Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
November 13, 2022
Hello All – The optimists' verdict on this week's congressional elections is that it could have been worse, or even that we should be heartened by the relative success of progressive candidates. Nevertheless, we can't escape the conclusion that it will be another two years of hard slogging in Congress, most likely achieving little. For us in New York, we will wear the scarlet letter for our failure to prevent the loss of four congressional seats, perhaps tipping the balance that will give control of the House to the Republicans. We can only welcome some serious thinking about why and how to oust the deadbeats who run and ruin the state Democratic Party. To get started, check out what our Rep. Jamaal Bowman had to say Friday on Aljazeera.
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 are a gift to us from The Chicks. (Special thanks to JS.) First up is their powerful "March. March." And for Armistice Day, here is their classic, "Travelin' Soldier." Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
The United States, China, and Great Power Competition in the Middle East
By Chas Freeman, former US Ambassador [November 9, 2022]
---- It's official. The Biden administration agrees with the Trump administration that almost everything that happens in world affairs can be explained by two interlocking zero-sum contests. One is geopolitical, as in 'great power rivalry.' The other is ideological, as in 'democracy vs. authoritarianism.' … But to a remarkable degree, the situation in the contemporary Middle East refutes Washington's current foreign policy dogma. Very little that now occurs in the region can be explained by either great power rivalry or ideological contests between democracy and. authoritarianism. The great powers, notably including the United States, have lost their grip on the place. And no one is trying to impose new systems of governance on it anymore. [Read More]
---- It's official. The Biden administration agrees with the Trump administration that almost everything that happens in world affairs can be explained by two interlocking zero-sum contests. One is geopolitical, as in 'great power rivalry.' The other is ideological, as in 'democracy vs. authoritarianism.' … But to a remarkable degree, the situation in the contemporary Middle East refutes Washington's current foreign policy dogma. Very little that now occurs in the region can be explained by either great power rivalry or ideological contests between democracy and. authoritarianism. The great powers, notably including the United States, have lost their grip on the place. And no one is trying to impose new systems of governance on it anymore. [Read More]
(Video) The Story of Baby O: The Supreme Court Case That Could Gut Native Sovereignty
From Democracy Now! [November 10, 2022]
---- The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in Haaland v. Brackeen, a case challenging the Indian Child Welfare Act and ultimately threatening the legal foundations of federal Indian law. ICWA was created in 1978 to address the systemic crisis of family separation in Native communities waged by the U.S. and requires the government to ensure foster children are adopted by members of their Indigenous tribes, as well as blood relatives, before being adopted by non-Indigenous parents. Now right-wing groups are supporting white foster parents to challenge the law as discriminatory. "Not only are our children on the line, but the legal foundation, the legal structure that defends the rights of Indigenous nations in the United States is literally at stake," says journalist Rebecca Nagle, who has been reporting on the case for years and says it's likely the Supreme Court will strike ICWA down. [See the Program]. Nagle expands on these remarks in "The Story of Baby O—and the Case That Could Gut Native Sovereignty," The Nation [November 9, 2022] [Link].
Imagining a Memorial to an Unimaginable Number of Covid Deaths
---- One day, probably in the not-too-distant future, somebody will propose, and somebody else will design and somebody else will build, an official memorial to Americans lost to Covid-19 — 1,055,000 as I write this in early October, more than perished in any war in U.S. history. And it is easy to imagine that that memorial will be built in New York City, where so many of the country's most shattering losses occurred in the pandemic's initial months in 2020. But it is harder to imagine what such a memorial will, or should, look like — perhaps because memorials, while they are locations for collective remembrance and mourning, also carry within them a kind of reassurance: That happened. We lived through it. …. But perhaps the most moving tribute is one of the earliest, the AIDS Memorial Quilt — honored last month on its 35th anniversary in a series of artist-led panel-making workshops at the Whitney Museum of American Art, organized by the New York and National AIDS Memorials and the Manhattan-based fabric company Maharam. The quilt — now spanning more than 1.2 million square feet and containing over 50,000 panels — is a collective work of art fashioned from individual expressions of grief. It embraces all the contradictions of memorial art and draws its power from them. [Read More]
The War in Ukraine – Is It Time for Negotiations?
