Operation Rolling Thunder was a sustained U.S. bombing campaign over Vietnam. The Rolling Thunder Revue was a 1975–76 madcap concert tour headed by Bob Dylan, featuring extraordinary musicians and collaborators. Now, there’s a new “Rolling Thunder”; a maximalist anti-abortion campaign aimed at pressuring the Trump administration, the FDA, Congress and the courts to ban the use of mifepristone. To bolster their claims against mifepristone, abolitionists have latched on to a new non-peer-reviewed highly questionable study by a conservative think tank.
During the Presidential campaign, Trump juked and jived on his position on abortion access as seven states passed measures to enshrine abortion rights and several others, including red Kansas blocked efforts to restrict existing access. Now the Administration must balance the real-politique of the upcoming mid-term elections with the zeal of the anti-abortion coalition.
The question remains as to whether abortion abolitionists can prevail over the will of the majority of women and men who support access to abortion.
Restricting and ultimately banning access to medication abortion has been a longtime goal of the conservative movement. According to the Guttmacher Institute, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the playbook for the Trump administration, advocated “reinstating medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone that require in-person dispensing and limit who can prescribe and receive the medication.
“By effectively ending telehealth provision of the method, these restrictions would limit access to the method for anyone who faces barriers to reaching a brick-and-mortar clinic, including individuals receiving telehealth care (under the protection of shield laws) in states where abortion is banned.”
Project 2025 “also recommends revoking mifepristone’s US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, which would remove the drug from the market entirely.”
Politico’s Alice Miranda Ollstein recently reported that, “While the Trump administration paid little attention to the medication in its first months in office, and even filed a court brief to preserve access, the activists are counting on a report from the conservative think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center to light a fire under those in power.”
Ollstein further notes that “Mifepristone, one of two drugs used in roughly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S., is a longtime target of conservative activists who consider it the primary driver of the increase in abortions since Roe’s fall in 2022 and the method millions of women are using to circumvent state bans”
This largest-known study of the abortion pill is based on analysis of data from an all-payer insurance claims database that includes 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions from 2017 to 2023.
10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.
The real-world rate of serious adverse events following mifepristone abortions is at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of “less than 0.5 percent” in clinical trials reported on the drug label.
The FDA should immediately reinstate its earlier, stronger patient safety protocols to ensure physician responsibility for women who take mifepristone under their care, as well as mandate full reporting of its side effects.
The FDA should further investigate the harm mifepristone causes to women and, based on objective safety criteria, reconsider its approval altogether.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA chief Marty Makary — have already expressed openness to re-examining the pills’ safety and efficacy. The Guardian reported that “Last month, Makary told the Semafor World Economy Summit that he had ‘no plans to take action’ on mifepristone. However, he added: ‘There is an ongoing set of data that is coming into the FDA on mifepristone. So if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data.’”
While Ollstein pointed out that “Medical experts and abortion-right supporters say it exaggerates the danger of a medication that more than 100 scientific studies have found are safe and effective,”
Anti-abortion activists are treating the Ethics and Public Policy Center report as if receiving manna from heaven. “One of the things that we have the ability to do now with this data is to pressure the FDA and lawmakers to reconsider, if not suspend, their approval of this medication until they can do more research into it,” Maria Baer, a podcast host for the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, said on a private Zoom call last week where anti-abortion leaders discussed the strategy. The groups on the call included Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Americans United for Life, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Students for Life and Live Action.
Abortion-rights supporters are calling the report “junk science,” maintaining, according to Ollstein, “that the paper was released directly by the conservative think tank and not published in a medical journal where it would have been vetted by outside experts in the peer review process.” Ollstein argues that, “Medical experts and abortion-right supporters say it exaggerates the danger of a medication that more than 100 scientific studies have found are safe and effective.”
“Activists on the Zoom call pushed back on those criticisms, arguing that academia is ‘broken’ and they couldn’t trust the peer reviewers not to leak or ‘sabotage’ their effort.”
As the Guardian recently reported, “So far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty.”
Abortion abolitionists will not be satisfied until all abortions are illegal, abortion pills banned, doctors punished for performing abortions, women stigmatized and criminalized for having abortions, and anyone daring to help a woman get an abortion is punished severely.
In a move that is surprising on the surface, on May 5, Trump Justice Department lawyers asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit aimed at restricting access to the abortion pill mifepristone on technical jurisdictional grounds.
Quoted in the NY Times, Mary Ziegler, a law professor and abortion law expert at the University of California, Davis, said that “the Trump administration’s action to dismiss the case is surprising, but I think the best way to read it is that they’re just buying time to figure out what to do about mifepristone.” …She said the filing “avoids saying anything on the substance at all,” and might reflect cautiousness before the mid-term elections.
Rolling Thunder is a blending of legal effort with political muscle, aiming not just to defund Planned Parenthood and close clinics, but to eliminate the most accessible form of abortion care altogether. If successful, it could further fragment reproductive rights across the U.S., deepening the divide between states that protect abortion access and those that seek to eliminate it entirely.
For the next few weeks, the buzzword in US debates on the liberal/left about economics and ecology will be “abundance” after the release of the book with that title by Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Derek Thompson (The Atlantic magazine).
The book poses politically relevant questions: Have policies favored by Democrats and others on the political left impeded innovation with unnecessary red tape for building projects? Can regulatory reform and revitalized public investment bring technological progress that can solve problems in housing, infrastructure, energy, and agriculture? The book says yes to both.
Those debates have short-term political implications but are largely irrelevant to the human future. The challenge is not how to do more but how to live with less.
All societies face multiple cascading ecological crises—emphasis on the plural. There are many crises, not just climate change, and no matter what a particular society’s contribution to the crises there is nowhere to hide. The cascading changes will come in ways we can prepare for but can’t predict, and it’s likely the consequences will be much more dire than we imagine.
If that seems depressing, I’m sorry. Keep reading anyway.
Rapid climate disruption is the most pressing concern but not the only existential threat. Soil erosion and degradation undermine our capacity to feed ourselves. Chemical contamination of our bodies and ecosystems undermines the possibility of a stable long-term human presence. Species extinction and loss of biodiversity will have potentially catastrophic effects on the ecosystems on which our lives depend.
I could go on, but anyone who wants to know about these crises can easily find this information in both popular media and the research literature. For starters, I recommend the work of William Rees, an ecologist who co-created the ecological footprint concept and knows how to write for ordinary people.
The foundational problem is overshoot: There are too many people consuming too much in the aggregate. The distribution of the world’s wealth is not equal or equitable, of course, but the overall program for human survival is clear: fewer and less. If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.
Check the policy statements of all major political players, including self-described progressives and radicals, and it’s hard to find mention of the need to impose limits on ourselves. Instead, you will find delusions and diversions.
The delusions come mainly from the right, where climate-change denialism is still common. The more sophisticated conservatives don’t directly challenge the overwhelming consensus of researchers but instead sow seeds of doubt, as if there is legitimate controversy. That makes it easier to preach the “drill, baby, drill” line of expanding fossil fuel production, no matter what the ecological costs, instead of facing limits.
The diversions come mainly from the left, where people take climate change seriously but invest their hopes in an endless array of technological solutions. These days, the most prominent tech hype is “electrify everything,” which includes a commitment to an unsustainable car culture with electric vehicles, instead of facing limits.
There is a small kernel of truth in the rhetoric of both Right and Left.
When the Right says that expanding fossil energy production would lift more people out of poverty, they have a valid point. But increased production of fossil energy is not suddenly going to benefit primarily the world’s poor, and the continued expansion of emissions eventually will doom rich and poor alike.
When the Left says renewable energy is crucial, they have a valid point. But if the promise of renewable energy is used to prop up existing levels of consumption, then the best we can expect is a slowing of the rate of ecological destruction. Unless renewables are one component of an overall down-powering, they are a part of the problem and not a solution.
Why aren’t more people advocating limits? Because limits are hard. People—including me and almost everyone reading this—find it hard to resist what my co-author Wes Jackson and I have called “the temptations of dense energy.” Yes, lots of uses of fossil fuels are wasteful, and modern marketing encourages that waste. But coal, oil, and natural gas also do a lot of work for us and provide a lot of comforts that people are reluctant to give up.
That’s why the most sensible approach combines limits on our consumption of energy and rationing to ensure greater fairness, both of which have to be collectively imposed. That’s not a popular political position today, but if we are serious about slowing, and eventually stopping, the human destruction of the ecosphere, I see no other path forward.
In the short term, those of us who endorse “fewer and less” will have to make choices between political candidates and parties that are, on the criteria of real sustainability, either really hard-to-describe awful or merely bad. I would never argue that Right and Left, Republican and Democrat, are indistinguishable. But whatever our immediate political choices, we should talk openly about ecological realities.
That can start with imagining an “abundance agenda” quite different than what Klein and Thompson, along with most conventional thinking, propose. Instead of more building that will allegedly be “climate friendly,” why not scale back our expectations? Instead of assuming a constantly mobile society, why not be satisfied with staying home? Instead of dreaming of more gadgets, why not live more fully in the world around us? People throughout history have demonstrated that productive societies can live with less.
Instead of the promise of endless material abundance, which has never been consistent with a truly sustainable future, let’s invest in what we know produces human flourishing—collective activity in community based on shared needs and reduced wants. For me, living in rural New Mexico, that means being one of the older folks who are helping younger folks get a small-scale farm off the ground. It means being an active participant in our local acequia irrigation system. It means staying home instead of vacationing. It means being satisfied with the abundant pleasures of this place and these people without buying much beyond essentials.
I’m not naïve—given the house I live in, the car I drive, and the food I buy from a grocery store, I’m still part of a hyper-extractive economy that is unsustainable. But instead of scrambling for more, I am seeking to live with less. I know that’s much harder for people struggling to feed a family and afford even a modest home. But rather than imagining ways to keep everyone on the consumption treadmill, only with more equity, we can all contribute ideas about how to step off.
Our choices are clear: We can drill more, which will simply get us to a cruel end game even sooner. We can pretend that technology will save us, which might delay that reckoning. If we can abandon the delusions and diversions, there’s no guarantee of a happy future. But there’s a chance of a future.
Emmanuel Macron and the macaron have many similarities. Both the French President and the French dessert are airy and insubstantial and are loved by the rich elite. For these reasons, it was a surprise to many when Macron announced his support for an end to arms deliveries to the Israeli terrorist regime. For a neoliberal following in the footsteps of interventionists such as George Bush and Tony Blair, such a declaration is nigh unthinkable. Not even Vice-President Kamala Harris, a nominal progressive, has called for an arms embargo. In fact, Harris has made it emphatically that she does not support any restraint when it comes to arms sales to Israel. Why then would a politician like Emmanuel Macron support such a position?
Well, it seems that George Bush and Tony Blair are only secondary influences on Macron whose true playbook seems to be derived from that of Italian philosopher, Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli is famous for his quote “Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception”, and Macron seems to have taken this to heart with his finger always in the proverbial “wind” of politics. But what would cause Macron to adopt this position in particular? Should we believe him when he says that he wants to “avoid the escalation of tensions, protect civilian populations, free the hostages and find political solutions”?
Up until this recent declaration, Emmanuel Macron has been anything but a friend to the people of occupied Palestine. From condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to equating antisemitism with anti-Zionism in the presence of Bibi Netanyahu, Macron has been staunchly pro-Israel his entire political career. Macron has not just actively voiced his opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict; he has also worked to crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. In one such Orwellian maneuver, France under macron’s leadership banned all pro-Palestinian protests.
Obviously, the French Left and, frankly, all supporters of free speech, were horrified by this despicable directive and the many other disastrous decisions carried out by the French government under Macron. Unsurprisingly, in the most recent French election, the people of France, both left-wing and right-wing, seemed to agree that Macronism should be tossed onto the trash heap of history. As a result, Macron’s party, Ensemble, suffered a historic defeat at the hands of the New Popular Front and the National Rally with the New Popular Front (NPF) faring the best out of the three. According to the Intercept, one of the factors contributing to this victory for the NPF was the coalition’s support for Palestine.
Macron’s strategy of pandering to the Right by fear mongering about the “radial Left” clearly did not contribute to positive electoral success. According to CNBC, “Without the left vote in favor of Macron against Le Pen in 2022 and 2017, he would not be president, and he never really tried to do something together in the end with the people who made him president”. Macron failed because he counted on the Left to bend to his every whim. He did not confront the real possibility of the Left being able to stand alone, but the Left realized that they simply did not need Macron to defeat the Right. Everyone has heard the saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and this seems to be the case with Emmanuel Macron. It is obvious that he truly does not care about the Palestinian people, yet he is willing to say what he believes will help him electorally including declaring his support for an arms embargo on Israel.
Nevertheless, Macron likely has other strategic reasons for this shift as well. Under Macron, France has done its best to maintain good relations with Western and non-Western powers alike. A recent example of this was the 2024 China-France summit which saw Macron pursuing, as some described, as strategic autonomy from the United States. Likewise, Macron has supported a hypothetical Ukraine-Russia cease-fire deal because he realizes that, according to Responsible Statecraft, “The vast majority of the electorate is clearly opposed to sending troops to Ukraine… Macron will be unwilling to risk hundreds of French lives for such a distant war nobody wants”.
Macron’s foreign policy strategy of realpolitik is all about appeasement. Macron believes that he must appease both the United States and the international community alike which is clearly opposed to Israel’s actions in Gaza per the recent UN vote of 124 to 14 in favor of demanding an end to Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank. Similarly, Macron believes that in order for his centrist party to remain in power he must placate both the French political Left and Right. Unfortunately for Macron, this strategy of fence-sitting has led to failure both electorally and geopolitically and will, naturally, continue to fail in the future.
Macron’s sudden shift in favor of an arms embargo is part of a greater political wager, which the French President believes will pay dividends in terms of international relevance and domestic support. His statement is inherently elitist and predicated on the idea that the French people are of low intelligence and will forget his history of support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For now, Macron’s dubious promises of peace and restraint are as insubstantial as the airy, delicate macarons his out-of-touch supporters so adore. And just like the dessert, they crumble easily under pressure, revealing the emptiness inside.
OK, this will be one of my non-satirical essays … or mostly non-satirical essays.
It will serve as a companion piece to The New Normal Left, another non-satirical essay that I published in April 2023, which was basically just a reiteration of a speech I gave at a conference in London. It went over pretty well back then. I republished most of it in my latest column, A Brief History of Global Capitalism. It didn’t go over quite as well this time. Political perspectives appear to have shifted significantly over the course of the last year and a half. Or maybe it was just the word “capitalism” in the title, which, for some reason, annoyed a lot of people.
This essay will also annoy some people. However, that is not my intent, so, if you’re one of those readers who get agitated if you see the word “capitalism” in anything other than an enthusiastically pro-capitalism context, you might want to give this essay a miss.
Also, if you’re one of my regular readers, apologies for the repetition of points that you’ve heard me make many times. Not everyone has read my previous essays, so I need to do that for the sake of clarity, which is what I hope to provide in this essay, rather than, you know, just making people laugh.
Ready? OK, here we go.
The first thing I should probably clarify is what I mean by the term “New Normal.” Naturally, people associate it with Covid. It doesn’t have anything to do with Covid. Yes, the “New Normal” was ushered into being by the “state of emergency” that was imposed on the world from 2020 to 2023, but it didn’t end in 2023, and it never had anything to do with a virus. You do not transform entire societies into pathologized-totalitarian police states and force people to submit to experimental “vaccinations” because of an airborne respiratory virus that poses no threat to the vast majority of humanity.
The “New Normal” was never about a virus. The term — which I did not make up; it was deployed by the authorities and the corporate and state media — means exactly what it sounds like it means. The “New Normal” is our new official “reality,” just as “The War on Terror” was our official “reality” from September 2001 to 2016.
The “New Normal” is actually an evolution of “The War on Populism” that began in 2016, after Brexit and the rise of European populism, and Donald Trump in the USA. I’ve published whole books of essays on this subject, so I’m not going to reiterate all the details here. Essentially, what happened in 2016 was, the global-capitalist system that we all live under switched “realities” like The Party switched official enemies in Orwell’s 1984. It happened over the course of a few weeks.
OK, let me try to clarify another point. When I say the “New Normal” is our official “reality,” I mean “reality,” not ideology. Ideologies are a dime a dozen. They exist in relation to other ideologies. “Reality” doesn’t. There is only one “reality.” If there is more than one “reality,” they’re just ideologies. “Reality” is singular. It is axiomatic. “Reality” isn’t up for debate. If you debate “reality,” you’re a crazy person. That’s the whole point of having a “reality.”
I realize this is a difficult concept. If you are having trouble with it, perhaps think of official “reality” as a supra-ideological ideology. I’ve often called it a “post-ideology.” It’s what an ideology becomes when there are no longer any other ideologies to put it in context (i.e., as an ideology). So, it disappears as ideology, and becomes “reality,” and becomes unassailable … or, in other words, “just the way it is.”
Which, of course, is the ultimate goal of every totalitarian movement and system; i.e., to overcode every element of society with its official “reality,” eliminating any and all forms of dissent, which, at that point, no longer has to be suppressed, because it has become inconceivable, literally inconceivable, as in the mind can no longer formulate such thoughts (no more than fish could think critically about water; i.e., if fish could think like that).
In any event, the “New Normal” is our new official “reality.” We are only in the early stages of it, but some of its features are unmistakably clear — the criminalization of dissent, corporate and state censorship, the devalorization of democratic rights and principles, the “pathologization” of political opposition, etc. I have described it as a new, nascent form of totalitarianism. A global-capitalist form of totalitarianism. I’m sorry if that agitates my “pro-capitalism” readers — as I mentioned, that is honestly not my intent — but global capitalism is the system that we all live in. We need to be able to call it what it is, and try to understand how it is rapidly evolving.
It is evolving in an increasingly totalitarian fashion, which, given the circumstances, is not at all surprising. As I put it in those earlier essays …
It’s one big global-capitalist world now. It has been since the early 1990s. GloboCap has no external adversaries, so it has nothing to do but ‘clear and hold,’ i.e., wipe out pockets of internal resistance and implement ideological uniformity. Which is what it has been doing for the last 30 years, first, in the former Soviet bloc, then, in ‘The Global War on Terror,’ and finally, in our so-called ‘Western democracies,’ as we have just experienced up close and personal during the shock-and-awe phase of the rollout of the New Normal, and are continuing to experience, albeit less dramatically. In other words, GloboCap is going totalitarian. That is what the ‘New Normal’ is.
If any of my staunchly “pro-capitalism” readers are still with me at this point, please, try to relax. I don’t want to confiscate your private property, or raise the capital gains tax on billionaires, or any of that other “commie” stuff. I am neither “pro-capitalism” nor “anti-capitalism.” I’m just trying to explain where we are.
Where we are is in the inceptive stages of the evolution of the first globally hegemonic power system in human history. Communism is dead. Nazism is dead. Every would-be ideological opponent to the hegemony of global capitalism is dead. There are only two major forces in play: (1) global capitalism, which is carrying out that above-mentioned global “Clear-and-Hold” op , and; (2) the reactionary resistance to it.
The character of that reactionary resistance is decentralized and heterogeneous, as is the character of the global-capitalist system. Neither force is a monolithic entity. The basic differences are: (1) global capitalism, despite its heterogeneous elements and the perpetual intramural competition among them, comprises a single ideological system, whereas the reactionary resistance to it does not, and; (2) the global-capitalism system is the occupying force, so it controls the territory — i.e., the entire planet — whereas the reactionary resistance is an insurgency, or, rather, a diverse array of insurgencies, many of which do not entirely understand what they are actually “insurging” against.
Which brings us to the New Normal Right.
I have described the resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism as “reactionary,” but I do not mean that in a pejorative sense. Most of this reactionary resistance is an attempt to defend traditional values from the value-decoding machine of capitalism.
If I can quote from The New Normal Left again …
Capitalism is a values-decoding machine. It decodes society of despotic values (i.e., religious values, racist values, socialist values, traditional values, any and all values that interfere with the unimpeded flows of capital. Capitalism does not distinguish). This is how capitalism (or democracy if you’re squeamish) freed us from a despotic ‘reality’ in which values emanated from the aristocracies, kings, priests, the Church, etc. Basically, it transferred the emanation and enforcement of values from despotic structures to the marketplace, where everything is essentially a commodity.
As the events of the last eight years have demonstrated, there are still a lot of people who have no interest in living in a global marketplace where there are no values, and anything means anything, and everything and everyone is essentially a commodity.
This is what the “culture war” in the West is all about. People are not quite ready to surrender their religious values, their cultural values, their national sovereignty, and other such concepts, and embrace a borderless, monomulticultural, supranationally- governed post-social society that is basically just an endless combination mega-mall and GloboCap theme park.
The thing is, the majority of the resistance in the West is staunchly “pro-capitalist,” or at least staunchly “anti-communist,” and thus is unable to face the fact that it is global capitalism and its values-decoding machine that they are actually resisting. Hence the desperate coining of alternative names to designate the adversary, “cultural Marxism,” “communism,” “wokeism,” “crony capitalism” … the list goes on and on.
The same goes for the non-Western resistance. Most militant Islamic fundamentalists believe they are waging jihad against “the infidels,” or “the Zionists,” or against “The Great Satan, America.” Populists in Eastern Europe believe they’re resisting the USA, or NATO, which they are, but that’s just intramural competition. What they are really up against is the values-decoding machine of global capitalism, which is desperate to get its hooks back into Russia, de-Putinize and re-privatize the hell out of everything, and get those flows of global capital reflowing.
Anyway, that’s the playing field, currently. You got GloboCap conducting its Clear-and-Hold op, neutralizing internal resistance to its global-capitalist Gleichschaltung campaign and implementing (post)ideological uniformity, and you got the internal, reactionary resistance to GloboCap.
So, that works out pretty well for GloboCap. You can’t carry out a Clear-and-Hold op if there’s no reactionary resistance to “clear.”
The catch is, most of the reactionary resistance is not quite scary and militant enough. I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that most conservatives are not longstanding members of democracy-hating neo-Nazi militias. They’re just regular folks who want to be left alone to live their lives as they please, and to raise their families according to their values, just like most liberals — and, yes, even leftists — are not fanatical, mask-wearing, censorship-happy, shrieking, totalitarian freaks, but just regular people, with good intentions.
But that doesn’t work for GloboCap. Garden-variety, non-fanatical folks, regardless of their political persuasions, are as useless to the GloboCap Clear-and-Hold op as a one-legged monkey in an ass-kicking contest.
And so that’s where the New Normal Right comes in.
If the New Normal Right did not already exist, GloboCap would be forced to invent it. It needs a convincing boogeyman — or, actually, a diverse collection of boogeymen — to serve as an excuse for its evolution into a pathologized-totalitarian system.
Fortunately, for GloboCap, the New Normal Right does exist, and is becoming uglier and thus more useful by the day. Just like the New Normal Left are playing their part — i.e., as the New Normal’s brownshirts — the New Normal Right are stepping right into their roles like seasoned Hollywood actors.
Their role in this drama is “the far-right extremists.” The “bigots.” The “anti-Semites.” The “Holocaust deniers.” The “neo-Nazis.” The “neo-nationalist insurrectionists.”
In other words, they are playing the part of “Hitler.”
Naturally, GloboCap is playing “America” (i.e., the “good guys” who defeated Hitler), so it needs a “Hitler” to be at war with. It needs a “Hitler” to justify doing away with what’s left of our democratic rights, transferring political power from nation-states to supranational global corporations and non-governmental governing organizations, censoring and visibility-filtering dissent, and otherwise continuing to metamorphose into its new totalitarian form. The terrorists are still playing “Hitler” abroad. It needs the New Normal Right to play “Hitler” at home.
Which the New Normal Right is increasingly doing. Emboldened in large part by Elon Musk and other prominent “influencers,” they’re letting it rip with the blatant bigotry, and anti-Semitism, and neo-nationalism, and strutting around like racist bull roosters. Holocaust denial is trending. Rumors of cat-eating Haitians are circulating. Elon, who has been consecrated “Free Speech Incarnate,” is martyring Himself in Brazil and the UK. His disciples are flying around the planet, preaching The Gospel of Elon in their “Free-speech X” T-shirts, and passing out Bolsonaro stickers.
And the Musk Cult is on its way to Washington to Rescue the Republic from tyranny!
Yes, the New Normal Right is salty! They are ready for action! The Rebellion is on! Unfortunately, they have no idea what it is that they are actually rebelling against. Intoxicated by a sense of impending victory over the “libtard commies” and their “woke mind virus,” they are playing right into GloboCap’s hands …
… or being led down to the Weser River, depending on how paranoid you want to get.
If I were the showrunner at GloboCap Pictures, I couldn’t have scripted the set-up any better. All we need now is an inciting incident, you know, like terrorists attacking the World Trade Center, Russia invading Ukraine, Hamas attacking Israel, or neo-Nazis storming the Reichstag, or the Trumpians storming the US Capitol, or British racists running amok, or … well, I think you get the general idea. Something that will enable GlobCap (also known as “The New Normal Reich”) to declare another “global state of emergency,” resuspend constitutional rights, turn loose the goon squads and the New Normal Left again, and maybe even shut down the Internet to protect the public from malinformation, or extremism, or terrorism, or Hitler, or whatever!
Who knows? Maybe they’ll even throw in another apocalyptic virus!
I am from rural America, sort of. I’m an intellectual, sort of. I’m certainly on the political left, but some comrades believe I’m turned conservative.
Like many people, I don’t fit easily into conventional labels used in today’s polarized political debates. To understand me—and anyone else—takes some sorting out. Here’s how I sort myself out.
I was born in North Dakota and grew up mostly in the big city of Fargo (well, it’s the largest city in the state). I never lived in a rural area, but I was a part of a larger rural culture, in which most everyone had some connection to the countryside through family, friends, or business. After living in several big cities during my professional life, I now live in northern New Mexico outside the small town of Taos, in a county with a smaller population than the university where I used to teach. Recent imports like me live alongside farmers and ranchers, interacting regularly through the acequia irrigation system.
I’m not rural, but I like to think I understand rural.
I started my professional life as a newspaper journalist before earning a PhD and becoming a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. But once I secured the guaranteed employment that comes with tenure, I walked away from the scholarly world of academic journals and conferences. I continued to teach but wrote for a general audience, immersing myself in a variety of community organizing projects.
I was an intellectual by profession, but I never really wanted to be part of formal intellectual life.
I’ve met intellectuals who assume rural life is bereft of intellectual activity. And I’ve met rural people who assume that intellectuals are condescending and annoying. There’s a kernel of truth in both assumptions. Since moving to a rural area, I have fewer opportunities for certain kinds of intellectual engagement; I don’t go to as many scholarly lectures as I did in Austin. At the same time, I don’t find myself wishing I was back in a faculty meeting and dealing with academic status-seeking. But I’ve met too many smart rural people and too many wonderful professors to fall back on stereotypes.
