Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
September 25, 2022
Hello All – The war in Ukraine has taken a new and more dangerous turn. The military victory of Ukrainian forces last week has led Russia to annex the areas of eastern and southern Ukraine that it occupies, greatly increase the size of its armed forces by calling up reserves, and warn "the West" that it was prepared to use its nuclear arsenal in "self-defense." Presumably this would include the defense of the newly annexed territories, current the center of the war itself.
All this is very dangerous, especially as it was followed by a counter-blast from the US leadership that it would not back down on its military support of Ukraine or on the economic war now being waged against Russia. The Biden administration promised "grave consequences" if nuclear weapons were used. At the same time, US military aid to Ukraine may have reached $100 billion, and many US military and CIA people must be in Ukraine to repair this equipment and direct its use. The stage is set for dangerous "accidents" and escalation.
In the face of the possibility of nuclear annihilation, it is common sense to work frantically for a cease fire and negotiations, but there seems little interest in this by governments and their military leaders. Instead, the hardliners in Russia, the Ukraine, and the USA are doubling down on a win-the-war effort, with inflamed rhetoric about marching to victory. Many analysts are speaking of a "slow-motion Cuban Missile Crisis." We may not be so lucky this time.
We must find a way to stop this. In addition to the dangers and suffering connected with the war itself, it is obvious that the war's contribution to global hunger, the looming energy crisis in Europe, and the foreclosing of international cooperation to mitigate the climate crisis are very serious "collateral damage" of this war. In the USA we must speak up for peace, foster awareness of the mortal danger we are in, and demand that our congressional representatives, news media, etc. end their knee-jerk support for a continuation of this war.
Some useful reading on the Ukraine War
Russia and NATO Tried to Wage War on the Cheap in Ukraine, But Could Now be Heading for Total War
---- President Vladimir Putin has been trying to wage war on the cheap in Ukraine for seven months, with disastrous results for Russia. He is now ordering a partial military mobilization that will take time to implement and may at best only create a stalemate between Russian and Ukrainian forces. … The risk is that endless wars have a natural tendency to escalate as opponents try new strategies and tactics to break the deadlock and defeat their enemy. Vicious and destructive though the war in Ukraine has been so far, it is a long way from "total war", a phrase that became popular to describe the situation in the Second World War as each side used every resource to destroy their opponent. The current fear is that Russian nuclear sabre-rattling might escalate into the actual use of nuclear weapons. This prospect is probably a long way off, but the possibility of a nuclear exchange is real and nearer than it was a year ago. [Read More]
The Road to War in Ukraine: Fact vs Fiction
By James Carden, Asia Times [September 2022]
Such assertions – that NATO expansion played little or no role in Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to go to war – are undermined by recent revelations made by two former US intelligence officers on Russian affairs, Angela Stent and Fiona Hill. Writing in Foreign Affairs in early September, Stent and Hill (both longtime critics of the Russian president) say that according to "multiple former senior US officials" in April, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators "appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement." The contours of the settlement appear to have included a pledge on the part of Ukraine not to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in exchange for "security guarantees from a number of countries." Another learned and concise corrective to the "it wasn't NATO" narrative (which, not coincidentally, provides political cover for the current US administration's ever-deepening involvement in the war) comes by way of Benjamin Abelow, whose new book How the West Brought War to Ukraine is admirably clear on the circumstances that brought the war about. [Read More]
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting, 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 is held each Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. To learn about our new project, "Beauty as Fuel for Change," go here; and to make a financial contribution to the project, go here. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. 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!
This week's Rewards for stalwart readers have their origin in last night's wonderful concert, sponsored by Common Ground, at South Church in Dobbs Ferry. The musicians were Robinson & Rohe. There is lots of their music on-line, but two songs from last night's concert that I especially liked were "Hunger" and Jean Rohe's attempt at a new national anthem, "Arise! Arise!" Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
My Revolutionary Inspiration, Barbara Ehrenreich
September 15, 2022]
[FB – Lynn Segal, one of the founders of the second-wave feminist movement in the UK, is a professor at Birkbeck College, London, and the author of many books, including Radical Happiness. In 1979 she was a co-author of the important manifesto, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism.]
