Photograph Source: Wilfredor – CC0

Recently, labor educator and economist Michael Yates of the Monthly Review stated, “Happy to see that Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, won reelection, and by a healthy margin. The mainstream media always refer to Maduro as an authoritarian, a strongman, autocrat, etc. Yet, like Chavez before him, he keeps winning elections in what many outside observers say is one of the most transparent and fair voting systems in the world. The US, as usual, will do what it can to put the rightwing in power, just as it does everywhere in the world. But as Vijay Prashad has pointed out (see CounterPunch, 7/31/2024), the US has to find a way to get Venezuelan oil to Europe given the heavy sanctions placed on Russia. So, it will have to deal with the Maduro government. What an irony. In any case, let’s hope the communes in Venezuela continue to grow and develop cultures of solidarity.”

In this interview, exclusive for CounterPunch, David Smilde, the Charles A. and Leo M. Favrot Professor of Human Relations, and Senior Associate at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane University, offers an additional take and discusses the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election that featured Nicolas Maduro (United Socialist Party of Venezuela) and Edmundo Gonzales (Democratic Unitary Platform). Smilde, along with editor Daniel Hellinger, published Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy: Participation, Politics, and Culture under Chavez (Duke University Press), a widely read survey of the country’s political landscape.

Smilde addresses how his approach on the topic differs from others on the left regarding the election and he begins by outlining his Neo-Weberian framework and the different ways of looking at the concept of orientalism. Further, he summarizes the recent past of America’s foreign policy with Venezuela and provides a commentary on the media coverage of Venezuela. Smilde offers a better understanding of Venezuela and the left as he explains the critical case against Maduro and how it crosses a political divide.

Daniel Falcone: Can you talk a little bit about how your work helps address the moving parts of Venezuela’s electoral political framework especially in the current electoral moment?  

David Smilde: What is perhaps unique about my work is that I am a left progressive but do not rely on Marxian theory. I work with Michael Mann‘s Neo-Weberian framework that is different in two ways. First, it recognizes not only how the capitalist economy leads to a concentration of power, but how political actors, through states and parties, seek monopoly — and how culture in the form of media, religion and popular culture also can crystallize into ideology.

Of course, Gramscian theory deals with these elements too, but generally wants to see them as in sync through concepts such as “totality.” Neo-Weberian theory thinks they are often at odds and does not give priority to economic factors. A second important difference is that Neo-Weberian theory does not work with notions of teleology. There is no necessary direction of human society in the global long term or in any particular social context. This means that critical engagement in any context requires actual research and cannot depend on broad brushstroke treatments based on the supposed teleology of global geopolitics. It requires actual research to figure out who is trying to preserve their advantage, monopolize resources and disempower others.

Daniel Falcone: Can you provide some context on what you see to be the ideological points of division on the left regarding the US and the West’s reaction to Maduro’s dubious victory? The right wing is calling him a dictator and the progressive left is upholding Maduro as a revolutionary figure. What’s going on here?

David Smilde: Working on the Global South from the privileged position of the Global North entails responsibilities. In his seminal texts, Edward Said used the concept of “orientalism” to describe the tendency of journalists, scholars, and writers to portray people and leaders in the East as irrational, emotional and dangerous. We can absolutely see, from the beginning of the Chávez era this tendency towards what I think of as “right orientalism.” Chavez and Chavistas have been portrayed in the media precisely as childish, emotional, self-defeating, and dangerous to the rest of the world. But we can also see what I think of as “left orientalism.” This is the tendency of global progressives to portray any revolutionary leader who declares her or himself anti-imperialist, in uncritical, heroic terms and ignore their abuses of the basic rights of their people as well as their corruption. In both its left and right forms, orientalism is essentially the same. Distance and lack of information allows orientalists to misrepresent the people and contexts of the Global South. In doing so it denies their full humanity. Given that it is generally done as a way of engaging in the politics of the Global North — broadly understood to include the identity-work of individuals and groups as well — it is a form of imperialism. It essentially uses the Global South as a resource base for consumption in the Global North.

Daniel Falcone: If we can go back to the Chavez years up until now, how would you evaluate and compare Bush’s or Obama’s foreign policy regarding Venezuela as well as how respective Trump and Biden doctrines might materialize in the region?

David Smilde: This is a big question because not only do you have different administrations, but quite different approaches at different moments within these administrations. We can basically think of different moments in which the policy has been to 1) ignore, 2) to engage diplomatically, 3) to pressure, and 4) regime change. I think the most damaging moment was the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign in 2019 and 2020 during which sectoral sanctions and secondary sanctions were levied and even military action was threatened. This, on the one hand, helped consolidate and unify the Maduro coalition, reducing internal discussion and criticism as everyone prioritized survival. On the other hand, it undermined opposition to the government as the sanctions contributed further to the economic collapse that was begun by Maduro’s economic mismanagement. It generated a wave of migration and led the people who stayed to concentrate on daily survival. In such a context, the Maduro government’s power over the population increased.

The Trump policy largely continued during the first year of the Biden administration as key personnel such Ambassador Jimmy Story continued in their positions and continued to support the interim government of Juan Guaidó. This changed with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. At that point the geopolitics and political economy of US relations with Venezuela changed and the Biden Administration had much more motivation to change course and engage in diplomacy with the Maduro government. Since then, it has continued to engage and use sanctions relief as a way to try to promote democratic elections. To my eye, this has been the most successful period of US policy towards Venezuela. While the elections did not lead to an immediate democratization, they have put Maduro in a place in which his authoritarian regime has been exposed to the domestic and international audiences that before were dubious. There are no guarantees to where this will lead. But it is always better to force an authoritarian government to play the political game than to just sit back and consolidate its power.

Daniel Falcone: How is the agenda-setting and mainstream corporate media covering the election in your view in general? 

David Smilde: There was a time when I thought the corporate media was part of a big conspiracy to defend the interests of capital, and that it therefore systematically misrepresented the interests of underprivileged people seeking liberation. There is something to that view, of course. But over the past fifteen years, I have been working closely with journalists from major corporate media and have found them to be quite open-minded — often more oriented to facts and with less of an axe to grind than my academic colleagues. Most journalists are quite progressive and have a significant sense of vocation. They generally want to do good reporting and are quite happy to complicate power. If they do not have good information, are on tight deadlines, and must cover contexts they do not fully understand, they will often use the narrative hooks typical of right orientalism. But if they have good sources that give them quality information and explain the history, context, and probable evolution of events on the ground, they generally relish writing stories that complicate power and humanize average people.

Daniel Falcone: I read that even in Petare, the barrio, once a Chavista stronghold, was resisting and revolting against Maduro’s “win.” Obviously, this differs from Republican, Democrat, and elite institutional criticism of the election results. But can you discuss the need, or difficulty in pushing back against US hegemony while making critical cases against Maduro?  

David Smilde: We are indeed seeing a new demography of protest in Venezuela in this round. On July 29, the day of Maduro’s proclamation it was the popular sectors who went to the streets to protest, despite María Corina Machado‘s calls on the population *not* to take to the streets. This should not surprise. They are the sectors that have most suffered in recent years with the economic collapse and were most hoping for change. And it is precisely because they are not the traditional opposition base — that they did not pay attention to the call not to protest — and went to the streets. The optics of this protest are quite difficult for Maduro as it is not easy to portray them as the same middle class, violent protests of 2014 and 2017.

The critical case against Maduro really crosses the left/right divide. Apart from Marxist hardliners, who think democracy and human rights are bourgeois tools and think a dictatorship is necessary to reach socialism, those of us who are left, because we reject the structural inequality created by people in positions of privilege and power, should be squarely against Maduro. He has used his control over the state, the military, and the oil industry to give himself and his officials a life of luxury while average Venezuelans struggle day-by-day to put food on the table and a roof over their heads and educate their children. There is nothing progressive about Maduro and his government. Criticizing and working against Maduro’s authoritarian government does not require support for U.S. hegemony, just the opposite. It will only be through a multilateral, regional diplomatic effort that any solution will be forged. The US can facilitate but should allow the governments of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico to lead advocacy for a solution.

In the long term, the best way the left can push back against US hegemony would be to advocate for and support movements and governments that work against structural inequality in all its forms, through democratic means. Concentrating power does not lead to more democracy, it just remains concentrated. And as suggested above, this advocacy should be based on actual knowledge and concrete portraits of people and contexts in their full humanity. There are no angels in Venezuela or elsewhere, just people with the usual set of vices and virtues with a constant tendency to create structural inequalities and monopolies. This must be combatted and is a struggle that will never end.

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Image by Planet Volumes

Great orators in history would not have been recognized as such if their words carried no value. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is neither a great orator, nor did his speech before a joint Congressional session on July 24 have actual worth. It was an expression of his desperation, if not defeat, on all fronts.

This is not new. For years, Netanyahu has served the role of a social media meme. During his United Nations General Assembly speech in September 2012, the Israeli leader displayed a bomb diagram to fan the flames for another Middle East war.

His equally bizarre map of the ‘New Middle East’, which he also carried during another UNGA speech on September 22, 2023, also invited mockery.

But on both occasions, as on others, Netanyahu’s strategy was never intended for humor. His spectacles were carried out with the knowledge that global media would not miss the opportunity to highlight his performance with much interest. His rhetoric would often go unchallenged.

Moreover, until October 7, Netanyahu’s possible risk factors, resulting from what may seem to us as outrageous behavior and outlandish speeches, were quite minimal. To the contrary, for his Israeli constituency, appearing on the world stage with such media fanfare was always a reason for yet greater approval.

To his followers, Netanyahu served the role of the ‘modern-day prophet‘.

“There are very few leaders left in Israel or around the world with the capacity to fully grasp and articulate the historical and prophetic relevance of what is happening in Israel, the Middle East and around the world today,” David Lazarus wrote on October 9, 2020 – almost exactly three years before the Hamas operation in southern Israel, and the most destructive Israeli war which followed.

But the supposed visionary has failed to read all the signs, not only in the lead-up to the war, but to the disastrous impact of the genocide, which will haunt his country for many years to come. Since then, the majority of Israelis have abandoned their prophet, numerous Israeli opinion polls continue to tell us.

Yet, Netanyahu appears unperturbed. He spoke at the Congress with near total lack of awareness of the new reality emanating from his failed policies and botched reading of history.

For those who may not know, Netanyahu also sells himself to Israelis as an intellectual. His intellect involves “exposing the deception”, of the centrality of the Palestinian cause to the Middle East, or the so-called “theory of Palestinian centrality”.

To counter that “big lie”, Netanyahu dedicated to the notion of the ‘reversal of causality’, as in challenging the notion that Israel – namely the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other Arab lands – is the main cause of problems in the Middle East.

Until recently, the man’s theories have garnered much traction, enough, in fact, to temporarily marginalize the Palestinian cause, and to invest in new ways of shaping a ‘new Middle East’, where Palestine simply is not on a map.

These illusions, however, have and continue to crumble. Instead of pushing a reset button that would shape the Middle East according to Israeli priorities and interest, the Palestinians pushed it.

This time around, Netanyahu has no theories, no actual solutions, no prophetic visions, not even a ridiculous map to save his life or career. Isolated by much of the world, he rushed to the only place where he would feel safe, where people would clap for him unconditionally, even before he spoke: The US Congress.

And, indeed, they did – 39 times, including 23 standing ovations, and a total of 10 minutes and 55 seconds to be exact. But even the jolly bunch of US representatives who agreed to be part of that tragic charade will not save Netanyahu.

Here, a quick pause is needed, in appreciation for those who refused to attend Netanyahu’s speech of lies, and admiration for US-Palestinian Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who held a sign throughout the whole event, reminding us, and the world, that Netanyahu is a “war criminal” and “guilty of genocide”.

Netanyahu is not a pathological liar, as he is often accused by his enemies and detractors, in Israel and elsewhere. He lies, because, at times, not telling the truth is convenient, especially when there is no accountability for lying, time and again.

In his Congress speech, however, Netanyahu did more than simply lie. He had the audacity of calling millions of Americans who protested the war “Iran’s useful idiots”, while perpetuating the right-wing language on the “clash between barbarism against civilization”.

Still, a few were truly impressed. Even his closest allies are abandoning him. Former US Speaker, Nancy Pelosi described his speech as “by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States”. Many others found him insincere, including his own people.

When Netanyahu mattered, his speeches often led to wars, or major regional instability. But Netanyahu no longer matters, except for a few US politicians vying for re-election.

The Israeli leader had hoped to press the reset button and return to his silly theories about the irrelevance of Palestine to the Middle East, and the world. He was proven wrong, again, making him a false prophet or, at best, a failed leader.

The post When ‘Prophets’ Become Memes: Rise and Fall of Benjamin Netanyahu appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Photo: Cpl. Shay Wagner, IDF Spokesperson’s Unit – CC BY-SA 3.0

“In every classroom in Israel there is a map,” says Nadav Weiman. “But it is a map without any green line and without any names of Palestinian villages or towns. Between the river to the sea it’s only Israel.”

Weiman is the executive director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers who have served in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem since September 2000 and who seek peace, an end to the Israeli occupation and the release of Israeli hostages.

Before leading Breaking the Silence, Weiman was a history teacher and before that, he was a sniper in the IDF. The green line refers to the internationally recognized “pre-1967” borders between Israel, the West Bank and Gaza that have been erased from official Israeli maps.

“You have to understand, Israelis we don’t see Gaza, we don’t see the streets of Gaza, we don’t see Gazans, we don’t hear about what is happening inside Gaza,” Weiman said, speaking at a Washington, DC press conference held with US veterans peace group, Common Defense, the day before Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed the US Congress. “There is an iron curtain between the people of Israel and the Gaza Strip.”

Weiman remembers that “The first time I met Palestinians in my life was as a combat soldier in Jenin in 2006 after finishing my training in the special forces. And it was from two sides of the barrel of a gun.”

On the other end was “a kid I dragged from his bed in the middle of the night,” a kid whose peers in Israel know nothing about him. At a talk Weiman gave to 18-year-old high schoolers in Tel Aviv just before traveling to Washington, “they asked me to explain to them what is the Gaza Strip? Who lives over there? What is going on over there because we don’t have any idea.”

Weiman got an idea during a 2008 operation in Gaza, when, as the spotter for his sniper unit, he called in a bulldozer to destroy greenhouses that were blocking the view from the house they’d commandeered for an ambush, “because our line of sight was more important than anything else in that operation.”

Although an Israeli soldier had been taken hostage at the time, the operation was not there to free him, Weiman said. It had only one purpose; to provoke. “The goal in that operation was to create an atmosphere where the Palestinians would attack us and then us as IDF snipers and soldiers can shoot them back,” Weiman said. “It was the day to day routine of the Israeli occupation.”

He recalled how “in Gaza every couple of years we have a very big operation where the IDF kills a lot of Palestinians, and a lot of soldiers die as well.” Civilian collateral damage used to number around 14 civilians per target, Weiman said, but today “we are seeing collateral damage of sometimes three digits” and military leaders are “considering collateral damage as something that is almost okay. And me personally as a soldier who fought over there, I don’t think it’s okay. I don’t think civilians should die, period. Not Israelis and not Palestinians.”

That dehumanization, says Common Defense executive director and former US Army veteran, Jose Vasquez, is what is driving the forever war in Gaza, and Israel’s occupation, both of which his organization, like Weiman’s, strives to end. What we are seeing, he said are “the dehumanizing impacts of occupation. Nowhere is evil more clear than in Gaza today. This brutal campaign has left Gaza in ruins and its people in despair.”

Janice Jamieson, a US Air Force veteran with Common Defense, agrees. “It seems that civilian casualties are the point,” she said. The Israeli attack on Gaza is “the most destructive bombing campaign of the past century,” Jamieson added. Such attacks, “are designed to annihilate an entire people.”

Vasquez has been to Gaza and the West Bank — before the current Israeli attack began — and has seen the conditions for himself, “how Palestinians on a daily basis get dehumanized,” whether it’s being told which streets they can walk on to controlling how they reach their places of business. “Many people have thrown around the word ‘apartheid,’ Vasquez said. “I don’t  know what other word best fits the situation.”

Indeed, Zwelivelile Mandela, grandson of South Africa’s revered former president, Nelson Mandela, has declared that “The Palestinians are experiencing a worse form of the apartheid regime, worse than that we have ever experienced as South Africans.”

The solution, said Vasquez, is “leaders who have a vision of what a future looks like that doesn’t require Israelis to on a daily basis dehumanize and occupy the Palestinian people. So it starts with a ceasefire but it’s a much bigger project.”

In the meantime, IDF soldiers continue to slaughter Palestinians with an apparent absence of remorse or empathy. That, says Weiman, is driven in large part by the rhetoric constantly fed to them, and in particular, the use of the term ‘Amalek’. It refers to an Old Testament commandment to wipe out all Amalekians for attacking Jews as they left Egypt, and not to spare their children or livestock while destroying everything they owned.

