Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
June 25, 2023
Hello All – It is too soon to assess the impact of yesterday's military revolt of Russia's Wagner group. The "March on Moscow" was abruptly canceled and the group's leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has accepted exile in Belarus as an alternative to harsher measures. It looks like the Wagner group – an international mercenary force involving tens of thousands of soldiers – may be disbanded, causing a withdrawal of an unknown number of Russian fighters from the Ukrainian front lines. The roots of the revolt, what it reveals about the Russian political and military elite, the stability of the Putin regime, and the possibilities for near-term peace talks will be part of what we will learn in the coming weeks.
Prior to Saturday's revolt, the framing of the military situation in Ukraine focused on the apparent failure of the initial stages of Ukraine's long-awaited "counter-offensive" to regain territory seized by Russia since 2014. The counter-offensive was led by NATO-trained brigades of fresh Ukrainian soldiers, and outfitted with upgraded NATO military equipment, such as German tanks and US fighting vehicles. Nevertheless, the offensive so far has resulted in the deaths of many Ukrainian fighters and much loss of equipment, with only meager result to show for this effort. Whether this is a harbinger of things to come, or reflects only initial "probing efforts" as NATO maintains, remains to be seen.
Not in doubt, however, is the need for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations. Even beyond the destruction and disasters inflicted by the war so far to Ukraine, the war is spinning out of control, while causing immense collateral damage. The US position currently rejects a ceasefire. We must work to change this.
Some Useful Reading on the Ukraine War – The "Counter-offensive" Moment
The Silent Slaughter of the Flower of Ukraine's Youth
By
---- As Ukraine prepared to launch its much heralded but long delayed counteroffensive, the media published a photograph of a Ukrainian soldier with his finger on his lips, symbolizing the need for secrecy to retain some element of surprise for this widely telegraphed operation. Now that the offensive has been under way for two weeks, it is clear that the Ukrainian government and its Western allies are maintaining silence for quite a different reason: to conceal the brutal cost Ukraine's brave young people are paying to recover small scraps of territory from Russian occupation forces, in what some are already calling a suicide mission. Western pundits at first described these first two weeks of fighting as "probing operations" to find weak spots in Russia's defenses, which Russia has been fortifying since 2022 with multiple layers of minefields, "dragon's teeth," tank-traps, pre-positioned artillery, and attack helicopters, unopposed in the air, that can fire 12 anti-tank missiles apiece. [Read More]
Rampant Russophobia takes us down a dangerous path
Anatol Lieven and George Beebe, Responsible Statecraft [June 21, 2023]
---- A deeply sinister and dangerous tendency has made its appearance in Western writing about the war in Ukraine. This is the extension of hatred for the Putin regime and its crimes to the entire Russian people, the Russian national tradition, and Russian culture. This tendency is of course bitterly familiar from the history of hostile propaganda, but precisely for that reason we should have learned to shun it. The banning of Russian cultural events and calls for the "decolonization" of Russian literature and Russian studies recall the propaganda of all sides during the First World War, which did so much to embitter that war and make its peaceful resolution all but impossible. … Demonization of this sort is morally wrong in itself; it is generally intellectually wrong in its details; it is incompatible with liberal internationalism; it betrays pluralist democracy in Ukraine; it is disastrous for the future peace of Europe; it fuels the paranoia and violent self-righteous extremism that has done so much damage to U.S. policy over the years; and, by helping to block moves towards a reasonable settlement of the conflict, it increases the dangers to the United States, Europe, the world, and Ukraine itself that stem from a continuation of the war. [Read More]
Also of Interest – "The CIA's New Nord Stream Narrative Is Terrifying," by Jeet Heer, The Nation [June 20, 2023] [Link]; "The Western Media Is Whitewashing the Azov Battalion," by Lev Golinkin, The Nation [June 13, 2023] [Link]; and "Negotiate for Peace in Ukraine," by H. Patricia Hynes, Informed Comment [June 23, 2023] [Link].
