Frick was the chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company. He had recently used 300 Pinkerton agents to break up a picket line in Homestead, Pennsylvania sparking a fierce battle that killed at least 10, including 7 striking workers.

Berkman took a train to Pittsburgh where Emma Goldman wired him money for supplies for his attempt. His assassination would ultimately fail and Berkman spent 14 years in prison.

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

We can only speculate why the Constitution’s Framers omitted a national recall in their lengthy deliberations in drafting the rules governing this young nation. They seem to have counted on a provision that a House impeachment and a Senate trial could oust a president. Somehow, they could not conceive of an autocratic or impaired president failing to uphold the Constitution, ruling a cowardly Congress, ignoring the courts, and crowning himself as the nation’s first lifetime dictator.

For starters, they obviously did not want a parliament or royalty to rule, nor voting by women, the property-less, and Native Americans. After all, how could the uneducated read or understand such ballot issues as budgets, taxes, war, corruption, property lines, gerrymandering, and the like? Besides, political leaders and officeholders recognized that voters might oust Senate and House members, Supreme Court judges.

Also, logistics of conducting a nationwide referendum or initiative was a factor, much less paying millions for it. Interestingly, it certainly hasn’t been a problem in electing a president in our 250-year history.

It also took a century before people recognized that state legislators failed to pass laws desperately needed. As an election expert on Ballotpedia’s website explained the origin of such oversight:

By the late 19th century, many citizens wanted to increase their check on representative government. Members of the populist and progressive movements were dissatisfied with the government; they felt that wealthy special interest groups controlled the government and that citizens had no power to break this control. A comprehensive platform of political reforms was proposed that included women’s suffrage, secret ballots, direct election of [legislative] senators, recall elections and primary elections.

The theory of the referendum process was that the individual was capable of enhancing the representative government. The populists—who believed citizens should rule the elected and not allow the elected to rule the people—and the progressives took advantage of methods that were already in place for amending state constitutions, and they began pushing state legislators to add an amendment that would allow for an initiative and popular referendum process.

Thus, the recall referendum/initiative system was born in those 19 states—but not for a president and other federal officials.

Soon, recalls took out mayors, judges, and two governors (North Dakota in 1921, California in 2003) and nearly California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021. He won by 69.1 percent of the vote, having raised $70 million for media promotion. And he also campaigned around the state to “meet-and-greet” voters. The estimated cost to California taxpayers: $215 million. Last year, Newsom faced yet another recall by opponents who then failed to get the required 1,311,963 petition signatures in time to make the state ballot.

A presidential recall referendum would require a Constitutional Amendment by passage from Congress and state legislators—and approval by 38 states with a seven-year deadline to gather signatures. So prospects for expelling Trump do seem bleak. But all the 27 Amendments once had the same challenges and met them despite geographic distances and lacking today’s electronic communication systems.

But the majority of states passed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) within the first year. Trump has three and a half years left to continue wreaking havoc on the American public and exchanging democracy for a dictatorship. If his first six months is any indication of peoples’ reaction to his rule, it brought at least five million angry protesters to the streets in a “No Kings” demonstrations against him a day before his 79th birthday. So consider what his continuing violations of the Constitution and democracy will do to destroy both during this term.

However, a new factor about election numbers can now foretell favorable outcomes if a recall movement gets started:

If the political marker of 3.5 percent of a nation’s voters opposes a dictator, the regime will fold, according to extensive long-term quantitative research noted recently by Harvard University professor Erica Chenoweth . America’s electorate was 154,000,000 in 2024, so 3.5 percent means it would take only 5.4 million voters to win a Constitutional Amendment referendum for recalling Trump.

Another factor is that far more millions would be voting in a Trump recall election than in 2024. For example, those five million No Kings protesters have family and friends who vote. So do those who couldn’t or wouldn’t participate. Then, add Trump’s social and healthcare victims affected by his “Big, Beautiful” budget-cutting bill he just signed into law. Like the 71, 258, 215 currently enrolled in Medicaid who will lose its benefits. Not to mention recipients’ families and friends. The 41 million on Trump’s chopping block for SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) certainly would vote for a recall Amendment. So would the 73.9 million receiving Social Security benefits he is threatening. Include, too, the tens of thousands of federal employees (plus family/friends) who have just been fired/laid off by Trump’s hatchet man Elon Musk.

Multiply the total by 3.5 percent.

Republicans in Congress who voted for that bill because of Trumpian and donor threats can count that percentage. If they can’t or won’t, furious and outspoken constituents in town halls or at campaign rallies will awaken them in the months before the 2026 mid-term elections. So will public confrontations of state legislators.

In such a hostile constituent climate, it would seem to be fairly easy for them to ignore heavy pressure by Trump and donors to pass a recall Amendment. He will, of course, veto it, but Congress can override the veto with a two-thirds affirmative vote in both houses (House: 290; Senate: 67). Apply that 3.5 percent to those totals.

Another supportive factor for a recall Amendment is the historical precedent of success by people finally ridding their countries from years of repressive and rapacious rulers. The French did it with revolution and guillotine, beginning in 1789. Our revolution began brewing in 1775 and took eight years of war to free us from Britain’s mad King George III. Both bloody uprisings were inspired and patterned by the achievement of democracy and people’s rights, first won 800 years ago in England. That’s when its barons forced King John to apply the royal seal approving Magna Carta (the Great Charter) June 15, 1215 on Runnymede meadows.

That monumentally important document ended immunity for imperious, narcissistic kings under the centuries-old “Divine Right” policy, starting with the feckless King John’s tyrannical reign (1166-1216). Most of its 63 clauses set out the rights of subjects and kings, established British law, and influenced the authors of both the U.S. Constitution and France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

John was a pampered, favored youngest son of Henry II and one of four brothers. He inherited a fortune, vast taxable properties in England and whole sections of France. With a lascivious nature, he married twice and had numerous mistresses despite often being away with the army to fight the French from stealing his holdings. His early struggle to seize the throne revealed deviousness, murderous ambition, insecurity, paranoia, physical cowardice—and greed. As a king, he jailed opponents, bullied absolute loyalty from his officials and the army, stole lands from the nobility. Worst of all, he never ceased extorting excessive taxes from the elite, commoners, and the English church.

Sound like a president we know?

The bad years began for King John in 1209. He was briefly excommunicated for opposing Pope Innocent III’s choice of England’s Archbishop of Canterbury. He suspected the candidate’s involvement with the growing unrest of barons and the people. After an attempted assassination in 1212 in the 14th year of his reign of terror, John went after the barons he suspected of the deed. But they had banded together, began drafting Magna Carta (chiefly protecting themselves from future kings), and raised an army against him for a civil war.

Only fear of certain defeat by the barons and a near-empty treasury could have brought a humbled King John to use negotiation to escape Magna Carta’s clauses. He had no intention of obeying them—especially the security clause (61) permitting 25 barons to seize his property and “distrain” him if he disobeyed the charter. He even got the Pope to annul the document a month later. The war ended with John’s death from dysentery the following year. By 1225, Magna Carta was in force.

This extraordinary historical event could now be repeated almost exactly 810 years later, lacking only the same solution: a final uprising of the high and low classes to strip Trump of his office and fortunes by a recall Amendment. It’s not so wild a dream at all.

We don’t have the vast organizational obstacles of the 13th century that took 17 years to put Magna Carta in place. But we do have the same furious energy and zeal of King John’s outraged public to oust a dictator and save the Constitution and democracy.

Consider that some 500 national organizations exist—MoveOn, Indivisable, and SEIU to Win Without War, Greenpeace, Patriotic Millionaires, and ACLU—to set up a nationwide alliance for such a cause.

The speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of the recent No Kings protest against Trump’s dictatorial regime shows what’s possible when a coalition is galvanized for a great historical cause. Its organizers in the 50-50-1 group (“50 states, 50 protests, one movement”), American Opposition, and Indivisible linked 193 powerful progressive “partners” driven by a singleness of purpose: to depose Trump and his regime.

So why not a repeat of this astonishing logistical success for a national recall referendum? Millions of volunteers would be more than willing to knock on doors, do teach-ins and phone-banking, lead rallies and marches, design signs and flyers, write articles, stuff envelopes, send emails and other electronic “reach-outs,”—and contribute funds large and small for expenses.

Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors against the American people will only get worse if we do nothing in the next few weeks. Let’s get to it!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Barbara G. Ellis.

British settler colonists in North America had their preachers and writers, but those individuals had a tendency to pretend Native Americans were not real, did not exist, perhaps never had existed, or simply didn’t count for much on empty land, or didn’t count because they were to be pushed out or eliminated rather than lived with. Spain, in contrast, generated a tremendous raging debate between supporters and denouncers of its killing, robbery, theft, enslavement, and terrorizing of indigenous people. Spain broke new ground, according to Grandin, in producing criticism of its own atrocities as it conquered South America.

In very rough terms, this is similar to the contrast between U.S. media noncoverage of the genocide in Gaza and Israeli media’s inclusion of denunciations of the same. It’s one thing to live where you can’t escape drunk country musicians singing about being free, and perhaps something else to live where you can hear voices saying some of the things that most need saying. In both cases, the brutal atrocities go on, but in one, there are seeds of some future change planted.

Voices like those of Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas laid the foundations for modern international law, but did so very differently from Dutch and English writers. The Spanish tradition is at least as tied up in religion as the English, and has certainly needed to evolve during these past four or five hundred years. But Grandin identifies a basis for a future pluralistic society, even in the belief that populations were diverse yet all descended from Adam and Eve. One can also, I think, see in the tradition of public confessions something of a precursor of truth and reconciliation commissions. In Latin America, unlike the North, dying conquistadores in the sixteenth century commonly confessed their part in the Conquest and paid restitution. NB: They did not admit to having strayed from proper conquest behavior into illicit atrocities. Rather, they admitted to participation in a Conquest understood to have been wrong and evil in its totality.

Seen from a perspective that includes Latin America, Las Casas — who went beyond Erasmus, Moore, or anybody else — begins to look like the father of international legal standards applied equally to all of humanity, not to mention of self-determination and governance by the consent of the governed. He got there first. He drew the logical conclusions, such as the abolition of slavery. And he acted on those conclusions to as great an extent and for as long as perhaps any other person who has lived.

The world was not, even in the seventeenth century, strictly separated into different legal traditions. The English read Las Casas, but they often read him with an eye to understanding how evil the Spanish were, in contrast to the English, or to get ideas for how to be more evil toward the Irish themselves. Perhaps they could have read him more in order to do as Las Casas recommended, more in order to outgrow dehumanization and division. Defining certain people as not really people was a skill that increased in English culture as colonization and slavery expanded.

Hugo Grotius read Vitoria, but — like Aquinas before him and like all “just war” theory — Grotius was after excuses for wars. War might be regulated, but not banned. John Locke drew heavily on Spanish writers like Juan de Mariana and José de Acosta, but he reached his own conclusions, including that land could be taken from anyone not farming it. For a great many years, Spanish writers denounced war and slavery as parts of the Conquest, whereas Locke, Smith, Hume, et alia, at best wrote rules to regulate such evils as war and slavery, leaving us to this day with a culture that hardly murmurs about the crime of war but chatters endlessly about “possible war crimes” — almost always only mysteriously “possible,” never verified.

Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816) and Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) sought a confederacy of independent nations in Latin America. The United States served as a partial inspiration but was not of much actual help. Thomas Jefferson’s house, just down the road from mine, had numerous books by Las Casas and other Spanish writers in it, yet he flipped their views upside down, declaring that “white” nations had the right to control non-white peoples in lands they claimed and to deny access to other “white” nations. He called this “a kind of international law for America.” The United States has sought its own unique “international law” from that day to this.

The Doctrine of Discovery — the idea that a European nation can claim any land not yet claimed by other European nations, regardless of what people already live there — dates back to the fifteenth century and the Catholic church, but it was put into U.S. law in 1823, the same year as Monroe’s fateful “Doctrine” speech. It was put there by Monroe’s lifelong friend, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. The United States considered itself, perhaps alone outside of Europe, as possessing the same discovery privileges as European nations. Perhaps coincidentally, in December 2022, almost every nation on Earth signed an agreement to set aside 30% of the Earth’s land and sea for wildlife by the year 2030. The exceptions were only the United States and the Vatican, not the nations of Latin America.

While the U.S. had broken free of British rule and thereby rid itself of a mother country that was moving rapidly toward the abolition of slavery, movements for independence from Spain in South America generally sought freedom from slavery as well as from foreign empire. The U.S. tradition of slave-owners like Patrick Henry making speeches about being metaphorically enslaved was a northern hypocrisy where revolution was a rich man’s game. Moves for independence in the South were, to some extent, more of a popular revolt. They were, at the very least, not a revolt to maintain slavery or to expand empire, and not to combine numerous colonies into one, at least not immediately. Rather, Bolivarianism amounted to a push to create simultaneously several free and independent nations, some through violence and some without it. By the early nineteenth century, there were nine of them, newly independent, or 10 counting Haiti.

Latin America was not yet called Latin America and was not some sort of flawless paradise. Wealth extremes (greater than in the U.S. of that day, though not greater than the U.S. of this day) and all kinds of cruelty persisted. But, not only was slavery being abolished, but something else of great potential was being created. Numerous new nations jointly developed means of nonviolently and legally arbitrating boundary disputes, dealing with each other as equals and not enemies.

Bolivar proposed a Congress in Panama among sister nations that would

• agree to mutual defense,
• condemn Spain for the suffering it had caused in the New World (has the U.S. done that yet with regard to England?),
• promote the independence of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Canary Islands, and the Philippines (the U.S. was supporting Spanish rule over Cuba as more likely to lead to later U.S. rule over Cuba),
• repudiate the doctrines of discovery and conquest,
• abolish slavery,
• recognize Haiti, and
• legalize agreed-upon borders.

Here we see an early version of the League of Nations or the United Nations just beginning to come into being.

Slavery had already been ended — and without a horrific U.S.-style Civil War — in Chile, Bolivia, and parts of Mexico. Central America ended it in 1824. Colombia and Venezuela were ending it, but it persisted in Peru and Brazil.

In taking up such matters of domestic policy at an international gathering like the Panama Congress of 1826, something else — another grave evil in the world, one that afflicts the United States — was being prevented from ever being born in Latin America. This evil is the passionate aversion to anyone outside a nation having any say over what that nation does. When you read the Constitutions of various European nations today that describe transferring power to international institutions, you can just feel the veins bursting in the faces of outraged U.S. politicians. In 1826, vicious fury burst forth at the very idea that the United States would send anyone to a Congress in Panama to sit with potentially non-white people to decide anything about the sacred U.S. right to enslave human beings. In the words of Grandin, this “jolted the Age of Jackson into existence.” It hasn’t let up much since. The U.S. would later reject the League of Nations as one among equals and only join the United Nations over which it held a veto.

By 1844, Latin American statesmen had been working on theories and plans for international law for decades, and Juan Bautista Alberdi gave the name “American International Law” to a set of principles that included rejection of the doctrines of discovery and conquest, equality of nations despite their size, non-intervention, usi possidetis, and impartial arbitration. Alberdi also wrote a book in 1870, available online for free in English, titled The Crime of War. This is a book filled with hundreds of pages arguing almost the identical arguments that war abolitionists use today. It’s an outlawry book a half century before the movement to outlaw war. It’s a book making the case for neutrality (see page 262), perhaps a century before the power of neutrality was widely appreciated and 150 years before it disastrously ceased to be. Latin American nations continued to push such a vision on the United States for years.

At the Hague Peace Conference of 1907, 18 of the 44 nations represented were from Latin America, and it was there that Latin American ideas of multilateralism and sovereignty are thought to have really taken hold.

Woodrow Wilson (U.S. president, 1913-1921) may look in retrospect like mostly a talk and not much action, a promising savior who didn’t save us, a warrior to end war who gave us more war, a Barack Obama of his day. But early Wilson, before World War I, had some substance, and some of the talk was well worth hearing, and a lot of it came from south of the U.S. border. Wilson was outraged by and sought to reverse his predecessor’s interference in Mexico. He also apologized to Colombia for the U.S. role in removing Panama from it, and paid Colombia $25 million for the loss. Wilson was unable to resolve crises in Mexico but did not make the usual U.S. move of reaching for larger weapons. Instead, he accepted a proposal from Chile for Argentina, Brazil, and Chile to meet with the U.S. and Mexico and work out a solution. They met for two months on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The United States then joined Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Colombia, and Costa Rica in announcing a new joint policy toward Mexico. (Can you hear the Muricafirsters screaming in outrage?) When World War I got going, Latin American governments favored neutrality. The President of Mexico proposed a collective trade embargo on the belligerents. Wilson wasn’t wise enough to listen.

Imagine if McKinley had listened when Spain had proposed neutral arbitration to resolve U.S. war lies over the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor!

But Wilson did listen to Latin American advocates for international law, whose work increasingly influenced U.S. scholars. Wilson said that “Pan-Americanism” was what he wanted to model the world on, but only after the war.

When the war had ended and the League of Nations was being planned and negotiated, Wilson had in mind a vision straight out of South America, and he wanted to apply it to the Earth. He had three barriers to face, however, and could not overcome them. One was that he was generally lying in bed, sick.

The second was that he was a serious racist — as were others involved — or at least that he felt obliged to please racists back home. When Japan proposed that the covenant to create the League of Nations support “equality of nations and just treatment of their nationals,” the racists wouldn’t stand for it. As a result, some in Japan concluded that their best path forward was not the rule of law but the creation of an empire, or “an Asian Monroe Doctrine.” This was the same conference that viciously punished Germany, thereby laying the groundwork for the other “theater” of World War II as well, and the same conference at which Wilson refused to meet with Ho Chi Minh, just to pile on the future catastrophes being seeded.

The third problem was U.S. exceptionalism. The U.S. insisted on putting the Monroe Doctrine into the League of Nations, giving itself the power to violate the basic premise of the League at will. This was enough to poison the whole project, but not enough to win support for it in the U.S. Senate.

Latin American nations had pushed for a truly equitable League of Nations, and every last one of them joined it, such as it was. But when the League actively supported imperialism, Costa Rica, in 1925, was the first to leave it. Meanwhile, something was infiltrating Latin America from the north: weapons. The arms profiteers were pushing sales hard and encouraging conflicts to boost them. European debts to Latin America for crops and resources supplied during World War I were paid off in left-over weapons, which strikes me as the opposite of paying off a debt. And the United States was still plying its beloved Monroe Doctrine, but it was now joined by imitators in Japan, Italy, England, and Germany, all declaring their own Monroe Doctrines.

President Franklin Roosevelt improved U.S. treatment of Latin America and took Latin American ideas to lay plans for the United Nations. Grandin sadly and typically switches into war supporter mode when it comes to World War II. The fact that Roosevelt was lying when he claimed to have in his possession Nazi plans to take over South and Central America, is relegated by Grandin to a footnote that itself avoids quite telling the story. The U.S. exploitation of Latin America for World War II is recounted quite positively. And then comes the post-war planning. FDR told Stalin and Churchill that Latin America should be the model. FDR’s advisor Sumner Welles drafted plans for the United Nations based on his experiences in Latin America. At the meeting in San Francisco, Latin American delegations pushed for the UN to ban war and create a court of arbitration, among many other positive steps.

But Latin American nations also demanded something I see as far less helpful than Grandin seems to. They wanted to hold onto a regional alliance as a commitment to defend each other. While others rightly feared that this could break the world up into sections, the final UN Charter nonetheless put into Article 51 that nations could act “collectively.”

This became an excuse for institutions seemingly at odds with the very purpose of the UN Charter, most notably NATO. Grandin quotes John Foster Dulles and Winston Churchill praising Latin America for this, and he argues that without this “compromise,” the United Nations might not have been created. But without Latin America demanding something at odds with the basic project, no compromise would have been needed.

After World War II, the U.S. rebuilt Germany with the Marshall Plan. George Marshall took part in a meeting in Bogotá in 1948 at which the nations of Latin America essentially asked, “Where is our Marshall Plan?” Of course, there was none, but can you imagine if there had been, if nations of the whole globe had been aided instead of armed? The post-war U.S. government wanted little to do with laws, rules, morality, or cooperation. Coups, weapons, bases, and invasions would be the order of the day. Pretty much from that day to this, with the addition of demonization.

And yet Latin America goes on showing the way. More than anywhere else in the world, Latin America is a nuclear-free zone, supports the International Criminal Court, opposes the genocide in Gaza, and refuses to support either side of the war in Ukraine. Wearing North American blinders makes it hard even to recognize that as leadership. I hope that such recognition, and appreciation of past efforts too, sets in before it is too late.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Swanson.

Environmentalists in the Cook Islands have criticised former Prime Minister and Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) head Henry Puna for joining the board of a deep sea mining company.

Puna, who finished his term as PIF secretary-general in May last year, played a pivotal part in the creation of multi-use marine park, Marae Moana, in 2017.

The marine protected area extends over the entire country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), covering an area roughly the size of Mexico.

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It prohibits large-scale commercial fishing and seabed mining within 50 nautical miles of each of the 15 islands.

Puna has now joined the board of deep sea mining company Cobalt Seabed Resources (CSR) — a joint venture between the Cook Islands government and the Belgian company Global Sea Mineral Resources.

CSR is currently undertaking exploration in the Cook Islands EEZ, along with two other companies. It also has an exploration licence in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, located in the high seas in the central Pacific Ocean.

Environmental advocates say Puna’s new role conflicts with his conservation work.

Simultaneously pushing for Marae Moana
The Te Ipukarea Society said Puna was interested in the deep sea mining industry while simultaneously pushing for the creation of Marae Moana during his time as Prime Minister.

“It is something to be wary about with his new role and maybe how he will go about green washing how the deep sea mining company operates within our waters and their actions,” the environmental charity’s director Alana Smith said.

While in Parliament, Puna was an MP for the Northern Group atoll Manihiki.

Manihiki resident Jean-Marie Williams said Puna was a good man

However, Williams believes the benefits of deep sea mining will not be seen on his island.

“We could make money out of it,” he said. “But who’s going to make money out of it? Definitely not the people of Manihiki.

“The corporat[ions] will make money out of it.”

‘First to know’
However, William Numanga, who previously worked for Puna as a policy analyst, does not view it like that.

“Remember, Henry lives on an atoll, up north, so if there is any effect on the environment, he would be first to know,” Numanga said.

“I do not think he will be putting aside a lot of the environmental concerns or challenges. He will be making sure that those environmental concerns are factored into this development process,” he added.

He believes Puna’s “passion for environmental protection”, coupled with his desire for economic development, makes him a good fit for the role.

Auckland doctoral student Liam Koka’ua said the company, which has the aim of extracting valuable minerals from the seabed, went against the purpose of Marae Moana.

“If you truly believe Marae Moana is a place that must be protected at all costs and protected for our sustained livelihood and future and be protected for generations to come, then I don’t think rushing into an experimental industry that could potentially have huge impacts is aligned with those intentions,” Koka’ua said.

RNZ Pacific has made multiple attempts to reach Puna for comment, but has yet to receive a response.

However, in a statement, he said CSR was “uniquely placed to make advances for the people of the Cook Islands”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Avelo Airlines has entered into a controversial agreement with US immigration authorities to operate deportation flights, sparking protests from coast to coast. Activists, legal organizations, and local communities are mobilizing against the carrier’s role in deportations. The controversy reflects a broader reckoning with the US’s long and bipartisan history of immigration enforcement.

Ultra-low budget airline flies gamblers, Hillary Clinton, and now deportees

Avelo Airlines started off flying gamblers in 1989 as Casino Express. Rebranded in 2005 as Xtra Airlines, it provided air transport for the Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign among other ventures. Current CEO and former United Airlines CFO Andrew Levy acquired the carrier in 2021, renamed it Avelo, and expanded from charter flights to low-cost commercial operations.

Following its California launch on a Burbank-Santa Rosa route, Avelo developed a hub at Tweed New Haven Airport in Connecticut. Avelo continued to expand destinations, most notably with its recent agreement to make federal deportation flights from Arizona starting in May. The “long-term charter” arrangement for the budget airline headquartered in Houston, TX, is with the US Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration Control and Enforcement Agency (ICE).

Chilling realities of ICE deportation flights

Research by the advocacy group Witness at the Border tracks ICE flights. Costly military deportation flights have largely been discontinued, leaving the dirty work to charter carriers such as Avelo.

An exposé by ProPublica revealed appalling conditions on ICE deportation flights by a similar charter carrier, GlobalX. The report states: “Flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose hands and legs were bound by shackles.

Leaving aside the issue of human decency, the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) “90-second” rule for accomplishing a full evacuation from an aircraft is impossible to achieve with passengers in chains.

Private security guards and an ICE officer accompany these ICE Air flights and are the only ones allowed to interact with the deportees, including even talking to them. But only the professional flight attendants, who are FAA certified, are trained in how to evacuate passengers in an emergency.

So if a plane crashes on the runway, ProPublica cautions, the rules are for the flight attendants to leave the aircraft for safety and abandon the shackled prisoners. Unfortunately, this grim scenario is not hypothetical.

Snoopy’s airport

On April 26, protesters lined the entrance to what locals affectionately call Snoopy’s airport. The Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport, named after the late cartoonist who lived in Sonoma County, is an Avelo Airlines hub. The Democratic Party-aligned Indivisible called the “profiting from pain” protest at the California wine country airport against Avelo’s plan to carry out deportation flights.

One protester flew an upside-down US flag, a signal of “dire distress in instances of extreme danger,” according to the US Flag Code. A sign proclaimed: “planes to El Salvador are just like trains to Auschwitz – a prison without due process is a concentration camp.”

“Boycott Avelo,” was the message on one young woman’s sign that implored, “travel should bring families together, not tear them apart.”

An Immigrant Legal Resource Center activist passed out wallet-sized “red cards” at the demonstration. She reported that nearly a thousand northern Californians have taken their training in recent weeks to defend their friends and neighbors who, regardless of immigration status, have certain rights and protections under the US Constitution.

At the grassroots level, communities are organizing and resisting. The North Bay Rapid Response Network hotline for reporting immigration enforcement activities dispatches trained legal observers and provides legal defense and support to affected individuals and families. Other resources include VIDAS, Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, Legal Aid of Sonoma County, and Sonoma Immigrant Services.

Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, New Haven Airport, CT, April 17. (Photo by Henry Lowendorf)

New Haven no-fly zone

Blowback against the nativist anti-immigrant wind was also evident across the continent in New Haven, CT. This Avelo Airlines hub city along with the state capital, Hartford, are both designated sanctuary cities. The state of Connecticut itself has also enacted measures limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

These politics reflect the demographics of urban Connecticut, which are now largely Latino and African American. Non-Hispanic whites, using Census Bureau terminology, are an urban minority.

According to local organizer Henry Lowendorf with the US Peace Council, the vast majority in New Haven are “adamantly opposed to the airline massively violating human rights with no judicial process and dumping people in a concentration camp in El Salvador.”

Over 200 protested Avelo Airlines on April 17 for the second Tuesday in a row, responding to a call by Unidad Latina en Acción, the Semilla Collective, and others. Led by immigrant rights activists, speakers included local and state officials. Even US Senator Richard Blumenthal spoke out against Trump’s immigration outrages.

Avelo currently benefits from a Connecticut state exemption from fuel taxes, which subsidizes its hub operations in New Haven. The pressure is on for Avelo to either cancel the deportations or pay the fuel levy.

The state Attorney General William Tong demanded that Avelo confirm that they will not operate deportation flights from Connecticut. But the airline has refused the AG’s request to make public their secret contract with the Homeland Security.

The continuity of US deportation policy

Aside from the heated rhetoric, the New York Times reports “deportations haven’t surged under Trump” although he has taken “new and unusual measures.” These have included deporting people to third countries far from their origins and invoking the eighteenth century wartime Alien Enemies Act.

The NYT concludes that deportations “fall short” from being the threatened mass exodus and, in fact, “look largely similar” to what was accomplished by Joe Biden. Despite all the drama and an initial surge of arrests, the pace of deportations under Trump has been slower than under Biden.

Barack Obama still retains the title of “deporter in chief” with 3.2 million individuals expelled. And Joe Biden still holds the recordfor the most expulsions by a US president in a single year if migrant removals under the Title 42 Covid-era public health provision are included (technically “expulsions” but not “deportations”).

Going forward, however, we can rest assured that Trump will try to beat those records. Lost in the mainstream discourse on the migrant controversy is the reality that US policy, such as sanctions, are a major factor driving migration to the US. This takes place in the context of the largest immigration surge into the US ever, eclipsing the “great immigration boom” of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

Protests expand to other Avelo cities

A petition is circulating with some 35,000 signatures to-date demanding cessation of the Avelo deportation flights. According to the petition, a leaked memo discloses that Avelo’s decision to enter the deportation business was financially motivated to offset other losses.

Boycott Avelo protests have expanded to other destinations served by the airline, including Rochester NY, Burbank CA, Daytona Beach FL, Eugene OR, and Wilmington DE. The campaign against Avelo is growing – locally, regionally, and nationally.

As the sign at the boycott Avelo protest in Santa Rosa reminds us: “immigration makes America great!”

The author at the Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

We’ll have to see.

You’ve written a lot about late bloomers and what it takes to find success creatively and professionally later in life. If you had to give one piece advice on how to become a late bloomer, what would you say?

Whatever it is that you’re going to do, you’ve already done something that’s relevant. You need to work out what that is and turn it into something productive.

How does one choose?

I’m always tempted to say that you shouldn’t have to choose. Also, people often conflate two things, motivation and success. I joked that I’m not a late bloomer yet because I haven’t bloomed. But clearly I am in the sense that I wanted to be a writer and I’m doing it, whether or not I become rich or acclaimed in the New York Times. That’s not what it’s about. I have motivation. I’m following the motivation. I’m doing the thing. I earn money by writing. That’s what I wanted to do. I’m not Malcolm Gladwell. That’s a separate point.

People often ask, “How do I find the thing where I’m going to be successful?” And it’s like, what does successful mean? Doing what you’re motivated to do? Or does it mean meeting certain external measures? If you’ve bundled these two things together, that may be a mistake.

What would you say to people who might ask, “Why focus on late blooming? Why not just focus on acceptance of current circumstances?”

Clearly plenty of people don’t accept their current circumstances. To me, it’s obviously inherent to a certain type of person to not accept your circumstances. That’s why people crossed oceans and founded new places. I think that’s an essential part of being human.

You’ve written about moments of crisis being important moments for people to change their lives and blossom. Is a logical conclusion that we should all be having life crises at age 20 and then again at 40 and 60?

I don’t think everyone should be doing this, but there’s a prevailing idea that a crisis when you’re young is an opportunity to rethink, explore, and do new things. But a crisis when you’re middle aged is generally seen as, well, don’t screw it up. You know what I mean? You’ve got to get through that. I think a lot of that is now becoming psychologized. This thing that gets called therapy talk and “doing the work.” It sounds like what people are doing is trying to turn the crisis to some kind of new state. But I suspect that a lot of the time, it doesn’t really lead to very much actual change in your life. It may lead to reorganization of how you think about some personal relationships. But I think there should be more of a sense that if someone has a midlife crisis, sometimes that is a signal that you should make some changes.

A midlife crisis might be less dramatic than the way it happens in the movies—new cars, divorces, all this stuff—but maybe it’s a good old-fashioned feeling of, “My life has lost all sense of purpose. What am I going to do?”

Obviously it’s not simple to actually then undertake those changes. But not all crises are crises that you can analyze your way out of.

There’s long been debate over whether suffering is necessary for art. How do crises fit into that? You have kids and theoretically you want them to be able to find something meaningful in their lives, without going through a crisis or suffering. How do you get them there?

I don’t want them to suffer. But your children will suffer, you will suffer. The people you know have suffered, your parents have suffered. It’s really unpleasant when your children are really sad about something. But it’s also how they grow up, how they learn. It gives you very good opportunities to talk to them about the way things are or what you know. I’m not convinced most parenting talk makes much difference. But sometimes when they’re really upset about something and you just say one thing, it can make a little bit of difference. So you have to learn to live with their suffering sometimes. It can be very sad. But that’s not their fault. That’s not their problem. That’s my problem.

Did you have a life crisis that inspired you to write this book?

In a very small way—and this is what I mean about small crises—I was just bored. I think boredom is genuinely bad for people. I was so bored, I was on the edge of tears. It was just so dull. And I was convinced I’d need a different job. And I had cancer about seven years ago. I didn’t think that was one of those turning moments. The doctor said to me, “You’re going to come to me afterwards and say this is the best thing that ever happened to you. You’ll write your book.” I said, “Just tell me what time to get here and how bad I’m going to feel. I’m not going to have a spiritual moment.” But I did start blogging while I was having my treatment, again out of boredom more than anything else. So I wasn’t having dark nights of the soul or whatever. It’s very hard to make a movie about someone going through a crisis of boredom, but I think it’s happening a lot and it’s absolutely corrosive.

It’s all too easy to treat boredom with stimulation. Social media, YouTube, TV, what have you.

But also, chatting in the pub.

So how did you avoid those usual drawbacks?

Who’s saying I avoided them? The biggest thing was the confluence of factors. I wanted to change my career. I was incredibly bored. I’d started blogging. I’ve written in my book about nuns. There is a moment when they’ve discovered their vocation, but either before or after that moment, there’s a prolonged period of becoming. The vocation coming to be true or coming to be real. It’s not, “I woke up one day and found God, so now I’m a nun.” It’s instead, “I realized my thing. Now it’s going to take quite a long time to work through that.”

Do you have to fall in love with struggle or the challenge?

I think you have to have motivation. I interviewed the economist Robin Hansen, and he told me motivation is the closest thing we have to magic. I come back to that a lot. If you have motivation, the struggle is not really a problem. A lot of what people complain about at work is that usually you like something about your job, something motivates you, but it’s encrusted with all sorts of other stuff to do, bureaucratic, administrative, making your laptop work. You have zero motivation for these tasks. So you can feel miserable in a job that you love. It’s more about getting the balance right between doing things you’re motivated to do with the things you’re not. I don’t think you can learn to love the struggle as such.

How young were you when you started writing?

I don’t really know. I’m not one of these people who knows a lot about their childhood. Some people can be like, “I wrote my first story when I was 4, and it was about a caterpillar in Wellingtons.” And I’m like, how do you know? I don’t remember.

You might have written that.

Yeah, I probably could have done, but I have no idea. I don’t understand how people know these things. What I really was and am is a reader. I think that’s the essential thing. I think what I’m doing is being a public reader more than anything else.

Do you think that reading can be a creative act?

Some people would say so, but I think what they really mean is that your response to the book is the creative act. I think creativity means you make something. And I think reading isn’t quite like that. If you have an idea about what you’ve read and you tell that idea to someone, that’s creative.

You’ve quoted Samuel Johnson as saying that all young men should read five hours a day. Do you read five hours a day? Did you ever read five hours a day?

I may even read more now than when I was young. In a good week I read for 20 or 30 hours or more. I can go to the library and do seven hours of reading and that is actually a sensible use of my day.

What is your usual daily schedule between writing and reading and other things?

I am very messy. I see all this advice about getting a schedule and habits and I’m the polar opposite of all this. I just do whatever is most worrying me on the to-do list. A lot of times the to-do list is not that urgent. So I go to the library and read and write and do whatever I want. I like to have screen free time in the library. No phone, no laptop. Other days, like today, I owe a lot of people a lot of things. I’m going to have to scramble through my list.

You’ve written that expertise can lead sometimes to illusions of competence. Do you ever worry about your own illusion of competence?

All the time. Well, that’s why I try to read so much. I don’t think someone writing criticism should stop learning.

So reading is the way to counteract that.

It depends on what you read. For literature, what I try to do is keep following footnotes and keep reading people whose work I’m unfamiliar with, whose ideas I might not like. I try to understand other ways of thinking.

Does anything come to mind of a writer or idea that you were skeptical of at first, but then came to appreciate?

Modernism. I hated modernism. I thought the whole thing was just a terrible mistake. Now I quite like it. I’m still fundamentally very different to a lot of the post-modernists and the literary theory people, but I do try and learn from them. I don’t do a good job. Substack is good for this because I have a lot of people reading me now who have a wide range of literary views and they’ll leave comments or disagree with me on Notes. And I think that’s very useful. That’s what I like about it. The other day I said to someone, “I really liked your review.” And they were like, “But I thought you hated that. I thought you loved that book. And my review said that I hated the book.” And I was like, “Yes, I did love the book, but it’s good to read a review that’s like, no, this is trash.”

You’ve also written about the importance of connecting different areas of thought. Like how Michelangelo started by painting bodies and then becoming an architect. Do you have any strategies to diversify your areas of thought and intelligence and keep it fresh?

I don’t need strategies for my own interests, but I do need to find other ways of writing about them. I helped to write the Progress studies Wikipedia page last year, and that whole area is kind of absent from my work because I’ve become a bit more focused and specialized. I used to write more about those things. I might have a piece coming out soon about related topics. Also, I’m quite interested in AI and a lot of literary people aren’t, so I might be writing more about that as well, but I don’t know. Some people hate me for that.

What is your take on AI and the opportunities that it presents?

My take is basically, it’s here, it’s not going away, and it’s not just slop. You’d be insane to just ignore it or think that it’s only a lot of scams. But I am seeing literary people saying this, and I’m like, guys, they’re trying to cure cancer with this. What are you talking about? Give me a break. How it applies to literature, I think there are two ways. The first is that literary culture was changed hugely by things like photography, radio, the movies, and television. And literature always incorporated that and responded to that, even if it was hostile to it. With the internet, though, the novel has not done a good job of writing about the internet. And if it keeps doing that with AI, that will be a mistake. But sometimes it takes novelists some time. In Charles Dickens, famously, the first train to appear in his work is in Dombey and Sons in the late 1840s, quite late compared to how long trains had been around.