“What we saw now after this war started on Gaza are government officials, MKs,(Members of the Knesset), ministers in our government, religious leaders, are using the dog whistle, Amalek,” Weiman said. “We had Xerxes and we had Hitler and now the Palestinians are called Amalek.

“You can hear it, you can see it in videos that soldiers are uploading from the Gaza Strip to social media and again you can hear ministers from our government using that word,” Weiman continued. “And that helps IDF soldiers to feel comfortable shooting inside Gaza.” It’s based on hatred and racism, he says, but also “not seeing Palestinians as people just like me, who have ambitions and dreams and kids and they are afraid and they are happy and only seeing them as the enemy.” That, he said “helps us with the 57 years of occupation.”

In the occupied West Bank, says Weiman, it’s also based on the Israeli rule of law. “We have two separate law systems,” he said. “We have the Israeli criminal law system for settlers and we have the Israeli military law system for Palestinians. And the Israeli criminal law system basically lets settlers do whatever they want.”

On the morning we spoke, Weiman had received a video “showing settlers with metal clubs with spikes on the edge of it, beating Palestinians, sending three of them to the hospital, one of them a 38-year old woman with a broken skull. Next to them, in the same video, you can see two soldiers protecting them,” he said, referring to the settlers.

“Essentially you’ve got people who are bullying children,” said Vasquez who, when visiting the West Bank, observed Palestinian children as young as seven “going from their elementary school to home” and having to face “being not only taunted but rocks thrown and sometimes physical altercations.” The result, he said, was that “unfortunately the orders the IDF soldiers receive is that they’re hands off when it comes to the settlers. So essentially you’ve got people who are bullying children and the one authority in the space who could do something about it are ordered to not do anything about it.”Those soldiers are told their actions — or inactions — are protecting Israel but, says Weiman, “it’s not true, it’s not protecting Israel, it’s controlling Palestinians. Weiman says he supports Israel’s right to defend itself and protect its civilians but not the way the Netanyahu government is going about it. “It’s protecting the settler enterprise. It’s not protecting Israel. Protecting Israel is being with the 1967 borders.”

The ones that aren’t shown on Israeli maps.

The post Former IDF Sniper Says Dehumanization of Palestinians and a Rhetoric of Hate is Driving Israel’s Forever War in Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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I covered Venezuela’s 3-week presidential campaign season, the elections, and their fallout for TeleSur English, the multilateral public TV news network funded by the governments of Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. I am an experienced analyst on Brazilian politics, but I do not claim to be a specialist on Venezuela. The following is not analysis but a description of events I witnessed on election night. I invite readers to use it to help with their own assessments of the political situation.

I worked during Venezuela’s presidential election on Sunday, July 28, from 4:45 AM to 2 AM Monday morning, with two cameramen, a producer, and a Spanish-language reporter. Together we spent the day doing live reports from inside and outside four polling stations around the city, finishing our day behind Miraflores Palace for the announcement of the election results.

By 2:30 PM, the huge lines of voters at Andre Bello polling station had thinned to a trickle

We left the building at 5:50 to position ourselves to cover the closing of the polls. The government had ordered all polling stations to close their doors at 6, but Andre Bello stayed open for another 10 minutes or so to let a few stragglers in to vote – 4 or 5 people tops, including an elderly couple who had problems walking.

When they finally closed the doors, a crowd of around 40 TV crew members and social media videomakers had gathered, with around 30 citizens who stood in front of the doorway and cheered as the doors shut, and a group of around 5 police officers guarding the doors.

Shortly after 6 PM, the doors closed at Andre Bello polling center

Minutes later, a crowd of around 100 people rushed up to the door and started yelling, “Let us vote! Let us vote!” Suddenly, there were live streamers everywhere. An Argentinian coworker pointed out a crew from Argentina’s Javier Milei-aligned Channel 13 that was streaming everything as a dour, conservatively dressed reporter asked crying women and angry-looking men why Nicolas Maduro wouldn’t let them vote.

For TeleSur Portuguese: “As you can see, there are nearly as many journalists here as their are protesters, in this mini-turmoil, trying to delegitimize the election.”

Journalist from Argentina’s far-right Channel 13, on a live feed, rushing around asking citizens, “why didn’t Nicolas Maduro let you vote?”

Half an hour later, a group of hundreds of men rode up on loud motorcycles, some of which seemed to have had their engines adjusted to provide constant backfires, with some riders in black hoods and masks. They blocked off the road in front of the polling station and sat there, revving their engines as the crowd yelled things like, “¡Viva Venezuela!” As I prepared to record a report, a muscular white man in the crowd glared at me, said, “Nicolas Maduro,” and made a throat-slitting gesture.

Suddenly, a group of motorcyclist rode up onto the sidewalk to the entrance, everyone else got off their bikes and left them blocking the road. Together, they marched into the crowd and rushed for the door, pushing at the police.

Screen shot of Machado supporters on their motorcycles moving up the sidewalk towards Andre Bello polling station.

At this point, I moved about 50 yards back to avoid being trampled. From there, I saw a lot of pushing and heard a lot of screaming. Two male police officers ran by me carrying a female police officer who was bleeding from the head. They loaded her up on a motorcycle and rode down the sidewalk past me toward a hospital. I saw no injuries in the crowd of Maria Corina Machado supporters.

A few minutes later, a group of motorcycles from the national police force rode up, two to a bike, with the passengers holding assault rifles, and most of the motorcyclists vacated the premises. The 5 police officers guarding the doors were replaced with a group of 20 female riot control police with plexiglass shields and helmets. Suddenly, the YouTube and Twitter streams of angry white men yelling at the police looked less heroic. It was a clever tactical move.

The crowd calms down after reinforcements arrive to guard the door of Andre Bello polling center.

As the crowd dwindled, more security arrived. A small group of Maria Corina Machado supporters lingered on, yelling, “We want the results! We want the results!” with far-right social media filmmakers cutting in close on their smartphones to make it look like they were in the middle of a big crowd.

Later that night, when I met up with other journalists covering the election behind Miraflores Palace, I heard similar stories from other polling stations. One journalist told me where she was located, the crowd started yelling, “Shut the doors! Shut the doors!” at 6. As soon as the doors shut, they started yelling, “Let us vote! Let us vote!”

Maria Corina Machado, Edmundo Gonzalez, and the PUD announced weeks before the election that they were not going to respect the democratic rule of law and would tally their own election results. What I witnessed in front of Andre Bello polling station on Sunday night appears to have been a form of theater – one of many tactics used to produce and disseminate videos to delegitimize the election, that was standardized at many polling centers across Caracas.

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Image by Levi Meir Clancy.

Israeli soldiers, like soldiers in other countries, bask in the self-serving effusive praise showered upon them by politicians, but privately they know BS when they hear it.

Right from the start on October 7th, the soldiers knew that the sudden collapse of Netanyahu’s state-of-the-art multi-tiered border defense system left the door open for the Hamas attack. Still denied an official investigation by Netanyahu, people know that had the border defense been in place, all the terrible consequences never would have occurred. (See, the open letter by six very prominent Israelis in the New York Times on June 26, 2024: “We Are Israelis calling on Congress to Disinvite Netanyahu.”)

The soldiers also know that the small Hamas militia of some 25,000 fighters hidden in tunnels, having only small arms with dwindling ammunition, is up against the 465,000–person military armed with 1,500 F-16 fighter pilots and nuclear weapons. The Israeli military is also equipped daily by Biden with the most modern weapons. All this makes Netanyahu’s absurd description of Hamas as an existential threat sheer propaganda designed to protect his job.

The evidence is on the bloody body-strewn ground of tiny Gaza and its crowded 2.3 million people. The Israeli military has dropped over 100,000 precision bombs, countless artillery shells from hundreds of tanks, and even naval missiles to kill over 300,000 innocent Gazan civilians, mostly children, women and elderly, who had nothing to do with October 7th. (See also my March 5, 2024 column “Stop the Worsening UNDERCOUNT of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza”). Most of the remaining people in Gaza are sick, injured or both. (See the open letter to President Joe Biden and the U.S. Congress titled, “45 American Health Workers’ Letter on Their Experiences in Gaza” dated July 25, 2024.)

How many Israeli soldiers have died? The official figure is 395 IDF soldiers – many from friendly fire in the fog of explosions, accidents such as collapsing buildings, and diseases. The exaggerated “Hamas battalions” send fighters popping up from their underground tunnels to fire rifles or grenade launchers before most are immediately extinguished by overwhelming firepower.

The largest number of Israeli casualties are the soldiers suffering from PTSD, including moral traumas, being treated in the thousands by Israeli psychologists and mental health specialists. These are the soldiers who will tell the stories of who they were ordered to kill and what they were ordered to destroy. The lack of a truthful account of the atrocities in Gaza— because of Netanyahu blocking war correspondents from Israel and other nations from freely reportingthere— will be brought to light by the reports of these soldiers.

To be sure, the thirst for vengeance after October 7th animated most of the soldiers at the outset – especially those screened for having no qualms about killing innocent children, women and men and destroying civilian facilities.

But as the weeks became months, the Torah’s instruction of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”  to limit escalating cycles of revenge, according to Biblical scholars, became a hundred and then a thousand eyes for an eye and a thousand teeth for a tooth. More soldiers and generals are questioning why they are still there amidst the smoldering ruins and ghastly slaughters.

Netanyahu’s drive to remain in power has stoked the carnage in Gaza. Despised by three out of four Israelis for earlier moving to weaken the judiciary, under indictment for political corruption by Israeli prosecutors, and soundly condemned for his defense failure on October 7th, ending this one-sided annihilation of defenseless people would mean the end of his political career.

Consider what these soldiers have witnessed or done: Powerful precision bombs blowing to bits babies, children, pregnant women, refugee camps, apartments, schools, health clinics, hospitals, ambulances, water mains, and electricity networks; Families starving on genocidal orders from the Israeli military “no food, water, medicine, electricity, fuel”; and Homeless people trapped, unable to escape, surrender or shelter.

The soldiers have seen their bulldozers flatten critical civilian infrastructure, even cemeteries and agricultural crops. F-16s have blown up universities, government buildings and many schools, mosques and historic churches. Snipers, among the most brutal of the army, kill patients in broken hospitals and survivors desperately try to pull their crushed families out from under the rubble.

Already, several reservists have told reporters in Israel that the military has no operating “rules of engagement.” They could blow up or shoot and kill anyone who moves, including UN relief workers, journalists and health workers protected by international law. The laws of war – the duty to disobey illegal orders – don’t exist in Gaza.

Soldiers saw the body parts of little children, heard the screams, the cries and groans of the dying, smelled the stench of rotting corpses being eaten by stray dogs, and saw their victims – mothers and fathers – begging in vain for help to save their dismembered children.

Unlike other wars, Israeli soldiers were not allowed to facilitate the emergency rescue crews that still exist in Gaza such as those with Doctors Without Borders, the Palestinian Red Crescent and several internationally respected providers of food and water – themselves subject to Israeli attacks. (See December 13, 2023, an open letter titled, “Stop the Humanitarian Catastrophe” to President Biden by 16 Israeli human rights groups which appeared in the New York Times).

Soldiers obeyed their commanders’ orders to repeatedly push hundreds of thousands of desperate Gazans on foot, exposed to the stifling heat and lethally polluted air, from one Israeli-designated area to another. The treachery is unlimited.

Other soldiers were told to block thousands of trucks ready to enter from Egypt, packed with humanitarian aid of food, water, medicine and other critical supplies. Still other soldiers were ordered to kidnap thousands of Gazans, including women and children, and send them without charges to be tortured in Israeli jails, as documented in a just-released UN Human Rights Office report titled, “Detention in the context of the escalation of hostilities in Gaza.”

Of course, there are plenty of soldiers happy to have such sadistic and unlawful commands. How dare the Gazans revolt against the decades of violent Israeli bombing, occupation, invasions and military embargoes? That’s historically been the imperious attitude of cruel, colonizing, land-seizing regimes. The ranks will grow to join past “refuseniks” who in 2002 courageously declared their refusal to go and beat up people, demolish homes and otherwise rampage against defenseless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

[…]

We, combat officers and soldiers who have served the State of Israel for long weeks every year, in spite of the dear cost to our personal lives, have been on reserve duty in the Occupied Territories, and were issued commands and directives that had nothing to do with the security of our country, and that had the sole purpose of perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people.

[…]

We hereby declare that we shall not continue to fight this War of the Settlements.

We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.

[From The Combatants’ Letter, January 2002]

Dozens of Israeli human rights organizations and leading advocates will record these reservists’ recollections, their remorse, and their recurring nightmares. The vicious omnicidal extremists who make up Netanyahu’s ruling coalition will be exposed for their war crimes and destruction of their own country’s freedoms. Returning war veterans have credibility that will fortify the forthcoming entry into Gaza of international commissions of inquiry and scores of investigative journalists. (See the new documentary “The Night Won’t End”).

The violent Netanyahu knows all this, which is why he is now scheming to provoke a wider regional war by dragging spineless Biden and the U.S. military directly into the fighting.  Remember Biden’s intense backing of the Bush/Cheney criminal invasion/war in Iraq.

If you don’t care what Netanyahu is doing over there, you’d better care about what he’s doing to America, our Congress, our tax dollars, our freedom of speech and our national security.

The post Israeli Soldiers Will Soon Find Ways to Tell Their Media About the Terror Inside Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Ken Thomas – KenThomas.us – Public Domain

I am tired of talking about J.D. Vance. And I’m not one for introspection (just ask my husband). But as a daughter of Appalachia and a professor of anthropology at a public university, J.D. Vance’s claim to represent Appalachia and his threats to attack our nation’s universities and their professors, who he’s labeled “the enemy,” are personal for me. Echoing other Appalachia-raised writers who have recently weighed in, I say to J.D. Vance: you are a hillbilly phony (Caleb Miller). You don’t represent us (Neema Avashia). And you can keep your “elegy” (Ivy Brashear) because hillbillies don’t need one (Meredith McCarroll). Your Hillbilly Elegy is a political platform disguised as a memoir, and I call bullshit.

I grew up on a mountainside in Jefferson, North Carolina. That’s in Ashe County (the Christmas tree capital of the country), in the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the Appalachian Highlands. My parents were public school teachers, first generation college students who met in the 1960s at Appalachian State Teachers College (now Appalachian State University). My mother, June, was one of seven children, born in Mitchell County, NC. Her fondest childhood memory was when the bookmobile came to the homestead. She would hide in a tree all day long with a stack of books. Her least favorite childhood memory was having to carry the hog’s head in a bucket up the road to Aunt Hattie for making hog’s head cheese. Mom’s father was an underemployed tinkerer and mica miner who died of silicosis when I was three years old (that’s a lung disease caused by breathing in tiny bits of silica). Mom’s mom, who we called Grandmommy, served hot lunches in a public-school cafeteria and sewed jeans at a Wrangler factory in Spruce Pine. Years of hoisting and sewing heavy denim left her with debilitating arthritis and a twisted back. After retiring, Grandmommy handstitched a quilt for every grown child and grandchild in the family. Some of us got two or three. She must have made at least 30.

Like other families, our social life centered around the local church. Ours was Baptist. We often went to church three times a week—two services on Sunday, and a Wednesday evening event. My dad David taught Sunday school, served as a deacon, and sang in the choir. My sister and I sang in the children’s choir and did service projects through “Girls in Action.” Mom coordinated potlucks, picnics, and trips for the youth, and did overseas outreach as head of the Women’s Missionary Union. We got, and gave, a lot of social support at church. It was our community. My sister and I were in Brownies and Girl Scouts, and I was in 4-H. We were always busy.

I went to Lansing Elementary and Northwest Ashe High School. The mascot for both of these rural mountain schools was the “Mountaineer,” in some pictures a proud explorer in the mold of Daniel Boone or Lewis and Clark, in others a hayseed, a hick, a clodhopper, a country bumpkin—in other words, a hillbilly. (I secretly wondered if the original mascot wasn’t Old Reece, the kindly bearded man with long grey hair who lived—and eventually died–in a cave near the high school).

We were lucky to grow up with two teachers for parents: in our household reading and learning was fun and homework was non-negotiable. At school our third-grade classroom had a termite problem. Our fourth-grade teacher had bad temper. (He was arrested on a meth charge thirty years later in the TV series “Southern Justice.”) But we got an excellent education at those small rural schools. When Mrs. Caviness had us read Chaucer in the original Old English, we were proud to recognize some of our own mountain dialect in the Old English. Our tough English vocabulary tests every Friday prepared us for the SAT. We went to statewide band competitions because Ashe County schools had strong music programs. The young former Peace Corps volunteer who taught French managed to equip us with a surprising amount of it.

My high school classmates, many of whom still live in Ashe and the surrounding Appalachian counties or slightly down-state, have jobs in agriculture, education, engineering, health care, social work, manufacturing, law enforcement, real estate, the arts, tourism, the service industry, and more. They went to universities like App State, UNC Chapel Hill, and NC State, or took classes at Wilkes Community College. Thanks to scholarships and federal loans, I went to Wake Forest University, a full two hours away in Winston-Salem (an eternity back then). Some amazing faculty members became my mentors, like Dr. William (“Billy”) Hamilton, who was like a second father. With their encouragement I studied abroad in Moscow, embarked on graduate studies, and eventually became a professor.