Top U.S. General Urges Diplomacy in Ukraine While Biden Advisers Resist
---- A disagreement has emerged at the highest levels of the United States government over whether to press Ukraine to seek a diplomatic end to its war with Russia, with America's top general urging negotiations while other advisers to President Biden argue that it is too soon. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has made the case in internal meetings that the Ukrainians have achieved about as much as they could reasonably expect on the battlefield before winter sets in and so they should try to cement their gains at the bargaining table, according to officials informed about the discussions. But other senior officials have resisted the idea, maintaining that neither side is ready to negotiate and that any pause in the fighting would only give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a chance to regroup. While Mr. Biden's advisers believe the war will likely be settled through negotiations eventually, officials said, they have concluded that the moment is not ripe and the United States should not be seen as pressuring the Ukrainians to hold back while they have momentum. [Read More] For an assessment of these developments, read "'Seize the Moment': Gen. Milley Sees Opportunity for Peace Talks Between Russia and Ukraine," by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com [November 10, 2022] [Link].
When Peace Had a Chance in Ukraine
[FB] - A new book by Benjamim and Davies - War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict - revisits the short life of the Minsk II agreement (2015). The following is excerpted from the book.
---- The Minsk II agreement, signed in February 2015, brought the worst fighting of the civil war in eastern Ukraine to an end. While the Ukrainian military cooperated in the cease-fire and the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the buffer zone, efforts by the Ukrainian government to move forward with the political aspects of the agreement, including arranging internationally monitored elections in the breakaway Donbas republics (DPR and LPR) and creating new laws granting them autonomy, quickly ran into domestic and international headwinds. The official position of the United States was always that it supported the Minsk II agreement. Its public statements blamed Russia for its failed implementation and highlighted cease-fire violations rather than the more critical problems with the political aspects of the agreement. But the United States also consistently acted as a "spoiler," a role that conflict resolution experts often observe outside powers playing in the failure of such peace agreements, by quietly incentivizing and supporting its proxy, in this case the Ukrainian government, to pursue military alternatives to the agreed-upon political resolution. [Read More]
Senior White House Official Involved in Undisclosed Talks with Top Putin Aides
By Vivian Salama, Wall St. Journal [November 6, 2022]
---- President Biden's top national-security adviser has engaged in recent months in confidential conversations with top aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in an effort to reduce the risk of a broader conflict over Ukraine and warn Moscow against using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, U.S. and allied officials said. The officials said that U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan has been in contact with Yuri Ushakov, a foreign-policy adviser to Mr. Putin. Mr. Sullivan also has spoken with his direct counterpart in the Russian government, Nikolai Patrushev, the officials added. The aim has been to guard against the risk of escalation and keep communications channels open, and not to discuss a settlement of the war in Ukraine, the officials said. [Read More] For an assessment of this report, read "Jake Sullivan Has Held Undisclosed Talks With Putin Aides," b[Link].
Exiled Russian Activist Challenges Pacifist Approach to Ending War on Ukraine
By Ashley Smith, Truthout [November 13, 2022]
---- In an exclusive for Truthout, Ashley Smith interviews Lolja Nordic from the Russian activist organization Feminist Antiwar Resistance about the movement against Putin's regime and its imperialist invasion of Ukraine. Lolja Nordic is anarcho ecofeminist, antiwar activist and artist from Saint Petersburg, where until recently she organized for gender equality, human rights and climate justice. She is a co-coordinator of Feminist Anti-War Resistance, a group created in February 2022 to protest the war in Ukraine. Since January 2021 Lolja has been facing political repression, arrest and threats for her activism. In March 2022 she had to flee Russia and continue her work in exile after becoming a suspect in a "phone terrorism" criminal case, which was fabricated by the Russian secret police to put pressure on several antiwar activists. … It is absurd to demand that an occupied country stop fighting for its liberation and essentially give up its land for peace. It's the same as telling a victim of violence to not resist a person who tries to abuse, rape or murder them. Why would we tell that to Ukrainians? Our task is to stop the aggressor. That means first and foremost building solidarity with Ukraine and its people. They have been screaming for help for months. They don't have enough weapons to fight against Russian aggression. They don't have defensive weapons to protect their citizens from missile attacks. They deserve all the military and financial help to liberate their country. Instead of putting demands on Ukraine to stop fighting, we should be focused on doing all we can to weaken Russia's war machine. [Read More]
More War & Peace
The Intolerable Price You Pay: A Civilian Addresses American Veterans on Veterans Day
By Kelly Denton-Borhaug, Tomdispatch [November 11, 2022]
[FB] - Denton-Borhaug gave a version of this talk to Veterans for Peace Chapter 102 at a Reclaim Armistice Day meeting at the Milwaukee City Hall Rotunda this Veteran's Day.
