“Shock!“ was a most common reaction.  Yet the two elections in eastern Germany were not all that  surprising, just somewhat better or worse than expected, depending on which side you were on.

In Thuringia there was a clear victory, with 32.8 percent, for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), its first such victory in all of Germany! This gives it first choice in forming a state government to replace the ten-year rule of a LINKE; Bodo Ramelow. But since every other party has rejected all ties to AfD–thus far–it will hardly succeed, and the Christian Democrats (CDU) with 23.6 percent, will then get their turn at squaring the circle. For years the CDU ruled out any coalitions “with far right or left,” but except for a thin Social Democrat remnant (7.3 percent), the AfD, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) and the LINKE are all that is left to deal with. Some resolves will have to crumble. But which?

Is the AfD a fascist party? Björn Höcke, its boss in Thuringia, one of its three best-known national leaders and its main rabble-rouser, has never concealed his admiration for Germany’s days of swastika glory. He was recently fined for shouting the forbidden Nazi stormtrooper slogan “Alles für Deutschland” to a mob of tough-looking supporters. So at his next rally he shouted only ”Alles für…” and let them add the missing word. Openly racist and viciously anti-immigrant, his party pushed most other parties in a similar direction – to keep their voters. But it kept on growing, despite countless organized anti-AfD rallies and marches.

Historians recall that one hundred years ago, in 1924, Germany’s first basically fascist party gained government seats in Thuringia (under another name, since Hitler’s party had been briefly forbidden). In January 1930, three years before its all-German take-over, two Nazi Party men joined in a Thuringian coalition cabinet. Several Jewish leaders were forced to resign, the famous Bauhaus art school had to leave Weimar, Communist teachers and mayors were expelled, books banned, and Nazification of the police force was begun.  Can history repeat itself?

In neighboring Saxony the AfD came in second on Sunday,  only narrowly beaten – 31.9 to 30.6 -by the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU)), rather like pre-Trump Republicans in the USA. It was no great new victory; they have held first place in Saxony ever since 1990 when – with all the other lucky East Germans – they got “reunited” with West Germany. Yet somehow there are many ungrateful folk these days who do not fully appreciate their luck, and while the CDU just managed to end up with its nose ahead, its erstwhile partners all took dives. The Greens barely squeezed past the 5 percent dividing line in Saxony and can thus remain, feebly, in the state parliament. They failed to reach that line in Thuringia,  with only 3,2 percent. The Social Democrats lost feathers like any molting pigeons, getting measly single-digit results in both votes. And the big-biz-buddy Free Democrats (FDP), never ever properly appreciated in East German regions, failed to reach even two percent in both states and can now be written off. completely. It  is exactly those three loser parties that now rule the roost nationally in a so-called “traffic-light” coalition (the red-green-yellow party colors). It is currently judged to be the least popular in recent history. People everywhere are dissatisfied or disgusted.

But now both states face the staggering task of forming a majority government; trying to fit the remaining pieces together like a badly-kept jigsaw puzzle. Minority governments involving less than half the deputies and “tolerated” by other parties are permissible. But they risk constant blackmailing by the tolerators and are shaky as a last leaf in autumn, threatening to fall with every stronger breeze. In both states, therefore, CDU conservatives, lacking votes from the “moderate” partners they often despise on a national level but now dearly miss, may be forced to rely on far worse partners, the kind they loved to hate. Think George W. Bush teaming up with Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders!

Thus, aside from the far-far right AfD, which – at least thus far and despite many shared genes– only a few already dare to openly embrace, they find almost only the LINKE party and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, which broke away from it last January. The CDU – despite almost intestinal pain and anger – may now feel itself compelled to alter or ignore troublesome taboos and offer cabinet seats to those horrible LINKE “extremists”  or even local  Sahra adherents.

But there are questions and problems among them too. First of all, the LINKE is in miserable shape. From a national highpoint of 11.9 percent in 2009 its popularity has sagged lower and lower ever since, with a sad 4.9 percent in 2021, and now less than 3 percent, close to an electoral vanishing point. Its main strength always used to come from the former GDR areas. Now even this advantage is in tatters, only partly because old GDR enthusiasts are dying out. In its stronghold  Thuringia, where it once won 28 percent of the voters, somehow even having its Bodo Ramelow as the state’s prime minister for the past ten years didn’t prevent it on Sunday from dropping to fourth place with 13.2 percent.

It was far worse in Saxony, where the LINKE dropped from 10.4 to a pitiful 4.5. That number, less than 5, would have kept it from getting even a single seat in the state legislature in Dresden. But thanks to a lucky state rule, if a party elects two or more delegates directly in their own districts then it gets the number of seats based on its total percentage. Since just exactly two did win out, the party stays in with six seats. Both are from less reactionary Leipzig. The very controversial Julia Nagel, 45, has long been a popular leader in her large, very leftist young people’s neighborhood. The other, Nam Duy Nguyen, 38, is the son of two Vietnamese contract workers who chose to stay in eastern Germany after their jobs were lost during unification and now run a food kiosk. He won thanks to his team campaign knocking on over 40,000 doors, speaking to people about their problems and wishes, also his playing in the local soccer team, and his pledge to take only € 2500 of his income as deputy, contributing the rest to worthy causes. He received an amazing 40 percent of the vote, well ahead of all opponents! Just those two lone victories changed the line-up in the legislature and made them possible choices for a new coalition!

Far more decisive in electoral terms was the rise of Sahra Wagenknecht’s young alliance, which celebrated an even more jubilant victory than the AfD. Many, many people on the left rejoiced! In less than eight months the Alliance (or Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, hence BSW) had achieved two-digit results, almost twelve percent in Thuringia, over thirteen percent in Saxony, putting them in a remarkable third place in both, making it impossible to ignore them and leading perhaps to invitations to join one or both new state governments. The media is obsessively occupied with analyzing this sudden new force in German politics, no easy job for anyone, with many sparks.

Last year the LINKE, heading towards oblivion, was torn by internal debate about NATO’s and Putin’s role in the Ukraine war, about sending armaments to Zelensky, even about taking a clear position on the war in Gaza. Many members were dismayed at seeing LINKE leaders bow to media and government pressures on these issues and, aside from expectable demands for social improvements, failing to really oppose the frightening rush toward a wartime military, economy and psychology. The Linke’s proud repute as Germany’s only “party of peace” was being diluted and compromised, they felt, and this was a major cause of its decline. Nor, it was said, had the leaders abandoned their hopes of getting accepted as respectable participants in reform measures instead of challenging the status quo social system. The criticism of these clearly suicidal tendencies led some of the best LINKE leaders and many members to applaud Wagenknecht’s move to start a militant new party.

Now she and her dozen or so co-founders could stress opposition to sending arms shipments to warring nations, especially Zelensky-Ukraine and Netanyahu-Israel. While carefully condemning Putin’s military invasion they also condemned NATO’s decade-long policy of increasingly dangerous expansion and provocation and demanded pressure for a negotiated end to the Ukraine war, followed by a search for a new peaceful Europe, including Russia, and renewing trade and détente.

Such positions have been viewed as almost high treason for the past two years, and are still squelched in many ways, especially because, in a seeming paradox, the AfD also demands similar pressure for peace in Ukraine. This made it easier to demonize the BSW and AfW as allied “Putin-lovers.” Wagenknecht’s statement that the BSW would only join coalitions with parties which, like hers, demanded the weapon-sales stop and withdrawal of American long-range missiles and atomic weapons from Germany, which made it the likely first (or second) victim of a war started by an attack or a human error, with only six-minutes for clarification or correction. These BSW conditions, basically correct but politically very difficult, are not making the formation of new governments any easier, while simple arithmetic still pressures the CDU to combine either with the AfD or one or both leftist parties.

The AfD is not a “peace party.” Its leaders support NATO growth, a bigger arms build-up in Germany, a renewal of military conscription as well as presenting the monopolies, with those making armaments in the lead, with magnanimous tax advantages worth many millions. But its call for negotiations and peace in the Ukraine, for whatever reasons, possibly purely pragmatic ones in the hunt for votes, may explain, at least in part, why it and the BSW were the only two winners in these East German states – where friendship with the USSR and demands for peace were once so intrinsic in all forms and levels of GDR education, culture and media attention  It is possible that this  still retains some effect, even though GDR generations are dying out. And while officials, politicians and pundits fear and hate just such unwanted feelings,  Wagenknecht enthusiasts admire her peace demands above all else, crucial as they are in a world balancing on the edge of total atomic annihilation.

Nevertheless, some questions about the BSW are arising on other matters. Most frequently, they regard her views on immigration, currently a subject of huge angry attention, with almost hysterical rabble-rousing, spread most extensively by Das Bild, the daily rag published by the Axel Springer company.  The matter was greatly worsened by the killing of three people during annual festivities in the Rheinland town of Solingen by a young Syrian asylum-seeker long marked for expulsion. The follow-up:  increased calls to keep “unwanted foreigners out of our Germany,” for tighter, tougher border controls, purposely unfriendly red tape, fenced-in camps for those in waiting, less pocket money or even medical assistance for asylum-seekers or “economic immigrants.” The tougher the better, with the AfD in the lead, the two “Christian” parties close behind, and the government parties forced to keep more or less in step to plug up further voter leakage. The frightening atmosphere was at times almost reminiscent of Hitlerian scapegoat anti-Semitism.

Unlike the solitary resistant LINKE, Sahra Wagenknecht joined in. Though in cooler, more civilized tones, she too echoed basically similar “The boat is full” reasoning and supported cooperation with the police against “foreign felons.” Her policy was originally justified as an attempt to win uncertain voters away from the fascistic AfD. It may indeed have won some voters – but not many from AfD ranks, who rarely switched leftwards. (More, however, from previously non-voter ranks.)  But some critics felt that a stress less on stricter regulations than on internationalism and solidarity with workers of all ethnic backgrounds might be a better leftist response, even if it won fewer votes.

Also worrisome for some is her lack of stress on the active working-class struggles they expected with the party split. Not only varied reforms and improvements, necessary as they are, but real fights directed not against a few monopolists, especially American ones, but against a monopoly system. Indeed, Sahra has seemed to want a return to the “good old days” in West Germany of the 1960s, with the generally “fair treatment” of smaller enterprises and the middle class before some monopolists took over. But weren’t they really dominant all along – and remain largely dominant? Daimler and Siemens were pulling in millions then. Now, above all firms like Rheinmetall, which makes Panther tanks, they are reckoning in billions! But should or can they really be controlled? Must they not be taken over and turned upside down? Completely? What are Sahra’s goals?

And finally, there are questions about naming a party for its one leader, for failing as yet to recruit  – or accept – new members, or to hold a first congress and adopt a program until after the Bundestag elections in September 2024. Sahra seems to enjoy leadership, and is popular nationally for about 9 percent in the polls, more in the East as the elections demonstrated (and commonly at the cost of the LINKE). More than half the BSW election posters showed her attractive face – although she was not a candidate in Thuringia or Saxony. How much will other voices in the BSW be heard? What real  actions will her party take, especially if it joins coalitions, possibly in the state of Brandenburg as well, which votes on September 22nd? There are many questions.

