My favorite piece of fictional writing of all time is the play for voices, Under Milk Wood by the Welsh writer, Dylan Thomas. It opens like this: “To begin at the beginning”.

If you want to put human faces to the story of nuclear power, you have to begin at the beginning. That’s why those who continue to promote nuclear power never begin at the beginning. Because if they do, they meet the faces of the people who are the first witnesses to the fundamentally anti-humanitarian nature of the nuclear age.

When we begin at the beginning, what do we find? We find uranium. We find people. And we find suffering.

When we begin at the beginning, we are on Native American land, First Nations land in Canada, Aboriginal land in Australia. We are in the Congo, now the site of a genocide with six million dead, the fighting mostly over mineral rights. We are walking on the sands of the Sahel with the nomadic Touareg. We are among impoverished families in India, Namibia, and Kazakhstan.

We see black faces and brown faces, almost never white faces — although uranium mining also happened in Europe.

Mostly, we find people who already had little and now have lost so much more. We find people whose ancient beliefs were centered in stewardship of the Earth, whose tales and legends talk of dragons and rainbow serpents and yellow dust underground that must never be disturbed.

And yet, it was they who were forced to disturb the serpent —in Australia, in Africa, in Indian country. As they unearthed uranium — the lethal force that would become the fuel for nuclear weapons and nuclear power — they were being made to destroy the very thing they held sacred. And their lives were about to be destroyed by it, too.

We are seeing a genocide. Because a genocide is not just a massacre. A genocide is also the erasure of a people culturally. It is the destruction of a way of life, often also a language, a belief system.

It was at that moment, when we first dug uranium out of the ground, that nuclear power became a human rights violation. And it never ceases to be one, along the entire length of the uranium fuel chain, from uranium mining to processing, to electricity generation, to waste mismanagement.

When we begin at the beginning in the United States, we are on Navajo land, or Hopi, Zuni, Laguna, Acoma, Lakota and, now, Havasupai. The places they now call home are sacred. But they also represent the indifference and abandonment of successive US governments and they were reached on a forced march to exile, the Trail of Tears.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Native Americans began to mine for uranium, without protective gear and without warning or knowledge of the dangers. They were told it was their patriotic duty.

So they breathed in the radon gas, and wore their radioactive dust-covered clothes home for their wives to wash. And they died, and so did their families. Unacknowledged as victims of the arms race or of the nuclear power industry, they have had to fight for compensation and cleanup ever since.

In Niger, in Arlit, a dusty desert town in the Sahel, people live in shacks, some with no running water or electricity. Here we find homes that have been built using radioactive scraps foraged from the uranium mine site. Discarded radioactive metal is available in the marketplace, potentially finding its way into household goods.

In the distance there is a mountain. It isn’t real. But it’s not a mirage either. It’s a tailings pile, ravaged by the Sahara winds, scattering radioactivity far and wide.

Areva, now Orano, whose subsidiaries mine there, make millions, lighting swank Paris apartments overlooking the Seine with nuclear powered electricity fueled by the sweat and toil of people whose children pick up radioactive rocks from the sandy streets and whose fathers die in the local hospital where the Areva-hired doctors tell them their fatal illnesses have nothing whatever to do with exposures at the mines.

When Guria Das died in her village in Jaduguda, India, she had the body of a three-year old. She was 13. She could not speak, she could not move. Nearby, the Uranium Corporation of India, Limited keeps working its six uranium mines, its tailing ponds leaching poison into a community ravaged by disease and birth defects, but who are told, of course, that their problems have nothing whatever to do with the uranium mines. It’s a story that repeats, over and over, wherever you find uranium mining. The corporations profit and then they deny.

This is the beginning. But it’s not the only part of the atomic lie that the nuclear power industry would rather keep hidden.

Erwin, Tennessee is home to a facility that processes highly-enriched uranium so that it can eventually be used as commercial nuclear reactor fuel. There are many stories here, too many to be purely coincidence, heartbreaking stories that were collected and published. Here is what one person wrote:

“I know we ate radiation straight from Mama’s garden. Our beloved little dog died of cancer. My dad died at 56 with colon cancer. Our next door neighbor died of colon cancer; I doubt she was 60. A friend and close neighbor had extensive colon cancer in his early 30s. I had a huge lymphoma removed from my heart at the age of 30. My brother had kidney failure in his early 30s. My sister and I both have thyroid nodules and weird protein levels in our blood that can lead to multiple myelosis.”

Once the fuel is loaded into nuclear power plants, the story of unexplained cancers continues.

In Illinois in the early 2000s, far too many children living between two nuclear power plants are suffering from brain cancer. Childhood brain cancer is extremely rare. Here there are numerous cases and they are rising. The children are taken away to Chicago for medical treatment. Those who die there are not recorded in the statistics of their local community. In this way, their deaths have nothing whatever to do with the nuclear power plants.

In Shell Bluff, Georgia, a poor African American community fought to stop the construction of the Vogtle 1 and 2 nuclear reactors. They lost. Then they fought again — against two new reactors — Vogtle 3 and 4 — and lost again.

In Japan, before that fateful moment on March 11, 2011, when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began melting down, the legal radiation exposure limit for the Japanese public was one millisievert a year. This is still too high. But after the disaster, when cleaning up the radioactive contamination proved an impossible task, the Japanese government raised the exposure limit, by 20 times. Now it is 20 milisieverts a year, unsafe for anyone, but especially babies born and still in the womb, and children and women. This represents an undeniable violation of human rights.

The Fukushima story includes animals, too. When evacuations began, many animals were left behind, some never to be retrieved. Dairy cows, tethered in their milking sheds, slowly died of starvation. It’s hard to look at the pictures that were captured of this suffering. But it’s even harder to say that this is something we are willing to accept, as part of the deal for using nuclear power.

Some farmers didn’t accept it and continued to tend their cows even though they could never sell the meat or milk. To abandon their cows would be a betrayal, a loss of our fundamental humanity. And of course they also knew that slaughtering the cows meant they disappeared from view — exactly what the Japanese government wants to see happen to the Fukushima disaster itself.

Before Fukushima there was Chernobyl and before that Church Rock and before that Three Mile Island. And before that Mayak. And after these, where?

Church Rock is the least known major nuclear disaster. It happened on July 16, 1979, just over three months after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and, ironically, on the same date and in the same state as the first ever atomic test, the 1945 detonation, Trinity.

At Church Rock, New Mexico, ninety million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes, burst through a broken dam wall at the uranium mill facility there, creating a flood of deadly effluents that permanently contaminated the Puerco River, an essential water source for the Navajo people. It was the biggest release of radioactive waste in U.S. history. But it happened far away in New Mexico, to people who didn’t count. Just one more chapter in the quiet genocide.

The atomic lie was at its most powerful after Chernobyl, selling us on the idea that only a handful of liquidators died as a result but no one else.

But there were many others who died and many who were sickened, suffering all their lives. Some of them told their stories to Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist. She put five hundred of their testimonies in her book, Chernobyl Prayer, recording their pain, their fears, and their losses.

These are the faces that are not seen by the ivory tower pro-atomic pundits, pushing papers in their glass-enclosed corner offices with the splendid view. These are the faces they dare not look at, who expose their great lie, the people who lost children. As one father told Alexievich:

“Can you imagine seven bald girls together? There were seven of them in the ward. No, that’s it! I can’t go on! Talking about it gives me this feeling….Like my heart is telling me: this is an act of betrayal. Because I have to describe her as if she was just anyone. Describe her agony….We put her on the door. On the door my father once lay on. Until they brought the little coffin. It was so tiny, like the box for a large doll. Like a box.”

Chernobyl remains the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident. But that record could still be broken. In the United States the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the industry are working to extend the licenses of nuclear power plants not just for 60 years, but out to 80 and even potentially 100 years.

Incredibly, the NRC has decided that protecting nuclear power plants from the ravages of the climate crisis — including significant sea-level rise, unprecedented rainfall and ever more violent storms — is not something they are required to plan for.

The NRC and the nuclear industry are also perfectly willing to ignore the fact that nuclear power is both dangerous and obsolete, and that reactors will continue producing radioactive waste that is lethal for millennia and for which there is no safe, longterm plan.

France and the United Kingdom chose to reprocess radioactive waste in a chemical bath that separates out the plutonium and uranium, reducing the amount of highly radioactive waste left over but greatly increasing the volume of other gaseous and liquid radioactive wastes.

Where do those wastes go? Into the air and into the sea and into living breathing organisms, including children. Around both the La Hague reprocessing site in Northern France and the Sellafield reprocessing site off the northwest coast of England, leukemia clusters have been found, especially among children. The researchers who discovered this were both dismissed and derided.

The radioactive waste produced at the end of the chain of these atomic lies has to go somewhere, or stay where it is. Either way, the outcome is a bad one. Should it be stored, buried, locked away or retrievable? Who takes care of it? And for how long?

And so we return to the lands of Indigenous people, and communities of color.

Yucca Mountain — for a time the chosen destination for America’s high-level radioactive waste —ripples across Western Shoshone Land in Nevada.  We are back in the dreamtime with stories of serpents. The Shoshone call Yucca Mountain “Serpent Swimming Westward”. It is a sacred place. It is also theirs by treaty, a treaty the United States has chosen to ignore and then to break.

“Nothing out there” is how areas like Yucca Mountain tend to be characterized. But the eyes of the Western Shoshone look closer. They see:

Quaking Aspens, a tree species that dates back 80,000 years. Thyms Buckwheat, a plant that only exists on five acres there, and nowhere else on Earth. There is the desert tortoise and the Devils Hole Pupfish that somewhere in its evolutionary history went from salt water to fresh water. And of course there are people, Native people, trying hard to preserve this precious corner of their history and the land they steward.

And so we keep searching. In Cumbria in England. In the Gobi desert. In Finland, a deep geological repository is under construction, even though no one can be sure if it will work, or how it can be marked so curious future generations don’t excavate it.

In Bure, France, nature protectors calling themselves owls, built houses in treetops in the forest that would be crushed to make way for a nuclear repository.

And in New Mexico and Texas there are Latino communities faced with the prospect of hosting the country’s reactor waste “temporarily”, at so-called Consolidate Interim Storage Facilities. But given we haven’t found anywhere else for the waste, it likely won’t be temporary. And once again, it is a minority community which must assume this burden.

The great Atomic Lie lives on, slithering through the halls of power, poisoning the minds of willing, gullible listeners in the media, the public, and the political sphere. Our fight isn’t over and it may never be. But we are the ones who are here now, the voices of reason, whispering on a breeze that will keep blowing, until our breath ceases and others take up the clarion call.

Linda Pentz Gunter’s forthcoming book, Hot Stories. Reflections from a Radioactive World, will be published in autumn 2024.

This first appeared on Beyond Nuclear International.

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Image by Egor Myznik.

Just recently, Shoshana Liessmann and Antje Herzog wrote about Immanuel Kant in honor of his 300^th birthday and explained how the celebrated “revolutionary thinker and one of the most prominent philosophers of the Enlightenment” could also be placed under “critical scrutiny.”

They write, with “His overt racism, anti-Judaism, and disparaging remarks about women …. How is it possible that Kant – a man hailed as a pioneer of universal human rights – could develop such attitudes?” In the 18^th century he carelessly stated, “Africans have no feeling that rises above the ridiculous.”

Surya Parekh is an Associate Professor of English, General Literature and Rhetoric at Binghamton University. He is the author of Black Enlightenment (Duke University Press, 2023). In this book, Parekh re-envisions the Enlightenment project from a Black perspective. He investigates Black authors such as Francis Williams, Ignatius Sancho, and Phillis Wheatley, and juxtaposes them with western thinkers like Immanuel Kant and David Hume. Parekh argues that literature allows us to imagine other people, enter other universes and other spaces that are unlike our own. One of the things we must try to do is imagine these spaces, asserts Parekh.

By challenging the traditional Enlightenment orthodoxy through the lens of Black writers, Parekh sets out to cite the complexities of Enlightenment history and tenets. His book pays special attention and points to the apprehension of race by philosophers such as Hume (the most skeptical of his day), and Kant, (perhaps the most critical). Parekh gets the reader to deliberate on how Black writers shaped their own agency only to see a society unreceptive to their rights and liberty. In examining Kant’s passages on race, Parekh is interested in Kant’s “strange kinds of distortions,” but at the same time wishes to complicate the story.

I recently spoke with Parekh. He reminds us that we must illuminate Black perspectives of the past to understand the present.

Daniel Falcone: What do you want readers to take away from the book? What was your aim with writing the book?

Surya Parekh: I wanted people to reread these historical figures (Francis Williams, Ignatius Sancho, and Phillis Wheatley). Phillis Wheatley is timely for us today. I think about how literary works call out towards different kinds of futures. As we read from our moment, it’s not necessarily that we want to make her contemporary; it’s how we can learn from her. How does the kind of future she imagines resonate for us today? So, the aim is to reread figures who are too quickly read or not read at all. I say in the Introduction that we tend to read early Black thinkers based on what we’ve now come to term as slave narratives; Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others — there’s a clear kind of goal of freedom in those narratives.

There is also the tremendous rhetoric of these narratives. They’re each very different. But the rhetoric of these narratives is pointing us towards certain kinds of subjects for whom the theme of freedom is the most important.

When we read folks like Wheatley, Sancho, or Francis Williams, or one of the other figures I look at briefly, Jupiter Hammon, who writes the first text in the thirteen colonies, directed towards other people in slavery — we think of them as having assimilated. We don’t think of them as radical, and so they don’t seem particularly useful in the way that a Frederick Douglass might, or that a Harriet Jacobs might. So, my desire for the book is to encourage my reader to go back to these works and start to read them anew.

I wanted to ask, ‘What happens if I reimagine the Enlightenment from the position of the Black subject?’ The general argument of the book is twofold: if we look at the canonical Enlightenment thinkers, generally white enlightenment thinkers, we see that most of them at some point, had to think about the Black subject in some way or another. Sometimes it comes as anxiety. So, for instance with David Hume, it comes in as a footnote, an odd footnote that seems to go against everything he’s writing in his essay “Of National Characters.” Why does he have to put this footnote in?

Or Immanuel Kant in passages on race. And in one of his more minor essays, he puts in page numbers. He hardly ever puts in page numbers when he cites. Kant also makes strange kinds of distortions on the stuff that he’s reading. And again, what we see is this anxiety popping up. I was trying to write not so much against (what would now be seen as racism), but in a way to complicate the story.

Kant certainly shapes the discourse on race. But scholars either try to save these thinkers from the accusation of race or the other way around, just say, look, they’re racist. My approach in the book is to really try to read the contradictions. Why, on the one hand, there’s something that seems to speak to something like a universal human and at the same time there’s often a kind of fierce racism in their work. What you see is real Black enlightenment subjects called forth. In the case of Hume, he says, oh, look! There’s a man in Jamaica, and that man in Jamaica was Francis Williams. He was a poet; he wrote in Latin. It looks like he went to England to study.

Of his poems we have only one left. Sadly, he may have been born into a less racist time than the one he dies. There was a brief two-week moment in Jamaica when the Assembly approved petitions for citizenship by Black and Jewish petitioners. Francis Williams’s father petitioned, and as a result they had a status other people did not. I set out to understand from their own normality what they were up to, and how they were trying to shape a certain kind of enlightenment.

Daniel Falcone: How does the book fit into the overall historiographical coverage of the Enlightenment? And could you comment on how the Enlightenment is studied in the present?

Surya Parekh: We don’t think of it as a solely Western European phenomena anymore. There’s been all kinds of stuff about the enlightenment and the colonies. And how we think of French India, how we think of Dutch India, and Indonesia – how we think of parts of Africa as contributing to the general story that we give of enlightenment. There has been a good deal of scholarship on the relationship of enlightenment to the Haitian revolution.

There has certainly been some on Eastern Europe and the Enlightenment. I’m a graduate of a department called History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It’s an interdisciplinary department and so I’m certainly part of that move to try to complicate the enlightenment. And I think I’m also part of the move to say that we think of the Enlightenment as an unfinished project.

Daniel Falcone: Can you talk about the archive you accessed to address the interdisciplinary components covered in the book?

Surya Parekh: I looked up all the sources of the people that I was reading. That’s really my method; much more like a literary scholar. I also read Peter Kolb’s work on the Cape of Good Hope. Kolb’s account formed the basis for both Jean Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the noble savage and Kant’s denigration of Black as lazy. They both were reading and impacted by Kolb.

Daniel Falcone: Since Kant and Hume were two thinkers that were carrying out the Enlightenment project, did they try to change the meaning of Enlightenment once they were aware of the “Black genius?”

Surya Parekh: By the time that Hume is writing in the 1730s, 1740s, and 1750s, there have been a couple of Black men who’ve gotten PhDs in Europe. This fact circulated throughout Europe. What I looked at was, why does Hume feel the need to exclude the Black subject? It’s not clear to me still, why, exactly he does. And to some degree I was looking at what that work was allowing Kant to do. It’s not fully clear. Kant’s one of the first people to teach geography in German, and because he doesn’t have a textbook he’s given permission to write his own. In his 1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant says that Africans have “no feeling that rises above the ridiculous.”

Daniel Falcone: Your book obviously explains the significance of race, but can you comment on how material interests and class factored into the lives of Sancho, Williams, and Wheatley?

Surya Parekh: One of my regrets is not discussing class more. It is a complicated question because the figures I’m looking at had unusual circumstances. In Sancho’s case, a rich benefactor in the Duke of Montague, in Wheatley’s case a family that treated her differently for reasons that we can only conjecture, (compared to others enslaved). We know that Boston by and large, had, relatively speaking, a smaller enslaved population in terms of chattel slavery.

Wheatley and Williams died in rather impoverished kinds of circumstances. Certainly, Wheatley did, and her husband, who was a free Black man, at one point owned a home in a rather decent neighborhood, but because he was a Black man, ended up being put in and out of debtors’ prison along the way, and Wheatley never published her second book of poetry.

The only book of poetry she published was while she was enslaved, when she was 19 years old, with the support of her master and her mistress, and folks like Selina Hastings, in England.

One of the extraordinary things for me is that Wheatley tried to be a poetess as a free person. In fact, most of her letters to her correspondents after she gains manumission are all about this. She asks her American correspondents: Can you sell more of my books? Can you send me money for the books? And so, what you are calling material interests are never far from the surface for her.

Jupiter Hammon, at the age of 76, writes in his book “I’m too old to be free,” but he also advocates freedom for the younger enslaved people. He asks who will take care of him if he’s freed. Hammon points to the difference between political freedom and economic freedom. He asks, what will the consequences of my freedom be?

In terms of social class, Kant himself, who comes from a lower middle-class Pietist background, says in the Observations that white people continually rise from the rabble, but never gives an actual example of a white person who has done so.

The class issues are obviously complicated by being enslaved in many ways.

