A national veterans’ organization on 30 September called for a grand jury to indict Department of State (DOS) Secretary Antony Blinken and the U.S. Ambassador to Israel for lying to Congress, violating the Export Control Act, the Genocide Prevention Act and the U.S. War Crimes Act.
In a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, Veterans For Peace (VFP) cited published reports showing that internal DOS emails and the statements of two senior State Department officials showed Blinken lied when he issued his “Report to Congress” stating, “…we do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.” (p. 32)
ProPublica revealed a series of State Department emails, internal memos and meeting notes in which officials agreed Israel was blocking humanitarian aid which should trigger Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act which prohibits weapons shipments to any country the President has been told is blocking humanitarian aid.
In addition to the internal documents ProPublica included, from previous reports, that Samantha Power, Director of USAID and Stacy Gilbert, a former USAID bureau head had both voiced objections to Blinken’s findings as the report was being prepared.
Power stated that the looming famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance” and called it “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.”
Gilbert, former senior civil military adviser in USAID’s refugees bureau, resigned in May after the DOS “Report to Congress” was released. She said then, “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid. To deny this is absurd and shameful. That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”
VFP human rights counsel Terry Lodge said, “The Israeli military continues detonating massive bombs in southern Beirut – bombs they would not possess but for Antony Blinken’s repeated violations of federal laws aimed at halting human rights and war crimes violations. Members of the Biden administration unwilling to rein in Israel and furthering its genocide in Gaza need to go to jail.”
VFP President Susan Schnall stated, “Just last week, the U.S. gave Israel another $8.7 billion in weapons to kill and wound innocent Palestinians – in addition to the $3.8 billion we give them every year. This ‘Genocide Tax’ is a theft from millions of Americans who have none of the health insurance every Israeli enjoys; from millions of Americans living in horrific housing while Israel builds thousands of upscale homes on land stolen from Palestinians; from millions of young Americans can’t afford college because America’s top priorities are weapons and death, not human needs.”
VFP’s letter seeking an indictment of Blinken follows one to the DOS Inspector-General February 9, 2024, alleging that Blinken and DOS officials had already violated a series of existing U.S. laws and international treaties by transferring arms to Israel, by quoting a sworn declaration from Josh Paul. Mr. Paul, former Director of Congressional and Public Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, attested to significant failures by the Department in a declaration filed in the Defense for Children International—Palestine lawsuit.
VFP’s February letter was never responded to nor acknowledged.
ProPublica also reported that
The head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel,
DOS Deputy Assistant Secretary, Mira Resnick, and the DOS acting legal adviser, Richard Visek, pressured that bureau and others to agree that Israel was not withholding U.S. humanitarian aid
The hopeless fault-finder. Illustration: Liu Rui/GT
These days the People’s Republic of China is celebrating its 75th anniversary. Over the past 75 years, China has grown from a poor and backward country to the world’s second-largest economy, with about one-sixth of the world’s population escaping poverty.
However, as China continued to rise, the US’ attitude toward China has changed dramatically. Be it the “China threat” narrative or the “China challenge” theory, US politicians have become increasingly anxious about China’s development. This anxiety has turned into slander and attempts to portray China as a force threatening global development.
Recently, a former American government official claimed that China aims to impose its ideology on the rest of the world, posing an unprecedented threat to the US.
Over the past few years, many US politicians have stressed the threat of China. But what exactly has China’s development taken away from the US?
When China was still a poor and backward country, the US never worried about China’s ideology “threatening” the world. However, as soon as China achieved economic takeoff, US politicians began exaggerating China’s “ideological threat.”
Over the past 75 years, if China’s ideology had been detrimental to development and harmful to its own and the world’s progress, China would not be standing so proudly before the US today. China’s development demonstrates that its ideology contributes to global growth, as proven by its achievements.
Even though China has become the world’s second-largest economy, its per capita GDP is still far below that of the US. In 2023, China’s per capita GDP was about $12,720, while the US was about $76,000, nearly six times higher. China must continue to advance steadfastly on its chosen path of development.
In 2020, the US Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China (May 20, 2020) read, the CPC has “accelerated its efforts to portray its governance system as functioning better than those of what it refers to as ‘developed, Western countries.’” Based on this assumption, then such competition should contribute to global development. Indeed, only through such competition can we show that human development is a diverse process. Every country has the right to choose its own path of development.
Isn’t it good for humanity if more countries develop through self-reliance like China? China has always adhered to the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs and has never attempted to export its ideology to other countries. However, China has proven that a country can achieve economic takeoff and social progress without copying Western models.
This successful approach has shaken the long-held discourse power and dominance of the West, especially the US, thus posing a significant challenge to the US’ global strategy.
Suppose the development model and path advocated by the US are no longer the only correct ones. In that case, the foundation of its global strategy and influence will be shaken.
When some US politicians claim that China’s ideology poses a threat, they are actually making excuses for Washington’s hegemonism. The “rules-based international order” in the mouths of American politicians is actually an order where the US makes the rules and other countries obey. Any country that attempts to challenge this order, regardless of its intentions, will be labeled an “ideological threat.”
China has chosen a suitable path for itself and achieved great success. This success should not be a reason for demonization. If Washington cannot accept and recognize a prosperous and stable China and tries to set China as an opponent or even an enemy of the US, that would be a huge threat to world peace and development.
Collapsing bridges, buckling roads, overheated railways, deteriorating power lines, contaminated water lines, outdated public transportation, overtaxed power grids, aging ports and waterways, unsafe tunnels and highways, and spotty or insufficient telecommunications assets are all becoming frequent hallmarks of the American way of life.
If the nation is woefully unprepared to deal with climate disasters such as floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts, despite the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars that have been pledged to shore up the nation’s infrastructure problems, it is because politicians across the political spectrum have failed us.
The devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene makes this failure by the government to put the needs of the American people first painfully evident. Entire towns are under water. Roadways have collapsed or are otherwise impassable. Potable water is scarce. More than 1.5 million households are still without power.
Clearly, our national priorities need to be re-examined.
While the politicians play partisan games with our tax dollars, the nation’s critical infrastructure—both the physical foundations of the nation and the figurative foundations of our freedoms—continues to be neglected and deprioritized in favor of grandstanding, bloated military budgets on endless wars abroad, foreign aid to shore up the infrastructure and military defenses of international allies, and all manner of graft and pork barrel spending.
When all is said and done, the bread-and-circus distractions and sleight-of-hand political theater being trotted out in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms adds nothing of real value to the lives of the average American.
It’s time to fix what’s broken in this country.
For starters, we need an overhaul of the nation’s infrastructure.
According to Time magazine, “Throughout the country, millions of Americans don’t have access to or can’t afford broadband internet service. In excess of 2 million people live without running water or basic plumbing. For too long, the American public has had to carry on while these deficiencies have gone unattended. The political will has been weak or inattentive, the rewards too far removed from electoral advantage.”
In other words, the politicians who dance to the tune of the oligarchic elite aren’t motivated to do anything about our failing infrastructure because they get nothing out of it: no votes, no money, no power.
This isn’t about whether the Republicans or Democrats have better policies.
Indeed, both parties’ priorities are disconcertingly alike: both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.
This is about the plight of the American people who continue to be treated like a permanent underclass.
Anyone who believes that this presidential election will bring about any real change in how the American government does business is either incredibly naive, woefully out-of-touch, or oblivious to the fact that as an in-depth Princeton University study shows, we now live in an oligarchy that is “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.”
Overhauling the nation’s infrastructure will take a significant amount of money, which won’t happen as long as the U.S. government continues to fund the military industry complex and its voracious appetite for endless wars.
James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
We are seeing this play out before our eyes.
The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.
This is exactly the scenario President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned would happen if we allowed the military-industrial complex to wage war, exhaust our resources and dictate our national priorities.
If we are to have any hope of restoring both the structural and freedom foundations of this nation, we’ll need to start by getting our priorities in order, and that means focusing on what really matters: shoring up our battered Bill of Rights and investing in the American homeland.
On October 1, Iran fired about 180 missiles at Israel in response to Israel’s recent assassinations of leaders of its Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), Hezbollah, and Hamas. There are conflicting reports about how many of the missiles struck their targets and if there were any deaths. But Israel is now considering a counterattack that could propel it into an all-out war with Iran, with the U.S. in tow.
For years, Iran has been trying to avoid such a war. That is why it signed the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement with the United States, the U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union. Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and despite Joe Biden’s much-touted differences with Trump, he failed to restore U.S. compliance. Instead, he tried to use Trump’s violation of the treaty as leverage to demand further concessions from Iran. This only served to further aggravate the schism between the United States and Iran, which have had no diplomatic relations since 1980.
Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees his long-awaited chance to draw the United States into war with Iran. By killing Iranian military leaders and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, as well as attacking Iran’s allies in Lebanon and Yemen, Netanyahu provoked a military response from Iran that has given him an excuse to widen the conflict even further. Tragically, there are warmongering U.S. officials who would welcome a war on Iran, and many more who would blindly go along with it.
Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, campaigned on a platform of reconciling with the West. When he came to New York to speak at the UN General Assembly on September 25, he was accompanied by three members of Iran’s JCPOA negotiating team: former foreign minister Javad Zarif; current foreign minister Abbas Araghchi; and deputy foreign minister Majid Ravanchi.
President Pezeshkian’s message in New York was conciliatory. With Zarif and Araghchi at his side at a press conference on September 23, he talked of peace, and of reviving the dormant nuclear agreement. “Vis-a-vis the JCPOA, we said 100 times we are willing to live up to our agreements,” he said. “We do hope we can sit at the table and hold discussions.”
On the crisis in the Middle East, Pezeshkian said that Iran wanted peace and had exercised restraint in the face of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its assassinations of resistance leaders and Iranian officials, and its war on its neighbors.
“Let’s create a situation where we can co-exist,” said Pezeshkian. “Let’s try to resolve tensions through dialogue…We are willing to put all of our weapons aside so long as Israel will do the same.” He added that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel is not, and that Israel’s nuclear arsenal is a serious threat to Iran.
Pezeshkian reiterated Iran’s desire for peace in his speech at the UN General Assembly.
“I am the president of a country that has endured threats, war, occupation, and sanctions throughout its modern history,” he said. “Others have neither come to our assistance nor respected our declared neutrality. Global powers have even sided with aggressors. We have learned that we can only rely on our own people and our own indigenous capabilities. The Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to safeguard its own security, not to create insecurity for others. We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.”
The U.S. response to Iran’s restraint throughout this crisis has been to keep sending destructive weapons to Israel, with which it has devastated Gaza, killed tens of thousands of women and children, bombed neighboring capitals, and beefed up the forces it would need to attack Iran.
That includes a new order for 50 F-15EX long-range bombers, with 750 gallon fuel tanks for the long journey to Iran. That arms deal still has to pass the Senate, where Senator Bernie Sanders is leading the opposition.
On the diplomatic front, the U.S. vetoed successive cease-fire resolutions in the UN Security Council and hijacked Qatar and Egypt’s cease-fire negotiations to provide diplomatic cover for unrestricted genocide.
Military leaders in the United States and Israel appear to be arguing against war on Iran, as they have in the past. Even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney balked at launching another catastrophic war based on lies against Iran, after the CIA publicly admitted in its 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons.
When Trump threatened to attack Iran, Tulsi Gabbard warned him that a U.S. war on Iran would be so catastrophic that it would finally, retroactively, make the war on Iraq look like the “cakewalk” the neocons had promised it would be.
But neither U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nor Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant can control their countries’ war policies, which are in the hands of political leaders with political agendas. Netanyahu has spent many years trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, and has kept escalating the Gaza crisis for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, with that goal clearly in mind.
Biden has been out of his depth throughout this crisis, relying on political instincts from an era when acting tough and blindly supporting Israel were politically safe positions for American politicians. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rose to power through the National Security Council and as a Senate staffer, not as a diplomat, riding Biden’s coat-tails into a senior position where he is as out of his depth as his boss.
Meanwhile, pro-Iran militia groups in Iraq warn that, if the U.S. joins in strikes on Iran, they will target U.S. bases in Iraq and the region.
So we are careening toward a catastrophic war with Iran, with no U.S. diplomatic leadership and only Trump and Harris waiting in the wings. As Trita Parsi wrote inResponsible Statecraft, “If U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this administration’s failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue America’s most core security interest here — avoiding war.”
Talk delivered for the event “Changes Not Seen in a Century: 75th Anniversary of the Founding of PRC.”
Friends, Colleagues, Comrades,
It’s a great honor for me to join you in this extraordinary, historical moment of celebration and reflection on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the PRC.
As has been said, we are seeing changes unseen in a century. Changes both great and terrible.
We are currently seeing the unravelling of Empire–and its last desperate, violent, hideous death rattle. We are seeing the unmasking of 500 years of western “civilization”, and the laying bare of its hypocrisy and unspeakable brutality. We are seeing the true face of capitalist imperialism, not its made up public relations face, but its resting bastard face.
It’s not pretty.
One of the precipitating factors of the end of Empire–not the only one, but a very important one, because it allows countries to resist hegemony together–is the rise of China.
The rise of China is one of the greatest success stories in the history of human civilization. So we could talk about China’s accomplishments all day. I’d like to highlight three.
We all know in 1949 when China stood up, liberating half a billion people, 10-20% of China’s population was still addicted to opium. In 4 years, the CPC eradicated opium addiction, liberating 90 million people from this colonial scourge. It’s also one of the greatest public health accomplishments of the 20th century. And I bet you’ve never heard of it.
By giving everyone the means of production–at the time, by distributing land–and by offering everybody education, community, meaning, hope, purpose–and by doing it at scale–because it has to be done at scale–the Party was successful.
You can’t do this in dribs and drabs. tinkering at the edges. You have to do it all at once for everyone.
The Power of People’s Solidarity
We all know this and understand this: we don’t liberate anyone, until everyone is liberated. We liberate each other. It’s because we are fundamentally socially interconnected.
This is our species being.
You don’t help anyone, until we all help each other, because we all are implicated in each other’s futures.
We saw the same thing with extreme poverty alleviation. Poverty was not seen as an individual failing–as it is, in the capitalist west. It was a whole of society responsibility requiring a whole of society response. It focused on everyone.
So, 850 million were brought out of extreme poverty–which lets the world know that poverty is not an immutable, social, historical fact. It is a policy choice. You can raise everyone up, if we all work together.
That’s the way it works–and it works for everything: if we start from this approach, we can succeed, no matter how vast and immense the challenge is.
So China is proof positive of the power of people’s solidarity, the power of a people’s leadership, the power of scientific planning according to socialist principles to overcome unthinkable challenges.
This is how China accomplishes things, and it accomplishes them at scale–at a scale so vast that nothing under heaven–as they say–is left behind.
Now, there is another achievement that China is working on.
Yes, a socialist society, that’s the ultimate goal, but this is an important stepping stone on the way to it. And it is a big one. It is the creation of an ecological civilization.
China is literally greening the planet, creating, single-handedly, the conditions and means to transition to a sustainable energy regime, to enable sustainable development, to turn back the tide of global warming. And it is doing it at a scale that is truly inconceivable–but necessary.
China knows how to accomplish things at scale. It knows how to solve problems even when the problems are unthinkably immense. And the leadership and the people do not flinch at the immensity of the challenge.
Ecological transition with Chinese characteristics:
China is concretely showing us the pathway out of Global Climate catastrophe. And as I said before, none of us are safe, good or well until all of us are. Until all of us are safe from the effects of the climate crisis, none of us are.
And China is leading the way. All the west has to do is work together with China: China has provided the tools and the map and it is showing the path out. So, to reduce it to its simplest terms, going green means going red. But–and there is a but: from the US standpoint, they don’t want that.
They do not want energy transition if it means the Chinese are going to be leading it. They would rather be dead than red. The US would rather burn up the planet than give China its place in the sun.
If China is on the side of renewable energy, then the US has to be firmly on the side of Global Warming: it’s more important to beat China than to beat Global Warming.
We can see that right now, in the massive sanctioning of Chinese sustainable technologies that could shift the balance. If the planet heats up, we’re all dead, but if China cools the planet and saves the world, then we are no longer the coolest, and that’s worse than death. That’s how the leadership in the US thinks.
Preparing for War: Not if but When
So we can’t talk about China’s successes, without talking about the US hostility towards China. The US sees China as the enemy. It is determined to take down China and all its accomplishments.
Now, China has overcome–countless threats–but this one is an existential threat.
Let’s be very clear. The US is preparing for war–kinetic war–against China. Washington is abuzz with talk of war with China. It’s seen as necessary, inevitable, and incredibly, winnable.
Winnable means they are planning to use nukes.
We see with Palestine, and now Lebanon, that there are no limits to the depravity of what the Imperial ruling class will do to stay in power. Nothing is off the table. Nothing is too inhumane, too brutal, too illegal, too dangerous. Nothing shocks the conscience. In fact, nuclear war is definitely on the table, in the policy papers being distributed, in the military table-top exercises they conduct, in the field training and air exercises that are now being conducted with the greatest intensity since WWII. We are headed towards war, towards nuclear war.
To put it bluntly, the US ruling class would rather see the end of the world than the end of their power and privilege. So we are at a turning point in history. a crisis: both opportunity and danger, hope and terror, unseen possibility and unthinkable tragedy.
This Imperial ruling class has actually been escalating to war against China–covertly since 2009 and now overtly. It has calendared dates–2027.
It’s not if, but when.
Three Steps to War
Now there are three distinguishable steps on the way to war:
The first is Information war: inventing the enemy and then demonizing them: manufacturing consent, shutting down opposition, like you shut down the skies before bombing. We’re being fire-hosed and carpet bombed with lies about China.
The second is shaping the theater logistically for war, with arms, alliance, exercises, material/fuel–pre-positioned stocks–and troops.
The third is provocation. There is non-stop provocation by the US–in the Taiwan strait, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, on the Korean peninsula, everywhere.
This follows the increasing, expanding ambit and intensity of proxy war in Europe, in the genocidal terror in the middle east, and in the building war momentum in the Pacific. Kurt Campbell, Biden’s Asia Czar and the architect of the Pivot, has threatened to unleash “a magnificent symphony of death” across a “unified field [of war]”.
Martial Arts in the No-Think Zone
And we can all see and feel the shutting down of anti-war dissent, of opposing voices and alternative media. That’s a key characteristic of the information war–silencing opposition, silencing voices of peace. It’s like taking out anti-aircraft batteries, and imposing a no fly zone. You shut down the skies, before you drop the bombs. You shut down the opposition before you drop the narrative bombs. You attack opposition to war, attack those who want good relations with China, or negotiations. You attack divergent voices and platforms in order to create a no-think zone.
No critical thinking. No thinking, no dialogue, no peace.
The US literally seeks full spectrum dominance in all domains of war, but especially in the space domain: outer space, cyber space, and information space, mental space. It literally seeks to occupy your mind.
So resistance in this critical moment–at the most fundamental level–begins with first not letting your mental space be occupied, colonized, dominated. It means resisting the narrative dominance of the dominant narrative; that China is threatening the world, that war is thinkable, that war is justified. It means resisting the normalization of war, of genocide, of terror, of atrocity, of lies and propaganda.
We can all be vectors of this transmission of lies of propaganda, or we can impede its transmission.
So it’s incumbent on all of us to re-engage in the mental martial art of critical thinking: we strengthen our psychic immune system against this type of mental virus, this colonization of our mental spaces. We re-orient, de-occupy ourselves, we kick out the colonizing narratives, and we recommit to “seeking truth from facts.”
What we need to do is tune up our critical thinking engines constantly, with the precision tools of wit, humor, parody, perspective, context–and facts.
The flipside of this is that we can also spread the facts and the truth, as many are doing together today. Share the truth. The rise of China, and the liberation of the Global South is not a threat to the peoples of the world. It is a transformative moment of hope for human history.
But the stakes are immense. The future of the planet is at stake. As Brian Berletic said, “A war against China is a war against the world.” And we all have a part to play. We have already been inducted.
Where do we start? We start with our clear minds and our courageous hearts. Decolonize and de-propagandize your minds, and resist! Together!
The future of China, the future of the Global South, the future of the world depends on it!
Researchers at the University of New South Wales have claimed a world-first breakthrough by demonstrating provable quantum entanglement between two atoms in silicon, a crucial step for scaling quantum computers. Entanglement between at least two qubits is the phenomena that enables information to be encoded and processed in a quantum computer. This was demonstrated by…
Is it acceptable for Israel to wipe Palestine and Palestinians off the map? On 5 November 2024, Americans have an opportunity to signal whether genocide is anathema for the majority of its citizens.
So, how can Americans signal their abhorrence for genocide?
Americans have been locked in a pattern of voting for the political duopoly: either wing of the business party. It is widely held that on most major matters there is little to separate the Democrats and Republicans. And this has led to many Americans voting based on whichever party is perceived to be the lesser evil.
Despite this lesser evilest-inspired voting, the election results have resulted in the presidency and congressional majority rotating between the Democrats and Republicans with little change in the US trajectory. As far as the US economy is concerned, the country has continued to increase its debt burden. As far as US foreign policy is concerned, the US has continued to wage wars abroad. As far as support for democracy is concerned, the US has continued to initiate coups against governments it does not approve of. As far as Israel is concerned, it continues to enjoy steadfast support from the duopoly.
One commonly heard refrain posits that continually resorting to the same action with expectation of a different result meets the definition of insanity. The expectation of lesser-evilist voting producing a significantly different outcome on the political scene given that such action has never brought about a change before speaks disparagingly to the strategy of lesser-evilist voting.
Being considered insane, however, is less disparaging than being considered immoral. That would be shameful.
Given the nugatory outcomes of lesser-evilist voting, another proposition comes to mind:
Fool me once, shame on you;
fool me twice, shame on me.
There are two candidates seen as frontrunners for the presidency of the United States. However, the Democratic Party candidate, Kamala Harris, and the Republican Party candidate, Donald Trump. Both stand solidly behind the Zionist entity dba as the state of Israel, and neither of these candidates will exert pressure on Israel to cease and desist in its commission of war crimes. In fact, the US funds Israel, arms Israel, and has situated its military and armaments in the region in support of Israel. This is despite Israeli officials openly calling for the eradication of Palestinians, causing a case to be brought against Israel charging it with genocide in the International Court of Justice.
The upshot of this is that a vote for either Harris or Trump must be considered as a vote for genocide. The only out for a voter to escape criticism for supporting genocide is, pathetic as it may be, ignorance.
What can Americans do to avoid supporting genocide? One can always abstain from voting. That, however, would not be fighting against genocide. Moreover, abstaining would still allow the supporters of genocide to vote for a genocidaire as president.
Strangely enough, many Americans seem oblivious to the existence of other presidential candidates that one can vote for. One can even cast a vote for a candidate opposed to Israeli crimes against Palestinians. To wit, there is candidate Cornel West who calls 7 October a “counter-terrorism response“; Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver has pledged to end the genocide; candidate Jill Stein has a platform Pledge to Stop Genocide.
Unfortunately, in a winner-take-all voting system, one must consider how the strong individual desire to attain political office plays against a tactical and selfless decision to coalesce around one anti-genocide candidate to increase the chances of shutting down a genocide in progress.
Voting in the US elections on 5 November 2024 is an opportunity to indicate one’s abhorrence to genocide. Elementary morality demands a vote for an opponent of genocide.
When I was about seven years old I used to play a “let’s pretend” baseball game in our backyard. I laid out 4 rags I’d gotten from the garage and placed them in a diamond form which represented the bases. The bases were about 20 feet apart. Then I looked at our house and took my batting stance and let my imagination take over. The imaginary scene is no doubt familiar to many of you. It is the last of the 9th inning, we are losing by three runs. The bases are loaded and there are two outs. Then I swing and hit the ball – tsssssch! As Mel Allen was saying in my head “there is a high fly ball deep to right center. The center fielder is at the track. It is going, going, gone”. Then I would trot around the bases. As I got older, I played a great deal of hardball and I hit home runs, but never quite experienced the situation I imagined when I was seven until the end of my playing days.
