Joe Biden did the right thing by ending his bid for a second term. Now, he needs to go a step further.

“May I ask you, Mr. President, for one more brave and bold action?” writes filmmaker Michael Moore.

“Kamala Harris will be in a much stronger position to win if she can run as the President of the United States. As the incumbent President. This will give the country a chance to see her in action — as the most powerful person in the world. She will have three and a half months (as they say, ‘an eternity in politics’) to show the American people her smarts, her strengths, her heart.”

Moore’s political instincts are famously good. He defied pundits and pollsters in 2016, yelling at the top of his lungs that Hillary Clinton was in danger of losing his home state of Michigan – and the election – to Donald Trump. And now, to prevent Trump’s return, Moore is calling on Biden to resign.

That’s a call I echo, albeit for a different reason.

Netanyahu’s Wars

As I write these words, the Middle East is terrifyingly close to erupting into a wider war primarily because of Israel’s belligerence. Yet Biden is unable to rein Israel in, even though doing so requires little more than conditioning US weapons transfers to our satellite. No ceasefire in Gaza? No US weapons for Israel.

Sure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks a big game about carrying on with or without US support. But beneath the bluster he knows that Israel is toast without the US. Even with Biden’s full backing over the past ten months, Israel has been unable to destroy Hamas, a penned-in militant group completely under Israel’s thumb.

Now Netanyahu is clamoring for war with Hezbollah, a far superior fighting force than Hamas. For Israel, a country already coming apart at the seams, a mano-a-mano war against Hezbollah in Lebanon may well prove its undoing. That’s why Netanyahu is desperate to bring the US directly into the mix. And the surest way to do this is by provoking an attack from Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran.

Even in the face of Israel’s extraordinary provocations, however, Iran has demonstrated remarkable restraint. So Netanyahu keeps upping the ante, never more so than on July 31.

Rather than kill Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh at his home in Qatar, Israel chose to assassinate him in Iran, just hours after that country swore in a moderate as president. By publicly humiliating Iran – Haniyeh was a diplomatic guest staying at a secure site in Iran’s capital city when he was killed – Netanyahu is goading Iran into retaliating.

“[Israel] appears to have decided to pursue a strategy of escaping forward, if you will,” analyst Mouin Rabbani told Drop Site News. “Faced with failure in the Gaza Strip, it has decided to expand its war regionally. And it seems particularly keen to draw Iran directly into this conflict.”

As Netanyahu sows chaos in order to keep himself in power (and out of jail), Biden merely mutters diplomatic niceties, while occasionally indicating he’s oh-so upset with his longtime friend. But Biden’s words matter less than his actions, and he keeps greenlighting Netanyahu’s warring by providing him with billions in weapons.

Biden does this even though a wider war will endanger thousands of US troops at bases scattered throughout the Middle East. They’re “sitting ducks for local militias,” said Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy.

Some of these troops have already become casualties. Since October – when Israel launched its assault on Gaza in response to Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack – at least 145 US military personnel in the region have been wounded or killed in attacks by Iranian proxy forces, Nick Turse reported for The Intercept.

This comes as a wave of anti-American sentiment sweeps the region thanks to US support for Israel’s leveling of Gaza. That’s according to US State Department officials, who warn that Israel’s war has been a boon for terrorist groups’ recruitment.

Despite the increasing threat to US troops, Biden is placing more of them in harm’s way as he sends warships, fighter jets and a submarine to the region to assist Israel in the event that war breaks out. With each passing day, the chances that things spiral out of control only seem to grow.

Lenin famously said something to the effect of, “There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen.” Right now feels like the latter. And with the Middle East on a knife’s edge, it’s terrifying to think of Biden — in cognitive free fall — remaining in office for another five months, stubbornly clinging to Israel.

President Harris

When it comes to Israel, President Kamala Harris is unlikely to blaze a very different path. At the same time, if only for her own political self-interest, Harris is likely to be less obsequious to Netanyahu. And hopefully that approach would buy enough time and goodwill to lower the temperature in the region and avert a wider war.

If Harris can follow that up by brokering a ceasefire in Gaza, she’s likely to steamroll Trump in November. On the other hand, “if Israel pulls the U.S. into a war in the Middle East,” former State Department official Annelle Sheline wrote in The New Republic, “the Democrats are almost certain to lose the election.”

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Photograph Source: Jamelle Bouie – CC BY 2.0

April 29, 1992: I am in Harlem, preparing for my AAU basketball team practice in Riverside Church’s basement. As I am warming up, my coach suggests I leave immediately. He had heard unrest was likely to erupt on 125^th Street after the acquittal of the police who brutally beat Rodney King in Los Angeles (LA). Harlem did not ignite that night but unrest ripped through LA.

I was eighteen at the time and vividly remember the troubling TV images of LA on fire. I thought something was drastically wrong with America. Despite our ideals of equality, freedom, and democracy for all, we were an intensely segregated nation filled with contradictions tied to our legacy of racial discrimination and inequality.