As I explain in It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics, perhaps most important to my identity is that I’m a radical. My politics are based on a critique of systems and structures of power that create impediments to meaningful social justice and real ecological sustainability: patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, First-World domination, and the worship of high-energy/high-technology gadgets in an industrial worldview. But how I apply these analyses make me both a part of the left and alienated from the left.
Let’s start with patriarchy. I was first politicized by the radical feminist movement to challenge the sexual-exploitation industries (pornography, prostitution, stripping—the ways men buy and sell objectified female bodies for sexual pleasure). That form of radical politics goes to the heart of systems and structures of male power. I also embraced what is typically called a radical analysis of racism, economic inequality, and imperialism. I thought that this kind of consistent critique—going to the root of problems by focusing on systems of power—was what it meant to be on the left, but over time I realized that most of my left comrades didn’t much care for radical feminism. Over time, more and more leftists not only rejected the critique of the sexual-exploitation industries but celebrated “sex work,” sometimes even portraying it as liberating.
When I started offering a critique of the ideology of the transgender movement, an analysis rooted in that radical feminism, I found myself not only disagreeing with left comrades but effectively being banished from left organizing groups. I learned quickly, starting in 2014, that a radical feminist critique of trans politics was unacceptable, even seen as a sign of closet conservativism.
But that shunning didn’t mean I wanted to find a home on the right. Conservatives weren’t much interested in a feminist critique of male domination—many on the right see patriarchy as the “natural” state of human societies. Conservatives might share a concern about the sexual-exploitation industries and transgender ideology, but for very different reasons than feminists.
Meanwhile, my focus on ecology and a deepening critique of technological fundamentalism—the belief that more technology can solve all ecological problems, including those created by previous technologies—has put me at odds with both right and left. Those who believe in the miracle of the market usually dismiss any talk of ecological collapse because free enterprise will save us. My left friends take environmental degradation and climate change more seriously but routinely argue that a more participatory democracy in a more socialist economy will save us.
Across the political spectrum, it’s hard to find anyone who agrees that a sustainable human future requires us to put dramatic limits on our consumption of energy and material resources, while we also dramatically reduce the human population. Conservatives often believe that is what leftists are secretly planning for, but I meet very few leftists who advocate those goals. The majority of left environmentalists I meet believe that renewable energy, combined with amazing yet-to-be-invented inventions, will allow us to dodge collapse.
I think I am making consistent and coherent arguments. But many of my left friends think I have abandoned left politics, even though we still agree on many issues. Conservatives will accept my political positions that seem in line with their own, though typically they aren’t interested in the radical analysis behind those positions.
I have changed my mind about specific policy proposals over the past four decades—as new information and insights emerge, reasonable people should adapt. But my analytical framework remains unchanged. I focus not merely on individual choices but on how systems work, and I don’t ignore the data that suggests collapse is all but inevitable on our current trajectory.
This leaves me largely in agreement with left comrades, but dealing with uncomfortable tensions when we disagree. Meanwhile, I’m at odds with right opponents most of the time, and when there is apparent agreement on policy there is an uncomfortable tension underneath.
How do I sort out all these political tensions, and sort out myself? To friends, I have started describing myself as an “intellectual hick.” I have no problem defending my intellectual contributions but also am happy to be living at a healthy distance from official intellectual spaces. Even with neighbors who don’t agree with my politics, our shared interest in caring for the land and water creates deep bonds.
How I label myself is less important than realizing that we all would benefit from sorting out ourselves. Once we critically self-reflect about our identities and ideas, it’s a lot easier talking with others about how they have sorted themselves out.
The EU elections over June 6 to June 9 have presented a chaotically merry picture, certainly for those on the right of politics. Not that the right in question is reliably homogeneous in any sense, nor hoping for a single theme of triumph. A closer look at the gains made by the conservative side of politics, along with its saltier reactionary wings, suggests difficulty and disagreement.
In any case, papers such as The Economist were hopelessly pessimistic about the post-Eden fall, which may suggest that democracy, in all its unpredictable nastiness, is working. The lingering nature of the Ukraine War, the obstinate, enduring presences of such nationalists as Marine Le Pen in France and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, all pointing to “a period of political rudderlessness”. In truth, the rudders are being replaced.
In France, Le Pen has managed to point the gun of discontent at the centre of bureaucratic control and (hideous word) governance. The two prominent targets: President Emmanuel Macron and Paris. She has been aided by the fact that Macron has been inclined to pack key positions in government with loyal, reliable Parisians. Last February, François Bayrou, an early Macron enthusiast and Justice Minister, found it hard to accept that 11 of the 15 important ministers in the government were from the Paris area. This revealed a “growing lack of understanding between those in power and the French people at the grassroots level”.
On June 9, Le Pen proved she had every reason to gloat, with the gains made by her party sufficiently terrifying French President Emmanuel Macron to dissolve parliament and call an election. Parties of the far-right came first in Austria, tied for top billing in the Netherlands and came in as runners-up in Germany (where Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats were savaged) and Romania.
The party of Italian Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni, also did well, winning 28.9% of the country’s vote in the elections. Predicted to get 24 seats in the European Parliament, the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) have done a shedding act on neo-fascism in favour of a smoother image, while still insisting that Europe’s identity had to be defended “from every cultural subjugation that sees Europe renounce its history to adopt that of others.” Such messaging has come with slick shallowness on social media, including such posts as those featuring “L’Italia cambia l’Europa” (“Italy changes Europe”), or the voter instruction to “scrivi Giorgia” (“write Giorgia”) on their ballot.
Meloni’s march was so significant as to compel EU Commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen, to become a salivating groupie for the right – of sorts. Her sharp policies on migration have drawn the approval of Meloni. Speaking at April’s Maastricht Debate, organised by POLITICO and Studio Europa Maastricht, von der Leyen openly expressed her interest in linking arms with Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).
The Italian PM has found herself to be an object of much political interest, indispensable to the chess pieces of Europe’s political manoeuvrings. Italy’s reactionary flame has become, for instance, a matter of much interest to Le Pen. To the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, Le Pen emphasised her insistence that a hard-right bloc of parties in the European Parliament could be formed, overcoming the current division between her Identity and Democracy (ID) group and that of Meloni’s ECR.
That said, any union of faux liberal types such as von der Leyen with those of the hard right of Europe is unlikely to be a fragrant one. Von der Leyen has taken heavy shots at Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally), excoriating its pro-Russian position along with those of Germany’s AfD and Poland’s Konfederacja. “They are Putin’s puppets and proxies and they are trampling on our values.” The promise to Meloni: if you want my dour, camouflaged conservatism, forget the other reactionaries.
What was telling was that the young, having voted in 2019 for parties of the left such as the Greens, had had a change of heart. In May an Ipsos poll revealed that 34% of French voters under the age of 30 were keen to vote for the 28-year old leader of the National Rally in the European Parliamentary elections. In Germany, the 22% of Germans between 14-29 were keen to plump for Alternative for Germany (AfD), just under double from what was registered in 2023.
For Albena Azmanova of the University of Kent, this presents a curious predicament for those on the progressive side of politics (is there such a thing anymore?). Dissatisfaction that would normally be mined by progressives for political advantage is being left over to the opposite wing of politics. “The left is failing to harness that discontent, although its trademark issues – poverty and unemployment – are now more salient for voters than the far right’s flagship of ‘immigration’.”
An unanticipated phenomenon has manifested: younger voters in France, Portugal, Belgium, Germany and Finland folding at the ballot box for parties of the right and far right. The pendulum has well and truly swung. Europe’s right, bulked by the young, is on the march.
While it’s near impossible to sidestep nationalist, imperialist and supremacist ideas, “leftists” should at least not promote prevailing anti-Palestinian ideological strictures. Despite the horrors Israel’s unleashed in Gaza, some who ‘stand with Palestine’ still prioritize Jewish sensitivities over opposing Canadian support for genocide.
In a hundred days 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, 60,000 seriously injured and 2 million displaced in Gaza. Half a million in Gaza are facing famine conditions and basically everyone is hungry. If Israeli-imposed hunger, disease and lack of medical care persists hundreds of thousands may end up dying. And the state perpetrating this genocide has long encaged, occupied and ethnically cleansed those it is slaughtering.
Amidst the genocide that Canada has enabled, some self-declared leftists still devote significant energy to smearing anti-genocide activists or trying to have their speaking events cancelled for purported “antisemitism”. Two months ago, some individuals associated with Independent Jewish Voices pushed to cancel my participation in a Palestinian Youth Movement and International League of People’s Struggles event in Ottawa. More recently, the anonymous X account Jane Austen Marxist posted, “In case there’s any doubt about Yves Engler’s antisemitism at this point (there isn’t)” atop a screenshot highlighting a passage from one of my articles. It noted, “With outsized influence in Hollywood and other domains, Jewish cultural influence is significant.” (Anyone interested in the broader context can read my full article here.) A hodgepodge of rightists and leftists liked or retweeted the statement.
There was no attempt to show how my statement was incorrect or even to explain how it was anti-Jewish. For them, stating that Jews have outsized influence in Hollywood can only be a “trope” or “dog whistle” and thus unmentionable. But my statement is factual, as this 2014 Globe and Mailarticle demonstrates. In a stunning 2008 Los Angeles Times article headlined “Who runs Hollywood? C’mon” Joel Stein writes:
How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah. The person they were yelling at in that ad was SAG President Alan Rosenberg (take a guess). The scathing rebuttal to the ad was written by entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents)… The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.
The demographic make-up at the top of the US entertainment/media industry would have had to shift dramatically for my innocuous “outsized influence” statement to be incorrect. Do those smearing me have alternative data or any coherent rebuttal? No. In fact, they would likely respond to my quoting Stein’s story about Jewish influence in Hollywood by doubling down on their smear. For them presenting any data that demonstrates “outsized Jewish influence” anywhere is another act of antisemitism. The effect is to be unable to describe how widespread and effective anti-Palestinianism is and why, which, of course, are necessary steps in combatting this form of racism.
A near universal, if undeclared, rule when discussing antisemitism in Canada is that one can only cite a single sociological indicator for status/oppression. Of the twenty most commonly employed categories in discussions of racism — income levels, incarceration rates, educational attainment, life expectancy, home ownership, positions on corporate boards, etc. — hate crime data is the only indicator one can mention. It’s no coincidence that hate crimes is the only widely used indicator of discrimination in which the Jewish community fairs poorly. While the genocide lobby exaggerates the scope of the problem, Canadian Jews are substantially over represented as victims of hate crimes. But they fare better (often significantly so) than other groups on the other indicators commonly employed to identify status/oppression.
A broader discussion of the community’s standing doesn’t excuse acts of hate or prejudice against Jews, but it does relativize the impact of antisemitism in Canada. This is important when the genocide lobby explicitly counterposes antisemitism with Palestine solidarity. In a stark example, the Trudeau government recently criticized South Africa’s case to the International Court of Justice against Israel for purportedly impacting Canadian Jews. The government statement noted, “We must ensure that the procedural steps in this case are not used to foster Antisemitism and targeting of Jewish neighbourhoods, businesses, and individuals.” So, an international legal case to end a genocide is objectionable because it may impact Canadian Jews!
When lobbyists, politicians and the media are explicitly counterposing antisemitism with stopping a genocide, internationalist and anti-racist minded individuals must avoid fueling the antisemitism panic and reinforcing the nationalist, imperialist and supremacist bias towards Canadian Jewish sensitivities. Even if one believed all the apartheid lobby’s most outlandish claims about the anti-genocide movement’s contribution to antisemitism, they barely register compared to the horrors Canada has enabled in Gaza. Let’s say Ottawa seriously pushing back against Israel’s atrocities — by calling it genocide, suspending arms permits and seeking to staunch the flow of subsidized charitable donations — restrained Israel’s barbarity by 1%. This would have saved 300 lives and led to 20,000 fewer Palestinians displaced and 5,000 fewer facing famine conditions. Anyone professing internationalist, humanist and anti-racist values would easily accept all (and some) of the apartheid lobby’s bigotry claims in exchange. But our political culture is highly nationalistic, imperialistic and supremacist. (In reality the Palestine solidarity movement is responsible for little antisemitism and there’s no reason why Canada couldn’t end its genocidal complicity with little spillover.)
Those implying that antisemitism is a major problem in Canada and that one must be hyper sensitive about “tropes” when discussing the Jewish community’s relations to Palestine are requiring those opposed to colonialism to fight with a hand tied behind their backs. They are saying we must be hyper sensitive to a form of discrimination, but can’t investigate the socioeconomic status of the community purportedly under threat. They are saying it’s illegitimate to cite “outsized Jewish influence” at the upper echelons of Hollywood even when it helps explain the cultural weight of antisemitism accusations and why few in the generally liberal movie industry have publicly denounced the genocide. They are saying mentioning Jewish wealth and power is antisemitic despite it contributing to the effectiveness of the apartheid lobby.
How many Palestinians have to be slaughtered before we stop prioritizing the sensitivities of a generally well-off Canadian group over a colonized people facing genocide?
One of the curiosities of our time is that the far right is quite comfortable with the established institutions of liberal democracy. There are instances here and there of disgruntled political leaders who refuse to accept their defeat at the ballot box (such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro) and then call upon their supporters to take extra-parliamentary action (as on 6 January 2021 in the United States and, in a farcical repetition, on 8 January 2023 in Brazil). But, by and large, the far right knows that it can attain what it wants through the institutions of liberal democracy, which are not hostile to its programmes.
The fatal, intimate embrace between the political projects of liberalism and those of the far right can be understood in two ways. First, this embrace is seen in the ease with which the forces of the far right use their countries’ liberal constitutions and institutions to their benefit, without any need to supplant them dramatically. If a far-right government can interpret a liberal constitution in this way, and if the institutions and personnel of this constitutional structure are not averse to this interpretation by the far right, then there is no need for a coup against the liberal structure. It can be hollowed from within.
Second, this intimate, but fatal, embrace takes place within the ‘cultures of cruelty’ (as Aijaz Ahmad called it) that define the social world of savage capitalism. Forced to work for capital – in increasingly precarious and atomised jobs – to survive, workers discover, as Karl Marx astutely observed in 1857/58, that it is money that is the ‘real community’ (Gemeinwesen) and it is the person who is the instrument, and the slave, of money. Wrenched from the care of genuine community, workers are forced into lives that oscillate between the hell of long and difficult workdays and the purgatory of long and difficult unemployment. The absence of state-provided social welfare and the collapse of worker-led community institutions produce ‘cultures of cruelty’, a normal kind of violence that runs from within the home to out on the streets. This violence often takes place without fanfare and reinforces traditional structures of power (along axes of patriarchy and of nativism, for instance). The far right’s source of power lies in these ‘cultures of cruelty’, which occasionally lead to spectacular acts of violence against social minorities.Savage capitalism has globalised production and liberated property owners (both individuals and corporations) from adhering to even the norms of liberal democracy, such as paying their fair share of taxes. This political economic structure of savage capitalism generates a neoliberal social order that is rooted in imposing austerity on the working class and the peasantry and in atomising working people by increasing their working time, eroding the social institutions that they run, and, therefore, diminishing their leisure time. Liberal democracies around the world conduct time-use surveys of their populations to see how people spend their time, but almost none of these surveys pay attention to whether workers and peasants have any time for leisure, how they might spend this leisure time, and whether the reduction of their leisure time is a concern for general social development in their country. We are very far away from the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation’s 1945 Constitution that urged the ‘free flow of ideas by word and image’ and the need to ‘give fresh impulse to popular education and to the spread of culture’. Social discussions about the dilemmas of humanity are silenced while old forms of hatred are sanctioned.
It is the hatred of the migrant, the terrorist, and the drug dealer – all portrayed as sociopaths – that evokes an acerbic form of nationalism, one that is not rooted in love of one’s fellow human beings but in hatred of the outsider. Hatred masquerades as patriotism while the size of the national flag grows and the enthusiasm for the national anthem increases by decibels. This is visibly displayed in Israel today. This neoliberal, savage, far-right patriotism smells acrid – of anger and bitterness, of violence and frustration. In cultures of cruelty, people’s eyes are turned away from their own problems, from the low wages and near starvation in their homes, from their lack of educational opportunities and provisions for health care, to other – false – problems that are invented by the forces of savage capitalism to turn people away from their real problems. It is one thing to be patriotic against starvation and hopelessness. But the forces of savage capitalism have taken this form of patriotism and thrown it into the fire. Human beings ache to be decent, which is why so many billions across the world have taken to the streets, blocked boats, and occupied buildings to demand an end to Israel’s war on Gaza. But that ache is smothered by desperation and resentment, by the intimate, diabolical embrace of liberalism and the far right.From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research comes What Can We Expect from the New Progressive Wave in Latin America? (dossier no. 70, November 2023), a study of the political landscape in Latin America. The text opens with a foreword by Daniel Jadue (the mayor of the commune of Recoleta, Santiago de Chile, and a leading member of the Communist Party of Chile). Jadue argues that savage capitalism has sharpened the contradictions between capital and labour and has accelerated the destruction of the planet. The ‘political centre’, he argues, has governed most countries in the world for the past few decades ‘without resolving the most pressing issues of the people’. With social democratic forces moving to defend savage capitalism and neoliberal austerity, the left has been dragged to the centre to defend the institutions of democracy and the structures of social welfare. Meanwhile, there has been, Jadue writes, ‘the resurgence of highly combative discourse among right-wing forces that is even more extreme than in the era of fascism almost a century ago’.
Our dossier traces the zigs and zags of politics across Latin America, with the left’s triumph in Colombia’s presidential election balanced out by the tight grip of the right in Peru, then settling on a point that is of great importance: the left across most of Latin America has abandoned the final aim of socialism and has instead adopted the task of being managers of capitalism with a more human face. As the dossier states:
[T]he left today has shown itself to be incapable of achieving hegemony when it comes to a new societal project. The irrevocable defence of bourgeois democracy itself is a symptom that there is no prospect of rupture and revolution. This is reflected by the reluctance of certain left‐wing leaders to support the current Venezuelan government, which they consider to be undemocratic – despite the fact that Venezuela, alongside Cuba, is one of the few examples of a country where the left has managed to face these crises without being defeated. This meek position and failure to commit to the fight against imperialism marks a significant setback.Liberal democracy has proved itself to be an insufficient barrier to halt the ambitions of the far right. Though liberal elites are horrified by the vulgarity of the far right, they are not necessarily opposed to diverting the masses from a politics of class to a politics of despair, as the far right has done. The main criticism of the right does not come from liberal institutions, but from the fields and the factories, as seen in the mobilisations against hunger and against the uberisation of work. From the mass demonstrations against austerity and for peace in Colombia (2019–2021) to those against lawfare in Guatemala (2023), people – barricaded, for decades, from liberal institutions – have again taken to the streets. Electoral victories are important, but, alone, they transform neither society nor political control, which has remained under the tight grip of the elite in most of the world.
Jadue’s foreword is alert to both the weakness of the political centre and the necessity to build a political project that lifts up mobilisations and prevents them from dissipating into frustration:
Reconstructing a concrete horizon – socialism – and building the unity of the left are key challenges in identifying and addressing the dilemmas we face. In order to do this, we must break from the language of our oppressors and create one that is truly emancipatory. Integration and coordination are no longer enough. A true understanding of what Karl Marx called the material unity of the world is essential to achieving the total unity of peoples and joint action across the planet.
The reservoirs of working-class forces across the world – including precarious workers and the peasantry – have been depleted by the process of globalisation. Leading revolutionary parties have found it difficult to extend and even maintain their strength in the context of democratic systems that have been taken over by the power of money. Nevertheless, to face these challenges, the ‘concrete horizon’ of socialism that Jadue mentions is being crafted through the sustained building of organisations, through the mobilisation of the masses, and through political education, including the battle of ideas and the battle of emotions (part of which, of course, is the work of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and this new dossier, which we hope that you will read and circulate for discussion).
One of the curiosities of our time is that the far right is quite comfortable with the established institutions of liberal democracy. There are instances here and there of disgruntled political leaders who refuse to accept their defeat at the ballot box (such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro) and then call upon their supporters to take extra-parliamentary action (as on 6 January 2021 in the United States and, in a farcical repetition, on 8 January 2023 in Brazil). But, by and large, the far right knows that it can attain what it wants through the institutions of liberal democracy, which are not hostile to its programmes.
The fatal, intimate embrace between the political projects of liberalism and those of the far right can be understood in two ways. First, this embrace is seen in the ease with which the forces of the far right use their countries’ liberal constitutions and institutions to their benefit, without any need to supplant them dramatically. If a far-right government can interpret a liberal constitution in this way, and if the institutions and personnel of this constitutional structure are not averse to this interpretation by the far right, then there is no need for a coup against the liberal structure. It can be hollowed from within.
Second, this intimate, but fatal, embrace takes place within the ‘cultures of cruelty’ (as Aijaz Ahmad called it) that define the social world of savage capitalism. Forced to work for capital – in increasingly precarious and atomised jobs – to survive, workers discover, as Karl Marx astutely observed in 1857/58, that it is money that is the ‘real community’ (Gemeinwesen) and it is the person who is the instrument, and the slave, of money. Wrenched from the care of genuine community, workers are forced into lives that oscillate between the hell of long and difficult workdays and the purgatory of long and difficult unemployment. The absence of state-provided social welfare and the collapse of worker-led community institutions produce ‘cultures of cruelty’, a normal kind of violence that runs from within the home to out on the streets. This violence often takes place without fanfare and reinforces traditional structures of power (along axes of patriarchy and of nativism, for instance). The far right’s source of power lies in these ‘cultures of cruelty’, which occasionally lead to spectacular acts of violence against social minorities.Savage capitalism has globalised production and liberated property owners (both individuals and corporations) from adhering to even the norms of liberal democracy, such as paying their fair share of taxes. This political economic structure of savage capitalism generates a neoliberal social order that is rooted in imposing austerity on the working class and the peasantry and in atomising working people by increasing their working time, eroding the social institutions that they run, and, therefore, diminishing their leisure time. Liberal democracies around the world conduct time-use surveys of their populations to see how people spend their time, but almost none of these surveys pay attention to whether workers and peasants have any time for leisure, how they might spend this leisure time, and whether the reduction of their leisure time is a concern for general social development in their country. We are very far away from the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation’s 1945 Constitution that urged the ‘free flow of ideas by word and image’ and the need to ‘give fresh impulse to popular education and to the spread of culture’. Social discussions about the dilemmas of humanity are silenced while old forms of hatred are sanctioned.
It is the hatred of the migrant, the terrorist, and the drug dealer – all portrayed as sociopaths – that evokes an acerbic form of nationalism, one that is not rooted in love of one’s fellow human beings but in hatred of the outsider. Hatred masquerades as patriotism while the size of the national flag grows and the enthusiasm for the national anthem increases by decibels. This is visibly displayed in Israel today. This neoliberal, savage, far-right patriotism smells acrid – of anger and bitterness, of violence and frustration. In cultures of cruelty, people’s eyes are turned away from their own problems, from the low wages and near starvation in their homes, from their lack of educational opportunities and provisions for health care, to other – false – problems that are invented by the forces of savage capitalism to turn people away from their real problems. It is one thing to be patriotic against starvation and hopelessness. But the forces of savage capitalism have taken this form of patriotism and thrown it into the fire. Human beings ache to be decent, which is why so many billions across the world have taken to the streets, blocked boats, and occupied buildings to demand an end to Israel’s war on Gaza. But that ache is smothered by desperation and resentment, by the intimate, diabolical embrace of liberalism and the far right.From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research comes What Can We Expect from the New Progressive Wave in Latin America? (dossier no. 70, November 2023), a study of the political landscape in Latin America. The text opens with a foreword by Daniel Jadue (the mayor of the commune of Recoleta, Santiago de Chile, and a leading member of the Communist Party of Chile). Jadue argues that savage capitalism has sharpened the contradictions between capital and labour and has accelerated the destruction of the planet. The ‘political centre’, he argues, has governed most countries in the world for the past few decades ‘without resolving the most pressing issues of the people’. With social democratic forces moving to defend savage capitalism and neoliberal austerity, the left has been dragged to the centre to defend the institutions of democracy and the structures of social welfare. Meanwhile, there has been, Jadue writes, ‘the resurgence of highly combative discourse among right-wing forces that is even more extreme than in the era of fascism almost a century ago’.
Our dossier traces the zigs and zags of politics across Latin America, with the left’s triumph in Colombia’s presidential election balanced out by the tight grip of the right in Peru, then settling on a point that is of great importance: the left across most of Latin America has abandoned the final aim of socialism and has instead adopted the task of being managers of capitalism with a more human face. As the dossier states:
[T]he left today has shown itself to be incapable of achieving hegemony when it comes to a new societal project. The irrevocable defence of bourgeois democracy itself is a symptom that there is no prospect of rupture and revolution. This is reflected by the reluctance of certain left‐wing leaders to support the current Venezuelan government, which they consider to be undemocratic – despite the fact that Venezuela, alongside Cuba, is one of the few examples of a country where the left has managed to face these crises without being defeated. This meek position and failure to commit to the fight against imperialism marks a significant setback.Liberal democracy has proved itself to be an insufficient barrier to halt the ambitions of the far right. Though liberal elites are horrified by the vulgarity of the far right, they are not necessarily opposed to diverting the masses from a politics of class to a politics of despair, as the far right has done. The main criticism of the right does not come from liberal institutions, but from the fields and the factories, as seen in the mobilisations against hunger and against the uberisation of work. From the mass demonstrations against austerity and for peace in Colombia (2019–2021) to those against lawfare in Guatemala (2023), people – barricaded, for decades, from liberal institutions – have again taken to the streets. Electoral victories are important, but, alone, they transform neither society nor political control, which has remained under the tight grip of the elite in most of the world.
Jadue’s foreword is alert to both the weakness of the political centre and the necessity to build a political project that lifts up mobilisations and prevents them from dissipating into frustration:
Reconstructing a concrete horizon – socialism – and building the unity of the left are key challenges in identifying and addressing the dilemmas we face. In order to do this, we must break from the language of our oppressors and create one that is truly emancipatory. Integration and coordination are no longer enough. A true understanding of what Karl Marx called the material unity of the world is essential to achieving the total unity of peoples and joint action across the planet.
The reservoirs of working-class forces across the world – including precarious workers and the peasantry – have been depleted by the process of globalisation. Leading revolutionary parties have found it difficult to extend and even maintain their strength in the context of democratic systems that have been taken over by the power of money. Nevertheless, to face these challenges, the ‘concrete horizon’ of socialism that Jadue mentions is being crafted through the sustained building of organisations, through the mobilisation of the masses, and through political education, including the battle of ideas and the battle of emotions (part of which, of course, is the work of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and this new dossier, which we hope that you will read and circulate for discussion).
American officials are debating whether the United States should continue to back the Israeli government. A growing number of Israelis are uninterested in that support.
