Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
September 12, 2022
Hello All – Will the war in Ukraine ever end, and how can it be ended before it inflicts more hardship on the world than it has already done? This was the front-burner question two weeks ago, summarized succinctly in the article from Code Pink linked below. The stalemate on the battlefield was beginning to resemble the interminable trench warfare of World War I. Ukraine itself had absorbed terrible destruction. Food shortages in the Global South and energy shortages in Europe ensued directly from the war, while the collapse of serious efforts to address the climate crisis was a predictable consequence of growing national antagonisms. Surely there must be Adults in some room who could settle this war!
In the last week, however, the rapid success of Ukrainian military attacks on Russian positions in eastern Ukraine has re-shuffled the cards. Why would the Ukrainian government want a cease fire and negotiations now, when they are on a roll? How could the Russian government – Putin – talk about negotiations now without risking a revolt or coup d'etat from the "nationalist" part of the political spectrum? And in the USA, as the article by Alice Speri linked below explains, the Ukrainian military successes serve to justify the enormous expenditures in military and other aid; from the USA alone, more than $40 billion since February. If one US goal in supporting Ukraine's war was to weaken Russia, advocates of this strategy are in the Pentagon's driver's seat.
Reading "pro-Russian" perspectives of the likely Russian response to recent military developments is not reassuring. In a report by Gilbert Doctorow assessing Russia's options, we learn that there is suddenly more open debate about "the special military operation" on Russian state-controlled media, that a leading theme is that "it is time to take the gloves off," and that Russian analysts point to the recent (5th) meeting of US and European military leaders in Ramstein, Germany, to suggest that Ukraine is the spearhead of a well-organized and –financed plan to destroy Russia. Which was what Putin said all along.
Today Code Pink and many other organizations began a week of action aimed at persuading Congress to focus on a cease fire and negotiations rather than signing blank checks for military weapons. To learn more about this campaign, and how you can participate, go here.
Some useful reading on the Ukraine crisis
Peace Talks Essential as War Rages on in Ukraine
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [September 5, 2022]
---- Six months ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. The United States, NATO and the European Union (EU) wrapped themselves in the Ukrainian flag, shelled out billions for arms shipments, and imposed draconian sanctions intended to severely punish Russia for its aggression. Since then, the people of Ukraine have been paying a price for this war that few of their supporters in the West can possibly imagine. Western sanctions have had mixed results, inflicting severe economic damage on Europe as well as on Russia, while the invasion and the West's response to it have combined to trigger a food crisis across the Global South. As winter approaches, the prospect of another six months of war and sanctions threatens to plunge Europe into a serious energy crisis and poorer countries into famine. So it is in the interest of all involved to urgently reassess the possibilities of ending this protracted conflict. For those who say negotiations are impossible, we have only to look at the talks that took place during the first month after the Russian invasion, when Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed to a fifteen-point peace plan in talks mediated by Turkey. Details still had to be worked out, but the framework and the political will were there. [Read More]
U.S. Military Aid to Ukraine Grows to Historic Proportions — Along With Risks
By Alice Speri, The Intercept [
----- Since Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February, the U.S. government has pumped more money and weapons into supporting the Ukrainian military than it sent in 2020 to Afghanistan, Israel, and Egypt combined — surpassing in a matter of months three of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in history. Because the assistance is drawn from a variety of sources — and because it's not always easy to distinguish between aid that's been authorized, pledged, or delivered — some analysts estimate the true figure of the U.S. commitment to Ukraine is much higher: up to $40 billion in security assistance, or $110 million a day over the last year. … The most recent U.S. military assistance announcements also marked a significant shift in the scope of the U.S. commitment to Ukraine. Earlier packages mostly involved the Defense Department drawing from preexisting stock to quickly equip Ukrainian forces in the face of urgent need — to the tune of $8.6 billion worth of equipment over the last year. The $675 million drawdown announced by Blinken this week marked the 20th time the administration invoked this authority to support Ukrainian defense. The $3 billion package announced by Biden last month, however, involves new contracts with defense manufacturers to produce equipment that will be delivered to Ukraine over months and years, in order to, according to officials, "build the enduring strength of their forces to ensure the continued freedom and independence of the Ukrainian people." In other words, as Under Secretary of Defense for Public Policy Colin Kahl put it, this aid is not intended to support Ukraine in "today's fight" but "for years to come." [Read More]
News Notes
Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, a resident of Westchester, has been undermined and attacked by the administration of San Francisco State University for her work championing Palestinian liberation. At SFSU, she is the director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies. Her case is important not only because she is our neighbor, but also because it illustrates the array of repressive strategies available to university administrations to prevent open discuss of the plight of Palestinians. Read her "Open Letter" of September 12th explaining her situation and the issues here,
For an update on the success of New York socialists in last month's elections, read "In a Political Climate Moving Right, New York Socialists Are Still Making Gains," by Liza Featherstone, Jacobin Magazine [September 2022] here.