---- None of the obituaries I have read of feminist fighter, activist, and writer Barbara Ehrenreich come close to capturing her significance to the movement, apart from the one penned by her lifelong friend Deirdre English for Mother Jones. Nearly all others give center stage to her powerful best-seller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), a stirring undercover account of the appalling poverty, stress, and disrespect faced by the working poor, especially women. … However, by the time Nickel and Dimed was published, Ehrenreich had already had a long career stretching back to the heyday of women's liberation, when she'd left her indelible mark on the movement by battling to preserve within it the revolutionary socialist current initially at the heart of Western feminism. First and foremost she was, and remained, the archetypal socialist feminist. Like Sheila Rowbotham in the UK, Barbara helped shape its meaning, as part of an "internationalist anti-racist, anti-heterosexist feminism." In her germinal essay "What is Socialist Feminism?" (1976), she explains that socialist feminists are distinct from classical Marxists in that they aim "to transform not only the ownership of the means of production, but the totality of social existence . . . women who seemed most peripheral [to Marxists], the housewives, are at the very heart of their class—raising children, holding together families, maintaining the cultural and social networks of the community." She maintained this distinctive stance in all she said and did until her dying breath, having just turned eighty-one. [Read More]
Noam Chomsky on David Graeber's Pirate Enlightenment
---- As questions of decolonisation rub up against the legacy of Enlightenment thinking in the West, anthropologist David Graeber argues in his posthumous book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (to be published early next year) that Enlightenment ideas themselves are not intrinsically European and were indeed shaped by non-European sources. The work focuses on the proto-democratic ways of pirate societies and particularly the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group formed of descendants of pirates who settled on Madagascar at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and whom Graeber encountered while conducting ethnographic research at the beginning of his academic career. Graeber died in 2020, but in a wide-ranging conversation for ArtReview, his widow, the artist and author Nika Dubrovsky, speaks with Noam Chomsky, an admirer of the anthropologist's work, about Graeber's last project, neoliberalism and democracy, Western empiricism and imperialism, free speech, Roe v. Wade in the US, the war in Ukraine, and how Germany's Documenta art exhibition has barely coped with inviting non-Western artists to direct it for the first time. [Read More]
War & Peace
Noam Chomsky: The War in Ukraine Has Entered a New Phase
Interviewed by C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout [September 22, 2022]
---- Suppose that negotiations fail or are not even contemplated. What then? The general expert consensus seems to be that there will be a protracted war, with all of its tragic consequences. General Austin and other U.S. officials have held that Ukraine can drive Russia out of all of Ukraine, presumably including Crimea. Suppose the prospect arises. Then follows the crucial question: Will Putin pack up his bags and slink away silently to obscurity or worse? Or will he use the conventional weapons that all agree he has to escalate the attack on Ukraine? The U.S. is gambling on the former but is not unaware of the nature of this gamble with the lives of Ukrainians, and well beyond. …To put it simply, the U.S. position that the war must continue to severely weaken Russia, blocking negotiations, is based on a quite remarkable assumption: that facing defeat, Putin will pack his bags and slink away to a bitter fate. He will not do what he easily can: strike across Ukraine with impunity using Russia's conventional weapons, destroying critical infrastructure and Ukrainian government buildings, attacking the supply hubs outside Ukraine, moving on to sophisticated cyber attacks against Ukrainian targets. All of this is easily within Russia's conventional capacity, as U.S. government and the Ukrainian military command acknowledge — with the possibility of escalation to nuclear war in the not remote background. [Read More]
Drone Debt: U.S. Refuses to Help Wounded Survivor of Wrongful Attack in Yemen
By Nick Turse, The Intercept [September 19, 2022]
[FB – Much of the effort to raise funds for Mr. Al Manthari's medical care comes from CFOW stalwart Nick Mottern and the organization Ban Killer Drones.. If you would like to assist Mr. Al Manthari, please contribute at this site.]