Political discourse in the United States consists largely of lies and confusions. One of the greatest of lies and confusions, which I hope to help dispel in this article, is the common delimitation of the very concepts “left” and “right”: it is claimed that to be on the right is to value freedom above all—this is what “small government” is supposed to mean, for example—while to be on the left is to value equality, if necessary an equality enforced tyrannically by an enormous, Soviet-style government. Nothing could be farther from the truth than this conventional wisdom. The opposite is closer to the truth: to be on the right means, in effect, to advocate an enforced equality of nearly universal servitude and anti-democracy, while to be on the left means to value the greatest freedom for the greatest number. Since left and right are still the most salient political categories (notwithstanding the fantasies of some commentators that they’re obsolete concepts), it is of utmost importance to be clear about their meanings.
Underlying this debate about definitions and political commitments is an important strategic point: the left has to reclaim the language of freedom from the faux-libertarian right. We shouldn’t let conservatives get away with pretending they’re the ones who value free speech, for example. The only reason freedom of expression is (to some degree) protected today is because of centuries of left-wing activism.
A couple of approaches to this subject are possible. One might expound the history of left and right, from the seventeenth century to the present, using it to illustrate the underlying values of the “radical” and the “conservative” traditions (with a congeries of milquetoast “centrists” always somewhere in between). Alternatively, one might analyze contemporary ideologies and policy positions, showing what their implications for freedom and human flourishing are. Both of these approaches would yield the same result: the left’s is a philosophy of emancipation and not mere insipid “equality”—unless it’s an equality of emancipation (freedom); the right’s is a philosophy of, to quote Corey Robin, defending hierarchy, or more specifically, of “having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” The right’s is an authoritarian, not a libertarian, philosophy. There have, admittedly, been people and governments who have called themselves leftist—or socialist, democratic, communist—who have been profoundly authoritarian, but they have always been attacked by more principled leftists, often anarchists or left-Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg, for their betrayal of libertarian values and having been corrupted by a love of power.
It was during the Cold War that the present political confusions became embedded in American culture. Before the 1940s, defenders of laissez-faire capitalism, from Social Darwinists like William Graham Sumner to anti-New Dealers like Herbert Hoover, had indeed insisted they were the true upholders of freedom, but labor organizers and socialists from Samuel Gompers to Eugene Debs had compellingly countered these claims. Franklin Roosevelt was revered for identifying freedom with economic security: “I am not for a return to that definition of liberty,” he said in one of his fireside chats, “under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few. I prefer and I am sure you prefer that broader definition of liberty under which we are moving forward to greater freedom, to greater security for the average man…” This inclusion of security in the definition of freedom was common sense to most Americans: you weren’t free if you had to work long hours in poor conditions for low wages, subject to the capricious tyranny of an employer because it was absolutely forbidden to form a union, i.e., to cooperate with your coworkers for mutual uplift. Most people in the 1930s took it for granted that the “freedom” of conservatives was the freedom of the ruling class to dominate, exploit, and immiserate the majority.
By the late 1940s and 1950s, during and after the Second Red Scare, big business had successfully counterattacked and “sold free enterprise” to Americans as the epitome of freedom itself. This was an easier sell than it would have been had the Soviet Union not been there to tarnish the idea of socialism (or communism), which used to mean nothing but an extension of democracy into the economic sphere: ordinary people freely controlling their own work, in the form of worker cooperatives and democratic government coordination of large industry. Americans were now persuaded to believe something ridiculous: whatever a government calls itself, it is in fact that thing. If, like the USSR, it calls itself socialist, communist, or left-wing, we have to take its word for it, because governments are always honest and trustworthy. (But then why didn’t we take the Soviets’ word for it when they called themselves a democracy, and thus conclude that the USSR had invalidated democracy just as it had supposedly invalidated socialism or communism? Could it be that we were simply victims of the West’s propaganda to defame an old anti-capitalist tradition?)
The history of the left was now forgotten, as, perversely, to be on the left ostensibly meant to be a totalitarian, a “collectivist,” who was willing to sacrifice freedom for the gray equality of a universal government bureaucracy. It was forgotten that the revolutionary left had always been at the forefront of the struggle for freedom. The words of the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” (note the alteration of John Locke’s original “life, liberty, and property”)—written in the context of mass struggle against illegitimate power, belonged to the tradition of the left. The abolitionist movement to emancipate the slaves was denounced for its radicalism by conservatives and centrists of the day. In the early twentieth century, the Industrial Workers of the World courageously tested the limits of American democracy in their famous free speech fights. In the 1930s, the Communist Party helped organize the early stages of a long civil rights movement against lynching, the Jim Crow regime, and economic exploitation of blacks in the South. The New Left of the 1960s expanded the realm of freedom further in its battles, anticipated in the Port Huron Statement, against the stultifyingly conformist, bureaucratic, right-wing Cold War establishment. And the counterculture, which conservatives so hated that it helped birth the New Right, had freedom as its watchword: free love, free access to drugs, free celebration of life and music and community.
In the meantime, conservatism was marshaling its forces for an all-out fifty-year assault against the emancipatory legacy of the New Deal and the New Left. Characteristically, it disguised its real intentions in the language of liberty: its economic philosophy it called libertarianism, although what it meant in practice was nothing but the tyranny of big business unconstrained by unions, government regulation, or the welfare state. This dystopian “free market” vision of the Mont Pelerin Society, significantly, was attractive to Southern white supremacists, who voted for Barry Goldwater, an early right-wing “libertarian,” in 1964 despite his being a Republican. Why this affinity between white supremacists and business supremacists? (One sees it today too, as white supremacists have notoriously supported Donald Trump, a business supremacist.) Because both groups worship power and hierarchy. In desiring a weakened—in some respects—federal government, what both types of conservatives really want is unfettered power over a subordinate group, whether non-whites or workers. With a smaller, weakened government, they can more easily wield this power unhindered by irksome federal laws and regulations that protect workers, minorities, public resources, and the natural environment.
In other words, however appealing the “small government” slogan might seem, or however grounded in classical liberalism, it is motivated today by values opposite to those of classical liberals like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Immanuel Kant. Humboldt argued that a human being “is born to inquire and create, and when a man or a child chooses to inquire or create out of his own free choice then he becomes in his own terms an artist rather than a tool of production or a well-trained parrot.” For Kant, “there is only one innate right: freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law.” In a time before the colossal modern corporation, before the vast complexity of industrial capitalist society, it made perfect sense to arrive from these premises at the conclusion that the state ought to be very small.
But circumstances change. How far the libertarian, anarchistic sensibility of Humboldt and Kant is from modern conservatism is clear from, say, the famous Powell Memorandum of 1971, which plotted the counterattack of the New Right against the New Left. To restore the ideological and cultural hegemony of big business over American society, Lewis Powell advocated, for example, a “Big Brother”-style monitoring of all media and educational institutions—not by the state, it’s true, but by the Chamber of Commerce. “The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance. This applies not merely to so-called educational programs…but to the daily ‘news analysis’ which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system [i.e., capitalism]. …[T]he result is the gradual erosion of confidence in ‘business’ and free enterprise.” It is necessary, then, to control what the public is allowed to see, hear, and read, so that confidence in capitalism is not eroded.
This waging of political war on behalf of the rich and powerful, so as to eliminate dissent against the system that has given them their power, is antithetical to classical liberalism. It has nothing in common with the desire for universal freedom.
Consistent leftists certainly have no love of “big government”: just read the writings of anarchists in the last 180 years, from Bakunin through Alexander Berkman to David Graeber. (These are the real successors to classical liberalism.) Even Marxists are well aware that the state tends to crush individual freedom, which is why they look forward to a withering away of the state. They understand, however, that a social democratic government that guarantees people the right to healthcare, free education, expansive public resources, and a decent standard of living is at least preferable to a Milton Friedmanite laissez-faire capitalism that leaves people no recourse against total domination by super-concentrations of economic power (and the government they control).
The distinction is sometimes made between negative freedom and positive freedom: “negatively, liberty is the absence of restraint; positively, it is the power to act and to enjoy,” to quote the liberal priest John Ryan (in his 1912 book A Living Wage). And it is claimed that conservatives value negative freedom while leftists value positive freedom. This, too, is false. For one thing, social conservatives are very comfortable restraining the liberty of others. Whatever one may think of abortion, same-sex marriage, and other social issues, it is evident that to legislate against them is to restrict the freedoms of women, gays, and other targeted groups. But economic conservatism, too, amounts to limiting people’s freedom, including their negative freedom. If strong labor laws, for instance, do not exist or are not enforced, employers can easily prevent workers from unionizing, which is an obvious infringement on their freedom. More generally, having to obey all the orders of a boss lest you be fired and left to the tender mercies of unemployment and (in many cases) a brutal job market is a clear “restraint” on your liberty. The philosophy of conservatism, therefore, is a philosophy of authoritarianism, precisely the opposite of what its exponents usually say.
In fairness, conservatives are often more honest when talking to each other. They can be quite open about their hatred of democracy (i.e., the freedom of everyone to participate in politics). In his presidential address in 1978 to the Mont Pelerin Society, for example, economist George Stigler suggested that victory in their privatization crusade might be achieved by “the restriction of the franchise to property owners, educated classes, employed persons or some such group.” As Nancy MacLean documents in Democracy in Chains, Stigler’s colleague James Buchanan, along with Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, and other “libertarian” authoritarians (who infamously supported Chile’s dictator Pinochet), were likewise very hostile to democracy, as conservatives have typically been. (It’s hardly a surprise that the Republican Party is currently trying to make it harder for certain groups of people, such as college students, to vote.) But this is perfectly natural if their ideology, as I’m arguing, is in its essence opposed to the freedom of everyone except the economic and political elite.
None of this is to say that all leftists are consistent, however. Woke cancel culture, which has been criticized by both leftists and conservatives, tends to restrict people’s freedom of expression, by implanting the fear in them that if they say something slightly outside the bounds of what is considered acceptable at that moment, they’ll suffer grievous consequences. If cancel culture could go as far as many of its practitioners would like it to go, very little dissent on matters of social significance would exist or be tolerated. A timidity and frigidity of thought would descend like a pall under a regime of soft totalitarianism. Cancel culture is hardly a new thing in history—conservatives and centrists have always practiced it to silence dissent, whether by excluding leftists from the dominant media, destroying their careers, imprisoning them, or killing them—but it is unseemly for leftists to participate in it.
In the end, the values of the left are those of the Enlightenment (in reaction against which conservatism was originally founded). “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” said Kant. “‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’—that is the motto of the Enlightenment.” Voltaire’s loathing of censorship, Rousseau’s love of freedom, Kant’s emphasis on the critical use of reason, Adam Smith’s moral philosophy of sympathy, Spinoza’s faith in democracy, Humboldt’s exaltation of individual creativity, Benjamin Rush’s philosophy of universal education, Condorcet’s belief in progress—these are the pillars of the left, the emancipatory tradition in politics. The “equality” that is valued is the equality of human rights, the equality of freedom, which presupposes a relative equality of economic security. Against the conservative love of unaccountable power and imposed inequality, the left believes in the universality of human dignity.
In part I of this series, following the work of Judy J. Johnson in What’s so Wrong with Being Absolutely Right: The Dangerous Nature of Dogmatic Belief, we identified dogmatism — not as the content of a particular ideology but as a process of thinking, emoting and acting. We distinguished dogmatism from fanaticism and clarified the differences between dogmatism and open-minded thinking. I spent most the article defining 14 characteristics of dogmatism. Five are cognitive, four are emotional and five are behavioral.
In this article, Part II, we examine the many causes of dogmatism — moving from sociological, to social psychological, to psychological to bioevolutionary and physiological. I will include my own research in sociology and cognitive psychology to support Judy’s book. The image above illustrates that despite the dogmatists’ aggression and scapegoating of groups lower them themselves in the hierarchy, they are slavishly obedient to those above them.
Socio-economic Causes: Contracting Economy, Class and Race Dynamics
Sociologists have found that race relations get better or worse depending on whether the capitalist economy is contracting or expanding. In an economy where jobs are relatively plentiful there are less incidents of racial violence. But when the economy is contracting race relations get worse. Why is this?
Whether or not capitalists intend to, they benefit from racism between workers on their job site. Capitalists have always paid white workers more money and given them privileges relative to Blacks. What is the likely fallout? There will be racial animosity. Black workers will be angry that white workers are being paid more money to do the same work. White workers will look for and find ideologies like racism and fascism to help justify these inequalities. Both white and Black workers face the same problem. They work very hard under difficult circumstances and are not paid very much. They have two choices. The first is either they see their problem as part of a questionable capitalist system or not. If they see that it is, they will unite on the basis of occupying the same class. The other choice is for white workers to think they have more in common with white employers on the basis of race and ignore their class commonalties with Black workers. If they do that, they are likely to be susceptible to many of the fourteen characteristics of dogmatism.
Small business owners are also caught in a bind. In a contracting economy, compared to corporate capitalists, the small business owner is likely to go under. They are also faced with two ways to make sense of things. One is to choose a structural response which is to demand that the state give them more protection so that they are not gobbled up by corporate capitalists. But the other is to blame their workers for wanting more money. In order to make up some of their losses they pays workers less than corporate capitalists pay. In order to keep workers from unionizing they will pay white workers more than Blacks and attack Black workers for being too greedy. After all, they rationalize, the Blacks should be grateful the owner has even hired them. If the small business owners make the second choice, they too are likely to have many of the fourteen characteristics of dogmatism. In fact, in the last two “elections” in Mordor, labor historian Kim Moody has shown that small business owners have the highest percentage of voting for fascists.
This economic, class and race analysis will help explain three of the behavioral characteristics named in Part I. This includes preoccupation with power and status; glorification of in-group and vilification of out-group; and dogmatic authoritarian aggression towards minorities.
Psychology of Dogmatism in Early Childhood Development
Johnson points out that when parents are uninformed, indifferent or malevolent and fail to satisfy their baby’s emotional and social needs it is hard for the child to develop a sense of resilience.
Prolonged separation from the primary caregiver causes emotional, cognitive and social disorganization. When repeated attempts fail to make a connection to the caregiver, they may react with clinginess or aggressive confrontation. These children learn to mistrust themselves and others because they cannot get past the burdensome thoughts and anxiety that erode their self-confidence. (369)
One mother might assume that more often than not, her baby’s crying is manipulative or attention-seeking. Still others respond with alternating periods of tender loving care, normal distancing, smothering enmeshment, negligence and even abuse. Adopting beliefs and holding them with adamant certainly will compensate for childhood insecurities Insecure attachment and the ensuring anxiety may also be converted to dogmatic authoritarian aggression. (370-371)
Young children with a history of neglect or abuse experience chronic hyperarousal that elevates their hormone level and causes chaotic biochemical alternations… This aggregate of misfortune also impairs the development of empathy. (363)
Johnson points out that in Erikson’s eight psychosocial stages of development, these types of problems would correspond to Erikson’s first stage of trust vs mistrust. But I see connections between dogmatism and Erikson’s second and third stages as well. Erikson’s second stage is autonomy vs shame and doubt. Autonomy means the child is practicing saying “no” (also known as the terrible twos). The third stage is initiative vs guilt. Initiative means saying “yes” to activities the child chooses. I see no reason why the budding young dogmatist would also be carrying both shame and doubt along with guilt as developmental baggage. This is because the authoritarian parents would not easily tolerate a child who defies them (saying no) or chooses activities that are not on the parents’ menu (initiative).
Dogmatism and Personality
Trait theory
According to trait theory one of the five major traits of a healthy personality is openness to experience. This consists of one’s desire to seek and appreciate new experiences for their own sake. Openness also reflects tolerance for and exploration of the unfamiliar. Openness means a person is curious, imaginative, insightful and has wide interests, vivid fantasies and unconventional attitudes. Low scores in openness, indicate closemindedness including an unadventurous, unanalytical mind and narrowness of interest. This person is drawn to the familiar, practical and concrete. There is a lack of interest in experience for its own sake. The open and closed personalities of trait theory closely resemble the dogmatic vs open personalities we discussed in Part I of this article. The second global trait is neuroticism. This includes emotional instability and anxiety. It means constant worry with inadequate coping mechanisms. Among the 14 traits of dogmatism this corresponds to characteristic six.
Adler
According to Johnson, within the first two years of life, infants experience inexorable feelings of inferiority due to physical smallness, intellectual immaturity, poor eyesight or hearing and health problems. Adler says that to compensate for the inevitable inadequacies, they began striving for superiority which Freudians might call a reaction formation. Children raised in harsh, punitive or negligent environments create fictions that steer them away from social interest and towards mistaken lifestyles. The three mistaken lifestyles for Adler are:
The ruling type who seeks to dominate others
The getting type (goal is passive dependence)
The avoiding type who sidesteps issues
From an Adlerian perspective, dogmatic characteristics of authoritarian aggression and arrogant, dismissive communication are tendencies that evolved from the early childhood goals of the ruling type.
If the insecure child cannot gain his caretaker’s love, safety and respect, the Divine Father would surely deliver the goods. These individuals do not go to church to maximize their social interest, but rather to both maximize their psychological survival and to minimize their self-doubt. Blind obedience to an authoritarian God is a tradeoff for a secure attachment that was not experienced as a child.
Karen Horney
According to Judy Johnson, feminist psychologist Karen Horney believed that basic anxiety that is prolonged beyond the normal range of anxiety has its origins in faulty parenting which includes parents who are dominating, intimidating, irritable, over-exacting and hypercritical. The second cause of anxiety is the unhealthy hyper-competitiveness of capitalist society.
For Horney, basic anxiety would be overcome by moving with people within a more cooperative society. If a person cannot live under those conditions there are three neurotic orientations: moving towards people, moving against people and moving away from people. Johnson writes that Horney’s moving against is the most relevant to dogmatism. The neurotic becomes driven by a search for glory at the expense of a scapegoated group. The need to proselytize or dominate conversations are typical of moving against strategies.
But I see that Horney’s neurotic trend of moving towards people can apply to the dogmatist’s in-group and their authority figures. They move with obsequious conformity and obedience. They seek out authorities who seem superior and therefore capable of taking care of them
Cognitive psychology: layers of cognition
In this section I will be bringing in three layers of cognitive identity – cognitive distorted interpretations, pessimistic explanatory styles and irrational assumptions. While Judy Johnson does not use these layers in her search for the dogmatic personality, some of these characteristics can easily be connected.
Cognitive distortions
According to Aaron Beck the eight cognitive distortions are:
Black and white thinking, which is also connected to catastrophizing. This was among the 14 dogmatic characteristics.
Overgeneralization can easily be seen at work in relation to scapegoated groups.
Over-personalization is at work when we talk about sensitivity to perceived insults.
Magnification is operating in relation to perceived insults while minimalizing would be at play in evaluating the achievements of minorities.
Distorted evidence – believing things without looking for good evidence is very common among dogmatists.
Selective choice of evidence is occurring when dogmatists stereotype groups without looking for exceptions to the rules.
Mind reading – misreading body cues, not asking people what they think because dogmatists lack interpersonal skill in conversations.
Feelings of confusion with behavior trapped in feelings and not being able to recognize that actions are different from feelings.
Pessimistic explanatory styles
According to Martin Seligman, whenever a new dramatic situation appears there are three questions that go through people’s minds:
How long will this last?
How will this affect the rest of my life?
Who is responsible?
Let’s say there is an economic crisis of some kind. The most pessimistic answers to these questions are that it will last forever, the rest of my life will be swept into the undertow, and I am responsible for the problem. The optimistic response to an economic crisis is it will be short-term (it will give me a chance to go to school or catch up in other areas of my life), it will not affect the rest of my life (I have solid support from my partner and family of origin) and I am not responsible (capitalism is in crisis all over the Western world). The dogmatist will have a pessimistic explanatory style. This matches one of the dogmatic characteristics, “excessive pessimism”.
Irrational assumptions
Albert Ellis came up with these many years ago. Most of them can be seen in dogmatists:
It is a dire necessity for me to be loved or approved of by everyone for everything.
Some people are evil and they know the things they do are wrong, but they do them anyway.
It is terrible, horrible and catastrophic when things don’t go my way.
Much human unhappiness is externally caused and is forced on one by outside people and events.
If something is dangerous or fearsome, worrying about it helps the situation.
It is easier to avoid than to face life’s difficulties and self-responsibilities because it takes less energy.
I need to depend on someone or something greater than myself on whom I can rely.
I should be thoroughly competent, adequate, intelligent and successful always.
Because something once strongly affected my life, it should affect it indefinitely.
What other people do is vitally important to my existence and I should make great efforts to change them in the direction I wish.
Human happiness can be achieved by waiting for the right person or situation to come along.
I have virtually no control over my emotions and I can’t help feeling certain things.
Clearly for the dogmatist, their early childhood background of neglect, inconsistency, and violence makes them desperate for approval, regardless of what they say. The second irrational assumption about people being evil fits easily with the dogmatist’s perception of those they are scapegoating. The lack of tolerance of ambiguity makes all disappointments catastrophic and earth-shaking for the dogmatist. Because the dogmatist lacks the ability to self-reflect, they cannot see their own part in creating a negative situation. Everything is mechanically and externally driven.
Thinking that I need to depend on someone greater than myself fits right in with an authoritarian, fundamentalist religion or an authoritarian political (especially fascist) leader. Lastly, thinking I have no control over my emotions and I can’t help feeling this way. Dogmatists have no idea of how cognitive interpretations, explanatory styles and assumptions have anything to do with their emotions. Emotions appear to be uncaused eruptions over which the person has no control.
Darwinian Evolutionary Biology
Judy Johnson names the following seven traits that have enabled primates to adapt and procreate during Paleolithic evolution and beyond:
Activity – total energy output that is expressed in vigorous, energized behavior
Fearfulness, cowering escape and wariness which activate physiological arousal of the autonomic nervous system
Impulsivity – acting on the spur of the moment without pause, planning or reflection
Sociability – preferring to be with others rather than live a solitary existence
Nurturance – helping others, which includes altruism
Aggressiveness – verbally and physically threatening or attacking others
Dominance – seeking and maintaining superior status over others
Dominance
The pushiness of dogmatism and the insistence on aggressive conversion has its roots in dominance-seeking or aggressive tendencies that are part of the package of our evolutionary inheritance. I am not suggesting that dominance and aggressiveness are the only or leading characteristic of human beings. As you can see from the list, there are also traits for sociability and nurturance which counter dominance and aggressiveness. These primitive, old-brain adaptations are still present in our modern institutions which are the products for dominance, aggressiveness, sociability and nurturance. To include evolutionary Darwinian biology as part of a theory of dogmatism, we must address the survival value of rigidly clinging to beliefs and defending them with arrogant certainty. One answer to this is evolutionary. since the rate at which nature and society change is slow from the period of 100,000 years to 10,000 years (9/10 of our existence), it would pay not to change our beliefs too quickly.
Anxiety
A biological predisposition for anxiety is part of shaping dogmatism. While a sudden intense anxiety that might be adaptive thousands of years ago, today it may be a maladaptive tagalong that continues to fire. Although the characteristics of dogmatism are not just biologically based, higher than average levels of anxiety do have a biological basis. Physiologically, Johnson says that excessive anxiety is linked to defects in the GABA system (gamma-aminobutyric acid). Research reveals strong evidence for the genetic heritability of anxiety. Genes initially create an emotional predisposition for anxiety that structurally facilitates a dogmatic style in emotions.
Biological Physiology Amygdala and extreme stress
The symptoms of PTSD occur in response to events outside the realm of normal human suffering such as natural disasters, combat fatigue and terrorist attacks or torture. While many of us have suffered from serious accident or illness, job loss or death of a loved one, most of us are resilient enough to return to our former selves of personality function. Dogmatists are less likely to do this.
An excitable amygdala is implicated in persistent anxiety and social inhibition. Johnson shows that:
Because molecular structures consolidate early childhood thoughts and emotions in circuits of long-term memory, these circuits continue to influence ongoing experience. In particular, prolonged distress or trauma,seriously impacts neural circuity. (292)
Researchers have found that when the amygdala, a midbrain structure, detects anything that signals danger, it activates an electrochemical fear response. Low-road reactions are instant, reflexive and protective. (296)
Rather than patiently waiting to understand the full context in order to determine how to react, our amygdala signals danger and we reflexively pull back. When at school or playing, if children are repeatedly teased or ridiculed, the felt anxiety may resurface in neutral or friendly social settings, which create overreactions in their interpersonal perceptions and interpretations. These children may become angry and defensive in response to open-ended, harmless questions.
An emotionally activated amygdala releases cortisol, a powerful hormone, the net effect of which is to disrupt hippocampal activity, weakening the ability of the temporal lobe memorial system to form explicit memories. Under prolonged stress cortisol representations of oneself, others and the surrounding world may become distorted. These proteins grow new synaptic connections that further alter brain circulates some of which become static, closed and invested in defensive structures to guard against anticipated assaults.(298)
Anger
There is a physiological price to be paid for prolonged anger. Johnson says:
Self-righteous anger is always twinned with physiological arousal of the sympathetic nervous system. Research on physiological reactions of aggression, especially prolonged hostility, release the chronically elevated stress hormones that not only strain the coronary and gastrointestinal systems, they also impair immunological functioning (218)
Lack of oxytocin
Children who are repeatedly denied cuddling, attention, playfulness and kindness have serious hormonal consequences:
Abusive or negligent parents limited the child’s ability to regulate the length, intensity or frequency of distressing emotions like anger, terror or shame. This emotional dysregulation is further exacerbated if in infancy, a baby does not experience pleasurable releases of oxytocin and other brain chemical that are secreted during positions of social connection. Known as the hormone of love, oxytocin evokes an inner sense of emotional calm and balance (292)
Without loving, nurturing parents who activate the chemical that helps produce children’s positive self-image, they are less resilient to stress and lose confidence in their ability to control their emotions. Consequently, they may become clingy and dependent. Without such skills, these children are more likely to conform to group values and succumb to peer pressure even when it goes against their self-interest or morals. They have no awareness that this desperate conformity has anything to do with early emotional deprivation from caregivers.
Lack of dopamine
From research in trait theory, there is a biological basis of the “Openness to Experience” trait. Being open to new ideas and experiences is influenced by individual differences in the dopaminergic system. Since the polar opposite of openness is closedness, the closed-minded manner in which dogmatic people process information may be due in part to some failed mechanism in the transmission of dopamine.
Conclusion
Here is summary of all the factors that produce dogmatic cognition, emotion and behavior.
Socio-economic
Some of these are from Judy Johnson, while others are my own.
PTSD (wars, rape, physical abuse, torture)
Economically contracted society
Economic competition between racially mixed working class
Economic competition between small business owners and corporate capitalists
Political groups with the financial means to ideologically seduce and indoctrinate the disenfranchised and psychologically vulnerable
Membership in narrow or closed-minded groups that offer a) the promise of social acceptances; b) individual recognition; c) honor and dignity
Joining a group on the basis of their rigid, authoritarian goals
Political and economic marginalization of youth
Inadequate state funding for educational infrastructure and support programs for cognitive impoverishment during childhood and adolescence
Social-cultural
Parents who themselves have the characteristics of dogmatism
Parental styles of parenting which are anxious-ambivalent as opposed to secure
Parental inability to facilitate emotional regulation during infancy and childhood
Prolonged exposure to role models who seek revenge for past injustices
Early indoctrination of religious beliefs that discourage natural curiosity and open-minded questioning and reasoning throughout childhood and adolescence (like religious fundamentalism)
Institutional punishment (at school) for independent thought in childhood and adolescence
The European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell is not particularly perceived by the EU’s political elite or mainstream media as a rightwing ideologue or warmonger. But seen through a different, non-western prism, it is hard not to mistake him for one.
