No newsletter next week; vacation!
Two blocks east of my building on Main St. in Hastings, Ted and Nune have a gallery that displays their magnificent photos of Armenian churches and castles, the remains of the once-flourishing Armenia civilization stretching back more than a thousand years. Concentrated in eastern Turkey, but spread throughout Turkey and parts of Russia and Persia, the Armenian people were nearly wiped out in the genocide of 1915, as the “Young Turks” then in power tortured and killed thousands and marched the rest into the Syrian desert to die of disease and starvation. The mission of Ted and Nune is to preserve through photography what remains of Armenia’s material culture. It is in part a race against time, as the Turkish government neglects and even continues to destroy crumbling Armenian structures.
It is impossible to read about the Armenian genocide of 1915 without feeling that you are reading about today’s events in Gaza. The killing, not sparing women and children; the official hatred for ‘the other”; the struggle to hang on to land scheduled for “settlement” by the Master Race; the targeting of cultural institutions and murder of teachers and intellectuals. Chronicling the war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza has become simply repetitive; who among those who could do something listens or cares? This week Human Rights Watch published its lengthy report on “Israel’s Crime of Extermination, Acts of Genocide in Gaza.” [Link]. Just as in Armenia in 1915, the world is well aware of what is happening, as today we watch the genocide live-streamed. There is no excuse for “not knowing” and thousands of cries go up to feed people, to save people on the verge of death, to end the killing. Yet the “leaders of the free world” wring their hands and claim impotence. Of the genocide in Armenia, Hitler told his generals, “Who now remembers it?” What will the future say about Gaza?
SOME ESSAYS EXTENDING THE THOUGHTS ABOVE
Are the Gaza ceasefire rumors finally real this time?
By Mitchell Plitnick, Mondoweiss [December 20, 2024]
---- Talks for an end to the genocide in Gaza, which Western and Israeli media refer to as a “hostage deal,” have heated up to an unprecedented degree in recent days. The question is, how genuine an opportunity is this? … Some things about this round are new, however. For one thing, it is not the Americans who are eagerly discussing the possibility of a deal, as has usually been the case. This time, Hamas has been the one saying that a deal is very close. The reason for Hamas being public about this is straightforward: there simply isn’t much reason for them to keep fighting anymore. Gaza has been destroyed. Iran and Hezbollah have been beaten back. For this reason, Hamas has not only been public about its hopes for an agreement with Israel, but it has conceded on some of the most important points in the hopes of raising public pressure on the Netanyahu government to accept the group’s concessions. [Read More] FOR AN UPDATE, READ “Report: Hamas Agrees to Release 11 Young Men in First Phase of Hostage Deal With Israel,” by Jack Khoury, et al., Haaretz [Israel] [December 22, 2024] [Link].
(Video) “Extermination & Acts of Genocide”: Human Rights Watch on Israel Deliberately Depriving Gaza of Water
From Democracy Now! [December 19, 2024]
---- Human Rights Watch is accusing Israel of committing acts of extermination and genocide by deliberately restricting safe water for drinking and sanitation to the Gaza Strip. The report details how Israel has cut off water and blocked fuel, food and humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip, and deliberately destroyed or damaged water and sanitation infrastructure and water repair materials. We speak to one of the report’s editors, Bill Van Esveld, the acting Israel and Palestine associate director at Human Rights Watch, who describes “a clear state policy of depriving people in Gaza of water,” that HRW is, for the first time in the current Israeli assault on Gaza, characterizing as a genocidal act. [See the Program]
NEWS NOTES
The collapse of the Assad government has energized a half-dozen states to take military action to hold or improve their control of parts of Syria. Code Pink has put up a good petition calling on the Biden administration to end sanctions against Syria, stop their bombing. and pull its 2,000 troops out of Syria. You can see & sign Code Pink’s petition here..