I’m not saying writers have to turn around and say AI is amazing. But I don’t really see how we have a viable literature if it’s all set in 1974, technologically. That’s just weird, isn’t it?

If you had to reinvent yourself right now, and take on a completely new vocation or passion, what would it be?

Well, because of AI, I might have to. I would quite like to be a gardener. I used to do a lot of gardening, and my wife is very talented at it. So I’d be the helper. She’d be the thinker. I don’t know if I’d be good, but I’d enjoy it very much.

What do you like about gardening?

I like the arrangement of shape and color, and I love growing things. I love being with the soil. Robert Frost, one of my favorite poets, wrote a lot about soil. Writers today, they don’t understand that stuff at all. The earth, plants, all that kind of thing. We have a very urban literature. But it would be good for them to get a new pastoral tradition.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Denise S. Robbins.

Morse Tan, a high ranking former US State Dept. official, recently let the cat out of the bag on the US ruling elite position on South Korea’s Martial Law.  He declared that “Yoon declared Martial Law to preserve South Korea’s Democracy.”  Having previously labeled South Korea a model democracy, this is a No-Scotsman-move taken to absurdity.

Now, Tan is not a current US government official, but he is an indicator of what the US national security state is thinking, in particular, what its neocon wing is thinking.  Tan also recently claimed that “the impeachment against Yoon is an insurrection” led by opposition party leader Lee Jae Myung “who wants to turn the country over to the Chinese communists”.

As absurd and conspiratorial as these allegations sound, these are actually finely-tuned and well-honed Washington-CPAC talking points about Chinese threats and interference in Korea, and they are echoed endlessly, if histrionically by US flag-waving foot soldiers at South Korean protests and on Youtube.  These anti-China messages were also repeated in German State TV ARD’s documentary “Staatskrise im Schatten von China und Nordkorea” (State Crisis in the Shadow of China and North Korea), released to its German public television website on Feb 25th. The documentary claimed that China had hacked South Korea’s legislative election to put the opposition DP party into power, who are now taking their orders from North Korea and China to impeach YoonThere is clearly a highly convergent and disciplined campaign of anti-China propaganda around the impeachment. ARD has removed its documentary, but the damage has clearly been done.

It’s impossible not to highlight the absurdity of Tan’s statement–“Yoon declared martial law (i.e. military dictatorship) to preserve democracy”.  And as a foreign national, Tan is breaking South Korean law by directly participating in domestic Korean politics.  But the free reign he is given, and the lack of disavowal or reprimand from the State Department–if only for his own safety–is very revealing.

Tan’s position in the state department was Ambassador at Large.  These are powerful, Viceroy-type postings: they represent US policy and US interests on a (grand) strategic level. Consider other Ambassadors-at-Large: Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge,  Paul Nitze, Paul Bremer III, StrobeTalbott, Robert Gallucci. These are not individuals given to improvising and airing idiosyncratic personal opinions. As a former state Viceroy, with the enduring prestige and power of state connections, the platforms that Tan has been given to expound his views signal that he is expressing the direction of official doctrine, reflected both in Tan’s public statements, state media talking points, and the coordinated erasure of counterviewpoints.

Strategic Unambiguity: What the US wants

US policy on South Korea’s dictatorship/martial law is analogous to its policy on Taiwan: Strategic “ambiguity” in language, concrete support and escalation in actions. The “ambiguity” serves to pretextually mask war preparations against China. Of course, there is nothing ambiguous about the strategy, other than the desire for a fig leaf of plausible deniability.

What the US wants from Korea is that which is strategically most advantageous for the US: a right wing Korean client regime to do the bidding of the US: escalate and prepare for war with China. This is a war that it has been envisioning since the early 2000’s and which was institutionalized by Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”. In fact, the reason Yoon was selected, elected, and lionized as South Korea’s president is because he was a walking neocon fulfillment list for this war.

As these war preparations accelerate and intensify, a South Korean military dictatorship with the US in control of the South Korean military is the easiest and most advantageous configuration to enact these plans. The US will settle for a client-plutocratic democratic state, but dictatorship has actually been the historical norm since South Korea was created by the US.  Given the tight timelines involved, it is also possible for this configuration to be instituted again:  this project of war is urgent and time-bound–US natsec heavyweights have calendared 2025 and 2027 (“the Minihan” & “Davidson windows”) as the propitious date range to trigger war with China.

Easy-peasy political proxy

South Korea offers two key strategic advantages. First, geographically and historically, Korea has always been the on ramp and bridgehead for invasion into China. War with China has always started from the Korean peninsula or Taiwan island, usually as interlinked pairs. Second, South Korea has the world’s 3rd largest standing army–including reservists, 3.6 Million troops–,larger than the militaries of China and Russia combined. The US gets operational control over these troops immediately if there is war. War with China is thus most compatible and convenient with a South Korean dictatorship.

There is very strong circumstantial evidence that the US knew beforehand about Yoon’s Martial Law declaration, due to the length and intricacy of the preparation and the aggressive military nature of the operation-which would have required coordination and communication with US forces in Korea. At the very least, they would have been aware. And regardless, they would have benefitted, geostrategically.

Sworn testimony shows that Yoon’s gambit was to trigger war with North Korea (through drone attacks, missile attacks, shelling, false flag assassinations of opposition) to justify declaring Martial Law.  Only poor execution, North Korean forbearance, and rapid citizen mobilization prevented the seamless rollout of this military coup. Evidence has come out that Yoon was preparing repeated coups. Historically, all military coups on the southern peninsula have been greenlighted by the US.

On that point, Morse Tan is the Nancy Pelosi of Korea: he functions like a Track II US envoy–cheerleading for a right-wing South Korean military coup, with just the slightest hint of plausible deniability.

Note the dead radio silence out of Washington throughout this whole process: silence during the Martial Law declaration, silence after the rejection of Martial Law, silence after the impeachment, and silence throughout.  Not a word of critique or condemnation. Note also the deafening hush of the mainstream corporate media.

Meanwhile, the fissures in SK society are approaching civil war.

Institutional Civil War, Governmental chaos

There is already intergovernmental war: on March 22 the CIO (Corruption Investigation Office, similar to the US Inspector General) raided the Prosecutor’s Office (similar to the Attorney General) for corruption, just days after the Prosecutor’s Office raided the CIO for evidence of warrant shopping on Yoon’s impeachment. This would be like the Inspector General raiding the Attorney General after the Attorney General raided the Inspector General.

Yoon has been released from custody on a technicality (“counting hours, not days”) despite being indicted for insurrection. His co-conspirators are still incarcerated, but the ringleader is free, highlighting the absurdity of the ruling. The prosecutor’s office, ostensibly committed to prosecuting Yoon, did not even bother to file an appeal. The prosecutor’s office is considered to be Yoon’s private army–Yoon was the former prosecutor general of Korea, and he promised to create a “Republic of Prosecutors”.  That much he has been successful on.

The Return of the Zombie

Han Duck Soo, the impeached South Korean Prime minister (and former acting president) has just had his impeachment reversed yesterday, and is now acting president again.

The constitutional court found that Han had violated the constitution (by refusing to appoint already approved justices to the Constitutional Court to rule on the impeachment issue) but they reinstated him anyway.  Never mind the irony that the court could have lacked standing to try his case if he had been successful in disabling the court. Han had also been tasked with appointing an independent counsel to investigate Yoon (to avoid the conflicts of interest that have appeared with the prosecutor’s office), but he had declined, leading to the current debacle of suspect loyalties and suspicious/delayed/tampered/sabotaged legal processes. One Constitutional Court justice claimed that the current political chaos was directly related to Han’s malfeasance and non-cooperation in these matters and found for impeachment–but she was a tiny minority of one in the ruling.

The Constitutional Court’s ruling on Han Duck Soo was already problematic in that it was out of sequence. The fact that they ruled first before Yoon’s case, and ruled against impeachment is an ominous signal. Two other high officials, Kim Seong-hun, and Lee Kwang-woo (of the presidential security service), indicted for impeding Yoon’s arrest, have recently also had their arrest warrants rejected.  These are powerful figures who are now at large, with huge axes to grind. The trends are not in favor of impartial justice or peaceful resolution.

Washington’s Dirty Hand

The delayed impeachment ruling of Yoon itself is widely thought to be due to Washington’s pressure: it has been one month since the testimony was completed, but still there has been no ruling. This is abnormally long for what is an open-and-shut case: there is no doubt that Yoon declared Martial Law (he is on television declaring it!), and there is no doubt that he used extra-constitutional means–military force–to implement it and to try to prevent its rescission. But it’s widely considered that the ruling is delayed so that Lee Jae Myung’s appeal ruling (due on 3/26) will be decided before the Constitutional court’s ruling on Yoon is made public.

This is because Lee Jae Myung, the opposition DP party chair, would be the leading candidate for president if the impeachment of Yoon triggers a snap election (in 60 days). He is currently 20+ points ahead of any other potential candidate by polling. The presidency would be his to take under normal circumstances.

However, if Lee’s guilt is sustained by the appellate court, he would be stripped of all political rights for a decade, and the opposition DP would lose its strongest candidate.  Washington does not want Lee Jae Myung as president, because it’s understood that he would balance with China against the US, and de-escalate the coming war on China. Hence the delay. Opposition party representative Park Sun-won has verified that the US is exerting pressure through diplomatic channels to align the impeachment date as close to Lee Jae Myung’s sentencing as possible.

On the Brink of Explosion

South Korea is now a tinderbox on the brink.

One million protestors hit the streets over the weekend, demanding the Constitutional court deliver its verdict immediately. Some of these protestors had been previously protesting in the snow for weeks, demanding justice.  From the right, there has been open aggression by right wing counter-impeachment protesters, paid up or pumped up with “anti-communist” fervor by religious leaders and the ruling party, repeating ARD and CPAC tropes on “Chinese communist intervention”. These shock troops have destroyed and rampaged through Seoul’s Western District Courthouse, assaulted opposition party politicians, as well as attacked Chinese tourists as “spies”. The right have openly spoken of reconstituting the North West Youth league–the genocidal red-baiting death squads of the Korean war.

And so, it seems the American flag-waving beatings will continue until the anti-communist morale improves in the country.  Regardless of the rulings to come, South Korea’s destiny is precarious: more potential turbulence, more violence, even potential civil war. Certainly more twists and turns. If the constitutional court acquits Yoon, there will be mass popular protests in the millions: Yoon will be incapable of ruling and is likely to declare Martial Law again, if only to save his bacon (he is facing insurrection charges). Recent news has revealed that Yoon had plans to declare Martial Law multiple times.

On the other hand, if the constitutional court successfully impeaches Yoon, the ruling party and its followers will pull out all the stops: street violence and a Maidan-type insurrection by the right wing cannot be ruled out.  The quiet acquiescence of the right as was the case after the Park Geun Hye impeachment is unlikely, given the heated propaganda allegations and the polarized ideology.

So, South Korea is facing risky outcomes either way. The forces acting on this small country are immense. Whether Koreans get a clear diamond or spontaneous combustion from the immense pressure remains to be seen.

There is a tiny, narrow path that would relieve pressure and facilitate a more peaceful outcome. If the US removes its finger from the scale in South Korean affairs–and disavows the US-flag-waving right that it is stoking and supporting–a single word of reprimand would deflate the South Korean rightwing like a sharp pin to a blow up doll.

But that would take a geostrategic shift–a downshifting and downsizing dreams of US Hegemony, and a turn towards peace and win-win.

Is the US capable of this? Or will it continue its dangerous ways? The fate of the peninsula–and possibly the planet–lies in the balance.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by K.J. Noh.

“It is concerning that military officers accused of attacking journalists have not been held to account,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa regional director, from New York. “Authorities must act to reverse impunity when security forces attack the press, and deliver compensation allocated to those attacked.”

The five journalists, all of whom work for privately owned broadcasters, include:

• Jacob Adu-Baah, a reporter with the local ABC News;
• Akwasi Agyei Annim, correspondent for Channel One TV and Citi FM;
• Henry Fynn Emil a reporter with Angel TV; 
• Tahiru Apiliye Ibrahim, a reporter with Zaa Multimedia;
• and Dokurugu Alhassan, a reporter with Accra.

Ibrahim and Alhassan told CPJ that six military officers beat them on February 12 after they filmed a bus on fire in the northeastern Mamprusi community. The journalists reported the incident to the local police station, but officers said they were unable to intervene with the military. 

Ghana Armed Forces spokesperson Eric Aggrey-Quashie told CPJ by phone that he was aware of the February 12 attack but could not speak about it.

Separately, on February 21, a group of suspected illegal miners attacked Annim, Adu-Baah, Emil and police escorts in western Adomanya forest, Annim and Adu-Baah told CPJ. The attackers twisted Annim’s arm and damaged his phone and camera’s receiver. Adu-Baah and Emil escaped unharmed. 

On March 5, a judge ordered that 37,000 Ghana cedis (USD$ 2,385) of compensation for those attacked be transferred from police to the journalists, but Annim and Adu-Baah said they had not received the money. Another court hearing was scheduled for March 26.

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

Rubio built his career around taking a hard line on Cuban socialism, even alleging that his parents fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba until the Washington Post revealed that they migrated to Miami in 1956 during the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. As Trump’s secretary of state, Rubio is in prime position to ramp up the belligerent US-Cuba policy first laid out in April 1960 by deputy assistant secretary of state Lester Mallory: to use economic warfare against revolutionary Cuba to bring about “hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

Cuba stands accused by the US government of human trafficking, even equating overseas Cuban medical personnel to slaves. Rubio’s tweet parroted this pretext. The real objective is to undermine both Cuba’s international prestige and the revenue it receives from exporting medical services. Since 2004, earnings from Cuban medical and professional services exports have been the island’s greatest source of income. Cuba’s ability to conduct “normal” international trade is currently obstructed by the long US blockade, but the socialist state has succeeded in converting its investments in education and health care into national earnings, while also maintaining free medical assistance to the Global South based on its internationalist principles.

Cuban medical internationalism: A core feature of Cuban foreign policy

The four approaches of Cuban medical internationalism were initiated early in the 1960s, all despite the post-1959 departure of half of the physicians in Cuba.

1. Emergency response medical brigades. In May 1960, Chile was struck by the most powerful earthquake on record, with thousands killed. The new Cuban government sent an emergency medical brigade with six rural field hospitals. This established a modus operandi under which Cuban medics mobilize rapid responses to “disaster and disease” emergencies throughout the Global South — since 2005 these brigades have been organized under the name “Henry Reeve International Contingents.” By 2017, when the WHO praised the Henry Reeve brigades with a public health prize, they had helped 3.5 million people in twenty-one countries. The best-known examples include brigades in West Africa to combat Ebola in 2014 and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Within one year, Henry Reeve brigades treated 1.26 million coronavirus patients in forty countries, including in Western Europe.
2. Establishment of public health care apparatuses abroad. Starting in 1963, Cuban medics helped establish a public health care system in newly independent Algeria. By the 1970s, they had set up and staffed Comprehensive Health Programs all throughout Africa. By 2014, 76,000 Cuban medical personnel had worked in thirty-nine African countries. In 1998, a Cuban cooperation agreement with Haiti committed to send 300 to 500 Cuban medical professionals there all while training Haitian doctors back in Cuba. By December 2021, more than 6,000 Cubans medical professionals had saved 429,000 lives in the poorest country in the western hemisphere, conducting 36 million consultations. And for two decades now, Cuba has maintained over 20,000 medics in Venezuela, peaking at 29,000. In 2013, the Pan American Health Organization contracted 11,400 Cuban doctors to work in under- and unserved regions of Brazil. By 2015, Cuban Integral Healthcare Programs were operating in forty-three countries.
3. Treating foreign patients in Cuba. In 1961, children and wounded fighters from Algeria’s war for independence from France went to Cuba for treatment. Thousands followed from around the world. Two programs were developed to treat foreign patients en masse: The first is the “Children of Chernobyl” program which began in 1990 and lasted for twenty-one years, during which 26,000 people affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster received free medical treatment and rehabilitation on the island — nearly 22,000 of them children. The Cubans covered the cost, despite the program coinciding with Cuba’s severe economic crisis, known as the Special Period, following the collapse of the socialist bloc. The second program to treat foreign patients en masse was Operation Miracle, set up in 2004 for Venezuelans with reversible blindness to get free eye operations in Cuba to restore their sight. It subsequently expanded regionally. By 2017, Cuba was running sixty-nine ophthalmology clinics in fifteen countries under Operation Miracle, and by early 2019 over four million people in thirty-four countries had benefited.
4. Medical training for foreigners, both in Cuba and overseas. It’s important to note that the Cuban state never sought to foster dependence. In the 1960s, it began training foreigners in their own countries when suitable facilities were available, or in Cuba when they were not. By 2016, 73,848 foreign students from eighty-five countries had graduated in Cuba while that nation was running twelve medical schools overseas, mostly in Africa, where over 54,000 students were enrolled. In 1999, the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM), the world’s largest medical school, was established in Havana. By 2019, ELAM had graduated 29,000 doctors from 105 countries (including the United States) representing 100 ethnic groups. Half were women, and 75 percent from worker or campesino families.

The monetary cost of Cuba’s contribution

Since 1960, some 600,000 Cuban medical professionals have provided free health care in over 180 countries. The government of Cuba has assumed the lion’s share of the cost of its medical internationalism, a huge contribution to the Global South, particularly given the impact of the US blockade and Cuba’s own development challenges. “Some will wonder how it is possible that a small country with few resources can carry out a task of this magnitude in fields as decisive as education and health,” noted Fidel Castro in 2008. He did not, though, provide the answer. Indeed, Cuba has said little about the cost of these programs.

However, Guatemalan researcher Henry Morales has reformulated Cuba’s international solidarity as “official development assistance” (ODA), using average international market rates and adopting the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) methodology, to calculate the scale of their contribution to global development and facilitate comparison with other donors. According to Morales, the monetary value of medical and technical professional services, Cuba’s ODA, was over $71.5 billion just between 1999 and 2015, equivalent to $4.87 billion annually. This means that Cuba dedicated 6.6 percent of its GDP annually to ODA, the world’s highest ratio. In comparison, the European average was 0.39 percent of GDP, and the United States contributed just 0.17 percent. Since the US blockade cost Cuba between $4 and $5 billion annually in this period, without this burden the island could potentially have doubled its ODA contribution.

These costs exclude Cuban state investments in education and medical training and infrastructure on the island. There are also considerable losses to Cuba from either charging recipients below international market rates or, in many cases, simply not charging them at all.

Medical services as exports

During “the Special Period” in the 1990s, Cuba introduced reciprocal agreements to share the costs with recipient countries that could afford it. Starting in 2004, with the famous “oil-for-doctors” program with Venezuela, the export of medical professionals became Cuba’s main source of revenue. This income is then reinvested into medical provision on the island. However, Cuba continues to provide medical assistance free of charge to countries who need it. Today there are different cooperation contracts, from Cuba covering the full costs (donations and free technical services) to reciprocity agreements (costs shared with the host country) to “triangulated collaboration” (third-party partnerships) and commercial agreements. The new measure announced by Rubio will impact them all.

In 2017, Cuban medics were operating in sixty-two countries; in twenty-seven of those (44 percent) the host government paid nothing, while the remaining thirty-five paid or shared the costs according to a sliding scale. Where the host government pays all costs, it does so at a lower rate than that charged internationally. Differential payments are used to balance Cuba’s books, so services charged to wealthy oil states (Qatar, for example) help subsidize medical assistance to poorer countries. Payment for medical service exports goes to the Cuban government, which passes a small proportion on to the medics themselves. This is usually in addition to their Cuban salaries.

In 2018, the first year Cuba’s Office of National Statistics published separate data, “health services exports” earned $6.4 billion. Revenues have since declined, however, as US efforts to sabotage Cuban medical internationalism have succeeded, for example in Brazil, reducing the island’s income by billions.

US criminalization of Cuban medical internationalism

Already in 2006, the George W. Bush administration launched its Medical Parole Program to induce Cuban medics to abandon missions in return for US citizenship. Barack Obama maintained the program until his final days in office in January 2017. By 2019, Trump renewed the attack, adding Cuba to its Tier 3 list of countries failing to combat “human trafficking” on the basis of its medical internationalism. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) even launched a project to discredit and sabotage Cuban health care programs. In 2024, the US House Committee on Appropriations bill included exposing the “trafficking of doctors from Cuba,” withdrawing aid from “countries participating in this form of modern slavery,” and prohibiting funds to Cuban laboratories. Meanwhile it allocated $30 million for “democracy programs” for Cuba, a misnomer for the regime change that Mallory strategized in 1960.

The service contracts that Cuban medics sign before going abroad are, in fact, voluntary; they receive their regular Cuban salary, plus remuneration from the host country. The volunteers are guaranteed holidays and contact with families. Whatever their motivations to participate, Cuba’s medical professionals make huge personal sacrifices to volunteer overseas, leaving behind families and homes, their culture and communities, to work in challenging and often risky conditions for months or even years. Interviewed for our documentary, Cuba & COVID-19: Public Health, Science and Solidarity, Dr Jesús Ruiz Alemán explained how a sense of moral obligation led him to volunteer for the Henry Reeve Contingent. He went on his first mission to Guatemala in 2005, West Africa for Ebola in 2014, and to Italy in 2020 when it was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I have never felt like a slave, never,” he insisted. “The campaign against the brigades seems to be a way to justify the blockade and measures against Cuba, to damage a source of income for Cuba.”

In the same documentary, Johana Tablada, deputy director for the United States at Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, condemned the “weaponization and criminalization” of Cuban medical internationalism that has “wreaked havoc,” particularly in countries pressured to end their partnerships with Cuba shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, such as Brazil and Bolivia. “The reason that the US calls it slavery or human trafficking has nothing to do with the international felony of human trafficking.” This is cover, she says, for a policy of sabotage that is “impossible to hold up to public scrutiny.” The United States cannot tell people in developing countries to give up medical services provided by Cuban medical brigades “just because it doesn’t match their policy to have international recognition and admiration [for Cuba].” The US is certainly not offering to replace Cuban doctors with its own.

The threat of a good example

The predominant global approach, exemplified by the United States, is to regard health care as an expensive resource or commodity to be rationed through the market mechanism. Medical students “invest” in their education, paying high tuition fees and graduating with huge debts. They then seek well-paid jobs to repay those debts and pursue a privileged standard of living. To ensure medics are well remunerated, demand must be kept above supply. The World Economic Forum projects a shortfall of ten million health care workers worldwide by 2030. But the Cuban investment in medical education raises the supply of professionals globally, thus threatening the status of physicians operating under a market system. Critically, the Cuban approach removes financial, class, race, gender, religious, and any other barriers to joining the medical profession.

The key features of the Cuban approach are: the commitment to health care as a human right; the decisive role of state planning and investment to provide a universal public health care system with the absence of a parallel private sector; the speed with which health care provision was improved (by the 1980s Cuba had the health profile of a highly developed country); the focus on prevention over cure; and the system of community-based primary care. By these means, socialist Cuba has achieved comparable health outcomes to developed countries but with lower per capita spending — less than one-tenth the per capita spending in the United States and one-quarter in the UK. By 2005, Cuba had achieved the highest ratio of doctors per capita in the world: 1 to 167. By 2018, it had three times the density of doctors in the US and the UK.

Today Cuba is in the midst of a severe economic crisis, largely resulting from US sanctions. The public health care system is under unprecedented strain, with shortages of resources and of personnel following massive emigration since 2021. Nonetheless, the government continues to dedicate a high proportion of GDP on health care (nearly 14 percent in 2023), maintaining free universal medical provision, and currently has 24,180 medical professionals in fifty-six countries.

Revolutionary Cuba was never solely concerned with meeting its own needs. According to Morales’s data, between 1999–2015 alone, overseas Cuban medical professionals saved 6 million lives, carried out 1.39 billion medical consultations and 10 million surgical operations, and attended 2.67 million births, while 73,848 foreign students graduated as professionals in Cuba, many of them medics. Add to that the beneficiaries between 1960 and 1998, and those since 2016, and the numbers climb steeply.

The beneficiary nations have been the poorest and least influential globally; few have governments with any leverage on the world stage. Recipient populations are often the most disadvantaged and marginalized within those countries. If Cuban medics leave, they will have no alternative provision. If Rubio and Trump are successful, it is not just Cubans who will suffer. It will also be the global beneficiaries whose lives are being saved and improved by Cuban medical internationalism right now.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Helen Yaffe.

Orientation
This article is about the differences between the micro psychology of liberals and the macro psychology of communists. Differences include: how society and the individual is configured; the impact of capitalism on personal life; how the mind-body relationship is conceived; how the objective and subjective worlds are integrated; how politics impacts personal life and how research should be conducted. These differences are not self-evident or easy for liberals to understand. In order to attempt a breakthrough, I describe the story of Flatland, Edwin Abbot’s great 1884 science fiction book of why two dimensional beings on Flatland fail to understand the Spaceland dimension of some of its creatures. I’ve included a link to a video of the story. This will conclude Part I.

In Part II we will discover that even when liberals find out about the Russian activity theory led by Lev Vygotsky, they interpret him in a bourgeois fashion. By this I mean they focus on educational reform and play, rather than work, while ignoring social class, exploitation, alienations as well as what an anti-capitalist individual might look like. To explore both parts of this article will referring to a great book by Carl Ratner: Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind. In my opinion more than any other individual in the United States Carl has remained the most uncompromising in presenting the communist psychology of Vygotsky to the Yankee public.

Hard Facts About Political Economy in Mordor
The US has the highest percentage of children living in poverty in the industrial world – 23% and climbing. We have the second highest infant mortality rate among wealthy countries. Mordor has the highest incarceration rate in the world (spending is three times the amount that is spent on education). We are something like 125th in the world of 200 countries in literacy. American Association for the Advancement of Science discovered that one third of American’s population believes that human beings have existed in their current form since the beginning of time. In absolute numbers we easily have the highest obesity rate in the world. We have a political party, a party that imagines itself as liberal, complicit in the production of genocide in Palestine while propping up dictators the world over. The highest paid individual in John McCain’s presidential campaign during the first half of October 2008 was Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist. Her salary was higher than McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser. The so-called program “War on drugs” program does nothing to stem the use of drugs in the US. The 400 wealthiest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest 400 million.

Sixteen years after the near collapse of the global financial system, the US Congress still has adopted no new rules to re-regulate financial institutions. The financiers and politicians who created the financial implosion of the early 21^st century have foisted greater harm on the US than all the country’s enemies. Why aren’t these problems fixed? We have no mass political party that might address these problems in a systematic way. We have political debates that are sponsored by a private organization, Commission on Presidential Debates. No other political parties are allowed to participate unless the two major parties agree.

In a Degenerating Society the Need for Propaganda is Essential
The ruling powers try to rationalize and legitimize their power by inventing ideologies that paint them as more capable and harder working than they really are. One part of their ideology is that there is no ruling class as a social formation. Class is simply the position that separate individuals occupy as a result of their individual competencies and effort. The “free market” is infinitely flexible, open to all comers. In this capitalist ideology there is no relationship between social classes. Capitalists appear to acquire their wealth as a completely separate process from what workers do or don’t do. What is really going on is that upper class wealth is dependent on their exploitation of the working class in the form of surplus value.

The ruling class does not invent its ideology by itself. The upper middle class perpetuates the ideology not only in economics, but in philosophical, artistic and scientific fields. Presidents of community colleges work for capitalists to dampen the expectations for working class students. Their commission institutes are specifically charged with developing ideological tools for legitimizing capitalist practices such as the RAND Foundation. Also on the ground floor is the Hoover Institution and American Enterprise Institute. All three hire intellectuals to do their bidding by giving talks and writing papers and books. These institutions play hard ball. For example, the RAND corporation installed its academic agendas through the leadership of RAND intellectuals who were by then in powerful university administrative positions. Thomas Schilling was one of the key figures in established rational choice theory, probably the most direct enemy of communist psychology.

Propaganda supporting individualism such as social contract theory has kept social scientists from solving complex social problems by refusing to understand these problems as structural and due to capitalism. Instead, the psyches of individuals are blamed. It enlists a massive social apparatus to block the truth and reality of exploitation as the real source of most psychological problems today.

Being mystified by this propaganda does not mean people are blind to every aspect of society. It only means they do not fundamentally understand how their society works. They are ignorant of the following deep issues of how power is distributed: the infrastructural relationships between the Deep State and particular political regimes; how capitalism operates and why it gets into crises roughly every seven years. The Mordor public, whether liberal or conservative, may know about lobbying, corruption, lying and cheating. They may be aware of inequality, poverty and discrimination. However, propaganda keeps them from not understanding the basis of these, or how these problems are interrelated and macro cultural in both form and content. Propagandists do not have to directly intervene in an institution in order to bend it to its will as Stephen Lukes points out in his third dimension of power. Furthermore, these propagandists can commit evil and be agents of oppression without themselves being perverted, sadistic or psychotic.

Consumer Psychology
Ratner writes that  consumer spending accounts for 70% of Mordor’s GDP. For capitalists, it is vitally important for the population to not only consume a great deal but to do so quickly. He writes that for capitalists, the natural cycles of growth of animals  are too slow for the profit motive so cows are fed hormones to speed up that growth. Fish  are also farmed in conditions that speed their growth. The same is true for people.  Capitalists do not want people to eat according to when they are hungry. This takes hours to peak. Instead, the act of eating has to be decoupled from hunger and coupled with fun because no other consumer activity can be performed as continuously as eating. We cannot wear new shoes all the time, but one can eat food every hour when watching TV, going to the movies or attending ball games because they require the rapid turnover to generate profit. It includes getting to work faster, working faster and spending money faster when these same workers consume.

Wholesome food takes a long time to digest, and afterword the person is sated and has no desire for more. Added to the headaches of capitalists, some wholesome food can be cheap to buy and generates low profit. On the other hand, junk food is digested quickly and its fat, sugar and salt provide instant gratification without real satiation while stimulating new cravings.  Ratner refers to Jules Henry’s book Culture Against Man who uses the adjective “pecuniary” to describe various aspects of consumer psychology. Pecuniary is synonymous with commodified. Furthermore, enjoyment and desire have to be shifted from use to acquisition. For many consumers the process of shopping becomes more enjoyable than using the product. Many compulsive consumers never use the products they buy. We can go window shopping and browse catalogues and ads without any particular object in mind. Obsessive shopping can become a pathology. One researcher, H. Dittmar found that compulsive shoppers have a larger discrepancy between their present self and their ideal self than others.

Sensationalism is rampant in modern culture, in popular music, in entertainment with car crashes, special technical effects and plenty of sexual suggestion. There is minimal, trivial content with little character development or substantive plot. Sensationalism offers no continuity between people and product. Throw-away products are deliberately designed for the short term and wear out quickly. They are unrepairable and replaced by new purchases. Capitalist intervention into the emotional life of the consumer with advertising campaigns is fueled by mass market psychologists. Capitalists can’t admit what they are doing to anyone else, let alone to themselves so they invent a theory that is the opposite of what they are doing.

A rational choice theory of economics ignores the emotional and sexual appeal of the advertising industry that posits the consumer as having a natural rationality where you know what you need, you gather information and weigh the pros and cons of purchasing. Rational choice theory was developed at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s and 60s. Rational choice theory is a mainstay of bourgeois ideology because it construes society as an outcome of interpersonal negotiations. It is the mother of contemporary individualistic social theory, one of whose forms is micro-cultural psychology

Why Can’t We See Through The Hard Facts of Political Economy, Propaganda and Consumer Psychology?
In order to penetrate below the surface of capitalist society and analyze what is going on, we need a communist psychology which requires more than a liberal or conservative understanding of what is what is happening in the political economy. Understanding communist psychology requires:

• understanding infrastructural and structural dynamics of capitalism that are invisible to the naked eye;
• understanding that these factors may contradict common sense. Because reality is complex and expanding we cannot experience its totality through sense impressions. We must use sense impressions to infer and deduce unobservable properties of reality on which science is based;
• understanding society as a kind of verb in motion, not a noun, an unchanging thing.

Carl Ratner gives three examples from the sciences which show that they have to move beyond their senses and beyond common sense in order to make new discoveries.

Astronomy is concerned with the immense, broad system of factors beyond the earth that bear on earth and bring it into being. Just as the characteristics of earth are unintelligible if one doesn’t understand the astrophysics of the sun, other planets, distant galaxies and the big bang, so characteristics of psychology are unintelligible without first understanding macro-cultural factors.

Secondly, Darwin could have never discovered how species evolved from changing environmental circumstances if all he had to go on was the plant and animal life in Britain in the 19th century. He had to travel half-way around the world to discover fossils of plant and animal life thousands of years old. He needed the geological work of Lyell in order to familiarize himself with ages much larger than human history to begin to understand the gradualness of bio-evolutionary change. He had to refuse the easy and infantile explanations of theologians who could not imagine that matter was self-organizing and not a passive lump molded by the will of God.

Lastly, in the atomic structure of steel beams:

Cultural factors in psychology may be analogized to atoms in steel: they are constituents which areinvisible to the naked eye, are difficult to accept from the perspective of common sense. Looking at a steel beam it seems inconceivable that it is composed of atomic particles which are in motion…. Macro cultural psychology is analogous to atomic science in revealing constituents that are invisible to the naked eye, …macro cultural psychology changes our way of understanding psychology just as fundamentally as atomic theory changes our way of understanding steel beams.

Macro cultural psychology is also like unseen distal sun in Plato’s cave. Everyday life in capitalist society with its villains and heroes in the movies, sports, music and politics are like the shadows cast by the sun’s light on the back of the cave. When we get involved in the puppet show of the shadows on the wall we ignore the capitalist sun that is responsible for the whole show. People act on the basis of their needs, interests, aims, passions and thoughts based on the shadows on the wall in the hopes of achieving satisfaction. However, behind these subjective experiences lies a macro cultural, political economic logic of the sun that structurally patterns them unconsciously in particular ways to remain focused on the puppet show rather than the light behind them.

From Flatland to Spaceland
Another way to capture the difference between liberal psychology and communist psychology is to imagine that each inhabits different dimensions of reality. In his mathematical science fiction book Flatland Edwin Abbot tells a story of life in the two-dimensional plane of Flatland. The people on Flatland take their world as self-evident. The higher functioning ones get around quite well just as working or middle-class people get along in capitalist society. What they don’t understand is that there is a third dimension of height. By accident, one of the Flatland inhabitants is visited  by someone from the third dimension which is called Spaceland. The third dimensional being can get along in the two-dimensional world, just as communists can get along in a capitalist world but their full life is more complex, living in the third dimension.

When the three dimensional being tells the Flatlander (a square) about the existence of Spaceland, the Flatlander is cynical. Finally the Spacelander challenges the square to ride with him into the dimension of height. The Flatlander is both frightened and delighted to find the real existence of Spaceland. In our time, the Flatlander being drawn into Spaceland would be like a Flatlander living through a socialist revolution. The square returns to Flatland to proselytize about the existence of Spaceland but he finds their resistance to the existence of Spaceland remains entrenched. Below is the link to a 30-minute video about the story.

What is Macro Cultural Psychology?
From the political to the economic to the psychological
Infrastructural macro cultural psychology posits that psychology is rooted in political and economic institutions that are neglected by neoliberal psychology. They include the state, the army, the stock market, the Catholic Church, corporate farms, banks, pharmaceutical companies, the healthcare industries, capitalist media and their impact on psychology. From this flow capitalist relations like commodification, alienation, surplus value, consumerism, class structure and possessive individualism. Lastly, these influence the familiar psychological expression such as emotion, perception, motivation, reasoning, self, sexuality and the senses. Interpersonal relations must be congruent with these macro factors if they are to function effectively. Whenever people express themselves psychologically, they mostly express and promulgate macro cultural factors embodied within it. Vygotsky writes that mental structures are inseparable from a social structure and that there is a social structure designed just for psychology.

Invisible levels in deep time beyond the senses
For macro cultural psychology nature is both outside and inside us. Culture mediates both outside and inside. Macro culture mediates our external interactions with nature (earthquakes, food sources, trees, animals, air, water, oil) and it mediates our internal relation to our own biology (our hormones, sense organs, motor organs, and cortical processes). This structure is invisible, yet implicit and outlasts the lives of the individuals who shape it. Macro culture imposes constraints as more than a mere sum of individual acts as claimed in liberal micro psychology.

Macro cultural factors cannot be known or managed by sensory impressions by themselves. One cannot see or hear the full dynamics of the stock market or a transportation system over time and around the world. Culture and communication are the most immediate bases for mental and psychological life. Without the symbolic duplication of objects over deep social space and time there would be little freedom to imagine variations in our choices. The freedom to imagine new things is a cultural product. Far from stifling imagination and freedom, macro culture provides the mechanism for making anything in culture psychologically possible. In Ratner’s conical model, every phenomenon is a complex of three qualities:

• its own distinct quality (family as a distinct institution);
• the qualities that are imparted from structural forces such as the state, laws, educational practices;
• the political economy – the stability of the stock market, as work opportunities and the cost of goods and services.

All layers of macro culture are not equal. The economics of manufacturing are more influential in society than painting or sculpture. For example, automobile production employs hundreds of thousands of workers. In its success or failure, it affects the steel, oil and transportation industries.

Beyond mind-body problems
Ratner argues that the so-called the mind-body problem of how the physical body-brain produces mental life is the wrong way to frame the origin of consciousness. It is culture that produces the mind, not brain circuitry. If nature is world one and culture is world two, consciousness/psychology is world three. Culture does not influence some primordial consciousness and then adds certain extrinsic elements to it. Rather, culture forms consciousness. A major difference between human and animal cognition it’s that animals perceive relations of observable features of immediately present entities (first order relations). With the exception of chimps dolphins, ravens and crows, for humans, the socio-cultural world mediates their relations. For the rest of the animal kingdom, present sensuous relations are all there is.

