|
IMPACTS OF THE ISRAELI WAR ON GAZA,
YEMEN, SYRIA, AND LEBANON
Monday, February 26, 9 pm Eastern, 6pm Pacific
| |
 | |
The 4 th Monday Series
Socialist Education Project (SEP)
Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS)
The brutal Israeli war on Gaza has been going on for more than three months leading to
about 30,000 known deaths, the physical destruction of housing, hospitals,
schools, churches and mosques. The United States, which has provided about $3
billion per year in military aid since 1979 and tens of thousands of weapons and
munitions to Israel and is expected to approve billions more this month in
funding and ongoing weapons and munitions supply. The US is a main supporter of Israeli
aggression. And more recently the US has launched related military attacks on targets in
various nations in the region, including Iraq, Yemen, and Syria. However South Africa with the support of the vast majority of the international community stood up to charge Israel with genocide in the International Court of Justice. Many nations and peoples also charge the United States with complicity with Israeli genocide.Many nations and peoples
also charge the United States with complicity with Israeli genocide.
This webinar, consisting of short presentations, will address the consequences of
the Middle East wars for the Palestinian people and the Middle East, possible region-wide and global war, and US politics.
Presenters will include:
Stephen David, South African scholar and activist and
Rod Such, author and Middle East activist who writes for such
publications as the Electronic Intifada.
These presentations will be followed by attendees being invited to comment on
aspects of the war, particularly from the vantage point of their own regions and
political places. The webinar promises to provide for a rich discussion of this issue
of human survival.
Please register below.
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pcu6vpzsvHNz3robLnUtGHpH7KkCfIUbB
| |
Consequences of the 2024 Elections: For Democracy, Racism, Workers, War, the Environment, Healthcare, Patriarchy and Cultural Diversity |  | |
First They Came for ther Immigrants
by Max Elbaum
reprinted from Convergence
Today’s hatemongering reflects a deeply rooted problem: a global “crisis of the right to stay home” due largely to Washington’s role in structuring the world’s economics and politics.
A CONVERGENCE SERIES
PREVIOUS
Demonizing immigrants and attacking their rights is at the forefront of today’s MAGA assault on the international, multiracial working class, democracy, and basic human decency.
Top Republican strategists have decided once again that fearmongering about immigrant “invaders” pouring over US borders is the best formula for winning the 2024 election and implementing their white Christian Nationalist agenda.
This is why Republican governors have been dramatizing the movement of people by busing them to “blue” cities; why Texas Republicans are attempting to nullify federal authority and take control of immigration enforcement at “their” borders; why Trump doubles down on saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” This is why Republicans demand that harsh “border security” measures be the price of approving the already terrible legislation funding military aid to Ukraine and Israel.
And the Democratic leadership? Having long embraced the framework that “undocumented immigrants are a problem,” they are incapable of offering more than a token defense against MAGA demagogy. Rather, in hopes of taking the issue of immigration off the 2024 electoral table Dems have agreed to numerous Republican demands in the negotiations over the combined immigration/military aid funding bill. Apparently only complete acceptance of what Trump plans to do if he wins in 2024 is good enough for the MAGA faithful, so according to House Speaker Mike Johnson the deal is “dead on arrival” in the House.
Your inbox needs more left. Sign up for our newsletter.
EMAIL *
The progressive movement has its heart in the right place and a host of groups are fighting back. But even if the most draconian of MAGA’s current proposals are blocked —and even if MAGA is kept out of power in 2024—it will take a leap in the priority we give this battlefront and unity around an action strategy to begin turning things around.
Crisis of “the right to stay home”
The first step in charting an effective course is gaining an accurate understanding of the problem we face—the root causes for the movement of people
.
Yes, a large number of migrants are trying to reach the US via crossing the US-Mexico border. But this is not at root a “border crisis.” The underlying problem is that tens of millions of people across the globe face a crisis of their right to stay at home. Migration has been a basic part of the human experience throughout history, and the right to migrate should be defended. But what the world faces today is forced migration, where millions who would prefer to stay in their homelands safely cannot do so:
“The movement of people from country to country, displaced by war, insecurity, and neoliberal economic policies, is enormous and growing… Nothing can stop this global movement, short of a radical reordering of the world’s economy and politics.” —David Bacon, Dignity or Exploitation: What Future for Farmworker Families in the United States, The Oakland Institute, 2021
As of 2020, the number of international migrants—people living outside their home country—was 281 million. This is 3.5% of the global population, compared to 2.8% in 2000 and 2.3% in 1980. And US policies are a big part of the reason for this steady increase: “neoliberal strictures, [US] support for oligarchs, and the War on Drugs have impoverished millions and destabilized Latin America.” Additionally, US militarism and failure to deal decisively with climate change are major contributors to forced migration globally.
Immigration policy in whose interests?
The mainstream debate over US immigration policy does not include much discussion of the root causes of global migration, much less the role of US policies in creating those conditions. Rather, the focus is how to manage the resulting displacement of human beings.
That management—according to the MAGA-controlled GOP and the pro-corporate elements in the Democratic Party—is to be done in the interest of those who want to earn a profit off human labor.
Their favored policies include “guest worker” programs, which create a pool of workers who can be brutally exploited because they lack political, labor or union organizing rights. And these guest worker programs simultaneously undermine the economic and political power of the workers’ movement as a whole. So does the persistent denial of a path to protected legal status and citizenship for migrants who are undocumented but have lived and worked in the US for many years. That denial also undermines democracy, as it legitimizes a two-tier system of political rights, even though both tiers are made up of people who work and contribute to society.
And for the bigots of MAGA, maintaining a constant “threat” of darker-skinned people “invading” the country is an ideal fit for their scapegoat —the “other.” It’s a perfect way of harnessing mass discontent and aiming it at a target other than the corporate class and their political representatives. It gins up their core base around the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, in which globalist elites and/or Jews are plotting to replace whites with people of color. And legitimizing the demonization of immigrants and the use of force against them without due process paves the way for extending dehumanization and repression to all peoples of color, all workers, and all political opponents of white Christian nationalism.
A progressive approach, by contrast, takes the side of those who work and those who are vulnerable. Our task is to build a global movement powerful enough to give every human being on the planet the option of living and thriving in their homeland, or having their rights protected should they decide to or be forced to migrate. On the way to that long-range goal, we must fight to protect the human rights of migrants specified in international law and win immigration policies that maximize the power and rights of the exploited and the vulnerable.
A basic set of demands flows from this perspective: legal status for all residents, an end to contract labor and guest worker programs, human rights for all including equal social, labor, and political rights. Simply put, we must demand full enfranchisement for all migrants.
Tough fights ahead
In the immediate period ahead, this translates mostly into waging a host of tough defensive fights while doing everything we can to introduce positive reforms into the national conversation.
An immediate priority is mobilizing opposition to the harsh anti-immigrant measures in the legislation under discussion in Washington in case that seemingly dead “compromise” comes back around. The proposed legislation includes restricting humanitarian parole programs that give asylum seekers temporary protection; expanding “expedited removals” that allow deportation with very little due process; capping asylum grants; mass mandatory detention, increased enforcement and other repressive measures. Every provision in this bill should remain a focus of battle whether or not this measure becomes law.
Other important defensive fights include:
And key to all of these demands is to prevent the ascent to the presidency of a man who has promised to make immigrants first on his hit list of “vermin” to be expelled from the body politic. Trump has pledged to round up, put in detention camps, and then deport all undocumented immigrants on his first day in office. To accept the framing of immigration as mainly a border security issue, as the Biden administration and top congressional Democrats currently do, is not just bad policy and bad politics in an important election. It cedes the ideological initiative to MAGA, makes it more difficult to turn out pro-immigrant voters, and weakens the capacity to persuade those open to persuasion that MAGA’s anti-immigrant crusade will not address the real sources of their hardships and discontent.
And even if Trump loses in 2024, the fight for immigrant rights will be far from easy. Progressives and the Democratic leadership have their sharpest differences on immigration policy and on the Biden administration’s support for Israeli genocide (and foreign policy in general). Those differences may change form, but they aren’t going to disappear on January 21, 2025, no matter who controls the White House and Congress.
On the positive reform side, a key task is to build support for the legislation introduced by Alex Padilla in the Senate and Zoe Lofgren in the House that would expand the number of long-term residents in the US who could apply for permanent resident legal status. This “Registry Bill” updates previous legislation to state that people of good moral character who have lived continuously in the US for seven years could apply to legalize their status. As things stand now, people would have had to live in the US continuously since 1972. Passage of this bill could lead to a pathway to citizenship for up to eight million people.
A task for all progressives
Every one of these fights will be difficult. For decades now, the mainstream opposition to anti-immigrant fearmongering has been limited to arguing for “trade-offs”—tough enforcement measures are traded for limited numbers of immigrants eligible for temporary residency or legalization. (The last fully progressive immigration legislation was passed in 1965, ending racist immigration quotas and making family reunification a top priority.)
This pattern, combined with the barrage of MAGA anti-immigrant fearmongering, and an especially large number of migrants trying to reach the US, has taken a toll on public opinion. Current polling shows almost 75% agreeing that “illegal immigration is a major problem.” A majority of voters say they trust Trump more than Biden to tackle immigration issues; this includes substantial numbers of voters of color as well as significant majorities among whites.
At the same time, a majority of voters support a path for undocumented people here to legalize their status. There is a deep reservoir of pro-immigrant sentiment out there, and many years of work by immigrant rights advocates has persuaded a substantial section of the population that we have to look at the roots of migration to understand why people are coming to the US in such numbers. An in-depth assessment of opinion polling on this issue released in 2020 by the National Immigration Forum showed majorities of 60 – 75% of the population saying immigration was a good thing for the country; majority support for paths to legalization, and majority opposition to mass detention of undocumented people. (It also showed the partisan divide on immigration policy widening, with Republicans growing more negative about immigrants and Democrats more positive.)
Still, it will take years of mass action, electoral campaigns, and political education to turn broad public sympathy for immigrants into a political force that targets the underlying roots of forced migration and is strong enough to bring about true immigration reform.
