Photograph Source: Ralf1969 – CC BY-SA 3.0

The UN agency is sounding the alarm about Ukraine’s reactors and Iran’s nuclear intentions, while at the same time promoting the very technology that delivers these risks

On March 21 in Brussels, Belgium, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will host what it is billing as the “First ever Nuclear Energy Summit.” The event follows a pledge made by 22 countries last December during the COP28 climate summit in Dubai to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. 

The Brussels summit, co-hosted by the IAEA and the Belgian government, and featuring prominent officials from the US Department of Energy, will bring together world leaders and other officials to “highlight the role of nuclear energy in addressing the global challenges to reduce the use of fossil fuels, enhance energy security and boost economic development,” according to the event’s website.

Ignoring for a moment that tripling anything by 2050 will be far too late to address the climate crisis now upon us, the Brussels summit is troubling as it marks a notable ramping up of aggressive nuclear power marketing by the IAEA, an agency of the United Nations that is mandated “to deter the spread of nuclear weapons”.

This goal is inherently thwarted by the promotion of civil nuclear energy, which effectively hands over the keys to the nuclear weapons castle by affording non-nuclear weapons countries the technology, materials, know-how and personnel to develop nuclear weapons. History has already demonstrated this with the nuclear weapons programs of India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea, all of which were acquired via the civil nuclear route.

This is precisely the conundrum with Iran, a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that affords non-nuclear weapons countries the “inalienable right” to develop a civil nuclear power program. Iran has long claimed to be doing precisely that and yet the IAEA’s director general, Rafael Grossi, sounded the alarm in late February when he noted that Iran appears to have enriched uranium “well beyond the needs for commercial nuclear use.” This should not be a surprise.

Another contradiction lies in the IAEA’s stated mission to work for “the safe, secure and peaceful application of nuclear science and technology”. To achieve this, the agency eagerly advocates for the global expansion of nuclear power while at the same time worrying about the extreme peril of Ukraine’s 15 civil reactors embroiled in the current Russian war in that country. 

“We are playing with fire, and something very, very catastrophic could take place,” lamented Grossi during a September 2022 UN Security Council briefing, referring to the six Zaporizhzhia reactors in Ukraine, the closest ones to the fighting.

In late February this year Grossi warned again that an “extremely vulnerable off-site power situation continues to pose significant safety and security challenges for this major nuclear facility”, calling the safety and security situation at the Zaporizhzhia plant “precarious”.

And yet, Grossi has also stated: “It’s very simple, the problem in Ukraine and in Russia is they are at war. The problem is not nuclear energy”. But nuclear energy is very much the problem. Wind farms and solar arrays would present no such dangers under similar circumstances.

At COP28, Grossi trumpeted that “global net zero carbon emissions can only be reached by 2050 with swift, sustained and significant investment in nuclear energy”, entirely ignoring the faster, cheaper and safer contribution renewable energy is already making to that end. 

In the same statement Grossi described nuclear power as “resilient and robust” when it is manifestly neither. Nuclear energy’s share of global commercial gross electricity generation hit a four-decade record low in 2022 according to the 2023 World Nuclear Industry Status Report, a downward trend that is unlikely to change.

The IAEA’s triple nuclear energy plan is both a massive over-reach and a reckless and unattainable diversion, given that no new nuclear construction has ever come anywhere close to this pace, even with known and familiar reactor designs. In fact, nuclear power plants have been taking even longer to build in recent years, at even higher cost. 

The proposed “new” smaller reactors — not new at all and rejected for decades as too uneconomical — are designs on paper only that have zero chance of delivery in time and in enough numbers to make any impact on the climate crisis.

The IAEA cannot be both nuclear policeman and promoter. In pushing nuclear power across the globe, the IAEA is complicit in a climate crime that wastes time and money on the needless expansion of expensive, slow and dangerous nuclear power. This takes away vital resources from renewable energy and energy efficiency that would rapidly, safely and affordably address the climate crisis, none of which nuclear power can achieve.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It’s been almost two months since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop killing Gazans and destroying their means of subsistence. So let’s look back and ask (1) how Israel has responded to its “orders,” and (2) how hard the Biden administration has pushed Israel to abide by those orders. Spoiler alert: the short answers are (1) not well and (2) not very.

The American government has provided most of the armaments and targeting technologies being used to kill Gazans by the thousands while turning many of the rest of them into refugees by destroying their homes, offices, schools, and hospitals. Nor did the Biden administration threaten to withdraw that support when Israel blocked shipments of crucial food and fuel to the 25-mile-long Gaza Strip. It also keeps vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions that would hold Israel accountable. And President Biden, despite an increasing amount of rhetorical shuffling, continues to back Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), even though they have ignored the International Court’s orders and continue committing atrocities.

Flouting the Order to Stop the Killing

On January 26th, the International Court of Justice handed down a ruling in a case brought by the Republic of South Africa accusing Israel of genocide. It ordered that Israel must “ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described” in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The court’s first order prohibited “killing members” of the Palestinian population or “causing serious bodily or mental harm” to them. How did Israel respond? Consider that, between late December 2023 and January 21st of this year, the IDF had killed about 5,000 Palestinians, already pushing the death toll in the Gaza Strip past 25,000. The court’s order, issued days later, would have essentially zero effect. Another 5,000-plus Palestinians would be killed by late February, raising the death toll to more than 30,000.

During the month after the ruling, Israeli troops repeatedly killed or injured civilians fleeing to, or taking shelter in, areas the IDF had advertised as “safe zones.” Typically, when, on February 12th, Israeli aircraft attacked 14 homes and three mosques in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, killing 67 Palestinians, some of the survivors toldreporters that they’d been inside tents in a refugee camp. Similarly, on February 22nd, Israeli warplanes struck a residential area in central Gaza, killing 40 civilians, mostly women and children, and wounding more than 100.

Worse yet, the Biden administration has enabled that ongoing killing spree by approving 100 separate military sales to Israel since the conflict began in October. As a former administration official told the Washington Post, “That’s an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of U.S. support.”

In other words, the backbone of the war on Gaza comes with a label: “Made in USA.” In the decade leading up to October 7th, as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has reported, two-thirds of Israel’s arms imports came from the United States. (From 1950 to 2020, the U.S. share was a whopping 83%!)

In just the first couple of months of the war, the Biden administration sent 230 cargo planes and 20 ships full of military goods to Israel, a trove that included 100 BLU-109 bombs (2,000-pounders designed to penetrate hardened structures before exploding), 5,400 MK84 and 5,000 MK82 bunker-busters, 1,000 GBU-39 bombs, 3,000 JDAM bomb-guidance kits, and 200 “kamikaze drones.”

Such powerful bombs, reported Al Jazeera, “have been used in some of the deadliest Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, including a strike that leveled an apartment block in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing more than 100 people.” And yes, such bunker-busters were widely used in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not in places as densely populated as Gaza’s cities. Israeli sources tried to justify that particular death toll by insisting it was necessary to kill one of Hamas’s leaders. If so, we’re talking about a 100-to-1 ratio, or a kind of collective punishment being supported by our tax dollars.

Worse yet, our military seems to have been participating directly in the IDF’s operations. According to the Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein and Matthew Petti, the Defense Department has been providing satellite intelligence and software to help the IDF find and hit targets in Gaza. An “Air Defense Liaison Team,” they report, even traveled to Israel in November to offer targeting help, adding that “for the first time in U.S. history, the Biden administration has been flying surveillance drone missions over Gaza.”

And even then, some members of Netanyahu’s government felt it wasn’t enough. Far right-wing Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich put it this way when it came to President Biden’s warning not to send the IDF into the southern Gazan city of Rafah where hundreds of thousands of refugees were gathered: “American pressure or fear of harming civilians should not deter us from occupying Rafah and destroying Hamas.”

The Israeli hostages held by Hamas are the excuse for so much of this, but the way to free them would be to negotiate, as Israel did successfully last fall, not try to “wipe Hamas off the face of the earth.” The Israelis are mostly bombing civilian sites in that campaign, because they’re reluctant to fight their way through the vast fortified network of tunnels from which the military wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, mounted a formidable resistance to the invasion, largely with weaponry they manufactured themselves, along with ammunition recycled from unexploded ordnance dropped in past Israeli attacks.

Conditions of Life (and Death)

In the second of its orders, the International Court of Justice prohibited “deliberately inflicting… conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part [or] imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

The Netanyahu government and the IDF blew off this directive as well. In the month that followed the ruling, Israeli troops continued to besiege hospitals across Gaza, thoroughly crippling, if not destroying, its healthcare system, especially two of its most important facilities: al-Shifa Hospital in the north and Nasser Hospital in the south. Before it was put out of service in mid-February, Nasser was one of the last hospitals still operating there in any capacity whatsoever. Not surprisingly, the World Health Organization has since reported a striking rise in respiratory infections, diarrhea, chickenpox, jaundice, skin rashes, and scabies, among other horrors.

Israel’s military has also been making conditions unlivable by restricting the food aid entering the territory and destroying local fishing boats, greenhouses, and orchards. It’s a formula for mass starvation. As Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, told the Guardian in late February, “The speed of malnourishment of young children is also astounding. The bombing and people being killed directly is brutal, but this starvation — and the wasting and stunting of children — is torturous and vile.” Around the same time, UNICEF announced that 90% of children under fivein Gaza were consuming “two or fewer food groups a day,” the functional definition of “severe food poverty.” About the same percentage were suffering from infectious diseases, most commonly diarrhea, which only exacerbated their malnutrition.

The world’s top group tracking food emergencies reported on March 17th that famine “is now projected and imminent” in northern Gaza within six weeks, and that “half of the population of the Gaza Strip (1.11 million people) is expected to face catastrophic conditions,” with starvation and death expected to be widespread. Keep in mind that, under the Geneva Conventions, it’s a war crime to starve civilians or “attack, destroy, remove, or render useless any items necessary for civilians’ survival.” Attacking a hospital can also be a war crime. In that context, here’s a thought experiment: What would President Biden and his top officials do if they suspected any other country of committing acts it knew could potentially lead to mass civilian deaths from starvation and disease? Would they shower it with more weaponry?

In defiance of the International Court’s orders — and undeterred by mild tut-tuttingfrom Washington — the Israeli military is also inflicting intolerable “conditions of life” with its approach to Gaza’s water supply. With fuel shipments blocked by the Israelis, Gazans are unable to keep running the desalinization plants that produce a significant amount of the Strip’s water. As a result, by late February, the water supply had dropped to 7% of its prewar level. In desperation, many Gazans, especially children, have been forced to turn to polluted water sources, putting them at risk of severe gastrointestinal disease with no functional hospitals to help them.

Israel is also, in effect, violating the International Court’s bar on “measures intended to prevent births,” since pregnant women are considered especially vulnerable to the food deprivation that is now the essence of life in Gaza. At the Deir al Balah clinic in central Gaza, one out of five maternity patients were being treated for malnutrition in February, causing doctors deep concern, since any malnourished mother will be carrying a malnourished fetus (with awful health prospects for both of them). Meanwhile, the U.N. Population Fund reports that women are miscarrying at a higher rate than before the war, while doctors are being forced to perform emergency caesarian sections without anesthetics, posing a high risk to both mother and child.

Smoke and Parachutes

The International Court of Justice’s third order was to “enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Israel’s leaders are ignoring that as well — or maybe they’ve just reinterpreted “enable” to mean “thwart.”

In January, before the court order, the IDF had been allowing approximately 140 aid trucks through their checkpoints into Gaza daily, instead of the 500 of the prewar period. If Gazans’ needs were to be fully satisfied, that flow of aid should have been steeply increased. Instead, the Israelis reduced the number of trucks allowed into Gaza to only 96 per day in February, all too literally feeding fears of starvation.

To make matters worse, groups of Israeli civilians have been blocking aid convoys, some by lying on the ground in front of the trucks. On a single day in February, 130 trucks were blocked and the IDF made no effort to deter the demonstrators. The Association of International Development Agencies reported that, even when their trucks were getting through the southern border crossings, most of them weren’t managing to reach the central or northern parts of the Strip, including Gaza City, because they were “hindered by Israeli military operations, including constant bombardment and checkpoint closures.”

The most notorious aid-denial incident occurred on February 27th, when at least 118 Palestinians were killed after Israel forces opened fire on a crush of people in Gaza City trying to get food from a truck convoy. Most of the victims of this “Flour Bag Massacre” seem to have been killed either by IDF troops firing from tanks or to have died in the crush of people desperately trying to escape being shot.

The Biden administration did not respond to such incidents as it should have — by threatening to cut off war funding and supplies to Israel, as it had earlier suspendedfinancial support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Gaza’s biggest prewar supplier of food, water, and shelter. The reason: allegations that some Palestinian UNRWA staff had, in the past, aided Hamas. Now, however, Reuters and the Times of Israel suggest that several agency staff members released from Israeli detention were coerced into falsely “admitting” to Hamas affiliations through physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats to their family members. (U.S. aid is still being withheld from UNWRA.)

Instead of pushing the Netanyahu government ever harder to allow more aid, the Biden administration decided to put on an airshow by dropping pallet-loads of packaged food into Gaza from military aircraft. Aid organizations panned the airdrops as little more than empty “gestures,” or a “theater of cruelty.” Even a hulking C-130 cargo plane can carry only the equivalent of one or two aid trucks. And despite similar expenditures, such airdrops can deliver only one-eighth to one-tenth as much food as a truck convoy. Worse yet, tons of cargo dropped from the sky can itself prove deadly. During an airdrop over a refugee camp along the northern Gaza coast on March 8th, a parachute failed to open, and the heavily loaded pallet attached to it plummeted into a group of adults and children who had been watching the drop from a rooftop. Five of them were killed, and 10 injured.

To Netanyahu & Co., the orders issued by the International Court of Justice have had about as much impact as a mosquito bite. And the United States, which could put more pressure on Israel than any other nation, has shied away from substantive action of any sort. President Biden and other officials continue to act largely as if they were just bystanders and the carnage in Gaza was being caused by some random natural disaster.

We aren’t policy experts, but it seems to us that any national leader with a strong sense of justice, of right and wrong, would do whatever was necessary to stop a genocide like the one now unfolding in Gaza. He or she would at least threaten to end all military support to Israel and press other supplying nations to do the same. He or she would put real effort into forcing Israel to let the aid trucks roll in and allowing Palestinians to decide their own fate.

Sadly, those aren’t our leaders. For now, Palestinians remain trapped in a nightmare vividly evoked by a recent photo that shows pallets of food aid parachuting earthward into Gaza as plumes of smoke from Israeli airstrikes rise to meet them — with both the food and the munitions courtesy of the United States of America.

This article is distributed by TomDispatch.

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Photograph Source: Michael Candelori from Philadelphia – CC BY 2.0

On March 3, 2024, the New York Times/Siena poll reported: “Donald Trump leads Joe Biden, 48 percent to 43 percent, among registered voters.” Millions of Americans are in a state of horror over the fact that millions more Americans are poised to elect as president not just a scumbag, but an in-your-face scumbag.

The horrified ask: What will it take for Trump’s supporters to finally become horrified by Trump? How much financial fraud? How much election interference? How many incited insurrections? How many obstructions of justice? How much felonious pilfering of national defense documents? How many contractors ripped off through bankruptcies? How many sexual assaults? How many “grab em by the pussy” comments?

By 2016, Trump recognized that his worshippers are unfazed by his legal and moral crimes, famously saying: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”

Among those millions of Americans who are horrified by Trump and his worshippers, only a small minority of them are horrified by a society that has created them.

A Sick Society and Erich Fromm

How has a society become sick enough to create a Trump and his worshippers?

Psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom, published in 1941, sought to explain the spread of fascism and authoritarianism, most prominently in Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Fromm concluded that freedom from medieval institutions and its traditional bonds, “though giving the individual a new feeling of independence, at the same time made him feel alone and isolated, filled him with doubt and anxiety, and drove him into new submission and into a compulsive and irrational activity.”

Such compulsive and irrational activities include a variety of escapes from being truly alive and forming loving bonds. One type of escape is submission to authoritarians such as Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin (or Putin and Trump). Humans also escape, Fromm noted, into destructiveness and conformity, such as automaton worker and consumer submission to a materialistic society. While there are red-team Trump worshippers, there are also blue-team Apple worshippers—all escaping freedom, fleeing into compulsive and irrational activities that render them loveless, soulless, insane, and dead.

Alienated in their work lives and alienated from their non-communities, Americans are also increasingly alienated from their societal institutions, for which the vast majority of Americans have no trust. A Gallup 2023 poll reported only a minority of Americans have confidence in the police (43%), the medical system (34%) banks (26%), public schools (26%), newspapers (18%), the criminal justice system (17%), television news (14%), big business (14%), and the three branches of the US government: the Supreme Court (27%), the presidency (26%), and Congress (8%).

The term alienation, Fromm reminds us in his 1955 book The Sane Society, was once used to denote an insane person, and he states, “This alienation and automatization leads to an ever-increasing insanity. Life has no meaning, there is no joy, no faith, no reality. Everyone is ‘happy’—except that he does not feel, does not reason, does not love.”

Fromm was a democratic socialist who, in The Sane Society, was sharply critical of both Western capitalism and the Soviet Union’s bastardization of communism: “They both are thoroughly materialistic in their outlook. . . . Everybody is a cog in the machine, and has to function smoothly.”

When a society is organized solely around capital and material accumulations—in other words, dead shit—it is no surprise that such a dead-shit toxic environment will create dead-shit sick families, unless the family rebels from such an environment. The more polite professional term for dead-shit sick is dysfunctional, and to the extent that a family is dysfunctional, it is loveless. Absent loving bonds, there are only transactional bonds in which family members narcissistically get their needs met for attention, security, and power by mutual objectification and manipulation.

The Karpman Drama Triangle

Fifty years ago, there were leading psychiatrists who focused on these dysfunctional mutual objectifications and manipulations. Today, that might come as a surprise to young critical thinkers, seeing only thought-leader psychiatrists who are drug-company whores—spouting pseudo-scientific theories of mental illness that maintain the societal status quo by blaming emotional suffering and behavioral disturbances on nonexistent biological-chemical defects in individuals, rather than challenging societal ills.

Fifty years ago, there were well-known psychiatrists—including Eric Berne, Murray Bowen, Nathan Ackerman, Salvador Minuchin, Don Jackson, and Stephen Karpman—who observed interactions and transactions in families and other groups, distinguishing between narcissistic bonds and loving ones.

The Drama Triangle, described by Karpman in 1968, depicts a destructive interactional drama that occurs in dysfunctional families and other loveless groups. The “actors” in the Drama Triangle play different roles, but are all narcissists committed to objectification and manipulation of others to selfishly meet their needs. The actors play three different roles: the persecutor, the victim, and the rescuer, and their selfish trips are both overt and covert. The same person can take on a different role when needs are not met; for example, victims and rescuers who fail to get their needs met routinely become persecutors.

The perverse genius of Trump—similar to Hitler’s perverse genius—is that he can dramatically project all three of these sicko roles simultaneously; and such a performance is magnetic for the damaged individual stuck in one of these roles and aspiring to another one. For such an individual, this drama is not seen as drama but as reality—a reality in which objectification and manipulation are the only ways to get needs met.

The Persecutor Role: The persecutor in this drama is sometimes called the villain or the bully. When things go wrong for either themselves or for others, the persecutor relishes blaming and humiliating others for their uselessness, stupidity, and weakness. Persecutors take no responsibility for anything bad happening either to themselves or others. They make clear that the opinions of others are worthless, as only they know who and what is to blame. Persecutors meet their needs for power by beating up on a pathetic victim. In clinical practice, a stereotypic persecutor role can be played by parents or spouses of destructive/self-destructive substance abusers, with the persecutor forming a bond with this substance abuser victim via humiliation.

We regularly see how Trump relishes the persecutor role, from his name-calling of his opponents, to his lashing out at anyone who wavers in total loyalty to him. By shamelessly relishing this persecutor role, he magnetically connects with millions of Americans who have shame over their victim role and crave to be persecutors, but are ashamed of that role as well.

The Victim Role: Victims manipulatively demand—aggressively and passive-aggressively so— rescue from others. The goal of victims is to convince others of the victims’ unfair treatment by their world, including family and society, which is to blame for their misery and failures. Victims take no responsibility for their lives, and they pressure others to rescue them, routinely attempting to guilt-trip others. In clinical practice, a stereotypic victim role is played by self-pitying substance abusers who blame their destructive/self-destructive behaviors on the persecution of them by the world, and they manipulate others to rescue them.

Trump claims victimization in many ways—from an election stolen from him, to a justice system out to get him. By shamelessly playing this role, he magnetically connects with millions of Americans who have shame over their victim role.

The Rescuer Role: The selfish motivations of the rescuer are more covert than the other drama participants, but the rescuer is just as narcissistic as the persecutor and the victim. Rescuers—in contrast to caring and loving coaches or teachers—are not truly committed to helping another person, as rescuers need victims to be dependent on them so as to get met their needs for control and attention. Rescuers also meet their status needs of being seen as heroes, which provides the rescuer with a savior identify, making the rescuer deeply dependent on a helpless victim for that identity. In clinical practice, a stereotypic rescuer role is also played by parents or spouses of destructive/self-destructive substance abusers, as such rescuers enable these victims to remain in that role by keeping them financially and psychological dependent on them.

Trump also relishes the role of rescuer and hero, “making America great again” by building the biggest wall to save the United States from Latino invaders, by talking tough to the evil Chinese, and by saving real Americans from the dreaded liberals. By shamelessly playing the role of rescuer and savior, Trump magnetically connects with victims who desperately crave a hero rescuer.

To repeat, Trump’s perverse talent is to simultaneously project the roles of persecutor-victim-rescuer—the unholy trinity that occurs in dysfunctional/loveless families and societies. Trump’s shameless personification of that unholy trinity and his shameless objectification and manipulation of others makes him irresistible to those ashamed of their own darkness.

Trump’s great luck is to appear on the scene when US society has become so sick that playing these Drama Triangle roles no longer costs one status. In the 1960s, US society was sick enough to elect lying bastard presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, however, US society was not so sick as to worship victims and persecutors.

So, after Nixon’s 1960 presidential defeat, when he believed that an election victory had been stolen from him (a belief, unlike Trump’s, that had at least some justification), Nixon voiced his victimization only privately, knowing full well that publicly claiming victimization during this era would end his political career. Nixon would only go “full frontal” as a victim when he believed his political career was over and that he had nothing to lose; this occurred when he lost the 1962 election for governor of California, after which in a press conference he famouly remarked: “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore. Because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” In 1962, Nixon’s victim performance was seen by much of the public as pathetic, ignoble, and unmanly. However, times have clearly changed.

You Want It Darker

In October 2016, shortly before singer-song writer Leonard Cohen’s death and the election of Trump as president, Cohen’s album You Want It Darker was released. In the album’s title cut, “You Want It Darker,” Leonard begins this way:

If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game
If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame
If thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame

As dark of a picture I’ve so far painted, perhaps I’ve been too sanguine. In “The Mass Psychology of Trumpism,” psychologist Dan P. McAdams, author of The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump (2020) states: “My argument, as strange as it might sound, is that Trump’s enduring appeal stems from the perception—his own and others’—that he is not a person.”

Could it be that the more US society is dehumanizing and ruled by objectifications and manipulations that an actual person—a human being capable of loving relationships—makes many Americans uncomfortable, and so increasing numbers of Americans are compelled to worship a nonperson?

McAdams reminds us of the victim-persecutor-rescuer archetype of Satan who is able to manipulate damaged people to worship him:

“A malignant narcissism rages at the core of Satan’s personality. Cast out of heaven for his overmastering pride, Satan wants to be God, resents the fact that he is not God and insists that his supreme worth entitles him to privileges that nobody else should enjoy while undergirding his reign as sovereign of the mortal world below. Wholly self-centered, cruel, vindictive and devoid of compassion and empathy, Satan nonetheless possesses substantial charisma and charm. Completely contractual in his approach to interpersonal relationships, he has perfected the art of the deal, as when, in the Gospel of Luke, Satan tempts Jesus with earthly powers and riches in return for his adulation: ‘If thou will therefore worship me, all shall be thine.’”

McAdams’s depiction of Satan has a further uncanny resemblance to Trump: “He is not troubled by a complex inner life, by the doubts, ambivalences and moral quandaries that routinely run through the consciousness of mature humans.”

For those ashamed of their humanity, it is “weakness” to take seriously marital fidelity, friendship, civility, and human decency. Thus, Trump, who pisses on these, is to be worshipped by the shame-based.

Trump sees himself as unlike other humans, McAdams points out: “He has often compared himself to a superhero. Trump has famously described himself as a ‘stable genius’ who has never made a mistake.” Trump’s belief about himself is also the belief about him of his worshippers, who view the Drama Triangle as life itself, and who see themselves as victims needing a super hero persecutor/rescuer to save them.

Escaping the Drama Triangle

Psychotherapists routinely see clients who report depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and other emotional suffering and behavioral disturbances; not all but many of these clients grew up in a Drama Triangle family, or they have naively entered into this drama through a significant relationship. Skilled therapists see the emotional suffering/behavioral disturbances of such clients not as “symptoms” of “mental illness,” but instead as a wake-up call to the reality that their soul is being threatened through participation in a sick drama.

Useful therapy begins with the client gaining awareness of theirs and others’ roles in this drama, and therapy then facilitates the gaining of strength to extricate from this sick game. Helpful for some clients is discovering alternatives to the “one-up” and “one-down” roles of the Drama Triangle. One such alternative is The Empowerment Dynamic (TED), created by David Emerald.

In Emerald’s empowering-loving alternative, instead of playing the victim role, the client is encouraged to become a creator (or problem solver) who employs life’s challenges as fuel for learning and discovering, and who focuses on solution outcomes. The alternative to the persecutor is the challenger (or truth teller) who, rather than bullying and humiliating, lovingly facilitates others seeing crucial realities. And the rescuer is encouraged to become a coach (or teacher) who, rather than enabling the dependence of a victim, sees others as capable of solving their own problems, assisting them via questions rather than sermons to examine goals and focus on consequences of their choices.

However, if a client is committed to a Drama Triangle role—such as being a victim—one can be a highly talented therapist yet find oneself becoming a sicko persecutor or a rescuer. We all become sick when we remain in the Drama Triangle.

It is difficult to predict what will happen in US society. As noted, only a small minority of those millions of Americans who are horrified by Trump and his worshippers recognize them as symptoms of a sick society. Only a small minority are not in denial that increasing alienation and automatization in US society, in Fromm’s words,“leads to an ever-increasing insanity,” where, “Life has no meaning, there is no joy, no faith, no reality. Everyone is ‘happy’—except that he does not feel, does not reason, does not love.”

Insane societies, lacking reason and love, submit to authoritarians and their henchman, who can either be quite clever or more dull-witted, and who can either be more or less capable of wreaking havoc. Americans, at least European Americans, have been relatively lucky in this regard. But it is insane to believe that such luck will last forever.

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Photograph Source: Djm-leighpark – CC BY-SA 4.0

Last week, a Bahamian friend living in Nassau was telling me he was getting cracked conch on Kemp Street, a Bahamian version of UK fish and chips. I was sorry not to be there. Instead, I was a guest of the NHS, our precious National Health Service. Our publicly funded healthcare system accessible to those living in the UK, no matter their citizenship, and begun after WWII when healthcare even more important than ever.