Fast forward to August 9, 2014. People took to Ferguson’s streets following the tragic police killing of an unarmed, Black young man, Michael Brown. A white police officer shot Brown multiple times for jaywalking and allegedly stealing some cigars. In impoverished Southeast Ferguson, folks converged from across the St. Louis region to mourn Brown’s death and protest unjust police actions. The Ferguson revolt was the start of the Black-led rebellions that rocked America between 2014 and 2020. The police killings of African Americans like Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor triggered one of the largest Black-led revolt movements in American history.

Today is the ten-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death and a critical moment to reflect on the uprisings. While some view these contemporary revolts as solely driven by police aggression, our modern unrest narrative is more complex. Through interviews for my new book Slow and Sudden Violence, Ferguson and Baltimore community leaders identified police brutality as a cause of the uprisings, but they also voiced other significant frustrations. They felt the uprisings originated not just from sudden antagonistic police actions but from ongoing housing and community development policies that facilitated Black segregation, dispossession, displacement, and gentrification. These policies of slow violence were critical to creating the racially unequal environments; the pockets of Black poverty where police brutality disproportionately impacts the lives of low-income African Americans.

Black poverty was pushed to Ferguson by ongoing violent urban renewal policies that consistently destroyed and re-segregated Black communities in the St. Louis region. The destruction of historic Black communities like Mill Creek Valley, Pruitt-Igoe, the Ville, and Kinloch forced Black redevelopment refugees to suburban Ferguson. Many of Southeast Ferguson’s families with low incomes live in affordable Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) supported units with Housing Choice Voucher rent subsidies. These urban redevelopment and affordable housing policies facilitated Black displacement and advanced neighborhood poverty.

The systematic destabilization of Black communities leads to a displacement pain, what I have coined chronic displacement trauma, among many low-income African Americans. The displacement trauma gets suppressed as people cope and carry on their everyday lives to survive. But sometimes another trauma, police violence, can release generational frustrations. The tragic police killings of African Americans triggered the release of deep-seated frustrations from ongoing policies that displaced people and segregated them in new poverty pockets where they are aggressively policed. Uprisings result from cumulated frustrations tied to violent urban restructuring and policing.

Since 2014, have we addressed aggressive police practices, invested in impoverished Black communities, stopped Black displacement, and signaled with our policy reforms that Black lives, and communities, matter?

No. Of course, following the massive uprising movement, we investigated some police departments, removed the names of known racists from some public schools, and toppled some Confederate monuments; however, our metropolitan landscapes are still racially unequal and filled with aggressively policed Black ghettos.

To tackle the underpinnings of unrest, we must change the community context in which policing occurs. We must minimize racialized spaces of poverty and invest in communities of color to bring greater stability to people in an ongoing cycle of state-sanctioned segregation, dispossession, displacement, and gentrification.

How can we do this? I offer a few policy suggestions. Of course, we need to reform policing, but we must also change our community and housing development policies. We must promote equitable growth that economically improves depleted communities without triggering displacement. We must reinstate one-for-one replacement for demolished public housing units. We must reform the LIHTC and Housing Choice Voucher programs so families displaced from gentrified spaces can find affordable housing in opportunity neighborhoods. We must reduce metropolitan level neighborhood inequality.

In 1992, I drove home from Harlem to a “safe” NYC suburb. In 2014, Michael Brown never made it home. He was killed in “dangerous” Ferguson not solely by the police but by the ongoing harmful American policies that “placed” his family, and many other Black families, in segregated environments where concentrated poverty and aggressive policing co-exist. If we are to ever fulfill the American ideals of equal opportunity, we must reform discriminatory policies that perpetuate racially unequal neighborhood conditions and the context for unrest.

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Photo by Ronan Furuta

The recent collapse of nuclear weapons talks between China and the United States in July 2024, followed the withdrawal by the U.S. and Russia from long-established nuclear weapons treaties, like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, (ABM) Intermediate-Range Forces Treaty (INF), and The Iran Nuclear Deal (JPCOA). Nuclear tensions have regressed to dangerous levels not seen since the Cold War.

China suspended nuclear weapons negotiations with the U.S.  in Geneva, blaming high levels of arms sales from the U.S. to Taiwan. Earlier nuclear weapons meetings in November 2023 turned accusatory as the U.S. complained of China’s “lack of transparency” and a failure to agree on “risk reduction strategies” while rebuffing the PRC’s offer of a No First Use agreement. China has expanded its nuclear arsenal to 500 warheads, predicted to reach 1000 warheads by 2030. The U.S. contends this arms buildup is inconsistent with China’s No First Use offer.  The U.S. currently deploys 1770 warheads and keeps over 5000 warheads in reserve.

The U.S. says China’s proffer of a No First Use agreement is disingenuous because China is constructing hundreds of new ICBM silos in the northwest region of the country. Apace, the U.S. is replacing 400 launch silos in the American northwest to house the new $140 billion Sentinel ICBM fleet.

China blames the U.S. for violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) provision to “reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons” by maintaining a huge nuclear arsenal and for threatening the first nuclear strikes to protect its allies under the American “nuclear umbrella”. Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand are now protected by U.S. nuclear weapons through mutual defense treaties. White papers from think tanks like The Atlantic Council recommend the inclusion of Taiwan as well under the U.S. nuclear umbrella increasing the geo-political friction surrounding U.S. / China nuclear negotiations.

