Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
October 30, 2022
Hello All – Last Monday the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) issued a letter to President Biden that supported in all ways his assistance to Ukraine in its war with Russia, but called for adding "negotiations" to the aid packages of military equipment and humanitarian funding. On Tuesday, following a torrent of criticism from leading Democrats and much of the mainstream media, the CPC "withdrew" the letter. In calling for negotiations, critics said the CPC was repudiating President Biden's policies. (For the whole story, go here.)
We/CFOW had greeted the CPC letter as a welcome crack in the door that might lead to an end to the fighting – to a cease fire – and eventually to negotiations. Indeed, there was little that was "radical" about the letter: the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had expressed similar views two weeks earlier. Yet in withdrawing the letter, Rep. Jayapal, the leader of the CPC, stated that she was in agreement with the views expressed earlier by President Biden, which were that the United States would support Ukraine's decisions regarding war aims and diplomacy, and would negotiate only in partnership with Ukraine, not separately.
This sounds very fine, except that by supplying most of Ukraine's arms and the money necessary to run the war and keep the government afloat, the United States and NATO are de facto co-belligerents against Russia. The threat of nuclear weapons endangers not just Ukraine, but everyone. Russia now says it will end cooperation in sending food from Ukraine to Africa and other parts of the world where people are threatened with starvation. Protests related to the war – inflation, energy, security – are breaking out across Europe. A leading scholar warns that Russia is fighting a war of genocide against Ukrainians. To refuse to pursue a ceasefire and negotiations until the politicians now governing Ukraine are in agreement seems reckless.
The setback for peace contained in the withdrawal of the CPC's letter advocating wartime negotiations is compounded by the likelihood that this may be the last effort by congressional progressives to speak out against the war for many months to come. They will have lost their nerve, their willingness to speak out. We have lost our voice for peace inside the government. How can we get it back?
Some Useful Reading about Efforts to End the War
The Growing Chorus for Peace in Ukraine
By Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies, Code Pink [October 27, 2022]
---- In the first weeks of the war, the United States and NATO countries sent weapons to Ukraine to try to prevent Russia from quickly defeating Ukraine's armed forces and conducting a U.S.-style "regime change" in Kyiv. But since that goal was achieved, the only goals that President Zelenskyy and his Western allies have publicly proclaimed are to recover all of pre-2014 Ukraine and decisively defeat and weaken Russia. These are aspirational goals at best, which require sacrificing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Ukrainian lives, regardless of the outcome. Even worse, if they should come close to succeeding, they are likely to trigger a nuclear war, making this the all-time epitome of a "no-win predicament." [Read More]
The West Must Stop Blocking Negotiations Between Ukraine and Russia
---- In the Gomel region of Belarus that borders Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian diplomats met on February 28 to begin negotiations toward a ceasefire. These talks fell apart. Then, in early March, the two sides met again in Belarus to hold a second and third round of talks. On March 10, the foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia met in Antalya, Türkiye, and finally, at the end of March, senior officials from Ukraine and Russia met in Istanbul, Türkiye, thanks to the initiative of Türkiye's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. On March 29, Türkiye's Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said, "We are pleased to see that the rapprochement between the parties has increased at every stage. Consensus and common understanding were reached on some issues." By April, an agreement regarding a tentative interim deal was reached between Russia and Ukraine, according to an article in Foreign Affairs. [Read More] And for similar details about an earlier period, read "The endless proxy war, by design," by Aaron Maté [October 18, 2022] [Link].
News Notes
Election Day is approaching fast, and early voting has already started (at the Hastings library, among other places). Rep. Jamaal Bowman will be campaigning next Saturday morning at the Hastings farmers market. Let's show up and give him some support!
Capital punishment. Oklahoma has vowed to execute one person a month until December 2024. 24,000 people are on Death Row in the USA, and executions are up. For an eloquent overview and protest, watch "Sister Helen Prejean on abolishing the death penalty" on Aljazeera with Marc Lamont Hill. [Link]
It was a closely held secret, but the Washington Post recently published a report on the "more than 500 retired U.S. military personnel — including scores of generals and admirals — have taken lucrative jobs since 2015 working for foreign governments, mostly in countries known for human rights abuses and political repression…. Most of the retired U.S. personnel have worked as civilian contractors for Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Persian Gulf monarchies, playing a critical, though largely invisible, role in upgrading their militaries." [Read the story here].
Finally, Ellen Schrecker has written a warm memoir of Chandler Davis, "a Courageous Hero of the Post-War Red-Scare Era," who died last week at the age of 96. Read about Chan Davis' lifelong quest for peace and justice here.
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!
