Figueredo refused to comply with a June 23 police summons, reviewed by CPJ. On that same day she received three private number phone calls warning her that a police investigation had been opened against her and Correa for “dangerousness,” the journalists told CPJ. On June 16, a local police officer parked outside the journalists’ home told them that they weren’t allowed to leave in an incident witnessed by others in the neighborhood.

“The Cuban government must halt its harassment of journalists Yunia Figueredo and Frank Correa, and allow them to continue their work with the community media outlet, Amanecer Habanero,” said CPJ U.S., Canada and Caribbean Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “Reporters should not be threatened into silence with legal orders.” 

Cuba’s private media companies have come under increased scrutiny from a new communication law banning all unapproved, non-state media and prohibiting them from receiving international funding and foreign training.

Amanecer Habanero is a member of the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Press (ICLEP), a network of six community media outlets, which has strongly condemned the actions of Cuban authorities against Figueredo, who became director of the outlet earlier this year.

In a statement, ICLEP said Figueredo has been the victim of an escalating campaign of intimidation by Cuban law enforcement, including verbal threats by state security agents; permanent police surveillance without a court order; restriction of her freedom of movement; psychological intimidation against her family; and police summonses without legal basis in connection with her work denouncing government.

Cuba’s private media companies have come under increased threat from a new communication law banning all unapproved, non-state media and prohibiting them from receiving international funding and foreign training.

Cuban authorities did not immediately reply to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

In the early hours of Sunday, May 18, police officers raided Mejía’s home in the Peña por Bajo neighborhood of Tegucigalpa, beat him, stole personal belongings, and subjected him to “cruel and inhuman treatment,” according to multiple news reports and local press group C-Libre.

Mejía told the Facebook news page Perspectiva Informativa that he was held for about three hours and threatened with death. Mejía said officers also seized his phone and stole $80 in cash.

“Authorities must treat these serious allegations with the urgency and transparency they demand, and hold the officers responsible to account,” said CPJ Latin America Program Coordinator Cristina Zahar, in São Paulo. “There can be no tolerance for abuses committed under the guise of security operations, especially when they target members of the press.”

Mejía, who self-publishes Comando Maya newspaper, filed a formal complaint on May 20, with the Honduran Public Prosecutor’s Office in Tegucigalpa. He was accompanied by his legal representative and son, Stuart Mejía. 

According to Perspectiva Informativa, Stuart said his father, who has no criminal record, was tortured and humiliated in a “gross violation of human rights,” and their family fears for their safety. The journalist underwent a forensic medical examination, and its findings were submitted to prosecutors along with the formal complaint.

Honduran Security Minister Gustavo Sánchez said on X that he directed the Inspector General’s Office to begin inquiries.

The national police director, Juan Manuel Aguilar, told the newspaper El Heraldo that the police denied any misconduct. The agency said the operation was based on a 911 emergency alert reporting a possible kidnapping at Mejía’s residence.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“The Senate just escalated threats to Social Security by confirming Frank Bisignano, another billionaire CEO, to lead the agency. He has spent his career catering to Wall Street elites. Bisignano could have stood up for working families and retirees by opposing efforts to roll back Social Security services, shutdown offices and lay off thousands of workers. Instead, he promises to provide more of the same failed, destructive leadership we have seen so far at Social Security. He describes himself as ‘fundamentally a DOGE person’ – even as Musk’s DOGE has jeopardized Americans’ private data.

“Their playbook is clearly to break Social Security so they can justify further cuts and privatization. AFSCME members won’t be fooled. We are keeping up the fight to protect our freedom to retire with dignity, and we will remember how our leaders voted and whether they stood with us in our battle to stop this hostile takeover of Social Security.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

We live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

This propaganda comes in two forms: covert and overt. The latter, and most effective form, comes with a large dose of truth offered rapid-fire by celebrated, authoritative voices via prominent media. The truth is sprinkled with subtle messages that render it sterile. This has long been the case, but it is even more so in the age of images on screens and digital media where words and images flow away like water in a rapidly moving stream. The late sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, updating Marx’s famous quote “all that is solid melts into thin air,” called this “liquid modernity.”

Welcome to Operation Pandemonium

See, these experts purport to say: What we tell you is true, but it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions. You must drink the waters of uncertainty forever lest you become a conspiracy nut. But if you don’t want to be so labelled, accept the simplest explanation for matters that disturb you – Occam’s razor, that the truest answer is the simplest – which is always the official explanation.  If this sounds contradictory, that is because it is. It is meant to be. We induce schizophrenia.

And it is, these experts suggest, because we live in a world where all knowledge is relative, and you, the individual, like Kafka’s country bumpkin, who in his parable “Before the Law,” tries to get past the doorkeeper to enter the inner sanctum of the Law but is never allowed to pass; you, the individual, must accept the futility of your efforts and accede to this dictum that declares that all knowledge is relative, which is ironically an absolute dictum. It is the Law. The Law of contradictions declared from on high.

Many writers, journalists, and filmmakers, while allegedly revealing truths about the U.S. and its allies’ criminal operations at home and abroad, have for decades slyly conveyed the message that in the end “we will never know the truth,” the real facts – that convincing evidence is lacking.

This refusal to come to conclusions is a sly tactic that keeps many careers safe while besmirching, intentionally or not, the names of serious researchers who reach conclusions based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence (the basis for most murder convictions) and detailed, sourced facts, often using the words of the guilty parties themselves, but are dismissed with the CIA weaponized term “conspiracy theorists.”

This often escapes the average person who does not read footnotes and sources, if they even read books. They read screens and the mainstream media, which should now be understood to include much of the “alternative” media. And they watch all sorts of films.

But this “we will never know” meme, this false mystery, is shrewdly and often implicitly joined to another: That we do know because the official explanation of events is true and only nut cases would believe otherwise. Propaganda by paradox. Operation chaos.

The JFK Assassination and the Release of Files

There are so many examples of this, with that of President Kennedy’s assassination being a foundational one. In this case, as with the current phony Trump release of more JFK assassination files, the ongoing “mystery” is always reinforced with the implicit or explicit presupposition that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, but yet implying that there are more mysteries to explore forever because “people” are paranoid. (Trump’s position, as he recently told interviewer Clay Travis, is that he has always believed Oswald assassinated Kennedy, but he wonders if he may have had help.) They are paranoid not because of government and media lies, but because “popular culture” (not highbrow) has created paranoia. To spice this up, there is often the suggestion that President Kennedy was assassinated on the orders of the Mob, LBJ, Cuba, or Israel, when the facts overwhelmingly confirm it was organized and carried out by the CIA. A. O. Scott’s recent front page article in The New York Times in response to the JFK files release – “J. F. K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?” (the title appropriately taken from a very fast-paced Billy Joel song and video) – is a perfect example of such legerdemain.

Thus the ruse to keep debating the assassination, get the latest documents, etc. to satisfy “people’s” insatiable paranoia. To pull out CIA fallback stories 2, 3, or even 4 when all else fails. Dr. Martin Schotz, the JFK researcher, rightly compares this to George Orwell’s definition of Crimestop:

‘Crimestop’ means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, or misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the powers that be]… and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. ‘Crimestop’, in short, means protective stupidity.

It’s the crazy people’s fault, not Scott’s or those who back him up at The Times, a newspaper that has been lying about the JFK assassination from day one. The same goes for the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, et al., and so many key events in U.S. history. It is a game of creating mental chaos by claiming we do know because the official explanation is correct but we don’t know because people have been infected with paranoia. If only people were not so paranoid! Unlike us at The Times, goes the implicit message.

The Epistemological Games of Certain Filmmakers

It is well known that people today are watching far more streaming film series and movies than they are reading books. That someone would lucubrate with pen in hand over a footnoted book on an important issue is now as rare as someone without a cell phone. The optical-electronic eye-ear screen connection rules most lives, mental and sensory. Marshall McLuhan, if a bit premature while referring in 1962 to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest – wrote sixty-three years ago in The Gutenberg Galaxy:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. [my emphasis] So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

Four years ago this month, I wrote an article – “You Know We’ll Never Know, Don’t You?” – about a new BBC documentary film series by the acclaimed British filmmaker, Adam Curtis, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World.”

The series is a pastiche film filled with seven plus hours of fleeting, fragmented, and fascinating archived video images from the BBC archives where Curtis has worked for decades, accompanied by Curtis’s skeptical commentary about “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere.” These historical images jump from one seemingly disconnected subject to another to reinforce his point. He says it is “pointless to try to understand the meaning of why things happen.” He claims that we are all living as if we are “on an acid trip.”

While not on an acid trip which I have never taken, I was reminded of this recently as I watched a new documentary – Chaos: The Manson Murders (2025) – by the equally famous U.S. documentary filmmaker, Erroll Morris, a film about the CIA’s mind control operation, MKULTRA, and its use of LSD. As everyone knows, the CIA is that way-out hippie organization from Virginia that is always intent on spreading peace, love, and good vibes.

While the content of their films differs, Curtis’s wide-ranging and Morris’s focused on Manson and the book by Tom O’Neil, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, I was struck by both filmmakers tendency to obfuscate while titillating their audience with footage and information that belies their conclusions about not knowing. In this regard, Curtis is the most overt and extreme.

Morris does not use Curtis’s language, but he makes it explicit at Chaos’s end that he doesn’t believe Tom O’Neil’s argument in his well-researched book that Charles Manson was part of a CIA mind-control experiment led by the psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Jolyon “Jolly” West. West worked in 1967 for the CIA on MKULTRA brainwashing projects in a Haight Ashbury clinic during the summer of love, using LSD and hypnosis, when Manson lived there and was often in the clinic with his followers.

On April 26, 1964, West also just “happened” to visit the imprisoned Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police Department, and when West emerged from the meeting, he immediately declared that in the preceding 48 hours Ruby had become “positively insane” with no chance that this “unshakeable” and “fixed” lunacy could be reversed. What happened between the two men we do not know – for there were no witnesses – but one might assume West used his hypnotic skills and armamentarium of drugs that were integral to MKULTRA’s methods.

MKULTRA

MKULTRA was a sinister and secret CIA mind-control project, officially started in 1953 but preceded by Operation Bluebird, which was renamed Operation Artichoke. These operations started right after WW II when U.S. intelligence worked with Nazi doctors to torture Russians and others to reveal secrets. They were brutal. MKULTRA was run by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and was even worse. He was known as the “Black Sorcerer.” With the formula for LSD, the CIA had an unlimited amount of the drug to use widely, which it did. It figured prominently in MKULTRA mind control experiments along with hypnosis. Tom O’Neil sums it up thus:

The agency hoped to produce couriers who could imbed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins. . . . MKULTRA scientists flouted this code [the Nuremberg Code that emerged from the Nuremberg trials of Nazis] constantly, remorselessly – and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to ‘induced pain’ and ‘psychosis.’ They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t do the trick, they’d try master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields. [my emphasis]

In 1973 during the Watergate scandal, CIA Director William Helms ordered all MKULTRA documents destroyed. Most were, but some were forgotten, and in the next few years, Seymour Hersh reported about it and the Senate Church Committee went further. They discovered records that implicated forty-four universities and colleges in the experiments, eighty institutions, and 185 researchers, Louis West among them. The evil cat and its large litter were out of the bag.

MKULTRA allegedly ended in 1973. But only the most naïve would think it did not continue under a different form. In 1964, McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message.” The new medium that was developed in the decades since has been effectively pointed straight at the brain as you watch the screens. And the message?

Tom O’Neil’s Powerful Case

While admitting that he has not conclusively proven his thesis because he has never been able to confirm Manson and West being together, O’Neil amasses a tremendous amount of convincing circumstantial evidence in his book that makes his case very strong that they were, and that Manson’s ability to get his followers to kill for him was the result of MKULTRA mind control and the use of LSD, which he used extensively and which was introduced by the CIA and used by West. Both men had an inexhaustible amount of the mind-altering drug to use on their victims.

This is the subject of Morris’s film, wherein he interviews O’Neil on camera, who explains the extraordinary fact that Manson was able to mesmerize his followers to kill for him without remorse or shame. They “couldn’t get him out of their heads,” even many years later. This was, of course, the goal of MKULTRA – through the use of brainwashing and drugs – to create “Manchurian Candidates.” This case has much wider ramifications than the sensational 1969 Hollywood murders for which Manson and his followers were convicted; for clearly Mansion’s “family” that carried out the murders on his orders appeared in every way to be under hypnotic control. How did a two-bit, ex-con, pipsqueak, minor hanger-on musician learn to accomplish exactly what MKULTRA spent so many years working on?

Yet at the end of his film, Morris makes a concluding comment without even a nod to the possibility that O’Neil is correct. He says he doesn’t believe O’Neil. I found it very odd, jarring, as though O’Neil had been set up for this denouement, which I think he had. But at the same time I recognized it as Morris’s method of setting up and then undermining the narrative protagonists in his films that are ostensibly about getting to factual truths but never do; they are stories about how all we ever have are endless interpretations and the unknowable, confounded by human fallibility. Everything is lost in the fog of Morris’s method, which is no accident.

Frank Olson

I then found an interview that O’Neil did in 2021 in which he said he pulled out of Morris’s film proposal because Morris wanted to make a film that combined the Frank Olson story (a CIA biologist) with his about Manson. In the interview, O’Neil said he knew Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, who has spent a lifetime proving that the CIA murdered his father in 1953, but he didn’t explain why he pulled out of the project. However, he appears extensively throughout Chaos, being interviewed on camera by Morris, only to be undermined at the end. Why he eventually agreed to be part of the project I do not know.

I am certain he has seen Wormwood (2017), Morris’s acclaimed (they are all acclaimed) Netflix film series about the biologist/ CIA agent Frank Olson and his son, Eric Olson’s heroic lifelong quest to prove that the CIA murdered his father because he had a crisis of conscience about the agency’s use of torture, brainwashing, LSD, and U.S. biological weapons use in Korea, much of it in association with Nazis. The evidence is overwhelming that Frank Olson did not jump from a NYC hotel window in 1953 but was drugged with LSD to induce hallucinations and paranoia, smashed in the head, and thrown out by the CIA. [Read this and view this] Despite such powerful evidence available to him before making Wormwood, in another example of Morris’s method, he disagrees with Eric Olson’s decades of conclusive research that his father was murdered.

Conclusion

Filmmakers like Adam Curtis and Erroll Morris are examples of a much larger and dangerous phenomenon. Their emphases on the impossibility of knowing – this seeming void in the human mind, an endless acid trip down a road of kaleidoscopic interpretations – is much larger than them. It is deeply imbedded in today’s society. One of the few areas in which we are said to be able to know anything for certain is in the area of partisan politics. Here knowingness is the rule and the other side is always wrong. Fight, fight, fight for the home team! Here the nostalgia for “knowledge” is encouraged, as if we don’t live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

With the arrival of the electronic digital life, “knowledge” is now screening. If you don’t want to confirm McLuhan’s prediction – “as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside” – it behooves everyone to step back into the lamplight to read and study books. And take a walk in nature without your machine. You might hear a little bird call to you.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

“Retirees who tuned into Frank Bisignano’s confirmation hearing hoping to hear that he planned on halting the chaos and destruction of the Social Security Administration caused by Elon Musk’s DOGE team were left disappointed.

“Mr. Bisignano refused to contradict Musk’s claim that Social Security is a criminal Ponzi scheme or acknowledge that a person whose benefit claim takes 3 months longer to complete simply because of new DOGE-imposed changes had experienced a cut in the benefits they earned.

“Mr. Bisignano knows a lot about processing payments and came across as a big fan of artificial intelligence in call centers. Unfortunately, he said nothing to assure older Americans that he gets the unique challenges technology presents to Social Security beneficiaries, who are older and have less access to or familiarity with technology.

“We urge members of the Senate to reject his confirmation.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“Today’s hearing showed that Frank Bisignano is not the cure to the DOGE-manufactured chaos at the Social Security Administration. In fact, he is part of it, and, if confirmed, would make it even worse.

Bisignano describes himself as ‘a DOGE person’. That’s something he has in common with the current acting commissioner, Lee Dudek, who has slashed staff and services at the direction of Elon Musk’s DOGE. Though Bisignano wouldn’t admit it, he has been intimately involved in creating the current chaos surrounding the Social Security Administration. Fortunately, a high-level civil servant has blown the whistle and set the record straight.

Bisignano’s record at the private sector companies he has run is right in line with DOGE. He cut staffing to the bone and reportedly created toxic work environments. If he is confirmed, the now toxic work environment at SSA will likely get worse.

Social Security needs a commissioner whose loyalty is to beneficiaries, not Elon Musk. Bisignano would not even contradict Musk’s slander that Social Security is a criminal Ponzi scheme. Every Senator who cares about Social Security’s future should vote no on the confirmation of Frank Bisignano. He is not only unqualified, with no expertise regarding this vital program — he is dangerous to it.”

Clips from the hearing can be viewed here.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

I grew up in New Jersey as an only child, with parents who were already 40 and 43 when I was born. Their age had a huge impact on my sensibilities, especially when it came to pop culture and entertainment. They introduced me to a world of mid-20th century showbiz that I probably wouldn’t have encountered if they’d been younger. Because of that, I developed this deep knowledge and appreciation for earlier pop culture—it shaped me in so many ways.

Even though we were only 18 miles from New York City, my little New Jersey town felt worlds apart. As I wrote in my memoir A Boy Named Phyllis, it was 18 miles and a world away. It was so small-town and provincial, and I craved glamour and excitement from an early age. Television was my escape.

How so?

I remember this one pivotal moment: I was maybe 12 or 13 years old, and I saw Cher on TV. She was dazzling, and I just thought, “Oh my God, I want to go where she is.”

There was a special Cher did in 1976—I was about 13. It was Cher, Elton John, and Bette Midler, all dressed in these stunning white outfits covered in disco mirror balls, surrounded by silver balloons. I looked at that scene and thought, “That’s where I want to live.” And, in many ways, I feel like I got to go live there. My life now, as much as I dreamed it would be, is full of silver balloons and mirror-ball moments. Entertainment and pop culture shaped me—they gave me an escape and inspired me to build a life that was exciting, vibrant, and glamorous.

Growing up in New Jersey, where home entertainment was such a central part of life, it sparked my interests in fashion, disco, and movies. I always describe myself as this glamour-starved kid in the suburbs, hungry for an urban, electrifying life. And that’s what I set out to build.

So was that special an awakening of some sorts for you?

When I think back to Cher, Elton, and Bette Midler on that TV special, they represented not just an awakening, but a kind of lifestyle epiphany. It wasn’t so much about sexual orientation as it was about the realization that I wanted a bold, colorful, glittering life. They shaped my idea of what kind of gay man I wanted to be—because I’ve always believed it’s better to be colorful than not.

And I’ve been lucky. I’ve actually gotten to meet all three of them—Cher, Elton, and Bette. It’s like life came full circle. Those icons who inspired me as a kid helped me dream of a life I’m now living. And honestly, when I interviewed all three of them, I was like, you know, I never need to go out again. I’ve met everyone I ever wanted to meet and I did live by that, but I really could feel that way for a moment. I was like, what’s going to be better than this?

Your books, especially your latest Disco: Music, Movies, and Mania under the Mirror Ball is certainly a full circle moment for the lifestyle epiphany you talked about. What has your process been like?

I had written a book that came out in 2019 on the history of drag in show business, and one of the things people praised the book for was that it shed light on and gave respect to an art form that people didn’t give enough respect to, didn’t appreciate. And I thought, well, that is kind of my mission as a writer: to excite people about something I’m excited about and to show respect to something that didn’t get what it deserved. I started thinking, what can I say, or what topics do I have something to say about? And I realized that disco was one of only a couple of them that I was really itching to do. So I started researching disco in its many forms and went down every online rabbit hole you could go down—watched clips, listened to music, and watched movies. I just immersed myself for about three or four years in all things disco.

I took the same approach that I took with drag—it’s sort of the kitchen sink approach, in that it’s a little bit of everything, or a lot of everything. I was trying to get as much stuff mentioned and explored as I could in the book. And I think the thing that makes this disco book different from the earlier ones is that I don’t push away the stuff that was silly or bad or kitschy. I embrace all of it.

You show a genuine interest in what we call “bad” movies, which shines through in your work, not just in the Disco book.

I love a bad movie way more than I love a good one. The more I researched disco movies—if we can even call it a “canon”—the more I realized people would say, “Oh my God, you have to see this one disco scene!” The one that always makes me laugh is from a Blaxploitation movie called Abby. It’s basically The Exorcist, but the exorcism takes place on a dance floor. The disco ball explodes, igniting the bar and setting everything on fire. It’s just incredible—pure chaos. That one kills me every time.

Then there’s this horror movie called Jennifer. It’s like a bargain-bin version of Carrie, except her powers involve snakes. She has power over snakes. It’s absurd. There’s a fantastic disco scene in it, filmed at the same club featured in Thank God It’s Friday. The club, Osko’s, used to be in Los Angeles, and the whole thing is just the worst—but in the best way. And Skatetown, U.S.A.—what a terrible movie! But it’s so much fun. It’s pure, delicious cheese. So cinematic, so over-the-top macho—it’s ridiculous and wonderful at the same time.

I fully agree with you, as I have done many genre-specific marathons over the years (most recently, TUBI originals) I think there’s a savant-like quality in those movies that most critics deem “bad.” That’s what makes them cult movies.

That’s a great way to put it. It’s fascinating to me that people would commit to telling a story about a possessed woman spending time in a disco, or about the goings-on at a roller-skating rink. There’s something irresistible about the earnestness brought to such a cheesy topic. I think the key is that nobody sets out to make something bad on purpose. If it’s deliberately bad, it’s not really fun. But if someone tries to create something that’s more fun than it is good, it becomes very appealing—and even heartwarming, in a way. Not every meal has to be a 10-course tasting menu from a Michelin-star chef. Sometimes, it’s a quarter-pounder with cheese—and that can be pretty delicious in its own way, even if it’s not good for you. I feel the same way about art. It can’t all be the most important, groundbreaking thing. Sometimes, it’s about a splendid misfire.

There are things like The Apple that really make you sit there and think, “What the hell am I looking at?” It’s one of those moments where you just can’t look away. It’s so absurd, with its models and out-of-this-world concepts, that you can’t help but be hooked. It’s the worst thing ever—and yet, you’re living for it. That kind of reaction is hard to come by these days, but when something makes your jaw drop in 2024, in a good way, that’s art. It’s rare for something to still surprise you like that, to make your eyes pop out of your head in disbelief. And that’s a good thing, because so much of what we see now feels overexposed and jaded. When something can still tickle you in that way, it’s a real treasure.

Occasionally, someone will try to make something serious, but it’ll turn out all wrong—and in that wrongness, it becomes so deliciously right. That’s the charm of some of these works. But you can’t force that kind of magic. You can try to learn it or recreate it, but if it doesn’t come naturally, you’re not going to capture it. it’s just, if you’re not a cheese, if you’re lactose intolerant, artistically speaking, stay away from the cheese. But if you get it, it’s really great.

Based on how you love to dig deep for treasures (of taste more or less questionable according to standard parameters), how do you know when a project is done?

I think when they start yelling at you, you have to stop, basically. It’s hard to decide when you’ve got it, but I think a manuscript sort of reaches critical mass. You start to think, okay, you know, I’ve got a lot here, and I’ve got enough here. And you just get this sort of instinct thing that you’re there. But honestly, you could keep adding to it until someone yells at you and says, “I need it tomorrow,” you know, and then you’ve got to turn it in.

So it’s somewhere between that awakening feeling of, “yeah, this is kind of it,” and someone screaming at you. I think you do have to stop at a certain point because sometimes, you know, if you turn in something that ends up looking like The Unabomber’s Manifesto, you’ve gone too far. I think I do have a sort of authoritative but fun quality to the writing, so it sounds like I really do know what I’m talking about. And this is, you know, I think it’s also enough material to make people feel smart about disco at a cocktail party—not necessarily where they feel like they have to become an expert on it.

Somebody said to me when I was writing the drag book—and I was getting nervous—they said to me, “Just write about the stuff you find interesting, and if you don’t find it interesting, don’t write about it.” And so I really took that to heart, because you sort of have to be your own barometer of what’s germane to the topic and what isn’t.

So, yeah, and I think that’s what I tried to do, because you don’t want to come off like a crazy person. No, you want to come across as an enthusiast and an expert, but not that crazy person who’s been watching disco movies for the last 30 years in their basement. You don’t want to be that guy either, you know. So, sort of find the happy medium.

As someone who gets overly enthusiastic when researching and has had editors rein me in, I need to know this: how does one avoid sounding like a rabid fan?

I think it goes back to basic rules of writing because when you’re writing a news story, you really do have to say, well, what is the most important information, and in which order should I present it? I think it goes back to news writing. Even though you’re writing these flamboyant features on the Ethel Merman disco album, you still have to approach it like it’s a news story–not exactly like “Two men robbed a bank at noon at the corner of Main and Broadway,” but almost as if you’re doing that.

You have to use your journalism skills. That’s why I think—it sounds like sour grapes—but some of us went to school to be journalists. It’s not just, “Oh, I can write, I’m a journalist.” I guess some of them turn out to be terrific, but generally speaking, it does pay to be a trained journalist who really knows what they’re doing and can write a murder-suicide story or the Ethel Merman disco album story. You have to be able to write all of it to be good at what you’re doing.

Speaking of sour grapes, how do you cope with failure?

I take it extremely personally, even if I had absolutely nothing to do with the failure. I lick my wounds for about seven years, and then I start again. I do know I am not good with failure. I’ve been lucky because there hasn’t been a lot of failure on my part, but I’ve certainly been a part of shows that didn’t get picked up past the initial 40 episodes or a newspaper that went under. On a Friday afternoon, they were like, “Clean out your desk. We’re done.” I’ve been a part of all that.

They canceled not only my radio show but the entire channel on the same day. They got rid of the whole thing. It was like, “Oh good, we’re not just gonna fire you. We’re firing everyone.” I’ve been through that a number of times, and it never gets easy. I don’t like it, and I spend way too much time feeling hurt. I don’t recommend that for anyone. Just pick yourself up and move on to the next thing, because it’s not your fault. However, that’s easier said than done for me. I always come up with something else to do, and you have to. You have to reinvent yourself, or you’ll find yourself with absolutely nothing to do.

Cher famously did it many times in her life: think of all the different genres she embraced, from the duets with Sonny to the leather-clad persona of the “If I Could Turn Back Time” era all the way to the “Believe” Eurodance and Autotune celebration–and the many less-than-stellar periods in between!

Cher is a huge inspiration, but I don’t think she ever bothered as much as I do, I think she’s smart enough to retain her confidence. I mean she was also called an inspiration regarding getting older, and she said “getting older sucks.”

While in the midst of a very disappointing year, professionally, I have to say It’s good to hear someone admitting to how bad it feels, rather than trying to find some profound meaning behind setbacks.

It’s weird, a mentor said to me “what have you ever failed in your life? NOTHING, You never really failed spectacularly in anything, you’ve always risen to the occasion.”

That said, it does not always work out. You can work as hard as you can, and sometimes it does not work, and it’s not your fault; it’s some network’s fault, it’s some publisher’s fault, or some CEO’s fault for closing a newspaper. I heard all these stories. You can feel good about what you bring to it and you should always do that, but sometimes it does not work. The quality of something does not always translate into its success. There are too many brilliant Broadway musicals that never found an audience. It’s not about hiding a light under a bushel, but some stuff is never going to find an audience even though it’s going to be brilliant to a lot of people whose lives are going to be changed. Quality does not ensure success.

So for writers and creatives like you and even myself, someone who treasures reporting on and researching the weird and wonderful but faces grimmer and grimmer budgets, what is one to create and make anyway?