Daniel Falcone: Were there any reviews or any interpretations of the book that surprised you? What do you hope readers find interesting?

Surya Parekh: There’s a review out in the London School of Economics Review of Books right now. I have a colleague at Wake Forest who’s taught the book to undergraduates who seem to really like the way that the book asks us to challenge the binary of radical and assimilationist.

One of the things that really interested me especially with Wheatley is how this person from 13 or 14 years of age claims a position of authority in the poems she writes. She constructs a lyrical speaker who’s speaking from authority. One of her early poems is to the graduates of what was called the University of Cambridge (Harvard University). She’s telling them to use their education for good purposes. How is it that a 14 or 15-year-old enslaved person feels able to do this?

Or Francis Williams, in his Latin poem, says that it’s the Black citizen that’s the representative citizen of Jamaica. Part of what is so interesting is that the imaginative positions that these thinkers take are surprising. It’s not what we would expect. And so how do we read these gestures?

This is what literature allows us to do, to imagine other people, to enter other universes and other spaces that are unlike our own. One of the things we try to do is imagine these spaces. How can we imagine the space of somebody who was brought across on the Middle Passage on a rather brutal voyage?

It is almost impossible for us to imagine but we must try to imagine it. And that’s what we do when we read, we take up that impossible task and keep trying to imagine.

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Photo by Palestinian Youth Movement.

I had the honor to be among the 3,600 people who greeted Palestinian journalist Sana’ Salameh Daqqah and her four year old child Milad at the recent Peoples Conference for Palestine held in Detroit over the May 24-26^th weekend.  Mother and daughter were enthusiastically cheered by thousands of participants gathered in an auditorium which had been renamed Walid Daqqah Hall for martyred Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daqqah, Sana’s husband and Milad’s father. Their presence at the conference, carefully planned by the conference organizers, was an extraordinary expression of Palestinian resistance. Sana’ and Milad had overcome multiple travel obstacles meant to deter their appearance at this landmark solidarity conference. Most significantly, they had surmounted decades of obstruction by the Zionist prison system meant to prevent the birth of Milad.

Milad was conceived through the smuggling of sperm by Walid Daqqah from inside an Israeli prison. She was born to Sana’ in February 2020 during the 34^th year of Walid’s imprisonment.  Walid and Sana’ met in a prison visiting room in 1996 when Sana’ came to report on prisoner conditions. In 1999 they won the difficult fight to get married inside Ashkelon prison with the presence of their comrades and members of their family. However, they were unable to win their struggle for conjugal visits.

Walid had been arrested in 1986 at the age of twenty-five and convicted of directing a group that abducted and killed an Israeli soldier for the purpose of exchanging him for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. His thirty-seven year sentence meant that he would likely be too old to have a child by the time he was released. So Sana’and Walid committed to the “liberation of sperm,”as Sana’ called it in a speech at the conference.

The insurgent project of smuggling sperm out of prison to ensure future generations of Palestinians was first successful in 2012.  Since then, the practice has increased significantly among Palestinian prisoners given the growing predominance of long sentences (many Palestinian prisoners are serving double or triple life sentences amounting to over 100 years.). According to Sana’, “The prisoners decided to create life from a life sentence.” These children are known as “the ambassadors of freedom.”  Over 115 children have been birthed in this way.

In 2011, on the occasion of his twenty-fifth year in prison, Walid wrote a poem for the unborn child he wished to have. The couple had already decided to call the child Milad which means “birth” in Arabic.

I write to my child that has not been born yet,
I write to the birth (Milad) of the future.
This is how we want to name our child,
and this is exactly how I would like for the future to recognize us….

The revolutionary drive of political prisoners to have children, defying the agents of incarceration, extends beyond Palestinians. Gerardo Hernández, one of the U.S.-held Cuban 5 political prisoners whom I corresponded with for several years, “liberated” his sperm in 2014 from the U.S. federal prison in Victorville where he was incarcerated. The Cuban Five were arrested in 1998 and falsely accused by the U.S. government of committing espionage conspiracy against the United States. In reality the Five were monitoring the actions of U.S.-based terrorist groups in order to prevent those groups from carrying out further attacks against Cuba.

In December 2014, after sixteen years of imprisonment, Gerardo and two other members of the Five won a resounding victory and were released from prison (two other members had already been freed.) Joyously, Gerardo was able to be present on January 6, 2015 when his wife Adriana Pérez, gave birth to their baby girl, Gema.

When asked to comment about Walid and Sana’s experience for this article Gerardo, who is now the national coordinator of Cuba’s Committees in Defense of the Revolution, told Resumen LatinoAmericano English:

“When I heard the remarkable story of Walid and Sana’, I could not help but compare it to Adriana and my experience when I was in a federal US prison serving two life sentences for monitoring the activity of Cuban American terrorists in Miami. Since we were married, before I went to prison, we too had dreamed of having children and through a long, determined struggle and a negotiated agreement, we were able to conceive our first child Gema while I was still behind bars. This is where the comparison ends because what Walid and Sana’ went through to have Milad is a victory of unbelievable courage and belief in Palestine. I look forward to a day when Sana’ and Milad can break bread together with our family and when Palestine is sovereign and free like Cuba.”

Che Guevara’s famous statement that it is easier to kill a guerrilla in the womb than in the mountains helped to explain imperialist population control policies in Latin America in the 1960’s & 70’s that were killing off generations before they could be born and grow up to be freedom fighters. Since the 1970’s, the U.S. and Israel have expanded the incarceration of people during their reproductive years as another front of population control. From bans on conjugal visits in Israeli prisons to forcible sterilization in U.S. women’s prisons and immigration detention centers, population control is now an integral function of both the Israeli and U.S. prison systems that seek to repress oppressed peoples and prevent them from organizing for change. Liberating sperm is one way to subvert the carceral repression of reproduction.

After the birth of Milad, Walid was punished with years of solitary confinement. Walid and Sana’ had to fight fiercely first to register Milad’s birth and later for the right to a family visit with her father in prison. After Walid finally got to visit Milad he wrote, “Today I experienced what it felt like for the prisoners who dug a tunnel out of the prison, stepped out into the light, and were then caught. It was a moment of freedom, a freedom with Milad.”

Walid was sentenced to thirty-seven years in prison and was supposed to be released in March 2023. However, in 2018 the Israeli government added two years to his sentence for his alleged help with bringing cell phones into the prison to enable prisoners to communicate with their families. In addition to the added sentence, they also denied him regular blood tests to monitor the cancer which he had developed a number of years before. The article Setting the Future Free, describes Sana’s arduous struggle to get Walid medical treatment for his cancer. “Daqqah’s family and supporters call out this medical neglect as deliberate, a regular policy of the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) to control and ultimately eliminate the political prison population.”

Despite an international campaign for Walid’s medical care and freedom, he was kept in the Ramleh prison clinic, known as ‘the slaughterhouse,’ until it was too late and he died due to medical neglect on April 7, 2024. The campaign has since shifted to a demand for the release of his body to his family which the Israeli authorities are withholding from the family “unlawfully and unconstitutionally.” Recently, the Israeli security minister decided that they would continue to withhold his body because of its value in negotiations for the Israeli captives held by the Palestinian Resistance. Israel’s criminal population control methods extend from birth to death and beyond.

Six weeks after Walid’s death, Sana’ and Milad traveled to Detroit. Their presence at the conference dramatically asserted the importance of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement. At a special plenary session, Sana’ detailed the history of the prisoner movement and how over time the prisoners became organized, developed educational programs, intellectual and cultural contributions and resistance strategies from hunger strikes to liberated sperm.

However, Sana’ cautioned, “This occupation sees an opportunity in this current moment to liquidate our prisoners. To liquidate the symbols of the prisoners’ movement, the symbols of our leadership, like what they did with Walid.” She explained that to the state of Israel, breaking the resistance of prisoners goes hand in hand with breaking the resistance in Gaza. She strongly urged the people and organizations at the conference to center the issue of prisoners “at every activity, every demonstration, every gathering.”

She continued “I can tell you fully that we have to be proud to be part of a people that brings out a prisoner movement like this and brings out heroes and resistance fighters like the ones we have in our prisoners’ movement. “

Sana’ and Milad are heroes of this people and this movement. Their presence brought an indelible, life affirming inspiration to the Peoples Conference that will be carried forward in the continuing struggle for a Free Palestine!

Diana Block works with the Bay Area Cuba Solidarity Network. She is a founding and active member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners , an abolitionist organization that celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2020. She is the author of a memoir, Arm the Spirit – A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back (AK Press 2009), and a novel, Clandestine Occupations – An Imaginary History (PM Press 2015). She writes for various online journals.

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Photo by Scott Rodgerson

There is an obscure mechanism by which fossil fuel companies maintain their global domination even as their products are destroying our futures. Most rank-and-file climate activists haven’t heard of it and most news media rarely discuss it in great detail. It is a tool that has its origins in colonialism and advantages corporate power over democracy. The technical term for such a tool is “Investor-state dispute settlement” or ISDS. And while it sounds boring and technical, it is crucial that we familiarize ourselves with it in order to dismantle it.

The Global ISDS tracker, a newly launched online database, describes these as “secretive corporate tribunals.” When nations enter into trade agreements with one another, they usually include a clause on using the benign-sounding ISDS to resolve corporate disputes with national regulators. In other words, if a corporation originating in one nation sees its profits threatened by regulations or nationalization in another nation, it can sue that second government.

When applied to curbing carbon emissions in order to save our planet’s ability to sustain life, one can see that such tribunals can be extremely problematic. Country A decides to transition away from the oil and gas industry toward green, renewable energy. However, an oil company based in Country B sues via an ISDS agreement to extract its lost profits. That’s precisely what is happening, to the tune of $327 billion, according to the Global ISDS Tracker. “[F]ossil fuel cases… can devastate public budgets or even bankrupt a country.”

For example, Nigeria is currently facing a massive set of damages determined by an ISDS tribunal to be paid to a UK-based company for a gas project to the tune of 30 percent of the entire nation’s foreign exchange reserves. And, foreign mining companies are demanding $30 billion from the Republic of Congo using ISDS tribunals. That’s twice the amount of Congo’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Former UN climate envoy and former Irish President Mary Robinson, who said she was “outraged” when she found out about oil and gas companies using ISDS to extort nations, explained that “if countries do the right thing on climate, they have to compensate fossil fuel companies.”

Where did ISDSs come from and how are they remotely justifiable in an era when society broadly agrees on democracy as the best form of government? Former U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration explained in the context of the 2016 free trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that “ISDS is specifically designed to protect American investors abroad from discrimination and denial of justice,” and that it is a “more peaceful, better way to resolve trade conflicts” compared to the “gunboat diplomacy” of earlier eras.

It is as if the United States’ only option has been to defend its corporations against other people’s democracies rather than allow private entities to fend for themselves. If only human beings were protected from “discrimination and denial of justice” to this extent!

According to a 2023 report by David Boyd, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, “[o]f the 12 largest ISDS awards to date, 11 involve cases brought by fossil fuel and mining investors.” The $95 billion they extracted from nations using ISDS “likely exceeds the total amount of damages awarded by all courts to victims of human rights violations in all States worldwide, ever,” wrote Boyd.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning media outlet Inside Climate News prefers to call ISDS “economic colonialism,” especially given that “the majority of cases have been filed by corporations from the United States, Europe, and Canada against developing nations.” Colonialism is a fitting descriptor. Gus Van Harten explained in his 2020 book “The Trouble with Foreign Investor Protection,” that ISDS treaties “originate in the efforts of former colonial powers and international organizations, especially the World Bank, to constrain newly independent countries.” In other words, ISDS is a means by which to extend colonialism after the end of physical occupation.

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning economist, prefers even harsher terminology. He called ISDS mechanisms “litigation terrorism,” because they “instill fear of environmental regulations, climate regulations because you know that it’s going to be costly” for governments.

British commentators had pressured the UK government to exit from treaties such as the “Energy Charter Treaty” (ECT) that require ISDS tribunals. In February 2024, the UK announced it would quit the ECT, following in the footsteps of France, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. Most recently Members of the European Parliament also backed a proposal to end its ECT membership. It was called a “historic” vote against a treaty seen as a “climate killer.”

It’s time for the U.S. to do the same. Last November, hundreds of climate justice and civil society groups signed on to a letter urging President Joe Biden to end ISDS mechanisms built into a trade agreement with nearly a dozen Latin American and Caribbean nations called Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity. The signatories explained that ISDS was “a global governance regime that prioritizes corporate rights over those of governments, people, and the planet.”

This was followed by a similar letter in December 2023 signed by more than 40 lawmakers from the Senate and House urging Biden to remove ISDS provisions from all trade agreements. The signatories, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse, lauded Biden for his “powerful action when he shut down the Keystone XL pipeline project, preventing the construction of a tar sands oil pipeline,” and pointed out that “TC Energy (formerly known as TransCanada)—the company behind the now-defunct pipeline—has filed an ISDS claim for billions of dollars to be litigated not in an American court, but in a shady international tribunal.”

What good does it do Biden and the U.S. for him to be a climate champion if any steps he takes to undermine fossil fuel domination are countered by a powerful and secretive corporate weapon?

Momentum against ISDS provisions is growing. In April 2024, hundreds of academics in law and economics also wrote to Biden urging him to “eliminate ISDS liability from existing agreements,” and offering valuable expertise on how it can be done.

Biden had said in 2020 that he was against ISDS provisions—in spite of his role as Vice President to the pro-ISDS Obama. In a letter to the United Steelworkers union, he said “I oppose the ability of private corporations to attack labor, health, and environmental policies through the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process, and I oppose the inclusion of such provisions in future trade agreements.” But what about current trade agreements?

It’s troubling that multinational corporations from the U.S. launched the highest number of ISDS cases worldwide. The U.S. is currently the top producer of crude oil in the world. U.S. oil and gas companies are reaping extraordinarily high profits while taking advantage of billions of dollars of public subsidies in the form of tax breaks. The least Biden can do to curb a deadly industry that is threatening our entire species is to take action against ISDS provisions in existing trade agreements.

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

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Each year, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) releases its World Migration Report. Most of these reports are anodyne, pointing to a secular rise in migration during the period of neoliberalism. As states in the poorer parts of the world found themselves under assault from the Washington Consensus (cuts, privatization, and austerity), and as employment became more and more precarious, larger and larger numbers of people took to the road to find a way to sustain their families. That is why the IOM published its first World Migration Report in 2000, when it wrote that “it is estimated that there are more migrants in the world than ever before,” it was between 1985 and 1990, the IOM calculated, that the rate of growth of world migration (2.59 percent) outstripped the rate of growth of the world population (1.7 percent).

The neoliberal attack on government expenditure in poorer countries was a key driver of international migration. Even by 1990, it had become clear that the migrants had become an essential force in providing foreign exchange to their countries through increasing remittance payments to their families. By 2015, remittances—mostly by the international working class—outstripped the volume of Official Development Assistance (ODA) by three times and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). ODA is the aid money provided by states, whereas FDI is the investment money provided by private companies. For some countries, such as Mexico and the Philippines, remittance payments from working-class migrants prevented state bankruptcy.

This year’s report notes that there are “roughly 281 million people worldwide” who are on the move. This is 3.6 percent of the global population. It is triple the 84 million people on the move in 1970, and much higher than the 153 million people in 1990. “Global trends point to more migration in the future,” notes the IOM. Based on detailed studies, the IOM finds that the rise in migration can be attributed to three factors: war, economic precarity, and climate change.

First, people flee war, and with the increase in warfare, this has become a leading cause of displacement. Wars are not the result of human disagreement alone, since many of these problems can be resolved if calm heads are allowed to prevail; conflicts are exacerbated into war due to the immense scale of the arms trade and the pressures of the merchants of death to forgo peace initiatives and to use increasingly expensive weaponry to solve disputes. Global military spending is now nearly $3 trillion, three-quarters of it by the Global North countries. Meanwhile, arms companies made a whopping $600 billion in profits in 2022. Tens of millions of people are permanently displaced due to this profiteering by the merchants of death.

Second, the International Labor Organization (ILO) calculates that about 58 percent of the global workforce—or 2 billion people—are in the informal sector. They work with minimal social protection and almost no rights in the workplace. The data on youth unemployment and youth precarity is stunning, with the Indian numbers horrifying. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy shows that India’s youth—between the ages of 15 and 24—are “faced by a double whammy of low and falling labor participation rates and shockingly high unemployment rates. The unemployment rate among youth stood at 45.4 percent in 2022-23. This is an alarming six times higher than India’s unemployment rate of 7.5 percent.” Many of the migrants from West Africa who attempt the dangerous crossing of the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea flee the high rates of precarity, underemployment, and unemployment in the region. A 2018 report from the African Development Bank Group shows that due to the attack on global agriculture, peasants have moved from rural areas to cities into low-productivity informal services, from where they decide to leave for the lure of higher incomes in the West.

Third, more and more people are faced with the adverse impacts of the climate catastrophe. In 2015, at the Paris meeting on the climate, government leaders agreed to set up a Task Force on Climate Migration; three years later, in 2018, the UN Global Compact agreed that those on the move for reasons of climate degradation must be protected. However, the concept of “climate refugees” is not yet established. In 2021, a World Bank report calculated that by 2050 there will be at least 216 million climate refugees.

Wealth

The IOM’s new report points out that these migrants—many of whom lead extremely precarious lives—send home larger and larger amounts of money to help their increasingly desperate families. “The money they send home,” the IOM report notes, “increased by a staggering 650 [percent] during the period from 2000 to 2022, rising from $128 billion to $831 billion.” Most of these remittances in the recent period, analysts show go to low-income and middle-income countries. Of the $831 billion, for instance, $647 billion goes to poorer nations. For most of these countries, the remittances sent home by working-class migrants far outstrips FDI and ODA put together and forms a significant portion of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

A number of studies conducted by the World Bank show two important things about remittance payments. First, these are more evenly distributed amongst the poorer nations. FDI transactions typically favor the largest economies in the Global South, and they go toward sectors that are not always going to provide employment or income for the poorest sections of the population. Second, household surveys show that these remittances help to considerably lower poverty in middle-income and low-income countries. For example, remittance payments by working-class migrants reduced the rate of poverty in Ghana (by 5 percent), in Bangladesh (by 6 percent), and in Uganda (by 11 percent). Countries such as Mexico and the Philippines see their poverty rates rise drastically when remittances drop.

The treatment of these migrants, who are crucial for poverty reduction and for building wealth in society, is outrageous. They are treated as criminals, abandoned by their own countries who would rather spend vulgar amounts of money to attract much less impactful investment through multinational corporations. The data shows that there needs to be a shift in class perspective regarding investment. Migrant remittances are greater by volume and more impactful for society than the “hot money” that goes in and out of countries and does not “trickle down” into society.