Interpersonal micro relations vs interpenetrating macro relations
Neoliberal micro psychology finds it roots in the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. It assumes that individual relations with society are associative, contractual and voluntary. Furthermore, society is confined to sensual relations between people in Everyday life.  Macro cultural psychology is grounded in the interpenetrating, interdependent relations of Hegel and Marx. It assumes individual relations with society are organic, necessary and involuntary. Society includes not just personal relations in everyday life, but structures and networks beyond sensuous interpersonal relations that impact an individual whether we like it or not.

For neoliberal capitalist psychology, psychological functions evolve on the individual level in order to realize individual agency or expression. For neoliberal psychology agency is usually touted as independent of macro culture – as expressing the individual resisting culture or recasting culture in more fulfilling personal terms. But this championing of individual agency breaks down. A good example of why this doesn’t make sense is early advertising campaigns to get women to smoke. Women’s “agency” did not create the demand to smoke out of personal choice. It was the macro culture of advertising agencies that began and sustained the process. Micro cultural society ignores macro cultural socialization such as various types of propaganda which are necessary to spread common cultural psychological signification throughout the population. Interpersonal socialization would be too fragmented and idiosyncratic to accomplish this massive, common socialization.

Overcoming Conventional Methodology
From idealism and mechanism to political practice
It is important not to restrict macro cultural psychology to conventional methodology. We should not conceptualize macro principles to terms that are amenable to simple, superficial, fragmental statements on a questionnaire or fragmented behavioral observations. But how are the objective and the subjective integrated? Because in liberal micro psychology the objective and the subjective are kept separate, their studies always are either overstressing the objective, resulting in mechanism or reification, such as behaviorism. The other possibility is they overstate the subjective which results in idealism, like humanistic psychology. In macro cultural psychology, the ultimate integration of the objective and the subjective is collective political practice of a party, union, or social movement in which individuals engage in attempting to change the world. This practice enriches and changes the objective world while transforming subjective experience. This collective political practice avoids the twin dangers of mechanism and idealism, reification and subjectivism.

Individualism in liberal micro psychology research methods
Individualism in research methods  are designed to validate subjects by:

• allowing them to speak freely;
• accepting their point of view uncritically;
• renouncing systematic interview and analytical methods that constrain the spontaneous subjectivity;
• ignoring cultural pressures that constrain the spontaneous subjectivity.

A central political issue in capitalist society as in all class societies is exploitation. Micro liberal psychology avoids the reality of exploitation marginalizing by:

• reducing it to personal meanings;
• interpersonal negotiations;
• discourse symbols;
• fragmenting it into variables.

Macro Cultural Psychology Qualitative Research

A phenomenon’s function is revealed when it answer at least these four questions:

• why it exists in the sense of why it is necessary for that particular constellation of elements;
• what role the element plays in the capitalist or socialist system;
• what it reciprocally contributes to the system;
• why the system needs it.

Ratner identifies primary questions for research which include:

• How can it conceptualize these elements as parts of a system?
• Which system are they part of?
• What are the other elements of this system?
• How do they depend upon and support one another?
• What features do each element acquire through its role in the system?
• How are the elemental features distinctive to or particular to this system?
• How might the features of the elements change if they played different roles

in this system or if they were transposed to a different system?

• What kinds of methods must be used to elicit answers to these questions?
• What kinds of probing questions must we ask to extract these answers?

Please see Table 1 at the end of Part I for a summary of the differences between micro and macro cultural psychology.

Let us close out Part I of this article with a discussion of the emotions.

Macro Origin of Emotions
The starting point of human emotions is not internal private experiences based the individual’s private history. These emotions are already always housed in macro cultural emotions. Ratner names love of country, anger at capitalists or racial minorities, hatred of socialism, national shame, dejection about political trends, fear of economic depressions, fierce loyalty to professional baseball, football, basketball or hockey teams or devotion to certain kinds of music or dance. Anger that culminates in violence exists on the macro cultural level in the form of a working-class person who fought in wars has PTSD and is homeless. Other working-class people are competing for jobs and whose union is not treating them well. Others face low wages and lack of medical benefits. These macro cultural emotional states are environmental, not outside private emotions. The macro-cultural environment is already inside of psychological private states.

Personal and interpersonal behaviors do not exist on their own. What appears to be individual behavior is only the immediate, apparent appearance that masks a deeper macro culture of emotions as a window into it. The same is true of memory. Personal memories are embedded in collective memories that involve systematically remembering favorable aspects of political life while forgetting other events as a result of political propaganda. These unify people whether they are based on reality or illusions. Whether individuals are conscious or not of having been internalized, these collective memories are the soil for private in which memories to grow or die.

It used to be thought in the 50s and 60s that advertising propaganda influenced people in a very heavy-handed way, implying the public was passive (Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders).  Then it was found by Michael Schudson in his book Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion that people were less snowed by advertisers than researchers thought. What I want to bring to your attention is the way advertisers directly impact the public emotions by fragmenting emotional experience during a television program.

Advertisements are strategically placed immediately before or after an intense emotional scene. This emotional fragmentation is built into the formatting of television scenes. One must wait for the ad to pass in order to complete the emotion. It does not permit long, continuous development and resolution of our emotions (168-169)

Ratner says this emotional format is recapitulated by people in their personal relationships. Individuals get used to experiencing fragmented emotions because cell phones, text messages, Twitter and Instagram break up a full emotional expression. Ratner says that individuals get so used to this that grow uncomfortable with extended continuous emotional responses.

Coming Attractions
“But” you might say, “I’ve heard of this Vygotsky you speak of. He worked in the field of cooperative learning and developed something called the zone of proximal development. So Vygotsky’s communist ideas are here in the United States.” The problem is this assumes that the communist ideas of a theorist can be directly translated into a capitalist society with no distortion, exaggeration or even censorship. In part two of this article, I will show 11 differences in how Vygotsky is interpreted by those whom Ratner calls “neoliberal” Vygotskyan psychologists.

Differences Between Micro and Macro Cultural Psychology

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

In 1962, the American scholar of international relations, Henry Morgenthau, suggested that foreign aid could fall into six categories: the sort that promoted humanitarian objects, the aid that offers subsistence goals and military aims, the sort that acted as a bribe, the attainment of prestige and economic development.

To provide aid suggests a benevolent undertaking delivered selflessly. It arises from the charitable mission, an attempt to alleviate, or at least soften the blows of hardship arising from various impairments (poverty, famine, disease). But the provision of aid is rarely benign, almost always political, and, in its realisation, often self-defeating. The very transaction acknowledges the inherent victimhood of the sufferer, the intractable nature of the condition, the seemingly insoluble nature of a social problem.

Morgenthau also conceded that humanitarian aid, despite being, on the surface, non-political in nature, could still “perform political function when it operates within political context.” And the very provision of aid suggests an accepted state of inequality between giver and recipient, with the former having the means to influence outcomes.

With such views frothing the mix, it is worth considering why the attack by President Donald J. Trump on USAID as part of his axing crusade against bureaucratic waste is not, for all its structural and constitutional limitations, without harsh merit. Over the years, insistent critics have been lurking in the bushes regarding that particular body, but they have been dismissed as isolationist and unwilling to accept messianic US internationalism. The Heritage Foundation, for instance, has been wondering if the whole idea of US foreign aid should be called off. In January 1995, the body produced a report urging the termination of USAID. “Despite billions of dollars spent on economic assistance, most of the countries receiving US development aid remained mired in poverty, repressions, and dependence.”

Such a viewpoint can hardly be dismissed as a fringe sentiment smacking of parochialism. (In the United States, imperialist sentiment is often synonymous with supposedly principled internationalism.) The less rosy side of the aid industry has been shored up by such trenchant critiques as Dambisa Moyo’s, whose Dead Aid (2009) sees the $1 trillion in development aid given to Africa over five decades as a “malignant” exercise that failed to reduce poverty or deliver sustainable growth. She caustically remarks that, “Between 1970 and 1998, when aid flows to Africa were at their peak, poverty in Africa rose from 11 percent to a staggering 66 percent.” Aid, far from being a potential solution, has become the problem.

The report card of USAID has not improved. One of the notable features of the aid racket is that much of the money never escapes the orbit of the organisational circuit, locked up with intermediaries and contractors. In other words, the money tends to move around and stay in Washington, never departing for more useful climes. A report by USAID from June 2023 noted that nine out of every ten dollars spent by the organisation in the 2022 fiscal year went to international contracting partners, most of whom are situated in Washington, DC. USAID funding is also very particular about its recipient groups, with 60% of all its funding going to a mere 25 groups in 2017 alone.

In January this year, the USAID Office of Inspector General authored a memorandum noting accountability and transparency issues within USAID-funded programs. USAID, Inspector General Paul K. Martin insisted, “must enforce the requirement that UN agencies promptly report allegations of fraud or sexual exploitation and abuse directly to OIG.” While the sentiment of the document echoes a long US tradition of suspicion towards UN agencies, valid points of consideration are made regarding mismanagement of humanitarian assistance. The OIG also took issue with USAID’s lack of any “comprehensive internal database of subawardees.”

Despite these scars and impediments, USAID continues being celebrated by its admirers as a projection of “soft power” par excellence, indispensable in promoting the good name of Washington in the benighted crisis spots of the globe. A cuddly justification is offered by the Council on Foreign Relations, which describes USAID as “a pillar of US soft power and a source of foreign assistance for struggling countries, playing a leading role in coordinating the response to international emergencies such as the global food security crisis.”

Stewart Patrick of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace discounts the politically slanted nature of US aid policies, not to mention its faulty distribution mechanism, by universalising the achievements of a body he cherishes. USAID “has contributed to humanity’s extraordinary progress in poverty reduction, increased life expectancy, better health, improved literacy, and so much more.”

A less disingenuous example can be found in the Financial Times, which encourages “fighting poverty and disease and enabling economic development” as doing so will improve safety, advance prosperity, curb instability and the appeal of autocracy. But at the end of the day, aid is a good idea because, reasons the editorial, it offers expanded markets for US exports. The sick and the impoverished don’t tend to make good consumers. To cancel, however “life-saving projects” at short notice was “a good way to provoke an anti-American backlash” while giving an encouraging wink to the Chinese. US Aid: far from benign, and distinctly political.

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

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.

On October 16, 2022, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) sent a letter urging the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation to “respect Haitian sovereignty and support the Haitian masses in their stand against the ongoing occupation of their country by foreign powers” by using their veto power and voting against another armed intervention and occupation into Haiti. In this letter, we outlined why the Haitian people perceive the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) as a foreign occupation that has undermined their independence and sovereignty since 2004. On October 3, 2023, we and over 100 social and civic movements and organizations throughout the Americas, including in Haiti and the diaspora, issued a joint statement denouncing the UN Security Council’s approval of the U.S.-orchestrated, Kenya-led MSS to Haiti. In these, we laid out demands in line with those of Haitian civic and social organizations. The Haitian people are resolute in their opposition to foreign intervention and remain steadfast in their commitment to self-determination.

As we articulated in our previous letter and statement, Haiti has endured a long history of U.S. intervention and occupation. The Haitian people recognize that their current challenges stem directly from the persistent meddling of the United States, the United Nations, and the Core Group. They are unequivocal in their belief that all U.S.-led foreign interventions over the past decades have been illegal and illegitimate. Notably, the current Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) lacks legitimacy, having been authorized under the auspices of an illegitimate and U.S.-installed Prime Minister, Ariel Henry. Subsequently, the U.S., with the support of CARICOM, established a nine-member “Presidential Council” and Prime Minister, neither of which has any legal status or legitimacy in Haiti, all without the backing of the Haitian populace or the opportunity for a democratic selection process. Importantly, the U.S. demanded that those permitted on the “Presidential Council” consent to foreign intervention (the MSS). Thus, the entire process that led to the imposition of a foreign force in Haiti is fundamentally fraudulent.

We find it extremely worrisome that the U.S. has enlisted foreign proxies—such as police and military forces from Kenya, Jamaica, and Belize—to implement its foreign policy objectives in the region. It is equally alarming that these foreign forces, as part of the MSS, enjoy effective immunity for their actions in Haiti. Given the traumatic legacy of the last UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH, 2004-2017), which was marred by violence, sexual exploitation, and a cholera epidemic, we view the MSS as a threat not only to Haiti’s sovereignty but also to the health and wellbeing of its people, particularly its children.

The Black Alliance for Peace also challenges the U.S. claim of addressing “gang violence” in Haiti. We assert that the U.S. and the so-called “international community” (including France and Canada) are fully aware that the current “gang violence” is funded and supported by Haiti’s oligarchs and the U.S.-backed political elite. This group imports weapons into the country and pays young men to instigate chaos, which is then used to manufacture consent for further invasion and occupation of Haiti. This is similar to the way the U.S. and France have increased the problem of “terrorism” in West and East Africa as a ruse to create U.S. military forces in that region, which we see in the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). The awareness of these underlying dynamics is underscored by the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and Canada on several members of Haiti’s economic and political elite, including former Haitian president Michel Martelly, who was installed by the U.S.

In a time of global upheaval, marked by a live-streamed genocide in Gaza and violent clashes between cartels and police in Mexico, it is perplexing that the U.S., France, and Canada are advocating for foreign occupation of Haiti—a country facing internal conflicts that do not threaten regional or global security. We must question the U.S. insistence on maintaining a military presence in Haiti at this juncture.

As an anti-war and anti-imperialist organization, the Black Alliance for Peace warns that the U.S. aims to use Haiti as a staging ground for a permanent military base in the region to, as articulated in its foreign policy documents, secure “U.S. national security and interests” and manage rival powers, presumably Russia and China.

We once again call on your countries to respect Haitian sovereignty and support the Haitian masses in their ongoing struggle against the relentless occupation by foreign powers. Only the Haitian people can determine their own solutions. Their leaders must not be selected by the U.S. or any other foreign entity. Allowing continuous U.S. and Western control over Haiti’s political apparatus not only threatens to extinguish the nation’s hard-won sovereignty, but also weakens the sovereignty and self-determinative capacities of every other nation in the Caribbean, Central, and South America.

As we know, Haiti is a laboratory for U.S. and Western imperialist policies and practices of domination and intervention. What is visited upon Haiti will inevitably be visited upon other nations in the hemisphere. We have seen this in Honduras as the U.S. ambassador acts like a government representative in a foreign land, against the sovereignty of that nation and its President, Xiomara Castro. This is a strategy that was fine-tuned in Haiti under the Obama-Clinton foreign policy apparatus and continues to this day.

We ask that you, leaders throughout the Americas, reject the old colonial divisions that have made the region more susceptible to U.S. intervention, sabotage and neocolonial rule, and use regional mechanisms like CELAC to support Haitian sovereignty. As nations have stood in solidarity with Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua against imperialist assaults, sanctions, and subterfuge aimed at undermining their sovereignty, so should you oppose the interventionist crimes and colonial impositions visited upon Haiti and its people by the U.S., UN and Core Group. As the overwhelming majority of nations and people of the Americas have decried the zionist genocide in Gaza and the ongoing violation of the sovereignty of Palestine and Lebanon, so should you fight against the imperialist actions that have resulted in instability, violence, and mass death in Haiti. There can be no “Zone of Peace” in the Americas if there is no peace and freedom for the people of Haiti.

The Black Alliance for Peace, in alignment with the wishes of the Haitian masses and their supporters, unequivocally opposes continued foreign armed intervention in Haiti. We stand firm in our demand for an end to the relentless meddling by the United States and Western powers in Haitian affairs. We urge your governments and nations to stand in solidarity with the Haitian people in their fight for liberation by opposing the extension of the MSS and any future plans to convert this mission into a UN peacekeeping operation.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Black Alliance for Peace.

It’s been hard. I mean, I’ve been writing in the sense that I often write, which is that I slowly accumulate things I am excited about, whether it’s ideas or characters or lines or whatever. Like the “phone notes” style of writing or the wake up in the middle of the night style. I mostly write in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, I just wake up and I have to get to it and do something. But that’s completely not a practice I can healthily cultivate. So I have certainly been having a lot of sleeplessness and complications, and often it’s about some kind of work obligation or adaptation, or, you know, like partnership or interview, or appearance.

The things that have been happening for me more often as sort of a full time job that aren’t writing will wake me up. But then in the waking, I get restless, and I get back to my manuscript. A friend of mine, T Kira Madden, advises people to just touch their manuscript, if you’re blocked or whatever. It’s not like, get a certain word count a day, you know, pressure yourself in that way. And I’m very much not that kind of writer. But I will always open up my work and read it over and get back into it because even if I do one tweak, or maybe I write a new page or something, or I just do some notes in the voice, or around some lines of a story, it’ll haunt me in the right way, when I maybe end up going back to sleep or get into my weird day or go off on a plane for hours.

That’s been the core of how I’ve been able to cobble together a creative practice. But actually writing is incredibly hard right now, like sitting down to write. Because there’s so much discussion of writing in the publicity arc I’ve been on…It’s tough to sit down and think about writing. And as I write thinking about how I’ll talk about that writing, at some point, if I get lucky in that way, again, with this [new] book. It’s a new era of my practice the same way it’s a new era of my career.

Do you have a partner? And if so how does this craziness affect them? The press of it all and the waking up in the middle of the night to write.

You know, we disrupt each other in all kinds of ways. But we also are there for each other on the other end of that disruption to celebrate and read the work and I think that’s been amazing. My partner has written way more amazing things in the last year than I have so I’ve loved getting to see that new work and be celebrating.

Are they a first reader for you?

Yeah, my partner is my first reader. She’s an amazing editor. Just very exacting and thoughtful and can see the whole of something in a way that I can’t once I’ve created it. So I think that’s become something really important to my practice, since I don’t really show my work to other people at all. I have a really closed loop on that… When I was in grad school I was sharing my work a lot, but I think even then I wasn’t as interested in it. I don’t know why. But, it’s really good to have someone close that helps my work in every single way before it goes to my agents and editors.

From the outside world, it seems like you have a really supportive publisher and editor and agent. How did you put that all together?

One led to one led to another led to another. A really good friend of mine named Emma Rathbone, she’s a terrific novelist, and also TV writer as a main gig right now, she thought when I was checking in about looking for a rep that her agent would be a good fit for me and would enjoy the kind of work I was doing. I hadn’t had agents before, because I just published in the sort of poetry/independent sphere…

So I sent the work to him, and he was incredibly kind about it. Like, immediately and then it was just a long time until we moved forward with anything, because it was right at lockdown, which was a very weird time to start…and he hadn’t represented new fiction in a while. So I was just patient because I had [also] gotten a contract to write my memoir. So instead of writing a whole other book, I wrote a whole book that came up before I’d been through it. It was a whole fun journey of being in the weeds on a new book. Not really thinking about this other weird novel with the mountain lion, so I could really be patient. And when he came back to me, it was like, “How’s it going? Have you showed someone else?” I’m like, “Absolutely not. Are you interested?” We went forward with it.

He’s very well respected in the publishing world, so everybody we sent it to was sort of excited to see what he was throwing at them. In that way, getting in the door with him got me into…Jackson Howard, my editor at FSG and MCD. …And so really, that was the intuition of my agent to go to that editor, and it’s been so fun working with him. Hopefully, we’ll all keep it going whenever I write a new book. It will be done. It will be fun.

You said that you sold your memoir before you got an agent—how did that work?

They have an open call for the Object Lessons series at Bloomsbury and I thought, “Oh, I have an idea for one” and started a conversation with the editor there, Chris Schaberg and we had a really great back and forth as I sort of developed the idea. The idea I had was already taken as an object, so I had to reshape it into Sticker, which it became.

When I try and describe that book, I say that it’s just like 20 perfectly crafted essays. There’s not a single errant word. It is such a beautiful, beautiful book.

Oh thank you. And that did exhaust me a lot because it was after I drafted Open Throat, I went into the weeds for about a year and a half into the pandemic pretty much one to one like from lockdowns to vaccination. You know, like reentering the world. I was in Brooklyn the whole time, it was very intense to be that densely populated in the pandemic. And that whole time I was working on Sticker. It’s such both a labor of love and like, labor of responsibility. To my hometown, and the history of racism in my family and everywhere. So I think after that, I was like, well, I never want to write nonfiction again. So next thing will be a novel, but it just took me a while because immediately after I was touring Sticker, I sold Open Throat. So it really hasn’t really stopped for me since the pandemic, either in a writing process on the contracts that they’re paying me to do, or on the promotional side or editing side of everything. So I don’t know. I am trying to find my space to just be in my lab again.

I was interested in your literary journal phase with Enter>text, and the collaborative nature of it, because I think so many people associate writing as very solo. Can you talk about how that fills your cup? Or why that was important?

Enter>text really came about because I went to Cal Arts and Cal Arts was a wonderfully wide ranging creative space. I had friends in all different disciplines. Even just in the writing program, none of us were tracked into fiction or poetry or whatever. So you know, some friends were novelists, some were poets, some were completely experimental conceptual artists who were doing like a textual element to their larger art.

As I understand it, that’s by design, right? Disney wanted cross pollination at CalArts…

Oh, of course. From Disney on, it was the idea that you could just sort of traverse the space and there’s music drifting through the halls and you’re running into like, a critique of an art show that’s just been put up on the walls. So just having that community and it was about, you know, 2011-2012 when we conceived and executed our first Enter>texts. My friends…got a warehouse and built it into a live/work space that also had a gallery so it was sort of a home and a gallery. So I thought, well, why don’t we take this whole thing over and do a happening where we can post readers in all the different rooms and different areas and create something immersive and offbeat, where we are honoring the fact that most of us don’t just have a solitary writing practice and want to get behind the podium and read in a monotone. Let’s dynamize this, let’s serve all the fun things we do…It was such a joy to do that and I think it was just to honor my community that I had access to via Cal Arts in LA at the time.

You were teaching, is that how you are kind of financing your writing?

Financing my writing?

Yeah, so many writers I know are also professors or something like that, they have to find a balance. Not everyone is a New York Times bestseller…

No, it’s so true…now I have some New York Times bestseller friends that I’m proud of. But you know, I never thought that would be my world. I always love teaching and I’ve taught in various places. And that was, yeah, that was a way to make money. I also like, it doesn’t matter, but I have some family wealth that I invest with. So I have passive income. So it does give me space that I know not everyone has. So that has been good. It doesn’t mean I’m like, great at writing with that space I’m given but that’s helped me also just write what I want to. I owe a lot to my family and how they supported me to write and do what I want, artistically and not have to shape it to kind of get something that might be a bestseller.

I think you’re one of the only people I know who has been honest about that.

I think it’s important to be honest…Because I live in New York and LA, most people have supplemental subsidized help from their family or other income and stuff. It’s tough to live here. Or it’s really, you know, day-to-day.

I mean, in my case, I have a partner who helps out a lot, but yeah.

Right, I know, that is incredibly helpful. And, you know, my partner and I help each other in a million ways. But, I think honestly, with financial things it’s important, because I don’t want to stand in front of people, especially now, I don’t want to talk to students, and be like: “Well, you can do what I do,” I mean, it would be dishonest. I’m privileged in a lot of ways.

I did teaching out of love and excitement. I taught at CalArts, sort of giving back and sort of continuing to build. Actually the two places I mostly taught were Cal Arts and at the University of Virginia summer program they have for high school students. I went to both of those programs as a student. So in a way I understood what they cultivated and lit a fire in me, and how to sort of pass it on and keep cultivating it. And I think that’s just so important: institutional knowledge and legacy and just sort of paying it forward to younger people and now a whole different generation of people.

Okay, and so lastly, given this publishing whirlwind you’re in, has it redefined what creative success means to you?

Yeah, I’m so grateful because this has been—it was, it wasn’t really my dream—but it is a dream and it’s a dream come true. I didn’t set out to even work with a big five publisher. I didn’t think that was my world because of what I do and how I do it and who I looked up to.

But so, yeah, I guess the idea is, going to CalArts, being into indie presses, being a fan of and meeting and working with people like Maggie Nelson, Eileen Myles, and Matthias Wagner… And they were doing this thing that I thought was closest to what I believed, and I wanted to create. The world has caught up in a lot of ways and I think that’s what’s exciting. It’s just to be truthful and authentic. So connecting with people through art is creative success to me, and it was what I did with Enter>text when it was 100 people every couple months in weird rooms and it’s what I believe in now.

I can’t wait to talk to more authors and connect more and dynamize my work with performance, media stuff, and just build more. I think that’s it for me, because the other stuff is very nice, but it is exhausting. And like I said in the beginning, it’s hard to balance with my own practice. But this part of the human connection, the reminder that we all have a lot to share, even though we can really easily dissect ourselves and get in conflict online and I don’t know, different head spaces. I think that that’s what really serves me as an artist and as a friend and a member of the world.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Giuliana Mayo.

On May 20, officers with the Nigeria Police Force-National Cybercrime Center (NPF-NCCC) summoned Akewushola, a reporter with the nonprofit ICIR news agency, and an ICIR’s managing director, who was not named, for questioning in connection with a police investigation “into a case of cyberstalking and defamation of character,” according to Akewushola, ICIR editor Victoria Bamas, and an ICR report.

On May 28, Akewushola and ICIR Executive Director Dayo Aiyetan went to the Nigeria police station in the Nigerian capital Abuja where officers held and questioned them for over nine hours and then released them on condition that they both must return for further questioning on June 11, according to the journalists and their lawyer, Saidu Muhammad Lawal, who spoke by phone with CPJ. Akewushola added that he needed to provide surety before he was released. Aiyetan and Lawal also said the officers threatened to charge Akewushola.

Akewushola and Aiyetan told CPJ that police questioned them about a February 2024 report authored by Akewushola and published by ICIR that alleged two former Nigeria inspector generals of police, Solomon Ehigiator Arase and Ibrahim Kpotum Idris, were involved in illegal land sales. During police questioning, Aiyetan, Akewushola, and Lawal said that officers showed them a criminal complaint filed by Corpran International Limited, one of the land developers mentioned in the ICIR report. Akewushola also said the complainant accused him of seeking a bribe when he called for comments before publishing the report, an allegation the journalist described as a blatant falsehood.

Additionally, days after the publication, Arase wrote a letter to ICIR, which CPJ reviewed, describing the report as false and demanding a retraction of the story and compensation of one billion naira ($714,647 USD). He also filed a civil suit against ICIR alleging defamation of character.

“Nigerian police should immediately end the criminal investigation of journalist Nurudeen Akewushola over his reporting, drop any plans to charge him or his colleagues, and cease harassing the International Centre for Investigative Reporting,” said Angela Quintal, head of CPJ Africa program, from Durban, South Africa. “It seems that despite reforms to Nigeria’s Cybercrimes Act, police continue to use it as a tool to summon and harass the press, even without bringing charges.”

On May 15, ICIR received a similar police summons, a copy of which CPJ reviewed, for Akewushola and the outlet’s “managing directors.” That summons was dated April 16, 2024, and cited a case of “cyberstalking and defamation of character,” without further details. 

Reached by phone on Wednesday, Corpran International Limited owner Andy Chime confirmed that he had filed a complaint with police alleging “cyberstalking and defamation of character” about ICIR’s February report. Chime also called this reporter “stupid” for requesting clarity on the allegation of cyberstalking mentioned in his complaint, before ending the call.

When CPJ contacted Arase on May 17, after the first invitation, he said he had filed a civil case against the ICIR and declined to comment about a possible police complaint filing.

On the same day, when CPJ contacted the director of the NPF-NCCC, Henry Ifeanyi, he declined to discuss details of the case that caused the summons and said he was not aware of any laws preventing the police from inviting Nigerians for questioning. Reached by phone on May 28 while Akewushola and Aiyetan were at the station, Ifeanyi said “I don’t have any journalists detained” and declined to comment further, referring CPJ to the police’s public relations office.

When contacted on May 28, police force public relations officer Muyiwa Adejebi said he will contact the Cybercrime Center for details of the police invitation and investigation. On Wednesday, Adejobi told CPJ that he could not give the details of any possible charge against Akewushola but added that if the investigators decided to charge him, it would relate to Akewushola’s work as a journalist. 

In February, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu signed into law amendments to the country’s Cybercrimes Act, increasing the burden of proof to bring charges under section 24, which relates to cyberstalking, according to a CPJ research.

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

Unelected Prime Minister Ariel Henry has announced he plans to resign amid rising opposition in Haiti, where a coalition of armed groups opposing the de facto leader have declared an uprising, led mass jailbreaks and taken over the country’s airport. At an emergency meeting with international actors in Jamaica, the regional bloc CARICOM has reportedly proposed a plan to set up a seven-member presidential panel that would appoint a new interim prime minister. Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said the panel would only include Haitians who support the deployment of a U.N.-backed security force, a policy supported by Henry, while large swaths of Haitians voiced opposition to another hand-selected leader. “I’m not sure this solves the problem that’s been going on in Haiti,” says Haitian American scholar Jemima Pierre, who explains why Henry’s resignation and transition announcement attempts to “put a veneer of legality on this situation,” while the country continues to operate under occupation by foreign interests. “There’s going to be more flare-ups in the next few months … if we don’t stop this problem by its root, which is the constant U.S. imposition of its terms on Haitian people and the denial of Haitian sovereignty.”

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

“SEIU’s almost two million members believe that wherever violence, fear and hatred thrive, working people cannot. We condemn antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and hate in all its forms around the world. Our union includes many members and their families—Palestinian and Israeli, Jewish, Muslim and Christian—who have been impacted by the recent violence. As a union family strongly committed to justice and democracy, we believe all people across the globe deserve to live safely and free of fear, with dignity and respect for their human rights, as well as access to food, water, shelter, medicine and other necessities. SEIU members understand that working people often feel the impact of war most deeply and bear the brunt of its terrible consequences.

We condemn the horrific attacks by Hamas on October 7th, which included the killing of over 1,200 Israelis and others, unconscionable acts of sexual violence, the abduction of over 200 hostages, and other atrocities.

We also condemn the widespread attacks on innocent civilians, including the bombardment of neighborhoods, healthcare facilities, and refugee camps, by the Israeli military. Months of assaults on Gaza have killed over 20,000 Palestinians, and led to the displacement of more than 85% of the Gazan population. Palestinians face an increasingly dire humanitarian crisis, threatened by starvation and disease as well as by violence, and desperately need aid.

We call for an immediate ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and the delivery of life-saving food, water, medicine and other resources to the people of Gaza.

Our call for a ceasefire is a call for peace, rooted in the pain that SEIU members are feeling, from the Jewish member concerned for her son’s safety in Tel Aviv, to the Muslim member who immigrated to this country from the Middle East to escape war and violence, to the hundreds of thousands of SEIU healthcare workers who see themselves in the healthcare workers in Gaza who have been killed trying to save lives.

We call on elected leaders to come together to bring an end to the violence and demand a peaceful resolution that ensures both lasting security for the Israeli people and a sustained end to decades of occupation, blockades and lack of freedom endured by the Palestinian people. This war must end, as it is expanding into a regional conflict. It is time for long-term solutions that will bring safety, peace, democracy, and justice to all in the region.”

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

I was beginning to think that nothing new or relevant could be said about the life of Sir Kissinger (he was made a Knight of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 1995). But with the smell of Messianic fanaticism weighing heavily in the air of Jerusalem these days, I realized I was quite mistaken. In 2012, Kissinger said something quite curious that very few people have taken seriously, yet his statement opens the door to an important lesson about world history—and Kissinger’s peculiar life gives us a window into it.

Speaking on Israel’s future in 2012, Kissinger sent shock-waves of confusion through the world when he said, “in 10 years, there will be no more Israel.”

Why would Kissinger, a man who devoted such a major part of his life to the cause of Zionism, believe with certainty that Israel would no longer exist in 10 years? What was supposed to happen under a Hillary Clinton regime that would have resulted in Kissinger’s prediction unfolding in 2022?

Did Kissinger not want the Middle East stability he so often spoke so highly of?

His apparent dual support for Zionist empowerment on one hand and his belief in the impending destruction of Israel on the other is not a glitch in the matrix nor a contradiction in Sir Kissinger’s thinking. Rather, it represents two sides of one bloody program that ultimately involves purging the Holy Land of both Jews and Arabs.

Since Kissinger’s 2012 opinion provided such an important, ironic crack in the machinery of oligarchism, I’d like to take a moment to invite you to join me as we peek through this crack into a story that may take us as far back as Babylon…

‘Greater Israel’ as a British Imperial Project

In 1914, the man who later became Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizman, stated:

Should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence, and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in 20 to 30 years a million Jews there-perhaps more; they would. . . form a very effective guard for the Suez/Canal.”

These words indicated a deeply underappreciated value that leading Jewish Zionists had for the British empire’s plans for global control over a century ago; these Zionists believed the empire could further their own plans for a Jewish state. Lord Shaftesbury’s Zionist project was launched in 1839, the British Empire created the Palestinian Exploration Fund in 1865, and the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, joined the cause of convincing the world’s Jews to live in the desert, but the role of British intelligence’s hidden hand in shaping the state of Israel, as well as international fascism more broadly, is often ignored. [1]

It wasn’t ignored by Sir Winston Churchill, then Lord of the British Admiralty during WWI. He wrote forcefully about the international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world on one hand, but he also spoke proudly of Zionism, saying in 1917: “If, as it may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish state under the protection of the British crown … [it] would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.”

While Churchill could not be said to be a supporter of Hitler’s National Socialism, up until 1935, he loudly proclaimed his admiration for Hitler and also spoke fondly of Mussolini’s Black Shirts. Churchill was also a rampant racist who presided over the mass extermination of ‘lower races’ as displayed in the controlled Bengal famine (killing three million Indians) in 1943. Like most other dominant Round Table leaders of Britain at this time, Churchill was an ‘imperial socialist,’ which has always been at the heart of 20th-century fascism.

Without the force of numerous antisemitic fascists throughout the last two centuries, Zionism would have never been possible.

Take as an example the case of Lord Arthur Balfour, a leading strategist of the Rhodes-Milner Round Table Group. Balfour co-authored the Balfour Accords in 1917 alongside Leo Amery, Lord Milner, and Walter Rothschild. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that, like Churchill, Lord Balfour was also a devoted white supremacist, Zionist, and supporter of fascism. Prime Minister Lloyd George, who oversaw the project at this time, was an ardent social imperialist (aka international fascist) who openly praised Nazism alongside another pro-Nazi royal named King Edward VIII.

While Leo Amery was not openly antisemitic, his son John was a devoted supporter of British Nazism and Adolph Hitler. His other son, Julian Amery, worked closely with unreconstructed Nazis after World War Two as part of Operation Gladio. It was under Julian Amery [2] that Nazis like Otto Skorzeny, Walter Rauft, and Alois Brunner were transplanted to the Middle East and even worked for the Mossad after the CIA played a direct role in establishing that organization in 1951.

Additionally, Leo Amery was a close collaborator of pro-fascist Zionist leader Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky during the former’s management of British Mandate Palestine (1925-1929) and co-founder of the Jewish Legion, which Jabotinsky went on to control. More than a Zionist, Amery was a believer in Cecil Rhodes’ vision for “a Church of the British Empire.”

Amery stated of his peculiar religion: “The Empire is not external to any of the British nation. It is something like the Kingdom of Heaven within ourselves.” (Take note that the term “Kingdom of Heaven” was the name of the Templar Kingdom of Jerusalem, which will play a larger role in this story).

After leading the passage of anti-Jewish immigration laws in England in 1905 that prevented persecuted Russian Jews from coming to the UK, Balfour wrote in 1919 that Zionism would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.”

Balfour saw the creation of Israel as one stone that could kill two birds by 1) providing an excuse to purge the Jews from Europe and 2) creating a perfect weapon for destabilization in the geopolitical pivot of Halford Mackinder’s Heartland and the cross-section of all major civilizational forces on the earth.

 Caption: The Silk Road trade routes of the Han Dynasty were revived again under the Tang Dynasty and have historically played a major role in disrupting systems of global empire by encouraging trade, cooperation, and understanding around diverse cultures (in opposition to the Crusader agenda that has promoted ‘clash of civilizations’ ideologies).

In his book Der Judenstat, Theodor Herzl openly admitted this when he said:

We should, there, form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should, as a neutral state, remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence.

Herzl was clear that like his British Imperial (and typically antisemitic pro-fascist sponsors), he envisioned Israel’s borders to extend “from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.”

In the 1890s, Herzl was not yet settled on the specific location of the Jewish national homeland. William Eugene Blackstone, a devotee of John Nelson Darby, leader of a British sect called “The Plymouth Brethren,” sent him a voluminous report justifying Jerusalem as the only location ordained by God. This earned him the title of “the father of Zionism” by American Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. In 1891, Blackstone drafted a memorandum dubbed “Palestine for the Jews,” which called for US leadership in establishing a homeland for the persecuted Jews of Russia. The memorandum was signed by 413 prominent Americans, including John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Supreme Court Justice Cyrus McCormick, the heads of dozens of major newspapers, the Speaker of the House, and many members of Congress.

In the 1890s, Herzl was not yet settled on the specific location of the Jewish national homeland. William Eugene Blackstone, a devotee of John Nelson Darby, leader of a British sect called “The Plymouth Brethren,” sent him a voluminous report justifying Jerusalem as the only location ordained by God. This earned him the title of “the father of Zionism” by American Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. In 1891, Blackstone drafted a memorandum dubbed “Palestine for the Jews,” which called for US leadership in establishing a homeland for the persecuted Jews of Russia. The memorandum was signed by 413 prominent Americans, including John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Supreme Court Justice Cyrus McCormick, the heads of dozens of major newspapers, the Speaker of the House, and many members of Congress.