In the Accident & Emergency (A&E) department of my local South East London hospital, 64 people were presently lined up on plastic chairs. They were like characters in a Beatles song. We were all together watching a plain wide screen declaring 9 hours and 21 minutes of waiting time.

There was faltering public confidence naturally in the NHS in the wake of these types of delay, unaided by fresh difficulties in accessing GP surgeries. The latest rating from CQC (Care Quality Commission) was that this hospital ‘requires improvement’, though for some in the room the process had already begun, and they were sat back down again. As the day progressed, however, the room would almost burst with patients — free healthcare does not a sick-free nation make — and most of the medical staff would be exhausted.

I shifted in my chair. ‘Wherever the art of medicine is loved,’ said Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, ‘there is also a love of humanity.’ The man next to me sat slumped in a wheelchair while his daughter dabbed the corner of his mouth. An elderly woman with a bloody lip in the row in front was perched next to an over-anxious husband in a wheelchair, while their two sons told everyone they dropped everything to get there.

Coughs. Sputum. A lot of that. Groans. Jugs of water and paper cups sitting on a nearby table.

At which point, a male in his late teens, barking loudly at a similarly aged female, limped into the building, loosely accusing his friend with whatever wreckage fell from his mouth. The female about-turned, both voices trailing behind them as they happened again in the big bad world.

Still feeling gratitude for the care being given, I was forgetting that NHS staff need more than our gratitude. Proper pay, as one would tell me later, and better resources — these were the orders of the day. It was all very well thinking we all need each other. The NHS was a never-ending funding crisis. There were staff shortages, impossibly high demand, weakening testing and preventative care. Not to mention well-documented profiteers still running amok down the hospital corridors.

Even Conservative Party donor Frank Hester — who said Labour MP Diane Abbott made him ‘want to hate all black women’ and that she ‘should be shot’ — has received more than £400m in swift and hugely profitable private contracts from the NHS and other government bodies.

Which is not to say hospitals don’t offer insight into the human condition. Hippocrates also said healing was a matter of time but also a matter of opportunity.

A man to my left slumped forward like a broken doll. At first sight, he looked like Laurence Olivier’s Archie Rice in Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer. He wore a loud checked suit, incongruous tie, and tiger-patterned shoes, which curled up at the end. He was trembling hard. Not a tall man, his legs while seated didn’t reach the ground. Popping one eye open when his name — a Slavic name — was called, he placed both on the ground, and marched towards the awaiting nurse, herself doing an impromptu head-count — like Nurse Ratched in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. All that was missing was the music of Jack Nitzsche.

I was still suffering from acute renal failure due to a suspected kidney stone. No big deal if I avoided organ failure, and it did allow me privileged access to the state-of-play in the NHS today as I awaited results from blood tests and a CT scan.

My assigned doctor beckoned me forward. I had noticed his gloomy disposition earlier, ascribable to a heavy workload, but he seemed lighter now and confirmed that I had a very large stone requiring a temporary stent in the kidney.

I was moved to an area with six large padded blue chairs, confusingly numbered ‘Red Chair 1’, ‘Red Chair 2’, etc. The man opposite, who was grimacing heavily, betrayed a natural friendliness. ‘I am 86,’ he chipped in, though he looked impressively younger. ‘Just been diagnosed with terminal cancer,’ he added, like a man describing a simple walk.

I said I was terribly sorry. He didn’t seem to hear, shouting instead that his wife had SAD: ‘Seasonally Affective Disorder,’ he strained. ‘Just starting to get better, too.’ He nodded and smiled. Insisting upon standing the whole time, he swayed about momentarily on his hips, just like a character in a Patrick O’Brian sea novel. To me, this man was heroic.

Next to him sat the man in the loud checked suit, still trembling. We had been placed on intravenous drips. Out of nowhere, a third man announced he had leukaemia. ‘He must be cold,’ he said, interrupting himself and pointing to the man in the suit. ‘Can’t we help?’ he asked. I placed my great coat across him and called for a nurse.

Just then, the SAD wife’s husband declared he could no longer hear because the battery in his hearing aid had run out. At which point, leukaemia man said he took something to help relieve himself, which was why in no time he was grabbing a paper cup and stuffing it down his trousers, the expression on his face one of imperious relief.

Next, a Rastafarian with a soundbox and walking stick wandered through, playing soft reggae and wishing everyone well. ‘Hopin’ y’all iris,’ he kept saying. ‘’Iris’?’ asked leukaemia man. ‘Feelin’ good,’ explained the Rasta, grinning at his bright red operating socks.

Then a youngish couple arrived, the woman in obvious pain. The man was being aggressive to one of the doctors, a young Muslim woman with a headscarf, accusing her of being rude, an accusation she politely declined.

His partner gasped and rolled. I wondered if she had a kidney stone. This was when more medical colleagues arrived, the man by now accusing them ALL of rudeness — who cares for beauty if your manners are ugly, I was thinking.

‘I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one,’ said NHS founder Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevin — presently played by Michael Sheen in ‘Nye’ at London’s Olivier Theatre — but this one antagonistic man seemed more in need of an ashram in Poona than even warm altruism.

Half an hour later, a needle was stabbed into my stomach, appropriately enough while looking at photographs of whale intestines taken by Jeffrey St Clair with his niece on a faraway beach in Oregon.

A call to prayer emitted from the hospital tannoy — Ramadan was due any moment — and I was wheeled to the ward as if on a camera dolly. Behind my bed’s drawn curtains, I could hear a nearby couple whispering.

I was introduced to the anaesthetist, an elegant woman with a worldly vibe, then to my surgeon, a warm and confident Bahamian with political aspirations. He was soon outlining the specifics of the insertion of the stent. This would be done under general anaesthetic via what I once remembered Italians calling the pepperoncino.

Sure enough, I soon lay beneath bright white lights in an anaesthetic room as Calumn, Ola and Sammy — I read their name-tags — put me to sleep. ‘Here’s what we like to call a nice little gin and tonic for you,’ said Calumn, administering the drugs.

I fell down a giant manhole, lights flashing as I dropped and dropped, arms gently flailing, music playing, sound effects, the surface by now so far away.

All life had become illusion. Jorge Luis Borges sat in a giant armchair stroking a tiny bird. The subconscious had left long ago. Welcome to the sub-subconscious.

Then I heard what sounded like wind chimes, animal sounds, an imagined bluebottle on a summer’s day.

At last, I was coming round. I was in a strange place. I was in the recovery room.

After being returned to my ward, I lay beneath my sheets as an unseen man in a neighbouring bed spoke in Urdu. I peered down at my catheter from where blood was flowing heavily into a bag. I called out for the nurse who took one look at it and ran for help, before returning more calmly to say I should drink more water, which I did. I began to feel better, the blood in the catheter clearing.

The catheter was removed the next day, after which the surgeon discharged me, saying he would remove the stent and work out what to do with the stone a few weeks later. ‘You can sail and play golf,’ he smiled.

I have long admired American poet Gary Snyder: ‘Doom scenarios, even though they might be true, are not politically or psychologically effective. The first step… is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world,’ he wrote. Placing the very real problems of the NHS aside for one moment, acknowledging the seriously injured patients trapped inside Gaza’s hospitals, remembering dying victims of war in Sudan’s growing refugee camps, acknowledging brutish casualties on Ukraine’s frontlines, I have to say I was already looking forward to hearing more from my surgeon about Bahamian politics. Perhaps we can all be getting cracked conch on Kemp Street.

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The Atlantic logo

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

– Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, 1933.

These are indeed perilous times for the United States at home and abroad.  It is unfortunate, however, that various experts and observers are advancing speculative theories that add an element of fear that is unwarranted and destabilizing.  U.S. experts on Russia have exaggerated the possibility of Russia’s use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine as well as the possibility that a Putin victory in Ukraine would lead to additional Russian attacks in the Baltics or East Europe.  Sinologists have exaggerated the threat of a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan without presenting any new evidence for their assessments.  Leading experts on North Korea, including Professor John Delury, argue that Kim Jong-un “may be preparing for war.”

And now The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer is spreading fear about the home front.  In his cover story, Foer emphasizes a political threat to the U.S. Jewish community that will “end an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans–and demolish the liberal order they helped establish.”  Foer argues that the United States is holding its Jews “at arm’s length,” which makes America “more intent on hunting down scapegoats than addressing underlying defects.”  In any event, Jews in the United States are not the minority most likely to be scapegoated by white supremacists.

Foer concludes that “such societies are prone to decline,” citing England’s “long dark age after expelling its Jews in 1290” and “Czarist Russia limping toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s.”  History may repeat itself, but each time it is different.
The Jewish community in the United States is economically prosperous and politically powerful, and there are no signs that this will change in any way.  There has been no Jewish diaspora anywhere in the world that rivals the American homeland.  The great regret of the founding generation of Israel was that the Jews in the United States had no interest in making “aliyah” to Israel, which is still true today.  But Foer lamely supports his arguments for increased Jewish anxiety by citing the efforts of his own mother to get a passport from Poland, the country of her birth, and an immigration lawyer he knows who had obtained a German passport.  These anecdotal examples prove nothing of course, and the view that life in Poland or Germany may provide a “safer haven” and assuage Jewish anxiety is risible.

There are legitimate reasons for Jewish Americans to be concerned by dire international conditions in view of their historical experiences as well as the examples of anti-Semitism that Foer cites. But the notion that the United States is on a course that would be the “end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them” is both hyperbolic and polemical.  In view of the overrepresentation of Jews in the Congress, the judiciary and law, in medicine, in technology, and in finance, The Atlantic’s handwringing over the plight of Jewish Americans is particularly risible.
The Atlantic would be better off examining the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a factor in the increase of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism as well as the deep divisions in the progressive movement, the Democratic Party, and even the Jewish-American community as a result of the horrific military campaign that Israeli Defense Forces are waging.

Even the Israeli military is growing critical of Netanyahu’s leadership.  Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus, who commands the only division still fighting on the ground in Gaza, said that Israel’s political leaders must “get their act together.  You have to be worthy of us.”  Thus far, Netanyahu has not acknowledged any responsibility for the war and refuses to permit an investigation into “what went wrong.”

Netanyahu’s actions have also fractured the Jewish-American consensus on Israel, although this could actually lead to a more cohesive and stronger liberal and progressive order in the United States in the long run.  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s criticism of the Netanyahu government suggests that he recognizes the increased opposition within the progressive and liberal movement regarding Israel’s genocidal actions, and as a result has drastically changed his position on the war.

One of the lessons of the Cold War should have been the danger of exaggerating the threat or key adversaries in order to avoid the great cost of unnecessary military buildups.  We spent unnecessarily against a Soviet “threat” that was hyped beyond reality.  Politicians and pundits alike are failing to actually assess the the threat or the adversary, which is contributing to budget deficits and heightened fears.  More time should be devoted to the study of diplomatic history in order to examine precedents for improving bilateral relations.  Fear is driving us toward arms races; diplomacy could drive us to arms control and disarmament as well as a more stable international environment.

The attention given to the notion of a threat to the Jewish-American community draws attention away from the horrors that Netanyahu’s right-wing government is doing to Palestinians in Gaza.  The ruthlessness of Israel’s military response to the terrible events of October 7th is far more threatening to the cohesion of the Jewish community in the United States than the isolated acts of anti-Semitism that Foer cites.  According to the New Republic, a quarter of American Jews consider Israel an “apartheid state,” and 22 percent believe Israel is committing genocide.  Shaul Magid, distinguished fellow of Jewish studies at Dartmouth, argues that “American Jewry is kind of broken.”  Once again, we have “met the enemy, and he is us.”

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Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv – CC BY 2.0

After five months of doubling down with Israel against Palestinians in Gaza, the Biden administration now finds itself walking in two directions.  On the one hand, it continues to supply U.S. bombs that fall indiscriminately on both northern and southern Gaza.  At the same time, it air drops food parcels for the hungry.  While President Biden now acknowledges that the Israeli response to the October 7 massacre is “over the top,” last weekend he reaffirmed his unconditional support of Israel, declaring: “I am never going to leave Israel.”

In response to the October 7 massacre, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his plan to eliminate Hamas through an exterminating war of retribution against Gaza.  When Biden endorsed that plan on October 10 and promised more weapons, he must have known that Hamas could not really be eliminated so long as the Israeli oppression continued. He must have known that a scorched earth campaign in the densely populated Gaza Strip would be a war on the Palestinian population, not just Hamas.   He must have known that in aiding Israel his administration would be condemning innocent Palestinians to extreme suffering and death.

Not only did the Israeli war cabinet launch a relentless bombing campaign in Gaza, but it also barred the entry of food, clean water, fuel, and other human necessities from entering the Gaza Strip. As its starvation war tactic pushed Gazans to the brink of famine, Israel began to allow some humanitarian aid, but it has fallen far short of what is required to meet the needs of more than two million war-traumatized population.

By early January, UN officials and academic experts were warning that Gaza was “on the brink of famine.”  Yet Israeli plans to invade Rafah (where more than a million Palestinians had sought refuge), “day after” issues, and unsuccessful hostage negotiations were the stories favored by the press. Almost nothing about famine in the major journals. Meanwhile, Israel has continued to bomb and attack targets in both north and south Gaza, raising the death toll to more than 31,000.

Only in February did the Biden administration wake up to the possibility of widespread famine. In various diplomatic meetings, it urged Israel to allow more food trucks to enter Gaza and to take steps to reduce civilian casualties.  The IDF responded with bombardments of Rafah and targeted attacks on hungry Gazans surrounding food trucks. Both Israeli citizens and some soldiers have blocked aid convoys at some entry points.

Instead of withholding arms, restricting them, or breaking relations with Netanyahu, the Biden team came up with two unilateral schemes that were designed more to allay concerns of constituents than to meet the immediate needs of hungry Palestinians.  The first was to deliver parcels by air, an inefficient and costly method as compared with deliveries by truck convoys. The air drops have proved to be dangerous as well, killing some on the ground when parachutes fail to inflate.  The second is to construct a floating pier that can receive food deliveries by sea.

The pier idea may have been a good one two or three months ago.  Now it appears as a cruel joke because thousands of intended beneficiaries will likely die of starvation before the pier is operational two months from now.  From the outside, Biden’s policy is manifestly inconsistent.  It calls for humanitarian assistance while allowing U.S. bombs and bullets to kill Gazans. What is Biden’s goal?

As pro-Palestinian protests (largely ignored by the media) erupt around the world, the U.S. President has moderated somewhat his adamant pro-Israel position and even endorsed Senator Schumer’s criticisms of Netanyahu. Yet his actions to support Israel speak louder than his calls for Israeli moderation.  Indeed, his words and actions are both too little and too late.

If President Biden really wants to stop the killing in Gaza, here is what he could do:

–Suspend all military aid and weapons transfers.

–Accept the UN Security Council’s call for a ceasefire.

–Threaten to break diplomatic relations.

–Impose sanctions on War Cabinet members.

–Negotiate a temporary refuge for Gazans in Egypt.

–Support legal accountability for war crimes.

Sadly, none of these steps are likely to occur in the current administration; and even if carried out would be too little and too late to save the many thousands who have already perished from Israeli bombings. Yet they are better than nothing to protect those who still live.

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Photograph Source: Fibonacci Blue – CC BY 2.0

How those years do fly by. We’ve now come nearly a quarter of the way through our 21st century.  Who’s “winning” this century so far? An easy question to answer: the richest among us.

Those rich are riding high. In the Hamptons, the prime Long Island summer getaway for Wall Street’s finest, realtors are now expecting an “especially lively” spring sales season. In February, Bloomberg reports, new listings in the Hamptons soared 51 percent over their level a year ago. The leap in listings running between $5 million and $10 million: up 136 percent. Listings over $20 million tripled.

The biggest steal in the lot? Maybe a 5,261-square-foot manse in Southampton that sits on 2.4 acres, boasts a pool and a tennis court, and sits adjacent to a nature preserve. A mere $7 million!

Here in the United States as a whole, show stats from the World Inequality Database, our top 1 percent’s wealth has so far this century jumped over 20 percent — and these wealthy are paying markedly less of their incomes in taxes than they did at our current century’s start.

Credit these happy tax times for America’s most financially favored to George W. Bush and Donald Trump. The first term of the second Bush to sit in the White House saw two major rich people-friendly tax cuts enacted — in 2001 and 2003 — and Donald Trump, in 2017, added another.

How much happiness have these cuts brought the wealthiest among us? Researchers at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, in a just-released statistical deep dive into our new century’s first quarter, tell that story quite well.

The Bush tax cuts didn’t fully phase in until 2010. In that year, an earlier CBPP reporthad noted, the Bush cuts raised the after-tax incomes of America’s richest 1 percent by 6.7 percent. In that same year, the Bush tax cuts inched up the after-tax incomes of the nation’s poorest 20 percent by just 1 percent.

The Trump tax cut in 2017 simply magnified that reward-the-rich trend. Top 1-percenters now stand to gain, on average, an estimated $61,090 in 2025 from the Trump tax giveaway. Our richest one-tenth of 1 percent, meanwhile, will be pocketing an average tax-time gain of $252,300, over 3,600 times the $70 gain that taxpayers in America’s poorest 20 percent will realize.

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Projecting an image onto smoke with a mirror, from Nouvelles récréations physiques et mathématiques (1770)

That coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the US mass media is distorted by a bias in favor of Israel is hardly news to people more or less in command of their faculties. But events since October 7 have brought to light examples that go well beyond the usual daily distortions to outright lying—lies that rival those of the WMD fabrications used to justify the US invasion of Iraq.

The PBS News Hour ran a piece on February 21 about the recent story that claimed twelve employees of the major UN agency that provides aid to Palestinians, UNRWA, had planned and participated in Hamas’s attack on October 7.

The piece was the usual ‘balanced’ format: two people presenting opposing sides of the story. The Israeli side was represented by Col. Grisha Yakubovich who was the former head of the Israeli agency that coordinated with various NGOs providing various forms of aid in the Occupied Territories, COGA. The other guest Mathis Schmale was the director of UNRWA in Gaza from 2017 to 2021. Nick Schiffrin the journalist began by asking Schmale about UNRWA’s general role in ‘the territories’—he skipped the usual term ‘the occupied territories’ possibly out of deference to Yakubovich since the Israeli occupation—now more than five decades long—is illegal according to the UN. ‘Occupation’ is now a polite term but with two meanings: the IDF presence in the West Bank, illegal per the UN charter and the second sense being the slow and gradual theft of Palestinian land by settlers accompanied by the declaration of more ‘military zones’ for the IDF.

Schmale began by saying he was now part of a UN mission in Somalia and that he had been the head of the UNRWA mission in Gaza from 2017 to 2021. During that time he had seen no evidence among the Palestinian staffers of any affiliations with Hamas or even sympathizers of Hamas—the Palestinians made up all of the 12 thousand staffers of UNRWA except for a handful of Schmale’s immediate UN employees. When Schiffrin mentioned parts of a dossier that Israeli intelligence had shared with the UN and US intelligence Schmale said he had not seen the dossier and could not comment on it.

Schiffrin then addressed Yakubovich, whose service in Gaza overlapped that of Schmale. Yakubovich said that not only were twelve members of UNRWA participants in the planning and attack itself, but at least ten percent of the 12,000 employees of UNRWA in Gaza were members of Hamas or sympathizers. His evidence for this was that ‘everyone knew it.’ Everyone but Schmale, apparently. The difference between the two men’s replies was clear. Schmale’s response was factual while Yakubovich was merely assertions. When Schiffrin returned to Schmale he said that this issue was never raised with him by anyone during his time in Gaza and that he and his UN staff were vigilant about making sure that the Palestinians who made up the vast number of UNRWA’s employees had no affiliation with Hamas or any other political organization that might compromise the strict neutrality of UNRWA. Yakubovich’s retort was simply that no one would ‘make up’ such a thing because it would not be ‘logical.’ Schiffrin never pressed Yakubovich to identify who ‘everyone’ was. Nor did Schiffrin ask that since Israel has an agency called Hasbara devoted wholly to spreading propaganda, why it would not be ‘logical’ to make up that figure? While Yakubovich spoke in the generalities of propaganda Schmale spoke based on what he could verify from his own experience. Schmale spoke to Schiffrin answering his questions while Yakubovich ignored Schiffrin’s questions and spoke to the American audience.

Schiffrin moved on and brought up the matter of the vast network of tunnels in Gaza. Here Schmale made an interesting comment. While the vast number of the tunnels were the creation of Hamas, in fact the tunnels under the largest hospital in Gaza al-Shifa were made by Israel. Again Yakubovich ignored this remark—with its implication for the Israeli penetration and presence in Gaza before the attack of October 7, 2023 took place.

At this point, it should have been clear that the ‘balance’ of this interview was between Yakubovich–interspersed with remarks about the good works of UNRWA though it was no longer needed—and Schmale’s observations based on his own experiences of what had happened and what had not happened during his tenure in Gaza.

Israel has only provided edited parts of a dossier on this issue, but based on that information—if it deserves that term—the US, Canada, Australia and its European have suspended all aid to UNRWA which has led now to the shortages of medicine, food and water for the Palestinians in Gaza. Only obtuse or ideologically blinded people can deny that the shortages of medicine, food and water are part of Netanyahu’s intent to kill Palestinians who survive the military assault. This story may serve as prologue to another story that is used to justify Israel’s all-out assault on Gaza.

This is the story of what has been called the ‘systematic weaponization of rape’ by Hamas on October 7. This story began in a New York Times article published in late December 2023 whose headline was “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” What follows here draws upon two exposés of that article. The first is a December 6 article published on the site Grayzone, “Scandal-stained Israeli ‘Rescue’ Group Fuels October 7 Fabrications,” written by that site’s chief editor Max Blumenthal.  The second is a February 28 article published on the site Intercept, “Between the Hammer and the Anvil,” written by Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim and Daniel Boguslaw. The Grayzone article concentrates mostly on the sources of disinformation about the October attack, while the Intercept articles focus mostly on the New York Times article that went viral and has been quoted by Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and numerous other US politicians, and cited by other mainstream news sources such as CNN, the Washington Post and numerous other people and publications.

On October 11 CBS reported that a man named Yossi Landau said he, “saw with his own eyes children and babies who had been beheaded.” CNN reported this same claim adding that it had been confirmed by Benjamin Netanyahu—whose record for truth-telling vies with that of Trump. Then Biden repeated the claim at a press conference also on October 11, despite objections by some of his staff and ignoring the recorded deaths that included only one infant dying in the attack, an eleven-month-old, Mila Cohen. Biden said at a press conference said he had seen “pictures of terrorists beheading children.” My quick Google image search yielded no such photos.

On October 12 in an interview with the Israeli Foreign Ministry-funded i24 channel, Landau went on to say that when he entered a home in Kibbutz Beeri, “we see a pregnant lady lying on the floor, and then we turn her around and see that the stomach is cut open, wide open. The unborn baby, still connected with an umbilical cord, was stabbed with a knife. And the mother was shot in the head. And you use your imagination, trying to figure out what came first.”

 Then at a Senate hearing on October 31 Antony Blinken described an instance of the savagery done by Hamas on October 7: “A young boy and girl, 6 and 8 years old, and their parents around the breakfast table,” Blinken intoned. “The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.”

Both CNN and the White House soon had to retract the claims about beheaded babies. A White House spokesman said, “The president based his comments about the alleged atrocities on the claims from Netanyahu’s spokesman and media reports from Israel.”

Rosenthal says that Landau appeared to have “crafted” his testimony about the pregnant woman with her belly cut open and her unborn child shot dead with the umbilical cord still connected to her based on a rumor that an anonymous military source spread online two days prior, according to which the supposedly pregnant victim was thirty years old. As Rosenthal says, “This alone discredited Landau’s claim, because the only female victims recorded in or around Beeri were 44-year-old Rinat Segev Even and 22-year-old Tair Bira — and neither were pregnant. In fact, no pregnant women were registered among those killed on October 7.”

Yossi Landau, the source for these stories, is the head of a group known as ZAKA that bills itself as devoted to “disaster victim identification”—the acronym ZAKA stands for that in Hebrew.  The co-founder of ZAKA was a man named Yehuda Meshi-Zahav according to Brad Pearce who wrote an exposé of the group “attempted suicide while facing a variety of sex crimes accusations in 2021.” Apparently Meshi-Zahav died a year later in a coma resulting from his attempt.” And he was known in the Haredi or orthodox community as “the Haredi Jeffrey Epstein,” due to what Max Blumenthal calls, “his well-known penchant for raping young people of both sexes”—a  fact that must have been known to Landau and other members of ZAKA. That ZAKA was the source for the Israeli investigation of the claims of widespread rape and other gruesome sex crimes is ironic, as Blumenthal says. In addition to his sexual exploits, Meshi-Zahav had also embezzled millions of the donations made to ZAKA with the result that the group was nearly bankrupt by October 7. Landau who was head of the southern branch of the group immediately saw the attack as a potential bonanza for the group and rushed to the site before Israeli police and forensic expert arrived. He was not mistaken. An article in Haaretz one of the leading Israeli dailies said that ZAKA had raised 13.7 million dollars since October 7.

The volunteers of ZAKA have no forensic training. According to Intercept, another site that debunked the story of Hamas’s heinous crimes, ZAKA volunteers moved corpses to create photos to support their stories, thus destroying much of site for Israeli forensic experts who arrived later.

Besides the beheaded babies, among the stories propagated by Landau and other ZAKA members and sympathizers were these:

+ The New York Times article “Screams Without Words” led off with a story about a woman named Gal Abdush who it said had been raped. The people the Times chose to initially put the story together had no experience in investigative journalism as one of them, Anat Schwartz, admitted. Schwartz was an Israeli filmmaker with no experience as a journalist. The other person was Adam Sella, whose own journalism experience before October 7 consisted mostly of writing about food and culture. When the problems with the story emerged Schwartz spoke up about her fruitless quest for other sources to confirm ZAKA’s account. “Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped,” the Times article labeled Abdush “a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the October 7 attacks.”  Her sister has denied she was raped. Abdush messaged her family on WhatsApp fifty-one minutes after the Hamas attack began saying she was in trouble at the border—with Gaza that is. Presumably, she and her husband were being taken as hostages. Nine minutes later her husband Nagi Abdush texted that she had been shot and he was next to her body. Whether deliberately or in a crossfire is unclear, but the latter seems likely since obviously they could not serve as hostages. The latter also seems more likely since her husband was right next to her and he was not shot until forty-five minutes later. One of the residents of the kibbutz also said that the attackers’ chief goal seemed to be taking hostages to be used to negotiate with them in exchange for Palestinian prisoners as Hamas had done in the past. During those forty-five minutes, he never mentioned that his wife had been raped. Members of Abdush’s family later said they felt misled and exploited by the New York Times article that claimed Abdush had been raped. Abdush’s sister flat-out denied that she had been raped. Her brother-in-law said simply, “The media invented it.” Despite the evidence accumulating in various sources both of web journals devoted to media critiques and other mainstream news sources like Reuters, the New York Times has chosen to brazen it out relying on its ability to drown out the criticism of its story. As far as I know, the only major media source that has questioned the Times article is CNN. The New York Times has only as another Intercept journalist puts it “quietly amended” its headline to “UN Team Finds Grounds to Support Reports of Sexual Violence in Hamas Attack.”

