different readings, audiences, and contexts. His work invites us to think critically, not reverently, about education, power, and resistance. To fully grasp the depth of Freire’s contributions, one must read his work in its entirety, as it cannot be disentangled from its historical and postcolonial origins. Yet, it equally resists being reduced to its author’s intentions or its historical moment.

The power of Freire’s project lies in its poetic and political tensions—a borderland where identity and history converge to reclaim power through acts of rewriting and resistance. Freire’s pedagogy speaks to those who dare to cross borders, who read history as a living document of struggle and hope, and who envision education as a radical act of reclaiming the future. His work is not just a call to understand the world but to transform it, to imagine solidarity as a present action rooted in the past, reverberating into the future.

Today, Freire’s ideas resonate with particular urgency. As authoritarianism tightens its grip, as climate crises deepen, as refugees are displaced, and as systemic racism and rising fascism fracture societies, Freire’s vision of education as a site of resistance and transformation becomes indispensable. The attacks on his legacy, such as those by former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, underscore the revolutionary potency of his work. Such hostility is a testament to the threat Freire’s ideas pose to oppressive systems—a reminder of their radical potential to empower the marginalized and challenge class and racially entrenched hierarchies.

Freire’s work is an enduring invitation to navigate the liminal spaces of history, culture, and identity—to envision new forms of justice and freedom in the face of persistent oppression. It calls us to confront the enduring legacies of colonialism and to dismantle the systems that sustain inequality and dehumanization. Yet Freire also dares us to dream beyond resistance, imagining a future where solidarity and emancipation are not abstract ideals but lived, transformative realities.

The pedagogical lesson here, one that Paulo deeply understood,  is that fascism begins with hateful words, the demonization of others considered disposable, and moves to an attack on ideas, the burning of books, the disappearance of intellectuals, and the  horrors of detention jails and camps. As a form of cultural politics, critical pedagogy as rendered by Freire  provides the promise of a protected space within which to think against the grain of received opinion, a space to question and challenge, to imagine the world from different standpoints and perspectives, to reflect upon ourselves in relation to others and, in so doing to understand what it means to “assume a sense of political and social responsibility.” [38]

We live at a time when the language of democracy has been pillaged, stripped of its promises and hopes. For instance, in the age of alleged fake news and post-truth, the degradation of language reinforces Umberto Eco’s remark that education as an organizing feature of fascism, “undermines civic literacy and produces an impoverished vocabulary and elementary syntax in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” [39]

Freire was right in insisting that if right-wing populism and authoritarianism are to be defeated, there is a need to make education an organizing principle of politics and, in part, this can be done with a substantively critical language, critical literacy, and pedagogy that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible.

Freire has entrusted us with a vision of critical pedagogy that demands educators ensure the future leans toward a more socially just world—a world where critique and possibility intertwine with the values of reason, freedom, and equality to reshape the foundations of how life is lived. His approach empowers students to think and act with creativity and independence while reminding us, as Stanley Aronowitz once argued, that the educator’s role is “to encourage human agency, not mold it in the manner of Pygmalion.”[40]

In a world fractured by rising authoritarianism and the unchecked power of capitalism, Freire’s pedagogy stands as a vital roadmap for reclaiming agency, fostering a politics of resistance, and nurturing anti-capitalist values that confront oppression and envision transformative possibilities. His work speaks not only to the intellect but also to the imagination, offering a song of liberation that calls us to cross borders—not just between nations and cultures but between despair and hope, between subjugation and freedom. It is an enduring testament to the power of education to resist, to reimagine, and to reclaim the promise of a more equitable and humane world.

Notes.

[1] Ginger Gibson, “Trump says immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ Biden campaign likens comments to Hitler,” NBC News (December 17, 2024). Online: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-immigrants-are-poisoning-blood-country-biden-campaign-liken-rcna130141

[2] See for example, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: Bloomsbury, 1968); Pedagogy of Hope (London: Bloomsbury, 1996); Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield1998)

[3] Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta, “Universities should not silence Research and Speech on Palestine,” The Conversation(November 27, 2024). Online: https://theconversation.com/universities-should-not-silence-research-and-speech-on-palestine-243880

[4] Henry Giroux, Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence  (London: Bloomsbury, 2025).