The Plymouth Brethren Gnostic Overhaul of Christianity

The Plymouth Brethren were a gnostic sect of pseudo-Christians founded in 1829 by an agent of the British East India Company named Anthony Norris Groves. Groves was sent to the Ottoman Empire and then India in 1830 as an orientalist engaged in recruiting young elites to train in British universities while carrying out espionage under the banner of Christian missionary work. Groves was soon joined by John Nelson Darby (godson of Admiral Horatio Nelson and father of modern rapture theology).

Darby, who considered himself a prophet, conducted six tours of the US seeding his doctrine into dozens of gnostic cults. Each one taught followers to interpret Bible prophecy the same way. This obviously required sending all Jews to Palestine, at which point a “secret rapture” for believers would unfold—followed by a hellscape of pain for heathens left to burn under the fires of global war and the anti-Christ.

Of course, in 1856, Darby’s prophetic gifts taught him that Russia—then Britain’s dominant nemesis after the US—was the anti-Christ and that the Civil War was a sign of the End Times. Darby went so far as to encourage his American followers not to fight to save the union since that would go against God’s will (to blow up the universe). Instead, he believed they should wait like good passive sheep atop their barns to be beamed up to heaven.

Among those American Christian movements influenced (and even created by Darby and the Plymouth Brethren sect), we have Cyrus Scofield. His 1909 reference bible became the most popular in the US during the 20th century and drew heavily upon Darby’s works.

Darby’s influence can also be seen in the works of Charles Fox Parham (the founder of Pentecostalism), George Pember, (the originator of the ‘fallen Nephilim’ interpretation of demonology now advanced by the alien disclosure movement), Dwight Lyman Moody (founder Moody Bible College), and James Hall Brookes (founding father and president of the Niagara Bible Conference, which helped spread Dispensationalism across America).

In fact, the entire Christian Zionist movement of war-pushing, faith-healing, rapture-loving preachers from John Hagee to Benny Hinn and Pat Robertson all sit on foundations created by Darby’s Plymouth Brethren—not the Bible.

The 1826 Albury Conferences on Prophecy

The Plymouth Brethren emerged onto the scene in tandem with a tightly knit network of Anglican/Jesuit intelligence operatives who operated under the leadership of 1) Henry Drummond (financier and co-founder of the New Apostolic Church founded in 1834), 2) Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 7^th Earl of Shaftesbury, and 3) John Nelson Darby (founder of the ‘Exclusive Brethren’ Plymouth Brethren and leader of the sect).

Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper was a follower of Henry Drummond, who devoted himself to the cause of “Premillennial Dispensationalism” soon after a series of conferences on prophecy were held between 1826 and 1830. They were dubbed “The Albury Conferences.”

These conferences, overseen by Drummond at a vast estate he purchased featuring 70 bedrooms in Surrey, England, included leading figures of London’s gnostic intelligentsia. This included occultists Robert Haldane and Sir Thomas Carlyle, both of whom went on to become 12 “apostles/prophets” of the New Apostolic Catholic Church created by Drummond and George Irving in 1830.

The Albury Conferences themselves were sparked by the rediscovery of the writings of the influential Jesuit Francisco Ribera (1537-1591) of Salamanca, who played a major role in the Council of Trent of 1545, which ensured never-ending wars between Catholics and Protestants. This council and its Jesuit controllers are sometimes called ‘the counter-reformation.’

A Jesuit Sleight of Hand Sets the Stage for Zionism

Ribera’s primary task was to create an intellectual argument in opposition to the Protestant affirmation that the end times were now (i.e. 545) and that the Whore of Babylon described in the Book of Revelation was the Catholic Church. Ribera’s solution was simple: make the case why the events of Revelation were neither in the present nor in the past (the majority of Christians at the time believed that the subject of the “Whore of Babylon” was Nero’s Rome). Rather, he argued, they were to take place at some distant moment in the future.

Jesuit grand strategist and true father of Christian Zionism Francisco Ribera (1537-1591). Note the Templar Cross. That will make more sense later.

Moreover, in his 500-page treatise In Sacrum Beati Ioannis Apostoli, & Evangelistiae Apocalypsin Commentari, Ribera explained that the signs of the end times would only occur when the temple of Solomon, destroyed in 70 CE during the first Roman Jewish War, was rebuilt (additionally implying the restoration of Jews to their homeland). Ribera’s writings became known as the Futurist School of Pre-Millennial Dispensationalism, from which arose such modern perversions of Christian-Zionism, Rapture theology, and the diverse array of End Times Cultists of Christian and Jewish brands in our modern era.

By the early 17th century, Ribera’s writings had fallen into obscurity. They were only rediscovered when S.R. Maitland (Keeper of Manuscripts for the Archbishop of Canterbury) found himself working in the Vatican archives. Maitland believed the Jesuitical concepts were revolutionary, and they inspired him to write books on the antichrist and End Times in the form of An Inquiry into the Grounds of the Prophetic Period in Daniel and St, John (1826), A Second Inquiry (1829), and An Attempt to Elucidate the Prophecies Concerning Anti Christ (1830).

Perhaps most importantly, Ribera’s eschatology lent itself to the geopolitical aims of a British Empire struggling to 1) prevent the spread of independence movements across the world that followed America’s lead and 2) maintain a system of global enslavement with India, Russia, Egypt, China, and the Ottoman Empire as prime targets.

The obvious danger of the renewal of Silk Road routes of cooperation connecting these ancient civilizational states would be a disaster for the British Empire’s ambitions to become a New Roman Empire retaining control through divide-to-conquer tactics.

The Cabalistic Fraud of Apostolic End Times Cults

Echoing a similar gnostic ‘secret doctrine’ that paralleled the Cabalistic traditions of ‘exoteric’ (public) Torah and esoteric (hidden/oral) Torah, these self-professed ‘apostles’ claimed to hold prophetic gifts and that they could interact with angels and Jesus through what they called ‘the holy spirit’ (a practice commonly involving going into self-induced trances and speaking in uncontrolled gibberish/tongues).

Dozens of End Times cults splintered off from this source. Various prophets like Edward Irving (founder of the Irvingites), John Dowie (founder of Zion Illinois), John Darby (founder of Exclusive Brethren), Charles Parham (founder of Pentecostalism), Joseph Smith of the Mormons, and Dwight L. Moody (founder of Moody Bible College) created occult societies masquerading as “Christian” movements.

The thread tying these new sects together tended to revolve around 1) rapture interpretations of the Bible, 2) the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land, and, in most cases, 3) the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple.

Were these actions to occur, it was taught by those with ‘special gnostic knowledge,’ the apocalyptic End Times would be invoked. The dual origins of Christian Zionism and End Times rapture theology are found here—not in the Bible.

The Fraud of British Israelism

It is also noteworthy that many of these “apostolic” cult creators were also devotees of “British Israelism,” which claimed that the 10 lost Tribes of Israel actually settled in Britain, and the British Royal family was directly descended from the House of David—the ‘secret children’ of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Films such as Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and the popular book Holy Blood Holy Grail made these actual beliefs of the oligarchy into articles of popular mythology in the minds of plebian consumers.

Most people watching King Charles III sprinkled with water from the River Jordan during his coronation had no idea what insane symbolism was occurring. In the mind of Charles and the broader oligarchy he represents, this ritual symbolizes Charles as the blood heir to the throne of Christ himself. The choice to carry a metallic globe and cross symbolizing his divine right to rule the entire globe as prima inter pares (first among equals)—a symbol of the Holy Roman Emperor—should also not be ignored (see image below).

In 1834, British Israelite Henry Drummond stated that “The majority of what was called the religious world, disbelieved that the Jews were to be restored to their own land, and that the Lord Jesus Christ was to return and reign in person on this earth.”

The Logic of England’s Use of Zionism

In January 1839, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper wrote an article in the London Quarterly Review commonly referred to as the first public call for the restoration of the Jews in Palestine:

The soil and climate of Palestine are singularly adapted to the growth of produce required for the exigencies of Great Britain; the finest cotton may be obtained in almost unlimited abundance; silk and madder are the staple of the country, and olive oil is now, as it ever was, the very fatness of the land. Capital and skill are alone required: the presence of a British officer, and the increased security of property which his presence will confer, may invite them from these islands to the cultivation of Palestine; and the Jews, who will betake themselves to agriculture in no other land, having found, in the English consul, a mediator between their people and the Pasha, will probably return in yet greater numbers, and become once more the husbandmen of Judaea and Galilee. (Cited in Victoria Clark, Allies for Armageddon, p.67)

In 1840, Lord Palmerston (Lord Cooper’s cousin and British Foreign Secretary) echoed this proto-zionist outlook in a letter to the British ambassador to Constantinople:

There exists at the present time among the Jews dispersed over Europe, a strong notion that the time is approaching when their nation is to return to Palestine… It would be of manifest importance to the Sultan to encourage the Jews to return and to settle in Palestine… I have to instruct your Excellency to recommend to hold out every just encouragement to the Jews of Europe to return to Palestine.

In 1853, Shaftesbury wrote to then-Prime Minister Aberdeen describing Syria as “a country without a nation, which should be matched to a nation without a country… Is there such a thing? To be sure there is. The ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews!”

Shaftesbury recognized the need to map Palestine (which also involved finding the location of Solomon’s Temple) in preparation for this vast project. To this end, he worked closely with his cousin Lord Palmerston and the Prince of Whales (later King Edward VII) to create the Palestinian Exploration Fund in 1865.

Templars, Mithra, and the Roots of the Palestinian Exploration Fund

This project was been put into motion a little earlier, when in 1862, Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Edward Albert, led an expedition to Palestine. The first secretary of the Palestinian Exploration Fund (PEF), Walter Besant, described the importance of the King’s venture to the Holy Land in his work Twenty-One Years Work in the Holy Land (1886):

Hitherto the opportunity for such systematic research has been wanting. It appears now to have arrived. The visit of HRH the Prince of Wales to the Mosque at Hebron has broken down the bar which for centuries obstructed the entrance of Christians to that most venerable of the sanctuaries of Palestine; and may be said to have thrown open the whole of Syria to Christian research.

The fact that Walter Besant of the Palestinian Expedition Fund was the brother-in-law of Annie Besant, leader of the international Theosophy movement, should raise some alarm bells since it has been noted that John Nelson Darby infused his translations of the Bible with language and terms only being used by the Theosophists.

Before Prince Edward Albert’s trip, the last royal to step foot in Jerusalem was King Richard the Lionheart in 1192 CE during the 3rd Crusade overseen by the Templars.

The Templars were a mercenary cult established by Cistercian grand strategist Bernard of Clairvaux in 1118 CE. They were officially called “The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.” Not living up to their aspirations of poverty, this order of elite Christian mercenaries soon became the dominant financial empire across Europe and the Mediterranean sphere. It oversaw a network of Mithraic mystery cults throughout the world stretching from Russia to Europe, England, and the Middle East.

In fact, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which reigned from 1099-1291, was frequently managed by the Templars and ranged widely in size during several bloody Crusades against the Muslims. An animation of the Kingdom can be seen here:

The Kingdom’s flag can be seen here:

The Jerusalem crosses became affiliated with the Templars before the order was dissolved (at least publicly) and appeared on the insignia of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre, established as a papal knighthood in 1098. It currently has 30,000 official members under an Order not too dissimilar in structure to Jesuit Generals [3]. Keep in mind that this papal knighthood was established 20 years before the founding of the Clairvaux’s Templars.

According to the sect’s website, the Knighthood of the Holy Sepulchre is devoted to “absolute fidelity to the Popes” and seeks to “sustain and aid…the Catholic Church in the Holy Land.” In Freemasonic fashion, the Order is organized around a Grand Master and a chain of command of obedience down to the lower degrees.

Among the priorities of the order today are the funding and maintenance of religious schools across Palestine, Israel, and the broader Middle East.

Below, one can see a Good Friday ritual celebrated by a group of Knights of the Sepulchre in Bolivia. I’m sure the similarities to the KKK (which emerged out of the Masonic Knights of the Golden Circle that nearly became the occult center of North America under Albert Pike’s command in the 19th century) are a complete coincidence.

In 1222, Francis of Assisi (ordained as the environmentalist’s saint) established a subdivision of his Franciscans dubbed “The Order of Penitent Brothers and Sisters.” Like its later incarnation in the Jesuits, the order was arranged around a general and featured an outward (exoteric) practice of strict Benedictine asceticism (this involved self-flagellation).

This order became known as the Franciscan Minorite Order and selected for themselves a very peculiar emblem.

This is important to keep in mind since the Prince of Whales Albert Edward celebrated his 1862 arrival in the Holy Land by engraving a tattoo featuring the Templar crosses on his arm. The Templar headquarters in Jerusalem were found in the elaborate crypts built under the Al-Aqsa Mosque (the supposed location of Solomon’s Temple) and are the source of much speculation. The likelihood of a Mithraic temple as part of a network of thousands scattered across the Holy Land and Europe is the most attractive hypothesis this author has yet seen.

Working directly under Prince Albert Edward was Sir Charles Warren, chief of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) and First Grand Master of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge, which was established in 1886. The Quatuor Coronati (Four Crowns) was the first archeology lodge devoted to mapping out the Middle East and ultimately rebuilding Solomon’s Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE.

Additional aims of the lodge and Palestinian Exploration Fund involved locating the ark of the covenant and holy grail. The geopolitical benefits of mapping the Middle East for the British High Command (as well as mapping out the tribal relations of Arabs living there under the manipulation of British orientalists) were obvious.

The entire field of ‘Biblical Archeology’ was created—and continues to be shaped—by the Quatuor Coronati. Upon founding the PEF, Warren stated that it was designed with the avowed intention of “gradually introducing the Jews, pure and simple, who are eventually to occupy and govern this country.”

In 1886, Sir Charles Warren was appointed the chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, where he was assigned to protect the Prince of Whales’ ritualistic murder of prostitutes across London in a famous unsolved case called “Jack the Ripper.” Warren worked with Plymouth Brethren member Sir Robert Anderson, head of Scotland Yard, to sabotage the investigation into the masonic ritual murder of prostitutes across London. These murders most likely occurred at the hand of Prince Albert Edward’s eldest son Prince Albert Victor. The 2001 Hollywood film From Hell, starring Johny Depp, was but one of many films banalizing this grotesque chapter of history in the form of popular entertainment.

It is also worth noting that author Michael Baigent—who wrote Holy Blood Holy Grail, which informed Dan Brown’s Davinci Code—was also a member of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge.

The Plymouth Brethren Start Religious Fires

Another Plymouth Brethren cultist played an important role in British Mandate Palestine. Colonel Charles Wingate was a leading figure in Darby’s sect and ensured that his son, Colonel Orde Wingate, would follow in his father’s shoes as a deviant imperialist and Christian Zionist.

Orde Wingate worked closely with Christopher Sykes (son of Mark Sykes of Sykes-Picot fame) and was sent to British Mandate Palestine in 1935 to train Zionist paramilitary groups. He created a network of elite ‘Night Squads’ working in tandem with Jabotinsky’s Haganah paramilitary group.

As demonstrated by the pioneering work of Steven P. Meyer, Vladimir Jabotinsky was a British intelligence asset from Ukraine who was groomed in the Freemasonic Young Turk operation set into motion by Lord Palmerston and Giuseppe Mazzini in the 1840s. He was a Jewish fascist admirer who Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, called “Vladimir Hitler” due to his adoption of Nazi practices and his rabidly racist ethnonationalist attitude.

In a letter to his cousin, Orde wrote:

The Jews are loyal to the Empire… Palestine is essential to our Empire- our Empire is essential to England- England is essential to world peace. We have the chance to plant here in Palestine and Transjordan a loyal, rich and intelligent nation, with which we can hold for us the key to world domination without expense or effort on our part.

It is a notable irony that Col. Orde Wingate had two very influential “pro-Arab” Orientalist cousins: 1) E.G Browne (sponsor of Al-Afghani, the spiritual father of Salafiyyism) and 2) T.E. Lawrence, whose manipulation of Bedouin Hashemite tribes drove the British Empire’s first ‘Arab Spring’ against the weak Ottoman Empire during World War One.

British Mandate Palestine Grand Mullah Haj Amin frequently collaborated with British intelligence from Britain’s Cairo office, including the Muslim Brotherhood, to 1) assassinate moderate Arabs seeking economic cooperation with the Jews and 2) kill Jews to stoke revenge sentiments similar to the earlier program of keeping Protestant vs. Catholic wars ablaze in Europe.

Haj Amin’s story as a British asset and provocateur is told in full by Cynthia Chung in her book The Empire in Which the Black Sun Never Set. [4]

British intelligence’s support of Islamist cults throughout the Arab world, from al-Afghani (founder of Salafyyism) to the Muslim Brotherhood, and their simultaneous support of the most fascist and violent Zionist ideologues should not be seen as contradictory in any way. Rather, this support is united by one firm principle: maintain global dominance for the Church of the British Empire.

With a game so dirty, one shouldn’t be surprised to discover that Wingate’s fellow British intelligence agent and self-professed satanist Aleister Crowley himself emerged out of Darby’s Plymouth Brethren sect.

Mystery Babylon from a New Lens

Plymouth Brethren grand strategist George Hawkins Pember (1837-1910) is known as one of the most influential of Darby’s sect. His works on ancient mystery cults, Zionism, prophecy, and even alien interpretations of scripture have done an incredible amount of damage in shaping imperial strategic planning for over 150 years.

In his book The Antichrist, Babylon, and the Coming of the Kingdom, Pember laid out the challenge of interpreting what the ‘Whore of Babylon’ might be. This information is very important for anyone wishing to calculate the days until the End Times.

Pember followed the Pre-Millennial Dispensationalist line by extracting the cataclysmic events into the future. “It would seem, that Babylon must be rebuilt and become again the center of the world and the glory of kingdoms, as we have it represented in the eighteenth chapter of the apocalypse,” he wrote.

But who is this Babylon that must rise to power to usher in the End Times? Is it Russia? Is it the papacy? Is it the British Empire? Or is it something else?

As a devout Christian Zionist cut from the cloth of Palmerston, Churchill, or Eichmann, the answer is clear, according to Pember. In his book The Antichrist, Babylon, and the Coming of the Kingdom, he wrote:

The wonder is that the restoration of Babylon has never yet been attempted…As soon, however, as Christendom is united in the form of the Ten Confederate Kingdoms, all jealousy will be at an end, and the great prize may then be seized for the common good. No doubt commerce will be the exciting motive: the civilized world will, perhaps, combine to build a great central emporium, which by their united exertions will quickly surpass all other cities, and finally become the capital of the Antichrist.

Keeping in mind the role of the Plymouth Brethren and gnostic intelligence operatives of the Palestinian Expedition Fund in creating Zionism in the first place, let’s review once more the region proclaimed by Herzl, Jabotinsky, and other Greater Zionists as the divine land ordained by God’s covenant for the “chosen people”…

Today, the Anglo-Zionist project has grown from an aggressively demonic fetus to a vicious, full-grown monster. It appears intent on fulfilling a divine prophecy to recreate a new Babylon while provoking a war with literally every Arab neighbor surrounding them. The maps of Babylon 539 BCE and Herzl’s fantasy are eerily similar.

America’s nuclear arsenal will likely support Zionist ambitions to purge the land of Arabs, starting with Palestine and followed by Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and possibly Saudi Arabia, as outlined by the neo-con Clean Break Doctrine submitted to Netanyahu in 1996. But are all Americans (or even Israelis) happy about this scenario? Judging from the mass protests in the US against Netanyahu’s current war and the collapse of his support within Israel itself, the answer is no.

But do the voices of the people who will be exterminated in the wake of a global nuclear war have any influence over the decisions made by imperial ideologues marching about Washington, London, or Tel Aviv? That remains to be seen.

I would also pose the question: Is it at all possible that the forces that birthed the Zionist project may ultimately see their creation as a disposable pawn in the great game? Is it also possible that these same forces don’t even see the US as a permanent fixture of the “end of history” some imperialists wish to see emerge onto the scene? These are just a few questions to ponder.

With all of this in mind, it is worth revisiting Henry Kissinger’s 2012 prophecy that “in 10 years, there will be no more Israel.”

The Fall of Babylon 2.0?

The Truth Concerning the Land is Revealed in Cabala. Jewish Mysticism (Cabala) militates for life in the Land of Israel. Rationalistic approaches to Judaism place no special value on the Land of Israel. In wars, national characters crystalize. Israel, as the universal reflection of mankind, benefits thereby. The heels of Messiah follow upon World Conflageration… At the hour of the downfall of Western civilization, Israel is called upon to fulfill its divine mission by providing the spiritual basis for a New World Order. [emphasis added]

— Rabbi Abraham Isaac Cohen Kook, Greater Israel champion, End Times cultist, Chief Ashkenaz Rabbi for British Mandate Palestine (1919-1935)

The genie of Greater Israelism, as promoted by the likes of Theodor Herzl, Rabbi A.I Kook, and the army of gnostic Christian Zionist heirs of John Nelson Darby begging for a first strike onto Iran represents a level of zealotry and fanaticism that may spell disaster for much of humanity. Unlike most End Times cults that have stained this world, this one happens to possess a nuclear arsenal, and it is supported by raving hordes of rapture-believing Christian Zionists in America hungry for Armageddon.

A strange collusion of the Jesuit-run papacy of Pope Francis and the Anglican Church of the eco-Crusader King Charles III has united on multiple fronts. This includes Lynn Forester de Rothschild’s Council for Inclusive Capitalism under the banner of the World Economic Forum. Additionally, why did Pope Francis (who took the name from the Templar-connected Francis of Assisi) choose to give shards of the cross upon which Jesus died (so it is claimed) as a coronation gift to a man who is a British Israelite who probably believes himself to be a blood heir to Jesus himself?

For that matter, why did Prince William’s wife, Kate Middleton, present her second baby to the world dressed in an outfit made famous by accused satanist and pedophile Roman Polanski in the film Rosemary’s Baby (featuring the story of a woman who is impregnated by a satanic cult leader and gives birth to the anti-Christ)?

This cult is also operating in a world shaped in large measure by a collapsing hegemon sitting atop a systemic financial meltdown that may make the 1929 depression look like a cakewalk.

Kissinger’s Role as a Midwife to Satan

Sir Henry Kissinger played an instrumental role in converting the US from a republic that aspired to uphold liberty to a nation fully committed to empire under the control of a techno-feudal priesthood.

It is important to keep in mind that throughout his long and destructive life, Kissinger cannot really be accused of being a cause of anything. Rather, he was always an instrument enslaved to a higher agency far beyond him. He was perhaps a fully witting agent—and thus all the more reprehensible than the many lower auxiliaries of technocracy who are ignorant of the evil they represent… but he was a slave nonetheless.

As a prized student of Rhodes Scholar William Yandall Elliot (who served as a guru to a nest of sociopathic young men at Harvard), Kissinger’s devout misanthropy, idealization of oligarchism, and spiritual devotion to systems of stasis were recognized by his handlers. He soon found himself working for the director of the CIA’s Office of Psychological Strategy Board in 1952, where he was brought into the inner sanctum of global intelligence operations.

Kissinger’s star rose quickly as he was made a member of the Round Table’s American think tank in 1956—The Council on Foreign Relations—and was soon brought into the Rockefeller Commission’s 1956 study group on America and the New World Order (named ‘Prospects for America’). There, he worked closely with Rhodes Scholar Dean Rusk and American fascist Henry Luce. This was soon followed by admission to the Bilderberg Group in 1957, where he went on to lead its steering committee.

Like his Rhodes Scholar mentor earlier, Kissinger found his own protégé in the form of a young sociopath named Klaus Schwab, whom he taught at a CIA-sponsored program at Harvard. Kissinger wasted no time setting the stage for the post-industrial era of deregulation, nation-stripping, and war as he brought the new Trilateral Commission into reality alongside David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

During his time as secretary of state and national security advisor, Kissinger worked closely with George Schultz in removing the US dollar from the fixed exchange rate gold reserve system, ensuring that what was once a viable industrial capital system would become a speculative weapon of mass destruction.

Once this was achieved, Kissinger’s work in orchestrating the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and broader oil shocks that resulted in a US dollar pegged to the price of OPEC oil was a cakewalk [5]. Kissinger’s next step in drafting the NSSM-200 program, transforming America’s foreign policy from a pro-industrial growth orientation toward “population control,” was another step into hell.

But were any of these policies designed to serve the interests of America or even Israel or Saudi Arabia in the long term?

Were any of these policies designed to serve any nation, or were they all simply different elements to the same abstract painting of chaos that he served on behalf of a higher agency?

What agency could that be if not American or Israeli or Saudi?

Kissinger’s Devotion to the British Empire Means More Than You Think

Sir Kissinger let the cat out of the bag on May 10, 1982, during a Chatham House (see: Round Table) conference in Britain. He described the principled schism between traditionally American vs. British imperial ways of looking at the world and demonstrated his commitment to the British imperial paradigm:

Many American leaders condemned Churchill as needlessly obsessed with power politics, too rigidly anti-Soviet, too colonialist in his attitude to what is now called the Third World, and too little interested in building the fundamentally new international order towards which American idealism has always tended. The British undoubtedly saw the Americans as naive, moralistic, and evading responsibility for helping secure the global equilibrium. The dispute was resolved according to American preferences- in my view, to the detriment of postwar security… The disputes between Britain and America during the Second World War and after were, of course, not an accident. British policy drew upon two centuries of experience with the European balance of power, America on two centuries of rejecting it.

Where America had always imagined itself isolated from world affairs, Britain for centuries was keenly alert to the potential danger that any country’s domination of the European continent-whatever its domestic structure or method of dominance-placed British survival risk… Britain rarely proclaimed moral absolutes or rested her faith in the ultimate efficacy of technology, despite her achievements in this field. Philosophically she remains Hobbesian: She expects the worst and is rarely disappointed. In moral matters Britain has traditionally practiced a convenient form of ethical egoism, believing that what was good for Britain was best for the rest…. In the nineteenth century, British policy was perhaps the principal factor in European system that kept the peace for 99 years without a major war ….

Perhaps most revealing was his description of his own role as secretary of state when he described his relationship with the British Foreign Office:

The British were so matter-of-factly helpful that they became a participant in internal American deliberations, to a degree probably never practiced between sovereign nations… In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department… It was symptomatic.

For those who may not be aware, Kissinger’s recruitment to William Yandall Elliot’s Round Table operation in Harvard, his allegiance to the Round Table movement’s Chatham House operation in London and New York (dubbed “The Mothership” by Hillary Clinton), and his words above are nothing less than an admission of allegiance to a new Templar order.

The secret society that Cecil Rhodes established in his last will and testament as “a Church of the British Empire,” modeled on “The Jesuit Constitution” was explicitly based on the Grail Myths of the Knighthood of the Round Table. These were designed in the 13^th century to promote the Templar-managed Crusades and the reconstruction of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem.[6]

As even Scottish Rite Grand Master Albert Pike stated in 1871, the Jesuit Order was itself a reconstructed and more disciplined Templar Order. In his Morals and Dogma, he wrote:

The Templars were unintelligent and therefore unsuccessful Jesuits. Their watchword was, to become wealthy, in order to buy the world. They became so, and in 1312 they possessed in Europe alone more than nine thousand seignories. Riches were the shoal on which they were wrecked. They became insolent, and unwisely showed their contempt for the religious and social institutions which they aimed to overthrow. Their ambition was fatal to them.

It has also been demonstrated that the Order of Saint Francis of Assisi was additionally a Templar Order (with the additional attributes of a Magna Mater cult of Cybele that dominated Rome as a nature-worship sect). This order also merged into the later Jesuit society. With this in mind, the union of Jesuits and Franciscans in 2013 takes on new meaning and should raise eyebrows.

It was, after all, the Jesuit influence on the 1545-1563 Council of Trent that both fueled the flames of never-ending religious wars across Europe and established the foundations of Christian Zionism and the End Times cults of our modern-day.

Whether it was the British Empire that created political Zionism as part of the Great Game as Winston Churchill, Lord Shaftesbury, or Lord Balfour believed, or whether Jewish cabalistic bankers were attempting to create a Greater Israel capital for a New World Order as Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, or Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook likely believed…it may not matter which imperial monstrosity is wagging the tail: both may be destined to the same fate that befell the first Babylon over two millennia ago.

Perhaps Kissinger knew what this new age of Babylon would involve… but he’s too busy dealing with other problems at this moment.

One thing is certain: the thing calling itself ‘the antichrist’ has been very angry with something very special within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam for a very long time. It’s time to rediscover what that is before the End Times cult Kissinger served achieves its final act.

Footnotes

[1] According to evidence available on record, Theodor Herzl was many things, but his own man was likely not one of them. His rise to prominence from a low-level journalist in 1893 to the leader of global Zionism within three years is unprecedented and doesn’t happen without vast institutional patronage. Additionally, his connection to Colonel Goldsmid (head of London’s Maccabee movement) from 1894 to 1904 is one of many important red flags of higher influences interfacing with Herzl. Colonel Goldsmid played a role in the Boer War alongside the new Round Table movement and was also the overseer of the British Empire’s Jewish colonial project in Argentina, which is no small thing. The Jewish colonial projects overseen by the British Empire in Argentina—like the Uganda scheme proposed by Chamberlain later (and submitted by Herzl to the World Zionist Congress in 1903)—was an indirect way of corralling international Jews from across Russia and Europe into controlled zones of British imperial domain that would serve as gateways towards a final Palestinian Zionist infusion. Ultimately, the empire’s success in sparking World War One and undermining the Ottoman Empire sped things up and made these stepping stones unnecessary. The fact that Herzl was also an antisemite who saw great practical use in antisemitism to make Europe and Russia unliveable for the Jews is a big red herring. It places him in conjunction with the intelligence agencies (often occult-theosophical) throughout the secret police operations of the Russian, French, Prussian, and British empires that coordinated the Dreyfuss Affair fiasco in France and the Protocols of Zion forgeries in Russia and their translations across the English world.

[2] In 1954, Egypt and the United Kingdom signed an agreement over the Suez Canal and British military basing rights. It was short-lived. By 1956 Great Britain, France, and Israel concocted a plot against Egypt aimed at toppling Nasser and seizing control of the Suez Canal, a conspiracy that enlisted the Muslim Brotherhood. The British went so far as to hold secret meetings with the Muslim Brotherhood in Geneva. According to author Stephen Dorril, two British intelligence agents, Col. Neil McLean and Julian Amery (Leo Amery’s son), helped MI6 organize a clandestine anti-Nasser opposition. Julian Amery would be directly linked to the Gladio networks. In Stephen Dorril’s book MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations he writes, “They [McLean and Amery] also went so far as to make contact in Geneva…with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, informing only MI6 of this demarche which they kept secret from the rest of the Suez Group [which was planning the military operation via its British bases by the Suez Canal]. Julian Amery forwarded various names to [Britain’s Foreign Secretary].” The full story can be found in Dorril, Stephen. (2000) MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations. The Free Press, New York p. 356, 629 and Chung, Cynthia, (2022) Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set, Canadian Patriot Press p. 286

[3] The Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem (or Knights of the Holy Sepulchre), is a Catholic Order of knighthood (f.1099) under the protection of the Holy See. The pope is the sovereign of the Order. The Order creates canons as well as knights with the primary mission to “support the Christian presence in the Holy Land.” It is an internationally recognized Order of chivalry. The Order today is estimated to have some 30,000 knights and dames in 60 lieutenancies around the world. The cardinal grand master has been Fernando Filoni since 2019, and the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem is grand prior. Its headquarters are situated at Palazzo Della Rovere and its official church in Sant’Onofrio al Gianicolo, both in Rome, close to Vatican City.” [description from Wikipedia]

[4] Specifically Chapter 11: “Nazis, the British, and the Middle East.”

[5] Under his careful watch, oil prices increased 400% during the 1973 OPEC crisis. This has been acknowledged to have played a big role in driving the 1973-79 inflation. But as researcher William Engdahl demonstrated in his 1992 A Century of War, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had more of a role in manufacturing this crisis from scratch by keeping hundreds of tankers replete with petrol from being unloaded in the US and facilitating the 400% interest rate increase with the assistance of several high-level oil ministers in the Middle East beholden to Kissinger. In recent years, Saudi Arabia’s OPEC minister at the time of the crisis corroborated Engdahl’s research stating: “I am 100 per cent sure that the Americans were behind the increase in the price of oil. The oil companies were in real trouble at that time, they had borrowed a lot of money and they needed a high oil price to save them.”

[6] See From Ritual to Romance by Jessie L. Weston, Cambridge University Press, 1920.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Matthew J.L. Ehret.

Photograph Source: White House Photo Office Collection – Public Domain

This may come as a shock to you, but your average terrorist isn’t actually a three-armed monster from hell who eats human flesh and breaths fire. Your average terrorist, if there really is such a thing, is in fact a human being and more often than not that human being is actually just some desperate, pissed-off, rube from a badly battered country with nothing left to lose but a dead-end life with little hope for a future. But just try suggesting this at the next neighborhood potluck in suburban Middle America and count the seconds before that tribe of docile orthodontists builds you a noose from the holiday lights.

To your average flag saluting normie, a terrorist is a completely different species that exists exclusively behind the label of ‘other.’ It’s not altogether hard to see how simpletons could come to such conclusions when you consider their sources. Turn to any cable news channel you like, and you won’t have to wait long for a lesson in the distinct otherness of your average terrorist. Within minutes you will be supplied with a cartoon caricature of a blood-drinking foreigner, worshipping a weird god and blowing himself to bits for fun and virgin pussy. Even the supposedly woke networks will basically tell you that the only white terrorist is a hillbilly with a heart full of black tar. And yet somehow Henry Kissinger doesn’t make the cut.

During a news week filled to the brim with breathless condemnations of the average terrorist creatures of Hamas, Henry Kissinger, a man with a well-known body count higher than most forms of cancer, is mourned as a national icon. Oh sure, all the assholes on cable will admit to the centurion statesman’s bloody misdeeds but always coupled with some convenient misnomer about the man being “complicated”, “controversial”, even “brooding.” Reading the New York Times, you would think he was some kind of conflicted heartthrob from a lost chapter of the Twilight saga. “Sure, he’s a monster, but I can fix him.”

They all go on and on about how intelligent and calculating and charming this creature was but let’s just cut the shit right now. This man was a fucking terrorist. The only thing that separated him from your average jihadist was that he was charming enough to turn political violence into a long, well-paying career, and this country of noose tying orthodontists was sick enough pay him.

The sheer number of crimes that Mr. Kissinger managed to commit during a relatively short stint in power is downright staggering. Between the years of 1969 and 1975, Henry served two administrations, first Richard Nixon’s, then Gerald Ford’s, as both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor and during those eight years, the bodies never stopped dropping. Kissinger was instrumental in prolonging the bloodbath in Vietnam by nearly a decade and expanded it across Southeast Asia, slaughtering somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million people with more bombs than the Second World War.

Henry was also instrumental in launching the 1973 coup against the democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, and having him replaced with a vicious fascist general named Augusto Pinochet who would hold that country hostage for nearly twenty years. Once Pinochet was finished machine gunning college students in converted soccer stadiums and building internment camps for some 80,000 political dissidents, the venerable Secretary of State helped him take that horror show on the road with Operation Condor, a CIA mission to cleanse the Southern Cone of South America of anything to the left of Phyllis Schlafly. 60,000 people simply disappeared across half a dozen countries between 1975 and 1983, including pacifists, missionaries, monks and nuns, many of them simply thrown from American helicopters into the sea.

Henry spread the love to East Timor in 1975 when he helped America’s favorite mononym monster, Suharto, carry out and get away with one of the worst acts of genocide of the Twentieth Century, slaughtering somewhere in the ballpark of 300,000 men, women and children or a third of that tiny island nation’s impoverished population over the next twenty years. Kissinger, a perpetually celebrated refugee of the Holocaust, seemed to have a kink for genocide. Aside from East Timor, he also offered America’s support to Pakistan while they slaughtered 3 million Hindus in Bangladesh in 1971 and even encouraged the Chinese to arm the Khmer Rouge during the height of their own final solution.

Shockingly, the list just keeps going on and on like this, from feeding the Kurds to a Baathist massacre to putting a junta in charge of Argentina and encouraging them to hurry up and kill their opponents before the gringo press could catch wind of the burning bodies. From backing the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus which continues to this day to the backing of the Moroccan invasion of Sahrawi which, wouldn’t you fucking know it, also continues to this motherfucking day. Kissinger’s shadow continues to linger over thousands of graveyards across the globe and an American war machine that owes God knows how many more corpses to his influence.

But Henry Kissinger’s most sickening act of international terrorism was getting away with it. For all his crimes, for all the bodies and bombs and genocide, Henry was awarded with the reputation of a global sex symbol. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that he broke his ass to prolong and expand. He was wined and dined by A-list celebrities and given the star treatment on every primetime news show from Crossfire to Nightline. They all knew Henry was a monster and they fucking loved it.

Some might call this popular perversion a cult of personality but it’s actually way more twisted than that. Henry Kissinger isn’t the only ugly American celebrated for his career as an unapologetic terrorist. This country’s history is jam packed with fabulous monsters. Thomas Jefferson invented “American Democracy” when he wasn’t busy raping his own slaves and killing Indians. FDR led us out of the Great Depression with programs modeled after the state expansions of Mussolini’s Italy and put an entire race of people into concentration camps for a Japanese invasion that he purposely provoked and allowed to happen. Ronald Reagen saved the world from communism while still making time to sling crack for baby killers in Nicaragua. And Barack Obama proved that America’s appetite for destruction was finally color blind when he became the first person of color to use the White House as a base to murder teenagers with model airplanes.

These terrorists didn’t get a pass because they were charming or charismatic. If that were true, George W. Bush would be painting shitty pictures of his feet in Guantanamo Bay right now. Every powerful American is lionized and sainted sooner or later for the simple fact that American power is exceptional. One cult of personality isn’t enough for the greatest empire since Rome. America has constructed an entire culture of personality that could redeem a club-faced cattle rapist if he spent a long weekend in the White House. This is a sickness caused by the greatest concentration of institutional power in human history and the only defense that sane human beings have against it is to smash the mythology itself.