+ Simcha Greiniman, Landau’s deputy was another copious source for the fabricated atrocities. Greiniman said he found naked women tied to trees at the Supernova music festival. He claimed he found a toddler with a knife stuck through his head. Another ZAKA spokesperson said he found a sexually mutilated woman’s corpse under rubble with her organs removed. No evidence was found of this.

+ Hamas fighters were said to have cut fetuses out of Israeli women’s wombs, severed a girl’s arm and baked a baby in an oven. No evidence was found of this either.

+ Besides the lurid tale of the pregnant woman who was cut open and the unborn fetus taken out of her with the umbilical cord still attached, there were other assertions made by Landau and his assistants of other pregnant women being slaughtered and abused. However, the only female victims in Beeri whose deaths were recorded that day were 44-year-old Rinat Segev Even and 22-year-old Tair Bira. Neither was pregnant and no pregnant women in Beer were in the death records. About the disemboweled pregnant woman, the kibbutz denied the story. To try to bolster the story of the woman and her unborn someone posted a video on social media as ‘evidence.’ The wife of the President of Israel Isaac Herzog wrote in a November 22 op-ed for Newsweek, “a Hamas video from a kibbutz shows terrorists torturing a pregnant woman and removing her fetus.” In fact, the video consisted of the claim of a ZAKA volunteer with video footage made by a Mexican drug cartel torturing and killing a captive.

+ Landau said he saw twenty children tied up, shot and then burned, their charred corpses then being heaped into two piles. As Rosenthal says, only thirteen children were recorded as dying that morning and the three were the most found in a single location.

+ In Kibbutz Beeri, a six-year-old boy and his eight-years-old, seated around a table for breakfast watched as Hamas fighters gouged out one of their father’s eyes, cut off one of their mother’s breasts, then cut off the girl’s foot and some of the boy’s fingers before they killed them. But the only children in Beeri near that age whose deaths were recorded that day were twelve-year-old twins Liel and Yanai Hetzrzoni who were killed by a shell from an Israeli tank.

+ The twelve-year-old girl Liel Hetzroni was the subject of many false reports. The Israeli Foreign Ministry wrote on its Twitter/X account of Hetzroni, “This little girl’s body was burned so badly that it took forensic archeologists more than six weeks to identify her. All that remains of 12-year-old Liel Hetzroni is ash and bone fragments. May her memory be a blessing.” But an Israeli eyewitness said the girl was killed by an Israeli tank shell.

Blumenthal has done a more extensive analysis of the origins of this story in an interview with the frequent contributor to CounterPunch, Chris Hedges. What follows is a summary of it.

A resident of the Kibbutz Beeri Yasmin Porat was among the hostages taken by Hamas fighters on the morning of October 7. She was in the house with Liel Hetzroni. She said the Hamas fighters thought mistakenly that the house was surrounded by Israeli troops. So they sent some of the hostages out and called the Israeli police to attempt to negotiate their exit. When Israeli troops finally arrived a ceasefire ensued. Her own captor decided to surrender. He stripped himself naked and used Hetzroni as a shield.  The Israelis held their fire seeing he was not a suicide bomber, and the man freed Hetzroni and surrendered. According to Porat, there were still fourteen Israeli hostages in the house along with thirty-nine Hamas fighters.

She told this to the Israeli commander and she basically drew a diagram of the various locations of the hostages and Hamas fighters. Regarding Liel Hetzroni she was quite specific about where Liel and her twin Yanai and her great-aunt Ayala were located near the kitchen.

The stand-off lasted until about four in the afternoon when both sides started firing. At seven-thirty in the evening the Israelis called for a tank. The tanks fired two shells at the house and only one person came out of the house, an Israeli Hadas Dagan. Dagan told her that the Hamas militants had not killed any of the hostages. Porat concluded her account that the militants “did not abuse us. They treated us very humanely.”

The Israeli commander was acting under what has been a standing order in the IDF for some time. The order is termed the “Hannibal Directive” of 1986 due to the fact that the Carthaginian general who killed himself so as not to be taken prisoner and put on display in Rome after his long years of fighting Rome. But the use of ‘Hannibal’ is a misnomer for the standing order which over time had given Israeli commanders the option of firing on their own soldiers—and in this case on Israeli civilians—if they deem it necessary to sacrifice them to kill enemy troops and weaponry. The directive was rescinded in 2016 but the Israeli response in Kibbutz Beeri would seem to indicate it is still unofficially operative.

Still more details about the chaotic and inept response of the IDF that day are found in a more recent article published on the site Intercept.

As one Israeli source involved in examining the bodies explained, “the volunteers are not pathology experts and have no professional tools to identify the murdered person and his age, or to declare the manner in which he was slaughtered.” For their part, Israeli police assert they have no record of the incident.

According to Haaretz, ZAKA did not document the remains and put parts from different bodies into the same bag. However, ZAKA volunteers did find time to rewrap already bagged remains in materials that “prominently displayed the ZAKA logo.”

Haaretz also said in its reportage after October 7, senior military leaders that, instead of using IDF soldiers specialized in recovering bodies and preserving evidence, they sent in untrained ZAKA volunteers. The ZAKA volunteers turned massacre sites into a “war room for donations,” used corpses as fundraising props to “spread accounts of atrocities that never happened.”

With regard to ZAKA, Landau talked openly on four occasions of inventing stories: “When we go into a house, and we’re using our imagination. The bodies is (sic) telling us the stories that happened to them.” Another ZAKA official in an official Israeli Foreign Ministry video, “The walls, the stone shouted: “I was raped.”

The lurid accounts that the Israeli government exploited to justify their no-holds-barred assault on Palestinian civilians in Gaza and simultaneously to raise funds for ultra-rightwing groups were all recounted by Eli Beer, the leader of one of ZAKA’s rivals United Hatzalah, at the annual summit of the Republican Jewish Coalition. The summit took place appropriately in Las Vegas.

The event was held at the RJC’s usual venue, the Venetian Resort. The hotel and casino were established by its biggest donor, the late Sheldon Adelson. Adelson had given hundreds of millions of dollars to right-wing media outlets that backed Netanyahu and Likud and, of course, Trump who gave Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That was due to the fact that Adelson and his wife Miriam were the two biggest donors to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Adelson’s donations to establish a new Israeli media outlet friendly to Netanyahu also are part of the graft charges hanging over Netanyahu now.

The grisly fabrications at the Las Vegas conference were taken up by various rightwing nuts and then passed on with new embellishments into the Never-Never land of rightwing websites. “They murdered his father. They gang-raped his mother, over and over and laughed all along. While they baked her baby alive in the oven” – Caroline Glick, the Jewish News Service editor. “THEY BAKED A BABY IN AN OVEN. Say ceasefire one more time you fucking baby-murdering-loving ghouls” – John Podhoretz, the editor of the neoconservative Commentary Magazine, on Twitter/X. And so on.

Given the influence of Hasbara, the Israeli propaganda machine, some of these fabrications and the subsequent hysteria and hate they aroused would sooner or later have played in the delusional world of the right-wing websites and media outlets. But it was the New York Times article that ensured it would be covered by mainstream news outlets where these lies are still masquerading as facts.

Now UNRWA has responded to the Israeli claims that staffers of the UN organization were also Hamas members who participated in the October 7 attack.

According to a Reuters article of March 4, in addition to the alleged abuse endured by UNRWA staff members, Palestinian detainees more broadly described allegations of abuse, including beatings, humiliation, threats, dog attacks, sexual violence, and deaths of detainees denied medical treatment, the UNRWA report said. Reportedly the UNRWA said the Israeli interrogations, “included severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members.”

Since then a March 11 BBC article said that Ahmed Abu Sabha, a doctor at Nasser hospital, said he was arrested on February 15. Abu Sabha was held for a week during which muzzled dogs were set upon him and his hand was broken by an Israeli soldier. His account matched those of two other medics who wished to remain anonymous because they feared reprisals. The medics told the BBC that they were beaten, doused with cold water all the while being made to kneel for hours. They were detained for several days before they were released.

In a similar incident on February 15, the IDF raided the hospital in Khan Younis in South Gaza. The hospital was one of the few in the Strip still functioning. The IDF said intelligence indicated that there were Hamas operatives in the hospital. Footage secretly filmed in the hospital the next day showed a row of men stripped to their underwear in front of the hospital’s emergency building, kneeling with their hands behind their heads. Medical robes are lying in front of some of them. Dr Atef Al-Hout, who was the general manager of the hospital said, “Anybody who tried to move his head or make any movement got hit. They left them for around two hours in this shameful position.” Unlike the fabricated accounts of Hamas’s torture and rape mentioned above, all of these accounts have been corroborated by the BBC and Reuters.

While Israel has a propaganda machine, the Hasbara, mostly aimed at foreign countries, the US has no official propaganda machine. It doesn’t need one because it has the New York Times. A great deal of what is printed in it concerning what happens outside the borders of the US is simply ‘rip-and-read’ restatements of State Department press releases. But when it comes to Israel the paper has divided loyalties. In the case of Israel, the Times doesn’t always parrot State Department statements, it also seeks to influence State Department policies to favor a right-wing racist government waging a merciless war in Gaza. The Times article “Screams Without Words” was itself a scream without basis.

On March 4, the United Nations released a report responding to Israeli claims about rapes and other forms of sexual perpetrated by Hamas October 7.  The report was made by the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. The report found “reasonable grounds” that there was sexual violence at the concert, Highway 232 and Kibbutz Reim, but it did not attribute that to Hamas saying a more thorough investigation was necessary. The caution of the UN is warranted because there are reports of Palestinians not associated with Hamas or any organization taking advantage of the attack to loot and possibly commit acts of violence including rape.

The head of that UN office was Pramila Patten went to Israel and visited sites where these actions were to have taken place. But the sites were always chosen by Israeli officials and Patten was always accompanied by Israeli ‘minders.’ She stressed the nature of her visit—which Israel had pressed the UN for—saying the mission, “was neither intended nor mandated to be investigative in nature.” She also stated that despite repeated calls for those affected to come forward, her team had been unable to locate a single victim of sexual assault by Palestinians. Patten’s report concluded, “In the medicolegal assessment of available photos and videos, no tangible indications of rape could be identified.”

Draw your own conclusions.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There is no daylight between presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump on the permanent war economy. Both tout the weapons industry as a source of jobs, jobs, jobs for Americans, never mentioning that the billions of government dollars flushed through the military-industrial complex could go for other things. Think universal health care, free higher education or maybe just the green economy – if money spent on what Politico called Bombenomics went to producing solar panels and wind turbines, we’d have jobs AND a planet not heating up at warp speed. Sadly, our two presidential contenders never met a weapon system they didn’t like. And as recent history repeats – if you spend all your cash building tanks, guns and bombs, they’re gonna get used.

Even worse, the U.S. MIC compels other countries to beef up their militaries. Take Russia. Before invading Ukraine, Moscow’s weapons industry puttered along, as did military conscription, but as soon as the Kremlin realized that it had no peace partners in the west or in Ukraine – a revelation that dawned on Moscow when then British prime minister Boris Johnson sabotaged peace talks between the two opponents in spring 2022 – things changed. Russia put itself on a war footing, so that now its industrial military base hums along, churning out tanks, hypersonic missiles (which the West lacks), rockets, guns and don’t forget nuclear bombs. Russia also placed tactical nukes in Belarus.

China, too, threatened by the U.S. over Beijing’s long-standing and very public intention peacefully to absorb Taiwan, has beefed up every aspect of its war machine. As military expert Will Schryver recently tweeted: “The U.S. is currently incapable of putting to sea more than four carriers at any given time – and no more than ~60 warships of all types. China currently has 3 carriers, almost 800 vessels and mountains of missiles.”

Meanwhile, there’s Iran – now using the Chinese satellite navigation system Beidou, which means, to quote the Sirius Report, “Iranian missiles are able to use a positioning system that the U.S. has no control over.” And Tehran could soon have nukes, thanks to Trump trashing the West’s nuclear pact with Iran and Biden inexplicably refusing to fix that bubblehead move. In other words, all these fiascos could have been avoided, seriatim, had Washington controlled its aggression and exerted its stupendous influence to promote peace. Even more critically, a worsening situation can still be avoided, if Beltway insiders pivot from sanctions, expanding foreign military bases to surround perceived enemies, fomenting color revolutions and generally behaving ruthlessly. Instead, the Empire might try the good neighbor approach, though after so many decades of violence, it might take the non-Western world a while to believe such a sea change.

And then there’s the blatant immorality of a war economy, one that depends for its health on bloodshed. Yet weapons production is one of the few manufacturing industries in the U.S. that hasn’t been entirely off-shored. This is a bad look. “What does your country make? Oh, guns, tanks and bombs, not much else.” That sends a message to the world, and it’s one, apparently, with which our rulers are not dissatisfied. After all, monomaniacal Washington’s chief carrot, (which is also its chief stick) over many decades, for recalcitrant foreign governments, has been, to rephrase renowned economist Michael Hudson: “Do what we want and we won’t bomb and obliterate you.” The fact that a principal U.S. industrial product is weaponry, helps concentrate the rest of the world’s mind on that threat.

Indeed, Biden “is supersizing the defense industry,” reports Responsible Statecraft February 23. This new National Defense Industrial Strategy would “catalyze generational change” of the U.S. defense industry. No surprise there, at a time when we recently learned that since 2014, during Biden’s stint as vice president with the Ukraine portfolio, the CIA beefed up its operations in Ukraine so that that nation essentially became the biggest CIA project in the agency’s history, bristling with agency bases and bunkers. That news appeared boastfully in the New York Times, right about the moment when it became clear that the west’s whole military project in Ukraine had flopped. (Right after the Times bragged about all these CIA bases on the Russia/Ukraine frontier, Russia used its artillery to liquidate one, thereby killing who knows how many Americans. Nothing like a fawning press so eager to flaunt intelligence “achievements” that it sends some of those achievers to their graves.)

And there’s no reason to suppose this new defense industry push won’t flop as well. The Biden gang “is proposing a generation of investment to expand an arms industry that, overall, fails to meet cost, schedule and performance standards,” Responsible Statecraft reports. In other words, President Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex are being worse than ignored. Biden breathes new life into the MIC’s evils, and so, could truly be said to be Ike’s nemesis.

Arms makers are a powerful lobby in Washington, who “have solidified their economic influence to stave off the political potential for future national security cuts, regardless of their performance or the geopolitical environment.” They can produce lemons or systems so finicky they need constant attention – Exhibit A is the F-35 – and still sell them abroad for billions. That’s because contractors carefully situate their plants in multiple states, so they can play the jobs card with Congress. The end result is an economy that demands war and more war, to keep a huge and deathly vigorous industry purring along. Meanwhile, Responsible Statecraft asks, “What is the military really getting from more and more national security spending? Less for more. Fewer weapons than it asked for, usually late and over budget, and much of the time dysfunctional.”

That’s actually not so bad. Weapons that don’t work could mean lives saved, but they also mean other things don’t get built. Instead of a massive EV base, an expanding textile industry or a big boost to solar panel manufacturing or shoe production or assembling any of the thousands of items stamped “made in China,” we get Patriot missiles and Abrams tanks, both, by the way, not all they’re cracked up to be, judging on reports from the Ukraine War.

Biden’s all in on the twisted notion that showering dollars on armaments benefits the economy, gushing about “equipment that defends America and is made in America: Patriot missiles for the air defense batteries made in Arizona; artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country – in Pennsylvania, Ohio Texas…” According to Truthout February 26, Arizona and Pennsylvania “are swing states crucial to his re-election bid, while the other two are red states with Republican senators he’s been trying to win over to vote for another round of military aid to Ukraine.”

More ghoulishly, “lobbyists for the administration even handed out a map, purporting to show how much money such assistance to Ukraine would distribute to each of the 50 states.” What a profitably blood-soaked investment our Ukraine proxy war is! Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men get to die fighting for the U.S., which doesn’t have to risk any soldiers, while back home armaments makers fatten on the carnage, and the politicians promoting this gory fiasco have the nerve to try to get re-elected! For the U.S., the Ukraine War has truly been a win/win business enterprise. Which has something to do with Washington never facing reality and admitting defeat. When the going gets rough, Washington gets going, like it did from Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and so forth. The trick is never fighting a peer competitor directly, but to bomb indiscriminately around the world, while keeping the cult of death flush with money. Eisenhower must be spinning in his grave.

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Image by Jakayla Toney

Following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks that resulted in at least 1,163 deaths, rumors began circulating that Israeli women were experiencing horrific mass rape and sexual violence. Months later, a position paper by Physicians for Human Rights Israel and a New York Times investigation convinced many observers that Hamas used rape as a weapon of war. But an investigation by YES! examining both reports, other media investigations, hundreds of news articles, interviews with Israeli sources, and photo and video evidence reveals a shocking conclusion: There is no evidence mass rape occurred.

The New Yorker, New York Times, Associated Press, and The Nation treat PHRI’s paper as the gold standard for proof of Hamas’ rape and sexual violence. But the paper is shockingly thin. It lacks original reporting and is based on media reports that are dubious at best with no corroboration—no forensic evidence, no survivor testimony, no video evidence.

During a two-hour-long interview that was heated at times, Hadas Ziv, director of ethics and policy at Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), acknowledged numerous problems with the position paper she co-authored, “Sexual and Gender-Based Violence As a Weapon of War During the October 7, 2023 Hamas Attacks.”

Ziv admitted credibility problems with sources and that she did not review all available evidence. She was “unaware” numerous sources had fabricated atrocity stories about Oct. 7. Ziv said, “Yeah, that’s a problem,” about a soldier she quotes whose claim of rape was changed by the government. She quoted volunteers from Zaka, a scandal-plagued organization that collected human remains after Oct. 7, but Ziv did not realize Zaka openly talks of inventing stories. When discussing claims that women’s sexual organs were deliberately mutilated, Ziv conceded, “OK, if there’s alternative explanations you can’t say that.”

While admitting “I did not know all the stories that you speak about that discredit those witnesses,” Ziv also lashed out: “I feel like I’m a rape victim that’s being interrogated.” YES! responded, “Not every interview is a friendly interview.”

Further, the PHRI paper is riddled with errors small and large. Names are misspelled, quotes don’t match links, and an individual is misidentified. Ziv was unaware that the Israeli government alleges it has forensic evidence of rape, which it has not produced publicly. Most egregious, Ziv didn’t realize her paper counted one alleged gang rape as two separate incidents.

The New York Times’ Dec. 28, 2023, story, “Screams Without Words,” has also been treated as proof that Hamas committed widespread sexual violence.

The cornerstone of that report is Gal and Nagi Abdush, a couple killed on Oct. 7. The Times says Israeli police believe Gal Abdush was raped. But the only evidence given is a “grainy video” of Gal’s burned corpse, “lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed.” Gal became known as “the woman in the black dress.” The story blew up in the Times’ face. Surviving family members denied she was raped.

PHRI references the video of Gal Abdush as evidence of possible “sexual abuse.”

The Times mentioned messages that Gal and Nagi, parents of two children, sent to their family during the attack. After Gal was killed, Nagi sent “a final audio message” to his brother Nissim Abdush at 7:44 a.m., “Take care of the kids. I love you,” right before he was killed.

But the Times fails to mention other text and phone messages that make it almost impossible Gal was raped. She messaged at 6:51 a.m. about intense explosions on the border, based on an Instagram comment by Miral Altar, Gal’s sister.

Nine minutes later, at 7:00 a.m., Nagi Abdush called his brother Nissim to say Gal was shot and dying.

Mondoweiss said Nissim told his story to an Israeli TV station. He said Nagi never mentioned Gal was raped, nor did Israeli police indicate to the surviving family that Gal was sexually assaulted. The Times never explains how Gal could be captured, raped, fatally shot, and burned to death in nine minutes while Nagi messaged his family and never mentioned any physical contact with Hamas forces.

YES! spoke with Nissim and Neama Abdush, siblings of Nagi. They said Nagi called twice, first to say Gal had been shot in the heart and had died, and then his farewell call asking them to take care of their children. Neama said, “No, no, no,” when asked whether Nagi said anything about Gal being attacked or raped.

In a follow-up call, Nissim reiterated the police did not give any indication Gal was sexually assaulted, but he refused to offer any more details unless he was paid 60,000 “dollars, shekels.”

Tali Barakha, another sister of Gal, wrote on Instagram, “No one can know if there was rape.”

The Dubious Dozen

PHRI’s paper stated there is “sufficient evidence to require an investigation of crimes against humanity.” The New York Times claimed “attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.”

Yet there are extraordinarily few sources. Twelve individuals account for the vast majority of rape and sexual violence claims in hundreds of articles.

Eight of these sources are in PHRI’s paper and six are in The New York Times report. Investigations by The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Straits Times, BBC, AP, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, NBC News, The New Yorker, and various CNN segments all rely on a combination of these 12 sources.

All but one of the 12 sources are connected to the Israeli military and police, such as the Home Front Command. Five of the sources are Zaka volunteers who told stories that smack of fabrications. Five other sources claimed they saw corpses that bore signs of rape or sexual violence. Not one of these sources was professionally trained to make such assessments, and nearly all fabricated stories, as described below.

That leaves only two people who claimed they witnessed rape. The government of Israel’s entire case for mass rape is built on two allegations: a source known as “Witness S.,” or Sapir, put forward by the police, and an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) special forces soldier, Raz Cohen. The soldier has changed his story numerous times, making it suspect, while Sapir’s account is so fantastical as to defy belief, as explained below.

Even if all 12 sources are considered entirely credible, their accounts lack photo and forensic evidence and survivor testimony. At best they are unsubstantiated claims.

As for evidence, two reports have thrown cold water all over it. First, Ha’aretz reported on Dec. 24 that Israeli police sent a court order to “general and psychiatric hospitals” to “provide information on the victims of sexual offenses committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7.” It was a tacit admission that police lack survivor testimony. The court order also undercut claims that alleged survivors were not being identified to protect them as unique details would make it simple to identify them.

Second, an even more revealing Ha’aretz report published on Jan. 4, 2024, pointed out that “[t]he police are having difficulty locating victims of sexual assault or witnesses to acts from the Hamas attack, and are unable to connect the existing evidence with the victims described in it.” Police are so desperate they appealed through the media, without success so far, “to encourage those who have information on the matter to come and testify.”

United Nations experts have provided some evidence. On Jan. 29, a U.N. envoy in Israel investigating sexual violence on Oct. 7 issued a plea through the Israeli president’s office for “victims of alleged sexual assault [to] break your silence.” It was met with silence. Then on Feb. 19, four U.N. experts said they “expressed alarm over credible allegations” that Israel had subjected hundreds of Palestinian women and girls in Gaza to “arbitrary detention,” “degrading treatment,” “multiple forms of sexual assault,” including rape, and “deliberate targeting and extrajudicial killing.”

Extrapolating “Evidence” From Hearsay

Much of the coverage of Oct. 7 is reminiscent of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Reporters have tried to glean “truth” from ambiguous photos and jumped to conclusions without considering other possibilities. An undressed corpse does not equal sexual assault. Clothes might be torn off while fleeing, in panic, hiding in brush, or dressing wounds.

The New York Times recounted the death of the Evens family in Kibbutz Be’eri, using texts and photos. Caught in a fire, “they stripped to their underwear.” Soldiers later found “several half-naked bodies lying under a line of trees.” The parents and two teenage boys “had all been shot dead.”

Similarly, metal fragments in a body does not equal sexual violence. A Reuters report on Be’eri, one of the worst-hit communities on Oct. 7, described how grenade blasts in a safe room turned screws from a sofa into shrapnel that punctured the leg of a 13-year-old girl. If she had not lived would that now be a case of Hamas sexual violence?

Asked about the Reuters report, PHRI’s Ziv admitted, “OK, if there’s alternative explanations you can’t say that” it was sexual violence.

Alternative explanations applies to nearly every sexual violence claim in the media.

Head in Hands

Two witnesses, the anonymous source Sapir and Raz Cohen, provide the most dramatic claims of sexual violence in PHRI’s paper, the Times, and other media. Sapir and Cohen attended the Supernova music festival and claimed to see gang rapes taking place 50 to 150 feet away from their hiding spots. The Times places them a few miles apart, meaning Sapir and Cohen were describing different assaults.

In early November Israeli police showed a three-minute video clip with Sapir’s face blurred to reporters, but they refused to take questions and have since “declined” to release the entire interview. Reports on the three-minute clip and shorter excerpts on the web were all that was known of Sapir’s story until The New York Times interviewed her “several times.” The Times says Sapir is “a 26-year-old accountant” who “has become one of the Israeli police’s key witnesses.”

The Times said Sapir was wounded in her back and feeling faint. She hid near a road covered “in dry grass and lay as still as she could.” She claimed to see a group of “about 100 men” involved in the horrific rape and murder of “at least five women.” The Times said:

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.

“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road.” …

Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.

Compare this to what is known of the police video. In a 52-second clip of the police video, Sapir claimed a woman standing on her feet was raped by militants and passed around. Sapir said a militant “cuts her breasts. He throws it on the road. They are playing with it.”

Referring to the police video, the BBC added that Sapir claimed a militant killed the woman and continued to rape her. “He … shot her in the head before he finished. He didn’t even pick up his pants; he shoots and ejaculates.”

One journalist who viewed part of the video said Sapir claimed “some terrorists were carrying heads in their hands [beheaded] as trophies, saying there wasn’t a thing [they] didn’t do to the heads,” implying that Hamas fighters were having sex with severed heads.

Sapir’s story and how it changes between the police video and Times report raises many questions. How could she see 100 militants and numerous assaults while lying still, covered? How does one victim of rape become five? Why did one woman who was raped and had her breast cut off in the police video become two women in the Times story?

Given such a slaughter—severed heads, hacked-off parts, blood sprays, and five mutilated corpses—where is the forensic and photo evidence? Why are there no witnesses who can verify any of her accounts, such as sex with severed heads and corpses that sound like they are out of Dante’s Inferno?

The Times published a follow-up defending the Dec. 28 report after it was hammered for poor sourcing and lack of evidence, but it only raised more questions about flimsy reporting.

PHRI’s position paper bungles Sapir’s story as well, citing it as two separate incidents. It is first mentioned in the “Victims” section as “a woman who detailed the group rape and murder of a young woman by assailants dressed in military uniforms.” Then, PHRI cited Sapir’s story again under “Visual Testimonies” as it is a video. Hadas Ziv admitted the mistake to YES!, but no other media outlets have picked up PHRI’s error.

Changing Stories

Raz Cohen, the second eyewitness to claim he saw rape, is a former Israeli officer from “the elite Maglan unit.” Neither the original Times report nor PHRI mentions Cohen is an ex-special forces soldier or that his story has changed numerous times.

Cohen hid in a streambed with friends after fleeing the Supernova festival. According to the Times, he claimed to see a white van pull up about 40 yards away and five men drag a woman across the ground, “young, naked, and screaming.” Cohen said, “They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words. Then one of them raises a knife, and they just slaughtered her.”

Initially, Cohen’s story was different. On Oct. 7, he described hundreds of terrified people fleeing Hamas gunmen across a field as some were shot and fell. Cohen and others hid for six hours in the bush as gunshots whistled above them and a battle between “our army and the terrorists” raged around them.