[5] A good starting point to examine post-colonial studies in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2^nd edition (New York: Routledge,  2005)

[6] Stanley Aronowitz, “Paulo Freire’s  Pedagogy: Not Mainly a teaching method,” in Robert Lake and Tricia Kress, eds. Paulo Freire’s Intellectual Roots: Toward Historicity in Praxis  (New York, NY: Continuum, 2012).

[7].An excellent analysis of this problem among Freire’s followers can be found in Gail Stygall, “Teaching Freire in North America” Journal of Teaching Writing (1988), pp. 113-125.

[8]. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York Routledge, 1990), p. 158.

[9].Joan Borsa, “Towards a Politics of Location,” Canadian Women Studies (Spring, 1990), p. 36.

[10].Ernesto Laclau quoted in: Strategies Collective, “Building a New Left: An Interview with Ernesto Laclau, Strategies, N0. 1 (1988), p. 12.

[11] Ibid.  Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta.

[12] Michael Klune,  “We Asked for it: The politicization of research, hiring, and teaching made professors sitting ducks,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 18, 2024).

[13] Ibid.  Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta.

[14] Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, (New York, N.Y.: Pantheon Books, 1994), pp. 100-101

[15]. Op. cit., Laclau, p. 27.

[16] Toni Morrison, “How Can Values Be Taught in This University,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Spring 2001),p.278

[17]. My use of the terms exile and “homelessness” have been deeply influenced by the following essays: Carol Becker, “Imaginative Geography,” School of the Art Institute of Chicago, unpublished paper, 1991, 12 pp.; Abdul JanMohamed, “Worldliness-Without World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of Border Intellectual,” University of California, Berkeley, unpublished paper, 34pp.; Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds., Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1990); Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do With It?” In Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Caren Kaplan, “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring, 1987), pp. 187-198; see also selected essays in Bell Hooks, Talking Back (Boston: South End Press,1989), Yearning (South End Press, 1990).

[18]. JanMohamed, Ibid. p. 27.

[19]. Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” The Oxford Literary Review N0. 9 (1987), p. 28.

[20]. See for example, Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1985); Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1987); Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, A Pedagogy for Liberation(London: Macmillan, 1987); Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

[21]. I have taken this term from JanMohamed, “Worldliness-Without World, Homelessness-as-Home,” Ibid.

[22] Paulo Freire quoted in Paulo Freire and Antonio Faundez, Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation (New York: Continuum, 1989), p. 13.

[23] Adorno cited in Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1990), p. 365.

[24].Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ibid., p. 197.

[25].Carol Becker, “Imaginative Geography,” School of the Art Institute of Chicago, unpublished paper, 1991, p. 1.

[26].JanMohamed, Ibid., p. 10.

[27].Edward  W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” Ibid., p. 365.

[28].JanMohamed, Ibid., p. 3o [29].Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vantage Books, 1979).

[30] Cornel West, “Decentring Europe: A memorial Lecture for James Snead,” Critical Inquiry 33:1 (1991), p. 4.

[31].Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990), viii.

[32].For an excellent discussion of these issues as they specifically relate to post-colonial theory, see Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” The Oxford Literary Review Vol. 9 (1987), 27-58; Abdul JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983); Gayatri, C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990); Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990); Homi K. Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990).

[33].Gayatri. C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic, op. cit., 42.

[34].This position is explored in Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism, and the Rehabilitation of Post-Colonial History,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 23:1 (1988), 169-181; Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonial  Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” Kunapipi 9:1 (1987), 17-34.

[35].Robert Young, White Mythologies, op. cit., 119.

[36].Linda Hutcheon, “Circling the Downspout of Empire,” in Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, eds. Past the Last Post (Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 1990), 176.

[37].I explore this issue in Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York: Routledge, 1992).

[38] Jon Nixon, “Hannah Arendt: Thinking Versus Evil,” Times Higher Education, (February 26, 2015). Online at: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/hannah-arendt-thinking-versus-evil/2018664.article?page=0%2C0

[39] Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” The New York Review of Books (June 22, 1995). Online:

Ur-Fascism

[40][40]. Stanley Aronowitz, “Introduction,” Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), p. 5.

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Are we now entering a period where no laws exist? My lawyer friends keep telling me that there is a rule of law. They argue that the indictments of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu prove that the rule of law is effective. I doubt that since neither has yet to be punished nor have the indictments changed their behavior. I challenge my legal friends by asking: What happens when continuing violations challenge the very existence of the rule of law?

