Simply put, the book’s existence is a crime against quality academic literature.

I had no expectations of strong, intellectual debate, because Cotton isn’t known for backing any of his claims with evidence (it only took me one page in to find that admittance: “I used simple common sense, not scientific knowledge or classified intelligence”), so I wasn’t disappointed by his complete lack of depth and historical accuracy.

More than anything, I was impressed that such an absurd, conspiratorial text could reach a publisher’s desk and be checked off on. It’s really not a book at all—it’s a manifesto of paranoia. The kind you expect to find written in messy, hand-scrawled letters and hidden beneath the desk of a serial killer whose crimes you are trying to piece together.

Well, Cotton’s crimes are many. This book is just one more venture in his career, full of asking, I wonder how much I can get away with?

While Tom Cotton has always been one of war’s #1 fans, his favorite of all is one still yet to happen—the one he’s trying to justify in his book. His “brave truth-telling” is nothing less than imperialist propaganda feverishly trying to manufacture an enemy and send us headlong into that war.

He starts by trying to convince us that China is the manifestation of all evil and wrongdoing, the harbinger of doom, and the pioneer of global villainy:

“China is waging economic world war.”

“Communist China is the focus of evil in the modern world.”

“China is coming for our children.”

As bewildering as these statements are, what stood out to me the most is that Tom Cotton has clearly never studied China in any real capacity. I can’t forgive him for his ignorance, because it’s undoubtedly followed closely by deep, soul-crushing racism, but I can teach him a few things he never learned in military boot camp.

Tom Cotton, here are seven things you need to learn about China.

1. China’s rise has nothing to do with the US.

Tom Cotton situates everything China has done over the past century as a calculated maneuver to outwit and conquer the United States. It’s a classic case of main-characterism, in which a subject assumes everyone’s actions revolve entirely around them.

The truth is, China’s rise has nothing to do with the US. Really, it’s none of our business. China developed because the modern era called for it. China sought economic prosperity because it had 1.4 billion citizens to provide for. China became powerful because that’s a side effect of having one of the largest economies in the world.

China’s success is its own achievement. The fact that the US considers another country’s growing prosperity to be a direct threat against it says far more about the US. Instead of buying into the existential threat narratives, we need to ask why they exist.

Why is China’s economic prosperity so terrifying to the Washington elite? Well, Tom Cotton says it loud and clear:

“Most of us take American global dominance for granted, without thinking much about it; since at least World War I, that’s just the way it’s been. World trade is conducted in dollars. English is the unofficial global language of business and politics. (…) For more than a century, Americans have reaped enormous economic and security benefits from this state of affairs.”

How dare another country become prosperous despite decades of foreign occupation, intervention, and coercion meant to reaffirm global inequality and protect US dominance?

2. China is 5,000 years old.

In 1949, when the PRC was established under the Communist Party, the US proclaimed that it had “lost China.”

Let’s get this straight: a 175-year-old country was proclaiming to have “lost” a 5,000-year-old civilization state. Isn’t that absurd? China was never ours to have or to lose, or to do anything with at all.

At the time, the US government even considered preemptively striking China to ensure it never obtained nuclear weapons. Those considerations never disappeared entirely.

We really have to consider the differences between the two states with vastly opposing backgrounds, because you can’t understand China through a Western lens. The US is a relatively young nation born out of settler colonization and genocide of the native people. Our wealth was amassed through resource extraction, exploitation, and slavery. What precedent does that set? In comparison, China has undergone thousands of years of dynastic empires rising and falling. It has a strong cultural continuity and shared historical experience that informs how it conducts itself in the global theater. Its wealth was amassed internally, not through imperialist behavior or the exploitation of another. It’s an ancient civilization with deep roots, and a unique vision of the world informed by a long philosophical tradition and an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist framework.

Additionally, China was one of the world’s largest economies for over 2,000 years, accounting for around 25-30% of global GDP. It wasn’t until the colonial period of the 1800s that colonial violence and occupation by Japan and the British Empire drove China into poverty. In the 1970s, it was one of the world’s poorest nations. The fact that China was able to return to its former prosperity despite decades of foreign intervention is nothing less than a miracle.

Tom Cotton has no understanding of these complexities. He sees China through the narrow, ultra-patriotic, super-imperialist, America-is-the-center-of-the-world-and-nobody-else-matters mindset. It doesn’t work, and it comes off incredibly cliche and small-minded.

3. You have to travel to China to understand China.

Which Cotton can’t do because he’s sanctioned from visiting. I really can’t blame China at all for that. I wouldn’t want Tom Cotton in my country either.

Regardless, I know this to be true: you have to see China for yourself to develop any real understanding of it. The fact that Tom Cotton has never been to China and will never go only proves that he has absolutely no authority, and never will, over writing a book about China’s actions and intentions.

It should be a prerequisite for any individual with any degree of political power to spend time in the country they claim to know so much about. They should be required to visit cities and towns, to learn the country’s version of its history, and to talk with local people about their unique perspectives.

Tom Cotton has not, will not, and therefore, his opinion should not be accepted or respected.

4. China does NOT want his kids.

In Chapter 6, Tom Cotton says, “China is coming for our kids.” It’s a bold statement, and he doesn’t give us much follow-up to reinforce such extremism. You’d expect something a bit more villainous, like a government-backed kidnapping ring or 5G mind control. But alas, what Cotton refers to is the growing prevalence of the social media app TikTok.

TikTok, he says, is a Chinese plot to take over the minds of the American youth.

You may recall Cotton’s viral moment when he repeatedly asked Singaporean TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew if he was Chinese. The conversation went like this:

“Of what nation are you a citizen?”

“Singapore, sir.”

“Are you a citizen of any other nation?”

“No senator.”

“Have you ever applied for Chinese citizenship?”

“Senator, I served my nation in Singapore. No, I did not.”

“Do you have a Singaporean passport?

“Yes, and I served my military for two and a half years in Singapore.”

“Do you have any other passports from any other nations?”

“No senator.”

“Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?”

“Senator, I’m Singaporean. No.”

“Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?”

“No, Senator. Again, I’m Singaporean!”

It goes without saying that the TikTok ban was dead in the water until pro-Palestinian content began proliferating. According to Congressman Mike Gallagher, “The bill was still dead until October 7th. And people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform, and our bill had legs again.”

In truth, the TikTok ban was never about China, but about shielding young minds from learning about Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinian people and the ongoing complicity of the United States. The ban now walks hand in hand with the new education reforms that seek to dispose of “anti-patriotic” fields of study like critical race theory and threatens open discussion about the genocide in Gaza by automatically deeming it antisemitic. Yes, we are watching radical censorship in action.

Anyway, Tom Cotton, China is not coming for your kids or anyone else’s, and making that claim without evidence is lazy and hysterical. This type of rhetoric serves one purpose only: to fuel fear and drive war.

5. China didn’t ruin our economy—we did.

It’s a real irony that those with all the power and money never take responsibility for their failings, but blame everyone else. And a lot of the time, people don’t see it. For instance, the elites who have crippled the US economy continue to point their fingers at those with no power at all—the impoverished, the starving, the homeless, the immigrants—and scream, it’s their fault! They did it! And the general populace turns on them with all the blame and rage of their wearisome existence. But who are the ones making all the decisions? Hoarding all the wealth? Throwing out tax breaks to billionaire friends and cutting the few life-saving programs that help regular folks get off the ground?

It’s the elites. The politicians. The CEOs.

We can’t blame China for developing. That’s its responsibility to its people. They didn’t steal our jobs. The thievery happened at home, on US soil, right under our noses. The corporate elite decided to take advantage of global inequality and save a few extra bucks by exporting industries abroad, where they could take advantage of cheap labor and exploit the resources of poorer nations.

Tom Cotton spends quite a lot of time talking about China’s “economic world war.” First of all, using war language to describe economic competition sets a dangerous precedent. Competition is natural within our economic systems, and shouting “war! “ when the US isn’t constantly on top is militant imperialist behavior (Sidenote: we must rid ourselves of the notion that there are limited resources and limited wealth. There’s plenty for everyone—the problem is the majority of wealth is hoarded by 1% of the global population.)

And secondly, I can’t help but wonder at the flips and tricks the human mind must do to accuse another nation of such an action, when the US has forever used sanctions, tariffs, and economic coercion as weapons to hurt and topple other nations, to corner them into loans and structural adjustments, and to strangulate, pressure, and punish. It makes Cotton’s particularly brief section on “economic imperialism” sound even more ridiculous.

6. China is more logical than Cotton will ever be.

My favorite section of Tom Cotton’s book began with the title, “Green is the new red.” I know it’s meant to be scary, but it reads more like one of those comedy-horrors that make you cringe, but you just can’t look away. I was particularly impressed with the impossible flexibility it takes to convince people a country is evil because it’s invested so much in… renewable energy!

Terrifying!

The mental gymnastics of this section might just be Cotton’s greatest feat ever.

One thing is for certain. There’s no logic to be found here. But there’s also no logic to be found in much of the US policy on climate change. If I had to put a symbol to it, I’d choose an ostrich sticking its head in the ground—if you don’t look, it’s not there!

Tom Cotton laments that as a result of heavy investment in solar panels, “China has devastated yet another American industry.” Those poor corporations. Those poor CEOs. How will they fare without their megayachts while the world burns?

It is an unfortunate side effect of capitalism that our system prioritizes wealth over protecting the planet. It’s a fortunate side effect of China’s socialist characteristics that they don’t. As Brazilian activist Chico Mendes said, “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.”

7. China doesn’t want to go to war.

We can’t define China by what-ifs. What if China wants to conquer the Pacific? What if China invades Poland? What if China hacks into my coffee pot and deciphers my favorite brew? What if what if what if? It’s nonsensical. We can only define China by what it’s said and what it’s done.

If there’s one thing Tom Cotton needs to learn, it’s that China has no desire for war. Literally none. China has not been involved in any overseas conflict for fifty years. Compare that to the 251 foreign military interventions the US has conducted since just 1991. Really, just think about that. Don’t you think that if China had hegemonic ambitions, it would build a foreign military base in every country… or multiple? Or maybe over 900+ like the US? But no, China has just one in Djibouti. Tom Cotton thinks that the Djibouti base is suspicious and signals China’s malign ambitions. In reality, many nations have a military presence there to prevent piracy and smuggling in one of the world’s most crucial shipping lanes, the US included. Clearly, Tom Cotton lives in a different reality of his own paranoid design.

Additionally, Chinese officials have repeated—over and over and over—that they have no desire for war. I think we can take them at their word, considering their lack of war historically, and their foundational policy of “peaceful coexistence.” In Cotton’s entire book, he never once refers to China’s foreign policy principles that guide every decision made. Chinese officials have never talked about a world in which China “dominates” other countries. They have only ever talked about visions of a world built on mutual respect, sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, cooperation, and peaceful coexistence.

Tom Cotton needs to do some more reading on Chinese political theory, but it seems like he spends most of his learning hours thinking about war: “As a senator, I regularly review war games between China and the United States—exercises where military experts play out what would happen in a war between the two nations. I’ve never seen happy results.”

You don’t need a war game to tell you that the results of war would be unhappy. Anyone could tell you that. I’m sure if Tom Cotton thought hard enough, he could even come up with that prediction all on his own.

And war between the US and China wouldn’t just be unhappy, it would be devastating. Which is why our Congress members should be doing everything they can to prevent it, not ramping up the possibility by writing tedious, hysterical conspiracies about the evilness of other nations and the inevitability of conflict.

Tom Cotton has a lot to learn about China, a lot more to learn about being a good politician, and the absolute most to learn about being a good person. But he can start with learning about China and switching his political tools to fostering dialogue, cooperation, and understanding, rather than the war-driving dribble he regularly spews.

Unfortunately, the book was published. So if you see it at your local bookstore, do us all a favor and move it to the fantasy section, where it belongs. Or, if you’re feeling extra whimsical, you can add some Tom Cotton war criminal bookmarks to surprise the next person who picks it up. Meanwhile, we’ll be putting publisher HarperCollins on notice that it needs a much better fact-checking department.

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

Simply put, the book’s existence is a crime against quality academic literature.

I had no expectations of strong, intellectual debate, because Cotton isn’t known for backing any of his claims with evidence (it only took me one page in to find that admittance: “I used simple common sense, not scientific knowledge or classified intelligence”), so I wasn’t disappointed by his complete lack of depth and historical accuracy.

More than anything, I was impressed that such an absurd, conspiratorial text could reach a publisher’s desk and be checked off on. It’s really not a book at all—it’s a manifesto of paranoia. The kind you expect to find written in messy, hand-scrawled letters and hidden beneath the desk of a serial killer whose crimes you are trying to piece together.

Well, Cotton’s crimes are many. This book is just one more venture in his career, full of asking, I wonder how much I can get away with?

While Tom Cotton has always been one of war’s #1 fans, his favorite of all is one still yet to happen—the one he’s trying to justify in his book. His “brave truth-telling” is nothing less than imperialist propaganda feverishly trying to manufacture an enemy and send us headlong into that war.

He starts by trying to convince us that China is the manifestation of all evil and wrongdoing, the harbinger of doom, and the pioneer of global villainy:

“China is waging economic world war.”

“Communist China is the focus of evil in the modern world.”

“China is coming for our children.”

As bewildering as these statements are, what stood out to me the most is that Tom Cotton has clearly never studied China in any real capacity. I can’t forgive him for his ignorance, because it’s undoubtedly followed closely by deep, soul-crushing racism, but I can teach him a few things he never learned in military boot camp.

Tom Cotton, here are seven things you need to learn about China.

1. China’s rise has nothing to do with the US.

Tom Cotton situates everything China has done over the past century as a calculated maneuver to outwit and conquer the United States. It’s a classic case of main-characterism, in which a subject assumes everyone’s actions revolve entirely around them.

The truth is, China’s rise has nothing to do with the US. Really, it’s none of our business. China developed because the modern era called for it. China sought economic prosperity because it had 1.4 billion citizens to provide for. China became powerful because that’s a side effect of having one of the largest economies in the world.

China’s success is its own achievement. The fact that the US considers another country’s growing prosperity to be a direct threat against it says far more about the US. Instead of buying into the existential threat narratives, we need to ask why they exist.

Why is China’s economic prosperity so terrifying to the Washington elite? Well, Tom Cotton says it loud and clear:

“Most of us take American global dominance for granted, without thinking much about it; since at least World War I, that’s just the way it’s been. World trade is conducted in dollars. English is the unofficial global language of business and politics. (…) For more than a century, Americans have reaped enormous economic and security benefits from this state of affairs.”

How dare another country become prosperous despite decades of foreign occupation, intervention, and coercion meant to reaffirm global inequality and protect US dominance?

2. China is 5,000 years old.

In 1949, when the PRC was established under the Communist Party, the US proclaimed that it had “lost China.”

Let’s get this straight: a 175-year-old country was proclaiming to have “lost” a 5,000-year-old civilization state. Isn’t that absurd? China was never ours to have or to lose, or to do anything with at all.

At the time, the US government even considered preemptively striking China to ensure it never obtained nuclear weapons. Those considerations never disappeared entirely.

We really have to consider the differences between the two states with vastly opposing backgrounds, because you can’t understand China through a Western lens. The US is a relatively young nation born out of settler colonization and genocide of the native people. Our wealth was amassed through resource extraction, exploitation, and slavery. What precedent does that set? In comparison, China has undergone thousands of years of dynastic empires rising and falling. It has a strong cultural continuity and shared historical experience that informs how it conducts itself in the global theater. Its wealth was amassed internally, not through imperialist behavior or the exploitation of another. It’s an ancient civilization with deep roots, and a unique vision of the world informed by a long philosophical tradition and an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist framework.

Additionally, China was one of the world’s largest economies for over 2,000 years, accounting for around 25-30% of global GDP. It wasn’t until the colonial period of the 1800s that colonial violence and occupation by Japan and the British Empire drove China into poverty. In the 1970s, it was one of the world’s poorest nations. The fact that China was able to return to its former prosperity despite decades of foreign intervention is nothing less than a miracle.

Tom Cotton has no understanding of these complexities. He sees China through the narrow, ultra-patriotic, super-imperialist, America-is-the-center-of-the-world-and-nobody-else-matters mindset. It doesn’t work, and it comes off incredibly cliche and small-minded.

3. You have to travel to China to understand China.

Which Cotton can’t do because he’s sanctioned from visiting. I really can’t blame China at all for that. I wouldn’t want Tom Cotton in my country either.

Regardless, I know this to be true: you have to see China for yourself to develop any real understanding of it. The fact that Tom Cotton has never been to China and will never go only proves that he has absolutely no authority, and never will, over writing a book about China’s actions and intentions.

It should be a prerequisite for any individual with any degree of political power to spend time in the country they claim to know so much about. They should be required to visit cities and towns, to learn the country’s version of its history, and to talk with local people about their unique perspectives.

Tom Cotton has not, will not, and therefore, his opinion should not be accepted or respected.

4. China does NOT want his kids.

In Chapter 6, Tom Cotton says, “China is coming for our kids.” It’s a bold statement, and he doesn’t give us much follow-up to reinforce such extremism. You’d expect something a bit more villainous, like a government-backed kidnapping ring or 5G mind control. But alas, what Cotton refers to is the growing prevalence of the social media app TikTok.

TikTok, he says, is a Chinese plot to take over the minds of the American youth.

You may recall Cotton’s viral moment when he repeatedly asked Singaporean TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew if he was Chinese. The conversation went like this:

“Of what nation are you a citizen?”

“Singapore, sir.”

“Are you a citizen of any other nation?”

“No senator.”

“Have you ever applied for Chinese citizenship?”

“Senator, I served my nation in Singapore. No, I did not.”

“Do you have a Singaporean passport?

“Yes, and I served my military for two and a half years in Singapore.”

“Do you have any other passports from any other nations?”

“No senator.”

“Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?”

“Senator, I’m Singaporean. No.”

“Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?”

“No, Senator. Again, I’m Singaporean!”

It goes without saying that the TikTok ban was dead in the water until pro-Palestinian content began proliferating. According to Congressman Mike Gallagher, “The bill was still dead until October 7th. And people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform, and our bill had legs again.”

In truth, the TikTok ban was never about China, but about shielding young minds from learning about Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinian people and the ongoing complicity of the United States. The ban now walks hand in hand with the new education reforms that seek to dispose of “anti-patriotic” fields of study like critical race theory and threatens open discussion about the genocide in Gaza by automatically deeming it antisemitic. Yes, we are watching radical censorship in action.

Anyway, Tom Cotton, China is not coming for your kids or anyone else’s, and making that claim without evidence is lazy and hysterical. This type of rhetoric serves one purpose only: to fuel fear and drive war.

5. China didn’t ruin our economy—we did.

It’s a real irony that those with all the power and money never take responsibility for their failings, but blame everyone else. And a lot of the time, people don’t see it. For instance, the elites who have crippled the US economy continue to point their fingers at those with no power at all—the impoverished, the starving, the homeless, the immigrants—and scream, it’s their fault! They did it! And the general populace turns on them with all the blame and rage of their wearisome existence. But who are the ones making all the decisions? Hoarding all the wealth? Throwing out tax breaks to billionaire friends and cutting the few life-saving programs that help regular folks get off the ground?

It’s the elites. The politicians. The CEOs.

We can’t blame China for developing. That’s its responsibility to its people. They didn’t steal our jobs. The thievery happened at home, on US soil, right under our noses. The corporate elite decided to take advantage of global inequality and save a few extra bucks by exporting industries abroad, where they could take advantage of cheap labor and exploit the resources of poorer nations.

Tom Cotton spends quite a lot of time talking about China’s “economic world war.” First of all, using war language to describe economic competition sets a dangerous precedent. Competition is natural within our economic systems, and shouting “war! “ when the US isn’t constantly on top is militant imperialist behavior (Sidenote: we must rid ourselves of the notion that there are limited resources and limited wealth. There’s plenty for everyone—the problem is the majority of wealth is hoarded by 1% of the global population.)

And secondly, I can’t help but wonder at the flips and tricks the human mind must do to accuse another nation of such an action, when the US has forever used sanctions, tariffs, and economic coercion as weapons to hurt and topple other nations, to corner them into loans and structural adjustments, and to strangulate, pressure, and punish. It makes Cotton’s particularly brief section on “economic imperialism” sound even more ridiculous.

6. China is more logical than Cotton will ever be.

My favorite section of Tom Cotton’s book began with the title, “Green is the new red.” I know it’s meant to be scary, but it reads more like one of those comedy-horrors that make you cringe, but you just can’t look away. I was particularly impressed with the impossible flexibility it takes to convince people a country is evil because it’s invested so much in… renewable energy!

Terrifying!

The mental gymnastics of this section might just be Cotton’s greatest feat ever.

One thing is for certain. There’s no logic to be found here. But there’s also no logic to be found in much of the US policy on climate change. If I had to put a symbol to it, I’d choose an ostrich sticking its head in the ground—if you don’t look, it’s not there!

Tom Cotton laments that as a result of heavy investment in solar panels, “China has devastated yet another American industry.” Those poor corporations. Those poor CEOs. How will they fare without their megayachts while the world burns?

It is an unfortunate side effect of capitalism that our system prioritizes wealth over protecting the planet. It’s a fortunate side effect of China’s socialist characteristics that they don’t. As Brazilian activist Chico Mendes said, “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.”

7. China doesn’t want to go to war.

We can’t define China by what-ifs. What if China wants to conquer the Pacific? What if China invades Poland? What if China hacks into my coffee pot and deciphers my favorite brew? What if what if what if? It’s nonsensical. We can only define China by what it’s said and what it’s done.

If there’s one thing Tom Cotton needs to learn, it’s that China has no desire for war. Literally none. China has not been involved in any overseas conflict for fifty years. Compare that to the 251 foreign military interventions the US has conducted since just 1991. Really, just think about that. Don’t you think that if China had hegemonic ambitions, it would build a foreign military base in every country… or multiple? Or maybe over 900+ like the US? But no, China has just one in Djibouti. Tom Cotton thinks that the Djibouti base is suspicious and signals China’s malign ambitions. In reality, many nations have a military presence there to prevent piracy and smuggling in one of the world’s most crucial shipping lanes, the US included. Clearly, Tom Cotton lives in a different reality of his own paranoid design.

Additionally, Chinese officials have repeated—over and over and over—that they have no desire for war. I think we can take them at their word, considering their lack of war historically, and their foundational policy of “peaceful coexistence.” In Cotton’s entire book, he never once refers to China’s foreign policy principles that guide every decision made. Chinese officials have never talked about a world in which China “dominates” other countries. They have only ever talked about visions of a world built on mutual respect, sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, cooperation, and peaceful coexistence.

Tom Cotton needs to do some more reading on Chinese political theory, but it seems like he spends most of his learning hours thinking about war: “As a senator, I regularly review war games between China and the United States—exercises where military experts play out what would happen in a war between the two nations. I’ve never seen happy results.”

You don’t need a war game to tell you that the results of war would be unhappy. Anyone could tell you that. I’m sure if Tom Cotton thought hard enough, he could even come up with that prediction all on his own.

And war between the US and China wouldn’t just be unhappy, it would be devastating. Which is why our Congress members should be doing everything they can to prevent it, not ramping up the possibility by writing tedious, hysterical conspiracies about the evilness of other nations and the inevitability of conflict.

Tom Cotton has a lot to learn about China, a lot more to learn about being a good politician, and the absolute most to learn about being a good person. But he can start with learning about China and switching his political tools to fostering dialogue, cooperation, and understanding, rather than the war-driving dribble he regularly spews.

Unfortunately, the book was published. So if you see it at your local bookstore, do us all a favor and move it to the fantasy section, where it belongs. Or, if you’re feeling extra whimsical, you can add some Tom Cotton war criminal bookmarks to surprise the next person who picks it up. Meanwhile, we’ll be putting publisher HarperCollins on notice that it needs a much better fact-checking department.

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

Project 2025 is hollowing out government — and it’s just getting started 

As we approach the fifth month of Donald Trump’s second term, you might be asking: “What’s up with Project 2025?” According to GPAHE (Global Project Against Hate and Extremism), “Data compiled by the Project 2025 Tracker reveals a presidency operating with methodical precision, adhering to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook. Of the 313 total objectives identified in Project 2025, 98 have been completed as of June 2025, representing a 42 percent completion rate in just five months of governance. This rapid-fire execution creates one of the most striking paradoxes of the early Trump presidency: a policy framework the candidate repeatedly disavowed during his campaign has become the most reliable predictor of his administration’s priorities.”

In short, despite the Trump administration denial that it is following the Heritage Foundation’s playbook, Project 2025 is aggressively strip mining government agencies, providing rebar for an authoritarian takeover of democracy.

Let’s review. Project 2025 is the 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the U.S., spearheaded by the powerful and extreme far-right Heritage Foundation. More than 100 far-right organizations were involved in crafting the document, which, according to GPAHE “is proving to be the source for Trump’s anti-democratic policies, despite his repeated disavowal of Project 2025 during his campaign.” In addition, “Dozens of members of the new administration have direct ties to the effort.”

Project 2025’s playbook turns back the clock on civil rights and deprives people of their hard-won constitutional rights, while “pushing for the erosion of environmental and education protections. It also advocates for a frightening centralization of power in the executive branch, something Trump is keen to achieve.” [Full analysis of Project 2025]

So what is up with Project 2025?  

In a June 1 interview with Russell Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director, CNN’s Dana Bash asked him about DOGE, presidential power potentially overruling Congress, and the “woke” administrative state, among other topics. Vought was smoothly responding until the conversation turned to Project 2025, when things got a little frosty.

According to GPAHE, “Bash asked him about the unmistakable convergence between Trump’s governing agenda” and Project 2025 — “a document for which Vought himself had served as a key architect and co-author — and his denial came swiftly and absolutely.”

“‘No, of course not,’ Vought declared when asked whether his current work represented an enactment of Project 2025. ‘The only people that are delusional about whether the president is the architect, the visionary, the originator of his own agenda that he was very public about throughout the campaign … are his adversaries.’”

Here are excerpts from GPAHE’s reporting on Project 2025:

The chronological record tells the story that Vought seemed determined to obscure during his CNN appearance. Within hours of his January 20 inauguration, Trump had executed 25 distinct Project 2025 recommendations, ranging from deploying active-duty military personnel to the southern border to eliminating diversity offices across federal agencies. The systematic nature of implementation becomes particularly apparent when examining agency-specific progress rates.

The personnel enacting these policies also tell the story. A report by DeSmog reveals that 70 percent of Trump’s cabinet maintains direct ties to Project 2025 organizations — more than 50 high-level officials bound to the very groups that authored or co-sponsored Project 2025, the blueprint they are now executing. Vice President JD Vance connects to five Project 2025 entities, Secretary of State Marco Rubio to four, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins to three. This represents the Heritage Foundation’s ultimate victory: the architects have become the executors.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has achieved 100 percent completion of its single objective: to reduce regulations on cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, all six of Project 2025’s objectives regarding USAID have been completed. The White House itself has completed 88 percent of its 13 objectives, while the Department of State has finished 75 percent of its 10 Project 2025 objectives.

Environmental policy offers the most vivid illustration of this systematic execution. Project 2025 called for eliminating “the use of the social cost of carbon” in federal decision-making — Trump’s January 20 executive orders accomplished precisely that objective. Project 2025 recommended immediate withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — both withdrawals were announced within hours of the inauguration. When Project 2025 suggested abolishing the Office of Domestic Climate Policy, Trump dissolved it before the inaugural celebrations had concluded. The Environmental Protection Agency has proven exceptionally responsive to Project 2025’s policies.

In May, the agency repealed energy efficiency standards for appliances, with Trump signing four Congressional Review Act resolutions to roll back energy efficiency rules while the Energy Department simultaneously rolled back 47 efficiency regulations. Earlier, the EPA had fired 388 probationary employees and terminated grant agreements worth $20 billion.

Project 2025 has been methodically checking off the boxes of its agenda. ICE, under “border Czar” Tom Homan is cranking up its activities; private prison corporations and companies providing infrastructure for ICE are profiting handsomely; and, the Department of Homeland Security eliminated its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, while also dissolving the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. Media companies and individual journalists are under attack.

GPAHE noted that when Bash When Bash “pressed Vought about pending Project 2025 recommendations — ‘eliminating the Fed, privatizing Fannie and Freddy, banning medication abortion’ — his response carried the careful ambiguity of calculated evasion. ‘What’s on the agenda is what the president has put on the agenda, most of which he ran on,’ he replied, neither confirming nor denying while maintaining the fiction of presidential originality. Vought’s Sunday CNN performance was pure political theater designed to obscure systematic policy execution of a document designed to foment authoritarianism and Christian nationalist policies.”

The Trump administration and its allies have been working at breakneck speed to implement Project 2025. The administration’s work is serving as a rallying cry for Trump’s White supremacist allies, who see the Project’s successes as a much-welcomed blueprint for authoritarianism and an attractive recruiting tool.

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

After twenty months of horror in Gaza, political rhetoric in Western countries is finally starting to shift—but will words translate into action? And what exactly can other countries do when the United States still shields Israel from efforts to enforce international law, as it did at the UN Security Council on June 5?

On May 30, Tom Fletcher, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, accused Israel of committing a war crime by using starvation as a weapon against the people of Gaza. In a searing interview with the BBC, Fletcher explained how Israel’s policy of forced starvation fits into its larger strategy of ethnic cleansing.

“We’re seeing food set on the borders and not being allowed in, when there is a population on the other side of the border that is starving,” Fletcher said. “And we’re hearing Israeli ministers say that is to put pressure on the population of Gaza.”

He was referring to statements like the one from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who openly admitted that the starvation policy is meant to leave Palestinians “totally despairing, understanding that there’s no hope and nothing to look for,” so that they will submit to ethnic cleansing from Gaza and a “new life in other places.”

Fletcher called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop this campaign of forced displacement, and insisted, “we would expect governments all over the world to stand for international humanitarian law. The international community is very, very clear on that.”

Palestinians might wish that were true. If the so-called international community were really “very, very clear on that,” the United States and Israel would not be able to wage a campaign of genocide for more than 600 days while the world looks on in horror.

Some Western governments have finally started using stronger language to condemn Israel’s actions. But the question is: Will they act? Or is this just more political theater to appease public outrage while the machinery of destruction grinds on?

This moment should force a reckoning: How is it possible that the U.S. and Israel can perpetrate such crimes with impunity? What would it take for U.S. allies to ignore pressure from Washington and enforce international law?

If impoverished, war-ravaged Yemen can single-handedly deny Israel access to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, and drive the Israeli port of Eilat into bankruptcy, more powerful countries can surely isolate Israel diplomatically and economically, protect the Palestinians and end the genocide. But they haven’t even tried.

Some are now making tentative moves. On May 19, the U.K., France, and Canada jointly condemned Israel’s actions as “intolerable,” “unacceptable,” “abhorrent,” “wholly disproportionate” and “egregious.” The U.K. suspended trade talks with Israel, and they promised “further concrete actions,” including targeted sanctions, if Israel does not end its offensive in Gaza and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.

The three countries publicly committed to the Arab Plan for the reconstruction of Gaza, and to building an international consensus for it at the UN’s High-Level Two-State Solution Conference in New York on June 17-20, which is to be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia.

They also committed to recognizing Palestinian statehood. Of the UN’s 193 member states, 147 already recognize Palestine as a sovereign nation, including ten more since Israel launched its genocide in Gaza. President Macron, under pressure from the leftist La France Insoumise party, says France may officially recognize Palestine at the UN conference in June.

Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, claimed during his election campaign that Canada already had an arms embargo against Israel, but was swiftly challenged on that. Canada has suspended a small number of export licenses, but it’s still supplying parts for Israel’s 39 F-35s, and for 36 more that Israel has ordered from Lockheed Martin.

A General Dynamics factory in Quebec is the sole supplier of artillery propellant for deadly 155 mm artillery shells used in Gaza, and it took an emergency campaign by human rights groups in August 2024 to force Canada to scrap a new contract for that same factory to supply Israel with 50,000 high-explosive mortar shells.

The U.K. is just as compromised. The new Labour government elected in July 2024 quickly restored funding to UNRWA, as Canada has. In September, it suspended 30 out of 350 arms export licenses to Israel, mostly for parts used in warplanes, helicopters, drones and targeting. But, like Canada, the U.K. still supplies many other parts that end up in Israeli F-35s bombing Gaza.

Declassified UK published a report on the F-35 program that revealed how it compromises the sovereignty of partner countries. While the U.K. produces 15% of the parts that go into every F-35, the U.S. military takes immediate ownership of the British-made parts, stores them on British air force bases, and then orders the U.K. to ship them to Texas for use in new planes or to Israel and other countries as spare parts for planes already in use.

Shipping these planes and parts to Israel is in clear violation of U.S., U.K. and other countries’ arms export laws. British campaigners argue that if the U.K. is serious about halting genocide, it must stop all shipments of F-35 parts sent to Israel–directly or indirectly. With huge marches in London drawing hundreds of thousands of people, and protests on June 17 at three factories that make F-35 parts, activists will keep applying more pressure until they result in the “concrete actions” the British government has promised.

Denmark is facing a similar conflict. Amnesty International, Oxfam, Action Aid and Al-Haq are in court suing the Danish government and largest weapons company, Terma, to stop them sending Israel critical bomb release mechanisms and other F-35 parts.

These disputes over Canadian artillery propellant, Danish bomb-release mechanisms and the multinational nature of the F-35 program highlight how any country that provides even small but critical parts or materials for deadly weapons systems must ensure they are not used to commit war crimes.

So all steps to cut off Israel’s weapons supplies can help to save Palestinian lives, and the full arms embargo that the UN General Assembly voted for in September 2024 can be instrumental in ending the genocide if more countries will join it. As Sam Perlo-Freeman of Campaign Against the Arms Trade said of the U.K.’s legal obligation to stop shipping F-35 parts,

“These spare parts are essential to keep Israel’s F-35s flying, and therefore stopping them will reduce the number of bombings and killings of civilians Israel can commit. It is as simple as that.”

Germany was responsible for 30% of Israel’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023, largely through two large warship deals. Four German-built Saar 6 corvettes, Israel’s largest warships, are already bombarding Gaza, while ThyssenKrupp is building three new submarines for Israel in Kiel.

But no country has provided a greater share of the tools of genocide in Gaza than the United States, including nearly all the warplanes, helicopters, bombs and air-to-ground missiles that are destroying Gaza and killing Palestinians. The U.S. government has a legal responsibility to stop sending all these weapons, which Israel uses mainly to commit industrial-scale war crimes, up to and including genocide, against the people of Palestine, as well as to attack its other neighbors.

Trump’s military and political support for Israel’s genocide stands in stark contradiction to the image he promotes of himself as a peacemaker—and which his most loyal followers believe in.

Yet there are signs that Trump is beginning to assert some independence from Netanyahu and from the war hawks in his own party and inner circle. He refused to visit Israel on his recent Middle East tour, he’s negotiating with Iran despite Israeli opposition, and he removed Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor for engaging in unauthorized warmongering against Iran with Netanyahu. His decisions to end the Yemen bombing campaign and lift sanctions on Syria suggest an unpredictable but real departure from the neocon playbook, as do his negotiations with Russia and Iran.

Has Netanyahu finally overplayed his hand? His campaign of ethnic cleansing, territorial expansion in pursuit of a biblical “Greater Israel,” the deliberate starvation of Gaza, and his efforts to entangle the U.S. in a war with Iran have pushed Israel’s longtime allies to the edge. The emerging rift between Trump and Netanyahu could mark the beginning of the end of the decades-long blanket of impunity the U.S. has wrapped around Israel. It could also give other governments the political space to respond to Israeli war crimes without fear of U.S. retaliation.

The huge and consistent protests throughout Europe are putting pressure on Western governments to take action. A new survey conducted in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Spain shows that very few Europeans–between 6% and 16% in each country–find Israel’s assault on Gaza proportionate or justified.

For now, however, the Western governments remain deeply complicit in Israel’s atrocities and violations of international law. The rhetoric is shifting—but history will judge this moment not by what governments say, but by what they do.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

Janine Jackson interviewed guitarist Tom Morello about music as protest for the May 30, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Rolling Stone (5/20/25)

Janine Jackson: We know the roll by now: Trump blurts out his latest hateful fever dream, and then anyone seeking favor scrambles to, if not make it make sense, make it happen. Among the latest is a demand that the Federal Election Commission launch a “major investigation” of Bruce Springsteen, who described the Trump White House as “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous” in a UK concert, even after Trump tweeted that Springsteen “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT,” and “we’ll all see how it goes for him.”

If there’s a “musicians to threaten” list going around, our guest is for sure on it. I suspect he’d be curious if he weren’t. Guitarist Tom Morello has been a member of bands Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave, along with myriad other projects, including supergroup Prophets of Rage with Chuck D, and his solo work as the Nightwatchman. He’s also, I understand, co-directing a documentary, and who knows what else. He joins us now by phone from LA. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tom Morello.