Ironically, all five permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5) are nuclear-armed countries. However, China remains the only permanent member of the UN Security Council, to adopt the No First Use of nuclear weapons. The other four permanent members, the U.S. U.K., France, and Russia are nuclear-armed states but with nuclear postures that include launching nuclear first strikes.

Lost in this dissonant diplomacy confounding nuclear negotiations seems to be the bedrock principle of nuclear deterrence as a defense.  Modern nuclear weapons are so lethal that no aggressor would risk a nuclear first strike understanding nuclear retaliation would be inescapable and would inflict unacceptable loss.

 The macabre calculus of mutually assured destruction, MAD, plus abundant good luck, have prevented nuclear attacks since 1945. No First Use achieves the same security balance through mutually agreed verifiable treaties without building diabolical weapons systems.

Past presidents mulling the option of ordering a nuclear first strike during difficult military situations have all determined that the international opprobrium and political isolation following a nuclear first strike by the U.S. would far outweigh any military advantage on the battlefield.

The sheer revulsion wrought in the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has impeded their further use to this day. A “nuclear taboo” (see Tannenwald) has restrained military leaders from launching nuclear attacks: in Korea (Truman, 1950) in the Taiwan Straits (Eisenhower, 1958), Cuba, (Kennedy 1962), Vietnam, (Nixon 1969), Iraq, (both Bushes), and probably more.

Recent predictions by U.S. Air Force generals of an inevitable nuclear war between the U.S. and China, “by 2025”, have not helped nuclear weapons negotiators’ work to build trust. Curbing bellicose threats and enhancing shared goals for a future secure from nuclear attack should be the policy of any administration and its military leaders.

If Kamala Harris is elected president, she should finally include No First Use of nuclear weapons in her Nuclear Posture Review, something both Presidents Obama and Biden had promised to do, but failed to deliver.

No First Use of nuclear weapons provides the only assurance that the first use of nuclear weapons will not degenerate into general nuclear war. Princeton’s Science and Security Lab predicts such a scenario.  In the Lab’s simulations, Russia targets massing NATO troops with a small tactical nuclear weapon, i.e. 12 kilotons, the destructive power of the Hiroshima A-bomb. NATO responds with its own tactical nukes. Within three hours both belligerents trade multiple nuclear salvos and suffer millions of deaths and casualties. The carnage cannot stop here, though; the long-dreaded mare of nuclear war spirals out of control.

 Russia, Europe and the U.S. escalate, targeting each other’s cities with evermore powerful strategic thermo-nuclear weapons. Within minutes, 80 million souls are dead.

As ghoulish as this scenario sounds it would only be the beginning of the end of a nuclear war started with a single nuclear “warning shot”.  Radio-active fallout from the bombing would poison fields, forests, rivers, lakes, and oceans for decades and even centuries.

“Nuclear winter” (see Robock) caused by plumes of dust and debris blasting into the atmosphere, would drop the Earth’s temperature below freezing for decades and potentially kill most of life on Earth.

No militarist or nuclear weapons proponent can prove full-scale nuclear cataclysm will not result from the first use of nuclear weapons. The hazards of a nuclear first strike cannot be managed and are not worth the risks. Implicit in the posture of nuclear deterrence is that no nuclear strike is worth the ensuing counter-attack.

Strategic security can be attained by a verifiable No First Use treaty. The great majority of the world’s states and their people agree with NFU policies. Nuclear powers have already committed not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear armed countries, the vast majority of states on Earth. Nuclear Weapons Free Zones comprising 40 percent of the world’s population, have been excluded from nuclear target lists.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty governing nuclear weapons came into force in 1970 with over 190 countries now signatories. Explicit in the NPT is the agreement by nuclear weapon states to reduce and eliminate their nuclear arsenals. Refusal by these nuclear weapon states to fulfill their responsibilities, curtail their nuclear “modernization” programs (costing trillions of dollars),  reduce the number of nuclear weapons in their arsenals, and to agree to a No First Use of nuclear weapons has caused the quinquennial NPT Review Conferences to fail over the last fifteen years. The oldest and most significant nuclear weapons treaty currently in effect is fraying.

No First Use of nuclear weapons was first promoted by a large contingent of scientists working on the Manhattan Project even before the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Leo Szilard, who patented nuclear fission in 1933, and who along with Albert Einstein urged President Roosevelt to fund the production of the first atomic bombs, also petitioned President Truman in early 1945, to delay using the atomic bomb because of moral and ethical concerns.

Though the Szilard Petition was quashed by Robert Oppenheimer and never reached Truman, Szilard and Einstein, aghast at the destructive power of the nuclear weapons they had helped create, founded the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists that to this day promotes nuclear disarmament and No First Use of nuclear weapons. Einstein regretted his letter to FDR propelling the Manhattan Project, as “the one great mistake of my life”. He worked for world peace for the remainder of his life. He even consulted Sigmund Freud perplexed by the seeming “death wish” compelling humankind to perpetual war.