Let’s start with Donald Trump. His indictments for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, illegally keeping classified documents as well as the obstruction of efforts to retrieve the documents have been dropped. Special counsel Jack Smith has thrown in the towel. He will also not continue his appeal against a ruling by a Trump appointed judge that he as a Special counsel was unlawfully appointed.

In addition, Trump’s electoral victory has suspended his New York hush money case. Probably, this case will be over as well.

The charges against Trump – four criminal charges, and so far thirty-four felony convictions – have not stopped him from being elected president of the United States.

How did he get off? Judicially, the Supreme Court’s decided last summer that presidents have a certain immunity for official acts while in office. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the majority decision, “The president is not above the law,” Roberts stated, and then added, ‘But Congress may not criminalize the president’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the executive branch under the Constitution.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor disagreed with the majority’s decision in a scorching dissent. Writing for the court’s three liberal judges, Sotomayor said the majority’s immunity ruling “makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of government that no man is above the law.” Her dissent argued that by forbidding the criminalization of a president’s conduct the majority of the Court placed the president above the law. She opposed the majority with unusual judicial vehemence; “Today’s Court … has replaced a presumption of equality before the law with a presumption that the President is above the law for all of his official acts.”

More than just criticizing the majority’s opinion that places the president “above the law,” Sotomayor wrote, “The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President.” A “law-free zone” is a place where no law exists. There is nothing to go above.

“Law-free zones” also exist in places outside Washington. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. (The ICC also issued a warrant for a leader of Hamas and previously for Russian President Putin.)

What was the reaction to the Court holding the Prime Minister of Israel guilty of violating international law? “Today is a dark day in the history of humanity, the international court in The Hague which was invented in order to protect humanity has become today the enemy of humanity,” Netanyahu declared, giving no legal justification for how he defends Israel’s actions nor any respect for the Geneva Conventions which define states’ obligations in times of conflict.

And the United States? [w]hatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas,” President Biden said supporting Netanyahu. “We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security,” he continued, with no legal reference as well. Always stand with Israel when the ICC has issued warrants for Netanyahu for his war crimes and crimes against humanity and the International Court of Justice has said that Israel is carrying out “plausible genocide”?

Does this mean that Israel is not only above the law, but that Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon are part of a “law-free zone”?

The Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian Law (IHL) are not only being violated in the Middle East. There are other regions of the world where there are egregious violations of IHL “There is ongoing murder, torture, and sexual violence against those who ought to be protected, and bombardment of establishments that must be respected,” Professor Andrew Clapham of the Geneva Graduate Institute recently wrote.” He continued, “We see repeated failures to respect schools and hospitals with devastating effects,”

More generally, Clapham argued in War (Oxford University Press), the act of war creates a law-free zone; “The idea of war often operates to legitimate something that would otherwise be illegal. Killing people is normally outlawed; destroying property is normally something that ought to be punished or compensated; seizing property is normally theft; locking people up should be justified through elaborate procedures. But when one can claim ‘there’s a war on’, the justifications for killing, destroying, seizing and interning apparently become self-evident.”

Are there no limits to what warring parties can do? Have war zones become “law-free zones”?

A recent example of Professor Clapham’s point about continuing violations of international law is the shipment of anti-personnel land mines from the United States to Ukraine.  164 states have currently ratified or acceded to a treaty banning the use of anti-personnel mines, including Ukraine. By using land mines, Ukraine is in clear violation of its treaty obligations. (The United States’ complicity in this violation must also be considered.)

Does the continuing violation of IHL and international law weaken it to such an extent that it loses its legitimacy? If there are daily violations throughout the world, what is the value of treaties and conventions when violators go unpunished with no change in their behavior? (Putin’s reduced travel possibilities are not a fundamental change in his behavior.)

What is the value of the rule of law today? If law is the gentle civilizer, in the Finnish legal historian Martti Koskenniemi’s popular use of the phrase, are we moving beyond gentility? Perhaps we are seeing more and more exceptional places like tax-free zones, freeports, special economic zones, foreign trade zones, or charter cities which should now be labelled “law-free zones.” (There are also “human-rights free zones” for stranded asylum seekers on Manus and Nauru.) All these places are exceptions from standard practices.

In many cases, the law is a fiction, in Lon Fuller’s phrase. When laws are continuously violated, with violators have no change of behavior or punishment, do the laws actually exist? If the laws are not enforced, do they remain merely a fiction?