Tom Morello: Thank you very much for having me, Janine. Nice to hear your voice.

JJ: This is all as ham-fisted as everything Trump does, and yet that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.

TM: Sure.

JJ: Intimidation doesn’t have to hit its ostensible target to have effects. So maybe no one thinks Taylor Swift, for example, is shaking in her boots, but less-powerful and less-protected artists might feel some kind of way. So how would you speak to artists trying to make their way, about how you see the potential role of, in particular, musicians in Trumpian times?

Tom Morello: “I’ve always had the firm belief…that history is not something that happens, it’s something that we make.” (Creative Commons photo: Ralph_PH)

TM: Yeah. I mean, I’ve always believed that dangerous times demand dangerous music, and especially in these troubled times, music, joy and even laughter have suddenly become acts of resistance. There may come a time in the not-so-distant future, we may be at it right now, where the ideas expressed in our songs, and the people who write them and play them, and maybe even those who sit in the audience, may find themselves censored, smothered, evicted and erased. But not today.

I’ve always had the firm belief, and expressed over 22 albums in my career, that history is not something that happens, it’s something that we make, and so I try to encourage both myself and my audience to head out into that world and confront injustice wherever it rears its ugly head, whether it’s in your school, in your place of work, or in your country at large: the threats of the Trump administration is to not just artists, but it’s a McCarthyite fervor that seems to be on the rise. And there’s two ways to respond to it. One is to duck and cover. And the other is to meet the moment.

I’ve been very encouraged; the way that Bruce Springsteen has continued—his response to Trump’s diatribe was to release an album of the show that infuriated Trump. I played a couple of days ago at my alma mater, Harvard University, with a set that not only supported Bruce, but supported the university stance of not bending the knee and kissing the ring and allowing private education facilities to be under the governance of a proto-fascist regime.

So people have to make up their minds who they are and what they’re going to be. My take has always been, if you do have convictions, you need to weave them into your vocation, and let the chips fall where they may. If you don’t have convictions, then by all means, don’t pretend to have them for Tom Morello.

Boston.com (5/26/25)

JJ: Boston Media described the atmosphere at your recent set at Boston Calling as “cathartic defiance.” I suspect you’re happy with that.

TM: I felt that, and I think that it’s cathartic because we live in a world where people don’t know if anyone’s feeling the same way that they do, if anyone’s willing to speak out when the right-wing choir is so loud, it’s like, will anyone stand against it? And when you play a set of my own music, Rage Against The Machine songs, some Bruce Springsteen songs, and rile them up with a good Fred Hampton–like fervor in between songs, people recognize that, “Oh, we are not alone,” and that music is a force that can really steel the backbone of people in times of turmoil and struggle.

JJ: I was bemused by one headline I saw that called that set “expletive-laden,” and that was the headline, and I thought, “Wow, we’ve got ‘grab them by the pussy’ in office, but it’s still worth noting when people don’t show decorum.”

AlterNet (5/26/25)

TM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is funny. The fact that that’s news, with the rollback of democracy and the mass murder of children and whatnot, if someone uses a cuss word, that that’s going to make the headline, feels absolutely ridiculous.

JJ: It’s ridiculous. Well, all right. Mother’s Day, which just passed, has become about buying flowers for underappreciated women, but some will know that it began as Mother’s Day for Peace, when activists were calling for husbands and sons not to be killed in war. Its founders hated that it became a Hallmark holiday.

Part of what I see you doing is waking present-day listeners to the history of protest music, and music as protest. Using Woody Guthrie‘s “This Land Is Your Land” is a great example of censored, semi-understood, sanitized history. Why does that song mean so much to you?

TM: Sure, sure, sure. Well, I learned “This Land is Your Land,” like most of us did, in the third grade, where they censored out the verses that explained what the song was really about. “This Land is Your Land” is a radical anthem about economic leveling. It was written by Woody Guthrie, and Woody Guthrie knew that music could be a binding force. It could be an elevating power, an uplifting, unifying and transcendent thing, that music can be both a defensive shield and a weapon for change. Authoritarians and billionaires think that this country belongs to them. Woody Guthrie’s song insists that this land is your land.

Woody Guthrie

JJ: And yet the very verses—it’s remarkable, in the sense that we learned to sing it and celebrate it and say, “Yeah, we all believe in this, but not this part that we’re not going to talk about.” It seems emblematic in some ways.

TM: Yeah, yeah, yeah:

As I was walking, I saw a sign there

And that sign said “private property.”

On the other side, it didn’t say nothing.

That side was made for you and me.

 

In the squares of the city, in the  shadow of the steeple,

Near the relief office, I see my people.

And some are grumbling and all are wondering

If this land is still made for you and me.

And then he sings the chorus, “This land was made for you and me,” answering his own question in a very powerful way.

YouTube (8/17/15)

JJ: I’m pretty sure that anyone singing that today would be told to shut up and sing.

I want to take you, just for a second—I’ve been to Rage shows, and I have seen oceans of young white men scream full-voice, “Some of those who work forces! Are the same who burn crosses!” since before George Floyd, before Michael Brown, before “I can’t breathe.” It’s…interesting, I will say. And it must mean that you’ve seen, for many, many years, a kind of energy, in a kind of place that I suspect many folks didn’t think existed.

TM: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of different buckets the people who enjoy Rage Against The Machine exist in. Some are people who come to the music because they pre-diagnosed to agree with the politics of it.

Some simply enjoy it for the raw power and the aggression and the screaming guitar solos and whatnot, and have no idea what’s going on in the lyrics, that sort of shout along. They’re more than welcome.

Loudwire (7/11/22)

Then there are those that are drawn to the songs because of the heaviness of the music, or the aggression of the music, and they come away with a different set of ideas, because that band has a different set of ideas than the other bands that play similar music. Sometimes you see that Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment, where their eyes are opened.

And then there’s the unique bucket of those that believe the songs are right-wing anthems, and are shocked to find that the members of Rage Against The Machine have politics very, very different from their own.

JJ: It’s got to be strange. It’s got to be strange. You know, if I put up a Facebook post and it gets more than 20 views, I get nervous: I’m not trying to be a spokesperson, I’m just trying to speak. You cannot answer every objection to what you’re doing. You cannot come along with every record and interpret it for people. So you have to relax and let it speak, right?

TM: Yeah. The Rage Against The Machine music, and the music in my 22-album career, it’s not a Noam Chomsky lecture. The idea is to make art that is compelling, and makes people jump up and down, or shake their butts or whatever, and then there is a message that’s contained in it. And you can check all the boxes, or one of the boxes, and it’s totally all right.

JJ: Right. Right. Well, you’re a musician because you love music, and you are political because you’re political, and these things come together. So, I mean, unless it’s an article about what strings you prefer, there’s really hardly a way for a music critic to talk about your career, and your various projects, without talking about social and racial justice, or what many insist on calling “politics,” as though that were somehow a separate, denatured category of interest. So I just said, “Shut up and sing.” That’s never made sense as a complaint with you, but it’s really dumb, whoever it’s aimed at?

TM: Well, I mean, “shut up and sing” is exclusively reserved for artists whom you disagree with. It’s not “shut up and sing” if you’re politically aligned. It’s when the cognitive dissonance occurs—like, “I really like this music, but I can’t stand the fact that I’m having my nose shoved in my own prejudices.”

Real Time with Bill Maher (6/10/16)

JJ: You’ve been interviewed, you’ve been spoken to a lot, and I can imagine some of the things that reporters come at you with. I remember, years ago, you went on Bill Maher, and had that experience. I wonder, do you ever feel like you need to redirect? I find sometimes I have to say, “Well, I’m not going to respond to that question. I’m going to say something different.” Do you ever need to redirect reporters, mid-conversation?

TM: I would say that I wish sometimes that there was more thoughtful reporting than what I’m exposed to, because to most people who cover music, I’m a unicorn. They don’t have a lot of artists that they’re exposed to that have a lifetime of political engagement. So a casual music journalist tends to ask the same seven questions, over the course of 30 years. I actually look forward to stuff that’s a little bit more on the Bill Maher end of the spectrum, where it’s a little bit more sparring, or it’s a little bit more thoughtful or more in-depth. Because they’re like, “So what’s it like being in a political band?” –that level of discourse.

JJ: Exactly. Well, I would say a word that I would use to describe you, Tom, is “jovial.” You’ve made yourself this big fat target, and you seem to be enjoying yourself, like, “This is what I trained for.” To what do you attribute this willingness to be misunderstood, and even hated?

TM: Well, I mean, I’m not jovial because people hate, let me just make that very, very clear.

JJ: No, clear, clear. You’ve been jovial the 30 years I’ve known you.

WMMR (5/30/24)

TM: Yeah, I think that’s independent. It’s independent. I mean, part of it is having a really, really clear North Star. From 16- or 17-years-old, I can attribute a large measure to my mom, Mary Morello, who is currently 101 years old, and still the most radical and popular member of the Morello family. But there’s always been this social justice North Star that is unbending and uncompromising, and I know what I was put here to do.

I didn’t choose to be a guitar player. That chose me. So I’m kind of stuck finding a way to express my convictions in my vocation, and just no two ways about it. Countless opportunities go away when you say the things I say, play the things I play and believe the things that I believe, and it’s totally fine. There’s a contingent of the audience that is smaller than it would be otherwise. But when people make music, make any art, that is widely and generally loved and absorbed by the vast majority of the population, it tends to be shitty art, and I’ve never been interested in that.

JJ: Jim and I used to say we live our life between two Marx quotes: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it,” and “I have spoken and saved my soul.”

TM: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JJ: It’s a difficult engagement; for many people, it’s more difficult today than it ever has been, but for many of us, it’s been difficult our whole lives, and knowing when to speak, and how to also keep ourselves safe, and all of that.

Spin (2/11/25)

But I’ll say, I’ll just read a quote from you:

It’s not a time to shy away from resistance. It’s a time to lean in. On a cultural front, that’s what these shows are, my small contribution to withstanding the fascist gale that is blowing.

Just talk, finally, Tom Morello, about how you see the present moment, your role within it, and what you’d like folks to think about.

TM: Well, having been engaged in activism of some sort for, my gosh, 40+ years now, it’s a realization that each of us are a link in the chain. Those of us that have a conviction that the world can be a more peaceful, a more equal, a more just place:  The arc of history may bend towards justice, but sometimes it swings back the other way, and that doesn’t mean that you should despair. That means you should realize what is moving the meter are people, no different than anyone listening right now. When there’s been progressive, radical, even revolutionary change, it has come from people no different from anyone listening to this right now.

So while that may sound daunting, the good news is that those people who have moved the meter, from Spartacus to today, have been no different from the people—like, no more money, power, influence, courage, intelligence, creativity. It’s a matter of standing up in your time, and doing it to the best of your ability, and recognizing that, in this particular historical moment, it’s a little bit now or never. If you’ve got feelings, you’ve got to express them. Apply yourself in your place of work, in your school, in your union, in your town, in your country right now. The cavalry is not coming. You’re it.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with guitarist, activist, now filmmaker Tom Morello. Thank you, Tom. Love to your mother. Thank you for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

TM: Thank you so much. Say hi to the family for me.

JJ: I will do.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Tom Morello at Occupy Wall Street (CC photo: David Shankbone)

This week on CounterSpin: Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé and…Oprah? They’re among the entertainers in Trump’s ALLCAPS sights for, it would seem, endorsing Kamala Harris in the election? And/or maybe saying something unflattering about him or his  actions—which, in his brain, and that of the minions who’ve chosen to share that brain, constitutes an illegal political contribution to his opponents, wherever they may lurk.

At a moment when politicians who swore actual oaths are throwing over even the pretense of democracy, or public service—or basic human decency—many of us are looking to artists to be truth-tellers and spirit lifters; to convey, maybe, not so much information as energy: the fearless, collective, forward-looking joy that can sustain a beleaguered people in a threatening time.

There’s a deep history of protest music and music as protest, and our guest is very intentionally a part of it. Tom Morello is a guitarist; part of Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave, Prophets of Rage and The Nightwatchman, among many other projects. His music has always been intertwined with his activism and advocacy for social, racial, economic justice; so we talk about the work of artists in Trumpian times with Tom Morello, this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the embassy shootings, a lawmaker’s arrest and commencement protests.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Tom Morello at Occupy Wall Street (CC photo: David Shankbone)

This week on CounterSpin: Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé and…Oprah? They’re among the entertainers in Trump’s ALLCAPS sights for, it would seem, endorsing Kamala Harris in the election? And/or maybe saying something unflattering about him or his  actions—which, in his brain, and that of the minions who’ve chosen to share that brain, constitutes an illegal political contribution to his opponents, wherever they may lurk.

At a moment when politicians who swore actual oaths are throwing over even the pretense of democracy, or public service—or basic human decency—many of us are looking to artists to be truth-tellers and spirit lifters; to convey, maybe, not so much information as energy: the fearless, collective, forward-looking joy that can sustain a beleaguered people in a threatening time.

There’s a deep history of protest music and music as protest, and our guest is very intentionally a part of it. Tom Morello is a guitarist; part of Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave, Prophets of Rage and The Nightwatchman, among many other projects. His music has always been intertwined with his activism and advocacy for social, racial, economic justice; so we talk about the work of artists in Trumpian times with Tom Morello, this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the embassy shootings, a lawmaker’s arrest and commencement protests.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Western capitals are still coordinating with Israel and the US on their ‘criticisms’ of the genocide – just as they earlier coordinated on their support for the slaughter

After 19 months of being presented with dissembling accounts of Gaza from their governments, western publics are now being served up a different – but equally deceitful – narrative.

With the finishing line in sight for Israel’s programme of genocidal ethnic cleansing, the West’s Gaza script is being hastily rewritten. But make no mistake: it is the same web of self-serving lies.

As if under the direction of a hidden conductor, Britain, France and Canada – key US allies – erupted this week into a chorus of condemnation of Israel.

They called Israel’s plans to level the last fragments of Gaza still standing “disproportionate”, while Israel’s intensification of its months-long starvation of more than two million Palestinian civilians was “intolerable”.

The change of tone was preceded, as I noted in these pages last week, by new, harsher language against Israel from the western press corps.

The establishment media’s narrative had to shift first, so that the sudden outpouring of moral and political concern at Gaza’s suffering from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – after more than a year and a half of indifference – did not appear too abrupt, or too strange.

They are acting as if some corner has been turned in Israel’s genocide. But genocides don’t have corners. They just progress relentlessly until stopped.

The media and politicians are carefully managing any cognitive dissonance for their publics.

But the deeper reality is that western capitals are still coordinating with Israel and the US on their “criticisms” of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – just as they earlier coordinated their support for it.

As much was conceded by a senior Israeli official to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. Referring to the sudden change of tone, he said: “The past 24 hours were all part of a planned ambush we knew about. This was a coordinated sequence of moves ahead of the EU meeting in Brussels, and thanks to joint efforts by our ambassadors and the foreign minister, we managed to moderate the outcome.”

The handwringing is just another bit of stagecraft, little different from the earlier mix of silence and talk about Israel’s “right to defend itself”. And it is to the same purpose: to buy Israel time to “finish the job” – that is, to complete its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

The West is still promoting phoney “debates”, entirely confected by Israel, about whether Hamas is stealing aid, what constitutes sufficient aid, and how that aid should be delivered.

It is all meant as noise, to distract us from the only pertinent issue: that Israel is committing genocide by slaughtering and starving Gaza’s population, as the West has aided and abetted that genocide.

PR exercise

With stocks of food completely exhausted by Israel’s blockade, UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC on Tuesday that some 14,000 babies could die in Gaza within 48 hours without immediate aid reaching them.

The longer-term prognosis is bleaker still.

On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to let in a trickle of aid, releasing five trucks, some containing baby formula, from the thousands of vehicles Israel has held up at entry points for nearly three months. That was less than one percent of the number of trucks experts say must enter daily just to keep deadly starvation at bay.

On Tuesday, as the clamour grew, the number of aid trucks allowed to enter Gaza reportedly climbed to nearly 100 – or less than a fifth of the bare minimum. None of the aid was reported to have reached the enclave’s population by the time of writing.

Netanyahu was clear to the Israeli public – most of whom appear enthusiastic for the engineered starvation to continue – that he was not doing this out of any humanitarian impulse.

This was purely a public relations exercise to hold western capitals in check, he said. The goal was to ease the demands on these leaders from their own publics to penalise Israel and stop the continuing slaughter of Gaza’s population.

Or as Netanyahu put it: “Our best friends worldwide, the most pro-Israel senators [in the US] … they tell us they’re providing all the aid, weapons, support and protection in the UN Security Council, but they can’t support images of mass hunger.”

Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, was even clearer: “On our way to destroying Hamas, we are destroying everything that’s left of the [Gaza] Strip.” He also spoke of “cleansing” the enclave.

‘Back to the Stone Age’

Western publics have been watching this destruction unfold for the past 19 months – or at least they’ve seen partial snapshots, when the West’s establishment media has bothered to report on the slaughter.

Israel has systematically eradicated everything necessary for the survival of Gaza’s people: their homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries, water systems and community kitchens.

Israel has finally implemented what it had been threatening for 20 years to do to the Palestinian people if they refused to be ethnically cleansed from their homeland. It has sent them “back to the Stone Age”.

A survey of the world’s leading genocide scholars published last week by the Dutch newspaper NRC found that all conclusively agreed Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Most think the genocide has reached its final stages.

This week, Yair Golan, leader of Israel’s main centrist party and a former deputy head of the Israeli military, expressed the same sentiments in more graphic form. He accused the government of “killing babies as a hobby”. Predictably, Netanyahu accused Golan of “antisemitism”.

The joint statement from Starmer, Macron and Carney was far tamer, of course – and was greeted by Netanyahu with a relatively muted response that the three leaders were giving Hamas a “huge prize”.

Their statement noted: “The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable.” Presumably, until now, they have viewed the hellscape endured by Gaza’s Palestinians for a year and a half as “tolerable”.

David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary who in the midst of the genocide was happy to be photographed shaking hands with Netanyahu, opined in parliament this week that Gaza was facing a “dark new phase”.

That’s a convenient interpretation for him. In truth, it’s been midnight in Gaza for a very long time.

A senior European diplomatic source involved in the discussions between the three leaders told the BBC that their new tone reflected a “real sense of growing political anger at the humanitarian situation, of a line being crossed, and of this Israeli government appearing to act with impunity”.

This should serve as a reminder that until now, western capitals were fine with all the other lines crossed by Israel, including its destruction of most of Gaza’s homes; its eradication of Gaza’s hospitals and other essential humanitarian infrastructure; its herding of Palestinian civilians into “safe” zones, only to bomb them there; its slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of children; and its active starvation of a population of more than two million.

Played for fools

The three western leaders are now threatening to take “further concrete actions” against Israel, including what they term “targeted sanctions”.

If that sounds positive, think again. The European Union and Britain have dithered for decades about whether and how to label goods imported from Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. The existence of these ever-expanding settlements, built on stolen Palestinian territory and blocking the creation of a Palestinian state, is a war crime; no country should be aiding them.

In 2019, the European Court of Justice ruled that it must be made clear to European consumers which products come from Israel and which from the settlements.

In all that time, European officials never considered a ban on products from the settlements, let alone “targeted sanctions” on Israel, even though the illegality of the settlements is unambiguous. In fact, officials have readily smeared those calling for boycotts and sanctions against Israel as “Jew haters” and “antisemites”.

The truth is that western leaders and establishment media are playing us for fools once again, just as they have been for the past 19 months.

“Further concrete actions” suggest that there are already concrete actions imposed on Israel. That’s the same Israel that recently finished second in the Eurovision Song Contest. Protesters who call for Israel to be excluded from the competition – as Russia has been for invading Ukraine – are smeared and denounced.

When western leaders can’t even impose a meaningful symbolic penalty on Israel, why should we believe they are capable of taking substantive action against it?

No will for action

On Tuesday, it became clearer what the UK meant by “concrete actions”. The Israeli ambassador was called in for what we were told was a dressing down. She must be quaking.

And Britain suspended – that is, delayed – negotiations on a new free trade agreement, a proposed expansion of Britain’s already extensive trading ties with Israel. Those talks can doubtless wait a few months.

Meanwhile, 17 European Union members out of 27 voted to review the legal basis of the EU–Israel Association Agreement – providing Israel with special trading status – though a very unlikely consensus would be needed to actually revoke it.

Such a review to see if Israel is showing “respect for human rights and democratic principles” is simple time-wasting. Investigations last year showed it was committing widespread atrocities and crimes against humanity.

Speaking to the British parliament, Lammy said: “The Netanyahu government’s actions have made this necessary.”

There are plenty of far more serious “concrete actions” that Britain and other western capitals could take, and could have taken many months ago.

A flavour was provided by Britain and the EU on Tuesday when they announced sweeping additional sanctions on Russia – not for committing a genocide, but for hesitating over a ceasefire with Ukraine.

Ultimately, the West wants to punish Moscow for refusing to return the territories in Ukraine that it occupies – something western powers have never meaningfully required of Israel, even though Israel has been occupying the Palestinian territories for decades.

The new sanctions on Russia target entities supporting its military efforts and energy exports – on top of existing severe economic sanctions and an oil embargo. Nothing even vaguely comparable is being proposed for Israel.

The UK and Europe could have stopped providing Israel with the weapons to butcher Palestinian children in Gaza. Back in September, Starmer promised to cut arms sales to Israel by around eight percent – but his government actually sent more weapons to arm Israel’s genocide in the three months that followed than the Tories did in the entire period between 2020 and 2023.

Britain could also stop transporting other countries’ weapons and carrying out surveillance flights over Gaza on Israel’s behalf. Flight tracking information showed that on one night this week, the UK sent a military transport plane, which can carry weapons and soldiers, from a Royal Air Force base on Cyprus to Tel Aviv, and then dispatched a spy plane over Gaza to collect intelligence to assist Israel in its slaughter.

Britain could, of course, take the “concrete action” of recognising the state of Palestine, as Ireland and Spain have already done – and it could do so at a moment’s notice.

The UK could impose sanctions on Israeli government ministers. It could declare its readiness to enforce Netanyahu’s arrest for war crimes, in line with the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant, if he visits Britain. And it could deny Israel access to sporting events, turning it into a pariah state, as was done to Russia.

It could announce that any Britons returning from military service in Gaza risk arrest and prosecution for war crimes.

And of course, the UK could impose sweeping economic sanctions on Israel, again as was done to Russia.

All of these “concrete actions”, and more, could be easily implemented. The truth is there is no political will to do it. There is simply a desire for better public relations, for putting a better gloss on Britain’s complicity in a genocide that can no longer be hidden.

Wolf exposed

The problem for the West is that Israel now stands stripped of the lamb’s clothing in which it has been adorned by western capitals for decades.

Israel is all too evidently a predatory wolf. Its brutal, colonial behaviours towards the Palestinian people are fully on show. There is no hiding place.

This is why Netanyahu and western leaders are now engaged in an increasingly difficult tango. The colonial, apartheid, genocidal project of Israel – the West’s militarised client-bully in the oil-rich Middle East – needs to be protected.

Until now, that had involved western leaders like Starmer deflecting criticism of Israel’s crimes, as well as British complicity. It involved endlessly and mindlessly reciting Israel’s “right to defend itself”, and the need to “eliminate Hamas”.

But the endgame of Israel’s genocide involves starving two million people to death – or forcing them out of Gaza, whichever comes first. Neither is compatible with the goals western politicians have been selling us.

So the new narrative must accentuate Netanyahu’s personal responsibility for the carnage – as though the genocide is not the logical endpoint of everything Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people for many decades.

Most Israelis are on board, too, with the genocide. The only meaningful voices of dissent are from the families of the Israeli hostages – and then chiefly because of the danger posed to their loved ones by Israel’s assault.

The aim of Starmer, Macron and Carney is to craft a new narrative, in which they claim to have only belatedly realised that Netanyahu has “gone too far” and that he needs to be reined in. They can then gradually up the noise against the Israeli prime minister, lobby Israel to change tack, and, when it resists or demurs, be seen to press Washington for “concrete action”.

The new narrative, unlike the worn-thin old one, can be spun out for yet more weeks or months – which may be just long enough to get the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza either over the finish line, or near enough as to make no difference.

That is the hope – yes, hope – in western capitals.

Blood on their hands

Starmer, Macron and Carney’s new make-believe narrative has several advantages. It washes Gaza’s blood from their hands. They were deceived. They were too charitable. Vital domestic struggles against antisemitism distracted them.

It lays the blame squarely at the feet of one man: Netanyahu.

Without him, a violent, highly militarised, apartheid state of Israel can continue as before, as though the genocide was an unfortunate misstep in Israel’s otherwise unblemished record.

New supposed “terror” threats – from Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran – can be hyped to draw us back into cheerleading narratives about a plucky western outpost of civilisation defending us from barbarians in the East.

The new narrative does not even require that Netanyahu face justice.

As news emerges of the true extent of the atrocities and death toll, a faux-remorseful Netanyahu can placate the West with revived talk of a two-state solution – a solution whose realisation has been avoided for decades and can continue to be avoided for decades more.

We will be subjected to yet more years of the Israel-Palestine “conflict” finally being about to turn a corner.

Even were a chastened Netanyahu forced to step down, he would pass the baton to one of the other Jewish supremacist, genocidal monsters waiting in the wings.

After Gaza’s destruction, the crushing of Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem will simply have to return to an earlier, slower pace – one that has allowed it to be kept off the western public’s radar for 58 years.

Will it really work out like this? Only in the imaginations of western elites. In truth, burying nearly two years of a genocide all too visible to large swaths of western publics will be a far trickier task.

Too many people in Europe and the US have had their eyes opened over the past 19 months. They cannot unsee what has been live-streamed to them, or ignore what it says about their own political and media classes.

Starmer and co will continue vigorously distancing themselves from the genocide in Gaza, but there will be no escape. Whatever they say or do, the trail of blood leads straight back to their door.

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

The mendacious pattern of the IDF and Netanyahu government has become clearer than ever. It comes in instalments, much like a distasteful fashion show. The opening begins with unequivocal, hot denial: famine is not taking place, and any aid to Gaza has been looted by the Hamas authorities; civilians were not targeted, let alone massacred; aid workers were not butchered but legitimately killed as they had Hamas militants among them. And there is no ethnic cleansing and genocide to speak of. To claim otherwise was antisemitic.

Then comes the large dollop of corrective, inconvenient reality, be it a film, a blatant statement, or some item of damning evidence. The next stage is one of quibbles and qualifications: Gaza will receive some necessaries; there is a humanitarian crisis, because we were told by the United States, our main sponsor, that this was the case; and there might have been some cases where civilians were killed, a problem easily rectified by an internal investigation by the military.

Just prior to the latest assault, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in leaked quotes, revealed another dark purpose of the new military operation.  “We are destroying more and more homes. They have nowhere to return to,” he said in testimony before the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee.  “The only inevitable outcome will be the desire of Gazans to emigrate outside the Gaza Strip.”  Here was a state official’s declaration of intent to ethnically cleanse a population.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was even blunter, something praised by Netanyahu.  Israel’s objective, he revealed in a statement on March 19, was to destroy “everything that’s left of the Gaza Strip”.  What was currently underway involved “conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed”.

The Netanyahu government has also added another twist to the ghastly performance. On March 18, the provision of various “basic” forms of humanitarian aid into Gaza was announced. The measure was approved by a security cabinet meeting pressed by concerns from military officials warning that food supplies from UN sources and other aid groups had run out. The pressure had also come from, in Netanyahu’s words in a March 19 video address, Israel’s “greatest friends in the world”, the trying sort who claimed that there was “‘one thing we cannot stand. We cannot accept images of hunger, mass hunger. We cannot stand that. We will not be able to support you’”. How inconveniently squeamish of them.

That same day, United Nations aid chief Tom Fletcher said nine aid trucks had been cleared by Israeli authorities to enter Gaza through the Karem Abu Salem crossing.  This was an absurd, ineffectual number, given the 500 trucks or more that entered Gaza prior to October 2023.

Fanatics who subscribe to the ethnic cleansing, rid-of-Palestine school were understandably disappointed, even at this obscenely modest provision of aid. “Any humanitarian aid that enters the Strip… will fuel Hamas and give it oxygen while our hostages languish in tunnels,” moaned National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. “We must crush Hamas, not simultaneously give it oxygen.” He also wished that Netanyahu “explain to our friends in the White House the implications of this ‘aid’, which only prolongs the war and delays our victory and the return of all our hostages.”

Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, also of Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, was in a similar mood, making the farcical resumption of aid sound like criminal salvation for a savage people. “This is our tragedy with Netanyahu’s approach. A leader who could have led to a clear victory and been remembered as the one who defeated radical Islam, but who, time after time, let this historic opportunity slip away. Letting humanitarian aid in now directly harms the war effort to achieve victory and is another obstacle to the release of the hostages.”

The picture emerging from Israel’s latest mission of carnage is one of murderous dysfunction. It made little sense to Knesset member Moshe Saada, for instance, that a broader, ever more lethal offensive was in the offing with five new IDF divisions even as aid was being provided.  This was implicitly telling.  Did Palestinian civilians matter insofar as they should be fed, even as they were being butchered and encouraged into fleeing?

The extent of the horror has now reached the point where it is being acknowledged in the capitals of Israel’s close allies. A joint statement from the UK, France, and Canada affirmed opposition to “the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza.” Israel’s permission of “a basic quantity of food into Gaza” was wholly inadequate in the face of “intolerable” human suffering. Denying essential humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population in the Strip “is unacceptable and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law. We condemn the abhorrent language used recently by members of the Israeli Government, threatening that, in their despair at the destruction of Gaza, civilians will start to relocate.”

For a long time, the notion of consciously eliminating the Palestinian presence in Gaza, through starvation, massacre, and displacement, was confined to the racial, ethnoreligious fringes of purist lunacy typified by Smotrich and Ben Gvir.  Their vocal presence and frank advocacy have now made that ambition a grotesque, ongoing reality.

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

The mendacious pattern of the IDF and Netanyahu government has become clearer than ever. It comes in instalments, much like a distasteful fashion show.  The opening begins with unequivocal, hot denial: famine is not taking place, and any aid to Gaza has been looted by the Hamas authorities; civilians were not targeted, let alone massacred; aid workers were not butchered but legitimately killed as they had Hamas militants among them.  And there is no ethnic cleansing and genocide to speak of.  To claim otherwise was antisemitic.

Then comes the large dollop of corrective, inconvenient reality, be it a film, a blatant statement, or some item of damning evidence. The next stage is one of quibbles and qualifications: Gaza will receive some necessaries; there is a humanitarian crisis, because we were told by the United States, our main sponsor, that this was the case; and there might have been some cases where civilians were killed, a problem easily rectified by an internal investigation by the military.

Just prior to the latest assault, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in leaked quotes, revealed another dark purpose of the new military operation.  “We are destroying more and more homes.  They have no nowhere to return to,” he said in testimony before the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee.  “The only inevitable outcome will be the desire of Gazans to emigrate outside the Gaza Strip.”  Here was a state official’s declaration of intent to ethnically cleanse a population.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was even blunter, something praised by Netanyahu.  Israel’s objective, he revealed in a statement on March 19, was to destroy “everything that’s left of the Gaza Strip”.  What was currently underway involved “conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed”.

The Netanyahu government has also added another twist to the ghastly performance.  On March 18, the provision of various “basic” forms of humanitarian aid into Gaza was announced.  The measure was approved by a security cabinet meeting pressed by concerns from military officials warning that food supplies from UN sources and other aid groups had run out.  The pressure had also come from, in Netanyahu’s words in a March 19 video address, Israel’s “greatest friends in the world”, the trying sort who claimed that there was “‘one thing we cannot stand. We cannot accept images of hunger, mass hunger. We cannot stand that.  We will not be able to support you’”.  How inconveniently squeamish of them.

That same day, United Nations aid chief Tom Fletcher said nine aid trucks had been cleared by Israeli authorities to enter Gaza through the Karem Abu Salem crossing.  This was an absurd, ineffectual number, given the 500 trucks or more that entered Gaza prior to October 2023.

Fanatics who subscribe to the ethnic cleansing, rid-of-Palestine school were understandably disappointed, even at this obscenely modest provision of aid.  “Any humanitarian aid that enters the Strip… will fuel Hamas and give it oxygen while our hostages languish in tunnels,” moaned National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.  “We must crush Hamas, not simultaneously give it oxygen.”  He also wished that Netanyahu “explain to our friends in the White House the implications of this ‘aid’, which only prolongs the war and delays our victory and the return of all our hostages.”

Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, also of Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, was in a similar mood, making the farcical resumption of aid sound like criminal salvation for a savage people. “This is our tragedy with Netanyahu’s approach.  A leader who could have led to a clear victory and be remembered as the one who defeated radical Islam but who time after time let this historic opportunity slip away. Letting humanitarian aid in now directly harms the war effort to achieve victory and is another obstacle to the release of the hostages.”

The picture emerging from Israel’s latest mission of carnage is one of murderous dysfunction.  It made little sense to Knesset member Moshe Saada, for instance, that a broader, ever more lethal offensive was in the offing with five new IDF divisions even as aid was being provided.  This was implicitly telling.  Did Palestinian civilians matter in so far as they should be fed, even as they were being butchered and encouraged into fleeing?

The extent of the horror has now reached the point where it is being acknowledged in the capitals of Israel’s close allies.  A joint statement from the UK, France and Canada affirmed opposition to “the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza.”  Israel’s permission of “a basic quantity of food into Gaza” was wholly inadequate in the face of “intolerable” human suffering.  Denying essential humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population in the Strip “is unacceptable and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law.  We condemn the abhorrent language used recently by members of the Israeli Government, threatening that, in their despair at the destruction of Gaza, civilians will start to relocate.”

For much time, the notion of consciously eliminating the Palestinian presence in Gaza, through starvation, massacre and displacement, was confined to the racial, ethnoreligious fringes of purist lunacy typified by Smotrich and Ben Gvir.  Their vocal presence and frank advocacy have now made that ambition a grotesque, ongoing reality.

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

As Israel unveils its final genocide push, and mass death from starvation looms in Gaza, western media and politicians are tentatively starting to speak up.

Who could have imagined 19 months ago that it would take more than a year and a half of Israel slaughtering and starving Gaza’s children for the first cracks to appear in what has been a rock-solid wall of support for Israel from western establishments.

Finally, something looks like it may be about to give.

The British establishment’s financial daily, the Financial Times, was first to break ranks last week to condemn “the West’s shameful silence” in the face of Israel’s murderous assault on the tiny enclave.

In an editorial – effectively the paper’s voice – the FT accused the United States and Europe of being increasingly “complicit” as Israel made Gaza “uninhabitable”, an allusion to genocide, and noted that the goal was to “drive Palestinians from their land”, an allusion to ethnic cleansing.

Of course, both of these grave crimes by Israel have been evidently true not only since Hamas’ violent, single-day breakout from Gaza on 7 October 2023, but for decades.

So parlous is the state of western reporting, from a media no less complicit than the governments berated by the FT, that we need to seize on any small signs of progress.

Next, the Economist chimed in, warning that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers were driven by a “dream of emptying Gaza and rebuilding Jewish settlements there”.

At the weekend, the Independent decided the “deafening silence on Gaza” had to end. It was “time for the world to wake up to what is happening and to demand an end to the suffering of the Palestinians trapped in the enclave.”

Actually much of the world woke up many, many months ago. It has been the western press corps and western politicians slumbering through the past 19 months of genocide.

Then on Monday, the supposedly liberal Guardian voiced in its own editorial a fear that Israel is committing “genocide”, though it only dared do so by framing the accusation as a question.

It wrote of Israel: “Now it plans a Gaza without Palestinians. What is this, if not genocidal? When will the US and its allies act to stop the horror, if not now?”

The paper could more properly have asked a different question: Why have Israel’s western allies – as well as media like the Guardian and FT – waited 19 months to speak up against the horror?

And, predictably bringing up the rear, was the BBC. On Wednesday, the BBC Radio’s PM programme chose to give top billing to testimony from Tom Fletcher, the United Nation’s humanitarian affairs chief, to the Security Council. Presenter Evan Davis said the BBC had decided to “do something a little unusual”.

Unusual indeed. It played Fletcher’s speech in full – all 12 and a half minutes of it. That included Fletcher’s comment: “For those killed and those whose voices are silenced: what more evidence do you need now? Will you act – decisively – to prevent genocide and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law?”

We had gone in less than a week from the word “genocide” being taboo in relation to Gaza to it becoming almost mainstream.