If the migrants of the world—all 281 million of them—lived in one country, then they would form the fourth largest country in the world after India (1.4 billion), China (1.4 billion), and the United States (339 million). Yet, migrants receive few social protections and little respect (a new publication from the Zetkin Forum for Social Research shows, for instance, how Europe criminalizes migrants). In many cases, their wages are suppressed due to their lack of documentation, and their remittances are taxed heavily by international wire services (PayPal, Western Union, and Moneygram) which charge high fees to both the sender and the recipient. As yet, there are only small political initiatives that stand with the migrants, but no platform that unites their numbers into a powerful political force.

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Unless on July 11 Judge Juan Merchan sends Donald Trump up the river for four years of hard labor (poetic justice for having purloined a presidential term), it’s not worth playing the MAGA mug’s game of sentencing the former president to community service (he’d just steal from the youth basketball cash box) or probation (good luck trying to find a paying job for an adjudicated sex offender).

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

These weeks see the end of the term for an ineffectual European legislature which served during the worst pandemic of this century, during Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and with it, the outbreak of a war on European soil that evokes the worst memories of the world wars of the last century. And as we witness the televised genocide of the Palestinian people, it appears that the international system of liberal governance seems to be collapsing like a house of cards.

The next parliamentary term is unlikely to improve the continent and world, but instead will accelerate the most damaging processes: the rise of the far right, remilitarisation, the return of austerity, racism, xenophobia, neocolonialism and a global disorder marked by inter-imperialist conflicts.

The beginnings of the last parliamentary term did not seem to foreshadow this context. In fact, it began with a ‘historic’ declaration of climate emergency[1] by the European Parliament, which demanded the European Commission align all its proposals with the objective of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. That will require reducing emissions by at least 55% by 2030 in order to achieve so-called carbon neutrality by 2050. The political and democratic justification for the European Green Deal came into being. However, it is critical to remember that this proclamation would not have been possible without the massive climate justice mobilisations led by the youth in several European countries and elsewhere, in the months preceding the 2019 European elections.

Above all, since the 2008 crisis, the lack of a European political project beyond the pursuit of maximum profit for private companies, the constitutionalisation of neoliberalism, and the establishment of a model of bureaucratic authority immune to popular will have eroded popular support for the EU, threatening its legitimacy and even its integrity. In this sense, the European Green Deal appeared to be justified by the urgency of infusing renewed political and social legitimacy into the neo-liberal European project by painting it green.

Yet the relative post-austerity hiatus during the Covid pandemic has not resulted in a shift away from the EU’s neo-liberal policies. Faced with the health emergency and the effects of the pandemic, the EU has been unable to develop a common health response beyond a vaccine purchasing centre – while denying vaccines to the world’s poor because German, Norwegian, Swiss and British leaders would not waive Intellectual Property rights when asked by more than 100 countries from 2020-22. The EU has not taken advantage of the situation to strengthen Member States’ health systems nor to establish a European public pharmaceutical company to deal with potential future epidemics.

Meanwhile, on the economic front, the leading governments, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank have increased the public debt, rather than financing a large portion of the financial outlay with tax revenues that should have come from the windfall profits of Big Pharma, GAFAM, and the banks which were the main beneficiaries of expansive economic policies during the crisis. Once again, we have witnessed how the EU has become a millionaire’s project at the expense of millions of poor people.

And in this sense, the pandemic was the prelude to the reassessment of the policies that were to accompany the declaration of climate emergency adopted by the Parliament. It served as a catalyst for a (new) gigantic transfer of public money to the private sector, with stimulus funds being used to support the interests of big business.

All the while, wily politicians peddled the Euro-reformist idea that it is feasible to pursue a non-austerity policy without definitively rejecting the European treaties and the fundamental principles that have governed the European economy for the previous three decades. Yet this represented merely an optical illusion of ‘another way out of the crisis’ that has, in practice, excessively deepened each country’s productive specialisation within the EU, and in the process, solidified hierarchical relationships between the central capitalist countries around Germany, France, the Benelux countries, and the peripheral countries.

However, if handling the pandemic served as a cover for the subsequent ‘shock doctrine,’ Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has become the perfect pretext for both full-blown austerity and the re-militarisation of Europe. Not only is the EU arming itself with expensive weaponry in order to speak the ‘hard language of power’ in a world beset by increasingly intense conflicts over scarce resources.

In addition, the most aggressive European capitalist agenda is also being amplified under the guise of war. Anything goes when we’re at war. An excellent illustration is how quickly and easily the EU’s green make-up was tossed out the window when in 2022, the European Commission’s ‘taxonomy’ included methane gas and nuclear power as supposedly ‘green’ energy under the guise of breaking energy dependence on Russia.

Just as dubious a policy is to put Europe’s carbon- and methane-cutting responsibilities in the hands of financial markets – the EU Emissions Trading Scheme – whose grasp of the planetary arson threat is so frivolous that immediately after Putin’s invasion, the price charged for emitting a tonne of CO2-equivalent crashed 30% and then between February 2023 and 2024, the price crashed by half.

Environmental policies approved in the middle of the parliamentary term also included the ‘farm to table’ strategy[2], one of the pillars of the European Green Deal, which promised to triple the area devoted to organic farming, to halve pesticides and to reduce chemical fertilisers by 20% by 2030. But that too became yet another casualty of the war in Ukraine. All’s fair when there’s war.

Similarly, the European Commission has declared that it will allow the use of ‘ecological interest’ zones and set-aside land to increase European agricultural production. Again, the argument is that food security must take precedence over the advancement of organic farming. War is again used as a justification.

In the absence of traditional military threats to justify increased defence spending, the EU’s external border security policy has evolved into a goldmine for the European defence industry[3]. These are the same military and security companies that profit from the sale of arms to the Middle East and Africa, fuelling the conflicts that force so many people to flee to Europe in search of refuge. These same companies then supply border guards with necessary equipment, border surveillance technology and the technological infrastructure to track population movements. A far-flung ‘xenophobia business’ has emerged, in the words of French researcher Claire Rodier,[4] one which, given its opacity and obscure margins, increasingly relies on EU budget lines disguised as development aid or ‘promoting good neighbourliness’. In fact, it could be said that the closest thing to a European army to date has been Frontex, the agency responsible for administering Europe’s external border surveillance system as if it were a military front.

This dynamic is, as Tomasz Konicz argues, inseparable from the crisis-riddled imperialism of the 21st century, which is no longer simply a phenomenon of plundering resources, but also strives to hermetically lock off the centres of superfluous humanity that the system produces in its throes. Thus, the protection of the last relative islands of well-being is central to imperialist strategies, reinforcing the security and control measures that fuel growing authoritarianism[5].

The tightening of EU migration laws in recent decades is a prime example, culminating in the ratification of the European Pact on Migration and Asylum in April 2024. This authoritarianism of scarcity is perfectly in tune with another brutal process: shrinking economic welfare that, after decades of neo-liberal policies, in turn create misery for large sections of the population. This sense of scarcity is at the heart of the xenophobia of welfare chauvinism, which fits in perfectly with the rise of a neo-liberal authoritarianism whose slogan is, in essence, ‘everyone for themselves!’, in the war of last against the second last.

In addition to the imaginary barbarian[6] invasions of Fortress Europe and its authoritarian drift, there is now the danger of the new Russian imperialism. Nothing is more cohesive and legitimising than a foreign enemy, when it comes to constructing the European neo-militarist project, which is not really about defending Ukraine but instead supports European leaders’ authoritarian neoliberalism. The new mantra in Brussels is that ‘Europe is more united today than ever,’ a phrase repeated to ward off the ghosts of recent crises and demonstrate to the outside world that Europe now has a common political goal.

The remilitarisation of Europe is an aspiration that European elites have long concealed behind euphemisms such as the ‘strategic compass’[7] or the quest for greater strategic autonomy for the EU. Until now, there seemed to be too many stumbling blocks for it to be achieved. The President of the European Commission herself, Ursula von der Leyen, asked rhetorically in her 2021 State of the Union address, why no progress had been made so far on common defence: ‘What has prevented us from making progress so far? It’s not a lack of resources, but a lack of political will’.

It is precisely this political will that seems to take precedence over everything else since the invasion of Ukraine. That war has become the perfect pretext for accelerating the agenda of Europe’s neoliberal elites, who no longer see in the remilitarisation of the EU merely a lifeline to deter invasion. This is, more openly now, the new strategic project for European integration to complement the market constitutionalism that has prevailed until now. A Europe of markets and ‘security’.

Thus, the global polycrisis – which is further undermining the EU’s geo-economic and geopolitical weight – is causing new leaps forward in its financial and, in turn, military integration, in the name of competitiveness and in response to the invasion of Ukraine. A few weeks after the invasion of Ukraine, Ms Von der Leyen told the European Parliament that the EU was more united than ever and that more progress had been made on common security and defence ‘in six days than in the last two decades’, referring to the release of €500 million in EU funds for Ukraine’s military equipment.

It cannot be denied that the European elites are using the war in Ukraine to accelerate the agenda of neoliberalism, including a closer financial and trade alliance between them and, in turn, a remilitarisation of the EU as a useful instrument for their project of a ‘Europe of power’. The military and security integration is obviously aimed at transforming the European economy for war.

We are facing a real paradigm shift. The High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, claims the EU ‘must learn quickly to speak the language of power’’ and ‘not only rely on soft power as we used to do’[8]. With this in mind, in March 2022, the Member States approved the famous Strategic Compass, an action plan to strengthen the EU’s security and defence policy by 2030. Although the Strategic Compass took two years to draw up, its content was quickly adapted to the new context opened up by the Russian invasion of Ukraine: ‘The more hostile security environment requires us to make a quantum leap forward and increase our capacity and willingness to act, strengthen our resilience and ensure solidarity and mutual assistance’. The new strategy envisages European defence as no longer based on peacekeeping, but on national-European security and the protection of ‘key trade routes.’ In other words, the aim is to protect European interests by ensuring the EU’s ‘strategic autonomy’.

The interest of Europe’s elites in speaking the hard language of power is intimately linked to the EU’s neocolonial and ‘green’ extractivism, which aims to secure the supply of scarce raw materials fundamental to the European economy and its so-called green transition, against a backdrop of growing struggles between old and new empires. As Mario Draghi puts it: ‘In a world where our rivals control many of the resources we need, such an agenda has to be combined with a plan to secure our supply chain – from critical minerals to batteries to charging infrastructure.[9]‘ The remilitarisation of Europe is only the necessary step towards being able to speak the hard language of power that secures the raw materials and resources that European businesses need.

The Strategic Compass repeatedly states that ‘Russia’s war of aggression constitutes a tectonic shift in European history’ to which the EU must respond. And what is the main recommendation of this strategic compass? Increased military spending and coordination. Precisely in a context when the military budgets of EU Member States are more than four times those of Russia, and European military spending has tripled since 2007[10]. This increase in defence spending was confirmed at the Versailles European Council in March 2022, when the Member States agreed to invest 2% of their GDP in defence[11]. This is the largest defence investment in Europe since the Second World War. For the same reason, at the summit, the President of the Council, Charles Michel, stated bluntly that the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the EU’s budgetary response had ‘confirmed the birth of European defence’.

Just two months ago, the European Commission presented the first Defence Industrial Strategy[12], an ambitious set of new actions to support the competitiveness and readiness of the defence industry throughout the Union. The main objective is to improve the Union’s defence capabilities by promoting the integration of Member States’ industries and reducing dependence on arms procurement outside the continent. In short, it’s about preparing European industry for war. As Mrs Von der Leyen told the plenary session of the European Parliament, while ‘the threat of war may not be imminent, but it is not impossible’, so ‘Europe has to wake up’[13].

Although the Strategic Compass increases European strategic autonomy, the document admits ‘how essential NATO is for the collective defence of its members’. Since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO has endeavoured to redefine itself and adapt to a new geopolitical environment in which the transatlantic link appeared to have been overcome. French President Emmanuel Macron himself argued in 2019 that the absence of American leadership was leading to a ‘brain death’ of the Atlantic Alliance and that Europe had to start acting as a global strategic power. Today, as Russian soldiers have invaded Ukraine and Moscow tacitly threatens to use nuclear weapons, NATO is experiencing a resurgence, a return to raison d’être and a new sense of its existential purpose.

Indeed, Macron himself has left the door open to sending NATO ground troops to fight in Ukraine: ‘We will do everything possible to prevent Russia from wining this war’[14]. In addition to providing Kiev with ‘long-range missiles and bombs,’ which had not been done previously for fear of escalating the conflict, Joe Biden and his European partners have recently authorised the use of their military equipment against targets in Russian territory in an attempt to mitigate Moscow’s offensive against Kharkiv. As the months pass, all of the United States’ and European Union’s red lines and safeguards become diluted, pushing us progressively closer to an armed clash with NATO soldiers on Ukrainian soil, which might lead to a Third World War with completely unknown and dangerous scenarios.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has not only allowed European public opinion to coalesce around a strong sense of insecurity about external threats; in response to the EU’s call for rearmament, Spain’s defence minister, Margarita Robles, stated that society ‘is not aware’ of the ‘total and absolute threat’ of war, legitimising the largest increase in military spending since World War II. However, it has also allowed NATO and US imperialism to erode any semblance of the EU’s political independence while restoring long-lost legitimacy and unity, especially after the failed occupation of Afghanistan.

While Putin’s invasion of Ukraine quickly became a figleaf for hiding the insecurities and pain stemming from neo-liberal social fragmentation – by exponentially increasing defence budgets and promoting European integration based on remilitarisation – so to does support for the State of Israel in its genocidal, collective punishment of the Palestinian people now function as an accelerator of the EU’s militaristic and warmongering drift.

The most powerful EU leaders not only approve the Zionist state’s policy of war crimes against the civilian population of Gaza, citing a non-existent ‘right to defence’ on the part of an occupying power. They also repress and attempt to ban any internal voices that oppose unconditional EU support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine and genocide of Gazans. The McCarthyite drift has a true goal: not simply to eliminate solidarity with the Palestinian cause, but to discipline the European population around the geostrategic interests of its elites, namely the remilitarization of Europe around the war in Ukraine and unconditional support for Israel.

Perhaps the only positive outcome of all of this is that we can finally consign to the dust bin, all of the so-called ‘European values’ and ‘founding myths of peace’ that the EU liberal propaganda machine continues to hammer away at.

In this sense, the construction of domestic enemies as scapegoats to justify and support increasingly repressive models and curtailments of general freedoms, which particularly target minorities considered to be dangerous, plays a fundamental role. And here, a dangerous minority is anyone who does not fit into the identity framework of European Christian whiteness[15]. That identity framework has a limited flexibility, since membership in the community no longer depends on a matter of birth, but instead on an ideological commitment to the values that the elites stipulate as authentically European[16].

Thus, a French person is not one who was born and nurtured in France, but rather one who identifies with a predetermined French identity. Anyone who rejects these French ideals loses their French identity, regardless of where they were born, what is inscribed on their passport, or whether they wear a national team jersey. Today, belonging to a national community is linked to a supposed identity and is increasingly thought of in ethno-cultural and ideological terms.

In this context, the far right sets the agenda, and the so-called centre complies, executes and normalizes it. And this is not only out of simple ideological conviction, but also out of pure strategic interest: in capitalist societies experiencing multiple and growing crises and instabilities, reinforcing repression and securitization becomes a necessary form of economic life insurance. Exploring and exploiting fears and insecurities to build an ideology of security gives the authoritarian neo-liberal project coherence and identity. Societies are rebuilt, and tensions are contained by the exclusion and expulsion of the most vulnerable or dissident sectors.

The far right is gaining a growing share of power within the EU, to the point of becoming a fundamental factor in determining parliamentary majorities in the next parliament. Indeed, the Eurocrat bureaucracy in Brussels, aware that it will need the support of part of this political family to ensure the governance of the EU, has embarked on a campaign to differentiate between the ‘good far right’ and the ‘bad far right’, i.e., between the far right that unambiguously adheres to neo-liberal economic policy, remilitarization and geostrategic subordination to European elites, and the far right that still questions them, albeit in an increasingly timid fashion.

The European Eurocracy is planning to give the extreme right a specific role in European government, thereby burying all of the taboos and precautions that Western democracies have taken against these political movements since the end of WWII. All of this occurs in a context where the drums of war are beating in the chancelleries, bringing us dangerously close to a new global military confrontation, against a backdrop of climate emergency and the ineptitude of the multilateral governance and international legal systems that have governed neoliberal globalisation over the last few decades.

European elites are taking advantage of the situation to launch a new phase of the European project, with the goal of establishing an oligarchic, technocratic federalism. For this is what Mario Draghi, the former Managing Director of Goldman Sachs in Europe, openly proposed in his recent report commissioned by von der Leyen: to accelerate the introduction of joint decision-making mechanisms for European institutions, to promote the union of EU capital markets, and to be able to act under better conditions in the race for ever more intense competitiveness with the other great powers, whether in decline or booming, after the end of happy globalization.

This dangerous cocktail promises new conflicts, a recomposition of the players, a widening of the battlefield and, above all, an acceleration of inter-imperialist conflicts. Beyond assessments of military tactics, what is beyond doubt is that the winners so far from the Russian invasion of Ukraine are: Russian imperialism itself, which succeeded in annexing and occupying part of the resource-rich territories Putin has long coveted; NATO, which has gone from a state of ‘brain death’ to the most aggressive geopolitical agenda in its history ; the old desire of European elites to use militarism as an integration mechanism; and the corporations that manufacture death, which have never made so much profit[17]. And the main losers, as always, are the citizens, in this case the Ukrainian people who nevertheless continue to resist the invasion and who deserve our support, just as do the Russian activists who are fighting Putin’s war.

While the European Parliament began the 2019 legislature by declaring a climate emergency, it ended by sounding the war drums in European chancelleries, promoting a remilitarization incompatible with any eco-social transition process. It seems that the next parliamentary term will see the return of austerity recipes, but this time under the straitjacket of an expansive defence budget that will ensure the remilitarization of Europe and the conversion of the European arms industry. It is therefore more necessary than ever to work towards building a broad transnational anti-militarist movement to challenge the elites’ plan for a combination of austerity, internal repression and remilitarization of Europe, co-governed by the deep centre and the reactionary wave of far-right parties.

To achieve this, it is essential to challenge the concept of security based on spending on armaments, defence and military infrastructure. As an alternative, we need to propose an anti-militarist security model that guarantees access to a functional public health system, education, employment, housing, energy, improved access to social services that ensure a dignified life, and a response to climate change based on an ecosocialist horizon. As the ReCommons Europe manifesto states, ‘the forces of the political and social left that wish to embody a force for change in Europe, with the aim of laying the foundations for an egalitarian society based on solidarity, must imperatively adopt anti-militarist policies. This means fighting not only the wars of European imperialist forces, but also arms sales and support for repressive and bellicose regimes’[18].