Some questions were indeed asked by those members of the LINKE, including a number of conscious Marxists, who opposed Sahra’s split. Despite their defeat at recent party congresses by those they often viewed as opportunists, pragmatists, “reformers” – or worse – they urged sticking it out and staying in the LINKE. There are signs that the catastrophic downhill slide of the party, leading straight to oblivion (with all that means, not only politically but also forthe entire party structure, with its offices, jobs, financial support), has finally forced a change in thinking.  With the catastrophe so close, few in the party leadership could deny any longer the need for a profound change. Was a last chance in sight?

The two co-chairpersons, Wissler and Schirdevan,  despite doubtless good intentions, proved fully unsuccessful in the role of rescuing cavalry officers. They surprised nearly everyone, shortly before the elections, by announcing they would not run for re-election at the party congress in Halle on October 18-20. Three candidates have thrown their hats in the ring. If their words can be materialized and their expressed hopes realized there may really be a genuine, sharp change in course. Is a rescue possible? Will the two leftist parties damage or complement one another? Is it possible, singly or doubly, to revive a struggle against the millionaires and billionaires in Germany and beyond, against war-hungry generals, manufacturers and corrupted politicians,  and to promote new thinking and above all new action in the direction of a social system without greedy profiteering, without further exploitation of the poor and hungry – and, above all, without further war or threat of war. A big peace demonstration is planned for October 3rd. Its hopeful effect, a new start at the LINKE congress, positive developments in a good-sized BSW, may help bring first, limited successes against powerful, increasingly dangerous German expansion and provocation. One way or another,  positive or negative,  will Germany certainly exert great influence– on Europe and the world.

But first let us see what voters in the pleasant towns, lakes, pine woods (and some shut-down pit mines and factories) of Brandenburg may decide at their election on September 22nd.

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Photograph Source: MINISTÉRIO DAS COMUNICAÇÕES – CC BY 2.0

Millions of Brazilians woke up on August 31 in a country without X, after the Supreme Court ordered the national telecommunications agency to block the social media platform. This move culminated over a year of X’s refusal to follow Brazil’s telecommunications laws, particularly those requiring deplatforming of suspects in internet crime investigations. In a single day, X lost 22 million users, while alternative platform Blue Sky gained 2 million new Brazilian users in just three days. The order to ban the platform initially came from Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, a figure vilified by the Bolsonaros and the international far right, and was ratified by a 5-0 vote in the Supreme Court’s 1st working group three days later.

The Court order came 12 days after Elon Musk closed X’s Brazilian offices to avoid liability for criminal charges against the company. With X owing R$9 million in fines, the Supreme Court froze the Brazilian assets of Musk’s company Starlink—a minor player in Brazil’s internet service provider industry, serving 250,000 clients in a country of 220 million. After the ban, a furious Musk used his own social media platform to attack one of Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court Ministers, Alexandre de Moraes, inadvertently doxing allies by publishing court documents containing their personal data.

Hailed as a victory for sovereignty while criticized by the far right as an affront to U.S. free speech principles, the X ban is the latest chapter in over a year of conflicts between Brazil and the world’s richest man

To understand how Brazil reached this point, we must go back to October 18, 2018, between the first and second rounds of Brazil’s Presidential elections. That day, investigative journalist Patricia Campos Mello published an article in Folha de São Paulo exposing a group of Brazilian businessmen for spending R$12 million to slander presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s rival, Fernando Haddad, on Meta’s WhatsApp platform. Using illegally acquired personal data, the group microtargeted segments of the population with disinformation. For instance, evangelical voters were bombarded with doctored photos falsely claiming that, as mayor, Haddad distributed baby bottles with penis-shaped nipples to São Paulo pre-school students. As a result, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court—comprising 3 Supreme Court Justices, 2 Superior Court Judges, and 2 lawyers—immediately launched an election fraud investigation.

This led to a surge in threats against judges in the Supreme and Superior Electoral Courts, extending to their families and calling for a military coup to shut down the Supreme Court. Among those making the call was Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Congressman Eduardo, who recorded a YouTube video seen by hundreds of thousands, saying, “All you need to shut down the Supreme Court is a single soldier or corporal […] Do you think anyone will protest in its defense?”

Unlike some countries, the Brazilian judiciary lacks its own police force. According to the 1988 Constitution, judiciary police duties are assigned to the regular police. The system’s failure to adequately address threats against Supreme and Superior Electoral Court judges prompted Chief Justice Dias Toffoli to issue a decree on March 14, 2019, allowing Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes to directly supervise a federal investigation into these threats.

As a result, Moraes became the main target of a hate campaign by Bolsonaro’s allies, who argued that, as a victim, he was unqualified to investigate his aggressors. Meanwhile, online threats against the judiciary intensified.

On October 29, 2021, the Superior Electoral Court announced the results of its investigation, with 5 of its 7 Justices confirming that the Bolsonaro campaign had used social media to commit election fraud in 2018. Unable to determine the fraud’s impact, the Court issued no punitive measures. However, Justice Moraes, set to take over the Presidency of the Superior Electoral Court six weeks before the 2022 presidential elections, announced that they now understood the scheme and that anyone using similar tactics in 2022 would “go to jail for attacking elections and democracy.”

Moraes, a conservative appointed to the Supreme Court by coup president Michel Temer in 2017, was already a target of Bolsonarista claims of a “communist dictatorship of the toga.” His upcoming role as head of the electoral court during the presidential election drove the Brazilian far-right into a frenzy.

As destroying the Supreme Court and installing a military dictatorship became the Bolsonarista rallying cry, de Moraes ordered several preventive arrests. These included Congressman Daniel Silveira for abusing his authority by repeatedly urging the army to shut down the Supreme Court while defying court orders. Sara Giromini, who styled herself as Sara Winter after the English fascist leader, was also arrested. She set up an Azov-inspired paramilitary camp outside Brasília, then led followers to camp out in front of the Supreme Court, launching increasingly large fireworks at the building for three days while making online threats against de Moraes and his family.

Clearly inspired by U.S. events—especially since Eduardo Bolsonaro attended the January 5 Washington DC “war council” meeting before the Capitol attack—the Bolsonaros began crafting their own “stop the steal” narrative, drawing more allies from the international far-right. As this campaign grew, Glenn Greenwald joined the attacks on Moraes, using elements of U.S. law that resonated in the Global North but were irrelevant in Brazil’s legal context.

After months of claiming “communists” would steal the elections, and deploying his federal highway police to suppress voting in pro-Lula districts on election day, Bolsonaro lost and fled the country before his term ended, leaving the presidency to his Vice President, General Hamilton Mourão.

In the last 60 days before Lula took office, two Bolsonaro supporters were arrested for attempting to detonate a bomb at Brasília’s airport, while another group staged a violent attack on Brazil’s Federal Police headquarters. Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters camped outside military barracks, demanding the shutdown of the Supreme Court.

A week after the inauguration, on January 8, a crowd invaded the National Congress and Supreme Court. Their goal, according to a detailed coup plan found in Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister Anderson Torres’ house, was to pressure Lula into declaring a state of siege, which would have handed national security to the armed forces. Lula refused to fall for the trick, relying on his federal police to disperse the rioters. Meanwhile, high-tension electrical towers were sabotagednationwide.

Two months after the capitol riots, a series of school massacres terrorized the nation. Investigators uncovered dozens of neo-Nazi cells targeting children on social media, attempting to incite them to commit school massacres on April 20 in honor of Hitler’s birthday. The Justice Ministry summoned social media representatives and provided a list of accounts requesting deplatforming. X initially resisted. Etela Aranha, then Secretary of Digital Rights, recalls:

“I told them, ‘I’m talking to you because there are profiles of actual terrorists. They use the names and faces of school massacre terrorists, posting videos with songs saying, “I’m going to get you kids, you can’t outrun my gun.” There are clips showing the terrorist’s picture followed by real school massacres.’ The Twitter representative said this didn’t violate their terms. After strong pushback from the justice minister and social pressure, Twitter changed its policy and cooperated with the investigation.” It was one of the last times the company would respect a request from the Brazilian government.

Fast forward to April 3, 2024. A libertarian pundit and former PR operative named Michael Shellenberger tweeted excerpts from emails by X executives, dubbed “Twitter Files Brazil,” alleging crimes by  Alexandre de Moraes. Shellenberger claimed Moraes had pressed criminal charges against Twitter Brazil’s lawyer for refusing to turn over personal information on political enemies. Elon Musk quickly shared the tweets, which went viral and were embraced by the international far right, delighting former President Bolsonaro and his supporters.

Aranha soon exposed the flaws in this narrative. The only criminal charge against Twitter Brazil mentioned in the leaked emails came from the São Paulo district attorney’s office after the company refused to provide data on a leader of Brazil’s largest cocaine trafficking organization, the PCC. Shellenberger had cut an email section about the São Paulo investigation and mixed it with unrelated complaints about Moraes.

Pressed by Brazilian reporters, Shellenberger said: “I regret my mistake and apologize. I don’t have evidence that Moraes threatened to file criminal charges against Twitter’s Brazilian lawyer.”

Three days later, Elon Musk announced his company would stop obeying court orders in Brazil and reinstate accounts of those deplatformed, including Alan dos Santos, a fugitive hiding in the U.S. On X, Musk tweeted a series of insults against Moraes, demanding he “resign or be impeached.”

That night, Moraes ordered X to be included in an ongoing obstruction of justice investigation related to the January 8, 2023, coup attempt and announced a series of fines for refusing to comply with court orders, which have now risen to R$9 million.

Tension continued to mount and on August 7, Musk threatened to close X’s offices in Brazil, claiming court orders to remove accounts of suspects in an online election fraud investigation amounted to “censorship.” His statements were immediately praised by Bolsonaro and allies in the  international far right but had no basis in Brazil’s free speech laws.

Like other nations such as Germany and France, Brazil views the right to free speech as fundamental but not absolute—a right that must coexist with other essential rights. According to Brazil’s constitution, no fundamental right can be used to deny another. This principle allows Brazil to ban actions legal in the U.S., like inciting pedophilia or practicing Nazism. In the case of the digital militia investigation, the court ruled that the right to free expression cannot be used to undermine the right to free and fair elections, another fundamental right in Brazil.

On August 17, Musk fired 40 workers and closed X’s offices in Brazil, leaving behind debts and criminal charges but pledging to keep the platform operational. This violated Brazil’s telecommunications laws, which require any media company operating in the country to have a legal representative. The Supreme Court froze Starlink’s assets until Musk settled his debts, and Moraes warned that if X didn’t appoint a legal representative, the platform would be banned. Instead of complying, Musk escalated his attacks on Moraes and President Lula, sharing an AI-generated image of Moraes behind bars with his 195 million followers.

On August 29, Moraes gave X  24-hours to comply with Brazil’s laws. When X missed the deadline, he ordered Anatel, the national telecommunications agency, to instruct all internet service providers to block X.

With X now offline in Brazil, on Monday, September 2, the Supreme Court held a plenary session to rule on Moraes’ order, upholding it by a vote of 5-0 in the Court’s 1st working group.

Justifying his vote, Minister Flavio Dino stated that a foreign company cannot operate in national territory “and expect to impose its own view on which laws it believes are valid or should be enforced […] Economic power and the size of a bank account do not grant immunity from jurisdiction.”

The Court has made it clear that X can reopen in Brazil by complying with the nation’s laws. Whether Musk will do that is another story. On Monday, September 2, Brazilian news outlets reported that Musk sought help from the Biden administration’s U.S. Embassy in Brasília to develop a strategy to overturn the Supreme Court ruling.