I do admire when someone creates something that is jaw dropping for any reason, whether it’s good or bad: it could be a B Movie or it could be the statue of David, where you’re just your breath is taken away. You know, it could be the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen or the dumbest thing you’ve ever seen but it makes such a strong impression that I do tell people to give it a watch, a listen, and know it’s not a hoax. The important thing for me is just trying to remain valid. That’s really the thing. As you get older and the longer you’ve been doing this, it’s more like, “Well, what else do I have to say, and what can I bring my heart and soul to?” I think you have to ask yourself that question when you’re doing a project that’s going to take as much time as a book does.

I was just in the running to write the eight-millionth book on Taylor Swift, and I was so glad when they went with somebody else. I thought, “Oh, thank God.” I would have done it for the money, but there’s nothing left to say. As much as I love her, there’s nothing I could bring to it that somebody else couldn’t bring even more to. But about disco? No, there aren’t that many people who could say what I can about it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Angelica Frey.

“Every American who has paid into Social Security and expects their guaranteed benefits should have concerns about Donald Trump’s plan to nominate Frank Bisignano to be Commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA).

“Nothing in Mr. Bisignano’s career suggests that he understands the unique needs of older and disabled Americans. His record in the private sector doesn’t instill confidence that he will protect beneficiaries from plans to dismantle and replace the SSA workforce with AI chatbots. We are also concerned that his decades on Wall Street will leave SSA with a cheerleader for risky schemes like allowing investment firms and crypto corporations to gamble with the trust funds and benefits that Americans paid for and earned through a lifetime of work.

“A Social Security commissioner’s first responsibility is to ensure that beneficiaries accurately receive the benefits they have earned. The commissioner is also responsible for ensuring policymakers and the American public understand the impact and consequences of any changes to the system.

“This is a critical time for the SSA and the tens of millions of Americans who rely on guaranteed monthly benefits they have earned. This fall a conservative think tank found that the combined effects of Donald Trump’s second term plans will result in the trust fund being unable to pay full benefits 3 years earlier than it would otherwise. Trump’s key advisers are talking about slashing the federal workforce, including the already severely understaffed SSA. Every day frontline SSA workers successfully deliver critical services to the American people at a low cost.

“Social Security is more than a government program. It is a sacred trust between the government and the American people. We need a commissioner who will always put the interests of beneficiaries first.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“The Kremlin’s tit-for-tat expulsion of German journalists Frank Aischmann and Sven Feller is yet another act to further restrict independent reporting in the country,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Journalists should not be used as political pawns, and Russia should allow Aischmann, Feller, and all other foreign journalists to work in Russia without fear of reprisal.” 

Earlier on Wednesday, Pervyi Kanal announced that German authorities were closing its German bureau, and requiring its correspondent Ivan Blagoy and camera operator Dmitry Volkov to leave the country by mid-December.

Berlin’s migration authorities confirmed the journalists’ residence permits were denied in connection with European Union sanctions imposed on Pervyi Kanal in December 2022. German Foreign Ministry spokesperson Christian Wagner denied that German federal authorities were behind the decision.

German public broadcaster ARD, which employs the two German journalists, said in a statement that their expulsion “marks a new low point in relations with Russia.” Jörg Schönenborn, an ARD representative, called the move “a drastic step” and said, “It will once again limit our ability to report from Moscow.”

CPJ’s email to the Russian Foreign Ministry requesting comment did not receive a response.

Russia has a history of expelling foreign reporters. In June, Russian authorities revoked the accreditation of Maria Knips-Witting, a journalist with the Moscow bureau of public broadcaster Austrian Radio and Television (ORF), as a response to Austrian authorities’ expulsion of Ivan Popov, a Vienna-based correspondent of the Russian state news agency TASS.

Since the start of Ukraine’s full-scale invasion, Russian authorities have failed to renew the visas and accreditations of Spanish journalist Xavier Colás, Finnish journalists Arja Paananen and Anna-Lena Laurén, and Dutch journalist Eva Hartog.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Ōriwa Tahupōtiki Haddon (Ngāti Ruanui), Reconstruction of the Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, c. 1940.

For the past few weeks I have been on the road in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia at the invitation of groups such as Te Kuaka, Red Ant, and the Communist Party of Australia. Both countries were shaped by British colonialism, marked by the violent displacement of native communities and theft of their lands. Today, as they become part of the US-led militarisation of the Pacific, their native populations have fought to defend their lands and way of life.

On 6 February 1840, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) was signed by representatives of the British Crown and the Māori groups of Aotearoa. The treaty (which has no point of comparison in Australia) claimed that it would ‘actively protect Māori in the use of their lands, fisheries, forests, and other treasured possessions’ and ‘ensure that both parties to [the treaty] would live together peacefully and develop New Zealand together in partnership’. While I was in Aotearoa, I learned that the new coalition government seeks to ‘reinterpret’ the Treaty of Waitangi in order to roll back protections for Māori families. This includes shrinking initiatives such as the Māori Health Authority (Te Aka Whai Ora) and programmes that promote the use of the Māori language (Te Reo Maori) in public institutions. The fight against these cutbacks has galvanised not only the Māori communities, but large sections of the population who do not want to live in a society that violates its treaties. When Aboriginal Australian Senator Lidia Thorpe disrupted the British monarch Charles’s visit to the country’s parliament last month, she echoed a sentiment that spreads across the Pacific, yelling, as she was dragged out by security: ‘You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back! Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. … We want a treaty in this country. … You are not my king. You are not our king’.

Walangkura Napanangka (Pintupi), Johnny Yungut’s Wife, Tjintjintjin, 2007.

With or without a treaty, both Aotearoa and Australia have seen a groundswell of sentiment for increased sovereignty across the islands of the Pacific, building on a centuries-long legacy. This wave of sovereignty has now begun to turn towards the shores of the massive US military build-up in the Pacific Ocean, which has its sights set on an illusionary threat from China. US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, speaking at a September 2024 Air & Space Forces Association convention on China and the Indo-Pacific, represented this position well when he said ‘China is not a future threat. China is a threat today’. The evidence for this, Kendall said, is that China is building up its operational capacities to prevent the United States from projecting its power into the western Pacific Ocean region. For Kendall, the problem is not that China was a threat to other countries in East Asia and the South Pacific, but that it is preventing the US from playing a leading role in the region and surrounding waters – including those just outside of China’s territorial limits, where the US has conducted joint ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises with its allies. ‘I am not saying war in the Pacific is imminent or inevitable’, Kendall continued. ‘It is not. But I am saying that the likelihood is increasing and will continue to do so’.

George Parata Kiwara (Ngāti Porou and Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki), Jacinda’s Plan, 2021.

In 1951, in the midst of the Chinese Revolution (1949) and the US war on Korea (1950–1953), senior US foreign policy advisor and later Secretary of State John Foster Dulles helped formulate several key treaties, such as the 1951 Australia, New Zealand, and United States Security (ANZUS) Treaty, which brought Australia and New Zealand firmly out of British influence and into the US’s war plans, and the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, which ended the formal US occupation of Japan. These deals – part of the US’s aggressive strategy in the region – came alongside the US occupation of several island nations in the Pacific where the US had already established military facilities, including ports and airfields: Hawaii (since 1898), Guam (since 1898), and Samoa (since 1900). Out of this reality, which swept from Japan to Aotearoa, Dulles developed the ‘island chain strategy’, a so-called containment strategy that would establish a military presence on three ‘island chains’ extending outward from China to act as an aggressive perimeter and prevent any power other than the US from commanding the Pacific Ocean.

Over time, these three island chains became hardened strongholds for the projection of US power, with about four hundred bases in the region established to maintain US military assets from Alaska to southern Australia. Despite signing various treaties to demilitarise the region (such as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Rarotonga in 1986), the US has moved lethal military assets, including nuclear weapons, through the region for threat projection against China, North Korea, Russia, and Vietnam (at different times and with different intensity). This ‘island chain strategy’ includes military installations in French colonial outposts such as Wallis and Futuna, New Caledonia, and French Polynesia. The US also has military arrangements with the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau.

Christine Napanangka Michaels (Nyirripi), Lappi Lappi Jukurrpa (Lappi Lappi Dreaming), 2019.

While some of these Pacific Island nations are used as bases for US and French power projection against China, others have been used as nuclear test sites. Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted sixty-seven nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. One of them, conducted in Bikini Atoll, detonated a thermonuclear weapon a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Darlene Keju Johnson, who was only three years old at the time of the Bikini Atoll detonation and was one of the first Marshallese women to speak publicly about the nuclear testing in the islands, encapsulated the sentiment of the islanders in one of her speeches: ‘We don’t want our islands to be used to kill people. The bottom line is we want to live in peace’.

Jef Cablog (Cordillera), Stern II, 2021.

Yet, despite the resistance of people like Keju Johnson (who went on to become a director in the Marshall Islands Ministry of Health), the US has been ramping up its military activity in the Pacific over the past fifteen years, such as by refusing to close bases, opening new ones, and expanding others to increase their military capacity. In Australia – without any real public debate – the government decided to supplement US funding to expand the runway on Tindal Air Base in Darwin so that it could house US B-52 and B-1 bombers with nuclear capacity. It also decided to expand submarine facilities from Garden Island to Rockingham and build a new high-tech radar facility for deep-space communications in Exmouth. These expansions came on the heels of the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) partnership in 2021, which has allowed the US and the UK to fully coordinate their strategies. The partnership also sidelined the French manufacturers that until then had supplied Australia with diesel-powered submarines and ensured that it would instead buy nuclear-powered submarines from the UK and US. Eventually, Australia will provide its own submarines for the missions the US and UK are conducting in the waters around China.

Over the past few years, the US has also sought to draw Canada, France, and Germany into the US Pacific project through the US Pacific Partnership Strategy for the Pacific Islands (2022) and the Partnership for the Blue Pacific (2022). In 2021, at the France-Oceania Summit, there was a commitment to reengage with the Pacific, with France bringing new military assets into New Caledonia and French Polynesia. The US and France have also opened a dialogue about coordinating their military activities against China in the Pacific.

Yvette Bouquet (Kanak), Profil art, 1996.

Yet these partnerships are only part of the US ambitions in the region. The US is also opening new bases in the northern islands of the Philippines – the first such expansion in the country since the early 1990s – while intensifying its arm sales with Taiwan, to whom it is providing lethal military technology (including missile defence and tank systems intended to deter a Chinese military assault). Meanwhile the US has improved its coordination with Japan’s military by deciding to establish joint force headquarters, which means that the command structure for US troops in Japan and South Korea will be autonomously controlled by the US command structure in these two Asian countries (not by orders from Washington).

However, the US-European war project is not going as smoothly as anticipated. Protest movements in the Solomon Islands (2021) and New Caledonia (2024), led by communities who are no longer willing to be subjected to neocolonialism, have come as a shock to the US and its allies. It will not be easy for them to build their island chain in the Pacific.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

International Relations (IR) theory fails to deliver on one of its key promises, specifically to produce positivist, value free analysis. What we encounter in the vast majority of international theory is the provincial or parochial normative purpose of defending and celebrating the ideal of the West in world politics. IR theory can no longer be represented as positivist, objective or value free.
~ John M. Hobson

Orientation

In 1981, Eric Jones wrote a very powerful book called The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. He was not alone in claiming there was something unique about Europe compared to the rest of the world. Though I doubt it was his intention, his work perhaps unintentionally supported a Eurocentric, paternalistic, racist orientation of a Wren theory which claimed to explain world politics. This is called International Relations Theory which claimed to be positivist, objective and value free. International relations theory is so deeply embedded in Western triumphalism that it has failed to notice that the West has been losing to China, Russia and Iran for the last 20 to 30 years. International  relations theory barely understands that this has happened and it has no theory to explain it. What we are witnessing today is a “Eurasian Miracle.”

In my article “Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival,” I identify five international relation theories: Neocon Realists; Neoliberal Globalists; Liberal Institutionalists; Constructivists and World-Systems Theorists. Most of my criticism in that article was leveled at the first three theories for their inability to account for the rise of China, Russia and Iran and the whole multipolar world. In this article, following the work of John A. Hobson in his book “The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics,” I point out a good reason for this is because of the Eurocentric nature of Neocon Realists, Neoliberal Globalists and Liberal Institutionalists theory. However, Hobson’s criticism of Eurocentrism does not stop there. He argues that even left-wing theories like constructionism and world-systems theory are guilty of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, not only because it takes different forms, but that some of these are even anti-imperialist. The conventional contrast of a Eurocentric or racist conception of imperialism from a constructivist and Marxist point of view is too simple and Eurocentrism is too deep.

What is Eurocentrism?
Hobson’s claim that there two steps in Eurocentric big-bang theory of world politics:

• Europeans single-handedly created a European capitalist international state system through their pioneering and exceptional institutional genius.
• They export their civilization to remake the world in their own image through globalization, imperialism or hegemony.
  To add to this, Eurocentrism claims the Eastern and Southern part of the world had no independent status. There was no East or South big bang. In the West the various movements of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution or socialism were purely Western. The East and South either helped out or they were left behind. With rare exceptions. Eastern and Southern parts of the world system never led Western development.

What is paternalism?
Historians of the modern West sought to explain social evolution. In doing so, they divided societies into three stages:

• savagery (hunter-gatherers);
• barbarism (horticultural and agricultural states) and
• civilization—industrial capitalist societies

Supposedly Europeans hoped that all societies would want to become civilized. But when societies of the East and South did not aspire to this, they were labelled either savages or barbarians. However, some historians and anthropologist thought it was their duty (white man’s burden) for the savages and barbarians to see the light. This led to paternalism.

An example of well-intentioned paternalist Eurocentrism: Rawls
John Rawls believed that his liberal vision has genuinely universalist criteria that do not offend cultural sensibilities of non-Western people. He was interested in culturally converting Eastern people rather than containing them as in Western liberal realism.

Yet there are five key Eurocentric dimensions of his theory:

• All well-ordered hierarchical societies must exhibit a separation of church and state (this will not work for Muslims).
• Imposition of free trade (free trade can only work with wealthy societies).
• Governed by a liberal law of peoples (teaching Eastern women to have less babies won’t work if they are being blocked by the IMF and the World bank from industrializing.
• Eastern states receive only conditional sovereignty because they are classified as despotic states and “failed” states are deemed uncivilized.
• Developed societies have a duty to assist burdened societies (paternalism).

Hobson’s claims

Hobson’s explicit claims are first that International Relations Theory contains six myths:

• the noble identity and foundational myth of the discipline;
• the positive myth of International Relations Theory;
• the great debates myth and reconceptualizing the clash of IR theories;
• the sovereignty or anarchy myth;
• the globalization myth; and
• the theoretical great traditions myth.

Hobson’s 2nd claim is there are six types of imperialism which are laid out over 250 years. His third claim is that Western racism was not always triumphant but was based on fear of what would become of Europe if Easterners and Southerners of the world  got the upper hand. Lastly, I close out with theories that are exceptions to the rule and are not Eurocentric or paternalistic and with a minimum of racism.

Hobson’s implicit claim is that without “the rest” there might be no West. The West was not an early, but a latedevelopment. This topic will be covered in my future article based on another of Hobson’s books, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

Six Eurocentric Myths of International Relations Theory
Hobson tells us the conscious or unconscious moral purpose of IR is to be a defender and promoter of Western Civilization. The key of disciplinary assumptions that are presently revered as self-evident truths really are largely Eurocentric myths. As stated above, these include the above myths.

The noble identity foundation myth: Whig and progress theory of history
International Relations Theory has embedded in a Whig an interpretation of its intellectual history. Whiggish means that the past is reorganized to make it seem that the present was the only possible passage that could have led to contemporary life. The Whig theory of history has the theory of progress embedded in it. The theory of progress claims that the later in time we go in social evolution the better societies get in material wealth, less labor, higher morality and happiness.

It is a now conventional assumption that the discipline of International Relations was born in 1919. Supposedly, it had a moral purpose to finding ways to solve the universal problem of war. This now conventional view was originally constructed by E.H. Carr in his classical text The Twenty Year’s Crisis (1946).

Contrary to this convention, IR theory did not appear all of a sudden after WW I out of the head of Zeus. It continued from its pre-1914 roots which were neither positive, objective nor value free. Rather they were paternalist, Eurocentric and intentionally or unintentionally racist. There are deep continuities that the 1919-1945 period of international theory has with the pre-1914 period of international theory. The Eurocentric racism and paternalism that underpinned it had been forged in the previous century. In addition, there is a continuum of imperialism that goes all the way back to the middle of the 18th century. Thirdly, there was an explosion of anti-colonial resistance. What were colonists resisting – those noble Western powers that colonialized them. In this larger scheme of things, the end of World War I was not the only game in town. As positivists, what Neocon realists and liberal globalists ignore is that the noble identity myth can also be a ideological justification for Eurocentrism, capitalism, racism and imperialism. The four stages are of Hobsons history if International relations include:

• 1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
• 1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
• 1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism
• 1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism

The positive myth of IR of theory of liberalism as emerging between the wars

This myth was that the between the wars IR theory was dominated by liberal globalists who searched for a new cooperative global order as a reaction to the Neocon realism of World War I. It was characterized as a harmonious and optimistic theory because it stands for peace. But as Hobson points out, interwar international theory was not monopolized by idealism or liberalism because it also exhibited a vibrant racism realist stream that emerged after 1889, especially in the world of geopolitical theorists, Ratzel, Mackinder, Mahan and others.

IR claims to be positivist with a value free epistemological base. This has been challenged by African-American Marxists Ralph Bunche, WEB Dubois and CLR James. They say that when viewed through a non-European lens, the vast majority of international theory produces a parochial or provincial analysis of the West that can masquerade as if it were universal. Further, the imperialist aspect of interwar idealist theory has not been widely noticed among modern IR scholars. Realist and so-called Liberal Idealists were united by the concern to restore the mandate of Western civilizational hegemony in one guise of another.

The great debate myth and reconceptualizing the idea of the clash of IR theories

These debates include the controversy between realism and idealism in the interwar period between history and scientism in the 1960s and between positivists and post-positivists in the 1990s. The first two appear as if these were great qualitative struggles, but like with Republicans and Democrats in Mordor, all parties have far more in common than they have in differences. The struggle between positivists and post-positivists are real but it are presented in too stark a manner. There were post-positivists as far back as the 1960s and those political scientists who were more statistical and quantitative also go back to the 50s and 60s. In other words that debate did not begin in the 1990s as IR theorists claim but thirty years earlier. In spite of these differences, there is consensus of virtually all parties concerning the politics of defending and celebrating Western civilization in world politics. These theories supported the Western powers. Their differences were small compared to the paternalism, racism and imperialism that they all shared.

Sovereignty vs anarchy myth
The sovereignty vs anarchy myth claims that in International Relations Theory all states are sovereign. But because there is no world-state the relations between nation-states are characterized as anarchistic. In the first place, IR theory limits which nation-states are considered sovereign to European countries. Eastern and Southern states are not considered sovereign because they lack the proper Western European credentials such as voting systems, more than one party, and capitalism. The school of Realism operates with universalist analytical principles that supposedly apply to all states regardless of how 2nd class some states are treated in practice. The problem for IR theorists is that the post the 1648 era there had been a proliferation of international imperial hierarchies, which were comprised of a series of single sovereign colonial powers, many of which were not nation-states. Its supposedly universal and ideologically unbiased principles of state-centrism sovereignty directly contradict its practice. For example, in 1878 the conference in Berlin divided Africa between European imperial powers. These sovereign states had colonies.

Furthermore if by anarchy they mean disorder, the relationship between sovereign states without a world state is by no means disorderly. There are shifting alliances between states rather than a Hobbesian war of all single states against each other. Secondly, to characterize this disorder as “anarchy” reveals either complete political bias or ignorance of anarchism as a respectable political tendency on the socialist left. Anarchism has involved thousands of people in many countries around the world since the late 1840s. It has had some success in the Paris Commune, the Russian and especially the Spanish revolutions. To characterize this as disorderly is an unforgivable omission from theorists who claim to be political scientists.

The globalization myth
The myth is that globalization has only recently (the last century) become an issue for international theorists. But to Hobson’s own surprise in his initial research, in many areas including some though not all realists, international theorists since 1760 have placed considerable emphasis on globalization. In his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization,Hobson points out that there were globalizing trade networks of, Africa, West Asia, India and China as far back as 500 CE.

The theoretical great traditions myth
IR theorists are no different than those who initiate artistic or spiritual movements in their search for origins. All political, artistic or spiritual movements seek to find their origins in the deep past rather than the recent past. In the IR traditional textbooks realism is claimed to go back to Thucydides in the ancient world and then forward to Hobbes and Machiavelli to culminate in Waltz, Gilpin and Mearsheimer via Carr and Morgenthau. But each of these theories are not air-tight. In fact IR theories mix with other theories within a given moment in time and each theory changes internally due to  changes in history.

Defining Imperialism and Anti-imperialism International Theory
Hobson claims that the vast literature on imperialism and anti-imperialism generally lacks conceptual precision. Here Hobson confront two broad definitional approaches:

• Narrow Eurocentric
• Expansive postcolonial

Most of modern Eurocentric international theory embraces a narrow definition and allows for considerable wiggle room when confronted with a charge of imperialism. It sees Eurocentrism and imperialism as distinct. You can be Eurocentric and not imperialist and conversely imperialist without being Eurocentric. At the other extreme, by contrast, post-colonial theorists seek to completely shut down this wiggle room by assuming that being Eurocentric is inherently imperialist and imperialism is always Eurocentric.

In table 1 I have a divided a spectrum of imperialism throughout history into 6 types. The three types on the left accept that they are imperialists and don’t apologize for it. The theories on the right deny they are imperialists. The theories on the left are formal empires, while the theories on the right are informal liberal empires. The people in the last cell are the theorists of various types of imperialism. The cell above it include the nature and justification of their mission. The names of the theorists are not important for now, but some of the more famous ones might be familiar to you. The importance of this table are not the theorists but rather the systems of justification, none of which are value free, universal and objective.

Table 1 The Definitional Continuum of Imperialism, Past and Present

Eurocentric Imperialism: Liberal and Marxism

In Table 2 below, one interesting but expected difference between liberalism and Marxism is that liberals see imperialism as benign. J. A. Hobson and John Stuart Mill see imperialism is benign at an international level, but Cobden, Bright and Angell see imperialism as benign at a national level. The fact that Marxists thinks imperialism as coerced rather than benign should not come as a surprise to anyone. Traditional International Relations Theory sees liberal internationalism and classical Marxism as the antithesis of imperialism. However, John Hobson’s main point is what Marxism and liberals have in common. They all agree that:

• The East can be characterized as “barbaric oriental despotism”
• The capitalist peripheral countries (Third world) are savage, anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
• Western agency is always pioneering, learning nothing from the rest of the world
• Eastern agency even at its best is conditional, always learning from the West

It is these four points that show how deep Eurocentrism of all Western theories, even Marxism. These are the type of deep assumptions, hundreds of years old the keep Western theorists of world politics that the BRICS world of the East is bypassing them.

Table 2 Paternalistic, Eurocentric. Institutional Imperial Concepts of World Politics

Here are some further examples of Eurocentrism. In the 19th century, even when IR theory was sensitive to interdependence, it wasn’t world interdependence. Rather it was interdependence among the civilized states of Europe. Outside of Europe there was no recognition of interdependence. Eastern societies only got recognition once they became colonies or only if these countries were at war with Europe. It is something like calling the ultimate baseball playoffs “the World Series” even when it only includes the United States.

At the same time, the Eurocentrists had no problem imagining war with the East if it was profitable. But when it came to the civilized states of Europe, war was seen as unprofitable. Also, as we shall see later, racist theories bemoaned Europeans fighting because this would result in the depletion of the white race. Colonial annexation was entirely appropriate when it come to Europe’s relation with the East. The East has  conditional agency, such as Japan during World War II. However, the East cannot take the lead in historical development without being predator (as in the Yellow Peril).

As for the Global South, (Africa) for it  to be a respectable civilized state, Western core countries took a page out of Calvinism and insisted that these “savage societies” have a duty to develop their land productivity (meaning agriculturally) and abandon their primitivism (hunting and gathering). Non-Western politics, whether they be monarchies without constitutions or the egalitarian political consensus societies of hunting and gathering, are not recognized as sovereign. It was representative bourgeois state politics that was the “civilized” norm. As late as 1993 Paul Johnson said most African states are not fit to govern themselves. Their continued existence and the violence of human degradation they bring are a threat to the stability and peace as well as an affront to our moral sense. As of today Zionist Israel has massacred over 200,000 Palestinians. Yet there is no call from the United Nations (controlled by the West) to intervene in this “failed state”.

European imperialists hide their protectionist policies. As Friedrich List remarked, once imperialists have attained their summit of greatness, they kick away the ladder by which they climbed up in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up afterwards behind them.

Both the US and Britain industrialized on the back of extremely protectionist regimes and only turned to free trade once they arrived at the top of the global economic hierarchy. Thus, the imposition of free trade on developing countries by Britain after 1846 and the US after 1945 prevents Third World states from using tariffs to protect the infant industries. The projection of “free trade” by Americans…constitute an economic containment strategy to keep the Third World down.

A Century of Marxist Eurocentrism

Karl Marx’s paternal Eurocentrism and the political necessity of the Western civilizing mission
Marx appears to have had little appreciation for the complexity of ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations. For him China and India were the home of “Oriental Despotism”. The East could only be emancipated from its backwardness by the British colonialists. India stands outside world history and China was understood as a rotting semi-civilization. Believe it or not, for Marx, opium wars were emancipatory for China. Without British intervention there would be no future emancipatory socialist revolution. Imperialism was an instrument for both political progress and a requirement of global primitive accumulation. Was the result of British colonization Chinese emancipation? No, it was a century of Chinese humiliation (1839-1949). The imperialist engagement with China did not lead to order but to massive social-dislocation. The various Chinese revolutions were in part stimulated by a reaction against the encounter with the West.

For Marx and Engels, the East could belatedly jump aboard the Western developmental plane as Hobson says as “The Oriental Express”. It could participate in the construction of world history. But they could never lead the train in a progressive direction. They only had conditional agency. The Western states on the other hand had hyper-sovereignty. Sadly, Hobson says there hasn’t been much effort to reconstruct Marx’s theory along non-Eurocentric lines in traditional Marxism.

Lenin has no theory of Eastern emancipation
According to Hobson, Lenin says the East is inherently incapable of self-development. Lenin discusses how the period of free competition within Europe was succeeded after 1873 with the rise of cartels which intensified after 1903 into full-fledged monopoly capital and finance capital. But the causes of the crisis lay in the West whether underconsumption (Hobson) or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Marx and Engels). There was no mention of resistance in the colonies. Lenin discussed the right of self-determination of nations, but those nations would never influence the West or provide leadership.

World-systems theory
Wallerstein
Immanuel Wallerstein was heavily criticized by Robert Brenner and other classical Marxists for overstating the interdependence of trade and hierarchy between societies and understating the class struggle within societies. But he maintains his traditional Marxian orientation in emphasizing the dynamics for the evolution of the world-system clearly in the Western part of the world. The West represents the civilized world, the core countries. The second division in the world is occupied by the regressive redistributive world empires in Asia. Division three of the world system is occupied by primitive reciprocal mini-systems found in North America, parts of Africa and Australasia (savage societies in the 19^thcentury parlance).

World-empires mainly in Asia saw their state structures weakened while their boundaries underwent a forced contraction and the surviving mini-systems of North American, Caribbean and Australia underwent wholesale destruction. 

Arrighi and Chase-Dunn

Other world-systems theorists like Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase Dunn suggested that the world-system didn’t consist of just a core and a periphery but consisted of a semi-periphery which may or may not be Western. They argued that when core Western countries experienced crisis and decline, it was the semi-periphery countries that provided a new resource which allowed them to become a new core.