Growing cracks

Cracks are evident in the British parliament too. Mark Pritchard, a Conservative MP and life-long Israel supporter, stood up from the back benches to admit he had been wrong about Israel, and condemned it “for what it is doing to the Palestinian people”.

He was one of more than a dozen Tory MPs and peers in the House of Lords, all formerly staunch defenders of Israel, who urged British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to immediately recognise a Palestinian state.

Their move followed an open letter published by 36 members of the Board of Deputies, a 300-member body that claims to represent British Jews, dissenting from its continuing support for the slaughter. The letter warned: “Israel’s soul is being ripped out.”

Pritchard told fellow MPs it was time to “stand up for humanity, for us being on the right side of history, for having the moral courage to lead.”

Sadly, there is no sign of that yet. Research published last week, based on Israeli tax authority data, showed Starmer’s government has been lying even about the highly limited restrictions on arms sales to Israel it claimed to have imposed last year.

Despite an ostensible ban on shipments of weapons that could be used in Gaza, Britain has covertly exported more than 8,500 separate munitions to Israel since the ban.

This week more details emerged. According to figures published by The National, the current government exported more weapons to Israel in the final three months of last year, after the ban came into effect, than the previous Conservative government did through the whole of 2020 to 2023.

So shameful is the UK’s support for Israel in the midst of what the International Court of Justice – the World Court – has described as a “plausible genocide” that Starmer’s government needs to pretend it is doing something, even as it actually continues to arm that genocide.

More than 40 MPs wrote to Foreign Secretary David Lammy last week calling for him to respond to allegations that he had misled the public and parliament. “The public deserves to know the full scale of the UK’s complicity in crimes against humanity,” they wrote.

There are growing rumblings elsewhere. This week France’s President Emmanuel Macron called Israel’s complete blockade on aid into Gaza “shameful and unacceptable”. He added: “My job is to do everything I can to make it stop.”

“Everything” seemed to amount to nothing more than mooting possible economic sanctions.

Still, the rhetorical shift was striking. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, similarly denounced the blockade, calling it “unjustifiable”. She added: “I have always recalled the urgency of finding a way to end the hostilities and respect international law and international humanitarian law.”

“International law”? Where has that been for the past 19 months?

There was a similar change of priorities across the Atlantic. Democratic Senator Chris van Hollen, for example, recently dared to call Israel’s actions in Gaza “ethnic cleansing”.

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, a bellwether of the Beltway consensus, gave Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Sharren Haskel, an unusually tough grilling. Amanpour all but accused her of lying about Israel starving children.

Meanwhile, Josep Borrell, the recently departed head of European Union foreign policy, broke another taboo last week by directly accusing Israel of preparing a genocide in Gaza.

“Seldom have I heard the leader of a state so clearly outline a plan that fits the legal definition of genocide,” he said, adding: “We’re facing the largest ethnic cleansing operation since the end of the Second World War.”

Borrell, of course, has no influence over EU policy at this point.

A death camp

This is all painfully slow progress, but it does suggest that a tipping point may be near.

If so, there are several reasons. One – the most evident in the mix – is US President Donald Trump.

It was easier for the Guardian, the FT and old-school Tory MPs to watch the extermination of Gaza’s Palestinians in silence when it was kindly Uncle Joe Biden and the US military industrial complex behind it.

Unlike his predecessor, Trump too often forgets the bit where he is supposed to put a gloss on Israeli crimes, or distance the US from them, even as Washington ships the weapons to carry out those crimes.

But also, there are plenty of indications that Trump – with his constant craving to be seen as the top dog – is increasingly annoyed at being publicly outfoxed by Netanyahu.

This week, as Trump headed to the Middle East, his administration secured the release of Israeli soldier Edan Alexander, the last living US citizen in captivity in Gaza, by bypassing Israel and negotiating directly with Hamas.

In his comments on the release, Trump insisted it was time to “put an end to this very brutal war” – a remark he had very obviously not coordinated with Netanyahu.

Notably, Israel is not on Trump’s Middle East schedule.

Right now seems a relatively safe moment to adopt a more critical stance towards Israel, as presumably the FT and Guardian appreciate.

Then there is the fact that Israel’s genocide is reaching its endpoint. No food, water or medicines have entered Gaza for more than two months. Everyone is malnourished. It is unclear, given Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health system, how many have already died from hunger.

But the pictures of skin-and-bones children emerging from Gaza are uncomfortably reminiscent of 80-year-old images of skeletal Jewish children imprisoned in Nazi camps.

It is a reminder that Gaza – strictly blockaded by Israel for 16 years before Hamas’ 7 October 2023 breakout – has been transformed over the past 19 months from a concentration camp into a death camp.

Parts of the media and political class know mass death in Gaza cannot be obscured for much longer, not even after Israel has barred foreign journalists from the enclave and murdered most of the Palestinian journalists trying to record the genocide.

Cynical political and media actors are trying to get in their excuses before it is too late to show remorse.

The ‘Gaza war’ myth

And finally there is the fact that Israel has declared its readiness to take hands-on responsibility for the extermination in Gaza by, in its words, “capturing” the tiny territory.

The long-anticipated “day after” looks like it is about to arrive.

For 20 years, Israel and western capitals have conspired in the lie that Gaza’s occupation ended in 2005, when Israel’s then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, pulled out a few thousand Jewish settlers and withdrew Israeli soldiers to a highly fortified perimeter encaging the enclave.

In a ruling last year, the World Court gave this claim short shrift, emphasising that Gaza, as well as the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, had never stopped being under Israeli occupation, and that the occupation must end immediately.

The truth is that, even before the 2023 Hamas attacks, Israel had been besieging Gaza by land, sea and air for many, many years. Nothing – people or trade – went in or out without the Israeli military’s say-so.

Israeli officials instituted a secret policy of putting the population there on a strict “diet” – a war crime then as now – one that ensured most of Gaza’s young became progressively more malnourished.

Drones whined constantly overhead, as they do now, watching the population from the skies 24 hours a day and occasionally raining down death. Fishermen were shot and their boats sunk for trying to fish their own waters. Farmers’ crops were destroyed by herbicides sprayed from Israeli planes.

And when the mood took it, Israel sent in fighter jets to bomb the enclave or sent soldiers in on military operations, killing hundreds of civilians at a time.

When Palestinians in Gaza went out week after week to stage protests close to the perimeter fence of their concentration camp, Israeli snipers shot them, killing some 200 and crippling many thousands more.

Yet, despite all this, Israel and western capitals insisted on the story that Hamas “ruled” Gaza, and that it alone was responsible for what went on there.

That fiction was very important to the western powers. It allowed Israel to evade accountability for the crimes against humanity committed in Gaza over the past two decades – and it allowed the West to avoid complicity charges for arming the criminals.

Instead, the political and media class perpetuated the myth that Israel was engaged in a “conflict” with Hamas – as well as intermittent “wars” in Gaza – even as Israel’s own military termed its operations to destroy whole neighbourhoods and kill their residents “mowing the lawn”.

Israel, of course, viewed Gaza as its lawn to mow. And that is precisely because it never stopped occupying the enclave.

Even today western media outlets collude in the fiction that Gaza is free from Israeli occupation by casting the slaughter there – and the starvation of the population – as a “war”.

Loss of cover story

But the “day after” – signalled by Israel’s promised “capture” and “reoccupation” of Gaza – brings a conundrum for Israel and its western sponsors.

Till now Israel’s every atrocity has been justified by Hamas’ violent breakout on 7 October 2023.

Israel and its supporters have insisted that Hamas must return the Israelis it took captive before there can be some undefined “peace”. At the same time, Israel has also maintained that Gaza must be destroyed at all costs to root out Hamas and eliminate it.

These two goals never looked consistent – not least because the more Palestinian civilians Israel killed “rooting out” Hamas, the more young men Hamas recruited seeking vengeance.

The constant stream of genocidal rhetoric from Israeli leaders made clear that they believed there were no civilians in Gaza – no “uninvolved” – and that the enclave should be levelled and the population treated like “human animals”, punished with “no food, water or fuel”.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich reiterated that approach last week, vowing that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” and that its people would be ethnically cleansed – or, as he put it, forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries”.

Israeli officials have echoed him, threatening to “flatten” Gaza if the hostages are not released. But in truth, the captives held by Hamas are just a convenient pretext.

Smotrich was more honest in observing that the hostages’ release was “not the most important thing”. His view is apparently shared by the Israeli military, which has reportedly put that aim last in a list of six “war” objectives.

More important to the military are “operational control” of Gaza, “demilitarization of the territory” and “concentration and movement of the population”.

With Israel about to be indisputably, visibly in direct charge of Gaza again – with the cover stories stripped away of a “war”, of the need to eliminate of Hamas, of civilian casualties as “collateral damage” – Israel’s responsibility for the genocide will be incontestable too, as will the West’s active collusion.

That was why more than 250 former officials with Mossad, Israel’s spy agency – including three of its former heads – signed a letter this week decrying Israel’s breaking of the ceasefire in early March and its return to “war”.

The letter called Israel’s official objectives “unattainable”.

Similarly, the Israeli media reports large numbers of Israel’s military reservists are no longer showing up when called for a return to duty in Gaza.

Ethnic cleansing

Israel’s western patrons must now grapple with Israel’s “plan” for the ruined territory. Its outline has been coming more sharply into focus in recent days.

In January Israel formally outlawed the United Nations refugee agency UNRWA that feeds and cares for the large proportion of the Palestinian population driven off their historic lands by Israel in earlier phases of its decades-long colonisation of historic Palestine.

Gaza is packed with such refugees – the outcome of Israel’s biggest ethnic cleansing programme in 1948, at its creation as a “Jewish state”.

Removing UNRWA had been a long-held ambition, a move by Israel designed to help rid it of the yoke of aid agencies that have been caring for Palestinians – and thereby helping them to resist Israel’s efforts at ethnic cleansing – as well as monitoring Israel’s adherence, or rather lack of it, to international law.

For the ethnic cleansing and genocide programmes in Gaza to be completed, Israel has needed to produce an alternative system to UNRWA’s.

Last week, it approved a scheme in which it intends to use private contractors, not the UN, to deliver small quantities of food and water to Palestinians. Israel will allow in 60 trucks a day – barely a tenth of the absolute minimum required, according to the UN.

There are several catches. To stand any hope of qualifying for this very limited aid, Palestinians will need to collect it from military distribution points located in a small area at the southern tip of the Gaza strip.

In other words, some two million Palestinians will have to crowd into a location that has no chance of accommodating them all, and even then will have only a tenth of the aid they need.

They will have to relocate too without any guarantee from Israel that it won’t continue bombing the “humanitarian zones” they have been herded into.

These military distribution zones just so happen to be right next to Gaza’s sole, short border with Egypt – exactly where Israel has been seeking to drive the Palestinians over the past 19 months in the hope of forcing Egypt to open the border so the people of Gaza can be ethnically cleansed into Sinai.

Under Israel’s scheme, Palestinians will be screened in these military hubs using biometric data before they stand any hope of receiving minimum calorie-controlled handouts of food.

Once inside the hubs, they can be arrested and shipped off to one of Israel’s torture camps.

Just last week Israel’s Haaretz newspaper published testimony from an Israeli soldier turned whistleblower – confirming accounts from doctors and other guards – that torture and abuse are rife against Palestinians, including civilians, at Sde Teiman, the most notorious of the camps.

War on aid

Last Friday, shortly after Israel announced its “aid” plan, it fired a missile into an UNRWA centre in Jabaliya camp, destroying its food distribution centre and warehouse.

Then on Saturday, Israel bombed tents used for preparing food in Khan Younis and Gaza City. It has been targeting charity kitchens and bakeries to close them down, in an echo of its campaign of destruction against Gaza’s hospitals and health system.

In recent days, a third of UN-supported community kitchens – the population’s last life line – have closed because their stores of food are depleted, as is their access to fuel.

According to the UN agency OCHA, that number is rising “by the day”, leading to “widespread” hunger.

The UN reported this week that nearly half a million people in Gaza – a fifth of the population – faced “catastrophic hunger”.

Predictably, Israel and its ghoulish apologists are making light of this sea of immense suffering. Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, argued that critics were unfairly condemning Israel for starving Gaza’s population, and ignoring the health benefits of reducing “obesity” among Palestinians.

In a joint statement last week, 15 UN agencies and more than 200 charities and humanitarian groups denounced Israel’s “aid” plan. The UN children’s fund UNICEF warned that Israel was forcing Palestinians to choose between “displacement and death”.

But worse, Israel is setting up its stall once again to turn reality on its head.

Those Palestinians who refuse to cooperate with its “aid” plan will be blamed for their own starvation. And international agencies who refuse to go along with Israeli criminality will be smeared both as “antisemitic” and as responsible for the mounting toll of starvation on Gaza’s population.

There is a way to stop these crimes degenerating further. But it will require western politicians and journalists to find far more courage than they have dared muster so far. It will need more than rhetorical flourishes. It will need more than public handwringing.

Are they capable of more? Don’t hold your breath.

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

What could possibly go wrong with Ameri-snitchers running around their communities?

Don’t like your neighbor’s dog running through your yard? Call ICE. Don’t want to pay for work an immigrant just performed for you? Call ICE. Co-worker not religious or patriotic enough? Call the government’s anti-Christian bias hotline!

Calling ICE on Your Neighbors

In January, Tom Homan, appointed by Trump to oversee deportation efforts, announced plans for a government hotline where individuals can report undocumented immigrants in their communities. Homan stated, “I’m hoping people start calling ICE and reporting because we have millions of people in this country that can be force multipliers for us if they just call us with information.”

“Experts warn government-inspired informing can devolve into corrupt acts and score-settling,” Forbes’ Stuart Anderson reported. “Businesses are likely to become targets during the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Given the nature of bureaucracies, officials will assign a top priority to generating large numbers of arrests without concern for collateral impacts.”

Trump’s Anti-Christian Grievance Hotline

For decades, prominent Religious Right leaders have complained about anti-Christian bias. In early February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.

Politico’s Robbie Gramer and Nahal Toosi recently reported that “The [State Department] … will work with an administration-wide task force to collect information ‘involving anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration’ and will collect examples of anti-Christian bias through anonymous employee report forms. … Some State Department officials reacted to the cable with shock and alarm, saying that even if well-intentioned, it is based on the flawed premise that the department harbors anti-Christian bias to begin with, and warning it could create a culture of fear.”

“The instructions are clear,” Daily Kos’ Alex Samuels recently pointed out. “Give names, dates, and locations of the alleged bias, with a task force set to meet on April 22 to review the ‘evidence.’ The goal? To collect examples of religious discrimination under the Biden administration, because nothing says “freedom of religion” quite like your coworkers quietly documenting your every move for a federal task force.”

According to the Guardian:

One example of the ‘bias’ the department wants reported includes ‘mistreatment for opposing displays of flags, banners or other paraphernalia’ – a thinly veiled reference to Pride flags displayed at US embassies under the previous administration. The cable also specifically points to ‘policies related to preferred personal pronouns’ as potentially discriminatory against religious employees.

George W. Bush’s Operation TIPS

In early March  2002, professional sidekick Ed McMahon (look up Johnny Carson) introduced Attorney General John Ashcroft to an enthusiastic audience of representatives from more than 300 Neighborhood Watch groups meeting in Washington, D.C. Ashcroft unveiled an expanded mission for the Neighborhood Watch Program, announcing a grant of $1.9 million in federal funds to help the National Sheriffs’ Association double the number of participant groups to 15,000 nationwide.

According to the government’s web page at citizencorps.gov/watch.html, “Community residents will be provided with information which will enable them to recognize signs of potential terrorist activity, and to know how to report that activity, making these residents a critical element in the detection, prevention, and disruption of terrorism.” Under the supervision of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), “Terrorism prevention” was intended to become the “routine mission” of the Neighborhood Watch Program, the web site pointed out.

The new thrust of Neighborhood Watch is just part of the Bush Administration’s plan to set up a whole network of citizen snitches. In August, for instance, it will unveil a new Justice Department initiative called Operation TIPS, which stands for Terrorist Information and Prevention System.

Operation TIPS “will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity,” says the citizencorps.gov web site. Involving one million workers in ten cities during the pilot stage, Operation TIPS will be “a national reporting system…. Every participant in this new program will be given an Operation TIPS information sticker to be affixed to the cab of their vehicle or placed in some other public location so that the toll-free number is readily available.”

Encouraging people to skulk around their neighborhoods in search of immigrants, and at government workplaces hunting anti-Christian bias is a totally anti-American undertaking. Trump’s policies could easily lead to abuse and misuse, including racial profiling, false reports and personal vendettas. It could also foster fear and mistrust within communities.

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

What could possibly go wrong with Ameri-snitchers running around their communities?

Don’t like your neighbor’s dog running through your yard? Call ICE. Don’t want to pay for work an immigrant just performed for you? Call ICE. Co-worker not religious or patriotic enough? Call the government’s anti-Christian bias hotline!

Calling ICE on Your Neighbors

In January, Tom Homan, appointed by Trump to oversee deportation efforts, announced plans for a government hotline where individuals can report undocumented immigrants in their communities. Homan stated, “I’m hoping people start calling ICE and reporting because we have millions of people in this country that can be force multipliers for us if they just call us with information.”

“Experts warn government-inspired informing can devolve into corrupt acts and score-settling,” Forbes’ Stuart Anderson reported. “Businesses are likely to become targets during the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Given the nature of bureaucracies, officials will assign a top priority to generating large numbers of arrests without concern for collateral impacts.”

Trump’s Anti-Christian Grievance Hotline

For decades, prominent Religious Right leaders have complained about anti-Christian bias. In early February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.

Politico’s Robbie Gramer and Nahal Toosi recently reported that “The [State Department] … will work with an administration-wide task force to collect information ‘involving anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration’ and will collect examples of anti-Christian bias through anonymous employee report forms. … Some State Department officials reacted to the cable with shock and alarm, saying that even if well-intentioned, it is based on the flawed premise that the department harbors anti-Christian bias to begin with, and warning it could create a culture of fear.”

“The instructions are clear,” Daily Kos’ Alex Samuels recently pointed out. “Give names, dates, and locations of the alleged bias, with a task force set to meet on April 22 to review the ‘evidence.’ The goal? To collect examples of religious discrimination under the Biden administration, because nothing says “freedom of religion” quite like your coworkers quietly documenting your every move for a federal task force.”

According to the Guardian:

One example of the ‘bias’ the department wants reported includes ‘mistreatment for opposing displays of flags, banners or other paraphernalia’ – a thinly veiled reference to Pride flags displayed at US embassies under the previous administration. The cable also specifically points to ‘policies related to preferred personal pronouns’ as potentially discriminatory against religious employees.

George W. Bush’s Operation TIPS

In early March  2002, professional sidekick Ed McMahon (look up Johnny Carson) introduced Attorney General John Ashcroft to an enthusiastic audience of representatives from more than 300 Neighborhood Watch groups meeting in Washington, D.C. Ashcroft unveiled an expanded mission for the Neighborhood Watch Program, announcing a grant of $1.9 million in federal funds to help the National Sheriffs’ Association double the number of participant groups to 15,000 nationwide.

According to the government’s web page at citizencorps.gov/watch.html, “Community residents will be provided with information which will enable them to recognize signs of potential terrorist activity, and to know how to report that activity, making these residents a critical element in the detection, prevention, and disruption of terrorism.” Under the supervision of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), “Terrorism prevention” was intended to become the “routine mission” of the Neighborhood Watch Program, the web site pointed out.

The new thrust of Neighborhood Watch is just part of the Bush Administration’s plan to set up a whole network of citizen snitches. In August, for instance, it will unveil a new Justice Department initiative called Operation TIPS, which stands for Terrorist Information and Prevention System.

Operation TIPS “will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity,” says the citizencorps.gov web site. Involving one million workers in ten cities during the pilot stage, Operation TIPS will be “a national reporting system…. Every participant in this new program will be given an Operation TIPS information sticker to be affixed to the cab of their vehicle or placed in some other public location so that the toll-free number is readily available.”

Encouraging people to skulk around their neighborhoods in search of immigrants, and at government workplaces hunting anti-Christian bias is a totally anti-American undertaking. Trump’s policies could easily lead to abuse and misuse, including racial profiling, false reports and personal vendettas. It could also foster fear and mistrust within communities.

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

We speak with New York Immigration Coalition President Murad Awawdeh about a mother and three children who were swept up in an ICE raid not far from the home of Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan in Sackets Harbor, New York, handcuffed and taken to a family detention center in Texas despite having no order of deportation. A protest calling for the family’s return is planned for this Saturday, and the mayor has called a state of emergency. Awawdeh also responds to what appears to be a pattern of collaboration with the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan among local leaders and institutions in New York, from Eric Adams’s mayoral administration to Columbia University. Adams had federal corruption charges against him dropped after agreeing to support increased immigration enforcement, while Columbia had federal funding restored after allowing ICE officers to carry out arrests and searches on campus and in university-owned housing.

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

circa 1830: A slave auction in America. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)

Through the centuries, the Republic that eventuated in North America has maintained a maximum of chutzpah and minimum of awareness in forging a creation myth that sees slavery and dispossession not as foundational but as inimical to the nation now known as the United States. But, of course, to confront the ugly reality would induce sleeplessness interrupted by haunted dreams, so far this unsteadiness has prevailed.
— Dr. Gerald Horne¹

When an origin story is considered sacrosanct, any challenge to it is sacrilege.
— Prof. Abby Reisman²

In most areas of the United States, school will be starting up in a few weeks. This reminds me of the song “What Did You Learn in School Today?” which was written by Tom Paxton and then recorded and released by Pete Seeger in 1963. Paxton’s lyrics mock the misinformation and lies provided by the public school system. This prompted me to wonder what would happen if today’s school children returned home from school and responded to Paxton’s question.

You’ll need to imagine that their teacher, (let’s call her, Ms Brown) is able to recast what follows in age appropriate language, a skill that lies far beyond my limited capacity and that he adopted a creative, critical thinking approach and not rote learning. Finally, how the precocious student conveys this information to parents might take the form of a jumbled response but we can hope the essential information is intact.

Okay. How about something along the following lines: “What did you learn in school today?” We discussed the America Revolution in 1776 and Ms Brown said that when she was in school, she was taught that the American Revolution was about besieged colonists courageously standing up against British tyranny and it was all about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She said the textbook authors characterized it as a glorious confirmation of American exceptionalism.

One of countless celebratory examples that she was taught was from Joseph J. Ellis, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 (New York: Liveright 2021). According to Ellis and other myth-making historians, the greatest activity of this “Revolutionary generation” was their devotion to popular sovereignty and their “common sense of purpose.”³

Ms Brown said that she later learned that this devotion excluded the majority of people in the new nation and that slavery existed in all 13 British colonies and had begun at least in 1619. And Africans weren’t the only ones aware of specious reasoning in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Hutchinson, the last colonial governor of Massachusetts, queried that if the rights were “absolutely inalienable” how could the delegates deprive so many Africans of “their right to liberty?”⁴ And this apparently included George Washington’s order for the genocidal attack on the Haudenosaunee nation in upstate New York where more than 40 villages were burned to the ground and all crops and winter provisions destroyed. Those not killed or captured fled to Canada. This event was, in truth, an example of the Founder’s “common purpose.”

We learned that in 1700, roughly 75 percent of land in colonial New York state was owned by only 12 individuals. In Virginia, 1.7 million acres was held by seven individuals.⁵ In 1760, less than five hundred men in just five colonies controlled most of the shipping, banking, mining and manufacturing on the eastern seaboard and in1767 the richest 10 percent of Boston’s taxpayers had 66 percent of Boston’s taxable income while some 30 percent had no property at all.⁶ Ms Brown said that fifty-six of these propertied men later signed the Declaration of Independence.⁷

Many of the Founders were not only slave holders but obsessive land speculators This included George Washington who began acquiring land in 1752, while still a teenager. He eventually owned more than 70,000 acres in what became seven states and the District of Colombia. Ms Brown smiled and said, “I cannot tell a lie. George Washington became the richest person in America.” We also learned that even before King George III issued his Proclamation forbidding settlements from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi, individuals and colonial land speculators were staking claims to millions of acres of and were eager to push forward into Indigenous land. Ms. Brown said that we must consider the possibility that Native dispossession and exclusion played a key role in creating the country through speculative capitalism.⁸ The patriotic fantasy or fig leaf for all of this was that America was destined by God to expand democracy and the Protestant ethos to the native inhabitants.

Ms Brown said we should always look for other sources of information and rely on evidence. She learned from her own reading — outside of school — that there’s an entirely different view of the so-called Revolutionary War of 1776 and that it was actually part of a “counter-revolution,” a conservative movement that the “Founding Fathers” — Britain’s “revolting spawn” — fought to oust London. When the colonial elites broke with the Mother Country, the world’s first-ever apartheid state came into being.⁹ We learned that in the 1770s, the British Parliament was moving toward abolition and in 1773 there was the famous Somerset case in Britain in which Lord Mansfield banned slavery — calling it “odious” —within the country but not yet in the colonies. There was a real fear that Britain would soon cease to support slavery in the thirteen colonies. Simultaneously, Alexander Hamilton, another Founding Father, bought and sold slaves for his wife’s family, owned slaves himself and called Indigenous people “savages.”

More specifically, Ms Brown told us that “…In November 1775, Lord Dunsmore in Virginia issued his famous — or infamous, in the view of the settlers — edict offering to free and arm Africans to squash an anti-colonial revolt, he entered a pre-existing maelstrom of insecurity about the fate of slavery and London’s intentions. And by speaking so bluntly, Dunsmore converted the moderates into radicals.” Indeed, another expert on the Colonial period says that Dunsmore’s edict “did more than any another measure to spur uncommitted white Americans into the camp of rebellion.”¹⁰ Our teacher said that many more Africans — some estimates run as high as 100,000 — allied with the Red Coats rather than with their masters. Of course there were risks for the Africans because if the Revolution succeeded they would be considered traitors and punished as such. It was a terrifying choice and their fears were justified because after the 1776-1783 Revolutionary War, tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people were returned to enslavement.

We learned that in 1787, after the war, James Madison made sure that the Constitution guaranteed that the government would, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” He was firmly against agrarian reform of any sort and opposed to anything akin to actual functioning democracy. Why? Because the majority — the poor and landless — might use the political power they were granted to force a redistribution of wealth.

We learned that the British were jeopardizing numerous fortunes, not only based on slavery, but the slave trade. So, the war was necessary to protect the freedom of a small white elite to maintain slavery and further, not have any interference as they went ahead with dispossessing and exterminating indigenous people. In short, British colonialism was replaced with U.S. capitalist state colonialism.¹¹

Ms Brown said there was evidence strongly suggesting that the American Revolution was, in the words of historian William Hoagland, “The first chapter in an inter-imperial war between Great Britain and its dissident elite in North America.” We learned that the Euro-American elite ‘patriots” had only contempt and fear of actual democracy which they termed “The tyranny of the majority.” One historian pointed out that “The American state, even in its earliest incarnation was more concerned with limiting popular democracy than securing and expanding it.”¹² He told us that the Declaration’s phrase “Life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” was changed in the Constitution to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property.”

In support of this revisionist history, Ms Brown shared a few excerpts from Howard Zinn’s magisterial book, A People’s History of the United States, in which he cogently explains that over a relatively short period, the colonial elite were able to:

… take over land, profits and power from the British empire. In the process they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new privileged leadership. When we look at the American Revolution in that way it was a work of genius.

The Declaration of Independence was a wonderfully useful device because the language of liberty and equality could unite just enough whites to fight for the Revolution, without ending either slavery or inequality.

…the rebellion against British rule allowed a certain group of the colonial elite to replace those loyal to England, give some benefits to small holders and leave poor white working people and tenant farmers in very much the same situation.¹³

Finally, we considered that in 1776, nascent capitalists pulled off the ultimate coup and succeeded in “convincing the deluded and otherwise naive (to this very day) that this naked grab for land, slaves and power was somehow a great leap forward for humanity.”¹⁴

Just before the bell rang, one kid in my class asked the teacher, “If what we’ve previously been taught about the American Revolution may not be true what else may not be true?” Ms Brown said that was a good question and we’d talk about it next week and also do some role playing.

ENDNOTES:

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

On January 31, the beginning of Tet, eighty-thousand Vietnamese troops issued Washington a formal eviction notice, attacking all the major cities and towns of colonial South Vietnam. Blasting through the walls of the U.S. Embassy compound, they killed two military police and holding off a helicopter assault for seven hours. Government employees arrived at work to find corpses twisted over the ornamental shrubbery and pools of blood in the white gravel rocks of the embassy garden.

They shelled the U.S. naval base at Camrahn Bay and threw open the jails in Quang Ngai city, setting thousands free. They marched nearly unresisted into the ancient capital of Hue and raised the Vietcong flag from its Citadel. They forced the U.S. to raze half the city to the ground at Ben Tre, which an American officer infamously justified on the grounds that, “We had to destroy the town to save it.”

After endless boasts of imminent victory, U.S. troops being home by Christmas, and the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, the Vietnamese Tet Offensive proved beyond all doubt that a U.S. military victory in Vietnam was not in the cards.

Wall Street turned against the war.

In March, LBJ discovered his Vietnam policy had left him no path to a second term. Though elected in a landslide in 1964, four years later his “Great Society” had turned to riot and left him a lonely prisoner of the White House. Wherever he went he was besieged by throngs of outraged students taunting him with “that horrible song” – “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” No matter how many speeches he canceled or how abruptly he changed his travel plans he could not avoid being “chased on all sides by a giant stampede.” The people were firing the president.

Support for escalation in Vietnam had evaporated. Worried that fulfilling General Westmoreland’s request for 206,000 more troops would leave Washington insufficiently protected against the threat of insurrection at home, a Council of Wise Men told a shocked Johnson to cut his losses and withdraw from the war before it tore the U.S. apart.

By then 150,000 Americans were dead or injured and much of Southeast Asia had been annihilated by a U.S. military machine that could do everything but stop. On March 31 Johnson went on nationwide TV to announce his forced retirement: “I shall not seek, and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

Four days later Dr. King was assassinated for having publicly connected the dots between domestic racism and imperial war. A year to the day before he was shot he was widely condemned for a speech he gave before a crowd of three thousand at Riverside Church in New York City, where he did not mince words about the war:

“The peasants watched as we supported a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself with extortionist landlords and executed its political opponents. The peasants watched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned their huts, annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into the towns, where thousands of homeless children wandered the streets like animals, begging for food and selling their mothers and sisters to American soldiers. What do the peasants think as we test our weapons on them, as the Germans tested new medicines and tortures in Europe’s concentration camps? . . . .We have destroyed their land and crushed their only non-Communist revolutionary political force – the Unified Buddhist Church. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators!”

A year later he was in Memphis to help striking Memphis garbage workers. The night of April 3 an exhausted and dispirited King was already in his pajamas and ready for bed when he received a call from Reverend Ralph Abernathy at Mason Temple, informing him that two thousand people had braved tornado warnings and a driving rain to hear him speak. “I really think you should come down,” pleaded Abernathy. “The people want to hear you, not me. This is your crowd.”

Dr. King got dressed and went out into the stormy night.

In the blaze of lights at the podium, he appeared nervous. He told his audience that if he were at God’s side on the dawn of creation he would ask to see Moses liberating his people, Plato and Aristotle debating philosophy, Renaissance Europe, Luther tacking his ninety-five theses on the church door, Lincoln emancipating the slaves, and Roosevelt charting a path to the New Deal. But he would not dally in those times or places, he said, preferring to move on and experience just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, when masses around the world rose up to say: “We want to be free.”

Dr. King, abandoned by militants, vilified by the press, stalked by death and the FBI, felt deeply grateful to share in the freedom struggles that heaped his life with hardship.

With the crowd shouting its approval, he bellowed that he had been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land. Brushing aside prospects of premature death, he said that longevity had its place, but that on that night he was not worried about any thing, not fearing any man.

A burning passion in his eyes, his voice rising to a shattering crescendo, he declared his last will and testament: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

The next day as he was preparing to go out to dinner with friends a bullet exploded into his face, severed his spine, and brought him crashing abruptly down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

Reverend Abernathy bolted to his side, crying out to those in the parking lot below: “Oh my God, Martin’s been shot!”

Dr. King, a look of terror in his eyes, clutched uselessly at his throat. His head lay in an expanding pool of blood. Abernathy tried to comfort him. “This is Ralph, this is Ralph, don’t be afraid.” Reverend King, still conscious, his magnificent voice silenced forever, couldn’t answer. But Abernathy felt he was communicating through his eyes.

In King’s motel room, Reverend Billy Kyle repeatedly banged his head against the wall as he screamed into the phone for an operator. Dashing up sobbing from the parking lot, Andrew Young groped for a pulse, then screamed: “Oh my God, my God, it’s all over!”

Everywhere at once riots erupted and cities burned.

Three weeks after King’s assassination Columbia exploded in protest. President Grayson Kirk, alarmed at the growing youth rebellion, announced that in disturbing numbers young people rejected all forms of authority, which was just another way of saying that all forms of authority were increasingly recognized to have discredited themselves.

Hundreds of students promptly took over the university, hoisting red flags, establishing community government, and barricading themselves inside campus buildings.

They purloined documents from Kirk’s office showing that the university was secretly promoting classified war research and working to “clean up” the neighborhood by moving out its Black and Puerto Rican residents. Resurrecting the spirit of the Paris Commune, the students debated meaning and tactics, relaxed to Dylan and the Beatles, and celebrated romance. Two students even got married, escorted to the center of an applauding circle by a candlelight procession of fellow protestors.

Eight days into deadlocked negotiations a thousand blue collar police were turned loose on the defecting sons and daughters of the Ivy League. Attacking with clubs and brass knuckles, they rioted for three hours, smashing up furniture and beating everyone in sight while carrying out a bloody mass arrest.

One hundred and twenty charges of police brutality were filed against the police department, the most in its history. Echoing the recently assassinated Che Guevara, Tom Hayden called for “one, two, many Columbias” in romantic hopes of bringing the racist imperial state tumbling down.

Days after the start of the Columbia revolt, student radicals in Paris surged into the streets chorusing “all power to the imagination,” propelling France to the brink of cultural revolution and setting the mighty franc to trembling.

Spontaneously embracing and kissing in the streets, tens of thousands of students and workers marched joyously together through the capital, waving red flags and singing the Internationale. Demanding workers’ power, peasants’ power, and students’ power, they announced the end of cooperation with soulless mechanization and bureaucratic arrogance.

On The Night Of The Barricades the fiercest street fighting since Liberation (WWII) shook the Latin Quarter as thousands of students marched in protest, overturning cars and trucks. The police attacked, beating them with clubs and rifle butts, kicking the rebels unconscious and dragging them through tear-gas clotted streets by the hair.  The students fought back with Molotov cocktails, filling them with siphoned gas and pushing vehicles into the middle of the street to serve as barricades. When the police charged, the protesters torched the cars and retreated behind sturdier lines while building residents tossed down water and wet cloths to aid their youthful comrades fighting with cobblestones.

A veteran of the clash reported, “I never felt the gas. I was never more alive.”

In 1968, even Catholic pacifists were moved to a more aggressive style of protest. On May 17, what became known as the Catonsville Nine entered the Catonsville, Maryland draft board office and doused a pile of draft records with their blood, then set them on fire with soap chips and gasoline, a homemade napalm recipe gleaned from a Green Beret handbook. While waiting to be arrested, they prayed and watched the records burn.

At their trial they spoke of United Fruit Company keeping Central American land fallow while the campesinos starved. They told of the CIA overthrowing the elected government of Guatemala and replacing it with a reign of butchers worthy of Hitler. Father Daniel Berrigan told of his visit to Hanoi, of the merciless U.S. bombings, of the weaponry certified improved through tests on Vietnamese flesh and bone. He read a statement explaining how simple humanity required the destruction of the draft files:

“Our apologies good friends . . . for the fracture of good order . . . the burning of paper instead of children . . . the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house . . . We could not so help us God do otherwise for we are sick at heart . . . our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children.”

In early June U.S. support for Israeli savagery caused Sirhan Sirhan to temporarily lose his mind. He had been just three years old when a series of violent episodes near his Jerusalem home scarred him for life. A dynamite bomb hurled by Zionists blew up a line of Arab passengers waiting for a bus at the Damascus Gate; a sudden burst of gunfire caused an army truck to swerve around a barrier and kill his older brother before his eyes; a British soldier blown up almost on his doorstep left behind a severed leg in a church tower and a finger in Sirhan’s back yard.

Nineteen years later Sirhan was living in Pasadena when Israel bombed and napalmed Palestinian refugee camps, subjugating what remained of historic Palestine in the Six Day Land Grab (1967), a sequel to the driving out of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, among them Sirhan and his family.