This article originally appeared in United World, and can be seen in its original format here

The post Inside Brazil’s X Ban: How Elon Musk Started–and lost–a Fight With Brazil’s Judiciary appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Olympic Rings on the Eiffel Tower (https://commons.wikimedia.org/)

The Eiffel Tower was unquestionably the focal point and the superstar of the recent Olympic Games in Paris. That is understandable, since Gustave Eiffel’s master piece has been the emblem of the city for a long time. However, the tower is also a symbol of the wealth and power of the bourgeoisie, the “capitalist class”, a patriciate whose exclusive ranks also happen to include the ladies and gentlemen of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). A soupcon of history may help us to understand the centrality the tower in the recent Olympic extravaganza in the “city of light”.

Eiffel’s steel pillar was erected in 1889 to celebrate the centenary of the beginning of France’s “Great Revolution” in 1789, but also to erase the memory of less “great” but more recent and very traumatic revolutions, namely those of 1848 and 1871, the latter known as the Paris Commune. All those revolutions constituted eruptions of a complex class struggle between the poor and the rich. The poor were typically referred to as ceux d’en bas, “those below”, or as le menu peuple, the “little people”, but they can also be described as the “demos”, a term of Greek origin we encounter in the word democracy, meaning “power by and for the little people”; in any event, they were – and are – the kind of people who can expect revolutionary changes to improve their mostly miserable lot, for example in the shape of lower prices for bread and other essentials. Looking down on the poor were ceux d’en haut, “those above”, that is, the rich folks on the higher levels of the social pyramid, the nobility and the bourgeoisie, the well-to-do burghers who found the established social and economic order to be quite satisfactory and abhorred the thought of revolutionary changes. It is not surprising, therefore, that the revolutions France experienced in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871, and took place, not exclusively but predominantly, in Paris, happened to be mostly the work of the “little” women and men of the country’s capital.

The democratic achievements of those revolutions should not be underestimated, because it was during the great upheaval of 1848, for example, that universal suffrage was introduced and that slavery was abolished. However, each revolution saw members of the bourgeoisie “kidnapping” the revolutions and thus managing to achieve the “liberal” political and capitalist social-economic objectives of their class; and this was done at the expense of the nobility and the Church but especially of “those below”, whose efforts to realize far-reaching democratic reforms were repressed in 1848 and whose attempted construction of a socialist society, manifested in the 1871 Paris Commune, was smothered in blood. After that triumph, the bourgeoisie was the mistress of France.

Before the Great Revolution of 1789, Paris had been a “royal city”, radiating the power and the glory of the centuries-old feudal order whose figurehead was the king. Countless monumental buildings and vast squares, featuring imposing statues of kings and cardinals and such, belonged to the privileged classes of that “Ancien régime”, the nobility and the (upper) clergy, and of course also the monarch. (But the latter preferred to reside in a sumptuous palace in Versailles, away from the busy capital and its “madding crowds”.) The architectural externalization of this “kingliness” of Paris as well as the city’s major tourist attraction was then the Pont Neuf, the very first stone bridge across the Seine, “gifted” to the city by King Henry IV around 1600. The power of the Church, intimately associated with the monarch, was reflected in the multiplicity of prayer houses and monasteries, which caused Paris to impress – or intimidate? – visitors and residents alike as a Catholic “new Jerusalem”.

In Paris, the nobility preferred to reside in the city’s western reaches, in big and fancy residences known as hôtels in the district of Saint-Germain and along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which ran parallel to the Champs Élysées to the village of Roule, perched on a hillock that would later be crowned with the Arc de Triomphe. Earlier, the aristocrats had lived mostly in the Marais, a neighborhood of central Paris, situated near the Bastille, with as its hub a “royal square” (place royale) that is now called Place des Vosges. But most of their hôtels in that district had been taken over by prosperous members of the “up-and-coming” bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie also inhabited other fine neighborhoods of central Paris, for example the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin and its side streets, including the Rue de la Victoire, where the young Napoleon and his bride, Josephine, were to live for some time.

The “little people” lived in run-down, often slum-like neighborhoods of the still quasi-medieval city center, featuring narrow, crooked, and dirty streets, and also in the city’s eastern districts and suburbs (faubourgs), especially the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, situated just beyond the Bastille and the demolished medieval city walls, a defensive system of which the Bastille had been a major stronghold. The faubouriens of Saint-Antoine revealed themselves in 1789, and again in 1830 and 1848, to be the shock troops that pulled the chestnuts out of the revolutionary fire; they did so, inter alia, by storming the Bastille on that famous fourteenth of July 1789 and by attacking the Tuileries Palace, and chasing the king from it, on August 10, 1792.

In some way, France’s revolutions came down to attempts by the “little people” to conquer Paris and to “de-royalize” the “royal city”. In 1793, during the “Great Revolution”, it was not a coincidence that the king was executed in the middle of the most royal of Parisian royal squares, the Place Louis XV, later to become known as Place de la Concorde. Other squares lost their regal names and statues, and royal symbols such as de fleur-de-lis were replaced by republican attributes such as the tricolore flag and the motto “liberty – equality – fraternity”. The “de-royalization” of the capital inevitably also involved a “de-clericalization” that saw countless monasteries and churches being closed and demolished, or in some cases transformed, for the benefit of the “great unwashed”, into hospitals, schools, or warehouses for the storage of large supplies of flour, wine, and other essential foodstuffs, this to avoid their prices to skyrocket in case of poor harvests.

The French capital appeared destined to become a city of, and for, the “little people”, the demos, a literally democratic city. However, this was not appreciated by the well-to-do burghers who supported the revolutionary movements as long as they targeted the feudal established order, but felt threatened and became reactionary when the Parisian revolutionaries started to pursue objectives that violated the “liberal” ideas and capitalist interests of the bourgeoisie. This happened in 1792, 1848, and 1871. Each time, the bourgeoisie managed to repress the attempted revolutionary radicalizations, to thwart the efforts to make Paris more plebeian, and, instead, to transform the former “royal city” a little more into a bourgeois metropolis.

A systematic embourgeoisement of Paris was launched under the auspices of Napoleon, who had been hoisted into the saddle of power by the bourgeoise and proved to be a keen promotor of its class interests.^[1] The Corsican, the scion of a family that may equally well be said to have belonged to the lower ranks of the nobility as to the higher levels of the bourgeoisie, was largely responsible for the fact that western Paris, prior to the Great Revolution monopolized by an elite of high birth, the nobility, could be colonized by an elite of high income, the (higher levels of the) bourgeoisie. This was achieved by the construction of wide avenues, inspired by the already existing Champs Elyées, along which rich folks could built prestigious homes to live in or to sell or rent out at high prices; those avenues converged to a large star-shaped space, the Place de l’Étoile. Western Paris thus became the exclusive habitat of the rich, the gens de bien, the propertied class.

Afer Napoleon and the 1815-1830 “Restauration”, a brief comeback of the Bourbon monarchy and the nobility as well as the Church, the embourgeoisement of Paris restarted under the rule of a “constitutional” king of the House of Orleans, Louis-Philippe, known as the “bourgeois king” because he championed very liberal policies. And spectacular progress towards the bourgeoisification of Paris was made when a nephew of Napoleon ruled France as Emperor Napoleon III for a couple of decades in the middle of the nineteenth century. Under the auspices of the Prefect of the Department of the Seine, Georges–Eugène Haussmann, known as “Baron Haussmann”, boulevards, vast squares and parks, and impressive monuments were created that transformed the historical center of Paris into a modern metropolis. However, the “Haussmannization” of the city also featured a contrarevolutionary dimension. First, the majority of the slums were made to disappear from Central Paris together with their poor and restless, and therefore potentially revolutionary, denizens. Room was thus made for beautiful but expensive constructions, immeubles de rapport, “buildings that generate money”, such as shops, restaurants, offices, and handsome apartements. Those projects provided juicy money-making opportunities for wealthy burghers but especially for the big banks that made their appearance on the economic stage at the time, among them the Crédit Lyonnais, Société Générale, and Rotschild Bank, the latter from 2008 tot 2012 employer of the present President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron. No less than 350,000 poor folks were thus exiled from the city centre.

The gens de bien, the “propertied people”, moved in, and the gens de rien, the “propertyless folks”, were forced to move out of the heart of the city. They were driven out eastward, to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and other outlying districts of the city, the eastern “Paris of poverty” that happened to be a very different planet compared to the western “Paris of luxury”. It was from the plebeian east that, in 1789, the Parisian demos had invaded central Paris for the purpose of “de-royalizing”, “revolutionizing”, and, indeed, “democratizing” the ville royale. In 1871, the Paris Commune constituted a final attempt to achieve that goal, but the uprising was repressed by troops that, coming from Versailles, penetrated Paris via the city’s western districts, where they were welcomed with open arms, but ran into increasingly tough resistance as they made their way toward the eastern reaches; the fighting ended there with the execution of countless captured Communards.

The bloody repression of the Commune sealed the triumph of a French bourgeoisie that was henceforth resolutely, almost fanatically, contra-revolutionary. The “Era of Revolutions” was over, in France and in the country’s revolutionary hotbed, Paris. The possibility of a conquest of the capital by its plebs appeared to have vanished forever; conversely, the city’s embourgeoisement, launched under Napoleon, now seemed to be a fait accompli.

This triumph of the bourgeoisie was to be certified symbolically in 1889, on the occasion of the centenary of the outbreak of the Great Revolution, by the erection of the Eiffel Tower, an oversized kind of totem pole that conjured up modernity, science, technology, and progress, values identified with by the bourgeois “tribe” in France as well as abroad, in general, and by France’s newborn “Third Republic”, in particular. The “republican pillar” simultaneously functioned as a phallic symbol of the young, dynamic, and potent class the victorious bourgeoisie believed itself to be.

Rising high above the waters of the Seine and conjuring up a lighthouse, Eiffel’s creation seemed to radiate the bright light of modernity to the four corners of the land and, indeed, the world. From a bourgeois point of view, the tower also had the merit of overshadowing the very horizontal Pont Neuf, emblem of the former royal Paris, as well as Notre Dame, the architectural face of the former ville royale. The pillar thus proclaimed the superiority of the new, republican, capitalist France of the bourgeoisie, to the old, monarchical, feudal France dominated by the nobility and the Church. Last but not least, the tower replaced the Pont Neuf as the greatest tourist attraction of the French capital and effectively shifted the city’s center of gravity from the Île de la Cité, hub of the Parisian wheel, to the city’s bourgeois western parts, the sumptuous domain of the bourgeois beau monde.

The Eiffel Tower during the Paris World Fair of 1889,  by Georges Garen (Wikimedia Commons)

Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian specialist in ancient myths and religions, has argued that archaic people tended to be overwhelmed by the vast, seemingly chaotic and in many ways mysterious and frightening world they inhabited, a world (or universe) of which they were only an infinitesimal, insignifcant, and powerless part. They experienced the need to bring order and surveyability to this world, that is, transform its chaos into a cosmos, a world that remained mysterious but was at least to some extent familiar, understandable, and less fearsome. This task was typically accomplished by finding and marking a center, that is, a place with great meaning in space as well as time, a sacred space: that spot was considered to be the center of a geographic space, the earth, and simultaneously as the locus of a high point in time, the place where the gods had created human beings and/or the world.