Borrell’s recent comments that “Europe is a garden” and that “the rest of the world is a jungle” were duly condemned as ‘racist’ by many politicians around the world, but mostly in the Global South. Borrell’s remarks, however, must also be viewed as an expression of superiority, not only of Borell personally, but of Europe’s ruling classes as a whole.
Particularly interesting about the EU top diplomat’s words are these inaccurate depictions of Europe and its relationship with the rest of the world: “We have built a garden”, “everything works” and “the jungle could invade the garden”.
Without delving too deep into what is obviously an entrenched superiority complex, Borell speaks as if an advocate of the so-called ‘Replacement Theory’, a racist notion advocated by the West’s – Europe especially – rightwing intellectuals, which sees refugees, migrants and non-Europeans as parasites aiming to destroy the continent’s supposedly perfect demographic, religious and social harmony.
If stretched further into a historical dimension, one also feels compelled to remind the EU leadership of the central role that European colonialism, economical exploitation, political meddling and outright military intervention have played in turning much of the world into a supposed ‘jungle’. Would Libya, for example, have been reduced to the status of a failed state if the West did not wage a major war starting in March 2011?
The imagined ‘jungle’ aside, Europe’s past and present reality strongly negates Borell’s ethnocentric view. Sadly, Europe is the birthplace of the most horrible pages of history, from colonialism and slavery to the nationalistic, fascist and nihilistic movements that defined most of the last three centuries.
Despite the desperate attempt to rewrite or ignore history in favor of a more amiable narrative focused on great splendors, technological advancement and civilizational triumph, Europe’s true nature continues to smolder underneath the ashes, ready to resurface whenever the geopolitical and socioeconomic factors take a wrong turn. The Syrian and Libyan refugee crisis, the Covid pandemic and, more recently, the Russia-Ukraine war are all examples of the proverbial wrong turn.
In fact, Borrell’s words, aimed to reassure Europe of its moral superiority, are but a foolhardy effort meant to conceal one of the most dramatic crises that Europe has experienced in nearly a century. The impact of this crisis on every aspect of European life cannot be overstated.
In an editorial published last September on the European Environment Agency (EEA) website, Hans Bruyninckx described the “state of multiple crises” that characterizes the European continent at the moment. “It seems as if we have been living through one crisis after another — a pandemic, extreme heatwaves and drought due to climate change, inflation, war and an energy crisis,” he wrote.
Instead of taking responsibility for this impending catastrophe, Europe’s ruling elites choose a different, though predictable route: blame others, especially the inhabitants of the non-European ‘jungle’.
Naturally, ordinary people throughout Europe who are already experiencing this harrowing reality hardly feel reassured by Borrell’s proclamation that “everything works”.
The risk of the resurgence of the far-right movements in Europe is now a real possibility. This danger was relatively mitigated by the setback of the extremist ‘Alternative for Germany’ and the victory of the Social Democrats in last year’s elections. Germany, however, is not the exception, as the European far-right is now back, virtually everywhere, and with a vengeance.
In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right party gained a record 41% of the total vote (over 13 million) in April. True, Emmanuel Macron managed to hold off the advance of Le Pen’s National Rally, but his coalition has lost its parliamentary majority, and his leadership has been significantly weakened. Currently, the country is rocked by massive rallies and strikes, all protesting the soaring prices and deepening inflation.
Sweden is another example of the determined rise of the far-right. A right-wing coalition, which won the general elections last September, now dominates the country’s parliament. On October 17, it elected a new prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, whose government was made possible because of the support of the Sweden Democrats, a party with neo-Nazi roots and a harsh anti-immigration agenda. SD was crucial in determining the victory of the coalition and it is now suited to play the role of the kingmaker in critical decisions.
In Italy, too, the situation is dire. A future government is expected to bring together Giorgia Meloni – the leader of Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) – former right-wing Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, and the extremist Matteo Salvini’s La Lega. Meloni’s party is rooted in the post-fascist tradition of the Italian Social Movement, which was formed in the aftermath of World War II by fascist politicians after their party was officially outlawed by the country’s progressive 1948 Constitution.
The shifting political grounds in Germany, France, Italy and Sweden have little to do with the ‘jungle’, and everything with the illusory European ‘garden.’ Europe’s extremism is a by-product of exclusively European historical experiences, ideologies and class struggles. Blaming Asians, Arabs or Africans for Europe’s “state of multiple crises” is not only self-deluding, indeed spiritless, but also obstructive to any healthy process of change.
Europe cannot fix its problems by blaming others, and the European ‘garden’, if it ever existed, is actually being ravaged by Europe’s own ruling elites – rich, detached and utterly dishonest.
• Romana Rubeo, an Italian journalist, contributed to this article.
The Italian far right has capitalized on the country’s profound economic dysfunction. But Meloni’s government will only bring more hardship to Italian workers.
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid threw a wrench into the works when he declared from the United Nations General Assembly podium: “An agreement with the Palestinians, based on two states for two peoples, is the right thing for Israel’s security, for Israel’s economy and for the future of our children.”
The statement took many by surprise, including the Palestinian leadership.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has been addressing the UNGA every September, every year, recycling the same speech about how he has fulfilled his commitments to peace and that it is Israel that needs to engage in serious negotiations toward a two-state solution.
This time, too, Abbas did his part as expected. In his latest speech, he referred to Israel’s “total impunity” and “premeditated and deliberate policies” aimed at “destroying the two-state solution”.
Lapid, like Naftali Bennet and Benjamin Netanyahu before him, was also expected to stick to the script: accusing Palestinians of terrorism and incitement, reeling against the UN’s supposed ‘bias’, and making a case of why Israel should be more invested in its own security than in a Palestinian state.
Lapid, however, did not go that route. True, he regurgitated much of the typical Israeli discourse, accusing Palestinians of “firing rockets and missiles at our children”, and the like. However, he also spoke, unexpectedly, about Israel’s desire to see a Palestinian state.
Hence, Lapid linked the theoretical Palestinian state on the condition it does not become “another terror base from which to threaten the well-being, and the very existence of Israel”.
Conditions aside, Lapid’s reference to a Palestinian state remains interesting and politically risky. Indeed, the majority of Israelis – 58 percent, according to the Israel Democracy Institute – do not support a Palestinian state. Since Israel is embarking on yet another general election – the fifth in less than four years – swimming against Israel’s dominant political current does not, initially, seem like a winning idea.
In fact, immediate condemnations of Lapid’s statement by Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, indicate that Lapid’s UN comments will definitely be a contentious campaign issue in the coming weeks.
So, why did Lapid utter these words?
To begin with, Lapid is not serious about a Palestinian state.
Israeli leaders have used this line since the start of the so-called peace process as a way to demonstrate their willingness to engage in a political dialogue under the auspices of Washington, but without going any further. If anything, for 30 years, Tel Aviv – and Washington – waved the Palestinian state carrot before the Palestinian leadership to win time for illegal settlement expansion and to, ultimately, cite Palestinian supposed rejection, incitement and violence as real obstacles before the establishment of such a state.
Lapid’s language – on the Palestinian state becoming a “terror base” threatening “the very existence of Israel” – is entirely consistent with the typical Israeli discourse on this issue.
Moreover, Lapid aimed to upset the predictable routine at the UN, where Palestinians make their case, which is usually supported by most UN members, and where Israel goes on the defensive. By alluding to a Palestinian state – a day before Abbas made his appeal for Palestinian full UN membership – Lapid wanted to regain the initiative and appear a pro-active leader with a plan.
Though it may appear that Lapid’s statement was a bad political move within the context of the rightwing-dominated Israeli politics, this might not be the case. For years, the Left and Center in Israel have been embattled, as they appeared to have no answers to any of Israel’s external and internal problems.
Contrastingly, the Right, along with its growing alliances within the religious and ultra-nationalist camps, seemed to have the answer to everything: their answer to Palestinian demands for freedom and sovereignty was annexation. Their answer to Palestinian protests against home demolitions in occupied East Jerusalem is more home demolitions, mass-scale destruction, and widening the circle of expulsions.
Unable to stop the tidal wave of the Right, Israel’s nominally Left, like the Labor party, and Center, like Kahol Lavan, moved closer to the Right. After all, the latter’s ideas, though sinister and violent, are the only ones that seem to be gaining traction among Israeli voters.
Israel’s political dichotomy, however, grew larger, as expressed in the stalemates of four previous elections, starting in April 2019. The Right failed to manage stable coalitions, and the Left failed to catch up. Lapid and his Yesh Atid party hope to change all of this by presenting a potentially stable Center-Left coalition that can offer more than mere opposition to the Right’s ideas, visions and plans of their own.
Though a Palestinian state is hardly a popular idea among most Israelis, Lapid’s target audience is not just Israel’s Left, Center, and possibly Arab parties. Another target audience is the Biden Administration.
US President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party, which remains, at least verbally, committed to a two-state solution, are embarking on very difficult times ahead: the Mid-term November election, which could cost them dearly in the House and Senate, and the subsequent Presidential elections in 2024. Biden is keen to present his administration as that of military strength and a vision of peace and stability. Lapid’s words about a Palestinian state were meant to entice the US administration, which will likely engage with Lapid’s party, and possible coalition government in the future, as a ‘peacemaker’.
Finally, Lapid is aware of the impending transition in the Occupied Palestinian territories. As an armed Intifada is growing in the northern Occupied West Bank, PA leader Abbas, 87, will soon leave the scene. A potential successor, Hussein al-Sheikh, is particularly close to Israel’s security apparatus, thus completely mistrusted by most Palestinians.
The talk of a Palestinian state is, therefore, meant to give whomever is to follow Abbas, political leverage that would allow him to stave off an armed revolt and take Palestinians into another futile hunt in search of another political mirage.
It remains to be seen if Lapid’s strategy will pay dividends – whether it will cost him in the coming Israeli elections, or whether his words will evaporate into the dustbin of history, as did many such references by Israeli leaders in the past.
After 12 bleak years of various Conservative governments, led by inadequate Prime Ministers, the UK is on its knees. Democracy is under attack like never before; the disaster of Brexit, which has resulted in a catalogue of negatives including social polarization, isolationism and rabid tribalism.
Years of grinding austerity, underinvestment in public services, frozen wages and staggering levels of incompetence have culminated in the unmitigated mess we see before us: A country in terminal decline, poverty growing, inequality entrenched, and to cap it all The Wicked Witch of the raving Right, Liz Truss, has now been elected leader of the Conservatives, and, as they are in office, the new Prime Minister. A totally undemocratic electoral process, but hey, ‘that’s the way it’s always been’.
She was voted in, in a country of around 69 million people, by 81,326 (57.4% of the total gaggle) Conservative members. A tiny group, overwhelmingly old, posh, white, male, anti-Europe, anti-immigrant, anti-environment – pro-fossil fuels, backward-looking nationalists. A crazy bunch operating within a dysfunctional system that, like much of the UK parliamentary structure and the primordial electoral model, desperately needs reforming.
The revolting campaign rhetoric spouted by Truss, was we hoped, just that, ranting rhetoric aimed solely at the conservative golf club nobs. Alas, in her first pronouncements as PM, surrounded by baying Tory sycophants, it was clear that Truss lives not in the real world at all, but in a crumbling castle for one, built on a foundation of Neo-Liberal doctrine, situated further to the right than any UK Prime-Minister in recent years.
Despite decades of disappointment, whenever a new PM/government takes office, naivety gives rise to a prickle of optimism: surely now things will improve, surely social justice will be prioritized, peace and environmental action imperatives. Well, PM Truss swiftly crushed any such childish hopes with her first speech in parliament and her wooden responses during Prime Minister’s Questions. Arrogance masquerading as certainty imbued every cruel statement of policy intent, and, as opposition parties shook their heads in disbelief, people around the country, millions of whom are struggling to pay rising energy bills and increased food prices, were again crushed.
Truss, her cabinet, and thanks to a purge of moderate voices undertaken by Boris Johnson to quieten dissent, most, if not all of the parliamentary party, is now firmly wedded to an extreme version of Neo-Liberalism and the failed doctrine of Trickle Down economics. After forty years of most boats being sunk by the rising tide, the Ideology of Injustice has been shown to deepen inequality, intensify poverty and further concentrate wealth in the pockets of The Already Wealthy.
In addition to economic plans designed to benefit corporations and, by her own admission, intensify inequality (‘I’m not interested in re-distribution’ she told the BBC), she plans to increase military spending, allow global energy companies to restart gas extraction in the North Sea, end the moratorium on fracking and abolish green levies, which are used to fund energy efficiency and renewable electricity. She despises labor rights and the Trades Union movement, peaceful public protest and immigrants, all of which she is threatening to criminalize or clutter with so much bureaucracy as to make such human rights unenforceable.
Her policies, dogmatism and the doctrine that underpin them are, in many ways, terrifying. And with the suspension of parliament and consequently, any form of scrutiny, resulting from the death of The Queen, there is a danger, or for her, an opportunity, that she attempts to introduce legislation under cover of national mourning. If Truss and her gang get their way, the limited form of democracy that exists in the UK will become a distant memory, rather as ethics and honesty in public office, compassion and honoring international commitments have in recent years.
Rising misery
The list of national crises that the Truss government inherits, most if not all of which she had a grubby hand in causing, is long, and growing. As is public anger. It is a list resulting from ideological obsession, gross incompetence and absenteeism.
The National Health Service (NHS) is in crisis – years of underfunding, lack of training and Brexit, which saw thousands of NHS workers from Europe leave the UK, have led to around 135,000 vacancies, including 40,000 nurses and over 8,000 doctors in England alone. The service has the longest waiting lists for routine treatments on record; if you dial 999 for an ambulance, it could be hours, or in extreme cases, days before it arrives. Social care is dysfunctional; there is a housing crisis, property prices are sky high, rents are unaffordable, tenancies offer no security, homelessness is increasing – according to Government figures, “between January to March 2022, 74,230 households were assessed as homeless or threatened with homelessness,”up 5.4% in the same period in 2021, a further 38,000 were regarded as at “risk of homelessness”.
Inflation is at 10.1% and rising, recession predicted, poverty booming. Thousands of people/families (many of whom are in full-time employment) rely on food banks for basic supplies – over two million people visited a food bank last year, and this doesn’t include independent providers – local charities, churches etc. Ten years ago food banks barely existed in the UK, now there are estimated to be 2,572, and constitute a growth area.
The privatization of utility companies including water in 1989 under Thatcher, has led to energy and water companies making huge profits for shareholders (£72bn in dividends), but neglecting consumers and failing to invest. Since water was privatized no new reservoirs have been commissioned (in 33 years), and, The Guardianreports,“2.4bn liters [of water] a day on current estimates have been allowed to leak away.” Airports including Heathrow, have had to limit the number of flights due to lack of staff; the airport authorities and airlines use the ‘It’s not us, it’s Covid’ excuse, so loved by companies and government agencies who laid off too many employees during the pandemic and either haven’t re-hired enough, or employees refused to return unless wages and conditions improved.
The judiciary is in crisis, as is the prison system and the police, particularly in London; childcare and nursery education is shambolic, unaffordable for most, hard to find, limited places, particularly for those on average incomes; again due in part to lack of properly trained staff. It is, it seems, an endless list, shameful and intensely depressing, There may, however, be a glimmer of light within the storm; a positive effect of this cacophony of chaos is a growing movement of resistance to economic injustice, and Trades Union industrial action.
Enough is Enough
Wages for most people in the UK have been effectively frozen for years; and now, with rising inflation income is reducing in value, economic hardship intensifying, fury rising. Unions, which have been greatly weakened in the last thirty years through restrictive legislation, have rediscovered their courage and purpose, and in response to members’ demands have organised strikes in a number of areas. Most notably, railway and Transport for London workers have withdrawn their labor on a number of occasions in disputes over pay and conditions; refuse workers in Scotland have been on strike over pay; postal workers have also been striking; junior barristers are on indefinite strike over pay; workers at the UK’s largest container port, Felixstowe, recently withdrew their labour for eight days in another dispute about pay. Nurses and doctors working in the NHS are threatening industrial action, as are teachers.
The leader of the RMT union, Mick Lynch, who has emerged as a leading voice for the people, has suggested that, “unions are on the brink of calling for ‘synchronized’ strikes over widespread anger at how much soaring inflation is outpacing wages.” If such a positive step were taken, it would be a powerful act of resistance against years of exploitation and injustice, and may further empower working people, who for years have been silenced.
In parallel with the workers revolt is a social movement of defiance. Initially triggered by high energy bills, rising costs and low wages, the scope of disquiet is expanding to include outrage at huge profits for energy companies and other corporations, increasing payments to shareholders whilst the majority struggle to feed themselves and their families; i.e., it’s about social injustice, exploitation and greed. Two movements of resistance and change have emerged from the widespread disquiet – ‘Don’t Pay’, which aims to empower people to not pay increased energy bills, and ‘Enough is Enough’, which is a broader social movement founded by union leaders and MPs.
The appearance of these groups is deeply encouraging and could prove to be a pivotal moment. Many people, the majority perhaps, are worn down, ashamed of where the country finds itself, and have had enough. Enough of being ignored and manipulated; of being told to ‘tighten their belts’ and ‘carry on’, whilst corporations, public/private companies including energy firms, pay out huge dividends and government ministers, spineless, unprincipled puppets, who live in the silk-lined pockets of big business, including most notably the media barons, lie and lie and lie again.
In the face of increasing levels of social injustice, government duplicity and economic hardship, eventually the people must unite and revolt. If, after the endless pantomime of the Queen’s funeral, people do come together, refuse to pay rising energy costs; refuse to work, refuse to be exploited and marginalized; refuse to stand by while the natural world is vandalised; if the unions do take coordinated action, and many of us would support such a progressive act, there is a chance, slim, but real, that years of frustration and anger, can be turned into empowerment and hope.
In 1995, Umberto Eco assessed that ‘Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old ‘proletarians’ are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.’ (source)
For whom is this Fourth of July dedicated to? The original First Nations people? The Afrikan slave? The immigrant? Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz explains a different history of USA and July Fourth’s meanings in her book,
The integral link between Wounded Knee in 1890 and Wounded Knee in 1973 suggests a long-overdue reinterpretation of indigenous-US relations as a template for US imperialism and counterinsurgency wars. As Vietnam veteran and author Michael Herr observed, we “might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter.”
Seminole Nation Vietnam War veteran Evan Haney made the comparison in testifying at the Winter Soldier Investigations:
The same massacres happened to the Indians . . . I got to know the Vietnamese people and I learned they were just like us . . . I have grown up with racism all my life. When I was a child, watching cowboys and Indians on TV, I would root for the cavalry, not the Indians. It was that bad. I was that far toward my own destruction.
Great words, but not for all audiences. See below, my op-ed in the local rag, after a little bit of Rags to Riches soft shoe tap dancing. Yeah, yeah, another year has gone by, and the fireworks are littering our beaches, toxifying the air and water, scaring the wildlife and pets, and cork-screwing into the chambers of hell for those of us with any form of complex PTSD.
Business as usual, sort of.
The lockdowns are a thing of the past (not), and, sure, the grocery stores (many owned by a French guy and German guy and a British guy — guy as in investment outfit from those countries) have inflated, gouging, profiteering prices, the hardware store (monoply run by Koch; i.e. Home Depot, or the others like Ace and Lowes — bye bye mom and pops!) is out of the basics to keep the old house or apartment upkeeped (or the price gouging and war-lockdown-billionaire profiteering in a time of Covid-Monkey Pox-All Things Cancelled is almost comical, as in six to seven times the unit price for anything compared to 2019!).
Lots to celebrate, no? Trillions for the offensive military and surveillance and digital and prison and financial hobbling complex. Below is, as I have stated before, an attempt to reach retirees, service industry folk, timber and fisher workers, and vacationers in the local hard copy twice-a-week newspaper. Lincoln County, Oregon, is a very strange and dichotomous place indeed. High poverty, and highly educated. Rich retirees and hundreds running around the woods in meth madness. Service workers form Guatemala, and a timber industry that sprays agent orange on clear cuts. Right on the Pacific, west of the Central Coast Range, a paradise, sort of, with 78 inches of rain a year, verdant forests, winds, and dramatic coastlines. The NOAA research ship is harbored in Newport, and the Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Sciences Center is located here as well. (see Haeder’s, “Bridging the Divide” and “Should We Trust Science?”
When you read my 1,000 word piece, you will note that I self censored, and that is also called editing, knowing your audience, and capturing ten minutes of a person’s time with honey laced with a little bit of truth.
The Fourth of July essay, written by a communist, me. Mellow, milquetoast with margarine on top, and necessary for me, a man without a tribe, a man with shitty prospects on the downside of 65.
This is an exercise in dumbdowning and, well, infantilizing. Sacred cows and holy history. And yet, we have lots of killing in Ukraine to celebrate. Getting people in the USA upset gets you, well, these lovelies:
If you criticize it so much, why don’t you just move to some other “great” country.
All countries have faults, but this one is the most dynamic in terms of the democracy, freedom of choice, capitalism experiments, and all those other countries certainly send their emissaries here to learn our ways.
To the conquerer goes the spoils — buck up. History is written by the victors.
And, so, why are millions crossing deserts and war zones to get to this supposed shit-hole if the country is so bad?
If we as a collective West don’t get into Africa and into Asia, then you just want the Chinese to exploit those places. I am sure the average Ethiopian is much more happier with Black Americans assisting with their country than the Chinese?
This is and always will be a Christian nation, and, yes, replacement theory is about concerns about the bloodline and the collective intelligence and spiritual and psychological alignments that the White Race have compared to those other cultures and races who have much different and anti-American values.
A good red/communist is a dead commie!
Easier said than done, just hitching out of here to another country. I just read that many/majority in the EU do not want more American military on those lands: 27 countries as of now, out of 44 European countries. Imagine that, those twenty-seven nations trying to extract the United States of Chaos/Lies/Destruction from the collective, which is bound to grow beyond the current 27 countries.
Not a Hallmark version of Fourth of July, but watered down, for sure, is what I give to the local readership.
Now now, we know why Hallmark sells so many cards, why Hersheys sells so many sweets, why apple pie is such an American treat. There is an American story behind every business, so here, J.C, Hall, of Hallmark fame. Again, PT Barnum, snake oil salesmen, reservations, boarding schools, genocide then, now and the future, so yep, the world for AmeriKKKans is La-La Land, and they complain about red state v. blue state, but the state of the American mind is mired in epigentic trauma, mostly not acknowledged, and the Karma is Coming Back to Kick this Country’s Ass, but it will be the Romans, with two centuries of collapse over a 500 year period of rape, mayhem, lies, chaos, disaster (47 BC to 462 AD). “Letting a sleeping dog lie” — that is, to ignore a problem because trying to deal with it could cause an even more difficult situation — is the American Way, 2022, a la endless death deals with ZioLensky and endless bioweapons research (sic) for endless ways to transform (eugenics) the world.
It is a mad mad mad world of Hallmarking the Country, while still Disneyfying and Walmartizing Mister Rogers’ Neighborhoods!
Hall was born in 1891 in David City, Nebraska, the son of Nancy Dudley Houston and George Nelson Hall, a traveling Methodist minister who had provided sparingly for his invalid wife and children. When Hall was seven, his father died. By age eight Hall was selling door-to-door with the company that eventually became Avon Products. Hall’s belief was that in the difficult economic straits of his widowed mother’s family, he needed to add a postscript to his father’s bible quote, “the Lord will provide”; it was, “It’s a good idea to give the Lord a little help.”
In 1905, Hall and his brothers invested $540 to buy picture postcards to sell to store owners and other dealers around their area. They also convinced some of the traveling salesmen who came into the Halls’ bookstore, which Joyce Hall’s older brothers bought with a partner in 1902, to add the postcards to their sales territories. Hall conceived the Norfolk Post Card Company in 1908 in Norfolk, Nebraska.
In 1910, Hall moved to Kansas City, Missouri, with little more than two shoe boxes of postcards. By 1913, he and his brothers were operating a store (which would eventually evolve into Kansas City’s Halls department store) selling not only postcards but also greeting cards. The store burned in 1915, and a year later, Hall bought an engraving business and began printing his own cards. It turned into a bigger business than he had had before. In 1928, he began marketing his cards under the Hallmark brand name.
Hall, who objected to the name Joyce and typically went by “J.C.”, retired in 1966 and spent his retirement in efforts to revitalize the Kansas City downtown area. One of the results was Crown Center, a combination business/shopping district surrounding the Hallmark corporate headquarters. Hall died in 1982 in Leawood, Kansas. (source)
Now, of course, that postcard salesman’s dream is a huge multi-company operation, conservative, dishing up Christian feel-good media while lobbying for conservitism and Republican values (sic).
Oh, then, there is slavery in my chocolate: Oh, that Hershey,
“The beatings were a part of my life,” Aly Diabate, a freed slave, told reporters. “Anytime they loaded you with bags (of cocoa beans) and you fell while carrying them, nobody helped you. Instead they beat you and beat you until you picked it up again.”
Brian Woods and Kate Blewett are ground-breaking film-makers who made history when they went undercover in China eight years ago to make a documentary which shook the world — “The Dying Rooms” — about the hideous conditions in Chinese state orphanages. Recently, they made a film about the use of child slaves in African cocoa fields. “It isn’t the slavery we are all familiar with and which most of us imagine was abolished decades ago,” says Brian Woods. “Back then, a slave owner could produce documents to prove ownership. Now, it’s a secretive trade which leaves behind little evidence. Modern slaves are cheap and disposable. They have three things in common with their ancestors. They aren’t paid, they are kept working by violence or the threat of it, and they are not free to leave.”
Blewett and Woods tell of meeting Drissa, a young man from Mali who had been tricked into working on an Ivory coast cocoa farm. “When Drissa took his shirt off, I had never seen anything like it. I had seen some pretty nasty things in my time but this was appalling. There wasn’t an inch of his body which wasn’t scarred.”
Rags-to-riches stories might seem like they’re a dime a dozen, but Hershey’s story was shaped by incredible hardship. Born Milton Snavely Hershey on September 13, 1857, Hershey had one younger sister who died when she was 4. His father was prone to what Hershey History calls “get rich schemes”, and all of those schemes — which included a trout farm — failed. Attempts to find that one last working scheme meant a lot of moving around, so young Hershey attended seven different schools before ultimately ending his formal education at the fourth grade.
Hershey then embarked on a series of failed ventures. He was dismissed from an apprenticeship as a printer, declared bankruptcy after opening his first candy company, and traveled across the country in a failed attempt to get in on a silver mine. He tried another candy business in New York City, and the doors closed on that one, too.