Osama Bin Laden was a killer. Henry Kissinger was a killer. Adolf Hitler was a killer. You can dress it up however you want, declare the perpetrator to be a terrorist, a statesman, or a dictator, but it’s all the same to me and none of it deserves any special treatment. Powerful people kill poor people because they can and the more power they get, the more they kill, so stop giving them more power with fancy titles and couture categories for their crimes. Terrorists kill people, period, so fuck all terrorists.

Throw Kissinger’s rotting carcass in the same hole as those cunts in Hamas and the IDF and stop pretending like any of them are special for doing dreadful things to innocent people. Now where’s my fucking noose? I’m not getting any more moderate here…

The post Terrorism with Honor: Henry Kissinger and America’s Infuriating Culture of Personality appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

1975, April 28 – Roosevelt Room – The White House

Henry Kissinger wrote his doctoral dissertation about Europe’s “long peace” after the defeat of Napoleon, focusing on how conservative statesmen negotiated the Concert of Europe through a mixture of diplomacy and military power. Kissinger was enamored of this approach to achieving an “equilibrium of forces.” The lesson he absorbed, and later applied as a presidential advisor, was the imperative of suppressing rebellious elements, be they reactionary or revolutionary, in order to preserve a stable status quo.

It was this seemingly old-fashioned approach to geopolitics that Kissinger smuggled into the second half of the twentieth century. He saw no role in global affairs for morality, particularly in its modern version of human rights. He spent long hours analyzing the global balance of power in order to reinforce a world order favorable to the United States. He wanted to sustain the “long peace” of the Cold War even if it meant the deaths of millions of people who lived far from Washington, Moscow, or the Berlin Wall.

Many obituaries of the recently deceased centenarian have highlighted his high crimes and misdemeanors: his recommendations to expand the Vietnam War to Cambodia, his role in overthrowing Salvador Allende in Chile, his support for Pakistan’s generals as they slaughtered up to 3 million people in East Pakistan, his effective greenlighting of Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor and Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus.

Kissinger certainly shares responsibility for this catalogue of war crimes. In this respect, he is no different from many of the despots whose rings he kissed: Mao in China, Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, Pinochet in Chile, the Shah of Iran. Because he spoke their idiom—a transnational language of power salted with frequent brutality—Kissinger could serve as the ideal interlocutor between a putatively democratic country and a series of dictatorships.

Kissinger was thus a throwback to previous centuries of statecraft when force of arms took precedence over force of argument. What made him different—larger than life and attractive to autocrats and celebrities alike—was the country that he served. If Kissinger had been a foreign minister in post-war Austria or Germany, he would not have had such global impact. Instead, having relocated as a young man to America before World War II, he became a Metternich with nukes. And that was a very dangerous thing indeed.

But aside from the fingerprints he left on any particular atrocity, Kissinger’s insertion of his version of realpolitik into U.S. foreign policy will represent perhaps his most toxic legacy.

Getting Real

The concept of realpolitik, formulated in 1853 by German theorist Ludwig August von Rochau, was a challenge to liberals of the time to “get real”—to acknowledge that apex predators rule the jungle. That didn’t mean, in Rochau’s book, to go all “red in tooth and claw” in response. Rochau simply reminded his fellow liberals that ideals and moral suasion would not necessarily win the day. As Rochau put it rather elegantly, if you want “to bring down the walls of Jericho, the Realpolitik thinks that lacking better tools, the most simple pickaxe is more effective than the sound of the most powerful trumpets.”

The conflict between a policy based on the world as it should be (idealism) and one grounded in the world as it is (realism) engaged many a thinker and government official in the decades since Rochau. Kissinger’s innovation, such that it was, involved the application of realpolitik, a term encrusted with many associations over the years, to the realm of the Cold War.

During that 40-year span, in an atmosphere of compulsive and often compulsory anti-Communism, conservatives maintained an unrelenting hostility toward the Soviet Union, China, and their sympathizers. Liberals did too, for the most part, though they were notably pinker in their approach to domestic policy. Progressives on the other hand favored détente with Communist regimes, either out of sympathy for some putatively shared socialist goals or out of a fear of nuclear war.

Kissinger didn’t care about those forms of ideology. He looked at geopolitics as if it were a game in which the players must outmaneuver one another for maximum gain (no game, no gain). Ideology was just so much heavy baggage that could prevent the odd alliances necessary for such game-playing. Thus, Kissinger urged the Nixon administration to negotiate an opening with China to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow. And he favored nuclear arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union not because he was a fan of disarmament but because he believed the United States could profitably redirect its resources in order to retain (or regain) a strategic advantage.

This single-minded focus on geopolitical advantage rendered all other considerations irrelevant. Kissinger once asserted that “nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo.” It was no accident that the axis of history overlapped the axis of his personal fortune. Kissinger made much money from helping companies invest in the same China that he’d helped to open years before. No surprise that some of his most flattering obituaries have come from the Chinese.

The categories of idealism and realism inevitably became entwined in Kissinger’s mind. He wasn’t bowing to any reality by driving a wedge between China and the Soviet Union. He was creating a reality, a version of the world as he wanted it to be. He was not rigorously anti-ideological. He was pursuing an ideology of his own making, a liberal internationalism presided over by the United States. He simply embraced Deng Xiaping’s preference for an effective mice-catcher regardless of the color of its fur.

Kissinger’s Legacy

Let’s get realpolitik here for a moment.

The Biden administration, looking at the geopolitical map, could decide that the current alliance between China and Russia does not serve U.S. interests or those of its European allies. It could decide that even though Chinese policies have become considerably more nationalistic and assertive over the last decade, the leadership in Beijing today is certainly more level-headed than were Mao and his advisors in the late 1960s. Borrowing a page from Kissinger’s book, Biden might decide to dial down the current anti-China enmity in the United States and semi-secretly negotiate a rapprochement that effectively drives a wedge (once again) between Beijing and Moscow. This deal would be considerably more equitable than what Kissinger managed, given the current size of the Chinese economy, but the effect would be comparable: a reduction of Russia’s influence.

When Kissinger’s brand of Chinapolitik prevailed in the 1970s, critics accused him of selling out the Tibetans and the Taiwanese, among others. If the Biden administration were to revive this strategy, critics would similarly accuse the president of abandoning the Uighurs and the Taiwanese.

But this time, Washington would have another, rather un-Kissinger-like priority: decarbonizing the global economy. Cooperation with China could speed innovation, direct more investments on an international level toward sustainable energy, and help to rewrite the rules of the global economy to make the transition away from fossil fuels possible. The argument for China to downgrade its relationship with Russia would rest not on the latter’s human rights record but on its stubborn dependence on a petro-economy.

The question, then, is whether this kind of chess-playing diplomacy can be stripped of its national arrogance—increasing the power and status of the United States—and applied to collective goals like saving the planet. In this case, as in the 1970s, ideals like human rights would not be jettisoned but rather delinked from singular priorities. In the 1970s, nuclear arms control agreements were largely protected from conditionalities like adherence to this or that human rights convention; today the same would apply to climate agreements.

To be clear, Kissinger-style realpolitik lives on in its most noxious forms. The Biden administration is making deals with the Saudi government regardless of its human rights record, much as Kissinger disregarded the Shah’s ruthlessness in Iran. What Kissinger did with Pakistan, a succession of U.S. administrations is now doing with India, this time in the name of containing China rather than opening it up. Trump’s greenlighting of Turkey’s invasion of Syria echoed Kissinger’s backing of Turkey’s incursion into Cyprus.

But the world has also moved on from the Kissinger era. Human rights agreements, institutions, and civil society organizations exert a powerful influence on global policy. The United States no longer has quite the free hand that it did in the 1970s; both China and the European Union represent alternative centers of power. Countries of the Global South—Brazil, South Africa, India—have taken their revenge on Kissinger by becoming important geopolitical players.

At 100, Henry Kissinger had become an anachronism, much as his version of realpolitik was an anachronism when he reintroduced it into U.S. policy in the 1960s and 1970s. Pragmatism, of course, has long been an engine of politics. But a systematic indifference to moral concerns became untenable after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, two years before Kissinger submitted his undergraduate thesis at Harvard.

From Ukraine to Climate Change

Now that Kissinger is gone, it’s time to reassess realpolitik for this era.

Over the last decade, Kissinger viewed Ukraine as part of Russia’s “sphere of influence,” though near the end of his life he shifted to supporting Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Either way, he was calculating the likelihood of different scenarios based on his assessment of the balance of power on the ground. Although it would be ludicrous to ignore such assessments, it’s critically important to incorporate international law and human rights in any policy recommendation, namely that Russia violated international law by invading Ukraine and has committed extensive atrocities during the war. Negotiations that contribute to undermining these norms, along with Ukrainian sovereignty, would represent the worst kind of realpolitik, as does the notion that Ukraine should “give up” simply because Russia has a larger and stronger military.

Support for Ukraine on these grounds is no mere idealism. The UN, after all, exists, as does international law. A realpolitik rescued from Kissinger would acknowledge power politics and the ruthless reality of military force but would nevertheless find ways to assert the importance of norms and strengthen the hand of the weak, the poor, and the victimized.

Even more critically, the planet needs a new realpolitik for the waning of the Anthropocene era.  Addressing climate change is not idealistic or ideological. It is also not in the interests of a single country or some subset of UN member states. Rather, the rising water, the burning wildfires, and the super-storms are as real as it gets—for all countries. But to address these problems fairly requires adherence to norms of equity, for instance in the climate debt the Global North owes the Global South so that it too can transition away from fossil fuels.

That’s what Rochau was driving at when he coined the term realpolitik. Addressing climate change will require a hard look at the powerful forces maintaining the fossil-fuel status quo and a forging of alliances across disparate ideologies. But it will also need that ingredient that Kissinger scorned: a respect for rights and international law.

Kissinger is gone. By purging geopolitics of his antiquated notions of amorality, let’s put to rest his toxic legacy as well.

The post Rescuing Realpolitik From Henry Kissinger appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Why did Kissinger come to Geneva? He was a friend of Professor Curt Gasteyger of the Graduate Institute. I knew that because I had written a critical assessment of Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy as a student in Gasteyger’s seminar. In my paper, I had overviewed all the negative reviews of the 1957 best seller that launched Kissinger’s career. Gasteyger had rejected my paper with an explanation of the importance of Kissinger and their relationship.

Gasteyger had invited Kissinger to come to Geneva to celebrate an anniversary of his program in international security. I bet with Gasteyger Henry wouldn’t come. Geneva, in my opinion, was too small for him. The bet was CHF 100. If Kissinger came, I would have the first question. If he didn’t, Gasteyger would pay me CHF 100.

Kissinger came. I spent weeks preparing my question. What to say to a man I felt responsible for prolonging the Vietnam War among other unethical policies? How to be polite in front of a packed distinguished Geneva audience?

I spent weeks preparing one question. How to be diplomatic in front of that audience while asking what I really wanted to know? “Dr. Kissinger,” I began, trying to sound as respectful as I could, “in your long and distinguished career, is there anything you regret, is there anything that you would have done differently?”

I was sure he heard my New York accent (He was raised in Inwood Park in the Bronx. I was raised near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, not far away.) He saw my age. For a moment I was back in the 60s, my hair longer, my voice more strident, screaming that Kissinger and Nixon were war criminals. Did he hear me then? Did he hear me now?

He gave me a look of condescension. He made it known that the question was misplaced, irrelevant. He had no qualms about any of his actions. “Young man,” he pontificated, “if you mean Vietnam, it was the highlight of my career.”

People applauded. I was stunned. 57,000 Americans dead. Millions of Vietnamese. Many who died could have lived had he stopped the war earlier. That we learned before 1999.

At the end of the evening people left the auditorium in awe of him and his verbal dexterity. Years later, friends have told me they remember my question.

Super Henry or Evil Henry? That evening all his diplomatic finesse was on display. And that day, the Geneva audience, except for very few, were duly impressed.

The post Henry Kissinger and I in Geneva appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Photograph of Henry A. Kissinger Dressing for a State Dinner – Public Domain

On the occasion of his death at 100, praises and denunciations of Henry Kissinger are being sung and spewed out in record numbers. Let me add to the “praises.” More than anyone else, Henry, along with his boss, Richard Nixon, was responsible for my transformation into an activist.

This transition from being a free-floating intellectual into an activist took place unexpectedly. It happened sometime in April 1970, when Kissinger and Nixon said they were going to end the war in Vietnam by expanding it to Cambodia. I was rushing along Prospect Road—where Princeton’s “eating clubs” or fraternities were located—to attend class when I was attracted to a commotion at a building housing the Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA). A crowd of about 100 surrounded some 15 people who had sat down and linked arms to block the entrance to the Institute, which was known to be doing contract work for the Pentagon. I crossed the street to see things, more out of curiosity than anything else. Then a phalanx of policemen arrived and shoved people aside in order to clear a path to arrest those who were seated on the ground with arms linked.

When the police started to brutally cut the human chain and pull people into the paddy wagon, something in me snapped and I leaped into the empty space opened up by an arrest and found myself linking up with two people that I later learned were Arno Mayer, a distinguished professor of diplomatic history, and Stanley Stein, an equally prominent professor of Latin American history. All I was conscious of as I joined them was: there goes my PhD. At that time, foreign students who were arrested in political events could expect deportation according to Immigration and Naturalization Service rules. In a split second, I had given up my future as a sociologist.

As we were processed after arrest at the Princeton police headquarters, I called Madge, my wife, and told her what had happened but left unmentioned the likelihood that we would be deported. I had made the leap, and, surprisingly, I had no regrets since I felt I had found my place in life: being an activist, an organizer for social change. Like the other participants in the IDA rally, I was judged guilty of trespassing and resisting arrest and given a punishment of community service, that is, cleaning the streets of Princeton on weekends for a whole month.

I waited for the deportation order. And waited. After a month of waiting, I began to realize what was happening. The local government in Princeton was not coordinating its work with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as I had been led to expect. That would not happen until after 9/11, under the aegis of the newly established Department of Homeland Security, over 30 years later.

My profession as a sociologist, for which I was being trained at Princeton, was given a new lease on life. But I was no longer the same. The arrest had transformed me.

At that point, my priority during my stay at Princeton became stopping the war in Vietnam, and when I was not deep into reading Marx and Marxists and post-Marxists, much of my work was leading or participating in discussion groups on how to organize more and more students into a critical mass on campus against the war.

By the time that Kissinger and Nixon invaded Laos early in 1971 to destroy the traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, I had become part of the informal leadership of the anti-war movement on campus. We called for a boycott of classes, but the coup de main was the takeover and shutting down of what was then called the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton’s school of public administration that served as a recruiting ground for the Central Intelligence Agency and the trained bureaucrats of foreign governments allied with the United States. I led the successful occupation of the School by hundreds of students, but at the price of my incurring the perpetual enmity of one of its professors. The prominent sociologist of modernization Marion Levy tried his best in the next few years to worm his way onto my dissertation panel with the sole aim of torpedoing the person he regarded as sullying his beloved Woodrow Wilson School.

I went on to do my dissertation, a study of the counterrevolution in Salvador Allende’s Chile from a Marxist perspective, and this was approved in 1975, thanks partly to the successful effort of the department chairman, Marvin Bressler, to keep the vengeful Marion Levy from getting onto my committee.

I went on to do full-time underground work as a cadre of the Communist Party of the Philippines for the next 15 years, incurring more arrests and jailing for civil disobedience in protests in the United States against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Later, as an international activist during the George W. Bush era, I again gave full play to my anti-war addiction, participating in mobilizations across the globe, from Baghdad to London to Beirut.

So, here’s to you, you old devil, Henry, for saving me from what would surely have been an unexciting academic life specializing in some godawful field such as Marion Levy’s “modernization theory.”

The post And Here’s to You, Henry Kissinger… appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Former U.S. secretary of state and national security adviser Henry Kissinger has died at the age of 100. He leaves behind a legacy of American statecraft that brought war, covert intervention and mass atrocities to Southeast Asia, South Asia and South America. “Few people have had a hand in so much death and destruction,” says our guest, human rights attorney and war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody. By some accounts, Kissinger was responsible for the deaths of at least 3 million people. We focus today on Kissinger’s actions in Cambodia, Bangladesh (previously East Pakistan) and East Timor, where, Brody argues, Kissinger ordered and oversaw U.S. actions that would make him “liable for war crimes.”

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

Photograph Source: The Central Intelligence Agency – Public Domain

“‘He’ll have ye smilin’,” an old Irish saying goes, “while he takes the gold out of your teeth’.”
– Charles Glass, London Review of Books, Oct 20, 2022

The obituaries of criminals, masterful or otherwise, are always going to be sordid matters. Either one has time for the deeds, giving column space to their execution and legacy, or one focuses on the extraneous details: voice, accent, suit, demeanour. “He may have killed the odd person or two, but he did have style.”

Much of the Henry Kissinger School of Idolatry is of the latter propensity. The nasty deeds are either misread or diminished – notably when they have to do with the global infliction of mass death, prolongation of conflict, or the overthrow of democratic governments. Instead, time is given to the perceptions of what is supposedly meant to have been the workings of an oversized brain in international relations. Rather than seeing the inside of a prison or being bothered to the gallows by overly fussy lawyers, Kissinger spent ample time at high level receptions receiving huge wads of cash for offering his inner expertise. He was admired, adulated and pampered; the critics kept at bay.

As former National Security Advisor and US Secretary of State, he was meant to be the great exponent of realism, which, rebadged, might simply be described as elevated gangsterism at play. His 1957 work, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 studied the Europe of the admired diplomat Prince Clemens von Metternich, revealing a mind keen on keeping international power in fine equilibrium. Stability and order were primary goals; justice and human rights were concepts that had little to no role to play.

Metternich, alongside British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Robert Stewart Castlereagh, was to construct a post-Napoleonic order suspicious, even paranoid of revolutionary movements. It held social and political progress in check; doused the fires of freedom. As a result, Kissinger reasons, Europe maintained stability from Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 to the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. For all that, Kissinger would write that Metternich lacked “the ability to contemplate an abyss, not with the detachment of a scientist, but as a challenge to overcome – or perish in the process.” As if envisaging his own future role in US diplomacy, he suggested that “men become myths, not by what they know, nor even by what they achieve, but the tasks they set themselves.”

This gnomic drivel was precisely the sort that fed a media illusion of the big-brained sage in command. His bloodied hands were washed on the international stage by such absurd titles as “Henry of Arabia,” one given to him by Time Magazine in 1974. The same magazine would give him front-cover billing in February 1969 as one keen on “New Approaches to Friends and Foes”, and repeat the treatment on no fewer than fourteen other occasions. Not to be outdone, Newsweek was positively crawling in depicting the German-Jewish émigré who made his name at Harvard and on the world stage as “Super K”.

As the Establishment Courtesan, Kissinger sought out such society reporters as Sally Quinn of The Washington Post to emetically inquire why she did not assume the master strategist to be “a secret swinger”. Sadistic touches to his curriculum vitae could thereby be ignored, including a butcher’s bill that would eventually run into roughly 3 million souls from the Vietnam War to Cambodia, East Timor, Bangladesh, the “dirty wars” of Latin America, and a number of encouragements and interventions in Africa.

This also meant that such abysmal contributions such as his spoiling role in prolonging the war in Vietnam by several years in order to satisfy the electoral lust of his eventual boss, Richard Nixon, could be overlooked in favour of “shuttle diplomacy ” in ending the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973. In this, he resembled, as Charles Glass suggested with striking salience, a certain “American frontier archetype: the pedlar whose wagonload of patent medicines promised to cure every ailment. By the time the rubes realised that his bottles contained snake oil, he had left town.”

A far better appreciation of the Kissinger legacy would be gained by consulting such publications as that ever reliable, if bleak source of primary documents, the National Security Archive. The Archive pursued the US government with admirable tenacity, alleging that Kissinger had sought to remove, retain and control some 30,000 pages of daily transcripts of his phone conversations (“telcons”) as “personal papers” when he left office in 1977.

As the director of the Archive, Tom Blanton, piquantly remarked, “Kissinger’s aides later commented that he needed to keep track of which lie he told to whom.” But the telcons are also illustrative, less of Kissinger the realist who furnished his employer with fearless advice than that of a truckler, obedient to his paymaster. When Nixon made the decision to commence the secret bombing of Cambodia to target Hanoi’s supply routes in March 1969, Kissinger conveyed the order to Secretary of Defence Melvin Laird without demur. He also states firmly that “there is to be no public comment at all from anyone at any level either complaining or threatening”. When public comment did make its way to the New York Times in May that year, Kissinger badgered the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to place a number of selected government officials and journalists under surveillance.

While one’s death is rarely a planned thing – the Grim Reaper makes calls at all unexpected hours – there was a sense in Kissinger’s case that he had cheated it just long enough. He made it to a century without his collar being fingered. He avoided, in the early 2000s, attempted legal suits for human rights violations in the UK and France. Despite failing health, he was surrounded by the Establishment sycophants of which he had been one, worshipping power over principle while proffering snake oil. And there were a goodly number of them for the sendoff.

The post Henry Kissinger: Snake Oil Salesman of Gangster Realism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

“‘He’ll have ye smilin’,” an old Irish saying goes, “while he takes the gold out of your teeth’.”

— Charles Glass, London Review of Books, Oct 20, 2022

The obituaries of criminals, masterful or otherwise, are always going to be sordid matters.  Either one has time for the deeds, giving column space to their execution and legacy, or one focuses on the extraneous details: voice, accent, suit, demeanour. “He may have killed the odd person or two, but he did have style.”

Much of the Henry Kissinger School of Idolatry is of the latter propensity.  The nasty deeds are either misread or diminished – notably when they have to do with the global infliction of mass death, prolongation of conflict, or the overthrow of democratic governments.  Instead, time is given to the perceptions of what is supposedly meant to have been the workings of an oversized brain in international relations.  Rather than seeing the inside of a prison or being bothered to the gallows by overly fussy lawyers, Kissinger spent ample time at high level receptions receiving huge wads of cash for offering his inner expertise.  He was admired, adulated and pampered; the critics kept at bay.

As former National Security Advisor and US Secretary of State, he was meant to be the great exponent of realism, which, rebadged, might simply be described as elevated gangsterism at play.  His 1957 work, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 studied the Europe of the admired diplomat Prince Clemens von Metternich, revealing a mind keen on keeping international power in fine equilibrium.  Stability and order were primary goals; justice and human rights were concepts that had little to no role to play.

Metternich, alongside British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Robert Stewart Castlereagh, was to construct a post-Napoleonic order suspicious, even paranoid, of revolutionary movements.  It held social and political progress in check; doused the fires of freedom.  As a result, Kissinger reasons, Europe maintained stability from Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 to the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. For all that, Kissinger would write that Metternich lacked “the ability to contemplate an abyss, not with the detachment of a scientist, but as a challenge to overcome – or perish in the process.” As if envisaging his own future role in US diplomacy, he suggested that “men become myths, not by what they know, nor even by what they achieve, but the tasks they set themselves.”

This gnomic drivel was precisely the sort that fed a media illusion of the big-brained sage in command.  His bloodied hands were washed on the international stage by such absurd titles as “Henry of Arabia,” one given to him by Time Magazine in 1974.  The same magazine would give him front-cover billing in February 1969 as one keen on “New Approaches to Friends and Foes”, and repeat the treatment on no fewer than fourteen other occasions.  Not to be outdone, Newsweek was positively crawling in depicting the German-Jewish émigré who made his name at Harvard and on the world stage as “Super K”.

As the Establishment Courtesan, Kissinger sought out such society reporters as Sally Quinn of The Washington Post to emetically inquire why she did not assume the master strategist to be “a secret swinger”.  Sadistic touches to his curriculum vitae could thereby be ignored, including a butcher’s bill that would eventually run into roughly 3 million souls from the Vietnam War to Cambodia, East Timor, Bangladesh, the “dirty wars” of Latin America, and a number of encouragements and interventions in Africa.

This also meant that abysmal contributions such as his spoiling role in prolonging the war in Vietnam by several years in order to satisfy the electoral lust of his eventual boss, Richard Nixon, could be overlooked in favour of “shuttle diplomacy ” in ending the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973.  In this, he resembled, as Charles Glass suggested with striking salience, a certain “American frontier archetype: the peddler whose wagonload of patent medicines promised to cure every ailment.  By the time the rubes realised that his bottles contained snake oil, he had left town.”

A far better appreciation of the Kissinger legacy would be gained by consulting such publications as that ever reliable, if bleak source of primary documents, the National Security Archive.  The Archive pursued the US government with admirable tenacity, alleging that Kissinger had sought to remove, retain and control some 30,000 pages of daily transcripts of his phone conversations (“telcons”) as “personal papers” when he left office in 1977.

As the director of the Archive, Tom Blanton, piquantly remarked, “Kissinger’s aides later commented that he needed to keep track of which lie he told to whom.”  But the telcons are also illustrative, less of Kissinger the realist who furnished his employer with fearless advice than that of a truckler, obedient to his paymaster.  When Nixon made the decision to commence the secret bombing of Cambodia to target Hanoi’s supply routes in March 1969, Kissinger conveyed the order to Secretary of Defence Melvin Laird without demur. He also states firmly that “there is to be no public comment at all from anyone at any level either complaining or threatening”.  When public comment did make its way to the New York Times in May that year, Kissinger badgered the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to place a number of selected government officials and journalists under surveillance.

While one’s death is rarely a planned thing – the Grim Reaper makes calls at all unexpected hours – there was a sense in Kissinger’s case that he had cheated it just long enough.  He made it to a century without his collar being fingered.  He avoided, in the early 2000s, attempted legal suits for human rights violations in the UK and France.  Despite failing health, he was surrounded by the Establishment sycophants of which he had been one, worshipping power over principle while proffering snake oil.  And there were a goodly number of them for the sendoff.

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

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

U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on Sept. 1, 1975.

The encomiums have flowed voluminously for Henry Kissinger, and there have been some condemnations too. But even in the latter, little attention has been paid to his efforts to prevent peace from breaking out in the Mideast — efforts which helped cause the 1973 Arab–Israeli War and set in stone the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This underappreciated aspect of Kissinger’s career adds tens of thousands of lives to his body count, which is in the millions.

Kissinger, who died at 100 on Wednesday, served in the U.S. government from 1969 to 1977, during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. He began as Nixon’s national security adviser. Then, in Nixon’s second term, he was appointed secretary of state, a position he held on to after Ford became president following Nixon’s resignation.

In June 1967, two years before the start of Nixon’s presidency, Israel had achieved a gigantic military victory in the Six-Day War. Israel attacked Egypt and occupied Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, and, following modest responses from Jordan and Syria, also took over the West Bank and the Golan Heights. 

In the following years, the ultimate fallout from the war — in particular, what, if any, of the new territory Israel would be able to keep — was still fluid. In 1968, the Soviets made what appeared to be quite sincere efforts to collaborate with the U.S. on a peace plan for the region.

The Soviets proposed a solution based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. Israel would withdraw from the territory it had conquered. However, there would not be a Palestinian state. Moreover, Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War would not return to Israel; rather, they would be resettled with compensation in Arab countries. Most importantly, the Soviets would pressure their Arab client states to accept this. 

This was significant because at this point, many Arab countries, Egypt in particular, were allies of the Soviets and relied on them for arms supplies. Hosni Mubarak, who later became Egypt’s president and/or dictator for 30 years, started out as a pilot in the Egyptian air force and received training in Moscow and Kyrgyzstan, which was a Soviet republic at the time.

When Nixon took office in 1969, William Rogers, his first secretary of state, took the Soviet stance seriously. Rogers negotiated with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., for most of the year. This produced what American diplomat David A. Korn, then assigned to Tel Aviv, Israel, described as “a comprehensive and detailed U.S. proposal for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” 

One person prevented this from going forward: Henry Kissinger. Backstage in the Nixon administration, he worked assiduously to prevent peace.

This was not due to any great personal affection felt by Kissinger for Israel and its expansionist goals. Kissinger, while Jewish, was happy to work for Nixon, perhaps the most volubly antisemitic president in U.S. history, which is saying something. (“What the Christ is the matter with the Jews?” Nixon once wondered in an Oval Office soliloquy. He then answered his own question, explaining, “I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists.”)

Rather, Kissinger perceived all the world through the prism of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Any settlement at the time would require the involvement of the Soviets, and hence was unacceptable to him. At a period when it appeared in public that an agreement with the Soviets might be imminent, Kissinger told an underling — as he himself recorded in his memoir “White House Years” — that was not going to happen because “we did not want a quick success [emphasis in the original].” In the same book, Kissinger explained that the Soviet Union later agreed to principles even more favorable to Israel, so favorable that Kissinger himself didn’t understand why the Soviets acceded to them. Nevertheless, Kissinger wrote, “the principles quickly found their way into the overcrowded limbo of aborted Middle East schemes — as I had intended.”

The results were catastrophic for all involved. Anwar el-Sadat, then Egypt’s president, announced in 1971 that the country would make peace with Israel based on conditions in line with Rogers’s efforts. However, he also explicitly said that a refusal of Israel to return Sinai would mean war.

On October 6, 1973, it did. Egypt and Syria attacked occupied Sinai and the Golan Heights, respectively. Their initial success stunned Israeli officials. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was convinced Israel might be conquered. Moreover, Israel was running out of war matériel and desperately needed to be resupplied by the U.S.

Kissinger made sure America dragged its feet, both because he wanted Israel to understand who was ultimately in charge and because he did not want to anger the oil-rich Arab states. His strategy, as another top diplomat put it, was to “let Israel come out ahead, but bleed.”

You can read this in Kissinger’s own words in the records of internal deliberations now available on the State Department website. On October 9, Kissinger told his fellow high-level officials, “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best.”

The U.S. then did send huge amounts of weaponry to Israel, which it used to beat back Egypt and Syria. Kissinger looked upon the outcome with satisfaction. In another high-level meeting, on October 19, he celebrated that “everyone knows in the Middle East that if they want a peace they have to go through us. Three times they tried through the Soviet Union, and three times they failed.”

The cost to humans was quite high. Over 2,500 members of the Israeli military died. 10,000-20,000 were killed on the Arab side. This is in line with Kissinger’s belief — recorded in “The Final Days” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — that soldiers are “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns in foreign policy.

After the war, Kissinger returned to his strategy of obstructing any peaceful settlement. In another of his memoirs, he recorded that in 1974, just before Nixon resigned, Nixon told him to “cut off all military deliveries to Israel until it agreed to a comprehensive peace.” Kissinger quietly stalled for time, Nixon left office, and it didn’t come up with Ford as president.

There’s much more to this ugly story, all available at your local library. It can’t be said to be the worst thing that Kissinger ever did — but as you remember the extraordinary bill of indictment for him, make sure to leave a little room for it.

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

Henry Kissinger is dead at the age of 100. The former U.S. statesman served as national security adviser and secretary of state at the height of the Cold War and wielded influence over U.S. foreign policy for decades afterward. His actions led to massacres, coups and and even genocide, leaving a bloody legacy in Latin America, Southeast Asia and beyond. Once out of office, Kissinger continued until his death to advise U.S. presidents and other top officials who celebrate him as a visionary diplomat. Yale historian Greg Grandin says those glowing obituaries only reveal “the moral bankruptcy of the political establishment” that ignores how Kissinger’s actions may have led to the deaths of at least 3 million people across the globe. Grandin is author of Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman.

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

Kissinger in the West Wing as National Security Adviser in April 1975. Photo: White House.

For U.S. mass media, Henry Kissinger’s quip that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” rang true. Influential reporters and pundits often expressed their love for him. The media establishment kept swooning over one of the worst war criminals in modern history.

After news of his death broke on Wednesday night, prominent coverage echoed the kind that had followed him ever since his years with President Richard Nixon, while they teamed up to oversee vast carnage in Southeast Asia.

The headline over a Washington Post news bulletin summed up: “Henry Kissinger Dies at 100. The Noted Statesman and Scholar Had Unparalleled Power Over Foreign Policy.”

But can a war criminal really be a “noted statesman”?

The New York Times top story began by describing Kissinger as a “scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States’ opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the time of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so.”

And so, the Times spotlighted Kissinger’s role in the U.S. “exit from Vietnam” in 1973 — but not his role during the previous four years, overseeing merciless slaughter in a war that took several million lives.

“Leaving aside those who perished from disease, hunger, or lack of medical care, at least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths according to researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington,” historian and journalist Nick Turse has noted. He added: “The best estimate we have is that 2 million of them were civilians. Using a very conservative extrapolation, this suggests that 5.3 million civilians were wounded during the war, for a total of 7.3 million Vietnamese civilian casualties overall. To such figures might be added an estimated 11.7 million Vietnamese forced from their homes and turned into refugees, up to 4.8 million sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange, an estimated 800,000 to 1.3 million war orphans, and 1 million war widows.”

All told, during his stint in government, Kissinger supervised policies that took the lives of at least 3 million people.

Henry Kissinger was the crucial U.S. official who supported the September 11, 1973 coup that brought down the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile — initiating 17 years of dictatorship, with systematic murder and torture (“trampling on democratic values” in Times-speak).

Kissinger remained as secretary of state during the presidency of Gerald Ford. Lethal machinations continued in many places, including East Timor in the Indonesian archipelago. “Under Kissinger’s direction, the U.S. gave a green light to the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor (now Timor-Leste), which ushered in a 24-year brutal occupation by the Suharto dictatorship,” the human rights organization ETAN reported. “The Indonesian occupation of East Timor and West Papua was enabled by U.S. weapons and training. This illegal flow of weapons contravened congressional intent, yet Kissinger bragged about his ability to continue arms shipments to Suharto.

“These weapons were essential to the Indonesian dictator’s consolidation of military control in both East Timor and West Papua, and these occupations cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Timorese and Papuan civilians. Kissinger’s policy toward West Papua allowed for the U.S.-based multinational corporation Freeport McMoRan to pursue its mining interests in the region, which has resulted in terrible human rights and environmental abuses; Kissinger was rewarded with a seat on the Board of Directors from 1995-2001.”

Now that’s the work of a noted statesman.

The professional love affairs between Kissinger and many American journalists endured from the time that he got a grip on the steering wheel of U.S. foreign policy when Nixon became president in early 1969. In Southeast Asia, the agenda went far beyond Vietnam.

Nixon and Kissinger routinely massacred civilians in Laos, as Fred Branfman documented in the 1972 book “Voices From the Plain of Jars.” He told me decades later: “I was shocked to the core of my being as I found myself interviewing Laotian peasants, among the most decent, human and kind people on Earth, who described living underground for years on end, while they saw countless fellow villagers and family members burned alive by napalm, suffocated by 500-pound bombs, and shredded by antipersonnel bombs dropped by my country, the United States.”

Branfman’s discoveries caused him to scrutinize U.S. policy: “I soon learned that a tiny handful of American leaders, a U.S. executive branch led by Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger, had taken it upon themselves — without even informing let alone consulting the U.S. Congress or public — to massively bomb Laos and murder tens of thousands of subsistence-level, innocent Laotian civilians who did not even know where America was, let alone commit an offense against it. The targets of U.S. bombing were almost entirely civilian villages inhabited by peasants, mainly old people and children who could not survive in the forest. The other side’s soldiers moved through the heavily forested regions in Laos and were mostly untouched by the bombing.”

The U.S. warfare in Southeast Asia was also devastating to Cambodia. Consider some words from the late Anthony Bourdain, who illuminated much about the world’s foods and cultures. As this century got underway, Bourdain wrote: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to [Slobodan] Milošević.”

Bourdain added that while Kissinger continued to hobnob at A-list parties, “Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.”

But back in the corridors of U.S. media power, Henry Kissinger never lost the sheen of brilliance.

Among the swooning journalists was ABC’s Ted Koppel, who informed viewers of the Nightline program in 1992: “If you want a clear foreign-policy vision, someone who will take you beyond the conventional wisdom of the moment, it’s hard to do any better than Henry Kissinger.” As one of the most influential broadcast journalists of the era, Koppel was not content to only declare himself “proud to be a friend of Henry Kissinger.” The renowned newsman lauded his pal as “certainly one of the two or three great secretaries of state of our century.”

The post For Media Elites, War Criminal Henry Kissinger Was a Great Man appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Henry Kissinger, who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford died Wednesday at the age of 100, his consulting firm said.

A controversial figure, who played a pivotal role in the United States’s withdrawal from Vietnam and helped build bridges with China, Kissinger continued to be involved in foreign policy up to his later years, albeit in an unofficial capacity, meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in July when he was hailed as an “old friend.”

Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize but was heavily criticized for his policies on Southeast Asia and support for Latin American dictators, helping orchestrate the toppling of Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende.

He was also described as a war criminal by his detractors partly due to the massive U.S. bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia.

As secretary of state under Nixon, Kissinger helped bring about the opening up of China to the West, arms control talks with the USSR, improved relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors and the Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam that ended U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Serving under President Nixon during the Watergate scandal, Kissinger emerged relatively unscathed and continued in his role as Secretary of State under Gerald Ford although he was stripped of his role as national security advisor.

When Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976, Kissinger left government to set up a consulting firm, advising corporate leaders, writing books and appearing regularly in the media.

“The world has lost a tireless advocate for peace,” Winston Lord, a former U.S. ambassador to China and Kissinger’s former special assistant at the National Security Council told Reuters. 

“America has lost a towering champion for the national interest. I have lost a cherished friend and mentor. Henry blended the European sense of tragedy and the American immigrant’s sense of hope. 

“During more than seven decades, he transformed America’s role in the world, held the nation together during a constitutional crisis, crafted visionary volumes, counseled world leaders, and enriched the national and international discourse.”

Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Germany in 1923, Kissinger moved to the U.S. in 1938, escaping the Nazi holocaust.

He became an American citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. army in World War Two.