Condemnation of the Russian invasion and solidarity with the Ukrainian people must intrinsically integrate rejection of Russian imperialism and rejection of the remilitarization of the EU and the strengthening of the Atlantic Alliance. Under no circumstances can our support for the Ukrainian people and the fight against Russian imperialism appear subordinate to our own imperialism. We must avoid the binary trap of having to support one imperialism against another, accepting the logic of the Union Sacrée at the dawn of WWI with new war credits. As anti-capitalists, our task should be precisely to break down this dichotomy and adopt an active, clear anti-militarist stance in support of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples, creating our own field independently of the conflicting imperialisms and defending: the right to conscientious objection and to active desertion by all soldiers and to be welcomed as political refugees; non-payment of the Ukrainian debt; an end to neo-liberal dictates (e.g. from the IMF) impoverishing Ukraine; peace without annexations; the unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine; and guaranteeing the right of people, without exception, to freely decide their future.

Without successful resistance, the EU elites will continue jeopardizing the societal model for decades to come. In this world on fire, the underlying conflict is between capital and life, private interests and common goods, property, and rights. We will never be able to undertake an ecological and social transition without fighting the capitalist disease of militarism. Today, more than ever, it is essential to open a new cycle of mobilizations capable of moving from the national to the European level. We need to shatter the EU’s Euro-reformist illusion to force through a democratic, anti-neoliberal, anti-militarist, feminist, ecologist-socialist and anti-colonial system that opens the door to a new project of European integration. Only then and there will we be, as Rosa Luxemburg insisted: socially equal, humanly different and totally free.

Notes.

[1]    https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20191121IPR67110/the-european-parliament-declares-climate-emergency

[2] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/from-farm-to-fork/,

[3]    To find out more about European border security policies, read the work of the Transnational Institute, Border Wars The arms dealers profiting from Europe’s refugee tragedy.

[4]    Claire Rodier, Xénophobie business, Éditions La Découverte,Paris, 2012, https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/xenophobie_business-9782707174338

[5]    Konicz, Thomas (2017).Ideologías de la crisis (Crisis ideologies). Madrid: Enclave de libros

[6]    The Romans used this term to describe peoples living outside their borders.

[7]    https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/strategic-compass/

[8]    Several Outlets – Europe Must Learn Quickly to Speak the Language of Power

[9]    https://geopolitique.eu/en/2024/04/16/radical-change-is-what-is-needed/

[10]  http://centredelas.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/A-militarised-Union-2.pdf

[11]  https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/54773/20220311-versailles-declaration-en.pdf

[12]  First ever defence industrial strategy and a new defence industry programme to enhance Europe’s readiness and security

[13]  Speech by President von der Leyen at the European Parliament Plenary on strengthening European defence in a volatile geopolitical landscape

[14]  Macron says ‘nothing ruled out,’ including using Western troops, to stop Russia winning Ukraine war

[15]  Hans Kundnani, Eurowhiteness, Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project, ‎ C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, London, 2023.

[16]  Daniel Bensaïd, Fragments mécréants: sur les mythes identitaires et la république imaginaire, Lignes, Essais, 2005; reprinted in 2018.

[17]  To give an example of the lucrative business of the war in Ukraine for European arms companies. These include the German multinational Rheinmetall, manufacturer of the Leopard tank, whose market value has more than quadrupled since the war in Ukraine, while it has seen a sharp rise in orders from Western governments seeking to replenish their stocks after supplying Kiev with large quantities of weapons.

[18] ReCommonsEurope: Manifesto for a New Popular Internationalism in Europe, 2019, https://www.cadtm.org/ReCommonsEurope-Manifesto-for-a-New-Popular-Internationalism-in-Europe

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Photo by Picsea

How Patriarchal Pronatalism Dominates the Conversation About the Human Future

Governments worldwide are in a race to see which one can encourage the most women to have the most babies. Hungary is slashing income tax for women with four or more children. Russia is offering women with 10 or more children a “Mother-Heroine” award. Greece, Italy, and South Korea are bribing women with attractive baby bonuses. China has instituted a three-child policy. Iran has outlawed free contraceptives and vasectomies. Japan has joined forces with the fertility industry to infiltrate schools to promote early childbearing. A leading UK demographer has proposed taxing the childless. Religious myths are preventing African men from getting vasectomies. A eugenics-inspired Natal conference just took place in the U.S., a nation leading the way in taking away reproductive rights.

The push for more babies to increase our numbers is hardly a new phenomenon. Longstanding forces of reproductive control have always favored population growth. These go back 5,000 years to the institutionalized male domination and patriarchy that emerged upon the rise of early states and empires centered in cities. Societies at the vanguard of civilization had two main goals: population expansion and seizure of resources. These were realized by coercing women to have as many children as possible and by pressuring men to become soldiers. Because of the dangers of both childbirth and war, birthing and soldiering had to be exalted and reinforced through social controls. To this day, pronatalism and militarism remain among patriarchy’s key features.

Its strength undiminished over the course of millennia, pronatalism serves powerful institutions of the state, the church, the military, and the economy by preaching that parenthood is an obligation, not a choice. Pronatalism runs so deep in our society, has become so pervasive, that to this day it colors the most important policy discussions and social norms.

As the Earth system groans under the burden of too many people consuming too much stuff, a new twist on this ubiquitous ideology – one that contemptuously sees women as mere procreative vessels – plays out on the global stage. While scientists warn that human numbers are a key driver of ecological and social crises, the subject of overpopulation gets short shrift by policymakers, think tanks, and even environmental groups. We are told that numbers don’t matter; what matters is solely the level of per capita consumption.

For example, when the revered Jane Goodall spoke about the harms of population growth, environmental journalist-cum-activist George Monbiot attacked her by insinuating that she was proposing the culling of people. Elsewhere he wrote, “It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men.”

I am a woman, born in India and now living in Canada, happily childfree as I near the end of my reproductive years. I am grateful to have a steady income, but I am not wealthy. Some might say I’m obsessed with overpopulation, though obsession isn’t the right term to describe a rational assessment of the role of population in the ecological degradation that makes humanity’s future precarious.

But Monbiot’s is just one example. Environmental journalist David Roberts acknowledges that population growth is a problem and then goes on to explain why “there’s much downside and not much upside to talking about population.” Katherine Hayhoe, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, an organization that has been accused of “promoting false climate solutions,” says in an interview, “As a climate scientist, I know that it’s not the number of people that matters. It’s how we live.” A formal statement by The Union of Concerned Scientists reads, “We’re sometimes asked ‘Isn’t population growth driving climate change?’ But that’s the wrong question—and it can lead to dangerous answers.”

Let’s unpack these statements, all of which fall into what political and social theorist Diana Coole has called the discourses of population denialism.

The first of these, “population shaming,” justifies silence about population by pointing to the excesses of “population control” movements of the past. And it is true that these coercive efforts deserve repudiation. Beginning in the 1970s, India forcibly sterilized millions of poor people (and it was backed in this endeavor by some Western powers). That was a dark moment in a benighted time, which focused on decreasing population growth in the lower-income countries rather than on moderating dramatically higher per capita consumption in the high-income countries.

But it would be fallacious, and a disservice to the valiant history of family planning, to suppose all approaches to curbing population growth are destructive. During and following India’s reprehensible conduct, family planning programs in Thailand, Costa Rica, Iran, and elsewhere not only advanced greater personal and reproductive autonomy for girls and women, but also led to significantly lower fertility rates, decreases in poverty, and gains in environmental conservation.

We know from historical experience that slowing population growth requires upholding fundamental human rights: championing universal education, prohibiting child marriage, empowering females, improving access to family planning services, and, most of all, standing up to patriarchy and pronatalism.

This relates to another oft-used and largely-superseded discourse of population denialism that “development” or economic growth is required to spur declines in fertility, a claim that plays directly into the hands of pro-growth neoliberal interests. Research shows that declining fertility rates, however, are most closely associated with increasing use of modern contraception and are largely independent of changes in the economy.

Disproportionately focusing on reproductive control efforts in the recent past, as so many environmentalists do, entirely misses the millennia-old chokehold of compulsive pronatalism in driving population growth—which makes these environmentalists unwitting accomplices of pronatalist patriarchy.

Equally as offensive is that population denialism defies scientific evidence.

In its 2022 report, the IPCC makes abundantly clear that “globally, GDP per capita and population growth remained the strongest drivers of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the last decade.” In a 2024 survey conducted by The Guardian, leading IPCC scientists candidly discussed their decisions to have no or fewer children, citing as their main motivations the impact of overpopulation on climate change and the fear of bringing their potential children into a perilous world environment.

In 2017, over 15,000 scientists from 184 countries issued a warning that “we are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically and demographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats.” Other Scientists’ Warnings have raised similar alarms.

In 2022, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification warned that “within the next few decades, 129 countries will experience an increase in drought – 23 primarily due to population growth and 38 because of their interaction between climate change and population growth.”

In its 2022 report, the UN Department of Social and Economic Affairs warned that “rapid population growth makes it more difficult for low-income and lower-middle-income countries to afford the increase in public expenditures on a per capita basis that is needed to eradicate poverty, end hunger and malnutrition, and ensure universal access to health care, education and other essential services.”

It goes without saying that hyper-consumerism and affluence-seeking in rich countries have played an outsized role in these crises, yes. But to focus on consumerism alone misses the full complexity of the world problematique.

The global middle class is the fastest rising demographic group, with at least one billion people—88% from Asia—projected to join it this decade, totaling 5.3 billion middle-class consumers. And other poorer billions surely have the right to increase their standard of living. Given that we are already in an extreme state of ecological overshoot, in which we are consuming 75% percent more than Earth can regenerate, further growth in our population and economy can only come at the expense of biophysical Earth systems, which means increased peril to our collective future. Refusing to deal with the twin threats of population and consumption, both of which are at unsustainable levels, only accelerates the destruction of other life and puts us on a long-term trajectory of immiseration of billions of people.

Meanwhile, some politicians and pundits seem to believe the great threat to humankind is a shrinking economy driven by declining fertility rates and aging populations — that is, the threat is not too many people but too few. “Population declinism,” as this is known—another tentacle of population denialism—is what is fueling the global trend of pushing women to pump out the babies.

Even amid declining fertility rates due to greater gender equality, global population is still growing by about 80 million people annually, just as in 1970, adding a projected 2.5 billion before the end of this century.

Observers of the panic about declining fertility rates, such as  Nobel laureate Steven Chu, have suggested that we are caught in a “Ponzi scheme” of endless growth that is “based on having more young workers than older people.” This unsustainable and ecologically-destructive scheme, which relies on an ever-increasing population, mostly serves the interests of tech billionaires, elites like Elon Musk, and the ideologies of far-Right, religious, nationalist, and market fundamentalists.

Not only has population denialism among progressives emboldened the far Right to pursue its pronatalist agenda of rolling back reproductive rights, passing stricter divorce laws, and relaxing domestic violence laws, progressives are now joining the chorus of “baby-bust” alarmism.

Media outlets regularly platform growth-biased pieces: this in The New York Times by an author whose organization received $10 million from Elon Musk for “fertility research”; this, this, and this in The Washington Post by contributors affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank with a history of climate denial and whose funders include ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers; and this by Vox in their Future Perfect section, a billionaire-fundedproject embedded in the deeply controversial effective altruism philosophy.

More disturbingly, attempts to challenge pronatalism today are strategically conflated by these pro-growth actors with anti-natalism, baby hating, or misanthropy.

Meanwhile, the rights of children to be born into conditions conducive to their social, psychological, and material well being are all but trampled as nations compete to pump out, by any means necessary, the next generation of worshippers, workers, consumers, taxpayers, soldiers, and of course, procreators. Warnings from leading authorities about dire population-driven consequences for children in the form of climate change impacts and extreme poverty, among others, go unheeded.

The alarmism surrounding declining fertility rates is unfounded; it is a positive trend that represents greater reproductive choice, and one that we should accelerate. A smaller human population will immensely facilitate other transformations we need: mitigating climate change, conserving and rewilding ecosystems, making agriculture sustainable, and making communities more resilient and able to integrate more climate and war refugees.

Research shows that societies with smaller populations and aging demographics can prosper. Instead of coercingwomen to have more babies, we can adopt progressive policies that strengthen social safety nets, wisely reallocate resources, and see seniors as meaningful contributors to society rather than a growing burden on a shrinking pool of younger workers. We can shift the failed paradigm of endless growth and transition to an economy that respects the biophysical limits of our planet.

It’s time to reject “population shaming” that pretends to champion human rights while echoing pronatalist ideologies that treat women’s wombs as cogs in the growth machine. To defend the right of all to a livable future, we need to get off the growth treadmill, get past population denialism, and work for a future that has both fewer human beings and less consumption.

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A map of the Tulare Basin from 1853.

“I am haunted by waters.”

– Norman Maclean

“We have to keep vision in place along with practical reflections.”

— Cornel West

In the spring of 2024, I met top members of the Tachi Yokuts Tribal Environmental Protection Agency at their offices on the Santa Rosa Rancheria near Lemoore CA. During the extremely wet winter a year earlier, the great Tulare Lake had once again overflowed its dams, dikes, levees and ditches, as it does every once in a while despite all the efforts of government and agribusiness, and spread to its full size of 800 square miles just south of the Rancheria, The return of the lake brought new faith and determination to these extraordinary people, who have lived here since long before the coming of the Europeans whom they have barely managed to survive.

I happened to have visited the Santa Rosa Rancheria long ago in 1966, when it consisted of a few shacks, most houses on wheels and cars on jacks on dusty dirt roads. The Yokuts people, composed of 60 tribes before Spanish arrival in the late 18^th century, had inhabited the entire San Joaquin Valley from the Sacramento Delta to the Tehachapi Range and a chunk of the Sierra foothills. Their language, part of the Penutian group, spread throughout Central California from the Southern Valley Yokuts to the Modocs on the Oregon border. An estimated 20,000 Tachi Yokuts lived around Tulare Lake, the largest lake west of the Mississippi, in what is now Kings County, an area about the size of Rhode Island, located between Fresno and Bakersfield, devoted for the last century to the production of cotton. Tulare Lake was the center of California Native religious life prior to the coming of the missions.

“We are the people of the lake,” Ken Barrios, Tachi tribal cultural liaison, told me.

After the Spanish arrived, the Tachi Yokuts suffered the common fate of California Indians: enslavement and suppression of culture and religion by the missions and haciendas,  and epidemics that killed most of their tribe; later, from the US settlers and goldminers, genocidal attack, removal from their homeland to the west side of the valley and to Fort Tejon for a time, and flight to the Sierra foothills as Yokuts villages throughout the San Joaquin Valley were destroyed by American yeomen farming families.

In 1921, the government gave 40 Tachi a 40-acre rancheria, where they lived below the poverty line, many “in tule huts, tin houses, old cars and chicken coops,” while they watched cotton growers drain their sacred lake. At that time, the average education was at the 3^rd grade level and most of the people were farmworkers. By the 1980s the rancheria had grown to 170 acres, 200 people were living there and the average education was at the 8^th grade level. With the arrival in 1988 of the federal Indian Gaming Regulation Act, the Tachi opened a bingo parlor that became quite successful and in 1994 the Tachi Palace Casino brought in slot machines. The casino now employs 1,500 people in a vast casino/hotel/restaurant complex and the average educational level in the tribe has risen to high school and college graduates.^.

Today, 750 Tachi and 150 non-Native residents of the Racheria look out on land that has subsided an average of six feet due to a century of agribusiness overdrafting of groundwater from the drained bottom of Tulare Lake.^2. However, now they confidently assert that they can control their destiny and bring back the lake, permanently.

“Before the white man,” Hank Brenard said, “California was tribes taking care of each other. They all had the same religion, and it came from the Yokuts; it was eradicated by churches in the Valley, but it stayed up north, with the Hupa, Karok, Yurok, and others.”

Brenard , director of the Tachi Environmental Protection Agency, is himself from the Bear River Band, located near Eureka. He was hired because of his expertise, gained in the decades’ long struggle of tribes along the Klamath River to remove a half a dozen hydroelectric dams to restore the native fishery.

“We are water people,” Barrios said. “We are people for Tulare Lake. The Tachi was in charge of the rituals on the lake in the old days, he added. “They ask us, ‘Who do you consider the people?’ The Tachi regards everyone as ‘the people.’ We hire everyone, we have over 2,000 employees. And the benefits (for non-tribal employees) are as good as our tribal members.”

“We put all people first,” Brenard added.

The first thing Brenard and Barrios wanted me to know was that there is a distinct tribal viewpoint: “If you had a lake, you wouldn’t have homeless, you’d have campers.

Your attitude toward a homeless person is ‘shame on you.’ Our attitude is ‘shame on us.’ We have a tribe.” Barrios added.

“We won’t leave. Everyone else will,” Barrios said.

“If it takes 50 or 500 years, this tribe can bring back life to the valley This valley has history that needs to be remembered.”

And the key to restoring life to the valley, he left no doubt, is the return of a permanent Tulare Lake.

“The people who live here welcome the tribe and its environmental management. The biggest difficulty is between Tachi and absentee agribusiness owners,” he said.

The two largest farmers in the Tulare Lake Basin are the Boswells, three generations of whom have resided in a mansion in Pasadena, and Sandridge Partners, whose owner, John Vidovich, lives on the San Francisco Peninsula.

The Tachis are the most local of all Kings County residents and contribute to the general welfare. To improve air quality, about as  bad as it gets in the state, the tribe is helping local school buses and electrical vehicle systems. They are applying for grants for electric vehicles to set up an electric bus station and to train mechanics for electrical vehicles.

Among other gifts, the tribe regularly contributes money to the police, but has yet to get acknowledgement for it.

“The County staff works well with the tribal staff,” a staffer said, “but not at the decision-making level.”

The Tachis own 3,600 acres of land in the Tulare Lake Basin, yet they don’t have a seat on any of the boards of the five water districts in the basin. The districts argue that because the land is owned by a sovereign government and half of it is in trust with the federal government, the tribe doesn’t meet their ownership criteria for voting membership.

It is nearly impossible for an old-time Anglo resident of the Valley to imagine dislodging the control of the corrupt combine of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the State Water Project, the Army Corps of Engineers, and agribusiness oligarchs the size of the J. G. Boswell Co. (largest cotton grower in the world) and Vidovich.

Jim Boswell and Clarence Salyer (the former second largest grower in the Tulare Basin) by various means had compelled the federal Bureau of Reclamation to exempt the growers of their part of the San Joaquin Valley from the 160-acre limitation on contracts for federal water; they were major proponents of the State Water Project, which delivers water to the region without any acreage limitation; they were among the major successful opponents of the Peripheral Canal project for Sacramento River water to bypass the Delta; and they successfully promoted the Army Corps of Engineers rather than the BOR to build dams to drain the lake and store irrigation water on the four rivers that flow into the Tulare Lake Basin because the Army has no 160-acre limitation.^{3. 4.}

But today, Native Americans have laws on their side. The passage in the 1970s of the most important federal environmental laws – the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water and Clean Air acts – along with similar laws in California including the all-important California Environmental Quality Act, together with the  federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 that legalized casinos on reservations (now worth more than $40 billion a year to the tribes), have increased the tribes’ power and prestige in a number of ways. But before the casinos, Californians should recognize the heroic labors of Rupert and Jeannette Costo for decades of research against tremendous opposition from the Catholic Church and various local and state entities to write about genocide in the missions. ^5.