Hershey’s family — who had invested in his failed businesses — largely shunned him. The exception was an aunt, who gave him a loan to buy his first caramel-making equipment. He spent days making candy, nights selling them from a pushcart, and found his calling. (Source)
Rags to riches, and that American Dream.
According to a 2010 report titled “Time to Raise the Bar: The Real Corporate Social Responsibility for the Hershey Company,” “Hershey has no policies in place to purchase cocoa that has been produced without the use of labor exploitation, and the company has consistently refused to provide public information about its cocoa sources…Finally, Hershey’s efforts to further cut costs in its cocoa production has led to a reduction in good jobs in the United States.” (Source)
Note that the dream/nightmare, all that murdering and land theft, AKA, The Indian Wars, lasted until 1924 (started in 1609).
Baseball, Mom and Apple Pie — Another Fourth of July Lie
Do we collectively have a duty as Americans to honor the idea of hope, change and a Republic free from British rule? Yep. I’ve worked as a teacher for 45 years. Before that, I was a product intense indoctrination — military brat. Mark two branches my old man ventured into: Air Force and Army. He put in 32 years, total.
I was born to question authority. Living overseas, on military bases and posts, and around a militaristic mindset, I did my duty as any red-blooded American should: question those who wield power. That wasn’t just the MPs I crossed paths with. I doubted my teachers’ power. As a newspaperman, I questioned many of those powers while covering city, county, military, education, police and federal beats.
That powerful elixir — free speech, free association and “innocent before proven guilty”— had entered my veins young. I questioned my editors’ decisions and questioned the owners of these small newspapers, and then later, the owners of the big papers (owned by Gannet or Pulitzer) for which I worked.
I gravitated toward the words of Americans like Frederick Douglass. “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” (1852).
I anticipate cringing from News-Times readers with concocted beliefs in false prophets and bad information. Knowing our people’s history of the United States is about embracing the good, bad, and ugly, as well as the warts and accomplishments of the US of A.
There is no communist conspiracy tied to teaching ethnic studies, embracing more nuanced history of indigenous and enslaved people, and knowing the roots of some disastrous features of our country’s legal, economic, and education systems: monopolies, Manifest Destiny, oligarchs influencing policy and laws, a second gilded age of wealth gap between haves and haves not, racism, sexism, and debt.
Douglass may have been pointing out the injustices in that July 4 speech, but he was aware of his place in the country. “The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable — and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight,” Douglass stated 170 years ago.
Some of the most remarkable “patriots” I have worked with were people assisting the poor, sick, old, disabled, and needy. In El Paso, Casa Anunciacion was run and staffed by remarkable people giving aid to refugees of Guatemala and El Salvador. While these simple people in many cases came to the U.S. for political asylum, they embraced Ruben Garcia, the ex-priest running the nonprofit, and the youth coming from around the country doing “their service” for mostly Jesuit and private colleges.
Imagine, victims of murder and forced displacement enforced by U.S.-trained militaries and leaders, and yet these people embraced us, the volunteers. They saw the United States as how Emma Lazarus imagined a Jewish refugee or Italian bricklayer would hold self-evident about this country. Her poem, “The New Colossus,” is at the base of Lady Liberty:
From her beacon-hand…
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she
With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’
Her poem was cast in bronze and put on the statue of Liberty. The statue was not conceived as a symbol of immigration. But to the millions of immigrants heading for Ellis Island, passing under the torch and her shining face, immigrants connected Lady Liberty with their own freedom.
Lazarus’s poem was set upon the pedestal in 1903 and “forever” locked the statue as a welcoming mother, and a symbol of hope to those outcasts of the world.
Shifting political baselines and cultural barrages, however, have forced people to defend that plaque. Even a fellow like Stephen Miller (senior advisor for policy and White House director of speechwriting to President Donald Trump) stated he thought the Lazarus poem should be ripped from the monument.
We are a divided nation, on many fronts, not just red state v. blue state. Read your history about slavery, about prohibition, about wars fought under false pretentions. We have been a mixed-up tossed salad of people, cultures, ethnicities. Not that proverbial melting pot.
There is a large dose of naivety in America’s collective consciousness that we are the world’s example of democracy. It is this hubris that covers both hope and delusion. However, we must hold future generations in both our collective hearts and with our policies.
Legacy is one not burdened with debt, decay, failing infrastructure and failing wars. We have to embrace our democracy’s roots: the Iroquois Confederacy, founded by the Great Peacemaker in 1142, is the oldest living participatory democracy on earth.
Ben Franklin followed suit 600 years later. Franklin referenced the Iroquois model as he presented his Plan of Union at the Albany Congress in 1754, attended by representatives of the Iroquois and the seven colonies. He invited the Great Council members of the Iroquois to address the Continental Congress in 1776.
Our roots run deep into this country’s Native American model of governance: one that is fair and will always meet the needs of the seventh generation to come.
This principle dictates that decisions made today should lead to sustainability for seven generations into the future. This Independence Day, can we realign ourselves into creating strong kinship bonds that promote leadership in which honor is not earned by material gain but by service to others?
End
Of course, apples are native to Kazakhstan, in central Asia east of the Caspian Sea. The capital of Kazakhstan, Alma Ata, means “full of apples.” By 1500 BC apple seeds had been carried throughout Europe.
The Memory of Fire by Eduardo Galleano is magificent in bringing historical grounding to the Americas as:Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind. This epic prose poem covers Latin American history written in short vignettes that are nonfiction, but flow in a narrative prose which reads like fiction.
Console yourself not with the lie that your foe is weak, or stupid, or evil. Sometimes the enemy is worthy. Sometimes his cause is just. Sometimes both sides are right in their own ways-and in the hour that just causes collide, good men will rise up and leap into the fray, and the clash of their meeting will shake the heavens. And their blood will flow like rivers.
Check him out on the internet, recorded in May 2009: Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) Laura Flanders interviewed the author in anticipation of what would become his last book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, published by Nation Books. Galeano spent a lifetime reflecting on the lives—political, cultural, and historical—of the people of the Americas. In April 2009, Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chavez gave Barack Obama a copy of Galeano’s book Open Veins of Latin America. Galeano joined us to discuss his work, the political moment, and the past and future of US-Latin American relations.
Interesting Teach-in, well, discussion, with the speakers below. You will hear Scott Ritter divert from some of these speakers saying that the actions by Russia in Ukraine are legal, ethical and necessary.
Here is Ritter, just interviewed, Strategic Culture. Note that Ritter is called a traitor (for looking at the Russian military and political angles) and a Putin Stooge (this is it for Western Woke Culture) and he’s been banned on Twitter for a day, and then back up, and the seesaw of social media continues (more McCarthy: The New Democratic Opperative). You do not have to agree with militarism, but here we are, so the Western Woke Fascist Media and the Mendacious Political Class want nothing to do with, well, military minds looking at Russia (Ritter studied Russia big-time, and studied their military big time, both Soviet Union and Russia). He also is married to a Georgian. But again, this is it for the Western Intellect (sic).
Like we can’t watch Graham Phillips work, without being called, well, Russian Stooges. The Mainlining Mendacious Media calls him a Russian Sympathizer. Imagine that. For years,, he’s been a sympathizer (he is British, speaks Russian and goes to the actual places with camera in hand. Look at the one on Ossetia, the breakaway republic of Georgia. It is delightful (note the dinner he is served by the typical family):
Here, from, “The Ukrainian Conflict Is a U.S./NATO Proxy War, but One Which Russia Is Poised to Win Decisively – Scott Ritter” by Finian Cunningham, April 9, 2022
Question: Do you think that Russia has a just cause in launching its “special military operation” in Ukraine on February 24?
Scott Ritter: I believe Russia has articulated a cognizable claim of preemptive collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. The threat posed by NATO expansion, and Ukraine’s eight-year bombardment of the civilians of the Donbass fall under this umbrella.
Question: Do you think Russia has legitimate concerns about the Pentagon sponsoring biological weapons programs in laboratories in Ukraine?
Scott Ritter: The Pentagon denies any biological weapons program, but admits biological research programs on Ukrainian soil. Documents captured by Russia have allegedly uncovered the existence of programs the components of which could be construed as having offensive biological warfare applications. The U.S. should be required to explain the purpose of these programs.
Question: What do you make of allegations in Western media that Russian troops committed war crimes in Bucha and other Ukrainian cities? It is claimed that Russian forces summarily executed civilians.
Scott Ritter: All claims of war crimes must be thoroughly investigated, including Ukrainian allegations that Russia killed Ukrainian civilians in Bucha. However, the data available about the Bucha incident does not sustain the Ukrainian claims, and as such, the media should refrain from echoing these claims as fact until a proper investigation of the evidence is conducted, either by the media, or unbiased authorities.
While one may be able to mount a legal challenge to Russia’s contention that its joint operation with Russia’s newly recognized independent nations of Lugansk and Donetsk constitutes a “regional security or self-defense organization” as regards “anticipatory collective self-defense actions” under Article 51, there can be no doubt as to the legitimacy of Russia’s contention that the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass had been subjected to a brutal eight-year-long bombardment that had killed thousands of people.
Moreover, Russia claims to have documentary proof that the Ukrainian Army was preparing for a massive military incursion into the Donbass which was pre-empted by the Russian-led “special military operation.” [OSCE figures show an increase of government shelling of the area in the days before Russia moved in.]
Finally, Russia has articulated claims about Ukraine’s intent regarding nuclear weapons, and in particular efforts to manufacture a so-called “dirty bomb”, which have yet to be proven or disproven. [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a reference to seeking a nuclear weapon in February at the Munich Security Conference.]
The bottom line is that Russia has set forth a cognizable claim under the doctrine of anticipatory collective self defense, devised originally by the U.S. and NATO, as it applies to Article 51 which is predicated on fact, not fiction. (Ritter, Russia, Ukraine & the Law of War: Crime of Aggression)
[Nuremberg Trials. 1st row: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Heß, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel. 2nd row: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel. (Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality/Still Picture Records LICON, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S)]
All the speakers, except maybe excluding John Kiriakou, have great points to make: Andrei Martyanov, expert on Russian military affairs, author The Real Revolution in Military Affairs; Chris Kaspar de Ploeg, author Ukraine in the Crossfire; James Carden, Adviser U.S.-Russia bilateral commission during the Obama administration & Ex. Editor of The American Committee for East-West accord; Scott Ritter, former U.S. Marine Intelligence officer, UN Arms Inspector, exposed WMD lie in U.S. push to invade Iraq; John Kiriakou, CIA whistleblower and Radio Sputnik host; Ron Ridenour, peace activist, author The Russian Peace Threat; Gerald Horne, historian, author, Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston; Jeremy Kuzmarov, CAM Managing Editor and author of The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce.
Imagine, the provocations.
The US government invoked self-defense as a legal justification for its invasion of Panama. Several scholars and observers have opined that the invasion was illegal under international law.
Oh, those Freedom Fighters, the back-shooting, civilian-killing, village-burning Contras:
Appendix A: Background on United States Funding of the Contras
In examining the allegations in the Mercury News and elsewhere, it is important to understand the timing of funding of the Contras by the United States. The following dates explain the periods during which the United States government provided funding to the Contras or cut off such funding.
Anastasio Somoza Debayle was the leader of Nicaragua from 1967 until July 1979, when he was overthrown by the Sandinistas. When President Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, he promptly canceled the final $15 million payment of a $75 million aid package to Nicaragua, reversing the Carter administration’s policy towards Nicaragua. On November 17, 1981, President Reagan signed National Security Directive 17, authorizing provision of covert support to anti-Sandinista forces. On December 1, 1981, Reagan signed a document intending to conceal the November 17 authorization of anti-Sandinista operations. The document characterized the United States’ goal in Nicaragua as that of interdicting the flow of arms from Nicaragua to El Salvador, where leftist guerrillas were receiving aid from Sandinista forces.
In late 1982, Edward P. Boland, Chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, introduced an amendment to the Fiscal Year 1983 Defense Appropriations bill that prohibited the CIA, the principal conduit of covert American support for the Contras, from spending funds “for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua.” However, the CIA could continue to support the Contras if it claimed that the purpose was something other than to overthrow the government. In December 1983, a compromise was reached and Congress passed a funding cap for fiscal year 1984 of $24 million for aid to the Contras, an amount significantly lower than what the Reagan administration wanted, with the possibility that the Administration could seek supplemental funds later.
This funding was insufficient to support the Administration’s “Contra program” and the decision was made to approach other countries for monetary support. In April 1984, Robert McFarlane convinced Saudi Arabia to contribute $1 million per month to the Contras through a secret bank account set up by Lt. Col. Oliver North.
In October 1984, the second Boland amendment took effect. It prohibited any military or paramilitary support for the Contras from October 3, 1984, through December 19, 1985. As a result, the CIA and Department of Defense (DOD) began withdrawing personnel from Central America. During this time, however, the National Security Council continued to provide support to the Contras.
In August 1985, Congress approved $25 million in humanitarian aid to the Contras, with the proviso that the State Department, and not the CIA or the DOD, administer the aid. President Reagan created the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office (NHAO) to supply the humanitarian aid. In September 1985, Oliver North began using the Salvadoran air base at Ilopango for Contra resupply efforts.
On October 5, 1986, a plane loaded with supplies for the Contras, financed by private benefactors, was shot down by Nicaraguan soldiers. On board were weapons and other lethal supplies and three Americans. One American, Eugene Hasenfus, claimed while in custody that he worked for the CIA. The Reagan Administration denied any knowledge of the private resupply efforts.
On October 17, 1986, Congress approved $100 million in funds for the Contras. In 1987, after the discovery of private resupply efforts orchestrated by the National Security Council and Oliver North, Congress ceased all but “non-lethal” aid in 1987. The war between the Sandinistas and the Contras ended with a cease-fire in 1990.
Although the Contras were often referred to as one group, several distinct factions made up the Contras.
In August 1980, Colonel Enrique Bermudez, a former Colonel in Somoza’s National Guard, united other former National Guard officers and anti-Sandinista civilians to form the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN). This group was known as the Northern Front because it was based in Honduras. In February 1983, Adolfo Calero became the head of the FDN.
In April 1982, Eden Pastora split from the Sandinista regime and organized the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE) and the Sandinista Revolutionary Front (FRS), which declared war on the Sandinista regime. Pastora’s group was based in Costa Rica and along the southern border of Nicaragua, and therefore became known as the Southern Front. Pastora refused to work with Bermudez, claiming that Bermudez, as a member of the former Somoza regime, was politically tainted. The CIA decided to support the FDN and generally declined to support the ARDE.
Again, let’s think about what is actually happening in Ukraine, and where the country is, and what the Russians in that country are facing, and, gulp, where is Ukraine? Thousands of miles away, like Panama and Nicaragua are from USA?
As the war in Ukraine rages on, I visited the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk as an embedded reporter with the Russian army.
Both of the republics are the trigger of the current conflict.
Russian President Vladimir Putin declared their independence on February 24, 2022, something a lot of people were waiting for since the CIA backed coup in Ukraine of February 2014. That coup had resulted in the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and new laws forcing the Ukrainian language on Russian-speaking residents. Luhansk and Donetsk consequently voted on their independence and Ukraine attacked them, precipitating the war.
European support for the so-called Maidan coup was considerable: the Dutch MP Hans van Baalen from the ruling Dutch VVD party (Mark Rutte), for example, was at the protests that helped trigger the coup, as was the former Prime Minister of Belgium Guy Verhofstadt. Both were seen cheering on the crowds, surrounded by right-extremists on the stage, shouting “democracy.”
So what is preemptive defense? Right to Protect? What is big ugly history of Nazi’s in Poland and Ukraine? What is that all about, uh, Americanum?
So, plans by ZioLensky for Dirty Bombs from the wasteland of Chernobyl, not a provocation?
How many were immolated in Waco? Why? Mount Carmel Center became engulfed in flames. The fire resulted in the deaths of 76 Branch Davidians, including 25 children, two pregnant women, and David Koresh himself.
Oh, the impatience of the USA, FBI, ATF, Attorney General, Bill Clinton, the lot of them.
Or, dropping bombs on Philly, to kill, well, black people:
How many died, and what happened to the city block? Bombs dropped on our own people, again! Police dropped a bomb on a West Philly house in 1985. The fire caused by the explosion killed 11 people, an atrocity that Philadelphia still grapples with today.
Oh, the irony.
Black Lives Do Not Matter, here, or in Ukraine. Below, representation of those lives killed by cops, of all races, in one year. Many of these in a year, 60 percent, did not involve a person with a gun, and a huge number, 40 percent, involved people going throug mental health crises.
[Foreign students trying to reach the Ukrainian border said they were thrown off trains, not allowed on buses, and made to wait hours in the cold before crossing over.]
Yes, the first casualty of war is truth, and with the USA as the Empire of Lies and Hate, the casualty is now a larger framework of a Zombie Nation of virtue signalers and those who want the fake news to be real, please!
So far as I know, this is the first war in modern history with no objective, principled coverage in mainstream media of day-to-day events and their context. None. It is morn-to-night propaganda, disinformation and lies of omission — most of it fashioned by the Nazi-infested Zelensky regime in Kiev and repeated uncritically as fact.
There is one thing worse than this degenerate state of affairs. It is the extent to which the media’s malpractice is perfectly fine to most Americans. Tell us what to think and believe no matter if it is true, they say, and we will think and believe it. Show us some pictures, for images are all.
There are larger implications to consider here. Critical as it is that we understand this conflict, Ukraine is a mirror in which we see ourselves as we have become. For more Americans than I wish were so, reality forms only in images. These Americans are no longer occupants of their own lives. Risking a paradox, what they take to be reality is detached from reality.
This majority — and it is almost certainly a majority — has no thoughts or views except those first verified through the machinery of manufactured images and “facts.” Television screens, the pages of purportedly authoritative newspapers, the air waves of government-funded radio stations — NPR, the BBC — serve to certify realities that do not have to be real, truths that do not have to be true.
Before proceeding to Bucha, the outrage of the moment, I must reproduce a quotation from that propaganda-is-O.K. piece The Times published in its March 3 editions. It is from a Twitter user who was distressed that it became public that the Ghost of Kiev turned out to be a ghost and the Snake Island heroes didn’t do much by way of holding the fort.
‘Why can’t we just let people believe some things?’ this thoughtful man or woman wanted to know. What is wrong, in other words, if thinking and believing nice things that aren’t true makes people feel better? (Patrick Lawrence, Special to Consortium News)
Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo- Events in America, has been cited by yours truly several times. It is a completely amazing work, sixty years ahead of its time, and it is almost completely ignored!.
I describe the world of our making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life. …. The reporter’s task is to find a way to weave these threads of unreality into a fabric the reader will not recognize as entirely unreal. (Boorstin)
The Christian right fought a long war against Dungeons & Dragons. With the role-playing game poised for superstardom, there may once again exist a temptation to bestow it with powers it doesn’t really possess.
W.E.B. DuBois: ‘To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.’
This documentary (see below, first one linked) is not news, and then, of course, it’s Trump in office blather, too. As if UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Portugal are havens for social and people and environmental justice.
How Poor People Survive in the USA — vapid.
The documentarian is done, really, through the auspices of Euro trash context, POV, narrative framing. Contrarily, you have to be in the mix, in the middle, from the chambers of power, schools, colleges, social work, to real journalism, and into the mess personally, with daily fear of losing the job and seeing savings go go go. That is the slippage in the death spiral of USA.
This is a Reservation/Rez Society. Boarding School Society. Celebrity Cults. Internment Camp FEMA Village (Soon). This entire unfolding of history the past 70 years has been this big time military propaganda operation embedding into all systems. Confusion creator. Mystical hatred or subservience while praying for that blue-eyed, blond hippie Jesus. Dirt poor, and loving Trump. College student loans over $100K, and loving AOC and Biden.
The enemy for me, and I’d say for 80 percent of USA, is that grouping — colonized Eichmann’s, the upper classes, the dream hoarders, the intelligence/knowledge workers, the higher ups in education-medicine-incarceration-pharma-medicine-energy-banking-data collecting-surveillance-real estate-Chamber of Commerce-AI-science-ag-retail-logistics-transportation, and then, MIC, congressional military complex. Join the mercenary forces, and lucky you, get your teeth pulled and a GI Bill.
I’ve asked why the stuff I send and publish elsewhere is no longer getting up on LA Progressive. No answer! Again, this documentary is broken (above), but that is documentary making, most times — focused, rarified, gatekeeping on steroids, with people on the projects not deep systems thinkers, and a willingness to leave out a lot.
Missing:
Tens of millions on the edge of the cliff of eviction, foreclosure, endless bad jobs, in the car or van, bunking up with family or friends, while working for middle managers who do not care, and the upper management and the billionaires and millionaires.
Inflammation — Capitalism is a complete, holistic, top-down disease, creating inflammation in the veins, brain, organs, belly. But worse — cuts the thinking process, deforms the mutual aid ethos, destroys collective action, kills the ability to squat and reappropriate wealth, land, whatever.
The rat race of those with a roof over their heads that continue to fuel prescriptions, Disneyland la-la-land thinking, buy-buy-buy, watching sports-stars-musicians, I got mine, you better fight to get yours
This country, USA, is the rotting roots and DNA of Europe, of that narrator above. These are not real people, and they are so sculpted in news speak, in priviledge.
This documentary doesn’t get to the fabric of colonization of cities, schools, the bullshit of privatization, and this wacky religious and wacky elitist country of Indian Removal, Enslavement then and now, and Nomadlands.
Americans are children, and that is thanks to the Media, the Boss, foolish k-6 education, and, well, we are here now, 355 million, and this is pre-covid crazies. Now? Complete imprisonment!
Oh, hell, the list is a thousand points long: Stan Brock, Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom. This is one fellow, and great heart, but in a world of Space Suits, Billionaires and Yachts, Lies Casted in Media-Banking-Digitalization, well, one guy. “He founded Remote Area Medical in 1985 to give people in need essential health care. Since then, RAM has provided free dental, vision and basic health care to more than 740,000 people.”
Here, the documentary on RAM above, description: During the U.S. debate about healthcare reform, the media reporters and news crews and filmmakers failed to put a human face on what it means to not have access to healthcare. Remote Area Medical fills that gap; it is a film about people, not policy. Focusing on a single three-day clinic held in the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee, Remote Area Medical affords us an insider’s perspective on the ebb and flow of the event, from the tense 3:30 a.m. ticket distribution that determines who gets seen to the routine check-ups that take dramatic turns for the worse, to the risky means to which some patients resort for pain relief. We meet a doctor who also drives an 18-wheeler, a denture maker who moonlights as a jeweler, and the organization’s founder, Stan Brock, who first imagined Remote Area Medical while living as a cowboy in the Amazon rainforest, hundreds of miles from the nearest doctor. But it is the extraordinary stories of the patients, desperate for medical attention, that create a lasting impression about the state of modern health care in America.
This can’t be ramped up, taken to the ultimate level? It’s socialism, brothers and sisters, the only way forward. Forget the hate that the right and the middle of the road have against socialism. They will ply the words of “one world government.” Or, the “government controlling us.” They will talk about Universal Basic Income. They will say it is brainwashing, and communism, and, well, that socialism means all rights are taken, managed, given to and taken away by some master groups of dictators. So we are dead in the water with capitalism by any means necessary: predatory, parasitic, casino, dog-eat-dog, shock therapy, zombie, trickle down nothingness.
That is, you know, vaccine passport, no. But, there is no Forced Healthcare for All. No, Massive Take Over the Empty Lots and Buildings for Massive Rehousing. No guerrilla farming everywhere. Nothing. Because, well, Capitalism is All about “We are all champions. We are all the New Eve and Adam. You can rest assured that the masters will NOT take care of you, but at least you have the stars and bars, god almighty, baby-land.”
This exceptionalism is what has detroyed many in the 80 percent. Many. They will work and think and do things against their own well-being. When you are a lost dog in this country, a limping stray, a hungry desperate pooch, well, you will jump to the master, run for the beasts of slapping, kicking, yelling, and hitting. Under the table, curled up, belly and organs exposed as its tail is between the legs.
Inflamed — Moreover, they point out how modern medicine has often missed these necessary connections—to our global detriment. What is needed is “deep medicine,” which, according to the authors, “requires new cosmologies, ones that can braid our lives with the planet and the web of life around us.”
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel spoke to YES! about the ravages of colonialist capitalism, the failures of modern medicine to treat them, and, most importantly, how a “deep medicine” approach can heal us all.
*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Is the title of the book, Inflamed, a metaphor for what is happening to our planet and its living systems?
Rupa Marya: It’s not at all a metaphor. It’s a description of what’s happening inside of our bodies and around us on the planet and our societies. The inflammatory response is the body’s ancient evolutionarily conserved pathway to restoring its optimal working condition when it’s been thrown off by danger or damage or the threat of damage. (Source, Yes Magazine)
No jobs, no good jobs, decayed systems, penalties, bad credit, criminal offenses, drugs, booze, and bodies torn at a very young age with multiple chronic diseases, many many diseases.
https://youtu.be/YrEwPp2bG48
This is the system that the beautiful people in the sciences, in technology, in the Reset Star Chamber, all of those hoarding money and the opportunities have set loose, and these fascists want these people — us, we the people — on UBI, held as data pools — body snatchers, mind snatchers, attention snatchers, activity snatchers, all part of mining people, putting us, them, the 80 percent, in the cloud, in algorithms, in data banks, all mashed up for social impact — do as we say, follow what we command, eat-drink-think like we say, and you will get the tokens, man, the money, the slice of a 200-square-foot-per-person habitat. No pets allowed.
When did parts of the left get so contemptuous of the principle of “bodily autonomy”? Answer: Just about the time they started fetishising vaccines as the only route out of the current pandemic.
Only two years ago most people understood “bodily autonomy” to be a fundamental, unquestionable human right. Now it is being treated as some kind of perverse libertarian luxury, as proof that the “deplorables” have been watching too much Tucker Carlson or that they have come to idealise the worst excesses of neoliberalism’s emphasis on the rights of the individual over the social good.
This is dangerous nonsense, as should be obvious if we step back and imagine what our world might look like had the principle of “bodily autonomy” not been established through centuries of struggle, just as were the right to vote and the right to health care.
Because without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be dragging virgins up high staircases so that they could be sacrificed to placate the sun gods. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be treating black people like animals – chattel to be used and exploited so that a white landowning class could grow rich from their enforced labours. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have doctors experimenting on those who are “inferior” – Jews, Romanies, Communists, gays – so that “superior races” could benefit from the “research”. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have the right of men to rape their wives as one of the unwritten marital vows.
Many of these battles and others were won far more recently than most of us care to remember. I am old enough to recall listening in the car on the way to school to “serious” debates on BBC Radio 4 about whether it was justifiable for the courts to presume a husband’s right to rape his wife.
Arguments about whose bodily autonomy has primacy – a woman’s or the foetus she is carrying – are at the heart of ongoing and inflammatory abortion debates in the United States. And protection of bodily autonomy was the main reason why anyone with an ounce of moral fibre opposed the US torture regime that became normalised in the war on brown people known as the “war on terror”.