The Indian Point Crisis (Continued…)
On Tuesday, the "special session" of the NYS Legislature (at long last) brought legislation to a vote that establish fines for dumping radioactive water into the Hudson River. The bill passed, more or less along party lines, and will now be sent to Gov. Huchul for her signature – or veto. Although, imo, the bill is disappointing in establishing only modest fines, rather than criminal penalties, for radioactive dumping, this is the protection we now have to protect the Hudson. Please call Gov. Hochul at 866-696-8249 and urge her to sign the Save the Hudson Bill. Thanks.
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 in Yonkers on Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. 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 join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. 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 features the fabulous Resistance Revival Chorus. They have many great songs on-line. My picks for this week are "Ella's Song," "My Joy," and "All You Fascists Bound to Lose." Be inspired!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
A Titanic Disparity in How the World Responds to Maritime Disasters
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan, Democracy Now! [June 22, 2023]
---- Titan and Adriana are two vessels recently lost at sea, four days and 4,000 miles apart. The five men who lost their lives on the Titan have been getting wall-to-wall coverage in the media worldwide. Meanwhile, the estimated 700 who died when the Adriana sank off the coast of Greece, mostly women and children, have been essentially forgotten. Passengers on the Titan were wealthy; two were billionaires. Each had paid $250,000 for an adventure of a lifetime, a deepsea dive to view the wreckage of the Titanic, the "unsinkable" passenger liner that sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg. Those crammed onto the ramshackle Adriana fishing boat were seeking not adventure but refuge from war, poverty, climate change or any of the many other life-threatening crises that force people to flee their homes with little more than the clothes on their back. They paid human traffickers to ferry them from Libya to Europe. Perhaps the most notable difference between these two disasters was how the world responded to them. [Read More] On June 20th, World Refugee Day ("Hope Away from Home"), Kathy Kelly wrote a thoughtful essay, "The Right to Seek Safety" [Link].
Cormac McCarthy's Unforgiving Parables of American Empire
By Greg Grandin, The Nation [June 21, 2023]
---- Blood Meridian, McCarthy's magnum opus, is arguably a Moby-Dick turned inside out. Three words, terse imperatives, open both novels: "Call me Ishmael"; "See the child." And then one is plunged into an abyss of run-on sentences of compounding beauty. Of the two, McCarthy was the more exacting when it came to his prose. His writing is more tightly wound even when he's letting his sentences and paragraphs unspool. Both novels, devoid of women (except for a few background prostitutes in Blood Meridian), tell of men hunting: a white whale in Melville's book and Native Americans to scalp and kill in McCarthy's. … McCarthy demonstrated how the frontier wasn't an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering. He rubbed away the veneer of Manifest Destiny, revealing US nationalism and empire to be nothing but the right of conquest updated for the democratic age. Let's admire the wonder of his writing, even though to my ear it often sounded strained, its artifice apparent, unlike the manic, ramshackle Melville, who really did seem to be handpicked by the gods of old—by Milton, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, and others—to speak for them. McCarthy, though, knew how to name what has been, or will soon be, lost. [Read More]
And Who Is Supposed to Protect the Palestinians?
By Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz [Israel] [June 25, 2023]
---- There aren't many populations in the world as helpless as the Palestinians who live in their own country. No one protects their lives and property, let alone their dignity, and no one intends to do so. They are totally abandoned to their fates, as is their property. Their houses and cars can be torched, their fields set on fire. It's all right to shoot them mercilessly, killing old people and babies, with no defense forces at their side. No police, no military: no one. If some such desperate defense force is organized, it's immediately criminalized by Israel. Its fighters are labeled "terrorists," their actions "terror attacks," and their fates sealed, with death or prison the only options. Amid the utter chaos created by the occupation, the ban on Palestinians defending themselves is one of the craziest rules; it's an accepted norm that isn't even discussed. Why aren't the Palestinians allowed to defend themselves? Who exactly is supposed to do it for them? Why, when talking about "security," it's only about Israel's security? Palestinians have more victims of assaults, bloodshed, pogroms, and violence – and no defensive tools at their disposal. Over three days last week, 35 pogroms have been carried out by settlers. Since the beginning of the year, around 160 Palestinians have been killed by soldiers, the vast majority of them unnecessarily and most of them criminally. From baby Mohammed Tamimi to the elderly Omar As'ad, Palestinians have been killed for no reason. [To read more, paste this link - https://archive.ph/86yLE – into your browser.]