In the next three days, a shaken Cohen described similar experiences in videos and interviews. He said people were “slaughtered with knives.” The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported in an Oct. 10 story based on an interview with Cohen that, “Hamas militants stabbed a group of women nearby.” But he made no mention of rape or sexual violence.

Then Cohen’s story changed. Later in the day in an Oct. 10 appearance, Cohen said on PBS Newshour, “The terrorists, people from Gaza, raped girls. And after they raped them, they killed them, murdered them with knives, or the opposite, killed—and after they raped, they—they did that.” In an Oct. 24 interview with the Washington Free Beacon he also claimed a woman was raped and murdered.

It is notable that Cohen’s story is strikingly similar to Sapir’s: multiple gang rapes, killing with knives, sexual assault of corpses. No major media has picked up on the similarities, nor that the number of victims appears to go from several to one.

Since both Sapir and Cohen’s accounts surfaced, a different companion who hid with each one has since come forward. The Times interviewed both, and their accounts don’t back up those of Sapir or Cohen. There are other accounts of rape and sexual violence, but the sources can’t be identified or say they “heard” but did not visually witness rape.

Further undermining Sapir and Cohen are reports on the massacre of 364 people at the festival. CNN, BBC, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, ABC News, and NBC News reconstructed the killing field using photos, videos, social media, and interviews with dozens of festival goers. It was a horrific slaughter, but no one mentioned torture, sexual violence, or rape.

Nor have police substantiated Sapir or Cohen’s stories despite possessing “over 60,000 ‘visual documents’ including videos from GoPro cameras worn by attackers, CCTV footage and images from drones.” YES! reviewed every graphic video and photo it could locate, including in a Telegram channel, Israeli government websites, and a five-part series of, frankly, snuff films. They show militants, brutal killings, and hundreds of corpses, but nothing like the scenes Sapir or Cohen described.

Body Bags and Money Grabs

The dearth of evidence of mass rapes has been attributed to Israeli government claims that religious concerns and chaos prevented the gathering of forensic evidence. But other reports indicate Israel manipulated evidence, forensics, and Zaka testimony that all create the appearance of a campaign of mass rape.

Ha’aretz reported Zaka volunteers sidelined soldiers in collecting evidence after Oct. 7.

[The] IDF decided to forego the deployment of hundreds of soldiers specifically trained in the identification and collection of human remains in mass casualty incidents. Instead, the Home Front Command chose to use Zaka, a private organization.

A Nov. 12 Ynet report suggests why Zaka took the lead. An information specialist in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office boasted to Ynet that Zaka testimonies “had a tremendous impact on the reporters” by portraying Hamas as “human-monsters.” That bolstered Israel’s narrative that “Hamas is equal to Isis … deepening the legitimacy of the state to act with great force,” the official said.

On top of serving as war propaganda, stories by Zaka volunteers appear invented. This author described in a recent Intercept investigation how Zaka officials say “we’re using our imagination” when they recount atrocities and “the bodies is telling us the stories that happened to them.” Western media is full of Zaka atrocity claims, nearly all of which are fabrications, dubious, or unsubstantiated.

Even more shocking, Zaka was founded decades ago by Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, who allegedly sexually assaulted at least 20 minors over decades before being exposed in 2021. Meshi-Zahav and relatives reportedly used “shadow organizations” to divert millions of dollars from a nearly insolvent Zaka into a “slush fund” to finance “a lavish lifestyle in 5-star hotels and a multi-million dollar villa.”

Ha’aretz reported that during Oct. 7 recovery efforts, a financially troubled Zaka used “the dead as props” for fundraising. In the process, Ha’aretz says, Zaka wrecked forensic evidence that could prove or disprove rape claims.

PHRI’s paper includes testimony from two Zaka volunteers. After being told a few Zaka stories, Hadas Ziv told YES!, “I didn’t know that they are unreliable. … But maybe I’m just trusting people who tell the story as it is and I don’t look into [it].”

Reuters, CNN, The New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, NBC, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post also quote Zaka volunteers with no mention of past scandals or present controversies.

A Flood of Disinformation

Remaining sources also have credibility problems. One is an anonymous paramedic with Unit 669, an elite Israeli search-and-rescue outfit. The soldier claims he found a dead girl, “14, 15-years-old teenager,” on the floor of a home in a kibbutz. She was “on her stomach, her pants are pulled down, and she is half-naked. Her legs are spread out, wide open, and there are remains of sperm on her back. Someone executed her right after he brutally, brutally raped her.”

He first spoke on Oct. 25 with Republic World, a right-wing Indian news channel, his back to the camera. Ziv linked to a clip in the PHRI paper from the same interview that Eylon Levy tweeted the same day. A spokesperson for Netanyahu, Levy is a conduit of disinformation.

In the full interview, the paramedic said a teammate “pulled out of the garbage” a 1-year-old baby “multiple times stabbed all over his body.” He also claimed there were “Arabic sentences that were written on entrances to houses [with] the blood of the people that were living in those houses.”

One infant was killed on Oct. 7, 10-month-old Mila Cohen, “who was shot while in the arms of her mother,” who survived.

Needless to say, these stories appear to be fabrications as well. More significantly, the paramedic is typical of other major sources. Their claims are wild, there’s no other witnesses, no independent reporting, no photo or forensic evidence, no information about the deceased.

Further weakening his credibility, the paramedic initially identified Kibbutz Nahal Oz three times as the site of the attack and translated its name as “River of Strength.” In Nahal Oz, at least 60 soldiers were killed and 12 civilians. Five family members were killed in one home, including two sisters, but they were adults, aged 18 and 20.

Perhaps realizing none of the victims in Nahal Oz matched the paramedic’s description, Eylon Levy changed the location to Be’eri in a tweet and trimmed the clip to cut out all references to Nahal Oz.

When talking to The New York Times, AP, The Washington Post, and CNN, the paramedic only referenced Be’eri as the location. The number of victims changed as well, hardly a minor point, from one to two, to half a dozen, and back to one or two.

When asked about how she did her research for the PHRI paper, Ziv said, “I checked every report that was available to me.” The Republic World interview of the paramedic was available to her as she linked to the short clip Levy tweeted out in the PHRI paper.

After listening to a description of the paramedic’s false stories, Ziv said, “No, I didn’t see this one.” YES! asked, “So you didn’t look at all the evidence then?” Ziv responded, “No I didn’t, probably.”

Ziv also said, “Yeah, that’s a problem” about the fact Netanyahu’s office altered the paramedic’s story and that he is an anonymous military source.

Dead Babies

Six of the 12 sources fabricated dead-baby stories, including Shari Mendes. A volunteer military reservist who worked in the Rabbinate Corps at the Shura military morgue in Central Israel for two weeks, Mendes helped “medics with fingerprinting and cleaning female soldiers’ bodies,” according to Reuters.

On Oct. 20, Mendes told The Daily Mail, “A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded.” Senior personnel at Shura, Col. Rabbi Haim Weisberg and retired Brig. Gen. Rabbi Israel Weiss, also claimed they discovered a pregnant mother killed with her fetus.

Ha’aretz says, “This horrific incident … simply didn’t happen.”

PHRI quotes Mendes from a Nov. 9 Times of Israel report. Mendes says, “Yes, we have seen that women have been raped. Children through elderly women have been raped. Forcible entry, to the point that bones were broken.” Mendes has also alleged, “We saw genitals cut off, heads cut off, babies, hands, feet, no reason.” She says, “This is not just something we saw on the internet, we saw these bodies with our own eyes.”

PHRI cites Capt. Maayan, an IDF reservist and dentist at Shura, from the same article. The Times of Israel wrote:

Maayan said on October 31 that she has seen several bodies that had signs consistent with sexual abuse.

“I can tell that I saw a lot of signs of abuse in the [genital region],” Maayan said, using her hand to euphemistically demonstrate. “We saw broken legs, broken pelvises, bloody underwear,” and women who were not dressed below the waist, she said.

The Times of Israel said Mendes is not “legally qualified to determine rape.” Likewise PHRI cautioned that “emergency and medical personnel who provided testimonies” were not “professionally trained to determine whether rape had occurred.”

But PHRI tries to have it both ways. It cites claims of rape and sexual abuse from Shari Mendes, Capt. Maayan, the paramedic, Itzik Itah and Simcha Greiniman of Zaka, and its final source, Rami Shmuel, a music festival organizer.

If these sources can’t determine rape, why include them? PHRI also says “the accounts they provided indicate the perpetration of sexual violence.” What qualifies them to conclude wounds are deliberate signs of sexual violence and not from weapons?

When asked how Mendes could have known broken pelvises were caused by mass rape, Ziv said, “She doesn’t, she doesn’t. She can only say that this is what she saw. She can’t say this is a result of rape.”

So why is Israel seemingly making untrained civilians the face of mass rape claims? At a high-profile U.N. session on Dec. 4, organized with the help of tech mogul Sheryl Sandberg, Mendes, and Greiniman testified and parts of Sapir’s video were shown.

Greiniman, a deputy commander in Zaka, claimed naked women were tied to trees at the Supernova festival, he found a toddler with a knife stuck through its head, and he discovered foreign fighters—they left their IDs in their pockets. Why did Israel choose to present sources with some of the most bizarre and hard-to-believe stories to the world?

Why have doctors, pathologists, or soldiers who recovered remains not offered testimony or documentation of rape, sexual assault, or other atrocities? Israel has produced videos of forensic investigations of Oct. 7 victims. Media were given access to document atrocities at the National Center of Forensic Medicine on Oct. 16.

On Oct. 14, Reuters, Ha’aretz, and Politico joined a media tour of Shura organized by Israeli officials. Reuters reported, “Military forensic teams … found multiple signs of torture, rape and other atrocities.” Rabbi Israel Weiss, who helped oversee the identification of the dead, said “Many bodies showed signs of torture as well as rape.” Capt. Maayan said, “Forensic examination found several cases of rape,” according to Politico.

But, according to Reuters, “The military personnel overseeing the identification process didn’t present any forensic evidence in the form of pictures or medical records.”

Not long after, Zaka volunteers, Shari Mendes, and the Unit 669 paramedic began making a splash in the media. Little has been heard from the forensic experts since.

Tali Shapiro provided research help for this story.

This piece first appeared in Yes!

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Andy Mahler at home at the Lazy Black Bear in southern Indiana. Photo: Steven Higgs.

A few miles outside the town of Paoli, in the unglaciated hill country of southern Indiana, there’s a 90-acre grove of old-growth hardwood forest called Pioneer Mothers. From 1816 to 1940, the land had been owned by the Cox family, who refused to log even a tree from the grove of titanic oaks, hickories, beech and tulip poplars. However, after the last of the Cox family died, the forest was sold to a local timber company, which planned to clearcut it. A local uprising ensued, led by some of the community’s most prominent women, who raised money to buy the property and donate it to the US Forest Service on the condition the forest would never be logged. The grove, which was named Pioneer Mothers in their honor, is now a Research Natural Area on the Hoosier National Forest and is one of only a handful of remaining old-growth groves in the Ohio Valley.

Forty-five years later another local revolt would take place in the same rural county over plans to clearcut the Hoosier National Forest. This uprising would be led by a man who lived not far from the Pioneer Mothers grove with his wife, Linda Lee, on an inholding inside the national forest, they called the Lazy Black Bear. His name is Andy Mahler, a descendant of the Bohemian composer. The son of academics, Mahler grew up in Bloomington, about 45 miles north and an entire cultural epoch away from Orange County, Indiana. Linda was a school teacher and Andy ran the farm. The couple spent much of their free time riding horses on the forest trails near the Lazy Black Bear. Then in 1985, Andy learned that the new management plan for the Hoosier National Forest had scheduled clearcuts and logging roads on the local trail network. Lots of clearcuts and as many as six miles of logging roads per square mile of land.

And that wasn’t all. The plan also called for oil and gas drilling, gypsum mining and 115 miles of Off-Road Vehicle (ORV) trails. Reflecting the usual cultural insensitivity of the Forest Service, some of the ORV trails were slated for a part of the forest called Little Africa, which received its name from one of the earliest settlements of free blacks and escaped enslaved people in Indiana along Lick Creek. The forest settlement was a refuge from the slave patrollers who roamed southern Indiana looking to kidnap black people and sell them south of the Ohio River. By the time of the Civil War, dozens of black families, along with some white Quakers, lived in the hollow, where the center of the community was the African Methodist Church. After the war, black families began to move out of Orange County to the cities, where jobs were more plentiful and racial animosity less fervent. By 1902, the last black family in Little Africa had sold their land and much of the area, including the ruins of the church and cemetery, was eventually acquired by the Forest Service. In 1985, the agency thought it might be a good idea to turn the entire area into a haven for dirt bikes.

African American cemetery at the Lick Creek (Little Africa) settlement. Photo: Forest Service.

The Forest Service, an agency whose arrogance rivals that of the Pentagon, had no idea of the political landmines it was setting for itself. But it soon found out, the hard way. The Agency was accustomed to encounters with environmentalists from Indianapolis and Bloomington, who’d waged a bruising 10-year-long battle in the 70s and early 80s to win a wilderness designation for a 13,000-acre roadless tract south of Bloomington named after the botanist Charles Deam. But they’d never had to confront a backwoods rebellion from the people who lived in and near the forest. And that’s exactly the kind of rebellion Andy Mahler set about igniting, when he formed a local group to fight the Forest Service called Protect Our Woods or POW.

At less than 200,000 acres (about the size of some ranger districts in the West), the Hoosier is one of the smallest national forests in the country. It doesn’t have sprawling tracts of old-growth forest. It doesn’t have any large predators. It doesn’t have any mountains or whitewater rivers. None of that matters to the forest’s defenders, who note that its ridges and hollows, seeps and rock shelters harbor an astonishingly high level of botanical diversity.

Mahler was able to read and understand the dense and impenetrable prose of the Forest Service plan and Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and explain what it meant in plain language to the people who lived near the forest and hiked and rode horses on its trails, hunted for morels and chanterelles in its hollows, watched the migration of warblers stream through in the spring and the colors of the hills some called the Little Smokies explode in blazing colors in the fall.

But the struggle for the future of the Hoosier Forest soon took on national implications. It was the first plan under the National Forest Management Act to be released in the Eastern Region. The fate of the Hoosier plan was going to set a precedent and the precedent Andy Mahler wanted to set was the end, not just of clearcutting, but the end of logging on national forest lands.

What became known as the Zero Cut movement began in southern Indiana and that scared the hell out of the top level bureaucrats in the Forest Service, then in the grips of the chainsaw mad Reagan administration, most of whom probably couldn’t find the Hoosier on a map.

Mahler and his pals in the backwoods knew some vital things that the Forest Service didn’t. First, locals, even in the most conservative redoubts of a very conservative state, didn’t like seeing their favorite haunts logged and they didn’t trust the Agency to tell them the truth about what they were up to. Also, Andy’s friend Bob Klawitter, a former IU professor who decamped to woods during the Vietnam War, had done a forest inventory of the Hoosier region showing there was more than enough forest on private lands to sustain the needs of the local industry and that subsidized timber sales on federal forests would only depress the price nearby private landowners could get for their timber. Finally, Mahler was able to convince his local Congressman, Frank McCloskey, to include in one of his constituent mailers a survey that asked whether they supported logging on the Hoosier National Forest: 69% said no and the opposition approached 79% for those under the age of 35. “We knew then, we were really on to something,” Mahler said.

Mahler was right. The Hoosier plan was dead, vanquished by an unlikely coalition of urban greens, back-to-the-landers and rural folk. Commercial logging came to an end on Hoosier for the next 30 years. The racist ORV plan was defeated, along with the obnoxious oil and gas leasing and mining projects.

Redbud and rock shelter, Hoosier National Forest. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

As the Forest Service began to freak out over the implications of the defeat of their plan for the Hoosier, Mahler began to broaden his vision. The precedent being set, he was eager to extend it. “We began to think bioregionally,” Mahler said. “The boundaries between these forests, and even the states, are artificial. My friend Leah Garlotte said, ‘A river isn’t a border, it’s the heart, the bloodstream of a forest ecosystem.’”

Out of this idea, Heartwood was born. Andy and Linda decided to go wherever people in the Ohio Valley were resisting the Forest Service. “Even if it was one or two people, we wanted to meet them, learn from them and join forces,” Mahler said. The search took them to the Wayne National Forest in southern Ohio and the Daniel Boone NF in northern Kentucky, the Shawnee NF in southern Illinois and the Mark Twain NF in the Ozarks of Missouri. “When we’d finally meet, it was often at the end of what Linda and I began to call a Heartwood driveway,” Mahler said. “A rutted gravel lane that winds through the woods for a quarter of mile to a cabin.”

The gospel Andy was spreading was the end of logging on federal forests and that the movement that could end it was going to be led by the people who lived in and near those forests. The other message Andy delivered to anyone who would listen, and more and more activists were, was that in order for people to trust Heartwood they couldn’t compromise on their vision. “We weren’t going to sell out,” Mahler said. “We weren’t ever going to be complicit in the destruction of forests.”

The next precedent was set on the Shawnee National Forest, where after a bitter struggle to stop the Fairview timber sale, which involved 79-day occupation, mass arrests and a Forest Service logging operation over the objections of the entire Illinois congressional delegation, a permanent injunction banned logging on the forest for the next 17 years. There is now a movement to make the Shawnee the nation’s first national park and climate preserve.

Even as Heartwood expanded into the Alleghenies, Adirondacks,  Appalachians and beyond, its heart remained back in Indiana, where bi-annual gatherings of activists convene for a long weekend of workshops, war storytelling and music at the Lazy Black Bear.  These forest councils are where old campaigns were celebrated and new ones born.

The problem, of course, is that few victories are permanent. As David Brower said, “Our opponents’ victories are usually forever. When we win, it is usually just a stay of execution. That’s why we need to be eternally vigilant.”  And so it is with Andy Mahler. Thirty years after crushing the Forest Service and ending commercial logging on the Hoosier, the Agency is striking back, right in Andy and Linda’s backwoods. In the fall of 2021, the Forest Service unveiled a massive logging, burning and road-building scheme across a 30,000-acre area known as Buffalo Springs. Though the name Buffalo Springs doesn’t appear on any known map of the region, it didn’t take Andy long to detect that the logging and burning was scheduled to take place just down the road from the Lazy Black Bear.

Little Blue River, Hoosier National Forest. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

So the old warhorse was summoned out of his stable for one last big fight to protect the forests of southern Indiana. Mahler went to work, doing what he’d done so many times in the past, pouring over the plans, deciphering the new coded language of the Forest Service, where the clearcuts of old were now dressed up as “vegetative treatments” for the seemingly benign purpose of ecological restoration. But it was clear: this project was more of an ecological blitz than a recovery plan that threatened, among others, two endangered species of bats that inhabit the caves of the world’s greatest karst geological zones.

Mahler knew that even after 30 years, people’s attitudes about logging or the Forest Service hadn’t changed. They didn’t like the former and didn’t trust the latter. And many were even more incensed about the agency’s newest menace: prescribed burning–the choking smoke from previous burns had sickened several residents so badly they had to be taken to the hospital. After months of outreach and organizing, the opposition to the sprawling assault on Buffalo Springs began to solidify. Protect Buffalo Springs signs sprouted up in nearly every yard and business across Orange County. Banners were draped from buildings in downtown Paoli and a billboard denouncing the plan greeted travelers on Highway 37, the main north-south corridor through the Hoosier National Forest.

Eventually, the county commissioners came out against it, including three Trump supporters. The Chamber of Commerce now opposes it. And, most significantly of all perhaps, the Farm Bureau, rarely an ally and usually a fearsome foe of environmentalists, announced its displeasure with the Forest Service’s Buffalo Springs plan.

The battle isn’t over. But the odds have shifted and the Forest Service knows it. So the agency may recalibrate and await an opportunity to strike again. But Andy Mahler and Heartwood aren’t going anywhere. This forest is, after all, where they live and its very existence is why they live there.

In recognition of his fearless and innovative approach to grassroots activism in the effort to protect forests, rivers and wildlife across the Central Hardwood region Andy Mahler was named the Grassroots Activist of the Year for 2024 by the Fund for Wild Nature, whose board I’m very glad to be a member of. 

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Georgia’s death chamber.

Georgia is poised to execute Mr. Willie Pye, a Black man, on March 20th, the very same day that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s seminal work Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in book form, to global acclaim, in 1852. Many are likely unaware of this date’s historical significance, but as someone who grew up not far from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, CT, it is an alignment that strikes me as significant. This certainly unintended synchronicity highlights yet again the unmistakable link between slavery and the death penalty, and the fitting use of the same word – abolition – to apply to the movements to end both of these menacing institutions. 

It is well-known that the death penalty in its historical context is demonstrably a “descendant of slavery, lynching and segregation.” Likewise, it is well-established that racial bias against defendants of color has a strong effect on who is ultimately capitally prosecuted, sentenced to death, and executed. Whereas Willie Pye was indeed convicted of a capital crime, the only “crime” committed by the appropriately controversial character of Uncle Tom–based in part on the Rev. Josiah Henson–was that he was born African-American and, therefore, a slave in antebellum America. Still, racism, a legacy of lynching, and the system of mass incarceration–which Michelle Alexander poignantly coined as “The New Jim Crow” – form a historical arc that connects America’s “peculiar institution” of slavery to its persistent death chambers, thereby linking the lethal plights of the literary figure of Uncle Tom with the very real Mr. Pye.

Willie Pye.

Statistics in Georgia and in Mr. Pye’s case present glaring examples of this long arm of historical injustice. As Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty has revealed, Spalding County, where Mr Pye was tried and convicted in the mid-1990s, has sought the death penalty disproportionately against Black defendants. Additionally, Mr. Pye’s trial attorney Johnny B. Mostiler was not only wildly ineffective but had a long and well-documented history of anti-Black racism. In his grossly inadequate defense of Mr. Pye, he failed to assemble a team that should have included a mitigation specialist with the expertise required to conduct a thorough investigation into his client’s deeply traumatic childhood and the pervasive racism in the community in which he was raised. The jury notably did not hear that Mr. Pye was reared in an environment of severe poverty, neglect, and abuse. Neither did they see the vast evidence of the violence and chaos in his household, including the fact that Child and Family Services was called into his home often, but never saw fit to remove young Willie to a safer place. Rather, the jury only heard a single fleeting reference to the fact that his family was poor. 

These glaring omissions, as well as equally prodigious oversights regarding Mr. Pye’s intellectual disability and non-violence in prison, contributed to the verdict of death that Georgia’s law allowed the jury to hand down to Mr. Pye. How fitting, indeed, that the state chose to enforce the aspect of its law that would allow it to kill Mr. Pye, rather than those systems of laws that might have allowed it to rescue him from his broken childhood home as a child. Mr. Pye’s slated March 20th execution date calls to mind the former Southern laws that allowed slave owner Simon Legree to command his overseers to put Uncle Tom to death without a fair trial, a fate that has been shared by countless African Americans. 

Just as racism has found this insidious way to allow for state-sanctioned murder in the form of executions, so, too, does its scourge inspire countless souls to oppose it. As the co-founder of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty,” – a group of nearly 3,300 individuals worldwide – I am among those in whom a fire has been lit to work to eradicate this cancerous blight on the Peach State, and across the globe. On Sept. 21st, 2011, it was none other than Georgia that infamously put to death another African-American, Troy Davis, an innocent man whose case captured the hearts of so many individuals, including this cantor, who was a younger Jewish prison chaplain at the time.  Not until well after that fateful day did I discover that lethal injection–Georgia’s preferred killing method for Troy Davis, Willie Pye and others it condemns to death – perpetuates the demonic mark of yet another notorious, racist regime that directly targeted my own people. Let there be no doubt: lethal injection is a direct Nazi legacy. It was first implemented in this world by the Third Reich as part of its infamous Aktion T4 protocol used to kill people deemed “unworthy of life.” That protocol was developed by Dr. Carl Brandt, the personal physician of Adolf Hitler. This unconscionable Nazi imprimatur, as well as that of the “novel” gassing executions now being proposed and carried out across the nation –  including via Zyklon B, as used in Auschwitz – has made it a non-starter for the Black and Jewish communities to stand united in the sacred cause of abolishing capital punishment. 

To offset these macabre historical arcs and ongoing cycles of violence that this March 20th unwittingly brings full circle, one is reminded of the famous quote of renowned death penalty abolitionist Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr.  “The arc of the moral universe is long,” Dr. King proffered, “but it bends towards justice.” King was echoing the words of 19th-century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who like Harriet Beecher Stowe was an avowed slavery abolitionist. They were ultimately successful in their mission, of course, a fact that should inspire all those engaged in this latest iteration of the abolitionist cause. In order to be on the correct arc of history, Georgians should sign the growing petition to spare the life of Mr. Pye, and join the cause of death penalty abolition, relinquishing the racist and Nazi legacy of the death penalty once and for all. 

When Abraham Lincoln encountered Harriet Beecher Stowe, he famously called her “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Perhaps with the efforts of today’s generation of abolitionists, the United States can take the necessary step of finally erasing the death penalty’s remaining lethal footprint from that awful conflagration that defined an age, and whose central issue–racism–still casts its deadly shadow across America in 2024. 

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America.

Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.

America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan, and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.

As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy, and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War, and become the “lone superpower” on this planet.

In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. President John F. Kennedy’s White House, manipulated by the CIA into the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.

America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.

Creeping Disaster in Ukraine

Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has been a curiously bipartisan project. As the Soviet Union began breaking up in 1991, Washington focused on ensuring that Moscow’s arsenal of possibly 45,000 nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons then stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at Dnipropetrovsk.

During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine’s future independence and gave what became known as his “chicken Kiev” speech, saying: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” He would, however, soon recognize Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as independent states since they didn’t have nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, though it had no way to actually deliver most of those atomic weapons. To persuade Ukraine to transfer its nuclear warheads to Moscow, Washington launched three years of multilateral negotiations, while giving Kyiv “assurances” (but not “guarantees”) of its future security — the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank account with a zero balance.

Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security in December 1994, three former Soviet republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine — signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and started transferring their atomic weapons to Russia. Simultaneously, Russia, the U.S., and Great Britain agreed to respect the sovereignty of the three signatories and refrain from using such weaponry against them. Everyone present, however, seemed to understand that the agreement was, at best, tenuous. (One Ukrainian diplomat told the Americans that he had “no illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.”)

Meanwhile — and this should sound familiar today — Russian President Boris Yeltsin raged against Washington’s plans to expand NATO further, accusing President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a “cold peace.” Right after that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”

Nonetheless, once those former Soviet republics were safely disarmed of their nuclear weapons, Clinton agreed to begin admitting new members to NATO, launching a relentless eastward march toward Russia that continued under his successor George W. Bush. It came to include three former Soviet satellites, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); three one-time Soviet Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (2004); and three more former satellites, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004). At the Bucharest summit in 2008, moreover, the alliance’s 26 members unanimously agreed that, at some unspecified point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would “become members of NATO.” In other words, having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by annexing that nation to create its own security corridor.

In those years, Washington also came to believe that it could transform Russia into a functioning democracy to be fully integrated into a still-developing American world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia’s governance had been autocratic and every ruler from Catherine the Great to Leonid Brezhnev had achieved domestic stability through incessant foreign expansion. So, it should hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.