Bad faith
There is good reason why, in western societies, vaccination uptake is lowest among ethnic minorities. The clues are embedded in the three preceding paragraphs. Powerful nation-states, run by white elites for the benefit of white elites, have been trampling on the bodily autonomy of black and brown people for centuries – sometimes because those elites were indifferent to the harm they were causing, and sometimes because they professed to be helping these “inferior” peoples, such as in the “war on terror’s” promotion of neoliberal “democracy” as the grounds for invading countries whose oil we coveted.
The pretexts change but the bad faith is the same.
Based on their long histories of suffering at the hands of western, colonial states, black and brown communities have every reason to continue assuming bad faith. It is not solidarity, or protecting them, to ignore or trivialise their concerns and their alienation from state institutions. It is ugly arrogance. Contempt for their concerns will not make those concerns evaporate. It will reinforce them.
But, of course, there is also something arrogant about treating the concerns of ethnic minorities as exceptional, patronising them by according them some kind of special dispensation, as though they need indulging on the principle of bodily autonomy when the rest of us are mature enough to discard it.
The fact is each generation comes to understand that the priorities of its ancestors were misplaced. Each generation has a powerful elite, or a majority whose consent has been manufactured, that luxuriate in the false certainty that bodily autonomy can be safely sacrificed for a higher principle. Half a century ago the proponents of marital rape argued for protecting tradition and patriarchal values because they were supposedly the glue holding society together. With 50 years’ hindsight, we may see the current debates about vaccine mandates – and the completely unscientific corollary that the unvaccinated are unclean and plague carriers – in much the same light.
The swelling political consensus on vaccine mandates intentionally ignores the enormous spread of the virus after two years of pandemic and the consequent natural immunity of large sections of the population, irrespective of vaccination status. This same consensus obfuscates the fact that natural immunity is most likely to prove longer-lasting and more effective against any variants of Covid that continue to emerge. And the consensus distracts from the inconvenient fact that the short-lived efficacy of the current vaccines means everyone is potentially “unclean” and a plague carrier, as the new variant Omicron is underscoring only too clearly.
No solidarity
The truth is that where each of us stands on the political divide over bodily autonomy says less about how much we prioritise human rights, or the social good, or solidarity with the weak and powerless, and much more about other, far less objectively rational matters, such as:
how fearful we are personally about the effects of Covid on ourselves or our loved ones;
whether we think the plutocrats that run our societies have prioritised the social good over the desire for quick, profit-making technological fixes, and the appearance of strong leadership and decisive action;
how sure we are that science is taking precedence over the interests of pharmaceutical corporations whose profits are booming as our societies grow older and sicker, and whether we think these corporations have captured our regulatory authorities, including the World Health Organisation;
whether we think it helpful or dangerous to scapegoat an unvaccinated minority, blaming it for straining health services or for the failure to eradicate a virus that is, in reality, never going away;
and, especially in the left’s case, how reassured we are that non-western, official “enemy” governments, such as Cuba, China, Russia and Iran, have thrown most of their eggs into the vaccine basket too – and usually as enthusiastically as western societies.
It is possible, however, that the way our technological, materialist world has evolved, ruled by competitive elites in nation states vying for power, means there was always likely to be a single, global conception of how to end the pandemic: through a quick-fix, magic bullet of either a vaccine or a drug. The fact that nation states – the “good” and “bad” alike – are unlikely to think outside this particular box does not mean it is the only box available, or that this box must be the one all citizens are coerced into.
Basic human rights do not apply only in the good times. They can’t just be set aside in difficult times like a pandemic because those rights are a nuisance, or because some people refuse to do what we think is best for them. Those rights are fundamental to what it means to live in a free and open society. If we get rid of bodily autonomy while we deal with this virus, that principle will have to be fought for all over again – and in the context of hi-tech, surveillance states that are undoubtedly more powerful than any we have known before.
Coerced vaccination
It is wrong, however, to focus exclusively on bodily autonomy. The undermining of the right to bodily autonomy is slipping into an equally alarming undermining of the right to cognitive autonomy. In fact, these two kinds of autonomy cannot be readily disentangled. Because anyone who believes that people must be required to take a vaccine will soon be arguing that no one should be allowed to hear information that might make them more resistant to vaccination.
There is an essential problem about maintaining an open and honest debate during a time of pandemic, which anyone who is thinking critically about Covid and our responses to it must grapple with every time they put finger to keyboard. The discourse playing-field is far from level.
Those who demand vaccine mandates, and wish to jettison the principle of bodily autonomy as a “medical” inconvenience, can give full-throated voice to their arguments in the secure knowledge that only a few, isolated contrarians may occasionally dare to challenge them.
But when those who value the principle of bodily autonomy or who blanch at the idea of coerced vaccination wish to make their case, they must hold back. They must argue with one arm tied behind their backs – and not just because they are likely to be mobbed, particularly by the left, for trying to widen the range of arguments under consideration in what are essentially political and ethical debates masquerading as scientific ones.
Tonight I will oppose both compulsory vaccines for NHS staff, and the introduction of vaccine passports. Both measures are counterproductive and will create division when we need cooperation and unity.
Those questioning the manufactured consensus – a consensus that intentionally scapegoats the unvaccinated as disease carriers, a consensus that has once again upended social solidarity among the 99 per cent, a consensus that has been weaponised to shield the elites from proper scrutiny for their profiteering from the pandemic – must measure every word they say against the effect it may have on those listening.
Personal calculations
I place a high value on autonomy, of both the cognitive and physical varieties. I am against the state deciding for me what I and you are allowed to think and say, and I am against the state deciding what goes into my and your body without our consent (though I also recognise that I have little choice but to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, and eat chemically altered food, all of which have damaged my and your immune systems and made us more susceptible to viruses like Covid).
But at the same time, unlike the vaccine mandate mob, I never forget that I am responsible for my words and that they have consequences, and potentially dangerous ones. There are a significant proportion of people who almost certainly need to be vaccinated, and probably regularly, to avoid being seriously harmed by exposure to the virus. Any responsible writer needs to weigh the effect of their words. I do not wish to be responsible for making one person who would benefit from a vaccine more hesitant to take it. I am particularly wary of playing God during a pandemic.
However, my reluctance to pontificate on a subject on which I have no expertise – vaccine safety – does not confer a licence on others to command the debate on other subjects about which they appear to know very little, such as medical and political ethics.
The fact is, however much some people would be best advised to take the vaccine, there is a recognised risk involved, even if we are not supposed to mention it. The long-term safety of the vaccines is unknown and cannot be known for several more years – and possibly for much longer, given the refusal of the drug regulators to release vaccine data for many more decades.
The vaccine technology is novel and its effects on the complex physiology of the human body and the individual vagaries of each of our immune systems will not be fully apparent for a long time. The decision to take a new type of vaccine in these circumstances is a calculation that each individual must weigh carefully for themselves, based on a body they know better than anyone else.
Pretending that there is no calculation – that everyone is the same, that the vaccines will react in the same manner on every person – is belied by the fact that the vaccines have had to be given emergency approval, and that there have been harsh disagreements even among experts about whether the calculation in favour of vaccination makes sense for everyone, especially for children. That calculation is further complicated by the fact that a significant section of the population now have a natural immunity to the whole virus and not just vaccine-induced immunity to the spike protein.
But stuffing everyone into a one-size-fits-all solution is exactly what bureaucratic, technocratic states are there to do. It is what they know best. To the state, you are I and just a figure on a pandemic spread-sheet. To think otherwise is childish delusion. Those who refuse to think of themselves as simply a spread-sheet digit – those who insist on their right to bodily and cognitive autonomy – should not be treated as narcissists for doing so or as a threat to public health, especially when the immunity provided by the vaccines is so short-lived, the vaccines themselves are highly leaky, and there is little understanding yet of the differences, or even potential conflicts, between natural and vaccine-induced immunity.
Perpetual emergency
Nonetheless, parts of the left are acting as if none of this is true, or even debatable. Instead they are proudly joining the mob, leading the self-righteous clamour to assert control not only over the bodies of others but over their minds too. This left angrily rejects all debate as a threat to the official “medical” consensus. They insist on conformity of opinion and then claim it as science, in denial of the fact that science is by its nature disputatious and evolves constantly. They cheer on censorship – by profit-driven social media corporations – even when it is recognised experts who are being silenced.
Their subtext is that any contrary opinion is a threat to the social order, and will fuel vaccine hesitancy. The demand is that we all become worshippers at the altars of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, at the risk otherwise of being denounced as heretics, as “anti-vaxxers”. No middle ground can be allowed in this era of perpetual emergency.
This is not just disturbing ethically. It is disastrous politically. The state is already massively powerful against each of us as individuals. We have collective power only in so far as we show solidarity with each other. If the left conspires with the state against those who are weak, against black and brown communities whose main experiences of state institutions have been abusive, against the “deplorables”, we divide ourselves and make the weakest parts of our society even weaker.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn understood this when he was one of the few on the left to publicly resist the recent move by the UK government to legislate vaccine mandates. He rightly argued that the correct path is persuasion, not coercion.
But this kind of mix of reason and compassion is being drowned out on parts of the left. They justify violations of bodily and cognitive autonomy on the grounds that we are living in exceptional times, during a pandemic. They complacently argue that such violations will be temporary, required only until the virus is eradicated – even though the virus is now endemic and with us for good. They silently assent to the corporate media being given even greater censorship powers as the price we must pay to deal with vaccine hesitancy, on the assumption that we can reclaim the right to dissent later.
But these losses, in circumstances in which our rights and freedoms are already under unprecedented assault, will not be easily restored. Once social media can erase you or me from the public square for stating real-world facts that are politically and commercially inconvenient – such as Twitter’s ban on anyone pointing out that the vaccinated can spread the virus too – there will be no going back.
Political instincts
There is a further reason, however, why the left is being deeply foolish in turning on the unvaccinated and treating the principles of bodily and cognitive autonomy with such contempt. Because this approach sends a message to black and brown communities, and to the “deplorables”, that the left is elitist, that its talk of solidarity is hollow, and that it is only the right, not the left, that is willing to fight to protect the most intimate freedoms we enjoy – over our bodies and minds.
Every time the left shouts down those who are hesitant about taking a Covid vaccine; every time it echoes the authoritarianism of those who demand mandates, chiefly for low-paid workers; every time it refuses to engage with – or even allow – counter-arguments, it abandons the political battlefield to the right.
Through its behaviour, the shrill left confirms the right’s claims that the political instincts of the left are Stalinist, that the left will always back the might of an all-powerful state against the concerns of ordinary people, that the left sees only the faceless masses, who need to be herded towards bureaucratically convenient solutions, rather than individuals who need to be listened to as they grapple with their own particular dilemmas and beliefs.
The fact is that you can favour vaccines, you can be vaccinated yourself, you can even desire that everyone regularly takes a Covid vaccine, and still think that bodily and cognitive autonomy are vitally important principles – principles to be valued even more than vaccines. You can be a cheerleader for vaccination and still march against vaccine mandates.
Some on the left behave as if these are entirely incompatible positions, or as if they are proof of hypocrisy and bad faith. But what this kind of left is really exposing is their own inability to think in politically complex ways, their own difficulty remembering that principles are more important than quick-fixes, however frightening the circumstances, and that the debates about how we organise our societies are inherently political, much more so than technocratic or “medical”.
The right understands that there is a political calculus in handling the pandemic that cannot be discarded except at a grave political cost. Part of the left has a much weaker grasp of this point. Its censoriousness, its arrogance, its hectoring tone – all given cover by claims to be following a “science” that keeps changing – are predictably alienating those the left claims to represent.
The left needs to start insisting again on the critical importance of bodily and cognitive autonomy – and to stop shooting itself in the foot.
Nah, we are not a society ready for deep discussion and debate about work, forced revealing of health information, forced mRNA jabs, and more. So, here we are, a teacher, ready to be gone gone gone. Andy Libson has drawn a line in the sand.
The decision of where a person will draw a line comes to our show hosts. We speak to Andy Libson about the decisions he is being forced into at his own job. Workers and students across the nation are being mandated to submit their status or proof of the COVID injection. This has caused many to face a “choice” between their “freedoms” or their livelihoods. Get jabbed or be terminated and ostracized in a society where the obligation to get injected by the government is being encroached in almost every sector of our society. This episode poses the question…”where will you draw your line?”
At 1 hour and 37 minutes, Kenny and Eduardo and Andy discussing how Andy is handcuffed with San Francisco School District provisos of giving the school district his vaccination status, and if he has a medical or religious exemption, that too.
You see that information is really not protected in some red file in HR. The administration in his school has it, and, really, when you listen to this, any parent who comes in and says she saw teacher Andy without a mask (she could lie, of course), then she would have a right to ask about HIS vaccination status.
There are no five ways to look at this — it is a culture of snitching, but worse: fear, and accommodating the worst of the worst concepts of always treating humans as guilty-dirty-useless-sick-unvaccinated before proving otherwise. And there is no proving, since there is no discourse. All information is being banned, and the pigs in administrations, pigs in the CEO class (sic) and those HR fools who listen to lawyers and default to the most common denominator: workers are not to be trusted.
Now, this might be pulled from Fuck You Tube, since Andy and Eduardo and Kenny are having a conversation about risks, intended risks, unintended risks, the subterfuge, the fascist policies of compulsory this, compulsory gene therapy, and forced dictates. This is not controversial, in any other time, other baseline. But that shifting baseline syndrome has rotted the brains of the liberal (faux) class, and the rampant/rabid stupidity of people who label those of us who WANT more information, who want to RESEARCH, who want to delve into the shit that is corporate crime and bureaucratic crime and group think and lies are truth, and newspeak.
Here’s JJ on a Bike, and those creeps, those sexist pukes like Howard Stern, Sean Penn, Bill Maher, et al, the wouldn’t last a minute with this fellow talking about the Covid origins. And the origins of this Covid-19 are important — WAY important tied to the entire lock-up mentality, the entire rush for Warp Speed untested non-vaccines. It just is a little hindrance, no, on exactly how the SARS-CoV2
This is the new lay of the land, not wanting to talk, to research, to listen. JJ: Pittsburg scientist, and this is March 2020!!!
You think Physics Teacher Andy Libson — before he’s sacked — could show this episode to seniors and discuss what scientific inquiry is? Hell, I couldn’t show this in a college level writing class without a whole lot of pain: just one student complaining; just one passing fellow teacher complaining. Or what about having this essay as a reading piece for discussion and response?
“COVID-19 Detention Camps: Are Government Round-Ups of Resistors in Our Future?”
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / September 29th, 2021
“No doubt concentration camps were a means, a menace used to keep order.”
It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.
This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and FEMA concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.
The question that needs to be begged is what will the SFSD do when they access this episode of What’s Left . . . and they have tons of snitches? Remember, these are mostly spineless administrators, out to lunch school board members, lock-step thinkers in the hierarchy in unions. These are schools that have fully-SWAT outfitted pigs on campus, “resource officers,” and these are schools that let the armed mercenary services on campus to recruit, but they would never let an antiwar, anti-military peace loving group on campus, or even Veterans for Peace, or Coffee Strong.
And, just breaking now, Shit-ehh-Fornia, and its bizarre Governor, mandating k12, 6 years of age to 20, the jab. This is how these people roll.
Gavin Newsom just announced that California would become the first state to mandate eligible students attending public and private schools be vaccinated against Covid for in-person instruction.
According to KFI News in Los Angeles, “The governor is directing the California Department of Public Health to add the COVID vaccine to other vaccinations required for in-person learning.”
This would have NEVER been accepted treatment of young kids, in 2019! The rich see us all as diseased!
The consensus is in — no choice, no life, no job, no nothing, without a passport. That medical, DNA scan, the retina scan, all biological systems covered, that all-encompassing passport that lists every move, every moment, every job, every purchase, every fine, penalty, tax, rental, home, significant or insignificant emotional and economic and familial event, captured in a chip. Americans are spoiled, for sure, as are Europeans, and Canadians. That mostly encompasses the Great White Hopes of those respective “countries.” The rest of us, in these “first world” environs are struggling, even with debit and credit and La-La Land accoutrements ad infinitum.
These new times in the west are old times, bubbling up, really, from the early conquest days of razing Indian families, destroying and taking over and plowing through villages, lands, territories. Entire rooms at elite Ivy League universities and museums with drawers and boxes of Native American skulls, bones, skins, eyes, belongings, sacred objects. It is the way of the Egyptologists, and it is the way of the Crusades. Pillage, set villages on fire, and now, set states and countries on fire with fear and terror campaigns in order to exact total compliancy. Services, labor, debt, future payments, extracted from us, capitalism’s marks. Victims. Useless eaters-breeders-breathers-squatters.
Here, from David Rovics, musician and protestor, with some great stuff on Dissident Voice over the years, just coming back from Denmark (and other countries in his gig line). He embraces progressivism and the forced jabs. He is a good fellow, who interviewed me, and we talked about other things tied to the ugly side of leftists and their canceling culture, censorship, etc., but this conversation about jab/mask/remote lockup mandates has not happened yet. I still have room in my brain to listen to what he says, though he misses so many points here:
Despite the prevalence of disinformation platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube being as popular in Denmark as anywhere else that doesn’t have the good sense to ban them, the anti-vaccine movement and anti-lockdown movement in Denmark never grew to the proportions of such movements in the US, Germany, France and elsewhere. But unlike those aforementioned countries, in Denmark most people have a well-founded reason to trust the government on matters of public health and safety.
In Denmark, if anyone jaywalks, they’re usually either a foreigner or an antisocial type. The overwhelming majority of Danes would never do that. This is also true in Germany and some other countries. Americans and Brits and others visiting from abroad tend to make typically American and British individualistic, antisocial assumptions about this conformist behavior. They see a crowd of Germans or Danes standing at a crosswalk, waiting for the “walk” signal, even if there’s no traffic in any direction, and they see something scary, from Children of the Corn or some other horror movie, a bunch of zombies who can’t think for themselves, or are afraid of getting a ticket. (source — David Rovics)
That’s a whole other set of discussion points from this tour he had in Denmark about what democratic socialism is, what society is, how science and government should be trusted (really?). Jaywalking and shoot, tossing banana peels on the side of the road. How dare us lazy, supercilious and egotistical North Americans! Yankees!
The unfolding global hysteria is congealing into even more lovely by-products of Big Pharma as Dictatorship. It comes in many forms and offshoots, for sure. The main functions of Western society are broken — neoliberal and conservative values (sic) have gutted infrastructure, have thrown trillions of bucks-euros to the few, have propped up this society into a very effective kleptocracy, have imbued a dog eat dog set of beliefs into a slew of folks.
We are at the point where billionaires and their lackeys in high places set the narrative, tone, and write the legislation, laws and force zero delimits on corporations and government in this “we the people” system we supposedly “fought” for. There is collapse, after collapse, after collapse, and it is apparent in the lack of governance over decades, and the adventures of imperial overreach, too.
In daily lives, professional managerial class actors are hitting the middle/upper middle class stratum, economically, through the systems of pain, fines, fees, tolls, penalties, regressive taxation, permits and litigation that eat at us, the 80 percent, from the soul and the brain and the body. We are in a time of most people not being able to navigate “the system,” and that can be any system — school, medical, social security, DMV, courts, and any number of systems of oppression and subjugation. So it is a time of chaos, now Covid Chaos, moving into more Chaos.
“People are fed up,” says Winni Paul, a management consultant whose clients have included campuses and higher-education groups. “The graciousness, the compassion, the ‘we do it for the students, we do it for the work’ — that’s gone.”
And I am with a group of teachers from many states, who are now scrambling to figure out what to do with the forced jabs, the forced proof of jabs, the forced masking, all of that, and many will not submit to the experimental mRNA, many have looked into these DNA-alternating medical devices, and they feel alone, big time. Their AFT (American Federation of Teachers) union has caved, and they see in big cities and small, all venues requiring, soon, a passport, CDC-approved vaccination card.
Delta airlines is forcing non-vaccinated employees to pay an additional $200 a month premium, AKA fine for not being jabbed. Oh, that was yesterday (August 25), and that will not be the end of it. Fools like Thom Hartman advocate ER physicians having the right to refuse treatment to anyone coming in — motorcycle accident, heart attack, broken leg, stroke — who are not vaccinated.
This is the Brave New World already outlined by the eugenicists of the 1920s, of the Modest Proposal of Swift’s time, of the middle passage days of tossing overboard hundreds of sick shackled slaves in one one-way crossing. Multiply that by hundreds of ships, tossing human beings for the sharks, alive, shackled in chains. It is the genocidal policies of empires and their corporate thugs (overlords) in despoiling cultures, murdering millions, and enslaving regions for their rubber, silver, gold, lithium, any number of things the capitalists call loot and booty. Pirates compared to the thieves from history and today seem like Fred McFeely Rogers in comparison.
Even a saint, Fauci, he is a titan of terror in his old man’s way — “over his 50-year career with the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to address the cause, to prevent or cure the exploding epidemics of allergies and chronic disease that Congress charged him with curtailing. The chronic disease pandemic is his enduring legacy. Those ailments now debilitate 54% of American children compared to 6% when he joined NIAD.” (source — RFK Jr.)
In this group of teachers, daily there are emails announcing more and more statewide jab mandates, and the teachers that have to pay twice-a-week tests, if not jabbed, well, it is filling up those school districts; and many now in this group want out, since their email boxes are filling up. Teachers, youngish and not, with no money in the bank, really, and no place to go, since I predict all new rental agreements throughout the land (except in some Breaking Bad locales) will require proof of jab x, jab y, jab z, jab infinity.
The playing field shifts hourly, and while I have a literary reading manana, in Portland, for this hour, at least, the restaurant and community room demands all to be masked. There is no shot record demand, YET, but that’s on the horizon, since Oregon is the first state to reinstate mandatory outside masking policies. But the venue’s other locations, well, the rock and roll and progressives, they want to see vax cards or proof of SARS-CoV2 free tests. The Crystal Ballroom
It doesn’t matter how many millions of people worldwide are not happy with mRNA experimental chemicals forced into the bloodstream and across the blood-brain barrier; not happy with the bioweaponry aspect of Operation Warp Speed; not happy with the therapeutics that have been disavowed and censored, which could have saved millions of lives, possibly. One size fits all, baby. This news aggregator and news maker site, well, it is almost scrubbed from all search engines:
These stories above and below are verboten in the minds of tens of millions, hundreds of millions Westerners — even though there are robust stories on other topics, besides Fauci, jabs and mRNA, and fascism in this places.
I am finding people fighting, for sure, against mandates. Hell, my one time with the doctor recently points to this: “While I did get the vaccination, I am against mandates. I am against forcing people against their will to get this. I am of the mind that people have the right to make up their own minds.” He’s older, maybe 70, is a DO, and I know the university where he adjunct taught and matriculated from, Touro University Nevada (TUN) (a private university in Henderson, Nevada. It is part of the Touro College and University System.Touro University Nevada is a branch campus of its sister campus Touro University California.)
My niece is there, in her second year, and my DO stated, his one word of advice for her is, Cash. “Tell her to write notes to family and friends, and state: ‘please send cash.’” The doctor likes me, and he’s a jokester. He told me reads a lot, and that he did work in Amazonian for years, “saving one life at a time.” He is looking at my recent stress test, and alas, getting a cardiologist on board to maybe do more investigation on some electrical anomalies when I got up to 160 beats per minute, that is another example of the failed capitalist system: there are none here on Highway 101 on the central coast, and getting one to see me could take weeks, out of the cities of Salem or Corvallis. This is the state of medicine, after decades of gutting taxation of the rich and the corporations (who are getting us sick) and years turning medicine into a bizarre insurance scam, where doctors spend more time on the computer screen than with the patient.
So, this next reset is all about pushing more and more people into fewer and fewer public spheres, pushing people away from outliers or those defiant and dissident like me and millions. It is about controlling the masses, setting forth sophisticated bandwagon forms of propaganda, and setting afire all forms of community gatherings and robust discussions of the millions of topics of the day.
With this teachers’ group, the messages are coming in:
Governor Pritzker just announced mandatory vax for all IL teachers
Here is Dr. Peter McCullough talking about the dangers of vaccines, among other things: Basically, the vaxxed are projecting all the havoc they themselves are wreaking even as “life is pretty much back to normal among the vaccinated,” as many are bragging onto the unvaxxed. Many op-eds in publications like WaPo and the NYT are filling their pages with doctors martyring themselves and declaring they won’t treat unvaxxed anymore (to cheers from bots and humans alike in the comments section) and normalizing ending friendships based on vaccination status. But they are the super spreaders. They are the ones making children and Grandma sick. This is scapegoating at its finest.
Some great work is being done by Mike Williams @ Sage of Quay. Also, great Common Law shows being done by Crrow777 Radio Alfonso Faggiola and Lena Pu.
Want to see a man stand up to the controllers? Check out Paul Unslaved . You can also gain a little insight from some of the good First Amendment auditors like Long Island Audit.
California AB455 – this bill, if passed, will mandate the C19 vaccine for all CA employees and for CA citizens to enter any establishment except church and grocery stores:
Lastly, ICYMI – Illinois’ Vax Verify – vaccination verification is tied to Experian – meaning residents will have to go through a one-time verification process through Experian to access their vaccination records. So stating the obvious – this is opening the door increasingly towards a social credit system.
Then this from one of the people on this list wanting the mandates and the draconian measures stopped:
Just a quick note: This Sunday will mark 58 years of me being active in the political sphere. Back in ’64, it was as a Goldwater volunteer. Some 6 years later, i switched sides, a consequence of the Vietnam War, the counterculture, ecological crisis,… And became much more of an activist. I have no love whatsoever for the right. But I’ve also seen the “left” act at critical points as a defender of the capitalist status quo, particularly as a consequence of the dominant tendency within the left to accept the state as if it were an institution acting on behalf of society as a whole, rather than the instrument of class power it has been since it emerged in history thousands of years ago. Both left and right (and “center”) are fully on board with the onrushing police state, while each proclaims itself to be defending the interests of humanity against the others. People need to look to themselves for solutions, and learn from historical movements, including anarchists and anti-statist socialists.
I heartily accept the motto,—”That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—”That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men and women are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
— Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government, 1849
Succinctly, Communist approaches to anti-statism center on the relationship between political rule and class struggle. Karl Marx defined the state as the institution used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. To this extent, the ultimate goal of communist society was theorized as both stateless and classless.
We are at 8 billion, and the planet is run by Blackstone and BlackRock and around 30 financial organizations, and around 140 corporations. The bottleneck is what the planned pandemic was all about — getting people to run away from sanity, common sense, and running into the various insane asylums. For anyone to question why some of us — who are way beyond just coming out from under the Capitalist-Media-Education rock — might doubt the purveyors of capital, scientism, control, policing, finance and corrupt drug companies, well, that is where I am now — “since the majority of people are in line for the jab, what’s your fucking lunatic problem?”
