Concerned Families of Westchester
December 31, 2017
Hello All – As 2017 comes to a close, CFOW rolls on, now in our 17th year. None of the years since 9/11 has been easy for peace and justice stalwarts, but the span covering Trump's election and his first year in office takes the cake for badness. Beyond the emergence of a dictatorship of the Very Wealthy and the destruction of, or the threat of destruction to, the basic welfare elements of a modern society, the sheer stupidity and nonsense of our political elite has produced many dark moments, speaking at least for myself. And must I mention the half-dozen (nay, more!) wars now underway, with the threats of serious conflict with Russia, North Korea, and Iran looming at the back of the stage. And how lonely CFOW stalwarts have felt this year, when so little of the anti-Trump "Resistance" focused on war and the threat of war!
It is against this background that, for me at least, the existence and perseverance of Concerned Families of Westchester has been like a candle in a dark room. In working together – talking, planning, deciding, and (especially) acting – our few dozen "stalwarts" have established a community of friends and fellow-passengers that makes this strange trip called America more bearable. For 2018, I hope that we can maintain the solidarity, community, and fighting spirit that is so important at this moment. Good luck to us all.
News Notes
This is the third year in a row that police officers in the United States have killed more than 1,000 people. And for the third time, Josh Begley of the Intercept has compiled a short video that shows the location of each of the (in 2017) 1,100 plus killings. This link explains the project and lets you see the video. What is striking to me is that the great majority of locations are rural or suburban, not "inner-city urban" in appearance. Check it out.
Erica Garner, the daughter of the murdered (by police) Eric Garner ("I can't breathe"), died Saturday at the age of 27. Democracy Now! has put together a video segment on Erica's work as an anti-police brutality activist, which you can see here.
In Factis Pax, the on-line journal of peace-making and peace education, has a new issue out. Of particular interest, imo, is the lead article by Boaventura de Sousa Santo (frequently linked in the CFOW newsletter) on "Colombia Between Neoliberal Peace and Democratic Peace."
It will come as no surprise that, according to Bloomberg's Billionaire Index, the richest people in the world got a trillion dollars richer in 2017. On December 26th the 500 billionaires surveyed controlled assets valued at $5.3 trillion, up from $4.4 trillion a year ago.
Nikki Haley, Trump's UN Ambassador, was (we think) the victim of a prank phone call and spent 22 minutes talking to someone she thought was the Polish Prime Minister. The high point of the call was her deft handling of the question of the US stance on the imaginary country of "Binomo," supposedly under threat from Russia. She pretended to have the situation under close scrutiny.
The environmental terrorists running Exxon, Shell, etc. foresee investing $180 billion in plastics over the next decade. A study released by the Center for International Environmental Law points out that this will
"permanently" pollute our oceans. Can't we do something about such terrorism besides wring our hands? Where are OUR drones? (Of course, that would be wrong.)
One of the visitors to our Holiday Party yesterday was Ken Gale, who runs an environmental program ("Eco-Logic") on WBAI on Tuesday evenings from 8 to 9 p.m. Check it out, and learn more at www.ecoradio.org
2017 in the rearview mirror
There is no stopping the tsunami of lists of good/bad/funny things that happened during 2017. Here is a highly selective list of some of these lists.
"10 Good Things About a TERRIBLE Year" by Medea Benjamin of Code Pink. [Link].
"2017 in Photos: Capturing the Causes and Impacts of Climate Change." From DeSmogBlog [Link].
"What were the top BDS victories of 2017?" from the Electronic Intifada [Link].
"Ten High School Protests That Defied the Trump Agenda in 2017," from Truth Out [Link].
"Top Stories Of 2017 In The Hudson Valley," from The Patch [Link].
This Newsletter
Articles linked in the CFOW newsletter are intended to illuminate some of the main action-issues about which we are concerned. Coming mostly from the "dissenting media," they provide an alternative to the perspectives of the mainstream media. In addition to the excellent "Featured Essays," I hope you will be able to read some of the articles on the unfolding situation in Iran; Marjorie Cohn's explanation of what's old and what's new in Trump's first National Security Strategy document; old friend Brian Tokar's interesting article about Murray Bookchin and the development of "social ecology"; a good set of articles about what's been happening with immigration during Trump's first year; and four (!) excellent articles about "Our History."