In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President Obama recognized the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that land to Russia’s orbit, saying: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”

Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.” At first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and the West reacted with a striking resolve — cutting Europe’s energy imports from Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of Scandinavia, and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.

After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets, and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in Russia’s favor.

Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks, the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s recent reverses on the battlefield.

The Republican Party’s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential to Vladimir Putin during “the now legendarily disastrous press conference” at Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced “the Kremlin held sway over the American president.” But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York Times columnist David Brooks notedrecently, the Republican Party’s historic “isolationism is still on the march.” Indeed, between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feelsthat “Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach… [and] the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.”

Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay its fair share sent shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider what such an alliance would be like without the United States (even as Russian President Vladimir Putin, undoubtedly sensing a weakening of U.S. resolve, threatened Europe with nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington’s global leadership is now anything but a certainty.

Crisis in Gaza

Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that Authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.

In 2005, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving “Israel’s security and international status.” Within two years, however, Hamas militants had seized power in Gaza, ousting the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.

Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic October 7th Hamas attack, theTimes of Israel published this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.” In her lead piece, senior political correspondent Tal Schneider reported: “For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”

On October 18th, with the Israeli bombing of Gaza already inflicting severe casualties on Palestinian civilians, President Biden flew to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Netanyahu that would prove eerily reminiscent of Trump’s Helsinki press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised the president for drawing “a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” Biden endorsed that Manichean view by condemning Hamas for “evils and atrocities that make ISIS look somewhat more rational” and promised to provide the weaponry Israel needed “as they respond to these attacks.” Biden said nothing about Netanyahu’s previous arm’s length alliance with Hamas or the two-state solution. Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N. while air-freighting, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including the behemoth 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that were soon flattening Gaza’s high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.

After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes, and nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world. In November and again in February, massive crowds calling for peace in Gaza marched in Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Istanbul, and Dakar, among other places.

Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000 in Gaza, striking numbers of them children, has already weakened Biden’s domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 — including Arab-Americans in the key swing state of Michigan, African-Americans nationwide, and younger voters more generally. To heal the breach, Biden is now becoming desperate for a negotiated cease-fire. In an inept intertwining of international and domestic politics, the president has given Netanyahu, a natural ally of Donald Trump, the opportunity for an October surprise of more devastation in Gaza that could rip the Democratic coalition apart and thereby increase the chances of a Trump win in November — with fatal consequences for U.S. global power.

Trouble in the Taiwan Straits

While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”

After recognizing Beijing as “the sole legal Government of China” in 1979, Washington agreed to “acknowledge” that Taiwan was part of China. At the same time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring “that the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force… that would jeopardize the security… of the people on Taiwan.”

Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese President Xi Jinping told the 20th Communist Party Congress that “reunification must be realized” and refused “to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan. In a fateful counterpoint, President Biden stated, as recently as September 2022, that the US would defend Taiwan “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”

But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that “unprecedented attack” by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs quarantine that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland China. With the island’s major ports at Taipei and Kaohsiung facing the Taiwan Straits, any American warships trying to break that embargo would face a lethal swarm of nuclear submarines, jet aircraft, and ship-killing missiles.

Given the near-certain loss of two or three aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy would likely back off and Taiwan would be forced to negotiate the terms of its reunification with Beijing. Such a humiliating reversal would send a clear signal that, after 80 years, American dominion over the Pacific had finally ended, inflicting another major blow to U.S. global hegemony.

The Sum of Three Crises

Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow, and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, President Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.

This column is distributed by Tom Dispatch.

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Photograph Source: Abhisek Sarda – CC BY 2.0

“And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg
Which hatch’d, would as his kind grow mischievous;
And kill him in the shell”

– Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

The brilliant scholar, Paul Gilroy, once stated that we live at a time when the “horrors of the past are much closer to us than we like to imagine.” [1] Gilroy’s words are more resonant today than they were when first written. At every level of domestic and foreign policy, the ghosts of fascism are evident, offering a glimpse of what horrors await us as the twenty-first century unfolds. At the level of foreign policy, blood gushes from the bombs, artillery, and tanks of rogue states in Gaza and Ukraine. Biden tells us that bringing diplomatic solutions to the dreadful warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East are less important than the profits and jobs created by death machines that constitute the defense industries feeding both wars. War culture and the language of hate fill the airwaves legitimating violence as a form of political opportunism. The cruel language and practices of human degradation and destructiveness now feed a growing fascist politics in the U.S.  Fascist demagogues now boast about their racial fantasies, unchecked adoration of violence, and their aggressive lawlessness.  What Ingmar Bergman once called “The Serpent’s Egg,” a metaphor for the birth of fascism is about to hatch.

In a world shaped increasingly by emerging authoritarianism, it has become increasingly difficult to remember what a purposeful and substantive democracy looks like, or for that matter, what the idea of democracy might suggest. Democracy as an ideal, promise, and working practice is under assault, just as a number of far-right educational, market, military, and religious fundamentalisms are gaining ascendancy in American society. Increasingly, it becomes more challenging to inhabit those public spheres where politics thrives—where thinking, speaking, and acting subjects engage and critically address the major forces and problems bearing down on their lives. In this new moment in history, which too often resembles the nightmares of a fascist past with its banning of books, erasing of history, attack on trans people, and support of white nationalism and supremacy, the question of how society should imagine itself or what its future might hold has become more demanding given the eradication of social formations that place an emphasis on truth, social justice, freedom, equality, and compassion.

Historical and social amnesia have become the organizing principles of U.S. society. Lies morph into the celebration of violence and language become part of the machinery of social death, relegated to the sphere of consumer culture, and devoid of an ethical grammar that is banished to zones of political and social abandonment.

Subjectivity, identity formation, and the longing for community have become powerful elements of a politics of aggression. An ocular—image-based culture celebrates human misery, turns monsters into political celebrities who preach a language that accelerates the death of the unwanted, powerless, and what Judith Butler calls the ungrievable. The mainstream media normalizes alleged leaders in the fields of politics, entertainment, and education who thrive on the energies of the dead, weak, and disposable. Yet, what is often missed is the spread of fascist ideology, fear, rhetoric, symbols, and demonstrations that circulate in lesser political circles and at the level of everyday life in the United States. All of which speaks to how deeply embedded authoritarianism, violence, and the mobilizing passions of fascism are in American society and culture. Three recent examples speak to the dark current of fascist politics in the United States.

First, I want to highlight the words of right-wing activist Jack Posobiec who in “his welcome speech at this year’s conference of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC,) stated: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” He then held up a cross necklace and continued: “After we burn that swamp to the ground, we will establish the new American republic on its ashes, and our first order of business will be righteous retribution for those who betrayed America.”[2] This is fascism on steroids and yet it got little media coverage and when it did it was dismissed as a kind of rogue extremism. In actuality, it simply echoes a central ideology of MAGA Republicans.

 Another example of how the embers of fascist politics have turned into a firestorm of authoritarian rhetoric and is downplayed or ignored in the mainstream media is visible in the ongoing rhetoric of the ignorant buffoon Mark Robinson who is running for the governorship of North Carolina. In the mainstream media, despite his extremist rhetoric, he is treated as a normal candidate even though he has referred to transgender and homosexual people as maggots and filth, stating that they “are equivalent to what the cows leave behind”[3] After a mass shooter in 2016 murdered 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Robinson posted on Facebook “I would pray for the souls of all those killed…However, homosexuality is STILL an abominable sin and I WILL NOT join in celebrating gay pride.”  He has stated that he wished for the days when women could not vote and called mass shootings “karma” for abortion. He has said that Christians must take control of public schools because children are being abused by teachers who are telling children “about transgenderism, homosexuality, and any of that  filth.”[4] Robinson’s remarks make clear that willful ignorance is a precondition for fascist politics, and that a culture of cruelty and hate has become a normalized tool of political opportunism.

The third example draws upon the current authoritarian assault on higher education which is far worse than anything that could have been imagined with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In light of this assault, how could the media largely ignore New College in Florida hiring Bruce Gilley, who has authored a book called The Case for Colonialism. Beyond the racist affirmation in book form supporting the genocidal legacy of colonialism, he has also stated publicly that “the transgender flag [is] a symbol of narcissistic sexual reductionism and the mutilation of children,” and that “virtually every indigenous leader in Canada is an identity fraud.” [5]  Without any critical understanding of history, he has endorsed a video by the Blackwater mercenary company founder Erik Prince calling for putting “the imperial hat back on” to govern “pretty much all of Africa.”[6] There is more at work here than the hiring of a far-right colonialist parading as a professor, there is a clarion call alerting to how higher education is being transformed into indoctrination centers and rabid disimagination machines.  James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in No Name in the Street that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”[7]

These events closely resemble Bergman’s notion of “The Serpent’s Egg,” an instructive metaphor for illuminating the conditions that gave rise to fascism. As Bergman noted in a previous era, the abyss of fascism “looms menacingly.” Bergman’s words resonate with a fascist politics that now draws on the culture of everyday life and in doing so spreads its ideologies, values, social relations, and culture of cruelty in institutions, practices, policies, and experiences of domination that take on the hue of being commonplace, wrapped in the discourse of freedom, victimhood, gated mentalities and gated borders.

For the playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht, “the serpent’s egg” suggests that beneath seemingly democratic societies lie dark, dangerous and volatile forces waiting to be unleashed by the dynamics of capitalism. For Brecht, no one can tell the truth about fascism without speaking out against the horrors of capitalism. The horrors of fascism lurk in the shadows of everyday life, and as Brecht observes “If anyone wishes to describe Fascism and war, great disasters which are not natural catastrophes, he must do so in terms of a practical truth. He must…  write the truth about evil conditions, one must write it so that its avertible causes can be identified. If the preventable causes can be identified, the evil conditions can be fought.”[8]

Writing about the truth must begin by recognizing how the snake of fascism lays its eggs—the serpent’s eggs, which are often hatched in the limelight of the spectacularized image of ocular politics where their impending danger is overlooked.  The challenge is to acknowledge how the seeds of fascism emerge in the shadows of everyday speech, practices, and social relations. The microaggressions of fascism are too often treated as if they reside solely in the theatricality of the overly dramatic, the exaggerated spectacle, or in the realm of self-serving attention-gripping mass hysteria. What is overlooked is the power of everyday practices in their overly stylized and calculating shock value, which slowly become normalized and accelerated, legitimized and expanded making  the efficacy of the unspeakable a core element of everyday life.   What is often dismissed as a minor public spectacle morphs into the horror of absolute evil in a world led by barbarians. In the current historical period, the eggs of the serpent are about to hatch keeping alive both its threat to end democracy, renew the legacy of colonialism, and once again let loose the politics of disposability, elimination, and death.  Susan Sontag was right in her insistence on the need “to detect fascist longings in our midst.”  Fascism now mobilizes people’s feelings in order to win them over either to the arena of hate and bigotry or to depoliticize them. Once we lose sight of how the dynamics of power hide in the language of the everyday. Fascism will arrive not with a thunderous bang but with the waving of the flag and the stench of death. The serpent’s egg will have hatched, and the lights will go out.

Notes.

[1] Paul Gilroy, “The 2019 Holberg Lecture, by Laureate Paul Gilroy: Never Again: refusing race and salvaging the human,” Holbergprisen, [November 11, 2019].   Online: https://holbergprisen.no/en/news/holberg-prize/2019-holberg-lecture-laureate-paul-gilroy

[2] Ben Goggin, “Calls to ‘fight’ and echoes of Jan. 6 embraced by CPAC attendees,” NBC News (February 23, 2024). Online: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/jack-posobiec-jan-6-2024-cpac-rcna140225

[3] Kira Lerner, “Hitler-quoting candidate wins North Carolina Republican gubernatorial primary,” The Guardian (March 6, 2024). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/05/mark-robinson-north-carolina

[4] See: Pic.twitter.com/aXjCPFKTs0

[5] Ryan Quinn, “New College of Florida Hires Professor Who Champions Colonialism,” Inside Higher Education (March 8, 2024). https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2024/03/08/new-college-florida-hires-scholar-who-defends

[6] Ibid. Ryan Quinn.

[7] Toni Morrison, ed. James Baldwin, Collected Essays: No Name in the Street (New York: Library of America, 1998), p. 437.

[8] Bertol Brecht, “Writing the Truth-Five difficulties,” Revolutionary Socialism.com (March 2015, 1935). Online: https://revolutionary-socialism.com/en/writing-the-truth-five-difficulties/

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The Israeli invasion of Palestine is an act of aggression of such gravity that it is almost impossible for me to speak of anything else. When the population of six cities and many villages is tortured daily in front of the whole world, and when those perpetrating these crimes are granted total immunity, then we have to stop and speak up because new standards are being established as to what is permissible internationally, which put us all in danger.

My first point, then, is that we have to oppose this aggression, these Israeli war crimes, in any way we can and there is a lot we can do since it is our money that pays for them. Without the United States Israel could not even function as an economy, much less have tanks to occupy every street in Palestine.

At the same time, we should not make the mistake of thinking that the situation in Palestine is unique. Palestine today is the image of what, in different ways, is occurring across the world.

The Israeli invasion of Palestine is a classic example of colonial conquest. In fact, the very creation of the state of Israel was part of the British colonization of the Middle East. This was acknowledged by Sharon when he told the president of France, Chirac, three weeks ago that : Palestine is our Algeria, with the difference (he added) that we are going to stay.

Over the last two decades the same colonial relations have been re-imposed by Europe and the U.S. on every part of the former colonial world, this time in the name of the debt crisis, globalization or the war on drugs” and, more recently, the war on terrorism. The slogans change but the objectives and the consequences are the same: uprooting the local populations, turning them into refugees, into cheap labor for the global market, appropriating their resources, their lands, their assets, their oil, their waters, their labor, either by the use of tanks and bombings or through trade agreements, structural adjustment programs, currency devaluations, all means of waging war on the people and the lands.

Not surprisingly, the same destructive policies that Israel is implementing in Palestine, with the use of deadly force through land expropriation, the expansion of settlements, the theft of water, and now the systematic destruction of every infrastructure (like water pipes, roads, power plants, sewers, schools, houses) are also being implemented, with the same results, in Africa, Asia, Latin America.

What in Israel is destroyed by the IDF, in many African countries is destroyed by the World Bank, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). In Palestine it is the Israeli tanks that bulldoze schools and houses. In Africa, it is structural adjustment, the defunding of the public sector, currency devaluation, but the effects are the same. In Palestine the sick, the wounded, the women giving birth cannot go to the hospitals because the Israelis shoot them. In Africa people cannot go to the hospitals, even without the Israeli bullets–although Israel has played havoc in Africa too, propping every dictator, from Mobuto to the white South African apartheid regime. In both cases, the results are populations of refugees, the transfer of lands from the local people to the new colonial powers, forwarding and protecting the interests of international capital.

Comparing the role of the Israeli government and the Israeli army with that of the World Bank, the IMF and WTO is not to underestimate what is taking place in Palestine or minimize its gravity, but it is to show the continuity between war and economic policy and between the aggression of Israel against Palestine and the many wars that are now bloodying the world.

President Bush has announced that fifty countries are on the US government list as candidates for bombings. But as a matter of fact an equal number has already experienced Americas warfare over the last two decades, to such an extent that it will take them decades to regain some degree of normalcy. Think of Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan. Many of these countries have been so devastated that they are now economically dis-functional or have been placed under the UN trusteeship.

Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that we are witnessing a new, extensive process of recolonization, with Palestine being the experimental field.

In the US as well, warfare is the rule with mass incarceration of black and Latino youth,

the use of capital punishment mostly against black people, and the attack on healthcare, housing, welfare provisions, immigrant men, and women.

Capitalism is waging a war on the people of the world, a war that deprives us of all means necessary to reproduce our lives, a war that keeps seeking new names and justifications but at the core has one purpose: stripping us from our entitlement to the wealth of the world; turning us into refugees of one sort of another, homeless people who have no claim to this earth, allows us only to work and work when it suits our employers.

This is our destiny and the destiny of our children if we do not resist and if we refuse to become settlers, guards, policemen. Today the people of Palestine are being martyred, but we delude ourselves if we think that the destruction of their communities and their expulsion from their lands will have no consequences for our lives. Palestine is the world, and the blood it sheds–caused by the weapons and financial aid provided by the United States–will fall on us as well.

Silvia Federici presented this talk at the Socialist Scholars Conference, April 2002.

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Climate heating takes a leap

On multiple fronts, these are not easy times for people who care about the future of the world.

The climate news is filled with reports of record-breaking temperatures. After a series of years since 2015 that were already the hottest on record, 2023 was the hottest ever by a long shot, just 0.02 degrees C shy of the 1.5 degree C limit that was set as an aspirational goal by the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. The record is continuing into this year, even as the El Nino Pacific Ocean warming condition which drives increased heating is fading. First, the world experienced the hottest January on record, 1.66 degrees C over the 1850-1900 baseline and “a stark deviation” from the average of the last 30 years, the World Meteorological Organization reported. Then February was the hottest for its month at 1.77 degrees C over the baseline.

The 12 months from February 2023 to January 2024 actually did breach the 1.5 degree C barrier by 0.02 degrees. The real question is whether this is a one-year breach or the beginning of a trend. The five-year average will tell the story. It is still around 0.3 degrees C below the 1.5 marker.

Meanwhile, sea surface temperatures are literally headed off the charts, as the below graph shows. Ocean heating is the precursor to storms and other weather extremes.

Antarctic sea ice cover at its point of maximum annual accumulation continues to hit record lows, with September 2023 the lowest by far. The previous February saw the record lowest minimum accumulation. The minimum reached this February tied with February 2022 for second lowest minimum.

“Antarctica’s low sea ice extent in 2023 and culminating with this low 2024 minimum is nothing short of shocking,” said leading ice research scientist Ted Scambos. “These consecutive lows have the potential to kick off real changes in ice sheet melting, snowfall on the ice sheet and warming of the surrounding ocean.”

Scientists are now calling it a regime shift, likely caused by those heating waters undermining ice formation. Low sea ice in the southern polar regions has impacts not only on Antarctica, but also on the flow of ocean currents, which affects weather patterns around the world.

A new review of climate tipping points studies by over 200 researchers comes to a stark conclusion, ScienceAlert reports: “humanity is heading for disaster, unless significant steps are taken to change that course . . . The research team mentions trillions of US dollars in climate-related damage, billions of people pushed into hardship around the world, and millions of lives lost as a result of a rapidly warming planet.

“The report focuses specifically on tipping points – sudden, large scale shifts in ecological conditions caused by a culmination of smaller environmental changes. Those cataclysmic shifts include the widespread destruction of coral reefs and the collapse of the biggest ice sheets, each of which would in turn lead to even greater widespread disruption.”

The nightmare is cascading tipping points, one triggering another. The below chart illustrates the complex interactions. One of the scariest chains is the disappearance of Arctic sea ice which reduces the white surface so less solar heat is reflected back into space and more to be absorbed in the blue ocean, thus disproportionately heating the polar region. In turn this melts Greenland ice, freshening the water and reducing its salt content. This disrupts North Atlantic currents. The current is propelled by heavier salt-laden water sinking to the depths when it reaches the North Atlantic, opening a space to pull water north. With lighter water the current slows. That reduces heat transport to the north and builds it up in oceans to the south, changing weather patterns to create drought and dieback in the Amazon rainforest while promoting disintegration of Antarctic ice.

The North Atlantic current is already the slowest in at least 1,500 years, and has slowed 15% since the mid-20th century, so all this may already be occurring to some extent. Meanwhile, a new study says the summer Arctic Ocean could become largely ice-free as soon as this decade, moving the earliest projection up a decade.

Wars and the threat of more

While all of this says the world should be moving toward unprecedented international cooperation to ensure our common survival, it’s going in the exact opposite direction. The great powers of the U.S., Russia and China seem inexorably driven to intensified conflict. In the view of many informed observers, the risk of nuclear war has never been greater. The war in Ukraine grinds on, with hundreds of thousands dead and maimed, while the prospect of introducing NATO troops has been raised by French President Emmanuel Macron. It is hard to see how that happens without hazarding escalation to nuclear warfare.

The event most often cited as the pinnacle of nuclear danger, the 1962 crisis over Soviet missiles in Cuba, lasted only 13 days. The current threat extends over an indefinite period. An extended time of tension magnifies the risks of nuclear war by accident or by misreading the intentions of the adversary, as during the 1983 NATO Able Archer exercise.

Meanwhile, the genocide in Gaza continues. The heartbreaking reality is captured in these articles in a way nothing else I’ve read does: “History will record that Israel committed a holocaust,” and “On the floors of genocide: sand, shit, decomposing flesh and odd slippers,” by Susan Abulhawa, who visited Gaza in February and early March. She recounts the absolute degradation to which the people of Gaza are being subjected, telling the stories of real human beings. This great tragedy of a state born of genocide commiting a genocide is almost too much to grasp. It is as if seeds planted in Israel’s founding are coming to full bloom, a cycle of evil feeding itself. I cannot express the depth of my gratitude for Jewish voices speaking up and organizing against this horror.

As if all this were not enough, political conflict in the U.S. is at a high pitch, with a civil war air to it. A year ago this month Donald Trump commenced his 2024 presidential campaign with a rally at Waco, Texas, site of the Branch Davidian shootout in 1993, a touchstone for the far right. A choir of people imprisoned for the January 6 Capitol invasion called in to sing the national anthem, and scenes of the event flashed on the screen. Trump vowed retribution on his enemies. Now, with the Super Tuesday results of a few days ago, he is almost certain to be the Republican nominee, while Biden is weakened by his association with Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Whoever wins in 2024, the result is unlikely to be accepted by the other side. Potential outcomes in 2025 verge on the unimaginable. In 1859 and 1860, few could envision the bloody Civil War that was just ahead. Most just could not believe that the nation would descend into such carnage, still the war that by far took the most U.S lives. I am not predicting a repeat of that scenario, but a breakdown of federal authority is quite conceivable.

The clash between Texas and the federal government over the state’s actions to prevent border crossings give an early indication. The Texas Nationalist Movement claims enough signatures to put a secession measure on the Republican ballot, which the party disputed because most were electronically registered. But the victories in the recent elections of 7 legislators committed to putting the measure on the ballot means the issue will go before the legislature. A February YouGov poll showed 31% of Texans support secession, the highest of any state except Alaska, which came in at 36%.

In case you think the sentiment is restricted to red states, California came in second at 29% and New York at 28%. My own state of Washington registered 24%. Overall, 23% in the U.S. support their state seceding, while 51% oppose it, with the remainder unsure. Among Republicans the break is 29% yes, 46% no. Among Democrats it’s 21% yes, 60% no. (Interestingly, 28% would support another state seceding. People who would like to get rid of Texas or California, no doubt.) Asked if the Constitution gives states the right to secede, 26% actually answered yes and only 35% no, the rest unsure, despite the result of the Civil War. What is shocking, indicating that the bonds among U.S. of Americans are not as unbreakable as we might have thought, is the thin majority opposing secession, the large minority supporting it, and the only one-third portion who say it is impossible. Secession was also a minority sentiment in the South before the election of Abraham Lincoln.

We’ve been drifting apart as a country for decades, arguably since the 1960s. In this situation, a fractious presidential election with a disputed result could well set off a cascading effect leading to some form of national division. It is aptly noted that the greatest dividing line in the U.S. is urban-rural, so a neat division of states is less feasible than in 1861. Nonetheless, large metropolitan areas tend to drag their states along. Again, with emotions running so high, what we think is impossible now could be the headlines in the next year or two. If not outright secession, then a refusal by states to obey federal authority on dividing line issues such as immigration and reproductive rights.

The greatest danger is despair

A climate system going into uncharted territory. The threat of World War III openly discussed. An actual genocide underway shocking the conscience of the world. (Though it has to be said we in the Western world are blind to mass deaths also occurring in places such as Sudan and the Congo.) A nation fraught with divisions that threaten to fracture it. As I started this post, these are times to trouble all of us who care for the future of our world. The prospect for bad outcomes seems to outweigh the odds for good ones. We teeter on the edge of chaos. It can be emotionally crushing. I know.

What is clear, and difficult to absorb, is that better possibilities for our world have been foreclosed, and we must now cope with the consequences of bad pathways long pursued, and indeed promoted by the various interests that hold power in our societies. Major industries including fossil fuels, agribusiness and timber insistently forward their climate-polluting profit schemes. The military-industrial complex and its network of think tanks and politicians push conflict and war, a boon to arms industry stock valuations. The Israel lobby forecloses reconciliation with the Palestinians. Various political party and media interests thrive on spurring national divisions, because it boosts votes, donations and ratings. In general, large corporate powers – big pharma, big tech, big banks, etc. – serve their own bottom line interests, whatever the broader impacts.

What has been lost here, or at least deeply obscured, is a sense of the common good, and with it a pursuit of common understandings. It seems there is a malicious intent to deny commonalities in order to further narrow interests. That is the thread running through all our convergent crises. This is why I think that in a world of dangers the greatest is despair, of caring, thoughtful people who place prime value in the common good becoming discouraged and just giving up to retreat into private life, to the limited personal spaces where we think we can do at least a little good. It is the greatest danger because, when narrow interests dominate, the only hope is people who care about the common good and act for it in an organized manner. I can hardly blame people for feeling despair, knowing how this world of troubles affects me in my own life. Facing situations over which one has little or no control, the emotional impact can be overwhelming.

That is why I am urgent to return to a theme I opened last year, building the future in place. To provide a pathway where people can engage around not just what we are against, as vital as that is, but also a hopeful vision of what we are for. The key concept is building a network of community-based institutions that meet basic human needs such as housing, food and energy by creating organized forms such as public banking and worker cooperatives, all driven by new instruments of governance and consensus-building including community assemblies and watershed councils. The idea is to build a new basis of human solidarity and mutual aid in the places and regions we live, in the new institutions themselves and the struggles to create them. To rediscover the sense of the common good in rebuilding community around us, and linking our efforts into broader movements for the common good in our countries and world.

We have to be real that things are likely to get worse before they get better. In the case of climate this is certainly so. And to confront this reality by creating centers of hope that embody a better future in the places we live. Both to deal with the sources of the multiple crises we face, and to build strong communities able to cope with the tough times we know are surely coming. In such times, nothing will be more important than a sense of human solidarity and common kindness. These are survival necessities. We need to continue to do everything we can at all levels to stop climate tipping points and wars, and at the same time build the peaceful, ecologically sustainable future we want and need where we have the most leverage, our home communities. Here is a critical venue where we can build power to confront the interests that are throwing away our future.

It is hard to know if any of this will be enough, and easy to conceive that anything we can do will fall short. These situations are indeed overwhelming and unprecedented in recorded human history. Whatever the case, we must not lose heart. We must not give up. We must try to build a future for ourselves, our children and their future generations. A future centered on community and a sense of the common good. The place to start is where we live. We must build the future in place.

This essay originally appeared on The Raven.

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Photograph Source: 玄史生 – CC0

There are many issues on the line this election year but one that gets little attention is former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax reform law that cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanently reduced the tax rate for big corporations from an already-low 35 percent to a ridiculously minuscule 21 percent. It also lowered tax rates for the wealthiest people from nearly 40 percent to 37 percent. Several provisions of that law are set to expire in 2025, making this November’s Congressional and Presidential elections particularly critical to issues of economic fairness and justice.