Brenard explained how the Tachi project is conceivable and even likely to come to pass. The vision for a permanent Tulare Lake rises on a scaffolding of new laws. There are declarations by governors Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, which acknowledge the brutal treatment California Indians received at the hands of miners and their early governments, mandating that the tribes be included in environmental management decisions in their regions, even establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.^6.

There is also legislation that alters the California Environmental Quality Act to mandate that tribes be consulted on environmental impact statements on properties beyond their reservations yet in their traditional territories. A law that has been on the books since 1937, state Fish and Game Code 5937, is largely responsible for returning water to the San Joaquin River between the Friant Dam and the Mendota Pool for the first time in more than 60 years. Felix E. Smith, retired US Fish and Wildlife Service fish biologist (one of two who first discovered what heavy metals and pesticide residue drain water from Westlands Water District did to hatching waterfowl on Kesterson Wildlife Refuge) described the importance of state Fish and Game Code section 5937 in a report in 2014 to Save the Water Association.^7.

Brenard said that the state Department of Fish and Wildlife would be ready to take down the old hydroelectric dams on the Kings, Kaweah, Tule and Kern rivers that currently store water that would naturally flow into a permanent lake.

“Put the lake back, send water to who needs it, set up a new model. Water policy has to change. It could change here,” Brenard said.

Dr. Smith in the same report provided a description of the Public Trust Doctrine, the basis for the 1983 Mono Lake Decision, denying Los Angeles Department of Water and Power the right to all the water from creeks flowing to Mono Lake.

TheTachi EPA raises in the form of a vision the fundamental issue in Kings County and the rest of the San Joaquin Valley: Is water for people and their environment or for agribusiness crops, often largely for export (particularly cotton and almonds)? Is the water for small farmers who live on their farms (including their drinking water) and other rural residents? Is it for the townspeople of Kings County – its teachers, local business and professional people, farm-equipment dealers and mechanics, farm workers, cotton-gin workers, et al; or is it the property of absentee owned agribusiness corporations? Will the surface water and groundwater of Central California continue to be considered a commodity to be expropriated by agribusiness as property by whatever means possible, or will it come to be considered a natural resource to be intelligently managed, first for sustainable, environmentally viable permanent wetlands, suitable for inhabitants, as it was before agribusiness?

Should water be considered a cultural resource protected by the Public Trust Doctrine or the alleged private property of big growers to be sold to Southern California water districts?

“There used to be wetlands,” Ken Barrios said. “When they drained it, it changed the weather, no more tule fogs, the funguses on the trees gone, they used to be a food source, evergreen trees are dying because the water table dropped.”

When I told them I’d seen a young Magpie that morning, they said they thought that was probably because of the lake, too. There is still a lake of 60-80 acres left.

But Brenard added that his office had sunk a foot in the last year and his horse got sick on the water at his place to bring us back to the problem of how to realize the vision.

Another question the Tachi EPA panel is asking is: Could the tribe take the Tulare Lake Basin by eminent domain? Brenard cited cases where memoranda of understanding has been reached between tribes and state and federal resource agencies for the co-management of wildlands and fisheries.

A month before our first interview, the federal Department of Interior had announced a co-management agreement on the bi-state Klamath River: “The collaboration and cooperation reached today in the Klamath Basin is a critical step forward as we work to support healthy ecosystems and water reliability in the region for generations to come,” said Secretary Deb Haaland.”^.

The Yokuts region covers around 30 of California’s 58 counties, Brenard said, and that leaves lots of opportunities.  But the Tachis’ focus is on removing the Army Corps dams on the Kings, Kaweah, Tule and Kern rivers, and the one on Deer Creek in order to make a permanent lake possible by taking control of the water away from growers.

I’d asked earlier about the recent probation order the state Water Resources Control Board had imposed on the five water districts that control the Tulare Lake Basin. Initially, the order will require fees for pumping groundwater but if the districts fail to come up with a plan acceptable to the criteria of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014, the state may impose pumping limits. Shana Powers, the tribal historical preservation officer, showed us how the probation order is perhaps not as serious as it looks, though, because each of the water districts has a different accounting system and therefore it will be impossible for regulators to figure out how much water is actually being pumped out of the Tulare Lake Basin, This is a tactic the big growers figured out a long time ago.

The big growers will do all right because they have contracts for surface water with the state and the feds and they own large portions of the ditches that divey up Kings River water. But the smaller growers who rely mainly on groundwater will be squeezed hard, per usual, unable to compete with their larger neighbors for what groundwater is left at ever greater depths, more expensive to find and to pump.

So, the probation order is just a familiar bit of the jolly old agribusiness corruption around water we can chuckle about at the coffee shop as the whole Valley sinks and the water turns bad.

That’s why we need visions. What we get from the government are detailed analyses of the disaster, replete with results from all the latest methods and technologies of measurement, and too often corruption of its own regulations.

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Photograph Source: عباد ديرانية – CC0

The Washington Post’s journalists recently exposed what many already suspected or knew. Donors from society’s richest 1 percent pressured university administrators and political leaders to use police and other means to crush peaceful student protests. The students wanted a change in United States and Israeli policy and action to secure an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Growing numbers of faculty are joining the students’ protests. They too have been unjustly persecuted by the same “authorities.”

Of course, the lawful role U.S. police are supposed to play is quite different. As “peacekeepers” police should act to make it safe for any and all sides of disputes over U.S. foreign (or domestic) policies to engage in free speech. When university leaders collaborate with police to shut down free speech, both abuse their power. Students around the world have confronted those abuses as have U.S. students in the past. Our students now confront them yet again.

As a professor myself, I am embarrassed when university administrators justify calling in the police to “remove” students from university “private property” (such as lawns). They argue as if real estate concerns outweighed the education and public importance entailed by peaceful student protests on urgent, life-and-death public issues of the day. Real estate justifications also reveal university administrators’ ignorance. Huge tax exemptions subsidize private universities in the United States with public money. They get expensive public services delivered to them gratis. The rest of the U.S. public pays the taxes that fund those public services. Likewise, massive government grants support general university purposes (added on to grants for specific academic research projects) for both “private” and public institutions. To significant degrees, all colleges and universities are publicly funded institutions. They are thus perfectly appropriate locations for public expressions of opinion about important public issues. University administrators try to hide slavish pandering to rich donors when they try fake “private property” excuses for calling the police on students. Punishing students seeking peace in Gaza brings deep and lasting shame on the universities who do that.

The same applies to all those authorities who use the old “violence” ploy to cover their pandering. They pose as driven to prevent or end mostly unreal campus violence. Meanwhile, these same authorities mostly support real, infinitely worse violence in Ukraine and Gaza. In contrast, student protestors for peace in Gaza have every reason to avoid campus violence precisely because it risks dissuading some other students from joining them. Enemies of the protest try to associate it with violence precisely to constrain the protests’ growth. Years ago, university administrators, police, and politicians likewise wildly exaggerated the minimal violence they blamed on anti-Vietnam war protesters. Unlike those authorities, those protesters actually helped end that war and its horrific violence.

Protests disrupt “business as usual” to open time and space for public discussion and action around an urgent public issue. That is why workers strike, marchers crowd streets for the rights of minorities and women, and vigils for peace gather at traffic intersections. In recent years, millions of French people wearing yellow vests shut down France to ask for social changes. In the spring of 2024, general strikers similarly shut down Argentina. Protesters explain why they want change. Their protests ask others to engage with the question of change.

Protests also attest to a society’s social health: its ability to overcome the resignation, reticence, and fear that too often prevent or delay social problems from getting public attention. The absence of protest often drives urgent social problems underground. There they fester and eventually burst forth more disruptively than earlier protests would have been. Let protesters make their points. If counter-protesters wish, let them do likewise with their points. That is what “free speech” means. When the “authorities” in power fear the criticism, questions, and demands of the people they control, almost any public protests quickly become intolerably frightening to them. Their control is challenged and they react in ways that undercut their empty claims to be “democratic.” We all have a right and duty to affirm genuine free speech.

The larger world is changing. The horrors in Gaza, the forming of a new, powerful student movement critical of U.S. foreign policy, and undemocratic efforts to stop free speech all flow from global changes. Our world is now fast becoming very different from what it was for most of our parents’ lives. Just as the British empire rose, peaked, and then fell, the American empire that followed it rose, peaked, and is now declining. Americans are only beginning to grasp that reality as denying it remains the majority’s position. Each of us confronts the changes in the world based on our own histories. Therefore, before drawing conclusions about Gaza and the student protests, I need to explain where I am coming from, my family’s history, and how it contextualizes my engagement with a changed and changing world.

My mother and her sister were both incarcerated in concentration camps in the late 1930s (my aunt in a German camp, my mother in a French camp). Their parents (my grandparents) were killed in a different German concentration camp. My mother was born and raised in Berlin, Germany, and attended the University of Berlin until she fled Germany in 1936. My father, born in Metz (a disputed French/German city on the border), attended several German and Swiss universities, became a lawyer and eventually a judge in Germany before leaving for France in 1933. His sister was picked up by the Gestapo in Paris in the late 1930s and later killed in Auschwitz. Many other family members died in ways linked to fascism and/or World War II. All those who “survived” suffered severe traumas, often aggravations of other traumas they had suffered earlier in their lives.

My parents, beyond surviving, additionally underwent the refugee experience in the United States. The English language and U.S. customs were largely unknown to them. They had no money. Their European professional credentials were not honored in the United States. When I was born, my father was a steel worker in a Youngstown, Ohio, factory, and my mother was a “homemaker” in that period’s words. As the first child of refugee “survivors” of multiple traumas, I was heavily pressured to “succeed” in the new country. My unspoken task was somehow to compensate for all the losses and injuries my parents always carried with them everywhere. I also listened closely to the snippets of information about fascism, Europe, World War II, and contemporary history that emerged from countless conversations in and around my family. This is the background for how I “relate” to the events in Israel, Gaza, and the United States over recent decades, especially since last October. “Relate” here includes confronting today’s student protests, their attempted repression, and writing this article.

The uniform premise of discussions of fascism, war, and related subjects within my family was that they all represented the most recent of a long list of human tragedies across history. They could have happened anywhere and probably did. And they could happen and probably would happen again anywhere. Perhaps the best that we could reasonably hope for was that some sort of political action we might undertake now could reduce the probability, frequency, or horrors of future tragedies.

For me, that meant I should seek to understand how societies work, act to change them, and thereby contribute to achieving the best that could reasonably be hoped for. Notions that any nation or region was uniquely prone to or immune from becoming Nazis were not taken seriously. Germany was in no way uniquely prone to nazification. Likewise, “denazification laws,” “civil liberty traditions,” or slogans like “never again” gave no nation immunity from becoming partly or wholly nazified. That included Israel.

My father fought fascism as a student in Germany, then as a journalist across Europe, as a labor lawyer in Germany, and later as a naturalized U.S. citizen combatting the racism directed against African Americans and against Puerto Rican immigrants in New York City. He was respectful of Marxism as an intellectual tradition and a political movement but personally kept his distance from it. He was always a European left social democrat: comfortable in the United States of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) from his arrival in 1939 until FDR’s death in 1945. He became progressively more uncomfortable after 1945. He neither missed nor denied the rightward shifts of politics in the United States and Western Europe after 1945. He sensed the maturation of conditions that could again enable new nazisms to emerge. He explicitly wondered about such possibilities, especially for a fascism to emerge and take power in the United States but also in other places including Israel.

As my mother grew older, she mused often that “the Jews learned nothing from the Holocaust” and “the Jewish Zionists learned nothing from the Holocaust beyond ‘Better to perpetrate one than to suffer it again’.” My mother, 9 years younger than my father, had to leave the University of Berlin in 1936 after police identified her as a courier for the anti-Hitler underground. A frequently heard comment from one or the other of my parents: Jews have very often been the enemies and victims of nationalisms, often after long periods of living and intermarrying in neighborhoods where Jews and non-Jews comingled peacefully. What drove non-Jews to turn on Jewish neighbors were worsening economic and social problems affecting both Jewish and non-Jewish communities. In both communities, few identified the sources of their problems as capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism: the taboos against such reasoning were too strong.

There were still too few Marxists to teach and explain the effects of capitalism. The Marxists and their allies that were active then analyzed social problems in ways and using terms heavily influenced by the Russian Revolution and the specific interpretation of Marxism promoted by the USSR. That interpretation became dominant over other, alternative interpretations because the unrivaled prestige of the first and only successful Marxist revolution in 1917 Russia made its interpretation dominant. Soviet Marxism defined capitalism as an economic system that combined private property (privately owned and operated enterprises) with free markets (enterprises and workers distributing goods and services to one another via exchange). Soviet Marxists and those who followed their lead argued that the capitalist system produced the inequalities of wealth and income, the instabilities of the “business cycle,” and the corruptions of politics by money that all together could lead to fascism and Nazis. In contrast, socialists proposed to advance beyond capitalism via (1) seizure of the state by the working class (by revolution or ballot victories), (2) state takeovers of enterprises, and (3) state planning instead of markets. They called such a socialism a rational economic system working in the interests of the majority working class rather than a minority capitalist class of owners. Such a socialism was the opposite, the antidote for, and the alternative to fascism.

Meanwhile, the emerging Nazis analyzed society by focusing on altogether different concepts such as race and nation. They defined the social problem as national and racial in origin: the German nation/Aryan race was being victimized by the Jewish nation/race. My father quoted Engels to the effect that such antisemitism was the stupid person’s socialism.

How had Germans in fact suffered (or, in Nazi terms, been victimized)? In and by the loss of World War I (1918), the huge reparations bill charged to Germany afterward, the worst inflation in modern European history that devastated its middle classes’ savings (1923), and then the Great Crash (1929) and its global Depression aftermath. German capitalists and the right-wing parties they funded took political advantage of all those events by deeming them victimizations. They blamed non-Germans for them: Bolsheviks from whom German socialists and communists had imported their evil ideologies. Nazis stressed the presence of Jews in the German left as their basis to rewrite history as a conspiracy to subordinate Germans (and others) to Jewish global financial rule. That project drew much inspiration from earlier writings across Europe accompanying antisemitic upsurges there. Casting Jews as thus a threatening race/nation, Nazis could mobilize Germans for their self-defense against the Jewish threat. Self-defense could and did justify repression, property dispossession, arrest, and eventually physical extermination of Jews. Similarly now for many Israelis, the war on Gaza is justified as an exercise in defense against Palestinians and the deep threat they are seen to represent. Aggressive U.S. foreign policies likewise refer to their military arm as the Department of Defense.

Germany’s extreme problems after World War I culminating in the impact of the global Great Depression after 1929 overwhelmed its leaders. They found no traditional way forward as the mass of Germans became ever more desperate. Therefore they accepted the way offered by Hitler. His genocidal tendencies found a fertile ground that led to scapegoating especially of Jews. The Nazis filled the jails, concentration camps, and eventually the ovens and graves of Germany and many of its allies (Poland, Austria, Italy, Spain, and occupied France) with all their scapegoats.

There was always opposition to Nazism. Alongside the Jewish opposition, there were also many others, especially among socialists and communists. Those oppositions suffered countless tragic losses but also proved spectacularly productive of heroic and productive breakthroughs in thought, association, and action. Those breakthroughs shaped world history after 1945. They helped to make us the critics of received norms of racial, gender, and class discrimination. In particular, they strengthened and transformed post-war anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. Most colonialisms were overthrown by the colonized.

My parents’ and their families’ traumas generated among the survivors a certain sympathy and empathy for the idea that Jews (and also LGBTQ+ people, the Roma, and others persecuted by Nazis) might finally and somehow find safety in the world. That extended to a romanticized early image of Israel—and especially its kibbutzim collectivities. But starting in the 1950s, as the kibbutzim declined and Israeli governments accepted ever more subordination to U.S. foreign policies, my parents’ sympathies diminished.

Qua religion, Judaism had been long abandoned not only by my mother and father but also by their parents. Those generations were proudly “free-thinkers” or what my father once called “post-religion.” Holding on to religious symbols and rituals at a time when they seemed ever more inappropriate, absurd, or worse struck them as unwanted modes of separation from the progressive tendencies of the larger society. Both my sister and I grew up and shared in that framework as have my children.

The previous paragraphs sketch some context for how I approach the Israeli-Palestine conflict and U.S. student protests. The Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a dead-end. Different as it is in most details from Germany in the 1930s, the Palestine-Israel conflict is similarly driven toward ever more deeply irrational objectives and strategies. For safety, some Jewish Zionists undertook a 20th-century settler colonialism in Palestine similar to what the British, French, German, and other European nations had undertaken in earlier centuries. Back then it was possible to “succeed” in military, political, and ideological terms in establishing and profiting from such settler colonialisms for long periods. There were centuries of time to ethnically cleanse indigenous people, to enable invading settler colonists to herd them into areas “reserved” for their impoverishment. Israel’s is the attempt much, much later to establish and secure a settler colonialism in radically altered historical conditions. Now most of the world’s people fight for and celebrate freedom from (ending) settler and other colonialisms. Their opposition offsets and now threatens to overwhelm the immense support Israel received and receives from the US and its shrinking number of other supporters.

Colonial subjects always resisted and fought back against the colonizers. Resistance repressed went and grew underground. Periodically then it exploded into view surprising the colonizers with its ever deeper roots, persistence, and intensities. Eventually and everywhere, resistance to colonialism developed the self-consciousness, theories, organizations, and weaponry to overcome colonialism at least to the point of acquiring formal political independence. My own PhD dissertation sought to identify the roots overdetermining this process in Britain’s settler colonialism in Kenya. There, accumulated resistances and repressions peaked in the Mau Mau rebellion. It freed Kenya’s people by ending Kenya’s colonial status. Acquiring real political independence is the next step now engaging many formerly colonized territories. Real economic independence—as required by real freedom—is yet a further step now gingerly explored by China, India, and Brazil.

Colonial history thus suggests the poorest of prospects for Israeli settler colonialism prevailing over a colonized Palestine. The conditions of existence for any such prevalence are not there now nor likely to emerge. Israel’s history thus displays repeated Palestinian uprisings and repeated Israeli repressions. Both become increasingly violent and vindictive. Stuck in a dead end, resistors and repressors resort to ever more extreme actions such as Hamas’s attack last October and Israel’s destruction of Gaza ever since. Israeli officials refer to Palestinians as “animals” and speak publicly about expelling millions of them from the country. Palestinian officials insist a genocide is being imposed by Israel upon them. Netanyahu’s allies join in banning and arresting opponents of his policies. How much further along that road will they go? U.S. students in response have given birth to a new mass movement that is changing the country as you read this.