The reward for stalwart Newsletter readers this week was inspired by a New York Times story marking the 50th anniversary of Stevie Wonder's album, "Talking Book." "It's an album mostly of songs about love," writes The Times, "euphoric, heartbroken, jealous, regretful, longing, anticipatory. Yet love songs like "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" and "Lookin' for Another Pure Love" don't confine themselves to the ups and downs of individual romance; their love can encompass family, friends, community and faith." The Times story has lots of pictures and musicians comments from back in the day. You can hear "Talking Book" here. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
(Video) Noam Chomsky: The Responsibility of Intellectuals
October 21, 2022]
Chris Hedges: So Noam, I want to begin with a quote from Edward Said's preface in the 25th anniversary edition of Said's book Orientalism, about the role of intellectuals in perpetuating the crimes and avarice of empire. These are Said's words: "Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, and bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. Can you talk about this battle between these intellectual posers and genuine intellectuals, a battle that I think has defined much of your own life? [See the Program]. To see Part 2 of this interview, on "Neoliberalism and the roots of fascism," go here.
Remembering Mike Davis: 1946–2022
By Jon Wiener, The Nation [October 25, 2022]
---- Mike Davis, author and activist, radical hero and family man, died October 25 after a long struggle with esophageal cancer; he was 76. He's best known for his 1990 book about Los Angeles, City of Quartz. Marshall Berman, reviewing it for The Nation, said it combined "the radical citizen who wants to grasp the totality of his city's life, and the urban guerrilla aching to see the whole damned thing blow." And the whole thing did blow, two years after the book was published. When the Rodney King riots broke out in LA in 1992, frightened white people rushed home, locked the doors, and turned on the TV news. Mike, however, was driving in the opposite direction, with his old friend Ron Schneck at his side. They parked, got out, and started talking with the people in the streets about what was going on. Then he went home and wrote about it. … Mike hated being called "a prophet of doom." Yes, LA did explode two years after City of Quartz; the fires and floods did get more intense after Ecology of Fear, and of course a global pandemic did follow The Monster at Our Door. But when he wrote about climate change or viral pandemics, he was not offering a "prophecy"; he was reporting on the latest research. … Unlike the rest of the New Left, Mike didn't reject the old left—his mentor in the 1960s and '70s was the renegade CP leader in Southern California, Dorothy Healey. Mike loved arguing with her. When Dorothy died in 2006, Mike wrote in The Nation that she represented "the left's 'greatest generation'—those tough-as-nails children of Ellis Island who built the CIO, fought Jim Crow in Manhattan and Alabama, and buried their friends in the Spanish earth." Their deaths, he said, were "an inestimable, heart-wrenching loss." Now we feel the same about his.
Also of interest is this recent interview: "Mike Davis, California's 'prophet of doom', on activism in a dying world: 'Despair is useless'" by Lois Beckett, The Guardian [UK] [August 31, 2022] [Link]; and "Mike Davis Was the Best Socialist Writer of the Last Half Century," by Owen Hatherley, Jacobin Magazine [October 2022], a useful survey of Davis' writings [Link].
My War Never Ends
By Chris Hedges, [October 26, 2022]
---- As this century began, I was writing War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, my reflections on two decades as a war correspondent, 15 of them with the New York Times, in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, and Kosovo. I worked in a small, sparsely furnished studio apartment on First Avenue in New York City. The room had a desk, chair, futon, and a couple of bookshelves — not enough to accommodate my extensive library, leaving piles of books stacked against the wall. The single window overlooked a back alley. … There were days when I could not write. I would sit in despair, overcome by emotion, unable to cope with a sense of loss, of hurt, and the hundreds of violent images I carry within me. Writing about war was not cathartic. It was painful. I was forced to unwrap memories carefully swaddled in the cotton wool of forgetfulness. The advance on the book was modest: $25,000. Neither the publisher nor I expected many people to read it, especially with such an ungainly title. I wrote out of a sense of obligation, a belief that, given my deep familiarity with the culture of war, I should set it down. But I vowed, once done, never to willfully dredge up those memories again. To the publisher's surprise, the book exploded. Hundreds of thousands of copies were eventually sold. Big publishers, dollar signs in their eyes, dangled significant offers for another book on war. But I refused. I didn't want to dilute what I had written or go through that experience again. I did not want to be ghettoized into writing about war for the rest of my life. I was done. To this day, I'm still unable to reread it. [Read More]
War & Peace
When Governments Kill Civilians
By October 27, 2022]
---- For centuries, civilians have been the victims of terrible war crimes. Sometimes they have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But often they have been directly targeted for purposes of ethnic cleansing, revenge, denying rebels a base of supporters, or terrorizing a government into surrendering. Recently, another historical instance of such an atrocity has been confirmed. In 1948, Israeli forces used bacteriological warfare—spreading typhus and dysentery bacteria—against the Arab population of Palestine in order to encourage them to flee and to prevent them from returning to their villages. Can we believe such claims? … Israel has not been the only government to target civilians. In its war in Indochina, the United States unleashed an unprecedented level of explosives and chemicals on the Vietnamese countryside, not in order to destroy enemy soldiers or military objects but to drive the population from their villages so they would be unavailable to support the National Liberation Front. In an absent-minded way the United States in Viet Nam may well have stumbled upon the answer to "wars of national liberation." The effective response lies neither in the quest for conventional military victory nor in the esoteric doctrines and gimmicks of counter-insurgency warfare. It is instead forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly brings the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power. … In Ukraine today, civilians caught behind Russian lines have suffered horrendous violence as part of Moscow's effort to subdue the population. Starting in October, however, the Russians have begun launching missiles and drones against civilian targets across the country in attacks designed explicitly to cause massive suffering of the population in the lead up to winter. [Read More]
Will the Haitian Crisis Lead to Yet Another Military Intervention?