A few months after Trump signed the bill, he boasted, “We have the biggest tax cut in history, bigger than the Reagan tax cut. Bigger than any tax cut.” It became a common refrain for him when touting his achievements. But, Trump, who was known for breaking all records on lying to the public while in office, conflated many different facts to come up with a positive-sounding falsehood in a nation already primed by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to view taxation as anathema. Trump’s tax cuts as a whole were the eighth largest in history. But his corporate tax cut was in fact the single largest reduction ever in that category.

Wealthy corporations have for years lobbied for and won so many carve-outs and loopholes to the U.S. tax system, and hidden so much money in offshore tax havens that their pre-2017 effective tax rates were already far lower than the official rates. Then, Trump lowered them even more. Imagine telling the American public that you are responsible specifically for the biggest tax cuts to the biggest corporations in U.S. history. It wasn’t a good look. And so, he lied, saying that he signed history’s biggest tax cut overall.

In the simplest terms, taxes are a way to pool collective resources so we can have the things we all need for safety and security. Progressive taxation is when wealthier individuals (and corporations) are taxed at higher-than-average rates because the richer one is, the less excess money one needs beyond one’s basic necessities. Progressive taxation ensures that wealth inequality doesn’t spiral out of control and helps ensure money that’s being sucked upwards, gets redistributed downward. When wealthy elites pay fewer taxes, they are effectively stealing from the public.

Since the cuts have been in place, many studies have attempted to assess their impact on the U.S. economy. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded in a March 2024 report that “[t]ogether with the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts enacted under President Bush (most of which were made permanent in 2012), [Trump’s] law has severely eroded our country’s revenue base.”

Trump’s law accelerated the draining of our collective revenues to fund the things we need. Even the fiscally conservative Peter G. Peterson Foundation concluded that, as a result of Trump’s law, “The United States collects fewer revenues from corporations, relative to the size of the economy, than most other advanced countries.”

Trump’s tax cuts were quite literally regressive, rewarding the already rich. A 2021 ProPublica report found that just one last-minute provision to the bill demanded by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) for so-called pass-through corporations benefited a handful of the wealthiest people in the nation: “just 82 ultrawealthy households collectively walked away with more than $1 billion in total savings, an analysis of confidential tax records shows.” It only cost about $20 million in bribes to Johnson (i.e., donations to the Senator’s reelection campaign) to enact this windfall.

It’s no wonder that the rich were thrilled with Trump’s presidency and that his virulent white supremacy and fascist leanings were not deal breakers.

It’s also unsurprising that wealthy elites are backing a second term for Trump. They want an extension of those tax bill provisions that are expiring in 2025, and perhaps an even bigger tax cut, if they can get it. If those provisions are left to expire, people making more than $400,000 a year—the top 2 percent of earners—will see an increase in taxation in 2025.

This is a demographic that is already prone to tax cheating given the IRS’s recent announcement that 125,000 Americans making between $400,000 and $1 million a year have simply refused to file taxes since 2017.

If the GOP wins control of the Senate and the House of Representatives this fall, and if Trump beats President Joe Biden, those cuts will become permanent. A GOP sweep in November will also usher in a new wave of threats to people of color, LGBTQ people, especially transgender communities, labor rights, and reproductive justice, as well as an escalationto the already-dire Israeli genocide in Gaza that Biden is fueling. It’s hard to believe but many Americans seem to have forgotten the horrors of 2016 to 2020.

But, at its heart, this election will be about money, for it will take a lot of money to fund the GOP’s reelection campaigns in order for moneyed forces to ensure they retain control of more money—democracy, justice, and equity be damned.

For Trump, this is even more important given his legal challenges. He’s relying on small-dollar donations from his base to cover his mounting legal fees and has had to post a $91 million bond to cover the fines he faces from a defamation lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll. The more desperate Trump gets in his bid to secure the White House, the more willing he and his party will be to sell the nation to the highest bidder. And, he will lie to the public by conflating tax cuts for the rich with tax cuts for all.

We ought to think of tax cuts in terms of public revenue theft. When the wealthy win lowered taxes, they are stealing money from the American public as a whole. As per the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, permanently extending Trump’s tax cuts will result in a loss of $3.5 trillion in revenues through the year 2033. That’s highway robbery.

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

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Photo by Alice Pasqual

When interest-bearing commercial and agrarian debt came to be incorporated into civilization’s economic structure in the third millennium BC, it was accompanied by clean slates that liberated bondservants and restored to debtors the rights to the crops and land that creditors had taken. By the second millennium BC in Babylonia these royal “restorations of order” became customary proclamations rescuing debtors whose family members had been reduced to bondage or who had lost their land to foreclosing creditors.

Anthropologists have looked at surviving tribal enclaves for ideas of how the Bronze Age takeoff may have been managed. But no tribal communities in today’s world possess the outward-reaching dynamics of Mesopotamia during its commercial takeoff, which occurred in many ways that are alien to modern ways of thinking. The documentation describes an approach operating on different principles from those that most modern observers assume to have been primordial and universal.

The Character of Bronze Age Debt That Made Royal Clean Slates Necessary

The dynamics of interest-bearing debt are different from those of tribal gift exchange and related reciprocity obligations. Monetary credit arrangements bear a specific interest rate, and the date of payment is specified in advance rather than left open-ended. That requires debts to be recorded in writing and formally witnessed. Creditors may take foreclosure measures for non-payment, leading to the debtor’s bondage or the loss of land rights.

Civilization’s earliest written records, from Sumer in the third millennium BC, provide the best evidence for civilization’s monetized debt relations “in the beginning.” Two categories of debt existed, each associated with its own designated monetary commodity. Business obligations owed by traders and entrepreneurial managers were denominated in silver, above all those associated with foreign trade. The agrarian economy operated on credit denominated in barley units, assigned a value equal to the silver shekel in order to strike a common measure.

Money Loans and Long-Distance Trade

Rules for money loans described in scribal training exercises are found almost exclusively in the commercial sphere, especially in connection with long-distance trade. These loans were denominated in silver at the equivalent of a 20 percent annual rate of interest, doubling the principal in five years. Under normal conditions merchants were able to pay this rate to their creditors and keep a profit for themselves. Lenders shared in the mercantile risk, taking what in effect was an equity position. If caravans were robbed or ships and their cargoes lost at sea through no fault of the merchant, the debt was voided. There is no indication that payment of such mercantile debts led to problems requiring royal intervention.

Interest-bearing debt had initially arisen in the commercial sphere, taking the form of advances of assets by the large public institutions to entrepreneurial recipients, enabling them to make an economic gain in commerce and land management. But throughout all antiquity the most problematic debts disrupting the economy’s fiscal and social balance were in the agrarian sphere. The original objective of charging interest to sharecroppers and other cultivators, however, can hardly have been to reduce them to bondage or to expropriate them from their self-support land. Their labor was needed for the agrarian economy to function.

Agrarian Debt and Land-Rental Agreements

Rural usury and the consequent widespread forfeiture of lands seem to have derived from advances of land, animals, and tools to sharecroppers (or their manager intermediaries) by temples and palaces. Sharecropping land and agricultural inputs were advanced for a rent of one-third of the (optimistically) estimated normal crop yield 1. Interest was charged on arrears of this rent and other agrarian obligations not settled at harvest-time. The interest rate charged on these carry-over debts was the same as the sharecropping rental rate: one-third. Even arrears for unpaid debts for food or credit for other needs, such as priestly social services, were charged interest at the rate of one-third of the sum owed, simply mirroring the sharecropping rental return for creditors.

Arrears on agrarian obligations must have been infrequent, given the ever-present risk of crop failure preventing anticipated crops payments from being paid. Researchers Alfonso Archi and Piotr Steinkeller show that agrarian interest rates denominated in barley are attested by the middle of the third millennium BC. Officials, collectors for the palaces and temples, and merchants often acted in their own private capacity to make interest-bearing loans to cultivators in arrears for arrears of fees owed to the large institutions.

Rural usury thus emerged as well-to-do “big men” charged for arrears owed to the palace and temples, also lending food and other necessities to distressed cultivators. But agrarian interest-bearing debt, especially usury charged to borrowers in need, was always denounced as socially unfair. The question therefore arises as to just how such charges originated in the first place.

Few types of barley debt involved actual loans of money. What often are called “loan documents” should more literally be termed “debt records” or simply “notes of obligation.” Even in the commercial sphere with its debts denominated in silver, textiles, and other handicrafts that temple and palace workshops consigned to merchants for trade were recorded as debts. And when contractual work was to be performed, craftsmen gave customers tablets of obligation when they were given materials to make into a finished product.

The basic contractual formulae were well established by the end of the third millennium BC. Debt tablets state the sum owed, the due date, and the names of witnesses, with the appropriate seals. Additional stipulations might include the pledges involved, guarantees by individuals who stood surety, and the interest rate to be charged (often to accrue only if the debt were not paid on time). Some documents were given a title citing the reason why the debt was established.

Agrarian debts mostly arose on rental agreements on land advanced by public institutions to intermediaries, who then subleased it to sharecroppers. Near East researcher Johannes Renger describes how land and workshops were administered directly by palace officials in Ur III (2111-2004 BC), but by the Old Babylonian period (2000-1600 BC) the palace franchised the management of its fields and date orchards, herds of sheep, brick-making workshops, and other handicrafts to “entrepreneurs” as Palastgeschäfte, “royal enterprises.” These managers were entitled to keep whatever they could produce or collect above and beyond the amount stipulated by their contract with the palace, but if the sums they collected fell short, their arrears were recorded as a debt and they were obliged to pay the difference out of their own resources.

The rate of interest payable by cultivators on such debt arrears was, as described above, one-third, being the same as the rate charged for advances of sharecropping land. Cultivators were also charged this one-third rate of interest for unpaid arrears of charges for advances to buy food or beer or meet emergency needs on credit. If they lacked the means to pay out of whatever assets they had, they had to work off the debt charges in the form of their labor service or that of their family members (daughters, sons, wives, or house-slaves), and ultimately they had to pledge their land rights.

How Agrarian Debt Transformed Land Tenure

Barley debts had an annual character reflecting the crop cycle, falling due upon harvest. The accrual of such debts did not reflect a parallel growth in the cultivator’s ability to pay out of their harvest. Creditors obtained work at harvest-time by extending loans whose interest was paid in the form of labor service, as labor-for-hire was not generally available in this epoch.

In addition to their labor, debtors were obliged to pledge their family members as bondservants, followed by their land rights. Self-support land had traditionally been conveyed from one generation to the next within families, not being freely disposable outside of the family or neighborhood. Land transfers did occur when families shrank in size and transferred their cultivation rights to distant relatives or neighbors. But starting with rights to its crop usufruct, subsistence land was pledged and relinquished to outsiders after 2000 BC.

Debtor families initially were left on the land after they lost their crop rights, but were forced off the land as the new appropriators turned to less labor-intensive cash crops such as dates. Debtors often ended up as members of rootless bands or mercenaries after the middle of the second millennium BC. Instead of crop and land rights being lost only temporarily—being returned to their original owners by royal edicts that restored the status quo ante2—such forfeitures became irreversible by the first millennium BC, especially in Greece and Italy to the west.

The Logic of Canceling Rural Debts and Reversing Land Forfeitures

An inability to meet obligations was inherent in the risks to which agrarian life was subject throughout antiquity: drought, flooding, infestation, or an outbreak of disease, capped by military disruptions. The problem confronting rulers was how to prevent debts from mounting up to the point where they threatened to expropriate the community’s corvée labor and fighting force, dooming debt-ridden realms to defeat by outsiders. If the indebted rural citizenry were to survive along customary lines, priority could not be given to creditors.

Mesopotamian rulers countered the rural debt problem not by banning interest outright, but by annulling barley debts. To restore the means of self-support, rulers issued edicts “proclaiming justice,” decreeing economic order and “righteousness.” These proclamations date from almost as early as interest-bearing debt is attested, starting in Sumer with Lagash’s rulers Enmetena circa 2400 BC and Urukagina and 2350 BC. Much as commercial debts were forgiven when the merchandise was lost through no fault of the merchant, Hammurabi’s laws (§48) provided that cultivators would not be obliged to pay their crop debts if the storm-god Adad flooded their field and the crop was lost. The operative principle was that debtors should not lose their economic liberty by being held liable for “acts of God.” And inasmuch as most barley debts were owed to the palace or royal officials, it was easy for rulers to cancel them. Letting officials and merchants keep the crops and labor of debtors would have deprived rulers of their ability to collect the customary royal fees and land rents for themselves and to obtain corvée labor and military service.

There was no modernist thought that the dynamics of interest-bearing debt might be self-stabilizing by letting “market forces” proceed unimpeded. There was no thought of Adam Smith’s Deist god designing the world to run like clockwork, with checks and balances automatically maintaining equilibrium without any need for intervention by kings or priestly sanctions. Not even the wealthy voiced the ideology of modern free-market fundamentalism arguing that society’s wealth and revenue would be maximized by letting it pass into the hands of the richest and most aggressively self-serving individuals reducing hitherto free families to bondage.

Notes.

1 Although not clear from the records, it seems likely that agricultural inputs were advanced as part of a “package” with the land for a total rental of one-third of the crop.

2 The classic studies of these edicts are F.R. Kraus, Königliche Verfügungen in altbabylonischer Zeit (Leiden, 1984); Jean Bottéro, “Désordre économique et annulation des dettes en Mesopotamie à l’époque paléo-babylonienne,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 4 (1961): pp. 113-164; J.J. Finkelstein, “Ammisaduqa’s Edict and the Babylonian ‘Law Codes,’” Journal of Cuneiform Studies, vol. 15 (1961): pp. 91-104; “Some New misharum Material and Its Implications,” in Assyriological Studies, no. 16 (1965); Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday: pp. 233-246; “The Edict of Ammisaduqa: A New Text,” Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archéologie Orientale, vol. 63 (1969): pp. 45-64; and the works of Igor Diakonoff and Dominique Charpin.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

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Twenty-five years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext for war.

The talks opened on February 6, 1999, in Rambouillet, France. Officially, the negotiations were led by a Contact Group comprised of U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill, European Union envoy Wolfgang Petritsch, and Russian diplomat Boris Mayorsky. All decisions were supposed to be jointly agreed upon by all three members of the Contact Group. In actual practice, the U.S. ran the show all the way and routinely bypassed Petritsch and Mayorsky on essential matters.

Ibrahim Rugova, an ethnic Albanian activist who advocated nonviolence, was expected to play a major role in the Albanian secessionist delegation. Joining him at Rambouillet was Fehmi Agani, a fellow member of Rugova’s Democratic League of Kosovo.

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright regularly sidelined Rugova, however, preferring to rely on delegation members from the hardline Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which had routinely murdered Serbs, Roma, and Albanians in Kosovo who worked for the government or opposed separatism. Only a few months before the conference, KLA spokesman Bardhyl Mahmuti spelled out his organization’s vision of a future Kosovo as separate and ethnically pure: “The independence of Kosovo is the only solution…We cannot live together. That is excluded.” [1]

Rugova had at one time engaged in fairly productive talks with Yugoslav officials, and his willingness to negotiate was no doubt precisely why Albright relegated him to a background role. Yugoslav Minister of Information Milan Komnenić accompanied the Yugoslav delegation to Rambouillet. He recalls, “With Rugova and Fehmi Agani, it was possible to talk; they were flexible. In Rambouillet, [KLA leader Hashim] Thaçi appears instead of Rugova. A beast.” [2] There was no love between Thaçi and Rugova, whose party members were the targets of threats and assassination attempts at the hands of the KLA. Rugova himself would survive an assassination attempt six years later.

The composition of the Yugoslav delegation reflected its position that many ethnic groups resided in Kosovo, and any agreement should take into account the interests of all parties. All of Kosovo’s major ethnic groups were represented in the delegation. Faik Jashari, one of the ethnic Albanian members of the Yugoslav delegation, was president of the Kosovo Democratic Initiative and an official in the Provisional Executive Council, Yugoslavia’s government in Kosovo. Jashari observed that Albright was startled when she saw the composition of the Yugoslav delegation, apparently because it went against the U.S. propaganda narrative. [3] Throughout the talks, Albright displayed a dismissive attitude towards the delegation’s Albanian, Roma, Egyptian, Goran, Turkish, and Slavic Muslim members.

U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as “the Serbs,” even though they constituted a minority of the members. The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding the presence of other ethnic groups in the province and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia.

After arriving at Rambouillet, the secessionist Albanian delegation informed U.S. diplomats that it did not want to meet with the Yugoslav side. Aside from a brief ceremonial meeting, the two groups had no direct contact. The Yugoslav and Albanian delegations were placed on different floors to eliminate nearly all contact. U.S. mediators Richard Holbrooke and Christopher Hill ran from one delegation to the other, conveying notes and verbal messages between the two sides but mostly trying to coerce the Yugoslav delegation. [4] Albright, Jashari said, would not listen to anyone. “She had her task, and she saw only that task. You couldn’t say anything to her. She didn’t want to talk with us and didn’t want to listen to our arguments.” [5]

Luan Koka, a Roma member of the Yugoslav delegation, noted that the U.S. was operating an electronic jamming device. “We knew exactly when Madeleine Albright was coming. Connections on our mobile phones were breaking up and going crazy.” [6] It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations said in private.

One day, it was Koka’s birthday, and the Yugoslav delegation wanted to encourage a more relaxed atmosphere with U.S. mediators, so they invited them to a cocktail party to mark the occasion. “It was a slightly more pleasant atmosphere, and I was singing,” Koka recalled. “I remember Madeleine Albright saying: ‘I really like partisan songs. But if you don’t accept this, the bombs will fall’.” [7] According to delegation member Nikola Šainović, “Madeleine Albright told us all the time: ‘If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.’” Šainović added, “We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo,” but secession remained the red line. [8]

From the beginning of the conference, U.S. mediator Christopher Hill “decided that what we really needed was an Albanian approval of a document, and a Serb refusal. If both refused, there could be no further action by NATO or any other organization for that matter.” [9] It was not peace that the U.S. team was seeking, but war.

As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators faced an alarming problem: the Yugoslav delegation had accepted all of the Contact Group’s fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group’s political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern.

On the second day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the Yugoslav delegation with the framework text of a provisional agreement for peace and self-rule in Kosovo, but it was missing some of its annexes. The Yugoslavs requested a copy of the complete document. As delegation head Ratko Marković pointed out, “Any objections to the text of the agreement could be made only after an insight into the text as a whole had been obtained.”

Nearly one week passed before the group received only one of the missing annexes. That came on the day the conference had initially been set to end. The deadline was extended, and two days later, a second missing annex was provided to the Yugoslav delegation. [10]

When the Yugoslavs next met with the Contact Group, they were assured that all elements of the text had now been given to them. Several more days passed, and at 7:00 PM on February 22, the penultimate day of the conference, the Contact Group presented three new annexes, which the Yugoslavs had never seen before. According to Marković, “Russian Ambassador Boris Mayorsky informed our delegation that Annexes 2 and 7 had not been discussed or approved by the Contact Group and that they were not the texts drafted by the Contact Group but by certain Contact Group members, while Annex 5 was discussed, but no decision was made on it at the Contact Group meeting.” The Yugoslav delegation refused to accept the new annexes, as their introduction had violated the process whereby all proposals had to be agreed upon by the three Contact Group members. [11]

At 9:30 AM on February 23, the conference’s final day, U.S. officials presented the full text of the proposal, containing yet more provisions being communicated for the first time. The accompanying note identified the package as the definitive text while adding that Russia did not support two of the articles. The letter demanded the Yugoslav delegation’s decision by 1:00 PM. [12] There was barely enough time to carefully read the text, let alone negotiate. In essence, it was an ultimatum.

Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware of Kosovo’s abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section of the text states: “The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles.” Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall “ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources.” [13] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region.

The document called for a Western-led Joint Commission, including local representatives, to monitor and coordinate the implementation of the plan. However, if commission members failed to reach a consensus on a matter, the Western-appointed Chair would have the power to impose his decision unilaterally. [14] Local representatives would serve as little more than window-dressing for Western dictate, as they could adopt no measure that went against the Chair’s wishes.

The Chair of the Implementation Mission was authorized to “recommend” the “removal and appointment of officials and the curtailment of operations of existing institutions in Kosovo.” If the Chair’s command was not obeyed “in the time requested, the Joint Commission may decide to take the recommended action,” and since the Chair had the authority to impose his will on the Joint Commission, there was no check on his power. He could remove elected and appointed officials at will and replace them with handpicked lackeys. The Chair was also authorized to order the “curtailment of operations of existing institutions.” [15] Any organization that failed to bend to U.S. demands could be shut down.

Chapter 7 of the plan called for the parties to “invite NATO to constitute and lead a military force” in Kosovo. [16] The choice of words was interesting. In language reminiscent of gangsters, Yugoslavia was told to “invite” NATO to take over the province of Kosovo or suffer the consequences.

Yugoslavia was required “to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required” by NATO. [17] Within six months, Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [18]

The plan granted NATO “unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum” to “communicate.” Although the document indicated NATO would make “reasonable efforts to coordinate,” there were no constraints on its power. [19] Yugoslav officials, “upon simple request,” would be required to grant NATO “all telecommunication services, including broadcast services…free of cost.” [20] NATO could take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air.

The plan did not restrict NATO’s presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its “vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia].” [21] NATO would be “granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges.” [22]

The agreement guaranteed that NATO would have “complete and unimpeded freedom of movement by ground, air, and water into and throughout Kosovo.” Furthermore, NATO personnel could not be held “liable for any damages to public or private property.” [23] NATO as a whole would also be “immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or criminal,” regardless of its actions anywhere on the territory of Yugoslavia. [24] Nor could NATO personnel be arrested, detained, or investigated. [25] Acceptance of the plan would have brought NATO troops swarming throughout Yugoslavia and interfering in every institution.

There were several other objectionable elements in the plan, but one that stood out was the call for an “international” (meaning Western-led) meeting to be held after three years “to determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo.” [26] It was no mystery to the Yugoslav delegation what conclusion Western officials would arrive at in such a meeting. The intent was clearly to redraw Yugoslavia’s borders to further break apart the nation.

U.S. officials knew the Yugoslav delegation could not possibly accept such a plan. “We deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept,” Madeleine Albright confided to a group of journalists, “because they needed a little bombing.” [27]

At a meeting in Belgrade on March 5, the Yugoslav delegation issued a statement that declared: “A great deceit was looming, orchestrated by the United States. They demanded that the agreement be signed, even though much of this agreement, that is, over 56 pages, had never been discussed, either within the Contact Group or during the negotiations.” [28]

Serbian President Milan Milutinović announced at a press conference that in Rambouillet, the Yugoslav delegation had “proposed solutions meeting the demands of the Contact Group for broad autonomy within Serbia, advocating full equality of all national communities.” But “agreement was not what they were after.” Instead, Western officials engaged in “open aggression,” and this was a game “about troops and troops alone.” [29]

While U.S. officials were working assiduously to avoid a peaceful resolution, they needed the Albanians to agree to the plan so that they could accuse the Yugoslav delegation of being the stumbling block to peace. U.S. mainstream media could be counted on to unquestioningly repeat the government’s line and overlook the real architects of failure. U.S. officials knew the press would act in their customary role as cheerleaders for war, which indeed, they did.

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook revealed the nature of the message Western officials were conveying to the Albanian delegation when he said, “We are certainly saying to the Kosovo Albanians that if you don’t sign up to these texts, it’s extremely difficult to see how NATO could then take action against Belgrade.” [30] Western officials were practically begging the secessionists to sign the plan. According to inside sources, the Americans assured the ethnic Albanian delegation that disarmament of the KLA would be merely symbolic and that it could keep the bulk of its weaponry so long as it was concealed. [31]

Albright spent hours trying to convince Thaçi to change his mind, telling him: “If you say yes and the Serbs say no, NATO will strike and go on striking until the Serb forces are out and NATO can go in. You will have security. And you will be able to govern yourselves.” [32] That was a clear enough signal that the intent was to rip the province away from Yugoslavia and create an artificial state. Despite such assurances, Thaçi feared the wrath of fellow KLA members if he were to sign a document that did not explicitly call for separation. When U.S. negotiators asked Thaçi why he would not sign, he responded: “If I agree to this, I will go home and they will kill me.” [33] This was not hyperbole. The KLA had threatened and murdered a great many Albanians who, in its eyes, fell short of full-throated support for its policy of violent secession and ethnic exclusion.

Even NATO Commander Wesley Clark, who flew in from Belgium, could not change Thaçi’s mind. [34] U.S. officials were exasperated with the Albanian delegation, and its recalcitrance threatened to capsize plans for war. “Rambouillet was supposed to be about putting the screws to Belgrade,” a senior U.S. official said. “But it went off the rails because of the miscalculation we made about the Albanians.” [35]

On the last day at Rambouillet, it was agreed that the ethnic Albanian delegation would return to Kosovo for discussions with fellow KLA leaders on the need to sign the document. In the days that followed, Western officials paid repeated visits to Kosovo to encourage the Albanians to sign.

So-called “negotiations” reconvened in Paris on March 15. Upon its arrival, the Yugoslav delegation objected that it was “incomprehensible” that “no direct talks between the two delegations had been facilitated.” In response to the Yugoslavs’ proposal for modifications to the plan, the Contact Group informed them that no changes would be accepted. The document must be accepted as a whole. [36]

The Yugoslav position, delegation head Ratko Marković maintained, was that “first one needs to determine what is to be implemented, and only then to determine the methods of implementation.” [37] The delegation asked the Americans what there was to talk about regarding implementation “when there was no agreement because the Albanians did not accept anything.” U.S. officials responded that the Yugoslav delegation “cannot negotiate,” adding that it would only be allowed to make grammatical changes to the text. [38]

From the U.S. perspective, the presence of the Yugoslav delegation in Paris was irrelevant other than to maintain the pretense that negotiations were taking place. Not permitted to negotiate, there was little the Yugoslavs could do but await the inevitable result, which soon came. The moment U.S. officials obtained the ethnic Albanian delegation’s signatures to the plan on March 18, they aborted the Paris Conference. There was no reason to continue engaging with the Yugoslav delegation, as the U.S. had what it needed: a pretext for war.

On the day after the U.S. pulled the plug on the Paris talks, Milan Milutinović held a press conference in the Yugoslav embassy, condemning the Paris meeting as “a kind of show” meant “to deceive public opinion in the whole world.” [39]

While the United States and its NATO allies prepared for war, Yugoslavia made last-ditch efforts to stave off bombing, including reaching out to intermediaries. Greek Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos contacted Madeleine Albright and told her that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević had offered to engage in further negotiations. But Albright told him that the decision to bomb had already been made. “In fact,” Pangalos reported, “she told me to ‘desist, you’re just being a nuisance.’” [40] In a final act of desperation to save the people from bombing, Milutinović contacted Christopher Hill and made an extraordinary offer: Yugoslavia would join NATO if the United States would allow Yugoslavia to remain whole, including the province of Kosovo. Hill responded that this was not a topic for discussion and he would not talk about it. [41]

Madeleine Albright got her war, which brought death, destruction, and misery to Yugoslavia. But NATO had a new role, and the United States further extended its hegemony over the Balkans.

