NOW founder and president Betty Friedan (1921–2006) with lobbyist Barbara Ireton (1932–1998) and feminist attorney Marguerite Rawalt (1895–1989)

The National Organization for Women was seen as a radical organization in the 1970s because of its valiant fight to protect reproductive rights for women. But even in those early days, NOW was not radical enough to include black women and LGBTQ as part of their mission. As the times changed and some people of color and LGBTQ members increased in the organization, including in leadership positions, the issues NOW addressed were mainstream, with the focus being on white middle-class women’s rights and some attention to working-class labor issues. In New York State, for example, NOW mostly addressed certification of reproductive rights, shielding sex workers while increasing the offenses for solicitation of sex workers, and protections for pregnant women in the workplace.

In the last few years NOW included intersectionality in its mission, because feminists who were elected to the highest offices of the organization believed that an intersectional lens helped one to look at the intersections of power and privilege, as our identities are marked by race, ethnicity, gender, ability, age, sexuality, wealth, and so on. Reproductive issues, for example, were not just a binary issue of choice versus removal of choice to have an abortion; they incorporated so much more depending on the situation of a woman: her ability to nurture her babies, support for mothers, IVF treatments not just for wealthy people, access to birth control, healthcare for women, trans women getting care, STD testing and treatment, and more. NOW has been slow to catch up on feminist ideas flowering in academia and in women and gender studies conferences.  Leading my chapter in Suffolk, Long Island, I was hopeful that we were on the right track to building a nuanced intersectional lens to the issue we addressed.

But after Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the holes in NOW’s intersectional mission became obvious. Within a week of the attack, NOW put forth a statement denouncing Hamas. It read: “NOW members are sticking fast to our core principles of human rights and freedom from fear, violence, and division. The rise in antisemitism and violent attacks on Jewish communities here and around the world underscore our alarm. The people of Israel live in constant fear of days like today. This is what happens when hate has no boundaries. NOW supports the right of the Jewish people to live without fear or violence, and we condemn antisemitism in all its forms.”

True, we were all horrified at the attack, and especially at the news about vicious sexual assaults on women, which, again, were not verified. (In fact, CDDAW was attacked by US feminists for saying that they can condemn the sexual assaults only after the UN completes the investigation).  When Israel’s initial bombardment of Gaza took place, I was shaken when I heard 4000 children were killed in the first few days. When the killing did not stop, I and many others knew we were witnessing genocide, even though there was barely anyone using that term. Then Code Pink came out with their banner and marched to stop the genocide. We were not alone. The world shuddered at the ongoing killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Many members of NOW responded, “No, this is not genocide. Israel is protecting its people. Hamas is using Gazans as human shields. This is Hamas’ war. Blame Hamas, not Israel. Israel has the right to defend itself.”

I attended a meeting of all the NOW chapters, where I stated the urgent need for NOW to come out with a statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, especially since the US was supporting Israel by sending arms. The moment I said this, members from different chapters began screaming at me. One said I was offensive by calling Israel’s action genocide. Some said: “How can you use that term on Jews who have gone through the Holocaust?”  The word “offensive” in subsequent meetings was used multiple times at the very mention of ceasefire or genocide. Needless to say, upon writing to the President and Vice President of NOW, the Suffolk and Nassau chapters were able to call for a Board meeting to discuss putting together a resolution for a ceasefire. An ad hoc committee of the Board worked on the resolution which was brought to a vote. The resolution failed. One member abstained and a couple of members left the meeting since the vote was called toward the end of a 3-hour meeting where other items on the agenda such as by-laws took precedence. Clearly, the ceasefire resolution was not a priority for NOW, and most of the members of NOW did not really care for the Gaza issue. The question that came up again and again was why were we focusing on an international issue when there are so many national issues that call for our attention? Moreover, NOW is a national, not an international organization. Valid points. But, Suffolk and Nassau chapters asked, why did NOW respond with a statement about Hamas’ attack on Israel, particularly to the sexual assaults? Why was Israel an urgent issue but not Palestine? For that matter, why weren’t we addressing Somalia, Sudan and the Congo? Members who opposed a ceasefire resolution countered with, “Is this a tit for tat?”

I was not surprised that NOW did not really believe in intersectionality, for that would mean applying the rule of equity to different groups. Our chapter demanded equity in how we talked about women’s issues. Why was NOW selective about the populations it supported? Support for Gaza was seen by many members as anti-Semitic. While antisemitism resolutions were introduced in NOW, there was not a single one about countering Islamophobia. Is it any surprise that NOW barely has any Muslim members? Another member asked at one of our national Board meetings, “We are being dragged into someone else’s drama,” without realizing that feminist activism is about being dragged into other people’s dramas! Audre Lorde’s statement was lost on her: “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”

Most of the younger feminists in the US support and apply intersectionality to women and gender issues. NOW cannot attract younger feminists, because of the severe lacunae in NOW’s vision that dismisses people who are marginalized. NOW leadership does not see that there is a contradiction in demanding ERA yet opposing Palestinian rights to life, their country, and self-rule. NOW does not see the connection between Black liberation and Palestinian liberation. While speaking strongly against sexual assaults on women, many NOW members don’t see a problem with advocating for victims of sexual assaults but not for women and children blown to bits or undergoing amputations and cesarean sections without anesthesia.

As some newer members observed, NOW is becoming defunct. It is old, stodgy, unwieldy, mismanaged, and disintegrating. While some chapters on the ground are doing some good work, as a national organization it has a brand name but without the substance behind it. It is unable to grow and move beyond the feminism of the 1970s and 80s. Therefore, adding intersectionality is “an empty gesture that reaffirms white supremacy,” say Ashlee Christofferson and Akwugo Emejulu. These authors further assert, “Intersectionality is fundamentally about recognition of the interrelation of structures of inequality (particularly race, class, and gender). Yet recognition of, and engagement with, the interrelationship of inequality structures, requires a prior step of recognizing the ontology of the structures themselves. This refusal to do so is reflected not only among white feminist academics who appropriate the language of intersectionality but fail to name or recognize white supremacy, instead bending and stretching intersectionality in the interests of white women—but also among practitioners.” NOW leaders need to recognize where they are operating out of priorities already established within systemic structures, deconstruct them, and look at issues that people are contending with. This means looking at sexual assault and genocide and ask the difficult questions such as why women are targeted, how as feminists we might advocate for all women, and how we should not allow our language and thinking be coopted by the military lingo used to euphemize horrible truths on the ground. Such an intersectional look at violence against women needs to be paramount in the feminist struggle to bring about change and truly embrace Audre Lorde’s belief in embracing freedom from oppression for all women, irrespective of their nationality, statehood, or other identity markers.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Hours after Kamala Harris gave her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, the president of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization J Street took a victory lap in an effusive e-mail to supporters. “Wow,” Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote. “What a week! As J Streeters leave the Democratic National Convention fired up and ready to go, it’s clear we’re having a greater impact than ever.” He added that “the vice president’s remarks on Israel-Palestine were perhaps the clearest articulation of J Street’s values from a presidential nominee.”

But what are those “values” and how do they apply to what’s happening in Gaza?

Discussing Gaza, Harris’ DNC acceptance speech began with the anodyne evocation of “working on a cease-fire” of Gaza’s pounding that America is funding: “President Biden and I are working around the clock, because now is the time to get a hostage deal and a cease-fire deal done.”

Then came the “ironclad” pledge of eternal support for Israel, justified in this case by the October 7 Hamas raid: “And let me be clear. And let me be clear. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself…”

Key to Harris’ brief discussion of Gaza in her acceptance speech was the customary refusal in American political discourse to attribute the slaughter to the U.S. or its Israeli partner. Instead, there was a reference to “what has happened” – evoking victims without victimizers – in this way: “What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”

After pledging unconditional support for Israel’s military, Harris expressed sorrow – as if the horrors are being inflicted by a force of nature, not a military force that the U.S. government supplies with fundamental and essential support.

Style aside, what Harris articulated about Israel-Palestine in her speech was no different than what President Biden has been saying and doing since last fall while enabling the slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The vehement enthusiasm from J Street, perhaps the USA’s leading liberal Zionist organization, is illuminating.

Harris carefully omitted any mention of the only way that the U.S. government could actually put an end to the suffering in Gaza that she called “heartbreaking” – an arms embargo to stop the huge shipments from the United States that provide the Israeli military with the weapons and ammunition it’s using to continue to massacre Palestinian people of all ages.

The Harris speech was consistent with the national party’s new platform – which “J Street helped shape,” Ben-Ami proudly wrote. But full affirmation of Biden’s policies toward the Gaza carnage should not have been any cause for celebration.

“As a Palestinian American who is an elected Democrat to the Colorado State House, it has been disheartening to witness Biden facilitate and abet Israel’s brutal war on Gaza with billions of dollars in U.S. weapons,” Iman Jodeh wrote during the convention. Harris “has said that an arms embargo – which human rights organizations have been calling for – is off the table, but that she supports a ceasefire.” However, “to truly reach a ceasefire and prevent a regional conflict, the U.S. must halt the arms shipments that fuel the conflict.”

The British medical journal The Lancet estimates that well over 100,000 residents of Gaza will die because of the Israeli bombardment and siege since Oct. 7, as hunger and disease are endemic, and housing and infrastructure have been systematically destroyed. Polio is appearing in the devastated population of more than 2 million. Israel’s assault on the enclave, populated substantially by refugees from the 1948 creation of the Israeli state, remains unchecked – and is literally made possible by the continuous arms pipeline from the United States.

For J Street’s leadership, the current U.S. policy hits the spot. “Could not be prouder of VP Harris for her remarks on Israel/Palestine – and of Democrats’ reaction,” Ben-Ami tweeted after the convention adjourned. “This is what it means in 2024 to be pro-Israel, pro-peace and pro-democracy.”

At the convention, the parents of a hostage held by Hamas since Oct. 7 spoke. But no Palestinian American was allowed to say anything. In effect, the convention’s podium was a place of apartheid, mirroring the reality of Israel’s apartheid system. (In his email, Ben-Ami wistfully noted the missed opportunity: “Hosting the first ever Palestinian speaker at a national convention would have been a powerful way to underscore the shared goal of an immediate ceasefire and hostage deal, and the compassion the party feels for Palestinians and Israelis alike.”)

J Street is determined to help ensure that liberal Zionism does not question the “ironclad” U.S. commitment to Jewish nationalist control in Palestine, as discussed in articles I co-wrote that were published 10 years ago and last spring. The organization is eager to define the limits of acceptable criticism of Israeli government policies from the Democratic Party establishment – setting aside human rights considerations as secondary to the mantra of Israel’s “right to exist.” (Whether apartheid South Africa had a “right to exist” is not a topic open for discussion.)

J Street represents untenable liberal American Zionism that clings to the fantasy of a democratic and humane “Jewish state.” Washington office-holders pledge continued weapons resupply for that fantasy Jewish state — with no connection to the actual Israel that is now engaged in remorseless genocide.

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Ger van Elk, Symmetry of Diplomacy, 1975, Groninger Museum

“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

– President John F. Kennedy, Inauguration Speech, January 20, 1961.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech last week was a tour de force.   It was presidential; it was compelling; it demonstrated presence and power.  But it provided no indication that she will address the weakest aspects of President Joe Biden’s national security policy, the failure to restore diplomacy as the central tool of foreign policy and to reestablish the primacy of arms control and disarmament.

Harris has a compelling personal story; she used the story effectively to introduce herself to the American public.  Harris’s confidence and charisma allowed her to connect to her audience, and perhaps to impress independents and even some Republicans to take a second look at a political figure who was caricatured unfairly by the mainstream media from the outset of the Biden administration.  She was so effective that it is difficult to imagine an incoherent and rambling Donald Trump sharing a stage with her at their debate that is scheduled for September 17th.

It is unreasonable to expect any vice president to deviate from the president’s foreign policy imperatives, but an opportunity was missed to at least introduce new aspects of foreign policy that were not addressed during Biden’s presidency.  One possible indicator of a more pragmatic approach is the fact that Harris’s foreign policy advisor is Philip Gordon, whose writings suggest an awareness of the limits of American power and a willingness to negotiate with autocratic regimes.

As an official in the Department of State during the Obama administration and a White House advisor to Obama on the Middle East, Gordon worked on the Iran nuclear accord, the effort to reset relations with Russia after its invasion of Georgia, and advised against supporting regime change in Syria.  The so-called reset with Russia contributed to the successful effort to remove chemical weapons from Syria. (Obama has been unfairly criticized for the failure to use force against the Assad regime in Syria, and the success of bilateral diplomacy with Russia has not been acknowledged.)  According to the Financial Times, Gordon has been responsible for crafting Harris’s more sympathetic tone for the plight of the Palestinians.

Although Biden put great stock into personal diplomacy, his team demonstrated no willingness to open areas of dialogue with key adversaries.  We have obvious differences with Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi, and Iran’s Ayatollah.  But over the past several months, these leaders have demonstrated an interest in pursuing substantive discussions with the United States.  It was encouraging that Harris did not personally mention these leaders and only singled out North Korea’s Kim Jong Un for criticism, although Kim’s interest in dealing with the United States is also apparent.

There is no sign of Harris’s positions on Biden’s policy choices that would suggest strong differences or alternative approaches to change the direction of U.S. policy.  Harris at this point cannot deviate from President Biden’s key positions on sensitive issues, although Vice President Hubert Humphrey probably lost the election in 1968 to Richard Nixon because of a belated critique on U.S. policy in Vietnam.  Biden’s unwavering support for Israel could ultimately hurt Harris in key states such as Michigan.

Harris acknowledged that she was the “last person in the room” on the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, and it was well known that she wanted to protect the Afghan women and children who would be most affected by the Taliban’s return to power.  But Harris, like Biden, was “eager” to find a political solution that would allow the withdrawal of American forces, which was the correct position after two decades of military and political failure in Afghanistan.

Ironically, when Joe Biden was vice president, he took strong exception to President Barack Obama’s decision to increase the U.S. force presence in Afghanistan and even warned the president to avoid getting “boxed in” by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that were pressing for a large increase in military forces.  Biden took the unusual step of sending a classified message to Obama to prevent any increase in the U.S. presence, and wrote a personal note for the record that he was “thinking I should resign in protest over what will bring his administration down.”

According to the Washington Post, Biden privately stated that protecting Afghan women was not a cause worthy of continued U.S. military intervention.  (My personal view is that Biden has been unfairly pilloried for ending the “forever war” in Afghanistan, which cost the United States more than $2 trillion.  It was one of Biden’s greatest achievements, refusing to prolong a war that made no sense and was never worth the cost after the initial success in 2001.)

Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing how Harris will handle two of Biden’s greatest failures: his continuation of Donald Trump’s failed policy toward China and his intense support for the illiberal and militaristic policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  The pursuit of containment against China is a losing hand that must yield to more nimble strategies and tactics.  Israel’s dangerous escalation in Gaza prevents any possibility of serious negotiations in the region, let alone a compromise for peace.  The “alliance” with Israel is a shackle that chains U.S. policy to Israel’s dangerous illusions and aspirations.  It must be addressed.

Harris’s speech ended with the usual tropes associated with presidential national security policy.  She stressed that she would “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” and that she would “take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”  Her emphasis on “standing up for Israel’s right to defend itself” obfuscates the fact that Israeli genocidal actions in Gaza and the West Bank have nothing to do with defense.

Our policy of globalism has been overly dependent on support for military lethality, which led us into losing wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; our stress on terrorism led us into the “Global War on Terror,” which led to a wrongful expansion of U.S. power into the Middle East and even Africa.  Our reliance on strategic superiority, which will require continued modernization of strategic forces, will be a costly liability in times such as these that require more stable and subtle policies.  There is much work to be done and, at this point, no clarity on the shape and substance of future foreign policy.

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Arfak Mountains, the highest point in West Papua. Photograph Source: David Worabay – CC BY-SA 3.0

Apart from the brutality it undergirds, almost always fuelling violence, there’s something truly unhinged about political disinformation, especially in Indonesian-occupied West Papua because it’s so at odds with reality, not to say bizarre. Yet it’s orchestrated at the highest levels of government in Indonesia and readily accepted by powerful governments and transnationals, which have their own systems of disinformation, including peddling Indonesia’s, and lying by commission and omission as a standard activity to advance geostrategic and economic objectives.