Coming Through the Hole in the Fence
Around the same time, my father used to take me across the street in the woods to play catch and bat. It was a good scene because the weeds would always stop the ball from going too far. In addition, I always hit with a tree in back of me so that if my father’s pitches were outside the strike zone or I missed or fouled it back, the tree stopped it. Then about a year later my father initiated me into the mysteries of the multiple baseball fields at Jamaica, Queens High School. Officially you had to go through a gate way at the end of the field to get in. But the local kids weren’t having it. They used cutting wires to pry open a hole in the fence. My father and I climbed through the fence and set up. He would pitch to me even though we only had one or two balls. If I hit it past him, he had to get it. But as happens often in these kind of situations, other kids or even adults are around, size up the situation and volunteer to catch or play the field. Willie came by and volunteered to be a catcher. He was an older kid, maybe 14, and looked like he could be a soccer player from South America. If I hit a ball past my father, I would run around those imaginary bases again. My father would retrieve the ball and throw it to Willie to try to get me out at the plate. Willie would make believe he missed the tag or the throw so I could hit a homerun. I was at the age where I couldn’t quite figure out if this was intentional not. Even then, I appreciated his kindness
Geographical Constraints of Choose-up Games in the Corner Our house was only 2 long blocks away from Jamaica High School so I went past the school for many reasons other than baseball. One time I noticed in the distance a group of kids playing baseball in the corner of the park. The actual baseball field for high school games was only part of the park. Surrounding the field was a track and beyond the track was a corner where the kids were playing. The “bases” were old rags of some sort that were laid out maybe 60-70 feet apart (as opposed to the official high school field which was 90 feet apart). These distances were decided long before I began to play. In part it was determined by the fact that our throwing arms weren’t strong enough to make a throw from third base to first, or short to first with the bases 90 feet apart. Also, the pitcher’s mound was only about 45 feet from the plate as opposed to 60 feet for the same reasons.
Adapting to Inadequacies in Numbers and Positions Our games never had 18 players. Mostly we had maybe 10 or 12. That meant that any kid who wanted to play could. We would adapt our rules to accommodate them. For example, we might decide that right field was in foul territory to shorten the distances to be covered by the outfielders. In addition, we might only have one outfielder to cover center and left. That wasn’t a big deal because most of us were not strong enough to hit it to the outfield. If you hit one on the other side of the high school track it was a home run. In right field there was large tree. As we got older and could hit the ball to the outfield more consistently and the right fielder had to play the ball off the trees. If someone hit a fly ball into the trees and the right fielder could catch the ball bouncing off the trees the batter was out. Needless to say, no one wanted to play right field! The pitcher and the catcher were not specialized positions. The catcher might not even be on the team on defense. It might be a player on the offensive team that was just backing up if the batter missed the ball or it was too far out of the strike zone. While the pitcher was on the defensive team, there were no balls and strikes. The pitcher’s job was to just get the ball over the plate so everyone could hit. There was no standing around. If you struck out it was because you missed the ball on the 3rd strike after either missing or fouling off the first two. Our fields had pebbles and sometimes rocks in the infield. There were many bad hops, but you just took it in stride. In the outfield you had to look out for potholes, mole hills and gravel.
Choosing Up Sides
Choosing up sides was an opportunity to feel proud or humiliated depending on when you were picked. The best players were usually the ones who picked the teams. The better players were chosen first and players with less skill picked later. In those days, Brendan and Owen were two of the best as was Tony Cirillo and I. We could all hit homeruns. Tony and I played shortstop on opposite teams. The shortstop position was usually the best fielder on the team and got the most action. Tony had a great arm. My arm was average but I covered a lot of ground. Brendan and Owen were close friends and always wound up on the same team. I don’t know why. They were both big guys and it might have been the case that we were too afraid to get them on opposite teams. How was it determined who picked first? Well, some neutral player would hold a bat out and grip it tightly. One of the guys who wanted to be captain had three chances to kick the bat out of their hands. If they were successful, they got to pick the first player
Culture and Class
Most of these kids were working class Irish and Italian. Here is a list of the players I remember. Brendan Rice, Owen Brennan, Chris Green, Tony Circillo, James (Head) Circillo, Abe Circillo, Ronnie Christian, Billy Smolin, James Sheehy, Georgie Robles, Bernard Rubino, Evan Munkmeir; Danny Mettines , Billy Insulman, Kenny Lowe, and Frankie Majori. Once in a while a tall lanky guy would slither thorough the hole in the fence on his way to the library. What was odd was that this guy (I think his name was Luke) wanted to be the Pope. As you can imagine, he was mercilessly teased. We’d say “there goes the Pope!”. Our neighborhood was very unusual. Within an area of about a mile and a half we had three social classes represented. From Parson’s boulevard to Jamaica high was a working-class area. The closer you got to 168th Street the houses were lower middle class attached houses. Our block, 168th Street was middle class. I would say there was subliminal tension between us around social class which I will get to later.
What to do About Close Plays
Those adults and kids who were involved in Little League have no idea how easy they had it. The teams had coaches who determined who was going to play what position, and they had umpires who determined who is safe and who is out on close plays. In the sandlots we had to figure this out for ourselves. For us the captains determine the battling order and the positions. But the captain of a team was the first among equals. By a long process of trial and error we learned who was the best in each position so the captain barely had to say a word about who was going to play where. Also, the players themselves got to know who was a weak and a strong hitter and they would self-organize themselves accordingly. No one kept personal records of performances. We just knew what the score was and what inning we were in. To this day I cannot imagine how we kept track of close plays at home, first, second or third base. Our arguments were never technical or legal. They were always matters of who beat the throw and who didn’t. What was interesting as I remember it, is the arguments never lasted very long. We just wanted to keep playing. Our games were usually high scoring so a game was usually never determined by a single call.
The Passing of a Comet: Danny Mettines
My father never liked the kids I played ball with. He grew up very poor. His mother raised seven kids and they were “on the dole”. He was an artist who rose out of poverty to become a commercial artist. We lived in a middle class neighborhood (one square block) and he was afraid my baseball friends would be a bad influence on me. He was always trying to get be to play for church teams as an alternative. I never gave up my friends but I did play on one church team in grammar school. I could never get enough of baseball. At St. Nicholas of Tolentine the teams were organized with the names of native American tribes – The Mohawks, Algonquins, Iroquois, Cheyannes. One day the Mohawks showcased a pitcher who was a real phenom, Danny Mettinis. Danny just towered over us in terms of skill. As a left-handed pitcher he could strike out anybody. As a first baseman he could scoop the ball out of the dirt and do splits to sweep up errant throws from the infield. Danny ran like the wind and as a hitter he could hit the ball 100 feet further than any one else. He wasn’t a big guy but he was built like a tank. He was charismatic, funny and sarcastic. I prayed that he’d never find out about our games in the corner, but that day came.
When Danny came to participate in our games, he revolutionized the existing hierarchy. Brendon, Owen, Tony and I were all knocked off of top ranking. Danny was in a class by himself. Danny was a lefthanded power hitter who would not only hit balls into the trees but over them. He would regularly hit homeruns over the track. It was hard to lose a game if Danny was on your side. Danny was charismatic, funny and sarcastic. You didn’t want to get on his bad side.
For the Love of the Game: Joe Austin On the actual playing field of Jamaica high, sometimes games and practices would be going on that were not connected to the actual high school baseball team. The players were older, maybe 15-17 years old. The person who was coordinating their practices was an old guy who I eventually came to know as Joe Austin. Joe was an ex-minor league baseball player who worked with kids in the neighborhood and eventually took them into leagues. Joe had skills way beyond any coach I had seen. If you happen to go to a baseball game early and watch the infield and outfield practices, that was the routine Joe would go through with his players. He would provide bats and balls for the players and when they were old enough to go into leagues, he would buy the uniforms. Joe worked at night in a brewery and then five days a week he would take the bus from his house on Sutfin Blvd about a mile to 168th Street. He would then walk 4 blocks to the field carrying bats, balls and gloves in a duffle bag. He was on the field from about 9AM to 3PM. When he went into leagues he named his teams Irish names. Like the Lepricons leprechaun? , Blarney Boys and Shannons.
When Joe thought we were old enough, he started coming to our choose-up games in the corner. He was not pushy at all. He provided bats and balls for us regularly and offered to umpire our games. This was a great relief for us as time wasn’t wasted arguing. He started to make lineup cards for us that he would draw on the back of a paper lunch bag. When we got a little older, maybe 11 or 12, he moved us to another part of the high school park, which had more room. Then he offered to pitch for both sides. This was a boom for us because he got the ball over the plate virtually all the time which speeded up the games. Joe had skills that in retrospect no other coach could ever come close to let alone match. He started to pitch us knuckleballs and curve balls us to get us used to hitting pitches other that weren’t straight. He also worked with kids who seemed to want to become pitchers and he taught them not only to throw curves, but sliders, screwballs, and forkballs. One kid, Joey Fitzgerald made it as far as the Mets farm system. Little did we know Joe was grooming us to be his next team, the Emeralds.
“Yaw wanna play ball, play ball! Ya don’t? Get the fuck off the field” Joe always welcomed new players so that once we transitioned to a bigger field, more boys came to play. Now the teams each had 9 players on a side. We were bigger, stronger and we could hit the ball further. Younger kids started coming including Jesse Braverman (with whom I’m still friends), Joey Fitzgerald, Bobby Saca, John Brennan, Ritchie Ames. While Joe was very inclusive, he was also very demanding. Once you started playing in the games, Joe expected you to be there every day. Some of the guys I started with stopped coming to the choose-up games probably because they got tired of it. Their skills had leveled off or they got involved in other activities (some activities like drugs or stealing cars). But one player, a catcher by the name of Davey Heckendorn, made a conscious choice to stop playing, told everyone about it and he paid for it.
One day Davey came to the field with someone I had never seen before. I later found out his name was Joe Trapp. Davey started to cry as he announced he wouldn’t be coming anymore. His music teacher told him that if he continued catching, he would ruin his hands by digging the balls out of the dirt. Joe Trapp and David Bernstein were there to support him. As I recall, Joe cursed him out for quitting. If you can imagine what a response was like from a group of 15 predominately Italian or Irish boys hearing this, it wasn’t pretty. We mocked him for crying and I’m sure we threatened Joe and David with a good beating for even daring to come to our turf again. I spoke with him years later, and this is the first topic we discuss. In retrospect, this was one of many miserable things I did as a 12-13 year old.
The lazy hazy days of summer pick-up games with Joe
In spite of the intensity that Joe demanded I would say the two years we spent on the big field were the happiest of all my 13 years of baseball. I loved playing against people I knew and because there were no crowds, uniforms, bells or whistles it was easy to relax. During the course of a summer’s day we would have two games. One in the morning, starting about 9:30 and one after lunch. After the first game I would rush home for lunch, eat quickly and then run back to the field. As I remember it, we let Joe pick the teams instead of us choosing up. Joe had a very good sense of how to pick combinations of players who would make the teams evenly matched. As I recall it most of our games were close. I switched over from shortstop to second base because as the field was larger I couldn’t make the throw from short to first very easily. I started secretly keeping records of my hitting statistics – batting average, homers, RBIs, doubles and triples. Because we were bigger now and could hit the ball further the outfield became more attractive to play rather than a sentence of banishment.
Poetry in motion One of my favorite activities was having Joe hit fungoes to me in the outfield. He would stand at home plate and I would be stationed in center field. With the wave of his hand, he would motion to me to run from center to right center. He would hit the ball to me perfectly, neither too far to make it uncatchable nor too easy where I would stand still and wait for it. I always had to catch it on the run. Then he would motion me to run to left-center back to right center field and the same thing would happen, back and forth for maybe 30-45 minutes. I loved to fact there was no fence to worry about crashing into. Playing the outfield really developed my arm so by the time I started playing that position I developed a really strong arm. Also, I was a very fast runner but you would never know it with me playing second base. Playing center field, I could utilize my speed to the max. I loved center because, like shortstop, it’s a position where you see the whole field at once.
Joe had nicknames for some of the players. He called me “Lash LaRue” after a movie he had seen where the cowboy used to strip a gunslinger’s gun out of his hand with a whip. Because my arm was pretty wild in center field when it was still developing, my throws home were often way off. He once yelled at me, “hey Lash, the backstop is 18 feet across. Do you think you get that shotgun within that range? I never took it personally. I was flattered that I had enough standing for him to tease me.
Crossing the Rubicon We did not always just play games among ourselves. Occasionally we would get a challenge from a group from another neighborhood to play a game. The game was not slow pitch. It was with pitchers pretty much throwing fast balls as hard as they could with someone calling balls and strikes. These games were harder for everyone because we had to hit pitches coming at us at much greater velocity. Some of our better players stopped coming. Billy Smolin and Bernard Rubino didn’t return. Tony Circillo stopped being the power hitter he was, but hung on as a pitcher. Brendon Rice was not a good hitter once we switched to fast pitch but continued as a catcher. Chris Green and I made the transition as did Danny.
Our entry into organized leagues as the Emeralds
It was in 1961 when I was 13 that Joe moved us to play on the actual Jamaica High School field. It was around the same year that Joe prepared us to play in the Queens-Nassau League. We stopped playing pick-up games and when we were together it was strictly infield and outfield and batting practice. Joe bought all uniforms. He never made any cuts (telling players they didn’t make the team). I think in our first year we had close to 30 players on our team. I believe it was in 1962 that we had our first team. The league had players that could be up to the age of 17. Our oldest players were 14. Joe wanted to play in a league with older players because the competition would be good for us. In retrospect I think it was a mistake. Before we got into the league, we knew that we were much better than kids our own age. But playing against teams with players who were 2-3 older than we were was demoralizing. I think in the first year in the league we were 4-16. The next year we did better. I think we played about .500 ball. Our last year in the league we thought we could compete for the championship. I think we won more than we lost but we never won anything.
A taste of the East Side kids Our team was a rough team, kind of like the East Side kids. We got into some fights with the other teams and probably the organizers of the league warned Joe. When we played occasionally in the suburbs we could feel the class tensions and this would carry over to Joe and his relationship with the other players. Joe would coach first base. Sometimes he’d get into razzing with opposing teams’ first baseman. One time
Joe told me to spike the first baseman. I said no. Joe took me out for a pinch runner.
Our team did not have good team spirit. We teased each other almost as much as we teased the other team. Who’s in and who’s out? Soon before our first year in the league two players we had never seen before started to come to our practices: Mark Kenny, Ronnie Gerreki. They were not from our neighborhood and naturally enough that challenged the existing pecking order. As I recall Mark Kenney’s father talked to Joe about taking Mark on the team. His father had professional aspirations for Mark and his father knew Joe would develop his talents. I think the same thing happened with Ronnie. Both Mark and Ronnie were very good. Probably the only player we had better than they was Danny. But there was a problem. Mark played short-stop and Ronnie played second. What was going to happen to the existing people we had to play short and second?
There were a number of tension points. One was the fact that Mark and Ronnie did not come up from the ranks. They just appeared, so naturally those who played with Joe for years would feel pushed aside. I was a good hitter and Joe still wanted me in the line-up so he moved me into center field where I had been practicing for a year or two. But we already had a center fielder, Frankie Majori. I was a much better hitter than Frankie and so because of me, Frankie was on the bench. This caused tension between some of Frankie’s friends and I who were also on the team. This was amplified by class conflicts. Frankie, Brendan and Bernard were working class. I was middle class and they knew it because they knew where I lived. I started to feel more isolated than I ever had.
My distance from others on the team was aggravated by the differences in where we went to school. Many of the Emeralds were also playing ball for Jamaica High School, a working class public school. My parents did not want me to go to Jamaica High. It was too rough and they thought I would get a better education at a Catholic school. So instead of going to a high school with my friends which was 2 blocks away, I was shipped off Holy Cross High School, three or four miles away. I was very angry at my parents for this and I had a major rift with my them that never really healed completely. Meanwhile the players who went to Jamaica high noticed my absence and probably concluded that I was spoiled, being shipped off to a private school. After I got home from school in high school, I would walk over to Jamaica High to watch my old friends play, hoping to find some solidarity and imagining I was in center field there. But my old friends rarely acknowledged me. I was an outsider. After a while I stopped going. It was too painful. I never even tried out for the Holy Cross baseball team. I hated going there and didn’t want to spend any extra time there.
My father coming to my games Despite my father’s disapproval of Joe and the Emeralds, he came to the games. From his point of view it was a natural thing to want to watch your kid play ball. But with rare exceptions, none of the kid’s father’s came to the game, so he stuck out like a sore thumb. In addition, being Italian he would yell when I did something well. It was humiliating. I asked him not to come but he didn’t, telling me that the other kids were jealous because their fathers didn’t come to the game. He didn’t understand that for a 15-year-old teenager living in the United States in the early 1960s, the last thing they wanted was to be seen with their parents. One time we had a Saturday afternoon game in which the field we were supposed to play on was waterlogged by the previous days of rain. I got word that we would switch fields. I called my father to tell him not to come to the waterlogged field and that we were playing somewhere else. He asked me where, and I made believe I couldn’t remember it. Well, I was very happy to know I wouldn’t have to deal with him for a day. However, when I stepped up leading off the game in the new location, Tony Cirillo says to me from the bench, “hey Bruce, guess who’s here?”. It was my father, who must have made some phone calls and found the field.
My performance I didn’t do nearly as well as I did in the pick-up games. In my three years with the Emeralds I think I hit about .260 or so. I was a streak hitter and better with runners on base. I was a good left-handed drag bunter so Joe translated that as my being a good leadoff batter. I wasn’t. I didn’t like taking pitches and my main goal was to get my cuts in. In retrospect, my best position was batting fifth, after Mark and Danny. That way I could hit with runners on base. The only reason I liked hitting lead-off was I would come to the plate more. Our home field was the 201st Street field which had a short rightfield fence. It was a great experience to hit a ball over the fence and trot around the bases. Until then if I hit one deep over the outfielders I had to run it out as it was it was an inside the park homer. I hit some homers but I also had bad streaks. I once struck out six times in a double-header, four in the first game and two in the second. By the end of the game, Jesse’s brother Roger was pointing out what I was doing wrong in front of a small crowd. He meant well, but it was humiliating.
By my seventeenth birthday my time with the Emeralds was up. I either had to find a new team or stop playing. I had been playing ball for 10 years and wouldn’t know what to do with myself, so I played on. I played three more years, one with the Dukes in South Zone Park; one was with a team in Forest Hills and one with a team from South Jamaica. I will focus most on my crazy year with the Dukes. I learned more about myself and life than I ever dreamed of in all my years with Joe. I had to face my shadow side.
From Joe Austin to Ray Church and the Dukes The shadow side of my baseball life In all my years with Joe I was a very good player all around. I could hit for power, I was a very good center fielder, I had a good arm and I was fast. I started every game and finished every game That meant I could count on:
never being pinch-hit for;
never pinch-hitting;
Never being pinch run for
never pinch running; and
never going into the outfield for defensive purposes
Doing any of these things was a sign you were not a complete player and only had part-time status. Yet when I played for Ray Church, I had to learn to accept all these roles. But what I found was that as I rose to the occasion and in the process formed at deeper relationship with a coach that I ever dreamed of.
Who was Ray Church? Ray Church was no Joe Austin. He could not hit fungoes like Joe. He couldn’t curse like Joe and he never played minor league baseball. I later found out the Ray worked at the LaGuardia airport in some administration capacity, he had been in the Air Force, and like Joe, he was single. What Ray had that Joe didn’t have was he was natural psychologist and social psychologist. Ray was very even-tempered and he seemed to have emotional relationships with most of players who were all about 17-18 years old. Ray was about 45 years old. My friend Jesse who used to represent Joe at the league meetings told me that Ray had coached the South Ozone Park Dukes for many years.
My introduction to Ray and Dave Laney Dave Laney was a well-built, good looking, tall Irish kid with a mass of bleached blond hair and a red face. I never knew whether his face was red because he had been surfing or drinking. I later found out it was both. I played against Davey when I was with Joe. He was a good left-handed pitcher and first baseman with power. One day he showed up at our Jamaica high field to pitch informal battling practice. I didn’t know why he was here, given South Ozone park was about five miles or so from Jamaica. However, Joe remembered him, let him pitch to us and Dave fit right in. I happened to be hitting well in batting practice and remember hitting everything he threw – line drives. I hit one over the wall. The next pitch he just rolled in like he was bowling. “Try to hit that one” he said. We had a good laugh. I liked his spirit. So I asked him about playing for the Dukes. As if he had rehearsed ahead of time he gave me Ray’s phone number. It was only later that I suspected that Ray had sent him over to recruit me. Anyway, two days later I called Ray and asked him if I could play for him. He said “any one of Joe’s boys can play for me”. I asked him when the first practice was and we were off.
From center field to the bench I got a late start in the Spring of 1968. The snow was slow to dry and so I wasn’t able to work out with Joe as I usually had (his “Spring training” began March 15th). Also I had put on some 10 pound, possibly from drinking in the woods with friends. We had some practices but I was struck by how rudimentary the practices were compared to Joe. However, the players were very good. The Dukes started me in center field but after three games or so I think I only had one hit. Meanwhile a center fielder named Wally Shultz was tearing up his high school league hitting .500. So, by the fourth game Wally was in center and I was on the bench. Ray seemed to understanding how disheartening this way for me. Without too much prodding sitting in his car after a game I blurted out how my father was driving me nuts, trying to control me. Before the next game Ray, came to pick me up along with some other guys and drive us to the field. I invited him to come in and meet my parents, which he did. Soon after he told me how much he understood about my situation of being controlled after meeting my parents.
As the season went on I played some of the time but never constantly. The players were much more supportive of me than anything I had experienced with Joe and all the guys I grew up with. One thing I noticed is that whenever I started a game I was never pinch-hit for, even if I wasn’t doing well. I think Ray understood that would be more painful for me to start and be taken out than not starting at all. Ray had a couple of coaches who were more impatient with me than Ray and I felt Ray was defending me.
One time after another fight with my father, I called Ray and asked him to come get me. He did and we spent a long time talking at his house until about 1 in the morning. I was becoming more and more attached to him and the more I wanted to show him I was a better player than what I had shown so far.
I hit a pinch-triple
That summer I had been working at UPS unloading trucks. I dropped a 50-pound box on my foot so my toe was bandaged for a while. However, I didn’t want to miss our night game we were playing so I went to game. I could still hit but I couldn’t run very fast. In about the 8th inning of a game, Ray told me to pinch hit for a player. The first pitch was a high fastball which I fouled back. I thought to myself I would have creamed that in any other year but this one. Well, lo and behold the pitcher threw me the same pitch. This one didn’t get away from me. I tomahawked to straight away center. It must have been 100 feet over center fielder head. I lumbered around to third with triple. Ray called time out and took me out of the game for a pinch runner. This was so weird. I had never been pinch-run for before. But then again, I probably never pinch hit before starting to play with Ray. After the game I sat in Ray’s car crying. I was so happy I contributed something. We hugged.
A late inning defensive replacement A little later in the summer when my foot healed and I lost the weight I had gained I found myself still on the bench. In the eighth inning of a game in which we were barely ahead, Ray called on me to replace Al Locaccio, a catcher who was only in left field because we needed his bat in the line-up. I hated left field because there was so little room to run. However, I was in no position to move Walley Shultz out of center. The field we were playing at was Rosedale. This field was notorious for fog. So sure enough, a right hand batter hits a long high drive towards me but curving foul. I keep on running into and through foul territory. I lose the ball in the fog but then it comes out of the fog and I snag it. I must have been 50 into foul territory. Our bench explodes with cheering. Mike Dunn, the other coach who was sympathetic to me looked at Ray in disbelief. Ray taps his forehead with his finger three or four times. I am fighting back the tears.
Ray confides in me he is gay My relationship with Ray was obviously deepening. He invited me to his place on Friday nights a couple of times just to visit. I asked him questions about himself because I thought it was selfish of me to keep the focus on myself. He told me he wasn’t looking forward to going to his sister’s house on Sunday because they kept asking him when he is going to get married. He then said something to me like, “Bruce, I have to tell you something. I’m gay.” I didn’t have an adverse relation other than sympathy for the situation he was in with his sister. I asked him why he didn’t just tell her. He said he wasn’t ready to do that. It would send shock waves through his family. I understood. I was very pleased that I built up a relationship with him such that he didn’t have to say “don’t tell anyone”. He just knew I wouldn’t. I was proud of that.