A very old and big tree and a real or imaginary mountain, such as a pyramid, might fucntion as such a sacred spot. Alternatively, a pillar or tower could be constructed and proclaimed to be the centre (or navel, axis) of the world and/or the locus of creation. Arguably the most famous example of such an axis mundi was the ziggurat or step–pyramid in the city of Babylon, the famous Tower of Babel, known locally at the time as Etemenanki, “temple of the creation of heaven and earth”. Such constructions functioned as symbolic connections between earth and heaven, they enabled humans to ascend or at least approach heaven and, conversely, permitted the gods to descend on earth to create humans; consequently, they were also viewed as ladders and featured steps, representing rungs, as in the case of the terraces of Etemenanki, the “hanging gardens” of Babylon, proclaimed by the Greeks as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

The Eiffel Tower’s construction, location, and most striking features may be interpreted with the help of these Eliadian insights. The French revolutions that rocked Europe and the entire world, but above all France itself, starting in 1789 and lasting until 1871, brought about the demise of the old cosmos of feudal and monarchical France, dominated by the duo of nobility and Church. After nearly a century of revolutionary chaos, a new cosmos emerged, a capitalist rather than feudal order with a republic as political exoskeleton, and dominated economically and socially by the (haute) bourgeoisie. Other countries were to follow suit, but France was first to achieve virtually perfect bourgeois status, it was the primordial bourgeois state.

The French capital, where most of the crucial revolutionary events had taken place, revealed itself to be the epicenter of an emerging international capitalist and bourgeois cosmos. It was therefore only fitting that the bourgeois metropolis erected a monument to confirm and celebrate its sacred status with respect to space and time: first, as epicentre of the new bourgeois and capitalist world, and second, as locus of the uneasy birth, via revolution(s), of this new world. The Eiffel Tower, highest building in the world, was that monument, a kind of step-pyramid whose perpendicularity, interrupted by three floors, also conjured up a ladder, much as the terraces or “hanging gardens” of Babylon had done. And indeed, the Eiffel Tower proclaimed Paris to be the Babylon, the city of cities, of the new bourgeois cosmos.

In other European countries too, the bourgeoisie came to power in the course of the nineteenth or early twentieth century, via revolutions or not, but no capital was ever “bourgeoisified” as early and as thoroughly as Paris. Russia, Germany, and the Habsburg Empire were monarchies, linked with “established” Churches, whose capitals were to remain not just royal but imperial cities boasting mostly magnificent imperial and aristocratic palaces as well as exuberant churches. In Britain, the liberal upper–middle class became a partner, but only a junior partner, of a conservative landowning nobility that continued to set the tone politically, socially, and also architecturally and urbanistically. London thus continued to be an urban world with two feudal architectural poles, on one end the Tower, a medieval, Bastille–like fortress, a fossil of royal absolutism, and on the other end the tandem of Buckingham Palace, a British Tuileries Palace, and Westminster Abbey, London’s Notre Dame; and it is not a coincidence that the style of most grand architectural creations of the time became known as “Victorian,” reflecting, even emphasizing, its monarchical connections.

In comparison with other capitals, Paris looked über–bourgeois after 1871. It is hardly surprising that the city was admired, visited, and praised by bourgeois women and men, young and old, conservative as well as avant-garde, from all over the world, that is, the “Western” world that was becoming increasingly industrial, capitalist and, indeed, bourgeois. From the four corners of the earth, well-to-do burghers converged on Paris like Catholic pilgrims converge on Rome or Muslim pilgrims on Mecca. Conversely, a bourgeoisified Paris, most effectively symbolized by “Haussmannian” town planning and architecture, migrated to cities all over the world where the bourgeoisie likewise triumphed politically, socially, and economically. Featuring imposing residences and expensive “money-generating buildings” overlooking wide avenues or vast squares, as well as imposing government edifices, banks, stock exchanges, theatres, palace hotels, and deluxe restaurants, Bucharest, Brussels, and Buenos Aires, for example, tried very hard to resemble the French capital.

In 1871, the curtain came down on France’s dramatic “Era of Revolutions”, but below, and occasionally above, the surface, lower-intensity class conflict persisted, and with it, the symbolic “Battle for Paris” fought between rich and poor. The bourgeoisie believed to have won that battle, but its victory was never truly complete. Eastern Paris remained plebeian, and as equally plebeian, even proletarian, revealed themselves the mushrooming new suburbs to the east and north of the capital, such as Saint-Denis; that is where the immigrants settled who came from all over France as well as abroad, looking for work in the capital but unable to afford the high prices of accommodation in the city’s center and western neighborhoods.

During the 135 years that have passed since the erection of the Eiffel Tower, Paris managed to remain bourgeois, but not as securely as one might think. This bourgeois supremacy was in fact threatened on a number of occasions. However, the German occupation of 1940-1944 did not constitute a problem in this respect, as one might think. Under the auspices of the occupant and the collaborator regime of Vichy, both eager practitioners of policies of low-wages and high-profits, the bourgeoisie prospered in France and especially in Paris. Hitler, himself a petit bourgeois who had been coopted by Germany’s haute bourgeoisie and governed on its behalf, was an admirer of Paris; he did not wish to destroy the city but, in cooperation with architect Albert Speer, made plans to transform Berlin so that the German capital could replace Paris as bourgeois Babylon. The Führer also opined that many Frenchmen were not unhappy with the German presence in the “city of light” because it eliminated “the menace of revolutionary movements”.^[2]

And indeed, a potentially revolutionary situation, threatening bourgeois supremacy in Paris, arose there in August 1944, when the Germans were pulling out of the city and Allied troops, coming in from Normandy, had not yet arrived. An opportunity thus opened up for the leftist, communist-led Resistance to come to power in the capital, and potentially in the entire country, in which case extremely radical, anticapitalist reforms would very likely have been introduced. But that scenario was foiled by the Americans. General de Gaulle, whom they had previously ignored, something for which he would never forgive them, was quickly transferred by them to Paris and presented there as the uncontested supremo leader of the Resistance, which he really was not, and soon to be head of the government of liberated France. His grand entry into the capital was staged not on Place de la Bastille or another site in eastern Paris, but on the Champs Elysées, the major thoroughfare of the same western districts where in 1871 an enthusiastic welcome awaited the troops on their way from Versailles to smother the Commune in blood. De Gaulle was to ensure that in France the bourgeois social-economic order remained intact – with, as cherry on the sundae, a Paris that was to remain equally bourgeois.

Hitler visits Paris on June 23, 1940 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/)

Charles de Gaulle strolls down the Champs Élysées on August 26, 1944 (https://en.wikipedia.org/)

That the bourgeoisifcation of Paris was never completely secured, also became evident in May 1968, when workers and students went on strike and demonstrated in the Latin Quarter and elsewhere in the city centre and the situation threatened to degenerate into civil war or revolution. On the other hand, the City of Light also experienced attempts to perfect its embourgeoisement. Interpretable this way are the great projects that were undertaken in eastern Paris, first by de Gaulle’s successor as President, Georges Pompidou, who arranged for the last slums of central Paris to make room for an art centre that was to receive his name. A little later, under the auspices of President François Mitterand, in theory a socialist but in reality a “bourgeois gentleman” (bourgeois gentilhomme), initiatives such as the construction of new opera on Place de la Bastille and a new ministry of finance as well as a sports stadium in the working-class neighorhood of Bercy, officially purported to rejuvenate the city’s east end for the benefit of its plebeian denizens; in reality, Mitterand’s urbanistic schemes came down to a gentrification for the benefit of the bourgeoisie and especially its jeunesse dorée or “gilded youth”, for whom western Paris probably looms a tad too bourgeois in the sense of “dull”.

In 2018, a new menace emerged for bourgeois Paris in the shape of a movement whose numerous and rowdy participants became known as the “yellow vests”. The protestors were “the usual suspects”, that is, plebeians from the capital’s eastern districts and suburbs, but they were joined in their weekly invasions of the city by counterparts from all over France and even from abroad. They demonstrated most provocatively not only on Place de la Bastille and elsewhere on their “home turf” in eastern Paris, but also, provocatively so, in the heart of the western “Paris of luxury”, including the Champs Elysées. The gilets jaunes were gunning for the person and politics of President Macron, a former banker and as much as bourgeois-president as Louis-Philippe had been a bourgeois-king. Bourgeois Paris trembled as the movement dragged on until, in 2020, de COVID-19 pandemic provided a perfect rationale for outlawing large gatherings.

The recent organization of the Olympic Games may be viewed, and understood, from the same perspective. The modern Olympics have effectively been described as a form of “celebration capitalism”,^[3] that is, a feast for the bourgeois “capitalist class” whose crème de la crème consists today of the hyper-rich owners, large shareholders, and managers of multinational enterprises, media moghuls, their allied financiers, jurists, and billionaire celebrities such as Lady Gaga, Céline Dion, and so forth. The primordial objective of this class is the maximization of profits. And the function of the Olympic Games is to enable this accumulation of riches with the collaboration of the host-city and the host-country, who are supposed to facilitate this privatisation of the profits not exclusively, but primarily, by the socialization of the costs.^[4] This elite of multinational capitalism sponsors the Games, and its members include mostly corporations whose home turf is the USA, now the centre of gravity of the capitalist world system, such as Coca-Cola, but also French companies like Louis Vuitton (LV), purveyor of all sorts of luxury products, a firm that flourished during the German occupation, as mentioned not a bad time at all for France’s bourgeois elite, typical consumers of the expensive goods made available by LV.

This international elite was willing to hold its Olympic celebration in Paris, but in a congenial Paris, in a Paris in which they could feel at home, and that meant the western, bourgeois part of the city, the “Paris of luxury”. Conversely, for the bourgeoisie, the “capitalist class” of Paris and all of France, the Olympic Games constituted a golden opportunity in two ways. First, to register unseen profits, for example by charging skyhigh prices for rooms in the fine hotels of western Paris that are pricey even at normal times, and also for balconies on the higher floors of favorably located “money-generating” buildings, whence well-heeled tourists could acclaim the passing athletes. Second, and more importantly at least for our purposes, to the bourgeoisie the Olympics also offered the possibility to reconfirm and even advance the embourgeoisement of the city – and to allow Paris to shine again, if only for a few weeks, as the Babylon of the international bourgeoisie. It was in this context that a “social cleansing” (nettoyage social) of the city was carried out, namely the expulsion of the homeless and the concomitant “obfuscation of poverty” (invisibilisation de la pauvreté).^[5]

Thus we can also understand why, on opening day, the boats loaded with thousands of athletes departed from the Austerlitz Bridge, situated on the cusp of the city’s historic center and its eastern neighborhoods, the “Paris of poverty”. By starting there, the Olympic show turned its back to plebeian Paris. Place de la Bastille, the primordial revolutionary locus delicti, and, behind it, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, once the den of the revolutionary lion, much of it literally barricaded, could thus be left unseen and unmentioned, it sufficed that the Olympische torch had briefly passed through that district earlier, namely on on July 14, Bastille Day. Unperturbed by unpleasant associations with the Revolution and with revolutions in general, the flotilla could thus happily descend the Seine to western Paris, the Paris where a sporty “celebration of capitalism” was as welcome as the troopgs coming from Versailles and General de Gaulle had been in 1871 en 1944, respectively.