A vibrant if still under-resourced and fragmented immigrant rights movement is in the forefront of those fights today. And it also offers analytic and strategic frameworks for long range work. See for example:
The groups mentioned here and other immigrant rights organizations and campaigns should not have to carry this fight alone. It is up to all of us in the growing progressive current and resurgent labor movement in the US embrace this issue and join in this fight.
Thanks to Rev. Deborah Lee of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, Xiomara Corpeño, David Bacon, and Lillian Galedo for providing analysis and resources enabling me to write this column, and thanks even more for all your work tackling this issue over so many years.
Featured image: Farmworkers brought to the US in the H-2A visa program harvest melons early in the morning in a field near Firebaugh, in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Photo © David Bacon
| |
Merle Ratner Presente!
Merle Ratner’s love for Vietnam to be treasured forever
The profound love that Merle Ratner, a left-wing and anti-war US activist who passed away on February 5, gave to Vietnam during her entire life will be always in the hearts of Vietnamese people.
VNA Wednesday, February 07, 2024 22:03 https://link.gov.vn/yjjfQmsD
| |
New York (VNA) – The profound love that Merle Ratner, a left-wing and anti-war US activist who passed away on February 5, gave to Vietnam during her entire life will be always in the hearts of Vietnamese people.
Ratner passed away in a traffic accident in New York on February 5 evening.
Merle Evelyn Ratner was born to a Jewish-American family in New York City in 1956. At the age of 13, she actively took part in the anti-war movement and showed her support for the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. At that time, the public in the US and the world were impressed by a small girl climbing the Statue of Liberty and waving the red flag with a yellow star and slogans calling for an end to the wrongful war.
She used to say that images of the destructive war in Vietnam and the stories about napalm bombs and toxic chemicals killing a large number of people had urged her to take to the streets to do something meaningful to help Vietnam.
Inspired by the sympathies and love for the S-shaped country, Ratner sought to read documents and writings about President Ho Chi Minh, General Vo Nguyen Giap, and the just struggle of the Vietnamese people. The more she learned about Vietnam, the more strongly she supported the fight for independence, freedom, and national reunification of its people.
To this left-wing activist, the day of April 30, 1975 was not only the day of complete victory for Vietnam but also a happy day of all progressive and peace-loving people around the world.
After 1975, with her stronger love for Vietnam, Ratner campaigned for the normalisation of the Vietnam - US relations and supported many international activities of Vietnam. During 1976 - 1979, she and her husband, Prof. Ngo Thanh Nhan, promoted the establishment of an association of patriotic overseas Vietnamese in the US to call on the US Government to normalise the relations with and lift the embargo on Vietnam.
She used to visit the Southeast Asian country for many times and work with mass organisations, the Vietnam Fatherland Front, and the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics.
Ratner was a co-founder and coordinator of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign (VAORRC) in the New York region. She worked tirelessly to appeal to organisations and individuals to support Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange and to the US Government to compensate the victims. Over the past years, she collected tens of millions of signatures via the internet to help Agent Orange victims of Vietnam to launch lawsuits.
Ratner was awarded the "For the Development of Vietnamese Women" insignia in 2010 and the “For Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange” insignia in 2013 in recognition of her enormous contributions.
Jonathan Moore, a lawyer and a board member of the VAORRC, regarded Ratner as a steadfast friend, tirelessly advocating for the rights of AO victims in Vietnam throughout her life. He said she will be remembered by those fighting for dignity and social justice.
Le Thanh Chung, a Vietnamese expatriate in New York, assessed the activist as being unwaveringly faithful to communist ideals and believing in socialism as the true path to happiness for the people. Notably, Ratner devoted her pure and loyal love to Vietnam, Chung said.
In a recent interview with Vietnam News Agency correspondents in New York on February 1 on the occasion of the 94th founding anniversary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), Ratner once again emphasised the leadership role of the CPV as the decisive factor in all of the nation’s achievements and victories. She affirmed that the CPV has steadfastly pursued the path of socialism and advocated for socialist values worldwide, with Vietnam certain to succeed on the chosen path.
Amidst the constant changes in the world, increasing right-wing nationalism, and increasingly fierce competition among major powers, she believed that Vietnam's foreign policy of "Four Nos" and "bamboo diplomacy" approach – which means flexible in practice yet unwavering in principles – demonstrate the rightness and help Vietnam ensure peace, independence and sovereignty, and achieve many meaningful accomplishments.
|  | |
|
Dear friends,
We, at the Viet Nam Union of Friendship Organizations are very sad to inform that Mrs. Merle Ratner - a close friend with a complete love for our Viet Nam, passed away by an accident on February 5, 2024 in New York city, the US. We are holding a Memorial Service for her at 9:00am (Ha Noi Time Zone), on February 16, 2024. Please find attached a Note of Condolence and Memorial Service Program.
Thank you very much for your participation. Hereunder is:
Tham gia Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/99490084442?pwd=amw0VHBUaVpaTXhaMVZ3YXVNUXg0dz09
ID cuộc họp: 994 9008 4442
Mật mã: 869551
Sincerely,
Phan Quynh
Secretariat Member
Viet Nam - USA Society
Department of Americas
Viet Nam Union of Friendship Organizations,
105Q Quan Thanh, Ba Dinh, Ha Noi, Viet Nam.
Email: [email protected]; Mob: 0904502398
| |
|
Presention on Gaza by Rod Such to the CCDS National Coordinating Committee
February 11, 2024
Thanks very much to CCDS for the invitation to talk with you today about the situation in Gaza. I’d like to frame this discussion around two questions. The first is what is the historic and current relationship between U.S. imperialism and the state of Israel? The second is, how does the rise of the Global South in a multipolar war threaten to impact this relationship?
The U.S.’s virtually unconditional support for Israel can be broken down into five components, which I label 1) the imperialist component 2) the war profit component 3) the congressional component 4) the ideological component and 5) a shared culture and history of settler colonialism, militarism, and imperialist interventionism.
Let’s start with the imperialist component. Our current president, Joe Biden, probably gave the clearest and most succinct answer to why the U.S. gives unquestioned support for Israel. As a U.S.senator in the 1980s, Biden gave a speech on the Senate floor in support of a resolution for billions in military aid to Israel. In this speech he said, “Were there not an Israel the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.”
This strategic thinking in the U.S. establishment goes as far back as 1949, when the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to President Harry Truman. In that memo they spelled out what those interests in the region were: oil and controlling who has access to it.
The Joint Chiefs were impressed with Israel’s military performance during the war with the Arab states in 1948-49 and recommended that the United States make an alliance with Israel as a regional force that could help protect U.S. access to and control of the Middle East’s oil resources.
But this proposed marriage was not consummated right away. Initially, the newly formed state of Israel courted and was courted by British and French colonialism, which also recognized a potential partner in Israel. A look at this temporary affair is not a digression because it gives us some insights into what a regional hegemon seeks from its imperialist patrons and how that played out with Israel’s eventual marriage to U.S. imperialism.
The period is 1955 to 1957. Britain was alarmed by Nasser’s intention to nationalize the Suez Canal. France was alarmed by Egypt’s open support for the Algerian revolution. Together they hatched a plot. I know that we generally avoid conspiracy theories because history is better explained as a result of systemic structures. But here we have an actual conspiracy, later revealed by the conspirators themselves. The Israeli historian Avi Shlaim in his book The Iron Wall details everything right down to the location of the French chateau where the conspiracy was decided.
The plot was that Israel would attack Egypt, using the ongoing border conflicts with Gaza’s refugees as its excuse. Britain would intervene in the name of safeguarding the Canal, with France’s assistance. Nasser would be ousted, and the Canal would be under Britain’s control.
Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion took part in the talks himself and outlined what Israel wanted in return for it providing the pretext; namely weapons from France and France’s assistance in developing a nuclear reactor, along with territorial divisions that would give Israel the West Bank and a big chunk of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River.
Of course, we know how the Suez Canal War ended. The conspirators fatally failed to consult the United States, and President Eisenhower, making clear who was the superior power, forced them to withdraw.
But Israel secured its reactor and eventually nuclear weapons and established itself as the only nuclear-armed power in southwestern Asia. In the 1967 War, when it destroyed Egypt’s army and air force, it further burnished its military prowess with the Pentagon.
Moreover, Israel proved its loyalty to U.S. imperialism with its backing of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the supply of arms and intelligence to the apartheid regime in South Africa and the U.S.-backed military juntas in Latin America. It even offered key components for South Africa’s atomic bomb program, as detailed in Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s excellent book The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa.
In the end, the United States didn’t need to “invent an Israel.” It came gift-wrapped, and as the Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi documents in Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, Israel was amply rewarded for its role of regional hegemon for U.S. interests. The tradeoff in this case was military, political,economic and diplomatic support in exchange for letting Israel have a free hand in how it treats the Palestinians.
So every 10 years the U.S. Congress renews a 10-year $40 billion military aid package to Israel, the largest amount given to any country. But often overlooked is a provision in that package requiring that Israel spend 78% of that amount with U.S. weapons manufacturers. In other words, in addition to our enormous military budget, each year we toss in a few extra billion in aid to Israel, 78% of which must be spent with U.S. weapons companies. Icing on the cake.
So the profits to be made by our own military-industrial complex are another big reason why the United States has always provided unquestioned military support for Israel.
Now to the third component: the U.S. Congress. We’re all familiar with President Eisenhower’s warning in his farewell address to the American people to guard against “the undue influence of the military-industrial complex.” Little known, however, is that in his original draft, Eisenhower called it “the military-industrial-congressional complex.”
That added component represented an acknowledgment that the Pentagon had purposefully and carefully spread out its military spending over the entire country. The Pentagon identified congressional districts where military contracts would create jobs and help ensure that the Pentagon always had a congressional majority for its military spending.
Every U.S. military aid package to Israel is almost always unanimously approved in the House and Senate because of this military-industrial complex and because of the existence of a powerful Israel Lobby. More on that later.
But there is yet another reason for US support, and once again Biden is a good example of this. When Biden flew to Israel and embraced Israeli prime minister Netanyahu after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, he declared “I am a Zionist.” Of course, Biden is a devout Catholic so that makes him a Christian Zionist like much of the Republican Party’s base. But what does this mean, and why did Biden feel the need to declare it?