As the “hibakusha”, survivors of the A-bombing of Japan, die away, will their warnings against nuclear weapons fade with them?  Whether the “nuclear taboo” and hideous memories of the A-bombings of Japan remain strong enough to discourage new generations of war leaders from nuclear weapons folly is hoped for but should not be relied upon.

The history of nuclear weapons negotiations since 1945 is marked by missed opportunities and distrust. The United Nations itself was founded expressly to avoid nuclear war, with the establishment of its First Committee.  In 1946 the Soviet Union offered to ban all nuclear weapons, the U.S. countered with its Baruch Plan, freezing the U.S. and USSR nuclear weapons stockpiles at current levels; 7 U.S. nukes and no USSR nukes. The U.S. proposed the new International Atomic Energy Commission to regulate fissile materials instead.  The Soviets called the Baruch Plan “U.S. nuclear hegemony” and proceeded with their nuclear weapons development.

Great debate occurred within the Truman Administration on whether to develop the fusion hydrogen bomb after the Soviets conducted their first fission A-bomb test in 1949. David Lilienthal, Dean Acheson, Robert Oppenheimer and others advised the U.S. to halt the development of the exponentially more destructive hydrogen bomb Truman rejected their reports, convinced by “technological fanatics” i.e. Edward Teller, to build and test a thermo-nuclear weapon, “The Super”, whose only purpose, according to Lilienthal, was genocide.

In Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986 Soviet leader Michele Gorbachev proposed to U.S. President Ronald Reagan the elimination of all nuclear weapons. The U.S. declined, instead funding Reagan’s fabulist Strategic Defense Initiative, aka SDI, aka Star Wars, aka a trillion dollars wasted.

Decades of distrust, paranoia and the chimera of nuclear weapons security have spawned a new nuclear arms race today. The current decline of nuclear weapons control negotiations, augurs ill for our future. If “man has war in his heart” and if peace remains beyond human capacity, at least nuclear weapons should be forsworn. Codifying No First Use of nuclear weapons agreements will be a first step back from the brink (see Back from the Brink) of looming nuclear disaster.

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Photo by Yohan Marion

From Havana Syndrome to Russian warships, major media outlets in recent years have sparked and fanned the flames of hysteria when it comes to Cuba.

The latest boogeyman: “China spy bases.”

There is no evidence any such base exists on the island.

But who needs evidence when you have anonymous U.S. officials?

The Journal “Breaks” the China Spy Base Story

In June 2023, D.C.-based journalists Warren P. Strobel and Gordon Lubold authored a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal with the headline: “China Plans Spy Base in Cuba.”

The article stated that Cuba and China had “reached a secret agreement” for China to set up an eavesdropping facility on the island in exchange for several billion dollars. The reporters cited the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and stated that the spy base would “represent an unprecedented new threat” to the United States.

Their only apparent sources were anonymous “U.S. officials.”

The Cuban embassy in Washington called the story “mendacious.”

A spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry denied knowledge of the bases, calling the U.S. government “an expert on chasing shadows and meddling in other countries’ internal affairs.”

The White House said the WSJ article was “inaccurate.”

Two days later, after a flurry of media coverage and bipartisan outrage on Capitol Hill, White House officials speaking on background (meaning they could not be cited by name) told reporters that China had already been operating “intelligence collection facilities” in Cuba for years.

No evidence was provided outside of vague statements from these unnamed officials. That did not stop “China Spy Base in Cuba” from becoming major headlines.

Intelligence is by its nature secret, so it’s not surprising that sources insist on anonymity and hard evidence is difficult to come by. But when a journalist bases their reporting entirely off statements of unnamed officials, a healthy dose of skepticism is in order.

The Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Committee urges journalists to identify sources whenever feasible and to always question the motives of anonymous sources. It’s not clear the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets who have run with the story have done either.

Not a New Story

Alarmist, evidence-free reporting on China spy bases in Cuba is nothing new.

In 2000, El Nuevo Herald reported (without providing any sources) that China had “an important listening station base” in the small town of Bejucal, Cuba, and two years later published a piece asserting that China had built spy bases in Cuba in two other locations (also without sources).

While debating Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican Primary, Sen. Marco Rubio called on Cuba to kick out the “Chinese listening station” in Bejucal, Cuba. Rubio provided no evidence such a listening station existed – nor did CNN moderator Jake Tapper ask him for it.

Google has also joined in, pointing its finger at another U.S. adversary. A military installation in Bejucal is referred to as “China and Russia Intelligence Base” on Google Maps. Not even the Wall Street Journal’s anonymous sources claim that Russia is a co-conspirator in operating “spy bases” in Cuba.

Rumors and Speculation

The latest iteration of the “China spy base” story was revived last month when the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a prominent D.C. think tank, released a report entitled “Secret Signals: Decoding China’s Intelligence Activities in Cuba.” The report was created by CSIS’s Hidden Reach program, which focuses on revealing China’s influence around the world.

CSIS’s media relations team did not respond to requests for interviews with the report’s authors.

The CSIS report used satellite imagery to identify four locations “where China is most likely operating” its alleged spy bases. It provided no evidence – not even from unnamed officials – that China is operating spy bases in Cuba.