Inevitably, the Games also had to make use of some of the sports infrastructure that happened to be located elsewhere, such as the national football and rugby stadium in the plebeian suburb of Saint-Denis, an impressive venue known as Stade de France. However, as many events as possible, including the most spectacular ones, took place in western neighborhoods. The marathons finished on the vast Esplanade des Invalides, and the cyclists arrived at the photogenic spot that could be viewed as the topographic focal point of the Parisian Olympics, virtually at the base of the Eiffel Tower, where temporary facilities had also been erected for events such as tennis and beach volleyball. That also happened to be the place where the athletes had disembarked from the boats to attend the opening ceremony. On that occasion, Eiffel’s pillar, sparkling with thousands of lights, proclaimed to the Parisians, the athletes, and the entire world not only that the Olympic celebration of capitalism was welcome in Paris but also that Paris continued to belong to the bourgeoisie – at least until imperiled again by a second coming of the “yellow vests” or the appearance of yet another plebeian horde.

1. See Jacques R. Pauwels, “Napoleon Between War and Revolution”, Counterpunch, May 7, 2021. ↑

2. See the comments on Paris (including the Eiffel Tower) and Berlin in Adolf Hitler, Libres propos sur la guerre et la paix, Paris, 1952, pp.23, 81, 97. ↑

3. See Jules Boykoff, Celebration capitalism and the Olympic games, London, 2014.

4. Jules Boykoff, who developed the concept of “celebration capitalism”, considers the Olympic Games as a reverse form of trickle-down economics, whereby the wealth actually trickles upward, from the poor to the rich. ↑

5. Igor Martinache, “L’olympisme, stade suprême du capitalisme (de la fête)?”, Revue Française de Socio-Économie, 1:32, 2024, https://shs.cairn.info/. ↑

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Netzah Yehuda training exercise. Photograph Source: יעסיעס – CC BY-SA 4.0

The Biden administration’s decision to continue funding the notorious Netzah Yehuda battalion, an ultra-Orthodox unit that operates on the West Bank, is the latest indication that the United States is unwilling to take any steps to counter Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.  The funding of the battalion marks a major defeat for the human rights experts in the Departments of State and Defense, who argued that Netzah Yehuda should be barred from receiving U.S. support.  This marks one more decision by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that ignores the need for accountability with regard to the barbarous actions of the Israeli Defense Forces.

The Netzah Yehuda battalion is particularly violent in dealing with the Palestinian community. The battallion has killed unarmed civilians and suspects in custody as well as committed sexual assault and torture.  it has attracted many members of an extreme religious-nationalist settler group infamous for establishing illegal outposts on Palestinian land that have no legal basis in Israeli law. In recent years, the Netzah Yehuda battalion has been involved in at least a half-dozen controversial cases involving its soldiers, resulting in jail time, discharge, or harsh criticism for assaulting or killing innocent Palestinians.

U.S. funding of the battalion is a violation of the Leahy Law, passed in 1997, that prohibits the Departments of State and Defense from providing military assistance to foreign security force units that violate human rights.   U.S. embassies and the appropriate regional bureaus of the Department of State vet potential recipients of security assistance.  If a unit is found to have been credibly implicated in a serious abuse of human rights, assistance is denied until the host nation government takes effective steps to bring the responsible persons within the unit to justice.  As a result, security forces and national defense units in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Columbia, Guatemala, and Mexico have been denied assistance in the past.  The United States, of course, plays by different rules when it comes to military support for Israel.

Even before Blinken made his unfortunate decision regarding the battalion, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu obnoxiously proclaimed that “if anyone thinks they can impose sanctions  on a unit of the IDF—I will fight it with all my strength.”  U.S. presidents have been unwilling to stand up to Netanyahu who has led six of the eleven different Israeli governments over the past 28 years.  This funding decision is particularly reprehensible because the battalion was responsible for the death of a 78-year-old American citizen whose stress-induced heart attack was brought on by being bound, gagged, and left on the ground by Israeli forces.  Netanyahu’s government prosecuted no one in this case.

One of the more feckless U.S. moves regarding the war in Gaza was President Biden’s decision  to deliver humanitarian aid to the Palestinians via a floating military pier.  U.S. officials in the Departments of State and Defense argued that the weather conditions in the Mediterranean would compromise any effort to make the pier workable.  The critics were right.  They wanted the Biden administration to put pressure on Israel to open land crossings for aid, but Biden refused to do so.  As a result, the pier was attached to Gaza’s coast line in May and abandoned in July.  

Israeli officials maintain that they are allowing aid into Gaza, but the aid is going in slowly and humanitarian conveys are still being attacked.  A UN vehicle, clearly marked, was attacked several days ago and Palestinian aid workers were killed.  Meanwhile, more than 560 schools in Gaza have been hit or destroyed, and numerous shelters have been attacked.  This points to the moral squalor of Israeli public declarations that deny the targeting of humanitarian missions.

In order to understand the Arab-Israeli conflict (and perhaps appreciate U.S. complicity), it helps to remember the first Israeli edicts against its Palestinian population more than 75 years ago.  With the creation of the state of Israel, the Knesset adopted the British Defense Regulations that enabled Israeli military authorities to close off the Arab areas and restrict entry and exit only to those with permits.  Every Arab inhabitant had to apply to the military government office or to the police in his/her district to obtain a permit to leave his/her village for whatever reason.

The Knesset added its own restrictions to the British regulations.  These enabled the Israelis to deport people from their towns or villages and to summon any person to present himself at a police station or to remain confined to his/her house.  Any Arab could be placed under administrative arrest for an unlimited time, without explanation and without trial.  Violators were tried by military courts and not civilian ones; this is still true today on the West Bank.  Tom Segev, one of Israel’s most distinguished historians, noted in his important book, “1949: The First Israelis,” that “among the soldiers and officers sent to rule over the Arabs were ones who had been found unfit for active service.”  They were vengeful, which is true today on the West Bank.  Segev is associated with Israel’s New Historians, a group challenging many of the country’s traditional narratives.

Another distinguished Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, recorded in his book, “Ten Myths About Israel,” that the discussion of the forced transfer of the Arab population in Palestine began even before Israel received its independence in 1948.  The discussions evolved into a master plan for the massive expulsion of Palestinians, which was known as Plan Delat.  Pappe notes that the Israeli Foreign Ministry created the myth that the Palestinians became refugees because their leaders told them to leave Palestine before the “Arab armies invaded and kicked out the Jews.”

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Photograph Source: Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet – Public Domain

Over 3,000 migrants fleeing from poverty and conflict, the Council on Foreign Relations recently noted, died last year trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe.

Those deaths made barely a ripple in most of the world’s major news media. But this summer one single tragedy on the Mediterranean has been making globs of global headlines.

On Monday, August 19, amid a fearsome sudden storm, a boat deemed “unsinkable” sank off the coast of Sicily’s Palermo. Seven of the 22 people on board perished.

What made this sinking so newsworthy? The ship that sank just happened to be a luxury sailing yacht that sported the world’s tallest aluminum mast. And the casualties from that superyacht’s sinking just happened to include the high-tech CEO once hailed as the “British Bill Gates.”

That chief exec, the yacht’s owner Mike Lynch, had envisioned this voyage as a celebration over a decade in the making. Just weeks earlier, after years of legal battling, a federal jury in Northern California had acquitted Lynch and one of his VPs on charges they had artificially inflated the value of Lynch’s software company. That inflating, prosecutors charged, had sealed the firm’s 2011 sale to Hewlett-Packard for over $11 billion, a deal that netted Lynch personally about $800 million.

But within a year after the sale the value of Lynch’s company had tanked by some $8.8 billion, and H-P was referring allegations of accounting improprieties against Lynch to the British Serious Fraud Office and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The referrals would eventually produce a civil-suit victory for H-P and a 2019 criminal conviction of a key exec at Lynch’s firm.

The 59-year-old Lynch and his finance VP Keith Chamberlain would have much better luck in their own criminal trial on similar charges. Unfortunately for them, they’ll never get to enjoy their acquittal. Lynch drowned in the sinking of his yacht, as did Lynch’s top trial lawyer and the chair of financial giant Morgan Stanley’s international arm, a star witness for Lynch’s defense.

What made this Lynch yacht sinking particularly irresistible for the world’s media? On the same day as the sinking, reports surfaced that Lynch’s acquitted co-defendant Chamberlain had just died after a car ran him over while he was jogging. A sheer coincidence? And how could the captain of Lynch’s superyacht and all but one of his crew escape the boat’s sinking alive while Lynch and six other passengers perished? Such juicy meat for endless conspiracy speculation!

But we need not resort to conspiratorial theorizing to understand why Lynch’s $25-million yacht sank so quickly that stormy night. That blame belongs in no small part to climate change, not some cabal of his billionaire corporate rivals.

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Photograph Source: WAFA (Q2915969) – CC BY-SA 3.0

Israel’s assault on Gaza has now officially surpassed the gruesome milestone of 40,000 Palestinians dead, but in counting only those killed in direct acts of violence that number captures just a fraction of the human loss.

“Most civilian casualties in war are not the result of direct exposure to bombs and bullets,” noted a 2017 studypublished by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “they are due to the destruction of the essentials of daily living, including food, water, shelter, and health care.”

This broader understanding of conflict casualties was applied to Gaza in a July study published in The Lancet, one of the world’s premier medical journals. The study found that at that time, it was plausible to assume that Israel’s military campaign would be responsible for the deaths of some 186,000 people.

To calculate this number, the authors started with the almost 37,400 direct deaths the Gaza health authorities had confirmed as of June 19, with Israeli intelligence services themselves deeming the authority’s counting reliable. The authors then cited a survey of armed conflicts over the last several decades that showed the ratio of direct to indirect deaths was roughly between 1:3 and 1:15.

In other words, for every person killed by direct violence in recent wars, another three to 15 died due to conflict-induced factors, mainly preventable diseases and hunger that resulted from losing access to healthcare, shelter, food, and clean drinking water. The Lancet authors then assumed a rather conservative ratio of 1:4 direct to indirect deaths in Gaza – 37,400 direct deaths plus 149,600 indirect deaths – to arrive at their estimate.

Notably, while Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel killed more than 1,000 people, the direct-to-indirect casualty ratio is not applicable given that the wider Israeli population was not denied the necessities of life for any significant period.

In Gaza, the 1:4 ratio is conservative given that the Israeli air force has subjected Gaza to the most intense bombing campaign in history. In the first 200 days of the onslaught alone, the Israeli air force dropped 20 times more bombs per square kilometer on Gaza than the US did during nine years of the Vietnam War, previously history’s most intense bombing campaign that had itself dwarfed those during World War II. This has left most buildings in Gaza damaged or destroyed and 80 percent of the population displaced, often numerous times.

The Israeli army has also blocked most food, water, fuel, electricity, and humanitarian and medical supplies from entering the strip since October 7. Today, this has left almost half a million Gazans facing “catastrophic” levels of food insecurity, according to the UN, with more than 1.6 million people suffering from acute respiratory infections, jaundice, and diarrhea, 20 of the strip’s 36 hospitals inoperable and the remainder “partially functional.”

The impact of losing access to healthcare is starkly illustrated by the example of pregnant women in Gaza, estimated at 50,000 when the war began. Many have miscarried and are having stillbirths, faced C-sections with unsensitized equipment and without anesthetic, while increasing numbers of newborns are “simply dying,” according to the World Health Organization, because starving mothers are giving birth to critically underweight babies.