I think this represents yet another component of US support for Israel, the ideological component. So what is Zionism and why is it important to this discussion. After declaring his intention to run for the presidency in 2020, Biden gave a speech to potential donors and said, “I get it. I understand why it’s important to have a Jewish state. It’s because of the long history of the persecution of the Jews.”
Of course, this statement ignores many other important facts, such as the long history of the Palestinian people’s desire for self-determination and the monumental injustice inherent in the very creation of the state of Israel.
Most people are unaware that the original United Nations partition plan was a recommendation, not a binding resolution. And most people don’t know of the inherent unfairness of the plan; namely that it gave most of the land of Palestine to the minority of the population that was Jewish. It’s no wonder the Palestinians rejected this plan.
Bear with me here because what I’m about to elucidate also goes to the heart of why there’s been unquestioning US military support for Israel.
Even fewer people are aware of how the leader of the Zionist movement at the time, David Ben-Gurion, viewed the UN recommendation. In a meeting with the leadership of his party, Ben-Gurion said that the UN plan created only a 56% Jewish majority in the state that was to be Jewish. This was unacceptable, Ben-Gurion said, because it meant the Zionists might have to enter into a coalition government with an Arab party. They were envisioning a parliamentary system, and co-governance with Arab political parties meant the Zionist movement wouldn’t have a Jewish state, which was its openly proclaimed goal ever since 1942.
Ben-Gurion proposed that the new Jewish state must have at least an 80% Jewish majority. That is when the expulsion of the Palestinians was envisioned. At the time it was called “transfer.” Military planning began almost immediately under the name Plan D, and by April 1948, 350,000 Palestinians had either been expelled or forced to flee due to massacres and military attacks on their villages.
That was one month before Israel declared itself a state, an often overlooked fact because Zionist historiography likes to portray the Palestinian refugees as resulting from the war declared by Arab states in May 1948. In fact Egypt, Jordan, and Syria entered the fighting precisely because they were angered by the expulsions and were absorbing the bulk of the refugees.
Ultimately, 800,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled from Palestine and made refugees, more than 500 villages were destroyed, and Israel ended up controlling more than 70% of the land. Palestinians call this the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe. By 1949 only about 100,000 Palestinian Arabs remained in Israel, making it a de facto Jewish state.
Because Israel was created on this foundation of ethnic cleansing and apartheid, it was certain that it would not be able to provide safety for Jewish people. Injustice never guarantees safety, and indeed, the Jewish citizens of Israel have faced three wars and ongoing, unrelenting popular resistance to their occupations. Peace and safety only come with justice and equal rights for all
Today, with the recent passage of the Nation-State Law, which states openly that Israel is a state of the Jewish people and the Jewish people alone, Israel is a de jure Jewish supremacist state.
Most of us think that true democracy means a state that belongs to all the people, and in which the people are sovereign.Today 20% of Israel’s population is Palestinian Arab. Yet they are told that the state does not belong to them. They are inherently unequal under the law. And so are Palestinian refugees still living in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, here in this country, and around the world. A Jew living anywhere has the right to become a citizen of Israel and yet Palestinians are told they do not have the right to return to the homes and land from which they were expelled.
Imagine if a candidate for political office in this country declared, “This is a state for white people, and for white people alone.”
And this is where I’m suggesting that the United States government has an ideological affinity with Zionism and the state of Israel. Because in fact we do have more than 200 years of history of white supremacy. We commited genocide against Native Americans. And then we confined the remaining indigenous refugees to reservations.Our country enslaved black Africans. And with the defeat of Reconstruction in the Deep South, we disenfranchised Black people in the South and confined them to ghettos in the North and the West. We have only begun to come out of this period of legalized white supremacy in the last 50 years and then only partially.
We are ourselves a settler-colonial society, much like Israel is today. The values we share with Israel as a Jewish supremacist state are the same values of a white supremacist state. And like Israel, we have a militaristic culture of might makes right, as we’ve attempted to impose our will not only on minorities within our country but on countries around the world.
Most of our current Congress and the Biden Administration is only now beginning to react to the genocide unfolding in Gaza. But this probably shouldn’t surprise us because neither have we ever come to terms with the genocides we carried out in Vietnam and in Iraq.
Finally I want to talk about our shared culture of militarism and interventionism with Israel. And in doing so, let’s bring it back to Gaza.
It’s important to see the parallels with Israel’s reaction to the 2006 parliamentary elections in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The blockade of Gaza actually began after Hamas won those elections. Israel imprisoned the Hamas candidates who won their elections in the West Bank; then, together with the U.S., supported a coup attempt against Hamas in Gaza in 2007. After the failure of that coup, the siege of Gaza tightened even further.
Similarly, in our history, when the U.S. doesn’t like the outcome of elections in certain countries, we also stage coups and support assassinations and try to impose a military solution, as we did in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. It’s in our DNA, the DNA of settler-colonialism, militarism, and intervention in the internal affairs of other nations and people striving for self-determination. This culture of militarism and interventionism is the fifth component of our unquestioned military support for Israel.
There is a crack in the wall finally with the beginnings of a genuine mass movement around Palestine, exemplified by the protests in Washington, D.C. that have drawn hundreds of thousands of people, comparable to those of the Vietnam War era. There have been thousands of protests and rallies around the country, and numerous examples of civil disobedience, including a massive sit-in at Grand Central station in New York City organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, not to mention hundreds of blockades of traffic and protests at arms manufacturers.
Significantly, nearly 60 municipalities have passed resolutions calling for an immediate cease-fire, including Chicago where the African-American mayor cast the deciding vote, and Minneapolis, where a 9-2 majority overrode a mayoral veto. The labor movement also entered the fray,with the United Auto Workers and the Postal Workers Union among the first to pass ceasefire resolutions, later joined by the SEIU and the AFL-CIO itself.
Yet another sign of the widening crack is the growth of the Squad in Congress. Significantly, the 18 members of Congress who originally called for a ceasefire in Gaza were all people of color. And significantly the Israel Lobby–particularly AIPAC and the Democratic Majority for Israel–are so scared they have pledged $100 million in the 2024 congressional elections to defeat them.
But without a doubt the most impressive development is the rise of the Global South, and in particular the leadership role of South Africa in bringing charges of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice, joined by numerous other countries. The Palestinian people now know they have a key ally in the Global South and its growing prominence in the international community. This mass movement includes the peace camp, the social Justice movement, and the climate justice movement represented by such groups as 350.org, the Sunrise Movement, and Extinction Rebellion, who see the links between reliance on fossil fuels, imperialist resource extraction, and the Palestinian struggle.
We don’t need access to the oil-rich regions of southwestern Asia. Just the opposite. We need to keep the oil in the ground because burning fossil fuels is fundamentally altering our climate and ultimately threatening mass extinctions.
We don’t need yet another ethno-supremacist state claiming that other people–migrants and refugees–for example, are “poisoning our blood,” a phrase echoing the Nazis that Donald Trump, one of Israel’s biggest supporters, just used.
Biden must demand an immediate ceasefire and push for a political solution or step aside and announce he will not run for re-election. Otherwise, he will continue alienating young voters, Arab Americans, people of color, and vast numbers of people of conscience. He will usher in Trump.
Sources:
https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-conspiracy-invade-nassers-egypt/14211
https://electronicintifada.net/content/century-complicity/30511
https://electronicintifada.net/content/new-book-reveals-top-secret-collusion-between-israel-us-during-twenty-years-peace-talks
https://electronicintifada.net/content/book-review-rashid-khalidi-shows-how-us-got-hired-israels-lawyer/12350
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf
https://breakingdefense.com/2021/01/ike-was-wrong-the-military-industrial-congressional-complex-turns-60/
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/12/how-joe-biden-became-americas-top-israel-hawk/
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4962369/user-clip-joe-biden-israel-usa-invent-israel-protect-interest-region
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/dying-to-forget-dying-to-forget-oil-power-palestine-and-the-foundations-of-u-s-policy-in-the-middle-east-book-review/
https://www.amazon.com/Palestinian-Refugee-Problem-1947-1949-Cambridge/dp/0521338891
https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553
https://jewishcurrents.org/joe-bidens-alarming-record-on-israel
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/i-am-zionist-how-joe-bidens-lifelong-bond-with-israel-shapes-war-policy-2023-10-21/
https://www.salon.com/2015/03/29/joe_bidens_israel_stunner_american_jews_should_let_israel_protect_them/
| |
Why did UAW’s Shawn Fain Endorse Biden After Calling for a Ceasefire? – Frank Hammer
Copy and paste link below to see interview.
| |
Ceasefire Now Ceasefire now, Ceasefire Now, Ceasefire Now!!!!!! | |
Students attack Columbia U’s complicity in genocide, and all major Muslim, Jewish, and Palestinian rights groups join forces in Uptown Manhattan. Truckers in Chicago have convoyed for justice and activists have blocked multiple bridges and tunnels in New York. Commentary from Rev Munther Isaac in Bethlehem and Professor Noura Erekat.
copy and paste into your browser: https://youtu.be/Gjzi_UKLjoY
| |
|
Go here to see demonstration in San Francisco demostration in support of Palestine
copy and paste into your browser
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bIs75F8i_heZrAwnAEoNTIrI7AXXB4Sv/view?usp=gmail&ts=65c48e81
| |
Honor Black History Month | |
 |
Thursday, February 1, 2024
Dr. King Speaks: Economic Consequences of the Capitalist/War System
Black History Month: Some Remembrances
Harry Targ
Dr. Martin Luther King, in his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York City, April 4, 1967, spoke of the devastating consequences of the Vietnam War on the Vietnamese people and the poor and oppressed at home. To him, the carnage of war not only destroyed the targets of war (their economies, their land, their cultures) but the costs also misallocated the resources of the nation-states which initiated wars.
Every health and welfare provision of the government, local, state, and federal, was limited by resources allocated for the war system. Health care, education, transportation, jobs, wages, campaigns to address enduring problems of racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental revitalization, and non-war related scientific and technological research were reduced almost in direct proportion to rising military expenditures.