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
Thursday, January 4th - The CFOW Facebook page is often adorned with the pictures of Erik R. McGregor, whom we got to know during the fight against the Spectra pipeline, and who seems to be everywhere that there is a protest or demonstration. He will be presenting and discussing his work on at the Municipal Archives, 31 Chambers St. in NYC, from 6 to 8 p.m. For more information, go here.
Sunday, January 7th – The next meeting of Concerned Families of Westchester – and the first of 2018! What will we do about that tyrant Trump and all the wars and other bad things that are left over from 2017? Show up at 7 p.m. at 12 Elm St. (the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society) in Dobbs next Sunday and we will get the New Year off to an energetic start! Everyone is welcome at these meetings.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Our leaflet and posters for our rallies are usually about war or climate change, but issues such as racial justice or Trump's tax cut legislation are often targeted, depending on current events. We meet on the first Sunday of each month, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. If you would like to make a financial contribution to our work, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
Among the guests at Saturday's CFOW holiday party was a contingent of "Raging Grannies." They brought along a fabulous sheet of holiday songs, skillfully crafting subversive lyrics to the tunes of traditional Christmas fare. There are many "gaggles" [chapters] of Raging Grannies across the world; check out the home page of our party visitors here. This snippet of video/singing is all that we have so far of Saturday's songfest, but this video from last year includes the late Lillian Pollak (then 101 years old) and our own Maria Harris (off to the right). Enjoy!
Best Wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Remaining Peaceful Was Their Choice
By Kathy Kelly, Waging Nonviolence [December 31, 2017]
---- People living now in Yemen's third largest city, Ta'iz, have endured unimaginable circumstances for the past three years. Civilians fear to go outside lest they be shot by a sniper or step on a land mine. Both sides of a worsening civil war use Howitzers, Kaytushas, mortars and other missiles to shell the city. Residents say no neighborhood is safer than another, and human rights groups report appalling violations, including torture of captives. Two days ago, a Saudi-led coalition bomber killed 54 people in a crowded market place. Before the civil war developed, the city was regarded as the official cultural capital of Yemen, a place where authors and academics, artists and poets chose to live. Ta'iz was home to a vibrant, creative youth movement during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. Young men and women organized massive demonstrations to protest the enrichment of entrenched elites as ordinary people struggled to survive. The young people were exposing the roots of one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world today. They were sounding an alarm about the receding water tables which made wells ever harder to dig and were crippling the agricultural economy. They were similarly distressed over unemployment. When starving farmers and shepherds moved to cities, the young people could see how the increased population would overstress already inadequate systems for sewage, sanitation and health care delivery. They protested their government's cancellation of fuel subsidies and the skyrocketing prices which resulted. They clamored for a refocus on policy away from wealthy elites and toward creation of jobs for high school and university graduates. Despite their misery, they steadfastly opted for unarmed, nonviolent struggle. [Read More]
---- People living now in Yemen's third largest city, Ta'iz, have endured unimaginable circumstances for the past three years. Civilians fear to go outside lest they be shot by a sniper or step on a land mine. Both sides of a worsening civil war use Howitzers, Kaytushas, mortars and other missiles to shell the city. Residents say no neighborhood is safer than another, and human rights groups report appalling violations, including torture of captives. Two days ago, a Saudi-led coalition bomber killed 54 people in a crowded market place. Before the civil war developed, the city was regarded as the official cultural capital of Yemen, a place where authors and academics, artists and poets chose to live. Ta'iz was home to a vibrant, creative youth movement during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. Young men and women organized massive demonstrations to protest the enrichment of entrenched elites as ordinary people struggled to survive. The young people were exposing the roots of one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world today. They were sounding an alarm about the receding water tables which made wells ever harder to dig and were crippling the agricultural economy. They were similarly distressed over unemployment. When starving farmers and shepherds moved to cities, the young people could see how the increased population would overstress already inadequate systems for sewage, sanitation and health care delivery. They protested their government's cancellation of fuel subsidies and the skyrocketing prices which resulted. They clamored for a refocus on policy away from wealthy elites and toward creation of jobs for high school and university graduates. Despite their misery, they steadfastly opted for unarmed, nonviolent struggle. [Read More]
What We Don't Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking
By Jackson Lears, London Review of Books [January 2018]
---- American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership's failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders's challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump's triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington. Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress. Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton's defeat. Then everything changed. A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton's chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s. [Read More]. For more on the negative consequences of "Russia-gate," read James Carden, "Russiagate Is Devolving Into an Effort to Stigmatize Dissent,"' The Nation [December 28, 2017] [Link].