Exceptions to the rule Gunder Frank, Abu-Lughod

To be fair, both a sympathizer and an arch-critic of World-Systems theory, Andre Gunder Frank accused Wallerstein of Eurocentrism in his writings culminating in hisbook Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. The work of Janet Anu-Lughod Before European Hegemony was so very powerful in showing the advanced state of non-Western trade networks  between 1250 and 1350 CE.

Exceptions to the Rule Outside of Marxism: James Watson

Watson’s analysis starts out with typical Eurocentrism with the Westphalian origins of European international society. He emphasizes the uniqueness of European restlessness and exceptional turbulence. Dynamic and enterprising as it is, it is  contrasted to the closed or isolated world of Asian cultures. The rise of the West is located in Weberian liberalism, neorealism and Marxism. Watson’s unusually explorative book The Evolution of International Society moves from the Italian city-state system and then proceeds with the emergence of sovereignly at the Westphalia conference by way of the Renaissance and the Reformation to arrive at the balance of power in 1713 at Utrecht. Yet he does talk about Eastern developments as reacting back on Europe as in a dialectical way. What the East contributed from the West included:

• the Italian city-state system was dependent on Eastern trade;
• financially cheques, bills of exchange, banks and commercial partnerships which had been pioneered in the Islamic and pre-Islamic Middle-East;
• overseas expansion which began in 1492 was only possible with the navigational and nautical techniques that were pioneered by Chinese and especially Muslims; and
• Industrialization, centerpiece of “British genius” was significantly enabled by Chinese innovations that stem back several millenniums.

Further, Watson analyzes in considerable detail many non-Western political formations prior to 1648.

Western Fear of Eastern and Southern Power

Most interesting is that many anti-imperialist racists argue against imperialism because it brings the white race in racially fatal conflict with the contaminating influences of non-white races. The impossibility of Eastern progressive development renders the Western civilizing mission all but futile.

Charles Henry Pearson: the decline of white supremacy and the barbaric rise of the yellow peril
Charles Henry Pearson (1830-1894) achieved immediate fame with the dire prophesy that he issued for the  white race in his book National Life and Character, a Forecast.  He argued that white racial supremacy was being superseded by very high levels of predatory Eastern agency. But in Pearson’s racist imagination it is the white West that has been fated to remain within its stationary limits while the yellow races are destined to expand and triumph over the higher whites. The barbaric threat also came from within as a result of the socialist states’ preference to prop up the unfit white working classes and from without via the Yellow Peril were all leading to deterioration.

James Blair and David Jordan

Jordan’s defensive social Darwinist racism was a pacifist’s eugenics. It had three components:

• The white race cannot survive in the topics.

It serves to affect a degeneration of the physical and intellectual energy of the Europeans. He gives an example of that as the Philippines lie in the heat of the torrid zone which he called natures asylum for degeneration. Benjamin Kidd argued though we in Europe have the greatest food-producing regions of the earth, we want to administer the tropic from a distance. The white races needed to wake up because the topics will lure them to their death. Kidd wanted to absolve the West of its home-grown liberal imperial guilt syndrome. His key concern about colonizing the tropics was the degenerative impact that the climate would have on white imperialists.

• The second anti-imperialist argument concerned the perils of immigration.

The Oriental is of the past. They have not progressed for centuries. The Easterner hates progress. He contends that the constitution of China is said to not have been changed for thousands of years. One the other hand, the West is progressive, energetic and intolerant of the very thing which is the East’s most marked characteristic, indolence. The two races should never amalgamate.

• Anti-war because the fittest white people would get kille

Jordan argues that warfare selects the best or fittest elements of the civilized white race to go out and fight, but in so doing leads to a reduction in the numbers of the fittest element as they lose their lives in futile colonial wars. Meanwhile the infirm and cowardly and feckless stay home, away from the battlefield. Some defensive racists were against the war between white countries so they could preserve white unity.

To summarize the threat from the East:

• Domestic white barbaric threat – unfit working class
• Racist interbreeding threat – contamination
• Tropical climatic threat
• Threat of European wars depleting the white race

The crisis of Western self-doubting and deep anxiety was reflected in a host of books which included:

• Spengler’s Decline of the West (European Institutionalist) (1919,1932)
• Madison Grant’s the Passing of the White Race (1918)
• Lothrop Stoddard The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy (1920)
• Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

 Stoddard

Eurocentrism and racism do not always deny non-white race’s agency. The climax of eugenics reflected not the moment of supreme white confidence but an acute  sense of anxiety regardless the future hegemony of the white race. For Stoddard, globalization is a real threat. The greatest threat to white racial existence lies

• in colored immigration problem
• a demographic explosion

The white races are under siege and disunited within their inner sanctum excavated by the Trojan horse of Western liberalism. Stoddard takes the notion of predatory Eastern agency beyond Mahan and Mackinder. He wants to call out the hubris of the white race. He is nervous and panicked about the Japanese victory over the white Russians in 1905. Further, rise of communism dealt a cruel blow to white racial unity. He is afraid of the white wars in which the best white stock would be lost on the battlefields. The white need to retreat from their imperial bases in Asia and leave the land to yellow and brown rule.

Madison Grant
Grant claimed colonialism weakens the white races. The Nordic race is unable to survive south of the line of latitude on white Virginia because of the detrimental impact of the hot climate. Nordics must keep away from the native population for fear of racial contamination from the sun’s actinic rays. Grant says the rapid decline in the birthrate of native white Americans is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which they once conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out.

Patrick Moynihan
In Patrick Moynihan book Pandemonium, he explores a  Malthusian logic in predicting the demographic doomsday scenario at the hands of the Eastern Hordes as does Paul Kennedy in his book Preparing for the 21^st Century. For them, the greatest challenge to world order in the coming century is the rising relative demographic gap between West and East. Western civilizations will have stable or declining populations and would be swamped by the East and the South. While Malthus in his day did not prevent a rising demographic to Europe from the East, by the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries these became a staple of much of racist Western thought.

Huntington and Lind on demographics
In the work of Huntington and Lind a close parallel can be drawn between their work and the racist imperialist thinker Mahan. But an even closer link can be found with CH Pearson’s National Life and Character, a Forecast; Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920);  Clashing Tides of Color (1935).  In Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations (1996). The roots of the barbaric threat that the Chinese and Muslims pose for the Western Civilization are located within a neo-Malthusian framework. It begins with the Eastern population explosion. This surplus population is problematic because it will seek to flood into the heartlands of the West.

For Huntington and Lind, non-Western societies were increasingly becoming the movers and shakers of their own history and of Western history. This meant in their ability to economically develop as well as resist imperialism. Lind writes that with the break-up of the Soviet “empire” the West’s great right flank will almost certainly be endangered as the Islamic republics will seek to join their Muslim brothers. Islam will be at the gates of Vienna as either immigrants or terrorists. Domestically multiculturalism in the West today is a “political virus” for it serves to boost the vitality of foreign cultures within the West.

Conclusion
The purpose of this article is to expose the theoretical blockages to the West’s understanding that they are being left beyond by the multipolar world of BRICS.

First, their Western International Relations Theory history has hardly been a positivist value free theory. It oozes Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. Secondly International Relations Theory only dimly perceives that these theories are not 100 years deep, starting after World War I, but have a 250 year history as Table 3 below shows. Thirdly, table 3 shows over 50 theorists over that 250 years, thus cementing a deep ideological commitment to “the rise of the West”. Those international theorists who have really understood that the East and the South are not merely passive recipients of the wisdom of the West but are themselves innovators. These theorists are isolated and could be counted on two hands.

Table 3 Eurocentrism, Paternalism and Racism  in International Theory 1760-2010

Below is the Conventional linear narrative of Liberal great tradition:

• From 1760 to 1816 there is classical liberal internationalism of Smith, Kant and Ricardo.
• From 1830 to 1913 classical liberal internationalism continues in the work of Cobden, Bright, JS Mill and Angell.
• Between 1900 to 1945 the emphasis switches to interdependence theory of liberal institutionalism of Hobson, Wilson, Zimmerman and Murray.
• Between 1989 and 2010 liberal cosmopolitanism is embodied in the theories of Fukuyama, Held and Rawls.

The Table 4 below shows Hobson’s very different breakdown of liberalism, calling it “paternalistic imperial liberalism”.

See Table 4 Hobson’s history in international Liberalism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Table 5 shows that history of realism has also been filled with political activity about as far from positivism as one can imagine.

See Table 5 Hobson’s history of international realism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Lastly Hobson charts the history of Marxism from 1840 to post 1989.

• With classical Marxism of Marx and Engels between 1840-1895. Hobson calls it explicit imperialism which is paternalist Eurocentrism.
• Between 1910 and the 1920s classical Marxism continues with the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Bukharin which Hobson characterizes as anti-imperialist, but a subliminal anti-paternalist Eurocentrism.
• Between 1967 and 1989 although World-Systems Theory differs from classical Marxism with its emphasis on conflicts between states more than class struggles within states, it shares the same combination of anti-imperialist, subliminal, anti-paternalist Eurocentrism of the Marxists of 1910-1920. The same is true for Robert Cox’s Gramscian hegemony theory.
• In the post 1989 period we find in the work of Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase-Dunn a continuation of anti-imperialist, anti-paternalist emphasis on Europe, but both are more willing to grant autonomy to non-Western countries. If Eastern or Southern countries  occupy what both call the capitalist  semi-periphery of the world system. Arrighi’s last book was called Adam Smith in Beijing, showing his interest in China as the new global hegemon
• In the same period It is in the work of Andre Gunder Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod that we finally theories that challenge any Eurocentrism or paternalism. Gunder Frank has always contended that World Systems Theory is Eurocentric and claims, as Hobson argues in another book that Europe only surpassed China after 1800. His book Re-Orient claims, correctly I think that the new Asian Age is on the horizon.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

International Relations (IR) theory fails to deliver on one of its key promises, specifically to produce positivist, value free analysis. What we encounter in the vast majority of international theory is the provincial or parochial normative purpose of defending and celebrating the ideal of the West in world politics. IR theory can no longer be represented as positivist, objective or value free.
~ John M. Hobson

Orientation

In 1981, Eric Jones wrote a very powerful book called The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. He was not alone in claiming there was something unique about Europe compared to the rest of the world. Though I doubt it was his intention, his work perhaps unintentionally supported a Eurocentric, paternalistic, racist orientation of a Wren theory which claimed to explain world politics. This is called International Relations Theory which claimed to be positivist, objective and value free. International relations theory is so deeply embedded in Western triumphalism that it has failed to notice that the West has been losing to China, Russia and Iran for the last 20 to 30 years. International  relations theory barely understands that this has happened and it has no theory to explain it. What we are witnessing today is a “Eurasian Miracle.”

In my article “Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival,” I identify five international relation theories: Neocon Realists; Neoliberal Globalists; Liberal Institutionalists; Constructivists and World-Systems Theorists. Most of my criticism in that article was leveled at the first three theories for their inability to account for the rise of China, Russia and Iran and the whole multipolar world. In this article, following the work of John A. Hobson in his book “The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics,” I point out a good reason for this is because of the Eurocentric nature of Neocon Realists, Neoliberal Globalists and Liberal Institutionalists theory. However, Hobson’s criticism of Eurocentrism does not stop there. He argues that even left-wing theories like constructionism and world-systems theory are guilty of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, not only because it takes different forms, but that some of these are even anti-imperialist. The conventional contrast of a Eurocentric or racist conception of imperialism from a constructivist and Marxist point of view is too simple and Eurocentrism is too deep.

What is Eurocentrism?
Hobson’s claim that there two steps in Eurocentric big-bang theory of world politics:

• Europeans single-handedly created a European capitalist international state system through their pioneering and exceptional institutional genius.
• They export their civilization to remake the world in their own image through globalization, imperialism or hegemony.
  To add to this, Eurocentrism claims the Eastern and Southern part of the world had no independent status. There was no East or South big bang. In the West the various movements of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution or socialism were purely Western. The East and South either helped out or they were left behind. With rare exceptions. Eastern and Southern parts of the world system never led Western development.

What is paternalism?
Historians of the modern West sought to explain social evolution. In doing so, they divided societies into three stages:

• savagery (hunter-gatherers);
• barbarism (horticultural and agricultural states) and
• civilization—industrial capitalist societies

Supposedly Europeans hoped that all societies would want to become civilized. But when societies of the East and South did not aspire to this, they were labelled either savages or barbarians. However, some historians and anthropologist thought it was their duty (white man’s burden) for the savages and barbarians to see the light. This led to paternalism.

An example of well-intentioned paternalist Eurocentrism: Rawls
John Rawls believed that his liberal vision has genuinely universalist criteria that do not offend cultural sensibilities of non-Western people. He was interested in culturally converting Eastern people rather than containing them as in Western liberal realism.

Yet there are five key Eurocentric dimensions of his theory:

• All well-ordered hierarchical societies must exhibit a separation of church and state (this will not work for Muslims).
• Imposition of free trade (free trade can only work with wealthy societies).
• Governed by a liberal law of peoples (teaching Eastern women to have less babies won’t work if they are being blocked by the IMF and the World bank from industrializing.
• Eastern states receive only conditional sovereignty because they are classified as despotic states and “failed” states are deemed uncivilized.
• Developed societies have a duty to assist burdened societies (paternalism).

Hobson’s claims

Hobson’s explicit claims are first that International Relations Theory contains six myths:

• the noble identity and foundational myth of the discipline;
• the positive myth of International Relations Theory;
• the great debates myth and reconceptualizing the clash of IR theories;
• the sovereignty or anarchy myth;
• the globalization myth; and
• the theoretical great traditions myth.

Hobson’s 2nd claim is there are six types of imperialism which are laid out over 250 years. His third claim is that Western racism was not always triumphant but was based on fear of what would become of Europe if Easterners and Southerners of the world  got the upper hand. Lastly, I close out with theories that are exceptions to the rule and are not Eurocentric or paternalistic and with a minimum of racism.

Hobson’s implicit claim is that without “the rest” there might be no West. The West was not an early, but a latedevelopment. This topic will be covered in my future article based on another of Hobson’s books, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

Six Eurocentric Myths of International Relations Theory
Hobson tells us the conscious or unconscious moral purpose of IR is to be a defender and promoter of Western Civilization. The key of disciplinary assumptions that are presently revered as self-evident truths really are largely Eurocentric myths. As stated above, these include the above myths.

The noble identity foundation myth: Whig and progress theory of history
International Relations Theory has embedded in a Whig an interpretation of its intellectual history. Whiggish means that the past is reorganized to make it seem that the present was the only possible passage that could have led to contemporary life. The Whig theory of history has the theory of progress embedded in it. The theory of progress claims that the later in time we go in social evolution the better societies get in material wealth, less labor, higher morality and happiness.

It is a now conventional assumption that the discipline of International Relations was born in 1919. Supposedly, it had a moral purpose to finding ways to solve the universal problem of war. This now conventional view was originally constructed by E.H. Carr in his classical text The Twenty Year’s Crisis (1946).

Contrary to this convention, IR theory did not appear all of a sudden after WW I out of the head of Zeus. It continued from its pre-1914 roots which were neither positive, objective nor value free. Rather they were paternalist, Eurocentric and intentionally or unintentionally racist. There are deep continuities that the 1919-1945 period of international theory has with the pre-1914 period of international theory. The Eurocentric racism and paternalism that underpinned it had been forged in the previous century. In addition, there is a continuum of imperialism that goes all the way back to the middle of the 18th century. Thirdly, there was an explosion of anti-colonial resistance. What were colonists resisting – those noble Western powers that colonialized them. In this larger scheme of things, the end of World War I was not the only game in town. As positivists, what Neocon realists and liberal globalists ignore is that the noble identity myth can also be a ideological justification for Eurocentrism, capitalism, racism and imperialism. The four stages are of Hobsons history if International relations include:

• 1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
• 1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
• 1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism
• 1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism

The positive myth of IR of theory of liberalism as emerging between the wars

This myth was that the between the wars IR theory was dominated by liberal globalists who searched for a new cooperative global order as a reaction to the Neocon realism of World War I. It was characterized as a harmonious and optimistic theory because it stands for peace. But as Hobson points out, interwar international theory was not monopolized by idealism or liberalism because it also exhibited a vibrant racism realist stream that emerged after 1889, especially in the world of geopolitical theorists, Ratzel, Mackinder, Mahan and others.

IR claims to be positivist with a value free epistemological base. This has been challenged by African-American Marxists Ralph Bunche, WEB Dubois and CLR James. They say that when viewed through a non-European lens, the vast majority of international theory produces a parochial or provincial analysis of the West that can masquerade as if it were universal. Further, the imperialist aspect of interwar idealist theory has not been widely noticed among modern IR scholars. Realist and so-called Liberal Idealists were united by the concern to restore the mandate of Western civilizational hegemony in one guise of another.

The great debate myth and reconceptualizing the idea of the clash of IR theories

These debates include the controversy between realism and idealism in the interwar period between history and scientism in the 1960s and between positivists and post-positivists in the 1990s. The first two appear as if these were great qualitative struggles, but like with Republicans and Democrats in Mordor, all parties have far more in common than they have in differences. The struggle between positivists and post-positivists are real but it are presented in too stark a manner. There were post-positivists as far back as the 1960s and those political scientists who were more statistical and quantitative also go back to the 50s and 60s. In other words that debate did not begin in the 1990s as IR theorists claim but thirty years earlier. In spite of these differences, there is consensus of virtually all parties concerning the politics of defending and celebrating Western civilization in world politics. These theories supported the Western powers. Their differences were small compared to the paternalism, racism and imperialism that they all shared.

Sovereignty vs anarchy myth
The sovereignty vs anarchy myth claims that in International Relations Theory all states are sovereign. But because there is no world-state the relations between nation-states are characterized as anarchistic. In the first place, IR theory limits which nation-states are considered sovereign to European countries. Eastern and Southern states are not considered sovereign because they lack the proper Western European credentials such as voting systems, more than one party, and capitalism. The school of Realism operates with universalist analytical principles that supposedly apply to all states regardless of how 2nd class some states are treated in practice. The problem for IR theorists is that the post the 1648 era there had been a proliferation of international imperial hierarchies, which were comprised of a series of single sovereign colonial powers, many of which were not nation-states. Its supposedly universal and ideologically unbiased principles of state-centrism sovereignty directly contradict its practice. For example, in 1878 the conference in Berlin divided Africa between European imperial powers. These sovereign states had colonies.

Furthermore if by anarchy they mean disorder, the relationship between sovereign states without a world state is by no means disorderly. There are shifting alliances between states rather than a Hobbesian war of all single states against each other. Secondly, to characterize this disorder as “anarchy” reveals either complete political bias or ignorance of anarchism as a respectable political tendency on the socialist left. Anarchism has involved thousands of people in many countries around the world since the late 1840s. It has had some success in the Paris Commune, the Russian and especially the Spanish revolutions. To characterize this as disorderly is an unforgivable omission from theorists who claim to be political scientists.

The globalization myth
The myth is that globalization has only recently (the last century) become an issue for international theorists. But to Hobson’s own surprise in his initial research, in many areas including some though not all realists, international theorists since 1760 have placed considerable emphasis on globalization. In his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization,Hobson points out that there were globalizing trade networks of, Africa, West Asia, India and China as far back as 500 CE.

The theoretical great traditions myth
IR theorists are no different than those who initiate artistic or spiritual movements in their search for origins. All political, artistic or spiritual movements seek to find their origins in the deep past rather than the recent past. In the IR traditional textbooks realism is claimed to go back to Thucydides in the ancient world and then forward to Hobbes and Machiavelli to culminate in Waltz, Gilpin and Mearsheimer via Carr and Morgenthau. But each of these theories are not air-tight. In fact IR theories mix with other theories within a given moment in time and each theory changes internally due to  changes in history.

Defining Imperialism and Anti-imperialism International Theory
Hobson claims that the vast literature on imperialism and anti-imperialism generally lacks conceptual precision. Here Hobson confront two broad definitional approaches:

• Narrow Eurocentric
• Expansive postcolonial

Most of modern Eurocentric international theory embraces a narrow definition and allows for considerable wiggle room when confronted with a charge of imperialism. It sees Eurocentrism and imperialism as distinct. You can be Eurocentric and not imperialist and conversely imperialist without being Eurocentric. At the other extreme, by contrast, post-colonial theorists seek to completely shut down this wiggle room by assuming that being Eurocentric is inherently imperialist and imperialism is always Eurocentric.

In table 1 I have a divided a spectrum of imperialism throughout history into 6 types. The three types on the left accept that they are imperialists and don’t apologize for it. The theories on the right deny they are imperialists. The theories on the left are formal empires, while the theories on the right are informal liberal empires. The people in the last cell are the theorists of various types of imperialism. The cell above it include the nature and justification of their mission. The names of the theorists are not important for now, but some of the more famous ones might be familiar to you. The importance of this table are not the theorists but rather the systems of justification, none of which are value free, universal and objective.

Table 1 The Definitional Continuum of Imperialism, Past and Present

Eurocentric Imperialism: Liberal and Marxism

In Table 2 below, one interesting but expected difference between liberalism and Marxism is that liberals see imperialism as benign. J. A. Hobson and John Stuart Mill see imperialism is benign at an international level, but Cobden, Bright and Angell see imperialism as benign at a national level. The fact that Marxists thinks imperialism as coerced rather than benign should not come as a surprise to anyone. Traditional International Relations Theory sees liberal internationalism and classical Marxism as the antithesis of imperialism. However, John Hobson’s main point is what Marxism and liberals have in common. They all agree that:

• The East can be characterized as “barbaric oriental despotism”
• The capitalist peripheral countries (Third world) are savage, anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
• Western agency is always pioneering, learning nothing from the rest of the world
• Eastern agency even at its best is conditional, always learning from the West

It is these four points that show how deep Eurocentrism of all Western theories, even Marxism. These are the type of deep assumptions, hundreds of years old the keep Western theorists of world politics that the BRICS world of the East is bypassing them.

Table 2 Paternalistic, Eurocentric. Institutional Imperial Concepts of World Politics

Here are some further examples of Eurocentrism. In the 19th century, even when IR theory was sensitive to interdependence, it wasn’t world interdependence. Rather it was interdependence among the civilized states of Europe. Outside of Europe there was no recognition of interdependence. Eastern societies only got recognition once they became colonies or only if these countries were at war with Europe. It is something like calling the ultimate baseball playoffs “the World Series” even when it only includes the United States.

At the same time, the Eurocentrists had no problem imagining war with the East if it was profitable. But when it came to the civilized states of Europe, war was seen as unprofitable. Also, as we shall see later, racist theories bemoaned Europeans fighting because this would result in the depletion of the white race. Colonial annexation was entirely appropriate when it come to Europe’s relation with the East. The East has  conditional agency, such as Japan during World War II. However, the East cannot take the lead in historical development without being predator (as in the Yellow Peril).

As for the Global South, (Africa) for it  to be a respectable civilized state, Western core countries took a page out of Calvinism and insisted that these “savage societies” have a duty to develop their land productivity (meaning agriculturally) and abandon their primitivism (hunting and gathering). Non-Western politics, whether they be monarchies without constitutions or the egalitarian political consensus societies of hunting and gathering, are not recognized as sovereign. It was representative bourgeois state politics that was the “civilized” norm. As late as 1993 Paul Johnson said most African states are not fit to govern themselves. Their continued existence and the violence of human degradation they bring are a threat to the stability and peace as well as an affront to our moral sense. As of today Zionist Israel has massacred over 200,000 Palestinians. Yet there is no call from the United Nations (controlled by the West) to intervene in this “failed state”.

European imperialists hide their protectionist policies. As Friedrich List remarked, once imperialists have attained their summit of greatness, they kick away the ladder by which they climbed up in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up afterwards behind them.

Both the US and Britain industrialized on the back of extremely protectionist regimes and only turned to free trade once they arrived at the top of the global economic hierarchy. Thus, the imposition of free trade on developing countries by Britain after 1846 and the US after 1945 prevents Third World states from using tariffs to protect the infant industries. The projection of “free trade” by Americans…constitute an economic containment strategy to keep the Third World down.

A Century of Marxist Eurocentrism

Karl Marx’s paternal Eurocentrism and the political necessity of the Western civilizing mission
Marx appears to have had little appreciation for the complexity of ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations. For him China and India were the home of “Oriental Despotism”. The East could only be emancipated from its backwardness by the British colonialists. India stands outside world history and China was understood as a rotting semi-civilization. Believe it or not, for Marx, opium wars were emancipatory for China. Without British intervention there would be no future emancipatory socialist revolution. Imperialism was an instrument for both political progress and a requirement of global primitive accumulation. Was the result of British colonization Chinese emancipation? No, it was a century of Chinese humiliation (1839-1949). The imperialist engagement with China did not lead to order but to massive social-dislocation. The various Chinese revolutions were in part stimulated by a reaction against the encounter with the West.

For Marx and Engels, the East could belatedly jump aboard the Western developmental plane as Hobson says as “The Oriental Express”. It could participate in the construction of world history. But they could never lead the train in a progressive direction. They only had conditional agency. The Western states on the other hand had hyper-sovereignty. Sadly, Hobson says there hasn’t been much effort to reconstruct Marx’s theory along non-Eurocentric lines in traditional Marxism.

Lenin has no theory of Eastern emancipation
According to Hobson, Lenin says the East is inherently incapable of self-development. Lenin discusses how the period of free competition within Europe was succeeded after 1873 with the rise of cartels which intensified after 1903 into full-fledged monopoly capital and finance capital. But the causes of the crisis lay in the West whether underconsumption (Hobson) or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Marx and Engels). There was no mention of resistance in the colonies. Lenin discussed the right of self-determination of nations, but those nations would never influence the West or provide leadership.

World-systems theory
Wallerstein
Immanuel Wallerstein was heavily criticized by Robert Brenner and other classical Marxists for overstating the interdependence of trade and hierarchy between societies and understating the class struggle within societies. But he maintains his traditional Marxian orientation in emphasizing the dynamics for the evolution of the world-system clearly in the Western part of the world. The West represents the civilized world, the core countries. The second division in the world is occupied by the regressive redistributive world empires in Asia. Division three of the world system is occupied by primitive reciprocal mini-systems found in North America, parts of Africa and Australasia (savage societies in the 19^thcentury parlance).

World-empires mainly in Asia saw their state structures weakened while their boundaries underwent a forced contraction and the surviving mini-systems of North American, Caribbean and Australia underwent wholesale destruction. 

Arrighi and Chase-Dunn

Other world-systems theorists like Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase Dunn suggested that the world-system didn’t consist of just a core and a periphery but consisted of a semi-periphery which may or may not be Western. They argued that when core Western countries experienced crisis and decline, it was the semi-periphery countries that provided a new resource which allowed them to become a new core.

Exceptions to the rule Gunder Frank, Abu-Lughod

To be fair, both a sympathizer and an arch-critic of World-Systems theory, Andre Gunder Frank accused Wallerstein of Eurocentrism in his writings culminating in hisbook Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. The work of Janet Anu-Lughod Before European Hegemony was so very powerful in showing the advanced state of non-Western trade networks  between 1250 and 1350 CE.

Exceptions to the Rule Outside of Marxism: James Watson

Watson’s analysis starts out with typical Eurocentrism with the Westphalian origins of European international society. He emphasizes the uniqueness of European restlessness and exceptional turbulence. Dynamic and enterprising as it is, it is  contrasted to the closed or isolated world of Asian cultures. The rise of the West is located in Weberian liberalism, neorealism and Marxism. Watson’s unusually explorative book The Evolution of International Society moves from the Italian city-state system and then proceeds with the emergence of sovereignly at the Westphalia conference by way of the Renaissance and the Reformation to arrive at the balance of power in 1713 at Utrecht. Yet he does talk about Eastern developments as reacting back on Europe as in a dialectical way. What the East contributed from the West included:

• the Italian city-state system was dependent on Eastern trade;
• financially cheques, bills of exchange, banks and commercial partnerships which had been pioneered in the Islamic and pre-Islamic Middle-East;
• overseas expansion which began in 1492 was only possible with the navigational and nautical techniques that were pioneered by Chinese and especially Muslims; and
• Industrialization, centerpiece of “British genius” was significantly enabled by Chinese innovations that stem back several millenniums.