Hitler’s genocide ended when outside forces intervened to fight and win World War II. Inside forces (Jewish resistance, resistance to German occupation, and anti-fascism) helped in key ways. Will the forces already inside Israel and Palestine together with outside forces intervene and stop the Palestine-Israel catastrophe? Students and faculties at colleges and universities across the world are now in the movement for such interventions. Each of them is now making personal choices about whether and how to participate in that movement. Each person’s choice will affect the rest of that person’s life.

Many students and teachers are at work trying to understand honestly how Palestinian and Israeli societies evolved, separately and in relation, such that they came to today’s horrific situation. They use classes, readings, and libraries seriously to interrogate concepts like “settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” “self-defense,” and “antisemitism/anti-Zionism.”

Many students and teachers proceed unafraid to ask about how capitalism may have operated on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides—and among their supporters—in producing today’s dead end. The point of asking is to inquire further about an urgent issue: could basic social changes help overcome the Israeli-Palestine dead end by providing a new beginning on an economic foundation better than capitalism? Might the kibbutzim, had their numbers and importance within the Israeli economy been facilitated, have produced a different politics? Might the growth of worker cooperatives within the Palestinian territories have functioned likewise? Had such coops and kibbutzim built upon their shared economic structures to fashion political alliances, how differently might the whole Middle East have evolved?

Yes, these are big, bold, new ways of thinking about the present, horrific dead-end in Gaza. Students and universities have often led the rest of society in such new ways. Yes, universities around the world now struggle with huge free-speech vs. police issues provoked by the Gaza events. But the old, defensive, aggressive ways of thinking and acting have more than failed to solve the Israeli-Palestine problem. They made it worse. Old defensive, aggressive ways of thinking also misunderstand a changed world, one in which the U.S. dominance coming out of World War II has now peaked and is receding. A declining empire is a new experience and context for everything else happening around us. Our generation is living through that process of decline. We need to think critically about historic dead ends without past generations’ fear of using anti-capitalist traditions of thought.

The student and faculty protest movement around demands for a Gaza ceasefire is doing that. For that it deserves applause and to be joined. To the students now leading us I offer my gratitude.

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It’s no surprise that the Republican leadership invited Prime Minister Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress, but why would the Democratic leadership co-sponsor the invitation?  The Republicans issued the invitation as part of their effort to embarrass President Biden’s support for a ceasefire in Gaza.  Democratic support for the invitation lends credibility to this effort and will further divide the Democratic Party, making it more difficult for Biden to be reelected in November.  

Biden has consistently overestimated his ability to influence Netanyahu, and has consistently underestimated the influence and importance of the progressive and liberal base of the Democratic Party that favors an immediate ceasefire.

The timing of the congressional invitation could not be worse.  Last week, Biden supported a three-phrase proposal for winding down the war in Gaza, emphasizing that “Hamas no longer is capable of carrying out another October 7.”  Biden argued that Israel had met its goals for its operation in Gaza and that the time has arrived to stop the fighting and to release the hostages.  Less than an hour after Biden endorsed the Israeli war cabinet’s proposal, Netanyahu insisted that Israel would not end the war until Hamas is defeated and “all of its goals are achieved.”

This is not the first time that Netanyahu has been given a congressional platform to embarrass a Democratic president.  Nine years ago, the Congress invited Netanyahu to address a joint session as part of his campaign to defeat the Iranian nuclear accord.  Netanyahu’s address was an unacceptable interference in the U.S. domestic political arena.  President Barack Obama, as a result, refused to hold a private meeting with Netanyahu.  Before leaving office, however, Obama signed the most generous military aid package ever given to the Israelis.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the Iran nuclear accord—marked Obama’s most successful exercise in international diplomacy and could have been a useful tool in creating a U.S.-Iranian diplomatic dialogue as well as strengthening moderates in Iran who wanted to reduce tensions in the region.  Donald Trump’s abrogation of the nuclear accord was a gift to Israel, and it ended the opportunity to resume relations with Iran, broken 45 years ago.

Five years ago, 400 members of the Senate and House of Representatives presented Netanyahu with another gift in the form of a letter that fully supported Israel’s militarist agenda for the Middle East.  The letter coincided with Netanyahu’s floundering efforts to form a new Israeli government; he used the letter to enhance these efforts.  In supporting the Israeli national security agenda for the region, the letter made it more difficult for any U.S. president to reduce its role in the Middle East, where we have wasted military and economic resources over the past 40 years.  Trump’s catering to Israel included moving the embassy to Jerusalem, ending humanitarian aid to the Palestinian Authority, and encouraging greater settlement activity on the West Bank.  Congressional catering to Israel has been a constant for the past 75 years.

The fulsome support for Netanyahu is particularly objectionable because of his anti-Americanism over the past 30 years.  He has embarrassed virtually every Democratic leader, including Presidents Bill Clinton, Obama and Biden as well as Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.  Netanyahu has often announced an expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank on the very day that U.S. officials were arriving in Israel for discussions.  Obama and Kerry were treated particularly poorly in the Israeli press.  Every time Biden raises the issue of a two-state solution, Netanyahu emphatically denounces the idea.

Relations between Obama and Netanyahu were particularly tense.  Several weeks after the United States announced a ten-year $38 billion package of military aid for Israel, Netanyahu made scathing remarks about Obama and Kerry.  Netanyahu was angered by the United States abstaining from a UN Security Council Resolution that demanded an end to settlement construction on occupied Palestinian territory.  No presidents did more for Israeli national security than Jimmy Carter and Obama, but they received no credit from their Israeli counterparts.

The relationship between Clinton and Netanyahu was also tense.  Clinton said that the Israeli prime minister was “smart and able and he knows how to hit people where they’re tender.”  Several years ago, Clinton acknowledged for the first time that he tried to help Shimon Peres win the 1996 election because Netanyahu was so unsupportive of an Israeli-Palestinian peace effort.  After being lectured by Netanyahu in a 1996 meeting, Clinton grumbled “Who the fuck does he think he is?  Who’s the fucking superpower here?”  After an acrimonious meeting in the Oval Office, Obama told his staff that Netanyahu “pissed on my leg.”

Netanyahu has always taken the United States for granted, and he has always gotten away with it.  He knows that the Democratic leadership is fearful of challenging Jewish support for Israel, and that he can count on the support of Christian Evangelicals and Jewish Americans.  The congressional invitation will bolster Netanyahu’s confidence that he can handle the Biden administration.

The United States is Israel’s only supporter; its major supplier of sophisticated military weaponry; and Israel’s defender in international fora such as the United Nations.  Netanyahu has no expectation that U.S. policy toward Israel will change, and as a result he will continue to ignore U.S. interests in his typical bull-headed way.

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Damaged USS Liberty one day after attack (9 June 1967)

“The State of Israel will be judged not by its wealth, nor by its army, nor by its technology, but by its moral character and its human values.”

– Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, 1955, Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister.

Fifty-seven years ago during the Six-Day War (June 8, 1967), Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) brutally attacked a U.S. naval intelligence ship that was seconded to the National Security Agency (NSA) for intercepting communications in the Middle East.  Thirty-four American sailors were killed in the attack, and 171 were wounded by unmarked Mirage fighter aircraft using cannons and rockets.  Israeli boats fired machine guns at close range at those helping the wounded, including a Soviet naval vessel that was trying to rescue U.S. sailors; they also machine-gunned life rafts that survivors had dropped in hopes of abandoning the ship.  The Israelis immediately called the disaster a “random accident.” It wasn’t “random” and it wasn’t an “accident,” but the NSA investigation of the assault remains classified to this day.

Israeli duplicity in their relations with the United States was displayed as early as 1955, when Israeli intelligence operatives bombed a U.S. library in Alexandria, Egypt, and the Israeli government placed the blame on Egyptian operatives.  This covert action was designed to stop the United States from funding the Aswan Dam in Egypt.  Several decades later, Israeli intelligence recruited a U.S. naval intelligence officer, Jonathan Pollard, to provide sensitive U.S. intelligence, despite the reams of intelligence that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was sharing with Israel.  

Pollard sold numerous state secrets, including the NSA’s ten-volume manual on how the U.S. gathers its signals intelligence as well as the names of thousands of people who had cooperated and were cooperating with U.S. intelligence agencies.  Some of Pollard’s documents ended up with the Soviet Union’s KGB, and the loss of sensitive signals intelligence contributed to several successful Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel. The Israelis maintained for years that the Pollard operation was an unauthorized rogue affair.  More lies.

Israeli deceit in their relations with the United States continues to this day.  U.S. weapons have been used illegally in Israeli wars, including the current genocidal attacks in Gaza.  U.S. weapons technology and the weapons themselves have been provided to third countries in violation of Israeli agreements with the United States.  The United States has never challenged the obnoxious personal attacks on its leaders by Israeli leaders, particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The current war in Gaza is replete with examples of Israeli denials and explanations that defy reality.  Israel has denied placing limits on humanitarian aid entering Gaza, which couldn’t be more counter-intuitive or counter-factual.  After all, there are famine conditions in the north and south of Gaza as well as ample evidence of Israels preventing aid trucks from entering Gaza.  There is no serious evidence that the Israelis are willing to investigate the brutal attacks that have taken place.  Israeli spokesmen describe the current Rafah operation as a “limited incursion,” which is belied by satellite photography that shows Israeli forces moving closer to the center of the city as well as the collapsed buildings and debris in the eastern parts of the city.

“The pattern of attacks” on aid workers, according to the Secretary General of Doctors Without Borders, Christopher Lockyear, “is either intentional or indicative of reckless incompetence.”  Israel’s 16-year blockade of Gaza at least permitted a stable food situation in the territory, but now Israeli Defense Forces ignore Israeli right-wing activists who destroy food headed for Gaza’s refugees. 

The Israeli military states that it would “never deliberately target aid convoys and workers,” but this too is a bald-faced lie.  Hundreds of Palestinian aid workers have been killed, but it was not until non-Arab workers were killed in a malicious attack that the international community expressed outrage.  This has not stopped Netanyahu from proclaiming that Palestinians “sanctify death while we sanctify life.  They sanctify cruelty while we sanctify compassion.”

Last week’s disgraceful attack on a tent camp in Rafah was the latest example of Israel’s lack of moral compunction in the killing of innocent civilians, even children.   The many Israeli wars against the Palestinians have demonstrated Israel’s ease in destroying homes and olive groves, but the increased killing of children reveals the absence of a moral compass  among Israeli civilian and military leaders.

The anniversary of the Liberty attack is a reminder that there are no limits to Israeli perfidy.  In June 1967, I was a junior analyst at the CIA working on the Six-Day War.  Our task force knew that the Israeli attack took place after six hours of intense, low-level reconnaissance.  The attack itself was conducted over a two-hour period by unmarked fighter aircraft.  According to Israeli archives, at least one of the pilots instructed to attack the Liberty communicated “But Sir, It’s an American Ship.”  He was told “Never Mind, Hit Her!”  

Even today, Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, maintains that the operation was an accident: “There was a lot of chaos. It was a classic screw-up.”  Another former ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, one of Netanyahu’s closest colleagues, once remarked that Israeli Defense Forces should be given a Nobel Peace Prize for its use of “knock on the roof” warning shots before they destroy homes that often house numerous members of extended families that are seeking shelter.  No warning was given to the Palestinian refugees in the Rafah encampment. Both Oren and Dermer would born in the United States and educated at Ivy League institutions.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials at the highest levels continue to maintain that the Israelis have crossed no “red lines” in their genocidal attacks in Rafah.  John Kirby, the spokesman for national security adviser Jake Sullivan, even maintained that Israeli use of precision guided weapons in Rafah “indicates a desire to be more deliberate and more precise in their targeting.”  When pressed, Kirby blithely maintained that he needed “more granularity” to explain the civilian losses.  The Palestinian in Rafah who held a girl’s brain in one hand and a bag full of body parts in the other hand should be sufficient “granularity.”

Several Biden administration officials and Department of States officials have resigned because of U.S. complicity with Israeli genocidal operations as well as the U.S. official view that Israel has not impeded humanitarian assistance to Gaza.  Meanwhile, the Palestinian death toll is climbing, and Israeli military operations are increasing, but the trio of Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan contend that no “red lines” have been crossed.

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Boris Kagarlitsky and his cat.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, almost 20,000 Russians have been detained for anti-war activities and 1000 put on trial, mainly on terrorism-related charges, according to independent human rights group OVD-info. Since the start of this year, 669 people have been labeled, without trial, as “extremists and terrorists” by authorities under anti-terror laws. This takes the total to more than 14,000 since 2014 — the year Russia started arming separatist forces in Ukraine and annexed Crimea.

Among the highest profile is Boris Kagarlitsky, author of a new book, The Long Retreat. As well as bringing Russian and Western thinkers into dialogue, the scholar-activist draws upon his experiences as a Russian dissident since the latter days of the Soviet Union in this detailed analysis of leftist strategy. As a Marxist, he engages in radical ideas including Universal Basic Income and decentralised collective ownership, as well as looking at historical and contemporary examples of revolution and dissent, covering the left’s response to the war in Ukraine.

Written just before Kagarlitsky’s 2023-24 jailings, The Long Retreat stands as a testament to subversive Russian literature. It asks if the left can put aside its paralysing sectarianism and conceits of ideological purity in order to transform society for the benefit of the global working class. Kagarlitsky believes it can, as long as it is unafraid to look critically at its own ideas and actions.

On Wednesday, June 5, Kagarlitsky and his legal team will present an Appeal to the Military Chamber of the Supreme Court, requesting dismissal of a five-year term in a penal colony in northwestern Russia. A petition to free him can be signed here.

Two online events will contemplate Boris’ contributions. First, in Moscow on Sunday, June 2, there will be a “Dialogue with Kagarlitsky,” in recognition of his imprisonment and his June 5 court hearing, hosted online by Rabkor. RSVP is essential, here. According to Rabkor, “Despite the fact that Boris Kagarlitsky is a leading Russian scientist, sociologist, political scientist and historian, recognised not only by the international scientific community but also by delegates from the BRICS countries, Boris is currently imprisoned on political charges of ‘justifying terrorism’. We believe it is important to update his writings by entering into an extramural dialogue with him, to show solidarity and recall the fate of the scientist in anticipation of the appeal hearing on June 5. That dialogue is based on recalling the 1990s, a time when, after the collapse of the USSR, the fate of Russia was decided for many years to come. Through his contributions, we will learn from Boris: What were these 90s like?; How did the transformation processes take place?; Is the current system a negation or a continuation of the 90s?; And, most importantly, what kind of future do we aspire to, given the experience of this period? The meeting will include a debate between Boris Nadezhdin and Alexei Safronov. Scientific papers by such scholars as Alexander Shubin, Anna Ochkina and Pavel Kudyukin will be presented. The meeting will take place on 2 June at 12:30, Moscow time.

Second, on June 13, the University of Johannesburg Centre for Social Change will host a hybrid book review and discussion about The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left. Join us here.

Join us, and sign the petition here.

Foreword to Kagarlitsky’s The Long Retreat

by Patrick Bond

Boris Yulyevich Kagarlitsky has had a torrid time with Russia’s notorious carceral regime—most recently on February 13, 2024 when prosecutors allied with one Kremlin faction had him re-imprisoned for a five-year term—albeit, he would insist, not nearly as severe as the systemic torture suffered by the late liberal opposition leader Alexei Navalny, killed on February 16 at the ‘Polar Wolf’ Artic Circle penal colony. Since the early 1980s, Boris has been repeatedly prosecuted for articulating left-wing ideals.

Boris was jailed in July 2023 on the way to fetch his wife from the airport, on charges of ‘justifying terrorism.’ He was sent to a prison in the north-western city of Syktyvkar, far from his Moscow base, once home to Soviet-era gulags. His crime, committed ten months earlier, was expressing a cheeky analysis of the Ukraine war via a (self-confessed) weak joke about Mostik, a stray cat who was the construction workers’ mascot for a recently built bridge linking the Russian mainland to Crimea.

But the bridge was bombed by Ukrainian or allied forces in October 2022. As he recalls, “Just on the eve of that attack, congratulatory wishes from Mostik the cat to President Putin were spread on Russian social networks […] I joked that he had acted as a provocateur with his congratulations.” As Boris knew so well, “Unfortunately, Leviathan has no sense of humour. I had to spend four and a half months in a prison cell.”

Nevertheless, after local and international pressure—and amidst incomprehensible gyrations within competing factions of Russia’s security bureaucracy—he was freed, having paid a fine of 600,000 roubles ($6,700; £5,250) raised within a day from his supporters via the Rabkor YouTube channel. The story is one he alone can tell, armed with his famous dry wit and optimism:

The prosecutor’s office stated that the joke about Mostik the cat was made “in order to destabilise the activities of government agencies and to press the authorities of the Russian federation to terminate the special military operation on the territory of Ukraine.” While I was behind bars, a solidarity campaign was unfolding outside, in which many people took part in Russia and around the world. Moreover, it seems that the Kremlin leadership was especially impressed by the fact that a significant part of the voices in my defense were coming from the Global South. In the context of confrontation with the West, Russian rulers are trying to establish themselves as fighters against American and European neo-colonialism, so criticism of them voiced in Brazil, South Africa, or India was received with vexation.

Along with so many others from the international left, there were indeed South Africans close to the SA Communist Party who added pressure, comrades with whom Boris will normally disagree on most matters of principle, analysis, strategies, tactics and alliances, since the Talk-Left, Walk-Right dance isn’t one he tolerates.

Still, what became evident from the episode was not only the ease with which he could proceed with sociological research on the situations facing fellow inmates. Also clear was an inexorable popularity stemming from his anti-war stance amongst both a new generation of Russian rebels and within an international independent left that for at least forty years has looked to Boris for socialist clarity at home and beyond.

But upon an extremely complicated political-ideological landscape, even where in some circuits of the left there is no critique of the Ukraine invasion, Boris attracted a broad scope of solidarity, e.g. when Manitoba-based geopolitical economist Radhika Desai made an in-person appeal to Vladimir Putin during a Valdai Club conference in October 2023:

We found ourselves also in a bit of a quandary because we do not agree with the position our dear friend [Boris] has taken. But we also remember how much we have learned from his formidable knowledge of Russia’s history and his formidable commitment to Russia. So, we just appeal to you that you take a personal interest in this case.

Putin’s reply: “You know, to be honest, I do not really know who this Kagarlitsky is—so my colleague here [Fyodor Lukyanov] even had to fill me in on that one. I will take the letter you have signed for me, I will read it and give you a response. I promise.”