“That’s bad analysis,” said Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst who also served as the nation’s top intelligence officer on Latin America. “The report pulls the rumors and speculation in only one direction – to support its preordained conclusion that Chinese intelligence capabilities are expanding in ways threatening to U.S. interests, with Cuba’s full support.”

The CSIS report identified four locations – three near Havana and one near Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second largest city – that “could” be used by China to conduct signals intelligence (SIGINT).

According to the report, images of the location near Santiago de Cuba showed the recent construction of a circularly disposed antenna array (CDAA), which it explained are “highly effective at determining the origin and direction of incoming high-frequency signals.”

This sounds impressive except for the fact that CDAAs have become largely obsolete. The report itself acknowledges that Russia and the United States have abandoned most of their CDAAs.

“The report looks at old Cold War technology and makes it seem like it’s cutting edge,” said Armstrong. “Nowadays SIGINT is not that dependent on geography. It’s all about fiber optics and satellites. You don’t need these great big antenna farms.”

On The Ground in Cuba

Belly of the Beast journalists tried to go to the three sites near Havana identified in the CSIS report, in the towns of Wajay, Bejucal and Calabazar.

All three appear to be facilities run by the Cuban military or Interior Ministry.

Wajay is on the outskirts of Havana less than two miles from José Martí International Airport.

The facility there is surrounded by residential neighborhoods and its antennas are in plain view from adjacent public streets.

The CSIS report claimed that “security fencing and two guard posts strongly suggests that the site is intended for military or other sensitive activities.”

When our journalists visited the site in Wajay, the guard posts appeared abandoned. Part of the facility’s perimeter was lined with a rusty fence. Another part was bordered by trees.

At the main entrance, the security guard was an elderly woman who was an unarmed civilian employed by Cuba’s Vigilance and Protection Corps (CVP), a state agency that provides security services at schools, hospitals, stores and hotels.

One neighbor said that the facility had once been robbed.

Nearby at Calabazar, antennas draped in ivy and a dirt-covered satellite dish could be seen from the street.

“That’s laughably old technology,” said Armstrong after viewing video footage of the Wajay and Calabazar facilities. “It’s sort of an insult to the Chinese if you’re going to say that this is the future of their intel collection against the United States.”

A no trespassing sign blocked access to the Bejucal facility. Locals said the base had existed for years and was Cuban, not Chinese or Russian.

A Pretext to Tighten the Screws on Cuba

Could any of these facilities in fact be a China spy base?

“Impossible,” said Carlos Alzugaray, a retired Cuban diplomat who lives in Havana. “The only foreign military installation that exists in Cuba is American: the Guantanamo Naval Base.”

The facilities near Havana identified in the CSIS report are Cuban and have been there for years, according to Hal Klepak, an expert on the Cuban military who was an advisor to the foreign and defense ministers of Canada.

“There is not the slightest evidence that China has paid, or is planning to pay, Cuba billions of dollars for anything, much less spy facilities which would be only very marginally useful and would set off unwelcome alarm bells in the U.S.,” said Klepak. “None of my sources on the island have suggested there is minor new construction at any of these installations, much less major.”

“This is obvious fake news,” said Alzugaray. “They want to show aggressive intent so they can tighten the screws against Cuba. This is obviously what these right-wing people are doing, trying to magnify the supposed Cuban threat.”

It would not be the first time unsubstantiated rumors and media hysteria were used by the U.S. government to justify a hard-line policy against Cuba.

In 2017, alleged “sonic attacks” on U.S. spies and diplomats in Havana, reported on uncritically and inaccurately by major media outlets, were used by the Trump administration to shut down the U.S. embassy and intensify sanctions against Cuba. As it turns out, audio recordings made by U.S. officials to document the “attacks” revealed that the sounds were made by short-tailed crickets.

Since then, media outlets have suggested that U.S. officials were “attacked” by microwave – not sonic – weapons.

No evidence has been presented to corroborate the existence of a microwave weapon capable of causing the symptoms reported by U.S. officials. Multiple U.S. intelligence agencies also found no evidence of an “attack” by a foreign adversary. A National Institute of Health study showed that none of the U.S. embassy personnel who reported symptoms suffered from brain or physical injuries.

“At some point it’s fair to look at the motivation of the people who are doing all of the hyperventilation about these supposed spy bases,” said Armstrong. “Is there a real threat here? Or is it really an opportunity for certain people to build another case against Cuba, another case against China, to build up these very aggressive policies that we have in place against these two countries, instead of engaging, for example, as we did with Cuba in the normalization that began under President Obama.”

Mudslingers Control the Narrative

So what could be happening at the four locations identified in the CSIS report?

According to Armstrong, there are multiple plausible explanations that have nothing to do with China spying on the United States, such as accessing satellite networks, tracking space missions, operating telecommunications inside Cuba and running radars to help catch drug traffickers.

“It probably also makes sense that when [Cuba] wants to buy technology that it cannot produce itself, it would buy technology from China,” he said. “China produces a lot of affordable electronic technology, but that’s far different from saying that China is running SIGINT bases out of Cuba.”

If Cuba is running SIGINT operations from its own territory, this would be routine and unsurprising, according to Armstrong.