Further, Watson analyzes in considerable detail many non-Western political formations prior to 1648.

Western Fear of Eastern and Southern Power

Most interesting is that many anti-imperialist racists argue against imperialism because it brings the white race in racially fatal conflict with the contaminating influences of non-white races. The impossibility of Eastern progressive development renders the Western civilizing mission all but futile.

Charles Henry Pearson: the decline of white supremacy and the barbaric rise of the yellow peril
Charles Henry Pearson (1830-1894) achieved immediate fame with the dire prophesy that he issued for the  white race in his book National Life and Character, a Forecast.  He argued that white racial supremacy was being superseded by very high levels of predatory Eastern agency. But in Pearson’s racist imagination it is the white West that has been fated to remain within its stationary limits while the yellow races are destined to expand and triumph over the higher whites. The barbaric threat also came from within as a result of the socialist states’ preference to prop up the unfit white working classes and from without via the Yellow Peril were all leading to deterioration.

James Blair and David Jordan

Jordan’s defensive social Darwinist racism was a pacifist’s eugenics. It had three components:

• The white race cannot survive in the topics.

It serves to affect a degeneration of the physical and intellectual energy of the Europeans. He gives an example of that as the Philippines lie in the heat of the torrid zone which he called natures asylum for degeneration. Benjamin Kidd argued though we in Europe have the greatest food-producing regions of the earth, we want to administer the tropic from a distance. The white races needed to wake up because the topics will lure them to their death. Kidd wanted to absolve the West of its home-grown liberal imperial guilt syndrome. His key concern about colonizing the tropics was the degenerative impact that the climate would have on white imperialists.

• The second anti-imperialist argument concerned the perils of immigration.

The Oriental is of the past. They have not progressed for centuries. The Easterner hates progress. He contends that the constitution of China is said to not have been changed for thousands of years. One the other hand, the West is progressive, energetic and intolerant of the very thing which is the East’s most marked characteristic, indolence. The two races should never amalgamate.

• Anti-war because the fittest white people would get kille

Jordan argues that warfare selects the best or fittest elements of the civilized white race to go out and fight, but in so doing leads to a reduction in the numbers of the fittest element as they lose their lives in futile colonial wars. Meanwhile the infirm and cowardly and feckless stay home, away from the battlefield. Some defensive racists were against the war between white countries so they could preserve white unity.

To summarize the threat from the East:

• Domestic white barbaric threat – unfit working class
• Racist interbreeding threat – contamination
• Tropical climatic threat
• Threat of European wars depleting the white race

The crisis of Western self-doubting and deep anxiety was reflected in a host of books which included:

• Spengler’s Decline of the West (European Institutionalist) (1919,1932)
• Madison Grant’s the Passing of the White Race (1918)
• Lothrop Stoddard The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy (1920)
• Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

 Stoddard

Eurocentrism and racism do not always deny non-white race’s agency. The climax of eugenics reflected not the moment of supreme white confidence but an acute  sense of anxiety regardless the future hegemony of the white race. For Stoddard, globalization is a real threat. The greatest threat to white racial existence lies

• in colored immigration problem
• a demographic explosion

The white races are under siege and disunited within their inner sanctum excavated by the Trojan horse of Western liberalism. Stoddard takes the notion of predatory Eastern agency beyond Mahan and Mackinder. He wants to call out the hubris of the white race. He is nervous and panicked about the Japanese victory over the white Russians in 1905. Further, rise of communism dealt a cruel blow to white racial unity. He is afraid of the white wars in which the best white stock would be lost on the battlefields. The white need to retreat from their imperial bases in Asia and leave the land to yellow and brown rule.

Madison Grant
Grant claimed colonialism weakens the white races. The Nordic race is unable to survive south of the line of latitude on white Virginia because of the detrimental impact of the hot climate. Nordics must keep away from the native population for fear of racial contamination from the sun’s actinic rays. Grant says the rapid decline in the birthrate of native white Americans is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which they once conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out.

Patrick Moynihan
In Patrick Moynihan book Pandemonium, he explores a  Malthusian logic in predicting the demographic doomsday scenario at the hands of the Eastern Hordes as does Paul Kennedy in his book Preparing for the 21^st Century. For them, the greatest challenge to world order in the coming century is the rising relative demographic gap between West and East. Western civilizations will have stable or declining populations and would be swamped by the East and the South. While Malthus in his day did not prevent a rising demographic to Europe from the East, by the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries these became a staple of much of racist Western thought.

Huntington and Lind on demographics
In the work of Huntington and Lind a close parallel can be drawn between their work and the racist imperialist thinker Mahan. But an even closer link can be found with CH Pearson’s National Life and Character, a Forecast; Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920);  Clashing Tides of Color (1935).  In Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations (1996). The roots of the barbaric threat that the Chinese and Muslims pose for the Western Civilization are located within a neo-Malthusian framework. It begins with the Eastern population explosion. This surplus population is problematic because it will seek to flood into the heartlands of the West.

For Huntington and Lind, non-Western societies were increasingly becoming the movers and shakers of their own history and of Western history. This meant in their ability to economically develop as well as resist imperialism. Lind writes that with the break-up of the Soviet “empire” the West’s great right flank will almost certainly be endangered as the Islamic republics will seek to join their Muslim brothers. Islam will be at the gates of Vienna as either immigrants or terrorists. Domestically multiculturalism in the West today is a “political virus” for it serves to boost the vitality of foreign cultures within the West.

Conclusion
The purpose of this article is to expose the theoretical blockages to the West’s understanding that they are being left beyond by the multipolar world of BRICS.

First, their Western International Relations Theory history has hardly been a positivist value free theory. It oozes Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. Secondly International Relations Theory only dimly perceives that these theories are not 100 years deep, starting after World War I, but have a 250 year history as Table 3 below shows. Thirdly, table 3 shows over 50 theorists over that 250 years, thus cementing a deep ideological commitment to “the rise of the West”. Those international theorists who have really understood that the East and the South are not merely passive recipients of the wisdom of the West but are themselves innovators. These theorists are isolated and could be counted on two hands.

Table 3 Eurocentrism, Paternalism and Racism  in International Theory 1760-2010

Below is the Conventional linear narrative of Liberal great tradition:

• From 1760 to 1816 there is classical liberal internationalism of Smith, Kant and Ricardo.
• From 1830 to 1913 classical liberal internationalism continues in the work of Cobden, Bright, JS Mill and Angell.
• Between 1900 to 1945 the emphasis switches to interdependence theory of liberal institutionalism of Hobson, Wilson, Zimmerman and Murray.
• Between 1989 and 2010 liberal cosmopolitanism is embodied in the theories of Fukuyama, Held and Rawls.

The Table 4 below shows Hobson’s very different breakdown of liberalism, calling it “paternalistic imperial liberalism”.

See Table 4 Hobson’s history in international Liberalism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Table 5 shows that history of realism has also been filled with political activity about as far from positivism as one can imagine.

See Table 5 Hobson’s history of international realism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Lastly Hobson charts the history of Marxism from 1840 to post 1989.

• With classical Marxism of Marx and Engels between 1840-1895. Hobson calls it explicit imperialism which is paternalist Eurocentrism.
• Between 1910 and the 1920s classical Marxism continues with the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Bukharin which Hobson characterizes as anti-imperialist, but a subliminal anti-paternalist Eurocentrism.
• Between 1967 and 1989 although World-Systems Theory differs from classical Marxism with its emphasis on conflicts between states more than class struggles within states, it shares the same combination of anti-imperialist, subliminal, anti-paternalist Eurocentrism of the Marxists of 1910-1920. The same is true for Robert Cox’s Gramscian hegemony theory.
• In the post 1989 period we find in the work of Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase-Dunn a continuation of anti-imperialist, anti-paternalist emphasis on Europe, but both are more willing to grant autonomy to non-Western countries. If Eastern or Southern countries  occupy what both call the capitalist  semi-periphery of the world system. Arrighi’s last book was called Adam Smith in Beijing, showing his interest in China as the new global hegemon
• In the same period It is in the work of Andre Gunder Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod that we finally theories that challenge any Eurocentrism or paternalism. Gunder Frank has always contended that World Systems Theory is Eurocentric and claims, as Hobson argues in another book that Europe only surpassed China after 1800. His book Re-Orient claims, correctly I think that the new Asian Age is on the horizon.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Fifty years ago the Portuguese became the first and only populace to overthrow its national fascist regime.

Although I was in Brazil in 1986 when the 1964 Atos Institutionais that defined the American incited and inspired military dictatorship were replaced by a new civilian constitution and in Berlin when the annexation of the GDR began and ultimately witnessed the first months when Anglo-American and other international owners of South Africa’s natural resource extraction system imposed an end to Afrikaaner domination, I missed the so-called “—”. In 1974 my father lay three years moulding in the grave and I was in the midst of adapting to “Jim Crow light” in the American South. The US regime was in the process of withdrawing the CIA’s official cover which former officer Frank Snepp would later call—perhaps ironically—“A Decent Interval” (1977). Another former CIA officer, John Stockwell, in his book In Search of Enemies (1978) would report that upon his return from Vietnam, the Portugal desk was the busiest in the Agency. The US media was full of the threat of Angola falling to the “Reds” no sooner had the Saigon embassy annex been evacuated by dramatic UH-1 roof manoeuvres. As Stockwell added, despite the work of the 40 Committee and Kissinger’s chronic belligerence, every bureaucratic attempt was made to conceal the fact that the Agency “goes rolling along.”

Stockwell, given his residual loyalty as a senior officer at the time and the compartmentalization of information endemic to covert operations (and public propaganda), was unable to say what the CIA—through the late Ambassador and Carlyle Group partner, Frank Carlucci—was doing in Lisbon. A film produced by some young Americans, still available in the Web, Scenes of the Class Struggle in Portugal (Cena da Luta de Classes em Portugal) is about the clearest depiction of the events I know. Among Portugal’s conservatives and reactionaries are those who believe that 25 April 1974 was staged by the Soviet Union and supported by the US as a means of hiving off the African colonies. The US with its older brother the UK would share Angolan and Mozambican loot while the Soviet Union got to play with the residue of the Salazar/ Marcelo nationalists. The implication of this formula—ignoring the popular struggles and ruthlessness with which they had been suppressed—was that the relatively weak communists would do the job of removing those in the Estado Novo regime who were genuinely patriotic and like in Germany wanted to preserve Portuguese sovereignty even at the expense of the colonial populations. The overoptimistic Left served, well by the organizational skills of the otherwise rather bourgeois Portuguese Communist Party, was rightly opposed to colonialism but ill-equipped to deal with a NATO fleet off its coast or the machinations of the world’s most vicious covert action agency. The social revolution was ended by systematic economic and political violence accompanied by the injection of the genetically engineered pseudo-socialist Mario Soares. This spore of international corruption had been cultivated in Switzerland and nurtured to ripeness with funds laundered through the German SPD foundation, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, to create a baseless Partido Socialista for parachuting into Lisbon armed covertly by the US and overtly with patronage to buy whomever threats could not suppress. Of course that did not all happen overnight. (It is worth noting that on the eve of the 50th anniversary, the reigning PS prime minister, Antonio Costa, was impelled to resign and yield to what appear to be at least marginally woke election results. The PS served its purpose even through the first campaigns of the continuing COVID war and its complement the “fifth crusade” in the East.)

It is hard to say whether the designation “Carnation Revolution” was a product of the same OTPOR-type marketing that has caused so much bloodshed since 1989. Given that Gene Sharp’s doctrines were reverse engineering of the Vietnamese NLF practices, it is safer to say that the same Einstein Institution types saw the 25 April military-civilian overthrow of Gaetano Marcelo’s modified Salazarism as a model to study. That means that just as Gene Sharp helped turn Mao’s theories of people’s war into counter-revolutionary tactics he and his acolytes recognized the potential for conversion of the symbolic and political success of the MFA in Portugal into a patent recipe for tactical regime change. As far as I know there has been no investigation of this possibility.

After more than 30 years living in the Federal Republic of Germany and intensive travel throughout the territories of Euro-American fascism, I can still say that there is a special atmosphere in this tiny semi-mountainous corner of the Iberian peninsula, Lusitania. My compatriots are remarkably apolitical in their sociability, preferring football to factional disputes in the Republican Assembly. Yet the air is somehow much easier to breath than in those countries “liberated” by foreign armies. Portuguese have gained a reputation for docility—although their ancient aggression led Westerners into the Indian Ocean and South China Sea with brutality that shocked the great empires at the world’s fulcrum. That was the beginning of the 500-year global war of terror whose most recent campaign was announced by the US in 2001 and has yet to end.

For more than half a millennium the civilized world has waited for the barbarians to join the human race. Periodically events occur which raise hope that humanity did not cease to breath west of the Urals or east of the Marianas Trench. The 25th of April 1974 was one of those choice moments when ordinary people not only complained about the incurable viciousness of their pathological rulers, they actually tried to do something about it.

25 de Abril, sempre!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

The post Bridging Gaps in Mental Health Crisis Response: Omaha Police Department’s “Frank Unit” appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Israel’s genocide on Gaza has led to at least 30,000 dead (including 12,000 children). This past week, we saw the Israelis begin bombing on Rafah and a ground invasion of the last refugee haven in Gaza is expected at any time. But while the Israelis wage their ethnic cleansing campaign with bombs and bullets, they’ve also weaponized environmental destruction to make sure that no one can return to a land and water poisoned by their war machine.

We talk with Joshua Frank (@joshua_frank) about the weaponization of environmental destruction in Palestinian territories. We also talk about Michael Menesini of the San Francisco’s District Attorney office anti-Arab emails to CounterPunch.

Bio// Joshua Frank is an award-winning California-based journalist and co-editor of the political magazine CounterPunch. He is the editor and co-author of several books. Most recently, he is the author of the book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (Haymarket Books 2022).

Rushed transcript:

Scott Parkin: Welcome to the silky smooth sounds of the Green and Red Podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about Israel’s continued attack and genocide on Gaza.

Joining us is our old friend Joshua Frank, Josh, welcome to the Green and Red Podcast.

Joshua Frank: Thanks for having me back.

Scott Parkin: Josh is a journalist and the managing editor at CounterPunch. org. He’s also the author of Atomic Days and co-editor of a couple of other books.

And then he just recently published an article. Which made the rounds called “Making Gaza Unlivable.” And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Israel’s attack on Gaza has left at least 30, 000 dead. This week, we saw the Israelis began bombing in Rafa, which is like one of the last bastions of people who have been displaced by this.

Josh’s article is about how Israel has been weaponizing environmental destruction against the Palestinians. And so Josh, talk to us a little bit about how Israel has been weaponizing environmental destruction against the Palestinians during this attack. And perhaps previously as well.

Joshua Frank: My piece really focused on what’s happening in Gaza. Obviously, a lot of this is applicable to the West Bank as well, although it’s not under the same kind of bombardment at the moment.

When we discuss the genocide that’s taking place in Gaza, which is very well documented, we usually only talk about impacts on human life. We haven’t really addressed the environmental impacts of what’s happening. So, I looked at three things. One, the bombing campaigns and what that’s doing and the destruction to the cities and to homes. Then I looked at the historic decimation of olive groves, which are the cultural heritage of Palestinians, and also, in Gaza, a big part of the economy, which we can talk about a little bit. Then thirdly, I talked about another aspect of this campaign, which is to flood all of these tunnels primarily in the North. There’s precedent for the destruction that this caused. Egypt flooded tunnels about ten years ago, and there’s a lot of documentation about what that flooding of seawater into those tunnels to destroy alleged Hamas smuggling routes did to agricultural lands.

So I looked at it holistically and put it in perspective that this is not just individual campaigns but a larger strategy on Israel’s part to deem Gaza unlivable. And I think it goes along with a lot of the rhetoric that we’re hearing out of the Israeli government.

And since October 7th, and even prior to that, the plan is to ultimately move Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip. Now, whether that happens, there is some pushback now on the international level, obviously the ICJ’s case. We’ll see what happens. But also, news just came out today that — if you’ve even heard about this yet — reports are coming out of Egypt that they’re building a buffer zone in the Sinai Peninsula, which would allegedly make room for Egypt to receive Gazans and move them out of the south and into the desert, which would be a crime. But if we’re to believe the rhetoric of the Israeli government, this is what they’ve been talking about the whole time. And we also know they have nowhere else to go back to in the North. Seventy percent of their homes have been destroyed.

Looking at the environmental impacts of this is important to understand the complexities of it and also the challenges that lie ahead if they are to return. What they are returning to the aquifers is being completely polluted and destroyed? Even before October 7th over 90 percent of the water was contaminated in the drinking water supplies. The sewage systems in the Gaza Strip are completely broken. This is before October 7th. The conditions before the war broke out, if we can call a genocidal assault a war, were horrific.

And now it’s just been exponentially made worse.

Bob Buzzanco: Yeah, you start with the, by talking about flooding the tunnels and so on. But it, I was surprised, I had no idea how much bigger it was than that. And I think it began a couple of years ago with salination in the tunnels. Can you want to explain how they did that?

Joshua Frank: Right now, the plan is, and apparently, they’ve already started to do this in the North — when I was writing the article, it was in the test phase, but they set up module pumps along the coast that are transporting seawater into these underground tunnels to destroy them.

What that salt concentration does is eventually permeate the groundwater supplies, polluting them, as well as make the agricultural land — and most of the agricultural land in Gaza is in the North — making that land infertile because it will be too salinized. So that’s the big fear among people keeping a close eye on this.

The other fear is that the water itself in the Mediterranean is very polluted in that area because of the sanitation being destroyed. So, a lot of that stuff has been historically just dumped right into the Mediterranean. So that’s another problem is that they’re pumping this water in that’s polluted to begin with and it has a high salt content. And so, they’re really fearful that the little agriculture that they were able to have is going to be gone. This is even going to make it harder to live. On top of that, when the ground is saturated — as we’ve noticed down here in Southern California with all the rain we had last week, hillsides collapsing — we have another type of problem. In Gaza, it’s going to be really difficult if the ground is unstable, which could also be part of Israel’s strategy to make that ground so unstable that they can’t rebuild in those areas that have been destroyed.

Scott Parkin: There was a stat from a UNICEF report in 2019 that 96 percent of water from Gaza’s soil aquifer is unfit for human consumption. And so, it seems part of the Israeli strategy here. It’s not just incidental to make Gaza make it unlivable.

Although there are a lot of stories about how the Israelis plan to have settlers move into Gaza, the way in which they’ve been doing in the West Bank and other places. But, I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how intentional a strategy is this?

Joshua Frank: I think the evidence is overwhelming that this has been the game plan from the get-go, and October 7th has been used as an excuse to destroy Gaza. I think at the highest levels of the Israeli government, they knew that they would never eliminate Hamas because Hamas is an ideology. It’s a movement. They can impact its military capabilities. They can set it back, but they’re not going to stop Hamas from spreading, and the hatred toward Israel will only be exponentially worse after this. So, I think that the intentionality of what they’re doing in Gaza and the amount of — if you want to call it a retaliation — of how disproportionate that’s been, it’s been intentional. When I wrote that piece, I think the numbers have changed somewhat since then, 29,000 air-to-surface munitions were fired. Forty percent of those were very large, unguided bombs.

Bombs like that are meant to destroy and are indiscriminate in what they destroy. Seventy percent of all homes destroyed, as I said earlier. Nearly all the hospitals are not functioning. Most of them are destroyed. Most of the schools are now destroyed.

Now they’re going after the United Nations efforts there as well. I think it’s a systemic genocide and ethnic cleansing that has been going on for over 75 years, and the attacks of October 7th, the failure of the Israeli government to respond to those, we can get into those details, too. There’s a lot of fishy stuff, of course, but I think they saw it as an opportunity, much like the U.S. saw 9/11 as an opportunity to expand in the Middle East. I think that we’ve heard these comparisons that this was Israel’s 9/11, but the reality is the reaction to this is more of an apt metaphor.

It’s important to also look at this as a nuclear conflict. Israel is nuclearly armed. We know that this is expanding regionally. Just today, they struck southern Lebanon, some Hezbollah targets there. We know what’s happening with the Houthis. Things are expanding and getting more and more dangerous as this drags on. And I don’t think there’s any turning back. And we know this: the Biden administration is totally, completely culpable. Whatever sort of pressure they’re allegedly putting on Netanyahu and the Israelis isn’t very effective. This makes you wonder if they’re putting any pressure on at all or if it’s just a political ploy. We really haven’t seen the worst of this yet.

Bob Buzzanco: Unfortunately, let me follow up, ask you a little bit of the munitions. In Vietnam, with Agent Orange and cluster bombs, there are still significant consequences that are visible.

And I know in Gaza, we’ve seen white phosphorus and cluster bombs already used. Are there other, in addition to the immediate destruction, which we’re seeing every day, which is horrific, are there any, kind of other things that may be long term?

Joshua Frank: What we don’t talk about a lot is the destruction of the buildings and what that creates as far as air quality. I compare it to the World Trade Centers, the towers that went down on 9/11, the lingering health effects on the people in that part of Manhattan, and also the impacts on air quality going forward. It was about a year, and even after 9/11, the air quality in lower Manhattan was horrible. I can’t imagine how bad it is in Gaza. We can’t measure these things right now, of course, because we don’t know exactly what’s going on. But those impacts have to be far greater. And that’s not even taking into account the leftover debris. We know that Gaza is a testing ground for Western arms manufacturers. We don’t know exactly what’s being used in some cases, but we know the impacts are horrific, and it will take decades to really not only rebuild but to understand the true toll that this is taking on the region.

We talk about the impacts of the bombs and these kinds of things. We talk about the plans for Israelis to move into Gaza. That might be a plan for some, but what are they moving into?

It is a decimated land and it’s going to take billions and billions of dollars to rebuild it to what it was before, let alone these new sort of fancy buildings on the coast. It’s a horrible situation. I think the estimates of what’s coming out of this destruction are lowball estimates. They are very conservative estimates. I think it’s much more horrific and much worse than we can even predict.

Scott Parkin: The olive trees that are ten percent of the Gaza economy. This is an example of also the Israelis trying to, destroy Palestinians to be able to have a viable economy. And so it’s in a sense, it’s also not only environmental warfare, but it’s also economic warfare. Could you talk about that?

Joshua Frank: Yeah, it’s also cultural warfare. It’s a war on the olive tree and what it represents to the Palestinians, which has a very deep history. In Palestine, since 1967, Israel has uprooted 800,000 native olive trees. These trees are not monocrops. These are forests. They have many other trees in these groves, like buckhorn, hawthorn, almond trees, pine, and fig trees. They’re ecosystems. They are home to many different types of birds: the green finch, the Eurasian jay, and other migrating birds. So these are forests that have been historically cultivated, but in the West Bank, they’ve been torn down to build settlements.

In Gaza, they’ve been destroyed often for no reason at all other than to destroy part of the economy and Palestinian culture. And the harvest season for the olives usually takes place in the fall, but that didn’t happen this year. Talking about the economy in Gaza right now seems ridiculous, right?

There is no economy; it’s gone. But before October 7th olive harvest made up about 10 percent of the entire economy of the Gaza Strip. There were thousands of farmers who harvested these olive groves. It’s a big part of their income. And a lot of them talk about not knowing if they’re ever able to go back to these areas. Secondly, what if they do go back, if those olive groves are even there? And I think it’s just — for anybody that’s even been a part of any environmental movement in the United States or in the Western world and the relationship that we have with the forests here and fighting to protect them — I think it’s really a similar feeling that Palestinians have, even on a much, much deeper level, to these olive groves. And I believe Israel knows that, I think part of them destroying those olive groves is to destroy part of that Palestinian history as well.

Bob Buzzanco: Earlier, you mentioned white phosphorus. In addition to being deadly to humans, doesn’t have an afterlife and seep into the environment?

They were using white phosphorus in Cast Lead in 2014. So, this is what they used. This is part of their arsenal.

Joshua Frank: Absolutely. It lingers for a long time. It’s linked to all kinds of bad stuff. It’s also illegal to use white phosphorus in urban areas. Talking about the war crimes that Israel has committed would take more than a podcast.

It will have great impacts. Parsing all these things out is difficult. I think once they get in there and can assess it, I’m sure it’s going to be whitewashed. Who’s going to be in there? It will be the Israeli security apparatus. And they’re not going to let in independent observers. I’m sure, especially with their efforts to kick out the U.N. now. I don’t know if we’ll ever really know the long-term effects, but we do know that white phosphorus has lingering impacts on groundwater supplies, on soil composition, and other things where it’s been used in the past.

Scott Parkin: There’s a new campaign that started here in the Bay Area called “No Fuel for Apartheid,” which is targeting Chevron., The company, since 2020, has been building an energy hub connected to gas fields in, off the coast of Gaza And also in Northern Gaza.

And I’m curious, what your thoughts are on how Western oil companies are taking advantage of this moment. And I’m wondering what your thoughts are on that.

Joshua Frank: I think for the fossil fuel industry, this is potentially an opening for them to get into the region more so than they already were. I think it’s probably more likely that we’ll see oil drilling off the coast and in the Gaza Strip before you’re going to see any building of settlements just because, obviously, it’s much easier to get in there and harvest oil than it is to build and clean out aquifers. And, of course, we know the oil industry is very good at polluting aquifers, too, so it will just make it a dead zone. I’ve seen some of the sort of overarching plans for some of these ventures, pipelines, and other things through the Gaza Strip. But I don’t know now what those look like and what’s going to happen. And I think there’s probably a lot of debate about that, too.

I think that complicates the picture a little bit, and I think that going back to what I was talking about earlier, I do think that there has been some pushback about these things. So, the talk has been muted about those long-term plans, but it’s definitely a part of it.

Bob Buzzanco: I didn’t read the entire ICJ complaint. Were any of these kinds of environmental issues brought up in the charges against Israel? Because during the Vietnam War, ecocide was not brought up.

Joshua Frank: Yeah, ecocide was not brought up. But some of the impacts, I think, of the ecocide that are related were addressed. Eighty-five percent of the population of Gaza, probably more now, is facing starvation. Those sorts of things are part of that environmental impact and part of destroying agricultural land. Gazans who are facing starvation now, they can’t go back to a place that has food because there’s nowhere to grow food. There’s no access to food, which forces them to leave Gaza, which is a big part of the plan and as we’ve seen with some of the prominent voices on social media in Gaza, like Motaz, who had something like 17 million followers on Instagram, more than President Biden. He exited, he got out, and they wanted him out of there, and part of that was obviously a threat to his life, and he’s not the only journalist. We know the war on journalists there, but I think part of that is because the rest of it’s not livable, right?

It’s enticing to leave, to save your own life, and I think that the state that we’re in right now, and that they’re in, especially in the south, is that there’s nowhere to go, being forced into the desert and the Sinai. Unfortunately, this will start looking good for them.

Scott Parkin: Are they doing anything like this in the West Bank or any other Palestinian areas?

Joshua Frank: We do know in the West Bank, there’s been horrific settler violence. The most vulnerable areas of the West Bank are in the southern part. And those are the areas where there are, I don’t want to say, nomadic peoples, but people that still live off the lands that herd sheep and other things. So, they are prime targets for settler violence.

We know olive groves in the West Bank continue to be burned and ripped up and sometimes scorched in the name of security, other times to build road, walls, and to build new settlements. It is still very similar to what’s happened in Gaza over the years; it’s happening now.

Today, in the West Bank, they live under a completely different sort of military occupation than Gaza did before October 7th. They’re going through security checkpoints day in and day out, living in a segregated region of apartheid, so getting cut off from their agricultural land, those sorts of things have happened and are continuing to happen as well.