With his people tasting another round of bitter injustice, Sirhan watched Senator Robert Kennedy wearing a yarmulke on television and promising to cut off U.S. aid to Arab states while sending fifty new Phantom jets to Israel. Shocked, angry, horrified, he fled the television set in tears, covering his ears with his hands.

He scribbled in his notebook: RFK must die.

At his trial for the assassination of Senator Kennedy, Sirhan testified to the assassination of an entire nation:

“Well, sir, when you move – when you move a whole country, sir, a whole people, bodily from their own homes, from their own land, from their own businesses, sir, outside their country, and introduce an alien people, sir, into Palestine – the Jews and the Zionists – that is completely wrong, sir, and it is unjust and the Palestinian Arabs didn’t do a thing, sir, to justify the way they were treated by the West.

“It affected me, sir, very deeply. I didn’t like it. Where is the justice involved, sir? Where is the love, sir, for fighting for the underdog? Israel is no underdog in the Middle East, sir. It’s those refugees that are underdogs. And because they have no way of fighting back, sir, the Jews, sir, the Zionists, just keep beating away at them. That burned the hell out of me.”

Nobody paid him the slightest attention.  In spite of Israel’s constant provocations and attacks, Jews were everywhere portrayed as heroic, avenging victims, Arabs as congenital terrorists, and Israel’s Six Day Land Grab as a glorious warding off of a second Holocaust. Facts were entirely irrelevant.

With hopes of a peace candidate now definitively crushed, all eyes turned to Chicago as the Democratic Party prepared to nominate Hubert Humphrey there as its candidate for the presidency. Eighty percent of Democratic voters had chosen to support either RFK or Eugene McCarthy in hopes of negotiating an end to the Vietnam slaughter. Faced with LBJ’s vice-president heading up the ticket, anti-war protesters vowed to lay siege to the city as a prelude to what they somehow imagined might become a revolution.

Protest was out of favor in the Windy City. In response to the nationwide riots that followed Dr. King’s assassination, the Chicago Tribune opined that “Here in Chicago we are not dealing with the colored population, but with a minority of criminal scum,” and urged Mayor Richard Daley not to be like the “spineless and indecisive mayors who muffed early riot control” in Newark (1967) and Los Angeles (1965). Daley obliged, ordering his police officers to “shoot to kill.”

Loathing “longhairs,” Daley refused to issue permits for protest marches, rallies, or sleeping in the parks. He ordered the city Ampitheatre fenced off with barbed wire, put all twelve thousand Chicago police on 12-hour shifts, and mobilized six thousand National Guard troops. He posted a thousand FBI agents around the city and placed six thousand U.S. Army troops outfitted with flamethrowers, bazookas, and bayonets around the suburbs. With police outnumbering protesters three or four to one, Tom Hayden told members of a New York audience to come to Chicago prepared to shed their blood.

As summer waned the Convention convened, and following days of dangerous cat-and-mouse games in the streets between police and protesters, a brownshirt riot ensued.

Shouting kill, kill, kill, a squadron of red-faced, blue-helmeted, club-wielding police charged out of a bus at full-speed and attacked a jeering crowd of onlookers outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel, beating, choking, kicking and macing everyone in their path, including medics sporting Red Cross armbands. Like maddened Samurai they mowed their victims down, charging again and again, leaving the battered bodies bleeding in the street. Loading them onto the ambulances, they beat them once more.

Eyes bulging with hate, they drove the crowd through the window of the Haymarket Lounge, jumping through the glass shards to upend tables and smash everything inside. They screamed “get the fuck out of here,” and “move your fucking ass,” beating even the startled patrons of the bar. Undeterred by the presence of live TV cameras, they rioted in clouds of tear gas for seventeen long minutes while the surrounding crowd chanted, “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.”

Across the street in his hotel shower Hubert Humphrey was briefly overcome from the effects of the gas, which he never was from the horrors of Vietnam.

When televised images of the bloodshed reached the floor of the Democratic Convention, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff stepped to the rostrum to denounce the “Gestapo tactics” of the police. In an instant Chicago Mayor Daley was on his feet, waving his arms and screaming in protest: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker go home.”

As the ballots were being cast, footage of the police riot was beamed across the nation. Viewers saw Hubert Humphrey, irrepressible advocate of the politics of joy, nominated for president in a sea of blood.

Of course, all this was but child’s play compared to the unrestrained violence being inflicted on the slopes and dinks and zipperheads – otherwise known as the Vietnamese people – by the U.S. war machine in Vietnam. Two years later in Detroit, Vietnam Veterans gave chilling testimony as to the type of crimes being committed:

“ . . . they didn’t believe our body counts. So we had to cut off the right ear of everybody we killed to prove our body count.”

“ . . . we threw full C-ration cans at kids at the side of the road. Well, just for a joke, these guys would take a full can, and throw it as hard as they could at a kid’s head. I saw several kids’ heads split wide open.”

“The philosophy was that anybody running must be a Viet Cong; he must have something to hide or else he would stick around for the Americans, not taking into consideration that he was running from the Americans because they were continually shooting at him. So they shot down anybody who was running.”

“This was common policy. Kill anything you want to kill, any time you want to kill it – just don’t get caught.”

“ . . . the heads of the bodies were cut off and they were placed on stakes, jammed down on stakes, and were placed in the middle of the trails and a Cav patch was hammered into the top of his head, with Bravo Company’s ‘B’ written right on the patch.”

“I saw during my tour 20 deformed infants under the age of one . . . I thought it was congenital or something, from venereal disease, because they had flippers and things . . . it was common knowledge that Agent Orange was sprayed in the area.”

“Fugas is a jelly-like substance. It’s flammable . . . they explode the barrel over an area and this flaming, jelly-like substance lands on everything . . . people or animals or whatever.”

“You could take the wires of a jeep battery put it almost any place on their body, and you’re going to shock the hell out of the guy. The basic place you put it was the genitals.”

In other words, the conduct of the United States in Southeast Asia during the war years was nothing short of a complete disgrace. Washington dropped eight million tons of bombs and nearly four hundred thousand tons of napalm, leaving behind twenty-one million bomb craters. It killed over two million Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Laotians, wounded over three million more, and scattered fourteen million traumatized refugees throughout Indochina. It rained down eighteen million gallons of Agent Orange and other defoliants, creating forests bereft of trees, animals or birds, and cursing the war’s survivors with extraordinary rates of liver cancer, miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects. It left in its wake eighty-three thousand amputees, forty thousand people blinded or deaf, and hundreds of thousands of orphans, prostitutes, disabled, mentally ill, and drug addicts.

The total effect was nearly permanent, as journalist Donovan Webster discovered on a visit to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) in the mid-1990s.  There he saw a storage room stacked from floor to ceiling on all four sides with deformed fetuses, the final result of the Pentagon’s defoliation program begun three decades before. Some were double bodies fused together on a single torso, others had malformed faces, many had excess heads, fingers, and toes.

Donovan walked out of the storage room in shock.

In a nursery down the hall, a roomful of genetically-damaged orphans was overjoyed to meet the U.S. reporter come to visit them from overseas.

Sources:

 On Vietnam and the Tet Offensive:

Godfrey Hodgson, America In Our Time, (Vintage, 1976) p. 353-4; Frances Fitzgerald, Fire In The Lake – The Vietnamese and The Americans in Vietnam, (Vintage, 1972) p. 518-34; George McTurnan and John W. Lewis, The United States In Vietnam, (Delta, 1969) p. 371-3; Douglas Dowd, Blues For America, (Monthly Review, 1997) p. 153; Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 289; David Harris, Our War (Random House, 1996) p. 89; Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War, (Pantheon, 1985) p. 308-9; Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian, (Little, Brown, 1994) p. 214

On MLK and his assassination:

Steven B. Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound – The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper and Row, 1982) p. 435, 483-6; PBS Documentary, 1968 – The Year That Shaped A Generation.

On the Columbia protests:

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, (Bantam, 1987) p. 306-8; Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 304-5; Barbara and John Ehrenreich, Long March, Short Spring, The Student Uprising At Home and Abroad, (Monthly Review, 1969) p. 125-7, 145; Tom Hayden, Reunion, A Memoir, (Random House, 1978) p. 276-82

On the French student-worker protests:

Barbara and John Ehrenreich, Long March, Short Spring, The Student Uprising At Home and Abroad, (Monthly Review, 1969 p. 73-102 passim; PBS Documentary, 1968: The Year That Shaped A Generation

 On the Berrigan brothers and The Catonsville Nine:

Phillip Berrigan with Fred. A Wilcox, Fighting The Lamb’s War: Skirmishes With The American Empire, (Common Courage, 1996) p. 80, 93, 96, 101-5; Daniel Berrigan, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Beacon, 1970) p. vii; William M. Kunstler with Sheila Isenberg, My Life As A Radical Lawyer, (Carol Publishing Group, 1994) p. 190.

On Sirhan Sirhan and RFK:

Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection – What Price Peace? (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1978) p. 242-3

Note: A slightly different version of Sirhan’s mental collapse comes from the late Alexander Cockburn, who says Sirhan was driven over the edge from reading an account of the Phantom jets to Israel written by Andrew Kopkind in the Nation. See Jeffrey St. Clair, “Roaming Charges: the Return of Assassination Politics,” Counterpunch, August 12, 2016

On Sirhan Sirhan directly quoted from his trial:

Godfrey Jansen, Why Robert Kennedy Was Killed, (Third Press, 1970) frontispiece.

For an honest account of the Six Day War:

Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995).

On Mayor Daley and protest at the 1968 Democratic Convention:

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, (Bantam, 1987) p. 320-6, Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir, (Random House, 1988) p. 297

On the Chicago police riots:

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 332-4; David Farber, Chicago, (University of Chicago, 1988) p. 200-1, 249; Daniel Walker, Rights In Conflict, (E. P. Dutton,  1968) p. 255-65; Mike Royko, Boss, (Signet, 1971) p. 188-9; Mark L. Levine et al, eds. The Tales of Hoffman (Bantam, 1970); p. 124; Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 297

On Vietnam Veterans’ testimony about war atrocities:

Vietnam Veterans Against The War, The Winter Soldier Investigation (Beacon, 1972) p. 5-114 passim

On statistics of the overall damage done by the Vietnam War:

Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar – Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race, (St. Martin’s 1989) p. 44; Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm – Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (South End, 1979), p. 7-9

On the long-lasting effects of the defoliation campaign in Vietnam:

Donovan Webster, Aftermath – The Remnants of War (Pantheon, 1996) p. 214-17

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michael K. Smith.

On Wednesday, Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo reported that Russian authorities refused to renew Colás’ visa, the outlet’s longtime correspondent in Moscow, and gave him 24 hours to leave Russia after working in the country for 12 years. 

“The hasty and unceremonious treatment Spanish journalist Xavier Colás received when being expelled from Russia demonstrates how keen the Russian authorities are to silence independent reporting,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities should renew Colás’ visa and let him return and work in the country unless they are afraid of journalists.”

According to the outlet, late on Tuesday, March 19, a Russian official told Colás when he went to collect his visa that he would “have problems” if he did not leave before his visa expired. The journalist left Russia the next day, according to media reports. 

“It’s hard to suddenly put 12 years of your life in three suitcases overnight and close the door knowing that that apartment will also be forbidden territory for you the next day,” Colás told El Mundo.

In a Twitter post, Colás wrote that the refusal to renew his visa happened “at the last minute.” 

He added, “I don’t regret anything. I have simply done my job: I have told what is happening, I have talked to the people who are suffering because of it, and I have explained who is responsible for what is happening.”

Colás, who recently reported on presidential elections in Russia, has also been covering the war in Ukraine. In February, he published Putinistan, a book critical of Putin’s regime.  

“The refusal to renew a journalist’s visa is one of the usual tools used by certain regimes to harm freedom of expression and prevent international coverage with autocracies such as Vladimir Putin’s, obsessed with controlling information,” El Mundo said, adding that Colás had remained in Moscow “to date” and “despite the regime’s hostility toward independent journalism.”

Russia tightened visa and accreditation rules for foreign correspondents after its February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with renewals required every three months, rather than once a year as previously required, according to mediareports. 

Russia has a history of expelling foreign reporters, including The Guardian’s Luke Harding in 2011 and the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford and Tom Vennink of the Dutch daily de Volkskrant in 2021. Since the start of Ukraine’s full-scale invasion, Russian authorities have failed to renew the visas and accreditations of Finnish journalists Arja Paananen and Anna-Lena Laurén, and of Dutch journalist Eva Hartog.

In March 2023, The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich was arrested on espionage charges, the first American journalist to face such accusations by Russia since the end of the Cold War. Russia has also detained Alsu Kurmasheva, a U.S-Russian dual citizen and an editor with the Tatar-Bashkir service of U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) since October 2023 on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent and of spreading “fake” information about the Russian army.

CPJ emailed the Russian Foreign Ministry for comment but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

Georgia’s death chamber.

Georgia is poised to execute Mr. Willie Pye, a Black man, on March 20th, the very same day that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s seminal work Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in book form, to global acclaim, in 1852. Many are likely unaware of this date’s historical significance, but as someone who grew up not far from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, CT, it is an alignment that strikes me as significant. This certainly unintended synchronicity highlights yet again the unmistakable link between slavery and the death penalty, and the fitting use of the same word – abolition – to apply to the movements to end both of these menacing institutions. 

It is well-known that the death penalty in its historical context is demonstrably a “descendant of slavery, lynching and segregation.” Likewise, it is well-established that racial bias against defendants of color has a strong effect on who is ultimately capitally prosecuted, sentenced to death, and executed. Whereas Willie Pye was indeed convicted of a capital crime, the only “crime” committed by the appropriately controversial character of Uncle Tom–based in part on the Rev. Josiah Henson–was that he was born African-American and, therefore, a slave in antebellum America. Still, racism, a legacy of lynching, and the system of mass incarceration–which Michelle Alexander poignantly coined as “The New Jim Crow” – form a historical arc that connects America’s “peculiar institution” of slavery to its persistent death chambers, thereby linking the lethal plights of the literary figure of Uncle Tom with the very real Mr. Pye.

Willie Pye.

Statistics in Georgia and in Mr. Pye’s case present glaring examples of this long arm of historical injustice. As Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty has revealed, Spalding County, where Mr Pye was tried and convicted in the mid-1990s, has sought the death penalty disproportionately against Black defendants. Additionally, Mr. Pye’s trial attorney Johnny B. Mostiler was not only wildly ineffective but had a long and well-documented history of anti-Black racism. In his grossly inadequate defense of Mr. Pye, he failed to assemble a team that should have included a mitigation specialist with the expertise required to conduct a thorough investigation into his client’s deeply traumatic childhood and the pervasive racism in the community in which he was raised. The jury notably did not hear that Mr. Pye was reared in an environment of severe poverty, neglect, and abuse. Neither did they see the vast evidence of the violence and chaos in his household, including the fact that Child and Family Services was called into his home often, but never saw fit to remove young Willie to a safer place. Rather, the jury only heard a single fleeting reference to the fact that his family was poor. 

These glaring omissions, as well as equally prodigious oversights regarding Mr. Pye’s intellectual disability and non-violence in prison, contributed to the verdict of death that Georgia’s law allowed the jury to hand down to Mr. Pye. How fitting, indeed, that the state chose to enforce the aspect of its law that would allow it to kill Mr. Pye, rather than those systems of laws that might have allowed it to rescue him from his broken childhood home as a child. Mr. Pye’s slated March 20th execution date calls to mind the former Southern laws that allowed slave owner Simon Legree to command his overseers to put Uncle Tom to death without a fair trial, a fate that has been shared by countless African Americans. 

Just as racism has found this insidious way to allow for state-sanctioned murder in the form of executions, so, too, does its scourge inspire countless souls to oppose it. As the co-founder of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty,” – a group of nearly 3,300 individuals worldwide – I am among those in whom a fire has been lit to work to eradicate this cancerous blight on the Peach State, and across the globe. On Sept. 21st, 2011, it was none other than Georgia that infamously put to death another African-American, Troy Davis, an innocent man whose case captured the hearts of so many individuals, including this cantor, who was a younger Jewish prison chaplain at the time.  Not until well after that fateful day did I discover that lethal injection–Georgia’s preferred killing method for Troy Davis, Willie Pye and others it condemns to death – perpetuates the demonic mark of yet another notorious, racist regime that directly targeted my own people. Let there be no doubt: lethal injection is a direct Nazi legacy. It was first implemented in this world by the Third Reich as part of its infamous Aktion T4 protocol used to kill people deemed “unworthy of life.” That protocol was developed by Dr. Carl Brandt, the personal physician of Adolf Hitler. This unconscionable Nazi imprimatur, as well as that of the “novel” gassing executions now being proposed and carried out across the nation –  including via Zyklon B, as used in Auschwitz – has made it a non-starter for the Black and Jewish communities to stand united in the sacred cause of abolishing capital punishment. 

To offset these macabre historical arcs and ongoing cycles of violence that this March 20th unwittingly brings full circle, one is reminded of the famous quote of renowned death penalty abolitionist Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr.  “The arc of the moral universe is long,” Dr. King proffered, “but it bends towards justice.” King was echoing the words of 19th-century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who like Harriet Beecher Stowe was an avowed slavery abolitionist. They were ultimately successful in their mission, of course, a fact that should inspire all those engaged in this latest iteration of the abolitionist cause. In order to be on the correct arc of history, Georgians should sign the growing petition to spare the life of Mr. Pye, and join the cause of death penalty abolition, relinquishing the racist and Nazi legacy of the death penalty once and for all. 

When Abraham Lincoln encountered Harriet Beecher Stowe, he famously called her “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Perhaps with the efforts of today’s generation of abolitionists, the United States can take the necessary step of finally erasing the death penalty’s remaining lethal footprint from that awful conflagration that defined an age, and whose central issue–racism–still casts its deadly shadow across America in 2024. 

The post From “Uncle Tom” to Willie Pye: Abolishing the Racist Legacy of the Death Penalty appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

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

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

— Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, 1935

In The Death of Expertise, national security expert Tom Nichols warns that knowledge is under attack by an ill-informed public determined to replace it with popular ignorance. Though this is not entirely possible – no society could survive such a transition – the breakdown in trust between experts and laypeople underlying this misguided ambition is making the U.S. ungovernable. Experts are held in contempt, sometimes for their errors, but increasingly simply because they are experts and laypeople are not. Knowledge inequality is taken to be as contemptible as wealth inequality, on the assumption that those in possession of it consider themselves smarter and better than the less educated. Aspiring to acquire knowledge and use it to enlighten others, once a noble ambition, now signals elitist arrogance.

Furthermore, where once we were entitled to our own opinions but not our own facts, today proliferating digital tribes proudly circulate self-justifying”alternative facts” without the inconvenience of being challenged. The Internet, though not the cause of this phenomenon, does aggravate it, since the “information superhighway” has degenerated into a galaxy of glittering websites eagerly catering to popular delusions on a growing range of topics. What now passes for “research” refers to scanning a few algorithm-curated lines that confirm one’s prejudices, then clicking away satisfied one’s half-baked notions have been proven right.

Easy access to vast troves of information, the debasement of university education into a consumer experience in which “the customer is always right,” and the fusion of news and entertainment into a 24-hour cycle of mind-killing spectacle, all have helped produce this situation, writes Nichols, yielding a deeply ignorant public nevertheless convinced it holds infallible judgment on a nearly limitless range of topics.

Formal democratic governance based on expert advice and popular ratification has therefore become nearly impossible, because increasing numbers of laypeople not only lack basic knowledge, but reject rules of evidence, effectively eliminating any possibility of logical debate. Strength of conviction, not persuasiveness of logic, determines the “winner” of disagreements, with more and more people succumbing to narcissistic self-congratulation on the grounds that, “I’m passionately convinced I’m right; therefore, how could I be wrong?”

In this emerging Dis-United States of Self-Righteousness we risk discarding centuries of accumulated knowledge and eroding the disciplines that allow us to acquire new knowledge. No democracy, even the very partial democracy that has existed in the U.S. to date, can survive such a trend.

The problem actually goes considerably beyond mere ignorance, observes Nichols, because want of knowledge can be remedied by study, whereas today’s popular impulse is to reject study itself on the grounds that ignorance trumps established knowledge. This is “the outrage of an increasingly narcissistic culture” that cannot tolerate any inequality, even that of knowledge. Equal rights has become equal validity of all opinions, the more crackpot the better, a proposition whose self-contradictory nature is rarely noted.

Furthermore, latter day know-nothings want to kick away the intellectual ladder that has permitted us to ascend to an age of at least semi-reason: “The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge,” says Nichols. “It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.”

We need not look far to find evidence supporting Nichols’s thesis. In the Covid-19 era we have seen massive and painful verification of it, with credentialed grifters and scientifically illiterate trolls lecturing career virologists and immunologists about the complexities of viruses and vaccines, all the while insisting on quack treatments as Covid deaths soar. Nurses and doctors confirm that many Covid sufferers willed themselves to unnecessary deaths clinging to medical delusions.[1] Though this is merely one example among many, the fact that people will die rather than let go of their mistaken opinions hauntingly confirms the validity of the author’s main point.

Nichols’s solution for this dismal state of affairs is for laypeople to re-engage the effort to be responsible citizens in a democracy, follow a variety of reputable news sources, at least one of which takes an editorial line contrary to one’s own views, and recognize that the public has a need to collaborate with experts, not shout them down.

This all sounds eminently sensible, at least for the more literate half of the population, and one can hardly argue with the conclusion that the U.S. public needs to be much better informed. Unfortunately, however, Nichols nowhere takes note of the impact of elite ideology, which relentlessly pumps a false world view into the public mind, one that vastly exceeds in impact all the ravings of crackpot conspiracy theorists put together.[2]

Nevertheless, those who debunk the establishment’s self-justifying propaganda are given short shrift by Nichols. For example, he dismisses Ward Churchill without examination because the former ethnic studies professor was fired for plagiarism, a conclusion that is narrowly correct but disingenuous in the extreme. Churchill’s real offense was insulting the national self-image by comparing “good Americans” working within a murderous U.S. empire to “good Germans” working under the Nazis, amplifying the provocation by drawing a parallel with Adolf Eichmann. This produced a familiar tsunami of public hysteria that culminated in an “examination” of Churchill’s published works obviously designed to find cause to fire him. In the event, four footnotes among thousands in his published works were found to be objectionable. This horrifying “plagiarism” largely consisted of Churchill re-using content from his previously published books, written in activist settings, sometimes in conjunction with others, where no money or reputational issues were at stake. Ho hum. Such an offense, if it really qualifies as such, is far less serious than Dr. King’s lifting of whole passages without attribution in his doctoral dissertation, but if we retroactively treat King the way we did Ward Churchill we will have to make ourselves party to a second assassination. Nichols cares about none of this, convinced that Churchill deserved what he got.

Here we see – once again – cancel culture wreaking havoc, with Churchill’s large body of work detailing centuries of lawless U.S. governments breaking hundreds of treaties with Indigenous American (among other important topics) shoved down Orwell’s memory hole. Incidentally, the very fact that Churchill taught in an Ethnic Studies Department rather than an American History Department testifies to the fact that twenty-first century history experts still cannot face the fact that dozens of indigenous peoples did not fortuitously vanish or voluntarily disband to make way for the civilized master race, but were deliberately eradicated. The death of their expertise is long overdue.

Nichols also dismisses the work of anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott, on the basis that her expertise is in medicine, not arms control and disarmament, and she substitutes a psychological examination of a presumed pathological arms race (Missile Envy is the title of one of her anti-nuclear books) for an examination of the topic by a relevant expert. She also once falsely claimed on a radio program that, “If Ronald Reagan is re-elected, nuclear war is a mathematical certainty.”

Only on the second point is Nichols on solid ground. Obviously, one cannot predict the future of anything on the basis of mathematical certainty, and Caldicott’s misuse of her social prestige as a doctor to try to influence how her audience would vote was dishonest and unprincipled. But that single instance hardly invalidates her entire anti-nuclear career.[3]

On Nichols’s preference for conventional arms control analysis instead of Caldicott’s psychological approach equating nuclear arms production to a form of madness (Nuclear Madness is the title of another one of her books), there is no need to choose one over the other. The two can fruitfully co-exist, if arms control experts engage her critique instead of dismissing it. Slaveholders could not ultimately avoid the abolitionist debate, and establishment arms control experts should not be able to avoid such a debate today.

Caldicott regards the proliferation of nuclear plants and weapons much like she does a cancer metastasizing in a human body, objecting to the radioactive contamination resulting from every aspect of the nuclear fuel cycle: mining, milling, waste storage, re-processing, plant decommissioning, etc. She credits “psychic numbing” for our ability to complacently live alongside what the late Daniel Ellsberg (an expert!) called the “Doomsday Machine,” a world wired up to explode in terminal war at a moment’s notice. Caldicott’s abolitionist views regarding nuclear weapons largely overlap with Ellsberg’s, as she enthusiastically endorsed his book describing our descent to what Lewis Mumford called “the morals of extermination.”[4]

If it is quackery to see stockpiling thousands of nuclear weapons (many on hair-trigger alert) among eight different countries wracked with antagonistic tensions as a form of human madness, then this needs to be demonstrated. But Nichols shirks the entire debate – quite unconvincingly – on the basis of credentialism, which conflicts with his stated view that democracy requires cooperative discussion between laypeople and experts.

In other words, if Caldicott’s expertise is not relevant to the debate, her interest and concerns surely are, and these cannot be dismissed as the result of a few casual internet searches. In fact, they make far more sense than the self-justifying assertions of arms control experts like Kenneth Adelman (Nichols regards him favorably), who said at his Senate confirmation hearings to be Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (for Ronald Reagan) that he that he had never given any consideration to the possibility of disarmament – the very purpose of the agency he sought to direct. Whatever the deficiencies of Caldicott’s arguments may be, it remains a mystery why the death of such clueless expertise ought to be mourned rather than celebrated.

Finally, Nichols also dismisses the views of dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky, likewise on credentialist grounds, since Chomsky’s doctorate is in linguistics rather than foreign policy. The upshot is that Chomsky, lacking the specialized, technical national security expertise that Nichols obtained by skill and training, cannot be expected to adequately understand the deep knowledge of the field, and therefore his views are simply irrelevant.

But are national security affairs really a science, impenetrable to laypeople, or can they be understood and insightfully engaged using no more than common sense, skepticism, and ordinary analytical ability? Chomsky argues the latter, pointing out that, in the social sciences

the cult of the expert is both self-serving for those who propound it, and fraudulent. Obviously one must learn from social and behavioral science whatever one can … But it will be quite unfortunate, and highly dangerous, if they are not accepted and judged on their merits and according to their actual, not pretended accomplishments. In particular, if there is a body of theory, well-tested and verified, that applies to the conduct of foreign affairs …  it’s existence has been kept a well-guarded secret. To anyone who has any familiarity with the social and behavioral sciences … the claim that there are certain considerations and principles too deep for the outsider to comprehend is simply an absurdity, unworthy of comment.[5]

Indeed. Where is the repeatedly tested body of theoretical knowledge informing national security affairs that Nichols allegedly possesses but laypeople do not? Obviously, none exists, which means that Chomsky’s supposed lack of foreign policy expertise is simply another dodge. If Nichols’s is an expertise worth having, he needs to drop the priesthood guise and engage debate, not just with colleagues, but with all who are interested.

A good place for him to start would be to examine Chomsky’s review of a prominent part of the expert community that has long held that laypeople are intellectually deficient by nature, and not merely as a consequence of having fallen into a state of narcissism.

For example, the democratic rebellion in 17th century Britain, Chomsky observes, was quickly condemned by experts of the day as a monstrous affair of the “rascal multitude,” “beasts in men’s shapes,” inherently “depraved and corrupt.” These sentiments were handed down to succeeding generations of elite thinkers, so that by the twentieth-century we have Walter Lippmann advising that the public “must be put in its place,” so that the “responsible men” may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.” The “function” of these “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders,” he believed, was to be “interested spectators of action,” not participants, ratifying the decisions made on their behalf by experts and policy-makers, then returning to their private concerns. This was said to be inevitable because of the “ignorance and superstition of the masses” (political scientist Harold Lasswell), the “stupidity of the average man” (Reinhold Niebuhr), and the fact that “the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality” (Walter Lippmann). The “specialized class” is drawn from the experts at articulating the needs of the powerful, what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci identified as “experts in legitimation.” These intellectual saviors were supposedly needed to protect “us” from the majority, which is “ignorant and mentally deficient,” (Robert Lansing, Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State) and has to be kept in its place via a constant diet of “necessary illusion” and “emotionally potent oversimplifications” (Rienhold Niebuhr).

Note that these are the sentiments of the liberal intelligentsia; conservative theorists are even harsher in their condemnation.[6]

Given the alleged intellectual backwardness of ordinary people, the expert policy prescription was to manipulate them, education being pointless with the lower breeds. Edward Bernays, the Father of Spin, openly declared this: “If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.” Minority rule was therefore inevitable: “In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.” And this minority rule was not contradictory to democracy, as one might think, but an expression of it: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

So …. hallelujah?

Hardly. Given the obnoxiousness of these longstanding views, it is difficult to believe that the widespread rejection of experts by an ever increasing portion of the general public is wholly unrelated to the open contempt with which ordinary people have been treated by the “specialized class.” Recall that in recent decades these experts have engineered the transfer of tens of trillions of dollars from the bottom and middle of the economic pyramid to the very top, while blaming the victims for not being educated enough to reverse the trend.

To be fair, not all experts share this contempt for laypeople, and Nichols is at pains to emphasize that not all experts are policy-making experts. True enough, but in a class-divided world expertise of all kinds skews towards fulfilling the needs of the wealthy, not those who work for them. At the height of the Covid crisis, for example, CDC recommendations to “shelter-in-place” were meaningless to workers in meat-packing plants, but highly valuable to the wealthy, who retreated to second homes remote from areas of high contagion – with no loss of income. This is characteristic of social policy under capitalism, where social loss is private gain.

Which means that experts that have the wrong class loyalties, such as those who advise labor unions on how to resist the continual blows capital directs at workers, command little attention, respect, or resources. This is because the most prominent ideas do not arise by happenstance but are those that keep a certain class in power. To quote labor expert Karl Marx:

The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of their dominance.[7]

Since public opinion necessarily diverges from “the ruling ideas,” especially on issues of wealth and power, experts perceive it as a threat to be managed and controlled, not a democratic reality to be intelligently cultivated. Their expertise consists as much of rationalizing the needs of the powerful as it does of reasoning one’s way to a justified conclusion. And this, in turn, feeds popular mistrust of experts, for as the great Chinese sage Laozi said, “Those who justify themselves do not convince.”

Finally, and most importantly, Nichols fails to address the stunted moral intelligence of so many experts, who, consumed by the intense demands of their specialized tasks, often end up morally blinded.

A classic example concerns J. Robert Oppenheimer. In the final stages of making the atomic bomb he was pressed by his Manhattan Project colleagues as to the moral implications of their work. Oppenheimer and his colleague Enrico Fermi replied that they were “without special competence on the moral question.”[8]

Without special competence on the moral question. In other words, the ethical implications of unleashing atomic bombs on an unsuspecting world fell outside Oppenheimer’s occupational specialty.

Is this not a perfect illustration of the dilemma we face in relying on expertise? What good is knowledge divorced from comprehension of its proper direction and use? Oppenheimer’s answer to the most important question humanity has ever faced suggests that the moral issue might best be engaged by a different class of experts than the bomb-makers, a Department of Extermination Affairs perhaps. He could conceive of no way our common humanity might be the source of a judgment about what to do.

Seventy-eight years later, with no solution to this problem in sight, can we really rest easy with just reading more and trusting experts’ hard work and good intentions? Such a modest prescription cannot hope to solve the grave problem of ideologically contaminated expertise.

For all that Nichols leaves unaddressed, however,  The Death of Expertise remains a lucid and compelling description of rising popular idiocy. Pity that the larger picture does not flatter the experts Nichols seeks to defend.

Thus we continue to entrench a social structure of highly specialized moral imbeciles governing narcissistic laypeople too mired in delusion to mount an intelligent rebellion.

ENDNOTES

[1] And now that the crisis has subsided, organized efforts are underway to ban any future pandemic response measures that might interfere with getting and spending.

[2] Every U.S. military intervention abroad, for example, is portrayed as necessary to stop “another Hitler.”

[3] However, her claim that in a brief meeting with President Reagan she was able to “clinically” assess his IQ to be 100, is also suspect.

[4] Ellsberg stresses that U.S. policy has always been a “first-strike” policy, that is, being ready and willing to initiate nuclear war to knock out Moscow’s retaliatory capacity, then threatening annihilation with an overwhelming second strike if they refuse to capitulate. See Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine – Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, (Bloomsbury, 2017).

[5] ” Chomsky quoted in Raphael Salkie, The Chomsky Update – Linguistics And Politics, (Unwin Hyman, 1990) p. 140.

[6] Comments taken from Chomsky’s “Year 501,” (South End Press, 1993) p. 18, and “Deterring Democracy,” (Hill and Wang, 1991) p. 253.

[7] Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845.

[8] Oppenheimer quoted in Jonathan Kozol, The Night Is Dark and I Am Far From Home – A Political Indictment of the U.S. Public Schools, (Continuum, 1984) p. viii.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michael K. Smith.

Dispossession of a people is a thoroughly nasty business, and it blatantly violates one of the biblical ten commandments, one that is encoded in law around the world, namely, “Thou shalt not steal.” Those who have gained property and wealth, and their progeny who continue to profit from the dispossession of Others, would like to paint a prettier picture of colonialism.

Sam Sullivan, a former mayor of Vancouver and former cabinet minister in the BC legislature, is the easy-to-listen-to narrator of Kumtuks, a series of historical videos which are usually interesting and informative. However, Kumtuks often presents a gussied-up narrative around the history of colonialism. Usually omitted from the discussion is that the land that settler-colonialists came into possession of was stolen from Original Peoples who had their own laws, beliefs, economies, and culture.

The Kumtuks video “1862 Smallpox Epidemic: British Columbia’s First Major Contagious Outbreak” claims to be based in the oral history of the Haida. The source given is the book Raven’s Cry (1966, 1992) by American author Christie Harris. Both versions of the book are interesting and informative for the historical perspective they shine on the Haida and the interactions they had with the Iron Men (as the Haida called the White men). The versions differ little, but the 1992 version is preferable because of the respect shown for the names and designations used by the Haida. Bill Reid, whose mother was Haida, is a renowned artist who illustrated Raven’s Cry and was a mentor to Harris. Harris also spent time with the family of Haida artist Charles Edenshaw. Harris, Reid, and Edenshaw are all deceased. So I will refer to Harris’s book to ascertain the verisimilitude of what Sullivan says in his narration.

What does Raven’s Cry indicate about Haida feelings toward the presence and behavior of the Iron Men?

Haida hostility, as well as the stormy moat around the Haida islands, discouraged American miners. Nevertheless, James Douglas, Chief Factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s western district and Governor of the little colony of Vancouver Island, advised Her Majesty Queen Victoria that it would be well to maintain a gunboat on the northwest coast to protect British rights. (p 102) [Italics added.]

Harris indicates the priority of Douglas. Douglas is not said to be protecting Haida rights. This was about colonialism: protecting rights claimed by the British, rights that presumably included sailing a gunboat in Haida waters.

The Haida did not acknowledge British rights. When the Company sent its schooner Recovery in with a group of Company miners in 1852, it was thwarted. The Haida simply waited for the white men to blast. Then they rushed in and grabbed the treasure. It was their gold. Let anyone else try to take it! (p 102)

Clearly, Douglas’s  priority was objectionable to the Haida.

The “native chiefs” objected to colonialism:

“What we don’t like about the [White man’s] government is their saying this, ‘We will give you this much land,’ ” they protested. “How can they give it when it is our own? We cannot understand it. They have never bought it from us or our forefathers. They have never fought and conquered our people and taken the land that way, and yet they say now they will give us so much land — our own land!” (p 134)

Sdast’a·aas Saang gaahl Eagle chief chief 7indansuu felt likewise:

“By what right do the King George men claim this land?” 7indansuu demanded of Governor Douglas. “There are no treaties with the tribes. There was no conquest by warriors.” (p 115)

The Raven and the First Men by Bill Reid

In a lighter vein, Harris wrote,

Unfortunately, Governor Douglas retired that year, though not before making a strong case for generous treatment of Indians, or before setting aside many reservations. The Queen had honored him with a knighthood. (p 132)

Harris generally comes across as respectful and sympathetic to the Haida, but she still seems mired in a colonialist mindset. Why is taking the land of a people and setting aside some reservations for them considered “generous”? If a thief steals my library and returns a few of the books, is the thief generous?

Because the narrative in “1862 Smallpox Epidemic: British Columbia’s First Major Contagious Outbreak” is starkly at odds with the narrative in The Smallpox War against the Haida, I turned to Swanky to discuss the different narratives. I also reached out to Sam Sullivan through the Global Civic Policy Society which produces the Kumtuks videos, but have yet to hear back.