---- In March 2018, the U.S. government decided that five Yemeni men were so dangerous that there was only one solution: They needed to die. After a U.S. military commander gave the final sign-off, a missile ripped through their SUV, near the village of Al Uqla, and tossed the car into the air. Three of the men were killed instantly. Another died days later in a local hospital. The only survivor was Adel Al Manthari. Al Manthari's body was ravaged. His entire left side was burned. … The U.S. military claimed that Adel Al Manthari and the others in the vehicle were "terrorists" from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but independent inquiries said otherwise. There is no evidence to suggest that the United States ever reinvestigated the strike. And every day for the past four years, Al Manthari has paid the price for America's shoot-first-ask-no-questions-later system of remote warfare. …. Repeated surgeries and medical treatment plunged his family into debt and the bills have never ceased. While the U.S. has millions of dollars in funds earmarked for civilian victims of U.S. attacks, the military ignored pleas on Al Manthari's behalf, leaving the 56-year-old to rely on a GoFundMe campaign earlier this year to save his life. [Read More]
The Climate Crisis
(Video) Climate Strike: How Capitalism, Colonialism & Imperialism Fuel Climate Crisis
From Democracy Now! [September 23, 2022]
---- Climate activists, led by Fridays for Future, are holding a global climate strike today to pressure world leaders to do more to address the crisis. We speak to Mikaela Loach, who has helped lead the fight against developing the Cambo oil field off the coast of Scotland and who describes the importance of seeing antiracism and climate activism as linked. "We're in this crisis because fossil fuels and nature have been completely extracted and destroyed to make profit and to continue expansion of economies, in the Global North in particular," says Loach. [See the Program]
Civil Liberties
America's Open Wound: The CIA is not your friend
By Edward Snowden [September 20, 2022]
---- Democracy and the rule of law have been so frequently invoked as a part of the American political brand that we simply take it for granted that we enjoy both. Are we right to think that? Our glittering nation of laws observes this year two birthdays: the 70th anniversary of the National Security Agency, on which my thoughts have been recorded, and the 75th anniversary of the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA was founded in the wake of the 1947 National Security Act. The Act foresaw no need for the Courts and Congress to oversee a simple information-aggregation facility, and therefore subordinated it exclusively to the President, through the National Security Council he controls. Within a year, the young agency had already slipped the leash of its intended role of intelligence collection and analysis to establish a covert operations division. Within a decade, the CIA was directing the coverage of American news organizations, overthrowing democratically elected governments (at times merely to benefit a favored corporation), establishing propaganda outfits to manipulate public sentiment, launching a long-running series of mind-control experiments on unwitting human subjects (purportedly contributing to the creation of the Unabomber), and—gasp—interfering with foreign elections. From there, it was a short hop to wiretapping journalists and compiling files on Americans who opposed its wars. … From the year it was established, Presidents and their cadres have regularly directed the CIA to go beyond the law for reasons that cannot be justified, and therefore must be concealed — classified. The primary result of the classification system is not an increase in national security, but a decrease in transparency. Without meaningful transparency, there is no accountability, and without accountability, there is no learning. [Read More]
The State of the Union
This Threat to Democracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight [Elections and voting]
Editorial, The New York Times [September 23, 2022]
---- From January 2021 to May of this year, just under three dozen restrictive laws had been passed in nearly 20 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. These are pernicious laws, and they undermine Americans' hard-won rights to vote. But just as important is the matter of who counts the votes, and who decides which votes count and which do not. This is where Mr. Trump's allies have focused much of their scheming since his re-election defeat. Their mission is to take over America's election infrastructure, or at least key parts of it, from the ground up by filling key positions of influence with Trump sympathizers. Rather than threatening election officials, they will be the election officials — the poll workers and county commissioners and secretaries of state responsible for overseeing the casting, counting and certifying of votes. These efforts require attention and mobilization from Americans