Over half the US federal budget goes to military spending past and current. And the irony is that the money that is extracted from the vast majority of the population of the United States goes to military budgets that enhance the profits of the less than one percent of the population who profit from the war system as it exists
“I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”
Since 1967 when he made that speech, Dr. King would surely have added a long list of other wars to the Vietnam case: wars in Central America and South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. and the more than 1,000 bases and outposts where US troops or hired contractors are fighting wars on behalf of capitalist expansion. Meanwhile the gaps between rich and poor people on a worldwide basis have increased dramatically with some twenty percent of the world’s population living below World Bank defined poverty lines.
| |
|
The Electoral College Landscape
To reach 270, Biden needs to win either Pennsylvania, or Georgia + Michigan.
February 9, 2024 Michael Podhorzer WEEKEND READING
One of the many reasons I urge people to stop caring about horse race polls is that we already know all we need to know ahead of Election Day: The outcome will be determined, as it was in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022, by narrow margins in six battleground states – the three northern states that once constituted the “Blue Wall” (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), and three more diverse states (Arizona, Georgia and Nevada). The margins in these states are usually much too small for any poll to reasonably predict. And we know that Democrats have won in those states only when voters were fully aware that the alternative was MAGA.
In this post, I’ll talk more about those six states and their Electoral College math (including an interactive tool). As always, remember that the outcome in those states will depend not on the margin of error in polls, but on the margin of effort by campaigns, activists, media, and concerned citizens to mobilize America’s anti-MAGA majority.
At this point, we can be pretty confident that the states in play are Arizona (11 electoral votes), Georgia (16), Michigan (15), Nevada (6), Pennsylvania (19), and Wisconsin (10). With those states undecided, the electoral vote tally is Trump 235, Biden 226.1 As a reminder, Biden prevailed in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin by less than one point, Pennsylvania by a point, and Michigan and Nevada by about 2 and a half points.
Only Two Paths to 270: Pennsylvania or Georgia + Michigan
To win the Electoral College, Biden must win either Pennsylvania, or both Georgia and Michigan; there is no realistic path to 270 without at least one of these combinations. (This is a change from 2020, when Michigan had one more Electoral College vote and Biden actually had three paths.) Also, remember that a 269-269 tie would throw the determination of the winner to the House of Representatives, where each state’s delegation gets one vote. And if a presidential election outcome is close enough nationally that it results in a 269-269 tie, it is hard to imagine that election resulting in Democrats controlling a majority of state Congressional delegations. (Currently, Republicans hold a majority of representatives in 27 states, compared to Democrats who hold just 22; Minnesota is evenly split. Other than deep-red at-large states, all of the GOP-held state delegations would require flipping at least two seats.2)
Thus, there are only two paths to 270.
- Pennsylvania (245)
- The Blue Wall Holds (270).
- If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary.
- Email
-
(One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.)
- Loses Wisconsin (260). Biden would have to win Georgia (276) or Arizona (271).
- Loses Michigan (255). This is the least likely along this path, as through the Trump era Democrats have done best in this Blue Wall state. Biden would have to win Georgia (271) or Arizona and Nevada (272).
- Georgia and Michigan (257) Biden has to win two of Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada.
Interactive Tool: Try It Yourself
While 270 to Win is a wonderful site, and I definitely recommend scrolling through its historical maps for important perspective on the nation’s persisting sectional alignment, I created an interactive (see below) to make it easier for you to roll through the combinations of battleground states to create your own scenarios.
Simply make a copy of this spreadsheet, and enter “0” or “1” in each cell if you think Trump or Biden will win the state.
Outside the Six Battlegrounds
A scenario in which Biden wins the Electoral College by flipping a state outside of the six in the section above is extremely unlikely, given that it would mean flipping a state that Democratic presidential nominees have not won since 1976 (Texas), 2008 (North Carolina), or 2012 (Florida), while losing at least three of the states that Biden won in 2020 and Democrats carried in the midterms.
While North Carolina, which Biden lost by 1.3 points in 2020, may theoretically be flippable and within the margin of effort, it also has a very gerrymandered House delegation and no 2024 Senate race, making it a much lower priority for achieving a Democratic trifecta of House, Senate, and White House control than the six battleground states discussed here.
Since Trump fell short by 7.3 points in Minnesota and 7.4 points in New Hampshire, it’s even more unlikely that he would win by picking up either of those states if he falls short in the six battleground states. That said, here’s a piece of New Hampshire trivia. We can’t not think about Florida when we think about Bush’s (s)election in 2000. But had Gore picked up just 7,212 more votes in New Hampshire, the outcome in Florida would not have mattered. Moreover, 2000 was the only one of the nine presidential elections since 1988 in which New Hampshire voted for the Republican nominee. So, if you’re superstitious, aim for 274 in the interactive.
The Post-Election Prisoner’s Dilemma
All of that said, I want to draw attention to the added importance of Biden winning the Electoral College with at least one state to spare. When Brad Raffensperger and other Republican election administrators refused to go along with Trump’s efforts to get them to flip the results in their states in their favor, they were credulously hailed as courageous democracy defenders. The actual story was a bit more complex. In 2020, once Biden was seen to have won Georgia and Arizona, every Republican election administrator faced the classic prisoner’s dilemma: if they “went rogue” and went along with Trump’s demands to alter the real results, but administrators in two of the other five states did not, Biden would still become president and they would face very serious legal liability. If this dynamic changes in 2024, and Republican election administrators in battleground states see a path forward for Trump by cooperating, we can’t presume that they will act with the “courage” Raffensperger did in 2020. That should help us make more sense of those Republican officials like Rusty Bowers who did the right thing in that situation, but who still say they will vote for Trump again.
The importance of winning with at least one state to spare brings the unprecedented importance of Nevada into focus. If you follow through the Electoral College math above, Nevada might seem inconsequential; you’ll see that there are very few scenarios in which losing Nevada would cost Biden the Electoral College majority. But winning Nevada, which is the only one of the six states that Democrats have won in all of the last three presidential elections, is the easiest way to ensure that Biden has an extra state.
Post Election Mischief
There have been several important developments since 2020 to reduce opportunities for post-election mischief and ambiguity. This includes the passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act; the Supreme Court’s ruling in Moore vs Harper discrediting the fabulist “Independent State Legislature” theory; and Democratic victories in critical states. Where, in 2020, there were Republican trifectas in Georgia and Arizona, now they have just Georgia. Where Republicans controlled both chambers of the state legislature in five of the battleground states, they now control both chambers in only two (Arizona and Georgia). And with victories in state supreme courts in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2023, the opportunities for rogue judicial rulings are reduced as well.
January 6th, 2025
In the event that Biden wins, if Democrats have majorities in both chambers that will greatly reduce the possibility of Republican disruption when Congress meets to count the Electoral Votes. The most likely scenario if Biden wins is that Democrats will control the House, but that Republicans will control the Senate – if they can defeat either Brown or Tester. (I’ll be doing a deeper dive on those races in the coming weeks.)
The House of Representatives
I think it’s fair to say that if Biden has won the popular vote by enough to secure a majority of the Electoral Votes, Democrats will have also flipped the House. In 2020, Biden carried 226 congressional districts. Taking into account the remapping done since the midterms, Biden won 224 of 2024 districts. Today, assigning all but the Cook toss-up districts to the party they at least lean toward, Democrats are down 202 to 210. But of the 23 toss-up races, all but two are in states Biden carried4, and all but 4 are in districts Biden carried.5 Of those four Biden lost, three elected Democrats to represent them in 2022.
The Senate
Although a new Congress will have been sworn in on January 3, Kamala Harris will remain the presiding officer, meaning that if there is a tie vote, hers will decide the outcome; in other words, Democrats would still be in the majority with 50 seats. While a great deal of attention is understandably being paid to the need for Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester to win their reelections in Red states for Democrats to retain 50 votes in the Senate, it’s important to remember that there are five other competitive Senate races, all in the six battleground states. Of those races, Baldwin in Wisconsin and Casey in Pennsylvania are best-positioned for a Democratic win. Michigan is an open seat, Arizona is complicated by Sinema running as an Independent, and Rosen has a more challenging re-election than is generally recognized given (1) that Democratic margins in Nevada have been narrowing, and (2) Nevada has had the greatest voter turnover since she was elected in 2018.
1 The split congressional districts in Nebraska and Maine are likely to break for Biden and Trump, respectively.
2 North Carolina is also currently tied, but likely to be Republican with the new lines. Meanwhile, Democrats hold only a single-seat majority in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and have a threatened at-large delegation in Alaska.
3 In other words, Biden would lose all three Blue Wall states, but win Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.
4 North Carolina and Ohio are the only states Biden lost that have toss-up districts.
5 Toss-up districts Biden lost in 2020 are CA-41, ME-02, PA-08, and WA-03.
Michael Podhorzer @MICHAELPODHORZER
Former political director of the AFL-CIO. Senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Founder: Analyst Institute, Research Collaborative (RC), Co-founder: Working America, Catalist. He publishes Weekend Reading. (weekendreading.net)
| |
Understanding and Countering Fascist Movements
From Void to Hope
By Joan Braune
This book is based on the premise that understanding fascism is crucial for defeating it.
Understanding and Countering Fascist Movements suggests fascism must be understood according to two “dimensions.” First, fascism is a social movement seeking power, always already connected to sources of power. Hence, fascism cannot be defeated by policing it as a crime problem, nor therapeutically treating it as a pathology of mental health. Second, fascists have cognitive and emotional needs they are seeking to fulfill through their participation in the movement, but the presence of these motivations must be held in tension with the fact that fascists are responsible for their choices and that these individual motivations also exist in a wider social context of capitalism and systems of supremacy.
The book opens by examining some psychological elements of recruitment and disengagement from fascist movements, before addressing broader social narratives, concluding with the limitations of an approach that is grounded in the national security state that relies on individualized, perpetrator-centered interventions. Rejecting centrist paradigms that see fascism as “extremism” or “accelerationism,” Braune argues that fascism must be addressed in its specificity and uniqueness as an ideology and movement. Ultimately, she argues, fascism can only be defeated by countervailing social movements that not only demand radical social change but offer alternative spaces of belonging, community care, and the search for meaning.
Understanding and Countering Fascist Movements is a philosophical contribution to antifascist theory and practice that will be appreciated by academics, students, and activists concerned about fascism today. https://www.routledge.com/
| |
Revisiting DuBois’ landmark book,
‘The World and Africa’
January 5, 2024 10:49 AM CST BY STU BECKER
reprinted from the Peoples World
The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History by W.E.B. DuBois argues that Africa’s great contributions to world civilization have been erased and ignored. DuBois argues that this is because of the transatlantic slave trade, which enslaved millions of Africans.