Tom Swanky: The Police Commissioner advised a journalist that Helmcken personally had administered a procedure to 500 natives on April 26, 1862, in a context where multiple observers reported that the disease – as of that date – remained confined to just one of the People represented at Victoria and these observers believed the disease still could be contained among that one People.

However, within a few days after the disclosure of Helmcken’s program, witnesses then began reporting that some noticeable number of the natives who he supposedly had “vaccinated” were seen to have the disease. Also, within ten days of Helmcken’s vaccination program being disclosed, that is, within the time usually required for an infection to become visible, the disease suddenly exploded so that it was now no longer visible among only one People, it was everywhere. This evidence is consistent with Helmcken’s program having been all or in part, not “vaccinations” but inoculation with actual smallpox. And thereby creating the opportunity for the disease to become rooted among new Peoples and spread widely as a result of inoculation epidemics. It was because of the risk of inoculation creating epidemics that Parliament had outlawed inoculation in 1840. To administer inoculations in 1862 was a violation of British law, and so any use of the procedure would have to be concealed.

There is substantial other evidence of inoculation being used to spread the disease in the North Pacific during 1862. The Oweekeno said in 1862 that the medicine the colonists sold them started the disease. Numerous other cases can be documented where doctors administered what was advertised as a “vaccination” program, but after which the disease exploded among the targeted population. In fact, there is little to no evidence that “Douglas had Helmcken send vaccines” around the colonies. At Kamloops, the HBC post manger reported administering a procedure to the surrounding natives all summer – however, by late fall, independent observers were reporting that the indigenous residents in the Kamloops area had been virtually exterminated.

Once can draw two lessons from Helmcken’s advertised “500 vaccinations.” The first lesson is that each stage of the disease undergoing an advance – beginning with its original importation in 1862 – was accompanied by some sort of public relations campaign that subsequent events would show was misdirection by those advancing the disease. The second lesson is that historians who come to this material unaware of their own colonial predispositions, or of the phenomenon of confirmation bias, seize on the first thing they read without doing the painstaking work of then seeing how events actually unfolded.

KP: The Kumtuks video mentions numerous conflicts among the Northern First Nations and the Southern First Nations, but he omits mention of any conflicts between First Nations and settler-colonialists. Instead the colonial administration of Vancouver Island is portrayed as a peacemaker in having the Northerners towed up island past Nanaimo. In Raven’s Cry, Harris wrote:

More than ever before, futile rage against the overpowering white man turned on fellow Indians. Understandably, it turned most fiercely on the Haida, the lords of the coast. Centuries of resentment burst out, especially among the northern neighbors.

The native people raged with resentment at these white men; but the rage turned on their ancient rivals. On June 12th, a thousand Haida reinforcements arrived at Victoria. (p 117-118)

The Kumtuks video seems not in concordance with Raven’s Cry or what you have written of the oral history presented to you by knowledge keepers of The People?

TS: If a researcher is unaware of the issues concerning the means through which the Crown asserted control among many of the indigenous Peoples – which diverse knowledge keepers allege was through a smallpox assisted genocide – then the researcher is unlikely to be attuned to the challenges presented by the sources.

On the one hand, among the colonial sources are the multiple efforts at misdirection – which were an integral part of the smallpox program executed by the colonial authorities – and, after 1862, there followed the usual post-genocide or post-criminal activity of denying the shameful or wrongful thing done.

On the other hand, among the indigenous sources there is the necessity of coping with having been purposefully targeted for destruction by the colonial authorities and the incoming colonial community. For the indigenous Peoples, the post-1862 task became walking a fine line so as not to offend a community that has shown a propensity to destroy you and yet wanting to work on the political task of undoing the loss of control brought about by what is understood to have been a smallpox genocide. So, for example, one will see praise offered for Douglas – politely overlooking his smallpox policies to focus on the time before April/June of 1860 when he had set a precedent of colonial respect for indigenous customs in inter-community relations and before he had begun the process of displacing indigenous authority. In addition, in things published primarily for the benefit of a colonial audience, one will see a desire not to be offensive but to cater to the colonial mythology concerning indigenous relations.

Very early in my work, I was advised by more than one elder that if I truly wanted to learn about the teaching in indigenous communities, I would learn by listening to what elders and knowledge keepers told each other or their communities and not by asking questions for someone to tell me something – for members of the colonial community often are told what they want to hear or a version satisfying some political need.

KP: The video depicts Douglas lamenting that some Indigenous peoples did not accept the preventative measures against smallpox. However, in your book, you noted how Douglas had tried to scare Haida by warning of a fake outbreak of measles. (Swanky, p 84-86) Harris in Raven’s Cry wrote:

Alarmed at the thought of what might happen next, Governor Douglas tried to banish all the natives with a measles scare, which had often worked before. But the native people weren’t frightened by it now. (p 118)

TS: This is all just fiction by someone who is not very familiar with the actual record. Nowhere does Douglas do any such lamenting. In fact, Bishop George Hills reported that the indigenous Peoples where the smallpox first broke out at Victoria were ready to do anything asked of them. Nowhere were natives reported to resist vaccinations – at least until the problems associated with inoculation began to emerge – but there are several accounts of natives going out of their way to become vaccinated.

Douglas used the false threat of an imminent outbreak of measles in June of 1860, in conjunction with his first attempt to assert control over the autonomous indigenous Peoples operating around Victoria. Dr. Helmcken proposed this plan and the hope was that all the autonomous communities would flee and then, when they returned, they would be assigned to spaces and come under the Police Commissioner’s control. Helmcken made this proposal in the Assembly and it was reported in the newspapers. Since Capt. John, the Haida leader who led the resistance to Douglas’s policies – and some other natives – were fluent in English, they would have learned from the newspapers that the threat was part of a dishonest plan to assert control over them. There was every reason not to be frightened and to be resentful of this dishonest trick.

KP: Douglas is portrayed as a defender of First Nations. The video gives Douglas a pass for having been away on the mainland when police towed Northerners into the ocean to return home. But the Kumtuks video states that the oral history of elders tells of Douglas trying to save lives by having the Haida towed home.

TS: This is not true. In another case of what turned out to be misdirection, the Police Commissioner advised the newspapers that he and a colonial gunboat would accompany north the Haida expelled on June 11 so that they would have safe passage past their enemies in Georgia Strait. British law in 1862 was that those with the custody of smallpox carriers had a legal duty to keep a safe distance between the infected people and any nearby healthy people. On this trip north, the Cowichan fired on this convoy to keep it from leaving infected people among them, the convoy did leave infected Haida at Nanaimo, and, rather than safe passage, the Police Commission delivered the Haida to the doorstep of some enemies at Cape Mudge who could be expected to kill them. This plan failed only because the enemies of the Haida at Cape Mudge already had attacked a previous Haida convoy, became infected and were dying.

The actual oral tradition is of Douglas executing a smallpox genocide “holding hands with the HBC.” This tradition is conveyed in “The Story of Bones Bay” and the next generation of knowledge keepers was instructed in the oral tradition during a formal ceremony and pole raising in 2008. The “Story” can be found in the March 2009 edition of Haida Laas, an official publication of the Council of the Haida Nation.

KP: This brings up many questions. Why did the video mention that the police removed the Haida when Douglas was away in the lower mainland? How could he attempt to save lives from the other side of the Salish Sea? Was it an eviction or a life-saving attempt? Also, I could find no mention of the oral history of Haida elders (in either the 1966 or 1992 edition of Raven’s Cry) that testifies that Douglas was trying to save Haida lives by having them removed. After all, this is illogical at best, or at worst genocidally racist, given that 1) the video relates a Victoria newspaper editorial that settler lives were at risk from the camps, in which case gathering all Haida together without discerning who was ill or not would put some Haida potentially at risk from each other, and 2) the question of why the Northerners should be removed all the way up the long water highway, especially since the video stated that it takes 12 days for signs of smallpox to manifest and become infectious. Why send them 800 km to Haida Gwaii and not to a nearby uninhabited island of which there are many around Vancouver Island?

TS: Most serious people recognize that Douglas’ 1862 smallpox policies in the ordinary course would have been considered as criminal offences under British law. That is, everyone recognizes that it was easily foreseeable that his policies would increase dramatically the native death toll. Douglas’ apologists are left to contend that his policies – and these additional deaths – were justified because the presence of smallpox among even one of the autonomous Peoples operating in the Victoria area constituted an emergency threatening the colonial population. On examination, this turns out to be another case of misdirection. The Police Commissioner planted the theory of an emergency in the newspapers at Victoria and Douglas planted the theory at New Westminster. Douglas already had used the concept of an emergency in 1860 to justify his first attempt to assert control over the autonomous Peoples operating in the Victoria area, rather than to deal through the existing native leadership as British policy usually required. The theory of an emergency would be advanced again in a bizarre way when colonists advanced the disease to the Nuxalk and Tsilhqot’in territories.

However, there was never any emergency that constituted an existential threat to the colonial community – vaccine was readily available from San Francisco or the Catholic missions in Oregon, and most of the colonial population already had been vaccinated before the theory of an emergency had been raised. The threat to the colonial community was economic. The fear in the colonial community was that prospective miners or settlers would stay away because ordinary human beings prefer not to witness suffering on a grand scale.

If the Douglas administration had wanted to decrease the death toll from smallpox in 1862, it would have carried out the three control measures that it advertised in the newspapers: vaccinations, a pest house for isolating carriers and sanctuaries to quarantine the disease among infected communities. Instead, the administration perverted each control so that it became another means by which the disease would spread.

KP: The character of James Douglas is wrapped up very much in the colonial history of Vancouver Island and British Columbia and the attempts to extinguish Indigenous title. There are plenty of quotations that attest to Douglas being a morally centered person, but they are several quotations that point to a racist streak. Few humans are white or black. In To Share, Not Surrender: Indigenous and Settler Visions of Treaty Making in the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia (UBC Press, 2022), the contributors have varying viewpoints on Douglas. Keith Thor Carlson, Canadian research chair in Indigenous and Community-Engaged History at the University of Fraser Valley captures the lack of consensus in his piece, “‘The Last Potlatch’ and James Douglas’s Vision of an Alternative Settler Colonialism,” pointing out that Douglas is less racist than others. This is neither laudatory or condemnatory. Nonetheless, relying on quotations seems to contravene the admonition that actions speak louder than words. Overall, Douglas appears lauded by contemporary academia, cultural depictions, and wider society. With the emerging acceptance of First Nations oral history, will a purported genocidaire such as Douglas continue to elude an honest rendering of history?

TS: In his correspondence with the colonial office in London, Douglas freely refers to the Haida as barbarians and savages. He seems an average representative of the British colonial culture in the North Pacific, which culture imagines anglo-saxons as a superior race – to use Dr. Helmcken’s words. However, it is a distraction to use “race” as a point of departure when seeking to understand the transition of sovereign authority that accompanied colonialism in the North Pacific. The problem facing Douglas and the colonists was to dispossess the indigenous Peoples of their communal or “national” resources through the most cost-effective means. Douglas and others make frequent references to the “great number” of natives occupying strategic locations, pointing to the projection of overwhelming political power that is inherent in great numbers. The implicit motive for this genocide, then, is not reducing another race per se, but reducing the native voice and the capacity of native authority to defend the integrity of its sovereign control.

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

[S]ettlers in thrall to colonial ideology saw every unfenced meadow as waste land free for the taking, especially the most fertile land supporting native self-sufficiency.

— Tom Swanky, The Smallpox War against the Haida (p 67).

July 1, was recently celebrated in “Canada” as Canada Day by “Canadians.” The Dominion of Canada was formed by the joining of three British North American colonies in 1867. It would serve as an Anglo bulwark against the French presence, and a bulwark against the American presence to the south. Over subsequent years, settler-colonialists spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Arctic coasts in what was deemed Canada. When the first European natives, the Norsemen, appeared in 1000 CE, Indigenous peoples had already inhabited the land for millennia, or as they often phrase it, since time immemorial.¹

The Original Peoples in Canada were dispossessed, largely decultured, proselytized, assimilated, disappeared. The founding peoples of Canada, as depicted on Canada’s colonialist coat-of-arms, are the English and French. Not the Indigenous peoples. The official languages of Canada are English and French. Indigenous languages are not recognized federally as official; moreover, linguicide of Indigenous languages was an outcome of the Residential School programs. This all amounts, unquestioningly, to cultural genocide.

But the genocide is more than just the annihilation of a group’s culture and language.

In The Smallpox War Against the Haida, author Tom Swanky (with contributions from Shawn Swanky) amplifies the oral history of the knowledge keepers among The Peoples that hold the administration of James Douglas, first governor of “British Columbia” (1858–1864) and second governor of “Vancouver Island” (1851–1864) culpable for a genocide via the spreading of the smallpox virus in 1862-63. The Original Peoples would suffer a horrific number of fatalities and would be rendered unable to withstand seizure of their land nor the implementation of colonial government and the meting out of colonial law.

Swanky humbly presents himself as conduit for the history of the knowledge keepers. He writes, “My only contribution is a search of the documentary record for evidence that may reflect on the native narrative, one way or another. I am not writing history. I am reporting how knowledge keepers tell of the history of BC’s founding and considering to what extent that teaching is justified.”

Why mention this? Because while discussing the smallpox genocide with a learned gentleman, he asked who the source of the information was. I replied, Tom Swanky. I was informed that some academics consider Swanky’s thesis as disputed. This was nothing new, and it is to be expected that there would be a pushback.² However, while the book’s authorship is by Tom Swanky, the narrative is the oral history of the Original Peoples. The oral history of First Nations was recognized in 1997 as admissible in court by Delgamuukw v British Columbia. However, Alexandra Potamianos, while a third-year JD student at Osgoode Hall Law School concluded that the Supreme Court of Canada’s Mitchell v Minister of National Revenue (2001) “has made it more difficult for Indigenous claimants to use oral history to counter dominant understandings of Indigenous presence and relationships to land.”³

Granting further credence to Swanky was his reporting of the Tsilhqot’in’s oral history about a grievous wrong in which chiefs were abducted by provincial officials in violation of the sacred peace pipe ceremony. Six chiefs were subsequently hanged in Quesnel, BC. This is detailed in his book The Great Darkening: The True Story of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific plus The Tsilhqot’in and other First Nations Resistance (2012).⁴ In 2014, then BC premier Christy Clark stated, “[We] confirm without reservation that these six Tsilhqot’in chiefs are fully exonerated for any crime or wrongdoing.”

Nonetheless, while the source of information is somewhat pertinent, what is unequivocally primary is the factuality of the information and the evidence and logic brought to bear on that information. Swanky listened to the oral history, assessed it and the historical record for verisimilitude, and applied logic to make sense of a narrative. Swanky, who holds a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree (among other academic credentials) connects the dots and builds a compelling case.

The Opening Scene of the Crime

It was common during that time period for First Nation peoples, the Tlingit, Haida, Ts’msyen (Tsimshian), Nuxalk, Tahltan, Heiltsuk, and others, to canoe down the water highway from the north to Fort Victoria and set up camps.

Fort Victoria was established by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1843 as a trading post at the location the Lekwungen People called Camosack meaning “rush of water.” It is not always easy to nail down the proper Indigenous designation as another moniker has it that the Lekwungen people called it Kuo-Sing-el-as, which means “place of strong fibre,” specifically the Pacific Willow. The WSÁNEĆ, Coast Salish neighbors of the Lekwungen, called Victoria METULIYE. The Haida called it Micdolly. (p ix)

The colonialist designation eponymous for an imperialist queen still persists, but probably one day moral sentiment and a semblance of honest intent toward reconciliation will result in a re-designation of the city that would honor First Nations.

The Genocidaires

Swanky has named the perpetrators of the genocide, many of who have their names applied to various geographic or manmade structures. James Douglas, who allegedly used his position of governor to plan the smallpox epidemic, had his name applied to a mountain (actually a tall hill, since renamed by the WSÁNEĆ as PKOLS while the park around the “mountain” still honors an alleged genocidaire), schools, main street, etc. Francis Poole, a bizarre prevaricator, played a major role in his peregrinations throughout the province, often connected to where smallpox outbreaks had occurred. In Haida Gwaii, his name was elided and replaced by Haida designations. Racist MLA Robert Burnaby is a capitalist whose name was bestowed on a city in the centre of Metro Vancouver, a mountain, a lake, etc. The same applies to other questionable characters in the smallpox war such as Alfred Waddington who was behind the ill-fated Waddington’s Road at Bute Inlet, MLA dr John Helmcken, AG George Cary, HBC insider Ranald McDonald, colonel Richard Moody, and others.

Indigenous characters are portrayed as well: Haida hyas tyee (roughly translates as “chief”) captain John, hyas tyee Gitkun, hyas tyee Albert Edenshaw, great Haida hyas tyee Geesh, Ts’msyen diarist Arthur Wellington Clah, etc.

Solving the “Indian Question”

Pre-1862-63, the settler-colonialists were vastly outnumbered by the Indigenous peoples and presented Douglas with the quandary of how to solve the “Indian Question.” Douglas was fervently against launching costly Indian wars. As a last resort, Douglas decided upon inflicting “cruelty and injustice” on the Indigenous peoples in the case that their suffering “could be given less regard than the ‘evils’ colonists associated with autonomous communities operating freely in colonizing zones…” (p 123-124) About this Douglas had no compunction since “natives who would not compromise their sovereign dignity should expect collective punishments. Otherwise in Douglas’ words, “the country will become intolerable as a residence for white-settlers.” (p 128)

“Cruelty and injustice” included starvation, ethnic cleansing (clearing The Peoples out of Victoria), and genocide via smallpox.

Smallpox-afflicted persons traveled by ship from San Francisco. Dubious inoculations were given to some of The Peoples. Dubious because, as Swanky relates, multiple eye-witness reported, and the timing of numerous outbreaks tends to corroborate, that Indigenes who were told that they were being vaccinated with harmless cowpox where instead inoculated with smallpox and, in that way, instead of contributing to controlling the disease, they were made into conduits for spreading the disease. Understanding inoculation as a tool of spreading the disease under the guise of vaccination is critical to understanding the “intent” required to prove genocide. The British Parliament’s Vaccination Act of 1840 had outlawed inoculation precisely because of the ease with which the procedure produced epidemics. (p 139)

Quarantining is also a tool for controlling the spread of contagions. The Songhees (a Lekwungen people) would ride out smallpox on a nearby island. Tellingly, the Douglas administration would violate British law by forcibly expelling the Northerners, forcing sick and healthy Indigenes into close contact and then putting them on the move to carry the disease up the coast and into their home territories. The administration implied that decreasing the risk of infection for Victoria’s resident colonists — most of whom had been vaccinated — justified actions that were certain to increase the First Nation death toll.

Swanky, furthermore, furnishes evidence showing that the pliable Poole, who was employed and coached throughout by MLA Robert Burnaby, set out and created his own “trail of blood” (chapters 10-13), thereby magnifying the smallpox epidemic.

Why Resort to Biological Warfare?

The settler-colonialists wanted the land. Land is regarded with deep reverence by most First Nations.⁵ For colonialists, land is money, and private property is a key cornerstone of capitalism. If a people are disappeared, then the empty land is for the taking. Smallpox was a means to weakening the ability of the First Nations to resist dispossession.

Swanky had as his starting point the oral history of The Peoples. Swanky found that the oral history is supported by the written record. That history, according to knowledge keepers as reported by Swanky, reveals that, starting in 1862, the colonialist administration of James Douglas engaged in biological warfare by spreading smallpox throughout First Nation territories. That measures such as inoculations/vaccinations and quarantines were obviated or ineffective suggests the criminality of the colonial administrations.

Thus today, the once numerous Indigenous peoples constitute 5.9% (2016 census) of the BC population. Where smallpox has not ended the existence of First Nations sovereignty in their unceded territories, colonial governments still resort to militarized RCMP and colonial courts to maintain colonial law. And when it suits the authorities, colonial court decisions anathema to politicians and corporations will be ignored. Thus today, the Wet’suwet’en are resisting an assault on their unsurrendered territory which is being scarred for a pipeline.

When the Indigenous peoples and the land they exist on is disregarded and hence disrespected, then reconciliation is diminished to a mere buzzword. It feels good to talk about it, but where is the action to back up the rhetoric?

That is why Swanky’s The Smallpox War Against the Haida is important. It is an extraordinary historically based opus resulting from detective work that combs the historical record, names the criminals, and points out legal redress to the grave crimes committed against the Haida by settler-colonialists.

If the admonition against forgetting history is a precautionary wisdom, then The Smallpox War Against the Haida ought to be promulgated in media; be taught in educational institutions, including in public schools; and should set in motion appropriate steps at atonement, beginning with a sincere apology. Indirectly, the book also provides a template for some steps for settler-colonialist society to achieve genuine reconciliation with The Peoples who were appallingly wronged, such as:

1. listening to the Original Peoples,
2. taking into account the evidence supporting the oral history,
3. listening to one’s conscience and what one’s sense of morality dictates,
4. publicly exposing history’s dissemblers and their disinformation and recasting the information and the dissemblers in an honest light,
5. educating people about the racism/supremacism that underlies the crimes of colonization,
6. recognizing the sovereignty of Original Peoples on their unceded territory,
7. recognizing the inherent humanity of all human beings, and
8. living according to the golden rule.⁶

ENDNOTES

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

Fifteen artists have been selected as the inaugural beneficiaries of NZ On Air’s New Music Pan-Asian funding.

The initiative, the first of its kind, aims to support the Asian music community in New Zealand.

The fund was established due to a lack of equitable representation of Asian musicians in the country’s music sector, says Teresa Patterson, head of music at NZ On Air.

• READ MORE: Other Blessen Tom articles

“Our Music Diversity Report clearly showed the under-representation of Pan-Asian New Zealand musicians in the Aotearoa music sector,” she said.

“This is reflected in the number of funding applications we received for this focus round.”

The funding provides musicians with up to $10,000 for recording, mixing and mastering a single, some of which can be set aside for the promotion and creation of visual content to accompany the song’s release.

“We received 107 applications for 15 grants, which is outstanding,” Patterson said.

‘Wonderful range’
“The range of genre, gender and ethnicity among the applicants was wonderful. We received applications from artists who identify as Chinese, Indian, Filipino, South Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Malaysian, Thai and Iraqi.

“The genres varied from alternative/indie and pop to hip-hop/RnB, dance/electro and folk/country.”

Six of the 15 songs that secured funding are bilingual, featuring Asian languages such as Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, Malay and Punjabi.

Patterson believed this variety would “really help to reflect the many voices of Aotearoa New Zealand” and add to the vibrant cultural music mix experienced by local audiences.

Swap Gomez, a drummer, visual director and academic lecturer, was one of the panel members responsible for selecting the musicians for the funding. He emphasised the challenges faced by Asian musicians in New Zealand.

“What was awesome to see was so many Pan-Asian artists applying; artists we had never heard of coming out of the woodwork now that a space has been created to celebrate their work,” Gomez said.

“This is the time we can celebrate those Pan-Asian artists who have previously felt overlooked by the wider industry.

“Now there is an environment and sector where they can feel appreciated for their success in music. As a multicultural industry, developing initiatives such as this one is more crucial than ever.”

NZ On Air has announced that funding opportunities for Asian musicians will continue in the next financial year.

“The response we have had to this inaugural NZ On Air New Music Pan-Asian focus funding round has been phenomenal,” Patterson said.

“It tells us that there is a real need, so NZ On Air is excited to confirm that it will return in the new financial year.”

The full NZ On Air’s Pan-Asian New Music recipient list:

• Amol; cool asf
• Charlotte Avery; just before you go
• Crystal Chen; love letter
• hanbee; deeper
• Hans.; Porcelain
• Hugo Chan; bite
• Julius Black; After You
• LA FELIX; Waiting
• Lauren Gin; Don’t Stop
• Memory Foam; Moon Power
• Phoebe Rings; 아스라이
• RESHMA; Kuih Lapis (Layer Cake)
• tei.; sabre
• Terrible Sons; Thank You, Thank You
• Valere; Lily’s March

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.

The president of a West Papuan advocacy group has appealed to the militants holding New Zealand pilot Philip Mehrtens hostage to free him unconditionally and unharmed, describing him as an “innocent pawn”.

United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) president Benny Wenda said he held  “deepest concern” for the life of Mehrtens, captured on February 7 by guerillas fighting for the independence of Papua.

Fighters of the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB), armed wing of the rebel West Papua Organisation (OPM), have demanded third party negotiations for independence and have recently called for Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape as a “mediator”.

• READ MORE: Author-poet condemns Papuan rebel threat to shoot NZ hostage pilot if denied talks
• Other West Papua reports

“Currently, the priority of all parties involved in this tragic ordeal is to help and assist the pilot to return home safely and rejoin his family and friends,” said Wenda in a statement.

He condemned the impact of the “brutal martial law” imposed by Indonesian security forces in the West Papua region.

“Philip Mehrtens’ condition is being made significantly more precarious by the Indonesian government’s refusal of outside aid and determination to use military means,” he said.

Jakarta’s aggressive stance went hand-in-hand with its increased militarisation of the region.

Mehrtens ‘innocent human being’
“Mehrtens is an innocent human being who has been unwittingly made into a pawn in a decades-old conflict between the colonial power of Indonesia and the indigenous resistance of West Papua.

“Therefore, securing Mehrtens’ safe return must be the top priority for all parties involved, as his life has been thrown into chaos through no fault of his own.”

Wenda said he was aware of a threat made by the TPNPB last week to shoot the pilot.

“It is indeed tragic that the life of the pilot is at risk, and I understand where the Liberation Army is coming from; however, I cannot comprehend why the blood of an innocent family man should be shed on our ancestral land.

“For more than 60 years, the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent Papuans has been shed on this sacred land as a result of Indonesian military operations.

“We do not need to shed the blood of another innocent.

“As Papuans, we do not take innocent lives; nor do we have a tradition of genocide, killings, massacres, or land theft.

Peaceful resolution
“This is not a teaching handed down from our ancestors. We have dignity and tradition and as our ancestors always taught us, the killing of an innocent person is strictly prohibited.

“We believe in this, and every Papuan knows it.

Wenda said the ULMWP sought a peaceful resolution to “reclaim our stolen sovereignty”.

“This does not imply that we are weak or ineffective, nor does it indicate that the international community has turned a blind eye to the crimes committed by the Indonesian security forces.

“The world is currently watching Indonesia closely due to their inhumane treatment, barbaric behaviours, genocidal policies, ecocide, and acts of terror against our people.

In a message to the TPNPB, he warned the rebels to “reconsider the threat” made against and what the pilot’s death would “mean to his grieving family, as well as to our national liberation cause”.

“All West Papuans know that international law is on our side: Indonesia’s military occupation and initial claim on West Papua being clearly wrong under international law.

“But so too is taking the life of an innocent person who is not involved in the conflict.

Wenda said it should never be forgotten that “truth is on our side and Jakarta knows it”.

“One day we will win. Light will always overcome darkness.”

Mourning for Beanal

Meanwhile, West Papuans have mourned the death of Tom Beanal, a freedom fighter, head of the Papua Presidium Council, and leader of the Amungme Tribal Council.

Wenda said that on behalf of the ULMWP and the West Papuan people, he expressed sympathy and condolences to Beanal’s family, friends, and “everyone he inspired to join the struggle”.

Tom Beanal was a member of the Amungme tribe. Along with the Kamoro people, the Amungme have been the primary victims of the struggle over the Grasberg Mine, the world’s largest gold and second largest copper mine. It is opened and operated by the US mining company Freeport McMoran.

“Amungme and Kamoro people are the indigenous landowners – tribes who have tended and protected their forest for thousands of years. But they have been forced to watch as their lands have been destroyed, physically and spiritually, by an alliance of big corporations and the Indonesian government,” Wenda said.

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

In his 2004 book Air Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing, former insurance agent and military enthusiast Tom Clancy claims, without evidence, that the USAF is “the best air force in the world for starters. No other air force trains as hard to go somewhere and fight as hard.” (p. 194) If only that were true because right now the USAF is getting so few flying hours that it would barely be able to handle many potential adversaries. Fortunately not everyone buys Clancy’s propaganda, and that includes a retired RAF pilot named Squadron Leader Russ Peart, AFC WKhm whose 2021 book From Lightnings to MiGs: A Cold War Pilot’s Operations, Test Flying, & an Airspeed Record flatly contradicts Clancy.

Back in the late 1970s, Peart participated in a competition against the USAF and the bragging rights for the winner were significant. He flew the RAF Jaguar, and said the USAF had better aircraft, but he was not intimidated: “The big international tactical bombing competition, TBC 78, was due to take place in June. The teams involved would be from the RAF and the USAF. No. 6 Squadron would provide one of the teams. The USAF were represented by a team of A7s from England Air Force Base. The other two teams were from 31 Squadron, from RAF Bruggen, representing RAF Germany and a team of RAF Buccaneers. The A7 was a formidable opponent in such a competition as its avionics were well developed and were somewhat more reliable than the navigation and weapon aiming system fitted to the Jaguar at this time.” (p.139) Despite this disadvantage, his squadron emerged victorious, and he won the leadership trophy to boot. (p. 140)

Later in his career he wanted to become a test pilot and considered trying to get a seat at the USAF and USN test pilot schools as well as the UK’s Empire Test Pilots’ School at Boscombe Down, but felt the American courses demanded too much emphasis on mathematics and not enough on actual flying, which is a serious insufficiency. To quote him directly, “The course at Boscombe was much more flying orientated, and probably more challenging in that respect, than the courses in the States. In the UK the thinking was that professional mathematicians would handle all the maths stuff, and test pilots just needed to know the principles of what was involved and not actually be involved in doing complex calculations.” (p. 144) He was selected to take the course at Boscombe Down along with students from the US and several other countries, but soon USAF deficiencies became obvious. “There were ten pilots who started the course, one each from France, Germany and Italy, two from Australia, two from the USA and three from the UK. Unfortunately one of the American students was just not quite up to the flying task. Although he was very well qualified academically, it wasn’t possible for the staff to send him solo on the Jaguar. It was a surprise to us all as he had been flying the F4 Phantom in the USAF. Although it wasn’t made clear the precise problem, it seems the USAF flying was less demanding than that of some other air forces. He was a good guy and we were all sad to see him depart back to the USA after just a few weeks.”(Emphasis added, p. 147)

He also had the opportunity to fly his Jaguar against USN F-14s, and concluded with pride: “We had the benefit of practising our tactics on many occasions with aircraft of the US Navy, who would be flying from carriers not so far away. It was very mutually beneficial. Many times we would be intercepting such very capable aircraft as F-14 Tomcats. This was a very difficult adversary for a Jaguar, but surprisingly we had many successful engagements with them. We also flew against A-6s, A-7s and even against USAF F-16s.” (p. 214) Speaking of the F-16, my all-time favorite American fighter, on a later occasion he flew against them along an AWACS aircraft and noted that “Training with them was interesting. The [USAF] F-16 pilots were operating a very capable dog fighter and ground attack type of aircraft, but their training was not as realistic as ours. They had many quite restrictive rules they were having to stick to. In particular they were amazed that we had no height limitations when low flying, and how we would return to join the circuit at 500 to 550 knots at 50 feet.” (pp. 221-222)

With all its flying restrictions, unrealistic training, and avoidance of demanding missions that other air forces do, I will take the word of Squadron Leader Peart on the demerits of the USAF over Clancy’s bragging any day. This is offered as constructive criticism because overconfidence can be a dangerous thing to a pilot in any air force and all Clancy did was promote a false narrative of invincibility.

NOTES

Russ Peart. From Lightnings to MiGs: A Cold War Pilot’s Operations, Test Flying & an Airspeed Record. Pen & Sword Books. Kindle Edition.

Tom Clancy; John Gresham. Fighter Wing (Tom Clancy’s Military Reference). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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

The post Dissecting Tom Clancy’s Delusions about the USAF appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among the high-profile departures announced on bloody Monday, one may prove far more historically consequential than the other two. Susan Rice cut a low public profile in her role as director of the Domestic Policy Council, but it is as important a role as any other inside the White House — perhaps more than any other. The choice of her successor will be arguably the most significant President Joe Biden makes in the back half of his first term.

With the House in Republican hands, the Biden administration’s ability to wield executive power when it comes to immigration, wages, implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, executing on its care economy agenda, implementing gun control policies, securing voting rights, or finding creative ways to expand access to abortion services will heavily depend on who Biden taps to run the Domestic Policy Council. The position will also take on heightened importance if the Supreme Court ultimately rejects the administration’s student debt relief plan. Biden will have a free hand, as the position is not Senate confirmed.

That’s a good thing for one of the leading candidates, Twitter jouster and White House adviser Neera Tanden, who is in the running for the job. She was previously tapped to run the Office of Management and Budget, but bipartisan opposition doomed her bid in the Senate. She was brought into the White House anyway and now serves as staff secretary, an influential position.

While Tanden would bring an unusual amount of intraparty polarization, to put it gently, to a role that requires broad coalition building in order to execute on strategy, the shortlist of those being discussed, according to well-placed sources in and out of the White House, also includes Tom Perez, Tara McGuinness, Sarah Bianchi, Emmy Ruiz, Ann O’Leary, and Carmel Martin. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to harm relationships with the White House or undermine the odds of any particular candidate.

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

More than 100 people including at least 30 children were reportedly killed Tuesday in airstrikes by Myanmar's military dictatorship targeting opponents of the coup regime.

Witnesses and members of the opposition National Unity Government told reporters that a military jet and Mi-35 helicopter gunship bombed and strafed a gathering marking the opening of a new office of the People's Defense Force (PDF), a militant resistance group, in the village of Pa Zi Gyi, Kanbalu Township in the country's northwestern Sagaing region.

"This was a war crime," Byar Kyi, a resistance fighter who helped recover victims' bodies, toldThe New York Times. "The place they attacked was not a military target."

Tom Andrews, the United Nations' special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, tweeted: "The Myanmar military's attacks against innocent people, including today's airstrike in Sagaing, [are] enabled by world indifference and those supplying them with weapons. How many Myanmar children need to die before world leaders take strong, coordinated action to stop this carnage?"

One villager told the BBC that the jet bombed Pa Zi Gyi at about 7:00 am local time, followed by a sustained 20-minute attack by the helicopter.

Local residents and journalists uploaded gruesome photos and videos showing dead and dismembered children, many of their bodies burned or blasted beyond recognition, lying strewn about the bombed-out village in the wake of the attack.

"The corpses cannot be identified since they are all scattered in body parts—legs and heads," one rescue worker toldThe Irrawaddy, an anti-junta news site. "After gathering them all, we burned them."

"The corpses cannot be identified since they are all scattered in body parts—legs and heads."

A resident of a neighboring village told the same publication that "at the moment it's hard to say exactly how many casualties there were."

"We haven't been able to retrieve bodies and body parts, as the area where the air strike occurred is still burning," they added.

Regional media also reported at least 11 deaths in a Monday airstrike on a high school run by the Chin National Defense Force in Falam Township, Chin state.

Myanmar's military—which seized power in a February 2021 coup—frequently targets anti-regime strongholds including Sagaing and Chin state. According to a BBC analysis published at the end of January, there have been over 600 aerial attacks by the junta's forces since the coup.

Last September, a pair of military helicopters attacked a school in Sagaing, killing at least 11 children, according to the United Nations children's agency. The following month, regime warplanes bombed an outdoor concert in Kachin state, killing at least 80 people.

"The military continues its mindless war on our country's own people. Their sole aim is to consolidate power through death and destruction. They will not succeed," National Unity Government Acting President Duwa Lashi La said in a Tuesday Facebook post.

"We will continue our fight for a new Myanmar," he added. "Our goal is a Myanmar in which such atrocities cannot occur and where power derives from the will of the people, not force of arms."

Human rights groups amplified calls to suspend aviation fuel shipments to Myanmar's military in the wake of the latest airstrikes.

"The relentless air attacks across Myanmar highlight the urgent need to suspend the import of aviation fuel," Montse Ferrer, Amnesty International's business and human rights researcher, said in a statement.

"Amnesty reiterates its calls on all states and businesses to stop shipments that may end up in the hands of the Myanmar Air Force," Ferrer continued. "This supply chain fuels violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes, and it must be disrupted in order to save lives."

Referring to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Ferrer added: "Instead of taking a back seat, ASEAN must step up and play a leading role in resolving the human rights catastrophe in Myanmar. The United Nations Security Council must find ways to push through effective actions to hold the Myanmar military accountable, including by referring the situation in the country to the International Criminal Court."

The European Union and countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States have moved to block the sale, supply, and shipment of aviation fuel to the Myanmarese regime and associated companies and businesspeople.