Bob Buzzanco: About public health, you’ve already talked about after what, four months now how serious it is. Respiratory illnesses and diarrhea, children are dying. What’s, and that’s only going to get worse, right?

Joshua Frank: I know it’s going to get worse as they make it harder and harder for medical teams to get in there and help them.

Part of defunding the efforts of UNRWA is to make those matters even worse. Some of the only functioning medical facilities in Gaza right now are run by the U.N. The doctors are coming out of that and talking about their experiences there and how horrible they are.

That’s only going to worsen, which is another reason for them to leave. I think that’s part of the plan. They’ve given some estimates of asthma and what’s happening. I think a lot of that had to do with the detonation of buildings, from the dust in the lingering sort of toxins in the air.

It’s something like 10 percent of Gazans are now dealing with asthma that weren’t prior to October 7th. Of course, diarrhea is rampant. Other waterborne illnesses are going crazy. It’s a total catastrophe. And it is a preventable one, obviously, but we’re so far along now, and I don’t think we even really have a true understanding of how bad the situation is there on a public health level.

Similar to evaluating sort of the environmental assessment later on — the numbers of those that are going to develop long-term severe impacts, not to mention mental health, are going to be exponential.

Bob Buzzanco: It was years later in Vietnam, you still have entire orphanages for Agent Orange babies and things like that without arms. It’s like it’s, yeah, same in Iraq and, of course, on another, on the human health side as well.

Joshua Frank: We already know the death toll and how high it potentially is, but how many others are amputees or coming out of this with other ailments? Unfathomable really. And all those bodies in the rubble, you can’t count because they’re buried?

Scott Parkin: Are there any agencies or institutions which are talking about the sort of environmental destruction being weaponized by the Israelis at this point? Or is it? The dust will settle, and then we will start talking about the long-term health effects of some of this environmental destruction.

Joshua Frank: Historically, when we look at Kuwait and the burning of oil fields, and these sorts of things like the impacts of depleted uranium on soldiers that were cleaning up things, cleaning up tanks in the battlefield in Iraq, a lot of these studies come out long after the fact. These are epidemiological studies. In some cases, sometimes they’re long studies because a lot of the impacts linger and don’t show up until years later. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of resources. And historically, in this country, at least, and in Britain as well, a lot of those studies aren’t funded properly, or they lose funding, and it’s hard to track these people. They get lost in the system. I’m talking about soldiers in this case. People who are being impacted in Gaza as well are Israeli soldiers, too, and a lot of them are young. It’s really impossible to track some of this stuff right now because it’s so fluid.

And I don’t think that the governments have an incentive. Israel doesn’t have an incentive to study this because it doesn’t bode well for them. The United Nations can keep an eye on this, and they do monitor things, but they can only do as much as they’re allowed to, and we know Israel is not going to allow them to do what they need to do in order to get a full picture of what’s happening.

Scott Parkin: My other question is, what sort of response have you gotten from telling this story? I think Kate Aronoff had a story about the climate environment around Chevron last fall in the new Republic. But I haven’t actually seen too much reporting on this. I’m curious about the sort of response you’ve been getting.

Joshua Frank: It’s made the rounds. I’ve talked to a lot of people about it. And I think it’s been in the conversation. It just hasn’t been maybe put together in a way where it’s all there and tied into the genocide itself.

Because the human toll is just so horrific, that becomes the focus. And so trying to tie that in and looking at it as this more complex thing that’s happening and especially going forward.

Right now, stopping the bombing of Gaza, not only because we obviously want to save lives first and foremost, but because we need to ensure that this destruction stops for environmental impact reasons as well.

Scott Parkin: I’m going to shift topics a little bit. It’s still going to be around Gaza, but it’s going to be a little bit about some things that have been happening in the U. S. Just last week, it turns out that an assistant district attorney in San Francisco, Michael Menesini, sent off some emails to your publication Counterpunch. He had some choice words for Counterpunch because published quite a quite a few articles around the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. I’m wondering if you could just maybe just fill us in on that a little bit as well.

Joshua Frank: I think the first email we received from him was in late January. Apparently, he was on our email list and has been receiving our little newsletter updates that we send out.

Scott Parkin: Is he a donor?

Joshua Frank: [Laughs] I don’t believe he’s a donor, and he won’t be anymore. Maybe some settlement will come out of this. I think that first email, he gave us the regular spiel that we’re anti-semitic because we’re criticizing Israel. Everything we publish is garbage because we can’t be taken seriously, blah, blah, blah.

I think what was startling was that he sent it from his work email address, which is a government email address. We’re used to nut jobs sending us stuff, of course, death threats and other things too, especially since October 7th, even our site was attacked right after October 7th, because we were immediately trying to stop the incursion into Gaza.

We’re used to this stuff, but coming from an Assistant District Attorney in San Francisco was alarming. And we talked to a lawyer after that one was sent to us. And we just thought we’d sit and wait and see what happened next. Fast forward a couple of weeks, and he sent another email to us.

And this time, he repeated some pretty horrible anti-Arab rhetoric, and so at that point, I thought, what’s the best way to push back against this guy, and I decided to post his emails to make them public. I thought about writing an article about it, but I said, “let’s just let social media do its thing.” I don’t have the time for this. He’s not worth my time, but it did get picked up in the San Francisco Standard, which did a pretty good piece on him. And in doing so, I think, put pressure on the DA’s office to investigate him. I don’t know where that stands now with him.

He is not part of the team that’s prosecuting the Bay Bridge 78. Those that shut down the Bay Bridge. But the office is, and so I think it shows that the anti-Arab sentiment within the DA’s office in San Francisco is pretty strong. If this guy feels like he can send off an email from his public government account.

The guy was also the vice mayor of Martinez. He’d been in the public life for a while, you’d think he would have some scruples or at least send us some hate mail from his personal email account, right?

So, we’ll see what happens. I think that he needs to be removed from his post. He certainly shouldn’t be on any cases that involve hate crimes, free speech, or protests of any sort. I think his job is done there, and I think he should retire. So, hopefully, there’ll be some pressure on him to do that.

Bob Buzzanco: It says a lot about the coastal elites to, in San Francisco, you have this guy and Pelosi saying the FBI should start surveilling people, guidance, crowds, and I started thinking about it too. It’s not just that he has these sentiments, right?

Joshua Frank: A lot of people have them, but few share them publicly. He did. In this case, he sent it to us. But I think it was also an attempt to silence a media organization, getting an email from a prosecutor’s office calling us out for something that they don’t agree with. That’s a pretty scary precedent. And one that I think, depending on what happens in November, obviously it could get worse as we go forward, these crackdowns on free speech. But I think that this is a warning shot in some ways.

Bob Buzzanco: People have been fired for tweeting sympathy for Palestinians consistently for the last four months.

Joshua Frank: I will say the response once those emails were made public has been nothing but supportive of CounterPunch. And I think he’s feeling the pressure for sure, and I don’t believe we’ll be hearing from him anytime soon.

Scott Parkin: It’s interesting how they’re allowed to get away with this to have anti-Arab sentiment is one thing, but then being able to go public with it on your institution server or whatever.

Joshua Frank: I think that anti-Arab sentiment is, it’s always been there, but it’s been heightened ever since 9/11. I think that there’s a lot of evidence that this type of anti-Arab sentiment in DA’s offices and prosecutors and the FBI and others are part of their training from day one, and we’re seeing that now 20, whatever, 23 years later, that it’s still very prevalent there.

That’s frightening. I think a lot about the hate crimes against Palestinian activists and others and how when it happens. — itt happened, Bob, right? It happened in Houston a couple of weeks ago, right? — how if  that were a Jewish activist, a Zionist, I should say, it would be front-page news in New York Times, but what happened in Vermont and, since they’re Palestinian, since they’re Arab since they hold sentiments that aren’t popular with the elite — the news falls off the radar. And that’s unfortunate, but I think that’s part of this bigger problem in our society as well, is dehumanizing Palestinians and dehumanizing those of us who stand up for Palestinian rights. And we’re seeing that crack down on campuses, of course, and all over the place.

Bob Buzzanco: Yeah, several universities have banned groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine.

Meanwhile, the public has turned against this war. We have cities all across the country passing resolutions and ceasefire resolutions because the heat is on and the public is out.

Scott Parkin: Including San Francisco, by the way.

Joshua Frank: Yeah, including San Francisco, and then Chicago, down here in Long Beach, all over the place. So meanwhile, the tide has shifted. And as horrible as it is, and not knowing what the future holds for Palestinians — never in the existence of the state of Israel has there been this much scrutiny of what they’re doing on an international scale day in and day out, documented on social media, documented in the news.

Even the New York Times has to cover this stuff. I try to hold on to that. I try to hold on to the fact that there’s a great opportunity for a new anti-war movement. I don’t think we’re there yet. I’m very inspired by Jewish Voice for Peace and other anti-Zionists in the Jewish community, as well as our rank-and-file antiwar folks.

We have a big opportunity to push back against the U.S. empire, and the apparatus that we support in Israel is a big part of that. And so I think there’s just a really great opportunity to move this forward, and that inspires me despite the horror that we’re witnessing.

Scott Parkin: Yeah, I completely agree with that. And, speaking of the Bay Bridge action, they did a blockade on the Golden Gate Bridge this morning. I saw that. Yeah. And in response to the Israelis bombing of Rafah.

Joshua Frank: We know the DA’s office will be under scrutiny now if they’re going to prosecute anybody.

Scott Parkin: Hopefully they’ll keep that in mind. I only have one question left, which is actually a little bit unrelated.

Bob Buzzanco: Just a great article. I think I’ve studied wars my whole life. And this is one element that I think is not really covered there. I call it ecocide, but you see this in Korea, just the consequence of the long-term impact of unexploded bombing, unexploded bombs, and things like that. So, this is important to get out using food and water as a weapon.

Joshua Frank: In every genocide, this sort of ecocide has been documented, a lot of these elements have been in place.

Bob Buzzanco: I was teaching the other day about the origins of World War One and the British blockade, which in 1914 was a violation of international law, so it’s been over 100 years, and the U.S. is just, clearly objectively rejected international norms.

Joshua Frank: Absolutely.

Scott Parkin: My last question actually is unrelated to a little more of an environment/climate question, and because you’re based in Southern California, we’ve been seeing these “atmospheric rivers” all over the state. Southern California, particularly the Los Angeles area where you are, is going to hit particularly hard.

I’ve actually seen some posts from you with some pretty with the river, Almost looking like it was overflowing if it wasn’t, and I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts on that since it’s also your beat as well.

Joshua Frank: I think what we’re witnessing here is we’re living in a world of extremes. We know that climate change is impacting so many different things in so many ways, but one of the things that we now know for sure, I think, is that these crazy weather events are going to happen.

Maybe not more often, but when they do happen, they’re going to be more ferocious, and that’s certainly the case with hurricanes. I think in the case of the dry spells that we’re going to experience, droughts, they’re going to be more extreme. And then cases like the atmospheric river that just happened down here were more extreme. This is our new norm. Unfortunately, this probably sets back the idea of rewilding the L.A. River in some ways because now people are afraid of flooding. The flood infrastructure here did hold, but will it in the future? If we get hit back-to-back, the impacts of atmospheric rivers or storms down here could be much greater. We have another one coming. I don’t know if it’s an atmospheric river, but I think we’re expecting a couple more inches this weekend.

The ground is saturated. There is nowhere for the water to go. Hillsides are collapsing. A lot of the hills in and around L.A. are at great risk. They’re having to evacuate some of the canyons because they’re afraid of mud, debris, and flow. Of course, in Southern California, as Mike Davis wrote about so eloquently in documenting the ecological disasters that we face, he was very prescient. He predicted that we’re going to be living in a time when these things become more exacerbated. We’re in the middle of it right now. If we want to understand all of this, I think we go back and read Ecology of Fear and see what we’re in for.

Scott Parkin: Josh, it’s been great talking to you again today.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bob Buzzanco - Scott Parkin.

Exonerated for the Elderly Mother and Daughter Murders

Mr. Manning was unjustly condemned to death for two separate double murders and has been exonerated of the 1993, case of murdering an elderly mother and daughter in Starkville, Mississippi. The Mississippi Supreme Court recognized vital evidence was hidden, showing that the state’s main witness lied for self-benefit.

The State’s Case against Willie Manning

Two college students, Tiffany Miller and Jon Steckler were found murdered on December 11, 1992. Four months later, in April of 1993, Manning became a primary suspect. The Oktibbeha County Mississippi Circuit Court appointed post-conviction lawyers twice. Both times the attorneys withdrew because they were not familiar with state post-conviction and federal habeas corpus practices. Meanwhile, an exceptionally experienced attorney in post-conviction and federal habeas corpus practice had the desire to represent Mr. Manning, and the circuit court of Oktibbeha County Mississippi ignored the attorney’s motion.

In the parking lot of an apartment building, Tiffany Miller’s vehicle was discovered double-parked. The car was a two-seater and evidence that Jon Steckler had been run over was clear from his blood found underneath the vehicle.  Sheriff Dolph Bryan assumed a connection between the murders and a previous car break-in. Bryan’s theory lacked concrete evidence as he believed the murder victims interrupted a theft in progress from John Wise’s car burglary. The break-in occurred at a fraternity house parking lot on the campus of Mississippi State University. The burglarized car belonged to Wise, who reported missing items which included a leather jacket, a portable CD player, and a brass restroom token. Some of the local businesses used brass tokens for entering their restrooms, and one was found near the murder victims, about five miles from the house Willie lived in with his mother. John Wise declared that the discovered coin exhibited a shiny appearance, contrasting with his own, which did not.

The sheriff created a scenario of the perpetrator forcing Miller and Steckler into Miller’s car, with Tiffany Miller sitting on Willie Manning’s lap and Jon Steckler driving. After reaching the destination, the sheriff surmised that the victims were forced out of Miller’s car and shot, after which the murderer drove the car to an apartment complex and abandoned it. Sheriff Dolph Bryan orchestrated this entire crime scene without physical evidence or witnesses.

This investigation resulted in Manning’s conviction, which was partially based on the discovery of a hair fragment belonging to a Black individual in Miller’s car. The hair fragment was admitted as evidence, and as a result, the sheriff and prosecutor implied Mr. Manning’s presence in the vehicle. The Department of Justice has acknowledged that the FBI’s hair analysis testimony at Manning’s trial was unreliable and false.  Mr. Manning is actively contesting his conviction of the double homicide.

Fabricated Testimonies and Sheriff Dolph Bryan

The case against Willie Manning is fundamentally weak, as it’s characterized by speculative assumptions from Sheriff Bryan, fabricated testimonies, and questionable forensic analysis, including the use of discredited hair follicle science. Willie Manning was convicted on jailhouse informant testimony made by Earl Jordan, Frank Parker, and Renee Hathorn. Each of the sheriff’s informants was facing prison time for criminal charges. Every jailhouse informant gave fabricated testimonies in return for reduced sentences or total exoneration, with two of them receiving financial rewards.

According to Earl Jordan’s affidavit, the sheriff indirectly made it clear that he would assist Jordan with his habitual offender charges in exchange for helping him with Manning. The sheriff and Jordan met four or five times and Jordan’s testimony was fabricated under the sheriff’s influence. In exchange, Jordan received some reward money and a 3-year sentence reduced to time served. Jordan submitted an affidavit because Dolph Bryan was no longer the sheriff. Bryan served as sheriff of Oktibbeha County from 1976-2012.

Similarly, Frank Parker’s testimony included claims of overhearing Manning confess to a cellmate about disposing of a gun and admitting to the murders. An affidavit from Willie’s cellmate challenges the credibility of this statement. Parker also stated he was fleeing charges in Texas and turned himself in at the jail in Mississippi.

Parker’s uncle, who housed Frank for over a decade, informed law enforcement about his nephew’s longstanding dishonesty. He recounted an incident where, during their absence, Frank cleared out their house and pawned their valuables. Frank’s uncle filed charges against him and subsequently informed law enforcement in Oktibbeha County that he would not consider Frank as a witness in any case, due to his lack of trustworthiness.

Renee Hathorn was Willie’s girlfriend at the time and her role was particularly pivotal. Hathorn testified against Manning for the defense. In an affidavit, she states that Sheriff Dolph Bryan pressured her into getting Willie to confess to the murders of Steckler and Miller. He never did, he consistently maintained his innocence. She also visited with Willie in his jail cell at night from time to time, while wearing a wire. Sheriff Dolph Bryan also met with her to discuss and rehearse her trial testimony. Before testifying during the trial, the sheriff gave her money, paid her bills sometimes, and also paid for some furniture. He additionally picked her up and purchased food from a fast food restaurant. Hathorn was facing from 8-10 years in prison and additional years on parole for a total of 33 bad checks in Oktibbeha and Lowndes Counties. She additionally states that she accrued bad check charges in Macon, Clay, and Jackson counties. She owed more than $10,000 in fraudulent checks and court fees. All of this was erased in exchange for her fabricated testimony. Additionally, she received $17,500 in reward money.

No Witnesses, Physical Evidence, DNA, Fingerprints or Fibers

The forensic analysis of hair by the FBI failed to conclusively establish a match between the hair discovered in the vehicle, where two students from Mississippi State were allegedly apprehended, and Willie Jerome Manning. The initial classification of the hair as originating from a Black individual was a critical factor in implicating Mr. Manning in the murder. There is an absence of definitive physical evidence connecting Manning to the crime. There are no witnesses, fingerprints, DNA, or blood, and there are not any fibers. The prosecution’s argument hinged primarily on the testimony of prison informants and a hair that the FBI initially claimed was consistent with a Black person. However, the FBI later withdrew this claim, admitting that such a conclusion surpasses the scientific validity of hair analysis, thereby rendering it unreliable and scientifically unsound.  Mr. Manning underwent trial, was found guilty, and subsequently sentenced to death row, based on contrived testimonies from jailhouse informants, prepared and orchestrated by Sheriff Dolph Bryan.

The prosecution in Willie Manning’s case relied on several key pieces of fabricated evidence. Testimonies from informants such as Earl Jordan and Frank Parker, who later admitted their statements were false and put them under pressure in exchange for wiping their criminal slates clean.

The role of the prosecutor was crucial in assembling and presenting these elements as part of the case against Manning. The prosecution’s case against Mr. Manning included forensic evidence, deemed unreliable. An expert asserted that bullets recovered from a tree in Manning’s yard were discharged from the same firearm used in the students’ murder, claiming this to the exclusion of all other firearms globally. However, current forensic science discredits such bullet comparisons as invalid. Mr. Manning has submitted a new petition to the Mississippi Supreme Court to contest his convictions in this case. Should this petition be rejected, it could lead to the court setting an execution date for him.

This article was composed using information sourced from the following petition:

Willie Jerome Manning, Petitioner, v. State of Mississippi, Respondent. In The Supreme Court of Mississippi, No. 2023-DR-01076. Motion for Leave to File Successive Petition for Post-Conviction Relief. Attorneys: Krissy C. Nobile, Robert S. Mink, Sr., David P. Voisin,  Clocked: September 29, 2023, 19:24:16.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Nancy Lockhart, M.J..

Photograph Source: MICHAEL VADON – CC BY-SA 4.0

The centrist New York Times columnist Frank Bruni ought to be commended, I suppose, for a recent commentary about the existential danger posed by Donald Trump. “It’s Not the Economy,”  Bruni’s opinion piece is titled, “It’s the Fascism.”

“Trump,” Bruni write, “has been saying, doing and contemplating some especially terrifying things lately.” Bruni provides a decent summary of some of those frightening things:

‘he sent out his Thanksgiving message…[in which] he roasted his perceived enemies, presenting a platter of slurs with all the semantic trimmings: ‘Radical Left Lunatics,’ ‘Psycho,’ ‘Marxists,’ ‘Communists.’…Just two weeks earlier, for Veterans Day, he traded inspiration for fulmination in a speech in New Hampshire, promising to ‘root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.’ Like vermin! And the month before that, he said that undocumented immigrants were ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’…His bastard music is …paired with a ‘series of plans by Mr. Trump and his allies that would upend core elements of American governance, democracy, foreign policy and the rule of law if he regained the White House,’….Those plans include the use of military funds for huge detention camps for undocumented immigrants, a Justice Department turned into a personal revenge force and ideological litmus tests for federal employees to ensure maximal sycophancy.”

Here Bruni might have added Trump’s recent call for the extra-judicial execution of suspected shoplifters, Trump’s intimidation of witnesses and legal personnel involved in his many indictments, Trump’s promise to invade Mexico, Trump’s suggestion that his former Joint Chiefs of Staff  should be executed, and Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act on the day of his next inauguration.

The Republican Party, Bruni notes, is “hostage” to Trump’s “extremism” with none of Trump’s serious Republican rivals remotely willing to call out  the Trump menace since “they prioritize coddling his supporters and gaining power over standing up for the rule of law and the integrity of democracy.” As Bruni correctly observes, the notion that Trumpism can be contained by the Republican Party is now a quaint fantasy.

The conclusion that Trump poses an existential menace to the American republic, Bruni rightly argues, “isn’t Trump derangement syndrome. It’s [a] straightforward observation” that makes “the price of eggs and gas” look like a secondary concern.

There’s some harsh and important truth here, but there are four key problems with Bruni’s column. First,  it’s not clear what Bruni means by “fascism.” The word appears only in his title and is nowhere to be found in his column’s text. Let me offer the following useful definition from the website of the organization Refuse Fascism, which was founded in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election:

RefuseFascism.org exposes, analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in this country. Seventy-four million people voted for Trump in 2020. The Republi-fascist Party has been purged of dissenting voices. The mass fascist movement has hardened in the wake of their January 6 coup attempt. Fascist initiatives around restricting voting, immigration and abortion rapidly advance in statehouses across the country. The election of Biden has not eliminated the danger, it has only bought some time…Fascism is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Once in power, fascism’s defining feature is the essential elimination of the rule of law and democratic and civil rights. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’ Truth is obliterated and fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build their movement and consolidate power.

Trump, Trumpism, and the Trump-captive Republican Party check all these and more definitional boxes marking them as fascist.

Second, it is clear from Bruni’s column that the only way he can imagine for us to stop the Amerikaner[1] fascist menace is for people to vote for Joe Biden and other corporate-imperialist Democrats in 2024. He just wants Biden and his party to move from “it’s the economy” to “it’s the fascism.”

That is horribly inadequate. RefuseFascism.org is on point (again) on this:

“The election of Biden has not eliminated the danger, it has only bought some time…The Democratic Party will not stop this nightmare. Trump, fascist Fox News, and the Republi-fascist Party have branded them as enemies and ‘traitors.’ Yet, the Democratic Party will consistently pull to try to work with, conciliate with and collaborate with them. There can be no reconciliation with fascism except on the terms of the fascists. Fascism must be resolutely opposed.”

Fascism and the conditions that give rise to it, which include the underlying US capitalist system and imperial order, must be “resolutely opposed” in the streets, public squares, and across the broad sociopolitical and ideological terrain.  And that is something the Democrats will simply not do.  Their Weimar party is an agent of appeasement that is failing on its own electoral terrain: the demented fascist maniac Trump is polling well ahead of the bumbling corporate-imperialist “Genocide Joe” Biden in all but one of the handful of contested states that determine US presidential elections under the archaic US Electoral College system.

Third, what “American democracy” is Bruni talking about, really? The United States’ political system is ruled by two rotten political parties, both captive and allegiant to the wealthy capitalist Few. Public opinion is practically irrelevant to the making of policy on one key issue after another, under the nation’s oxymoronic “capitalist democracy.” The nation’s constant claim to be a “one person one vote democracy” and even “the greatest democracy the world has ever seen” is mocked by basic empirical studies showing that majority US sentiments are consistently trumped by concentrated US wealth and power. The nation’s “democracy” claims are nullified also by its continued adherence to an ancient 18th-century slaveowners’ Constitution that vastly overrepresents its most reactionary and hateful elements – a de facto Minority Rule charter and structure that massively inflate the power of revanchist interests determined to roll back every basic civil, human, social, and environmental right won through mass popular struggle in modern times. It’s hard to expect millions to stand up for popular self-governance when the underlying social order has long rendered inauthentic their country’s egalitarian and democratic boasts.

Fourth, where has Bruni been for the last eight years?! His column contains the following bizarre statement on Trump’s Republican primary rivals: “They’re no more eager to take on Trump the budding fascist than they are to take on Trump the practiced fantasist…”

A “budding fascist”? Seriously? That’s like saying that Taylor Swift is a popular new voice on the music scene or that Steph Curry is an emerging new basketball star! Smart people within and beyond the intellectual class – including Iowa City high school students with whom I helped occupy Interstate 80’s eastbound lanes after Trump’s collegiate election – had Trump quite properly pegged as a fascist in 2015 and 2016.  Among many examples, one that has always stood out for me is the following passage from Adam Gopnik (a centrist liberal of whom I am no particular fan) at The New Yorker in May of 2016:

There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word ‘fascist.’ …his personality and his program belong exclusively to the same dark strain of modern politics: an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government…is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and ‘success.’… The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history (“Going There With Donald Trump,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2016, emphasis added).

For more citations of early and proper identification of Trump and Trumpism as fascist, please see Chapter 2, titled “The Fascist Wolf Defined and Foretold,” in my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America. See the following chapter, “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-21” for a dizzying/depressing account of the nearly countless number of ways in which Trump showed himself to be a fascist as US president.

Bruni’s column is bizarrely denialist about Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump’s fascism prior to his final presidential  days (January 6^th and all that) and post-presidency. Trump before that is for Bruni a clownish buffoon prone to “puerile rants, outlandish provocations and petty-dictator diatribes” in a time “when Trump’s darkest comments and direst vows could be dismissed as perverse performance art — as huffing and puffing that wouldn’t and couldn’t amount to all that much.”

Please.  Plenty of us with a serious historical understanding and definition of fascism never fell for that foolish dismissal and denial, which seemed very much like something out of the head-in- the-sand idiocy mocked in Sinclar Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. The historian  Timothy Snyder (another centrist “liberal” and imperialist of whom I am no fan) was easily able to predict in March of 2017 that the fascist Trump’s first term would culminate in an attempted coup.

It’s good, I suppose that Bruni can say and write “the F-word” in 2023, but his strangely time-delayed identification of the menace in connection with Trump is I think intimately related to his lack of a serious definition of Gopnik’s “dark strain in modern politics” and to his lack of any serious notion of how to stop Amerikan fascism beyond telling people to vote for the dismal imperialist “Genocide Joe” Biden.

Endnote

1. As far as I am aware, I am the inventor of the term “Amerikaner” in left political discourse. It is a play on the name of the white Dutch-Anglo minority that imposed a regime of savage Third World fascist regime of racial apartheid and white minority rule on South Africa during the 19^th and 20^th Centuries. Like the South African Afrikaners, I maintain, the US hard-core Trumpist-Amerkaner base and the American white nationalist movement is heir to an earlier history of genocidal and imperialist white settlement, opposed to majority rule democracy, and committed to the imposition of racial and ethnic apartheid and inequality. White fears of coming minority status (projected by 2050) in the increasingly non-white United States are one aspect of the parallel, reflected in the adoption of the term by certain parts of the nation’s fascistic alt-right.

The post Frank Bruni  Discovers Donald Trump’s “Budding” Fascism…in the Late Fall of 2023! appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

Veteran national security reporter James Risen joins us for an in-depth look at his new book, The Last Honest Man, about the work of Senator Frank Church to rein in the FBI, CIA and other agencies after the Vietnam War, Watergate and other fiascos had shaken the public’s trust in the U.S. government. Church, a Democrat, chaired a Senate committee that in 1975 began investigating the intelligence community and uncovered numerous abuses, including assassination plots and widespread domestic surveillance. Risen’s book also includes new details about Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s previously unknown role in the work of the committee. “The Church Committee, I think, is probably the most important congressional investigation in modern American history,” says Risen, who says it marked a “before and after” in U.S. national security policy and helped to limit abuses by the government in the decades that followed.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Intercepted.