The distortions that go on under capitalism are so obscene it’s hard to wrap your head around it sometimes, on a micro level as well as a macro level. I was riding on the subway and I took a couple of trains and I was looking at the ads. The average American sees about 3,000 ads a day. One ad was for a credit card, and this is the slogan for the credit card—“Less plastic, more human—Discover it is human.” Discover is the card that they were advertising. In other words, you can actually be more human by having this type of credit card. Another ad, and this gets to the quality of life, that I pass by was about online delivery of food—how you can order online instead of having to phone somebody—and the ad read, “You’ve perfected the odds of getting to third base faster. Food delivery date night.” The obscenity and depravity of capitalism knows no depths to which it will not plumb.
This is something that Karl Marx talked about quite a bit. He was speaking at the anniversary of the People’s Paper in 1856, and I think this resonates far more with us now than it did even in his time.
On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire.
That kind of sense of decay pervades our world as it is currently structured. He goes on:
In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.
At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.
John Bellamy Foster on ecosocialism: “Ecological resistance in the twenty-first century has more and more been informed by the development of Marxian ecology and ecosocialism more generally. However, as ecosocialist analysis has grown, various divergent branches of thought have emerged, often in conflict with each other. Based on the conviction that clarity about capitalism’s relation to the environment is indispensable for the strategic understanding of present-day struggles, this talk will present some of the new research within Marxian ecology, bringing together the core issues of the expropriation of nature and the metabolic rift, and seeking to unite the ecosocialist movements of our time.”
Another set of notes from another teacher on this V is for Vendetta Vaccines email group — I’m calling it that as a joke:
I just attended a workshop for religious exemptions, and will forward the email for any of those who wish to attend. I am also happy to share insights and notes I took to help out anyone who wishes to take this route. However, I would like to share some notes and important information discussed in this workshop.
First, if you are part a union or teachers union, Collective Bargaining needs to take place. Many unions did not have a seat at the table and have sent cease and desist letters that could delay the mandates. Remember the unions represent both the majority and the minority of their union members and even if there is only 15 percent against the mandates, those individuals should be represented. It was recommended to call your Labor Relations Representative or Union Rep to see if they have sent a cease and desist letter or are planning on it. Key word is the Collective Bargaining aspect of the unions and you may be able to ask them to do so.
Additionally, I think if you are able to file for a religious exemption it is a good way to buy time. The common law approach may be a good option for those who do not have an option. Realistically, for Californians we are a Right to Work state, and employers have the right to fire and hire at will. With either method there is a possibility of job termination which has to be considered, and I do not know exactly how the outcome has been going for individuals who have filed religious vs. common law approaches. That said I do know there have been many religious exemptions accepted and there is an appeals process if denied. If you are on a timetable and need to be vaccinated by a date that is closely approaching, the religious exemption is probably more likely to be one way to hold onto employment a little longer. My understanding of the common law approach is that it can be more time consuming because legal notices have times frames for notices, responses, and actions to take place and may not work with your deadline which again can lead to termination. Because California is an At Will Work state there may be risk to filing for any unemployment as well, so all these things should be considered before deciding which route to take.
I am not saying one option is better than the other, I am just presenting them as Option A or Option B, because I think we all have differences in our personal situations. One may work better for you personally than the other. That said, we should also have our plan B in place if neither work. Helping each other is essential and it will be good to share with one another what has worked and what hasn’t, and I do not want to argue either method, just help out in any way possible. Our differences in ideology are unimportant to me at this time. I believe there is a good portion of us, who are strong personalities, opinionated and intelligence — and these may be the wonderful unifying qualities that have brought us together at this critical time to fight for our humanity.
Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed,
Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need –
new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child…
Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace.
Europe’s identity crisis is not confined to the ceaseless squabbles by Europeans over the EU, Brexit or football. It goes much deeper, reaching sensitive and dangerous territory, including that of culture and religion. Once more, Muslims stand at the heart of the continent’s identity debate.
Of course, anti-Muslim sentiments are rarely framed to appear anti-Muslim. While Europe’s right-wing parties remain committed to the ridiculous notion that Muslims, immigrants and refugees pose a threat to Europe’s overall security and unique secular identities, the left is not entirely immune from such chauvinistic notions.
The right’s political discourse is familiar and is often condemned for its repugnantly ultra-nationalistic, if not outright racist, tone and rhetoric. The left, on the other hand, is a different story. The European left, notably in countries like France and Belgium, frame their ‘problem’ with Islam as fundamental to their supposed dedication to the secular values of the State.
“A problem arises when, in the name of religion, some want to separate themselves from the Republic and therefore not respect its laws,” Macron said during a speech in October 2020.
Leftist politicians and intellectuals were just as eager as the right to prevent Ihsane Haouach, a Belgian government representative, from serving as a commissioner at the Institute for the Equality of Women and Men (IEFH). Again, both sides joined forces, although without an official declaration of unity, to ensure Haouach had no place in the country’s democratic process.
It was a repeat of a similar scenario in France last May when Sara Zemmahi was removed from the ruling party’s candidates list for seemingly violating France’s valeurs de la République – the values of the Republic.
These are but mere examples, and are hardly restricted to French-speaking countries. There are many such disquieting events pointing to a deep-seated problem that remains unresolved. In Britain, Rakhia Ismail, who was celebrated as the country’s first hijab-wearing mayor in May 2019, resigned from her post less than a year and a half later, citing racism and marginalization.
While the Belgian, French, and British media elaborated on these stories as if unique to each specific country, in truth, they are all related. Indeed, they are all the outcome of an overriding phenomenon of anti-Muslim prejudice, coupled with a wave of racism that has plagued Europe for many years, especially in the last decade.
Though Europe’s official institutions, mainstream media, sports clubs and so on, continue to pay lip service to the need for diversity and inclusion, the reality on the ground is entirely different. A recent example was the horrific outcome of England’s defeat in the EURO2020 final against Italy. Gangs of white English, mostly males, attacked people of color, especially black people, whether on the street or online. The extent of cyber-bullying, in particular, targeting dark-skinned athletes is almost unprecedented in the country’s recent history.
Various British officials, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, condemned the widespread racism. Interestingly, many of these officials have said or done very little to combat anti-Muslim hate and violence in the past, which often targeted Muslim women for their head or face covering.
Strikingly, Johnson, purportedly now leading the anti-racist charge, was one of the most disparaging officials who spoke demeaningly of Muslim women in the past. “Muslim women wearing burka look like letter boxes,” he said, according to the BBC.
Of course, Islamophobia must be seen within the larger context of the toxic anti-refugee and anti-immigrant sentiments, now defining factors in shaping modern European politics. It is this hate and racism that served as the fuel for rising political parties like Le Front National in France, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, The Freedom Party in Austria and the Lega in Italy. In fact, there is a whole intellectual discourse, complete with brand new theories that are used to channel yet more hate, violence and racism against immigrants.
And where is the left in all of this? With a few exceptions, much of the left is still trapped in its own intellectual hubris, adding yet more fuel to the fire while veiling their criticism of Islam as if genuine concern for secularism.
Oddly, in Europe, as in much of the West, crosses and Stars of David as necklaces, or the Catholic nuns’ head covering, velo delle suore, let alone the kippahs, the religious tattoos and many other such symbols are all part of Europe’s everyday culture. Why do we never hear of such controversy of a Jewish man being tossed out of a public building because of his kippah or a white French woman being expelled from university for wearing a cross? The matter has less to do with religious symbols, in general, than of the religious symbols of races and peoples who are simply unwanted in Europe.
Also, limiting the discussion to refugees and immigrants may give the impression that the debate is mostly concerned with the non-European ‘others’ who are ‘invading’ Europe’s shores, determined to ‘replace’ Europe’s original, white, Christian inhabitants. This is hardly the case, since a sizable percentage of Belgians and French, for example, are themselves Muslims, estimated at 6 percent and 5% respectively. Namely, these Muslims are European citizens.
Haouach, Zemmahi and Ismail actually wanted to be a part of – not break apart from – these societies by honoring their country’s most cherished political traditions, yet without erasing their own cultural heritage and religious identities in the process. Alas, they were all vehemently rejected, as if Europe has made a collective decision to ensure that Muslims subsist in the margins forever. And when Muslim communities try to fight back, using Europe’s own judicial systems as their supposed saviors, they are, once again, rejected. The latest of such spurns was in June, when Belgium’s constitutional court resolved that prohibiting the wearing of hijab does not constitute a violation of freedom of religion or the right to education.
It is time for European countries to understand that their demographics are fundamentally changing, and that such change can, in fact, be beneficial to the health of these nations. Without true diversity and meaningful inclusion, there can be no real progress in any society, anywhere.
But while demographic shifts can offer an opportunity for growth, it can also inspire fear, racism and, predictably, violence as well.
Europe, which has fought two horrendous wars in the last century, should know better.
Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward.
— Jaron Lanier
Critical race theory, according to Wikipedia, is “a body of legal scholarship and an academic movement of civil-rights scholars and activists in the United States that seeks to critically examine U.S. law as it intersects with issues of race in the U.S. and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice.”
Critical race theory (CRT), according to the Republican House Freedom Caucus, is “teaching American students to hate each other,” “tears people apart,” is “teaching our children that America is evil and is a “divisive ideology that threatens to poison the American psyche.”
All of the above is false or maybe it’s true. Who knows? Who cares? None of it matters anyway. CRT is now as informative a term as “family values” or “diversity” or “Black lives matter” or “socialism” or “common good” or “tolerance” or “social justice” or “freedom of speech” or… you get the idea. These terms are weapons. Whether you vibe with them or not, you use them as disingenuous weapons — without a hint of concern about the accuracy or deeper meaning. They are straw men in a bigger game of distraction and denial. While the Fake News swirls and mesmerizes, those in charge gain more power and more wealth. Same as it ever was.
Are there some on the Right who are using anti-CRT rhetoric to mask their racist tendencies? Of course. Are there some on the Left using their pro-CRT rhetoric to mask their fascist tendencies? Of course. But most of those talking about CRT right now are uninformed dupes. They’re regurgitating the talking points of their TV network or social media platform of choice — without a hint of concern about the accuracy or deeper meaning. It’s virtue signaling yet again.
Useful debate is impossible so we’ve moved on to utter deception. You can blame CRT for whatever bothers you about the world with no worries. No one will ever bother looking it up. What good is fact-checking in a time of alternative facts? Besides, if you’re a Republican blah-blah-blahing about CRT on Fox News, your colleagues and your opponents aren’t concerned with what you’re actually saying. In their minds, all that matters is that you’re a Republican on Fox News. They pre-emptively agree or disagree with you before you even open your mouth. This is what passes for “debate” in 2021.
CRT is merely this year’s villain of choice and the media always profits from the creation of villains (Isis, communists, right-wing radio hosts, maskers, anti-maskers, Antifa, MAGA, etc., etc.). They only exist to scare or slander or bully or demonize others. So if you’re expecting me to present an annotated dissertation on the deep meaning critical race theory, you’re barking up the wrong tree. I could but there is no value in any such discussion when people can’t even agree on what words mean. The window for meaningful discussion on CRT slammed shut a long time ago. All sides made certain of that.
As a result, CRT is nothing more than the latest bogeyman for the Right and the latest cudgel for the Left. To gain credibility within your narrow hive mind, there is no need to comprehend the nuances and related issues. All you need to do (depending on which echo chamber you call home) is declare your undying love for CRT or denounce it to Hell. Your fellow cult members will adore you and assure you that you’ve broken the code.
Reminder: Regardless of which sect you’ve joined, the vast majority of U.S. students aren’t particularly interested in what they learn in school anyway. They were conditioned a long time ago to temporarily memorize what they need to know. Once the exams are over, they can just forget it all to make room for the important stuff, you know, like TikTok.
This entire “debate” is teeming with bad ideas from all players on all sides. The solution for bad ideas should never be the silencing of those with whom you disagree. Almost always, the solution for bad ideas is better ideas. Pro tip: Skip the dog and pony shows. Focus instead on rediscovering the subversive pleasure of thinking for yourself — and helping as many others as you can along the way.
These are early days for the self-styled ‘coalition of change’ in Israel, but it has already been presented with significant challenges in the form of the Jerusalem Flag March, the Evyatar outpost, and the Citizenship and Entry law. There is another one just around the corner.
This week, the High Court of Justice informed the new Minister of Education, Yifat Shasha-Biton, that she has three weeks to decide her position regarding one of the last acts of her predecessor, Yoav Gallant of Netanyahu’s government. Before leaving his post, Gallant made a final decision as Education Minister not to award the high-profile Israel Prize in computer science to a professor at the Weizmann Institute, Oded Goldreich.
Initially, Gallant vetoed the award of the prize back in April in the wake of a right-wing group ‘uncovering’ the academic’s alleged support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. In a follow-up to the veto, Gallant cast himself in the role of chief prosecutor in an investigation into the granting of the prize and Goldreich was summoned to a hearing whose function was to determine the answers to questions regarding petitions and open letters signed by him, his position regarding BDS and his activities in a group called Academia for Equality.
Professor Goldreich has been clear about his nuanced position regarding sanctions against Israel but former Minister Gallant did not do nuance. For him, the hearing had a straightforward purpose: to examine ‘whether the professor’s current renunciation of the boycott movement is sincere and whether the information he provided to the court and the state in this matter is correct.’ Goldreich’s legal representative confirmed his refusal to cooperate with a process that was ‘blatantly McCarthyist.’
Former Minister Gallant has history. He made headlines earlier this year for ordering the cancellation of a discussion in a school involving Hagai El-Ad, the director of human rights organization B’Tselem which had declared that Israel must now be considered an apartheid state. Gallant’s wider intention was to prohibit schools from inviting representatives of groups that discourage ‘meaningful service in the Israel Defence Forces’ and call Israel ‘false derogatory names.’
As an Israeli politician, Gallant is one of the more enthusiastic when it comes to attempting to shut down voices which are critical of Israeli policy. But with Gallant now sent into opposition, a declaration of a full-blown form of McCarthyism in Israel would be arguably premature. Gallant’s hearing was only a tribute act to the House Un-American Activities Committee and the new Education Minister has a real opportunity to signal a change of culture.
Shasha-Biton is well regarded but it won’t be easy. As a result of the Netanyahu years, there has been a substantial shift to the right in terms of what is acceptable to discuss in the public sphere. Direct censorship is uncommon in Israel but editorial selection, self-censorship and the mediation of Palestinian voices through Israeli journalistic ‘analysis’ result in compliant media organizations that readily provide platforms for far-right settlers, whilst moving down the news agenda anything relating to the daily reality of occupation.
Gallant’s activities were part of a trend that exists beyond the farce of the Israel Prize controversy and his own Orwellian interpretation of the job of Education Minister. Benjamin Netanyahu can be proud that, although dethroned, he bestowed upon the nation a significant legacy in the form of the delegitimization of liberal opinion. He achieved a toxification of the adjective ‘left-wing’ and his constant rhetoric referring to the dangers of the left was designed to stoke fear. His language trickled down to the street, tacitly encouraging the harassment of those who don’t conform, those considered traitors – even on the right. These are, of course, the problems of the privileged. In this land, it is still much harder to be a Palestinian than a progressive Israeli.
That said, beyond the influence of those in government, there is a layer of extra-parliamentary activity contributing to a climate of fear and intimidation and, yes, a nascent form of McCarthyism. It is worth taking stock here of some of the right-wing non-governmental organizations – sometimes described as ‘watchdogs’ or ‘think-tanks’ – which are active in the business of monitoring the left.
One of these, ‘grassroots Zionist movement’ Im Tirzu, claims to have played a direct role in the lobbying of Gallant in the case of Professor Goldreich. Im Tirzu is present on the usual range of platforms, but the website is particularly informative. The organization is dedicated to defending Zionism and exposing ‘widespread efforts to delegitimize Israel from within, whether it is in the form of BDS or subverting sovereign policies.’ A key activity is the group’s ‘Know the Anti-Israeli Professor’ project which produces and publishes files on academics worldwide, including one dedicated to Goldreich. In my book, if it looks like a blacklist and reads like one, then it probably is one.
Im Tirzu is not the only organization involved in monitoring individuals and the left in a broader sense and with challenging anything perceived as critical. Israel Academia Monitor is concerned with the activities of academics who ‘propound…false arguments that defame Israel.’ NGO Monitor focuses on ‘the anti-Israeli propaganda machine’ and the activities of NGOs such as B’Tselem ‘that claim to promote human rights.’ Honest Reporting is a website which exists to ‘combat ideological prejudice: in journalism and the media, as it impacts Israel.’ Ad Kan is a group specializing in ‘undercover work’ and infiltration, investigating ‘domestic organizations that discredit’ the name of the State of Israel.
These NGOs, together with the current squatter of Balfour and his lapdogs like Gallant, are part of an ideological front which has an interest in engendering an atmosphere of national paranoia. This has not disappeared with the formation of a new government. Highly political NGOs could be argued to be part and parcel of debate in a democratic society, but Israel is not a normal country after 50 plus years of a corrupting occupation, as ‘anti-Zionist’ NGOs such as B’Tselem and Yesh Din have pointed out. The wider culture of intimidation and blacklisting spawned by Netanyahu and these NGOs and the increasingly narrow boundaries of public discourse, reflect this fact.
It is not unpatriotic to be concerned about issues such as the occupation, and Professor Oded Goldreich has resisted the calls for public ‘renunciation’ in a show trial. Shasha-Biton has a decision to make which goes beyond the difference between her and Gallant, the new government and the old. At stake is not the integrity of the Israel Prize but the ability to express, or even hold, an oppositional opinion in the public arena in Israel. The likes of Gallant (and indeed Netanyahu, as we have learned) are ultimately accountable at the ballot box, but increasingly influential self-appointed watchdogs like Im Tirzu and Ad Kan operate freely. Unless there is an effort to transform the culture, they will continue to set the agenda through activities which identify, intimidate, and render vulnerable, those who think differently.
There’s been a new public fracturing of the intellectual left, typified by an essay last week from Nathan J Robinson, editor of the small, independent, socialist magazine Current Affairs, accusing Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi of bolstering the right’s arguments. He is the more reasonable face of what seems to be a new industry arguing that Greenwald is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, setting the right’s agenda for it.
Under the title “How to end up serving the right”, Robinson claims that Greenwald and Taibbi, once his intellectual heroes, are – inadvertently or otherwise – shoring up the right’s positions and weakening the left. He accuses them of reckless indifference to the consequences of criticising a “liberal” establishment and making common cause with the right’s similar agenda. Both writers, argues Robinson, have ignored the fact that the right wields the greatest power in our societies.
This appears to be a continuation of a fight Robinson picked last year with Krystal Ball, the leftwing, former co-host of a popular online politics show called The Rising. Robinson attacked her for sharing her platform with the conservative pundit Saagar Enjeti. Ball and Enjeti have since struck out on their own, recently launching a show called Breaking Points.
Notably, Greenwald invited Robinson on to his own YouTube channel to discuss these criticisms of Ball when Robinson first made them. In my opinion, Robinson emerged from that exchange looking more than a little bruised.
As with his clash with Ball, there are problems with Robinson’s fuzzy political definitions.
Somewhat ludicrously in his earlier tussle, he lumped together Enjeti, a thoughtful right wing populist, with figures like Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, both of them narcissists and authoritarians (of varying degrees of competence) that have donned the garb of populism, as authoritarians tend to do.
Similarly, Robinson’s current disagreements with Greenwald and Taibbi stem in part from a vague formulation – one he seems partially to concede – of what constitutes the “left”. Greenwald has always struck me more as a progressive libertarian than a clearcut socialist like Robinson. Differences of political emphasis and priorities are inevitable. They are also healthy.
And much of Robinson’s essay is dedicated to cherrypicking a handful of tweets from Greenwald and Taibbi to make his case. Greenwald, in particular, is a prolific tweeter. And given the combative and polarising arena of Twitter, it would be quite astonishing had he not occasionally advanced his arguments without the nuance demanded by Robinson.
Overall, Robinson’s case against both Greenwald and Taibbi is far less persuasive than he appears to imagine.
Stifling coverage
But the reason I think it worth examining his essay is because it demonstrates a more fundamental split on what – for the sake of convenience – I shall treat as a broader intellectual left that includes Robinson, Greenwald and Taibbi.
Robinson tries to prop up his argument that Greenwald, in particular, is betraying the left and legitimising the right with an argument from authority, citing some of the left’s biggest icons.
Two, Naomi Klein and Jeremy Scahill, are former journalist colleagues of Greenwald’s at the Intercept, the billionaire-financed online news publication that he co-founded and eventually split from after it broke an editorial promise not to censor his articles.
Greenwald fell out with the editors in spectacularly public fashion late last year after they stifled his attempts to write about the way Silicon Valley and liberal corporate media outlets – not unlike the Intercept – were colluding to stifle negative coverage of Joe Biden in the run-up to the presidential election, in a desperate bid to ensure he beat Trump.
Greenwald’s public statements about his reasons for leaving the Intercept exposed what were effectively institutional failings there – and implicated those like Scahill and Klein who had actively or passively colluded in the editorial censorship of its co-founder. Klein and Scahill are hardly dispassionate commentators on Greenwald when they accuse him of “losing the plot” and “promoting smears”. They have skin in the game.
But Robinson may think his trump (sic) card is an even bigger left icon, Noam Chomsky, who is quoted saying of Greenwald: “He’s a friend, has done wonderful things, I don’t understand what is happening now… I hope it will pass.”
The problem with this way of presenting Greenwald is that the tables can be easily turned. Over the past few years, my feeds – and I am sure others’ – have been filled with followers asking versions of “What happened to Chomsky?” or “What happened to Amy Goodman and Democracy Now?”
The answer to these very reductive questions – what happened to Greenwald and what happened to Chomsky – is the same. Trump happened. And their different responses are illustrative of the way the left polarised during the Trump presidency and how it continues to divide in the post-Trump era.
Authoritarian thinking
Robinson treats the Trump factor – what we might term Post-Traumatic Trump Disorder – as though it is irrelevant to his analysis of Greenwald and Taibbi. And yet it lies at the heart of the current tensions on the left. In its simplest terms, the split boils down to the question of how dangerous Trump really was and is, and what that means for the left in terms of its political responses.
Unlike Robinson, I don’t think it is helpful to personalise this. Instead, we should try to understand what has happened to left politics more generally in the Trump and post-Trump era.
Parts of the left joined liberals in becoming fixated on Trump as a uniquely evil and dangerous presence in US politics. Robinson notes that Trump posed an especial and immediate threat to our species’ survival through his denial of climate change, and on these grounds alone every effort had to be made to remove him.
Others on the left recoil from this approach. They warn that, by fixating on Trump, elements of the left have drifted into worryingly authoritarian ways of thinking – sometimes openly, more often implicitly – as a bulwark against the return of Trump or anyone like him.
The apotheosis of such tendencies was the obsession, shared alike by liberals and some on the left, with Russiagate. This supposed scandal highlighted in stark fashion the extreme dangers of focusing on a single figure, in Trump, rather than addressing the wider, corrupt political structures that produced him.
It was not just the massive waste of time and energy that went into trying to prove the unprovable claims of Trump’s collusion with the Kremlin – resources that would have been far better invested in addressing Trump’s real crimes, which were being committed out in the open.
It was that the politically tribal Trump-Russia narrative engulfed and subverted a meaningful politics of resistance. It snared those like Wikileaks founder Julian Assange who had been trying to break open the black box of western politics. It fortified the US security services after they had been exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations as secretly and illegally conducting mass spying on the public’s communications. It breathed a dangerous credibility into the corrupt Democratic party machine after its embarrassment over engineering Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy. And it revived the fortunes of an increasingly discredited liberal media that quickly won large ratings by promoting fabulists like Rachel Maddow.
Those on the left who tried to challenge Russiagate in order to focus on real political issues were stigmatised as Putin’s puppets, their arguments were labelled “fake news”, and they were gradually algorithmed into social media purdah.
Under the Russiagate banner, parts of the left were soon rallying, however reluctantly, behind corporate champions of the planet-destroying status quo.
But it was even worse than that. The fixation on the obviously hollow Russiagate narrative by the Democratic Party, the corporate media, Silicon Valley, and the US intelligence agencies served to prove to wide swaths of conservative America that Trump was right when he berated a “liberal” establishment for being invested only in its own self-preservation and not caring about ordinary Americans.
Russiagate did not just divide the left, it dramatically strengthened the right.
Free speech dangers
Robinson knows all this, at least intellectually, but perhaps because Trump looms so large in his thinking he does not weigh the significance in the same terms as Greenwald and Taibbi.
The problem with characterising Trump as a supremely evil figure is that all sorts of authoritarian political conclusions flow from that characterisation – precisely the political conclusions we have seen parts of the left adopting. Robinson may not expressly share these conclusions but, unlike Greenwald and Taibbi, he has largely ignored or downplayed the threat they present.
If Trump poses a unique danger to democracy, then to avoid any recurrence:
We are obligated to rally uncritically, or at least very much less critically, behind whoever was selected to be his opponent. Following Trump’s defeat, we are dutybound to restrain our criticisms of the winner, Joe Biden, however poor his performance, in case it opens the door to Trump, or someone like Trump, standing for the presidency in four years’ time.
We must curb free speech and limit the free-for-all of social media in case it contributed to the original surge of support for Trump, or created the more febrile political environment in which Trump flourished.
We must eradicate all signs of populism, whether on the right or the left, because we cannot be sure that in a battle of populisms the left will defeat the right, or that left wing populism cannot be easily flipped into right wing populism.
And most importantly, we must learn to distrust “the masses” – those who elected Trump – because they have demonstrated that they are too easily swayed by emotion, prejudice and charisma. Instead, we must think in more traditional liberal terms, of rule by technocrats and “experts” who can be trusted to run our societies largely in secret but provide a stability that should keep any Trumps out of power.
Greenwald and Taibbi have been focusing precisely on this kind of political fallout from the Trump presidency. And it looks suspiciously like this, as much as anything else, is what is antagonising Robinson and others.
Greenwald’s own experiences at the Intercept underline his concerns. It was not just that Greenwald was forced out over his efforts late last year to talk about the documents found on Hunter Biden’s laptop and the questions they raised about his father, the man who was about to become US president. It was that the Intercept stopped Greenwald from talking about how the entire liberal corporate media and all of Silicon Valley were actively conspiring to crush any attempt to talk about those documents and their significance – and not on the basis of whether they were genuine or not.
Greenwald walked away from what amounted to a very well-paid sinecure at the Intercept to highlight this all-out assault on democratic discourse and the election process – an assault whose purpose was not the search for truth but to prevent any danger of Trump being re-elected. By contrast, in a tweet thread that has not aged well, Robinson along with many others quibbled about the specifics of Greenwald’s case and whether it amounted to censorship, very much ignoring the wood for the trees.
Now that @ggreenwald's Biden article has been published, the relevant question for evaluating whether the Intercept was justified in refusing to publish it is: are its claims false/insufficiently supported? How did it fall short of publication standards? https://t.co/5CwJT72XpC
Greenwald and Taibbi talk so much about the role of the traditional media and Silicon Valley because they understand that the media’s professed liberalism – claims to be protecting the rights of women, ethnic minorities and the trans community – is a very effective way of prettifying corporate authoritarianism, an authoritarianism the left claims to be fighting but has readily endorsed once it has been given a liberal makeover.