---- Dear Veterans, As Americans, all of us are, in some sense, linked to the violence of war. But most of us have very little understanding of what it means to be touched by war. Still, since the events of September 11, 2001, as a scholar of religion, I've been trying to understand what I've come to call "U.S. war-culture." For it was in the months after those terrible attacks more than 20 years ago that I awoke to the depth of our culture of war and our society's pervasive militarization. Eventually, I saw how important truths about our country were concealed when we made the violence of war into something sacred. And most important of all, while trying to come to grips with this dissonant reality, I started listening to you, the veterans of our recent wars, and simply couldn't stop. … Such complexities involving alternatives to Washington's war-making urges are, of course, not part of the national conversation on Veterans Day. Instead, we are promised that war and this country's warriors will somehow redeem us as a nation. … But to convert war-making into something sacred means fashioning a deceitful myth. Violence is not a harmless tool. It's not a coat that a person wears and takes off without consequences. Violence instead brutalizes human beings to their core; chains people to the forces of dehumanization; and, over time, eats away at you like acid dripping into your very soul. That same dehumanization also undermines democracy, something you would never know from the way the United States glorifies its wars as foundational to what it means to be an American. [Read More] Also of interest is "The Other Way of Celebrating Armistice Day: Soldiers and Vets for Peace," b[Link].
We Need to Break the Wall of Indifference Around the War in Yemen
By Laurent Bonnefoy, Jacobin Magazine [November 2022]
[FB] – This is a review of Helen Lackner, Yemen: Poverty and Conflict.
---- Western states and arms companies have facilitated a destructive war in Yemen that's already claimed 400,000 lives. A six-month truce recently ended without agreement on a peace deal — ending this horrific conflict must now be an international priority. Interest in the war that has been ongoing in Yemen since 2015 has been persistently limited, whether among diplomats, the media, or the general public. This is surprising when one thinks of the war's wider ramifications across the Middle East. Those consequences have included Iranian encroachment in Yemen through Tehran's support for a rebel group, the Houthis, and daily air bombardments by a foreign power, Saudi Arabia, with the assistance of other states — first and foremost the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — and armed by Western military companies. This indifference is even more puzzling when one takes into consideration the multiple violations of international law that have occurred in Yemen and the immense humanitarian tragedy that the conflict has produced. According to UN figures, the war has claimed four hundred thousand victims, directly or indirectly, yet it remains largely under the radar in the West as well as in Arab countries. … Much like the United States in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, or France in Algeria and the Sahel region, Saudi Arabia has proved incapable of accomplishing a mission that seemed feasible on paper. The imbalance between the Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition in terms of military equipment, funding, and control of airspace has not enabled the latter to achieve anything more tangible than the destruction of human lives and infrastructure. [Read More]
For more on War & Peace – "The US military is operating in more countries than we think," by Jim Lobe, Responsible Statecraft [November 8, 2022] [Link]; and "The 2022 Nuclear Posture Review: Arms Control Subdued By Military Rivalry," by Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda, Arms Control Association [October 27, 2022] [Link].