The slave trade, he argues, served in many ways as the foundation for the emergence of the world capitalist system, as slave labor was used to toil on the sugar, tobacco, and cotton plantations of the American (South America, North America, and Caribbean) colonies. These crops and the wealth they created then fueled the Industrial Revolution and enriched Western Europe and the future United States of America.
The collective memory of the greatness of the rich history of Africa had to be erased in order to perpetuate the myth that African people or people of African descent were inferior in order to justify the transatlantic slave trade, the industrial capitalist system, and the imperialist colonization of Africa by Western Europe.
This book is very important; it serves as a corrective for the habits of Western European and North American scholars to ignore or downplay the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles of Africa. However, if the people of Africa free themselves from Western neocolonialism, colonialism, and imperialist domination and extraction of their resources—i.e. if Africans completely take control over their resources and use them for their own development—it would be a major blow to imperialism’s system of exploitation, oppression, poverty, war, and racialism/racism.
Here are some interesting points DuBois makes:
After the transatlantic slave trade became unmanageable and untenable due to the resistance and revolts of Africans on the continent of Africa, on the slave ships, and in the colonies in the Western Hemisphere, the Western European colonial slave-holding countries then switched to direct colonization of the African continent in order to exploit the rich natural resources of Africa and the labor of Africans. Colonization also allowed Europeans to use the colonies as a market for their finished products.
Labor was degraded through the process of the transatlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Africans. Labor was seen as the work of supposedly inferior people while superior people lived at their expense. It was common sense in the colonizing countries that the darker peoples of the world in Africa, Asia, and Latin America should work and be exploited by the Western European “white” world; this was viewed as a just social order.
The concept of race was developed to justify the enslavement of Africans and the exploitation of Africa and Asia, i.e. the world capitalistic system. The governments and mainstream academics of Western European countries and the U.S. said race had scientific backing, that whiteness was defined as “civilized” and “advanced,” and that non-white people were primitive and inferior.
DuBois understands World War I as being, at its core, a conflict among the imperialist powers for control over spheres of influence in Asia and colonies in Africa. Germany demanded to get more colonies and the right to extract wealth just like Britain and France.
In one passage from the book, DuBois connects the exploitation of workers in Europe with the exploitation of colonized people in Africa and Asia and the racism involved in the imperialist system. DuBois points out that Nazism went hand-in-hand with the ideological constructs already constructed by the major imperial powers:
“The concept of the European ‘gentleman’ was evolved: A man well-bred and of meticulous grooming, of knightly sportsmanship and invincible courage even in the face of death; but one who did not hesitate to use machine guns against assagais [wooden spears] and to cheat ‘n******’; an ideal of sportsmanship which reflected the Golden Rule and yet contradicted it—not only in business and in industry within white countries, but all over Asia and Africa—by indulging in lying, murder, theft, rape, deception, and degradation, of the same sort and kind which has left the world aghast at the accounts of what the Nazis did in Poland and Russia.
“There were no Nazi atrocity-concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood—which the Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.
“Together with the idea of a Superior Race there grew up in Europe and America an astonishing ideal of wealth and luxury: the man of ‘independent’ income who did not have to ‘work for a living,’ who could indulge his whims and fantasies, who was free from all compulsion either ethic or hunger, became the hero of novels, of drama and of fairy tale.
“This wealth was built in Africa especially, upon diamonds and gold, copper and tin, ivory and mahogany, palm oil and cocoa, seeds extracted and grown, beaten out of the blood-stained bodies of the natives, transported to Europe, processed by wage slaves who were not receiving, and as Ricardo assured them they could never receive enough to become educated and healthy human beings, and then distributed among prostitutes and gamblers as well as among well-bred followers of art, literature, and drama.” (pp. 75 -76)
DuBois applies Marxist methodology to analyze the connection between Western Europe/the U.S. and the colonies. The wealth enjoyed by the Western European ruling classes was accumulated through exploitation and oppression, land theft, murder, brutality, and the domination of Africans and exploited workers in Europe and America alike.
They disguised their system based on exploitation and oppression with the trappings of elections and democracy at home and tales of benevolence in managing the colonized. Their societal narratives turned Western colonialist gangsters and thieves into heroes. The European and European-American capitalist ruling class professed to be Christian while doing the opposite of Christian teachings:
“Cities were built, ugly and horrible, with regions for the culture of crime, disease, and suffering, but characterized in popular myth and blindness by wide and beautiful avenues where the rich and fortunate lived, laughed, and drank tea. National heroes were created by lopping off their sins and canonizing their virtues, so that Gladstone had no connection with slavery, Chinese Gordon did not get drunk, William Pitt was a great patriot and not an international thief. Education was so arranged that the young learned not necessarily the truth, but that aspect and interpretation of the truth which the rulers of the world wished them to know and follow.
“In other words, we had progress by poverty in the face of accumulating wealth, and that poverty was not simply the poverty of the slaves of Africa and the peons of Asia, but the poverty of the mass of workers in England, France, Germany, and the United States. Art in building, painting, and literature, became cynical and decadent. Literature became realistic and therefore pessimistic. Religion became organized in social clubs where well-bred people met in luxurious churches and gave alms to the poor. On Sunday they listened to sermon—“Blessed are the meek;” “Do unto others even as you would that others do unto you;” “If thine enemy smite thee, turn the other cheek;” “It is more blessed to give than to receive;”—listened and acted as though they had read, as in very truth they ought to have read—“Might is right;” “Do others before they do you;” “Kill your enemies or be killed;” “Make profits by any methods and at any cost so long as you can escape lenient law.” This is a fair picture of the decadence of that Europe which led human civilization during the nineteenth century and looked unmoved on the writhing of Asia and of Africa.” (pp. 76 -77)
DuBois then goes into the long and rich history of Africa that has been ignored by Western scholars to justify the exploitation and oppression of African (Black) peoples. When African people were enslaved by the Western imperialist powers, the world was told by the West that Africa had no history, no culture, and no civilization. Nothing could be further from the truth, however, DuBois argues. Africa has a vast history that stretches much further back in time than that of Western Europe.
Humanity began in Africa, he reminds readers. The civilizations of Egypt and Ethiopia alone lasted for over 3,000 years, and each is much older than Greece, the first well-known civilization in Europe. Also, there are thousands of ethnicities, cultures, and civilizations to be found throughout the African continent. African history and culture shouldn’t be ignored by anyone serious about understanding the world, DuBois says; it should be respected and studied.
In the chapter on Egypt, he discusses how some racist European scholars calling themselves “Egyptologists” sought to argue that Egyptian society did not consist of dark-skinned African people. It was all an attempt to detach darker-skinned people from the kind of technical achievements that were obvious in Egyptian history. DuBois argues that actually, Egypt consisted of dark-skinned African people, lighter-skinned Africans, and other colors in between. Egypt is known for being one of the first world civilizations, and DuBois shows that the people there came in many colors, including the darkest colors, despite what the “Egyptologists” claimed.
In the chapter on Ethiopia, DuBois connects its history with that of Egypt. The two civilizations are tied together, he writes, as many people from Egypt originally migrated from Ethiopia. DuBois shows that Greece, rather than being the leader in social evolution as claimed by the scholars of “Western Civilization,” actually looked to Ethiopia and Egypt for inspiration. Ethiopia was seen as a great place for Greeks to go to and visit, and some select few among the elite traveled there, just as Americans might have traveled to England or France in the past looking for models. Ethiopians were also black/dark-skinned. The name Ethiopia that we use today, in Greek, translated to “land of the burnt faces.”
In the chapter on Sudan, DuBois discusses how the Islamic empires expanded through North and West Africa up to Spain. In the Islamic world in West Africa, there were universities, such as that found at Timbuktu. The empire of Mali was an African Islamic empire. DuBois makes the argument that the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment in Europe had to be influenced by Africans but that this spillover is largely ignored because of the ideology of racism.
Towards the end of the book, DuBois included a speech he had previously given calling for Africa to unite under what he described as the “beautiful robes of Pan-African Socialism.” He called on African countries to increase trade with the Soviet Union and China instead of the capitalist West. He told Africans to arise, saying—paraphrasing Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto—they had nothing to lose but their chains and a world to win.
DuBois discusses his efforts to organize several Pan-African Congresses aimed at raising awareness of the struggle for Pan-Africanism and the fight against European colonialism and imperialism in Africa. Those conferences are an episode of history worth closer study; DuBois organized them with just a few other people in the early 1900s—a half-century before the major anti-colonial struggles on the African continent broke out into the open. DuBois met with other Pan-Africanists in those early days, such as George Padmore. In the later Pan-African Congresses, he met the future president of Ghana and renowned leader of the Revolutionary Pan-African struggle, Kwame Nkrumah, and the leader of the Kenyan liberation struggle against British colonialism, Jomo Kenyatta.
In the book, DuBois tells the story of Nkrumah and the anti-colonial revolution in Ghana to oust the British. Nkrumah, after becoming Ghana’s leader, sought to industrialize Africa and called for the continent to become socialist and unite against colonialism, neocolonialism, and Western capitalism and imperialism. He was removed from power in a coup backed by the U.S. while visiting Vietnam.
DuBois also writes about Patrice Lumumba and tells of how the young brilliant man who was hungry for knowledge became the president of the Congo. Lumumba was killed in a coup that was backed by the U.S. and Belgium, largely because he wanted the resources of the Congo and Africa to be used for the development of the Congo and Africa and not Belgium, the U.S., or the West.
The World and Africa should not be forgotten by anyone fighting for truth, justice, and freedom in the world. It should be studied by all.
W.E.B. DuBois’ The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History is available from International Publishers.
| |
MALCOLM AND MANNING
Black History Month: Some Remembrances
Harry Targ
(A Rag Blog repost from July 18, 2011)
“And finally, I am deeply grateful to the real Malcolm X, the man behind the myth, who courageously challenged and transformed himself, seeking to achieve a vision of a world without racism. Without erasing his mistakes and contradictions, Malcolm embodies a definitive yardstick by which all other Americans who aspire to a mantle of leadership should be measured.” Manning Marable, Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention, 2011, 493).