From time to time the Newsletter prints "mainstream media tutorials," suggesting ways that media biases can be discovered and decoded. Recently the excellent website Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) published "NPR Devotes Almost Two Hours to Afghanistan Over Two Weeks—and 30 Seconds to US Starving Afghans," by Bryce Greene, [September 2, 2022] [Link]. Such "counts" (whether of time or column inches) is a simple but sound way to quantify what a media outlet thinks is important and what is not important. Try it yourself!
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 Rewards for stalwart readers this week are a gentle reply to the Anglo-mania sweeping the world following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. First up is a tender ballad by one of my favorites, Chumbawamba, called "Her Majesty," a cover of a John Lennon song. But what's with Kings and Queens? For the historians among us, here is some documentary footage of early English resistance to the monarchy. Finally, my own views are summed up in a nice song by Billy Bragg, "The World Turned Upside Down." Diggers stand up for glory, stand up now!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
Humanity's Fate Isn't Sealed — If We Act Now
An interview with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin, Truthout [September 8, 2022]
[FB – Chomsky and Pollin regard war, and especially nuclear war, and the climate crisis as the two existential problems threatening human survival. This interview address both of these issues … and a few more.]
[FB – Chomsky and Pollin regard war, and especially nuclear war, and the climate crisis as the two existential problems threatening human survival. This interview address both of these issues … and a few more.]
---- The Ukraine war finds its natural place in this collective madness. One outcome of Putin's criminal aggression and the consequent sanctions regime is to restrict the fossil fuel flow from Russia on which Europe relies, particularly the German-based system that is its economic powerhouse. Economic consequences for Europe are severe, though not for the U.S., which is largely immune; or for that matter for Russia, which at least for now is profiting handsomely from rising oil prices and has many eager customers outside of Europe. Europe is seeking alternative sources of oil and gas, a bonanza for the U.S. fossil fuel industry, rewarded with new markets and expansive drilling opportunities to enable it to destroy life on Earth more effectively. And the military industry could hardly be more ecstatic as the killing and destruction mount. People seem to have a different view. In Germany for example, where 77 percent of the population "believe that the West should initiate negotiations to end the Ukraine war." One can think of other reasons to bring the horrors to a quick end, but the fate of organized human society is surely one. The Ukraine war has reversed the limited efforts to address the mounting crisis of environmental destruction. While it should have accelerated efforts to move rapidly towards sustainable energy, that was not the path chosen by the political leadership. Rather, the choice has been to accelerate the race to the abyss. [Read More]
Sanctions are Destructive, Illegitimate, and Totally Bipartisan
By Jacob Batinga, Current Affairs [September 1, 2022]
---- What right does the United States have to starve civilians to achieve political goals? Despite its obvious importance, this question is largely absent from mainstream discourse. Through economic sanctions, or economic warfare, the U.S. can unilaterally collapse economies and generate famine in foreign countries. The civilian death toll from sanctions is often equal to—and sometimes greater than—the toll from conventional warfare. Yet on both sides of the aisle, it is taken for granted that we have the "right" to impose destitution on civilian populations in order to advance our interests. … Many legal scholars and most of the world, including the European Union, maintain that these secondary sanctions clearly violate well established principles of international law, interfere with the sovereignty of foreign governments, and are ultimately illegitimate. However, due to the threat of being cut off from the American economy and the dollar, nations are often forced to comply, regardless of their legal or moral qualms.