In West Papua, disinformation buttresses Indonesia’s hands-on, six-decade, genocidal and ecocidal project. At the global level—where official and corporate-funded lying about the climate catastrophe (which, as anyone can see and feel, is upon us), criminalization of protestors, and harassment and abuse of climate scientists are standard—West Papua is an important part of the story as home to one of the world’s largest rainforests, a crucial factor in any attempt to limit the generalized effects of the disaster. But Indigenous people everywhere who are trying to save their rainforest habitats, who know how to protect them, are being displaced, attacked, and killed. In West Papua, the struggle isn’t about isolated tribes trying to protect their bit of turf, but a nationwide social movement with a comprehensive political platform, the Green State Vision. Since this is diametrically opposed to Indonesia’s brutal policy of what Sartre called “the systematic exploitation of man’s humanity for the destruction of the human”, in which no autochthonous life, vegetable, animal, or human is sacred, it’s labeled “terrorist”. The name-calling, whereby all West Papuans are terrorists (just as all Palestinians threaten the genocidal state of Israel), is no idle trash-talk but structural racism, requiring wholesale destruction of living obstacles to Indonesia’s “development”.

In April 2021, the Coordinating Minister of Politics, Law, and Security of the Indonesian government officially designated the TNPPB-OPM (National West Papua Freedom Army – Free Papua Movement) a terrorist group, an “Armed Secessionist Criminal Group”, “Security Intruder Movement”, and “Armed Criminal Group”. Indonesia, a member of the UN Human Rights Council, may have been given a nimbus of dubious respectability to make such charges (the righteous state embraced by the international “community”, beset by savage terrorists) but the perpetrator of terrorism is Indonesia itself, with its torture mode of governance, if this definition of “terrorism” is applied to its military occupation of West Papua: “Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-)clandestine individual, group, or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons… [The] direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population and serve as message generators.”

The TNPPB-OPM is “terrorist” because it’s tenaciously trying to make known and prevent the ravages of such cataclysmic projects as the 4,300-km Trans-Papua highway and connecting roads, carving up the rainforest to enable extractive projects; palm oil plantations and food estates (just one of which takes an 2.7 million hectares of forest and peat areas, devastating some 200 villages); military-linked gold mining, for example in the Intan Jaya regency; huge mining projects like the Freeport Grasberg mine and BP’s Bintuni gas project, safeguarded under the heading of “vital national projects”; and many smaller projects, also protected by violent “security” forces. All those affected are victims of what’s called “counterterrorism”.

The Green State Vision is particularly threatening, as its reach goes far beyond local or identity politics. It’s of global relevance, universal in spirit, and a blueprint for other social movements around the world which are struggling against the forces that are destroying the possibilities for human life, and most other kinds of life, on planet Earth. It’s the political platform of a well-organized social movement, the United Liberation Movement for West Papua(ULMWP) which brings together “all West Papuans, both inside and outside West Papua”.

A social movement is “an organized effort by a group of human beings to effect change in the face of resistance by other human beings”, to cite anthropologist David Aberle who, in The Peyote Religion Among the Navajo (1966), identifies four different kinds: alterative (seeking partial change through individual behavior, as in recycling); redemptive (often religious movements promising salvation through total personal transformation); reformative (aiming at partial social change, through women’s voting rights, for example); and transformative (seeking to abolish the prevailing system). In this framework, the Green State Vision offered by the ULMWP would be “redemptive” and “transformative”. Although it isn’t religious by nature, it does require an ethical, redemptive understanding of life and the place of humans on Earth, which would fit with transformative goals of leaving the neoliberal system to which the planet is currently subjected. Unlike social movements that seek an improved status quo, the Green State Vision is, by definition, anti-neoliberal, and anti-system. It also differs from most social movements in scope since it’s tackling ecocide and, understanding the interconnectedness of all forms of life on Earth is, therefore, seeking results on a global scale.

Ecocide

Ecocide affects, to a greater or lesser—and certainly worsening—extent, all human and non-human life. It is a crime of global extractivist politics, escalating from early industrialization, through colonialism, to neoliberalism. Since it is worldwide in reach, combatting it requires a solution of the same magnitude. In terms of social justice, the principle that promotes the “happiness of the whole of the community”, as the nineteenth-century Irish philosopher William Thompson put it, the only doctrine covering all humans is universal human rights, because human is a universal category. However, as scientists are learning more and more about interdependence in what evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis called the “symbiotic planet”, it’s also now obvious that the “community” must include all life forms.

In its dictionary definition, ecocide seems straightforward: “the destruction of large areas of the natural environment as a consequence of human activity”. But not the activity of all humans. It’s a direct and indirect crime of a minority of humans against the majority, extending beyond human victims to all living things and the elements that sustain them (soil, rocks, air, vegetation, oceans, landforms, mountains, hills, valleys, mounds, berms, deserts, watercourses, water bodies, springs, wetlands, forests, jungles, and so on). “Eco”, from the Greek oikos, contains the idea of place and, in particular, home or household, while “-cide” is from the Latin caedere (to demolish or kill). Ecocide has consequences for all living and non-living beings and their home, this now-endangered planet. It’s more destructive than genocide, which is confined to certain human groups, global in spread and globalizing in consequences. Piecemeal measures against ecocide will never suffice.

States, which control economic, political, social, and ideological approaches to ecocide (and increasingly often severely punishing demonstrators against its causes like fossil fuel dependence), protect the interests of their powerholders. This entails covering up the fact that ecocide produces, “great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health”, which is listed as a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Court. More than five hundred years ago, colonialism established states built on plunder, whose “legitimacy”, backed by property laws and governmental institutions (and, more recently, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and “development” banks), depends on the profits of despoiling “underdeveloped” lands to fund lavish trappings of power and provide “developed” populations with large infrastructure projects presented as an alluring dream of modernity. Subduing the earth means much more than grabbing certain resources here and there. It’s a whole economic system of marauding and dispossession, an ideology profoundly affecting social and human/nature relations. Plunder occurs in “enclaves”, but the benefits go international. The misery caused is extensive and the profits are highly concentrated.

Ecocide is related with genocide but differs in magnitude and political consequences. Indigenous peoples have long been decimated by genocide perpetrated by colonial and postcolonial governments, and national and multinational corporations, but it’s often swept under the diplomatic rug of “national sovereignty”, a political stance of non-interference. Unspoken racism underlies indifference to genocide because it’s not occurring in the West. However, ecocide does affect the West, and does affect planet Earth as a whole, as the present climate crisis is showing. Stop Ecocide International is seeking to introduce ecocide as a fifth international crime (after genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression) into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). It defines ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”. Inclusion of the crime of ecocide into the Rome Statute could contribute to a global “change of consciousness” as well as offering a more effective legal framework for safeguarding the future of planet Earth.

Understanding “ecocide” means questioning Western notions of separate species and human exceptionalism. Taxonomising nature into species, as if making an inventory of human possessions, gives a false idea of independent existences. As Lynn Margulis famously pointed out, symbiosis constantly brings together different life forms in such a way that “individuals” generate new symbiotic forms at growing and evermore inclusive levels of integration. All life depends on the microbial world, the “source and well-spring of soil and air”. There’s still much to be learned about the interrelationships of the different parts of nature in fast-changing environments where large groups of lifeforms are becoming extinct. The present climate catastrophe constitutes a global laboratory scarily demonstrating the truth of Margulis’s theory of the deep interdependence of species. However, Margulis wasn’t the first person to understand this for it’s a core notion of Indigenous cosmologies.

West Papua and the Global Order

Indigenous habitat defenders have cosmologies that couldn’t be less extractivist, less capitalist. This is expressed in language too, for example in circular concepts of time entailing care and responsibility rather than the deadly “arrow” that “progresses” into a future by ripping up a past and present; or, often with few numbers, emphasizing quality over quantity (and the ultimate perversion of algorithms that control human existence). If Indigenous peoples have always understood their natural habitat as a world, a cosmos, a well-ordered whole, they also know that damaging an environment, a sea, a lake, a forest, a savanna, a desert, means damaging the world, perhaps beyond repair. Benny Wenda, Interim President of the ULMWP Provisional Government, expresses it thus: “If you want to save the world, you must save West Papua”.

One of Earth’s most betrayed and castigated countries, West Papua, the western half of the Melanesian island of New Guinea, shares a colonially imposed border (slashed through the center of the island, dividing tribes and lands), with independent Papua New Guinea. With a mountainous interior, forest lowlands, large mangrove swamps, as well as many small islands and coral reefs, West Papua has some 230 tribes, with unique cultures and languages. They are the rainforest’s stewards, observing ancient, small-scale agricultural practices of cultivating yams, sweet potatoes, and pigs in the highlands, or a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with a diet largely based on sago and fish in the lowlands. West Papua’s biodiverse forests cover about 34.6 million hectares, of which more than 27.6 million have been designated as “production” (read: for plundering) forest. The plunderers are the Indonesian military and their transnational corporate partners.

Indonesia’s settler colonial project in West Papua is built on structural racism. Like the forest, the people protecting the land must be chopped down and cleared away. They’re an obstacle to “progress”. Since 1963, when it invaded West Papua, it has carried out a huge social engineering (transmigration or Indonesianisation) project, bringing well over a million (the number is a state secret) poverty-stricken people from several islands to live in camps cut into the rainforest. It seems that Indonesians now outnumber West Papuans. Then there are direct, murderous attacks on West Papuan villages. As Benny Wenda describes it, “Indonesia tried to build development on the bones of our people. The international community must stop the genocide and ecocide of my people in order to protect planet earth”. He also observes that the politics of social justice doesn’t come in separate boxes where you tick one (like save the trees) but forget the rest (like all the forest’s living beings, like universal human rights).

Protection of rainforests can’t happen without recognition that the peoples who live in them are agents with a leading role as their custodians. Their voices must be heard, not only when bearing witness to the crimes committed against them but also when sharing their knowledge of cohabitation in and with nature, which is now so essential for the planet’s survival (at least as a human habitat). Yet, when the West Papuan leaders presented the Green State Vision at COP26 in Glasgow it was largely ignored, then and since.

One of the reasons why this valuable, constructive document presented by rainforest caretakers was not gratefully welcomed and widely circulated is that, in geopolitical terms, it would mean condemning six decades of genocide in West Papua. Not only Indonesia is responsible. Genocide is also the result of a sham UN-supervised referendum in 1969, after which the General Assembly formally “took note” that it did not represent the will of the people, but went ahead anyway to recognise Indonesian sovereignty, and then to help cover up the killing of up to (or more than) ten percent of the population. Indonesia’s allies, including the United States, European countries, and Australia (and if you want an idea of how complicit Australia is, watch this documentary on its 1975 oil-and-gas-motivated coverup of Indonesia’s murder of five of its journalists in Balibo, East Timor), are “strategically aligned” accomplices. Why? Because, to give one geopolitical reason, Indonesia crucially occupies a position at the intersection of the Pacific Ocean, the Malacca Straits, and the Indian Ocean. More than half the world’s shipping passes through Indonesian waters, including US nuclear attack submarines going to taunt China with their might.

To sum up, the Green State Vision challenges the imperially based Westphalian system in embracing the idea of Indigenous systems that recognise interdependence between political actors and the land itself. Any state-level support for the West Papuan project would entail enraging the Indonesian regime and its big western backers. There is much talk of a global system which, logically, should include everyone, but the words usually refer to the G8, or maybe the G20. They tend not to include ordinary, and especially Indigenous people. Rainforests and all their species won’t be protected if the human rights of their Indigenous inhabitants—5% of the world’s population caring for 85% of its biodiversity—aren’t included and recognised as leaders in the project of saving rainforests. Their human rights are crucial for those of everyone else.

The Green State Vision: Education and Politics

If West Papuan resistance is ever discussed, the OPM (Free Papua Movement) tends to be mentioned, often demeaned as primitive and exotic. Consisting of various groups armed with bows and arrows, machetes, axes, and some rifles and revolvers, it has existed since the 1960s. The political and diplomatic wings of the struggle are usually ignored in the mainstream press. They’re essential because they’ve achieved a nation-wide social movement, the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (UMLWP) with a political programme, the Green State Vision. Focused on protecting the West Papuan rainforest, this represents what the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide calls a change of consciousness. Drafted with the help of international lawyers, it’s a quintessentially West Papuan document but of global significance. It’s an ethical statement of intention, spelling out how “to restore, promote and maintain balance and harmony, amongst human and non-human beings, based on reciprocity and respect toward all beings”. Understanding that social justice fosters the “happiness of the whole of the community”, the West Papuan people have organised a government-in-waiting and, not only that, but an official plan for “Making Peace with Nature in the 21st century”.

The Green State Vision is conceptually inseparable from the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) which was formalised when leaders from different factions of the independence movement met in Vanuatu in December 2014 to unite the three main political organisations that have long struggled for independence: Federal Republic of West Papua (NRFPB), National Coalition for Liberation (WPNCL), and West Papua National Parliament (PNWP). This initiative meant recognition of one of the strengths of the overall struggle for independence. The fact that there are so many tribes with their own languages and boundaries may, for a westerner, look like fragmentation. However, this is a system of tribal democracy, of centuries-old rules and agreements with neighbouring tribes that has worked for some 50,000 years. People, identifying with their tribes and as West Papuans, have always understood the checks and balances of the system, and the ULMWP plans to conserve them in a nation-wide federal structure.

The Green State aims to provide free education and healthcare to citizens and residents. However, “redemptive” and “transformative” education is happening now, as an ongoing part of the struggle. Keeping traditional values alive, passing down languages and customs means rejecting the system that’s trying to kill them. Education for a future Green Vision happens in daily life through resistance, maintaining the ethos of learning from nature, reinforcing the community, understanding that women—providers of food and educators at village level—are an essential part of the struggle, eschewing individualist consumerism, accepting the responsibilities of customary guardianship, grassroots diplomacy (between tribes), and democratic governance. Since 1963, the political struggle has been the harsh classroom of survival, and the West Papuan people and their leaders have learned not only that their age-old customs are the strongest defence of their national identity but also, as the climate catastrophe wreaks its terrible damage everywhere, that the principles they foster among their own people have worldwide relevance.

The Green State Vision commits, inter alia, to the following:

+ Restoring and promoting harmony, reciprocity, and respect among human and non-human beings, with people accepting responsibility as protectors and carers.

+ Attending to the needs of society and the environment rather than GDP.

+ Acting globally and locally to combat and mitigate the climate emergency, making ecocide a serious criminal offence, and supporting its inclusion as a crime in the International Criminal Court.

+ Serving notice on oil, gas, mining, logging, and palm oil corporations that they must respect international best practices in environmental protection.

+ Providing free education and healthcare to citizens and residents, with robust social policies in general.

+ Restoring guardianship of lands, forests, rivers, and other waters to customary authorities, together with decision-making powers on their occupation and use; providing state support with appropriate laws, policies, technical assistance, funds, and enforcement; and guaranteeing that a substantial and fair proportion of the benefits flow to the local community.

+ Establishing institutional and legal safeguards to ensure that customary powers are not abused, and that the environment is at all times safeguarded in accordance with international standards.

+ Adopting and adapting the best features of the modern democratic state including a representative legislature, an accountable executive government, an independent, impartial judiciary, and other independent institutions and mechanisms to prevent corruption and abuse or misuse of power at all levels (national, regional, and customary); ensuring effective protection of human rights; consulting stakeholders before and while making laws and policies that affect their rights and interests; and cooperating with other states in combatting the climate emergency, pursuing international criminal justice, and other key aspects of global co-operation.

+ Ensuring that the coercive arms of the state do not abuse or misuse their power.

Indigenous Knowledge

One huge stumbling block to westerners’ understanding of how Indigenous people experience their rainforest habitats, source of their sustenance is that, in the West, food is divorced from social life. Sanitised, plastic-wrapped, genetically manipulated, it is flown and trucked in from around the globe to be sold in supermarkets where the cashier barely has time to look up and say hello, and often consumed alone. By contrast, rainforest communities are organized around fishing, hunting, gathering, and planting as social and cultural activities. Their environment is essential for their health, so they love, understand, and care for it. This cosmos is an inseparable part of human nature, language, and culture. Indigenous peoples belong to and are not owners of their environment. Of course, Indigenous knowledge isn’t homogenous. In the world’s different habitats, people interact with their environment in historically diverse ways, which means that general, quick-fix solutions must be avoided, and proper attention given to particular ecosystems which, in turn, will benefit biodiversity in general. Nevertheless, with its solid principles, the Green State Vision can serve internationally as a foundational document for rainforest defenders, for tackling ecocide, as well as setting an example of good political and philosophical practice for Western social movements.