Manning Marable: Scholar/Activist
Professor Manning Marable was a member of the Political Science and Sociology Departments at Purdue University during the 1986-87 academic year. His scholarship, activism, and ground-breaking books and articles inspired faculty and students even though his stay at our university was brief. His classic theoretical work, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, along with over 20 books and hundreds of articles, inspired social science scholarship on class, race, and gender.
His weekly essays, "Along the Color Line," were published in over 250 community newspapers and magazines for years. He once told me that writing for concerned citizens about public issues was the most rewarding work he ever did. He was a role model for all young, concerned and committed scholar/activists.
I just finished reading the powerful biography of Malcolm X authored by Manning Marable. My encounter with this book was as fixating and transforming as I remember my reading of Malcolm’s autobiography in the 1960s.
On Malcolm X in the Classroom
While I lack the deep sense of Malcolm X’s impact on African American politics and cultural identity that others have, I feel compelled to write something about this reading experience. (Bill Fletcher’s review and analysis of the Marable biography provides much expertise on the subject. “Manning Marable and the Malcolm X Biography Controversy: A Response to Critics," from The Black Commentator, July 7, 2011.)
During my first year at Purdue University in north central Indiana in 1968, I requested to teach a course called “Contemporary Political Problems.” Since I was on the cusp of becoming a political activist in belated response to the civil rights and antiwar movements, I thought I could use this course to have an extended conversation with students about where we needed to be going intellectually and politically.
My plan was to assign a series of books that reflected different left currents, politically and culturally, and get us all to reflect on their value for understanding 1968 America and what to do about it. We read Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey, Herbert Marcuse, the Port Huron and Weatherman statements, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
While my students and I embraced, endorsed, or rejected various of these authors, we were profoundly impacted by the power of Malcolm X’s personal biography and his transformations from the streets to the international arena. As the word got out about the course, and largely because of Malcolm X, sectors of the Purdue campus got the word that there was a new “radical” in the Political Science department. (Therefore, I owe my growing enrollments to Malcolm X).
More important, during the second semester in which I taught the course, I had a very quiet and respectful African American student in the class. He was a member of Purdue’s track team. One day, after he showed up at the local airport sporting a very thin, almost invisible, mustache the track coach ordered him off the plane. Why? Because he had unauthorized facial hair. His modest symbolic act, growing the mustache, and the universities response to his words and deed, set off extended protest activities by African American students in support of him over several weeks.
Shortly before this incident, we had spent a couple of weeks in class discussing Malcolm X’s autobiography. During one class period this very quiet person announced to the rest of us that we should consider ourselves lucky that he chose to participate in this class.
I saw him 40 years later for a fleeting moment. He remembered me and said that he had read Malcolm X’s autobiography for the first time in my class. The student’s emerging boldness and his articulated sense of pride must have had something to do with his reading of Malcolm X.
Manning Marable’s Biography of Malcolm X
Reflecting on the Marable biography, I was struck by the capacity of people to change their ways of thinking, their ideologies, and their practice. Marable attributes some of Malcolm X’s development to his conscious desire to reinvent himself and to do so as he told his life story to Alex Haley, his autobiographical collaborator.
Despite the world of racism, repression, and theological rigidity Malcolm encountered, Marable records how Malcolm X’s experience and practical political work were in fact transforming.
Different people gleaned different things from reading Malcolm X’s autobiography, and the same is true of a reading of Manning Marable’s stirring and frank biography. While those of us on the left were most inspired by the last two years of Malcolm X’s life, my student was probably impacted as much by Malcolm’s developing sense of pride and self-worth in a society that demeaned and ridiculed people of color
Reading Malcolm and Marable reminds us that, while we bring change through our organizational affiliations, each individual can have a role to play in achieving that change. Not all of us can be Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Dolores Huerta, or Mother Jones. But we can make a difference.
In addition, Manning Marable makes a particularly strong case for Malcolm X as an internationalist. The United Nations had adopted a Declaration on Human Rights in 1948 but human rights discourse was not part of the language of international relations until Malcolm X demanded the international community address the issue.
For Malcolm X, United States racism, while violating the civil rights of its Black and Brown citizens, was also violating the fundamental human rights of peoples at home and abroad. At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X was working to build a coalition of largely former colonial states to demand that each and every country, and particularly the United States, respect the human rights of all peoples. Multiple problems including racism, poverty, disease, hunger, political repression, and sexual abuse were problems at the root of twentieth century human circumstance AND the United States was a major violator of human rights.
Marable described in great detail Malcolm X’s frenetic travels through Africa and the Middle East to build a coalition of Black and Brown peoples to demand in the United Nations and every other political forum the establishment of human rights. Bombing Vietnamese people and killing Black children in Birmingham were part of the same problem.
And, this campaign was being launched at the very same time that the countries of the Global South were struggling to construct a non-aligned movement to retake the resources, wealth, and human dignity that had been stripped from peoples by colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism. This was the position that Dr. Martin Luther King came to in 1967, as articulated in his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York. Malcolm X was introducing this global human rights project in 1964.
Marable’s Malcolm X therefore transformed himself from a minor street hustler to a Black Muslim to a visible world leader advocating a global human rights agenda. This is the Malcolm X that has meant so much to us over the years, along with his insistence that Black and Brown people be accorded respect everywhere and that they should honor and respect themselves.
But, Marable carefully documents Malcolm X’s flaws as well as his strengths. He, at various times, was anti-Semitic, misogynistic, not unsympathetic to violence, and a man engaged in intense, sometimes petty, political struggles with his organizational colleagues.
Manning Marable humanizes Malcolm X. Humanizing our heroes makes our efforts to pass the messages and symbols of the past to newer generations of activists more convincing. Young people do not need to see progressive heroes as untainted by their own humanity. And when we present those who make a contribution to building a better world to new generations, the examples of their flaws make it clear that no one is beyond personal and political redemption.
Finally, the biographer, Manning Marable, as my statement at the outset suggests, was a profoundly important scholar/activist. Marable used his historical knowledge, social scientific analytical skills, and political values to craft a career of writing and activism that impacted his students, his academic colleagues, and his fellow socialists in the struggle for a better world.
Telling Malcolm X’s story was Marable’s way of advocating for fundamental social change in a deeply troubled world.
| |
Police detain more than 100 people protesting at Pa. Capitol Monday who want Pennsylvania to divest from Israeli bonds
By Zack Hoopes
Pennlive.com
More than 100 people protesting the war in Gaza were detained at the Pennsylvania Capitol on Monday.
The protestors were handcuffed with zip ties by Capitol police and state troopers and taken into custody of the Capitol police after refusing to leave the Rotunda, the main hall of the Capitol, police said.
Those who were detained were released after being held for less than an hour. They were issued citations by Capitol police for $40.
The protestors organized a rally outside the East Wing of the Capitol Monday morning to call on the state to divest millions held in Israeli government bonds.
They moved inside the Capitol around noon holding banners reading “30,000 Killed in Gaza,” “Fund PA Schools and “Fund PA Transit.” The protestors were led away to a holding area in the Capitol about 1:30 p.m. and released around 2:20 p.m.
Posted by Carl Davidson
| |
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
OPEN BORDERS: A PROGRESSIVE RESPONSE TO THE IMMIGRATION CRISIS
Harry Targ
Why Migration
People migrate from one place to another for a variety of reasons. A good part of that migration has to do with international relations, national economies, and the increasingly globalized economy. Literally millions of people have moved from one geographic space to another in the twenty-first century, in most cases for reasons of physical fear or economic need. Two prominent causes that “push” people to leave their communities and homeland relate to “hybrid wars” and neoliberal globalization.
Hybrid wars refer to the long-term policies of imperial powers to systematically undermine political regimes that pursue policies and goals that challenge their global hegemony. Over long periods of time imperial powers have used force, covert operations, supporting pliant local elites, and funneling money to disrupt local political processes. If targeted countries still reject outside interference the imperial power uses force to overthrow recalcitrant governments. In the 1980s all these tactics were used by the United States to crush revolutionary ferment in Central America. Of course, the US hybrid war strategy has been a staple of United States policy in the region ever since President Franklin Roosevelt declared the policy of “The Good Neighbor.”
Neoliberalism refers to the variety of policies that rich capitalist countries and international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization have imposed on debt-ridden poor countries. These policies require poor countries to cut back on public services, deregulate their economies, reduce tariffs that protect their own industries and agriculture, and in other ways insist that poor countries open their economies to foreign investment and trade penetration. The impacts of neoliberalism have been to impose austerity on largely marginalized populations. Their agriculture and industries have been undermined by subsidized agribusinesses from the Global North and global investors. Since the initiation of neoliberal policies in the 1970s gaps between rich and poor nations and rich and poor people within nations have grown all across the world, with a few exceptions such as China.
In sum, people everywhere have experienced the creation of repressive regimes and economic policies that have shifted vast majorities from modest survival to deep poverty. (Susan Jonas once wrote that the Guatemalan people lived more secure lives before the arrival of Spanish colonizers in the fifteenth century than ever since). The globalization of the economy, increased violence and repression within countries (largely involving United States interference), increasing income and wealth inequality and poverty, and the rise of repressive regimes everywhere, has led to massive emigration. Some estimates indicate that 37 million people left their home countries (some 45 countries) between 2010 and 2015 for humanitarian reasons.
One of the ironies of world history is that capital in the form of investments, trade, the purchase of natural resources, the globalization of production, and military interventions have been common and necessary features of capitalism since its emergence in the sixteenth century. But, paradoxically, and except for the global slave trade and selected periods of history, the movement of people has been illegal. (Sometimes branding migrants as “illegal” has been a device to cheapen their labor). The idea of national sovereignty has been used to justify categorizing some human migrants as “illegal.” If capital is and has been legal, the movement of people should be legal as well. It makes no sense, nor is it humane, to brand any human beings as “illegal.”
The Concept of Open Borders
This sketchy analysis of the “root causes” of emigration suggest the need to oppose imperialism, both in the form of hybrid wars and promotion of neoliberal economic policies. This traditional task of peace and anti-imperialist campaigns is ongoing and needs to continue. And the analyses of the deleterious effects of hybrid wars and neoliberalism should be linked to movements fighting against cruel and inhumane immigration policies in recipient countries, such as the United States. In addition, drawing on history, law, ethics, and a humane and socialist vision of the universality of humankind, progressives should expand on a conversation raised by some about the concept of “open borders.”