He was married twice, to Ann Fleischer with whom he had two children, and then Nancy Maginnes.

Kissinger visited China more than 100 times. State broadcaster CCTV hailed his "historic contribution to the opening of the door to US-China relations," AFP reported.

It called Kissinger "an important witness who experienced the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States and the development of the relationship between the two countries".

China’s ambassador to the U.S. Xie Feng said he was “deeply shocked and saddened” to learn of Kissinger’s death.

“History will remember what the centenarian had contributed to China-U.S. relations,” he said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“He will always remain alive in the hearts of the Chinese people as a most valued old friend.”

Edited by Taejun Kang and Elaine Chan.

Updated to include comments from CCTV and China's ambassador to the U.S.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Mike Firn for RFA.

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

The post More Evidence Regarding Henry Kissinger’s Lies About Chile appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

(The name Henry Ford came up in a comment thread recently so I thought it’d be helpful to offer some lost context.)

Henry Ford, the autocratic magnate who despised unions, tyrannized workers, and fired any employee caught driving a competitor’s model, was also an outspoken anti-Semite.

In 1918, he bought and ran a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, that became an anti-Jewish forum. The May 22, 1920 headline blared, “The International Jew: The World’s Problem,” and thus began a series of ninety-two articles, including “The Jewish Associates of Benedict Arnold” and “The Gentle Art of Changing Jewish Names.”

By 1923, the Independent’s national circulation reached 500,000. Reprints of the articles were soon published in a four-volume set called The International Jew, which was translated into sixteen different languages.

“The New York Times reported in 1922 that there was a widespread rumor circulating in Berlin claiming that Henry Ford was financing Adolf Hitler’s nationalist and anti-Semitic movement in Munich,” write James and Suzanne Pool in their book Who Financed Hitler. They add:

“Novelist Upton Sinclair wrote in The Flivver King, a book about Ford, that the Nazis got forty-thousand dollars from Ford to reprint anti-Jewish pamphlets in German translations, and that an additional $300,000 was later sent to Hitler through an intermediary.”

Ford’s plants in Germany adopted an Aryan-only hiring policy in 1935 before Nazi law required it. A year later, Ford fired Erich Diestel, manager of the automobile company’s German plants, simply because he had a Jewish ancestor.

An appreciative Adolf Hitler kept a large picture of the automobile pioneer beside his desk, explaining, “We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America.”

Hitler hoped to support such a movement by offering to import some shock troops to the U.S. to help Ford run for president.

In 1938, on Henry Ford’s 75th birthday, he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle from the Führer himself.

He was the first American (General Motors’ James Mooney would be second) and only the fourth person in the world to receive the highest decoration that could be given to any non-German citizen. An earlier honoree was none other than a kindred spirit named Benito Mussolini.

When appraising history and today’s Titans of Capitalism, keep your guard up…

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

On the morning of September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier, the former foreign minister of Chile living in exile in the United States, was driving to work in downtown Washington, D.C., when a bomb planted in his car exploded, killing him and one passenger while wounding another.

Letelier was assassinated in the heart of Washington by the brutal regime of Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, a far-right dictator who gained power in a 1973 coup backed by the Nixon administration and the CIA, overthrowing the socialist government of President Salvador Allende. Letelier served as foreign minister for Allende, and later was arrested and tortured by Pinochet. After a year in prison, Letelier was released thanks to international diplomatic pressure and eventually settled in Washington, where he was a prominent opponent of the Pinochet regime.

Even in exile, Letelier still had a target on his back. The Pinochet regime, along with the right-wing governments of Argentina and Uruguay, launched a vicious international assassination program — code-named Operation Condor — to kill dissidents living abroad, and Letelier was one of Operation Condor’s most prominent victims.

Nearly 50 years later, the full story of Letelier’s assassination, one of the most brazen acts of state-sponsored terrorism ever conducted on American soil, is still coming into focus.

Now, the 100th birthday of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, which has been marked in the press by both powerful investigations as well as puff pieces and hagiography, offers an opportunity to reexamine the Letelier assassination and the broader U.S. role in overthrowing Chile’s democratically elected government in order to impose a brutal dictatorship. It was one of the darkest chapters in Kissinger’s career and one of the most blatant abuses of power in the CIA’s long and ugly history.

Tanks arrive in front of La Moneda, Chile, in the aftermath of the 1973 coup d’état led by Army Commander-in-Chief Augusto Pinochet.

Photo: Horacio Villalobos/Corbis via Getty Images

Making a Coup

The first steps in the covert campaign by Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA to stage a coup in Chile began even before Allende took office. Their actions were eerily similar to President Donald Trump’s coup attempt following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, when Trump tried to block the congressional certification of the election, culminating in the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

On September 4, 1970, Allende came in first in the Chilean presidential election, but since he did not gain an outright majority, Chile’s legislature had to choose the winner. Scheduled for late October, that legislative action was supposed to be a pro-forma certification of Allende, the first-place candidate, but Nixon, fueled by anti-communist paranoia that led him to oppose leftist governments all around the world, wanted to use that time to stop Allende from coming to power.

The Nixon administration pursued a two-track strategy. The first track included a campaign of propaganda and disinformation against Allende, as well as bribes to key players on Chile’s political scene and boycotts and economic pressure from American multinational corporations with operations in Chile.

The second track, which was far more secretive, called for a CIA-backed military coup. 

On September 15, 1970, in a White House meeting, Nixon ordered CIA Director Richard Helms to secretly foment a military coup to stop Allende from becoming Chile’s president. Also attending the meeting was Kissinger, who was then Nixon’s national security adviser, and Attorney General John Mitchell. Helms later said that “if I ever carried a marshal’s baton in my knapsack out of the Oval Office, it was that day.”

Helms and the other CIA officials involved didn’t think they had much of a chance of mounting a successful coup — and they were right, at least in 1970. Their coup efforts failed that year, but a renewed coup attempt succeeded in 1973, during which Allende died and Pinochet came to power.

Pinochet’s Guardian

By 1976, three years after gaining power in the CIA-backed coup, Pinochet had created a bloody police state, torturing, imprisoning, and killing thousands. Despite its draconian practices, Pinochet’s intelligence service enjoyed close relations with the CIA, while Kissinger remained Pinochet’s guardian in Washington, fending off congressional efforts to punish Pinochet’s regime over its human rights record.

Kissinger held a secret meeting with Pinochet to privately tell the dictator that he could ignore the public upbraiding that he was about to give him.

By September 1976, when Letelier was killed, Pinochet had good reason to believe he could get away with murder in the heart of Washington. In fact, Letelier’s assassination may have been enabled by a secret meeting between Pinochet and Kissinger three months earlier.

On June 8, 1976, Kissinger — by then the secretary of state for President Gerald Ford — met with Pinochet at the presidential palace in Santiago, just as Pinochet’s vicious human rights record was becoming a major international issue. The Church Committee, the Senate’s first investigation of the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, had just completed an inquiry into the CIA’s efforts to foment a coup in Chile, and had closely examined a CIA scheme in 1970 to kidnap a top Chilean general who had refused to go along with the CIA-backed anti-Allende plots. As part of its CIA-Chile investigation, the Church Committee secretly interviewed the exiled Orlando Letelier.

Former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier’s car, following his assassination by car bomb in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 21, 1976.

Photo: Peter Bregg/AP

In the summer of 1975, Church Committee staffer Rick Inderfurth and another staffer quietly interviewed Letelier at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was living with his wife and four children. Inderfurth questioned Letelier about a wide range of issues, including how the overt and covert policies of the CIA and the Nixon administration in the years leading up to the 1973 coup had destabilized the Allende government. Letelier provided valuable insights for the Church Committee’s investigation, but he did not testify in public during its hearings on Chile. The fact that Letelier was interviewed by the Church Committee was reported for the first time in my new book, “The Last Honest Man.”

Even though he lived in Washington, Letelier wasn’t safe from Pinochet. 

After the Church Committee’s investigation and other disclosures, Congress was seeking to punish Pinochet’s regime for its use of torture and other human rights abuses, and Letelier met with congressional leaders about how to hold Pinochet accountable. Kissinger, who held broad sway on foreign policy under Ford, was under mounting pressure to publicly reprimand Pinochet.

Kissinger agreed to travel to Chile in June 1976 to give a speech to publicly criticize Pinochet on human rights. But just before his address, Kissinger held a secret meeting with Pinochet to privately tell the dictator that he could ignore the public upbraiding that he was about to give him. Kissinger made it clear to Pinochet that his public criticism was all for show and part of an effort to placate the U.S. Congress. During their private talk, Kissinger made clear that he thought the complaints about Pinochet’s human rights record were just part of a left-wing campaign against his government. Kissinger emphasized that he and the Ford administration were firmly on Pinochet’s side.

“In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here,” Kissinger told Pinochet, according to a declassified State Department memo recounting the conversation, published in “The Pinochet File,” by Peter Kornbluh. “I think that the previous government [Allende’s administration] was headed toward Communism. We wish your government well. … As you know, Congress is now debating further restraints on aid to Chile. We are opposed. … I’m going to speak about human rights this afternoon in the General Assembly. I delayed my statement until I could talk to you. I wanted you to understand my position.” 

After getting Kissinger’s reassurances, Pinochet began to complain that the U.S. Congress was listening to his enemies — including Letelier.

“We are constantly being attacked” by political opponents in Washington, Pinochet told Kissinger. “They have a strong voice in Washington. Not the people in the Pentagon, but they do get through to Congress. Gabriel Valdez [a longtime Pinochet foe] has access. Also Letelier.” Pinochet bitterly added that “Letelier has access to the Congress. We know they are giving false information. … We are worried about our image.” It is not known whether Pinochet was aware that Letelier had been a secret witness for the Church Committee, or whether the dictator only knew about Letelier’s more public lobbying efforts to get Congress to take action against the Pinochet regime.

During the June 8 meeting, Kissinger did not respond to Pinochet’s complaints about Letelier. Instead, he told Pinochet, “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined [Allende] government here. We are not out to weaken your position.” Given the context of the meeting, during which Kissinger signaled to Pinochet that the Ford administration was not going to penalize him for his regime’s human rights record, Kissinger’s silence in the face of Pinochet’s complaints about Letelier must have been viewed by Pinochet as a green light to take brutal action against the dissident. 

Kissinger took further action later in the year that gave Pinochet the freedom he needed to move against Letelier. After the U.S. found out about Operation Condor, State Department officials wanted to notify the Pinochet regime and the governments of Argentina and Uruguay not to conduct assassinations. But on September 16, 1976, Kissinger blocked the State Department’s plans. Kissinger ordered that “no further action be taken on this matter” by the State Department, effectively blocking any effort to curb Pinochet’s bloody plans. Letelier was assassinated in Washington five days later. 

Letelier was one of three witnesses of the Church Committee who were murdered, either before or after they talked to the committee. (The other two were Chicago mobster Sam Giancana and Las Vegas gangster Johnny Roselli, who were both involved in the CIA’s secret alliance with the Mafia in the early 1960s to try to kill Fidel Castro, a scheme that was the subject of a major investigation by the Church Committee.) Meanwhile, Pinochet remained president of Chile until 1990.

Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 in connection with the human rights abuses he committed while in power, and was placed under house arrest in the United Kingdom until 2000, when he was released on medical grounds without facing trial in Britain. He returned to Chile and faced a complex series of investigations and indictments — but no actual trial in his homeland — until his death in 2006.

Henry Kissinger has never been held to account.

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

The post The Red Cross in Crisis: What Would Henry Dunant Say? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

A central theme of the experiments was examining the effects of stress, characterised by what Murray called “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks. Ideals and beliefs were assailed; egos pulverised. For Murray, this came naturally. He had cut his teeth designing psychological screening tests for the forerunner to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services. It was perfect preparation for what came to be known as Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men.

Kaczynski was the less than grateful recipient of the higher end of the experiment. “I had been talked or pressured,” he told his attorney Michael Mello in August 1998, “into participating in the Murray study against my better judgment.” It is indisputable that he, along with other subjects, had been sufficiently deceived to be victims of a breach of experimental ethics known more commonly as the Nuremberg Code.

Drafted in the aftermath of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial of German concentration camp doctors, the code stressed the importance of informed consent. “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential,” declared the judges responsible for formulating the code. The subject should also be “so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress…”

Kaczynski can hardly be said to go on to better things, but they were certainly bigger. In terms of notoriety, his position in the technology obsessed undergrowth of the United States was assured by his murderous and maiming efforts. His favourite method: the package bomb, 16 of which were mailed to his intended victims. Three people died; 23 were injured.

A central tenet of Kaczynski’s thought was levelled at those complicit representatives of what he called the Industrial Society and its state manifestation. Far from being critical of power, its methods, and its wielding by bureaucrats and planners, its members were adjutants and prosecutors of a sinister agenda of behavioural control.

The profiles of the victims, actual and intended, constituted a true fruit salad, at times erratic and scattered: academics in engineering, psychology, genetics and computer science; the president of the California Forestry Association; a computer store owner; an advertising executive; American Airlines Flight 444 and the United Airlines President.

In its unifying theme, the manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, opens its barrels on the role of technology. “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences,” goes the grave opening, “have been a disaster for the human race.” While it had “greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in ‘advanced’ countries”, society had been destabilised, life made “unfulfilling”. Humans had been subjected to “indignities” and “widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well)”. The “natural world” had also suffered.

James Ley, reflecting on Kaczynski’s writing, finds his understanding of technology to be “the ultimate constraint on freedom, beyond any specific laws or political arrangements that might obtain.” The conservatives are deluded for conniving in the destruction of their own ideals in embracing technology; leftists merely pursue goals of improvement without dealing with the elephant in the room: the properties of technological enslavement.

In an area of surveillance capitalism, inexorable data mining, and Mark Zuckerberg, there is something haunting about this. The manifesto may not be the sprightliest work of originality, but the vision is contemporary and relevant. The technological society systematically oppresses; it cannot be regulated. With that monstrous genie out of the bottle, it can only be, according to Kaczynski, destroyed.

Kaczynski defied the authorities and the technological state he so despised, eluding capture for almost two decades. Being incapable of summoning the forces to destroy technology, he eschewed it, becoming a rustic version of the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the man who “ate civilization”, and in so doing ate his own wickedness.

He lived in a cabin near Lincoln, Montana, a place in every sense off the grid: no electricity, no television, no telephone. He moved about with a bicycle. He took an interest in regeneration in nature. He even foraged. This was his way of romancing the notion of the “pre-industrial city”, as he termed it, where the “19th century frontiersman” could create “change himself, by his own choice.” Change for the “modern man”, in contrast, was “imposed”.

Despite isolation, his pride proved too powerful, the need for recognition, consuming. His efforts to get the New York Times and Washington Post to publish his 35,000-word manifesto undid him. His brother David, and sister-in-law, on realising he was the author, identified him. The FBI, furnished by letters and documents provided by David, joined the dots, arresting Kaczynski on April 3, 1996.

The stage was set for the Unabomber to become a figure of medical interest. At trial, fearing that his brother would receive the death sentence, David, and the defence, opted for psychopathological grounds. Did the Murray experiments tip him over? The lawyers ran with the argument that the Harvard experience had provided the bricks and mortar of paranoid schizophrenia. Their client begged, with tenacious fury, to differ. His terrorism had been principled, rational, his Weltanschauung outlined in his manifesto. To suggest medical illness and disturbance was to give into the pathologizing agenda, something that would render him mad and therefore illegitimate as a thinker.

Far from being mad, the dystopia of Kaczynski’s industrial society has found solid roots. And the forces behind it, be they the myriad of social networks, data hungry platforms and the increasingly agitated discussion about Artificial Intelligence and its generative properties, implicates us all.

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

A central theme of the experiments was examining the effects of stress, characterised by what Murray called “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks. Ideals and beliefs were assailed; egos pulverised. For Murray, this came naturally. He had cut his teeth designing psychological screening tests for the forerunner to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services. It was perfect preparation for what came to be known as Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men.

Kaczynski was the less than grateful recipient of the higher end of the experiment. “I had been talked or pressured,” he told his attorney Michael Mello in August 1998, “into participating in the Murray study against my better judgment.” It is indisputable that he, along with other subjects, had been sufficiently deceived to be victims of a breach of experimental ethics known more commonly as the Nuremberg Code.

Drafted in the aftermath of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial of German concentration camp doctors, the code stressed the importance of informed consent. “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential,” declared the judges responsible for formulating the code. The subject should also be “so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress…”

Kaczynski can hardly be said to go on to better things, but they were certainly bigger. In terms of notoriety, his position in the technology obsessed undergrowth of the United States was assured by his murderous and maiming efforts. His favourite method: the package bomb, 16 of which were mailed to his intended victims. Three people died; 23 were injured.

A central tenet of Kaczynski’s thought was levelled at those complicit representatives of what he called the Industrial Society and its state manifestation. Far from being critical of power, its methods, and its wielding by bureaucrats and planners, its members were adjutants and prosecutors of a sinister agenda of behavioural control.

The profiles of the victims, actual and intended, constituted a true fruit salad, at times erratic and scattered: academics in engineering, psychology, genetics and computer science; the president of the California Forestry Association; a computer store owner; an advertising executive; American Airlines Flight 444 and the United Airlines President.

In its unifying theme, the manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, opens its barrels on the role of technology. “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences,” goes the grave opening, “have been a disaster for the human race.” While it had “greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in ‘advanced’ countries”, society had been destabilised, life made “unfulfilling”. Humans had been subjected to “indignities” and “widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well)”. The “natural world” had also suffered.

James Ley, reflecting on Kaczynski’s writing, finds his understanding of technology to be “the ultimate constraint on freedom, beyond any specific laws or political arrangements that might obtain.” The conservatives are deluded for conniving in the destruction of their own ideals in embracing technology; leftists merely pursue goals of improvement without dealing with the elephant in the room: the properties of technological enslavement.

In an area of surveillance capitalism, inexorable data mining, and Mark Zuckerberg, there is something haunting about this. The manifesto may not be the sprightliest work of originality, but the vision is contemporary and relevant. The technological society systematically oppresses; it cannot be regulated. With that monstrous genie out of the bottle, it can only be, according to Kaczynski, destroyed.

Kaczynski defied the authorities and the technological state he so despised, eluding capture for almost two decades. Being incapable of summoning the forces to destroy technology, he eschewed it, becoming a rustic version of the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the man who “ate civilization”, and in so doing ate his own wickedness.

He lived in a cabin near Lincoln, Montana, a place in every sense off the grid: no electricity, no television, no telephone. He moved about with a bicycle. He took an interest in regeneration in nature. He even foraged. This was his way of romancing the notion of the “pre-industrial city”, as he termed it, where the “19th century frontiersman” could create “change himself, by his own choice.” Change for the “modern man”, in contrast, was “imposed”.

Despite isolation, his pride proved too powerful, the need for recognition, consuming. His efforts to get the New York Times and Washington Post to publish his 35,000-word manifesto undid him. His brother David, and sister-in-law, on realising he was the author, identified him. The FBI, furnished by letters and documents provided by David, joined the dots, arresting Kaczynski on April 3, 1996.

The stage was set for the Unabomber to become a figure of medical interest. At trial, fearing that his brother would receive the death sentence, David, and the defence, opted for psychopathological grounds. Did the Murray experiments tip him over? The lawyers ran with the argument that the Harvard experience had provided the bricks and mortar of paranoid schizophrenia. Their client begged, with tenacious fury, to differ. His terrorism had been principled, rational, his Weltanschauung outlined in his manifesto. To suggest medical illness and disturbance was to give into the pathologizing agenda, something that would render him mad and therefore illegitimate as a thinker.

Far from being mad, the dystopia of Kaczynski’s industrial society has found solid roots. And the forces behind it, be they the myriad of social networks, data hungry platforms and the increasingly agitated discussion about Artificial Intelligence and its generative properties, implicates us all.

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

The post Henry Kissinger, the Shrewd Striving Flunky appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

The post Henry Kissinger, the Shrewd Striving Flunky appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

The post Henry Kissinger, the Shrewd Striving Flunky appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

When he turned a deeply unjust 100 last week, U.S. media feted Dr. K as an urbane "elder statesman" who wielded power "with wisdom and compassion." WTF, said a horrified world that recalled "history's bloodiest social climber," "one of the 20th century's most prolific butchers," and a pitiless strategist for American empire-building. Hence the rise of caustic sites like "Is Henry Kissinger Dead?" Given a "back-of-the-envelope" body count of 3 or 4 million, they argue, "The least he could do is add his own body to it."

The stomach-churning, history-revising hoopla surrounding Kissinger's 100th birthday offered more grievous proof if we needed it there is "precious little true justice in the world." Despite an informal "back-of-the-envelope" tally that his barbarous actions likely caused from three to four million deaths, "one of the most decorated war criminals in 20th century history” remains not only hale but held to no account, swathed in the silken world of wealth and power - "Don't you love to hurt the weak?" - and free to celebrate his heedless decades of support for "brutal dictators, brutal regimes, brutal wars...without an arrest warrant or war crimes tribunal in sight." Vapid mainstream accounts described a former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State - Nixon and Ford - who has "continued to hold sway over Washington’s power brokers," is "still active in global affairs," and "maintains an international consulting business"; predictably, given his famed duplicity, the accounts fail to name which small, frail democracies he's now working to bomb or undermine. There's his flight as a teenager from Nazi Germany, his "major foreign policy events" like Middle East "shuttle diplomacy" and detente with China and Russia, his jet-setter, "playboy of the Western Wing” status among "America's schmanciest people," who regularly, politely decline to mention his monstrous record.

Amnesiac accolades have long extended across the social and political spectrum, from the Playboy Mansion to Hillary Clinton, who called Kissinger "a really good friend" to Gerald Ford, who deemed him, "An elder statesman who wielded America’s great power with wisdom and compassion in the service of peace" - laughable if not for the "Everest-sized mountain" of dead bodies" left in the wake of his bloody, decades-long policies. Despite those bodies, he remains untouchable in a nation where the rich and powerful champion him as "an asset and not an aberration" for his ceaseless support of empire, from Southeast Asia to Latin America to the Middle East. Given this unconscionable moral and legal pass, Dr. K has remained an obdurate, remorseless "stranger to shame," denying all criminality in a long criminal career. He's never apologized for or even questioned his complicity with Nixon to "just cream the fuckers" in the carnage of Vietnam - its lies and miscalculations, its up to two million Vietnamese civilian deaths, its napalm-seared children and ravaged villages and vast devastation from what he boasted was "wave after wave of planes," the dead and maimed U.S. soldiers he deemed “dumb, stupid animals to be used." his complicity with Nixon to "just cream the fuckers" On all those crimes against humanity - a fraction of the ghastly whole - he says, "I fail to see the moral issue."

Of course not only did he help Nixon sabotage peace talks to end a war he'd stoked and lied about, but Kissinger orchestrated the savage, illegal expansion of the war into Cambodia, personally approving each of 3,875 bombing raids - after his chilling call to hit "anything that moves" - against a neutral country we were not at war with. From 1969 to 1973, formerly classified U.S. military documents reveal, the rabid U.S. campaign dropped 540,000 tons of bombs that killed between 150,000 and 500,000 civilians, far more than the U.S. ever acknowledged, in a vain effort to destroy alleged enemy supply lines and otherwise put pressure on an intractable Vietnam. As he argued, “I refuse to believe a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point." He was very hands-on - "Strike here in this area" - and very enthused - "K really excited," wrote a Nixon aide - with records of the illegal attacks assiduously burned. The decimation he undertook, in turn, hastened the overthrow of the Cambodian government by a genocidal Khmer Rouge that killed at least two million Cambodians. There, too, there has been no renunciation: Last week, in an interview with ABC's Ted Koppel, who once called Kissinger “the most admired man in America, the best thing we’ve got going for us" and who now dared to question the "criminality" of Cambodia, the great man sniffed, "It was a necessary step."

Pol Pot's "killing fields" and desperate choppers fleeing Saigon were only the start, a bloody glimpse of the coups, lies, extrajudicial wars and bolstering of tyrants in America's long tradition of toppling governments for corporate profit in the name of defending "freedom." For decades, Dr. K played a vital role in nearly every conflict the U.S. took part in: Indonesia’s massacre in East Timor, Pakistan’s in Bangladesh, Latin America's Operation Condor that helped dictators "disappear" each other's opponents, Argentina's Dirty War - the warning to expect "a good deal of blood" met with, "If there are things that have to be done, do them quickly" - and Chile's "insidious" democratic election of Socialist Salvador Allende, who the CIA overthrew in 1973 to usher in Augusto Pinochet's 20-plus years of fascist terror. On a 1976 visit, Kissinger told Pinochet, "You did a great service to the west." He is not "singularly responsible for the evolution of the U.S. national security state into a monstrosity," writes Greg Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow. "But his example, especially his steadfast support for bombing as an instrument of 'diplomacy,' has coursed through the decades, shedding a spectral light on the road that has brought us to a state of eternal war." Proposing a 1975 intervention in Cyprus, Dr. K summed up his approach: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

Inevitably, Kissinger's chaos-spawning practice of subverting or unseating those he views as inimical to American interests - geopolitical rivals, progressive revolutions, insurgencies in unhappily occupied countries, balky electorates in key client states - has played out in a moneyed, perennially unstable Middle East, where in the name of power and petrodollars he counseled U.S. administrations to "capitalize on continuing hostilities” - fueling the fires by helping sell so many arms to so many Gulf states "the proxy wars in the Middle East could last for years." And they have. He urged the removal of Saddam Hussein and the “surgical destruction of Iraq’s military assets”; Dick Cheney said, “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more (than) anybody else." He propped up and fawned over the Shah of Iran, but when they went to war with Iraq wistfully mused, "Too bad they both can't lose." He forged an "iron-clad alliance" with a brutal House of Saudi, then ceaselessly funneled arms and money to support their atrocity-filled war on Yemen. He sold out the Kurds, wondered, "Can’t we overthrow one of the sheikhs just to show we can do it? How about Abu Dhabi?", and baited fellow hawks with Cold War rhetoric about “abdication" and "consequences" in support of dubious interventions and repressive regimes "to ensure favorable conditions for American investors in as much of the world as possible."

Always, en route, he made millions. Over four decades, the globe-spanning consulting work of Kissinger Associates has epitomized the queasy convergence of U.S. corporate and governmental power in both foreign and domestic policy, a symbol of the profitable status quo with no thorny questions asked. Merging his public policy clout with savvy business advice, he's guided behemoths like American Express, Lehman Brothers, Merck, JP Morgan to massive profits as a top strategist for America’s empire. At the same time, he's guarded the secrecy of his "client list" so fiercely that when questions arose - what conflicts of interest? - he resigned as head of George Bush's 9/11 Commission rather than reveal it. Just as consistently, Grandin writes, Kissinger's zealous support for "American interests" no matter the human cost - and his utter lack of consequences for any crimes committed in pursuit of them - further affirms, "The United States can do whatever it wants in the rest of the world." “If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven,” Grandin notes Barack Obama once said, thus "offering Kissinger his retroactive absolution" for a lifetime of questionable military adventures and cementing the swaggering belief an unaccountable U.S. has the right to violate the sovereignty of any country. "Here, then, is a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle."

Still, the tributes poured in last week when the "political genius" and "great sports enthusiast" turned 100, with no unseemly mention of war crimes to be heard. The Post let his son David Kissinger tout his dad's "rare brain," "unflagging energy" and glad longevity thanks to "a diet heavy on bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel." Dr K will enjoy “centennial celebrations (from) New York to London (to) his hometown of Fürth, Germany,” he said, adding his dad's "force of character" helped him outlive "most of his peers, eminent detractors and students." Among the detractors was the late Anthony Bourdain, who in his 2001 book A Cook's Tour famously wrote, "Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands"; he ripped a "treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag" who ravaged and "threw to the dogs" a country "still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg." After a kick-off event at NYC's Yale Club, Bourdain's fury was bitterly echoed when a Vox writer queried what readers wanted to ask the famed perp: “How does he sleep at night? Can he feel the flames of hell gently tickling his toes? Whose organs did he steal? What do you think your eternal punishment will entail? Which circle of hell do you think is waiting for you?"

Those sentiments animate multiple parody sites eagerly awaiting the great "statesman"'s demise. And no, they insist, despite the left's mandate to be tolerant, none of them are as tasteless as "the amount of blood on Kissinger's hands." “I think Americans in particular are very susceptible to this very stupid idea that it's bad to celebrate the death of an evil person," said a Peruvian law student who runs Is Henry Kissinger Dead? Its posts run the gamut from "NO" and "NOOOOO" to "Soon please God" and, in March, "He is going to make it to 100 FOR FUCK'S SAKE." Others argue Kissinger's "firm refusal to die" through a long career "devoted to destroying every foreign democracy that posed even a minor threat to U.S. hegemony" represents "evil forces bigger than you." To help balance the scales, online charity death pools like Henry Kissinger RIP offer prizes - donations to organizations that undo some of the damage of U.S. imperialism, a “selection of liquors" from countries where Kissinger overthrew elected leaders - to whomever accurately predicts his death day. Facts owe: Despite years of rehabilitation efforts and preposterous declarations like John McCain's, at Dr. K's 90th birthday, that "I know of no individual who is more respected in the world," that "rare and foul beast" Kissinger remains for much of the world a reviled war criminal who "should be ashamed to be seen in public."

He does, in fact, need to think twice before traveling; in recent years, he has avoided visiting several countries, including Chile and Brazil, for fear of being charged with war crimes. In this country, for those of a certain age and political leaning, he often summons Gilbert Shelton's 1962 underground comic-book character "Wonder Wart-Hog," a far-right "Hog of Steel" whose "excessive force often (goes) overboard." All told, he remains wholly unrepentant, stunningly resistant to moral nuance, and awash in a blind hubris so enduring and over-arching he can still babble about his "public honor" and losing a brutish war in Vietnam, not because it was unholy but because, "I didn't have enough power." "Does Henry Kissinger Have A Conscience?" asked one New Yorker profile. Evidently not. Most fundamentally, writes Ben Burgis in Jacobin, it's vital to remember that "Kissinger isn't the only Kissinger." The fact he's free and celebrated isn't an oversight, he stresses, but a symptom of "a much deeper pathology," an American empire that rages and lumbers on. "The ugliest truth about Kissinger is that he isn’t a unique monster," he argues. "He is an unusually plainspoken representative of a monstrous system of US global hegemony...There may be something almost demonic in how unabashed Dr K is about his crimes. But when it comes to his basic willingness to disregard legal and moral obstacles (to) the U.S. working its will in the world? It's Kissingers all the way down."

“His own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the ancient philosopher Anacharsis, who maintained that laws were like cobwebs; strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand.” - Christopher Hitchens in "The Trial of Henry Kissinger."

Henry Kissinger is 100 and still free, somehow | The Mehdi Hasan Show youtu.be

Kissinger and Chile's dictator Augusto Pinochet shake bloody hands in 1976.Photo from National Security Archive

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.

— Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour (2002)

If a heavy resume of crimes is a guarantee of longevity, then surely Henry A. Kissinger (HAK, for short), must count as a good specimen. The list of butcheries attributed to his centurion, direct or otherwise, is extensive, his hand in them, finger fat and busy. There were the murderous meddles in Latin America, the conflicts in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. (The interventions in Laos and Cambodia are said to have left 350,000 Laotians and 600,000 Cambodians dead.) Then came the selective turning of blind eyes in Indonesia and Pakistan, and the ruthless sponsorship of coups in Africa.

Regarding the Vietnam War, this pornographer of power’s deviousness, and his attempt to inveigle himself into the favours of Richard Nixon, running as presidential candidate in 1968, knew no bounds. With privileged access as an advisor to the US State Department, he became the conduit for information to Nixon’s campaign to sabotage the Johnson Administration’s efforts to broker an earlier peace with North Vietnam. This involved convincing South Vietnam that the peace terms they could negotiate would be far more favourable under a Nixon administration. Peace prospects were scuppered; the war continued, eventually yielding a wretched Nobel Peace Prize for the Doctor in 1973. The US forces soon withdrew, leaving the impotent South Vietnamese to be overrun by their stronger Northern opponents.

Nixon’s electoral victory in 1968 ushered in an era of ruthless subversion of the international order, and one that bears repeating in these testy times of China ascending and US imperial anxiety. Kissinger, working with Nixon, thought that convincing North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh to return to talks would be helped by targeting North Vietnamese supply routes in Laos and Cambodia. With stomach-churching cynicism, these bombing operations were given various gastronomic names: Operation Menu; Breakfast Plan. When the covert bombing program was exposed by the New York Times on May 9, 1969, Kissinger put the wind up FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to not only place a number of journalists under surveillance, but a select number of government officials, including his aides in the National Security Council. One of the latter, Morton Halperin, would subsequently sue his former boss, Nixon and the Department of Justice for illegal wiretapping of his home and office phones.

In Chile, Nixon and Kissinger poisoned the waters of that country’s politics, destabilising the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvador Allende and paving the way for a bloody coup that installed General Augusto Pinochet. A mere eight days after Allende’s election in September 1970, Kissinger, in conversation with CIA director Richard Helms emphatically stated that, “We will not let Chile go down the drain.” Three days later, Nixon, in a meeting including Kissinger, infamously told the CIA to “make the [Chilean] economy scream.”

In November 1970, Kissinger demonstrated an almost callow level of expertise in claiming in a memorandum that Allende’s election “would have an effect on what happens in the rest of Latin America and the developing world; on what our future position will be in the hemisphere; and on the larger world picture”. To permit democratically elected socialist governments in the Americas along the “Titoist” lines of Allende’s government “would be far more dangerous to us than in Europe”, creating a model whose “effect can be insidious.”

Kissinger’s venality, and complicity as a deskbound suited thug, supply us a bottomless reservoir. To commemorate the occasion of his hundredth natal day, Nick Turse of The Intercept revealed a number of unreported attacks on Cambodian civilians during the secret war, suggesting that the program has been more expansive, and vicious, than had been previously assumed. “These attacks were far more intimate and perhaps even more horrific than the violence already attributed to Kissinger’s policies, because the villages were not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopters gunships and burned and looted by US and allied troops.”

The incidents are too numerous to list, leaving us a catalogue of cruelties ghoulish and despairing. Yet his own accounts do little to shed light on such exploits. The White House Years are barren on his blood-soaked achievements, the doorstop memoirs being a selective account drawing from memos, memcons and telcons that this faux Metternich had generated while in office. In 1977, in typical fashion, Kissinger made off with over 30,000 pages of daily transcripts of phone conversations he was involved in, documents he deviously called “personal papers”. In self-reflective glory, he could pilfer, cut and adjust.

Efforts to seek his richly deserved arrest have been made, though all have ended in a legal and practical cul-de-sac. In January 2015, CODEPINK protesters ventured to make a citizen’s arrest during a US Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. In the UK, human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell also had a stab in April 2002, seeking a warrant from the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court under the Geneva Conventions Act 1957. The charges asserted that “while he was national security adviser to the US president 1969-1975 and US Secretary of State 1973-1977, [Kissinger] commissioned, aided and abetted and procured war crimes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia”.

The presiding District Judge Nicholas Evans was not willing to play along, hampered by higher powers. To proceed, the Attorney-General’s consent was needed. Lacking that, “there is nothing I can do.” That’s HAK’s way of operation, an oleaginous Brahmin above others. Let the likes of Pinochet be nabbed; the backer always makes his getaway.

Best, then, to conclude this natal day salutation to the man by reflecting on the remarks of that most raw yet delicate of culinary (and social) commentators, Anthony Bourdain. In visiting Cambodia for his Cook’s Tour series, he could only reflect about why such a man was not sharing dock space at The Hague with other war criminals. “You will never be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking.” Sadly, for many in the Kissinger cosmos, they continue to do so without so much as flinching.

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

Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., on Feb. 6, 2023.

Photo: David Crane/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images

In 2002, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his wife attended an elegant dinner party hosted by Barbara Walters. Other participants included Time editor Henry Grunwald, one-time ABC Chair Thomas Murphy, and Peter Jennings, then the anchor of ABC “World News Tonight.”

At one point in the evening, as New York magazine recounted, Jennings addressed Kissinger and asked him, “How does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?”

Kissinger did not respond. However, Grunwald informed Jennings that this inquiry was “unsuitable.” Walters, who considered Kissinger “the most loyal friend,” later said, “I tried to change the subject, but it was a very uncomfortable moment. [Kissinger’s wife] Nancy reacted very strongly and hurt.”

There are several notable things about this.

First, the people at the top of American society absolutely love Henry Kissinger. He is their beloved compatriot, and they are anxious to protect his delicate feelings.

Second, Jennings sincerely believed that Kissinger was a war criminal and, unusually, was willing to say this in private. Yet he didn’t have the courage to say this in public, to his audience of tens of millions of Americans. Presumably he then would no longer be invited to these sorts of parties.

Third, Kissinger’s fancy, famous, rich pals will not exactly dispute that Kissinger is a monster. Rather, bringing it up is an embarrassing social faux pas, like, say, mentioning how everyone knows that your buddy is cheating on his wife, who is sitting next to you. Why would you want to spoil the mood just when we’re all feeling toasty from the Chambertin Grand Cru and having such a lovely time?

Think of how Kissinger lives, ensconced in the silken embrace of wealth and power, when you read Nick Turse’s new reporting on his actions while in office. Kissinger, it turns out, was responsible for even more misery and death in the U.S. bombing of Cambodia than was already known — which is truly saying something.

At the top of the pyramid, Kissinger enjoys endless banquets and oceans of acclamation. During the Nixon administration, Kissinger was beloved by Hollywood, often literally. He spoke at the 1996 funeral for a less prominent war criminal, Thomas Enders, an event also attended by David Rockefeller (John D.’s grandson, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank), Paul Volcker (chair of the Federal Reserve who said, “The standard of living of the average American has to decline”), Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat (an Argentinian billionaire), and Gustavo Cisneros (a Venezuelan billionaire).