Radical Social Movements As Love Letters: An Interview with Robin D.G. Kelley
By Norman Stockwell, The Progressive [August 22, 2022]
[FB – I think Robin Kelley is one of our most interesting and insightful historians. In this interview, the author revisits his newly expanded influential work 'Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination,' and talks solidarity, reciprocity, and expansive visions of emancipation. The interview starts with this question: In the foreword to the new twentieth-anniversary edition of your book Freedom Dreams, poet Aja Monet writes, "Twenty years later, the truths revealed remain relevant and necessary especially in the thick paralyzing despair of a global pandemic." Where do you see the truths of today?
---- Robin D.G. Kelley: You and I are talking shortly after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, in what looks like the beginning of a rightwing, Christian-fundamentalist-driven agenda. If there's a main lesson in the book, it's that many of these dark moments of repression are actually responses to rebellion, opposition, [and] resistance to other kinds of possibilities. In other words, what we're witnessing now from the Supreme Court is its rightwing turn in response to the opening of democratic possibilities going back to the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In many ways, it's almost as if the right was simply able to outmaneuver a lot of us. They were trying to shut down something. … Something had to happen for them to roll it back. What we're witnessing now is a rollback . . . . [Here] in the United States, no one really could [have] imagined twenty-six million people on the street around the killing of a Black man, who himself was a formerly incarcerated person. That was unimaginable. What I always remind myself, and my students and comrades, is that what's possible now is far more visionary and expansive than what we thought was possible. That's what Freedom Dreams is all about: trying to imagine something beyond that, rather than trying to go back to the status quo. [Read More]
War & Peace
A perpetual war for an impossible peace [Iraq]
By Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera [September 1, 2022]
---- The scenes of violence and chaos at the heart of Iraq's capital Baghdad earlier this week were terribly disturbing but hardly surprising. Tensions have been building throughout this bruised nation over the past year; a formidable nation that has been deformed by war and violence over the past two decades and more, with no end in sight. … The last two decades of imperial, sectarian and civil wars were preceded by two other decades of regional war and violence. It started with the horrific Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the US-led war to liberate it, followed by crippling sanctions throughout the 1990s. This has systematically drained the country's manpower and resources, ruined its economy, torn apart its society and sapped the spirit of its people. It is tiring to merely list these long episodes of war and violence, so you can imagine how incredibly exhausting and dispiriting it must have been for generations of Iraqis to live and die through it. It is as if Iraq and the rest of this ill-fated region are doomed to live in perpetual violence after a century of Western colonial, imperial and proxy wars. The region has not enjoyed a single year, a single day without conflict and violence ever since. [Read More]
The Climate Crisis
Greta Thunberg, 4 Years Later
By Ali Withers, The Nation [September 2022]
---- It was week 211 of the School Strike for Climate. A little over four years ago, Greta Thunberg, then 15, skipped school to protest outside of Parliament ahead of the 2018 Swedish general election, which evolved thereafter into the Fridays for Future movement. The movement gained international traction, with the goal of putting moral pressure on politicians to enact policies that would meet the Paris Agreement on fighting climate change. As Sweden prepares to go to the polls again in an election season dominated by discussions around crime and immigration, tireless teenage climate activists who, over the past years, have formed a dedicated core to push for climate action—and in doing so have formed bonds that help them cope with climate anxiety— are using the Fridays leading up to the election to refocus the national conversation. But they question if politicians are getting the message. "I feel very small and that [the leaders] don't listen to us. They hear us, but they don't listen," says 19-year-old Filippa Paperin, who joined her first strike at age 15. "We don't see any change." In a video posted online last week, Thunberg was bleaker. "If your hope rests on some almost burnt out teenagers doing this after school… well then there's not much hope. We need to build hope, and we do that with people joining the movement." [Read More]