The climate crisis began long ago. For capitalism to exist, beliefs linking people to animals, soil, sun, stars, moon, seas, rivers, and rocks had to be destroyed. It also required a separation of humans and the animals they exploit. Today, contempt for animals and their habitat is at the core of the global system that has caused the climate crisis. In their sterile, high-rise (severed from the earth), air-conditioned offices with fake exotic plants, the people who are making decisions about the fate of the planet are also the most alienated from nature. We need to stop the real perpetrators of terror who are destroying conditions of life everywhere. We need a new system that respects nature, respects human rights, and the West Papuan people are offering an exemplary proposal of a redemptive, transformative social movement that is trying to “effect change”. Vital change.

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Photograph Source: SecretName101 – CC BY 4.0

During her nearly 40-minute-long speech on the final day of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Vice President Kamala Harris laid out her economic plan for the nation as “an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed.”

I deliberately chose not to watch her speech, preferring instead to read it. The ebullience at this year’s DNC was infectious. The Democratic Party is leaning into some of the language of progressive economic populism and is energized by a younger, more enthusiastic nominee. But reading Harris’s speech rather than watching it, helped bring some distance from the joy and clarified that the party is still not embracing the language of progressive economic populism and continues to use the destructive language of the right.

The term “opportunity economy” is itself the problem. It’s a phrase that former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used to defend Donald Trump’s economic agenda in 2019. Florida’s Chamber of Commerce, a staunchly pro-business outfit, has used it as well.

The word “opportunity” means a chance, the creation of circumstances to make something possible. We live in a nation where racial segregation is technically illegal, which means people of color have the “opportunity” to attend elite schools, apply for jobs, build wealth, retire comfortably, and pass their wealth to their children. Those opportunities have existed for decades. But data shows over and over that they don’t translate into reality, especially for Black and Brown people in the U.S. The racial wealth gap, for example, remains high. There are structural barriers that remain firmly in place, and that require very specific government intervention to dismantle. Will Harris embrace such a dismantling?

Harris proudly related during her DNC speech that she “took on the big banks, delivered $20 billion for middle-class families who faced foreclosure, and helped pass a homeowner bill of rights, one of the first of its kind in the nation.”

But she took on banks as a prosecutor, not as a legislator or executive. And her homeowner bill of rights was, once more, based on the ideas of “opportunity.” In a 2017 op-ed she explained that the bill of rights was based on “six bills designed to give Californians a fair opportunity to work with their banks, modify their loans, and keep their homes.”

Harris pointed out at the DNC that she “stood up for veterans and students being scammed by big, for-profit colleges. For workers who were being cheated out of their wages, the wages they were due. For seniors facing elder abuse.” Again, all were commendable achievements made during her role as a prosecutor and Attorney General of California. Will she stand up for the rights of veterans, students, workers, and seniors, or simply afford them opportunities for justice?

There is a huge difference between “opportunities” and “rights.” The former is a pro-corporate, pro-business term that is perfectly consistent with an individualist capitalist economy that has “winners” who make use of opportunities for wealth-building and “losers” who fail to do so. But “rights” is a word that insists on basic standards of fairness that everyone deserves. It encompasses an idea that capitalism hates: that people have the right to healthcare, childcare, education, homes, good wages, union jobs, and a stable climate. There are no winners and losers.

There was little talk of such rights at the Convention. In fact, even the New York Times noticed that Democrats avoided bringing up Medicare-for-All and the idea that everyone—not just a subsection of the population—has the right to taxpayer-funded healthcare. The Times’s Noah Weiland pointed out, “Her avoidance of a policy that had been central to progressive Democratic aspirations underscores how quickly she has sought to define her candidacy while appealing to more moderate voters, and how Medicare-for-All proposals have effectively left the Democratic mainstream for now.”

Instead of asserting that everyone has the right to taxpayer-funded healthcare Harris said, “We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare. We are not going back to when he tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions.”

It sounds as though she and her party have given up on expanding government healthcare to all and instead gone on the defense against the Republican Party’s attacks on Medicare and the ACA.

Harris’s second favorite word, after “opportunity” was “freedom.” She used it a dozen times in her speech, recasting “rights” as “freedoms.” She referenced the “The freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities, and places of worship. The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride.” She also touted, “The freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis. And the freedom that unlocks all the others: the freedom to vote.”

Clearly, Harris was attempting to reclaim the word “freedom” from the GOP, a formation that has been pulled toward the extreme right by Republican lawmakers who label themselves as members of the “Freedom Caucus.” Freedom is akin to opportunity.

Indeed, Harris’s failure to make a full-throated embrace of progressive economic populism was a failed “opportunity.” The conditions were ripe for her to lean in to language centered on the rights of people given that we have witnessed a cultural sea change on the failures of capitalism.

This change was apparent at the 2024 DNC as well. One need only examine how Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was received this year compared to the last two conventions. When Sanders spoke at the 2016 DNC in Philadelphia, his role was to placate progressives in the party who had supported his candidacy for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. He urged his voters to back Hillary Clinton, the centrist candidate who would go on to lose the electoral college vote to Donald Trump in spite of winning the popular vote. Only months earlier, leaked internal emails from the Democratic National Committee revealed just what the party’s insiders thought of Sanders—and it wasn’t pretty.

Then, four years ago, his role at the 2020 DNC in Wisconsin was to defend Joe Biden’s candidacy against Trump. He remarked, “Many of the ideas we fought for, that just a few years ago were considered ‘radical,’ are now mainstream.”

But this year, even though his role was once more to convince his supporters to back a mainstream Democratic candidate, Sanders’s prime-time address at the 2024 DNC in Chicago sounded remarkably mainstream. The New York Times recognized him as an insider, saying that he seemed to have “a sense of vindication that the Democratic Party, as he sees it, has finally recognized that many progressive causes are broadly popular with Americans.”

Sanders hasn’t changed, but the party’s rhetoric has. Slate’s Alexander Sammon pointed out that, “There were very few themes in Sanders’s speech that other Democratic speakers hadn’t already covered on Monday and Tuesday.” Although the DNC’s tenor was markedly different from four and eight years ago—Sanders now sounded like he fit in, largely because the tenor, if not the substance, of his political leanings have become mainstream.

Meanwhile, Harris’s language of “opportunity agenda” leans right. She shared at the DNC, “My mother kept a strict budget. We lived within our means. Yet, we wanted for little and she expected us to make the most of the opportunities that were available to us, and to be grateful for them.” Such words could easily have been said by a Republican and reflect the party’s ideas about “fiscal responsibility.”

Harris also touted a “middle-class tax cut” in attempting to distinguish herself from Trump’s tax cuts for the rich. But tax cuts for the middle class is a core GOP talking point—even if the party usually delivers for the already-rich in spite of its promises to the not-so-rich.

In truth, Harris is likely more economically progressive than she let on. She has backed the Child Tax Credit, a program that was popular and remarkably effective. But she made no mention of it at the DNC. Her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is known for his economically progressive policies.

Granted, party conventions these days appear to be tailored to appease a sliver of the American public: the undecided voters in swing states whose all-important ballots will help determine who wins the electoral college, and thus, the presidency. In the context of such an undemocratic system, politicians will always feel pressure to tack toward the center, as winning the popular vote does not guarantee victory.

But we live at a time when momentum is building for fulfilling the economic “rights” of people via such ideas as universal basic income plans, and reparations for Black people. A broad movement of progressives has for years demanded that the Democratic Party distinguish itself from the GOP by making a full-throated defense of the values it claimed to stand for. Rather than leaning rightward by using the Republican-style language of “opportunity” and “freedom,” the Democratic Party could lean left and center the “rights” of people.

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

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Vice-President Kamala Harris speaking at the Democratic National Convention, August 22, 2024, Canadian Broadcasting Company (Screenshot).

The not-so-good ones

The just concluded Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago was by most accounts a success. On Monday, the first night, Joe Biden gave his valedictory address, after which the audience breathed a sigh of relief. Not just because the long, self-indulgent peroration was over, but because Biden was finally out: one geezer down, one more to go. Two days later, state delegates conducted a celebratory roll-call vote, formally designating Kamala Harris and Tim Walz the Democratic Party nominees for president and vice-president.

On Tuesday, there were not-so-good speeches by their Royal Majesties the Obamas and Clintons. Michelle spoke glowingly and interminably about her mother and all mothers. (Like dogs, there are no bad mothers.) But she also delivered the best zinger of the convention. Reminding listeners of Trump’s gaffe at the conference of the National Association of Black Journalists, she said: “Who’s gonna tell him that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’”. Barak’s address, which immediately followed his wife’s, was ponderous and unfocussed. (He should study the cadences and inflections of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.) His only attention-getting line concerned Trump’s peculiar (not to say “weird”) preoccupation with comparing his crowd size to Harris’s. At one point, Obama brought his hands close together to indicate Trump’s comparatively small size. He undercut the punch line by embarrassment at his own vulgarity.

Bill Clinton was avuncular but confusing – no more “Secretary of “Splainin’ Stuff”, as Obama called him in 2012. Hilary was pompous as expected and mangled her metaphors: “As vice president, Kamala sat in the situation room and stood for American values.” Did anybody hold the veep’s chair as she did all that sitting and standing? “Together,” Hilary continued, self-referentially and prayerfully, “we put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling.” She went on in the same vein: “Tonight, we are so close to breaking through, once and for all.” And still more: “I want to tell you what I see through all those cracks. I see freedom.” Why did she need to look through the cracks to see it? Was the glass dirty – didn’t anybody tell her about Windex? But Hilary wasn’t done: Kamala could finally “break through” at which point she’d be “on the other side of that glass ceiling.” Was it the sitting down and quickly standing up – and bumping her head — that finally broke the ceiling? Who repaired he floor above, and can you please get me his number? It’s hard to fine good contractors.

Oprah spoke with earnestness but little substance. She emphasized unity and decried those who would “divide and conquer us.” She spoke in favor of books, abortion rights, and “adult conversations” in place of ridiculous tweets. She wound up being the only person in the five days to mention animal rights, when she said: “When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about the homeowner’s race or religion, we don’t wonder who their partner is or how they voted. No, we just do the best we can to save them. And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, well, we try to get that cat out too.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another Democratic grandee, gave a six-minute address highlighting Biden and the Democrats’ achievements during the previous four years including the Inflation Reduction Act, Infrastructure Bill and legislative and executive actions on behalf of veterans, seniors and students. It was boilerplate, memorable for just one thing: the rapturous ovation Pelosi received on her way to the podium. The diminutive, 84-year-old legislator from the Bay Area was, by all accounts, the person most responsible for giving Joe the boot. No amount of “Thank you Joes” will wash away the stain of that act of political benevolence.

Two other disappointing performances were delivered by the leading Democratic Party progressives, 34-year-old Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and 82-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders. The former thanked Biden, blessed Harris, and energetically cut the air with hands and index fingers. She spoke euphemistically, at first, like American politicians do, about the American middle-class. Just as there are no bad mothers, there’s no American working class, only a middle class stifled in its aspiration to become…middle class. (In fact, nearly 70% of the U.S. population is working class; excluding home ownership, they have no other assets than their wages.) AOC then confusingly shifted gears and began speaking about the American working class, but never got beyond generalities. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain was more direct and more internationalist in his short address. He began it by saying: “Good evening to the people that make this world move, the working class!” I half expected him to sing the Internationale.

Bernie was better than AOC, though plodding – he sounds less and less, these days, like Larry David’s impersonation of him. As usual, Sanders spoke in lists, calling for an activist government that increased the minimum wage, expanded Medicare and Medicaid, and increased Social Security payments to the elderly. He also supported legislation to increase union membership, create public financing of elections, and raise taxes on corporations and the billionaire class. One reason the address was so boring, paradoxically, is that these positions are now uncontroversial among Democratic voters and politicians. That they remain aspirational however, reveals the gap between party rhetoric and Democratic legislative priorities.

I might have missed somebody, but so far as I could tell, the only artist or literary figure given time at the convention podium was Amanda Gorman. At the Biden inauguration in 2021, she performed a sentimental and much-lauded hip-hop poem titled “The Hill We Climb.” For the DNC, she read “This Sacred Scene,” which began: “We gather at this hallowed place because we believe in the American Dream.” The United Center? The only deity she could be invoking is Michael Jordan, whose Bulls won six NBA championships between 1991 and 1998. But if Jordan is God, I worry for Harris and Walz; the Bulls finished 9^th in their division in 2023-4.

The better speeches

The best speeches at the convention, in my view, were not given by the A-listers, but the B-listers. Senator Raphael Warnock started his address by saying that Georgia made history on Jan. 5, 2020, by electing him, a Black man, and Jon Ossoff, a Jewish man, as U.S. Senators; but that history was tarnished the next day by a Trump-inspired insurrection to overturn the results of the presidential election. He meandered a bit in the middle of his 15-minute speech – there was the inevitable and deflating encomium for Biden — but Warnock regained his groove when he said: “Donald Trump is a plague on the American conscience.” That was a new epithet. Then he launched into a series of claims – would that they were true — that the Democrats were quickly moving forward on reproductive rights, worker’s rights, and voting rights. Then he spoke about the kindness of fathers, in particular his own, now deceased, “a preacher and a junkman who, Monday through Fridays lifted old broken cars and put ‘em on the back of an old rig. But on Sunday morning, the man who lifted broken cars lifted broken people…and told them they were God’s somebody.” He followed up by saying: “I’m convinced we can lift the broken even when we climb…we can heal sick bodies, we can heal the wounds that divide us, we can heal a planet in peril….” Great stuff from a preacher turned senator.

In his brief but rousing address, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro invoked Philadelphia, his state’s biggest city and site of the first, Continental Congress (1774-81), to tell a story of continued American progress in the advancement of freedom and justice. All that was thwarted, he said, by Donald Trump in his single term in office and would be again if he was elected once more. Trump and the Republicans, Shapiro said, wrap themselves up in the rhetoric of freedom, but undermine it at every turn. “It’s not freedom to tell our children what books to read” he said, with Obama’s former cadence and a Black English inflection. “And it’s not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies.” Pausing briefly for cheers from the audience, he tightened his lips and shook his head, adding “No, it’s not.”

Then, mixing the rhetoric of the Baptist preacher–Shapiro is Jewish – and the union leader, he continued, pointing at the camera: “And hear me on this, it’s sure as hell not freedom to say: ‘You get to vote, but he picks the winner.” “Real freedom” he continued, is “when a child can walk to and from school and get home safely to her mama.” Shapiro then expertly deployed what rhetoricians call anaphora. He repeated the phrase “real freedom is” followed by a series of positive liberties: the freedom to “join a union,” marry “who you love”, start a family “on your own terms,” “breath clean air, drink pure water…and live a life of purpose in which [you] are respected for who [you are].” Shapiro understood that an effective speaker doesn’t pause after applause, but speaks over it, building up to a crescendo. Though he treated anti-Israeli protesters on Pennsylvania campuses shamefully, he sure gives a good speech.

And finally, there was Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech. On the plus side, it was short and well-delivered. She began by discussing her mother Shaymala, an Indian immigrant and later, cancer researcher. Harris said little about her father, the prominent, Jamaica-born Marxist economist Donald J. Harris, except that he and her mother created a home environment of love and support. After saying that she proudly accepted her party’s nomination for president, she went on to describe the fundamental characteristics of a good president, including common sense and the ability to listen, and said that she possessed them, while Donald Trump lacked them.

From there, like the prosecutor she was, Harris proceeded to build the case for her presidency block by block. In the courtrooms of Oakland, she stood up against predators who abused women and children. As California Attorney General, she “took on” the banks that were illegally foreclosing on poor tenants and homeowners, and supported laws protecting consumers. She however omitted from her story the fact that as prosecutor and AG, she defended manifestly wrongful convictions, supported the forensic work of lab technicians convicted of corruption, upheld the death penalty, opposed a bill requiring state investigations of police shootings, and challenged a law mandating correct use of police body cameras.