The Israeli campaign in Gaza – for which the world’s top two international courts are pursuing charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Israeli state and its leaders – has continued unabated since The Lancet published its study. With no reason to believe that the 1:4 ratio of direct to indirect deaths has decreased, the 40,000 Gazans now confirmed killed by violent means entails that the total deaths attributable to the Israeli campaign would be pushing past 200,000. That is 9 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population.

The Israeli army claimed in August that it had killed 17,000 Hamas fighters. While yet to comment on this latest assertion, Hamas itself has said previous Israeli statements of its losses were inflated by more than two-thirds. Regardless of which is closer to the truth, what the range makes clear is that combatants make up a fraction of the 200,000 total deaths for which Israel is responsible.

To properly place the Gaza death toll within the context of historical atrocities, consider that the first extermination camp the Nazis established during WWII, near Chelmno in German-occupied Poland, massacred at least 172,000 innocent people, while the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan during the same war and their radioactive aftermath are estimated to have killed more than 210,000 souls.

Perhaps most tragically, Gaza Health Ministry figures show that of the 40,000 direct deaths reached by August, 41 percent were children younger than 18 years old. Children tend to be disproportionately affected by the harms of armed conflict. Thus, it is likely that the ratio of indirect deaths within this age bracket is greater than for the general population. However, using The Lancet’s 1:4 ratio as a baseline, it is plausible to assume that the number of children Israel’s Gaza campaign will be responsible for killing is at least 82,000.

For perspective, three children who were laid side-by-side holding hands would take up roughly a meter’s width on average. Some 82,000 children laid side-by-side would form a line over 27 kilometers long. An average person standing on a flat plain would see that line of dead children stretch from them to the horizon and well beyond. That person would have to walk for five and a half hours to reach the end of the line. The drive would take more than 15 minutes on the highway, traveling at 100 km per hour.

All that would apply if today the war ended. As of this writing, however, Israel was still bombing Gaza and blocking access to life’s necessities, thereby ensuring the line of bodies will continue stretching well into the distance.

This first appeared on the Beirut-based Badil.

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Photograph Source: Lorie Shaull – CC BY 2.0

I was proud to be an antiwar activist in Chicago at the time of the Democratic convention in 1968.  I helped organize events there and then the next year worked on the staff of the Chicago Conspiracy trial that followed.

We were very much about movement building.  Including trying as best we could to minimize the division between “political” and “cultural” activists.  That meant movement centers, concerts and more, not just protests.

Back then I didn’t appreciate how extraordinary it was that a U.S. war engendered such widespread internal opposition.  It was decades before I became fully aware of the violence required for territorial expansion, conquest and control that created the continuous history of the USA.

It takes work to overcome the obfuscation of the magnitude of violence required by settler colonialism to expand from sea to shining sea and beyond. Then add in racialized slavery and segregation.  Together with patriarchy, gun worship, and other factors, we live in an immersive, self-renewing Culture of Violence the likes of which has never existed anywhere before.

Support for war and aggression has always been bipartisan.  The names of the political parties have changed and evolved since the U.S. became a modern nation state.  But there has never been a mainstream peace party. Nor is there one now.

Currently, the President sending the limitless money and weapons happens to be a Democrat.  Lest anyone forget the Republican’s loyalty to the cause, however, the “sane” presidential aspirant, Nikki Haley thought it was a great idea to be photographed autographing the U.S. manufactured and supplied bombs before they were loaded on the U.S. made warplanes.

Once and only once

Zooming out to see the long arc of USA! USA! USA! — only that one time did any war engender the kind of mass opposition that showed up in Chicago in 1968 as part of the circa 1965-1975 antiwar movement.

It’s not that opposition to other wars was zero. There were, for example, conscientious objectors during WWI and WWII.  The Civil War never had majority support in the North. It spawned the only other active draft resistance movement in U.S. history.

Which is how it works.  People don’t want to fight in wars they oppose.  I address this because I have learned over the decades that many people are mistakenly persuaded that it was the 1960’s draft that caused the antiwar movement.  If that were true, there would have been comparable opposition to the Korean war.  But there wasn’t.

For many reasons, especially the impact of the freedom movement in the South, there was unprecedented mass opposition to the war on Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos.

Today’s antigenocide movement is also unique.

In modern history there has never been a time when a genocide was significantly opposed while it was underway by people other than those being attacked. Certainly not during the Holocaust.  Meaning no disrespect to those who gave refuge to those fleeing Hitler’s regime, Germany mostly attracted opposition for its expansionist territorial ambitions, not for sending millions of Jewish people and others into gas ovens.

It’s true that the efforts of the South African government in the International Court of Justice, U.N. votes, the Uncommitted movement and huge global protests have yet to save a single Palestinian life, school, hospital, business or residence.  But that doesn’t change the extraordinary nature of the struggle to do so.

What time is it on the clock of U.S. militarism?

Is the military-industrial complex stronger today than it was in 1968? Or weaker?

Stronger, by a lot.  Better funded, more entrenched in every nook and cranny of the economy, certainly more powerful in Congress.  Vastly improved at preventing discussion in the public sphere about militarism or peace.

Specific to the political conventions, my guess is that if asked, more delegates in 1968 would have expressed genuine sympathy for the children of Vietnam than would 2024 delegates on behalf of Palestinian children.  I don’t remember any delegates in 1968 wearing camo hats.

In 2024, no Palestinians were permitted to speak.  The calculation apparently is that Kamala enthusiasm, especially among Black voters, will more than offset any votes lost to Palestinians or their sympathizers.

In her acceptance speech, Kamala Harris said:

And America, we must also be steadfast in advancing our security and values abroad. …As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. And I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families, and I will always honor and never disparage their service and their sacrifice.

Interestingly 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey, who also inherited the nomination from a President who chose not to run, expressed a weak hope for a ceasefire in Vietnam.  So did Kamla Harris about Palestine.  She even paid lip service to Palestinian suffering—without, of course acknowledging who was financing and supplying the weapons that cause the atrocities in the first place.

What’s telling however is this from Humphrey:

But the task of slowing down the arms race, of halting the nuclear escalation—there is no more urgent task than ending this threat to the very survival of our planet, and if I am elected as your President, I commit myself body, mind and soul to this task.

Harris espoused nothing anywhere close to that.  For all the allusions to struggles for civil rights, there were virtually no references to non-violence or Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or any danger whatsoever of nuclear war.  The plan was clearly to reassure voters that President Harris would be a loyal and competent Colonizer in Chief.

Things take time to work out.  At the moment however, the energy and resources for Palestinian solidarity devoted to the Democratic convention appeared to have failed. Maybe even backfired. Here’s how long time Middle East advocate and expert Helena Cobban assessed it:

This week the U.S. Democratic Party put on two big performances that left me even more depressed than last week. In Chicago, the party’s big-bucks powers-that-be put on an intricately choreographed, North Korea-style pageant of “joy” and “unity” in which they very pointedly threw the party’s anti-genocide activists under a bus. And during plane rides around West Asia, meanwhile, Secretary of State Blinken continued his lengthy “performance” of trying to win a Gaza ceasefire deal, while American weapons continued to flow copiously to the most heavily armed and genocidal actor in the region.

For Blinken and his bosses–Pres. Biden, and now also VP Harris–that “performance” of diplomacy is precisely the point. “We are working ceaselessly… ” “We are working around the clock… ” Etc., etc. Their effort in this is either woefully uninformed or wittingly mendacious, or both.

The 1968 antiwar movement was decidedly not anticolonialist.  Most participants were and still are fiercely loyal to the machinery that has produced all the wars before and since.  The same is generally true now regarding the genocide being carried out against Palestinians.

An often-overlooked manifestation of that fidelity, even stronger now than then, is allegiance to the importance of the Presidency.  Worship of the U.S. presidency is itself an expression of support for Empire.  All our lives we have been told that the president of the USA is the most powerful person in the world.

We are supposed to take pride in that.  The wall-to-wall media coverage of the intricately planned spectacle of both parties’ conventions is itself more flaunting of opulence, gigantism and aspirations to red-white-and blue world domination.

Consequently, even a demonstration at a Convention cannot help but be a degree of compliance with the structure of Empire itself.  Inescapably therefore further legitimizing the very thing that some of us at least want to be the change from.  That’s not meant to suggest that there should never be protests at such events. Only that there is a tradeoff worth considering.

The Military Industrial complex is stronger.  White Empire is weaker. 

The more wars the Pentagon loses—which is all of them, albeit at the cost of millions of lives and other damage—the more money it gets.  The more they fail to meet their recruitment goals, the more they up the incentives for enlistment.  And hire mercenaries. And invest in automated warfare.

Virtually every success the Ukrainian military achieves is because they ignore what their Pentagon advisors tell them to do.  The U.S. Navy is routinely outmaneuvered by teenage Houthi rebels. People go to Beijing or Istanbul to negotiate global military and political deals. Not to Washington or Camp David.

The post WWII era of U.S. global hegemony is in irreversible decline.  For peace advocates, appreciating this profound shift is important to our analysis and strategy.

So, to pose a different question, will the movement supporting Palestine in 2024 come to more deeply challenge the underlying racism, militarism and materialism that Rev. Martin Luther King said in 1967 made the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world?”

Theories of change

If a theory of change keeps reinforcing the status quo over decades or even hundreds of years, perhaps it isn’t really a theory of change after all. Or at least not an effective one.  Maybe over time, like a bad marriage it becomes a learned and convenient codependence.

Personally, I don’t want the opposite of what we have now.  I want something way better than that.  As to how we get there, hindsight confirms even more strongly a predominantly non-electoral theory of change.

Elections for school board, municipal offices and ballot initiatives can be significant exceptions.  And there is much to be said for the argument of Aurora Levins Morales and others that electoral participation, especially at the Presidential level, is best understood through the lens of choosing your opponent.

But it’s the Montgomery Bus Boycotts; the Mississippi Summers; the people’s diplomacy efforts; the building of Beloved Communities including Palestinian solidarity encampments; resistance to military service and other strategies in a virtuous cycle that can create more transformative change.

The antiwar movement itself was a marvel of energy, creativity and innovation.  Including interactions with the Vietnamese.  Many activists engaged with Madame Nguyen T. Binh and other Vietnamese leaders to better understand the Vietnamese reality.  This strategy built on lessons the Vietnamese had learned from their successful struggle against the French.

At the time there was also a global anticolonial movement that influenced the context in which the war was understood and opposed.  Many, though by no means all, U.S. peace and justice activists have been in solidarity with the Palestinian movement for many years.  There is a particular bond with the Black community.  The engagement of Jewish Voice for Peace since October 7, 2023 has been remarkable.  While different in form, internationally there is at least as much support for Palestine now as there was for Viet Nam in the 1960’s.

What’s new, what now? 

While it’s as amorphous as all get out, there is a growing component of the movement that is quite different from what existed in 1968.  Maybe it could be called emergent strategies, a term used by adrienne maree brown.  Seeking to grow beyond the narrow limitations of much past and current thinking, many are exploring approaches that combine cultural, economic and spiritual theory and practice into a different kind of movement building.

Not a day goes by that I don’t learn about a new book, article or video expressing this emerging perspective.  BECOMING KIN by Patty Krawec and WHAT IT TAKES TO HEAL by Prentis Hemphill are examples that center the revolution in values that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called for.