The Climate Crisis
Grim outlook on global warming emerges from UN conference
By Anatol Lieven, Responsible Statecraft [November 9, 2022]
---- The 27th United Nations conference on climate change, or COP27, meeting in Egypt, has seen two realities take hold among delegates: The goal of keeping the overall rise of global temperatures below 1.5 degrees by 2100 has almost certainly been lost; for preventing this requires cuts in emissions of 45 percent by 2030 — hardly a feasible prospect. The second recognition is that whatever we now do, some very unpleasant consequences of climate change are not just inevitable, but are already happening. The result has been a new emphasis at COP27 on the need to build resilience against the effects of climate change in especially vulnerable regions. These growing disasters pose severe challenges for all states. For the United States and Europe, the biggest is the consequences for mass migration, which has already reached record levels this year. … The UN has warned that a combination of climate change and the war in Ukraine is putting an additional 45 million people around the world at risk of starvation. The largest concentrations are in Africa, including the Sahel, where the impact of drought combines with local civil wars. Apart from the humanitarian consequences, this has led to concern about radically increased political instability, and an enormous surge in migration. [Read More] Also of interest is (Video) "Alaa Abd El-Fattah's Sister Speaks Out at U.N. Climate Summit as Pressure Grows on Egypt to Free Him," from Democracy Now! [November 8, 2022] [Link].
The State of the Union
Extremists in Uniform Put the Nation at Risk
Editorial, New York Times [November 13, 2022]
---- There has been a steady rise in political violence in the United States — from harassment of election workers and public officials to the targeting of a Supreme Court justice to an attack on the husband of the speaker of the House of Representatives and, of course, the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. An alarming number of Americans say that political violence is usually or always justified, and this greater tolerance for violence is a direct threat to democratic governance. … One of the most troubling facts about adherents of extremist movements is that veterans, active-duty military personnel and members of law enforcement are overrepresented. One estimate, published in The Times in 2020, found that at least 25 percent of members of extremist paramilitary groups have a military background. Still, only a tiny number of veterans or members of the active-duty military or law enforcement will ever join an extremist group. Their overrepresentation is partly due to extremist groups focusing on recruiting from these populations because of their skills. But the presence of these elements within the ranks of law enforcement is cause for extra concern. Of the more than 900 people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 attacks, 135 had military or law enforcement backgrounds. [Read More]
Israel/Palestine
Extreme Right in Netanyahu's Government Won't Dent Western Support
November 8, 2022]
---- The most disturbing outcome of Israel's general election this week was not the fact that an openly fascist party won the third-biggest tally of seats, or that it is about to become the lynchpin of the next government. It is how little will change, in Israel or abroad, as a result. Having Religious Zionism at the heart of government will alter the tone in which Israeli politics is conducted, making it even coarser, more thuggish and uncompromising. But it will make no difference to the ethnic supremacism that has driven Israeli policy for decades. Israel is not suddenly a more racist state. It is simply growing more confident about admitting its racism to the world. And the world – or at least the bit of it that arrogantly describes itself as the international community – is about to confirm that such confidence is well-founded. Indeed, the West's attitude towards Israel's next coalition government will be no different from its attitude towards the supposedly less-tainted ones that preceded it. [Read More] Also of interest is "Israel's Far-Right Turn Is Nothing New," by Mairav Zonszein, International Crisis Group [Link].
Our History
[FB] – Arguably, the war in Ukraine is the outcome of 30 years of failed negotiations, and/or 30 years of the failure to negotiate. I think of the classic ballet that I saw 50 years ago (h/t RM), and share it with you here.
The Green Table by Kurt Jooss
Dutch National Ballet
---- The German choreographer Kurt Jooss created the ballet The Green Table in 1932, but its choreography still moves and engages audiences to this day. Jooss' initial inspiration for this magnum opus was the medieval Danse Macabre, but events in 1930s Germany soon transformed this work into an indictment against abuses of power – stressing the futility of war. We see the 'big shots' at a conference table, deciding the fate of soldiers and civilians; while – at the opposite end of the spectrum – the victims of war come together in a silent circle dance, led by a triumphant death. [See an introduction from the Dutch National Ballet]. To see the full half-hour ballet, by the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, go here.