In the years following the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, NATO was intent on redefining its mission. The absence of the socialist bloc presented NATO not only with the need to construct a new rationale for existence but also with the opportunity to expand Western domination over other nations.

Bosnia offered the first opportunity for NATO to begin its transformation, as it took part in a war that presented no threat to member nations.

Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role of NATO as an offensive military force acting on behalf of U.S. imperial interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations in Africa. Despite NATO’s claim that it is “committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes,” the record shows otherwise.

Notes.

[1] “Albanian Rebels Say Kosovo Independence Vital,” Reuters, October 27, 1998.

[2] “Sećanja aktera neuspelih pregovora u Rambujeu: Da li je bombardovanje moglo da se izbegne?” Nedeljnik, February 6, 2019.

[3] Interview with Faik Jashari and other Kosovo Albanians by a delegation that included author, Belgrade, August 9, 1999.

[4] Bogoljub Janićević, “Priprema za bombardovanje u Rambujeu,” Večernje Novosti, March 19, 2018.

[5] Interview with Faik Jashari and other Kosovo Albanians by a delegation that included author, Belgrade, August 9, 1999.

[6] “Sećanja aktera neuspelih pregovora u Rambujeu: Da li je bombardovanje moglo da se izbegne?” Nedeljnik, February 6, 2019.

[7] “Sećanja aktera neuspelih pregovora u Rambujeu: Da li je bombardovanje moglo da se izbegne?” Nedeljnik, February 6, 2019.

[8] “Никола Шаиновић за Курир открио тајну последњег папира из Рамбујеа,” Socialist Party of Serbia, February 12, 2019.

[9] Christopher Hill, Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, a Memoir, Simon and Schuster, 2014, p 149.

[10] Address to Assembly of the Republic of Serbia by Ratko Marković, broadcast, Radio Beograd Network, March 23, 1999.

[11] Address to Assembly of the Republic of Serbia by Ratko Marković, broadcast, Radio Beograd Network, March 23, 1999.

[12] Address to Assembly of the Republic of Serbia by Ratko Marković, broadcast, Radio Beograd Network, March 23, 1999.

[13] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 4a, Article I, February 23, 1999.

[14] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 5, Article I, section 3, February 23, 1999.

[15] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 5, Article IV, section 5, February 23, 1999.

[16] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 7, Article I, section 1a, February 23, 1999.

[17] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 7, Article I, section 1c, February 23, 1999.

[18] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 7, Article IV, section 2, February 23, 1999.

[19] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 7, Article VIII, section 5b, February 23, 1999.

[20] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 7, Article VIII, section 5b, February 23, 1999.

[21] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Appendix B, section 8, February 23, 1999.

[22] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Appendix B, section 11, February 23, 1999.

[23] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Appendix B, section 15, February 23, 1999.

[24] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Appendix B, section 6, February 23, 1999.

[25] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Appendix B, section 7, February 23, 1999.

[26] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo: Chapter 8, Article I, section 3, February 23, 1999.

[27] “Albright: They Need a Little Bombing,” Workers World News Service, June 10, 1999.

George Kenney, “Rolling Thunder: the Rerun,” The Nation, June 14, 1999.

 In the Nation article, the quote is attributed to “a senior State Department official.” In the Workers World report, further detail is provided: “On the Pacifica program ‘Democracy Now’ on June 2, Kenney confirmed that the high official was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.”

[28] Broadcast, Radio Beograd Network, 9:15 AM, March 23, 1999.

[29] Transcript, Press Conference by Milan Milutinović, Tanjug, February 23, 1999.

[30] “Cook Warns Kosovo Albanians Over Air Strikes,” Reuters, February 21, 1999.

[31] Peter Dejaegher, “Serbs Feel Cheated,” De Standaard (Groot-Bijgaarden), March 31, 1999.

[32] Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary, Harper Collins, 2013, p 406.

[33] Christopher Hill, Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, a Memoir, Simon and Schuster, 2014, p 153.

[34] Jane Perlez, “Talks on Kosovo Near Breakdown; Deadline is Tuesday,” New York Times, February 23, 1999.

[35] R. Jeffrey Smith, “Albanian Intransigence Stymied Accord,” Washington Post, February 24, 1999.

[36] Address to Assembly of the Republic of Serbia by Ratko Marković, broadcast, Radio Beograd Network, March 23, 1999.

[37] Address to Assembly of the Republic of Serbia by Ratko Marković, broadcast, Radio Beograd Network, March 23, 1999.

[38] “Никола Шаиновић за Курир открио тајну последњег папира из Рамбујеа,” Socialist Party of Serbia, February 12, 2019.

[39] “Press Conference Held by the President of Serbia,” Politika, March 19, 1999.

[40] “Ex-Minister Claims ‘Meddling’ in Kosovo Prompted Sacking,” Athens News, December 1, 2001.

[41] S.J. Matić, R. Dragović , “20 Godina Od Početka Pregovora U Rambujeu: Izbegnuta je okupacija,” Večernje Novosti, February 6, 2019.

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When Napoleon engaged Russia in a European land war, the Russians mounted a determined defense, and the French lost. When Hitler tried the same, the Soviet Union responded similarly, and the Germans lost. In World War 1 and its post-revolutionary civil war (1914-1922), first Russia and then the USSR defended with far greater effect against two invasions than the invaders had calculated. That history ought to have cautioned U.S. and European leaders to minimize the risks of confronting Russia, especially when Russia felt threatened and determined to defend itself.

Instead of caution, delusions prompted ill-advised judgments by the collective West (roughly the G7 nations: the U.S. and its major allies). Those delusions emerged partly from the collective West’s widespread denial of its relative economic decline in the 21st century. That denial also enabled a remarkable blindness to the limits that decline imposed on the collective West’s global actions. Delusions also flowed from a basic undervaluation of Russia’s defensiveness and its resulting commitments. The Ukraine war starkly illustrates both the decline and the costly delusions it fosters.

The United States and Europe seriously underestimated what Russia could and would do to prevail militarily in Ukraine. Russia’s victory—at least so far after two years of war—has proven decisive. Their underestimation stemmed from a shared inability to grasp or absorb the changing world economy and its implications. By mostly minimizing, marginalizing, or simply denying the decline of the U.S. empire relative to the rise of China and its BRICS allies, the United States and Europe missed that decline’s unfolding implications. Russia’s allies’ support combined with its national determination to defend itself have so far defeated a Ukraine heavily funded and armed by the collective West. Historically, declining empires often provoke denials and delusions that teach their people “hard lessons” and impose on them “hard choices”. That is where we are now.

The economics of the U.S. empire decline constitutes the continuing global context. The BRICS countries’ collective GDP, wealth, income, share of world trade, and presence at the highest levels of new technology increasingly exceed those of the G7. That relentless economic development frames the decline of the G7’s political and cultural influences as well. The massive U.S. and European sanctions program against Russia after February 2022 has failed. Russia turned especially to its BRICS allies to quickly as well as comprehensively escape most of those sanctions’ intended effects.

UN votes on the ceasefire issue in Gaza reflect and reinforce the mounting difficulties facing the U.S. position in the Middle East and globally. So does the Houthis’ intervention in Red Sea shipping and so too will other future Arab and Islamic initiatives supporting Palestine against Israel. Among the consequences flowing from the changing world economy, many work to undermine and weaken the U.S. empire.

Trump’s disrespect for NATO is partly an expression of disappointment with an institution he can blame for failing to stop empire’s decline. Trump and his supporters broadly downgrade many institutions once thought crucially central to running the U.S., empire globally. Both the Trump and Biden regimes attacked China’s Huawei corporation, shared commitments to trade and tariff wars, and heavily subsidized competitively challenged U.S. corporations. Nothing less than a historic shift away from neoliberal globalization toward economic nationalism is underway. An American empire that once targeted the whole world is shrinking into a merely regional bloc confronting one or more emerging regional blocs. Much of the rest of the world’s nations—a possible “world majority” of the planet’s people—are pulling away from the U.S. empire.

U.S. leaders’ aggressive economic nationalist policies distract attention from the empire’s decline and thereby facilitate its denial. Yet they also cause new problems. Allies fear that economic nationalism in the United States already has or will soon adversely affect their economic relations with the United States; “America first” targets not only the Chinese. Many countries are rethinking and reconstructing their economic relations with the United States and their expectations about those relations’ futures. Likewise, major groups of U.S. employers are reconsidering their investment strategies. Those who invested heavily overseas as part of the neoliberal globalization frenzies of the last half century are especially fearful. They anticipate costs and losses from policy shifts toward economic nationalism. Their pushback slows those shifts. As capitalists everywhere adjust practically to the changing world economy, they also quarrel and dispute the direction and pace of change. That injects more uncertainty and volatility into a thereby further destabilized world economy. As the U.S. empire unravels, the world economic order it once dominated and enforced likewise changes.

“Make America Great Again” (MAGA) slogans have politically weaponized U.S. empire’s decline, always in carefully vague and general terms. They simplify and misunderstand it within another set of delusions. Trump will, he promises repeatedly, undo that decline and reverse it. He will punish those he blames for it: China, but also Democrats, liberals, globalists, socialists, and Marxists whom he lumps together in a bloc-building strategy. There is rarely any serious attention to the economics of the G7’s decline since to do so would critically implicate capitalists’ profit-driven decisions as key causes of the decline. Neither Republicans nor Democrats dare do that. Biden speaks and acts as if the U.S. wealth and power positions within the world economy were undiminished from what they were across the second half of the 20th century (most of Biden’s political lifetime).

Continuing to fund and arm Ukraine in the war with Russia, like endorsing and supporting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, are policies premised on denials of a changed world. So too are successive waves of economic sanctions despite each wave failing to achieve its goals. Using tariffs to keep better, cheaper Chinese electric vehicles off the U.S. market will only disadvantage U.S. individuals (via such Chinese electric vehicles’ higher prices) and businesses (via global competition from businesses buying the cheaper Chinese cars and trucks).

Perhaps the greatest, costliest delusions that follow from a denial of years of decline dog the upcoming presidential election. The two major parties and their candidates offer no serious plan for how to deal with the declining empire they seek to lead. Both parties took turns presiding over the decline, yet denial and blaming the other is all either party offers in 2024. Biden offers voters a partnership in denial that the empire is declining. Trump promises vaguely to undo the decline caused by bad Democratic leadership that his election will remove. Nothing either major party does entails sober admissions and assessments of a changed world economy and how each plans to cope with that.

The last 40 to 50 years of the economic history of the G7 witnessed extreme redistributions of wealth and income upward. Those redistributions functioned as both causes and effects of neoliberal globalization. However, domestic reactions (economic and social divisions increasingly hostile and volatile) and foreign reactions (emergence of today’s China and BRICS) are undermining neoliberal globalization and beginning to challenge its accompanying inequalities. U.S. capitalism and its empire cannot yet face its decline amid a changing world. Delusions about retaining or regaining power at the top of society proliferate alongside delusional conspiracy theories and political scapegoating (immigrants, China, Russia) below.

Meanwhile, the economic, political, and cultural costs mount. And on some level, as per Leonard Cohen’s famous song, “Everybody Knows.”

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

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As Western bombs rain on Gaza’s starving civilians, the New Atheism turns 20. The philosophical genre, which argues for secularism over organized religion, was kick-started by Sam Harris. His 2004 book, The End of Faith, promoted neuroscience-based spirituality in place of irrational groupthink. The philosopher, Daniel Dennett, soon followed with Breaking the Spell (2006), as did the evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, with his 2 million unit-selling, The God Delusion. The late essayist, Christopher Hitchens, completed the quartet, known as the Four Horsemen, publishing God Is Not Great (2007).

Inspired by the attacks of September 11th, the genre appeared on the scene shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It became immediately clear that the Four Horsemen were exploiting Enlightenment principles to justify the bombing of women and children in third world nations.  Muslim terrorists are not aggrieved by Western foreign policy, the authors claim, but rather by their fanatical devotion to their faith. The decimation of Iraq was not motivated by elite US strategies to control oil markets, but because “god” told Bush to invade. The state does not exploit religious differences for cynical realpolitik; but rather, hateful mobs randomly attack each other because of their different belief systems.

As I document in my latest book, The New Atheism Hoax, the authors concocted a major fraud. In case after case, their own sources say the opposite of what they claim. This doesn’t happen a few times. It happens almost every time. Examples are cherry-picked, context is removed, and counter-evidence suppressed. In tribute to the suffering people of Palestine, consider these Arab-Israeli examples alone:

SAM HARRIS

“Most Muslims who commit atrocities are explicit about their desire to get to paradise,” says Harris in The End of Faith(Free Press edition) citing the single example of Zaydan Zaydan, a failed Palestinian suicide bomber. Zaydan:

described being “pushed” to attack Israelis by “the love of martyrdom.” He added, “I didn’t want revenge for anything. I just wanted to be a martyr.” … With regard to the suffering that his death would have inflicted upon his family, he reminded his interviewer that a martyr gets to pick seventy people to join him in paradise. He would have been sure to invite his family along. (p. 31)

Source(s): James Bennett, ‘In Israeli Hospital, Bomber Tells of Trying to Kill Israelis’, New York Times, June 8, 2002.

Here’s what Harris left out. Bennett describes the painful circumstances that led Zaydan to try to become a bomber. Crucially, Bennett also emphasizes Zaydan’s efforts to kill Israeli occupational soldiers, not Israeli civilians. Zaydan makes clear that he does not hate ordinary Israelis. Bennett also implies that Zaydan wanted revenge not for particular Israeli atrocities, but rather as a means of resisting occupation and the threat of further raids into the Jenin refugee camp in 2002. Bennett (omitted by Harris) writes:

[Zaydan] gave a rare glimpse into the blend of religion, desperation, low technology and cruelty that can produce suicide bombers …  Mr. Zaydan, who is 18, spoke of his hopeless search for a job, of long days spent in pool halls before he found his way deeper into Islam, and of how his recruiter composed his last, videotaped statement for him, because, as a fifth-grade dropout, he can read but not write.

This is in direct contradiction not only to Harris’s rendering of events, but also his other claims, that no or few Palestinian bombers are motivated by poverty and desperation. Bennett provides some background: Israel raided the Jenin refugee camp in 2002; Israeli soldiers “could enter Jenin at any time”; Zaydan “sought to kill only soldiers.” Zaydan is quoted by Bennett, not by Harris, as saying: “As long as life continues like this … you will have people who think like me.”

DANIEL DENNETT

In one chapter, Dennett writes about the Palestinian lawyer and activist, Raja Shehadeh. Dennett says: “Palestinian society, if Shehadeh is right, is beset with a virulent case of the ‘punish those who won’t punish’ meme … [W]e mustn’t assume that policies that are benign in our own culture will not be malignant in others.” (Breaking the Spell, Penguin edition, pp. 329-30)

According to Dennett’s largely vacant account, the alleged and largely undefined dogma within Palestinian society is a result of religion. Dennett is careful not to quote Shehadeh’s explanation of this condition of prolonged tension, namely the Israeli occupation and the political collusion with Israeli occupiers by the Palestinian authorities in the occupied West Bank.

The collaborationist PLO is the largely secular Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), also known as the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, which rules the West Bank as a dictatorship, much in the way that the Islamist group Hamas rules Gaza.

Shehadeh explains (here’s what Dennett leaves out): “The prevailing local Palestinian politics were of the crudest kind … It was feared that [judiciaries] might use their position to challenge the political hegemony of the PLO.”  Palestine, writes Shehadeh, is “a society that had to survive under difficult and trying conditions.” He goes on to recount the painful experience of meeting West Bankers living in the United States and how their American enculturation led to a naiveté among the expats concerning the daily struggles of life under occupation. Shehadeh writes of his encounter with one such individual in the US:

He did not have to worry about being stopped and harassed [by the Israeli occupiers and PLO collaborators]. He did not have to be concerned that soldiers could enter his home and do what they wished under the authority of military law. He did not live with the constant news of bombs exploding here and there and injuries and deaths and bloodshed and collective punishments and hatred and fear and no certainty from day to day whether you can go on with the education of your children or with your business or profession.

Dennett omits all of the above, reducing the roots of Palestinian terrorism to the supposedly backward culture of the peoples.

RICHARD DAWKINS

Following the pattern, Richard Dawkins quotes the testament of ‘S’, “a polite young Palestinian aged twenty-seven.” ‘S’ is reported as saying:

We were floating, swimming, in the feeling that we were about to enter eternity … We made an oath on the Koran, in the presence of Allah – a pledge not to waver. This jihad pledge is called bayt al-ridwan, after the garden in Paradise that is reserved for the prophets and the martyrs. I know that there are other ways to do jihad. But this one is sweet – the sweetest. (Quoted in The God Delusion, Black Swan edition pp. 344-45. Ellipsis added).

This makes ‘S’ and by association all suicide bombers sound like lunatics motivated by visions of “paradise.” Dawkins again conveniently omits the background details.

Source(s): Nasra Hassan, ‘An Arsenal of Believers: Talking to the “human bombs”’, The New Yorker, 19 November 2001.

The rest of the article—not quoted by Dawkins—says that ‘S’ was one of 11 children born to a middle-class family that had to flee from Majdal, Palestine, to a refugee camp in Gaza due to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.

‘S’ joined Hamas in his early-teens as a street activist. In 1989, he was jailed by the Israeli occupiers for his part in the overwhelmingly non-violent Palestinian Intifada (‘Uprising’ against the occupation). Hassan notes that over half of the suicide bombers he studied “were refugees from what is now Israel.” Like Harris with his case of Mr. Zaydan, Dawkins leaves out all of the crucial details.

The would-be bombers told Hassan: “The Israelis humiliate us. They occupy our land, and deny our history.” When asked why they condone the murder of Israeli civilians and in contrast to Zaydan, they told Hassan: “The Israelis kill our children and our women. This is war, and innocent people get hurt.”

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

In God Is Not Great, Hitchens writes of a young Palestinian woman, Yusra al-Azami, who was shot to death in Gaza in April 2005 “for the crime of sitting un-chaperoned in a car with her fiancé. The young man escaped with only a vicious beating,” says Hitchens. The culprits, he alleges, were the Hamas Vice and Virtue Squad, whose members roam the streets of Israeli-occupied Gaza looking for fellow Palestinians to harass for alleged immoral and un-Islamic behavior. “In once secular Palestine, mobs of sexually repressed young men are conscripted to snoop around parked cars, and given permission to do what they like” by the upper echelons of Hamas. (p. 24).

The New Humanist article indeed says what Hitchens claims it does.  Other accounts of al-Azami’s murder differ somewhat. Ghazi Ahmed in The Palestine Report notes that “Yusra was in fact a member of the Islamic Front”: Hamas’s student division. Her murder “shocked the Gaza Strip, and was condemned and discussed across the board by Palestinian factions, residents, officials at the PA [Palestinian Authority], writers and journalists.”

The alternative report says that “Yusra was killed on April 8, while walking with her fiancé, her sister, Majduleen, and her sister’s fiancé on Gaza’s beach,” not in a parked car. The group headed to their car when armed men shot at their tyres but hit Yusra in the head. “Hamas has been emphatic that, while the individuals are members of the movement, they acted at their own behest and not with any approval from the movement.” Ahmed notes that Israeli media picked up the story and added lies about a Hamas ‘Decency’ unit that was responsible for the murder. Ergo, the New Humanist article was probably based on Israeli propaganda.

Returning to the New Humanist, the article gives the background details on the origins of Hamas and fundamentalism in Palestine. The background is excised by Hitchens. The article says that Hamas developed from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Israeli occupation of Egypt (1967-82), Palestine (’67-present), and Syria (’67-present) boosted the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood among Arabs in the region. The article goes on to note that successive Israeli administrations backed Hamas as an Islamic weapon against the secular PLO, which was then reluctantly accepting a two-state solution.

CONCLUSION

At the time of writing, the two surviving New Atheists—Dawkins and Dennett—have been rather quiet about the Gaza genocide. Dawkins signed an open letter in support of Israel’s supposed right of self-defense, which in reality no country has while it illegally occupyies another. But he has not written or tweeted about it, as far as I know. Harris, on the other hand, has published thousands of words on the subject (transcripts from his podcast). If his previous record is anything to go by, prepare, dear reader, to be twisted into logical pretzels and to be lied to by omission.

With the exception of Hitchens whom, in his final years, became a right-winger, the attention of liberals was diverted by the seductive, anti-religiosity of the New Atheists. Instead of analyzing the world through the only lens that matters—realpolitik—progressives were invited to divide the world into the simple dialectics promoted by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden’s speechwriters: that of a “clash of civilizations,” to use a phrase popularized by Samuel P. Huntington.

For the New Atheists’ many critics who spent time trying to argue points of logic, none seemed to notice that the Four Horsemen had perpetrated an intellectual hoax by systematically misrepresenting their own sources.

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Personhood for Embryos, no isolation requirements for active respiratory infections, advancement of genocide—it’s a recipe for early-onset dementia to try and unravel the current “pro-life” atmosphere hanging over the United States and to grapple with the logical fallacies being advanced as principled stands.

The Christian extremists in America now have some common themes going. Polls indicate they are very much against abortion due to a proclaimed belief that a pregnancy is a life with inherent rights, and that it is worth negating any bodily autonomy concerns for the women (or even children who tragically become pregnant through the lawless behavior of others). In short, they have made allowances that one stand is worth the erosion of rights for the other. In this manner, no other considerations can be put forth, no room for any nuance. The woman or girl does not have a right in this situation, so they are making a line in the sand with no room for any other consideration.

Amazingly (but not surprisingly to most non-orthodox Christian Americans) the hypocrisy begins to show when looking into often shared conservative stances such as being pro-death penalty, supporting the deaths of untold numbers in Gaza, or simply backing policy that allows for Covid to wreck more lives. These are very real situations with a clear decision to back policy that kills and overwhelmingly, this contingent of the population opts for the slaughter of adults, even rejoices in it. The embryo or fetus is conveniently an entity that makes no real demands on you, literally has no voice, but can act as a place to put all of your so-called humanitarian and Christian love. This while backing policy and behavior that very clearly kills those out there with overt feelings and voices. The moment the baby is born, the interest wanes, of course. The pregnancy acted as an abstraction and a place to derive self-esteem and a notion of moral superiority. The hard work of actively caring for humans that have autonomy and voice is not anything that they are interested in.

I am discussing the reactionary right, but they simply pave the way for these types of policies, which then become part of the mainstream due to a lack of push-back from any sort of left in this country. It is no accident that far right demagogues through history, however, have shoved a forced pregnancy narrative in with policy quite hostile to the life of all others. It’s a clear means of control over the populace who want to feel they are morally upright people, but have absolutely no desire to do the hard work of true good. You can slip in a lot of evil policy if you allow the population to believe they are righteous. It’s a superficial label with no depth or reality-based meaning.

The normalization from the far right has allowed for the other elements of the ruling class to accept and use the issues for fund raising and hand wringing, all the while moving everything more clearly into reactionary and fascist territory. It becomes something advanced beyond just the evangelical circles, into all political parties. One recent example is the fact that the comically named Centers for Disease Control have decreed that you really don’t need to stay home when you’re kinda sick with covid. If your symptoms are improving and you aren’t febrile, you go right out and flip those burgers and expose others. It’s not like you have sick leave anyway, so it’s all good. This right to be sick and work is basically accepted in the United States now by those of all political stripes. It started as a right-wing thing, but when Biden occupied the oval office, those who had disgust at Trumpian policies became fine and even enamored with this “return to normal”. The lack of concern for others is truly bipartisan in the current United States. This new CDC policy moves forward and makes a new normal, even as excess death data piles up and long covid clinics have wait-times to get in that indicate a mass disabling event is going on. Again, embryonic and fetal life matters, workers in the United States, not so much.

Biden has said “I’ve never been supportive of, you know, It’s my body, I can do what I want with it”. I don’t think the man has ever been more honest than he was with that statement. It is a perfect synopsis of what the ruling class thinks about each and every one of our bodies, that is, they have the right to control them—to expect a willing and docile class that throws itself into the meat grinder, whether it be in War is a Racket adventures or meat grinders in the service sector economy. And by god women had better offer up the little precious ones they carry as fodder for that workforce or army. To consider that human life is truly an intangible spark without limit, with full self-directed rights is not anything our current leaders believe. Fetishize the fetus, hate your neighbors, hope for the extermination of Palestinians. Americans are very, very sick right now.

So anyway, who knew the United States were being held together with gunpowder, toothpaste and cognitive dissonance?

I don’t write the above to plunge others into a state of depression, but to join in the shared relief of clearly recognizing the ploys of the ruling class (and yes, I’m using that term as solidarity with Aaron Bushnell’s words and worldview). It’s our responsibility to continue to see this all clearly, even when difficult, and to continue to serve as a push-back to the insane times we find ourselves alive in. Let’s hope and attempt to “infect” others with our worldview just as effectively as our oppressors have been able to do throughout history.

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Photograph Source: 龙2000 – CO0

Amid bots, bombast and border bullying, Mexico’s general election campaign kicked off March 1. An estimated 98.9 million Mexicans, up from 89.1 million in 2018, will be able to cast ballots June 2 for a new president, Congress, state lawmakers, local officials and nine governorships, including the powerful Mexico City position.   

According to the National Electoral Institute (INE), regulator and organizer of the country’s elections, nearly 20,000 offices nationwide are up for grabs. 

Unless the world turns upside down (a possibility in these times), it’s almost certain that a woman will be elected president for the first time in Mexico. Competing for the top job are 62-year-old Claudia Sheinbaum, former Mexico City governor and the standard bearer of the three-party Sigamos Haciendo Historia (Let’s Continue Making History) coalition that supports the left-leaning policies of outgoing President López Obrador (AMLO), and  Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz, a 61-year-old former Fox administration official who’s the hopeful of a three-party center-right coalition, Fuerza y Corazón por México (Strength and Heart for Mexico).  

Numerous Mexican polls give Sheinbaum a wide lead. A career politician, 38-year-old Jorge Álvarez Máynez, is running on the ticket of the centrist Citizen Movement (MC) party. Yet the male presidential contender faces a tough admittance to the main ring in a political slugfest held during an era that is popularly dubbed “the time of the women.”

Not helping Álvarez’s prospects is a key politician in the MC, Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro, who’s declared he will not participate in the presidential campaign. Alfaro is a fierce critic of the party leadership’s current direction and strategy, dismissing it as replete with fluff and foolishness. 

Essentially, the races for the presidency and congressional seats boil down to a referendum on whether to continue forward with López Obrador’s Fourth Transformation (4T). The 4T’s components include reasserting state control over key economic sectors, curbing corruption and cutting governmental fat, reaffriming national sovereignty, and redistributing wealth to the lower-income, majority sectors of the population.

While the transcendental figure of AMLO looms large over state and municipal races, an array of local issues, personalities and politics will have major influences on the campaigns and their outcomes. The national party coalitions that back the presidential candidates may or may not repeat at state and local levels, where there is a stronger tendency for the parties to go it alone. 

Both Fuerza y Corazón por México and the MC might be characterized as the “neo-liberal light” opposition. 

A prominent Gálvez supporter, Enrique de la Madrid, former tourism secretary and son of President Miguel de la Madrid (1982-88), recently synthesized the opposition’s philosophy on national television when he criticized “officialdom” for being wedded to state control and an anti-free enterprise bent at a time when demographic changes foreshadowing the end of Mexico’s youthful “demographic bonus” require robust economic growth. 