Our community had its problems—quite a few kids had food instability; some experienced domestic violence, addiction, and mental health crises themselves or in their families. One of our classmates died by suicide not long after graduation. But these challenges were not “special” to Appalachia. And almost all of us benefitted from supports like excellent teachers, arts programs in schools, community churches and other organizations, and public assistance like subsidized meals at school.

Appalachia is in my bones, and I don’t recognize myself or my community in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. But I would never offer my own history, my own little story, as representative of the Appalachian experience. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what J.D. Vance does in his book.

Vance tracks his rags to riches journey from Middletown, Ohio, to Yale Law School (with summers in Jackson, Kentucky which, unlike Middletown, is actually in Appalachia). He bounces from one living situation to another with a substance-using mother and her string of “flavor of the month” boyfriends, all under the watchful eye of MaMaw and PaPaw, with whom he also lived intermittently. Vance describes an environment of domestic violence and substance use, but also of fierce love for family and country. He “made it” not because of his environment but in spite of it. His Appalachia—the “hillbilly culture” he escaped—is one of backwardness, bad choices, and lack of initiative. The characters in Elegy are vivid and relatable, especially MaMaw, the salty family matriarch, who cusses like a sailor and smokes like a chimney. Vance credits MaMaw with keeping him on the straight and mostly narrow. (In his recent RNC speech, Vance proudly claimed that after her death, he found 19 loaded handguns in MaMaw’s house.)

Vance is a good writer. He tells his story well.

But that’s just it. Hillbilly Elegy is one man’s story, the story of a man who technically didn’t even grow up in Appalachia. Vance grew up in an Ohio town in the Rust Belt, a town to which a lot of people from Appalachia—including Vance’s grandparents—had moved. His grandparents were products of the so-called “hillbilly highway,” the migration of tens of thousands of Appalachian families to towns and cities in the Midwest and elsewhere for work.

So, Vance’s very claim to be a “hillbilly” from Appalachia is not clear cut. As Kentucky’s governor Andy Beshear recently said, “J.D. Vance ain’t from here.”

Even if Vance did qualify as Appalachian, he certainly does not speak for all of Appalachia. He uses anecdotes from his own life to paint a vast swath of the United States in broad brushstrokes. Appalachia spans 206,000 square miles and comprises 423 counties across 13 states. He overlooks Appalachia’s rich diversity and her 26.4 million residents, instead offering his own experiences as representative of “hillbilly culture.” His statement that “the culture of Greater Appalachia is remarkably cohesive” (p. 4) is breathtaking in its dismissal of the tapestry of topographies, linguistic traditions, racial and ethnic identities, livelihoods, and cultural traditions that make up Appalachia.

By contrast, Roger May captures Appalachia’s unique beauty and diversity in his “Looking at Appalachia” project, a crowdsourced website of nearly 600 photographs taken by Appalachians from New York to Mississippi. As Meredith McCarroll describes in The Bitter Southerner,

Scrolling through the website, you see Appalachia. Mechanics, farmers, poets, tattoo artists, preachers, and builders. Mountains under descending fog, mountains with their tops blasted off, mountains covered in snow. Car lots and tobacco barns and trailer parks and factories. Schools and rivers and kudzu and train tracks. Dancers and soldiers and barbers and loafers. Laughter and pride and sorrow and regret. You see Appalachia and know that it is also America.

An image of “Stikes Holler” in Warrensville shows a cascade of vintage cabins and barns where my classmates, the Stikes, used to live, and maybe still do. I rode past Stikes Holler every day going to school for 12 years. Stikes Holler is an iconic image of hillbilly poverty. It exists, and it is real. But it is only one tiny sliver of Appalachia, not representative of the region as a whole. Nothing is.

In dedicating his elegy to “hillbillies,” a term associated with whiteness, Vance already discounts the experiences of anyone in Appalachia who is not white. According to the Appalachian Regional Commission, one-fifth of the population of Appalachia are people of color (Blacks, Hispanics, and other people of color), as are over a third of the population of Southern Appalachia. Appalachia includes three federally recognized and five state recognized Native American Tribal Communities. Another Appalachian writer, Neema Avashia, reminds us that immigrants “provide essential labor in Appalachia in healthcare, agriculture and service industries.” And what of the migrant laborers from Mexico, Central and South America, and elsewhere who help keep many agricultural industries in Appalachia afloat? Many of these people are unlikely to show up in any census, but they, too, are Appalachia.

Appalachia is much more economically diverse than Vance acknowledges. Poverty is most acute in the Central and North Central Appalachian regions, especially eastern Kentucky, southeast Ohio, southcentral West Virginia, and Appalachian Mississippi. But many Appalachian counties have economies positively designated as “transitional” or “competitive.” Reading Elegy, one might think the main employment in Appalachia is still mining and manufacturing. In fact, employment in resource-extractive (mining) and goods-producing sectors (manufacturing) have declined over the past decades, and the service-producing sector now accounts for more than 75% of the Appalachian region’s employment. Reading Elegy, it would be easy to think that few hillbillies have steady jobs. In fact, 95.7% of Appalachia’s labor force is employed, which is slightly higher than the U.S. rate.

Vance also ignores decades of insightful scholarship about Appalachia and Appalachian migrants. In his 261 pages purporting to explain Appalachia, Vance cites only 14 published sources (fewer than I’ve use here!), perpetuating centuries-old stereotypes. As Ivy Brashear observes in the Bitter Southerner, Vance “continues the long tradition of presenting Appalachia as a monolithic region and a group of people characterized only by laziness and violence and dislike of anyone or anything different.” Worse, Vance offers “policy recommendations” based on these limited observations. (To wit: child and family services should employ a more expansive definition of “family;” and too many government supports are aimed towards getting people to college.)

And what is the story Vance tells about those poor, white, working-class hillbillies? He identifies a “decay of culture” that perpetuates poverty in Appalachian families, and he diagnoses hillbillies with “learned helplessness.” “There was something almost spiritual about the cynicism of the community,” Vance writes (p. 188). Elegy constantly calls out the pessimism of working-class whites, implying that just having a better attitude would solve people’s problems. While acknowledging their ever-shrinking job market as manufacturing jobs move overseas, Vance warns,

…this book is about something else:  what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it. (p. 7)

In short, Elegy blames the region’s problems on Appalachian people’s pessimism and bad choices. He spends little time considering structural forces—changing economies, environmental disasters left by unchecked extractive industries, lack of quality health care, and generational trauma—that keep some Appalachian people poor and disadvantaged. Vance mocks people on public assistance, assuring the reader that white people can be “welfare queens,” too. Food stamp recipients are people who show little interest in honest work. Addiction treatment and 12-step programs are a joke because addiction is not a disease, just a lack of will power.

The “culture of poverty” narrative driving the book is a version of the “bootstrap” narrative, which writer Alissa Quart describes as “the claim that all success is the result of an individual’s gifts and efforts, and anyone who tries hard can make it.” Bootstrapping is a powerful idea. We’d like to believe that hard work, ingenuity, and perseverance are all we need to attain the American Dream, a dream most often measured in money and material wealth. The bootstrapping narrative locks us into a vision of success calculated in terms of social mobility and financial wealth, not healthy relationships, physical, emotional, and spiritual health, and other measures of well-being.

In Elegy, Vance is the quintessential self-made man. And this is where Vance’s book reveals itself as more political platform roadmap and less “memoir.” To Vance, problems like poverty are personal and “cultural,” not structural and political. Lacking faith in public institutions, Vance thinks government assistance makes things worse. In his self-tale, he rose through sheer grit and determination—and a little help from ferocious MaMaw. The message: if only hillbillies believe in themselves, choose the right friends, and don’t succumb to “learned helplessness,” they, too, can succeed.

Rugged individualism is supposedly a cornerstone of American democracy. It’s a compelling idea that ignores the personal, community, and government supports that enable survival and make success possible for those who need a boost, things like school lunch programs, church picnics, community health clinics, Medicaid, school trips, little free libraries (and bookmobiles!), housing assistance, food pantries, neighborly attention, sports, arts and music programs in schools, Meals on Wheels, public libraries, exceptional teachers, Pell grants and other need-based scholarships, and more. Many of these assists surely played a role in Vance’s life, but admitting this would render his bootstrap narrative impotent.

The bootstrap narrative is often coupled with a call to cut public programs. To his credit, as an Ohio state senator, Vance has broken with the Republican party on some public assistance issues, healthcare in particular. He supported maintaining government investment in Medicare and social security, and strong government interventions to improve healthcare systems. We should all keep an eye on whether he will revert to the familiar bootstrap narrative or do the right thing and such support public programs.

Still, in one of the most poignant moments in Elegy, Vance comes to the wrong conclusion. When he and other law students are interviewed for summer internships with top-shelf law firms, we see him awkward at a fancy recruitment dinner: he can’t pronounce sauvignon blanc, so he orders the easier-to-say chardonnay. He doesn’t know what all the cutlery is for, so he calls his girlfriend. Feeling out of place, he reflects on how the game is rigged, how players from more elite backgrounds start the game with more knowledge and tools, with a head start. And he realizes that as an Ivy League law student he, too, is privileged. Yale Law opened a door for him that many aspiring lawyers could never hope to enter.

Here is Vance’s chance to think about relative privilege: how access to generational wealth, social capital (networks), and cultural capital (know-how, familiarity with the rules of the game) advantage certain members of society and disadvantage others. He could reflect on the negative effects of generational trauma, which he experienced as the grandson of a violent alcoholic and the son of a verbally and physically abusive user of drugs who bounced him from home to home. Here’s Vance’s chance to ponder structural ways to level the playing field, to give more people from more diverse backgrounds a seat at that fancy law-firm recruitment dining table. Or, to move the event both literally and figuratively to a less posh, more inclusive space where everyone could focus on substance and the exchange of ideas rather than which fork to use. In other words, Vance might consider ways to give more people a leg up so they can access the game and master its rules OR entertain the possibility of changing the rules altogether.

Instead, Vance responds as a rugged individualist: learn the rules quickly, play hard, and propel yourself to the top, supposedly on willpower and perseverance alone. As West Virginia-born Ivy League graduate Caleb Miller wrote in his recent critique of Vance, “He wants you to believe that he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and he wants you to look away as he pulls up the ladder behind him.” Vance has no plan to level the playing field, only a plan for himself—the supposedly self-made man—to work harder, jump higher, and scale those socioeconomic ladders to the top, solo.

It is a shame that Vance ignores the value of community supports, including diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, to ensure fair play in education, employment, and public service. DEI is fundamentally about creating spaces that value a range of backgrounds, viewpoints, and strengths so that everyone can contribute their unique talents (diversity). DEI is about people with diverse experiences coming together around a table to cooperate and learn from each other—it helps us understand and bridge cultural and other differences (inclusion). And DEI entails noticing and addressing the structural barriers and inequities that some people experience simply because of their location in the social stratum (equity).

Eboo Patel for the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that Vance presents a terrific argument for DEI when he describes a successful Yale seminar comprised of diverse law students:

We called ourselves the island of misfit toys … a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia, the super-smart daughter of Indian immigrants, a Black Canadian with decades’ worth of street smarts, a neuroscientist from Phoenix, an aspiring civil-rights attorney born a few minutes from Yale’s campus, and an extremely progressive lesbian with a fantastic sense of humor, among others. (pp. 200-201)

They “became a kind of family for me” (p. 200), Vance recalls. Yet instead of reflecting on his own experiences of feeling excluded as a “hillbilly” in various settings—and his positive counter-experience in the “misfits’” seminar—to consider the benefits of inclusion programs, Vance, now as a Vice Presidential candidate, is coming after DEI programs at US universities. He recently tweeted that “DEI is racism, pure and simple.”

DEI is not racism; it is not about “hiring on race.” Diversity and inclusion are big-tent concepts that include not only race, ethnicity, (dis)ability, and gender, but also socioeconomic status. Being poor, coming from a single-parent home, growing up in non-traditional housing arrangements—all that is diversity, too. The GI Bill that served predominately white veterans (including “hillbillies”) and programs for first generation college students (many of them economically underserved whites) are examples of equity and inclusion. Perhaps Vance is weaponizing DEI because he cannot see the ways in which a class-disadvantaged kid like him (if not a hillbilly) might have benefitted from DEI. Let’s be clear: in a country where the majority of poor people are white, DEI helps white people, too.

Targeting DEI is just one of Vance’s attacks on the nation’s universities. A college education has for centuries afforded many Americans (marginalized “hillbillies” and others) a path for upward social mobility, even as it is not the only route. Having already benefitted from opportunities at two of the country’s great universities, one public (Ohio State), Vance now wants to pull the rug out: “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” he said in 2022. In a 30-minute speech he declared, “The Universities are the Enemy.”

As a public university professor with 21 years of experience teaching, mentoring, and caring about the next generation of America’s leaders, I am concerned about J.D. Vance’s planned assault on higher education and on DEI. Equity and inclusion are essential practices for navigating the world. As a microcosm of the world, universities are learning grounds for the life practices and processes that reflect the world in which we live. DEI is about raising up a big tent and bringing everyone into the conversation. It is about bridging differences, finding common ground, and identifying complementary strengths, so that all boats rise. It is about learning when to speak, when to listen, when to lend a hand, and when to ask for help. And it is about providing those with less access to knowledge and networks—those who don’t possess the kind of cultural and social capital that is valued by society—opportunities to play on a level playing field or to change the rules for the greater good.

And so I offer my mountaineer’s prayer: that people will look beyond J.D. Vance’s skewed portrait of Appalachia to appreciate the unique beauty and challenge of the region’s past, present, and future. That folks will see through the myth of bootstrapping and do the hard work needed to support one another as we navigate the election cycle, climate change, health care crises, and the so-called culture wars. And that universities will remain big tent spaces where freedom of speech and assembly, critical thinking, and diversity, equity and inclusion thrive.

I am grateful to Carmen Henne-Ochoa and Kate Wiegele for their contributions to this article and its arguments.

Additional Sources and Notes.

William J. Barber II, with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, White Poverty: How Exposing Myths about Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy (Liveright, 2024).

Meredith McCarroll and Anthony Harkins, eds. Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (West Virginia University Press, 2019).

Alissa Quart, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream (Ecco, 2023).

The post A Mountaineer’s Prayer appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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The Geneva Conference. Photograph Source: U.S. Army – Public Domain

With the U.S.- backed carnage in Gaza continuing and the threat of growing violence looming throughout the region (in Lebanon, Iran, and who knows where else), we need to think more deeply than ever about how the American people have historically been excluded from foreign policy decision-making. An upcoming anniversary should remind us of what sent us down this undemocratic path.

Sixty years ago, on August 7, 1964, Congress handed President Lyndon Johnson the power to wage a major war in Vietnam, solidifying its long-standing deference to the presidency on foreign policy. Not once since World War II has Congress exercised its constitutional responsibility to vote on declarations to decide if, when, and where the United States goes to war.

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 flew through Congress, in part because most members trusted the president’s assurance that he sought “no wider war.” Their trust was misplaced. The Johnson administration kept secret and lied about its plans for future military escalation in Vietnam. It also lied about the incident used to persuade Congress to give LBJ a blank check to use military force however he wanted: the false claim that American ships had been the targets of unprovoked and unequivocal attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats.

In fact, the United States had been fighting a secret war against North Vietnam since 1961. The U.S. destroyers that LBJ said were innocently sailing on the “high seas” were there to support South Vietnamese attacks (organized by the U.S. military and CIA) on North Vietnamese coastal villages. On August 2, 1964, these ongoing acts of war finally provoked a few Vietnamese patrol boats to chase after a U.S. destroyer which, firing first, easily disabled the small vessels. The Vietnamese managed to fire a few torpedoes but missed. There were no American casualties. Not exactly Pearl Harbor.

What’s more, the White House also claimed it had “unequivocal” evidence that North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked again on August 4. In fact, the U.S. commander on the scene sent a “flash message” urging civilian authorities to delay any decision–because what first seemed like an attack may have been a false alarm caused by “freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonarmen.” Within days it was all but certain that no second attack had occurred. As President Johnson said to an aide, “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!”

Nonetheless, Johnson went on television near midnight on August 4 to announce that it was his “duty” to launch a “retaliatory” airstrike. As he spoke, 64 U.S. warplanes were on their way to bomb North Vietnam. The next day LBJ asked Congress for a resolution giving him the authority “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States.” We now know that the heart of this resolution had been drafted months earlier. The administration had just been waiting for a pretext to ram it through Congress.

We also know the lies didn’t stop there. That fall, as Johnson campaigned for the presidency, he sounded like a peace candidate, promising that he would not send “our boys to do the fighting for Asian boys.” Running against prowar Republican Barry Goldwater, LBJ won in a landslide.    Americans voted for peace and ended up with a war that killed more than three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans.