Pinch hit double and score the winning run We were a pretty good team and at the end of the year we were in contention to go to the playoffs. Maybe we were about 12-8. Our game was being played at my old 201st street field where I played with the Emeralds. In our last game which was to determine if we were going to the playoffs or not I came up to pinch hit to start off the bottom of the 9th inning of a game that was tied. Before I stepped to the plate Ray motioned to me to come towards him where he was coaching third base. He looked me straight in the eye and said “look, this is your turf. Act accordingly”. I went back to home plate looked it him. He always gave me a sign to hit line drives, and not to try to hit everything out of the park. I stepped in. The first pitch was a fastball right down the middle. I blasted it over the right field fence and over the Long Island Railroad tracks for a ground rule double (it wasn’t a homer for reasons I won’t go into.). As I look my lead off second, I noticed that instead of pitching from a stretch, the pitcher went into a full wind-up. I broke for third. I got such a great jump I was less that 10 feet from third base when Sandy Ameroso lined a single to right. It reached the right fielder in two hops. I paid no attention to any signals from Ray, I just instinctively thought I could beat the throw. I turned on the jets and slid safely underneath the throw which reached the catcher on a hop. Our dugout exploded from the bench to greet me at home. It was hard for me to cry in front of other boys. They didn’t seem to understand what I was crying about. But coach Mike Dunn and Ray knew what I was crying about.
Our end of the year party
Every year some sandlot baseball teams have a dinner in which the coaches give speeches and awards to the players. I was sitting at a table with one of some of the players I felt closest to. Since I batted .206 for the season, I was confident I wouldn’t be standing up for anything. So along with many other 18-year-old boys at a table, I started to drink. I was never much good at holding my liquor so after 3 beers I was pretty high and the room seemed foggy. Then out of the fog I hear my name. “For sportsmanship award, Bruce Lerro”. What the fuck” I think to myself. I don’t even know what the award is for. The people at my table already started laughing at the prospect of me walking to the front of the room. As I was making my way to the front, Ray, said “and to present him with this award, the only and only, Joe Austin” Now, Joe himself was known to drink a bit and it seemed like he too had been drinking. I got the trophy and wobbled back to my table. the players at my table were fighting off laughing until I was respectfully seated. Then they burst out full flush.
My happy ending with my Forest Hills team
I was done with the South Ozone park Dukes because I was too old. So the next year I hooked up with another team in Forest Hills Queens. I had a very good year with this team. I played center every game and I hit consistently throughout the year. But the climax came at the end of the year when we made the playoffs. This section has been taken from my article Facing the Music: Religion, Nationalism and Sports Have Enchanted the Working Class; Socialism Hasn’t
Making my dreams come true In 1968 our team from Brooklyn got into a playoff game at Victory Field which was one of the fanciest fields around. My girlfriend, Rose Nuccio, let it be known to me that this was the last time she was coming to my games. Sunday was her only day to sleep in. “Besides” she said, “you are 0-8” (referring to my performance in the last two games.) She brought her sister Miriam along with her for this game. In the top of the first inning, I was up with two guys on base and two outs. The left-handed pitcher, Rick Honeycutt, threw me a high inside curve ball.
“Tshrush”! I tomahawk the pitch and the ball really does head for the right center field fence just like in my fantasy 13 years ago. As I watch the ball head for the fence time and space seem to contract. It’s as if I were in my backyard 13 years ago. The ball lands on the tennis courts on the other side of the fence scattering everyone. I am so out of it that as I make my rounds of the bases, I miss first base. The coach has to get me to touch the base. As I round second, I see Rosie and Miriam jumping up and down screaming like two young Italian gals will. The look on Rosie’s face as our eyes met was like a melting ray of sunlight that united our eyes. I missed third base, too. Finally, as I headed for home most everyone on our team came out to home plate to meet me. It was as if we won the World Series. I disappeared in a mass of teammates at the plate.
A thirteen year life cycle is complete dialectically. I returned to my fantasy of thirteen years ago, on a higher level, deeper, richer more real. I tell this story in my Brainwashing Propaganda and Rhetoric class to point out the Propagandistic power of Sports. There is rarely a dry eye in the house.
The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) urges the leaders of the nations of the Americas to oppose the upcoming United Nations’ decision to renew the Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) in Haiti for another 12 months. Additionally, we call on these regional leaders to challenge the United States’ proposal to convert this MSS into a full-fledged UN Peacekeeping mission by 2025.
On October 16, 2022, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) sent a letter urging the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation to “respect Haitian sovereignty and support the Haitian masses in their stand against the ongoing occupation of their country by foreign powers” by using their veto power and voting against another armed intervention and occupation into Haiti. In this letter, we outlined why the Haitian people perceive the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) as a foreign occupation that has undermined their independence and sovereignty since 2004. On October 3, 2023, we and over 100 social and civic movements and organizations throughout the Americas, including in Haiti and the diaspora, issued a joint statement denouncing the UN Security Council’s approval of the U.S.-orchestrated, Kenya-led MSS to Haiti. In these, we laid out demands in line with those of Haitian civic and social organizations. The Haitian people are resolute in their opposition to foreign intervention and remain steadfast in their commitment to self-determination.
As we articulated in our previous letter and statement, Haiti has endured a long history of U.S. intervention and occupation. The Haitian people recognize that their current challenges stem directly from the persistent meddling of the United States, the United Nations, and the Core Group. They are unequivocal in their belief that all U.S.-led foreign interventions over the past decades have been illegal and illegitimate. Notably, the current Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) lacks legitimacy, having been authorized under the auspices of an illegitimate and U.S.-installed Prime Minister, Ariel Henry. Subsequently, the U.S., with the support of CARICOM, established a nine-member “Presidential Council” and Prime Minister, neither of which has any legal status or legitimacy in Haiti, all without the backing of the Haitian populace or the opportunity for a democratic selection process. Importantly, the U.S. demanded that those permitted on the “Presidential Council” consent to foreign intervention (the MSS). Thus, the entire process that led to the imposition of a foreign force in Haiti is fundamentally fraudulent.
We find it extremely worrisome that the U.S. has enlisted foreign proxies—such as police and military forces from Kenya, Jamaica, and Belize—to implement its foreign policy objectives in the region. It is equally alarming that these foreign forces, as part of the MSS, enjoy effective immunity for their actions in Haiti. Given the traumatic legacy of the last UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH, 2004-2017), which was marred by violence, sexual exploitation, and a cholera epidemic, we view the MSS as a threat not only to Haiti’s sovereignty but also to the health and wellbeing of its people, particularly its children.
The Black Alliance for Peace also challenges the U.S. claim of addressing “gang violence” in Haiti. We assert that the U.S. and the so-called “international community” (including France and Canada) are fully aware that the current “gang violence” is funded and supported by Haiti’s oligarchs and the U.S.-backed political elite. This group imports weapons into the country and pays young men to instigate chaos, which is then used to manufacture consent for further invasion and occupation of Haiti. This is similar to the way the U.S. and France have increased the problem of “terrorism” in West and East Africa as a ruse to create U.S. military forces in that region, which we see in the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). The awareness of these underlying dynamics is underscored by the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and Canada on several members of Haiti’s economic and political elite, including former Haitian president Michel Martelly, who was installed by the U.S.
In a time of global upheaval, marked by a live-streamed genocide in Gaza and violent clashes between cartels and police in Mexico, it is perplexing that the U.S., France, and Canada are advocating for foreign occupation of Haiti—a country facing internal conflicts that do not threaten regional or global security. We must question the U.S. insistence on maintaining a military presence in Haiti at this juncture.
As an anti-war and anti-imperialist organization, the Black Alliance for Peace warns that the U.S. aims to use Haiti as a staging ground for a permanent military base in the region to, as articulated in its foreign policy documents, secure “U.S. national security and interests” and manage rival powers, presumably Russia and China.
We once again call on your countries to respect Haitian sovereignty and support the Haitian masses in their ongoing struggle against the relentless occupation by foreign powers. Only the Haitian people can determine their own solutions. Their leaders must not be selected by the U.S. or any other foreign entity. Allowing continuous U.S. and Western control over Haiti’s political apparatus not only threatens to extinguish the nation’s hard-won sovereignty, but also weakens the sovereignty and self-determinative capacities of every other nation in the Caribbean, Central, and South America.
As we know, Haiti is a laboratory for U.S. and Western imperialist policies and practices of domination and intervention. What is visited upon Haiti will inevitably be visited upon other nations in the hemisphere. We have seen this in Honduras as the U.S. ambassador acts like a government representative in a foreign land, against the sovereignty of that nation and its President, Xiomara Castro. This is a strategy that was fine-tuned in Haiti under the Obama-Clinton foreign policy apparatus and continues to this day.
We ask that you, leaders throughout the Americas, reject the old colonial divisions that have made the region more susceptible to U.S. intervention, sabotage and neocolonial rule, and use regional mechanisms like CELAC to support Haitian sovereignty. As nations have stood in solidarity with Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua against imperialist assaults, sanctions, and subterfuge aimed at undermining their sovereignty, so should you oppose the interventionist crimes and colonial impositions visited upon Haiti and its people by the U.S., UN and Core Group. As the overwhelming majority of nations and people of the Americas have decried the zionist genocide in Gaza and the ongoing violation of the sovereignty of Palestine and Lebanon, so should you fight against the imperialist actions that have resulted in instability, violence, and mass death in Haiti. There can be no “Zone of Peace” in the Americas if there is no peace and freedom for the people of Haiti.
The Black Alliance for Peace, in alignment with the wishes of the Haitian masses and their supporters, unequivocally opposes continued foreign armed intervention in Haiti. We stand firm in our demand for an end to the relentless meddling by the United States and Western powers in Haitian affairs. We urge your governments and nations to stand in solidarity with the Haitian people in their fight for liberation by opposing the extension of the MSS and any future plans to convert this mission into a UN peacekeeping operation.
As another October approaches, the beautiful season of colors begins here in New England. Call it October’s Surprise Party. The turning leaves with all their colors come to announce the earth’s glory, the possibility of peace and happiness for all.
Yet as the month transpires and November nears, I think we might expect what for many will be the unexpected, as Bob Dylan reminds us with “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Listen: “I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warnin’/I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.”
A Black Swan event or the expected?
And if that hard rain does fall, it won’t just be those ravishing leaves that will be pounded down and die. First comes the beauty, then the dying follows, as every fall decrees. And while nature always brings the rebirth of spring, in their hubris, humans, thinking they are gods, have devised a technological solution that can bring all life to an end for good – nuclear weapons.
That their government is provoking their use by waging a war against Russia via Ukraine and backing the Israeli Middle East slaughter and genocide is not a thought that most Americans choose to entertain as they blithely go about their lives. Such lucidity is deemed too depressing.
Dylan wrote that song in the summer of 1962, 62 years ago (a symbolic number by the way), shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis that October when nuclear annihilation was avoided at the last minute when John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev came to their senses.
Today we are even closer than ever to a nuclear war, as those who closely follow such events tell us. Scott Ritter, the former U.S. Marine and UN weapons inspector who tried to stop the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 by reporting that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is one. He is joined by a host of lonely voices crying out their warnings: ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern, journalist Pepe Escobar, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the late Daniel Ellsberg and Randy Kelher, the author James W. Douglass who has been writing and demonstrating (with his wife Shelley) against nuclear weapons for nearly half-a-century, peace activist and former CIA officer Elizabeth Murray, et al. (my apologies for limiting the list). Many of these irenic and fatidic voices warning the world of the closeness of nuclear war have appeared on Andrew Napolitano’s illuminating Judging Freedom interview show. Their voices are easily available, for now.
Ritter, who is being hounded by the U.S. government, has just written an article, “Life Pre-empted” whose opening line reads as follows: “If you’re not thinking about the end of the world by now, you’re either braindead or stuck in some remote corner of the world, totally removed from access to news.” [my emphasis]
He is right, although contemplating our nearness to nuclear war no doubt gives most people such a serious case of the megrims that they turn away. It is understandable but must be resisted if the world is to avoid disaster. A world-wide antinuclear movement is necessary, one that links the dangers of the U.S. aggressive Ukrainian proxy-war against Russia with the U.S./Israeli genocide of Palestinians and its expanded war throughout the Middle East together with the U.S. provocations of China.
Even the corporate mainstream media are here and there starting to recognize the growing danger of nuclear war. Of course, they blame Russia for this, as they do for everything, even as most of the world correctly points the finger at the United States.
For it is the USA together with its NATO lap dogs that have brought us to this point, as they have spent decades surrounding Russia with troops and missiles and waging a war to conquer Russian via Ukraine. For those who don’t know this history, they are in for a big surprise if Russia responds and the nuclear missiles fly, as Pepe Escobar recently tweeted about a statement by Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia and presently the deputy chairman of its Security Council:
IT’S THUNDERBOLT TIME Medvedev Unplugged does know his Latin. But then Russian educational standards are in a class by itself, as I never cease to learn here in Moscow. Commenting on the update of Russia’s nuclear doctrine, Medvedev noted, “This change in our country’s guidelines for using nuclear weapons, in and of itself, may cool the ardor of those of our opponents who have not yet lost their sense of self-preservation. As for the dim-witted, only the Roman maxim remains: caelo tonantem credidimus Jovem Horace’s Odes. AnRegnare …” All of us who studied Latin know that comes straight from Horace and it goes straight to the point: thunder out of the sky reminds everyone that Jupiter rules. Medvedev’s metaphor is a beauty: the only way the “dim-witted” – Hegemonic and the vassal swamp – will learn is when the Russian Jupiter releases a thunderbolt.
Let us hope it doesn’t come to that. But the danger of a nuclear war has increased dramatically as the Biden administration continues to up the ante with its support for Ukraine and Israel. If it approves the Ukrainian request to use U.S., British, and French-supplied long-range missiles for strikes deep inside Russia, all bets are off. And the world awaits Russian ally Iran’s response to the current Israel bombing of Lebanon and the killing of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement, a war crime of another government that believes there will be no repercussions for their actions.
The American public’s problem is not really ignorance of Latin (that is a symptom of a much greater ignorance), but being unable to recognize the truth about its leaders’ insane aggression and nuclear gamesmanship. A knowledge of the Roman and Greek Classics reminds us that evil is real and tragedy descends on those who surpass the limits. The tragic flaw – hamartia – is not part of the American lexicon. Disney World talk is.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently issued a warning to the US/NATO that Russia’s nuclear policy has changed as a result of US/NATO/Ukraine’s attacks inside Russia. “Aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, with the participation or support of a nuclear state, is proposed to be considered as a joint attack on the Russian Federation,” he said. As a result, he added, “We reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression against Russia and Belarus.”
But the Biden/Harris administration’s idiot leaders push the nuclear envelope thinking Russia is bluffing. In their desire to conquer Russia, they have lost all reason and continue on a trajectory that started long ago but has now hit a crisis point.
For those who think this war against Russia will come to a peaceful conclusion, I refer them to a series of articles in the propaganda organ of the U.S. “deep state,” which is really very shallow and obvious – the journal Foreign Affairs ( January/February 2023) – the mouthpiece for the Council of Foreign Relations. There you will read articles promoting the destruction of Russia, regime change, and the removal of Vladimir Putin, etc. All justified by America’s God-given right to rule the world. One article by Robert Kagan, the neoconservative adviser to Republican and Democratic administrations and the husband of the infamous Victoria Nuland, a central figure in the 2014 US-engineered Ukrainian coup d’état, is laughable, but that it is taken seriously is a sign that the ruling elites are so deluded and intent on never stopping to try to destroy Russia that they will claim anything, no matter how contrary to obvious facts. They just make things up to fit their narrative.
In “A Free World If You Can Keep It,” Kagan writes, presumably with a straight face, the following: “Similarly, Putin’s serial invasions of neighboring states have not been driven by a desire to maximize Russia’s security. Russia’s never enjoyed greater security on its western frontier than during the three decades after the end of the Cold War…. But at no time since the fall of the Berlin Wall has anyone in Moscow had reason to believe that Russia faced the possibility of attack by the West.” [my emphasis]
This crap is so laughable if it weren’t so dangerous and delusional. If Kagan actually believes what he is saying, which I doubt, then he is dumber that a rock. Since the end of the Cold War, US/NATO has, contrary to their promises, continually moved east, surrounding Russia right up to its borders with troops, bases, and missiles aimed at Russia. Clear provocations and threats that Russia has been complaining about for a long time.
*****
So October approaches, the month of Halloween, actors, and masks. Gore Vidal got a laugh when years ago he referred to Ronald Reagan as our “acting president.” But we’ve had six acting presidents since and their acts have left millions dead and wounded around the globe, including thousands of American troops. The American electoral system is a horror show, a spectacle in what Guy DeBord called “The Society of the Spectacle.” Many Americans have acquiesced in this ongoing tragedy, playing their parts in this deadly charade. The ghosts of all these victims walk among us, and they will haunt us until we come to life by admitting our own complicity in their deaths. The show must not go on, but it will, as long as we keep acting our parts.
The Classical scholar Norman O. Brown so well describes our stage set: “Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.”
So many Americans mask themselves from this savage truth in a futile, face-saving, phony performance. The act is wearing thin. It is time to see through the illusion that a world war is not in the making, unless vast numbers arise from their sleep and oppose it.
It is not just our “leaders” who perform at the Devil’s Masquerade Ball, which is the charade we call American Exceptionalism or The American Way of Life. I think of how all persons are, by definition, masked, the word person being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask. Another Latin word, larva, occurs to me, it too means mask, ghost, or evil spirit.
The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating through our days. The murdered ghosts demanding retribution, and the spirits of the brave and truthful ones urging us to oppose the killers.
While etymology might seem arcane, I rather think it offers us a portal into our lives, not just personally, but politically and culturally as well. Shakespeare was right, of course, “all the world’s a stage,” though I would disagree that we are “merely” players. It does often seem that way, but seeming is the essence of the actor’s show and tell.
Who are we behind the masks? Who is it uttering those words coming through the masks’ mouth-holes (the per-sona, Latin, to sound through)?
October’s surprise party is coming.
“I heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening,” sings Dylan.
In recent days, Donald Trump and his Republican running mate, JD Vance, have doubled down on their false and defamatory claims about legally-admitted Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, thus churning up widespread fears, bomb threats, and school evacuations. Claiming that these migrants were destroying the American “way of life,” Trump promised that, if elected, he would order massive deportations. This statement echoed his astonishing promise, made during the 2024 campaign and previously, to seize and deport between 15 and 20 million immigrants.
Nativist agitation has a long, sordid history in the United States. In the 1850s, large numbers of American Protestants rallied behind the Know Nothing movement and its political offshoot, the American Party, ventures centered primarily on opposing the influence of immigrant Catholics. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, hostility toward Chinese immigrants (“the yellow peril”) and, later, Japanese immigrants led to lynchings, riots, and legislation that barred virtually all immigration from the two Asian nations.
During the early twentieth century, American xenophobia focused on the alleged dangers provided by the “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe, predominantly Catholics and Jews. Such people, it was claimed, had a higher propensity for moral depravity, feeble-mindedness, and crime, and were polluting the “Nordic race.” As a result, many “old stock” Americans championed changes in immigration law to sharply reduce the number of these allegedly inferior people entering the country. Adopted in legislation during the 1920s, a new, highly discriminatory national origins quota system did, indeed, largely restrict their ability to enter the United States, leaving millions to perish in Europe after the onset of the Nazi terror.
Of course, many Americans, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, welcomed the arrival of people from foreign lands. And, in line with their views, U.S. immigration law was significantly liberalized in 1965.
What has inspired this hostility to people coming from other lands?
Many individuals, it seems, feel uneasy when confronted with the unfamiliar. Thus, they sometimes find differences in skin color, religion, language, or culture to be disturbing. Although some people can―and often do―find these things a welcome addition to their lives or, at least, interesting, others become uncomfortable. In these circumstances, immigrants are easily added to other disdained minority groups as victims of widespread misinformation, mistrust, and prejudice.
Unfortunately, this unease with human differences provides a ready-made opportunity for political exploitation. As many a demagogue or unscrupulous politician has learned, fear and hatred of the “other” can be effective in stirring up a mob or winning an election.
Although nativism has been mobilized by political parties and movements of varying political persuasions, it has appeared most frequently on the Right. Fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s focused heavily on the supposed glories of their nation and the ostensible biological inferiority of people from other lands. This xenophobia provided a rightwing ideological component in numerous countries, including the United States, where groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Silver Shirts, the Nazi Party, and the America First movement lauded a mythical “Americanism” and assailed the foreign-born.
More recently, too, anti-immigrant sentiment has played a central role in Europe’s parties of the Far Right, such as France’s National Front (now the National Rally), Alternative for Germany, the Swiss People’s Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, the Party of Freedom of the Netherlands, the Brothers of Italy, and numerous others of their stripe. Meanwhile, in the United States, anti-immigrant sentiment has thrived in the increasingly rightwing Republican Party. Trump’s adoption of an anti-immigrant approach as a central theme of his MAGA movement, like his promise of building a wall between Mexico and the United States, is no accident, but part of a political strategy to ride xenophobia to power.
A key reason that nativism has become a staple of the Right is that, with the advent of democratic institutions in many nations, the Right has faced a difficult situation. Before the commoners gained the vote, their opportunities for effectively challenging economic and social inequality were limited. But, armed with the ballot, masses of people had the power to elect governments that would implement more equitable policies, such as sharing the wealth. This could be accomplished in a variety of ways, including taking control of giant corporations and estates, heavily taxing vast fortunes, raising workers’ pay, reducing the workday and lengthening vacations, building inexpensive housing, and establishing free education and healthcare. Worst of all, from the standpoint of the Right, such leveling measures, advanced by a burgeoning Left, had significant popular appeal.
Faced with this dilemma, the economically and socially privileged and their political parties on the Right recognized that, to defeat the drive for the expansion of economic and social equality, it would be useful to fan the flames of popular prejudices (among them, hostility to immigrants), as this would divide the mass base of the Left and put it on the defensive. Consequently, they gravitated toward this divide and conquer strategy―a strategy that sometimes worked.
Will it work again in the 2024 U.S. presidential and congressional elections? With the poll numbers so close, it’s hard to say.
Meanwhile, though, it’s worth noting how ironic it is that, in the United States―a nation populated almost entirely by immigrants and their descendants―anti-immigrant sentiment, whipped up by Trump and Vance, has once again come to the forefront of American politics.
Here he goes again, cap in hand, begging for the alms of war. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been touring the United States, continuing his lengthy salesmanship for Ukraine’s ongoing military efforts against Russia. The theme is familiar and constantly reiterated: the United States must continue to back Kyiv in its rearguard action for civilisation in the face of Russian barbarism. By attempting, not always convincingly, to universalise his country’s plight, Zelenskyy hopes to keep some lustre on an increasingly fading project.
The Ukrainian president has succeeded most brazenly in getting himself, and the war effort, into the innards of the US presidential election. In doing so, he has become an unabashed campaigner for the Democrats and the Kamala Harris ticket while offering uncharitable views about the Republicans. (Electoral interference, anyone?) The Republican contender, Donald Trump, had good reason to make the following observation about Zelenskyy: “Every time he comes into the country he walks away with $60 billion … he wants them [the Democrats] to win this election so badly.”
Even as a lame duck president, Joe Biden could still be wooed to advance another aid package. This seemed to be done, as the White House records, on threadbare details about Zelenskyy’s “plan to achieve victory over Russia.” According to the readout, diplomatic, economic and military aspects of the plan were discussed. “President Biden is determined to provide Ukraine with the support it needs to win.”
Detail was also scarce in a briefing given by White House national security spokesperson John Kirby. Zelenskyy’s plan to end the war “contains a series of initiatives and steps and objectives that [he] believes will be important”.
In a statement, Biden announced that he had directed the Department of Defense to allocate the rest of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative funds by the end of the year along with US$5.5 billion in Presidential Drawdown Authority. The US$2.4 billion from the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative is intended to supply Ukraine “with additional air defense, Unmanned Aerial Systems, and air-to-ground ammunitions, as well as strengthen Ukraine’s defense industrial base and support its maintenance and sustainment requirements.”
In terms of materiel, an additional Patriot air defence battery is to be furnished to Ukraine’s air defences, along with additional Patriot missiles. Training for Ukrainian F-16 pilots is to be expanded. The air-to-ground Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW), colloquially known as glide bombs, will also be supplied.