"Star Wars: The Last Jedi" Takes a Side in the Class War
By Kate Aronoff, The Intercept [
---- What "The Last Jedi" advises is a radical break from resistance as we know it: abandoning old tactics and loyalties and handing the keys — or at least more of them — over to the grassroots: the mechanics, the child laborers, the Ewoks, and the rebel foot-soldiers. The resistance of the "Star Wars" films has never been particularly visionary, operating as a kind of top-down, underground rebellion looking to reconstitute the New Republic of the prequels. Its biggest heroes have been messiah figures, princesses, and the so-called great men. The biggest heroes of "The Last Jedi," by contrast, are the proletariat — working stiffs who've gotten the short shrift throughout the franchise. They're also mostly women, and many are people of color — not unlike the makeup of the American working-class. [Read More]
What's Happening in Iran?
Misreading Qazvin in Washington: On the Protests in Iran
----- Iran has featured protests throughout several provincial cities (e.g., Mashhad, Kermanshah, Rasht, and Isfahan) since they first started on Thursday 28 December 2017. Some reports indicate that conservative opponents of the Rouhani government in the north-eastern city of Mashhad initiated the protests. However, they have since spread and escaped their oversight. In the early stages, protestors' demands largely revolved around spiraling prices of basic foodstuffs and bore the classic signs of frustration with the country's ongoing economic torpor. Today, they reached Tehran and have been taken up in limited numbers by students around the university. As of yet, it is not clear whether we can speak of one protest movement or several protest movements, as there are different (and sometimes conflicting) grievances and solutions being articulated. [Read More]
Iran Protests: Civil Rights Movement Or Revolution?
By Reza Marashi [National Iranian American Council] [December 31, 2017]
---- Revolution or civil rights movement? That's the question I've been asked repeatedly as the latest round of protests in Iran commenced. But it's not the first time I've tried to explain what even many inside Iran had trouble explaining. In 2009, I served in the Office of Iranian Affairs at the State Department and was one of a small handful of people who covered the post-election protests from start to finish. Days in, we were asked to clarify how things would end – an impossible question to answer. However, after taking a step back and examining the situation dispassionately, we gave our superiors an assessment that proved correct. Broadly conceived, the core elements of our advice eight years ago remain true today. A few key points illustrate why. [Read More]
For more on this confusing/developing story – Juan Cole, "Did the US cause Iran's Economic Protests & will Trump Take Advantage?" [Informed Comment] and "Top 5 Signs Trump doesn't Actually Care about Iranian Protesters" [Informed Comment]; "Iranian Officials Struggle to Halt Growing Demonstrations," Antiwar.com; James Dorsey, "Spinning the Iranian protests" [LobeLog]; and from the New York Times today, "Rouhani Urges Calm in Iran as Protests Continue" [Link].
WAR & PEACE
Trump's "America First" Security Strategy Imperils the US
December 29, 2017]
---- Last week, with great fanfare, Donald Trump rolled out his new National Security Strategy (NSS). Its guiding theme is "America First." An analysis of the 55-page document, however, reveals a program that renders the United States more unpopular and vulnerable to external threats. Trump's plan takes Barack Obama's policy of "American exceptionalism" to a new level. In his speech accompanying the NSS's release, Trump stated, "America has been among the greatest forces for peace and justice in the history of the world." Yet Trump has not only continued but also escalated the Bush-Obama wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, dropped Tomahawk missiles on Syria, threatened North Korea and Iran, intensified airstrikes against Muslim countries, and fanned the flames of conflict in the Middle East. Trump's NSS stresses military might but makes scant reference to diplomacy. His administration is building 10 new aircraft carriers worth $13 billion each as a counterweight to China, and expanding the US nuclear weapons program to the tune of $1 trillion over the next 30 years. [Read More]
Trump National Security Strategy Could 'Create More Pathways to Nuclear War,' Critics Warn
By
---- Viewed by critics as further evidence that President Donald Trump is "obsessed with nuclear weapons and creating the conditions for nuclear war," the White House's newly unveiled National Security Strategy (NSS) lionizes America's nukes as the "foundation" of its security policy and suggests they could be deployed even in the case of non-nuclear threats. "Nuclear weapons have served a vital purpose in America's National Security Strategy for the past 70 years," states Trump's NSS document made public on Monday. "While nuclear deterrence strategies cannot prevent all conflict, they are essential to prevent nuclear attack, non-nuclear strategic attacks, and large-scale conventional aggression." … Trump's NSS was released as tensions between the U.S. and North Korea continue to soar. As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, the U.S. flew a B-1B supersonic bomber over the Korean Peninsula as part of war exercises that North Korea denounced as a simulation of "all-out war." Given Trump's expressed affinity for America's nuclear arsenal, it is not entirely surprising that his administration's security strategy would place it at the center of attention. [Read More]
Also important in decoding the Trump Military Agenda – "Trump's National Security Strategy and the Middle East: A Bridge to Nowhere" LobeLog; "Trump Touts New Security Strategy as Congress Warns of Costs," Military.com; "Trump to Drop Climate Change as National Security Threat" EcoWatch; and "US could broaden its use of nuclear weapons, Trump administration signals" [The Guardian [UK]. You can read Trump's "remarks" on the NSS here; the White House briefing/spinning here; and the entire 68-page unclassified version of the NSS here.