Harris spent the middle of her address attacking Trump – there’s no need to recite the litany here – and then moved to close the argument in favor of her own election. To be sure, the case is for me open and shut. But there were several passages in her speech, that should temper everyone’s enthusiasm for her candidacy. The first was her strong support for the “bipartisan border security law” proposed by Biden and backed by leading Republicans until it was nixed by Trump – it might rob him of his signature issue. She said she would bring it back to Congress and when passed, sign it into law. The bill is a sop to the far right; it would among other things, set arbitrary caps on asylum claims in contravention of existing U.S. and international law.

The second was her unconditional support for Israel’s security, regardless of its leadership or policies. She spoke about Gaza in the passive voice, as if the genocide were a natural disaster: “At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past ten months is devastating. Too many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for shelter again and again, the scale of suffering is heartbreaking.” But her answer to the travesty is simply to follow the same path to peace that has been blocked again and again by Israeli president Netanyahu and his war cabinet. She did not propose simply following U.S. law – the Leahy Amendment – that denies U.S. weapons and supplies to any regime that violates human rights with impunity. She did not support the International Criminal Court in its pursuit of arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders.

The third utterance that made me cringe – leaving aside the bromides about American exceptionalism — was the following: “We must be steadfast in advancing our values and our security abroad….As Commander-in-Chef, I will ensure that America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” That the U.S. has the most lethal military in the world is beyond question. But that’s the problem, not the solution to global violence. The genocide of Native Americans, the wars against Korea and Vietnam, and the military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and a dozen other nations have killed millions. The wars currently wars fought in Ukraine and Gaza have the stamp of U.S. incompetence, indifference and profiteering all over them.

Paeans to America’s “military might” are by now reflexive. All candidates repeat them to appear strong and attract votes. But that reflexivity is, to repeat the formulation above, the very problem that a good president must tackle. By repeating the oath to lethality and war so prominently in a speech seen by 30 million Americans – way more than Trump’s acceptance speech, but who’s counting – Harris risks making her promise self-fulfilling. Is she already, even before her possible (now likely) election, sowing the seeds of her own political demise, just as Lyndon Johnson did in 1968 with Vietnam and Biden did in 2024 with Gaza?

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Photo by Li Yang

It’s always better to do business with people than to pick fights with them. But this piece of common sense seems to have dropped out of the brains – if they have them – of American congressional and white house leaders. During his presidential tenure, Donald “The Tariff Man” Trump slapped tariffs on washing machines, aluminum, steel, solar panels and other goods, totaling $380 billion worth of trade from China, the U.S.’s third biggest trading partner. That amounted to a tax increase of $80 billion. Not to be outdone in the stupidity sweepstakes, Joe “Copycat” Biden added his tariffs. They affected batteries, steel, aluminum, semiconductors, solar cells, electric vehicles, critical minerals and more.

As election campaigns kicked off, the candidates outdid each other on who could be tougher on China economically. Let’s hope Kamala “Advised by Black Rock” Harris eschews these idiotic soundbites. They do nothing besides offend Beijing. And you don’t want to offend Beijing. It is America’s second biggest creditor, and when Washington’s rulers make hostile, Sinophobic noises, Beijing dumps U.S. Treasuries. Other countries follow suit. This, while treasury secretary Janet Yellen already has her hands full, trying to unearth buyers for American debt. She doesn’t need, China, Saudi Arabia and who knows who else ditching billions of dollars worth of USTs.

And that’s merely finance and taxes. Just as bad, maybe worse, are all the economic prohibitions the last two administrations have slapped on trade. Biden sez no chips to China. Well, that boomeranged fast. China boosted a homegrown chip industry and it just had a huge breakthrough: Huawei’s Mate 60 smartphone features a seven-nanometer chipset. The manufacturer, SMIC, “achieved seven nanometers in two years from the conventional fourteen nanometers without access to foreign technology,” reported Foreign Policy Research Institute June 28. So China is well on the way to semi-conductor self-sufficiency, which will “alter the global chip supply chain and raise geopolitical security concerns…” Nothing like sanctions and tariffs to make America Third-Rate Again.

And they backfire in lots of ways. Again, take Biden’s semiconductor sanctions against China. Back in July 2023, Beijing struck back: it announced export controls on two rare earth minerals, gallium and germanium, indispensable for U.S. satellites, semiconductors and solar cells. Given that China has 60 percent of the world’s supply of rare earth minerals, with the other 40 percent in locations of dubious accessibility, Beijing’s move alarmed ceos at American tech corporations, who feared they portended more to come.

In fact, honchos at Nvidia and Intel begged the Biden bumblers to ease semiconductor sanctions against China. But it was too late, according to Shaun Rein, founder of China Market Research Group. These idiotic sanctions already made American companies lose billions. “Chinese semiconductor companies have emerged. China won’t trust U.S. politics again, so will buy domestic. Biden shot the U.S. in the leg.” More recently, Beijing announced “export limits on antimony and related elements due to national security concerns,” the Sirius Report tweeted August 15. “Antimony is used in military applications such as ammunition, infrared missiles, nuclear weapons and photovoltaic equipment etc. etc.” Washington sanctions Beijing and gets sanctioned in return. Brilliant move on the part of a nation, namely the U.S., utterly dependent on foreign supplies of parts, minerals and just about anything else you can think of.

Given how interdependent Chinese and American economies are, this prolonged white house attempt to decouple them resembles a surgeon using a chainsaw instead of a scalpel: it’s disastrous. Take soybeans. The U.S. is the world’s biggest soybean producer and China the biggest soybean consumer. But the U.S. has lost the Chinese market due to the foolish American trade war, which helped shift China to buying soybeans from Latin America. At the higher end of trade products, consider the U.S. ban on Chinese software in autonomous cars. Developing these vehicles relies on global cooperation, Sputnik reported August 6, “as the sector has a relatively large ecosystem and high costs for research and development.” But team Biden aims to propose a rule prohibiting “Chinese software in vehicles in the U.S. with level 3 automation and above and effectively ban testing on U.S. roads of autonomous vehicles produced by Chinese companies.” And that ain’t all.

Vehicles with “Chinese-developed wireless communication” would be booted off U.S. highways, and their producers were compelled to prove that “none of their connected vehicles or advanced autonomous vehicle software was developed in a ‘foreign entity of concern,’ like China.” This proposed ban is all of a piece with Biden’s trade policies. Indeed, less than three months ago, the mega-minds in the white house decided on more tariffs on Chinese EVs.

So these Beltway geniuses insist on their dangerous tariffs (which cost Americans a fortune), sanctions and other prohibitions, which get us nowhere. Remember “the ruble will be rubble”? Well, it wasn’t. It’s doing great, and so’s the Russian economy, which is now ranked fourth richest in the world. Sanctions and stealing foreign financial assets don’t work. All they do is convince foreign money managers to flee U.S. banks – and the dollar, which ultimately hurts Americans. But hey, since when did Washington sachems ever factor pain for Americans into their calculations? Never forget the financial policies of Barack “Evict the Homeowners” Obama.

Unfortunately, there’s no end in sight to this Inside the Beltway imbecility regarding China. Former Trump national security advisor Robert O’Brien pontificated back in June that if reelected, Trump should cut all economic ties with China. For good measure, O’Brien added, in a Foreign Affairs article June 18, that Trump should start live nuclear-weapons testing and ponder deploying ALL marines to Asia. “As China seeks to undermine American economic and military strength, Washington should return the favor…should in fact, seek to decouple its economy from China’s,” O’Brien wrote. According to the Taipei Times June 19, O’Brien claims to be in “regular contact” with Trump and “O’Brien gave a copy [of the Foreign Affairs article] to Trump campaign adviser Susan Wiles.” She reportedly showed it to Trump, but this was denied by his campaign. This was a wise move: ramping up military and economic hostilities with yet another country, that is, China, is not a winning campaign platform.

Specifically, O’Brien urged “that the 60 percent tariffs on China that Trump has floated should only be the first step, followed by tougher export controls ‘on any technology that might be of use to China…’” Because that’s gone so well lately. Those export controls, aka sanctions, have hiked homegrown tech industries in China, thrown Beijing and Moscow into an economic, political and military embrace and made American industries,’ including weapons producers’ reliance on global supply chains very dicey.

Not that I’m complaining: if Lockheed Martin can’t obtain needed parts or software from China due solely to moves by the Einsteins in Washington, that’s fewer bombs and guns in the world and fewer corpses in places like Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the far East and Africa. But these moronic policies don’t just affect armaments production. They damage all sorts of industries on which ordinary people depend. Like it or not, the world is economically interwoven, and it is the height of folly to burn these global bridges without even a scintilla of a plan for kick-starting homegrown industries. And there’s no plan, because such industries ain’t happening, for the simple reason that that doesn’t interest our oligarchs.

American corporate overlords like cheap wages in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam, Mexico and, yes, China. They have no intention of spending money to plant new industries in the U.S., whose workers might unionize, or already be unionized and thus threaten the wealth on which their aristocratic privilege rests. Until political bigwigs start talking about how we’ll re-industrialize here in America, all these insults aimed at Beijing are worse than hot air: they’re economic suicide.

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Bolivian journalist Fernando Molina on the racist roots of Bolivia’s right-wing 2019 coup and how the country’s movements defended democracy from the streets.

Journalist Fernando Molina in La Paz, Bolivia. Photo by Benjamin Dangl.

Armored trucks and rogue military officers filled La Paza’s central Plaza Murillo once again this past June in a failed coup attempt against Bolivian President Luis Arce. This right-wing effort at seizing power harkened back to 2019, when another coup successfully overthrew the government of President Evo Morales, leading to massacres and widespread repression. The 2019-2020 coup government of Jeanine Áñez was ultimately defeated by the country’s social movements and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS).

Throughout those events and up today, Bolivian journalist and analyst Fernando Molina has written incisive commentary and journalism that helps readers navigate the country’s tumultuous times. Molina is the author of numerous books including Racismo y Poder en Bolivia and El pensamiento boliviano sobre los recursos naturales. In 2012, he won the King of Spain’s Ibero-American Journalism Award. He regularly writes for El País and Nueva Sociedad on current events in the region.

In this interview, Molina discusses the classist and racist roots of the 2019 coup against the Evo Morales government, how MAS party defeated the coup government at the ballot box, and how the country’s social movements defended democracy from the streets.

Benjamin Dangl: To begin with, how do you explain Áñez’s support and the movement against Evo and the MAS in 2019-2020? Can you explain what sectors participated and why?

Fernando Molina: I call it a counter-revolutionary insurrection by the bourgeoisie, although it’s not the bourgeoise per se but rather what replaces the bourgeois in countries like Bolivia, which is a more politicized, more educated middle class.

These groups begin to distance themselves from Evo Morales from the very beginning, even if some voted for him in order to punish neoliberalism (precisely, Sánchez de Lozada). But it quickly becomes evident that there’s a division between a popular, working-class, Indigenous majority that supported the changes and a group that pollsters called ‘the scared ones,’ those scared of change, as I said, even if some of them had voted for Morales.

The core of this group is in Santa Cruz, because for different reasons the area has an elite holding a hegemonic control of the region, based on the identity of cruceños. They don’t feel Indigenous at all, rather, they’re pretty racist. Cruceños feel they’re different from the rest of Bolivians, that they are direct descendants of the Spaniards, and that the mixing has been absorbed by what is Spanish. They feel whiter and more Western than us. That elite has also gotten richer, especially since 1952 [when the National Revolution took place], and is at the core of this Bolivian middle class. This conglomerate radically opposed Evo Morales more and more as his politics unfolded.

Morales enjoyed an economic bonanza, so the opposition remained rather silent, but two things were always present. One, a sense of national tragedy because we called ourselves plurinational, that is, Indigenous, and for them this was tragic; they felt they weren’t included in that country, that it was not theirs anymore because they were losing the power they always had. They were expecting Morales to be similar to other processes like the 1952 Revolution, which after a while allowed the elite to join.

But Morales came from below; even if there were spaces where the elite were allowed in and did business, in general terms they were not able to fully enter. So, they lost a political space of ideological, cultural, educational capital they had which was the State. This was very useful to carry out their business; they also made business through the State.

The Plurinational State was a tragedy for them, and they also had a feeling of losing relevance. So, they became more anti-MAS and more explicit about their racism, which used to be more hidden, it wasn’t an issue, or rather it was a private issue, but Morales makes it a public one, so it generates a lot of reactions.

The ‘scared ones’ go from being 25-30%, who sometimes voted for MAS, to becoming a stronger opposition; they’re never homogenous, and they’re always fragmented. Finally, Morales makes the mistake of giving them a space as he’s trying to get reelected again [through a 2016 national referendum]. These groups win the referendum in 2016, as they had grown enough; they’re also lucky – they did a better campaign than Evo.

And back then the country was in a pretty good balance, but when Evo tries to get reelected [in 2019]… Uff! Things change. That is, the popular movement in the left loses strength and cohesiveness due to those mistakes, and certain groups break away, like the miners from Potosí, sectors from the COB [Bolivian Workers’ Central, a national union], teachers… That mistake generated the conditions for Áñez’s arrival, and of course those who supported her were from Santa Cruz, and the elites of all the departments.

During the coup it became serious; there were patrols against Indigenous people. They returned to power and kicked the Indigenous out. This translated into a brutality against the MAS, because of all the previous years without being able to take revenge against what they supposedly suffer. What do they want? What was the counterrevolution for? To eliminate the Plurinational State and return to the Republic, that is, a monocultural government, and to return to neoliberalism as much as possible.

Racism plays a fundamental role. It’s because racism disconnects the elite from the MAS groups—since they’re very different realities—that they feel they’ve lost their space in the country. And so, the first thing they do is to offend the Indigenous population. Áñez’s attacks against the MAS were also attacks against the Indigenous people so they would ‘learn their lesson.’

BD: Regarding the MAS and this period, could explain why and how MAS Presidential candidate Luis Arce and Vice President David Choquehuanca won in the 2020 general election?

FM: When Áñez came to power, a racist, corrupt, and authoritarian and violent leader—not only against the MAS but also its bases—there emerged a fantastic phenomenon of cohesion. It was a time of courage and struggle. That was Arce’s victory; the popular bloc came back and that is now a bigger sector than the elitist. There was again a cohesive movement, as happened in neoliberal times.

Another factor was that they did a good campaign because they had a very good candidate for the time, which was a period of economic crisis due to the pandemic. Arce was an economist [in the Morales administration] and he’s been in good times, economically speaking. So, they did a good campaign. At that time something stronger than Morales happened, which was a punishment vote against the elite, ‘we don’t want this again’, and so [MAS] obtained 55% of votes.

BD: What was the role of the movements demanding elections in August of 2020?

FM: Yes, the thing is that, as it happens a lot in Bolivia, [Áñez’s] was a transitional government, but first it tried to re-found neoliberalism in Bolivia. They had three months and tried to re-found the nation, right? And above all they wanted to do business, to get offices, etc. So then the pandemic comes…

The pandemic gave Bolivia the chance to look at [the Áñez administration] for a year as they were governing. The pandemic gives the MAS the opportunity to consolidate as an alternative to what was happening, which was a disaster. Áñez and her ministers want to take advantage of this and make up the fact that the elections were going to kill one million people due to COVID, so they could keep delaying them.

That’s when the August blockades came. I think Áñez’s desire to keep delaying [elections] as much as possible is easy to prove, there are many declarations. She was already a candidate, but there was always a chance of her not wining, so she tried to continue being president as much as possible. Obviously, there were ministers like [Interior Minister Arturo] Murillo who were stealing and wanted to keep doing it.

Now, the August blockades are interesting because, given the context it should’ve been a peasant massacre. We had two previous massacres against pro-Evo protests [in 2019]. The [Áñez government] had no scruples, they controlled the Army, and did with it what they did. And then the social base of Añismo was hysterical.

And why did the press align with Áñez? It wasn’t the money; it was an ethnic-racial issue. The press begins to try to prosecute the protesters.

The logical thing—and this is what I expected—was for Murillo to crush the protests by fire and sword. There’s no proof of this but some say that Murillo told the Army to stop the blockades (this would necessarily be with violence), and they refused. Why? Because the blockades were very strong. The strength of the blockades was impressive, it was full of rocks from one town to another. Every town organized blockades. The blockade was really important, really impressive. […] Thanks to this, the elections were moved forward.