The backdrop of Israel’s wars on Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria includes the stark fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu has been indicted for corruption and other assorted crimes, and his prosecution and likely sentencing is on hold only as long as he is Prime Minister. Yet Netanyahu’s coalition is held together only as long as he continues his wars; and an end to the wars and his coalition would likely mean the end of his immunity from prosecution and possible jail time. On Democracy Now! the week, guest and filmmaker Alex Gibney untangles some of these threads in discussing his new film, “The Bibi Files.” [See the Program]
The attack at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis., on Monday was the 323rd shooting at elementary or secondary schools this year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. At least 267 people were injured or killed in school shootings this year, according to the database. That number was a slight increase from last year when 249 people were fatally shot or wounded — and a significant rise from a decade ago when 49 people were shot at schools. To read more about this from the School Shooting Database, go 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.) 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 make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
REWARDS!
Our newsletter’s traditional Reward for Christmas week is John McCutcheon’s rendition of the antiwar song "Christmas in the Trenches." The song memorializes the too-little-known spontaneous truce between German and British soldiers that happened in 1914, when the war “that would be over by Christmas” had already killed more than one million soldiers. Many of the CFOW team heard McCutcheon perform this song in NYC a decade ago. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ESSAYS & ARTICLES
Trump Confronts a Rising China: Can He Manage U.S.-China Relations Without Precipitating World War III?
By Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch [December 18, 2024]
---- Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela: President-elect Donald Trump will face no shortage of foreign-policy challenges when he assumes office in January. None, however, comes close to China in scope, scale, or complexity. No other country has the capacity to resist his predictable antagonism with the same degree of strength and tenacity, and none arouses more hostility and outrage among MAGA Republicans. In short, China is guaranteed to put President Trump in a difficult bind the second time around: he can either choose to cut deals with Beijing and risk being branded an appeaser by the China hawks in his party, or he can punish and further encircle Beijing, risking a potentially violent clash and possibly even nuclear escalation. How he chooses to resolve this quandary will surely prove the most important foreign test of his second term in office. [Read More]
The International Court of Justice Takes On Climate Change
By Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker [December 2024]
---- Thanks to the maneuverings of Vanuatu, the entire industrialized world effectively went on trial this month in The Hague. The case, before the fifteen-member International Court of Justice, is about climate change. Do countries have a legal as well as a moral obligation to prevent a planetary disaster? And, if they violate those obligations, what should the consequences be? Roughly ninety countries submitted written testimony in the case, and a similar number sent representatives to the Netherlands to make oral arguments. The proceedings have been called “landmark,” “historic,” “momentous,” and a “watershed moment.” … At this point, only action at an unprecedented pace and scale can prevent the world from warming by a disastrous 2 degrees Celsius, and, under current policies, the temperature increase could easily exceed 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. It is precisely because this “regime” has proved so woefully—indeed, world-historically—inadequate that Vanuatu pressed for the case now before the World Court. As James Hansen, the former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, put it in his testimony in The Hague, “Climate change must be brought to the International Court of Justice because young people, developing nations, and indigenous people have nowhere else to turn.” [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST – “International Court of Justice Set to Decide Whether Fueling Climate Change Violates International Law,” by Marjorie Cohn, Truthout [December 16, 2024] [Link].
How America Invented the Red State
By Tarence Ray, The Nation [December 17, 2024]
---- The long-term effect of this election will likely be an ever more firmly entrenched red wall in the predominantly rural states in the middle of the country. As with every election since the turn of the millennium, this will drive Democratic Party operatives to continue conflating the population of red states with both “rural” and “white”—despite the fact that Trump gained ground in more than 90 percent of the nation’s counties since the last election. … For now, the right controls the map. That is its bastion of geographical—yet not necessarily demographic—support: where its material power is most easily reproducible through land, minerals, livestock, guns, and a bloc of displaced, disorganized workers. But the right has to chart an increasingly narrow terrain of contradictions. Today, the ideology of land and ammunition buttresses the hegemony of natalism and deportation. But the profit motive beckons, and the amount of resources shrinks every day. With it, so does the patience of the working class. [Read More]
The President’s Arsenal
From The New York Times [December 17, 2024]
[FB – This is one in a series of useful reports on the state of the US/world nuclear arsenals and how they might be used to exterminate us all.]