Ukraine’s fate is being annexed to the US election campaign, with the Ukrainian president keen to make his own boisterous intervention in the election. On September 22, Zelenskyy paid a visit to a military facility in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was calculated for maximum effect. The facility is not only responsible for manufacturing some of the equipment being used in the war against Russia, notably 155-millimeter howitzer rounds, but is a crucial state for the presidential contenders. On hand to join him was a full coterie of Democrats: Gov. Josh Shapiro, Senator Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Representative Matt Cartwright (D-8th District)
Harris is clear that any administration she leads will see no deviation from current policy. Peace proposals were to be scoffed at, while prospects for a Ukrainian victory had to be seriously entertained. Stopping shy of playing the treason card in remarks made on September 26, Harris claimed that there were those “in my country who would instead force Ukraine to give up large parts of its sovereign territory, who would demand that Ukraine accept neutrality, and would require Ukraine to forgo security relationships with other nations.” And such types had endorsed “proposals” identical to “those of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.”
That message of sanctimonious chest beating was also embraced by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who could only see Zelenskyy as a fighter “for freedom and the rule of law on behalf of democracies around the world” while “Trump and his craven MAGA followers side time and again with Vladimir Putin,” one responsible for a “filthy imperialist and irredentist invasion.” Clearly, the Zelenskyy promotions tour has exercised some wizardry.
The full soldering of Ukrainian matters to US electoral politics has received a frosty response from various Republicans. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) demanded nothing less than Zelenskyy’s dismissal of the Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova. “Ambassador Markarova organised an event in which you toured an American manufacturing site.” The tour took place “in a politically contested battleground state, was led by a top political surrogate for Kamala Harris, and failed to include a single Republican because – on purpose – no Republicans were invited.”
Those on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, seething at Zelenskyy’s electoral caper, have launched an investigation into the possibility that taxpayer funds had been misused to the benefit of the Harris presidential campaign. Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), in a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, noted that, as the Department of Justice was “highly focused on combatting electoral interference, the Committee requests DOJ review the Biden-Harris Administration’s coordination with the Ukrainian government regarding President Zelensky’s itinerary while in America.”
Comer could not resist a pertinent reminder that the Democrats had made much the same charge against Trump while in office in 2019. That occasion also featured Zelenskyy, only that time, the accusation was that Trump had used him “to benefit his 2020 presidential campaign, despite a lack of any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of President Trump.”
GOP dissatisfaction is far from unreasonable. Zelenskyy’s sojourn is nothing less than a sustained effort at electoral meddling, the sort of thing that normally turns US exceptionalists into rabid hyenas complaining of virtue despoiled. Only this time, there are politicians and officials in freedom’s land happy to tolerate and even endorse it. At stake is a war to prolong.
Note: Update of my previous article from March 2008.
Except for a brief interlude during the Eisenhower administration, United States’ support for Israel, in its genocide of the Palestinian people, has been an ongoing process since the Truman administration recognized the state. Contemporary events prompt a review of the post-World War II history that resulted in the formation of a nation that had no visible name until David Ben Gurion proclaimed, on May 14, 1948, the state as Israel.
Books, articles, documents, memoirs and letters from past generations detail how a small group of insiders prevailed over recommendations from an experienced and famous U.S. State Department of “wise men.” It is the story of the Zionist mission. It is the story of apartheid Israel.
The impact, legacy and relevance of the 1946-1948 events to today’s occurrences have not been sufficiently explored. Under the surface are the hidden messages and obscure drives that shaped the past and extended into the future. A more complete analysis of the legacy from Truman’s rapid recognition of the state of Israel explains the past and clarifies the present.
In the initiation of a trend, supporters of those who derailed State Department Near East policy were able to integrate themselves into Middle East policy and subsequently shape global policies. Turmoil from initial events provoked a continuous turmoil in the Middle East. Almost all administrations framed Middle East polices to favor the Zionist cause.
The Truman State Department consisted of leading luminaries of U.S. State Department history. George C. Marshall, United States military chief of staff during World War II, first military leader to become Secretary of State and later a Nobel Prize recipient, had Loy Henderson, Robert A. Lovett, Dean Rusk, Warren Austin and other known figures in his department. Many of them were not entirely supportive of the UN partition plan; their State Department followed Truman’s directives until sensing the partition plan would be counterproductive and cause more violence than it intended to resolve. The record indicates the State Department attempted to modify Truman’s policy that favored partition. They sought a temporary UN trusteeship.
President Truman postured himself as motivated by a conviction — the displaced Jews who had survived the World War II Holocaust needed and deserved an immediate home. The U.S. president vacillated in his arguments and contradicted himself in statements. He railed vehemently against the steady stream of advocates for a Jewish state and retained several presidential advisors who pursed one purpose; promoting a new Jewish state. A suspicion remains that his humanitarian motives had a political content; the Democratic Party craved the financial and voting support of Zionist organizations and their allies.
Clark Clifford, Truman’s chief consul and ardent promoter for a Jewish state, quickly became one of the president’s closest assistants. He was not Truman’s principal assistant, a post held by John Roy Steelman, and behaved as if he were titular chief of staff by acting unilaterally and somewhat dubious in actions that proved decisive. The evidence points to Clifford favoring election expediencies in developing policies that led to the creation of the state of Israel.
The story begins at the closing shots of World War II and with the refugees in displaced persons camps.
The plight of the displaced persons could not be easily resolved. The United States was involved in returning millions of its armed forces to their homes, in the repatriation of captured enemy soldiers, and in preventing mass starvation in Europe. A possibility of a post-war depression and mass unemployment guided America’s political thinkers. In addition, the U.S. immigration laws did not permit the immediate admittance of the displaced persons, nor could it show favoritism. Unable to find a legal mechanism that would bring them to America, Truman petitioned Great Britain to allow them to immigrate to Palestine. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee cited the 1939 White Paper, which specified a definite number of applicants, as a limiting factor. He also suspected new immigrants would burden Britain’s over-stressed mandate and add troubles to the existing emergency.
Truman could not prevail over Attlee. What to do? After presentations by an Anglo-American inquiry commission and a joint cabinet committee (Morrison-Grady) failed to achieve welcoming peace proposals, a tired and irked British government requested the UN General Assembly to consider the Palestine problem. On May 15, 1947, the UN created the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). The committee outlined a partition plan with the city of Jerusalem under a UN trusteeship. Truman instructed the State Department to support the partition plan. UN Ambassador Warren Austin and the state department’s Near East Division, led by Loy Henderson, doubted that partition could resolve the situation.
During the months of UNSCOP’s efforts, Truman complained of pressure by pro-Zionist groups. In Volume II of his Memoirs, p.158, the former president relates:
The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been there before but that the White house too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders — actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats — disturbed and annoyed. Some were even suggesting that we pressure sovereign nations into favorable votes in the General Assembly.
This harsh rhetoric was mild compared to other Truman’s statements concerning the Zionists and its American leaders, especially Cleveland’s Rabbi Silver. In a memorandum to advisor David K. Niles, the president wrote, “We could have settled this whole Palestine thing if U.S. politics had been kept out of it. Terror and Silver are the contributing cause of some, if not all of our troubles.”
On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved the UNSCOP Partition plan. Approval only meant agreement in principle. No effective means for transferring the principle into an operational result had been determined. The lack of enforcement provoked more conflict in Palestine. Each side strived to gain territory and advantage. The uncontrolled mayhem steered the U.S. State Department to adopt the concept of a temporary trusteeship for the area. Believing it had President Truman’s approval, the State Department instructed the U.S. delegation to the United States to petition for a special session of the General Assembly and reconsider the Palestinian issue. In his presentation, UN Ambassador Warren Austin proposed the establishment of a temporary trusteeship for Palestine.
Truman denied giving a green light for the presentation and wrote in his diary, which has been quoted in “The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman, P.127. “This morning I find that the State dept. has reversed my Palestine policy. The first I knew about it is what I see in the papers. Isn’t that hell!” His infuriation arose from embarrassment of having assured Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, whom he highly regarded, that the U.S. would not depart from the Partition Plan and would not entertain a temporary trusteeship. George McKee Elsey, in his memoir, An Unplanned Life, p.161, supplied evidence of Truman’s awareness and permission for the speech. White House staff member Elsey writes:
In fact, as I quickly learned in delving into the record and querying White House and State Staff, Truman had personally read and approved some days earlier the Austin speech, which outlined a plan for U.N. trusteeship of Palestine when the British Mandate ended in May in lieu of partitioning the area into separate Jewish and Arab territories.
The May 15 date for the British exit neared, and the Zionists prepared to declare their state and present their credentials for recognition. Contradictions in U.S. Near East policy led to policies that became completely confusing.
In a speech to the UN General Assembly, March 25, 1948, President Truman clarified his nation’s temporary endorsement of a UN Trusteeship for Palestine that did not prejudice partition. The pleased State Department instructed Ambassador Austin to proceed with deliberations of the Trusteeship proposal. As if not cognizant of the UN trusteeship discussion, Truman prepared to recognize the soon to be formed state. On May 12, two days before an expected announcement by the Jewish Agency in Palestine, an angered George C. Marshall and his assistant Robert Lovett confronted Truman and demanded reasons for the haste in wanting to grant recognition. The president selected his counsel Clark Clifford, who was not involved in foreign policy, to clarify the reasons for the intended recognition.
Clifford’s principal reasons for instant recognition: The UN Security Council could not obtain a truce in hostilities; partition would happen in fact; the U.S. would eventually have to recognize a new state, and it was preferable to get the jump on the Soviet Union.
Clifford’s arguments are easily rebutted. (1) More significant than whether or not the Security Council could obtain a truce was that the UN council was engaged in discussions hoping to achieve a truce. Recognition would close the discussions and prevent the truce. (2) If the Trusteeship was approved and implemented, an entity unilaterally invoking a partition scheme would violate the UN dictates. (3) Clifford’s simple explanation that the U.S. must recognize the new state quickly because the U.S. must recognize the new state was a statement and not a clarification. (4) As for the Soviet Union, Clifford echoed the alarm of Phillip C. Jessup, a member of the U.S. delegation to the UN, who, according to Robert J. Donovan in his book Conflict and Crisis, The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, p.380, cabled UN affairs officer Dean Rusk that the Soviet Union wanted recognition to use Article 51 of the UN charter to protect the new state and thus gain a foothold in the Middle East. This view is specious — Article 51 pertains to defense of member states and the new nation did not become a UN member until one year later. Besides, wasn’t it advantageous for the U.S. to have the Soviet Union recognize the new state before it did? The State Department could then claim it had no choice and would lose less favor with the Arab states.
Marshall questioned why a domestic affairs advisor was determining foreign policy. Truman replied that he had invited Clifford to make a presentation. Obviously, Truman did not want history to record his words and asked his campaign manager to speak for him. Sensing that politics and the forthcoming presidential election had become overriding factors in a significant foreign policy decision, the dedicated George C. Marshall uttered one of the most insulting words ever directed by a cabinet official to a president, “If you follow Clifford’s advice, and if I were to vote in the next election, I would vote against you.” Clark Clifford’s Memoir, Council to the President, P.13, mentions that the Secretary also insisted that these personal remarks be included in the official state department record of the meeting. Whew! (Vice President Harris take note.)
Fearing that the transfer of advice on Near East affairs from the state and defense departments to inexperienced advisors and non-professional lobbyists would continue, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Lovett determined to change Truman’s intentions. For some unknown reason, rather than calling the president directly, he channeled his inquiries through Counselor Clark Clifford. The president’s counselor didn’t speak to the president about Lovett’s urgencies, but assumed a new role ─ he spoke for the president. In response to Lovett’s request to ask Truman to delay recognition, Clifford confesses in his memoir, P.22,
Saying (to Lovett) I would check with the President, I waited about three minutes and called Lovett back to say that delay was out of the question. It was about 5:40 and the State Department has run out of time and ideas.
Within a few minutes, one of the most bizarre sequence of events that had ever occurred in U.S. diplomacy unfolded.
Clifford states he called Dean Rusk and asked the UN affairs officer to inform Warren Austin, chief of the U.S. delegation to the UN, that the president intended to recognize the new Near East state within fifteen minutes. His called bypassed protocol; usually the assistant secretary of state should be informed and that person has the obligation to inform other staff members of decisions. Clifford quotes a surprised Rusk as retaliating with the remark, “This cuts directly across what our delegation had been trying to accomplish in the General Assembly, and we have a large majority for it.” Rusk supposedly called Warren Austin who went home without bothering to inform the U.S. delegation of the news.
Truman’s rapid signing (within 11 minutes) of the document that gave de facto recognition to the ‘new state of Israel’ angered members at a United Nations meeting on the Trusteeship. After learning the new state would be called Israel, the words ‘Jewish state’ were crossed out and the words ‘state of Israel’ were inserted.
May 14 was an enviable day for the new state of Israel, but an unpleasant day for the 160 year old American republic. The diplomatic solution to the Near East crisis had been settled, but the conflict has not been resolved.
What does history show?
History supports the conviction that the Partition Plan would not resolve the hostilities. The State Department concern for rapidly recognizing a new state, without knowledge of its constitution or composition, was diplomatically correct and prescient. The quick recognition of a state for the Jewish population prevented the UN from finishing a discussion of providing mechanisms to prevent more bloodshed and providing proper protection for the state’s large Palestinian population. George Marshall’s State Department acted honestly, with knowledge, and with the conviction it served the interests of the United States
President Harry S. Truman correctly perceived the tenacity of the Zionists. He erred in his judgment that the Partition Plan would resolve the conflict. The unusual rapid response for recognition of the new state, without awareness of its composition, signified a pardon of the excesses committed by Irgun and Haganah against civilian populations and certified the exclusion of any Palestinian voice in the new government. Truman never asked what would happen to the 400,000 Palestinians who had no representation in the new state. Evidently, he didn’t consider that the placing of 100,000 displaced Jews into Palestine would also mean the placing of weapons in the hands of many of these persons and, together with instant recognition, would reinforce the eventual displacement of 900,000 Palestinians. The European DP camps were temporary shelter for those who would undoubtedly find permanent homes and citizenship; the UNWRA refugee camps became permanent homes for several million Palestinian displaced persons who languish with stateless identification.
The post-election provided Truman with an opportunity to show he was not captive to the Zionist enterprise. What did he do? He only half-heartedly pressured Israel in 1949 to resettle displaced Palestinians. This token maneuver is verified by Joshua Landis. In a paper published in The Palestinian Refugees: Old Problems – New Solutions, University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, OK, 2001, p. 77-87, Landis writes,
McGee threatened the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. that if Israel did not accept 200,000 refugees, the US would withhold $49 million worth of Export-Import Bank loans to Israel. The Israeli Ambassador was unimpressed with McGhee’s threat and responded that McGhee “wouldn’t get by with this move.” The Israeli Ambassador boasted that “he would stop it.”
True to his word, the Ambassador was able to nip McGhee’s threat in the bud. That same afternoon, the White house phoned McGhee to say that the President would have nothing to do with withholding loans to Israel. Never again would a State Department official under President Truman attempt to intimidate Israel on the issue of refugees.
Landis claims the U.S. President tried to resolve the Palestinian DP problem by offering the Syrian government $400,000,000 dollars in exchange for settling up to 500,000 Palestinians in the fertile plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. A president of a nation was willing to burden his own nation in order to relieve Israel of its obligation to the Palestinian refugees. In retrospect, he behaved circumspect and his compassion for victims depended on their value to the Democratic Party.
A humanitarian light brightened the parade of lobbyists for partition and this light managed to convince many of the validity of their cause. Later U.S. government Middle East policies repeated the intense lobbying that guided Truman’s 1948 decisions and subdued the power and recommendations of government agencies.
The darkened perspective, due to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, has not deterred the forces who continue to obtain a U.S. foreign policy that favors their direction. The memory of Truman’s electoral victory, which defied all predictions, continues to make prospective candidates for national office sense that winning elections depends upon support from those who also support Israel.
The legacy of the 1946-1948 events is well described. Control of discussions pushed a previous U.S. administration to provide a legal frame for creation of the state of Israel. Control of discussions continued and impelled contemporary administrations to provide the support for that frame. Without U.S. support, Israel’s authentic moral, political, economic and military character would have been exposed and its structure weakened. The Israeli state might have collapsed.
The genocide started in 1947, from an improbable ‘there’ and has continued until the impossible ‘here.’ By supporting Israel, the democratic and freedom loving United States has made the improbable a sickening and frightful reality.
Claims that Nicaragua is “weaponizing” immigration by allowing free passage of migrants towards the U.S. border have been appearing regularly in the media over the last twelve months. The claim was made on NPR in January, in the Associated Press last October, in El Pais last November and by the BBC this July, to cite just a few. In May, the Biden administration accused the Nicaraguan government (the “Ortega-Murillo regime”) of “repressing people and preying on migrants,” imposing new sanctions on those it believed responsible. Is there any basis to these claims?
Behind all such stories is Manuel Orozco of The Inter-American Dialogue, who has been accusing his former country of “weaponizing” immigration since at least early 2023. Orozco’s most recent appearance is in an article by Robert Looney for World Politics Review (WPR),which quotes him extensively. Orozco’s main argument is summarized in this sentence by Looney: “Unlike other Central American countries that have implemented more stringent visa regulations to control migration to the U.S., Managua permits citizens from around 90 countries to enter visa-free, allowing them to bypass the dangerous Darien Gap route through Panama on their way north.”
Let’s take a look at what this really means.
First, it’s true that Nicaragua does allow migrants from different countries to arrive without visas, some of them on charter flights, also allowing them to head north towards the U.S. However, it is not the only country to do so: Brazil does too, and El Salvador gives passage to many foreign nationals, albeit with high visa fees. Furthermore, while Mexico and Guatemala have taken steps to deter migrants, other Central American countries allow them to pass through freely – such as Honduras, Costa Rica and (until recently) Panama. In the latter case, migrants arriving from Colombia through the notoriously dangerous Darién Gap have been obliged to take buses north to Panama’s border with Costa Rica, facilitating their rapid passage through the country.
Second, for many migrants transiting Nicaragua the only realistic alternative to arriving in Managua by air is to start their journey in South America and cross the Darién Gap, where at least 141 migrants died in 2023 alone. Indeed, a recent report by Human Rights Watch decries the neglect by countries in the region of the extreme dangers facing migrants in Darién, and calls for safe alternatives. Enabling people who are determined to reach the U.S. border to avoid facing these dangers by landing in Managua is surely one of them.
Third, WPR claims that the landing fees and visa charges linked to migrant charter flights primarily benefit the “Ortegas and their associates” rather than stimulating broader economic development. This is a completely evidence-free statement, since the fees collected at Nicaraguan border controls enter the government’s general revenue accounts, as they would in most countries. Nicaraguan government spending strongly prioritizes poverty reduction and investment in public services (unlike the US federal budget, two-thirds of which goes on defense spending).
In reality, Nicaragua is picked out by Washington, and sanctioned, because “weaponizing” immigration is a convenient addition to U.S. criticisms of the Sandinista government. When other countries facilitate the passage of migrants by land, the Biden administration turns a blind eye.
What is remarkable is that WPR and similar articles in mainstream media simply accept the premise that it is entirely reasonable for Washington to expect Nicaragua’s help in deterring migrants. This ignores the fact that the Ortega government’s lack of cooperation might be an understandable response to the Biden administration’s unremitting public attacks and, more especially, economic sanctions, which have led to cuts in its development programs of at least $2,500-3,000 million over the past five years.
Washington’s brazen arrogance in expecting Nicaragua’s assistance while doing its best to undermine its government is perhaps not surprising, but might at least be questioned by the media. The administration’s actions might reasonably be noted as an obstacle to cooperation and a possible explanation for Nicaragua’s indifference. Instead, Nicaragua is even accused (by the Christian Science Monitor) of using migration as a “bargaining tool” to get concessions from Washington (which, if it were true, would have been a remarkably unsuccessful tactic on the part of the Ortega government).
There is another, related charge made against Nicaragua by the WPR and in other articles: that its government is actively “encouraging the emigration of Nicaraguans” themselves, because of high unemployment levels in their homeland and because they will send money (“remittances”) to their Nicaraguan families. Supposedly, remittances are “a crucial source of revenue preventing the collapse of the Nicaraguan economy.”
There is little or no evidence to support this argument either. While Nicaragua does not prevent its citizens from migrating, it certainly does not encourage them. Indeed, given that the whole emphasis of government spending is on poverty reduction and the provision of better health, education and housing for its inhabitants, achievements that are promoted enthusiastically at almost every opportunity, it would be decidedly two-faced if the government were also to encourage Nicaraguans to leave the country.
In another absurd claim, WPR credits Washington with trying to alleviate the “push factors” which might tempt Nicaraguans to migrate, giving as an example its sanctioning of two of Nicaragua’s gold-mining companies and its imposition of visa restrictions on 250 individual Nicaraguans. Quite how these aggressive measures are expected to disincentivize migration is not made clear. In fact, the prospect of ever tighter U.S. sanctions is a much more likely “push factor”.
If the question arises as to who, then, is encouraging Nicaraguans to leave, at least part of the answer can be found not in Managua but in various “pull factors” created by Washington itself. The U.S. government long gave Nicaraguans arriving at its southern border preferential (so-called “Title 8”) treatment compared with similar arrivals from the rest of Central America, a fact well known to potential migrants. However, for the past two years it has been promoting its more attractive “humanitarian parole” program, via regular publicity from the U.S. embassy which is faithfully repeated by opposition media (the same media which two-facedly blame the Sandinista government for encouraging migration).
Surprisingly, and contrary to claims regularly made by Manuel Orozco, Nicaraguan migration north is rather low, despite Washington’s tempting offers. For example, in fiscal year 2023 just 38,113 Nicaraguans were granted “parole”, accounting for only four per cent of all parole cases approved that year (and, of course, not all those granted parole will actually migrate). While it’s also true that Nicaraguans featured strongly for a short period (2021-23) in southern border “encounters” by U.S. agencies, those numbers have returned almost to their previous miniscule levels (2,666 in August 2024, less than two per cent of all encounters). And all this is despite Nicaragua having one of the lowest per-capita incomes in the hemisphere.
A parallel argument from Orozco, which Looney calls Central America’s “forgotten” migrant crisis, is that massive numbers of Nicaraguans have also been forced to go south to Costa Rica. It is true that some 308,000 Nicaraguans have sought asylum since 2018, the vast majority in Costa Rica, but it is also true that its government has been remarkably reluctant to grant their claims, partly because it believes they mostly come from Nicaraguans trying to regularize their status in a country to which they have travelled looking for work. Costa Rica has a fluid population of more than half a million Nicaraguans, on which its economy depends, and its own statistics show that they travel freely back and forth to their home country (over 300,000 did so in the last 12 months, slightly more than travelled in the opposite direction).
Of course, all this could change if Nicaragua were to be at the receiving end of much tougher sanctions, as has happened with countries such as Cuba and Venezuela. When there was a short-lived attempt to encourage a consumer embargo of Nicaraguan meat exports to the U.S. (so-called “conflict beef”), producers said it put the livelihoods of 600,000 Nicaraguan workers at risk. This is perhaps why Washington now only slings insults at Daniel Ortega rather than instigating another coup attempt as it did in 2018. It views the Sandinista government as a severe irritant because it refuses to kowtow to U.S. demands, but it might find a surge of uncontrolled Nicaraguan migration to be far more problematic.
A quick Google search will show that Manuel Orozco’s claims appear very widely in mainstream media. Not surprisingly, his employer, The Inter-American Dialogue, is a think tank funded by the US government, Ford Foundation and others aligned with U.S. foreign policy. He claims, on the kind of flimsy evidence discussed here, that nearly a quarter of Nicaraguans live abroad, blaming this (of course) on government repression. Yet published statistics show Nicaragua’s population growing almost every year since 1960. As a long-time opponent of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, Orozco could fairly be accused of “weaponizing” immigration himself.
On 13 September, at a conclave in Washington, DC, US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer indicated that it would be acceptable for Ukraine to fire missiles, provided by the West, into Russian territory. No official decision has been announced as of yet, but it is clear where the conversation among North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) member states is headed. After Starmer – whose approval rating with voters sits at 22% – returned to London, his foreign secretary David Lammy told the press that the UK government is in conversation with other allies about lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of UK-provided Storm Shadow missiles into Russia. Sir John McColl, a retired senior UK army officer, went further, stating that these missiles would eventually be used against Russia, yet – by themselves – they would not enable Ukraine to prevail. In other words, knowing full well that these missiles will not change the tenor of the war, these men (Biden, Starmer, and McColl) are willing to risk deepening the conflict.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made the use of Western-provided missiles a central theme of his conversations with world leaders, claiming that if his military is allowed to fire the Storm Shadow missiles (from the UK), SCALPs (from France), and ATACMS (from the US), then Ukraine will be able to hit Russian military bases on Russian soil. A greenlight by NATO to use these three missile systems, which have already been supplied to Ukraine by NATO member countries, would be a significant escalation: if Ukraine were to use these missiles to attack Russia, and Russia were to retaliate with an attack on the countries that provided the missiles, it would trigger Article 5 of the NATO charter (1949), drawing all NATO member countries directly into the war. In such a scenario, several nuclear powers (US, UK, France, and Russia) will have their fingers on the nuclear button and could very well take the planet down the path of fiery destruction.