However, a March report from Amnesty International, Global Witness, and Burma Campaign U.K. showed Asian and European companies continued to be involved in supplying Myanmar's military with aviation fuel.

"Since the military's coup in 2021, it has brutally suppressed its critics and attacked civilians from the ground and the air. Supplies of aviation fuel reaching the military enable these war crimes," Ferrer said last month. "These shipments must stop now."

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

USS John F. Kennedy. Photo: US Navy.

The late bestselling author Tom Clancy had a fascination, some would say an obsession, with aircraft carriers, especially the really big ones operated by the USN. This was made plain in his 1999 book on the subject, Carrier: A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier. The reason I miss Clancy is that he made so many over-the-top statements in his nonfiction, especially in this book, and they still both entertain me and encourage me to write rebuttals, like this article.

The first statement to catch my attention was in the beginning of the book as Clancy gloated about beating the Soviet Union in the Cold War.  He said: “Despite the best efforts of the former Soviet Union to develop a credible ‘blue-water’ fleet during the Cold War, the U.S. Navy never lost control of any ocean that it cared about. One of the big reasons for this was the regular presence of carrier battle groups, which took any sort of ‘home-court advantage’ away from a potential enemy. Armed with aircraft that were the match of anything flying from a land base, and flown by the best-trained aviators in the world, the American carriers and their escorts were the ‘eight-hundred-pound guerrillas’ of the Cold War naval world. This is a position that they still hold to this day. However, their contributions have taken on a deadly new relevance in the post-Cold War world.”

This flies right in the face of the late Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt, USN (Ret.) who was the Chief of Naval Operations from 1970 to 1974. Zumwalt openly admitted that the Soviet Navy had overtaken the USN and that the Americans “would lose” a naval war with the Soviets.  In my book Zumwalt opined that: “‘the United States has lost control of the sea lanes to the Soviet Union.’ He observed years later that ‘the odds are that we would have lost a war with the Soviet Union if we had to fight (during the mid-1970s); the navy dropped to about a 35% probability of victory.’” (p.103) Apparently the early 1970s didn’t count for Clancy, possibly because it might require humility and a willingness to face the ugly truth. This sort of thing didn’t matter to Clancy, who was more interested in boosterism and telling the American public only good things in order to sell books and make him rich.

In Clancy’s poorly informed view, USN pilots were the best in the world, which will come as a surprise to the British, Australians, Israelis, and Canadians, all of whom regularly outperform the USN in air combat competitions and exercises. Even the USAF has better pilots than the USN, with its Fighter Weapons Instructor Course (FWIC) taking a whopping six months whilst the Navy’s Topgun is only 12.5 weeks. According to Colonel Steve Ladd, USAF (Ret.): “Don’t let Maverick, Goose and that Hollywood crowd hoodwink you; I have no doubt the Navy’s Top Gun course is challenging and extremely valuable to those who spent a short stint at Naval Air Station Miramar, California. The Navy course was four weeks long in the 1970s, five weeks in the 1980s, and all about air-to-air stick and rudder work with a similarly focused academics program in between; IMHO not nearly as grueling or fulfilling as the six-month Air Force version. The FWIC Academic program was – and there’s no other way to put it – a bitch.” (p.124)

Another quick note and I’ll let you get on with your day. In his acknowledgements, Clancy thanked his friend the late Jeff Ethell, but apparently didn’t read all of Ethell’s work on fighter combat. In 1989, Ethell published an article in Air Combat magazine about how the Chilean Air Force had clobbered a USN carrier air wing in exercises. He offered the following: “In the US pilots are limited to 10,000 foot ceilings and clear air for dog fighting. In the Chilean Air Force these limits would be considered unrealistic.” (p. 33) According to Ethell, the outcome of simulated combat between USN F-14s and F-18s against Chilean F-5s was ”…astonishing: 56 USN aircraft shot down for 16 [Chilean] aircraft. After some mutual rehashing of the gun camera assessments and pilot debriefings that could be reduced to 36 USN aircraft lost for 20 {Chilean] aircraft depending on who is counting.” (p. 56) For some bizarre reason, Clancy missed this when he wrote about how invincible US naval aviators are. Now that he has gone, at least he will not be forgotten. Although his nationalism and militarism may appeal to some even now, I miss Clancy for a different reason. He provoked me into writing my second book and for that I am grateful.

NOTES

Tom Clancy. Carrier: A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier. Berkley Books. Kindle Edition.

Roger Thompson. Lessons Not Learned: The US Navy’s Status Quo Culture. Naval Institute Press. Kindle Edition.

Steve Ladd. From F-4 Phantom to A-10 Warthog: Memoirs of a Cold War Fighter Pilot (p. 124). Pen & Sword Books. Kindle Edition.

Jeff Ethell, “Chilean Knife Fight” Air Combat, August 1989, pp. 28-36, 56-57.

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

During his one term in the Senate (1973 to 1978), he singlehandedly took the plight and causes of Native Americans to heights the long-complicit Congress and media could not ignore. Read what the Associated Press had to say in its obituary:

Mr. Abourezk was the first chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and successfully pressed for the American Indian Policy Review Commission. It produced a comprehensive review of federal policy with American Indian tribes and sparked the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the Indian Child Welfare Act — a landmark piece of legislation meant to cut down on the alarming rate at which Native American children were taken from their homes and placed with white families.

Abourezk found a keen supporter in fellow South Dakotan Senator George McGovern, who was pioneering Senate hearings “discovering” serious hunger in America, including on Indian Reservations. He grew up on the impoverished Rosebud Reservation and never forgot where he came from.

As Senator, he visited Lebanon, the ancestral land of his immigrant parents, which introduced him to U.S. policy in the Middle East and the oppression of the Palestinian people by Israel and its main backer, the U.S. government. As a lone voice on Capitol Hill, he championed wider recognition of these racist practices, including discrimination against Arab-Americans (the other anti-Semitism).

His style was one of dialogue and friendly debate. He co-authored a book with Hyman Bookbinder titled, Through Different Eyes: Two Leading Americans, a Jew and an Arab, Debate U.S. Policy in the Middle East (1987). They travelled together around the country discussing and disagreeing before rapt audiences unused to such two-way dialogues.

The former Senate Democratic majority leader, South Dakotan Tom Daschle was a Senate aide to Senator Abourezk. He told AP, “He was courageous, he was outspoken. I give him great credit for his advocacy of human rights, especially of the need to recognize the Arab American community in the United States. He was a lone voice for many years. He was a great storyteller; he had great humor; he was quick-witted and people loved to be around him.”

Not surprising when you learn of all the jobs Abourezk had before and after serving four years in the Navy, earning a civil engineering degree from the South Dakota School of Mines and a law degree from the University of South Dakota School of Law. He worked as a ranger, blackjack dealer, judo instructor, bartender, bouncer, car salesman and wholesale grocery salesman.

Such experiences can lead to an independence of thought and practice. These jobs gave him a sense of theatre. Saying that sports was not controversial and can bring people together, he arranged for the University of South Dakota basketball team to play a game with the Cuban national basketball team in Cuba, where he met with Fidel Castro.

After retiring from the U.S. Senate, he wrote a memoir epitomizing his sense of humor, rooted in truth, emerged in force. He wrote of the Senate: “Where else are your doors opened for you, is your travel all over the world provided free of charge, can you meet with world leaders who would otherwise never let you into their countries, have your bad jokes laughed at and your boring speeches applauded? It’s the ultimate place to have one’s ego massaged, over and over.”

He believed in term limits and practiced what he preached – one term only – to the detriment of the American people that “this prairie populist” so dutifully spoke and acted for in the corporate-dominated Congress. We found him to be the “go-to” person in the Senate when time was of the essence. He took up consumer, labor, and family farmer causes as a matter of duty. With knowledge and intuition, he rose to the occasion, often with his close collaborator, Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH), to challenge big business lobbies.

After he left the Senate, he founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), practiced law in South Dakota for good causes, and continued to speak out on U.S. foreign policy. Former ADC president, Albert Mokhiber wrote: “We lost a dear friend and mentor, a brave leader and the best that America has and hopefully will continue to offer.”

In the Nineties, he told me he sometimes regretted leaving the Senate, noting that by then his seniority would have made him chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He observed that had he led that Committee, several top judicial nominees, including Clarence Thomas, would not have been confirmed.

He was an exceedingly compassionate man. He was quick to express condolences and suggest some award or other legacy be established in honor of the deceased.

His many friends should gather together and decide what kinds of permanent legacies can be established in honor of a man who stood out, stood tall and proclaimed the needs of justice for the dispossessed. That would be a good way to convey condolences to his outstanding restaurateur wife and author, Sanaa Dieb, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The young generation, turned off by corrupt and cowardly politicians, needs to learn about the luminous life of 92-year-old James Abourezk.

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

Environmental groups on Tuesday accused the Biden administration of putting the profits of big agribusiness over public health and critical pollinators by attempting to obstruct the Mexican government's ongoing push to ban genetically engineered corn.

"The U.S.'s shameful efforts to strong-arm Mexico into accepting GE corn it has rejected is nothing short of 21st-century imperialism,” Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the U.S.-based Center for Biological Diversity. "Our government is working tirelessly to pad the multibillion-dollar profits of domestic agribusiness corporations by pushing GE corn, even though our glyphosate-drenched GE cornfields are playing an outsized role in driving catastrophic declines in vital pollinator populations."

The group's statement came after Mexico issued a new decree earlier this week that scraps the country's original January 2024 deadline to halt imports of GMO corn for livestock feed and industrial use, a move widely seen as a concession to the U.S., which has been pressuring its southern neighbor to drop the ban since Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) first announced it in 2020.

But Mexico—the largest destination for U.S. corn exports—reiterated its intention to prohibit GE corn for human consumption by 2024 in its latest decree. Mexico is also aiming to ban imports and use of glyphosate, a cancer-linked chemical that is often sprayed on genetically engineered corn.

The new decree instructs Mexican authorities to "revoke and refrain from granting permits for the release into the environment in Mexico of genetically modified corn seeds."

Mexican officials have repeatedly argued that GE corn and the associated use of glyphosate pose threats to human health and pollinators, as well as domestic production.

"We have to put the right to life, the right to health, the right to a healthy environment ahead of economic and business [interests]," Víctor Suárez Carrera, Mexico's undersecretary of food and competitiveness, toldReuters in 2021.

Viridiana Lázaro, food and agriculture campaigner at Greenpeace Mexico, said Tuesday that "the ban of GE corn is the first step to transform Mexico's agriculture system from one industrialized, based on pesticides, and dependent on transnational corporations to an agro-ecological system that offers solutions to soil fertility, local pest problems, allows crop diversification, and protects biodiversity and health of farmers and consumers."

"To carry out the gradual substitution of genetically modified corn for animal feed and industrial corn for human consumption, as is stated in the new decree, is a broad challenge and, in order to ensure that it does not remain only on paper, public policies aimed at the agroecological transition must be issued in order to achieve it," Lázaro continued. "Also, we must ensure that glyphosate and GE corn do not improperly end up in dough and tortillas, which studies have demonstrated has happened before."

"The United States has refused to respect Mexico's choice, instead working tirelessly to bully the country into accepting GE corn in order to protect the short-term profits of U.S. agribusiness giants."

The U.S. government claims that Mexico's plans, which have also drawn fierce opposition from industry lobbying groups, would run afoul of provisions in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and harm American farmers. The Biden administration has threatened to take legal action under the USMCA if Mexico doesn't reverse course.

The USMCA entered into force in 2020 and replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), under which U.S. corn flooded the Mexican market.

In a statement on Tuesday, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said he is "disappointed" that Mexico is still pushing ahead with its proposed ban on genetically modified corn. An estimated 90% of U.S. corn production is genetically modified.

"The U.S. believes in and adheres to a science-based, rules-based trading system and remains committed to preventing disruptions to bilateral agricultural trade and economic harm to U.S. and Mexican producers," Vilsack added. "We are carefully reviewing the details of the new decree and intend to work with [the United States Trade Representative] to ensure our science-based, rules-based commitment remains firm."

Tom Haag, president of the National Corn Growers Association, a lobbying group, declared that "singling out corn—our number one ag export to Mexico—and hastening an import ban on numerous food-grade uses makes USMCA a dead letter unless it's enforced."

This week's back-and-forth between the U.S. and Mexico marks a significant escalation in the yearslong trade dispute over the proposed ban on GE corn and glyphosate.

In February 2021, The Guardianreported that "internal government emails reveal Monsanto owner Bayer AG and industry lobbyist CropLife America have been working closely with U.S. officials to pressure Mexico into abandoning its intended ban on glyphosate, a pesticide linked to cancer that is the key ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup weedkillers."

The Center for Biological Diversity noted in a Tuesday press release that "the United States has, for months, exerted heavy pressure on Mexico to accept U.S.-produced corn that is genetically engineered to withstand what would normally be a deadly dose of pesticides."

"Corn's historical role in Mexican diets and culture—and current concerns about the impacts of glyphosate and genetic contamination of Mexico's many varieties of heirloom corn—prompted its leaders to ban GE corn for human consumption and phase out glyphosate," the group added. "The United States has refused to respect Mexico's choice, instead working tirelessly to bully the country into accepting GE corn in order to protect the short-term profits of U.S. agribusiness giants."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The post Encounters with Tom Verlaine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Human rights defenders condemned a Friday attack outside a synagogue in an illegal Israeli settlement by a Palestinian gunman who murdered at least seven people—a massacre that followed the killing of 10 Palestinians by Israeli forces during a raid in the occupied West Bank Thursday.

TheTimes of Israelreports the unidentified gunman shot and killed seven people and wounded three others during the Friday evening attack in Neve Yaakov in East Jerusalem. Friday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The attacker was shot dead during a gunfight with police as he attempted to flee into the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina. An ambulance service said the deceased ranged in age from 20 to 70.

In a statement, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, said the U.N. chief "strongly condemns today's terrorist attack by a Palestinian perpetrator outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, which claimed the lives of at least seven Israelis and injured several others."

"It is particularly abhorrent that the attack occurred at a place of worship, and on the very day we commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day," Dujarric added. "There is never any excuse for acts of terrorism. They must be clearly condemned and rejected by all."

Tom Nides, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, tweeted that he is "shocked and disgusted at this heinous terrorist attack on innocent people, including children. Praying for all of the victims and their loved ones."

The synagogue massacre came one day after Israeli occupation forces killed 10 Palestinians including an elderly woman and wounded around 20 others during an early morning raid on the Jenin refugee camp. Israeli forces then bombed Gaza early on Friday morning after Palestinian resistance fighters fired two rockets at Israel.

The Jenin raid was part of Operation Breakwater, a nine-month campaign targeting Palestinian resistance in the camp and nearby Nablus. Human rights groups say 30 Palestinians, both fighters and civilians, have been killed so far by Israeli forces in 2023. Last year was the deadliest year for West Bank Palestinians since the second intifada—or general uprising—a generation ago, with 150 people including 33 children killed. Another 53 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2022.

In a statement following the synagogue murders, the U.S.-based group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) called the attack "the inevitable, horrifying outcome of decades of Israeli apartheid"

"We grieve for all this unthinkable loss. And with our grief, we also rage. The Israeli government's domination and oppression of Palestinians is the root cause of each of these senseless, tragic deaths," JVP contended.

"The violent, racist speech coming from the Israeli government makes it clear that the Israeli military will continue to escalate its violent attacks on Palestinians. Already the Israeli army has invaded Palestinian neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem," the group said.

JVP continued:

What we are witnessing is not a "conflict," a "clash," or a "war" between two equal parties. There is no mistaking the massive disparity of power between the Israeli government and the Palestinians it targets. Backed by $3.8 billion in annual military funding from the U.S. government, the Israeli government controls, dominates, and dispossesses Palestinian lives and lands.

"We are on the side of unconditional commitment to justice, equality, freedom, and dignity for all people, no exceptions," JVP added. "To achieve a future where all are safe and free, we must end the Israeli government's settler-colonial apartheid regime."

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

Human rights defenders condemned a Friday attack outside a synagogue in an illegal Israeli settlement by a Palestinian gunman who murdered at least seven people—a massacre that followed the killing of 10 Palestinians by Israeli forces during a raid in the occupied West Bank Thursday.

The Times of Israel reports the unidentified gunman shot and killed seven people and wounded three others during the Friday evening attack in Neve Yaakov in East Jerusalem. Friday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The attacker was shot dead during a gunfight with police as he attempted to flee into the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina. An ambulance service said the deceased ranged in age from 20 to 70.

In a statement, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, said the U.N. chief "strongly condemns today's terrorist attack by a Palestinian perpetrator outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, which claimed the lives of at least seven Israelis and injured several others."

"It is particularly abhorrent that the attack occurred at a place of worship, and on the very day we commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day," Dujarric added. "There is never any excuse for acts of terrorism. They must be clearly condemned and rejected by all."

\u201c\ud83d\udea85 #Israelis killed & 5 wounded in a shooting attack near a synagogue in the Neve Yaakov settlements in occupied East Jerusalem.\n\nViolence begets violence begets violence....\n\nPeople don't understand how close the occupied territories are to a full disastrous explosion!\u201d

— Muhammad Shehada (@Muhammad Shehada) 1674846498

Tom Nides, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, tweeted that he is "shocked and disgusted at this heinous terrorist attack on innocent people, including children. Praying for all of the victims and their loved ones."

The synagogue massacre came one day after Israeli occupation forces killed 10 Palestinians including an elderly woman and wounded around 20 others during an early morning raid on the Jenin refugee camp. Israeli forces then bombed Gaza early on Friday morning after Palestinian resistance fighters fired two rockets at Israel.

The Jenin raid was part of Operation Breakwater, a nine-month campaign targeting Palestinian resistance in the camp and nearby Nablus. Human rights groups say 30 Palestinians, both fighters and civilians, have been killed so far by Israeli forces in 2023. Last year was the deadliest year for West Bank Palestinians since the second intifada—or general uprising—a generation ago, with 150 people including 33 children killed. Another 53 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2022.

\u201cInstead of linking today's terrible attack in Jerusalem to Holocaust Remembrance Day, which it has nothing to do with, you might connect it instead to the 30 Palestinians that have been killed by Israel just this month. This is a cycle of violence borne of Israeli apartheid.\u201d

— Arielle Angel (@Arielle Angel) 1674851482

In a statement following the synagogue murders, the U.S.-based group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) called the attack "the inevitable, horrifying outcome of decades of Israeli apartheid"

"We grieve for all this unthinkable loss. And with our grief, we also rage. The Israeli government's domination and oppression of Palestinians is the root cause of each of these senseless, tragic deaths," JVP contended.

"The violent, racist speech coming from the Israeli government makes it clear that the Israeli military will continue to escalate its violent attacks on Palestinians. Already the Israeli army has invaded Palestinian neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem," the group said.

\u201c10 killed in #Jenin and now 5 dead, 5 wounded in Jerusalem shooting attack: these are the ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE RESULTS of a vicious extremist #Israeli government that leaves no room for hope, no room for peace, more to come. https://t.co/kQt5NgIMw3\u201d

— Sarah Leah Whitson (@Sarah Leah Whitson) 1674845638

JVP continued:

What we are witnessing is not a "conflict," a "clash," or a "war" between two equal parties. There is no mistaking the massive disparity of power between the Israeli government and the Palestinians it targets. Backed by $3.8 billion in annual military funding from the U.S. government, the Israeli government controls, dominates, and dispossesses Palestinian lives and lands.

"We are on the side of unconditional commitment to justice, equality, freedom, and dignity for all people, no exceptions," JVP added. "To achieve a future where all are safe and free, we must end the Israeli government's settler-colonial apartheid regime."

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

Human rights defenders condemned a Friday attack outside a synagogue in an illegal Israeli settlement by a Palestinian gunman who murdered at least seven people—a massacre that followed the killing of 10 Palestinians by Israeli forces during a raid in the occupied West Bank Thursday.

TheTimes of Israelreports the unidentified gunman shot and killed seven people and wounded three others during the Friday evening attack in Neve Yaakov in East Jerusalem. Friday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The attacker was shot dead during a gunfight with police as he attempted to flee into the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina. An ambulance service said the deceased ranged in age from 20 to 70.

In a statement, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, said the U.N. chief "strongly condemns today's terrorist attack by a Palestinian perpetrator outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, which claimed the lives of at least seven Israelis and injured several others."

"It is particularly abhorrent that the attack occurred at a place of worship, and on the very day we commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day," Dujarric added. "There is never any excuse for acts of terrorism. They must be clearly condemned and rejected by all."

Tom Nides, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, tweeted that he is "shocked and disgusted at this heinous terrorist attack on innocent people, including children. Praying for all of the victims and their loved ones."

The synagogue massacre came one day after Israeli occupation forces killed 10 Palestinians including an elderly woman and wounded around 20 others during an early morning raid on the Jenin refugee camp. Israeli forces then bombed Gaza early on Friday morning after Palestinian resistance fighters fired two rockets at Israel.

The Jenin raid was part of Operation Breakwater, a nine-month campaign targeting Palestinian resistance in the camp and nearby Nablus. Human rights groups say 30 Palestinians, both fighters and civilians, have been killed so far by Israeli forces in 2023. Last year was the deadliest year for West Bank Palestinians since the second intifada—or general uprising—a generation ago, with 150 people including 33 children killed. Another 53 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2022.

In a statement following the synagogue murders, the U.S.-based group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) called the attack "the inevitable, horrifying outcome of decades of Israeli apartheid"

"We grieve for all this unthinkable loss. And with our grief, we also rage. The Israeli government's domination and oppression of Palestinians is the root cause of each of these senseless, tragic deaths," JVP contended.

"The violent, racist speech coming from the Israeli government makes it clear that the Israeli military will continue to escalate its violent attacks on Palestinians. Already the Israeli army has invaded Palestinian neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem," the group said.

JVP continued:

What we are witnessing is not a "conflict," a "clash," or a "war" between two equal parties. There is no mistaking the massive disparity of power between the Israeli government and the Palestinians it targets. Backed by $3.8 billion in annual military funding from the U.S. government, the Israeli government controls, dominates, and dispossesses Palestinian lives and lands.

"We are on the side of unconditional commitment to justice, equality, freedom, and dignity for all people, no exceptions," JVP added. "To achieve a future where all are safe and free, we must end the Israeli government's settler-colonial apartheid regime."

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

Indigenous and green groups on Wednesday applauded the Biden administration for reinstating protections for millions of acres of wilderness in Alaska's Tongass National Forest that were lifted during a Trump-era regulatory rollback spree.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced Wednesday that it has finalized protections for the Tongass National Forest by restoring "longstanding roadless protections to 9.37 million acres of roadless areas that support the ecological, economic, and cultural values of Southeastern Alaska."

The Roadless Rule was established in 2001 to protect wilderness areas in U.S. national forests from roads and logging. The administration of former President Donald Trump rescinded the rule in 2020 amid a flurry of regulatory rollbacks, prompting a lawsuit from a coalition of Indigenous, conservation, and business organizations. The Biden administration subsequently committed to reviving the Roadless Rule in 2021.

"As our nation's largest national forest and the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, the Tongass National Forest is key to conserving biodiversity and addressing the climate crisis," U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement Wednesday. "Restoring roadless protections listens to the voices of tribal nations and the people of Southeast Alaska while recognizing the importance of fishing and tourism to the region's economy."

According to the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife:

The Tongass contains rare expanses of pristine old-growth forest and as many as 17,000 miles of creeks, rivers, and lakes. These waters abound with all five species of Pacific salmon, which anchor the economy of Southeast Alaska. Approximately 1 million visitors come from all over the U.S. and internationally each year to see its glaciers, old-growth forests, and abundant wildlife.

The Tongass supports an incredible array of biodiversity and is home to the Alexander Archipelago wolf, brown bears, bald eagles, northern goshawks, and Pacific marten, among others. The Tongass is also one of the world's largest carbon reservoirs, storing the equivalent of about 8% of the carbon stored in all the U.S. forests combined. In addition, a broad coalition of tribal leaders, outdoor recreation businesses, and conservationists in Southeast Alaska have fought to preserve the region's remaining cedar, hemlock, and Sitka spruce trees.

"The restoration of National Roadless Rule protections for the Tongass National Forest is a great first step in honoring the voices of the many tribal governments and tribal citizens who spoke out in favor of Roadless Rule protections for the Tongass," said Naawéiyaa Tagaban, the environmental justice strategy lead at Native Movement. "We are grateful to the Biden administration for taking this first step toward long-term protections for the Tongass. We hope that going forward true long-term protections will be established that do not rely on a rule which can be changed at the whim of a presidential administration."

"The administration must look to tribal sovereignty and Indigenous stewardship as the true long-term solution for protections in the Tongass," Tagaban added. "Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people have lived in and managed the Tongass national forest for generations; true protections will look like the restoration of lands into Indigenous ownership."

Kate Glover, senior attorney at EarthJustice, said her group applauds the Forest Service "for making good on its commitment to tribes and to the climate by restoring the Roadless Rule across the Tongass. This is great news for the forest, the salmon, the wildlife, and the people who depend on intact ecosystems to support their ways of life and livelihoods."

Teague Whalen, who owns Tongass Teague, asserted that "there are two uncompromising realities for the survival of life on this planet: clean air and clean water."

"My hiking tours into the Tongass begin at the literal end of our road, where the Roadless Rule reinstatement will ensure that the Tongass can continue to be a lasting carbon sink," Whalen added.

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

As early as November 2, top US officials conveyed to Axios that the Joe Biden Administration is “unlikely to engage with Jewish supremacist politician, Itamar Ben-Gvir”.

In fact, the US government’s apprehensions surpassed Ben-Gvir, who was convicted by Israel’s own court in 2007 for supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism.

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reportedly “hinted” that the US government would also boycott “other right-wing extremists” in Netanyahu’s government.

However, these strong concerns seemed absent from the congratulatory statement by the US Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, on the following day. Nides relayed that he had “congratulated (Netanyahu) on his victory and told him that I look forward to working together to maintain the unbreakable bond” between the two countries.

In other words, this ‘unbreakable bond’ is stronger than any public US concern regarding terrorism, extremism, fascism, and criminal activities.

Ben-Gvir is not the only convicted criminal in Netanyahu’s government. Aryeh Deri, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, was convicted of tax fraud in early 2022 and, in 2000, he served a prison sentence for accepting bribes when he held the position of interior minister.

Bezalel Smotrich is another controversial character, whose anti-Palestinian racism has dominated his political persona for many years.

While Ben-Gvir has been assigned the post of national security minister, Deri has been entrusted with the ministry of interior and Smotrich with the ministry of finance.

Palestinians and Arab countries are rightly angry, because they understand that the new government is likely to sow more violence and chaos.

With many of Israel’s sinister politicians in one place, Arabs know that Israel’s illegal annexation of parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories is back on the agenda; and that incitement against Palestinians in Occupied East Jerusalem, coupled with raids of Al-Aqsa Mosque will exponentially increase in the coming weeks and months. And, expectedly, the push for the construction and expansion of illegal settlements is likely to grow, as well.

These are not unfounded fears. Aside from the very racist and violent statements and actions by Netanyahu and his allies in recent years, the new government has already declared that the Jewish people have “exclusive and inalienable rights to all parts of the Land of Israel”, promising to expand settlements, while distancing itself from any commitments to establishing a Palestinian State, or even engaging in any ‘peace process’.

But while Palestinians and their Arab allies have been largely consistent in recognizing extremism in the various Israeli governments, what excuse do the US and the West have in failing to recognize that the latest Netanyahu-led government is the most rational outcome of blindly supporting Israel throughout the years?

In March 2019, Politico branded Netanyahu as the creator of “the most right-wing government in Israeli history,” a sentiment that was repeated countless times in other western media outlets.

This ideological shift was, in fact, recognized by Israel’s own media, years earlier. In May 2016, the popular Israeli newspaper Maariv described the Israeli government at the time as the “most right-wing and extremist” in the country’s history. This was, in part, due to the fact that far-right politician Tom Nides, was assigned the role of the defense minister.

The West, then, too, showed concern, warned against the demise of Israel’s supposed liberal democracy, and demanded that Israel must remain committed to the peace process and the two-state solution. None of that actualized. Instead, the terrifying figures of that government were rebranded as merely conservatives, centrists or even liberals in the following years.

The same is likely to happen now. In fact, signs of the US’s willingness to accommodate whatever extremist politics Israel produces are already on display. In his statement, on December 30, welcoming the new Israeli government, Biden said nothing about the threat of Tel Aviv’s far-right politics to the Middle East region but, rather, the “challenges and threats” posed by the region to Israel. In other words, Ben-Gvir or no Ben-Gvir, unconditional support for Israel by the US will remain intact.

If history is a lesson, future violence and incitement in Palestine will also be blamed mostly, if not squarely, on Palestinians. This knee-jerk, pro-Israeli attitude has defined Israel’s relationship with the US, regardless of whether Israeli governments are led by extremists or supposed liberals. No matter, Israel somehow maintained its false status as “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

But if we are to believe that Israel’s exclusivist and racially based ‘democracy’ is a democracy at all, then we are justified to also believe that Israel’s new government is neither less nor more democratic than the previous governments.

Yet, western officials, commentators and even pro-Israel Jewish leaders and organizations in the US are now warning against the supposed danger facing Israel’s liberal democracy in the run-up to the formation of Netanyahu’s new government.

This is an indirect, if not clever form of whitewashing, as these views accept that what Israel has practiced since its founding in 1948, until today, was a form of real democracy; and that Israel remained a democracy even after the passing of the controversial Nation-State Law, which defines Israel as a Jewish state, completely disregarding the rights of the country’s non-Jewish citizens.

It is only a matter of time before Israel’s new extremist government is also whitewashed as another working proof that Israel can strike a balance between being Jewish and also democratic at the same time.

The same story was repeated in 2016, when warnings over the rise of far-right extremism in Israel — following the Netanyahu-Lieberman pact — quickly disappeared, and eventually vanished. Instead of boycotting the new unity government, the US government finalized, in September 2016, its largest military aid package to Israel, amounting to $38 billion.

In truth, Israel has not changed much, either in its own self-definition or in its treatment of Palestinians. Failing to understand this is tantamount to tacit approval of Israel’s racist, violent and colonial policies in Occupied Palestine over the course of 75 years.

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

Ahead of the omnibus spending bill set to be released late Monday night, one of the staunchest defenders of press freedom and whistleblower rights in the Senate — Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa — told The Intercept he doesn’t think that the PRESS Act will be included in the year-end legislation. “I don’t think so,” Grassley said. The legislation, also known as the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act, seeks to protect journalists from government efforts to compel them to disclose the identities of their sources.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., a rabid opponent of the legislation and the protections it seeks to advance, argued on the Senate floor that the Pentagon Papers represented an example of criminal behavior by the media intended to influence public opinion against the war in Vietnam, and stood in as a reason to block the PRESS Act.

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

This is a developing story… Please check back for possible updates...

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton on Wednesday blocked the passage of a House-approved bipartisan bill that's been heralded by advocates as "the most important free press legislation in modern times."

The Senate had in recent days faced mounting pressure from journalists, press freedom groups, and others to follow the House's lead and approve the Protect Reporters From Exploitative State Spying (PRESS) Act, spearheaded by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).

After Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday revealed in the Chicago Sun-Times that he supported fast-tracking the PRESS Act (S. 2457/H.R. 4330), Wyden took to the floor early Wednesday to try to pass the bill by unanimous consent and send it to President Joe Biden's desk.

Cotton (R-Ark.) objected, claiming that "the PRESS Act would immunize journalists and leakers alike from scrutiny and consequences for their actions."

"This bill would prohibit the government from compelling any individual who calls himself a 'journalist,'" Cotton continued, indicating scare quotes with his hands, "from disclosing the source or substance of such damaging leaks."

Wyden pushed back against Cotton's claims, pointing to the exceptions in the law that were adequate enough to satisfy all Republicans in the House, which advanced the bill by a voice vote in September.

As Durbin detailed Tuesday:

[In] considering the PRESS Act—and the shield from subpoenas and other compulsory legal process it provides—you have to think through the tough questions, such as: Who qualifies as a journalist? What information should be shielded from law enforcement? Should law enforcement be prevented from seeking evidence from a white supremacist or other domestic violent extremist with information about a planned act of domestic terror just because he or she occasionally posts to a blog?

It's questions like these that I've wrestled with for over a decade as bills similar to the PRESS Act have been debated.

That's why I am glad that today's PRESS Act—like recent Justice Department regulations issued by Attorney General Merrick Garland—accounts for these scenarios. It makes exceptions for information necessary to prevent or identify the perpetrator of an act of terrorism or to prevent a threat of imminent violence, significant bodily harm or death. And it doesn't apply to foreign agents, terrorists, or journalists suspected of committing crimes.

Considering the inclusion of those exceptions, Daniel Schuman, policy director at Demand Progress, said of Cotton, "His reasoning is... specious."

Demand Progress was among the media outlets along with civil liberties, government accountability, and press freedom organizations that on Monday had urged Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to include the PRESS Act in the omnibus spending bill.

Highlighting that the PRESS Act would codify the Justice Department's recently announced reforms so they couldn't be repealed by a future administration, they wrote to Schumer that "it is crucial that you act before this Congress adjourns so that journalists do not need to wait another decade or more for the protections they need to do their jobs effectively."

Ahead of Cotton's obstruction on Wednesday, Freedom of the Press Foundation—which has been backing the bill and signed the letter to Schumer—published a piece by Seth Stern, the group's director of advocacy, explaining why all Republicans should support the legislation.

Noting how "conservative journalists are often targets of government surveillance" but also that "most harassment of journalists isn't political," Stern argued that this "strong anti-surveillance" bill "recognizes national security concerns" and would protect all reporters—regardless of politics—while helping independent and alternative media thrive.

Stern said in an email to Common Dreams that "the PRESS Act can still be included in a year-end omnibus package and passed this year."

"Sen. Cotton's hostility to press freedoms demonstrates exactly why these protections are needed," he added. "We hope everyone will contact their elected officials ASAP and urge them to move the PRESS Act forward."

In a series of tweets Wednesday, Freedom of the Press Foundation executive director Trevor Timm pointed to the end-of-the-year spending bill and the fact that a Boston Globe reporter was forced to testify in federal court this week despite First Amendment concerns.

"If the Senate passes the PRESS Act this week," he said, "this type of press freedom violation would become a thing of the past."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

The First No-Thanks Thanksgiving

Trigger Warning (noun): a statement at the start of a piece of writing, video, etc., alerting the reader or viewer to the fact that it contains potentially distressing material

This hoopla around Turkey Day —  this so-called Big Box Store Shuffle and Great American Pig-out Thanksgiving — is a National Day of Mourning.

I was not my history teacher’s favorite student in high school when I wrote essays on my country’s hypocrisy of football, apple pie and Thanksgiving while never facing the genocide against the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. I was called a traitor, self-loathing white and un-American when I pointed out the war against the “Indians” didn’t officially end until 1924, more than thirty years after the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890).

When I was teaching in El Paso, I got mired in a push to commemorate the “first” thanksgiving here, in Paseo del Norte. El Paso laid claim to the first undocumented/illegal settlement in North America in the form of Conquistadors and Friars.

In 1598 the Spanish explorer, Don Juan de Oñate, and his army established the first European colony in North America. The settlement was located at San Gabriel near Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, 30 miles north of Santa Fe.

I’ve been there, and the double-edge sword of breaking bread and pavo (turkey) with the Spanish interlopers is quaint for the people of El Paso looking for tourism bucks.

However, like the Plymouth Rock celebration of 1621, this Texas one represents a foreboding of genocide. I’ve been to that “celebration.” This El Paso organization declared this first Thanksgiving took place, near San Elizario, Texas. Oñate and his battalion of soldiers, Franciscan missionaries and colonists, celebrated their safe arrival on April 30, 1598.

That same year, the Spanish colonial governor de Oñate put 507 Acoma on trial. Women between 12 and 25 were enslaved for 20 years at the Pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh. Men over age of 25 had one foot cut off, and younger men were enslaved for 20 years. Oñate was later tried for excessive cruelty.

Switching to my Canadian roots, I absorbed more revised history. As a kid, I learned of that country’s treatment of Indigenous peoples since my mother was a journalist in Vancouver who reported on stories about Canada’s maltreatment of their First Nations. On September 30, 2021 Canada established a statutory holiday observation of Orange Shirt Day. This is a remembrance of missing and murdered children from residential schools as well as a process of healing for survivors.

It’s sort of a truth and reconciliation moment to raise consciousness about the residential school system and its impact on Indigenous communities for over a century. Hundreds of children were buried in unmarked graves at just one residential site, where my sister lived, Kamloops, BC. Thousands of other graves are located throughout Canada.