As part of the National Council of Elders, King and Breaking Silence Project, I have been involved with organizing a series of webinars including. Decolonize; and From Terror to Transformation Can The Violence In Palestine-Israel Become A Turning Point For Humanity? The most recent Only Revolutionary Love Can Save Us Now features a conversation between Michelle Alexander and Rev. Nelson and Joyce Johnson of the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, North Carolina.

These programs combine new insights with lessons learned over the last fifty plus years.  They explore “making the path by walking” to a broader and deeper way toward lasting change.

Should we do everything we can to stop the current slaughter of Palestinians?  Of course.  Which can be entirely compatible with trying to replace the culture of violence system already working on the next wars and genocides.

To the degree we succeed, millions of lives will be saved.  And, as the John Lennon song Imagineenvisions, in another 56 years we won’t still need to be protesting whatever slaughter the U.S. is involved in then.

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Interior view of the destroyed Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, Berlin, burned on Kristallnacht

On a recent trip to Germany, I sought to better understand how the Nazi Party rose to power, and carried out the Holocaust, in which most of my Hungarian Jewish relatives perished. I gained some new insights, and learned several lessons that may be useful in the polarized United States today, with the election looming and far-right agitation growing.

I visited the Nuremberg rally grounds, and stood on the rostrum where Hitler instilled his poisonous views in German minds in the mid-1930s. I saw German synagogues that were attacked on Kristallnacht in 1938, and toured Auschwitz in southern Poland, where most of my relatives were sent in 1944, as well as the Nuremberg courtroom where some Nazi war criminals were put on trial in 1945-46.

The Nazi Party took power in 1933, and in 1935 instituted the Nuremberg Laws that stripped  German Jews of their citizenship and many of their basic rights. In August 1938, Berlin ordered the mass deportation of all Jews with foreign citizenship, even if they had been born in Germany.

In October 1938, according to Hannah Arendt, 12,000 Polish Jews (including many born in Germany) were forcibly expelled by Germans shouting “Juden Raus! Auf Nach Palästina!” (“Jews Out! Go to Palestine!”), but Poland would not take them in. (At the same time, Germans were playing a board game called “Juden Raus” to simulate such a mass deportation.)

The Dynamics of Kristallnacht

The key turning point was Kristallnacht, or the “night of broken glass” in November 1938, when fascist paramilitaries carried out a violent national pogrom against Jews, in response to the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, by one of those deported German-born Polish Jews. That was the first lesson I learned, that it was the mass deportation of foreign citizens that ultimately set Kristallnacht into motion, which makes me shudder now every time I hear Trump promote the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

In the following few days, Berlin banned Jews from attending school, organizing cultural activities, publishing newspapers, or owning weapons. Paramilitaries joined by ordinary citizens destroyed hundreds of synagogues, and thousands of shops and homes, immediately killed nearly 100 as the police and military stood by, and incarcerated 30,000 in concentration camps.

The second lesson I learned was that Kristallnacht was deeply unpopular in Germany. Many Germans were concerned that foreign reporters’ accounts gave their country a more negative image abroad (which still mattered in 1938), and they deemed the paramilitary mobs as disorderly, chaotic, and illegal, akin to pogroms in Czarist Russia. Kaiser Wilhelm II was “ashamed to be German,” some individual Party members tried to intervene to protect Jews, and a survey showed that 63% of Party members disapproved of the violent pogrom.

The third lesson I learned was that their opinion didn’t matter one bit. Nazi leadership had decided to set mass, violent persecution into motion, so the voices of dissent among newer Party members (who had joined for the job rather than the ideology) had no effect whatsoever. Kristallnacht was not the result of individual opinions or prejudices, but a structural exercise in power by an extremist political minority to crush democracy and human rights. Even if some Party members questioned the Party’s direction, the machinery of persecution moved forward toward its logical outcome of genocide. Even if some church members objected, it meant nothing unless they’d actively resisted and stood in the way of the machine. So now whenever I see a CNN poll showing a similar majority of Republicans disapproving of political violence, it provides little reassurance.

One of the reasons that internal dissenters were ignored was that their opposition was usually couched in legal terms, decrying the violence of Kristallnacht as illegal, insinuating that any government persecution had to be done instead through legal means. So in the ensuing months and years, in response to the criticism, the State changed the laws to give violent persecution a legal veneer.

That was the fourth lesson I gained from Kristallnacht, that if one objects to abuses of human rights and democracy only on legal grounds, we’ll get caught flat-footed when the laws are changed to legalize the abuses. If we object to U.S. armed paramilitaries merely as illegal “vigilantes” (as I pointed out in 2020), we’re not prepared for a situation when the militia members are deputized and issued orders. Using the military for political ends, such as shooting protesters or deporting immigrants, may be technically illegal now, but President Trump can give an official stamp of approval.

A New Civil War?

The entire experience of personally seeing the sites of the Nazi Party’s rise, including Kristallnacht, offered a fifth lesson that has made me question the current American trend to fear a possible “civil war” in the United States. Numerous books, opinion columns and polls envision an upcoming “civil war” between red and blue states, and the Hollywood action film Civil War provides the gory images. But I’ve grown to see the fear of civil war as both inaccurate and misplaced.

Even if the red vs. blue divide led to a violent cataclysm, it wouldn’t be a war between the states, but a war within the states. As a political geographer who has studied many election maps, I can see that the real divide is not between states, but between the blue metro areas and the surrounding red counties. The dynamic would be less like the American Civil War than like insurgencies in which rural-based militias encircled and assaulted what they viewed as decadent, cosmopolitan cities, as the Bosnian Serb Army did to multiethnic Sarajevo in 1992.

But the United States is not going to have a civil war for one simple reason: one side has nearly all the guns. The political right romanticizes guns and militarism, and far-right militias tend to target human beings (killing at least 114 people in the U.S. in 2001-21). The political left romanticizes peace and relies on legal political movements, and even its most militant factions usually go only so far as to vandalize or destroy property. After all, how many liberals, progressives, or leftists do you know who actually own a weapon?

The only realistic scenario for a new civil war would be if the U.S. military itself divided along political lines, and both sides gained heavy weaponry. Some military enlistees and officers did question the possibility of attacking protesters in 2020, and resisted the Iraq War a decade earlier. The troops are about 43 percent people of color, so (like during the Vietnam War) some could refuse or frustrate orders to use their weapons at home. But there is no evidence of a schism within the military that even approaches the divisions leading up to our original Civil War, or for that matter civil wars in any other country.

So my conclusion is that instead of thinking about a two-sided civil war that isn’t going to happen, it would be much more useful to think through what we would do in case of a one-sided spasm of violence directed at marginalized communities (such as undocumented immigrants), and any governments that defend them. We’re narrowly drawing from our own history in envisioning a new civil war, when what we should really be worried about is a Kristallnacht.

American Kristallnacht

We’re seeing a preview of mob violence in the recent anti-immigrant riots in British and Irish cities, and attacks on refugees and asylum seekers in Germany.  Our own history has plentiful precedents of militarized mob violence against Black, Native, Latin, and Asian communities, and violence against LGBTQ+ communities. In the aftermath of a contested election, it’s conceivable that a one-sided mass assault could be directed not just against government officials or buildings such as the Capitol, but against immigrants, Muslims, Jews, real and perceived leftists in higher education and media, or a combination of individual attacks lashing out at any “enemies of the people.”

It’s possible that the U.S. came within one inch of such a scenario on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania. What would have been the spontaneous reaction from armed Trump supporters had the assassination attempt been successful? The identity of the shooter would have been less relevant than the opportunity to take revenge against Trump’s “enemies.” The 1994 Rwanda genocide began with the downing of a plane carrying the president, signaling to Hutu militias not only to massacre the Tutsi ethnic group, but any Hutus who stood in the way.

When we look forward to any contested election results on November 5, the certification on January 6, 2025, anti-immigrant riots, a threatened mass deportation, or some other trigger for far-right violence, we should heed the lessons of the one-sided Kristallnacht pogrom rather than focus on fanciful visions of a two-sided civil war. No matter if a pogrom is legal or not, or is popular or not, it’s a moral atrocity and an exercise of far-right power to crush democracy and human rights. It can only be stopped by a mass mobilization of people, using our numbers and creativity to exercise our own power to stand in the way.

Resistance to mass deportations

Such a mass mobilization could involve large counterdemonstrations to defend human rights. In Germany, counterdemonstrations grew against extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party leaders, after a recording revealed in January that they were secretly planning mass deportations of refugees and immigrants. The huge rallies may have isolated the AfD and suppressed its share of the European Parliament election vote, even if the party has made major gains in eastern states.

This German experience is of little solace to Americans, given that Trump supporters are openly waving “Mass Deportation Now!” signs, with little pushback from Harris or her supporters. But if mass deportations and family separations are threatened, immigrant workers and their communities may strike and march as they did on the “Day Without Immigrants” in 2006 and 2017, or professional players could carry out a “sports strike” as they did in 2020.

Another mass mobilization could involve popular noncompliance with anti-immigrant directives.  In 1994, California Republican Governor Pete Wilson won a ballot initiative to establish a state-run citizenship screening system. Proposition 187 would have prohibited undocumented immigrants from using non-emergency health care, public education, and other services, and required all providers to report the names of anyone they thought was undocumented. But health care workers, educators, and many others collectively refused to comply en masse with the directives, and a federal judge later overruled Prop 187.

If any future president decided to carry out mass deportations of refugees and up to 11 million undocumented immigrants, it would be a logistical nightmare, requiring either unrestrained mob violence or (as Trump proposes) the use of military personnel. It may be critical to proactively reach out to active-duty Army and National Guard soldiers, preferably via veterans and military families, to educate them about the injustices facing war refugees and undocumented workers. The soldiers could be educated about their own rights and power, not just about becoming individual public refusers, but about more covert collective disobedience (akin to “search-and-avoid” missions in Vietnam and Iraq).

The United States could certainly at risk of a second civil war, but our country is even more frighteningly unprepared for a national pogrom resembling Kristallnacht. If Trump again sabotages the peaceful transfer of power, it may not be another January 6 in Washington D.C., but a far more violent upsurge that is spread across the country. And whether Trump wins and instigates mass deportations, or Harris wins and is pressured by far-right riots like those occurring in Europe, the main targets could well be refugees and undocumented immigrants (or anyone who looks or speaks like them). By preparing and organizing for these grim possibilities, we can have more proactive ways to respond than relying on our weakened legal system, and not be caught surprised again.

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“Escalation dominance defines a situation in which a nation has the military capabilities that can contain or defeat an adversary at all levels of violence with the possible exception of the highest.”

– Reagan Administration’s Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, “Discriminate Deterrence,” 1988.

There is no greater strategic madness than the belief that nuclear superiority must be maintained at each rung of the nuclear ladder in order to maintain deterrence.  U.S. weapons technology was a major driver of escalation dominance throughout the 1950s and 1960s along with the belief that the Soviet Union would move to a level of nuclear conflict that the United States could not counter.  “Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb” parodied these fears, and the arms control and disarmament developments of the 1970s and 1980s helped to defuse them.  Sadly, the Biden administration has taken a step that suggests a return to escalation dominance, which will spiral a Pentagon budget that will soon reach $1 trillion per year.