Pisces Moon is couched as a memoir of Valentine’s journey to Southeast Asia in the early 1990s. His book, The Phoenix Program, the best book on the subject I’ve ever read, had caught the eye of The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Valentine was ‘hired’as a consultant to a documentary series the BBC was making about the CIA’s activities in South Vietnam. However, other consultants on the project more sympathetic to the crimes of the CIA such as John Ranelagh, objected to Valentine’s presence and once he arrived in Southeast Asia, he received little support from the feckless BBC; this even though he ‘muled’ ten grand to the BBC’s rep in Vietnam.

Largely left high and dry by the BBC, Valentine links up with locals and ex-pats alike and recalls his adventures including being briefly detained in Vietnam. The memoir/travel framework serves as a contemporary grounding for Valentine’s impeccable research. And his major reason for traveling to Indo-China, to interview three retired CIA station chiefs living in Thailand, Anthony Poshepny, John Shirley and William Young, do produce some revelatory results.

Valentine is a consummate researcher and interviewer with an amazing ability to get criminals to speak openly about their crimes. In fact, as I have observed over the years — confirmed by Valentine — these miscreants even, or especially, at the highest levels of the clandestine world like to brag about their international felonies.

Valentine, to this purpose, reprises Kathy Kadane’s reporting in the New York Times, concerning the slaughter of 900,000 Indonesians after the US mastered coup against Sukarno. Kadane told me personally that two CIA directors, William Colby and Richard Helms, had literally bragged about their parts in the wholesale butchery of nearly a million people. The same with Robert J. Martens, political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, who provided lists of ‘communists’ to the Indonesian military and the CIA’s Deputy Station Chief in Jakarta, Joseph Lazarsky. After a couple or three of scotches and a pretty face, these psychos probably thought this turned Kadane on, as these homicidal maniacs swaggered through their tales of mass murder. Valentine describes Bill Young as being “relatively open and held little back”.

So, in agreement with anthropologist Cora Du Bois, that there are cultural types, Valentine too describes the CIA as being made up of “criminal, sociopathic (often psychopathic), capitalist, ultraconservative, racist, sexist and fascist.” As Lenny Bruce joked apropos the Richard Daley Chicago Democratic Machine, “They’re so corrupt it’s thrilling”.

Valentine’s ability to make murderous thugs confess their crimes along with his deep research makes for an exhilarating brew. And Pisces Moon is no exception. Whether it’s John Muldoon, Richard Secord, Tom Clines or The Blond Ghost, Ted Shackley, Valentine has interviewed them all. And that takes guts.

I’m reminded of the way John Pilger cringed in fear when Duane ‘Dewey’ Clarridge, drunk as a skunk and reeking violence, challenged him over the number of Chileans the US had proxy murdered after the Salvador Allende coup during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. I don’t know if it’s his excellent preparation or because Doug looks so goddamn straight, which makes these black bag felons spill the beans. But Valentine has shown uncommon courage and composure taking them on as well as a detailed knowledge which demonstrates to them he is a serious interlocutor and not another media hack.

And as a result, Valentine in Pisces Moon moves seamlessly from facts culled from his interviews to his deep research into the background, the historical context where the new information fits in like pieces of a historically credible conspiratorial puzzle. As he states on page 142 of Pisces Moon, “My visits to Udon, Chiang Mai, Phuket and Bangkok provide me now with a means to chart the extent of CIA operations and drug trafficking in Southeast Asia. What follows is a summary of the origins of that apparatus, which will help put my interviews with Poshepny, Young and Shirley in perspective.” Then follows one of many historical accounts too rich in detail and source material to reprise here.

For me, the headlong plunge into the historical data is the most exciting part of this excellent book. And for anyone familiar with the material, Pisces Moon is an essential update. All the old perps are here from Vang Pao to Bill Casey, Lucien Conein to Paul Hellilwell, Ed Lansdale to Donald Gregg, Frank Nugen to Michael Hand, George White to Sidney Gottlieb etc. But as Valentine brilliantly demonstrates, the devil is in the details and the details in their own unique sociopathic way are exhilarating. Nobody writes more vivid, in your face historical reportage than Valentine.

For example, here’s bit of Valentine on the Hmong tribesmen and Vang Pao:

CIA case officers were also busy recruiting hilltribe chiefs with no loyalty to the indigenous lowland Laotians. Vang Pao, military commander of the Hmong tribe that had migrated from China in the 18^th century and settle on mountain tops in northeast Laos, was by far the most important. Not only were the Hmong outsiders, but Pao had proved himself as a soldier while fighting for the French at Dien Bien Phu, where the French made there last stand before turning Vietnam over to the Vietnamese in 1954. Located just inside Vietnam some 250 winding miles north to Luang Prabang, Dien Bien Phu was important for having been the center of the French opium trade since 1841. Notably, the French had relied on the Hmong in the surrounding mountains for their opium supply, not to the lowland White Thais who had inhabited the region for over a thousand years.

Or this corruption titbit about Deputy Director of the OSS in China, Willis Bird and Director of OSS ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan:

Central in the CIA’s underworld was Willis Bird, who surfaced after the war [WWII] in Manila where, on behalf of outgoing OSS Director William Donovan, he managed the disposal of military surplus worth hundreds of millions of dollars. As OSS officer Oliver Caldwell observed, ‘It became wise for the colonel [e.g. Bird] to leave the Philippines without stopping over in Washington. The last I heard of him, he was living in Thailand with a bevy of beautiful Thai girls.’

There has been much excellent detailed reporting on the connection between the CIA and the international drug trade from Alfred J. McCoy’s groundbreaking Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, to Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press; to Peter Dale Scott’s Cocaine Politics and most recently Aaron Good’s primer for the grandchildren, American Exception: Empire & the Deep State.

All of Valentine’s books including Pisces Moon abide in the pantheon of works on this most crucial topic. And all of these works expose the rot of American imperialism and its clandestine services, which, on the whole, helps explain America’s current decline. The US Evil Empire is on the wane and no doubt this is in large part a result of the institutionalized murder, theft and perfidy that are at the heart of US foreign policy. With the rise of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its commitment to peaceful development, the international community has caught on to such US militarily destabilizing efforts like Africom.

But this decline is, also, in no small part due to the efforts of courageous historians like Douglas Valentine and books like Pisces Moon. On page 213 of Pisces Moon, Valentine quotes William Burroughs calling the present collapse of US hegemony, “the backlash and bad karma of empire”.

In 1584, in the age of Elizabethan piracy and Spanish conquest, Giordano Bruno in his La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper, 1584) trumps Burroughs remark by 400 years. Bruno prophecies the future decline of the West in terms of the Age of Discovery and European Imperialism:

The helmsmen of explorations have discovered how to disturb the peace of others, to profane the guardian spirits of their countries, to mix what prudent nature has separated, to redouble men’s desires by commerce, to add the vices of one people to those of the other, to propagate new follies by force and set up unheard-of lunacies where they did not exist before, and finally to give out the stronger as the wiser. They have shown men new ways, new instruments, and new arts by which to tyrannize over and assassinate one another. Thanks to such deeds, a time will come when other peoples, having learned from the injuries they suffered, will know how and be able, as circumstances change, to pay back to us, in similar forms or worse ones, the consequences of these pernicious inventions.

Bad ‘karma’ indeed. And Douglas Valentine is one of our best chroniclers of this grand ‘karmic’ collapse. Pisces Moon gives ample context to the US’s moral, ethical and material tumble. It is an essential read.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Carlo Parcelli.

We speak with Ugandan LGBTQ activist Frank Mugisha about a draconian new anti-gay bill the country is on the verge of imposing, which makes it a crime to identify as queer, considers all same-sex conduct to be nonconsensual, and even allows for the death penalty in certain cases. Both the Biden administration and the U.N. secretary-general are urging Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni not to sign the bill into law. Mugisha says anti-LGBTQ measures in Uganda reflect the legacy of British colonialism, which introduced anti-sodomy laws across Africa, as well as the influence of the U.S. religious right. “The homophobia and transphobia we are seeing toward queer and trans people in Uganda is from the West,” says Mugisha, Uganda’s most prominent gay rights activist, who could face decades in prison for “promotion” of homosexuality under the new legislation.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Twenty years on, former US President George W. Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a foreign country but the regional and global cataclysm consequential to it, remain at large. Since then, Bush has taken to painting; Blair and Howard have preferred to sell gobbets of alleged wisdom on the lecture circuit.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US-led Coalition of the Willing was a model exercise of maligning the very international system of rules Washington, London and Canberra speak of when condemning their latest assortment of international villains. It recalled those sombre words of the International Military Tribunal, delivered at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946: “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

The invasion of Iraq defied the UN Security Council as the sole arbiter on whether the use of force would be necessary to combat a genuine threat to international peace and security. It breached the UN Charter. It encouraged instances of horrendous mendacity (those stubbornly spectral weapons of mass destruction) and the inflation of threats supposedly posed by the regime of Saddam Hussein.

This included the unforgettable British contribution about Saddam’s alleged ability to launch chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes. As Blair declared to MPs in September 2002: “It [the intelligence service] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes.”

Putin, not one to suffer amnesia on this point, also noted this fact in his speech made announcing Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Iraq, he noted, had been invaded “without any legal grounds.” Lies, he said, were witnessed “at the highest state level and voiced from the high UN rostrum. As a result, we see a tremendous loss of human life, damage, destruction, and a colossal upsurge of terrorism.”

In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the infrastructure of the country was ruined, its army and public service disbanded, leaving rich pools of disaffected recruits for the insurgency that followed. The country, torn between Shia, Sunni and Kurd and governed by an occupation force of colossal ineptitude, suffered an effective collapse, leaving a vacuum exploited by jihadis and, in time, Islamic State.

Since the invasion, a number of civil society efforts have been undertaken against the dubious triumvirate of evangelist warmongers. The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, convened over four days in November 2011, invoked universal jurisdiction in finding Bush, Blair and their accomplices guilty of the act of aggression.

Despite its unmistakable political flavour – the original body had been unilaterally established by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad – its reasoning was sound enough. The invasion of Iraq could not “be justified under any reasonable interpretation of international law” and threatened “to return us to a world in which the law of the jungle prevails over the rule of law, with potentially disastrous consequences for the human rights not only of the Iraqis but of the people throughout the region and the world”.

The Sydney-based SEARCH Foundation also resolved to submit a complaint to the ICC in 2012, hoping that the body would conduct an investigation and issue a warrant for Howard’s arrest. In September 2013, a complaint was filed by Peter Murphy, Secretary of the Foundation, alleging, among a range of offences, the commission of acts of aggression, breaches of international humanitarian law and human rights, and crimes against peace. The effort failed, leaving Howard irritatingly free.

In two decades, the United States still finds itself embroiled in Iraq, with 2,500 troops stationed in a capacity that is unlikely to stop anytime too soon. That said, the parallels with Afghanistan are already being drawn. In 2022, the outgoing head of US Central Command, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, trotted out his dream about what would happen. “You want to get to the state where nations, and security elements in those nations, can deal with a violent extremist threat without direct support from us.”

Ironically enough, such violent extremist threats had more than a little help in their creation from Washington’s own disastrous intervention. Eventually, the Iraqis would simply have to accept “to take a larger share of all the enabling that we’re doing now.”

The calamity of Iraq is also a salutary warning to countries willing to join any US-led effort, or rely on the good grace of Washington’s power. To be an enemy of the United States might be dangerous, but as Henry Kissinger reminds us, to be a friend might prove fatal.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Barney Frank, a former House Democrat from Massachusetts, has been the subject of criticism since federal regulators took over Signature Bank on Sunday.

That's because Frank, architect of the Dodd-Frank banking regulations implemented in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, played a key role in whitewashing the bipartisan effort to weaken those rules in 2018—after he had received more than $1 million while serving on Signature's board following his departure from Congress.

Since federal regulators seized Signature's assets on Sunday—two days after they intervened to protect depositors amid the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)—progressive critics have been quick to blame a deregulatory measure approved five years ago by the then-Republican-controlled Congress for engendering two of the three largest bank failures in U.S. history.

The GOP, however, wasn't alone in supporting Sen. Mike Crapo's (R-Idaho) Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a trenchant critic of the legislation, observed when it was moving through Congress, several Democrats—including Sens. Mark Warner (Va.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), and Jon Tester (Mont.)—were integral to its passage.

To justify their decision, many of them pointed to Frank. The originator of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act used his cachet as a presumed banking expert to legitimize a rollback of the very framework he helped enact in 2010 as chair of the House Financial Services Committee. But the ex-lawmaker wasn't merely an uninterested bystander. In 2015, he joined the board of directors at Signature, a crypto-friendly bank that was poised to benefit from less stringent oversight.

Frank said Crapo's Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act "would not help the biggest Wall Street banks and denied it would increase the risks of another financial crisis," The Washington Post reported when then-President Donald Trump signed the bill into law in May 2018. "Some Democrats leaned heavily on those words as they pushed back against the plan's liberal critics."

However, the newspaper noted, "proponents of the law rarely, if ever, mentioned that Frank is not just the author of the 2010 law, but also sits on the board of New York-based Signature Bank."

In the wake of Signature's collapse on Sunday night, Frank's role in downplaying the risks of deregulation—while being paid by a bank that stood to gain from it—has received fresh light.

As the Post reported in May 2018: "Dodd-Frank imposed additional regulatory safeguards on banks with more than $50 billion in assets, but the rollback that passed this week, among other things, raises that threshold to $250 billion. Signature Bank has more than $40 billion in assets and can now grow significantly without automatically facing additional regulation."

But the bank's growth over the past half-decade came to a screeching halt over the weekend when its customers, alarmed by the failure of SVB, quickly withdrew $10 billion.

"Frank acknowledged that Signature stood to benefit, but he said his role on the bank's board did not influence his thinking," the Post reported five years ago. "Frank said his position on the threshold predates his compensation from the financial sector."

As Politicoreported on Monday, Frank disputes that Trump-era deregulation "had anything to do with" Signature's failure, even though it weakened oversight of "mid-size and regional banks like his own."

"I don't think that had any impact," Frank told the outlet. "They hadn't stopped examining banks."

Frank went so far as to tellCNBC that there was "no real objective reason" that Signature had to enter federal receivership.

"I think part of what happened was that regulators wanted to send a very strong anti-crypto message," Frank argued. "We became the poster boy because there was no insolvency based on the fundamentals."

Warren, by contrast, has focused her ire directly on the deregulatory moves minimized by Frank.

"Had Congress and the Federal Reserve not rolled back the stricter oversight, SVB and Signature would have been subject to stronger liquidity and capital requirements to withstand financial shocks," Warren wrote Monday in a New York Times opinion piece.

"They would have been required to conduct regular stress tests to expose their vulnerabilities and shore up their businesses," the lawmaker continued. "But because those requirements were repealed, when an old-fashioned bank run hit SVB, the bank couldn't withstand the pressure—and Signature's collapse was close behind."

"These bank failures were entirely avoidable if Congress and the Fed had done their jobs and kept strong banking regulations in place since 2018," she added. "SVB and Signature are gone, and now Washington must act quickly to prevent the next crisis."

Like Warren, Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has called for fully repealing "the disastrous 2018 bank deregulation law."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

Bainimarama and Fiji’s top police officer are accused of stopping a 2019 police investigation into complaints of financial mismanagement at the University of the South Pacific, according to the prosecutor’s statement.

Police Commissioner Sitiveni Qiliho, who was suspended in January, and Bainimarama “are alleged to have arbitrarily and in abuse of the authority of their respective offices, terminated an active police investigation,” said Christopher Pryde, the director of public prosecutions.

Bainimarama’s 16 years in power ended in December after his Fiji First Party dropped below 50% of the vote in national elections, allowing opposition parties to form a coalition government led by former Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka. Both men are former coup leaders – Rabuka in the late 1980s and Bainimarama in 2006.

A purge of Bainimarama appointees from important public positions has followed the first change in government in Fiji since Bainimarama’s coup, along with a slew of investigations into alleged abuses of office and a promise by Rabuka to remove restrictions on the media.

Fiji, a linchpin nation in a region increasingly contested by major powers, has a burgeoning relationship with China while maintaining close security ties with the United States and countries such as Australia and New Zealand. 

Fiji’s ties with China blossomed after New Zealand, Australia and other countries sought to punish Bainimarama and his government for the 2006 coup.

Bainimarama left office grudgingly and stayed in the official prime minister’s residence for several weeks after Rabuka was confirmed as Fiji’s new leader by a vote in parliament. 

Bainimarama was suspended from parliament in February for three years after accusing the country’s president of failing to follow the constitution, which gives the military a guardian role over the nation’s politics. 

On Wednesday, Bainimarama resigned from his seat in parliament so it could be filled by another politician from his party. He said he would return to grassroots political campaigning and would remain leader of Fiji First.

“We will engage more actively outside Parliament with our Fiji First supporters and the growing number of unsatisfied Fijians who are now questioning their decision to vote for parties that seem to be not delivering on their promises,” he said in a video address.

Pryde, the public prosecutor, said investigations into the university case were ongoing.

“The police have also been requested to undertake further investigations into other matters arising from this case and more charges may be laid against other suspects in due course,” he said.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Stephen Wright for BenarNews.

As many Native Americans on Monday marked the 50th anniversary of the militant occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, participants in the 1973 uprising and other activists linked the deadly revolt to modern-day Indigenous resistance, from Standing Rock to the #LandBack movement.

On February 27, 1973 around 300 Oglala Lakota and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), seething from centuries of injustices ranging from genocide to leniency for whites who committed crimes against Indians, occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation for more than two months. The uprising occurred during a period of increased Native American militancy and the rise of AIM, which first drew international attention in 1969 with the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

"The Native people of this land after Wounded Knee, they had like a surge of new pride in being Native people," Dwain Camp, an 85-year-old Ponca elder who took part in the 1973 revolt, told The Associated Press.

"Anything that goes on, anything we do, even today with the #LandBack issue, all of that is just a continuation."

Camp said the occupation drove previously "unimaginable" changes, including the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, the Indian Child Welfare Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

"After we left Wounded Knee, it became paramount that protecting Mother Earth was our foremost issue," he explained. "Since that period of time, we've learned that we've got to teach our kids our true history."

Camp said the spirit of Wounded Knee lives on in Indigenous resistance today.

"We're not the subjugated and disenfranchised people that we were," he said. "Wounded Knee was an important beginning of that. And because we're a resilient people, it's something we take a lot of pride in."

Some of the participants in the 1973 uprising had been raised by grandparents who remembered or even survived the 1890 massacre of more than 200 Lakota Lakota men, women, and children by U.S. troops at Wounded Knee.

"That's how close we are to our history," Madonna Thunder Hawk, an 83-year-old elder in the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who was a frontline participant in the 1973 occupation, toldIndian Country Today. "So anything that goes on, anything we do, even today with the #LandBack issue, all of that is just a continuation. It's nothing new."

Nick Tilsen, an Oglala Lakota who played a prominent role in the 2016-17 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota and who founded the NDN Collective, toldIndian Country Today that "for me, it's important to acknowledge the generation before us—to acknowledge their risk."

"It's important for us to honor them," said Tilsen, whose parents met at the Wounded Knee occupation. "It's important for us to thank them."

Akim Reinhardt, an associate professor of history at Townson State University in Baltimore, told Indian Country Today that the AIM protests "helped establish a sense of the permanence of Red Power in much the way that Black Power had for African-Americans, a permanent legacy."

"It was the cultural legacy that racism isn't okay and people don't need to be quiet and accept it anymore," he added. "That it's okay to be proud of who you are."

Indian Country Todayreports:

The occupation began on the night of Feb. 27, 1973, when a group of warriors led by Oklahoma AIM leader Carter Camp, Ponca, moved into the small town of Wounded Knee. They took over the trading post and established a base of operations along with AIM leaders Russell Means, Oglala Lakota; Dennis Banks, Ojibwe; and Clyde Bellecourt, White Earth Nation.

Within days, hundreds of activists had joined them for what became a 71-day standoff with the U.S. government and other law enforcement.

On March 16, U.S. Marshal Lloyd Grimm was shot and paralyzed from the waist down. Two Indians were subsequently killed during the standoff. Frank Clearwater, a 47-year-old Cherokee from North Carolina, was shot in the head while resting in an occupied church on April 17 and died a week later. The day after Clearwater's death, Lawrence "Buddy" Lamont, a local Lakota and Vietnam War veteran, was shot through the heart by a sniper during a shootout. He was 31 years old.

Black activist Ray Robinson, who had been working with the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization, went missing during the standoff. In 2014, the FBI confirmed that Robinson died at Wounded Knee, but his body was never recovered.

AIM remains active today. Its members have participated in the fights against the Dakota Access, Keystone XL, and Line 3 pipelines, as well as in the effort to free Leonard Peltier, a former AIM leader who has been imprisoned for over 45 years after a dubious conviction for murdering two FBI agents during a separate 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Kevin McKiernan, then a rookie reporter for NPR who was smuggled into Wounded Knee after the Nixon administration banned journalists from covering the standoff, said in an interview with NPR that the #LandBack movement—spearheaded in the U.S. by NDN Collective—is a leading example of the occupation's legacy.

"And I think that there is a collective or a movement like that on every reservation with every tribe," McKiernan said. "They're going to get back, to buy back, to get donated—just do it by inches."

"That's what's going on in every inch of Indian country today," he added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

As many Native Americans on Monday marked the 50th anniversary of the militant occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, participants in the 1973 uprising and other activists linked the deadly revolt to modern-day Indigenous resistance, from Standing Rock to the #LandBack movement.

On February 27, 1973 around 300 Oglala Lakota and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), seething from centuries of injustices ranging from genocide to leniency for whites who committed crimes against Indians, occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation for more than two months. The uprising occurred during a period of increased Native American militancy and the rise of AIM, which first drew international attention in 1969 with the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

"The Native people of this land after Wounded Knee, they had like a surge of new pride in being Native people," Dwain Camp, an 85-year-old Ponca elder who took part in the 1973 revolt, told The Associated Press.

"Anything that goes on, anything we do, even today with the #LandBack issue, all of that is just a continuation."

Camp said the occupation drove previously "unimaginable" changes, including the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, the Indian Child Welfare Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

"After we left Wounded Knee, it became paramount that protecting Mother Earth was our foremost issue," he explained. "Since that period of time, we've learned that we've got to teach our kids our true history."

Camp said the spirit of Wounded Knee lives on in Indigenous resistance today.

"We're not the subjugated and disenfranchised people that we were," he said. "Wounded Knee was an important beginning of that. And because we're a resilient people, it's something we take a lot of pride in."

Some of the participants in the 1973 uprising had been raised by grandparents who remembered or even survived the 1890 massacre of more than 200 Lakota Lakota men, women, and children by U.S. troops at Wounded Knee.

"That's how close we are to our history," Madonna Thunder Hawk, an 83-year-old elder in the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who was a frontline participant in the 1973 occupation, toldIndian Country Today. "So anything that goes on, anything we do, even today with the #LandBack issue, all of that is just a continuation. It's nothing new."

Nick Tilsen, an Oglala Lakota who played a prominent role in the 2016-17 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota and who founded the NDN Collective, toldIndian Country Today that "for me, it's important to acknowledge the generation before us—to acknowledge their risk."

"It's important for us to honor them," said Tilsen, whose parents met at the Wounded Knee occupation. "It's important for us to thank them."

Akim Reinhardt, an associate professor of history at Townson State University in Baltimore, told Indian Country Today that the AIM protests "helped establish a sense of the permanence of Red Power in much the way that Black Power had for African-Americans, a permanent legacy."

"It was the cultural legacy that racism isn't okay and people don't need to be quiet and accept it anymore," he added. "That it's okay to be proud of who you are."

Indian Country Todayreports:

The occupation began on the night of Feb. 27, 1973, when a group of warriors led by Oklahoma AIM leader Carter Camp, Ponca, moved into the small town of Wounded Knee. They took over the trading post and established a base of operations along with AIM leaders Russell Means, Oglala Lakota; Dennis Banks, Ojibwe; and Clyde Bellecourt, White Earth Nation.

Within days, hundreds of activists had joined them for what became a 71-day standoff with the U.S. government and other law enforcement.

On March 16, U.S. Marshal Lloyd Grimm was shot and paralyzed from the waist down. Two Indians were subsequently killed during the standoff. Frank Clearwater, a 47-year-old Cherokee from North Carolina, was shot in the head while resting in an occupied church on April 17 and died a week later. The day after Clearwater's death, Lawrence "Buddy" Lamont, a local Lakota and Vietnam War veteran, was shot through the heart by a sniper during a shootout. He was 31 years old.

Black activist Ray Robinson, who had been working with the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization, went missing during the standoff. In 2014, the FBI confirmed that Robinson died at Wounded Knee, but his body was never recovered.

AIM remains active today. Its members have participated in the fights against the Dakota Access, Keystone XL, and Line 3 pipelines, as well as in the effort to free Leonard Peltier, a former AIM leader who has been imprisoned for over 45 years after a dubious conviction for murdering two FBI agents during a separate 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Kevin McKiernan, then a rookie reporter for NPR who was smuggled into Wounded Knee after the Nixon administration banned journalists from covering the standoff, said in an interview with NPR that the #LandBack movement—spearheaded in the U.S. by NDN Collective—is a leading example of the occupation's legacy.

"And I think that there is a collective or a movement like that on every reservation with every tribe," McKiernan said. "They're going to get back, to buy back, to get donated—just do it by inches."

"That's what's going on in every inch of Indian country today," he added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Kendall Hawkins.

Around noon on January 16, in Budiriro, southwest of the capital city of Harare, anti-riot police harassed about 20 journalists, barred them from covering a court hearing, and threatened to beat them, according to media reports, a statement by the Zimbabwean chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), and five of the journalists, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

The journalists had gathered to cover the hearing of opposition party Citizens Coalition for Change Organizing Secretary Amos Chibaya and 24 others charged with holding an unlawful gathering with the intent to incite public violence, according to those sources.

Police only allowed journalists from the state-owned outlets Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and The Herald newspaper to cover the hearing, according to the MISA statement and the journalists who spoke to CPJ.

“Zimbabwean authorities must facilitate open justice in the country’s courts and ensure that journalists’ access is not impeded by baton-wielding riot police favoring state media over privately owned media outlets,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “All journalists should be free to cover cases before the courts and not risk censorship, harassment, and beatings for simply trying to do their jobs to keep citizens informed.” 

The journalists who were barred included those working for the privately owned news outlets ZimLive, TechnoMag, NewsHawks, NewsDay Zimbabwe, NewZimbabwe, Nhau News Online, and Heart and Soul TV, among others, according to the five journalists who spoke with CPJ.

TechnoMag’s Audience Mutema told CPJ that, although the journalists produced press identification cards, police pushed them away with their batons, ordered them outside, and refused to allow them to stand near the court building.

Freelance journalist Frank Chikowore told CPJ that police threatened to beat the journalists if they continued trying to gain access to the court. 

“They asked us: ‘Who invited you here?’ And they then told us, ‘We don’t want any journalists here, go away,’” Chikowore said. “They told us, ‘We will beat you up; get out of here.’”  

The news outlet NewZimbabwe tweeted that some journalists “were even dragged and pushed out of the court,” and that one police officer told a journalist, “I’ll injure you.”

Ruvimbo Muchenje, a NewsHawk reporter, told CPJ that anti-riot police “pushed us around and told us to leave; they said the court was full.”

Later that afternoon, a few journalists were allowed in the courtroom after the intervention of Zimbabwe national police spokesperson Paul Nyathi and the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, Mutema told CPJ.

CPJ called and texted Nyathi for comment but did not receive any responses.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Sen. Frank Church during a session of the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA in 1975.

Photo: Bettmann Archive

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by James Risen.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Lucy Martirosyan.