---- In the United States, only the president can decide whether to use nuclear weapons. It’s an extraordinary instance in which Mr. Trump’s decision-making power will be absolute. He will not need to consult Congress, the courts or senior advisers on when or how to use them. He will have a free hand to craft our nation’s nuclear posture, policy and diplomacy. … Most Americans have never seen — or perhaps even contemplated — what it takes to be ready for nuclear conflict. Times Opinion gained rare, up-close access this summer to film what this looks like in the United States. Observing the missile launch procedures provided a glimpse at the inner workings of a warfighting machine that should never be set in motion. [Read More]
TRUMP’S WAR ON IMMIGRANTS
A Working-Class History of Fighting Deportations
By David Bacon, Jacobin Magazine [December 15, 2024]
---- The history of working-class organizing in the United States is full of examples of immigrant resistance to mass deportation, sweeps, and other tactics. Time and again, immigrant worker activity has changed the course of society. It has produced unions of workers ranging from copper miners to janitors. It turned the politics of Los Angeles on its head. And it is this tradition of worker resistance that is the real target of immigration enforcement waves, both current and threatened by the incoming administration. … The rich tradition of worker organizing against immigrant repression is a story of courageous struggle and a reservoir of strategic thinking that can help immigrant workers and communities confront the promised MAGA wave of repression. It involves far too many organizations and fights to list here. This article aims to show what people faced, how they fought, and what kind of future they fought for. [Read More]
Room at the Bottom [Immigrants to Europe – 50 years ago]
By Neal Ascherson, New York Review of Books [February 5, 1976]
[FB – In both Europe and the US, immigration has become an issue that is fueling the rise of rightwing policies, organizations, and political parties. Fifty years ago John Berger published an insightful book about Turkish men coming to Switzerland, illustrated with evocative photos by Jean Mohr, called A Seventh Man. It captured the early waves of what now is a powerful tide of workers and refugees on the move. Back then it was important to me personally; perhaps this good review will stimulate interest among other readers.]
--- To understand what the presence of migrant labor means, both to the “host” country and to the workers themselves, one must have two kinds of knowledge, one analytic and the other imaginative. One is collecting the statistics—a harder job than it sounds—and finding a distinguishable structure among the gravel heaps of detail. The other is to seek out the migrant himself—for he is usually a male alone, as befits a soldier in what Marx called “the industrial reserve army”—and learn about his sense of his own life. What is important about A Seventh Man is that John Berger has mastered both kinds of knowledge. His book is a work of literature and of analysis. Jean Mohr’s intense photographs, with their juxtaposition of village and foreign city, peasant work and factory labor, all the agonizing departures, sugary nostalgias, strutting optimism, or dull-eyed routines of the migrant worker’s existence, are not illustrations but a carefully integrated part of the total work. The migrant’s journey northward, his recruitment and medical examination (sullen male chests chalked with incomprehensible numerals by an industrial doctor), his first encounter with the cities, his work, and his return are presented as a narrative, interleaved with blocks of statistical data. There are poems, dreams, snatches of talk from the migrant workers and from those who employ them or work beside them. [Read More]
THE WAR ON GAZA
In northern Gaza, Israel makes death feel like mercy
By Shahd Abusalama, Declassified UK [December 16, 2024]
---- In a theatrical move at the height of the US election, Joe Biden threatened to restrict military supplies to Israel if more humanitarian aid did not enter Gaza within a month. His deadline expired and the siege continued, putting Palestinians at risk of “imminent” famine. Yet the White House decided not to sanction Israel, with State Department spokesman Vedant Patel claiming there was “some progress” in the flow of aid. From speaking to my surviving relatives in northern Gaza, I know this assessment could not be further from the apocalyptic reality on the ground. Israel’s choking siege has entered its third month, segregating Jabalia, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun from the rest of Gaza City amid horrific scenes of mass killing. Nearly 4,000 people have been killed there since October 2024 as Israel targets every remaining concentration of Palestinians, forcing them to either leave or die, if not by bombs, then by starvation. We are more scared than ever of enduring the same fate of the Nakba generation who were dispossessed and displaced in 1948 and never allowed to return. [Read More]