For Children All Over The World, 2017 Was Defined by War
By Vijay Prashad, AlterNet [December 27, 2017]
---- It is now normal to have armies enter a country and bomb it viciously or to enter into towns and villages to execute those suspected of being the enemy. All this is now normal. It is everyday life in Afghanistan. In the midst of such normality are children, many of whom not only grow up with the ferocious sound of bombs going off, but also see death before them when their lives have not yet begun. Entire generations in Afghanistan have come to this world surrounded by death, just as a generation in Iraq, in Syria and in Libya, in the broken parts of the Great Lakes region of Africa and in the wounded areas of Myanmar know too much of the sounds of gunfire and the images of death. Children are often in the crossfires of astoundingly loud days and nights. Their trauma is evident in the drawings done by children in refugee camps. Flashes of light and explosion are drawn at a very large scale. The impossibility of representing the noise is clear to the young artists. But it is what is so central to their ordeal. [Read More]
(Video) How Did Bombs Made in Italy Kill a Family In Yemen?
December 29, 2017] – 7 minutes
---- We followed shipments of bombs from a holiday island in Italy to Saudi Arabia, then found those bombs at the scene of civilian deaths in Yemen. Is Italy capitalizing on a brutal conflict or just doing business? [See this powerful video]
GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHAOS
Social Ecology: Communalism against Climate Chaos
By Brian Tokar, Roar Magazine #7 [December 2017]
---- Since the 1960s, the theory and praxis of social ecology have helped guide efforts to articulate a radical, counter-systemic ecological outlook with a goal of transforming society's relationship to non-human nature. For many decades, social ecologists have articulated a fundamental ecological critique of capitalism and the state, and proposed an alternative vision of empowered human communities organized confederally in pursuit of a more harmonious relationship to the wider natural world. … The philosophical vision of social ecology was first articulated by Murray Bookchin between the early 1960s and the early 2000s, and has since been further elaborated by his colleagues and many others. It is a unique synthesis of social, historical and anthropological investigation, dialectical philosophy and political strategy. Social ecology can be viewed as an unfolding of several distinct layers of understanding and insight, spanning all of these dimensions and more. It begins with an appreciation of the fact that environmental problems are fundamentally social and political in nature, and are rooted in the historical legacies of domination and social hierarchy. [Read More] NB the latest issue of "Roar Magazine," from which this essay is excerpted, is focused on "System Change," with many interesting-looking articles.