Virtually every top U.S. foreign policy official knew the Johnson administration was lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, including thirty-three-year-old Daniel Ellsberg. By chance, Ellsberg’s first full day on the job, as one of Robert McNamara’s Pentagon “whiz kids,” was August 4, 1964. Ellsberg was then a Cold War hawk who supported the U.S. mission in Vietnam. Like all his colleagues, he raised no internal objections to Johnson’s airstrikes or the administration’s effort to sell the Tonkin Gulf Resolution through deceit. And no insider gave a second’s thought to revealing those lies to Congress, the media, or the public.

After a year in the Pentagon, nearly two years in Vietnam, and two more years meeting young antiwar activists and intensely studying the 7000-page top-secret history of decision-making in Vietnam that became known as the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg underwent a dramatic political and moral conversion. By 1967, he believed the war an unwinnable stalemate from which the U.S. should find a face-saving exit. By 1969, he regarded it as fundamentally immoral and unjust, and thought the U.S. should withdraw unilaterally and immediately.

At that point, Ellsberg decided to photocopy the Pentagon Papers and make them public, hoping that their sordid record of government lying would further ignite antiwar activism. He did so with the knowledge that it might bring him a life sentence in prison. First Ellsberg tried to persuade antiwar Senators to put the Pentagon Papers into the public record. When that effort failed, he took the papers to the New York Times and 18 other newspapers. Each of them published substantial portions in June 1971.

Later that year, Ellsberg spoke with former Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, one of only two members of Congress who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. They talked about the documents in the Pentagon Papers that contained detailed evidence of the Johnson administration’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Morse said to Ellsberg, “If you’d given me those documents, at the time, in 1964, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution would never have gotten out of committee. And if they had brought it to the floor, it would have lost.”

You can’t replay history, so we can’t test Morse’s claim, but Ellsberg has many times said that the greatest regret of his life was not exposing the government’s lies about Vietnam much earlier. There were many reasons why he didn’t, and why so few officials ever expose national security wrongdoing. The biggest reason, Ellsberg came to realize, was the intense culture of power, loyalty, and careerism that characterizes foreign policy circles. Almost no one in those positions, even those who have serious objections to ongoing policies, is willing to risk their insider status and their access to power and privileged information. Most fully internalize the arrogant assumption that the foreign policy elite understands far better than Congress or the people how the world works and how the U.S. should exercise its power.

And Congress, for its part, continues to enable an ever more imperial presidency that decides when and where the U.S. goes to war. It almost never uses the power of the purse to reduce

U.S. militarism or to cut funding for unpopular wars. The nearly trillion-dollar Pentagon budget is rubber stamped every year. There is no guarantee that a more engaged Congress would give us a less militarized and interventionist foreign policy. But it would make it more accountable to a public which historically has been substantially more antiwar than its representatives. As in the Vietnam era, a majority of Americans opposed the 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan many years before they ended. And since at least March 2024 a majority of Americans have opposed the Israeli government’s war on Gaza, yet Congress continues to bankroll U.S. support for it.

We have seen, in the last ten months, an unprecedented outpouring of American protest in support of Palestinian rights. For good reason. At least 40,000 Gazans, most of them civilians, and many of them children, have been killed by the Israeli military’s indiscriminate and disproportionate response to the Hamas killing of some 1200 Israelis on October 7, 2023. At least 2 percent of the Gazan population (2.14 million) have been killed and at least 75 percent displaced from their homes (many have had to flee multiple times). A recent study by the medical journal The Lancet, estimates that the death toll in Gaza could reach 186,000 even if there is a ceasefire today.

For most Americans, this level of suffering is unimaginable. Yet we must try to imagine it. If we were Gaza, at least 6.5 million of us would be dead, the vast majority women, children and other civilians. Many millions more would be among the uncounted dead and dying – buried, lost, sick, starving. At least 240 million of us would be forced from our homes, on the road seeking shelter, food, and water under ongoing military attacks and perils beyond description.

That is the reality in Gaza.

In the end, only a mass democratic movement has the potential to dramatically change U.S. foreign policy. The first challenge is to overthrow the baseless claim that the United States is the greatest force for good in the world, the “indispensable nation” that stands for the rule of law, freedom, and democracy. Our record does not warrant such a delusion. Only when that ideology and naïve faith is broadly undermined can we hope to chip away at the long-standing infrastructure of U.S. militarism-–the 750 military bases on foreign soil, the annual military exercises in two-thirds of the world’s nations, and the “defense” budget that equals the next nine most militarized nations combined.

Ellsberg and Morse were right. The people must know the truth. But we have long had more than enough evidence to demand fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy. We can’t wait for Congress to represent us faithfully. The people’s voice must be heard.

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Image Source: The Heritage Foundation – Public Domain

“Christians, get out and vote.  Just this time.  You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what?  Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” 

– Donald Trump, July 27, 2024, Speech to a gathering of religious conservatives sponsored by the conservative advocacy group Turning Point Action.

I am not arguing that “Project 2025” is directly comparable to Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto “Mein Kampf,” but there are some similarities in their political ideology and their political plans for the United States and Germany, respectively.  Both documents are “blueprints for authoritarianism.” As the saying goes, often you need to be forewarned in order to be forearmed.

The antisemitic ravings of “Mein Kampf” are quite different from the unconscionable anti-immigrant markers in “Project 2025.”  However, the language of the documents as well as the language of Donald Trump reveal a contempt for groups of individuals that is evil and ugly.  Hitler wrote about the “Jewish peril,” which isn’t far removed from Trump’s racism going back to the “American Carnage” speech of 2017 as well as the Project’s call for mass deportations.Trump’s language has only worsened over the years, and we never should forget his Muslim ban and the reference to “shithole” countries in his first year in the White House.

The important role of Stephen Miller on behalf of Trump and the Project is stunning; Miller is Jewish but he would have made a good Gauleiter for any Fascist party.   Miller has been working for years to get a nationwide crackdown on immigration.  He has vowed to increase deportations by a factor of ten, to a million people a year, according to recent articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker.  Project 2025 calls for “stringent reinforcement” of immigration and deportation measures, including “ramped-up workplace inspections,” and penalties for employers hiring undocumented workers.

The United States was alerted nearly a decade ago to Steve Bannon’s Leninist “destruction of the administrative state,” and Project 2025 moves in this direction, calling for partisan control of the Department of Justice and the FBI.  The Project wants increased military participation in domestic law enforcement, stressing the use of the Insurrection Act of 1807 to put down revolt or even civil unrest in the United States.  Even peaceful protests could be targeted.  The Germans had nearly one decade of warning regarding Hitler’s interest in destroying the parliamentary system, but never took his views seriously.  We seem to be following the German pattern.  Are we Germany 1933?

Even a cursory look at Project 2025 regarding U.S. governance reveals a dystopian view of American democracy and American freedoms.  Trump and Project 2025 are in complete agreement regarding the plan to “dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington.”  Senator J.D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee has gone even further, saying he would “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state.  Replace them with our people.”  In Trump’s first term, he issued an Executive Order to allow the president to remove “rogue bureaucrats.”  Trump created a “Schedule F” to eliminate civil service protections.  President Biden revoked this schedule in one of his first acts as president.  Trump will certainly restore it.

Trump and Project 2025 favor the round-up of millions of immigrants in detention camps on the way to deportation.  They advocate for abolishing the Department of Education, and the promotion of Christian white nationalism in public schools.  All climate change progress, considerable under the Biden administration, would be reversed, and the words “climate change” would be banned.  

Trump and Project 2025 would destroy the Voting Rights Act, and ban abortion and IVF.  Gerrymandering, the filibuster, and voter suppression tactics would close down the channels of democratic change in our democracy.  It would be very difficult to reverse this damage.  Trump 2.0 will be worse than the first time around because Trump will be appointing far more right-wing troglodytes than the first time around.  There will be no Gary Cohns on the economic side, or conservative military officers who were the adults in the room between 2017 and 2019.  Trump has tried to distance himself from the Project but he hasn’t identified any Project proposals that are anathema to him, and virtually every key member of the Project worked in Trump’s administration and was identified as a super-MAGAn.

In at least one respect, Project 2025 must be taken just as seriously as Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”  The latter was the hatred and musings of a narcissistic paranoid.  Project 2025 is a product of Trump’s acolytes who have created an entire institutional framework to put their agenda into place.  The Center for Renewing America was formed to “end woke and weaponized government,” and to address the threat from critical race theory, which it terms “vast, real, and increasingly existential.”  

CRA’s founder, Russell Vought, Trump’s chief of the Office of Management Budget in the first term, wrote an oped for Newsweek titled “Is there anything Actually Wrong with ‘Christian Nationalism’?”  Vought’s group works closely with the Conservative Partnership Institute that is populated with such troglodytes as Mark Meadows.  Stephen Miller runs America First Legal, which has been called the ACLU of the MAGA movement.  The Conservative Partnership Institute was created in 2017 by former senator Jim DeMint, who left the Senate to run the Heritage Institution.  According to Jonathan Blitzer in the New Yorker, these groups have invested $50 million in real estate in and around Washington, particularly on Capitol Hill, to construct their empire.  

This poses a far more dangerous threat than Trump’s first term, which was destructive in its own right.  But the mainstream media continue to dismiss Trump’s ability to turn ideas into actual policy.  The Washington Post, still runs opeds with such titles as “The GOP still doesn’t know what it would do with power.” The Post ran an oped last week, indicating that Trump has softened his stance against abortion, and that Trump has “distanced himself.”  But these are campaign statements with no real meaning whatsoever.  The key is that, while many of the personnel in Trump’s first term ignored his ranting and ravings, the zealots in any second term will be counted on to support the rants and ravings of Trump and Vance.  Hitler and Trump both benefitted from societies that refused to take them seriously, and from a press corps that underestimated the threat.

There is no question that a second Trump term would be far worse than the first regarding expanded presidential powers, social conservative initiatives, and the use of the military in the domestic arena.  The personnel in the second term would be far more loyal and far more ideological.  After all, Trump didn’t have a political structure in the first term; the second term will be dominated by hard-core polemicists and ideologues, who will not be committing insubordination to their leader.  As for their leader, he is a dangerous demagogue. whose flawed character has been accurately described in books by family members. Trump, if elected, will secure the “American Carnage” that he predicted seven years ago.

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Image by Planet Volumes.

Chinese diplomacy has done it again.

By hosting a historic signing of a unity agreement between 14 Palestinian political parties in Beijing on July 23, China has, once more, shown its ability to play a global role as a peace broker.

For years, China has attempted to play a role in Middle East politics, particularly in the region’s most enduring crisis, the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

In 2021, China announced its four-point plan, aimed at “comprehensively, fairly and permanently” resolving the Palestinian question.

Whether the plan itself was workable or not, it mattered little, as neither the Israeli government nor the Palestinian Authority were prepared to ditch Washington, which has dominated Middle East diplomacy for decades.

For the Israelis, their interests lie largely within their historic alliance with the United States, which has translated into very generous aid packages, military support and political backing.

As for the PA, since its inception in 1994, it revolved largely within a US-foreign policy sphere.

With time, the Palestinian leadership grew even more reliant on American-western financial handouts and validation. Thus, allowing China to flex its diplomatic muscles in the Middle East, at the expense of the US, would be considered a violation of the unspoken agreement between Washington and Ramallah.

Consequently, the Chinese efforts yielded nothing tangible.

But China’s success in ending a seven-year rift between Saudi Arabia and Iran re-introduced Beijing as a powerful new mediator, in a region known for its protracted and layered conflicts.

The latest horrific war in Gaza has further highlighted the possible role of China in Palestine and the region at large.

For years, China attempted to find the balance between its historic role as a global leader, with clout and credibility in the Global South, and its economic interests, including those in Israel.

That balancing act began eroding soon after the start of the war.

The Chinese political discourse on the war was committed to the rights of the Palestinian people and their historic struggle for freedom and justice.

The above notion was highlighted in the words of China’s ambassador to the UN, Fu Cong, when he said that “the establishment of an independent state is the indisputable national right of the Palestinian people, not subject to questioning or bargaining”.

Such language, which came to define China’s strong stance against the war, the massive human rights violations and the urgent need for a ceasefire, continued to evolve.

On February 22, China’s representative to the Hague, Ma Xinmin, said that “in pursuit of the right to self-determination, Palestinian people’s use of force to resist foreign oppression (…) is (an) inalienable right well founded in international law”. His statement was made during the fourth day of public hearings held by the ICJ to address Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine.

The Chinese, and other countries’ efforts, paid dividends, as the ICJ released its Advisory Opinion on July 19, stating that “the sustained abuse by Israel of its position as an occupying Power” and “continued frustration of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, violates fundamental principles of international law”.

It is within this context that ‘The Beijing Declaration on Ending Division and Strengthening Palestinian National Unity’ was signed.

The agreement was not a mere document, similar to those signed between rival Palestinian parties in the past. It proposed a three-step initiative that includes a “comprehensive, lasting and sustainable ceasefire in Gaza”, followed by a post-conflict governance plan, which is itself predicated on the principle of “Palestinians governing Palestine.”

The final step seeks long-term peace, all of which is achieved through broad-based participation of regional and international players. In other words, ending the domination of a single country over the future of Palestine and her people.

There will certainly be attempts to undermine, if not cancel, the Chinese efforts entirely. But there are reasons that give us hope that the diplomatic push by China may, in fact, serve as a foundation for a change in the global attitude towards justice and peace in Palestine.

The fact that western European countries like Spain, Norway and Ireland have recognized Palestine shows that the US-dominated western diplomacy is breaking apart.

Moreover, the growing role of the Global South in supporting the Palestinian struggle suggests another seismic shift.

Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, much of the world has been sidelined from the struggle in Palestine. This is no longer the case.

China’s growing role in Palestinian and Middle East politics is taking place with changing global dynamics, and the practical end of the US traditional role as the ‘honest peace broker’.

The war on Gaza has presented China with the opportunity to play the role of an advocate for Palestine. This has given Beijing the needed credibility to achieve the most comprehensive agreement among Palestinian groups.

Time will tell if the agreement will be implemented or thwarted. But the fact remains that China is now officially a peace broker in Palestine and, for most Palestinians, a credible one at that.

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Photograph Source: Wilfredor – CC0

On July 28, the 70th birthday of Hugo Chávez (1954-2013), Nicolás Maduro Moros won the Venezuelan presidential election, the fifth since the Bolivarian Constitution was ratified in 1999. In January 2025, Maduro will start his third six-year term as president. He took over the reins of the Bolivarian Revolution after the death of Chávez from pelvic cancer in 2013. Since the death of Chávez, Maduro has faced several challenges: to build his own legitimacy as president in the place of a charismatic man who came to define the Bolivarian Revolution; to tackle the collapse of oil prices in mid-2014, which negatively impacted Venezuela’s state revenues (over 90 percent of which was from oil exports); and to manage a response to the unilateral, illegal sanctions deepened on Venezuela by the United States as oil prices declined. These negative factors weighed heavily on the Maduro government, which has now been in office for a decade after being re-elected through the ballot box in 2018 and now in 2024.

From Maduro’s first election victory in 2013, the increasingly far-right opposition began to reject the electoral process and complain about irregularities in the system. Interviews I have held over the past decade with conservative politicians have made it clear that they recognize both the ideological grip of Chavismo over the working class of Venezuela and the organizational power not only of Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela but of the networks of Chavismo that run from the communes (1.4 million strong) to youth organizations. About half of Venezuela’s voting population is reliably wedded to the Bolivarian project, and no other political project in Venezuela has the kind of election machine built by the forces of the Bolivarian revolution. That makes winning an election for the anti-Chávez forces impossible. To that end, their only path is to malign Maduro’s government as corrupt and to complain that the elections are not fair. After Maduro’s victory—by a margin of 51.2 percent to 44.2 percent—this is precisely what the far-right opposition has been trying to do, egged on by the United States and a network of far-right and pro-U.S. governments in South America.

Europe Needs Venezuelan Oil

The United States has been trying to find a solution to a problem of its own making. Having placed severe sanctions against both Iran and Russia, the United States now cannot easily find a source of energy for its European partners. Liquified natural gas from the United States is expensive and not sufficient. What the U.S. would like is to have a reliable source of oil that is easy to process and in sufficient quantities. Venezuelan oil fits the requirements, but given the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, this oil cannot be found in the European market. The United States has created a trap from which it finds few solutions.

In June 2022, the U.S. government allowed Eni SpA (Italy) and Repsol SA (Spain) to transport Venezuelan oil to the European market to compensate for the loss of Russian oil deliveries. This allowance revealed Washington’s shift in strategy regarding Venezuela. No longer was it going to be possible to suffocate Venezuela by preventing exports of oil, since this oil was needed as a result of U.S. sanctions on Russia. Since June 2022, the United States has been trying to calibrate its need for this oil, its antipathy to the Bolivarian Revolution, and its relations with the far-right opposition in Venezuela.