Note: This interview was translated from Spanish to English by Nancy Piñeiro and has been edited for clarity and length.

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Migrant farmworkers, domestic workers and their supporters march and rally at the Federal Building to call for passage of the Registry Bill, which would allow undocumented people to gain legal immigration status. The march was organized by the Northern California Coalition for Just Immigration Reform. It was the third day of a three day march from Petaluma to San Francisco. Copyright David Bacon.

On August 17, a group of committed migrant activists set forth on a three-day march from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, highlighting the choices for progressive candidates in the coming November election. Should their campaigns amplify the hysteria about an immigration “crisis,” or should they speak the truth to the American people about the border and the roots of migration? Even more important, these marchers are providing a practical way for activists and political leaders to advocate for rights as they work to defeat the threat of MAGA racism.

The question at hand is whether to support the compromise immigration enforcement bill negotiated between centrist Democrats and Republicans last year, and to campaign against Donald Trump from the right, attacking him for undermining Republican support for the enforcement measures it contained.

In that bill, President Joe Biden agreed that he would close the border to asylum applicants if their number rose beyond 5,000 per day, while making it much harder to gain legal status for those even allowed to apply. Biden said he would cut short the time for screening asylum applicants by asylum officers, which would make winning permission to stay much more difficult.

To keep people imprisoned while their cases are in process, instead of releasing them, Biden proposed an additional $3 billion for more detention centers, a euphemism for immigrant prisons. There are already over 200, according to the group Freedom for Immigrants. Under a law signed by President Obama, Congress required that 34,000 detention beds be filled every night. At the end of 2023, those beds held 36,263 people, and another 194,427 were in “Alternatives to Detention,” which required wearing the hated ankle bracelets that bar travel for more than a few blocks. Over 90 percent of these jails are run for profit by private companies like the Geo Group, (formerly the Pinkerton Detective Agency).

These proposals respond to a media-driven frenzy that constantly refers to an immigration “crisis” and calls the border “broken.” That media coverage, and the response by centrist Democrats and Republicans, treats migrants as criminals, as an enemy. Political operatives in Washington then take polls, announce that the public wants draconian enforcement, and advise candidates that going against this tide will lead to election losses.

Yet this accepted political “wisdom” in Washington is not actually based on facts.

Let’s Look at the Numbers

Department of Homeland Security statistics show that over the decades the number of people crossing the border, and subject to deportation, rises and falls, while displacement and forced migration remain constant. In 2022, about 1.1 million people were expelled after trying to cross, and another 350,000 deported. In 1992, about 1.2 million were stopped at the border and 1.1 million deported. Over a million people were deported in 1954 during the infamous “Operation Wetback.” Arrests at the border have totaled over a million in 29 of the last 46 years.

Last year the number arrested at the border was higher: about 2.5 million. But the reality is that the migration flow has not stopped and will not stop anytime soon. What, then, is the “crisis”? New York Times reporter Miriam Jordan says, “In December alone, more than 300,000 people crossed the southern border, a record number.” They all believe, she says, that “once they make it into the United States they will be able to stay. Forever. And by and large, they are not wrong.”

In fact, the number of refugee admissions in 2022 was 60,000. In 1992, it was 132,000. According to Jordan, applicants are simply released to live normal lives until their date before an immigration judge. That will certainly be news to families facing separation and the constant threat of deportation. But this is what Republicans and anti-immigrant Democrats call an “invasion” and threaten to “shut the border.”

Criminalizing the Undocumented

Should Trump win election in November, he promises to reinstitute the notorious family separation policy. Children who survive the crossing might easily be lost, as so many were, in the huge detention system. Senator James Lankford (R-OK) wants to reintroduce the “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which people wanting asylum were not allowed to enter the United States at all, to file their applications. The Mexican government was forced to set up detention centers just south of the border to house them while they waited.

Trump and other Republicans would imprison all migrants who face a court proceeding that allows them to apply to stay or stop a deportation. Pending cases now number in the millions, because the immigration court system is starved for the resources for processing them.

Texas Governor Abbott has pushed through a law that makes being undocumented a state crime. Republicans in Congress last year proposed to build more border walls, create barriers to asylum, force the firing of millions of undocumented workers, and permit children to be held in detention prisons with their parents. Centrist Democrats are very willing to agree to modified proposals like these.

No money, running from something or someone, trying to keep a family together and give it a future, or just needing a job at whatever wage—these are the commonalities of the thousands who arrive at the U.S. border every year. Winning public understanding of immigration is the only way to decisively defeat this anti-immigrant hysteria, rather than caving into its illogic, and to the media frenzy and the onslaught of Republicans and MAGA acolytes.

Roots of Migration

President Obama made some acknowledgement of the poverty and violence that impels people to come but drew the line at recognizing this migration’s historical roots, much less any culpability on the part of the U.S. government. President Biden sent Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic candidate for president, to Central America in his first year in office with a similar message—don’t come.

So far, the new presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has not taken a different direction. In Arizona she gave a speech recommitting to the Biden-brokered compromise and criticizing Trump for killing it. In a new TV ad, she promised to hire thousands of additional border patrol agents. The three enforcement arms of the Department of Homeland Security—the Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement today account for 52,300 officers, making it the largest law enforcement agency in the country.  The numbers mushroomed by 22,000 in the past 20 years; the Border Patrol alone tripled from 2,700 to 8,200.

The rationale for this huge increase is that immigrants must be met with deterrence and enforcement to stop them from coming. Today an unwillingness to look at U.S. responsibility for producing displacement and migration is starkest in relation to Haitians and Venezuelans, who have made up a large percentage of the migrants arriving at the Rio Grande in the last two years.

After Haitians finally rid themselves of the U.S.-supported Duvalier regime and elected Jean Bertrand Aristide president, the United States put him on an outbound plane in 2004, as it did with Miguel Zelaya in Honduras. A string of U.S.-backed corrupt but business-friendly governments followed, which pocketed millions while Haitians went hungry and homeless by the tens of thousands after earthquakes and other disasters. The treatment of Haitian migrants is a form of institutionalized racism.

Survival in Venezuela became impossible for many as its economy suffered body blows from U.S. political intervention and economic sanctions. If the United States moves further to increase sanctions in response to the recent elections, it will produce even more migration.

These interventions produce migrants and then criminalize them. In 2023, the Border Patrol took 334,914 Venezuelans into custody, along with 163,701 Haitians. And while promoting military intervention in Haiti and regime change in Venezuela, the Biden administration put people on deportation flights back home, in the hope that this would discourage others from starting the journey north.

The disconnect is obvious to anyone born south of the Mexican border. Sergio Sosa, a Guatemalan exile who heads the Heartland Workers Center in Omaha, observes: “People from Europe and the U.S. crossed borders to come to us, and took over our land and economy. Migration is a form of fighting back. We’re in our situation, not because we decided to be, but because we’re in the U.S.’s backyard.”  While President Clinton was the author of many anti-immigrant measures, he did recognize this historic truth, and apologized to the Guatemalan people for the U.S. support of the military dictatorships that massacred thousands.

The Democrats have to tell people the truth, and political campaigns are the times when this is most important. Agreeing with Trump that immigrants are the enemy to be detained at the border, and then only disagreeing on the numbers and methods, contradicts any commitment to a fact-based policy, while making immigrant communities scapegoats.

As they march from Silicon Valley, immigrant rights campaigners are reminding the Democratic Party of this truth and are calling for a commitment to the welfare of the 11 million people already in the United States who lack legal immigration status. That commitment has been all but lost in the border “crisis” hype.

An Alternative Approach

The goal of these marchers is to win support for a bill that could make a profound difference in the lives of millions of people. Today, anyone who entered the United States without a visa before January 1, 1972, can apply for legal permanent residence. From 2015 to 2019, however, only 305 people received legal status this way because over 90 percent of undocumented immigrants came after that date. As the years go by, ever fewer numbers qualify.

Known as the Registry Bill, HR 1511 would allow anyone in the country for seven years to apply for legal status. Emma Delgado, a leader of Mujeres Unidas y Activas (United and Active Women) in San Francisco says, “I haven’t seen my children in many years because there is currently no way for me to apply for legal residency.” She called the family separation produced by current immigration law “immoral.”

Angelica Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigration Reform in Los Angeles, challenges the idea that Democrats can’t campaign for it during an election year, and that a Republican majority in the House dooms it. “Think of all the millions of U.S. citizens who have immigrant parents,” she urges, “and how many have had their fathers or mothers deported. All over the country. Immigrant workers are a big part of the workforce. They’re all part of a base that can force change. We can’t depend on political winds or what people tell us is possible.”

No matter how many walls and migrant prisons the government builds, people will come. Over the years they will become part of communities here, and with progressive immigration policies, eventually voting citizens. Democrats need a long-term vision that sees the future in organizing and defending them, in turning those old anti-immigrant arguments around, rather than reinforcing them.

This first appeared on FPIF.

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Photo by Kristina Flour

More often than not, the dead do not return to rejoin the living but rather to lead them into some dreadful snare, entrapping them with disastrous consequences [… What] haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.

– Nicolas Abraham

I was about six when I learned the word decapitated. Behind one of the two hotels in the main street of my hometown, Angaston, there was an abandoned quarry with a cave where two men lived. This place was totally out of bounds, so it was irresistible as a shortcut on the route from school to my best friend’s home. We skirted the cave, taking a track around the top of the quarry. We knew the men were there but, in our perfect town, named after a philanthropic founder, George Fife Angas, they didn’t exist. No one spoke of them until they died in a fire one night and, even then, perfunctorily. That was when I heard the word, apparently referring to one of the men. That’s how the word itself remained, decapitated from any real man or meaning. Who was he? Why was he living in a cave with another man? Why was he decapitated? Why? Why? Why? They were questions that could never be asked, let alone answered. They were silenced, together with other throttled questions arising from anything that cast even a shadow of doubt on the pristine image that had been carefully constructed for our settler colonial town.

I was reminded of the two men when PJ, a childhood friend, phoned the other day for a bit of a gossip. One of her friends had seen a 50-year-old from the town, enjoying a night out while his wife was in labour with their first child. The grapevine operated. PJ’s friend told her, and PJ told me. What a jerk! It wasn’t surprising but par for the course of what I know about his family. The conversation got around to the Angas Park dried fruit company, with which this man is indirectly connected. I realised then that I don’t know much about it or where I grew up. I mean I only knew the story we’d been fed, which is why decapitated unsettle(re)d me because it didn’t fit the narrative.

What I know now, after digging around in the town’s history, points to the importance of secrecy in underpinning social attitudes that maintain hierarchies and privilege. The biggest secret belongs to the town’s myth of origin. The words “settler colonialism” are never uttered. Since this is a system of murder and dispossession there must be victims, but they can’t be allowed to exist in physical form or concept. Otherwise, there’d be a counter-story. The victims’ story. The word “settlement” is comfier when “colonialism” has been decapitated from it. Then, in the void thus created, a new narrative, airbrushing and promoting settler interests, could be constructed to ensure that we, the townspeople, unquestioningly accepted our part in the real story by remaining ignorant or keeping mum about it. Unlike personal secrets in the realm of a right to privacy, secrets of the public domain are systemic. Controlling how they’re produced, presented, and suppressed is one of the “keys to power, indeed of social relations in their entirety”.

When I was at primary school, the town and the Barossa Valley where it was located had been settled for just over a hundred years by a few British families in the early 1840s, followed by large groups of Germans they imported. We were taught about the feats of those hundred years, about the foresight of George Fife Angas, a director of the South Australian Company. This commercial enterprise was essential in initiating immigration to the colony. There was never any hint that immigration of some meant expulsion of others. In 1839, Colonel William Light, South Australia’s first Surveyor General, sold George Fife Angas 28,000 acres where Angaston (now covering 19,772 acres) is located for £1 an acre. In 1843, with the settlement underway, he sent his son John Howard Angas to manage his recently acquired bit of empire. It all sounded very visionary. The place called Angaston was purged of any history before that.

Angas, still residing in England, founded the colony of South Australia as a commercial venture. But the South Australian Company, this private, convict-free initiative within Britain’s penal colony in Australia, had to be blessed by law. His Majesty required conditions, including the sale of £35,000 in land, to ensure that his realm would not be financially disadvantaged. So, Angas founded and chaired the South Australian Company, with ten directors whose names are liberally immortalised in the street names of the South Australian capital, Adelaide. Angas invested £40,000 (nearly £6 million today) in 102 lots of land of 135 acres, 13,770 acres of prime town and country real estate, and the right to rent another 220,160 acres of pastured land. How did he raise this huge amount? It’s a good question because it’s also asking about the secret origins of the colony of South Australia and its banking system.

In the person of George Fife Angas, these origins extend beyond London to British Honduras (now Belize), from which Angas was bringing mahogany for his furniture- and coach-making father after establishing his own shipping business in 1824. Once “discovered”, Belize had been taken after 1577 by British buccaneers as an operative bolthole in waters where there was fierce competition from French and Spanish corsairs. By the end of the seventeenth century, they’d moved into the logging business, first seizing logwood cut by Spaniards, then felling bloodwood trees and, later, rainforest mahogany in such quantities that they needed a workforce. They therefore introduced a particular system of chattel slavery. On the outward journey, Angas shipped European luxury goods and plenty of alcohol for the slavers. With a riff on Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy, the Australian historian Humphrey McQueen writes, “Without chattel slaves, the Angases have no mahogany to import and no market for their exports; without those profits they have no hoard. It is chattel-slavery which gives the South Australian Company its founding philanthropist. Thus, slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance for free settlement.”

So, a good part of George Fife Angas’s fortune came from “his family’s wage-slaves who crafted furniture out of Honduran mahogany harvested by chattel-slaves” and the Atlantic trade that serviced the slave economies. But the huge sum required to set up the South Australian Company came from compensation after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was passed, freeing British “property” of 800,000 African slaves. Less well-known is the fact that the Act (British taxpayers) provided for financial compensation of slave owners for the loss of said “property”. Angas collected £6,942 in 1835, acting as an agent for slave-owners in London. For him, this felicitously coincided with the fact that once the Caribbean “was no longer a place to make a fortune, descendants of slaveowners chose [Australia] as the next frontier of empire.” Abolition coincided with a restructuring of the East India Company to become the proxy government of India. This upheaval in the western and eastern halves of Empire led to a surge in the colonisation of Australia and what more respectable way to go about it than to apply colonial enthusiast, Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s principles of land commodification, wage-labour, and forced migration, dressed up as philanthropy where possible?

With the green light of the colonial Act, Angas met Pastor August Ludwig Kavel who was aiding (mainly Silesian) Lutherans being persecuted by Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm and arranged for them to emigrate. One websiteadds, letting out the secret that George Fife Angas’s help to the Silesian immigrants wasn’t entirely disinterested, that by 1850, “encouraged by the income he was receiving from his German tenants” (who called him Your Honour), George Fife Angas had emigrated to Australia. Eventually, the Angases from the Collingrove and Lindsay Park homesteads accrued a pastoral empire covering 12 million acres of South Australia (about 5% of the total). Their dynastic power is recognised in Adelaide where the High Court, the Federal Court and the South Australian Police headquarters are all established in Angas Street.

But rectitude had to be bastioned. In 1862, Robert Harrison was asked to write a history of that “virtuous territory which should be palatable to certain classes of a small community”. But describing George Fife Angas, he wrote that his aim in life, “was to accumulate cash, study the principles of banking and investment, with a little theology read backwards to lull him into the pleasing belief that he was eminently adapted for a celestial sphere”. This was most unpalatable, so “every copy available was purchased and destroyed by the Angas family”.

The biggest unspoken lie of my childhood was a resounding absence. Absence of the people who’d given beautiful toponyms to the surrounds of Angaston: the Angas homestead, Tarrawatta (plenty of water); the town of Nuriootpa (Nquraitpa, a meeting place); town of Tanunda (waterhole); town of Kapunda (leaping water or spring). But there was no sign of the people who’d been disconnected from them. They didn’t exist in physical presence or in school history books. They were simply cleared away for, unlike what happened in other parts of Australia, this land hadn’t been decreed terra nullius. The only sign of them a hundred years later was the place names they’d left behind, now decapitated words hinting at something too shameful to speak of. With all the German names—Heuzenroeder, Feibiger, Schmidt, Roesler, and many more—connected to people, our neighbours, and the desolate absence of other people, mutely wailed by the Aboriginal toponyms, it was evident even to a child that there was some kind of lethal equation: get rid of some people and replace them with others.