Ion Grigorescu and Arutiun Avakian (Romania/Armenia), The Genius and the Era, 1990/1950s.
In December 2021, Russia and the United States held a series of consultations that, even at that late hour, could have prevented hostilities from breaking out in Ukraine. A summary of those discussions is vital to highlight the key issues underlying the conflict:
1. 7 December 2021. US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a two-hour video conference. The White House readout, which is only a paragraph long, focused on Russian troop movements on the Ukrainian border. The Kremlin summary is a bit longer and introduced a point that the United States has ignored: ‘Vladimir Putin warned against the shifting of responsibility on Russia, since it was NATO that was undertaking dangerous attempts to gain a foothold on Ukrainian territory and building up its military capabilities along the Russian border. It is for this reason that Russia is eager to obtain reliable, legally binding guarantees ruling out the eventuality of NATO’s eastward expansion and the deployment of offensive weapons systems in the countries neighbouring Russia’.
2. 15 December 2021. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov met with US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Karen Donfried in Moscow. The Russian press release published after the meeting said that ‘they had a detailed discussion of security guarantees in the context of the persistent attempts by the US and NATO to change the European military and political situation in their favour’.
Maria Khan (Pakistan), Craving for Love, 2012
3. 17 December 2021. Russia released a draft treaty between itself and the United States as well as a draft agreement with NATO. Both texts made it clear that Russia was seeking firm security guarantees against any destabilisation of the status quo to its west. In these texts, there are explicit and important statements about missiles and nuclear weapons. The draft treaty says that neither the US nor Russia should ‘deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in the areas of their national territories, from which such weapons can attack targets in the national territory of the other Party’ (article 6) and that both sides should ‘refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories’ (article 7). The draft agreement with NATO says that none of the NATO countries should ‘deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties’ (article 5).
4. 23 December 2021. In his annual press conference, Putin once more broadcast Russia’s anxiety about NATO’s eastward movement and about the threats of weapons systems being deployed on Russian borders: ‘We remember, as I have mentioned many times before and as you know very well, how you promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly: there have been five waves of NATO expansion, and now the weapons systems I mentioned have been deployed in Romania, and deployment has recently begun in Poland. This is what we are talking about, can you not see? We are not threatening anyone. Have we approached US borders? Or the borders of Britain or any other country? It is you who have come to our border, and now you say that Ukraine will become a member of NATO as well. Or, even if it does not join NATO, that military bases and strike systems will be placed on its territory under bilateral agreements’.
5. 30 December 2021. Biden and Putin had a phone call about the deteriorating situation. The Kremlin’s summary is more detailed than the one from the White House, which is why it is more useful. Putin, we are told, ‘stressed that the negotiations needed to produce solid legally binding guarantees ruling out NATO’s eastward expansion and the deployment of weapons that threaten Russia in the immediate vicinity of its borders’.
On 24 February 2022, Russian troops entered Ukraine.
Louay Kayyali (Syria), Then What?, 1965.
Russia has been anxious about its security guarantees ever since the United States began to unilaterally withdraw from the delicate arms control system. The bookends of this dismissal are the US’s 2001 departure from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and 2019 revocation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The disposal of these treaties and the failure to acknowledge Russian pleas for security guarantees – alongside NATO aggressions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya – caused anxieties to grow in Moscow about the possibility that the West could place short-range nuclear missiles in Ukraine or in the Baltic states and be able to strike large Russian cities in the west without any hope of defence. That has been Russia’s main argument with the West. If the West had taken the treaties that Russia proposed in December 2021 seriously, then we might not be in a situation where the Western countries are discussing the use of NATO missiles against Russia.
A new study by the consulting firm Accuracy shows that arms companies in the United States and Europe have benefited enormously from this war, with stock market capitalisation for the main weapons companies having increased by 59.7% since February 2022. The largest gains were made by Honeywell (US), Rheinmetall (Germany), Leonardo (Italy), BAE Systems (UK), Dassault Aviation (France), Thales (France), Konsberg Gruppen (Norway), and Safran (France). The US companies Huntington Ingalls, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grumman also saw gains, though their percentage increases were lower because their absolute profits were already at obscene levels. While these NATO merchants of death profit enormously, their populations continue to struggle with higher prices due to fuel and food price inflation.
Perhaps the most cruelly ironic part of this entire debate is that allowing Ukraine to strike Russia would not necessarily result in any military benefit. Firstly, Russian air bases have now moved out of range of the missiles under discussion, and, secondly, Ukrainian supplies of these missiles are low. Adding to the looming threat of nuclear war are two recent statements from the US. In August, the US press reported that the Biden administration had produced a secret memorandum about preparing the US nuclear arsenal to combat China, North Korea, and Russia. This came on the heels of another report, in June, that the US is considering expanding its nuclear forces.
All of this is part of the backdrop of the 79th United Nations General Assembly meeting taking place this month, where member states will discuss a new Global Compact. The draft compact uses the word ‘peace’ over a hundred times, but the real noise we hear is war, war, war.
Tuvshoo (Mongolia), Tears of Joy, 2013.
When I was a teenager in Calcutta, India, I would often zip off to the Gorky Sadan theatre and watch the films of the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, which ruminated about life and the human desire to be better. One of these films, Mirror (1975), about the outrageousness of war, is anchored in the poems of the filmmaker’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky. As tensions rise in Ukraine, the elder Tarkovsky’s poem ‘Saturday, June 21’ (referring to the day before the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany 1941) warns us against mounting threat of war:
There’s one night left to build fortifications.
It’s in my hands, the hope for our salvation.
I’m yearning for the past; then I could warn
Those who were doomed to perish in this war.
A man across the street would hear me cry,
‘Come here, now, and death will pass you by’.
I’d know the hour when the war would strike
Who will survive the camps and who will die.
Who will be heroes honoured by awards,
And who will die shot by the firing squads.
I see the snow in Stalingrad, all strewn
With corpses of the enemy platoons.
Under the air raids, I see Berlin
The Russian infantry is marching in.
I can foretell the enemy’s every plot
More than intelligence of any sort.
And I keep pleading, but no one will hear.
The passersby are breathing in fresh air,
Enjoying summer flowers in June,
All unaware of the coming doom.
Another moment – and my vision disappears.
I don’t know when or how I ended here.
My mind is blank. I’m looking at bright skies,
My window not yet taped by criss-crossed stripes.
Nearly a year into the world’s first live-streamed genocide – which began in Gaza, and is rapidly expanding into the occupied West Bank – the establishment western media still avoid using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s rampage of destruction.
The worse the genocide gets, the longer Israel’s starvation-blockade of the enclave continues, the harder it gets to obscure the horrors – the less coverage Gaza receives.
The worst offender has been the BBC, given that it is Britain’s only publicly funded broadcaster. Ultimately, it is supposed to be accountable to the British public, who are required by law to pay its licence fee.
This is why it has been beyond ludicrous to witness the billionaire-owned media froth at the mouth in recent days about “BBC bias” – not against Palestinians, but against Israel. Yes, you heard that right.
We are talking about the same “anti-Israel” BBC that just ran yet another headline – this time after an Israeli sniper shot an American citizen in the head – that managed somehow, once again, to fail to mention who killed her. Any casual reader risked inferring from the headline “American activist shot dead in occupied West Bank” that the culprit was a Palestinian gunman.
After all, Palestinians, not Israel, are represented by Hamas, a group “designated as a terrorist organisation” by the British government, as the BBC helpfully keeps reminding us.
And it is the supposedly “anti-Israel” BBC that last week sought to stymie efforts by 15 aid agencies known as the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to run a major fundraiser through the nation’s broadcasters.
No one is under any illusions about why the BBC is so unwilling to get involved. The DEC has chosen Gaza as the beneficiary of its latest aid drive.
The committee faced the very same problem with the BBC back in 2009, when the corporation refused to take part in a Gaza fundraiser on the extraordinary pretext that doing so would compromise its rules on “impartiality”.
Presumably, in the BBC’s eyes, saving the lives of Palestinian children reveals a prejudice that saving Ukrainian children’s lives does not.
In its 2009 attack, Israel killed “only” 1,300 or so Palestinians in Gaza, not the many tens of thousands – or possibly hundreds of thousands, no one truly knows – it has this time around.
Famously, the late, independent-minded Labour politician Tony Benn broke ranks and defied the BBC’s DEC ban by reading out details of how to donate money live on air, over the protests of the show’s presenter. As he pointed out then, and it is even truer today: “People will die because of the BBC’s decision.”
According to sources within both the committee and the BBC, the corporation’s executives are terrified – as they were previously – of the “backlash” from Israel and its powerful lobbyists in the UK if it promotes the Gaza appeal.
A spokesperson for the BBC told Middle East Eye that the fundraiser did not meet all the established criteria for a national appeal, despite the DEC’s expert opinion that it does, but noted the possibility of broadcasting an appeal was “under review”.
Pulling punches
The reason Israel is able to carry out a genocide, and western leaders are able to actively support it, is precisely because the establishment media constantly pulls its punches – very much in Israel’s favour.
Readers and viewers are given no sense that Israel is carrying out systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, let alone a genocide.
Journalists prefer to frame events as a “humanitarian crisis” because this strips away Israel’s responsibility for creating the crisis. It looks at the effects, the suffering, rather than the cause: Israel.
Worse, these same journalists constantly throw sand in our eyes with nonsensical counter-claims to suggest that Israel is actually the victim, not the perpetrator.
Take, for example, the new “study” into supposed BBC anti-Israel bias, led by a British lawyer based in Israel. A faux-horrified Daily Mail warned over the weekend that the “BBC is FOURTEEN times more likely to accuse Israel of genocide than Hamas … amid growing calls for inquiry”.
But read the text, and what’s truly stunning is that over the selected four-month period, the BBC associated Israel with the term “genocide” only 283 times – in its massive output across many television and radio channels, its website, podcasts and various social media platforms, which serve myriad populations at home and abroad.
What the Mail and other right-wing attack-dog media don’t mention is the fact that none of those references would have been the BBC’s own editorialising. Even Palestinian guests who try to use the word on its shows are quickly shut down.
Many of the references would have been BBC News reporting on a case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, which is investigating Israel for what the world’s top court termed in January to be a “plausible” risk of genocide in Gaza.
Regrettably for the BBC, it has been impossible to report that story without mentioning the word “genocide”, because it lies at the heart of the legal case.
What should, in fact, astound us far more is that an active genocide, in which the West is fully complicit, was mentioned by the BBC’s globe-spanning media empire a total of only 283 times in the four months following 7 October.
Campaign of intimidation
The World Court’s preliminary ruling on Israel’s genocide is vital context that should be front and centre of every media story on Gaza. Instead, it is usually unmentioned, or hidden at the end of reports, where few will read about it.
The BBC infamously gave barely any coverage to the genocide case presented in January to the World Court by South Africa, which the panel of judges found to be “plausible”. On the other hand, it broadcast the entirety of Israel’s defence to the same court.
Now, after this latest campaign of intimidation by the billionaire-owned media, the BBC will likely be even less willing to mention the genocide – which is precisely the aim.
What should have stunned the Mail and the rest of the establishment media far more is that the BBC broadcast 19 references to a Hamas “genocide” in the same four-month period.
The idea that Hamas is capable of a “genocide” against Israel, or Jews, is as divorced from reality as the fiction that it “beheaded babies” on 7 October or the claims, still lacking any evidence, that it committed “mass rape” on that day.
Hamas, an armed group numbering thousand of fighters, currently pinned down in Gaza by one of the strongest armies in the world, is quite incapable of committing a “genocide” of Israelis.
This is, of course, why the World Court is not investigating Hamas for genocide, and why only Israel’s most fanatic apologists, including the western media, run with fake news either that Hamas is committing a genocide, or that it is conceivable it may try to do so.
No one really takes seriously claims of a Hamas genocide. The tell was the world’s stunned reaction when the group managed to escape from the concentration camp that is Gaza for a single day on 7 October and wreak so much death and havoc.
The idea that Hamas could do anything worse than that – or even repeat the attack – is simply delusional. The best Hamas can do is wage a guerrilla war of attrition against the Israeli military from its underground tunnels, which is precisely what it is doing.
Here’s another statistic worth highlighting from the recent “study”: in the same four-month period, the BBC used the term “crimes against humanity” 22 times to describe the atrocities committed by Hamas on one day last October, compared with only 15 times to describe Israel’s even worse atrocities committed continuouslyover the past year.
Allowable thought
The ultimate effect of the latest media furore is to increase pressure on the BBC to make even larger concessions to the self-serving, right-wing political agenda of the billionaire-owned media and the corporate interests of the war machine it represents.
The state broadcaster’s job is to set limits on allowable thought for the British public – not on the right, where that role falls to papers such as the Mail and the Telegraph, but on the other side of the political spectrum, on what is misleadingly referred to as “the left”.
The BBC’s task is to define what is acceptable speech and action – meaning acceptable to the British establishment – by those seeking to challenge its domestic and foreign policy.
Twice in living memory, progressive left-wing opposition leaders have emerged: Michael Foot in the early 1980s, and Jeremy Corbyn in the late 2010s. On both occasions, the media have united as one to vilify them.
That should surprise no one. Making the BBC a whipping boy – denouncing it as “left-wing” – is a form of permanent gaslighting designed both to make Britain’s extreme right-wing media seem centrist, and to normalise the drive to push the BBC ever further rightwards.
Over decades, the billionaire-owned media have crafted in the public’s mind the idea that the BBC defines the extreme end of supposedly “left-wing” thought. The more the corporation can be pushed to the right, the more the left faces an unwelcome choice: either follow the BBC rightwards, or become universally reviled as the loony left, the woke left, the Trot left, the militant left.
Bolstering this self-fulfilling argument, any protests by BBC staff can be deduced by the journalist-servants of Rupert Murdoch and other press tycoons as further proof of the corporation’s left-wing or Marxist bias.
The media system is rigged, and the BBC is the perfect vehicle for keeping it this way.
Pressing the button
What the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media are downplaying are not just the facts of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but also the obvious genocidal intent of Israeli leaders, the country’s wider society, and its apologists in the UK and elsewhere.
It should not be up for debate that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, when everyone from its prime minister down has told us that this is very much their intent.
The examples of such genocidal statements by Israeli leaders filled pages of South Africa’s case to the World Court.
Just one example: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the Palestinians as “Amalek” – a reference to a biblical story well known to every Israeli schoolchild, in which the Israelites are ordered by God to wipe an entire people, including their children and livestock, off the face of the earth.
Anyone engaged on social media will have faced a battery of similarly genocidal statements from mostly anonymous supporters of Israel.
Those genocide cheerleaders recently gained a face – two, in fact. Video clips of two Israelis, podcasting in English under the name “Two Nice Jewish Boys”, have gone viral, showing the pair calling for the extermination of every last Palestinian man, woman and child.
One of the podcasters said that “zero people in Israel” care whether a polio outbreak caused by Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s water, sewage and heath facilities ends up killing babies, noting that Israel’s agreement to a vaccination campaign is driven purely by public relations needs.
In another clip, the podcasters agree that Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons deserve to be “executed by shoving too large of an object up their butts”.
They also make clear that they would not hesitate to press a genocide button to wipe out the Palestinian people: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza – every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow – I would press it in a second … And I think most Israelis would. They wouldn’t talk about it like I am, they wouldn’t say ‘I pressed it’, but they would press it.”
Relentless depravity
It is easy to get alarmed over such inhuman comments, but the furore generated by this pair is likely to deflect from a more important point: that they are utterly representative of where Israeli society is right now. They are not on some depraved fringe. They are not outliers. They are firmly in the mainstream.
The evidence is not just in the fact that Israel’s citizen army is systematically beating and sodomising Palestinian prisoners, sniping Palestinian children in Gaza with shots to the head, cheering the detonation of universities and mosques, desecrating Palestinian bodies, and enforcing a starvation-blockade on Gaza.
It is in the welcoming of all this relentless depravity by wider Israeli society.
After a video emerged of a group of soldiers sodomising a Palestinian prisoner at Israel’s Sde Teiman torture camp, Israelis rallied to their side. The extent of the prisoner’s internal injuries required him to be hospitalised.
In the aftermath, Israeli pundits – educated “liberals” – sat in TV studios discussing whether soldiers should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether to rape Palestinians in detention, or whether such abuses should be organised by the state as part of an official torture programme.
?SHOCKING?
Israel is quite possibly the only nation in the world where it is permissable and commonplace to go on TV and openly declare that the RAPING of prisoners should be a LEGITIMATE and OFFICIAL POLICY of the state and must be widely implemented. pic.twitter.com/1PyRXk8fxU
One of the soldiers accused in the gang rape case chose to cast off his anonymity after being championed by journalists who interviewed him. He’s now treated as a minor celebrity on Israeli TV shows.
Polls show that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis either approve of the razing of Gaza, or want even more of it. Some 70 percent want to ban from social media platforms any expressions of sympathy for civilians in Gaza.
None of this is really new. It all just got a lot more ostentatious after Hamas’s attack on 7 October.
After all, some of the most shocking violence that day occurred when Hamas fighters stumbled onto a dance festival close to Gaza.
The brutal imprisonment of 2.3 million Palestinians, and the 17-year blockade denying them the essentials of life and any meaningful freedoms, had become so normal to Israelis that hip, freedom-loving Israeli youngsters could happily hold a rave so close to that mass of human suffering.
Or as one of the Two Nice Jewish Boys observed of his feelings about life in Israel: “It’s nice to know that you’re dancing in a concert while hundreds of thousands of Gazans are homeless, sitting in a tent.” His partner interrupted: “Makes it even better … People enjoy knowing they [Palestinians in Gaza] are suffering.”
‘Heroic soldiers’
This monstrous indifference to, or even pleasure in, the torture of others isn’t restricted to Israelis. There’s a whole army of prominent supporters of Israel in the West who confidently act as apologists for Israel’s genocidal actions.
What unites them all is the Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism.
In Britain, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has not spoken out against the mass slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza, nor has he kept quiet about it. Instead, he has given Israel’s war crimes his blessing.
Back in mid-January, as South Africa began making public its case against Israel for genocide that the World Court found “plausible”, Mirvis spoke at a public meeting, where he referred to Israel’s operations in Gaza as “the most outstanding possible thing”.
"We can be proud of the state of Israel, what it represents .. what Israel is doing is the most outstanding thing a decent responsible country can do for its citizens”
British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis praises Israeli forces at a recent talk at Cranbrook United Synagogue… pic.twitter.com/QjSEs76dLf
He described the troops clearly documented committing war crimes as “our heroic soldiers” – inexplicably conflating the actions of a foreign, Israeli army with the British army.
Even if we imagine he was truly ignorant of the war crimes in Gaza eight months ago, there can be no excuses now.
Yet, last week, Mirvis spoke out again, this time to berate the British government for imposing a very partial limit on arms sales to Israel after it received legal advice that such weapons were likely being used by Israel to commit war crimes.
In other words, Mirvis openly called for his own government to ignore international law and arm a state committing war crimes, according to UK government lawyers, and a “plausible genocide”, according to the World Court.
There are apologists like Mirvis in influential posts across the West.
Appearing on TV late last month, his counterpart in France, Haim Korsia, urged Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza, and backed Netanyahu, who the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor is pursuing for war crimes.
Korsia refused to condemn Israel’s killing of at least 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, arguingthat those deaths were “not of the same order” as the 1,150 deaths of Israelis on 7 October.
He clearly meant Palestinian lives were not as important as Israeli lives.
Inner fascist
Nearly 30 years ago, Israeli sociologist Dan Rabinowitz published a book, Overlooking Nazareth, that argued Israel was a far more profoundly racist society than was widely understood.
His work has taken on a new relevance – and not just for Israelis – since 7 October.
Back in the 1990s, as now, outsiders assumed that Israel was divided between the religious and secular, the traditional and modern; between vulgar recent immigrants and more enlightened “veterans”.
Israelis often see their society split geographically too: between peripheral communities where popular racism flourishes, and a metropolitan centre around Tel Aviv where a sensitive, cultured liberalism predominates.
Rabinowitz tore this thesis to shreds. He took as his case study the small Jewish city of Nazareth Illit in northern Israel, renowned for its extreme right-wing politics, including support for the fascist movement of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.
Rabinowitz ascribed the city’s politics chiefly to the fact that it had been built by the state on top of Nazareth, the largest community of Palestinians in Israel, specifically to contain, control and oppress its historic neighbour.
His argument was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were not more racist than the Jews of Tel Aviv. They were simply far more exposed to an “Arab” presence. In fact, given the fact that few Jews chose to live there, they were heavily outnumbered by their “Arab” neighbours. The state had placed them in a direct, confrontational competition with Nazareth for land and resources.
The Jews of Tel Aviv, by contrast, almost never came across an “Arab” unless it was in a servant’s role: as a waiter or a worker on a building site.
The difference, noted Rabinowitz, was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were confronted with their own racism on a daily basis. They had rationalised and become easy with it. Jews in Tel Aviv, meanwhile, could pretend they were open-minded because their bigotry was never meaningfully tested.
Well, 7 October changed all that. The “liberals” of Tel Aviv were suddenly confronted by an unwelcome, avenging Palestinian presence inside their state. The “Arab” was no longer the oppressed, tame, servile one they were used to.
Unexpectedly, the Jews of Tel Aviv felt a space they believed to be theirs exclusively being invaded, just as the Jews of Nazareth Illit had felt for decades. And they responded in exactly the same way. They rationalised their inner fascist. Overnight, they became comfortable with genocide.
The genocide party
That sense of invasion extends beyond Israel, of course.
On 7 October, Hamas’s surprise assault wasn’t just an attack on Israel. The breakout by a small group of armed fighters from one of the largest and most heavily fortified prisons ever built was also a shocking assault on western elites’ complacency – their belief that the world order they had built by force to enrich themselves was permanent and inviolable.
7 October severely shook their confidence that the non-western world could be contained forever; that it must continue to do the West’s bidding, and that it would remain enslaved indefinitely.
Just as it has with Israelis, the Hamas attack quickly exposed the little fascist within the West’s political, media and religious elite, who had spent a lifetime pretending to be the guardians of a western civilising mission – one that was enlightened, humanitarian and liberal.
The act worked, because the world was ordered in such a way that they could easily pretend to themselves and others that they stood against the barbarism of the Other.
The West’s colonialism was largely out of sight, devolved to globe-spanning, exploitative, environmentally destructive western corporations and a network of some 800 US overseas military bases, which were there to kick ass if this new arms-length economic imperialism encountered difficulties.
Whether intentionally or not, Hamas tore off the mask of that deception on 7 October. The pretence of an ideological rift between western leaders on the right and a supposed “left” evaporated overnight. They all belonged to the same war party; they all became devotees of the genocide party.
All have clamoured for Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself” – in truth, its right to continue decades of oppression of the Palestinian people – by imposing a blockade on food, water and power to Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.
All actively approve arming Israel’s slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinians. All have done nothing to impose a ceasefire apart from paying lip service to the notion.
All seem readier to tear up international law and its supporting institutions than to enforce it against Israel. All denounce as antisemitism the mass protests against genocide, rather than denouncing the genocide itself.
7 October was a defining moment. It exposed a monstrous barbarity with which it is hard to come to terms. And we won’t, until we face a difficult truth: that the source of such depravity is far closer to home than we ever imagined.
A moment of prayer and meditation at the opening of the UN General Assembly, September 10, 2024 (Photo credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)
On September 18th, the UN General Assembly is scheduled to debate and vote on a resolution calling on Israel to end “its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” within six months. Given that the General Assembly, unlike the exclusive 15-member UN Security Council, allows all UN members to vote and there is no veto in the General Assembly, this is an opportunity for the world community to clearly express its opposition to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.