India's Prime Minister Comes Calling
[FB – Last week India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived for a State Visit. He was given a lavish welcome; and though the US State Department had issued a damning report last May about India's human rights record and the state terror directed against its Muslim citizens, eight weeks later all was forgiven. The reasons for the US about-face are explained in an excellent segment from Democracy Now!; for additional background, read "The US Rolls Out the Red Carpet for Modi," Jewish Currents [Link]. Below, we have another magnificent essay by Arundhati Roy.]
India: The Place I Love, the Place I Know and Live In, the Place That Breaks My Heart Every Day. And Mends It, Too
Arundhati Roy March 27, 2023
[FB - The following is from speech given at the Swedish Academy on March 22, 2023, at a conference called "Thought and Truth Under Pressure."]
---- I thank the Swedish Academy for inviting me to speak at this conference and for affording me the privilege of listening to the other speakers. It was planned more than two years ago, before the coronavirus pandemic unleashed the full scale of the horror it had in store for us and before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But those two cataclysmic events have only intensified the predicament that we have gathered here to think about—the phenomenon of democracies transmuting into something unrecognizable but with unnervingly recognizable resonances. And the escalating policing of speech in ways that are very old, as well as very new, to the point where the air itself has turned into a sort of punitive heresy-hunting machine. We seem to be fast approaching what feels like intellectual gridlock. … When I speak of failing democracy, I will speak mainly about India, not because it is known as the world's largest democracy, but because it is the place I love, the place I know and live in, the place that breaks my heart every day. And mends it, too. Remember what I say is not a call for help, because we in India know very well that no help will come. No help can come. I speak to tell you about a country that, although flawed, was once so full of singular possibilities, one that offered a radically different understanding of the meaning of happiness, fulfillment, tolerance, diversity and sustainability than that of the western world. All that is being extinguished, spiritually stubbed out. [Read More]
The Climate Crisis
A week of highs: Where climate change made heat worse in America
By John Muyskens, et al., Washington Post [June 23, 2023]
---- Last week, 96 percent of people in the contiguous United States experienced nighttime temperatures more likely to occur due to human-caused warming. The findings come from a Washington Post analysis of data provided by the nonprofit Climate Central, which released the world's first tool to show how climate change is affecting daily temperatures in real time. Overnight temperatures, as opposed to daytime temperatures, were boosted the most by climate change. While more and more people are increasingly exposed to warmer nighttime temperatures, which are potentially more dangerous to the body, last week's number stands out. [Read More]
Civil Liberties
The Imminent Extradition of Julian Assange and the Death of Journalism
By
---- High Court Judge Jonathan Swift rejected two applications by Julian Assange's lawyers to appeal his extradition last week. The extradition order was signed last June by Home Secretary Priti Patel. Julian's legal team have filed a final application for appeal, the last option available in the British courts. If accepted, the case could proceed to a public hearing in front of two new High Court judges. If rejected, Julian could be immediately extradited to the United States where he will stand trial for 18 counts of violating the Espionage Act, charges that could see him receive a 175-year sentence, as early as this week. … Julian, once shipped to the U.S., would be put on trial in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia where most espionage cases have been won by the U.S. government. [Read More]
The State of the Union
Life on the Abortion Borderland
By Amy Littlefield, The Nation [June 23, 2023]
---- One day each week, the Rev. Erika Ferguson puts on leggings and a sweatshirt, pulls her hair back under a baseball cap, and heads to a North Texas airport to meet a group of people who need abortions. She shepherds the strangers through security and onto a short flight to Albuquerque, N.M. The women Ferguson has accompanied represent a cross section of Texans—Black, Latina, Asian, and white. There have been rape victims and teenagers. There have been moms with teenage children at home. "I've taken women from all walks of life, from all ages," Ferguson told me. She calls the airlifts, which are coordinated by the Albuquerque-based New Mexico Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (NM RCRC), the "Tubman Travel Project." The journeys made by people fleeing abortion bans remind her of those taken by enslaved people fleeing to free states. [Read More]
