Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
August 29, 2021
Hello All - Concerned Families of Westchester was formed the day after 9/11/2001. We were concerned about terrorism and afraid that President Bush & Co. would go to war. We were right on both counts. Can we now hope for peace? Last week's horrible bombing at the Kabul airport is a reminder that peace and stability will come slowly, if at all. An urgent debate is beginning – and will continue for some time – about whether the "lessons of Afghanistan" are to work for peace or to Prepare Better for War. I think it is vital that those wishing for peace to speak up loudly at this moment, for the drift of the mainstream media and much of Congress is to blame President Biden for somehow "losing Afghanistan" and to demand a restoration of US world domination.
"Working for peace" starts today. In addition to caring for our veterans and the refugees, our country has a moral duty to support a real peace process. Here are some suggested first steps:
· Feed Them! – The UN's World Food Program estimates that more than14 million people urgently need food assistance. The US can help with funding and by taking no military or other steps that might endanger the program. Put the Afghan people first.
· Give Peace a Chance! – The United States should accept the fact that the Taliban will control the new state, and not engage in further military or other actions pointing to "regime change. Aid and development assistance should be sent to Afghanistan.
· Investigate Who Was Responsible for This Disaster – Congress should investigate the decisions to start the war in 2001. CIA and Pentagon liars, war-profiteers, and the media should be held accountable. We must prevent future wars.
Implicit in the coming policy debates on these and other items will be "What kind of country do we want the USA to be?" To hope for a better outcome than we have now, and to stave off disaster, all voices must be raised.
Some useful reading about Afghanistan
Afghanistan is facing a vast humanitarian disaster — and not only at the airport
By Barnett R. Rubin, Washington Post [August 24, 2021]
---- The United States and other aid donors have responded to the Taliban takeover by stopping the flow of financial aid and freezing Afghanistan's reserves and other financial accounts. Yet Afghanistan is one of the poorest and most aid-dependent countries in the world. An internal document of the World Food Program warns that, "A humanitarian crisis of incredible proportions is unfolding before our eyes. Conflict combined with drought and covid-19 is pushing the people of Afghanistan into a humanitarian catastrophe." According this document, more than 1 in 3 Afghans — some 14 million people — are hungry today while 2 million children are malnourished and urgently need treatment. More than 3.5 million — out of a population of 38 million — are internally displaced. Just to make matters worse, a massive drought has devastated crops. More than 40 percent of the country's crops were lost to drought this year. … Afghans are facing a humanitarian catastrophe of daunting proportions. The world must take action — sooner rather than later. After 20 years of botched policy, the United States has a particular obligation to mitigate the oncoming disaster. Let us hope it can find the will to do what it can. [Read More]
Afghan Feminists Warned Us That War Wouldn't Free Them
By Sonali Kolhatkar, YES! Magazine [August 27, 2021]
---- I am feeling a pervasive sense of déjà vu in reading the news of how the Taliban has taken over Afghanistan within weeks of the U.S. withdrawal. Nearly 20 years after the U.S. invaded one of the world's poorest nation in a retaliatory response to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the so-called enemy force is back in power. Afghan feminist activists have spent the past two decades warning the U.S. against resorting to violent solutions like war and collaborating with armed fundamentalists. Their pleas were ignored. So, it should not surprise us that the Afghanistan occupation—and withdrawal—have gone as badly many predicted they would. … And just as Western media pundits and liberal feminists in 2001 justified the war in the name of saving Afghan women from the institutionalized misogyny of the Taliban, today we hear similar warnings about how women "will now be subject to laws from the seventh century" under Taliban rule. [Read More]
The history of the Taliban is crucial in understanding what might happen next
By Ali Olomi, The Conversation [August 26, 2021]
---- While the Taliban emerged as a force in the 1990s Afghan civil war, you have to go back to the Saur Revolution of 1978 to truly understand the group, and what they're trying to achieve. The Saur Revolution was a turning point in the history of Afghanistan. By the mid-1970s, Afghanistan had been modernizing for decades. The two countries that were most eager to get involved in building up Afghan infrastructure were the United States and the Soviet Union – both of which hoped to have a foothold in Afghanistan to exert power over central and south Asia. As a result of the influx of foreign aid, the Afghan government became the primary employer of the country – and that led to endemic corruption, setting the stage for the revolution. [Read More] Also useful are the observations of veteran correspondent Patrick Cockburn, "The Taliban Pretend to Show Moderation," The Independent [UK] [August 26, 2021] [Link].