If Israel predictably fails to heed a General Assembly resolution calling on it to withdraw its occupation forces and settlers from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the United States then vetoes or threatens to veto a Security Council resolution to enforce the ICJ ruling, then the General Assembly could go a step further.
It could convene an Emergency Session to take up what is called a Uniting For Peace resolution, which could call for an arms embargo, an economic boycott or other UN sanctions against Israel – or even call for actions against the United States. Uniting for Peace resolutions have only been passed by the General Assembly five times since the procedure was first adopted in 1950.
The September 18 resolution comes in response to an historic ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on July 19, which found that “Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.”
The court ruled that Israel’s obligations under international law include “the evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements” and the payment of restitution to all who have been harmed by its illegal occupation. The passage of the General Assembly resolution by a large majority of members would demonstrate that countries all over the world support the ICJ ruling, and would be a small but important first step toward ensuring that Israel must live up to those obligations.
Israel’s President Netanyahu cavalierly dismissed the court ruling with a claim that, “The Jewish nation cannot be an occupier in its own land.” This is exactly the position that the court had rejected, ruling that Israel’s 1967 military invasion and occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories did not give it the right to settle its own people there, annex those territories, or make them part of Israel.
While Israel used its hotly disputed account of the October 7th events as a pretext to declare open season for the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem used it as a pretext to distribute assault rifles and other military-grade weapons to illegal Israeli settlers and unleash a new wave of violence there, too.
Armed settlers immediately started seizing more Palestinian land and shooting Palestinians. Israeli occupation forces either stood by and watched or joined in the violence, but did not intervene to defend Palestinians or hold their Israeli attackers accountable.
Since last October, occupation forces and armed settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have now killed at least 700 people, including 159 children.
The escalation of violence and land seizures has been so flagrant that even the U.S. and European governments have felt obligated to impose sanctions on a small number of violent settlers and their organizations.
In Gaza, the Israeli military has been murdering Palestinians day after day for the past 11 months. The Palestinian Health Ministry has counted over 41,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, but with the destruction of the hospitals that it relies on to identify and count the dead, this is now only a partial death toll. Medical researchers estimate that the total number of deaths in Gaza from the direct and indirect results of Israeli actions will be in the hundreds of thousands, even if the massacre were to end soon.
Israel and the United States are undoubtedly more and more isolated as a result of their roles in this genocide. Whether the United States can still coerce or browbeat a few of its traditional allies into rejecting or abstaining from the General Assembly resolution on September 18 will be a test of its residual “soft power.”
President Biden can claim to be exercising a certain kind of international leadership, but it is not the kind of leadership that any American can be proud of. The United States has muscled its way into a pivotal role in the ceasefire negotiations begun by Qatar and Egypt, and it has used that position to skillfully and repeatedly undermine any chance of a ceasefire, the release of hostages or an end to the genocide.
By failing to use any of its substantial leverage to pressure Israel, and disingenuously blaming Hamas for every failure in the negotiations, U.S. officials are ensuring that the genocide will continue for as long as they and and their Israeli allies want, while many Americans remain confused about their own government’s responsibility for the continuing bloodshed.
This is a continuation of the strategy by which the United States has stymied and prevented peace since 1967, falsely posing as an honest broker, while, in fact, remaining Israel’s staunchest ally and the critical diplomatic obstacle to a free Palestine.
In addition to cynically undermining any chance of a ceasefire, the United States has injected itself into debates over the future of Gaza, promoting the idea that a post-war government could be led by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians view as hopelessly corrupt and compromised by subservience to Israel and the United States.
China has taken a more constructive approach to resolving differences between Palestinian political groupings. It invited Hamas, Fatah and 12 other Palestinian groups to a three-day meeting in Beijing in July, where they all agreed to a “national unity” plan to form a post-war “interim national reconciliation government,” which would oversee relief and rebuilding in Gaza and organize a national Palestinian election to seat a new elected government.
Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the political movement called the Palestinian National Initiative, hailed the Beijing Declaration as going “much further” than previous reconciliation efforts, and said that the plan for a unity government “blocks Israeli efforts to create some kind of collaborative structure against Palestinian interests.” China has also called for an international peace conference to try to end the war.
As the world comes together in the General Assembly on September 18, it faces both a serious challenge and an unprecedented opportunity. Each time the General Assembly has met in recent years, a succession of leaders from the Global South has risen to lament the breakdown of the peaceful and just international order that the UN is supposed to represent, from the failure to end the war in Ukraine to inaction against the climate crisis to the persistence of neocolonialism in Africa.
Perhaps no crisis more clearly embodies the failure of the UN and the international system than the 57-year-old Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it invaded in 1967. At the same time that the United States has armed Israel to the teeth, it has vetoed 46 UN Security Council resolutions that either required Israel to comply with international law, called for an end to the occupation or for Palestinian statehood, or held Israel accountable for war crimes or illegal settlement building.
The ability of one Permanent Member of the Security Council to use its veto to block the rule of international law and the will of the rest of the world has always been widely recognized as the fatal flaw in the existing structure of the UN system.
When this structure was first announced in 1945, French writer Albert Camus wrote in Combat, the French Resistance newspaper he edited, that the veto would “effectively put an end to any idea of international democracy… The Five would thus retain forever the freedom of maneuver that would be forever denied the others.”
The General Assembly and the Security Council have debated a series of resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and each debate has pitted the United States, Israel, and occasionally the United Kingdom or another U.S. ally, against the voices of the rest of the world calling in unison for peace in Gaza.
Of the UN’s 193 nations, 145 have now recognized Palestine as a sovereign nation comprising Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and even more countries have voted for resolutions to end the occupation, prohibit Israeli settlements and support Palestinian self-determination and human rights.
For many decades, the United States’ unique position of unconditional support for Israel has been a critical factor in enabling Israeli war crimes and prolonging the intolerable plight of the Palestinian people.
In the crisis in Gaza, the U.S. military alliance with Israel involves the U.S. directly in the crime of genocide, as the United States provides the warplanes and bombs that are killing the largest numbers of Palestinians and literally destroying Gaza. The United States also deploys military liaison officers to assist Israel in planning its operations, special operations forces to provide intelligence and satellite communications, and trainers and technicians to teach Israeli forces to use and maintain new American weapons, such as F-35 warplanes.
The supply chain for the U.S. arsenal of genocide criss-crosses America, from weapons factories to military bases to procurement offices at the Pentagon and Central Command in Tampa. It feeds plane loads of weapons flying to military bases in Israel, from where these endless tons of steel and high explosives rain down on Gaza to shatter buildings, flesh and bones.
The U.S. role is greater than complicity – it is essential, active participation, without which the Israelis could not conduct this genocide in its present form, any more than the Germans could have run Auschwitz without gas chambers and poison gas.
And it is precisely because of the essential U.S. role in this genocide that the United States has the power to end it, not by pretending to plead with the Israelis to be more “careful” about civilian casualties, but by ending its own instrumental role in the genocide.
Every American of conscience should keep applying all kinds of pressure on our own government, but as long as it keeps ignoring the will of its own people, sending more weapons, vetoing Security Council resolutions and undermining peace negotiations, it is by default up to our neighbors around the world to muster the unity and political will to end the genocide.
It would certainly be unprecedented for the world to unite, in opposition to Israel and the United States, to save Palestine and enforce the ICJ ruling that Israel must withdraw from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The world has rarely come together so unanimously since the founding of the United Nations in the aftermath of the Second World War in 1945. Even the catastrophic U.S.-British invasion and destruction of Iraq failed to provoke such united action.
But the lesson of that crisis, indeed the lesson of our time, is that this kind of unity is essential if we are ever to bring sanity, humanity and peace to our world. That can start with a decisive vote in the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, September 18, 2024.
The peoples around the world have looked to Venezuela as a vanguard leading Nuestra América in its second independence struggle, against the US. The US rulers operate as the inheritor of the European colonial empires, assuming the right to interfere in other countries’ elections, and dictate who are the winners. No other country – save US underlings in Europe, and Israel – dares to violate international law so brazenly.
The Venezuelan right-wing had no real plan to win a democratic election, but instead prepared for a coup d’etat even before the polls closed. Working with the US government and corporate media, they allege President Maduro stole the July 28 presidential election, then committed human rights abuses to crush protests. This opposition declares it beat President Maduro 70% to 30% but refuses to present their “evidence” to the National Electoral Council (CNE) or Supreme Court. The opposition claimed fraud in every election during the 25-year period of Chavista rule – except twice, when they won.
The attempted coup bears much in common with recent US coup attempts in Nicaragua (2018), Bolivia (2019) and Venezuela (2013, 2014, 2017, 2019). If the US-backed candidates lose, the election is “fraudulent.” This scheme drove Evo Morales from power in Bolivia. The US even appointed its own president for Venezuela after its 2018 presidential election, and then proceeded to steal tens of billions of dollars of Venezuela’s resources held overseas.
US coup attempts use new tools besides the US-trained military as in the past
First, the US crushes a country with sanctions and economic blockades, causing scarcities and shortages, leading to discontent among the people over worsening living conditions. National Security gangster John Bolton said: “Sanctions are a means of repression and coercion between military warfare and diplomacy.” Richard Nephew, Treasury deputy secretary, adds: “Over the past decade, the most important tool for enforcing American power is the sanctions mechanism.” To justify sanctions, the US relies on its media, intellectuals, universities and think tanks, to make them seem humane to the public. In Venezuela, US sanctions caused government revenue to collapse by 99%, requiring dramatic cuts in the many social programs. The sanctions killed over 100,000 civilians, Venezuelans knew that voting for Nicolas Maduro would mean a worsening of the US-EU economic warfare they face.
Second, corporate media and social media now play a coup-making role similar to that of Pentagon-trained generals in the past. Supervised by the CIA, this media blanketed a targeted country and the world with disinformation against its government, seeking to foment a “regime change” mass movement.
Six corporations control over 90% of the US media and so own the news. They dominate the world media just as the US dollar dominates the world financial system. The all-important weapon, social media, which saturates billions of mobile phones, are in the hands of Elon Musk (X, formerly Twitter), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram). Working with the CIA, they can impose an alternative reality, seen in Nicaragua in 2018, Bolivia during the 2019 coup, and Venezuela today.
Corporate media describe the elected Maduro government – and the elected ones in Nicaragua and Cuba – as dictatorships.
Delegitimizing Venezuelan elections in advance followed a pattern used in Bolivia (2019) and Nicaragua (2021). The US created automated networks of thousands of fake social media accounts to swamp the public with fake news. These accounts generate streams of posts in a coordinated manner, creating the appearance of popular repudiation of Evo Morales, Nicolas Maduro, or Daniel Ortega.
Bots were used in a massive way against Evo’s government. The two main coup leaders created 95,000 twitter accounts before the coup to spread the election fraud story and call for violent protests. Over 68,000 false accounts were set up to legitimize the army’s overthrow of Morales and justify killing those protesting the coup.
US social media control in these countries drowns out pro-government and independent voices not just by saturating the online conversation, but by shutting them down. After the US annointed Juan Guaido the Venezuela president, Twitter closed thousands of Chavista accounts to foster the impression that most Venezuelans supported Guaido.
Governments in countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia cannot respond effectively to the US media disinformation warfare against them any more than to the US blockades imposed on them. It takes them years to build up national media networks, and even then, their resources are minor compared to what the US commands.
Third, the US relies on cyberwarfare to incapacitate its opponents. In Bolivia in 2019 a cyberattack of the electoral system’s computers disrupted the vote count, preventing the authentic results being issued. The US-backed opposition then claimed Evo delayed the vote count because he was fixing it.
After the July 28 election, 126 digital platforms of the Venezuelan state suffered cyberattacks, the most significant being the CNE, the constitutional agency recording the vote. Hacked over 100 times that night, it could not operate normally, delaying for days the release of the results. Again, this was used to claim the vote totals were being fixed.
At times 30 million cyber attacks per minute occurred between July 28 and August 9th. Such an attack disables Venezuelan government computer systems and paralyzes operations. These large-scale cyberattacks generated hundreds of gigabytes per second (your laptop system memory may have 16 gb).
These attacks falsified IP links, duplicated links, reconfigured government portals and hijacked information. Names and addresses of government workers were released on social media to “comanditos” (opposition gangs), creating physical threats for those affected.
The US powerful media and cyber weapons, able to swamp a country’s airwaves with CIA concocted “news,” while disrupting the country’s response, open the door to violent protests against the government.
Fourth, having created the conditions for opposition leaders to assert the Maduro government stole the election, they then called people into the streets to protest and create chaos or guarimbas. “Comanditos” (small groups paid to instigate violence), caused destruction and violence, killed 25 and injured 192, burned buildings, sacked several regional CNE headquarters, blocked roads, attacked police and military, beat up people who “looked” Chavista, attacked local community leaders, food distribution centers, public schools, hospitals, offices, ransacked warehouses, the transportation system, the electrical grid, all to paralyze the country. The US media could portray to the world a picture of national chaos, inviting military intervention to restore order, meaning a US neo-colonial regime.
These protests (as in Bolivia in 2019 and Nicaragua in 2018, Cuba in 2021) are portrayed in the corporate media as peaceful democracy rallies. When police forces and mobilized Chavista organizations attempt to stop the violence, the corporate media charges democracy protests are being repressed. This has been a habitual corporate media scam in US regime change operations, yet people still fall for it. In fact, the strategy was first used in the coup against the democratic government of Iran in 1953.
National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez noted the comanditos were financed entirely by NGOs. “When the actions and financing of these groups were investigated, it was discovered that they were financed by organizations of dubious origin from Europe or by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)”
Eva Golinger wrote years ago, “Wherever a coup d’etat, a colored revolution or a regime change favorable to US interests occurs, USAID and its flow of dollars is there…The same agencies are always present, funding, training and advising: USAID, National Endowment for Democracy [NED], International Republican Institute [IRI], National Democratic Institute [NDI], Freedom House, Albert Einstein Institute [AEI], and International Center for Non-Violent Conflict [ICNC].”
Fifth, US coup attempts count on funding NGOs to carry out “regime change.” Besides the CIA-controlled USAID, NED, NDI, and IRI, NGOs receive millions from Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and others. The US uses them to buy an internal opposition, similar to AIPAC in the US – except here AIPAC works to disenfranchise we the people.
NED funds NGOs worldwide to incite color revolutions against those the US empire finds not properly subservient. Between 2016-2019 1600 NGOs received NED grants, highlighting the value the US places on the NGO coup-making tool. Needless to say, the US does not tolerate foreign countries funding NGOs pressing for political change here.
From 2000-2020, the US spent $250 million funding “regime change” NGOs in Cuba. Tracey Eaton wrote, “An extensive network of groups financed by the US government sends cash to Cuba to thousands of ‘democracy activists,’ journalists and dissidents every year.” Since 1996, the US spent $20-$45 million dollars a year to fund these Cuban groups. These NGOs created the CIA Cuban social media ZunZuneo, and even infiltrated the Cuban hip-hop scene, laying the basis for the 2021 protests.
From 2017 through 2019, USAID admitted giving nearly $467 million to the Venezuelan opposition. USAID committed another $128 million to US appointed president Juan Guaidó. In 2006, Ambassador William Brownfield in 2006 revealed the goals of USAID funding: “1) Strengthening Democratic Institutions, 2) Penetrating Chavez’ Political Base, 3) Dividing Chavismo, 4) Protecting Vital U.S. business, and 5) Isolating Chavez internationally.” The NED disclosed in 2010 that agencies funded the opposition $40-50 million annually.
Venezuela and Nicaragua recently passed laws controlling NGOs – which the US painted as a sign of their dictatorial nature.
How Venezuela Defeated this Five-Pronged CoupAttempt
The Maduro government had campaigned for months educating and warning the people of opposition schemes to disrupt the election, refuse to recognize the results, create new guarimbas, and that united popular action could stop this. They succeeded. The violent coup attempt on July 29-30 failed; on July 31 the terrorists were being rounded up, and calm restored. On August 3, more than half a million Chavistas marched to support President Maduro and peace.
Internationally, the Maduro government benefited from the considerable prestige it had gained standing up to everything the US rulers threw at it. The US has likewise lost much credibility, especially over its full support for the endless massacres in Gaza. It could not even get the subservient OAS to condemn Maduro.
Venezuela, like Cuba, has developed a strong civic-military union supported by thousands of voluntary militias that has been a bastion against the war – economic, military, propaganda, and cyberwar – against the country. Moreover, the Venezuelan military command, like in Cuba and Nicaragua, is dedicated to defending the constitutional order, denying US coup-plotters an opening. A people’s militia in Bolivia, which did not and still does not exist, could have maintained order in October 2019 after the police and military commands declared they would not stop right wing violence.
Besides the mass civic-military union, the Venezuelan government, like Cuba, relies on mobilizing the people. President Maduro’s closing campaign rally culminated in over a million marching on July 25th. Right after the July 28 election, hundreds of thousands of Chavistas took to the streets of Caracas and other cities. This was an antidote to the coup attempt and violence, since these mobilizations vastly outnumbered the capacity of the opposition.
After 25 years of the US forcing the Chavista leadership live under pressure cooker conditions, it has been unable to divide them and overturn the revolution as it has so often elsewhere, such as Grenada, Burkina Faso, Algeria, the Soviet bloc, and now threatens Bolivia.
The Maduro government maintains broad popular support because of its commitment to the people. The oil industry was nationalized and its income, while curtailed due to the US blockade, benefits the people. Mass literacy campaigns ended illiteracy. Over 5.1 million homes have been built for the poor. Venezuela has become almost self-sufficient in food production. The CLAP program distributes discounted or free food to 7.5 million families every month. Free health care and education through university are provided to all. Venezuela is overcoming the US blockade with the economy expected to grow 10% in 2024, and has the lowest inflation rate in 14 years. In recognition, about one million Venezuelans have returned home.
Chavismo defeated this coup because of its organic connection with the people, because of the class consciousness that has matured in its citizens since Hugo Chavez initiated the Bolivarian process, and because of the political clarity and determination of the Chavista leadership. Their victory is one for the peoples of the world.
A crass new iteration of anti-Haitianism has recently received a remarkable amount of attention. This novel form of racism with deep anti-Black roots was even referenced in the US presidential debate.
Recently racist and ignorant social media users have circulated the idea that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating pets. US Vice presidential candidate JD Vance greatly boosted the anti-Haitian claim with a post to X stating, “Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
Vance’s X post had over 11 million views with Donald Trump even referencing the claim in the presidential debate. This despite an absence of any evidence whatsoever. Springfield officials haven’t received any credible reports of Haitian immigrants abducting and eating pets.
The ‘Haitians eat pets’ tale is the latest in a long line of anti-Haitian claims. In the early 1980s Haitians were stigmatized as the originators of the HIV virus in the US. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) labeled Haitians as a risk group, which gave rise to “the 4-H’s” designation of Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs, Heroin addicts and Haitians. At the time the Canadian Red Cross publicly identified Haitians as a “high-risk” group for AIDS, the only nationality singled out. In 1983 they called on homosexuals and bisexuals with multiple partners, intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs and recent immigrants from Haiti to voluntarily stop giving blood. A Canadian government pamphlet, which was distributed in shopping malls, also linked Haitians with AIDS. Again, this was despite a lack of evidence that the incidence of AIDS in Haiti was greater than in the US. By 1987 it was lower in Haiti than in the US and other Caribbean nations. But, as a result of the unfounded stigmatization, the country’s significant tourism basically collapsed overnight. Out of fear the virus may transmit through goods, some Haitian exports were even blocked from entering the US!
The Haitians are responsible for AIDS allegation still pops up. During an explosion of xenophobia against Haitian migrants in Guyana in 2019 reports focused on HIV/AIDS and Voodoo and in a 2016 radio outburst former Canadian Member of Parliament, André Arthur, labeled Haiti a “sexually deviant” country populated by thieves and prostitutes responsible for HIV/AIDS.
In another example of stigmatizing Haitians over disease, CDC incident manager for the Haiti cholera response, Jordan W. Tappero, blamed Haitian cultural norms for the 2010 cholera outbreak that caused tens of thousands of deaths. He told Associated Press journalist Jonathan Katz that Haitians don’t experience the “shame associated with open defecation.” As was then suspected and later confirmed, cholera was introduced to Haiti by UN forces who followed poor sanitation practices.
Ten months earlier influential US pastor Pat Robertson suggested the terrible January 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas was due to a “deal made with Satan” two centuries earlier. Robertson claimed Haitians “were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever … And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’” Robertson added, “you know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”
Canadian Protestant groups have promoted similar thinking about the August 1791 Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caïman) Vodou ceremony that helped launch the Haitian Revolution. In “Haiti’s Pact with the Devil?: Bwa Kayiman, Haitian Protestant Views of Vodou, and the Future of Haiti” Bertin M. Louis points out that some Haitian Canadian Protestants believe Haiti was consecrated to the devil. Mainstream Canadian voices have repeatedly denigrated voodoo. After the 2004 US/France/Canada coup the National Post published an editorial headlined “Voodoo is not enough”, arguing for “a coalition of the willing to permanently extract the country from the quagmire. A 1952 Globe and Mail story attempting to be sympathetic to the country began by noting, “Haiti’s principal export is not, as popularly supposed, Zombies.” One of the first books to expose North Americans to the voodoo zombie was Magic Island, a 1929 book by William Buehler Seabrook. The book sensationalized encounters with voodoo cults in Haiti and their resurrected thralls.
Voodoo has been demonized by white supremacist and Christian forces for over two centuries. Important for defeating slavery and securing Haitian independence, the religion offered spiritual/ideological strength to those who revolted against their slave masters in maybe the greatest example of liberation in the history of humanity.
The 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution was simultaneously a struggle against slavery, colonialism and white supremacy. Defeating the French, British and Spanish empires, it led to freedom for all people regardless of colour, decades before this idea found traction in Europe or North America. The Haitian revolt rippled through the region and compelled the post-French Revolution government in Paris to abolish slavery in its Caribbean colonies. It also spurred London’s 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
The Haitian Revolution led to the world’s first and only successful large-scale slave revolution. “Arguably”, notes Peter Hallward, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things.”
But, in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution thousands of photos, articles and books denigrated Haiti, depicting the slaves as barbaric despise the fact 350,000 Africans were killed, versus 75,000 Europeans, over the 13 years. Anti-Haitianism has deep roots.
It’s easy to mock those who claim Haitian immigrants are eating cats. But overt anti-Haitianism is also relayed by ‘sophisticated’ liberals. Their high-minded commentaries calling for foreign tutelage of the country appear regularly in the pages of the Globe and Mail and Boston Globe.
Anti-Haitianism flows out of and reinforces the country’s weakness, which is spurred by imperial domination. Technically “independent” for more than two centuries, outsiders have long shaped Haitian affairs. Through isolation, economic asphyxiation, debt dependence, gunboat diplomacy, occupation, foreignsupported dictatorships, structural adjustment programs, “democracy promotion”, coups and rigged elections, Haiti is no stranger to the various forms of foreign political manipulation.
JD Vance’s anti-Haitian musings have deep roots in centuries of anti-Black racism and US imperial ambitions. All those who fail to support real Haitian independenc are tainted by this legacy and present-day reality.
Rolling out of my crib before dawn today (I was in it long before the charlatans Harris and Trump began their theatrical “debate”), it being another September 11th, I wondered where Dick Cheney was.
And I was still wondering where Elmer Gantry was, having received the previous day a form message from RFK, Jr.’s faith-based engagement team leader, Rev. Wendy Silvers, that she was conducting a “pop-up” prayer service for the great Ciceronians’ debate, with Bobby Kennedy in the press room, rooting for his boy Donald. Cheney and Harris vs. Kennedy and Trump. A tag-team match perfect for the World Wrestling Federation (WWF).
I had just dreamed, or so I thought, that Cheney was out night-riding his white stallion across the Wyoming hills, long gun tight aside his saddle, cowboy hat slung back with a full moon shining on his melonic noggin, sea-shells in his ears as he grooved from side-to-side to the music of that other Kamala Harris endorser, Taylor Swift. It’s always wonderful, wonderful, oh so wonderful to get political advice from a fully-clothed warmonger and a scantily-clad diva.
In my dream I heard another voice as night rider Dick ripped off his earphones and pulled back on the reins. “Dick, Dick,” an eerie voice rang out:
‘If you want to save your soul from hell a-riding on our range,
Then cowboy change your ways today or with us you will ride
-try’ng to catch the devil’s herd
Across these endless skies’
Yippee-yi-ay, yippee-yi-o,
The ghost herd in the sky.