An open letter from mathematicians against the genocide in Gaza
From Aljazeera [December 18, 2024] – signed by 1,089 people
---- In late October 2024, the Palestinian Ministry of Education, based in Ramallah, reported that Israel had killed over 11,057 schoolchildren and 681 students in Gaza since October 7, 2023, and injured over 16,897 schoolchildren and 1,468 students. In total, 441 teachers and education personnel have been killed, and 2,491 injured. At least 117 academics in Gaza have been killed, including Sufian Tayeh, mathematician, theoretical physicist, and president of the Islamic University of Gaza, who was killed along with his family by an Israeli bombing in the Jabaliya refugee camp on December 2, 2023. Additionally, 406 schools in Gaza have been damaged, with 77 completely destroyed. Gaza’s universities have been gravely impacted, with 20 institutions damaged, 51 buildings completely demolished, and 57 partially destroyed. As a result, nearly 88,000 students and 700,000 schoolchildren in Gaza have been deprived of education for more than a year. [Read More]
POST-ASSAD SYRIA
For Syria’s Economy, the Way Forward Starts With Sanctions Relief
By Patricia Cohen, New York Times [December 21, 2024]
---- There is widespread agreement that the single most important step in rebuilding Syria’s economy can be taken only by the United States: Lift the punishing layers of sanctions that have effectively cut off Syria from international commerce and investment. U.S. restrictions imposed in 2019 on financial flows were intended to punish the Assad regime. Now, they are cutting Syria off from money it desperately needs for reconstruction and economic development. Families and relief organizations cannot send assistance; refugees cannot transfer money from Western bank accounts to invest in a home or business; the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank cannot offer aid. Ending all financial restrictions would also mean removing the terrorist designation placed on Mr. al-Shara and his organization, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, by the United States and the United Nations. … Oil previously provided around half of the country’s revenues, said Joshua Landis, co-director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Those fields, he said, belong to the government in Damascus and should be returned to its control. [Read More]
Join the Struggle to Defend the Women’s Revolution in Rojava and Build a Democratic Syria
From Kongra Star [Rojava and Syria] [December 2024]
---- For women and the peoples of Syria, the overthrow of the Assad dictatorship is an important development. If we prevent the former dictatorship from simply being replaced by another despotic regime then this new situation has opened the doors to a new process for the peoples of Syria and the entire region. … While Erdoğan hypocritically emphasizes the importance of the “territorial integrity of Syria”, the Turkish army is invading further in the regions of Northern Syria, neglecting the existence and the will of the Kurdish people and all other peoples of the region. Since the 27th of November 2024, hundreds of thousands of people of the cantons Shahba, Manbij and Kobane have been forcibly displaced. …All these attacks target the accomplishments of the women’s revolution, and the Democratic Autonomous Administration which has been the guarantee of the democratic, equal and free life for all communities; for Kurdish, Arab, Armenian, Assyrian, Turkmen, Circassian, Chechen, Durzi, Alewit, Sunni, Christian and Ezidi women. Since 2012, the model of democratic autonomy jointly established and implemented by women, men and the youth of all communities, first in Rojava and then in other regions of North and East Syria, has proven that direct democracy and the active role of women in politics and all fields of life are essential for the peoples’ communal life and the resolution of social problems. [Read More]
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
European 'peacekeepers' in Ukraine? A horrible idea.