It is not that the “liberal” establishment – the corporate media, Silicon Valley, the intelligence services – is actually liberal. It is that liberals have come increasingly to identify with that establishment as sharing their values.
For this reason, Robinson obscures the real nature of the divide on the left when he discusses the power of the Supreme Court. He criticises Greenwald and Taibbi for ignoring the fact that the right exercises absolute power through its packing of the court with rightwing judges. He accuses them of instead unfairly emphasising the power exercised by this “liberal” establishment.
But despite Robinson’s claims, the Supreme Court very obviously doesn’t wield “all the power”, even with its veto over legislation and actions of the administration. Because an even greater power is invested in those institutions that can control the public’s ability to access and interpret information; to find out what is being done in the shadows; and to make choices based on that information, including about who should represent them.
Information control and narrative management are the deepest forms of power because they shape our ability to think critically, to resist propaganda, to engage in dialogue and to forge alliances that might turn the tide against a profoundly corrupt establishment that includes both the Supreme Court and Silicon Valley. Robinson ignores this point in his essay, even though it is fundamental to assessing “What happened to Greenwald and Taibbi?”. A commitment to keeping channels of information open and ensuring dialogue continues, even in the post-Trump era, is what happened to them.
Hard drives smashed
The crux of Robinson’s argument is that Greenwald and Taibbi have made a pact with the devil, gradually chaining their more progressive credentials to a Trumpian rightwing populism to defeat the “liberal” establishment. That, Robinson suggests, will only strengthen and embolden the right, and ensure the return of a Trump.
The evidence Robinson and others adduce for Greenwald’s betrayal, in particular, are his now regular appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, where Greenwald and Carlson often find common ground against the authoritarian excesses of that same “liberal” establishment.
That should not surprise us. Carlson and the right have an interest in the break-up of Silicon Valley’s tech monopolies that favour a Democratic Party authoritarianism over their own Republican Party authoritarianism. Greenwald has an interest in the break-up of Silicon Valley’s tech monopolies too but for a very different reason: because he is against monopolies designed to keep the public propagandised and manipulated.
Opposing them both is an authoritarian “liberal” establishment – the Democratic Party, traditional corporate media, Silicon Valley, the intelligence services – that have every interest in perpetuating their control over the tech monopolies.
Robinson contrasts Greenwald’s behaviour to his own clean hands as the editor of the small socialist magazine, Current Affairs.
But we should note that Robinson has compromised himself far more than he cares to admit. For several years he used the liberal corporate outlet of the Guardian as a platform from which to present a watered-down version of his own socialist politics. To do so, he had to ignore the paper’s appalling record of warmongering abroad and of subverting socialists like Jeremy Corbyn at home.
Robinson finally came unstuck when a Guardian editor effectively fired him for writing a satirical tweet about the huge sums of aid given by the US to Israel each year to kill and maim Palestinians under occupation and destroy their infrastructure.
My latest: In sacking a columnist over a tweet criticising US military aid to Israel, the Guardian wasn't stopping 'antisemitism'. It was policing speech to stop the left drawing attention to the continuing colonial nature of western societies https://t.co/E2gORnn5x8
One can debate whether it is wise for the left to use essentially hostile corporate platforms – liberal or conservative – to advance its arguments. But that is not the debate Robinson is trying to provoke. And for obvious reasons: because in piggybacking on the Guardian, Robinson did what Greenwald has done in piggybacking on Tucker Carlson. Both have used the reach of a larger corporate outlet to build their audience and expand the number of people exposed to their more progressive ideas.
There is an apparent difference, though. In Robinson’s case, he has admitted with impressive frankness that he would have been willing to self-censor on Israel had he been told by the Guardian beforehand that speaking out was likely to cost him his job. That sets his own position apart from Greenwald, who decided to walk from the Intercept rather than allow his work to be censored.
Nonetheless, it is far from clear, as Robinson assumes, that liberal corporate outlets are a safer bet for the left to ally with than rightwing corporate outlets.
Greenwald, remember, was eased out of the “liberal” Guardian many years before Robinson’s sacking after he brought the paper the glory associated with the Snowden revelations while also incurring the intelligence services’ wrath. Those revelations exposed the dark underbelly of the US national security state under the “liberal” presidency of Barack Obama, not Trump. And years later, Greenwald was again pushed out, this time from the supposedly even more “liberal” Intercept as part of its efforts to protect Biden, Obama’s Democratic party successor.
Greenwald wasn’t dispatched from these publications for being too righ-twing. Tensions escalated at the Guardian over the security service backlash to Greenwald’s unwavering commitment to free speech and transparency – just as the Guardian earlier fell out with Assange faced with the security services’ retaliation for Wikileaks’ exposure of western war crimes.
The Guardian’s own commitment to transparency was surrendered with its agreement to carry out the UK security services’ demand that it smash hard drives packed with Snowden’s secrets. The destruction of those files may have been largely symbolic (there were copies in the possession of the New York Times) but the message it sent to the left and to the UK intelligence agencies was clear enough: from now on, the Guardian was resolutely going to be a team player.
What these experiences with the Guardian and the Intercept doubtless demonstrated to Greenwald was that his most fundamental political principles were essentially incompatible with those of the “liberal” media – and all the more so in the Trump era. The priority for liberal publications was not truth-telling or hosting all sides of the debate but frantically shoring up the authority of a “moderate” technocratic elite, one that would ensure a stable neoliberal environment in which it could continue its wealth extraction and accumulation.
Robinson implies that Greenwald has been embittered by these experiences, and is petulantly hitting back against the “liberal” establishment without regard to the consequences. But a fairer reading would be that Greenwald is fighting against kneejerk, authoritarian instincts wherever they are found in our societies – on the right, the centre and the left.
The irony is that he appears to be getting a better hearing on Tucker Carlson than he does at the Guardian or the Intercept. Contrary to Robinson’s claim, that says more about the Guardian and the so-called liberal media than it does about Greenwald.
Captured by wokeness
Robinson also misrepresents what Greenwald and Taibbi are trying to do when they appear on rightwing media.
First, he gives every impression of arguing that, by appearing on the Tucker Carlson show, Greenwald naively hopes to persuade Carlson to switch allegiance from a right wing to left wing populism. But Greenwald doesn’t go on the Tucker Carlson show to turn its host into a leftist. He appears on the show to reach and influence Carlson’s millions of viewers, who do not have the same investment in neoliberalism’s continuing success as the multi-millionaire Carlson does.
Is Greenwald’s calculation any more unreasonable than Robinson’s belief while writing for the Guardian that he might succeed in turning the Guardian’s liberal readers into socialists? Is Robinson right to assume that liberals are any less committed to their selfish political worldview than the right? Or that – when their side is losing – liberal readers of the Guardian are any less susceptible to authoritarianism than rightwing viewers of Fox News?
Robinson also wrongly accuses Greenwald and Taibbi of suggesting that the CIA and major corporations have, in Robinson’s words, “become captured by culturally left ‘woke’ ideology”. But neither writer appears to believe that Black Lives Matter or #MeToo is dictating policy to the establishment. The pair are arguing instead that the CIA and the corporations are exploiting and manipulating “woke” ideology to advance their own authoritarian agendas.
Their point is not that the establishment is liberal but rather that it can more credibly market itself as liberal or progressive when a Trump is in power or when it is feared that a Trump might return to power. And that perception weakens truly progressive politics. By donning the garb of liberalism, elites are able to twist the values and objectives of social movements in ways designed to damage them and foster greater social divisions.
A feminism that celebrates women taking all the top jobs at the big arms manufacturers – the corporations whose business is the murder of men, women and children – is not really feminism. It is a perversion of feminism. Similarly, establishment claims to “wokeness” provide cover as western elites internally divide their own societies and dominate or destroy foreign ones.
“Woke authoritarianism”, as Robinson mockingly terms it, is not an attribute of wokeness. It is a description of one specific incarnation of authoritarianism that is currently favoured by an establishment that, in the post-Trump era, has managed more successfully to cast itself as liberal.
Mask turn-off
The central issue here – the one Robinson raises but avoids discussing – is what political conditions are most likely to foster authoritarianism in the US and other western states, and what can be done to reverse those conditions.
For Robinson, the answer is reassuringly straightforward. Trump and his rightwing populism pose the biggest threat, and the Democratic party – however dismal its leaders – is the only available vehicle for countering that menace. Therefore, left journalists have a duty to steer clear of arguments or associations that might confer legitimacy on the right.
For Greenwald and Taibbi, the picture looks far more complicated, treacherous and potentially bleak.
Trump fundamentally divided the US. For a significant section of the public, he answered their deep-seated and intensifying disenchantment with a political system that appears to be rigged against their interests after its wholesale takeover by corporate elites decades ago. He offered hope, however false.
For others, Trump threatened to topple the liberal facade the corporate elites had erected to sanctify their rule. He dispensed with the liberal pieties that had so effectively served to conceal US imperialism abroad and to maintain the fiction of democracy at home. His election tore the mask off everything that was already deeply ugly about the US political system.
Did that glimpse into the abyss fuel the sense of urgency among liberals and parts of the left to be rid of Trump at all costs – and the current desperation to prevent him or someone like him from returning to the Oval Office, even if it means further trashing free speech and transparency?
In essence, the dilemma the left now faces is this:
To work with the Democrats, with liberals, who are desperate to put the mask back on the system, to shore up its deceptions, so that political stability can be restored – a stability that is waging war around the globe, that is escalating the threat of super-power tensions and nuclear annihilation, and that is destroying the planet.
Or to keep the mask off, and work with those elements of the populist left and right that share a commitment to free speech and transparency, in the hope that through open debate we can expose the current rule by an unaccountable, authoritarian technocratic class and its corporate patrons masquerading as “liberals”.
The truth is we may be caught between a rock and hard place. Even as the warning signs mount, liberals may stick with the comfort blanket of rule by self-professed experts to the bitter end, to the point of economic and ecological collapse. And conservatives may, at the end of the day, prove that their commitment to free speech and disdain for corporate elites is far weaker than their susceptibility to narcissist strongmen.
Robinson no more has a crystal ball to see the future than Greenwald. Both are making decisions in the dark. For that reason, Robinson and his allies on the left would be better advised to stop claiming they hold the moral high ground.
Canadians like to think of ourselves as less racist, less right wing and especially less violent than Americans. But two recent events coming after a previous series of mass murders has shaken this belief.
Four members of a Muslim family were murdered in a hate crime while out for a stroll last Sunday in London, Ontario; two weeks earlier 215 First Nations children were found buried on the grounds of a Kamloops, B.C. Indian residential school; one year ago 22 died during a shooting spree by a Nova Scotia wannabe cop with a severe anger management problem after a fight with his girlfriend; four years ago 26 people, mostly women, were mowed down by a misogynist on a Toronto sidewalk leaving 10 dead; a year before that, six worshippers were shot and killed by a young man in a Quebec City mosque. All murders motivated by right wing hate.
This isn’t the real Canada, some people say. But it is. And always has been.
The truth is Canada, the British colony that preceded it, and the French colony before that, were all founded on racist, misogynist, militaristic, imperialistic, homophobic, white Christian supremacy. This is a history we share with the USA, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, all members along with Canada, of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance.
Our countries have proudly glorified white male warrior, racist colonialism and participated in it at home and abroad. Our laws, our institutions, our foreign policy, our culture have all been affected by these vile practices and ideologies, and they continue to infect and influence us today.
And this is not ancient history.
Born in 1953, I have lived in a Canada with genocidal residential schools, racist laws and immigration policies, that forbade people from voting based on their ethnicity, that ensured property could only be sold to white Christians, that jailed people for their sexuality, that had quotas for Jews in universities, that criminalized women’s reproductive rights and taught me in Catholic school that men were the head of the family and to be proud of the British Empire. The legacy of all that remains alive in me and my country.
These are historical facts that, if acknowledged, can be confronted, and overcome. But you can’t build a better world on a foundation of lies or ignorance, only on concrete reality.
And confronting our past is not just “virtue signalling” or part of “woke” culture or some academic exercise or ritual self-flagellation to earn forgiveness for our sins. There are those who revel in and glorify this past and would return us to it, whether we like it or not. Ignoring or whitewashing our history empowers the right-wing extremists who today wish to create something very much like Margaret Atwood’s Republic of Gilead. It is not only our neighbours to the south who are at risk of an authoritarian fascism built upon making America great again. There are people in all the “Five Eyes” who promote racist, colonial, imperialistic, misogynist, militaristic, homophobic white Christian supremacy and will use violence to achieve their goals.
Having spent the past four years researching and writing about the extreme right in the FAKE NEWS Mysteries, including my latest, American Fascism, there is no doubt in my mind that more violence is coming.
Fascists are conservatives in a panic. They are panicked because they see the victories of women, people of color, First Nations, anti-racists, the LGBTQ+, unions, socialists, peace advocates, environmentalists and internationalists as threatening. They are funded by some very wealthy people who use fascists as the tip of the spear against economic democracy. At its root fascism is a violent defence of economic and social privilege.
To combat those who would inflict Gilead upon us, we must understand who we were, who we are and who we would like to be. As many self-help books posit, knowing yourself is the first step to change. That’s exactly why conservatives and fascists glorify the past, defend statues of racists and insist history should focus on instilling patriotism instead of telling the truth.
To combat them we must educate ourselves and especially our children. Only then can we build a better world, one where all people can live together in respect, dignity and equality. One that is not afraid of positive change. One that can resiliently resist right wing extremism.
We are led to believe that history is being made in Israel following the formation of an ideologically diverse government coalition which, for the first time, includes an Arab party, Ra’am, or the United Arab List.
If we are to accept this logic, the leader of Ra’am, Mansour Abbas, is a mover and shaker of history, the same way that Naftali Bennett of the far-right Yamina Party, and Yair Lapid, the supposed ‘centrist’ of Yesh Atid, are also history makers. How bizarre!
Sensational media headlines and hyperboles aside, Israel’s new government was a desperate attempt by Israeli politicians to dislodge Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving Prime Minister, from power. While Lapid is fairly new to Israel’s contentious politics, Bennett and Abbas are opportunists, par excellence.
Lapid is a former TV anchorman. Despite his claims to centrist ideologies, his political views are as ‘right’ as they get. The problem is that such characters as Bennett, Ayelet Shaked, also of Yamina, and Netanyahu, of course, among others, have relocated the center of Israel’s political spectrum further to the right, to the point that the right became the center and the ultra-right became the right. This is how Israel’s neofascist and extremist politicians managed to become kingmakers in Israel’s politics. Bennett, for example, who in 2013 bragged about “killing lots of Arabs” in his life, is set to be the Prime Minister of Israel.
It is in this strange context that we must understand Mansour Abbas’ position. His meager four seats at the Israeli Knesset made his party critical in forming the coalition that has been purposely created to oust Netanyahu. Ra’am does not represent Israel’s Palestinian Arab communities and, by joining the government, Abbas is certainly not making history in terms of finding common ground between Arabs and Jews in a country that is rightly recognized by Israeli and international human rights groups as an apartheid state.
On the contrary, Abbas is moving against the current of history. At a time that Palestinians throughout historic Palestine – the occupied Palestinian territories and today’s Israel – are finally unifying around a common national narrative, Abbas is insisting on redefining the Palestinian agenda merely to secure a position for himself in Israeli politics – thus, supposedly ‘making history.’
Even before Abbas shook hands with Bennett and other Israeli extremists who advocate the killing of Palestinians as a matter of course, he made it clear that he was willing to join a Netanyahu-led government. This is one of the reasons behind the splintering of the once unified Arab political coalition, known as the Joint List.
Following his meeting with Netanyahu in February, Abbas justified his shocking turnabout with unconvincing political platitudes as one “needs to be able to look to the future, and to build a better future for everyone”, and so on.
The fact that Netanyahu was largely responsible for the despairing outlook of Israel’s Palestinian communities seemed entirely irrelevant to Abbas, who was inexplicably keen on joining any future political alliance, even if it included Israel’s most chauvinistic political actors. Sadly, though not surprisingly, this has proved to be the case.
Abbas’ position became impossible to sustain in May during the well-coordinated Israeli war in Gaza and the racist attacks on Palestinian communities in Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and throughout Israel. Even then, when Palestinians were finally able to articulate a common narrative linking the occupation, siege, racism and apartheid in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Israel together, Abbas insisted on developing a unique position that would allow him to sustain his chances of achieving power at any cost.
Although it was the Palestinian Arab communities that were under systematic attacks carried out by Israeli Jewish mobs and police, Abbas called on his community to “be responsible and behave wisely,” and to “maintain public order and keep the law.” He even parroted similar lines used by right-wing Israeli Jewish politicians, as he claimed that “peaceful popular protests” by Palestinian communities inside Israel have turned “confrontational,” thus creating a moral equilibrium where the victims of racism somehow became responsible for their own plight.
Abbas’ position has not changed since the signing of the coalition deal on June 2. His political narrative is almost apolitical as he insists on reducing the national struggle of the Palestinian people to the mere need for economic development – not fundamentally different from Netanyahu’s own ‘economic peace’ proposal in the past. Worse, Abbas intentionally delinks the state of poverty and under-development in Palestinian communities from state-championed racial discrimination, which constantly underfunds Arab communities while spending exuberant amounts of funds on illegal Jewish settlements that are built on ethnically cleansed Palestinian lands.
“We have reached a critical mass of agreements in various fields that serve the interest of Arab society and that provide solutions for the burning issues in Arab society — planning, the housing crisis and, of course, fighting violence and organized crime,” Abbas said triumphantly on June 2, as if the rooted inequality, including communal violence and organized crime, are not direct results of racism, socio-economic inequality and political alienation and marginalization.
No history has been made by Abbas. He is but an example of the self-serving politician and a direct expression of the endemic disunity in the Palestinian Arab body politic inside Israel.
Sadly, the unprecedented success of the Arab Joint List following the March 2020 elections has now culminated in a tragic end, where the likes of Abbas become the unwelcomed ‘representative’ of a politically conscious and awakened community.
In truth, Mansour Abbas, a Palestinian Arab politician who is willing to find common ground with extremists and proud ‘Arab killers’, only represents himself. The future will attest to this claim.
The photo was unprecedented. It showed Mansour Abbas, leader of an Islamist party for Palestinians in Israel, signing an agreement on Wednesday night to sit in a “government of change” alongside settler leader Naftali Bennett.
Caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fervently try to find a way to break up the coalition in the next few days, before a parliamentary vote takes place. But if he fails, it will be the first time in the country’s 73-year history that a party led by a Palestinian citizen has joined – or been allowed to join – an Israeli government.
Aside from the symbolism of the moment, there are no other grounds for celebration. In fact, the involvement of Abbas’s four-member United Arab List in shoring up a majority for a government led by Bennett and Yair Lapid is almost certain to lead to a further deterioration in majority-minority relations.
There will be a reckoning for this moment, and Israel’s 1.8 million Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the population, will once again pay the heaviest price.
The sole reason that this makeshift coalition exists – the only glue holding it together – is the hostility of the various parties towards Netanyahu. In most cases, that is not a hostility towards his political positions; simply towards him personally, and towards the corrupting stranglehold he has exerted on Israel’s political system for the past 12 years.
The “change” referred to by this proposed government coalition begins and ends with the removal of Netanyahu.
Doubly offended
It barely needs stating again that Bennett, who will serve first as prime minister in rotation with Lapid, is even more right wing than Netanyahu. In fact, three of the new coalition’s main parties are at least, if not more, rabidly nationalistic than the Israel’s longtime leader. In any other circumstances, they would be enthusiastically heading into government with his Likud Party.
As Bennett and Mansour huddled inside a hotel near Tel Aviv to sign the coalition agreement as the clock ticked down on Lapid’s mandate to form a government, far-right demonstrators noisily chanted outside that Bennett was joining a “government with terror supporters”.
Much of the ultra-nationalist right is so incensed by Bennett’s actions that he and other members of his Yamina party have been assigned a security detail for fear of an assassination attempt.
No one has forgotten that it was Bennett’s own settler camp that produced Yigal Amir, the man who in 1995 shot dead the then-prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in a bid to foil the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians. Amir killed Rabin in large part because the latter was seen to have betrayed the Jewish people by allowing “Arabs” – Palestinian parties in the parliament – to prop up his minority government from outside. They did so to pass legislation necessary to begin implementing the Oslo process.
The chain of events that followed the assassination are well-known. Israelis lurched further rightwards and elected Netanyahu. The Oslo track with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was derailed. A Palestinian intifada erupted. And – coming full circle – Netanyahu returned to power and is now Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.
Today’s potential Yigal Amirs are doubly offended by Bennett’s behaviour. They believe he has stabbed the right’s natural leader, Netanyahu, in the back, while at the same time allowing Abbas – seen by the right as Hamas’s man in the Knesset – to dictate policy to the Jewish owners of the land.
Digging in heels
It was notable that Bennett and Abbas were the last to sign the coalition agreement, after both made great play of digging in their heels at the final moment for more concessions. Each risks inflaming their own constituency by being seen to cooperate with the other.
Commentators will try to spin this agreement between a settler leader and the head of an Islamic party as a potential moment of healing after last month’s unprecedented inter-communal fighting inside Israel.
But such a reading is as misleading as the narrative of the recent “Jewish-Arab clashes”. In fact, protests by Palestinian youths against systematic discrimination escalated into confrontations only after Israeli police turned violent and let Jewish gangs take the law into their own hands. Just as the balance of power on the streets was weighted in favour of Jewish vigilantism, so the balance of forces in this new coalition will work solidly against Abbas.
When Bennett spoke publicly on Sunday, as the horse-trading began in earnest behind the scenes, he underscored his credentials as the former head of the Yesha Council of Jewish settlements. That will be the theme of this proposed “government of change”.
Pact with the ‘devil’
During the coalition-building negotiations, the more moderate Labor and Meretz parties conceded time and again to the demands of the far-right and settler parties on ministerial positions and policy. That is because the moderates have nowhere else to go.
They have built their whole electoral strategy on ousting Netanyahu at any cost, using the anti-Netanyahu street protests of the past two years as their rallying cry. They cannot afford to be seen as missing this opportunity.
By contrast, as the death threats highlight, Bennett has far more to lose. Some 60 percent of his party’s voters recently told pollsters they would not have backed him had they known he would join a coalition with Lapid. Equally at risk are Gideon Saar, whose New Hope party broke away from Likud to challenge Netanyahu, and Avigdor Lieberman, a settler politician whose right-wing base has found in him their local strongman.
These three must now do everything in their power during the term of this new government – if it happens – to prove to their constituencies that they are not betraying the far-right’s favourite causes, from settlements to annexation. Baiting them from the sidelines at every turn will be Netanyahu, stirring up passions on the right – at least until he is forced to step down, either by his party or by a verdict against him in his current corruption trial.
The Achilles heel Netanyahu will keep prodding as viciously as he can is the fact that his rivals on the right have made a Faustian pact with the Arab “devil”. Netanyahu has never been shy to incite against the Palestinian minority. To imagine he will restrain himself this time is fanciful.
Bennett understands the danger, which is why he tried to legitimise his dealings with Abbas on Thursday by calling him “a brave leader”. But Bennett was also keen to emphasise that Abbas would not be involved in any security matters and that he was not interested in “nationalism” – in this case, indicating that Abbas will neither offer support to Palestinians under occupation nor seek to advance national rights for Palestinian citizens of the kind Israeli Jews enjoy.
Early on Thursday, Netanyahu had decried the new coalition as “dangerous” and “left wing”. He will most likely be in the driving seat, even while in opposition. Far from healing the country, a “government of change” could rapidly provoke yet more street violence, especially if Netanyahu believes such a deterioration would weaken Bennett as prime minister.
Extracting benefits
Abbas, the United Arab List leader, reportedly held out until last before signing. His whole electoral strategy was built on a promise to end the permanent exclusion of Palestinian parties from Israel’s national politics. He will be keen to show how many benefits he can extract from his role inside government – even if most are privileges the Jewish majority has always enjoyed by right.
Abbas trumpeted that the agreement would “provide solutions for the burning issues in Arab society – planning, the housing crisis, and, of course, fighting violence and organised crime”. He has reportedly secured some $16bn in extra budgets for development and infrastructure, and three of the many Bedouin villages the state has long refused to recognise will be given legal status.
Abbas is also pushing for the repeal of a 2017 law that makes tens of thousands of homes in Palestinian communities inside Israel vulnerable to demolition.
One of his fellow legislators, Walid Taha, observed of the United Arab List’s new role: “For decades, Arab Israelis [Palestinian citizens] have been without any influence. Now, everyone knows that we’re the deciding votes as far as politics goes.”
Abbas has every incentive to use such claims as a whip to beat his rivals in the Joint List, a coalition of several other Palestinian parties that are staying in opposition. He needs to emphasise his role in bringing about change to make them look weak and irrelevant.
Hostility and disdain
But despite the promises that lured Abbas into the new government, he will face a rough ride getting any of them translated into tangible changes on the ground.
Lapid will be busy as foreign minister, selling this as a new era in Israeli politics. Meanwhile, Benny Gantz, the current defence minister who just oversaw the destruction yet again of Gaza, will offer continuity.
Back home, the key internal ministries will be held by the far-right. Lieberman will control the purse strings through the finance ministry, directing funds to settlements before Palestinian communities inside Israel. Bennett’s partner, Ayelet Shaked, will be interior minister, meaning the settlements in the occupied West Bank will be treated as more integral to Israel than the communities of Palestinian citizens. And Saar will be justice minister, helping to drive the legal system even further to the right.
Faced with this bloc, all of them keen to be seen as upholding the values of the right, Abbas will struggle to make any progress. And that is without considering the situation he will find himself in if Bennett pushes for annexation of the West Bank, or authorises another police invasion of al-Aqsa, or oversees the expulsion of Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah, or launches a fresh attack on Gaza.
Abbas put the coalition negotiations on pause during Israel’s assault on Gaza last month. He won’t be able to do the same from inside the government. He will be directly implicated.
As a result, Palestinian citizens are likely to end up growing even more disillusioned with a political system that has always treated them with a mix of hostility and disdain. They will finally have representatives inside government, but will continue to be very much outside of it. The triggers for the protests that erupted among young Palestinians in Israel last month are not going away.
The most likely scenario over the coming months is that Netanyahu and Bennett will engage in a furious competition for who deserves the title of champion of the right. Netanyahu will seek to break apart the coalition as quickly as possible by inciting against Abbas and the Palestinian minority, so he has another shot at power. In turn, Bennett will try to pressure Likud to abandon Netanyahu so that Bennett can collapse the “government of change” as quickly as possible and rejoin a large majority, far-right government with Likud.
Rifts will not be healed; coexistence will not be revived. But the preeminence of the ultra-nationalist right – with or without Netanyahu – will be restored.