On Tuesday, December 13, a Quezon City court convicted Cimatu, a contributor to the independent news outlet Rappler, of cyber libel over a 2017 Facebook post by the journalist about alleged corruption by then Agriculture Secretary Manny Pinol, news reports said.  

The court ordered Cimatu to serve a prison term ranging from six months and one day to a maximum of five years, five months, and 11 days, according to those reports, which said he was also fined 300,000 pesos (US$5,385) in moral damages.

Cimatu is free on bail and will appeal the ruling, according to news reports, which said he could appeal as high as the Supreme Court.

“The spurious charge against Philippine journalist Frank Cimatu should be dropped and authorities should start work immediately on decriminalizing libel and overhauling the overbroad cybercrime provisions that allow for these kinds of outrageous convictions,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “The wanton abuse of cyber libel laws is killing press freedom in the Philippines.”

In a 19-page ruling, Judge Evangeline Cabochan-Santos wrote that Cimatu’s Facebook post, which alleged that Pinol had personally profited from state corruption, was defamatory and appeared to impute a crime, reports citing the ruling said. The ruling said Cimatu made the post in malice and “failed to show any proof to establish that his post was done in good faith.”  

Cimatu reportedly argued that the post was private and was only seen by his Facebook friends, but the court ruled it was initially made under a public setting, news reports said. CPJ was unable to review Cimatu’s Facebook account, which has been taken down or set to private.

NewsLine Philippines reported that Cimatu’s Facebook post was referencing a report by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism about Pinol’s personal asset and liability declaration. Cimatu covers a wide range of political and other news topics from the northern region of the main Philippine island of Luzon, his Rappler profile shows.

Pinol, a former news broadcaster, filed the charges against Cimatu, according to those reports. CPJ was unable to find contact information for Pinol.

Cimatu is at least the third Rappler reporter to be convicted of cyber libel, along with Rappler CEO and executive editor Maria Ressa and ex-Rappler researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr. Their appeal of a 2020 cyber libel conviction was rejected in October and is now pending at the Supreme Court. CPJ has repeatedly and called for the charges to be dropped.  

CPJ emailed the Quezon City prosecutor’s office for comment but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ralph Nader.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by CounterPunch.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Karl Grossman.

Can we, as limited cognitive beings, ever be able to cope with the growing complexity of cities and be a part of its decision-making structure or are we doomed to go into an automated democracy?

One thing we can say about a city, unlike a power regime, is that cities have very long lives. They may suffer massive destruction, but they recover in a way that a king etc might not. Cities are resilient.¹ But cities are never independent of the broader power regime in which they are born and in which they exist and survive through time. Cities are shaped differently if they are under a monarchy, a despotism, an empire, or an imperial setting. Time runs through cities, and their durability is striking. The German historian Reinhardt Koselleck wrote in Sediments Of Time, that it is the way in which cities developed certain customs, institutions and rules that makes them survive the mover time. If we think within the European tradition, the language of civil society is very important for the way we think about democracy today: civility, citizen, citizen of a town. This language of citizenship of civil society was born at a much earlier point, it is a product of urban life. Cities in early, late medieval times, and early modern Europe were small. In the 1500s, maybe only three or four cities had a population of 100,000 residents or more. For example, Naples, the largest of the time. And yet, those cities contributed a great deal to the whole subject of democracy and the way we think about power and the right to resist tyranny. The call to abolish monarchy, constitutional conventions, popular elections, the right of toleration of religious differences, liberty of the press, and later inventions like municipal socialism. All of these were creations of urban settings of citizens and their representatives in a broader power context. And those customs, the whole spirit of those innovations, survive until today. They’re a very important part of our urban history.

But now, we are seeing the rise of a different type of cities, the mega cities. Has that changed that perception? Are cities still connected with their power regimes in the same way as before? Or is that continuity being lost? Georg Simmel was one of the very first analysts of modern urban life. He was inspired by living in Berlin that was back then, becoming one of the great European cities, one of the great global cities. His emphasis lied on the restlessness of life and of the institutions inside cities. His emphasis was on the conflicts. Cities are never zones of harmony. Urban life sharpens the sense of complexity of the world in which subjects live. But what about the cities of today? The scale is clearly different if we look at the Chinese plans for a Greater Bay Area, to include Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. This is to be the largest mega city in the history of the human species.² And as researchers, as architects, no doubt, there’s a lot of work to be done to make sense of how that mega city is going to operate. Complexity is a challenge that was noted 100 years ago, and it continues to be with us. The implication here is that there is a warning whenever we talk about cities, in the present, and in the past, these are always interpretations. These are selective accounts of vast totalities that are in a way ungraspable. And it’s one of the magic of cities. It’s one of the attractiveness of cities. It was so historically, and it remains so today. When you arrive in a city which is unknown to you, one is struck by the contrast between rich and poor, between decadence and innovation. One is struck by the blight of concrete, and one is struck by the rewilding projects that go on. It puts one’s head in a world of a certain dizziness. And that should be borne in mind when we talk about the subject: modesty.

Charles Montgomery’s happy city work or Jan Gehl’s clearly show the impact of designs of cities that can create more empathic people. Researchers and activists do awesome work, but it almost never reaches planners at the city levels that implement it. How can we bridge this?

Most cities are small and they come by anonymously, almost never to be invaded, say, by the masses of foreigners who want to visit them. Now, the big cities contain within them very important contributions to a system, to a situation, to a kingdom, to whatever it might be. They generate complexities, and not all complexities can work in those cities. So, we have these two moments, we have poor, and we have rich, and we have bandits and we have honesty, that is part of the city, the city is that institution. The city is an open domain, with multiple options, multiple positives, multiple negatives. And it never completely stands still. When it stands still, it’s a dead city.

There is a danger of romanticizing small cities. There are small cities where indeed there is a sense of communitarianism, let’s say, but many small towns and cities are not happy places. Size is not the key variable for explaining if cities are happy or happier. Frank Lloyd Wright talked about the ideal city³ being a small city, where there is harmony, there is “organic architecture”. And even goes on to say that America is the place where the true democratic architecture⁴ is being built because it’s natural, and those cities are thus democratic, because they are organic, they are harmonious whole. Wright was a kind of communitarian, a green aristocratic, he was well ahead of his time in that he thought in terms of the embedding of cities within the biomes, which they depend upon. But the image of a city as a place of communitarian equality, where each individual flourishes like an aristocratic dignity is an impossible idealization. It’s a false description of cities. So we are back to the question of the self paralyzing trends of large cities, the way in which pluralism cripples itself. And the question therefore becomes, how democratically? Can that city be regulated? How can it be governed? This is the central question, and cities that are unhappy cities that are full of negative negatives are cities which are badly governed, or badly self governed, via abuses of power that destroy solidarities and that destroy the dignities of at least some of its population.

Democracy is a central ingredient of a well governed city, well functioning and happy city. Cities have been democratic laboratories. That was true for the ancient cities of Syria, Mesopotamia, Nepal, for example, or Babylon, where assemblies were invented.⁵ Cities have a history of being democratic laboratories. But in our time, are cities still the innovators? Are they innovator sin matters of power? And in matters of good government? Are they spaces of innovation? And the short answer is, yes! Despite the commercialization, the destruction of zones of solidarity, degradations and the surveillance that plagues cities, there are things going on in our times, such as, police monitoring groups, sanctuary cities, citizens’ innovations to protect mosques, synagogues, churches, to protect the right to be different, or in matters of for example queer politics… Cities are spaces where the “greening” of democracy has been going on for a generation.

Let’s hope one day we can talk about how cities have actually contributed to the whole idea and practice of democracy that has never happened before, which is the extension of the rights of representation. Democracy comes to mean not just the self government of people who can decide on Earth whatever they want, but democracy is coming to mean slowly, but surely, the self government of people that refuse arbitrary power. That acknowledges human’s dependence upon the nonhuman. This is a very fundamental innovation that largely happened in cities. And so we witness innovation, such as the Opal project in London, where citizens are called upon to note the birds and living beings in their back gardens, to try to publicly monitor species’ survival or destruction. Or the Butterfly Bridges, a small but very powerful simile of this trend. Butterflies and other insects don’t like traffic, they don’t like urbanization, it’s destructive of their meeting and of their feeding patterns. But good citizens build bridges of flowers, across roads, to enable butterflies to survive and to thrive in urban settings. And in general, the greening of cities is of striking historical importance. It’s one of the great examples of how cities today continue to function as democratic laboratories.

Cities survived corporations, kings, all of them. Have cities, being a design, emergent or planned, induced democracy or are they improving it, or rather is it the opposite effect?

In other words, is the rise of cities or maybe city states linked to the rise of democracies and now then new despotisms (despots hiding themselves behind fake democracies)?

A city exists under certain conditions, and there is considerable variety of power of who wins and who loses. At the same time, everybody is in principle, enabled, not at the same level, but that means that you have the rich and you have the poor, and they both benefit in many ways from the city, do the rich benefit more? Of course they do. But the poor exist too as they are distracted about their condition to survive. In Latin America you have a brutality of poverty versus wealth. The Americas are among the most extreme versions of the urban and of the kind of brutality and indifference towards the poor and those who suffer, makes the Americas not the most attractive when it comes to what a great city is. The Europeans do better, the Japanese do better.

Let’s take the example of public transport and of the fate of democracy in India.⁶ India’s public transport networks are on the whole disgraceful and this has a powerful destructive effect on people’s lives. There is no natural harmony. When there is a good functioning public transportation, as for example in Copenhagen or Berlin, London or Barcelona, this enables everybody in the city (if it is affordable) to move around. The right of motion makes us as equal citizens, when one boards into a tram or a bus or a metro and pays a standard price, rich and poor, and everybody in between black and white, yellow and brown, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, non believer and so on, they enjoy the entitlement to move through space in time as equals. And cities that do not have decent public transport systems are much more miserable places.

Argentina is considered a democracy, but 40% of its population lives in the equivalent of shantytown settings. The measure of a good city should be if all residents of the city, all inhabitants and those who move in and out, enjoy equal capacities to live well, and to live in environmentally sustainable conditions. So there is no natural law towards the survival of cities that promote well being, this is a matter for citizens themselves to co determine it. It’s a matter of the governments and businesses and other nongovernmental organizations, and whether they are prepared to nurture that city and to nurture it well.

New despotisms are building cities that are architecturally astonishing. In which there is good public transport, they are clean, there is an effort to purify the air cities, like Dubai,⁷ with it’s tree shaped Palm Jumeirah Island, or the artificial new city in Colombo, reclaiming land from the sea, or Doha’s Lusail complex, which is built for the World Cup next year, or go to Kazakhstan to the new capital city Nur-Sultan and you will find amazing architecture. You will find a well functioning public transport. But you will also find that self government of citizens is a phantom. That is to say that these are cities without democracy. These are cities that are governed despotically with, of course, the support of the people of those cities. But where elections don’t function as free and fair, in which accountability mechanisms are in short supply. These cities are kind of phantom democracies. And that complicates the discussion about cities, happiness, well being and self-government.

We cannot import democracy, it is to grow from within, in our own cities. Do citizens and regulators and other organizations within cities, do they share experiences, do they network?

There are networks, initiatives, such as city net. It’s a network of cities of local governments in the Asia Pacific region. The point is to share information practices about how to improve the quality of life in cities, be it water recycling, or techniques of restricting automobile traffic, so that they do not choke cities, or for example participatory budgeting. If you go to Seoul, outside of the municipal hall of the city government, there is a large, big red and white ear. And you can as a citizen, dictate a message into that big ear, which goes straight into the government. Another example from Seoul, university engineering departments are putting their students to go out to inspect the safety of bridges. And this is simple innovation. But it’s the kind of innovation that is a shared knowledge that is shared among cities, and they help keep the spirit of democracy alive. If democracy means equality or equalization of life chances, if it means free and fair elections as well, and if it means the public scrutiny of arbitrary power, then innovations like the big ear in Seoul, are the sediments of time for which cities are justly famous.

Would there be a possible link where people agglomerated in such densified spaces tend to organize themselves for fairer decisions, more critical, or is the urban densification with lack of a social plan leading us into ever more loneliness and extremist positions?

Land is being grabbed for so many different functions that the question of space becomes extremely important. And the need to protect the urban condition. For instance, we are beginning to see certain cities, where growth damages life quality. For some of the low-income workers that live at the edges of the cities, they need to travel for two or three hours every morning to get to their job. Should we maybe build new cities?

We know densification is a very positive format, you don’t waste a lot of time, you have concentrated diversities of knowledge and needs, and intelligence, it’s all positive. That is what makes a city live, makes it significant. There is a set of conditionalities that need to be in play to have a functioning city, a city that functions for everybody. So, there are many cities now that function for everybody, for the rich, for the poor, etc. But there are also many cities that are expanding endlessly, and you see that in these, that is a negative.

If the norm is that cities should function for everybody, then we are talking about democratic cities in the exact sense that democracy has always stood for a vision that no tyrant, no monarch, no despot, is entitled to rule over others because they are simply not good enough. And what flesh and blood people are capable of, is just good enough to govern themselves and live their lives as equals in cities. The best cities to replicate are those with that ethos, with a flourishing Montesquieu’s spirit. That’s true for public transport.

Maybe we do not need to build more cities, maybe we need to redesign those that exist, their redesign and their improved self government, their improved democratic qualities. And here, plenty can be learned from the history of cities and their contribution as democratic laboratories from the last quarter of the 19th century in Europe and the push for what would be called, for example, in England, municipal socialism. So there ought to be decent sewage, so that it doesn’t flow and pollute and infect people in streets. Think too for example of the importance of the public library movement. The provision of gas and electricity, public parks, these were all innovations. Some of them are under great pressure as we speak, but they were all innovations designed by their own local champions to make cities places that function for everybody. The question is, what can we think globally of innovations that have similar compounding effects? Well, for instance, there are in several Asian cities, social innovation forums, where digital analysts, coders, come together with citizens and with urban planners and with elected representatives, to think about how a city could become digitally a place in which there is equal access to high speed 5g, or it will be six 6G networks, and so on.

Or a Dutch innovation: publiques (a play on the word public), it’s a letterbox, a Julian Assange type of a letterbox into which citizens and civil servants can post anonymous messages about corruption, about the need for improved government. Or think about the way that the best functioning cities have been redesigned in the last quarter of a century for people with disabilities, they were very unfriendly places. In some cities, there’s a greater visibility of disabled people and there’s a greater generosity towards them because of public servicing of their particular needs. Commons workshops where tools are shared among citizens of particular part of a city or festivals. One of my favorite examples is the kissing fest that was developed in Mexico City. The idea is that, on a Sunday afternoon, citizens are invited to command to be with others, most of whom they do not know. And to kiss at least one person, you could kiss your partner, you could kiss your lover, you could kiss a passer by. What is the significance of this? Well, it’s an expression of affection, bodily affection, a reminder that citizenship is embodied. But it’s also there’s a kind of equalization of differences for the first time you see someone queer, someone from other LGBTQ groups kissing and this has a civilizing effect. There are multiple ways in which ideas are transferable to cities in which these can become places that function for everybody and not just for the powerful and not just for the rich.

Historically cities are a place where those without power, can make history. Cities give a voice. Are we even relevant within these super organisms called cities?

Competing amongst each other, cities have a voice but do we still have a voice in them? It’s an illusion that we can think we have a theory about the cities. The mix of different types of institutions, different materials for building, also the diversity of actors have made cities into very complex little animals. And now that we realize how much knowledge is involved, we discover how little of that knowledge we typical citizens have, no matter how caring they are. Let’s take something as obvious as plants. In some fancy neighborhoods, people were trying to make it all beautiful, wanting to plant certain plants. Then the experts came by and said, no, you do not want those plants here, because it’s not going to work for you, you won’t like the smells that they will produce by the time they’re three years old. There was suddenly a recognition that putting the wrong tree in a city can produce negatives. The city is a very open system, it survives because it is an open system, we can be actors, but we have voids.

The greening of cities that is going on now, in the most advanced of examples, it is doing something to that very ideal of being a citizen. A citizen comes under pressure from this greening of urban life, that is, in its early stages, and has a great deal of opposition to it. The Citizen becomes someone who is the equal duty bound to respect the entitlements of others and who is entitled to live as an equal, but only insofar as the citizen comes to be conjoined with the biomes in which they dwell, that there is a recognition of inequality, or the need for a greater equalization of that relationship between humans and nonhumans. It’s a very important challenge to the historic originally Greek and Republican notion of a city. The greening of cities implies overcoming the dualism of city and country. And this is an unfinished process. There are some cities where the greening is more advanced than in the country. There’s a great paradox that needs imagination and fresh thinking.

There is a need in these years of the 21st century when it comes to cities and democracy and thinking about their interrelationship to reimagine democracy, as a never ending process within a city, and in other contexts, in which citizens and their chosen representatives are on the lookout for dangers that democracy comes to be the carrier, not of blindness or illusions of omniscience, but democracy comes to be a carrier of precautionary thinking and of precautionary attitudes, that cities must be on guard in the way that they’re governed in the way that power is allocated in the way that they treat the biomes in which they’re situated. Because if they don’t, they can accelerate the destruction of large parts of our planet.

So democracy has a quality of restraining abuses of power, restraining blindness and illusions of omnipotence, the omniscience of urban planners, or corporate builders of high rise buildings, etc. Democracy comes to be an early warning detector system. Cities need this more than ever; this is a new way of thinking about democracy. It stands for equality; it is against arbitrary power. It is a whole way of life. But it is also a set of mechanisms for blowing whistles on arbitrary reckless abuses of power. And in this sense, democracy is an early warning detector system that can prevent the self destruction of cities.

Regarding the vertical city versus a linear city, do you see an impact on the concept of democracy as to how that city is formed?

Is there a benefit to the vertical city because it creates more open spaces? Is there a disadvantage to that? And how would that compare to more of a linear city? There’s a balance needed between the too high and the too low because densification is important but so is human scale. If you stack human beings too much on top of each other, to maximize the return of investments for the stakeholders, then we are in trouble. We need to have a better social plan in the design of cities, in terms of, mobility, or in what kind of communities are these people being integrated into, hopefully, into existing communities, where they adapt into, because building up a community takes a long time. There are basic physical aspects of energy ratios that one must be aware of when going too high. If the local energy prices are high, going tall is nonsensical, if it’s low, like in the UAE, then skyscrapers are a good solution. Also, if you put a skyscraper of 100 floors, it might be difficult to build up a personal connection between the person on the bottom and the person on top. There’s a human scale to everything and we need to be identified with it in the cities in the micro and macro scale.

Certainly much more research needs to be done about the impact of COVID-19 on this individualization. One of the great complaints about Paris is that it’s a clump of people who live anonymously, they don’t pass by others, they have no sense of community. It’s as if they lose themselves in a mass of people and buildings and winding streets. It’s an old complaint. But it is an empirical question. It’s a question for research as to what degree physical distancing, for instance, in the last two years of this pestilence, will irreversibly fragment or render more anonymous life in cities.

But a vertically organized city is not just a reference to the height of buildings, but it’s also to the power structures, and unhappy and unlucky are those cities that suffer verticality. The much happier cities are those that are messier or complex, where there is a kind of entanglement of the people. There was in the history of cities, the push to socialize life and that meant to make cities happier, greater equality, equal access to libraries and public spaces into running water and electricity. So this is not a dead principle. The question is, what does it mean for these years of the 21st century? We are all aware that when we visit a city that is well governed and in which there is a sense that the city belongs to more than a few, this is a much more interesting city amidst its complexity, and dynamism. It is a place that one wants to visit again.

In the role of the city squares, like in Shanghai or Wuhan, one sees lots of people in the evenings going into the city squares or corners around buildings to do their dances and their communal activities. But we also see a trend over the last 100 years where city squares are being privatized. What impacts is this bringing?

Yes, that trend is a decadent trend that will result in the destruction of sociability. It will accelerate the privatization of experiences in cities. And those cities become much less interesting. Certainly less plural, and certainly less democratic. We are living through an unfinished communications revolution, we’re moving into an age of communicative abundance. When I’m staying at home I can go to places in the most private of domains, one is socially connected. I mean, this needs to be built into the understanding of city life. But unlucky are those cities where public spaces are destroyed by privatization. And it’s not accidental that there are cities such as under Erdogan in Turkey, where an uprising took place against this despotic trend under a government that has multiplied the number of shopping malls seven times. An uprising took place because of an attempt to privatize, destroy, develop, and modernize an existing public space. Public spaces remain of fundamental importance for democracy. And for the vibrance and the magnetism of cities.

Would there be any examples of these happy but chaotic cities that we can look at just for get some further inspiration or just a consideration for how we can take those as an example for better living?

Suvilahti is a no man’s land in the middle of Helsinki. The city wanted to change this and capitalize on that area and build office spaces. It’s an old compound with Victorian architecture “occupied” by artists. We were against the plans of the city, as Suvilahti is the last place of experimental architecture and pop up culture in the city. As we wrote back then with the late Michael Sorkin, the city of Helsinki has been promoting itself as to be experimental but to close such open systems will destroy the only place to experiment at. We should therefore have new updated zoning laws and regulations, not just residential, or office spaces, but maybe zones of the “in between”, things that progress over time and can change, or temporary structures. A city should be more adaptable in terms of experiments and in terms of temporary structures.

We could also speak about Hong Kong here as an allegory of the city in the 21st century. This city is large and vibrant. People live in very high-density settings. It is a city connected to thereat of the world. It’s the one of the largest air freight airports in the world that connects China to the rest of the world. It is a city of considerable diversity. It’s geographically filled with ups and downs. There are rich and poor alongside each other, the cost of living is very high, unaffordable for so many people. There are surprises at every time in the city. The food is very interesting. There is a bizarre liveliness 24/7. It has all the qualities of a functioning viable city with a great deal of inner complexity and anonymity plus sociability. But it is also a city that is now under great pressure to conform to a national security law in which public life in the last six months has been attenuated. Its public life has been suffering. And it’s a less of a happy city now. It’s a city from which there are now large numbers of emigrants. It is an allegory of the way in which cities have this democratic potential but they can also be transformed relatively quickly into sites of despotic rule. Where their vibrancy, their plurality, their openness can suddenly be chucked. It is an open question as to the future of Hong Kong but it stands as an allegory of these competing trends.

This transcript has been condensed, edited and referenced for clarity. Full debate can be seen below.

1. Fraccascia, L., Giannoccaro, I., & Albino, V. “Resilience of complex systems: state of the art and directions for future research,” Complexity, 2018. “A common property of many complex systems is resilience, that is, the ability of the system to react to perturbations, internal failures, and environmental events by absorbing the disturbance and/or reorganizing to maintain its functions.”
2. Or maybe even Delhi. See Bansal, S. (2022, January 20). “The Plans for the World’s Next Largest City Are Incomplete,” New York Times. Retrieved January 21, 2022.
3. Wright, F. L. (1945). When democracy builds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
4. Not to confuse with Pedro Aibéo’s term of “Architectural Democracy.”
5. Assemblies of citizens who consider themselves as equals who discuss and decide who gets what, when and how is not a Western invention, archaeologists tell us it happened much earlier. See Keane, J. (2009). The life and death of democracy. Simon and Schuster.
6. See Chowdhury, D. R. and Keane, J. (2021). To Kill A Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism. Oxford University Press.
7. Dubai in 2019 invited a couple of urban planners, to make an urban planning participatory program. 100 million US dollars investment. Everyone knew it was a facade of participation. But at the same time, everyone knows that if you don’t start somewhere, you never start. So what changes first? The political regime, the participation, the education, the cities?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Pedro Aibéo, John Keane and Saskia Sassen.

“I think he killed himself,” insisted 76-year-old former judge Alexander Nemer. “I mean, look at the photos. Part of the man’s head is missing. Something blew it off. There’s a picture of a cat licking the inside of his skull when he’s there on the garage floor. I would generally say something took the top of his head off.”

Ignoring the disturbing image this statement conjured, Texas Public Radio reporter David Martin Davies and I pointed out that that was why we were there. The crime scene photos, autopsy files, police records, and the actual inquest documents were all gone, vanished, and no one — including myself and Davies — could find them.

Nemer simply informed us that he gave the inquest files to the court clerk when the hearing was concluded.

Davies pressed on, asking Nemer if the photo in question actually proved that the victim shot himself or that he was shot, possibly by someone else. I reminded Nemer that Texas Ranger Bob Prince had testified at the inquest and said there was no gunpowder residue found on the victim’s body. We asked Nemer how that was possible.

“I’m not here to speculate,” Nemer said. “I’m only here to tell you what happened.”

The official details of the crime, so far as they exist, are limited to a report issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), dated Oct. 15, 1976: County, Anderson; Place of Occurrence, Palestine; Victim, Frank J. Robinson; Offense, Questionable Death.

Outside of the contemporary newspaper coverage, the DPS report on this 74-year-old Black man’s death is all that’s left. Everything else is missing.

The initial DPS findings, filed by Prince, an officer of Company F of the Texas Rangers, is 12 pages long and communicates that agency’s discovery in some detail. On Wed., Oct. 13, 1976, Robinson — a retired school superintendent and prominent Palestine civil rights leader — was killed by a single 12-gauge shotgun blast to his forehead, the barrel of which had been pressed directly against the flesh covering the bridge of his nose between his eyeballs. The top and right sides of his head were blown away. The physical evidence, mostly confined to the front half of the left bay of the two-car garage adjacent to and behind the Robinson residence, was described as follows:

Body was laying on its back in a sprawled position, feet slightly spread, left hand laying on the left side of chest, and right arm laying back, pointed upward. Victim was fully clothed, top part of head blown away from obvious shotgun wound. Brain matter and blood were on the walls surrounding the body, and on the floor surrounding same. Head was resting against closed screen door [approximately halfway down the left wall of the garage bay] which entered into the house from garage.

A 12 gauge, double barrel, sawed off shotgun, SN X4313, Ranger brand, was found with stock resting on victim’s legs, and barrel laying onto the concrete floor. In the chamber of the shotgun was found one spent round and one live round, both of #8 shot, Remington Peters ammunition, with spent round being in left barrel.

There were two spent shells found on the ground, both of the same caliber and brand and shot number as was found in the weapon. One was found beside the right arm of the victim and the other one was found approximately three feet from the victim.

Frank’s wife Dorothy’s new, red 1976 Oldsmobile was parked in the right bay of the garage and, in front of it, sat a gasoline rototiller and a lawn vacuum sweeper. The bag for the sweeper was draped over the handle of the rototiller. Ranger Prince’s report indicated that the rototiller, the lawn vacuum sweeper bag, and the front fender of Dorothy’s car all had shot damage and that some of the shot struck the catalytic converter and muffler under the vehicle and some ricocheted off the front bumper and lodged in the back wall of the garage.

Frank and Dorothy Robinson’s residence sat on a hill just west of the A.M. Story Middle School (formerly the A.M. Story High School) and north of most of the rest of the neighborhood, which was called Haven Acres. Robinson dabbled in real estate and had developed Haven Acres himself. One of the streets into the neighborhood was named Robinson, and another bore Dorothy’s maiden name, Redus. The playground for the A.M. Story Middle School sat below the front of the Robinson residence, between the school itself and Variah (“Vibrant Life”), the street the Robinsons lived on the end of.

And on the day Frank Robinson was killed, six boys were playing football on that playground and actually heard or saw something relevant to the man’s death.

The six boys who provided details are James David Allen, 11, white; David Warden Brown, 12, white; Charles Hardy Gregory, III, 11, white; Jeffrey Todd Kale, 11, white; Carlos Aaron Sepulveda, 12, Hispanic; and Donald Eugene Watkins, 13, white. All six heard four shots, and Hawkins said he saw a white man standing behind Robinson’s fence when the last couple of shots were fired. Earlier that morning, Story student Michael Kevin Peterson, 11, white, said he saw a white man in a white van leaving the Robinson residence.