The U.S. and the Venezuelan Far-Right

The emergence of Chavismo—the politics of mass action to build socialism in Venezuela—transformed the political scenario in the country. The old parties of the right (Acción Democrática and COPEI) collapsed after 40 years of alternating power. In the 2000 and 2006 elections, the opposition to Chávez was provided not by the right, but by dissenting center-left forces (La Causa R and Un Nuevo Tiempo). The Old Right faced a challenge from the New Right, which was decidedly pro-capitalist, anti-Chavista, and pro-U.S.; this group formed a political platform called La Salida or The Exit, which referred to their desired exit from the Bolivarian Revolution. The key figures here were Leopoldo López, Antonio Ledezma, and María Corina Machado, who led violent protests against the government in 2014 (López was arrested for incitement to violence and now lives in Spain; a U.S. government official in 2009 said he is “often described as arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry”). Ledezma moved to Spain in 2017 and was—with Corina Machado—a signatory of the far-rightMadrid Charter, an anti-communist manifesto organized by the Spanish far-right party, Vox. Corina Machado’s political project is underpinned by the proposal to privatize Venezuela’s oil company.

Since the death of Chávez, Venezuela’s right wing has struggled with the absence of a unified program and with a mess of egotistical leaders. It fell to the United States to try and shape the opposition into a political project. The most comical attempt was the elevation in January 2019 of an obscure politician named Juan Guaidó to be the president. That maneuver failed and in December 2022, the far-right opposition removed Guaidó as its leader. The removal of Guaidó allowed for direct negotiations between the Venezuelan government and the far-right opposition, which had since 2019 hoped for U.S. military intervention to secure them in power in Caracas.

The U.S. pressured the increasingly intransigent far-right to hold talks with the Venezuelan government in order to allow the U.S. to reduce sanctions and let Venezuelan oil go into European markets. This pressure resulted in the Barbados Agreement of October 2023, in which the two sides agreed to a fair election in 2024 as the basis for the slow withdrawal of the sanctions. The elections of July 28 are the outcome of the Barbados process. Even though María Corina Machado was barred from running, she effectively ran against Maduro through her proxy candidate Edmundo González and lost in a hard-fought election.

Twenty-three minutes after the polls closed, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris—and now a presidential candidate in the November elections in the United States—put out a tweet conceding that the far-right had lost. It was an early sign that the United States—despite making noises about election fraud—wanted to move past their allies in the far-right, find a way to normalize relations with the Venezuelan government and allow the oil to flow to Europe. This tendency of the U.S. government has frustrated the far-right, which turned to other far-right forces across Latin America for support, and which knows that its remaining political argument is about election fraud. If the U.S. government wants to get Venezuelan oil to Europe it will need to abandon the far-right and accommodate the Maduro government. Meanwhile, the far-right has taken to the streets through armed gangs who want to repeat the guarimba (barricade) disruptions of 2017.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Photo: Roger Harris.

July 29, 2024, Caracas, Venezuela.

Shortly before midnight, the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), Elvis Amoroso, announced the re-election of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro. Like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, the US-backed and funded far-right opposition cried fraud.

Maduro won with 51.2% of the vote. His nearest rival, the far-right US-backed candidate Edmundo Gonzalez trailed by 7 percentage points.

While the US corporate press refers to the “opposition” as if it were a unified bloc, eight other names appeared on the ballot. Unlike the US, where most of the electorate is polarized around two major parties, the fractious opposition in Venezuela is split into many mutually hostile camps whose dislike of the ruling Socialist Party is matched by their loathing for each other. And this is despite millions of US tax-payer dollars used to try to unify a cabal that would carry Washington’s water.

Sore losers

In the quarter century since Hugo Chavez initiated the Bolivarian Revolution when he was elected president in 1998, the Chavistas have won all but two of over thirty national contests. The far-right opposition celebrated when they won a national referendum along with the 2015 National Assembly contest. But every other time, the sore losers cried fraud.

Yet every one of these contests employed the same electoral system of multiple public audits, transparent counting, and an electronic vote backed with paper ballots. The system is incontrovertibly fraud-proof. Former US President Jimmy Carter, whose electoral monitoring organization had observed over ninety elections – including Venezuela’s – had declared the South American country’s system the best in the world.

Beyond the accusations, concrete proof of fraud had not been forthcoming in the past even though the data were publicly available.

I was one of 910 internationals representing over one hundred countries who had been invited to Venezuela to accompany this election. Yesterday, I visited polling stations in the state of Miranda.

I observed long but orderly lines of people going to the polls. At each one of the individual mesas (rooms at a polling station), representatives of political parties sat to monitor the process. I spoke to representatives of Maduro’s Socialist Party (PSUV) as well as other parties. All expressed confidence in the fraud-proof nature of their electoral system. In fact, they are very proud of their system regardless of political affiliation.

According to news reports, there were cyberattacks on the electoral system. At some polling stations, far-right opposition elements reportedly attacked electoral workers in attempts to disrupt the process.

But my experience visiting the polls could only be described as festive. Seeing our international invitee credentials, which we wore on lanyards around our necks, we were universally greeted with shouts of bienvenida (welcome), V-signs, and applause. These were clearly a people with great civic pride.

This reception was the same in “popular” Chavista neighborhoods as well as wealthier ones. Some hoped for “change” and others for continuing the Bolivarian Revolution. But all freely and enthusiastically participated in the electoral process.

The perennial accusations of fraud, trotted out every time the far-right gets rebuked by the voting public, were not reflected by the actions of the people on the ground as evidenced by their wholehearted participation.

July 25, the last day of official campaigning, was marked by the final political rallies. The far-right drew an estimated 100,000. I attended the Maduro rally of some one million. As far as I could see, people had jammed the main boulevards of Caracas. Clearly the Chavistas have a vast and dedicated base.

And they are wildly supportive of their current president Nicolas Maduro, who is seen as carrying on the legacy of the deceased founder of the Bolivarian project, Hugo Chavez, whose birthday is the same as this election day.

But it goes deeper than that. As the slogan yo soy Chavez (I am Chavez) indicates, the base sees the Bolivarian project not simply as one of their political leadership but more so as a collective endeavor.

The real electoral interference

Far greater than any accusation of fraud manufactured by the far-right opposition is the much more significant interference in the electoral process by Washington.

The vote for continuing the Bolivarian Revolution represents a mandate for national sovereignty. Venezuelans went to the polls knowing that a vote for the incumbent meant no relief from US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called “sanctions” have been part of Washington’s failed regime-change campaign explicitly designed to asphyxiate the Venezuelan economy and turn the people against their government.

This shout-out of, in Maduro’s words, “we are not anyone’s colony” was indeed heard around the world.

Roger D. Harris is with the US Peace Council and the 39-year-old human rights organization Task Force on the Americas.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

When President Joseph R. Biden finally removed himself from the race for a second presidential term on July 21, there followed a cascade of high praise, not only for his “brave decision” to step down but also for his “remarkable achievements” over a lifetime of public service. Both long-time colleagues and the major media applauded him in columns or tweets. In a New York Times opinion, historian Jon Meacham called the President’s decision to end his campaign “one of the most remarkable acts of leadership in our history.”

The President can take credit for a number of domestic achievements during his term of office.  Most notably, he oversaw dramatic post-Covid job growth; lowered costs for diabetes drugs; subsidized the production of computer microchips; increased veterans’ war-related benefits; and achieved major legislation on climate and infrastructure. Perhaps his most enduring accomplishment was to set a high standard for diversity in his judicial and Cabinet appointments, which included representation from various minority groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, women and gays. He also appointed the first Native American as Secretary of the Interior.

During the Biden presidency, there were also catastrophic failings: the President’s chaotic and ill-prepared evacuation of U.S. troops from Afghanistan; his push back against negotiations to prevent and later end the Ukraine war; his repeated multi-billion-dollar weapons transfers to the Zelensky government; and his inability to persuade Israel to agree to a ceasefire–all the while delivering a constant stream of bombs and missiles to the IDF.  The last failing earned him the dubious title of “Genocide Joe.”

If we examine Biden’s failures as president in more detail, we see that they each cost the United States dearly–in lives, taxpayer money and global reputation.  In the overdue U.S. exit from Afghanistan, many Afghan and some American lives were lost for lack of adequate advance planning.  Many Afghans who had helped American forces as translators, drivers or other service employees were left behind in fear of retribution by the Taliban.

In an effort to degrade the Russian military, Biden discouraged Ukraine from negotiations before the war and from talks later to end it–apparently preferring to carry on a proxy war against Vladimir Putin on the backs of Ukrainian soldiers. NATO’s threat to admit Ukraine right on Russia’s doorstep gave Putin an excuse to send his tanks barreling toward Kiev in February 2022.  Instead of simply celebrating Ukraine’s repulsion of Russian forces and Kyiv’s survival in a just war of self-defense, Biden organized a coalition of NATO partners to begin massive weapons transfers to aid Ukraine’s expanded “second war” in the southern and eastern parts of the country, which since 2014 were the scene of a Russian-backed ethnic conflict. Although many leaders praised Biden for his leadership in the NATO partnership, the coalition has been at least partly responsible for prolonging the war. Given Russia’s population of more than four times that of Ukraine, it’s not surprising that after two and a half years of brutal conflict, Ukraine is not only failing to achieve its top strategic goals but is currently losing ground.  Biden has encouraged European leaders to put their faith in a NATO that has nearly surrounded Russia and pushed military rather than diplomatic solutions.

Even if Biden’s ongoing support of Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza does not result in ICJ charges of complicity, it will be a lasting and shameful blot on his legacy. The President’s greatest blunder has been his steadfast support of Netanyahu and continuing arms aid to the IDF, which has killed almost 40,000 Palestinians  (mostly children and women)  and destroyed not only residential areas and community infrastructure, but also most medical, educational, religious and cultural facilities.  Experts say it will take tens of billions of dollars to make Gaza habitable again. No such remedy is in sight for the 90,000 Palestinians suffering serious injuries from Israel’s onslaught.  Meanwhile, Gazans are stuck in an open-air prison that lacks not only health workers and hospitals, but also adequate water and food.

Biden’s recent withdrawal from the presidential race and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor may open new possibilities for change.   Her absence from the  Netanyahu address to Congress on July 24 could be a first sign of a distancing from Joe Biden’s war policies toward Gaza.  If Harris wins the party nomination and the election, she has a chance to stop more arms shipments and to reassess America’s relationship with the leaders of Israel and the Arab states.

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Battle between the USS Monitor and Merrimack – Public Domain

On the afternoon of July 13, a family member called me.

“They just shot Trump. This is how civil wars start.”

The family member is an ardent Trump supporter, and he believes, as many others in the Trump camp, that the shooter didn’t act alone. The glaring omission of leaving a roof in the line of fire unprotected fuels that belief, as do facts such as that the shooter was seen on the roof beforehand, and that he was somehow able to carry a ladder and rifle across a distance of around 200 yards from his van to the building without being challenged.

Whether this was a monumental set of screw-ups or something worse, a truism I long ago learned about politics is that perception is reality. And for that reason, if Trump had suffered more than a flesh wound, it would have legitimated violent response in the eyes of many. This is a reason that the sentiment all too widespread, “Too bad he missed,” is remarkably shortsighted. People who believe Trump is the problem, and not the symptom of something deeper, are just not getting it.

There is a growing division in the U.S. between what seem to be almost irreconcilable opposites.  It is hard to see how that division will be resolved short of some kind of conflict. One can hope it will not be bloody, though the violent history of this country does not inspire confidence. In any event, whoever is elected this November, a vast segment of the U.S. population will be deeply unhappy, in fact feel existentially threatened. That is the recipe for divisive clashes.

I have been returning to this theme over the past several years. In this post I will review a number of pieces I have written that indicate reason for deep concern. About polling which shows widespread expectations of national breakdown, and even broad sentiment for division into separate nations. And reviews of several books which delve into the potential for its occurrence. Then in a follow-up post I will offer my own thoughts for how we navigate coming years in the most peaceful manner possible.

Polling on civil war prospects

In a 2021 piece, I asked, “Is the U.S. beyond repair?”.

“Polls show broad support for secession across the political spectrum. A University of Virginia poll found support for breaking blue and red states into two separate countries at 52% among Trump voters and 41% among Biden voters. Asked if leaders from the other party are ‘a clear and present danger to democracy,’ 80% of Biden voters and 84% of Trump voters responded yes.”

The sense that the other side poses an existential threat is exactly what causes civil wars. The election of Lincoln in 1860 created that sense among Southern slaveholders, fearful of losing their property, and led to the secession of the Confederacy.

“Taken all together, one has to ask, is the U.S. as we have known it coming to an end? Will continuation in its current form become so unacceptable to one side or another that it will fly apart? If Democrats pull it out and win in 2024, will the strong tendencies toward secession in red states come to the fore? If Republicans win, and appear to cement in permanent minority rule, how will that play on the West Coast and in the Northeast?”

In 2022, I reported the results of a recent survey in a story, “New poll shows high expectations of civil war.”   I wrote, “Around 40% of U.S. citizens believe a civil war will break out, 47% expect a total economic collapse, and 50% anticipate the end of the U.S. as a global superpower, all in the next 10 years. Those are the results of a poll of 1,000 U.S. citizens conducted Sept. 1-4 by YouGov and The Economist which asked people’s views on 15 catastrophic scenarios. Margin of error is 3%. Results demonstrate that the U.S., once the land of optimism, has sunk into deep pessimism over its future.”

The polling had one bright spot. “While many expect a civil war, few think it would be a good thing. Overall, 69% answered bad, and only 6% good.”

I also reported, “People who believe democracy will survive in the U.S. only marginally exceed those who expect it to end, 39% versus 38%. The end of U.S. democracy is considered very likely by 13%, but the number who think that very unlikely are not much greater at 18%.”

The results are shown in this graphic.

The dangers of seeking domination

Last year I reviewed a book by conservative writer David French in a piece entitled, “Drive for domination puts U.S. unity at risk.”

“He introduces his book, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, with these words. ‘It’s time for Americans to wake up to a fundamental reality: the continued unity of the United States of America cannot be guaranteed. At this moment in history, there is not a single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pushing us apart. We cannot assume that a continent-sized, multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy can remain united together, and it will not remain united if our political class cannot and will not adapt to an increasingly diverse and divided American public.’

“He lays blame for increasing divisions precisely at the feet of that class. ‘The people who actually drive American politics and policy are committed to escalation, and as they escalate, they drive their committed followers to ever-greater frenzies . . . cultural and economic incentives align to time and time again grant the most fame and fortune to those who stoke the most rage.’

“In a nation too diverse to function any other way than as a pluralist order, the drive for domination puts unity at risk. Writes French, ‘ . . . the quest for moral, cultural, and political domination by either side of our national divide risks splitting the nation into two (or three or four).’

“French himself became a target, and a meme, for his advocacy of civility and traditional liberalism in the sense of respect for civil liberties, when New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari published an essay, ‘Against David French-ism’ that went viral. French says Ahmari typifies exactly what he warned against when the latter argued that politics was moving into a state of ‘war and enmity’ so civility and decency toward political opponents were ‘second-order values.’

“’That kind of “quest for domination is dangerous . . . Our nation’s angriest culture warriors need to know the cost of their conflict. As they seek to crush their political and cultural enemies, they may destroy the nation they seek to rule.’”

Surveying secession prospects

In a 2023 piece entitled, A national divorce? Surveying the potential for a national breakup, I reviewed another book by a conservative writer around the same theme,  American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by F.H. Buckley.

“Secession movements are rising around the world, notes Buckley. He cites the movement for Scottish independence, the breakup of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, and separatist sentiments in nations ranging from Pakistan and Indonesia to Turkey and Nigeria. ‘Go down the list and there are secession groups in nearly every country. And are we to think that, almost alone in the world, we’re immune from this?’ To prove his point, Buckley cites secession efforts in California and Cascadia, coming from the left, and Texas, coming from the right.

“’We’re now living in a secessionist moment in world history,’ writes Buckley.

“’Countries threaten to split apart when their people seem hopelessly divided,’ he writes. ‘We’re less united today than we’ve been at any time since the Civil War, divided by politics, religion and culture. In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of the law, we’re already divided into two nations just as much as in 1861.’

“National divisions have caused political gridlock with divided government unable to meet in the middle of key issues such as health care and immigration reform. That has produced the first constitutional crisis since the Civil War. ‘And, as in 1861, that’s a recipe for secession.’

“While the idea of secession ‘has been consigned to the political loony bin since the Civil War,’ the idea is increasingly respectable, Buckley asserts. ‘The barriers to a breakup are far lower than most people would think, and if the voters in a state were determined to leave the Union they could probably do so.’”

“Writes Buckley, ‘I see us on a train, bound for a breakup. The switches that might stop us have failed, and if we want to stay united we must learn how to slow the engine.” His recommended solution . . .  is ‘a devolution of power to the states.’”