News Notes
As drone whistle blower Daniel Hale begins his 45-month prison sentence for giving information about the US drone program to the media, Rep. Ilhan Omar has called on President Biden to pardon Hale. "The legal question of Mr. Hale's guilt is settled, but the moral question remains open," she wrote on Thursday. As reported in The Intercept, "Omar said the information Hale revealed, 'while politically embarrassing to some, has shone a vital light on the legal and moral problems of the drone program and informed the public debate on an issue that has for too many years remained in the shadows.'" Meanwhile, the collapse of the US project in Afghanistan has intersected with the Biden administration's re-writing of the "rules" of drone warfare; read more here.
In Congress, the Democratic Party leadership is confronting fierce debate with the Republicans and within the Democrats themselves over what should be included in the two zillion-dollar infrastructure bills and how to overcome the obstruction of a Republican-led filibuster in the Senate. The website Common Dreams has a user-friendly guide to what's going on, as "Progressives Vow to 'Hold the Line' on the Democrats' Bold Agenda.
Finally, the historian James Loewen died last week. He was most famous for his best-selling book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Learn more about him and his work at the Zinn Education Project. James Loewen, ¡Presente!
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil takes place every Monday from 6 to 6:30 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email. Our 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 support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
To Mark Twain is attributed the observation that "history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." This Deep Thought was brought to mind this week while viewing two versions - here and here – of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," likely to stir some memories in esp. older Newsletter readers. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
What are the Prospects For Peace? - An Interview With Noam Chomsky
Q. - The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently put the hands of the doomsday clock to 100 seconds before midnight. Midnight means all-out war, probably nuclear holocaust. This is the closest it has ever been. Do you agree with this dire assessment?
Chomsky - A fair assessment, unfortunately. The BAS analysts cited three major increasing threats: nuclear war, environmental destruction, and what some have called an "infodemic," the sharp decline in rational discourse — the only hope for addressing the existential crises.
Every year that Trump was in office, the minute hand moved closer to midnight. Two years ago the analysts abandoned minutes and turned to seconds. Trump steadily escalated all three threats. It's worth reflecting on how close the world came to an indescribable catastrophe last November. Another 4 years of Trump's race to the abyss might have had incalculable consequences. His worshippers of course don't see it this way, but, remarkably, the same is true of segments of the left. In fact, liberal litanies of his abuses also largely skirt his major crimes. Worth consideration when we recognize that he or some clone might soon regain the levers of power. Also worth consideration are the warnings by thousands of scientists that we are approaching irreversible tipping points in environmental destruction. We can read all about it in Aljazeera. [Read More]
The United States Is Not "a Nation of Immigrants"
Bu Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Boston Review [August 16, 2021]
---- The United States has never been "a nation of immigrants." It has always been a settler state with a core of descendants from the original colonial settlers, that is, primarily Anglo-Saxons, Scots, Irish, and Germans. The vortex of settler colonialism sucked immigrants through a kind of seasoning process of Americanization—not as rigid and organized as the "seasoning" of Africans, which rendered them into human commodities, but effective nevertheless. In the 1960s, U.S. historians were having to adjust the historical narrative of the white republic and progress in response to Black civil rights demands for a reckoning about racism. But in the process of those adjustments and reforms, the settler state was never a subject of debate. … This is the chief characteristic of U.S. nationalism, and it is similar to other settler states, such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Northern Ireland, and twentieth-century copycat settler states Israel and the now-defunct Afrikaner apartheid regime in South Africa. But only the United States became an unparalleled capitalist state and military machine. Unlike those other states—whose damage, damaging as it is, remains mostly local or regional—the United States rules the seas and skies, with the futures of humanity and Earth itself at stake. [Read More]
The Climate Crisis
Almost half of the world's children are seriously threatened by the rapidly deteriorating global climate.