After local law enforcement officers completed their crime scene analysis, Palestine Police Chief Kenneth Berry — who had been on the job only 18 months after 17 years with the Waco Police Department — announced that the official autopsy revealed no traces of gunpowder residue on Robinson’s body and termed his death a homicide. By Friday, October 15, the police issued a public plea for help in the investigation of the “shotgun slaying.” Chief Berry said, “We have no suspects, but we do have leads we are working on.”

By that following Monday (October 18), Chief Berry’s mind had changed. Within a week of Robinson’s death, Berry was claiming an absence of nitrate or gunpowder residue on a person who fired a shotgun was not uncommon. And in a matter of days, many whites in the community already accepted the narrative that Robinson’s wounds were self-inflicted, while most Blacks contended it was an assassination. Dr. John Warfield, a University of Texas professor and the national secretary of the Black Political Assembly, told the Austin American-Statesman at the time, “Black people there have little faith in the police department. … [The Palestine police] are not prone to provide justice for Black people.”

State Rep. Paul Ragsdale (D-Dallas) also spoke with the Statesman, and his sentiments echoed Warfield’s. “The people there are very much concerned that it is a possible political assassination.”

Warfield, after whom the John L. Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies at UT-Austin is now named, expounded on his remarks to the Statesman. “It is clear that this Ku Klux Klan-style murder and terror is as real on the 200th birthday of this immature nation as it was in the 19th century. There is a conspiracy in this state to obstruct the political rights and the political awakening of Black and brown people and the powerful potential constituency they represent.”

And Warfield’s political conspiracy reference was directly aimed at sitting Texas Gov. Dolph Briscoe, who had vocally opposed President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s 1965 Voting Rights Act and referred to South Texas as a “little Cuba” just a month earlier.

Warfield also told the Statesman that he thought the assassin waited for Robinson in the office connecting the house with the garage and observed that “these are the kinds of things that create a climate that legitimizes the thing that happened to Frank.”

Ragsdale noted that many locals believed Robinson’s death was the result of a sanctioned hit executed by a hired killer from somewhere else.

It was mid-July 2022 when I got a phone call from Davies, an award-winning San Antonio journalist. Since 1999, he had been the host and producer of Texas Matters, a weekly radio news magazine and podcast in which he examines the questions and issues facing the Lone Star State. Davies had done pieces on the Slocum Massacre after my book on the subject came out in 2014 and while I was working with the descendants of that pogrom for a historical marker. The marker effort was a grueling and uphill but eventually successful slog, thanks in no small part to journalists like Davies, who covered it for NPR. I think we both knew then that there was still work to be done.

I pushed on along with the chief spokesperson behind the efforts to erect a Slocum Massacre historical marker. Descendant Constance Hollie-Jawaid and I co-wrote a screenplay on the subject while continuing to try to raise awareness about the atrocity and remind people that the victims of the carnage are still buried in unmarked mass graves. And something that was said when we first met with Anderson County Historical Commission Chairman Jimmie Ray Odom about the approved marker stunned us.

Frank J. Robinson had known Abe Wilson, a Hollie-Jawaid forebear directly affected by the Slocum Massacre, and Robinson had gone on, again, to become a local civil rights champion. In fact, he and two other Black men from Palestine, Rodney A. Howard and Timothy Smith, had sued the Anderson County Commissioners Court over race-based gerrymandering and won their suit in a Smith County Federal Court in 1973 and prevailed again on December 23, 1974, when Anderson County challenged the ruling in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Howard and Smith’s attorney had been the husband of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, Dave Richards.

But Robinson, Smith, and Howard didn’t stop there. They immediately began working on a lawsuit to establish single-member districts so the local Black vote would also be protected in city council elections. Austin attorney Larry Daves worked with the trio on this suit, and, in late 1975, they achieved a consent decree that forced Palestine into redistricting. The trio’s efforts opened up Anderson County to Black political representation, a say in how the community was run and how the county was governed.

Then, in mid- to late-1976, Robinson began working on (among other things) a local scandal, specifically reports that Black citizens who lived north of him were being charged for city services that they didn’t receive. It became the next injustice that he turned his attention to. On Labor Day weekend of that year, he expressed as much to longtime friends Sidney Earl and Vita Childs Palmer, whom Robinson and Dorothy had known since their college days at Prairie View A&M University. The Palmers’ daughter, Eloyce Green, had grown up referring to the Robinsons as “Uncle Frank” and “Aunt Dorothy,” and she remembered Robinson discussing the scandal with her father at their home in Tyler during a Labor Day visit.

“I can still see my parents talking to Frank in the kitchen,” Green, 82, told me. “My dad told him, ‘If you don’t leave these white folks alone, they’re gonna kill you.’”

Frank’s response was simple and straightforward. “I’m not afraid ’cause they won’t be getting nothing but an old man.”

Davies and I had both been watching the current Texas legislature’s ongoing gerrymandering tactics across the state with various and, I’m sure, comparable levels of consternation and dismay. And we were both aware of Frank J. Robinson’s work and genuinely troubled by the ways in which the current Republican attempts to ensure white electoral primacy undermined everything Robinson had fought and probably died for. Robinson believed Blacks ought to have a say. Robinson believed Blacks should have a seat at the table. The most recent Republican-apportioned voting maps seemed flagrantly designed to limit the voices of persons of color in particular.

So, Davies called me in mid-July to discuss researching the suspicious circumstances surrounding Robinson’s death. He said he was working on an October piece for the Texas Observer and an NPR podcast examining the subject in more detail. And he noted that when he discussed the details of his story with the Observer, they suggested that he reach out to me.

Staff members at the Austin-based bimonthly were aware of my book The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas and my work with massacre descendants to get the historical marker. Former Observer staffer Michael Barajas had also written a powerful feature on the unmarked mass graves in the Slocum area, titled “Where the Bodies Are Buried,” in the July-August 2019 edition of the magazine. And three months later, I was mentioned in the October Texas Monthly cover story “The Battle to Rewrite Texas History” as part of a new generation of writers and scholars trying to set the record straight.

Then, when American conservatives declared Critical Race Theory (CRT) Public Enemy No. 1, I wrote about meeting Anderson County Historical Chairman Odom with Slocum Massacre descendant Hollie-Jawaid in the July 7, 2021 edition of the Fort Worth Weekly:

In late December 2015, Constance Hollie-Jawaid and I were still working on the final plans for the dedication ceremony for a Texas state historical marker commemorating the Slocum Massacre. The fight to get the marker approved had been grueling, and, on that particular day, we had traveled to Palestine, Texas, to meet with the marker effort’s chief antagonist, Anderson County Historical Chairman Jimmy Ray Odom. Odom’s beliefs about the Slocum Massacre were almost completely contradictory to ours, but — in conversation, anyway — he was a straight shooter. Our historical and cultural disagreements notwithstanding, I respected him for that.

Jimmy had taken some heat in the press for his straight-shooting, and he was upset with me. And when we met that day in late December, he let me know this in no uncertain terms. At that point, however, the marker was secured. Constance — a descendant of victims of the atrocity — and I had won the argument, so we could be magnanimous. I let Jimmy air his grievances without response or complaint. …

After the discussion regarding the marker ceremony concluded and the air was a hair more convivial, I asked Jimmy why there was no historical marker for a Black activist named Frank J. Robinson — and his response was as straightforward as it was shocking.

“Oh, they killed him,” Jimmy said.

The statement was dumbfounding.

Odom and the Anderson County Historical Commission had so adamantly opposed our Slocum Massacre marker that we were forced to go around Anderson County and appeal directly to the Texas State Historical Commission. And because Odom and the local commission had engaged in so many ridiculous machinations and stall tactics, the state consented to our request. And here Odom was, unwilling to concede an atrocity committed 115 years earlier but flatly acknowledging an assassination just 40 years previous.

I had planned to do more research into Frank J. Robinson’s death at that time and maybe even write a book on the subject, but one project or another interfered or led me on to other stories.

By the middle of last year, Davies had begun his own research on Robinson’s “questionable death.” A few months before my piece in the Fort Worth Weekly, he had requested records pertaining to Robinson’s death from the Palestine Police Department, and, on May 26, 2021, Donna Thornell, one of the department’s administrative assistants, responded with a short letter informing Davies that “due to the age of this case, there are no files available/located with the Palestine Police Department pertaining to Mr. Robinson.”

Davies, then, like me, got busy with other projects, and it was a year before he picked it back up and contacted me for an assist and an extra eye on the case.

Hate crime.

It’s a fairly new legal term in this country, but it was made a crime by Texan President Lyndon Baines Johnson in Title I of the 1968 Civil Rights Act. It became against the law to use, or threaten to use, force to willfully interfere with any person because of race, color, religion, or national origin and especially when that person is participating in a federally protected activity, such as attending school, patronizing a public place/facility, applying for employment, or acting as a juror in a state court or voting.

One hundred and three years after the end of the Civil War.

As I left my West Fort Worth home, veered east and headed for Palestine, my mind was jumbled with thoughts on this subject. When I began my journey on I-20, I recalled that a group of Fort Worth citizens had actually traveled to Kansas in 1860 to seize Anthony Bewley, a white abolitionist pastor, and return him to Cowtown to publicly lynch him. Rumors still persist that following Bewley’s September 13, 1860 lynching, his bones were prominently displayed at a local business for years after the act.

As I exited I-20 and headed southeast on 287 South, I remembered that the city of Mansfield had refused to desegregate its schools for a decade after desegregation became federal law.

A year after my book on the Slocum Massacre was released, I published Black Holocaust: The Paris Horror and a Legacy of Texas Terror with Eakin Press. In it, I detail the circumstances and facts about the dozens of persons of color who had literally been burned at the stake in Texas. And, as 287 led me through Midlothian, I thought of Steve Davis, an innocent Black man burned at the stake in the Waxahachie area on May 12, 1912.

Then, when I finally reached I-45, and turned south, I was soon greeted by a new billboard inviting tourists to Corsicana. It labeled the town Texas’ Favorite Detour, which disturbed me because I knew it wasn’t for an innocent Black man named Jonas “John” Henderson. He was pulled off a train headed for Fort Worth in Hillsboro, transported to Corsicana, and ceremonially burned at the stake in the town square on March 13, 1901, for allegedly murdering a white woman he may never even have met. And there’s a photo collection in the Dallas Public Library that documents the act?!

Corsicana’s new billboard struck me the wrong way. It was morbid. Or maybe I was being morbid.

At Corsicana, I exited and turned left to finish the drive to Palestine on 287 South, and then it started all over again. A few miles past the Richland-Chambers Reservoir, I saw a sign for Kerens, where a Black man was mysteriously burned alive in the town jail on December 13, 1890. And a little farther down, I saw a sign announcing a right turn for the Freestone County seat, Fairfield, where three innocent Black men — Johnnie Cornish, Snap Curry, and Mose Jones — were seized from the county jail, transported 14 miles west to Kirven, and burned at the stake one after another in the wee hours of May 7, 1922, for the alleged murder of a young white woman.

Was it any wonder that so many of us consciously or subconsciously averted our eyes to this history? Didn’t it sabotage everything we’d been taught to believe about ourselves, our state, and even our country?

I arrived in Palestine mid-morning on Friday, July 29, 2022, and the early steps in the investigation that Davies and I took were inauspicious. Davies’ preliminary research indicated that the Robinson residence was directly behind the A.M. Story Intermediate School but said the street they lived on was no longer there. My initial research focused on the street itself, and I said it was still there. So, off we went in search of 819 Variah. It was still there and so was the original Robinson residence — we confirmed it with images from old newspaper clippings — but the A.M. Story Junior High was gone, having become a large, overgrown vacant lot. I thought it was strange. Generally speaking, school districts repurpose school buildings instead of raze them, especially if they have historical significance.

Alonzo Marion Story came to Texas from Louisiana at the age of 21 and taught math in a little town called Midway before moving to Palestine in 1912. He taught math at the community’s Black high school, Lincoln, for five years and then took a job as the superintendent of the state’s Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Institute for Colored Youth. In 1924, he returned to Lincoln High School and served as the principal and a math teacher until his retirement in 1949. In 1953, the Palestine Independent School District opened the Alonzo Marion Story High School for Blacks, and, after desegregation, the facility became a junior high — which it was at the time of Robinson’s death — and then an elementary school. But as Davies quickly uncovered, the original A.M. Story building was demolished by a tornado on November 15, 1987. It was rebuilt as an intermediate school at a different location in 1990. The Category 3 cataclysm traveled 200 miles on that November day, leaving several dead and millions of dollars of destruction in its wake, but it had passed right in front of Frank and Dorothy’s old house without leaving so much as a scratch.

The most recent owners of the Robinsons’ former residence were out when we came by, so we examined the house and the adjacent two-car garage from the street and then drove around Haven Acres. The name of the main access street running in front of Haven Acres had been changed. It was now known as Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., and Robinson Avenue intersected it at the 1700 block. This was encouraging and grist for a discussion of bizarre serendipity versus simple happenstance. A questionable, controversial death. A tornadic rampage that destroyed the historic school. And then the community’s MLK Boulevard placed and dedicated right down the hill from the scene of the possible crime and a subsequent natural disaster. It figuratively — if not literally — reeked of a guilty community. Neither Davies nor I are superstitious, but it seemed almost silly to assume it was a coincidence.

We made our way to the Anderson County Courthouse and spent most of the rest of the day shuttling back and forth between the bowels of the courthouse and Palestine City Hall. The staff members were great, but we got nowhere. No folders, no files, and no relevant paperwork. We spent hours in the courthouse basement thumbing through multiple tomes of legal documents but found nothing pertinent. Frustrated, we pressed the assistants in the County Clerk’s office, and they referred us to the county clerk himself, Mark Staples.

We’d contacted Staples beforehand, and he, in fact, was the one who sent us to the basement file room. Coincidence or no, he was out the day we told him we’d be there. A couple of city hall staff members subsequently referred us to the office of James Todd, Justice of the Peace, Precinct 3. Todd, 68, had been a JP in Anderson County since 1985 and, before that, the chief of police in Elkhart. They thought he might know something or be able to help us.

Todd’s courthouse office was lined with baseball bats and sports memorabilia. He was personable, knowledgeable, and forthcoming. Well aware of the controversial investigation into Robinson’s death, Todd was unequivocal.

“It stinks to high heaven,” he said of the suicide ruling.

Davies and I questioned him about the reported four shots, noting the 12-gauge shotgun’s two-shell capacity, and asked whether it was reasonably feasible that Robinson could have fired the double barrel, break action shotgun four times, cracking it open to remove spent shells and reload, without getting gunpowder residue on his person. Todd succinctly confirmed what other law enforcement officers I had spoken with had already told me. It was practically impossible.

Listening in, Todd’s secretary said we should go talk to County Judge Jeff Doran. Doran, 71, was also personable and amicable, and he agreed with Todd. Though he wasn’t in the area at the time, he commented that the results of the virtually unprecedented inquest into the cause of Robinson’s death weren’t universally well-received in the community and conceded that many Anderson County citizens, Black and white, felt and still feel that the local justice system got it wrong.

Then, as the discussion proceeded, Davies and I asked him about the imposing Reagan Park statue of John Reagan, the former Postmaster of the Confederacy and the first Railroad Commissioner of Texas. Following his release from prison after the Civil War, Reagan returned to Palestine and quickly became unpopular. He told his fellow former Confederates to go along with the occupying Union troops. His former compatriots mistakenly viewed him as a traitor, but Reagan was playing the long game. He knew the sooner the citizens of Palestine complied, the sooner the Union troops would leave and Palestine could get back to going about their business — especially where the Black population was concerned. Reagan is still practically omnipresent in the community, but there is nary a hint of progressive folks like Frank J. Robinson, who was certainly one of the state’s most important Black civil rights leaders. Palestine hardly claimed him.

On that point, Doran was starkly realistic. “You have to understand. Before the Civil War, Palestine was the fourth-largest city in the state.”

He noted that it had even donated some of its early, horse-drawn trolleys to its “little sister” city, Dallas, and that the most valuable asset Palestine and Anderson County possessed in those days was its slave population — their slaves were worth more than anything else in the economy. And after the Civil War, the most valuable asset the community had was eradicated. Doran didn’t shill for the Confederacy, but he did say Reagan brought the railroad to Palestine after its economy had been flattened and ensured the city’s prosperity for the next 150 years.

Davies and I then tracked down Ben Campbell, 81, a local historian and the recent author of Two Railroads Two Towns. Campbell confirmed Doran’s comments about John Reagan and the railroad, but he also echoed Todd’s and Doran’s general sentiments about Frank J. Robinson’s death.

“It doesn’t pass the smell test,” he said. “It wasn’t a suicide.”

When Davies and I solicited his opinion on why Robinson’s accomplishments, legacy, and horrific end were so little-known, he was frank.

“The Black community knows about it,” he said but noted that hardly anyone outside of that demographic or even Frank’s generation reflects on the incident. “It was over and done. People don’t talk about it.”

It was a contemplative evening for me. Outside of a handwritten, unilluminating paragraph or two in a ledger provided to us by Todd, we found no other investigation documents or evidence. More questions than answers.

As previously noted, Palestine Police Chief Berry declared Robinson’s death a murder and then reclassified it as a suicide because he somehow straight-facedly reasoned that they could establish no motive for a homicide. And on October 20, he told the Austin American-Statesman that “no one saw anybody near [Robinson’s] house the day he died,” even though testimonies to the contrary submitted by five white middle-schoolers and one Hispanic child were already part of the investigative record.

Berry’s perspective on the case did not jibe with that of Roy Herrington, the longtime Anderson County Sheriff. Now both deceased, Berry’s and Herrington’s disagreement, other inconsistencies, and outside parties comparing Robinson’s convenient demise to the assassinations of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr., led to a special inquest of the incident.

None of the sitting Justices of the Peace had law degrees, and somehow the county inquest fell to a 30-year-old municipal court judge. Judge Nemer scheduled a formal inquest before a six-person “coroner’s jury” for November 16, 1976, and empaneled the unsequestered jurists the day before, which was 11 years to the day before the 1987 tornado tore through Palestine. Nemer also instructed Chief Berry and others that a “gag rule” would be imposed on every trial participant to prevent them from elaborating on their testimony after the inquest was over.

In the newspapers of the day, it went well for Palestine. The whole city seemed to be on trial, and, in the end, Robinson’s suicide acquitted the white community and absolved the longstanding cultural institutions that whites cherished. Nemer’s inquest was conducted by local attorneys Richard Handorf and Melvin Whitaker, with assistance from Black State Assistant Attorney General Anthony Sadberry. In a 1982 interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Sadberry indicated that “he was bound by his profession to accept the ruling of the court” unless he could produce “concrete, conflicting evidence,” and he couldn’t. But he wasn’t satisfied. Of his cohorts and the leaders of the community in general, Sadberry remarked that they seemed “very interested in vindicating that town.”

Damning evidence was blatantly ignored, and every narrative that bolstered the “suicide” theory was stressed. The testimony of A.M. Story middle schoolers was discounted, and a local mortician who claimed Robinson’s body was “tampered with” at the scene of the crime was never called to testify. The testimony of Robinson’s wife, Dorothy — a chairwoman of the Texas Advisory Council for Technical Vocational Education and a recent recipient of an achievement award from the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women Clubs, who was in Minnesota at the time of her husband’s death — was hardly an obstruction for what her attorney, David Richards, later described as a “steamroller” toward a foregone conclusion. In his 2002 book Once Upon a Time in Texas: A Liberal in the Lone Star State, Richards writes, “There was no evidence to support the suicide theory, no notes, no indication of despondency or health problems. Yet the power structure apparently could not live with the murder alternative and were committed to the suicide rationale. The trial was so painful and the atmosphere so tense that much of it is blotted from my mind.”

Sadberry, now deceased, was haunted by the inquest outcome. “I can’t say in my own mind I am satisfied with the outcome of the inquest,” he told the Star-Telegram in 1982. “I don’t feel sure about what took place.”

First up for Davies and me on Saturday, July 30, was a local Black historian named Norris White. Soft-spoken, cautious, and thoughtful, White wanted to make sure we knew he hadn’t come to Palestine until the early 1990s and, when he found out about what Frank J. Robinson and others achieved, he was shocked by the absence of any real recognition of those achievements or indignance about Robinson’s death. A 54-year-old academic with some edge, White prefaced his interview with us by laying out several books that he felt explained the history of the Black experience in East Texas, and one of them was my book on the Slocum Massacre. I was flattered but more impressed by some of his recent efforts, which paralleled ours. In February 2018, he published a story about Robinson’s accomplishments in the Palestine Herald-Press, and it cost him a job. Undeterred, he dug further into Robinson’s death and spoke with six local Blacks and one white, ranging in age from their 60s to 80s. And what they agreed to share was communicated only under Norris’ promise of complete confidentiality. After those conversations, including two with Black men who had been middle schoolers at A.M. Story when Robinson was killed (and who corroborated the white middle schoolers’ accounts) but knew better than to come forward, Norris was emphatic.

“The history of East Texas speaks for itself,” he said. “There are no intricate plots. The plot is, ‘Let’s go kill that nigger.’ It may be 160 years since the Civil War ended, and post-civil rights, but the mindset is the same.”
The sense that White got from everyone he interviewed was remarkably similar. “Mr. Robinson was a guy for everybody, and to a lot of people, that’s what’s so hurtful about it.”

White and the folks he interviewed suggest that that’s what is most a shame. For the past 46 years, nobody has really done anything about what many perceive to be Frank’s assassination, and they feel like the community has let Robinson down. But Norris White isn’t naïve. “Lemme tell you, when I first got here, this was the running joke: ‘Black may be beautiful, and tan may be grand, but white is the color of the big boss man.’ In other words, ‘Don’t step out of line, nigger.’ And that’s the sentiment. That’s East Texas. That’s the East Texas I worked under 30 years ago, and that’s the East Texas I live in today.”

Norris White’s comments and the strict confidence he had to offer to obtain his information brought another confidential informant with whom Davies and I had both spoken on separate occasions to mind. The source would say a lot but nothing on record. They had been involved in the local justice system and Anderson County historical circles. They had actually questioned a member of the local judiciary who had been an attorney involved in the Robinson inquest about the unconvincing outcome, and that individual, who was then a sitting judge, cautioned the source in no uncertain terms to leave it alone. He even threatened to charge the source with contempt of court.

Davies and I finished the day trying to locate other interviewees but without much luck. We wanted to speak with Rodney A. Howard, the surviving member of the trio who had challenged and defeated the gerrymandering regime of Anderson County and Palestine on two separate occasions, but he was busy and hard to pin down. I thought, like Norris White’s anonymous sources, and ours, Howard was reticent to speak with us. And I understood why.

We located a 73-year-old Black man that Frank J. Robinson had mentored and who would speak on the record instead. His name is James Robert Smith. The Palestine NAACP secretary at the time of Robinson’s death,

Smith rejects the inquest’s determination. “I believe it was a setup and related to an undercurrent of old money. Frank was causing a rift that these people didn’t want.”

Smith believes Frank was killed and his death was made to look like a suicide to discredit him. “Suicide is like voodoo taboo [for Black people], so we don’t do that.”

Later, collating, considering, and weighing the interviews and information we’d collected so far led to another heady night. Over the last decade, I’d spent a lot of time researching and writing about some incredibly dark history in East Texas, and Robinson and his cohorts appeared to have been proverbial beacons of light. And now, 46 years after his sketchy death, I’d met nothing but Palestine citizens — Black and white — who didn’t believe Robinson had committed suicide.

It was unfamiliar, heartening territory for me.

Davies and I spoke with Nemer the following Sunday morning. As late as 2017, he had served again as a municipal court judge in Palestine, and he had actually just campaigned unsuccessfully to become the town’s next mayor.

Friendly and well-spoken, Nemer was possessed of an uncanny recollection of the inquest proceedings. “I knew one day that exactly what we’re doing would come to pass.”

He knew someone would eventually show up at his door asking questions about Robinson’s death. And he admitted that county officials needed someone to handle the inquest and that the 30-year-old “was the easiest mark available.”

But he insisted the inquest went where the evidence led it and stood by the inquest’s declaration of suicide.

Nemer also claimed he “knew Frank as well as anybody” and that the political establishment in Anderson County was “not the least bit afraid of Mr. Frank. Period.”

Davies wasn’t having it. We both knew Robinson had been working with Ragsdale on something bigger and with broader implications.

“Robinson and Ragsdale were getting ready to expand on their successes,” Davies said, “where they would take what Frank had done here and move it to 11 different counties across East Texas … and so, though he presented himself as a nonthreatening figure, he was actually doing incredible things through the courts and bringing about the empowerment of African-American communities throughout East Texas.”

“I certainly would agree with that,” Nemer replied. “That’s the truth.”

“And you don’t think some people didn’t like that?” Davies said.

“I can’t speak for them,” Nemer responded, like an implacable totem of the old guard.

“Well,” Davies continued, “how do you think Frank should be remembered?”

“First, I think Frank J. Robinson should be remembered as a good person,” Nemer said. “Second, I think he should be remembered as a community activist who led the way to doing a lot of good and, ultimately, brought the Black and white communities together. It takes leaders to accomplish things, and he certainly, absolutely, positively was a leader who did his darn level best to accomplish that. He felt like it was his mission, and he did it to the best of his ability.”

When Davies and I finally sat down with Rodney Howard and told him Nemer had a high opinion of Robinson but still stood by the inquest verdict, Howard spoke very plainly. “He would. Quite a few of them, that’s the spin they wanted to put on it.”

Howard, 80, had worked with his elders Robinson and Timothy Smith in the early- to mid-1970s as an energetic protégé, young but equal and willing to put in the work and stick with it. A civil rights champion in his own right, he didn’t waste time with platitudes. When we told him Nemer dismissed the notion that the local powers that be ever sweated Robinson and, by extension, the work of the trio, he almost grinned. “Well, I think Frank was a big threat because they didn’t wanna see the county change. We were working on a level of political power that they didn’t want us to have.”

In a recent phone call with Daves, the trio’s attorney in their final case against the Palestine City Council, the retired lawyer agreed. Robinson “was a threat in the sense that he was taking on the status quo, and he was trying to drag the community into the modern age. There was a long, long history of white supremacy there, and the atmosphere was intimidating. I think Frank was a threat to the power structure there because he was trying to undo the last 100 years of history in the region.”

Howard mourns his old friend Frank and doesn’t believe the “official” version of Robinson’s demise. “What reason did Frank have to kill himself? He totally caught his wife off guard. He caught the Black community off guard. He caught all the people who worked with him off guard. He and Dorothy were not struggling. They were living decent. I didn’t see anything that would indicate that he would go off his rocker and do something like that. He had too much to live for and be proud of.”

Howard and Timothy Smith had also received death threats back then, and Howard went a stretch or two sleeping on the floor on the side of his bed farthest from a window, with any weapons he had at his side.

“I think he was killed, myself,” Howard said. “Those of us who were close to him and worked with him … we knew he was too much of a fighter to do something like that.”

And yet.

Frank J. Robinson is gone, and his legend doesn’t really live on. And the past several incarnations of the Texas legislature verge on violating Title I of the 1968 Civil Rights Act every other session, making a mockery of everything Robinson stood for, fought for, and probably died for — and hardly anyone pays his memory much less his legacy any mind or heed.

Shouldn’t we make sure FJR is not forgotten? Isn’t the truth of the matter obvious, and don’t we owe it to folks like Robinson, Rodney Howard, and Timothy Smith to do our part?

Perhaps the citizens of Anderson County who want the statue of John Reagan to remain in Reagan Park should consider erecting a new statue of Frank J. Robinson, just as impressive, to face him. Perhaps the citizens of Texas should interject the upcoming election rhetoric with the spirit of Rodney Howard, Timothy Smith, and FJR.

Or what Frank J. Robinson died for was probably all for naught.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by E.R. Bills.

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