High support for regional commonwealths

In another 2023 article, “While regional independence gains traction, we need to consider our interdependence,” I reported on a poll that shows a shockingly high proportion of people in the U.S. favor some form of devolution.

“While the movements that proclaim support for secession and independence are still relatively small, the potential support for the idea is surprisingly large. A poll conducted in July 2022 by Yahoo News/YouGov found:

+ 32% of Republicans and 21% of Democrats believe the U.S. would be better off splitting into “red” and “blue” countries.

+ 42% of Republicans and 51% of Democrats say things would be worse off.

+ As a whole, 21% of voters are in the better off camp compared to 46% replying worse off.

“Though the majority favors the status quo, the numbers speak to a large potential base of support for independence movements. A July-August 2021 University of Virginia poll found significant support for regional unions, at 66% among Southern Republicans and 47% among West Coast Democrats. (Results are shown in in the opening graphic.) Overall support for new regional unions was no less than one-third in any region.

“These numbers point to scenarios for a broad rearrangement in U.S. governance structures over coming years. If history indicates anything, it is that big changes often come unexpectedly, from the French Revolution to the break-up of the Soviet Union. As tensions long rising on an earthquake fault result in a sudden snap, the conditions that lead to such earth-shattering political events build up for a long time before the break comes. Divisions have been increasing in the U.S. for some time, and could be near a breaking point. Large segments of the population feel marginalized from a political system that seems increasingly unresponsive to all interests but those of big money.”

Secession from a progressive perspective

The best work on the centrifugal tendencies of the U.S. is by a progressive author, Richard Kreitner, Break It Up: Secession, Division and The Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. Kreitner documents secessionist movements throughout its history, including a little known effort by slavery abolitionists to have the North secede from the South when the latter dominated U.S. politics. I wrote about it in 2022 this piece “Secession from the left.” Kreitner’s conclusions are worth quoting at length.

“If the radical abolitionists of the 1840s thought the Slave Power held such complete control over the government that no progress toward emancipation could be made within it, should we wonder whether we’re fast approaching that day – if it has not already arrived – when the Money Power’s control over our politicians has become so deeply entrenched, so ineradicable, that no remedy can be found in the existing political system?”

“How long will Americans rightly terrified by the coming climate chaos work within a system that appears utterly incapable of doing anything to wean our country off a way of life that has rendered human beings an endangered species? Our government appears to be irrevocably broken, and we are running out of time . . . The breakdown in constitutional government is nearly complete. At the federal level, every branch is mired in a legitimacy crisis from which the future offers little hope of easy extraction.”

“Our political discourse is civil war by other means – we sound as if we do not really want to continue to be me members of one country  . . . There never was any guarantee that the country would survive, and there is none now . . .   Say we can agree, despite all our differences, that we want to preserve the Union . . . significant changes in our political and even social behavior will be required. We cannot keep trying to bludgeon one another into submission or indulge fantasies of the sudden evaporation, wholesale extermination, or unconditional surrender of the other side.”

Progressive Kreitner here echoes the sentiments of conservative French. Or as Rodney King asked, “Can’t we all just get along?”

This first appeared in The Raven..

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Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Jerusalem – CC BY 2.0

I returned home from Wednesday’s anti-Netanyahu demonstration on Capitol Hill in time to watch the Israeli prime minister address a joint session of the U.S. Congress.  The vilest thing about the event was not the speech itself, which was predictably bloodthirsty and mendacious, but the reactions of the assembled Congresspeople.  Almost all of them stood and cheered lengthily while their invited guest smeared those protesting his appearance in the streets outside the Capitol as pro-Hamas “idiots” who “stand with rapists and murderers,” and whose protests are “paid for by Iran.”

Understand that almost all those protesting, including me, were Americans — a group that the members of Congress claim to represent.  But never mind that.  Benjamin Netanyahu is an experienced con artist who knows very well when he has an audience of suckers who will buy any Brooklyn Bridge that he feels like selling.  I arrived home in time to watch him bedazzle the Congressional rubes by introducing wounded Israeli war veterans — who just happened to be people of color – in the visitors’ gallery.  No one laughed or objected when he defamed the protestors, when he called the Israel Defense Forces the most scrupulously pro-civilian army in world history, or when he accused the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court of disseminating an antisemitic “blood libel.”  But his best trick of all was using the Book of Genesis to justify Israeli claims to all of 21^st century Palestine.

“They call Israel a colonialist state,” he ranted, pounding the lectern. “Don’t they know that the Land of Israel is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prayed, where Isaiah and Jeremiah preached and where David and Solomon ruled?”

That grotesque non-sequitur evoked the loudest cheers of all!  Netanyahu understands perfectly well that what sustains the remaining American support for Israel is a combination of Zionist political and financial pressure, evangelical Christian hopes for a Middle East Armageddon, and U.S. imperialism.  He baldly presented Israel as a U.S. agent in the region obviating the need for American “boots on the ground.”  His peroration, cheered on passionately by the yokels, called for an Abrahamic Alliance to make war on Iran and Hezbollah.

About half of the Democrats in Congress had the decency to absent themselves from this bellicose farce.  Kamela Harris refused to attend and preside; Rashida Tlaib attended but held up a small sign that read “War Criminal.”  Other Democrats like Jerry Nadler of New York and Jamie Raskin of Maryland were in the hall but behaving weirdly – sitting on their hands for some of Bibi’s more obnoxious pronouncements but rising to cheer at other moments of jingoistic bombast.  No point in offending AIPAC and its supporters in an election year!

Most Republicans, of course, were in ecstasy throughout, especially when Netanyahu praised their Dear Leader.  As I write this, he is on the way to Mar-a-Lago to pay him homage.  So much for Donald Trump the “peace candidate.”  The one useful result of this globally embarrassing event was the revelation – if one were needed – that the MAGA Republicans are united in support of a U.S.-financed “forever war” in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the world watches in disbelief as the clueless American Empire further isolates itself morally and politically from virtually all the world’s peoples.  With friends like Netanyahu, as the old Jewish joke goes, who needs enemies?

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In a shameful moment for U.S. history, an accused war criminal addressed Congress on July 24.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to plead for more arms for his war on Gaza, where the International Court of Justice has found it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide. “Give us the tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster,” Netanyahu said.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is seeking a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But instead of arresting him, Congress gave him multiple standing ovations.

Beyond applause, the U.S. government is also Israel’s chief supplier of arms. Every year, Congress sends billions in military aid — including thousands of high powered explosives and other weapons since October.

To avoid complicity in war crimes and genocide, these shipments must end.

There is overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces under Netanyahu’s leadership have committed massive human rights atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza. And that’s against the backdrop of an illegal military occupation of Palestinian territory and apartheid, as another ICJ ruling confirmed recently.

Nonetheless, Congress invited Netanyahu to speak. He used this platform to deny any responsibility for the slaughter, famine, and catastrophic destruction in Gaza — and to denigrate Americans who are rightly horrified by their government’s support for his genocidal campaign.

As Netanyahu spoke, thousands of people took to the streets near the Capitol. Braving tear gas and arrest, they gave voice to the majority of Americans who demand an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an embargo on arms to Israel.

Most Americans are disgusted that U.S-made bombs keep turning up at massacre after massacre. Over the past few weeks alone, Israel has repeatedly bombed so-called “safe zones” and at least eight schools in Gaza where thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinians were sheltering.

On July 9, the Israeli military murdered at least 30 Palestinians who were playing soccer at the Al-Awda school using GBU-39 bombs made by Boeing. Israel also dropped GBU-39s on another UN school-turned-shelter in the Nuseirat refugee camp on July 6, killing at least 40, and before that on Palestinian families sheltering in plastic tents during the May 26 Rafah massacre.

On July 13, Israeli forces killed 90 people and injured hundreds more at the Al-Mawasi refugee camp that Israel had designated a “safe zone.” Children were reportedly found “in pieces.” Eight 2,000-pound bombs turned the civilian area into a “smoldering crater.” At least one of the munitions was a Boeing-made JDAM.

Despite these atrocities, the weapons continue to flow.

In May, President Biden announced that he would pause the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs ahead of Israel’s invasion of Rafah, which Biden had called “a red line.” However, Israel has still received destructive 500-pound bomb shipments despite invading Rafah, and the killing in Gaza continues.

These weapons shipments violate both international and U.S. law. The United States is legally obligated to withhold military assistance when U.S. weapons are used to violate human rights.

The UN Human Rights Council and various experts have called on all countries to end the sale and transfer of military equipment to Israel — or else risk complicity in crimes, including genocide. They called on arms manufacturers supplying Israel to do the same, including Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.

Polls show that a majority of Americans support closing the arms pipeline to Israel. In advance of Netanyahu’s speech, seven major labor unions representing nearly 6 million workers called on President Biden to “immediately halt all military aid to Israel.”

The voices of the American people deserve more respect in Congress than Netanyahu’s lies and demands. An immediate end to all U.S. weapons transfers to Israel is long overdue, alongside a permanent ceasefire and larger pursuit of freedom and justice for the Palestinian people.

We must not allow ourselves to become a nation that applauds mass murder.

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Image by Lukáš Lehotský.

Rafael Grossi, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Director General, has been busy over the last few years. The media has often reported on his efforts to highlight “the risk of a major nuclear accident” at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Grossi has also met with Russian President Vladimir Putin twice to discuss the situation at Zaporizhzhia, arguing that a “severe nuclear accident…would recognize no borders” and “we must do everything possible to prevent” such an accident.

But Grossi has also simultaneously been increasing the risk of accidents, albeit inadvertently, by calling for building more nuclear reactors. This advocacy takes many forms. He has written op-eds in prominent outlets like Foreign Affairs. He has been trying to canvas countries to start nuclear power programs. For example, in March 2024. he went to Baghdad and committed to working with Iraq to help build a nuclear reactor “for peaceful purposes”. And as a way to deal with the unaffordable costs of nuclear reactors, he has pushed the World Bank and Asian Development Bank to provide funding for building nuclear plants.

None of this make sense. When viewed as investment advice to banks, Grossi’s promotion of nuclear power does not meet the laugh threshold. According to Grossi, the banks’ lack of funding for nuclear energy is “out of date, out of step with what is happening”. But it is Grossi’s advocacy that is out of step with happening to nuclear energy in the real world.

When nuclear energy is evaluated through how much it contributes to the world’s electricity production, the technology has been declining continuously for over 25 years, from 17.5 percent in 1996 down to 9.2 percent in 2022. For reasons discussed later, this trend will likely continue. In other words, the importance of nuclear energy is diminishing. Investing more money into a technology that some scholars argue is “destined for decline” makes little sense.

When analyzing Grossi’s advice to these development banks, one should remember what these institutions are supposed to do. The World Bank’s mission is “to end extreme poverty and boost prosperity on a livable planet”. And the Asian Development Bank has a similar mission, with a regional focus on Asia and the Pacific. The World Bank’s mission, in particular, mentions the multiple, intertwined crises we are confronting and emphasizes both the need for “affordable energy” and how quickly these crises should be addressed, stating “time is of the essence”. Nuclear energy fails on both counts.

Expensive and Slow

Electricity from nuclear reactors is costly and does not provide affordable energy, especially when compared to other low-carbon, renewable sources of energy. During the same period mentioned earlier, the share of all electricity generated by modern renewables has risen from just over 1 percent of in 1996 to 15.9 percent in 2023. Today, it is utility-scale solar photovoltaic power that provides the least costly option for generating electricity plants in many countries. This is why, in 2020, the International Energy Agency dubbed solar “the new king of the world’s electricity markets”. Money spent on nuclear reactors by banks would only divert funds away from investing in renewables and associated technologies and infrastructures.

Nuclear reactors have also almost never been on time. An astonishing 89 percent of all reactors that were connected to the grid between 2020 and 2022 were delayed: just two reactors in China were on schedule. In the United States, the two AP1000 reactors that just started operating in the state of Georgia ended up costing nearly $35 billion. In 2011, when the utility company building the reactor sought permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it projected a total cost of $14 billion, and “in-service dates of 2016 and 2017” for the two units. These cost escalations and delays are even more extreme than the historical pattern identified in an academic study that examined 180 nuclear power projects and found that 175 had exceeded their initial budgets, by an average of 117%, and took 64% longer than initially projected

That is not all. Around the world, 92 nuclear projects have been cancelled or suspended, usually after hundreds of millions, if not billions, have been spent. In the United States, the latest such cancellation was a project involving a small modular reactor from NuScale that the company advertised as “smaller, safer, and cheaper”. Cheaper, it certainly wasn’t, with a final cost estimate that was around 250% more than the initial per megawatt cost for the Vogtle project in Georgia. The earlier cancellation, of the V. C. Summer project involving two AP1000 reactors in South Carolina, was canceled after over $9 billion was spent—electricity consumers in the state will be paying for decades for this bad investment.

Necessary Conditions for Nuclear Power

It is not as though development banks have not considered nuclear energy. Back in 1959, the World Bank did invest in a nuclear project in Italy, based on a set of conditions, most importantly the unavailability of other cost-competitive alternatives. That project was not a success. More important for the present discussion is that with the reduced cost and increasing availability of solar and wind power, nuclear power no longer meets these conditions to be cost-effective.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB), too, undertook an analysis of various technologies and published an Energy Policy paper in 2009 that highlighted a number of barriers confronting nuclear power development, including “public concerns related to nuclear proliferation, waste management, safety issues, high investment costs, long lead times, and commercial acceptability of new technologies”. Thanks to these concerns, the paper declared that “ADB will maintain its current policy of non-involvement in the financing of nuclear power generation”. None of these barriers have disappeared.

The challenge of ensuring safety was reinforced just two years after the ADB’s paper when multiple reactors at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant melted down spreading radioactive materials widely, and posing difficult technical, socio-political and economical challenges: including an estimated future bill of 35 to 80 trillion yen (around $322 to $736 billion). Fukushima served as a reminder that the nature of nuclear technology ensures “the inevitability of accidents”.

The Unlearned Lessons of Zaporizhzhia

A different route to a severe nuclear accident is on display at the Zaporizhzhia power plant—and Grossi has been eloquent about how such an accident will “have ripples and reverberations all over the world”. But instead of considering Zaporizhzhia as a wake-up call to reflect on whether the world should continue to build more nuclear power plants, Grossi has taken recourse to advocating for five principles of nuclear safety and security. Unfortunately for him these rules are unlikely to be widely accepted—as evidenced by the many attacks on the Zaporizhzhia plant.

This is not for lack of precedence. Well before Russia occupied Zaporizhzhia, Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 and, then in 2007, bombed the Al-Kibar nuclear facility where Syria was building a reactor. Iran and the United States have also attacked Iraq’s nuclear facilities. None of the attackers faced any consequences.

Grossi’s principles and calls for new regimes might also contradict other imperatives. In a recent paper published in The Nonproliferation Review, two scholars have examined the history of such attacks in detail and concluded that “attacks on nuclear facilities endure as a feature of the global nonproliferation regime because the international community—or at least some of the most influential members of the community—deem them a necessary option for the maintenance of that regime”. In other words, Zaporizhzhia is unlikely to be the last nuclear plant at risk of being attacked.

None of this information is new but they don’t appear to play any part in Grossi’s advocacy for nuclear energy. When advising the World Bank to invest in nuclear power, he doesn’t explain that the tens of billions of dollars the Bank might invest in a nuclear reactor could, within a matter of minutes, be converted into a cleanup project that would cost hundreds of billions. Or explaining to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni that the small modular reactors he recommended that Italy build could be blown up and the result might, as with Zaporizhzhia, cause “enormous suffering”.

Grossi’s silence about this risk should be troubling at the best of times. But it is particularly inexcusable when he is, in parallel, emphasizing the risks of suffer a major accident at the Zaporizhzhia power plant. When he went to Iraq recently, he actively downplayed the legitimate concerns in that country thanks to its nuclear reactors being bombed by Israel and the United States. Grossi’s prescription is to simply call for “turning the page on this complex past”. Can he genuinely and credibly assure Iraq that such an attack will not happen again?

The deeper problem is a conflict of interest. As the head of the International Atomic Energy, Rafael Grossi, like his predecessors, tasked with two separate objectives: “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world” and to “ensure, so far as it is able, that assistance provided by it or at its request or under its supervision or control is not used in such a way as to further any military purpose”. The case for promoting nuclear energy was never very strong and has completely collapsed in recent years. It is past time to simply abandon the first objective and focus on the second.

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Photograph Source: United States Senate – Public Domain

Trying to make sense of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race and deification of Vice President Kamala Harris into the pantheon of great Democratic leaders, I reached out to someone on the inside and got back the following email.

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Photograph Source: Muhammad Sabah, B’Tselem – CC BY 4.0

The International Court of Justice released its historic advisory opinion on 19 July 2024 just as I was finishing my essay on Israel’s theft and abuse of the water resources of Palestine.