The idea of open borders has not been sufficiently discussed as the immigration crisis in the United States and Europe has unfolded. The core concept, with much room for discussion of implementation, suggests that, as a recently endorsed Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) calls for, there should be an “uninhibited transnational free movement of people….and a pathway to citizenship for all non-citizen residents.” The idea of open borders implies that no human being by virtue of her/his presence in any geographic space can be defined as “illegal” and that the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights apply to everyone, everywhere.
In a 2017 article Aisha Dodwell, Global Justice Now, wrote in defense of open borders (Aisha Dodwell, “7 Reasons Why We should Have Open Borders,” New Internationalist, November 29, 2017, https://newint.org/blog/2017/11/29/why-open-borders) . Among her arguments are the following:
-Borders are tools to separate the rich and powerful from the poor.
-Borders do not stop efforts to emigrate but exacerbate violence against already victimized people.
-Immigrants are erroneously blamed for declining employment and jobs when, in fact, it is the demonization of immigrants that divides workers from each other.
-Open borders would allow for emigres to return home when the brutal repressive and economic conditions that led them to flee were reduced.
-Open borders would lead to greater employment, increased earnings, rising demand for goods and services, and through income repatriation, more money sent back to families in countries the emigres fled. In short, open borders would be a stimulus for economic growth in both the country of origin and the host country of emigres.
-Open borders would mean the equalization of the rights of people to emigrate; thus avoiding the current policies that allow for immigration of certain populations (such as skilled workers) and not others.
-Historically, open borders have always existed for corporations, banks, the super-rich, tourists and other select populations who are beneficiaries of the global capitalist system.
Earlier Roque Planes, Latino Voices, (“16 Reasons Why Opening Our Borders Makes More Sense Than Militarizing Them,” Huffpost, September 2, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/open-borders_n_5737722?guccounter ) adds to the list of reasons justifying open borders. Planes quotes an immigration expert who has argued that, with glaring exceptions such as Asians, open borders existed until the 1920s. “‘Legally’ meant something very different then than it does now. At the time, the United States accepted practically everyone who showed up with few restrictions other than the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and a brief health examination. The foreign-born share of the population, 12.9 percent, is lower today than it was during the entire period from 1860 to 1920, according to data published by the Brookings institution.”
Planes posited arguments pertaining to open borders:
-Today capital and goods flow across borders but not always labor.
-Rich people have the privilege of open borders.
-the US immigration system is broken.
-Open borders within the European Union, while increasingly volatile politically, did not lead to the collapse of European economies.
-‘Illegal’ immigration is a direct resultant of US policies. Planes sites overthrowing governments, financing militaries in poor countries, promoting policies that destroy domestic agriculture in poor countries, and, he could have added, the war on drugs.
-Open borders increase the possibility of immigrants returning to their homelands.
-Immigrants, in the main, are not the cause of stagnant wages in the United States. Using anti-immigrant and racist policies divert attention from the primary causes of economic exploitation.
-The broken immigration system has provided huge profits for the prison/industrial complex and large budgets for law enforcement agencies.
As to the last point, Todd Miller, Empire of Borders: The Expansion if the U.S. Border Around the World, Verso Books, 2019, argues that United States policy is “pushing out the border,” such that allies tighten their own borders to serve the needs of expanding imperial control. In addition, by pressuring other countries to tighten their own border security, the U.S. is expanding its border security apparatus, to include new special forces and expansion of State Department and other agency activities. A reviewer of Miller’s book, (Cora Currier, Pushing out the Border: How the U.S. is Waging a Global War on Migration,” Portside, August 4, 2019, https://portside.org/2019-08-04/pushing-out-border-now-us-waging-global-war-migration) quotes Miller who writes that U.S. Customs and Border Protection “has trained new patrol and homeland security units for Kenyan, Tanzanian and Ugandan borders.”
The reviewer points out from Miller’s study that “…the U.S. Department of Homeland Security can be found assisting border projects in the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, India, Poland, Turkey, and Vietnam.” In addition the Border Patrol has offices in Mexico and Canada and a presence in Puerto Rico to oversee the Caribbean. Quoting Miller: “Hundreds of millions in U.S. funds have flowed to Central American borders to turn them into U.S.-style defensible zones.” And soldiers from around the world are flown to the U.S. southwest to gain experience in border control. Clearly, Miller is describing a growing military/corporate/immigration complex. The ideological glue justifying this massive enterprise are claims about national sovereignty and presumed racist threats that people fleeing repression and starvation represent.
What To Do?
Along with the panoply of proposals for immigration reform, campaigns to combat racism, and the movements to provide sanctuary to desperate migrant peoples, progressives need to look at the history/ theory/ and practice of anti-immigrant policies. A central conclusion that needs to be raised is to call and work for open borders as suggested by the DSA resolution on open borders.
In sum central elements of a truly radical and humane response to the immigration crisis in the United States and the world should include:
-Increased efforts to challenge imperialism everywhere in both its political/military dimensions and its intrusive neoliberal economic policies
-Rejection of the idea that people can be deemed “illegal.”
-Mobilizing around the concept of opening borders to people fleeing repression and economic deprivation, similar to the U.S immigration policies of the early part of the twentieth century.
-Using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a guide to law and practice all across the globe.
-Revitalizing programs of humanitarian assistance on a global basis including revisiting the possible value of instituting economic regulations of global capitalism that were once in the United Nations, referred to as “The New International Economic Order.”
-Work to dismantle the military/corporate/immigration complex.
While these larger demands will be difficult to achieve, working for them and articulating a vision of the world where human beings are not deemed illegal will add clarity to the reasons behind more modest demands for reform.
| |
|
New releases and initiatives from Hard Ball Press
http://www.hardballpress.com/index.html
Get ready for some great new books from Hard Ball & Little Heroes Press! We have a powerful historical novel, a history of radical activists, and a charming children's book about combating bullies. Plus, news about our work promoting preservation of indigenous languages. Read on...
In December, 1980, an officer with the longshoremen’s union in San
Francisco learned there was a shipment of military weapons on the
docks waiting to be loaded onto a ship bound for the fascist
government of El Salvador. Ronald Reagan had just been elected
president on a right wing, pro—fascist agenda. The El Salvador
government was murdering thousands of its citizens.
Herb Mills, an officer in that ILWU Local, proposed that the union
refuse to load the weapons -a direct violation of their union
contract that could lead to the officers going to jail and the
government taking over the union.
Could they stop the shipment and keep out of jail?
Out of his personal diary and historical union records, Mills
fashioned Presente, A Dockworker Story, a fictional account of that
campaign. The names have been changed, but the courage and the
daring of the union men and women have not.
Release date: March 7, 2024
_ _ _ _
Who really makes history?
Radical Connecticut: People’s History in the Constitution State
tells the stories of everyday people and well-known figures whose
work has often been obscured, denigrated, or dismissed. There are
narratives of movements, strikes, popular organizations and people
in Connecticut who changed the state and the country for the better.
Unlike a traditional history that focuses on the actions of
politicians, generals, business moguls and other elites, Radical
Connecticut is about workers, the poor, people of color, women,
artists and others who engaged in the never-ending struggle for
justice and freedom. It offers a fresh look at history that should
especially inspire young people engaged in social justice work in an
increasingly dangerous world.
Release date: March 15, 2024.
_ _ _ _
Children, did you know that you have real superpowers?
It’s true! Even if you are young, even if you are small, you and
your friends and schoolmates have the power to make the world a
better place.
Want to know how to release your powers? Read Little Meena and the
Big Swim/ La Pequeña Meena Y El Gran Nado and you will see that
when many little people all get together and speak in one voice, big
people have to listen. And change.
It is called Solidarity/ Solidaridad!
Release: June, 2024
_ _ _ _
Hard Ball Press is helping preserve indigenous languages through
partnering with the Maya Book Project. Little Heroes author Andy
Carter has released his wonderful children's book Margarito's Forest
in English-Mam and English-K'iche, the two most common indigenous
languages spoken by the Maya.
In Guatemala, the Ministry of Education, in partnership with the
Maya Book Project, is including the Spanish/K’iche and the
Spanish/Mam editions in their indigenous bilingual curriculum.
Children in schools across the country will be able to practice
their native language.
In addition, Little Heroes Press has released two new editions: Mam/
English and K’iche’/English. We published these versions for
children in North America to help Maya children (and parents!)
practice their indigenous language.
| |
 | |
OpEdNews Op Eds 9/8/2022 at 6:38 PM EDT H3'ed 9/8/22
By Steven Jonas
"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)
Homininae.svg. And by golly, somehow we ended up as the only one of the species-set that kills each other in great numbers, the cause of which is what this column speculates about.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Author Not Given) Details Source DMCA
Introduction (2022): I originally published this column back in 2014. It was inspired both by some theoretical work I had been doing on two subjects which were, in my mind at least, related. The first was the fact that Homo Sapiens is, among all of the myriad species on Earth, the only one that is for the most part dependent for its existence upon the following: the conversion of various resources that it encounters, animal, vegetable, and mineral, in the environment, into various kinds of foods, products, forms of shelter, basic means survival (e.g., finding and preserving pure water supply/figuring out how to dispose of wastes in such a way that they don't kill species-members), and so on and so forth. The processes of conversion become evermore complex as what we call "civilization" proceeds/develops apace. The second subject that I was exploring was the matter of how and why Homo Sapiens has developed into the only self-destructive-species-on-a-mass scale that life-on-Earth has ever known. I came to the conclusion that those two remarkable features of the species are intimately related. Which is what this column is about.
For me, the examination of both phenomena in some detail happens to have begun with a consideration of a movie from 2014 entitled "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" (for the reference see below). I am revisiting that column at this time for several reasons that might seem obvious, but are well worth stating and re-stating
.
1. Catastrophic consequences of human-caused climate change are no longer something "down the road if we don't do something." They range from, for example, from the massive floods in Pakistan that can in part be directly linked to the global-warming-related melting of glaciers way up in the Himalayas, to the excessive heat waves in countries ranging from Portugal to the West of the United States, to the collapse of a massive Antarctic glacier plus the melting of the Greenland ice cap which have the potential for raising sea levels to some significant very damaging degree.