“You can’t really fault Cuba for collecting signals intelligence for their own national security purposes given that we have posed a threat to Cuban national security for many, many years,” he said.

The challenge in questioning unsubstantiated claims is that it’s all but impossible to prove something doesn’t exist.

“You can’t prove a negative, so mudslingers control the narrative,” said Armstrong.

Tempest in a Teapot

Perhaps the more important question is: If China is gathering intelligence from Cuba, does it even matter?

“It’s a tempest in a teapot,” said Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the D.C.-based National Security Archives. “If China is using Cuba as a location to spy on the U.S., it does not represent a serious threat.”

Nearly every government in the world uses its diplomatic missions as “listening posts” to seek information on their host states or nearby states, according to Klepak.

“Even if China is doing some intelligence gathering in Cuba, just as it does in every other part of the world, including in its diplomatic posts in the United States, this would neither be surprising nor necessarily threatening,” he said.

Klepak said that the Wall Street Journal’s warning of “an unprecedented new threat” is “absurd beyond words.”

“The [U.S.] Department of Defense has been consistent for at least 29 years in saying Cuba poses no security threat,” he said. “There are real threats out there and China using some facilities in Cuba to gain access to intelligence from the United States would not be one of them.”

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In 2013, Justine Sacco, an executive at a New York public relations firm, sent a tweet in which she joked about AIDS among Black Africans. “Going to Africa,” her tweet said, “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” The tweet, which went viral, was denounced as racist and, despite an abject apology, Sacco was fired from her job.

Amy Cooper earned a similar fate. In May, 2020, Cooper was roaming in New York’s Central Park when a male birdwatcher confronted her about her unleashed dog. Cooper then called the police. “There is a man, African American,” she reported, “and he is recording me and threatening me and my dog … please send the cops immediately!” For this racist ploy, Cooper was publicly condemned. She, too, ended up losing her job.

On July 8, 2024, the WRAL (Raleigh, NC) news website ran the headline, “Millions of Tax Dollars Going to a Company Accused of Racism. WRAL Investigates Why the State Still Hasn’t Taken Action.” The headline implies that what’s allegedly going on is wrong and should be investigated, presumably to stop state support for a racist enterprise.

These examples of anti-racist reaction suggest that as a society we’ve reached a point where public expressions of racism, as well as public support for racism, are unacceptable. One offensive joke can get you fired. Yet we now see an egregious double standard being applied in the U.S. when it comes to tolerance of and support for racism.

Imagine a revised version of that WRAL headline: “Billions of Tax Dollars Going to a Country Accused of Racism. Mainstream Media Coordinate Efforts to Investigate Why the Federal Government Still Hasn’t Taken Action.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for it.

The reality is that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are going to a country not only accused of racism, but which, as many see it, was founded on racist premises, still practices apartheid, and whose leaders have for decades made unabashedly racist public statements. That country is, of course, Israel.

Since October 7, 2023, blatantly racist statements by Israeli leaders have been widely reported. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likened Palestinians to Amalekites, an ancient tribe in Old Testament lore whom Yahweh told the Israelites to destroy—men, women, children, infants, and cattle. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referred to Israel’s assault on Gaza as a fight against “human animals.” Other Israeli officials called for erasing Gaza from the face of the earth, claiming that no Palestinian civilians are innocent.

Cued by their political leaders, Israeli soldiers have released racist videos on social media celebrating their dominance of Palestinians and the destruction of Palestinian homes.

From the top echelons of government to army field units, Israeli racism has been on clear display to the world. These expressions of virulent racism mattered to the International Court of Justice, which took them as evidence of genocidal intent, but they did not seem to matter to U.S. political leaders, except perhaps as instances of bad optics.

Partisans of Israel sought to explain away these expressions of anti-Palestinian racism as uncharacteristic outbursts, products of the rage many Israelis felt in the aftermath of the October 7 attack by Hamas. There is no doubt some truth in this claim; anger conduces to saying hateful things. But the history of anti-Palestinian racism in Israel did not begin in 2023. In fact, it precedes Israel’s founding.

Theodore Herzl, one of the principal architects of political Zionism in the late 19th century, saw the native Arabs of Palestine as “primitive and backward,” according to Israeli historian Avi Shlaim. Herzl expected Palestinian Arabs to be grateful for the prosperity that a Jewish influx would bring to Palestine. Consistent with the ideological fantasies of earlier generations of European colonizers, Herzl imagined that Jews would merit credit for assuming the white man’s burden of civilizing the natives.

Other early Zionists differed in the degree to which they anticipated Arab resistance to the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine. But all accepted the principle that it ultimately didn’t matter what the indigenous people wanted. By use of military force backed by outside imperial powers (Britain; later the U.S.), and through diplomatic sidelining of Palestinian Arabs, Zionists aimed to create the ethnocratic state of Israel, regardless of the conflicting nationalist aspirations of Palestinians.

All this preceded WWII, the Holocaust, and the formal creation of Israel. The forcible displacement of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes and land—what we today would call “ethnic cleansing”—in the 1948 Nakba was largely a matter of putting into practice an idea rooted in political Zionism from the start: the lives, wishes, and well-being of the native Arab population would not be allowed to deter the creation of a Jewish state.