That was it, I threw my old clothes on and headed up the hill to the lake to clear my mind of such a nasty flic. Dick hadn’t changed his ways since 2001, except to embrace Democratic war making instead of Republican. Actually, that’s wrong, for as Mr. Neocon, a signer of the bloodthirsty neo-conservative document the Project for the New American Century, he always welcomed and got bipartisan support to attack Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. The neo-cons who run the Democrats and Republicans alike, and whose document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” most interestingly stated long before COVID-19 that “advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”
You don’t say.
There was no need for these neocons to mention the Palestinians, of course, for their slaughter was guaranteed, not only because so many neocons held dual Israeli-U.S. citizenship, but because of all the Israel Lobby money flowing into the pockets of Congress. As for the Russians, attacking them was as American as cherry pie, for they were always coming to get us, just as those sneaky Chinese had their eyes on seizing California.
It was still semi-dark as I walked, with just the fingertips of a rosy-fingered dawn raising its hand over East Mountain. At the lake’s edge, two men in woolen caps and parkas sat meditating facing the mist-rising lake. I wondered why. Were they seeking personal peace of mind or illumination about the ruthless ways of their government? As I walked, I talked to myself and my own ghosts, watching as I went the disappearing vapor and the sky slowly turning blue.
I remembered that September 11, 2001 was also a very blue day until the black clouds flew in and that sparkling morning turned to smoke and dust as the three World Trade Center buildings were brought down by controlled demolition, not airplanes.
But where was Dick Cheney that morning? Not out on the range, no siree. He was riding herd on another roundup. He had taken control of the U.S. government under a Continuity of Government (COG) declaration, as Peter Dale Scott has documented:
Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Cheney in effect took command of the national security operations of the federal government. Quickly and instinctively, he began to act in response to two longstanding beliefs: that the great dangers facing the United States justified almost any response, whether or not legal; and that the presidency needed vastly to enhance its authority, which had been unjustifiably and dangerously weakened in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years.
James Mann has argued that COG implementation was the “hidden backdrop” to Cheney’s actions on 9/11, when he “urged President Bush to stay out of Washington,” and later removed himself to more than one “’undisclosed location’”.
Scott and authors James Mann and James Bamford further show how Cheney and his buddy Donald Rumsfeld of “unknown unknowns” fame were for a long time part of the permanent hidden national security apparatus that runs the country as presidents like Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden enter and exit the White House and are falsely held up as leading the nation. “Cheney and Rumsfeld had previously been preparing for almost two decades, as central figures in the secret agency planning for so-called Continuity of Government (COG),” writes Scott. “It was revealed in the 1980s that these plans aimed at granting a president emergency powers, uncurbed by congressional restraints, to intervene abroad, and also to detain large numbers of those who might protest such actions.”
Unlike this morning when I saw Cheney riding the range, on the morning of September 11, 2001, Cheney was in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) beneath the White House. What exactly he was doing there I will leave to the reader’s research initiative. The great researcher David Ray Griffin’s many books about the attacks of that day would be a good place to start. Let’s just say he wasn’t listening to pop music, not presidential recommender Taylor Swift anyway, for she was just eleven years old that day. She was probably dreaming of writing her political music, Phil Ochs style.
Have you ever noticed how in all the presidential debates since 2001, the truth about what happened on September 11, 2001 is never discussed? It is just assumed that the government’s version of events is true. It is a third rail of American politics; mention it and your goose is cooked.
Just this morning at the 23rd anniversary memorial service of September 11th in NYC, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris shook hands. (Anthony Fauci would be outraged, having said that “I don’t think people should ever shake hands again.”) Was that handshake some sort of tacit agreement never to broach the subject of September 11th during the campaign? To suggest that both the attacks of that day and the subsequent anthrax attacks were linked inside jobs sounds so conspiratorial. That’s a voter turnoff. Even I find accusing the U.S. government of a false flag attack conspiratorial, since that’s exactly what it is, as I wrote years ago about the linguistic mind-control used to convince Americans that they are ruled by a secret cabal of ghost writers in the sky. My words:
In summary form, I will list the language I believe “made up the minds” of those who have refused to examine the government’s claims about the September 11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax attacks.
Pearl Harbor. As pointed out by David Ray Griffin and others, this term was used in September 2000 in The Project for the New American Century’s report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (p.51). Its neo-con authors argued that the U.S. wouldn’t be able to attack Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. “absent some catastrophic event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” Coincidentally or not, the film Pearl Harbor, made with Pentagon assistance and a massive budget, was released on May 25, 2001 and was a box office hit. It was in the theatres throughout the summer. The thought of the attack on Pearl Harbor (not a surprise to the U.S. government, but presented as such) was in the air despite the fact that the 60th anniversary of that attack was not until December 7, 2001, a more likely release date. Once the September 11 attacks occurred, the Pearl Harbor comparison was “plucked out” of the social atmosphere and used innumerable times, beginning immediately. Even George W. Bush was widely reported to have had the time that night to allegedly use it in his diary. The examples of this comparison are manifold, but I am summarizing, so I will skip giving them. Any casual researcher can confirm this.
Homeland. This strange un-American term, another WW II word associated with another enemy – Nazi Germany – was also used many times by the neo-con authors of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” I doubt any average American referred to this country by that term before. Of course it became the moniker for The Department of Homeland Security, marrying home with security to form a comforting name that simultaneously and unconsciously suggests a defense against Hitler-like evil coming from the outside. Not coincidentally, Hitler introduced it into the Nazi propaganda vernacular at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Both usages conjured up images of a home besieged by alien forces intent on its destruction; thus preemptive action was in order.
Ground Zero. This is a third WWII (“the good war”) term first used at 11:55 A.M. on September 11 by Mark Walsh (aka “the Harley Guy” because he was wearing a Harley-Davidson tee shirt) in an interview on the street by a Fox News reporter, Rick Leventhal. Identified as a Fox free-lancer, Walsh also explained the Twin Towers collapse in a precise, well-rehearsed manner that would be the same illogical and anti-scientific explanation later given by the government: “mostly due to structural failure because the fire was too intense.” Ground zero – a nuclear bomb term first used by U.S. scientists to refer to the spot where they exploded the first nuclear bomb in New Mexico in 1945 – became another meme adopted by the media that suggested a nuclear attack had occurred or might in the future if the U.S. didn’t act. The nuclear scare was raised again and again by George W. Bush and U.S. officials in the days and months following the attacks, although nuclear weapons were beside the point. But the conjoining of “nuclear” with “ground zero” served to raise the fear factor dramatically. Ironically, the project to develop the nuclear bomb was called the Manhattan Project and was headquartered at 270 Broadway, NYC, a few short blocks north of the World Trade Center.
The Unthinkable. This is another nuclear term whose usage as linguistic mind control and propaganda is analyzed by Graeme MacQueen in the penultimate chapter of the very important The 2001Anthrax Deception. He notes the patterned use of this term before and after September 11, while saying “the pattern may not signify a grand plan …. It deserves investigation and contemplation.” He then presents a convincing case that the use of this term couldn’t be accidental. He notes how George W. Bush, in a major foreign policy speech on May 1, 2001, “gave informal public notice that the United States intended to withdraw unilaterally from the ABM Treaty”; Bush said the U.S. must be willing to “rethink the unthinkable.” This was necessary because of terrorism and rogue states with “weapons of mass destruction.” PNAC also argued that the U.S. should withdraw from the treaty. A signatory to the treaty could only withdraw after giving six months notice and because of “extraordinary events” that “jeopardized its supreme interests.” Once the September 11 attacks occurred, Bush rethought the unthinkable and officially gave formal notice on December 13 to withdraw the U.S. from the ABM Treaty. MacQueen specifies the many times different media used the term “unthinkable” in October 2001 in reference to the anthrax attacks. He explicates its usage in one of the anthrax letters – “The Unthinkabel” [sic]. He explains how the media that used the term so often were at the time unaware of its usage in the anthrax letter since that letter’s content had not yet been revealed, and how the letter writer had mailed the letter before the media started using the word. He makes a rock solid case showing the U.S. government’s complicity in the anthrax attacks and therefore in the Sept 11 attacks. While calling the use of the term “unthinkable” in all its iterations “problematic,” he writes, “The truth is that the employment of ‘the unthinkable’ in this letter, when weight is given both to the meaning of this term in U.S. strategic circles and to the other relevant uses of the term in 2001, points us in the direction of the U.S. military and intelligence communities.” I am reminded of Orwell’s point in 1984: “a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.” Thus the government and media’s use of “unthinkable” becomes a classic case of “doublethink.” The unthinkable is unthinkable.
9/11. This is the key usage that has reverberated down the years around which the others revolve. It is an anomalous numerical designation applied to an historical event, and obviously also the emergency telephone number. Try to think of another numerical appellation for an important event in American history. The future editor of The New York Times and Iraq war promoter, Bill Keller, introduced this connection the following morning in a NY Times op-ed piece, “America’s Emergency Line: 911.” The linkage of the attacks to a permanent national emergency was thus subliminally introduced, as Keller mentioned Israel nine times and seven times compared the U.S. situation to that of Israel as a target for terrorists. His first sentence reads: “An Israeli response to America’s aptly dated wake-up call might well be, ‘Now you know.’” By referring to September 11 as 9/11, an endless national emergency became wedded to an endless war on terror aimed at preventing Hitler-like terrorists from obliterating us with nuclear weapons that could create another ground zero or holocaust. It is a term that pushes all the right buttons evoking unending social fear and anxiety. It is language as sorcery; it is propaganda at its best. Even well-respected critics of the U.S. government’s explanation use the term that has become a fixture of public consciousness through endless repetition. As George W. Bush would later put it as he connected Saddam Hussein to “9/11” and pushed for the Iraq war, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” All the ingredients for a linguistic mind-control smoothie had been blended.
*****
It’s getting dark now, the sun is setting and shimmering across the lake. Shadows are falling, but to quote Dylan, “it’s not dark yet but it’s getting there.” I hope to dream again tonight as I rock in my crib, not about Cheney and his ilk, not about Trump or Harris and the Spectacle, but maybe just about the lovely lapping lake I listened to today, thinking of Yeats’ poem, The Lake of Innisfree, set in the land of my ancestors, hearing its cadence that flows like a prayer. It is always the poets who remind us that words can be used to traumatize or transport one into a beautiful dreamer.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Once again, the Haiti/Americas Team of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) strongly denounces the latest attempts by the U.S. to push for yet another UN military occupation of Haiti. We condemn this action and the relentless assaults on Haitian self-determination by the US and its criminal allies. We also urge Caribbean and Latin American governments to stand in solidarity with Haiti – just as they have stood with one another against violations of national sovereignty in Venezuela, Cuba, Honduras, etc. – as the Haitian people continue to bear the brunt of U.S. imperial policies and actions in the region.
On September 5th and 6th, the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In Haiti, Blinken met with members of the US- and CARICOM-imposed “presidential council” and the illegitimate Prime Minister of Haiti to discuss support for the Kenyan and U.S. occupation forces currently present in the country.
On September 5, 2024, a group of Haitian and Dominican organizations released a statement denouncing Blinken’s visit to the island (English translation here). The statement titled, “Repudiation of the Presence of the Representative of Yankee Imperialism in Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” declared:
“This interventionist visit will bring no good to the Haitian people, nor to the Dominican people. Rather, it will seek to consolidate the neocolonial domination imposed on Haiti since the first U.S. military occupation (1915-1934) and on the Dominican Republic (1916-1924). In fact, Blinken’s only mission is to protect the interests of imperialism in Haiti and those of Haiti’s small, repugnant elite class. He will do the same in the Dominican Republic.”
Soon after Blinken’s departure from the island, Western media revealed the true U.S. objective of his visit: transforming the illegal, unpopular, and inept U.S.-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission of 400 Kenyan police officers into a full-scale UN occupation (cynically referred to as a “peacekeeping operation.”). This was further confirmed by reports that the UN Security Council is considering a resolution to deploy a military force to Haiti.
BAP’s position has been consistent and unwavering: we support Haitian self-determination. We will continue to struggle against foreign invasion and occupation of the country. Since 2021, we have advocated against U.S. imperial machinations in Haiti, including the continuing renewal of the mandate of the UN office in Haiti (BINUH), which Haitian people see as an occupation force, and the establishment of the MSS. BAP challenged the narrative of “gang violence” as a pretext for occupation and argued that it is the U.S.’s own puppets and Haitian oligarchs that are arming young men in Haiti. We warned that the MSS was a temporary cover for a more permanent military occupation of Haiti through proxies, and with the blessing of the UN. And we continue to remind people of the brutal repercussions of the two decades-long 2004 UN intervention and occupation of Haiti.
In solidarity with Haitian and Dominican organizations opposing U.S. imperialism, and in defense of Haitian self-determination and sovereignty, the Haiti/Americas Team of the Black Alliance for Peace demands an end to the current occupation of Haiti, calling for the closure of the BINUH office in Haiti, and the removal of Kenyan and U.S. militarized police from the country. We also demand that the UNSC cease its interference in Haitian affairs on behalf of the U.S.
We urge people of conscience around the world to help stop another UN invasion of Haiti and, we also warn leaders of the Caribbean and Latin America – who have either remained silent or are actively participating in the U.S. usurpation of Haitian sovereignty – that if Haiti is not free from U.S. bullying and imperial control, no other country in the region will be free.
Invention is the mother of necessity, and Russia’s response to largely Western-imposed economic and trade sanctions has shown the extent of that inventiveness. While enduring attritive punishment in its Ukraine campaign, the war remains sustainable for the Kremlin. The domestic economy has not collapsed, despite apocalyptic predictions to the contrary. In terms of exports, Russia is carving out new trade routes, a move that has been welcomed by notable powers in the Global South.
One of the chief prosecutors of sanctions against Moscow was initially confident about the damage that would be caused by economic bludgeoning. US President Joe Biden, in February 2022, insisted on the imposition of measures that would “impair [Russia’s] ability to compete in a high-tech 21st century economy.” The Council of the European Union also explained that the move was intended to weaken Moscow’s “ability to finance the war and specifically target the political, military and economic elite responsible for the invasion [of Ukraine].”
In all this, the European Union, the United States and other governments have ignored a salient historical lesson when resorting to supposedly punitive formulae intended to either deter Russia from pursuing a course of action or depriving it of necessary resources. States subject to supposedly crushing economic measures can adapt, showing streaks of impressive resilience. The response from Japan, Germany and Italy during the 1930s in the face of sanctions imposed by the League of Nations provide irrefutable proof of that proposition. All, to a certain extent, pursued what came to be known as Blockadefestigkeit, or blockade resilience. With bitter irony, the targeted powers also felt emboldened to pursue even more aggressive measures to subvert the restraints placed upon them.
By the end of 2022, Russia had become China’s second biggest supplier of Russian crude oil. India has also been particularly hungry for Russian oil. Producing only 10% of domestic supply, Russia contributed 34% of the rest of Indian oil consumption in 2023.
Trade routes are also being pursued with greater vigour than ever. This year, progress was made between Russia and China on a North Sea Route, which straddles the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, running from Murmansk on the Barents Sea to the Bering Strait and the Far East. The agreement between Russia’s state nuclear agency Rosatom and China’s Hainan Yangpu Newnew Shipping Co Ltd envisages the joint design and creation of Arctic-class container vessels to cope with the punishing conditions throughout the year. Rosatom’s special representative for Arctic development, Vladimir Panov, confidently declared that up to 3 million tonnes of transit cargo would flow along the NSR in 2024.
While that agreement will operate to Russia’s frozen north, another transport route has also received a boosting tonic. Of late, Moscow and New Delhi have been making progress on the 7,200-kilometre International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which will run from St. Petersburg in northwestern Russia to ports in southern Iran for onward movement to Mumbai. While the agreement between Russia, Iran and India for such a multimodal corridor dates back to September 2000, the advent of sanctions imposed in the aftermath of the Ukraine War propelled Moscow to seek succour in the export markets of the Middle East and Asia.
As staff writers at Nikkeipoint out, the shipping route will not only bypass Europe but be “less than half as long as the current standard path through the Mediterranean Sea and the Suez Canal.” One calculation suggests that the time needed to transport cargo to Moscow from Mumbai prior to the initiation of the corridor was between 40 and 60 days. As things stand, the transit time has been shaved to 25-30 days, with transportation costs falling by 30%.
Much progress has been made on the western route, which involves the use of Azerbaijan’s rail and road facilities. In March, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Digital Development and Transport revealed that rail freight grew by approximately 30% in 2023. Road freight rose to 1.3 million tonnes, an increase of 35%. The ministry anticipates the amount of tonnage in terms of freight traffic to rise to 30 million per year. In June this year, the Rasht-Caspian Sea link connecting the Persian Gulf with the Caspian Sea via rail was opened in the presence of Russian, Iranian and Azerbaijani dignitaries.
A further factor that adds worth to the corridor is the increasingly fraught nature of freight traffic from Europe to Asia via the Suez Canal. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have been harrying vessels in the Red Sea, a response to Israel’s ferocious campaign in Gaza. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk suggested back in January that the “North-South [corridor] will gain global significance” given the crisis in the Red Sea.
Despite the frightful losses being endured in the Russia-Ukraine war, it is clear, at least when it comes to using economic and financial weapons, that Moscow has prevailed. It has outfoxed its opponents, and, along the way, sought to redraw global trade routes that will furnish it with even greater armour from future economic shocks. Other countries less keen to seek a moral stake in the Ukraine conflict than pursue their own trade interests, have been most enthusiastic.
It is both apt and ironic that the anniversary of 9/11, which paved the way for the government to overthrow the Constitution, occurs the week before the anniversary of the day the U.S. Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787.
All sides are still waging war on our constitutional freedoms, and “we the people” remain the biggest losers.
This year’s presidential election is no exception.
As Bruce Fein, the former associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, warns in a recent article in the Baltimore Sun, “In November, the American people will have a choice between Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance. But they will not have a choice between an Empire and a Republic.”
In other words, the candidates on this year’s ballot do not represent a substantive choice between freedom and tyranny so much as they constitute a cosmetic choice: the packaging may vary widely, but the contents remain the same.
No matter who wins, the bureaucratic minions of the Security/Military Industrial Complex and its Police State/Deep State partners will retain their stranglehold on power.
Neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris have the greatest of track records when it comes to actually respecting the rights enshrined in the Constitution, despite the rhetoric being trotted out by both sides lately regarding their so-called devotion to the rule of law.
Indeed, Trump has repeatedly called for parts of the Constitution to be terminated, while both Harris and Trump seem to view the First Amendment’s assurance of the right to free speech, political expression and protest as dangerous when used to challenge the government’s power.
This flies in the face of everything America’s founders fought to safeguard.
Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.
Unfortunately, although the Bill of Rights was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.
In the 23 years since the USA Patriot Act—a massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA—was rammed through Congress in the wake of the so-called 9/11 terror attacks, it has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.
The Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, violating at least six of the ten original amendments—the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments—and possibly the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well.
The Patriot Act also redefined terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations and civil disobedience are now considered potential terrorist acts, thereby rendering anyone desiring to engage in protected First Amendment expressive activities as suspects of the surveillance state.
In fact, since 9/11, we’ve been spied on by surveillance cameras, eavesdropped on by government agents, had our belongings searched, our phones tapped, our mail opened, our email monitored, our opinions questioned, our purchases scrutinized (under the USA Patriot Act, banks are required to analyze your transactions for any patterns that raise suspicion and to see if you are connected to any objectionable people), and our activities watched.
We’re also being subjected to invasive patdowns and whole-body scans of our persons and seizures of our electronic devices in the nation’s airports. We can’t even purchase certain cold medicines at the pharmacy anymore without it being reported to the government and our names being placed on a watch list.
In this way, “we the people” continue to be terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.
The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, a viral pandemic, and more to come), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called name of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.
A recitation of the Bill of Rights—set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and the like (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, and the courts)—would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.
What we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Sadly, most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.
If there is any sense to be made from a recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.
So what’s the solution?
It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.”
In other words, it’s our job to make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.
From the President on down, anyone taking public office should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.
Some critics are advocating that students pass the United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college. I’d go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship exam before graduating from grade school.
Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.
A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to do more than grouse and complain.
CSIRO’s United States subsidiary will be shuttered later this year, according to the national science agency’s latest corporate plan, as the extent of its massive enterprise services restructure continues to emerge. The 2024 corporate plan reveals that the office, registered in Delaware as an operating entity for commercialisation less than eight years ago, “will close…
The Biden/Harris administration is renewing its attacks on Venezuela. On Monday, September 2, US officials seized a jet plane belonging to the Venezuelan government when it was in the Dominican Republic for servicing, then flew it to Florida.
Contrary to a false report in the NY Times, the plane was not “owned by Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro”. It is owned by the Venezuelan government and used for travel by various Venezuelan officials in addition to the president.
The NYT article claims, “The Biden administration is trying to put more pressure on Mr. Maduro because of his attempts to undermine the results of the recent presidential election.” This is another inversion of reality. The US government is trying to undermine the results determined by the Venezuelan National Election Council (CNE) and ratified by their Supreme Court.
Contrary to Western claims, the Supreme Court and Election Council are not synonymous with the government. They are approved by Venezuela’s elected national assembly. While one opposition member of the Election Council criticized the results, he did not attend the count or meetings. He does not ordinarily live in Venezuela and has returned to his home in the USA. Meanwhile, another opposition member of the Election Council, Aime Nogal, participated and approved the council’s decision.
Before the election, polls showed vastly different predictions. The US-funded polling company, Edison Research, showed the Gonzalez/ Machado opposition winning. Other polls showed the opposite. Polls are notoriously unreliable, especially when the poll is funded by an interested party. A better indication was the street demonstrations where the crowd in support of the coalition led by Maduro was near one million people. In contrast, the crowd for Gonzalez was a small fraction of that.
Increasingly, countries throughout the Global South are rejecting and criticizing Washington’s intervention in other nations’ internal affairs. On August 28, the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro Zelaya, terminated the long standing extradition treaty with the United States and denounced US meddling after the US Ambassador commented negatively on Honduran – Venezuelan discussions. Along with many other Latin American countries but the dismay of the U.S., Honduras recognized the results of the Venezuelan election.
For over twenty years, the US has been trying to overturn the Bolivarian revolution. In 2002, the US government and elite media supported a coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez. To their chagrin, the attempt collapsed due to popular outrage. Since then, there have been repeated efforts with the US supporting street violence, assassination attempts, and invasions. Under Obama, Venezuela was absurdly declared to be a “threat to US national security”. This was the bogus rationale for the economic warfare which the US has waged ever since. Multiple reports confirm that tens of thousands of Venezuelans have died as a result of hunger and sickness due to US strangulation of the economy. Again, the truth is the opposite of what Washington claims: the US is a threat to Venezuela’s national security.
Unknown to most U.S. residents, in December 2020 the U.N. General Assembly declared US unilateral coercive measures (sanctions) are “contrary to international law, international humanitarian law, the Charter of the United Nations and the norms and principles governing peaceful relations among States.”
Illegal U.S. measures were used to justify the kidnapping and imprisonment of Venezuelan diplomat, Alex Saab. They have now been used to justify the theft of a et plane needed by Venezuelan officials.
Previously, sanctions were used to justify the seizure of Venezuela’s CITGO gas stations and freezing gold reserves in London. It comes after the U.S. and allies pretended for several years that an almost unknown politician, Juan Guaido, was the president of Venezuela.
The reasons for Washington’s repeated efforts to overturn the Bolivarian revolution are clear: Venezuela has huge oil reserves and insists on its sovereignty. Under Chavez and Maduro, the Bolivarian revolution has sought to benefit the vast majority of Venezuela’s people instead of a small elite of Venezuelans and foreigners. Washington cannot tolerate the idea that those resources are used to benefit the Venezuelan people instead of billionaires like the Rockefeller clan, which made much of its wealth from Venezuela.
Under the Bolivarian revolution, Venezuela insists on having its own foreign policy. In 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez denounced the U.S. invasion of Iraq and compared U.S. President Bush to the devil. In May this year, Venezuelan President Maduro denounced Israel’s genocide in Gaza and accused the West of being “accomplices.”
The cost of seizing Venezuela’s plane on foreign soil was probably greater than the $13 million value of the plane. So why did the Biden administration do this now? Perhaps it is to garner the votes of right-wing Cubans and Venezuelans in Florida. Perhaps it is to distract from their foreign policy failures in Gaza and Ukraine.