The Case Against Nuclear Power: A Primer
---- If the fact that nuclear power isn't carbon neutral doesn't bother you. If mining on Indigenous lands doesn't bother you. If the trouble with the disposal of radioactive waste doesn't bother you. If nuclear powers' ties to nuclear weapons don't bother you. If the risks of accidents don't bother you, then maybe the cost of nuclear development will give you pause. Nuclear power is very, very expensive, and if we are to believe in the urgency of combating climate change, it cannot be deployed fast enough to replace fossil fuels. The average time it takes to build a new nuclear reactor is about 10-15 years. As of 2020, renewables were the cheapest form of energy in the world and also the quickest to deploy. For the first time, they were competitive with coal, which has always been cheap. Renewables were cheaper than natural gas and far cheaper than nuclear power. Proponents of nuclear power, which often echo the industry itself, will tell us that nuclear is still the best bang for the buck because it can produce so much energy. But even the pro-nuclear lobby admits that without huge government subsidies, nuclear cannot compete with the renewables market. [Read More]
Civil Liberties/"The War on Terror"
The brave new world of the high-tech surveillance state
By Dan Drollette Jr, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [September 8, 2022]
---- This issue of the magazine was inspired by recent events in Russia and in China—two countries where the surveillance state has expanded dramatically in size and capability in a relatively short time. In Russia, this development has been highlighted by Vladimir Putin's recent efforts to take his country back to the bad old days of Stalin's Soviet Union: expelling foreign journalists; shutting down independent domestic magazines, newspapers, and websites; making it a crime to use the word "war" instead of the Kremlin-approved "special military operation;" clamping down on dissent in the streets; and making it so that the Russian public can only see the Kremlin version of events on state-sponsored television (which is often the only easily accessible form of media). [Read More]
Israel/Palestine
(Video) Race, Apartheid, and Settler Colonialism
A talk by Noura Erakat [April 27, 2022]
---- Since 2021, several Israeli and mainstream human rights organizations, have concluded what Palestinians have long known and insisted upon: Israel is an apartheid regime. Despite the welcome, and long-awaited, synergy between them, there remains significant analytical divergence among these organizations and Palestinian activists and scholars. In particular, while the reports emphasize that Israel has become an apartheid regime as a result of its failure to establish a Palestinian state, Palestinians have pointed to Zionist ideology to insist that Israel did not become become a discriminatory regime but is defined by such discrimination. This lecture will explore the implications of this analytical divergence by examining the juridical framework of apartheid embodied in the 1973 Convention consecrating it as a crime against humanity. It will also trace the Palestinian intellectual tradition to highlight that Zionism is not like apartheid but that the ideologies constitute intellectual and political bedfellows. Finally, by visiting the drafting history of UNGA Resolution 3379 (1975) declaring Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination, the lecture will help fill a glaring lacuna in the recent apartheid reports regarding racial theories of Zionism. [See the Program]
Our History
World With No Escape [Victor Serge]
By Mitchell Abidor, Jewish Currents [September 7, 2022]
---- Once all but forgotten even in the French-speaking world outside of small radical circles, Serge is now an international icon of independent, anti-Stalinist leftism. Though Memoirs of a Revolutionary, an account of his life from his beginnings in Belgium to his final home in Mexico City, has become his best-known book, it was his fiction that Serge valued most highly. Their guiding ethos is perhaps best captured by a title Serge used for a chapter of his memoirs: "World With No Escape Possible." His novels repeatedly trace the collapse of hopes and societies, from the disabused vision of revolutionary Russia in Conquered City (1932) to the rise of Stalinism in The Case of Comrade Tulayev (published posthumously in 1948). Last Times—his final book, written in exile in Mexico City—takes place against the backdrop of France's military, political, and moral debacle in the face of the German invasion and occupation in June 1940. [Read More]