The concept of “law-free zones” shows the growing reality behind legal fiction. We are witnessing an increasing tendency within the U.S. and abroad for officials and companies to operate outside accepted legal norms. In terms of “law-free zones,” Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” is quickly becoming the new normal.

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I have always been for women’s participation in the military.  I think the military should accept gay people too.  I think it should be trans-inclusive as well.  Because the right of equality of human beings is important to fight for.  If these groups don’t have representation in certain social arenas such as the military, then it becomes that much easier to strip them of their freedoms and powers on a broader basis.

Of course, one could argue (and quite legitimately too) that opening up the military to a wider social demographic will increase the pool of ordinary people who can be sucked into the kind of predatory and imperialist conflicts like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars which promote the interests of a small, wealthy elite by facilitating mass murder abroad.

But while this is true, I would still say that one should not sacrifice the principle of equality as a consequence.  One should continue to stress that those minorities who are discriminated against should be allowed to enter the military, but at the same time, we should try and protest military imperialism wherever such conflicts and occupations arise.

Something is similar in the case of assisted dying.   The right to die with dignity and with minimal pain, the right to have some kind of control and determination over one’s own death is – or at least should be – a fundamental human right.   It is an expression of human freedom at the starkest and most elemental level.

And yet, the assisted dying bill which was passed last week in the UK provoked a lot of opposition from leading radical-left wing figures such as Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot, both of whom voted against it in parliament.

The concerns they had were shared by many on the left more broadly.  And I think such concerns are warranted.  In a neoliberal-capitalist society, the assisted dying bill could provide a means by which those who are poverty stricken – those who are marginalized due to disability or debilitating illness and can’t afford the kind of decent palliative care they should have access to – will end their lives as a result of economic deprivation, in order to avoid the misery of inadequate or non-existent care packages.

In fact, a recent analysis by the charity Marie Curie showed that around 100,000 people in England requiring palliative care went without it at the end of their lives.  And around half of the families interviewed expressed unhappiness about the quality of care their loved ones had received – reports of people left in pain and with little support as they approached their deaths were rife.   It is difficult to imagine that people in this kind of situation might not use assisted dying as a way to end their suffering, and who could blame them?  This, in turn, would relieve the government of its obligation of care to some of the poorest and most vulnerable in our number.

But the solution to the dilemma is not to negate or eliminate a fundamental human right.  The empowerment of the human individual by way of possessing and determining both the context of their life and their death is not something we should seek to work against.  Rather, the real victory will be won by fighting for the political and economic measures which see the standard of healthcare and hospices uplifted and made available to all, while at the same time averring those fundamental freedoms which bestow the type of dignity and self-determination which befit human beings.

On a more niche note, the debate about assisted dying as a political right has some resonance in the history of Marxist theory more broadly.  Marx’s own critique of ‘bourgeois right’ came down to an acute philosophical understanding of the relationship between form and content.   Bourgeois right promised ‘legal equality’ but this was always a formal equality; it provided only a carapace of universality that was indifferent to the content of the real economic distinctions which opened up between one individual and another in class society, and determined the horizons of a given life: ‘This equal right is an unequal right for … [i[t recognizes no class differences … It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content.’

So, for example, every person can stand for political office, but if you are working in a supermarket for ten hours a day struggling to support a family it is unlikely you will have either the time or financial resources to hit the campaign trail.   Likewise, I have as much legal right to buy a major national newspaper as Rupert Murdoch, but the £3065 currently sitting in my bank account means this is unlikely to work out for me.

And yet, for all its criticism of Enlightenment thought, Marxism was as well the inheritor of the Enlightenment tradition, it presents a deepening of rationalism through a more concrete historical unfolding.   The philosophy of Marxism was about providing Enlightenment thought with the type of social and economic content to be wrought by a practical and radical transformation of society, one that would allow all people to realise the universality promised by bourgeois right because such universality would, for the first time, be inscribed into a social context where the economic conditions of class exploitation had ceased to pertain.

On a more modest scale, a similar logic should be applied to the issue at hand.  The truly radical demand is not to abolish assisted dying as a legal right.  The truly radical demand is to fight to bring the content in terms of economic conditions – in terms of quality of care of hospices, hospitals, carers and so on – into alignment with the form – i.e. the possibility of assisted dying as a political and legal right.   In this way, we can all work to make sure that it is not just the wealthy or well-off who are guaranteed respite and medical compassion in their final days.

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