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An Israeli soldier checking the IDs of Palestinians at the Huwara checkpoint. Photo by Gary Fields.

Lost in Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the Presidential election, and the now-likely accession of Kamala Harris to Democratic nominee, is the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last week on the legality of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.*   In a searing rebuke to the State of Israel, the Court in its 83-page brief refuted Israeli claims that the Palestinian territories under its control are “disputed,” not occupied.  More to the point, the Court determined that the occupation regime established by Israel in these three areas, which it considers to be “a single territorial unit,” [p. 27] is in violation of innumerable statutes of international law.

From restrictions on basic rights of free movement, to special pass laws for Palestinians, arbitrary and systematic demolitions of Palestinian homes, and overt discrimination against Palestinians as a group, the ICJ Opinion catalogs a widespread pattern of abuses by the State of Israel as an occupier and violator of the most fundamental human rights of Palestinians over whom it rules.  In conclusion, the Court notes, “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Territories is illegal.” [p. 72ff].

From this ruling, Israel emerges as nothing other than a pariah state, similar to that other notorious violator of human rights, the apartheid regime of South Africa.

According to the Court, in the Territories under its occupation, Israel has created a system of laws, policies, and practices resulting in physical segregation and differential legal treatment for Palestinians.  By these measures, such a system is akin to an apartheid system, that is, a regime that subjects people to different sets of laws, policies, and practices according to race, ethnicity or religion.

For several years now, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights have condemned Israel as an apartheid state.

Now, for the first time, the World Court adjudicating the conduct of States, has affirmed this contention about Israeli apartheid, writing in its Opinion of four days ago “that Israel’s legislation and measures constitute a breach of Article 3 of CERD” [the Convention for the Elimination of Racial Segregation].  Article 3 of CERD makes reference to the illegality of “racial segregation and apartheid” and obligates state signatories to the Convention to “undertake to prevent, prohibit and eradicate all practices of this nature.” [pp. 64-65]  A breach of Article 3 of CERD means that the country is in violation of the international convention on segregation and apartheid.

It is this part of the ICJ ruling that is undoubtedly the most vexing for the U.S.  If, according to the world’s preeminent international legal authority, Israel has entered the legal terrain once occupied by South Africa, then members of the international body under its jurisdiction, UN member states are obligated not to aid and abet such regime as was the case with South Africa.  The problem for the U.S. is obvious.  America is deeply entangled in the probable genocidal activity of a now-designated apartheid regime.  At the same time, there is an even more immediate, and in many ways more deeply troubling problem for the U.S.

This week, the embattled Prime Minister of Israel, Benyamin Netanyahu addressed lawmakers in the U.S. Congress.  The Israeli PM has performed this role on multiple occasions previously and, as in past appearances, he was feted by a cast of mostly adoring and compliant legislators who accorded him saintly status with multiple standing ovations and raucous calls of approval.  There is something truly sordid in all of this.  Imagine the leader of a State now carrying the legal designation of a pariah regime and violator of the apartheid convention, who is at helm of a military plausibly committing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza – with a possible indictment over his own head as a war criminal – being feted and applauded as if he were Mother Teresa.  It is difficult to imagine a more macabre kind of spectacle.

Finally, this invitation to the Israeli leader and the relationship with Israel in general poses a daunting problem for the now-likely Democratic Presidential nominee.

Kamala Harris is a lawyer and former prosecutor.  She is no doubt familiar with at least the broad outlines of the legal entanglements now gripping America’s most ironclad ally.  As a prosecutor, Harris seems certain to grasp the ramifications of aiding and abetting entities and individuals designated as criminals.  At certain times, the Vice President has shown that she does have a conscience and some compassion for those abandoned by good fortune.  On the moral dimensions of the carnage in Gaza, however, Kamala Harris has been largely silent.  Her conscience and sense of moral righteousness are going to be tested in the coming days as this spectacle in the U.S. Congress unfolds as a prelude to November, and perhaps if fate and fortune align in a certain way, into the future as well.

All references come from the ICJ Opinion accessible at this link.

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Photo: NATO.

Why has NATO been so generally accepted in Europe by almost all the major political parties and especially puzzling, the social democratic ones? Its economic costs, illegal aggressive wars, environmental damage, and the risks of nuclear annihilation would seem to make it a prime platform item. Well-informed political activists are unlikely to believe that an invasion of Switzerland or Denmark is imminent. There are significant anti-NATO movements, such as No to War No to NATO, but so far they haven’t been able to turn the tide.

Some reasons are fairly obvious. The US military connections to European defense and foreign ministries began during World War II. These strong ties have continued, now with an emphasis on NATO’s newly acquired feminist face, the Women, Peace, and Security agenda.

The photo above, taken at the 2022 NATO summit in Madrid, depicts women Foreign Affairs and Defense ministers, from Canada, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, Iceland, Slovenia, Germany, and Belgium.

Promotion long and wide has been carried out by overtly pro-NATO lobbies such as the Atlantic Council and national think tanks, for example, the  Council on Foreign Relations (US), the British Royal Institute of International Affairs, and their counterparts in many nations. There is also a Youth Atlantic Treaty Association, a network of national organizations of young professionals, university students and researchers.

The secretive Bilderberg group harnesses the political, economic, academic and journalism elites of NATO nations. Operation Gladio, Operation Paperclip and others have sustained firm links with military and intelligence agencies. There has also been covert and overt interventions in political parties and nongovernmental organizations, such as the CIA funding of Christian Democratic party in 1948 to defeat the Communist Party and meddling in the British Labour Party to minimize the influence of the Committee on Nuclear Disarmament. These  have also cleared the path for NATO.  Eastern Europe was even more easily penetrated by NATO, after the devastation of its economic, cultural, and scientific institutions.

There have been constant protests against NATO bases, yet their less vocal sympathizers appreciate the economic benefit. At first, in war-torn Europe both the liberated and the occupied nations saw little economic activity. Now the European economy is increasingly militarized, having outsourced much of its civilian industry and facing declines in its tourist industry due to pandemics, protests by local residents, and environmental costs. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Fact Sheet of 2024, weapons production has greatly accelerated in many European countries, even though NATO and national militaries also equip themselves royally with US products.  Sales to the Middle East and other violence inflicted areas are good business.

         Now workers, many unionized and some even socialists and communists, have secure jobs in war industries and in the burgeoning military-civilian industries. As the Erikssons have documented:

The defence industry is undergoing rapid change, particularly regarding the development of dual-use technology and transfer of technology between military and civilian domains. . . The blurring of the military-civilian divide is particularly noticeable with the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), digitalization, satellite technology, integrated quantum, photonics, high-capacity wireless communications, and “big data” networking through 5 G – developments which have been referred to as “the fourth industrial revolution. . .”

Just as its military bases need everything, NATO institutes, operations, conferences, war games, and its supersized headquarters in Brussels equip and maintain from every kind of business. Much information is available on the NATO website; it also has a presence on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and X (Twitter). The NATO Support and Procurement Agency contracts database for 2023 lists only orders valued above €80,000. It includes “consumables” from a firm in Luxembourg, transport of tents and conference center equipment from Belgium, winter clothing from France, “civil and mechanical” from Albania, medical equipment from Sweden, waterproof bags from Great Britain, and spare parts from vendors in many countries. Undoubtedly, even smaller businesses supply a wide range, and, as in the US, provide economic survival for owners, workers, and communities (see The Trillion Dollar Silencer). A listing of bids above €800,000 includes medical treatment structures from a firm in Italy, training services (Netherlands and Spain), and military cots and mosquito nets (Italy and Turkey). Although the largest in both lists are expenditures for weapons, firms that are often the economic lifeblood—rather the deathblood—of their communities, the smaller (but not piddling) purchases can influence many citizens and their elected representatives.

NATO training and research operations involve civilian universities, which increasingly have military departments, as well as national military academies. There are even public high school training programs, e.g., in Sweden, Germany, and France (Defence Cadets). In addition, the US Department of Defense has direct contracts with universities and scientific institutes worldwide, especially for weapons development, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.

NATO also has several layers of its own training entities. One is the Partnership Training and Education Centres, in 34 member and partner (i.e., not full member) countries. Some examples are Switzerland, Geneva Centre for Security Policy; Israel, IDF Military Medical Academy; Serbia, Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Training Centre; Mongolia, Peace Support Operations Centre; Colombia, International Demining Centre; Italy, The International Institute of Humanitarian Law; and United Kingdom, United Kingdom Defence Academy.

Another NATO network is the 28 Centres of Excellence which are “international military organizations that train and educate leaders and specialists from NATO member and partner countries.” They are funded nationally and accredited by NATO. Some of these are Civil-Military Cooperation, one of two in the Netherlands; Crisis Management and Disaster Response, Bulgaria; Modelling and Simulation, one of several in Italy; Strategic Communications, Latvia; Climate Change and Security, Canada; and Maritime Security, Turkey. The latter is described as:

[P]roviding expertise both as a centre for academic research and as a (multinational) hub for practical training in the field of maritime security, along with relevant domains (maritime trade, energy security, maritime environment, maritime resources, public health, maritime transport-logistic). The Centre strives to achieve the necessary collaboration among stakeholders from government, industry, academia and the private sector.

NATO’s enormous Civil Diplomacy department works through all print and electronic media. Its Press Tours enable reporters to “sail aboard the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush on the Adriatic Sea” and “mingle with counter-terrorism experts in a metro station in Rome, Italy.” The department also welcomes grant applications from think tanks, universities, NGOs, and other civil society organizations “ranging from out-of-the box, non-traditional ideas to more institutional formats. Particular focus should be placed on outreach to youth audiences, female audiences and key opinion formers, including those who have not connected with NATO before.”

As Merje Kuus notes:

In addition to NATO’s own public diplomacy division, the alliance’s message is produced and projected through a host of NGOs that collaborate with NATO but are not affiliated with it. Funded through national foreign and defense ministries, NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division, and private companies, they organize a wide range of activities designed to popularize NATO within and beyond its member states.

NATO’s less obvious influence may derive from its accelerated penetration of civilian institutions: education, entertainment, teenage “influencers,” festivals, nongovernmental organizations, even progressive and human rights movements. NATO portrays itself as simply the prime association of democratic nations, which was apparently very persuasive in Eastern European regimes trying to divest themselves of the “totalitarian” label.

A notable example is its Women, Peace and Security Agenda. Journalist Lily Lynch reports:

In January 2018, Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg held an unprecedented press conference with Angelina Jolie. While InStyle reported that Jolie “was dressed in a black off-the-shoulder sheath dress, a matching capelet and classic pumps (also black)”, there was a deeper purpose to this meeting: sexual violence in war. The pair had just co-authored a piece for the Guardian entitled “Why NATO must defend women’s rights”. The timing was significant. At the height of the #MeToo movement, the most powerful military alliance in the world had become a feminist ally. “Ending gender-based violence is a vital issue of peace and security as well as of social justice,” they wrote. “NATO can be a leader in this effort.”

A study by Katharine AM Wright, exploring the legitimacy given to NATO by the surprising participation of women’s rights groups in its activities, found some activists who argued that it enabled feminists to “advise” NATO, “to get it to hear things that they don’t usually hear,” and to “speak truth to power.”

As climate change is among NATO’s catalog of serious threats to security, environmentalists speak at NATO conferences and vice versa, serve on advisory boards, and formally interact in many ways. For example, the 2020 meeting of the Brussels Dialogue on Climate Diplomacy and the Environment & Development Resource Centre was hosted by the Policy Planning Unit in the Office of the NATO Secretary-General.

In addition to the more traditional Youth Atlantic Treaty Association, NATO has more recently created youth activities that are more cuddly. Its 2022 “Protect the Future campaign” recruited:

12 young online creators [teenage “influencers”] from Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. To discover more about the Alliance’s work, the creators met with the Secretary General in May; travelled to the Madrid Summit in June; visited the US aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush in October; and went on an AWACS training mission in November.

The outcome, NATO reported, was 300,000 social media engagements that reached more than 9 million young people.

In another wing of this campaign, “young artists from across the Alliance took part in an open competition to help create NATO’s first-ever graphic novel, ‘Protect the Future.’ Six young artists were selected to work with professionals to produce the book.” For the multitude, a Youth Summit was held that included 35,000 people from 99 countries.

At the [2023] NATO Gaming Tournament in Warsaw, Poland, thousands of gamers from across the Alliance and around the world gathered to play online games and chat with experts from NATO Headquarters. The vibe in the room is casual and relaxed. Young gamers from Warsaw mingle with artists, soldiers and NATO experts. In one corner, troops from NATO’s multinational battlegroup in Poland play vintage console games, including Street Fighter and Super Mario. In another area, gamers mash buttons on old arcade games like Pac-Man.

The arts are not neglected. NATO sponsors exhibits, murals, and competitions:

Are you an artist under 35? Do you have a creative mind and want your artwork to be displayed at a permanent location in Washington D.C. where NATO will mark the 75th anniversary of the Alliance? Submit your work to the NATO mural competition – an opportunity to showcase your talent and artistic vision of the future. The winner will get to work with a local street artist to feature their mural permanently on a wall in the city.

The NATO mural competition will give young talents a chance to produce a signature image for NATO’s anniversary as part of its “Protect the Future” campaign.

In our era of network governance it is not surprising that NATO has close connections with the European Union (including its Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and European Defense Agency), the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and many other intergovernmental organizations. These in turn are interwoven with international (e.g., World Economic Forum, Amnesty International) and thousands of national nongovernmental organizations (e.g., Council on Foreign Relations), foundations, and business corporations. Zbigniew Brzezinski noted in The Grand Chessboard:

As the imitation of American ways gradually pervades the world, it creates a more congenial setting for the exercise of the indirect and seemingly consensual American hegemony. And as in the case of the domestic American system, that hegemony involves a complex structure of interlocking institutions and procedures, designed to generate consensus and obscure asymmetries in power and influence. (p.27)

The staffs of intergovernmental organizations are required to be politically neutral. However, there is also pressure on progressive or left wing nongovernmental organizations to avoid confrontation or strong dissent with conference participants or any member of the “partnership.”

The very size of this monumental hive of associations, including representatives, staffs, task forces of university and other experts, NGOs, and contractors may in itself affect the complexion of European political parties. Although I have found no evidence so far, perhaps there has been a “brain drain” of progressive activists into the more promising, interesting, and often paid work of these institutions, compared with the scant rewards of local political parties. It could be yet another factor in the passive or active support for NATO in Europe.  Might there be scholars, journalists, or activists exploring this possibility?

Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are from the NATO website. 

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Photo by Marek Studzinski

“If NATO nations are willing to donate aircraft to Ukraine and train pilots, why not let those same freshly trained pilots fly sorties from bases on NATO territory—and refuel, rearm and repair these jets there as well?”

– Washington Post oped, July 2024.

In the mid-1990s, I was a professor of international relations at the National War College and a member of the Brookings Institution’s Russian Study Group that held regular off-the-record discussions of key issues.  This was an important time when the leading subject for the study group was the question of expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  The group had rather high level membership from the National Security Council, the Departments of State and Defense, and the intelligence community, particularly CIA and INR, the intelligence arm of State.  These individuals were for the most part supporters of the absurd idea that we had won the Cold War and there was a mood of triumphalism and exceptionalism that was obvious in their support for NATO expansion.

Some of the leading cheerleaders in this respect were Nicholas Burns, currently our ambassador to China, and the late Helmut Sonnenfeldt, the Counselor at State who worked closely with Henry A. Kissinger during the key events in the 1970s that led to arms control and detente.  Brookings scholar Fiona Hill, who went on to serve in Donald Trump’s NSC, and James Steinberg, a former deputy national security adviser and deputy at the State Department, were members who actively supported the expansion.

I was essentially an outlier at these meetings because of my strong opposition to any expansion of NATO, and I had strong support from a leading Sovietologist, Ray Garthoff, a former ambassador and the major actor in the negotiation of the SALT and ABM treaties.

Our opposition was based on the danger of expanding an alliance that formerly had a common perception of the threat into a wider organization that would be divided into its east and west wings, which is currently the case.  But our major opposition was that Russia in the 1990s was a failing state in no position to argue against the expansion, but that Russia would not be failing forever or even for long. And that Russia-which is a national security state in so many ways—would never tolerate having NATO members in the east and surely would not tolerate NATO members on their entire border.

It should be understood that in 1990, when we were trying to negotiate the Soviet troop withdrawal from East Germany, we told the Soviets at the highest level that, if their troops left, we would never “leap frog” over East Germany to go into East Europe.  Former secretary of state James Baker said that to the Soviet foreign minister, and President George H. W. Bush delivered a similar message to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.  I interviewed Baker for my book on Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, and Baker confirmed the use of the words “leap frog.”  He even had his assistant look up the notes of his meetings with Shevardnadze to confirm the use of the words “leap frog.”  Unfortunately, nothing was put into writing.  Baker wanted to write a policy statement with the Soviets, but national security adviser Brent Scowcroft blocked that effort.  The conventional wisdom was that Scowcroft was a moderate; he wasn’t—he was more of a hard-liner than was understood at the time, and so was President Bush who opposed Ronald Reagan’s disarmament policies.