In one sense, little has changed since 1948. Successive Israeli governments have used different levels of violence to quash Palestinian resistance to colonial oppression, but all have adhered to the principle that Israel should be a Jewish state, run by Jews for Jews, with as few Palestinians as possible from the river to the sea. Nor has any Israeli government relinquished the idea that Palestinian desires for freedom and self-determination must be subjugated if necessary for Israel to exist as a Jewish state.

Today, the heir to this racist philosophy is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Over thirty years ago, in his book A Place among the Nations: Israel and the World, Netanyahu slandered Arabs across the board, writing, “Violence is ubiquitous in the political life of all the Arab countries. It is the primary method of dealing with opponents, both foreign and domestic, both Arab and non-Arab.” Netanyahu goes on to call terrorism “the quintessential Middle East export,” saying that “its techniques everywhere are those of the Arab regimes and organizations that invented it.” Projection much?

To be clear, what makes Zionism racist are its implicit assumptions that the desires of Jews to live in freedom, safety, and dignity take precedence over Palestinian desires for the same things; that it is acceptable for a militarily powerful Jewish state to impose its will on a stateless and vulnerable Palestinian group; and that the goal of maintaining a Jewish state trumps the basic human rights of Palestinians.

Anti-Palestinian racism helps to legitimate these ideas and is further reinforced when it is invoked, as by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, to justify violence and the daily humiliation of apartheid. These are not radical observations. In much of the world, outside the sphere of U.S. influence, Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism is plain as day, and what I’m saying here would be uncontroversial.

So when other expressions of racism are unacceptable in the U.S. today, why does anti-Arab Israeli racism get a pass? Why isn’t Israel shunned as a pariah nation, as South Africa once was, for denying the human rights of Palestinians and the immorality of its ethno-supremacist practices?

One answer is that realpolitik rarely bends to morality. As secretary of state and former army general Alexander Haig once put it, Israel is like an unsinkable American aircraft carrier in the Middle East, projecting power in a region of great economic importance to the U.S. ruling class. Relative to the larger geopolitical stakes at play in the region, the fate of a stateless Arab minority is not that important, except as a potential source of instability. If this source of instability were somehow made to go away, many U.S. political leaders would be perfectly happy, regardless of the racism embedded in the solution.

Another reason many Americans are willing to tolerate Israeli racism is that the two nations are seen as sharing a similar origin story, one that makes racist crimes forgivable.

Just as European colonists once sought freedom from popes and kings by forging a new nation in North America, Jews sought freedom from pogroms and antisemitism by creating a Jewish state in the Middle East. Yes, some indigenous people got hurt in the process, and that’s a shame. But this suffering pales when weighed against the benefits America and Israel have brought the world. What’s more, after the Holocaust, Jews have an undeniable claim to seek their own version of Manifest Destiny. So the story goes.

Those who accept this settler-colonial mythos—underscored by biblical fables, post-Holocaust guilt, and devaluing of a racialized Other—may have trouble seeing what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinians as wrong. It will be admitted that maintaining an ethnocratic Jewish state is ugly, even bloody, at times; but the ends justify the means.

Nor should we forget that anti-Arab racism abounds in the U.S. as well as Israel. Americans are thoroughly propagandized to accept the stereotype of Arabs as terrorists, or as Islamic fanatics rooted in a regressive medieval culture. The racist Israeli view of Arabs thus fails to shock in the U.S., fails to shock as it should, because the same view is normalized here. Our “special relationship” with Israel is built in part on this shared infection with the virus of colonial racism.

Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism is a glaring example of the dehumanization that racism entails and the murderous brutality racism enables. This is what the world has seen play out in Gaza these last ten months. There could be no better example, right now, of why Israeli racism should not get a pass in the U.S., nor anywhere, ever again.

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Fans of capitalism like to say it is democratic or that it supports democracy. Some have stretched language so far as to literally equate capitalism with democracy, using the terms interchangeably. No matter how many times that is repeated, it is simply not true and never was. Indeed, it is much more accurate to say that capitalism and democracy are opposites. To see why, you have only to look at capitalism as a production system where employees enter into a relationship with employers, where a few people are the boss, and most people simply work doing what they are told to do. That relationship is not democratic; it is autocratic.

When you cross the threshold into a workplace (e.g., a factory, an office, or a store), you leave whatever democracy might exist outside. You enter a workplace from which democracy is excluded. Are the majority—the employees—making the decisions that affect their lives? The answer is an unambiguous no. Whoever runs the enterprise in a capitalist system (owner[s] or a board of directors) makes all the key decisions: what the enterprise produces, what technology it uses, where production takes place, and what to do with enterprise profits. The employees are excluded from making those decisions but must live with the consequences, which affect them deeply. The employees must either accept the effects of their employers’ decisions or quit their jobs to work somewhere else (most likely organized in the same undemocratic way).

The employer is an autocrat within a capitalist enterprise, like a king in a monarchy. Over the past few centuries, monarchies were largely “overthrown” and replaced by representative, electoral “democracies.” But kings remained. They merely changed their location and their titles. They moved from political positions in government to economic positions inside capitalist enterprises. Instead of kings, they are called bosses or owners or CEOs. There they sit, atop the capitalist enterprise, exercising many king-like powers, unaccountable to those over whom they reign.