The original Peramangk, Kuarna, and Ngadjuri people hadn’t been directly massacred, as happened to many other First Peoples of Australia, but they were dispossessed of their traditional land, which is one way of murdering people who are so united to place. They were dispersed, confined on missions, and died of introduced diseases, mainly smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, influenza, measles, tuberculosis, bronchitis, pneumonia, diarrhoea, and dysentery. The places they’d named for their qualities were given the stamp of empire with new names denoting quantifiable possession. Angaston street names—Fife, Murray, French, Dean, Sturt, and Hodder (after George Fife Angas’s hagiographer), for example—ratified the settlers’ land grabs in the town’s public spaces.

Today, one of the Angaston “Heritage” websites has a politically correct “Acknowledgement of Country”: “The land that today we call Angaston has been the spiritual and physical home of the Peramangk, Nadjuri and Kaurna people since the dawn of time. We acknowledge this ongoing connection, and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.” Needless to say, information about Angaston and its surrounds as a “spiritual home” or how it was snatched from people who’d been there since the “dawn of time” is absent. Like the people.

Settler colonial claims to and uses of the land require permanence, which means “notional” as well as “actual elimination” of the First People. An early account by George French Angas, in Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand (1847, pp. 215-216) is filtered through the entrepreneurial worldview of the South Australian Company, just a few years after his father George Fife expelled the Peramangk, Ngadjuri and Kaurna people: “The settlers’ homesteads frequently display an air of comfort quite inviting: the white buildings peeping through the trees, and the lazy cattle reposing beneath the shade of some umbrageous eucalyptus”. He rejoices that the hills around Angaston “abound in minerals: chalcedony, opal, iron, marble, copper. And an almost endless variety of mineral substances … [that] will undoubtedly become of great value, and increase in quality as they are worked below the surface”. The once sacred land is now pastured and ripped open. It eventually yields a cave-in-a-quarry-where-a-man-was-decapitated.

Returning to the present, there are enduring ideological as well as physical effects of this settlement, partly resulting from strategies of elision and euphemism used to cover slave trade profits. Thanks to the abolitionist humanitarian discourse favoured by George Fife Angas, it became démodé to justify subordination and dispossession of Black people on grounds of innate racial inferiority. Deemed too primitive to be proper inhabitants (users) of the land, their “backwardness” was the excuse for wrenching them from their non-capitalist traditions and subjecting them to the civilising regime of missions, which were actually reserves with little or no government control. There, they would die unnoticed and unremembered. For descendants of those First People who survived, the result of all this is undermining of identity, outsider status, and inequalities of health and wellbeing through to the present day.

Essentially unchallenged, the secret Angaston history of exploitation eventually boomeranged back to the Americas. Angas Park, the famous dried fruit company established in 1911, was acquired in 1987 by racehorse breeder Colin Hayes (so exploitation of and cruelty to horses, also enter the story of Angaston’s success) and his son-in-law, Paul Mariani. Then, it was described as a $40 million company. Hayes, whose racing associates included Dubai’s Sheik Hamden and Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, owned the most prestigious of the Angas properties, Lindsay Park, bought from George Fife Angas’s grandson, Sir Keith Angas in 1965. Together with Tarrawatta, it now belongs to a Hong Kong billionaire. In 2000, Hayes and Mariani sold Angas Park to Chiquita for $53 million. The deal was praised as a “win-win situation” in the South Australian Legislative Council on 31 May 2000 by Liberal (conservative) party member Caroline Schaefer, who quotes Mariani: “…it is good for our shareholders, good for our employees and management, all of whom will remain, and it’s good for the local community and South Australian industry as well.” Good for the community? There’s nothing “community” about Chiquita.

The United Fruit Company, founded in 1899, later became United Brands Company in 1970, and then Chiquita in 1990. It was notorious for grave crimes in Latin America and, in particular, the 1928 “Banana massacre” in Ciénaga, Colombia, which Gárcia Márquez famously fictionalised in A Hundred Years of Solitude. It was famous for an advertising campaign called The Great White Fleet, with cruise liners that took American adventurers—also encouraged to wear white—to Central America to show them its plantations (where conditions for dark-skinned workers actually presented a “clear overtone of slavery”). In Guatemala, where the government of President Jacobo Árbenz had introduced land reform measures, United Fruit, joined by the CIA, orchestrated a coup in 1954, which ushered in 40 years of violence called the Guatemalan Genocide in which an estimated 200,000 people were murdered. None other than US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles had negotiated the 1930 United Fruit land grab in Guatemala (and Honduras) and, prior to the coup, the company had been able to persuade President Dwight D. Eisenhower to pressure and threaten Árbenz. Eisenhower and many other prominent US government officials had considerable stock in United Fruit.

The name changed but the tactics remained the same. Chiquita is notorious for mistreating workers on its Central American plantations, pollution, cocaine trafficking, bribery of foreign officials, and illegal land transactions. In the 1990s and early 2000s, around the time it came to “be good for the local community” of Angaston, Chiquita (and other corporations like Fresh Del Monte Produce, and Hyundai) were paying the Colombian far-right paramilitary and drug trafficking group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). This didn’t remain so secret as, in 2007, a federal jury in South Florida ordered the company to pay more than $38 million in damages to families of AUC victims. It was the first of many wrongful death and disappearance lawsuits.

If you uncover one secret, it usually leads you to more. Chiquita also uses aerial spraying of hazardous pesticides without warning workers or providing them with protection. As if Guatemala weren’t castigated enough by the company’s activity, Chiquita has been sued for continuing to poison its villages with “pesticide showers”. Genocide, crimes against humanity, and grave human rights abuse come hand in hand with ecocide so, to return to the source of George Fife Angas’s wealth, Belize, his success has shaped the country’s culture through settler control of large areas of forest and uncontrolled logging of certain species, especially with the change of logwood to mahogany, which requires a large labour force and significant capital outlay. Hence a small wealthy class established the country’s “unique slave system”, which means that few people have engaged in smallholder agriculture. By 2014 Belize had lost 40% of its forest cover. Large sugar cane, corn, citrus, and banana plantations, using huge amounts of agrochemicals and mercury, are damaging the soil and polluting rivers and coastal zones.

Three and four generations on from George Fife Angas, Hayes and Mariani introduced Chiquita and its human rights and environmental crimes into Angaston as “good for the local community”. Well, at least it fitted neatly enough with the hidden slave-based foundational story. One aspect of secrets about abuse is that they not only enable more abuse, but they also cause social breakdown because, unable to see any difference between lies and truth, people don’t know right from wrong, so they’ll go along with anything that seems not to affect them directly. But it’s not only people and environments in Australia, in Belize, in Guatemala, and Colombia, to start with, who are affected. Once recent indication of a global emergency, showing yet again that everything is interconnected, is monkeypox, but problems like this will never be solved until questions about their real origins are answered. No wrong can be righted until the true nature of the wrong is known.

Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor knew all too well that humans find Miracle, Mystery, and Authority easier to accept than the moral responsibilities required by knowledge of harsh truths: “Did we not love mankind when we admitted so humbly its impotence and lovingly lightened its burden and allowed mankind’s weak nature to sin so long as it was with our permission.” Late capitalism, decked out in its delusive miracle, mystery, and authority, gives permission to any sin that benefits it and, wantonly ignoring its own secrets, the ones it imposes so it can keep exploiting, is destroying the planet that sustaines it, together with its people (except, perhaps, a few billionaires in bunkers), creatures, land, air, and seas.

Postscript

I grew up playing with fourth-generation Angas kids, visited their houses, knew their families. The secrets were palpable enough in all the rules entailed by socialising with them (in one family, the temperature of the bathwater was taken by a nurse before the kids could get in the tub). But I didn’t know then that they were secrets. It was more like an asphyxiating atmosphere. There was a big secret in my own family too. My father, who expressed socially acceptable anti-Semitic views and said he was Catholic, was Jewish on his mother’s side. I only found out when he died. He’d turned his back on his family. I know very little about them, but this wasn’t so unusual in a newish settler colony in which many people, some 20%, are descended from transported convicts and keen to hide their criminal ancestry, even while wittingly or unwittingly perpetuating the work of bigger criminals by accepting their secrets. In Angaston (for me, Angstown) there are many things you can’t talk about. If you give voice to them, you pay the price. I was eventually disinherited and declared “feral” by my family when I started trying to articulate the “gaps left within us by the secrets of others”. The break is hard but being feral, in a wild state after escape from domestication, is fine. And I still have my childhood friends, like PJ.

I bucked against secrets without knowing what they were. I still don’t know a lot of them. Just enough to understand that if a crime against human rights is kept secret, it will continue to be committed in new forms and with new names, including philanthropy. These crimes are not decapitated instances, cut off from general society, because they’ll eventually affect everyone, even while today’s oligarchs are trying to keep secret what its system has wrought, and what it’s doing to the planet.

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An observation from George Orwell — “those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future” — is acutely relevant to how President Biden talked about Gaza during his speech at the Democratic convention Monday night. His words fit into a messaging template now in its eleventh month, depicting the U.S. government as tirelessly seeking peace, while supplying the weapons and bombs that have enabled Israel’s continual slaughter of civilians.

“We’ll keep working, to bring hostages home, and end the war in Gaza, and bring peace and security to the Middle East,” Biden told the cheering delegates. “As you know, I wrote a peace treaty for Gaza. A few days ago I put forward a proposal that brought us closer to doing that than we’ve done since October 7th.”

It was a journey into an alternative universe of political guile from a president who just six days earlier had approved sending $20 billion worth of more weapons to Israel. Yet the Biden delegates in the convention hall responded with a crescendo of roaring admiration.

Applause swelled as Biden continued: “We’re working around-the-clock, my secretary of state, to prevent a wider war and reunite hostages with their families, and surge humanitarian health and food assistance into Gaza now, to end the civilian suffering of the Palestinian people and finally, finally, finally deliver a ceasefire and end this war.”

In Chicago’s United Center, the president basked in adulation while claiming to be a peacemaker despite a record of literally making possible the methodical massacres of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Orwell would have understood. A political reflex has been in motion from top U.S. leaders, claiming to be peace seekers while aiding and abetting the slaughter. Normalizing deception about the past sets a pattern for perpetrating such deception in the future.

And so, working inside the paradigm that Orwell described, Biden exerts control over the present, strives to control narratives about the past, and seeks to make it all seem normal, prefiguring the future.

The eagerness of delegates to cheer for Biden’s mendaciously absurd narrative about his administration’s policies toward Gaza was in a broader context — the convention’s lovefest for the lame-duck president.

Hours before the convention opened, Peter Beinart released a short video essay anticipating the fervent adulation. “I just don’t think when you’re analyzing a presidency or a person, you sequester what’s happened in Gaza,” he said. “I mean, if you’re a liberal-minded person, you believe that genocide is just about the worst thing that a country can do, and it’s just about the worst thing that your country can do if your country is arming a genocide.”

Beinart continued: “And it’s really not that controversial anymore that this qualifies as a genocide. I read the academic writing on this. I don’t see any genuine scholars of human rights international law who are saying it’s not indeed there. . . . If you’re gonna say something about Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, you have to factor in what Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, has done, vis-a-vis Gaza. It’s central to his legacy. It’s central to his character. And if you don’t, then you’re saying that Palestinian lives just don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter this particular day, and I think that’s inhumane. I don’t think we can ever say that some group of people’s lives simply don’t matter because it’s inconvenient for us to talk about them at a particular moment.”

Underscoring the grotesque moral obtuseness from the convention stage was the joyful display of generations as the president praised and embraced his offspring. Joe Biden walked off stage holding the hand of his cute little grandson, a precious child no more precious than any one of the many thousands of children the president has helped Israel to kill.

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Photograph Source: redoxkun – CC BY-SA 2.0

Spanish officials reassuringly heralded a “new era” for the country after May 2024 elections. Catalonian pro-independence parties had lost the parliamentary majority that had enabled them to govern their region since 2015, and for the first time in decades, had failed to secure a majority of seats in regional parliament. Spain’s ruling Socialists meanwhile managed to emerge as Catalonia’s largest party.

Madrid’s political focus on Catalonia has intensified since 2017. After holding what was deemed by Spanish authorities an illegal independence referendum, Catalonia’s president and other officials fled to Belgium, prompting a diplomatic crisis. Spain then imposed direct rule over the region, with the EU backing the decision and citing the need for constitutional approval for referendums. In the aftermath, local support for Catalonia’s independence declined, offering Madrid a way in.

Spain’s separatist and autonomous movements are among Europe’s most well-known, and its management of them is watched closely across the continent. Many other European nations, particularly in larger countries, have autonomous movements seeking devolution, self-government, or outright independence. The perceived failure of the EU, international diplomacy, and integration efforts to resolve these issues has led countries to maintain their own policies. Although few movements are considered serious threats, attempts to assert themselves often provoke direct interventions by national governments—when these governments have the capacity to do so.

Many of Europe’s once-distinct regional identities have only waned in recent times. The rise of nationalism in Europe in the 1800s led to unitary states that integrated peripheral regions with the capitals, a trend known as “capital magnetism.” Additionally, increasing urbanization in other large cities weakened traditional ties to local communities and support systems.

Integration and assimilation pressure was also exerted on regional identities to create more national identities. At the time of Italy’s unification in 1861, for example, less than 10 percent of Italians spoke the Tuscan dialect which began to be promoted as standard Italian. Steadily, its use in public and administrative life, mass media, and other methods led to a decline in the use of other regional dialects and languages. Similarly, French policies promoted the Parisian dialect as standard French, and the German Empire promoted High German.

Modern EU states face greater limitations on language suppression. The framework provided by the EU’s “post-sovereign” system implores member states to uphold minority language protections and other rights. Nonetheless, national governments have modernized their approaches to establishing national uniformity. Proficiency in majority languages is often a prerequisite for education, media, and employment opportunities, while immigration favors majority language learners. As a result, dozens of minority European languages are on the brink of extinction.

Nonetheless, autonomous movements in Europe do wield political power. Political networks like the European Free Alliance, a group of pro-independence political parties, operate in the EU parliament and serve as political outlets for separatist movements, using democratic processes.

Italy is constantly attempting to more effectively tie to itself its autonomous regions of Sicily, Sardinia, and several northern regions. The transformation of the regional political party Lega Nord into a national one, Lega in 2018, demonstrated some success. The autonomy movements, however, are similarly adaptive. Other northern Italian parties recently rallied to vote to approve legislation approving them greater autonomy in June 2024. South Tyrol, Italy’s German-speaking region, brings the added challenge of receiving support from Austria. Austrian leaders have repeatedly proposed granting Austrian passports to German speakers, and, in January 2024, voiced support for further autonomy reforms, drawing a reflexive rebuke from Rome.

Hungary’s disputes with its neighbors are even more notable. The 1920 breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire left significant Hungarian communities across Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. Today, the Hungarian government supports these communities by funding cultural institutions, providing financial aid, and fostering solidarity, which has sparked tensions with these countries. However, as a smaller nation, Hungary struggles to exert significant influence, especially in EU member states like Romania and Slovakia, and has also found limited success in Ukraine.

Nonetheless, EU countries generally tend to avoid interfering in others’ separatist movements. This has helped France to consolidate its rule over its mainland territory. However, it hasn’t yet done so over the Mediterranean island of Corsica, purchased by the French in 1768. The rollback of the French Empire after World War II reignited historical tensions, further inflamed by the arrival of many French people and Europeans in Algeria to Corsica in the 1960s. Though violence largely subsided in Corsica after the 1970s, a ceasefire was not reached until 2014, and pro-separatist riots in 2022 show the situation remains tense.

Following the unrest, French President Macron raised the possibility of granting Corsica greater autonomy. Previously, in 2017, as tensions were building in neighboring Spain over Basque separatism, France raised the administrative autonomy of its own Basque territory by granting it single community status, unifying several local councils under one regional authority. Contrastingly, the merger of the region of Alsace in 2016 with two other French areas reduced its autonomy and integrated it more into the national apparatus. The different approaches demonstrate the diverse policies used by national governments to manage their regions.

Germany, the most populous country in the EU, administers several regions with aspirations for greater autonomy. However, its federal system, which grants states greater authority over areas such as education and language, has helped temper separatist sentiment and reduced the need for management from Berlin.