By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute [August 24, 2021]
---- "Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don't want your hope," said Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg in 2019. "I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day." Now the famed young eco-warrior and Nobel Peace Prize nominee might get her wish as she, along with other youth activists, has collaborated with UNICEF—a United Nations agency working in more than 190 countries and territories to provide humanitarian and developmental aid to the world's most disadvantaged children and adolescents—to launch an alarming new report that has found that a billion children across the world are at "extremely high risk" from the impacts of climate change. … The report introduces the new Children's Climate Risk Index (CCRI), a composite index that ranks nations based on children's exposure to climate shocks, providing the first comprehensive look at how exactly children are affected by the climate crisis, offering a road map for policymakers seeking to prioritize action based on those who are most at risk. Nick Rees, a policy specialist at UNICEF focusing on climate change and economic analysis and one of the report's authors, told the Guardian that "[i]t essentially [shows] the likelihood of a child's ability to survive climate change." [Read More]
The State of the Union
Supreme Court Ended the Eviction Moratorium, but Pandemic Has Shown Road Map for Fighting Back
By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [
---- At 10 p.m. Thursday night, without oral arguments or a full briefing, the Supreme Court ruled to end the federal eviction moratorium. The eight-page order puts hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of tenants at risk of losing their homes as the coronavirus pandemic rages on — almost at the exact moment that federal unemployment benefits are set to expire. The justices know what is at stake: A Centers for Disease Control study, which was cited in the dissenting justices' opinion, found that when 27 states lifted their eviction moratoria this past summer, it resulted in 433,700 excess Covid-19 cases and 10,700 excess deaths nationally. The court's majority nonetheless sided with the economic concerns of landlords. … For those in the struggle for housing as a human right, however, it has long been clear that short-term moratoria on evictions are a Band-aid on the bullet wound of a broader crisis. The crisis predates the pandemic and requires a radical restructuring of how housing works in this country. [Read More] Also useful is "Most Rental Assistant Funds Not Yet Distributed, Figures Show" by Glenn Thrush and Alan Rappeport, New York Times [August 27, 2021] [Link].
Israel/Palestine
'Close friends' Biden and Bennett leave progressive Americans out in the cold
ByAugust 28, 2021]
---- The progressive base of the Democratic Party was completely dissed yesterday by the White House in President Biden's meeting with rightwing Israeli PM Naftali Bennett. The president said he and the PM are "close friends," and he sounded a hawkish note on Iran and mentioned Palestine only in passing. Bennett and Israel got everything that they wanted, observers said. … Speaking to the New York Times, Aaron David Miller emphasizes the usefulness of Bennett to Biden, because he won't politicize support for Israel in the U.S. "He's Biden's guy…. He has offered him a huge respite from what would have been Netanyahu's highly partisan, politicized courting of Republicans." … Again it must be emphasized that the base of the Democratic Party, which by two-to-one supports restricting military aid to Israel because of its treatment of Palestinians, has nothing to show from this meeting. [Read More]
Our History
U.S. boarding schools for Indians had a hidden agenda: Stealing land
By Brenda J. Child, Washington Post [August 27, 2021]
---- Indian education in the United States and Canada originated in the same colonial project — one that imposed private property rights and Christianity on Indigenous people at a time when their lands and resources were viewed as ripe for plunder. But it's important to note that the two school systems differed in design and scope. Canada farmed out Indian education to organizations like the Catholic and Anglican churches. Here, the federal government ran Indian boarding schools, employing teachers and staff from the Indian School Service, some of whom were American Indians. In Canada, residential schools continued for a half-century after their assimilation-model counterparts in the United States began to shutter in 1933. This is because the U.S. schools had a very specific purpose: They helped the government acquire Indian lands. [Read More]