Democracy has been kept out of capitalist enterprise for centuries. Many other institutions in societies where capitalist enterprises prevail—government agencies, universities and colleges, religions, and charities—are equally autocratic. Their internal relationships often copy or mirror the employer/employee relationship inside capitalist enterprises. Those institutions try thereby to “function in a businesslike manner.”

The anti-democratic organization of capitalist firms also conveys to employees that their input is not genuinely welcomed or sought by their bosses. Employees thus mostly resign themselves to their powerless position relative to the CEO at their workplace. They also expect the same in their relationships with political leaders, the CEOs’ counterparts in government. Their inability to participate in running their workplaces trains citizens to presume and accept the same in relation to running their residential communities. Employers become top political officials (and vice versa) in part because they are used to being “in charge.” Political parties and government bureaucracies mirror capitalist enterprises by being run autocratically while constantly describing themselves as democratic.

Most adults experience working at least eight hours for five or more days per week in capitalist workplaces, under the power and authority of their employer. The undemocratic reality of the capitalist workplace leaves its complex, multilayered impacts on all who collaborate there, part time and full time. Capitalism’s problem with democracy—that the two basically contradict one another—shapes many people’s lives. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Walton family (descendants of Walmart’s founder), along with a handful of other major shareholders, decide how to spend hundreds of billions. The decisions of a few hundred billionaires bring economic development, industries, and enterprises to some regions and lead to the economic decline of other regions. The many billions of people affected by those spending decisions are excluded from participating in making them. Those countless people lack the economic and social power wielded by a tiny, unelected, obscenely wealthy minority of people. That is the opposite of democracy.

Employers as a class, often led by major shareholders and the CEOs they enrich, also use their wealth to buy (they would prefer to say “donate” to) political parties, candidates, and campaigns. The rich have always understood that universal or even widespread suffrage risks a nonwealthy majority voting to undo society’s wealth inequality. So, the rich seek control of existing forms of democracy to make sure they do not become a real democracy in the sense of enabling the employee majority to outvote the employer minority.

The enormous surpluses appropriated by “big business” employers—usually corporations—allow them to reward their upper-level executives lavishly. These executives, technically also “employees,” use corporate wealth and power to influence politics. Their goals are to reproduce the capitalist system and thus the favors and rewards it gives them. Capitalists and their top employees make the political system depend on their money more than it depends on the people’s votes.

How does capitalism make the major political parties and candidates dependent on donations from employers and the rich? Politicians need vast sums of money to win by dominating the media as part of costly campaigns. They find willing donors by supporting policies that benefit capitalism as a whole, or else particular industries, regions, and enterprises. Sometimes, the donors find the politicians. Employers hire lobbyists—people who work full time, all year round, to influence the candidates that get elected. Employers fund “think tanks” to produce and spread reports on every current social issue. The purpose of those reports is to build general support for what the funders want. In these and other ways, employers and those they enrich shape the political system to work for them.

Most employees have no comparable wealth or power. To exert real political power requires massive organization to activate, combine, and mobilize employees so their numbers can add up to real strength. That happens rarely and with great difficulty. Moreover, in the U.S., the political system has been shaped over the decades to leave only two major parties. Both of them loudly and proudlyendorse and support capitalism. They collaborate to make it very difficult for any third party to gain a foothold, and for any anti-capitalist political party to emerge. The U.S. endlessly repeats its commitment to maximum freedom of choice for its citizens, but it excludes political parties from that commitment.

Democracy is about “one person, one vote”—the notion that we all have an equal say in the decisions that affect us. That is not what we have now. Going into a voting booth once or twice a year and picking a candidate is a very different level of influence than that of the Rockefeller family or George Soros. When they want to influence people, they use their money. That’s not democracy.

In capitalism, democracy is unacceptable because it threatens the unequally distributed wealth of the minority with a majority vote. With or without formal institutions of democracy (such as elections with universal suffrage), capitalism undermines genuine democracy because employers control production, surplus value, and that surplus value’s distributions. For capitalism’s leaders, democracy is what they say, not what they do.

This adapted excerpt from Richard D. Wolff’s book Understanding Capitalism (Democracy at Work, 2024) was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Photograph Source: Wilfredor – CC0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ones that aren’t shown on Israeli maps.

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

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Election Theater in Venezuela: a Tale From Election Day in Caracas appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Levi Meir Clancy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

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

[From The Combatants’ Letter, January 2002]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional Sources and Notes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the reality in Gaza.

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

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

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Image Source: The Heritage Foundation – Public Domain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Image by Planet Volumes.

Chinese diplomacy has done it again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consequently, the Chinese efforts yielded nothing tangible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photograph Source: Wilfredor – CC0

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

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

Europe Needs Venezuelan Oil

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

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

The U.S. and the Venezuelan Far-Right

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

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

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

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

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Photo: Roger Harris.

July 29, 2024, Caracas, Venezuela.

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

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

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

Sore losers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real electoral interference

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

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

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

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

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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