CIVIL LIBERTIES/"THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR"
Intelligence Community Says US Had Better Reauthorize Surveillance… Or Else
By Caitlin Johnstone, [December 23, 2017]
---- In a new joint statement by the Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, FBI Director Christopher Wray, NSA Director Michael Rogers, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the US intelligence community warns that should congress fail to reauthorize Section 702, something very, very bad may happen to America. … Going by what we ordinary people can actually put our eyes on, surveillance is not even really about fighting terrorism at all; it's about having access to as much information as possible which can be used for geopolitical manipulation and leverage for America's unelected power establishment. And yet these intelligence agencies, which appear to spend far less energy fighting terrorism than they pretend to, are warning of terrorist attacks should the American people's elected representatives fail to grant them the reauthorization they demand. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
This Is What Pseudo-Democracy Looks Like
By Norman Soloman, Truth Dig [December 28, 2017]
---- Oligarchy prevents democracy. That explains the gist of why the United States became more undemocratic in 2017. With vast income inequality and corporate power, this country's oligarchy keeps consolidating itself—largely hidden in plain sight—normalized and embossed on the wallpaper of mass-media echo chambers. Several decades of ominous trend lines have brought us to dire tipping points. "In the American republic, the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and our news keeps that knowledge from us," historian Walter Karp wrote. … Nearly 30 years later, the power of billionaires, huge banks and Wall Street over U.S. politics is far more dominant, while a propaganda fog diverts attention from their antidemocratic leverage. An array of news media (including big "public" outlets like NPR) and corporate politicians, unwilling to acknowledge let alone challenge the reality of an oligarchy in the United States, love to point accusatory fingers elsewhere. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/pseudo-democracy-looks-like/ [Read More] [FB – I only learned today about a national network focused on changing the Democratic Party for the better. I know nothing about the Justice Democrats except that their website looks interesting.]
RoseAnn DeMoro and the Nurses Union Chief Might Save Our Health Care.
By Wes Enzinna, Mother Jones [January/February 2018] (h/t P&IA)
---- As Trump tries to sabotage Obamacare, DeMoro is leading the counteroffensive in California, pushing single-payer health care in a campaign she hopes will offer a blueprint for how progressives can defeat the GOP. The battle also pits DeMoro against Democratic leaders who fear the proposed program could trigger a ferocious response from Trump and possibly bust the state budget. But all sides realize it's a test case that could determine the future of universal health care in America. … In this modern era of polished union bosses, DeMoro, 69, retains an old-school flair, with a classic Norma Rae hairstyle and a disposition more Jimmy Hoffa than Sheryl Sandberg, more "in your face" than "lean in." [Read More]
Any Shame Around Poverty Lies With the Society That Perpetuates It, Not the Poor
[An interview with Rev. Emily McNeill of the new "Poor People's Campaign:]
By Sarah Jaffe, Truth Out [December 25, 2017]
Sarah Jaffe: The national Poor People's Campaign launch was December 4. Tell us about what is going on and why now.
Rev. Emily McNeill: It is a really, really exciting development. There are a couple of reasons why it is happening now. The most important is that we are at a crisis point in a lot of ways in our country -- certainly in New York State, as well -- in terms of how a large portion of our population is being impacted by poverty, by racism and other forms of discrimination, by militarism and an economy that revolves around war in a lot of ways, and also, ecological devastation. We are really seeing a point at which if we don't really mobilize and organize in a new way that builds power in a new way and connects people in a new way ... we are in trouble. … A lot of the things that Dr. King and his colleagues were talking about then were, in many cases, even worse today. The vision that they had and the strategy and analysis that they had really resonates [Read More] To learn about/recall Dr. King's project for a "Poor People's Campaign in 1967-68,' unfinished because he was murdered, go here.
Puerto Rico Relief Package Demands More Than Half Measures
By Matt Nelson, Truthout [December 28, ,2017]
---- The damage to homes, lives and communities from Hurricane Maria continues to mount in Puerto Rico months later. About one-third of approximately 425,000 Puerto Rican homeowners are behind on mortgage payments, tens of thousands of whom haven't made payments in months. Some economists predict that if the current indicators hold, the entire island is destined for a fate similar to Detroit's. … When the situation is so dire it transcends partisanship, we have an opportunity to pass a relief package that not only addresses the immediate tragic state of Puerto Rico, but also sets its people up for success well into the future. Puerto Rico doesn't just need its electricity and safe drinking water restored; it needs permanent policy that provides much-needed economic relief and allows it to reinvest in infrastructure that allows its residents to weather the next inevitable hurricane while avoiding more catastrophe. [Read More] Also useful is "If only they Were Houston: 45% Puerto Ricans still lack Power," from TeleSur [December 30, 2017] [Link].