“Dr. Strangelove” remains the greatest of movie satires for a host of reasons, not least that it hews so closely to the real-life absurdities of two saber-rattling superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—escalating an arms race that could only end in mutual annihilation.  Now we have a third superpower—China—that is expanding its nuclear arsenal, and the Biden administration has approved a highly classified nuclear strategic plan—the Nuclear Employment Guidance—that seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from Russia, China, and North Korea.  According to David Sanger in the New York Times, the document is so highly classified that “there are no electronic copies, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.

The importance of escalation dominance in the Cold War was driven by such Cold Warriors as Paul Nitze, who argued that a Soviet nuclear attack would enable the Kremlin to hold the American population hostage and to dictate the terms of peace.  Nitze added that the Soviet Union’s “effective civil defense program” would keep Soviet casualties to two to four percent of their population, a cost that Moscow would be willing to pay to achieve “dominance.”  These absurd notions encouraged the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s to advise U.S. families to build bomb shelters as protection from atomic fallout in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.  President John F. Kennedy said the government would provide such protection for every American; in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan guaranteed protection in the form of his Star Wars missile defense.

Only the United States has spent billions of dollars in the pursuit of a missile defense shield over the entire country.  I wrote about this 25 years ago in a book titled “The Phantom Defense: America’s Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion.”  Now, European leaders are talking about a “European Air Shield,” and the Heritage Foundation—Donald Trump’s think tank—favors a missile defense system that would destroy over 100 incoming missiles.  Trump’s flawed reference to the success of Israel’s Iron Dome defensive system is also illusory because it intercepts small short-range rockets fired by militants in the region and not ballistic missiles.

The next president will inherit a nuclear landscape that is more threatening and volatile than any other since the dangers of the Cuban missile crisis more than 60 years ago.  China is expanding its nuclear arsenal; Russia is threatening the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine and warning about World War III; Iran’s nuclear program is expanding rapidly in size and sophistication; and North Korea reportedly has a nuclear arsenal that rivals three nuclear states that never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty: Israel, India, and Pakistan.

The close ties between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are feeding Washington’s nuclear paranoia.  Washington’s failure to hold substantive discussions with these four countries makes the potential for conflict more real.  Our obsession with terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons adds to the exaggeration of the threat and our distorted strategic spending. The fact that Donald Trump may return to the White House, where he once boasted about the size of his nuclear button and promised to return America’s nuclear arsenal to the “top of the pack,” adds to nuclear uncertainty.

Russia and China are willing to enter discussions on nuclear matters with the United States, but only as part of a larger strategic discussion on the tensions and challenges that confront Washington’s bilateral policies with both Moscow and Beijing.  President Biden’s administration has refused to enter such an expanded dialogue, which is a major failure in its national security strategy.  It is essential for the three major nuclear powers to discuss arms control, risk reduction, and the importance of nonproliferation; the United States is primarily responsible for the failure to begin a dialogue.  Instead, Biden and his national security team have been preoccupied with ways to interfere in the broader China-Russia relationship, which has never been stronger.  In fact, it has been Washington’s opposition to Sino-Russian relations that has led Moscow and Beijing to bolster their ties.

The United States has been lacking serious disarmament specialists at the highest levels of the government since the Obama administration when John Kerry was secretary of state and Rose Gottemoeller was undersecretary for arms control and international security and assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation.  Kerry and Gottemoeller were fighting an uphill battle because of President Bill Clinton’s decision in 1997 to abolish the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which seriously weakened the entire arms control community in the United States.  ACDA’s demise as an independent voice for arms control weakened national security by narrowing arms control options for presidential decision making.

Unfortunately, we’re in an election season with both candidates battling over who would create a more lethal military force and increase military spending,  The campaign thus far has featured no reference to arms control and disarmament.  The United States is already responsible for half of the global spending on the military, and is the world’s only country that has power projection capabilities that involve every corner of the globe.  Our nuclear inventory contains more warheads than there are strategic targets, and this is certainly true for the other nuclear powers around the world.  There is no greater shared irresponsibility in the international community than the secret decisions that led to the overkill capabilities in the nuclear inventories of the nine nuclear powers.  It will take a serious act of statesmanship to stop the fear-mongering delusions that could once again shape our nuclear weapons policy.

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Not the First Time: Family from the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, Gaza City in what remains of their house destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

Since 2007, when the State of Israel implemented its still-ongoing blockade of Gaza, several different monikers have emerged to describe the conditions for Palestinians living in the territory under the ongoing Israeli siege.  Now, after 11 months of the murderous Israeli assault on the people of Gaza, it is necessary once again to revise what the State of Israel has imposed on the territory.  What the state of Israel has created in the Gaza Strip is nothing less than a death camp akin to what the Nazis created for the massacre of Jews and other so-called enemies of the Reich.

For many years, the descriptor of choice for Gaza emerged – surprisingly — from remarks in 2010 by the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron while on a trip to Ankara Turkey, who described the Gaza Strip as the “world’s largest open-air prison.”  Speaking alongside his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Cameron bluntly insisted that “Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp.”  This characterization of Gaza as a prison bore resemblance to the metaphor used by Michel Foucault to describe the stasis and immobility imposed by authorities on late medieval European towns afflicted by the Plague and became a standard representation of Gaza under the Israeli siege.

Man from the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, Gaza City grieving in the ruins of his house destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

After October 7, 2023, in the initial weeks of the brutal reprisal by the Israeli military against the civilians of Gaza, Masha Gessen in a highly provocative article for the New Yorker, wrote that the prison analogy was no longer applicable to describe what the Palestinians of Gaza were experiencing.  Gessen instead insisted on referring to Gaza as a “Ghetto,” and suggested that what Israel was undertaking in Gaza was precisely what the Nazis did in places such as the Ghetto of Warsaw.  In what was a courageous, as well insightful observation, Gessen wrote that the Israelis were “liquidating” the Ghetto of Gaza just as the Nazis liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto.

Now, after 11 months of incessant daily bombing and killing of a largely defenseless population with no end in sight; with an entire population, including women and children, made to suffer from no food, no clean water, diseases with no medicines and with the hospitals largely destroyed; and with the civilians of Gaza locked inside the space of the territory with nowhere to flee; the Israeli military is re-creating a project akin to the camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Oswiecim but on a larger spatial scale.  What else but a death camp corresponds to the organized daily slaughter of Palestinians within a confined space carried out by the State of Israel?

An area of the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, Gaza City destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

In such circumstances, the question that beckons for answers is:  how could a nation that claims its heritage from the ashes of the Holocaust and the Nazi death camps — and prides itself on upholding the slogan “never again” — turn around and inflict virtually the same kind of suffering on another group of civilians, and do it seemingly without remorse?  While there are no easy answers to this vexing puzzle, surprisingly one place to begin comes from the insights of two contemporaries from the 19^th century with vastly different political persuasions.

In his celebrated work, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856), Alexis de Tocqueville asked how the luminaries of the French Revolution, with their “love of equality and the urge to freedom” ultimately crafted a system of authoritarian rule little different from the absolutism they so passionately set out to overturn.*  In seeking to explain this paradox, de Tocqueville signaled a beguiling truth about revolutionaries such as Robespierre and St. Just who he insists, “were men shaped by the old order.”  These individuals may have wanted to distance themselves from the ancien regime they so fervently wished to destroy, but years of conditioning under French absolutism had influenced their outlook and behavior.  Try as they might, these revolutionaries, “remained essentially the same, and in fact…never changed out of recognition.”

The main mosque in the town of Kuza’a (Khan Yunis District) destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

Four years before de Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime, Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, wrote how human beings make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please.  They make it “under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”  He used this insight to show not how history repeats, but instead how history “rhymes” as human actors in the present recreate in the present what they have encountered from past experience.  Marx famously described the reprise of the past as both tragedy and farce.

In this way, both de Tocqueville and Marx emphasize how human actors emerge from the circumstances around them and in an uncanny way re-enact what they themselves know and have already experienced.  What these two towering figures reveal is that history weighs upon the living as they seek to remake the world of the present.  What kind of “dead weight” did the Holocaust and the experience of the Nazi death camps cast upon Zionism, Jews, and the State of Israel?

In response to this question, the logical but ultimately naïve impulse is to imagine the victims of the Holocaust filled with compassion for those who have experienced similar fates.  Supposedly, those who endured the ravages of the death camps would emerge from their tragedy replete with empathy for the suffering of others.  In some cases, this is undoubtedly true.

Far more credible is the disturbing likelihood that the Holocaust produced heirs thoroughly replete with rancor and bitterness toward humanity, with little compassion for other victims of brutality and injustice, and a deeply resentful if not unique sense of victimhood.  Indeed, these were hapless victims of an unspeakable state sponsored crime who passed such sentiments of bitterness and resentment to subsequent generations, including the current generation of Israelis who by all accounts of public opinion are fully supportive of the fratricidal activities of their government and seem oblivious to the suffering of their Palestinian neighbors in Gaza.  How else is it possible to explain the coarsened cruelty of those Israeli civilians vandalizing aid supplies intended for the starving and suffering people of Gaza, a truly depraved spectacle that conjures up images of the suffering, starving, skeleton-like Jewish captives in the death camps of the Nazis.

Apartment Buildings in Beit Hanoun destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

+++

There is a scene toward the end of the recent award-winning film, The Zone of Interest in which Nazi death camp commanders and various civilian experts are in a meeting, seated around a large table discussing how they will implement the logistics of liquidating a contingent of 700,000 Hungarian Jews who are being transported to the various camp locations.  The coldly blunt, even banal dialogue in this scene on the logistical challenges of processing so many bodies for death is obviously an echo of Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil.  At the same time, the visual imagery in this cinematic re-creation of the meeting is eerily similar to the fleeting images presented on newscasts of the so-called, Israeli “War Cabinet” that usually features the stoic faces of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant.  While we don’t know the exact words exchanged among these Israeli Generals and civilian leaders, the handiwork of this group has been on full display for the world to see for the past 11 months.

In a riveting press briefing of August 26^th, two veteran UNRWA officials directly involved in on-the-ground distribution of medical and food aid to the people of Gaza, Louise Wateridge and Sam Rose described a humanitarian catastrophe that they characterized as unprecedented, something they had never seen in decades of UN work.  People in places such as Al-Mawasi and Deir al Balah, without food, water, medicines or medical care, are living amid lakes of raw sewage in an apocalyptic landscape of carnage in conditions utterly unfit for human habitation.  The situation is worsening by the hour as Israel commands one million starving and sick people to remove themselves again and again — already 16 evacuations in August — and find shelter in a confined space comprising 11% of Gaza that the Israeli military is incessantly bombarding.

Ultimately, the way to comprehend how such a situation described by the two UNRWA officials comes about is to juxtapose the scene from The Zone of Interest on the liquidation of the 700,000 Hungarian Jews, and compare it to the visuals of the Israeli War Cabinet.  There is an unsettling symmetry in this comparison that asks us to ponder how the State of Israel has come to this moment in massacring so many thousands of innocents, while keeping those still alive penned in place, readying them for death by preventing them any route of escape.

* For the rest of this paragraph and the next see Gary Fields, “Nazis:  The Fraught Politics of a word and a People Besieged.”  Jadaliyya.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ecocide

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

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

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

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

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

West Papua and the Global Order

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Green State Vision: Education and Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indigenous Knowledge

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

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

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Photograph Source: SecretName101 – CC BY 4.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The not-so-good ones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The better speeches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo by Li Yang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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