By Amy Wilentz, The Nation [October 27, 2022]
---- This is a crisis moment for Haiti, and not only because of the spiking gang violence—much of it supported at various times by a smattering of powerful business and political interests—which is destroying the country's ability to function and to continue as an ongoing community and culture. Haiti's ruler, de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry, effectively selected for the job by the Biden administration after the assassination of Haiti's president Jovenel Moise in July, 2021, requested earlier this month that the United Nations send a "specialized armed force" to Haiti to quell the violence. Already, limited military matériel, including some armored vehicles, has arrived in Port-au-Prince from Canada and the United States, and some suspect, given recent unprecedented (though not numerous) arrests and killings of gang members by the Haitian National Police, that outside law-enforcement specialists and advisers have also already been sent in. … Now, Haiti stands at a crossroads. Aside from Henry and his cohort, very few Haitians want to see a foreign force of any kind on Haitian soil. Yet at the same time they see an outside intervention of some kind as possibly their only recourse at this point. [Read More] And an important point: "Who Is This 'Haiti' That's Appealing for Intervention?" by Jane Regan, FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] [October 25, 2022] [Link].
The Climate Crisis
Chomsky and Pollin: Pushing a Viable Climate Project Around COP27
An interview with C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout ]October 23, 2022]
The hope for COP27 is that the world will set more stringent greenhouse gas emissions reduction requirements considering the ever-clearer consequences of global warming. Noam, is this a significant climate meeting?
---- Let's take a look. The U.S. government has just passed a climate bill, a pale shadow of what was proposed by the Biden administration under the impact of popular climate activism, which in the end could not compete with the power of the true masters in the corporate sector. The final shadow is not meaningless. It is, however, radically insufficient in its reach, and also burdened with measures to ensure that the interests of the masters are "most peculiarly attended to." … The rules of the game are that you expand profit and market share, or you lose out. For self-delusion, it suffices to hold out the thin hope that maybe our technical culture will find some answers. There is an alternative to the resolute march toward suicide. The distribution of power can be changed by an aroused public with its own very different priorities, such as surviving in a livable world. The current masters can be controlled on a path toward elimination of their illegitimate authority. The rules of the game can be changed, in the short term modified sufficiently to enable humankind to adopt the means that have been spelled out in detail to "step back from the abyss." [Read More]
Climate crisis: UN finds 'no credible pathway to 1.5C in place'
By Damian Carrington, The Guardian [October 27, 2022]
---- There is "no credible pathway to 1.5C in place", the UN's environment agency has said, and the failure to reduce carbon emissions means the only way to limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis is a "rapid transformation of societies". The UN environment report analysed the gap between the CO2 cuts pledged by countries and the cuts needed to limit any rise in global temperature to 1.5C, the internationally agreed target. Progress has been "woefully inadequate" it concluded. Current pledges for action by 2030, if delivered in full, would mean a rise in global heating of about 2.5C and catastrophic extreme weather around the world. A rise of 1C to date has caused climate disasters in locations from Pakistan to Puerto Rico.If the long-term pledges by countries to hit net zero emissions by 2050 were delivered, global temperature would rise by 1.8C. But the glacial pace of action means meeting even this temperature limit was not credible, the UN report said. [Read More] For more on the climate crisis, read "'Worst Possible News': Scientists Urge Immediate Action as Greenhouse Gas Levels Hit All-Time High," by Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams [October 27, 2022] [Link].
Israel/Palestine
We're All Dressing Up as Democrats [Israel's election]
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [October 30, 2022]
---- Israel's election on Tuesday is not a general election, and therefore not a democratic one. Apartheid South Africa had exactly the same deception: the regime was defined as a parliamentary democracy and later as a presidential democracy. Elections were held in adherence with the law, with the National and Afrikaner parties forming a coalition. Only one thing separated South Africa from democracy – elections were meant for whites only… A regime in which elections are held only for whites, namely Jews, or for those with citizenship that is not bestowed on all subjects, including the native ones living under the permanent rule applying to their land, is not a democracy. When an occupation stops being a temporary one, it defines the regime of the entire country. There is no such thing as a partial democracy. It's amazing how for decades Israeli have knowingly lied to themselves, just like the whites in the parties of the Afrikaners. [Read More]
Our History
Why I Keep Coming Back to Reconstruction
By Jamelle Bouie, New York Times [October 25, 2022]
---- The scholarship on Reconstruction is vast and comprehensive. But my touchstone for thinking about the period continues to be W.E.B. Du Bois's "Black Reconstruction," published in 1935 after years of painstaking research, often inhibited by segregation and the racism of Southern institutions of higher education. The central conceit of Du Bois's landmark study — whose full title is "Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880" — is that the period was a grand struggle between "two theories of the future of America," rooted in the relationship of American labor to American democracy. "What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States?" Du Bois asks. "Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color?" And if not, he continues, "How would property and privilege be protected?" [Read More]