Then, in my Arizona high school days, I was “adopted” by some Apache friends and their families. Starting then – as their aunties and uncles were active in the American Indian Movement and Red Nation – I’d been to various events decrying the Plymouth Rock myth. For me, since age 15, Thanksgiving has been a Day of Mourning for Indigenous Peoples who were devastated by settler colonialism and imperialism.

The National Day of Mourning protest was founded by Wamsutta Frank James, an Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribal member, and other Indigenous men and women. In 1970, Wamsutta had been invited by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to speak at a banquet commemorating the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims. The organizers of the banquet thought Wamsutta might deliver an honorific tribute singing the praises of the American settler colonial project. He was not about to “thanks” the Pilgrims for bringing “civilization” to the Wampanoag.

The speech that Wamsutta wrote, which was based on historical fact instead of the hollow fiction, portrayed in the Thanksgiving myth asked fundamental questions: What are the foundational myths of the United States? Who created them and who is erased and harmed?

He detailed how the English before 1620 brought diseases that caused a “Great Dying.” They took Wampanoag people captive, selling them as slaves in Europe for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims robbed Wampanoag graves immediately upon landing in Massachusetts. Yes, there was a meal provided largely by the Wampanoag in 1621, but it was not a “thanksgiving.” Rather, the first official “thanksgiving” (not including the San Elizario one) was declared by the Puritans (not the Pilgrims) in 1637 to celebrate massacring hundreds of Pequot men, women and children on the banks of the Mystic River in Connecticut.

When the organizers of the celebration read the speech, they suppressed it. One of the more powerful messages in it was a collective message of Native American pride: “Our spirit refuses to die,” wrote Wamsutta. “Yesterday we walked the woodland paths and sandy trails. Today we must walk the macadam highways and roads. We are uniting… We stand tall and proud, and before too many moons pass we’ll right the wrongs we have allowed to happen to us.” (RIP, James, an elder of great weight)

Much of these histories – massacres of women and children, the enslavement of men, the amputation of feet, and the death of children ripped from families and forced into these “schools” – cannot be taught in K12, as there are no “trigger warnings” strong enough to “protect” youth from the truth. I’ve had young people complain to administrators for the negative and horrific stories a substitute brings to the high school class.

Going back to mythologies and Disneyfied presentations of history is not just retrograde; it’s dangerous. Having faculty like myself being charged with “teaching anti-white critical race theory junk” is also McCarthyite.

Thank goodness for some of my activist friends in El Paso who years ago did some statue editing: they chopped off the bronze foot of Don Onate as he is poised on a Spanish steed high above his slaves. The foot has never been found.

Part Two

Amazing curriculum,

The revised edition of Native People of Wisconsin introduces students to the historical background, cultural traditions, and treaties negotiated by the eleven federally-recognized Indian Nations in the state today, the Brothertown Indians, a group still waiting to regain federal recognition, and urban Indians. This is serious material, the only mandated subject in social studies instruction in Wisconsin.

Author Patty Loew is a member of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Ojibwe Nation, who based Native People of Wisconsin on the research done for Indian Nations of Wisconsin, now in its second edition, which is written for a general audience. She strongly feels the responsibility to help students gain knowledge of Indian Country from a Native perspective and from the perspective of each major tribal group represented in Wisconsin’s current population.

The authors of this accompanying teacher’s guide want you to feel confident and comfortable teaching about Native people even if you don’t have much firsthand knowledge. Of course, you and your students have been inundated with images of Indian people, and it’s important that you help your students separate the reality from the stereotypical or mythical, positive and negative. We are happy to direct instructors to real stories from Native communities in videos produced by The Ways: Stories on Culture and Language from Native Communities Around the Central Great Lakes. This online educational resource is a production of Wisconsin Media Lab. The videos are integrated into many of the activities we’ve included and are linked to their corresponding activities in the Table of Contents. Educators may use this video content in conjunction with these Student Activities: Learning from My Elders; Food That Grows on the Water; Oneida Language & Culture; Boarding Schools; Native Songs and Dances (source)

Yet, if this post were to be read by the same people reading my short piece, the one above, with the post’s title, “The First No-Thanks Thanksgiving,” which I hope will appear in the Newport News Times, what kind of backlash would I receive?

Tons of writers or bots or both calling me a kook or loony or anti-business or self-hating when I weigh in on various alternative news sites.

Bottom line is we need more nuance, more critical thinking, and more people who can be counter-intuitive and have several theses, sometimes contradictory, while holding onto strong ethical frame works. I can be for the Declaration of Human Rights, a la United Nations, but I can also be opposed to many of the UN’s programs, people, representatives.

I can see the amazing forward thinking of say The Earth Charter, but I can also think hard about systems, how we need more than a charter, and we need true communism with people power, planet power, thinking and acting globally but also living and organizing and doing locally and regionally.

How can we not engage positively with this?

Preamble — Earth Charter

We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.

Alas, though, any sort of collective and creative and earth and people centric thinking will be attacked. Any thinking around just what happened to Native Americans over the course of almost 600 years, that is not heretical.

Just what was that Union Pacific Railroad all about? Mr. Durant, getting how many millions of acres for that transcontinental feat? How many millions of buffalo slaughtered — “shot from the comfort of your railcar” Indian Killing, err, Buffalo Killing, trips?

The telegram arrived in New York from Promontory Summit, Utah, at 3:05 p.m. on May 10, 1869, announcing one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of the century:

The last rail is laid; the last spike driven; the Pacific Railroad is completed. The point of junction is 1086 miles west of the Missouri river and 690 miles east of Sacramento City.

The telegram was signed, “Leland Stanford, Central Pacific Railroad. T. P. Durant, Sidney Dillon, John Duff, Union Pacific Railroad,” and trumpeted news of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. After more than six years of backbreaking labor, east officially met west with the driving of a ceremonial golden spike. In City Hall Park in Manhattan, the announcement was greeted with the firing of 100 guns. Bells were rung across the country, from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. Business was suspended in Chicago as people rushed to the streets, celebrating to the sounding of steam whistles and cannons booming.

Back in Utah, railroad officials and politicians posed for pictures aboard locomotives, shaking hands and breaking bottles of champagne on the engines as Chinese laborers from the West and Irish, German and Italian laborers from the East were budged from view. (source)

Oh, that was General Sheridan’s concept of Total War, which he utilized heading to Atlanta: three hundred miles of immolated towns, farms, livestock, crops, everything. He now was with President Grant attempting to take care of the “Indian Problem.” Imagine that, more than 120 years ago, utilizing the concept of destroying great people like the Lakota using psychology as a weapon.

Harper’s Weekly described these hunting excursions:

Nearly every railroad train which leaves or arrives at Fort Hays on the Kansas Pacific Railroad has its race with these herds of buffalo; and a most interesting and exciting scene is the result. The train is “slowed” to a rate of speed about equal to that of the herd; the passengers get out fire-arms which are provided for the defense of the train against the Indians, and open from the windows and platforms of the cars a fire that resembles a brisk skirmish. Frequently a young bull will turn at bay for a moment. His exhibition of courage is generally his death-warrant, for the whole fire of the train is turned upon him, either killing him or some member of the herd in his immediate vicinity.

I just finished the eight-part series, The American West, a Robert Redford production. Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Wyatt Earp, Custer. Durant is also a character in the dramatized documentary. Seeing John McCain yammering away about Indigenous peoples in this series takes some acid reflux pills, but then, Tom Selleck, and Kiefer Sutherland and Burt Reynolds?

Producers Stephen David and Tim Kelly:

What prompted you to explore the West in your latest series?

Stephen: We found that after the Civil War – the series focuses on the 25 years after the Civil War – the country was broken and divided, but 25 years later we wound up with this unified country with the same good-bad similarities going on throughout the country. Big business ran things. The American spirit that we have today came from this 25-year period. The lawman, the outlaws, the Army, the Native Americans – everything that was mixed up in this time period – contributed to who we are today.

Tell us what we can expect from the episodes.

Tim: You can expect an unknown story of the West and how the West was settled. It’s a lot of names that you know with a lot of unknown stories. You’ll see the way everything was connected and how the push West was shaped by the Civil War and the opportunity that was available. It’s a very personal story. It focuses on a group of people who aren’t necessarily directly connected, but the effect of what they do is seen throughout the West and how it is formed. There’s also focus on the Native Americans. It’s a mix of outlaws, politicians and Native Americans and the roles they played settling the West.

Yeah, I was a reporter in Tombstone, for the University of Arizona lab paper, The Tombstone Epitaph. I then was a graduated BA/BS working in Bisbee, Cochise County and along the border on both sides of the dividing line.

I was a reporter and teacher and activist in El Paso, and Las Cruces, and had tequila and empanadas on the grave of John Wesley Hardin in Concordia Cemetery.

In the mix, of course, with all these documentaries and dramas the Native Americans are either completely washed out of these stories, or set into a white man’s milieu. I’ve studied graduate courses on “planning in the West,” you know, urban and regional planning. Looking at the West as a unique place in the USA, with a large chunk of the planning course looking at water, Indian sovereignty, and more.

“One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”

― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

Boom and bust, the West. In 2022, the West is all about sinking and shrinking waterways and reservoirs and fires and population influxes and the same snake oil salesmen I ran into in Tucson and throughout Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas.

I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in his sight. It is not necessary for Eagles to be Crows.

–Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Lakota chief. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion by Vine Deloria

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

Democracy Now! is broadcasting live from COP27, the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where hundreds of activists protested outside the plenary hall Thursday to demand climate justice. We speak to two Indigenous activists and land defenders at the summit, Eriel Tchekwie Deranger and Tom Goldtooth. “It is frontline communities, land defenders and Indigenous peoples that have experienced the loss of our territories at the hands of oil and gas and extractivism,” says Deranger, executive director of Indigenous Climate Action and member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. “Colonialism has to be addressed in these hallways, and there’s been lack of political will around that,” says Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network and member of the Diné and Dakota nations.

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

He’s the former Penn State assistant football coach and pedophilic monster who started a foundation, The Second Mile, in order to gain sexual access to prepubescent boys, hundreds of whom he molested, until eight heroic ones stepped forward to tell a jury about their ordeals in 2012, resulting in the sixty-eight-year-old Sandusky’s thirty-to-sixty-year prison term.

If you recall anything else about the case, it is probably the wrenching story of the ten-year-old “little boy in the shower,” who, on February 9, 2001, was seen being raped by Sandusky in a Penn State athletic facility. For some reason the witness, a hulking former quarterback named Mike McQueary, didn’t intervene, but on the next morning he did go straight to the legendary football coach Joe Paterno and tell him about the sodomy.

Paterno conferred with the university’s athletic director, Tim Curley, who then involved a vice president, Gary Schultz, and the president, Graham Spanier. Instead of reporting the crime to the police, however, the three officials conspired to cover it up, thus sparing scandal to their all-important football program. As for the rape victim, he couldn’t appear in person at Sandusky’s trial, because nobody knew who he was.

But there’s a problem with what you remember. It’s sheer folklore. True, Sandusky took a shower with a boy. That’s what he often did, quite openly, after a workout together, and the showers typically included innocent horseplay. That behavior had been commonplace in the recreation center where Sandusky was raised.

As for the incident in question, Mike McQueary initially misremembered its date by more than a year, and then probably misdated it again; he wasn’t at all sure he had glimpsed a sex act, and that’s why he had done nothing to stop it; he evidently didn’t mention it to Paterno until weeks later, and then only in passing; and his subsequent inaction and cordiality toward Sandusky indicated that he had reconsidered his initial concern

Most crucially, when a grand jury indictment mentioned sodomy, McQueary protested that his testimony, which prosecutors had been nudging him to make more graphic, had been misconstrued. The email he received in response from Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach said in part, “I know that a lot of this stuff is incorrect and that it is hard not to respond. But you can’t.” In other words, Eshbach and her team had suborned perjury and were still intending to nail Sandusky with it.

As it happened, they failed in that instance. The jury, reasoning that too much time had elapsed since an event that had no identified victim, and taking note of conflicting versions narrated by McQueary, acquitted Sandusky on the charge. This would be the single greatest irony of the many-sided Sandusky case. When the grand jury presentment became known in November 2011, an accusation that would fail to be sustained in July 2012 completed Sandusky’s demonization in the media.

And within four days that same dubious story, automatically presumed to be true, brought about the firing of Curley and Schultz, the forced resignation of Spanier, the subsequent jailing of all three, and the removal from service of the eighty-five-year-old, mortally ill Joe Paterno–the longest-serving, “winningest,” and most revered football coach in America, whose reputation would now be soiled forever. All that to atone for an abomination that was never ascertained to have occurred.

A verdict of not guilty, of course, doesn’t exclude the possibility that a crime was committed. But in this instance, definitive proof of innocence lay at hand. Sandusky remembered the shower and the name of his companion, Allan Myers, who had been nearly fourteen, not ten, at the time; and Myers’s ongoing relation to Sandusky wasn’t that of a rape victim to a perpetrator. On the contrary, he was a virtual member of the Sandusky household both before and after the infamous shower.

Jerry and his wife Dottie had taken Myers with them on two trips to California, and he had lived with them for months in 2005. At Myers’s request, Jerry had delivered the commencement address at his high school graduation; and they had been photographed arm in arm at Myers’s wedding.

But what if Allan Myers simply wasn’t “the little boy in the shower”? Not possible. At age twenty-four he, too, still remembered the incident, and when he learned that it figured in the criminal case, he gave a sworn statement to Sandusky’s lawyers:

I would usually work out one or two days a week, but this particular night is very clear in my mind. We were in the shower and Jerry and I were slapping towels at each other to sting each other. I would slap the walls and slide on the shower floor, which I am sure you could have heard from the wooden locker area. 

While we were engaged in fun as I have described, I heard the sound of a wooden locker door close…. I never saw who closed the locker. The grand jury report says that Coach McQueary said he observed Jerry and I engaged in sexual activity. That is not the truth and McQueary is not telling the truth. Nothing occurred that night in the shower.

Later we will see why Myers, who had previously been grilled by the police and had resisted their attempt to recruit him as a victim, didn’t testify for Sandusky or even identify himself at the trial. The answer will lead to a perspective on the whole Sandusky matter that challenges received opinion to its core.

2.

But first, we have an important book to consider: Graham Spanier’s In the Lions’ Den: The Penn State Scandal and a Rush to Judgment. The author served as Penn State’s president from 1995 to 2011. As the first extended statement by a principal figure in the events of 2011-12, and as a recital that rings true throughout, his book is a precious contribution to our understanding. And though the subtitle’s “rush to judgment” pertains chiefly to Spanier’s own ordeal, his revelations about mischief caused by other players shows how little confidence we can have in the authorities who took Sandusky down.

It may strike you as egotistical on Spanier’s part to be placing himself at the vortex of the Sandusky hurricane. To be sure, his two months in jail and the hatred directed at him year after year were unmerited, and they took a heavy toll.

But they hardly compare to what Sandusky himself has endured: ten years in prison, the first five of which were passed in solitary confinement, and universal vilification that has never let up. But Spanier has a point. If he wasn’t the most abused party in the Penn State scandal, he was the most important target of a plot that I will set forth. And his removal as president, forestalling a due-process approach to the grand jury’s sensational charges, initiated a cascade of bad decisions and real cover-ups from whose consequences the university has by no means recovered.

As president of Penn State, Spanier compiled a superb record of upgrading both research and instruction. He can hardly be blamed for now emphasizing his accomplishments. More pertinently for the trustworthiness of his narrative, no one ever questioned his integrity. Nor, for that matter, had there been any prior complaints against Messrs. Curley, Schultz, and Paterno.

Despite the crude popular belief that Penn State exists only for football, those who knew Paterno understood that he regarded himself as a teacher of ethics and that he characteristically put the university’s interests ahead of his team’s.

Who, then, unless in an atmosphere of general panic, could believe that those four men would jeopardize their honor by hiding the rape of a child by a man who hadn’t even been a university employee at the time? Spanier in particular is offended by the suggestion, for he underwent sadistic childhood whipping, and he reserves a special disgust for perpetrators.

All four of the accused testified that no one had informed them of a sex crime. Their conduct is consistent with no other supposition. They deemed it inappropriate on Sandusky’s part to be showering with kids on campus, and they admonished him never to do it again. And they notified the current head of The Second Mile that its founder had behaved imprudently. Those mild actions were proportionate to the information the four were given. Spanier is strictly correct in asserting that he, Curley, Schultz, and Paterno did nothing wrong.

When the grand jury’s indictment of Sandusky was made public in November 2011, however, it contained an explosive surprise: Curley and Schultz had been indicted, too, for “failure to report,” and an inference could be drawn that they had protected Joe Paterno’s football program.

One of the anachronisms in Pennsylvania’s judicial system is that a grand jury charged with investigating one suspect can scoop up others as well. Curley, Schultz, and Paterno, all of whom had told the grand jury about their handling of the McQueary matter, had been given no inkling that they were targets. Thus the presentment, written by the prosecutors, not the jury, must have been intended to throw the Penn State community into the chaos that ensued.

Now, what could have caused the Pennsylvania attorney general’s team, which had assumed responsibility for the Sandusky case, to harbor a special animus against Penn State? By now the answer to that question, which Spanier lays out with admirable clarity and detail, is known to many people. The attorney general, Linda Kelly, had been hand picked by the Republican governor, Tom Corbett, who had himself been the attorney general preceding Kelly. Corbett had a contentious relation to Penn State in general and to Graham Spanier in particular, and a motive for getting Kelly to do his bidding.

It was common knowledge that Corbett disliked public higher education and was resentful toward Penn State. One of his early moves after assuming office in January 2011 was to announce a devastating cut of 52.4% in the university’s budget. Spanier immediately and dramatically protested, and the legislature took his side.

In Corbett’s eyes, that was an unforgivable humiliation. But he had already contracted negative feelings toward Spanier. In October 2010, when running for office, he had gained the mistaken impression that Spanier was publicly favoring the Democratic candidate, Dan Onorato. Corbett was heard to say that after his election, he would have Spanier’s head.

The leading prosecutor of Sandusky was Frank Fina, chief of the criminal division in the attorney general’s office. The grand jury presentment was his and Jonelle Eshbach’s creation, and both of them were serving Corbett’s wishes as mediated by Attorney General Kelly. As Spanier now explains, the indictment of Curley and Schultz seems to have been motivated by two considerations.

First, their status as accused criminals would prevent them from testifying in Sandusky’s favor with regard to the shower incident. And second, Fina, who was known for tactics of bullying and intimidation, expected that Curley and Schultz would save themselves from jail by turning on Spanier, whose indictment was already foreseen. The big fish to be hauled in wasn’t the ancient Joe Paterno, and it certainly wasn’t the insignificant retiree Jerry Sandusky; it was Spanier.

When the media began depicting Paterno as a co-conspirator with Curley and Schultz, Spanier knew that a voice of leadership was needed. He announced his personal faith in his accused subordinates, whom he knew to be innocent, and he prepared to call for calm and patience. But Penn State’s trustees were egged on by Governor Corbett, who told them by speakerphone, “Remember that little boy in the shower!”

They forbade Spanier to say another word in public. And the new de facto chairman of the trustees, John Surma, a former CEO of U.S. Steel, saw an opportunity to settle a personal grudge against Paterno. (His troubled nephew had been dropped from the football team.) As State College erupted in riots after Paterno’s dismissal, Spanier grasped that his own fate had been decided as well. He quickly resigned, thus temporarily safeguarding some privileges and his pension.

The subsequent behavior of the leading trustees, from November 2011 until right now, offers a textbook example of how to make a bad situation worse. Rather than combat the fiction that Penn State had sacrificed children to the great god Football, they embraced it.

They welcomed draconian sanctions from the National Collegiate Athletic Association, heaped disgrace on the dead Paterno, left Spanier, Curley, and Schultz to twist in the wind, and established a huge fund for the compensation of Sandusky’s as yet unproven victims, as if every one of them had been molested with an assist from Penn State.

The idea was to make a show of remorse and penitence so as to turn a new page with alumni, parents, and donors–and, not incidentally, to keep the 2012 football season from being canceled. That last goal was met, but the stench of hypocrisy has remained in the air.

The trustees’ most craven action was to appoint an “investigative” body whose actual task was to justify their other measures by scapegoating Paterno, Spanier, Curley, and Schultz. The supposedly independent commission, formed at the joint urging of Governor Corbett and Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who was now seeking private employment, worked hand in glove with Corbett, the trustees, Linda Kelly’s point man Frank Fina, and the NCAA, all of whom shared an interest in presuming Sandusky’s guilt and the four sacked officials’ complicity in it.

The Freeh commission didn’t bother to interview principal figures in the case. Although the Federal Investigative Service reaffirmed Spanier’s top-level security clearance after its intensive study determined that the sodomy-in-the-shower tale was bogus, the Freeh commission stonewalled that finding.

And it sketched a vulgar caricature of Spanier’s Penn State as a football-crazy institution whose actual boss had been the dictatorial Joe Paterno. The Freeh report is no longer taken seriously, but its uncritical acceptance in 2012 locked into place America’s media-fed misperception of the entire Sandusky matter.

Understandably, large portions of In the Lions’ Den are taken up with Spanier’s legal vicissitudes, from his indictment in 2012 through his nightmarish jail term in 2021. The saga is beyond Kafkaesque. Spanier was betrayed, in amazing fashion, by Penn State’s legal counsel Cynthia Baldwin, who pretended to act as his personal attorney.

In reality, she was controlled by Frank Fina, who held over her a constant threat of prosecution for having ignored subpoenas to Penn State. Baldwin knew that Spanier was a grand jury target but convinced him otherwise, and at Fina’s insistence she later gave carefully rehearsed false testimony about his alleged orchestration of a cover-up.

For their misconduct, Fina would be suspended from the practice of law and Baldwin would be formally censured and then ostracized by the entire legal community. But a new attorney general, Kathleen Kane, and then yet another one, the Josh Shapiro who is now a lesser-evil candidate for governor, kept the pressure on Spanier, eventually hounding him into jail despite the ruling of a federal appeals panel that the charges against him lacked any merit.

One reward for reading about Spanier’s eight years of legal torment is that one gets an up-close look at Pennsylvania’s judicial system in action. It’s a farce in which political ambition and personal rivalry can determine a defendant’s fate; in which collusion between prosecutors and judges is commonplace; in which some courtroom rulings are determined not by law but by a presumption of guilt; and in which incompetent judges summarily deny appeals in order to support their friends, other incompetent judges.

A fitting symbol of the whole circus is an email network that came to light, consisting of racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic pornography that was shared between Deputy Attorney General Fina and various judges, including two justices of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court.

3.

As we have seen, the only part of the Sandusky case that bears on Graham Spanier’s tribulations is the legendary shower and its aftermath. But it’s impossible to read In the Lions’ Den without realizing that it brings into question the fairness of Sandusky’s own prosecution and trial. Spanier and Sandusky were both implacably pursued by Linda Kelly, Jonelle Eshbach, and Frank Fina, who was not above threatening witnesses, making shifty deals with judges, and leaking grand jury testimony in order to pollute a jury pool.

Although Spanier avoids the question of Sandusky’s guilt or innocence, he points out that the alleged pedophile’s trial was rushed; that the prosecution used an old trick in dumping possibly exculpatory documents on the defense when insufficient time remained to read them; and that the judge wouldn’t even allow Sandusky’s lead attorney to resign on grounds that he was unprepared to proceed.

But as you could learn from chapters 14-17 of Mark Pendergrast’s indispensable book The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment (Sunbury Press, 2017), that’s just a sampling of the travesty that ended in a foreordained conviction.

A knowledgeable student of the Sandusky case who reads In the Lions’ Den would be able to infer some previously unnoted linkage between Spanier’s fate and Sandusky’s. For example, in March 2011 the attorney general’s case against Sandusky was on life support. Kelly, Fina, and Eshbach had only two witnesses, Mike McQueary and Sandusky’s main accuser, Aaron Fisher, neither of whom could keep his story straight. But that was the month when Tom Corbett and Graham Spanier waged their battle royal over Penn State’s budget–a battle that ended by putting a target on the victorious Spanier’s back.

Suddenly, new momentum was imparted to the campaign against Sandusky, which was taken into the public sphere. On March 31, feloniously leaked grand jury material found its way into the first of cub reporter Sara Ganim’s lurid articles, which would bear such inflammatory titles as “Former Coach Jerry Sandusky Used Charity to Molest Kids.”

And in the following weeks, twelve employees of the attorney general’s office and many state troopers set out to interview hundreds of ex-Second Milers, some of whom might be willing to declare that Sandusky had molested them. Each interrogated boy or man was told, falsely, that many others had already admitted to having been abused.

The dragnet, however, yielded only a file of tributes to Sandusky’s generosity and sterling character. As one officer grumbled in frustration, his interviewees “believe Sandusky is a great role model for them to emulate.”

Here was precious evidence that Sandusky was no child molester. But Kelly and her team, apparently fired up by Corbett, were now playing hardball. Instead of supplying the police files to Sandusky’s attorneys as required by law, they withheld them and wrote insinuatingly, in their grand jury presentment, “through the Second Mile, Sandusky had access to hundreds of boys.”

By means of their Freeh commission and their lavish, no-questions-asked compensation fund, the Penn State trustees played a significant role in destroying Sandusky. The fund, established before his trial, attracted scammers who reinforced the impression that many more victims of the monster’s abuse were awaiting discovery.

But that wasn’t all. Two local “sex abuse” lawyers, Andrew Shubin and Benjamin Andreozzi, sensed what was coming from Penn State and advertised their services to anyone who looked forward to making a claim.

All of the young men (not boys) who were being prepped to testify against Sandusky answered the call. And someone else did, too: Allan Myers. Just weeks after he had exculpated Sandusky in straightforward terms, he became Shubin’s client and was persuaded to affirm, in a statement evidently written by Shubin, that Sandusky had frequently molested him over a period of years.

Then, as Spanier recounts, Shubin physically hid Myers for the duration of Sandusky’s trial, forestalling a catastrophic cross-examination. And prosecutor Joseph McGettigan, in full awareness of the truth, told Sandusky’s jury that only God knew the shower boy’s identity. When Sandusky was acquitted on the relevant charge, it didn’t matter to Myers and Shubin. They picked up a cool $6.9 million from Penn State.

The other accusers didn’t fare badly, either, sharing with their attorneys sums ranging from $1.5 to $20 million, depending on the extremity of their reported suffering. The highest settlement went to an accuser, a good friend of the Sanduskys through at least October 2011, who now said Jerry had assaulted him about 150 times and on one occasion had locked him in his basement, starved him, and raped him anally and orally over a three-day period while Dottie Sandusky, one floor above, ignored his screams.

This was at a time when Jerry, already in his sixties, was suffering from prostatitis, dizzy spells, kidney cysts, a brain aneurism, a hernia, bleeding hemorrhoids, chest pains, headaches, hypothyroidism, high blood pressure, and sleep apnea, to say nothing of his lifelong testosterone deficiency and of his shrunken testicles, unremarked by any accuser.

But there was another important outcome of the trustees’ munificence (with insurance money). Even after the attorney general’s office, partly with the help of a telephone hotline, had rounded up a handful of previously unconcerned “victims” to supplement the wavering McQueary and Fisher, those who actually knew Sandusky remembered him as a kindly mentor and hesitated to say anything against him.

Worse, not one of them, in boyhood or thereafter, had ever disclosed abuse by Sandusky to anyone. And still worse, none of them, including Aaron Fisher, had gone to the police without being prodded or enticed. Most inconveniently of all, the pre-hotline “victims” harbored no memory of their molestation. They had to have their minds massaged by already convinced therapists, social workers, and cops. But once the prospect of multimillion-dollar payouts hove into view, “memories” began to flow in earnest. Penn State’s trustees deserve the credit for that.

Fisher had been brought around to “recalling” Sandusky’s depredations after many months of treatment by a recovered-memory therapist, Mike Gillum. As Fisher wrote in the book they later coauthored, “It wasn’t until I was fifteen and started seeing Mike that I realized the horror.” Now Shubin and Andreozzi decided to send their Sandusky-case clients to memory spelunkers, with Gillum as their principal resource.

The result was spectacular: an outpouring of “refreshed memories” so grotesque and ridiculous that they needed to be severely winnowed by Linda Kelly’s team. Then Kelly could exult, at a rally on the courthouse steps after Sandusky’s conviction, “it was incredibly difficult for some [victims] to unearth long-buried memories of the shocking abuse” Sandusky had inflicted on them.

Whether the hostile witnesses were driven more by greed or by therapeutic suggestion is impossible to say. We can assert with confidence, though, that Penn State’s pot of gold, descried at the end of the rainbow by Messrs. Shubin and Andreozzi, helped to turn alleged misdemeanors into horrific felonies that would overawe an ingenuous jury.

4.

When no firm evidence can be found to adjudicate between clashing allegations, plausibility can serve as a deciding factor. If, for example, you say you were raped a previously unrecalled 150 times by the same person, you’ll be hard pressed to explain why, after the first devastating trauma, you put yourself in harm’s way on 149 further occasions.

Did repression or dissociation cause each event to be immediately forgotten? But now you’re trafficking in pseudoscience, and your claim can’t be believed, much less allowed in court. (Except in Pennsylvania, that is.)

In the case of the little boy in the shower, sufficient evidence does exist to prove that Graham Spanier, not Frank Fina, was telling the truth about it. There can be no doubt that Allan Myers’s first statements on the matter were the authentic ones. But suppose Myers hadn’t presented himself in support of his benefactor. Then we would have had to choose whom to believe. Everything that is known about Spanier speaks to his credibility; the opposite must be said of Fina.

By the same token, it’s no contest between Fina and the Jerry Sandusky who was known to friends, associates, and the public before Sara Ganim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism began smearing him in 2011. As Spanier puts it, Sandusky “was perhaps the second most admired figure in central Pennsylvania, and maybe the entire state, through the 1980s and 1990s.”

The coaching of linebackers was subordinate to the help he provided, in person and through his foundation, to some 100,000 at-risk boys, whom he taught to play sports, shun alcohol, drugs, and early sex, and apply themselves to schoolwork. On his retirement from coaching, Sports Illustrated’s cover story named him “Saint Sandusky.”

In order to have molested children with impunity for decades, Sandusky would have had to deploy superhuman powers of stealth, guile, and intimidation. But if you watch interviews with him on YouTube, you will see an earnest, unsubtle man who has trouble even fathoming the questions posed to him. That picture is consistent with the Jerry known to his family, friends, and associates: a grown-up Boy Scout who eschewed alcohol and tobacco, and a Bible-reading Methodist who practiced the Golden Rule.

No one can say whether there was an erotic component to the affection Jerry showed to the relatively small number of boys he personally supervised. The point to bear in mind is that we don’t customarily send people to prison for their thoughts and feelings. And if it’s sexual abuse to hug an abandoned or neglected twelve-year-old, we’re all in trouble.

Sandusky, Paterno, Spanier, Curley, Schultz. They represent diverse levels of sophistication, but they all devoted themselves to Penn State and were betrayed by it. The university’s clumsy and then stupidly cruel trustees have tried to restore trust at those men’s expense.

It hasn’t worked, because Paterno’s memory is still sacred to many. Next–we already see signs of it–they will ease up on Paterno alone, hoping that will do the trick. In the Lions’ Den will help in that effort by proving that Joe behaved honorably to the end. But another guiltless man is being left to rot in prison. Does anyone out there care about simple justice?

First published at Big Trial.

The post A Shower of Lies: Spanier, Sandusky and the Mess at Penn State first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/11/a-shower-of-lies-spanier-sandusky-and-the-mess-at-penn-state/feed/ 0 340643 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/30/comedian-writer-and-radio-host-tom-scharpling-on-not-being-afraid-to-do-something-new/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/30/comedian-writer-and-radio-host-tom-scharpling-on-not-being-afraid-to-do-something-new/#respond Fri, 30 Sep 2022 07:00:00 +0000 https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/comedian-writer-and-radio-host-tom-scharpling-on-not-being-afraid-to-do-something-new You’ve hosted the radio call-in show The Best Show with Tom Scharpling for 21 years. Last year you published a book, It Never Ends: A Memoir with Nice Memories!. In the spirit of doing one thing for so long, anything that’s new must be revelatory. Even though it’s still your voice, when it takes the shape of a book, people receive you in a different way. It must feel nice to be pushed into the deep end of a new pool.

Oh absolutely. That was the biggest thing for me, just the lifelong fetishizing of what it’d be like to one day write a book. Would I do it? Is this going to be a pipe dream that I’d never get to? To just be able to jump in and experience every aspect of what it means to put one of these things together and to see it through to the level of what I wanted it to be was uncharted territory. I was not ready. I’ve been writing my whole life, but not writing like this. I’ve been broadcasting for my whole life, but this was unlike anything I’ve ever done. So much of it was new to me.

Is there any one part of the book writing process that made you feel “This is different, this is something I couldn’t plan for?”

I couldn’t plan for what it was like to not hide behind characters or move between fictional storylines. I didn’t know what the toll of being so literal with things was going to be, where suddenly I was talking about myself every day. That adds up. There’s a real mental exhaustion I felt when I started mining my own stories, and turning them into humor was the next part of it. It was like, am I turning my life into some sort of punchline for everyone’s amusement? But it’s mine, I only have this. Am I selling myself out to make people laugh?

There’s seemingly two categories of stories within the book. There are the stories that place the humor first. For the other category of story, the ones that highlight the darker parts of your childhood and the path that got you to where you are now, did you try to find the humor to act as connective tissue?

The goal with the book was just to alway be funny in one way or another. I had two purposes going into it and I needed to find a way to weave them together. One was to be funny, because I wanted to write a funny book, but I also wanted to tell these stories and give context for who I am and how I got here. If I avoided some of the rougher aspects, I wouldn’t have been telling the full story. I would have known in my head that I’m ducking, and not saying “I was in a hospital, I got electroconvulsive therapy.” If I denied those things, there would be a false aspect on the most foundational level. The goal became for the funny stories find some deeper resonance in these and connect them to what they mean in a larger sense, and then conversely try and find some funny stuff in the hard parts. But the goal was always to be funny, that’s all I ever wanted to do with the book.

There’s a through-line between your earlier influences that lit that spark, where the jokes can be truly laugh-out-loud funny, but also really brutal. I think that lends to having humor as a defense mechanism, amidst a tragedy.

One of the worst and best parts of this whole experience was when I was trying to track down this psychiatrist who had administered my treatments, and he didn’t remember me. In that moment I had two thoughts side by side, and one was this is the worst thing, and I was just destroyed by that. I shut down for days. I still knew in my mind well that’s the end of the book.

Take a break, you’ve got to!

Seriously, that is a priority for me, the next bunch of stuff is just going to be funny. Any kind of self help thing just doesn’t fit for me, I don’t feel like I have the tools to do that properly. I’d do other people a huge disservice. And I’d do myself a disservice because that’s not where my heart is. I’m figuring out that if there were two settings on this, the comedy and the tragedy, I’ve lived with both his whole time, and the comedy is there for a reason.

Your story and trajectory is so specific, but there must have been many people since the book’s release who have reached out to you in response to one story or another. How does that feel?

It’s a reaffirmation that everybody has something. That’s what I really wanted to touch on. My thing is only my thing, no one is going to have the same story, but a lot of people are going to have their version of my story and see those commonalities and realize that stuff happens to everybody, sometimes you get a little more of it, sometimes you get a little less of it, and it’s a matter of staying on your feet, getting through it, and coming out the other side. I wanted to communicate that whatever you’ve been carrying, it doesn’t have to turn into shame, which is unfortunately what happened to me for so much of my life. Me talking about it has been the process of unburdening, and also letting other people know we don’t have to carry these things as burdens of shame. You didn’t do something wrong because something happened in your life. But some of us are stuck with these brains that will mutate that into shame and guilt.

That really connects to those through-lines you were saying you tried to find between all the stories in the book. There are these tentpoles in “It Never Ends,” shame is a big one and kindness is another one and drive and humor as well, and it’s really interesting to read and experience when those energies are running parallel and when they fully smash into each other head on.

Thank you, that was the goal, to keep all these plates spinning the whole time. The part that’s so weird now is, if I was going to try and do this a second time I think I would be terrified of certain parts of writing this, because I was just so dumb with it, I just didn’t know, I started writing this not knowing what it was going to be. I’m interested in trying something else where I don’t know what the process will be.

I’m finally reading Trouble Boys (the Replacements biography by Bob Mehr), and that’s absolutely the recurring theme from it, that Paul Westerberg is acting dumber than he is, and the thrill of that dumbed down identity. Then on stage he’s acting meaner than he is, and sometimes you accidentally just become that way.

They became the screwups they pretended to be, and that’s the tragedy of that band. But if I ultimately become stupid? I’d be very into that. To not be able to tell the difference between Kate Bush and Bush. That would be the greatest.