The Trump Agenda and Immigration Chaos
One Year of Immigration Under Trump
By Maryam Saleh, The Intercept [
---- Donald Trump made his formal entry into politics with the racism and xenophobia that would become a hallmark of his lightning-rod candidacy and, ultimately, his first year in the Oval Office. "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best," he said in his presidential announcement speech. "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." "It's coming from more than Mexico," Trump continued. "It's coming from all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably — probably — from the Middle East." Fast forward 2 1/2 years. Trump is wrapping up his first calendar year as president, and he's failed to make policy progress on many of his campaign promises. But when it comes to immigration, the president has proven to be much more than just a big talker. In his first year, he's significantly uprooted immigration policy, tearing apart the families of longtime residents and erecting significant barriers in the face of would-be immigrants to the United States. [Read More]. Also useful/important is Julianne Hing, "Why Numbers Alone Obscure the Real Deportation Story," The Nation [December 28, 2017] [Link].
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
Parallel Worlds: Gaza and Israel
---- What is there about a tiny enclave known as Gaza that so offends, so alarms, so intimidates Israel? It would be far too easy to say nothing and simply reduce it to Tel Aviv's voracious chase of its off-shore gas reserves or its potential as a Mediterranean tourist coastline …once cleansed of its native population and the destruction which bears the marked Star of David. No. Gaza terrorizes Israel not by force of arms but through the endless resound of its resilience and the muscle of its inspiration. To millions of Palestinians under siege in Palestine, or those forcibly exiled by a Diaspora now 70 years of age, and to its chorus of supporters worldwide, Gaza stands as a shining beacon of resistance and hope. Yet, to romanticize Gaza is to lend excuse to Israel and no such apologia will be offered here. 50 miles from the destruction that is Gaza sits Tel Aviv… as so much a marker of grotesque Israeli indifference. … But an hour's drive, yet worlds away, sits Gaza; home to two million Palestinians. Once known, in polite social circles, as the earth's largest open air prison, it long ago moved on from jail to Israeli administered death camp. Whether by embargo or bombs, it is simply impossible to watch the life and death of the coastal enclave without seeing Israel's criminal plan unfold. [Read More]
Will 2018 Usher in a New Palestinian Strategy?
By Ramzy Baroud, ZNet [December 27, 2017]
---- 2017 will be remembered as the year that the so-called 'peace process', at least in its American formulation, has ended. And with its demise, a political framework that has served as the foundation for US foreign policy in the Middle East has also collapsed. The Palestinian leadership and its Arab and international allies will now embark on a new year with the difficult task of drumming up a whole new political formula that does not include the United States. The Palestinian Authority entered 2017 with the slight hope that the US was in the process of moving away, however slightly, from its hardline pro-Israel attitude. This hope was the result of a decision made by the Barack Obama Administration in December 2016 not to veto United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 that declared the status of illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories null and void. But the new Donald Trump Administration suffocated all optimism as soon as it took over the White House, with a promise to relocate the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thus recognizing, in defiance of international law, the Holy City as Israel's capital. [Read More]
Nabi Saleh is where I lost my Zionism
By Lisa Goldman, +972 Magazine [Israel] [December 24, 2017]
---- By the time I began going to Nabi Saleh, I had spent about four years reporting on what I saw in the West Bank and Gaza, watching detachedly as my politics moved ever leftward. What I witnessed in that small West Bank village was the last straw. Throughout the many months I attended Friday demonstrations in Nabi Saleh, I never saw a single reporter from an Israeli media outlet. And yet, during the drive home after those long and distressing days, the news presenter on Israel Radio would report that there had been "riots" in a West Bank village and that "our forces" responded with crowd control measures. The Tamimi family has been demonstrating every Friday for about a decade, protesting the takeover of Nabi Saleh's natural water spring by nearby settlers. As Bassem Tamimi once explained to me, in quite fluent Hebrew, the villagers said nothing when the army built the settlement of Halamish (originally Neve Tzuf) on their land. But when the settlers confiscated their spring, and the army then prevented the Tamimis from accessing it, Bassem and his extended family decided to draw a red line. [Read More]
"To see a world in a grain of sand" [Wm. Blake] – So much about the Tamimi family and its experience under Israeli occupation captures – for me – the entire Zionist project. For more on this chapter of history, read Ben Ehrenreich, "Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start?" [Link]; and "Israel Extends 16-year-old Palestinian Girl's Detention Because She Could 'Pose a Danger,'" Haaretz [Israel] [Link]. And check out this marvelous video with Ahmed Tahimi, "Living Resistance Tour"; more than 400,000 people have seen it. (h/t FG)
OUR HISTORY
Mary McCarthy's Unsparing Honesty.