At the height of the Iraq War, Vice President Dick Cheney reported that “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by.” Hillary Clinton referred to Kissinger as “a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state.” (Clinton rearranged her schedule giving an award to designer Oscar de la Renta so both she and de la Renta could attended Kissinger’s 90th birthday.) In 2014, he attended a Yankees game with noted humanitarian Samantha Power, who later received an award both named after and presented to her by Kissinger.

He served on the board of the fraudulent company Theranos with Jim Mattis, the Marine Corps general who’d go on to be Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, and George Shultz, who was secretary of state for Ronald Reagan. Kissinger joked that he didn’t ask questions of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, because “We were all afraid of her.”

This week, the Washington Post granted Kissinger’s son David — president of Conan O’Brien’s production company — space to tell us that to enjoy his 100th birthday, Kissinger is participating in “centennial celebrations that will take him from New York to London and finally to his hometown of Fürth, Germany.” One of the kickoff events was held at the Yale Club in Manhattan:

Then consider those down at the bottom of the pyramid: the Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, Timorese, Pakistanis, Latin Americans, and many more, whose lives and bodies were torn to shreds by Kissinger. (The “many more” here includes U.S. soldiers, whom Kissinger referred to as “dumb, stupid animals to be used.”) Here is what Turse writes about one such person he met while reporting in Cambodia: 

Round-faced and just over 5 feet tall in plastic sandals, Meas Lorn lost an older brother to a helicopter gunship attack and an uncle and cousins to artillery fire. For decades, one question haunted her: “I still wonder why those aircraft always attacked in this area. Why did they drop bombs here?”

But Meas Lorn will never, ever get an answer. Turse describes an encounter with Kissinger when he was able to pass her inquiry along:

When pressed about the substance of the question — that Cambodians were bombed and killed — Kissinger became visibly angry. “What are you trying to prove?” he growled and then, when I refused to give up, he cut me off: “Play with it,” he told me. “Have a good time.”

I asked him to answer Meas Lorn’s question: “Why did they drop bombs here?” He refused.

“I’m not smart enough for you,” Kissinger said sarcastically, as he stomped his cane. “I lack your intelligence and moral quality.” He stalked off.

“Play with it.” It is bracing indeed to understand that the people who run this country find this kind of human being charming and delightful. It makes you wonder if there are any killers from history who they would not celebrate, assuming the killers had conducted their slaughter with the aim of keeping America’s elites rich, warm, and safe behind a phalanx of guns.

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

An Intercept investigation, years in the making, reveals previously unpublished, unreported, and underappreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the conflict in Cambodia and remain almost entirely unknown to the American people. This week on Intercepted, host Murtaza Hussain talks to Nick Turse, an investigative journalist and contributing writer for The Intercept, about his work to uncover the mass violence Kissinger ordered and oversaw in Cambodia while the U.S. carpet-bombed the country between 1969 and 1973. Turse’s investigation, “Kissinger’s Killing Fields,” is based on previously unpublished interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors of U.S. military attacks in 13 Cambodian villages so remote they couldn’t be found on maps. Their accounts reveal new details of the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war.

“It was very hands on. Kissinger was picking where bombs would be dropped in Cambodia,” Turse says. “The authentic documents associated with these strikes were burned and phony target coordinates and other forged data were supplied to the Pentagon and eventually Congress.” Experts say Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11.

Transcript coming soon.

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

The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) recently published information based on newly obtained evidence from the ongoing U.S. prosecution of the alleged assassins. It reveals the seeming complicity of foreign embassies in Haiti, including those of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan.

The Haiti/Americas Team and MOLEGHAF, in addition, strongly denounce the recent U.S. attempts to have Brazil lead another military invasion and the occupation of Haiti. We also denounce efforts by defense contractor Wesley Clark to work with the unelected and illegitimate Ariel Henry to organize a paramilitary group in Haiti to “rival [Russia’s] Wagner Group.” The Haiti/Americas Team and MOLEGHAF are against Haiti being used as a geopolitical chess piece for the United States’ new Cold War ambitions.

BAP has always insisted the “crisis” in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism. In the past, the UNSC has served U.S. and Western imperialism’s interest by leading and supporting various unpopular UN missions in Haiti. We argue the UNSC has the responsibility to the Haitian people to investigate the role of foreign governments in destabilizing Haiti and creating a threat to international peace. But, more importantly, the international community has a responsibility to respect the sovereignty of the Haitian people and uphold the principle that the Haitian people and nation have the right to self-determination.

Hands off Haiti, respect international law, and support the call for democracy in Haiti and to make the “Americas” a Zone of Peace!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Black Alliance for Peace.

Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.

— Justice William O. Douglas

Absolutely, there is a war on free speech.

To be more accurate, however, the war on free speech is really a war on the right to criticize the government.

Although the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom, every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.

Indeed, those who run the government don’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.

In fact, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.

For instance, as part of its campaign to eradicate so-called “disinformation,” the Biden Administration likened those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists. This government salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government narrative.

In his first few years in office, President Trump declared the media to be “the enemy of the people,” suggested that protesting should be illegal, and that NFL players who kneel in protest during the national anthem “shouldn’t be in the country.”

Then again, Trump was not alone in his presidential disregard for the rights of the citizenry, especially as it pertains to the right of the people to criticize those in power.

President Obama signed into law anti-protest legislation that makes it easier for the government to criminalize protest activities (10 years in prison for protesting anywhere in the vicinity of a Secret Service agent). The Obama Administration also waged a war on whistleblowers, which The Washington Post described as “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” and “spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records.”

Part of the Patriot Act signed into law by President George W. Bush made it a crime for an American citizen to engage in peaceful, lawful activity on behalf of any group designated by the government as a terrorist organization. Under this provision, even filing an amicus brief on behalf of an organization the government has labeled as terrorist would constitute breaking the law.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the FBI to censor all news and control communications in and out of the country in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt also signed into law the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate by way of speech for the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence.

President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which made it illegal to criticize the government’s war efforts.

President Abraham Lincoln seized telegraph lines, censored mail and newspaper dispatches, and shut down members of the press who criticized his administration.

In 1798, during the presidency of John Adams, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious” statements against the government, Congress or president of the United States.

Clearly, the government has been undermining our free speech rights for quite a while now.

Good, bad or ugly, it’s all free speech unless as defined by the government it falls into one of the following categories: obscenity, fighting words, defamation (including libel and slander), child pornography, perjury, blackmail, incitement to imminent lawless action, true threats, and solicitations to commit crimes.

This idea of “dangerous” speech, on the other hand, is peculiarly authoritarian in nature. What it amounts to is speech that the government fears could challenge its chokehold on power.

The kinds of speech the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation, prosecution and outright elimination include: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, left-wing speech, extremist speech, politically incorrect speech, etc.

Conduct your own experiment into the government’s tolerance of speech that challenges its authority, and see for yourself.

Stand on a street corner—or in a courtroom, at a city council meeting or on a university campus—and recite some of the rhetoric used by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Adams and Thomas Paine without referencing them as the authors.

For that matter, just try reciting the Declaration of Independence, which rejects tyranny, establishes Americans as sovereign beings, recognizes God (not the government) as the Supreme power, portrays the government as evil, and provides a detailed laundry list of abuses that are as relevant today as they were 240-plus years ago.

My guess is that you won’t last long before you get thrown out, shut up, threatened with arrest or at the very least accused of being a radical, a troublemaker, a sovereign citizen, a conspiratorialist or an extremist.

Try suggesting, as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin did, that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to shed blood in order to protect their liberties, and you might find yourself placed on a terrorist watch list and vulnerable to being rounded up by government agents.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Observed Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”

Better yet, try suggesting as Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, John Adams and Patrick Henry did that Americans should, if necessary, defend themselves against the government if it violates their rights, and you will be labeled a domestic extremist.

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine. “When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.” Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.” And who could forget Patrick Henry with his ultimatum: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

Then again, perhaps you don’t need to test the limits of free speech for yourself.

One such test is playing out before our very eyes on the national stage led by those who seem to believe that only individuals who agree with the government are entitled to the protections of the First Amendment.

To the contrary, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, was very clear about the fact that the First Amendment was established to protect the minority against the majority.

I’ll take that one step further: the First Amendment was intended to protect the citizenry from the government’s tendency to censor, silence and control what people say and think.

Having lost our tolerance for free speech in its most provocative, irritating and offensive forms, the American people have become easy prey for a police state where only government speech is allowed.

You see, the powers-that-be understand that if the government can control speech, it controls thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

This is how freedom rises or falls.

Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.

We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.

Never forget: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.

What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

Tolerance for dissent is vital if we are to survive as a free nation.

While there are all kinds of labels being put on so-called “unacceptable” speech today, the real message being conveyed by those in power is that Americans don’t have a right to express themselves if what they are saying is unpopular, controversial or at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.

By suppressing free speech, the government is contributing to a growing underclass of Americans who are being told that they can’t take part in American public life unless they “fit in.”

Mind you, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable to respecting our rights and abiding by the rule of law is labeled an “extremist,” is relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, must be watched all the time, and is rounded up when the government deems it necessary.

It doesn’t matter how much money you make, what politics you subscribe to, or what God you worship: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are all potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of the government.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

To believe and perpetrate the “Good War” and “Greatest Generation” myths, we must ignore many sordid realities. I’ve written about some of them here, here, and here (and several other posts).

This time, I’ll focus on the memory-holed topic of AWOL American soldiers running wild in Europe.

“Paris was full of them,” remarks historian Michael C.C. Adams.

Journalist Chet Antonine has written of U.S. troops “looting the German city of Jena where the famous Zeiss company made the best cameras in the world.”

The U.S. compiled a list of “Continental AWOLs” that included as many as 50,000 men. Many of them turned to the black market.

“Allied soldiers [in Italy] stole from the populace and the government, and once, GIs stole a trainload of sugar, complete with the engine,” writes Adams.

V.S. Pritchett, in the New Statesman and Nation (April 7, 1945), wrote about GIs stealing cameras, motorbikes, wine glasses, and books.

In the New York Herald Tribune, the legendary John Steinbeck reported on three soldiers arrested for selling stolen watches.

In October 1945 alone, American GIs sent home $5,470,777 more than they were paid.

One illegal form of currency for GIs — AWOL or otherwise — was whiskey. As alcohol dependency rose, desperate soldiers resorted to such homegrown brews as Aqua Velva and grapefruit juice or medical alcohol blended with torpedo fluid.

The buying and trading weren’t limited to moonshine. Throughout the European theater of operations, the Allied soldiers did their best to exploit desperate and vulnerable females.

“In a ruined world where a pack of cigarettes sold for $100 American, GIs were millionaires,” says Antonine. “A candy bar bought sex from nearly any starving German girl.”

“Soldiers had sex, wherever and whenever possible,” Adams reports. “Seventy-five percent of GIs overseas, whether married or not, admitted to having intercourse. Unchanneled sexual need produced rape, occasionally even murder. Away from home, where nobody knew them, some GIs forced themselves on women.”

In northern Europe, venereal diseases caused more U.S. casualties than the German V-2 rocket. In France, the VD rate rose 600 percent after the liberation of Paris.

Where did those 50,000 AWOL GIs go after doing their part to soil the image of a “good” war? Nearly three thousand were court-martialed and one was executed, Private Eddie Slovik of G Company, 109th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division. The Detroit native deserted in August 1944, surrendered in October of that same year and was put on trial a month later.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the execution order of December 23, 1944, and Slovik faced a twelve-man firing squad at St. Marie aux Mines in eastern France shortly thereafter. None of the eleven bullets (one is always a blank) struck the intended target — Slovik’s heart —and it was a full three minutes before he died. Outrage spread quickly and there were no further executions.

Eddie Slovik, minutes before his grisly death

As for the rest of the AWOL GIs, Antonine’s guess seems as good as any: “A goodly number of them undoubtedly stayed on in Europe as they had after World War One. Perhaps some of them got bogged down in ordinary life, marrying and having children. Others may have continued their lives of crime and ended up in prison. Only nine thousand of them had been found by 1948.”

That generation being “great” in Bensheim

Then there was a certain staff sergeant who used his authority to anoint himself the absolute lord of the German town of Bensheim during those black market days: future Nobel Peace [sic] Prize winner, Henry Kissinger.

“After evicting the owners from their villa,” Antonine writes, “Kissinger moved in with his German girlfriend, maid, housekeeper, and secretary and began to throw fancy parties.”

These fancy parties were not the norm in Bensheim, an area where the average German made do with fewer than 850 calories per day. FYI: That’s less food than was given to prisoners at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Seventy-eight years later, Kissinger the parasite continues to see himself as an absolute lord. Here’s something I recently wrote about him:

Take-home message: Challenge all myths.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

Founded in 2011, CELAC is a bloc of 33 Caribbean and Latin American countries. It has stated its mission as promoting regional integration and providing an alternative to U.S. power in the region, especially as that power is channeled through the multi-state entity, Organization of American States (OAS).

At the conclusion of the summit, CELAC members released the Buenos Aires Declaration, a 28-page, 111-point document covering environmental cooperation, post-pandemic economic recovery, food and energy security. Included in that document was CELAC’s endorsement of the development of the region as a Zone of Peace, free of nuclear weapons and committed to non-militaristic solutions to intra-regional problems.

Yet, CELAC’s commitments to peace as well as to other principles, such as “democracy; the promotion, protection and respect of Human Rights, international cooperation, the Rule of Law, multilateralism, respect for territorial integrity, non-intervention in the internal affairs of States, and defense of sovereignty,” are all directly undermined by its stance on Haiti. By inviting Henry, CELAC has legitimized an unpopular, Core Group-installed, de facto prime minister in Haiti. Henry has not only refused to hold elections, but he has presided over the departure from office of every single elected official in the country. Meanwhile, against the wishes of the Haitian masses and majority, he has begged for foreign intervention to shore up his power.

The Haiti/Americas Team affirms the words of Ajamu Baraka, chairperson of BAP’s Coordinating Committee, who stated, “Solidarity has to be reciprocal. CELAC must commit itself to supporting the democratic struggles in Haiti against an illegitimate U.S. puppet [government]. Inviting the Haitian government to CELAC is like inviting Juan Guaidó to represent Venezuela.”

Points 101 and 102 of the Buenos Aires Declaration directly address the situation in Haiti. Point 102 endorses the September 8 letter from the UN Secretary General to the President of the Security Council encouraging the organization of a “specialized multinational force” to intervene in Haiti. Nowhere in the Declaration do they mention the role of the international community in creating the current crisis in Haiti. Nowhere do they mention that the crisis is a crisis of imperialism, brought on by the United Nations, the Core Group (an alliance of countries as well as multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank), the United States, Canada, and other so-called “friends” of Haiti in the international community.

If CELAC supports non-intervention in the internal affairs of independent states, how can they call for foreign intervention in Haiti? If CELAC promotes a Zone of Peace, how can they demand foreign military intervention? If CELAC is for regional sovereignty, how can they support an imperialist design, driven by the United States and others? If CELAC is an advocate for the people of the Caribbean and Latin America, how can they so brazenly ignore the wishes and demands of the people of Haiti?

BAP’s Haiti/Americas Team suggests CELAC government leaders listen to the voices of the Haitian people, and their supporters in the region, as well as CELAC Social. This new entity of more than 200 organizations issued its own declaration demanding, in part, that the “region give its own response to the Haitian question, respecting the principle of non-intervention and the right of the people of Haiti to define sovereignly their destiny.”

CELAC’s position on Haiti is ill-informed and dangerous, representing an all-too frequent, reactionary “Haiti exception” when it comes to the “progressive” governments of the Americas. Peace and solidarity in the region cannot be achieved at the expense of Haitian sovereignty. CELAC must avoid contributing to Haiti’s current crisis—the crisis of imperialism.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Black Alliance for Peace.

Since his 2004 arrest for the murders of an 89-year-old woman and her 67-year-old daughter in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans, Mr. Henry has always maintained his innocence. He was held pre-trial in the Orleans Parish Jail until 2011 when he was tried for capital murder, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. In 2015, new pro bono counsel at the Innocence Project and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison took over the case, beginning a seven-year fight to overturn his conviction — their efforts included a cert petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, an application and hearing for post-conviction relief, a successful motion for DNA testing on several items of evidence recovered from the crime scene, two trips to the Louisiana Supreme Court, and Mr. Henry’s release on bail. 

“This day is a long time coming for Darrill Henry,” said Vanessa Potkin, Mr. Henry’s Innocence Project attorney and director of special litigation. “For a decade, he lived under the threat of being convicted and potentially executed for a crime he did not commit. He spent another eight years of a life sentence at Angola, one of the harshest prisons in the country. His ordeal began when he was 29, and now as a 47-year-old man, we see what was taken from him, which includes the ability to raise his two children and to properly grieve the death of his mother and other close family members who died while he was wrongfully incarcerated.” 

The State’s case was weak from the start. It rested on the testimony of eyewitnesses who were shown suggestive photo lineups. No other evidence implicated Mr. Henry in the crime and his alibi put him at several businesses, miles away from the scene, where he was applying for jobs. After unsuccessfully appealing Louisiana’s law (which prevented Mr. Henry from calling an expert at his trial to explain to the jury the flaws in the eyewitness identifications) to the U.S. Supreme Court, Mr. Henry’s team filed a post-conviction petition to have his conviction overturned. A breakthrough came when biological evidence from the crime scene was tested, and the DNA — which had been recovered from under the fingernails of one of the victims — definitively excluded Mr. Henry. 

Based on the new scientific evidence, Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Dennis Waldron, who presided over Mr. Henry’s 2011 trial, overturned his conviction in March 2020. Judge Waldron subsequently ruled that the DNA evidence in Mr. Henry’s case was “clear and convincing evidence that he is indeed factually innocent of the crime for which he was convicted,” adding that “[i]n all the years that I have served and all of the decisions that I’ve made, I’ve never been as confident in a decision.” 

Afterwards, with the expectation that District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office would appeal, Mr. Henry’s legal counsel filed a motion seeking Mr. Henry’s immediate release. Over the district attorney’s opposition, the trial court granted the application and set bail. Working with the Innocence Project, Mr. Henry’s family, and The First 72+ (a nonprofit organization in New Orleans committed to helping people re-enter their communities after imprisonment), Mr. Henry raised sufficient funds to obtain a bond to secure his release. In May 2020, after overcoming appeals attempting to block his release by the district attorney’s office to the state’s highest court, Mr. Henry finally walked out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary (known as Angola prison) and reunited with his family. In the nearly three years since then, he has lived with the uncertainty of a potential second trial, while awaiting the resolution of his case.

Mr. Henry has lost nearly two decades of his life to this wrongful conviction. At the time of his arrest, he was raising an 8-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son, who are now 26 and 24 respectively. 

“I can finally breathe. I knew this would happen, I just didn’t know when. I never doubted it,” said Mr. Henry after his exoneration today. 

Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Angel Harris, who has presided over Mr. Henry’s case since taking office in 2021, addressed him in court saying, “From my position, this case …  underscores the downfalls in our system and is something that we need to recognize when we are looking at eyewitness identification … This will be a case that will guide me on my career on the bench…” She went on to acknowledge that wrongful convictions impact so many people and have residual effects for all.

A Highly Suggestive Photo Array 

On June 15, 2004, Durelli Watts was stabbed over a dozen times, and her house was set on fire. As the assailant was leaving, he encountered Ms. Watts’ daughter, Ina Claire Gex, on the front porch and shot her.

Three neighbors across the street, who were inside their homes when they heard the gunshots, saw the assailant fleeing the scene. While their descriptions understandably varied — as they had seen a complete stranger, briefly and mostly from a far distance, and under stressful circumstances — they all consistently reported that the assailant had worn a red shirt. 

Police received Crime Stoppers tips in the weeks following the crime that pointed to numerous individuals. Mr. Henry became a suspect after a man told police that he had seen the assailant run down the street and enter a house where Mr. Henry’s ex-girlfriend had lived. Despite the fact that the neighbors all had seen the assailant run in the opposite direction, police focused on Mr. Henry.

Just over a week after the crime, police showed one of the neighbors a photo array of six photographs, including one of Mr. Henry wearing a red shirt. Three other people in the photo array were also shown wearing similar red or orange t-shirts. The witness did not identify Mr. Henry but told police that another person in the lineup “jumped out” at him. 

Police then showed a second neighbor a different photo array — this time, no one except Mr. Henry was shown wearing a red shirt. The suggestive nature of this photo lineup was compounded when the witness used her hand to cover each individual’s face from the eyes up and explained that she had never seen the assailant’s eyes or hair because he had worn dark sunglasses and a hat. As a result, the main feature visible in the array was the red shirt. Two-and-a-half months after the crime, police showed another neighbor this same suggestive photo array in which Mr. Henry was the only person seen wearing a red shirt. By this time, this photograph of Mr. Henry in the red shirt had been featured on television news identifying him as the main suspect in the crime, which the neighbor had seen. Not surprisingly, they selected Mr Henry from the array.

Six Years Later, A Third Identification 

As Mr. Henry’s case headed to trial, the State’s case was based entirely on the two identifications that police had procured using the patently suggestive photo procedures. Six years later, however, the person who had initially failed to identify Mr. Henry from the non-suggestive photo lineup nine days after the crime was himself arrested. Facing up to 40 years in prison on unrelated charges of child pornography, the witness suddenly recalled that Mr. Henry was the stranger he had seen running from the scene. While there were obvious incentives for this witness to offer false testimony in exchange for leniency in his case, he denied that this was a motivating factor for his testimony at trial. 

Eyewitness misidentification, as in this case, is the leading cause of wrongful convictions and has contributed to approximately 63% of the 241 Innocence Project exonerations and releases. Since the time of Mr. Henry’s trial, Louisiana has revised its Code of Evidence to allow for testimony from eyewitness identification experts. In 2018, Louisiana also passed a new law adopting standards and best practices around eyewitness identification procedures that law enforcement agencies in Louisiana are required to implement, and giving courts the ability to hold the agencies accountable when they fail to follow statutory procedures. Had Louisiana’s current eyewitness identification procedures and laws been in place in 2004, they would likely have prevented Mr. Henry from being wrongly convicted.  

“The State’s case rested on identifications that were the result of highly suggestive procedures that all but guaranteed Mr. Henry would be misidentified as the perpetrator. Even though we have a new understanding of the unreliability of the eyewitness identification evidence used to convict Mr. Henry, the legal system does not automatically correct itself. If it were not for the DNA, Darrill would be spending the rest of his life imprisoned at Angola as an innocent man,” said Ms.Potkin.     

Mr. Henry has been represented by Vanessa Potkin, director of special litigation at the Innocence Project; Jared Miller of the Orleans Parish Public Defender’s Office; and a team of lawyers from Paul, Weiss, that includes partner Michele Hirshman; counsel Aaron Delaney; associates Ariane Rockoff-Kirk, Johan Tatoy, and Jack Day; and former partner Jim Brochin. Letty Di Giulio of the Law Office of Letty S. Di Giulio was Mr. Henry’s Louisiana counsel throughout the post-conviction proceedings.

The post Darrill Henry Exonerated in New Orleans Double Murder Following Decades Long Fight appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by jlucivero.

A photo illustration of Henry Ford, left, and Elon Musk, right.

Photo illustration: Elise Swain/The Intercept; Photos: Getty Images

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

We look at the high stakes of the midterm elections for workers, including in key battleground states. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, says they are campaigning to empower working people, especially infrequent voters of color and new immigrants, to vote in their best interests. “We have got to make our votes a demand, and not a show of support for candidates that are with us one day and against us the next,” says Henry.

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

Gélin Buteau (Haiti), Guede with Drum, ca. 1995.

At the United Nations General Assembly on 24 September 2022, Haiti’s Foreign Minister Jean Victor Geneus admitted that his country faces a serious crisis, which he said ‘can only be solved with the effective support of our partners’. To many close observers of the situation unfolding in Haiti, the phrase ‘effective support’ sounded like Geneus was signalling that another military intervention by Western powers was imminent. Indeed, two days prior to Geneus’s comments, The Washington Post published an editorial on the situation in Haiti in which it called for ‘muscular action by outside actors’. On 15 October, the United States and Canada issued a joint statement announcing that they had sent military aircraft to Haiti to deliver weapons to Haitian security services. That same day, the United States submitted a draft resolution to the UN Security Council calling for the ‘immediate deployment of a multinational rapid action force’ into Haiti.

Ever since the Haitian Revolution won independence from France in 1804, Haiti has faced successive waves of invasions, including a two-decade-long US occupation from 1915 to 1934, a US-backed dictatorship from 1957 to 1986, two Western-backed coups against the progressive former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and 2004, and a UN military intervention from 2004 to 2017. These invasions have prevented Haiti from securing its sovereignty and have prevented its people from building dignified lives. Another invasion, whether by US and Canadian troops or by UN peacekeeping forces, will only deepen the crisis. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the International Peoples’ Assembly, ALBA Movements, and the Plateforme Haïtienne de Plaidoyer pour un Développement Alternatif (‘Haitian Advocacy Platform for Alternative Development’ or PAPDA) have produced a red alert on the current situation in Haiti, which can be found below and downloaded as a PDF.

What is happening in Haiti?

A popular insurrection has unfolded in Haiti throughout 2022. These protests are the continuation of a cycle of resistance that began in 2016 in response to a social crisis developed by the coups in 1991 and 2004, the earthquake in 2010, and Hurricane Matthew in 2016. For more than a century, any attempt by the Haitian people to exit the neocolonial system imposed by the US military occupation (1915–34) has been met with military and economic interventions to preserve it. The structures of domination and exploitation established by that system have impoverished the Haitian people, with most of the population having no access to drinking water, health care, education, or decent housing. Of Haiti’s 11.4 million people, 4.6 million are food insecure and 70% are unemployed.

Manuel Mathieu (Haiti), Rempart (‘Rampart’), 2018.

The Haitian Creole word dechoukaj or ‘uprooting’ – which was first used in the pro-democracy movements of 1986 that fought against the US-backed dictatorship – has come to define the current protests. The government of Haiti, led by acting Prime Minister and President Ariel Henry, raised fuel prices during this crisis, which provoked a protest from the trade unions and deepened the movement. Henry was installed to his post in 2021 by the ‘Core Group’ (made up of six countries and led by the US, the European Union, the UN, and the Organisation of American States) after the murder of the unpopular president Jovenel Moïse. Although still unsolved, it is clear that Moïse was killed by a conspiracy that included the ruling party, drug trafficking gangs, Colombian mercenaries, and US intelligence services. The UN’s Helen La Lime told the Security Council in February that the national investigation into Moïse’s murder had stalled, a situation that has fuelled rumours and exacerbated both suspicion and mistrust within the country.

Fritzner Lamour (Haiti), Poste Ravine Pintade, ca. 1980

How have the forces of neocolonialism reacted?

The United States and Canada are now arming Henry’s illegitimate government and planning military intervention in Haiti. On 15 October, the US submitted a draft resolution to the United Nations Security Council calling for the ‘immediate deployment of a multinational rapid action force’ in the country. This would be the latest chapter in over two centuries of destructive intervention by Western countries in Haiti. Since the 1804 Haitian Revolution, the forces of imperialism (including slave owners) have intervened militarily and economically against people’s movements seeking to end the neocolonial system. Most recently, these forces entered the country under the auspices of the United Nations via the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which was active from 2004 to 2017. A further such intervention in the name of ‘human rights’ would only affirm the neocolonial system now managed by Ariel Henry and would be catastrophic for the Haitian people, whose movement forward is being blocked by gangs created and promoted behind the scenes by the Haitian oligarchy, supported by the Core Group, and armed by weapons from the United States.

Saint Louis Blaise (Haiti), Généraux (‘Generals’), 1975.

How can the world stand in solidarity with Haiti?

Haiti’s crisis can only be solved by the Haitian people, but they must be accompanied by the immense force of international solidarity. The world can look to the examples demonstrated by the Cuban Medical Brigade, which first went to Haiti in 1998; by the Via Campesina/ALBA Movimientos brigade, which has worked with popular movements on reforestation and popular education since 2009; and by the assistance provided by the Venezuelan government, which includes discounted oil. It is imperative for those standing in solidarity with Haiti to demand, at a minimum:

1. that France and the United States provide reparations for the theft of Haitian wealth since 1804, including the return of the gold stolen by the US in 1914. France alone owes Haiti at least $28 billion.
2. that the United States return Navassa Island to Haiti.
3. that the United Nations pay for the crimes committed by MINUSTAH, whose forces killed tens of thousands of Haitians, raped untold numbers of women, and introduced cholera into the country.
4. that the Haitian people be permitted to build their own sovereign, dignified, and just political and economic framework and to create education and health systems that can meet the people’s real needs.
5. that all progressive forces oppose the military invasion of Haiti.

Marie-Hélène Cauvin (Haiti), Trinité (‘Trinity’), 2003

The common sense demands in this red alert do not require much elaboration, but they do need to be amplified.

Western countries will talk about this new military intervention with phrases such as ‘restoring democracy’ and ‘defending human rights’. The terms ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ are demeaned in these instances. This was on display at the UN General Assembly in September, when US President Joe Biden said that his government continues ‘to stand with our neighbour in Haiti’. The emptiness of these words is revealed in a new Amnesty International report that documents the racist abuse faced by Haitian asylum seekers in the United States. The US and the Core Group might stand with people like Ariel Henry and the Haitian oligarchy, but they do not stand with the Haitian people, including those who have fled to the United States.

In 1957, the Haitian communist novelist Jacques-Stéphen Alexis published a letter to his country titled La belle amour humaine (‘Beautiful Human Love’). ‘I don’t think that the triumph of morality can happen by itself without the actions of humans’, Alexis wrote. A descendent of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of the revolutionaries that overthrew French rule in 1804, Alexis wrote novels to uplift the human spirit, a profound contribution to the Battle of Emotions in his country. In 1959, Alexis founded the Parti pour l’Entente Nationale (‘People’s Consensus Party’). On 2 June 1960, Alexis wrote to the US-backed dictator François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier to inform him that both he and his country would overcome the violence of the dictatorship. ‘As a man and as a citizen’, Alexis wrote, ‘it is inescapable to feel the inexorable march of the terrible disease, this slow death, which each day leads our people to the cemetery of nations like wounded pachyderms to the necropolis of elephants’. This march can only be halted by the people. Alexis was forced into exile in Moscow, where he participated in a meeting of international communist parties. When he arrived back in Haiti in April 1961, he was abducted in Môle-Saint-Nicolas and killed by the dictatorship shortly thereafter. In his letter to Duvalier, Alexis echoed, ‘we are the children of the future’.

The post The Last Thing Haiti Needs Is Another Military Intervention first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/22/the-last-thing-haiti-needs-is-another-military-intervention/feed/ 0 343929 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/29/henry-giroux-the-attack-on-public-education/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/29/henry-giroux-the-attack-on-public-education/#respond Thu, 29 Sep 2022 21:00:55 +0000 https://www.alternativeradio.org/products/girh003/
This content originally appeared on AlternativeRadio and was authored by info@alternativeradio.org.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/29/henry-giroux-the-attack-on-public-education/feed/ 0 337369 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/02/henry-kissinger-a-warmongers-lying-continues/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/02/henry-kissinger-a-warmongers-lying-continues/#respond Tue, 02 Aug 2022 06:02:05 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=250940 Kissinger, who believed in the possibility of limited nuclear war in the 1950s, favored the use of a nuclear card in the war between India and Pakistan in 1971, and the October War in the Middle East in 1973.  On an earlier occasion, in 1970, when the Nixon administration was faced with a threat about the Soviet construction of a submarine repair facility in Cuba, Kissinger wanted to send a strong military signal to the Soviets.  Nixon wisely said, “I think we can resolve this with diplomacy.”  Nixon was right. More

The post Henry Kissinger: A Warmonger’s Lying Continues appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/02/henry-kissinger-a-warmongers-lying-continues/feed/ 0 319948 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/29/drc-journalist-henry-hererimana-serushago-in-hiding-after-beating-threats-from-m23-rebels/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/29/drc-journalist-henry-hererimana-serushago-in-hiding-after-beating-threats-from-m23-rebels/#respond Fri, 29 Jul 2022 12:36:05 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=213741 New York, July 29, 2022 — Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo should ensure the safety of journalist Henry Hererimana Serushago and take steps to protect reporters covering conflicts throughout the country, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.

On the morning July 5, a group of six soldiers with the M23 rebel group detained Serushago, a reporter at La Voix de Mikeno (RACOM) community radio broadcaster, according to the journalist, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview, and a report by Journaliste en Danger, a local press freedom group.

Members of the M23, a rebel movement fighting the DRC government in the country’s east, stopped Serushago as he attempted to cross into Uganda from Bunagana, in the DRC’s eastern North Kivu province, according to those sources.

Serushago told CPJ that he refused to speak to an M23 colonel about the rebel group’s offer to cooperate with RACOM. The colonel then ordered Serushago to be detained, and soldiers forced him to the ground, tied him up, and whipped, kicked, and beat him, he said.

The colonel threatened to kill Serushago if he spoke publicly about his mistreatment, saying he knew the location of his home, Serushago told CPJ. The rebels released him after about seven hours in custody, and he received treatment for injuries to his right leg and chest at a local hospital, he said.

Serushago told CPJ that he had gone into hiding and feared for his life.

“Congolese authorities must guarantee the safety of journalist Henry Hererimana Serushago, and protect him and his colleagues while they cover the conflict with M23 rebels in the country,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in Durban, South Africa. “Journalists covering conflict are far too often targeted for their coverage, which is critical for people in the local community and around the world to know what is happening.”

M23 rebels previously looted RACOM’s station in June after employees refused to collaborate with them, as CPJ documented at the time.

The colonel who sought to speak with Serushago said M23 soldiers could install equipment to make the station operational again, if the broadcaster agreed to work with them, Serushago said.

Serushago was attempting to enter Uganda to conduct interviews with Congolese people who had fled the fighting in the eastern DRC, where M23 rebels recently seized control of several villages, he told CPJ.

He said his previous interviews with people displaced by the conflict included their denunciations of the M23, and had been broadcast in late June by stations in the DRC’s eastern town of Rutshuru and in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province.

Separately, unidentified armed men ransacked Serushago’s home in Bunagana in late June and destroyed his belongings while he was reporting from Uganda, according to two of his neighbors, who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing security concerns. The neighbors told CPJ they believed the armed men were M23 soldiers because the group was in control of Bunagana at that time.

CPJ called the DRC military governor of North Kivu, Constant Ndima Kongba, but did not receive any reply.

When CPJ called M23 President Bertrand Bisimwa, he said he was in a meeting and was not available for comment. Minutes later, Bisimwa’s assistant, David Mugabe, called CPJ and in an interview said that the July 5 attack on Serushago “did not happen,” and that M23 was not involved in the raids on the journalist’s home or RACOM’s office.

Mugabe, who said he was speaking from Bunagana, suggested that former members of other armed groups or people with personal “vendettas” against Serushago may have been responsible for those incidents.

Mugabe said that Serushago and all journalists’ “safety are one hundred percent guaranteed” in the area controlled by M23.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/29/drc-journalist-henry-hererimana-serushago-in-hiding-after-beating-threats-from-m23-rebels/feed/ 0 319249 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/12/imperial-detritus-henry-luces-dream-comes-undone/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/12/imperial-detritus-henry-luces-dream-comes-undone/#respond Tue, 12 Jul 2022 16:48:13 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/338242

"The American Century Is Over." So claims the July 2022 cover of Harper's Magazine, adding an all-too-pertinent question: "What's Next?"

What, indeed? Eighty years after the United States embarked upon the Great Crusade of World War II, a generation after it laid claim to the status of sole superpower following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and two decades after the Global War on Terror was to remove any lingering doubts about who calls the shots on Planet Earth, the question could hardly be more timely.

Rather than attempting to resurrect the American Century, perhaps it's time to focus on the more modest goal of salvaging a unified American republic.

"Empire Burlesque," Daniel Bessner's Harper's cover story, provides a useful, if preliminary, answer to a question most members of our political class, preoccupied with other matters, would prefer to ignore. Yet the title of the essay contains a touch of genius, capturing as it does in a single concise phrase the essence of the American Century in its waning days.

On the one hand, given Washington's freewheeling penchant for using force to impose its claimed prerogatives abroad, the imperial nature of the American project has become self-evident. When the U.S. invades and occupies distant lands or subjects them to punishment, concepts like freedom, democracy, and human rights rarely figure as more than afterthoughts. Submission, not liberation defines the underlying, if rarely acknowledged, motivation behind Washington's military actions, actual or threatened, direct or through proxies.

On the other hand, the reckless squandering of American power in recent decades suggests that those who preside over the American imperium are either stunningly incompetent or simply mad as hatters. Intent on perpetuating some form of global hegemony, they have accelerated trends toward national decline, while seemingly oblivious to the actual results of their handiwork.

Consider the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. It has rightly prompted a thorough congressional investigation aimed at establishing accountability. All of us should be grateful for the conscientious efforts of the House Select Committee to expose the criminality of the Trump presidency. Meanwhile, however, the trillions of dollars wasted and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost during our post-9/11 wars have been essentially written off as the cost of doing business. Here we glimpse the essence of twenty-first-century bipartisanship, both parties colluding to ignore disasters for which they share joint responsibility, while effectively consigning the vast majority of ordinary citizens to the status of passive accomplices.

Bessner, who teaches at the University of Washington, is appropriately tough on the (mis)managers of the contemporary American empire. And he does a good job of tracing the ideological underpinnings of that empire back to their point of origin. On that score, the key date is not 1776, but 1941. That was the year when the case for American global primacy swept into the marketplace of ideas, making a mark that persists to the present day.