Israel/Palestine
(Video) From Drone Strikes to Settler Attacks, Israel Intensifies Effort to "Completely Take Over Palestine"
From Democracy Now! [June 23, 2023]
---- This week, Israel has launched several attacks on Palestinians with weapons used in the conflict for the first time in nearly 20 years, including deploying U.S.-made Apache helicopter gunships inside the West Bank and firing a targeted assassination aerial strike. Jewish settlers have also raided Palestinian villages in the West Bank, attacking residents and setting fire to homes and vehicles. Mariam Barghouti, senior Palestine correspondent for Mondoweiss, calls the attacks "an intensification to completely take over Palestine." She adds that the growing violence is reflective of the leadership of Israel's minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who recently called for the renewing of Defensive Shield, a military operation which used similar weaponry in 2002 that has been condemned for "crimes against humanity." This all comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government has agreed to accelerate the process for approving new settlements in the West Bank despite criticism from the United Nations, European Union and United States. [Read More] For additional information, read "West Bank Dispatch: Israeli campaign to quell Jenin resistance reaches new heights," from Mondoweiss [June 19, 2023] [Link]
(Video) "The Palestine Laboratory": How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation
From Democracy Now! [June 23, 2023]
---- We speak with journalist and author Antony Loewenstein about his new book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. Loewenstein explains that Israel's military-industrial complex has used the Occupied Palestinian Territories for decades as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that it then exports around the world for profit. "You find in over 130 countries across the globe in the last decades, Israel has sold … a range of tools of occupation and repression that have initially been tested in Palestine on Palestinians," Loewenstein says. [See the Program] For more, read "How Israeli Spyware Endangers Activists Across the Globe," by Antony Loewenstein, In These Times [June 13, 2023] [Link].
Our History
Be like the Silkworm [Marx's literary style]
By Terry Eagleton, London Review of Book [June 29, 2023]
[FB – This is a review of Marx's Literary Style by Ludovico Silva. Throughout his political and economic writings, Marx frequently refers to classics of Western literature to illustrate his points. I found this essay interesting and hope you do also.]
---- Marx is one of the sources of what we now call cultural studies: the single work of fiction to which he devoted most space was the bestselling sensationalist novel The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue. He was also one of the first exponents of the historical study of literature. He championed what he called 'the present splendid brotherhood of fiction writers in England', among them Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell and the Brontë sisters, claiming that they revealed more social and political truths than all the moralists and politicians put together; but like his collaborator and financial backer Friedrich Engels he was wary of literary works that had political designs on the reader. He used the term 'literature' to cover all writing of high quality, yet he scorned those who confused the kind of truth appropriate to poetry and fiction with other modes of knowledge. To demand a philosophical system from poets and novelists struck him as absurd. Truth for a writer was not abstract and invariable but unique and specific. [To read more, paste this link - https://archive.ph/R9Hji – into your browser.]
The Illustrated W. E. B. DuBois
June 23, 2023
---- The first graphic novels were often dismissed as mere comic books by critics and other entities that consider themselves the guardians of the publishing world. … No longer are these book length works considered as little more than big comic books. Also true is that more than fiction is being composed and published in this expanding format. Writer, publisher, and editor Paul Buhle has been editing books of graphic nonfiction for over twenty years. Before that, he occasionally worked with underground comic artists, most notably when he was part of the collective that published the late 1960s-early 1970s Radical America magazine. … His most recent collaborative work—a graphic presentation of WEB Dubois' The Souls of Black Folk—is a masterpiece. It breathes a life into one of world literature's most important texts unlike any other previous version. As so many similar works have already done, this edition of a classic introduces it to a new audience. [Read More]