By Maggie Doherty, The Nation [December 28, 2017]
---- "The Fact in Fiction" [essay] offers the best of Mary McCarthy: her considered criticism of writers, her careful taxonomies, her bold and withering condemnations, and her impeccable, almost fastidious sentences. These were the qualities that made her one of the most respected—and feared—critics of her generation. They also reveal what she valued in fiction, both in what she read and what she wrote. Verisimilitude was paramount. Depicting a social world was more valuable than rendering a subjective consciousness, unless that consciousness was itself given to observations about the social world. A novelist could entertain, she could illuminate, but she must never swerve from the world as it is experienced. "Factuality," her word for a precise and honest accounting of the observable world, was both McCarthy's literary standard and her lodestar. … But this emphasis on accuracy was more than just a literary aesthetic; it was a moral and political position, a principle to live by. McCarthy was allergic to groupthink in all its forms, as skeptical of the small political sects of the 1930s as she was of mass culture in the 1950s. She participated briefly in Communist Party activities and was on the left her entire life, but she never surrendered her independent mind in the name of solidarity. [Read More]
'Wormwood' Is an LSD-Soaked True Crime Masterpiece [Errol Morris]
By Matthew Gault, Vice [December 28, 2017]
---- America loves watching true crime documentaries. There are several television channels dedicated to the subject, dozens of podcasts, and hundreds of movies. Most of them tell the story of a violent crime, then unravel its mysteries. There are variations on the theme—authorities catch a killer or don't, the wrong person is accused, or the bad guy gets away—but they all follow a similar pattern. Then there's the work of director Errol Morris. He wants the audience to understand not just the crime, but the way the crime affected everyone around it, and what the story people tell about the crime says about them. Wormwood is his new documentary miniseries on Netflix that—on its surface—it's about LSD, the CIA, and the clandestine MKUltra project. From the early 1950s until 1973, the CIA and the Pentagon used torture, hypnosis, and drugs such as LSD to attempt to control the human mind. It didn't work, and the project killed Frank Olson. … It's Morris' focus on Eric's obsession with truth rather than the procedural details of a true crime documentary that makes Wormwood transcend the genre. It revisits themes from his 1988 masterpiece The Thin Blue Line in that both films use a real death and elaborate reenactments not only to reconstruct disputed versions of the past, but to examine the slippery methods with which truth itself is constructed. [Read More]
The Amazing Benjamin Lay: Friend of Animals, Enemy of Slavers
---- Marcus Rediker's The Fearless Benjamin Lay: the Quaker Dwarf who became the first revolutionary abolitionist was published by Beacon Press and is the latest in a series of books the historian has written about slavery. Rediker is to be hailed for rescuing Lay from obscurity. This was a freedom-fighter who lived a life that was strikingly in the spirit of contemporary radicalism even though he was born 335 years ago. Not only was he against slavery, he was also against cruelty to animals. A strict vegan, he shunned ostentation in keeping with his Quaker faith even as the bourgeois members of the faith were indistinguishable from other Protestant elites. Constantly being expelled from one Quaker congregation after another, he refused to keep his mouth shut about slavery. He saw his mission as one of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable—to paraphrase how Finley Peter Dunne described the role of newspapers. Finally, anticipating the kind of guerilla theater Abbie Hoffman pulled off when he threw dollar bills into the trading floor of the NY Stock Exchange, Lay often adopted tactics that relied more on the daring deed than the spoken word. [Read More]
Bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail
By Merrill A. McPeak, New York Times [December 26, 2017]
---- Starting in the late 1950s, North Vietnam appropriated a piece of Laotian real estate the size of Massachusetts and constructed an infrastructure that in many ways mirrored ours: hundreds of miles of road, communications centers, ammo dumps, stockpiles of food and fuel, truck parks, troop bivouacs. The North Vietnamese did this in a much more difficult environment: a sparsely populated region of rugged mountains, triple-canopy jungle and dense primeval rain forest. It was one of history's great achievements in military engineering, and all of it hidden from sight except for the trace of the road itself. … We dropped two million tons of bombs on Laos — something like our total tonnage during all of World War II in both the European and Pacific theaters. We seeded clouds to induce flooding, sprayed Agent Orange, mined the road, installed sensors along the electronic-monitoring McNamara Line. No doubt about it, we extracted a heavy price. In time, the North filled 72 military cemeteries with the remains of those who built, manned and moved over the trail. [Read More]