A federal system has not resolved the challenges faced by Belgium. The country’s Flemish-speaking and French-speaking regions have sought greater autonomy, with some advocating for unification with a greater Dutch or French-speaking state. While increasing regional autonomy has been part of the solution, the regions remain interconnected through the capital, Brussels, and its wider role as the capital of the EU.

That has not deterred breakup advocates from proposing a similar “Velvet Divorce” between Belgium’s regions, like the peaceful split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992. Polls indicated a victory in June 2024 for Vlaams Belang, a party whose leader ran on reaching an agreement to dissolve the country or declaring Flanders’s independence. But their shock defeat ensured Belgium’s continuity and thus the stability of the EU.

Outside the EU, Europe’s autonomy issues are also in flux. In the late 1990s, the UK granted greater autonomy to Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales. Scottish independence efforts were then disrupted after a failed 2014 referendum and the UK’s subsequent EU departure two years later. The Scottish National Party established a Brussels office to maintain EU connections, as did the European Friends of Scotland Group, founded in 2020. The Scottish Independence Convention plans to hold a convention in Edinburgh in October 2024 featuring more than a dozen European groups to coordinate their independence initiatives, though the participation of separatist movements within EU countries may limit the extent of EU involvement.

Brexit also reignited secessionist sentiment across the UK, particularly in Northern Ireland, but also in Wales. Even in England, regional parties like CumbriaFirst, the East Devon Alliance, and Mebyon Kernow advocate for their own regions’ autonomy, and devolution within England has been increasingly discussed in recent years. While London has struggled to counter these movements since Brexit, it has succeeded in preventing a resurgence in paramilitary activity since it ended it in Northern Ireland in the 1990s.

Western Europe’s relative success in reducing armed conflicts over the last few decades contrasts with its resurgence in Eastern Europe. The region’s fragile borders and the emergence of weak states in the wake of the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union have seen separatist movements gain increasing power.

The EU and NATO played a pivotal role in the collapse of Yugoslavia and the emergence of new states, often at the expense of Serbia. In response, ethnic Serbian separatism has surged across Bosnia and Kosovo, with supporters citing the EU’s and NATO’s support for separatist movements in the 1990s as justification for their actions.

Russia has also inflamed separatism in parts of the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union to counter EU and NATO expansion or to incorporate these regions into it. Beyond supporting Serbian interests in the Balkans, Russia has utilized, to varying degrees, separatist movements in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan to advance its interests.

Russia has long performed outreach to separatist movements in the West, including inviting representatives to conferences like the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, though largely consisting of fringe groups. Russia itself has its own separatist and autonomy movements, however, including in Chechnya, Tatarstan, and elsewhere. These have found support from Western actors, including through the launch of the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum. Turkey has also supported Russian separatist movements, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan meanwhile recently celebrated the 50-year anniversary of the Turkish invasion of EU member state Cyprus in 1974 in support of local Turkish separatists.

Most separatist movements in Europe lack the infrastructure to become independent states without external support, but persist in their pursuit of independence, nonetheless. And European countries with territories outside of Europe, such as France with New Caledonia or Denmark with Greenland, must manage their burgeoning independence movements. Access to the EU may be influential in convincing them to remain, but external factors, such as Azerbaijan’s recent support for New Caledonia’s independence, could potentially play a stronger role.

A new concern for national governments may emerge closer to home. In the Baltic States, the tension between Russian minorities and national governments remains evident, and the situation faces uncertainty amid the war in Ukraine. The rise of the Alternative für Deutschland political party in East Germany has in turn highlighted the enduring divides within the country less than 40 years after reunification, and how new political entities can emerge to exploit such sentiments.

Yet the most pressing issue appears to be emerging in Western Europe’s major cities. French President Emmanuel Macron, aiming to address concerns over what French authorities describe as “parallel societies” of Muslim immigrants and their descendants, proposed a law in 2023 to disrupt the education, finances, and propaganda networks of radical Islam, often from foreign countries. Macron labeled this phenomenon as “separatism.” He was referring to marginalized communities on the outskirts of major French cities in the famed banlieues, which are increasingly beyond state control and driven by domestic grievances and dissatisfaction with French foreign policy. While France’s situation appears the most severe, such sentiment is common across Western Europe.

The EU’s handling of autonomous and separatist movements has frequently faced criticism from nationalist governments, and balancing separatism with nationalism remains a sensitive challenge. However, major countries like Germany and smaller ones like Denmark demonstrate it is possible to manage these issues within national frameworks. Switzerland, a non-EU state, shows similar success in keeping itself together. Clearly, despite nationalist policies, centuries-old communities are resilient and difficult to absorb and erase, even without outside support. Managing these long-standing issues, as well as emerging movements, will require continual adaptation.

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

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Town Hall with Ralph Nader and Phil Donahue (1996).

Phil Donahue passed away Sunday night, after a long illness. He was beloved by those who knew him and by many who didn’t.

He started as a local reporter in Ohio, was a trailblazer in bringing social issues to a national audience as a daytime broadcast TV host, and then he was pretty much banished from TV by MSNBC because he – accurately, correctly and morally – questioned the horrific U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In the 1970s, Phil took progressive issues and mainstreamed them to millions through his syndicated daytime show. He was a pioneer in syndication. He also pioneered on the issues; his most frequent guests on his daytime show were Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem and Rev. Jesse Jackson. They appeared dozens of times as Phil boosted civil rights, women’s rights, and consumer rights. He regularly hosted Dr. Sidney Wolfe warning of the greedy pharmaceutical industry and unsafe drugs. Raised a Catholic, he also featured advocates for atheism.

Mainstream media obits will likely focus on his daytime TV episodes that included male strippers or other titillation, but Phil was serious about the issues – and did far more than most mainstream TV journalists to address the biggest issues.

I was a senior producer on Phil’s short-lived MSNBC primetime show in 2002 and 2003. It was frustrating for us to have to deal with the men Phil called “the suits” – NBC and MSNBC executives who were intimidated by the Bush administration and resisted any efforts by NBC/MSNBC to practice journalism and ask tough questions of Washington before our young people were sent to Iraq to kill or be killed. Ultimately, Phil was fired because – as the leaked internal memo said – Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war.”

But before we were terminated, we put guests on the screen who were not commonly on mainstream TV. We offered a full hour with Barbara Ehrenreich on Labor Day, 2002, a full hour with Studs Terkel, Congress members Bernie Sander and Dennis Kucinich, columnist Molly Ivins, experts like Phyllis Bennis and Laura Flanders, Palestinian advocates including Hanan Ashrawi.

No one on U.S. TV cross-examined Israeli leaders like Phil did when he interviewed then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They seemed stunned – never having faced such questioning from a U.S. journalist.

But “the suits” ruined our show when they took control and actually mandated a quota system favoring the right wing: If we had booked one guest who was anti-war, we needed to book two that were pro-war. If we had one guest on the left, we needed two on the right. When a producer suggested booking Michael Moore – known to oppose the pending Iraq war – she was told she’d need to book three rightwingers for political balance.

Three weeks before the Iraq war started, and after some of the biggest antiwar mobilizations the world had ever seen (which were barely covered on mainstream TV), the suits at NBC/MSNBC terminated our show.

Phil was a giant. A huge celebrity who supported uncelebrated indy media outlets. He loved and supported the progressive media watch group FAIR (which I founded in the mid-1980s.)

Phil put Noam Chomsky on mainstream TV. He fought for Ralph Nader to be included in the 2000 presidential debates. He went on any TV show right after 9/11 that would have him to urge caution and to resist the calls for vengeful, endless warfare that would pointlessly kill large numbers of civilians in other countries. He opposed active wars and the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He supported war veterans and produced an important documentary on the topic: “Body of War.”

Phil Donahue made his mark on our society. He fought for the underdog. He did it with style and grace and a wonderful sense of humor. He changed my life. And others’ lives.

He was inspired by the consciousness-raising groups he saw in the feminist movement and he sought to do consciousness-raising on a mass scale . . . using mainstream corporate TV. He did an amazing job of it.

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Photograph Source: Al Jazeera English – CC BY-SA 2.0

Daily reports of Palestinians killed in Gaza focus on deaths from Israeli bombs and missiles, now exceeding 40,000.  Yet the famine stalking the Strip today threatens  the lives of many times that number. Already children in North Gaza are dying of malnutrition. Like canaries in coal mines, they signal mass starvation to come. Sadly, the major media has largely ignored the accelerating famine conditions in Gaza.

On June 25, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Report (IPC) on Gaza  found that “96% of the population is facing acute food insecurity at crisis level (Category 3) or higher, with almost half a million people in catastrophic (Category 5) conditions.”  Partnering with experts from U.N. agencies, governments and major aid groups, the IPC applies scientific standards to evaluate food insecurity levels.   The  IPC observed that “many in Gaza go entire days and nights without eating.” The World Food Program said the IPC report “paints a stark picture of ongoing hunger.”

On October 9, 2023, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals….”  On August 6, CNN quoted Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who said in a speech that “it may be just and moral” to starve 2 million Gaza residents until Israeli hostages are returned. While some, but grossly inadequate, amounts of food aid continue to enter Gaza, the continuing IDF attacks in north, central, and south regions restrict distribution efforts.

The Genocide Convention of 1948 includes as a genocidal act “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” This would seem to include the use of mass starvation as a war tactic, already recognized as a war crime. In January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), responding to South African allegations that Israel has used starvation as a war tactic, found that the use of starvation against Gazans is a “plausible” violation of the Genocide Convention.

Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza are increasingly falling ill and dying from diseases that are abetted by malnutrition, a lack of clean water, unsanitary conditions, repeated evacuations and untreated war injuries. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance reported in June that 67% of Gaza’s water and sanitation system has now been destroyed. On July 24 the New York Times reported that hepatitis B has infected more than 100,000 Gazans and that other diseases, including polio, are now threatening fragile civilians.

As we saw with the 1981 Irish hunger strikers, proper health conditions and adequate hydration can delay death by starvation to sixty or more days.  In Gaza people who are severely weakened by malnutrition, will likely die much earlier from disease or exhaustion. Starvation begins with a skipped meal, followed by a prolonged period without food. The third and fatal stage occurs when all stored fats have been depleted and the body turns to muscle and bones as sources of energy.

Alex de Waal, a professor and head of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, is a leading scholar of famine.  His 2018 book entitled Mass Starvation, The History and Future of Famine, makes two important points: (1) that modern famines are caused by a political decision (not crop failure) which he terms “famine crime;” and (2) that the best way to fight famine is to combat the political leaders who made the decision to starve a population. In requesting arrest warrants against the Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor cited among the alleged war crimes “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.”  According to de Waal, “A first-degree famine crime is committed by someone determined to exterminate a population through famine.” He notes that “mass atrocities” of famine “are closely associated with war, and ending war goes far in reducing” the starvation of civilians. He calls for tougher laws to criminalize mass starvation.

In Gaza today, it seems likely that famine will continue to spread and kill until there is a ceasefire. Given current political realities in Israel, a ceasefire is unlikely until the United States halts its recurring transfers of lethal weapons to the IDF.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

As the very public face of genocide has raged throughout Palestine these past ten months, Columbia University has opened a domestic front in its own war against dissent. In the name of “public safety,” Columbia has sought to silence protest and speech be it by suspension, expulsion or arrest.  Utilizing an academic star chamber stoked by outside investigators and inside sham, by pretext and intimidation, it has invented an academic crisis and then marched to punish students and faculty who wish nothing more than to express ideas.

Columbia’s talismanic incantation of “public safety” is so transparent, so pretextual, it is laughable. Yet, isolated it is not. For Columbia University never misses the chance to be on the wrong side of history and academic freedom. On October 1, 1917, it “fired two faculty members for alleged ‘disloyalty’ regarding U.S. involvement in World War I. Both were vocal opponents of the war. There were, of course, no hearings regarding their views.”^[1]

In the 1950s, while publicly boasting how the University protects its faculty from the intimidations of the House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), then President Grayson Kirk capitulated to political pressure and terminated a well-regarded 17-year professor, Gene Weltfish, who had been labeled a “communist” because she had the temerity to suggest that the United States should not use chemical weapons. Eerily similar to its most recent betrayal of academic dissent to the bullying of Zionist funders, Israeli lobbyists, and their elected agents, it was all done by pretext. The professor was never publicly accused of being a communist by the University. Instead, the President quietly changed the employment criteria so as to disqualify her. At day’s end, Columbia managed to serve up a “communist” to HUAC without damaging its bogus progressive, liberal brand. And while Columbia University presidents and trustees maintained throughout the Cold War that the university protected its professors from McCarthyism, the case of Gene Weltfish proves otherwise. In 1952, Weltfish was called in front of the House un-American Activities Committee, and a few months later the university dismissed her under a shady rule recently created by University President Grayson Kirk and the trustees. Her case shows how, when faced with a professor who spoke publicly about views that aligned with communism, the University gave into the same sort of McCarthyist tendencies it publicly criticized. Worst still, President Kirk did so under the guise of “academic freedom,” stating with a straight face that the Weltfish dismissal protected academic freedom.

At Columbia, the pattern repeats itself time and time again.  While publicly championing civil rights, the University evicted hundreds of mostly African American tenants from their Harlem homes so the school could build “Gym Crow”, a segregated facility with separate entrances for the mostly white college students and the mostly Black Harlem residents. When confronted with this design flaw, instead of fixing it, the University obfuscated, temporized and outright lied creating such resentment in the community that the project was halted. Beginning in 1959, the University initiated plans to build a gymnasium for Columbia College students that would sit on two acres of public land just inside Morningside Park. The New York Legislature approved Columbia’s gymnasium plans, which included limited community access, in 1960. Fundraising delays held up the construction of the building for several years. By the mid-1960s, the University’s allocation of public land for the project provoked increasingly negative feelings among government officials, community groups and Columbia students. Those opposed to the gym were particularly critical of its design.  The building provided access to the University community at the top of Morningside Park along its western boundary, while residents of the surrounding Harlem community would enter on the basement level, along the eastern edge of the park, where they would have access to only a small portion of the building. Separate and unequal access to the facilities prompted cries of segregation and racism. Almost immediately after Columbia began construction on the gym in February 1968, demonstrating Columbia students and neighborhood residents descended on the site in protest.^[2]

In 1959, Columbia joined the five-year-old Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), and University president Grayson Kirk became Columbia’s representative on the IDA board.  IDA served as a forum where leading research universities and government agencies that funded military research could discuss issues of mutual interest. Although IDA did not issue contracts for military research and development, participating members were given de facto priority. Columbia acknowledged its membership in IDA when questioned by SDS in the mid-1960s, but proved less forthcoming about the extent of defense-related secret research conducted at the University.  President Kirk refused to consider allowing the faculty to vote on the issue of withdrawal from the IDA when other universities, including Princeton and the University of Chicago, were doing just that. In response to growing criticism of Columbia’s involvement in IDA Kirk created the Henkin Committee in January 1968 to investigate the University’s ties to the defense industry.

Again, in the 1960s, when its policies supporting the Vietnam War were challenged, the University deliberately misinformed its faculty, students and the public about its long-term membership in the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). This of course contributed to the 1967 anti-war, anti-militarism protests and the months-long crisis thereafter. Beginning, in February 1967, eighteen members of SDS staged Columbia’s first sit-in in Dodge Hall – in protest of CIA recruitment on campus. Still, other demonstrations centered around opposition to the University’s unauthorized submission of student class rankings to Selective Service Boards, military recruitment on campus, and University involvement in the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA).

And, yet again in the 1980s, when its investments propping up the apartheid regime in South Africa were challenged, instead of recognizing the moral imperative and divesting immediately it took months of protests to finally yield a reluctant change in policy. And, even then, after publicly announcing a divestiture policy the University dithered and took years to fully divest. Although the Coalition for a Free South Africa (CFSA) had begun protesting Columbia’s economic support for Apartheid South Africa years before through efforts to pass motions for divesture in the University Senate composed of students, faculty, and administration, real practical change was stalled until April 4, 1985, when seven student members of CFSA chained closed the doors to Columbia’s administrative building, Hamilton Hall, and sat on the steps, blockading the entrance. They were there to protest the University’s investments in corporations that operated in Apartheid South Africa. Soon after, a march coordinated by other members of CFSA passed by Hamilton Hall. When the marchers saw the small blockade on the steps, they rushed to join in. Within two hours, the seven initial protesters had seen their number grow to more than 250. The blockade drew immediate news attention both for its visibility and the strong campus participation. The school immediately responded by threatening to expel CFSA leaders and dozens more received disciplinary notices within the next few days. The University continued, despite a restraining order issued by a sympathetic judge preventing police action, to point out the various civil and criminal violations made by the student protesters. The blockade, however, continued eventually growing to some 1,000 students sitting on the steps of Hamilton Hall at various times. Several months later Columbia’s Trustees proceeded to divest the University of their investments with South African connections.