Nonetheless, given the overwhelming popularity of AMLO’s new social programs that benefit the elderly, low-income students and small farmers, the opposition is loathe to openly attack them, much less propose their dismantlement as conservatives in the U.S. do. Gálvez pledges to support the programs, and even do better than AMLO or Sheinbaum in serving the elderly.  

Insecurity is the big card wielded by the opposition. With violence connected to organized crime still submerging regions of the country in blood, terror and forced displacement, the opposition is zeroing in on AMLO’s “Hugs not Bullets” approach. It’s no accident, then, that Gálvez kicked off her campaign in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, recently rated Mexico’s most insecure municipality in a public perception poll conducted by the federal statistics and census agency INEGI.  

Later on the day of March 1, Gálvez moved on to Guanajuato, another violence torn state. During her jaunt in the cradle of Mexican independence, Gálvez pricked her finger and with a dab of blood signed a notorized document promising to not slash the existing social programs. For good measure, she vowed to lower the eligible retirement age to 60 instead of 65.   

Sheinbaum, on the other hand, proposes granting women aged 60 to 64 a bimonthly half-pension until full retirement so females can enjoy “greater autonomy.” Upping the ante, the old Insitutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for decades but is now part of Gálvez’s coalition, is running television spots promising youth aged 19-25 nest eggs totalling approximatey $7,140 payable in three installments over six years.  

Not to be outdone in the media messaging, underdog Álvarez began his uphill run in Lagos de Morena, Jalisco, a municipality likewise plagued by violence. Whether or not someone was sending a message of their own to Álvarez, seven bodies were reported scattered around Lagos de Morena in the hours before the candidate’s appearance. 

Sheinbaum includes bolstered security initiatives in a list of 100 actions she vows her government will undertake to deepen and extend AMLO’s program of political and social reform, based on his political philosophy of Mexican humanism.  

Back on the security front, the physical safety of candidates, especially at the local  level, is again emerging as a concern. The narco-ridden states of Michocan and Guerrero rank high among the hot spots. Adrián López Solís, Michoacan state prosecutor, was quoted by Aristeguinoticias blaming February’s murders of two primary candidates for mayor of the town of Maravatío (one from the PAN and the other from AMLO’s and Sheinbaum’s Morena party) as stemming from the intention of criminal groups to “take them out” of the electoral race in order to secure political control and have a free hand in controlling the police and exploiting public resources. 

On March 3, Alfredo Alfredo González Díaz,  Díaz, a mayoral primary candidate for the municipality of Atoyac de Alvarez in Guerrero’s Costa Grande region, was murdered by gunmen. González was associated with the Labor Party (PT), which is a supporter of the 4T and a member of Claudia Sheinbam’s electoral coalition. According to the Guerrero news outlet El Sur, Manuel Eugenio Arriaga Rosendo, PT mayoral primary candidate for the municipality of Cualac, was earlier slain in January. 

Historically a municipality dedicated to the production of coffee and other crops, Atoyac is likewise known for its guerrilla and popular insurgencies, hundreds of still unresolved dissapearances at the hands of Mexican security forces during the government’s counterinsurgency campaign against leftist guerrilla forces during the 1970s, and the cultivation of first opium poppies and later, coca leaves for cocaine. 

On the Trails of History

Kicking off her campaign March 1 in Mexico City’s Zocalo plaza before tens of thousands of supporters, Sheinbaum rattled off the 100 actions list and praised AMLO for being a pivotal figure who changed the course of Mexican history.  

“He showed us not to grovel in front of the power of money and trust in the people and their dignity,” Sheinbaum said. “I anticipate that the end of his adminstration will be spectacular.”  

In a post-rally interview on Milenio television, Sheinbaum framed her lengthy platform points around the general areas of public-private investments, social well being, environmental protection, education, healthcare, and “shared prosperity.”

Clearly a woman on a mission with history, Sheinbaum touched on her personal trajectory from a young social activist to the likely first woman president in Mexican history. Besides her political credentials, Sheinbaum holds an energy engineering doctorate. She served as environment secretary when AMLO was mayor of Mexico City in the early 2000s, and was among the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change awarded a Nobel Prize in 2007. 

From 2018 to 2023, Sheinbaum oversaw the governance of Mexico City, no small feat for anyone.  

Reminisicent of López Obrador, who began his successful 2018 presidential run at the Benito Juárez Monument in Ciudad Juarez, Sheinbaum arrived in the Mexican border city March 2, where she met with supporters, business leaders, reporters and maquiladora industry workers. 

“I made the decision to come first to Ciudad Juárez, the most beautiful border in the world, because it is here where the country begins,” Sheinbaum said to thousands gathered at the Juárez Monument.  

“Here where Benito Juárez came to defend the country against the French invasion, and in a place which is a symbol of violence against women, the first woman president of Mexico had to initiate her campaign.”

In a post-rally interview on Milenio television, Sheinbaum framed her lengthy platform points around the general areas of public-private investments, social well being, environmental protection, education, healthcare, and “shared prosperity.”

Although matters of gender, equity, social justice and public safety loom large in the 2024 elections, international relations, especially with the United States, likewise are shaping the Mexican elections. Foreign influence in Mexican elections is nothing new, but with U.S. elections also underway this year the two political transitions are intertwined not only by the calendar but in theme and tone as well. 

Since the beginning of the year, a dizzying parade of foreign press stories alleging narco money in previous López Obrador campaigns, countercharges by the Mexican president, cell phone number leaks targeting reporters and Mexican politicians, political attacks against AMLO traced to Argentine bot farms, friction over Mexican steel exports to the U.S., and new Canadian visa restrictions for Mexican nationals have the news cycles in full tilt boogie.

On February 29, the day before the Mexican general election campaign commenced, President Biden and former President Trump staged competing visits to the U.S. Mexico border, which for all of President Lopez Obrador’s earlier appeals for his country not to become the piñata of U.S politics, is again a big election year prop in the political theater of El Norte. 

In particular, Trump has retrieved the rhetoric he found successful with his base in 2016,  comparing migrants and refugees with criminals and crazies while denouncing an “invasion” of the United States. Stirring the pot further, both Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and former Trump national security official Chad Wolf, the latter in comments made on CNN, urged a return to the Trump era policy of Remain in Mexico for asylum seekers. 

South of the border, Johnson’s comments that Washington should tell Mexico what to do because “we are the United States” sounded like a ghostly recording from the Big Stick era of U.S. intervention in Latin America. 

Voices from Now and Then

Finally, a network of Mexican civil society organizations released a recent statement that emphasized the importance of fundamental issues which often get dowplayed in the heat of political campaigning.  

Scores of indigenous, environmental, human rights, health care professional, community and small producer organizations published the one-page statement in La Jornada daily demanding that “candidates to posts of popular election prioritize public health, the environment, human rights and the rights of original peoples above those of private interests.”  

The activists called on Mexican candidates to reveal any relationship with private sector interests, abstain from participating in decisions when a conflict of interest exists, and uphold the supremacy of scientific evidence over commercial interests.

The signatories of the statement included the Baja California Association of Nutritionists and Dieticians, Rio Sonora Basin Committees, Greenpeace Mexico, Guerrero’s Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of the Mountain, Ejido Union in Defense of Maya Territory, and the anti-GMO No Corn, No Country campaign, among many others.  

Meanwhile, outgoing President López Obrador must comply with election rules that prohibit him from openly backing candidates or publicizing his government’s achivements during the period leading up to June 2. Consequently, the Mexican president said he will devote part of his morning press conferences to readings of Mexican history and historical figures. 

“How are we going to envision the future, a better society if we are not inspired by our fertile history?” AMLO asked. “How do we advance without ideals, without principles. It is necessary to seek an ideal, a doctrine, a dream to make it reality…” 

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Burning with passion for Palestine, active-duty U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire, committing suicide to protest genocide.

Make no mistake: Aaron Bushnell is not a role model. Don’t set yourself on fire! Do not emulate self-immolation. But do let it illuminate a very dark situation.

And not just any dark situation. Aaron Bushnell did not set himself on fire over the “Israel/Hamas war” as the mainstream media (MSM) tried to explain, before moving on to the weather report, nor was he experiencing a mental health episode that could have been alleviated with a pill or a call to a suicide hotline, as implied by other MSM hasbara.

“They want us to believe we are mad and this war is sane,” observed CounterPunch’s Jeffrey St. Clair.

Indeed, on his own Twitch-broadcast livestream, Aaron Bushnell sanely and calmly spelled out exactly what he was protesting as he marched to the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, wearing his U.S. military fatigues. “My name is Aaron Bushnell,” he said. “And I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

Then he set his phone to auto-record, and he set himself on fire.

He poured the kerosene on his head, stuck his cap back on and, just before he struck the match, a disembodied voice with the banality of a store clerk inquired, “Can I help you, Sir?”

Then suddenly, the blaze erupted, and Airman Aaron Bushnell became a real-life “Burning Man,” a Burning Soldier, marching in place in what must have been searing agony, yelling, “Free Palestine!” over and over again – his voice raw with pain mixed with love for the Palestinian people, so many of whom have been and are still being burned alive by Israeli bombs, paid for by American taxpayers – until he fell to the ground in flames.

“Get on the ground! Get on the ground!” yelled someone, presumably an Israeli embassy guard. Slowly, the guard walked toward the fire, arms stretched taut, hands together, holding a gun on the Burning Soldier as he burned to death.

A gun?

Another guy, perhaps a paramedic, arrived on the scene shouting, “Yo! I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers.”

What a moment. A quintessential defining snapshot of humanity, as the world turns and we all burn – as we go on fighting wars, bombing civilians and shooting our neighbors – when the wisest amongst us can barely be heard above the violence, stating the obvious…

“I don’t need guns! I need fire extinguishers!”

Finally, the fire extinguishers arrived, a little too late and spraying clouds of foam all over the Burning Soldier’s burned body, as everyone (but Aaron) shouted, panicked, and someone near the camera asked, “What is that? Who is this?”

Then the camera switched off.

What Are You Doing Right Now?

Before his dramatic act of blazing protest, Aaron Bushnell posed this question, “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘what would I do if I was alive during slavery/ or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

Then Aaron set himself on fire. That was his answer to his own challenge. I’m not saying it was a good answer. It wouldn’t be my answer. It’s not an answer I would recommend to anyone. But it was his answer, and I respect it.

He could have posted his views on social media, like so many of us do, or gone to a protest, or done a podcast. He could have drowned his sorrows in beer or porn or ketamine. He could have killed himself less flamboyantly with pills, or perhaps a gun, maybe taking a few friends or strangers down with him, as so many American ammosexual mass murderers have done. Instead, his answer to his question, “What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” was to set himself on fire for all the world to see, feel and take note.

It’s tragic, and very strange, but I feel a kinship with Aaron Bushnell. Maybe it’s because he’s a self-described “anarchist” and a performance artist who performed the ultimate act of anarchistic political performance art protest on Sunday, February 25, 2024, and he did it with such pacifist grace and humble purity, without physically harming anyone but himself.

U.S. Airman Bushnell was trained to be a cog in the American war machine, but for one brief moment he clogged the gears, broke the machine, transformed his destiny and brought the entire Military Industrial Complex to a screeching halt.  He fought fire with fire and sacrificed his life, transmogrifying himself into the Burning Soldier for Palestine.

From Burning Monk to Burning Soldier

Aaron Bushnell’s performance protest triggered one of my first memories of any kind of protest. I was about five years old, too little to read or even watch the news, but I caught a glimpse of something that transcended “news” in my father’s newspaper, an extraordinary black and white photo that showed a man on fire, sitting cross-legged on a busy street.

Having been taught never to even touch a hot stove, my kindergarten brain wondered, “How could he do such a thing?” as the image branded itself into my brain.

I later learned that the man in the photo was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk named Thích Quảng Đức who burned himself alive, using principles of Mahayana meditation, to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the US-supported Catholic government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Diem.

He became known as the “Burning Monk.”

Frightening and mystical as it was, the “Burning Monk” photo taken by AP photographer Malcomb Browne had a huge impact on people’s impressions of America’s presence in Vietnam. Several other self-immolation protests have occurred since then, including an unnamed woman holding a Palestinian flag in front of Atlanta’s Israeli consulate in 2023. Unfortunately, her protest was not filmed, and the MSM was able to spin a more Zionism-friendly narrative, quoting Israeli consul general Anat Sultan-Dadon’s portrayal of the woman’s final act as an expression of “hate and incitement toward Israel” – before sweeping it under the imperialist rug.

Not so with Aaron Bushnell; a 25-year-old Whitmore, Massachusetts native raised on a Christian compound called the Community of Jesus, who joined the air force, becoming a cyber defense operations specialist with the 531st intelligence support squadron at joint base San Antonio, Texas. You could question his background (was that compound a cult?), but his motivations would not be so easily mischaracterized by the MSM spin doctors, as his fiery self-sacrifice on the altar of the Israeli embassy, along with his words explaining it, was live-streamed for the world to see, achieving a monumental impact that has yet to be measured.

Aaron Bushnell, the Burning Soldier, marched through that fire into the hearts and minds of millions. He marched into the history books – if there are to be history books in our future. He certainly marched into trending topics.

Unsurprisingly, his actions were often misinterpreted, minimized as “mentally ill” and even mocked on social media, but he also sparked a lot of art, memorials and tributes, including Gaza Fights for Freedom filmmaker Abby Martin’s Portland vigil, featuring her husband, U.S. army veteran and anti-war activist Mike Prysner and fellow About Face: Veterans Against the War. Mike’s tribute to Bushnell and Abby and Robbie Martin’s Media Roots Radio show on “The Self-Immolation of Aaron Bushnell” are also very moving.

Mid-vigil, Mike and the other veterans burned their military uniforms in a can of fire, chanting, “Remember Aaron Bushnell! He’s not alone.”

Holy Fire

Chanting, dancing or just sitting around a bonfire like that feels sacred. In the Bible, fire represents the “holy spirit.” Moses encounters God in the “burning bush,” the prophet Elijah ascends to heaven in a “Chariot of Fire,” and the Hanukkah candles that only had enough oil to last 24 hours burn for a miraculous eight days.

But fire isn’t all sparkles and light. In Greek mythology, Prometheus is condemned to suffer for eternity for having given humanity the gift of fire.

Whatever your beliefs, fire illuminates what you might not otherwise see, and the firelight of the Burning Solider illuminates the plight of the Palestinians burning, suffering and dying under Zionist apartheid and genocide. It illuminates our need to protest, to resist ennui and despair.

Whatever we do or don’t do, every precious moment, we are answering Aaron’s question, “What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”

Saint Joan Burned at the Stake

The Burning Soldier triggered another old memory for me. When I was a shy but drama-loving adolescent, I played the title role in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, which focuses on Joan of Arc’s trial before she was burned at the stake. I was no Marie Falconetti – luminous star of Carl Dreyer’s silent masterpiece, “Passion of Joan of Arc” (also featuring another of my fiery favorites, Antonin Artaud). However, for my sheltered little middle class mind, learning lines for a high school play, it was a deep challenge to just contemplate being burned alive.

Yikes!

I learned that Joan was given a chance to live if she would just recant her “voices” and stop wearing “men’s clothes,” but she refused. She made a choice to be burned at the stake (according to Shaw); it was an act of voluntary self-immolation – to make a spiritual, political point – like Aaron Bushnell. Whether or not her point was taken, in 1920 (three years before Shaw wrote his play), Joan of Arc was canonized by the Catholic Church as “Saint Joan.”

Who will canonize the Burning Soldier? Will he be honored like Vietnam’s Burning Monk revered by Buddhists as a Bodhisattva?

Fire Fetish

Being a sex therapist, I always wonder about the sexual angles of things, and though I wouldn’t call a Burning Soldier “sexy” or even particularly sexual, I would say it was an erotic action, an act of Eros, the Greek god of sex, love and life itself. In that sense, Aaron Bushnell’s live streamed self-sacrifice was an act of noble exhibitionism and, in a way, quite beautiful. Fire can radiate great beauty, and since the video never shows Aaron Bushnell’s charred body (even in the unpixellated version) we just see a dazzling man on fire – a real Burning Man.

I wonder how the Burners feel about the Burning Soldier. The Burning Man founders I knew from my Golden Gate Bridge-climbing days with the Suicide Club would have been obsessed by him, though who knows? Nothing and no one stays the same, especially when touched by fire.

Maybe I’m a little fire-“touched” myself… or is that torched? One of my ex-boyfriends juggled fire, and I’ve always been a bit of a pyrophiliac, not drawn to setting fires, but just to watching fireworks, hot wax play, the romance of candelabras, the fetish of firelight. Not to disrespect the purity of Airman Bushnell’s sacrifice; these are just the wildfire thoughts of a sexologistobserving a riveting act of extreme political protest.

As long as we’re talking kink, it bears mentioning that when it comes to the truly dark, depraved, violent and dystopian fetishes of war, the IDF or IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) sadistic war porn is off the charts, far worse than George W. Bush’s P.O.W. Porn at Abu Ghraib – and that’s just what the Israelis themselves show openly on their own channels.

Of course, a fetish is not *just* about sex; a fetish is also a spiritual symbol, like a rabbit’s foot, a flag, a man dying on a cross for humanity’s sins, or a burning soldier protesting a genocide.

But it is more than a symbol; Aaron’s fire dance is a heartfelt and romantic sacrifice of eros – life – for the love of Palestine. He went up in flames in Palestine’s name.

Eros travels fast these days, and Aaron Bushnell’s eternal Eros, his love for Palestine, is already being returned a million-fold, as Palestinians are carrying pictures of Aaron Bushnell, honoring him as a “martyr” and their American superhero. More powerful than Superman or Spiderman, at least in their lives, is Aaron Bushnell’s Burning Soldier whose pain illuminates theirs.

Cannon Fodder to Canonized Fighter

On our recent Callin show, we talked about the Burning Soldier and the many thousands of Palestinian women, men, children, doctors, journalists and artists, who have been incinerated by Israel’s U.S. taxpayer-paid bombs, as well as starved to death while Genocide Joe lasciviously licks his ice cream.

One of our callers, Maria, a George Galloway and Beatles fan in the Midwest, was extremely moved by the sacrifice of Aaron Bushnell, almost like he’s a close relative of hers. In fact, she was rather peeved that he hasn’t been honored like the Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi whose self-immolation was praised by Barack Obama, and helped to trigger the Arab Spring.

The difference is disturbingly clear: Not to minimize either sacrifice, but Bouazizi’s act of self-immolation served the interests of U.S. Empire, and Bushnell’s does the opposite, refusing to be “complicit” in Uncle Sam’s dirty deeds.

So, let’s not expect Ice Cream Joe to memorialize the great American Burning Soldier, U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell, at his State of the Union address, but I will at my upcoming State of the Sexual Union address (here’s last year’s); every little bit of love counts in this hate-filled world.

Another Callin caller, Joshua, an active-duty U.S. Army serviceman, identified as “right-wing” and didn’t agree with Bushnell’s “anarchist” politics, but he couldn’t help but be impressed by the extraordinary “discipline” of Airman Bushnell whose blazing courage transformed himself from cannon fodder to canonized fighter for Palestine.

He was also impressed by Capt’n Max’s tales of his own sharpshooting prowess when he was in basic training, hitting 11 out of 12 targets – though the moral of the story is that as soon as Max saw he could shoot, he realized he “could kill somebody,” threw down his rifle and quit.

How Max managed to quit the army with an honorable discharge is another story; there are many ways to make like bonobos, not baboons. But it’s especially difficult when you’re in the U.S. Military. So… radiant or revolting, the Burning Soldier’s fiery protest should be a flaming red flag for the rest of us.

Ceasefire now! Before it’s too late, and our whole world catches fire.

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Photograph Source: European Commission (Dati Bendo)

A group of young people in Paris are enjoying a drink in a café on an unseasonably warm evening. The conversation drifts into politics, but—as one young woman says—“Let’s not talk about France.” The others nod their assent. They focus on the U.S. presidential election, a slight bit of Gallic arrogance at play as they mock the near certainty that the main candidates will be President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Biden is 81 years old and Trump is 77. A Special Counsel in the United States has called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory,” hardly the words required to inspire confidence in the president. Trying to defend himself, Biden made the kind of gaffe that is fodder for online memes and affirmed the report that he tried to undermine: he called President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt the “president of Mexico.” No new evidence is required, meanwhile, to mock the candidacy of Trump. “Is this the best that the United States can offer?” asks Claudine, a young student at a prestigious Parisian college.

These young people are aware enough that what appears to be comical on the other side of the Atlantic—the U.S. presidential election—is no less ridiculous, and of course less dangerous, in Europe. When I ask them what they think about the main European leaders—Olaf Scholz of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France—they shrug, and the words “imbecilic” and “non-entity” enter the discussion. Near Les Halles, these young people have just been at a demonstration to end the Israeli bombing of the Rafah region of Gaza. “Rafah is the size of Heathrow Airport,” says a young student from England who is spending 2024 in France. That none of the European leaders have spoken plainly about the death and destruction in Gaza troubles them, and they say that they are not alone in these feelings. Many of their fellow students feel the same way.

The approval ratings for Scholz and Macron decline with each week. Neither the German nor the French public believes that these men can reverse the economic decline or stop the wars in either Gaza or Ukraine. Claudine is upset that the governments of the Global North have decided to cut their funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN Palestine agency, although another young person, Oumar, interjects that Brazil’s President Lula has said that his country will donate money to UNRWA. Everyone nods.

A week later, news comes that a young soldier in the United States Airforce—Aaron Bushnell—has decided to take his own life, saying that he will no longer be complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians. When asked about the death of Bushnell, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the President is “aware” and that it is a “horrible tragedy.” But there was no statement about why the young man took his life, and nothing to assuage a tense public about the implications of this act.

Eating an ice cream in New York, U.S. President Joe Biden said that he hoped that there would be a ceasefire “by the beginning of the weekend” but then moved it to “by next Monday.” The meandering statements, the pledge for a ceasefire alongside the prevarication, and the arms deliveries do not raise the confidence of anyone in Biden or his peers in Europe.

With the Emir of Qatar beside him, France’s President Emmanuel Macron called for a “lasting ceasefire.” These phrases—“lasting ceasefire” and “sustainable ceasefire”—have been bandied about with these adjectives (lasting, sustainable) designed to dilute the commitment to a ceasefire and to pretend that they are actually in favor of an end to the war when they continue to say that they are behind Israel’s bombing runs.

In London, the UK Parliament had a comical collapse in the face of a Scottish National Party (SNP) resolution for a ceasefire. Rather than allow a vote to show the actual opinions of their members, both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party went into a tailspin and the Parliament’s speaker broke rules to ensure that the elected officials did not have to go on the record against a ceasefire. Brendan O’Hara of the SNP put the issue plainly before the Parliament before his words and the SNP resolution was set aside: “Some will have to say that they chose to engage in a debate on semantics over ‘sustainable’ or ‘humanitarian’ pauses, while others will say that they chose to give Netanyahu both the weapons and the political cover that he required to prosecute his relentless war.”

Global desire for an immediate stop to the Israeli bombing is now at an all-time high. For the third time, the United States vetoed a UN resolution in the Security Council to compel the Israelis to stop the bombing. That the United States and its European allies continue to back Israel despite the widespread disgust at this war—exemplified by the death of Aaron Bushnell—raises the frustration with the leadership of the Global North.

What is so particularly bewildering is that large sections of the population in the countries of the North want an immediate ceasefire, and yet their leaders disregard their opinions. One survey shows that two-thirds of voters in the United States—including majorities of Democrats (77 percent), Independents (69 percent), and Republicans (56 percent)—are in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza. Interestingly, 59 percent of U.S. voters say that Palestinians must be guaranteed the right to return to their homes in Gaza, while 52 percent said that peace talks must be held for a two-state solution. These are all positions that are ignored by the main political class on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The qualifications of “lasting” and “sustainable” only increase cynicism among populations that watch their political leadership ignore their insistence on an immediate ceasefire.

Clarity is not to be sought in the White House, in No. 10 Downing Street, or in the Élysée Palace. It is found in the words of ordinary people in these countries who are heartsick regarding the violence. Protests seem to increase in intensity as the death toll rises. What is the reaction to these protests? In the United Kingdom, members of parliament complained that these protests are putting the police under “sustained pressure.” That is perhaps the point of the protests.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Richard Rummell – Collection of Arader Galleries – Public Domain

The Supreme Court did not kill diversity. Higher education did it to itself. It has done it slowly and methodically over the last few years, as the corporate university created and then destroyed diversity as part of its business plan to attract students and make itself more relevant to American capitalism.

Many thought that the US Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended affirmative action, pronounced the death knell for diversity in higher education. The reality is that colleges produce the seeds for its destruction. Typifying this undermining  of diversity is a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article highlighting how many colleges are now advertising to students that they are  a school where everybody is just like you.

How did all this happen?

The history of higher education in America has always faced a contradiction.  On the one hand, universities have preached diversity as intellectual openness to new ideas, while excluding or segregating women, the poor, those of certain religions,  and people of color. Yet from the 1960s, partly as a result of the civil rights movement and of changing demographics in America, universities gave lip service to demographic diversity.   This resulted in affirmative action programs providing special consideration for women and individuals of color.

In the landmark 1978  Regents of California  v. Bakke, the Supreme Court ruled that while racial quotas were unconstitutional, the use of race could be considered as an effort to try to promote diversity. From that decision on, schools struggled with what it means to be diverse, how to promote it, and really, who would be the beneficiaries of it.  But for the corporate university, diversity rested less on a concept of fairness and equity than it did on both a way to expand its customer base and use the concept as a marketing tool to achieve that.

Who won from diversity?  In part because of the failures of K-12 to deliver an adequate and equitable education for students of color, the pipeline to college was racially constricted.  The main beneficiaries of affirmative action became middle class white females. Recruiting them allowed schools to “check the box” for diversity. Over the course of the last 50 years, higher education has transformed from being a male-dominated  to a female-dominated institution, with some numbers suggesting that more than 60% of those enrolled in colleges and universities are now female.   That has come at the expense of persons of color, whose numbers continue to dwindle, or at least remain stagnate, especially at some of the elite schools such as Harvard.

At the same time, the corporate university in its effort to boost enrollment and to define a niche for itself, has increasingly pitched its message to its students that it is a school that will specialize to the  particular needs of students in the same way businesses market to locate customers and maximize profits.  This narrowing of the focus of higher education comes at the same time that schools are deemphasizing liberal arts education. Liberal arts, at its best, was about exposing students to new and contrasting ideas. It was intellectual diversity that went beyond gender and skin color.

But liberal arts is expensive. It requires universities to staff a variety of courses and programs that are not necessarily high profit producing even though they are important for intellectual diversity. The narrowing of the perspectives of higher education has morphed into intellectual safeness and narrowness, protecting both conservative and liberal students from opposing ideas from which they disagree.

The result is that the real diversity that college universities are supposed to stand for—exposure to new ideas, different perspectives, and different people—has gradually eroded.

The business plan of the corporate university in its effort to save money has narrowed the intellectual scope and diversity of both the ideas that it offers and the students that it caters to.  The future of higher education increasingly looks much like the past of higher education.

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