across the political spectrum. America's system of voting is complex and decentralized, with most of the oversight done at the state and local level by thousands of elected and appointed officials, along with poll workers. While it is outdated and inconvenient in many places, this system has worked relatively well for roughly 200 years. But Mr. Trump's attempts to subvert the election also revealed the system's vulnerabilities, and his allies are now intently focused on exploiting those pressure points to bend the infrastructure of voting to their advantage. Their drive to take over election machinery county by county, state by state, is a reminder that democracy is fragile. The threats to it are not only violent ruptures like the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol but also quieter efforts to corrupt it. [Read More]
"You Strike So You Don't Quit": Across the Country, Nurses Are Fighting Overwork
By Bryce Covert, The Nation [September 22, 2022]
---- On the first day of a massive nurses' strike across 16 hospitals in Minnesota, Emily Kniskern and her daughter arrived outside the hospital where she works, St. Luke's Duluth, at 6:30 in the morning. Her daughter soon left to go to school, but after cross-country practice, she came back to rejoin the picket line. Other nurses brought their kids too. …The nurses were joined by firefighters, teachers, retired nurses, even elected officials. Other unions pulled up with coolers full of food and water. Community members thanked the nurses for the care they've gotten at St. Luke's. Kniskern said her whole unit of about 55 nurses walked the picket line. But the numbers run much deeper. For three days in mid-September, 15,000 nurses in the Twin Cities, Twin Ports, and Moose Lake areas of Minnesota represented by the Minnesota Nurses Association went on strike, making theirs the largest private-sector nurses' strike in the country's history. … Nurses in other parts of the country, including Michigan and New York, are ready to go on strike too. Across the different unions, one issue has pushed them to this point: understaffing and the extreme workload they face as a result. [Read More]
Israel/Palestine
We Document Human Rights Violations. Israel Wants to Silence Us.
By Shawan Jabarin, New York Times [September 23, 2022]
[FB - Mr. Jabarin is the general director of Al-Haq.]
---- Just after 3 a.m. on Aug. 18, Israeli soldiers blasted open the locked doors of Al-Haq, the oldest and largest human rights organization in the occupied Palestinian territories, for which I serve as general director. … A few hours later, as I took in what was happening, my phone started beeping with messages that soldiers had also invaded and sealed off the offices of six other leading Palestinian organizations. This was an escalation in Israel's campaign against us — last October, it labeled six of our organizations "terrorist" entities and tried to choke off the international funding we receive. … My main concern, however, is not for myself or Al-Haq. It's about the wider implications the raid has for Palestinian civil society. The organizations targeted by Israel provide vital social services and support to a Palestinian population devastated by more than half a century of brutal Israeli military occupation and colonization by Israeli settlers. Over the past year and a half, leading international and Israeli human rights organizations have joined Palestinians in concluding that the oppressive system Israel has imposed on us amounts to apartheid. Perhaps this is why Israel has intensified its efforts to suppress our work. [Read More]
Our History
Jean-Luc Godard Was Cinema's North Star
---- No one did more to make movies the art of youth than Jean-Luc Godard, who was born in 1930, in Paris, and died on Tuesday, at his home in Rolle, Switzerland, by assisted suicide. Godard's films of the nineteen-sixties, starting with his first feature, "Breathless," inspired young people to make movies in the same spirit in which others started a band. His works—political thrillers, musical comedies, romantic melodramas, science fiction, often more than one per year—moved at the speed of his thought, transformed familiar genres into intimate confessions, and made film form into a wild laboratory of aesthetic delight and sensory provocation. He put his own intellectual world into his movies with a collage-like profusion of quotes and allusions, and cast the people in his life as actors, as stars, or as icons. Working fast, he alluded to current events while they were still current. But it wasn't just the news that made his films feel like the embodiment of their times—it was Godard's insolence, his defiance, his derisive humor, his sense of freedom. More than any other filmmaker, he made viewers feel as if anything was possible in movies, and he made it their own urgent mission to find out for themselves. Where Hollywood seemed like a distant, cosseted, and disreputable dream, he made the firsthand cinema—the personal and independent film—an urgent and accessible ideal. [Read More]