Even this brief walk down the pathway of Columbia’s political history puts the lie to its public brand of a progressive institution committed to diversity of thought and action. In reality, Columbia is in practice a conservative, reactionary institution that all at once seeks to maintain a public brand of enlightenment while committed to repressive doctrinaire policies that over the decades have proven so intertwined with the government that it is practically an arm of the state. Today is no different.

Over these past 10 months, I have represented numerous students at Columbia… those actually charged with violation of various University regulations and others who have been swept up into a grand inquisition process that has used the pretext of “public safety” as a lever to explore student thoughts, association and aspiration.  Not long before the first University invitation to NYC police to raid the campus to silence dissent with batons and beatings, the university targeted a “teach-in” which was held in a basement of “Q House” an on-campus residence that is home to some 15 students.  Initially scheduled at URIS Hall at Columbia, it was next moved to the Center for Research on Women at Barnard and then at the last minute to Q House.  Told that other venues were unavailable, the move to Q House occurred after several residents reached out to housemates to determine whether they had any opposition to the teach-in being held there.

Named “Resistance 101” the teach-in was organized to provide historical context of the plight of Palestinians and the various crossroads of resistance they have endured and undertaken over these many decades. By no means a secretive gathering, online registration for the one-and-a-half-hour educational event was available to any and all interested students who wished to participate in-person or virtually through a posted link.^[3] Structured as a series of mini-lectures to be followed by a brief question-and-answer period, Resistance 101 had a speakers’ panel of 5 including Nerdeen Kiswani, JD, an organizer with “Within Our Lifetime” a Palestinian-led community organization that has been building support for Palestine in NYC for some ten years.

Ultimately some 30-40 students live-participated in what was very much an informative historical teach-in about Palestine that has since been described by various academic scholars who have seen the video, as akin to a graduate lecture/course on Palestine and the Middle East with real potential for framing as an advanced thesis on the region and its historical travails. Although there was an exchange of ideas and specific questions and points raised among the presenters and the student attendees, it was not extensive nor framed as an organizing strategy for going forward on campus or off.  None of the participants had weapons of any sort, nor at any time urged violence at any place or time. Nothing expressed during Resistance 101 crossed the line from protected speech to either criminal incitement or prohibited conduct.  Nor were plans discussed to undertake any acts of violence anywhere, or to break criminal laws or university regulations. Like classes across the country, and at Columbia, the content of this lecture while uncomfortable for some, was empowering if not thrilling for others. That’s the marketplace of ideas. That’s speech in all its intended glory. After an hour and a half, the teach-in ended with some students returning to their rooms in Q house, or elsewhere, and others to campus activities or classes.

Inexplicably, several days after the teach-in, Columbia pressed the political panic button over what, on the record before it, was very much a non-violent pure academic assembly and lawful exchange of information in an isolated area of a group residence among several dozen university students, and nothing more. Despite this, Columbia’s recently appointed CEO, Cas Holloway, issued a statement which, in relevant part, announced that after learning of the teach-in “we immediately notified law enforcement and engaged an outside firm led by experienced former law enforcement investigators to conduct an investigation.”

Citing undefined “public safety” concerns, not long thereafter, and but some 4 weeks before the semester’s end, the CEO sent a series of threatening emails ^[4] to some sixteen students ordering them to appear before private investigators to answer questions about Resistance 101 or to face suspension from Columbia which necessarily included not just the loss of student housing, employment, and medical care but credit for the semester’s work which to many and their families ran into some thirty-thousand dollars in tuition. Although to date, it remains unknown why these particular students were targeted for investigation, most were simply residents of Q House and several others active in the pro-Palestinian community of Columbia University and New York City. Among those threatened with suspension, were students who did not attend the event or play any role in organizing or publicizing it. None of the targeted students has a criminal record of any sort. None has ever been accused of possessing or owning a weapon or committing an act of violence anywhere or threatening another person; be they a classmate, family member or acquaintance. None has been ejected from a classroom, or administrative office or previously been suspended by Columbia or any other school they have attended.

Citing a nebulous public safety concern, a week or so after the teach-in Columbia imposed a highly intrusive compulsory interrogation process upon more than a dozen of its students. Although, at times, a legitimate end when established, on campus or off, a public safety alarm is not a vague run-of-the-mill escape valve that swallows well-defined rights without a specific showing of exigence.[5]Under the circumstances present here no such necessity was met by Columbia when it compelled these “interviews” at the risk of suspension.

And what of these interrogations?  Triggered, we are told, by a genuine public safety concern, based on the information shared and questions asked, the coerced interviews proved to be little more than a Columbia witch-hunt without a witch. While investigators did ask a few generic questions as to what was discussed at the teach-in and whether any violence was promoted or generated fear among its participants, immediate student denials of any such concerns led to a sweeping series of questions that focused not on Resistance 101 but campus activism in general.

Thus, almost all students were asked what groups and or organizations they belonged to. What the purpose of such groups was; who the group leaders were; how and where the groups met and what the process was for prioritizing group activities. Others were asked what kinds of clubs met at Q House, for what reason and how the events were undertaken; and how people could access Q House. In particular the investigators were interested in Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) asking if any residents of Q House belonged to either group or shared their public releases. Questions were also asked about how students communicate with one another on campus about events, or share group notices about such activities; whether permission was required for events and, if so how; whether they had hosted any event or club meeting and if so where, how and why. All students were shown photos of two women who attended Resistance 101 and asked if they could identify them and if they recognized two posters that had been placed on campus announcing the event at several different locations. They were also asked to provide the names of any persons they saw at the event or as they left it.

Most disturbing of all was the impermissible overreach by investigators through their focus on campus Palestinian groups and pro-Palestinian activists. For example, they asked numerous detailed questions that focused specifically on such Palestinian support groups as Within Our Lifetime, the Palestine Solidarity Working Group, DAR Palestine, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, and Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). They also asked questions about a different virtual teach-in, Palestine10, which included a renowned Columbia history professor, Rashid Khalidi.

Entirely disconnected from Resistance 101, this race and national-origin-based line of inquiry lost any vestige of legitimacy as it clearly trespassed from irrelevant examination to discriminatory inquisition arguably in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the primary education law that protects students from discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in any program or activity that receives Federal funds or other Federal financial assistance.

The students intimidated into impermissible interrogation, and the group that refused, represents the best and the brightest among the generation that is preparing to take our place in all positions of society. They committed no crimes, urged no violence, and posed no danger. Yet absent any definable misstep, let alone evidence of such, they were threatened with suspension unless they immediately surrendered certain fundamental rights to the baseless talisman of public safety.

While public safety is very much a cornerstone of the social compact, an agreement where citizens, including students, surrender certain individual freedoms in exchange for collective benefit, it is not a pretext that permits a seizure of individual rights.

A plain read of the so-called safety sweep ordered and undertaken by Columbia University established that it was a mere ploy to gain prohibited access to the hearts, minds, souls and beliefs of students to which neither the state nor the university is lawfully entitled. At its core, this effort was little more than an intrusive intelligence-gathering operation that leveraged a peaceful, perhaps unsanctioned, event to gain information beyond the legitimate need and necessary reach of Columbia.

The absurdity of throwing students out of school for attending a non-violent teach-in on the most compelling issue of the day or for refusing to participate in the inquisition about it which followed is worthy of Kafka. Perhaps the leadership of Columbia University would do well to study the writings of the great legal thinker molded at Columbia Law School 100 years ago, William O Douglas. Having served 37 years on the Supreme Court, Justice Douglas wrote hundreds of opinions, but two statements, one legal and the other pedagogical, are especially applicable to this case.

“a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech, though not absolute, is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest.” Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1,4 (1949)(internal citation omitted). ^[6]

Notes.

[1]See, https://todayinclh.com/?event=columbia-university-fires-two-disloyal-faculty.

[2] See https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/1968/causes/gym

[3] The event was recorded and posted without redaction publicly on X (formerly Twitter) which was apparently shared among a quarter of a million followers of the platform as of March 24^, 2024.

[4] In addition to emails, private investigators suddenly appeared at the doors of two targets asking to interview them after somehow obtaining entrance to buildings that were otherwise secured and required a swipe of a student ID card for entry,

[5]  It is of course well settled that words and words alone no matter how disturbing do not create a risk to public safety or constitute a breach of criminal law. See, Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969)(upholding the right of the Ku Klux Klan to meet, demonstrate and even spew hateful speech, in announcing a test that remains good law today, the Supreme Court found the statute under which Brandenburg was prosecuted ignored whether or not the advocacy it criminalized actually led to imminent lawless action. See, also, Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989)(The fact that an audience takes offense to certain ideas or expression does not justify prohibitions of speech); Street v. New York, 394 U.S. 576,592 (1969)(“It is firmly settled that under our Constitution the public expression of ideas may not be prohibited merely because the ideas are themselves offensive to some of their hearers”). Cf. People v. Tolia, 214 A.D.2d 57,64 (1st. Dept. 1995)(Brandenburg protection not applicable where “defendant’s intentional actions posed a “clear and present danger” which led to violent, tumultuous behavior engaged in by 10 or more people. Indeed, this is not a case of a few poorly chosen words that led to unintended consequences … Rather, it is a case of steadily deteriorating circumstances worsened by defendant’s relentless calls for the crowd to use force to resist and stop the police from ending the concert, at which police officers were greatly outnumbered.”).

[6]  See, also, An Almanac of Liberty New York: Doubleday, Douglas, William O., p. 363 (1954) (“The most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue-questions and answer that pursue every problem to the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom and scientific inquiry”.).

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Photograph Source: Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif – CC BY 4.0

It is almost as if the Israeli army is trying to gather as many Palestinians as possible in one place and then kill them all. Ahmed Abed and his family fled the Dalal al-Maghribi school in early August after an Israeli airstrike displaced them. That airstrike killed 15 Palestinians who had taken refuge there after Israel had bombed their homes in the Ash Shujaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City. The family arrived at the al-Taba’een school, a private school with an attached mosque, that sheltered 2,500 people. Since the Israelis began their most recent bombardment of Gaza in October 2023, Palestinians have taken refuge in private schools and in schools run by the United Nations (UN). The UN reports that in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli attacks have damaged 190 of their facilities, most of them schools. There are few sanctuaries left in Gaza. These schools—whether private or UN—are the only places that were seen as relatively safe.

At 4:30 a.m. on August 10, Israeli jet fighters flew over Gaza City and dropped U.S.-made GBU-39 250-pound bombs on the al-Taba’een school and mosque. During that time, a large number of the inhabitants had lined up at the mosque to go for the Fajr or dawn prayer. The bombs hit the people near the mosque, killing at least 100 Palestinians. It is a grotesque massacre that took place just when the United States decided to rearm Israel with these kinds of weapons. Sarah Leah Whitson, former Middle East and North Africa division director for Human Rights Watch, wrote that the arms sales to Israel by the United States on the day of this bombardment demonstrated a “Pavlovian conditioning for a feral army.”

The United States, despite occasional statements about withholding weapons, has consistently armed Israel during this genocidal war. Since 1948, the United States has provided $130 billion worth of weapons to Israel. Between 2018 and 2022, 79 percent of all weapons sold to Israel came from the United States (the next was Germany, which supplied 20 percent of Israel’s arms imports). The U.S. arms sales have come in deliberately small bunches of under $25 million per sale so that they do not require the scrutiny of the U.S. Congress, and therefore public debate. From October 2023 through March, the U.S. approved 100 of these small sales, which amount to over $1 billion in weapons sales, including the GBU-39. It is important to know that the bomb, created in the United States, was likely loaded onto an Israeli fighter jet by a U.S. technician seconded to the Israeli bases.

A Pattern of Targeting Schools

Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson for Gaza’s civil defense unit, said that the medics who got to the scene at the al-Taba’een school, many of them already veterans of this kind of violence, were confounded by what they found. “The school area is strewn with dead bodies and body parts,” he said. “It is very difficult for paramedics to identify a whole dead body. There’s an arm here, a leg there. Bodies are ripped to pieces. Medical teams stand helpless before this horrific scene.” At least 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli bombings since last October, and 2 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes.

In the lead-up to the attack on al-Taba’een school, the Israeli forces have been escalating their bombings of schools in Gaza that serve as shelters. In July, the Israeli military struck 17 schools in Gaza, killing at least 163 Palestinians. In the week before August 10, Israel hit the Khadija and Ahmad al-Kurd schools in Deir al-Balah killing 30 Palestinians (July 27), the Dalal Moghrabi school in Ash Shujaiyeh killing 15 Palestinians (August 1), the Hamama and Huda schools in Sheikh Radwan killing sixteen Palestinians (August 3), the Hassan Salame and Nasser schools in al-Nassr killing 25 Palestinians (August 4), and the al-Zahraa and Abdul Fattah Hamouda schools killing 17 Palestinians (August 8).

This sequence of attacks on schools came before the August 10 bombing, which shows that there is a pattern of targeting civilians who are seeking shelter in schools. The massacre at al-Taba’een is the 21st attack by Israel against a school that has been serving as a shelter since July 4. Ahmed Abed lost his brother-in-law Abdullah al-Arair in the massacre at al-Taba’een. “There is nowhere else to go,” he said. “Every place in Gaza is a target.”

Israeli Denials

Israel accepted that it had bombed these schools but denied that it had killed civilians. In fact, Israel no longer names these places such as al-Taba’een and Dalal Moghrabi as schools; it calls them “military facilities.” The Israeli military said that it had killed at least 20 “terror operatives” since it is reported to have claimed to have hit an “‘active’ Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad command room embedded within a mosque.” The Israeli authorities released the names of at least 19 people who they claimed were senior operatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The EuroMed Human Rights Monitor, an independent organization based in Switzerland, studied the claims made by Israel’s military and found them to be factually wanting. The Monitor’s staff went to the school, did a survey of the survivors, and reviewed the Israeli-controlled civil registry for the names. The team’s “preliminary investigation found that the Israeli army used names of Palestinians killed in Israeli raids—some of whom were killed in earlier raids—in its list.” The three people killed earlier, but whose names appeared in the Israeli lists, include Ahmed Ihab al-Jaabari (killed on December 5, 2023), Youssef al-Wadiyya (killed on August 8, 2024), and Montaser Daher (killed on August 9, 2024). The Israeli list also had three elderly civilians who have no connection to any militant group, including Abdul Aziz Misbah al-Kafarna (a school principal) and Yousef Kahlout (an Arabic language teacher and deputy mayor of Beit Hanoun). The list also includes six civilians, “some of whom were even Hamas opponents.”

It is remarkable that even in their own statements the Israeli officials seem unsure about their claims. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari of the Israeli military said that “various intelligence indications” show that there was a “high probability” that Ashraf Juda, a commander of the Islamic Jihad’s Central Camps Brigade, was in al-Taba’een school. But the Israelis could not confirm it. So, the Israelis killed 100 civilians even though they were not certain if their target was in the facility at that time.

The Israeli army has set up a pattern for its genocidal campaign. It first bombs civilian neighborhoods, sending terrified people into shelters such as schools and hospitals. Then, it announces blanket evacuation orders from an entire area, forcing people in these shelters to live in fear since many of them do not have the wherewithal to leave them for other places (indeed, “There is nowhere else to go,” said Ahmed Abed). Having made these evacuation orders, Israel then bombs the protected shelters, including hospitals and schools, with the argument that these are military targets. This formula was enacted in Gaza City and in other parts of Gaza.

Now, Israel has announced forced evacuation orders for people in Khan Younis, a city in central Gaza. Alongside these orders, Israeli forces have begun aerial and artillery attacks at the eastern edge of Khan Younis. We will now see these kinds of attacks on schools and hospitals that are shelters for desperate people in the center of Gaza, with every building seen by the Israelis as a legitimate target.

 This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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