By Anatol Lieven, Responsible Statecraft [December 16, 2024]
---- President-elect Trump is reportedly advancing the idea that a large and heavily armed peacekeeping force from Europe (but including NATO members) could be introduced into Ukraine as part of a peace settlement there. It is important that this very ill-thought-out idea be shot down before it does serious damage to the prospects for an early peace and causes Ukraine still further human, economic and territorial loss. … On the face of it, this idea might seem to reconcile several mutually contradictory pressures on the Ukrainian peace process: The Russian demand for a treaty that will permanently bar Ukraine from NATO membership; the Ukrainian demand for Western guarantees against future Russian aggression; Trump’s determination not to put U.S. troops on the ground or make additional and permanent U.S. commitments to Ukraine; and the real need for a substantial international force to patrol an armistice line. … There is just one problem: According to every Russian official and expert with whom my colleagues and I have spoken (most recently on Thursday), the idea of Western troops in Ukraine is just as unacceptable to the Russian government and establishment as NATO membership for Ukraine itself. Indeed, the Russians see no essential difference between the two. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES/“THE WAR ON TERROR”
Once Upon a Time, a Nation of Laws: From the Global War on Terror to Donald Trump’s Second Term
By Karen J. Greenberg, TomDispatch [December 20, 2024]
---- Today’s crisis has been evolving for so many years now. In fact, much (though admittedly, not all) of what we’re witnessing today might simply be considered an escalation of the dire turn that this country took after the attacks of September 11, 2001, nearly a quarter of a century ago. … At the heart of such a rejection of the law [Guantanamo, etc.] was the determination that the president had primary, if not ultimate, authority when it came to national security. Members of Congress generally agreed and facilitated the shift to ever more solitary executive power in the name of war, setting a template for yielding some of its constitutional and statutory powers in matters of war to the president. … Worse yet, such deviations from constitutional protections and the law did not come to an end with the Bush administration. … Trump’s first presidency combined the strategies of Bush and Obama when it came to the war on terror. Trump brought the tools and tactics designed for the war on terror to the “home front,” notably in his approach to dissent. He attacked Black Lives Matter protesters as enemies, labeling them “terrorists.” He made discrimination against foreigners a national policy at the onset of his first presidency, announcing his plans to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants and promising to institute policies that intentionally separated migrant children from their families. He even threatened to widen the uses of Guantánamo. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Protect Medicaid!
By Andrew Moss, Counterpunch [December 17, 2024]
---- Catastrophic cuts are in the offing for Medicaid, the nation’s largest single source of health coverage, serving primarily low-income Americans. But catastrophe isn’t inevitable. … While the federal government currently provides 90 percent of matching federal-state funding to ensure that all eligible individuals are covered (according to a provision of the Affordable Care Act), the House Republican plan and the Project 2025 proposals would reduce the federal share significantly, transferring costs to the states and to individuals. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
The People in the Shop [David Montgomery and the vitality of labor history]
By Kim Phillips-Fein, The Nation [December 17, 2024]
---- One of the paradoxes of contemporary American politics is that the working class may be invisible as a true political force, but the idea of the working class is everywhere. … This omission was a problem that the great labor historian David Montgomery set out to tackle. Throughout Montgomery’s long academic career, he was always concerned with the interplay between politics and the workplace. From his first book, a study of working-class politics in the era of Reconstruction (Beyond Equality), to his landmark account of the politics of the pre–World War I labor movement (The Fall of the House of Labor), Montgomery explored how people’s experiences of work shaped their political horizons. Having spent many earlier years in an industrial job, he brought this sensibility to his own workplace, too—making himself available, time and again, to the many different kinds of workers who populate academia: the maintenance and clerical staff, the graduate student instructors and graders, and, of course, his fellow faculty. … When Montgomery became a labor historian, the field was still dominated by the institutionalism of an earlier generation, which viewed workers as pragmatic utilitarians who joined unions primarily out of narrow economic self-interest rather than a larger politics, and which saw the rise of modern trade unions as the key to understanding working-class history. There were also many historians at the time who believed that organized labor had reached the “end of history” with the advent of the New Deal. According to this analysis, the rise of the CIO and its entrenchment in postwar life was a seismic shift that had led to a sharp reduction in class conflict. Montgomery had a different perspective. [Read More]