In fact it was at least the second time that Putin was responding to questions about the Kagarlitsky case, and he still didn’t know what the issue was about. No response was given to Radhika Desai or other Valdai Club members who signed the letter. However, ten weeks later, when rumors about Putin’s supposed death were widely circulating around Russia, Boris was briefly released, albeit with restrictions on his freedom of expression.

Two months later, Kafkaesque bureaucratic maneuvers led to his re-imprisonment. Remarkably, he retained an optimistic fighting spirit, posting to Telegram: “I continue to collect data and materials for new books, including descriptions of prison life—now in Moscow institutions. Anyway, see you soon! I am sure that everything will be fine eventually. We will see each other again both on the channel and in person. We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country.”

Awareness of his plight emerged around the world once again, and even if soon overshadowed by the killing of Navalny, International Director for Russia Natalia Zviagina reminded:

This conviction, and the closed nature of his trial, provide another stark example of the treatment of political dissenters in Russia. It is an overt attack on freedom of expression with the aim of silencing critical voices through fear and repression. This case is not an isolated incident but part of a broader, systematic effort to stifle opposition and control what can and cannot be said in Russia.

+++

Boris has long directed the Institute of Globalisation Studies and Social Movements, whose fate also hung in the balance due to Putin’s periodic clampdowns and the Institute’s ‘foreign agent’ designation (thanks to grants mainly from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation). It was closed down in 2022 after failing to pay severe fines which were regularly showered on the organization by hostile bureaucrats. Boris had earlier served on the faculties at Moscow State University, the Moscow School for Social and Economic Sciences, and the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

But it was through global justice activists, starting when he hosted a session in Moscow in 1999 parallel to the Seattle World Trade Organisation, that many more came to know of how broadly he could apply class analysis.

In South Africa, we’d hear of his courage in speaking truth to power dating back to the early 1980s. During his studies of theatre criticism at the State Institute of Theatrical Art, he was expelled as a dissident. He edited samizdat journals, which led to his 1982 arrest (and his longest spell in jail), followed by an official pardon in 1983.

Five years later, his book The Thinking Reed won the Deutscher Memorial Prize, the most prestigious of international progressive literary awards. During the early 1990s he was active in the Party of Labour (including having won a Moscow municipal electoral office), but in October 1993, Boris’s opposition to the Yeltsin regime’s unconstitutional power grab led to another arrest—and an immediate release after international protest.

Boris’s 1995 visit to South Africa, which was hosting scores of leftist celebrities after Nelson Mandela’s release from jail, left a major impression on many of us. We had many interactions in the subsequent years, especially when Boris began considering the global justice movement as his natural international home.

He published (often with Pluto Press) a variety of influential books on Russian and international politics. The latter included two co-edited works, Globalization and Its Discontents in 1997 and The Politics of Empire in 2004. Sole-authored books about the world situation included a 1999 trio—New Realism, New Barbarism; The Return of Radicalism; and The Twilight of Globalization—followed by From Empires to Imperialism in 2014, and Between Class and Discourse in 2020.

Boris benefitted from a long-running fellowship at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, starting in 2000. He played a leadership role in anti-Putin protests in 2011–2012, but a shift in perspective took place when the G20 was hosted in St. Petersburg in mid-2013. Many international allies (myself included) attended the counter-summit his institute organized, but funding contributed by a faction within Putin’s state may have deterred local attendees, for interest in the event was sparse.

+++

This period, from 2013 to 2017, was one in which Boris was labeled a ‘pink Putinist,’ unfairly it seems to me, but not without contradictions worth recalling. After the popular 2014 Maidan uprising in Kiev against pro-Putin leader Viktor Yanukovych—albeit one that was Washington-facilitated with all manner of conservative features—Boris was fascinated by the opportunity of what he saw as a Donbas workers’ rebellion and breakaway from the Ukrainian state, for self-government and radical social policy.

However, hijacked by Putin’s Eastern Ukraine allies, the experiment ended soon enough. In The Long Retreat, we learn that, “In supporting the people’s republics that were proclaimed in Donetsk and Lugansk, the Kremlin rulers were mainly interested in ensuring that the protests by dissatisfied citizens in south-eastern Ukraine against the new authorities in Kiev did not turn into a social revolution. The radical-minded leaders of the revolt were almost all killed or excluded from the leadership of the movement.”

Another force loomed, as Boris had acknowledged in Links in August 2014: “Over several weeks the entire leadership of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics has effectively been replaced. The most momentous, and unexpected, development has been the ousting of the military leader of the militias, Igor Strelkov […] an obvious act of revenge on the part of those very Kremlin forces on whom [Strelkov] had inflicted a serious political defeat in early July.”

Boris recognised Strelkov’s “sympathies for the pre-revolutionary monarchy and nostalgia for the Russian empire,” as he wrote at the time, but was more impressed by the mass base, e.g. “rank-and-file militia fighters demanding that the slogan of ‘social republics’ that had been proclaimed in Donetsk and Lugansk should be put into effect, that the property of oligarchs should be nationalised […] A law was adopted reversing the commercialisation of health care that had been initiated by the previous leaders.”

The Donbas worker uprising was soon repressed, but Boris was accused by progressive allies of unjustifiably supporting Russia’s Ukrainian land grabs, including Crimea. However, Kagarlitsky never sided with Strelkov, who later called Boris his most respected enemy. Boris and his comrades backed the left-leaning militia of Aleksey Mozgovoy (he was later killed, apparently by Putin’s special forces or by mercenaries from the Wagner Group).

For his part, Strelkov was an uncomfortable partner for the Kremlin. He was subsequently convicted by a Dutch court for shooting down the Malaysia Airlines plane above south-eastern Ukraine in mid-2014, killing all 298 passengers and crew. As the most prominent populist right-wing critic of Putin, Strelkov was arrested in mid-2023 just days before Boris, leading to suspicions that the Kremlin was attempting an incarceration balancing act.

The situation at that point was extremely fluid, with Putin obviously feeling more vulnerable than ever, having just been disinvited from the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) annual summit by Cyril Ramaphosa due to the outstanding International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Ukrainian war crimes.

The prior month, Wagner Group leader Evgeny Prigozhin tried his own quasi-coup against Kremlin military elites. Then, just as the BRICS summit began in Johannesburg on 23 August, Prigozhin was (reportedly) killed when his airplane mysteriously exploded between Moscow and St Petersburg.

The extent to which Boris had distanced himself from Russian nationalism was clear through his role in both the Belarusian anti-Lukashenko revolt of 2020–2021 and pro-Navalny activism of early 2021. In early 2022 he immediately was one of the most vocal critics of the Ukraine invasion.

This we learned when Johannesburg hosted the August 2023 BRICS summit and Boris was invited to keynote the ‘BRICS from Below’ workshop at the University of Johannesburg Centre for Social Change. He agreed to speak on video link—but not come in person, out of concern he would not be re-admitted to his homeland. The lecture was prevented from happening, for a month before the BRICS convened, Boris was confined to a jail term some observers feared would last seven years.

What we had anticipated hearing from Boris, as occurred periodically at such sessions dating back to his own Moscow hosting of BRICS-country dissidents in 2012, was a sense of how weak we then found not only global capitalist managers but also the BRICS versions—including those in Moscow promoting Russia’s desired de-dollarisation agenda (foiled in Johannesburg by conservative forces within the BRICS financial elite). But what you will read in The Long Retreat is probably the most cogent explanation of why, alongside the empire of capital, it’s been our international and local left oppositions that have weakened far more rapidly since the 1970s.

The campaign to free Boris Kagarlitsky is in full swing in the East and West alike.

+++

The conditions in which Boris wrote, before his arrest, provided greater confidence in elite breakdown, dating back fifteen years to the world financial crisis catalysed by US home mortgage gambles gone sour in 2007, spreading quickly across speculative European real estate markets and then across the world, requiring a G20 financial fix. Since then, he insists, global capitalism “has been unable to restore its ‘normal’ process of reproduction,” given that all manner of money-printing gimmicks, artificially low interest rates and rising debts kept the capital-overaccumulation bubble from bursting, as all had feared would happen in early 2009. But, Boris warns, “Unfortunately, at the same time as public dissatisfaction with capitalism around the planet has reached an unprecedented scale, the left movement has finished up at the lowest point in its entire history. If this is not true on the organisational plane, then it is certainly the case on the ideological and moral level.”

That weakness allows not only right-wing populist forces to fuse economic grievances and culturally reactionary politics, but at the same time, according to Boris, gives greater reign for corporate elites “to curtail, and if possible to end altogether, the participation of the masses in politics while preserving the formal institutions of parliamentarism, free elections and other conquests of liberal democracy. This task was achieved through combining market reforms with the technocratic adoption of decisions supposedly too complex to be understood by ordinary voters.”

With this force emanating from corporate centres of power in New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt and Tokyo, resistance in these sites has been timid, and the mild-mannered Western intelligentsia continually disappoints. Work by one prominent Dutch historian reflects “the moral and methodological dead end in which the left movement in the early twenty-first century has finished up,” thanks in part to “the epoch of postmodernism, when an integrated worldview is replaced by an unsystematic pastiche of ideas, of fragmentary concepts and of arbitrarily assembled images.”

In contrast, you will find in The Long Retreat a systematic socialist analysis, including important auto-critiques of Soviet legacies: “after the collapse of the USSR, when the world communist movement no longer possessed any rallying point or shared guidelines (even if only negative), it was placed in a situation of “everyone for themself,” and rapidly fell apart. The organisational and political inflexibility had turned into an appalling fragility.”

That state of fragility degenerated yet further, leaving room for far-right populists to rise with critiques of ‘globalist’ elites. In Russia, Boris has been writing in a context in which, as he told Links’s Federico Fuentes in mid-2022, “All sorts of racist, fascist statements are made on state channels. It’s an absolutely incredible flood of aggression, xenophobia and hatred.”

Proving his point in late 2023, Sergey Lavrov offered this extraordinary statement to RT:

“The goals declared by Israel for its ongoing operation against Hamas militants in Gaza seem nearly identical to those put forward by Moscow in its campaign against the Ukrainian government […] we need to be very careful about our common history with Israel and, above all, the history of the fight against Nazism. This is the main thing that unites us historically.”

This comparison was “bizarre and greatly offensive, to say the least,” according to Palestinian analyst Ramzy Baroud—but offers a flavour of the ideologically surreal times we suffer.

Boris’s ‘Letter from Prison’ shortly after the July 2023 arrest was philosophical: “This is not the first time in my life. I was locked up under Brezhnev, beaten and threatened with death under Yeltsin.[…] In the 40-odd years since my first arrest, I have learned to be patient and to realize how fickle political fortune in Russia is.”

The re-arrest on February 13 drove home that point. Debates over his mid-2010s positioning within Russia aside, Boris’s international analysis has not been fickle, all these years. The humility needed today is summed up in this book’s advice: “in changed circumstances the left should learn to retreat, without succumbing to panic or losing its nerve, and should regroup its forces in order to prepare for new battles.”

We’re terribly fortunate Boris has updated his critique of political economy and politics with the grace and passion for which this great sociologist has long been respected, and look forward to his eventual release from another undeserved term in a Russian jail—with the greatest impatience.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The Miami Herald recently reported on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) latest forecast predicting a record-breaking hurricane season for the Atlantic Ocean. “Brace Yourself, Florida,” warned the paper, explaining that the “NOAA is predicting that 17 to 25 named storms could form this year,” which is “the highest ever forecast by the federal agency.”

The paper, to its credit, made clear links between such dire predictions and global warming, saying, “Climate change is making more powerful storms more likely, cranking up the dial on extreme rainfall and strong surge and making it more common that storms rapidly strengthen as they approach land.” Insurance companies are likely taking heed, and have rightly pointed out that it’s “no surprise that Florida has been hit by more hurricanes than any other state since… 1851.”

But there was no mention in the Herald story about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signing a series of bills aimed at limiting solutions to global warming and even removing mentions of the phrase “climate change” from state laws. DeSantis proudly proclaimed that his intention was to, “keep windmills off our beaches, gas in our tanks, and China out of our state.”

The Florida Republican seems unconcerned about NOAA’s prediction nor of the record high temperatures impacting his state, such as Key West’s heat index of 115 degrees Fahrenheit. He did not acknowledge that Florida, given its peninsula coastline and location in the Atlantic, remains one of the most vulnerable states to climate change in the nation.

Florida-based meteorologist and climate change reporter Steve MacLaughlin made all the links between the coming storms, climate change, and the governor’s policy. He cited the NOAA report and warned NBC 6 News audiences that the “entire world is looking to Florida to lead in climate change, and our government is saying that climate change is no longer the priority it once was.”

There was a time, not too long ago when journalists and media outlets avoided any mention of climate change, even as scientists and climate activists urged them to say the words. Today, although media outlets have significantly improved coverage of the science, they tend not to explicitly draw a line between climate disasters and policy failures on the part of elected officials like DeSantis.

The Florida governor, who is waging a battle against climate justice as part of his culture wars, isn’t even the biggest threat to curbing climate change. He controls legislation in only one state. If Donald Trump captures the White House, the entire nation will fall even further behind in tackling the climate. Far-right shills for oil and gas companies have an ambitious battle plan in place to begin undoing the modest climate progress that the federal government has made. It’s called Project 2025 and is a brazen call “to deconstruct the Administrative State” on Day 1 of a Republican—read Trump—Presidency.

Like the hardliners who are openly articulating their doomsday plan, Trump has made no secret of where his allegiances lie, unabashedly demanding a billion dollars in campaign funding from oil and gas companies. At a now-infamous April 2024 Mar-a-Lago dinner, Trump directly solicited financial help from fossil fuel executives in exchange for more than $100 billion worth of tax breaks that President Joe Biden has proposed repealing.

The grift was so clearly a quid pro quo, so openly veering on extortion, that some Senators have now launched an inquiry into Trump’s statements. But they can’t keep up. A day before the Senate action, Trump made more such offers, saying to oil company executives at a fundraiser in Houston, Texas, that he would issue “immediate approvals for energy infrastructure” such as “pipelines, power plants” if he returned to the White House. Trump raised an easy $25 million at that event. If he regains power, he will engage in a new ethical infraction every other day, as he did the first time around.

To listen to Republicans, one might imagine that Democrats are Big Oil’s worst enemy, fighting to curb climate change on behalf of the good people of Florida and the rest of the nation. But much Democratic opposition exists in the form of incentives for green energy industries, for example, those built into the Inflation Reduction Act.

In terms of actually holding climate polluters accountable, other than Biden’s budgetary proposal to end tax breaks (which is, after all, only a proposal), and a pause on natural gas permits, Democratic challenges have come in the form of “homework assignments for companies, and requests for Justice Department investigations,” wrote Axios reporter Ben German.

Such tepid actions are not good enough, especially in the face of the overt Republican war on our climate, and by extension, our lives. The GOP may claim it wants to ban windmills on beaches, but its real agenda is handing our future over to oil and gas companies.

If the climate is to be a battleground for the GOP’s culture wars, and if Democrats are going to face the wrath of oil and gas companies for the most modest of limits on greenhouse gas emissions, why not go all in, and actually wage their own culture and policy war to save the climate?

Trying to capture voters who are at the center of the political spectrum has been a go-to Democratic strategy that has often ended in loss. Already centrist commentators are warning Biden to stop appealing to the left edge of his party ahead of November’s election.

But, growing numbers of Americans—and a majority of Democratic voters—are seeing past the media’s limited coverage and politicians’ doublespeak on the climate. They are deeply worried about climate change and are critical of Biden’s milquetoast approach to curbing it.

Labeling parts of the political spectrum is a helpful exercise. The left edge wants to move us forward, to progress, hence the adoption of the term “progressive.” The right flank wants to move society backward, and really ought to be dubbed “regressive.” Meanwhile, the center is happy with the current status quo and is best defined by the term “conservative.” Centrists want to conserve things just as they are.

On the issue of climate change, progressive policies mean a future for our children, stability for our homes and communities, and the preservation of human and other species. It literally means we have a good chance at life as a whole.

Regressive policies will lead to certain, accelerated death, broadly speaking, while conservative centrists appear to endorse a slow death. In other words, DeSantis, Trump, and their party are leading a death cult, while Biden and his party seem torn over the choice between life and death. To the rest of us, decisively choosing life is the only option.

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

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Photograph Source: REY BANIQUET/PPD – Public Domain

Guilty of massive violations of international humanitarian law! That was the unanimous verdict handed down at the conclusion of the two-day International People’s Tribunal (IPT) regarding human rights in the Philippines held recently in Brussels, Belgium on May 17-18, 2024. On trial were the governments of past president Rodrigo Duterte, current president Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., and the government of the United States of America for its support and complicity with these regimes.

The IPT is a quasi-judicial mechanism whereby evidence is presented to a panel of jurors to render judgment on specific charges, in this instance war crimes committed in the conduct of the civil war in the Philippines. The Jurors included: Lennox Hinds, Professor of Law at Rutgers University and former legal counsel for the African National Congress; Suzanne Adely President of the National Lawyers Guild (U.S.); Severine De Laveleye, member of the Chamber of Representatives of Belgium; Julen Arzuraga Gumuzio, member of the Basque Parliament; and Archbishop Joris Vercamen, former member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches.

Along with the distinguished panel of jurors, we had the opportunity to be present to hear harrowing testimony from 15 witnesses detailing widespread human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law committed by the Philippine government and its military forces. We heard first-hand accounts of extrajudicial killings, torture, enforced disappearances, harassment, and indiscriminate aerial bombing of indigenous communities defending their ancestral lands from mining and corporate plunder. These included testimony from Brandon Lee, a U.S. citizen activist in Ifugao province who was shot by suspected state agents after being “red-tagged” (labeled as a communist without any proof), threatened, and surveilled. Lee survived and is now a quadriplegic, but in his words, “while I can no longer use my body, I can continue to use my voice” to speak up for justice. Ariel Casilao spoke of the brutal murder of Peace Consultant Randall Echanis in his home while he slept in August of 2020.

Jonila Castro, along with a colleague Jhed Tamano, both environmental activists working to save Manila Bay testified she was forcibly abducted by the military in September 2023. After 17 days of interrogation and cruel torture the two were paraded by the military as captured operatives of the New People’s Army insurgency at a public press conference. It was here that the two recanted their forced confessions and exposed their kidnapping by the military. This was another example of civilian activists being targeted by the military. Also documented in graphic detail was the murder of nine indigenous leaders who opposed a massive dam project that would have destroyed the livelihoods of the people of Panay Island. (Panay is where Siegfred hails from.)

Many of the victims testified that there is a failure to distinguish between civilians and combatants in the conduct of the Philippine government’s war on the revolutionary movement. The counterinsurgency campaign deliberately targeted civilians resulting in systematic harassment. The Tribunal found the Philippine Government acted with impunity and complete disregard for International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Conventions.