Whatever the reason, the theft of the Venezuelan jet plane is an example of U.S. foreign policy based on self-serving “rules” in violation of international law. It shows who is the rogue state.
President Xiomara Castro of Honduras is representative of the wave of disgust with US interference, crimes, and arrogance. In the past, Honduras was called a “banana republic” and known as “USS Honduras”. Now its president says, “The interference and interventionism of the United States … is intolerable. They attack, disregard and violate with impunity the principles and practices of international law, which promote respect for the sovereignty and self-determination of peoples, non-intervention and universal peace. Enough.”
The Guardianreported this week a source from within the Foreign Office confirming what anyone paying close attention already knew.
By last February, according to the source, Britain’s then Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, had received official advice that Israel was using British arms components to commit war crimes in Gaza. Cameron sat on that information for many months, concealing it from the House of Commons and the British public, while Israel continued to butcher tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Several points need making about the information provided to the Guardian:
1. The source says that the advice to Cameron on Israeli war crimes was “so obvious” it could not have been misunderstood by him or anyone else in the previous government. Given that the new Labour government has been similarly advised, forcing it to partially suspend arms sales, one conclusion only is possible: Cameron is complicit in Israel’s war crimes. The International Criminal Court must immediately investigate him. Its British chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, needs to issue an arrest warrant for Cameron as soon as possible. No ifs or buts.
2. Now in government, Labour has a legal duty to make clear the timeline of the advice Cameron received – and who else received it – to help the ICC in its prosecution of the former Foreign Secretary and other British officials for complicity in Israel’s atrocities.
3. The current furore being kicked up over Labour’s suspension of a tiny fraction of arm sales to Israel needs to be put firmly in context. David Lammy, Cameron’s successor, is keen to evade any risk of complicity charges himself. Leaders of the previous government are denouncing his decision on arms sales only because it exposes their own complicity in war crimes. Their outrage is desperate arse-covering – something the media ought to be highlighting but isn’t.
4. Labour needs to explain why, according to the source, the advice it has published has apparently been watered down from the advice Cameron received. As a result, Lammy has suspended 30 of 350 arms contracts with Israel – or 8 per cent of the total. He has avoided suspending the British components most likely to be assisting Israel in its war crimes: those used in Israel’s F-35 jets, made in the US.
Why? Because that would incur the full wrath of the Biden administration. He and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, dare not take on Washington.
In other words, Lammy’s decision has not only exposed the complicity of Cameron and the previous Tory leadership in Israeli war crimes. It also exposes Lammy and Starmer’s complicity. Put bluntly, following this week’s announcement, they are now 8 per cent less complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity than Cameron and the Tories were.
5. There has been lots of fake indignation from Israel and its lobbyists, especially in Britain’s Jewish community, about how offensive it is that the government should announce its suspension of a small fraction of arms sales to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza the day six Israeli hostages were buried.
The chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, for example, is incensed that the UK is limiting its arming of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, saying it “beggars belief”. He is thereby calling for the UK to trash international law, and ignore its own officials’ advice that Israel risks using British weapons to commit war crimes. He is demanding that the UK facilitate genocide.
The British Board of Deputies, which claims to represent British Jews, has retweeted Mirvis’ comment. The Board’s president has been all over the airwaves similarly decryingLammy’s decision.
Israel would, of course, have always found some reason to be appalled at the timing. There is an obviously far more important consideration than the bogus “sensitivities” of Israel and genocide apologists like Rabbi Mirvis. Each day the UK government delays banning all arms to Israel – not just a small percentage – more Palestinians in Gaza die and the more Britain contributes to Israel’s crimes against humanity.
But equally to the point: according to the rules Starmer imposed on the Labour party – that Britain’s Jewish leaders get to define what offends Jews and what amounts to antisemitism, especially on issues concerning Israel – the Labour government is now, judged by those standards, antisemitic. You can’t have one set of rules for Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left, and another for Starmer and the Labour right.
Or rather you can. That is precisely the game the entire British establishment has been playing for the past seven years. A game that has facilitated Israel’s genocide in Gaza even more than the sales of British weapons to Israel.
6. Many have dismissed the significance of recent rulings against Israel from the International Court of Justice – that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza and that its decades of occupation are illegal and a form of apartheid – as well as moves from the International Criminal Court to arrest Netanyahu as a war criminal.
Here we see how mistaken that approach is. Those legal decisions have set the two wings of the British establishment – the Tories and the Starmerite Labour right – at loggerheads. Both are now desperate in their different ways to distance themselves from charges of complicity.
The rulings have also opened up a potential rift with Washington. The State Department spokesman has been shown having to frantically justify why the US is not banning its own arms sales.
Journalist Humeyra Pamuk questioned State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on why the US has not followed the UK's decision to suspend arms sales to Israel over concerns about potential violations of international law. pic.twitter.com/mujwDyblgZ
Admittedly, these are only small fissures in the western system of oligarchy. But those fissures are weaknesses – weaknesses that those who care about human rights, care about international law, care about stopping a genocide, and care about saving their own humanity can exploit. We have few opportunities. We need to grasp every single one of them.
“It’s brave to admit your fears” – Ukrainian recruiting poster. Photo credit: Ministry of Defense, Ukraine.
The Associated Press reports that many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers.
“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire. … That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.”
This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of U.S. Brigadier General Samuel “Slam” Marshall, a First World War veteran and the chief combat historian of the U.S. Army in the Second World War. Marshall conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe, and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command.
One of Slam Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of U.S. troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own lives in greater danger.
Marshall concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is now understood to lie at the root of much of the PTSD suffered by combat veterans.
Marshall’s conclusions were incorporated into U.S. military training, with the introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher firing ratios.
That trend continued in Vietnam and more recent U.S. wars. Part of the shocking brutality of the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the dehumanizing indoctrination of the U.S. occupation forces, which included falsely linking Iraq to the September 11th terrorist crimes in the U.S. and labeling Iraqis who resisted the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country as “terrorists.
A Zogby poll of U.S. forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of U.S. troops believed their mission was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” and 77% believed that the primary reason for the war was to “stop Saddam from protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth by propagandists in Washington, and yet, three years into the U.S. occupation, the Pentagon was still misleading U.S. troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11.
The impact of this dehumanization was also borne out by court martial testimony in the rare cases when U.S. troops were prosecuted for killing Iraqi civilians. In a court martial at Camp Pendleton in California in July 2007, a corporal testifying for the defense told the court he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an innocent civilian as a summary execution. “I see it as killing the enemy,” he told the court, adding, “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.”
U.S. combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (6,257 killed) were only a fraction of the U.S. combat death toll in Vietnam (47,434) or Korea (33,686), and an even smaller fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans killed in the Second World War. In every case, other countries suffered much heavier death tolls.
And yet, U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan provoked waves of political blowback in the U.S., leading to military recruitment problems that persist today. The U.S. government responded by shifting away from wars involving large deployments of U.S. ground troops to a greater reliance on proxy wars and aerial bombardment.
After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military-industrial complex and political class thought they had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” and that, freed from the danger of provoking World War III with the Soviet Union, they could now use military force without restraint to consolidate and expand U.S. global power. These ambitions crossed party lines, from Republican “neoconservatives”to Democratic hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2000, a month before winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton echoed her mentor Madeleine Albright’s infamous rejection of the “Powell Doctrine” of limited war.
“There is a refrain…,” Clinton declared, “that we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.
During the question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged Clinton on that statement. “I wonder if you think that every foreign country– the majority of countries–would actually welcome this new assertiveness, including the one billion Muslims that are out there,” he asked, “and whether or not there isn’t some grave risk to the United States in this–what I would say, not new internationalism, but new imperialism?”
When the aggressive war policy promoted by the neocons and Democratic hawks crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should have prompted a serious rethink of their wrongheaded assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal uses of U.S. military force.
Instead, the response of the U.S. political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of U.S. ground forces or “boots on the ground.” They instead embraced the use of devastating bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, “ironclad” U.S. support, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and now Ukraine and Palestine.
The absence of large numbers of U.S. casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most Americans knew very little about these more recent wars, until the shocking atrocity of the genocide in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence and indifference.
The results of these U.S. proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. domestic political impacts have been mitigated, but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly, destructive and destabilizing as ever, undermining U.S. “soft power” and pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world.
In fact, these policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos and poverty caused by the aggressive projection of U.S. military and economic power, whether by U.S. wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups or economic sanctions.
Now the U.S.-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are provoking growing public dissent among America’s partners in these wars. Israel’s recovery of six more dead hostages in Rafah led Israeli labor unions to call widespread strikes, insisting that the Netanyahu government must prioritize the lives of the Israeli hostages over its desire to keep killing Palestinians and destroying Gaza.
In Ukraine, an expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young Ukrainians do not want to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened veterans see new recruits much as Siegfried Sassoon described the British conscripts he was training in November 2016 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: “The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.”
Several months later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sassoon wrote Finished With War: a Soldier’s Declaration, an open letter accusing the political leaders who had the power to end the war of deliberately prolonging it. The letter was published in newspapers and read aloud in Parliament. It ended, “On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.”
As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Netanyahu and Zelenskyy are taking increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the U.S. must come to their rescue. By “leading from behind,” our leaders have surrendered the initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own.
Proxy war has failed to resolve the problem it was intended to solve. Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.
Neither the changes to U.S. military training since the Second World War nor the current U.S. strategy of proxy war have resolved the age-old contradiction that Slam Marshall described in Men Against Fire, between killing in war and our natural respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historic crossroads, where we must once again make the fateful, unambiguous choice between the path of war and the path of peace.
If we choose war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we must be ready, as military experts tell us, to once more send tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths, while also risking escalation to a nuclear war that would kill us all.
If we truly choose peace, we must actively resist our political leaders’ schemes to repeatedly manipulate us into war. We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends and “allies” in other countries.
We must insist that our mis-leaders instead recommit to diplomacy, negotiation and other peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries, as the UN Charter, the real “rules based order,” in fact requires.
If you ask Elli Hanson about the barriers facing Australian startups and founders in a US-centric VC world, she’ll tell you it has a lot to do with our humility and the social phenomenon known as tall poppy syndrome. “Australian founders hold this incredibly profound quiet confidence, but don’t want to talk about the things…
Critical cultural historical perspective is not easy to obtain. Yet its importance as an orientation is immeasurable. One episode in the past American century of war is still virtually unknown and/ or misrepresented, the longest single armed conflict in the history of the North American republic—its campaign against Korea. In terms of active hostilities conducted by military formations, the United States dba the United Nations fought in Korea between 1951 and 1953, until a ceasefire and armistice was agreed between the United Nations and the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. In practice, war by other means has continued with scarcely an abatement to this day.
This persistence of this condition is well understood in Korea, China and Japan, even if the public statements diverge among the governments of these three. In the United States one can say that the vast majority of the population has little or no idea about the campaign beyond the few lines in school history books, occasional sentimental films and the ignorant as well as outright dishonest statements by the US government. Since Barack Obama announced the regime’s “pivot to Asia”, there have been occasional eruptions of sensitivity to events and developments on the Korean peninsula. These remain largely incoherent. As I have argued elsewhere this incoherence and general ignorance can be explained by the fact that although every US school pupil has heard the term “manifest destiny” very few have ever understood it. In contrast, one can hear almost anyone preach with authoritative tones about the Monroe Doctrine as if this were an institution of international law and not an arrogant gesture, mainly addressed to the British Empire in the 19th century (when it was barely capable of defending its own merchantmen).
Without a clear understanding of manifest destiny: the US absorption of the Philippines and denial of its hard fought independence after Spain had ceded it in the Treaty of Paris (1898), the promotion of Japanese expansion into the Asian mainland including colonization, the transfer of Germany’s China assets to Japan after the Great War, and the covert operations against Japan that led to the provoked (and staged) Pearl Harbor “surprise”, as well as the “loss of China” in 1949, it is impossible to explain the comprehensiveness of US imperial engagement in Asia and the importance of Korea in this constellation (or Vietnam for that matter). The “pivot” announced under Barack Obama was not a new policy. It was a relabelling of a policy that emerged from manifest destiny long before the US was capable of projecting the naval, military and economic power to actively pursue it.
At the end of the campaign against Japan in 1945, the immediate consequence of Japan’s defeat at the hands of the Soviet Union was surrender and withdrawal from its Korean colony. Prosaically, the almost hereditary military governor of the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur (father had been military governor while son had commanded the Philippine armed forces until the Japanese invasion), played a significant role in executing in Korea the same manoeuver perpetrated by Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay. Just as the Spanish had been forced to cede the Philippines to the US, the Japanese were to surrender their Korean possession to the United States. However, after waging four years of bloody war again for democracy, the high representatives of the Allies had declared in Cairo that Korean independence was to be restored. Thus, the US designs had to be cloaked in other garb.
This is the most reasonable perspective from which to see the beginnings of the war in Korea as far as the United States is concerned. It is the simplest and most consistent explanation not only for Dean Acheson’s action in 1951 but also for the policies pursued today by the permanent state that directs the foreign policy a reigning POTUS is permitted to pronounce.
Of course, there are many complexities involving conflicts among the interested parties which make it impossible to reduce all the events and phenomena of the war to just one cause or effect. Several political conflicts arose among the US Establishment because of the Korean campaign. The impact on occupied Germany and relations with the temporary “ally”, the Soviet Union, as well as emerging independent states like India, was substantial. Therefore, to argue for a controlling cultural historical perspective is not to claim a linear or analogue explanation for everything that happened between 1951 and 1953.
This is the fundamental strength of the numerous books Bruce Cumings has written about the Korean War, including his participation in a highly controversial Thames TV documentary called Korea: The Unknown War. The importance of the latter lies in its unparalleled compilation of eyewitness interviews and archival film material about a war that predated “TV war fetishism”. The interpretative work was so controversial in the production that Professor Cumings later wrote a critical analysis and partially distanced himself from the end product. Nonetheless, as “diluted” as some evidence and critique in the film was, two versions had to be distributed. US television broadcasters found the original British documentary to negative for American audiences.
In 2010, The Korean War: A History was published in the Modern Library, an established series characterized by titles that widely recognized as “classics”. Perhaps that is why David Martin assumed for the purpose of his review that Bruce Cumings account and interpretations of this period in US and Korean (as well as Chinese) history are now Establishment or mainstream. He supports this assumption by reminding the reader of Professor Cumings’ pedigree, a distinguished professor emeritus from a top-tier American university and former chair of that institution’s history department. Dr Martin then concludes that The Korean War, as narrated by Professor Cumings, is best assigned to that bin of radical Leftist revisionism he imagines—like many conservatives—dominates the apex of US power. Alas Dr Martin is gravely mistaken. Ever since Bruce Cumings published his Origins of the Korean War, the Establishment has done its best to ignore, if not discredit, the conclusions he drew—as they were unable to refute the copious historical record with which the book is supported. If appearances in the think tank/ talkshow circuit are any measure of ideological acceptance, Bruce Cumings is probably one of the rarest figures to be found in public debate about Korea or US Asia policy. His standing in the academy entitles him to more respect among colleagues but that hardly constitutes political influence in high places. As far as I know it has not earned him a place in that cesspool of the Anglo-American Establishment, the Council on Foreign Relations—usually the first sign of elevation to the rank of official sage.
Dr Martin opens his salvo against The Korean War by reporting that he was in Korea as an ROTC candidate at about the same time that Bruce Cumings was in Korea serving in the Peace Corps. The invidious distinction between these two assignments is almost amusingly nostalgic, reminiscent of the sneers of newly-minted patriotic butter bars leaving for Saigon amidst protesting college students. Accusing Professor Cumings of a lack of martial spirit and patriotism may reflect the naive feelings of a fresh officer candidate fifty years ago, it is certainly not a serious way to approach the published research of a senior scholar, regardless of political coloration. However, the publication of this digest of Professor Cumings decades-long research in the Modern Library does at least suggest that the content has been prepared for a mass market, lay audience. In that sense The Korean War, while by no means Establishment orthodoxy, has crept a few rungs to be admitted to educated debate beyond the university. That is something Dr Martin should greet. Since before one can adequately argue with an analysis or judgement it is necessary to understand it. That is certainly the aim of the publishers—not to approve the views but to render them susceptible to broader understanding and thus foster intelligent debate about a continuing conflict in US foreign policy.
Yet, David Martin, a retired economist, employed mainly in government service, reviews Bruce Cumings’ book as if it were the established, standard history of the war. Of course it never was and still isn’t. Dr Martin also disparages I.F. Stone’s Hidden History of the Korean War, one of the few contemporary critical analyses of the Korean campaign, based entirely on public sources available at the time. All this is based on the conviction that these are Left-wing views of the matter and therefore inherently incorrect.
The review does not confine itself to ad hominem. Dr Martin asserts that aside from an anti-American bias, Professor Cumings makes statements that also lead to substantive questions that he does not answer. To the extent this is accurate, it is beside the point. The Korean War makes no claims to comprehensiveness. On the contrary it is a compact digest. Professor Cumings explains in the introduction that every effort was made to keep the evidentiary apparatus to a minimum in the interest of broader readership. In the two-volume Origins of the Korean War lie the answers to numerous questions Dr Martin sees as unresolved. On the narrative as a whole he is more than candid:
I wish I could write with the serene confidence that other historians do in similarly short books, offering their settled interpretations unencumbered by footnotes and sources. So many things about this war are still so controversial, however, vehemently debated and hotly affirmed or denied (or simply unknown)…
Having read both volumes of the Origins, his other books on the subject, viewed Korea: The Unknown War, several times as well as corresponding directly with him, I can only attest to the caution with which Professor Cumings drew any conclusions from his research. Rather than trying to prove who may have started the armed hostilities that became a major military conflict for three years, his work has focussed on the context in which this war began, the various aims, interests and objectives pursued by those persons involved and those of the institutions through which they acted. The limitations on historical documentation are never overlooked. Interpretation is always an act in the present. However it always is an interpretation of what we call the past. Hence new documents may lead to reassessment of previously known documents. The Korean War is “a history”—not “the history” as would be implied by a genuinely Establishment narrative.
At one point Dr Martin writes:
To be sure there would have been social unrest such as occurred on Jeju Island and in South Jeolla Province, but it’s hard to see how it could have developed into an all-out war. Backing someone like Kim Ku, who seems to have had wider public support, instead of Syngman Rhee might have been a wiser course for the United States.
Dr Martin is primarily concerned with the US interest in Korea—“a wiser course for the United States” (or for that matter all of Asia-Pacific) and not with what Koreans wanted or may still want.
In fact, the massacre on Jeju island was not “social unrest.” It was the first in the extermination campaigns of the communists (or those opponents the US and Rhee regime declared to be communists) in all of Korea. These actions began with the overt and covert support of the USMGIK which gladly deployed Japanese and Korean collaborators peninsula-wide. Backing Kim Ku might have led to a peaceful Korea, but that is not what the US wanted at all. The US wanted a dictatorship and wanted to turn all of Korea into a war platform against China. It also wanted to Christianize all of Korea.
Unfortunately, even attempts to popularize his Korea research have largely failed, if one considers that US Korean policy and the ignorance of the US population about Korea have scarcely changed since Theodore Roosevelt got his Nobel prize for helping Japan colonize it.
David Martin’s review is also an example of the importance of the overall perspective. The perspective with which one examines the facts is a crucial distinction. Since Martin reads Korean history only as relevant for US history he cannot entertain the idea that Koreans did not want their country divided and occupied. Unlike Germany, Korea was not a party to the war. It was a conquered colony of Japan. Dean Rusk, who claimed to have chosen the 38th parallel as the dividing line, long before he became a cabinet secretary, explained how arbitrary the choice was. In other words, division of the peninsula was decided based on factors that had little or nothing to do with the interests or needs of Koreans, a people with a settled nationality in the peninsula spanning more than a millennium. That such a decision could be taken by people from a country with barely 150 years of history is insulting on its face. It would have been decent if Martin could have overcome his anti-communism sufficiently to examine the copious evidence Cumings produced to show what the real US role in Korea was and how it has done everything possible to maintain the ROK as a launch pad against China, as it remains today.
In an environment of such enhanced belligerence, guided by military doctrines of perpetual war, an organizer of Veterans for Peace (as stated in Dr Martin’s biography) might contribute by dispelling some of the illusions that still nurture manifest destiny in the hearts and minds of those who rule the US.
Despite much grandstanding in the Biden administration about halting specific arms shipments to Israel over feigned concerns about how they might be used (inflicting death is the expected form), US military supplies have been restored with barely a murmur. In a report in Haaretz on August 29, a rush of weapons to Israel has been noticed since the end of July.
August proved to be the second busiest month for US arms deliveries to Israel’s Nevatim Airbase since the October 2023 attacks by Hamas. This has taken place alongside an increased concentration of US forces in the region since Israel’s assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh at the end of last month. Two aircraft carriers, a guided missile submarine, and deployments of advanced F-22 stealth aircraft in Qatar, have featured in a show intended to deter Tehran from any retaliatory strikes.
After examining open-source aviation data from the end of July, Haaretz concluded that the issue of delayed shipments of US weapons had “been solved.” Dozens of flights by US military transport planes, along with civilian and military Israeli cargo planes, mostly from Qatar and the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, had been noted. Demands by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his July 24 speech to Congress that US military aid be “dramatically” expedited to “end the war in Gaza and help prevent a broader war in the Middle East”, had been heeded.
On August 26, Israel received its 500th aerial shipment of weapons and military supplies from the United States since the latest war’s commencement. The 500 flights have also been supplemented by 107 sea shipments, altogether facilitating the transfer of 50,000 tons of military equipment in an initiative between the US military, Israel’s Defence Ministry’s Directorate of Production and Procurement and Mission to the United States, the IDF’s planning Directorate and the Israeli Air Force.
During the same month, the Democratic National Convention, which saw no debate about the candidature of Kamala Harris as its choice for presidential candidate, had tepidly promised some agitation on continued arms to Israel. Ahead of the event, the Uncommitted movement’s 30 delegates, picked by voters alarmed by US support for Israel’s war machine in Gaza, were hoping to convince the 4,000 pledged delegates Harris had captured to add an arms embargo to its campaign in order to induce a ceasefire.
A petition by the group sought two outcomes: the adding of language to both the party and campaign platform “that unequivocally supports a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and a cessation of supplying weapons for Israel’s assault and occupation against Palestinians.”
These wishes proved much too salty for the apparatchiks and party managers. The Democratic Party’s 2024 national platform ironically enough begins with an effusive “land acknowledgment” to “the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations” but plays it safe regarding an ally very much the product of territorial seizure, violence and occupation. Despite mutterings in the party room about a split between moderate and progressive members on Israel’s conduct of the war, the topic of a ceasefire never made it to the committee hearings when the document was drafted.
In firmly insisting on continued US support for Israel in its war against Hamas, much is made in the platform about US efforts to forge a way that will see a release of the hostages, “a durable ceasefire”, the easing of “humanitarian suffering in Gaza” and the “possible normalization between Israel and key Arab states, together with meaningful progress and a political horizon for the Palestinian people.” The language is instructive: the Palestinians are objects of pitiful charity, at the mercy of Israel, the US, and various Arab states. Like toddlers, they are to be managed, steered, guided, their political choices forever mediated through the wishes of other powers.
With Israel remaining Washington’s paramount ally in the Middle East, that process of steering and managing the unruly Palestinians has been, thus far, lethal. During her first interview given after the convention (she has an aversion to them), Harris scotched any suggestions on going wobbly on Israel. “I’m unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defence and its ability to defend itself, and that’s not going to change,” she told CNN’s Dana Bush. In what has become a standard refrain, Harris lamented that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” while acknowledging Israel’s right to self-defence.
When asked whether she would alter President Biden’s policy on furnishing military assistance to Israel, “No” came the reply. “We have to get a deal done. The war must end, and we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out. I’ve met with the families of the American hostages. Let’s get the hostages out. Let’s get the ceasefire done.”
This middle-management lingo says much about Harris’s worldview; in wishing to “get the ceasefire done”, she is encouraging a range of factors that will make sure nothing of the sort will be achieved. The Netanyahu formula has worked its usual black magic. Hence, the lack of an arms embargo, and the continued, generous supply to the IDF from their largest military benefactor.