A lot of the people The Best Show celebrates actually live in that weird Venn diagram. Andrew Dice Clay is another example. There should be a reference list of people who began as send-ups of a character and just couldn’t get out of the bear trap and became the thing.

Maybe with me this ends with some giant laugh track machine alone as I watch the world crumble around me.

I’ve come to realize that the brain I’ve got, it sometimes doesn’t do me favors, but ultimately I’ll take it. I’d rather have this overly driven brain that won’t let me quit and makes me feel like a dog that won’t let go of a bone.

It’s how we learn. When you’re a kid, there’s a such a weird boilerplate of things you’re warned about. Strangers, drugs, bullies maybe. No parental figure properly puts into words that you’re going to make stupid decisions and have to live with them, and that’s not specific to just you. That’s what being a kid is. It’s those training wheels of trying to be the adult you want to be. It’s like, I’m a person who goes to concerts, I’m sixteen. The way you think you look when you’re sixteen versus when you see a sixteen year-old when you’re older.

They should be at home in a crib. What are you doing out and about pretending to be an adult?

Exactly. I do think in lieu of an officer coming to your school and warning you about the pitfalls of putting yourself out there, your book can now be the place where people will get those lessons.

Any time I give any advice, I know I’m giving it to myself at the same time. You’re right, though, parents warn you not to drink and drive, but they don’t warn you about the tiny, stupid things. There’s no guidance about that. “Hey, maybe if you go to a concert, just play it cool and act like you’ve been there before. Just see what other people are doing, read the room and act accordingly…” I never got any advice like that.

I think parents want to maintain the illusion that they’ve never screwed up for as long as possible. Which is pretty unhealthy probably…

Well yeah, it’s a total lie.

It’s a big lie!

It’s an enormous lie, where by omission they aren’t talking about the way they’ve screwed up over time, but it is funny, those are the things you’re completely on your own with.

You write about the time you spent working at the sheet music store, World Of Music, in Summit New Jersey. I loved reading about Jim, the owner.

He was, and still is, an uncle to me in terms of advice and worldview and even though he was just a maniac in certain ways, I love him to death. He taught me so much stuff.

There’s the story in the book about Jim losing his temper on a customer who perused for an hour and purchased two guitar picks, but are there any other stories of him that helped shape the way you saw the world?

I was just with him every day for years, because we worked at this store side by side. We just would laugh and laugh and try to get through the days. I believed in that store so much and got so much satisfaction from working there and seeing it succeed, it was just a special learning experience. I took all of those skills and brought them into writing and broadcasting. I learned more about professionalism and dedication from him and from my mother than anywhere else.

I find it interesting that even in the first places you decided to work, you still end up in the underdog of business. Working at a sheet music store rather than working at a record store…you don’t need to be paid hourly to learn how to listen to records.

No, I got every lesson I could get from going into record stores, I didn’t need to work at one.

That trajectory of going from a sheet music store when sheet music was very much out of fashion, into an unpaid position at a community radio station (WFMU), which is sort of like the sheet music store of radio stations; it wouldn’t be an enjoyable story if you didn’t land where you are now. If there is anyone taking advice from your experiences, it’s not about looking at every individual hardship and saying, let me look at this specific moment and ask “did this teach me anything? Is it just bad luck?” But rather ask if you can get past it and end up in a place where you can be happy and be surrounded by people you love and choose to be around. That’s the triumph and maybe it justifies why we have to go through anything.

I couldn’t say it any better. Why didn’t you write my book?

I’d like to spend a final moment talking about your Paul Simon music video pitch. The joy of a book like yours is that you fill it with as many stories as you can and different people will gravitate towards different parts and tell you which made them laugh the most, and your failed Paul Simon video pitch just made me laugh so hard. Because I can really see it. It stays with me.

Oh, I can watch that video with my eyes closed. I can’t even tell you what song it is, I think I just set it to “You Can Call Me Al” because I figured that version of Paul Simon deserves to get hit by a barrel, no offense to Graceland fans.

Would you mind walking me through it one more time?

Sure, it was going to be an OK Go style video, like for their song “This Too Shall Pass” with the giant Rube Goldberg machine. It’s really just one of the most impressive feats that’s ever been accomplished, that video. The video would start like that, then an oil drum goes rogue and bounces the wrong way and hits Paul Simon hard in the leg, and he hits the ground. It would all be in one shot, no cut-aways, he’s in agony, and there’s just this moment, this would have been the funniest part, too, this moment while he’s in pain before people are sure whether he needs help or not…that just speaks volumes about me, that I find that the funniest moment. That when you’re trying to figure out how bad a situation is. So he’s lying on the ground in pain, some people come around to help him, it’s not good. An ambulance pulls onto set and the camera follows him into the ambulance on the stretcher, and it would just go until the song ran out. That was my big pitch for a Paul Simon music video and shocker of shockers it did not get off the runway.

I mean, I think if anyone reading this wants to start the petition…there’s one last chance.

I’m ready. I would go and do it today. I would quit my job, I’d quit everything to go make that video. If they were like “Let’s shoot this video in the hottest of COVID hot zones, we’re gonna shoot it in Tampa,” I’d say “Let’s do it.”

Adam Schatz recommends (via Tom Scharpling)

Things that I’ve discovered through listening to Tom over the years

ABBA

Trouble Boys, the big and wonderful book about the Replacements by Bob Mehr

Comedian Mary Houlihan and her very funny monthly zine that I currently pay $10/month for on Patreon

This video of when Lou Reed and Pavarotti performed “Perfect Day” together

Shout about what you love without remorse

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Adam Schatz.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/30/comedian-writer-and-radio-host-tom-scharpling-on-not-being-afraid-to-do-something-new/feed/ 0 337547 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/01/journalists-face-growing-hostility-as-ethiopias-civil-war-persists/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/01/journalists-face-growing-hostility-as-ethiopias-civil-war-persists/#respond Mon, 01 Aug 2022 18:58:48 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=214305 Ethiopia’s 21-month-old civil war is accelerating the deterioration of press freedom in the Horn of Africa nation. The conflict between the federal government and the rebel forces led by the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF) has prompted a media crackdown that extinguished the glimmer of hope sparked by the initial reforms of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. Research by the Committee to Protect Journalists shows that Ethiopia now ranks with Eritrea as sub-Saharan Africa’s worst jailer of journalists.

Here is CPJ’s briefing on the deteriorating conditions for Ethiopia’s journalists, the context of the crackdown, and recommendations to improve the country’s climate for press freedom.

What’s behind the hostility toward the media?

Ethiopian journalists are no strangers to repression. Ethiopia used to be one of the world’s most-censored countries. Under the Abiy administration and the previous TPLF-led administrations, they have experienced internet shutdowns and had anti-terror laws used against them.

Now, the fight to control the narrative of the war is one of the major reasons for the increasing hostility against the press. On-the-ground fighting is accompanied by misinformation, disinformation, and a war of narratives on social media. In the beginning the government even insisted on calling the conflict a “law enforcement operation” rather than a war. Journalists and commentators expressing dissenting views, or doing independent reporting, became vulnerable to arrest, threats, expulsions, and other forms of attacks.

The crackdown on the press is also happening within the context of human rights violations from all sides of this war, as documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. In some cases, detained journalists have been held as part of broader sweeps in which thousands of people have been arbitrarily arrested, according to CPJ’s own reporting as well as reports by human rights watchdogs and the media.

How many journalists have been arrested in Ethiopia since the start of the war?

CPJ has documented the arrest of at least 63 journalists and media workers since November 4, 2020, at least eight of whom remain detained as of August 1, 2022. All the detentions that CPJ has documented so far have been in Addis Ababa, the capital; Oromia, Amhara, Afar, and Somali states; and more recently in rebel-held Tigray state, which has been under a telecommunications blackout for most of this war, making it difficult to researchreports that even more journalists are held there.

Most detentions follow a similar script: authorities arrest a journalist or media worker and present them in court requesting more and more time to hold them for investigations. These proceedings have resulted in formal charges in very few of the cases documented by CPJ. When the courts eventually grant bail, police frequently mount appeals that delay the journalists’ releases. Some journalists are detained without access to family or legal counsel, such as in the cases of Gobeze Sisay–who was arrested on May 1 and held for a week–and Yayesew Shimelis, who was held at an unknown location  from June 28 to July 8.

Freed journalists have told CPJ of restrictions on their bank accounts and movements even after their release.

These detentions have a ripple effect on the broader media community. In 2021, Awlo Media Center shut down after its staff were arrested in mid-2021. CPJ also spoke to four previously detained journalists who said they were no longer working in journalism. Self-censorship becomes an inevitable by-product in an environment of fear, eroding the diversity within public discourse and undermining the public’s right to know. 

What other actions have been taken against the media?

Journalists have faced physical attacks. In February 2021, men thought to be intelligence personnel raided the home of freelancer Lucy Kassa and warned her about reporting on the conflict. A group of four unidentified men abducted and assaulted online journalist Abebe Bayu in June 2021.

In 2021, CPJ documented the first killing of an Ethiopian journalist – Sisay Fida – in connection with their work since 1998. Sisay’s death was attributed by authorities to the Oromo Liberation Army, an insurgent group allied with the TPLF. CPJ continues to investigate the motive behind the killing of a second journalist, Dawit Kebede Araya, who was shot in Mekelle, Tigray, in January 2021, at a time when the city was in the hands of federal authorities.

Addis Standard, an independent publication, was suspended for a week in 2021. New York Times correspondent Simon Marks was expelled in May 2021. Tom Gardner, an Economist correspondent expelled from Ethiopia in May 2022, has recounted how he was harassed online and offline.

Telecommunications disruptions also continue to affect Tigray region, as well as parts of Amhara and Afar state, undermining media coverage of the war, according to CPJ’s reporting and research by the digital rights organization Access Now. The shutdown has hampered CPJ’s research into the killing of Dawit Kebede Araya, the recent detention of five Tigrai TV reporters, as well reports that other journalists may be detained in the region.

CPJ’s annual prison census documented at least nine journalists jailed in Ethiopia on December 1, 2021. CPJ has since confirmed that seven others were also in jail on that date. How does that affect CPJ’s census data for that year?

It’s important to understand that CPJ’s census reflects research based on a specific indicator – it is a snapshot of journalists jailed around the world on December 1. We do not include journalists released before or arrested after that date, or if we cannot confirm until after the census’ deadline that a journalist was in jail on December 1.

We did not include an additional seven journalists in the 2021 census because we either were not aware of their detention at the time, or we were still investigating the details of their cases. Had we been able to confirm the details ahead of the 2021 census publication, the data would have reflected that Ethiopia had 16 journalists in jail on December 1 – meaning that it would have tied with Eritrea as sub-Saharan Africa’s worst jailer of journalists.

We have since reported the additional arrests as part of our daily coverage on our website andwill adjust our 2021 prison database when we publish our census for 2022.

What does CPJ recommend to improve Ethiopia’s press freedom climate?

The authorities – at federal and state level – need to stop detaining journalists for their reporting. That would go far in clearing the fog of fear that characterizes the current media climate. Authorities need to address the injustices committed against journalists and ensure state institutions cannot be used to gag and harass the press in the future.

Impunity breeds attacks on journalists, so authorities must do more to conduct credible, transparent investigations into physical attacks and to ensure the perpetrators are held accountable. Ongoing telecommunications disruptions should end, and journalists should be allowed the free access they need to not only report the war, but other matters of public interest in Ethiopia.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/01/journalists-face-growing-hostility-as-ethiopias-civil-war-persists/feed/ 0 319901 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/29/roaming-charges-tell-tom-joad-the-news/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/29/roaming-charges-tell-tom-joad-the-news/#respond Fri, 29 Jul 2022 05:59:29 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=250390 Ticket prices for Springsteen's Born to Run tour in 1975 averaged about $8 for general admission. ($7.50 in Upper Darby, PA, when he played venues that small.) The minimum wage was $2.10 per hour. So a kid had to work less than half a day to earn enough to go to the gig. Today the minimum wage is a miserly $7.25 an hour. But the price of tickets for this fall's Springsteen tour ranges from $90 to nearly $4000 a piece. The cheapest price I could find for the Portland show was a restricted view seat from behind the stage selling for $136–which means that a Springsteen fan who works at a minimum wage job (assuming he has any left) would have to work nearly 3 full days to buy a crappy ticket. They call him the boss for a reason. Now go tell Tom Joad the news. More

The post Roaming Charges: Tell Tom Joad the News appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/29/roaming-charges-tell-tom-joad-the-news/feed/ 0 319129 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/24/ethiopian-authorities-arrest-11-employees-of-4-independent-media-outlets/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/24/ethiopian-authorities-arrest-11-employees-of-4-independent-media-outlets/#respond Tue, 24 May 2022 22:02:40 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=196988 New York, May 24, 2022 – Ethiopian authorities should immediately release all recently arrested journalists and media workers and ensure that authorities cease harassing members of the press, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday.

Authorities have arrested at least 11 journalists and media workers since May 19 in Amhara state and the capital Addis Ababa as part of a broader crackdown that the state government calls a “law enforcement operation” that has resulted in the arrest of over 4,500 people for allegedly illegal activity.

Those detained include five journalists and media workers of the privately owned YouTube channel Ashara Media, four journalists and media workers of the YouTube channel Nisir International Broadcasting Corporation, Meskerem Abera, the founder and editor of private broadcaster Ethio Nekat Media; and Solomon Shumeye, the founder and owner of private broadcaster Gebeyanu Media.

 “With the latest arrests of at least 11 journalists and media workers, it’s one step forward and three steps backward in Ethiopia and shows, yet again, that the government has no regard for press freedom and the right of citizens to information from a plurality of independent media sources,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator. “Authorities should immediately release all of them without charge and ensure that Ethiopian journalists can report without fear of arbitrary detention, repression, and censorship.”

At about 5:30 p.m. on May 19, Amhara police raided the studio of Ashara Media in the Amhara state capital of Bahir Dar and arrested five employees, according to news reports, Elias Debasu, the director of Ashara Media, and Blen Techane, the wife of journalist Gashaye Negusse, who spoke to CPJ by phone. The arrested are:

• Gashaye Negusse, journalist
• Getenet Yalew, journalist
• Habtamu Melese, journalist
• Daniel Mesfin, a camera operator and video editor
• Kelemu Gelagay, a camera operator and video editor

During the raid, police did not show a warrant and confiscated office equipment, including laptops and external hard drives, Elias told CPJ. Blen, who was able to briefly visit the detained journalists, said they were transferred to a prison in the small northern town of Nefas Mewcha, about 185 kilometers (115 miles) from Bahir Dar, on the morning of May 20 and are now being detained without access to family or lawyers.

Ashara Media recently covered the government’s crackdown on Fano, an armed militia in Amhara state, the detention of government critics, and a public demonstration about housing concerns, according to CPJ’s review.

Separately, around 5:30 p.m. on May 19, Amhara police raided the office of Nisir International Broadcasting Corporation and detained three of its employees and another employee on May 20, according to news reports, an outlet statement, and a person familiar with the events who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal. CPJ is not publishing the names of the four employees as the outlet fears it will compromise the journalists’ and their families’ safety.

During the raid, police seized equipment, such as computers, memory cards, and external hard drives, and detained two of the employees in Bahir Dar and the other two in Nefas Mewcha, according to a person familiar with the events. The outlet’s statement indicates that the employees were editors, reporters, and other supporting staff.

CPJ’s review of Nisir’s content shows reports on the government’s actions on the Fano militia, press statements from an opposition political party, and the recent revocation of accreditation and expulsion of The Economist’s Ethiopia correspondent Tom Gardner.

On May 20, Addis Ababa police detained Gebeyanu Media’s Solomon at the Addis Ababa Police Commission, according to news reports, which cited Solomon’s lawyer and a family member. Solomon appeared in court on May 21 for allegedly making media statements that incited people to violence and creating discord between the federal and Amhara state governments, according to the VOA report.

CPJ’s review of Solomon’s recent work indicates he was critical of the government’s fiscal policy, the impact of the war in northern Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian government’s increasingly authoritarian approach to dealing with dissidents.

On May 21, Ethiopian security officers detained Ethio Nekat Media’s Meskerem at Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa as she traveled from Bahir Dar, according to news reports, her lawyer Henok Aklilu, and her husband Fitsum Gebremichael, who spoke with CPJ by phone.  Henok told CPJ that Meskerem was detained at Addis Ababa Police Commission and charged with crimes of incitement of public violence through her media appearances, adding that she appeared in court on May 23 and May 24. Her next appearance is scheduled for June 6.

Ethio Nekat Media’s coverage features news about Amhara state, a message by Meskerem to an Ethiopian military general appealing to him to side with the Fano militia and the people amid what she described as a “looming crackdown,” and a segment in which Meskerem defended the need for the Fano militia in the state.

In a May 20 press statement, the Federal Government Communication Service vowed to “continue to take decisive measures against those engaged in illegal activities, intentionally causing public alarm and turmoil, as well as those who are working to cause violence and disturbance among the public under the disguise of journalism and media work.” 

CPJ emailed Justice Minister Gedion Timothewos Hassebon, Federal Police spokesperson Jeylan Abdi, the Addis Ababa Police Commission, Amhara Police Commission, Amhara State Communications, and Amhara National Regional State Prison Commission but did not receive any replies.

Separately, Desu Dula and Bikila Amenu of the Oromia News Network appeared in court on May 24 and their case was adjourned for June 3, according to a news report. CPJ has documented their months-long detention and called for their immediate release.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/24/ethiopian-authorities-arrest-11-employees-of-4-independent-media-outlets/feed/ 0 301451 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/16/ethiopia-expels-economist-correspondent-tom-gardner/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/16/ethiopia-expels-economist-correspondent-tom-gardner/#respond Mon, 16 May 2022 20:24:52 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=194094 Nairobi, May 16, 2022–The Committee to Protect Journalists on Monday condemned Ethiopia’s expulsion of Economist correspondent Tom Gardner, following the revocation of his press accreditation on Friday, May 13. Gardner’s expulsion came almost a year after Ethiopian authorities similarly expelled New York Times reporter Simon Marks and within the context of a deteriorating press freedom climate in which authorities have arbitrarily arrested numerous members of the press amid the ongoing civil war.

“When international journalists are expelled while local members of the press face the threat of arrest, the message is clear: Ethiopian authorities will not tolerate critical journalism or dissenting opinions,” said CPJ sub-Saharan Africa representative Muthoki Mumo. “Ethiopian officials should rescind the expulsion of Economist correspondent Tom Gardner and create an environment where both international and local press feel safe reporting even on the most sensitive of subjects.”

The Ethiopian Media Authority, a statutory regulator, issued a statement on Friday saying that it had revoked Gardner’s credentials because he “failed to live to [the] standards of conduct for journalists.” The authority indicated it was willing to grant a license to another correspondent from the publication. In a statement published on Monday, The Economist said that authorities subsequently gave Gardner “48 hours to leave the country,” alleging “unspecified” ethical breaches. In March, the authority issued a public warning to Gardner, accusing him of tweeting information that was not “properly sourced or supported by appropriate authorities.” In its statement, The Economist said Gardner’s reporting on Ethiopia “has been professional, unbiased and often courageous.”

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/16/ethiopia-expels-economist-correspondent-tom-gardner/feed/ 0 299253 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/04/15/biden-is-pushing-for-a-tom-paine-tax-plan/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/04/15/biden-is-pushing-for-a-tom-paine-tax-plan/#respond Fri, 15 Apr 2022 10:05:10 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/336168

The great pamphleteer of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, had much more on his mind than independence from the British.

Paine spent his life, Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Vanessa Williamson write in a new paper, advocating for a democratic "commonwealth" that shared the wealth. He wanted to free people "from domination both political and economic."

Billionaires pay at a lower overall rate than average Americans.

In particular, Paine believed that a wealth tax on grand private fortunes could prevent the emergence of an anti-democratic elite. This tax season, over two centuries later, we may finally have a president who's taking Paine to heart.

In its new budget proposal, the Biden administration is calling for a new "Billionaire Minimum Income Tax." The White House isn't calling this proposal a "wealth tax," but we should.

Under Biden's plan, Americans worth over $100 million would be expected to pay an annual tax of at least 20 percent on their total income—including any increases in the value of their stocks, bonds, and other liquid assets.

These liquid assets make up the bulk of every billionaire fortune, but increases in their value go totally untaxed until their wealthy owners decide to sell them off. That gives "ultra-high-net-worth households," the White House points out, the ability to have their gains "go untaxed for decades or generations."

Let's take the example of a CEO who pockets $20 million a year in salary. He might pay a 20 percent tax on that $20 million.

But if this executive also holds stocks worth $10 billion and those stocks gain 10 percent in value—an extra $1 billion—then the vast majority of our CEO's real income would go completely untaxed.

Under Biden's plan, that CEO would have to pay taxes on his CEO pay and all his stock gains. That would hike his federal tax tab from $4 million to $204 million.

America's 700 or so billionaires, the Biden administration notes, saw "their wealth increase by $1 trillion" last year. Yet current law has billionaires paying "just 8 percent of their total realized and unrealized income in taxes."

That's right: Billionaires pay at a lower overall rate than average Americans.

"Under current law, when an American worker earns a dollar of wages, that dollar is taxed as they earn it," the White House explains. "But when a billionaire earns income because their investments increase in value, that gain is too often never taxed at all."

Firefighters and teachers, adds the White House, "can pay double" the rate billionaires pay.

The Biden tax plan is actually taking much the same approach that Tom Paine took with a wealth tax proposal he first put forward in 1792, tax historians Bearer-Friend and Williamson argue.

Under Paine's plan, the pair calculate, today's billionaires would pay a tax of about 3.5 percent of their personal fortunes during normal market years. That figure is remarkably close to the tax rates that appear in wealth tax proposals that Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have advanced.

Biden's plan doesn't take that big a bite. But it does represent a significant step toward taxing the wealth of America's wealthiest, says Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman.

Mega-billionaires Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Elon Musk, Zucman reminds us, together paid just $1.5 billion in federal income taxes over the five-year period that ended in 2018. Under the Biden proposal, this trio would pay at least 100 times more over the next decade or so.

Paine believed that extreme wealth undermines "the ability of citizens to choose their leaders," Bearer-Friend and Vanessa Williamson argue, a condition that many will easily recognize today. Freedom, in Paine's view, "meant both lifting the poor from penury and dependence" and eliminating the "vicious influence" of fiercely concentrated wealth.

Tom Paine had it right. And if Congress takes up Biden's new tax plan, we can too.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

Let’s take the example of a CEO mogul holding shares of stock worth a clean $10 billion. Let’s assume, for the sake of this exercise, a 10 percent annual growth in the value of our mogul’s stock holdings, a conservative estimate given recent Wall Street history. Last year, for instance, the S&P 500 rose 26.9 percent.

Let’s also assume that this same mogul pockets $20 million in annual CEO pay. After taking various deductions, the mogul turns out to owe 20 percent of this $20 million in annual income tax.

But our mogul would also owe tax, if Congress adopts the Biden budget, on the 10 percent annual gain in the mogul’s stock holdings. Adding in this stock gain would bring the mogul’s total taxable income for the year, under the Biden tax plan, to $1.02 billion, with the $20 million from the mogul’s CEO pay package added to the $1 billion the mogul’s shares of stock have gained in annual value.

The mogul would have to pay, under the Biden plan, at least 20 percent of this $1.02 billion — $204 million — in tax. Under existing law, our mogul would owe just $4 million in tax.

Such a tax increase, venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary opined this past Monday on CNBC’s Squawk Box, would be simply “unAmerican.”

Such an increase, retorts the Biden administration, would be simple fairness.

“Under current law, when an American worker earns a dollar of wages, that dollar is taxed as they earn it,” the White House explains. “But when a billionaire earns income because their investments increase in value, that gain is too often never taxed at all.”

America’s over 700 billionaires, the administration adds, last year saw “their wealth increase by $1 trillion.” Yet current law has billionaires paying “just 8 percent of their total realized and unrealized income in taxes.”

“A firefighter or teacher,” adds the White House, “can pay double that tax rate.”

The Biden tax plan is actually taking much the same approach that Tom Paine took with the wealth tax proposal he first put forward in 1792. Paine keyed his tax, as Biden’s proposal does, to the gains the wealthy realize from their wealth, not the total value of that wealth. As a result, observe tax analysts Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Vanessa Williamson in their new paper, The Common Sense of a Wealth Tax, some scholars believe we can describe Paine’s tax plan as either “an income tax or a wealth tax” — the same definitional option we now have with Biden’s new tax plan.

George Washington University’s Bearer-Friend and Brookings senior fellow Williamson have converted the tax brackets and rates of Paine’s plan into 2020 U.S. dollar terms. Under Paine’s plan, they find, households of means collecting just over $15 million from their wealth would pay $1.4 million in total tax. Households making nearly $50 million off their wealth would pay about $23 million in tax. And households gaining more than $50 million from their wealth would face a 100 percent tax on all their gains over that $50 million.

In other words, Paine was essentially calling for a limit on the wealth any rich people could annually add to their fortunes. “Roughly speaking,” Bearer-Friend and Williamson’s research concludes, Paine’s 100 percent tax bracket — if enacted today — would apply only to billionaires.

Under Paine’s plan, the two analysts go on to point out, billionaires who experienced a 5 percent annual return off wealth of $2 billion would owe $73.3 million in taxes, the equivalent of about a 3.5 percent tax on their personal fortunes. That 3.5 percent rate, Bearer-Friend and Williamson note, would run remarkably close to the tax rates that appear in wealth tax proposals that Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have advanced in recent years.

The Biden administration tax plan doesn’t put that big a bite on grand private fortune. But the Biden plan does represent a significant step toward taxing the wealth of America’s wealthiest, says go-to global expert on economic inequality Gabriel Zucman. This University of California-Berkeley economist reminds us that mega-billionaires Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Elon Musk together paid just $1.5 billion in federal income taxes over the five-year period that ended in 2018. Under the Biden proposal, this trio would pay “at least” 100 times more in taxes over the next nine years.

Tom Paine’s tax policy priorities, Bearer-Friend and Williamson suggest, “speak directly to the 21st century challenges of the rise of oligarchic wealth concentration and the deteriorating conditions of American democracy.” Paine believed that extreme wealth undermines “the ability of citizens to choose their leaders.” Freedom, in Paine’s view, “meant both lifting the poor from penury and dependence” — so they could participate as full-fledged citizens — and eliminating the “vicious influence” of fiercely concentrated wealth.

Tom Paine had it right.

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

Tom Stern: I think they’re a really important band in rock and roll history. Their story isn’t known widely enough. There’s a cadre of fans that are very passionate, and people who are into music know them. A lot of people have heard of them because they had that hit, “Pepper,” but most people just have a vague idea of who they are. They don’t really know.

Their history is so interesting and so important in the larger picture of rock and roll history, music history, and even American cultural history at large because they were part of the American underground. They were maybe the biggest or most influential underground band of the ’80s, and they really had a big influence on Nirvana. Kurt Cobain liked the Buttholes a lot. He went to see their shows all the time. He met Courtney Love at a Butthole Surfers show. [Butthole Sufers frontman] Gibby [Haynes] and Kurt were good friends. Not that this is the focus of our film, but their careers intertwined in dramatic ways. Gibby was in rehab with Kurt just a few days before Kurt killed himself.

Back then, there was this real separation between mainstream and underground culture that was interesting historically because it’s not really there anymore. The underground was a reaction to the Reagan era that was so conformist and conservative. The whole ethos of the Reagan era was, “Fall into line and don’t be weird,” and The Butthole Surfers were the pure antithesis of that.

You filmed the Surfers back in the mid-80s at CBGBs. Was that your first encounter with them?

TS: I first saw them at the Pyramid Club, I believe, when I was a sophomore at NYU. This was 1984, I think. Instantly, I was blown away. I just thought they were so cool. Then I went back and saw them a few days later at CBGBs. The Buttholes were so unique, so different from the other underground punk and post-punk music of the day in that they broke all these rules. Hardcore and punk rock had become this rigid, formulaic music. The Buttholes threw away the formulas and tried mixing things up in such interesting ways.

They were playing to underground crowds of 100 or 150 people at the most back then, but all those clubs were always sold out because the word of mouth about the band spread really fast. Everybody who was into cool underground music was into them. The pop music of the day was okay, but it was that not that dangerous, or interesting, or provocative on an art level. The Cars are good songwriters and everything, but if you’re really into art and music, you want something more interesting. And the Butthole Surfers just were so interesting.

They have a silly, profane name, but they’re also really smart. [Guitarist] Paul [Leary] and Gibby are two genius artists who came together and reacted together in this really combustible but exciting way—Paul being the musical genius and Gibby being a conceptual art genius and also a genius frontman in the way he totally rewrote the book and turned the band into this circus in which he was the ringleader. It really was this surrealist or Dada circus—using crazy stagecraft to produce spectacular visual dissonance and spectacle. He pushed the idea of what’s psychedelic into strange new realms that were more like what you’d see at an art museum by some artist like Joseph Beuys or Marcel Duchamp, who was an artist that really influenced Gibby. So if you love art and punk rock, these guys just fucking nailed it.

You mentioned the psychedelic aspect, and I think that’s one of the interesting things about the Butthole Surfers. Most of the punk bands of the ’70s and ’80s specifically rejected psychedelia as hippie nonsense, but the Butthole Surfers embraced it. Was that part of the attraction for you?

TS: Well, I loved psychedelic music. I loved the Beatles and Pink Floyd. I loved punk rock, too, but I think a lot of people loved both. Even though Johnny Rotten wore a T-shirt that said, “I Hate Pink Floyd,” I think he was just being provocative. And like you said, the Buttholes embraced that. They had monster riffs and this thunderous rhythm section with two drummers playing these tribal beats that just put you in a trance. You felt like you were at some kind of ritual, or “What the fuck is going on here?” It didn’t feel like just a rock show. It was a crazy spectacle with crazy juxtapositions. I think the band is all about really intense juxtapositions—the beautiful and the horrific.

It’s fascinating—to me, anyways—that Paul Leary and Gibby Haynes have backgrounds in accounting, which one tends to think of as a straight-laced, conservative profession. What’s your take on that?

TS: I’ve asked them about it, and it’s one of the mysteries of the band that I can hopefully shed some light on. I can’t give you the perfect answer, but I hope by the end of the film we will know why, because that fascinates me as well.

The documentary is still in progress. You two are on your way to shoot some interviews as you’re talking to me. Tell me about some of the challenges of making this film so far.

Noa Durban: I think one of the major challenges is trying to show the band to different generations. I’m 28, so I got to know them through their later stuff, like, “Who Was In My Room Last Night?” from the early ’90s, when they were signed to Capitol Records. So a lot of people don’t actually know about their crazy heritage of spectacle live shows that are like art collections. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a way to document it that well because it was all done on VHS and crappy stuff that you used to bootleg shows, so it’s hard to capture the full experience. That’s one of the main challenges for this movie, I would say: To recreate that feeling without relying on just using old footage.

How are you dealing with that?

ND: We want to bring in animators and approach it with a creative outlook. We don’t want it just to be talking heads and archival footage, like, “Here’s some stuff you can find on YouTube, and Henry Rollins is talking.” We want to try to recreate the experience through the movie. It makes the job harder for us, but also more creative, satisfying and fun. And we can’t just rely on footage because there is not a lot of good footage.

TS: The cool thing about the publicity you get from Kickstarter is that fans come forward with footage they have. That’s already happened. I was just watching some footage this morning of the infamous Danceteria show in ’86, which was Kathleen the dancer’s first time onstage with the band. It was a legendary outrageous performance, and I’d never seen it, so it was amazing to watch.

ND: It is rumored that there was some sexual activity going on onstage, but I don’t want to give away too much, because that’s one of the things that we are exploring in this movie—what was myth and what was real.

TS: As Noa was saying, we have this creative challenge of trying to recreate or give the impression to our viewers of being at a Butthole Surfers show back in the day. So we’re really thinking outside the box. I want to do some stop-motion and/or puppetry where we build miniatures of those venues like CBGBs and the I-Beam in San Francisco, and actually create animations that put you in that space, in that world, surrounded by the mayhem, and recreate all the spectacular visuals that they created back in the day.

As you mentioned, you’re funding this documentary through Kickstarter. What kind of conversation did you have about that before you decided to launch the campaign?

ND: We want to do this movie independently, as we mention in our sizzle reel, and one of the main reasons is that we want to maintain creative freedom. We have the blessing of the band, and we don’t want it to be just like a manufactured, pre-produced movie by a big streaming channel. We want to be able to control the material, so it’s really handy to have platforms like Kickstarter, where you don’t have to compromise. You don’t have to sign away your artistic license, and you can still get the backing and the money to make shit happen. It’s the best thing for indie. It’s the best thing if you don’t want to do a presale because you’re afraid you won’t make it.

The other thing is that our executive producer, Paul Rachman, who directed the very iconic documentary, American Hardcore, was an advocate for going this route specifically for those reasons. And I come from a digital marketing background, so we didn’t have to outsource that part of it. We could keep a small staff. In that way, it’s also cost-effective to do it through Kickstarter. If you know what you’re doing, it’s a cost-effective way to raise money.

You put together a trailer or “sizzle reel” that really does its job of getting people excited about the film. Can you tell me about the process of putting that together and the decisions that went into it?

TS: That’s a great question, because I thought it would take two weeks to cut the sizzle reel but we just kept having to push the deadline because it was actually really hard to put together. It was really hard to figure out how to position the film and how you want to introduce yourself to the world and pitch the film, essentially, to investors or supporters.

So, we went through a lot of different versions. In one version, I was cutting a little montage to set the stage and explain what the American underground was in those days—with bands like The Cramps and the Minutemen and Black Flag and the Bad Brains—to try and show how the Buttholes were different. But then you’re like 15 seconds in and you haven’t mentioned the Butthole Surfers, so that doesn’t work.

ND: Because I come from the business and marketing world, I don’t like promotional videos that are too long. We want to keep it short and sweet. So, I kept telling him, “It needs to be shorter. It needs to be shorter. There’s too much information.” So then we kept editing it and dialing it in, and we finally settled on about three minutes.

TS: It was a long, agonizing process—although it was fun when we finally cracked it. But for a long time, we were sort of like, “Goddammit, how do you do this so fast? How do you make it pop?” As a filmmaker, I wanted to make it pop and really have a great pace, because I’m all about pace. I even want to cut the film based on the songs. That’s off-topic for this question, but I think that’ll be what makes it sing, no pun intended—finding the structure to tell the story of this band in a musical way. The songs are going to help us tell the story.

The fact that you two are from different generations seems to be a huge advantage in making this film.

ND: I’m learning a lot from Tom. He’s a legend in what he does, and I’m a fan. That’s how I got to meet him, actually—through being a fan. And I’m learning a lot of lessons from his experience, but I think it’s also valuable to have someone like me who’s coming from a newer generation and is very digitally oriented. Because we are using these modern platforms to promote this stuff, I think that’s where I came in handy.

TS: Yes. Noa is an absolute lifesaver, because I was on this chaotic quest to make a Butthole Surfers movie, but with no particular schedule. And I definitely don’t have the digital marketing skills and the networking skills that Noa is really proficient at. She’s mastered that world of digital connection, and she’s also got a brilliant logistical mind. She whipped us into shape, and I couldn’t be happier. We’re on a tight schedule to finish a cut a little less than a year from now to get into a major film festival.

Tom, you went to film school at NYU. I think a lot of young people wonder about the value of that these days because college is so expensive. What did you get out of film school, and do you think it’s worth it?

TS: That’s a really important question for young people, especially with college as ridiculously expensive as it is in this country. I’d say film school is worth it if you can afford it. I wouldn’t take out loans to do it, though. I was lucky that my parents had saved money for my college, and they paid for it—I didn’t have to take student loans—and college was not as insanely expensive when I went to school. But I didn’t want to waste my parents’ money. That was a big burden on my mind.

It was worth it for me because I ended up meeting people that I later worked with—people like Alex Winter. We met freshman year at NYU, and we were a creative partnership for 12 years. And that was crucial to establishing myself because Alex was acting as well, and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure was this surprise hit. Before that film, we were slogging away in Hollywood trying to write screenplays. But after that film, we got into people’s offices to pitch them. They suddenly took our meetings, and that helped us get Freaked made. The people you meet are everything in this business. So if film school helps you make connections, it could be worth it. But there’s a lot of other ways to do that now, of course.

ND: Like you can reach out to your favorite director on Instagram and end up producing their movie! I didn’t go to film school, and I’m now producing this movie, right? I generated those connections on my own basically because I’m a relentless person. If I want to do something, I lock jaws on it and I do it. So if you don’t have the money for film school, that’s also an approach. Both approaches are correct. You can go to film school, but if you don’t push yourself, it doesn’t matter. You can also only push yourself, and that’s all that matters.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by J. Bennett.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.