Siegfred Deduro, an author of this report, is also a victim of the Philippine Governments disregard for human rights. A long-time activist and former Member of Congress, Deduro and his family were red-tagged, with death threats so constant and serious that they had to hide for seven months and ultimately flee the Philippines. Recently the Philippine Supreme Court ruled that red-tagging was a violation of human rights in a landmark case which Deduro was a plaintiff.  The high court rules that linking red-tagging and guilt by association jeopardizes a person’s fundamental right to life, liberty, and security.  While the Supreme Court ruling is welcome, the threats continue and it remains unsafe for Deduro to return to the Philippines.

A health worker and human rights activist, Zara Alvares, who earlier filed a petition for a writ of amparo (protection from extrajudicial killing or disappearance), was nonetheless murdered. Even development workers and organizations working with government institutions are not spared from red-tagging and harassment by methods such as the freezing of bank accounts.  Such draconian and brutal tactics are being widely used by the Marcos, Jr. regime. The question remains, will the Philippine military and police comply with the ruling?

While political in nature, a People’s Tribunal is both an important venue for airing legitimate grievances of human rights victims as well as laying important groundwork for future legal actions while also gaining support from allies. In 2009, the International People’s Tribunal regarding Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange found the U.S. military guilty of ecocide and provided key documentation ultimately leading to justice for some victims. The verdict of the Philippine Human Rights IPT has been delivered to those on trial plus numerous international bodies demanding future actions by bodies such as the International Criminal Court.

The U.S.’s moral, political, and financial support for the Philippine Military and its security forces have enabled these crimes against the Filipino people, to persist and proliferate.  The U.S. cannot claim to be a country that cherishes human rights while turning a blind-eye to these horrific human right abuses.

The post Philippines Found Guilty of Massive Human Right Violations appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Photograph Source: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit – CC BY-SA 3.0

We have come together as Palestinian academics and staff of Gaza universities to affirm our existence, the existence of our colleagues and our students, and the insistence on our future, in the face of all current attempts to erase us.

The Israeli occupation forces have demolished our buildings but our universities live on. We reaffirm our collective determination to remain on our land and to resume teaching, study, and research in Gaza, at our own Palestinian universities, at the earliest opportunity.

We call upon our friends and colleagues around the world to resist the ongoing campaign of scholasticide in occupied Palestine, to work alongside us in rebuilding our demolished universities, and to refuse all plans seeking to bypass, erase, or weaken the integrity of our academic institutions. The future of our young people in Gaza depends upon us, and our ability to remain on our land in order to continue to serve the coming generations of our people.

We issue this call from beneath the bombs of the occupation forces across occupied Gaza, in the refugee camps of Rafah, and from the sites of temporary new exile in Egypt and other host countries. We are disseminating it as the Israeli occupation continues to wage its genocidal campaign against our people daily, in its attempt to eliminate every aspect of our collective and individual life.

Our families, colleagues, and students are being assassinated, while we have once again been rendered homeless, reliving the experiences of our parents and grandparents during the massacres and mass expulsions by Zionist armed forces in 1947 and 1948.

Our civic infrastructure – universities, schools, hospitals, libraries, museums and cultural centres – built by generations of our people, lies in ruins from this deliberate continuous Nakba. The deliberate targeting of our educational infrastructure is a blatant attempt to render Gaza uninhabitable and erode the intellectual and cultural fabric of our society. However, we refuse to allow such acts to extinguish the flame of knowledge and resilience that burns within us.

Allies of the Israeli occupation in the United States and United Kingdom are opening yet another scholasticide front through promoting alleged reconstruction schemes that seek to eliminate the possibility of independent Palestinian educational life in Gaza. We reject all such schemes and urge our colleagues to refuse any complicity in them. We also urge all universities and colleagues worldwide to coordinate any academic aid efforts directly with our universities.

We extend our heartfelt appreciation to the national and international institutions that have stood in solidarity with us, providing support and assistance during these challenging times. However, we stress the importance of coordinating these efforts to effectively reopen Palestinian universities in Gaza.

We emphasise the urgent need to reoperate Gaza’s education institutions, not merely to support current students, but to ensure the long-term resilience and sustainability of our higher education system. Education is not just a means of imparting knowledge; it is a vital pillar of our existence and a beacon of hope for the Palestinian people.

Accordingly, it is essential to formulate a long-term strategy for rehabilitating the infrastructure and rebuilding the entire facilities of the universities. However, such endeavours require considerable time and substantial funding, posing a risk to the ability of academic institutions to sustain operations, potentially leading to the loss of staff, students, and the capacity to reoperate.

Given the current circumstances, it is imperative to swiftly transition to online teaching to mitigate the disruption caused by the destruction of physical infrastructure. This transition necessitates comprehensive support to cover operational costs, including the salaries of academic staff.

Student fees, the main source of income for universities, have collapsed since the start of the genocide. The lack of income has left staff without salaries, pushing many of them to search for external opportunities.

Beyond striking at the livelihoods of university faculty and staff, this financial strain caused by the deliberate campaign of scholasticide poses an existential threat to the future of the universities themselves.

Thus, urgent measures must be taken to address the financial crisis now faced by academic institutions, to ensure their very survival. We call upon all concerned parties to immediately coordinate their efforts in support of this critical objective.

The rebuilding of Gaza’s academic institutions is not just a matter of education; it is a testament to our resilience, determination, and unwavering commitment to securing a future for generations to come.

The fate of higher education in Gaza belongs to the universities in Gaza, their faculty, staff, and students and to the Palestinian people as a whole. We appreciate the efforts of peoples and citizens around the world to bring an end to this ongoing genocide.

We call upon our colleagues in the homeland and internationally to support our steadfast attempts to defend and preserve our universities for the sake of the future of our people, and our ability to remain on our Palestinian land in Gaza. We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again.

Signatories:

Dr Kamalain Shaath, Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Omar Milad, President of Al Azhar University Gaza, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Mohamed Reyad Zughbur, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Nasser Abu Alatta, Dean of Students Affairs, Al Aqsa University

Dr Akram Mohammed Radwan, Dean of Admission, Registration, and Student Affairs, University College of Applied Sciences – Gaza

Dr Atta Abu Hany, Dean of Faculty of Science, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Hamdi Shhadeh Zourb, Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Ahmed Abu Shaban, Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Ahmed A Najim, Dean of Admission and Registration, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Noha A Nijim, Dean of Economics and Administrative Science Faculty, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Hatem Ali Al-Aidi, Dean of Planning and Quality, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Ihab A Naser Dean of Faculty of Applied Medical Sciences, Al Azhar University Gaza

Eng Amani Al-Mqadama, Head of the International Relations, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Mohammed R AlBaba, Dean of Faculty of Dentistry, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Rami Wishah , Dean of the Faculty of Law, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Basim Mohammad Ayesh, Head of MSc Programme Committee and Professor of Molecular Genetics, Al Aqsa University

Prof Hassan Asour, Dean of Scientific Research, Al Azhar University Gaza

Khaled Ismail Shahada Tabish, Head of Salaries Department, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Mazen Sabbah, Dean of Faculty of Sharia, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Ashraf J Shaqalaih, Head of Laboratory Medicine Dept, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Mahmoud El Ajouz, Head of Food Analysis Center and Lecturer at the Faculty of Agriculture, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Mazen AbuQamar, Head of Nursing Department, Al Azhar University Gaza

Eng Abed Elnaser Mustafa Abu Assi, Head of Engineering Office, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Ahmed Rezk Al-Wawi, Vice President of the Islamic University Workers’ Union, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Shareef El Buhaisi, Head of Administration Office at the Faculty of Applied Medical Sciences, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Saeb Hussein Al-Owaini, Director of Employees, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Mai Ramadan, Director of the Drug and Toxicology Analysis Centre, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Mohammed S M Kuhail, Director of Libraries, Al Azhar University Gaza

Eng Emad Ahmed Ismail Al-Nounou, Director, Technical Department, Al Azhar University Gaza

Eng Ismail Abdul Rahman Abu Sukhaila, Director Engineering Office, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Osama R Shawwa, Director of Administrative Office in the Department of Political Sciences, Al Azhar University Gaza

Adnan A S El-Ajrami, Director of Administrative Office at the Faculty of Medicine, Al Azhar University Gaza

Hashem Mahmoud Kassab, Director of Public Relations and Media Department, Al Azhar University Gaza

Mazen Hilles, Director of Administration of Diploma Programme, Al Azhar University Gaza

Adel Mansour Suleiman Al-Louh , Services Manager, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Hammam Al-Nabahen, Director of IT Services, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Maher Haron Ereif, Audit Department Assistant Director, Al Azhar University Gaza

Khalid Solayman Alsayed, Information Technology Administrator, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Amani H Abujarad, Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics Department of English, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Ayman Shaheen, Assistant Professor in Political Sciences, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Alaa Mustafa Al-Halees, Faculty of Information Technology, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Basil Hamed, Faculty of Engineering, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Mohamed Elhindy, Assistant Professor in Veterinary Medicine, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Bassam Ahmed Abu Zaher, Faculty of Science, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Fakhr Abo Awad, Faculty of Science – Department of Chemistry, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Saher Al Waleed, Professor of Law, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Kamal Ahmed Ghneim, Faculty of Arts, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Khadir Tawfiq Khadir, Department of English Language – Faculty of Arts, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Marwan Saleem El-Agha, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Mona Jehad Wadi, Assistant Professor of microbiology, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Mohammed Faek Aziz, Deanship of Quality and Development, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Muhammed Abu Mattar, Associate Professor in Law, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Abdul Fattah Nazmi Hassan Abdel Rabbo, Faculty of Science, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Saher Al Waleed, Professor of Law, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Sari El Sahhar, Assistant Professor in Plant Protection, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Nidal Jamal Masoud Jarada, Law, University College of Applied Sciences – Gaza

Dr Sherin H Aldani, Assistant Professor in Social Sciences, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Wael Mousa, Assistant Professor in Food Technology, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Mohamed I H Migdad, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Alaa Mustafa Al-Halees, Faculty of Information Technology, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Usama Hashem Hamed Hegazy, Professor of Applied Mathematics, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Basil Hamed, Faculty of Engineering, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Tawfik Musa Allouh, Professor of Arabic Literature, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Bassam Ahmed Abu Zaher, Faculty of Science, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Zaki S Safi, Professor of Chemistry, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Fakhr Abo Awad, Faculty of Science – Department of Chemistry, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Kamal Ahmed Ghneim, Faculty of Arts, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Khadir Tawfiq Khadir, Department of English Language – Faculty of Arts, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Khaled Hussein Hamdan, Faculty of Fundamentals of Religion, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Ata Hasan Ismail Darwish, Professor of Science Education and Curriculum, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Hazem Falah Sakeek, Professor of Physics, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Mohammed Abdel Aati, Department of Electrical Engineering and Intelligent Systems, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Nader Jawad Al-Nimra, Faculty of Engineering, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Prof Nasir Sobhy Abu Foul, Professor of Food Technology, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Rawand Sami Abu Nahla, Lecturer at Faculty of Dentistry, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Hussein M. H. Alhendawi, Professor of Organic Chemistry, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Ihab S. S. Zaqout, Professor in Computer Science, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Rushdy A S Wady, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Abed El-Raziq A Salama, Assistant Professor in Food Technology, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Ahmed Aabed, Admin Assistant in Administrative and Financial Affairs Office, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Ahmed Mesmeh, Faculty of Sharia and Law, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Emad Khalil Abu Alkhair Masoud, Associate professor of microbiology, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Alaa Issa Mohammed Saleh, Lecturer at the faculty of Dentistry, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Ali Al-Jariri, Continuing Education Department, Al Quds Open University

Dr Arwa Eid Ashour, Faculty of Science, Department of Mathematics, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Hala Zakaria Alagha, Assistant Professor in Clinical Pharmacy, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Marwan Khazinda, Professor of Mathematics, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Moamin Alhanjouri, Associate Professor in Statistics, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Sameer Mostafa Abumdallala, Professor of Economics, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Bilal Al-Dabbour, Faculty of Medicine, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Nabil Kamel Mohammed Dukhan, Faculty of Education – Department of Psychology, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Jamal Mohamed Alshareef, Assistant Professor, Linguistics Department of English, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Sadiq Ahmed Mohammed Abdel Aal, Faculty of Engineering, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Khaled Abushab, Associate Professor in Applied Medical Sciences, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Abed El-Raziq A Salama, Assistant Professor in Food Technology, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Emad Khalil Abu Alkhair Masoud, Associate Professor of Microbiology, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Hala Zakaria Alagha, Assistant Professor in Clinical Pharmacy, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Jamal Mohamed Alshareef, Assistant Professor, Linguistics Department of English, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Khaled Abushab, Associate Professor in Applied Medical Sciences, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Suheir Ammar, Faculty of Engineering, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Dr Waseem Bahjat Mushtaha, Associate Professor in Dental Medicine, Al Azhar University Gaza

Prof Ali Abu Zaid, Professor of Statistics, Al Azhar University Gaza

Dr Zahir Mahmoud Khalil Nassar, Faculty of Science, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Abdul Hamid Mustafa Said Mortaja, Faculty of Arts, Department of Arabic Language, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Abdul Rahman Salman Nasr Al-Daya, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Sharia and Law, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ayman Salah Khalil Abumayla, Officer – Student Affairs Department, Al Azhar University Gaza

Abdullah Ahmed Al-Sawarqa, Library, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ashraf Ahmed Mohammed Abu Mughisib, Faculty of Science, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Mohammed Abdul Fattah Abdel Rabbo, Deanship of Engineering and Information Systems, University College of Applied Sciences – Gaza

Basheer Ismail Hamed Hammo, Faculty of Fundamentals of Religion, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Bssam Fadel Nssar, Faculty of Engineering, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Eng Mohammed Awni Abushaban, Teaching Assistant IT Department, Al Azhar University Gaza

Etemad Mohammed Abdul Aziz Al-Attar, Faculty of Science, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Fahd Ghassan Abdullah Al-Khatib, Engineering Office, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ibrahim K I Albozom, Administrative Officer Faculty of Arts, Al Azhar University Gaza

Abdullah Ahmed Anaqlah, Faculty of Information Technology, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ahmed Abdelrahman Abu Saloom, Radiologist at the College of Dentistry, Al Azhar University Gaza

Feryal Ali Mahmoud Farhat, Administrator, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Fifi Al-Zard, Campus Services, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Manar Y Abuamara, Secretary, Al Azhar University Gaza

Hani Rubhi Abdel Aal, Graduate Studies, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ahmed Abdul Raouf Al-Mabhouh, Faculty of Science, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ahmed Adnan Al-Qazzaz, Faculty of Information Technology, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Sfadi Salim Abu Amra, Supporting Services Department, Al Azhar University Gaza

Hassan Ahmed Hassan Al-Nabih, Department of English Language – Faculty of Arts, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Hassan Nasr, Information Technology, University College of Applied Sciences – Gaza

Hatem Barhoom, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Tamer Musallam, Lecturer in Business Diploma Programme, Al Azhar University Gaza

Ahmed Adnan Mahmoud Mattar, Information Technology, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ahmed Jaber Mahmoud Al-Omsey, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Qadoura, Administrator, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Hussein Al-Jadaily, Faculty of Nursing, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ibrahim Issa Ibrahim Seidem, Faculty of Fundamentals of Religion, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ezia Abu Zaida, Secretary, Al Azhar University Gaza

Khaled Mutlaq Issa, Faculty of Engineering, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Khalil Mohammed Said Hassan Abu Kuweik, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ibraheem Almasharawi, Instructor at the Faculty of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Al Azhar University Gaza

Maher Jaber Mahmoud Shaqlieh, Information Technology Affairs, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Mahmoud Abdul Rahman Mousa Asraf, Department of English Language, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ahmed Mohammed Said Abu Safi, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ahmed Omar Ismail Al-Dahdouh, Faculty of Information Technology, University College of Applied Sciences – Gaza

Ahmed Salman Ali Abu Amra, Faculty of Sharia and Law, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ahmed Saqer, Faculty of Science, Department of Mathematics, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ahmed Younes Abu Labda, Personnel Affairs, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Alaa Fathi Salim Abu Ajwa, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Mahmoud Said Mohammed Al- Damouni, Central Library, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Ghasasn Alswairki, Adminstration Officer at Faculty of Pharmacy, Al Azhar University Gaza

Mahmoud Shukri Sarhan, Faculty of Education, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Mahmoud Youssef Mohammed Al- Shoubaki, Faculty of Fundamentals of Religion, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Majdi Said Aqel, Faculty of Education, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Muahmmed Abu Aouda, Security Department, Al Azhar University Gaza

Majed Hania, Faculty of Science, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Majed Mohammed Ibrahim Al-Naami, Faculty of Literature, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Mamoun Abdul Aziz Ahmed Salha, Information Technology, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Emad Ali Ahmed Abdel Rabbo, Administrator, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Imad Alwaheidi Lecturer in Livestock Production Al Azhar University Gaza

Manar Mustafa Al-Maghari, Medical Department, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Mohammed Bassam Mohammed Al- Kurd, Campus Services, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Marwa Rouhi Abu Jalaleh, Information Technology Department, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Yousif Altaban, Security Department, Al Azhar University Gaza

Hala Muti Mahmoud Abu Naqeera, Student Affairs, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Marwan Ismail Abdul Rahman Hamad, Faculty of Education, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Mohammad Hussein Kraizem, Health Sciences, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Mohammed AlAshi, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Mohammed Hassan Al-Sar, Faculty of Engineering, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Mohammed Ibrahim Khidr Al-Gomasy, Faculty of Education, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Mohammed Juma Al-Ghoul, Faculty of Sharia and Law, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Mohammed Khalil Ayesh, Information Technology, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Faiz Ahmed Ali Hales, Computer Maintenance Department, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Mohammed Taha Mohammed Abu Qadama, Administrator, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Yousef Fahmy Krayem, Lab Technician at Faculty of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Al Azhar University Gaza

Nabhan Salem Abu Jamous, Department of Supplies and Purchases, Head of Storage Section, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Nihad Mohammed Sheikh Khalil, Faculty of Arts – Department of History, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Tamer Nazeer Nassar Madi, Faculty of Information Technology, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Rami Othman Mohammed Hassan Skik, Faculty of Information Technology, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Salah Hassan Radwan, Information Technology, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Salem Abushawarib, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Salem Jameel Bakir Al-Sazaji, Faculty of Information Technology, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Abed Alraouf S Almasharawi, Administrative Officer in the Library, Al Azhar University Gaza

Samah Al-Samoni, Public Relations, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Wafa Farhan Ismail Ubaid, Faculty of Nursing, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Tawfiq Sufian Tawfiq Harzallah, Admission and Registration Department, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Walid Zuheir Aidi Abu Shaaban, Finance and Auditing Department, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Yasser Zaidan Salem Al-Nahal, Faculty of Science, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

Youssef Sobhi Abdel Nabi Al-Rantissi, Computer Technician, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)

The post An Open Letter on the Fate of Higher Education in Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.