God on Our Side

The marketing began with the February 17, 1941, issue of Life magazine, which contained a simply and elegantly titled essay by Henry Luce, its founder and publisher. With the American public then sharply divided over the question of whether to intervene on behalf of Great Britain in its war against Nazi Germany—this was 10 months before Pearl Harbor—Luce weighed in with a definitive answer: he was all in for war. Through war, he believed, the United States would not only overcome evil but inaugurate a golden age of American global dominion.

Life was then, in the heyday of the print media, the most influential mass-circulation publication in the United States. As the impresario who presided over the rapidly expanding Time-Life publishing empire, Luce himself was perhaps the most influential press baron of his age. Less colorful than his flamboyant contemporary William Randolph Hearst, he was politically more astute. And yet nothing Luce would say or do over the course of a long career promoting causes (mostly conservative) and candidates (mostly Republican) would come close to matching the legacy left by that one perfectly timed editorial in Life's pages.

When it hit the newsstands, "The American Century" did nothing to resolve public ambivalence about how to deal with Adolf Hitler. Events did that, above all Japan's December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet once the United States did enter the war, the evocative title of Luce's essay formed the basis for expectations destined to transcend World War II and become a fixture in American political discourse.

During the war years, government propaganda offered copious instruction on "Why We Fight." So, too, did a torrent of posters, books, radio programs, hit songs, and Hollywood movies, not to speak of publications produced by Luce's fellow press moguls. Yet when it came to crispness, durability, and poignancy, none held a candle to "The American Century." Before the age was fully launched, Luce had named it.

Even today, in attenuated form, expectations Luce articulated in 1941 persist. Peel back the cliched phrases that senior officials in the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon routinely utter in the Biden years—"American global leadership" and "the rules-based international order" are favorites—and you encounter their unspoken purpose: to perpetuate unchallengeable American global primacy until the end of time.

To put it another way, whatever the "rules" of global life, the United States will devise them. And if ensuring compliance with those rules should entail a resort to violence, justifications articulated in Washington will suffice to legitimize the use of force.

In other words, Luce's essay marks the point of departure for what was, in remarkably short order, to become an era when American primacy would be a birthright. It stands in relation to the American empire as the Declaration of Independence once did to the American republic. It remains the urtext, even if some of its breathtakingly bombastic passages are now difficult to read with a straight face.

Using that 1941 issue of Life as his bully pulpit, Luce summoned his fellow citizens to "accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world" to assert "the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." (Emphasis added.) For the United States duty, opportunity, and destiny aligned. That American purposes and the means employed to fulfill them were benign, indeed enlightened, was simply self-evident. How could they be otherwise?

Crucially—and this point Bessner overlooks—the duty and opportunity to which Luce alluded expressed God's will. Born in China where his parents were serving as Protestant missionaries and himself a convert to Roman Catholicism, Luce saw America's imperial calling as a Judeo-Christian religious obligation. God, he wrote, had summoned the United States to become "the Good Samaritan to the entire world." Here was the nation's true vocation: to fulfill the "mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels."

In the present day, such towering ambition, drenched in religious imagery, invites mockery. Yet it actually offers a reasonably accurate (if overripe) depiction of how American elites have conceived of the nation's purpose in the decades since.

Today, the explicitly religious frame has largely faded from view. Even so, the insistence on American singularity persists. Indeed, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary—did someone mention China?—it may be stronger than ever.

In no way should my reference to a moral consensus imply moral superiority. Indeed, the list of sins to which Americans were susceptible, even at the outset of the American Century, was long. With the passage of time, it has only evolved, even as our awareness of our nation's historical flaws, particularly in the realm of race, gender, and ethnicity, has grown more acute. Still, the religiosity inherent in Luce's initial call to arms resonated then and survives today, even if in subdued form.

While anything but an original thinker, Luce possessed a notable gift for packaging and promotion. Life's unspoken purpose was to sell a way of life based on values that he believed his fellow citizens should embrace, even if his own personal adherence to those values was, at best, spotty.

The American Century was the ultimate expression of that ambitious undertaking. So even as growing numbers of citizens in subsequent decades concluded that God might be otherwise occupied, something of a killjoy, or simply dead, the conviction that U.S. global primacy grew out of a divinely inspired covenant took deep root. Our presence at the top of the heap testified to some cosmic purpose. It was meant to be. In that regard, imbuing the American Century with a sacred veneer was a stroke of pure genius.

In God We Trust?

By the time Life ended its run as a weekly magazine in 1972, the American Century, as a phrase and as an expectation, had etched itself into the nation's collective consciousness. Yet today, Luce's America—the America that once cast itself as the protagonist in a Christian parable—has ceased to exist. And it's not likely to return anytime soon.

At the outset of that American Century, Luce could confidently expound on the nation's role in furthering God's purposes, taking for granted a generic religious sensibility to which the vast majority of Americans subscribed. Back then, especially during the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, most of those not personally endorsing that consensus at least found it expedient to play along. After all, except among hipsters, beatniks, dropouts, and other renegades, doing so was a precondition for getting by or getting ahead.

As Eisenhower famously declared shortly after being elected president, "Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is." Today, however, Ike's ecumenical 11th commandment no longer garners anything like universal assent, whether authentic or feigned. As defining elements of the American way of life, consumption, lifestyle, and expectations of unhindered mobility persist, much as they did when he occupied the White House. But a deeply felt religious faith melded with a similarly deep faith in an open-ended American Century has become, at best, optional. Those nursing the hope that the American Century may yet make a comeback are more likely to put their trust in AI than in God.

Occurring in tandem with this country's global decline has been a fracturing of the contemporary moral landscape. For evidence, look no further than the furies unleashed by recent Supreme Court decisions related to guns and abortion. Or contemplate Donald Trump's place in the American political landscape—twice impeached, yet adored by tens of millions, even while held in utter contempt by tens of millions more. That Trump or another similarly divisive figure could succeed Joe Biden in the White House looms as a real, if baffling, possibility.

More broadly still, take stock of the prevailing American conception of personal freedom, big on privileges, disdainful of obligations, awash with self-indulgence, and tinged with nihilism. If you think our collective culture is healthy, you haven't been paying attention.

For "a nation with the soul of a church," to cite British writer G.K. Chesterton's famed description of the United States, Luce's proposal of a marriage between a generic Judeo-Christianity and national purpose seemed eminently plausible. But plausible is not inevitable, nor irreversible. A union rocked by recurring quarrels and trial separations has today ended in divorce. The full implications of that divorce for American policy abroad remain to be seen, but at a minimum suggest that anyone proposing to unveil a "New American Century" is living in a dreamworld.

Bessner concludes his essay by suggesting that the American Century should give way to a "Global Century… in which U.S. power is not only restrained but reduced, and in which every nation is dedicated to solving the problems that threaten us all." Such a proposal strikes me as broadly appealing, assuming that the world's other 190-plus nations, especially the richer, more powerful ones, sign on. That, of course, is a very large assumption, indeed. Negotiating the terms that will define such a Global Century, including reapportioning wealth and privileges between haves and have-nots, promises to be a daunting proposition.

Meanwhile, what fate awaits the American Century itself? Some in the upper reaches of the establishment will, of course, exert themselves to avert its passing by advocating more bouts of military muscle-flexing, as if a repetition of Afghanistan and Iraq or deepening involvement in Ukraine will impart to our threadbare empire a new lease on life. That Americans in significant numbers will more willingly die for Kyiv than they did for Kabul seems improbable.

Better in my estimation to give up entirely the pretensions Henry Luce articulated back in 1941. Rather than attempting to resurrect the American Century, perhaps it's time to focus on the more modest goal of salvaging a unified American republic. One glance at the contemporary political landscape suggests that such a goal alone is a tall order. On that score, however, reconstituting a common moral framework would surely be the place to begin.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Andrew Bacevich.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/12/imperial-detritus-henry-luces-dream-comes-undone/feed/ 0 314694 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/08/black-sufferance-insufferable-whites-an-interview-with-reverend-dr-james-henry-harris/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/08/black-sufferance-insufferable-whites-an-interview-with-reverend-dr-james-henry-harris/#respond Fri, 08 Jul 2022 05:50:10 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=248697

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Reverend Dr. James Henry Harris is Distinguished Professor of Homiletics and Pastoral Theology and a research scholar in religion and humanities at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, Virginia Union University. He also serves as chair of the theology faculty and pastor of Second Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia. He is a former president of the Academy of Homiletics and recipient of the Henry Luce Fellowship in Theology. He is the author of numerous books, including Beyond the Tyranny of the Text and Black Suffering: Silent Pain, Hidden Hope (Fortress Press, 2020). His latest book is N: My Encounter with Racism and the Forbidden Word in an American Classic, a memoir that describes and critically wonders about a graduate English class he took on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and provides crucial insight into the CRT conundrum.

Harris and I conversed by Zoom about his books — especially Black Suffering and N. — on June 29, 2022. Here is an edited version of that exchange.

John Hawkins:

In Native Son (1940), Richard Wright observed of white people:

“To Bigger and his kind, white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark.”

This is great writing and probably gives too much credit to whites. But it did have me thinking that this “natural force” that Wright refers to has been responsible for leading the planet to climate catastrophe and, maybe, species extinction. And we can go to Derek Chauvin, as a force, you know, the knee in the neck guy.

James Henry Harris:

I’ve always been fascinated with Richard Wright and some of the Harlem Renaissance writers. I had no interest in some of the things we were reading in high school English classes, you know, like Beowulf and other pieces. And then when the teacher assigned Black Boy, it just spoke to my soul.

Almost unconsciously my writing has been influenced by people like Richard Wright and James Baldwin and maybe even Countee Cullen as well. I adored reading their works, and some element kind of comes through in my own writing and some of the same issues that existed, you know, the issues of race and so forth that Bigger Thomas encountered. And what Wright talked about, I mean, it’s almost like it’s not yesterday, but today.

When I read the Wright quote, I think of Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. He wrote, “Black people love white people. And white people struggle to be human.” And in a very real sense, I was thinking that it’s almost like a straight line. I argue in my book, Black Suffering that there is a straight line between American chattel slavery and what goes on today. The death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and all of these things, that it’s almost a straight line. And it continues today with the election of the last president. And so when I read that Wright quote, it just seems to be so accurate, in terms of what is going on today. You know, we see the bubbling over of white people’s apparent concern about the browning of America. And overturning Roe versus Wade. I think that is a part of a larger goal to try to halt what I’m calling the browning of America.

Hawkins:

I grew up in the Sixties, so I have a pretty good sense of how revolutionary it was back then, in terms of activism. People wanted change and wanted the war to stop. Children who couldn’t vote were being drafted and sent to war against their will. They can’t vote, but they can go die for us, you know, and they had no say at all. They’re basically slaves really being sent to war, whether they liked it or not. Right. But there was drama, there was fight back, the Black Panthers were saying, No, it’s not okay. Angela Davis said, No, it’s not okay. And there was just a more dynamic sense of an urgency to actually get things done. It seems to have died a little bit.

Harris:

I think you’re absolutely right. And it’s, I think, the complexity of it now has it grounded in the farcical notion of integration. You’re talking about the sixties. Segregation was the dominant practice. It was codified in the law, which made it much more of a bifurcated thing that was easier to deal with then — up until the recent [Trump] administration, where there was a kind of sleepiness about race relations in America. As a matter of fact, some African Americans, you know, young people, who are millennials, and others, have said to me things like, you know, well, that was in your generation. We don’t have that problem today. And so forth. And then comes Obama, which, for a week or two, kind of substantiated those views.

Hawkins:

Speaking of complexity, let’s talk about your memoir, N: My Encounter with Racism and the Forbidden Word in an American Classic. That classic being Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. One thing you say in your book is that no white person has the right to use N-word. I was marveling, as a white reviewer, at the task of reading your book in which the N-word features so much, even in the contention of its use. Should I even be reading your book? The title is forbidding. And confrontational in a way. Reminded me a bit of the time as a youngster when I saw Abbie Hoffman’s book in a store and was going to buy it, but got up in the title of the book: Steal This Book. Moral dilemma time, in an arch way.

But it must have been a strange moral dilemma for you as well, entering a college classroom to sit with white people and their white instructor to discuss Huckleberry Finn and hear your fellow students use the Forbidden Word — because it’s part of the narrative of the book, 222 times — and feel violated by the word spoken out, while knowing that it would be again forbidden outside, when the class was finished, and re-enter the world of political correctness. Strange. It was a welcome experience for this reader when you confronted that anomaly immediately.

Harris:

What? White America, you know, made The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a national and international bestseller. And it blatantly used the word, as I said. You know, hundreds of times. And these same people are now saying they have a problem with the word.

Hawkins:

It’s strange. There’s a lot of delicacy around handling the race question from a white point of view, as if we don’t have an effective way of addressing it. We’re creating a barrier, you know, and I’m just trying to figure out the politics of how we went from Dick Gregory using Nigger as his title and right on his cover. That’s the name of the book versus what you’re doing, with N., which is like drawing attention to the changes that have taken place politically over the last 50 years, since Gregory’s book came out.

Harris:

Yeah. Well, you know, Randall Kennedy also uses the word in the title of his book.

It’s a dialectic, in a sense. I mean, Trump — I promised myself that I was not going to invoke his name — but, you know, like I said, his views are rather racist, front and center. And he has all of these people joining him. That’s on the one hand. And then, on the other hand, you have other people, maybe liberals or quasi radicals or whatever on the left, who feel some kind of conflict with the discussion of rights. But, you know, that as a black person, you cannot walk out the door without being encountered with the issue of race in one form or another.

I’ve thought about these things a lot. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life studying philosophy. And whites study Hegel and Plato and Aristotle and all of these other people. And, you know, the problem I have is that whites understand everything from physics to calculus to biochemistry and to philosophy, and to argue all of a sudden that there’s something that they don’t understand is amazing to me. It’s not even true. I’m saying it’s basically a lie. I just don’t buy it.

Hawkins:

Well, can whites effectively teach CRT? When I think of CRT being introduced it reminds me of some of my undergraduate English Lit classes at UMass-Boston which were taught by a new wave of Harvard-trained professors who brought into the classroom active feminist approaches to lit that seemed, at that time, condescending in the re-tooling of the white working class minds they presumed needed a healthy dose of critical feminine theory to show how unreconstructed their plantation thoughts were regarding women in fiction. I admit, I resented the presumptuousness that I felt came out of her class superiority — like I was some MAGA pleb — teaching at me, rather than with me. I mean, hell, I was a lefty! A lot of the classes seemed like that back then — when radical chic meant radical chick with radical cheek — taught by Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis or Billie Jean King, who looked as if she’d hop right over the table like Professor Turgeson in Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School and come at you if you said the wrong thing. It confronted the ego. But I came away with a healthy appreciation of reader-response theory though. So maybe CRT needs a similar break in period?

Harris:

I graduated from the University of Virginia. Yep. Where, you know, there’s an air of gentility that is everywhere. And yet, Jefferson was a slave owner. And a slave trader. And as a graduate student at the University of Virginia, I would make people very uncomfortable about talking about these things in class, because I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the UVA campus, but there are multiple statues of Jefferson on campus. And then there are still some renovated slave quarters that also operate as classrooms in certain areas. So. You know, I’m saying this to say that there is a kind of ingrained, insidious kind of duplicity that pervades American society and culture. To overcome that, I mean, I think it’s so embedded in American history and in the American psyche.

And this whole issue of denial, which is so present in the pushback against critical race theory. And maybe any critical theory, I was thinking, but definitely critical race theory. It’s like the history of American racism has been so fabricated and fictionalized that it has almost become truth to some people. I was born in the fifties. I grew up basically in the sixties. And when I was studying Virginia history and American history, it was advanced that slaves were happy. And almost grateful for the way they were treated by the slave master. I mean, a lot of these narratives were actually placed in American history books. Critical race theory only seeks to point out historical truths as the pushback to that. So there is no real interest in the truth.

Hawkins:

Yeah. N: My Encounter with Racism and the Forbidden Word in an American Classic, your account of taking a graduate course in MarkTwain’s Huckleberry Finn, including the setting of the classroom in an old plantation, speaks to that “insidious duplicity” quite eloquently in one passage. You write:

“This is where Black folk learned the ways of white folk. This is where Black folk acquired the necessary astuteness to speak, breathe, and exist without the Otherness that defined them… It is where the practices of smiling, “softshoeing,” and “cooning” were refined into a tradition of degradation and self-deprecation. This is the house in which Blacks learned to wear masks and store their anger in their hearts and souls until it could be unleashed like hellfire and brimstone.”

Sounds very surreal and disturbing.

I know what you mean when you say it could be any critical theory that causes problems for the collective Delusion. Recently, I did a review of a critical analysis of Robinson Crusoe, which is, in America, regarded as a tale of the rugged individualist. But re-reading it, you remember the guy was a slave, you know, and then escaped from Africa and sold his mate to th Portuguese, and then finds fortune with tobacco farming in South America, and not satisfied, rounds up other farmers and sets out to Africa to buy slaves — which is when the fully-laden ship goes down, with the Crusoe the lone survivor. On the “desert” island are all kinds of wildlife, he sets up three abodes, and salvages virtually the entire store of goods from the reefed ship. He lived in luxury and without much need for ruggedness. When Friday arrives, 30 years later, Crusoe’s first impulse is to enslave him. We know that not much rehabilitation has been afforded the tale because recently Tom Hanks gave us the latest white boy update of rugged individualism in Castaway, where he had to make do with freight of goodies from a crashed DHL plane.

Harris:

Absolutely. Yeah. But part of my argument is that, you know, this is normative. And I’m saying to some degree that normativity was, in my view, advanced by Mark Twain and his use of the N-word. You normalize the use of the word and put it right out front and center in the public domain. You know, so, um, I’m saying that America is very adept at this, and lots of days I can only scratch my head. It’s like walking up against a brick wall almost daily.

Hawkins:

Well, so you wouldn’t ban Huckleberry Finn, but as far as teaching it, you make the point that and I think it’s a fair point that it really requires a mature mind; a mind that’s been through some critical analysis of itself to actually know how to teach it. So where do you draw the balance between, you know, a book filled with so many forbidden word references? Should it only be taught under certain circumstances — like someone who actually can teach it rather than generally assigned? Like, how do we figure out who can actually teach it without doing damage?

Harris:

As an aside, my best friend in that Huck Finn class was a white man who had also graduated from the University of Virginia. He was a history major before he began to focus on literature and writing. Somebody like him, who was clearly highly qualified. There are many, many others. I think the main thing is to have some degree of sensitivity to what’s really going on in the book. It is complex for sure. But, you know, I intentionally got in that class. I had heard things about the book. Because its presence has been so ubiquitous in American literature. And I was in the class mainly because I did not want to have to get a masters degree in English literature without having read, you know, some of the purported classics, right?

Hawkins:

Toni Morrison defends Twain’s use of the Forbidden Word in his work, especially Huck Finn, and writes:

“In the early eighties, I read Huckleberry Finn again, provoked, I believe, by demands to remove the novel from the libraries and required reading lists of public schools. These efforts were based, it seemed to me, on a narrow notion of how to handle the offense. MarkTwain’s use of the term “[n–]” would occasion for black students and the corrosive effect it would have on white ones. It struck me as a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate the problem, band-aid the solution.”

Do you agree?

Harris:

This is a bit complicated because I think white America prefers hearing from Blacks they have endorsed in some way. And so I think being a professor at Harvard or being a professor at Princeton, like Toni Morrison and Randall Kennedy at Harvard, and, you know, the list goes on and on. But I think that somehow there’s these African American professors considered the spokespeople for their race. And the problem I have with that is that they don’t even teach a black university, like I do, and have for most of my academic life. Yeah. And so I’m trying to figure out: How do they become more of an authority on blackness and black education?

Hawkins:

You draw the conclusion by the end of the class that “Mark Twain was a racist.” Can you say more on this?

Harris:

I was the only black in the class, the only [black] male in the class. And the only person in the class who had been called the N-word. So I had a kind of deeper understanding than probably anybody else in the class, obviously. I guess a lot of people in the world of letters, probably just took Toni Morrison’s word for Twain’s value. In other words, Toni Morrison was such a big name and whatever she said about that. But I wasn’t thinking along those lines at all in terms of Toni Morrison’s thought. I think that Twain did do a lot of things. He was probably very amenable to blacks and so forth. But I think that was normal in the world of the slave-ocracy as well in many ways. So I just felt that the normalization of the word or the ubiquitous use of the word by Twain, in my view, made him almost like the consummate racist. I think he used the word almost without a full thought. It was just so natural. Yeah. And I think that is probably what constitutes racism.

Hawkins:

You note that the Forbidden Word occurs “220 times” in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The same word occurs in your memoir 177 times. Made me think of Miles Davis’s Tribute to Jack Johnson, a tower of strength seemingly warning the listener: “I’m Black; they’ll never let me forget it. I’m Black alright; I’ll never let them forget it.” Can we EVER get over skin color as politics? Or will there always be a knee in the neck waiting?

Harris:

Martin Luther King Jr said in 1967/68 that the “stigma of color” is the source of Black pain and suffering. Fifty five years later, his words continue to ring true. There seem to be no other ethnic groups in America who bear the unique scars of American chattel slavery. Only Black folk hold this distinction and only Blacks have been treated with such sustained violence and evil. 246 years! The same age as American independence! Sojourner Truth was right in exclaiming “what evil has this slavery not done.” So, my hope is in the language of the Negro spiritual: “I’m so glad trouble don’t last always.” Your question, will there always be a knee in the neck waiting? My simple answer is grounded in hope; however, a more pragmatic approach would have to include considering a response that is equally as violent as the knee on the necks of Blacks. In the spirit of the Old Testament: “An eye for an eye”, Or in this case, a knee for a knee.

Hawkins:

Can you say more about W.E.B. Du Bois’ use of “double consciousness”? What is this double consciousness? And we know what it’s supposed to have been like in the Richard Wright era, especially with the story, “Almos’ A Man.” But when you think about it in the modern era, I mean, what is this double consciousness that he’s referring to? Where do we see it? Where do we see it? It’s such a softball question, but…

Harris:

Well, it’s a hardball question that masquerades as a softball. But, you know, I mean, it’s complex. I both admire and not admire some of what DuBois has to say about double consciousness. It’s so much a part of black psychology or black American psychology, you know, in the sense that he’s right on in talking about the two worlds and all of this is a part of the double consciousness. And I think that it’s evident today. For example, I’ve been going to the same bank for, let’s say, 20 years. Mm-hmm. Okay. And almost every time I go, the teller asks for my ID. Well. She saw me last week. And the week before that and the week before that and the week before that. I’m saying. What is that? What is it? That’s a very simple example. But what is that about? And I’m suggesting that that’s a minuscule example of the issues that black people face in America daily.

Yeah. So, you know, it’s complex, but there is no escaping. There’s no escaping your blackness in America. There’s no escaping it. And my thinking is that the stresses that are imposed upon you contribute to all kinds of health issues, and other kinds of things where black people are disproportionately affected by all of the major diseases from diabetes to heart disease and so forth. And I think a lot of that is grounded in the fact that you always are subjected to a double standard. Yeah. And so in some ways, your consciousness in and of itself is a double consciousness.

Hawkins:

What is the way forward?

Harris:

We seem to be on a collision path toward chaos since the “Beloved Community” contemplated by Dr. King is a bridge too wide and too deep to cross in this age of “turning back the clock” on Civil Rights, Voting Rights, minority rights, women’s rights, and the freedom of Black people across America. We are indeed going backward, not forward. States Rights is a damning and evil act of regression! The Supreme Courts overturning of the landmark decision in Roe v Wade was as predictable as the weather. And, the politics of the Democrats in Congress is as sickening as the Republicans because for 50 years they did nothing to ensconce the Roe decision into law—beyond the reach of the fickleness of the Supreme Court. And now they pretend to be devastated. No reasonable human being is duped by party politics! America has been fighting the Civil War before and every year since the Emancipation Proclamation. And, it seems that the nation is poised to again spill blood in the streets over the same issue— the crucible of RACE.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/08/black-sufferance-insufferable-whites-an-interview-with-reverend-dr-james-henry-harris/feed/ 0 313585 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/25/aoc-blasts-democratic-leaders-for-boosting-pro-nra-incumbent-henry-cuellar/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/25/aoc-blasts-democratic-leaders-for-boosting-pro-nra-incumbent-henry-cuellar/#respond Wed, 25 May 2022 10:42:54 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/337140

In the wake of the horrific massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasted her party's leadership for supporting an incumbent in the state whose record and policy positions earned him an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association.

"On the day of a mass shooting and weeks after news of [the Supreme Court's impending decision to overturn Roe v. Wade], Democratic Party leadership rallied for a pro-NRA, anti-choice incumbent under investigation in a close primary. Robocalls, fundraisers, all of it," Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wrote in a series of tweets.

"Congress should not be an incumbent protection racket."

The New York Democrat was referring to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), whose campaign for a 10th term in the U.S. House was boosted by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.).

"Accountability isn't partisan," she added. "This was an utter failure of leadership. Congress should not be an incumbent protection racket and sadly it is treated as such by far too many. The fact is those who fail their communities deserve to lose. They don't need rescuing from powerful leaders who state they fight for gun safety, the right to choose, and more."

The New York Democrat's scathing message came as the results of Cuellar's runoff contest against progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros rolled in late Tuesday. As of this writing, Cuellar leads by fewer than 180 votes and has declared victory while Cisneros—whose campaign had the backing of Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives—noted that the race remains too close to formally call.

Given the razor-thin margins of the runoff, Ocasio-Cortez argued Tuesday that "if Cuellar wins, leadership's decision to go to the mat for a pro-NRA incumbent will be the reason why."

The last time leadership waded in to save him, he thanked them by obstructing the party’s signature legislation, paving the way for the child tax credit to collapse and imperiling millions while taking a victory lap for it.

We can’t afford to reward such acts. We can do better.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 25, 2022

Cuellar and Cisneros both condemned the shooting in Uvalde, where a gunman killed at least 19 children and two teachers in the deadliest school massacre since Sandy Hook. Since that 2012 atrocity, there have been more than 3,500 mass shootings in the U.S. as Congress has repeatedly failed to pass meaningful reforms to the nation's gun laws.

"I am heartbroken over the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School," Cuellar tweeted Tuesday. "Families, the South Texas community, and the entire nation are in mourning. Let us pray for peace. Let us come together for our neighbors that need support. And let us remember the bright lives we lost today."

In response, Cuellar's critics pointed to his past donations from the NRA and favorable rating from the gun lobby, which aggressively fights even the most basic gun-safety regulations. As CNBC reported, Cuellar "has received thousands of dollars in donations from the group since he was elected to Congress over a decade ago."

"Cuellar received $6,950 in donations from the NRA Political Victory Fund during his reelection campaign [in 2018,]" the outlet noted.

In 2019, Cuellar's campaign rebuffed calls to return the NRA donations or give them to charity following mass shootings in Texas and other states that year.

Since Sandy Hook, the nation has experienced more than 3,500 mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that tracks gun violence and defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are killed or injured.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/25/aoc-blasts-democratic-leaders-for-boosting-pro-nra-incumbent-henry-cuellar/feed/ 0 301634 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/25/abortion-opponent-henry-cuellar-was-buoyed-by-democratic-leaders-to-a-narrow-lead-in-texas-runoff/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/25/abortion-opponent-henry-cuellar-was-buoyed-by-democratic-leaders-to-a-narrow-lead-in-texas-runoff/#respond Wed, 25 May 2022 04:22:15 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=397887

In early May, as aggrieved civilians mourned the impending end of Roe v. Wade at the hands of a court determined by lifetime appointments, President Joe Biden issued an urging that struck many as hollow: “[I]t will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November,” he said in a statement, which used the word “abortion” only once. But Democratic voters, at the federal level, had for the most part already done that. In the U.S. House of Representatives, only one anti-abortion Democrat remained: Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas.

But despite Biden’s urging, abortion defenders in Texas’s 28th District may have fallen short Tuesday night. The final vote count is not yet in, but Cuellar is well positioned to win the nomination for a 10th term in a congressional career for which he long enjoyed an A rating from the NRA. Those who associate the Democratic Party with reproductive rights and gun control efforts could be forgiven for being confused: Despite his stances, top Democratic House leaders lined up to protect the incumbent.

“On the day of a mass shooting and weeks after news of Roe, Democratic Party leadership rallied for a pro-NRA, anti-choice incumbent under investigation in a close primary. Robocalls, fundraisers, all of it,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday night. “Accountability isn’t partisan. This was an utter failure of leadership.”

TX28 is an extremely close race. If Cuellar wins, leadership’s decision to go to the mat for a pro-NRA incumbent will be the reason why. If Cisneros pulls it out, they will have mobilized against a badly needed grassroots for Nov & fought against a historic victory. And for what?

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 25, 2022

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., played both sides. While she pledged her continued support for an embattled Cuellar in March after he was forced into a runoff and reportedly recorded a robocall backing him in the district, she also sent a last-minute fundraising plea Tuesday to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee email list to help elect pro-choice Democrats. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., however, was firmly in Cuellar’s corner. In a robocall on Tuesday, he described Cuellar as “a staunch advocate for the people’s health care,” the Texas Tribune reported. Two days after the draft Roe v. Wade opinion came out, Clyburn, who says he supports abortion rights, stumped alongside Cuellar at a get-out-the-vote rally event in San Antonio.

Cuellar’s campaign raised more than $3 million to Cisneros’s $4.5 million. He also got a boost from outside groups including the political action committee for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has spent millions so far this cycle against progressive candidates in at least five competitive Democratic primaries.

In Texas, election rules stipulate that in a primary where no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two candidates compete in a runoff. Cisneros came within 1 percentage point of that margin in March. The next month, AIPAC’s PAC, United Democracy Project, poured more than $330,000 into the race to oppose her. The PAC spent another $1.5 million in May, bringing its total expenditure on the race to just under $2 million.

The race could represent the “pro-Israel” lobby’s second major win this cycle, after PACs for AIPAC and its offshoot, Democratic Majority for Israel, spent $1.3 million to reelect Rep. Shontel Brown over Nina Turner in Ohio.

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Another group aligned with the pro-Israel lobby and fighting to protect conservative Democrats, Mainstream Democrats PAC, stepped in to support Cuellar. As the National Journal reported, after the draft Roe opinion leaked, Cuellar’s support dipped in several Democratic surveys. But the fledgling Mainstream Democrats PAC made its first independent expenditure in the race to support Cuellar on the day of the leak.

Dmitri Mehlhorn, a top adviser to Mainstream Democrats PAC founder Reid Hoffman, recently told The Intercept that the decision to back Cuellar was informed in part by advice from DMFI head Mark Mellman. According to federal campaign disclosure records, Mainstream Democrats PAC and DMFI share an office.

Spending more than $750,000 to back the incumbent, the PAC ran an ad earlier this month claiming that Cuellar was “under attack by extremists” and had “made it clear that he opposes a ban on abortion.” Cuellar has said he supports abortion access in a few extreme cases, like rape and incest but generally opposes it otherwise. He was the only House Democrat to vote against codifying Roe in September.

Voters who lean more to the center still don’t support overturning Roe or imposing widespread restrictions on abortion, and groups canvassing on behalf of Cisneros sought to peel off those voters in Cuellar strongholds like Webb County, where they started knocking on doors of women under the age of 50. Cuellar won Webb County by more than 37 points, while Cisneros carried Bexar County, and Cuellar’s share of the vote there slipped. Primary turnout in Texas has been historically low, and turnout for Tuesday’s was much lower than that for the March primary.

new Cuellar ad funded by Mainstream Democrats PAC in #TX28 — his first ad that mentions women's rights as "under attack by extremists" and that he "opposes a ban on abortion." Cuellar was sole House D to vote against codifying Roe in 2021 (bill failed in Senate). pic.twitter.com/sqCS8CwvsD

— marissa martinez (@mar1ssamart1nez) May 12, 2022

Team Blue PAC, another committee to protect incumbent Democrats launched last June by House Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries and Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Terri Sewell, D-Ala., listed the TX-28 primary as one of its “races to watch,” along with Reps. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., and Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif. Schrader is poised to lose his primary by just under 20 points, with less than 80 percent of precincts reporting from the May 17 primary.

Cisneros’s campaign earlier this month called on party leaders to withdraw their support for Cuellar, and told The Intercept that refusal to do so showed “cognitive dissonance” in the party’s stated values and its actions with respect to the right to abortion. The Working Families Party helped convene progressive groups to coordinate independent expenditures in support of Cisneros. Groups including the PACs for WFP, Justice Democrats, Communications Workers of America, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and J Street spent just under $2 million in support of Cisneros and against Cuellar, who came within 4 points of losing his seat to Cisneros in the 2020 Democratic primary.

Ads in the final weeks of the race from an anonymous sender falsely claimed that Cuellar had been cleared by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a probe that included a January raid of his home in Laredo. Cuellar has not been cleared, and the probe is reportedly related to an investigation into business interests in Azerbaijan, where Cuellar has ties with prominent oil executives. Other billboard ads that called Cisneros a “homewrecker” were bought by a firm called Big River Media, which Cuellar’s campaign has used in the past and is run by a major Cuellar donor. His campaign issued a statement and said it did not condone the billboard. The campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The ultimate winner will face Republican candidate Cassy Garcia in the November 8 general election. In early March, the University of Virginia Center for Politics changed its 28th District’s rating from “leans Democratic” to “toss-up,” and said of the change: “[W]e believe the GOP trend in this region is real; because the Democratic runoff is likely to be nasty; and because the overall political environment looks good for Republicans.”

Historically, the region has been heavily Democratic, and Biden carried it by 7 points over Donald Trump in 2020.

Top Democrats have blamed the party’s left wing for stifling Biden’s agenda while allowing conservative members to usher its demise. Party leadership’s fear of backlash is protecting a member who could very well be the deciding vote on federal abortion legislation.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/25/abortion-opponent-henry-cuellar-was-buoyed-by-democratic-leaders-to-a-narrow-lead-in-texas-runoff/feed/ 0 301509 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/24/silicon-valley-billionaire-storms-into-texas-to-bail-out-abortion-foe-henry-cuellar/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/24/silicon-valley-billionaire-storms-into-texas-to-bail-out-abortion-foe-henry-cuellar/#respond Tue, 24 May 2022 12:00:07 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=397787

Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman came to the rescue of embattled Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat who remains the party’s most strident foe of abortion rights, in the final stretch of a primary campaign that goes to the polls Tuesday.

On May 2, Politico reported that the Supreme Court had decided to strike down Roe v. Wade, injecting new urgency into the race between challenger Jessica Cisneros, who supports reproductive rights, and Cuellar. (The race headed to a runoff after neither reached the 50-percent threshold needed to end it in the first round in March.) That same day, fortunately for Cuellar, Hoffman’s political action committee Mainstream Democrats dropped its first expenditure for Cuellar, with just three weeks left in the race, spending $178,000 on a mailing to the district, using the firm Sisneros Strategies (no relation).

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

If for some inexplicable reason, you couldn’t come up with a reason to be ashamed of the U.S., I’ve got one for you: Henry Kissinger has been a widely revered thinker and statesman for six decades, and is the recipient of awards like the Nobel Peace Prize (1973); Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977); and Medal of Liberty (1986).

I may soon write a long article to document at least some of Kissinger’s heinous catalog of criminality. For now, I’d simply like to clarify his ongoing role as a Godfather of sorts to all the other miscreants that make up the top 1%.

I mean, the esteemed HK has his own damn page on the World Economic Forum (WEF) website and has been mentoring the notorious Klaus Schwab for decades. In the photo up top, Kissinger and Schwab openly plot for us to “have nothing” and “be happy.”

Kissinger’s interests have heavily influenced the parasites-in-charge (regardless of political party). As far back as 1974, he penned National Security Study Memorandum 200 on “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth For U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” In that document, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate muses about “technological innovations” that might reduce the globe’s human population.

Kissinger has also declared: “Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the Third World, because the U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries.”

This brings us to Bill Gates — yet another psychopath who cavorts and contrives with the murderous Henry K and his WEF cronies. Gates might see himself as up to the task of providing Kissinger with the “technological innovations” that might reduce the globe’s human population:

Click here to see and hear Gates saying these words, in case you think it’s a misquote.

I’ve told you about deadly protocols imposed on U.S. hospitals that killed about one million people. I’ve been telling you about all the vaccine adverse events that are being ignored while countless suffer and die. The sociopaths-in-charge have left a clear, easy-to-find paper trail of their intentions. What are you gonna do about all this?

P.S. I know I said I’d save all the Kissinger evidence for its own article but I can’t resist offering one example of the kind of man who is awarded a peace prize in today’s society:

With a total population of nearly 30 million, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own country and have often been used as geopolitical pawns. In 1975, in the midst of a border dispute between Iraq and the Shah of Iran (a U.S. ally), then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger secretly channeled $16 million in military aid to Iraqi Kurds.

The Kurds, succumbing to the spin, believed Washington was finally supporting their right to self-determination. In reality, the United States was using the Kurdish rebels to sap the resources of the Iraqi regime and coerce them into a settlement.

That settlement came at the 1975 OPEC summit, at which time the United States promised Iraq that support for the Kurds would be immediately withdrawn. As Iraq wiped out the Kurdish rebels, Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani sent a message to Kissinger. It read in part:

“Our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way, with silence from everyone. We feel, your excellency, that the United States has a moral and political responsibility towards our people, who have committed themselves to your country’s policy.”

One can easily imagine Kissinger getting off on being called “your excellency,” while cringing at the concept of “moral responsibility,” but he did not directly reply to Barzani. Instead, he instructed a staff member: “Promise them anything, give them what they get, and fuck them if they can’t take a joke.”

When asked to explain America’s duplicity towards the Kurds, Kissinger delivered a one-liner that effectively sums up his beliefs and U.S. foreign policy: “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

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