Frankly, anyone who has spent any time working on the Soviet/Russia problem should understand the great Soviet/Russian fear of encirclement and their fears of war on their vulnerable borders.  Nevertheless, a huge group of so-called specialists over the years enthusiastically supported going further, expanding NATO into former Soviet republics (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), employing a so-called defensive weapons system in Romania, Poland, and the Czech Republic against Iran of all places, deploying German troops into the Baltics, and creating U.S. bases in Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania.  Fortunately, we were spared the thought of a Camp Trump in Poland, but I don’t know who was responsible for that. 

So here were are in the midst of two and a half years of war in Ukraine, which is not going well for Ukraine and really hasn’t give Russia a lot to brag about in view of its sadistic war crimes.  But for politicians and pundits to chortle that Putin’s war was “unprovoked” is simply wrong.  We clearly played a role in provoking this war and only the United States could provide the security guarantees to both Ukraine and to Russia that would end it.  Meanwhile, our politicians and pundits argue that if Putin can’t be stopped in Ukraine, he will move on.  Move on to where, which one of the many NATO countries that surround him.  His conventional tactics failed against a small backward state on his border, so he resorted to a war of terrorism. I don’t believe Russia is in a position to attack a NATO country.  

My next article will deal with the role that the United States could play if we had a president who could throw himself into such a difficult task as well as having a Department of State that understands the strategies and processes of such an endeavor.  Sadly, we don’t have either one. The prospect of a Trump-Vance administration doesn’t offer any hope.  Trump says that he doesn’t “give a shit” about NATO, and Vance says that he does not care in any way about Ukraine.

Unfortunately, the United States has no plan for Ukraine, let alone for ending the war, let alone negotiating the peace.  We’re simply in a tit-for-tat spiral raising the ante as we go.  The latest suggestion in a Washington Post oped from a former Naval officer is indicative of the kind of sleepwalking that we are engaged in that will possibly lead to wider war.  He wants to “Let Ukraine fly its jets from ‘sanctuary bases’ on NATO territory.  This cockamamie scheme is supposed to scare the Russians in the same way that the Russians scare us with threats of using tactical nuclear weapons.  The author says not to worry about any of this because “strict rules of engagement” would be established.  You can’t get more obtuse than that.

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Photograph Source: Rory Arnold/No10 Downing Street – CC BY 2.0

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to address a joint session of Congress on July 24. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson took the lead in extending the invitation last March.  With the participation of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, it soon became a bipartisan invitation. This won’t be the first time an Israeli leader has used an address to Congress to strengthen Israel’s already powerful relations with America.  In 2015 Netanyahu bypassed the White House to deliver an address that attacked U.S participation in the Iran nuclear deal negotiations.  Although the Prime Minister’s visit deeply embarrassed then President Obama, a year later he overlooked the slight to commit $38 billion in arms aid to Israel over ten-years.

As distasteful as the planned Netanyahu visit may be to some in the Democratic party, it is hardly surprising.  Pro-Israel lobby organizations have donated significant sums to members of Congress in their most recent elections.  AIPAC reportedly committed $100 million to defeat those progressive House Democrats who called for a ceasefire and opposed the transfer of U.S. weapons to Israel.  Not even the highly visible genocide in Gaza and settler attacks on Palestinian communities in the West Bank have diminished U.S. enthusiasm for Israel in the executive and legislative branches. Pro-Israel members of Congress have even condemned the recent protests on university campuses as “antisemitism.” Despite the rising toll of dead and injured Gazans and International Court of Justice (ICJ) warnings against “genocidal acts,” the Israel narrative that blames Hamas for Palestinian casualties and accuses pro-Palestinians of antisemitism has taken root in America.

It is not an overstatement to say that U.S. policy in the Middle East is mostly if not entirely dominated by Israel; that the White House and Congress have combined to provide bombs and missiles that fuel the IDF’s war on Palestinians in Gaza; and that so long as unlimited PAC funds are available to politicians, nothing is likely to change in America’s cozy relationship with Israel. As a result, we can expect much applause and many standing ovations when Netanyahu speaks to Congress next Wednesday.  The  expected boycott by a small number of members is unlikely to lessen Congress’ love affair with Israel.

We know that the loudest supporters of Israel receive the most money from the Israel lobby and that the lobby’s donations to members of Congress (MOCs) have increased since October  We know that candidates for House or Senate seats face a Hobson’s choice: accept the lobby’s money or see it go to their opponents. No wonder that senators and congressmen of both parties mindlessly follow President Joe Biden’s lead in giving the IDF all the lethal weapons it wants for its ongoing war on Gaza. When the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, some MOCs called for sanctions against the prosecutor.  Meanwhile, the U.S  vetoed repeated resolutions that called for a ceasefire in Gaza. When Biden recently announced a three-phase plan to end the war and return the hostages held by Hamas, he secured a UN Security Council resolution to that effect. Yet Netanyahu has continued to insist that Israel’s onslaught on Gaza will not end until all of his war goals are met. The U.S. now appears tethered to Israel, while its Prime Minister is yoked to the fascist members of his war cabinet. Who or what can break these gordian knots?

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a preliminary decision in January stating that “all measures” must be taken to prevent acts of genocide.  We can expect that the Court will ultimately rule that Israel’s many war crimes, including the use of starvation as a war tactic, do indeed constitute genocide under the Genocide Convention of 1948.  In disregarding and denigrating both the ICJ and the ICC, the U.S. undercuts both institutions and the international rule of law.

The upcoming Netanyahu address to Congress should be viewed as an inflection point in U.S.-Israel relations. As Biden’s future as the Democratic nominee for the presidency hangs in the balance, now is the time for prospective candidates to call for a reset of America’s relations with Israel. More immediately, the failure to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza risks a major war with Hezbollah in Lebanon that would likely draw in U.S. troops.

What is to be gained by joining hands with an extremist regime that commits genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank?  This moment is a time for policymakers to consider more broadly the pros and cons of the U.S. security state, with its hundreds of military bases around the world.

The coming visit of Netanyahu should prompt a serious assessment of U.S. relations with Israel. It should also cause citizens to question the financing of U.S. elections by lobbyists, corporations and billionaires, who corrupt democracy with their money.

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Atomic bomb mushroom clouds over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right): Wikipedia.

Three Weeks After the first Atomic Bomb Test, They Used It on Two Japanese Cities

Teen physicist Ted Hall, who helped perfect the plutonium bomb, passed its secrets to the Soviet Union hoping to prevent the US from ever using it again. For the past 79 years that courageous act has accomplished what he hoped it would.

Just before sunrise 79 years ago at 5:29 Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945 the Journado del Muerto desert in New Mexico instantly and in total silence flashed as bright as day. As a group of several hundred scientists peered from six miles away at a 100-foot steel tower holding the world’s first atomic bomb, the sky turned brighter than day and the tower and bomb vanished in a brilliant flash of light that erased the stars of the night sky, They were replaced by a fiery turbulent cloud of smoke and dust. A powerful shock wave and the roar of the explosion followed he flash as a mushroom cloud rose 38,000 feet into the stratosphere.

The Nuclear Era had begun with a 25-kiloton bang.

Watching from 20 miles away along with over a hundred-fifty other soldiers of the Army Special Engineering District tasked with guarding the top-secret Los Alamos bomb design and fabrication center was 18-year old physicist Ted Hall. The youngest physicist in the Manhattan Project had significantly helped with the design, testing and success of the implosion system needed to successfully detonate the 3.6” sphere of 13.6 lbs. of plutonium at the core of what was called the “Gadget.”

His job during this first atomic bomb test though, was was to be ready to race off with other soldiers in a bunch of waiting army trucks to evacuate any indigenous residents of the region who might be at risk of radioactive fallout should the winds change from what had been predicted. (As it happened, the winds did shift but Hall and the other SED soldiers were never ordered to make those evacuation runs. As a result, the first nuclear test dubbed “Trinity” by Manhattan Project Director Robert Oppenheimer, which did produce massive fallout to the east of the explosion, wound up causing early deaths, cancers and deformed infants victims in that region. Those native people where the fallout came down were the first victims of the atomic bomb, even predating the Hibakusha — the Japanese survivors of the two atom bombs dropped three weeks later by the US on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

Ted Hall, at 18 the youngest physicist hired in January 1944 onto the Manhattan Project right out of his junior year as a physics major at Harvard, recalled in a interview in 1998, a year before his death from kidney cancer, that the Trinity explosion was a “stunning success” but added that he did not share in the jubilant celebration of most of the scientists who had witnessed it. As most of the scientists returned to the Los Alamos “camp” where thousands of scientists and engineers had labored frenetically to develop the bomb, to a day and night of celebrations, Hall said he returned instead to the barracks where he was lodged and listened to some of his 78 rpm recordings of Mahler and Beethoven.

While the huge blast that he had just witnessed was deeply depressing, viewing the awesome power of the atomic weapon he had helped to create hardened his resolve to complete the other job he had been “moonlighting” at in secret since mid-October of 1944 while he was diligently working on the plutonium bomb.

That other job, which he had volunteered for in mid-October 1944, was gathering up all the details he knew about the construction of that bomb and supplying the information to the NKVD, the Soviet spy agency. He was about to provide the full schematics of the bomb and full details about its construction to courier whom he had arranged to meet up with three weeks later, right between the dropping of the Hiroshima “Little Boy” uranium bomb on August 6 and the Nagasaki “Fat Man” plutonium bomb on Aug. 9.

By the time of the Trinity Test, Japan was frantically attempting to get the US to accept a Japanese surrender and an end to World War II in the Pacific. But, as I detail in my new book Spy for No Country (Prometheus Books, 2024) on Ted Hall’s spying and its impact on nuclear history, at the same time, the US was instead trying to delay an end to the violence. Indeed, on the very day of the explosion at Alamogordo, NM, the uranium bomb was being loaded at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard onto the Navy cruiser USS Indianapolis for delivery to Tinian Island. There the U235 explosive would be placed inside the bomb called “Little Boy” for mission against the doomed city of Hiroshima.

At the same time, a second plutonium bomb, almost identical to the “Gadget” used successfully in the Trinity Test, was being prepared for shipment by air to Tinian in two B-29s to, be assembled there and armed with its plutonium “pit.”

The official US version of the story of the nuking of two Japanese cities remains that the two bombs were deemed necessary by President Truman and his advisers to convince the Japanese to end the war and “save American lives” by avoiding a land invasion. In truth, it later became clear, though it is still not common knowledge among most Americans, that Truman and his military and national security advisors were in no hurry for the war to end as they wanted a chance to test their two new weapons in a real war setting to “send a message” to the Soviet Union and the world that Washington had the atomic bomb and as the only country with it, intended to use it, or threaten to use it, to have its way.

Truman even had his Secretary of State James Byrnes instruct Nationalist Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek to have his negotiator in Moscow, Soong Tse-wen, who was attempting to reach an agreement with Stalin for a Japanese peace deal, to slow the process down so that the two atomic bombs could be used before the war ended. As I note, thousands of American soldiers, marines, sailors and merchant seamen, not to mention tens of thousands of Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino and other military and civilian people died in that interval between the Trinity Test and the two atomic bombings (which alone killed a quarter of a million people, most of them civilians).

The decision to bomb two populated cities, and to do both by surprise in early morning when people were outside on the way to work, and when children on the way to school, was a deliberate effort to maximize both bombs’ death and destruction.

After Trinity, as it became clear around the “camp” at Los Alamos that the US was about to bomb a non-nuclear nation with its new weapons of mass destruction, Leo Szilard, a top physicist at Los Alamos typed a well reasoned letter to Truman, quickly signed by 70 fellow scientists on the project, pleading with him not to use the bomb on Japan. (Remember, It was a fear that Germany might build an atomic bomb that had led FDR to launch he Manhattan Project, and Hitler’s scientists never came close to building one before the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945.)

Szilard’s petition was handed to Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, who promised to deliver to Truman. He apparently never did deliver it, though Truman was unlikely to have been swayed by it anyhow. (Even the opposition of 5-star Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in WWII, to US use of an atomic bomb on Japan, which he expressed forcefully to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, was ignored.)

Hall was horrified at the destructive power of the atomic bomb. He was also aware as an atomic scientist of the vastly more powerful fusion bombs that by war’s end were being looked into at Los Alamos, Hall had also heard word around Los Alamos that Gen. Gates at a dinner party in March 1944 for senior British physicists working at Los Alamos had told astonished guests that the real purpose of the bomb project was “to subdue the Russians.” This, shockingly, was said even as Russia’s Red Army, after staggering losses, was beating Germany’s crack troops and driving them back to Germany.

Hall, by the summer fall of 1944 had already become concerned that the US would emerge from WWII with a monopoly on the atomic bomb and an evident willingness to use its advantage to maximum effect. He rather presciently decided that the only way to prevent that situation would be to have another country with the bomb, one that would act to prevent that monopoly. He and his friend, Harvard roommate and later courier and co-conspirator Saville Sax, realized early that the only country capable of standing up to a nuclear US would be a nuclear USSR (which it must be noted was a key US ally against Germany and had done the main job of defeating Hitler’s Wehrmacht).

Hall passed his most significant information—many pages of carefully copied drawings and detailed descriptions of the construction of the plutonium bomb—to the American Soviet spy Lona Cohen, shortly after the Hiroshima bombing during a handoff in Albuquerque. She in turn delivered it to the NKVD in the Soviet Consulate in NY which sent it on to Moscow in the diplomatic pouch.

That information convinced both struggling Soviet nuclear scientists and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to put off efforts to develop a uranium bomb. Instead they decided to focus all available resources in the war-ravaged country on making a copy of the US plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki. They succeeded in testing that copy in the Semipalatinsk desert on Aug. 29, 1949, stunning US scientific and military experts who had predicted such a feat would take the USSR at least a decade.

It was a good thing for the Soviet people (and probably for humanity) that their country got its own atomic bomb when it did. Unknown to Americans, even today, the US, almost immediately after the war ended, had begun working on developing the hydrogen bomb, a nuclear fusion weapon of unlimited destructive power. Even more urgently important, work had begun on how to mass produce fission bombs of the size used on Japan, which at the time were being painstakingly and slowly assembled by hand.

The plan for these new mass-produced bombs, given various names like Broiler, Sizzle, and Shakedown as the number of bombs in the stockpile grew, but eventually called Operation Dropshot, was initially to use 400 of those Nagasaki-sized weapons to destroy 100 cities and other targets in the Soviet Union. Some bombs were also to target cities in the newly established Peoples Republic of China, the Democratic Republic of Korea, the People’s Republic of Vietnam and even major cities in the captive eastern European countries occupied by the USSR after the war and eventually known as the Warsaw Pact nations. During the late 1940s, the target date for this first-strike holocaust was 1954, the year (called A-Day by nuclear strategists in Washington), after which it was assumed that without a preemptive attack, the Soviets would have nuclear weapons with which to retaliate.

Once the Soviets had tested their first bomb in 1949, Washington’s mass murder scheme was thankfully put on indefinite hold, replaced by the Cold War arms race.

Critics will will no doubt say that the young physicist Hall and several other spies, notably the German/British physicist Klaus Fuchs, were traitors worse than America’s Benedict Arnold or Britain’s Mata Hari. But consider the millions of people, mostly civilians of third-world nations who have been killed as a result of US military actions since the end of World War II, and without any nuclear weapons being employed. If seems clear that had the Soviets not obtained their own bomb when they did, their country, and other less developed communist nations, would have likely been leveled to prevent their getting the bomb. Evidence for this view is how close the US came to using atom bombs in 1946 against Soviet troops preparing to move into Iran to claim rights to the oil field across the border from the USSR as promised at the Yalta conference, in 1948 during the Berlin Blockade and in 1954 to stave off capture of the French forces seeking to retake their Indochina colony from the Viet Minh independence forces. Threats to use the bomb against the USSR were made in each case but were not carried out for various different reasons.

Frightening as the Cold War era was (and I personally remember the anxiety back as far as 1955 when I was six!), and as scary as the current situation is with the Ukraine war and US-supplied weapons being used by the Ukrainian military deep inside Russian borders, there has been no use of a nuclear weapon in war since the bomb dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.

That was the bomb Ted Hall helped design and that he helped the Soviets replicate.

Hall, who was never charged or prosecuted for his spying (long story there, all explained in my book), said he had hoped that if two nations had the bomb, neither would dare use it, fearing to do so would be a murder-suicide act, and that they as a result would ultimately ban it.

That hasn’t happened, although almost all nations of the world have voted to have nuclear weapons banned, and that ban is now part of the laws of war. The hitch is that all nine nuclear nations, including the US and USSR, have refused to sign on to the nuclear bomb ban and the international law has no enforcement mechanism.

Getting those nine nations to join the ban is the task ahead of humanity, and especially of the citizens of the recalcitrant nuclear nations.

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