2. One of the participants in the "Ukraine War" is a) threatening the possible use of "tactical nuclear weapons," and b) engaged in activities in and around a nuclear plant that could result in another "Chernobyl," or worse.
3. Authoritarian government of one form or another is threatening to become the norm in an increasing number of nations around the world. Its past history has always involved self-destruction-of-the-species to a greater or lesser extent.
And so, the revisit to the earlier column (with modest edits here and there), is presented from this point forward.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Intrigued with the 2014 movie the "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes," I reviewed it on these pages. In that review, I noted that among the levels on which the movie could be seen was as an essay in paleo-anthropology. In the movie, a group of great apes (collectively known as the "Simians") and a group of Homo sapiens that are survivors of a world-wide, highly fatal infectious disease epidemic which the humans conveniently name the "Simian flu" (even though its origin was of human manufacture, to be experimented with on apes.)
The Simian population leads a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, in a communal setting. One outstanding feature of that society is that while they have one acknowledged political leader, Caesar, no one appears to have either a) any control over the hunting-gathering processes, or b) any material advantages over anyone else. They also appear to not engage in intra-Simian violence, as a routine. When one episode of that sort does occur, an attack on Caesar, when the latter wins and condemns the perpetrator to death, before he does so Caesar pronounces the profound words: "You are not an ape."
The Homo sapiens population is, well, classically Homo sapien. (Note the irony of the name, which translated into English means "wise man.") They have guns aplenty and with few exceptions are ready to use them at a moment's notice. Violence, against other species and within their own, is both commonplace and for the most part fully accepted. But of course, as noted, they are members of one of the only species of animal on the planet that kills, indeed slaughters, each other in numbers that have grown ever larger in the geologically microscopically brief period of time that the species has existed in its so-called "civilized" mode of organization. (Anthropologists have given this very short segment of geological time the name "Anthropocene".)
Homo sapiens are devious, both with each other and with the Simians. Most importantly, unlike the Simians, the Homo sapiens cannot exist for very long without converting one or more elements that they find in their environment into one or more other goods and services. In the movie, forming the plot line it is the struggle of the Homo sapiens to physically get to an abandoned hydro-electric dam that lies to the north of where the Simians live so that they, the Homo sapiens, can have the electricity they need on an ongoing basis to power a variety of conversion processes. The Homo sapiens are about to run out of power as the fuel supply for the electrical generators they are currently using runs out.
So, what we see here is a fundamental conflict between an apparently economically egalitarian society of hunter-gatherers which, among other things rejects the use of use of intra-species (actually in this case intra-genus) violence, and the classic Homo sapiens society. An essential characteristic of that society (ours, of course) is that, as noted, in order to survive, uniquely among the species on Earth, conversion-of-resources is essential. Of course, those processes have become ever more complex over time.
In postulating what human-like life might be like on one or more of the numerous other planets in the vastness of the universe that could conceivably support life as we know it, Elsewhere I have discussed in some detail what has happened in the history of Homo sapiens concerning the essential "conversion-of-natural-elements-in-order-to-survive" process. Apparently from pretty close in time to the beginning of communities organized at any level, then societies, the ownership of the various means of production that converts elements found in the environment into those goods and services needed/used for individual and species survival has for the most part been in private hands.
The "means of production" in those days could include anything from the ownership of farm or grazing land, the ownership/manufacturing of weapons, the ownership of boats for fishing, in the beginning on inland lakes, or the ownership of the means by which raw meat/game, vegetables, and grains were made into food, and distributed. It is precisely that mode of ownership, and the means the owners have used over time to protect their ownership, that eventually leads to violence within and between societies, on a larger and larger scale.
In one way "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" can be seen as a parable of the apparent conflict that took place over many tens thousands of years between the species Homo sapiens and the one that we call "Neanderthal." (The word, by the way, refers to the valley, Thal, through which in Germany the Neander river, where the first Neanderthal remains were found, runs.) Apparently, the Neanderthals were hunter-gatherers, not resource-converters. There is no evidence, at least not yet, that they engaged in intra-species violence.
Neanderthals apparently did have larger brain cases than ourselves. Whether or not that indicates that they were more intelligent has been the subject of great debate. Whether or not Homo sapiens and Neanderthals fought each other, as species, with ours eventually eliminating theirs, presumably through violent means, is also the subject of debate, as is the matter of whether or not there was inter-species breeding. What are not subjects of debate is that we are here and they are not, and that we survive only through the means of conversion-of-resources, once again in modern terms known as the "means of production."
Indeed, since just about the earliest of times, human society has been characterized by intra-species violence. Confirming what I have said, "Live Science" has summarized it this way:
"Compared with most animals, we humans engage in a host of behaviors that are destructive to our own kind and to ourselves. We lie, cheat and steal, carve ornamentations into our own bodies, stress out and kill ourselves, and of course kill others."
That then raises the question of whether from just about the beginning of the appearance of our version of the genus Homo (and of course there were many others before us), is there possibly a gene or genes in Homo sapiens for intra-species violence on a mass scale that exists in no other species? (If they are to survive, all animal species need to have one or more violence genes directing activities at one or more other species.) Or is it simply a behavioral manifestation arising out of the necessity of conversion-of-resources-for-survival that would naturally arise as the means of production were arrogated into private hands.
Either way, behavioral or genetic (and it might have been a combination of both), it is most likely that it was the private ownership of the means of production that has, over time, selected for intra-species violence. This pattern may have started even before the organization of communities around agriculture: "Now, analyses of archaeological sites as well as ethnographies of traditional societies are etching a more complex picture, suggesting that some ancient hunter-gatherers may have accumulated wealth and political clout by taking control of concentrated patches of wild foods." In this view, it is the ownership of small, "resource-rich areas"--- and the ease of bestowing them on descendants"--- that fosters inequality, rather than agriculture itself."
And how better to preserve the private ownership of those early "means of production" than through intra-species violence, on the part of the owners and those non-owners who they engage to protect their ownership, against those who work for them and their interests. Certainly, in known historical times it hasn't been done through the use of reason.
Thus in summary, it would appear that it has been, since the earliest times of the organization into communities of the species Homo sapiens, the private ownership of those necessary-for-species-survival-means-of-conversion-then-production that has promoted, and indeed may have even selected for, the use of intra-species violence and the gene or genes that may underlie it. Furthermore, it is the perpetuation of the interests of certain owners of various means of production which have contributed so substantially to the immediate threat of global warming and its catastrophic consequences fro species Homo sapiens and myriad others. Combine this with the fact that Homo Sapiens has developed ever more violent and massive means of intra-species destruction, the future does not look too healthy, does it. At least as long as the ownership of the means of production necessary to species survival remains in private hands, that is.
| |
|
Your copy should address 3 key questions: Who am I writing for (audience)? Why should they care (benefit)? What do I want them to do (call-to-action)?
Create a great offer by adding words like "free," "personalized," "complimentary," or "customized." A sense of urgency often helps readers take action, so consider inserting phrases like "for a limited time only" or "only 7 remaining!"
|  | |
Saturday Morning Coffee!
A Zoom conversation with Carl Davidson and comrades from the Online University of the Left...and other places as well.
It will be more of a hangout than a formal setting. We can review the news in the previous days' LeftLinks or add a new topic. We can invite guests or carry on with those who show up. We'll try to have a progressive stack keeper should we need one.
Most of all, we will try to be interesting and a good sounding board. If you have a point you would like to make or a guest to invite, send an email to Carl Davidson, [email protected]
Continuing weekly, 10:30 to Noon, EDT.
The Zoom link will also be available on our Facebook Page.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86897065843
Meeting ID: 868 9706 5843
| |
|
The Man Who Changed Colors
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
When a dockworker falls to his death under strange circumstances, investigative journalist David Gomes is on the case. His dogged pursuit of the truth puts his life in danger and upends the scrappy Cape Cod newspaper he works for.
Spend a season on the Cape with this gripping, provocative tale that delves into the
complicated relationships between Cape Verdean Americans and African Americans, Portuguese fascist gangs, and abusive shipyard working conditions. From the author of The Man Who Fell From The Sky.
“Bill Fletcher is a truth seeker and a truth teller – even when he’s writing fiction. Not unlike Bill, his character David Gomes is willing to put his life and career in peril to expose the truth. A thrilling read!” − Tavis Smiley, Broadcaster & NY TIMES Bestselling Author
Review by John Bachtell
Click HERE to purchase
| |  |
|
From Upton Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University
Essays on the Ongoing Transformation of Higher Education
By Daniel Morris
and Harry Targ
Paperback USD 17.00
This is a unique collection of 15 essays by two Purdue University professors who use their institution as a case-in-point study of the changing nature of the American 'multiversity.' They take a book from an earlier time, Upton Sinclair's 'The Goose-Step A Study of American Education' from 1923, which exposed the capitalist corruption of the ivory tower back then and brought it up to date with more far-reaching changes today. time. They also include, as an appendix, a 1967 essay by SDS leader Carl Davidson, who broke some of the original ground on the subject.
Click HERE to Purchase
| | |
From the CCDS Socialist Education Project... | |
A China Reader
Edited by Duncan McFarland
A project of the CCDS Socialist Education Project and Online University of the Left
244 pages, $20 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
The book is a selection of essays offering keen insight into the nature of China and its social system, its internal debates, and its history. It includes several articles on the US and China and the growing efforts of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.
| | |
|
Taking Down White Supremacy
A Reader on Multiracial and Multinational Unity
Edited by the CCDS
Socialist Education Project
166 pages, $12.50 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/changemaker
This collection of 20 essays brings together a variety of articles-theoretical, historical, and experiential-that address multi-racial, multi-national unity. The book provides examples theoretically and historically, of efforts to build multi-racial unity in the twentieth century.
Click here for the Table of contents
| | |
CHANGEMAKER PUBLICATIONS: Recent works on new paths to socialism and the solidarity economy
Remember Us for Gift Giving and Study Groups
We are a small publisher of books with big ideas. We specialize in works that show us how a better world is possible and needed. Click Gramsci below for our list.
| |
522 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-6637
| | | | | |
